Core IP Services doesn't have the whole datacenter at this space. Telx has a huge datacenter in this building, and Core IP resells rackspace there. Note that only 50 systems were affected. It sounds like the FBI pulled the plug on a set of cages or cabinets rented by Core. See this message from Core's owner.
Not to defend the FBI's stupidity, but their approach is not that different from those Black Hole Lists that many Slashdotters defend. I used to work Help Desk for Hurricane Electric, and the most frustrating aspect of my job was helping shared hosting customers whose email was being blocked because one of our IP blocks was on a blacklist. Why was it being blocked? Because of spam that supposedly came from our IP blocks. If this was real spam at all (and not a legitimate newsletter that some heuristic filter interpreted as spam) it was from somebody who had a shared hosting account with somebody who rented rackspace from us. Or even on somebody who provided shared hosting on rackspace they rented from one of our customers! In other words, everybody in our IP space was being punished for the misdeeds of a customer of a customer of a customer! Getting the spammer offline meant going through multiple abuse desks, and was thus pretty slow.
(Of course, it didn't help that our own abuse desk and the BHL maintainers were always throwing snits at each other.)
The lesson here is to think things through before you get all self-righteous. Otherwise you accomplish nothing but hurting innocent bystanders.
I was using "free" in a sense different from what you're assuming. Perhaps it's the wrong word for this situation.
But whatever my misuse of semantics, your tirade is just plain stupid. I never said that these energy sources could be had without cost. Quite the opposite, as you have learned if you had bothered to actually read my post, instead of picking out a convenient word to bash me about.
Nothing makes me laugh more than this weird belief that contracts can replace government. What do you do when there's a difference of opinion over how to apply a contract? Don't say "free arbitration" because there's nobody to enforce the arbitration, just as there's nobody to enforce the contract.
Contract disputes would end up being settled by force of arms. NRA types with their Daniel Boone mythology doubtless think that would be pretty cool. But wars aren't won by rugged individualists, they're won by people with a lot of resources who can deploy huge numbers of well-trained soldiers and expensive hardware. So all arguments get won by the people who have the best armies. That's a formula for creating a ruling class of professional warriors. That's called feudalism.
Now, Feudalism has its advocates. But they are ignorant fools. You may not like a government that taxes away 40% of your income, but I don't think a hereditary feudal ruling class that demands almost all your income and considers outsiders an inferior life form is much of an improvement.
Huh? There are maybe 30 reserved words in a typical programming language. Learning 30 words in a foreign language is something you can do in less than a day. Nothing like the effort it takes to acquire a meaningful vocabulary and learn the hundreds of grammar rules and idioms you need to be fluent in English.
Come to think of it, most people on the planet probably already know a couple of hundred English words.
They're certainly not paying $7 billion for Java. "Owning" Java just means the headache and cost of maintaining the specification and reference implementation. The only real benefit is more influence as to how the platform evolves. That's valuable, but not that valuable.
Nor are they paying $7 billion for Solaris. Like Java, it's open source. See above.
The hardware business justifies a lot of that $7 billion. It would push their server market share from barely ahead of Dell to almost half the market. That gives them a lot of leverage. I also suspect they have their eye on Sun's high-density x64 server products. These have many technical advantages over the competition, but are poorly marketed by an organization that still hasn't gotten over its SPARC fanboy mentality. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody at IBM thinks they can sell these Sun products better than Sun can.
There's also Sun service business. Service is now actually where most of IBM's income comes from. Getting access to Sun's customers would be pretty helpful.
And no, IBM is not looking to shut down a competitor. Sun competes against IBM, Dell, and HP, and is much smaller than any of them. Sun's disappearance probably wouldn't do that much to make the market less competitive. Maybe a little, but not $7 billion worth. Especially when HP and Dell would benefit too.
Another reason to buy Sun: it's a bargain that's too good to pass up. Lack of investor confidence and the recession combined to drive Sun's market cap down to less than $4 billion (before the IBM takeover talks leaked), but Sun is really worth a lot more than that. Sun's cash reserves alone are worth almost that much.
And on top of everything else, Sun was close to be divied up by Dell and Oracle. Preventing that from happening is worth a billion or so all by itself.
