You may laugh, but it seems pretty common practice. I got myself an Acer Timeline 1810TZ (dinky 11" with the same duallie as the Air) for the small size and awesome battery life... it didn't come with a recovery disc, but software to allow you to burn your own recovery discs, on a machine without an optical drive. I was a little flabbergasted - you couldn't even say "just make an ISO or a backup file and I'll copy it somewhere on the network", it wouldn't even start the process without a DVD burner attached.
Thankfully I never plan on using the default image, and I replaced the HDD with a 120GB SSD and installed from scratch (Acer provide all the drivers and utilities, but none of the bundled crapware, on their website), but it's an idiotic "recovery" measure for anyone who isn't a geek.
we will start to see ISPs offer lower prices for customers who agree to be NATed (or perhaps, demanding higher prices from those customers who refuse to be NATed)
Ha! Someone is optimistic. Call me cynical (you might as well, it's my middle name) but I expect to see ISP's saying "but we have to put up prices! We've run out of internets!" and then NAT everyone anyway. Bonus points to the first ISP who starts selling off/8's once they've implemented NAT on all their non-business customers.
Reminds me alot of Neasden Police station log from Private Eye. From wikipedia, as I can't find an example online:
"A fictional police station log, satirising current police policies that are met with general contempt and/or disdain. Ordinary police activities are ignored, with police attention limited to 'counter-terrorism' and obsessive political correctness and pointless bureaucracy. Examples may include an incident in which an elderly woman is attacked by a gang of youths, and is arrested (and unfortunately dies of "natural causes" in police custody) for infringing on their right to terrorise OAPs, or the officers who arrest themselves for ordering a Full English, in direct contravention of the Celtic Minority (Non-Discriminatory Breakfast Provision) Regulations 2006."
The problem for alot of us hobbyists-cum-professionals is that the barriers to entry for IPv6 are pretty high; using IPv6 on your home network requires both your home router and all devices on your LAN support IPv6. For most of us with non-Linux systems in the same house, this is a complete no-no.
If you want to try using IPv4 on your LAN with an IPv6 external address (which is probably the most sensible approach for most people who have to handle IPv4-only devices internally), you need to find either an ISP that provides IPv6 (which in the UK at least is nigh impossible, the only ISP's that do provide it are the £££ business backbone providers like BT Global Services and EasyNet) and you still need a router that supports IPv6 on the WAN side, and then you need a tunnel broker or 6to4 in order to access the IPv4 internet that everyone else uses. For 90% of people who might have been interested you'll get a resigned "Meh, NAT works for me" and that's the last you hear of it.
Since most hobbyists and IT pro's can't try it out easily at home, they're wary of being forced to adopt it because they haven't been given the chance to familiarise themselves with its foibles and pitfalls, or there's those who insist on using IP addresses instead of hostnames and insist IPv6 addresses are too hard to remember (despite the fact most people running on an intranet will only need to know the::abcd or even just::abcd:192.168.1.1 format anyway) or the people that are still convinced that you can't have a firewall on an IPv6 router unless you also run NAT.
Heck, I've been using ADSL draytek routers for years, they're reliable but pricey compared to your average netgear POS since they're targeted at the SOHO/small business crowd, and they apparently have absolutely no plans to implement IPv6 support. I've had to resort to keeping my IPv6 testbed confined to a VM because I can't afford to keep it running on the LAN any more due to other peoples laptops, consoles, phones, etc, and most of us geeks that don't need access to IPv4-only devices aren't bothering with it because the tools to give it a whirl aren't easily available.
That's my assessment of it anyway. I don't know a great deal about IPv6 and I'm certainly not a network professional, so I may well be wrong on several points; all I know is that due to incumbent ISPs and consumer routing equipment, even wanting to try IPv6 is waaaay harder than it should be.
I'm one of those people that can only see 3D if I squint (and sit directly in front of the screen and don't move my head), and it gives me a headache after about 20mins... but I still have to agree with you, the 3D in Coraline was as good as I've ever seen it done (it came bundled with the blu-ray). It helped, being miniature shots of models, that the focal length of the lens stayed pretty much static throughout... the number of attempts at 3D I've seen where you get cuts between wide angle, standard and tele (or, god forbid, zooms) is astonishing, and it makes my eyes hurt just thinking about it... binocular vision does not work that way!
