WiFi is a great way to invite people into your systems that you wouldn't let in your front (or back) door! I prefer to use at least as much access control to my network as I do to my home...
I'm working with a customer that has a very high regulatory sensitivity to hardware changes. Whenever they change the hardware platform, there are mountains of paperwork to fill out.
We went with Vmware,so that as they have to change hardware dueto life-cycle replacement, the virtualized hardware seen by the OS and applications never changes.
Either Vmware's or Microsoft's products should provide as consistent a virtualized environment as can be had today. Certainly less painful than moving the existing software environment to a new machine.
Looking closely at the top and side pictures, I can identify PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse connectors, a serial port, and a metal can that seems to hold 2 USB ports and maybe a firewire port (the top connector-Not an RJ-45).
Next to the can is where a dual Ethernet (standard on most server MBs) connector would go. Nothing there.
Are they using USB/firewire for communications or add-in boards (maybe Ethernet or Infiniband)? Or maybe it's a Zen thing...
Chances are, not. Most IT managers I meet are looking for people with some type of specific skill and wind up with someone who may only meet their needs for a few months. You can teach a reasonable amount of technical knowledge to a monkey. What you can't teach is judgement and a willingness to hammer out the details that, if not hammered out, lead to failed projects.
I'm in my late 40's and remember what I was like in my 20's - eager to go, spinning my wheels on a full-time basis and cussing about those old farts that seemed to do things "once" slowly that I did "fast" three or four times because I had no discipline. I see it in the 20-somethings we hire today; but a few of them have that special something that goes beyond technical knowledge and youthful energy.
I've seen knowledgeable, energetic, yet completely nonproductive young people who grew into listless and still nonproductive old farts. At the same time, I've seen moderately knowledgable but interested young people who grew up to become superstars in their 30's and 40's.
Don't hire somebody for want you need right now (Temp it instead). Hire the person for the qualities that you'll want around in 5 years. If additional knowledge is needed, there's training and education.
If you're in leadership, it's also important to differentiate between those who produce versus those who manage to look productive to the boss. If you've been in the workforce any time at all, I don't need tp explain that one...
For all the talk about programs and data being swapped out, the biggest problems I've seen are systems to too much swap and not enough RAM. By the time RAM gets short enough for serious swapping, the system is already thrashing so heavily as to be unusable. For me the bottom line is that the machine must have enough RAM to fully hold everything that normally runs with room to spare + cache space, then think about swap to cover peaks.
I wonder precisely what promises Google has made and what responsibilities have they disclaimed themselves of? As any business school graduate knows, one of the keys to keeping customers is to make it easy to start with them but tough to leave.
Does Google owe any level of data integrity and privacy? Do they owe return of user data without claiming rights to use it otherwise? Do they make any promise of data protection and disaster recovery? What due diligence does the use owe in the process?
As we move to an environment where more and more people simply 'trust" corporations to hold and protect their (potentially personal) data, I fear that we're way ahead of the law in defining the rights and responsibilities of both users and providers. In the absence of law, providers, such as Google, will write naturally terms of use that mostly benefit themselves. Users will simply lose.
I read this in grad school. An excellent treatment on group dynamics and building effective teams. While it's geared toward software development, the concepts are applicable to many fields...
I have an Adesso model that I'm really happy with.it's a 2.4GHz model with a trasmitter about the size of a USB thumb drive. I've had it close to 30' way with no problems, although it's rated at 100 feet.
Adesso's done a really nice job of integrating a nice keyboard and trackball that works nice in my lap, with mouse buttons in several places that work well with various ways of holding it.
...to link the Federal Budgeting process to expected tax revenue. As strange as it may seem, the process by which the Federal Budget is created has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with how much tax revenue is projected. The politicians make a budget of how much they want to spend, with the assumption that revenues will cover it. The result of decades of this madness is our huge national debt (approaching $10 trillion). Republicans want to cut taxes and both parties want to raise spending, but the spending is never covered, much less past borrowing.
In addition to the budget nightmare this causes in Washington, because the states MUST balance their budgets, they look to the Feds to fund things they don't want to tax for. In the end, all the pols get a free ride, and the country goes broke.
