There was a blurb on the news about the NSA guy who wants to head the CIA. In adding up his negatives they said that he was behind to the push to get the NSA to adopt off-the-shelf technology instead of relying on home grown, which they said had been a major failure for the NSA, costing it as much or more than in-house stuff and providing lesser capabilities.
I wonder if this product is one of the off-the-shelf wins or losses?
For all of its capabilities, it seems unlikely it can break even DES in real time, and would it be able to recognize, say, an SSH session tunneled via legitimate HTTP packets (not just SSH on port 80, but SSH embedded in HTTP packets)? I've used a Packeteer that was great at "seeing" layer 4/5 traffic regardless of port, but at a certain level of layering you don't really know what you've got.
Most thinking people see the rise in campus "speech codes" and other restrictions on speech as being a byproduct of the left's institutional dominance; it's a byproduct of the left's social control goals, and it's not coincidental that Communist China's social control goals also involve censorship.
The university left doesn't believe in indivdual freedom any more than the Chinese do.
There's somebody in the state of Virginia computer systems department putting "Should Virginia create a custom GINA?" on a meeting agenda right now, just hoping that somehow it really will get named VA-GINA and survive long enough to not be renamable.
Do you actually have any comparisons beyond just channel flipping? Such as season passes, wish lists, user interfaces, device stability, etc?
The Guide and other live TV functions are features I almost never use, since I almost never watch live TV. For me the value of Tivo is how well it can record what I want (wish lists, season passes) and the ease of use in doing so and playing the recordings back.
Admittedly the standalone hardware is pretty much obsolete; serial/IR channel changing, analog-only audio and video, and the single tuner capability cleary set it behind the cable DVRs for those capabilities.
Given the U.S. credit card industry's record on theft and security and Russia's general record on corruption, can you actually use your credit card on that site and not end up ripped off?
Why reinvent the wheel? Why not just implement a Bash or other/bin/sh compatible shell that many of us already know?
Or at least *fix* cmd.exe so that as a GUI and keyboard interface it's not punishing -- make cut and paste work like every terminal emulator woth a darn (SecureCRT or Putty), make the screen resizable in the right way, etc.
My fear is that you've just developed yet another programming interface and all the dimestore VB/Access programmers are going to create a nightmare of spaghetti code with it, simply because they can.
It's all about unemployment compensation. When a company cans you without a specific reason (insubordination, absenteeism, failing to follow rules) they get stuck with a tab for your unemployment compensation. Since unemployment functions a little like insurance, the more employers are liable for it, the more they pay (ie, higher risk).
Most states only allow denial of unemployment benefits for "termination for cause" and being bad at your job isn't considered termination for cause, since it is presumed to be the employer's responsibility to determine if you are capable of doing the job before hiring you. This means that errors in judgement or lack of skill aren't considered valid causes. If they hired you to design widgets and you can't do it, that's their mistake.
It doesn't mean that they *can't* fire you, they can, they just have to foot the bill for your unemployment benefits. They face some legal exposure if the termination was highly arbitrary and/or a involved standards that were not applied uniformly, but I think a lot of companies can beat the rap on this unless they are substantial mitigating factors involving protected class status (women, racial minorities, and increasingly, age).
This is why many employers coax/bully/blackmail/coerce/lure employees into resigning voluntarily; voluntary terminations are exempt from unemployment compensation. Employees get a couple of weeks (or more depending) at full salary, extended benefits availability and the ability to say "they quit" and a vague assurance that future employers will be told that the employee did work there and did quit voluntarily. Employers don't have to pay unemployment and often also get some signed document agreeing to forsake future legal action. With friendly inside references and a good story, most employees can bounce back.
I personally think it's more balanced than its given credit for. Employers pay a stiff cost for capricious termination, but can still easily get rid of problem employees. Employees don't suffer immediate financial peril but can't get a free lunch forever. And if an employee really does break some well-defined rules you can get rid of them and not pay for the privilege.
The only employers that complain about this are those with bad personnel policies, since they end up with a lot of involuntary terminations and high unemployment costs. Employers that make good hiring decisions, have supportive policies (ie, training so you do your job well) and competent management (no tyrants or bullies) and decent compensation don't have this problem -- they seldom have the need to terminate without cause.
This isn't really about free speech, it's about definitions of intellectual property.
Every time someone wants to limit speech, one of the first things out of their mouths is the line above. The goal is always to frame the issue at hand as not being about free speech, but about something else we are willing and able to put limits on.
Debating Iraq? It's not about free speech, it's about national security.
Pornography? It's not about free speech, it's about community morals.
Journalism? It's not about free speech, it's about public order.
Religion? It's not about free speech, it's about religious tolerance.
YOU want to live in a country where freedom of speech is subverted to other goals or values? Great. Have at it. But here those other values are secondary to freedom of speech.
You don't get it. Romantic love is a myth, she will never be into you "for you", just as you're unlikely to be "into her" for reasons that don't have something to do with tits, ass and a willingness to not embarass you in front of your friends.
We're all driven by the biological imperitive -- reproduction. The priority list for women when it comes to reproduction unfortunately doesn't include your witty opinions, good taste in art or your skill at cunnilingus.
What it does include is your ability to provide for the material well-being of her offspring. If you can cover that one, you're golden. She'll tolerate your ignorant opinions, bad hygiene and clumsy sexual technnique; do it well enough, and she will make you believe that you have the logic of Aristotle, the body of Adonis and the skills of Rocco Siffredi.
Of course if you *can* provide for her offspring and you both know it, the trick of course is to make her sing for her supper.
OK, let's say you have 5 Win2k03 applications that require 5 servers.
Your capital outlay for the servers will be around $10k. Add in a support package for hardware and you're talking another $500 or so per year. Each box uses power, requires a KVM interface, physical space, a network port and puts a heat load onto the air conditioner. These marginal costs will add another $100 per box, so we're now looking at a 3 year cost of around $13k, not including any labor costs.
A GSX rollout would have been about $7500 for a bigger server and a GSX license. Setup would have been faster, since the base Wink03 image could have been cloned 4 times. The single server would require less A/C, power, switch ports and KVM ports, but we can still call it $200 and be safe. Our three year cost would still be under the hardware only costs of the 5 server configuration.
Patching is really a non-factor, since you're patching regardless, and you can patch 5 VMs and then the server and really get away with one reboot, since most Wink03 patches don't require an immediate reboot.
Of course this barely takes into the ease of managing a virtual box (cloning machines for patch testing, backup of raw images, etc), the flexibility of being able to create a new server almost instantly without having to hunt down hardware. And once you get into the "datacenter" rollouts with SANs and multiple ESX hosts and the ability to move VMs between hardware platforms, it gets even better.
Can you run VMWare from within the Windows VM?
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
...and it may be too late. I've long been amazed at the lack of hardware innovation on Tivo's platform. I've owned my S2 Tivo for nearly 4 years now and there's been a couple of times I would have considered buying new devices to solve very specific problems but Tivo had no hardware innovations available.
Nobody really likes hardware churn for minor features, but I think Tivo really cost themselves a lot of sales (and hence service) opportunities by not coming out with incremental upgrades.
I would have moved my S2 to the bedroom and bought a new one for the ability to record and play digital audio, and might even have considered replacing that non-existent unit with one that could do digital audio and CableCard 1.0 even without HD support. Of course that unit I would have replaced with the upcoming S3 unit which appears to solve all the problems at once, including HD.
So there's 2-3 Tivo hardware sales plus at least one additional service subscription (wife probably wouldn't have accepted three Tivo subs). And I don't think I'm alone in this regard; I think there's a lot of people who defected completely or at least compromised and added cable DVRs for HD recording.
I'm just hoping Tivo makes it and the S3 boxes come out, as I think they're Tivo's last, best chance.
