In my research, I have seen that energy providers will buy some power from someone with a solar array. Usually in the form of discounted electric bills. So yeah... that's an option. I guess I feel that if the electric company is going to be benefiting from my investment/work, they should be paying me to build it. Oh well. Nobody said life is fair.
*I* wanted to be the first person in the U.S. to do that!!! I've been in the research phase for the past year or so. Basically, I want to be able to sever my connection to the grid except for emergency needs. Especially where my technological needs are concerned. Oh well... I might not be the first, but at least I'll be an early adopter.
American and European humans are ALREADY stock to be tracked. There was a tipping point in the late 80s/early 90s when business became powerful enough that they lost interest in you buying their products. That wasn't profitable enough. The new profit center is buying, selling and trading humans and it happens daily. Do you honestly think that television ads and the companies that make them make much money from getting you to buy a product? They make MUCH more money by selling YOU to their true customers: the business selling the product. The businesses that are actually trying to sell something aren't interested in things like customer loyalty these days. If anything, it's more profitable to them if they take a group of their customers and sell them over to another company who will pay handsomely to own you and your patronage. This is why there is no attention paid to making you happy. You only need to be "happy enough".
Major problem with your line of thinking... in most instance there IS only one way that is the most correct regardless of what people may think. The problem with "diversity" in thinking is that it gives people the right to believe things incorrectly. That's never a good thing. Take the Holocaust deniers for example. If they work hard enough and long enough to espouse their view as correct and no one takes them to task for it (ie, tells them to shut the hell up under pain of intellectual death) you may very well wind up with a future society that believes it didn't happen. We're seeing similar things happening already. The recently deceased American president, Gerald Ford, has died an "honorable man" in the eyes of mainstream America. However he was a ghastly individual who rewrote history with just a few words when he was involved in the investigation of the J.F.K. (one of America's greatest presidents to date) assassination. The same goes for Richard Nixon who was also revered on television even though he was one of America's most criminal leaders and should have been executed.
So it goes without saying that some ways of thinking are wrong. Anti-choice (opposing a woman's right to safe and clean pregnancy termination) stance? Wrong. Opposition of equal opportunity programs? Wrong. Opposition of nationalized health care? Wrong. (Witness the disaster that is the American health care industry just a over a decade from when things could have been much better). There are just some ways of thinking that should not be allowed as they interfere with the progress and betterment of every human being on the planet, and not just a chosen few. If a way of thinking does not benefit every man, woman and child on every continent, it is the wrong line of thinking. If a way of thinking only benefits the powerful or those who make more than $100,000 a year to the detriment of anyone not included in those groups, it is the wrong way of thinking. Period. End of story. Anyone who disagrees is wrong.
OK. Let's put it another way for you monkeys to comprende. Capiche?
They buy Sealand and become a sovereign nation to avoid prosecution. The RIAA, MPAA and BSA all band together and officially buy the U.S. government and military/industrial complex. Bush becomes an RIAA, MPAA, BSA executive by default. He declares a pre-emptive strike on Sealand to both curry favor with his, now official, bosses AND to distract from the disaster that is Iraq. "Shock and Awe" is employed but on a smaller scale so that Sealand isn't totally destroyed. The liberals go into hand wringing mode for the downtrodden pirate land peoples. Areas of Sealand (no larger than two feet by two feet) are occupied by American forces, while the Pirate Bay folks hide in ventilation shafts with Osama. American troops are ravaged by spitball artillery attacks launched from various vents on the compound. The leader of the Pirate Bay goes on pirate radio to bring the troops over to their cause as a sort of "Tokyo Rose" with an attitude. This drags on for four years with casualties on both sides. Republicans despise the Pirate Bay people on principal. Liberals hold them up as modern day heroes, but since the media is all controlled by the RIAA, MPAA and BSA, they can't get the message out that easily and have to resort to holding up index cards at their local supermarket with "Free the Repressed Peoples of Pirate Bay" and "Bring the Troops Home". Yeah. I can see it now.
Wow you actually drank the koolaide. What about the poor people who produce a lot but don't get compensated for it. And what about the wealthy people who produce next to nothing and continue to get richer through unethical means? They exist and those tendencies are increasing on both ends of the spectrum.