Should also add that Coraline is an awesome movie in plain-jane 2D as well and it's very much the pinnacle of the stop-motion craft. Watch it and try and figure out how much CGI they used.
Wish I could have any optimism about Star Wars, but as you point out this is going to be a "Hey! Let's extrapolate a 95% profit marg... uh, I mean, let's extrapolate depth information and create 3D from nothing!" cash-in. It will look awful and give me headaches even more than the originals (no, I'm not a fan), and will make millions.
I think the parent is referring to the so-called laws banning "obscene" pornography in the UK (mostly S&M IIRC). The same hilarious laws that say "You can legally DO that thing to that person... but if you film it, take a photo of it or write about it you're going to prison!". Forget the name of the law itself and google isn't proving helpful.
Of course, what with "obscenity" being the best Aunt Sally in the world - especially when you aren't allowed to describe what it is - no-one wants to back the victims of an idiotic law. Because, y'know, if you support free speech and/or logical laws you must be one of those obscene people and the stuff I see in my head when I think of "obscenity" makes me disgust you!
There's also a whole buncha interesting stuff in the links on the left. As another poster points out, people have been inventing things like this in freeform sandboxes since things like freeform sandboxes were invented, but IMHO it doesn't make any of these less impressive. Personally I was just happy with trapping invaders in an automated obsidian-encasing machine:)
Not to mention a nifty "myth busted" moment for that old Hollywood trope of a post-nuclear wasteland.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear one, it was steam (due to a massive reactor power spike thanks to the skillful removal of pretty much all possible safety procedures in an already sub-optimal reactor design) that blew open the core and scattered radioactive material over the landscape and into the atmosphere thanks to the lack of a containment vessel. The Hollywood trope of the post-nuclear landscape typically involves the detonation of several hundred megatons of nuclear bombs and, as near as we can tell, is pretty accurate; Chernobyl isn't really comparable to a nuke in either the degree of the explosion or in the amount of radioactive fallout./nitpick
Too late for that - the evening papers in the UK have already run an article on him banging on about how he'd "created a virus for Japanese porn" and was "completely unrepentant for his actions". Tomorrow's knee jerk involves hanging the chaps who discovered HIV and next week we're going to decapitate all asbestos inspectors.
I've been seeing horribly aliased fonts in alot of microsoft sites, this and technet included - happens in chrome and firefox so, but not opera. Perhaps a truetype issue?
Can any web devs give us a clue as to what MS are doing wrong on these sites from a W3C standpoint?
Agree on the server proliferation thing 100% - I've come across dozens of companies that have been forced to run hundreds of massively overspecced servers because support agreements mandate that "no other apps can be installed on the box"; if you want to use tin that's supported you're stuck with buying a new box every 3-5yrs that ends up being three times as fast as it's predecessor (but the shoddily written app is still just as slow). VMware provided an easy answer to that and IMHO it's why they got so big so quickly.
I've often wondered why VMware, citrix or MS didn't introduce a halfway house "desktop" virtualisation like you suggest - spinning off a chroot-a-like into a cut-down hypervisor (either on the server or the client) should be a piece of piss; I'm not really a fan of the thin-client approach of VDI. I'd love a remote VM filesystem that'd sync back your local hypervisor with a centralised server, which'd allow you centralised management and the ability to take the app offline. It prolly has limited applications though.
Yes, it's merely annoying from someone who isn't tech literate... but it's inexcusable coming from an IT publication. Even if they're just parroting a press release, surely an editor who knew the difference between storage and memory would have spotted it? Maybe IT World and/. use the same recruitment agency...
As much as I'd love that... I doubt it. vCentre is a pretty complex bunch of code, at least a large chunk of it in.net. It's also the flakiest part of the VMware infrastructure IME; the ESX hypervisor hasn't crashed on us since the earliest days of 2.0.
Not saying that VMware couldn't re-implement VC as a linux client but.. biggest issue with a port would be the plugins however; the integrated live P2V management (VMware Converter) runs on windows because it's easy to provide Linux services from a windows host - all you need is an SSH binary. Running the myriad of services windows requires from a linux host would mean alot of reinventing the wheel; not to mention all the other goodies like guided consolidation and recovery manager that would be useless to the majority of shops that run mostly windows (and I've yet to see any business of more than a few dozen people that doesn't have at least one MS server somewhere).
Then there's all the third-party code that integrates into VC - backup clients, hardware monitoring... and VMware are even getting rid of ESX (which gives you a linux console to play with) and shifting to ESXi (much smaller footprint hypervisor with no "proper" console [although you can finagle SSH access if you wish]) and relying on a virtual centre intregrated CLI, in the form of powershell.
ESX might have a bunch of linux in its guts, but VMware's direction over the last few versions has been moving away from linux based frontends to a much more windows-centric approach. I say this as a person who was allowed several years back to become the company expert on VMware cos I was the de facto "Linux guy" in a windows shop (well, not strictly true - we're windows and AIX). Of all the hundred or so people I met doing the various certifications, only three were confident on a linux CLI (they were also the only other people working for a FTSE100), and five more knew how to use `ls`, `service XXXXX restart`... the rest shit bricks whenever they had to use it. Sad but true.
Heh, no, I'm based in London. But incompetent management is as universal as shitty apps running in VMware because there's no other way to run nine hojillion 1U rackmounts:)
On the whole I'd concur, but it does depend very much on your workload - YMMV. For most "enterprisey" setups, you'll probably be running a million and one individual utility servers that spend 99% of their time doing nothing and, if it anything like where I work, management will want every VM is overspecced and treated as if it was a physical machine - "the lowest-end hardware we can currently buy for a domain controller is a quad core box with 4GB of RAM... so all VMs must have at least four processors and at least 4GB of RAM!" even when most servers are more than happy with a single CPU and 1-2GB RAM.
Anecdotally, we run two 16-node vSphere clusters at work, with about 200 production VMs and maybe 4-500 dev/test/uat VMs; All hosts are 2P quad core i7 setups with 96GB of RAM - we rarely see any of the hosts go over 25% overall CPU utilisation (and they've never gone above 50%), whereas host memory is usually fairly constant at 80% across the clusters - thankfully we're not having to overcommit yet (although most of the VMs have been massively overspecced for RAM because certain people with more political clout than me can't tell the difference between "the server does not have enough memory" and "the server is utilising all the memory it's allocated as efficiently as possible").
There are certain VM workloads though, especially compute nodes or compile farms or anything else that typically runs the CPU high, that'll take any CPU you can throw at them - we run a handful at work that'll happily chew up eight virtual cores if you let them. I'm aware of a few places that do HPC running on VMware (it's only a ~5% performance overhead on CPU-intensive tasks at least as far as our own benchmarks tell us) and for workloads like this, you often really do need stupendously fast CPUs. I was able to do x264 encode across an 8P VM at 90% of the speed it ran on the physical 8P tin.
Completely agree that memory bandwidth/latency (and quantity!) and I/O availability are the number one priorities for getting good performance out of ESX at least. Management let us splurge on the hosts but cheaped out on the storage side - they wouldn't let me use dedicated 10Gb fabric for the iSCSI cluster as they told me that VMware wouldn't be used for "high throughput" applications - and it's now biting them in the arse now that they want to transition more servers, including databases and exchange, onto the clusters... so they're spending a small fortune on a dedicated storage network whilst I get to look very smug. Payback's a bitch.
TLDR: 95% of VM workloads I've seen don't tax the proc at all, but that doesn't mean VMs can't easily run CPU's at 100%; it's just that most servers, especially in this day and age of ultra-fast processors, have absolutely no way of utilising that much processing power, the bottlenecks are mostly all at the I/O level these days even with solid state storage.
At first I thought these must be april fool's pranks, but apparently not; I do find the entire concept ridiculous though. Getting an award in a game is generally a fun, if usually completely ephemeral, thing to do... but installing a buttload of apps or performing better tasks? IMHO resources would be better spent on either a) improving the apps themselves or b) writing more/better documentation (even if it's in the form of videos along the lines of "Look at some of the cool things you can do with X to improve your workflow!").
And if it really does provide as great an incentive as these people think it does, it'll also be a great attack vector; "why not download and totallynotavirus.exe to get three new achievements to unlock plus fourteen e-penis points! Use http:///www.totallynotaphishingpage.ru to remember all those awkward banking passwords and we'll give you a selection of new fanfare sounds for whenever you score more than 250 in solitaire!".
Call me one of those boring cynics who has a blank grey desktop, zero eye-candy features and likes to do Real Work and Real Relaxation on their computer I guess, but I find the idea of this sort of thing pretty patronising, as though users are incapable of learning new tricks unless there's a gaudy carrot dangled in front of them.
Cue a dozens posts telling me I have too high an opinion of users:)
...has me doing a "me too!" to everyone telling you to use IMAP + maildir; I use dovecot myself, complete with self-signed SSL cert (curse you firefox!).
El_Muerte_TDS has just pointed me towards mairix, a dedicated maildir + friends indexing system which I've just tried out, and seems to be ideal for my use - fast email search has always been a good thing for me, but I've rarely found a nice lightweight indexing solution that was catered only to mail; "desktop" search engines tend to take the opinion that if I want one thing indexed then I automatically want everything indexed, and also insist on running around the clock. Much nicer for my needs to just have one little lightweight indexing program that only runs when I want it to.
Best thing about mairix IMHO is the way it creates a virtual maildir on the fly using symlinks, so not only is it easily viewable on the command line, it's also automatically compatible with all of those IMAP + maildir clients out there... which, last time I looked, was all of them. Useful hack for KMail users here.
Disclaimer: my IMAP server has all its databases on an SSD, so even full text searches from the client are pretty speedy (seriously - the lack of access times on small chunks of random data cuts down search times by at least an order of magnitude), but obviously mairix has the advantage of being able to scale to multiple users with >X GB mailboxes much easier than spending a fortune on fast storage.
Our "control centre" at work was basically built by us and the network guys, money went on decent monitoring software and nice big hi-res screens, all controlled from a single workstation with three graphics cards (soon to be replaced by a single ATI); we cam in massively under-budget because, hey, form follows function. We were told to spend the rest of the money making it look more like a movie set, otherwise the directors wouldn't be impressed - so we spent a couple of hundred quid on halogens, one of our guys cooked up a homebrew COM-controlled lighting system and we now literally have a "panic button" where enter + scroll lock on the num pad turns off the main lights and kicks in a bunch of OpenGL screensavers full of pointless 3D bar charts, spectrum analysers (on a screen labelled "Continuous Raster Attenuation Particulates), random beeping noises. Most new techies that see it burst out laughing at the contrived stupidity of it all.
The best bit? The eight hundred quid left over went a long way to paying for a whole bunch of delicious scotch at a bar around the corner as we got pissed and laughed our arses off. Biggest grin was from the slightly sozzled manager who smirked as he signed off the bar bill as a "consultancy fee". Fun times.
I'm aware of that, but don't they both fulfil the same sorts of roles? Fast, non-volatile storage...? I'm just surprised no-one seems to have used it for things like storage caches yet, whatever the technology behind it.
IIRC, FreeScale has had (small) MRAM chips on the market for a while, memristors are just more of the same thing. I was quite surprised not to see hard drive manufacturers jump on them, at least for enterprise drives and/or RAID controllers - imagine having your HDD cache as fast as DRAM, but not needing a battery backup to retain the data in the event of sudden power loss; write-back caches could become a whole lot more widespread, for all types of storage.
And, of course, once densities go up you manage to replace DRAM, SRAM and eventually NAND with this sort of thing too.
I'm British, and my grandfather made beer in Germany for most of his working life after the war (a captured Luftwaffe pilot taught him how to, oddly enough)... but no-one does beer like the Belgians. Czech stuff is all a bit samey IMHO.
Whilst there's lots of good beer coming out of some european macrobreweries and the occasional nice brew from american microbreweries, you just can't beat a good trappist ale or a nice strong amber or golden ale; some of them don't travel especially well so if you can, pop over to belgium or the netherlands and treat yourself to a glass of Westmalle Triple or a Piraat.
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You may laugh, but it seems pretty common practice. I got myself an Acer Timeline 1810TZ (dinky 11" with the same duallie as the Air) for the small size and awesome battery life... it didn't come with a recovery disc, but software to allow you to burn your own recovery discs, on a machine without an optical drive. I was a little flabbergasted - you couldn't even say "just make an ISO or a backup file and I'll copy it somewhere on the network", it wouldn't even start the process without a DVD burner attached.
