Might want to catch up, this has already been dealt with. Android 2.0 has full working support and as of now I haven't heard any complaints about it. I still have a WinMo phone the company provides but I'll be buying an android for my personal cell use. I am far from alone.
My Palm Treo 650 would last for four days no problem, same with my Samsung slider, the A520, I forget which phone I had before that but it easily lasted four days as well. If you're talking on it all day then of course it wouldn't last that long. But several short calls through-out the day or texting a lot would easily make that mark. My MotoQ had a high density battery and it would go for four days easy and that's with checking email through ActiveSync.
Battery life has taken a huge hit with the newer phones, the iPhone lowered a lot of people's standards as the original was absolutely abysmal. The 3GS is better than the old 2G but it still sucks.
The counter-weight however is that people are doing a lot more with their phones now than they were even four years ago and that means a lot.
I wasn't suggesting that the way it is currently isn't flooded with problems but I think you see my point since I specifically mentioned a growing divide between the educated and the uneducated. This needs to be addressed but as I said, there is no will to address it properly.
That said, if a child wants to learn and parents have maintained an active role in their child's education then most public schools are quite capable of offering Algebra to a 5th grader. Personally, I took Algebra in 8th grade I wanna say 15 years ago. Now it's not uncommon for 6th graders to be taking it. My mother taught 8th grade math for almost 20 years, recently she moved to 5th grade where it got easier but now she's back to 7th grade and they are tough!
The administration of most public schools has been far too neutered to be effective largely due to frivolous lawsuits. The litigious nature of many has caused a great deal of problems across all facets of our economy.
There are many great teachers out there that even spend their own money to help enrich the lives of their students. My mother does this regularly and she is far from alone. The education is accessible to practically anybody, there is just no cultural value for education right now. This will change when our quality of life reflects the change in competition globally.
While I do think that the war in Iraq was about oil I see it as a poor investment given that we've spent a trillion dollars there and rebuilding is likely to cost a lot more. I don't see any return on that investment which is on top of the thousands of lives lost on all sides. The whole situation is rather sad.
Hiring outside help just because it is cheaper is not what the H1B program was built for. If there is an actual shortage of domestic workers performing regular tasks, such as programming then I don't see a need to bring in other people as the going wage is set by the local population, not the world population. This is why it is so badly abused.
If you're doing cutting edge research and someone across the pond has potential to contribute then by all means, bring him or her onboard. That is why the program was created.
Beyond that I'm unsure of where you mean the education lacks. If you're talking about primary schooling, grades 1 - 12 then I agree with you. If you're talking about universities which you specifically mention then I think you are hard pressed to state how any standards have been lowered in the science fields.
The reason why people would see solving integrals as hard is simply because the vast majority of Americans, or Europeans, or Asians, or anyone for that matter would not encounter integrals in their life. If they are pursuing a math degree in the U.S. then this would not be a superhuman feat. My math major friend from high school days went on to CMU and none of his skills seem superhuman to even me although he is quite talented.
With that said, I think there is a growing divide in the U.S. between the educated masses and the increasingly alienated uneducated masses. Most of my family falls into the uneducated group and I don't see that changing despite my family seeing first hand how much more successful those of us that are educated have become. Maybe in another generation their priorities will change. If experience is any lesson I have little hope as we try to support our family, give them jobs when they are in need at great personal and economic sacrifices but still nothing changes as education is not valued and to be blunt, inaccessible to them while they were growing up when it would be the most useful. Rural schools are in seriously rough shape with poorly qualified teachers. A lot of that has to do with massively increasing populations of school age children forcing rapid growth without associated funding increases. Eventually this funding will even out and I think the problem will ease back a bit. The is particularly a problem in the Las Vegas and Phoenix areas.
A large number of changes would need to occur and I see no sign that they will happen anytime soon. America is slumbering, it will take much more pain before we as a population wake the hell up.
It is very frustrating seeing science deliberating misinterpreted to support political agendas. We are definitely capable of competing properly though. There is just no will to do what is necessary at the moment for the vast majority of Americans.
I agree completely, I didn't mean to say that Japan was innovating only because we weren't really competing, they have created a culture that appreciates innovation and encourages intelligence.
I definitely wouldn't say there is only a single cause, it would indeed take many to get us where we are. I do think that the anti-intellectualism is a fairly recent phenomena though. During my schooling through the 80's and 90's people weren't made fun of for being smart or geeky although admittedly that was probably not representative of the population at large as it was a small town in rural Vermont.
While I think there is rampant abuse of the H1-B program I do think it is vital a U.S. dominance in all technological fields. Through-out the 30's and 40's we were not pulling just highly educated people from other countries, we were pulling in rockstars of science, people that could contribute the science we were trying to develop. Today H1-Bs are just a form of cheaper labor for companies and you don't have to be especially well qualified to land a job using an H1-B. Because of this our job pool is diluted and all the effort bringing people here yields very little.
The best and brightest minds are naturally going to be in other countries as we hold merely 5% of the population. H1-B needs to be about bringing in the best and the brightest, not about filling non-existent programmer position voids. Foreigners helped us construct the atomic bomb among many other technological leaps forward. They are necessary. The fact that Japan is so successful right now is due to us being lazy and let's face it, science was manipulated for political gains through the new millennium. When we recover our strengths you'll see us surpass Japan unless they too start bringing in foreign talent.
Of course you might remember that Japan was in a similar position to the U.S. now about a decade ago. They shifted their priorities and surprise surprise, they are back to being productive members of the international community. Right now people in the U.S. take their success for granted and have forgotten that it was only achieved through lots of hard work and lots of sacrifice! My own feelings lean towards suggesting that the religious awakening since 9/11 has been the root cause due to people living in fear searching for a quick fix rather than fixing the root of the problems at hand. It's easy to say god will save us, hard to actually do it yourself and stop the international sale of arms to unstable regions and stop the acquisition of oil from countries that behave unconscionably. All solutions come with sacrifice and there would be serious humanitarian issues to deal with although I suspect China would fill any economic gaps for those countries we stopped buying from. At some point we have to accept higher gas prices as a cost of our ideals which are just and sound if only we had the balls to live up to them.
The problem is that you have cell carriers installing DS3s into their cell towers. This basically means that the carriers have no interest in people using more cell broadband. Most people I know with an iPhone or myself with a WinMo phone don't use the 3G Internet because it rarely works as advertised depending on if you're in a crowded place or rural area. We end up using WIFI instead which the netbooks already support. But I think there is a place for both. I don't imagine I'll be hooking up a USB-to-serial adapter to my phone anytime soon to configure switches out at my remote locations.
Well expressed, a nice mirror of how I see IT in the company I work for. The tools we have developed and deployed over the years have allowed the company to double in sales with the need to add personnel. We are a very proactive team and it took a while to form a team that could get that way. Now we have a good programmer, and I see myself as a decent sysadmin.
IT should embrace and extend. Everywhere we've touched has seem major improvements in productivity and that's the way it should be. Too often IT is seen as just a money sink for company, a necessary evil. Instead, the executives at least for the company I work for see as as enabling higher profits by reducing the cost of growth and increasing the capacity of our web presence which gives us considerable income these days.
Actually when I call that TAC line for our ISP because our fiber to the building is dropping both my data and my PRI traffic I call that critical for a business. Quite annoying when you're on hold for five minutes and your call drops only to have you start over.
Feel free to make assumptions though. I'm sure my company can do without reliable phones and Internet. Fortunately for me it frees up budget so I can have another provider! They never let you do it until a problem crops up. Gotta love it!
Actually you called me a liar so you started it by saying I was lying about my cheapo slider phone.;)
I don't take kindly to being called a liar because quite simply, as a sysadmin, my word is relied upon by a great many and thus, it is important to be honest. The M520 from Samsung is what I had with Pandora and that was two years ago now. This is not even remotely recent as the M520 was one of the first to receive the Pandora app. Was kinda why I bought it to begin with.
That said, one of my duties is that of a PBX admin for my company and so I deal with cell problems everyday. The change to ATT has dramatically increased my workload. Simply put, ATT service sucks hard. I'm in Phoenix, this is pretty much an ideal place to role out service since we don't have any mountains or tall buildings and sprawl means individual towers are not likely to be overly congested.
We have problems with the Samsung Jack, the iPhone 3GS and a few different ATT feature phones. I have resorted to deploying a separate dedicated WIFI network but again, it's crippled. The phones will indeed automatically connect but the WinMo phones in particular do not use WIFI by default for Internet connections. When you select Automatic for network detection it will prefer 3G since we have 5 bars of signal despite a 30% dropped call rate.
Contrast that with Sprint where we had weak reception, 2 bars but service always worked and calls almost never dropped. Sometimes you found yourself in a particularly weak spot which would cause the drop.
Also, in regards to Edge, it is the difference between your phone lasting through the day and needing a charge half way through. Edge service is bullshit even though it has more coverage. It's relatively fine for ActiveSync but years on Sprint has spoiled my users, they liked consistency which is what Sprint offered. Albeit, at a much higher cost per business line.
All that said, even though I grew to despise BB phones in the days when BES was required for Exchange it has much improved and is a much better platform than the iPhone and WinMO. Of course in the WinMo case its more about the carrier crippling the OS as my iPaq does everything just fine with the WinMo 6.5.
Android devices only recently became a good idea as they have working ActiveSync now, some builds don't work as well as others though.
The last thing is about network selection since you seem to think it's reasonable to have to manually change which connection WAP will use. For technical users this is not a problem, for my VP users, executives, and downright regular folk this is simply not acceptable. I'm resorting to a custom rom to enable all the functionality that the OS already supports. Fortunately WinMo has a huge developer community. I would say that banking with any phone on any network is not a good idea. Most banks will alert you when funds are low and if you need to confirm a check then that is best from a computer where a proper ledger can be reconciled.
Given that I'm being forced to deploy a new dedicated WIFI network at work to support the iPhone specifically I beg to differ. I'm in Phoenix, which isn't exactly a small market nor are their mountains and tall buildings in our way. Calls drop 30% of the time to the point where I make critical calls on my personal Sprint phone instead of my ATT work phone. The irony that we're spending tens of thousands of dollars on equipment just so the executives can use the iPhone is endless. I'll grant that I have a Windows Mobile phone on ATT that is just as bad kind of eliminating the idea that it's the iPhone at fault. We can watch our phones go from five bars to one bar without moving the phone or ourselves.
Needless to say I'm not happy with the ATT change. We did it because Sprint charges a ridiculous amount for business lines but the money we save with service we use in equipment to provide better coverage. I'm actually toying with intercepting cell signals and routing them through my PBX as it's the only way to fix the calls dropping. The 3G Internet works just fine though! Course some of us are funny, we want to make phone calls with our cell phones. Of course ATT crippled the VOIP support in WinMo which is pretty solid and they screwed up network detection to favor MediaNet so it won't switch automatically between WIFI and 3G. Boy is that annoying for end-users! I can handle changing the preferred connection but my users will yell quite loud about it.
