Not at all. In fact, ads typically aren't served directly through Akamais caching technology, AFAIK. Most of the content that gets cached on Akamai servers are things like images (which virtually every major commercial site is chock full of these days), data files (Windows Update), etc. Typically ad serving and web caching don't work well together since the advertisers want different ads displayed each time you visit a particular site, not the exact same ad over and over and over...
I think running a mail server is a bit more complicated than a webserver or a streaming server for video
It sounds to me like you don't understand what it is that Akamai does. They're not just running web & streaming servers on their 15k machines. They're distributing content in real time in a way thtat vastly improves user access all around the world. You may have heard when Victorias Secret held their first video-streaming lingerie show. Well their servers couldn't handle the load because of all the people trying to watch it. They became an Akamai customer, and Akamai was able to redistribute their streams in real-time all over the globe. To be able to take video (or just web content) from a single source and distribute it quickly and efficiently to thousands of distributed users in real-time is a huge undertaking. Akamai has some very impressive technology to be able to do this.
I'm not saying that running a mail service like Hotmail is a piece of cake, but I do think that what Akamai does is a lot more difficult and impressive when you think about it. If Akamai's distributed environment were to drop off the net then you probably wouldn't be able to access any of the on-line services of most of their customers. (And that's just a small subset of their customer base) The ability to keep websites like those of Microsoft, eBay, Fed Ex, Red Hat, etc. all highly responsive to end users is not a simple feat by any stretch of the imagination.
more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe... are overseen by hundreds of administrators.
Heh. I used to work at Akamai which provides content delivery services for many of the biggest sites on the web. They have somewhere over 15,000 servers that are managed by tens of administrators, not hundreds. In fact, a typical NOCC (yes, 2 'C's for Akamai) shift at Akamai is only staffed by 8 or so people, with only a couple of senior level admins on call. And they're delivering all sorts of web-based content, including streaming, not just e-mail. But then Akamai runs them all on linux, whereas I belive Hotmail is all Windows based. You do the math.
My first thought in reading about huge magnetic fields was that this is the modern-day equivilant of The "Philadelphia Experiment". If you've seen the move by the same name you know the basics. Supposedly the US Navy tested using huge magnetic fields around a ship in the 1940's to see if it would make it invisible. The story goes that the ship disappeared but also phase-shifted and some sailors on board ended up partially embedded within the hull of the ship when it finally re-appeared.
I also get a kick out of all the hacks that MIT has pulled off at the Havard/Yale football games. One at least one of those occasions the local papers stated that MIT had won the game. (In fact I seem to recall they DID win, technically, by hacking into the scoreboard and changing the score during one game)
If you don't like someone in france, send them a sock each day.
Sounds to me like somebody should start a sock-mailing campaign targeting the head of the French Department of Culture and any other French politicans responsible for this absurdity.
what will be the complications when our complex implants' OS gives us the equivalent of the BSOD?
Not to worry. It's still a long way off. Microsoft won't release the first beta of "Windows for Prosthetics" for at least a decade or two. It'll probably take a minimum of 5 years before this technology is ready for prime-time, then another 5 years before bionic prosthetic use reaches a critical mass to even get on MS's radar screen. After that it's another 5+ years of all the marketing, vaporware hype, press-releases, etc. that Microsoft goes through before they finally manage to push a first buggy release out the door.
What's to keep Linux & friends from simply naming the next version 2.8 (actually 2.9 given the test/release numbering of the past), as a way to prevent legal problems from arising from SCO's nonsense?
My dad tells this story from time to time. I don't know if it's true, but it makes a good story. Back in the early days of computers when only big corporations had them, most software was written in-house by staff programmers. One of the major soda manufacturers had a new mainframe and had one of their top programmers write an accounting package for them. It so happens that the manufacturer was a major competitor of 7-Up. Well for whatever reason the programmer left the company on not-too-good terms. The very next time the manufacturer when to print out a report from the accounting package, every 7th page contained the phrase "Drink 7-Up" in big block letters. They had their remaining programmers go back through the code and try to remove this new "feature" but they were unable to. This guy was so good that he'd embedded the logic for this nastygram right into the actual logic of the accounting package. Supposedly there was code that would dynamically generate other instructions that, when executed would generate other instructions, etc. They were supposedly unable to get rid of the 7-Up message without breaking other parts of the program, so they ended up having to go back to square one and write a whole new accounting package.
Every industrial datacenter I have been in places racks over either empty spaces, or tiles with a large vent in them.
