Sadly, it's that opinion (which I broadly share) against math, and math is going to win. If you want to get rid of the two party system, you have to make a structural change. Something like partisan voting for the House, or a preferential system or some such. But as long as we are first past the post, only a two party system is stable.
Anonymous is, in effect, practicing an eclectic combination of bits of espionage, sabotage and warfare. (For that matter, so is WikiLeaks.) Eventually, they will run up against people who don't think that should be confined to the online world when it has real world consequences. I really wonder if they've considered what happens then.
There are at least 3 issues of note in this: how do you measure the performance of a teacher, how do you measure the performance of a system of education, and how do you improve educational outcomes. We want to do the third, but we seem to frequently get confused between individual teacher performance and systemic performance.
If you'd asked me before I started this project, I'd have said Sun. OpenLDAP used to be... not as useful as other solutions, let's just say. But really, recent versions have made some significant improvements in performance and reliability. I can't be nearly as dismissive of it as I used to be.
While I admit that having troops quartered in your house might, in fact, result in them making unreasonable searches and seizures, I suspect you should reread the Bill of Rights.
Dead on. And I'm currently building an ecommerce site on openldap. It's way better than it used to be. In particular, I'd never use it in the past because slurpd stank. Now that that's gone their replication is fast and solid. And yeah, NoSQL is basically a poor reimplementation of well tuned LDAP.
Mirrored surface. The visibility tradeoff is on the defender's side, because you're going to see them anyway: they'll be radiating heat. So the lasers would likely be terribly ineffective. You need some kind of kinetic weapon, or maybe radiation from a sufficiently close range.
The first thing to do is constrain the question. "What would naval combat look like" would have a very different answer in 500BC than it does today. So let's assume that you mean, in the next few years.
The battlefield has the characteristics that movement is free, but acceleration is generally not; there is a complex set of small accelerations constantly acting on the combatants, and those forces are constantly varying with time; the environmental accelerations get substantially larger as the combatant's proximity to a large body increases, and also substantially larger as the combatant enters any atmosphere (and the closer in, the denser the atmosphere so the larger the acceleration); vision is essentially unimpeded except in the vicinity of relatively large bits of debris (somewhat larger than the combatant vessels); detection is simple because all manned or powered objects will radiate heat, and that cannot be particularly well masked within the laws of thermodynamics and both human and machine endurance. In the near future, we will not have the ability to accelerate for long periods of time or at high rates, except downwards (towards a reasonably close planet or star), because chemical and nuclear rockets have to carry fuel, and other known methods of propulsion (such as solar sails or electric propulsion like ion engines) generate low levels of thrust.
These characteristics favor a few combat methods. Long-range rockets, probably with warheads of some combination of boulders (resistant to weapons trying to destroy them) and pebbles (also resistant to being destroyed, and capable of doing damage over a broader area, but potentially could be armored against), would be the major weapons systems. Most likely, these would involve a short, fast boost followed by a long coast with the booster discarded, followed by last-minute maneuvering to hit the target - all of these characteristics intended to make the weapon less visible, and thus the reaction too late. There are some circumstances where rail guns or even low-recoil gatling-type cannon might be handy, such as in close-in combat around asteroids/planetary rings.
Because ships can be detected a long way off, but maneuver takes a lot of time (because acceleration costs heavily), it's likely that most of the combat will be very slow by modern standards. It might take days for two ships to fight a battle, with long range shots starting the action, followed by closing slowly once the long range ammo was gone, followed by either boarding (think like the boarding pods on B5 that attached to the hull and then burned through) or the aforementioned rail guns or other kinds of small, fast ballistic projectiles. Mines would be immensely popular, because they use almost no power and thus generate almost no heat. If they only transmit, and do not receive, their radio signature would also be quite small, so they would be very difficult to detect, but could still be command as well as proximity detonated. They would probably be nuclear, because that would increase the destructive radius substantially (especially from radiation and EMP effects; blast would be a minor issue unless the mine was right on top of a combatant, because there's no fluid medium to transmit the pressure).
So basically, in the near future, it would likely look a lot like Napoleonic naval combat.
