Oh, I agree. My taxes were done the day after I got the W-2 in the mail. Just responding to the argument about doing them the first couple weeks in January.
It really depends on the cable company. Comcast (and I believe Time Warner) passes the HD signals they receive straight through to your cable box. They don't do any additional compression. Some cable companies (seems to be those limited to the 552 - 750 MHz band) re-compress the signal. Especially if your cable company still supports a large analog offering. Each analog channel (a 6 MHz slice) takes the room of around 8 or so digital SD channels, and ~2 HD channels, so they may be forced to do re-compression, especially if they're not 850 MHz-capable.
For internet access, one 6 MHz channel holds something like 30-40 Mb of bandwidth, so high-speed service should have little impact on cable TV offerings.
No, see, you're just confused. Hackers don't find one exploit in Windows every week. They find 4 the day after Patch Tuesday, then take the rest of the month off.
The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.
Uh... yeah, no kidding. I thought the RIAA's past legal failures should have already taught them that. Oh, wait... were they talking about the kid's charges?
I've been working a lot in the VDI realm as of late. The concept is using virtualization (usually VMware ESX 2.5 or VI3 w/ VirtualCenter) to create a pool of standalone virtual desktops, a "connection broker" which can dynamically assign users to a particular VM and give them an RDP or VNC connection to it, and a thin client terminal (Wyse's S10 Blazer works well for this).
The Wyse terminal integrates with the connection broker, which handles authentication. Once the user is authenticated, the connection broker assigns the user to one of your virtual workstations and creates a remote desktop session to it on the terminal. The connection broker is responsible for tracking which users are assigned to which VMs. If one crashes, the broker knows about it, removes it from the pool of available workstations, and when the user logs back on they are re-assigned to another VM.
VDI has most all of the benefits of Citrix, like centralization of data and tighter control over user access. There are also some benefits of this over the traditional Terminal Server/Citrix model. One, the user experience is much closer to what they're used to with a regular PC, because they are essentially accessing a fully-featured workstation. Second, you don't have Citrix and Terminal Server weirdnesses, like apps that just won't run in a multi-user environment. Each user's VM, while centralized, is a completely siloed OS instance sharing the resources of the host server. What one user does on their VM typically has much less impact on other users than what can happen in a Citrix environment. With VMware VI3 and their dynamic resource concept, it opens a whole new avenue of dynamic load-balancing between your entire pool of hardware.
There are some downsides, too. A major one is cost. If you're using Windows, you're paying for XP licenses for each user, you're typically paying for VMware licensing for each server, you're paying for thin clients (the S10 is around $300), and you're paying for connection broker licenses. Citrix licensing isn't cheap either, but in my experience, VDI with VMware comes out more expensive. You can typically fit WAY more users per server in the Citrix world than you can with VDI, which adds to your per-user cost for VMware licensing and server hardware. You're also still having to manage individual desktops (although some cool disk streaming products like Ardence can help with this) for patches and new software installs, as opposed to the one-per-sever work you have to do under Citrix.
VDI is still pretty new, but the advancements I've seen just in the past year are making it a pretty exciting world to work in.
try leaving a computer image up for 48 hours on an LCD or plasma!
I do quite often, thank you. LCD does NOT suffer from burn-in. You're the second person in this thread to claim this... where is this misinformation coming from?
I my experience, IT departments are often viewed by the business as pure red-ink. An annoying drain on their income that, because they often don't understand technology, know that they need but don't know why. IT deparments, in traditional businesses, don't directly add income. And because of that, they are expected to do the impossible at the snap of a finger, whenever the business asks for it. The IT group can start getting pushed around by "clueless users", and this can lead to a somewhat adversarial relationship within the company, with negative reactions from your IT staff.
I think this is slowly starting to change, as technology becomes more integrated into business, and executive types are starting to see the benefits of technology to their bottom line. You'll always have the Comic-book-guy type geek who feels disdain for the lower forms of life he is forced to deal with. But that's hardly limited to IT. Look at how doctors often treat nurses, or lawyers treat paralegals.