That works to an extent, but what if the cabinet is pretty much fully loaded? We loaded up 8-foot cabinets with 30+ 1U dual CPU servers. The amount of air coming up through the holes underneath the cabinets were never enough to cool all that hardware down. Besides, my original example was just that - an example.
Cooling, IMO, is a secondary use of raised floors.
The real usefulness is the ability to run cabling from any point A to any point B in the floor space.
That's good to an extent, as long as the cable runs aren't too long. Go take a look at an enterprise grade colocation hosting facility and you may change your mind. I've spent a lot of time at one of the top-tier MCI facilities. It has a raised floor that's used for cooling and power distribution, but all networking is done via 3 or 4 layers of overhead cable trays. It's much easier to climb on top of a cable ladder that can easily support your weight to run a cable the length of a datacenter than it is to crawl underneath a floor trying to fish a cable past supports, power lines, etc.
If something is airtight, putting air in one end will move air out the other end.
The problem lies with larger datacenter environments. Imagine a room the size of a football field. Along the walls are rows of air conditioners that blow cold air underneath the raised floor. Put a cabinet in the middle of the room and replace the tiles around it with perforated ones and you get a lot of cooling for that cabinet. Now start adding more rows & rows of cabinets along with perforated tiles in front of each of them. Eventually you get to a point where very little cold air makes it to those servers in the middle of the room because it's flowing up through other vents before it can get there. What's the solution? Removing servers in the middle of hotspots & adding more AC? Adding ducting under the floor to direct more air to those hotspots? Not very cheap & effective approaches...
You're not required to get one of these EZ passes are you?
Nope. It's offered as an incentive to pass through tolls much quicker. It can be quite useful if you drive toll roads on a regular basis, especially if there's a lot of traffic backed up at tolls.
Do you have to interact with people at the toll booths?
Nope. You don't interact with people at all if you have an EZ Pass.
The ones I've seen here, just have a booth at one end...you either throw the money in the basket, or hand to attendent...and drive on. There's no booth at the end of the thing...so, do you have to check in at one end and check out at the other?
Precisely (about booths at both ends). We do have some single toll booths in a few places (heading up to NH, bridges/tunnels that enter cities like NYC & Boston, etc). CT got rid of all of theirs years ago. But toll roads like the New York State Throughway, the Massachusetts Turnpike, etc. have toll booths both at their entrances and exits. You get a ticket when you enter, and pay when you exit. The toll amount varies depending on where you enter & exit. The cost increases the longer you stay on the highway. Going one exit might only cost $0.50 but going the entire length of the road can cost a few dollars. The EZ Pass is a little box you mount on your windshield behind the rear view mirror. If you have one then you can drive through specially marked lanes at the toll booths that will read a serial number from that box. In some cases you don't even have to stop - you can drive through at up to about 15mph. It sure beats waiting in line to get a ticket or pay your toll!
What i want to know is are there any migrations of birds from overseas such as africa and such?
I forget where I read it but I came across something that said the US was concerned about migratory paths through Alaska. Since parts of the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Strait, etc. provide land masses only tens of miles apart between the Russian and American mainlands it would provide easy stepping stones between the two continents. I'm not sure if there are any migratory paths along those routes or not, but it's definitely within the realm of possibilities. So while you may not see migratory routes directly between Africa and the US there's the possiblity of a path for the virus to north America through Alaska.
Microsoft has had success playing the catch-up game in the past, but I think this time the lag is going to cost them.
While I do agree with your comments about MS playing catch-up, I do think that if they play their cards right they could succeed in penetrating at least part of Googles ad space. MS isn't shy about throwing money where it thinks it'd do them good in the long run. If they started out with a pay-per-view instead of pay-per-click model, or even paid website owners significantly more per-click then it could help them to get more of a foothold.
Personally I'd consider displaying both Googles & MSN's ads on my websites as long as one or the other didn't have an exclusivity clause in their agreements. At least until I got a better handle on which one generates more revenue for me. If MSN's ads turned out to generate more revenue for me then I'd probably switch, but it'd be up to MSN to prove to me that that's the case.
Interesting thought, but I doubt even M$ would have the ability to sustain such a program for very long. How many poor college types like Linus would they have to hire & shut up to truely stifle the FOSS movement? Every year colleges & universities around the world are cranking out more computer geeks who embrace FOSS. To shut them all up M$ would go broke trying to hire them all.
You know, this only happens because Microsoft is the industry standard
Microsoft is the "industry standard" only because they are big & powerful & have the ability to force others to do things their way. Standards are based upon community support. What DVD Jon is doing is showing that there's little community support for Microsofts so-called "standards".
