It's worth noting that fuel is one of the things that you naturally collect over time in Farmville -- it takes about 8 hours for my fuel gauge to refill completely. Does mean you can't always use the tractor (or harvester, or seeder), but for me, given that the only real reason I have for using the tractor is to earn the King of the Plow ribbons, I'm OK with just using the fuel as quickly as I 'distill' it (partially because I have no intention of giving Zynga any actual money).
I saw the movie twice -- the first time in 2D, the second in 3D. The first showing left me cold -- I called people after I left the theatre and told them not to see the movie. The second showing was astounding. I think seeing Avatar in 2D is... shit. Just don't.
The technology Netflix uses for streaming movies on your computer (and by that, I mean "your x86 box that runs Mac OS or a modern version of Windows," unfortunately) is, in fact, Silverlight.
But Netflix is, and has been, pushing hard for more device adoption of streaming -- at this point, you can stream Netflix on Roku boxes, Samsung and LG players, some Sony TVs, PS3s, XBoxes, etc. It's not the case -- and you should not assume -- all these systems are using Silverlight to do aforementioned streaming.
Someone below mentions the possibility of D-Link coming to Netflix and saying "we have X boxes, we'd like to have some help." I suspect they'd find a warm reception.
There was a limited part of the workload you couldn't do, and wasn't directly relevant to everything else. But because you couldn't do it, you reacted to that failure by falling apart and not being able to do other things that, by your admission, you should be able to do. In other words, you're self-defeating, and under pressure are prone to falling apart.
I don't know, man. I can see how that'd be of concern to me as an employer. I promise you that, calculus or not, there'd come a day when there was something you couldn't do and I don't think someone who falls apart under the pressure of failure is a fantastic find.
Given that the Toyota and the Lexus are, actually, materially different (different materials, different design), I'm not sure how you can claim that because their scores are 30% apart, a 30% difference is immaterial.
Worse, the logic leap from that to say that the Ford brand, at 30% higher than Toyota, is basically equivalent to Toyota is a little breathtaking. By that logic, if we agree that 30% is basically a rounding error and we can ignore it, then it's worth noting that since the Kia, at 278, is only 30% higher than the Ford, it really should be considered equal in quality. In fact, since the Land Rover, at 368, is LESS than 30% higher than the Kia, it should be considered equal in quality.
And therefore, we can easily determine that the Land Rover, at 368, is basically equal in quality to the Lexus, at 120.
The GPS component of Google Maps suffers pretty drastically compared to ye olde average GPS device:
1. No voice navigation;
2. No "OK, you're coming up on the turn, take the NEXT right turn";
3. No "Oops, you've missed it, OK, the next street is a one-way street, so go two blocks.. " (i.e. automatic route re-calculation);
4. No ability to specify preferences such as "I want to take that bridge, not this one" (maps.google.com lets you rejigger your route quite nicely, but not the app on the iPhone);
5. Doesn't help you at all if you need to control your iPod component right now (so the app isn't in the foreground);
It can actually be an issue. A wiped Blackberry will still place 911 calls. A Blackberry being wiped, however, will not. And the last time I had a Blackberry wiped from under me (I had a dispute with our Asset Management group; they won), it took about 60 minutes, due to security policies and scrubbing memory. During that time, the Blackberry was useless for any purpose, including placing 911 calls.
I thought of doing this, but I suspect you'll likely find this very hard for a myriad of reasons, least of which is that the control part is actually about 3" below the right headphone earpiece -- so you'll have to do at least two splice jobs, one for each ear. I had hoped you could actually adapt the built-in headphones into an adapter, but I fear that's unlikely to be feasible.
The headphones have no DRM built into them. You could argue that, maybe, Apple is actually making the Shuffle 'closed-source' by requiring a user to use their headphones with their player (I'll insert the customary car analogy -- they're producing a car and restricting you to putting their wheels on their car!), but frankly Apple has long been in the business of coming up wit new ways of doing things and letting the rest of the market catch up. Unless we hear Apple stopping other people from producing headphones or adapters for this device, I'm going to assume that we'll soon see other vendors coming up with adapters and headphones for it. Oh, look, Scosche has already announced they're working on it.
