Didn't I read in the other article that the Katie responsible for the book could be reached at her e-mail address with her own domain? Why not just publish the book with that title instead? Sheesh!
I don't think I'd make a good lawyer, because there's no fight and no money in my solution...
Oracle, DB2, Splus, and Mathematica all run on Solaris. In fact, as I understand it, Oracle is developed first on Solaris and then ported to the other OSs they support.
Verticle applications will be a different story, but there's very little that can run on LINUX that can't run on Solaris already. Never mind what gets written in Java.
I apologize for the misstatement. I was referencing a movie line and was hoping the intent, not the content, would be enough for my point. Let's call that "exageration for conversation." Not intended to be passed as fact--but we all knew the part of the movie of which I spoke, didn't we.
I'm thinking of the Forrestall when I think that Jimbo would be in risk of being chosen under an aircraft. Jimbo was certainly put out there to put out the fire, but not to save the planes--rather, to save the ship. And in that comment, it wasn't so much to save the iron, wood, and electronics, it was because the other 500 guys (exageration for conversation, again) on the boat would also be lost.
The reason they want the pilot back is because it's easier to make planes than pilots, is true. The loss of a pilot, however, goes way beyond the inconvenience of training another one. The loss of any person is bad for their unit, their family, their effort, and, of course, the person. This goes for any individual. Loss of life at the very least introduces FUD, and at the very worst, causes more loss.
Yes, to some small degree, persons are units of attrition, as seen in WWII. The US goes a long, long way to make sure that attrition is kept to a minimum. If a beach needs to be stormed (think Normandy or Iwo Jima), then the loss of life is undesired but expected, and may be reduced to formulas. I think if this didn't happen, most wars would be pretty short--you'd be reduced to the nutbags fighting each other.
Think about Iraq for a moment, and consider that for the tens of thousands of fatalaties in that country, only 900 or so are American soldiers. Much is done to keep individuals out of harm's way.
If a tool, like the iRobot, can be used instead, it will definately be sacrificed instead. The snide comment implying the robot's value over a person's is very far off the mark.
The SunRay appliance is a thin client that basically runs an X "client" allowing connection to remote servers. The SunRay server software (currently only available for Sparc, but as the article portends, will be ported to LINUX) provides the SunRay appliances with the information to get going (a list of login servers, for example). The appliance basically connects to a Sun server's X.
The SunRay appliance hardware is pretty small, and individually unimpressive--which makes it kind of impressive. The SunRay appliance boots entirely from flash, so they're quiet and light. The small processors make them generate little heat, as well.
They behave similar to something like PXES or the myriad of other thin client solutions. That software turns your system into a remote workstation for any xdm server. That works on any Intel system (maybe there are ports?_ from floppy, USB, flash, TFTP...
An interesting thing is, if you have a LINUX box running xdm, you can use the SunRay appliance as a remote thin client for that server. You still need a SunRay server to get the appliance to behave on the network first, though.
Uncle Sam takes the lives of people very seriously. While they are rightly upset when you foolishly endanger expensive equipment (eg, the "discussion" about the $80M airplane with Tom Cruise in Top Gun), they really would rather have the pilot than the plane back if they can't have both. And they'd rather have the robot operator instead of the robot. Now, if the robot operator were trying to play chicken against tanks with his robot, yes, there'd be stern words.
Poor little iRobot possibly saved the lives of more than one bomb-squad soldier, or more lives for unlucky troops walking or driving nearby.
If a soldier was to pick up the pieces, it would be either to attempt a repair and reuse (another good reason to use them instead of people), prevent the bad guys from getting our technology, or just to be responsible with debris in a field.
You don't want to get any more e-mail do you? Just kidding.
Personally, I feel that a few too many people are give a few too many tasks on the PC with the assumption that they know what they're doing. I know these are intelligent people who know how to do their jobs. Most of them are even pretty good with the things they do on the computer, with a bit of training, that are related to their jobs.
The trouble begins when these intelligent people begin to make assumptions about how the computer magic works. They're complicated, and take some know-how to make work right. The trouble users don't undertand what "safe computing" is, or they don't believe bad things will happen to them, or something simple like that. No malice, just no training, and sometimes no respect.
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Most of the problems that result in clashes between these intelligent people and are based on OE: Operator Error. Downloading crap because it's there. Clicking on every "yes" button they see. Thinking that because they can send and receive e-mail they can for some reason manage network shares on their own.
Truly, not understanding what it takes to make a computer work, and then working outside of whatever parameters they are shown is a bad thing. Most of the goofs and trouble made are because these intelligent people don't know what they're doing in my arena. I don't know how to do their jobs, and you'll notice I don't sneak into their offices and mess with their papers when they're not looking.
It's rude, I'll give you that, to think that all of the users are stupid (some may be, but it's rude to think that, too). Pause for amoment and think how idiotic it is for some asshole to not understand the dumbass things you do for a living. Trained monkeys with broken arms can do that, right? Can't be that hard to sort paper and push pencils. That's not right, is it? You took it seriously enough to go to school, or work at it for a while, or fight your way up from the trenches. Sysops do not do this because other options are slim.
The individual pricks you work with may well be in the wrong job. It's probably the case that they're just overwhelmed with the blissful environment you provide them. I'm really going strong on the feedback you've provided. The first thing I think when someone calls me a prick, is how much of a prick they are. Probably just goes downhill from there.
For me, I'm about as nice as they come. I realize that my 15-years of computer experience has given me a unique insight to how all of this magic stuff works. I truly understand the bit-packed arrays of data that you call a spreadsheet, I understand what all those cables do sticking out of that big noisy box on your desk. Yes, I can write software from scratch, and I know why you can't get to your e-mail.
