AFAIK, in the UK, free incoming calls is so much of a given that no company could even think of charging.
But in the UK it costs about 10 times as much to call a mobile phone (from a landline or a different network) as it does to call a landline. In the US mobile phones have standard geographic numbers (rather than 07xxx as in the UK) and it costs no more to call a mobile than to call a landline in the same area.
The flipside, of course, is that you pay the same for incoming calls on your mobile as you do for outgoing calls. But this means that the owner of the phone is acutely aware of the cost of mobile calls (in the UK it's the incoming callers who are aware of the cost) and so there's heavy pressure amongst the phone companies to offer cheaper deals to customers (as anyone can switch their number to a different network to save money). Most plans now give you unlimited night/weekend minutes and a few hundred daytime minutes per month, which is enough for almost all casual use.
Paul
It's too bad Google doesn't have one of those things where you can watch everyone's search scrolling down the screen live. I bet there would be a lot of "pictures of mountains" searches right about now.
Actually they do. Unfortunately for those not in Silicon Valley, it's on the reception wall of their office in Mountain View...
But in Europe, you need to know whether you're calling a cell phone, as it costs about 5-10 times as much as calling a land line. We don't need to know in the US, as they're all the same rate. In the UK at least, each cell phone operator has their own area code, so to remember a friend's number you have to remember their cell operator; here you just need to remember where they live. (Obviously this is no longer the case once you have overlaid area codes.)
If you look at the picture on the second page where he's sitting in front of his laptop you can see why he's got RSI!
Guy obviously didn't read the little ergonomics flyer that comes with practically everything these days.
Absolutely - he needs to get a separate keyboard and a good keyboard/mouse tray. Bringing my hands down several inches so that my forearms were level was IMO probably the single biggest factor in getting rid of my tendonitis a year or so ago.
Then again, if you want 1/50th the channels for what you are paying now, commercial-free TV would be an option.
I do want that, so please tell me where I can sign up for that option.
Move to England...
Two of the national TV channels (and a bunch of the radio stations) are commercial-free (paid for by a "TV/radio licence fee") and the other channels don't have as much advertising as US channels do.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country...
I'm not sure who said it. But it sure does apply.
A judge in Robert Heinlein's short story Life-Line. It's part of the Future History series, and anthologised in various places, including The Man Who Sold The Moon. It's talking about a scientist who's created a machine that will tell you the precise moment of your death, and he gets sued by a bunch of life insurance companies, since by consulting him, people know exactly when to start investing in life insurance policies...
(Oh, and the original doesn't appear to have the words for their private benefit at the end.)
Given that the site is fairfax.com.au, I guess that's probably Australian dollars - so more like $75,000 in US money. Still not cheap, but slightly more believable.
A friend of mine had some success with it. I don't have much dieting experience so I wonder what others here think of this book.
For me, the main advantage of his approach was the daily visual feedback from the spreadsheet graphs, which took the normal daily weight fluctuations, and smoothed them out with an exponential rolling average to give you a better idea of what your "real" weight was. The tracking of your average calorie deficit/excess was also great, as it gave you a guide in more concrete terms (calories/day) of how far from weight loss equilibrium your current diet was.
I managed to lose about 18 pounds over six months, with the bulk of it in the first four months. I then put most of it back on the next couple of years when I moved to the US, but I've managed to lose most of it again using the same approach.
Why on earth would you put up with it crashing ever?
I've had VMware 2.x kill the host system on several occasions, and both 2.x and 3.x have died with assertion failures from time to time, (generally while doing restores on multiply-checkpointed VMs) so it's not perfect either.
But I'd still rate VMware as an essential tool - a 30-second edit/compile/resume/test cycle (and avoiding reboot/fsck) is very handy when you're trying to hunt down bugs in kernel modules.
(Local disk access because you want silly amounts of swap space to allow caching of many pages in virtual memory).
Agreed, disk access speed is a factor - but:
if you can't fit your working set of served pages in RAM, performance is going to fall pretty drastically, so available RAM is going to be more important
you don't need to use swap space to store the files that you're mapping into virtual memory - assuming the web server isn't modifying the static files in any way, they'll still be clean and hence can just be reloaded from their original disk locations if necessary.
Ensim ServerXchange effectively costs $250 per machine: the $25,000 box is a provisioning box which can provision up to 100 other machines. Each of the provisioned machines can then be chopped up into private servers with a percentage of memory, space and processor power. You also get:
an integrated suite of web- and Java-based applications providing control and management for the service providers, their resellers, and their users;
a large number of applications and application suites that can be installed en-masse on private servers with just a few mouse clicks.
To answer questions raised in other comments:
What's the difference between this and installing VMware for $329?
