I think "Cloud" is less about physical architecture and more about feature set. When I think "Cloud" I think dynamic, quickly reconfigurable, essentially "limitless". Where I work we're moving away from a traditional model where applications are installed on their own dedicated servers with dedicated DB and FS storage to a Cloud model where VMs can be dynamically allocated in seconds, cloned from images and ready to roll. Storage is via EC2 style no-sql object storage and doesn't need to be pre-provisioned. For a small shop this probably doesn't sound very exciting but when you're in an environment with tens of thousands of machines and are used to multi-week wait times for approval, purchasing and install of new hardware it's a pretty big shift.
So it's not the redundancy, or even use of VMs that's interesting, it's the pooling of resources - having compute & storage be essentially utilities you can take as little or as much of as you need. Places like Google have been doing this for a long time, but it's only recently becoming mainstream in other orgs.
You just said "two or more out of date". The bug affects CS5. CS6 came out this month. See the problem now? Their support for a product lasts exactly up until the next one comes out, and that's not cool.
Netflix on Tivo is abysmal, which is a shame because I love Tivo. Netflix on everything else (PS3, Xbox, PC, Roku, etc,) is pretty sweet. I bought a couple of WDTV streamers for under $100 each and use those for Netflix & local media streaming, keeping the Tivo for recorded stuff. It's a shame, but I have yet to find any solution which really works well for multi room cablecard DVR, network file playback & streaming.
(and yes, I've looked at WMC, XBMC, Boxee and pretty much everything else - they all fall down somewhere).
The City certainly isn't car-free (at least it wasn't last time I was there), but the congestion charge with a lack of parking makes it pretty impractical to drive around there too much. The extra airport security is there largely because the US would ban incoming flights from LHR if it wasn't.
I personally don't have a problem with the cameras (you are in public after all) but the monitoring/logging is crazy and makes me glad I don't live there any more.
Well by that measure I'm not married either. Heterosexual atheist couple, non-religious ceremony. That said, I take the vows damn seriously, and I consider them sacred. Just not blessed by his noodly appendage.
In the streets? Maybe not. But there are PLENTY of employable (and even employed) people in the US who don't have enough food to feed themselves of their families. The numbers are truly staggering - literally millions of Americans can't afford to eat as much as they need to. That's why places like community foodbanks need to exist. Of course because these people aren't out on the street begging people like you don't think they exist - but they do. I've volunteered at local foodbanks in my area and the stories are heartbreaking - these are normal, decent hardworking people who through a series of events find themselves without the money they need and without help from the state or anyone else, and have to rely on charity. It's an absolute embarrassment to this country and something we should all be utterly ashamed of.
Fair enough, I clearly misunderstood your post. Your use of that phrase made me assume you believed it had some accuracy. That said, all three of your examples of things which would "make" you use Windows are also available on OSX;) The reality is there's very little which is only available on Windows these days - but there's a lot which isn't available on Linux.
What I think really pushes people towards Microsoft who don't have a strong opinion (and everyone on Slashdot does have a strong opinion, one way or the other!) is the price and availability of hardware bundled with Windows vs that bundled with OSX or something else. The vast majority of regular consumers go buy a laptop based on their budget, what color it is and what the sales person in Best Buy recommends. Statistically it will probably come with Windows and they'll probably never change it because they just don't care that much.
It's been said, people use iOS and OSX because they *want* to. People use Windows because they *have* to.
And like all generalizations, it's a gross oversimplification (to the point of just being wrong). On the desktop I use Windows because I want to - it's not perfect but out of the available options it's the one I prefer. For mobile I use iOS because I want to, again it's not perfect but overall it's my preference (Win Phone 7 is a very close second and is certainly on my radar). On the server I'd never run anything except Linux.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone's wants and needs are the same as yours:)
Why do you think that all large corps have these kind of attitudes? I work for a large multinational, you've heard of us - I'm a software dev team lead. We totally encourage people to take their vacations - we actually have policies in place to stop people skipping them.
It's good for the employees and good for the company too. We work hard to hire the best people (it's certainly not easy) and the last thing we want is to burn them out or have them make mistakes because they're overtired. On the other hand, people get sick and people quit. It's important for us to make sure our teams still function without the key players, and vacations are a great way of figuring out if someone has unique knowledge or experience they should share more broadly in case they have to be out unexpectedly.