I sure don't hold it against anyone who's using a computer as a tool to do their real work if they don't really get what the computer's trying to do. I do take it personally when they second-guess or make shit up and then get pissy when it doesn't work, especially if I'm holding back a well-deserved "I told you so.".
Be nice to me and my compadres. We work hard so you don't have to. Yes, I can take any piece of shit computer you have, plug it into any bizarre situation you demand, and make it work. Probably even make it work well. I am darn good at my job, and I know most of the other ops out there are, too.
(Oh, and we get paid more than you. We know because we can see everything on the network.)
Because the processing power on their separate workstations undoubtedly tromp the PCI cards. PC-in-your-PC is lame. Get bigger Sparc workstations, run Solaris with better apps. If they're pushing 10,000 destkops, I'm sure whatever they use on Windows can be ported. Heck, I'll do it.
I once consulted at a place where someone thought to bring some questionable P2P software in to "bring his music software to the office." He ran the same software on his home PC where he did have a collection of ripped CDs, as well as previously P2P downloaded music and videos.
He was not cautious about his setup, and I very quickly showed him how I could basically browse his entire computer hard drive, and (granted with a little hands-on) very quicky map every network resource his system had access to. I suggested that he remove that lest some dishonest version of the software do the additional mapping unbeknownst to him.
I have yet to see a large group running with just a few people maintaining it. MS or otherwise. There's always a need for helping people who should be using computers anyway, and there are legitimate problems (usually caused by other user errors). Simple system maintenance on thousands of systems isn't entirely automatable, no matter what platform you run. Thin clients on massive servers would be the closest you'd have ("unplug your unit...wait...plug it back in..."), but the kind of server (possibly farm) you need to truly replicate that many desktops' usability is potentially staggering, too. In your image editing needs, I would imagine that huge RAM and adequate storage may be necessary on each workstation; replicating that on a single server or a few servers for more than a handful of users moves into rather large and spendy systems. Even if the math works out that the thin-client, massive server solution is cheaper, the $1M price tag in the server room often stops that conversation.
In a shop where X is a primary requirement, I agree MS is not a solution to even consider. I was discussing a "more typical" office with word processing, e-mail, web browsing, and maybe a proprietary solution or two. I believe that better solutions exist than MS for all of these, save possibly the proprietary solution (which is only because of the glut of MS-biased developers and managers, not because solutions don't exist for other platforms). I know that if an office started with non-MS systems, and reasonable compatible software, the users would be just as useful in the long run; in the short run, try explaining the difference between "C:\My Documents" and "~" to non-nerdy types when they need to find their spreadsheet.
The biggest company I've consulted for has 60,000 employees with over 50,000 desktops. Almost all of their work was done in word processors, e-mail (not even Exchange, mind you), and web browsers. Except for the in-house stuff developed on Access (which could have been made in a dozen alternatives, yes), nothing required MS OS, yet every desktop had it. A big part of this was ease of setup (systems came with OS installed, additional configuration was minimal), and comfort for the end-users. Of those 50,000 desktop users, I'd imagine 49,000 didn't know how to do anything more than type... (some exaggeration may exist for conversation, but you know what I really mean).
LINUX is getting easier to install, especially if your system is made of mainstream parts, as off-the-shelf solutions tend to be. I agree that if everything runs nice off NFS, it can be as simple as pushing a few config files and running some standard setup scripts. If that NFS is at all "iffy," or unavailable, then every workstation is very likely to become an island looking for disparate servers (e-mail, web, etc).
Don't underestimate the mass-install capabilities of MS software, though. The unattended install for MS OSs is pretty painles, and does allow for network-based configuration, too. Once configured, it's really a matter of turning on the PC, pointing it to the network, and standing back.
Where I'm consulting now, hundreds of developers are writing 100% Java software using Eclipse and other 100% Java solutions. The target server OS is Solaris, with target workstations running LINUX. All of these development stations are Windows, however. Sadly, because it comes on PCs out of the box that way, Office and Exchange are used (yes, I know there are LINUX alternatives), and the less-technical worker-bees all know how to get their software started.
I run 95% non-Windows in my lab; one 2003 server and a couple XP workstations, with the rest Solaris or LINUX. I would dig an opportunity to dump Windows; I don't do anything that requires it anymore, except consult for places that won't work without it.
As answered 100 times already, yes, the really were. Even now, allowing that "low price" includes ROI considerations like my time to setup systems, train users, and maintain networks, MS is a decent alternative. I'm a big fan of the LINUX potential, and hope that this or something like it kicks into high gear and gets in all those little places, but until "dumb users" (we all have them in our offices) get over their FUD of not Windows, it's here.
Consider that to the average Joe (think's he's computer savvy, but isn't really) that walks into his local mega-outlet to buy a ready-to-use computer-in-a-box, Windows is installed (although I have seen Lindows-installed PCs on the shelf, now), included in the price. Realistically, yes, the price is in there somewhere, but to Joe, it's "free" (as in "already done for me"). To change the OS, assuming Joe can figure that out, there's at the very least download and install time, if not a direct purchase of an OS box from the shelf to use. In this case, Microsoft can be argued to be the low-cost winner. Before you bash me, yes, this is where MS has been playing badly...monsters in my box.
To another Joe, the really-savvy computer guru, like you, dear reader (who assembles his system from scratch picking the best components money can buy and lovingly screwing them together in is l33t modded case...), looking at the Suse, RedHat, and Microsoft OS boxes on the shelf, no, Microsoft is not the clear winner in the low-price category. (Especilly to the l33t users who say "screw the shelves" and get their latest from BitTorrent.)