Thankfully I never plan on using the default image, and I replaced the HDD with a 120GB SSD and installed from scratch (Acer provide all the drivers and utilities, but none of the bundled crapware, on their website), but it's an idiotic "recovery" measure for anyone who isn't a geek.
Ha! Someone is optimistic. Call me cynical (you might as well, it's my middle name) but I expect to see ISP's saying "but we have to put up prices! We've run out of internets!" and then NAT everyone anyway. Bonus points to the first ISP who starts selling off /8's once they've implemented NAT on all their non-business customers.
Reminds me alot of Neasden Police station log from Private Eye. From wikipedia, as I can't find an example online:
"A fictional police station log, satirising current police policies that are met with general contempt and/or disdain. Ordinary police activities are ignored, with police attention limited to 'counter-terrorism' and obsessive political correctness and pointless bureaucracy. Examples may include an incident in which an elderly woman is attacked by a gang of youths, and is arrested (and unfortunately dies of "natural causes" in police custody) for infringing on their right to terrorise OAPs, or the officers who arrest themselves for ordering a Full English, in direct contravention of the Celtic Minority (Non-Discriminatory Breakfast Provision) Regulations 2006."
oldthinker unbellyfeel nicesurveillance
The problem for alot of us hobbyists-cum-professionals is that the barriers to entry for IPv6 are pretty high; using IPv6 on your home network requires both your home router and all devices on your LAN support IPv6. For most of us with non-Linux systems in the same house, this is a complete no-no.
If you want to try using IPv4 on your LAN with an IPv6 external address (which is probably the most sensible approach for most people who have to handle IPv4-only devices internally), you need to find either an ISP that provides IPv6 (which in the UK at least is nigh impossible, the only ISP's that do provide it are the £££ business backbone providers like BT Global Services and EasyNet) and you still need a router that supports IPv6 on the WAN side, and then you need a tunnel broker or 6to4 in order to access the IPv4 internet that everyone else uses. For 90% of people who might have been interested you'll get a resigned "Meh, NAT works for me" and that's the last you hear of it.
Since most hobbyists and IT pro's can't try it out easily at home, they're wary of being forced to adopt it because they haven't been given the chance to familiarise themselves with its foibles and pitfalls, or there's those who insist on using IP addresses instead of hostnames and insist IPv6 addresses are too hard to remember (despite the fact most people running on an intranet will only need to know the ::abcd or even just ::abcd:192.168.1.1 format anyway) or the people that are still convinced that you can't have a firewall on an IPv6 router unless you also run NAT.
Heck, I've been using ADSL draytek routers for years, they're reliable but pricey compared to your average netgear POS since they're targeted at the SOHO/small business crowd, and they apparently have absolutely no plans to implement IPv6 support. I've had to resort to keeping my IPv6 testbed confined to a VM because I can't afford to keep it running on the LAN any more due to other peoples laptops, consoles, phones, etc, and most of us geeks that don't need access to IPv4-only devices aren't bothering with it because the tools to give it a whirl aren't easily available.
That's my assessment of it anyway. I don't know a great deal about IPv6 and I'm certainly not a network professional, so I may well be wrong on several points; all I know is that due to incumbent ISPs and consumer routing equipment, even wanting to try IPv6 is waaaay harder than it should be.
I'm one of those people that can only see 3D if I squint (and sit directly in front of the screen and don't move my head), and it gives me a headache after about 20mins... but I still have to agree with you, the 3D in Coraline was as good as I've ever seen it done (it came bundled with the blu-ray). It helped, being miniature shots of models, that the focal length of the lens stayed pretty much static throughout... the number of attempts at 3D I've seen where you get cuts between wide angle, standard and tele (or, god forbid, zooms) is astonishing, and it makes my eyes hurt just thinking about it... binocular vision does not work that way!
Should also add that Coraline is an awesome movie in plain-jane 2D as well and it's very much the pinnacle of the stop-motion craft. Watch it and try and figure out how much CGI they used.
