I think Solaris 10 (or maybe a later version, I can't remember) is suppose to support a concept of Quality of Service applied to disk accesses.
This is being added as a necessary feature in order to support hardened "containers" or whatever they will be called when Solaris 10 is released.
Basically, if you've got several virtual images of Unix running on a single box, you need to be able to throttle not only disk usage, but CPU, memory, and other resources, especially if you have any mission critical virtual servers running on the single physical server.
The power of being able to create hundreds of virtual servers on a single hardware platform is useless without the ability to guarantee some type of QoS to each individual image.
I'd expect some of the technology worker bees and programmers not to have much difficulty moving to something like this, but how about further up Sun's management hierachy that lives and breathes things like Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations?
I hate to burst your bubble, but having worked for Sun for the last 2 years, I can tell you that Sun does a pretty good job of keeping their own employees using Sun software. This includes Star Office and Solaris. Most Sun offices use SunRay terminals hooked to a Sun Enterprise server. They run StarOffice 7 on top of Solaris 9. This makes it pretty easy for a Mac geek like me to open work documents using OpenOffice on OS X. In fact, up until very recently it was a fireable offence to even install Windows XP on any work computer. They were pretty worried about all of the privacy issues in XP and didn't want MS stealing corporate secrets through some unknown backdoor. Now, they allow you to run XP only if you run some script called XP Neuter first.
If anything, things are the other way around here, simply because of the NIH (not invented here) syndrome. Sun employees tend to be extremely anti-MS and anti-IBM, and most would not run MS Office or even Internet Explorer unless they were forced to by some management directive.
About the Java Desktop rollout: I can't speak for those in large Sun offices like Broomfield, CO and Burlington, MA; they may be running it already, but out in the small field offices it hasn't been rolled out yet. I haven't had a chance to preview it yet with the LiveCD thingy, but I would imagine within a year or so everyone will be running it.
When I went to price out one of Sun's new AMD systems, I was somewhat disappointed. First of all, the website does not give the level of detail that Dell's does. I want to know everything about the system from ram speed, to hd speed, to bus speed, etc. Then, I want much more ability to configure scsi, ide, raid levels, etc. On top of that, it was pretty expensive. You can get a dual xeon dell with 2GB of ram, 15K rpm scsi for about $1,000 less than a bare bones sun with an amd chip. For what it's worth, IBM is much worse in this regard when pricing any of their systems online. I think they're even more expensive and the website sucks way more.
First of all, you must not have looked very hard, because if you go to the main SunFire V20z server page and click on the Datasheet link halfway down the page, you get all of the specs you could ever want, including RAM speed and hard drive speed.
Second of all, on the price issue: You're not comparing Apples to Apples if you compare it with a Xeon server. Xeon is only a 32-bit architecture, which is severely memory bandwidth starved, as all processors in the system share the same paltry 533-mhz. memory bus. AMD's Hypertransport gives each processor dedicated channels to accesss memory with. Not only that, you're getting a full 64-bit machine, which runs circles around similarly equipped Xeons. If you don't believe me, Tom's Hardware recently did a comparison between dual and quad servers running Opteron and Xeon processors, and the Opterons ate the Xeons for lunch. I can't seem to find the exact link to the article, but it was posted on Slashdot a little while back.
Third, anyone who has purchased Sun hardware before knows that the price listed on the web is the "suggested retail price", and that you should call a local Sun reseller to get a much better price.
After you've gotten a real price, compare the two and I think you'll be surprised to see the Sun is actually cheaper than the Dell. On their low-end servers Sun has actually reached price parity and even beats Dell on most similar configurations. This is something that not a lot of Dell customers are even aware of, since most of them don't purchase Sun on a regular basis.
So, your purchasing choice really comes down to a support question:
Do you want Dell to provide your hardware support, and purchase Linux support from a third-party vendor like Red Hat with their Advanced Server package? (Be sure to add that $1500 license fee into the cost of your server)
-or-
Do you want Sun to be your one stop shop for both hardware and software support, freeing you up to do your job and not having to worry about the whole hardware vs. software support issue?
I think if you actually priced in all the support costs the Sun box actually ends up giving you a lower TCO. Most Sun Enterprise customers know this, and prefer to have just one vendor to call when anything goes wrong.
This has GOT to be illegal. Right? RIGHT? The simple fact that a corporation had any insight into political draft documents and help write them shows intense political and corporate based motivation for law.
No, this isn't illegal. Take a look at what Cheney did with the energy task force. Having Enron write their own energy laws is like having the fox guard the henhouse, but there is nothing illegal about it. Government has been having "industry leaders" draft legislation affecting their industry for years now. That's why large corporations can pollute the environment with little or no responsibility. When the industrial polluters are writing pollution laws, business is good for everyone, except those unfortunates that live downwind.
It was a joke, a play on words used by Fox News to describe their reporting. Funny how so few people on this board can take a joke. But I do think the Daily Show does a great job by using satire to expose a lot of the shenanigans perpetrated by our current administration.
