They were running thier outfit on VMWare Server - as in the free-runs-on/in-a-desktop version.
So basically thay benchmarked a virtual machine runnning on top of a full blown OS running on physical hardware.
Then they switched to running a virtualised environment on physical hardware.
I am amazed that they ony got a 10 fold increase!
Seriously, Try ESXi, the free hypervisor from VMWare and run the benchmarks again.
The author really should do more research before slating vmware.
Lets say employee A works at company B. Company B suspects employee A of fiddling expenses. Company B then does an "investigation" and finds that, in their opinion, employee A probably did fiddle the expenses and finds this grounds for dismissal under the companies policies and procedures. A disciplinary panel is formed of managers of company B who decide to terminate the employee's contract and does so.
Up until now the only people involved are employee A, the manager of employee A, an investigating manager from company B, the HR droid from company B and the disciplinary panel of company B. Its not a court of law and they only need find reasonable suspicion of guilt to can employee A's ass!
But then they send out an e-mail to all employees of company B stating that employee A has been fired for fiddling expenses.
Now company B feels like they are somehow sending a message, that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated and that staff be warned but they have made a mistake. But they are not the police, nor are they lawyers in a court of law. They are a company who conducted an internal investigation that is subject to all sorts of bias and non neutral points of view. Policies and Procedures do not trump the actual law and this employee A, who may be guilty, was not tried and convicted in a court of law, he was tried and convicted in a closed internal company procedure. He doesn't get to put his side to all the colleagues in a nice e-mail or get to defend himself (or herself) publicly and, while nobody argues that the company had sufficient grounds for dismissal, they should have simply fired employee A and let staff know he was no longer at the company, no reason need be given.
Instead, in addition to firing employee A, they chose to accuse him publicly and that gives him grounds to sue as a public accusation needs to meet a burden of proof in a court of law.
If they felt they wanted to make a public statement they should have involved the police who would have investigated and found evidence of fraud. He could then be tried in criminal court or civil court if they wanted to make a civil case of it and if the outcome was in company B's favor THEN they can shout it from the rooftops because it is then a legal fact and not libellous.
But until then, company B should have been smart and opened up a can of STFU and simply fired his/her ass. Instead company B is on the defensive which is not where they should be.
And the papers never say someone is guilty unless it is proven... otherwise the couch accusations as questions like "Employee A, Did he fiddle expenses?" or make references to sources / allegations "It is alleged that Employee A may have been fiddling expenses" or "Sources say A may have defrauded B".
I conceed the point that it is more of a branding exercise than a technical merit argument.
But I will state that if it is indeed a branding issue then some sort of independent org needs to be set up to create a suitable standard with associated logo that certifies players and gives them a suitlable rating without the commercial angle.
Just my opinion.
DivX makes an announcement that thier DivX player can now support a format that even Media Player Classic can play with an open source codec?
First off, MKV is a container which can add features to an encoded video stream such as chapters, subtitles, additional audio streams etc.
The corresponding DivX container (Introduced with DivX6) is far inferior with its limited support for audio codecs and its insistence on DivX video encoding profiles.
DivX the codec is simply a MP4 based video/audio encoder.
You can wrap virtually any video or audio format in an MKV container and it should work just fine. I see no reason why DivX encoded movies could not be wrpped in an MKV container!
I have never tried to encode DivX into an MKV container for several reasons:
1. DivX is not the best MP4 Codec out there, XviD is better and freely availiable (It is a fork of the original OpenDivX). 2. DivX started bundling thier codecs with all sorts of crapware some time ago which really tuned me off the codec. 3. x264 is already availiable for high definition encoding. 4. DivX encoding will cost you money with the Pro version. 5. It is bloatware.
Basically DivX are trying to make money by charging inexperienced users for functionality that is already freely availiable.
If you want to watch virtually every availiable format without problems with a choice of video players I suggest the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net/).
Or you can go ahead and pay the ignorance tax that is DivX.
Is to utilise APC power strips which can be used to powercycle frozen machines (remember to set the bios APM to poer on after ac loss)
SSH for windows servers to give you cli access and VNC for desktop.
Ensure you use srvany to ensure critical apps are run as services with the relevant credentials so that they can be easily reset and can have conditional rules set for failure and dependencies.
If you have money to spend I recommend Kaseya as a most impressive all in one low bandwidth solution that can accommodate flaky connections by queueing up commands ready for collection and execution by agents on the servers regardless of manufacturer.
Comapring the USA to the police is only valid if you are used to the police kicking in your door (shock and awe) without a warrant (no UN mandate) then arresting all the suspects and locking em up wether guilty or not (gitmo & abu graib) and then smacking the suspects around whilst in custody (abu graib, waterboarding) until finally refusing them the right to a fair trial (illegal combatants).
And the worst part was, nobody called them in the first place! (I mean why are we in Iraq anyway?)
Very often it is management responding to outside influences such as bad press or legislation that prompt the implimentation of whole disk encryption security. No sane IT department takes on the responsibility of whole disk encryption across the whole IT inventory without good reason or suitable resources and funding.
Exceptions can be made for individuals but if you are looking after a sizeable IT inventory it becomes prohibitively expensive to manage security on a case by case basis.
Excellent products, like truecrypt, are designed for personal workstations and lack the enterprise management tools you need when performing mass rollouts and configurations not to mention future management of passwords and data recovery requests. Thats why PGP has become an industry standard.
The marginal loss of performance experienced by the encryption overhead both in termas of performance and hassle of management needs to be offset against the organisations requirments for encryption to comply with legislation or to counter corporate espionage.
If only people were trustworthy and the world was a nicer place then we wouldnt need it at all but to quote Gunnery Sgt. Hartmann "If assholes like you didnt leave footlockers unlocked there would be no thievery!" (Not verbatim, I know, but apt!)