I suspect I was one of the first few people on Thursday to pick one up. This Shuffle is my first, complementing my 30GB Video, 60GB Video, and iPhone devices. Basically, I've gotten tired of lugging around the bigger devices while I bike.
So far, I'm really pleased with it. Hate the headphone arrangement in principle, but I can live with it for now. It's tiny, as noted, and I've already lost it (and found it again) once. I suspect that's the biggest risk to owning a small, black device like that.
There's a much bigger problem with bombs: They don't require informed consent.
See the case of Nizar Hindawi, who attempted to sneak a bomb on an El Al flight by tricking his pregnant girlfriend into taking it with her -- having her go through any intention scanner would show her to be completely trustworthy and innocent -- because she was. That's a problem that is exists for bombs, but not (easily) for guns. After all, it's not like you'd look in your carryon half-way through the flight, find a gun you didn't expect there, and go "OMG! Got to hijack the plane!"
If you look at virtualization as a commodity -- being able to run multiple VMs on a single physical box -- there are hordes of solutions out there, and certainly Sun has some nice options. We use LDOMs today on T5240s and like them; Containers are also an option, obviously.
However, if you look at virtualization as enabling a bunch of other capabilities, and you start asking whether or not Sun enables those capabilities, that's where you get into the area where they're really lacking. They've got the basic, low-level capabilities right, but if you look at, say, VMotion, or VMware's Lab Manager (the ability to check in/out a set of VMs by a user is nice), or their Site Recovery Manager, this is all stuff that's entirely missing on the Sun side. Could you write your own home-grown solutions to potentially do some similar stuff? Sure. But we don't want to.
There are two factors here: 1. We've been burned before by using stacks that are not very popular. For example, we're currently a huge DB2-on-Solaris shop. While DB2 on Solaris is officially supported, it's not a very mainstream configuration, and we've found that we've run into obscure problems because it's not very well implemented. So mainstreamability (yes, I just made that word up) is important to us; 2. We've pretty much drank the VMware kool-aid. We've not just drank the kool-aid, we emptied the pitcher and then went into the kitchen to make another batch. We're committed to x86 virtualization as a strategic initiative.
So you look at these two issues, and you see: 1. Solaris on Sparc doesn't fit our strategy; 2. Solaris on x86 does fit our strategy, but hits against the (1) issue above, because perception is that Solarix on x86 is not a very mainstream commercial platform (not so much from Sun's side -- I think they've got a pretty decent product there -- but from the ISV side).
I work at a Fortune 500 non-tech company, with responsibility for, among others, the UNIX side of the house which has been Solaris until now. After months of discussions, we finally got the go-ahead yesterday from our CIO to move forward with Linux support; the intention is to have Linux be our #1 choice for UNIX[ish] deployments, with Solaris only being used when we absolutely, positively, can't use Linux or Windows.
For us, we're going with RedHat primarily for two reasons: 1. We're very conservative -- the whole "supportable platform" thing scares the crap out of some of my coworkers, especially on the applications side, so we absolutely require commercial, neck-on-the-line support;
2. We intend to primarily use Linux as the underlying infrastructure for commercial applications, so one obvious question we had to ask was: What Linux distro is most likely to be supported by our vendors (DB2, Oracle, various Symantec products, etc)? It came down to SLES and RHEL, and... well, I don't like SLES:)
It's worth noting that while I've got really smart Solaris system engineers working for me, the standard I use is: Can my engineer support this system at 2AM, with one hand tied behind their back, blindfolded, having been woken up from a drunken, drugged stupor? We're not quite there yet with Linux, so it's helpful to have robust support. I've had experience with RHEL support in a previous company and was duly impressed.
