There is a number of clustered storage apps operating on P2P basis with N:M redundancy model. Just do an internet search and choose your poison. Neither one of them offers amasing performance, but the actual availability often exceeds what you get from an average SMB Winhoze server.
and only in a few cases around the country have I ever heard of a government treating copying fees as a profit center...
This means the USA has a lot to learn from the UK. It is an ongoing profitable business over here. DVLA records, electoral register, land registry data, ordnance survey data, you name it. Everything is for sale and everything is for a profit. Privacy? Yeah, we heard about it. A person with a criminal record till last year could obtain anyone's details (provided that they own a vehicle) for mere 5 quid. Checks? What checks. Provided that the buyer pays the price checks should not get into the way of government officials conducting business ya know.
Are you sure that they cannot? I recall a brilliant joke on the subject from the days of KDS, KGB and Stazi:
What is one bulgarian?
A bandit.
Two bulgarians?
A gang
Three bulgarians?
A gang with an informer.
As far as using virtual worlds and so on for terrorism plotting a plot nurtured in Sadville will remain a wankoff. I would be much more worried about a plot nurtured in a cafana with the morning coffee and a Hooka pipe.
Now imagine the same flight in something resembling an old fashioned pullman vagon. You do not have "close friends". You are alone in a cubicle or with 1 or 3 more people depending on the class you fly. It may be slower, but it is much more comfortable.
I would much rather fly in something like this even if it takes 2-3 times longer.
If we throw in connectivity options, a good restaurant and some in-flight entertainment and frankly there will be many people willing to take it. In fact, with modern connectivity it will often make more business sense for businesses to use this instead of sardine can transports.
A good example for the viability of this travel model is the success of the Eurostar and the other European high speed trains. There is clearly a market in providing comfortable travel at the expense of speed.
GATTACA sir, not Gattaca. As far as the slippery slope we have been on it for a long time. Nuchal scans in pregnancy, 14 week scan, 20 week scan, tripple test and the tests for Talassemia and Cickle cell. So it is not a matter of are we on the slope to GATTACA, but how far are we on that slope.
Nothing to do with that. 5% will always use 95%. The probability distribution which governs this says so. You remove the offending top 5% and replot the remaining 95%. Guess what, once again there are 5% using 95%. By removing the the top 5% you have changed the numerical parameters of the curve, but its overall shape remains the same.
The Internet what for us used to be the local street. We used to go out, play in the street and meet people. Unsupervised. And we are pretty much alive.
Personally, I would prefer if we actually do it the Dutch and Danish way. In their residential districts they have wiped off the road markings, dropped the speed limit to 20 and put the vehicles on the lowest rung of the priority ladder. They also have suburbia. But they have kids playing out and about in it. The streets have been reclaimed and given back where they belong - to the children.
As there is no likelihood of USA or UK becoming civilised and accepting the Dutch way of thinking, the kids will use the Internet do we like it or not.
"that ejabberd XMPP server can be used to develop a distributed Twitter-like system."
You mix twat,tit and throw in some dimwit and you get a twit. Do a while (42) {} on it and here is your twitter.
On a more serious note the more obscure parts of the XMPP spec can be read in so many ways that there is always a way to create non-interoperable clients. For example - the thread support which is even in the original RFC is still not implemented in any of the clients (I did a patch for pidgin a while back, it is still sitting in the queue). Same for whiteboarding and many other things. Classic XML-ism actually. The spec is so vague that it could have been written by IBM.
If the deal is largely in shares you are also obliged to consider the what these shares might cost by the time the deal is complete which is 1-2 years due to the regulatory hurdles. Considering that the most recent lineup of Microsoft products is a flop I will not look at a deal consisting largely of Microsoft shares very kindly. It may indeed undervalue the company. Everything else aside, preparing for a merger of this magnitude is an enormous expense in itself. There is no way it can complete successfully without the regulators forcing Yahoo or Microsoft to offload certain parts of their portfolio. None of these are likely to get a particularly good price under the conditions. And so on.
