what needs "public" IPs? What/really/ needs them? routing interfaces between networks, and websites using ssl. Since a very large percentage of the web surfing population is still using windowsXP or older, we can't use TLS (which has been around for ages). So instead, every single ssl-enabled site needs it's own IP. I work at a small company, and even we could release hundreds of public IPs if WindowsXP could use tls instead of ssl.
err...if you have 50,000 music streaming apps for ipad, and 500 music streaming apps for android, but the top 10 work about the same...
...then guess what. They're equal. The "music streaming" role has been satisfied. You're not going to be using 50,000 of them at once, anyway.
I regularly work (directly, in person) with, help, and visit people living in third-world conditions. I make all my purchases, including of electronics, with a mind to minimize the damage the manufacture and shipping from the item I'm purchasing (which is why I shun the cattle industry, and am vegan; it's also why I refuse to own a car). Posting on the internet to tell me I'm a bad person because I'm on the internet is...odd. Reminds me of a child that is told they need to close their eyes during a prayer, and who looks up at their parent and says "but mommy, your eyes are open too! That's how you saw me!"
The internet affects billions of lives, in a positive way. Sending a couple dozen people to Mars for short-term species-preservation reasons doesn't. Try again.
perhaps the reason I get so annoyed at this whole idea is because I frequently see, in person, people living in third-world conditions. People that, given $100, could dramatically improve their quality of life. People that dispose of their feces and urine in a hole in the ground, a few feet from the shanty they live in.
No, I will not"consider Mars to be a backup data center with a back copy of the code required to rebuild." There's no purpose to that. Neither I, nor you, gain immortality simply because the species survived somewhere. Not even the people on Mars would gain immortality; even they would eventually die. But for a billionth of the cost per-person to sustain a person on Mars, I can sustain a person in a third-world country here on this planet.
As I mentioned in a different post, servers aren't self-aware, they don't have a desire to replicate to other geographic locations. Servers exist to perform a role, and redundancy exists to sustain that role - and the role exists not for the server's benefit, but for the benefit of the humans that use the services the server provides. The extremely impoverished family that I can in fact give medical care, food, and a house to right here on this planet? They don't exist for my benefit. If they live and I die, that doesn't make me immortal. If we're going to spend money for someone else's survival benefit we have exponentially more cost-effective options here on this planet. A rock that might hit Earth some time in the next few thousand years, doesn't justify spending more money to save the "species" than it would cost to save the Earth and almost every real person on this planet (versus the conceptual person, the "idea" of a person, within species preservation served by an irrational colonization of Mars).
to be clear - tens of billions would merely get a place on Mars that can't sustain itself. Tens of trillions of dollars over at least a couple hundred years, might get close. What would that accomplish? Species preservation, where a few hundred humans survive, thus preserving the irrational sense of immortality some people have.
OR, we could spend tens of billions to clean up this place...and save billions of lives. I'd be willing to bet, for instance, that for less than the cost of getting 20 people to Mars, and getting them enough supplies to survive just 5 years, you could clean up every single one of the dirties rivers in the world, rivers which right here, right now, are killing people.
So instead of saying I'm selfish, perhaps you should realize I'm arguing for saving billions of real lives, that are already here, and ending extreme suffering that occurs right here, right now, on this planet - and I'm valuing that over "species preservation" - which wouldn't be accomplished anyway by sending a couple dozen people to Mars. They'd live for a few years, until their supplies ran out. Ooops, you lost your immortality anyway!
but there are some people out there to whom the continued existence of the human race is important. I understand that you're clearly one of those people who does not care about anything unless it affects you directly.
No, I'm one of those people who think that, given X amount of money, we should use it to save billions of people's lives, not dozens. I'm one of those people who allows himself to think rationally despite of the shallow "species preservation" instinct all animals have.
yes, I'm selfish because I think we should spend the money to save billions of lives, versus spending the money to...accomplish nothing. I'm selfish because I my "species preservation" instinct doesn't lead me to extremely irrational behavior. I'm selfish because I refuse to own a car, I only buy local produce, I'm vegan, etc. The fact that I'm trying to fix this planet, which is already 99.99% the way to being ideal for our species, versus converting a planet that would take hundreds of years and trillions of dollars to make merely survivable...means I'm selfish.
