As always when reading this stuff, my first thought was that the media shouldn't have gotten so obsessed with damaging the Bush administration over the Plame "scandal" nonsense that they demanded that punishing leakers take priority over all else.
The irony in your statement is that there would be no reason to try and "damage the Bush administration" if they hadn't willfully and maliciously acted to damage Valerie Plame's career and personal safety, simply for being married to someone that spoke out about the lies on WMDs.
You think that reporters should be punished for "damaging the reputation of government?" What kind of fascist, repressive country do you think we live in? What part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;" don't you understand?
I like Biodiesel much more because it has higher energy density than alcohol or gasoline, but I see your point about reducing emissions. That's why they mix ethanol with gas right now during the winter in cold areas.
The way that I see it, Ethanol would create fewer corn subsidies because of the rise in demand.
Sure, people voluntarily using Ethanol would be fine, that's the way free markets are supposed to work. When the corn lobby (don't think small farmers, think Archer Daniels Midland) forces refineries through law to add Ethanol to our gas, raising the cost of gas for everyone, and lowering our gas mileage, that is called a subsidy. The government is mandating that we buy it, how else is that anything other than a handout?
There is a lot of corn production in his district, so that is the example he uses.
Case closed... He is pandering to the corn lobby, that spends hundreds of thousands each year forcing legislation down our throat that requires us to use Ethanol... This is all about handouts for corn farmers... A big part of the reason why gas went up to $3 a gallon was the combined aftermath of Katrina with the Ethanol requirements passed after heavy lobbying by the corn lobby. Refiners couldn't get easy access to Ethanol, but the law required it, therefore gas prices jumped.
No thanks, I don't need to pay an extra $0.25 a gallon just so that corn farmers in Nebraska can make more money.
I went to download server beta a few days ago to try it, and AFTER filling in my contact details I got the licence terms that said no commercial use under any circumstances.
This is total BS. Their license agreement has never said that, and as a matter of fact, their FAQ makes it pretty clear:
Q: Who can use VMware Server?
A: The benefits of server virtualization can be realized by a company of any size -- even small companies with just a few servers.
Especially for MMOs, there's no reason they have to fall behind.
Actually, there's a very good reason why most MMOs fall behind in the graphics department and look very dated after a few years: Installed User Base. Think about it this way: WoW was released in 2004 and used average graphics for the time, not wanting to require people to have a top of the line PC to run it. Now, 2 years later, the graphics look extremely dated to me. Why wouldn't they just updated them? Well, they have 5 million users out there that most likely don't want to have to buy a new PC just to keep getting their WoW fix. Do they risk alienating their user base by increasing the system requirements for the game? Hell no. Because that's what updating the graphics are all about: Increased graphics require increased system specs.
I would love for MMOs to release a new client that supports the latest whiz-bang graphics features, yet still support the original client so that all of those people with 3 year old machines can still play. That would be the best of both worlds... Don't lock anyone out because they're not part of the techno-elite, but let those of us with dual SLI rigs see the latest eye-candy on a game they know and love.
Was there any additional latency on a couple of the ping responses?
Yes, I have to admit that one or two of the ping responses is a little delayed during the final cutover. It first does the memory copy across gigabit, which takes about 30 seconds, then when the receiving server is ready, there is a final cutover where the VM is killed on one server and started up on the other. That is when I saw latency jump from 0.1 ms up to a couple hundred ms for a couple pings.
We have about 10 Citrix Servers running on a VMware ESX 2.5.3 system on HP BladeCenter (AMD Opterons). It works pretty well overall. We found out that you definitely need the SMP upgrade component so each Citrix instance can access two physical processors. VMware ESX 2.5.3 only supports 3600 MB max memory per guest OS and only 32-bit guest OS's, however, VMware ESX 3 just came out and it now supports 64-bit guests, with up to 16GB of RAM each, and up to 4 processors each (physical processors, not just virtual).
The benefits of ESX server are pretty great. Secure remote console. Remote power. Ability to clone your VMs (with VirtualCenter, or a free perl script). Ability to migrate a running VM to a different server without shutting it down (google vmotion). The benefits of running virtualized are even greater than maximizing the use of hardware. Manageability is a big plus to going virtual.