I suspect that, 2-4 years from now when we've developed the skill level to support Linux very well without having to rely on Support much (and the good news is, in this environment it's likely most of my well-performing engineers will still be here in 2-4 years), we'll reconsider the commercial support necessity and revisit this. But application compatibility will still be key, so unless mainstream enterprise vendors (see names above) start supporting dists such as Ubuntu, chances are we'll still stick with one of the big commercial distributions.
I've got to tell you, I think you're incorrect here. I work for a Fortune 500 company and I happen to manage the storage and backup group (in addition to some other responsibilities). It's true that backups cost something, especially if you'll retain them for a while (and we retain things 'forever', because our legal people actually like to be able to go back and find email -- it's been more helpful to our defense than the other side's case). At this point, backing up Exchange makes up 25% of our total backup volume.
However, there's a very easy way around that, that the original poster mentions -- you can keep your own PSTs. Doing so shifts the responsibility for backing up that email from the backup group to the user. For example, I copy everything to PSTs on my laptop, which (intentionally) does not get backed up.
For us, we use Symantec's Enterprise Vault to actually keep every single email in one centralized location, which lets us avoid duplication of emails (100 people get a 10MB presentation? Great, we'll make one 10MB backup) and helps when we deal with legal discovery.
This isn't about saving money on storage and backups. It's about one interpretation on how to improve your legal standing (and, as I noted, it's only one interpretation -- ours is quite the opposite).
You're looking for Diffusion of Responsibility, made famous by the incident in which Kitty Genovese was murdered within earshot of a whole bunch of people, all of whom thought "damnit, someone should do something about this!"
I was wondering about this -- my Blackberry Curve (8310) doesn't actually feel like it's thicker than 1cm. So I looked it up -- it's 0.91cm thick (0.36"). How is the F71, if it really is 1cm thick, the world's thinnest?
I switched to the Unicomps when my last Model M died, about eight years ago. Since then, I've been using Unicomps consistently. I love them -- they feel certain, and comfortable. Coworkers also like the way they feel (though usually not enough to pay for one, or have work pay for one).
That said, for me, the only minor downside is something the original author mentions -- noise. They're quite noisy, and while it doesn't bother me, it does sometimes cause my cubicle's neighbors to comment (e.g. "I always know whether or not you're in your cubicle because I can hear your keyboard from 20 meters away"). Good news is, the only people in the vicinity work for me, so they can't really complain too loudly:). Also, people know if I'm typing while on the phone. That's OK for, say, work meetings where it's expected I'm taking notes, but if I'm having a heart-to-heart conversation with my wife and want to catch up on email at the same time, I usually have to switch to my laptop's keyboard so she won't hear me:)
It's not just programmers -- my wife's an attorney, and at her last job they offered her a certain salary and then, about four months later, said -- and I'm not making this up -- "oh, crap. Hey, listen, we screwed up on your salary in your offer letter, so... as of the next pay period, we're dropping your salary by 26%. Sorry!"
Nothing she could do about it (and hey, she's an attorney. You can bet she talked to a labor attorney).
We're a largeish company with one HQ (and associated data center), about 400 field offices, and four regional field service centers. Our approach was to centralize everything but printing, but that means EVERYTHING -- so people use Terminal Services to go into HQ. This means that once they've done the TS hop, everything is local, because they're accessing their files, running their apps, and accessing databases locally to where the terminal server is. Printing is, of course, still done in the office, via print servers in HQ.
The users don't seem to complain of speed issues -- then again, this whole thing is running on fairly old hardware (6-7 year old PCs) in the field, and they're not doing anything particularly high-performance (e.g. video).
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It's worth noting that fuel is one of the things that you naturally collect over time in Farmville -- it takes about 8 hours for my fuel gauge to refill completely. Does mean you can't always use the tractor (or harvester, or seeder), but for me, given that the only real reason I have for using the tractor is to earn the King of the Plow ribbons, I'm OK with just using the fuel as quickly as I 'distill' it (partially because I have no intention of giving Zynga any actual money).
