"The N line is something which Dell began to sell recently, but the situation is much more complex that it would seem."
Dell has had the N line for at least 2 years now - We have a couple N systems in the office that were bought in '03. I think it's just that they've gotten more notoriety lately, so people think they are new.
That company needs a better Exchange admin. There are a dozen better ways to let someone read everyone's email, with the end users never being able to tell it has been read.
Kerio MailServer is a nice Exchange replacement that runs on Linux and Mac OS X. It has a really nice AJAX webmail app that is a feasible replacement for a desktop app. It's not free, but it is cheap, and it's not Exchange:-)
There was a blurb on engadget.com this morning saying that you could pick one of these up at Radio Shack. No word if those models include the subscription model or not. Info is here
I mean, a few years ago, Tivo was a wonderful, one-of-a-kind service. Back then, maybe something like this would fly. But now, with virtually every cable company out there offering their own DVRs, the novelty of having a tivo has pretty much worn off. Sure, nobody's DVR can match the ease of use or features of a Tivo, but I don't think a tivo is worth the $150 price premium they're imposing on their users.
I have two Tivos, a 40 hour and a 140 hour. I have them cuz they 'just work', and I haven't gotten around to building a stable MythTV box yet. I'm also a Tivo Rewards member, with 6 referrals under my belt. With this new pricing strategy, those two Tivos will be the last I ever buy, and I'll never recommend a Tivo to anybody again.
How many years has IE6 been on the market? Four, right? It's had time to mature as a product, and be patched, secured, etc. Mozilla has been on the market for far less time, so I'd expect it to have more bugs in the code. This is like comparing straight Windows XP to Windows 2K with SP4 and all patches in place.
Let's look at it in another light: IE 6 is a 4-year-old software product, and still has a boatload of security vulnerabilities. I'd be more pissed that my 4-year-old app had 13 vulnerabilities, while my 1-year-old app has 28.
I was reading this article when a user called because he couldn't get into his website that we host. The first thing I did was log into our server's control panel while I had him on the phone. If this method of eavesdropping was powerful enough to detect keystrokes over the phone, that would be a very scary premise.
Since you've taken things off topic, I'll grab the wheel and pull it right off a cliff.
The reason Exchange uses a database can be summed up in three words: Single Instance Store.
Say you send one 1MB Word document to 100 of your colleagues. In a relational database-based, Single Instance Store-driven mail server, that document takes up exactly 1MB on the server. If somebody in the organization forwards the Word doc to the remaining 900 people in your organization, how much space does it take on the server? 1MB.
Send a 1MB document to 1000 users on a flat, mbox-style mail server, and how much space is taken up on the server? 1000MB.
I see your point about some things, sure. Being able to jump in and restore a mailbox from tape by just dumping a folder somewhere is nice, but it just doesn't scale in terms of storage the way a db-driven mail system does.
Don't flame me as an MS advocate. There are times when an SIS-based email system is good, and there are times when a flat email system is good. I've run Exchange environments for 500+ people, and I've run Linux-based mail systems for 1000+ people. I'm just saying that your particular argument is one-sided and flawed.
I don't know your situation at all, but if the manager has any influence on the rest of management, and they even think that he has a modicum of knowledge, your work life will be hell. He (hopefully) realizes that he's not as skilled as his workers, and will try to steal their (your) thunder every chance he gets.
I worked for a manager that knew very little about tech, and any time I had a suggestion for an improvement, it somehow ended up becoming his suggestion by the time it made its way up the food chain. I was lucky enough to land a great job elsewhere and I got the hell out before it got too bad.
My new boss knew less than me technically, but he knew and freely admitted that he knew less, as his job was to be a manager, not a technician. All my successes were mine, and all he took credit for was doing a wonderful job in hiring the right people - which is how it should be, IMHO.
"But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."
It's got nothing to do with revenue, it's about market share. Virtual machines are going to be huge in the coming years, especially in the webhosting market. Pretty soon, leasing a "dedicated server" will be simply leasing a dedicated "instance" of a server, for lack of a better word.
