I hate to be the voice that doesn't sing along the choir lines, but I have to report problems with ReiserFS.
It was an SMP system (my corporate web-proxy), running ReiserFS on 2.2.1X, with 5 x 9 Gb disks
It rocked - until it stopped working at all. There was some race which locked the CPUs after at most one day of uptime. Granted, the box is plenty loaded, at the time was pretty low on RAM, etc etc etc.
Still, I had to revert to ext2 and it's been running perfectly since.
On the good side, I haven't had any problem on UP boxes or not-so-loaded systems (probably they just couldn't gather enough load to trigger the bug:-).
So I really hope that the problems are fixed, and that ReiserFS (possibly along with its "raw" variant, which has great promise for web-caches and news-servers) will be mainstream soon.
Then you add HDDs (even a low-end server will have it's 7200RPM UDMA/66 HDD), the power supply (which dissipates heat) and its fans, and the RAMs (which also dissipate quite a lot of heat) and you'll see that the processor doesn't "weight" as much. A single server will use 150W, won't it?
I don't consider half a 20W lamp to be much responsible for global warming. Do you?
I am european (italian, to be more exact), and I'll just put my.02e on this.
The USA in the '40 and '50ies did much more than help save our asses. They helped us rebuild the economies of a continent ravaged by a war that cost millions of lives and just about everything there was to sustain the war effort. My gratitude (I am in no position to talk for anybody else) goes to the USA for that effort and that help. Period.
Now, about the attitude of USA governments NOW. I have mixed feelings in the matter: on one side the USA _are_ helping around. But at the same time they are doing it like bullies, and only when directly touched (in the purse, mostly), sadly. Compare the time it took for the USA to intervene in Kuwait to the time it took to intervine in Bosnia, or in Kosovo, or East Timor (still waiting on that one), or Ethiopia, Ruanda, Burundi or just about anywere in continental Africa (where there was no military involvement of the USA at all, even when genocides were happening). USA governments have this bad habit of acting how they please, whether it suits the rest of the world or not. If it doesn't, who cares. The rest of the world isn't likely to put an embargo on the US, or declare war, is it?
Add to this the USA governments' attitude towards the United Nations (which should rubber-stamp some of the USA interests in the world - or at least this is what the USA governments seem to like to think). The USA is the single biggest debitor to the United Nations. I am not sure, but it might very well be that the USA never paid a single dime to sustain the UN. This is not exactly good behavior, is it?
Now, about american PEOPLE. Every single person is unique, and is to be considered as such. Considering average attitudes, I think that US citizens are good-natured, a tad full of themselves, and with a generalized ignorance of other places' customs. They go around expecting everything to be like the US is. But this opinion is worth less then the electrons it's written with.
Sure, but try to put that in a 64-processors server.
Scratch that. Try to put that in a 2-processors system.
Scratch that. The P4 is not able to do SMP. Pity, isn't it?
SMP is kind of a must-have in servers doing work, and I mean lots of work. The P3-Xeon is sort of the best thing out there in the x86 word (but sadly it only scales up to 8way AFAIK. Compare that to UltraSparc, whose hardware could theoretically scale up to 64k processors, and routinely scales up to 64).
More of the same: when you go to the computers manifacturers sell as "servers", the CPU cost is actually tiny when compared to the whole system. Usually you have custom-built motherboards with nifty monitoring features, custom-tailored cases to go with the custom motherboards. You have to have ECC RAM, actually lots of it, and the controllers that go with that. Two redundant power supplies, willya? And then a battery-backupped RAID controller, or RAID will be no good at all. And of course the disks, all of them UW160SCSI, and usually you have a support contract with replacement clauses for them. That is, unless you go with shared fibre-channel or whatever else. As an afterthought, redundant NICs also add some.
In all of this, the CPUs weight actually less than 10% of the total hardware cost for your typical x86 "server".
If you also add redundancy (you need to double the server to get decent availability of course), and costs because of downtime (no x86 server comes with hot-plug CPUs or memory AFAIK, and only a few have hot-plug power supplies, while most have hot-plug HDDs), well in these conditions you'll find that alphas or sparcs or mips actually come pretty cheap, bang for buck.