Re:What he really means to say
on
Enter The 2160p HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Your information is a little dated, and bit misleading. The Sony HDV 1080i is a consumer product, not a professional one. The Sony HDCAM is 10 years old. The newer HDCAM SR does full 1920x1080. And as I understand it, DVCPRO100 was intended more as an entry-level professional HD tape for news crews and the like, who aren't as concerned about full resolution picture as much as convenience and portability.
Almost all modern professional equipment does 1920x1080. Most of what you see on stations like DiscoveryHD and INHD, not to mention film transfers like those on HDNet, are all done in full 1080i these days.
Re:What he really means to say
on
Enter The 2160p HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not price that's going to prevent this from coming to the consumer market. Plasma 4 years ago was around $30,000 for the larger units, but the prices dropped pretty fast. The real issue for consumer adoption is bandwidth. Cable and satellite providers have enough trouble delivering decent-quality 1080i. And over the air broadcasts? Forget about it. The ATSC standard is 19Mbits with MPEG-2 compression. There's no way you're fitting 2160p in 19Mbits with MPEG-2 and have a picture that looks better than a 1990's era AVI. So unless a brand new broadcast standard is developed and adopted, that's not happening. Cable and satellite have the advantage of being able to go to MPEG-4. But even with that, DirecTV cripples their HD by dropping the 1920x1080 picture down to 1440x1080 so they can fit more content.
I agree with you. The more we see of the Cylons, the more uninteresting they become. They joke, they display sarcasm, they fall in love, they have faith, they get angry, jealous, etc. They've taken all the mystery out of them, along with all the menace. They're just annoying zealots who look and act EXACTLY like humans, except they can't be "killed" while they're near a resurrection ship.
The numerous interpersonal conflict-driven stories lately were getting pretty tiresome, and really were slowing things down for the wrong reasons. Although, to be fair, the show has really always been a tad slow. I remember watching a few earlier episodes and realizing that an entire hour of show seemed to cover about 15 minutes of time in the story.
There is some hope left. I was pretty intrigued by the hybrid-thing that controls the Base Stars. And this whole "5 unknown models" thing has some promise. That, at least, adds some mystery back into it. Although, the whole Baltar is-he-or-isn't-he thing is getting dragged on too far long, and I can't see a way for that to be answered that ISN'T disappointing. If he is, then it seems too obvious. If he isn't, then it seems a bit too contrived.
Actually, they can still call it a CD. They cannot, however, use the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" name and logo, as it does NOT comply with the Philips standard. As I recall, a few years back some media company was forced to stop using the Philips logo on their crippled discs.
I would guess they are doing this to please retail stores and cable manufacturers (*ahem* Monster), who sell HDMI cables at insane prices to people who think that paying $80 for a cable that passes a digital signal somehow gives them better picture quality than a $10 cable you can buy online.
All I can say is my audio CDs have lasted far longer than my hard drives. I've got CDs I bought 15 years ago that have no flaws in them. HDDs? Not so much. Although I did have one 80MB SCSI drive last for about 13 years before it croaked.
I dont agree that XEN is the reason for the zero-costing of these products. MS undercut VMWare on the workstation product line. VMWare noticed/realized/always-planned that the money was on the server, and (significnatly) server management side of things. So they cut MS off at the knees, producing a zero cost player, and then eventually zero cost Server.
Thank you. I was actually with VMware trainers in Palo Alto the day that the VMware Server beta was announced. There was not a SINGLE mention of XeN. At all. The talk (which turned out to be true) was that Microsoft was starting to seriously look VMware's way, and was planning a free offering of Virtual Server to undercut GSX. VMware decided on a preemptive strike and came out with VMware Server to replace GSX. XeN didn't seem to even be a blip on the radar.
I know it makes all the XeN fanboys happy to think that VMware started offering free products to complete with them... but it's simply not reality.
I've got the Vista beta running on VMware Workstation. They actually have a guest OS option for Vista, but there's a big "experimental" warning on it. However, it seems to work fine. Slow, of course, because the Vista beta is a HUGE resource hog. But it runs...
