particularly when there are questions regarding reliability and what real-world flash failure looks like (is it still readable? Does the controller start spewing garbage?)
If I were building a personal cloud of Linux VMs, KVM would certainly tempt, yes. At work we're about to shift from a pile of large, expensive, horribly underutilised Solaris SPARC servers to a bunch of Ubuntu VMs in our hosting company's cloud, with VMware to manage them. I'm confident the VM itself is a hell of a lot more robust in KVM than VB - but what are KVM's tools like?
These days Apache does the world's Java infrastructure and, oh yeah, a web server. Their stuff's pretty good, though they have a nasty tendency to break stuff in minor versions.
VirtualBox is ehh okay at best. If you want to do anything even slightly fancy (manage a BlackBerry over USB, or perhaps run OpenBSD), it fails badly.
More importantly, it's really just not up to serious production use where anything resembling money is at stake. VMware is the only way to go, which is why they can charge such hideous sums of money. I would LOVE not to give money to VMware any more, but VirtualBox is miserably inadequate to the task.
After years of messing around with VirtualBox on the desktop, I've given up and gone with VMware Player. It has the important feature that shit actually works.
OpenOffice.org, being a huge project with lots of contributors, used Mercurial for version control (after a disastrous and painful switch to Subversion). LibreOffice uses Git.
IBM^WApache OOo has decided that's not good enough. No, they're going back to... Subversion, 'cos NIH totally works.
Good luck! Let us know how that works out for you!
Office 365, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go answer to Google Docs, delivers the same delight you’re used to from Office on your PC, only slower and clunkier and only working on Internet Explorer. Remember Internet Explorer? Of course you do!
Microsoft Online Services have marketed Office 365 directly to your bosses, who have little people like you to do all the bits that involve actually touching a computer. It promises a fully integrated solution to your daily working needs, with the reliability of Hotmail and Sidekick. That is, it promises it to your IT department, who can now inflict ribbon toolbars on your system without you even having to reboot.
The application monitors your daily activity for increased efficiency, automatically timesheeting your use of Facebook or Twitter at work, for your comfort and convenience when demonstrating their business necessity and utility to your company’s social media strategy to your boss. Firefox no longer works, but that’s a small price to pay for this sort of well-maintained elegance.
The final Office 365 release will include a marketplace where Microsoft partners will be able to sell applications for your Windows Phone or BlackBerry. (Android and iPhone are not supported, and will in fact explode on contact.)
The ribbon toolbar will not be present in the next version of Office 365, whose interface will be based on the recently-released hit game Portal 2. “Windows 7 was my idea,” says user interaction consultant GlaDOS.
As the Wine FAQ points out, there's a billion lines of Windows code out there that isn't going away; and one of the really important functions for Wine is to run that "just one app" that keeps you stuck on Windows.
This is not just a hypothetical consideration. My previous workplace dealt with digital TV, which means dealing with proprietary vertical-market software running only on Windows; in one content chain, we ran the compiler piece on Wine (where it ran flawlessly) rather than commission yet more Windows boxes and try to hook them into the middle of an otherwise-Linux chain. The result was functionally superior in every way. Wine is quite up to commercial production use involving proper money.
DAS BUNKER, Redmond, Friday (MSBBC) — Cheap netbooks are too limited and no-one will want them any more, say high-ticket vendors at the mere 103% increase in netbook sales in 2009 over 2008.
The small, portable computers sold in stupendous numbers in 2009, but industry watchers have been convinced by Microsoft and Intel to say that their popularity is waning. “No-one is buying a 10-inch netbook that costs £500 and runs Windows 7,” said Stuart Miles of Pocket Unit. “So everyone will go back to expensive iPhones and full-sized laptops, any day now. This ‘internet’ thing is just a fad too.”
What people are looking for now, he believes, is a machine that can keep up with the demands of contemporary web users. A small netbook running Windows 7 Dumbass Edition, which runs up to three applications at a time and holds your data hostage until you cough up eighty quid to run a fourth, is “thoroughly inadequate” to the task. “Linux, of course, doesn’t exist, wasn’t the impetus for cheap netbooks and didn’t cripple Microsoft’s bottom line for the last three years by providing actual competition for the first time in decades. So it’s not like it can do twice as much in half the space.”