Liberated? Democratic? Yeah, as per the "Civilised West" definition of that which also for some reason includes Pinochet, the Salvador Huntas as well as a number of other pillars of democracy and human rights.
We should have never gone there. We should have read the history books.
I recently read an excellent review on the so called "defeats" of foreign armies in Afganistan over the ages. The reality is there has not been a single case where an organised army has ever been defeated there. Whoever wanted, went there, won every single battle against the local wankers, stayed for as much as they like and left because the country has no strategic value whatsoever. No resources of any interest and no industry besides dope. The Mongols went through, won every single one of their battles with virtually zero losses and went on to create an empire in India. The locals promptly claimed victory. The British went several times, did whatever they liked and left because there was nothing else to do. The locals promptly claimed victory again every time. The Russians went twice (once more than 100 years ago), won every single military encounter they had and left for the same reason. The reality is that the mojahedin did not win a single battle. Even during the famous Squad No-9 incident when the Russians faced Osama's CIA trained mercenaries for the first time Osama lost despite having a 20+ times advantage in manpower and being propped by "instructors". End of the day, the army was pulled for political reasons and the locals claimed victory.
We might as well read the f*** history book and see what happened every time. We will have to leave. And the locals will claim victory as every time they have done for the last 2000 years. It is cheaper to isolate this country and keep it completely separate from the rest of the world and let them play savages as much as they like. As far Osama it is his sponsors which matter and they are not there. They are in Saudi Arabia which should have been the country to invade in the first place.
If an ISP filters straight on the submission SMTP connection and bounces there I see nothing wrong in the practice. You get a bounce and an error message straight away. No virus, no zombies, no SPAM. Wish more of them did it.
Nice to know that Comcast does not do that. No wonder it figures prominently in my server blacklist.
Re:Funny you should mention Media Center Edition..
on
Time for a Vista Do-Over?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a media center. Using Microsoft components. But running Linux.
One huge box tucked away in the loft with storage (2TB and counting). Diskless clients hanging off it. No noise. No heat. A P3 with a AGP Nvidia can easily drive A 1366x768 Screen (most common size in HD-ready EU TVs in the 22-30in zone). For a smaller screen you can even get away with a factory made thin client. Cost - around 120 quid per client, 400 quid for the storage.
Works a treat. Video and Music the way I want it at the touch of a remote. No pesky ads, no stupid DVD menus, no mandatory previews, no 20 minutes searching through the DVD collection for something to watch. All with off the shelf stuff from Debian (using the multimedia apt store). I wrote all in all around 10 lines to fix for various sillies here and there to get it working.
All of that at around 10% of the cost of a branded MCE PC system. And with 10 times the capability.
Labels love it and they are happy with it and its top-to-bottom DRM. This is what MSFT wanted, this is what it got. Now they will happily shovel it down our throats do we like it or not.
It a repeat of the sad story of Media Center Edition of Microcrapware. If you deliberately remove all functionality that users are interested in you should not expect something to sell. Pick up a MCE Remote and look. It is missing "My Videos", "My Music" and any hint of fetching existing content from the hard disk. Yep. Right, We peones are not supposed to have content that has not been approved and blessed for distribution by a label ya know. Only recorded content for ya. Dumb, idiotic, no-seller from day one, but labels are happy.
Microsoft is not doing pesky Apple (or Hauppage) things and offering the users what they actually want. That is good ya know.
Vista is the same, just on a bigger scale. An OS made to order for the labels. No wonder it is crap.
Who said they were worried about staying in business? One company has never made a profit or marketed a drug of its own.
That is new wave Biotech, not Pharmaceutical or Chemical industry company.
I agree, most of the Biotech companies out there are overinflated and underdelivering piles of fraud. Before I turned to the dark side of IT I did an MSc in chemistry and nearly finished a second degree in Molecular Biology and Biotech. While my knowledge is a bit fossilised by todays standards, it is still enough to make me stand in awe at the insane amount of money being poured into vague promisses that are least likely to deliver any time in the future. The Dot-Bomb came and went, the biotech madness continues. Granted, we no longer have attempts to convert whole country economies to fit the madness like Todor Zhivkov's Bulgaria in the 80-es. None the less, it is still mad. Totally mad. For one small delivery you have decades of abject failure. Properly glycosilated human interferon anyone? Noone can still cannot produce the f*** thing 20 odd years after biotech gurus beat themselves in the chest that it will be available "next year". I remember messing with plasmids with this damn gene in 1987 during my first lab apprenticeship in high school. Where are we with it? Nowhere. This is just one example, tens of thousands of others.
At the same time, while biotech has never delivered anything close to its promisses, old good chemistry and pharmaceuticals continue to create product and generate profit as they have since the days of Nobel and the German industrial revolution. For most of its time this industry had IP protection only on methods of synthesis and purification, not on the actual compounds. This did not prevent it from becoming one of the cornerstone of industrialised society so I do not quite see a justifiction for it suddenly getting it now.
Now if they stop granting patents on chemical compounds and their use and return to granting patents only on synthesis and novel purification methods that will be really worth cracking a bottle of bubbly.
The chemical and pharmaceutical industry happily grew to become one of the biggest contributors to developed nations GDP using only this kind of protection. It does not really need anything more. Anything more is just protectionism and racketeering.
This is just the SMC. In order to handle SMS it relies on capability in the network and the price is driven by the network capability, not by the system which uses it.
Unless the phone can do SMS over GPRS, each SMS message eats signalling capacity and travels along an SS7 link. After that it once again eats signalling capacity and competes with the rest of the signalling traffic for a place in the sun on the beacon channel. This is probably the most expensive way to encapsulate data known to man. You use mostly serial links, reliable transfer everywhere, transaction safe forwarding on every step and so on. It is not surprising that it is hideously expensive. When the protocol was designed nobody had the slightest idea how popular it will be and now it is a commodity so everyone is afraid to break it while trying to optimise it.
So the hideous price of GSM SMS is here to stay until we switch to 3G.
Are we talking about the philosophers on the same country that had dissection of corpses prohibited and where the doctors thought that the brain is a useless gland which upset the balance of the other parts of the body?
It missed another one - commanding stupid devices designed for command line control. Routers, switches, automation, you name it. On average it takes 5-10 software engineers with the corresponding budget to maintain a full network inventory and activation system written in perl in house for a telco with a few million customers. Been there, done that.
Compared to that it takes 100 times as much to do this using "carrier class" software written in C++ or Java. Similarly, upgrading, changing adapting this type of software in perl gives you a time to market of weeks (months at most). With C++ or Java you are looking at quarters or even years. Been there, done that as well.
This is an application where perl rocks. It is generally frowned upon by management for no other reason, but because there is simply no slack to outsource and claim efficiencies. It just works.
Via charges for its i-Dot which is a mini-ATX system 65 quid. Similar system in a mini-ITX format is 120+. Reasons aplenty: demand for ultrasmall systems for use in point of sale and home kit is consistently high and in the mini-ITX arena Via is king. There is no contest. Intel simply does not manage to fit into the TDP requirements of most enclosures. While there are mainboards around, nobody buys them.
Well... I would not be so cynical. While in many cases it is exactly as you say in plenty of others the charity needs money to buy medicines, to finance education programmes and so on. If it is given goods as a donation it has to sell them to finance these goals. From there on it usually sells them in the worst possible fashion, with the smallest profit possible and with the biggest possible waste for exactly this reason - they are not a company. So if you actually want to donate, donate money, do not donate goods unless the goods are sold locally through established shops the way Oxfam, Salvation Army and the like do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I said it when I saw the description of vmsplice() for the first time. I guess I was right.
