You obviously don't deal with many vertical apps. Most of them are not SMP aware, or tend to sit there hogging a single CPU/Core pretty much all the time. At least, this is true in the Windows world... UNIX is quite different, but there's a dearth of the applications my users want to run.
No, just 'cos I do it for a living doesn't mean I have to like it:)
And yet most processing workloads in apps I work with are single-threaded and not terribly scalable. The reality is that >1 CPU is exponentially more difficult to code for (at least so the excuses I hear from developers goes).
However, if your application can sit behind a load balancer and runs a single thread, why NOT have n*single CPU servers? Of course, that sort of takes away from the instant failover advantage. Ho hum:P
It's close enough. I played with this feature at VMworld last year, and when running SQL transactions along with a ping, we dropped one packet but the SQL transactions didn't miss a beat.
It's impressive enough... the two systems are working in lockstep, such that even memory is duplicated between the two systems. It's an extension on the existing VMotion function in VMware today. However, bear in mind it has some limitations; only one CPU is possible at the moment and you still have the overhead of really two VM's running at once instead of just one. So it's not a solution for ALL of your environment, just part of it.
I'm sure the limitations will be eased over time as they tune the technology... but as a first attempt it IS awesome. Thing is, in my environment the stuff that is needed so critically that it can't take an hardware failure is usually >1 CPU, so this isn't a solution... but I guess if you have some relatively low-load but high-criticality servers then you could find a use for it (web servers seem like a good place to do this).
And the answer is no, I don't think the end user will ever notice so long as your network infrastructure is good enough. Certainly, my users never notice a VMotion event.
My wife and I watched Heroes first season and I really like it. Enough that I wanted to watch it when it came on for the second season. But with the commercials every 10 minutes and 5 minutes of commercials at the end, I finally bailed. I'm sure I'll get the DVD for the second series and will probably like it a lot.
Meh... I wouldn't bet on it. The second season lost touch with everything that made the first season great; the charm, the wit, and the fun they had with the characters even as they descended into a dark and scary storyline. The neutered the single most interesting character in my opinion (Hiro) and turned him back into a bumbling idiot.
If I were you I'd skip season 2 entirely and just watch Season 3. It's better... not as good as season 1, but you can actually watch it and pretend season 2 never happened:D
Pity... because a lot of the sci-fi that "looks cheesy" is in fact among the best. This is precisely why we have such execrable movies as "Armageddon" trying to pass for science fiction these days; spectacle is everything, story is nothing.
By modern standards, 2001 "looks cheesy", yet is a seminal science fiction movie. See also The Andromeda Strain and THX1138.
No, I'm not an old fogey... all of these movies are older than me but show an incredible piece of science fiction as art... despite the cheesiness. Terminator... I was too young to see it in the movies when it was released... but it's also a great piece of cinematic science fiction, and one of the few time travel stories that actually contains within it the logic that makes it all work. Most time travel is used as a crutch in so-called "science fiction" (witness most Star Trek time travel stories) or as a simple tool to tell a bigger story (Doctor Who).
Terminator was a time travel story that was internally consistent as well as being a great and tense chase movie. You really got the feeling that no matter how fast and how far Sarah ran, the Terminator would catch up eventually even if it took years. That's why she had to turn around, face and destroy it.
Um... those shows were all around 30 years ago... the GP's shows were 10-20... so I guess the answer to your question would be "yes, and get off my damned lawn";)
In a way you're both right and wrong. TV in the 70's and 80's was mostly populist crap with the occasional gem. However, in many ways TV quality improved dramatically into the 90's and turn of the century... only to find itself mired in "reality show hell" sometime around 2002-2003 (aftermath of the dot-com bubble).
I'm afraid in some ways I agree with the GP... most TV these days is cheap to make and pretty much worthless. The only reason I even keep cable any more is (a) I have kids who enjoy their TV shows and (b) Discovery / History / Science etc. I barely watch anything else except maybe House... which while it's the same script every week with minor modifications, at least is an enjoyable distraction.
The personnel may not, but the building they're housed in might. Oh, and electricity costs, overall infrastructure share cost (plumbing, networking, etc).
And from my experience, NASA doesn't build a new comms infrastructure for every launch. They have large consolidated arrays that are actually owned by separate companies... sometimes literally, sometimes they're just "shadow" companies. Communications time is "rented" from these companies at a set rate.
Yes, sometimes it's all just a shell game when dealing within NASA and the USA, but it makes a certain kind of sense. Instead of having a communications infrastructure that's "in the dark" for 12 hours a day and can't talk to the rovers, they instead rent that infrastructure out to people "looking the other way" and rent antenna time in Australia, Japan, Russia etc. Having the arrays manage by another company actually keeps the books easier to keep straight than if you were a project owning your own infrastructure and leasing out antenna time to projects from ESA.
And no, not a rocket scientist... but drank with plenty and a few have talked about this:)
I feel like I tell my kids that all the time... anyway;
Counter with an offer of sale of 49% of the company; a non-controlling share, to the mega-corp for half what they're offering. They still get a "seat on the board" and get to work with you, not to mention get to profit from your profits.
Yeah, it means that in the event your idea goes under you've only got 49% of the money you could've walked away with... but that's the point... 49% of the money is better than 0% of it (which is what you're potentially going to get if you walk away), or having 100% of the money and 0% of the business.
