I've been around long enough to see fads come and go. This "cloud" crap that we keep hearing about is just that...another fad. I can see some small and even medium sized companies embracing cloud computing...for a limited set of tasks. I work almost exclusively with large companies and none of them, and i mean none, are ready to dump their internal IT staff to just throw it up into the "cloud" and hope everything works out. There is simply too much at stake for them.
True. Anyone who has been around for a long while sees the same discarded technology pushed to the forefront again and again, often being forced to relearn the same lessons.
We hired service bureaus, then we got our own terminals, then we got our own mainframes, then we got departmental mini-computers, then company wide mainframes then PCs, then file servers, etc etc etc.
This isn't always bad, mind you. New technology can make old ideas better.
I've watched State government division directors railing red-faced in rage at an IT director that overwrote years of backup tapes. I've also seen entire offices lose everything to a worm.
If data has that much value, no rational person would entrust it ONLY to cloud. Still I can and do see the cloud treated like a long piece of CAT5. Most rational cloud users only use the cloud this way, as a pathway to distribution, not as the ultimate or only means of storage. In this way it works fine.
What is missing is strong encryption of cloud data. When the feds can demand all of your data with nothing more than a rubber stamped national security letter, and you are never told about it, putting anything on the cloud without client side encryption is stupid.
Unless, of course that data is public knowledge anyway (stripped of private identifiers etc). And in that regard, much of government data is (or can be made to be) of this type. In which case the cloud is a good way of freely distributing it.
Much beyond simple mathematics (addition subtraction multiplication and division) is seldom encountered in the lives of many people. However people working in the trades (electricians, carpenters, mechanics) usually need a little more.
But your first sentence seem to contain an internal contradiction. You claim china speed too much time on memorization and not enough time on understanding. Yet you state that China leads the US in this regard.
So, by your own example Understanding is less important than memorization.
You know, there have been tablets running Windows for around a decade now. Businesses have been able to write that off on their taxes (which they can also do for ipads), and put it to immediate use without having to rewrite all their corporate apps. If you think somehow this will be better, you need to explain why, because binary compatibility obviously isn't enough to make a tablet successful.
Yes, I know. I have one. (HP Slate)
I wouldn't try to do much of anything other than email on it tho. My associates asked if they should get one for their office, and I had to tell them NO.
I think the prior versions were pretty much a lash-up. Maybe the PRO will better.
I'm not so sure. The Apple brand is getting spread pretty darn thin already. It no longer feels special to own Apple gear and their brand was mostly what it's all about for them. The one thing they do really well is marketing though, so maybe they'll be able to milk it for a few more product cycles.
Well, my tongue was lodged firmly in my cheek..... So I guess we agree for the most part.
Still when they announce something like this the fanbois will line up a midnight, Apple has been reselling to its customers for years, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
> But haven't Windows tablets been available since the early 90s? What does the Surface bring to the table if you leave out the Metro part? Why would this be more successful then the preceding Windows 7 tablets?
More touch-screen friendly. Cheap (compared to most tablets in the past). Powerful. Good industrial design.
Yeah I have one sitting right here, HP Slate 500, Intel Atom processor running Windows 7. Just slow enough to be a pain in the ass, and just small enough to require a stylus much of the time. The touch business was a problem on the Slate. It should be better on the Pro.
But it too, runs just about anything you would care to install.
Win8 has a few UI "issues", most of which become benefits when it's on a touch screen device. It still runs virtually all apps fine. There's no real reason to upgrade, and a slight cost of helping users find the login screen, shutdown screen, and desktop; but it's no biggie.
That's been my experience as well.
On a typical PC, the first thing everybody does is request a familiar startbar, and install apps that way. But with a tad of tinkering you can get your apps to appear on the new UI.
Folks that use a lot of different software packages soon learn tricks to keep from having to mouse-scroll all over the place trying to find the launch Icons. It wastes a lot of space. There is a learning curve, but for people who live their lives in Outlook or a browser, it won't be steep.
But once you actually HAVE a touch screen, it would probably be just fine.
Every bit of software I've thrown at 8 works just as well as it did on 7. (To date, I've only had 8 installed in a virtual machine).
Even if you had the source code, you would have a huge amount of work to do rewriting the UI.
Ok, my bad. Someone on slashdot said that if you had win32 code (c++ or C# or something) you could just run it thru the compiler, indicate you wanted RT code, and it would run perfectly under RT. (Microsofts compilers would do the api translation).
It sounded plausible, if not a little too good to be true. I personally don't know.
