The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm.
What exactly is proprietary about Linux? From the summary link (click on the first circle on the linked page):
Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want.
capable of running all valve's source games in HD.
It is true that the system won't be able to run all of the Steam library, however if you have another PC in the house that can you can stream it to the SteamBox again from the link:
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
No rebuying anything
You don't have to rebuy games for Linux. Whenever you buy a game on Steam that is Mac/Linux compatible you can run it on all of those platforms for no extra cost.
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
May not count as native games for the Steam Box, but this could certainly help. Keep your gaming PC in your office/bedroom/wherever and have the steambox to relay your library to your TV.
(*) 1000Mbps link is limited to 470Mbps actual bandwidth due to internal chip busses limitation
Sounds like they have the ethernet chipset off of the USB bus on this unit as well. Although I would expect the ethernet to perform better than a Pi since it has more CPU power to handle the overhead.
Compare that to the weeks and months that marketing, product management, development, QA testers are working on features and it is insignificant.
Where is all of this development and QA testing going on? The point of a cloud is to build and automated image that can be deployed to any of your environments. Presumably you are architecting your applications so that they scale as well which the cloud is excellent for.
For example the dev team is done with their changes and want to push from the dev environment to UAT. Say you have two instances in UAT. instead of shutting down, updating your code, starting up each machine one at a time you just deploy 2 new instances. The deploy script fires off a test or two to make sure that the app started successfully. If you are doing something web related it hits the API on the load balancer to add the new nodes in, maybe fires off a couple of tests against the VIP, removes the old nodes, a couple more tests against the VIP, and just like that your deployment is complete. If you are doing something messaging related where your services communicate over a message bus of some kind presumably your apps just connect themselves. QA can then test, and determine if the code is ready to promote to production.
Of course this all sounds a bit over complicated for a UAT environment, but once you have every single piece of the puzzle automated that is when things get interesting. Lets say that your source control allows you to mark your projects as "ready for UAT", and allows your QAs to mark them as ready for production. You can just have your entire test system rebuild itself every day and production releases once a week through the same process. Also since you are in a position to scale either through your load balancer or a messaging bus you can use the same processes to scale.
Say your monitoring service watches CPU usage on your web app servers, and as soon as you hit 75% it fires up another instance. If load continues to come in after the new node is online then fire up another one. If the CPU drops below what is required to run on n-1 nodes then hit that load balancer API take a node out and destroy it.
Even if you don't need to scale doing deployments often means shutting down apps on one node at a time. If you design everything for n+1 nodes that means that during your deployments you are still running fine, but you are "at risk"
From a sysadmin perspective this is all great because a machine going down means nothing. Your monitoring services see that the VMs are offline, and they fire up another instance wherever there is extra CPU cycles. Without a "cloud" this is easy to do with VMware as long as you have shared storage, but do you trust the VM? It died while the system was running what if something was corrupted? With the cloud you don't care about the old instance, just let it die. Create a new one instead.
Everyone loves VMs due to live migration but why not take that one step further to save yourself some money while you are at it. Skip the extra cards/ports/networks/switches/cables for iSCSI/FC, skip the expensive SAN and pack the hosts with some cheap SSDs. You don't need to migrate when you can just redeploy (although many of the hypervisors support moving images without shared storage now). This way you get local read/write speeds which will probably beat any SAN that you don't have to sell your first born to buy.
Backups also become much easier. Backup the images (which won't change often), and the source control systems, and you are pretty much set (maybe a couple of 1 off monitoring and deployment servers). Why bother with expensive dedup/compression appliances when you just have a few images to backup. DBs are an obvious exception there.
Speaking of DBs lets say you want to rebase one of your lower environments off of a higher one. Lets say you want to refresh the dev DBs with the test DB data. You just hit the api and take a snapshot of the test DB data image. Clone the that snapshot to a new image, shutdown your DB node, unattach the old image, reattach the clone, and start it back up. All of which can be an automated process. No pestering the DBAs to do it for you.
Also Debian and Ubuntu only have official builds for ARMv7. The Debian team rebuilds ARMv6 as a seperate distro (Raspbian) for the Pi.
Many of the other boards are well within $10 of the price of a Pi, but include eMMC flash on the board so no SD card is required to boot the OS making the TCO about the same or cheaper if you are buying fast SD cards to boot quickly on the Pi.