So basically ... In Soviety Pandora, tree samples YOU?
I saw the movie twice -- the first time in 2D, the second in 3D. The first showing left me cold -- I called people after I left the theatre and told them not to see the movie. The second showing was astounding. I think seeing Avatar in 2D is ... shit. Just don't.
The technology Netflix uses for streaming movies on your computer (and by that, I mean "your x86 box that runs Mac OS or a modern version of Windows," unfortunately) is, in fact, Silverlight.
But Netflix is, and has been, pushing hard for more device adoption of streaming -- at this point, you can stream Netflix on Roku boxes, Samsung and LG players, some Sony TVs, PS3s, XBoxes, etc. It's not the case -- and you should not assume -- all these systems are using Silverlight to do aforementioned streaming.
Someone below mentions the possibility of D-Link coming to Netflix and saying "we have X boxes, we'd like to have some help." I suspect they'd find a warm reception.
This word "commandeered" ... I do not think it means what you think it means.
So basically ...
There was a limited part of the workload you couldn't do, and wasn't directly relevant to everything else. But because you couldn't do it, you reacted to that failure by falling apart and not being able to do other things that, by your admission, you should be able to do. In other words, you're self-defeating, and under pressure are prone to falling apart.
I don't know, man. I can see how that'd be of concern to me as an employer. I promise you that, calculus or not, there'd come a day when there was something you couldn't do and I don't think someone who falls apart under the pressure of failure is a fantastic find.
Given that the Toyota and the Lexus are, actually, materially different (different materials, different design), I'm not sure how you can claim that because their scores are 30% apart, a 30% difference is immaterial.
Worse, the logic leap from that to say that the Ford brand, at 30% higher than Toyota, is basically equivalent to Toyota is a little breathtaking. By that logic, if we agree that 30% is basically a rounding error and we can ignore it, then it's worth noting that since the Kia, at 278, is only 30% higher than the Ford, it really should be considered equal in quality. In fact, since the Land Rover, at 368, is LESS than 30% higher than the Kia, it should be considered equal in quality.
And therefore, we can easily determine that the Land Rover, at 368, is basically equal in quality to the Lexus, at 120.
Brilliant!
The GPS component of Google Maps suffers pretty drastically compared to ye olde average GPS device:
1. No voice navigation;
2. No "OK, you're coming up on the turn, take the NEXT right turn";
3. No "Oops, you've missed it, OK, the next street is a one-way street, so go two blocks .. " (i.e. automatic route re-calculation);
4. No ability to specify preferences such as "I want to take that bridge, not this one" (maps.google.com lets you rejigger your route quite nicely, but not the app on the iPhone);
5. Doesn't help you at all if you need to control your iPod component right now (so the app isn't in the foreground);
It can actually be an issue. A wiped Blackberry will still place 911 calls. A Blackberry being wiped, however, will not. And the last time I had a Blackberry wiped from under me (I had a dispute with our Asset Management group; they won), it took about 60 minutes, due to security policies and scrubbing memory. During that time, the Blackberry was useless for any purpose, including placing 911 calls.
I thought of doing this, but I suspect you'll likely find this very hard for a myriad of reasons, least of which is that the control part is actually about 3" below the right headphone earpiece -- so you'll have to do at least two splice jobs, one for each ear. I had hoped you could actually adapt the built-in headphones into an adapter, but I fear that's unlikely to be feasible.
What in heaven's name are you talking about?
The headphones have no DRM built into them. You could argue that, maybe, Apple is actually making the Shuffle 'closed-source' by requiring a user to use their headphones with their player (I'll insert the customary car analogy -- they're producing a car and restricting you to putting their wheels on their car!), but frankly Apple has long been in the business of coming up wit new ways of doing things and letting the rest of the market catch up. Unless we hear Apple stopping other people from producing headphones or adapters for this device, I'm going to assume that we'll soon see other vendors coming up with adapters and headphones for it. Oh, look, Scosche has already announced they're working on it.