It's as if the 10% ethanol actually reduced mileage slightly.
And that is indeed precisely what it does. There is less energy per gallon in ethanol. It can't help but reduce mileage. It should cost 10% less than unblended gas, but I doubt it does.
The battery life is the biggest draw back in my opinion. Not a deal breaker, but still a drawback.
For practical use in business, you have to be able to have it run all day on the shop floor, the sales floor, the offices or the patient wards.
To be fair, the run time tests were continuous operation of some fairly screen intensive applications. If it is allowed to go to sleep mode in between frequent, but not continuous use, it may be fine in the real world.
You know, it's silly to even have this type of "story" at Slashdot since it is a TROLL to began with. It does not matter what happens with Surface, since it's a Microsoft product, good bad or great, it will not get an unbiased review here.
Exactly so. Much hated and despised and derided here on slashdot. Yes its heavy, thicker, and has a shorter battery life and costs more. So what? It still meshes perfectly with your existing software.
Surface Pro will sell, because most businesses can simply write it off of their taxes, an put it immediately to use without having to first rewrite all of their corporate apps to run on IOS or Android, or Surface RT.
With Surface PRO, you install your existing apps and go. Its that easy, and all of a sudden the shop floor has inventory management (or whatever) without having to leave workstations all over the place.
I actually expect it to outsell Surface RT, because even though those apps written in C++ can (allegedly) be cross compiled for RT, not every company has access to the source of the commercial products they use, and not every company wants to jump through Microsoft's hoops to get their software released for RT.
I don't doubt that at all. My figures tend to agree.
I've bought a few tanks of standard (E-zero) gas, and used it for a several drives that take almost exactly one tank of gas.
I have to use E10 on the return trip, because there is no unblended available there. My car's mileage computer (Chrysler 300) always shows better than the factory claimed mileage on the E-zero leg, and 3mpg less on the return leg.
3mpg is almost 10% of the sticker highway mileage for this car.
Nexus 4 sold over a million units while competing in heavy traffic against all other android phones, to say nothing about IOS phones.
This from a phone that was aimed primarily at developers, not your average user. And the supply problem has been due to the fact that the average consumer is snapping it up in numbers no one anticipated for a developers device.
Apple's margin in the iPhone exceeds industry standards by a huge amount, 58% vs 20%. That's gouging by anyone's standards.
Not to mention that dozens of these are already on the market, some specific to the Android world, some rather generic. Sony has bluetooth Smartwatches and LiveView watchs that let you check email, messages, etc without taking the phone out of your pocket. These are peripherals for your phone.
There are also full phones that actually seems to get good reviews. Some of these are actually fairly inexpensive.
But, hey, if Apple makes it and charges $596, they will sell millions because it will be the best thing ever.
Still the article points out corn ethanol produces 1.2 unit for every 1 unit put, so the original claim is wrong.
True, the wiki article suggest that you get slightly more energy out than you put in. We'd get a lot more out with cellulose based production such as switch grass.
But, the production side is only half of the picture. The other side is any inefficiencies when actually using the ethanol as a fuel. Chemical analysis of the PRODUCTION side does not always translate into real world use.
You also have the USE side. According to the US Department of Energy E85 (85% ethanol - so-called FlexFuel) gives 25 to 30% less mileage. My car's manual (2012 Chrysler product) just flat out states 30% less miles per gallon, and it further states don't ever use it unless your car has a FlexFuel badge. (which my car does not).
E10 (10% ethanol), makes only a 3 to 4% drop in mileage (according to DOE). There are some stations in my area that have E15 (15% ethanol), reduces milage by 7.7% according to the DOE referenced study. My owners manual specifically warns against that as well. Essentially, the report indicated the reduction in miles per gallon continued as a linear trend with increasing ethanol content.
Further there appears to be little pollution benefit from using ethanol, contrary to the claims of some people.
Regulated tailpipe emissions remained largely unaffected by the ethanol content of the fuel. As ethanol content increased,
oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and non-methane organic gases (NMOG) showed no significant change;
non-methane hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions declined on average for all ethanol blend levels tested. Neither pollutant changed appreciably from E10 to E20;
ethanol emissions increased;
acetaldehyde emissions increased;
formaldehyde emissions increased slightly; and
benzene and 1,3-butadiene were expected to decrease due to dilution, but measurements were conducted on only a subset of the vehicles and have not been thoroughly analyzed to date.
