While they don't get "Hurricanes" per se, they do get what is called an Orkan, which is pretty much the same.
That would be because "Orkaan" is the dutch word for "Hurricane".
And no, the Netherlands doesn't really get that many hurricanes. The Netherlands greatest problems with flooding tend actually not to come from the sea but from the Rijn, one of the biggest rivers in Europe, which exits to the sea via the Netherlands. It floods regularly.
The way the dutch cope with this is through dijks ('dykes' in english?) and, more recently, through controlled flooding: as it's simply become impossible to fully contain the Rijn, the thinking is now to let it flood as much as possible into farmland and hence reduce the strain on dijks around more important inhabited lands.
If you use the right libraries endian issues are automatically corrected.
No, not at all. Particularly for any software which implements networking protocols (other than character strings based protocols like HTTP), you'll get bugs porting from big-endian software (which don't per se need to use htonX(), as the byte order is the same), to little-endian. Other things will break, where a programmer manipulates data naively. Little-endian systems tend to discourage such naivety pretty quickly, simply cause little-endian is so odd.
Ah, interesting. Presumably that or those mainframes didn't just run Unix? Anyway, ok, then let me correct and clarify given what you stated:
It's really only relatively recently that it became common to run Unix on mainframes, when the predominant mainframe vendor, IBM, began supporting Linux on their mainframes. There have been ports of Unix and Unix-like systems to mainframes by smaller vendors and/or customers, but by and large mainframes have run mainframe specific OSes (typically, those of IBM). One quite noteworthy mainframe operating system was Multics.
(this stuff started on mainframes where logic was impreative)
Except Unix started on "cheap" mini-computers, not mainframes. It's really only recently that Unix ever ran on mainframes.
Having worked on a VAX and a few Alphas running OpenVMS, I can say that the underlying concepts between mainframe OSes and *nix
Except that those are mini-computers, indeed even micro-computers. And OpenVMS is a mini-computer OS. Eg, one difference, software wise, is that a mainframe typically does not run an OS - it runs several of them, from a low-level monitor up to multiple and different OSes.
You don't know what a mainframe is:). (Now, for that matter, nor do I. But I know VAX and Alpha's running Linux or VMS most definitely are not.)
I try to avoid using sarcasm in posts, but for some reason, the "pixies" irritated me...
Ah, sorry, I should have put in a smiley. It was intended as good-humoured banter. My posts generally should be taken as such.
Everywhere is *completely* budgeted for, for that 20 day period. For the space of a desktop PC. Of course it is.
I did not say "budgeted for", I said it had a cost. Whether you track that cost and budget for it or not is a different thing. You may feel it well-worth it to simply provide for lots of slack in terms of resources rather than spend lots of time accounting and micro-budgeting for everything. And you could even be right. But those costs remain however, whether you count them or not.
However, if you're planning on setting up a "utility computing grid" then you need to determine exactly how much those costs are, and then you *do* have to go and meticulously examine and account for every little cost, as much as you can. Otherwise, you'll never know how much to charge.;)
I've never come across IT pixies.
Nor have I, that's my point. If you find any, let me know;). But round here, people don't do things for free - either because they get money or some other benefit.;)
I've never yet seen a business plan for a computer-room that didn't have huge amounts of spare capacity built right in.
I've definitely seen computer-rooms that were stretched to capacity and in a pretty poor state, because they were badly planned or had out-grown the original plans. Much pain.
On the flip side, if you massively over-provide, then you're wasting money, as in two to four years your kit which you never really used will be obsolete anyway. Pure cost. It's *really* easy to waste massive amounts of money on a regular basis in a corporation if budgets are not carefully controlled and examined (but OTOH it's really hard to control budgets finely while still retaining flexibility and avoiding red-tape) - amounts large enough to start affecting your bottom line significantly.
Course, you never notice, because you don't track capacity and budgets carefully enough.;) Until your competitors start eating you (better margins + lower prices -> they take your customers away from you, and you can't comprehend it's partly cause you're sinking significant quantities of cash into black-holes).
making use of it (for 20 days) seems like a good thing to me, not a bad one.
Yes, it is. If you have it, use it. But grid computing is aimed more at those who don't have it, who want it soon, and don't need it continiously. If you happen to keep a bunch of racks of clustered 1U dual Opterons + high-bandwidth interconnects + redundant SAN spare for when you think you might need them, then Suns' grid is not for you.;)
If the cost is (in the end) the same, why keep the boxes ?
If you don't even take the time to work out what your own costs/really/ are, then you have no basis for determining whether or not the cost actually is the same, or less or more.
You simply don't know. And I still think you greatly underestimate the true costs of IT.;)
--paulj
Re:your problem is similar to DMCA proponents
on
Defeating Captcha
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I said textual tests would do just as well as the visual ones.
I have not at any time said anything about whether Turing tests to filter out non-humans are generally a good idea or not.
I'm not sure what politics has to do with this, other than that tending to put words in other people's mouths is one trait you share with them.
Look, what part of this is unclear ? I am not trying to compete with Sun!
Didn't say you were, you were however trying to extrapolate costs from what you think your home costs are.