Learn from my mistakes. I did the same thing... I lost my business to another smoother operator, then lost my job within a year due to (cutbacks) (this was ~2002... last time the economy was tough). As it turned out he made a great living off my idea and concept, and I got the shaft.
My new business... well, I'm building that one on my own and I won't make that mistake again.
Thank you... but I would disagree with that assertion. We as technical people already know the contents of the article are false. Yes, I read it... but yes, I researched the source BEFORE I read it because that's the sort of person I am.
As a technical person myself, I looked at the summary and immediately saw false and misleading information. Yes, sometimes the summaries are a little "off" on Slashdot, but I can confirm the summary was accurate in this case. Nonetheless, simply put your computer will not "jitter" and "slow down" in the event your network connection is lost, because the network is NOT the computer, despite what Larry Ellison says.
I work "off network" quite often, and though it is nice to have Internet access, it's rarely required to do business proposals, or play most video games, or edit photos/videos, or... well, let's just say that 95% of what I do on my computer probably doesn't need Internet access. If my computer jittered and slowed down when I'm off network because the network's not there, I think I'd get a better computer.
I recently bought myself a BeagleBoard setup and have had great fun and great luck running Angstrom and Ubuntu on an ARM platform. At the moment I'm playing with putting a Gentoo distribution on it, and while compiles are slow (come on, it's only a 500/600Mhz CPU) I think it's quite possible to build out a very free, open setup that is actually usable.
My plan with my board is to develop a car PC. Yeah, I know... how 2001 of me... but it's not because I want a PC in my car necessarily, but I want to play with embedded type tech in an harsh environment and all the integration that requires. It sounds like fun to me because... well... I'm a geek.
ARM is free. Just as any platform that Linux supports is free. In fact, the ARM architecture is far more free than x86 because you can choose so many different manufacturers for your ARM CPU. The BeagleBoard happens to use a really sweet TI ARM CPU that has an integrated DSP and rudimentary (though impressive) 3D acceleration. All this in a silent, fanless board that integrates most of the hardware you'd ever need from a project.
Yeah, there are some bad points... like the fact that you can't use much non-free software because it's just not available... but why would you want to? The free alternatives are more than acceptable and actually quite fun to play with. Hell, on my Gentoo desktop at home (built originally with a 2005.x install) I don't think I've used anything but free and open software in years.
Obviously someone who doesn't remember the old OS X and "Classic" environment. That was a virtual machine before virtual machines became "cool".
Is it pretty and wonderful and exciting? Not really... but it DID work. Classic continued to work all the way up to the point that Apple moved to Intel... and along with Carbon it provided developers a lovely, smooth transition path to the new OS X API's. Sure, it wasn't perfect... but it was far better than what Microsoft did with Vista.
When Microsoft released Vista, they released their own OS X... a very different OS with some very specific needs and care and feeding instructions. They did this with no real backward compatibility layer (which is what this is), and because of their mostly closed and incomprehensible API's provided few paths for developers to smoothly transition to the new platform. This is an attempt to rectify part of that, and I for one applaud Microsoft for doing this, even if it's not exactly an original idea.
Now, if Microsoft would just give away their dev tools on the installation DVD like Apple do...
But it fixes the PERCEIVED problem that Vista is incompatible with lots of legacy software. Microsoft can point at Windows 7 and say that it runs MORE than Vista, and actually be truthful about it.
Yes, it's all semantics at the end of the day. In truth I've been running 64-bit Vista on my work laptop for months now and I actually really like it. Although I still deal with the occasional incompatibility, it's usually nothing I can't work around. It's far more stable than XP, and I feel a lot more secure (yes, UAC actually does succeed so long as you don't turn it off!). It's still Windows, so it still frustrates the hell out of me sometimes as I'm a Mac user at home and in my career have been a UNIX admin several times... but hey, this is what I do for a living and I accept that. If I worked only with technology that I liked, I'd bore of the technology far too quickly and start to dislike it.
This is mostly marketing hype. The same functions they're touting here you can do with free software today. I have VirtualBox on my Vista machine, on which I run an XP AND a Gentoo setup in seamless mode. I have hidden XP's Task Bar and just have a button bar for my "badly behaved apps", which by the way are becoming fewer and fewer all the time. Once I get my desktop up, I can pull up the start menu for Vista from the bottom of my screen, launch Linux apps from the left and XP 32-bit apps from the right. So far the only negative is the lousy support for dual monitors...
On your points though; yes, the anti-virus will be an issue because it's supposed to get deep into the file management structure of the OS to really work. That's valid... but hey, if you have anti virus you're used to taking it up the rear once a year for a renewal and upgrade... this is nothing new.
Printers? There's no reason the printing subsystem couldn't be bi-directional within the VM, thus allowing the physical machine to print via the VM to the legacy printer. Hell, I do that today again with my VirtualBox machines... though I rarely print anything anyway these days. Yes, my setup is not "Joe-User" friendly, but it wouldn't take much to abstract that away so that the VM's printers just appear in the Printers menu.
Old games also may be an issue, but hopefully not. Any games written in recent years are all DirectX based, and thus pretty compatible with DirectX 10 in Vista. I've yet to encounter a game written in the last 5 years that won't run in Vista... though granted I'm not a big gamer and thus my experience is limited. Older than 5 years shouldn't be an issue because they were written to an hardware standard that's really out of date and thus shouldn't really press the hardware all that much.