They could make dynamic pricing work, but it would work better if Google hosted the music library and playlists (another thing they've demonstrated mastery of). But the bugger with pay-per-play is that people expect their media to be portable to devices and places where counting plays doesn't work.
I think people generally expect to "own" music and video, which seems to eliminate most of Googles strengths.
I even make mine with dynamic-sized VMDKs to keep space low (generally it's not a performance strain except during initial setup), but I guess you can never have enough disk space.
For me the biggest issue with running too many simultaneous VMs isn't disk but RAM. I like to keep RAM allocations generous to keep swapping at a minimum, since I think VM swapping laptop HDDs is more of a penalty than anything.
I wish I could get a laptop with that much disk space. I keep stock VMs that I clone for client projects worthy of it, but even with cloning I find myself pruning VMDKs that haven't been used a while.
VM Layer or legacy-free installs?
on
Why Windows is Slow
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think a better solution would be a legacy-free OS that would have XP-level compatibility but would provide a VM layer configurable as DOS, NT4 or Win2k, depending on the need of the application.
If this isn't practical (having to run one each of the above layers could gobble tons of RAM), then at least providing a way to do a legacy-free installation with the option of adding support for older environments later. Systems that didn't need it wouldn't have to have it added, perhaps improving performance.
I know that the library had reel-film (Super 8, probably) movies, although I think they were largely B&W shorts and many were probably silent since I think there were probably few people who had sync-sound Super 8 projectors.
I think there were also a lot of rental options for 16mm prints of movies. Not down at the corner shop, but all those hollywood movies we watched in school and college came from someplace.
MD would have rocked if Sony would have pulled their heads out of their asses and opened up ATRAC so you could rip CDs to it and made players that supported both MP3 and ATRAC.
They'll never do the out-of-band raises. Microsoft is too corporate and the corporate class system will not tolerate pay and benefits systems that allow "workers" to be paid more than "management." Ever. Even for one FY cycle.
It only works that way at tech companies run by the engineers that started them, and then only temporarily, until either enough management types are brought in from the outside or until the engineers with stock options and influence decide its not any fun anymore and leave. The latter is a real death knell, since those original engineers are the ones to whom the management guys owe *their* jobs to and it's hard for management to push the corporate class system when their are engineers still there who have both the proven track record and the financial resources to call bullshit on them.
But when it does reach that point, it becomes Just Another Corporation where the corporate class system gets re-introduced and the company is ultimately run by its marketing arm like any other corporation, hoping that nobody sees the mediocrity through the bullshit.
I just wonder how long it will take Google to get like that, or if they have discovered some way around it.
I've been totally stumped about this for years. I can only imagine that there would be an order of magnitude increase in efficiency and compliance if they did this.
Call me conspiratorial, but I think the only reason they don't do this is that there's an entire industry built up around filing taxes that would more or less be eliminated by this. Which is fine by me -- I don't think the government should prop up businesses by making the business of government overcomplicated.
I sometimes wonder if studios have got themselves into a pickle with special features and would actually like to stop making them but don't quite know how without being the first.
Perhaps this will allow them to do this without looking like cheap bastards.
The expectation is that players are playing to win, not to maximize their financial outcomes.
Players may choose to execute safe plays that avoid injuries so they can maximize their pay vs. executing riskier plays that place them at greater injury risk but enhance their victory potential.
Players engage in self-centered behavior (eg, demanding to be traded, etc) vs team behavior that will contribute to victories.
Intel's new virtualization technology is supposed to make this much simpler and possibly a future reality (and may be a driving factor in why Apple chose Intel, and why Apple isn't fighting to keep Windows off their machines...).
Right now, though, VMWare ESX is *kind of* like that -- the core "OS" that you boot into is the hypervisor and the management session is actually a VM running under it.
The problem has always been that Intel chips don't do virtualization well.
If Apple and VMWare announced a deal to build a hypervisor into Mac OS to allow partitioning and native booting of non-Mac OSes, I'd be queuing for an IntelMac tomorrow.