If a big rock takes out the Earth, no amount of terraforming Mars will keep the billions of people here from being dead. All you're doing is allowing selfish people to over-reproduce even more, rape and pillage yet another planet, and maybe...maybe, the species will survive. So what. If we want the species to survive, a much more cost-effective method would be to fix this place.
We're not servers in a data center. We exist individually, with our own purpose. I don't exist, for example, for your benefit. A server in a server farm, yes - put it in multiple locations, because big rocks happen. But those servers - they're performing a role for the benefit of groups of individual humans. Server node ci-112a is not a self-aware, self-realized being that seeks to colonize another data center for the protection of itself. The analogy is stupid and fails utterly.
If the Earth goes to hell in a handbasket, humans will be the ones who took it there...and no colony anywhere else will save the billions here that died.
no. We (you and I) will die regardless whether or not anyone at all goes to Mars. What you really mean by "we" is "the human species." So? Do you realize how shallow and irrational your desire to be immortal via species preservation, really is? I can understand trying to save a species that is vital to maintaining a particular ecosystem.
Additionally, like I said - it would be far, far cheaper to save this planet than it would be to make Mars habitable. You may think the ozone layer is thin here, but you should see it there! Global warming here has nothing on the temperatures there. Slight lack of extremely abundant water too, as it so happens. I'll grant though that the fact that there is substantially less atmosphere there does mean it has less...err..dirty air, than Earth does.
Spending tens of billions to send a couple dozen people to Mars won't save the human species. Spending 1/10th that to clean shit up around here, might though.
"humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth"
For the love of G-d and all that is holy, whymust we? If we have the technology to make Mars habitable, then we have the technology to fix Earth. If the Earth goes to hell in a handbasket, would humans living on Mars save your life? Why not spend 1/10th that same energy to fixing this place? If we can't straighten out our own house, what the hell makes us think we could make Mars work out?
Such a trip would be nothing more than billions upon billions of dollars, pulled from the taxes of hundreds of millions of people, just to pander to the selfish dreams of a very small number of people. Spend that money on making a light rail system spanning the US, clean energy sources (solar, wind, etc), and you'll have lots left over; and then it helps save this planet, for the benefit of billions of current earthlings, plus all generations to come. Or...spend the money to send a couple dozen people to Mars, so they can...do jack for the rest of us.
One key thing to keep in mind - most of the people who went from Europe to the US back in the day either paid their own way, or were sent specifically so they could gather resources to send back. The idea that it was a one-way trip is true only for the people who paid their own way. So if a few billionaires want to get together and send themselves to Mars, I'm not going to stop them. But why the hell should I pay for someone else to go?
Except a compute cluster that beats the crap out of the amazon cluster nodes (due to gpu performance) costs about $1500 per node.
No. It most certainly does not. You're leaving out the high performance networking between the nodes, the server room, the image building machine, the salary of the sysadmin that set it up and maintains it, the cost of the building the server room is in, the cost of the electricity, etc.
And, again, the maximum cluster you'll spin up "in minutes" is 64 cores, no more. That's pathetic.
All of Amazon's services have a "pathetic" starting max; we hit our limits on 3 things all at once when we started, all on the first day, and got confused for a moment...until realized you can send a request for an increased maximum, and the request is granted fairly quickly. We had our caps increased (not for HPC, but caps none the less) in about an hour. Proper planning, you request higher caps/before/ you need it.
I can promise you the anti-missle systems are in place...and unless someone purposefully turned them off, they'd have responded in/some/ way, even if unsuccessfully. That they didn't, means this was a known event.
I seriously doubt things like Amazon or GAE will beat even small compute clusters available at universities
That was true until recently - Amazon now has "HPC" capabilities. While not extremely impressive (yet?), you can indeed rapidly beat out any small compute cluster at a university now - at a fraction of the cost, too. Now instead of having a cluster that takes weeks to give you results, takes lots of man-hours to build and maintain, and spends only part of it's time being used...you can spin up (in minutes) a cluster that can do the work, then you can release the nodes and you're no longer paying.