Wish I could have any optimism about Star Wars, but as you point out this is going to be a "Hey! Let's extrapolate a 95% profit marg... uh, I mean, let's extrapolate depth information and create 3D from nothing!" cash-in. It will look awful and give me headaches even more than the originals (no, I'm not a fan), and will make millions.
I think the parent is referring to the so-called laws banning "obscene" pornography in the UK (mostly S&M IIRC). The same hilarious laws that say "You can legally DO that thing to that person... but if you film it, take a photo of it or write about it you're going to prison!". Forget the name of the law itself and google isn't proving helpful.
Of course, what with "obscenity" being the best Aunt Sally in the world - especially when you aren't allowed to describe what it is - no-one wants to back the victims of an idiotic law. Because, y'know, if you support free speech and/or logical laws you must be one of those obscene people and the stuff I see in my head when I think of "obscenity" makes me disgust you!
Just as a shameless karma whore - here's a link to one of the (several) water-powered computers made in Dwarf Fortress:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-8269
There's also a whole buncha interesting stuff in the links on the left. As another poster points out, people have been inventing things like this in freeform sandboxes since things like freeform sandboxes were invented, but IMHO it doesn't make any of these less impressive. Personally I was just happy with trapping invaders in an automated obsidian-encasing machine :)
Not to mention a nifty "myth busted" moment for that old Hollywood trope of a post-nuclear wasteland.
The explosion at Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear one, it was steam (due to a massive reactor power spike thanks to the skillful removal of pretty much all possible safety procedures in an already sub-optimal reactor design) that blew open the core and scattered radioactive material over the landscape and into the atmosphere thanks to the lack of a containment vessel. The Hollywood trope of the post-nuclear landscape typically involves the detonation of several hundred megatons of nuclear bombs and, as near as we can tell, is pretty accurate; Chernobyl isn't really comparable to a nuke in either the degree of the explosion or in the amount of radioactive fallout. /nitpick
Too late for that - the evening papers in the UK have already run an article on him banging on about how he'd "created a virus for Japanese porn" and was "completely unrepentant for his actions". Tomorrow's knee jerk involves hanging the chaps who discovered HIV and next week we're going to decapitate all asbestos inspectors.
I've been seeing horribly aliased fonts in alot of microsoft sites, this and technet included - happens in chrome and firefox so, but not opera. Perhaps a truetype issue?
Can any web devs give us a clue as to what MS are doing wrong on these sites from a W3C standpoint?
Agree on the server proliferation thing 100% - I've come across dozens of companies that have been forced to run hundreds of massively overspecced servers because support agreements mandate that "no other apps can be installed on the box"; if you want to use tin that's supported you're stuck with buying a new box every 3-5yrs that ends up being three times as fast as it's predecessor (but the shoddily written app is still just as slow). VMware provided an easy answer to that and IMHO it's why they got so big so quickly.
I've often wondered why VMware, citrix or MS didn't introduce a halfway house "desktop" virtualisation like you suggest - spinning off a chroot-a-like into a cut-down hypervisor (either on the server or the client) should be a piece of piss; I'm not really a fan of the thin-client approach of VDI. I'd love a remote VM filesystem that'd sync back your local hypervisor with a centralised server, which'd allow you centralised management and the ability to take the app offline. It prolly has limited applications though.
Maybe in a few years...
Yowza, nice comeback - hadn't heard hide nor hare of this one; although at ~18 months without an update I wonder how much momentum there is behind it.
oldthinker unbellyfeel iSpecs!
Yes, it's merely annoying from someone who isn't tech literate... but it's inexcusable coming from an IT publication. Even if they're just parroting a press release, surely an editor who knew the difference between storage and memory would have spotted it? Maybe IT World and /. use the same recruitment agency...
As much as I'd love that... I doubt it. vCentre is a pretty complex bunch of code, at least a large chunk of it in .net. It's also the flakiest part of the VMware infrastructure IME; the ESX hypervisor hasn't crashed on us since the earliest days of 2.0.
Not saying that VMware couldn't re-implement VC as a linux client but.. biggest issue with a port would be the plugins however; the integrated live P2V management (VMware Converter) runs on windows because it's easy to provide Linux services from a windows host - all you need is an SSH binary. Running the myriad of services windows requires from a linux host would mean alot of reinventing the wheel; not to mention all the other goodies like guided consolidation and recovery manager that would be useless to the majority of shops that run mostly windows (and I've yet to see any business of more than a few dozen people that doesn't have at least one MS server somewhere).