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There was a blurb on the news about the NSA guy who wants to head the CIA. In adding up his negatives they said that he was behind to the push to get the NSA to adopt off-the-shelf technology instead of relying on home grown, which they said had been a major failure for the NSA, costing it as much or more than in-house stuff and providing lesser capabilities.
I wonder if this product is one of the off-the-shelf wins or losses?
For all of its capabilities, it seems unlikely it can break even DES in real time, and would it be able to recognize, say, an SSH session tunneled via legitimate HTTP packets (not just SSH on port 80, but SSH embedded in HTTP packets)? I've used a Packeteer that was great at "seeing" layer 4/5 traffic regardless of port, but at a certain level of layering you don't really know what you've got.
Most thinking people see the rise in campus "speech codes" and other restrictions on speech as being a byproduct of the left's institutional dominance; it's a byproduct of the left's social control goals, and it's not coincidental that Communist China's social control goals also involve censorship.
The university left doesn't believe in indivdual freedom any more than the Chinese do.
There's somebody in the state of Virginia computer systems department putting "Should Virginia create a custom GINA?" on a meeting agenda right now, just hoping that somehow it really will get named VA-GINA and survive long enough to not be renamable.
Do you actually have any comparisons beyond just channel flipping? Such as season passes, wish lists, user interfaces, device stability, etc?
The Guide and other live TV functions are features I almost never use, since I almost never watch live TV. For me the value of Tivo is how well it can record what I want (wish lists, season passes) and the ease of use in doing so and playing the recordings back.
Admittedly the standalone hardware is pretty much obsolete; serial/IR channel changing, analog-only audio and video, and the single tuner capability cleary set it behind the cable DVRs for those capabilities.
But this should change with the S3 standalones.
Given the U.S. credit card industry's record on theft and security and Russia's general record on corruption, can you actually use your credit card on that site and not end up ripped off?
Why reinvent the wheel? Why not just implement a Bash or other /bin/sh compatible shell that many of us already know?
Or at least *fix* cmd.exe so that as a GUI and keyboard interface it's not punishing -- make cut and paste work like every terminal emulator woth a darn (SecureCRT or Putty), make the screen resizable in the right way, etc.
My fear is that you've just developed yet another programming interface and all the dimestore VB/Access programmers are going to create a nightmare of spaghetti code with it, simply because they can.
It's all about unemployment compensation. When a company cans you without a specific reason (insubordination, absenteeism, failing to follow rules) they get stuck with a tab for your unemployment compensation. Since unemployment functions a little like insurance, the more employers are liable for it, the more they pay (ie, higher risk).
Most states only allow denial of unemployment benefits for "termination for cause" and being bad at your job isn't considered termination for cause, since it is presumed to be the employer's responsibility to determine if you are capable of doing the job before hiring you. This means that errors in judgement or lack of skill aren't considered valid causes. If they hired you to design widgets and you can't do it, that's their mistake.
It doesn't mean that they *can't* fire you, they can, they just have to foot the bill for your unemployment benefits. They face some legal exposure if the termination was highly arbitrary and/or a involved standards that were not applied uniformly, but I think a lot of companies can beat the rap on this unless they are substantial mitigating factors involving protected class status (women, racial minorities, and increasingly, age).
This is why many employers coax/bully/blackmail/coerce/lure employees into resigning voluntarily; voluntary terminations are exempt from unemployment compensation. Employees get a couple of weeks (or more depending) at full salary, extended benefits availability and the ability to say "they quit" and a vague assurance that future employers will be told that the employee did work there and did quit voluntarily. Employers don't have to pay unemployment and often also get some signed document agreeing to forsake future legal action. With friendly inside references and a good story, most employees can bounce back.
I personally think it's more balanced than its given credit for. Employers pay a stiff cost for capricious termination, but can still easily get rid of problem employees. Employees don't suffer immediate financial peril but can't get a free lunch forever. And if an employee really does break some well-defined rules you can get rid of them and not pay for the privilege.
