When they first started out, Iomega expected everyone to buy a Zip/Jaz drive, and the disks themselves would be the "portable" element. I believe they did this mostly because they didn't have a choice. USB wasn't around yet, and the only other widely available interfaces didn't lend themselves to being as portable. This new drive represents what they've been moving towards over the last year or two, and I think it's a great idea. Basically eliminating the need for anyone to have a compatable drive by just making the drive portable as well. What's going to kill this device is the same thing that killed all their other devices: it's friggin' expensive! Not only will the drive run you about $400, but the disks will probably be expensive as well. Even a 1Gb Jaz disk still costs $100! Ok, so they might not be moving in the right direction (like a portable DVD writer...) but at least it's closer to the right direction. The only way I see these getting very popular is if they drop the price $300 or so.
It's strange what celebrities do outside of the eye of the American press. When I was living in Japan, I used to see commercials with Arnold Swartzenegger (sp?) advertising things like beer and canned ham. Sly Stallone did ads for cars all the time, and Meg Ryan used to commercials for chocolate covered pretzels, a fruit drink, and a couple of different cars. There were tons of other ones too, people like Wynona Rider, Randy Quaid, Brad Pitt, Chevy Chase... Celebrities you think would be above making commercials for fruit drinks and canned hams. I seem to remember some website out there that had a bunch of these to download, but I can't remember where. It's been so long.
I agree, and the drop in defacements will be good for everyone involved. Not only will less pages get defaced, but maybe a few s'kiddies will grow up and spend more time concentrating on being a real sysadmin/programmer. As annoying as you may think s'kiddies are, there is a lot of really good talent out there being wasted by just defacing websites. Maybe now that they've lost some of the attention that used to be rewarded, they will focus their talents in a more constructive pursuit.
Our company tests all of our major systems once a year with a company called Comdisco. They provide us with hardware (servers, disk arrays, tape drives, everything) that we can then use to simulate and test our disaster recovery procedures. They are a very large company (the largest in their industry I believe), and they can provide you with any type of hardware you need; everything from large mainframes down to small Intel based servers.
Along with allowing us to test our procedures once a year, in case of a real emergency, our critical systems can be reloaded at their facilities and brought back up until the neccesery repairs/reloads are performed here.
When you're doing a test, or an actual disaster recovery, they also have a full staff of experienced sysadmins to help. This is really valuable as even the most experienced sysadmin doens't get as much practice at disaster recovery as those guys do.
As you can imagine, services like this aren't cheap, but they are aimed at large companies that need this type of protection. They also have a whole host of other services they provide, mostly network monitoring services; this may include testing your site's ability to defend against a hacker attack, but I'm not sure. If you work for a large (or growing) company and don't yet have a company providing these services for you, I highly, highly recommend Comdisco.
I think a popular mistake to make is to think that the console games market is similar to the PC gaming market. Certainly, it'd be nice to bridge the gap between them, and this move by Nokia may do that, but it's not likely. There's two obstacles to overcome for a company to succeed in the console market: the magic $199 price tag, and 3rd party game development. Sure, the Open Source community can and likely will develop games for the Nokia platform; but without big names like EA, 989 Studios, etc., developing games for the box then it will tank. Remember the Jaguar? Atari had the clear advantage of having the first true 64-bit console on the market, and at a reasonable price, but they alienated game developers like Konami and Capcom to point where they refused to develop games for the platform. Within a few years of it's introduction the Jaguar was dead. The same was true with Turbo Graphics 16, Turbo Duo, and Lynx, all of which died due to lack of 3rd party games.
Very true, I hadn't thought about it from that standpoint. But does the Microsoft plan say that the software will actually stop working, or will it just be violating the lisence agreement? Oracle runs their lisencing by the same method, but after your license period runs out, the software still works, it's just not legal until you pay for it.