Even though an Ensim private server appears to the applications running on it to be a dedicated server, it runs in the same operating system as the host. This means that it can take advantage of services provided by the OS with much less overhead than VMware, in terms of both CPU and memory usage.
How is this different than traditional load balancing / clustering / virtual web hosting and the like? Where is the real benefit?
A private server is a fully featured virtual machine and provides a lot more flexibility than traditional web hosting. It is cheaper than a dedicated server (both for the ISP/ASP and the customer) while providing guaranteed resource allocation.
...there is absolutely no way in modern operating systems to allocate CPU space to a group of processes.
We can do it:-)
Unix timesharing systems have been hit with all sort of internal dos attacks. My personal favorite is the shell script which does nothing but call itself in an infinite loop.
If you do this on an Ensim private server you will only hurt that private server itself. Other private servers running on the same box will not be affected.
How do they prevent priority inversion? For example a process I have granted unlimited (or very large) amounts of service too, and a process I have granted only tiny bits of service too, and another in between. The "unlimited" one waits for a disk I/O to complete. The "tiny" one starts an extreamly slow X operation (like fetching the glyphs for a all 64K chars in a 16bit true type font at some huge scale...or a mouse grab...or a PEX operation). The disk I/O completes, and the large one wants to display something, but it can't as the tiny one is doing something. The "in between" process wakes now, and starts doing a non-X thing (say five hours of ray tracing). It has more resources allocated to it then the "tiny" process so I assume it gets to suck them up, but less then the "large" one, which won't matter until the "tiny" one gets enough slop from the middle one to continue.
There are several assumptions that you make in this scenario that are fundamentally overturned by Nemesis.
Firstly, you fundamentally can't do proper QoS support just using a purely priority-based model. Instead you offer scheduling guarantees - for example, for a process with a relatively low requirement for CPU, you might offer 1ms of processing time per 100ms of real time. For a CPU intensive process, you might give it 2ms of processing time per 5ms of real time. Even though the "low-priority" task is being offered far less time than the "high-priority" task, it is still guaranteed to receive the allocation that has been made to it. The Nemesis scheduler can enforce these deadlines, since the kernel itself is incredibly lightweight - more so than many microkernels.
Secondly, the major problem with offering QoS is working out who is actually causing/benefitting from the work being carried out by the kernel/servers. In a vertically-structured system such as Nemesis, most of the data-path work is moved into the applications themselves, (in shared libraries) rather than being done by servers. So in the case of video, clients render their own pixels into their own memory, and invoke a protected trap into the framebuffer device driver to actually transfer those pixels (over the PCI bus) into their windows on the screen. The trap code respects the CPU scheduling deadlines, effectively causing all of the time consumed in rendering and blitting to be accounted to the application. You can have multiple applications on Nemesis all rendering to the screen (animations, or video being streamed from the disk/network), and the display server is using absolutely no CPU time itself. The display server only has to actually do any work itself when applications want to create/destroy/move windows, or to handle mouse and keyboard events. There is also a separate "X-server" process providing certain X facilities such as the clipboard for legacy applications. Clearly if you have two processes wanting to do a mouse grab, only one of them can do so at any one time - but the important thing is that this shouldn't cause your real-time video conference to break up.
The same idea is used for network and disk access - the disk driver schedules disk block reads/writes, and the network driver schedules ethernet frames. In each case access controls ensure that applications cannot access packets/blocks that they have no authorisation for; by splitting the work up into very small chunks, the task of scheduling (using guarantees rather than simple priorities) is made much more straightforward. Tasks such as protocol processing for TCP/UDP, or interpreting disk blocks to form file data, are performed by the applications using standard shared libraries.
More information about Nemesis can be found at:
The Nemesis SourceForge site, complete with downloads
Slashdot Mirror
How is 5%/year (compound) growth not an example of exponential growth?
But in the UK it costs about 10 times as much to call a mobile phone (from a landline or a different network) as it does to call a landline. In the US mobile phones have standard geographic numbers (rather than 07xxx as in the UK) and it costs no more to call a mobile than to call a landline in the same area.
The flipside, of course, is that you pay the same for incoming calls on your mobile as you do for outgoing calls. But this means that the owner of the phone is acutely aware of the cost of mobile calls (in the UK it's the incoming callers who are aware of the cost) and so there's heavy pressure amongst the phone companies to offer cheaper deals to customers (as anyone can switch their number to a different network to save money). Most plans now give you unlimited night/weekend minutes and a few hundred daytime minutes per month, which is enough for almost all casual use. Paul
There are a bunch of other places in the kernel that call do_brk() - mostly in the binary loaders and 32-bit emulation layers.