It's perfectly logical as you WILL be coming back genetically if you have offspring. Assuming you have a child or children, and they do the same, you will eventually have a LOT of people connected to you. It's completely logical to care for their well-being. It's completely ILLOGICAL to be oblivious to this fact. Now... if you plan on never having kids, then you are welcome to be short sighted. I think living without a care for the future while having your own children is essentially being a "deadbeat meta-parent".
The humor of your comment is not lost. Sadly, there are people who really live with a mentality that doesn't extend beyond their own lifetime. I think people should all be planning for at least 10,000 years beyond their lives if we want to make civilization perfect. Take these people for instance.
...if you're looking a billion years back in time, then doesn't that imply that if some ancient alien race existed back then, you'd be able to see their battle cruiser with sufficient resolution? Also... this brings up an interesting quandry. Seeing that light takes that long to travel to our eyes here, then that means there is a visual delay. Much like sufficient distances on earth create audible delays for sound, correct? This does suggest some level of time shifting as what we see or hear from a sufficient distance is "now" for us, but "back then" for the other subject.
Now, with that line of thinking, reverse the viewpoint. If you are over where the furthest stars are right now, you SHOULD be seeing our portion of the universe a billion years ago. With sufficient resolution, that view should be quite interesting. We should be able to eventually get that vantage point (and much farther) if we master quantum entanglement to the point where we can isolate particles here that are entangled with particles there. Those particles could then be used to study the currently occurring light patterns "there" from here with instantaneous results. I see no reason why we can't use entanglement to create sensor arrays out of particles at remote locations to intercept a wide variety of interesting data. Just a thought.
I think the problem right now is that Xen really can't be fully experienced unless you either buy it from Xensource to layer over your Novell Suse Distro, or you get "down and dirty" with the code (what I did) from the unstable tree and build it in a distro like Gentoo. I don't know what the Xensource licensing/costs are but I expect they aren't cheap. Building it from source code and getting familiar with it is far less expensive especially if you're like me and you're doing this at home for practical reasons.
Ahhh... you've apparently never experiences paravirtualization. It's nearly as fast as running on the bare metal. I mean in the neighborhood of 95-98% of the real system's performance. We're not talking VMWare Workstation or Virtual PC/Server here. This is the real deal... If I were running the PBX in Xen using full virtualization, I'd probably see what you're talking about. But not with paravirtualization. It really is an amazing thing. The reputation that virtualization seems to have of being "slow" is unwarranted when you're talking about Xen.
Yes. To elaborate a bit, I'm actually using LVM2 logical volumes. So we are talking real disk devices. Here's the general idea:
Host OS/dev/hda (C: drive in Windows parlance) Partitioned into/dev/hda1 (boot)/dev/hda2 (root)/dev/hda3 (swap)/dev/hda4 (lvm space) Volume Group "Xenspace" contains/dev/hda4 (Sort of like software RAID concatenation in Windows or Dynamic Disks) Logical Volume/dev/xenspace/winxp (A slice of the volume group (/dev/hda4) that maps back to the physical drive in the host) Guest OS maps/dev/xenspace/winxp to/dev/hda which Windows XP sees as C:\
LVM performs very well and the benefits of it over partitioning are quite huge. The current setup I have is temporary though. I plan to set up a "SAN" using Linux network block devices so that the logical volumes will be on a different box from the Xen server. That might help things a bit...
After playing around with paravirtualization with Xen for the past two+ years, I finally got the cash in August to buy a cheapo AMD dual-core 64-bit system (~$800 at Best Buy: an HP system with a 4200 and 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM). I've run both Xen and QEMU on it under 64-bit Gentoo Linux. The performance of Windows XP on Xen vs. QEMU is fairly close. I would have to say that it seems to me that where Xen suffers is disk I/O. Anything that's disk intensive seems to eat up the CPU. I suspect this wouldn't be the case on better hardware with a high performance SCSI/RAID system. That should, at least, make things a bit better anyway. But for the time being I'm sticking with Xen since it's just too easy to use. And I am especially interested in the live migration features. As long as you have centralized disk storage, you can move live VMs between physical hosts with less than a second of interruption (ie. your users will never notice). Keep in mind, I'm doing this all at home as I'd really like to collapse many of my machines into one or two boxes and keep everything else as simple X displays where GUIs are needed. I've currently got four VMs running on the box with two of them being fully virtualized (Windows XP SP2 for access DRMed crap and Redhat Linux 7 which still hosts some services I don't want to part with) and the other two being paravirtualized (Domain0 which is just the VM management environment and my Gentoo Asterisk "PBX"). PAravirtualized performance is damn amazing. I think if I used strictly paravirtualized OSes I could probably squeeze out 20 VMs from this guy with decent performance. I actually just added two more gigs to the system tonight, and if I assume 128 megs per virtual machine (I've allocated 512M to the Windows XP VM) I can get up to 32 VMs running simultaneously.