That would be illegal unless you are using it for development only.
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'yum shell' has saved me a few times when things were hozed. i.e. a package that was half installed and another package is dependant on the old version of that package (reinstall/downgrade options may be able to do the same). Also works great if you want to replace a package with a different one that provides the same libraries, and the yum remove to get rid of the first one would uninstall all of the dependencies. yum shell > remove package-a > install package-b > run
'yum localinstall/path/to/package.rpm' is very handy. The easiest way I can find to do the same with apt is dpkg -i/path/to/package.rpm (fails due to dependencies missing) apt-get -f install (installs dependencies) dpkg -i/path/to/package.rpm (to make sure that the package is fully installed)
'yum provides' seems to be fairly superior to apt-file yum provides */library.so
apt-file works fine, but a) it isn't normally installed and b) the file lists are generated separately from the normal repo, so not every repo owner generates it vs the rpm repos where it is a standard part of the repo.
It has an HDMI input and an HDMI output just like GoogleTV. Theoretically it will work with any external box that has an HDMI output. Hopefully the Xbox will be able to control HDMI-CEC devices so that you can use one controller for everything. If your device doesn't have HDMI-CEC capabilities (or if they don't include it in the Xbox) they do appear to have an IR blaster connection on the back to relay controls the peripheral box.
And how many people would know how to convert an Xvid AVI or H.264 MKV into a format that will play on a DVD player? Not many.
True, however how much of at least the younger generations actually care? Laptops and phones with HDMI, DLNA media players, and DVD players with USB ports have made those formats easy to play in their native format on your TV without any conversion. My new SmartTV autodetected XBMC, and WMP on my network and streaming 1080p MKVs works flawlessly without any conversion.
And that still doesn't explain why I can get music in bog standard MP3 when for TV shows you are already broadcasting unencrypted so adding ANY DRM is doing fuck all to piracy its ONLY being a pain in the paying customer's ass.
The switch from DRM music to MP3s may have had more to do with how the content is delivered. Most of the video streaming services never let you have an actual copy of the media locally they assume the only way you will be playing the content will be over the internet. With music it was always assumed that you would have a local copy (because you need to get it on your mp3 player) which lead to all sorts of problems with DRM. A corrupted iTunes could loose your DRM key and then all of your media is worthless, and it was inconvenient enough that the average user didn't like it. Unfortunately with video the average user just wants to hit play and start their stream. The way we watch video probably plays into this as well. If you purchase an album you will probably listen to it many times, however most video content is watch once then forget about it.
The amount of effort it takes to convert a file from X to Y is the same no matter WHAT format you start out in,
Yes you are right here, I guess I am probably thinking back to the DVD shrink days where DVD-DL disks were still expensive (as were the burners) so the steps involved were much more involved than copying a CD. DVD-DL media is so cheap now I suppose that's not an issue.
by your logic they shouldn't sell DVDs because there is software that can easily copy those.
I bet if they came out with a format that couldn't be copied and if they weren't worried about the backlash of people who didn't want to upgrade technology, they would drop DVD in a heartbeat. Of course that backlash would probably end up loosing them more money than the loss of piracy would gain them so they don't.
The point you and they are missing is if you make it easy and cheap? We humans are lazy bastards and thus WE WON'T BOTHER because it would mean bullshit we don't want to deal with.
They probably already think they are making it easy and cheap. In a couple of seconds I can hop on amazon prime, and rent/buy brand new movie releases for a few dollars. I don't use iTunes but I believe there are plenty of shows for a couple bucks a piece that come out within a week of airing on TV. I don't think they have realized that things like Netflix have seriously changed our definition of cheap. Expecting us to pay a quarter of a months worth of a Netflix subscription for one episode is pretty far out there.
