Business is like fishing. Yeah, luck plays a part. It plays the part of determine the exact time you become successful. But even with "bad luck", if you do the right things, you *will* eventually catch a fish.
What's up with all the editorializing in the summary? Danger was bought by MS only 18 months ago. What the heck has this got to with Office and cloud computing except wishful thinking by the submitter?
So... in a year and a half they shouldn't have toured their new acquisition and checked for basic things like:
1) Updated server software
2) Firewalls
3) Backups
And other "yer an idjit if you don't do this" kinda stuff?
For *any* kind of hosted service, having backups measures just slightly below "is it turned on" in terms of importance. And for a year and a half, NONE WERE DONE? Further, they did a major update to a SAN and didn't backup first?
This isn't about bashing Microsoft - highly successful businesses have had to close shop forever due to glaring, horrid oversights like this. This is gross incompetence.
The problem is that we imagine there's some reason to it: that if we just think harder, network more, or spend a few more hours in the lab, we'll be successful too. That's bullshit. It's luck. (And increasingly these days, the luck of having been born into the correct socioeconomic stratum.)
Sorry. That's just bullsh--.
Look, I'm not super-rich, but I do well for myself. I have a nice house, I have a wife and two children going to college that I'm paying for, a daughter is an exchange student in Europe, more young teens getting warmed up, and I just bought into a private plane.
But, I started out with a distant relationship with any "silver spoon". I grew up poor, in a mobile trailer on the edge of a small town. I didn't get a college degree. In fact, I didn't even get a standard High School diploma - life at home was bad enough that I ran my senior year!
So I worked as hard AND as smart as I could for years on end. I got used to 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, and have struggled (successfully!) to fit in time with my lovely family. I have started many businesses and nearly all failed to turn a profit, but each failure taught me something else to not do. I read like mad (and do, to this day!) and have discovered that Barnes and Nobles is an incredibly rich resource if you are willing to spend money and time on good quality books. IMHO, it's always worth it.
Opportunities abound, but most are mediocre. You need to find the good ones. My formula is to listen for two words:
1) Expensive, or
2) Pain in the !@#$. (PITA)
People will happily give you their money if you can do it cheaper. They'll also happily give you their money if you make life better for them - eliminate some big problem, whatever. Put them both together and all you have to do is listen and come up with something that works. Don't bother with the proverbial mousetrap - they're already cheap and work well. Instead, look for something where you can save lots of money AND provide powerful, new capabilities.
In my company, we've done a little of both, and have never had a down year in almost a decade. Sure, at first, it was a milestone to be able to pay ourselves an actual, honest-to-god living wage, and it took us 2 YEARS to get to the "living wage" part. Hard years, put in while working a day job to feed the wife and kids. But now, my years of investment are paying off.
I work as hard as anyone, for a very long time (years). Is this luck?
I wish I could mod you up more. But although I have mod points, you're already at +5.
And seriously, rather than drop support for ports, why not simply adopt SRV records for https services? Then we could have our multi-SSL-per-IP capability, and still not require the "other guys" change anything? As far as specified ports, we could officially deprecate them and perhaps at some point in the WAAAAYYYY distant future, we could drop support for ports by convention.
As far as SSL goes, it's LAME that I have to have a different set of IP addresses per SSL target, when I have a cluster of servers serving multiple (hundreds!) of SSL domains and subdomains behind a single set of load balancers!
Economies have to do with the transfer of money. Money is an abstract concept used to replace physical goods. Money is rarely found in its original form (precious metals) and even its derivative form (paper currency) is fast disappearing. Money now is nothing more than bits in your bank's computer.
In other words, money is information. So what sets its limits? The stuff that it represents. Which nowadays is most commonly... more information!
Don't confuse downtime (EG server powered down) with a catastrophic failure like this one. (total, irretrievable data loss)
Your school was a far better place (apparently) than MS Danger. Although downtime was more likely with your single sendmail server, you would still expect about 99.9% to 99.99% uptime year on year. that equates to about 4 hours per year on average. That's definitely down in the 'minor inconvenience' range for a school.
