I understand the latency of the switchover. It will be dependent on the size of the volatile set of memory that needs to be transferred between the save/restore cycles. I.e., this will be virtual machine-dependent, and tend to increase linearly with the virtual machine's memory footprint and memory utilization.
"Data center readiness," to me, does not mean a few servers running Xen. It means many, many servers, taken from at least superset of servers taken from all the mainstream enterprise server vendors, in all the common configurations. IOW, if I have a set of Dell 1955 Blades with Net App 3050 NFS storage heads running Xen and it crashes during live migration, (and I do), Xen is not ready for data center deployment, QED.
An example of someone else who's jimmied together a successful rig does not serve as evidence of "data center readiness." I have tried SLES10 out of the box, SLES10+patches, RHEL5, RHEL5+patches, and Open Source Xen with careful compilation of specific kernel options... all with live migration. They are all terribly unstable on our hardware configuration.
Show me an enterprise deployment of hundreds of Xen hypervisors deployed servicing guests with a minimum of four nines of availability guarantee with a contractual financial penalty for availability violations... then we can start talking seriously about the "data center readiness" of Xen.
Today Xen is/not/ "data center ready".
Maybe next year.
Not today.
If you ask me, Xen's going to get clobbered by KVM; a different subject for a different day.
This is a fine theory, but the reality is Walmart has more bargaining power at the table than most manufacturers attempting to set a price floor. I.e., Walmart will tell the manufacturer that it will make a price-floor exception for Walmart, or lose Walmart's business. The manufacturer will cave.
You can move virtual machines between real machines while they're under load, with a 6ms delay.
That's really interesting. See, the authors of Xen say live migration isn't ready and that it's unstable. I have deployments of redhat, suse, and open source xen that prove that with swarm-cloud migration testing (just put all the vms into flight constantly, ping-ponging around to various hypervisors). Meanwhile, Xen Enterprise does not today feature live migration. Why? Did I say that it's not ready, and that the authors say that it's not ready? Xen Enterprise is the author's commercial implementation of Xen. What do they know that you do not?
That live migrations fail, occasionally, for no apparent reason. Most common failure: live migration never ends, get stuck with a zombie on other end. Rarer failure: host operating system crashes, taking all virtual machines with it.
Don't get me wrong. I have high hopes for Xen in the future. But advertising Xen as "data center ready" TODAY is irresponsible. It just isn't ready for anything past judicious and careful early deployment.
C//
Re:Xen "Just Works" (I know. I use it every day)
on
Desperately Seeking Xen
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The free VMWare server can't do that. Micrsoft's Virtual Server can't do that until they have a hypervisor. And there really isn't anything else that can.
Well you can try to do that with Xen if you want, but you might be sorry.:) But I suspect you knew that.
Hopefully the Summer release remedies this situation.
Full virtualization, as used in Xen, VMware and VirtualBox, has performance issues that are not yet well understood, but thought to revolve around dramatically increased L2 cache misses. I am not aware that any changes are in the works to fully resolve this.
Hmmmm. No, not really.
Performance problems with VMWare are almost universally associated with the added latency of the multiplexing/demultiplexing code that needs to be run to talk with shared I/O devices. This added latency in turn impacts bandwidth. "L2 cache misses" refers to CPU overhead, of which there is little to speak of in any of the above technologies (5% with VMWare, practically zero with Xen). CPU should be of no concern to you with any virtualization technology that I know of.
I've validated this time and time again with different benchmarks from SPEC (not just the CPU benches, but NFS and so forth, as well as OSDB, basic simultaneous FTP tests, and so on).
Well. He's obviously a little somewhere off of center. Be that as it may, there's nothing particularly speculative about his assertion that there are agencies that we are not allowed to know about. There are plenty of organizations of that type, most of them fairly small when compared to NSA and CIA. They're are generally purpose-built, some of them temporarily, some more permanently. I'm not speculating. Hint, hint.:)
I think that her attorney may be able to get some traction on the claims of state and federal RICO charges, and suspect the RIAA and associated organizations are going to really get hurt by this one. At first glance, this appears to be a real stinger of a lawsuit. Reading the lawsuit makes it clear that far more than a few copyrights are on the line. The RIAA has been formally challenged to a battle to the death.
I thought about this further, and I think you are right. Namely, if I authorize a magazine to reprint my work, and the put ads here and there on the page, is that a "derivative" work? I don't think that one can credibly say so.
The whole thing is just playing peoples worst fears,...