As far as KVM goes, I've had a good deal of experience with QEMU and it KVM is similar, there are some limitations I hope they will overcome. (For what it's worth, the hardware based virtualization in Xen is also a modified QEMU process called qemu-dm) The main one being PCI device allocation. Xen allows you to partition your PCI devices and assign individual cards to specific VMs. I don't think QEMU does this, and I expect that KVM doesn't either.
Rush Limbaugh told me that the only reason that it's not snowing in winter anymore in the northern sections of the U.S. is because of the number of cows we farm and the carbon moronoxide they expude from their butts. Cow farts != global warming folks! And besides, even if global warming is happening (which it isn't) there's a lot of benefits: The southern U.S. will become a tropical paradise. The mid U.S. will be able to produce different crops. And even the Canadians will benefit in that they won't have those savage winters anymore. Any concerns about coastal areas flooding can be put to rest as the army corp of engineers will be able to build very efficient and effective dams and breakwalls for most normal situations. Besides, floodwaters can easily be pumped out back to the ocean to lower the local water level. So stop all this worrying. There is no global warming. Rush told me so and I believe him. Megadittos!!!
I don't understand the reason why so many people are shying away from GPL3. To me it seems a pretty logical upgrade to GPL2 and makes it even harder for businesses to openly thwart the spirit of free software. To be honest, I've always been annoyed by the fuss made over licenses.
I use IE for everything and I've never once been hacked by these supposed security holes. I do all kinds of stuff like online banking, eTrade, eBay, online shopping, the works! And it's totally secure because it's all encrypted. Sure, I've had something like $24,000 worth of charges applied to my credit cards that weren't mine, but that wasn't because of IE. That was because I made the mistake of dealing with a few companies that use Linux or some Unix variant (heh, sounds like a disease we're talking about here instead of an OS) for their web portals and they probably got rooted. Open source software is just not safe. The hackers are all over it since it's all out in the open. Once they get a chance to look at how it works, they can easily make it do their bidding. At least Microsoft has the sense to keep stuff private. NO hackers in the entire world could figure any of that stuff out because there just isn't any single person as smart as Bill Gates and his crack team of developers. I wouldn't touch Firefox with a ten foot pole since it's open source. Although they only report the bugs they think they've found, there are probably billions more than MS has in IE because the hackers have a roadmap with open source. It says, "Here's the keys to the kingdom. Come hack me". I Trust MS products because MS is all about making great, innovative software that is secure and robust and stable.
NOTE: The above post is merely a parody of the Windows user who's "got religion". A reasonable Windows user knows better. A reasonable *nix user knows better. Let the games begin...
Build one? Hehe... let's see how many opinions come out on this one. Actually when I first read it I was thinking 14" refractive telecope. Not reflective (where the 14" is the mirror).
Oh I'm well aware of the fact that they research things that aren't used for killing. You're using the fruits of some of that research right now to attack me.;P (RAR!!!) I'm not saying the D.O.D. is evil. I'm saying that there are some very warped people who work at various levels of our government who are very interested in the ultimate killing technologies. Especially solutions that would exterminate all life on Earth if necessary just to win an ideological argument. Considering how you went off on me, I suspect that you might be one of them. Cheers!
...that the U.S. D.O.D. would be interested in this. There are people in this world who are completely wrong in the head;...to the point where having NO survivors in an all out war would be considered a victory. "Yeah, no one would survive. But at least the enemy would be eliminated". That is the only thing a weapon (bio, nuclear, chemical, etc...) that assures complete destruction of all life would be useful for.