EMC wants to keep their lion's share of the market, especially with products like MS' Virtual Server 2005 and SWSoft's Virtuozzo entering the fray.
I did some contracting work for Big Blue a few months ago, and their deployment teams LOVE VMWare. They used it for all kinds of crazy stuff, and it worked amazingly well. I hadn't used VMWare since a very early beta back in the 90's, and was impressed at how well it has come along since then.
EMC is just protecting its market share now as best it can, before others start chipping into it.
I'd assume that the build cycle on laptops is pretty long - you're designing the whole enclosure and all of its parts to work tightly together, pun intended.
If the holdup was a chipset, it's likely that they've been sitting on the final design for a long time now. To scrap it at this point would cost a ton of money, especially since it's been what, ten months since the last ibooks came out?
And finally, When are the Intel-based Macs due? 2006? 2007? It's not worth delaying a product launch that long just to wait for the new architecture, especially since nobody's heard anything about Intel-based *books yet.
"Now those of is in the here see that as nonsense, since filling up the hard drive with not-currently-executing code does not have any impact on memory usage or CPU usage."
Sorry, but you're wrong. Installing MS Office on a Windows machine loads a TON of resident and shared DLLs that just sit on the system and use resources. The more apps you throw on, the more shared files show up. The more files that show up, the more need to be processed by the OS when loading DLLs.
Take a clean XP machine. Measure its boot time. Install all of the programs I mentioned in the first post. Remove any of them from startup. Reboot and time how long it takes to get into Windows. I guarantee it takes five to ten seconds longer to boot than on the clean system. Such is the way that Windows processes its system files and installed applications.
As someone that's built thousands of Windows machines over the past few years, let me be the first to say this: Out of the box, on current hardware, Windows XP is blazing fast. What slows it down is all the bloatware and DLLs that you load up as you install software.
Take XP, load Office 2003, Norton AV, the standard CD burning and DVD viewing apps, and watch the performance (and boot times) degrade considerably.
I love telling this story to people that ask why they should run Windows Update / run a firewall / get antitivirus, etc.:
I was at a client's site, and needed to do some testing on their backup DSL line. Since it was a backup meant to plug into the main firewall in case of an outage, the line had no firewall - It was wide open.
I had a laptop I had just rebuilt for an employee. Win2K, SP4. Unpatched, no antivirus. I planned on jumping on the line for all of five minutes to do some quick IP testing, and I just didn't think about it being vulnerable.
So, I change the IP and plug into the DSL line. I'm plugged in no more than two minutes, and I get the damn "Windows is shutting down" dialog box. It reboots, and all hell breaks loose. Within those two minutes the damn machine had contracted the Blaster worm. I formatted and reloaded it to be safe, and learned a fun lesson that day. Good thing the laptop didn't have any important data on it.
"Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."
I've worked for companies under investigation by the SEC for inappropriate behavior. Sometimes "one or two" emails is all it takes to break the law and cause a company's stock to plummet.
My current company 'buys up expensive tools' and 'hires extra staff' to run backups on the network, just in case one or two problematic hard drive failures occur. Why is it ok to monitor company hardware but not ok to monitor company communications?
I have to disagree a bit. Back when the PII 300 was king, there was still a lot of 'waiting' going on. I'm sure a lot of it may have had to do with memory limits back then (remember, Win95 can't address more than 64MB efficiently), but overall everything was still somewhat slow. We all felt that things could go faster.
Also, keep in mind that when the high end was 300MHZ, the low end was still in the 486 range. That was one hell of a defecit between the low and the high. Low end machines could barely run the latest office apps.
Fast forward to now. The low end box out there is roughly a 1GHZ machine with 128-256MB RAM. Let's say 256MB is the low end for argument's sake. The high end box (in a corporate or home environment; we're not talking video rendering here) is in the 3GHZ range with 1GB RAM.
Now, take your average home user or administrative assistant, and have them speed test each machine for a day. Then ask them which was faster overall. I'd bet that many of them can't tell the difference. Even those that could would most likely tell you that the difference was negligible, once all the apps load into RAM.