And your risk of catastrophic failure with all the (verified?) tapes is near zero. Sounds like a good solution to me!
* Use the Linux box to connect to the Internet and create a private network with NAT with default inbound deny, connect the Windows box to the NAT network so that worms don't infect it. Run all Windows updates on the relatively secured private network. (works every time, so far)
Erlang apparently gets it right. Scales smoothly from single core to multi-core to multi-server in a near linear fashion. Astonishingly reliable, having achieved nine nines of uptime - much less than a second of downtime - in a year. Purposely designed to mitigate shared memory problems. Built for hot-switchover - you can upgrade Erlang problems without closing them first!
In just about every conceivable way, Erlang is the right choice for high-end multi-core multi-system clustered application development. I have a large-stack, clustered application written in PHP. While it works well, there are limits to what we can do within a single process - a problem that's likely to become worse over time as needs continue to scale up. If I were to do it all over again, I'd take a good, hard, look at Erlang.
$500 million is what BART wants to spend to build a 3.2 mile stretch of elevated rail to connect the Oakland Coliseum to the Oakland Airport, and this boondoggle of a project is already funded.
Cool! You mean, when I fly my private plane into Oakland to see a game or concert at the Coliseum, I won't have to wait 10 minutes for the free shuttle to come and get me? That will make my life so much different for the better... worth every penny of that 500 million dollars!
The challenges are when you want to use biomass for that source of carbon. You can just mine or pump up fossil carbon sources. Growing fuel crops takes a ton of land (habitat), water, leads to runoff, and all sorts of other problems.
I guess you don't live anywhere near an orchard?
Every year your average orchard generates TONS of wood material in the form of prunings. See, they have to prune the fruit and nut trees every year in order to optimize their growth for fruit/nut production. Currently, they use big tractors to pile the "waste" wood prunings into huge piles, often 30 feet high or more, and then burn them - flames that reach 100 feet or more into the sky, and take weeks to burn out.
Having grown across the street from Almond orchards, I can assure you, this is commonplace. Can you imagine just how many miles we could get out of a single pile, if we were to effectively harness this fuel source?
In my experience, if somebody has to do backups, then backups will not be done with any regularity. It's just a fact of life.
Thats why I rsync my approx 12GB of data, stuff that changes all the time, nightly to another machine here in the house, and to a USB drive, then once a week, I do an incremental of the second machine's copy to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk... For what I paid for Jungledisk ($20 one-time) and the recurring costs to Amazon (usually under $2.00/mo, depending on how much more I've uploaded and the transfer/requests charges).. That way, I lose the harddrive on my main machine, the most I've lost is one day, and if the house goes up in smoke, the most I've lost is one week. Jungledisk/Amazon S3 beats the hell out of Mozy/MozyPro/Carbonite, neither of which can run on Linux (Jungledisk *can*).
Spoken like somebody who is truly tech-savvy. So every day you back it up nightly to another machine in the house, and to a USB drive. For 12 GB, even locally, this takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on the average file size. So that means that about 200 days/year (if you are PERFECT) you are backing up this data. At 15 minutes per day, that adds up to 50 hours/year of time spent... backing up data.
How much is your time worth?
Let's say you are just a lowly wage slave and earn just $9/hour. 9*50 = $450, which is how much money you're spending per year for your glorious process. I'd guess your time is worth considerably more - probably more like $30/hour. Maybe even $50/hour? In which case, your 50 hours just cost your employer $1500, or even $2,500. That is, if you bother. And I sincerely doubt you actually *are* backing up every day. More likely 1-2x/week, which raises your loss footprint to around 3-5 days/max, which costs quite a bit more.
Yet an online backup service (like Mozy) will back up all that data for $60/year in a way that's almost invisible. It's automatic. It happens EVERY SINGLE DAY that the computer is on. And even non-tech weenies will do it, because all they have to do is INSTALL THE SOFTWARE. Anybody can do this, even a techneophyte. And you can take the other $2,450 and buy one !@#@$! of a computer with it...
This brings the typically techno-centric topic of data backups to the common Joe. And while cloud services aren't perfect, they are usually a damned sight better than the alternatives. Even with something like Mozy (just the 1st name to come to mind, not affiliated, blah blah) the odds of Mozy crashing or dying at the same time that your own computer does is pretty slim, and certainly you are far better off.
I've made a good living building and maintaining php-gtk apps for Windows/OSX. However, I've never seen GTK bindinngs for mobile anything, and porting over PHP-GTK apps to mobile platforms is at the point a non-starter.
I would be looking at this very seriously - at this point I've pretty much decided to move everything (eventually) to HTML/javascript because of its cross-platform capability even if it sometimes makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a toothpick.
Yes, I'm part of a private company. We provide software services in education. And we routinely provide software that is significantly less expensive than other solutions, while being more comprehensive, integrated, and (usually) easier to use. Sure, sometimes people pick solutions based on risk abatement rather than fitness for the task, but this is by no means a certainty, even if this reality is unpopular.
"Nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces"? Given that wood-burning has a pollution profile as bad as coal burning (the exact amount of different pollutants in each case varying depending on pollution controls), I seriously doubt straw burning is all that clean.
You don't have to interpret this as "straw-burning furnaces, which by nature of burning straw, are clean...". What you could just as easily interpret is "straw-burning furances, which have been modified to burn cleanly..".
Wood can burn horribly, generating thick black plumes of carcinogenic smoke, for example, when it's too wet. However, under controlled environments, wood can burn *very* cleanly. Take a look at a pellet stove - basically a wood burning stove, with the wood pellets providing a much more optimal burning profile that produces dramatically fewer pollutants.
What if you could buy software that was a service? One that provided excellent availability, convenience, automatic backups, and automatic updates?
Oh yeah... you can!
Many software products nowadays are not products, but in fact, services. From Google's Gmail-based email hosting (for schools and businesses) to customer relationship management (Salesforce, et al) to my own company's products, many software products, especially software targeting larger organizations, are actually best sold as a service.
It's now a feature that many directors in organizations are looking for - they don't want to have to buy servers and hire staff and do backups and apply patches and all that - they'd rather just login and get started. If the software is commodity and doesn't represent any special "mojo", SaaS (Software as a Service) or by its new name, "Cloud Computing" can make lots of sense.
Now, perhaps *you* don't want this. And that's fine. You aren't required to buy it. But it's not some horrid conspiracy. It's just a reflection of the fact that, in many cases, the cost of hosted applications can be dramatically lower while simultaneously improving the overall service quality by moving the application hosting closer to the people who produce the software in the first place!
It's pretty simple, really. If the company makes money on each connection, and reinvests part of that profit, then the service network overall grows more capable. More towers, more frequencies, more bandwidth.
Assuming that the phone companies are smart enough to reinvest a portion of their profits - at my company we invest heavily in growth, and have at any time about 5x-10x capacity headroom, along with fully redundant backup schema for D/R. A few times, we've leaned on that extra infrastructure - while not cheap, it's cheap insurance.
We are a Redhat/CentOS shop, so the pull of BSD kernel is pretty light, but for backups. See, we have a system that does nothing ut backup everything else. Specs are light, 2 Ghz unicore, 2 GB RAM but it has 12 hard disks in there with room for more. Managing all that space gets VERY cumersome with partitions and Ext3.
I'd consider switching to Deb/BSD if it supported ZFS in kernel land and was VERY stable. That way, I'd get userland environment that would pretty familiar (more than BSD) and ZFS.
Sure, HDMI is a joke. But there's a deeper issue going on... who hasn't noticed that TV as we've known it is almost dead?
1) I don't bother with rabbit ears.