Yeah, good luck getting any promotions, raises, or any kind of a career working 15 mins a day. Or for that matter by treating your employer like that. Guess what - employment is a two way street. If you hate your employer so much that you are just looking for ways of slacking off why are you even working there? They should treat you with respect and you them.
Bottom line - you should enjoy your work, and workplace, if not you're wasting your life.
I'm just pointing out that if they'd taken one or two more sentences to precisely describe it, nobody would be in any doubt. So instead of looking at the law, they're looking at federalist papers and such that only represents the opinions of some of the founders, not something actually agreed on and passed as law.
I agree with your points - but it raises further questions for me.
Why are the founders' opinions so important? Why do we spend so much time, effort and money arguing about what some people thought about something in the past rather than deciding what is the correct decision for today, in our society?
As someone who moved to the US from a country without a formal written constitution I find the obsession with it's minutiae somewhat baffling - it's treated the same way as the Bible, as some kind of holy truth handed down from a divine being. In fact it's just a bunch of opinions of some people who happened to be in charge of the country a bunch of years ago. Those opinions could be irrelevant to today's USA, they could even be wrong (*gasp*) and might even have been wrong back then! Why we give those opinions more weight than our own (and those of the leaders we actually elected) is a bit of a mystery to me.
This isn't to say I disagree with having an enshrined set of rights and principles for government, I actually think it's a good thing. But if something in it is ambiguous or unclear (or simply outdated) it seems to me far more sensible to just decide how it should be rewritten (starting from a clean slate) than try to guess what the person who originally wrote it meant - it really doesn't matter.
So this isn't for you, move along. A lot of people do watch TV though, and so some of these advances might be interesting for them. Speaking for myself, I consider HD essential and have done so for years. 3D is another matter, no real interest at this point (mainly because of the glasses and angle of view) but we'll see what comes along tech wise.
Sometimes, what we have is good enough.
And sometimes what's good enough for one person isn't for another.
1. Outlook does autocomplete of addresses - has done for years. 2. Undo cannot be provided by the OS because the concept of application state (and what constitutes a previous state, and how to revert to it) is private and specific to each application. 3. Not sure what your comment is re: fonts, but certainly in Windows every application has access to the same set of system wide fonts. Word doesn't have it's own fonts (although it does have own styles, which are different and by necessity Word specific).
Actually I'm pretty sure it is. They didn't say "300% MORE than they used to", which would have been wrong. 50% of $100m is $50m, 100% of $100m is $100m, 200% of $100m is $200m, and so on.
PAX is explicitly not a trade show - nothing new is announced there and the trade presence is typically companies re-using their demos and booths from the previous E3 as well as a bunch of indies who are too small for a real trade show. PAX is a community gathering, the panels and other community events are way more interesting than the expo floor.
Speak for yourself. I'm a software developer with an interest in UI design and there's no way I'd let myself or any of my team design an interface without someone who knows what they're doing getting involved at least in an advisory capacity. The average developer has no clue whatsoever how to build a good UI, and that's fine - the average UI designer has no idea how to write c++.
I'm sick and tired of the mantra that it's everyone else who's responsible for bad software - the designers, or the managers, or the marketing people, or whoever. Anyone except the precious engineer who, simply left alone, would produce the most perfect god-like software known to man. That's just arrogant crap.
Oh, and I like the new Firefox interface - it's a great improvement. I can't say I give a damn about any of the things you say are missing.
Good grief with the Kindle thing again. It happened once - Amazon discovered that they had sold a version of a book they weren't licensed to sell, in other words they had broken the law. So they revoked the title and gave everyone a refund. There were other (legal) versions of the same title available so anyone who cared could just rebuy a different version and carry on with their lives. They've also said that if the same situation comes up in the future they'll handle it differently. What more do you want? (I'd also point out that this was years ago, and Kindle was far from the dominant eBook reader at the time).
I use a fair bit of software which isn't available on anything except Win and OSX (e.g. Lightroom, Photoshop, Ableton, etc), so that narrows me down to two options. I've tried OSX on a number of occasions (had a Mac for about a year) but I just don't like it. Too many little UI niggles that annoy me, and to be honest it's just not worth relearning everything. I've been using Windows for close to 20 years now and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I've had no significant malware problems, performance is good, reliability is excellent.