If only there were some mechanism to ensure those who need the energy most would be guaranteed to get it, while those who need it less would be encouraged to consume less. We could call it a market, and combined with a ready mechanism for the exchange of value, it would make us all better off. Alternately, of course, we can simply assume that people capable of and willing to grasp and maintain the power of the state not only do so with only our best interests at heart, but that they are so wise and knowledgeable as to know the right course of action in every case, so that they can mandate it, as the people directly involved in the situation clearly cannot be wise enough to know their own interests.
I used to really respect your opinion, but the reason now escapes me. I suppose, though, that it may do some good to mention that the Supreme Court's current interpretation of the interstate commerce clause is such that if they were in fact to manufacture incandescent bulbs, in their own house for their own use, the government could still come take them. Well, no, it probably won't do any good. People, it seems, are fine to tolerate creeping totalitarianism forever, so long as it creeps at a rate that doesn't inconvenience them personally.
I realize that. I was just thinking of something recent and technical enough that/. readers would get the analogy. The whole point was that the precautionary principle inherently favors overreaction and hysteria, rather than thinking. The OP was an example of that: having conceived of a truly aweful worst case scenario, without regard to whether or not it is reasonable that it could happen, let's overthrow the world order just in case. It's an example of the point of "economics in one lesson," as well, since the OP completely fails to take into account that the remedies proposed may themselves impose catastrophic outcomes.
The best research indicates that public keys can be trivially broken. Therefore if you don't make me CEO of your ecommerce company and pay me a hundred million dollars a year in salary, your customers will all be hacked and you will be bankrupt. This is in essence the analog of the precautionary principle argument that you are making, and it's bunk.
Actually, I didn't. I had an Xserve with 10.5 and later 10.6 server on it, but it's really not a fantastic server OS. Or at least it wasn't. Again, though, it doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if they put a big push behind it, either.
Yes, Apple's stuff is harder to manage for multiple systems, but there are many solutions for that. It sounds like you could use someone who really knows Macs to come in and teach you how to manage them. For that size establishment, it should be fairly trivial. When most of the people here say "enterprise," they generally mean "hundreds to thousands of machines in multiple locations widely geographically separated." It's a different class of problem.
Actually, I can imagine Apple providing something equivalent to or better than MSSQL. Postgres is open source, after all, and if Apple wanted to challenge MS in the RDBMS space, that would be one easy way to do it, with a little extending and some branding.
But in practical terms, I don't think Apple has the slightest bit of interest in challenging MS on SQL or device management or directory services or any of the other areas MS is good at. I think Apple intends to do an end run around IT entirely.
Well, you no longer need iTunes to manage current iDevices, but the point is basically valid nonetheless. iTunes is a horrible thing these days. It needs to be split into a server to manage data, and several different clients to do the other things iTunes is used for. iTunes currently incorporates media library management, several stores, two music players (the normal one and the DJ mode), a movie player, device backup and synchronization, device configuration management, courseware management and delivery, media ripper/burner, media server (home sharing), music and app discovery services (Genius), a podcast client, an internet radio client and — if you can believe this — even a screensaver. What could be five or six really nice, clean apps has become instead a singular bloated monstrosity. I don't know why Apple puts up with that, since it goes so much against their philosophy in nearly everything else.
First, let me point out that Apple's model isn't even a fantastic fit for a family, using my own experience. In order to buy music through iTunes, which we do a fair bit of, we need an AppleID. For all the convenience features (like automatically downloading music that any of us buys, for instance), we have to use the same AppleID on all the computers/devices that we use for storing the music, listening to it, or loading it on the phones/iPods/etc. And even with iCloud, this works reasonably smoothly, because you can set one AppleID for your music and another for everything else, so that you can still share music but not, say, email.
OK, but that means that our playlists are shared (which we can deal with by using folders for our individual playlists), but so is the metadata. Mostly, that's a good thing, but what if my wife and I and my sons want to all rate the same song differently? Out of luck: the rating is shared. I could go on about what should be shared and what shouldn't, but the point is that Apple does not make it easy to share some things and not others even within a family. I imagine that trying to work AppleIDs and iDevices into an enterprise must be quite the nightmare from that point of view.