Also, I've had a chance to use a Linux-powered Itanium system for a while. Not as impressive as it could have been, since GCC is not up to snuff so far in dealing with instruction-level parallelism (a very high percentage of the output instructions were noops). It can only get better though.
Last summer my company (30k employees) did a massive Win2k deployment. Then Bad Things (TM) began to happen, especially with Active Directory.
In a few days, Microsoft assembled a 20-people team (mostly developers) that came on-site, plus another couple of sizeable groups in the US and UK to support them.
The problems got fixed in about two weeks (I must commend the guys, they worked really hard).
It would work, but not with the current pricing schemes.
The point is, to avoid the scenario you're suggesting, there needs to be a deterrent against marking all traffic as high-priority. It could be done as placing network limitations, as it is done with IPv4-TCP out-of-band data (out-of-band data is a mechanism to send "urgent" packets overriding TCP's congestion-control mechanisms; said limit consists in only allowing one packet of OOB data to be alive in the network at a given moment), but it would probably be quite expensive to enforce. Or it can be done (much more effectively) using billing: "you can mark your packets high-priority. We charge by the byte, and high-priority packets cost twice than 'bulk' packets".
This is not, as you can see, a technical issue, but a marketing one. Unfortunately the current dominant pricing scheme is flat, which offers no such deterrent, indeed it's quite the opposite.
For my 10k-something-employees employer (no, I won't name it) we have 12 Quad-Xeon Compaq Proliant 5500 servers, and they barely manage (we add a new one every about 3 months).
When I-love-you hit, our mail services were down for 3 days.
Seems bad, doesn't it?
The problem is, it is bad.
If you plan to use Exchange as an MTA only, think again. As an MTA, Exchange sucks big time. It is bloatware. And that is can be its strong point: where using it does make sense, is when somebody needs an integrated MTA+groupware+PIM+calendar. Which means, Exchange is good where Lotus Notes is good, not where Postfix is. Using Exchange as a MTA only means using at most 20% of its potential (and hitting on its weakest points: setting Exchange up as a MTA is terrible: it's at the same time cumbersome and restrictive). From this point of view it's not different from any other Microsoft product: 90% people won't use in their life more than 10% of the features in Word o Excel, yet everybody pays for it all.
So my suggestion is: sure, set an Exchange server up for those 10% of the people who might need the full deal, and just keep some lean and mean MTA (well, calling Sendmail "lean and mean" sounds strange, but in this context it is...) for the other 90% of the people.
I installed it on MS Windows, and just selected Custom, and unchecked all the extra garbage.
Got a clean Netscape, no junk. No AIM, no Winamp, no Realplayer, no spellcheckers which I wouldn't use anyways.
Exactly WHAT did you guys install?
First rule of the software installer: no matter what the source, NEVER use the "typical" setups. ALWAYS go Custom and remove the cruft.
The point I am trying to make is not giving the developer absolute freedom. For that kind of licensing BSD-like terms are of course the best choice.
What TT's choice did is try to satisfy three very different groups of users-developers:
- those who write Free Software. Those people would already use some free license, and among the free licenses the GPL has a very important role.
- those who write Commercial software. To them, the big cost is in paying developers' wages. A few thousand dollars spent in licenses are usually not even noticeable in their cash flows.
- Troll Tech: they need the money just like anybody else. But Free Software programmers just can't shell that kind of money usually. They'd just move to something else. Those who can, will pay. Those who likely could (and would) not, will not.
Besides, it's in everybody's best interests to get software developed for a platform. If you get a programmer experienced in it, when s/he goes commercial s/he'll gladly shell a few bucks for it. If s/he isn't willing to, s/he can use another toolkit, no problem there. Hell, even Microsoft gives huge discounts to students...
Also, the LGPL is all but deprecated by the FSF AFAIK. Maybe Stallman's stance might not matter to a pragmatist, but it's not something to be discounted that easily. I met him a couple of weeks ago, he was very obviously happy over GPL'ed QT and OpenOffice. The only weak point for the Free Software community is that a software using the QT can't be licensed under BSD or Artistic or whatever different license. Too bad.