2) I have a television but it's never on except to play video games.
3) I never turn on a set to see "what's on".
4) When I want to "watch TV", I turn to my Mac Mini, and surf to Hulu, Netflix or sometimes directly to the major networks.
5) I'm oblivious to the network behind most of the shows I watch. I typically go to the networks' sites last, and then only when I have time to kill. Which is rare.
6) I watch the shows I want, when I want, starting from the beginning. If I don't like a show, I switch to another show, which also starts right up, exactly when I want it to. When I stay at a Hotel, I find the "channel surfing" experience annoying since I can't start the shows at the beginning!
I have plenty of money to buy a TV. I just don't care to - Hulu/Netflix/Mac-Mini with a nice screen and Altec Lansing speakers give me a much more satisfactory experience. (seriously, who knew speakers so small could PUMP like that with good fidelity to boot?)
The only thing I really miss is the remote - the Mac Mini remote doesn't work with the browser. Wireless mice are annoying since the pointer tends to bounce around, and the batteries die quickly. But it's a small price to pay...
The information gained doesn't benefit them? Why else did they do this, then? Benefit isn't just cash, you know. Anythiing that provides an advantage is a 'benefit'...
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Business is like fishing. Yeah, luck plays a part. It plays the part of determine the exact time you become successful. But even with "bad luck", if you do the right things, you *will* eventually catch a fish.
What's up with all the editorializing in the summary? Danger was bought by MS only 18 months ago. What the heck has this got to with Office and cloud computing except wishful thinking by the submitter?
So... in a year and a half they shouldn't have toured their new acquisition and checked for basic things like:
1) Updated server software
2) Firewalls
3) Backups
And other "yer an idjit if you don't do this" kinda stuff?
For *any* kind of hosted service, having backups measures just slightly below "is it turned on" in terms of importance. And for a year and a half, NONE WERE DONE? Further, they did a major update to a SAN and didn't backup first?
This isn't about bashing Microsoft - highly successful businesses have had to close shop forever due to glaring, horrid oversights like this. This is gross incompetence.
The problem is that we imagine there's some reason to it: that if we just think harder, network more, or spend a few more hours in the lab, we'll be successful too. That's bullshit. It's luck. (And increasingly these days, the luck of having been born into the correct socioeconomic stratum.)
Sorry. That's just bullsh--.
Look, I'm not super-rich, but I do well for myself. I have a nice house, I have a wife and two children going to college that I'm paying for, a daughter is an exchange student in Europe, more young teens getting warmed up, and I just bought into a private plane.
But, I started out with a distant relationship with any "silver spoon". I grew up poor, in a mobile trailer on the edge of a small town. I didn't get a college degree. In fact, I didn't even get a standard High School diploma - life at home was bad enough that I ran my senior year!
So I worked as hard AND as smart as I could for years on end. I got used to 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, and have struggled (successfully!) to fit in time with my lovely family. I have started many businesses and nearly all failed to turn a profit, but each failure taught me something else to not do. I read like mad (and do, to this day!) and have discovered that Barnes and Nobles is an incredibly rich resource if you are willing to spend money and time on good quality books. IMHO, it's always worth it.
Opportunities abound, but most are mediocre. You need to find the good ones. My formula is to listen for two words:
1) Expensive, or
2) Pain in the !@#$. (PITA)
People will happily give you their money if you can do it cheaper. They'll also happily give you their money if you make life better for them - eliminate some big problem, whatever. Put them both together and all you have to do is listen and come up with something that works. Don't bother with the proverbial mousetrap - they're already cheap and work well. Instead, look for something where you can save lots of money AND provide powerful, new capabilities.
In my company, we've done a little of both, and have never had a down year in almost a decade. Sure, at first, it was a milestone to be able to pay ourselves an actual, honest-to-god living wage, and it took us 2 YEARS to get to the "living wage" part. Hard years, put in while working a day job to feed the wife and kids. But now, my years of investment are paying off.