They were paying for it regardless of if I push 10 boxes on the shelves in the spare rack-space and wire them up to the switch.
And that slack capacity, in terms of floor and rackspace and network, has a definite cost. So does planning ahead in order to balance cost against sufficient slack (people's time has a cost).
So. Zero extra cost apart from electricity.
Uhuh, that's cause that data-centre is free. As are the admins who run it, no doubt. All free.
Most corporates have an IT dept as well, and I would expect the same to apply.
Yep. IT departments come free when you register a company, with special pixies who never need to eat , sleep or have any life beyond being IT pixies. All free.
I put 10 machines in the spare room and leave the window open (it has a grill). Zero extra cost apart from electricity.
There is a cost, that room is a cost for one. You could have bought an N bedroom house instead of an N+computer room house and saved yourself 20,000 or more - which would be sufficient to lease a rack from a co-lo for 5+ years. Alternatively, maybe you'll need to go buy a N+1 house now, cause you need another spare room (eg, you get married and have a kid, or whatever), now you need to pay for moving (costs your own time if nothing else) as well as the more expensive house.
And again, the computers in your house could not meet the kind of reliability guarantees many businesses want, or expect (even when self-hosting). Go spec redundant power for your house and then think again about $1/hour. And again, your time isn't free either.
Sure we can all make up costs and "apply" them, but for the case of an employee/student/individual just wanting "to do it", I can't see the big deal.
So while you feel qualified to comment on whether or not $1/cpu/hour is a fair price or not, you don't think it's actually necessary to include any actual real costs other than electricity in determining what such a fair price is?
It's obvious you work in acadamia;).
--paulj
PS: I'll be dropping around a few computers to your house later on. If you could put them in your spare room, hook them up to a UPS and give me a key to your house for access and/or field calls at any time and do maintenance for me on them, that'd be great. Cause you sure come at a/great/ price.. I'll pay for your electricity of course.;)
I don't believe any of them cost $100 for every 20 days runtime! As for 250%, Oh boy! I have a bridge to sell you!
You're not paying for and hence you do not have:
- data centre floor space with:
- heavy duty UPS
- generator backup
- climate control
- security
- redundant networking
- multiply redundant storage
- tape backup silos / HSM - The 24x7 staff to:
- monitor security
- test the generator weekly
- monitor the backup processes
- monitor and maintain the network
- monitor and maintain the hardware
etc. etc. If you think your costs as "Joe Bloggs the guy who runs a few Linux PCs at home" are comparable to a corporate affair then you're simply kidding yourself, particularly when you're not billing yourself for your own time;), and your SLA with yourself is pretty flexible and forgiving;).
A lot of corporates have thought what you thought "Ah sure, it can't be expensive to run a few servers in our own 'data centre'", and they typically either under-estimate the costs, or they end-up with very shoddy server facilities. Then they'll have reliability problems due to:
- servers overheating cause they're stuffed into a cupboard (seen this) - lack of staff expertise (all too common) - utilities failures (they couldn't afford the large UPS + diesel generators + cut-over switches + electricians expenses) - the gradual increasing burden of maintaing installed plant, which if not planned professionally slowly but surely turns into a huge sprawl of unmarked cables, till it gets to point even simple rewiring tasks are a massive (and error-prone) undertaking.
Eventually, to a lot of these types of small corporations, locating in a managed data-centre and letting someone else take care of the details becomes very very attractive. (particularly for coporates whose primary business is *not* computing).
You are almost certainly underestimating the costs.
For the same $400 you could get 100 CPUs for four hours. If your problem divides up reasonably well, then instead of spending your $400 CPU and waiting 16 days, you could instead get your answer in hours.
Maybe you could do it cheaper by buying your own CPUs, but you could be waiting two weeks for your Dells to arrive. How much is it worth to you to get an answer within hours or days versus a few weeks or months of waiting?
I would dare to say that computers are not well-suited to those with visual impairments, either.
You can do quite well with a screen reader and/or braille display. Unix environment particularly is very well suited due to its long history and hence having a very rich text-orientated environment. There are visually impaired people who do quite well in computing.
Also, couldn't you argue that technical sites (or sites heavily scientific in content) should be required to provide simpler explanations for its mentally-impaired viewers?
You could, I wouldn't per se. However that would be a different argument (actively make your site better for the impaired) from asking sites to not put additionalunnecessary obstacles in place to accessibility.
it just seems that we head down a slippery slope when forced to cater to everyone, when the media is (unfortunately) not suited for them.
It isn't about demanding sites to bend over backwards to accomodate visually-impaired. It's just asking them to not make things worse. ASCII Turing tests work just as well, and don't make things worse for the visually impaired.
If ever in the future you, for whatever reason, become impaired in some way, you will likely revise your opinion.
Noone forced newspapers yet to print in Braille, or did they?
No they don't, because that is not discrimination as the goods involved, newspapers, intrinsically, are not suited to those with visual impairments. If however the newspaper refused to sell the newspaper to blind people, that *would* be discrimination. Note that are newspapers who offer their paper online, where it is easily accessible to the visually impaired, and that there are companies who reprint newspapers and books in Braille and also on audio media for the visually impaired.