Incorrect. Although the natural gas price has been dropping for a couple of reasons (oversupply being one), there are many wells that are frakked for nat gas. And oil. And nat gas and oil. What you may be getting confused about it the fact that they are flaring a lot of natural gas because the price is low.
This just points out to one of the many insanities about how we go extracting resources.
I've often thought that it should be made illegal to flaring a lot of gas. When you loot toward the future, and gas is getting scarce how stupid will this look in retrospect?
I understand there are technical reasons to flare for short periods, but if you have that much excess gas that you flare for years on end, either re-inject it, or pipe it to a small gas fired generation plant and put it on the electrical grid.
Its our resource they are wasting. Flaring is free for them, because they don't pay extraction royalties to the states or federal government until the oil enters the commercial supply chain (pipes or rail cars). If the states started taxing flared gas there would be a quick turnaround in practices.
my friends pay money for every little thing I download for free with my android phone. sucks to be them
Well, Apple users seem pretty proud of overpaying for their handsets and waiting for next year's release. You always hear them bragging that Apple is the most profitable handset maker and has a bank vault full of gazillions of cash.
Not once does it occur to them that the reason for this is that they are simply overpaying for what they are getting. They delight in pointing out that Apple sells every single phone they make, (forgetting that Apple is in control of what they make, and can easily engineer in a tight supply to prop up prices).
I actually think it is simply scraping Google, because there is no sign of yandex in my web server logs, but newly added pages can be found via searchs on yandex, and the only crawler that appears in the log was Google.
Where do you buy things on line at safeway, AND get a choice delivery time slots, automatic re-orders, ability to log in and add or subtract from your automatic order, put your weekly order on hold while you are on vacation?
You have to place EACH order on line at safeway. You can't tell them to deliver a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs every 4 days at 5pm.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been around long enough to see fads come and go. This "cloud" crap that we keep hearing about is just that...another fad. I can see some small and even medium sized companies embracing cloud computing...for a limited set of tasks. I work almost exclusively with large companies and none of them, and i mean none, are ready to dump their internal IT staff to just throw it up into the "cloud" and hope everything works out. There is simply too much at stake for them.
True. Anyone who has been around for a long while sees the same discarded technology pushed to the forefront again and again, often being forced to relearn the same lessons.
We hired service bureaus, then we got our own terminals, then we got our own mainframes, then we got departmental mini-computers, then company wide mainframes then PCs, then file servers, etc etc etc.
This isn't always bad, mind you. New technology can make old ideas better.
I've watched State government division directors railing red-faced in rage at an IT director that overwrote years of backup tapes.
I've also seen entire offices lose everything to a worm.
If data has that much value, no rational person would entrust it ONLY to cloud. Still I can and do see the cloud treated like a long piece of CAT5. Most rational cloud users only use the cloud this way, as a pathway to distribution, not as the ultimate or only means of storage. In this way it works fine.
What is missing is strong encryption of cloud data. When the feds can demand all of your data with nothing more than a rubber stamped national security letter, and you are never told about it, putting anything on the cloud without client side encryption is stupid.
Unless, of course that data is public knowledge anyway (stripped of private identifiers etc). And in that regard, much of government data is (or can be made to be) of this type. In which case the cloud is a good way of freely distributing it.
Just don't rely on it for storage.
Much beyond simple mathematics (addition subtraction multiplication and division) is seldom encountered in the lives of many people.
However people working in the trades (electricians, carpenters, mechanics) usually need a little more.
But your first sentence seem to contain an internal contradiction. You claim china speed too much time on memorization and not enough
time on understanding. Yet you state that China leads the US in this regard.
So, by your own example Understanding is less important than memorization.
Maybe I just misread what you typed.
You know, there have been tablets running Windows for around a decade now. Businesses have been able to write that off on their taxes (which they can also do for ipads), and put it to immediate use without having to rewrite all their corporate apps. If you think somehow this will be better, you need to explain why, because binary compatibility obviously isn't enough to make a tablet successful.
Yes, I know. I have one. (HP Slate)
I wouldn't try to do much of anything other than email on it tho.
My associates asked if they should get one for their office, and I had to tell them NO.
I think the prior versions were pretty much a lash-up.
Maybe the PRO will better.
I'm not so sure. The Apple brand is getting spread pretty darn thin already. It no longer feels special to own Apple gear and their brand was mostly what it's all about for them. The one thing they do really well is marketing though, so maybe they'll be able to milk it for a few more product cycles.
Well, my tongue was lodged firmly in my cheek.....
So I guess we agree for the most part.