I mean I've spent probably $400+ in the past couple of years on Steam for me and my boys....do you HONESTLY think I couldn't have downloaded every. damned. game. and paid nothing for them? yep but then I'd have to set up BT, download the thing, download the patches, find a crack for the patches...that is too fucking much bullshit when i can just go "push this button to get game" and there, DONE. No work, no thought, no hassle, i wanted the fucking game so I pushed the button and in less than 3 minutes enough of the game is in I can start playing. Oh my oldest wants the Walking dead game? BAM, done. i pushed the button and now he has it, I didn't have to download the thing, drive over to his place, install the thing, no, fuck that, push the button and I'm
It's all about barrier to entry. How many people do you know that copied CDs and handed them out to friends? Now compare that to the number of people giving friends DVDs. While there are quite a few people that know how to rip DVDs I am willing to bet the number is quite a bit lower than for CDs (outside of the tech community anyways) due to the extra software required to remove the DRM. granted the DVD copy programs are so easy to use now that there isn't much of a difference, but the user has to know those programs exist and install them to use them vs CDs where Windows Media Player could rip and burn for you.
Start handing people.avi and.mkv files and they are back to square one. Anyone with a jump drive can copy it and pass it around. TPB requires extra knowledge of torrents, seeding, where to find the files, and most importantly the possibility of getting a DMCA notice in the mail which makes the illegal part of it seem so much more real.
As far as mp3s go I think they have just given up there. That content is fairly cheap to produce in comparison to movies/TV, and the music works as an advertisement for concerts and tours, which isn't possible with TV.
I want the same thing, and would be willing to pay to get the content I want, but I bet it would be a hard sell to a boardroom.
There are less updates to be applied with fewer packages installed. Especially when you have things like PCI requirements that require that you have your critical patches into production within 30 days. You really don't want to have to rush changes through to production just because you had installed a package that you aren't using.
As long as your dish is less than 39.37" in diameter you are good to go, even if you are a renter they can't stop you if you have a porch/deck to put it on.
PXE boot gPXE, to load your Linux/Windows off of iSCSI from a central NAS/SAN. Other than the NAS which anyone this technical probably already has you don't need any special hardware. Just a DHCP server that has a next-server option, and some onboard NICs that support PXE booting.
If your iSCSI target is something like ZFS snapshots/rollbacks are easy. "you want to use the computer? Sure!" Just roll it back to an auto snapshot after they are done. Big plus if you have multiple desktops, as you can do one OS install and clone/boot on multiple hosts.
Windows seems to be hit or miss on which hardware it can boot its root drive via gPXE on, but I have done it before. Linux is a breeze of course... If performance is a concern you can always have your OS locally on HDD and the guest OS via PXE.
For the same reason I wouldn't take Euros, Pounds or any other currency and then immediately convert it to USD (my local currency), it's extra work and trouble for me to do.
Well if you are accepting credit cards you are already doing this. No credit card transaction is free, and it's not the customer that is paying for the transaction fees (other than through inflated prices for the goods).
Presumably the process would be automated so that conversion rates, and conversion to USD would be automatic. There shouldn't be any extra work beyond initial development time. Also if you are dealing with people from other countries that do use other currencies every transaction in BTC would cost you considerably less to get their money. Take PayPal as an example: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_display-xborder-fees-outside&countries= Even domestic transactions cost 2.9% + $0.30 from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees
So that's costing YOU 3+% + $0.30 for every transaction to someone outside of the US let alone what your customers credit cards are charging them to convert to USD. Compare that to BitPay's 1% flat rate. https://bitpay.com/pricing BitPay also appears to have immediate USD payouts as part of their service as well.
So in the end by accepting BTC you will save yourself, and your customer money, while opening yourself up to more customers that will be looking for services available in BTC form. Unless all of your customers can pay in person, with cash you will only make more money accepting BTC.
People just don't commonly price things in two different currencies and want to deal with exchange rates all day long.
I live within an hour of the Canadian border, and almost all of the gas stations/businesses around here accept Canadian currency. They certainly don't price everything in the store with two prices, they simply post whatever the store is currently charging for a conversion rate somewhere and expect the customer to figure out the prices for themselves until they get to the checkout. The best part is the store can charge whatever conversion rate they want. If the bank/market is at 102% go ahead and charge them at 95% and pocket the difference. The customer can either go and convert it themselves or eat the difference for the convenience.
If you are immediately converting back to USD (or whatever currency you want) on payment and passing on any exchange fees in the prices of your goods why would you not accept them? That would be like not accepting cash because you don't want to walk to the bank to get the money in your account, all you will do is loose extra customers that only have cash in their wallets. The ones with the BTC in their wallets are the ones taking the risk of loosing their money not you.