Anyway, in your situation, I would recommend installing ESX server on your two big boxes, and using many smaller 4GB 32-bit Citrix servers. Citrix will automatically load balance your apps among your server farm, and ESX will let you load about 4-5 Citrix servers on a single physical box/blade.
Also, get some shared storage (SAN, or even SCSI disk shelf attached to both servers) so you can use Vmotion to migrate VMs around. Imagine how cool it is when you need to do a hardware upgrade or fix a bad component to just migrate the VMs off, do your maintenance, then migrate them back on, without scheduling downtime or the users even noticing. I've even run a countinuous ping to a VM, done a migration from one blade to another, and watched it never miss a single ping. It dumps the contents of memory across a gigabit ethernet connection to the other node, then somehow points it at the shared disk drive on storage, never missing a beat/ping...
Instead, we've been using these. Very good cooling:
Unfortunately, with a generic motherboard and an off-the-shelf SATA RAID controller, good luck fixing the thing when a drive fails. What's that? The RAID controller is reporting a bad drive, but you have no idea which drive it is because there's no way to light it up without shutting down the server and going into the RAID controller BIOS and telling it to flash the drive light?
Tough luck. There is a reason why Sun is a little more expensive: RAS. RAS is Sun's main hardware principle. It stands for Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability. Sun hardware is truly built with these concepts in mind. Concepts like: A failed component should trigger a visible alert (warning light), as well as a human readable syslog message that calls out the exact part that failed. You will never see these things in a self-built beige box without some serious hardware hacking on your own, and at that point, you might as well hire a team of EEs to reinvent the wheel.
Why is Guild Wars not even covered in this chart? Especially, now that they've just sold 2 million copies. Is it because there is no monthly fee to play? I think that is a very stupid metric.
Not every good MMORPG requires a fee to play, but it looks like even if you create an immensely popular game, unless you're bending your customers over and asking them to take it in the ass every month to the tune of $14.95, you don't get listed.
Lets say a company like Dodge (auto company) had a monopolistic influence over the auto industry (they dont.. but lets just pretend) and they tell all of the auto manufacturers that they will provide the Hemi engine FOR FREE to all of them. Now, because of their monopolistic presence, all of the companies dump EVERY OTHER engine manufacturer because of a) their name, and b) the free price... then you would see LOTS of people and lots of states getting ready to sue Dodge.
Actually, that's a bad example, because just being a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal. Now, in your example, if Dodge made all other auto parts incompatible with their engine and used their monopoly to force all car owners to buy Dodge auto parts, this would be illegal, and a much closer analogy to the current MS case.
...lazily writes up a job description "requiring H1B Visa"... therefore targetting the job at the friend/acquaintance that they want to hire.
The only problem with this is that it's still illegal. An american company that wants to hire an H1B visa worker has to sign a statement saying that they have made an effort to find an american worker to do this job, but have been unable to do so, and therefore, their only option is an H1B visa worker.
By requiring an H1B visa to get in the door, this is violating the law. Period, end of story.
This isn't so much about google as it is about TV. The value of most internet traffic ($40/month for a 3 mbps unique connection) is nearly an order of magnitude below the value of TV ($60/mo for shared access to stream equivalent to ~27 mbps)
You're absolutely right.
And, you bring up an interesting point.
The cable and telcos have been arguing that without the ability to charge Google/Yahoo/MSN for access, they won't be able to deliver the next generation of HDTV on demand video streaming services. This is a bullshit argument, and here's why:
I used to work at a cable ISP and I learned that a cable modem segment only occupies one 6 mhz. band, or a single analog cable channel, and contains 27 megabits of broadcast ability a second. Basically there are ~80 or so analog channels available (forgot how many). This means that the cable company only takes a single analog channel on their network to deliver broadband Internet to an entire neighborhood or small town. They also deliver digital cable by compressing about 3 or 4 channels down to another 6 mhz. analog channel. That's why the big push to get people off of analog cable... each one of those channels is worth about half a T3 worth of digital bandwidth from the central office to the customers.
