My first flight post 9/11 I had forgotten a pair of 6" barber's clippers (the pokey kind) in my ditty bag in my backpack. The guy at the screener is like:
Hmm... looks like clippers. Looks like really big clippers. [looks at me] this bag yours. Me: Yep. Yep. REALLY big clippers. have a nice day.
And I walk onto my plane.
You can't tell me they weren't racially profiling back then (this was in Boston, by the way). I lost a small swiss army knife on the return flight, out of Norfolk (much more serious folk down there). And I turned in a 3" kabar mule in Boston because I was in a hurry and couldn't mail it home, and I really didn't want to sit in interrogation for the rest of my life. The screener said, "You know I can have you arrested for this?" to which I replied, "You got to do what you got to do, man."
TF.Greene (PVD) was pretty good too. They caught the same kabar when I was heading to Orlando. No paperwork, and I got to send it home, but I did notice for a while I was getting extra scrutiny on flights afterwards (back searches, etc.).
If I'm one of said good samaritans, I think of it this way (since I'm big, tough, and I've been cut on a bit in my life) : better me than a plane full of women and children.
I'll never forget my first flight after 9/11. It was to a karate camp in Norfolk, VA (not the place to be walking through with weapons). Where Boston had ANG folks with puny little sidearms guarding the gates, the guys in Norfolk had big bad military folk with huge M4s and a serious disposition (I like guns, I just don't like other people having bigger guns than me). Anywho, we sit on this little puddle-jumper, and my instructor sits in the front row, pulls out a Black Belt Magazine, crosses his legs and starts reading. I'm watching as the stewardess finally catches the title of the magazine - 13 ways to defeat a boxcutter.
The return flight I was tied to my seat while I was sleeping. The stewardess behind me was none-too-pleased when I tore off 4 feet of duct tape to retaliate on said instructor, giggling like a school girl in the front of the plane.
I'm surprised I wasn't escorted off in plastic handcuffs.
My mom took me out for two straight nights before my driving exam to practice parallel parking, as that's the only thing I had trouble with (I'd been driving tractors since I was old enough to reach the pedals, going forward, backward and side-to-side with and without a trailer wasn't so tough). Go figure, the day of the test they didn't bother with the parking job. Phew! It was bad enough to be sitting next to a guy with a sidearm and a bad attitude.
See me, I'd be doing whatever I could to get my digital textbooks on PS3 online and XBox Live. Throw in a little bit of MIT's Open Courseware, and off you go.
The future is to build out and enhance projects like MITs Open Courseware. Grad students work on producing content, vetted by advisors, with a marginal delay for release, open to all. It has all the potential for breaking the status quo.
Same with Verizon. I've been a Verizon user since 1997. Happy, I might add. Though I've chewed through three warranty replacements of the Treo 700p this year alone.:-/
That said, I've been evaluating phones lately, the iPhone, the Curve 8900, the Pre (that I have in my hand) and the G1. I don't care for the landscape keyboards, and a physical keyboard is kind of important for me, as is corporate email sync. Blackberry is going to be it for my company next year, unless we implement Exchange Direct Push (which the Pre supports).
Anyway, Verizon doesn't have a single one of those phones available. TMobile or AT&T are my only choices, and in my world Verizon is the big dog in terms of coverage. Sprint apparently has a roaming agreement with Verizon - if my Pre can't get a Sprint tower it'll use a Verizon tower (or so I've been told by the Sprint guys).
First off, the battery on this thing is atrocious. With GPS enabled and brightness fully turned up, expect 3-5 hours of battery life, and that's just web browsing and contact management, no phone calls. The phone clarity and speaker is very good. I'm not sure if there is any wired headset option. I don't know if the 3.5mm headset jack supports a microphone.
The Contact management features are great - I love how 3 years of Gmail and 10 years of AIM contacts simply popped into my phone. The only downside is browsing. Scrolling through a list of 500+ contacts without using the keyboard is a PAIN IN THE ASS. You also can't rename contacts in the phone. Say you have a contact "Joe Blow" with just an email, but another contact with "Joe Blo" with address, phone numbers, more emails, etc. You can make "Joe Blo" the primary profile source, but you can't rename it. I'm not sure how I feel about this, or whether it's a limitation of Palm profile service.
Browsing - is just like the iPhone.
Keyboard - it's sunken a bit, which is new. As a longtime Treo user (which took me some time to get used to), I adapted pretty well, and I have HUGE fingers. The autocorrect is good, but annoying at times, as auto-correct can be.
Text fields and data entry: If you make a typo, it's hard, using your finger, to position the caret at the exact spot you want to hit delete, or add new data. I thing that they would have been well-served to at least keep a left/right scroll button on the phone. I'm not sure if there's a simple feature of the phone I'm missing.