There is a number of clustered storage apps operating on P2P basis with N:M redundancy model. Just do an internet search and choose your poison. Neither one of them offers amasing performance, but the actual availability often exceeds what you get from an average SMB Winhoze server.
This means the USA has a lot to learn from the UK. It is an ongoing profitable business over here. DVLA records, electoral register, land registry data, ordnance survey data, you name it. Everything is for sale and everything is for a profit. Privacy? Yeah, we heard about it. A person with a criminal record till last year could obtain anyone's details (provided that they own a vehicle) for mere 5 quid. Checks? What checks. Provided that the buyer pays the price checks should not get into the way of government officials conducting business ya know.
Are you sure that they cannot? I recall a brilliant joke on the subject from the days of KDS, KGB and Stazi: What is one bulgarian? A bandit. Two bulgarians? A gang Three bulgarians? A gang with an informer. As far as using virtual worlds and so on for terrorism plotting a plot nurtured in Sadville will remain a wankoff. I would be much more worried about a plot nurtured in a cafana with the morning coffee and a Hooka pipe.
What you are describing is travelling in a "bus".
Now imagine the same flight in something resembling an old fashioned pullman vagon. You do not have "close friends". You are alone in a cubicle or with 1 or 3 more people depending on the class you fly. It may be slower, but it is much more comfortable.
I would much rather fly in something like this even if it takes 2-3 times longer.
If we throw in connectivity options, a good restaurant and some in-flight entertainment and frankly there will be many people willing to take it. In fact, with modern connectivity it will often make more business sense for businesses to use this instead of sardine can transports.
A good example for the viability of this travel model is the success of the Eurostar and the other European high speed trains. There is clearly a market in providing comfortable travel at the expense of speed.
GATTACA sir, not Gattaca. As far as the slippery slope we have been on it for a long time. Nuchal scans in pregnancy, 14 week scan, 20 week scan, tripple test and the tests for Talassemia and Cickle cell. So it is not a matter of are we on the slope to GATTACA, but how far are we on that slope.
Nothing to do with that. 5% will always use 95%. The probability distribution which governs this says so. You remove the offending top 5% and replot the remaining 95%. Guess what, once again there are 5% using 95%. By removing the the top 5% you have changed the numerical parameters of the curve, but its overall shape remains the same.
Compared to a stripped and vandalised "recovery disk" it is high quality. You could actually install from it.
I would agree with it.
The Internet what for us used to be the local street. We used to go out, play in the street and meet people. Unsupervised. And we are pretty much alive.
Personally, I would prefer if we actually do it the Dutch and Danish way. In their residential districts they have wiped off the road markings, dropped the speed limit to 20 and put the vehicles on the lowest rung of the priority ladder. They also have suburbia. But they have kids playing out and about in it. The streets have been reclaimed and given back where they belong - to the children.
As there is no likelihood of USA or UK becoming civilised and accepting the Dutch way of thinking, the kids will use the Internet do we like it or not.
You mix twat,tit and throw in some dimwit and you get a twit. Do a while (42) {} on it and here is your twitter.
On a more serious note the more obscure parts of the XMPP spec can be read in so many ways that there is always a way to create non-interoperable clients. For example - the thread support which is even in the original RFC is still not implemented in any of the clients (I did a patch for pidgin a while back, it is still sitting in the queue). Same for whiteboarding and many other things. Classic XML-ism actually. The spec is so vague that it could have been written by IBM.
If the deal is largely in shares you are also obliged to consider the what these shares might cost by the time the deal is complete which is 1-2 years due to the regulatory hurdles. Considering that the most recent lineup of Microsoft products is a flop I will not look at a deal consisting largely of Microsoft shares very kindly. It may indeed undervalue the company.
Everything else aside, preparing for a merger of this magnitude is an enormous expense in itself. There is no way it can complete successfully without the regulators forcing Yahoo or Microsoft to offload certain parts of their portfolio. None of these are likely to get a particularly good price under the conditions. And so on.
What in particular do you call weird?