Does it seem premature to declare this the savior of our energy troubles before you have even put up a single test/prototype site?
Did you miss the part where they said "potentially"? I haven't heard anybody proclaiming that all our energy and greenhouse gas problems are over.
The fact remains that there's a lot of free energy out there. In theory you could provide our entire energy budget a thousand times over from any one of several renewable resources: wind, tides, geothermal, solar. But in order to tap resources properly (as opposed to the puny projects we've done to date) we have to solve big problems. Did I say big? Enormous, gigantic, titanic. There isn't an adjective that really describes how difficult this is.
But that's all the more reason to play up the enormous amount of energy available this way. If big huge problems can only be solved with big expensive projects. You're not going to get anybody, public or private, to invest the enormous sums required unless there's hope of enormous return.
They're targeting a pretty small market if they feel the need to advertise their Amiga library.
The fact that they are introducing a new gaming console in an oversaturated market means they have no idea what their market is. Amiga support just makes it a little more obvious.
This is typical geek entrepeneurship. The product is based on what they think is cool rather than what there's a likely market for.
Of course, sometimes geek entrepeneurship succeeds in spite of itself. Woz thought the target audience for the Apple was fellow geeks, which is why he invented the idea of an plug-in bus with documented specs for it. If he'd been right, Apple might have derived a modest income from this product for a short while. But what actually happened is that people started designing serious plugin cards that transformed the Apple II into the first mass-market computer.
So maybe these guys will prove us cynics wrong. But the odds are against them.
So tell me, please, which streaming media stack should they be using? Yes, Real sucks, but so does Windows Media, Move Player, and Quicktime. And there's nothing else, not off the shelf.
You can always roll your own (as Netflix had the wisdom to do) but not everybody has the resources for that.
SATA and SAS both rate as "commodity" technologies. In the server world, you don't pay extra for SAS unless you really need the higher burst speed and reliability.
I work for Sun, and most of our servers take SAS or SATA. That's not hard to do, because spec-compliant SAS host bus adapters also support SATA drives. (Which should tell you about the importance of SATA in the server world.) The exceptions are our storage servers, which are SATA only.
Of course it doesn't prove something. They whole article is a hypothesis. Welcome to science class.
I didn't describe the paper as "proof" at all. So what's you're point? Beyond riffing on the usual theme that "people who believe in global warming are stupid."
There is also, in fact, an argument for pet giraffes. In fact, it is just an argument, not a fact, in fact. Argument. Fact. (Stop talking.)
It's often wise to stop talking before you spout gibberish. Or maybe I'm just too dumb to see what pet giraffes have to do with anything.
All real-world feedback systems reach a point of saturation, including audio amplifiers and world climate.
Ergo, no big deal? That's like saying that getting shot at is no big deal because bullets have a finite range. The question is, where does the limit to the phenomenon lie in relation to some undesirable event. I think we can verify that such events often occur with respect to bullets and amplifiers. As for global warming, it would only take a average global temperature shift of 6 degrees celsius to make life pretty difficult.
In that these hundreds of papers present evidence that shows the correlation between CO2 and Temperature, then go on to present a hypothesis showing causality. This is the scientific process. It is not fact.
The "correlation" issue was addressed earlier in the thread. But I'm perfectly willing to concede that nobody's proven it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Except this isn't a criminal trial. It's a gamble with the future of humanity. The bet is a possible economic hit (if we do it right, retooling our infrastructure away from carbon fuels actually makes economic sense in the long run) versus the probable end of civilization and the possible extinction of our species. Under those circumstances, the evidence we have, much of it from very conservative scientists who are probably under estimating the danger, is more than enough.
You spend half your waking life writing post after post on a web site you claim to despise, and you say I'm irrelevant?
Look at my posting history. I actually convince people of stuff. When was the last time you convinced anybody of anything, except, "This guy is so full of himself"?
OK, I went and read the paper, and basically what they're arguing is that the last ice age wasn't ended by an increase in CO2.
Fine. But that doesn't prove that CO2 has no effect on climate. Quite the opposite:
Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter ~4200 years of the warming.
There is, in fact, an argument for manmade climate change. They finish up by saying
The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the present-day and future climate.