Well, except that their fears are REAL. Not the dams and infrastructure part: the espionage part. We're under constant electronic attack every day, by many nations, threatening or otherwise. There's no commercial defense contractor today who does not have foreign electronic agents planted in their systems.
It should be pretty good for Microsoft's bottom line. If they can force you and eveyone else to rebuy their "O/S" 3 to 6 times over the lifetime of the box/lapbox at $100-400 or more, how can that not help MS's bottom line.
That would be utterly disastrous to their bottom line, because they can't "force" consumers to do that, they can only try.
In California, there is legislation that permits arbitration clauses. Whether or not the courts are upholding it or not is a matter I am unaware of (although the provisions are recent, so may not be tested yet). Finally, your citation is to a TOS, which is a contract of adhesion. Not all contracts are contracts of adhesion, after the terminology being referred to in your article. Good to know, however, thank you for the pointer.
You can't waive your right to sue, although you can be tricked into thinking you did. Such provisions are always ignored wholesale by the courts. Only thing that they can do is make you go through a arbitration process FIRST, but even then they cannot force you to use the ruling of the arbiter. You can ALWAYS sue.
I'm not (thank God) an IP lawyer but intuitively, it doesn't seem that pasting advertising into someone else's creative work without permission would be fair use.
Fair virtually never includes any third party's commercial conduct. There may be some exception for things like converting books into formats that the blind can read and the like (when the author neglects them), not sure about that.
A proxy makes a copy for reasons other than publishing the content in the current transaction, so (nitpicking) it would mean it is illegal.
Nitpicking, anything between the end user and you is a system of relays. The law already has provisions for this, going back things like radio, where the transmissions have to be rebroadcast over many hops.
The "unlicensed derivative work" angle is interesting; I could see how that argument, if made, could get traction in a court.
What you must do is release all your source code, IFF you elect to invoke the GPL as the instrument by which you are allowed to disseminate your program to others. No such invocation, no such obligation.
Of course, if you elect to disseminate your program to others, you may wish to verify that it is not an unlicensed derivative work belonging to someone else. If it is, you may find yourself at the nasty end of a lawsuit,... or (mostly theoretically) a criminal investigation.
My experience is the same. I actually LIKE Vista, albeit two things:
I've turned off the various annoying security features.
Have compatibility issues with some of my favorite programs.
If "XP Compatibility Mode" actually worked, I wouldn't complain, might recommend everyone switch and just know how to turn the compatibility mode on. But no. Compatibility mode doesn't help.
We were working on a DARPA contract quite a while back, back when the Semantic Web, OWL, and all that stuff was still in complete infancy. There was this outsider who kept on creating and uploading interesting OWL ontologies and sometimes software tweaks to some of our tool sets. The DARPA PM noticed, too, and we wanted to figure out how to perhaps pick him up.
All the things you mentioned are a pittance portion of the federal budget, and not much of the states, either. The vast majority of the federal budget is along these lines:
1. Debt service 2. Military expenditures 3. Social Security 4. Medicare/medicaid 5. Overhead
I know many conservatives who like to bash on "welfare," whereby they mean "welfare other than 3 and 4 above," but if you look at the portion of federal and state budgets dedicated to welfare in the traditional sense, for example AFDC, it is almost so small as to not justify a budgetary line. Expending that much energy on something so small is a big bait and switch.
Most Americans don't really care, until their wallets or possessions enter the mix.
Hmmmm. Unless you are poor, you cannot live in America without having your wallet involved in politics.
As far as your comparison to tax bases versus freedoms, while there indeed is some truth to your remark, it's not accurate in the large. I.e., if government were significantly reduced, we'd be more free of government interference. Government takes funding. Period.
Supposing I were your attorney, I would suggest to you in the most polite possible language, that you should never ever discuss a case with any third party other than me or perhaps your spouse.
I'm not your attorney, so instead I'm going to say: YOU ARE A GODDAMN FOOL FOR DUMPING FURTHER MATERIAL REGARDING A CASE ONTO THE GODDAMN INTERNET. Accusing someone in the public press of criminal conduct (read: AS IN THE ABOVE GODDAMN MESSAGE WHERE YOU GODDAMN PRINT A GODDAMN PERJURY CHARGE FOR CHRIST SAKE) is not only very actionable in court, but can put you on the receiving end of a libel case that can result in findings the SIZE OF A GODDAMN HOUSE. No, I'm not GODDAMN KIDDING. How would you like to own a GODDAMN QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS? But you're going to keep running your fingers over your GODDAMN KEYBOARD, aren't you!?!?!?
I would opine that there are far, far too many weapons in private hands in the U.S. for any kind of dictatorship to emerge here. Look at what the IRA did to Ireland... that was 400 members in the IRA at its peak, in a country where personal possession of firearms had been illegal for decades. They had to leave the country just to train with their weapons. Here is a different story. An attempt to force a military dictatorship here would be a total bloodbath. What scares me most isn't so much the forcing of the issue, but rather a Hitleresquian rise to power (or if you prefer, an Ayatollian risoe to power), where the masses think its a fine idea just long enough for it to be too late for regrets.
Which, btw, applies in both metaphors, although more so the latter than the first.
I'm uncertain in situations involving federal cases who the court appoints to conduct their arrests for contempt. However, I am pretty certain that they do indeed command the practical authority to have their contempt charges enforced. Whether or not they would be likely to engage an individual (FBI director, unlikely) as opposed to a fine ($100K a day until you comply... more likely) is worth discussing. And I think you're wrong: he who controls the PRESS controls everything. It just so happens that the one with the guns MIGHT be also in command of the press.
BTW, while you have fine rant, the practical reality is that the FBI director won't be so for long with a warrant out for his arrest....
Really, I don't understand how the FBI could "ignore" a ruling. I would think that the judge would respond by naming specific individuals at the FBI, like the Director, and holding them in contempt and in jail, in perpetuity, until compliance occurs.
Oh, I see. I had exactly this problem with Time Warner Cable. I had actually managed to get their technical specialists to agree that there was a problem with one of their routers in our physical neighborhood. I called to get status on that very subject, and the person on the other end absolutely insisted on walking me through the "script,"... it's veddy important dat first you must power your modem on. And so forth. I attempted to explain the situation one final time, they refused to listen, and I fired Time Warner Cable for both digital and video service the very next day.
The worst part of this whole thing is, I had gotten my digital satellite service all set up when later Time Warner folks came out and attempted physical work on my house, screwing up the digital satellite. Their customer service is so bad they fuck you over even when you're not a customer.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the latency of the switchover. It will be dependent on the size of the volatile set of memory that needs to be transferred between the save/restore cycles. I.e., this will be virtual machine-dependent, and tend to increase linearly with the virtual machine's memory footprint and memory utilization.
"Data center readiness," to me, does not mean a few servers running Xen. It means many, many servers, taken from at least superset of servers taken from all the mainstream enterprise server vendors, in all the common configurations. IOW, if I have a set of Dell 1955 Blades with Net App 3050 NFS storage heads running Xen and it crashes during live migration, (and I do), Xen is not ready for data center deployment, QED.
An example of someone else who's jimmied together a successful rig does not serve as evidence of "data center readiness." I have tried SLES10 out of the box, SLES10+patches, RHEL5, RHEL5+patches, and Open Source Xen with careful compilation of specific kernel options... all with live migration. They are all terribly unstable on our hardware configuration.
Show me an enterprise deployment of hundreds of Xen hypervisors deployed servicing guests with a minimum of four nines of availability guarantee with a contractual financial penalty for availability violations... then we can start talking seriously about the "data center readiness" of Xen.
Today Xen is
Maybe next year.
Not today.
If you ask me, Xen's going to get clobbered by KVM; a different subject for a different day.
C//
This is a fine theory, but the reality is Walmart has more bargaining power at the table than most manufacturers attempting to set a price floor. I.e., Walmart will tell the manufacturer that it will make a price-floor exception for Walmart, or lose Walmart's business. The manufacturer will cave.
C//
You can move virtual machines between real machines while they're under load, with a 6ms delay.
That's really interesting. See, the authors of Xen say live migration isn't ready and that it's unstable. I have deployments of redhat, suse, and open source xen that prove that with swarm-cloud migration testing (just put all the vms into flight constantly, ping-ponging around to various hypervisors). Meanwhile, Xen Enterprise does not today feature live migration. Why? Did I say that it's not ready, and that the authors say that it's not ready? Xen Enterprise is the author's commercial implementation of Xen. What do they know that you do not?
That live migrations fail, occasionally, for no apparent reason. Most common failure: live migration never ends, get stuck with a zombie on other end. Rarer failure: host operating system crashes, taking all virtual machines with it.
Don't get me wrong. I have high hopes for Xen in the future. But advertising Xen as "data center ready" TODAY is irresponsible. It just isn't ready for anything past judicious and careful early deployment.