I suspect I was one of the first few people on Thursday to pick one up. This Shuffle is my first, complementing my 30GB Video, 60GB Video, and iPhone devices. Basically, I've gotten tired of lugging around the bigger devices while I bike.
So far, I'm really pleased with it. Hate the headphone arrangement in principle, but I can live with it for now. It's tiny, as noted, and I've already lost it (and found it again) once. I suspect that's the biggest risk to owning a small, black device like that.
There's a much bigger problem with bombs: They don't require informed consent.
See the case of Nizar Hindawi, who attempted to sneak a bomb on an El Al flight by tricking his pregnant girlfriend into taking it with her -- having her go through any intention scanner would show her to be completely trustworthy and innocent -- because she was. That's a problem that is exists for bombs, but not (easily) for guns. After all, it's not like you'd look in your carryon half-way through the flight, find a gun you didn't expect there, and go "OMG! Got to hijack the plane!"
Yes, I'm frankly surprised this is news, given that iTunes' similar behavior -- with a much greater user base -- doesn't seem to merit a peep.
Just for the record, my wife (mid 30's, attorney, no tech whatsoever) loved both ads. Can't really tell you why -- I don't get it.
If you look at virtualization as a commodity -- being able to run multiple VMs on a single physical box -- there are hordes of solutions out there, and certainly Sun has some nice options. We use LDOMs today on T5240s and like them; Containers are also an option, obviously.
However, if you look at virtualization as enabling a bunch of other capabilities, and you start asking whether or not Sun enables those capabilities, that's where you get into the area where they're really lacking. They've got the basic, low-level capabilities right, but if you look at, say, VMotion, or VMware's Lab Manager (the ability to check in/out a set of VMs by a user is nice), or their Site Recovery Manager, this is all stuff that's entirely missing on the Sun side. Could you write your own home-grown solutions to potentially do some similar stuff? Sure. But we don't want to.
There are two factors here:
1. We've been burned before by using stacks that are not very popular. For example, we're currently a huge DB2-on-Solaris shop. While DB2 on Solaris is officially supported, it's not a very mainstream configuration, and we've found that we've run into obscure problems because it's not very well implemented. So mainstreamability (yes, I just made that word up) is important to us;
2. We've pretty much drank the VMware kool-aid. We've not just drank the kool-aid, we emptied the pitcher and then went into the kitchen to make another batch. We're committed to x86 virtualization as a strategic initiative.
So you look at these two issues, and you see:
1. Solaris on Sparc doesn't fit our strategy;
2. Solaris on x86 does fit our strategy, but hits against the (1) issue above, because perception is that Solarix on x86 is not a very mainstream commercial platform (not so much from Sun's side -- I think they've got a pretty decent product there -- but from the ISV side).
Make sense?
I work at a Fortune 500 non-tech company, with responsibility for, among others, the UNIX side of the house which has been Solaris until now. After months of discussions, we finally got the go-ahead yesterday from our CIO to move forward with Linux support; the intention is to have Linux be our #1 choice for UNIX[ish] deployments, with Solaris only being used when we absolutely, positively, can't use Linux or Windows.
For us, we're going with RedHat primarily for two reasons:
1. We're very conservative -- the whole "supportable platform" thing scares the crap out of some of my coworkers, especially on the applications side, so we absolutely require commercial, neck-on-the-line support;
2. We intend to primarily use Linux as the underlying infrastructure for commercial applications, so one obvious question we had to ask was: What Linux distro is most likely to be supported by our vendors (DB2, Oracle, various Symantec products, etc)? It came down to SLES and RHEL, and ... well, I don't like SLES :)
It's worth noting that while I've got really smart Solaris system engineers working for me, the standard I use is: Can my engineer support this system at 2AM, with one hand tied behind their back, blindfolded, having been woken up from a drunken, drugged stupor? We're not quite there yet with Linux, so it's helpful to have robust support. I've had experience with RHEL support in a previous company and was duly impressed.