If you are doing an immediate conversion back to your local currency any volatility in the value of the bitcoins is irrelevant, since you will be basing your BTC price on the conversion rate + fees. That of course assumes that you can get the customer to agree to the transaction price and convert before the price changes enough to care about the difference.
I have found that when calling on servers when I say the OS is Linux they forward me to a different group and it is much easier to get my replacements there. If I call in on a Windows server they start asking for a dset reports, and such. If you have done at least a little bit of testing before calling that usually helps as well.
Overall our Dell servers are extremely dependable. New boxes sometimes hit their RAM error counts, but those usually get weeded out in the first couple of months (and its never been bad enough to cause instability). We have around 500 physical boxes, and other than HDDs and RAM sticks we can go months without running onto problems.
They could just as easily combine both methods. Buy the disk at the store, and you get a code that unlocks the game. The initial game install can come from the disk, or if you loose/scratch the disk you can just pull the game off of the online store instead. Or for those who see no need for the physical media, they can just buy it on the online store with a slight discount since there is less production, and distribution costs. Since the disk is just the initial download one person could buy the disk, and pass it around to their friends to speed up their installs from keys that the others just grab online.
Sometimes I think the only reason they haven't already started letting people do this is that they want to create artificial scarcity to increase hype for the games. They want the huge lines of people at the B&M stores, to make a big deal out of their release day. A steam style distribution (especially with the encrypted pre-downloads) removes that for them.
Having someone else get some of your contacts is nowhere near the same league as having an app that is contacting others and sending them apps.
Step 1) Get contacts and send them back to C&C servers Step 2) Spam contacts a link to the app with a faked e-mail address matching the infected users e-mail.
It seems like the outcome/risk is the same to me. It's not like the malware can actually force the users in your contact list to install the app.
In the end the safety is the same on both iOS and Andrioid. It all depends on what they allow into the market, but it's not like they have the code for these apps so no number of tests can be enough to prove that an app is trustable. Android also has the added risk of the "Other Sources" option being easy to turn on which is needed to install this particular malware, but that is no different than jailbreaking an iPhone, which is fairly common as well.
Bottom line any device that allows you to install software, from your TV to your PC is at risk when you start putting untrusted software on them, and just because Apple/Google has done some tests doesn't mean that any app should be trusted. Unless you can read (and understand) the code then compile it yourself...
Does anybody have some good recommendations for cloud servers?
Well the really cool thing about these clouds is the API that allows your services to manipulate the servers.
Imagine a couple of app servers behind a load balancer, that are monitored by another service. This monitor service can watch response times and as traffic grows and the response times increase the monitor service can hit the API and deploy another app server. Once the app server is running the monitor service can hit the API on the load balancer and add the new node into the spray. Once traffic dwindles down you can do the opposite and spin down the extra instances saving you server resources (or money if you are on the public cloud) that can be used for other things. Basically if you build your applications to scale properly you can use the cloud to use your resources where they are actually needed.
The cloud also makes deployments easier. Lets say you have updates to apply. You can simply apply the updates to your golden image, and deploy to dev. The image has automated scripts that deploy the services on the machine for the environment. You can then test the changes in dev/test and promote the new image to prod. Instead of applying updates directly to the currently running machines just add in new instances with the new image into the load balances and then remove the old instances.
Now imagine if this was all automated. Have your sysadmin install the updates during the week and test out that everything is working, dev automatically gets redeployed every day in the morning with the new image and any new code to go with it. QA during the week and then promote your image for the auto redeploy into prod on Sunday mornings.
It seems like a lot of people are scared of the cloud, or think that its all hype, but I think that if you can architect your environment properly the cloud can be a very powerful tool.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason a wanted a valve box is to break free of the proprietary xbox sony console paradigm.
What exactly is proprietary about Linux? From the summary link (click on the first circle on the linked page):
Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want.
capable of running all valve's source games in HD.
It is true that the system won't be able to run all of the Steam library, however if you have another PC in the house that can you can stream it to the SteamBox again from the link:
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
No rebuying anything
You don't have to rebuy games for Linux. Whenever you buy a game on Steam that is Mac/Linux compatible you can run it on all of those platforms for no extra cost.
From the linked page (click on the first circle)
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!
May not count as native games for the Steam Box, but this could certainly help. Keep your gaming PC in your office/bedroom/wherever and have the steambox to relay your library to your TV.
