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User: Donny+Smith

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  1. Re:Well... (Not Internet just Connectivity) on Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet? · · Score: 1

    >What would you say if they offered to subsidize your cellular calls in exchange for LISTENING to brief targeted messages served to your phone prior to placing a call?

    I would say they will lose money big time.

    First, it was tried before (startups back in 2000, all went bust since) and didn't work.

    Second, why would I listen to some ad crap when phone calls are FREE (Skype, etc.) or , in worst case, so cheap?

  2. No it can't on How Can Tech Help Fight Education Costs? · · Score: 1

    What a stupid question in the first place.

    "Tech" can lower cost of education for a few years, then evereyone gets to the same "cost" level and "expensive" again becomes a relative term.

    What's the cost difference between two schools that use open source for everything?
    Dick.

  3. Re:Publicity on Adult Site Sues Google, Google Compared To MS Again · · Score: 2, Insightful

    >Is anyone else getting the feeling that this whole "Google is actually evil like Microsoft" theme could easily be the beginnings of a FUD campaign organised by - who else - Microsoft?

    Riiight. And Microsoft's interest in comparing Google's badness to ... Microsoft is...?

    >So far Google hasn't don't anything worthy of being called "evil".

    Their cookie expires in 2038, they block freedom-related sites in China, they never delete your email and they pirate other people's contents (without consent) using the Google cache. These are some of the things we *know*. Then there are those other other things that we don't.

  4. Re:$1/CPU/hour? on Sun Grid Utility Goes Live for Employees · · Score: 1

    >on a much larger scale.

    I am aware of that, I was commenting on the small-scale example from grandparent post.
    As far as large scale computing is concerned, I believe that vertical solution providers, specializing in particular industries like oil & gas, biotech, etc. will be able to provide a better solution for large scale customers as they have domain know-ho.
    And xSPs and hosting providers can sell unused compute power to grid service providers at a very low cost. I do not believe Sun can run data centers more efficiently than RackSpace, GoDaddy and other guys with many years of expeience in huge scale datacenter management.

  5. Re:WTF for? on Intel and Laptop RAID? · · Score: 1

    >Some folks will do it for speed. RAID0.

    Exactly.
    It'd be a wonderful thing to have - one could easily learn, test and demo misc. enterprise apps off a laptop computer with virtualization software instead of using a bulky server or remote connection.
    For example, people do that now with VMWare and a Firewire external disk. Internal RAID0 is a cheaper and more elegant way to do that.

  6. Re:$1/CPU/hour? on Sun Grid Utility Goes Live for Employees · · Score: 1

    I see no advantage in either case (over existing solutions, that is).

    If you look at a basic mail/Web/mySQL server with some 200 emails and 2-3,000 hits/day, it probably consumes about 2-3% of CPU resources (average figure).
    That'd be $1*2%*24hrs = 48 cents a day or some 150 bucks a year. I'm sorry but that's already available at any hosting company at approximately the same price.

    And let's not be naive - I'm sure somewhere in the fine print it probably says you must cough up X bucks for setup and buy a minimum of Y time units, whereas many hosting companies allow monthly extensions and charge nothing for account setup.

    I'm lazy to calculate now, but at higher percentage of CPU utilization Sun's deal is probably even less attractive.

  7. Linux lock-in on Yellow Dog Linux Finds New PPC Hardware Vendor · · Score: 1

    >This is great news for customers like the US Navy who rely on Linux-on-PowerPC for important tasks like sonar imaging systems.

    Is this the way to read this sentence:
    Although they use Linux, it's Linux on PPC so they're screwed and migration to industry standard (Inel/AMD) Linux would cost them a fortune.

    If yes, well that's great publicity for the open and standard Linux OS.

    If no, what the hell is that supposed to mean?

  8. Re:Another Google buyout? on Google, Skype and the Future of IM · · Score: 1

    >What ever happened to free will?

    Didn't you know?
    The research shows it does not exist.

    Unfortunately I can't remember what it was exactly, but I do remember it was connected to brain research - people make "decision" what they're about to do before they think they've made it. In other words, course of their behavior is not determinted based on your will but on bunch of other factors that we're not aware of.

  9. Re:No, that's crap. on Google, Skype and the Future of IM · · Score: 1

    > That's crap. Google's business isn't personal advertisement, it's context-sensitive advertisement.

    Why do they need that cookie?
    To track you. Otherwise they could do away with it (just interpret the page content and guess what ad to display from the content)

    And why does it expire in 2038?
    Because they're not tracking you thru a click stream during your visit (in which case it'd expire in a day or week) - they're tracking you for lifetime.