There's a positive feedback loop here that's quite scary. You heat up the atmosphere a tiny bit, you get outgassings of greenhouse gases (CO2 from the oceans, methane from defrosting ice sheet in the north, gases released by dying wetlands) and that heats up the atmosphere more. Which releases more gases...
Feedback loops can cycle out of control damn quickly. Ever held a microphone in front of its own speaker?
One last point: even if you weren't misreading this paper, the way you cite it as counterevidence is totally bogus. There are hundreds of papers making the opposite argument. You don't bring the whole edifice of argument down just by citing somebody's inference from one set of ice core samples.
Dude, if there's anything less productive than arguing with an AC, it's arguing with an AC that mouthing racist right-wing crap that somebody has already modded down.
You're misusing the word "correlation". A correlation is a statistical relationship, like "Slashdotters tend to lose their temper." The fact that that certain gases trap heat is not a statistical relationship, it's basic physics. You might as well say "water boils when you heat it to 100 degrees celsius" is a correlation.
I assume there are some blogosphere idiots who claim this physical connection isn't established, just as there are ones who have "proven" that Pi is not an irrational number. But amongst people with any knowledge of the subject, it's a simple fact.
The "skeptics" (the ones with any scientific training) are not questioning the relationship between CO2 and heat. They are questioning whether there's enough greenhouse gases to cause any permanent change in the climate. Or if they admit that point, they question whether a significant portion of those gases are manmade.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, that statement makes no sense. Or should I say even less sense than your other statements.
I'd ask you to explain why you put me on your friends list, but I'm really afraid of the answer. Go bother somebody who cares.
Oh wait, you don't believe anybody cares. So please kill yourself, there's a nice fellow.
Bored now.
Core IP Services doesn't have the whole datacenter at this space. Telx has a huge datacenter in this building, and Core IP resells rackspace there. Note that only 50 systems were affected. It sounds like the FBI pulled the plug on a set of cages or cabinets rented by Core. See this message from Core's owner.
Not to defend the FBI's stupidity, but their approach is not that different from those Black Hole Lists that many Slashdotters defend. I used to work Help Desk for Hurricane Electric, and the most frustrating aspect of my job was helping shared hosting customers whose email was being blocked because one of our IP blocks was on a blacklist. Why was it being blocked? Because of spam that supposedly came from our IP blocks. If this was real spam at all (and not a legitimate newsletter that some heuristic filter interpreted as spam) it was from somebody who had a shared hosting account with somebody who rented rackspace from us. Or even on somebody who provided shared hosting on rackspace they rented from one of our customers! In other words, everybody in our IP space was being punished for the misdeeds of a customer of a customer of a customer! Getting the spammer offline meant going through multiple abuse desks, and was thus pretty slow.
(Of course, it didn't help that our own abuse desk and the BHL maintainers were always throwing snits at each other.)
The lesson here is to think things through before you get all self-righteous. Otherwise you accomplish nothing but hurting innocent bystanders.
I was using "free" in a sense different from what you're assuming. Perhaps it's the wrong word for this situation.
But whatever my misuse of semantics, your tirade is just plain stupid. I never said that these energy sources could be had without cost. Quite the opposite, as you have learned if you had bothered to actually read my post, instead of picking out a convenient word to bash me about.
Everything accomplished by contract.
Nothing makes me laugh more than this weird belief that contracts can replace government. What do you do when there's a difference of opinion over how to apply a contract? Don't say "free arbitration" because there's nobody to enforce the arbitration, just as there's nobody to enforce the contract.
Contract disputes would end up being settled by force of arms. NRA types with their Daniel Boone mythology doubtless think that would be pretty cool. But wars aren't won by rugged individualists, they're won by people with a lot of resources who can deploy huge numbers of well-trained soldiers and expensive hardware. So all arguments get won by the people who have the best armies. That's a formula for creating a ruling class of professional warriors. That's called feudalism.
Now, Feudalism has its advocates. But they are ignorant fools. You may not like a government that taxes away 40% of your income, but I don't think a hereditary feudal ruling class that demands almost all your income and considers outsiders an inferior life form is much of an improvement.