The only employers that complain about this are those with bad personnel policies, since they end up with a lot of involuntary terminations and high unemployment costs. Employers that make good hiring decisions, have supportive policies (ie, training so you do your job well) and competent management (no tyrants or bullies) and decent compensation don't have this problem -- they seldom have the need to terminate without cause.
This isn't really about free speech, it's about definitions of intellectual property.
Every time someone wants to limit speech, one of the first things out of their mouths is the line above. The goal is always to frame the issue at hand as not being about free speech, but about something else we are willing and able to put limits on.
Debating Iraq? It's not about free speech, it's about national security.
Pornography? It's not about free speech, it's about community morals.
Journalism? It's not about free speech, it's about public order.
Religion? It's not about free speech, it's about religious tolerance.
YOU want to live in a country where freedom of speech is subverted to other goals or values? Great. Have at it. But here those other values are secondary to freedom of speech.
But wouldn't the Rothschilds be a better reference?
You don't get it. Romantic love is a myth, she will never be into you "for you", just as you're unlikely to be "into her" for reasons that don't have something to do with tits, ass and a willingness to not embarass you in front of your friends.
We're all driven by the biological imperitive -- reproduction. The priority list for women when it comes to reproduction unfortunately doesn't include your witty opinions, good taste in art or your skill at cunnilingus.
What it does include is your ability to provide for the material well-being of her offspring. If you can cover that one, you're golden. She'll tolerate your ignorant opinions, bad hygiene and clumsy sexual technnique; do it well enough, and she will make you believe that you have the logic of Aristotle, the body of Adonis and the skills of Rocco Siffredi.
Of course if you *can* provide for her offspring and you both know it, the trick of course is to make her sing for her supper.
OK, let's say you have 5 Win2k03 applications that require 5 servers.
Your capital outlay for the servers will be around $10k. Add in a support package for hardware and you're talking another $500 or so per year. Each box uses power, requires a KVM interface, physical space, a network port and puts a heat load onto the air conditioner. These marginal costs will add another $100 per box, so we're now looking at a 3 year cost of around $13k, not including any labor costs.
A GSX rollout would have been about $7500 for a bigger server and a GSX license. Setup would have been faster, since the base Wink03 image could have been cloned 4 times. The single server would require less A/C, power, switch ports and KVM ports, but we can still call it $200 and be safe. Our three year cost would still be under the hardware only costs of the 5 server configuration.
Patching is really a non-factor, since you're patching regardless, and you can patch 5 VMs and then the server and really get away with one reboot, since most Wink03 patches don't require an immediate reboot.
Of course this barely takes into the ease of managing a virtual box (cloning machines for patch testing, backup of raw images, etc), the flexibility of being able to create a new server almost instantly without having to hunt down hardware. And once you get into the "datacenter" rollouts with SANs and multiple ESX hosts and the ability to move VMs between hardware platforms, it gets even better.
Can you?
...and it may be too late. I've long been amazed at the lack of hardware innovation on Tivo's platform. I've owned my S2 Tivo for nearly 4 years now and there's been a couple of times I would have considered buying new devices to solve very specific problems but Tivo had no hardware innovations available.
Nobody really likes hardware churn for minor features, but I think Tivo really cost themselves a lot of sales (and hence service) opportunities by not coming out with incremental upgrades.
I would have moved my S2 to the bedroom and bought a new one for the ability to record and play digital audio, and might even have considered replacing that non-existent unit with one that could do digital audio and CableCard 1.0 even without HD support. Of course that unit I would have replaced with the upcoming S3 unit which appears to solve all the problems at once, including HD.
So there's 2-3 Tivo hardware sales plus at least one additional service subscription (wife probably wouldn't have accepted three Tivo subs). And I don't think I'm alone in this regard; I think there's a lot of people who defected completely or at least compromised and added cable DVRs for HD recording.
I'm just hoping Tivo makes it and the S3 boxes come out, as I think they're Tivo's last, best chance.