  10. Re:Damn you Google! on Google's Turn To Be The Villain · · Score: 1

    >Google on the other hand releases specs and APIs to work with the system and they don't care which platform you happen to be running on.

    Gee Sherlock - is Google is not a software company? No, it's a fucking portal or whatever - why would they care what OS or whatever you're running as long as you click on those ads.

  11. Re:MOD PARENT DOWN! on Google Instant Messenger Coming Really (or Not?) · · Score: 1

    >Oh, I see, maybe you mean shameful.

    I think you guessed right, but he probably meant "shameless". ;-)

  12. Re:You misunderstand the problem on Microsoft Proposes Cooperative Research With OSDL · · Score: 1

    >So you have two problems:
    >1) Microsoft creating a larger job market
    > for its competition and
    >2) Microsoft paying lots of money for very
    > temporary delays

    Is that a fact?

    1) Microsoft creates a MS Linux distro
    For all that matters, it could be Debian
    based, so that they can lower the cost of
    fscking around for free.
    Actually they could undersell SuSE and
    Red Hat because instead of developing a
    whole new distro, they'd just need to do
    the artwork, add their software and fix
    a few things so that it integrates better
    with their SFU.
    The all-new MS Linux would be compatible
    and standard (Debian Core Alliance)
    and would cost the same (or less) to invest
    than IBM and similar companies donate/sink
    in Linux every year.

    2) They port their apps to MS Linux (and
    keep them proprietary)
    OK, this would take some effort, but they
    wouldn't need to port *everything* at once.
    And these apps would cost same as they
    do on Windows.

    3) Profit!
    Imagine how much would it cost to add a
    few utils, the artwork and do the QA when
    most bugs are standard -
    "as seen on debian.org"
    With lower cost and the unique support
    value proposition ("we'll take care of
    both your Windows and Linux bugs if you
    use the industry standard MS Linux")
    they'll be in better position
    to charge more for the same thing that RH
    and Novell do and all that at a lower cost.

  13. Re:Am I the only one that on Google Releases GDS 2.0 · · Score: 1

    > "hey remember that email I sent you three months ago."

    I don't know what MUA you use (Outlook Express?) but most normal clients can search by themselves just fine:

    - Setup (IMAP) folders (auto sorting rule by "From:")
    - To find a particular message, scroll in the folder around the date/week or even search by keyword in the whole folder

    Why would I install crap on my PC for something I can accomplish with a single CTRL+F?

  14. Hah, hah on NCSA Issues Disclaimer on Google/Yahoo Study · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    They probably almost got their ass sued, hah, hah...

    They asked for it... Within days (ok, maybe weeks) of Yahoo's announcement they think up, prepare and conduct a "study". Riiight.

    Unfortunately that's not a CVS tree that one can do updates and send diffs as they please.
    And the bozos used the university site to publish such mambo-jumbo study. Very professional!

  15. There we go: yet another portal on Google Releases GDS 2.0 · · Score: 1

    I'm disappointed they've taken the portal path and I'll take a Luddite approach to this service as I don't want to have Google datamine thru *all* my data I don't keep on my PC (to that end, for example, I uninstalled Google Toolbar 1.x and installed A9 toolbar instead - as long as those two don't enter alliance or acquire each other, I'll be fine). They know enough about me as is.
    So, thanks, but no thanks. I'll rather use the second best solution than put all my eggs in a single (BETA!) basket.

    From the business side, it's going to cost them a pretty penny to get lazy portal users to migrate to Google services. Cost of acquisition of search users (Step 1: copy-and-paste your query here, Step 2: Hit Search) was next to nill, but to get users to move their data to Google... hmmm... it's definitively going to be harder.

    I had thought they'd use that $4b to buy Skype. Yahoo and Hotmail are already free, how are they going to motivate people to use their services? (Don't tell me Gmail is better - I've got an account and I'm not impressed. Besides, for how much I use it, I could as well be using Yahoo or any other free email provider).

    If they buy Skype, they'd get some 100m subscribers, that would be a nice way to catch-up with the other big guys. If they don't, well, we'll see how they plan to do pull that one off.

  16. Search http://lucene.apache.org/nutch with Google on Google Techs, Webmasters Mingle · · Score: 1

    But in the top right corner there's still a "search this site with google" (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/).

    How cute!

