I am a photographer as well and also into Fashion Photography, work for an agency, and it does seem that a lot of high Fashion Photographers are using medium format camera, namely the Hasselblad. The H2D I had in my hand was a piece of art. I did not try the 39MP back, but a lower one. The images coming out of it are just fantastics. I don't have experience with large format, but as far as film is concerned, the quality of this in my mind is just "wow". I am seriously considering buying one, even though it is the price of a very nice car!
I do have a 20D and a 1DsMarkII, 16MP, DSLR, I already thought the quality was much better than any other 35mm camera I have had, but yes, the H2D cameras are just great, or even medium format are. The quality is truly a step beyond 35mm, except that pretty much no amateurs know about medium format because to have a digital back is very costly...
I have to say, this is totally true, and not only from the CES. I went recently to the PhotoExpo in Javist Center NYC. I went there by mistake during the last hour of the show. I didn't know it was the last hour. I stayed there after the closing because I wanetd to walk around and potentially buy something I really needed. And yes, a LOT of exhibitors were willing to sell you stuff for cheap because they did not wanted to pack them, bring them home with them, and they were rushed with time, just wanted to get out of there ASAP.
Really a lot of cheap stuff... and got a couple of FREE things as well I did not even ask for! Now that I know... next time I will do it again, on purpose! and I will bring cash because the drawback was that a lot could not sell to me because their credit card machine was unplugged and I did not had cash on me!
Not that I am a big fan of windows being a Linux user since 92... but... sure you have gentoo+asterisk on that machine. Is it running X-window? Or just a console? Gotta compare apple to apple.
I am running a big of the same config for my asterisk-pbx/firewall. All text-based. Works flawlessly. But then... if I were to compared I guess I would compared to... dos? Or something else text based. GUIs + windows manager are expensive, very expensive depending on which one... Try runnint the last version of X with last version of KDE or GNOME on your machine, and compare. or try running an old version of X with fwvm and win3.11... that would be more of a fair comparaison... because well, Win3.11 works fine on that kind of platform.
That is what I would say. If they do the things well, and so far they did, they could truly become a huge company. They are profitable, have very smart ideas, investing into a lot of research, hiring pretty smart people it seems... Future seems to be bright.
Now, will all the ads and all the things Google do remain discret and small? I doubt it.
As it will become a bigger company, and go more and more into the traditional advertising business, it will probably behave like others in part. Depending on the media we will see more and more ads, and more and more obstrusive. Sure some will not be too obstrusive, but as they grow and install themselves even more what will prevent them from doing like the others? big flashy ads, etc? The way they started and gained market share was by doing things differently than others, and 'better?'. Sure, when you are a new company growing, it is pretty much required. You have to be different and better than the competition. Upon growing and having this domination, it WILL give them more freedom to do like others if they wish so.
Now the question is. Do they want it? What will they do in 10years? I say. Market will tell.
I would have to agree on the statement that mythtv requires way too much tweaking...
It isn't like I am not an experienced Linux user... I have been extensively using Linux at home, then work since 1992, kernel 0.98. I use it everyday, work, home.
I do have a mythtv box, and timewarner cable HD. It is a pain. I gave up on my mythtv box, was wasting too much time on it and ended up getting the timewarner HDPVR which works okay for what it is supposed to do: recording shows. I am not a big fan of it, lacks mythtv functionnalities but hey, it records and I can play my shows.
Why do I think mythtv is a pain?
configuring it and having it to work is a major hassle. Between the special drivers for the infrared receiver/remote, the lircc, the kernel drivers, making sure the tv card works (PVR350), getting the sound in, especially I have HD, I WANT to record in HD, and AC3 sound. Well, I only got Svideo. Quality sucks. Oh, and the major pain is to be able to change channel, as it uses my only HD tuner in the place, it has to change channel via IR (which doesn't work still), and it forces me to watch what is being recorded. I live in NYC and I have no interest in recorded over the air shows and would rather be able to record anything that is playing on my HD set.
So if someone could sell me a pre-installed mythtv ready for HDTV, with HDTV tuner integrated that I can then tweak and customize, I would take it and pay for it! I love the functionnalities of Mythtv, but for what I want. It is just not ready yet.
believe me. I LOVE mythtv. I just wish I could use it as easily as the PVR I have.
I agree with parent's poster. The number of inputs, especially for hidef devices is a joke.
Someone like me, I have 1 xbox, 2 ps2 (An american and a Japanese for import games), a dvd player, an SACD player, a VCR, an HDTV via time warner, plus a computer, all going to my projector. I am going to get an xbox360 and probably a PS3 as well. I have components out on pretty much everything + DVI on my HD projector. Wait... DVI! My HDTV set from Time Warner refuses to talk to my projector (Sanyo PVL70) that way. NOT compliant. SUCKS. Not enough components input on my set! I mean the hires one that distributes the signal over 3 wires and not the lores quality Svideo that sucks.
oh wait... I wish as well I had enough digital-fiber-in for all my equipment so I would not have to have only stereo on my xbox, or have to move the fibers in depending on what I want to listen.
yes, I WISH I could connect ALL my peripherals AT THE SAME TIME using high quality component cables + fibers for high quality sound and not have to do compromises. I DO NOT WANT to have a switch cables everytime I want to switch devices.