Speed dial: I know it has the capability, but it appears to only be limited to 10 speed dial entries. I like the Treo - I can put a speeddial entry on nearly the entire keyboard.
Wifi: Works great.
Fits great in the hand.
Mostly, it takes a LOT of time to get the gestures down. There are so many, I stumbled on many by accident. But most are intuitive if you take a few minutes to think about it.
I've been looking for an upgrade (with wifi) to my Treo, with a touchscreen, and the Treo keyboard style, minus WinMo. The Pre is apparently the only thing coming on the market in the near future that meets those requirements.
As a PIM, the Pre is hands down the best I've EVER used (minus the scrolling bit above). I synced my Gmail account 10 seconds after I had the phone paid for. I was reading email 60 seconds later, and playing Youtube a few minutes after that. Palm has gotten it right. Now they need to get Mojo out so their community of vendors can flesh out the platform. There is a Palm Classic emulator - the question I have is if the emulator speaks to the Pre contact manager?
Sorry, I should have clarified both the Storm and iPhone do not have PHYSICAL QWERTY keyboards. Which are an important feature for me. I don't like giving up half my screen to a keyboard, which I use *ALL* the time.
Yeah, but he's got a point. It really is best-of-breed. Frightening, no? In terms of interoperability, it wins hands down. Throw GPOs on top, and you have a compelling tool that the OSS movement just can't compete with (yet).
Everyone allows you to try before you buy nowadays (14 day return policies). Why not give a Pre a shot. I know where I'm gonna be at 9am on Saturday morning.
What I *REALLY* want, is the old style Palm Visors with graffiti area to come back and just get rid of all the buttons. I was so much better at graffiti than typing, and we could have MASSIVE screens in the same form factor. I *LOVED* my Kyocera 6035.
I *LIKE* the BB/Treo keyboard styles, so landscape style keyboards kind of ruin the experience for me. After playing with a G1 last night, I'm not convinced. I think it's come down to a WinMo treo, BB 8900, or the Pre if I like how it feels.
I've been a Verizon customer for 12 years. I love my service - I'm loath to leave, but Verizon has been on the shit-end of the smartphone arena for too long.
And the benefit comes when you add shared storage clustering. Now you have failover without having to implement native OS clustering (Though that can *STILL* be beneficial from a service upgradability standpoint).
I took it to mean that I'm putting Accounting + Tech Support + ClearCase + Leads Management + CRM + Email on one server. That's bad juju in ANY environment.
It was a J2EE development environment, where the app, on startup, consumed 1.5 GB of memory, before doing any calculations. Some also had oracle servers running on them. We had 16-24GB of memory on each VM host, and overcommitted by about 100GB.
Each VM was the same app, as each developer was testing their fixes. Because we had a lot of ESX servers, we mixed some production VMs on these too (at higher resource priority), to spread the load around a bit. We didn't have the budget for separate production and development ESX clusters.
I broke VMware ESXs upper CPU limit of 168 vcpus with 104 running VMs. About 20 of which were under any significant load. 24ghz of CPUs and 32 GB of memory. Pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.
Consolidate several lightly used, different services onto ONE server? Have you ever managed multiple applicatoins in a heterogenous environment? Consolidating applications causes operational complexity that is inappropriate in a lot of instances. While service isolation is easy on Unix platforms, it's not on Windows.
What are you talking about? ESX has supported REAL SANS since almost day one. I've been able to GREAT things on a single vmware server, in one instance I managed 25 2GB J2EE app VMs on a quad core XEON (2005 era). In another I managed 168 sparsely used testing VMs (2x quad core). But I've ALWAYS had trouble with databases and Citrix, in particular, with VMware.
Storage is only part of the issue. Having to run 10-160 schedulers *IS* the issue. Vmware doesn't utilize efficiencies in this arena like Xen or Jails, or OpenVZ or Solaris Containers can.
In some respects, I would say yes, as kittens are unable to fight back. But maybe I'm odd... I've never cried for anyone I've known who's died, but I've cried for every pet I had to put down.
Now killing babies vs. killing kittens - there you've got me.
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My first flight post 9/11 I had forgotten a pair of 6" barber's clippers (the pokey kind) in my ditty bag in my backpack. The guy at the screener is like:
Hmm... looks like clippers.
Looks like really big clippers.
[looks at me] this bag yours.
Me: Yep.
Yep. REALLY big clippers. have a nice day.
And I walk onto my plane.
You can't tell me they weren't racially profiling back then (this was in Boston, by the way). I lost a small swiss army knife on the return flight, out of Norfolk (much more serious folk down there). And I turned in a 3" kabar mule in Boston because I was in a hurry and couldn't mail it home, and I really didn't want to sit in interrogation for the rest of my life. The screener said, "You know I can have you arrested for this?" to which I replied, "You got to do what you got to do, man."