I work as hard as anyone, for a very long time (years). Is this luck?
I wish I could mod you up more. But although I have mod points, you're already at +5.
And seriously, rather than drop support for ports, why not simply adopt SRV records for https services? Then we could have our multi-SSL-per-IP capability, and still not require the "other guys" change anything? As far as specified ports, we could officially deprecate them and perhaps at some point in the WAAAAYYYY distant future, we could drop support for ports by convention.
As far as SSL goes, it's LAME that I have to have a different set of IP addresses per SSL target, when I have a cluster of servers serving multiple (hundreds!) of SSL domains and subdomains behind a single set of load balancers!
Economies and ecosystems are not.
Economies have to do with the transfer of money. Money is an abstract concept used to replace physical goods. Money is rarely found in its original form (precious metals) and even its derivative form (paper currency) is fast disappearing. Money now is nothing more than bits in your bank's computer.
In other words, money is information. So what sets its limits? The stuff that it represents. Which nowadays is most commonly... more information!
I'm with parent. I hire programmers. I wouldn't hesitate to hire somebody who worked for a casino or a (legal) gambling institution.
Funny, I couldn't remember the source of my 1/3 loss, so I threw a few words at google, and found the same reference that you did - 7.2%.
But the funny part is that THAT citation isn't exactly authoritative, either. Further searching found that in India, the rate is as low as 70% while the state of Deleware declares that "70 percent of the energy in the fuels used to generate electricity is lost" and in the UK it's supposedly about 2% lost in transmission.
Wikipedia isn't the definitive answer, folks, even if it is a good starting point!
About 1/3 of energy generated in the United States is wasted in transmission.
Yes, about 1/3.
Don't confuse downtime (EG server powered down) with a catastrophic failure like this one. (total, irretrievable data loss)
Your school was a far better place (apparently) than MS Danger. Although downtime was more likely with your single sendmail server, you would still expect about 99.9% to 99.99% uptime year on year. that equates to about 4 hours per year on average. That's definitely down in the 'minor inconvenience' range for a school.
And your risk of catastrophic failure with all the (verified?) tapes is near zero. Sounds like a good solution to me!
Strategies continued...
* Use the Linux box to connect to the Internet and create a private network with NAT with default inbound deny, connect the Windows box to the NAT network so that worms don't infect it. Run all Windows updates on the relatively secured private network. (works every time, so far)
Erlang apparently gets it right. Scales smoothly from single core to multi-core to multi-server in a near linear fashion. Astonishingly reliable, having achieved nine nines of uptime - much less than a second of downtime - in a year. Purposely designed to mitigate shared memory problems. Built for hot-switchover - you can upgrade Erlang problems without closing them first!
In just about every conceivable way, Erlang is the right choice for high-end multi-core multi-system clustered application development. I have a large-stack, clustered application written in PHP. While it works well, there are limits to what we can do within a single process - a problem that's likely to become worse over time as needs continue to scale up. If I were to do it all over again, I'd take a good, hard, look at Erlang.
$500 million is what BART wants to spend to build a 3.2 mile stretch of elevated rail to connect the Oakland Coliseum to the Oakland Airport, and this boondoggle of a project is already funded.
Cool! You mean, when I fly my private plane into Oakland to see a game or concert at the Coliseum, I won't have to wait 10 minutes for the free shuttle to come and get me? That will make my life so much different for the better... worth every penny of that 500 million dollars!
The challenges are when you want to use biomass for that source of carbon. You can just mine or pump up fossil carbon sources. Growing fuel crops takes a ton of land (habitat), water, leads to runoff, and all sorts of other problems.
I guess you don't live anywhere near an orchard?
Every year your average orchard generates TONS of wood material in the form of prunings. See, they have to prune the fruit and nut trees every year in order to optimize their growth for fruit/nut production. Currently, they use big tractors to pile the "waste" wood prunings into huge piles, often 30 feet high or more, and then burn them - flames that reach 100 feet or more into the sky, and take weeks to burn out.