It's simply about putting unreasonable obstacles in the way of people based solely on their gender, race or impairment (where none of those factors reasonably should affect the disposal of that service or good). See:
for the relevant section of the statute in force where I live.
Further, never mind whether or not there are laws. Any ethical person simply should not be in favour of excluding the visually impaired by using image-recognition based Turing tests when textual tests would do just as well without excluding such people. It's about having a basic level of consideration for your fellow man (whether or not your local statutes demand it in this particular respect).
However, the law in *my* country and the country neighbouring mine[1] most definitely says it is illegal for *any* company to discriminate in the provision of goods or services to people, other than for some reasonable (and specifically listed) exceptional cases, on the grounds of race, gender or disability. See my reply to the other person who replied to me.
I suspect many other EU countries have similar laws.
--paulj
1. Some might add "and occupying a part of my country".
If you think it does, please tell me how it could be prosecuted.
By an impaired user, or by a state body tasked with enforcing such a law.
So long as the actual server(s) and the company itself isn't/aren't in that jurisdiction, there is nothing that can be done from a legal standpoint except to write a polite letter explaining the issue and show them a better way.
Alternatively, if the disabled user and the company are in the same jurisdication, then they may be able to/sue/. Eg, see the UK legislation:
It is simply illegal to discriminate against impaired people when providing access to your services, in many jurisdictions, full stop. The EU is also active in seeing that all EU jurisdictions bring such legislation into place.
So yes, Irish and British companies would *definitely* be in contravention of existing law and risk civil suits if they used image based Turing tests, and I suspect as would companies in many other EU countries.
It's also extremely unfriendly to people with visual impairments, and hence illegal in some jurisdictions.
If you must use a Turing test, use ones expressed in ASCII: "What is seven plus two?", should work just as well and without shutting out the visually impaired who rely on screen readers. (these are used on blogs.sun.com to great effect).
In other news - "Norwegian hackers develop an O(1) algorithm for breaking AES"..... Various three-letter intelligence agencies who might be reading this, stop this madness while you still can.
AES being broken any time soon is highly unlikely, it had a very long period of peer review before Rijndael was selected (from a strong field of candidates) as the official AES cipher - including, without a doubt, extensive review by the NSA.
There will be other places to attack PMP though, particularly authentication and session key exchange. E.g. the authentication method the driver will use to authenticate your video card need not be cryptographic, but instead depend on your driver having knowledge of undisclosed nuances of your hardware. That sounds like something that will get broken on at least one graphics chip;).
However, PMP includes a method for Microsoft to (if needs absolutely be) revoke the driver for that particular hardware, or revoke ability to display through or on particular hardware. So if you were unfortunate you might run Windows Update one day (or have Windows run it automatically, without you having a choice) and find that suddenly those films and whatever you acquired *legally* from then on is displayed in low-quality, or maybe *not at all*.
I can't see how this will work without the cooperation from the drivers.
Yes, that's exactly the idea. Google for "Protected Media Path", drivers will be cryptograhically verified and revocable if needs be, using hardware TCPA. The authenticated driver must then authenticate the video card, and must authenticate the displays too.
Monitor will know that the content of a certain window is a movie being played?
Cause the 'trusted' video driver and your 'trusted' video card will ask your trusty monitor what kind of inputs and outputs it has. If your trusty monitor isn't trusted enough, your video card will downscale to a size specified by the "content owner" then upscale the content again so it will lack quality, before sending it on to be displayed. (eg like watching a 320x160 MPEG at full-screen). Your trusty video card will also switch-off or blank the content in any "bad" outputs it might have, like unprotected VGA or DVI.
Note that in this vision of the future of computers, not even your PCI bus is to be trusted if it has user-accessible slots or even motherboard traces. Your trusty graphics driver will have to encrypt the content using AES first before passing it across the bus to your graphics card (which has to decrypt it) - if the content owner demands it.
Ie, the future of computing involves your trusty computer doing massive amounts of extra work for 0 reward to you except to keep Hollywood happy.
Btw, just to comment on the text from OSI which you quoted:
it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together.
This is quite incorrect. The incompatibly is because the *GPL* has restrictions which the CDDL does not have, as the *GPL does not allow* itself to be mixed with less-restrictive licences, it's more the GPL which is incompatible with the CDDL.
Further, GPL and CDDL *can* be legally linked, if the copyright holder of the GPL work grants an exception (this is easy if the one wishing to link GPL to CDDL is also the author of the GPL code;) ). Further, the GPL's "reach" wrt linking is a bit of a grey area, some would argue that if the CDDL code is not a derived work of the GPL (eg which would almost obviously be the case if the GPL work wanted to make use of the CDDL code by linking to it), that then the GPL's reach does not extend across that linking, and it would be legal.
But that's a complex and unresolved question, to the best of my understanding. And the FSF (AFAIK) believe that by default the GPL/would/ reach.
I've both read the CDDL and legal analysis of it. Various laywers and other members of the legal community disagree with you.
The poster I replied to claimed Sun could remove rights to CDDL patents from 'forks'. That is wrong and sheer FUD. You havn't even read this thread properly;).
which discusses exactly the kind of patents that Sun may have licensed from SCO or Microsoft or whomever and hidden in "open" Solaris.