TF.Greene (PVD) was pretty good too. They caught the same kabar when I was heading to Orlando. No paperwork, and I got to send it home, but I did notice for a while I was getting extra scrutiny on flights afterwards (back searches, etc.).
If I'm one of said good samaritans, I think of it this way (since I'm big, tough, and I've been cut on a bit in my life) : better me than a plane full of women and children.
I'll never forget my first flight after 9/11. It was to a karate camp in Norfolk, VA (not the place to be walking through with weapons). Where Boston had ANG folks with puny little sidearms guarding the gates, the guys in Norfolk had big bad military folk with huge M4s and a serious disposition (I like guns, I just don't like other people having bigger guns than me). Anywho, we sit on this little puddle-jumper, and my instructor sits in the front row, pulls out a Black Belt Magazine, crosses his legs and starts reading. I'm watching as the stewardess finally catches the title of the magazine - 13 ways to defeat a boxcutter.
The return flight I was tied to my seat while I was sleeping. The stewardess behind me was none-too-pleased when I tore off 4 feet of duct tape to retaliate on said instructor, giggling like a school girl in the front of the plane.
I'm surprised I wasn't escorted off in plastic handcuffs.
My mom took me out for two straight nights before my driving exam to practice parallel parking, as that's the only thing I had trouble with (I'd been driving tractors since I was old enough to reach the pedals, going forward, backward and side-to-side with and without a trailer wasn't so tough). Go figure, the day of the test they didn't bother with the parking job. Phew! It was bad enough to be sitting next to a guy with a sidearm and a bad attitude.
Yes, it's called "Getting Laid on a Regular Basis".
Tends to wipe that depression and self-destructive instinct right out of you.
See me, I'd be doing whatever I could to get my digital textbooks on PS3 online and XBox Live. Throw in a little bit of MIT's Open Courseware, and off you go.
The future is to build out and enhance projects like MITs Open Courseware. Grad students work on producing content, vetted by advisors, with a marginal delay for release, open to all. It has all the potential for breaking the status quo.
Same with Verizon. I've been a Verizon user since 1997. Happy, I might add. Though I've chewed through three warranty replacements of the Treo 700p this year alone. :-/
That said, I've been evaluating phones lately, the iPhone, the Curve 8900, the Pre (that I have in my hand) and the G1. I don't care for the landscape keyboards, and a physical keyboard is kind of important for me, as is corporate email sync. Blackberry is going to be it for my company next year, unless we implement Exchange Direct Push (which the Pre supports).
Anyway, Verizon doesn't have a single one of those phones available. TMobile or AT&T are my only choices, and in my world Verizon is the big dog in terms of coverage. Sprint apparently has a roaming agreement with Verizon - if my Pre can't get a Sprint tower it'll use a Verizon tower (or so I've been told by the Sprint guys).
First off, the battery on this thing is atrocious. With GPS enabled and brightness fully turned up, expect 3-5 hours of battery life, and that's just web browsing and contact management, no phone calls. The phone clarity and speaker is very good. I'm not sure if there is any wired headset option. I don't know if the 3.5mm headset jack supports a microphone.
The Contact management features are great - I love how 3 years of Gmail and 10 years of AIM contacts simply popped into my phone. The only downside is browsing. Scrolling through a list of 500+ contacts without using the keyboard is a PAIN IN THE ASS. You also can't rename contacts in the phone. Say you have a contact "Joe Blow" with just an email, but another contact with "Joe Blo" with address, phone numbers, more emails, etc. You can make "Joe Blo" the primary profile source, but you can't rename it. I'm not sure how I feel about this, or whether it's a limitation of Palm profile service.
Browsing - is just like the iPhone.
Keyboard - it's sunken a bit, which is new. As a longtime Treo user (which took me some time to get used to), I adapted pretty well, and I have HUGE fingers. The autocorrect is good, but annoying at times, as auto-correct can be.
Text fields and data entry: If you make a typo, it's hard, using your finger, to position the caret at the exact spot you want to hit delete, or add new data. I thing that they would have been well-served to at least keep a left/right scroll button on the phone. I'm not sure if there's a simple feature of the phone I'm missing.
Speed dial: I know it has the capability, but it appears to only be limited to 10 speed dial entries. I like the Treo - I can put a speeddial entry on nearly the entire keyboard.
Wifi: Works great.
Fits great in the hand.
Mostly, it takes a LOT of time to get the gestures down. There are so many, I stumbled on many by accident. But most are intuitive if you take a few minutes to think about it.
I've been looking for an upgrade (with wifi) to my Treo, with a touchscreen, and the Treo keyboard style, minus WinMo. The Pre is apparently the only thing coming on the market in the near future that meets those requirements.