My point is, the low-to-high end performance gap now compared to 2001 is exponentially smaller. We really are reaching the point where a two or three year old computer is more than enough for the majority of computer users out there.
I think if you could quantify the 'usefulness' of the personal computer, contrast it with the machine's power on paper, and put it on a reverse timeline, you'd see something on par with Moore's Law, only in reverse, and much more accelerated.
Hell, I think I'll chart it all and release a paper on the subject. I'll call it Jerky's Law, and will someday offer a reward for the original slashdot posting;-)
Xbox and GC both have force feedback in their controllers (not counting the wavebird). Why aren't they in trouble as well? The article was extremely light on details, does anybody have more info?
I assume that was meant as a joke, but it brings up a really good point. Put on your tinfoil hats and wax with me a moment...
What if the designers of the PSP made their APIs as open as possible in order to entice people to cook up emulators for the platform? Of course, they could never admit this publically, but what if one handheld, in this case the PSP, could emulate a competitor's product? Conventional Wisdom tells us that an emulator usually won't be able to emulate a current system's hardware effectively, but if the PSP could, say, play GBA and N64 games in addition to playing its own titles, it could be an unstoppable device.
Naturally, Sony would have to condemn anyone running competing games on their platform lest they get charged with unfair business practices, but behind closed doors this could be exactly what Sony needs to gain major market share over Nintendo in this market.
Please bear with me, as I never paid any attention to astronomy-related stuff. I'm just curious as to how many other planets/ moons/ celestial bodies out there are known to have an atmosphere? Is this a really big deal, or is it a relatively common occurance?
Slashdot Mirror
Why aren't there any pics of this unit? I'm interested in not only the hardware, but the touchscreen, and just some general pics of it in action.
"The N line is something which Dell began to sell recently, but the situation is much more complex that it would seem."
Dell has had the N line for at least 2 years now - We have a couple N systems in the office that were bought in '03. I think it's just that they've gotten more notoriety lately, so people think they are new.
"He could cash the place out, if he wanted. Shut the servers down, tell everyone to go home."
I don't think his employers would appreciate that.
Plus, you can use it to pick up chicks at MIT bars.
That company needs a better Exchange admin. There are a dozen better ways to let someone read everyone's email, with the end users never being able to tell it has been read.
Kerio MailServer is a nice Exchange replacement that runs on Linux and Mac OS X. It has a really nice AJAX webmail app that is a feasible replacement for a desktop app. It's not free, but it is cheap, and it's not Exchange :-)
There was a blurb on engadget.com this morning saying that you could pick one of these up at Radio Shack. No word if those models include the subscription model or not.
Info is here
...Are they trying to get rid of their customers?
I mean, a few years ago, Tivo was a wonderful, one-of-a-kind service. Back then, maybe something like this would fly. But now, with virtually every cable company out there offering their own DVRs, the novelty of having a tivo has pretty much worn off. Sure, nobody's DVR can match the ease of use or features of a Tivo, but I don't think a tivo is worth the $150 price premium they're imposing on their users.
I have two Tivos, a 40 hour and a 140 hour. I have them cuz they 'just work', and I haven't gotten around to building a stable MythTV box yet. I'm also a Tivo Rewards member, with 6 referrals under my belt. With this new pricing strategy, those two Tivos will be the last I ever buy, and I'll never recommend a Tivo to anybody again.
How many years has IE6 been on the market? Four, right? It's had time to mature as a product, and be patched, secured, etc. Mozilla has been on the market for far less time, so I'd expect it to have more bugs in the code. This is like comparing straight Windows XP to Windows 2K with SP4 and all patches in place.
Let's look at it in another light: IE 6 is a 4-year-old software product, and still has a boatload of security vulnerabilities. I'd be more pissed that my 4-year-old app had 13 vulnerabilities, while my 1-year-old app has 28.
I was just thinking exactly that.
I was reading this article when a user called because he couldn't get into his website that we host. The first thing I did was log into our server's control panel while I had him on the phone. If this method of eavesdropping was powerful enough to detect keystrokes over the phone, that would be a very scary premise.
