Actually...

I've seen that too...

British my ASCII.

I'm Canadian. Born and bred.

Subitting in word

Submitting in word is bad. (.rtf or drew bludgeons you!) But some of us old geezers still use it for writing in. (Spell check with 20 years worth of custom dictionary...)

Suspect users will be harder to bead into compliance than the few straggling backwards writers. (And by few, I suspect that is only me. >_> *fleeing*)

My Mooney is only reporting on the peer reviewed science. There have been a number of different papers relating to the topic, all of which seem to come to the same broad conclusions.

I always find it interesting to see who thinks the article is utter bunk and who doesn't however. Especially in light of the ongoing research in the area. (Seriously, it's a great topic, and Google scholar is your friend.)

I suppose it’s a natural topic for me to be attracted to; my entire family is full of shrinks. Group dynamics, observational bias and confirmation bias are all topics I am absolutely fascinated with. They combine to create people like this guy. Otherwise sane, rational and logical people who nonetheless reject some aspect of science because it deeply conflicts with their beliefs. Even in fields they themselves pioneered!

That particular case is sad; people accepting his bunk take on science resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly more. But is climate science – or the hype around renewables – any different?

Climate change is real. Humans are causing it. This isn’t a debate excepting amongst those who must believe it because it would otherwise harm their belief systems. And yet this drags on. And on. And on. The zealotry with which some deniers are attached to the concept is frightening!

The other side is guilty too. Wind power? Are you kidding me? Photovoltaic?!?

Please.

We all cling to our beliefs in the face of hard science. We look for any loophole, any crack, any moral argument or unexplained phenomenon. Seven pages in to this thread, and we’ve still not moved past the basic denier argument of "evolution hasn’t yet explained everything, therefore intelligent design must be considered!" (There’s even a whole bit about "fluorescent cats, therefore god.")

Let’s completely bypass the part where "no biology has yet been discovered which evolution cannot explain." No…the mere possibility that something might exist which evolution cannot explain means that Intelligent Design absolutely must be considered as a valid alternative to evolution!

The mind-warping logic is truly stunning.

We could cover virtually anything. Cell phones causing cancer to vaccines causing autism, to "Fukushima was worse than Chernobyl, and all of Japan will have mutant babies OMG." Climate change deniers to creationists, or economic/political/psychological extremists. It’s all bunk. Life isn’t so black and white as we seem to need to believe.

Science is hard. It’s hard to understand, it’s hard to even dip your toes into the many and varied disciplines that exist enough to even be able to reasonably comprehend how very, deeply wrong most of us are about most things. We all have misperceptions and misconceptions. We all have these ingrained beliefs and prejudices.

One misconception in this area over here can cascade into a lack of understanding here, there and there. Suddenly, you become absolutely convinced in the overwhelming wrongness of everyone else because your entire string of logic makes perfect sense…all the way back to the one tiny misunderstanding somewhere in a completely unrelated field.

Tracking these down is hard. They are usually taught us as at a very young age. Identifying these flaws in our understanding of science is difficult. Correcting them may well be impossible.

So all of us – even the most distinguished of scientists – are vulnerable. Even those of us who know that we are and accept that we are. How then are we to overcome our human weakness and move forward?

I don’t have an answer. The only solution seems to be "in aggregate."

Sometimes what is needed for science to advance is for old scientists to die.

This is why I study this. All of this. People. Group dynamics. Psychology. Astrophysics. Evolutional biology…science in general. I want to correct my misperceptions. I want to learn everything I can learn. I want to know as much about the world as possible so that I might better contribute to it.

I don’t want to be one of those people whose greatest contribution to the species was to simply get out of the way.

The interesting part is that this desire in and of itself provides a source of bias and a perceptual filter through which I filter information.

Some days, its just not worth chewing through the straps…

Single entity fanbois

"Single entity fanbois" seem to be far more rare. They occur when (usually) when someone is so deeply impressed with a product/ideology/etc. that they quickly incorporate it into their own personal "image." These can occur “in a vacuum;” for example when someone is entirely unaware of any alternatives but encounters the New Shiny that does the thing they want it to do.