Subscription based software isn't all that new at all, I don't see why nobody got upset until M$ tried it. Companies like Oracle, HP, IBM, and others all have subscription-type liscensing schemes for some of their biggest products. The Linux community should be last to complain, because many Linux software companies employ a subscription-type marketing scheme to make their money. In fact, a lot of Open Source companies are depending on schemes like the one M$ is doing in order to keep their doors open. Take for instance E-Smith Linux, or RedHat, both sell subscription based 'support services' which both come with, by the way, free software upgrades during the time of the subscription. I mean, is there a whole lot of differences? I don't think the question is will the business community take to this new idea, it's how have they accepted it so far?
I agree. M$ realized several years ago that Win2K is about as far as they can go before needing a huge change in order keep those customers who upgrade. They realized that right about this time, they're going to need another change the like of what Windows 95 was, in order to maintain their dominance over the market. That change is.NET and I think that this change to subscription based licenses for Office XP is just the beginning. This change will ease the 'everyday user' in to the mindset of subscription software, so that when.NET finally arrives, it won't be as much of a shock. Look for more and more M$ products to go subscription based as well.
Because corporations only live if they can sustain an income, products are created that will fail to function in a timely manner.
I'd have to disagree, at least with regard to anything BUT software. Businesses that manutacture a product rely on the fact that it won't fail, and that it will live up to the customer's expectations. If a company produces, say telephones, they're not going to engineer them to break after six months in order to get people to come back to buy another one. The consumer is just going to throw the piece of crap telephone away and buy another brand of telephone. Every physical product has a logical lifespan. Materials wear out, gears grind down, and materials corrode. That's just a fact of nature. That's why we don't have lightbulbs that last 30 years (yet) and cars that last a lifetime (yet). What Microsoft has done is convince people that software acts the same manner, as if a program can "wear out", requiring you to buy a whole new one every few years. So comparing software to products like cars and lightbulbs isn't viable.
I don't think it's fair that the quest for wealth kills the spirit of discovery, if anything it's the opposite (again, except for software). Companies must innovate, they must discover new and better ways of producing their product or they will fail.
We have to remember that we're still in the very early stages of the software revolution. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it's the best system around, and it's treated us very well.
This is something that I was really interested in a few years ago when I got the job I have now, and at the time I did quite a bit of research in to it. The research paid off and now I have a job that I love, that doesn't require me to be there 70 hours a week. Here's a few tips if you're looking to cut your workweek without cutting your paycheck:
1. Stay away from big cities or technological 'hot-spots' like Silicon Valley, L.A., Redmond, etc. Even though the dot-com bubble has burst, there's still a lot of companies out there that get by with half has many people as they should have doing 3 times the work they should have. There's jobs in places like the midwest and south that will use and hone your talents just as well, and won't keep you in the office 60 hours a week.
2. Go with a large company, owned by a big division, which is owned by a huge corporation. The more people in your IT department, the better Everyone has what they want to do and what they must do. Chances are, you're "must do's" are someone elses "want to do's", and vice versa. The more people, the better the work can be moved around so everyone is happy and working less hours.
3. Take a good look at the company's IT people when you interview for a job. Talk to some of them and see what their disposition is. If they're overworked and burnt out, you will be too.
4. Get a good feel for the "state" of the company's IT department during the interview process. Find out how up to date their technology is, and how well everything is set up. The more out-of-whack everything is, the more hours you'll spend fixing it.
5. Finally, if you don't want to be at work 60 hours a week, find out why the position is open. If they're hiring 20 people to bolster the size the IT department, chances are there's enough work for 40 people to do. If they're just replacing someone who resigned, you're safe.
Very good points. Even though the Pocket PC comes with Pocket Word and Excel, you're right, I never use those, and doubt many people do. Even though Pocket PC is marketed as a 'PC in your hand', I think most people get them primarily for 2 reasons: 1) the color screen. Yes, color is not neccesery to track your appointments and contacts, but you have to admit it's nice. Personally, I stopped using non-color displays when I dumped my green-on-black monitor back in 88. 2) The geek factor. First let me say Palm OS has some really cool software, and there's tons of it. Which is what Pocket PC lacks, variety of software. BUT, there's just something about playing a 3D shooter like Metalion, or running through you're favorite Quake levels on a device roughly the size of a couple decks of cards. And the geek factor is increased by the video playback capabilities, and the ability to 'skin' the OS with software like Dashboard and WIS bar.