The reason I ask, is because of the way VMotion works. It copies the VM's config file (simple text file) to the target server, and starts making a copy of the VM's memory (both physical and, if needed, ESX swap space). At a certain point, when the memory space between the two hosts is just about as close as it can get, it briefly freezes the VM on the source host, copies any lingering changes in the VM's memory over to the target server, then resumes the VM on the target host. The virtual disk files are stored on a shared storage device, so the virtual drives aren't really touched at all. The only chance I see for corruption really, is in the memory synchronization process. I could see where, if there were some kind of unchecked corruption during that transfer, that when the VM is resumed on the new host, it might cause a lock up or a crash. But I would think a VM corruption to that level would be a pretty rare event. Though I suppose it depends on what exactly in memory was corrupted. Perhaps error checking wasn't robust enough in an older version or something, and the patch fixed that.
There's some pretty strong reccomendations about setting up VMotion. They really suggest you isolate Vmotion traffic to it's own non-shared interface, and even it's own isolated VLAN or switch. The reason given, is to ensure there is no degraded network performance from VMotioning, but considering the relatively limited amount of data that is sent across the Vmotion interface I wonder if there isn't some deeper worry there...
Even VMware will tell you that virtualization is not a solution for everything, and not every server or application should be virtualized. For instance, heavy-duty database servers (like Oracle) are not really a good idea. Or are putting up servers that do an extreme number of disk writes (especially the case if you're using shared LUNs between multiple ESX servers) because you still have to deal with SCSI locks. Microsoft supposedly won't support you if you put your AD controllers on a VM (even their own Virtual Server!).
However, we have NEVER had an issue with the network and VMware. If you design your host correctly and put in plenty of NICs to bond to scale to your need, it seems to work just fine. And make sure that all the servers are using VMware Tools and the VMXNET interface. I'm also interested in the corrupt VM statement. What exactly corrupted?
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Oh, I agree. My taxes were done the day after I got the W-2 in the mail. Just responding to the argument about doing them the first couple weeks in January.
Why not do your taxes in the first couple weeks of January?
Because most companies wait until the very last possible moment to send their W-2's out.
I did the same. I think it was back in 2002. Caused a huge black eye for Intuit because they took forever to acknowledge there was a problem.
I've been using TaxCut online since 2003, and it works great.
It really depends on the cable company. Comcast (and I believe Time Warner) passes the HD signals they receive straight through to your cable box. They don't do any additional compression. Some cable companies (seems to be those limited to the 552 - 750 MHz band) re-compress the signal. Especially if your cable company still supports a large analog offering. Each analog channel (a 6 MHz slice) takes the room of around 8 or so digital SD channels, and ~2 HD channels, so they may be forced to do re-compression, especially if they're not 850 MHz-capable. For internet access, one 6 MHz channel holds something like 30-40 Mb of bandwidth, so high-speed service should have little impact on cable TV offerings.
They should make it do 24fps. Then I could feel like I'm in my own movie all the time.
This just in... users are clueless. Film at 11.
No, see, you're just confused. Hackers don't find one exploit in Windows every week. They find 4 the day after Patch Tuesday, then take the rest of the month off.
The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.
Uh... yeah, no kidding. I thought the RIAA's past legal failures should have already taught them that. Oh, wait... were they talking about the kid's charges?
I've been working a lot in the VDI realm as of late. The concept is using virtualization (usually VMware ESX 2.5 or VI3 w/ VirtualCenter) to create a pool of standalone virtual desktops, a "connection broker" which can dynamically assign users to a particular VM and give them an RDP or VNC connection to it, and a thin client terminal (Wyse's S10 Blazer works well for this).
The Wyse terminal integrates with the connection broker, which handles authentication. Once the user is authenticated, the connection broker assigns the user to one of your virtual workstations and creates a remote desktop session to it on the terminal. The connection broker is responsible for tracking which users are assigned to which VMs. If one crashes, the broker knows about it, removes it from the pool of available workstations, and when the user logs back on they are re-assigned to another VM.