I suspect that, 2-4 years from now when we've developed the skill level to support Linux very well without having to rely on Support much (and the good news is, in this environment it's likely most of my well-performing engineers will still be here in 2-4 years), we'll reconsider the commercial support necessity and revisit this. But application compatibility will still be key, so unless mainstream enterprise vendors (see names above) start supporting dists such as Ubuntu, chances are we'll still stick with one of the big commercial distributions.
I've got to tell you, I think you're incorrect here. I work for a Fortune 500 company and I happen to manage the storage and backup group (in addition to some other responsibilities). It's true that backups cost something, especially if you'll retain them for a while (and we retain things 'forever', because our legal people actually like to be able to go back and find email -- it's been more helpful to our defense than the other side's case). At this point, backing up Exchange makes up 25% of our total backup volume.
However, there's a very easy way around that, that the original poster mentions -- you can keep your own PSTs. Doing so shifts the responsibility for backing up that email from the backup group to the user. For example, I copy everything to PSTs on my laptop, which (intentionally) does not get backed up.
For us, we use Symantec's Enterprise Vault to actually keep every single email in one centralized location, which lets us avoid duplication of emails (100 people get a 10MB presentation? Great, we'll make one 10MB backup) and helps when we deal with legal discovery.
This isn't about saving money on storage and backups. It's about one interpretation on how to improve your legal standing (and, as I noted, it's only one interpretation -- ours is quite the opposite).
You're looking for Diffusion of Responsibility, made famous by the incident in which Kitty Genovese was murdered within earshot of a whole bunch of people, all of whom thought "damnit, someone should do something about this!"
I was wondering about this -- my Blackberry Curve (8310) doesn't actually feel like it's thicker than 1cm. So I looked it up -- it's 0.91cm thick (0.36"). How is the F71, if it really is 1cm thick, the world's thinnest?
I switched to the Unicomps when my last Model M died, about eight years ago. Since then, I've been using Unicomps consistently. I love them -- they feel certain, and comfortable. Coworkers also like the way they feel (though usually not enough to pay for one, or have work pay for one).
:). Also, people know if I'm typing while on the phone. That's OK for, say, work meetings where it's expected I'm taking notes, but if I'm having a heart-to-heart conversation with my wife and want to catch up on email at the same time, I usually have to switch to my laptop's keyboard so she won't hear me :)
That said, for me, the only minor downside is something the original author mentions -- noise. They're quite noisy, and while it doesn't bother me, it does sometimes cause my cubicle's neighbors to comment (e.g. "I always know whether or not you're in your cubicle because I can hear your keyboard from 20 meters away"). Good news is, the only people in the vicinity work for me, so they can't really complain too loudly
I agree. We need to stop misusing these terms.
Plus, I'm concerned this software could brick my cell phone, requiring me to reboot.
It's not just programmers -- my wife's an attorney, and at her last job they offered her a certain salary and then, about four months later, said -- and I'm not making this up -- "oh, crap. Hey, listen, we screwed up on your salary in your offer letter, so ... as of the next pay period, we're dropping your salary by 26%. Sorry!"
Nothing she could do about it (and hey, she's an attorney. You can bet she talked to a labor attorney).
We're a largeish company with one HQ (and associated data center), about 400 field offices, and four regional field service centers. Our approach was to centralize everything but printing, but that means EVERYTHING -- so people use Terminal Services to go into HQ. This means that once they've done the TS hop, everything is local, because they're accessing their files, running their apps, and accessing databases locally to where the terminal server is. Printing is, of course, still done in the office, via print servers in HQ.
The users don't seem to complain of speed issues -- then again, this whole thing is running on fairly old hardware (6-7 year old PCs) in the field, and they're not doing anything particularly high-performance (e.g. video).