...then you'd see that it said Mazda is testing a USB key in a concept car. Concept cars are prototypes of what the auto companies think cars MIGHT be like in the future. Many "features" in concept cars never actually make it into production. So despite the title of this article, Mazda isn't switching to USB keys - they're using it in a test vehicle that may never even see the light of day.
The real key to AI lies in software, and superior algorithms.
Personally I think it'll require a huge paradigm shift in the way all digital computing is currently performed. Trying to force AI into a system run by a digital processor, whether it's an x86 or some other current-day architecture, results in pretty significant limitations. True intelligence isn't binary - there are an infinite number of shades of grey that come with it.
I don't think we'll see real AI until the next major advancement in computing hits, but I don't think anybody currently knows precisely what that'll be. It'll be something on the order of the transition from analog vacuum tubes to digital microprocessors.
How would they attach tags to things like plastic bags (frozen/fresh veggies) individual pieces of produce (they're now starting to use lasers to etch barcodes onto the skin of fruits), and other small or unusually shaped items? Barcodes can be put on almost anything no matter what the shape or size. Can the same be done with RFID tags?
And what about boxes that have multiple barcodes? Cell phones are one example - they have serial numbers, ESN's, etc. that all need to be scanned at different times for different reasons. How do you do this with RFID? I suppose you could say that the RFID that begins with one prefix is a serial number, with another prefix is an ESN, etc. but then you put a lot more in the way of constraints on the manufactureres, and I doubt they'd like that.
Until the general population of computer users become smart enough to know not to open strange attachments
A-men! I used to work for a company that used MS Exchange for e-mail among a handful of offices scattered around the US. Thankfully I was in an office made up mostly of tech-savvy people. Whenever word got out of a new virus/worm e-mail message our IT department would send out a warning message like "Don't open any e-mail with a subject line of 'foo'". Nobody in our office ever did, but throughout the rest of the day we'd get spammed with multiple copies of the spam/virus/worm because it seemed that every non-technical idiot in the other offices opened up multiple copies of those e-mails anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
"services" = ads (mostly)
Not at all. In fact, ads typically aren't served directly through Akamais caching technology, AFAIK. Most of the content that gets cached on Akamai servers are things like images (which virtually every major commercial site is chock full of these days), data files (Windows Update), etc. Typically ad serving and web caching don't work well together since the advertisers want different ads displayed each time you visit a particular site, not the exact same ad over and over and over...
I think running a mail server is a bit more complicated than a webserver or a streaming server for video
It sounds to me like you don't understand what it is that Akamai does. They're not just running web & streaming servers on their 15k machines. They're distributing content in real time in a way thtat vastly improves user access all around the world. You may have heard when Victorias Secret held their first video-streaming lingerie show. Well their servers couldn't handle the load because of all the people trying to watch it. They became an Akamai customer, and Akamai was able to redistribute their streams in real-time all over the globe. To be able to take video (or just web content) from a single source and distribute it quickly and efficiently to thousands of distributed users in real-time is a huge undertaking. Akamai has some very impressive technology to be able to do this.
I'm not saying that running a mail service like Hotmail is a piece of cake, but I do think that what Akamai does is a lot more difficult and impressive when you think about it. If Akamai's distributed environment were to drop off the net then you probably wouldn't be able to access any of the on-line services of most of their customers. (And that's just a small subset of their customer base) The ability to keep websites like those of Microsoft, eBay, Fed Ex, Red Hat, etc. all highly responsive to end users is not a simple feat by any stretch of the imagination.
more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe ... are overseen by hundreds of administrators.
Heh. I used to work at Akamai which provides content delivery services for many of the biggest sites on the web. They have somewhere over 15,000 servers that are managed by tens of administrators, not hundreds. In fact, a typical NOCC (yes, 2 'C's for Akamai) shift at Akamai is only staffed by 8 or so people, with only a couple of senior level admins on call. And they're delivering all sorts of web-based content, including streaming, not just e-mail.
But then Akamai runs them all on linux, whereas I belive Hotmail is all Windows based. You do the math.
Will the US get second season episodes around the same time they're broadcast in the UK (and the rest of the world)?
Considering the second season has already started airing, probably not...
My first thought in reading about huge magnetic fields was that this is the modern-day equivilant of The "Philadelphia Experiment". If you've seen the move by the same name you know the basics. Supposedly the US Navy tested using huge magnetic fields around a ship in the 1940's to see if it would make it invisible. The story goes that the ship disappeared but also phase-shifted and some sailors on board ended up partially embedded within the hull of the ship when it finally re-appeared.