According to the Cubic website:
(*) 1000Mbps link is limited to 470Mbps actual bandwidth due to internal chip busses limitation
Sounds like they have the ethernet chipset off of the USB bus on this unit as well. Although I would expect the ethernet to perform better than a Pi since it has more CPU power to handle the overhead.
Compare that to the weeks and months that marketing, product management, development, QA testers are working on features and it is insignificant.
Where is all of this development and QA testing going on? The point of a cloud is to build and automated image that can be deployed to any of your environments. Presumably you are architecting your applications so that they scale as well which the cloud is excellent for.
For example the dev team is done with their changes and want to push from the dev environment to UAT. Say you have two instances in UAT. instead of shutting down, updating your code, starting up each machine one at a time you just deploy 2 new instances. The deploy script fires off a test or two to make sure that the app started successfully. If you are doing something web related it hits the API on the load balancer to add the new nodes in, maybe fires off a couple of tests against the VIP, removes the old nodes, a couple more tests against the VIP, and just like that your deployment is complete. If you are doing something messaging related where your services communicate over a message bus of some kind presumably your apps just connect themselves. QA can then test, and determine if the code is ready to promote to production.
Of course this all sounds a bit over complicated for a UAT environment, but once you have every single piece of the puzzle automated that is when things get interesting. Lets say that your source control allows you to mark your projects as "ready for UAT", and allows your QAs to mark them as ready for production. You can just have your entire test system rebuild itself every day and production releases once a week through the same process. Also since you are in a position to scale either through your load balancer or a messaging bus you can use the same processes to scale.
Say your monitoring service watches CPU usage on your web app servers, and as soon as you hit 75% it fires up another instance. If load continues to come in after the new node is online then fire up another one. If the CPU drops below what is required to run on n-1 nodes then hit that load balancer API take a node out and destroy it.
Even if you don't need to scale doing deployments often means shutting down apps on one node at a time. If you design everything for n+1 nodes that means that during your deployments you are still running fine, but you are "at risk"
From a sysadmin perspective this is all great because a machine going down means nothing. Your monitoring services see that the VMs are offline, and they fire up another instance wherever there is extra CPU cycles. Without a "cloud" this is easy to do with VMware as long as you have shared storage, but do you trust the VM? It died while the system was running what if something was corrupted? With the cloud you don't care about the old instance, just let it die. Create a new one instead.
Everyone loves VMs due to live migration but why not take that one step further to save yourself some money while you are at it. Skip the extra cards/ports/networks/switches/cables for iSCSI/FC, skip the expensive SAN and pack the hosts with some cheap SSDs. You don't need to migrate when you can just redeploy (although many of the hypervisors support moving images without shared storage now). This way you get local read/write speeds which will probably beat any SAN that you don't have to sell your first born to buy.
Backups also become much easier. Backup the images (which won't change often), and the source control systems, and you are pretty much set (maybe a couple of 1 off monitoring and deployment servers). Why bother with expensive dedup/compression appliances when you just have a few images to backup. DBs are an obvious exception there.
Speaking of DBs lets say you want to rebase one of your lower environments off of a higher one. Lets say you want to refresh the dev DBs with the test DB data. You just hit the api and take a snapshot of the test DB data image. Clone the that snapshot to a new image, shutdown your DB node, unattach the old image, reattach the clone, and start it back up. All of which can be an automated process. No pestering the DBAs to do it for you.
The Pi is an ARMv6 with a FPU attached, and a decent GPU. Most of the new ARM SBCs out there now are ARMv7 which should be more efficient. Often they have NEON support to help with hardware decoding media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_SIMD_.28NEON.29.
Also Debian and Ubuntu only have official builds for ARMv7. The Debian team rebuilds ARMv6 as a seperate distro (Raspbian) for the Pi.
Many of the other boards are well within $10 of the price of a Pi, but include eMMC flash on the board so no SD card is required to boot the OS making the TCO about the same or cheaper if you are buying fast SD cards to boot quickly on the Pi.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3310907/what-are-the-advantages-of-armv7-over-armv6-when-compiling-iphone-apps
That would be illegal unless you are using it for development only.