You want to develop some GPL software? Sure you can, great. You'll use a great library and toolkit and you'll benefit the world at large, not just your pockets. You want proprietary? Sure, here's the means and here's the fee. Want to try it out? Sure, as long as you don't distribute what you do with it...
Many times GPL's "virality" has been cited as an obstacle against the adoption of Free Software concept and its results (calling them products would not make them any justice). But I think that the path TT took is the classic "Columbus' egg" which can satisfy everybody.
Keeping logs of what's happening isn't by itself an invasion of privacy. Also, it might be requested at a later time that logs be turned in by law enforcement agencies with a court order. The invasion of privacy is in using those logs for whatever reason, and acting because of discoveries from the logs even moreso.
Most people will never know nor care whether Rambus embarks in moves as idiotic as they do.
They'll just see some review in some magazine saying that RDRAM enhances performance of their PC or workstation by 30% (it's not even true, but they won't be able to tell), and they'll shell the money for it gladly.
Those who know are a minority (maybe vocal, but small). Those who care are even less. IT managers want only three things: cover their asses, justify their (high) wages, and get a job done by whatever means it takes. And it's them deciding what companies buy, (re-insert second paragraph here).
Nonetheless, I really really hope that Rambus will lose their pants on their actions.
Right now in Milano, Italy, something good is going on.
With the recent liberalization in the phone network (it used to be a state-controlled monopoly), many new companies sprung up offering phone services.
One in particular, named e.Biscom and mostly owned by Milano's most popular power and gas utility company, a couple of years begun aggressively cabling in optics the whole city.
Now the first offerings using this extensive optic network are beginning to spring up. A company called FastWeb has recently begun marketing a residential offer for 10 MB/s Internet access, plus phone (free to all other Fastweb subscribers, some discounts for local and long-distance calls), and Video-on-demand. The cost is less than the equivalent of US$ 50/month flat, including taxes. They'll bring the fiber up to the doorstep free of charge, and the 10 MB/s limitation is handled by the splitter device (Notice: the whole network backbone is over IP, including phone and video).
First they have to _prove_ that there has been leakage of unlawfully-obtained code (assuming that the act of cracking a computer _is_ unlawful in Russia or wherever else the perpetrators have committed the act) into clean projects like Wine etc.
In the end, if the worst-case scenario comes true (that is, if there has actually been IP theft), all it takes is that the developers of Wine (etc.) refuse to get in touch with the stolen code.
I can imagine the scene: a dark alley, a Wine developer passing by and from a dark corner a hushed voice saying: "You look down. Problems compiling? I have something good for you... you know it won't hurt, in fact it will make you feel all right...":-)
I spent almost one year (my Military Service) helping out in an organization whose purpose is helping people land jobs (it's kind of a charity, State-funded).
One of the things we were taught by the people working there, is that job-hunting ads are always exagaggerated. They ask for the very best they could desire, as unrealistic as it might be. And then they throw in some buzzwords, and then some more. But in the end, usually they need far less, and most often desire far less, as it will be cheaper for the employer.
So don't be fooled. If you like a job prospect, don't be afraid to apply, even if you satisfy less then half the requirements. Worst scenario they'll tell you "we don't need you", but you have a better chance at landing the job than you believe.
Been there, done that.
Would you trust such a site? It's possible that some user seeing a ":portnum" part in the URL would consider (or at least fear, which is more than enough) the site to be a forgery and leave for safer harbours.
Secure sites can't move to name-based virtual hosting, as site and key selection takes place before a single HTTP header line is sent.
In other words, a secure site requires an unique IP address.
So as a general policy it's pretty dumb, unless exceptions are made for secure sites, and from the announcement it doesn't seem so.
The fact that the CPU is not the main power draw is possible.
But it's for sure the most concentrated source of heat (thus the requirement for air intakes and fans), maybe en par with the hard drive.
It is possible that Transmeta's claims be overestimating the true benefit, but it's a step forward and an heat source on my lap I'll gladly do without, especially considering that CPUs, especially on laptops, are idle most of the time.
I'm italian, here's my take on our local situation.
A few months ago, the number of active GSM phones surpassed the number of active "ordinary" phone lines. There are 4 major GSM connectivity providers, the biggest being TIM (controlled by Telecom Italia, former telehone monopolist) with slightly over 20 million subscribers (out of a population of roughly 65 million). Then there' Omnitel (over 13 million subscribers) owned by Vodaphone, Wind (over 3 million I think) which is owned by the former power distribution monopolist and France Telecom, and the newest arrival Blu (less than 0.5 million subscribers, it's only a few months old).
Most of the country (I'd take more than 90%) is under GSM coverage. Phone tariffs can vary a bit, from 4 LIT/sec (slightly less than 0.2 US cents) (VAT included, no call setup fee, any destination in Italy, be it mobile or land) for some "summer-special-offers" to as high as 1.2 US$/min (plus 0.1 US$ call setup fee, VAT included) for some tariffs. The call receiver only pays if s/he's doing international roaming (they receive their call while being outside Italy).
Land lines: we're still in the process of coming out of a monopoly (by Telecom Italia). The last mile is still under monopoly, and the connection fee still goes to Telecom Italia (about 20 US$ / month, no calls included). Besides that, there are three players (Telecom Italia, Infostrada (owned by Vodaphone, I believe), and Wind) offering both local and long-distance calls. Besides them, therere are a few more offering only long-distance, plus a host of local phone companies that are now starting up.
The network is fully digital (has been for a few years), ISDN is a no-problem (besides being more expensive than analog). Set-up times can vary from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, depending on the location. ADSL takes a month or so to set up.
Tariffs are normally by-the-second. A few flat offerings are appearing, but they're quite expensive (I believe about 30 US$/month for local calls, or 50$/month for local and long-distance, plus another 30 US$/month for Internet connectivity)
Slashdot Mirror
2.2.17
I hate to be the voice that doesn't sing along the choir lines, but I have to report problems with ReiserFS.
:-).
It was an SMP system (my corporate web-proxy), running ReiserFS on 2.2.1X, with 5 x 9 Gb disks
It rocked - until it stopped working at all. There was some race which locked the CPUs after at most one day of uptime. Granted, the box is plenty loaded, at the time was pretty low on RAM, etc etc etc.
Still, I had to revert to ext2 and it's been running perfectly since.
On the good side, I haven't had any problem on UP boxes or not-so-loaded systems (probably they just couldn't gather enough load to trigger the bug
So I really hope that the problems are fixed, and that ReiserFS (possibly along with its "raw" variant, which has great promise for web-caches and news-servers) will be mainstream soon.
Then you add HDDs (even a low-end server will have it's 7200RPM UDMA/66 HDD), the power supply (which dissipates heat) and its fans, and the RAMs (which also dissipate quite a lot of heat) and you'll see that the processor doesn't "weight" as much. A single server will use 150W, won't it?
I don't consider half a 20W lamp to be much responsible for global warming. Do you?
Damn. That is NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition.
Sorry.
The soon-to-be-released win2k-Datacenter should be able to handle 16 CPUs (or was it 8?). Windows NT 4.0 should be able to manage 8.
I am european (italian, to be more exact), and I'll just put my .02e on this.
The USA in the '40 and '50ies did much more than help save our asses. They helped us rebuild the economies of a continent ravaged by a war that cost millions of lives and just about everything there was to sustain the war effort. My gratitude (I am in no position to talk for anybody else) goes to the USA for that effort and that help. Period.
Now, about the attitude of USA governments NOW. I have mixed feelings in the matter: on one side the USA _are_ helping around. But at the same time they are doing it like bullies, and only when directly touched (in the purse, mostly), sadly. Compare the time it took for the USA to intervene in Kuwait to the time it took to intervine in Bosnia, or in Kosovo, or East Timor (still waiting on that one), or Ethiopia, Ruanda, Burundi or just about anywere in continental Africa (where there was no military involvement of the USA at all, even when genocides were happening). USA governments have this bad habit of acting how they please, whether it suits the rest of the world or not. If it doesn't, who cares. The rest of the world isn't likely to put an embargo on the US, or declare war, is it?