I don't think the new Clie shows a intention to evolve PalmOS in to Pocket PC, but rather shows how flexible it can be, and appeal to more people. Now PalmOS can offer PDA for anyone, from the low end "organizer-only" PDA like the Palm m100, to the executive m505 or Visor Edge, to (now) the multimedia rich Clie. This is something that Pocket PC simply cannot offer.
>>Most PDAs are used by executives, who for the most part have no intrest in Mp3s, and thus aren't willing to pay the extrea $$$.
I'd have to disagree with this for several reasons. First, handheld devices are quite popular with techno-geeks like sysadmins and programmers. I'm a sysadmin in a team of about 20, 12 of us have Pocket PC devices, and 3 other have Palm OS devices. I decided on Pocket PC over Palm OS because of it's color capabilities, MP3 playback, and mulitmedia functions. I think that Sony is trying to appeal to these consumers with this new Clie, not the executives. Which is exactly what Palm OS needed, something to attract the younger audience away from Pocket PC. I would have loved to buy a Palm OS handheld over a Pocket PC, but none of them offered, at the time, what I wanted. I'm getting one of these as soon as I can, and I would bet that many more existing Pocket PC people will start jumping ship as well.
And as far as executives not willing to shell out cash for PDAs, I seem to recall iPaqs selling for upwards of a grand on eBay only a few months ago.
First of all, I agree, I worded my original submission incorrectly. The importance of this story, and with many other Microsoft-related stories, is between the lines. Microsoft is giving out prizes for turning in sites with unlicensed copies of their operating system. And you can't refute that the e-mail is not targeting home users, but rather large system builders that deal in large quantities. Such large quantities that it could cost Microsoft large amounts of money, amounts up to *gasp* $200K. Sounds reasonable right? Sure!
But here's what Microsoft is telling the system builders, in between the lines: 1) If you sold a pc without Windows on it, you must be a software pirate because pc's cannot work without Windows. 2) Simply selling pcs without Windows is not legally reason enough to prosecute someone, so could you please tell us who is, so we may swiftly litigate them out of business? and 3) (this is the important message) You can avoid this type of hassle in the future if you just put a purchased copy of Windows on every pc you sell, and front the cost to the consumer. Microsoft is trying to use the issue of software piracy to cover up the real issue: they don't want you to have a choice of which OS you buy with a new PC.
I think history has proven that it's easy to underestimate Microsoft, or dismiss stories like these as typical Slashdot FUD. But why wait until it too late, and then complain? Again?
I've been playing Black & White everyday since I got it about a month ago, and I think I had this same dilema when I first started.
I got the hang of the controls quickly, but eventually I found that the mouse works well for maneuvering around, but was still unreliable when casting miracles. Often the gestures for casting a miracle would have to be slow and deliberate, and even then would take 2-3 trys to work. When you're trying to cast a miracle in a hurry, this is unacceptable.
I dug out a touchpad I won as door prize at a conference (which I hadn't opened until then) and gave it a shot. Casting miracles with a touchpad was an incredible improvement, the movement was much more intuitive to do with a finger rather than your whole hand. However, maneuvering in Black & White with touch pad is a pain, and in some situations it was impossible to use (fighting and other quick point-and-click motions).
So I got a serial mouse and starting using the mouse to play the game and the touch pad to cast miracles. This, IMHO, is the way the game was meant to be played. After a while, you'll find things that work better with the touchpad, such as interacting with your creature, and things that work better with the mouse, i.e. fighting and catching followers to feed to your creature. Give em both I shot, it's worth the $50 or so for a touchpad.