So, if the cable company is already streaming Hidef and standard def movies to me on a different channel than my 10 megabit cable modem service (I have OptimumOnline, YMMV), and watching an "on-demand" movie on my TV doesn't interfere with my BitTorrent download in the next room, then why even bring up this idea that Google and MSN and Yahoo somehow interfere with that. It's a Straw Man Argument...
They want the uneducated Congress-Critters to think that if Google video or YouTube takes up too much bandwidth... "the gosh 'dern TV might stop werking!!! Oh NOES!!!!!11!1!1One!1!!1"
The truth is, the cable companies (and telcos) have tons of bandwidth; way more than they could ever use at the last mile. This argument that internet, which only occupies a single ~27 mpbs channel, can possibly interfere with any of the 80+ other ~27mbps data streams is laughable at best.
I hope this sheds some light on the situation. I started to put 2 and 2 together on my own...
Power grid reliability is not a big concern. Data centres of this size will have backup generators.
Actually, power grid reliability is a huge concern. Most data centers of this size will have connections to two different power grids, preferably from two different electric providers. I don't care how much generator capacity you have, it's most likely not enough to last longer than a couple of days without power. This definitely influences data center projects of this size, where architects need to consider all potential risks that might affect operations, especially power.
The audible (as opposed to measured, about which I know nothing) quality is decent. Not quite as good as an uncompressed CD, probably as good as a 192kbps MP3 CD, and much crisper than radio.
I have a free 3 month subscription to Sirius that came with my Jetta (turbo diesel ftw), and I have to say that I will be cancelling it before the 3 months is up. The sound quality is absolutely atrocious, with most channels coming in at around 32kbps, and talk channels like NPR coming in at around 3-6 kbps. How anyone can listen to music with this level of compression and not want to drive an icepick through their ear drum is beyond me...
Let me just say that I'm not a big audiophile, I find it perfectly acceptable listening to 128kbps MP3 streams on the internet all the time, but Sirius satellite radio is just way overcompressed.
All of the Sirius channels we listened to exhibited the kind of artifacts compressed-data audio codecs generate when low bit rates are used. Most noticeable was a mid- to high-frequency swirling effect that was most evident on slow to moderately fast music with a clear high end - acoustic guitars, cymbals, and strings were the most problematic.
For example, on The Calling's "Wherever You Will Go" (on US-1, a pop channel), the swirling artifacts caused the sound of the cymbals and acoustic guitars to blur together. Similarly, the rapid notes played by the strings in the finale of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (on the Symphony Hall channel) were rendered indistinguishable. Phasing effects caused the solo part on a horn concerto (composer unknown because the Kenwood head unit doesn't display composer information on the classical channels) to become disturbingly distorted. This phasing was also apparent on pianos. Sustained notes in particular had a fluttering, unstable quality.
Musical notes often seemed to lose their attack. This was especially evident in Sting's "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You" (the Bridge channel), where the sharp snap of the percussion and bass all but disappeared. We had similar problems with the speech channels, which Sirius says are coded at a lower bit rate than the music channels. And these problems were audible both while we were stopped and while driving. We could even hear them when we were standing outside of the vehicle in a parking lot with the system playing at normal volume and the windows rolled down.
The bottom line: Sirius's sound quality was inferior to XM's - to a significant degree, we thought. But perhaps we set a high bar: one of us teaches the engineers who design audio systems; the other is a recording engineer who spends 8 hours a day critically listening to audio to ensure that the sound quality is the best it can be. Your ears might be more tolerant.
Why didn't Sirius sound as good as XM? There are a number of possibilities. Both systems use digital transmissions, and both limit audio bandwidth (particularly the highest frequencies) and use data-reduction codecs to provide as many channels as they do. But XM uses a version of AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) while Sirius uses sPAC (Satellite Perceptual Audio Coding). Differences between these codecs - such as how they compensate for the way we perceive sound and how they distribute the available bits between the channels - can make a big sonic difference. Compared with encoding, the receiver's chore of decoding the bits back into music is relatively simple, and even doing it badly can't cause the kind of degradation we heard. So the sonic problems weren't the fault of Kenwood's Sirius receiver.
The HDTV broadcasts which he records are already compressed using MPEG2 compression. It's much better quality (and exactly the same as when you watch it at home) to just record the MPEG bitstream coming in off the firewire cable, rather than convert it to analog and then back to digital again.