Ian Drew, spokesman for chip designer ARM Holdings, also believes netbooks are in for a shake-up. “Apparently, netbooks that weigh nothing, run twice as fast and have an all-day battery but don’t run Windows are a problem for ARM, not for Microsoft,” he said, lighting a cigar off a fifty-pound note.
Mr Miles believes tablets will take up the mantle from the netbook. “If we carefully define tablets as ‘not netbooks,’ even though they’re made by the same companies with the same technology running the same software, we can claim the netbook is dead even though people are suddenly realising how stupidly huge, unwieldy and heavy even a fourteen-inch laptop is. It’s all about picking your terms rather than, e.g., selling what people actually want instead of what you’d like them to want. Also, if you whack in a 3G modem it’s suddenly a phone instead, and never mind the Mini 9.”
“Clap your hands if you don’t believe in netbooks,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Marketers! Marketers! Marketers! Marketers!”
I just read one Bitcoin partisan (Robert Horning) arguing on Wikimedia foundation-l that Bitcoin would seriously continue past the existence of the Internet, computers and reliable electricity . I mean, what the actual fuck. People here react badly to Bitcoin advocacy because the quality of it is so consistently awful - that's what my undue cruelty to Bitcoin for cheap lulz is about.
Quite seriously - I work with programmers. They tell jokes about annoying Bitcoin advocates in the office. You seriously, seriously have to do something about the terrible advocates you have. The rest of the world really hates them.
This is an unjustified plural. As I note above, that you're personally actively seeking proper regulation for BTC gets you a lot of points in my mind.
But you put your hand on your personal equivalent of the Bible and tell me that most Bitcoin partisans are not accurately portrayed as above. I've read the forums. They're economically naive Internet libertoonians whose most exploitable resource is their unexamined privilege.
USD are also a lot more popular. This is actually important: there's 300 million people who will do work for you if you offer them a certain quantity of pieces of paper called "US dollars".
Bitcoin is a decentralised computer currency designed by self-righteous Ayn Rand-reading nerds who despise looters and parasites like, er, you. It is used to purchase Internet services, illegal drugs and pictures of naked women holding video cards.
Bitcoin works by an emergent synergy of cryptography, peer-to-peer, anonymity, anarchism, libertarianism, wasting stupendous quantities of electricity, the marketing department at NVidia, the enduring exchange value of tulip bulbs and doing all of this instead of Folding@Home.
Bitcoin successfully harnesses a hitherto-unexploited Internet resource: the vast reserves of unexamined privilege amongst computer programmers. Coins are "mined" by stealing them from people who are able to comprehend this level of computer science but still keep their Bitcoin wallet in plain text on a Windows machine.
The Bitcoin system is robustly designed to continue past the inevitable collapse of the US dollar and the world economy, as the Internet, fast computers and reliable electricity are all expected to be readily available when barbarian hordes are wandering the burnt-out post-apocalyptic remnants of civilisation.
It is completely incorrect to describe Bitcoin as a "pyramid scheme." Technically, it's a "pump-and-dump."
Many common products are still inexplicably not purchasable with Bitcoins. "It's like they don't understand the revolutionary wonder of Bitcoin," says Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "I can't get chicks with Bitcoins either. Even with my slickest Pick-Up Artist techniques! It's as if my knowledge of economics, game theory and Bayesian epistemology didn't substitute for understanding anything about people. But that's impossible, of course. They're probably just theists. Hold on, I just gotta post to Slashdot about this."
Bitcoin was invented by Internet libertarians, in the spirit of freely-chosen individual interpersonal interactions that will bring about the utter collapse of the oppressive taint of the dead hand of government, in order to make money at your expense.
DRAMATICA, Wackyleeks, Wednesday (textfiles.com) — The noose is tightening on LulzSec, oh yes it is, with a red-handed capture nearly almost imminent, said FBI Media Liaison today, and don't you worry about that.