Consider also Joe, the manager of the mega-corp IT department, who licenses and maintains 10,000 desktops. MS is again arguably a low-cost winner, again, especially considering the simple ROI factors.
Note, no insult intended to anyone actually named Joe, who may or may not know how to do any of these things...
MS did a great job of figuring it out early. Although it's since been kicked for unfair practices, they started out selling "irrelevant" software to IBM, who only wanted the hardware money, and became a giant. While their own APIs are closed, they've done plenty for the developers who wish to create software to run on their platform. They rallied the world and got basically anyone who makes hardware to provide (either MS or OEM) drivers that work. They did OK figuring plenty out.
Open Source is to Closed Source, as Hive Societies are to Kingdoms
And can someone point out a "Hive Society"? Surely you don't mean some kind of bee-like or Borg-like collective or commune... The "kingdom" (more of a republic, really) I live in is doing pretty good, despite all of the bees buzzing around in Michigan and Montana. However, I think I know what you mean. In the long run, yes, the hives may outlast the big, fat kingdom, but in the meantime, the kingdom will, well, get big and fat...MS posts billions of dollars of revenue, and the collection of your favorite other software manufacturers is a shadow of their tax liability...
Now, I know it looks like I'm on the MS bandwagon; I just believe that you can't bash them just because they're the biggest. Pick on them because they behave monsterously; that they do.
One of us is taking this personally. I'm sure it's not me.
I'm not stuck on DVD as next generation or big floppy. I'm not even thinking DVD as next generation VHS. I'm discussing the passing trends of technology. VHS hit houses in the 70s and 80s, becoming fairly ubiquitous in the late 80s and early 90s. I've got a few VCRs, but I can't remember the last time I rented or purchased a tape, and I know I'm not alone. DVD has started replacing VHS which lasted, therefore, about 20 years on top.
Whatever you stick on the DVD doesn't matter. Whatever the purpose of your sticking things on the disk doesn't matter, either. Yes, there are stand-alone devices that make it unlike computers. I concede. You missed some of my point, but I got yours. You win.
My mention of broadband was not to imply an extension of PPV. On the contrary, I was simply suggesting that bandwidth can become a medium for delivery of movies or data delivered by other than physical media. The other discussions in this thread have kicked that horse to death, but here's my take:
Consider the possibility that out-of-band delivery or really high speed makes it so that time isn't the problem; now downloading many GB of data (including the MPEG encoded movies) can take hours longer than going to your video outlet and making a purchase. You instead order your purchase from Amazon. It's delivered to your home entertainment server, or made available in perpetuity from some remote server (in the example, bandwidth isn't a big deal, but maybe storage is). You watch the digital any time you want, same as having the disk in the drive. You want to take it with you, you move it to your portable player, just like music on an iPod, or you access your video server account from your buddy's player when you want to share.
Even wire as a medium might fade. Wireless is nearly everywhere, and if the bandwidth and access can become ubiquitous, too, maybe that'll open the system up so you don't need the comfort of holding the plastic disk in your hand.
Given that, I believe even today's technology surpasses PPV and DVD. Small changes to PVR software could allow technology to integrate and deliver content differently than today. You set up your PVR to record the movie to watch later, poof it's there; there until you don't want it any more. Better than DVD, it gets the resolution best suited for your video and storage device, lanugage preference, and viewing preference (letterbox, directors' cut, whatever). You've go the right setup (I've got nearly a TB of storage on 11 different servers in my house), you probably never have to get rid of it. Sure, licensing needs to be worked out. BitTorrent ripped DVDs aren't always legal (although there is legal content, too), but here I'm just pointing out different technology, not advocating theft.
That's what Bill was talking about. Not the shitty "watch on demand" crap from your cable company.
DVD as a medium? It'll pass. I bet it'll pass a lot faster than albums have (which have gone through their own transitions such as two sided, 78-, 45-, and 33-RPM, stereo, etc, so it's not like they turned out the best phonograph 100 years ago). It takes a lot of gear to make a DVD work, instead of just a needle and something to vibrate for a phonograph. That technology will change more rapidly than it has to bring us DVD. High-definition, surround-sound, extra features, all that jazz will push the limits of the media, and it'll shift. You want to record your own stuff on DVD? That's not where it will be either (and you have to concede, nearly no one ever recorded albums at home).
I think the medium of DVD will be around for a long time. I hope so--I have hundreds of the damned things (exaggerated, but not unrealistic). I also think the next best thing will be here before we send men to Mars.
I wasn't trying to compare DVDs to floppies. I was tying to use floppies as an example of something ubiquitous that is no longer so popular, and to show that huge shifts in technology have been delivered in less time than the 10 years projected in the article. On some fronts I believe floppies are superior to DVDs (they are cheaper than dirt, I can fit them in my pocket, I can use it a bazillion times, they can still hold fair amounts of data, and they're pretty durable), but CD and DVD kick ass on size and speed. No real comparison, I agree with you. As for media not used on computers, yes, audio cassettes are still easy to find and use, even though CDs are much better, and VHS cannot hold a candle to DVD; the next thing will undoubtedly do the same thing to CD and DVD media and storage.
I also wasn't trying to suggest that anything would outright disappear. If I wanted to make that comparison I might have indicated punch tape and cards, not floppy disks.
What I intended to share was an agreement with the article that the technology we have now is very likely to become weak in comparison to the technology yet to come. Imagine installing your favorite OS entirely by floppy today; it used to be that way.
