Let's say that it's around 1915, your name is Thomas J. Watson and you've just been been hired to help out a company called Computing- Tabulating- Recording Company. Your job is to come up with a hundred-year plan to help the company sell their tabulating and time-recording devices to businesses. Please account for technologies that haven't been invented yet, materials that haven't been discovered or invented, a couple of wars, advances in travel and communications, a depression that wiped out most of the valuation of the country, radical changes in culture and a space program. What's your plan?
Too tough? Ok, let's try for 50 years. Please account for multiple "police actions" with other countries, a revolution in electronics, two wars, the creation of global communication infrastructure based upon technology that doesn't yet exist and a revolution in miniaturization, satellites and an attempt at a landing on the Moon.
Wanna try for a twenty-five-year plan? Add computers that are cheap enough to be bought by normal people. You get the point.
BTW, if the name isn't a hint as to what that company became, here's another: who has the most patents?
And don't try to sell me that "it takes $10 a month to run the servers" crap either. The total bandwidth you suck down in those games isn't all that large (even though you do have to download great big patches every so often, which can add quite a bit), and the storage/admin costs are negligible when spread across the entire population of players.
If those were their only costs, yes, that would be possible. But those aren't the only costs in running a datacenter. Blizzard also has to pay maintenance costs for their infrastructure (switches, routers, servers, etc.), service and support costs for any licensed software and other costs. Someone once told me that they have an Oracle backend - I can't verify this as true, but having negotiated Oracle contracts, I can tell you that this would be a huge chunk of change.
They also have to pay the folks that actually create the content - neither programmers nor artists work on spec and both tend to be very well paid for some very good reasons...
We have hundreds of servers, most of which aren't even coming close to suffering any performance problems due to over utilization, so it it turns out to be more cost effective for us to use virtualization on systems that are running applications that aren't necessarily processor-intensive (which, in reality, makes almost no difference) rather than the cost hit of hardware and maintenance costs on a bunch of servers that are being underused.
We don't use it for everything, just where it makes sense.
You then copy mp3s across (generally, folders and all) and then navigate these on the device. Quick, easy, and no clunky, proprietary software needed.
The reason for Apple's "clunky" interface becomes clear when you have a lot of music. I have close to 6000 songs and I'd be hard pressed to remember where I put 'em if I had to keep track of them by organizing them into folders.
In California, breaks aren't something that the employee gets a choice in.
California labor code requires employers allow one 30-minute lunch break (unpaid) and two 10-minute breaks during an eight hour day. Whether an employer pays the employee during the short break is up to the employer (most do), but not allowing breaks at all will generally result in a law suit.
We're about to migrate our 500+ server farm (webservers, Exchange and databases) to VMs and I can't seem to get them to understand that not everything can work within a VM.
Let me correct that: Most technical people are not confused by the issue like M$ would want them to be.
The only way that I would describe Linux as a kernel rather than an OS to our business units is if I wanted to make sure that I never got invited to talk with them about technical issues again. Even in the unlikely event that they are aware of the difference between a OS kernel and the services that are layered on top of it (which I sincerely doubt), the two are synonymous. To them, Linux is Linux, Unix is Unix and Windows is Windows.
Fully 50% of the California State budget goes toward education (the majority of which was mandated by Prop 98, - a voter-passed initiative which mandated that a set percentage of the California budget be spent on education). Of the remainder, 23% goes toward Health and Human Services (welfare, MediCal, etc) with the rest going toward infrastructure, salaries and the other items which are funded through the General Fund.
I'm all for paying better teachers a higher wage, but how do you quantify performance? Test scores? Peer review? Independent review? Whatever the parents say?
With no absolutes to measure against, how
does one decide that one instructor's performance is better than another's?
You will see more of this for as long as India has a superiour high school system to the USA.
You'll see more of this, but it won't be India getting the work. As wage expectations rise in India, as they have been, it, too will become too expensive. And then India, too, will will be having this same discussion as graduates are unable to find jobs because someone else will do the same work for less money. It's only a matter of time.
If you are a potential voter you can do something about this.
