Exactly, this is more about the independence that could be given back for the few. My wife and child are basically dependent on me and only me due to having a mildly inconvenient 20 second partial seizure every 6 weeks or so. Since we have crap public transit in this town, when I leave for a conference or to work in a remote site for a couple days, she has to take time off work and we have to plan to have enough $itemX in the house.

Imagine similar issues for someone who can't have their vision corrected good enough or has some other mild disability. Or imagine if you could convince the elderly that this is a fantastic alternative to scraping up the side of their car on the garage every month and being constantly honked at.

I believe that the Google algorithm is taking lane-splitting motorcycles into account. If you watch the video from their engineers they definitely are aware and working on it, I can't remember the solution though.

This type of [large percentage] of people are within [range] of a [ubiquitous thing] could be said for a lot of things when you figure how population is distributed. You know how AT&T can claim they cover 90-some% of the population? They aren't lying, but that doesn't mean that huge chunks of land aren't dead to them, including plenty of places you drive on the way between places.

Go ask google maps to show you all the sears locations in some major metropolitan area. Now take the measure tool and swing 10 miles out in a circle... covers more than you'd think.

Lets take Minnesota, because it's close to me. The Minneapolis metro is only 30-some miles corner to corner along the interstates and I guarantee that there's a sears or kmart on each corner suburb and one in the middle someplace. Put one of either type in the top 10 non-twin cities towns and blammo, 90%.

Do your math again. He said 3 months 'ago' not after 3 months.

'a couple' could be construed to 2 or more, subtract those 3 months. This was beyond 1 year of use, so the 1 year warranty had expired.

Roundup is an herbicide, not a pesticide. While I wouldn't go drinking a shot of the stuff, it's pretty safe to people in the grand scheme of things.

While I'm not the OP...

GM has had an on-again-off-again affair with these things in various levels of interesting. My 98 Bonneville had a basic mode as did a lot of Pontiacs of the era, Grand Prix, Bonneville, Firebird. Various Caddilacs, Corvettes, Camaros, Colorados, Acadias... the list goes on and on in GM. Some did just speed, turn signals and warnings. You could go up into getting radio stations and more information. A lot of the new ones do nav if you've got it.

Creative google searching will give you BMW and probably more if you can read the steering wheel emblems. Apparently you can get it add on now days too, but that's probably just for things you'd find in the radio... i.e. station info and Nav.

Ok, my bad, I'll eat that crow. Last I heard they were buying them and I never did read the other side where it didn't happen, but I didn't go trolling (as in fishing, not green guy under the bridge) the net for the news.

That being said VMWare does still standardize on them and have been converting their old pre-built CentOS based appliances to SuSE. They also will give you a license for unlimited guests of SuSE-for-VM with the level of vSphere we buy here. Novell's website also references the SuSE-for-VM stuff a lot. It just felt like they owned them to me as a user :-P

Speaking from the small window of the world that I can see... tons. SuSE is the preferred distro for anything that VMWare puts out today since, you know, they own the distro. That means that all of the pre-built appliances for their management services and apps are built on SuSE. Beyond that it's the distribution that IBM uses on any strange architecture they decide to run linux on, for example Watson is SuSE running on Power. I figured it would have been AIX but I was wrong. Beyond that, I'm told that it's also the preferred internal architecture for SAP development and if they can suggest an OS to you for the app servers, that's what it is... although officially they are OS agnostic.

I don't think you get near any of those things without a pretty big checkbook, so I'll go ahead and call them professional.

You don't truly have QOS unless you control both ends of the pipe and either everything in between or a very rigid conduit structure. You can get close if you have a QOS trust with your ISP but you only get what they allow you to get.

*** disclaimer: I'm not a network engineer, but I sit next to a few of them.

If you have a home router with QOS you have a priority structure among the devices in your house but once the packet leaves your CPE it is (barring a trust relationship with them) at the mercy of the network operators. If your cable co decides that VoIP is lower priority than streaming Pay-per-view then you're hosed. Beyond that, if you're fighting at the fiber head-end before you get to a piece of equipment that can even QOS tag/prioritize then you can be fighting a losing battle with your bittorrent neighbor for supremacy on the line.

Beyond that, lets assume that everyone is 'trusting' your QOS. You've assigned traffic flow X a priority of 3, now you have to decide how much bandwidth it gets either in % or in througput, whether or not that's a hard cap or it's allowed to exceed if the bandwidth is there, etc.. Your ISP can set their own rules too.

QOS is a fine concept, but one that everyone must be in agreement on.

Then I suggest you never fly in a modern commercial airliner. From an uncle's stories flying many an Airbus for United, you have 0 ability to perform an evasive maneuver in one that is outside the bounds of 'comfort for the passengers.' Want to throw it into a dive or a hard corner? Nope, that must be an incorrect command from the yoke, we'll just go ahead and give you the predetermined limit for that action instead. Here you go, a nice steady decline, that's what you really meant.