Huh? There are maybe 30 reserved words in a typical programming language. Learning 30 words in a foreign language is something you can do in less than a day. Nothing like the effort it takes to acquire a meaningful vocabulary and learn the hundreds of grammar rules and idioms you need to be fluent in English.
Come to think of it, most people on the planet probably already know a couple of hundred English words.
They're certainly not paying $7 billion for Java. "Owning" Java just means the headache and cost of maintaining the specification and reference implementation. The only real benefit is more influence as to how the platform evolves. That's valuable, but not that valuable.
Nor are they paying $7 billion for Solaris. Like Java, it's open source. See above.
The hardware business justifies a lot of that $7 billion. It would push their server market share from barely ahead of Dell to almost half the market. That gives them a lot of leverage. I also suspect they have their eye on Sun's high-density x64 server products. These have many technical advantages over the competition, but are poorly marketed by an organization that still hasn't gotten over its SPARC fanboy mentality. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody at IBM thinks they can sell these Sun products better than Sun can.
There's also Sun service business. Service is now actually where most of IBM's income comes from. Getting access to Sun's customers would be pretty helpful.
And no, IBM is not looking to shut down a competitor. Sun competes against IBM, Dell, and HP, and is much smaller than any of them. Sun's disappearance probably wouldn't do that much to make the market less competitive. Maybe a little, but not $7 billion worth. Especially when HP and Dell would benefit too.
Another reason to buy Sun: it's a bargain that's too good to pass up. Lack of investor confidence and the recession combined to drive Sun's market cap down to less than $4 billion (before the IBM takeover talks leaked), but Sun is really worth a lot more than that. Sun's cash reserves alone are worth almost that much.
And on top of everything else, Sun was close to be divied up by Dell and Oracle. Preventing that from happening is worth a billion or so all by itself.
Does it seem premature to declare this the savior of our energy troubles before you have even put up a single test/prototype site?
Did you miss the part where they said "potentially"? I haven't heard anybody proclaiming that all our energy and greenhouse gas problems are over.
The fact remains that there's a lot of free energy out there. In theory you could provide our entire energy budget a thousand times over from any one of several renewable resources: wind, tides, geothermal, solar. But in order to tap resources properly (as opposed to the puny projects we've done to date) we have to solve big problems. Did I say big? Enormous, gigantic, titanic. There isn't an adjective that really describes how difficult this is.
But that's all the more reason to play up the enormous amount of energy available this way. If big huge problems can only be solved with big expensive projects. You're not going to get anybody, public or private, to invest the enormous sums required unless there's hope of enormous return.
They're targeting a pretty small market if they feel the need to advertise their Amiga library.
The fact that they are introducing a new gaming console in an oversaturated market means they have no idea what their market is. Amiga support just makes it a little more obvious.
This is typical geek entrepeneurship. The product is based on what they think is cool rather than what there's a likely market for.
Of course, sometimes geek entrepeneurship succeeds in spite of itself. Woz thought the target audience for the Apple was fellow geeks, which is why he invented the idea of an plug-in bus with documented specs for it. If he'd been right, Apple might have derived a modest income from this product for a short while. But what actually happened is that people started designing serious plugin cards that transformed the Apple II into the first mass-market computer.
So maybe these guys will prove us cynics wrong. But the odds are against them.
But it's not a console! It's a PC! Its chassis is big and ugly!
Yes, and it's so perfect for enterprise Unix applications.
HTTP is fine if you don't care about the video stopping and starting a lot. Alas, most people do.
Little detail: to have a media stream, you also need a server.
So tell me, please, which streaming media stack should they be using? Yes, Real sucks, but so does Windows Media, Move Player, and Quicktime. And there's nothing else, not off the shelf.
You can always roll your own (as Netflix had the wisdom to do) but not everybody has the resources for that.
those are SATA disks (not SAS)
SATA and SAS both rate as "commodity" technologies. In the server world, you don't pay extra for SAS unless you really need the higher burst speed and reliability.
I work for Sun, and most of our servers take SAS or SATA. That's not hard to do, because spec-compliant SAS host bus adapters also support SATA drives. (Which should tell you about the importance of SATA in the server world.) The exceptions are our storage servers, which are SATA only.
Of course it doesn't prove something. They whole article is a hypothesis. Welcome to science class.