I could have posted the message as Anonymous Coward if I really wanted to hide. What is so wrong about publishing the CEO's phone number? I got this information from someone at Dish Customer Service. There's nothing confidential about this information at all.
Maybe you didn't read my message, but they recently changed their pricing. There is now $0 installation, and a $9.50/month box rental. Not only that, there is no contract.
I've actually heard from people on AVSForum that Monsters is one of the coolest channels. The channels I'm really interested in are:
HBOHD SHOHD CinemaxHD StarzHD DiscoveryHD a nd of course ABC, CBS, and NBC HD.
All the rest of them, I could care less about, other than TechTV and Comedy Central, and possibly Discovery Times, I really don't watch any other TV.
Dude, I'm not even a Voom customer yet, much less a shill. I currently have digital cable through Charter Communications, but I've signed up for Voom and I'm going to be installed soon.
Also, there is no fucking contract. Excuse my language, but I don't like being called a shill when I'm not one. Not only is there no contract, but if you decide you don't want their service any more, you can call them and they'll send an installer back out to uninstall the dish from your roof. How many other companies will do that?
Also, name one satellite or digital cable provider that doesn't require an STB on every television. Can't think of any? That's because there aren't any. Maybe you're fine with 60 low quality SD analog cable channels, but I'm not.
I was just watching the Daily Show on Comedy Central, and during the commercial break, just about 30 seconds ago, they ran an ad basically blaming the entire incident on Dish Network and saying, "If you have a friend with Dish, he'll be spending a lot of time on your couch". The punchline at the end of the ad said something like "Comedy Central, now only on Cable and DirecTV".
Frankly, Viacom are the scum of the earth. I used to respect the Daily Show as one of the last bastions of fair and balanced (TM) news reporting available. Jon Stewart and the other correspondents seem to be the only (fake) news reporters that actually tell things the way they are, but for some strange reason they are totally silent about this news story, which is one of the biggest news stories on CNN and all other major news networks. I'm sure Viacom has given them a hush order or some other such mandate, but it really stinks of media bias.
I've lost a lot of respect for the Daily Show today, which used to be one of my favorite programs, and I'm seriously considering starting an email campaign against Viacom.
For those of you wanting to give Viacom a piece of your mind, here is the contact information for the CEO:
Mel Karmazin M-F 9:00 am to 5:00 pm - (212) 975-6500 or better yet, call him at home on the weekend at: (212) 956-1007
Cheers, and down with massive media conglomerates.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather get Voom service. Over 30 channels in full HDTV, plus all of the standard SD channels, plus they install a Channelmaster local antenna so you can get the HD locals as well. What's the cost? $0 up front for installation and only $9.50 a month to lease the box (which is a very nice Motorola set top box with DVI-HDCP output to drive your HDTV or Plasma screen).
DirecTV has been recompressing their HDTV channels recently to cram more bandwidth onto their already overcrowded satellites and in the process making HD-HBO look like crap. Dish has major problems of their own. I think Voom is looking more and more like the best option. They offer not only HD-HBO and HD-SHOtime, but also HD-Cinemax and HD-Starz, which none of the other satellite or cable companies currently offer, and only $80 a month for all the channels, or $40 a month for a basic package. As far as I'm concerned, both DirecTV (with their money-grubbing RIAA style extortion tactics) and Dish Network (with their terrible customer service and contract problems) can stick it where the sun don't shine.
I would recommend Cingular. I had a dual-band (TDMA & analog) Nokia 6250, and used to drive through the backroads of Arkansas quite a bit for my job. It doesn't get more rural than that. Cingular has a nationwide no roaming plan, and I got coverage almost everywhere I went. Even up on the lake or in a lot of camping grounds I would still get analog coverage.
Also, they don't gouge you on the price either. I think my bill was like $79 a month for 1000 anytime nationwide no roaming minutes. Here's a tip: If you're going to sign up for a Cingular plan, do it at Best Buy instead of at a Cingular outlet. Best Buy negotiates discounts on the phones. At the time I signed up (a couple of years ago), the Cingular outlet wanted $200 for the phone + a 2 year contract. Well, I got the same phone at Best Buy for only $15 plus a 1 year contract.
Damn, I just replied to another comment with more or less the exact thing you said in your statement.
GPL or no, MS would love to break the Java client, ship it in the next Windows Service Pack, and Sun would be forced to swallow their poison pill and backport their extensions into the main Java tree, else Java would fork and 100 million or so clients would be on the MS proprietary fork. Sun would lose Java completely.
Hey, that was a really great article, but I just wanted to point out one thing that Ganesh seems to be overlooking in his request to Sun.
He says that Sun should release Java under the GPL license in order to keep Microsoft from polluting it like they tried to do in the past with the JVM. He says this would make it easy for any changes MS made to be backported to the main Java tree.
This is true, but don't you think that MS could kill Java just as easily by "breaking" the implementation (adding their code to make it not function very well), bundling their broken client with the next Windows XP and 2000 service packs, and releasing their changes back under the GPL? Sun would then be forced to swallow the poison pill because they would have to support the millions of clients that are broken, and would probably have to accept the code into the main Java tree, else Java would fork.