VDI has most all of the benefits of Citrix, like centralization of data and tighter control over user access. There are also some benefits of this over the traditional Terminal Server/Citrix model. One, the user experience is much closer to what they're used to with a regular PC, because they are essentially accessing a fully-featured workstation. Second, you don't have Citrix and Terminal Server weirdnesses, like apps that just won't run in a multi-user environment. Each user's VM, while centralized, is a completely siloed OS instance sharing the resources of the host server. What one user does on their VM typically has much less impact on other users than what can happen in a Citrix environment. With VMware VI3 and their dynamic resource concept, it opens a whole new avenue of dynamic load-balancing between your entire pool of hardware.
There are some downsides, too. A major one is cost. If you're using Windows, you're paying for XP licenses for each user, you're typically paying for VMware licensing for each server, you're paying for thin clients (the S10 is around $300), and you're paying for connection broker licenses. Citrix licensing isn't cheap either, but in my experience, VDI with VMware comes out more expensive. You can typically fit WAY more users per server in the Citrix world than you can with VDI, which adds to your per-user cost for VMware licensing and server hardware. You're also still having to manage individual desktops (although some cool disk streaming products like Ardence can help with this) for patches and new software installs, as opposed to the one-per-sever work you have to do under Citrix.
VDI is still pretty new, but the advancements I've seen just in the past year are making it a pretty exciting world to work in.
try leaving a computer image up for 48 hours on an LCD or plasma!
I do quite often, thank you. LCD does NOT suffer from burn-in. You're the second person in this thread to claim this... where is this misinformation coming from?
LCD (projection or flat-panel) does NOT suffer from burn in.
I my experience, IT departments are often viewed by the business as pure red-ink. An annoying drain on their income that, because they often don't understand technology, know that they need but don't know why. IT deparments, in traditional businesses, don't directly add income. And because of that, they are expected to do the impossible at the snap of a finger, whenever the business asks for it. The IT group can start getting pushed around by "clueless users", and this can lead to a somewhat adversarial relationship within the company, with negative reactions from your IT staff.
I think this is slowly starting to change, as technology becomes more integrated into business, and executive types are starting to see the benefits of technology to their bottom line. You'll always have the Comic-book-guy type geek who feels disdain for the lower forms of life he is forced to deal with. But that's hardly limited to IT. Look at how doctors often treat nurses, or lawyers treat paralegals.
Your information is a little dated, and bit misleading. The Sony HDV 1080i is a consumer product, not a professional one. The Sony HDCAM is 10 years old. The newer HDCAM SR does full 1920x1080. And as I understand it, DVCPRO100 was intended more as an entry-level professional HD tape for news crews and the like, who aren't as concerned about full resolution picture as much as convenience and portability. Almost all modern professional equipment does 1920x1080. Most of what you see on stations like DiscoveryHD and INHD, not to mention film transfers like those on HDNet, are all done in full 1080i these days.
It's not price that's going to prevent this from coming to the consumer market. Plasma 4 years ago was around $30,000 for the larger units, but the prices dropped pretty fast. The real issue for consumer adoption is bandwidth. Cable and satellite providers have enough trouble delivering decent-quality 1080i. And over the air broadcasts? Forget about it. The ATSC standard is 19Mbits with MPEG-2 compression. There's no way you're fitting 2160p in 19Mbits with MPEG-2 and have a picture that looks better than a 1990's era AVI. So unless a brand new broadcast standard is developed and adopted, that's not happening. Cable and satellite have the advantage of being able to go to MPEG-4. But even with that, DirecTV cripples their HD by dropping the 1920x1080 picture down to 1440x1080 so they can fit more content.
Some spoilers within.
I agree with you. The more we see of the Cylons, the more uninteresting they become. They joke, they display sarcasm, they fall in love, they have faith, they get angry, jealous, etc. They've taken all the mystery out of them, along with all the menace. They're just annoying zealots who look and act EXACTLY like humans, except they can't be "killed" while they're near a resurrection ship.
The numerous interpersonal conflict-driven stories lately were getting pretty tiresome, and really were slowing things down for the wrong reasons. Although, to be fair, the show has really always been a tad slow. I remember watching a few earlier episodes and realizing that an entire hour of show seemed to cover about 15 minutes of time in the story.
