Whatever it is, I'm going to buy stock in it. This guy is a genius, and has truly initiated world-changing technologies. I'm going to be closely watching to see where he goes, because it's going to be impressive.
I wonder, though, what this means for the future of Sun...
They don't have to read slashdot, they just have to look at the webserver access logs to see what pages have been referring folks. Even SCO probably knows how to do that.
Notice that the pricing is in Pounds, not Dollars
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
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· Score: 4, Informative
Before you freak at the prices, those are in pounds, not dollars. 1,713 works out to about $2,715 at today's rate.
Still not a bad price, considering what you get. I'll probably settle for more RAM for my iMac rather than replacing it with one of these, but it's an awfully nice machine.
The coolest thing about this one (which everyone seems to ignore because it runs linux) is that it can record two shows simultaneously.
Again, that's still nothing new. The Sony SAT-T60 has dual-satellite inputs, so if you have a dual-LNB dish, you can record two programs at once (while watching a third, recorded one if you want). Tivo Hacks are out there to add pretty much as much disk as you want...if anything, it's commercializing what the Tivo Hacking community has been doing for years.
I've had my Sony DVR running Linux for a couple of years now, it's called a DirectTivo. Hooks to the satellite, and I get a bit over an hour per gig of storage.
Yes, it's exciting and cool to have Linux in consumer devices, but it's certainly nothing new, not even the Sony DVR aspect of it. SAT-T60 is the model number, in case anyone wants to google.
Yes, the performance is better running an x-displayed VMWare instance of Windows, than it does running it in Virtual PC. VMWare isn't an emulation, it's native execution on the pentium, so it's faster, *and* it doesn't slow down the other stuff the Mac is doing.
It's not quite procedure-able yet, but with a bit of tinkering, it's working just fine. Frees up some desk space too.
As much as upgrading my kernel to 2.6.x interests me, I think I'll build that deck, instead. Maybe on some crappy, rainy weekend I'll play kernel games, but man, the sun is shining.
I've figured out how to get the best out of both worlds for my home network. I've got the iMac on the desk, and a PC in the basement running Linux. X11 on the mac - when I need a Windows app, I fire up VMWare on the Linux box, displayed back to the Mac. The Windows instance comes up in the VM, displayed on the Mac. I've got the cd/dvd drive on the Mac shared out to the windows instance in the VM on the Linux box, so I stick a disk in the mac, the PC sees it, and it all "just works".
Sounds complicated, but for the cost of one VMWare license (like 60 or 100 bucks), I've got a copy of Windows running native (not emulated), working fine with the mac for the display & cd drive.
I only use it for a couple of apps, but when I need to, I can get to it in a few seconds. Windows even seems like it behaves better in the VM than it does on the machine itself.
To work, a Stirling engine needs a temperature differential - a "hot" side and a "cold" side. Doesn't matter which is where, but you need that differential or there won't be any expansion or contraction to work with.
So, what you'd be doing is using the Stirling engine as a heat transfer device - going from the inside of the case to the outside. Easier and cheaper to just cut a hole in the case & let it go out by itself, or bump the fan up a bit.
OK, so hydrogen burns clean. Yay. Now tell me where you plan to get it? The only way to get it in any quantities, is to make it...by using energy. Electrolysis of water is most common, but no matter how you're going to do it, you have to spend energy to break the hydrogen away from whatever it's attached to.You aren't going to get more energy by burning it (turning it back into H2O) than you spent in getting it (by taking it out of H2O). All you're doing is making that energy portable.
The article mentions "a powerplant in every home" or noises to that effect. This is effectively the same thing we have today; anyone can buy a gas-powered generator and stick it in the back yard. Yes, fuel cells might be a way to go for some things, but distributed backup power isn't one of them. How many people are going to want a tank of hydrogen hanging around? Yes, it can be stored safely. Yes, it's no more dangerous than, say, gasoline or propane. But, it also doesn't give any benefit that those fuels do not.
The energies being spent on hydrogen power could be better applied to something that's actually an improvement - biofuels, wind, solar...that's where independance is, not in going from one type of fuel to another that has the same or worse problems.
Hydrogen may be a really interesting technology for some things, but this isn't one of them.