Then Microsoft goes to their potential.NET customers and says "why would you want to use Java, it sucks?", and the PHB making the decisions says "yeah, every time I try to access a Java web app my machine blue screens, I guess you have a point."
I think Sun is smart enough to have already thought of this problem, and they're not going to let Microsoft poison Java again, GPL or no. That's why Java will never be open source.
Ganesh makes some great points though. I wish some of the higher-ups at Sun would read them.
Well, of course, the best solution is the one I use, personally.:-) The main benefit to my solution is that it actually works. I'm not just talking out my ass about how theoretically Freevo or MythTV will do what you want, if you can figure out how to install it.
Major benefits to my solution:
Uses Divx+AC3 files for great compression with minimal loss of picture quality.
Scales Divx video up to 720p for remarkable picture quality, which in many cases looks better than the original DVD. The PQ approaches HD in many cases.
Allows Dolby 5.1 AC3 optical pass-thru for true surround sound with no recompression of audio streams. The sound you hear is the sound on the original DVD.
Each compressed DVD movie is just over 1GB in size.
Compressed movies can be delivered to wireless clients anywhere in the home with standard 802.11b, with seamless playback.
Head-end server can be located in the basement or a closet to keep computer and fan noise away from your home theatre.
Also stores and catalogs your entire MP3 music library for listening to music from any client.
Outputs stereo audio sources (such as standard MP3 files) to both front and rear stereo channels in a surround setup, giving you output from all speakers in your surround setup, even if you're only listening to a stereo source.
Listen to Internet radio from any client.
The only disadvantage to my setup:
Not enough disk space to rip entire movies including menus in a lossless format. My setup can fully support reading.VOB files from the server, provided you have enough space to store them all.
Actually, I think it's pretty good. This is the hardware I had lying around to work with, most donated by my work:
1 Sun Ultra 5 360 mhz. workstation w/ 256 MB RAM and 9GB HD. (about $190 on eBay).
1 dual-channel differential PCI SCSI card, (about $20 on eBay).
1 Sun StorEdge D1000 with 10x 18GB SCSI hard drives, (about $130 for the array itself on eBay, then buy some Sun spud drive brackets and load up with your own SCSI drives).
1 Xbox, modded, with DVD remote kit, for each client.
You could get a much cheaper server for storage and all that by just building a PC clone and throwing a few 250 GB hard drives in it, but this hardware was free (except for the Xbox), so I used what I have.
Here are the installation steps:
1. Install Solaris 9 on the Ultra 5.
2. Use Solstice Disksuite to setup a RAID 5 metadevice spanning across all 10 18GB SCSI drives. Newfs the metadevice, end up with about 150 GB of space mounted under/bigdisk.
3. Setup Samba on the Ultra 5 and share out the/bigdisk partition in read-only to everyone and read-write to your ripping workstation.
4. Rip your DVDs in Divx format with AC3 audio (don't recompress the audio stream, because AC3 is already compressed and you want 5.1 surround, right?)
5. Save your.avi video files to the Samba server.
6. Mod your Xbox (use the 007 agent under fire savegame hack to avoid buying a modchip and cracking the case). If you want instructions on how to do this, check out the Tutorials section on this site.
7. Install XboxMediaCenter on your Xbox and set it up as the main dashboard.
8. Configure XBoxMediaCenter to point to your Video server using smb://username:password@servername/bigdisk or whatever you decided to name it.
9. Enjoy movie watching madness from any TV in your house.
Too many people (and I was one once) get around Xauthority hassles with an
$ xhost +
and I can't begin to tell you just how Bad that is.
Why not try:
$ xhost + hostname
instead, where hostname is the name of the server you're trying to send the display from? That way, you're only allowing the single server you're connecting from to send you applications, and not any random fool on the network.
I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.
Typical Slashdot anti-Solaris FUD that is spread in every single article on Sun. Folks, there's this neat little CD called the "Solaris Software Companion" CD that comes with every version of Solaris since Solaris 8. Install that CD, and voila, all the opensource tools you'll probably ever use are there, including GCC, KDE, many Gnu utilities, etc. Basically, think of it as Cygwin for Solaris.:-)
Now how many times do I need to say this before people will keep spreading this FUD?
Damn! Finally somebody on Slashdot that gets it. I have been saying this type of thing for a long time now and I usually get about 5 flames from 17 year old Linux users that think their overclocked AMD Athlon system runs circles around a Sun box costing 4 times as much, so therefore, Sun sucks.
It is a very rare treat to see someone on Slashdot that understands that Binary Compatibility and long support life-cycles are the king in the Enterprise space. That is why banks and telcos will continue to use Sun big iron regardless of how fast or cheap the latest Intel Linux solution is.
My electric shaver has a Nicad battery that is charged by AC power, but the motor itself runs off of power from the DC battery. I'm not an EE major, but isn't having a DC current next to your head a lot different than having a 60 hz AC current running next to your head?