Sigh. The CDDL requires Sun to grant a patent licence. If a relevant patent is not owned by Sun, then Sun can not grant a licence, and hence it can not CDDL the code. Tracking down all these licence issues is part of the reason why it took so long to get OpenSolaris out (and hence everyone on/. called OpenSolaris vapourware for quite a while).
If the code could not be contributed to OpenSolaris under the CDDL because of 3rd party patent issues, well then the patent still stands, it's still there. You still have to worry about that 3rd party's patent, it still affects you.
IOW: Relevant patents owned by MS or SCO, Sun can not do anything about no matter. The rest, you should be grateful they're owned by Sun then, because you are now free to implement them in your code. Further, patents are not referred to in code or on www.sun.com (other than by number on the latter), so you can *not* open yourself to triple damages by reading OpenSolaris code. Ie, wrt patents embodied in OpenSolaris, you are in the exact same position wrt your patent liabilities whether:
- you don't read the OpenSolaris to avoid "polluting" yourself (FUD put out by a RedHat employed GNU libc hacker)
- you do read the code (you still dont open yourself to knowledge of whether some code embodies a patent)
It makes no difference. However, what you *do* now have is the option to take CDDL code and use it in your own code (as long as the CDDL file and its derivatives of that file stay CDDL), and you automatically have an explicit patent grant from Sun and any others who contributed to that file under the CDDL.
Does the Sun patent grant extend to Linux and other non-CDDL systems: No, of course not, cause they're not CDDL licenced, and the very thing which enables the patent grant *is the CDDL*.
The GPL offers no patent protections (other than "you cant redistribute"). The entire reasoning behind the patent provisions in the CDDL is to setup a patent-commons "You sue for patent infringement and you can no longer use/any/ of the code". If Sun gave a blanket patent licence to all GPL code, it would dilute the effectiveness of the CDDL patent-commons idea, it would counter-act the deterrent against patent-lawsuits which the CDDL tries to create.
I know Sun-bashing and wild Sun conspiracy theories are all the rage here on/., however, I can see behind the curtain (given my @sun.com email address;) ), and it's amazingly frustrating to see how wrong the FUD is. I'm also a fairly strong FSF supporter btw, I wouldn't work for Sun if I believed they had some evil-genius plan to destroy Free Software.
--paulj
PS: No Sun do not have any evil genius plans to destroy Free Software. They just want to compete with Linux and BSD and have OpenSolaris become a strong choice for running (typically) Free or Open Source applications (many of which Sun have contributed to btw).
I did read it. I did not claim anything about what RMS said other than that he used the word "free" in relation to OpenSolaris at least twice in that article.
I work for Sun, and RMS in that article has many criticisms of Sun, and some positive words. I don't see why I should not link to it.:)
I also try to support the FSF btw, regularly enough that they like to send me news letters anyway.
I know it's de rigueur to be hyper-critical of Sun here on/., but I work for the company, I know Sun do a lot for Free Software and Open-Source software. I know Suns' culture values open standards, even where the code is closed. I'm at a loss to understand why there is, sometimes, such unabashed/hatred/ of Sun. Yes, Sun compete with Linux, and yes, Sun are pretty sure Solaris as a base system is better. But the same attitudes can be found in the BSD camps sometimes wrt Linux. Yet all these systems, BSD, Linux, Solaris, erm, OpenSolaris, are competing with each other. And we typically end up running the same applications, regardless of which base system we choose.
Competition, in my mind, is good. The alternative is the MS Windows hegemony. If you look at Sun PR on Solaris v Linux in that light (as you would if FreeBSD people railed against Linux), you might then get a better perspective on things, imho.
The CDDL is less "viral" than the GPL, as the CDDL specifically restricts itself to files which are CDDL licenced and derivatives of those files.
You are hence, without question, allowed to take a CDDL licenced file implementing something you're interested in for your own code, modify it to suit your needs, and then link to the resulting (CDDL derived) code from your own code. Your own code can be whatever licence you want.
So CDDL is like GPL, but less viral (by the licence authors design anyway. There are open questions as to how far GPL's viral nature can actually legally go. FSF think linking code always becomes affected by the GPL of code it links to, others think not).
Slashdot Mirror
While they don't get "Hurricanes" per se, they do get what is called an Orkan, which is pretty much the same.
That would be because "Orkaan" is the dutch word for "Hurricane".
And no, the Netherlands doesn't really get that many hurricanes. The Netherlands greatest problems with flooding tend actually not to come from the sea but from the Rijn, one of the biggest rivers in Europe, which exits to the sea via the Netherlands. It floods regularly.
The way the dutch cope with this is through dijks ('dykes' in english?) and, more recently, through controlled flooding: as it's simply become impossible to fully contain the Rijn, the thinking is now to let it flood as much as possible into farmland and hence reduce the strain on dijks around more important inhabited lands.