They could make dynamic pricing work, but it would work better if Google hosted the music library and playlists (another thing they've demonstrated mastery of). But the bugger with pay-per-play is that people expect their media to be portable to devices and places where counting plays doesn't work.
I think people generally expect to "own" music and video, which seems to eliminate most of Googles strengths.
I even make mine with dynamic-sized VMDKs to keep space low (generally it's not a performance strain except during initial setup), but I guess you can never have enough disk space.
For me the biggest issue with running too many simultaneous VMs isn't disk but RAM. I like to keep RAM allocations generous to keep swapping at a minimum, since I think VM swapping laptop HDDs is more of a penalty than anything.
I wish I could get a laptop with that much disk space. I keep stock VMs that I clone for client projects worthy of it, but even with cloning I find myself pruning VMDKs that haven't been used a while.
I think a better solution would be a legacy-free OS that would have XP-level compatibility but would provide a VM layer configurable as DOS, NT4 or Win2k, depending on the need of the application.
If this isn't practical (having to run one each of the above layers could gobble tons of RAM), then at least providing a way to do a legacy-free installation with the option of adding support for older environments later. Systems that didn't need it wouldn't have to have it added, perhaps improving performance.
I know that the library had reel-film (Super 8, probably) movies, although I think they were largely B&W shorts and many were probably silent since I think there were probably few people who had sync-sound Super 8 projectors.
I think there were also a lot of rental options for 16mm prints of movies. Not down at the corner shop, but all those hollywood movies we watched in school and college came from someplace.
MD would have rocked if Sony would have pulled their heads out of their asses and opened up ATRAC so you could rip CDs to it and made players that supported both MP3 and ATRAC.
They'll never do the out-of-band raises. Microsoft is too corporate and the corporate class system will not tolerate pay and benefits systems that allow "workers" to be paid more than "management." Ever. Even for one FY cycle.
It only works that way at tech companies run by the engineers that started them, and then only temporarily, until either enough management types are brought in from the outside or until the engineers with stock options and influence decide its not any fun anymore and leave. The latter is a real death knell, since those original engineers are the ones to whom the management guys owe *their* jobs to and it's hard for management to push the corporate class system when their are engineers still there who have both the proven track record and the financial resources to call bullshit on them.
But when it does reach that point, it becomes Just Another Corporation where the corporate class system gets re-introduced and the company is ultimately run by its marketing arm like any other corporation, hoping that nobody sees the mediocrity through the bullshit.
I just wonder how long it will take Google to get like that, or if they have discovered some way around it.
I've been totally stumped about this for years. I can only imagine that there would be an order of magnitude increase in efficiency and compliance if they did this.
Call me conspiratorial, but I think the only reason they don't do this is that there's an entire industry built up around filing taxes that would more or less be eliminated by this. Which is fine by me -- I don't think the government should prop up businesses by making the business of government overcomplicated.
I sometimes wonder if studios have got themselves into a pickle with special features and would actually like to stop making them but don't quite know how without being the first.
Perhaps this will allow them to do this without looking like cheap bastards.
Hasn't it been fixed for some time via the allow-query and allow-recursion configuration options?
The expectation is that players are playing to win, not to maximize their financial outcomes.
Players may choose to execute safe plays that avoid injuries so they can maximize their pay vs. executing riskier plays that place them at greater injury risk but enhance their victory potential.
Players engage in self-centered behavior (eg, demanding to be traded, etc) vs team behavior that will contribute to victories.
Intel's new virtualization technology is supposed to make this much simpler and possibly a future reality (and may be a driving factor in why Apple chose Intel, and why Apple isn't fighting to keep Windows off their machines...).
Right now, though, VMWare ESX is *kind of* like that -- the core "OS" that you boot into is the hypervisor and the management session is actually a VM running under it.
The problem has always been that Intel chips don't do virtualization well.
If Apple and VMWare announced a deal to build a hypervisor into Mac OS to allow partitioning and native booting of non-Mac OSes, I'd be queuing for an IntelMac tomorrow.