I'm just curious, because I just bought a nice electric shaver and I'd like to keep using it. I never use my shaver while it's plugged into the wall. I only plug it in about once a week to recharge it.
There is an increasing number of western medical doctors that are starting to believe that having electric fields near your body aren't health for you. One of my favorite doctors, Dr. Weil, who has a great website, by the way, recommends that you should get rid of the clock radio by your nightstand as well as any electric blankets in your house. It has also been proven that women who spend 8 hours a day in front of a CRT monitor during pregnancy have a higher rate of birth defects. Exposure to electromagnetic fields can't be that good for you, so I try to stay away from them...
Of course, I'm typing this from my Powerbook sitting on my lap while I sit on the couch, with the AC adapter plugged in and charging away... Maybe I shouldn't try to have kids for the next little while...:-)
I appreciate your response, and I do agree with you that protectionism doesn't work, but it is also naive to think that America doesn't make up the majority of the global economy. 80% of the wealth in the world is in America, so if our economy collapses it is pretty certain to take the rest of the 1st world countries down with it. Would you disagree? I simply think that if CEOs and others that are making the outsourcing decisions cared about the bigger picture (trade deficit, putting dollars into local economy, etc.) rather than making a quick buck, we would all be better off. Let the Indian tech companies compete head-to-head with American tech companies. They will have the benefit of cheap labor and we will have the benefit of sharing the same culture as the local customer. It would also be nice to see India create some local technology consumers of it's own. With the blossoming tech economy in India, it can't be too long until there are local companies that need code written.
Another thing I would like to mention is that protectionism is a two-way street. Right now it is unfairly balanced in the favor of the Indian programmer. You are allowed to take my job, but I am not allowed to move to India and take yours. I am just using this as an example, because I'm not a programmer, I'm a Unix sysadmin. All things being equal, I should be more qualified for a job in India than a native, because I speak English as my first language, plus I understand the culture here in America and can interface better with management in America that writes technical specs. So why can't I go to India and take your job? You are allowed to come here and take mine through a government sanctioned H1B visa. With the low cost of living I bet I could live really well over there for a small salary. Also, I've been in IT for 14 years, which is probably much longer than your IT industry has even been around.
So if you really want protectionism to go away completely, be careful what you wish for.
You just refuted your own argument. Let's take for example, the same 100,000 programmers you're talking about.
Take some hypothetical math here. Say there are 100,000 U.S. Programmers making about 80,000 dollars a year (with benefits and business side social security tax). That's
80,000 * 100,000 = 8,000,000,000 dollars a year.
That $8 billion is going directly into the pockets of US workers, who will spend the money buying goods and services here in the US, therefore, that $8 billion is going directly back into the US economy.
Now imagine, aggregated, U.S companies via outsourcing eliminate those jobs (so-called creative destruction) and instead pay 100,000 indian folks an average of 20,000 a year.
100,000 * 20,000 = 2,000,000,000 dollars a year.
Now, you've taken $2 billion directly out of the US economy and shipped it overseas to India. Sure, a few of those Indian programmers might buy computers made in the US, but you'll never see anywhere close to 100% of that money end up back over here. Not only that, the $6 billion you've saved ends up getting paid back to shareholders of the company in the form of dividends and profits on their stock. The people that receive that other $6 billion are not middle class Americans like the programmers that lost their jobs. They're most likely the upper few percentiles, who are the least likely to spend their money on goods and services. They're more likely to reinvest their money into another company that offshores their workers, and turn another tidy profit.
So let's see here, $8 billion directly into the US economy, or $2 billion lost, plus another $6 billion to the wealthy, privileged few? I think you've just refuted your own argument.
The thing that really irks me about all of this is that those on the top know what's happening. They know that a trade deficit this large is unsustainable, and that eventually, when there is no middle class in America to buy their goods and services, the whole global economy will collapse, and yet, they do nothing about it, and prefer to make a short-term profit, fucking the long term global economy. Eventually it will all come crashing down like a house of cards, but in the meantime, hey, crack open a bottle of Dom Perignon! The good times are rolling!
You've obviously never used any pro audio or video production apps. Almost every pro-audio app I've ever used does not have resizeable widgets on things like mixer windows. Can you imagine how painful Logic Audio would be if every fader or knob was the size of a pin-head?
When you install the Software Companion CD in its entirety, a Solaris 8 or 9 box looks and quacks like a familiar Linux machine.
You're absolutely correct. Sun should be marketing the Software Companion CD as a benefit of using Solaris. I've heard a lot of Linux users that are new to Solaris complain about things like "where the hell is GCC?" Having the Software Companion CD installed makes any sysadmin's life about 10 times easier.
The article *is* about installing the Sun supplied version of KDE which comes on the Software Companion CD. Nowhere does it mention sunfreeware.com.
The article is kind of confusing because it mentions Sun Freeware as a source of the KDE binaries. I just wanted to clear up the confusion for anyone reading the article.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Solaris 10 (or maybe a later version, I can't remember) is suppose to support a concept of Quality of Service applied to disk accesses.
This is being added as a necessary feature in order to support hardened "containers" or whatever they will be called when Solaris 10 is released.
Basically, if you've got several virtual images of Unix running on a single box, you need to be able to throttle not only disk usage, but CPU, memory, and other resources, especially if you have any mission critical virtual servers running on the single physical server.
The power of being able to create hundreds of virtual servers on a single hardware platform is useless without the ability to guarantee some type of QoS to each individual image.
Mugger: I SAID, your I-POD or your LIFE!
How about your iPod or your iLife?
I'd expect some of the technology worker bees and programmers not to have much difficulty moving to something like this, but how about further up Sun's management hierachy that lives and breathes things like Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations?
I hate to burst your bubble, but having worked for Sun for the last 2 years, I can tell you that Sun does a pretty good job of keeping their own employees using Sun software. This includes Star Office and Solaris. Most Sun offices use SunRay terminals hooked to a Sun Enterprise server. They run StarOffice 7 on top of Solaris 9. This makes it pretty easy for a Mac geek like me to open work documents using OpenOffice on OS X. In fact, up until very recently it was a fireable offence to even install Windows XP on any work computer. They were pretty worried about all of the privacy issues in XP and didn't want MS stealing corporate secrets through some unknown backdoor. Now, they allow you to run XP only if you run some script called XP Neuter first.
If anything, things are the other way around here, simply because of the NIH (not invented here) syndrome. Sun employees tend to be extremely anti-MS and anti-IBM, and most would not run MS Office or even Internet Explorer unless they were forced to by some management directive.
About the Java Desktop rollout: I can't speak for those in large Sun offices like Broomfield, CO and Burlington, MA; they may be running it already, but out in the small field offices it hasn't been rolled out yet. I haven't had a chance to preview it yet with the LiveCD thingy, but I would imagine within a year or so everyone will be running it.
When I went to price out one of Sun's new AMD systems, I was somewhat disappointed. First of all, the website does not give the level of detail that Dell's does. I want to know everything about the system from ram speed, to hd speed, to bus speed, etc. Then, I want much more ability to configure scsi, ide, raid levels, etc. On top of that, it was pretty expensive. You can get a dual xeon dell with 2GB of ram, 15K rpm scsi for about $1,000 less than a bare bones sun with an amd chip. For what it's worth, IBM is much worse in this regard when pricing any of their systems online. I think they're even more expensive and the website sucks way more.
First of all, you must not have looked very hard, because if you go to the main SunFire V20z server page and click on the Datasheet link halfway down the page, you get all of the specs you could ever want, including RAM speed and hard drive speed.
Second of all, on the price issue: You're not comparing Apples to Apples if you compare it with a Xeon server. Xeon is only a 32-bit architecture, which is severely memory bandwidth starved, as all processors in the system share the same paltry 533-mhz. memory bus. AMD's Hypertransport gives each processor dedicated channels to accesss memory with. Not only that, you're getting a full 64-bit machine, which runs circles around similarly equipped Xeons. If you don't believe me, Tom's Hardware recently did a comparison between dual and quad servers running Opteron and Xeon processors, and the Opterons ate the Xeons for lunch. I can't seem to find the exact link to the article, but it was posted on Slashdot a little while back.
Third, anyone who has purchased Sun hardware before knows that the price listed on the web is the "suggested retail price", and that you should call a local Sun reseller to get a much better price.
After you've gotten a real price, compare the two and I think you'll be surprised to see the Sun is actually cheaper than the Dell. On their low-end servers Sun has actually reached price parity and even beats Dell on most similar configurations. This is something that not a lot of Dell customers are even aware of, since most of them don't purchase Sun on a regular basis.
So, your purchasing choice really comes down to a support question:
Do you want Dell to provide your hardware support, and purchase Linux support from a third-party vendor like Red Hat with their Advanced Server package? (Be sure to add that $1500 license fee into the cost of your server)
-or-
Do you want Sun to be your one stop shop for both hardware and software support, freeing you up to do your job and not having to worry about the whole hardware vs. software support issue?
I think if you actually priced in all the support costs the Sun box actually ends up giving you a lower TCO. Most Sun Enterprise customers know this, and prefer to have just one vendor to call when anything goes wrong.
This has GOT to be illegal. Right? RIGHT? The simple fact that a corporation had any insight into political draft documents and help write them shows intense political and corporate based motivation for law.
No, this isn't illegal. Take a look at what Cheney did with the energy task force. Having Enron write their own energy laws is like having the fox guard the henhouse, but there is nothing illegal about it. Government has been having "industry leaders" draft legislation affecting their industry for years now. That's why large corporations can pollute the environment with little or no responsibility. When the industrial polluters are writing pollution laws, business is good for everyone, except those unfortunates that live downwind.
It was a joke, a play on words used by Fox News to describe their reporting. Funny how so few people on this board can take a joke. But I do think the Daily Show does a great job by using satire to expose a lot of the shenanigans perpetrated by our current administration.
I could have posted the message as Anonymous Coward if I really wanted to hide. What is so wrong about publishing the CEO's phone number? I got this information from someone at Dish Customer Service. There's nothing confidential about this information at all.
Maybe you didn't read my message, but they recently changed their pricing. There is now $0 installation, and a $9.50/month box rental. Not only that, there is no contract.
a nd of course ABC, CBS, and NBC HD.
I've actually heard from people on AVSForum that Monsters is one of the coolest channels. The channels I'm really interested in are:
HBOHD
SHOHD
CinemaxHD
StarzHD
DiscoveryHD
All the rest of them, I could care less about, other than TechTV and Comedy Central, and possibly Discovery Times, I really don't watch any other TV.
Cable shill alert...
Dude, I'm not even a Voom customer yet, much less a shill. I currently have digital cable through Charter Communications, but I've signed up for Voom and I'm going to be installed soon.
Also, there is no fucking contract. Excuse my language, but I don't like being called a shill when I'm not one. Not only is there no contract, but if you decide you don't want their service any more, you can call them and they'll send an installer back out to uninstall the dish from your roof. How many other companies will do that?
Also, name one satellite or digital cable provider that doesn't require an STB on every television. Can't think of any? That's because there aren't any. Maybe you're fine with 60 low quality SD analog cable channels, but I'm not.
Ahh yes... That is one good channel that they don't have. Good thing I'm not married (yet) or my wife might veto the Voom right from the start.
I was just watching the Daily Show on Comedy Central, and during the commercial break, just about 30 seconds ago, they ran an ad basically blaming the entire incident on Dish Network and saying, "If you have a friend with Dish, he'll be spending a lot of time on your couch". The punchline at the end of the ad said something like "Comedy Central, now only on Cable and DirecTV".
Frankly, Viacom are the scum of the earth. I used to respect the Daily Show as one of the last bastions of fair and balanced (TM) news reporting available. Jon Stewart and the other correspondents seem to be the only (fake) news reporters that actually tell things the way they are, but for some strange reason they are totally silent about this news story, which is one of the biggest news stories on CNN and all other major news networks. I'm sure Viacom has given them a hush order or some other such mandate, but it really stinks of media bias.
I've lost a lot of respect for the Daily Show today, which used to be one of my favorite programs, and I'm seriously considering starting an email campaign against Viacom.
For those of you wanting to give Viacom a piece of your mind, here is the contact information for the CEO:
Mel Karmazin
M-F 9:00 am to 5:00 pm - (212) 975-6500
or better yet, call him at home on the weekend at:
(212) 956-1007
Cheers, and down with massive media conglomerates.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather get Voom service. Over 30 channels in full HDTV, plus all of the standard SD channels, plus they install a Channelmaster local antenna so you can get the HD locals as well. What's the cost? $0 up front for installation and only $9.50 a month to lease the box (which is a very nice Motorola set top box with DVI-HDCP output to drive your HDTV or Plasma screen).
DirecTV has been recompressing their HDTV channels recently to cram more bandwidth onto their already overcrowded satellites and in the process making HD-HBO look like crap. Dish has major problems of their own. I think Voom is looking more and more like the best option. They offer not only HD-HBO and HD-SHOtime, but also HD-Cinemax and HD-Starz, which none of the other satellite or cable companies currently offer, and only $80 a month for all the channels, or $40 a month for a basic package. As far as I'm concerned, both DirecTV (with their money-grubbing RIAA style extortion tactics) and Dish Network (with their terrible customer service and contract problems) can stick it where the sun don't shine.
I would recommend Cingular. I had a dual-band (TDMA & analog) Nokia 6250, and used to drive through the backroads of Arkansas quite a bit for my job. It doesn't get more rural than that. Cingular has a nationwide no roaming plan, and I got coverage almost everywhere I went. Even up on the lake or in a lot of camping grounds I would still get analog coverage.
Also, they don't gouge you on the price either. I think my bill was like $79 a month for 1000 anytime nationwide no roaming minutes. Here's a tip: If you're going to sign up for a Cingular plan, do it at Best Buy instead of at a Cingular outlet. Best Buy negotiates discounts on the phones. At the time I signed up (a couple of years ago), the Cingular outlet wanted $200 for the phone + a 2 year contract. Well, I got the same phone at Best Buy for only $15 plus a 1 year contract.
Damn, I just replied to another comment with more or less the exact thing you said in your statement.
GPL or no, MS would love to break the Java client, ship it in the next Windows Service Pack, and Sun would be forced to swallow their poison pill and backport their extensions into the main Java tree, else Java would fork and 100 million or so clients would be on the MS proprietary fork. Sun would lose Java completely.
Very insightful.
Hey, that was a really great article, but I just wanted to point out one thing that Ganesh seems to be overlooking in his request to Sun.
.NET customers and says "why would you want to use Java, it sucks?", and the PHB making the decisions says "yeah, every time I try to access a Java web app my machine blue screens, I guess you have a point."
He says that Sun should release Java under the GPL license in order to keep Microsoft from polluting it like they tried to do in the past with the JVM. He says this would make it easy for any changes MS made to be backported to the main Java tree.
This is true, but don't you think that MS could kill Java just as easily by "breaking" the implementation (adding their code to make it not function very well), bundling their broken client with the next Windows XP and 2000 service packs, and releasing their changes back under the GPL? Sun would then be forced to swallow the poison pill because they would have to support the millions of clients that are broken, and would probably have to accept the code into the main Java tree, else Java would fork.
Then Microsoft goes to their potential
I think Sun is smart enough to have already thought of this problem, and they're not going to let Microsoft poison Java again, GPL or no. That's why Java will never be open source.
Ganesh makes some great points though. I wish some of the higher-ups at Sun would read them.
Major benefits to my solution:
Uses Divx+AC3 files for great compression with minimal loss of picture quality.
Scales Divx video up to 720p for remarkable picture quality, which in many cases looks better than the original DVD. The PQ approaches HD in many cases.
Allows Dolby 5.1 AC3 optical pass-thru for true surround sound with no recompression of audio streams. The sound you hear is the sound on the original DVD.
Each compressed DVD movie is just over 1GB in size.
Compressed movies can be delivered to wireless clients anywhere in the home with standard 802.11b, with seamless playback.
Head-end server can be located in the basement or a closet to keep computer and fan noise away from your home theatre.
Also stores and catalogs your entire MP3 music library for listening to music from any client.
Outputs stereo audio sources (such as standard MP3 files) to both front and rear stereo channels in a surround setup, giving you output from all speakers in your surround setup, even if you're only listening to a stereo source.
Listen to Internet radio from any client.
The only disadvantage to my setup:
Not enough disk space to rip entire movies including menus in a lossless format. My setup can fully support reading .VOB files from the server, provided you have enough space to store them all.
Actually, I think it's pretty good. This is the hardware I had lying around to work with, most donated by my work:
1 Sun Ultra 5 360 mhz. workstation w/ 256 MB RAM and 9GB HD. (about $190 on eBay).
1 dual-channel differential PCI SCSI card, (about $20 on eBay).
1 Sun StorEdge D1000 with 10x 18GB SCSI hard drives, (about $130 for the array itself on eBay, then buy some Sun spud drive brackets and load up with your own SCSI drives).
1 Xbox, modded, with DVD remote kit, for each client.
You could get a much cheaper server for storage and all that by just building a PC clone and throwing a few 250 GB hard drives in it, but this hardware was free (except for the Xbox), so I used what I have.
Here are the installation steps:
1. Install Solaris 9 on the Ultra 5.
2. Use Solstice Disksuite to setup a RAID 5 metadevice spanning across all 10 18GB SCSI drives. Newfs the metadevice, end up with about 150 GB of space mounted under /bigdisk.
3. Setup Samba on the Ultra 5 and share out the /bigdisk partition in read-only to everyone and read-write to your ripping workstation.
4. Rip your DVDs in Divx format with AC3 audio (don't recompress the audio stream, because AC3 is already compressed and you want 5.1 surround, right?)
5. Save your .avi video files to the Samba server.
6. Mod your Xbox (use the 007 agent under fire savegame hack to avoid buying a modchip and cracking the case). If you want instructions on how to do this, check out the Tutorials section on this site.
7. Install XboxMediaCenter on your Xbox and set it up as the main dashboard.
8. Configure XBoxMediaCenter to point to your Video server using smb://username:password@servername/bigdisk or whatever you decided to name it.
9. Enjoy movie watching madness from any TV in your house.
Why not try:
$ xhost + hostname
instead, where hostname is the name of the server you're trying to send the display from? That way, you're only allowing the single server you're connecting from to send you applications, and not any random fool on the network.
I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.
:-)
Typical Slashdot anti-Solaris FUD that is spread in every single article on Sun. Folks, there's this neat little CD called the "Solaris Software Companion" CD that comes with every version of Solaris since Solaris 8. Install that CD, and voila, all the opensource tools you'll probably ever use are there, including GCC, KDE, many Gnu utilities, etc. Basically, think of it as Cygwin for Solaris.
Now how many times do I need to say this before people will keep spreading this FUD?
Damn! Finally somebody on Slashdot that gets it. I have been saying this type of thing for a long time now and I usually get about 5 flames from 17 year old Linux users that think their overclocked AMD Athlon system runs circles around a Sun box costing 4 times as much, so therefore, Sun sucks.
It is a very rare treat to see someone on Slashdot that understands that Binary Compatibility and long support life-cycles are the king in the Enterprise space. That is why banks and telcos will continue to use Sun big iron regardless of how fast or cheap the latest Intel Linux solution is.
Welcome to my Friends list!
My electric shaver has a Nicad battery that is charged by AC power, but the motor itself runs off of power from the DC battery. I'm not an EE major, but isn't having a DC current next to your head a lot different than having a 60 hz AC current running next to your head?