What Unka Bill tried to say in his statement (and that I agree with) was that the way video, and by extension data, is presented on DVD is likely to pass the proverbial torch a different technology. Video, the most obvious current use of DVD, will be delivered differently; simply stated. Perhaps by the Internet or other network, perhaps by better optical or magnetic media, and quite probably by something we haven't envisioned yet.
iFilm is chock full of video, mp3 is full of audio (just to pick some free and legal sites--not intended as a limit of knowledge or endorsement), not to mention the various peer-to-peer and BitTorrent methods of sharing (for the other kind). This as an alternative to DVD is a more viable reality as broadband becomes ubiquitous. Currently on my 3MB pipe it can take almost as long to download from a busy site as it will to watch, but I can see things speeding up.
DVDs will no doubt be around for a very long time; at the very least, until the last manufacturer of DVD players has been long gone, and no one can repair what's left behind. However, the next greatest thing will probably not just be a bigger DVD (as DVDs are bigger CDs), but something different. Something that doesn't get scratched or broken in half or can hold more and get reused better and has faster random access.
To address the support you mentioned in your observation, 5 years is less than ten, while a decade is equal to ten; seems that you don't disagree with the timeline of the technology shift either. I must disagree with your three decades of compatibility for the past technology--at which computer store can one buy an 8-inch floppy drive? I still have some of the disks from my old Tandy system that was still in use in the mid-eighties (barely three decades),
Similarly, I bet you can't go get your favorite contemporary group's latest release to play on that fancy new phonograph of yours...maybe some, but not enough to make it your primary means of entertainment. And if you could, you'd probably rip the song from the vinyl to your MP3 player so you could take it with you anyway.
I don't mean to sound like I'm defending Master of the Universe Gates...but his statement isn't terribly out of whack.
A few things to consider are the vast sweeping changes that can happen in 10 years. Personal Computers, nay, computers at all, are very little like what they were ten years ago. The two things that will decide if this prediction is correct will be the way we store things, and the things we store.
Looking at the time, 10 years doesn't seem too long to expect a shift in technology. Consider the floppy. Very popular 10 years ago. Hell, 10 years ago CD-ROM drives weren't even guaranteed in most systems, so floppies were the assumed portable storage. Currently CD-ROM is assumed, and DVD is becoming so. I find it easy to purchase systems without floppies. To speclate that the DVD may be replaced in 10 years is not so far fetched.
The acceleration of advancing technology will probably decide whether the media of DVD is sound enough technology. The write-once, or at least write-more-finite-times-than-magnetic-media aspects of any optical media will lead to their demise before their size, is my personal prediction. Scratching, warping, and other physical weakness of the media seem to be pretty reasonable reasons to not use them forever. While I don't think they'll go away in ten years (my computer store still sells 3.5-inch floppies), they won't last forever (I cannot, however purchase a 5.25-inch floppy off the shelf).
The size of the things we store continues to grow, but that doesn't seem to be growing as fast. The sampling of sound hasn't increased the size of storage required since the introduction of the CD (in fact, thanks to compression like MP3, it's smaller), but higher-quality video has become common. What you type will rarely fill the media, but what data you generate probably can. For example, backing up other media (like your HDD) onto inexpensive optical is very common, so this might drive a larger solution. Like CDs can store multiple tunes or albums(heck, to the hundreds of tunes and many albums with MP3 compression), video storage of the future may store much more than we live with now; entire seasons or runs of television, all of the series of movies or actor's lines, every home video you've ever produced...
Not that you care, but personally, I use flash media now for most of my portable storage. It's virtually indestructable (in everyday, carry it in my pocket use). It's pretty spacious; my current 256MB USB drive is capable of holding practically my entire working environment (OS not included, but data and editors are), and larger drives are available when this no longer suffices. They're not as cheap, I'll grant you, but I got it on sale for less than a stack of CDRWs, and I've written to it more times than I could have a similar priced stack of DVD write-onces. While not replacing DVDs yet, I'll argue that these flash media are reasonable replacements for CDs; it's conceivable that a small shift in the technology or manufacture and this could replace DVDs in size, too.
I use an external HDD for the backup of my main system's HDD. Well, in reality, I typically back up all important data across multiple HDDs--either on drive sets in RAID, separate systems or servers, or both. Again, not as cheap, but faster and rewritable to a much larger degree (lots of billions of rewrites versus thousands or millions).
I never post to NNTP/USENET news groups (peeking at warez doesn't require it, right..?), but afraid for what my news reader might do behind my back, I always use news@reader.org. The domain is parked, so I would imagine the mail gets dumped into/dev/null or some blackhole mailbox.
Communications could be useful
on
GPS on Mars?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While I'm not up for any grand schemes too long before people or large installations of machines are in place, if the satellites functioned as communications also, that would reduce the effect of being "on the dark side" of the planet. Any messages to and from Earth (or elsewhere) could be relayed around the planet.
On another thought, a slightly more enhanced, outward looking system could be put into place for scanning the rest of space while Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun. Or this could be used just to get a view from farther away, or what have you.
Often when I travel, especially on a jaunt that takes me to several cities, I don't bring much underwear (or socks or other lesser toiletries); instead I purchase new when I get there and abandon them when I leave. Of course, I bring a spare or two in case acquiring new is difficult or untimely. Who wants to drag along 30 pair of underwear for a two week trek across Europe, especially when you know that they sell it there? And is underwear (or a razor) so expensive that it can't be treated as cost of travel?
I mean, you'd drop $5 for a cup of convenient coffee every day, right? Is it so different drop a few bucks for a couple changes of briefs and tees, and then leave them behind?