Add to this the USA governments' attitude towards the United Nations (which should rubber-stamp some of the USA interests in the world - or at least this is what the USA governments seem to like to think). The USA is the single biggest debitor to the United Nations. I am not sure, but it might very well be that the USA never paid a single dime to sustain the UN. This is not exactly good behavior, is it?
Now, about american PEOPLE. Every single person is unique, and is to be considered as such. Considering average attitudes, I think that US citizens are good-natured, a tad full of themselves, and with a generalized ignorance of other places' customs. They go around expecting everything to be like the US is. But this opinion is worth less then the electrons it's written with.
Sure, but try to put that in a 64-processors server.
Scratch that. Try to put that in a 2-processors system.
Scratch that. The P4 is not able to do SMP. Pity, isn't it?
SMP is kind of a must-have in servers doing work, and I mean lots of work. The P3-Xeon is sort of the best thing out there in the x86 word (but sadly it only scales up to 8way AFAIK. Compare that to UltraSparc, whose hardware could theoretically scale up to 64k processors, and routinely scales up to 64).
More of the same: when you go to the computers manifacturers sell as "servers", the CPU cost is actually tiny when compared to the whole system. Usually you have custom-built motherboards with nifty monitoring features, custom-tailored cases to go with the custom motherboards. You have to have ECC RAM, actually lots of it, and the controllers that go with that. Two redundant power supplies, willya? And then a battery-backupped RAID controller, or RAID will be no good at all. And of course the disks, all of them UW160SCSI, and usually you have a support contract with replacement clauses for them. That is, unless you go with shared fibre-channel or whatever else. As an afterthought, redundant NICs also add some.
In all of this, the CPUs weight actually less than 10% of the total hardware cost for your typical x86 "server".
If you also add redundancy (you need to double the server to get decent availability of course), and costs because of downtime (no x86 server comes with hot-plug CPUs or memory AFAIK, and only a few have hot-plug power supplies, while most have hot-plug HDDs), well in these conditions you'll find that alphas or sparcs or mips actually come pretty cheap, bang for buck.
Actually, WinNT on Alpha ran in 32-bit mode IIRC.
Also, I've had a chance to use a Linux-powered Itanium system for a while. Not as impressive as it could have been, since GCC is not up to snuff so far in dealing with instruction-level parallelism (a very high percentage of the output instructions were noops). It can only get better though.
Last summer my company (30k employees) did a massive Win2k deployment. Then Bad Things (TM) began to happen, especially with Active Directory.
In a few days, Microsoft assembled a 20-people team (mostly developers) that came on-site, plus another couple of sizeable groups in the US and UK to support them.
The problems got fixed in about two weeks (I must commend the guys, they worked really hard).
It would work, but not with the current pricing schemes.
The point is, to avoid the scenario you're suggesting, there needs to be a deterrent against marking all traffic as high-priority. It could be done as placing network limitations, as it is done with IPv4-TCP out-of-band data (out-of-band data is a mechanism to send "urgent" packets overriding TCP's congestion-control mechanisms; said limit consists in only allowing one packet of OOB data to be alive in the network at a given moment), but it would probably be quite expensive to enforce. Or it can be done (much more effectively) using billing: "you can mark your packets high-priority. We charge by the byte, and high-priority packets cost twice than 'bulk' packets".
This is not, as you can see, a technical issue, but a marketing one. Unfortunately the current dominant pricing scheme is flat, which offers no such deterrent, indeed it's quite the opposite.
For my 10k-something-employees employer (no, I won't name it) we have 12 Quad-Xeon Compaq Proliant 5500 servers, and they barely manage (we add a new one every about 3 months).
When I-love-you hit, our mail services were down for 3 days.
Seems bad, doesn't it?
The problem is, it is bad.
If you plan to use Exchange as an MTA only, think again. As an MTA, Exchange sucks big time. It is bloatware. And that is can be its strong point: where using it does make sense, is when somebody needs an integrated MTA+groupware+PIM+calendar. Which means, Exchange is good where Lotus Notes is good, not where Postfix is. Using Exchange as a MTA only means using at most 20% of its potential (and hitting on its weakest points: setting Exchange up as a MTA is terrible: it's at the same time cumbersome and restrictive). From this point of view it's not different from any other Microsoft product: 90% people won't use in their life more than 10% of the features in Word o Excel, yet everybody pays for it all.