I do run Linux on my server (command line only), it's the obvious choice there and I have no problems with it, and I'd probably choose a modern desktop Linux distro over OSX if Windows suddenly wasn't an option. But really it boils down to "it does everything I need & works well, why change?".
I've had professionally maintained and supported enterprise level RHL servers kernal panic. I've had OSX lockup/reboot/crash. I've had iOS randomly restart. I've had embedded Linux in a Tivo get funky and need a power cycle. In short - I have never seen an OS which hasn't, at one time or another, needed the three finger salute. I run Win 7 on most of my machines at home, and while it's not perfect stability wise, it's certainly no worse than anything else I've ever used. The uptime is usually measured in weeks and only interrupted by updates.
Similarly, the only printers iDevices will link to are Apple's proprietary Wireless printers. If you try using a different printer that you already have, you're out of luck.
Huh? Apple don't even make printers (last I checked). As it happens I can print to my 3 year old Brother laser printer from my iPad just fine because CUPS supports AirPrint. Zero setup - thanks Linux!
I'm not an Apple fanboy (I sold my only Mac a long time ago, resisted the iPod until the competition went bust and have a general dislike for OSX) but I do have an iPad, which I use every day. Multiple times. In fact I use it more frequently than my main desktop PC (although not for as long at a time).
For quick 5 minute web lookups, playing a game, checking twitter, etc it's perfect. I know my wife also wouldn't part with hers. If I had to pick between an iPad and a PC I'd go with the PC for sure, but I'm not so sure about her. As you mention netbooks, we both also have those - basically never used since the iPads came along. Now _that's_ a category who's time has passed.
I would think if the system is "mission critical" then step 1 is failover to the DR host, and step 2 is then restore from backup. The contents of things like/bin is pretty static (between system updates it should be entirely static) so it's not like you have transactional data to try and rescue.
Slashdot Mirror
I think "Cloud" is less about physical architecture and more about feature set. When I think "Cloud" I think dynamic, quickly reconfigurable, essentially "limitless". Where I work we're moving away from a traditional model where applications are installed on their own dedicated servers with dedicated DB and FS storage to a Cloud model where VMs can be dynamically allocated in seconds, cloned from images and ready to roll. Storage is via EC2 style no-sql object storage and doesn't need to be pre-provisioned. For a small shop this probably doesn't sound very exciting but when you're in an environment with tens of thousands of machines and are used to multi-week wait times for approval, purchasing and install of new hardware it's a pretty big shift.
So it's not the redundancy, or even use of VMs that's interesting, it's the pooling of resources - having compute & storage be essentially utilities you can take as little or as much of as you need. Places like Google have been doing this for a long time, but it's only recently becoming mainstream in other orgs.
You just said "two or more out of date". The bug affects CS5. CS6 came out this month. See the problem now? Their support for a product lasts exactly up until the next one comes out, and that's not cool.
Netflix on Tivo is abysmal, which is a shame because I love Tivo. Netflix on everything else (PS3, Xbox, PC, Roku, etc,) is pretty sweet. I bought a couple of WDTV streamers for under $100 each and use those for Netflix & local media streaming, keeping the Tivo for recorded stuff. It's a shame, but I have yet to find any solution which really works well for multi room cablecard DVR, network file playback & streaming.
(and yes, I've looked at WMC, XBMC, Boxee and pretty much everything else - they all fall down somewhere).
The City certainly isn't car-free (at least it wasn't last time I was there), but the congestion charge with a lack of parking makes it pretty impractical to drive around there too much. The extra airport security is there largely because the US would ban incoming flights from LHR if it wasn't.
I personally don't have a problem with the cameras (you are in public after all) but the monitoring/logging is crazy and makes me glad I don't live there any more.
Assuming they use the same tech as they do for games, it's orders of magnitude better than VNC.
Well by that measure I'm not married either. Heterosexual atheist couple, non-religious ceremony. That said, I take the vows damn seriously, and I consider them sacred. Just not blessed by his noodly appendage.