I've used QEMU in "production" both at home and at work for what it's worth. As good as it is, it's really more a desktop virtualization solution IMHO as you can't run multiple instances of QEMU on a normal box and expect full blown performance even with the kqemu module. My work application was to let some of my users run a test workstation environment to test some software that couldn't have multiple instances of different versions running. These users were on Windows 2000 boxes and were running virtualized Windows 2000 guests. I even used one of the GUI management utilities to allow them to just point and click to select the VM to run, shut it down, save it's state, etc... It didn't perform well enough for my boss, so he ordered the Windows guy to install Virtual PC. Oh well... At home I actually did something I think was damn cool. I had a server here that was running a highly customized RedHat 7 and I wanted to upgrade it to something newer. But at the same time I couldn't afford the downtime for mail, vpn, web and dns services that I provide. So I took the entire root filesystem and used 'rsync' to copy it all to a loopback filesystem. Then I booted it up with QEMU and it worked part way. I had to make some config changes (different virtual NIC than the original box). I ran with it for a year with increased performance since the host system was much newer than the original server. I just moved it from QEMU the other day to Xen with 'svm' support on a 64 bit Dual core AMD system. I have to say Xen is much better performance wise because you can get many more virtual systems on a modern box with enough RAM than you can with QEMU with some exceptions. Right now I've got two VMs running with svm support (it's a modified QEMU in Xen actually) and two that are paravirtualized. Paravirtualization is where you get the most bang for your buck. If you're running completely paravirtualized, you can probably stuff up to 25 VMs on a typical modern Desktop processor with 4-8 gigs of RAM.
Uhm... I started using it on the PC platform in 1998/99 with VMWare on RedHat 7. I was amazed when I saw I could boot a Windows 98 system simultaneously with my already running Linux system on a lowly Pentium MMX 233 with 32 megs of RAM. Then I found out that what I thought was new back then was something the big iron world had enjoyed for decades and originated in the 60s. It was just new to x86 is all come 1998/99. Since then, I've moved onto Xen for Linux which is rather amazing in terms of performance and flexibility if you paravirtualize the system. I've got three VMs running on an old Pentium II era Celeron at 400 MHz with 384 megs of RAM. That system has enough horsepower to do the following for my network:
Internal: DHCP, DNS, postfix SMTP server for internal clients, Squid proxy, OpenVPN MySQL DB, DBMail IMAP services that use MySQL as the backend. All in 128 megs of RAM. And they all perform smoothly and quickly.
External: DNS, postfix SMTP server for spam filtering and relaying to the virtual internal SMTP server, OpenVPN server. All in 64 megs of RAM.
I plan to add an Asterisk PBX to that same box for a third VPN so I can have private VoIP with my OpenVPN users (all friends and family as I'm talking about a system at home, not at work).
I've, of course also played with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, QEMU and poked at OpenVZ. For me, a decent virtualization solution has to be able to run other OSes to count as good which is why certain virtualization solutions don't do much for me. If I need access to Windows, I want to be able to do it without wasting good hardware on it. That's why UserMode and Linux Virtual Servers (more akin to chroot jails) do absolutely nothin for me other than when I'm building a Gentoo box. But, this is not the big new thing. It's only that MS is making waves with it now... typical.
Oh it'll be made alright. They'll use CGI to augment Ford's looks. He'll wind up looking better than he did in the 80s. Probably like a cross between that Russell Crow guy and the Terminator. And he'll probably wind up having a big fight with several thousand "natives" while jumping all over the place in superhuman fashion. AND... he'll DEFINITELY shoot first.
Well I was actually being a bit trollish myself. However, it does irk me when I see idiot writing where there are three sentences per "paragraph" and the text looks more like a poem than an essay.
Thanks for pointing out that I exceeded the twelve sentences per paragraph rule by two sentences. It contributed OH SO much to the conversation. I learned the twelve sentences per paragraph rule in grade school like any other moderately educated kid born before 1980. I suspect you learned to write by aping others online? Typical 21st century drivel is what you just wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
In my research, I have seen that energy providers will buy some power from someone with a solar array. Usually in the form of discounted electric bills. So yeah... that's an option. I guess I feel that if the electric company is going to be benefiting from my investment/work, they should be paying me to build it. Oh well. Nobody said life is fair.
