As the developer of a popular fork of Tomato, I'd like to address a few points:
Not all features supported
Specific to their Tomato port:
1 > WPA is not working. 2 > There is no support of SAMBA server . 3 > NAS is accessible only through command line using ftp. No GUI support to access NAS is available till now.
1: Presumably, WPA2 is, which means that this isn't a showtopper, just a big annoyance. There's actually only one missing feature here, WPA support. The rest would not be expected.
2/3: Mainline Tomato doesn't support any of this on USB-supporting routers anyhow.
Binary kernel modules
This is no different than mainline Tomato, which also relies on binary kernel modules. In fact, most opensource firmwares DO.
Looking at this from the perspective of one of the authors of Tomato/MLPPP (bonding multiple DSL lines using a fork of Tomato), only WPA is really of any concern, and even then, you can work around it by using WPA2. This router adds support for 802.11N, more (MUCH FASTER) RAM, and a far faster CPU (200 -> 480MHz, plus other architectural improvements). Considering that memory throughput/latency and CPU power are our main bottlenecks when bonding multiple DSL lines, this router remains quite interesting despite the lack of WPA.
How is this any different from ISPs that give you a modem "free" with your subscription? Or Verizon putting down four figures to wire your house on the hope that they'll recoup it over a period of years? Or your cellphone company giving you a "free" phone with three year contract (or even on pay-as-you-go in Virgin Mobile USA's case)?
If you're paying $x per month as a steady revenue stream, it's not a big deal. This isn't the same as giving away CueCats and hoping people use it, this is a hardware-provided-with-subscription kind of thing. Which is perfectly reasonable.
Nothing at all like the stuff we saw during the dot-com bubble.
Which reminds me; the problem about rebuild times growing will more or less go away as the industry (eventually) moves to SSDs; freed of the mechanical limitations of existing drives, SSDs will likely see increases in capacity keep up with increases in speed.
Today's high-end (~$900) drives can theoretically do a rebuild on a 3x80GB RAID-5 array in about two and a half to three minutes. Yes, minutes; the read/write speeds are on the order of half a gig per second on the PCI-e based drives.
So, OK, we've got performance covered for the forseeable future. What about the concern that RAID-6 is just a "reliability Band Aid"? That's bullshit, to be honest.
The big problem with RAID-5 is, what happens if you're rebuilding a missing drive, and you get a read error on one of your two remaining drives? Well, excusing the fact that filesystems using checksums such as ZFS should be able to detect and re-read if the data itself is sound, RAID-6 fixes the problem in that the *EXACT* same sector would have to be bad on two out of three disks in order to cause a permanent failure. The chances of that happening are infinitesimal, and always will be.
I took a look at Seagate's Cheetah drives. They have a reported error rate of 1x10E-16. If we assume that's in bits, that indicates you'll get a read/write error every 1.25 petabytes OK, not too low, but I can see that being a concern as disk sizes get bigger.
OK, so what are the chances of the *SAME* sector having an error there? How often would that occur? Unless I'm mistaken, you multiply the probabilities, and you get a read error on the two disks simultaneously 12,500,000,000,000,000 petabytes. That don't sound like no "Band Aid" to me.
*NOTE: I'm crap at statistics, so I know that I'm failing to take into account that there are three disks that can have a read error in a RAID-6 scenario. So sue me, it doesn't change my point.
You don't want to use satellite and you say cellular coverage isn't good enough. What exactly are you expecting? If there's no connectivity, there's no connectivity. No amount of homebrew can fix that.
You also seem confused by WiFi In Motion and Cradlepoint products. They don't amplify anything, they're just access points that you can plug your phone in to get wifi coverage. A laptop and a router can do the same thing.
You have two choices:
1) Pony up the dough for satellite coverage 2) Get a cellular data plan and live with no connectivity in dead zones
1) They're bottlenecked by SAS, which, if they're using 3gbit controllers, probably won't go that much higher than ~500MB/s
2) Their cost is probably insane, if they're setting the upper bounds at $6000
By comparison, Fusion-IO claims 100,000 IOPS (not as high, but not far off) on their drives, and are about to introduce a new model for $895. They use a PCI-e 4x slot, which assuming v1.x, should give them about 10gbit/s (before overhead) to play with.
Also, Woz is their chief scientist, so bonus.
The newer version of SAS would bump up the interface to 6gbit, but then, PCI-e 2.0 would bump a 4x slot up to 20gbit/s.
In short, it seems to me that the future of super high performance drives is in PCI-e rather than SAS.
No, it's not all providers. Tethering still works fine in 3.1 on providers that support it, such as Fido/Rogers in Canada.
For example, my iPhone from Fido running 3.1 still has tethering support, just like it always has.
Tethering has only been disabled in 3.1 for providers that don't officially support the iPhone. That sucks, certainly, but let's not engage in hyperbole. If you buy a phone not supported by your carrier, you run the risk of this sort of thing. That's true with any phone, not just the iPhone.
Concordia University in Montreal dual-booted XP and Fedora on all lab machines, and supported Linux, going so far as to give instructions for setting up wireless networking under Gnome.
A good portion of CS courses also took place in Linux; most software development courses that I took worked under Linux, as did the OS course.
He has a point, though. If you're trying to cache a 2TB drive with a 4GB cache, there's only so much you can do.
Besides, I've got 12GB of RAM in my system, and most of that gets used as a disk cache. The performance still saw an enormous boost when I moved to SSD. What can on-mobo flash-cache do that a similar amount of RAM cache couldn't? Colour me skeptical.
In which case, some optical format (CD, DVD, BluRay, etc) is probably fine, so long as a disc is chosen that is rated to last that amount of time (and they do exist, for far more than 20 years).
The form factor for optical disc has pretty much been "perfected". We've now got three generations of optical technologies all using the same form factor, and they're all backwards compatible back to the original.
Any time a new optical format is introduced, it's imperative to support the previous optical formats for adoption purposes. So if you burn your stuff onto a CD or DVD, it's highly likely that you'll be able to read it in 16 years with the optical drive of the day. At the very worst, it shouldn't be hard to find a computer in 16 years that can read a CD or DVD. After all, it's trivially easy today to find a 20 year old computer. Some people even still use them.
In short, 16 years is easy. 50 might be more of a challenge.
You seem to have missed the point of Chrome then... The browser was designed by the logic you espouse. They felt that the GUI should get out of the way as much as possible since the contents of the browser window were the important stuff. That's why Chrome has such a minimalist and simple interface compared to the rest.
Unless you want to just have a square with no UI controls whatsoever, Chrome is about as close as you can get.
It all depends on what you want. The basic 360 has half a gig of Flash, like the Wii. That may not be ideal if you want to download XBLA games or demos, but is probably sufficient for saves, patches, and a bit of DLC.
The 360 doesn't have wireless, which can be a major problem if your console isn't near a network jack. But you may not need it if it's close enough to a router (my TV is next to my computer, so wireless would be overkill to get network connectivity 3 feet).
The 360 doesn't have an HD-capable optical drive, leaving it unable to play BluRay discs. But that may not be important if you already have one, or have a computer with one, or don't want one. Or if you already have a PS3;)
It all comes down to different requirements. Not everybody needs the missing things. Many people do need them. If you do need them and want to save money, I'd point out that buying a wireless router that supports something like dd-wrt micro and using it as a wireless bridge is usually a far cheaper solution than buying Microsoft's overpriced wireless receiver. And BluRay capabilities are probably better served by buying a BluRay burner for your PC anyhow; they cost less than $130 USD, and can be used to burn BluRay discs; if you already have an HTPC, or can run an HDMI cable from your PC, you're golden. Of course, that really brings up the cost, but it's a lot more flexible.
There isn't any doubt that Sony needs to bring the price down on the PS3. But then again, so does Nintendo, and even Microsoft to an extent. The cost of PCs that can match the performance of the consoles is rapidly approaching the cost of the consoles. I doubt they'll ever completely get there, but when your choice would be between a $400 console or a $500 PC that can match the performance, the PC will do a heck of a lot more!
Roughly two 2.5" drives fit in the space of a 3.5" drive (using common adapters). So with a standard two-drive 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (such as a Bay Rafter), you can now have 2TB with 2.5" or 3.5" drives as your choice.