I agree. I don't know any sysadmins that are married to one single Linux distro, or even one flavor of Un*x for that matter. We run HP-UX for our databases, RedHat for some DNS, and I've recently converted some RS/9000 AIX boxes to SuSE 7.1. I usually choose a distro just by how easy I want the install to go. If I need something simple like a DNS server, I'll choose RedHat because you can just throw it in, edit a few files and go. But if I need something like a webserver or DB server, when I want to dig in and customize everything, I'll take Debian or Slackware, just because nothing is done for you with these. The only way you know it's done right is when you do it yourself.
One of the most important lessons that I've learned since I've been a sysadmin (about 6 years now), is that there's two types of sysdmins out there. The daytime admins and the geeks.
The daytime admins usually didn't know a thing about computers until they went to college, and use the knowledge they learned there and in whatever training classes they've been sent to to do their job, and that's it. And most do their job very well; they use their knowledge as a means to put food on the table.
The geeks, on the other hand, usually gets in to computers at a young age. The geek works not only for the money, but for the love of the technology. These are the people that check/. six times a day, have a bookshelf of O'Reilly books, write webpages for their friends, teach themselves new programming languages, etc. Geeks make the effort to learn every technology they can not because their job dictates it, they just love to know it.
The important thing to remember is that one is not better than the other, there's a definite place for both types of people in the IT industry. The daytime sysadmins are bountiful and relatively cheap. You might say that they're the worker ants; they fill cubicle chairs, and they get the work done and they do it well. But every IT needs it's share of geeks. Geeks are always the dreamers, and it's their spirit of curiosity that drives the IT industry forward. They're never happy with "it does what it's supposed to do", they're concerned with "let's see what it CAN do".
To us geeks, being a sysadmin (or programmer or whatever) isn't work, it's fun. I remember when I got my first hand-me-down 286 computer when I was 8, that feeling of excitement of a new toy. I couldn't wait to dig in to it and find out everything it can do. I still get that same feeling now when a new state-of-the-art server comes in for me to setup, or our my boss asks me to evaluate new software. It's that spirit of curiosity that will continue to drive technology in to the future, along with the help of the daytime admins.
I read an artice a year or so ago about how exactly they run trans-oceanic fiber lines, and I don't think that the line being severed or even damaged will be a concern. The fiber that was laid from the U.S. to Japan is covered excessive by protective casing and padding. So much so that an oil barge could sink and land on the line with minimal or no damage at all. Sure, all of the extra protection almost doubled the cost of the project, but the impression that I got from the artice was that one the fiber is laid, they don't want to go back and fix it. A cable is closet is difficult enough to work in, imagine splicing fiber at the bottom of the ocean.
It's was either Slashdot or The Register where I got this link from a few months ago. It's about the same subject, but goes as far to mention that this technology can be used to guide individual atoms through the fiber tubes. The article says that the research on this is just beginning, and will be used to measuring gravitational fields and the like... I'm not too up on my physics, but does anyone see this akin to teleportation? It's only one atom at a time, and it's not a "wireless" solution, but you are moving actuall matter over high speed communications lines. Any physics people have an opinion? (as if I had to ask)
With the recent announcement of Windows XP Blade as a low-cost, drop-in-and go web server, it's obvious that Microsoft is trying to regain some of the ground that it has lost in the web server arena. My question is will this version of XP be tied to IIS, or will users have a choice to use Apache? And if so, how will Microsoft lure away exsisting Linux/Apache users to use the XP/Apache platform, given how dedicated Linux users tend to be?
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When they first started out, Iomega expected everyone to buy a Zip/Jaz drive, and the disks themselves would be the "portable" element. I believe they did this mostly because they didn't have a choice. USB wasn't around yet, and the only other widely available interfaces didn't lend themselves to being as portable. This new drive represents what they've been moving towards over the last year or two, and I think it's a great idea. Basically eliminating the need for anyone to have a compatable drive by just making the drive portable as well. What's going to kill this device is the same thing that killed all their other devices: it's friggin' expensive! Not only will the drive run you about $400, but the disks will probably be expensive as well. Even a 1Gb Jaz disk still costs $100! Ok, so they might not be moving in the right direction (like a portable DVD writer...) but at least it's closer to the right direction. The only way I see these getting very popular is if they drop the price $300 or so.
It's strange what celebrities do outside of the eye of the American press. When I was living in Japan, I used to see commercials with Arnold Swartzenegger (sp?) advertising things like beer and canned ham. Sly Stallone did ads for cars all the time, and Meg Ryan used to commercials for chocolate covered pretzels, a fruit drink, and a couple of different cars. There were tons of other ones too, people like Wynona Rider, Randy Quaid, Brad Pitt, Chevy Chase... Celebrities you think would be above making commercials for fruit drinks and canned hams. I seem to remember some website out there that had a bunch of these to download, but I can't remember where. It's been so long.
What's next? Digital characters doing ads for real products? Next thing you know Lara Croft will be doing an ad for Pepsi! Oh wait...
I agree, and the drop in defacements will be good for everyone involved. Not only will less pages get defaced, but maybe a few s'kiddies will grow up and spend more time concentrating on being a real sysadmin/programmer. As annoying as you may think s'kiddies are, there is a lot of really good talent out there being wasted by just defacing websites. Maybe now that they've lost some of the attention that used to be rewarded, they will focus their talents in a more constructive pursuit.
Along with allowing us to test our procedures once a year, in case of a real emergency, our critical systems can be reloaded at their facilities and brought back up until the neccesery repairs/reloads are performed here.
When you're doing a test, or an actual disaster recovery, they also have a full staff of experienced sysadmins to help. This is really valuable as even the most experienced sysadmin doens't get as much practice at disaster recovery as those guys do.
As you can imagine, services like this aren't cheap, but they are aimed at large companies that need this type of protection. They also have a whole host of other services they provide, mostly network monitoring services; this may include testing your site's ability to defend against a hacker attack, but I'm not sure. If you work for a large (or growing) company and don't yet have a company providing these services for you, I highly, highly recommend Comdisco.
1) Running a native/ported app is faster/more stable/better than one that is emulated
2) If no native app is available, running one over an emulator is preferable to not having one at all
3) Killer games and compatable software is what will eventually (if ever) allow Linux to take over the desktop market, and
4) Linux will need the help of both companies like Loki and projects like WINE in order to gain dominance over Microsoft, not just one or the other.
If Linux will ever take over the desktop market, both of these players will have a key role.
Very true, I hadn't thought about it from that standpoint. But does the Microsoft plan say that the software will actually stop working, or will it just be violating the lisence agreement? Oracle runs their lisencing by the same method, but after your license period runs out, the software still works, it's just not legal until you pay for it.
Subscription based software isn't all that new at all, I don't see why nobody got upset until M$ tried it. Companies like Oracle, HP, IBM, and others all have subscription-type liscensing schemes for some of their biggest products. The Linux community should be last to complain, because many Linux software companies employ a subscription-type marketing scheme to make their money. In fact, a lot of Open Source companies are depending on schemes like the one M$ is doing in order to keep their doors open. Take for instance E-Smith Linux, or RedHat, both sell subscription based 'support services' which both come with, by the way, free software upgrades during the time of the subscription. I mean, is there a whole lot of differences? I don't think the question is will the business community take to this new idea, it's how have they accepted it so far?
I agree. M$ realized several years ago that Win2K is about as far as they can go before needing a huge change in order keep those customers who upgrade. They realized that right about this time, they're going to need another change the like of what Windows 95 was, in order to maintain their dominance over the market. That change is .NET and I think that this change to subscription based licenses for Office XP is just the beginning. This change will ease the 'everyday user' in to the mindset of subscription software, so that when .NET finally arrives, it won't be as much of a shock. Look for more and more M$ products to go subscription based as well.
I'd have to disagree, at least with regard to anything BUT software. Businesses that manutacture a product rely on the fact that it won't fail, and that it will live up to the customer's expectations. If a company produces, say telephones, they're not going to engineer them to break after six months in order to get people to come back to buy another one. The consumer is just going to throw the piece of crap telephone away and buy another brand of telephone. Every physical product has a logical lifespan. Materials wear out, gears grind down, and materials corrode. That's just a fact of nature. That's why we don't have lightbulbs that last 30 years (yet) and cars that last a lifetime (yet). What Microsoft has done is convince people that software acts the same manner, as if a program can "wear out", requiring you to buy a whole new one every few years. So comparing software to products like cars and lightbulbs isn't viable.
I don't think it's fair that the quest for wealth kills the spirit of discovery, if anything it's the opposite (again, except for software). Companies must innovate, they must discover new and better ways of producing their product or they will fail.
We have to remember that we're still in the very early stages of the software revolution. Capitalism may not be perfect, but it's the best system around, and it's treated us very well.
1. Stay away from big cities or technological 'hot-spots' like Silicon Valley, L.A., Redmond, etc. Even though the dot-com bubble has burst, there's still a lot of companies out there that get by with half has many people as they should have doing 3 times the work they should have. There's jobs in places like the midwest and south that will use and hone your talents just as well, and won't keep you in the office 60 hours a week.
2. Go with a large company, owned by a big division, which is owned by a huge corporation. The more people in your IT department, the better Everyone has what they want to do and what they must do. Chances are, you're "must do's" are someone elses "want to do's", and vice versa. The more people, the better the work can be moved around so everyone is happy and working less hours.
3. Take a good look at the company's IT people when you interview for a job. Talk to some of them and see what their disposition is. If they're overworked and burnt out, you will be too.
4. Get a good feel for the "state" of the company's IT department during the interview process. Find out how up to date their technology is, and how well everything is set up. The more out-of-whack everything is, the more hours you'll spend fixing it.
5. Finally, if you don't want to be at work 60 hours a week, find out why the position is open. If they're hiring 20 people to bolster the size the IT department, chances are there's enough work for 40 people to do. If they're just replacing someone who resigned, you're safe.
I don't think the new Clie shows a intention to evolve PalmOS in to Pocket PC, but rather shows how flexible it can be, and appeal to more people. Now PalmOS can offer PDA for anyone, from the low end "organizer-only" PDA like the Palm m100, to the executive m505 or Visor Edge, to (now) the multimedia rich Clie. This is something that Pocket PC simply cannot offer.
I'd have to disagree with this for several reasons. First, handheld devices are quite popular with techno-geeks like sysadmins and programmers. I'm a sysadmin in a team of about 20, 12 of us have Pocket PC devices, and 3 other have Palm OS devices. I decided on Pocket PC over Palm OS because of it's color capabilities, MP3 playback, and mulitmedia functions. I think that Sony is trying to appeal to these consumers with this new Clie, not the executives. Which is exactly what Palm OS needed, something to attract the younger audience away from Pocket PC. I would have loved to buy a Palm OS handheld over a Pocket PC, but none of them offered, at the time, what I wanted. I'm getting one of these as soon as I can, and I would bet that many more existing Pocket PC people will start jumping ship as well.
And as far as executives not willing to shell out cash for PDAs, I seem to recall iPaqs selling for upwards of a grand on eBay only a few months ago.
But here's what Microsoft is telling the system builders, in between the lines: 1) If you sold a pc without Windows on it, you must be a software pirate because pc's cannot work without Windows. 2) Simply selling pcs without Windows is not legally reason enough to prosecute someone, so could you please tell us who is, so we may swiftly litigate them out of business? and 3) (this is the important message) You can avoid this type of hassle in the future if you just put a purchased copy of Windows on every pc you sell, and front the cost to the consumer. Microsoft is trying to use the issue of software piracy to cover up the real issue: they don't want you to have a choice of which OS you buy with a new PC.
I think history has proven that it's easy to underestimate Microsoft, or dismiss stories like these as typical Slashdot FUD. But why wait until it too late, and then complain? Again?
I got the hang of the controls quickly, but eventually I found that the mouse works well for maneuvering around, but was still unreliable when casting miracles. Often the gestures for casting a miracle would have to be slow and deliberate, and even then would take 2-3 trys to work. When you're trying to cast a miracle in a hurry, this is unacceptable.