Having grown across the street from Almond orchards, I can assure you, this is commonplace. Can you imagine just how many miles we could get out of a single pile, if we were to effectively harness this fuel source?
In my experience, if somebody has to do backups, then backups will not be done with any regularity. It's just a fact of life.
Thats why I rsync my approx 12GB of data, stuff that changes all the time, nightly to another machine here in the house, and to a USB drive, then once a week, I do an incremental of the second machine's copy to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk... For what I paid for Jungledisk ($20 one-time) and the recurring costs to Amazon (usually under $2.00/mo, depending on how much more I've uploaded and the transfer/requests charges).. That way, I lose the harddrive on my main machine, the most I've lost is one day, and if the house goes up in smoke, the most I've lost is one week. Jungledisk/Amazon S3 beats the hell out of Mozy/MozyPro/Carbonite, neither of which can run on Linux (Jungledisk *can*).
Spoken like somebody who is truly tech-savvy. So every day you back it up nightly to another machine in the house, and to a USB drive. For 12 GB, even locally, this takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on the average file size. So that means that about 200 days /year (if you are PERFECT) you are backing up this data. At 15 minutes per day, that adds up to 50 hours/year of time spent... backing up data.
How much is your time worth?
Let's say you are just a lowly wage slave and earn just $9/hour. 9*50 = $450, which is how much money you're spending per year for your glorious process. I'd guess your time is worth considerably more - probably more like $30/hour. Maybe even $50/hour? In which case, your 50 hours just cost your employer $1500, or even $2,500. That is, if you bother. And I sincerely doubt you actually *are* backing up every day. More likely 1-2x/week, which raises your loss footprint to around 3-5 days/max, which costs quite a bit more.
Yet an online backup service (like Mozy) will back up all that data for $60/year in a way that's almost invisible. It's automatic. It happens EVERY SINGLE DAY that the computer is on. And even non-tech weenies will do it, because all they have to do is INSTALL THE SOFTWARE. Anybody can do this, even a techneophyte. And you can take the other $2,450 and buy one !@#@$! of a computer with it...
This brings the typically techno-centric topic of data backups to the common Joe. And while cloud services aren't perfect, they are usually a damned sight better than the alternatives. Even with something like Mozy (just the 1st name to come to mind, not affiliated, blah blah) the odds of Mozy crashing or dying at the same time that your own computer does is pretty slim, and certainly you are far better off.
I've made a good living building and maintaining php-gtk apps for Windows/OSX. However, I've never seen GTK bindinngs for mobile anything, and porting over PHP-GTK apps to mobile platforms is at the point a non-starter.
I would be looking at this very seriously - at this point I've pretty much decided to move everything (eventually) to HTML/javascript because of its cross-platform capability even if it sometimes makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a toothpick.
Every day, however, I see the opposite effect.
Yes, I'm part of a private company. We provide software services in education. And we routinely provide software that is significantly less expensive than other solutions, while being more comprehensive, integrated, and (usually) easier to use. Sure, sometimes people pick solutions based on risk abatement rather than fitness for the task, but this is by no means a certainty, even if this reality is unpopular.
"Nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces"? Given that wood-burning has a pollution profile as bad as coal burning (the exact amount of different pollutants in each case varying depending on pollution controls), I seriously doubt straw burning is all that clean.
You don't have to interpret this as "straw-burning furnaces, which by nature of burning straw, are clean...". What you could just as easily interpret is "straw-burning furances, which have been modified to burn cleanly..".
Wood can burn horribly, generating thick black plumes of carcinogenic smoke, for example, when it's too wet. However, under controlled environments, wood can burn *very* cleanly. Take a look at a pellet stove - basically a wood burning stove, with the wood pellets providing a much more optimal burning profile that produces dramatically fewer pollutants.