The drug-running terrorist paedophile probably-Chinese-government members of LulzSec have used their horrifying and "l33t" "Internet Relay Chat" skills (or "sk1llz0r," as "hackers" call them) to break into some of the most complicatedly protected computery gadget devices on the Inter-web-thing, particularly the ones running Microsoft Windows. Just like your computer does!!
"Fortunately," fed an off-the-record FBI source, "we have tracked down these dastardly fiends to their festering basement lairs, where they sit all day exchanging BitCoins via their 'four-channel' systems. Our agents are poised right now to swoop, swoop! upon these avatars of delinquency! Multiple US agencies are involved. They might be right outside!"
Authorities worry the "hackers" will get wind of the raids and scatter and burn the evidence. Repeat, the authorities don't want the group to scatter and burn the evidence. Just so that's clear with everyone.
LulzSec was formed by a group of Scientologists interested in Guy Fawkes. The group is named after "lulls," which is when the four-channel system goes quiet, and "sex," the availability of which would cause the group's immediate collapse.
Watchguard? Porn site? Please give me info on this! dgerard[AT]gmail.com - I'll chase it up.
Re:Bitcoin to revolutionise economy
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The pieces of paper are backed by a country of 300 million people who will do work in exchange for them.
(One good thing about Bitcoin threads on Slashdot: plenty of opportunity to beat Econ 101 into the heads of libertoonians who think they've got the perfect zinger for every situation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does for me - XP in a VMWare Player. BlackBerry 9300, OS 6. What were you trying?
particularly when there are questions regarding reliability and what real-world flash failure looks like (is it still readable? Does the controller start spewing garbage?)
CodingHorror answers this:
1. They fail. A lot. Within months. If you're lucky.
2. The failure is they just die completely and conclusively.
However, they stress the important point:
3. They're so ridiculously fast that you want one anyway. And you'll keep replacing it when, not if, it fails.
For server use, the current fashion is as a gigantic cache in front of magnetic hard disks.
For either desktop or server, "GET REALLY GOOD AT BACKUPS, YOU'LL USE THEM" is the thing to remember.
If I were building a personal cloud of Linux VMs, KVM would certainly tempt, yes. At work we're about to shift from a pile of large, expensive, horribly underutilised Solaris SPARC servers to a bunch of Ubuntu VMs in our hosting company's cloud, with VMware to manage them. I'm confident the VM itself is a hell of a lot more robust in KVM than VB - but what are KVM's tools like?
These days Apache does the world's Java infrastructure and, oh yeah, a web server. Their stuff's pretty good, though they have a nasty tendency to break stuff in minor versions.
VirtualBox is ehh okay at best. If you want to do anything even slightly fancy (manage a BlackBerry over USB, or perhaps run OpenBSD), it fails badly.
More importantly, it's really just not up to serious production use where anything resembling money is at stake. VMware is the only way to go, which is why they can charge such hideous sums of money. I would LOVE not to give money to VMware any more, but VirtualBox is miserably inadequate to the task.
After years of messing around with VirtualBox on the desktop, I've given up and gone with VMware Player. It has the important feature that shit actually works.
OpenOffice.org, being a huge project with lots of contributors, used Mercurial for version control (after a disastrous and painful switch to Subversion). LibreOffice uses Git.
IBM^WApache OOo has decided that's not good enough. No, they're going back to ... Subversion, 'cos NIH totally works.
Good luck! Let us know how that works out for you!
Office 365, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go answer to Google Docs, delivers the same delight you’re used to from Office on your PC, only slower and clunkier and only working on Internet Explorer. Remember Internet Explorer? Of course you do!
Microsoft Online Services have marketed Office 365 directly to your bosses, who have little people like you to do all the bits that involve actually touching a computer. It promises a fully integrated solution to your daily working needs, with the reliability of Hotmail and Sidekick. That is, it promises it to your IT department, who can now inflict ribbon toolbars on your system without you even having to reboot.
The application monitors your daily activity for increased efficiency, automatically timesheeting your use of Facebook or Twitter at work, for your comfort and convenience when demonstrating their business necessity and utility to your company’s social media strategy to your boss. Firefox no longer works, but that’s a small price to pay for this sort of well-maintained elegance.