*I* wanted to be the first person in the U.S. to do that!!! I've been in the research phase for the past year or so. Basically, I want to be able to sever my connection to the grid except for emergency needs. Especially where my technological needs are concerned. Oh well... I might not be the first, but at least I'll be an early adopter.
American and European humans are ALREADY stock to be tracked. There was a tipping point in the late 80s/early 90s when business became powerful enough that they lost interest in you buying their products. That wasn't profitable enough. The new profit center is buying, selling and trading humans and it happens daily. Do you honestly think that television ads and the companies that make them make much money from getting you to buy a product? They make MUCH more money by selling YOU to their true customers: the business selling the product. The businesses that are actually trying to sell something aren't interested in things like customer loyalty these days. If anything, it's more profitable to them if they take a group of their customers and sell them over to another company who will pay handsomely to own you and your patronage. This is why there is no attention paid to making you happy. You only need to be "happy enough".
Major problem with your line of thinking... in most instance there IS only one way that is the most correct regardless of what people may think. The problem with "diversity" in thinking is that it gives people the right to believe things incorrectly. That's never a good thing. Take the Holocaust deniers for example. If they work hard enough and long enough to espouse their view as correct and no one takes them to task for it (ie, tells them to shut the hell up under pain of intellectual death) you may very well wind up with a future society that believes it didn't happen. We're seeing similar things happening already. The recently deceased American president, Gerald Ford, has died an "honorable man" in the eyes of mainstream America. However he was a ghastly individual who rewrote history with just a few words when he was involved in the investigation of the J.F.K. (one of America's greatest presidents to date) assassination. The same goes for Richard Nixon who was also revered on television even though he was one of America's most criminal leaders and should have been executed.
So it goes without saying that some ways of thinking are wrong. Anti-choice (opposing a woman's right to safe and clean pregnancy termination) stance? Wrong. Opposition of equal opportunity programs? Wrong. Opposition of nationalized health care? Wrong. (Witness the disaster that is the American health care industry just a over a decade from when things could have been much better). There are just some ways of thinking that should not be allowed as they interfere with the progress and betterment of every human being on the planet, and not just a chosen few. If a way of thinking does not benefit every man, woman and child on every continent, it is the wrong line of thinking. If a way of thinking only benefits the powerful or those who make more than $100,000 a year to the detriment of anyone not included in those groups, it is the wrong way of thinking. Period. End of story. Anyone who disagrees is wrong.
OK. Let's put it another way for you monkeys to comprende. Capiche?
They buy Sealand and become a sovereign nation to avoid prosecution. The RIAA, MPAA and BSA all band together and officially buy the U.S. government and military/industrial complex. Bush becomes an RIAA, MPAA, BSA executive by default. He declares a pre-emptive strike on Sealand to both curry favor with his, now official, bosses AND to distract from the disaster that is Iraq. "Shock and Awe" is employed but on a smaller scale so that Sealand isn't totally destroyed. The liberals go into hand wringing mode for the downtrodden pirate land peoples. Areas of Sealand (no larger than two feet by two feet) are occupied by American forces, while the Pirate Bay folks hide in ventilation shafts with Osama. American troops are ravaged by spitball artillery attacks launched from various vents on the compound. The leader of the Pirate Bay goes on pirate radio to bring the troops over to their cause as a sort of "Tokyo Rose" with an attitude. This drags on for four years with casualties on both sides. Republicans despise the Pirate Bay people on principal. Liberals hold them up as modern day heroes, but since the media is all controlled by the RIAA, MPAA and BSA, they can't get the message out that easily and have to resort to holding up index cards at their local supermarket with "Free the Repressed Peoples of Pirate Bay" and "Bring the Troops Home". Yeah. I can see it now.
Wow you actually drank the koolaide. What about the poor people who produce a lot but don't get compensated for it. And what about the wealthy people who produce next to nothing and continue to get richer through unethical means? They exist and those tendencies are increasing on both ends of the spectrum.
