He may be right, right now.

That's because people have historically coded their apps with the assumption that the database/hard drive/web server/IP address would always be there to write to or read from. They're also written with vertical scalability, i.e., if things are slow then throw faster hardware/more IOPS at it. All of these criteria vmware is good at handling.

People are now writing simple apps that use ridiculously complicated frameworks to ensure things work even when they're pear shaped. Most of those apps are written so scalability is horizontal. More speed comes from throwing more hardware at it. This also increases reliability.

These are usually done by new startups because they have specific needs (avoiding paying a SAN vendor) and skillsets (coders who don't understand, or don't know about the availability of a hardware solution so they code something in software.) The thing is, yesterdays startup is tomorrows enterprise. They won't migrate away from whatever cloud stack platform they're running without serious thoughts to the problems it may cause.

I'd guess one of the reasons a vmware CEO would say openstack isn't a competitor is they're owned by EMC, a SAN vendor.

Having said that, we evaluated openstack for our business and didn't like the rough edges in places. We're using a mix of vmware and proxmox right now.

If you ignore the reincarnation aspect and treat it as separate actors playing the same role you might ask if it's time for James Bond to be female?

It might be time for stories to be written about female secret agents, but that doesn't mean the one agent you've written about has to change genders.

BTW, nothing wrong with changing genders and in scifi scenarios where it was already written (lots of Ian Banks books for instance) it's welcome that the character might become female or male. If anyone wants to tackle Culture stories as a serial scifi show I would love it (as long as they didn't ruin it)

I think there is plenty of things wrong with doctor who currently (plot wise) that don't involve gender bending. If they introduced a female doctor it would mean at least two years of stories pretty much devoted to aspects and repercussions of the change. Even if they choose not to address it there would be an uproar from fans about not addressing it, and there would always be the undercurrent of novelty from it.. hehe, look at us we're edgy because we recast the Doctor as female.

There is a giant untapped group of people, the gallifreyans who are all time travelers. Some of them were female. They could get their own spinoff show. I know they're all dead now in the doctor who universe but there was a time when they weren't dead and the spinoff could be during that period.

I've been considering a kickstarter for a new version of SMTP, while at least for the moment leaving IMAP alone. Specifically, the way headers are appended to mail in transit is unsupportable in a secure environment. The things I'm considering is that there doesn't have to be a flag day, you just need the vendors of several heavily used MTA's to support it as an option, then once 99% (or whatever number your company deems appropriate) of your email uses the new format you turn off the old.

This was poopoo'd in the past because there were 10s if not hundreds of thousands of email servers. Now people have pretty much stopped hosting most email and turned it over to google, yahoo, microsoft or one of the other major players. Therefore you're no longer faced with trying to get everyone to change things. You only need 5 major companies to change, and hopefully they're interested in the new protocol as well (nobody likes SMTP as it is, the question is can you get everyone to agree to some consensus of next generation email then move forward with it)

DJB's pull based email thing could be a part of this, maybe not the exact idea but something along those lines:

DJB's IM2000 (http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html). While I don't think all mail should be stored on the originating server, I think a mix could be used to provide more flexibility. Mailing lists could leave all the mail on the server, since a bunch of readers never read every message there isn't a point of exploding it out to thousands of mailboxes (except for reliability, and that could be gained by mail->nntp for public mailing lists)

Requiring domain keys could also be useful, since headers wouldn't be modified, just appended and signed.

If people are interested in crypto/privacy aspects, emails that aren't delivered but instead picked up by the recipients don't leak metadata like To, From.

It's probably best to approach this through the IETF, despite failures to make broad sweeping changes in the past, a new working group might be the best choice to get the interested parties involved.

Tangent here:

I also think that email clients need to be brought back and worked on. Thunderbird died because of two reasons: 1. Mozilla couldn't find a way to monitize it, and 2. Their biggest email competitor (gmail) and biggest contributor (google search) had already found a way to monetize email and thunderbird wasn't seeing significant updates at that point.

Other stuff I'd like to see in thunderbird:

Contact pictures on email (not something I think I would use, but nice for people used to facebook/twitter/etc). Integrated IM/Skype/Phone so you can effortlessly change the medium you're communicating through. Also the ability to send calendar events through IM or SMS would be nice.

Real synchronization. That includes plugins and every setting via a service like weave that is secure. This would also sync your passwords and gpg keys. Actually a generic weave-like framework that could be integrated with pidgin, thunderbird and other open source apps to sync across machines would be great. That would also fix major issues with pidgin's OTR.

So the reason I never kickstarted it is the same reason Mozilla doesn't work on thunderbird anymore. I have no idea how to monetize it in a way that would be long term sustainable. Users hate adds, they hate paying for software. Maybe an addon store, but that just means you're subbing the good development work to other people and then making the users pay to fix the things wrong with your app.

They are actually, but every minute they're not paid has been negotiated by the airline unions. If you've ever had your flight delayed due to maintenance after they've pushed back from the gate? Yeah, that's an asshole pilot and cabin crew who knew the plane wasn't ready to fly, but wanted to start the clock on their paycheck.

They don't get paid until the doors are closed and they're away from the gate, so sitting on the runway with no air conditioning is better for them than delaying your boarding. I won't say they don't deserve to be paid, but inconveniencing 300 people to please 10 isn't the right way to do things. Then topping that with federal laws that don't allow people to get up and go to the bathroom, or turn their phones on because the plane is "taxiing" technically even though it's sitting there with the wheels off, or whatever they're doing to it.

I googled for this and don't see anything about it. I personally would like to opt-out of anything but certified letters, but I think the government sends things like Jury duty notices in regular mail and I don't want to go to jail for non-compliance.

If you're a company and anyone associates to your corporate network using an Android phone, you've now got a problem.

And how are you supposed to stop this with policy other than blanket banning android phones? Ignore the fact that google is "good guy google" and think about what happens if the database is somehow exposed to hackers, or if there is a malicious google employee who decides to sell 1.4 million wifi passwords?

I would have rather seen radios that bonded on 4 40Mhz channels than one 160Mhz channel. Maybe the overhead is lower because you can do all your FEC at once, but it means you can't work around noise by grabbing two low 40Mhz and two high 40Mhz. Or even better if you could break it into 8 20Mhz channels.

Maybe they're doing all or nothing because there is already so much overlap in 5Ghz than it's not worth frequency hopping or whatever, or maybe they're trying to keep the chip cost down so people can afford to buy consumer grade devices.

There is starting to be a market for nuclear cleanup. Just think how many companies out there are researching, or have a product that helps to mitigate oil spills? People dump millions of barrels of oil into the ocean then go out and try to clean it up.. we're still using it though, even though it's really nasty and really hard to clean.

The same can be said of nuclear waste. If they start handing out multi-billion dollar contracts to clean things up then shit will get cleaned up. Impractical methods of removing nuclear contaminants from soil and other material already exist, but nobody can afford to use them on a massive scale. Not to mention they would be a huge waste of energy.

I guess what I'm saying is that I understand their wanting to hold for now. Just letting things decay naturally saves tons of work and increases the safety. It also allows time for scientific or engineering work that may make the job easier.

As far as I know it's just a coincidence, but I like that the student is also named Farnsworth.

For what it's worth, it's not providing any more bandwidth than the old technique, which had 80 channels at 10Gbps each. What it's doing is, instead of saying I have 80 channels, each of them needs to be clean in order to pass 10Gbps, it's saying I have these big channels which are noisy, but we have ways to mitigate that. Once all our mitigation is done you can expect 800Gbps (that may or may not be with error correction/other overhead factored in. Depends on the marketing department I suppose, but usually with fiber they give max achievable throughput)

The advantage in running unchannelized is on each 10Gbps channel they were holding extra bandwidth in reserve for error correction/overhead. With this you get the whole thing and your error correction is done on the aggregate, with less probable overhead and such.

I'm typing this on my windows 8 laptop right now. I will say that metro occasionally does something pretty but is largely useless. I usually get into it by accident and not by choice. I consider it kind of like the media center interface for windows 7. Something you might engage by accident and marvel at for a moment, then try your best to turn off (at least if you're using XBMC or some other media center replacement).