I didn't describe the paper as "proof" at all. So what's you're point? Beyond riffing on the usual theme that "people who believe in global warming are stupid."
There is also, in fact, an argument for pet giraffes. In fact, it is just an argument, not a fact, in fact. Argument. Fact. (Stop talking.)
It's often wise to stop talking before you spout gibberish. Or maybe I'm just too dumb to see what pet giraffes have to do with anything.
All real-world feedback systems reach a point of saturation, including audio amplifiers and world climate.
Ergo, no big deal? That's like saying that getting shot at is no big deal because bullets have a finite range. The question is, where does the limit to the phenomenon lie in relation to some undesirable event. I think we can verify that such events often occur with respect to bullets and amplifiers. As for global warming, it would only take a average global temperature shift of 6 degrees celsius to make life pretty difficult.
In that these hundreds of papers present evidence that shows the correlation between CO2 and Temperature, then go on to present a hypothesis showing causality. This is the scientific process. It is not fact.
The "correlation" issue was addressed earlier in the thread. But I'm perfectly willing to concede that nobody's proven it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Except this isn't a criminal trial. It's a gamble with the future of humanity. The bet is a possible economic hit (if we do it right, retooling our infrastructure away from carbon fuels actually makes economic sense in the long run) versus the probable end of civilization and the possible extinction of our species. Under those circumstances, the evidence we have, much of it from very conservative scientists who are probably under estimating the danger, is more than enough.
You need to work on your sarcasm. It lacks conviction.
You spend half your waking life writing post after post on a web site you claim to despise, and you say I'm irrelevant?
Look at my posting history. I actually convince people of stuff. When was the last time you convinced anybody of anything, except, "This guy is so full of himself"?
OK, I went and read the paper, and basically what they're arguing is that the last ice age wasn't ended by an increase in CO2.
Fine. But that doesn't prove that CO2 has no effect on climate. Quite the opposite:
Finally, the situation at Termination III differs from the recent anthropogenic CO2 increase. As recently noted by Kump (38), we should distinguish between internal influences (such as the deglacial CO2 increase) and external influences (such as the anthropogenic CO2 increase) on the climate system. Although the recent CO2 increase has clearly been imposed first, as a result of anthropogenic activities, it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere. The sequence of events during this Termination is fully consistent with CO2 participating in the latter ~4200 years of the warming.
There is, in fact, an argument for manmade climate change. They finish up by saying
The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing, which is then further amplified by fast atmospheric feedbacks (39) that are also at work for the present-day and future climate.
There's a positive feedback loop here that's quite scary. You heat up the atmosphere a tiny bit, you get outgassings of greenhouse gases (CO2 from the oceans, methane from defrosting ice sheet in the north, gases released by dying wetlands) and that heats up the atmosphere more. Which releases more gases...
Feedback loops can cycle out of control damn quickly. Ever held a microphone in front of its own speaker?
One last point: even if you weren't misreading this paper, the way you cite it as counterevidence is totally bogus. There are hundreds of papers making the opposite argument. You don't bring the whole edifice of argument down just by citing somebody's inference from one set of ice core samples.
Try reading the first sentence of the abstract. "Timing is not accurately known". In other words, it neither confirms nor refutes your assertion.
"Badass" is one word for your shoot-from-the-lip behavior. Others more accurately describe your lack of conscious thought.
Dude, if there's anything less productive than arguing with an AC, it's arguing with an AC that mouthing racist right-wing crap that somebody has already modded down.
Citation please?
You're misusing the word "correlation". A correlation is a statistical relationship, like "Slashdotters tend to lose their temper." The fact that that certain gases trap heat is not a statistical relationship, it's basic physics. You might as well say "water boils when you heat it to 100 degrees celsius" is a correlation.
I assume there are some blogosphere idiots who claim this physical connection isn't established, just as there are ones who have "proven" that Pi is not an irrational number. But amongst people with any knowledge of the subject, it's a simple fact.
The "skeptics" (the ones with any scientific training) are not questioning the relationship between CO2 and heat. They are questioning whether there's enough greenhouse gases to cause any permanent change in the climate. Or if they admit that point, they question whether a significant portion of those gases are manmade.
If the wrong people caught you, it being illegal would be the least of your problems.