Would anyone in the audience be willing to start a GNU version of a virtual machine monitor (VMM)?
Take a look at Plex86
Actually they do. Unfortunately for those not in Silicon Valley, it's on the reception wall of their office in Mountain View
But in Europe, you need to know whether you're calling a cell phone, as it costs about 5-10 times as much as calling a land line. We don't need to know in the US, as they're all the same rate. In the UK at least, each cell phone operator has their own area code, so to remember a friend's number you have to remember their cell operator; here you just need to remember where they live. (Obviously this is no longer the case once you have overlaid area codes.)
Absolutely - he needs to get a separate keyboard and a good keyboard/mouse tray. Bringing my hands down several inches so that my forearms were level was IMO probably the single biggest factor in getting rid of my tendonitis a year or so ago.
Move to England
Two of the national TV channels (and a bunch of the radio stations) are commercial-free (paid for by a "TV/radio licence fee") and the other channels don't have as much advertising as US channels do.
A judge in Robert Heinlein's short story Life-Line. It's part of the Future History series, and anthologised in various places, including The Man Who Sold The Moon. It's talking about a scientist who's created a machine that will tell you the precise moment of your death, and he gets sued by a bunch of life insurance companies, since by consulting him, people know exactly when to start investing in life insurance policies
(Oh, and the original doesn't appear to have the words for their private benefit at the end.)
Given that the site is fairfax.com.au, I guess that's probably Australian dollars - so more like $75,000 in US money. Still not cheap, but slightly more believable.
I managed to lose about 18 pounds over six months, with the bulk of it in the first four months. I then put most of it back on the next couple of years when I moved to the US, but I've managed to lose most of it again using the same approach.
I've had VMware 2.x kill the host system on several occasions, and both 2.x and 3.x have died with assertion failures from time to time, (generally while doing restores on multiply-checkpointed VMs) so it's not perfect either.
But I'd still rate VMware as an essential tool - a 30-second edit/compile/resume/test cycle (and avoiding reboot/fsck) is very handy when you're trying to hunt down bugs in kernel modules.
Agreed, disk access speed is a factor - but:
To answer questions raised in other comments:
Even though an Ensim private server appears to the applications running on it to be a dedicated server, it runs in the same operating system as the host. This means that it can take advantage of services provided by the OS with much less overhead than VMware, in terms of both CPU and memory usage. A private server is a fully featured virtual machine and provides a lot more flexibility than traditional web hosting. It is cheaper than a dedicated server (both for the ISP/ASP and the customer) while providing guaranteed resource allocation. We can do itThere are several assumptions that you make in this scenario that are fundamentally overturned by Nemesis.
Firstly, you fundamentally can't do proper QoS support just using a purely priority-based model. Instead you offer scheduling guarantees - for example, for a process with a relatively low requirement for CPU, you might offer 1ms of processing time per 100ms of real time. For a CPU intensive process, you might give it 2ms of processing time per 5ms of real time. Even though the "low-priority" task is being offered far less time than the "high-priority" task, it is still guaranteed to receive the allocation that has been made to it. The Nemesis scheduler can enforce these deadlines, since the kernel itself is incredibly lightweight - more so than many microkernels.
Secondly, the major problem with offering QoS is working out who is actually causing/benefitting from the work being carried out by the kernel/servers. In a vertically-structured system such as Nemesis, most of the data-path work is moved into the applications themselves, (in shared libraries) rather than being done by servers. So in the case of video, clients render their own pixels into their own memory, and invoke a protected trap into the framebuffer device driver to actually transfer those pixels (over the PCI bus) into their windows on the screen. The trap code respects the CPU scheduling deadlines, effectively causing all of the time consumed in rendering and blitting to be accounted to the application. You can have multiple applications on Nemesis all rendering to the screen (animations, or video being streamed from the disk/network), and the display server is using absolutely no CPU time itself. The display server only has to actually do any work itself when applications want to create/destroy/move windows, or to handle mouse and keyboard events. There is also a separate "X-server" process providing certain X facilities such as the clipboard for legacy applications. Clearly if you have two processes wanting to do a mouse grab, only one of them can do so at any one time - but the important thing is that this shouldn't cause your real-time video conference to break up.
The same idea is used for network and disk access - the disk driver schedules disk block reads/writes, and the network driver schedules ethernet frames. In each case access controls ensure that applications cannot access packets/blocks that they have no authorisation for; by splitting the work up into very small chunks, the task of scheduling (using guarantees rather than simple priorities) is made much more straightforward. Tasks such as protocol processing for TCP/UDP, or interpreting disk blocks to form file data, are performed by the applications using standard shared libraries.
More information about Nemesis can be found at: