So finish the thought. In 2001, how would you have done that?
Use the example of having a user who you need to get a text file from. They have the text file stored on their hard drive. It is 2001. How do you setup something server side to pull a file from your client?
You just told the story of software applications. Nothing that you said is entirely the domain of apps developed with IE6 as the UI. These things happen all the time.
In 2001, what else could they have used besides IE6 that would still be around and supported? Keep in mind it has to work on every Windows machine out there and can't rely on components to be installed on the workstation. All the parts need to be there, so that whoever wants to use it just needs to download a web browser to use the app.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. But go back in time. What was the alternative?
Exactly. What interoperates so well with Oracle, or SAP, or Apple? Last I checked the ENTIRE FUCKING INDUSTRY is all about vendor lock in. The only place you have people working together to come up with interoperable solutions are at hacker spaces where they are all using the same, free, OSS tools. Even in OSS land, does PostgreSQL interoperate with MySQL? Can you send the same query to both and get equal results?
I'd go so far as to say that Microsoft competes entirely on their implementation. They will give a business ANYTHING that they need to manage or create information with. It might not be the best, but they have an offering. From the OS, to apps to back-office servers, they have a complete stack. They have dev tools to tie the stack together.
What is the alternative? Seriously? What is the alternative? How's that product roadmap for Linux looking? What features can I look forward to in 2013? How about MySQL? Will they be around in 5 years in case I want to develop an app on top of that? Maybe I can roll out Firefox, it's so secure... 0-day exploit released on 10/25/10 not withstanding. Maybe Apple will sell me a relational database to build my web apps on. Maybe Oracle will give me a desktop and office productivity apps for the sales force.
Or maybe, I could go with the one stop shop that THE MAJORITY of the rest of the companies in the world use and realize that "vendor lock in" is a strawman arugment that falls apart in the face of the reality that there isn't anything besides vendor lock in, no matter what you do.
Nine years ago IE6 and specifically ActiveX offered a lot of functionality. Users were given a web browser that could function as an application platform. We take that for granted now. Microsoft's biggest mistake was trading functinoality for security. They provided an app development platform, but failed to secure it. They were so focused on pushing functionality that they neglected security.
It wasn't until JavaScript matured and other browsers arrived that people were able to start moving away from IE.
I think the "locked into IE6" meme is a bit over blown. We have an app like that. The vendor released a new version that does not work with IE6. They realized IE6 was an albatross and dropped it. Change is a gradual process. As customers demand better products, vendors deliver. We can't blame Microsoft forever that vendors and IT departments aren't keeping up with new software releases.
How many companies are still running SQL Server 7, or Exchange 5.5, or NT 4.0? I can't name a single one. But for some reason IE6 gets a pass. Nobody can handle upgrading IE6? Nobody can rewrite some code?
That's because as you get further away from the center, the far left and far right tend to lean toward each other. It ends up looking more a horseshoe than a V.
I have been playing the Grand Theft Auto series since the original came out. In the original games, and even going up through GTA III on the original PS, the mission timers were strict. There wasn't any room for error. You had to find the perfect path to complete the mission or you would run out of time and have to start all over again. It was frustrating but at the same time when you did figure out how to do it, there was a sense of accomplishment. It was like the game designers would not let you get by with mediocrity. You had to do it just right.
Fast forward to GTA IV and it is MUCH more simple. There seems to be a lot of leeway built into the game. Instead of making it nearly impossible to succeed, they have made it nearly impossible to fail. On missions where you have to chase after people, they will actually slow down if they get too far ahead. In the original, if they got too far ahead, that was it, game over.
I think the attention spans of children are getting shorter. They have too many entertainment options these days. When I was a kid, we had a system.... usually it was one or two kids in the neighborhood had one and everyone else went over to their house. First it was an Atari. Then a Nintendo. Piracy wasn't an option. Game designers had some leeway because choices were limited.
In this day and age, there are simply too many options. If a game is too difficult, your average kid will go do something else and might not ever come back.
You're already way out on the fringe for wanting to mod the games. I agree with you and I know where you are coming from, but you have to realize that we are on the fringes. For everyone who wants to make their own maps, there are hundreds if not thousands of other players who simply want new maps and expect that someone else will create those maps for them. Those people will never care that they can't mod the game because they don't want to. That is the point I was trying to make. Most people can't have their minds changed or be made to care about truly "owning" their hardware because they have zero inclination to do anything with it.