Instead of taking the blame for writing yet another security hole (not even a novel one at that), they're pushing it off on the customers who are behind on patches. Yes, people should apply patches for these, but maybe they could be a bit more careful in writing the OS and apps in the first place. The blame here is on MS and the virus/worm writers, not on the customers who are having both inflicted on them.
Yes, no OS is perfect. But, their attitude here seems to be "you deserve to get hit if you didn't apply the patch-of-the week".
They've given the windowsupdate.com site to Akamai to serve for them. Not a bad idea, actually, since Akamai has something like 15,000 webservers distributed around the world, to share the load.
Of course, it's extremely amusing that they're paying to have their content served by a flock of 15,000 penguins. I'm a bit concerned for our own site this weekend, as we use akamai for our static content. It'll be interesting to see how my pageloadtimes are affected (if they are).
Akamai is a great resource for dealing with huge spikes in webserver load - I guess you could say this qualifies as that.
I plead the "George Harrison / She's So Fine" defense. (I may have seen that in the past but I don't think so), but I wasn't intentionally ripping anything off.
More than anything, it's a response to the perpetually predictable one-liners that, c'mon, were funny the first 17 times they were posted but...
The result? Every possible legal weakness of Linux and the GPL has been strengthen by legal precedence, which is very hard to turn around.
While the end effect may in fact be this, I question the idea that it's them being extremely clever; it's at least equally likely that they're just greedy execs of a has-been.bomb that are trying to pump up the stock price.
Either way, it's becoming more and more clear as time goes on that this isn't a real threat. I was vaguely uncomfortable at first, (our CIO is one who got "the letter" and I had to respond) but at this point, it's more of a "OK, what are they going to say _next_" kind of thing.
Yeah, by all means, let's not look at the merits of the case or the precident it sets, as long as the little guy won against the big company with the deep pockets.
I can only hope you're being sarcastic with your comment, but I can't really tell.
It's the same problem, really, as people touching circuitry and not wearing a static strap. The damage doesn't show immediately, so by the time it does, it's attributed to something other than the real cause.
No different than someone kinking a cable, trying it, finding it's OK, and forgetting about it for a few months/years. Eventually, someone will get bit by the mistake of years ago.
As with so many things in the IT field, a mistake now may take a long time to show up, but it will bite you. Be it a server reboot identifying a missed.rc script, or a kinked cable just waiting for you to put a bit too much power into it, or whatever else...mistakes cause problems, eventually. It's still not news, though.
Is 802.11(a,b,g) not fast enough for you? Wherever you put the wire/fiber/whatever, it'll be in the wrong place and obsolete in 5 years. If your feed isn't faster than, say, 11Mb/second, why bother with anything other than wireless?
...if you abuse copper conductors, they'll fail too.
I'm having a hard time saying this is surprising; minimum bend radius for fiber is nothing that hasn't been obvious to anyone working with the stuff. As long as you're treating it well, you'll be fine. If you or your upstream is stupid about how to handle it, well, it's like any other poor infrastructure, it's gonna bite you. No surprises there.
"This technology is going to be bought out and buried, just like hydrogen combustion engines in the mid-nineties."
Hydrogen combustion is a loss. You have to use energy to get the hydrogen in the first place, almost always by breaking water down by hydrolysis (high current through water - oxygen goes to one pole, hydrogen to the other). You're going to lose energy in the thermal inefficiencies of that process, you're going to lose some in leakage (H2 is a *very* small molecule), and then you still have the same inherent inefficiencies of an internal combustion engine that you have with any other fuel.
All hydrogen does is to displace the energy use (and pollution) to a different place, it doesn't give you any extra, or free, energy. A more logical approach would be to pursue biofuels that can be burned in existing vehicles (biodiesel, or more alcohol in gasoline blends)...uses existing infrastructure (gas stations, tankers, etc), works in existing vehicles, and doesn't need the world to change several expensive things all at once to work.
Hydrogen power might be appropriate for some things, but cars are not one of them. Too many things to change at once, to get it to be widely adopted.
Slashdot Mirror
Good. I'm glad he did well with the stock. He caused much of the rise, after all.