The atlantic threat is there too, while not near hurricanes in power, atlantic storms are far more frequent. It seems easier to contain though. There are barriers in place around the entrances to the Zeeland tidal estuaries, which you can see in the map the previous poster gave as blue lines, and there's a truly gigantic floating set of metal arms, which are rotated into place and then sunk, to protect the mouth of the Rotterdam waterway. (To consider how huge these must be, Rotterdam Europoort, the busiest shipping port in the *world* apparently, can just be seen in part to the right in the picture above, with a ferry sailing down that large channel..)
Zero extra cost apart from electricity.
5 0829
Btw, see this interesting blog about the cost of just electricity in a big data centre:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/marchamilton/200
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
Weighting candidates for a job by their qualifications is illegal? ROFL!
--paulj
If you use the right libraries endian issues are automatically corrected.
No, not at all. Particularly for any software which implements networking protocols (other than character strings based protocols like HTTP), you'll get bugs porting from big-endian software (which don't per se need to use htonX(), as the byte order is the same), to little-endian. Other things will break, where a programmer manipulates data naively. Little-endian systems tend to discourage such naivety pretty quickly, simply cause little-endian is so odd.
Ah, interesting. Presumably that or those mainframes didn't just run Unix? Anyway, ok, then let me correct and clarify given what you stated:
It's really only relatively recently that it became common to run Unix on mainframes, when the predominant mainframe vendor, IBM, began supporting Linux on their mainframes. There have been ports of Unix and Unix-like systems to mainframes by smaller vendors and/or customers, but by and large mainframes have run mainframe specific OSes (typically, those of IBM). One quite noteworthy mainframe operating system was Multics.
Would that be more accurate?
(this stuff started on mainframes where logic was impreative)
:). (Now, for that matter, nor do I. But I know VAX and Alpha's running Linux or VMS most definitely are not.)
Except Unix started on "cheap" mini-computers, not mainframes. It's really only recently that Unix ever ran on mainframes.
Having worked on a VAX and a few Alphas running OpenVMS, I can say that the underlying concepts between mainframe OSes and *nix
Except that those are mini-computers, indeed even micro-computers. And OpenVMS is a mini-computer OS. Eg, one difference, software wise, is that a mainframe typically does not run an OS - it runs several of them, from a low-level monitor up to multiple and different OSes.
You don't know what a mainframe is
--paulj
I try to avoid using sarcasm in posts, but for some reason, the "pixies" irritated me...
;)
;). But round here, people don't do things for free - either because they get money or some other benefit. ;)
;) Until your competitors start eating you (better margins + lower prices -> they take your customers away from you, and you can't comprehend it's partly cause you're sinking significant quantities of cash into black-holes).
;)
/really/ are, then you have no basis for determining whether or not the cost actually is the same, or less or more.
;)
Ah, sorry, I should have put in a smiley. It was intended as good-humoured banter. My posts generally should be taken as such.
Everywhere is *completely* budgeted for, for that 20 day period. For the space of a desktop PC. Of course it is.
I did not say "budgeted for", I said it had a cost. Whether you track that cost and budget for it or not is a different thing. You may feel it well-worth it to simply provide for lots of slack in terms of resources rather than spend lots of time accounting and micro-budgeting for everything. And you could even be right. But those costs remain however, whether you count them or not.
However, if you're planning on setting up a "utility computing grid" then you need to determine exactly how much those costs are, and then you *do* have to go and meticulously examine and account for every little cost, as much as you can. Otherwise, you'll never know how much to charge.
I've never come across IT pixies.
Nor have I, that's my point. If you find any, let me know
I've never yet seen a business plan for a computer-room that didn't have huge amounts of spare capacity built right in.
I've definitely seen computer-rooms that were stretched to capacity and in a pretty poor state, because they were badly planned or had out-grown the original plans. Much pain.
On the flip side, if you massively over-provide, then you're wasting money, as in two to four years your kit which you never really used will be obsolete anyway. Pure cost. It's *really* easy to waste massive amounts of money on a regular basis in a corporation if budgets are not carefully controlled and examined (but OTOH it's really hard to control budgets finely while still retaining flexibility and avoiding red-tape) - amounts large enough to start affecting your bottom line significantly.
Course, you never notice, because you don't track capacity and budgets carefully enough.
making use of it (for 20 days) seems like a good thing to me, not a bad one.
Yes, it is. If you have it, use it. But grid computing is aimed more at those who don't have it, who want it soon, and don't need it continiously. If you happen to keep a bunch of racks of clustered 1U dual Opterons + high-bandwidth interconnects + redundant SAN spare for when you think you might need them, then Suns' grid is not for you.
If the cost is (in the end) the same, why keep the boxes ?
If you don't even take the time to work out what your own costs
You simply don't know. And I still think you greatly underestimate the true costs of IT.
--paulj
I said textual tests would do just as well as the visual ones.
I have not at any time said anything about whether Turing tests to filter out non-humans are generally a good idea or not.
I'm not sure what politics has to do with this, other than that tending to put words in other people's mouths is one trait you share with them.
Look, what part of this is unclear ? I am not trying to compete with Sun!
;).
/great/ price.. ;)
Didn't say you were, you were however trying to extrapolate costs from what you think your home costs are.
They were paying for it regardless of if I push 10 boxes on the shelves in the spare rack-space and wire them up to the switch.