Along this line of logic, you might also consider getting some baoding balls. They will increase the circulation and improve your health. Like the OP, I was running into health problems in my late 20s due to too much computer use. I started training tai ji, walking, qi gong... eventually worked up to full blown kung fu training. Pay attention to what your body is telling you... move around, get the circulation going, rehabilitate what feels weak. The body is amazing. It can heal just about anything.
You bring up some good points about the cloud for personal use, but what about team work? Right now I'm working at a place that might be considered a mini-cloud. We have 25TB of data spread between SQL and the file system. It is accessed via a web app and our clients are Fortune 50 companies with offices spread across the globe. We have redundancy up the wazoo, from geographically dispersed SANs and clusters, load balanced and redundant web servers, even going all the way down to the individual racks we have dual paths for network and SAN connectivity, and PDUs that fail over in the event that one of the transformers goes down. Globalized collaboration is the future. Online data storage is a necessary evil due to the dispersed nature of today's workforce. Costs keep coming down. Even an entry level Sonicwall firewall can support failover. Is $400 a month really too much to spend and two reliable internet lines?
I've been doing IT for almost fifteen years. I started in the SMB segment and I've worked my way up. The world is moving toward the cloud, be it private or public. Your average small business can't justify hosting it all in house. Most people see hosted email as a no brainer. Hosted LOB apps are the next piece of the puzzle. Microsoft is working on hosted Office. Google has Docs. The time is coming where your average office will have a router and some sort of local NAS setup to cache important files in the event that the hosting provider gets nuked. All of the heavy lifting and processing will be done by the hosting provider. The real bottle neck at this point is the applications. Most apps have been developed based on the belief that they will be running on a 100MB or 1000MB LAN.
You'd have to convince the majority that they are losing rights that they care about. For your average end user of a video game, they do not want to do anything above and beyond playing the video game. The only people who care about these things are people who want to screw around with what they buy. In my own case, I bought a PS3 simply because I was tired of playing against people who wanted to screw around with (ie: hack) FPS games. Have never used a single aimbot or wall hack in my entire life, and having been playing FPS games since Wolfenstein, I finally got sick of it. Other than being able to cheat a game, what is your average consumer going to care about?
Piracy comes to mind. Despite how rampant it is, I still think your average American has some morals left and realizes that piracy = stealing. So as much as they want to be able to pirate things, they aren't going to freak out about not being able to do something that they feel like they shouldn't do anyway.
In the end it comes down to mindset. Most people simply do not care. The geek mindset seems to be the weird one. Geeks want to mess with things and change things and experiment. Everyone else simply buys products based on their advertised uses and never even considers that they might be useful for something else. As long as they "get what they paid for", they're happy.
Have you checked VMWare's HCL? It seems like you should be able to buy any high end Intel or Broadcom NIC and be fine. It might set you back a couple hundred bucks for the NIC, but you'd be good to go.
Do you have inside wire maintenance? Have you checked your wiring?
I had AT&T for DSL years ago and I had some connectivity problems. It took a few months for them to sort it out, but they did sort it out. The trick is to start at your modem, inside your house, and work backwards until you get to the CO. They don't want to do it, but if you are polite and knowledgeable without being a know it all, they will help you out.
I agree with the idea in theory but it falls apart when we bring applications and bandwidth into the picture. A phone call only takes up a very small, fixed amount of bandwidth. You can talk all day long and never consume more than a miniscule amount of bandwidth at any given time. An internet connection is a slightly different beast. Consumers don't want to pay to have a dedicated, 15mb circuit. The cost is too prohibitive. Likewise the telcos don't want to expand their networks to give everyone a 15mb connection because the cost is too prohibitive. So we're caught in this middle ground where neither side really wants to budge. Telcos want to traffic shape and consumers are freaked out about the what if's.
It worked for me as well, but do you think it is still valid? I started working in IT back in 1996 when I was 18 years old. At that point the knowledge I had gained from tinkering on my own, and going to 2600 meetings and Defcon was enough to get me a job doing IT. When I look back at it, I think that I was able to do what I did and embark on the career path that I was on because I was in the right place at the right time. People with the skills to configure networking gear and servers and firewalls were in short supply. Because of that, my boss gave me a shot and I happened to flourish.
Here we are almost fifteen years later. Things have changed. There are colleges that are turning out IT employees with technical skills. The market is saturated with IT people. How many companies are going to take a chance on someone who has tinkered their whole life, versus someone who has tinkered their whole life and also gone to school for it?
I understand where you are coming from. I live in Southern California and am looking forward to eventually moving to Oregon. (Now before all the Oregonians give me crap, my parents grew up there and I have a lot of family in the area. I'm not one of "those" Californians who is going up there and screwing up all of the property values.)
If you are good at what you do in IT, you have some flexibility. I work with AT&T and Dell a lot. Their reps are always working from home. Even my co-workers are often bouncing from office to office, or working from home.
You might need to re-evaluate your notion of life in the boonies. Everyone I've known who has grown up in Bum Frick Nowhere has the same story... the only thing to do is drink and have sex. By the time people are done with high school, they have pretty much slept with everyone else in town. Although come to think of it, moving to the boonies would have the benefit of fresh meat syndrome. You'd be the one person everyone hadn't yet slept with, so you'd have your pick.
I don't think that the article is talking about the real boonies though. Any place that is large enough to maintain a good sized IT operation isn't the kind of boonies that I'm talking about.
I've seen a lot of posts from know it alls who talk about how Skype is so cheap, and how they can talk to their office in Asia over VoIP for nothing more than the cost of an internet line. Skype and VoIP for internal communications might be great, but they are not suitable for business. Until everyone who you want to sell a product to has a Skype account or a VoIP connection, you need a regular phone line to talk to them. Except for some fringe cases of small businesses that can do everything over email and IM, the rest of the world uses these things called telephones.
I bet that even those VoIP servers and SIP gateways that got hacked were probably plugged into old fashioned PRI/T1 circuits from the telco. VoIP is great and all, but at some point you need to leave the playground and interact with the rest of the world. When that happens, you end up paying through the nose for POTS service.
Or maybe one of you geniuses can come up with a new business model. You can setup a VoIP server, and when people call in it can direct them to a webpage with instructions on how to download Skype. Then your customers can go through the hassle of setting up Skype to connect to you.
Or maybe, your customers will just find the next company that sells the same widgets that you do, pick up their phone and dial 800-NOT-VOIP.
I'm talking about their enterprise drivers for their Proliant servers. You know those big boxes that they actually make money on and support. The ones that support hundreds of users per box. Who cares about your 2.2ghz desktop that you probably bought at Best Buy?
You do realize that we are talking about taxing pot, right? I read a figure that said the city of Oakland made $1 million dollars in tax revenue last year when they taxed 3 dispensaries at a 1% tax rate. That's one city, 3 dispensaries, 1% tax. What is the tax on a pack of cigarettes? 10% or something insane like that?
There are millions, if not billions of dollars in marijuana (legal or otherwise). The question is, where do we want that money going? We can either divert it to the general fund, or we can continue pumping it into the criminal enterprises. The smart choice is obvious.
One of the issues with marijuana is that it is not any worse than alcohol or cigarettes. It seems hypocritical to allow a more harmful substance, but make a less harmful one illegal. I don't think that anybody is saying it is safe. People are simply saying, "I'm a grown adult. I can be trusted with alcohol and cigarettes, but not marijuana? That's bullshit."
In my own life, I know people who have used marijuana to quit cigarettes. Then they quit smoking pot. I know alcoholics who have said that pot is way less damaging to them than alcohol is.
If you do some research, you'll learn that marijuana was used to outlaw hemp. Huge corporate interests like DuPont and Dow wanted hemp out of the way because they were introducing chemical and oil based products to do what had been done by hemp for centuries. A few people in this thread have commented about how much it sucks that big business buys legislation. Look at Prop 19 in California as the first step in over turning legislation that was originally bought fifty plus years ago.
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So finish the thought. In 2001, how would you have done that?
Use the example of having a user who you need to get a text file from. They have the text file stored on their hard drive. It is 2001. How do you setup something server side to pull a file from your client?
You just told the story of software applications. Nothing that you said is entirely the domain of apps developed with IE6 as the UI. These things happen all the time.
In 2001, what else could they have used besides IE6 that would still be around and supported? Keep in mind it has to work on every Windows machine out there and can't rely on components to be installed on the workstation. All the parts need to be there, so that whoever wants to use it just needs to download a web browser to use the app.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. But go back in time. What was the alternative?
Exactly. What interoperates so well with Oracle, or SAP, or Apple? Last I checked the ENTIRE FUCKING INDUSTRY is all about vendor lock in. The only place you have people working together to come up with interoperable solutions are at hacker spaces where they are all using the same, free, OSS tools. Even in OSS land, does PostgreSQL interoperate with MySQL? Can you send the same query to both and get equal results?
I'd go so far as to say that Microsoft competes entirely on their implementation. They will give a business ANYTHING that they need to manage or create information with. It might not be the best, but they have an offering. From the OS, to apps to back-office servers, they have a complete stack. They have dev tools to tie the stack together.
What is the alternative? Seriously? What is the alternative? How's that product roadmap for Linux looking? What features can I look forward to in 2013? How about MySQL? Will they be around in 5 years in case I want to develop an app on top of that? Maybe I can roll out Firefox, it's so secure... 0-day exploit released on 10/25/10 not withstanding. Maybe Apple will sell me a relational database to build my web apps on. Maybe Oracle will give me a desktop and office productivity apps for the sales force.
Or maybe, I could go with the one stop shop that THE MAJORITY of the rest of the companies in the world use and realize that "vendor lock in" is a strawman arugment that falls apart in the face of the reality that there isn't anything besides vendor lock in, no matter what you do.
Nine years ago IE6 and specifically ActiveX offered a lot of functionality. Users were given a web browser that could function as an application platform. We take that for granted now. Microsoft's biggest mistake was trading functinoality for security. They provided an app development platform, but failed to secure it. They were so focused on pushing functionality that they neglected security.
It wasn't until JavaScript matured and other browsers arrived that people were able to start moving away from IE.
I think the "locked into IE6" meme is a bit over blown. We have an app like that. The vendor released a new version that does not work with IE6. They realized IE6 was an albatross and dropped it. Change is a gradual process. As customers demand better products, vendors deliver. We can't blame Microsoft forever that vendors and IT departments aren't keeping up with new software releases.
How many companies are still running SQL Server 7, or Exchange 5.5, or NT 4.0? I can't name a single one. But for some reason IE6 gets a pass. Nobody can handle upgrading IE6? Nobody can rewrite some code?
That's because as you get further away from the center, the far left and far right tend to lean toward each other. It ends up looking more a horseshoe than a V.
I have been playing the Grand Theft Auto series since the original came out. In the original games, and even going up through GTA III on the original PS, the mission timers were strict. There wasn't any room for error. You had to find the perfect path to complete the mission or you would run out of time and have to start all over again. It was frustrating but at the same time when you did figure out how to do it, there was a sense of accomplishment. It was like the game designers would not let you get by with mediocrity. You had to do it just right.
Fast forward to GTA IV and it is MUCH more simple. There seems to be a lot of leeway built into the game. Instead of making it nearly impossible to succeed, they have made it nearly impossible to fail. On missions where you have to chase after people, they will actually slow down if they get too far ahead. In the original, if they got too far ahead, that was it, game over.
I think the attention spans of children are getting shorter. They have too many entertainment options these days. When I was a kid, we had a system.... usually it was one or two kids in the neighborhood had one and everyone else went over to their house. First it was an Atari. Then a Nintendo. Piracy wasn't an option. Game designers had some leeway because choices were limited.
In this day and age, there are simply too many options. If a game is too difficult, your average kid will go do something else and might not ever come back.
You're already way out on the fringe for wanting to mod the games. I agree with you and I know where you are coming from, but you have to realize that we are on the fringes. For everyone who wants to make their own maps, there are hundreds if not thousands of other players who simply want new maps and expect that someone else will create those maps for them. Those people will never care that they can't mod the game because they don't want to. That is the point I was trying to make. Most people can't have their minds changed or be made to care about truly "owning" their hardware because they have zero inclination to do anything with it.
Along this line of logic, you might also consider getting some baoding balls. They will increase the circulation and improve your health. Like the OP, I was running into health problems in my late 20s due to too much computer use. I started training tai ji, walking, qi gong... eventually worked up to full blown kung fu training. Pay attention to what your body is telling you... move around, get the circulation going, rehabilitate what feels weak. The body is amazing. It can heal just about anything.
You bring up some good points about the cloud for personal use, but what about team work? Right now I'm working at a place that might be considered a mini-cloud. We have 25TB of data spread between SQL and the file system. It is accessed via a web app and our clients are Fortune 50 companies with offices spread across the globe. We have redundancy up the wazoo, from geographically dispersed SANs and clusters, load balanced and redundant web servers, even going all the way down to the individual racks we have dual paths for network and SAN connectivity, and PDUs that fail over in the event that one of the transformers goes down. Globalized collaboration is the future. Online data storage is a necessary evil due to the dispersed nature of today's workforce. Costs keep coming down. Even an entry level Sonicwall firewall can support failover. Is $400 a month really too much to spend and two reliable internet lines?
I've been doing IT for almost fifteen years. I started in the SMB segment and I've worked my way up. The world is moving toward the cloud, be it private or public. Your average small business can't justify hosting it all in house. Most people see hosted email as a no brainer. Hosted LOB apps are the next piece of the puzzle. Microsoft is working on hosted Office. Google has Docs. The time is coming where your average office will have a router and some sort of local NAS setup to cache important files in the event that the hosting provider gets nuked. All of the heavy lifting and processing will be done by the hosting provider. The real bottle neck at this point is the applications. Most apps have been developed based on the belief that they will be running on a 100MB or 1000MB LAN.
You'd have to convince the majority that they are losing rights that they care about. For your average end user of a video game, they do not want to do anything above and beyond playing the video game. The only people who care about these things are people who want to screw around with what they buy. In my own case, I bought a PS3 simply because I was tired of playing against people who wanted to screw around with (ie: hack) FPS games. Have never used a single aimbot or wall hack in my entire life, and having been playing FPS games since Wolfenstein, I finally got sick of it. Other than being able to cheat a game, what is your average consumer going to care about?
Piracy comes to mind. Despite how rampant it is, I still think your average American has some morals left and realizes that piracy = stealing. So as much as they want to be able to pirate things, they aren't going to freak out about not being able to do something that they feel like they shouldn't do anyway.
In the end it comes down to mindset. Most people simply do not care. The geek mindset seems to be the weird one. Geeks want to mess with things and change things and experiment. Everyone else simply buys products based on their advertised uses and never even considers that they might be useful for something else. As long as they "get what they paid for", they're happy.
Yet there is a Mac called an iMac.
Have you checked VMWare's HCL? It seems like you should be able to buy any high end Intel or Broadcom NIC and be fine. It might set you back a couple hundred bucks for the NIC, but you'd be good to go.
Do you have inside wire maintenance? Have you checked your wiring?
I had AT&T for DSL years ago and I had some connectivity problems. It took a few months for them to sort it out, but they did sort it out. The trick is to start at your modem, inside your house, and work backwards until you get to the CO. They don't want to do it, but if you are polite and knowledgeable without being a know it all, they will help you out.
I agree with the idea in theory but it falls apart when we bring applications and bandwidth into the picture. A phone call only takes up a very small, fixed amount of bandwidth. You can talk all day long and never consume more than a miniscule amount of bandwidth at any given time. An internet connection is a slightly different beast. Consumers don't want to pay to have a dedicated, 15mb circuit. The cost is too prohibitive. Likewise the telcos don't want to expand their networks to give everyone a 15mb connection because the cost is too prohibitive. So we're caught in this middle ground where neither side really wants to budge. Telcos want to traffic shape and consumers are freaked out about the what if's.
It worked for me as well, but do you think it is still valid? I started working in IT back in 1996 when I was 18 years old. At that point the knowledge I had gained from tinkering on my own, and going to 2600 meetings and Defcon was enough to get me a job doing IT. When I look back at it, I think that I was able to do what I did and embark on the career path that I was on because I was in the right place at the right time. People with the skills to configure networking gear and servers and firewalls were in short supply. Because of that, my boss gave me a shot and I happened to flourish.