Oh, wait, you probably wanted some intelligent banter about the preferences... Certainly some form of encryption would be made available. Wrap everything in a 4096-bit PKI scheme. Works for mail, why not preferences and data? I feel pretty safe with my SSH tunneled connections to VNC and RDP servers behind my firewalls; would this truly be so different (data v. screenshot not the point).
That is true, but in the example set forth in the article, speaking only of the model year, there is neither an O or a 0. I can see confusion between O and Q, too, especially on that grubby tag in the junk yard.
To further agree, even if you removed I, O, Q, and Z, that's 6^32 instead of 6^10 for just the serial number.
Perhaps just using letters in more places, or even just use all of the letters. The article broke out the, uh, breakdown of the VIN string; seems that there are some unused letters in the year code, for example. And if the serial number isn't strictly a number, but more of a code, they'd go from 10^6 to 36^6 just by allowing 000000 to ZZZZZZ.
I went to all of the Comdex exhibits, he went to the other exhibits after the first hour of looking at Comdex.
I seem to remember we each thought we had a better time than the other. Although, now that I think of it, he had pictures to prove he had a good time...
Slashdot Mirror
I was gonna try, but now you've ruined it.
I don't think I'd make a good lawyer, because there's no fight and no money in my solution...
Verticle applications will be a different story, but there's very little that can run on LINUX that can't run on Solaris already. Never mind what gets written in Java.
I'm thinking of the Forrestall when I think that Jimbo would be in risk of being chosen under an aircraft. Jimbo was certainly put out there to put out the fire, but not to save the planes--rather, to save the ship. And in that comment, it wasn't so much to save the iron, wood, and electronics, it was because the other 500 guys (exageration for conversation, again) on the boat would also be lost.
The reason they want the pilot back is because it's easier to make planes than pilots, is true. The loss of a pilot, however, goes way beyond the inconvenience of training another one. The loss of any person is bad for their unit, their family, their effort, and, of course, the person. This goes for any individual. Loss of life at the very least introduces FUD, and at the very worst, causes more loss.
Yes, to some small degree, persons are units of attrition, as seen in WWII. The US goes a long, long way to make sure that attrition is kept to a minimum. If a beach needs to be stormed (think Normandy or Iwo Jima), then the loss of life is undesired but expected, and may be reduced to formulas. I think if this didn't happen, most wars would be pretty short--you'd be reduced to the nutbags fighting each other.
Think about Iraq for a moment, and consider that for the tens of thousands of fatalaties in that country, only 900 or so are American soldiers. Much is done to keep individuals out of harm's way.
If a tool, like the iRobot, can be used instead, it will definately be sacrificed instead. The snide comment implying the robot's value over a person's is very far off the mark.
The SunRay appliance is a thin client that basically runs an X "client" allowing connection to remote servers. The SunRay server software (currently only available for Sparc, but as the article portends, will be ported to LINUX) provides the SunRay appliances with the information to get going (a list of login servers, for example). The appliance basically connects to a Sun server's X.
The SunRay appliance hardware is pretty small, and individually unimpressive--which makes it kind of impressive. The SunRay appliance boots entirely from flash, so they're quiet and light. The small processors make them generate little heat, as well.
They behave similar to something like PXES or the myriad of other thin client solutions. That software turns your system into a remote workstation for any xdm server. That works on any Intel system (maybe there are ports?_ from floppy, USB, flash, TFTP...
An interesting thing is, if you have a LINUX box running xdm, you can use the SunRay appliance as a remote thin client for that server. You still need a SunRay server to get the appliance to behave on the network first, though.
Poor little iRobot possibly saved the lives of more than one bomb-squad soldier, or more lives for unlucky troops walking or driving nearby.
If a soldier was to pick up the pieces, it would be either to attempt a repair and reuse (another good reason to use them instead of people), prevent the bad guys from getting our technology, or just to be responsible with debris in a field.
Personally, I feel that a few too many people are give a few too many tasks on the PC with the assumption that they know what they're doing. I know these are intelligent people who know how to do their jobs. Most of them are even pretty good with the things they do on the computer, with a bit of training, that are related to their jobs.
The trouble begins when these intelligent people begin to make assumptions about how the computer magic works. They're complicated, and take some know-how to make work right. The trouble users don't undertand what "safe computing" is, or they don't believe bad things will happen to them, or something simple like that. No malice, just no training, and sometimes no respect. .
Most of the problems that result in clashes between these intelligent people and are based on OE: Operator Error. Downloading crap because it's there. Clicking on every "yes" button they see. Thinking that because they can send and receive e-mail they can for some reason manage network shares on their own.
Truly, not understanding what it takes to make a computer work, and then working outside of whatever parameters they are shown is a bad thing. Most of the goofs and trouble made are because these intelligent people don't know what they're doing in my arena. I don't know how to do their jobs, and you'll notice I don't sneak into their offices and mess with their papers when they're not looking.
It's rude, I'll give you that, to think that all of the users are stupid (some may be, but it's rude to think that, too). Pause for amoment and think how idiotic it is for some asshole to not understand the dumbass things you do for a living. Trained monkeys with broken arms can do that, right? Can't be that hard to sort paper and push pencils. That's not right, is it? You took it seriously enough to go to school, or work at it for a while, or fight your way up from the trenches. Sysops do not do this because other options are slim.
The individual pricks you work with may well be in the wrong job. It's probably the case that they're just overwhelmed with the blissful environment you provide them. I'm really going strong on the feedback you've provided. The first thing I think when someone calls me a prick, is how much of a prick they are. Probably just goes downhill from there.
For me, I'm about as nice as they come. I realize that my 15-years of computer experience has given me a unique insight to how all of this magic stuff works. I truly understand the bit-packed arrays of data that you call a spreadsheet, I understand what all those cables do sticking out of that big noisy box on your desk. Yes, I can write software from scratch, and I know why you can't get to your e-mail.