Whatever it is, I'm going to buy stock in it. This guy is a genius, and has truly initiated world-changing technologies. I'm going to be closely watching to see where he goes, because it's going to be impressive.
I wonder, though, what this means for the future of Sun...
They don't have to read slashdot, they just have to look at the webserver access logs to see what pages have been referring folks. Even SCO probably knows how to do that.
Before you freak at the prices, those are in pounds, not dollars. 1,713 works out to about $2,715 at today's rate.
Still not a bad price, considering what you get. I'll probably settle for more RAM for my iMac rather than replacing it with one of these, but it's an awfully nice machine.
The coolest thing about this one (which everyone seems to ignore because it runs linux) is that it can record two shows simultaneously.
Again, that's still nothing new. The Sony SAT-T60 has dual-satellite inputs, so if you have a dual-LNB dish, you can record two programs at once (while watching a third, recorded one if you want). Tivo Hacks are out there to add pretty much as much disk as you want...if anything, it's commercializing what the Tivo Hacking community has been doing for years.
I've had my Sony DVR running Linux for a couple of years now, it's called a DirectTivo. Hooks to the satellite, and I get a bit over an hour per gig of storage.
Yes, it's exciting and cool to have Linux in consumer devices, but it's certainly nothing new, not even the Sony DVR aspect of it. SAT-T60 is the model number, in case anyone wants to google.
Yes, the performance is better running an x-displayed VMWare instance of Windows, than it does running it in Virtual PC. VMWare isn't an emulation, it's native execution on the pentium, so it's faster, *and* it doesn't slow down the other stuff the Mac is doing. It's not quite procedure-able yet, but with a bit of tinkering, it's working just fine. Frees up some desk space too.
As much as upgrading my kernel to 2.6.x interests me, I think I'll build that deck, instead. Maybe on some crappy, rainy weekend I'll play kernel games, but man, the sun is shining.
I've figured out how to get the best out of both worlds for my home network. I've got the iMac on the desk, and a PC in the basement running Linux. X11 on the mac - when I need a Windows app, I fire up VMWare on the Linux box, displayed back to the Mac. The Windows instance comes up in the VM, displayed on the Mac. I've got the cd/dvd drive on the Mac shared out to the windows instance in the VM on the Linux box, so I stick a disk in the mac, the PC sees it, and it all "just works".
Sounds complicated, but for the cost of one VMWare license (like 60 or 100 bucks), I've got a copy of Windows running native (not emulated), working fine with the mac for the display & cd drive.
I only use it for a couple of apps, but when I need to, I can get to it in a few seconds. Windows even seems like it behaves better in the VM than it does on the machine itself.
...stirling engine...
To work, a Stirling engine needs a temperature differential - a "hot" side and a "cold" side. Doesn't matter which is where, but you need that differential or there won't be any expansion or contraction to work with.
So, what you'd be doing is using the Stirling engine as a heat transfer device - going from the inside of the case to the outside. Easier and cheaper to just cut a hole in the case & let it go out by itself, or bump the fan up a bit.
OK, so hydrogen burns clean. Yay. Now tell me where you plan to get it? The only way to get it in any quantities, is to make it...by using energy. Electrolysis of water is most common, but no matter how you're going to do it, you have to spend energy to break the hydrogen away from whatever it's attached to.You aren't going to get more energy by burning it (turning it back into H2O) than you spent in getting it (by taking it out of H2O). All you're doing is making that energy portable.
The article mentions "a powerplant in every home" or noises to that effect. This is effectively the same thing we have today; anyone can buy a gas-powered generator and stick it in the back yard. Yes, fuel cells might be a way to go for some things, but distributed backup power isn't one of them. How many people are going to want a tank of hydrogen hanging around? Yes, it can be stored safely. Yes, it's no more dangerous than, say, gasoline or propane. But, it also doesn't give any benefit that those fuels do not.
The energies being spent on hydrogen power could be better applied to something that's actually an improvement - biofuels, wind, solar...that's where independance is, not in going from one type of fuel to another that has the same or worse problems.
Hydrogen may be a really interesting technology for some things, but this isn't one of them.