Do what, exactly? Grand and glorious unworkable education policies are made at the national level, but everything important happens at the local level. People there don't use their vote to change the world or affect US policy, they try to make sure the streets are safe (at least in their neighborhoods) and that a WalMart won't be able to move in next door. So long as the money comes from the local tax base and as long as the people that bother to vote are unwilling to change their voting priorities and as long voters aren't convinced that education is more important than, say, police or filling potholes, nothing will change.
still find it difficult to believe that education standards have slipped enough that there are schools that don't teach calculus at all
Maybe because calculus isn't really necessary - at least at the high-school level. With high schools having the problems that they do retaining students, do you really think that it's a good idea to force yet another irrelevant class down the students' throat?
If an English teacher's 50% cut to a Physics teacher's pay bothers the English teacher, he (she) need only get the necessary background to qualify to teach physics. It seems like a simple equation... it's kind of (not exactly) how it works in the job market.
This isn't just the Legislature, it's all of the State Agencies.
Which is why it's largely useless.
Putting aside people's feelings about Microsoft or ODF, realistically, it ain't gonna happen.
California State agencies, up until now, haven't had to follow any standard document format. Although most use Microsoft Word, the California CMAS master contract that State Agencies use to buy their software has Word, WordPerfect and other word processing packages on it. Which means that agencies can pick and choose what they think that they need. Now the Legislature wants to set one - and you can bet that there's no money in the bill to do it. If the bill is passed, agencies will need to convert already existing processes and applications to use the new format. With no new staff nor new money to hire someone else to do it.
I've been in the SF store and I kinda like it because it is dark and close. I've gotten tired of the current crop of designed-by-shopping-psychology-consultants-to-be- annoyingly-bright-and-cheerful-all-stores-must-be- the-same-all-salespeople-must-have-the-same-rictus -grin stores that you find in malls.
It also helps that their selection, although smaller, is a couple of orders of magnitude better than Best Buy. I only go to that CompUsa when I need only one thing and don't feel like driving down to Fry's, but I actually kind of like it. I grew up with stores that were small and not well lighted, so it's sorta like going home...
Just stick with unexpanded WoW for the time being. You won't be able to get to Outland for a while and, unless you really want to play an Draenei or Blood Elf or unless Jewelcrafting sounds like something that you want to do, the expansion doesn't give a low-level character all that much more.
You already paid a bunch less than most of us to buy the game - wait to see if you really like it before investing the extra bucks...
The only arguement WoW has to support its cost is technical support and better servers.
I guess that the developers who write and upgrade code and the artists that do the artwork work for free, right? And I'm sure that their telco provider gives them a bye when it comes to paying their bills and the switch, router and server vendors all happily donated their equipment, and the regular maintenance costs, for free. Gee, it must be great to work for Blizzard - people keep giving them stuff...
And so dispute resolution by violence is perpetuated to another generation...
Maybe things are different now than they were when I was a kid. I wasn't terribly interested in advancing my standing within the group by picking on someone else and the few times I got hassled, I just walked away. Yes, I got called a chicken, but so what? I was interested in neither their opinion nor the macho BS game that they wanted to play. Eventually people learn that they can't get under your skin enough to make you react and go away.
I've had this conversation - it usually goes something like this:
"We need to have an FTP server to get some files from an outside company."
"Ok, we already have something set up to do that. Here's how to use it."
"That's too much trouble. We want to use our own."
"Well, we don't usually do that, but if you really need it, we'll need to get authorization to place it in our DMZ - it'll take about two weeks."
"Why do I need to put it there? We're already running one here - why can't you just let our customer connect to it? I'm not an idiot. It's secure."
"We never said that you were."
"Then what's the problem?"
"Even assuming that you've set everything up correctly, which you probably did, we don't permit connections to systems on our internal network.
Why?
"Because, honestly, if we did this every time we were asked, we wouldn't need a DMZ."
"This is only one connection. If you'd take off your tinfoil hat for a minute..."
--- You can guess the how this usually went from there... ---
You're probably more than competent to do this. Some of the people who make these kind of requests are. From experience, however, we know that the vast majority of people who make these requests have little to no clue as to how to set up a secure system. We'd love to let everybody do what they want to do (especially if they know the difference between "want" and "need"), but there's only so many hours in a day...
I didn't say anything about wanting universal broadband access. In fact, I can think of fewer things less important to the general populace than a fast Internet connection. I just pointed out that reason that it's not more widespread could possibly be because not everybody wants it or feels that it's terribly important to them.