Your garden variety Cessna isn't in that category, but those big ones you've actually been in are worse than a car for absolute control.

Once again, on paper. I suggest you go out to the formations where they *do* fracking and take a drive around. You'll find more than a few locations where good chunks of land has been completely sterilized by the truck-driver that got tired of waiting in line at the disposal station and dumped in the ditch. Either that or his company told him to drive 'over that hill there' and dump it out so they could get back to drilling.

I don't know what the hell they put into or take out of the wells, but the effects are pretty indisputable when they're staring you in the face. Maybe your additives are ok, but some others apparently aren't, or create bad things when they are mixed.

The rapid expansion of drilling up here in the 2nd largest production state in the union has meant that the enforcement agencies are ill equipped to handle the volume of complaints. They act on as many as they can to show that enforcement does happen but most just get filed away. End result: you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it.

You should really come look at what 'current' VMware software looks like and the directions they're going. Things may be further along in 5.1 but my info is good as of the latest patch to 5.0.

vCenter is offered as an appliance VM (vCSA) that is good for many small-medium shops, limited by the database connectivity and integration with other non-essential VMware tools and partner software. While it doesn't yet have the integration with all the addons, they're coming supposedly. It also brings along a web interface good for 90% of your day-to-day, which while built on (what I think is) a crappy framework, it does work. I'd venture a guess that SRM is almost ready for the vCSA environment as it's basically written in Perl. I think EMC has their integration bits working in the web client, and NetApp said they were close.

They don't exactly roll their own web service either, it's tomcat everywhere you look for the web services, all but the esxi hosts require AD integration for authentication and vC uses an ADAM database for linking servers together. I have heard a couple of grumbles about people not liking the windows servers for their VC a year ago, but honestly who has a totally non-windows environment these days?

I'd love to see the whole stack as a group of drop-in appliance VMs, but then again, this is job security right :-P Seriously though, they need a lot of work around the edges for that to happen. It's a major chore if you want to tweak stuff up like change all the certs to trusted certs with your internal enterprise CA or purchased PKI. It'd be cooler if it was easier, but it's not there yet.

This is exactly what has been going on in the enterprise storage space for a while. I only know much about two vendors, but they both have a solution like this. High end IBM storage has EasyTier, which while originally for the mix of FCAL/SAS to SATA, it works with SSD too, and in the latest revs all 3 tiers at the same time. NetApp used to have a PAM card which is now called... FlashCache? FlexCache? F-Something-Cache anyway, which is essentially an SSD drive on a PCI card.

Good to see the high end tech being applied to consumer level workloads.

I hope so, or at least that there would be a level of license to use a semi-autonomous car, there are people that this would help if so. For example, my wife cannot legally drive a car today because of a seizure disorder*. If there was a license that required a lower standard but could only be used in an auto-car, I would buy one, cost be damned.

In my town public transport is a joke, and doesn't even come within a mile of my house or her job, and that's at a school. Other days she could have to work at a sporting venue across town, or work later than a bus travels. The only reliable way to get to and from your job for her occupation is to drive yourself. Some days of the year it is too cold to bike, and honestly in her condition, there are times that biking across an intersection could be deadly... hell a fully functional person could be in trouble crossing the intersection of two "4 lane + turning lanes" roads.

I wait for this day in great anticipation. If it's only 5 years away, I will rejoice.

*This is commonly called epilepsy, but this is not shake on the floor epilepsy, just a short term (15 second) period of time where she isn't under complete control, once every couple of weeks. Unfortunately, it happened once at the wrong time before her license was revoked, and she almost died, thank the engineers at Nissan that she didn't. Thank her partial control for not ending someone else.

Speaking from VMWare land here, YMMV if you're Hyper-V (more on that later)

What we do is a soft lock on our first AD server, SQL box behind VirtualCenter* and vCenter* server so that they are always on host #1. If there's some maintenance going on, we have to disable that rule just to take down host #1. It will move if that box fails, but not before. In the case of a dark datacenter we know to turn that box on, connect to it directly and fire those three boxes up in order. Beyond that it's back to business as usual.

There's a doc from VMWare about why to keep one physical AD server, but I can't remember why.

Now if you're on Hyper-V you get to deal with one of the stupidest architectures, in my opinion. If you're using the clustered filesystem, you need AD to mount it. If your AD server is on the clustered filesystem, you can't mount the shared FS. I guess you *really* need a physical AD server in that case. Why exactly do you need something so high level as AD to get to something as low-level as a filesystem that's behind something as low-level as the hypervisor is beyond me. I could see for high level, tightly integrated services, but at this level it's just bad design. /rant

* we don't do that any more because we've had a run on bad HBAs that cause SAN issues, and there are problems managing your hosts on the san when your san is having problems. They're still virtual, just not on the cluster, on a standalone box on the side built for 'special' cases.