  17. Re:Dot Com all over again? on Google Files to Sell 14.2 Million More Shares · · Score: 1

    And fact that the Google add killer CustomizeGoogle is one of hottest Firefox extensions tells a lot about prospects of their ad business...

    https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php ?application=firefox&category=Popular

  18. Re:On an NFS message store on Intel and BlueArc Set New Mail Server Record · · Score: 1

    >(Think one Bluearc machine is 3 times
    >faster than a cluster of the highest end
    >Netapps).

    Their controller throughput seems to be 20Gbps - I'm lazy to check but I think I've seen one or two vendors with better performance.
    http://www.bluearc.com/html/products/titan.shtml

    >Bluearc actually treats all of these raid-5
    >shelves as disks that it does raid-1
    >across. This gives you redundancy and
    >double-striping in hardware from end to
    >end.

    Don't all high end disk arrays work the same way? You create storage groups, then you create RAIDs of those.

    > just check out specs.org to see how fast the thing is.

    http://specs.org/? WTF?
    Does this web site have a BlueArc NAS back-end?

  19. Re:Replaces the meeting room on Exchange Alternatives Round-up · · Score: 1

    >I hope you're forecasting the increase in licensing costs for all the functionality you are currently experiencing under Exchange Server.

    First, he said they've already got MS Office.

    Second, LiveMeeting does much more and is intended for real-time collaboration (unlike Exchange). If it delivers additional value, people will buy it.

    Three, Sharepoint is more like CRM/Intranet system and it does much more than just document routing and sharing.
    http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinf o/sharepoint/features.mspx

    Therefore, the idea is that instead of internally developing (the stuff the grandparent post mentioned) on top of Exchange, Microsoft offers complete framework for the customer and the customer in turns saves some development cost and gets additional functionality compared to the current Exchange environment.

    If MS *didn't* move these features to dedicated products, people'd complain of slowness, feature bloat and whatnot.
    Now that they do, they complain of added licensing cost. Whatever.

  20. Re:They forgot about ExchangeIt on Exchange Alternatives Round-up · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Poster boy of OSS movement and one of reasons why the industry dislikes working with open source zealots.

    Conspiracy, bloated, control, ripoff, proprietary, expensive, DRM, information wants to be free, blah, blah, blah, blah....

  21. Re:Delete your cookies regularly on Death of Cookies, Spyware Greatly Exaggerated? · · Score: 1

    >Advertisers can take a hike.

    They still can make good use of your cookies during a browsing session.
    If you refused them alltogether, well then...

  22. Re:Not that it would matter, but on Death of Cookies, Spyware Greatly Exaggerated? · · Score: 1

    Good luck with the Google cookie.

    http://www.google.com/search?q=google+cookie
    (See result #1)

  23. Misinformed on LinuxWorld Highlights · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From TFA:

    "I was also impressed by Coraid, maker of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), hardware. The AoE protocol allows Ethernet-connected hard drives. What's so great about that? It offers the ability to build SANs without the cost and complexity of fibre channel or iSCSI. "

    Wow, wow, wow! Hold it right there!
    Let remind ourselves here that he uses the word "SAN" in a very loose sense.
    There's a heaven-and-sky difference between this and good old fibre channel SAN.
    I don't know who this pal is, but I figure were he familiar with the traditional SANs, he wouldn't have toss out the SAN word just like that.

    Then he sez:

    "Essentially, this allows machines to write data via a low-level Ethernet protocol using a machine's standard NIC card. To me, this offers the potential to allow SMBs to get access to SAN functionality previously unaffordable to them."

    About "previously unaffordable". It can't be more affordable than iSCSI (as the network and the adapters used are the same), so except for the novel (read: niche, unsupported, unreliable and most likely untested - especially when compared to the industry-standard and well-tested iSCSI protocol) protocol, I don't see how this can be attractive to any company, including the suicidal SMBs (SMEs).
    I mean, what would you use this kind of "SAN" for? ERP? Oracle? Mail? Never.

    It's too bad that he missed to call any of that stuff "mission-critical".

    Oh, well - typical Linux enthusiast attitude that makes IT people laugh. Then again, it's in line with what we usually get to read here.

  24. Re:As a Google fan on Google Loses AdWords Case · · Score: 1

    I think it was a Coke guy drinking Pepsi (which surprised me).

  25. I downloaded at least 30 times on Firefox Hits 80,000,000 Downloads · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In the past 12 months I have downloaded FireFox at least 30 times.

    In addition to that, I have *updated* it (on several systems that I own (and re-install) about 10-15 times.

    Perhaps I'm more active than Average Joe, but you get the picture...