My personal solution is a Google voice account, give everyone at the office that number and it'll forward to both my personal and work phone. Yeah, I pay more money in minutes on my personal cell but it means I can actually call tech support when the shit hits the fan.
Since you're an idiot that can't read their page and still have the nerve to call me a liar. Here's a list of phones that aren't BB, WinMo, or iPhone. Sprint Phones including Sliders
As for Wifi, I didn't say the wifi didn't work, I said that automatic detection didn't, because every ATT does to lock you in means that it favors MediaNet even when reception is crappy and WIFI reception is good. So I force it to manually use WIFI for each of the services. This is fine for me, but I can't expect my users to want to go through the massive inconvenience.
You seem to be confused about the status of the U.S. This country has swung back and forth in regards to wealth distribution a number of times since the creation of a middle class. There are more millionaires being born every day here. Yes, a lot of people are struggling right now but there are still those like myself who started out living almost in poverty only to see our compensation doubled and tripled during these hard times because we've developed skills that are needed.
The biggest problem is the lack of focus on education and the utterly absurd ideas surrounding universal health-care. The only argument for maintaining a privatized health-care industry is the number of jobs at stake despite the fact that it is bad for the country on economic and humanitarian levels in the long term. We like our short term solutions though as they get politicians re-elected.
That's weird, on my Sprint cheapo slider phone I could play Pandora in the background. My ATT smart phone for work is useless though, when I get 3g coverage, and I'm in a city, Phoenix to be specific, it'll constantly switch back and forth to edge, and forget using WIFI since Automatic network connection simply doesn't work. I was trying to call into a support line with it a week ago and I got so fed up with waiting in the queue only to have my call dropped that I just called with my damned Sprint phone. Sure it used my personal minutes but it got the job done and without a call drop. They both had the same number of bars.
We just switched to ATT because Sprint is retardedly expensive for business lines and our support representative was less than what I consider responsive. We switched to Sprint from Verizon a couple years ago. Seems like any option you take is going to suck pretty hard. If you want your phone to, you know, make phone calls, Sprint seems to be the best for service, they even had the fastest Internet for a long time. But they do crush their phones and their selection of handsets was ridiculous for a long time. Seems like they are starting to see the error of their ways though. We'll see how the landscape changes with these new players, it's good to see some shake-up although I still see very little progress.
Ya know, I looked and I don't see any IPv6 support on DynDNS. Until more DNS servers support IPv6 it's adoption will still fall short. Fundamentally changing how you network is no small feat. I predict organizations will deploy IPv6 internally first, then upgrades will move further out. For instance, my 4 month old top-end Sonicwall doesn't have IPv6 support. Not exactly a fringe piece of hardware. My Barracuda load balancers don't support IPv6. My Cisco 2811s don't support IPv6 without paying for a software upgrade. My HP Procurves at least support IPv6 but at this stage that's about it which fortunately for me, my primary routing is done on a Procurve so internally I can do IPv6 without much hassle. None of my gear is terribly old and I'm not afraid of learning new ways of networking which are more efficient and eliminate problems. Right now it will cause more problems than it solves.
And as an answer to your question, I write down product keys for software without much trouble so I imagine adapting to right out IPv6 addresses in hex wouldn't be that much harder than what I write down now. So no, I don't think that is hurting the adoption of IPv6.
We routinely work with 1gig PPT files, powerpoint doesn't allow streaming of the file so you can't work with it until the machine has downloaded the whole thing. It doesn't really matter though since the same concept applies to any files of any real size. Few people that use RDP on the regular see it as remotely slow. I have a problem with one of my coworkers who likes to run RDP sessions full screen. He often forgets he's directly on a server and then attempts to pull up a site like Hulu and subsequently finds flash not installed only to go ahead and install it. Fortunately he doesn't fill a role where he logs into servers anymore so its no longer an issue.
Then there's this idea that screen scrolling would require an entire redownload of a frame which is simply untrue. Slashdot for instance is mostly white background which wouldn't have to be redownloaded. Then of course the task bar and firefox menu are unchanged and thus not redownloaded.
The software involved has had more than 15 years to mature and is quite efficient at this stage which is why you saw MS enable 3d acceleration inside RDP for Windows Vista and Server 2008. Super high framerate stuff becomes a problem on slow connections, but most connections are just fine and most of the processing gets done on better hardware than typical end-user hardware. This doesn't make sense for all scenarios, but it does for a lot of them.
The thing you don't quite get is that a picture is the same size for a given resolution. Yes it will go up and down depending on how many structures are in the image but you have an upper limit. Contrast that against the need to download that 1gig powerpoint presentation over the Internet over ATT 3G spotty speed and you quickly realize how much faster it is to just transmit the pictures of what you are seeing. This is why RDP is much faster over the Internet than directly managing the machine.
Now most Internet services can handle the bitmap transfer. Local software will cache bitmaps so common things like the start menu aren't redownloaded, this means that image size drops the more you use it.
I don't believe this is a more secure approach, but it is definitely faster. Scrolling only requires downloading enough of the screen to cover the new info to be displayed, usually the process of scrolling gives the machine enough time to download it. Smooth scrolling isn't always perfect, but over a LAN or at least a decent Internet connection it's great, it will also tolerate temporary disconnects so you rarely ever lose your work.