As a PIM, the Pre is hands down the best I've EVER used (minus the scrolling bit above). I synced my Gmail account 10 seconds after I had the phone paid for. I was reading email 60 seconds later, and playing Youtube a few minutes after that. Palm has gotten it right. Now they need to get Mojo out so their community of vendors can flesh out the platform. There is a Palm Classic emulator - the question I have is if the emulator speaks to the Pre contact manager?
Any idea on the ETA? I'm getting myself in line at Sprint tomorrow at 7:30 to test-drive the Pre... who knows, maybe I'll hate it.
Sorry, I should have clarified both the Storm and iPhone do not have
PHYSICAL QWERTY keyboards. Which are an important feature for me. I don't like giving up half my screen to a keyboard, which I use *ALL* the time.
Yeah, but he's got a point. It really is best-of-breed. Frightening, no? In terms of interoperability, it wins hands down. Throw GPOs on top, and you have a compelling tool that the OSS movement just can't compete with (yet).
Too bad it's $700 to get started.
Everyone allows you to try before you buy nowadays (14 day return policies). Why not give a Pre a shot. I know where I'm gonna be at 9am on Saturday morning.
What I *REALLY* want, is the old style Palm Visors with graffiti area to come back and just get rid of all the buttons. I was so much better at graffiti than typing, and we could have MASSIVE screens in the same form factor. I *LOVED* my Kyocera 6035.
Okay, I'm a developer, and the phones environment is pretty snazzy these days. But here's pretty much what I have for choices.
My needs:
Tethering, Music (ghetto iPod), Skye (maybe), custom app development.
AT&T:
Blackberry Curve 8900 - no touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, SD card
iPhone - Touchscreen, no QWERTY keyboard
Verizon:
Palm Centro - WinMo (ick) - QWERTY, SD card, Touchscreen
Blackberry Storm - no QWERTY, no touchscreen, SD card
TMo
Blackberry Curve 8900
Android G1 -> qwerty keyboard, touchscreen, sd card
Sidekick XL
Sprint:
Palm Treo 800/750: qwerty, touchscreen, sd card
Palm Pre : Touchscreen, qwerty, sd card?
I *LIKE* the BB/Treo keyboard styles, so landscape style keyboards kind of ruin the experience for me. After playing with a G1 last night, I'm not convinced. I think it's come down to a WinMo treo, BB 8900, or the Pre if I like how it feels.
I've been a Verizon customer for 12 years. I love my service - I'm loath to leave, but Verizon has been on the shit-end of the smartphone arena for too long.
And the benefit comes when you add shared storage clustering. Now you have failover without having to implement native OS clustering (Though that can *STILL* be beneficial from a service upgradability standpoint).
Verizon doesn't have ANY rights to the Pre until 2010. The Pre is launching on Sprint.
Um, they sell rebranded hardware, ESX Server is software, dude.
90% of VMware "hardware" will be Dell or HP, with some IBM thrown in. There are no boxes with "VMware" stamped on the front.
I took it to mean that I'm putting Accounting + Tech Support + ClearCase + Leads Management + CRM + Email on one server. That's bad juju in ANY environment.
It was a J2EE development environment, where the app, on startup, consumed 1.5 GB of memory, before doing any calculations. Some also had oracle servers running on them. We had 16-24GB of memory on each VM host, and overcommitted by about 100GB.
Each VM was the same app, as each developer was testing their fixes. Because we had a lot of ESX servers, we mixed some production VMs on these too (at higher resource priority), to spread the load around a bit. We didn't have the budget for separate production and development ESX clusters.
I broke VMware ESXs upper CPU limit of 168 vcpus with 104 running VMs. About 20 of which were under any significant load. 24ghz of CPUs and 32 GB of memory. Pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.
Consolidate several lightly used, different services onto ONE server? Have you ever managed multiple applicatoins in a heterogenous environment? Consolidating applications causes operational complexity that is inappropriate in a lot of instances. While service isolation is easy on Unix platforms, it's not on Windows.
What are you talking about? ESX has supported REAL SANS since almost day one. I've been able to GREAT things on a single vmware server, in one instance I managed 25 2GB J2EE app VMs on a quad core XEON (2005 era). In another I managed 168 sparsely used testing VMs (2x quad core). But I've ALWAYS had trouble with databases and Citrix, in particular, with VMware.
Storage is only part of the issue. Having to run 10-160 schedulers *IS* the issue. Vmware doesn't utilize efficiencies in this arena like Xen or Jails, or OpenVZ or Solaris Containers can.
In some respects, I would say yes, as kittens are unable to fight back. But maybe I'm odd... I've never cried for anyone I've known who's died, but I've cried for every pet I had to put down.
Now killing babies vs. killing kittens - there you've got me.
Don't forget the tethering. :-) Where wifi just isn't available. Lol.