And that slack capacity, in terms of floor and rackspace and network, has a definite cost. So does planning ahead in order to balance cost against sufficient slack (people's time has a cost).
So. Zero extra cost apart from electricity.
Uhuh, that's cause that data-centre is free. As are the admins who run it, no doubt. All free.
Most corporates have an IT dept as well, and I would expect the same to apply.
Yep. IT departments come free when you register a company, with special pixies who never need to eat , sleep or have any life beyond being IT pixies. All free.
I put 10 machines in the spare room and leave the window open (it has a grill). Zero extra cost apart from electricity.
There is a cost, that room is a cost for one. You could have bought an N bedroom house instead of an N+computer room house and saved yourself 20,000 or more - which would be sufficient to lease a rack from a co-lo for 5+ years. Alternatively, maybe you'll need to go buy a N+1 house now, cause you need another spare room (eg, you get married and have a kid, or whatever), now you need to pay for moving (costs your own time if nothing else) as well as the more expensive house.
And again, the computers in your house could not meet the kind of reliability guarantees many businesses want, or expect (even when self-hosting). Go spec redundant power for your house and then think again about $1/hour. And again, your time isn't free either.
Sure we can all make up costs and "apply" them, but for the case of an employee/student/individual just wanting "to do it", I can't see the big deal.
So while you feel qualified to comment on whether or not $1/cpu/hour is a fair price or not, you don't think it's actually necessary to include any actual real costs other than electricity in determining what such a fair price is?
It's obvious you work in acadamia
--paulj
PS: I'll be dropping around a few computers to your house later on. If you could put them in your spare room, hook them up to a UPS and give me a key to your house for access and/or field calls at any time and do maintenance for me on them, that'd be great. Cause you sure come at a
I'll pay for your electricity of course.
I don't believe any of them cost $100 for every 20 days runtime! As for 250%, Oh boy! I have a bridge to sell you!
;), and your SLA with yourself is pretty flexible and forgiving ;).
You're not paying for and hence you do not have:
- data centre floor space with:
- heavy duty UPS
- generator backup
- climate control
- security
- redundant networking
- multiply redundant storage
- tape backup silos / HSM
- The 24x7 staff to:
- monitor security
- test the generator weekly
- monitor the backup processes
- monitor and maintain the network
- monitor and maintain the hardware
etc. etc. If you think your costs as "Joe Bloggs the guy who runs a few Linux PCs at home" are comparable to a corporate affair then you're simply kidding yourself, particularly when you're not billing yourself for your own time
A lot of corporates have thought what you thought "Ah sure, it can't be expensive to run a few servers in our own 'data centre'", and they typically either under-estimate the costs, or they end-up with very shoddy server facilities. Then they'll have reliability problems due to:
- servers overheating cause they're stuffed into a cupboard (seen this)
- lack of staff expertise (all too common)
- utilities failures (they couldn't afford the large UPS + diesel generators + cut-over switches + electricians expenses)
- the gradual increasing burden of maintaing installed plant, which if not planned professionally slowly but surely turns into a huge sprawl of unmarked cables, till it gets to point even simple rewiring tasks are a massive (and error-prone) undertaking.
Eventually, to a lot of these types of small corporations, locating in a managed data-centre and letting someone else take care of the details becomes very very attractive. (particularly for coporates whose primary business is *not* computing).
You are almost certainly underestimating the costs.
--paulj
For the same $400 you could get 100 CPUs for four hours. If your problem divides up reasonably well, then instead of spending your $400 CPU and waiting 16 days, you could instead get your answer in hours.
Maybe you could do it cheaper by buying your own CPUs, but you could be waiting two weeks for your Dells to arrive. How much is it worth to you to get an answer within hours or days versus a few weeks or months of waiting?
--paulj
I would dare to say that computers are not well-suited to those with visual impairments, either.
You can do quite well with a screen reader and/or braille display. Unix environment particularly is very well suited due to its long history and hence having a very rich text-orientated environment. There are visually impaired people who do quite well in computing.
Also, couldn't you argue that technical sites (or sites heavily scientific in content) should be required to provide simpler explanations for its mentally-impaired viewers?
You could, I wouldn't per se. However that would be a different argument (actively make your site better for the impaired) from asking sites to not put additional unnecessary obstacles in place to accessibility.
it just seems that we head down a slippery slope when forced to cater to everyone, when the media is (unfortunately) not suited for them.
It isn't about demanding sites to bend over backwards to accomodate visually-impaired. It's just asking them to not make things worse. ASCII Turing tests work just as well, and don't make things worse for the visually impaired.
Then that law is just downright stupid.
If ever in the future you, for whatever reason, become impaired in some way, you will likely revise your opinion.
Noone forced newspapers yet to print in Braille, or did they?
No they don't, because that is not discrimination as the goods involved, newspapers, intrinsically, are not suited to those with visual impairments. If however the newspaper refused to sell the newspaper to blind people, that *would* be discrimination. Note that are newspapers who offer their paper online, where it is easily accessible to the visually impaired, and that there are companies who reprint newspapers and books in Braille and also on audio media for the visually impaired.