:-)
I'm just curious, because I just bought a nice electric shaver and I'd like to keep using it. I never use my shaver while it's plugged into the wall. I only plug it in about once a week to recharge it.
There is an increasing number of western medical doctors that are starting to believe that having electric fields near your body aren't health for you. One of my favorite doctors, Dr. Weil, who has a great website, by the way, recommends that you should get rid of the clock radio by your nightstand as well as any electric blankets in your house. It has also been proven that women who spend 8 hours a day in front of a CRT monitor during pregnancy have a higher rate of birth defects. Exposure to electromagnetic fields can't be that good for you, so I try to stay away from them...
Of course, I'm typing this from my Powerbook sitting on my lap while I sit on the couch, with the AC adapter plugged in and charging away... Maybe I shouldn't try to have kids for the next little while...
I appreciate your response, and I do agree with you that protectionism doesn't work, but it is also naive to think that America doesn't make up the majority of the global economy. 80% of the wealth in the world is in America, so if our economy collapses it is pretty certain to take the rest of the 1st world countries down with it. Would you disagree? I simply think that if CEOs and others that are making the outsourcing decisions cared about the bigger picture (trade deficit, putting dollars into local economy, etc.) rather than making a quick buck, we would all be better off. Let the Indian tech companies compete head-to-head with American tech companies. They will have the benefit of cheap labor and we will have the benefit of sharing the same culture as the local customer. It would also be nice to see India create some local technology consumers of it's own. With the blossoming tech economy in India, it can't be too long until there are local companies that need code written.
Another thing I would like to mention is that protectionism is a two-way street. Right now it is unfairly balanced in the favor of the Indian programmer. You are allowed to take my job, but I am not allowed to move to India and take yours. I am just using this as an example, because I'm not a programmer, I'm a Unix sysadmin. All things being equal, I should be more qualified for a job in India than a native, because I speak English as my first language, plus I understand the culture here in America and can interface better with management in America that writes technical specs. So why can't I go to India and take your job? You are allowed to come here and take mine through a government sanctioned H1B visa. With the low cost of living I bet I could live really well over there for a small salary. Also, I've been in IT for 14 years, which is probably much longer than your IT industry has even been around.
So if you really want protectionism to go away completely, be careful what you wish for.
You just refuted your own argument. Let's take for example, the same 100,000 programmers you're talking about.
Take some hypothetical math here. Say there are 100,000 U.S. Programmers making about 80,000 dollars a year (with benefits and business side social security tax). That's
80,000 * 100,000 = 8,000,000,000 dollars a year.
That $8 billion is going directly into the pockets of US workers, who will spend the money buying goods and services here in the US, therefore, that $8 billion is going directly back into the US economy.
Now imagine, aggregated, U.S companies via outsourcing eliminate those jobs (so-called creative destruction) and instead pay 100,000 indian folks an average of 20,000 a year.
100,000 * 20,000 = 2,000,000,000 dollars a year.
Now, you've taken $2 billion directly out of the US economy and shipped it overseas to India. Sure, a few of those Indian programmers might buy computers made in the US, but you'll never see anywhere close to 100% of that money end up back over here. Not only that, the $6 billion you've saved ends up getting paid back to shareholders of the company in the form of dividends and profits on their stock. The people that receive that other $6 billion are not middle class Americans like the programmers that lost their jobs. They're most likely the upper few percentiles, who are the least likely to spend their money on goods and services. They're more likely to reinvest their money into another company that offshores their workers, and turn another tidy profit.
So let's see here, $8 billion directly into the US economy, or $2 billion lost, plus another $6 billion to the wealthy, privileged few? I think you've just refuted your own argument.
The thing that really irks me about all of this is that those on the top know what's happening. They know that a trade deficit this large is unsustainable, and that eventually, when there is no middle class in America to buy their goods and services, the whole global economy will collapse, and yet, they do nothing about it, and prefer to make a short-term profit, fucking the long term global economy. Eventually it will all come crashing down like a house of cards, but in the meantime, hey, crack open a bottle of Dom Perignon! The good times are rolling!
You've obviously never used any pro audio or video production apps. Almost every pro-audio app I've ever used does not have resizeable widgets on things like mixer windows. Can you imagine how painful Logic Audio would be if every fader or knob was the size of a pin-head?
When you install the Software Companion CD in its entirety, a Solaris 8 or 9 box looks and quacks like a familiar Linux machine.
You're absolutely correct. Sun should be marketing the Software Companion CD as a benefit of using Solaris. I've heard a lot of Linux users that are new to Solaris complain about things like "where the hell is GCC?" Having the Software Companion CD installed makes any sysadmin's life about 10 times easier.
The article *is* about installing the Sun supplied version of KDE which comes on the Software Companion CD. Nowhere does it mention sunfreeware.com.
The article is kind of confusing because it mentions Sun Freeware as a source of the KDE binaries. I just wanted to clear up the confusion for anyone reading the article.