Instead of taking the blame for writing yet another security hole (not even a novel one at that), they're pushing it off on the customers who are behind on patches. Yes, people should apply patches for these, but maybe they could be a bit more careful in writing the OS and apps in the first place. The blame here is on MS and the virus/worm writers, not on the customers who are having both inflicted on them.
Yes, no OS is perfect. But, their attitude here seems to be "you deserve to get hit if you didn't apply the patch-of-the week".
They've given the windowsupdate.com site to Akamai to serve for them. Not a bad idea, actually, since Akamai has something like 15,000 webservers distributed around the world, to share the load.
Of course, it's extremely amusing that they're paying to have their content served by a flock of 15,000 penguins. I'm a bit concerned for our own site this weekend, as we use akamai for our static content. It'll be interesting to see how my pageloadtimes are affected (if they are).
Akamai is a great resource for dealing with huge spikes in webserver load - I guess you could say this qualifies as that.
I plead the "George Harrison / She's So Fine" defense. (I may have seen that in the past but I don't think so), but I wasn't intentionally ripping anything off.
More than anything, it's a response to the perpetually predictable one-liners that, c'mon, were funny the first 17 times they were posted but...
The result? Every possible legal weakness of Linux and the GPL has been strengthen by legal precedence, which is very hard to turn around.
.bomb that are trying to pump up the stock price.
While the end effect may in fact be this, I question the idea that it's them being extremely clever; it's at least equally likely that they're just greedy execs of a has-been
Either way, it's becoming more and more clear as time goes on that this isn't a real threat. I was vaguely uncomfortable at first, (our CIO is one who got "the letter" and I had to respond) but at this point, it's more of a "OK, what are they going to say _next_" kind of thing.
...which will never be read, let alone modded up.
Vague expansion of witty idea, looking like every other one-liner predictably posted to the thread.
--
Pointless and/or overly-geeky quote
Er, because it predates the last 100 years, I would guess.
...and the other is warfare.
Yeah, by all means, let's not look at the merits of the case or the precident it sets, as long as the little guy won against the big company with the deep pockets.
I can only hope you're being sarcastic with your comment, but I can't really tell.
It's the same problem, really, as people touching circuitry and not wearing a static strap. The damage doesn't show immediately, so by the time it does, it's attributed to something other than the real cause.
.rc script, or a kinked cable just waiting for you to put a bit too much power into it, or whatever else...mistakes cause problems, eventually. It's still not news, though.
No different than someone kinking a cable, trying it, finding it's OK, and forgetting about it for a few months/years. Eventually, someone will get bit by the mistake of years ago.
As with so many things in the IT field, a mistake now may take a long time to show up, but it will bite you. Be it a server reboot identifying a missed
Is 802.11(a,b,g) not fast enough for you? Wherever you put the wire/fiber/whatever, it'll be in the wrong place and obsolete in 5 years. If your feed isn't faster than, say, 11Mb/second, why bother with anything other than wireless?
...if you abuse copper conductors, they'll fail too.
I'm having a hard time saying this is surprising; minimum bend radius for fiber is nothing that hasn't been obvious to anyone working with the stuff. As long as you're treating it well, you'll be fine. If you or your upstream is stupid about how to handle it, well, it's like any other poor infrastructure, it's gonna bite you. No surprises there.
...actually, I patented that. -- Jeff Bezos
"This technology is going to be bought out and buried, just like hydrogen combustion engines in the mid-nineties."
Hydrogen combustion is a loss. You have to use energy to get the hydrogen in the first place, almost always by breaking water down by hydrolysis (high current through water - oxygen goes to one pole, hydrogen to the other). You're going to lose energy in the thermal inefficiencies of that process, you're going to lose some in leakage (H2 is a *very* small molecule), and then you still have the same inherent inefficiencies of an internal combustion engine that you have with any other fuel.
All hydrogen does is to displace the energy use (and pollution) to a different place, it doesn't give you any extra, or free, energy. A more logical approach would be to pursue biofuels that can be burned in existing vehicles (biodiesel, or more alcohol in gasoline blends)...uses existing infrastructure (gas stations, tankers, etc), works in existing vehicles, and doesn't need the world to change several expensive things all at once to work.
Hydrogen power might be appropriate for some things, but cars are not one of them. Too many things to change at once, to get it to be widely adopted.