And what about the cost of replacing the workstation once its off warranty? Or when the hdd breaks? Or the site visits to clean up all sorts of software messes users get themselves into? Those costs put it back into the court of the thin client since they have no moving parts. Keep in mind that shutting off a computer over the network is rarely a good idea as users probably left something open and of course didn't save!! Thin client side you shut off the thin client and the VM is humming away in the server room where it uses more efficient power at least here in the U.S. at least.
And of course I can power down my server hardware during periods of low activity as well with monitoring software powering up more hardware as needed. Naturally you would start up your daily required hardware probably two hours before the morning rush but you end up saving a ton of electricity. Combine all that with a DR site using different SAN hardware and you have a highly available infrastructure that is more flexible for users, not less. Thin client notebooks are great for the users that are away as well as it will cache a local copy of the image. It's not super fast that way but you can still work on that office document or connect to hotel wifi to browse the web.
With workstation hardware failures causing downtime for users I don't see how it's possible for all but the smallest shops to find it cheaper, the cost of the time to troubleshoot alone over the course of a year easily equals the cost of a server or two, nevermind the fact that a server failure doesn't result in downtime for any users since it's all in a pool, the vm will just be migrated to hardware that is working, automatically.
I think a lot of people are just afraid of giving up local control and I understand that, it's the same reason that I tread slowly with cloud services. You make sure you can handle your critical services on your own and use the cloud to scale out. At least that's the approach I've taken, I can handle quite a bit of usage on my own and it's only a few times a year that I have a few orders of magnitude more usage. For those times the cloud is potentially the perfect solution as I only have to rent out VMs for the length of time that I need them.
There are only a few applications these days where a thin client isn't appropriate just like there are a few applications in the server world that don't make sense to virtualize. My security servers recording 5megapixel resolution are far too IO intensive for it to make sense to virtualize for instance.
With traditional thin clients you were right, with XenDesktop or most VDIs out there now you can even watch full 1080p video provided the thin client supports it. CAD is easy to do inside a virtual desktop. I'm currently in trials with XenDesktop and it's pretty terrific, users also like being able to just go to their phone and login to their corporate desktop as well. They have access to their stuff whenever and wherever they want either with a thin client or with a traditional desktop. Support costs are a lot less now especially since for my trial purposes at least, XenDesktop is free.
The limitations of the past are gone, with USB pass-through you can use your webcams or connect almost any proprietary device you've got. I haven't found any hardware yet that the thin client can't pass to the VM. This is more of a logical next step, it won't end regular computers for certain applications but the vast majority of office workers out there don't need special hardware. For me, the beauty of the whole thing is the simple ability to add physical hardware on the back-end to boost performance so I don't have to upgrade all the thin clients because an application has become sluggish. This also means if physical hardware dies on the back-end the users don't notice and I just replace the one server. This is nice compared to all the times I've had hard drives fail on me on office computers. All the support calls that their computer has slowed down disappear. Thin clients being without moving parts is a big benefit, they will indeed last much longer and there are only limits means of which the user can screw up their access.
I'm deploying a 4 monitor 10zig rig to a test group of people that need high resolution work. If it passes their tests then I'll go company wide with it. A VPN connection and a Citrix receiver is all that is needed for users to then have their full corporate desktop experience whether they are in the office or across the pond on vacation. Most of them seem to like the idea and with location-based policies I can control security accordingly. Things like USB pass-through I probably wouldn't want enabled for all remote users for instance.
I'm sure there are downsides to virtual desktops, I haven't encountered them yet though. I'd love to hear about actual limitations as I'm in the process of identifying pros and cons, right now I haven't really seen any cons. New user provisioning is a snap as you just clone from a template and you're done. Makes remote administration much much simpler as I then have easy access to the console of the VM which means keeping everything up to date is easy. Regular snapshotting makes backups a snap.
Seems like most people have feelings about thin clients dating back to when they were complete bullshit with WYSE green screens not able to do anything on their own. Modern thin clients have a sweet of utilities on the machine itself so if you enterprise infrastructure fails you, you can also use the onboard office suite and web browser. Building back-end infrastructure seems much easier to me than ensuring all end-user machines are well maintained and replaced as warranty status demands.
Every heard of RDP? You even have accelerated graphics and dual monitor support these days. With device pass-through is a very viable option. Of course I went one further for the owner of the company I work for. We've got XenDesktop Express, good for 10 virtual machines running on a dual processor quad core server and he has all the photoshop and Sims power he needs. Even had 1080p video and associated formats for HD audio. That's a bit overkill for the average consumer. He'll have 5 thin clients through-out his house see that he can enjoy fan-less high speed computing at 5 different locations, some will be wired, some will be serviced with 802.11n.
RDP works here and now for the average consumer running Windows 7 though. I do this all the time on my much more limited budget. Virtual desktops are definitely the future though.
It doesn't seem like you know what a monopoly is and why Microsoft got into trouble in the past since this is pretty much the same situation. When you have a significant portion of the market and you utilize anticompetitive practices you get yourself into a lawsuit. This is why Microsoft got into trouble a while back and why Apple hasn't gotten into trouble yet. If Apple had larger marketshare than Microsoft they would be in much hotter water than MS ever was.
If Intel had only done the nasty compiler trick they may have gotten away with it, but all the OEM strong arming and nasty licensing restrictions for AMD also contribute to the lawsuit. Intel did everything it could to prevent AMD from gaining any marketshare. AMD did gain a lot of marketshare regardless but that's not at issue here. It is one thing to compete on merits, and it is another to use your marketshare to cut out competition.