I know some people that are very happy with their dial-up service (and no, they're not on AOL). They've never tried anything else, so they're not staying with dial-up because of some cost or service issue, and they have seen what I can do with my much faster connection, so they're not ignorant of what can be done. Their needs are well served by the service that they get. Is this a problem?
...the US is "lagging behind" because a sufficient case hasn't been made for having universal broadband access in the first place?
So far as I've seen, the only people that bring this up are trying to sell something. Politicians like talking about the US being "behind" other countries 'cause it sounds good and will get them votes, cable companies and telcos talk about it because it'll make them more money and magazines talk about it because it'll sell ads. If people are really clamoring for faster access to the Internet and someone can make money at it, why isn't it available?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say that it's around 1915, your name is Thomas J. Watson and you've just been been hired to help out a company called Computing- Tabulating- Recording Company. Your job is to come up with a hundred-year plan to help the company sell their tabulating and time-recording devices to businesses. Please account for technologies that haven't been invented yet, materials that haven't been discovered or invented, a couple of wars, advances in travel and communications, a depression that wiped out most of the valuation of the country, radical changes in culture and a space program. What's your plan?
Too tough? Ok, let's try for 50 years. Please account for multiple "police actions" with other countries, a revolution in electronics, two wars, the creation of global communication infrastructure based upon technology that doesn't yet exist and a revolution in miniaturization, satellites and an attempt at a landing on the Moon.
Wanna try for a twenty-five-year plan? Add computers that are cheap enough to be bought by normal people. You get the point.
BTW, if the name isn't a hint as to what that company became, here's another: who has the most patents?
If those were their only costs, yes, that would be possible. But those aren't the only costs in running a datacenter. Blizzard also has to pay maintenance costs for their infrastructure (switches, routers, servers, etc.), service and support costs for any licensed software and other costs. Someone once told me that they have an Oracle backend - I can't verify this as true, but having negotiated Oracle contracts, I can tell you that this would be a huge chunk of change.
They also have to pay the folks that actually create the content - neither programmers nor artists work on spec and both tend to be very well paid for some very good reasons...
We have hundreds of servers, most of which aren't even coming close to suffering any performance problems due to over utilization, so it it turns out to be more cost effective for us to use virtualization on systems that are running applications that aren't necessarily processor-intensive (which, in reality, makes almost no difference) rather than the cost hit of hardware and maintenance costs on a bunch of servers that are being underused.
We don't use it for everything, just where it makes sense.
It's "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.
The reason for Apple's "clunky" interface becomes clear when you have a lot of music. I have close to 6000 songs and I'd be hard pressed to remember where I put 'em if I had to keep track of them by organizing them into folders.
When it appears that your "Internet Strategy"'s opening gambit is a hit piece against your opponent, it may not be a very effective strategy.
California labor code requires employers allow one 30-minute lunch break (unpaid) and two 10-minute breaks during an eight hour day. Whether an employer pays the employee during the short break is up to the employer (most do), but not allowing breaks at all will generally result in a law suit.
That's somewhat akin to saying that CDs were a failure because they didn't sell as well as LPs when just a few people had CD players.
Has to work better than what I've tried. Besides, if I say I read it on Slashdot, they gotta submit to my advanced research skillz...
We're about to migrate our 500+ server farm (webservers, Exchange and databases) to VMs and I can't seem to get them to understand that not everything can work within a VM.
The only way that I would describe Linux as a kernel rather than an OS to our business units is if I wanted to make sure that I never got invited to talk with them about technical issues again. Even in the unlikely event that they are aware of the difference between a OS kernel and the services that are layered on top of it (which I sincerely doubt), the two are synonymous. To them, Linux is Linux, Unix is Unix and Windows is Windows.
Here it is: http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/BudgetSummary/GRE/124955 9.html
Fully 50% of the California State budget goes toward education (the majority of which was mandated by Prop 98, - a voter-passed initiative which mandated that a set percentage of the California budget be spent on education). Of the remainder, 23% goes toward Health and Human Services (welfare, MediCal, etc) with the rest going toward infrastructure, salaries and the other items which are funded through the General Fund.
With no absolutes to measure against, how does one decide that one instructor's performance is better than another's?
You'll see more of this, but it won't be India getting the work. As wage expectations rise in India, as they have been, it, too will become too expensive. And then India, too, will will be having this same discussion as graduates are unable to find jobs because someone else will do the same work for less money. It's only a matter of time.