Can be found here. Unfortunately it ends in 2004...
One of the favorite ones that I witnessed firsthand was the police car on top of the MIT dome.
I also get a kick out of all the hacks that MIT has pulled off at the Havard/Yale football games. One at least one of those occasions the local papers stated that MIT had won the game. (In fact I seem to recall they DID win, technically, by hacking into the scoreboard and changing the score during one game)
If you don't like someone in france, send them a sock each day.
Sounds to me like somebody should start a sock-mailing campaign targeting the head of the French Department of Culture and any other French politicans responsible for this absurdity.
what will be the complications when our complex implants' OS gives us the equivalent of the BSOD?
Not to worry. It's still a long way off. Microsoft won't release the first beta of "Windows for Prosthetics" for at least a decade or two. It'll probably take a minimum of 5 years before this technology is ready for prime-time, then another 5 years before bionic prosthetic use reaches a critical mass to even get on MS's radar screen. After that it's another 5+ years of all the marketing, vaporware hype, press-releases, etc. that Microsoft goes through before they finally manage to push a first buggy release out the door.
UserFriendly has a dig at Sony (as well as Microsoft) in today's strip
What's to keep Linux & friends from simply naming the next version 2.8 (actually 2.9 given the test/release numbering of the past), as a way to prevent legal problems from arising from SCO's nonsense?
My dad tells this story from time to time. I don't know if it's true, but it makes a good story. Back in the early days of computers when only big corporations had them, most software was written in-house by staff programmers. One of the major soda manufacturers had a new mainframe and had one of their top programmers write an accounting package for them. It so happens that the manufacturer was a major competitor of 7-Up. Well for whatever reason the programmer left the company on not-too-good terms. The very next time the manufacturer when to print out a report from the accounting package, every 7th page contained the phrase "Drink 7-Up" in big block letters. They had their remaining programmers go back through the code and try to remove this new "feature" but they were unable to. This guy was so good that he'd embedded the logic for this nastygram right into the actual logic of the accounting package. Supposedly there was code that would dynamically generate other instructions that, when executed would generate other instructions, etc. They were supposedly unable to get rid of the 7-Up message without breaking other parts of the program, so they ended up having to go back to square one and write a whole new accounting package.
So the story goes...
Every industrial datacenter I have been in places racks over either empty spaces, or tiles with a large vent in them.
That works to an extent, but what if the cabinet is pretty much fully loaded? We loaded up 8-foot cabinets with 30+ 1U dual CPU servers. The amount of air coming up through the holes underneath the cabinets were never enough to cool all that hardware down. Besides, my original example was just that - an example.
Cooling, IMO, is a secondary use of raised floors.
The real usefulness is the ability to run cabling from any point A to any point B in the floor space.
That's good to an extent, as long as the cable runs aren't too long. Go take a look at an enterprise grade colocation hosting facility and you may change your mind. I've spent a lot of time at one of the top-tier MCI facilities. It has a raised floor that's used for cooling and power distribution, but all networking is done via 3 or 4 layers of overhead cable trays. It's much easier to climb on top of a cable ladder that can easily support your weight to run a cable the length of a datacenter than it is to crawl underneath a floor trying to fish a cable past supports, power lines, etc.
If something is airtight, putting air in one end will move air out the other end.
The problem lies with larger datacenter environments. Imagine a room the size of a football field. Along the walls are rows of air conditioners that blow cold air underneath the raised floor. Put a cabinet in the middle of the room and replace the tiles around it with perforated ones and you get a lot of cooling for that cabinet. Now start adding more rows & rows of cabinets along with perforated tiles in front of each of them. Eventually you get to a point where very little cold air makes it to those servers in the middle of the room because it's flowing up through other vents before it can get there. What's the solution? Removing servers in the middle of hotspots & adding more AC? Adding ducting under the floor to direct more air to those hotspots? Not very cheap & effective approaches...
You're not required to get one of these EZ passes are you?
Nope. It's offered as an incentive to pass through tolls much quicker. It can be quite useful if you drive toll roads on a regular basis, especially if there's a lot of traffic backed up at tolls.
Do you have to interact with people at the toll booths?
Nope. You don't interact with people at all if you have an EZ Pass.
The ones I've seen here, just have a booth at one end...you either throw the money in the basket, or hand to attendent...and drive on. There's no booth at the end of the thing...so, do you have to check in at one end and check out at the other?