The final Office 365 release will include a marketplace where Microsoft partners will be able to sell applications for your Windows Phone or BlackBerry. (Android and iPhone are not supported, and will in fact explode on contact.)
The ribbon toolbar will not be present in the next version of Office 365, whose interface will be based on the recently-released hit game Portal 2. “Windows 7 was my idea,” says user interaction consultant GlaDOS.
Yes, NIH, apparently.
You are entirely correct. See Matthew Garrett's blog for the icky details of EFI on Linux. He makes this hideous piece of shit work for a living.
As the Wine FAQ points out, there's a billion lines of Windows code out there that isn't going away; and one of the really important functions for Wine is to run that "just one app" that keeps you stuck on Windows.
This is not just a hypothetical consideration. My previous workplace dealt with digital TV, which means dealing with proprietary vertical-market software running only on Windows; in one content chain, we ran the compiler piece on Wine (where it ran flawlessly) rather than commission yet more Windows boxes and try to hook them into the middle of an otherwise-Linux chain. The result was functionally superior in every way. Wine is quite up to commercial production use involving proper money.
DAS BUNKER, Redmond, Friday (MSBBC) — Cheap netbooks are too limited and no-one will want them any more, say high-ticket vendors at the mere 103% increase in netbook sales in 2009 over 2008.
The small, portable computers sold in stupendous numbers in 2009, but industry watchers have been convinced by Microsoft and Intel to say that their popularity is waning. “No-one is buying a 10-inch netbook that costs £500 and runs Windows 7,” said Stuart Miles of Pocket Unit. “So everyone will go back to expensive iPhones and full-sized laptops, any day now. This ‘internet’ thing is just a fad too.”
What people are looking for now, he believes, is a machine that can keep up with the demands of contemporary web users. A small netbook running Windows 7 Dumbass Edition, which runs up to three applications at a time and holds your data hostage until you cough up eighty quid to run a fourth, is “thoroughly inadequate” to the task. “Linux, of course, doesn’t exist, wasn’t the impetus for cheap netbooks and didn’t cripple Microsoft’s bottom line for the last three years by providing actual competition for the first time in decades. So it’s not like it can do twice as much in half the space.”
Ian Drew, spokesman for chip designer ARM Holdings, also believes netbooks are in for a shake-up. “Apparently, netbooks that weigh nothing, run twice as fast and have an all-day battery but don’t run Windows are a problem for ARM, not for Microsoft,” he said, lighting a cigar off a fifty-pound note.
Mr Miles believes tablets will take up the mantle from the netbook. “If we carefully define tablets as ‘not netbooks,’ even though they’re made by the same companies with the same technology running the same software, we can claim the netbook is dead even though people are suddenly realising how stupidly huge, unwieldy and heavy even a fourteen-inch laptop is. It’s all about picking your terms rather than, e.g., selling what people actually want instead of what you’d like them to want. Also, if you whack in a 3G modem it’s suddenly a phone instead, and never mind the Mini 9.”
“Clap your hands if you don’t believe in netbooks,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Marketers! Marketers! Marketers! Marketers!”
Photo: Netbook, circa 1982.
Fortunately, free software means that Windows developers can use Win32 approximately forever! On WINE.
I have a theory: like backups, no-one ever really gets the idea of free software until the lack of it has bitten them in the arse, good and hard.
*cough*
Yes, I was speaking conservatively. Even as a fanzine editor in the 1980s in Australia, I accepted USD cash.
Link of above claim: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-June/066437.html
I just read one Bitcoin partisan (Robert Horning) arguing on Wikimedia foundation-l that Bitcoin would seriously continue past the existence of the Internet, computers and reliable electricity . I mean, what the actual fuck. People here react badly to Bitcoin advocacy because the quality of it is so consistently awful - that's what my undue cruelty to Bitcoin for cheap lulz is about.
Quite seriously - I work with programmers. They tell jokes about annoying Bitcoin advocates in the office. You seriously, seriously have to do something about the terrible advocates you have. The rest of the world really hates them.
"You're acting like politicians"
This is an unjustified plural. As I note above, that you're personally actively seeking proper regulation for BTC gets you a lot of points in my mind.