Here we are almost fifteen years later. Things have changed. There are colleges that are turning out IT employees with technical skills. The market is saturated with IT people. How many companies are going to take a chance on someone who has tinkered their whole life, versus someone who has tinkered their whole life and also gone to school for it?
Probitoics and chlorella. Both are great for the gut and very useful as building blocks for the rest of the body.
I understand where you are coming from. I live in Southern California and am looking forward to eventually moving to Oregon. (Now before all the Oregonians give me crap, my parents grew up there and I have a lot of family in the area. I'm not one of "those" Californians who is going up there and screwing up all of the property values.)
If you are good at what you do in IT, you have some flexibility. I work with AT&T and Dell a lot. Their reps are always working from home. Even my co-workers are often bouncing from office to office, or working from home.
You might need to re-evaluate your notion of life in the boonies. Everyone I've known who has grown up in Bum Frick Nowhere has the same story... the only thing to do is drink and have sex. By the time people are done with high school, they have pretty much slept with everyone else in town. Although come to think of it, moving to the boonies would have the benefit of fresh meat syndrome. You'd be the one person everyone hadn't yet slept with, so you'd have your pick.
I don't think that the article is talking about the real boonies though. Any place that is large enough to maintain a good sized IT operation isn't the kind of boonies that I'm talking about.
And the feature was just like 'finger' from Unix, go figure.
I once heard the saying that, "Luck is simply being prepared to act when the time to act presents itself."
I've seen a lot of posts from know it alls who talk about how Skype is so cheap, and how they can talk to their office in Asia over VoIP for nothing more than the cost of an internet line. Skype and VoIP for internal communications might be great, but they are not suitable for business. Until everyone who you want to sell a product to has a Skype account or a VoIP connection, you need a regular phone line to talk to them. Except for some fringe cases of small businesses that can do everything over email and IM, the rest of the world uses these things called telephones.
I bet that even those VoIP servers and SIP gateways that got hacked were probably plugged into old fashioned PRI/T1 circuits from the telco. VoIP is great and all, but at some point you need to leave the playground and interact with the rest of the world. When that happens, you end up paying through the nose for POTS service.
Or maybe one of you geniuses can come up with a new business model. You can setup a VoIP server, and when people call in it can direct them to a webpage with instructions on how to download Skype. Then your customers can go through the hassle of setting up Skype to connect to you.
Or maybe, your customers will just find the next company that sells the same widgets that you do, pick up their phone and dial 800-NOT-VOIP.
I'm talking about their enterprise drivers for their Proliant servers. You know those big boxes that they actually make money on and support. The ones that support hundreds of users per box. Who cares about your 2.2ghz desktop that you probably bought at Best Buy?
You do realize that we are talking about taxing pot, right? I read a figure that said the city of Oakland made $1 million dollars in tax revenue last year when they taxed 3 dispensaries at a 1% tax rate. That's one city, 3 dispensaries, 1% tax. What is the tax on a pack of cigarettes? 10% or something insane like that?
There are millions, if not billions of dollars in marijuana (legal or otherwise). The question is, where do we want that money going? We can either divert it to the general fund, or we can continue pumping it into the criminal enterprises. The smart choice is obvious.
One of the issues with marijuana is that it is not any worse than alcohol or cigarettes. It seems hypocritical to allow a more harmful substance, but make a less harmful one illegal. I don't think that anybody is saying it is safe. People are simply saying, "I'm a grown adult. I can be trusted with alcohol and cigarettes, but not marijuana? That's bullshit."
In my own life, I know people who have used marijuana to quit cigarettes. Then they quit smoking pot. I know alcoholics who have said that pot is way less damaging to them than alcohol is.
If you do some research, you'll learn that marijuana was used to outlaw hemp. Huge corporate interests like DuPont and Dow wanted hemp out of the way because they were introducing chemical and oil based products to do what had been done by hemp for centuries. A few people in this thread have commented about how much it sucks that big business buys legislation. Look at Prop 19 in California as the first step in over turning legislation that was originally bought fifty plus years ago.
The title says it all.