The reason I see this as the top priority is that we can't solve the critical problems of the nation (Social Security, Medicare, Defense, etc), until we have our fiscal house in order. Decades of borrowing are tying up more and more tax revenue just to pay the interest. The longer we overspend, the less ability the Government has to leverage it's financial muscle to solve problems, and the poorer we all become.
The questioner doesn't specifically have a data transfer problem, but instead a wide-area information processing problem (of which data transfer may be a part).
While the answer may reside with any of the main themes recommended by responders (improving transfer, reducing the amount of data to transfer, and eliminating the need to transfer via remote desktop solutions such as Citrix, MS Terminal Services, and VNC), the questioner really needs to define his needs. Does the data really need to be local at each site? If data needs to reside locally, does each site really need such large chunks? What are the OS platforms used? How important is privacy, data integrity, and "chain of custody"? Answering about ten basic questions can shed enough light the problem to determine which of the recommended solutions (if any) make sense.
It's tough to get a good answer without asking good questions. On the other hand, when you ask the right question, the answer is generally obvious...
Having an EE degree and working as an IT consultant for 20+ years, I've found the the best people doing investigative work in IT have an educational background other than IT. The best ones have been philosophy and social science majors. The nasty fact of life is that IT education and training tend to foster "inside the box" thinking based on current industry trends (not necessarily a formula for long-term success and happiness). I've been in grad school twice and saw the same thing both times. The folks who approach IT from other specialties and move to IT are often have a broader view and are much more effective in IT than those who start out with IT in mind.
The choice in the field eventually comes to whether you're looking for short-term bucks or a career that will be fun for the next 2-4 decades. If you want it to be fun for the long-run, don't be too quick to specialize in a narrow IT area. If you're just looking for bucks, get ready to be bored for a long time. I see lots of people who've been in IT for 10-20 years who hate what they do and hate themselves for doing it, but stay because the money's good. It's scary to think that they spend so much of their life being unhappy.
Most people I meet in my work (both inside and outside IT) are working in a field different from their degrees. It tells me a lot about how little we know of a field before we actually enter it, but it also tells me a lot about how the easily knowledge from one field translates to another.
I have a similar problem. I have 20/20 or better in both eyes (no magnification needed), but astigmatism that has been variable all my life but gotten worse (to +0.75) as I age (45+ these days), although I've only needed reading glasses in the past year. Having vision problems for the first time in my mid-40's taught me few things:
1. LCD screens are much nicer to the eye than CRT's, but turning down the LCD backlight makes it even essier on the eyes. I dim the backlight until the screen is about the brightness of a sheet of copier paper (not high-brightness printer paper) under a white light near the screen. It makes the White background of the LCD screen MUCH less harsh.
2. I crank up screen resolution to the max, then increase the screen font sizes. This is not so that I can read the screen, it just makes reading feel a hell of a lot better. When screen resolution increases, fonts shrink and push my eyes slightly into eyestrain...not enough to make them hurt, but enough to make reading uncomfortable.
3. Few opthamalogists and optomistrists stake into account how you read and computer use when writing and filling eyeglass prescriptions. It strikes me that eye distance to the media is key, but I've never been asked. My opthamalogist didn't ask about the distance I like to read at (typically, I read a newspaper that's laying in my lap) and then he assumed a distance 8-12 inches closer than I'm accustomed to reading at, without asking. Also, the idea that there was a difference between the distances that I read paper and my laptop's screen was an alien concept to him. He assumed that I read everything at the same distance that he did. Hint: Carry something to read and have them measure the "eye to media" distance that you're accustomed to, and make sure he/she pays attention...After all, you're paying them for the service.
4. There is a big difference in eye correction between eyeglass brands and optomotrists are often clueless. I grew up laying books and newspapers in my lap to read them. My first prescription reading glasses (Sferoflex) required me to hold the newspaper directly in front of me to read it (causing tired arms). A smaller pair that I got to fit in my briefcase (Irish Eyes) focused further away so that I can comfortably read a newspaper at arm's length or in my lap. The optomotrist from whom I order both pairs thought I was crazy until I showed him both pairs, filled from the same prescription. There really were different!
There are many things you can do, but the best is to experiment and advocate for yourself. As I see it, the system wants to give a "good enough" solution that might meet your needs, but only if you're average. If you don't complain, they think they did well....