But you put your hand on your personal equivalent of the Bible and tell me that most Bitcoin partisans are not accurately portrayed as above. I've read the forums. They're economically naive Internet libertoonians whose most exploitable resource is their unexamined privilege.
USD are also a lot more popular. This is actually important: there's 300 million people who will do work for you if you offer them a certain quantity of pieces of paper called "US dollars".
What amazes me is that people who understand the cryptography still do this stuff on Windows machines. WHAT.
I am amazed it took this long for someone to work out a way to mine and exploit unexamined privilege as a resource.
Though to be fair, that Amir is British and is actively seeking proper regulation gets him a lot of points in my mind :-)
Bitcoin is a decentralised computer currency designed by self-righteous Ayn Rand-reading nerds who despise looters and parasites like, er, you. It is used to purchase Internet services, illegal drugs and pictures of naked women holding video cards.
Bitcoin works by an emergent synergy of cryptography, peer-to-peer, anonymity, anarchism, libertarianism, wasting stupendous quantities of electricity, the marketing department at NVidia, the enduring exchange value of tulip bulbs and doing all of this instead of Folding@Home.
Bitcoin successfully harnesses a hitherto-unexploited Internet resource: the vast reserves of unexamined privilege amongst computer programmers. Coins are "mined" by stealing them from people who are able to comprehend this level of computer science but still keep their Bitcoin wallet in plain text on a Windows machine.
The Bitcoin system is robustly designed to continue past the inevitable collapse of the US dollar and the world economy, as the Internet, fast computers and reliable electricity are all expected to be readily available when barbarian hordes are wandering the burnt-out post-apocalyptic remnants of civilisation.
It is completely incorrect to describe Bitcoin as a "pyramid scheme." Technically, it's a "pump-and-dump."
Many common products are still inexplicably not purchasable with Bitcoins. "It's like they don't understand the revolutionary wonder of Bitcoin," says Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "I can't get chicks with Bitcoins either. Even with my slickest Pick-Up Artist techniques! It's as if my knowledge of economics, game theory and Bayesian epistemology didn't substitute for understanding anything about people. But that's impossible, of course. They're probably just theists. Hold on, I just gotta post to Slashdot about this."
Bitcoin was invented by Internet libertarians, in the spirit of freely-chosen individual interpersonal interactions that will bring about the utter collapse of the oppressive taint of the dead hand of government, in order to make money at your expense.
Photo: A typical Bitcoin advocate swimming through his Bitcoin bin, while his family look on, looking at him like he's insane.
DRAMATICA, Wackyleeks, Wednesday (textfiles.com) — The noose is tightening on LulzSec, oh yes it is, with a red-handed capture nearly almost imminent, said FBI Media Liaison today, and don't you worry about that.
The drug-running terrorist paedophile probably-Chinese-government members of LulzSec have used their horrifying and "l33t" "Internet Relay Chat" skills (or "sk1llz0r," as "hackers" call them) to break into some of the most complicatedly protected computery gadget devices on the Inter-web-thing, particularly the ones running Microsoft Windows. Just like your computer does!!
"Fortunately," fed an off-the-record FBI source, "we have tracked down these dastardly fiends to their festering basement lairs, where they sit all day exchanging BitCoins via their 'four-channel' systems. Our agents are poised right now to swoop, swoop! upon these avatars of delinquency! Multiple US agencies are involved. They might be right outside!"
Authorities worry the "hackers" will get wind of the raids and scatter and burn the evidence. Repeat, the authorities don't want the group to scatter and burn the evidence. Just so that's clear with everyone.
LulzSec was formed by a group of Scientologists interested in Guy Fawkes. The group is named after "lulls," which is when the four-channel system goes quiet, and "sex," the availability of which would cause the group's immediate collapse.
Picture: Practice safe computing!
Watchguard? Porn site? Please give me info on this! dgerard[AT]gmail.com - I'll chase it up.
The pieces of paper are backed by a country of 300 million people who will do work in exchange for them.
(One good thing about Bitcoin threads on Slashdot: plenty of opportunity to beat Econ 101 into the heads of libertoonians who think they've got the perfect zinger for every situation.)