Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs... (Score 1) 989

Who is over thinking things? A customer goes to an Apple store, or in-store Apple corner. And he sees in front of him:
The iPad 2 and The iPad.

What do you think he will prefer?

Not calling that a huge marketing mistake, seems silly to me.
When Steve went for the iPad 2 name, he asked for numbers.

But hey, don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful product. With super innovation with respect to screen and the required sw and hw to support that. I'm happy for that as it will lead to better products in the Android tablet ecosystem as well.
Android made a few mistakes Apple made in the early nineties, and will gain the technological benefit from that. However, it is sad to see that the no-longer-underdog biggest IT company in the world, also wants to resort to monopolistic tactics to even further its grip on the market.

And then I'm talking about the closed nature of the iPhone and the iPad, not opening it up. Locking customers in. Closing down installing applications except from the App Store, BY DEFAULT on the next version of MacOS. Sad!

The underdog has to be careful to not become the bully!

Comment Re:Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs... (Score 1) 989

You mean as in MacBook Pro? So it will be iPad Pro? ;) The point is, the name is something Steve would never have forgotten... it's the heart of the marketing ploy... Steve would use it in many sentences. A linguistic analysis of the past Steve performances would have been a ood idea for Tim.

Comment Re:Stupidity at Google, guess they have the money. (Score 1) 260

It just will not happen. Many embedded devices build today don't even enable the IPv6 stack while it's only a configurable option away in the Linux kernel. And these devices aren't even released yet. They will after release run for a decade in the infrastructure. Sure we tell people who make them to care. Yet mostly they have more important things to care about, as for example to get them working in the first place.

An extra screen in the config box to set a static IPv6 address on an embedded device? Not seen one yet... Why? Because these embedded boxes are typically run in a seperate VLAN in the company.

Corporate requirements for IPv6 are close to nonexistent, so nobody cares, nor will. It's not that I'm against IPv6, but one has to be realistic about what to expect from the rest of the world - and a drastic change without a game-changing urgent need is not one of these things.

And I'm still waiting for an example of any organization _ANY_ organization who needs to have in the order of 16 million directly communicating devices on their private network. Just a million will do as well. Probably Google is the only organization which comes close to that order.

And even for them, there is not really an important reason why their infrastructure could not be split up between the google search cloud as one 10.x.x.x range and the gmail infrastructure as another one, for example, as direct communication between the two is probably unnecessary and managed by separate teams anyway.

One could argue that the 'renumbering' is difficult. Yet the cluster which Google build handles server failover, swap-in and swap-out and data partitioning as one of the major features. Fail to see why they couldn't implement it on the 'private IPv4'-level either...

While I agree that on their scale, such an experiment might be valid, my guess is that it will remain as such;... an experiment with a lot of problems:
1) increased latency because of IPv6 tunneling - and Google is very latency conscious 2) less proven technology leading to exotic problems which show up even more at the Google scale - because nobody uses it

And for what?
To solve the 'we are too lazy to write a stupid IPv4 pool re-numbering/re-partitioning'-problem? While it can be done with a very small shell script(TM)? ;)

Comment Re:Stupidity at Google, guess they have the money. (Score 1) 260

The NAT traversal problem has been solved by a lot of services/applications. And instead of asking the entire world to change their home routers and throw away their embedded devices, NAT solves most issues more or less. IPv6 introduces a lot more problems than it solves. And privacy concerns is one of them.

Comment Filosophy and history (Score 3, Insightful) 467

I have been professionally teaching IT people since 1998. That's a really long time. It's not exactly the same as freshmen. Though I learned some things over the years:

Don't forget to talk about the history and the philosophy; while it might seem less important than getting everything in their heads; motivation is key. Because it's hard. Really hard; for them in the beginning. Motivation is everything. Don't waste your time with complicated stuff which can be easier (such as trying to fill their head with vim as joe is there too - if they like Linux, later they'll come back to vim).

Talk about the hippy-like Richard Stallman who got everything started and what the Free Software Foundation is all about; freedom in a digital future and such. And about the 'other side' within the community with the 'OpenSource' people who just think it's very convenient to be able to work together, but not morally wrong to write proprietary software. Whichever you prefer; 'welcome to the opensource community'.

Involve them.

If you can come up with something which can help them to accomplish something; go for it. Whether it's a LAMP box with Dyndns or something completely different. If they think something is 'stupid', point out that it's OpenSource, so they have the freedom to change it and fix it according to their wishes.

And don't forget: 'Have Fun!' ;-D

Good luck!
Jasper

Comment Just an improvement on a bad programming technique (Score 1) 298

Basically he starts out with doing the wrong thing and improves it:

Allocating too much memory in userspace so the system starts swapping.
And then he comes up with a more efficient way to use the often swapped in and out memory pages.

Better programming is: keep all the junk you need quick in real memory, leave enough space for filesystem caching as well and prevent the OS from most swap activity.

Slashdot Top Deals

Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. -- Ambrose Bierce

Working...