You're right as well that Joe Public doesn't get virtualization. Done right, they never will have to because it should be just an invisible part of their computing experience. That's what I keep espousing to my developers when they ask questions, to the point that I have grown so weary of listening to them that I hide the VMware Tools icon on all their virtual machines. Most of them don't even realize any more that their dev servers are all virtual and have been for a year! All they know is that the Infrastructure department is really responsive when they need more storage, more RAM, more CPU's... whatever... in that we just ask them when we can take the system down, reassign resources and boot it back up again. They love that responsiveness and the smart developers don't care.
The dumb, bad developers... now they're the ones I get phone calls from saying that their code doesn't work because it's running in a VM. For them I have a special place in my Office Communicator groups...
Oh, and Outlook isn't sane anyway... so any problems you have on next startup would be expected. This is where IMAP and/or Exchange are great things because if the locally stored mail cache becomes corrupt, just flush it and start again.
What you're looking for is "Wake on LAN" but then you're not turning the computer off, you're putting it into suspend mode, which is an entirely different beast.
Not true. WOL is supported on network cards and BIOS... the operating system can be shut down entirely. WOL tells the BIOS to turn the system on, then the OS boots. Voila.
Yes, it means the system is still drawing some power, but it's on the order of fractions of a watt instead of multiples of 100 watts.
I use it all the time in my VMware farm for power management... we reduce to about 2/3 of our powered on hosts at night because we don't need them... then when work starts up again in the morning the hosts WOL and power on. The savings for the last couple of quarters since this was implemented have been significant.
Message Tracking in Exchange 2007 is virtually a lost cause if you have a lot of servers unless you want to write Powershell essays to gather, filter, process and output the tracking logs from disparate servers in a usable format.
Heh... and if you're a halfway decent ASP coder, then it's easy to do that. Just have it parse out the Exchange HT servers found in Active Directory, collate those logs in RAM (or temporary file, your pick) and then process with some basic text manipulation tools. Voila:) I did it in an afternoon and put a nice (?!?!?) web front end on it for my user community.
And if you want it to be faster at the collection and collation, then an earlier version of my program did "log shipping" in that it would take a copy of the latest log files once every 30 minutes and keep them on the reporting server. This turned out to be unnecessary because the time it took to collect the log files was actually pretty short since most of our Hub Transport servers were in our collo facility that forms the hub of our network, and I could just put the reporting server there.
As I understand it, the Exchange Management Console (the GUI) was a bit of an afterthought with Exchange 2007. Everything was intended to be done with Exchange Management Shell (Powershell). I think the only reason we didn't see more GUI functionality was because the Devs built the entire GUI on the Powershell, but I suspect ran out of time since they were coding to a deadline. That's why we've seen constant, incremental improvements in EMC since release.
Me? I architected, built and now do some maintenance on an Exchange 2007 system that supports all of our North American users... and I like it. It's a far cry from Exchange 2003, which I hated working with beyond VERY basic management. With 2007 I do most of my stuff through EMS instead of EMC because I'm comfortable with a command line. What can I say? I'm a UNIX geek. I've created a bunch of scripts that I can run any time to do just about anything I would need to do on a daily basis. And when I encounter something I've never done before... I create a script for that too just in case it comes up again.
Using EMS I was able to create a pretty quick and dirty web page in ASP for my users so they could do their own message tracking. I took away the necessity for them to call Helpdesk because they can just hit the Intranet, click a link and then provide it basic information about the email. It collates all that info from our numerous Hub Transport servers and then returns the results, allowing them to drill down further and (if it's queued) find out why.
No, Exchange 2007 is not made for the single-server environment. In fact I've recommended at least one friend of mine that they wait for 2010 because 2007 is really designed with the enterprise in mind.
Now, having said that I might also point out that generally those companies that HAVE migrated to 2007 are on ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements). We have an ELA for all of our software, and when 2010 is released we just go to our fulfillment site and download the ISO's. It costs us nothing more than we already pay... and we don't pay for the server... we pay per user. So it doesn't matter if we have one Exchange server per user, it'll still cost us the same (though mail routing would be a nightmare:) ) We won't pay for Exchange 2010 any more than most Enterprises will... we'll pay our user CAL as we've always done and just stand up the instances we need to support our user community.
The only cost to the ELA is that every few years I have to run reports on the licenses / CALs we've used... but having a good SCCM (SMS) infrastructure makes that a simple matter of dumping those reports to an Excel file and emailing it back to our rep.
YMMV... but I suspect I'll be asked to start testing Exchange 2010 sometime later this year with a prod rollout probably mid 2010.
For client-side API dev, you've got WebDAV in the OWA. To all intents and purposes the Outlook client is really just a WebDAV client that happens to cache stuff locally.
For server-side, you have Powershell, which actually gives you a very effective command line / API into the back end. As I understand it, the Exchange Management Console is in fact just sending Powershell commands behind the scenes... it just puts everything in a pretty (????) interface.
Basically in other words, yes... you could replace every admin tool and front end with your own quite simply, just maintaining Exchange on the back end. I've done some basic tool creation for administration since that's my work focus... but I know plenty of people who've written stuff using WebDAV to Exchange backends.
The only thing I find a true negative is that although you can program WebDAV from a non-Windows client, so far Powershell for Linux / BSD does not appear to be forthcoming.:)
Just as an academic exercise, we recently built out a server running SSD's. It was certainly interesting.