I sure don't hold it against anyone who's using a computer as a tool to do their real work if they don't really get what the computer's trying to do. I do take it personally when they second-guess or make shit up and then get pissy when it doesn't work, especially if I'm holding back a well-deserved "I told you so.".
Be nice to me and my compadres. We work hard so you don't have to. Yes, I can take any piece of shit computer you have, plug it into any bizarre situation you demand, and make it work. Probably even make it work well. I am darn good at my job, and I know most of the other ops out there are, too.
(Oh, and we get paid more than you. We know because we can see everything on the network.)
Because the processing power on their separate workstations undoubtedly tromp the PCI cards. PC-in-your-PC is lame. Get bigger Sparc workstations, run Solaris with better apps. If they're pushing 10,000 destkops, I'm sure whatever they use on Windows can be ported. Heck, I'll do it.
It's about time we see appreciation other than the shrines to bad users and other system sacrifices.
He was not cautious about his setup, and I very quickly showed him how I could basically browse his entire computer hard drive, and (granted with a little hands-on) very quicky map every network resource his system had access to. I suggested that he remove that lest some dishonest version of the software do the additional mapping unbeknownst to him.
P2P is a potential blessing and a damned curse.
I have yet to see a large group running with just a few people maintaining it. MS or otherwise. There's always a need for helping people who should be using computers anyway, and there are legitimate problems (usually caused by other user errors). Simple system maintenance on thousands of systems isn't entirely automatable, no matter what platform you run. Thin clients on massive servers would be the closest you'd have ("unplug your unit...wait...plug it back in..."), but the kind of server (possibly farm) you need to truly replicate that many desktops' usability is potentially staggering, too. In your image editing needs, I would imagine that huge RAM and adequate storage may be necessary on each workstation; replicating that on a single server or a few servers for more than a handful of users moves into rather large and spendy systems. Even if the math works out that the thin-client, massive server solution is cheaper, the $1M price tag in the server room often stops that conversation.
In a shop where X is a primary requirement, I agree MS is not a solution to even consider. I was discussing a "more typical" office with word processing, e-mail, web browsing, and maybe a proprietary solution or two. I believe that better solutions exist than MS for all of these, save possibly the proprietary solution (which is only because of the glut of MS-biased developers and managers, not because solutions don't exist for other platforms). I know that if an office started with non-MS systems, and reasonable compatible software, the users would be just as useful in the long run; in the short run, try explaining the difference between "C:\My Documents" and "~" to non-nerdy types when they need to find their spreadsheet.
The biggest company I've consulted for has 60,000 employees with over 50,000 desktops. Almost all of their work was done in word processors, e-mail (not even Exchange, mind you), and web browsers. Except for the in-house stuff developed on Access (which could have been made in a dozen alternatives, yes), nothing required MS OS, yet every desktop had it. A big part of this was ease of setup (systems came with OS installed, additional configuration was minimal), and comfort for the end-users. Of those 50,000 desktop users, I'd imagine 49,000 didn't know how to do anything more than type... (some exaggeration may exist for conversation, but you know what I really mean).
LINUX is getting easier to install, especially if your system is made of mainstream parts, as off-the-shelf solutions tend to be. I agree that if everything runs nice off NFS, it can be as simple as pushing a few config files and running some standard setup scripts. If that NFS is at all "iffy," or unavailable, then every workstation is very likely to become an island looking for disparate servers (e-mail, web, etc).
Don't underestimate the mass-install capabilities of MS software, though. The unattended install for MS OSs is pretty painles, and does allow for network-based configuration, too. Once configured, it's really a matter of turning on the PC, pointing it to the network, and standing back.
Where I'm consulting now, hundreds of developers are writing 100% Java software using Eclipse and other 100% Java solutions. The target server OS is Solaris, with target workstations running LINUX. All of these development stations are Windows, however. Sadly, because it comes on PCs out of the box that way, Office and Exchange are used (yes, I know there are LINUX alternatives), and the less-technical worker-bees all know how to get their software started.
I run 95% non-Windows in my lab; one 2003 server and a couple XP workstations, with the rest Solaris or LINUX. I would dig an opportunity to dump Windows; I don't do anything that requires it anymore, except consult for places that won't work without it.
As answered 100 times already, yes, the really were. Even now, allowing that "low price" includes ROI considerations like my time to setup systems, train users, and maintain networks, MS is a decent alternative. I'm a big fan of the LINUX potential, and hope that this or something like it kicks into high gear and gets in all those little places, but until "dumb users" (we all have them in our offices) get over their FUD of not Windows, it's here.
Consider that to the average Joe (think's he's computer savvy, but isn't really) that walks into his local mega-outlet to buy a ready-to-use computer-in-a-box, Windows is installed (although I have seen Lindows-installed PCs on the shelf, now), included in the price. Realistically, yes, the price is in there somewhere, but to Joe, it's "free" (as in "already done for me"). To change the OS, assuming Joe can figure that out, there's at the very least download and install time, if not a direct purchase of an OS box from the shelf to use. In this case, Microsoft can be argued to be the low-cost winner. Before you bash me, yes, this is where MS has been playing badly...monsters in my box.
To another Joe, the really-savvy computer guru, like you, dear reader (who assembles his system from scratch picking the best components money can buy and lovingly screwing them together in is l33t modded case...), looking at the Suse, RedHat, and Microsoft OS boxes on the shelf, no, Microsoft is not the clear winner in the low-price category. (Especilly to the l33t users who say "screw the shelves" and get their latest from BitTorrent.)