In the streets? Maybe not. But there are PLENTY of employable (and even employed) people in the US who don't have enough food to feed themselves of their families. The numbers are truly staggering - literally millions of Americans can't afford to eat as much as they need to. That's why places like community foodbanks need to exist. Of course because these people aren't out on the street begging people like you don't think they exist - but they do. I've volunteered at local foodbanks in my area and the stories are heartbreaking - these are normal, decent hardworking people who through a series of events find themselves without the money they need and without help from the state or anyone else, and have to rely on charity. It's an absolute embarrassment to this country and something we should all be utterly ashamed of.
Fair enough, I clearly misunderstood your post. Your use of that phrase made me assume you believed it had some accuracy. That said, all three of your examples of things which would "make" you use Windows are also available on OSX ;) The reality is there's very little which is only available on Windows these days - but there's a lot which isn't available on Linux.
What I think really pushes people towards Microsoft who don't have a strong opinion (and everyone on Slashdot does have a strong opinion, one way or the other!) is the price and availability of hardware bundled with Windows vs that bundled with OSX or something else. The vast majority of regular consumers go buy a laptop based on their budget, what color it is and what the sales person in Best Buy recommends. Statistically it will probably come with Windows and they'll probably never change it because they just don't care that much.
And like all generalizations, it's a gross oversimplification (to the point of just being wrong). On the desktop I use Windows because I want to - it's not perfect but out of the available options it's the one I prefer. For mobile I use iOS because I want to, again it's not perfect but overall it's my preference (Win Phone 7 is a very close second and is certainly on my radar). On the server I'd never run anything except Linux.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone's wants and needs are the same as yours :)
Why do you think that all large corps have these kind of attitudes? I work for a large multinational, you've heard of us - I'm a software dev team lead. We totally encourage people to take their vacations - we actually have policies in place to stop people skipping them.
It's good for the employees and good for the company too. We work hard to hire the best people (it's certainly not easy) and the last thing we want is to burn them out or have them make mistakes because they're overtired. On the other hand, people get sick and people quit. It's important for us to make sure our teams still function without the key players, and vacations are a great way of figuring out if someone has unique knowledge or experience they should share more broadly in case they have to be out unexpectedly.
Yeah, good luck getting any promotions, raises, or any kind of a career working 15 mins a day. Or for that matter by treating your employer like that. Guess what - employment is a two way street. If you hate your employer so much that you are just looking for ways of slacking off why are you even working there? They should treat you with respect and you them.
Bottom line - you should enjoy your work, and workplace, if not you're wasting your life.
I'm just pointing out that if they'd taken one or two more sentences to precisely describe it, nobody would be in any doubt. So instead of looking at the law, they're looking at federalist papers and such that only represents the opinions of some of the founders, not something actually agreed on and passed as law.
I agree with your points - but it raises further questions for me.
Why are the founders' opinions so important? Why do we spend so much time, effort and money arguing about what some people thought about something in the past rather than deciding what is the correct decision for today, in our society?
As someone who moved to the US from a country without a formal written constitution I find the obsession with it's minutiae somewhat baffling - it's treated the same way as the Bible, as some kind of holy truth handed down from a divine being. In fact it's just a bunch of opinions of some people who happened to be in charge of the country a bunch of years ago. Those opinions could be irrelevant to today's USA, they could even be wrong (*gasp*) and might even have been wrong back then! Why we give those opinions more weight than our own (and those of the leaders we actually elected) is a bit of a mystery to me.
This isn't to say I disagree with having an enshrined set of rights and principles for government, I actually think it's a good thing. But if something in it is ambiguous or unclear (or simply outdated) it seems to me far more sensible to just decide how it should be rewritten (starting from a clean slate) than try to guess what the person who originally wrote it meant - it really doesn't matter.
A few cartoons, 1 heavy cg movie about blue people, and a bunch of schlock that looks like garbage because the 3d was faked in
So what have you watched apart from the Smurfs movie?
I hardly watch TV anyway
So this isn't for you, move along. A lot of people do watch TV though, and so some of these advances might be interesting for them. Speaking for myself, I consider HD essential and have done so for years. 3D is another matter, no real interest at this point (mainly because of the glasses and angle of view) but we'll see what comes along tech wise.
Sometimes, what we have is good enough.