Well, that's great and all, but if that is cloud computing, then why am I supposed to be interested ?
if you're not interested, then fine - you don't need it then.
I'm not interested in buying a purse, but that doesn't mean I want purses redefined until they're something I'm interested in. I'm not interested in buying lipstick, but that doesn't mean I want to redefine lipstick until it suits my needs, or scoff at anyone else who would want to use lipstick.
That you don't have a need for it, doesn't matter. You were clearly not the target audience.
But it still needs to do things like letting me see it's screen, replug, reconfigure the network, add/remove disks,...
No. It doesn't. That's not cloud computing. Buy a desktop, attach a monitor to it. Now you can see the screen, reconfigure the network, etc. You're thinking of a particular singular instance, and missing the *entire* point.
that crap exists. It's not cloud. You're looking for Slicehost. They have a webconsole you can use to log in, disable networking, re-enable networking, the whole bit.
I don't get why people think that "cloud" merely means "hosted VM" when, in fact, it means nothing of the sort. If system 148 of a cluster of 250 stops responding, your cloud shouldn't notice or care; it should die automatically, and get replaced automatically. If you're beholden to the health of a particular system, then it's not Cloud Computing. If you can't control and access the resources with simple REST, then it's not cloud. If it's a glass of water, it's not a cloud.
yeah except no. Even minor changes to Ubuntu, and I completely make the system unable to deal with the package management from the distro. 95% of the point of a distro is the package management system.
Fedora is less bad at that, especially the current release.
I don't want to convert you. If you're happy with windows, go for it. I want my Linux that wasn't moderate, middle-ground, washed out bloated crap. I could go back to the better, more solid/stable/secure extreme with Solaris...oh, wait, it's Oracle now, and they're not really worrying about Solaris anymore.
Windows won, that's all there is to it. And by "won" I mean "won the war of making crappy software acceptable to the masses." Hell, it's even making products from other industries get more leeway on how bad it can be at release, and still be ok. I have a 20+ year old manual can opener that got damaged, and now only mostly works. I go buy a new one every once in a while, the best I can find that isn't ridiculously priced, and alas - without fail, somewhere around 3 months later I'm using my old can opener again, because the new one stopped working. Tangent? Probably. You want to use an electric can opener that gets the can from the cupboard from you, opens it, and sings you a song. I want one I turn by hand. I don't want my manual can opener to be semi-fancy, in a play to middle ground (read: Ubuntu). I have no problem getting everything I want working (including watching hulu, using pandora, playing WoW, etc etc) done on a home-brew linux in mere hours - about the same amount of time as it takes to deal with the million updates and reboots for a windows machine. Keep it! Why can't you have your thing, and me mine? Why is mine supposedly inferior if it doesn't make you happy?
Google has, thankfully, helped us understand that "beta" means "something that is released for public consumption for many years, and never actually reaches a 'release candidate' phase, much less an actual release."
But but...we get it for free!!! Damn right we better, half the time when I'm using Chrome to start a google docs document, the damn browser tells me I'm in an infinite loop and that the site sucks balls. Good thing they don't charge for google apps...oh, wait...
I started as a slackware guy, back in...well, I won't date myself. Then I built everything myself, in a linux-from-scratch style way. Then I moved to Gentoo for a while. Then, after I realized I wanted to get work done, stop farking around, and accept that I wasn't needing to prove something to someone (not by building my own "distro" at least) I moved to Fedora.
Somewhere along the way, I went with XFCE. I was one of those people who had used Gnome because it was so lightweight compared to CDE. I was saddened by how ugly it got. I don't want my computer making decisions for me, on questions I never asked. All this is my long-winded, I've-been-drinking, way of saying that XFCE is where it's at if you want something out of the box that doesn't suck but still works.