There are solutions to some such problems, and certainly different IT shops have different ways of doing things, which means that for some (including my current one), it's easy while for others it's a complete nightmare. Fundamentally, if you have an IT shop where integrating is easy, there's little reason not to do it. If you'd need Apple servers, or more control over devices (say, if you're regulated, or a government entity), then you're probably out of luck and should tell users — yes, even users like the C-level types — that they're welcome to use whatever they want, but IT cannot support it.
In some cases, this means that IT shops as we are used to them will have to dramatically change to accommodate their users. And in some cases, it means that the users will have to live with the restrictions. I can see some shops moving to a model where internal users are treated like external users, except that they have access to different resources through their (untrusted) network connection to the servers. VPNs would be unnecessary: just connect to resources directly over the network, "local" or remote, and be done with it. In other words, I could see some shops moving to a model that protects the data, but not the desktop. But I think other shops will likely have to dig in their heels, not because they want to be difficult, but because they cannot allow the kinds of practices that Apple would require. (Think of trying to manage a bank's customer data when you couldn't properly audit the machines used to access that data, and then think of trying to explain that to a bureaucrat.)
But in the end, I think that the general purpose computer in a decade or so will be far less common than today. Thin client devices, tablets and the like will replace a lot of computers simply because of cost, maintenance, training and business utility advantages intrinsic to the types. And that means that IT shops will lose a lot of the control that they have now over the user experience. They'll still keep control of the centralized data stores, certainly, but that may be the extent of it for a lot of shops. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: in truth, how many users really need something as powerful and flexible as a laptop? Maybe 10% — maybe? Well, why not make things cheaper and easier for the other 90%, even if it does make IT's job harder in some ways?
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, it's that opinion (which I broadly share) against math, and math is going to win. If you want to get rid of the two party system, you have to make a structural change. Something like partisan voting for the House, or a preferential system or some such. But as long as we are first past the post, only a two party system is stable.
Anonymous is, in effect, practicing an eclectic combination of bits of espionage, sabotage and warfare. (For that matter, so is WikiLeaks.) Eventually, they will run up against people who don't think that should be confined to the online world when it has real world consequences. I really wonder if they've considered what happens then.
AMteK owned the iTablet trademark last I saw.
There are at least 3 issues of note in this: how do you measure the performance of a teacher, how do you measure the performance of a system of education, and how do you improve educational outcomes. We want to do the third, but we seem to frequently get confused between individual teacher performance and systemic performance.
If you'd asked me before I started this project, I'd have said Sun. OpenLDAP used to be ... not as useful as other solutions, let's just say. But really, recent versions have made some significant improvements in performance and reliability. I can't be nearly as dismissive of it as I used to be.
While I admit that having troops quartered in your house might, in fact, result in them making unreasonable searches and seizures, I suspect you should reread the Bill of Rights.
What encryption product was used? It sounds like it is doing its job.
Dead on. And I'm currently building an ecommerce site on openldap. It's way better than it used to be. In particular, I'd never use it in the past because slurpd stank. Now that that's gone their replication is fast and solid. And yeah, NoSQL is basically a poor reimplementation of well tuned LDAP.
So "fake but accurate" is good enough for you?
Mirrored surface. The visibility tradeoff is on the defender's side, because you're going to see them anyway: they'll be radiating heat. So the lasers would likely be terribly ineffective. You need some kind of kinetic weapon, or maybe radiation from a sufficiently close range.
The first thing to do is constrain the question. "What would naval combat look like" would have a very different answer in 500BC than it does today. So let's assume that you mean, in the next few years.
The battlefield has the characteristics that movement is free, but acceleration is generally not; there is a complex set of small accelerations constantly acting on the combatants, and those forces are constantly varying with time; the environmental accelerations get substantially larger as the combatant's proximity to a large body increases, and also substantially larger as the combatant enters any atmosphere (and the closer in, the denser the atmosphere so the larger the acceleration); vision is essentially unimpeded except in the vicinity of relatively large bits of debris (somewhat larger than the combatant vessels); detection is simple because all manned or powered objects will radiate heat, and that cannot be particularly well masked within the laws of thermodynamics and both human and machine endurance. In the near future, we will not have the ability to accelerate for long periods of time or at high rates, except downwards (towards a reasonably close planet or star), because chemical and nuclear rockets have to carry fuel, and other known methods of propulsion (such as solar sails or electric propulsion like ion engines) generate low levels of thrust.