I dug out a touchpad I won as door prize at a conference (which I hadn't opened until then) and gave it a shot. Casting miracles with a touchpad was an incredible improvement, the movement was much more intuitive to do with a finger rather than your whole hand. However, maneuvering in Black & White with touch pad is a pain, and in some situations it was impossible to use (fighting and other quick point-and-click motions).
So I got a serial mouse and starting using the mouse to play the game and the touch pad to cast miracles. This, IMHO, is the way the game was meant to be played. After a while, you'll find things that work better with the touchpad, such as interacting with your creature, and things that work better with the mouse, i.e. fighting and catching followers to feed to your creature. Give em both I shot, it's worth the $50 or so for a touchpad.
I agree. I don't know any sysadmins that are married to one single Linux distro, or even one flavor of Un*x for that matter. We run HP-UX for our databases, RedHat for some DNS, and I've recently converted some RS/9000 AIX boxes to SuSE 7.1. I usually choose a distro just by how easy I want the install to go. If I need something simple like a DNS server, I'll choose RedHat because you can just throw it in, edit a few files and go. But if I need something like a webserver or DB server, when I want to dig in and customize everything, I'll take Debian or Slackware, just because nothing is done for you with these. The only way you know it's done right is when you do it yourself.
The daytime admins usually didn't know a thing about computers until they went to college, and use the knowledge they learned there and in whatever training classes they've been sent to to do their job, and that's it. And most do their job very well; they use their knowledge as a means to put food on the table.
The geeks, on the other hand, usually gets in to computers at a young age. The geek works not only for the money, but for the love of the technology. These are the people that check /. six times a day, have a bookshelf of O'Reilly books, write webpages for their friends, teach themselves new programming languages, etc. Geeks make the effort to learn every technology they can not because their job dictates it, they just love to know it.
The important thing to remember is that one is not better than the other, there's a definite place for both types of people in the IT industry. The daytime sysadmins are bountiful and relatively cheap. You might say that they're the worker ants; they fill cubicle chairs, and they get the work done and they do it well. But every IT needs it's share of geeks. Geeks are always the dreamers, and it's their spirit of curiosity that drives the IT industry forward. They're never happy with "it does what it's supposed to do", they're concerned with "let's see what it CAN do". To us geeks, being a sysadmin (or programmer or whatever) isn't work, it's fun. I remember when I got my first hand-me-down 286 computer when I was 8, that feeling of excitement of a new toy. I couldn't wait to dig in to it and find out everything it can do. I still get that same feeling now when a new state-of-the-art server comes in for me to setup, or our my boss asks me to evaluate new software. It's that spirit of curiosity that will continue to drive technology in to the future, along with the help of the daytime admins.
I read an artice a year or so ago about how exactly they run trans-oceanic fiber lines, and I don't think that the line being severed or even damaged will be a concern. The fiber that was laid from the U.S. to Japan is covered excessive by protective casing and padding. So much so that an oil barge could sink and land on the line with minimal or no damage at all. Sure, all of the extra protection almost doubled the cost of the project, but the impression that I got from the artice was that one the fiber is laid, they don't want to go back and fix it. A cable is closet is difficult enough to work in, imagine splicing fiber at the bottom of the ocean.
It's was either Slashdot or The Register where I got this link from a few months ago. It's about the same subject, but goes as far to mention that this technology can be used to guide individual atoms through the fiber tubes. The article says that the research on this is just beginning, and will be used to measuring gravitational fields and the like... I'm not too up on my physics, but does anyone see this akin to teleportation? It's only one atom at a time, and it's not a "wireless" solution, but you are moving actuall matter over high speed communications lines. Any physics people have an opinion? (as if I had to ask)
With the recent announcement of Windows XP Blade as a low-cost, drop-in-and go web server, it's obvious that Microsoft is trying to regain some of the ground that it has lost in the web server arena. My question is will this version of XP be tied to IIS, or will users have a choice to use Apache? And if so, how will Microsoft lure away exsisting Linux/Apache users to use the XP/Apache platform, given how dedicated Linux users tend to be?