Don't forget you have automatic saves every 10-15 mins and when that takes more then just a second or two it is a really major pain and interruption to the job.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but this is 2006. We've had multi-threaded applications for how many years now? Spin off another thread for the auto-save process. Word already does this.
Sweeping generalizations of millions of individuals are 100% subjective by nature. The only thing we know about the linux "community" is that it has something to do with linux.
Fair enough, my bad. I shouldn't have generalized. I should have said "sadly, some people (Negroponte) in the Linux community..."
The way it is stated, it makes Sun look like some sort of terrible ogre, that is denying children access to computers, when it is the program creator that does not allow Java on the laptops.
Exactly. It's a bit vindictive to say "Sun is preventing kids from running Java", when there is nothing preventing them from freely distributing Java with every kid's laptop, other than their open source only rule that was arbitrarily made by themselves.
From TFA: Negroponte wants only open source software on the machines, according to Red Hat, which is a member of the project
You can't always have your cake and eat it too. How about a compromise? Only open-source where possible, but free as in beer is OK if there is no better open-source alternative. This would allow people to use a mostly free OS, but still use quality closed-source yet free as in beer software like Java.
Sadly, the Linux community is sometimes blinded by zealotry in cases like this.
But I can't "upgrade" directly to Vista (not that I would want to, unless some good games will only run on it)? Bullshit.
It sounds like you've got a pretty nice system already. If for some reason you really feel the urge to "upgrade" to Vista, I'm sure you know that it's never a good idea to do an "upgrade" of Windows, or most any commercial OS. It's always better to back up your data and do a "Fresh Install". That great clean and fresh and lightweight feeling you get after starting fresh with a non-bloated registry is worth the hassle...:-)
Now, why can't Windows come up with an "Archive Install" option like OS X has? That and Firewire target disk mode machine upgrade (suck all your apps and home directory across Firewire in about 10 minutes) are OMGWTFBBQ great!
I see they're still stuck on the strange idea that speed is the proper metric for determining who's the best programmer.
Want to hear a funny story? When I was in college I went to one of these competitions with about 200 other programmers. We were given 4 hours to complete the assignment. The assignment was to create a customer database for some company. You are given points for each working feature, and there are probably 20 different features that have to work in order to win.
You had to bring your own computer. Most of the other geeks there like myself all had home-built PCs, generic beige boxes. This is when a 386-33 was state of the art, so laptops were still a little too expensive for every college student to have one.
The funny thing was: most of us wrote the application in Pascal or C, which seemed to be the most common programming languages. The guy that won the competition finished in only 1 hour and did it on a Mac using Filemaker... ugh.. This is before OS X and we were not impressed. The application we had to write was a database, and filemaker, even though there was no actual programming involved, allowed him to create a really quick GUI and database structure and have it functional within minutes.
It has always seemed like a strange metric: time, but what else can you use to measure good programming skill?
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As always when reading this stuff, my first thought was that the media shouldn't have gotten so obsessed with damaging the Bush administration over the Plame "scandal" nonsense that they demanded that punishing leakers take priority over all else.
The irony in your statement is that there would be no reason to try and "damage the Bush administration" if they hadn't willfully and maliciously acted to damage Valerie Plame's career and personal safety, simply for being married to someone that spoke out about the lies on WMDs.
You think that reporters should be punished for "damaging the reputation of government?" What kind of fascist, repressive country do you think we live in? What part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;" don't you understand?
Other option? Biodiesel.
I like Biodiesel much more because it has higher energy density than alcohol or gasoline, but I see your point about reducing emissions. That's why they mix ethanol with gas right now during the winter in cold areas.
The way that I see it, Ethanol would create fewer corn subsidies because of the rise in demand.
Sure, people voluntarily using Ethanol would be fine, that's the way free markets are supposed to work. When the corn lobby (don't think small farmers, think Archer Daniels Midland) forces refineries through law to add Ethanol to our gas, raising the cost of gas for everyone, and lowering our gas mileage, that is called a subsidy. The government is mandating that we buy it, how else is that anything other than a handout?
There is a lot of corn production in his district, so that is the example he uses.