These characteristics favor a few combat methods. Long-range rockets, probably with warheads of some combination of boulders (resistant to weapons trying to destroy them) and pebbles (also resistant to being destroyed, and capable of doing damage over a broader area, but potentially could be armored against), would be the major weapons systems. Most likely, these would involve a short, fast boost followed by a long coast with the booster discarded, followed by last-minute maneuvering to hit the target - all of these characteristics intended to make the weapon less visible, and thus the reaction too late. There are some circumstances where rail guns or even low-recoil gatling-type cannon might be handy, such as in close-in combat around asteroids/planetary rings.
Because ships can be detected a long way off, but maneuver takes a lot of time (because acceleration costs heavily), it's likely that most of the combat will be very slow by modern standards. It might take days for two ships to fight a battle, with long range shots starting the action, followed by closing slowly once the long range ammo was gone, followed by either boarding (think like the boarding pods on B5 that attached to the hull and then burned through) or the aforementioned rail guns or other kinds of small, fast ballistic projectiles. Mines would be immensely popular, because they use almost no power and thus generate almost no heat. If they only transmit, and do not receive, their radio signature would also be quite small, so they would be very difficult to detect, but could still be command as well as proximity detonated. They would probably be nuclear, because that would increase the destructive radius substantially (especially from radiation and EMP effects; blast would be a minor issue unless the mine was right on top of a combatant, because there's no fluid medium to transmit the pressure).
So basically, in the near future, it would likely look a lot like Napoleonic naval combat.
If only there were some mechanism to ensure those who need the energy most would be guaranteed to get it, while those who need it less would be encouraged to consume less. We could call it a market, and combined with a ready mechanism for the exchange of value, it would make us all better off. Alternately, of course, we can simply assume that people capable of and willing to grasp and maintain the power of the state not only do so with only our best interests at heart, but that they are so wise and knowledgeable as to know the right course of action in every case, so that they can mandate it, as the people directly involved in the situation clearly cannot be wise enough to know their own interests.
I used to really respect your opinion, but the reason now escapes me. I suppose, though, that it may do some good to mention that the Supreme Court's current interpretation of the interstate commerce clause is such that if they were in fact to manufacture incandescent bulbs, in their own house for their own use, the government could still come take them. Well, no, it probably won't do any good. People, it seems, are fine to tolerate creeping totalitarianism forever, so long as it creeps at a rate that doesn't inconvenience them personally.
I realize that. I was just thinking of something recent and technical enough that /. readers would get the analogy. The whole point was that the precautionary principle inherently favors overreaction and hysteria, rather than thinking. The OP was an example of that: having conceived of a truly aweful worst case scenario, without regard to whether or not it is reasonable that it could happen, let's overthrow the world order just in case. It's an example of the point of "economics in one lesson," as well, since the OP completely fails to take into account that the remedies proposed may themselves impose catastrophic outcomes.
The best research indicates that public keys can be trivially broken. Therefore if you don't make me CEO of your ecommerce company and pay me a hundred million dollars a year in salary, your customers will all be hacked and you will be bankrupt. This is in essence the analog of the precautionary principle argument that you are making, and it's bunk.
But so far as I know, soldiers haven't been quartered on civilians. It would take that to violate the 3rd amendment.
Long before the PATRIOT Act. Actually, the 3rd may be the only amendment in the Bill of Rights that hasn't been essentially abrogated.
Actually, I didn't. I had an Xserve with 10.5 and later 10.6 server on it, but it's really not a fantastic server OS. Or at least it wasn't. Again, though, it doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't surprise me if they put a big push behind it, either.
So not in OCIO, then?
Yup. That's why I put it first.