Then there's all the third-party code that integrates into VC - backup clients, hardware monitoring... and VMware are even getting rid of ESX (which gives you a linux console to play with) and shifting to ESXi (much smaller footprint hypervisor with no "proper" console [although you can finagle SSH access if you wish]) and relying on a virtual centre intregrated CLI, in the form of powershell.
ESX might have a bunch of linux in its guts, but VMware's direction over the last few versions has been moving away from linux based frontends to a much more windows-centric approach. I say this as a person who was allowed several years back to become the company expert on VMware cos I was the de facto "Linux guy" in a windows shop (well, not strictly true - we're windows and AIX). Of all the hundred or so people I met doing the various certifications, only three were confident on a linux CLI (they were also the only other people working for a FTSE100), and five more knew how to use `ls`, `service XXXXX restart`... the rest shit bricks whenever they had to use it. Sad but true.
Heh, no, I'm based in London. But incompetent management is as universal as shitty apps running in VMware because there's no other way to run nine hojillion 1U rackmounts :)
On the whole I'd concur, but it does depend very much on your workload - YMMV. For most "enterprisey" setups, you'll probably be running a million and one individual utility servers that spend 99% of their time doing nothing and, if it anything like where I work, management will want every VM is overspecced and treated as if it was a physical machine - "the lowest-end hardware we can currently buy for a domain controller is a quad core box with 4GB of RAM... so all VMs must have at least four processors and at least 4GB of RAM!" even when most servers are more than happy with a single CPU and 1-2GB RAM.
Anecdotally, we run two 16-node vSphere clusters at work, with about 200 production VMs and maybe 4-500 dev/test/uat VMs; All hosts are 2P quad core i7 setups with 96GB of RAM - we rarely see any of the hosts go over 25% overall CPU utilisation (and they've never gone above 50%), whereas host memory is usually fairly constant at 80% across the clusters - thankfully we're not having to overcommit yet (although most of the VMs have been massively overspecced for RAM because certain people with more political clout than me can't tell the difference between "the server does not have enough memory" and "the server is utilising all the memory it's allocated as efficiently as possible").
There are certain VM workloads though, especially compute nodes or compile farms or anything else that typically runs the CPU high, that'll take any CPU you can throw at them - we run a handful at work that'll happily chew up eight virtual cores if you let them. I'm aware of a few places that do HPC running on VMware (it's only a ~5% performance overhead on CPU-intensive tasks at least as far as our own benchmarks tell us) and for workloads like this, you often really do need stupendously fast CPUs. I was able to do x264 encode across an 8P VM at 90% of the speed it ran on the physical 8P tin.
Completely agree that memory bandwidth/latency (and quantity!) and I/O availability are the number one priorities for getting good performance out of ESX at least. Management let us splurge on the hosts but cheaped out on the storage side - they wouldn't let me use dedicated 10Gb fabric for the iSCSI cluster as they told me that VMware wouldn't be used for "high throughput" applications - and it's now biting them in the arse now that they want to transition more servers, including databases and exchange, onto the clusters... so they're spending a small fortune on a dedicated storage network whilst I get to look very smug. Payback's a bitch.
TLDR: 95% of VM workloads I've seen don't tax the proc at all, but that doesn't mean VMs can't easily run CPU's at 100%; it's just that most servers, especially in this day and age of ultra-fast processors, have absolutely no way of utilising that much processing power, the bottlenecks are mostly all at the I/O level these days even with solid state storage.
At first I thought these must be april fool's pranks, but apparently not; I do find the entire concept ridiculous though. Getting an award in a game is generally a fun, if usually completely ephemeral, thing to do... but installing a buttload of apps or performing better tasks? IMHO resources would be better spent on either a) improving the apps themselves or b) writing more/better documentation (even if it's in the form of videos along the lines of "Look at some of the cool things you can do with X to improve your workflow!").