Slashdot Mirror
what needs "public" IPs? What /really/ needs them? routing interfaces between networks, and websites using ssl. Since a very large percentage of the web surfing population is still using windowsXP or older, we can't use TLS (which has been around for ages). So instead, every single ssl-enabled site needs it's own IP. I work at a small company, and even we could release hundreds of public IPs if WindowsXP could use tls instead of ssl.
the top streaming music app is Pandora...which is available for both platforms. Way to miss the point.
err...if you have 50,000 music streaming apps for ipad, and 500 music streaming apps for android, but the top 10 work about the same...
...then guess what. They're equal. The "music streaming" role has been satisfied. You're not going to be using 50,000 of them at once, anyway.
would you fight...to the pain? Because that would probably be redundant, as linux nerds have been a PITA to MS for years already
TSA agent charged with raping 14 year old girl
But it's ok! Lets have them grab crotches of our teenage sons and daughters, take naked pictures of our wives, etc. It makes us safer!
http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/1549245/Cracking-Passwords-With-Amazon-EC2-GPU-Instances ;)
Your argument was already weak, given that you can request more than the initial cap, and given that you disregarded all costs other than the cost of the blade units themselves
I regularly work (directly, in person) with, help, and visit people living in third-world conditions. I make all my purchases, including of electronics, with a mind to minimize the damage the manufacture and shipping from the item I'm purchasing (which is why I shun the cattle industry, and am vegan; it's also why I refuse to own a car). Posting on the internet to tell me I'm a bad person because I'm on the internet is...odd. Reminds me of a child that is told they need to close their eyes during a prayer, and who looks up at their parent and says "but mommy, your eyes are open too! That's how you saw me!"
The internet affects billions of lives, in a positive way. Sending a couple dozen people to Mars for short-term species-preservation reasons doesn't. Try again.
perhaps the reason I get so annoyed at this whole idea is because I frequently see, in person, people living in third-world conditions. People that, given $100, could dramatically improve their quality of life. People that dispose of their feces and urine in a hole in the ground, a few feet from the shanty they live in.
No, I will not"consider Mars to be a backup data center with a back copy of the code required to rebuild." There's no purpose to that. Neither I, nor you, gain immortality simply because the species survived somewhere. Not even the people on Mars would gain immortality; even they would eventually die. But for a billionth of the cost per-person to sustain a person on Mars, I can sustain a person in a third-world country here on this planet.
As I mentioned in a different post, servers aren't self-aware, they don't have a desire to replicate to other geographic locations. Servers exist to perform a role, and redundancy exists to sustain that role - and the role exists not for the server's benefit, but for the benefit of the humans that use the services the server provides. The extremely impoverished family that I can in fact give medical care, food, and a house to right here on this planet? They don't exist for my benefit. If they live and I die, that doesn't make me immortal. If we're going to spend money for someone else's survival benefit we have exponentially more cost-effective options here on this planet. A rock that might hit Earth some time in the next few thousand years, doesn't justify spending more money to save the "species" than it would cost to save the Earth and almost every real person on this planet (versus the conceptual person, the "idea" of a person, within species preservation served by an irrational colonization of Mars).
to be clear - tens of billions would merely get a place on Mars that can't sustain itself. Tens of trillions of dollars over at least a couple hundred years, might get close. What would that accomplish? Species preservation, where a few hundred humans survive, thus preserving the irrational sense of immortality some people have.
OR, we could spend tens of billions to clean up this place...and save billions of lives. I'd be willing to bet, for instance, that for less than the cost of getting 20 people to Mars, and getting them enough supplies to survive just 5 years, you could clean up every single one of the dirties rivers in the world, rivers which right here, right now, are killing people.
So instead of saying I'm selfish, perhaps you should realize I'm arguing for saving billions of real lives, that are already here, and ending extreme suffering that occurs right here, right now, on this planet - and I'm valuing that over "species preservation" - which wouldn't be accomplished anyway by sending a couple dozen people to Mars. They'd live for a few years, until their supplies ran out. Ooops, you lost your immortality anyway!
but there are some people out there to whom the continued existence of the human race is important. I understand that you're clearly one of those people who does not care about anything unless it affects you directly. No, I'm one of those people who think that, given X amount of money, we should use it to save billions of people's lives, not dozens. I'm one of those people who allows himself to think rationally despite of the shallow "species preservation" instinct all animals have.