It's perfectly logical as you WILL be coming back genetically if you have offspring. Assuming you have a child or children, and they do the same, you will eventually have a LOT of people connected to you. It's completely logical to care for their well-being. It's completely ILLOGICAL to be oblivious to this fact. Now... if you plan on never having kids, then you are welcome to be short sighted. I think living without a care for the future while having your own children is essentially being a "deadbeat meta-parent".
The humor of your comment is not lost. Sadly, there are people who really live with a mentality that doesn't extend beyond their own lifetime. I think people should all be planning for at least 10,000 years beyond their lives if we want to make civilization perfect. Take these people for instance.
Whew! OK. Back to the crack.
(Pick pipe up again after encouragement by random Slashdotter)
...if you're looking a billion years back in time, then doesn't that imply that if some ancient alien race existed back then, you'd be able to see their battle cruiser with sufficient resolution? Also... this brings up an interesting quandry. Seeing that light takes that long to travel to our eyes here, then that means there is a visual delay. Much like sufficient distances on earth create audible delays for sound, correct? This does suggest some level of time shifting as what we see or hear from a sufficient distance is "now" for us, but "back then" for the other subject.
Now, with that line of thinking, reverse the viewpoint. If you are over where the furthest stars are right now, you SHOULD be seeing our portion of the universe a billion years ago. With sufficient resolution, that view should be quite interesting. We should be able to eventually get that vantage point (and much farther) if we master quantum entanglement to the point where we can isolate particles here that are entangled with particles there. Those particles could then be used to study the currently occurring light patterns "there" from here with instantaneous results. I see no reason why we can't use entanglement to create sensor arrays out of particles at remote locations to intercept a wide variety of interesting data. Just a thought.
(puts crack pipe down for a refill)
I think the problem right now is that Xen really can't be fully experienced unless you either buy it from Xensource to layer over your Novell Suse Distro, or you get "down and dirty" with the code (what I did) from the unstable tree and build it in a distro like Gentoo. I don't know what the Xensource licensing/costs are but I expect they aren't cheap. Building it from source code and getting familiar with it is far less expensive especially if you're like me and you're doing this at home for practical reasons.
Ahhh... you've apparently never experiences paravirtualization. It's nearly as fast as running on the bare metal. I mean in the neighborhood of 95-98% of the real system's performance. We're not talking VMWare Workstation or Virtual PC/Server here. This is the real deal... If I were running the PBX in Xen using full virtualization, I'd probably see what you're talking about. But not with paravirtualization. It really is an amazing thing. The reputation that virtualization seems to have of being "slow" is unwarranted when you're talking about Xen.
Yes. To elaborate a bit, I'm actually using LVM2 logical volumes. So we are talking real disk devices. Here's the general idea:
/dev/hda (C: drive in Windows parlance) /dev/hda1 (boot) /dev/hda2 (root) /dev/hda3 (swap) /dev/hda4 (lvm space) /dev/hda4 (Sort of like software RAID concatenation in Windows or Dynamic Disks) /dev/xenspace/winxp (A slice of the volume group (/dev/hda4) that maps back to the physical drive in the host) /dev/xenspace/winxp to /dev/hda which Windows XP sees as C:\
Host OS
Partitioned into
Volume Group "Xenspace" contains
Logical Volume
Guest OS maps
LVM performs very well and the benefits of it over partitioning are quite huge. The current setup I have is temporary though. I plan to set up a "SAN" using Linux network block devices so that the logical volumes will be on a different box from the Xen server. That might help things a bit...
My experience so far...