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'yum shell' has saved me a few times when things were hozed. i.e. a package that was half installed and another package is dependant on the old version of that package (reinstall/downgrade options may be able to do the same). Also works great if you want to replace a package with a different one that provides the same libraries, and the yum remove to get rid of the first one would uninstall all of the dependencies.
yum shell
> remove package-a
> install package-b
> run
'yum localinstall /path/to/package.rpm' is very handy. The easiest way I can find to do the same with apt is /path/to/package.rpm /path/to/package.rpm
dpkg -i
(fails due to dependencies missing)
apt-get -f install
(installs dependencies)
dpkg -i
(to make sure that the package is fully installed)
'yum provides' seems to be fairly superior to apt-file
yum provides */library.so
apt-file works fine, but a) it isn't normally installed and b) the file lists are generated separately from the normal repo, so not every repo owner generates it vs the rpm repos where it is a standard part of the repo.
It has an HDMI input and an HDMI output just like GoogleTV. Theoretically it will work with any external box that has an HDMI output. Hopefully the Xbox will be able to control HDMI-CEC devices so that you can use one controller for everything. If your device doesn't have HDMI-CEC capabilities (or if they don't include it in the Xbox) they do appear to have an IR blaster connection on the back to relay controls the peripheral box.
A couple of easy ways are if you are running your storage via OCFS2 or BTRFS.
https://blogs.oracle.com/OTNGarage/entry/save_disk_space_on_linux
And how many people would know how to convert an Xvid AVI or H.264 MKV into a format that will play on a DVD player? Not many.
True, however how much of at least the younger generations actually care? Laptops and phones with HDMI, DLNA media players, and DVD players with USB ports have made those formats easy to play in their native format on your TV without any conversion. My new SmartTV autodetected XBMC, and WMP on my network and streaming 1080p MKVs works flawlessly without any conversion.
And that still doesn't explain why I can get music in bog standard MP3 when for TV shows you are already broadcasting unencrypted so adding ANY DRM is doing fuck all to piracy its ONLY being a pain in the paying customer's ass.
The switch from DRM music to MP3s may have had more to do with how the content is delivered. Most of the video streaming services never let you have an actual copy of the media locally they assume the only way you will be playing the content will be over the internet. With music it was always assumed that you would have a local copy (because you need to get it on your mp3 player) which lead to all sorts of problems with DRM. A corrupted iTunes could loose your DRM key and then all of your media is worthless, and it was inconvenient enough that the average user didn't like it. Unfortunately with video the average user just wants to hit play and start their stream. The way we watch video probably plays into this as well. If you purchase an album you will probably listen to it many times, however most video content is watch once then forget about it.
The amount of effort it takes to convert a file from X to Y is the same no matter WHAT format you start out in,
Yes you are right here, I guess I am probably thinking back to the DVD shrink days where DVD-DL disks were still expensive (as were the burners) so the steps involved were much more involved than copying a CD. DVD-DL media is so cheap now I suppose that's not an issue.
by your logic they shouldn't sell DVDs because there is software that can easily copy those.
I bet if they came out with a format that couldn't be copied and if they weren't worried about the backlash of people who didn't want to upgrade technology, they would drop DVD in a heartbeat. Of course that backlash would probably end up loosing them more money than the loss of piracy would gain them so they don't.
The point you and they are missing is if you make it easy and cheap? We humans are lazy bastards and thus WE WON'T BOTHER because it would mean bullshit we don't want to deal with.
They probably already think they are making it easy and cheap. In a couple of seconds I can hop on amazon prime, and rent/buy brand new movie releases for a few dollars. I don't use iTunes but I believe there are plenty of shows for a couple bucks a piece that come out within a week of airing on TV. I don't think they have realized that things like Netflix have seriously changed our definition of cheap. Expecting us to pay a quarter of a months worth of a Netflix subscription for one episode is pretty far out there.
I mean I've spent probably $400+ in the past couple of years on Steam for me and my boys....do you HONESTLY think I couldn't have downloaded every. damned. game. and paid nothing for them? yep but then I'd have to set up BT, download the thing, download the patches, find a crack for the patches...that is too fucking much bullshit when i can just go "push this button to get game" and there, DONE. No work, no thought, no hassle, i wanted the fucking game so I pushed the button and in less than 3 minutes enough of the game is in I can start playing. Oh my oldest wants the Walking dead game? BAM, done. i pushed the button and now he has it, I didn't have to download the thing, drive over to his place, install the thing, no, fuck that, push the button and I'm
It's all about barrier to entry. How many people do you know that copied CDs and handed them out to friends? Now compare that to the number of people giving friends DVDs. While there are quite a few people that know how to rip DVDs I am willing to bet the number is quite a bit lower than for CDs (outside of the tech community anyways) due to the extra software required to remove the DRM. granted the DVD copy programs are so easy to use now that there isn't much of a difference, but the user has to know those programs exist and install them to use them vs CDs where Windows Media Player could rip and burn for you.