And sometimes what's good enough for one person isn't for another.
1. Outlook does autocomplete of addresses - has done for years.
2. Undo cannot be provided by the OS because the concept of application state (and what constitutes a previous state, and how to revert to it) is private and specific to each application.
3. Not sure what your comment is re: fonts, but certainly in Windows every application has access to the same set of system wide fonts. Word doesn't have it's own fonts (although it does have own styles, which are different and by necessity Word specific).
Actually I'm pretty sure it is. They didn't say "300% MORE than they used to", which would have been wrong. 50% of $100m is $50m, 100% of $100m is $100m, 200% of $100m is $200m, and so on.
In fact, Wolfram Alpha confirms it!
PAX is explicitly not a trade show - nothing new is announced there and the trade presence is typically companies re-using their demos and booths from the previous E3 as well as a bunch of indies who are too small for a real trade show. PAX is a community gathering, the panels and other community events are way more interesting than the expo floor.
Speak for yourself. I'm a software developer with an interest in UI design and there's no way I'd let myself or any of my team design an interface without someone who knows what they're doing getting involved at least in an advisory capacity. The average developer has no clue whatsoever how to build a good UI, and that's fine - the average UI designer has no idea how to write c++.
I'm sick and tired of the mantra that it's everyone else who's responsible for bad software - the designers, or the managers, or the marketing people, or whoever. Anyone except the precious engineer who, simply left alone, would produce the most perfect god-like software known to man. That's just arrogant crap.
Oh, and I like the new Firefox interface - it's a great improvement. I can't say I give a damn about any of the things you say are missing.
Good grief with the Kindle thing again. It happened once - Amazon discovered that they had sold a version of a book they weren't licensed to sell, in other words they had broken the law. So they revoked the title and gave everyone a refund. There were other (legal) versions of the same title available so anyone who cared could just rebuy a different version and carry on with their lives. They've also said that if the same situation comes up in the future they'll handle it differently. What more do you want? (I'd also point out that this was years ago, and Kindle was far from the dominant eBook reader at the time).
I use a fair bit of software which isn't available on anything except Win and OSX (e.g. Lightroom, Photoshop, Ableton, etc), so that narrows me down to two options. I've tried OSX on a number of occasions (had a Mac for about a year) but I just don't like it. Too many little UI niggles that annoy me, and to be honest it's just not worth relearning everything. I've been using Windows for close to 20 years now and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I've had no significant malware problems, performance is good, reliability is excellent.
I do run Linux on my server (command line only), it's the obvious choice there and I have no problems with it, and I'd probably choose a modern desktop Linux distro over OSX if Windows suddenly wasn't an option. But really it boils down to "it does everything I need & works well, why change?".
I've had professionally maintained and supported enterprise level RHL servers kernal panic. I've had OSX lockup/reboot/crash. I've had iOS randomly restart. I've had embedded Linux in a Tivo get funky and need a power cycle. In short - I have never seen an OS which hasn't, at one time or another, needed the three finger salute. I run Win 7 on most of my machines at home, and while it's not perfect stability wise, it's certainly no worse than anything else I've ever used. The uptime is usually measured in weeks and only interrupted by updates.
Huh? Apple don't even make printers (last I checked). As it happens I can print to my 3 year old Brother laser printer from my iPad just fine because CUPS supports AirPrint. Zero setup - thanks Linux!
Bullshit.
I'm not an Apple fanboy (I sold my only Mac a long time ago, resisted the iPod until the competition went bust and have a general dislike for OSX) but I do have an iPad, which I use every day. Multiple times. In fact I use it more frequently than my main desktop PC (although not for as long at a time).
For quick 5 minute web lookups, playing a game, checking twitter, etc it's perfect. I know my wife also wouldn't part with hers. If I had to pick between an iPad and a PC I'd go with the PC for sure, but I'm not so sure about her. As you mention netbooks, we both also have those - basically never used since the iPads came along. Now _that's_ a category who's time has passed.
I would think if the system is "mission critical" then step 1 is failover to the DR host, and step 2 is then restore from backup. The contents of things like /bin is pretty static (between system updates it should be entirely static) so it's not like you have transactional data to try and rescue.
Sure it's an acceptable English word. It's just the wrong one.