I have not found a single home theather set that can accomodate all my needs. Sure they all have Svideo in, and stereo inputs. Usually they get at most 3 fiber digital in, and at most 2, 3 exceptionnaly hi-res components in. Sucks! not enough!
I realize that I have a bunch of equipment but I must not be the only one?? How do others do? I must not be the ONLY one that wants to connect more than 3 devices in their highest possible quality?
I have a projector at home. I use it for both HDTV and have a computer connected to it. 120" diagonal. Believe me, you have no problem seeing it from 20' away!
I have both an xbox, ps2 and computer connected to it. Wow. it rocks! HD gaming rocks. I have a bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse as my computer is well, probably about 20 feet away from the area I usually sit. I had to go bluetooth because other wireless technologies for keyboard/mouse just didn't do it.
On the side. I wish there were more choices in bluetooth keyboard/mouse/equipment for computer. It is truly amazing. I also wish that you could pair up a bluetooth keyboard/mouse to different computers at the same time and just switch from a computer to another by a switch on the keyboard (my dream!!!) any manufacturer listening?????
Am I the only that is amazed? (or read the full survey!) at this line that says:
Order from Spam: 6% of online men. 5% of online women.
5%, even with a margin of error is still a lot. But i know that it is probably true. At a previous business that wasn't doing spam but were sending small email campaigns we were estimating a return rate of about 3%.
I just think this number is scaringly high... the reason spam works, spammers still have work, and my 6 years old email address receives over 500 spams a day!
so, yes, am I the only one amazed by this? I would have like to have more question on this topic, like what do you buy from spam? Are you satisfied with it? How often do you buy from spam? etc...
Well, the bigger problem I see with video blog is that it is the most inconvenient thing to do while at work, or even outside.
Why? first, it takes more time, more attention. I like blogs, or texts, because I can take a break anytime and go back to it. i don't have to go back, my eyes can fast forward or go backwards very fast... less attention is needed. I don't need to, well, listen.
Also, at work, i can't have a video playing. Too obstrusive! bandwitch, and noisy. It is an open-space. If everybody starts to look at videos, and some do - I hate it, it would become very noisy and unproductive.
even at home. I find it quicker to read something than to listen to a blog. I can read several articles at the same time. I can only listen/watch/pay attention to mostly one video. I do this at home when I am lazy and don't feel like reading.
I mean, yes, how long before we see players that can do both?
After all... when DVD-Rs came out, and DVD+R. No one was doing both, suddently (I don't remember the history in detail, who), but someone came out (sony?) with a player that was doing both...
and now, what? Well, don't they all do both? or all? DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW? It's been a while since I have seen a player/recorder that do only one format...
Why can't the same thing happen for Blu-Ray/HD-DVD?
Sure it is a license thing... like it was for DVDs... You pay? You got the right to do it. Is there anything in the agreements they have that will prevent both format to co-exist in the same device? I doubt...
Combo HR-DVD/Blu-ray. Sure it might be expensive at first. The technology seems to be quite different for both format. But we have seen more difficult things happen
This is when the upload speeds and latency both matter.
I am in New York, my parents are in France. I have time warner cable so probably about 500KB/s down, 45KB/s up. They used to have 14KB/s Up, now they have 256kb/s. We used to do a lot of VoIP/Video Conferencing. usually as soon as they were turning on Video (MSN Messenger, or Yahoo), their voice was becoming choppy. Bad bad bad. Don't even try to do Video messenging with several people at the same time for them, it just wasn't working well.
Where as with my upload speed, I can do a little bit more, but it is still limited. I have an Asterisk server home, as well as webserver, mail, etc... sometime I do download big files, or upload big files: much more often, almost daily basis. I am a photographer on the side of my IT job. I work with a 16MP camera.
When I upload files for customers, 16bits, full res, they are 100MB! Even smaller files are usually still at least 50MB when converted to 8bits. Fullsize JPEGS are easily 2MB to 10MB when the best settings are setup. Now imagine having to upload a couple of photos for someone to see full size. I often have to upload 10 to 50 images. It is a real pain.
Now imaging, over my 45KB/s up bandwith, I am uploading for 250MB of images (last night), very common. It will take about an hour and a half, best case. Now I receive phone calls on my Asterisk/VoIP box at home... Well, my sound is choppy!! And the sound quality is so bad that it just doesn't work. Yes I know I should enable QoS on my Linux firewall but it is a pain and I am LAZY!!! Besides I don't like changing something that works well and I don't feel like recompiling my kernel it is an old one that works just fine.
Give me better upload speed for the same price? I'll take it tomorrow!! Oh wait, I would have taken it yesterday! Oh and better latency too, because it does matter when you work online. Remote desktop, voip, video, etc... response time is about latency. Oh wait, I clicked in my remote desktop window (or remote X-window). Why is the machine 5000 miles away seems to be SO much slower than the other machine sitting 50 miles away when the pipe between the two of them is the same? hmmmm. I have a latency of 300ms against 20ms.
Latency + bandwith improvements are what we need. I want Symmetrical bandwith and everybody in the world to have symmetrical bandwith.
I can find so many usages for more bandwith/latency, both on personal/professional level.
On this I could comment as well. I have seen this before, both from India and from others. I am myself from Europe/France and came here (New York/98) with a visa. The first 2 years, well, it was new and I loved my job, but then, after abused and all, I just wanted to leave. Too bad the economy sucked (end of the.com bubble, 2000/2001). I had no choice than to say yes to keep my job. I got married, got my work authorization independent from my Visa, I was free. I resigned, created my own business, didn't work so found another job as a Manager in another company. I wasn't a yes man, at all, but was really good so they kept me.
They hired a new boss there, he was the best one and the most knowledgeable of the company but he got fired by the CIO because he was a NO man, better than our CEO, more experienced, and speaking his mind on what should be changed and what should be done right. He got laid off. Everybody was saying, even in other divisions that he was the best one. But his manager could not stand him not agreeing. Later he was replaced... by a friend of the CIO, an indian guy... Who was a yes man with the CIO and tough with everybody else. Everybody else hated that guy, and he was not competent. After 9 months at the job and a few months of lateness in the biggest project of the company, he got laid off.
I wonder if there is a lesson to learn there...
By the way... on the original topic. I think that there is just not that MANY programmers over 40 these days because real development, outside of cobol/fortran over 20 years ago was very limited and not that many positions compared to today. I would say probably 1/50th the number of IT developers than there is in the industry these days. I know a few, they either went to management, or moved to architect positions, or moved out of IT, or are still very much in demand for legacy Cobol/VMS applications...
Hey. I would agree with this. I have been keeping all the old junk and buying some useless ones... Doesn't mean a thing. I probably have about 6 or 7 computers home. Only 3 that are plugged and that I use on a regular basis: My Linux Firewall, my Linux fileserver, and my W***** desktop! All the others are not even plugged! Oh yes, I have a mac mini, but not using it... too slow compared to my dual core P4.
Gotta love all those machines stacking around and wasting space... makes nice furniture or seats when guests come around, especially this big heavy iron tower!
They are concerned... because as one of the previous poster above said, there are probably about 126 domains to be available.
Now if you read the article and that most domains will go in the 6figures, and most like with the crazyness around these days, over a million $$. It is a LOT of money for Icann.
Even in the case of the.com only, minus the few already registered. The ones left can easily make over $100K each... consider that usually one domain name is if I recall right $3 to the registrar. Those are the equivalent of AT LEAST 33.000 domains. EACH. Not bad! Especially if ICANN introduce a mandate that says they receive all or a part of the fee...
Yup. I can confirm this. I used to work at a major domain registrar, using Linux/Apache and Microsoft visited us and asked for us to migrate our servers to Window/IIS for the sole purpose of increasing the netcraft numbers... We were doing URL forwarding. By the way, the conversion was VERY painful... even though they engineers came on site to work on the code for this.
Just an idea... if you want to go with open sources products in your company.
First, the most important is the backend storage.
- I would try using a SAN for storage, like a small Clarion for example. I would carve the storage for the mail there on a volume. - I would create a set of export servers that would connect directly to the SAN and re-export the volumes to a set of front end servers using a combination of gndb, gfs, etc... See this document: - http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/g fs/ - configure a set of servers that would act now as the mail servers themselves (frontends). I would strongly suggest using maildir. CourrierIMAP for the pop3/imap accounts is great. Install this on all the machines. For the SMTP agent you could use courrier but I usually prefer Exim. - run both the IMAP/POP/SMTP servers on all the servers, using maildir only. - use a mysql database to store the users information (passwords, email addresses, etc...). You might want to configure 2 mysql servers. One as the Master slave that will receive only the writes, and the other that would be accessed for read and balanced with the first one as reads to access user information and accounts will probably be 99% of the database activities. - use a load balancer to put in front of all the frontend servers, do a load balancing for all the services (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) with sticky session that will try to keep the same users on the same machines when they try to download their mail.
When you are running out of capacity, simply adds new frontends, put them behind the load balancers and voila...
of course I would advise going right away with powerfull 2x3.6GHZ P4 servers and like 4GB of memory. That is powerfull and can certainely serve a LOT of users already per server.
my 2c, written quickly. I apologies if not complete but I am pretty sure the general idea is there and sound.
You configure the web accelerator to automatically translate all the languages to yours and all the pages would be translated to YOUR language in real time.
Wouldn't that be great? And seem to be easily doable with their technology if they would like to.
and to finish on this... We are going to have private companies in a few years (spaceshipone?) that will be able to launch reliably people in space for a very modest cost. Why can't their technology and business model be adapted for something like this?
That's the simple question I have. If it cost that much to take care of it on earth, with so many environmental problems. Why can't we just send it to the SUN? It would certainely take care of it.
Sure, space travel is yet 100% sure, but why not invest in technology that would allow to do that in a safe way?
yes, i Know you asked how can find how to setup a high traffic architecture. I think you came at the right place on Slashdot.
Although I have never seen really many documentation online, I have setup many architecures in the past, and still able to handle very high volume traffic:10s of millions of pages views a day, most of them dynamic.
It really all depends on ONE factor: money.
I will give 2 choices, I have implemented both: Appropriate budget: Frontends/Load Balancing: We had a pair of of Big/IPs with SSL accelerator, configured for redundancy, that rocks. behind them, we had a clustered NetApp F840, with gigabit interfaces, on a gigabit networks. Frontends: We were running Apache, with all the binaries, config, webpages, perl scrips located on the shared filesystem. Each machine was a dual CPU, 2GB memory, 2x36GB scsi drive, we had 26 of them, double the capacity really needed so if a machine or two were to go down during the night, no need to worry and it would wait for next day, business hours, great for peaks as well.
As a database backup we had an Oracle Cluster on a SUN 6650, 14CPUs, 14GB of Memory, connected on an EMC storage. One machine was configured as the master, the other as a standby with the possibility to take down the primary and mount it's filesystem directly from the SAN. Pretty much all the config was on the SAN, on different volumes, and could be mounted on either machine. Each volumes had a copy and an hourly update in case of failure of the primary volume.
Now for a more realistic scenario with low budget: - Load Balancer: Get 2 Linux machines, I'd suggest machines with 2GB Memory, 2x36GB Disk, 2x3Ghz CPUs, with Linux Virtual Server. (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/) - Build 2 Linux machines that you would use as NFS Server (If you are short in budget also could use them as Oracle or Mysql Server), configure them with 2 external scsi arrays that can be mounted on either machine. If you are really short in budget, don't use external array, but big enough internal drives, and for example rsync to replicate the data between the 2 of them. (I would personnally use LVM, establish a snapshot copy on the master and do a rsync of this snapshot. If you have a database on it, put it in quiet (hot-backup) mode while you do the snapshot ). - FrontEnds: Get a couples of machines with 2 CPUs, 2GB memory for example, 2x36Gb drives. Configure them to mount the filesystem from the NFS servers.
- Database, it is budget, use Mysql (or Oracle this would work), configure one machine as Master, the other as read-only. Have all your machines interrogating either machines for read-only requests, and going to the master only for write requests.
If you need more power: configure more frontends, configure more read-only slave database server. Now if you are write intensive, more than reads, on the database, then it becomes a bit more complicated.
Sure, cell phone coverage is much easier outdoor than indoors and around building... One cell phone tower at the top of a mountain and you got a big area covered, a few miles... In city like NYC, big concrete walls, metal, etc, WILL prevent in some cases cell phones to work. In anyways, cell phones not working in subways is more of a political decision than a technical difficulty.
Yes, my MTA card works in the subways AND buses, but not in cabs. It would be great if it could work there as well, no more headache to find change and all. If only they could give as well a clear receipt with their medallion number, maybe I could have recovered the 2 cell phones plus the digital camera I lost in a cab. (Okay I recovered 1 cell phone, but it was because of someone called me with it).
Hmm.... you musn't live in New York then or a living in an ideal city because:
1- Cell phone coverage sucks... no matter who you are using noone has coverage in the subway, nor in the elevator of my buildings, or even very bad coverage where some friends live.
2- yea, warning, that is different from a countdown. Do you know exactly how many seconds are left between red and green? Nope? Well in china you do...
3- Again, I live in NY and although taxis should have that (I do take taxis at least 3 or 4 times/week), I almost never take any that do accept. What they are talking about in China is the same card used for everything.
4- Park!=different from exercise machine. They have parks in China, AND exercise machines. You just don't do the same thing on those 2 things.
5- Do you live in the city with no thiefs? Lucky you... I have yet to see restaurants with hooks under the table, maybe the 2 or 3 times a week I go out to different places are not sufficient. Oh and by the way,all the places tell you that they are not responsible in case of lost item left to them.
6- They didn't say they don't have internet/phone access, I am sure they do as well... But it is in addition, because sometime it is just nice to be able to go to a Branch and have a live person.
7- Again, refer to 5, I have never seen that in NY.
8- yes, but they refer to in advance of going to the parkings. They have signs that tell you which parkings are full, how many spots left, BEFORE you even go near. How neat!
9- seating maps, I would agreed can be found at _some_ places, but can you reserve your seat in the movie theater? Haven't seen that...
10- hemming... What a pain in the neck... Buying something at Bloomingdale. "How's wednesday next week would be for you?" and that is on a Thursday... I would gladly wait 10mn to have it same day.
Why can't the Oil companies convert to nuclear companies? After all it is a very lucrative and future market for energy in the future.
Why can't they use the profit of the oil sale to build nuclear plants and invest in other nuclear programs that would allow them to be the main actors when it is time to switch to Nuclear because Oil is not going to be around forver.
8 Firewire drive enclosure: (i have the 4 drives version). $600. http://www.cooldrives.com/fi80013oc5fi.html $1360 = 8* $170 250GB ATA drives. $700 = Hardware for a Linux machine as correct file server = $2930 for 2TB of raw space, 1.5TB Of raid 5 with an hot spare, or 1.75TB of raid five with no hot spare.
You got yourself a nice fileserver for home usage... install that with mythtv and you're up for hours of video....
Slashdot Mirror
I am a photographer as well and also into Fashion Photography, work for an agency, and it does seem that a lot of high Fashion Photographers are using medium format camera, namely the Hasselblad. The H2D I had in my hand was a piece of art. I did not try the 39MP back, but a lower one. The images coming out of it are just fantastics. I don't have experience with large format, but as far as film is concerned, the quality of this in my mind is just "wow". I am seriously considering buying one, even though it is the price of a very nice car!