Reasons for using it: It really is faster than windows 7 at several tasks. Booting for one. My laptop has an EFI bios and I installed a solid state drive. It boots in 2 seconds. It also updates far less frequently than win7 and has to reboot less, but that may be just because they haven't found all the bugs yet.

Way to use it: Get classic shell and configure it to skip metro

Things I hate about it: The windows 7 search functionality is broken from the start button. I think this is a classic shell limitation. I believe if you actually use metro and type a search it will be like win7. Basically it doesn't properly search for programs and other things so if you're used to hitting windows key and begin typing name until completion happens, that doesn't work right.

I don't remember the term for it, but if you own a business it can be said that it makes a profit, but at the same time it loses money. The reason for this is it's not making enough money vs what an investor would get putting his money in a different investment. So let's say you're making your expenses plus 5%, the investor is mad because he might get a 6% interest rate if he loaned his money to someone else.

I suspect the same thing would apply to generating electricity specifically to mine bitcoins. You might find several more valuable things to invest your electricity in (or you might not, since the value of bitcoins fluctuate)

I haven't read the article so I'm not sure of the details, but you generally don't need to be able to read all the cards. Lots of cards are distinguishable from each other. An 8 for instance looks nothing like an Ace. A face card can easily be distinguished from a regular card. You could tell if the card was black or red even if you couldn't see the suite.

With Texas holdem and other community card games, it's easier to see the important details. Does he have a pair? Does he have a flush? A straight? An Ace or a face card? You could at least have some confidence of what they don't have.

I have a windows 7 box at home.. huge beast of a machine that I use to play games. I've got windows 8 on a laptop to experiment with. What I love so far about windows 8 is that it boots on my laptop in 2 seconds (with a solid state drive). That's from power-on to usable. Linux Mint came close to that speed but not quite.

The laptop is for taking meeting notes, reading email, taking on trips, etc.

My desktop at work is a Linux box. I fired ubuntu a few years back and went to straight debian. This wasn't as bad as it sounds, and with 3rd party repos for most of the big apps it never felt out of date. I occasionally would package things or repair packages if I wanted to deploy to servers or help with debian community stuff, or just wanted to make sure whatever it was installed cleanly.

Recently I upgraded the computer at work and decided to try ubuntu again, but while I was feeling experimental I decided to try KDE again too. I've been a gnome user for years because I wanted something unobtrusive that just worked. Like CDE on Solaris (most of the time, long ago).. slightly bloated but quick, something where terminal + firefox + thunderbird + pidgin just worked.

I hadn't used KDE since probably before KDE3 days.. so I hadn't given it a fair shake in a long time.. I'd given windows and MacOS X more of a shakedown than KDE, so it was only fair to try it again. It was hideously terribly ugly.

But everything I hated about it has become easily customizable via the menus, and the terminal feels like it's made for developers or power users. Everything has a power user tweak or a way to get rid of it, if you decide it's something you don't want. My last big gripe was I couldn't tell the dumb ATI driver which monitor was really primary so it always put my taskbar on an old 21" 4:3 I have turned sideways. I wanted it in my middle monitor where it's easy to navigate.

KDE lets you drag it to another monitor and put it wherever you want.

So, while it's pointless to ask slashdot for opinions on these things, I feel like I've tried all the OS's recently and Linux is mature enough to be a primary desktop OS for anyone, if that's what you want.

It doesn't need to be reliable enough to work 100%. At a certain accuracy level it could be enough to trigger secondary authentication.

I tend to walk away from my computer at work for trivial reasons, and I don't always lock the screen. So I started thinking about this a few years ago. I was thinking bluetooth triangulation might be good, but that could be defeated by leaving your keys on your desk or a few other means. So I thought "what if the computer could detect my keyboard rhythm to a certain level of confidence and lock the screen if it didn't think it was me.

Couple this with webcams and other things and you would have a pretty reliable method to stop casual snoopers and pranksters.

So how about this:

if Rhythm doesn't match:
Checks for proximity of bluetooth device
Turns on webcam to check for basic similarities
checks other computers you manage to see if you're actively using one of those

finally:
locks the screen