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Might want to catch up, this has already been dealt with. Android 2.0 has full working support and as of now I haven't heard any complaints about it. I still have a WinMo phone the company provides but I'll be buying an android for my personal cell use. I am far from alone.
My Palm Treo 650 would last for four days no problem, same with my Samsung slider, the A520, I forget which phone I had before that but it easily lasted four days as well. If you're talking on it all day then of course it wouldn't last that long. But several short calls through-out the day or texting a lot would easily make that mark. My MotoQ had a high density battery and it would go for four days easy and that's with checking email through ActiveSync.
Battery life has taken a huge hit with the newer phones, the iPhone lowered a lot of people's standards as the original was absolutely abysmal. The 3GS is better than the old 2G but it still sucks.
The counter-weight however is that people are doing a lot more with their phones now than they were even four years ago and that means a lot.
I wasn't suggesting that the way it is currently isn't flooded with problems but I think you see my point since I specifically mentioned a growing divide between the educated and the uneducated. This needs to be addressed but as I said, there is no will to address it properly.
That said, if a child wants to learn and parents have maintained an active role in their child's education then most public schools are quite capable of offering Algebra to a 5th grader. Personally, I took Algebra in 8th grade I wanna say 15 years ago. Now it's not uncommon for 6th graders to be taking it. My mother taught 8th grade math for almost 20 years, recently she moved to 5th grade where it got easier but now she's back to 7th grade and they are tough!
The administration of most public schools has been far too neutered to be effective largely due to frivolous lawsuits. The litigious nature of many has caused a great deal of problems across all facets of our economy.
There are many great teachers out there that even spend their own money to help enrich the lives of their students. My mother does this regularly and she is far from alone. The education is accessible to practically anybody, there is just no cultural value for education right now. This will change when our quality of life reflects the change in competition globally.
While I do think that the war in Iraq was about oil I see it as a poor investment given that we've spent a trillion dollars there and rebuilding is likely to cost a lot more. I don't see any return on that investment which is on top of the thousands of lives lost on all sides. The whole situation is rather sad.
Hiring outside help just because it is cheaper is not what the H1B program was built for. If there is an actual shortage of domestic workers performing regular tasks, such as programming then I don't see a need to bring in other people as the going wage is set by the local population, not the world population. This is why it is so badly abused.
If you're doing cutting edge research and someone across the pond has potential to contribute then by all means, bring him or her onboard. That is why the program was created.
Beyond that I'm unsure of where you mean the education lacks. If you're talking about primary schooling, grades 1 - 12 then I agree with you. If you're talking about universities which you specifically mention then I think you are hard pressed to state how any standards have been lowered in the science fields.
The reason why people would see solving integrals as hard is simply because the vast majority of Americans, or Europeans, or Asians, or anyone for that matter would not encounter integrals in their life. If they are pursuing a math degree in the U.S. then this would not be a superhuman feat. My math major friend from high school days went on to CMU and none of his skills seem superhuman to even me although he is quite talented.
With that said, I think there is a growing divide in the U.S. between the educated masses and the increasingly alienated uneducated masses. Most of my family falls into the uneducated group and I don't see that changing despite my family seeing first hand how much more successful those of us that are educated have become. Maybe in another generation their priorities will change. If experience is any lesson I have little hope as we try to support our family, give them jobs when they are in need at great personal and economic sacrifices but still nothing changes as education is not valued and to be blunt, inaccessible to them while they were growing up when it would be the most useful. Rural schools are in seriously rough shape with poorly qualified teachers. A lot of that has to do with massively increasing populations of school age children forcing rapid growth without associated funding increases. Eventually this funding will even out and I think the problem will ease back a bit. The is particularly a problem in the Las Vegas and Phoenix areas.
A large number of changes would need to occur and I see no sign that they will happen anytime soon. America is slumbering, it will take much more pain before we as a population wake the hell up.
It is very frustrating seeing science deliberating misinterpreted to support political agendas. We are definitely capable of competing properly though. There is just no will to do what is necessary at the moment for the vast majority of Americans.
I agree completely, I didn't mean to say that Japan was innovating only because we weren't really competing, they have created a culture that appreciates innovation and encourages intelligence.
I definitely wouldn't say there is only a single cause, it would indeed take many to get us where we are. I do think that the anti-intellectualism is a fairly recent phenomena though. During my schooling through the 80's and 90's people weren't made fun of for being smart or geeky although admittedly that was probably not representative of the population at large as it was a small town in rural Vermont.
While I think there is rampant abuse of the H1-B program I do think it is vital a U.S. dominance in all technological fields. Through-out the 30's and 40's we were not pulling just highly educated people from other countries, we were pulling in rockstars of science, people that could contribute the science we were trying to develop. Today H1-Bs are just a form of cheaper labor for companies and you don't have to be especially well qualified to land a job using an H1-B. Because of this our job pool is diluted and all the effort bringing people here yields very little.
The best and brightest minds are naturally going to be in other countries as we hold merely 5% of the population. H1-B needs to be about bringing in the best and the brightest, not about filling non-existent programmer position voids. Foreigners helped us construct the atomic bomb among many other technological leaps forward. They are necessary. The fact that Japan is so successful right now is due to us being lazy and let's face it, science was manipulated for political gains through the new millennium. When we recover our strengths you'll see us surpass Japan unless they too start bringing in foreign talent.