Still when they announce something like this the fanbois will line up a midnight,
Apple has been reselling to its customers for years, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
> But haven't Windows tablets been available since the early 90s? What does the Surface bring to the table if you leave out the Metro part? Why would this be more successful then the preceding Windows 7 tablets?
More touch-screen friendly. Cheap (compared to most tablets in the past). Powerful. Good industrial design.
Yeah I have one sitting right here, HP Slate 500, Intel Atom processor running Windows 7.
Just slow enough to be a pain in the ass, and just small enough to require a stylus much of the time.
The touch business was a problem on the Slate. It should be better on the Pro.
But it too, runs just about anything you would care to install.
Win8 has a few UI "issues", most of which become benefits when it's on a touch screen device. It still runs virtually all apps fine. There's no real reason to upgrade, and a slight cost of helping users find the login screen, shutdown screen, and desktop; but it's no biggie.
That's been my experience as well.
On a typical PC, the first thing everybody does is request a familiar startbar, and install apps that way.
But with a tad of tinkering you can get your apps to appear on the new UI.
Folks that use a lot of different software packages soon learn tricks to keep from having to mouse-scroll all over the place trying to find the launch Icons. It wastes a lot of space. There is a learning curve, but for people who live their lives in Outlook or a browser, it won't be steep.
But once you actually HAVE a touch screen, it would probably be just fine.
Every bit of software I've thrown at 8 works just as well as it did on 7. (To date, I've only had 8 installed in a virtual machine).
Even if you had the source code, you would have a huge amount of work to do rewriting the UI.
Ok, my bad. Someone on slashdot said that if you had win32 code (c++ or C# or something) you could just run it thru the compiler, indicate you wanted RT code, and it would run perfectly under RT. (Microsofts compilers would do the api translation).
It sounded plausible, if not a little too good to be true. I personally don't know.
No. Do your own research.
It's as if the 10% ethanol actually reduced mileage slightly.
And that is indeed precisely what it does. There is less energy per gallon in ethanol. It can't help but reduce mileage.
It should cost 10% less than unblended gas, but I doubt it does.
The battery life is the biggest draw back in my opinion. Not a deal breaker, but still a drawback.
For practical use in business, you have to be able to have it run all day on the shop floor, the sales floor, the offices or the patient wards.
To be fair, the run time tests were continuous operation of some fairly screen intensive applications. If it is allowed to go to sleep mode in between frequent, but not continuous use, it may be fine in the real world.
After the abject failure that was the Windows RT Surface, any real interest outside of the nerd community probably fell off of a cliff.
The interest in Surface PRO is NOT in the nerd community.
Its in the business community that can immediately use PRO without waiting for an RT version of the software they use every day to come out.
You know, it's silly to even have this type of "story" at Slashdot since it is a TROLL to began with. It does not matter what happens with Surface, since it's a Microsoft product, good bad or great, it will not get an unbiased review here.
Exactly so. Much hated and despised and derided here on slashdot. Yes its heavy, thicker, and has a shorter battery life and costs more.
So what? It still meshes perfectly with your existing software.
Surface Pro will sell, because most businesses can simply write it off of their taxes, an put it immediately to use without having to first rewrite all of their corporate apps to run on IOS or Android, or Surface RT.
With Surface PRO, you install your existing apps and go. Its that easy, and all of a sudden the shop floor has inventory management (or whatever) without having to leave workstations all over the place.
I actually expect it to outsell Surface RT, because even though those apps written in C++ can (allegedly) be cross compiled for RT, not every company has access to the source of the commercial products they use, and not every company wants to jump through Microsoft's hoops to get their software released for RT.
I don't doubt that at all. My figures tend to agree.
I've bought a few tanks of standard (E-zero) gas, and used it for a several drives that take almost exactly one tank of gas.
I have to use E10 on the return trip, because there is no unblended available there. My car's mileage computer (Chrysler 300) always shows better than the factory claimed mileage on the E-zero leg, and 3mpg less on the return leg.
3mpg is almost 10% of the sticker highway mileage for this car.
Nexus 4 sold over a million units while competing in heavy traffic against all other android phones, to say nothing about IOS phones.
This from a phone that was aimed primarily at developers, not your average user. And the supply problem has been due to the fact that the average consumer is snapping it up in numbers no one anticipated for a developers device.
Apple's margin in the iPhone exceeds industry standards by a huge amount, 58% vs 20%. That's gouging by anyone's standards.
Not to mention that dozens of these are already on the market, some specific to the Android world, some rather generic.