Case closed... He is pandering to the corn lobby, that spends hundreds of thousands each year forcing legislation down our throat that requires us to use Ethanol... This is all about handouts for corn farmers... A big part of the reason why gas went up to $3 a gallon was the combined aftermath of Katrina with the Ethanol requirements passed after heavy lobbying by the corn lobby. Refiners couldn't get easy access to Ethanol, but the law required it, therefore gas prices jumped.
No thanks, I don't need to pay an extra $0.25 a gallon just so that corn farmers in Nebraska can make more money.
The link you published, http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/asedeno/vmware/ vmware-console-distrib/doc/EULA, seems to be a EULA for the VMware console distribution, not for VMware server.
This is total BS. Their license agreement has never said that, and as a matter of fact, their FAQ makes it pretty clear:
Especially for MMOs, there's no reason they have to fall behind.
Actually, there's a very good reason why most MMOs fall behind in the graphics department and look very dated after a few years: Installed User Base. Think about it this way: WoW was released in 2004 and used average graphics for the time, not wanting to require people to have a top of the line PC to run it. Now, 2 years later, the graphics look extremely dated to me. Why wouldn't they just updated them? Well, they have 5 million users out there that most likely don't want to have to buy a new PC just to keep getting their WoW fix. Do they risk alienating their user base by increasing the system requirements for the game? Hell no. Because that's what updating the graphics are all about: Increased graphics require increased system specs.
I would love for MMOs to release a new client that supports the latest whiz-bang graphics features, yet still support the original client so that all of those people with 3 year old machines can still play. That would be the best of both worlds... Don't lock anyone out because they're not part of the techno-elite, but let those of us with dual SLI rigs see the latest eye-candy on a game they know and love.
Was there any additional latency on a couple of the ping responses?
Yes, I have to admit that one or two of the ping responses is a little delayed during the final cutover. It first does the memory copy across gigabit, which takes about 30 seconds, then when the receiving server is ready, there is a final cutover where the VM is killed on one server and started up on the other. That is when I saw latency jump from 0.1 ms up to a couple hundred ms for a couple pings.
We have about 10 Citrix Servers running on a VMware ESX 2.5.3 system on HP BladeCenter (AMD Opterons). It works pretty well overall. We found out that you definitely need the SMP upgrade component so each Citrix instance can access two physical processors. VMware ESX 2.5.3 only supports 3600 MB max memory per guest OS and only 32-bit guest OS's, however, VMware ESX 3 just came out and it now supports 64-bit guests, with up to 16GB of RAM each, and up to 4 processors each (physical processors, not just virtual).
The benefits of ESX server are pretty great. Secure remote console. Remote power. Ability to clone your VMs (with VirtualCenter, or a free perl script). Ability to migrate a running VM to a different server without shutting it down (google vmotion). The benefits of running virtualized are even greater than maximizing the use of hardware. Manageability is a big plus to going virtual.
Anyway, in your situation, I would recommend installing ESX server on your two big boxes, and using many smaller 4GB 32-bit Citrix servers. Citrix will automatically load balance your apps among your server farm, and ESX will let you load about 4-5 Citrix servers on a single physical box/blade.
Also, get some shared storage (SAN, or even SCSI disk shelf attached to both servers) so you can use Vmotion to migrate VMs around. Imagine how cool it is when you need to do a hardware upgrade or fix a bad component to just migrate the VMs off, do your maintenance, then migrate them back on, without scheduling downtime or the users even noticing. I've even run a countinuous ping to a VM, done a migration from one blade to another, and watched it never miss a single ping. It dumps the contents of memory across a gigabit ethernet connection to the other node, then somehow points it at the shared disk drive on storage, never missing a beat/ping...
As always, YMMV.
Instead, we've been using these. Very good cooling:
Unfortunately, with a generic motherboard and an off-the-shelf SATA RAID controller, good luck fixing the thing when a drive fails. What's that? The RAID controller is reporting a bad drive, but you have no idea which drive it is because there's no way to light it up without shutting down the server and going into the RAID controller BIOS and telling it to flash the drive light?