Consider also Joe, the manager of the mega-corp IT department, who licenses and maintains 10,000 desktops. MS is again arguably a low-cost winner, again, especially considering the simple ROI factors.
Note, no insult intended to anyone actually named Joe, who may or may not know how to do any of these things...
MS did a great job of figuring it out early. Although it's since been kicked for unfair practices, they started out selling "irrelevant" software to IBM, who only wanted the hardware money, and became a giant. While their own APIs are closed, they've done plenty for the developers who wish to create software to run on their platform. They rallied the world and got basically anyone who makes hardware to provide (either MS or OEM) drivers that work. They did OK figuring plenty out.
And can someone point out a "Hive Society"? Surely you don't mean some kind of bee-like or Borg-like collective or commune... The "kingdom" (more of a republic, really) I live in is doing pretty good, despite all of the bees buzzing around in Michigan and Montana. However, I think I know what you mean. In the long run, yes, the hives may outlast the big, fat kingdom, but in the meantime, the kingdom will, well, get big and fat...MS posts billions of dollars of revenue, and the collection of your favorite other software manufacturers is a shadow of their tax liability...
Now, I know it looks like I'm on the MS bandwagon; I just believe that you can't bash them just because they're the biggest. Pick on them because they behave monsterously; that they do.
I remember my $600-ish Commodore 64 costing less than $200 when "PCs" were still four-digit investments.
I'm not stuck on DVD as next generation or big floppy. I'm not even thinking DVD as next generation VHS. I'm discussing the passing trends of technology. VHS hit houses in the 70s and 80s, becoming fairly ubiquitous in the late 80s and early 90s. I've got a few VCRs, but I can't remember the last time I rented or purchased a tape, and I know I'm not alone. DVD has started replacing VHS which lasted, therefore, about 20 years on top.
Whatever you stick on the DVD doesn't matter. Whatever the purpose of your sticking things on the disk doesn't matter, either. Yes, there are stand-alone devices that make it unlike computers. I concede. You missed some of my point, but I got yours. You win.
My mention of broadband was not to imply an extension of PPV. On the contrary, I was simply suggesting that bandwidth can become a medium for delivery of movies or data delivered by other than physical media. The other discussions in this thread have kicked that horse to death, but here's my take:
Consider the possibility that out-of-band delivery or really high speed makes it so that time isn't the problem; now downloading many GB of data (including the MPEG encoded movies) can take hours longer than going to your video outlet and making a purchase. You instead order your purchase from Amazon. It's delivered to your home entertainment server, or made available in perpetuity from some remote server (in the example, bandwidth isn't a big deal, but maybe storage is). You watch the digital any time you want, same as having the disk in the drive. You want to take it with you, you move it to your portable player, just like music on an iPod, or you access your video server account from your buddy's player when you want to share.
Even wire as a medium might fade. Wireless is nearly everywhere, and if the bandwidth and access can become ubiquitous, too, maybe that'll open the system up so you don't need the comfort of holding the plastic disk in your hand.
Given that, I believe even today's technology surpasses PPV and DVD. Small changes to PVR software could allow technology to integrate and deliver content differently than today. You set up your PVR to record the movie to watch later, poof it's there; there until you don't want it any more. Better than DVD, it gets the resolution best suited for your video and storage device, lanugage preference, and viewing preference (letterbox, directors' cut, whatever). You've go the right setup (I've got nearly a TB of storage on 11 different servers in my house), you probably never have to get rid of it. Sure, licensing needs to be worked out. BitTorrent ripped DVDs aren't always legal (although there is legal content, too), but here I'm just pointing out different technology, not advocating theft.
That's what Bill was talking about. Not the shitty "watch on demand" crap from your cable company.
DVD as a medium? It'll pass. I bet it'll pass a lot faster than albums have (which have gone through their own transitions such as two sided, 78-, 45-, and 33-RPM, stereo, etc, so it's not like they turned out the best phonograph 100 years ago). It takes a lot of gear to make a DVD work, instead of just a needle and something to vibrate for a phonograph. That technology will change more rapidly than it has to bring us DVD. High-definition, surround-sound, extra features, all that jazz will push the limits of the media, and it'll shift. You want to record your own stuff on DVD? That's not where it will be either (and you have to concede, nearly no one ever recorded albums at home).
I think the medium of DVD will be around for a long time. I hope so--I have hundreds of the damned things (exaggerated, but not unrealistic). I also think the next best thing will be here before we send men to Mars.
I wasn't trying to compare DVDs to floppies. I was tying to use floppies as an example of something ubiquitous that is no longer so popular, and to show that huge shifts in technology have been delivered in less time than the 10 years projected in the article. On some fronts I believe floppies are superior to DVDs (they are cheaper than dirt, I can fit them in my pocket, I can use it a bazillion times, they can still hold fair amounts of data, and they're pretty durable), but CD and DVD kick ass on size and speed. No real comparison, I agree with you. As for media not used on computers, yes, audio cassettes are still easy to find and use, even though CDs are much better, and VHS cannot hold a candle to DVD; the next thing will undoubtedly do the same thing to CD and DVD media and storage.
I also wasn't trying to suggest that anything would outright disappear. If I wanted to make that comparison I might have indicated punch tape and cards, not floppy disks.
What I intended to share was an agreement with the article that the technology we have now is very likely to become weak in comparison to the technology yet to come. Imagine installing your favorite OS entirely by floppy today; it used to be that way.