Of course you might remember that Japan was in a similar position to the U.S. now about a decade ago. They shifted their priorities and surprise surprise, they are back to being productive members of the international community. Right now people in the U.S. take their success for granted and have forgotten that it was only achieved through lots of hard work and lots of sacrifice! My own feelings lean towards suggesting that the religious awakening since 9/11 has been the root cause due to people living in fear searching for a quick fix rather than fixing the root of the problems at hand. It's easy to say god will save us, hard to actually do it yourself and stop the international sale of arms to unstable regions and stop the acquisition of oil from countries that behave unconscionably. All solutions come with sacrifice and there would be serious humanitarian issues to deal with although I suspect China would fill any economic gaps for those countries we stopped buying from. At some point we have to accept higher gas prices as a cost of our ideals which are just and sound if only we had the balls to live up to them.
The problem is that you have cell carriers installing DS3s into their cell towers. This basically means that the carriers have no interest in people using more cell broadband. Most people I know with an iPhone or myself with a WinMo phone don't use the 3G Internet because it rarely works as advertised depending on if you're in a crowded place or rural area. We end up using WIFI instead which the netbooks already support. But I think there is a place for both. I don't imagine I'll be hooking up a USB-to-serial adapter to my phone anytime soon to configure switches out at my remote locations.
Well expressed, a nice mirror of how I see IT in the company I work for. The tools we have developed and deployed over the years have allowed the company to double in sales with the need to add personnel. We are a very proactive team and it took a while to form a team that could get that way. Now we have a good programmer, and I see myself as a decent sysadmin.
IT should embrace and extend. Everywhere we've touched has seem major improvements in productivity and that's the way it should be. Too often IT is seen as just a money sink for company, a necessary evil. Instead, the executives at least for the company I work for see as as enabling higher profits by reducing the cost of growth and increasing the capacity of our web presence which gives us considerable income these days.
Actually when I call that TAC line for our ISP because our fiber to the building is dropping both my data and my PRI traffic I call that critical for a business. Quite annoying when you're on hold for five minutes and your call drops only to have you start over.
Feel free to make assumptions though. I'm sure my company can do without reliable phones and Internet. Fortunately for me it frees up budget so I can have another provider! They never let you do it until a problem crops up. Gotta love it!
Actually you called me a liar so you started it by saying I was lying about my cheapo slider phone. ;)
I don't take kindly to being called a liar because quite simply, as a sysadmin, my word is relied upon by a great many and thus, it is important to be honest. The M520 from Samsung is what I had with Pandora and that was two years ago now. This is not even remotely recent as the M520 was one of the first to receive the Pandora app. Was kinda why I bought it to begin with.
That said, one of my duties is that of a PBX admin for my company and so I deal with cell problems everyday. The change to ATT has dramatically increased my workload. Simply put, ATT service sucks hard. I'm in Phoenix, this is pretty much an ideal place to role out service since we don't have any mountains or tall buildings and sprawl means individual towers are not likely to be overly congested.
We have problems with the Samsung Jack, the iPhone 3GS and a few different ATT feature phones. I have resorted to deploying a separate dedicated WIFI network but again, it's crippled. The phones will indeed automatically connect but the WinMo phones in particular do not use WIFI by default for Internet connections. When you select Automatic for network detection it will prefer 3G since we have 5 bars of signal despite a 30% dropped call rate.
Contrast that with Sprint where we had weak reception, 2 bars but service always worked and calls almost never dropped. Sometimes you found yourself in a particularly weak spot which would cause the drop.
Also, in regards to Edge, it is the difference between your phone lasting through the day and needing a charge half way through. Edge service is bullshit even though it has more coverage. It's relatively fine for ActiveSync but years on Sprint has spoiled my users, they liked consistency which is what Sprint offered. Albeit, at a much higher cost per business line.
All that said, even though I grew to despise BB phones in the days when BES was required for Exchange it has much improved and is a much better platform than the iPhone and WinMO. Of course in the WinMo case its more about the carrier crippling the OS as my iPaq does everything just fine with the WinMo 6.5.
Android devices only recently became a good idea as they have working ActiveSync now, some builds don't work as well as others though.
The last thing is about network selection since you seem to think it's reasonable to have to manually change which connection WAP will use. For technical users this is not a problem, for my VP users, executives, and downright regular folk this is simply not acceptable. I'm resorting to a custom rom to enable all the functionality that the OS already supports. Fortunately WinMo has a huge developer community. I would say that banking with any phone on any network is not a good idea. Most banks will alert you when funds are low and if you need to confirm a check then that is best from a computer where a proper ledger can be reconciled.
Given that I'm being forced to deploy a new dedicated WIFI network at work to support the iPhone specifically I beg to differ. I'm in Phoenix, which isn't exactly a small market nor are their mountains and tall buildings in our way. Calls drop 30% of the time to the point where I make critical calls on my personal Sprint phone instead of my ATT work phone. The irony that we're spending tens of thousands of dollars on equipment just so the executives can use the iPhone is endless. I'll grant that I have a Windows Mobile phone on ATT that is just as bad kind of eliminating the idea that it's the iPhone at fault. We can watch our phones go from five bars to one bar without moving the phone or ourselves.
Needless to say I'm not happy with the ATT change. We did it because Sprint charges a ridiculous amount for business lines but the money we save with service we use in equipment to provide better coverage. I'm actually toying with intercepting cell signals and routing them through my PBX as it's the only way to fix the calls dropping. The 3G Internet works just fine though! Course some of us are funny, we want to make phone calls with our cell phones. Of course ATT crippled the VOIP support in WinMo which is pretty solid and they screwed up network detection to favor MediaNet so it won't switch automatically between WIFI and 3G. Boy is that annoying for end-users! I can handle changing the preferred connection but my users will yell quite loud about it.