Start handing people .avi and .mkv files and they are back to square one. Anyone with a jump drive can copy it and pass it around. TPB requires extra knowledge of torrents, seeding, where to find the files, and most importantly the possibility of getting a DMCA notice in the mail which makes the illegal part of it seem so much more real.
As far as mp3s go I think they have just given up there. That content is fairly cheap to produce in comparison to movies/TV, and the music works as an advertisement for concerts and tours, which isn't possible with TV.
I want the same thing, and would be willing to pay to get the content I want, but I bet it would be a hard sell to a boardroom.
There are less updates to be applied with fewer packages installed. Especially when you have things like PCI requirements that require that you have your critical patches into production within 30 days. You really don't want to have to rush changes through to production just because you had installed a package that you aren't using.
If they are telling you that you cannot have a satellite dish they are lying...
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule
As long as your dish is less than 39.37" in diameter you are good to go, even if you are a renter they can't stop you if you have a porch/deck to put it on.
PXE boot gPXE, to load your Linux/Windows off of iSCSI from a central NAS/SAN. Other than the NAS which anyone this technical probably already has you don't need any special hardware. Just a DHCP server that has a next-server option, and some onboard NICs that support PXE booting.
If your iSCSI target is something like ZFS snapshots/rollbacks are easy. "you want to use the computer? Sure!" Just roll it back to an auto snapshot after they are done. Big plus if you have multiple desktops, as you can do one OS install and clone/boot on multiple hosts.
Windows seems to be hit or miss on which hardware it can boot its root drive via gPXE on, but I have done it before. Linux is a breeze of course... If performance is a concern you can always have your OS locally on HDD and the guest OS via PXE.
For the same reason I wouldn't take Euros, Pounds or any other currency and then immediately convert it to USD (my local currency), it's extra work and trouble for me to do.
Well if you are accepting credit cards you are already doing this. No credit card transaction is free, and it's not the customer that is paying for the transaction fees (other than through inflated prices for the goods).
Presumably the process would be automated so that conversion rates, and conversion to USD would be automatic. There shouldn't be any extra work beyond initial development time. Also if you are dealing with people from other countries that do use other currencies every transaction in BTC would cost you considerably less to get their money. Take PayPal as an example: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_display-xborder-fees-outside&countries= Even domestic transactions cost 2.9% + $0.30 from PayPal https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees
So that's costing YOU 3+% + $0.30 for every transaction to someone outside of the US let alone what your customers credit cards are charging them to convert to USD. Compare that to BitPay's 1% flat rate. https://bitpay.com/pricing BitPay also appears to have immediate USD payouts as part of their service as well.
So in the end by accepting BTC you will save yourself, and your customer money, while opening yourself up to more customers that will be looking for services available in BTC form. Unless all of your customers can pay in person, with cash you will only make more money accepting BTC.
People just don't commonly price things in two different currencies and want to deal with exchange rates all day long.
I live within an hour of the Canadian border, and almost all of the gas stations/businesses around here accept Canadian currency. They certainly don't price everything in the store with two prices, they simply post whatever the store is currently charging for a conversion rate somewhere and expect the customer to figure out the prices for themselves until they get to the checkout. The best part is the store can charge whatever conversion rate they want. If the bank/market is at 102% go ahead and charge them at 95% and pocket the difference. The customer can either go and convert it themselves or eat the difference for the convenience.
If you are immediately converting back to USD (or whatever currency you want) on payment and passing on any exchange fees in the prices of your goods why would you not accept them? That would be like not accepting cash because you don't want to walk to the bank to get the money in your account, all you will do is loose extra customers that only have cash in their wallets. The ones with the BTC in their wallets are the ones taking the risk of loosing their money not you.