Tough luck. There is a reason why Sun is a little more expensive: RAS. RAS is Sun's main hardware principle. It stands for Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability. Sun hardware is truly built with these concepts in mind. Concepts like: A failed component should trigger a visible alert (warning light), as well as a human readable syslog message that calls out the exact part that failed. You will never see these things in a self-built beige box without some serious hardware hacking on your own, and at that point, you might as well hire a team of EEs to reinvent the wheel.
Why is Guild Wars not even covered in this chart? Especially, now that they've just sold 2 million copies. Is it because there is no monthly fee to play? I think that is a very stupid metric.
Not every good MMORPG requires a fee to play, but it looks like even if you create an immensely popular game, unless you're bending your customers over and asking them to take it in the ass every month to the tune of $14.95, you don't get listed.
Closed source has a far bigger anti-capitalist problem with EULAs (name a car that limits where you can drive it) than Open source will ever have.
I agree that EULA's have gotten out of hand, but I just wanted to point out to you that most open source has a EULA as well: it's called the GPL.
Lets say a company like Dodge (auto company) had a monopolistic influence over the auto industry (they dont .. but lets just pretend) and they tell all of the auto manufacturers that they will provide the Hemi engine FOR FREE to all of them. Now, because of their monopolistic presence, all of the companies dump EVERY OTHER engine manufacturer because of a) their name, and b) the free price ... then you would see LOTS of people and lots of states getting ready to sue Dodge.
Actually, that's a bad example, because just being a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal. Now, in your example, if Dodge made all other auto parts incompatible with their engine and used their monopoly to force all car owners to buy Dodge auto parts, this would be illegal, and a much closer analogy to the current MS case.
...lazily writes up a job description "requiring H1B Visa"... therefore targetting the job at the friend/acquaintance that they want to hire.
The only problem with this is that it's still illegal. An american company that wants to hire an H1B visa worker has to sign a statement saying that they have made an effort to find an american worker to do this job, but have been unable to do so, and therefore, their only option is an H1B visa worker.
By requiring an H1B visa to get in the door, this is violating the law. Period, end of story.
This isn't so much about google as it is about TV. The value of most internet traffic ($40/month for a 3 mbps unique connection) is nearly an order of magnitude below the value of TV ($60/mo for shared access to stream equivalent to ~27 mbps)
You're absolutely right.
And, you bring up an interesting point.
The cable and telcos have been arguing that without the ability to charge Google/Yahoo/MSN for access, they won't be able to deliver the next generation of HDTV on demand video streaming services. This is a bullshit argument , and here's why:
I used to work at a cable ISP and I learned that a cable modem segment only occupies one 6 mhz. band, or a single analog cable channel, and contains 27 megabits of broadcast ability a second. Basically there are ~80 or so analog channels available (forgot how many). This means that the cable company only takes a single analog channel on their network to deliver broadband Internet to an entire neighborhood or small town. They also deliver digital cable by compressing about 3 or 4 channels down to another 6 mhz. analog channel. That's why the big push to get people off of analog cable... each one of those channels is worth about half a T3 worth of digital bandwidth from the central office to the customers.
So, if the cable company is already streaming Hidef and standard def movies to me on a different channel than my 10 megabit cable modem service (I have OptimumOnline, YMMV), and watching an "on-demand" movie on my TV doesn't interfere with my BitTorrent download in the next room, then why even bring up this idea that Google and MSN and Yahoo somehow interfere with that. It's a Straw Man Argument...
They want the uneducated Congress-Critters to think that if Google video or YouTube takes up too much bandwidth... "the gosh 'dern TV might stop werking!!! Oh NOES!!!!!11!1!1One!1!!1"
The truth is, the cable companies (and telcos) have tons of bandwidth; way more than they could ever use at the last mile. This argument that internet, which only occupies a single ~27 mpbs channel, can possibly interfere with any of the 80+ other ~27mbps data streams is laughable at best.
I hope this sheds some light on the situation. I started to put 2 and 2 together on my own...
Power grid reliability is not a big concern. Data centres of this size will have backup generators.
Actually, power grid reliability is a huge concern. Most data centers of this size will have connections to two different power grids, preferably from two different electric providers. I don't care how much generator capacity you have, it's most likely not enough to last longer than a couple of days without power. This definitely influences data center projects of this size, where architects need to consider all potential risks that might affect operations, especially power.