And if it really does provide as great an incentive as these people think it does, it'll also be a great attack vector; "why not download and totallynotavirus.exe to get three new achievements to unlock plus fourteen e-penis points! Use http:///www.totallynotaphishingpage.ru to remember all those awkward banking passwords and we'll give you a selection of new fanfare sounds for whenever you score more than 250 in solitaire!".
Call me one of those boring cynics who has a blank grey desktop, zero eye-candy features and likes to do Real Work and Real Relaxation on their computer I guess, but I find the idea of this sort of thing pretty patronising, as though users are incapable of learning new tricks unless there's a gaudy carrot dangled in front of them.
Cue a dozens posts telling me I have too high an opinion of users :)
...has me doing a "me too!" to everyone telling you to use IMAP + maildir; I use dovecot myself, complete with self-signed SSL cert (curse you firefox!).
El_Muerte_TDS has just pointed me towards mairix, a dedicated maildir + friends indexing system which I've just tried out, and seems to be ideal for my use - fast email search has always been a good thing for me, but I've rarely found a nice lightweight indexing solution that was catered only to mail; "desktop" search engines tend to take the opinion that if I want one thing indexed then I automatically want everything indexed, and also insist on running around the clock. Much nicer for my needs to just have one little lightweight indexing program that only runs when I want it to.
Best thing about mairix IMHO is the way it creates a virtual maildir on the fly using symlinks, so not only is it easily viewable on the command line, it's also automatically compatible with all of those IMAP + maildir clients out there... which, last time I looked, was all of them. Useful hack for KMail users here.
Disclaimer: my IMAP server has all its databases on an SSD, so even full text searches from the client are pretty speedy (seriously - the lack of access times on small chunks of random data cuts down search times by at least an order of magnitude), but obviously mairix has the advantage of being able to scale to multiple users with >X GB mailboxes much easier than spending a fortune on fast storage.
Funny? This should be +5 insightful.
Our "control centre" at work was basically built by us and the network guys, money went on decent monitoring software and nice big hi-res screens, all controlled from a single workstation with three graphics cards (soon to be replaced by a single ATI); we cam in massively under-budget because, hey, form follows function. We were told to spend the rest of the money making it look more like a movie set, otherwise the directors wouldn't be impressed - so we spent a couple of hundred quid on halogens, one of our guys cooked up a homebrew COM-controlled lighting system and we now literally have a "panic button" where enter + scroll lock on the num pad turns off the main lights and kicks in a bunch of OpenGL screensavers full of pointless 3D bar charts, spectrum analysers (on a screen labelled "Continuous Raster Attenuation Particulates), random beeping noises. Most new techies that see it burst out laughing at the contrived stupidity of it all.
The best bit? The eight hundred quid left over went a long way to paying for a whole bunch of delicious scotch at a bar around the corner as we got pissed and laughed our arses off. Biggest grin was from the slightly sozzled manager who smirked as he signed off the bar bill as a "consultancy fee". Fun times.
I'm aware of that, but don't they both fulfil the same sorts of roles? Fast, non-volatile storage...? I'm just surprised no-one seems to have used it for things like storage caches yet, whatever the technology behind it.
IIRC, FreeScale has had (small) MRAM chips on the market for a while, memristors are just more of the same thing. I was quite surprised not to see hard drive manufacturers jump on them, at least for enterprise drives and/or RAID controllers - imagine having your HDD cache as fast as DRAM, but not needing a battery backup to retain the data in the event of sudden power loss; write-back caches could become a whole lot more widespread, for all types of storage.
And, of course, once densities go up you manage to replace DRAM, SRAM and eventually NAND with this sort of thing too.
...but here's a wonderful graphic that AT&T can repurpose.
+5 insightful.
I'm British, and my grandfather made beer in Germany for most of his working life after the war (a captured Luftwaffe pilot taught him how to, oddly enough)... but no-one does beer like the Belgians. Czech stuff is all a bit samey IMHO.
Whilst there's lots of good beer coming out of some european macrobreweries and the occasional nice brew from american microbreweries, you just can't beat a good trappist ale or a nice strong amber or golden ale; some of them don't travel especially well so if you can, pop over to belgium or the netherlands and treat yourself to a glass of Westmalle Triple or a Piraat.
Apple make servers with panzers inside? I KNEW Jobs was out for world domination!