As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct.

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We’ve attempted to think out of the box a bit designing this system by not relying on central inventories and tools like SSH, we’re not simply a fancy SSH “for loop”.

If you’re a system administrator and have lots of systems to manage you will immediately see how this software could be useful. If you’ve ever used tools like shmux for parallelized execution of commands via ssh, you’ll note the benefit of being able to use discovered meta-data with mcollective. That means you can break from using hostnames or a centralized document as the ultimate source of truth about your environment when running a parallelized operation. With tools like Facter the information lives on the servers to which it is applicable. You’ll always be able to rely on the most up-to-date information about your environment.

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…Its profits are still being generated by the same engines that have driven Microsoft for years: Office, Windows, and its server division. (Meanwhile, its entertainment and devices division is only recently profitable again, and its online division is a money pit.)

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I’m looking forward to trying one out at the local Apple store.

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Just when you thought you were all ready to plunk down your holiday gift cards toward a new iPhone, Google comes out of a left field with a scrappy alternative.

This is my favorite review so far, if you can even call it that.

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The Wall Street Journal offers some details – it cites people “briefed by the company” who say Apple plans to ship the tablet in March, and that it will feature either a 10 or 11-inch touch screen. The paper also cites analysts who “currently believe” the machine will cost $1,000, which may include a Kindle-like built-in wireless plan.

Amazon’s original Kindle was released in November of 2007 and people were impressed. Those people were rightly impressed because it was an innovative piece of technology at the time. Shortly after the Kindle, a number of competing e-book reader products were released only barely to be acknowledged to even exist. I won’t mention any of them either. Netbooks flood the market, and their owners are typically underwhelmed by their performance. I’ve come to the realization that these are pieces of single-serving technology. What does the Kindle do without books? What does a netbook do without a network? Not much.

All the while Apple was building and perfecting a method for the distribution of digital goods. The iPhone changed the way people think about cellular phones and what they expect out of technology. The technology that Apple has brought to the market has created an expectation. All reports indicate that Apple is stepping up to the plate with a tablet computing device that could change things in the same way the iPhone changed cellular phones. iPhone wasn’t just a step ahead it was miles ahead, and the expectation is that anything Apple does must be similarly groundbreaking.

Apple now has a mountain of paying customers who are now quite invested in music and movies and are also overwhelmingly satisfied with their iPhone. Who can blame them? They’ve got a great user interface, a speedy mobile browser and an excellent content distribution system. To create the ultimate device in this ultra-mobile space all it would take is the addition of print-style media, books and magazines to fill the gap that exists in the content they offer. I have no idea if that’s what they’re going to attempt, but it seems reasonable.

I’m not sure anyone really knows what is going to be released, the usual Apple secrecy has people making wild predictions. The only thing I can count on is to expect the unexpected.

^{As an aside; if you are in the business of printing stuff on paper on a daily basis take the deal. Whatever it is, take it before they stop doing you the courtesy of even offering.}

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For all the hype, this one appears to be a bit of a let down.

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The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’

For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage. For a 166 minute movie the rendering coordination was intense.

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The Internet giant is taking a new, and potentially risky approach to selling the device. Rather than selling the phone through a wireless carrier–the way the bulk of phones are sold in the U.S. today–Google plans to sell the Nexus One itself online, these people said. Users will have to buy cellular service for the device separately.

A bold move by Google by allowing the device to be attached to the consumers carrier of choice. I hope we see more of this in the future as it forces competition in the device market and forces carriers to compete for customers.

The device will allegedly be for sale next year. The crux, in my opinion, is weather or not HTC can deliver the device. Android is good, and getting better all the time but a mediocre piece of hardware will make for a flop.

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