What might this be useful for? It would reduce the space needed for a RAID-5 array. For example, you could have four drives in two 3.5" slots, running in RAID-5, 3TB usable. With desktop drives, you could at best do RAID-1 with 2TB usable.
It also potentially could have performance benefits. It's not clear if this is a 7200RPM drive, but the performance of two drives in RAID-0 might be better than a desktop 2TB drive. Of course, the cost would be $600, nearly four times what you'd pay for 2TB of storage in desktop drives.
Sure, power costs in Quebec have gone up over time, but not THAT much. If the US refuses to build sufficient capacity, just move servers to Montreal or some other Canadian city with cheap renewable power.
If you're serving, catering, and marketing to users in Canada, and even partnering with Canadian telecoms to get your software on their phones, then a physical presence might not be required.
The mere fact that I can walk around Montreal and see advertisements for Facebook indicates that at the very least they could be forced to stop advertising in Canada, and the telecoms could be forced to stop distributing/bundling the Facebook apps. Even if they don't have a legal presence in Canada, they certainly do have *a* presence, and that's enough to force changes. That gives the Canadian government leverage to force Facebook to make changes.
"Comply with our laws or we'll cut off all your marketing and partnerships in Canada."
The question is, under US law, the photographs are public domain. There isn't even any room for, as the grandparent poster said, "rationale" that they "should" be under the public domain; according to US law, they *are* public domain. Whatever UK law or the NPG might feel or say about it, he's simply dealing in public domain images.
How, then, is he a pirate? And how could he agree that the copyright was anyones when it was under the public domain? That'd be making false copyright claims, which is perjury (at least if you make claims against someone).
From an ethical standpoint, though, there might be a valid argument. So my question becomes, does the NPG allow visitors to take photographs of the public domain paintings? If so, then I might tend to say, "NPG doesn't have a valid claim, but I feel for them."
If they prevent photographs from being taken, then I have no sympathy.
Semantics. There is a fee to use h.264. It doesn't matter what you call it, a codec licensing fee or a patent licensing fee, that doesn't change the fact that there's a fee to pay.
And so instead they can't even be sure if either of them are implemented, and will potentially have to encode their video in even MORE formats than just two...
A restriction and a requirement are not the same thing. Browsers could be *required* to support at least one of Theora or h.264. That doesn't prevent them from implementing both or others, it merely ensures that they support at least one.
I'd also argue that the lack of requirements might explain why we're still stuck with JPEG for lossy compression in browsers despite the numerous wavelet-based image codecs (such as JPEG2000 at the very least) being available for a decade or more.
I find it odd that they bought Id Software for their engine technology only to sing the praises of the Gamebryo engine instead. If the Gamebryo engine is so great, why do they need Id Tech 5?
$18 million to redesign a website? WTF are they doing with it?
From TFA, they're going to spend $9.5 million over the next 6 months or so. Assuming $75k salaries for the web developers/DBAs/etc (generous), they'd be hiring 250 people to design a website.
And Americans wonder why they have such a big deficit.
While geographic diversity is certainly an excellent goal, it's not always that simple. My ISP's network core was located in the Peer 1 suite at 151 Front (whose UPS caused the fire). Power was cut to Peer 1's suite, but not the rest of the building (151 Front has independent power/cooling/etc. per-suite to the extent where each tenant is responsible for getting their own solution).
Redundant power sources could have mitigated the issue had there not been a fire; running two independent circuits to critical equipment that passes through different UPS, different PDUs, different generators, and different utilities.
Even for those on a budget, geographic diversity isn't necessarily difficult, even within the same company. Many companies have multiple locations; my VPS provider, Linode, has colo space in virtually all corners of the continent, about as far apart as you can get without going overseas. Getting a second VPS at a geographically distinct location could be a cheap way to provide failover if getting something from a different provider isn't financially feasible.
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As the developer of a popular fork of Tomato, I'd like to address a few points:
Not all features supported
Specific to their Tomato port:
1 > WPA is not working.
2 > There is no support of SAMBA server .
3 > NAS is accessible only through command line using ftp. No GUI support to
access NAS is available till now.
1: Presumably, WPA2 is, which means that this isn't a showtopper, just a big annoyance. There's actually only one missing feature here, WPA support. The rest would not be expected.
2/3: Mainline Tomato doesn't support any of this on USB-supporting routers anyhow.
Binary kernel modules
This is no different than mainline Tomato, which also relies on binary kernel modules. In fact, most opensource firmwares DO.
Looking at this from the perspective of one of the authors of Tomato/MLPPP (bonding multiple DSL lines using a fork of Tomato), only WPA is really of any concern, and even then, you can work around it by using WPA2. This router adds support for 802.11N, more (MUCH FASTER) RAM, and a far faster CPU (200 -> 480MHz, plus other architectural improvements). Considering that memory throughput/latency and CPU power are our main bottlenecks when bonding multiple DSL lines, this router remains quite interesting despite the lack of WPA.
The iPhone has a nice open source Unix operating system too. Some people know it as "Darwin", running on the "Mach 3 Microkernel".
An open source OS has absolutely no bearing on the openness of the device.
How is this any different from ISPs that give you a modem "free" with your subscription? Or Verizon putting down four figures to wire your house on the hope that they'll recoup it over a period of years? Or your cellphone company giving you a "free" phone with three year contract (or even on pay-as-you-go in Virgin Mobile USA's case)?
If you're paying $x per month as a steady revenue stream, it's not a big deal. This isn't the same as giving away CueCats and hoping people use it, this is a hardware-provided-with-subscription kind of thing. Which is perfectly reasonable.
Nothing at all like the stuff we saw during the dot-com bubble.
Which reminds me; the problem about rebuild times growing will more or less go away as the industry (eventually) moves to SSDs; freed of the mechanical limitations of existing drives, SSDs will likely see increases in capacity keep up with increases in speed.
Today's high-end (~$900) drives can theoretically do a rebuild on a 3x80GB RAID-5 array in about two and a half to three minutes. Yes, minutes; the read/write speeds are on the order of half a gig per second on the PCI-e based drives.
So, OK, we've got performance covered for the forseeable future. What about the concern that RAID-6 is just a "reliability Band Aid"? That's bullshit, to be honest.
The big problem with RAID-5 is, what happens if you're rebuilding a missing drive, and you get a read error on one of your two remaining drives? Well, excusing the fact that filesystems using checksums such as ZFS should be able to detect and re-read if the data itself is sound, RAID-6 fixes the problem in that the *EXACT* same sector would have to be bad on two out of three disks in order to cause a permanent failure. The chances of that happening are infinitesimal, and always will be.
I took a look at Seagate's Cheetah drives. They have a reported error rate of 1x10E-16. If we assume that's in bits, that indicates you'll get a read/write error every 1.25 petabytes OK, not too low, but I can see that being a concern as disk sizes get bigger.
OK, so what are the chances of the *SAME* sector having an error there? How often would that occur? Unless I'm mistaken, you multiply the probabilities, and you get a read error on the two disks simultaneously 12,500,000,000,000,000 petabytes. That don't sound like no "Band Aid" to me.
*NOTE: I'm crap at statistics, so I know that I'm failing to take into account that there are three disks that can have a read error in a RAID-6 scenario. So sue me, it doesn't change my point.
You don't want to use satellite and you say cellular coverage isn't good enough. What exactly are you expecting? If there's no connectivity, there's no connectivity. No amount of homebrew can fix that.
You also seem confused by WiFi In Motion and Cradlepoint products. They don't amplify anything, they're just access points that you can plug your phone in to get wifi coverage. A laptop and a router can do the same thing.
You have two choices:
1) Pony up the dough for satellite coverage
2) Get a cellular data plan and live with no connectivity in dead zones
I don't believe there are any other alternatives.
Two problems:
1) They're bottlenecked by SAS, which, if they're using 3gbit controllers, probably won't go that much higher than ~500MB/s
2) Their cost is probably insane, if they're setting the upper bounds at $6000
By comparison, Fusion-IO claims 100,000 IOPS (not as high, but not far off) on their drives, and are about to introduce a new model for $895. They use a PCI-e 4x slot, which assuming v1.x, should give them about 10gbit/s (before overhead) to play with.