Sony has bluetooth Smartwatches and LiveView watchs that let you check email, messages, etc without taking the phone out of your pocket.
These are peripherals for your phone.
There are also full phones that actually seems to get good reviews. Some of these are actually fairly inexpensive.
But, hey, if Apple makes it and charges $596, they will sell millions because it will be the best thing ever.
If it was really for nerds, would they have cited a pay-walled article?
Citation? Common sense needs a citation?
Yes it does, because you will find that common sense isn't all that common.
Common sense is indistinguishable from religious belief and superstition in the minds of a large percentage of people.
The word "common" is as much a pejorative as anything else.
Still the article points out corn ethanol produces 1.2 unit for every 1 unit put, so the original claim is wrong.
True, the wiki article suggest that you get slightly more energy out than you put in. We'd get a lot more out with cellulose based production such as switch grass.
But, the production side is only half of the picture. The other side is any inefficiencies when actually using the ethanol as a fuel. Chemical analysis of the PRODUCTION side does not always translate into real world use.
You also have the USE side. According to the US Department of Energy E85 (85% ethanol - so-called FlexFuel) gives 25 to 30% less mileage. My car's manual (2012 Chrysler product) just flat out states 30% less miles per gallon, and it further states don't ever use it unless your car has a FlexFuel badge. (which my car does not).
E10 (10% ethanol), makes only a 3 to 4% drop in mileage (according to DOE). There are some stations in my area that have E15 (15% ethanol), reduces milage by 7.7% according to the DOE referenced study. My owners manual specifically warns against that as well. Essentially, the report indicated the reduction in miles per gallon continued as a linear trend with increasing ethanol content.
Further there appears to be little pollution benefit from using ethanol, contrary to the claims of some people.
Regulated tailpipe emissions remained largely unaffected by the ethanol content of the fuel.
As ethanol content increased,
oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and non-methane organic gases (NMOG) showed no significant
change;
non-methane hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions declined on average for
all ethanol blend levels tested. Neither pollutant changed appreciably from E10 to E20;
ethanol emissions increased;
acetaldehyde emissions increased;
formaldehyde emissions increased slightly; and
benzene and 1,3-butadiene were expected to decrease due to dilution, but measurements
were conducted on only a subset of the vehicles and have not been thoroughly analyzed
to date.
Nice insightful typo :)
LOL, totally missed that, but I'll take it.
Incorrect. Although the natural gas price has been dropping for a couple of reasons (oversupply being one), there are many wells that are frakked for nat gas. And oil. And nat gas and oil. What you may be getting confused about it the fact that they are flaring a lot of natural gas because the price is low.
This just points out to one of the many insanities about how we go extracting resources.
I've often thought that it should be made illegal to flaring a lot of gas. When you loot toward the future, and gas is getting scarce how stupid will this look in retrospect?
I understand there are technical reasons to flare for short periods, but if you have that much excess gas that you flare for years on end, either re-inject it, or pipe it to a small gas fired generation plant and put it on the electrical grid.
Its our resource they are wasting. Flaring is free for them, because they don't pay extraction royalties to the states or federal government until the oil enters the commercial supply chain (pipes or rail cars). If the states started taxing flared gas there would be a quick turnaround in practices.
If a pipeline is leaking ~1/20th of the gas it carries then... well, words escape me.
I said it was theoretically possible, not likely.
Which suggests that the whole story in nothing but a theory, probably pushed forward to attack fracking than provide any hard facts.
my friends pay money for every little thing I download for free with my android phone. sucks to be them
Well, Apple users seem pretty proud of overpaying for their handsets and waiting for next year's release. You always hear them bragging that Apple is the most profitable handset maker and has a bank vault full of gazillions of cash.
Not once does it occur to them that the reason for this is that they are simply overpaying for what they are getting. They delight in pointing out that Apple sells every single phone they make, (forgetting that Apple is in control of what they make, and can easily engineer in a tight supply to prop up prices).
My tests show the same thing.
I actually think it is simply scraping Google, because there is no sign of yandex in my web server logs, but newly added pages can be found via searchs on yandex, and the only crawler that appears in the log was Google.
And by "attempting to patent" you mean DID patent, because the patent was in fact issued.
Now it's up to someone else to fight to overturn it.
Where do you buy things on line at safeway, AND get a choice delivery time slots, automatic re-orders, ability to log in and add or subtract from your automatic order, put your weekly order on hold while you are on vacation?
You have to place EACH order on line at safeway. You can't tell them to deliver a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs every 4 days at 5pm.