My personal solution is a Google voice account, give everyone at the office that number and it'll forward to both my personal and work phone. Yeah, I pay more money in minutes on my personal cell but it means I can actually call tech support when the shit hits the fan.
Since you're an idiot that can't read their page and still have the nerve to call me a liar. Here's a list of phones that aren't BB, WinMo, or iPhone. Sprint Phones including Sliders
As for Wifi, I didn't say the wifi didn't work, I said that automatic detection didn't, because every ATT does to lock you in means that it favors MediaNet even when reception is crappy and WIFI reception is good. So I force it to manually use WIFI for each of the services. This is fine for me, but I can't expect my users to want to go through the massive inconvenience.
You seem to be confused about the status of the U.S. This country has swung back and forth in regards to wealth distribution a number of times since the creation of a middle class. There are more millionaires being born every day here. Yes, a lot of people are struggling right now but there are still those like myself who started out living almost in poverty only to see our compensation doubled and tripled during these hard times because we've developed skills that are needed.
The biggest problem is the lack of focus on education and the utterly absurd ideas surrounding universal health-care. The only argument for maintaining a privatized health-care industry is the number of jobs at stake despite the fact that it is bad for the country on economic and humanitarian levels in the long term. We like our short term solutions though as they get politicians re-elected.
That's weird, on my Sprint cheapo slider phone I could play Pandora in the background. My ATT smart phone for work is useless though, when I get 3g coverage, and I'm in a city, Phoenix to be specific, it'll constantly switch back and forth to edge, and forget using WIFI since Automatic network connection simply doesn't work. I was trying to call into a support line with it a week ago and I got so fed up with waiting in the queue only to have my call dropped that I just called with my damned Sprint phone. Sure it used my personal minutes but it got the job done and without a call drop. They both had the same number of bars.
We just switched to ATT because Sprint is retardedly expensive for business lines and our support representative was less than what I consider responsive. We switched to Sprint from Verizon a couple years ago. Seems like any option you take is going to suck pretty hard. If you want your phone to, you know, make phone calls, Sprint seems to be the best for service, they even had the fastest Internet for a long time. But they do crush their phones and their selection of handsets was ridiculous for a long time. Seems like they are starting to see the error of their ways though. We'll see how the landscape changes with these new players, it's good to see some shake-up although I still see very little progress.
Ya know, I looked and I don't see any IPv6 support on DynDNS. Until more DNS servers support IPv6 it's adoption will still fall short. Fundamentally changing how you network is no small feat. I predict organizations will deploy IPv6 internally first, then upgrades will move further out. For instance, my 4 month old top-end Sonicwall doesn't have IPv6 support. Not exactly a fringe piece of hardware. My Barracuda load balancers don't support IPv6. My Cisco 2811s don't support IPv6 without paying for a software upgrade. My HP Procurves at least support IPv6 but at this stage that's about it which fortunately for me, my primary routing is done on a Procurve so internally I can do IPv6 without much hassle. None of my gear is terribly old and I'm not afraid of learning new ways of networking which are more efficient and eliminate problems. Right now it will cause more problems than it solves.
And as an answer to your question, I write down product keys for software without much trouble so I imagine adapting to right out IPv6 addresses in hex wouldn't be that much harder than what I write down now. So no, I don't think that is hurting the adoption of IPv6.
We routinely work with 1gig PPT files, powerpoint doesn't allow streaming of the file so you can't work with it until the machine has downloaded the whole thing. It doesn't really matter though since the same concept applies to any files of any real size. Few people that use RDP on the regular see it as remotely slow. I have a problem with one of my coworkers who likes to run RDP sessions full screen. He often forgets he's directly on a server and then attempts to pull up a site like Hulu and subsequently finds flash not installed only to go ahead and install it. Fortunately he doesn't fill a role where he logs into servers anymore so its no longer an issue.
Then there's this idea that screen scrolling would require an entire redownload of a frame which is simply untrue. Slashdot for instance is mostly white background which wouldn't have to be redownloaded. Then of course the task bar and firefox menu are unchanged and thus not redownloaded.
The software involved has had more than 15 years to mature and is quite efficient at this stage which is why you saw MS enable 3d acceleration inside RDP for Windows Vista and Server 2008. Super high framerate stuff becomes a problem on slow connections, but most connections are just fine and most of the processing gets done on better hardware than typical end-user hardware. This doesn't make sense for all scenarios, but it does for a lot of them.
100megabit is required for 1080p but realistically you can get away with 24megabit. I like to have a lot of head-room though.
The thing you don't quite get is that a picture is the same size for a given resolution. Yes it will go up and down depending on how many structures are in the image but you have an upper limit. Contrast that against the need to download that 1gig powerpoint presentation over the Internet over ATT 3G spotty speed and you quickly realize how much faster it is to just transmit the pictures of what you are seeing. This is why RDP is much faster over the Internet than directly managing the machine.
Now most Internet services can handle the bitmap transfer. Local software will cache bitmaps so common things like the start menu aren't redownloaded, this means that image size drops the more you use it.
I don't believe this is a more secure approach, but it is definitely faster. Scrolling only requires downloading enough of the screen to cover the new info to be displayed, usually the process of scrolling gives the machine enough time to download it. Smooth scrolling isn't always perfect, but over a LAN or at least a decent Internet connection it's great, it will also tolerate temporary disconnects so you rarely ever lose your work.