After playing around with paravirtualization with Xen for the past two+ years, I finally got the cash in August to buy a cheapo AMD dual-core 64-bit system (~$800 at Best Buy: an HP system with a 4200 and 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM). I've run both Xen and QEMU on it under 64-bit Gentoo Linux. The performance of Windows XP on Xen vs. QEMU is fairly close. I would have to say that it seems to me that where Xen suffers is disk I/O. Anything that's disk intensive seems to eat up the CPU. I suspect this wouldn't be the case on better hardware with a high performance SCSI/RAID system. That should, at least, make things a bit better anyway. But for the time being I'm sticking with Xen since it's just too easy to use. And I am especially interested in the live migration features. As long as you have centralized disk storage, you can move live VMs between physical hosts with less than a second of interruption (ie. your users will never notice). Keep in mind, I'm doing this all at home as I'd really like to collapse many of my machines into one or two boxes and keep everything else as simple X displays where GUIs are needed. I've currently got four VMs running on the box with two of them being fully virtualized (Windows XP SP2 for access DRMed crap and Redhat Linux 7 which still hosts some services I don't want to part with) and the other two being paravirtualized (Domain0 which is just the VM management environment and my Gentoo Asterisk "PBX"). PAravirtualized performance is damn amazing. I think if I used strictly paravirtualized OSes I could probably squeeze out 20 VMs from this guy with decent performance. I actually just added two more gigs to the system tonight, and if I assume 128 megs per virtual machine (I've allocated 512M to the Windows XP VM) I can get up to 32 VMs running simultaneously.
As far as KVM goes, I've had a good deal of experience with QEMU and it KVM is similar, there are some limitations I hope they will overcome. (For what it's worth, the hardware based virtualization in Xen is also a modified QEMU process called qemu-dm) The main one being PCI device allocation. Xen allows you to partition your PCI devices and assign individual cards to specific VMs. I don't think QEMU does this, and I expect that KVM doesn't either.
Rush Limbaugh told me that the only reason that it's not snowing in winter anymore in the northern sections of the U.S. is because of the number of cows we farm and the carbon moronoxide they expude from their butts. Cow farts != global warming folks! And besides, even if global warming is happening (which it isn't) there's a lot of benefits: The southern U.S. will become a tropical paradise. The mid U.S. will be able to produce different crops. And even the Canadians will benefit in that they won't have those savage winters anymore. Any concerns about coastal areas flooding can be put to rest as the army corp of engineers will be able to build very efficient and effective dams and breakwalls for most normal situations. Besides, floodwaters can easily be pumped out back to the ocean to lower the local water level. So stop all this worrying. There is no global warming. Rush told me so and I believe him. Megadittos!!!
I don't understand the reason why so many people are shying away from GPL3. To me it seems a pretty logical upgrade to GPL2 and makes it even harder for businesses to openly thwart the spirit of free software. To be honest, I've always been annoyed by the fuss made over licenses.
I use IE for everything and I've never once been hacked by these supposed security holes. I do all kinds of stuff like online banking, eTrade, eBay, online shopping, the works! And it's totally secure because it's all encrypted. Sure, I've had something like $24,000 worth of charges applied to my credit cards that weren't mine, but that wasn't because of IE. That was because I made the mistake of dealing with a few companies that use Linux or some Unix variant (heh, sounds like a disease we're talking about here instead of an OS) for their web portals and they probably got rooted. Open source software is just not safe. The hackers are all over it since it's all out in the open. Once they get a chance to look at how it works, they can easily make it do their bidding. At least Microsoft has the sense to keep stuff private. NO hackers in the entire world could figure any of that stuff out because there just isn't any single person as smart as Bill Gates and his crack team of developers. I wouldn't touch Firefox with a ten foot pole since it's open source. Although they only report the bugs they think they've found, there are probably billions more than MS has in IE because the hackers have a roadmap with open source. It says, "Here's the keys to the kingdom. Come hack me". I Trust MS products because MS is all about making great, innovative software that is secure and robust and stable.
NOTE: The above post is merely a parody of the Windows user who's "got religion". A reasonable Windows user knows better. A reasonable *nix user knows better. Let the games begin...
Build one? Hehe... let's see how many opinions come out on this one. Actually when I first read it I was thinking 14" refractive telecope. Not reflective (where the 14" is the mirror).
Oh I'm well aware of the fact that they research things that aren't used for killing. You're using the fruits of some of that research right now to attack me. ;P (RAR!!!) I'm not saying the D.O.D. is evil. I'm saying that there are some very warped people who work at various levels of our government who are very interested in the ultimate killing technologies. Especially solutions that would exterminate all life on Earth if necessary just to win an ideological argument. Considering how you went off on me, I suspect that you might be one of them. Cheers!
...that the U.S. D.O.D. would be interested in this. There are people in this world who are completely wrong in the head; ...to the point where having NO survivors in an all out war would be considered a victory. "Yeah, no one would survive. But at least the enemy would be eliminated". That is the only thing a weapon (bio, nuclear, chemical, etc...) that assures complete destruction of all life would be useful for.