I'd think that by 2020, advertisers wouldn't need such crude input paths. Better yet to just repeatedly impress ads directly on your brain. They could have you experience virutally buying their product so many times that you buy it out of force of habit without thinking.
At that point, the only way to avoid avertising would be to remove your brain. Of course so many people seem to function without brains now that they could just operate your body instead.
Getting a job may only require a few specialized, but managing a 30-40 year career in the IT field requires a deeper insight into systems, organizations, and people. I seriously doubt you'll be doing the same thing in 25 years that you're doing today.
I'm an electrical engineer by education and my job has changed 100% every year since I got my first job. For the first 10 years, the stuff I took in college wasn't helpful, but since then it becomes more relevant every year as I attack complicated large-scale problems involving technology, business, and people. I used only the practical stuff at first, but now the technical theory and broadbased education I received is invaluable.
Training provides specific knowledge to use now, while education shapes your ability to grow beyond what you are today. So, at least in my opinion, you have to draw a distiction between getting a job this year and how you'll progess through your life and career over the entire working span of your life.
Maybe they really don't want you to know that it wasn't really much better than what it replaced.
When a company really innovates, they're can't wait to show their specs. If the "new and improved" version is just marginally better, hide the specs and pay more for marketing.
You bought it, but if you saw the specs, you might be less impressed by the marketing hype next time.
No matter what the playback technology, good material is still good and bad material is still bad. No amount of hot technology is going to make "Casablanca" a sucky movie nor will it make "Plan 9 From Outer Space" a great one.
Watching a great, well-told story on an old 19" television played back from a VHS tape is every bit as humanly compelling as seeing it on a 60" digital screen from a progressive scan DVD. From a human standpoint, there's litle difference and I've never met anyone who watches movies just to see the picture quality.
I think you're right about the money, but I think the money part is only right because there's no tangible gain from an entertainment standpoint. This is most likely the reason that the FCC and industry hasn't convinced any more people to buy into HDTV.
I've had a Panasonic 200-cd changer for almost 8 years that runs almost continuously with little problem. On the other hand, I have to replace a CD-ROM drive in at least one of my computers yearly, even though I don't read a lot of CD's. The only drive I've not had to replace is an HP CD burner, now 4 years old. Too bad the CD-ROM drives I get to avoid reading with it fail regularly.
Ok, so the router can prioritize gaming protocols over other traffic going out of your DSL or cable connection to your ISP. That's only a fairly small part of overall network delay.
-This box can do nothing for round-trip latency to/from the gaming site after traffic leaves the router for the ISP, which represents probably 90+ percent of overall delay.
-The order and prioritization of traffic coming to your door from your ISP happens in their network, not your router. If your ISP's network lets other traffic win during congestion, gaming traffic is at it's mercy. In networking, you only have traffic shaping control over the traffic patterns you send, not the ones you receive.
IMHO, this is marketing hype because it can at best address about 10% of overall round-trip network delay. The only way it could provide more is if the end-user has some other honking traffic going outbound, in which case they should be smart enough to turn down that traffic when gaming (A cheaper way to save some bucks and improve perfomance...).
A Wireless LAN is essentially an open invitiation for entrance into your systems by people you'd never let in your house.
If you left something valuable out in your front yard, you'd be less surpised to find it missing than if you locked it up in your house. Wireless LANs, in their current incarnation, are little better than leaving your private data out in your front yard for anybody to snag. Entering theives leave no signs of forced entry and our current system of laws can't do much to help unless the theft arises to the correct level of money.
Security technology only helps a little if the law isn't on your side (ask any identity theft victim about trying to become "whole" again) and the law can't help if there's no forensic evidence with which the perpetrator can be found. Until both Wireless LAN security technology and the law catch up to that of a locked house, a few CAT5 cables look very attractive!
After reading the linked Sun article, this still sounds a lot more like Intel's Hyperthreading articles that your post would indicate.
As a developer, the OS provides the interface for handling threads. Yes, we may have to handle locks on some platforms, but the OS still does most of the heavy lifting. What Sun describes would mainly apply to the interface between the part of OS that schedules process and/or threads (some OS'es, like Linux, treat threads and processes as contexts and don't differentiate between them for scheduling) on hardware, rather than something that a developer can make direct use of.
Sure, Intel uses the concept of logical processors for Hyperthreading, but the main thing that does is allow backwards compatible with API's available in current OS'es. I'm sure that, at some point in the future, OS'es may provide some other great way to use the capability.
I don't see that Sun has offered anything significantly different. Yes, they're handling caching diferently and their solution may actually work better, but the overall concept and net impact looks very similar. A developer will still use a threading API, so for a given hardware/OS/Development environment, there should be little difference. Future API developments and thread-safe libraries will make the biggest difference to the developer.
Right! These cats are geting all worked up about 1-3dB decreases for each change. Don't they know that the ear is a logarithmic device? It generally takes about 10dB of change to be preceived by most people. -7dB would hardly be noticable!
I took a homebrew machine which was so loud it could be heard across the house, moved it into an Antec Sonata case, changed the CPU cooler with an Artic Cooling Temprature-controlled unit and now you can hardly hear it sitting next to it. You can hear the ceiling fans, but not the PC. Must be at least a 20dB decrease. That's what I consider significant!
I worked with a guy who had one of those MAC clone laptops many years ago. I was really intrigued by the "rolling bar" as a pointing device. It seemed to work really well. The motion was smooth and the "limit" problem wasn't really any worse than running a mouse on a mousepad. The biggest problem was that the roller bar was so close to the front edge of the laptop that you had to hang your hands out in space to use it (these were the days before laptops had "wrist rest" space).
The basic mechanism, combined with a wrist pad, might make a great combination. I currently use an Itac Mousetrak, which is better than a mouse but has it's own problems, particularly with diagonal motion. The RollerMouse has me thinking about augmenting or retiring the Mousetrak!
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WiFi is a great way to invite people into your systems that you wouldn't let in your front (or back) door! I prefer to use at least as much access control to my network as I do to my home...
DAMN YOU, notarockstar1979!!! (With fist in the air...)
Except they don't make the claims of "Hackability"...
Who leaked it!
We went with Vmware,so that as they have to change hardware dueto life-cycle replacement, the virtualized hardware seen by the OS and applications never changes.
Either Vmware's or Microsoft's products should provide as consistent a virtualized environment as can be had today. Certainly less painful than moving the existing software environment to a new machine.
Looking closely at the top and side pictures, I can identify PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse connectors, a serial port, and a metal can that seems to hold 2 USB ports and maybe a firewire port (the top connector-Not an RJ-45).
Next to the can is where a dual Ethernet (standard on most server MBs) connector would go. Nothing there.
Are they using USB/firewire for communications or add-in boards (maybe Ethernet or Infiniband)? Or maybe it's a Zen thing...
I'm in my late 40's and remember what I was like in my 20's - eager to go, spinning my wheels on a full-time basis and cussing about those old farts that seemed to do things "once" slowly that I did "fast" three or four times because I had no discipline. I see it in the 20-somethings we hire today; but a few of them have that special something that goes beyond technical knowledge and youthful energy.
I've seen knowledgeable, energetic, yet completely nonproductive young people who grew into listless and still nonproductive old farts. At the same time, I've seen moderately knowledgable but interested young people who grew up to become superstars in their 30's and 40's.
Don't hire somebody for want you need right now (Temp it instead). Hire the person for the qualities that you'll want around in 5 years. If additional knowledge is needed, there's training and education.
If you're in leadership, it's also important to differentiate between those who produce versus those who manage to look productive to the boss. If you've been in the workforce any time at all, I don't need tp explain that one...
For all the talk about programs and data being swapped out, the biggest problems I've seen are systems to too much swap and not enough RAM. By the time RAM gets short enough for serious swapping, the system is already thrashing so heavily as to be unusable. For me the bottom line is that the machine must have enough RAM to fully hold everything that normally runs with room to spare + cache space, then think about swap to cover peaks.
I wonder precisely what promises Google has made and what responsibilities have they disclaimed themselves of? As any business school graduate knows, one of the keys to keeping customers is to make it easy to start with them but tough to leave.
Does Google owe any level of data integrity and privacy? Do they owe return of user data without claiming rights to use it otherwise? Do they make any promise of data protection and disaster recovery? What due diligence does the use owe in the process?
As we move to an environment where more and more people simply 'trust" corporations to hold and protect their (potentially personal) data, I fear that we're way ahead of the law in defining the rights and responsibilities of both users and providers. In the absence of law, providers, such as Google, will write naturally terms of use that mostly benefit themselves. Users will simply lose.
I read this in grad school. An excellent treatment on group dynamics and building effective teams. While it's geared toward software development, the concepts are applicable to many fields...
Adesso's done a really nice job of integrating a nice keyboard and trackball that works nice in my lap, with mouse buttons in several places that work well with various ways of holding it.
I think I paid about $60.
http://www.adesso.com/products_detail.asp?productid=336
In addition to the budget nightmare this causes in Washington, because the states MUST balance their budgets, they look to the Feds to fund things they don't want to tax for. In the end, all the pols get a free ride, and the country goes broke.
The reason I see this as the top priority is that we can't solve the critical problems of the nation (Social Security, Medicare, Defense, etc), until we have our fiscal house in order. Decades of borrowing are tying up more and more tax revenue just to pay the interest. The longer we overspend, the less ability the Government has to leverage it's financial muscle to solve problems, and the poorer we all become.
While the answer may reside with any of the main themes recommended by responders (improving transfer, reducing the amount of data to transfer, and eliminating the need to transfer via remote desktop solutions such as Citrix, MS Terminal Services, and VNC), the questioner really needs to define his needs. Does the data really need to be local at each site? If data needs to reside locally, does each site really need such large chunks? What are the OS platforms used? How important is privacy, data integrity, and "chain of custody"? Answering about ten basic questions can shed enough light the problem to determine which of the recommended solutions (if any) make sense.
It's tough to get a good answer without asking good questions. On the other hand, when you ask the right question, the answer is generally obvious...
The choice in the field eventually comes to whether you're looking for short-term bucks or a career that will be fun for the next 2-4 decades. If you want it to be fun for the long-run, don't be too quick to specialize in a narrow IT area. If you're just looking for bucks, get ready to be bored for a long time. I see lots of people who've been in IT for 10-20 years who hate what they do and hate themselves for doing it, but stay because the money's good. It's scary to think that they spend so much of their life being unhappy.
Most people I meet in my work (both inside and outside IT) are working in a field different from their degrees. It tells me a lot about how little we know of a field before we actually enter it, but it also tells me a lot about how the easily knowledge from one field translates to another.
1. LCD screens are much nicer to the eye than CRT's, but turning down the LCD backlight makes it even essier on the eyes. I dim the backlight until the screen is about the brightness of a sheet of copier paper (not high-brightness printer paper) under a white light near the screen. It makes the White background of the LCD screen MUCH less harsh.
2. I crank up screen resolution to the max, then increase the screen font sizes. This is not so that I can read the screen, it just makes reading feel a hell of a lot better. When screen resolution increases, fonts shrink and push my eyes slightly into eyestrain...not enough to make them hurt, but enough to make reading uncomfortable.
3. Few opthamalogists and optomistrists stake into account how you read and computer use when writing and filling eyeglass prescriptions. It strikes me that eye distance to the media is key, but I've never been asked. My opthamalogist didn't ask about the distance I like to read at (typically, I read a newspaper that's laying in my lap) and then he assumed a distance 8-12 inches closer than I'm accustomed to reading at, without asking. Also, the idea that there was a difference between the distances that I read paper and my laptop's screen was an alien concept to him. He assumed that I read everything at the same distance that he did. Hint: Carry something to read and have them measure the "eye to media" distance that you're accustomed to, and make sure he/she pays attention...After all, you're paying them for the service.
4. There is a big difference in eye correction between eyeglass brands and optomotrists are often clueless. I grew up laying books and newspapers in my lap to read them. My first prescription reading glasses (Sferoflex) required me to hold the newspaper directly in front of me to read it (causing tired arms). A smaller pair that I got to fit in my briefcase (Irish Eyes) focused further away so that I can comfortably read a newspaper at arm's length or in my lap. The optomotrist from whom I order both pairs thought I was crazy until I showed him both pairs, filled from the same prescription. There really were different!
There are many things you can do, but the best is to experiment and advocate for yourself. As I see it, the system wants to give a "good enough" solution that might meet your needs, but only if you're average. If you don't complain, they think they did well....
At that point, the only way to avoid avertising would be to remove your brain. Of course so many people seem to function without brains now that they could just operate your body instead.
I'm an electrical engineer by education and my job has changed 100% every year since I got my first job. For the first 10 years, the stuff I took in college wasn't helpful, but since then it becomes more relevant every year as I attack complicated large-scale problems involving technology, business, and people. I used only the practical stuff at first, but now the technical theory and broadbased education I received is invaluable.
Training provides specific knowledge to use now, while education shapes your ability to grow beyond what you are today. So, at least in my opinion, you have to draw a distiction between getting a job this year and how you'll progess through your life and career over the entire working span of your life.
When a company really innovates, they're can't wait to show their specs. If the "new and improved" version is just marginally better, hide the specs and pay more for marketing.
You bought it, but if you saw the specs, you might be less impressed by the marketing hype next time.
Watching a great, well-told story on an old 19" television played back from a VHS tape is every bit as humanly compelling as seeing it on a 60" digital screen from a progressive scan DVD. From a human standpoint, there's litle difference and I've never met anyone who watches movies just to see the picture quality.
I think you're right about the money, but I think the money part is only right because there's no tangible gain from an entertainment standpoint. This is most likely the reason that the FCC and industry hasn't convinced any more people to buy into HDTV.
I've had a Panasonic 200-cd changer for almost 8 years that runs almost continuously with little problem. On the other hand, I have to replace a CD-ROM drive in at least one of my computers yearly, even though I don't read a lot of CD's. The only drive I've not had to replace is an HP CD burner, now 4 years old. Too bad the CD-ROM drives I get to avoid reading with it fail regularly.
-This box can do nothing for round-trip latency to/from the gaming site after traffic leaves the router for the ISP, which represents probably 90+ percent of overall delay.
-The order and prioritization of traffic coming to your door from your ISP happens in their network, not your router. If your ISP's network lets other traffic win during congestion, gaming traffic is at it's mercy. In networking, you only have traffic shaping control over the traffic patterns you send, not the ones you receive.
IMHO, this is marketing hype because it can at best address about 10% of overall round-trip network delay. The only way it could provide more is if the end-user has some other honking traffic going outbound, in which case they should be smart enough to turn down that traffic when gaming (A cheaper way to save some bucks and improve perfomance...).
If you left something valuable out in your front yard, you'd be less surpised to find it missing than if you locked it up in your house. Wireless LANs, in their current incarnation, are little better than leaving your private data out in your front yard for anybody to snag. Entering theives leave no signs of forced entry and our current system of laws can't do much to help unless the theft arises to the correct level of money.
Security technology only helps a little if the law isn't on your side (ask any identity theft victim about trying to become "whole" again) and the law can't help if there's no forensic evidence with which the perpetrator can be found. Until both Wireless LAN security technology and the law catch up to that of a locked house, a few CAT5 cables look very attractive!
As a developer, the OS provides the interface for handling threads. Yes, we may have to handle locks on some platforms, but the OS still does most of the heavy lifting. What Sun describes would mainly apply to the interface between the part of OS that schedules process and/or threads (some OS'es, like Linux, treat threads and processes as contexts and don't differentiate between them for scheduling) on hardware, rather than something that a developer can make direct use of.
Sure, Intel uses the concept of logical processors for Hyperthreading, but the main thing that does is allow backwards compatible with API's available in current OS'es. I'm sure that, at some point in the future, OS'es may provide some other great way to use the capability.
I don't see that Sun has offered anything significantly different. Yes, they're handling caching diferently and their solution may actually work better, but the overall concept and net impact looks very similar. A developer will still use a threading API, so for a given hardware/OS/Development environment, there should be little difference. Future API developments and thread-safe libraries will make the biggest difference to the developer.
I took a homebrew machine which was so loud it could be heard across the house, moved it into an Antec Sonata case, changed the CPU cooler with an Artic Cooling Temprature-controlled unit and now you can hardly hear it sitting next to it. You can hear the ceiling fans, but not the PC. Must be at least a 20dB decrease. That's what I consider significant!
The basic mechanism, combined with a wrist pad, might make a great combination. I currently use an Itac Mousetrak, which is better than a mouse but has it's own problems, particularly with diagonal motion. The RollerMouse has me thinking about augmenting or retiring the Mousetrak!