Do what, exactly? Grand and glorious unworkable education policies are made at the national level, but everything important happens at the local level. People there don't use their vote to change the world or affect US policy, they try to make sure the streets are safe (at least in their neighborhoods) and that a WalMart won't be able to move in next door. So long as the money comes from the local tax base and as long as the people that bother to vote are unwilling to change their voting priorities and as long voters aren't convinced that education is more important than, say, police or filling potholes, nothing will change.
Maybe because calculus isn't really necessary - at least at the high-school level. With high schools having the problems that they do retaining students, do you really think that it's a good idea to force yet another irrelevant class down the students' throat?
And then you'll have no English teachers.
Which is why it's largely useless.
Putting aside people's feelings about Microsoft or ODF, realistically, it ain't gonna happen.
California State agencies, up until now, haven't had to follow any standard document format. Although most use Microsoft Word, the California CMAS master contract that State Agencies use to buy their software has Word, WordPerfect and other word processing packages on it. Which means that agencies can pick and choose what they think that they need. Now the Legislature wants to set one - and you can bet that there's no money in the bill to do it. If the bill is passed, agencies will need to convert already existing processes and applications to use the new format. With no new staff nor new money to hire someone else to do it.
Yeah, it'll happen.
It also helps that their selection, although smaller, is a couple of orders of magnitude better than Best Buy. I only go to that CompUsa when I need only one thing and don't feel like driving down to Fry's, but I actually kind of like it. I grew up with stores that were small and not well lighted, so it's sorta like going home...
You already paid a bunch less than most of us to buy the game - wait to see if you really like it before investing the extra bucks...
I guess that the developers who write and upgrade code and the artists that do the artwork work for free, right? And I'm sure that their telco provider gives them a bye when it comes to paying their bills and the switch, router and server vendors all happily donated their equipment, and the regular maintenance costs, for free. Gee, it must be great to work for Blizzard - people keep giving them stuff...
The PS3 has the same switch that the PS2 had. Same place, too.
Maybe things are different now than they were when I was a kid. I wasn't terribly interested in advancing my standing within the group by picking on someone else and the few times I got hassled, I just walked away. Yes, I got called a chicken, but so what? I was interested in neither their opinion nor the macho BS game that they wanted to play. Eventually people learn that they can't get under your skin enough to make you react and go away.
"We need to have an FTP server to get some files from an outside company."
"Ok, we already have something set up to do that. Here's how to use it."
"That's too much trouble. We want to use our own."
"Well, we don't usually do that, but if you really need it, we'll need to get authorization to place it in our DMZ - it'll take about two weeks."
"Why do I need to put it there? We're already running one here - why can't you just let our customer connect to it? I'm not an idiot. It's secure."
"We never said that you were."
"Then what's the problem?"
"Even assuming that you've set everything up correctly, which you probably did, we don't permit connections to systems on our internal network.
Why?
"Because, honestly, if we did this every time we were asked, we wouldn't need a DMZ."
"This is only one connection. If you'd take off your tinfoil hat for a minute..."
--- You can guess the how this usually went from there ... ---
You're probably more than competent to do this. Some of the people who make these kind of requests are. From experience, however, we know that the vast majority of people who make these requests have little to no clue as to how to set up a secure system. We'd love to let everybody do what they want to do (especially if they know the difference between "want" and "need"), but there's only so many hours in a day...
I didn't say anything about wanting universal broadband access. In fact, I can think of fewer things less important to the general populace than a fast Internet connection. I just pointed out that reason that it's not more widespread could possibly be because not everybody wants it or feels that it's terribly important to them.
I know some people that are very happy with their dial-up service (and no, they're not on AOL). They've never tried anything else, so they're not staying with dial-up because of some cost or service issue, and they have seen what I can do with my much faster connection, so they're not ignorant of what can be done. Their needs are well served by the service that they get. Is this a problem?
So far as I've seen, the only people that bring this up are trying to sell something. Politicians like talking about the US being "behind" other countries 'cause it sounds good and will get them votes, cable companies and telcos talk about it because it'll make them more money and magazines talk about it because it'll sell ads. If people are really clamoring for faster access to the Internet and someone can make money at it, why isn't it available?
I love online manuals! Whenever I have problems with my network, I can just look up the answer!