Also, Woz is their chief scientist, so bonus.
The newer version of SAS would bump up the interface to 6gbit, but then, PCI-e 2.0 would bump a 4x slot up to 20gbit/s.
In short, it seems to me that the future of super high performance drives is in PCI-e rather than SAS.
No, it's not all providers. Tethering still works fine in 3.1 on providers that support it, such as Fido/Rogers in Canada.
For example, my iPhone from Fido running 3.1 still has tethering support, just like it always has.
Tethering has only been disabled in 3.1 for providers that don't officially support the iPhone. That sucks, certainly, but let's not engage in hyperbole. If you buy a phone not supported by your carrier, you run the risk of this sort of thing. That's true with any phone, not just the iPhone.
Concordia University in Montreal dual-booted XP and Fedora on all lab machines, and supported Linux, going so far as to give instructions for setting up wireless networking under Gnome.
A good portion of CS courses also took place in Linux; most software development courses that I took worked under Linux, as did the OS course.
He has a point, though. If you're trying to cache a 2TB drive with a 4GB cache, there's only so much you can do.
Besides, I've got 12GB of RAM in my system, and most of that gets used as a disk cache. The performance still saw an enormous boost when I moved to SSD. What can on-mobo flash-cache do that a similar amount of RAM cache couldn't? Colour me skeptical.
You only have to bridge about two decades
In which case, some optical format (CD, DVD, BluRay, etc) is probably fine, so long as a disc is chosen that is rated to last that amount of time (and they do exist, for far more than 20 years).
The form factor for optical disc has pretty much been "perfected". We've now got three generations of optical technologies all using the same form factor, and they're all backwards compatible back to the original.
Any time a new optical format is introduced, it's imperative to support the previous optical formats for adoption purposes. So if you burn your stuff onto a CD or DVD, it's highly likely that you'll be able to read it in 16 years with the optical drive of the day. At the very worst, it shouldn't be hard to find a computer in 16 years that can read a CD or DVD. After all, it's trivially easy today to find a 20 year old computer. Some people even still use them.
In short, 16 years is easy. 50 might be more of a challenge.
Care to define the difference? Because you're splitting hairs at best.
You seem to have missed the point of Chrome then... The browser was designed by the logic you espouse. They felt that the GUI should get out of the way as much as possible since the contents of the browser window were the important stuff. That's why Chrome has such a minimalist and simple interface compared to the rest.
Unless you want to just have a square with no UI controls whatsoever, Chrome is about as close as you can get.
It all depends on what you want. The basic 360 has half a gig of Flash, like the Wii. That may not be ideal if you want to download XBLA games or demos, but is probably sufficient for saves, patches, and a bit of DLC.
The 360 doesn't have wireless, which can be a major problem if your console isn't near a network jack. But you may not need it if it's close enough to a router (my TV is next to my computer, so wireless would be overkill to get network connectivity 3 feet).
The 360 doesn't have an HD-capable optical drive, leaving it unable to play BluRay discs. But that may not be important if you already have one, or have a computer with one, or don't want one. Or if you already have a PS3 ;)
It all comes down to different requirements. Not everybody needs the missing things. Many people do need them. If you do need them and want to save money, I'd point out that buying a wireless router that supports something like dd-wrt micro and using it as a wireless bridge is usually a far cheaper solution than buying Microsoft's overpriced wireless receiver. And BluRay capabilities are probably better served by buying a BluRay burner for your PC anyhow; they cost less than $130 USD, and can be used to burn BluRay discs; if you already have an HTPC, or can run an HDMI cable from your PC, you're golden. Of course, that really brings up the cost, but it's a lot more flexible.
There isn't any doubt that Sony needs to bring the price down on the PS3. But then again, so does Nintendo, and even Microsoft to an extent. The cost of PCs that can match the performance of the consoles is rapidly approaching the cost of the consoles. I doubt they'll ever completely get there, but when your choice would be between a $400 console or a $500 PC that can match the performance, the PC will do a heck of a lot more!