It's simply about putting unreasonable obstacles in the way of people based solely on their gender, race or impairment (where none of those factors reasonably should affect the disposal of that service or good). See:
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/ZZA8Y2000S5.html
for the relevant section of the statute in force where I live.
Further, never mind whether or not there are laws. Any ethical person simply should not be in favour of excluding the visually impaired by using image-recognition based Turing tests when textual tests would do just as well without excluding such people. It's about having a basic level of consideration for your fellow man (whether or not your local statutes demand it in this particular respect).
--paulj
That's your personal opinion.
However, the law in *my* country and the country neighbouring mine[1] most definitely says it is illegal for *any* company to discriminate in the provision of goods or services to people, other than for some reasonable (and specifically listed) exceptional cases, on the grounds of race, gender or disability. See my reply to the other person who replied to me.
I suspect many other EU countries have similar laws.
--paulj
1. Some might add "and occupying a part of my country".
The illegal argument really doesn't fly.
/sue/. Eg, see the UK legislation:
i sability/index_en.html
l _protection/index_en.htm
It very much flies.
If you think it does, please tell me how it could be prosecuted.
By an impaired user, or by a state body tasked with enforcing such a law.
So long as the actual server(s) and the company itself isn't/aren't in that jurisdiction, there is nothing that can be done from a legal standpoint except to write a polite letter explaining the issue and show them a better way.
Alternatively, if the disabled user and the company are in the same jurisdication, then they may be able to
http://www.disability.gov.uk/dda/
Or the legislation in place in Ireland:
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2000_8.html
See the general EU site on disability discrimination:
http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/d
And:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/socia
It is simply illegal to discriminate against impaired people when providing access to your services, in many jurisdictions, full stop. The EU is also active in seeing that all EU jurisdictions bring such legislation into place.
So yes, Irish and British companies would *definitely* be in contravention of existing law and risk civil suits if they used image based Turing tests, and I suspect as would companies in many other EU countries.
It's also extremely unfriendly to people with visual impairments, and hence illegal in some jurisdictions.
If you must use a Turing test, use ones expressed in ASCII: "What is seven plus two?", should work just as well and without shutting out the visually impaired who rely on screen readers. (these are used on blogs.sun.com to great effect).
--paulj
In other news - "Norwegian hackers develop an O(1) algorithm for breaking AES". .... Various three-letter intelligence agencies who might be reading this, stop this madness while you still can.
;).
AES being broken any time soon is highly unlikely, it had a very long period of peer review before Rijndael was selected (from a strong field of candidates) as the official AES cipher - including, without a doubt, extensive review by the NSA.
There will be other places to attack PMP though, particularly authentication and session key exchange. E.g. the authentication method the driver will use to authenticate your video card need not be cryptographic, but instead depend on your driver having knowledge of undisclosed nuances of your hardware. That sounds like something that will get broken on at least one graphics chip
However, PMP includes a method for Microsoft to (if needs absolutely be) revoke the driver for that particular hardware, or revoke ability to display through or on particular hardware. So if you were unfortunate you might run Windows Update one day (or have Windows run it automatically, without you having a choice) and find that suddenly those films and whatever you acquired *legally* from then on is displayed in low-quality, or maybe *not at all*.
Sounds good, doesn't it?
I can't see how this will work without the cooperation from the drivers.
Yes, that's exactly the idea. Google for "Protected Media Path", drivers will be cryptograhically verified and revocable if needs be, using hardware TCPA. The authenticated driver must then authenticate the video card, and must authenticate the displays too.
See this recent Ed Felten article and the linked to Microsoft white paper on Protected Media Path.
Monitor will know that the content of a certain window is a movie being played?
Cause the 'trusted' video driver and your 'trusted' video card will ask your trusty monitor what kind of inputs and outputs it has. If your trusty monitor isn't trusted enough, your video card will downscale to a size specified by the "content owner" then upscale the content again so it will lack quality, before sending it on to be displayed. (eg like watching a 320x160 MPEG at full-screen). Your trusty video card will also switch-off or blank the content in any "bad" outputs it might have, like unprotected VGA or DVI.
Note that in this vision of the future of computers, not even your PCI bus is to be trusted if it has user-accessible slots or even motherboard traces. Your trusty graphics driver will have to encrypt the content using AES first before passing it across the bus to your graphics card (which has to decrypt it) - if the content owner demands it.
Ie, the future of computing involves your trusty computer doing massive amounts of extra work for 0 reward to you except to keep Hollywood happy.
Read the paper and be astounded.
Btw, just to comment on the text from OSI which you quoted:
;) ). Further, the GPL's "reach" wrt linking is a bit of a grey area, some would argue that if the CDDL code is not a derived work of the GPL (eg which would almost obviously be the case if the GPL work wanted to make use of the CDDL code by linking to it), that then the GPL's reach does not extend across that linking, and it would be legal.
/would/ reach.
it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together.
This is quite incorrect. The incompatibly is because the *GPL* has restrictions which the CDDL does not have, as the *GPL does not allow* itself to be mixed with less-restrictive licences, it's more the GPL which is incompatible with the CDDL.