If a big rock takes out the Earth, no amount of terraforming Mars will keep the billions of people here from being dead. All you're doing is allowing selfish people to over-reproduce even more, rape and pillage yet another planet, and maybe...maybe, the species will survive. So what. If we want the species to survive, a much more cost-effective method would be to fix this place.
We're not servers in a data center. We exist individually, with our own purpose. I don't exist, for example, for your benefit. A server in a server farm, yes - put it in multiple locations, because big rocks happen. But those servers - they're performing a role for the benefit of groups of individual humans. Server node ci-112a is not a self-aware, self-realized being that seeks to colonize another data center for the protection of itself. The analogy is stupid and fails utterly.
If the Earth goes to hell in a handbasket, humans will be the ones who took it there...and no colony anywhere else will save the billions here that died.
no. We (you and I) will die regardless whether or not anyone at all goes to Mars. What you really mean by "we" is "the human species." So? Do you realize how shallow and irrational your desire to be immortal via species preservation, really is? I can understand trying to save a species that is vital to maintaining a particular ecosystem. Additionally, like I said - it would be far, far cheaper to save this planet than it would be to make Mars habitable. You may think the ozone layer is thin here, but you should see it there! Global warming here has nothing on the temperatures there. Slight lack of extremely abundant water too, as it so happens. I'll grant though that the fact that there is substantially less atmosphere there does mean it has less...err..dirty air, than Earth does. Spending tens of billions to send a couple dozen people to Mars won't save the human species. Spending 1/10th that to clean shit up around here, might though.
"humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth" For the love of G-d and all that is holy, why must we? If we have the technology to make Mars habitable, then we have the technology to fix Earth. If the Earth goes to hell in a handbasket, would humans living on Mars save your life? Why not spend 1/10th that same energy to fixing this place? If we can't straighten out our own house, what the hell makes us think we could make Mars work out? Such a trip would be nothing more than billions upon billions of dollars, pulled from the taxes of hundreds of millions of people, just to pander to the selfish dreams of a very small number of people. Spend that money on making a light rail system spanning the US, clean energy sources (solar, wind, etc), and you'll have lots left over; and then it helps save this planet, for the benefit of billions of current earthlings, plus all generations to come. Or...spend the money to send a couple dozen people to Mars, so they can...do jack for the rest of us. One key thing to keep in mind - most of the people who went from Europe to the US back in the day either paid their own way, or were sent specifically so they could gather resources to send back. The idea that it was a one-way trip is true only for the people who paid their own way. So if a few billionaires want to get together and send themselves to Mars, I'm not going to stop them. But why the hell should I pay for someone else to go?
most industries don't have such regulations. Just so you know.
Except a compute cluster that beats the crap out of the amazon cluster nodes (due to gpu performance) costs about $1500 per node.
No. It most certainly does not. You're leaving out the high performance networking between the nodes, the server room, the image building machine, the salary of the sysadmin that set it up and maintains it, the cost of the building the server room is in, the cost of the electricity, etc.
And, again, the maximum cluster you'll spin up "in minutes" is 64 cores, no more. That's pathetic.
All of Amazon's services have a "pathetic" starting max; we hit our limits on 3 things all at once when we started, all on the first day, and got confused for a moment...until realized you can send a request for an increased maximum, and the request is granted fairly quickly. We had our caps increased (not for HPC, but caps none the less) in about an hour. Proper planning, you request higher caps /before/ you need it.
I can promise you the anti-missle systems are in place...and unless someone purposefully turned them off, they'd have responded in /some/ way, even if unsuccessfully. That they didn't, means this was a known event.
I seriously doubt things like Amazon or GAE will beat even small compute clusters available at universities
That was true until recently - Amazon now has "HPC" capabilities. While not extremely impressive (yet?), you can indeed rapidly beat out any small compute cluster at a university now - at a fraction of the cost, too. Now instead of having a cluster that takes weeks to give you results, takes lots of man-hours to build and maintain, and spends only part of it's time being used...you can spin up (in minutes) a cluster that can do the work, then you can release the nodes and you're no longer paying.