Since you've taken things off topic, I'll grab the wheel and pull it right off a cliff.
The reason Exchange uses a database can be summed up in three words: Single Instance Store.
Say you send one 1MB Word document to 100 of your colleagues. In a relational database-based, Single Instance Store-driven mail server, that document takes up exactly 1MB on the server. If somebody in the organization forwards the Word doc to the remaining 900 people in your organization, how much space does it take on the server? 1MB.
Send a 1MB document to 1000 users on a flat, mbox-style mail server, and how much space is taken up on the server? 1000MB.
I see your point about some things, sure. Being able to jump in and restore a mailbox from tape by just dumping a folder somewhere is nice, but it just doesn't scale in terms of storage the way a db-driven mail system does.
Don't flame me as an MS advocate. There are times when an SIS-based email system is good, and there are times when a flat email system is good. I've run Exchange environments for 500+ people, and I've run Linux-based mail systems for 1000+ people. I'm just saying that your particular argument is one-sided and flawed.
Quit. Seriously.
I don't know your situation at all, but if the manager has any influence on the rest of management, and they even think that he has a modicum of knowledge, your work life will be hell. He (hopefully) realizes that he's not as skilled as his workers, and will try to steal their (your) thunder every chance he gets.
I worked for a manager that knew very little about tech, and any time I had a suggestion for an improvement, it somehow ended up becoming his suggestion by the time it made its way up the food chain. I was lucky enough to land a great job elsewhere and I got the hell out before it got too bad.
My new boss knew less than me technically, but he knew and freely admitted that he knew less, as his job was to be a manager, not a technician. All my successes were mine, and all he took credit for was doing a wonderful job in hiring the right people - which is how it should be, IMHO.
Who's the host? Guess I'm a step behind the times. :-)
"But from the looks of last quarter's financial reports, VMware doesn't need much help getting people on board."
It's got nothing to do with revenue, it's about market share. Virtual machines are going to be huge in the coming years, especially in the webhosting market. Pretty soon, leasing a "dedicated server" will be simply leasing a dedicated "instance" of a server, for lack of a better word.
EMC wants to keep their lion's share of the market, especially with products like MS' Virtual Server 2005 and SWSoft's Virtuozzo entering the fray.
I did some contracting work for Big Blue a few months ago, and their deployment teams LOVE VMWare. They used it for all kinds of crazy stuff, and it worked amazingly well. I hadn't used VMWare since a very early beta back in the 90's, and was impressed at how well it has come along since then.
EMC is just protecting its market share now as best it can, before others start chipping into it.
I'd assume that the build cycle on laptops is pretty long - you're designing the whole enclosure and all of its parts to work tightly together, pun intended.
If the holdup was a chipset, it's likely that they've been sitting on the final design for a long time now. To scrap it at this point would cost a ton of money, especially since it's been what, ten months since the last ibooks came out?
And finally, When are the Intel-based Macs due? 2006? 2007? It's not worth delaying a product launch that long just to wait for the new architecture, especially since nobody's heard anything about Intel-based *books yet.
"Now those of is in the here see that as nonsense, since filling up the hard drive with not-currently-executing code does not have any impact on memory usage or CPU usage."
Sorry, but you're wrong. Installing MS Office on a Windows machine loads a TON of resident and shared DLLs that just sit on the system and use resources. The more apps you throw on, the more shared files show up. The more files that show up, the more need to be processed by the OS when loading DLLs.
Take a clean XP machine. Measure its boot time. Install all of the programs I mentioned in the first post. Remove any of them from startup. Reboot and time how long it takes to get into Windows. I guarantee it takes five to ten seconds longer to boot than on the clean system. Such is the way that Windows processes its system files and installed applications.
As someone that's built thousands of Windows machines over the past few years, let me be the first to say this: Out of the box, on current hardware, Windows XP is blazing fast. What slows it down is all the bloatware and DLLs that you load up as you install software.