A great example is my own sweet salient self and Plex. I am a Plex fanboi. But the reality is not that this occurred within the context of “competing products or brands.” Rather it occurred whilst I lacked exposure to any competitive products whatsoever.

Plex did the job, it did it well, it impressed the hell out of me. Only afterwards did I really go hunting for alternatives. (I was aware that things like XBMC existed, but honestly had never really played with them much.)

It was after running across Plex that I decided to go hunting for all the various alternatives – I was bored! – and the deeper down the rabbit hole I went, the more I respected Plex. I ended up being a bit of a fanboi for the product, something which translated to the brand as a whole when I finally had a chance to talk to their CTO as part of an interview for my article. (Great guy. We ended up yakking for hours after the actual interview on any number of topics.)

So fanbois can develop without the competitive factor, but my research into the science of the matter indicates that the statistical significance of such events pales in comparison to the importance of brand/product competition to personal identity and the subsequent creation of "fanbois."

Forum design

The design of a comment/mail system depends on the methodology used to cache session variables. In typical modern forum software, session variables are not stored in cookies. Instead, cookies are used only to store a session identifier. The variables of relevance are actually stored in the database.

This is critical to implementing a mail-back system because it allows the forum to keep track of "when the last time you visited the website" was.

Assuming that the El Reg forums employ such a system, it should be a moderately difficult – say 4 of 10 – item for Murray to implement a system wherein the individual monitoring the forum receives an e-mail that a post has occurred in a forum they are following, but in which they receive no subsequent emails until after they have viewed that forum.

I suspect the groundwork for this is already in place due to the behaviour of the “posts since you last ‘starred this forum’” system that Murray had in place shortly before holidays. (This functionality has since been retracted and replaced with the older code of “posts since you last posted.”)

This indicates that at the bulk of such a notification system already exists in the code base, but that tweaks must be made before it is ready for prime time. That said, once Murray has the “posts since you last starred/visited” ironed out, implementing the single-email/multiple-comments functionality will be trivial.

And yes, I am a giant nerd. I sadly do spend my time inferring all sorts of things about software design from such trivial minutia.

Apparently I need more hobbies.

Worth a read on the topic:

Fanbois treat criticism of favorite brands as threat to self-image

Additional reading that is related:

Confirmation bias in science: how to avoid it

Saturation advertising

People rejecting saturation advertising isn't really a different phenomenon though; these are people identifying with *dislike* for a product. Look at how many people are Apple anti-fanbois, and that very hatred of the brand is part of what they use to define them.

Indeed; saturation advertising has been used in the past in order to achieve just this effect; a polarisation of the “fan base.” It ends up making your own “fans” more insecure about themselves such that they then “retreat into the brand” all the more.

It’s all group psychology. As a competitor you can cause something similar by simply mentioning the opponent brand repeatedly. This can cause saturation of the opponent’s brand name and thus the creation of a group of people fiercely loyal to anyone who isn’t said brand.

The thing that gets me is that so many people mistakenly treat this all like voodoo. “Oh, that’s cute, but it’s all lies and speculation.” Etc.

Bull.

We’ve spend over 100 years refining this into hard science. You can get multiple flavours of PHd in group psychology, mass manipulation and so forth. We not only know how this stuff works, we have actual laws that ban various types of it! (For example: pheromone use, subliminal messages of various types in auditory and visual media, etc.)

Fanbois aren’t happenstance. They aren’t a deficiency of the individual; an abnormality of personality that sets them apart from “normal.” Fanbois are made. They are carefully crafted en masse by people who know damned well what they are doing and why.

Zealots of any type only very rarely spontaneously appear. (Think Tim McVey.) Zealotry is not something that normally occurs in isolation. Quite the opposite; it requires a social context. It requires a “high priest” of some variety pushing the faithful towards ever greater heights. It requires a community that is deeply insecure, feels it is “the underdog” and is given the repeated message that they are “better” than others for some reason.

There is little difference between the creation of a pack of religious nutters willing to slaughter millions and fanbois fawning over the latest iPud. The differences that do exist are in the end goal of the techniques used to create the zealtory, not in the techniques themselves.

Apple – or any corporation – doesn’t want an army of the faithful willing to blow up others. They want money out of the wallets of the faithful. So instead of training martyrs, they train fanbois. But the evangelical nature – the cult, if you will – is no different. The techniques, the science of the group manipulation is the same.

That isn’t to say we aren’t responsible for constant vigilance against this. We should be as wary of the shysters at $megacorp as we are the clowns trying to sell us a sky fairy. But it also means the deck is stacked in their favour.

I’m not psychological superman, and neither are you. No matter how much you think you know, no matter how prepared you are or how ardently you believe in your own mental defences, they know more.

The best we can hope for is to pick elements of social identity – from brands to beliefs to politics – that do the least amount of damage. As for the rest, we shall see…

Fangerl?

Always thought it was "fangurrl."

Also; I think you're off base. No "buying the wrong thing and getting bitten" required. It's far simpler: we all like to feel like we belong. We exist in a consumerist culture. What we buy - or don't - defines us. (Corporations have spent trillions on creating culture over several decades.)

It is perfectly natural then to polarise around a brand. We are taught since birth that this defines us. The more insecure we are, the more we cling to the identity provided by the brand.

But even awareness of the science behind tbis does not make one immnune. We are pack animals; we need that social bond. We all of us - even those who are aware of it - fall prey.

I should point out also that awareness of the sciences relating to propaganda and subliminal suggestivity also provide no immunity. Humans are sheep.

Moi aussi. Baaaaaaaaah.

I will defeat him!

All it takes is time. Bug testing is the art of dull persistance.

My list ATM

Drew, I am emailing my list to you because Murray doesn't have the paragraphs thing working quite right yet. The system will eat all my formatting and it will be a pain to read.

@JimC

Simcity 3000 works in virtualbox. No luck getting it to work elsewhere. :(

@Audrey S. Thackeray

@Davidoff

Interesting.

Microsoft's literature explicitly says this is unsupported. They say that in theory anything that is DX10 with real RAM should work, but lay out the caveat that driver support and hardware delta make it nearly impossible to make a positive claim for this.

Indeed, I have been able to get *some* desktop-class cards to work, but others that should meet the specs flat out don't. Even similar generation gear (4870 x2s) from two different manufacturers are different. Some work, others don't!

It should also be noted that Microsoft explicitly states that there are some nebulous “minimum performance requirements” for this to work. (I.E. your Radeon 5500 probably won’t work, real RAM or not.)

I expect that the recent mid-high to high-end cards from both nVidia and AMD should work, as they have been billed as being “GPGPU capable” cards.

The officially supported list however contains only workstation-class cards, and the desktop class stuff is still very hit-or-miss.

Curious to see if the new 7000 series work; better than any workstation card I know of for performance!

My understand is that "rendering" is in fact done as FPU calcs in remotefx, as opposed to more traditional methods. But that was extracted from one demo video, and isn't what I'd consider "reliable evidence of how it works" yet.

But lines up with the MS propaganda about desktop cards "not meeting performance requirements." More research is required.

Additionally: coffee first, /then/ pull out cell phone to add comments to thread. *wince*

I will use XP and Office 2003 until it either stops working at an acceptable speed, or stops doing what I need it to do.

Give me one good reason to switch?

"Be cause X is newer" isn't a valid reason.

It simply isn't slow or otherwise getting in my way.

If, in the very unlikely event my well defended XP setup gets a virus, I can revert to a previous copy.

There are zero apps I have encountered that require anything newer than XP and which offer even a remotely compelling reason to switch.

I have some businesses on newer OSes, and I have moved most of them to the latest Libre Office. But there are business reasons for that. Usually tied to increased Active Directory awesome.

For my personal workspace, you will have to do a truly epic amount of work to convert me to the religion of "new because it's new."

I don’t spend money or expend my time unless there is a solid business case on the table. If you have one, let’s hear it. Al you’ve presented is fearmongering about old installs that in no way reflect the reality of the past decade or so of my professional experience

I have thousands of XP systems in the field. I still have some 2000, some NT 4 and the odd Mac from the late 80s! If you are doing you job right, you can certainly have these things just hum along for decades.

I don’t upgrade because Microsoft wants more money. I need a damned good reason.

http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2010/02/how-to-use-dual-monitors-in-remote-desktop-session-on-windows-7/

Software: Windows Server 2008 R2 / hyper-v.

I used to use esxi, but went to hyper-v after the licence change. Now my vhost is not only a vhost, it is an htpc as well. (Hooked up to my projector). The thing plays a 1080p video on the projector whilst the PlexServer VM is transcoding 2 720p videos for other members of the house to watch and still serves our personal virtual machines just fine. Total hardware cost: $750.

I absolutely adore Sandy Bridge.

As to dual screen RDP; the issues you mentioned have not been sol ed. When you access the VM from so many different devices, the windows will end up in odd places on the next device.

I wish I had a better solution; I hear Windows 7 has much better multimon support than XP.

I should check that out some time...

That's a tough one.

But I’ll try. The initial setup would be a pain, but my first instinct is to create two VMs, largely identical. (Start with clones.) One local to the laptop, one hosted on the internet/at home.

These would both dropbox the data back-and-fourth, and use cloudy services like the firefox sync doohicky. It would never keep settings 100% the same between both environments, but if you can fit all your data into dropbox - or similar - then you should have two mostly identical "digital office" VMs.

You could even periodically overwrite one with the other to ensure that they are kept as close to "the same" as possible.

Also serves as a backup of you "digital office" if your laptop gets nommed.

Second instinct: Win 7 can back up to vhd. Can you just automate that from your notebook? Regular images dump a vhd onto a home vhost, then mout it for your use? Add dropbox to sync in-the-field file changes and this would let your notebook do the thing without a VM on it.

Again; bit difficult to set up, but could work.

You could go old school; domain with roaming profiles and "offline files and folders." But lose the notebook, you lose the environment.

@mikejs

Yep; I am using a 2004-ish XP vm. Works fine. Speedy and homey.

As to your personal assessment of the "necessity" or not...well, to each their own. I've explained my reasons and detailed the processes elsewhere in this thread. We are going to have to agree to disagree, sir.

Security

Netgear WNDR3700 v2 /w Openwrt.

The Big Guns. :)

@Dribbles

Click "email the author" at the top of the article and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have!

Even VM's need updates

Too true. :(

38 updates pending. I should care about that at some point...

@AdamWill

The endpoint OSes handle things like watching video. Actually, they're rather good at it. I haven't even had to install VLC in quite some time.

RDP supports multi-monitor just fine.

"Out of the house" experience has thus far been positive. I use the setup from my smartphone using 3G for a couple hours a day.

You just don't really do any video-intensive stuff in the VM unless you are at home. (BTW, 720p video seems to work just fine over RDP as long as I am on the same local area network.)

Is this “reinventing the thin client?” Sure; to a limited extent. It’s a halfway point between traditional thin client and a fat client. Some tasks (gaming, video) are typically handled by the endpoint. But the central location stores most of your “daily work.’

It is about making things easy to use and configure; about being to access from anywhere without a big power expenditure. It’s about the ability *not* to nerd about the details and the Linux this or the image that or the “just use 15 lines of perl to get the job done!” As stated in the article: I do this sort of stuff for a living. I know a dozen other ways to skin this cat, but almost all of them require some form of upkeep.

This is the zero upkeep system. It doesn’t require thought. I doesn’t require care, or planning, it doesn’t require backing up your endpoints or migration or any of that crap. It just works. Anywhere. From any device. It backs itself up into the cloud.