Well, that's great and all, but if that is cloud computing, then why am I supposed to be interested ?
if you're not interested, then fine - you don't need it then.
I'm not interested in buying a purse, but that doesn't mean I want purses redefined until they're something I'm interested in. I'm not interested in buying lipstick, but that doesn't mean I want to redefine lipstick until it suits my needs, or scoff at anyone else who would want to use lipstick.
That you don't have a need for it, doesn't matter. You were clearly not the target audience.
But it still needs to do things like letting me see it's screen, replug, reconfigure the network, add/remove disks, ...
No. It doesn't. That's not cloud computing. Buy a desktop, attach a monitor to it. Now you can see the screen, reconfigure the network, etc. You're thinking of a particular singular instance, and missing the *entire* point.
that crap exists. It's not cloud. You're looking for Slicehost. They have a webconsole you can use to log in, disable networking, re-enable networking, the whole bit.
I don't get why people think that "cloud" merely means "hosted VM" when, in fact, it means nothing of the sort. If system 148 of a cluster of 250 stops responding, your cloud shouldn't notice or care; it should die automatically, and get replaced automatically. If you're beholden to the health of a particular system, then it's not Cloud Computing. If you can't control and access the resources with simple REST, then it's not cloud. If it's a glass of water, it's not a cloud.
yeah except no. Even minor changes to Ubuntu, and I completely make the system unable to deal with the package management from the distro. 95% of the point of a distro is the package management system.
Fedora is less bad at that, especially the current release.
I don't want to convert you. If you're happy with windows, go for it. I want my Linux that wasn't moderate, middle-ground, washed out bloated crap. I could go back to the better, more solid/stable/secure extreme with Solaris...oh, wait, it's Oracle now, and they're not really worrying about Solaris anymore.
Windows won, that's all there is to it. And by "won" I mean "won the war of making crappy software acceptable to the masses." Hell, it's even making products from other industries get more leeway on how bad it can be at release, and still be ok. I have a 20+ year old manual can opener that got damaged, and now only mostly works. I go buy a new one every once in a while, the best I can find that isn't ridiculously priced, and alas - without fail, somewhere around 3 months later I'm using my old can opener again, because the new one stopped working. Tangent? Probably. You want to use an electric can opener that gets the can from the cupboard from you, opens it, and sings you a song. I want one I turn by hand. I don't want my manual can opener to be semi-fancy, in a play to middle ground (read: Ubuntu). I have no problem getting everything I want working (including watching hulu, using pandora, playing WoW, etc etc) done on a home-brew linux in mere hours - about the same amount of time as it takes to deal with the million updates and reboots for a windows machine. Keep it! Why can't you have your thing, and me mine? Why is mine supposedly inferior if it doesn't make you happy?
Google has, thankfully, helped us understand that "beta" means "something that is released for public consumption for many years, and never actually reaches a 'release candidate' phase, much less an actual release."
But but...we get it for free!!! Damn right we better, half the time when I'm using Chrome to start a google docs document, the damn browser tells me I'm in an infinite loop and that the site sucks balls. Good thing they don't charge for google apps...oh, wait...
I started as a slackware guy, back in...well, I won't date myself. Then I built everything myself, in a linux-from-scratch style way. Then I moved to Gentoo for a while. Then, after I realized I wanted to get work done, stop farking around, and accept that I wasn't needing to prove something to someone (not by building my own "distro" at least) I moved to Fedora.
Somewhere along the way, I went with XFCE. I was one of those people who had used Gnome because it was so lightweight compared to CDE. I was saddened by how ugly it got. I don't want my computer making decisions for me, on questions I never asked. All this is my long-winded, I've-been-drinking, way of saying that XFCE is where it's at if you want something out of the box that doesn't suck but still works.
I know, farking hell - I have like 15 every other day or something. Oh well ;)
surely this is just a plug for the john stewart rally thing today...right?