If you are doing an immediate conversion back to your local currency any volatility in the value of the bitcoins is irrelevant, since you will be basing your BTC price on the conversion rate + fees. That of course assumes that you can get the customer to agree to the transaction price and convert before the price changes enough to care about the difference.
I wouldn't call mosquitos a minor inconvenience...
http://www.netsforlifeafrica.org/malaria/malaria-statistics
Malaria is a deadly mosquito-borne disease that affects millions each year
Over half a million (655, 000) people die from malaria each year...
I have found that when calling on servers when I say the OS is Linux they forward me to a different group and it is much easier to get my replacements there. If I call in on a Windows server they start asking for a dset reports, and such. If you have done at least a little bit of testing before calling that usually helps as well.
Overall our Dell servers are extremely dependable. New boxes sometimes hit their RAM error counts, but those usually get weeded out in the first couple of months (and its never been bad enough to cause instability). We have around 500 physical boxes, and other than HDDs and RAM sticks we can go months without running onto problems.
They could just as easily combine both methods. Buy the disk at the store, and you get a code that unlocks the game. The initial game install can come from the disk, or if you loose/scratch the disk you can just pull the game off of the online store instead. Or for those who see no need for the physical media, they can just buy it on the online store with a slight discount since there is less production, and distribution costs. Since the disk is just the initial download one person could buy the disk, and pass it around to their friends to speed up their installs from keys that the others just grab online.
Sometimes I think the only reason they haven't already started letting people do this is that they want to create artificial scarcity to increase hype for the games. They want the huge lines of people at the B&M stores, to make a big deal out of their release day. A steam style distribution (especially with the encrypted pre-downloads) removes that for them.
The shortcut is assignable...
Who down modded this? Obviously a joke.
Kubuntu is no longer official, and the KDE packages have been moved from main to the universe repository. http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/kde/
This is why I switched to Debian. Might as well get the packages straight from their source.
Having someone else get some of your contacts is nowhere near the same league as having an app that is contacting others and sending them apps.
Step 1) Get contacts and send them back to C&C servers
Step 2) Spam contacts a link to the app with a faked e-mail address matching the infected users e-mail.
It seems like the outcome/risk is the same to me. It's not like the malware can actually force the users in your contact list to install the app.
In the end the safety is the same on both iOS and Andrioid. It all depends on what they allow into the market, but it's not like they have the code for these apps so no number of tests can be enough to prove that an app is trustable. Android also has the added risk of the "Other Sources" option being easy to turn on which is needed to install this particular malware, but that is no different than jailbreaking an iPhone, which is fairly common as well.
Bottom line any device that allows you to install software, from your TV to your PC is at risk when you start putting untrusted software on them, and just because Apple/Google has done some tests doesn't mean that any app should be trusted. Unless you can read (and understand) the code then compile it yourself...
It probably needs a new hard drive, the ~300 Watt power supply might be going out
Well its a good thing that the Raspberry PI comes with both of those things!
Does anybody have some good recommendations for cloud servers?
Well the really cool thing about these clouds is the API that allows your services to manipulate the servers.
Imagine a couple of app servers behind a load balancer, that are monitored by another service. This monitor service can watch response times and as traffic grows and the response times increase the monitor service can hit the API and deploy another app server. Once the app server is running the monitor service can hit the API on the load balancer and add the new node into the spray. Once traffic dwindles down you can do the opposite and spin down the extra instances saving you server resources (or money if you are on the public cloud) that can be used for other things. Basically if you build your applications to scale properly you can use the cloud to use your resources where they are actually needed.
The cloud also makes deployments easier. Lets say you have updates to apply. You can simply apply the updates to your golden image, and deploy to dev. The image has automated scripts that deploy the services on the machine for the environment. You can then test the changes in dev/test and promote the new image to prod. Instead of applying updates directly to the currently running machines just add in new instances with the new image into the load balances and then remove the old instances.
Now imagine if this was all automated. Have your sysadmin install the updates during the week and test out that everything is working, dev automatically gets redeployed every day in the morning with the new image and any new code to go with it. QA during the week and then promote your image for the auto redeploy into prod on Sunday mornings.
It seems like a lot of people are scared of the cloud, or think that its all hype, but I think that if you can architect your environment properly the cloud can be a very powerful tool.
RAID is not a backup solution
RAID certainly isn't a backup solution, however he is making a copy of his data to put onto the RAID array (aka a backup).