I've used QEMU in "production" both at home and at work for what it's worth. As good as it is, it's really more a desktop virtualization solution IMHO as you can't run multiple instances of QEMU on a normal box and expect full blown performance even with the kqemu module. My work application was to let some of my users run a test workstation environment to test some software that couldn't have multiple instances of different versions running. These users were on Windows 2000 boxes and were running virtualized Windows 2000 guests. I even used one of the GUI management utilities to allow them to just point and click to select the VM to run, shut it down, save it's state, etc... It didn't perform well enough for my boss, so he ordered the Windows guy to install Virtual PC. Oh well... At home I actually did something I think was damn cool. I had a server here that was running a highly customized RedHat 7 and I wanted to upgrade it to something newer. But at the same time I couldn't afford the downtime for mail, vpn, web and dns services that I provide. So I took the entire root filesystem and used 'rsync' to copy it all to a loopback filesystem. Then I booted it up with QEMU and it worked part way. I had to make some config changes (different virtual NIC than the original box). I ran with it for a year with increased performance since the host system was much newer than the original server. I just moved it from QEMU the other day to Xen with 'svm' support on a 64 bit Dual core AMD system. I have to say Xen is much better performance wise because you can get many more virtual systems on a modern box with enough RAM than you can with QEMU with some exceptions. Right now I've got two VMs running with svm support (it's a modified QEMU in Xen actually) and two that are paravirtualized. Paravirtualization is where you get the most bang for your buck. If you're running completely paravirtualized, you can probably stuff up to 25 VMs on a typical modern Desktop processor with 4-8 gigs of RAM.
Uhm... I started using it on the PC platform in 1998/99 with VMWare on RedHat 7. I was amazed when I saw I could boot a Windows 98 system simultaneously with my already running Linux system on a lowly Pentium MMX 233 with 32 megs of RAM. Then I found out that what I thought was new back then was something the big iron world had enjoyed for decades and originated in the 60s. It was just new to x86 is all come 1998/99. Since then, I've moved onto Xen for Linux which is rather amazing in terms of performance and flexibility if you paravirtualize the system. I've got three VMs running on an old Pentium II era Celeron at 400 MHz with 384 megs of RAM. That system has enough horsepower to do the following for my network:
Internal: DHCP, DNS, postfix SMTP server for internal clients, Squid proxy, OpenVPN MySQL DB, DBMail IMAP services that use MySQL as the backend. All in 128 megs of RAM. And they all perform smoothly and quickly.
External: DNS, postfix SMTP server for spam filtering and relaying to the virtual internal SMTP server, OpenVPN server. All in 64 megs of RAM.
I plan to add an Asterisk PBX to that same box for a third VPN so I can have private VoIP with my OpenVPN users (all friends and family as I'm talking about a system at home, not at work).
I've, of course also played with Virtual PC, Virtual Server, QEMU and poked at OpenVZ. For me, a decent virtualization solution has to be able to run other OSes to count as good which is why certain virtualization solutions don't do much for me. If I need access to Windows, I want to be able to do it without wasting good hardware on it. That's why UserMode and Linux Virtual Servers (more akin to chroot jails) do absolutely nothin for me other than when I'm building a Gentoo box. But, this is not the big new thing. It's only that MS is making waves with it now... typical.
Oh it'll be made alright. They'll use CGI to augment Ford's looks. He'll wind up looking better than he did in the 80s. Probably like a cross between that Russell Crow guy and the Terminator. And he'll probably wind up having a big fight with several thousand "natives" while jumping all over the place in superhuman fashion. AND... he'll DEFINITELY shoot first.
Well I was actually being a bit trollish myself. However, it does irk me when I see idiot writing where there are three sentences per "paragraph" and the text looks more like a poem than an essay.
Thanks for pointing out that I exceeded the twelve sentences per paragraph rule by two sentences. It contributed OH SO much to the conversation. I learned the twelve sentences per paragraph rule in grade school like any other moderately educated kid born before 1980. I suspect you learned to write by aping others online? Typical 21st century drivel is what you just wrote.