Basically, my testing found that generally when running a Windows operating system, the system booted quite quickly and the "feel" of the desktop was pretty good. However, I was hard pressed to say that it was really significantly better than the 10K 146GB SAS drives we were already using. Granted this was using SATA drives on a SAS/SATA combined controller (from HP), so we were able to test both configurations just by switching out drives.
Now, I will say though that once booted and running, synthetic benchmarks (Atto) actually resulted in some surprising results. When configured in a RAID 1, the read performance was generally pretty good, but only in the realms of 5-10% faster than the SAS drives in the same configuration. Write performance was the achilles heel because it plateaued early in the test and as you got up to larger write sizes the SAS drives actually pulled ahead by up to 20%.
Note that this wasn't terribly scientific, but a quick test hitting the servers across the network from a workstation attached to gig showed no discernible difference between application or file performance in either case. We also tested some SQL in this configuration and the results were about the same.
We blew both configurations away at that point and then created a VMware ESXi server. Again, the results were rather disappointing, with even a virtual desktop hosted on the ESXi box running with almost identical performance on the SAS drives to the SSD's. The virtual desktops tested were XP and Vista. A Linux guest also performed about the same.
Atto on the virtual desktops showed results pretty consistent with the raw Windows Server on the SSD's... about 5-10% max increase in performance on reads, but writes falling behind... though VMware's aggressive caching meant that performance was better as a VMware guest than bare metal (though only slightly)
I then ran a torture test with Atto running for a week on the SSD's, using VMware guests all running Atto at the same time. Note that during this week of constant read/write activity we noted a marked decline in performance on the SSD's, which my research says would be expected. In fact the read performance was almost a 1:1 match at the end of that week to the SAS drives, and write performance had suffered also by 5-10%.
It was decided that the problems associated with SSD's (performance degradation over time) coupled with cost meant that in reality it was not likely we were going to start using SSD's any time soon.
Granted, we didn't do any power monitoring; that was not a focal point of the test.
Now, having said all that, I put an SSD (Samsung) in my laptop recently with Vista and saw a visible and marked improvement in performance. I've been incredibly impressed with the SSD in a laptop... but if I'm totally honest with myself the performance of Vista on a server-class controller with SAS drives is pretty much identical. So the conclusion I drew from that (without a significant amount of benchmarking... just "seat of the pants") is that while SSD's DO bring server-class I/O performance to laptops and desktops, they really do nothing for a well optimized and properly configured server storage array.
I agree with just about everything you said. One other thing that bears mentioning though is that Eve is really NOT a single-player game. If you decide to go it "lone-wolf" style then yes, you're probably going to get bored unless you have the patience of a saint.
The point of Eve is community. Join corps, leverage them as a jump-off point for your own corp if you want, or work your way up the ranks. Just like real life. I've played on and off and been in a few corps. In most cases, I've left on really good terms and come out with loads of equipment, ISK and training (not to mention, friends that I made through Eve Online). Sure there have been times I've been raiding my ex corps thanks to a mission in my new corp... but that's half the fun.
For some, Eve is a bit TOO much like real life I think. I only stopped playing frequently about 8 months ago because I just didn't have time for it. But I still plan to return... my character is still sitting on a database somewhere and will one day be reactivated. Maybe I'll join another corp (currently independent), or maybe I'll use the equipment and money I have now to build myself a new corp... enlist some of my old friends if they're still around.
Because there is support for WPA2 to use TKIP, which is compatible with SOME Wireless B cards (with appropriate firmware). If you're using AES though, you're out of luck because that's only generally compatible with Wireless G and above cards.
I use AES because I prefer not having something that's hackable with a brute-force attack. Therefore Wireless B is not an option for me.
Question is... is it Wireless G? I ask because I know at home I use WPA2 for security, and that's not even supported at all by the 802.11b spec; WEP is your only horrendous choice. OK, I could create a DMZ'd wireless at home, but just for this thing?
I couldn't find any information saying that it's Wireless G, the only specs I could find say B. That's a big deal to me and many other people... even your average home user these days will usually use WPA over WEP.
I'm not trying to be mean... I really want one of these things, particularly at that price. I'm an old-school hacker:)
On a side-note... funnily enough yesterday I ordered my Beagleboard components... I'm hoping to start hacking on some fun projects soon:)
It's not the CPU clock that makes a difference... it's the RAM. The RAM on the Dell runs at almost half the speed of the RAM on the MBP. That architectural difference makes an HUGE difference in performance on the desktop, particularly with aggressive caching like in OSX or Vista.
Maybe, but back in 1985/1986 if you were a studio looking for a computer, then you were going to buy one with MIDI already in it... not one in which you could add a card. Computer literacy was lower then than it is now, even... and the thought of installing a card was anathema to the thought processes of these studio owners. Few studio owners would even know about the MIDI cards they could buy... only that some of their musicians said he/she needed MIDI in a computer.
As a result, the line item in the specs that said "MIDI ports built-in" or something along those lines, made the ST an obvious choice because it WAS the only off-the-shelf computer at the time with that feature.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously don't deal with many vertical apps. Most of them are not SMP aware, or tend to sit there hogging a single CPU/Core pretty much all the time. At least, this is true in the Windows world... UNIX is quite different, but there's a dearth of the applications my users want to run.
No, just 'cos I do it for a living doesn't mean I have to like it :)
And yet most processing workloads in apps I work with are single-threaded and not terribly scalable. The reality is that >1 CPU is exponentially more difficult to code for (at least so the excuses I hear from developers goes).
However, if your application can sit behind a load balancer and runs a single thread, why NOT have n*single CPU servers? Of course, that sort of takes away from the instant failover advantage. Ho hum :P
It's close enough. I played with this feature at VMworld last year, and when running SQL transactions along with a ping, we dropped one packet but the SQL transactions didn't miss a beat.
It's impressive enough... the two systems are working in lockstep, such that even memory is duplicated between the two systems. It's an extension on the existing VMotion function in VMware today. However, bear in mind it has some limitations; only one CPU is possible at the moment and you still have the overhead of really two VM's running at once instead of just one. So it's not a solution for ALL of your environment, just part of it.
I'm sure the limitations will be eased over time as they tune the technology... but as a first attempt it IS awesome. Thing is, in my environment the stuff that is needed so critically that it can't take an hardware failure is usually >1 CPU, so this isn't a solution... but I guess if you have some relatively low-load but high-criticality servers then you could find a use for it (web servers seem like a good place to do this).
And the answer is no, I don't think the end user will ever notice so long as your network infrastructure is good enough. Certainly, my users never notice a VMotion event.
My wife and I watched Heroes first season and I really like it. Enough that I wanted to watch it when it came on for the second season. But with the commercials every 10 minutes and 5 minutes of commercials at the end, I finally bailed. I'm sure I'll get the DVD for the second series and will probably like it a lot.
Meh... I wouldn't bet on it. The second season lost touch with everything that made the first season great; the charm, the wit, and the fun they had with the characters even as they descended into a dark and scary storyline. The neutered the single most interesting character in my opinion (Hiro) and turned him back into a bumbling idiot.
If I were you I'd skip season 2 entirely and just watch Season 3. It's better... not as good as season 1, but you can actually watch it and pretend season 2 never happened :D
Pity... because a lot of the sci-fi that "looks cheesy" is in fact among the best. This is precisely why we have such execrable movies as "Armageddon" trying to pass for science fiction these days; spectacle is everything, story is nothing.
By modern standards, 2001 "looks cheesy", yet is a seminal science fiction movie. See also The Andromeda Strain and THX1138.
No, I'm not an old fogey... all of these movies are older than me but show an incredible piece of science fiction as art... despite the cheesiness. Terminator... I was too young to see it in the movies when it was released... but it's also a great piece of cinematic science fiction, and one of the few time travel stories that actually contains within it the logic that makes it all work. Most time travel is used as a crutch in so-called "science fiction" (witness most Star Trek time travel stories) or as a simple tool to tell a bigger story (Doctor Who).
Terminator was a time travel story that was internally consistent as well as being a great and tense chase movie. You really got the feeling that no matter how fast and how far Sarah ran, the Terminator would catch up eventually even if it took years. That's why she had to turn around, face and destroy it.
Um... those shows were all around 30 years ago... the GP's shows were 10-20... so I guess the answer to your question would be "yes, and get off my damned lawn" ;)
In a way you're both right and wrong. TV in the 70's and 80's was mostly populist crap with the occasional gem. However, in many ways TV quality improved dramatically into the 90's and turn of the century... only to find itself mired in "reality show hell" sometime around 2002-2003 (aftermath of the dot-com bubble).
I'm afraid in some ways I agree with the GP... most TV these days is cheap to make and pretty much worthless. The only reason I even keep cable any more is (a) I have kids who enjoy their TV shows and (b) Discovery / History / Science etc. I barely watch anything else except maybe House... which while it's the same script every week with minor modifications, at least is an enjoyable distraction.
The personnel may not, but the building they're housed in might. Oh, and electricity costs, overall infrastructure share cost (plumbing, networking, etc).
And from my experience, NASA doesn't build a new comms infrastructure for every launch. They have large consolidated arrays that are actually owned by separate companies... sometimes literally, sometimes they're just "shadow" companies. Communications time is "rented" from these companies at a set rate.
Yes, sometimes it's all just a shell game when dealing within NASA and the USA, but it makes a certain kind of sense. Instead of having a communications infrastructure that's "in the dark" for 12 hours a day and can't talk to the rovers, they instead rent that infrastructure out to people "looking the other way" and rent antenna time in Australia, Japan, Russia etc. Having the arrays manage by another company actually keeps the books easier to keep straight than if you were a project owning your own infrastructure and leasing out antenna time to projects from ESA.
And no, not a rocket scientist... but drank with plenty and a few have talked about this :)
I feel like I tell my kids that all the time... anyway;
Counter with an offer of sale of 49% of the company; a non-controlling share, to the mega-corp for half what they're offering. They still get a "seat on the board" and get to work with you, not to mention get to profit from your profits.
Yeah, it means that in the event your idea goes under you've only got 49% of the money you could've walked away with... but that's the point... 49% of the money is better than 0% of it (which is what you're potentially going to get if you walk away), or having 100% of the money and 0% of the business.
Learn from my mistakes. I did the same thing... I lost my business to another smoother operator, then lost my job within a year due to (cutbacks) (this was ~2002... last time the economy was tough). As it turned out he made a great living off my idea and concept, and I got the shaft.
My new business... well, I'm building that one on my own and I won't make that mistake again.
Thank you... but I would disagree with that assertion. We as technical people already know the contents of the article are false. Yes, I read it... but yes, I researched the source BEFORE I read it because that's the sort of person I am.
As a technical person myself, I looked at the summary and immediately saw false and misleading information. Yes, sometimes the summaries are a little "off" on Slashdot, but I can confirm the summary was accurate in this case. Nonetheless, simply put your computer will not "jitter" and "slow down" in the event your network connection is lost, because the network is NOT the computer, despite what Larry Ellison says.
I work "off network" quite often, and though it is nice to have Internet access, it's rarely required to do business proposals, or play most video games, or edit photos/videos, or... well, let's just say that 95% of what I do on my computer probably doesn't need Internet access. If my computer jittered and slowed down when I'm off network because the network's not there, I think I'd get a better computer.
Respect in this case comes from the Internet Innovation Alliance who fund it. Of course, AT&T funds the IIA
Make of that what you will. I know that the first thing I think is "shill", followed closely by "astroturf".
Watch for this study to be cited in some bills regarding tiered service agreements any day now.
Meh... this just smacks of astroturfing for "tiered service agreements" that the ISP's have been trying to push for a decade!
Besides, aren't random freezes and jittering just part of Windows "charm"? :)
Then you're in luck... it's coming.
I recently bought myself a BeagleBoard setup and have had great fun and great luck running Angstrom and Ubuntu on an ARM platform. At the moment I'm playing with putting a Gentoo distribution on it, and while compiles are slow (come on, it's only a 500/600Mhz CPU) I think it's quite possible to build out a very free, open setup that is actually usable.
My plan with my board is to develop a car PC. Yeah, I know... how 2001 of me... but it's not because I want a PC in my car necessarily, but I want to play with embedded type tech in an harsh environment and all the integration that requires. It sounds like fun to me because... well... I'm a geek.
ARM is free. Just as any platform that Linux supports is free. In fact, the ARM architecture is far more free than x86 because you can choose so many different manufacturers for your ARM CPU. The BeagleBoard happens to use a really sweet TI ARM CPU that has an integrated DSP and rudimentary (though impressive) 3D acceleration. All this in a silent, fanless board that integrates most of the hardware you'd ever need from a project.
Yeah, there are some bad points... like the fact that you can't use much non-free software because it's just not available... but why would you want to? The free alternatives are more than acceptable and actually quite fun to play with. Hell, on my Gentoo desktop at home (built originally with a 2005.x install) I don't think I've used anything but free and open software in years.
Obviously someone who doesn't remember the old OS X and "Classic" environment. That was a virtual machine before virtual machines became "cool".
Is it pretty and wonderful and exciting? Not really... but it DID work. Classic continued to work all the way up to the point that Apple moved to Intel... and along with Carbon it provided developers a lovely, smooth transition path to the new OS X API's. Sure, it wasn't perfect... but it was far better than what Microsoft did with Vista.
When Microsoft released Vista, they released their own OS X... a very different OS with some very specific needs and care and feeding instructions. They did this with no real backward compatibility layer (which is what this is), and because of their mostly closed and incomprehensible API's provided few paths for developers to smoothly transition to the new platform. This is an attempt to rectify part of that, and I for one applaud Microsoft for doing this, even if it's not exactly an original idea.
Now, if Microsoft would just give away their dev tools on the installation DVD like Apple do...
But it fixes the PERCEIVED problem that Vista is incompatible with lots of legacy software. Microsoft can point at Windows 7 and say that it runs MORE than Vista, and actually be truthful about it.
Yes, it's all semantics at the end of the day. In truth I've been running 64-bit Vista on my work laptop for months now and I actually really like it. Although I still deal with the occasional incompatibility, it's usually nothing I can't work around. It's far more stable than XP, and I feel a lot more secure (yes, UAC actually does succeed so long as you don't turn it off!). It's still Windows, so it still frustrates the hell out of me sometimes as I'm a Mac user at home and in my career have been a UNIX admin several times... but hey, this is what I do for a living and I accept that. If I worked only with technology that I liked, I'd bore of the technology far too quickly and start to dislike it.
This is mostly marketing hype. The same functions they're touting here you can do with free software today. I have VirtualBox on my Vista machine, on which I run an XP AND a Gentoo setup in seamless mode. I have hidden XP's Task Bar and just have a button bar for my "badly behaved apps", which by the way are becoming fewer and fewer all the time. Once I get my desktop up, I can pull up the start menu for Vista from the bottom of my screen, launch Linux apps from the left and XP 32-bit apps from the right. So far the only negative is the lousy support for dual monitors...
On your points though; yes, the anti-virus will be an issue because it's supposed to get deep into the file management structure of the OS to really work. That's valid... but hey, if you have anti virus you're used to taking it up the rear once a year for a renewal and upgrade... this is nothing new.
Printers? There's no reason the printing subsystem couldn't be bi-directional within the VM, thus allowing the physical machine to print via the VM to the legacy printer. Hell, I do that today again with my VirtualBox machines... though I rarely print anything anyway these days. Yes, my setup is not "Joe-User" friendly, but it wouldn't take much to abstract that away so that the VM's printers just appear in the Printers menu.
Old games also may be an issue, but hopefully not. Any games written in recent years are all DirectX based, and thus pretty compatible with DirectX 10 in Vista. I've yet to encounter a game written in the last 5 years that won't run in Vista... though granted I'm not a big gamer and thus my experience is limited. Older than 5 years shouldn't be an issue because they were written to an hardware standard that's really out of date and thus shouldn't really press the hardware all that much.
You're right as well that Joe Public doesn't get virtualization. Done right, they never will have to because it should be just an invisible part of their computing experience. That's what I keep espousing to my developers when they ask questions, to the point that I have grown so weary of listening to them that I hide the VMware Tools icon on all their virtual machines. Most of them don't even realize any more that their dev servers are all virtual and have been for a year! All they know is that the Infrastructure department is really responsive when they need more storage, more RAM, more CPU's... whatever... in that we just ask them when we can take the system down, reassign resources and boot it back up again. They love that responsiveness and the smart developers don't care.
The dumb, bad developers... now they're the ones I get phone calls from saying that their code doesn't work because it's running in a VM. For them I have a special place in my Office Communicator groups...
The /f switch is a lovely thing ;)
Oh, and Outlook isn't sane anyway... so any problems you have on next startup would be expected. This is where IMAP and/or Exchange are great things because if the locally stored mail cache becomes corrupt, just flush it and start again.
What you're looking for is "Wake on LAN" but then you're not turning the computer off, you're putting it into suspend mode, which is an entirely different beast.
Not true. WOL is supported on network cards and BIOS... the operating system can be shut down entirely. WOL tells the BIOS to turn the system on, then the OS boots. Voila.
Yes, it means the system is still drawing some power, but it's on the order of fractions of a watt instead of multiples of 100 watts.
I use it all the time in my VMware farm for power management... we reduce to about 2/3 of our powered on hosts at night because we don't need them... then when work starts up again in the morning the hosts WOL and power on. The savings for the last couple of quarters since this was implemented have been significant.
Message Tracking in Exchange 2007 is virtually a lost cause if you have a lot of servers unless you want to write Powershell essays to gather, filter, process and output the tracking logs from disparate servers in a usable format.
Heh... and if you're a halfway decent ASP coder, then it's easy to do that. Just have it parse out the Exchange HT servers found in Active Directory, collate those logs in RAM (or temporary file, your pick) and then process with some basic text manipulation tools. Voila :) I did it in an afternoon and put a nice (?!?!?) web front end on it for my user community.
And if you want it to be faster at the collection and collation, then an earlier version of my program did "log shipping" in that it would take a copy of the latest log files once every 30 minutes and keep them on the reporting server. This turned out to be unnecessary because the time it took to collect the log files was actually pretty short since most of our Hub Transport servers were in our collo facility that forms the hub of our network, and I could just put the reporting server there.
As I understand it, the Exchange Management Console (the GUI) was a bit of an afterthought with Exchange 2007. Everything was intended to be done with Exchange Management Shell (Powershell). I think the only reason we didn't see more GUI functionality was because the Devs built the entire GUI on the Powershell, but I suspect ran out of time since they were coding to a deadline. That's why we've seen constant, incremental improvements in EMC since release.
Me? I architected, built and now do some maintenance on an Exchange 2007 system that supports all of our North American users... and I like it. It's a far cry from Exchange 2003, which I hated working with beyond VERY basic management. With 2007 I do most of my stuff through EMS instead of EMC because I'm comfortable with a command line. What can I say? I'm a UNIX geek. I've created a bunch of scripts that I can run any time to do just about anything I would need to do on a daily basis. And when I encounter something I've never done before... I create a script for that too just in case it comes up again.
Using EMS I was able to create a pretty quick and dirty web page in ASP for my users so they could do their own message tracking. I took away the necessity for them to call Helpdesk because they can just hit the Intranet, click a link and then provide it basic information about the email. It collates all that info from our numerous Hub Transport servers and then returns the results, allowing them to drill down further and (if it's queued) find out why.
No, Exchange 2007 is not made for the single-server environment. In fact I've recommended at least one friend of mine that they wait for 2010 because 2007 is really designed with the enterprise in mind.
Now, having said that I might also point out that generally those companies that HAVE migrated to 2007 are on ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements). We have an ELA for all of our software, and when 2010 is released we just go to our fulfillment site and download the ISO's. It costs us nothing more than we already pay... and we don't pay for the server... we pay per user. So it doesn't matter if we have one Exchange server per user, it'll still cost us the same (though mail routing would be a nightmare :) ) We won't pay for Exchange 2010 any more than most Enterprises will... we'll pay our user CAL as we've always done and just stand up the instances we need to support our user community.
The only cost to the ELA is that every few years I have to run reports on the licenses / CALs we've used... but having a good SCCM (SMS) infrastructure makes that a simple matter of dumping those reports to an Excel file and emailing it back to our rep.
YMMV... but I suspect I'll be asked to start testing Exchange 2010 sometime later this year with a prod rollout probably mid 2010.
For client-side API dev, you've got WebDAV in the OWA. To all intents and purposes the Outlook client is really just a WebDAV client that happens to cache stuff locally.
For server-side, you have Powershell, which actually gives you a very effective command line / API into the back end. As I understand it, the Exchange Management Console is in fact just sending Powershell commands behind the scenes... it just puts everything in a pretty (????) interface.
Basically in other words, yes... you could replace every admin tool and front end with your own quite simply, just maintaining Exchange on the back end. I've done some basic tool creation for administration since that's my work focus... but I know plenty of people who've written stuff using WebDAV to Exchange backends.
The only thing I find a true negative is that although you can program WebDAV from a non-Windows client, so far Powershell for Linux / BSD does not appear to be forthcoming. :)
Just as an academic exercise, we recently built out a server running SSD's. It was certainly interesting.
Basically, my testing found that generally when running a Windows operating system, the system booted quite quickly and the "feel" of the desktop was pretty good. However, I was hard pressed to say that it was really significantly better than the 10K 146GB SAS drives we were already using. Granted this was using SATA drives on a SAS/SATA combined controller (from HP), so we were able to test both configurations just by switching out drives.
Now, I will say though that once booted and running, synthetic benchmarks (Atto) actually resulted in some surprising results. When configured in a RAID 1, the read performance was generally pretty good, but only in the realms of 5-10% faster than the SAS drives in the same configuration. Write performance was the achilles heel because it plateaued early in the test and as you got up to larger write sizes the SAS drives actually pulled ahead by up to 20%.
Note that this wasn't terribly scientific, but a quick test hitting the servers across the network from a workstation attached to gig showed no discernible difference between application or file performance in either case. We also tested some SQL in this configuration and the results were about the same.
We blew both configurations away at that point and then created a VMware ESXi server. Again, the results were rather disappointing, with even a virtual desktop hosted on the ESXi box running with almost identical performance on the SAS drives to the SSD's. The virtual desktops tested were XP and Vista. A Linux guest also performed about the same.
Atto on the virtual desktops showed results pretty consistent with the raw Windows Server on the SSD's... about 5-10% max increase in performance on reads, but writes falling behind... though VMware's aggressive caching meant that performance was better as a VMware guest than bare metal (though only slightly)
I then ran a torture test with Atto running for a week on the SSD's, using VMware guests all running Atto at the same time. Note that during this week of constant read/write activity we noted a marked decline in performance on the SSD's, which my research says would be expected. In fact the read performance was almost a 1:1 match at the end of that week to the SAS drives, and write performance had suffered also by 5-10%.
It was decided that the problems associated with SSD's (performance degradation over time) coupled with cost meant that in reality it was not likely we were going to start using SSD's any time soon.
Granted, we didn't do any power monitoring; that was not a focal point of the test.
Now, having said all that, I put an SSD (Samsung) in my laptop recently with Vista and saw a visible and marked improvement in performance. I've been incredibly impressed with the SSD in a laptop... but if I'm totally honest with myself the performance of Vista on a server-class controller with SAS drives is pretty much identical. So the conclusion I drew from that (without a significant amount of benchmarking... just "seat of the pants") is that while SSD's DO bring server-class I/O performance to laptops and desktops, they really do nothing for a well optimized and properly configured server storage array.
I agree with just about everything you said. One other thing that bears mentioning though is that Eve is really NOT a single-player game. If you decide to go it "lone-wolf" style then yes, you're probably going to get bored unless you have the patience of a saint.
The point of Eve is community. Join corps, leverage them as a jump-off point for your own corp if you want, or work your way up the ranks. Just like real life. I've played on and off and been in a few corps. In most cases, I've left on really good terms and come out with loads of equipment, ISK and training (not to mention, friends that I made through Eve Online). Sure there have been times I've been raiding my ex corps thanks to a mission in my new corp... but that's half the fun.
For some, Eve is a bit TOO much like real life I think. I only stopped playing frequently about 8 months ago because I just didn't have time for it. But I still plan to return... my character is still sitting on a database somewhere and will one day be reactivated. Maybe I'll join another corp (currently independent), or maybe I'll use the equipment and money I have now to build myself a new corp... enlist some of my old friends if they're still around.
That's what Eve is all about.
Because there is support for WPA2 to use TKIP, which is compatible with SOME Wireless B cards (with appropriate firmware). If you're using AES though, you're out of luck because that's only generally compatible with Wireless G and above cards.
I use AES because I prefer not having something that's hackable with a brute-force attack. Therefore Wireless B is not an option for me.
Question is... is it Wireless G? I ask because I know at home I use WPA2 for security, and that's not even supported at all by the 802.11b spec; WEP is your only horrendous choice. OK, I could create a DMZ'd wireless at home, but just for this thing?
I couldn't find any information saying that it's Wireless G, the only specs I could find say B. That's a big deal to me and many other people... even your average home user these days will usually use WPA over WEP.
I'm not trying to be mean... I really want one of these things, particularly at that price. I'm an old-school hacker :)
On a side-note... funnily enough yesterday I ordered my Beagleboard components... I'm hoping to start hacking on some fun projects soon :)
It's not the CPU clock that makes a difference... it's the RAM. The RAM on the Dell runs at almost half the speed of the RAM on the MBP. That architectural difference makes an HUGE difference in performance on the desktop, particularly with aggressive caching like in OSX or Vista.
Maybe, but back in 1985/1986 if you were a studio looking for a computer, then you were going to buy one with MIDI already in it... not one in which you could add a card. Computer literacy was lower then than it is now, even... and the thought of installing a card was anathema to the thought processes of these studio owners. Few studio owners would even know about the MIDI cards they could buy... only that some of their musicians said he/she needed MIDI in a computer.
As a result, the line item in the specs that said "MIDI ports built-in" or something along those lines, made the ST an obvious choice because it WAS the only off-the-shelf computer at the time with that feature.