Yes, Apple's stuff is harder to manage for multiple systems, but there are many solutions for that. It sounds like you could use someone who really knows Macs to come in and teach you how to manage them. For that size establishment, it should be fairly trivial. When most of the people here say "enterprise," they generally mean "hundreds to thousands of machines in multiple locations widely geographically separated." It's a different class of problem.
Kind of like Occupy IT, but without the rapes, diseases, property destruction and general asshattery.
OK, I deserve the flame bait and troll ratings I'm going to get for that.
Actually, I can imagine Apple providing something equivalent to or better than MSSQL. Postgres is open source, after all, and if Apple wanted to challenge MS in the RDBMS space, that would be one easy way to do it, with a little extending and some branding.
But in practical terms, I don't think Apple has the slightest bit of interest in challenging MS on SQL or device management or directory services or any of the other areas MS is good at. I think Apple intends to do an end run around IT entirely.
Well, you no longer need iTunes to manage current iDevices, but the point is basically valid nonetheless. iTunes is a horrible thing these days. It needs to be split into a server to manage data, and several different clients to do the other things iTunes is used for. iTunes currently incorporates media library management, several stores, two music players (the normal one and the DJ mode), a movie player, device backup and synchronization, device configuration management, courseware management and delivery, media ripper/burner, media server (home sharing), music and app discovery services (Genius), a podcast client, an internet radio client and — if you can believe this — even a screensaver. What could be five or six really nice, clean apps has become instead a singular bloated monstrosity. I don't know why Apple puts up with that, since it goes so much against their philosophy in nearly everything else.
First, let me point out that Apple's model isn't even a fantastic fit for a family, using my own experience. In order to buy music through iTunes, which we do a fair bit of, we need an AppleID. For all the convenience features (like automatically downloading music that any of us buys, for instance), we have to use the same AppleID on all the computers/devices that we use for storing the music, listening to it, or loading it on the phones/iPods/etc. And even with iCloud, this works reasonably smoothly, because you can set one AppleID for your music and another for everything else, so that you can still share music but not, say, email.
OK, but that means that our playlists are shared (which we can deal with by using folders for our individual playlists), but so is the metadata. Mostly, that's a good thing, but what if my wife and I and my sons want to all rate the same song differently? Out of luck: the rating is shared. I could go on about what should be shared and what shouldn't, but the point is that Apple does not make it easy to share some things and not others even within a family. I imagine that trying to work AppleIDs and iDevices into an enterprise must be quite the nightmare from that point of view.
There are solutions to some such problems, and certainly different IT shops have different ways of doing things, which means that for some (including my current one), it's easy while for others it's a complete nightmare. Fundamentally, if you have an IT shop where integrating is easy, there's little reason not to do it. If you'd need Apple servers, or more control over devices (say, if you're regulated, or a government entity), then you're probably out of luck and should tell users — yes, even users like the C-level types — that they're welcome to use whatever they want, but IT cannot support it.
In some cases, this means that IT shops as we are used to them will have to dramatically change to accommodate their users. And in some cases, it means that the users will have to live with the restrictions. I can see some shops moving to a model where internal users are treated like external users, except that they have access to different resources through their (untrusted) network connection to the servers. VPNs would be unnecessary: just connect to resources directly over the network, "local" or remote, and be done with it. In other words, I could see some shops moving to a model that protects the data, but not the desktop. But I think other shops will likely have to dig in their heels, not because they want to be difficult, but because they cannot allow the kinds of practices that Apple would require. (Think of trying to manage a bank's customer data when you couldn't properly audit the machines used to access that data, and then think of trying to explain that to a bureaucrat.)
But in the end, I think that the general purpose computer in a decade or so will be far less common than today. Thin client devices, tablets and the like will replace a lot of computers simply because of cost, maintenance, training and business utility advantages intrinsic to the types. And that means that IT shops will lose a lot of the control that they have now over the user experience. They'll still keep control of the centralized data stores, certainly, but that may be the extent of it for a lot of shops. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: in truth, how many users really need something as powerful and flexible as a laptop? Maybe 10% — maybe? Well, why not make things cheaper and easier for the other 90%, even if it does make IT's job harder in some ways?