On the flip side, you can purposefully create smoke, and use it as fuel in an internal combustion engine. This is called "wood gassification" and it's being used right now to drive a truck across the country. The Mother Earth News (magazine) built one more than 25 years ago back when the memory of the 70's oil embargo was still fresh and painful.
What if you could buy software that was a service? One that provided excellent availability, convenience, automatic backups, and automatic updates?
Oh yeah... you can!
Many software products nowadays are not products, but in fact, services. From Google's Gmail-based email hosting (for schools and businesses) to customer relationship management (Salesforce, et al) to my own company's products, many software products, especially software targeting larger organizations, are actually best sold as a service.
It's now a feature that many directors in organizations are looking for - they don't want to have to buy servers and hire staff and do backups and apply patches and all that - they'd rather just login and get started. If the software is commodity and doesn't represent any special "mojo", SaaS (Software as a Service) or by its new name, "Cloud Computing" can make lots of sense.
Now, perhaps *you* don't want this. And that's fine. You aren't required to buy it. But it's not some horrid conspiracy. It's just a reflection of the fact that, in many cases, the cost of hosted applications can be dramatically lower while simultaneously improving the overall service quality by moving the application hosting closer to the people who produce the software in the first place!
It's pretty simple, really. If the company makes money on each connection, and reinvests part of that profit, then the service network overall grows more capable. More towers, more frequencies, more bandwidth.
Assuming that the phone companies are smart enough to reinvest a portion of their profits - at my company we invest heavily in growth, and have at any time about 5x-10x capacity headroom, along with fully redundant backup schema for D/R. A few times, we've leaned on that extra infrastructure - while not cheap, it's cheap insurance.
Why would cellular networks be any different?
Not 4 digits, but not born yesterday, either...
My first thought was... why?
We are a Redhat/CentOS shop, so the pull of BSD kernel is pretty light, but for backups. See, we have a system that does nothing ut backup everything else. Specs are light, 2 Ghz unicore, 2 GB RAM but it has 12 hard disks in there with room for more. Managing all that space gets VERY cumersome with partitions and Ext3.
I'd consider switching to Deb/BSD if it supported ZFS in kernel land and was VERY stable. That way, I'd get userland environment that would pretty familiar (more than BSD) and ZFS.
Good work!
Amazing!
You managed to pull a steaming, raw, pile from your backside, serve it up with buzzword compliance, and make it all the way to +5 insightful.
My hats off to you, sir. Excellent trolling. Excellent!
Don't be sheepish! When they say "TV" you say: "Why would you want one of those?".
Turn the conversation around, and make them justify spending $XX money without even getting video "on demand".
Sure, HDMI is a joke. But there's a deeper issue going on... who hasn't noticed that TV as we've known it is almost dead?
1) I don't bother with rabbit ears.
2) I have a television but it's never on except to play video games.
3) I never turn on a set to see "what's on".
4) When I want to "watch TV", I turn to my Mac Mini, and surf to Hulu, Netflix or sometimes directly to the major networks.
5) I'm oblivious to the network behind most of the shows I watch. I typically go to the networks' sites last, and then only when I have time to kill. Which is rare.
6) I watch the shows I want, when I want, starting from the beginning. If I don't like a show, I switch to another show, which also starts right up, exactly when I want it to. When I stay at a Hotel, I find the "channel surfing" experience annoying since I can't start the shows at the beginning!
I have plenty of money to buy a TV. I just don't care to - Hulu/Netflix/Mac-Mini with a nice screen and Altec Lansing speakers give me a much more satisfactory experience. (seriously, who knew speakers so small could PUMP like that with good fidelity to boot?)
The only thing I really miss is the remote - the Mac Mini remote doesn't work with the browser. Wireless mice are annoying since the pointer tends to bounce around, and the batteries die quickly. But it's a small price to pay...
The information gained doesn't benefit them? Why else did they do this, then? Benefit isn't just cash, you know. Anythiing that provides an advantage is a 'benefit'...