Roughly two 2.5" drives fit in the space of a 3.5" drive (using common adapters). So with a standard two-drive 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (such as a Bay Rafter), you can now have 2TB with 2.5" or 3.5" drives as your choice.
What might this be useful for? It would reduce the space needed for a RAID-5 array. For example, you could have four drives in two 3.5" slots, running in RAID-5, 3TB usable. With desktop drives, you could at best do RAID-1 with 2TB usable.
It also potentially could have performance benefits. It's not clear if this is a 7200RPM drive, but the performance of two drives in RAID-0 might be better than a desktop 2TB drive. Of course, the cost would be $600, nearly four times what you'd pay for 2TB of storage in desktop drives.
Sure, power costs in Quebec have gone up over time, but not THAT much. If the US refuses to build sufficient capacity, just move servers to Montreal or some other Canadian city with cheap renewable power.
If you're serving, catering, and marketing to users in Canada, and even partnering with Canadian telecoms to get your software on their phones, then a physical presence might not be required.
The mere fact that I can walk around Montreal and see advertisements for Facebook indicates that at the very least they could be forced to stop advertising in Canada, and the telecoms could be forced to stop distributing/bundling the Facebook apps. Even if they don't have a legal presence in Canada, they certainly do have *a* presence, and that's enough to force changes. That gives the Canadian government leverage to force Facebook to make changes.
"Comply with our laws or we'll cut off all your marketing and partnerships in Canada."
The question is, under US law, the photographs are public domain. There isn't even any room for, as the grandparent poster said, "rationale" that they "should" be under the public domain; according to US law, they *are* public domain. Whatever UK law or the NPG might feel or say about it, he's simply dealing in public domain images.
How, then, is he a pirate? And how could he agree that the copyright was anyones when it was under the public domain? That'd be making false copyright claims, which is perjury (at least if you make claims against someone).
From an ethical standpoint, though, there might be a valid argument. So my question becomes, does the NPG allow visitors to take photographs of the public domain paintings? If so, then I might tend to say, "NPG doesn't have a valid claim, but I feel for them."
If they prevent photographs from being taken, then I have no sympathy.
Semantics. There is a fee to use h.264. It doesn't matter what you call it, a codec licensing fee or a patent licensing fee, that doesn't change the fact that there's a fee to pay.
And so instead they can't even be sure if either of them are implemented, and will potentially have to encode their video in even MORE formats than just two...
A restriction and a requirement are not the same thing. Browsers could be *required* to support at least one of Theora or h.264. That doesn't prevent them from implementing both or others, it merely ensures that they support at least one.
I'd also argue that the lack of requirements might explain why we're still stuck with JPEG for lossy compression in browsers despite the numerous wavelet-based image codecs (such as JPEG2000 at the very least) being available for a decade or more.
For those of us who are professional web developers, $18M is still a large amount of money to spend on a web app.
I find it odd that they bought Id Software for their engine technology only to sing the praises of the Gamebryo engine instead. If the Gamebryo engine is so great, why do they need Id Tech 5?
OK, so they could hire 1000 developers in India. That doesn't change my point; how can they possibly spend $18 million redesigning a website?
$18 million to redesign a website? WTF are they doing with it?
From TFA, they're going to spend $9.5 million over the next 6 months or so. Assuming $75k salaries for the web developers/DBAs/etc (generous), they'd be hiring 250 people to design a website.
And Americans wonder why they have such a big deficit.
While geographic diversity is certainly an excellent goal, it's not always that simple. My ISP's network core was located in the Peer 1 suite at 151 Front (whose UPS caused the fire). Power was cut to Peer 1's suite, but not the rest of the building (151 Front has independent power/cooling/etc. per-suite to the extent where each tenant is responsible for getting their own solution).
Redundant power sources could have mitigated the issue had there not been a fire; running two independent circuits to critical equipment that passes through different UPS, different PDUs, different generators, and different utilities.
Even for those on a budget, geographic diversity isn't necessarily difficult, even within the same company. Many companies have multiple locations; my VPS provider, Linode, has colo space in virtually all corners of the continent, about as far apart as you can get without going overseas. Getting a second VPS at a geographically distinct location could be a cheap way to provide failover if getting something from a different provider isn't financially feasible.