Further, GPL and CDDL *can* be legally linked, if the copyright holder of the GPL work grants an exception (this is easy if the one wishing to link GPL to CDDL is also the author of the GPL code
But that's a complex and unresolved question, to the best of my understanding. And the FSF (AFAIK) believe that by default the GPL
regards,
Paul Jakma.
GNU/OpenSolaris to be quite accurate.
With a 4 digit number, I'd expect you to know better...so, are you trolling?
:)
Given you had to go correct yourself (appreciate that btw), maybe the lesson to take away here is:
"Yep, 4 digit IDs *do* know better!".
--paulj
I've both read the CDDL and legal analysis of it. Various laywers and other members of the legal community disagree with you.
;).
/. called OpenSolaris vapourware for quite a while).
/any/ of the code". If Sun gave a blanket patent licence to all GPL code, it would dilute the effectiveness of the CDDL patent-commons idea, it would counter-act the deterrent against patent-lawsuits which the CDDL tries to create.
/., however, I can see behind the curtain (given my @sun.com email address ;) ), and it's amazingly frustrating to see how wrong the FUD is. I'm also a fairly strong FSF supporter btw, I wouldn't work for Sun if I believed they had some evil-genius plan to destroy Free Software.
The poster I replied to claimed Sun could remove rights to CDDL patents from 'forks'. That is wrong and sheer FUD. You havn't even read this thread properly
which discusses exactly the kind of patents that Sun may have licensed from SCO or Microsoft or whomever and hidden in "open" Solaris.
Sigh. The CDDL requires Sun to grant a patent licence. If a relevant patent is not owned by Sun, then Sun can not grant a licence, and hence it can not CDDL the code. Tracking down all these licence issues is part of the reason why it took so long to get OpenSolaris out (and hence everyone on
If the code could not be contributed to OpenSolaris under the CDDL because of 3rd party patent issues, well then the patent still stands, it's still there. You still have to worry about that 3rd party's patent, it still affects you.
IOW: Relevant patents owned by MS or SCO, Sun can not do anything about no matter. The rest, you should be grateful they're owned by Sun then, because you are now free to implement them in your code. Further, patents are not referred to in code or on www.sun.com (other than by number on the latter), so you can *not* open yourself to triple damages by reading OpenSolaris code. Ie, wrt patents embodied in OpenSolaris, you are in the exact same position wrt your patent liabilities whether:
- you don't read the OpenSolaris to avoid "polluting" yourself (FUD put out by a RedHat employed GNU libc hacker)
- you do read the code (you still dont open yourself to knowledge of whether some code embodies a patent)
It makes no difference. However, what you *do* now have is the option to take CDDL code and use it in your own code (as long as the CDDL file and its derivatives of that file stay CDDL), and you automatically have an explicit patent grant from Sun and any others who contributed to that file under the CDDL.
Does the Sun patent grant extend to Linux and other non-CDDL systems: No, of course not, cause they're not CDDL licenced, and the very thing which enables the patent grant *is the CDDL*.
The GPL offers no patent protections (other than "you cant redistribute"). The entire reasoning behind the patent provisions in the CDDL is to setup a patent-commons "You sue for patent infringement and you can no longer use
I know Sun-bashing and wild Sun conspiracy theories are all the rage here on
--paulj
PS: No Sun do not have any evil genius plans to destroy Free Software. They just want to compete with Linux and BSD and have OpenSolaris become a strong choice for running (typically) Free or Open Source applications (many of which Sun have contributed to btw).
I did read it. I did not claim anything about what RMS said other than that he used the word "free" in relation to OpenSolaris at least twice in that article.
:)
/., but I work for the company, I know Sun do a lot for Free Software and Open-Source software. I know Suns' culture values open standards, even where the code is closed. I'm at a loss to understand why there is, sometimes, such unabashed /hatred/ of Sun. Yes, Sun compete with Linux, and yes, Sun are pretty sure Solaris as a base system is better. But the same attitudes can be found in the BSD camps sometimes wrt Linux. Yet all these systems, BSD, Linux, Solaris, erm, OpenSolaris, are competing with each other. And we typically end up running the same applications, regardless of which base system we choose.
I work for Sun, and RMS in that article has many criticisms of Sun, and some positive words. I don't see why I should not link to it.
I also try to support the FSF btw, regularly enough that they like to send me news letters anyway.
I know it's de rigueur to be hyper-critical of Sun here on
Competition, in my mind, is good. The alternative is the MS Windows hegemony. If you look at Sun PR on Solaris v Linux in that light (as you would if FreeBSD people railed against Linux), you might then get a better perspective on things, imho.
Anyway...
The CDDL is less "viral" than the GPL, as the CDDL specifically restricts itself to files which are CDDL licenced and derivatives of those files.
You are hence, without question, allowed to take a CDDL licenced file implementing something you're interested in for your own code, modify it to suit your needs, and then link to the resulting (CDDL derived) code from your own code. Your own code can be whatever licence you want.
So CDDL is like GPL, but less viral (by the licence authors design anyway. There are open questions as to how far GPL's viral nature can actually legally go. FSF think linking code always becomes affected by the GPL of code it links to, others think not).