Liberated? Democratic? Yeah, as per the "Civilised West" definition of that which also for some reason includes Pinochet, the Salvador Huntas as well as a number of other pillars of democracy and human rights.
We should have never gone there. We should have read the history books.
I recently read an excellent review on the so called "defeats" of foreign armies in Afganistan over the ages. The reality is there has not been a single case where an organised army has ever been defeated there. Whoever wanted, went there, won every single battle against the local wankers, stayed for as much as they like and left because the country has no strategic value whatsoever. No resources of any interest and no industry besides dope. The Mongols went through, won every single one of their battles with virtually zero losses and went on to create an empire in India. The locals promptly claimed victory. The British went several times, did whatever they liked and left because there was nothing else to do. The locals promptly claimed victory again every time. The Russians went twice (once more than 100 years ago), won every single military encounter they had and left for the same reason. The reality is that the mojahedin did not win a single battle. Even during the famous Squad No-9 incident when the Russians faced Osama's CIA trained mercenaries for the first time Osama lost despite having a 20+ times advantage in manpower and being propped by "instructors". End of the day, the army was pulled for political reasons and the locals claimed victory.
We might as well read the f*** history book and see what happened every time. We will have to leave. And the locals will claim victory as every time they have done for the last 2000 years. It is cheaper to isolate this country and keep it completely separate from the rest of the world and let them play savages as much as they like. As far Osama it is his sponsors which matter and they are not there. They are in Saudi Arabia which should have been the country to invade in the first place.
Never taunt someone call Tatyana or god forbid Katusha... If you value your life that is...
If an ISP filters straight on the submission SMTP connection and bounces there I see nothing wrong in the practice. You get a bounce and an error message straight away. No virus, no zombies, no SPAM. Wish more of them did it.
Nice to know that Comcast does not do that. No wonder it figures prominently in my server blacklist.
I have a media center. Using Microsoft components. But running Linux.
One huge box tucked away in the loft with storage (2TB and counting). Diskless clients hanging off it. No noise. No heat. A P3 with a AGP Nvidia can easily drive A 1366x768 Screen (most common size in HD-ready EU TVs in the 22-30in zone). For a smaller screen you can even get away with a factory made thin client. Cost - around 120 quid per client, 400 quid for the storage.
Works a treat. Video and Music the way I want it at the touch of a remote. No pesky ads, no stupid DVD menus, no mandatory previews, no 20 minutes searching through the DVD collection for something to watch. All with off the shelf stuff from Debian (using the multimedia apt store). I wrote all in all around 10 lines to fix for various sillies here and there to get it working.
All of that at around 10% of the cost of a branded MCE PC system. And with 10 times the capability.
All this does not matter.
Labels love it and they are happy with it and its top-to-bottom DRM. This is what MSFT wanted, this is what it got. Now they will happily shovel it down our throats do we like it or not.
It a repeat of the sad story of Media Center Edition of Microcrapware. If you deliberately remove all functionality that users are interested in you should not expect something to sell. Pick up a MCE Remote and look. It is missing "My Videos", "My Music" and any hint of fetching existing content from the hard disk. Yep. Right, We peones are not supposed to have content that has not been approved and blessed for distribution by a label ya know. Only recorded content for ya. Dumb, idiotic, no-seller from day one, but labels are happy.
Microsoft is not doing pesky Apple (or Hauppage) things and offering the users what they actually want. That is good ya know.
Vista is the same, just on a bigger scale. An OS made to order for the labels. No wonder it is crap.
That's OK. Read Bulgakov's "Heart of The Dog" (Sobachie Serdce) and you will remember it. Surreal as it is, it was written more than 70 years ago.
That is new wave Biotech, not Pharmaceutical or Chemical industry company.
I agree, most of the Biotech companies out there are overinflated and underdelivering piles of fraud. Before I turned to the dark side of IT I did an MSc in chemistry and nearly finished a second degree in Molecular Biology and Biotech. While my knowledge is a bit fossilised by todays standards, it is still enough to make me stand in awe at the insane amount of money being poured into vague promisses that are least likely to deliver any time in the future. The Dot-Bomb came and went, the biotech madness continues. Granted, we no longer have attempts to convert whole country economies to fit the madness like Todor Zhivkov's Bulgaria in the 80-es. None the less, it is still mad. Totally mad. For one small delivery you have decades of abject failure. Properly glycosilated human interferon anyone? Noone can still cannot produce the f*** thing 20 odd years after biotech gurus beat themselves in the chest that it will be available "next year". I remember messing with plasmids with this damn gene in 1987 during my first lab apprenticeship in high school. Where are we with it? Nowhere. This is just one example, tens of thousands of others.
At the same time, while biotech has never delivered anything close to its promisses, old good chemistry and pharmaceuticals continue to create product and generate profit as they have since the days of Nobel and the German industrial revolution. For most of its time this industry had IP protection only on methods of synthesis and purification, not on the actual compounds. This did not prevent it from becoming one of the cornerstone of industrialised society so I do not quite see a justifiction for it suddenly getting it now.
Now if they stop granting patents on chemical compounds and their use and return to granting patents only on synthesis and novel purification methods that will be really worth cracking a bottle of bubbly.
The chemical and pharmaceutical industry happily grew to become one of the biggest contributors to developed nations GDP using only this kind of protection. It does not really need anything more. Anything more is just protectionism and racketeering.
This is just the SMC. In order to handle SMS it relies on capability in the network and the price is driven by the network capability, not by the system which uses it.
Unless the phone can do SMS over GPRS, each SMS message eats signalling capacity and travels along an SS7 link. After that it once again eats signalling capacity and competes with the rest of the signalling traffic for a place in the sun on the beacon channel. This is probably the most expensive way to encapsulate data known to man. You use mostly serial links, reliable transfer everywhere, transaction safe forwarding on every step and so on. It is not surprising that it is hideously expensive. When the protocol was designed nobody had the slightest idea how popular it will be and now it is a commodity so everyone is afraid to break it while trying to optimise it.
So the hideous price of GSM SMS is here to stay until we switch to 3G.
Are we talking about the philosophers on the same country that had dissection of corpses prohibited and where the doctors thought that the brain is a useless gland which upset the balance of the other parts of the body?
It missed another one - commanding stupid devices designed for command line control. Routers, switches, automation, you name it. On average it takes 5-10 software engineers with the corresponding budget to maintain a full network inventory and activation system written in perl in house for a telco with a few million customers. Been there, done that.
Compared to that it takes 100 times as much to do this using "carrier class" software written in C++ or Java. Similarly, upgrading, changing adapting this type of software in perl gives you a time to market of weeks (months at most). With C++ or Java you are looking at quarters or even years. Been there, done that as well.
This is an application where perl rocks. It is generally frowned upon by management for no other reason, but because there is simply no slack to outsource and claim efficiencies. It just works.
The answer is yes.
Via charges for its i-Dot which is a mini-ATX system 65 quid. Similar system in a mini-ITX format is 120+. Reasons aplenty: demand for ultrasmall systems for use in point of sale and home kit is consistently high and in the mini-ITX arena Via is king. There is no contest. Intel simply does not manage to fit into the TDP requirements of most enclosures. While there are mainboards around, nobody buys them.
No need for that.
It will be triggered by most smoke detectors out there. Depending on the type or the model they contain either Polonium or Thorium.
Well... I would not be so cynical. While in many cases it is exactly as you say in plenty of others the charity needs money to buy medicines, to finance education programmes and so on. If it is given goods as a donation it has to sell them to finance these goals. From there on it usually sells them in the worst possible fashion, with the smallest profit possible and with the biggest possible waste for exactly this reason - they are not a company. So if you actually want to donate, donate money, do not donate goods unless the goods are sold locally through established shops the way Oxfam, Salvation Army and the like do it.