And what about the cost of replacing the workstation once its off warranty? Or when the hdd breaks? Or the site visits to clean up all sorts of software messes users get themselves into? Those costs put it back into the court of the thin client since they have no moving parts. Keep in mind that shutting off a computer over the network is rarely a good idea as users probably left something open and of course didn't save!! Thin client side you shut off the thin client and the VM is humming away in the server room where it uses more efficient power at least here in the U.S. at least.
And of course I can power down my server hardware during periods of low activity as well with monitoring software powering up more hardware as needed. Naturally you would start up your daily required hardware probably two hours before the morning rush but you end up saving a ton of electricity. Combine all that with a DR site using different SAN hardware and you have a highly available infrastructure that is more flexible for users, not less. Thin client notebooks are great for the users that are away as well as it will cache a local copy of the image. It's not super fast that way but you can still work on that office document or connect to hotel wifi to browse the web.
With workstation hardware failures causing downtime for users I don't see how it's possible for all but the smallest shops to find it cheaper, the cost of the time to troubleshoot alone over the course of a year easily equals the cost of a server or two, nevermind the fact that a server failure doesn't result in downtime for any users since it's all in a pool, the vm will just be migrated to hardware that is working, automatically.
I think a lot of people are just afraid of giving up local control and I understand that, it's the same reason that I tread slowly with cloud services. You make sure you can handle your critical services on your own and use the cloud to scale out. At least that's the approach I've taken, I can handle quite a bit of usage on my own and it's only a few times a year that I have a few orders of magnitude more usage. For those times the cloud is potentially the perfect solution as I only have to rent out VMs for the length of time that I need them.
There are only a few applications these days where a thin client isn't appropriate just like there are a few applications in the server world that don't make sense to virtualize. My security servers recording 5megapixel resolution are far too IO intensive for it to make sense to virtualize for instance.
With traditional thin clients you were right, with XenDesktop or most VDIs out there now you can even watch full 1080p video provided the thin client supports it. CAD is easy to do inside a virtual desktop. I'm currently in trials with XenDesktop and it's pretty terrific, users also like being able to just go to their phone and login to their corporate desktop as well. They have access to their stuff whenever and wherever they want either with a thin client or with a traditional desktop. Support costs are a lot less now especially since for my trial purposes at least, XenDesktop is free.
The limitations of the past are gone, with USB pass-through you can use your webcams or connect almost any proprietary device you've got. I haven't found any hardware yet that the thin client can't pass to the VM. This is more of a logical next step, it won't end regular computers for certain applications but the vast majority of office workers out there don't need special hardware. For me, the beauty of the whole thing is the simple ability to add physical hardware on the back-end to boost performance so I don't have to upgrade all the thin clients because an application has become sluggish. This also means if physical hardware dies on the back-end the users don't notice and I just replace the one server. This is nice compared to all the times I've had hard drives fail on me on office computers. All the support calls that their computer has slowed down disappear. Thin clients being without moving parts is a big benefit, they will indeed last much longer and there are only limits means of which the user can screw up their access.
I'm deploying a 4 monitor 10zig rig to a test group of people that need high resolution work. If it passes their tests then I'll go company wide with it. A VPN connection and a Citrix receiver is all that is needed for users to then have their full corporate desktop experience whether they are in the office or across the pond on vacation. Most of them seem to like the idea and with location-based policies I can control security accordingly. Things like USB pass-through I probably wouldn't want enabled for all remote users for instance.
I'm sure there are downsides to virtual desktops, I haven't encountered them yet though. I'd love to hear about actual limitations as I'm in the process of identifying pros and cons, right now I haven't really seen any cons. New user provisioning is a snap as you just clone from a template and you're done. Makes remote administration much much simpler as I then have easy access to the console of the VM which means keeping everything up to date is easy. Regular snapshotting makes backups a snap.
Seems like most people have feelings about thin clients dating back to when they were complete bullshit with WYSE green screens not able to do anything on their own. Modern thin clients have a sweet of utilities on the machine itself so if you enterprise infrastructure fails you, you can also use the onboard office suite and web browser. Building back-end infrastructure seems much easier to me than ensuring all end-user machines are well maintained and replaced as warranty status demands.
Every heard of RDP? You even have accelerated graphics and dual monitor support these days. With device pass-through is a very viable option. Of course I went one further for the owner of the company I work for. We've got XenDesktop Express, good for 10 virtual machines running on a dual processor quad core server and he has all the photoshop and Sims power he needs. Even had 1080p video and associated formats for HD audio. That's a bit overkill for the average consumer. He'll have 5 thin clients through-out his house see that he can enjoy fan-less high speed computing at 5 different locations, some will be wired, some will be serviced with 802.11n.
RDP works here and now for the average consumer running Windows 7 though. I do this all the time on my much more limited budget. Virtual desktops are definitely the future though.
VB.net is also used in web development, same with C#
It doesn't seem like you know what a monopoly is and why Microsoft got into trouble in the past since this is pretty much the same situation. When you have a significant portion of the market and you utilize anticompetitive practices you get yourself into a lawsuit. This is why Microsoft got into trouble a while back and why Apple hasn't gotten into trouble yet. If Apple had larger marketshare than Microsoft they would be in much hotter water than MS ever was.
If Intel had only done the nasty compiler trick they may have gotten away with it, but all the OEM strong arming and nasty licensing restrictions for AMD also contribute to the lawsuit. Intel did everything it could to prevent AMD from gaining any marketshare. AMD did gain a lot of marketshare regardless but that's not at issue here. It is one thing to compete on merits, and it is another to use your marketshare to cut out competition.