Precisely (about booths at both ends). We do have some single toll booths in a few places (heading up to NH, bridges/tunnels that enter cities like NYC & Boston, etc). CT got rid of all of theirs years ago. But toll roads like the New York State Throughway, the Massachusetts Turnpike, etc. have toll booths both at their entrances and exits. You get a ticket when you enter, and pay when you exit. The toll amount varies depending on where you enter & exit. The cost increases the longer you stay on the highway. Going one exit might only cost $0.50 but going the entire length of the road can cost a few dollars. The EZ Pass is a little box you mount on your windshield behind the rear view mirror. If you have one then you can drive through specially marked lanes at the toll booths that will read a serial number from that box. In some cases you don't even have to stop - you can drive through at up to about 15mph. It sure beats waiting in line to get a ticket or pay your toll!
What i want to know is are there any migrations of birds from overseas such as africa and such?
I forget where I read it but I came across something that said the US was concerned about migratory paths through Alaska. Since parts of the Aleutian Islands, the Bering Strait, etc. provide land masses only tens of miles apart between the Russian and American mainlands it would provide easy stepping stones between the two continents. I'm not sure if there are any migratory paths along those routes or not, but it's definitely within the realm of possibilities. So while you may not see migratory routes directly between Africa and the US there's the possiblity of a path for the virus to north America through Alaska.
Microsoft has had success playing the catch-up game in the past, but I think this time the lag is going to cost them.
While I do agree with your comments about MS playing catch-up, I do think that if they play their cards right they could succeed in penetrating at least part of Googles ad space. MS isn't shy about throwing money where it thinks it'd do them good in the long run. If they started out with a pay-per-view instead of pay-per-click model, or even paid website owners significantly more per-click then it could help them to get more of a foothold.
Personally I'd consider displaying both Googles & MSN's ads on my websites as long as one or the other didn't have an exclusivity clause in their agreements. At least until I got a better handle on which one generates more revenue for me. If MSN's ads turned out to generate more revenue for me then I'd probably switch, but it'd be up to MSN to prove to me that that's the case.
What's in it for me to switch to MSN's?
Starve it of resources.
Interesting thought, but I doubt even M$ would have the ability to sustain such a program for very long. How many poor college types like Linus would they have to hire & shut up to truely stifle the FOSS movement? Every year colleges & universities around the world are cranking out more computer geeks who embrace FOSS. To shut them all up M$ would go broke trying to hire them all.
Microsoft is the "industry standard" only because they are big & powerful & have the ability to force others to do things their way. Standards are based upon community support. What DVD Jon is doing is showing that there's little community support for Microsofts so-called "standards".
...then you'd see that it said Mazda is testing a USB key in a concept car. Concept cars are prototypes of what the auto companies think cars MIGHT be like in the future. Many "features" in concept cars never actually make it into production. So despite the title of this article, Mazda isn't switching to USB keys - they're using it in a test vehicle that may never even see the light of day.
Personally I think it'll require a huge paradigm shift in the way all digital computing is currently performed. Trying to force AI into a system run by a digital processor, whether it's an x86 or some other current-day architecture, results in pretty significant limitations. True intelligence isn't binary - there are an infinite number of shades of grey that come with it.
I don't think we'll see real AI until the next major advancement in computing hits, but I don't think anybody currently knows precisely what that'll be. It'll be something on the order of the transition from analog vacuum tubes to digital microprocessors.
How would they attach tags to things like plastic bags (frozen/fresh veggies) individual pieces of produce (they're now starting to use lasers to etch barcodes onto the skin of fruits), and other small or unusually shaped items? Barcodes can be put on almost anything no matter what the shape or size. Can the same be done with RFID tags?
And what about boxes that have multiple barcodes? Cell phones are one example - they have serial numbers, ESN's, etc. that all need to be scanned at different times for different reasons. How do you do this with RFID? I suppose you could say that the RFID that begins with one prefix is a serial number, with another prefix is an ESN, etc. but then you put a lot more in the way of constraints on the manufactureres, and I doubt they'd like that.
Until the general population of computer users become smart enough to know not to open strange attachments
A-men! I used to work for a company that used MS Exchange for e-mail among a handful of offices scattered around the US. Thankfully I was in an office made up mostly of tech-savvy people. Whenever word got out of a new virus/worm e-mail message our IT department would send out a warning message like "Don't open any e-mail with a subject line of 'foo'". Nobody in our office ever did, but throughout the rest of the day we'd get spammed with multiple copies of the spam/virus/worm because it seemed that every non-technical idiot in the other offices opened up multiple copies of those e-mails anyway.
You mean like "ntpdate "?