So my suggestion is: sure, set an Exchange server up for those 10% of the people who might need the full deal, and just keep some lean and mean MTA (well, calling Sendmail "lean and mean" sounds strange, but in this context it is...) for the other 90% of the people.
I think I just removed it from the desktop and from my memory as soon as I saw the new icons on the desktop :-)
I installed it on MS Windows, and just selected Custom, and unchecked all the extra garbage.
Got a clean Netscape, no junk. No AIM, no Winamp, no Realplayer, no spellcheckers which I wouldn't use anyways.
Exactly WHAT did you guys install?
First rule of the software installer: no matter what the source, NEVER use the "typical" setups. ALWAYS go Custom and remove the cruft.
The installer _is_ proxy-aware, and will even support proxy authentication (which I need).
Pity that it will fail...
We have different views.
The point I am trying to make is not giving the developer absolute freedom. For that kind of licensing BSD-like terms are of course the best choice.
What TT's choice did is try to satisfy three very different groups of users-developers:
- those who write Free Software. Those people would already use some free license, and among the free licenses the GPL has a very important role.
- those who write Commercial software. To them, the big cost is in paying developers' wages. A few thousand dollars spent in licenses are usually not even noticeable in their cash flows.
- Troll Tech: they need the money just like anybody else. But Free Software programmers just can't shell that kind of money usually. They'd just move to something else. Those who can, will pay. Those who likely could (and would) not, will not.
Besides, it's in everybody's best interests to get software developed for a platform. If you get a programmer experienced in it, when s/he goes commercial s/he'll gladly shell a few bucks for it. If s/he isn't willing to, s/he can use another toolkit, no problem there. Hell, even Microsoft gives huge discounts to students...
Also, the LGPL is all but deprecated by the FSF AFAIK. Maybe Stallman's stance might not matter to a pragmatist, but it's not something to be discounted that easily. I met him a couple of weeks ago, he was very obviously happy over GPL'ed QT and OpenOffice. The only weak point for the Free Software community is that a software using the QT can't be licensed under BSD or Artistic or whatever different license. Too bad.
Their dual-licensing terms are great imo.
You want to develop some GPL software? Sure you can, great. You'll use a great library and toolkit and you'll benefit the world at large, not just your pockets. You want proprietary? Sure, here's the means and here's the fee. Want to try it out? Sure, as long as you don't distribute what you do with it...
Many times GPL's "virality" has been cited as an obstacle against the adoption of Free Software concept and its results (calling them products would not make them any justice). But I think that the path TT took is the classic "Columbus' egg" which can satisfy everybody.
Way to go, TT!
Disclaimer: IANAL, this is all IMHO.
Keeping logs of what's happening isn't by itself an invasion of privacy. Also, it might be requested at a later time that logs be turned in by law enforcement agencies with a court order. The invasion of privacy is in using those logs for whatever reason, and acting because of discoveries from the logs even moreso.
Most people will never know nor care whether Rambus embarks in moves as idiotic as they do.
They'll just see some review in some magazine saying that RDRAM enhances performance of their PC or workstation by 30% (it's not even true, but they won't be able to tell), and they'll shell the money for it gladly.
Those who know are a minority (maybe vocal, but small). Those who care are even less. IT managers want only three things: cover their asses, justify their (high) wages, and get a job done by whatever means it takes. And it's them deciding what companies buy, (re-insert second paragraph here).
Nonetheless, I really really hope that Rambus will lose their pants on their actions.
Right now in Milano, Italy, something good is going on.
With the recent liberalization in the phone network (it used to be a state-controlled monopoly), many new companies sprung up offering phone services.
One in particular, named e.Biscom and mostly owned by Milano's most popular power and gas utility company, a couple of years begun aggressively cabling in optics the whole city.