Take XP, load Office 2003, Norton AV, the standard CD burning and DVD viewing apps, and watch the performance (and boot times) degrade considerably.
I love telling this story to people that ask why they should run Windows Update / run a firewall / get antitivirus, etc.:
I was at a client's site, and needed to do some testing on their backup DSL line. Since it was a backup meant to plug into the main firewall in case of an outage, the line had no firewall - It was wide open.
I had a laptop I had just rebuilt for an employee. Win2K, SP4. Unpatched, no antivirus. I planned on jumping on the line for all of five minutes to do some quick IP testing, and I just didn't think about it being vulnerable.
So, I change the IP and plug into the DSL line. I'm plugged in no more than two minutes, and I get the damn "Windows is shutting down" dialog box. It reboots, and all hell breaks loose. Within those two minutes the damn machine had contracted the Blaster worm. I formatted and reloaded it to be safe, and learned a fun lesson that day. Good thing the laptop didn't have any important data on it.
But, beep, beep.
"Yet, the companies are buying up expensive tools and hiring staff to watch just in case they catch the one or two problematic emails that go over the corporate network."
I've worked for companies under investigation by the SEC for inappropriate behavior. Sometimes "one or two" emails is all it takes to break the law and cause a company's stock to plummet.
My current company 'buys up expensive tools' and 'hires extra staff' to run backups on the network, just in case one or two problematic hard drive failures occur. Why is it ok to monitor company hardware but not ok to monitor company communications?
First post gets modded 4, then his reply to his own post gets modded 4 also.
The Karma is strong with this one.
I have to disagree a bit. Back when the PII 300 was king, there was still a lot of 'waiting' going on. I'm sure a lot of it may have had to do with memory limits back then (remember, Win95 can't address more than 64MB efficiently), but overall everything was still somewhat slow. We all felt that things could go faster.
;-)
Also, keep in mind that when the high end was 300MHZ, the low end was still in the 486 range. That was one hell of a defecit between the low and the high. Low end machines could barely run the latest office apps.
Fast forward to now. The low end box out there is roughly a 1GHZ machine with 128-256MB RAM. Let's say 256MB is the low end for argument's sake. The high end box (in a corporate or home environment; we're not talking video rendering here) is in the 3GHZ range with 1GB RAM.
Now, take your average home user or administrative assistant, and have them speed test each machine for a day. Then ask them which was faster overall. I'd bet that many of them can't tell the difference. Even those that could would most likely tell you that the difference was negligible, once all the apps load into RAM.
My point is, the low-to-high end performance gap now compared to 2001 is exponentially smaller. We really are reaching the point where a two or three year old computer is more than enough for the majority of computer users out there.
I think if you could quantify the 'usefulness' of the personal computer, contrast it with the machine's power on paper, and put it on a reverse timeline, you'd see something on par with Moore's Law, only in reverse, and much more accelerated.
Hell, I think I'll chart it all and release a paper on the subject. I'll call it Jerky's Law, and will someday offer a reward for the original slashdot posting
Xbox and GC both have force feedback in their controllers (not counting the wavebird). Why aren't they in trouble as well? The article was extremely light on details, does anybody have more info?
I assume that was meant as a joke, but it brings up a really good point. Put on your tinfoil hats and wax with me a moment...
What if the designers of the PSP made their APIs as open as possible in order to entice people to cook up emulators for the platform? Of course, they could never admit this publically, but what if one handheld, in this case the PSP, could emulate a competitor's product? Conventional Wisdom tells us that an emulator usually won't be able to emulate a current system's hardware effectively, but if the PSP could, say, play GBA and N64 games in addition to playing its own titles, it could be an unstoppable device.
Naturally, Sony would have to condemn anyone running competing games on their platform lest they get charged with unfair business practices, but behind closed doors this could be exactly what Sony needs to gain major market share over Nintendo in this market.
Course, I could be wrong.
Please bear with me, as I never paid any attention to astronomy-related stuff. I'm just curious as to how many other planets/ moons/ celestial bodies out there are known to have an atmosphere? Is this a really big deal, or is it a relatively common occurance?