I have a free 3 month subscription to Sirius that came with my Jetta (turbo diesel ftw), and I have to say that I will be cancelling it before the 3 months is up. The sound quality is absolutely atrocious, with most channels coming in at around 32kbps, and talk channels like NPR coming in at around 3-6 kbps. How anyone can listen to music with this level of compression and not want to drive an icepick through their ear drum is beyond me...
Let me just say that I'm not a big audiophile, I find it perfectly acceptable listening to 128kbps MP3 streams on the internet all the time, but Sirius satellite radio is just way overcompressed.
Check out this article:
I consistently get a tech out same day (from ATT (SBC), no less).
"Sure Mr. Customer, we'll be right out to fix your wiretap... er... I mean DSL service... Thank you for calling AT&T!"
Do you ever use compression?
The HDTV broadcasts which he records are already compressed using MPEG2 compression. It's much better quality (and exactly the same as when you watch it at home) to just record the MPEG bitstream coming in off the firewire cable, rather than convert it to analog and then back to digital again.
Don't forget you have automatic saves every 10-15 mins and when that takes more then just a second or two it is a really major pain and interruption to the job.
Dude, I hate to break it to you, but this is 2006. We've had multi-threaded applications for how many years now? Spin off another thread for the auto-save process. Word already does this.
It removes one of Dell's advantages in the Corp. World: near-drop-in systems.
Sorry, but nobody that uses Dell in the enterprise uses the default XP home build that they are talking about in this article.
Corporate users image their computers with a volume license key version of XP pro and something like Ghost.
Sweeping generalizations of millions of individuals are 100% subjective by nature.
The only thing we know about the linux "community" is that it has something to do with linux.
Fair enough, my bad. I shouldn't have generalized. I should have said "sadly, some people (Negroponte) in the Linux community..."
The way it is stated, it makes Sun look like some sort of terrible ogre, that is denying children access to computers, when it is the program creator that does not allow Java on the laptops.
Exactly. It's a bit vindictive to say "Sun is preventing kids from running Java", when there is nothing preventing them from freely distributing Java with every kid's laptop, other than their open source only rule that was arbitrarily made by themselves.
From TFA:
Negroponte wants only open source software on the machines, according to Red Hat, which is a member of the project
You can't always have your cake and eat it too. How about a compromise? Only open-source where possible, but free as in beer is OK if there is no better open-source alternative. This would allow people to use a mostly free OS, but still use quality closed-source yet free as in beer software like Java.
Sadly, the Linux community is sometimes blinded by zealotry in cases like this.
But I can't "upgrade" directly to Vista (not that I would want to, unless some good games will only run on it)? Bullshit.
:-)
It sounds like you've got a pretty nice system already. If for some reason you really feel the urge to "upgrade" to Vista, I'm sure you know that it's never a good idea to do an "upgrade" of Windows, or most any commercial OS. It's always better to back up your data and do a "Fresh Install". That great clean and fresh and lightweight feeling you get after starting fresh with a non-bloated registry is worth the hassle...
Now, why can't Windows come up with an "Archive Install" option like OS X has? That and Firewire target disk mode machine upgrade (suck all your apps and home directory across Firewire in about 10 minutes) are OMGWTFBBQ great!
I see they're still stuck on the strange idea that speed is the proper metric for determining who's the best programmer.
Want to hear a funny story? When I was in college I went to one of these competitions with about 200 other programmers. We were given 4 hours to complete the assignment. The assignment was to create a customer database for some company. You are given points for each working feature, and there are probably 20 different features that have to work in order to win.
You had to bring your own computer. Most of the other geeks there like myself all had home-built PCs, generic beige boxes. This is when a 386-33 was state of the art, so laptops were still a little too expensive for every college student to have one.
The funny thing was: most of us wrote the application in Pascal or C, which seemed to be the most common programming languages. The guy that won the competition finished in only 1 hour and did it on a Mac using Filemaker... ugh.. This is before OS X and we were not impressed. The application we had to write was a database, and filemaker, even though there was no actual programming involved, allowed him to create a really quick GUI and database structure and have it functional within minutes.
It has always seemed like a strange metric: time, but what else can you use to measure good programming skill?