There is some hope left. I was pretty intrigued by the hybrid-thing that controls the Base Stars. And this whole "5 unknown models" thing has some promise. That, at least, adds some mystery back into it. Although, the whole Baltar is-he-or-isn't-he thing is getting dragged on too far long, and I can't see a way for that to be answered that ISN'T disappointing. If he is, then it seems too obvious. If he isn't, then it seems a bit too contrived.
Actually, they can still call it a CD. They cannot, however, use the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" name and logo, as it does NOT comply with the Philips standard. As I recall, a few years back some media company was forced to stop using the Philips logo on their crippled discs.
I'm just surprised that in a post-Columbine world, this movie would get made.
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Ah yes, the sites that use them. Otherwise known as, the Internet.
I'm so confused.
I would guess they are doing this to please retail stores and cable manufacturers (*ahem* Monster), who sell HDMI cables at insane prices to people who think that paying $80 for a cable that passes a digital signal somehow gives them better picture quality than a $10 cable you can buy online.
All I can say is my audio CDs have lasted far longer than my hard drives. I've got CDs I bought 15 years ago that have no flaws in them. HDDs? Not so much. Although I did have one 80MB SCSI drive last for about 13 years before it croaked.
I dont agree that XEN is the reason for the zero-costing of these products. MS undercut VMWare on the workstation product line. VMWare noticed/realized/always-planned that the money was on the server, and (significnatly) server management side of things. So they cut MS off at the knees, producing a zero cost player, and then eventually zero cost Server.
Thank you. I was actually with VMware trainers in Palo Alto the day that the VMware Server beta was announced. There was not a SINGLE mention of XeN. At all. The talk (which turned out to be true) was that Microsoft was starting to seriously look VMware's way, and was planning a free offering of Virtual Server to undercut GSX. VMware decided on a preemptive strike and came out with VMware Server to replace GSX. XeN didn't seem to even be a blip on the radar.
I know it makes all the XeN fanboys happy to think that VMware started offering free products to complete with them... but it's simply not reality.
I've got the Vista beta running on VMware Workstation. They actually have a guest OS option for Vista, but there's a big "experimental" warning on it. However, it seems to work fine. Slow, of course, because the Vista beta is a HUGE resource hog. But it runs...
The reason I ask, is because of the way VMotion works. It copies the VM's config file (simple text file) to the target server, and starts making a copy of the VM's memory (both physical and, if needed, ESX swap space). At a certain point, when the memory space between the two hosts is just about as close as it can get, it briefly freezes the VM on the source host, copies any lingering changes in the VM's memory over to the target server, then resumes the VM on the target host. The virtual disk files are stored on a shared storage device, so the virtual drives aren't really touched at all. The only chance I see for corruption really, is in the memory synchronization process. I could see where, if there were some kind of unchecked corruption during that transfer, that when the VM is resumed on the new host, it might cause a lock up or a crash. But I would think a VM corruption to that level would be a pretty rare event. Though I suppose it depends on what exactly in memory was corrupted. Perhaps error checking wasn't robust enough in an older version or something, and the patch fixed that.
There's some pretty strong reccomendations about setting up VMotion. They really suggest you isolate Vmotion traffic to it's own non-shared interface, and even it's own isolated VLAN or switch. The reason given, is to ensure there is no degraded network performance from VMotioning, but considering the relatively limited amount of data that is sent across the Vmotion interface I wonder if there isn't some deeper worry there...
Even VMware will tell you that virtualization is not a solution for everything, and not every server or application should be virtualized. For instance, heavy-duty database servers (like Oracle) are not really a good idea. Or are putting up servers that do an extreme number of disk writes (especially the case if you're using shared LUNs between multiple ESX servers) because you still have to deal with SCSI locks. Microsoft supposedly won't support you if you put your AD controllers on a VM (even their own Virtual Server!).
However, we have NEVER had an issue with the network and VMware. If you design your host correctly and put in plenty of NICs to bond to scale to your need, it seems to work just fine. And make sure that all the servers are using VMware Tools and the VMXNET interface. I'm also interested in the corrupt VM statement. What exactly corrupted?