C//
The free VMWare server can't do that. Micrsoft's Virtual Server can't do that until they have a hypervisor. And there really isn't anything else that can.
:) But I suspect you knew that.
Well you can try to do that with Xen if you want, but you might be sorry.
Hopefully the Summer release remedies this situation.
C//
Full virtualization, as used in Xen, VMware and VirtualBox, has performance issues that are not yet well understood, but thought to revolve around dramatically increased L2 cache misses. I am not aware that any changes are in the works to fully resolve this.
Hmmmm. No, not really.
Performance problems with VMWare are almost universally associated with the added latency of the multiplexing/demultiplexing code that needs to be run to talk with shared I/O devices. This added latency in turn impacts bandwidth. "L2 cache misses" refers to CPU overhead, of which there is little to speak of in any of the above technologies (5% with VMWare, practically zero with Xen). CPU should be of no concern to you with any virtualization technology that I know of.
I've validated this time and time again with different benchmarks from SPEC (not just the CPU benches, but NFS and so forth, as well as OSDB, basic simultaneous FTP tests, and so on).
C//
Well. He's obviously a little somewhere off of center. Be that as it may, there's nothing particularly speculative about his assertion that there are agencies that we are not allowed to know about. There are plenty of organizations of that type, most of them fairly small when compared to NSA and CIA. They're are generally purpose-built, some of them temporarily, some more permanently. I'm not speculating. Hint, hint. :)
C//
I think that her attorney may be able to get some traction on the claims of state and federal RICO charges, and suspect the RIAA and associated organizations are going to really get hurt by this one. At first glance, this appears to be a real stinger of a lawsuit. Reading the lawsuit makes it clear that far more than a few copyrights are on the line. The RIAA has been formally challenged to a battle to the death.
C//
I thought about this further, and I think you are right. Namely, if I authorize a magazine to reprint my work, and the put ads here and there on the page, is that a "derivative" work? I don't think that one can credibly say so.
C//
The whole thing is just playing peoples worst fears,...
Well, except that their fears are REAL. Not the dams and infrastructure part: the espionage part. We're under constant electronic attack every day, by many nations, threatening or otherwise. There's no commercial defense contractor today who does not have foreign electronic agents planted in their systems.
C//
It should be pretty good for Microsoft's bottom line. If they can force you and eveyone else to rebuy their "O/S" 3 to 6 times over the lifetime of the box/lapbox at $100-400 or more, how can that not help MS's bottom line.
That would be utterly disastrous to their bottom line, because they can't "force" consumers to do that, they can only try.
In California, there is legislation that permits arbitration clauses. Whether or not the courts are upholding it or not is a matter I am unaware of (although the provisions are recent, so may not be tested yet). Finally, your citation is to a TOS, which is a contract of adhesion. Not all contracts are contracts of adhesion, after the terminology being referred to in your article. Good to know, however, thank you for the pointer.
C//
You can't waive your right to sue, although you can be tricked into thinking you did. Such provisions are always ignored wholesale by the courts. Only thing that they can do is make you go through a arbitration process FIRST, but even then they cannot force you to use the ruling of the arbiter. You can ALWAYS sue.
C//
I'm not (thank God) an IP lawyer but intuitively, it doesn't seem that pasting advertising into someone else's creative work without permission would be fair use.
Fair virtually never includes any third party's commercial conduct. There may be some exception for things like converting books into formats that the blind can read and the like (when the author neglects them), not sure about that.
C//
A proxy makes a copy for reasons other than publishing the content in the current transaction, so (nitpicking) it would mean it is illegal.
Nitpicking, anything between the end user and you is a system of relays. The law already has provisions for this, going back things like radio, where the transmissions have to be rebroadcast over many hops.
The "unlicensed derivative work" angle is interesting; I could see how that argument, if made, could get traction in a court.
C//
This isn't actually true.
... or (mostly theoretically) a criminal investigation.
What you must do is release all your source code, IFF you elect to invoke the GPL as the instrument by which you are allowed to disseminate your program to others. No such invocation, no such obligation.
Of course, if you elect to disseminate your program to others, you may wish to verify that it is not an unlicensed derivative work belonging to someone else. If it is, you may find yourself at the nasty end of a lawsuit,
C//
My experience is the same. I actually LIKE Vista, albeit two things:
I've turned off the various annoying security features.
Have compatibility issues with some of my favorite programs.
If "XP Compatibility Mode" actually worked, I wouldn't complain, might recommend everyone switch and just know how to turn the compatibility mode on. But no. Compatibility mode doesn't help.
C//
You speak as if this is something new.
We were working on a DARPA contract quite a while back, back when the Semantic Web, OWL, and all that stuff was still in complete infancy. There was this outsider who kept on creating and uploading interesting OWL ontologies and sometimes software tweaks to some of our tool sets. The DARPA PM noticed, too, and we wanted to figure out how to perhaps pick him up.
HE WAS STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL.
Hah.
C//
All the things you mentioned are a pittance portion of the federal budget, and not much of the states, either. The vast majority of the federal budget is along these lines:
1. Debt service
2. Military expenditures
3. Social Security
4. Medicare/medicaid
5. Overhead
I know many conservatives who like to bash on "welfare," whereby they mean "welfare other than 3 and 4 above," but if you look at the portion of federal and state budgets dedicated to welfare in the traditional sense, for example AFDC, it is almost so small as to not justify a budgetary line. Expending that much energy on something so small is a big bait and switch.
C//
Most Americans don't really care, until their wallets or possessions enter the mix.
Hmmmm. Unless you are poor, you cannot live in America without having your wallet involved in politics.
As far as your comparison to tax bases versus freedoms, while there indeed is some truth to your remark, it's not accurate in the large. I.e., if government were significantly reduced, we'd be more free of government interference. Government takes funding. Period.
C//
Supposing I were your attorney, I would suggest to you in the most polite possible language, that you should never ever discuss a case with any third party other than me or perhaps your spouse.
I'm not your attorney, so instead I'm going to say: YOU ARE A GODDAMN FOOL FOR DUMPING FURTHER MATERIAL REGARDING A CASE ONTO THE GODDAMN INTERNET. Accusing someone in the public press of criminal conduct (read: AS IN THE ABOVE GODDAMN MESSAGE WHERE YOU GODDAMN PRINT A GODDAMN PERJURY CHARGE FOR CHRIST SAKE) is not only very actionable in court, but can put you on the receiving end of a libel case that can result in findings the SIZE OF A GODDAMN HOUSE. No, I'm not GODDAMN KIDDING. How would you like to own a GODDAMN QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS? But you're going to keep running your fingers over your GODDAMN KEYBOARD, aren't you!?!?!?
C//
I would opine that there are far, far too many weapons in private hands in the U.S. for any kind of dictatorship to emerge here. Look at what the IRA did to Ireland... that was 400 members in the IRA at its peak, in a country where personal possession of firearms had been illegal for decades. They had to leave the country just to train with their weapons. Here is a different story. An attempt to force a military dictatorship here would be a total bloodbath. What scares me most isn't so much the forcing of the issue, but rather a Hitleresquian rise to power (or if you prefer, an Ayatollian risoe to power), where the masses think its a fine idea just long enough for it to be too late for regrets.
Which, btw, applies in both metaphors, although more so the latter than the first.
C//
65% unlikely. :)
I'm uncertain in situations involving federal cases who the court appoints to conduct their arrests for contempt. However, I am pretty certain that they do indeed command the practical authority to have their contempt charges enforced. Whether or not they would be likely to engage an individual (FBI director, unlikely) as opposed to a fine ($100K a day until you comply... more likely) is worth discussing. And I think you're wrong: he who controls the PRESS controls everything. It just so happens that the one with the guns MIGHT be also in command of the press.
BTW, while you have fine rant, the practical reality is that the FBI director won't be so for long with a warrant out for his arrest....
C//
Really, I don't understand how the FBI could "ignore" a ruling. I would think that the judge would respond by naming specific individuals at the FBI, like the Director, and holding them in contempt and in jail, in perpetuity, until compliance occurs.
C//
Oh, I see. I had exactly this problem with Time Warner Cable. I had actually managed to get their technical specialists to agree that there was a problem with one of their routers in our physical neighborhood. I called to get status on that very subject, and the person on the other end absolutely insisted on walking me through the "script," ... it's veddy important dat first you must power your modem on. And so forth. I attempted to explain the situation one final time, they refused to listen, and I fired Time Warner Cable for both digital and video service the very next day.
The worst part of this whole thing is, I had gotten my digital satellite service all set up when later Time Warner folks came out and attempted physical work on my house, screwing up the digital satellite. Their customer service is so bad they fuck you over even when you're not a customer.
C//