If I drive over my laptop, I can just not care. If I want a new computer, I can go get a new computer. The power of the endpoint determines the games I can play, or the videos I can watch.

But I can get work done from a $10 android phone over a crappy 2G connection if I need to.

Someone needs to package this and sell it for a yearly fee. If I didn’t already have the setup in place, I’d be the first customer! Just because I can do all the various Linuxy things or build my own domain and group policies or manually move this and configure that doesn’t mean that I want to.

Fixing computers isn't my hobby. It's my job. I refuse to do it at home.

@Ammaross Danan

I5 2500, 16GB RAM and Vertex 2 120GB SSD. It is in a tiny little case with an 80+ gold PSU and I am pretty sure the whole thing didn't cost me more than $750 at the time of build. (Which was some time ago.)

I regularly run with 120+ tabs of Firefox open, 50+ rdp sessions, 25-30 SSH sessions, 12-15 Notepad sessions, Outlook, Trillian, FeedDemon, Dropbox, 3 or 4 Word sessions, a pair of Excel spreadsheets, Google Calendar sync and MSE. (Give or take, that's my PVM setup.) That fits just fine a VM with 3.5GB of RAM. I have not had a problem with it in 7 years.

My wife's Windows 7 VM has 2GB of RAM, hold more or less the same loadout of programs (but nearly as many open at a time) and I haven't heard complaints. My roommate's CentOS has 4GB of RAM; no blitting from the back buffers there.

I don’t see how that “isn’t good enough for most people.” There’s gobs of free RAM for little widgety VMs to run in the background and still have lots left for the host.

The whole thing consumes next to no power (I think it averages less than 50W consumption during the day,) and the exhaust from the fans actually blows into the cage for my Geckos, helping to keep them warm.

Cheap, does the job…fast enough for three people’s work with overhead to spare. Where’s the issue?

As to Windows 7 image-based backups; my success rate with them is only about 70%. Oh, like hardware to like hardware, sure. But if the southbridge is too far out, the thing just doesn't seem to like to go.

But even is Microsoft fixed that, it is still only part of the puzzle. I own more than one endpoint! I have a desktop, notebook, netbook, two tablets two cell phones and that’s before I start counting work computers or trying to get the things I need done while over at a friend’s house or on a client’s site.

The VM solution puts everything I need on the other end of an RDP session for 50W of average electricity usage. I don’t have to leave some monstrous desktop running 24/7. I don’t have to synchronise profiles/bookmarks/settings/sqrt(-feet)/whatever between all these different devices.

I just need an RDP client. Then work gets done.

@Anonymous Coward

Pano logic doohicky would be cool. Don't have a Pano Logic 18" notebook, don't have a Pano Logic cell phone. Etc.

Pano is great if I want fixed desktop access points. Less awesome for writing articles under a tree overlooking the lake full of ducks, or a quick RDP in to check some financial data or an address.

Plus – and here’s the bit that still sort of gets me – I periodically go places on vacation that don’t have internet. Indeed, I have a lake lot where the cell phone signals don’t reach. (It is why I have a lake lot there.)

I do enjoy taking the Alienware full of games though. Most of them don’t require access to steam to play some single player.

That said; Pano can do some really Neat Things regarding multimedia and 3D playpack centrally processed and delivered to a zero client. I'm just not that tied to a desk anymore.

@Captain Underpants

But WHO CARES what steam wants to do with the endpoint.? It OWNS the endpoint. There is nothing on it excepting the OS, Steam and the RDP client. I dont' ask steam what its doing, or why. It doesn't tell me. I can play any of the games in my library. My workspace lives in an RDP window.

Also: you aren't "creating other systems that you need to manage." The virtual host can be - and usually is - some random box that i find on sale that runs ESXi. ESXi takes all of 5 minutes to install and requires zero configuration.

This has worked for 7 years. Life is easy.

I fail to understand how this is remotely harder or more scary than reinstalling and reconfiguring every tiny thing each time you get a new endpoint...