I do have a 20D and a 1DsMarkII, 16MP, DSLR, I already thought the quality was much better than any other 35mm camera I have had, but yes, the H2D cameras are just great, or even medium format are. The quality is truly a step beyond 35mm, except that pretty much no amateurs know about medium format because to have a digital back is very costly...
I have to say, this is totally true, and not only from the CES. I went recently to the PhotoExpo in Javist Center NYC. I went there by mistake during the last hour of the show. I didn't know it was the last hour. I stayed there after the closing because I wanetd to walk around and potentially buy something I really needed. And yes, a LOT of exhibitors were willing to sell you stuff for cheap because they did not wanted to pack them, bring them home with them, and they were rushed with time, just wanted to get out of there ASAP.
Really a lot of cheap stuff... and got a couple of FREE things as well I did not even ask for! Now that I know... next time I will do it again, on purpose! and I will bring cash because the drawback was that a lot could not sell to me because their credit card machine was unplugged and I did not had cash on me!
Not that I am a big fan of windows being a Linux user since 92... but... sure you have gentoo+asterisk on that machine. Is it running X-window? Or just a console? Gotta compare apple to apple.
I am running a big of the same config for my asterisk-pbx/firewall. All text-based. Works flawlessly. But then... if I were to compared I guess I would compared to... dos? Or something else text based. GUIs + windows manager are expensive, very expensive depending on which one... Try runnint the last version of X with last version of KDE or GNOME on your machine, and compare. or try running an old version of X with fwvm and win3.11... that would be more of a fair comparaison... because well, Win3.11 works fine on that kind of platform.
Well... if they would add like a laptop pcmcia card... with support for the exist edge/evdo cards it would solve the problem...
if only...
That is what I would say. If they do the things well, and so far they did, they could truly become a huge company. They are profitable, have very smart ideas, investing into a lot of research, hiring pretty smart people it seems... Future seems to be bright.
Now, will all the ads and all the things Google do remain discret and small? I doubt it.
As it will become a bigger company, and go more and more into the traditional advertising business, it will probably behave like others in part. Depending on the media we will see more and more ads, and more and more obstrusive. Sure some will not be too obstrusive, but as they grow and install themselves even more what will prevent them from doing like the others? big flashy ads, etc? The way they started and gained market share was by doing things differently than others, and 'better?'. Sure, when you are a new company growing, it is pretty much required. You have to be different and better than the competition. Upon growing and having this domination, it WILL give them more freedom to do like others if they wish so.
Now the question is. Do they want it? What will they do in 10years? I say. Market will tell.
I would have to agree on the statement that mythtv requires way too much tweaking...
It isn't like I am not an experienced Linux user... I have been extensively using Linux at home, then work since 1992, kernel 0.98. I use it everyday, work, home.
I do have a mythtv box, and timewarner cable HD. It is a pain. I gave up on my mythtv box, was wasting too much time on it and ended up getting the timewarner HDPVR which works okay for what it is supposed to do: recording shows. I am not a big fan of it, lacks mythtv functionnalities but hey, it records and I can play my shows.
Why do I think mythtv is a pain?
configuring it and having it to work is a major hassle. Between the special drivers for the infrared receiver/remote, the lircc, the kernel drivers, making sure the tv card works (PVR350), getting the sound in, especially I have HD, I WANT to record in HD, and AC3 sound. Well, I only got Svideo. Quality sucks. Oh, and the major pain is to be able to change channel, as it uses my only HD tuner in the place, it has to change channel via IR (which doesn't work still), and it forces me to watch what is being recorded. I live in NYC and I have no interest in recorded over the air shows and would rather be able to record anything that is playing on my HD set.
So if someone could sell me a pre-installed mythtv ready for HDTV, with HDTV tuner integrated that I can then tweak and customize, I would take it and pay for it! I love the functionnalities of Mythtv, but for what I want. It is just not ready yet.
believe me. I LOVE mythtv. I just wish I could use it as easily as the PVR I have.
I agree with parent's poster. The number of inputs, especially for hidef devices is a joke.
Someone like me, I have 1 xbox, 2 ps2 (An american and a Japanese for import games), a dvd player, an SACD player, a VCR, an HDTV via time warner, plus a computer, all going to my projector. I am going to get an xbox360 and probably a PS3 as well. I have components out on pretty much everything + DVI on my HD projector. Wait... DVI! My HDTV set from Time Warner refuses to talk to my projector (Sanyo PVL70) that way. NOT compliant. SUCKS. Not enough components input on my set! I mean the hires one that distributes the signal over 3 wires and not the lores quality Svideo that sucks.
oh wait... I wish as well I had enough digital-fiber-in for all my equipment so I would not have to have only stereo on my xbox, or have to move the fibers in depending on what I want to listen.
yes, I WISH I could connect ALL my peripherals AT THE SAME TIME using high quality component cables + fibers for high quality sound and not have to do compromises. I DO NOT WANT to have a switch cables everytime I want to switch devices.
I have not found a single home theather set that can accomodate all my needs. Sure they all have Svideo in, and stereo inputs. Usually they get at most 3 fiber digital in, and at most 2, 3 exceptionnaly hi-res components in. Sucks! not enough!
I realize that I have a bunch of equipment but I must not be the only one?? How do others do? I must not be the ONLY one that wants to connect more than 3 devices in their highest possible quality?
Yup.
I have a projector at home. I use it for both HDTV and have a computer connected to it. 120" diagonal. Believe me, you have no problem seeing it from 20' away!
I have both an xbox, ps2 and computer connected to it. Wow. it rocks! HD gaming rocks. I have a bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse as my computer is well, probably about 20 feet away from the area I usually sit. I had to go bluetooth because other wireless technologies for keyboard/mouse just didn't do it.
On the side. I wish there were more choices in bluetooth keyboard/mouse/equipment for computer. It is truly amazing. I also wish that you could pair up a bluetooth keyboard/mouse to different computers at the same time and just switch from a computer to another by a switch on the keyboard (my dream!!!) any manufacturer listening?????
Am I the only that is amazed? (or read the full survey!) at this line that says:
Order from Spam: 6% of online men. 5% of online women.
5%, even with a margin of error is still a lot. But i know that it is probably true. At a previous business that wasn't doing spam but were sending small email campaigns we were estimating a return rate of about 3%.
I just think this number is scaringly high... the reason spam works, spammers still have work, and my 6 years old email address receives over 500 spams a day!
so, yes, am I the only one amazed by this? I would have like to have more question on this topic, like what do you buy from spam? Are you satisfied with it? How often do you buy from spam? etc...
Well, the bigger problem I see with video blog is that it is the most inconvenient thing to do while at work, or even outside.
Why? first, it takes more time, more attention. I like blogs, or texts, because I can take a break anytime and go back to it. i don't have to go back, my eyes can fast forward or go backwards very fast... less attention is needed. I don't need to, well, listen.
Also, at work, i can't have a video playing. Too obstrusive! bandwitch, and noisy. It is an open-space. If everybody starts to look at videos, and some do - I hate it, it would become very noisy and unproductive.
even at home. I find it quicker to read something than to listen to a blog. I can read several articles at the same time. I can only listen/watch/pay attention to mostly one video. I do this at home when I am lazy and don't feel like reading.
I mean, yes, how long before we see players that can do both?
After all... when DVD-Rs came out, and DVD+R. No one was doing both, suddently (I don't remember the history in detail, who), but someone came out (sony?) with a player that was doing both...
and now, what? Well, don't they all do both? or all? DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW? It's been a while since I have seen a player/recorder that do only one format...
Why can't the same thing happen for Blu-Ray/HD-DVD?
Sure it is a license thing... like it was for DVDs... You pay? You got the right to do it. Is there anything in the agreements they have that will prevent both format to co-exist in the same device? I doubt...
Combo HR-DVD/Blu-ray. Sure it might be expensive at first. The technology seems to be quite different for both format. But we have seen more difficult things happen
Any bet on this? When?
This is when the upload speeds and latency both matter.
I am in New York, my parents are in France. I have time warner cable so probably about 500KB/s down, 45KB/s up. They used to have 14KB/s Up, now they have 256kb/s. We used to do a lot of VoIP/Video Conferencing. usually as soon as they were turning on Video (MSN Messenger, or Yahoo), their voice was becoming choppy. Bad bad bad. Don't even try to do Video messenging with several people at the same time for them, it just wasn't working well.
Where as with my upload speed, I can do a little bit more, but it is still limited. I have an Asterisk server home, as well as webserver, mail, etc... sometime I do download big files, or upload big files: much more often, almost daily basis. I am a photographer on the side of my IT job. I work with a 16MP camera.
When I upload files for customers, 16bits, full res, they are 100MB! Even smaller files are usually still at least 50MB when converted to 8bits. Fullsize JPEGS are easily 2MB to 10MB when the best settings are setup. Now imagine having to upload a couple of photos for someone to see full size. I often have to upload 10 to 50 images. It is a real pain.
Now imaging, over my 45KB/s up bandwith, I am uploading for 250MB of images (last night), very common. It will take about an hour and a half, best case. Now I receive phone calls on my Asterisk/VoIP box at home... Well, my sound is choppy!! And the sound quality is so bad that it just doesn't work. Yes I know I should enable QoS on my Linux firewall but it is a pain and I am LAZY!!! Besides I don't like changing something that works well and I don't feel like recompiling my kernel it is an old one that works just fine.
Give me better upload speed for the same price? I'll take it tomorrow!! Oh wait, I would have taken it yesterday! Oh and better latency too, because it does matter when you work online. Remote desktop, voip, video, etc... response time is about latency. Oh wait, I clicked in my remote desktop window (or remote X-window). Why is the machine 5000 miles away seems to be SO much slower than the other machine sitting 50 miles away when the pipe between the two of them is the same? hmmmm. I have a latency of 300ms against 20ms.
Latency + bandwith improvements are what we need. I want Symmetrical bandwith and everybody in the world to have symmetrical bandwith.
I can find so many usages for more bandwith/latency, both on personal/professional level.
On this I could comment as well. I have seen this before, both from India and from others. I am myself from Europe/France and came here (New York/98) with a visa. The first 2 years, well, it was new and I loved my job, but then, after abused and all, I just wanted to leave. Too bad the economy sucked (end of the .com bubble, 2000/2001). I had no choice than to say yes to keep my job. I got married, got my work authorization independent from my Visa, I was free. I resigned, created my own business, didn't work so found another job as a Manager in another company. I wasn't a yes man, at all, but was really good so they kept me.
They hired a new boss there, he was the best one and the most knowledgeable of the company but he got fired by the CIO because he was a NO man, better than our CEO, more experienced, and speaking his mind on what should be changed and what should be done right. He got laid off. Everybody was saying, even in other divisions that he was the best one. But his manager could not stand him not agreeing. Later he was replaced... by a friend of the CIO, an indian guy... Who was a yes man with the CIO and tough with everybody else. Everybody else hated that guy, and he was not competent. After 9 months at the job and a few months of lateness in the biggest project of the company, he got laid off.
I wonder if there is a lesson to learn there...
By the way... on the original topic. I think that there is just not that MANY programmers over 40 these days because real development, outside of cobol/fortran over 20 years ago was very limited and not that many positions compared to today. I would say probably 1/50th the number of IT developers than there is in the industry these days. I know a few, they either went to management, or moved to architect positions, or moved out of IT, or are still very much in demand for legacy Cobol/VMS applications...
my 2c on this.
Hey. I would agree with this. I have been keeping all the old junk and buying some useless ones... Doesn't mean a thing. I probably have about 6 or 7 computers home. Only 3 that are plugged and that I use on a regular basis: My Linux Firewall, my Linux fileserver, and my W***** desktop! All the others are not even plugged! Oh yes, I have a mac mini, but not using it... too slow compared to my dual core P4.
Gotta love all those machines stacking around and wasting space... makes nice furniture or seats when guests come around, especially this big heavy iron tower!
They are concerned... because as one of the previous poster above said, there are probably about 126 domains to be available.
.com only, minus the few already registered. The ones left can easily make over $100K each... consider that usually one domain name is if I recall right $3 to the registrar. Those are the equivalent of AT LEAST 33.000 domains. EACH. Not bad! Especially if ICANN introduce a mandate that says they receive all or a part of the fee...
Now if you read the article and that most domains will go in the 6figures, and most like with the crazyness around these days, over a million $$. It is a LOT of money for Icann.
Even in the case of the
so, I would believe it is about money... Yup.
Yup. I can confirm this. I used to work at a major domain registrar, using Linux/Apache and Microsoft visited us and asked for us to migrate our servers to Window/IIS for the sole purpose of increasing the netcraft numbers... We were doing URL forwarding. By the way, the conversion was VERY painful... even though they engineers came on site to work on the code for this.
Just an idea... if you want to go with open sources products in your company.
g fs/
First, the most important is the backend storage.
- I would try using a SAN for storage, like a small Clarion for example. I would carve the storage for the mail there on a volume.
- I would create a set of export servers that would connect directly to the SAN and re-export the volumes to a set of front end servers using a combination of gndb, gfs, etc...
See this document:
- http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/
- configure a set of servers that would act now as the mail servers themselves (frontends). I would strongly suggest using maildir. CourrierIMAP for the pop3/imap accounts is great. Install this on all the machines. For the SMTP agent you could use courrier but I usually prefer Exim.
- run both the IMAP/POP/SMTP servers on all the servers, using maildir only.
- use a mysql database to store the users information (passwords, email addresses, etc...). You might want to configure 2 mysql servers. One as the Master slave that will receive only the writes, and the other that would be accessed for read and balanced with the first one as reads to access user information and accounts will probably be 99% of the database activities.
- use a load balancer to put in front of all the frontend servers, do a load balancing for all the services (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) with sticky session that will try to keep the same users on the same machines when they try to download their mail.
When you are running out of capacity, simply adds new frontends, put them behind the load balancers and voila...
of course I would advise going right away with powerfull 2x3.6GHZ P4 servers and like 4GB of memory. That is powerfull and can certainely serve a LOT of users already per server.
my 2c, written quickly. I apologies if not complete but I am pretty sure the general idea is there and sound.
open to comments
imagine the product you have if they can do it.
You configure the web accelerator to automatically translate all the languages to yours and all the pages would be translated to YOUR language in real time.
Wouldn't that be great? And seem to be easily doable with their technology if they would like to.
and to finish on this... We are going to have private companies in a few years (spaceshipone?) that will be able to launch reliably people in space for a very modest cost. Why can't their technology and business model be adapted for something like this?
That's the simple question I have. If it cost that much to take care of it on earth, with so many environmental problems. Why can't we just send it to the SUN? It would certainely take care of it.
Sure, space travel is yet 100% sure, but why not invest in technology that would allow to do that in a safe way?
just an idea?
yes, i Know you asked how can find how to setup a high traffic architecture. I think you came at the right place on Slashdot.
:10s of millions of pages views a day, most of them dynamic.
Although I have never seen really many documentation online, I have setup many architecures in the past, and still able to handle very high volume traffic
It really all depends on ONE factor: money.
I will give 2 choices, I have implemented both:
Appropriate budget:
Frontends/Load Balancing: We had a pair of of Big/IPs with SSL accelerator, configured for redundancy, that rocks.
behind them, we had a clustered NetApp F840, with gigabit interfaces, on a gigabit networks.
Frontends: We were running Apache, with all the binaries, config, webpages, perl scrips located on the shared filesystem. Each machine was a dual CPU, 2GB memory, 2x36GB scsi drive, we had 26 of them, double the capacity really needed so if a machine or two were to go down during the night, no need to worry and it would wait for next day, business hours, great for peaks as well.
As a database backup we had an Oracle Cluster on a SUN 6650, 14CPUs, 14GB of Memory, connected on an EMC storage. One machine was configured as the master, the other as a standby with the possibility to take down the primary and mount it's filesystem directly from the SAN. Pretty much all the config was on the SAN, on different volumes, and could be mounted on either machine. Each volumes had a copy and an hourly update in case of failure of the primary volume.
Now for a more realistic scenario with low budget:
- Load Balancer: Get 2 Linux machines, I'd suggest machines with 2GB Memory, 2x36GB Disk, 2x3Ghz CPUs, with Linux Virtual Server. (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/)
- Build 2 Linux machines that you would use as NFS Server (If you are short in budget also could use them as Oracle or Mysql Server), configure them with 2 external scsi arrays that can be mounted on either machine. If you are really short in budget, don't use external array, but big enough internal drives, and for example rsync to replicate the data between the 2 of them. (I would personnally use LVM, establish a snapshot copy on the master and do a rsync of this snapshot. If you have a database on it, put it in quiet (hot-backup) mode while you do the snapshot
).
- FrontEnds: Get a couples of machines with 2 CPUs, 2GB memory for example, 2x36Gb drives. Configure them to mount the filesystem from the NFS servers.
- Database, it is budget, use Mysql (or Oracle this would work), configure one machine as Master, the other as read-only. Have all your machines interrogating either machines for read-only requests, and going to the master only for write requests.
If you need more power: configure more frontends, configure more read-only slave database server. Now if you are write intensive, more than reads, on the database, then it becomes a bit more complicated.
if you want to know more, contact me off-list.
Sure, cell phone coverage is much easier outdoor than indoors and around building... One cell phone tower at the top of a mountain and you got a big area covered, a few miles... In city like NYC, big concrete walls, metal, etc, WILL prevent in some cases cell phones to work. In anyways, cell phones not working in subways is more of a political decision than a technical difficulty.
Yes, my MTA card works in the subways AND buses, but not in cabs. It would be great if it could work there as well, no more headache to find change and all. If only they could give as well a clear receipt with their medallion number, maybe I could have recovered the 2 cell phones plus the digital camera I lost in a cab. (Okay I recovered 1 cell phone, but it was because of someone called me with it).
Hmm.... you musn't live in New York then or a living in an ideal city because:
1- Cell phone coverage sucks... no matter who you are using noone has coverage in the subway, nor in the elevator of my buildings, or even very bad coverage where some friends live.
2- yea, warning, that is different from a countdown. Do you know exactly how many seconds are left between red and green? Nope? Well in china you do...
3- Again, I live in NY and although taxis should have that (I do take taxis at least 3 or 4 times/week), I almost never take any that do accept. What they are talking about in China is the same card used for everything.
4- Park!=different from exercise machine. They have parks in China, AND exercise machines. You just don't do the same thing on those 2 things.
5- Do you live in the city with no thiefs? Lucky you... I have yet to see restaurants with hooks under the table, maybe the 2 or 3 times a week I go out to different places are not sufficient. Oh and by the way,all the places tell you that they are not responsible in case of lost item left to them.
6- They didn't say they don't have internet/phone access, I am sure they do as well... But it is in addition, because sometime it is just nice to be able to go to a Branch and have a live person.
7- Again, refer to 5, I have never seen that in NY.
8- yes, but they refer to in advance of going to the parkings. They have signs that tell you which parkings are full, how many spots left, BEFORE you even go near. How neat!
9- seating maps, I would agreed can be found at _some_ places, but can you reserve your seat in the movie theater? Haven't seen that...
10- hemming... What a pain in the neck... Buying something at Bloomingdale. "How's wednesday next week would be for you?" and that is on a Thursday... I would gladly wait 10mn to have it same day.
Poor you...
Ok... but one question.
Why can't the Oil companies convert to nuclear companies? After all it is a very lucrative and future market for energy in the future.
Why can't they use the profit of the oil sale to build nuclear plants and invest in other nuclear programs that would allow them to be the main actors when it is time to switch to Nuclear because Oil is not going to be around forver.
just my thoughts...
A way of doing it (Which I did)
0 = 8* $170 250GB ATA drives.
8 Firewire drive enclosure: (i have the 4 drives version).
$600. http://www.cooldrives.com/fi80013oc5fi.html
$136
$700 = Hardware for a Linux machine as correct file server
= $2930 for 2TB of raw space, 1.5TB Of raid 5 with an hot spare, or 1.75TB of raid five with no hot spare.
You got yourself a nice fileserver for home usage... install that with mythtv and you're up for hours of video....