What Unka Bill tried to say in his statement (and that I agree with) was that the way video, and by extension data, is presented on DVD is likely to pass the proverbial torch a different technology. Video, the most obvious current use of DVD, will be delivered differently; simply stated. Perhaps by the Internet or other network, perhaps by better optical or magnetic media, and quite probably by something we haven't envisioned yet.
iFilm is chock full of video, mp3 is full of audio (just to pick some free and legal sites--not intended as a limit of knowledge or endorsement), not to mention the various peer-to-peer and BitTorrent methods of sharing (for the other kind). This as an alternative to DVD is a more viable reality as broadband becomes ubiquitous. Currently on my 3MB pipe it can take almost as long to download from a busy site as it will to watch, but I can see things speeding up.
DVDs will no doubt be around for a very long time; at the very least, until the last manufacturer of DVD players has been long gone, and no one can repair what's left behind. However, the next greatest thing will probably not just be a bigger DVD (as DVDs are bigger CDs), but something different. Something that doesn't get scratched or broken in half or can hold more and get reused better and has faster random access.
To address the support you mentioned in your observation, 5 years is less than ten, while a decade is equal to ten; seems that you don't disagree with the timeline of the technology shift either. I must disagree with your three decades of compatibility for the past technology--at which computer store can one buy an 8-inch floppy drive? I still have some of the disks from my old Tandy system that was still in use in the mid-eighties (barely three decades),
Similarly, I bet you can't go get your favorite contemporary group's latest release to play on that fancy new phonograph of yours...maybe some, but not enough to make it your primary means of entertainment. And if you could, you'd probably rip the song from the vinyl to your MP3 player so you could take it with you anyway.
A few things to consider are the vast sweeping changes that can happen in 10 years. Personal Computers, nay, computers at all, are very little like what they were ten years ago. The two things that will decide if this prediction is correct will be the way we store things, and the things we store.
Looking at the time, 10 years doesn't seem too long to expect a shift in technology. Consider the floppy. Very popular 10 years ago. Hell, 10 years ago CD-ROM drives weren't even guaranteed in most systems, so floppies were the assumed portable storage. Currently CD-ROM is assumed, and DVD is becoming so. I find it easy to purchase systems without floppies. To speclate that the DVD may be replaced in 10 years is not so far fetched.
The acceleration of advancing technology will probably decide whether the media of DVD is sound enough technology. The write-once, or at least write-more-finite-times-than-magnetic-media aspects of any optical media will lead to their demise before their size, is my personal prediction. Scratching, warping, and other physical weakness of the media seem to be pretty reasonable reasons to not use them forever. While I don't think they'll go away in ten years (my computer store still sells 3.5-inch floppies), they won't last forever (I cannot, however purchase a 5.25-inch floppy off the shelf).
The size of the things we store continues to grow, but that doesn't seem to be growing as fast. The sampling of sound hasn't increased the size of storage required since the introduction of the CD (in fact, thanks to compression like MP3, it's smaller), but higher-quality video has become common. What you type will rarely fill the media, but what data you generate probably can. For example, backing up other media (like your HDD) onto inexpensive optical is very common, so this might drive a larger solution. Like CDs can store multiple tunes or albums(heck, to the hundreds of tunes and many albums with MP3 compression), video storage of the future may store much more than we live with now; entire seasons or runs of television, all of the series of movies or actor's lines, every home video you've ever produced...
Not that you care, but personally, I use flash media now for most of my portable storage. It's virtually indestructable (in everyday, carry it in my pocket use). It's pretty spacious; my current 256MB USB drive is capable of holding practically my entire working environment (OS not included, but data and editors are), and larger drives are available when this no longer suffices. They're not as cheap, I'll grant you, but I got it on sale for less than a stack of CDRWs, and I've written to it more times than I could have a similar priced stack of DVD write-onces. While not replacing DVDs yet, I'll argue that these flash media are reasonable replacements for CDs; it's conceivable that a small shift in the technology or manufacture and this could replace DVDs in size, too.
I use an external HDD for the backup of my main system's HDD. Well, in reality, I typically back up all important data across multiple HDDs--either on drive sets in RAID, separate systems or servers, or both. Again, not as cheap, but faster and rewritable to a much larger degree (lots of billions of rewrites versus thousands or millions).
I never post to NNTP/USENET news groups (peeking at warez doesn't require it, right..?), but afraid for what my news reader might do behind my back, I always use news@reader.org. The domain is parked, so I would imagine the mail gets dumped into /dev/null or some blackhole mailbox.
On another thought, a slightly more enhanced, outward looking system could be put into place for scanning the rest of space while Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun. Or this could be used just to get a view from farther away, or what have you.
I mean, you'd drop $5 for a cup of convenient coffee every day, right? Is it so different drop a few bucks for a couple changes of briefs and tees, and then leave them behind?
Oh, wait, you probably wanted some intelligent banter about the preferences... Certainly some form of encryption would be made available. Wrap everything in a 4096-bit PKI scheme. Works for mail, why not preferences and data? I feel pretty safe with my SSH tunneled connections to VNC and RDP servers behind my firewalls; would this truly be so different (data v. screenshot not the point).
To further agree, even if you removed I, O, Q, and Z, that's 6^32 instead of 6^10 for just the serial number.
Perhaps just using letters in more places, or even just use all of the letters. The article broke out the, uh, breakdown of the VIN string; seems that there are some unused letters in the year code, for example. And if the serial number isn't strictly a number, but more of a code, they'd go from 10^6 to 36^6 just by allowing 000000 to ZZZZZZ.
Doesn't this assume that the parents know more about LINUX than their kids?
Well, kinda. They are providing a service on the Internet.
I seem to remember we each thought we had a better time than the other. Although, now that I think of it, he had pictures to prove he had a good time...