Now the first offerings using this extensive optic network are beginning to spring up. A company called FastWeb has recently begun marketing a residential offer for 10 MB/s Internet access, plus phone (free to all other Fastweb subscribers, some discounts for local and long-distance calls), and Video-on-demand. The cost is less than the equivalent of US$ 50/month flat, including taxes. They'll bring the fiber up to the doorstep free of charge, and the 10 MB/s limitation is handled by the splitter device (Notice: the whole network backbone is over IP, including phone and video).
First they have to _prove_ that there has been leakage of unlawfully-obtained code (assuming that the act of cracking a computer _is_ unlawful in Russia or wherever else the perpetrators have committed the act) into clean projects like Wine etc.
:-)
In the end, if the worst-case scenario comes true (that is, if there has actually been IP theft), all it takes is that the developers of Wine (etc.) refuse to get in touch with the stolen code.
I can imagine the scene: a dark alley, a Wine developer passing by and from a dark corner a hushed voice saying: "You look down. Problems compiling? I have something good for you... you know it won't hurt, in fact it will make you feel all right..."
I spent almost one year (my Military Service) helping out in an organization whose purpose is helping people land jobs (it's kind of a charity, State-funded).
One of the things we were taught by the people working there, is that job-hunting ads are always exagaggerated. They ask for the very best they could desire, as unrealistic as it might be. And then they throw in some buzzwords, and then some more. But in the end, usually they need far less, and most often desire far less, as it will be cheaper for the employer.
So don't be fooled. If you like a job prospect, don't be afraid to apply, even if you satisfy less then half the requirements. Worst scenario they'll tell you "we don't need you", but you have a better chance at landing the job than you believe.
Been there, done that.
Would you trust such a site? It's possible that some user seeing a ":portnum" part in the URL would consider (or at least fear, which is more than enough) the site to be a forgery and leave for safer harbours.
Secure sites can't move to name-based virtual hosting, as site and key selection takes place before a single HTTP header line is sent.
In other words, a secure site requires an unique IP address.
So as a general policy it's pretty dumb, unless exceptions are made for secure sites, and from the announcement it doesn't seem so.
The fact that the CPU is not the main power draw is possible.
But it's for sure the most concentrated source of heat (thus the requirement for air intakes and fans), maybe en par with the hard drive.
It is possible that Transmeta's claims be overestimating the true benefit, but it's a step forward and an heat source on my lap I'll gladly do without, especially considering that CPUs, especially on laptops, are idle most of the time.
I'm italian, here's my take on our local situation.
A few months ago, the number of active GSM phones surpassed the number of active "ordinary" phone lines. There are 4 major GSM connectivity providers, the biggest being TIM (controlled by Telecom Italia, former telehone monopolist) with slightly over 20 million subscribers (out of a population of roughly 65 million). Then there' Omnitel (over 13 million subscribers) owned by Vodaphone, Wind (over 3 million I think) which is owned by the former power distribution monopolist and France Telecom, and the newest arrival Blu (less than 0.5 million subscribers, it's only a few months old).
Most of the country (I'd take more than 90%) is under GSM coverage. Phone tariffs can vary a bit, from 4 LIT/sec (slightly less than 0.2 US cents) (VAT included, no call setup fee, any destination in Italy, be it mobile or land) for some "summer-special-offers" to as high as 1.2 US$/min (plus 0.1 US$ call setup fee, VAT included) for some tariffs. The call receiver only pays if s/he's doing international roaming (they receive their call while being outside Italy).
Land lines: we're still in the process of coming out of a monopoly (by Telecom Italia). The last mile is still under monopoly, and the connection fee still goes to Telecom Italia (about 20 US$ / month, no calls included). Besides that, there are three players (Telecom Italia, Infostrada (owned by Vodaphone, I believe), and Wind) offering both local and long-distance calls. Besides them, therere are a few more offering only long-distance, plus a host of local phone companies that are now starting up.
The network is fully digital (has been for a few years), ISDN is a no-problem (besides being more expensive than analog). Set-up times can vary from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, depending on the location. ADSL takes a month or so to set up.
Tariffs are normally by-the-second. A few flat offerings are appearing, but they're quite expensive (I believe about 30 US$/month for local calls, or 50$/month for local and long-distance, plus another 30 US$/month for Internet connectivity)