Is it just me or is/. really struggling for content these days? Carrying the obit of, and lets face it, a very mediocre fantasy author is hardly "Stuff that Matters". Sad and tragic yes but Robert Jordan?
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series was a bloated, padded, self indulgent money spinning exercise. I personally couldn't make it past book 4 as the sheer frustration at his tendency to "make it up as he went along" approach left me tired, bored and longing for a Unix manual which would have least have had an ending! Anyone who is striving to read all that dross must be a masochist, bored, insane or possibly all 3.
Mod me down as a troll or flaimbait if you must but lets try to get a grip on the editorial section here ppl. "Stuff that matters" not "Stiff that doesent matter"
Think outside the technology box for a second and see the business case for.NET vs OSS.
I am a business. I make software product X for Market Y. I started small and in order to keep costs down I chose OSS. Free, customizable, accessible. My target customers in Market Y had the same goals as me, keep costs down and maximize returns. My software gave them what they wanted and they really didn't care about development platforms as long as I delivered on my promise.
Now my business is growing, and so are my customers. Suddenly my sales guys are pitching to businesses who are Microsoft houses and who DO care about my development platform as it needs to fit in with theirs. They want to create custom interfaces into my product using their existing developers and methods.
So I have a choice, try and sell LAMP to a Microsoft house or sell them something written on a platform designed to integrate with their business.
There is nothing wrong with LAMP. I as a technology manager love it. But with my business manager hat on I know that decisions I make have to fit in with my customers requirements if im gonna put food on the table.
It all comes down to the money in the end. If I want to make any I have to bow to the customers wishes and the market demand.
Big bad Microsoft bigwig says "How we gonna get the punters to buy our stuff and not use the free open sauce thingys?", marketing droid says "Give em a free sample of the full product that is hobbled just enough to make it useful! Then, when they want to do something _really_ useful with it they have to come and buy the full version!" "Brilliant!" says exec "bonuses all round!"
Next day "hey, someone made our free version do something useful!" says exec... "They cant do that with our products! Who do these customers think they are?!?!? Get me the firm of Sue, Grabbit & Run on the line! We will sue innovation out of this market if it kills us!"
One man band developer "But I didnt do anything wrong apart from improve on a product... I didnt say they had to give it away for free! And Im not charging for my "Free" version"
Dev Community "WTF!!! hmmmm Open Source looks that bit more attractive now!"
Microsoft "Whew, that was close, almost had someone innovating there! Why is my foot so sore? And whats that gunpowder smell?"
Lets be honest here, The express edition is restricted in such a way that if you want more features you have to opt for the full product. Cansdale simply developed something which undermined the value of the full product which, in the gorilla's eyes, was somebody going for their bananas so they slapped him.
But the truth is it is a useful feature, written independently and without violating the EULA.
To hear you blather on about fairness and spirit of agreements in relation to Microsoft is laughable.
Oligarch #1: There seems to be a trend towards downloading content... Oligarch #2: Really, wow, what should we do about that? Leverage the new technology to our advantage? Oligarch #1: Naaa, lets bury our head in the sand and pretend its not happening! That way we dont have to do any actual work and can continue to skim traditional channels for the bulk of the cash! Oligarch #2: Cool, and lets sue the internet! Oligarch #1: Yeah, that will work! Kinda like our "fart vs thunder" collegues in the RIAA!
Oh please.... thats akin to saying because all graphics subsystems use directx all games look the same.
We're talking CREATIVITY here.... you can build your own combat / pvp / pve / rp environments using the engine. Or have you not bothered to even download it yet. Sheesh.
Read this first and then step up to the plate. They e-mailed and also let him know via well established channels. If the guy uses sloppy code and lets a spammer cause him to be delisted its his problem.
I logged into Second Life to see what all the fuss was about. It had all the action of a retiremnt home and all the allure of a burnt out cortina.
In order to actually enjoy second life you really are saying you have no life.
Slashdot Mirror
They were running thier outfit on VMWare Server - as in the free-runs-on/in-a-desktop version. So basically thay benchmarked a virtual machine runnning on top of a full blown OS running on physical hardware. Then they switched to running a virtualised environment on physical hardware. I am amazed that they ony got a 10 fold increase! Seriously, Try ESXi, the free hypervisor from VMWare and run the benchmarks again. The author really should do more research before slating vmware.
Ok, Disclaimer - NAL
Lets say employee A works at company B. Company B suspects employee A of fiddling expenses. Company B then does an "investigation" and finds that, in their opinion, employee A probably did fiddle the expenses and finds this grounds for dismissal under the companies policies and procedures. A disciplinary panel is formed of managers of company B who decide to terminate the employee's contract and does so.
Up until now the only people involved are employee A, the manager of employee A, an investigating manager from company B, the HR droid from company B and the disciplinary panel of company B. Its not a court of law and they only need find reasonable suspicion of guilt to can employee A's ass!
But then they send out an e-mail to all employees of company B stating that employee A has been fired for fiddling expenses.
Now company B feels like they are somehow sending a message, that this sort of behaviour will not be tolerated and that staff be warned but they have made a mistake. But they are not the police, nor are they lawyers in a court of law. They are a company who conducted an internal investigation that is subject to all sorts of bias and non neutral points of view. Policies and Procedures do not trump the actual law and this employee A, who may be guilty, was not tried and convicted in a court of law, he was tried and convicted in a closed internal company procedure. He doesn't get to put his side to all the colleagues in a nice e-mail or get to defend himself (or herself) publicly and, while nobody argues that the company had sufficient grounds for dismissal, they should have simply fired employee A and let staff know he was no longer at the company, no reason need be given.
Instead, in addition to firing employee A, they chose to accuse him publicly and that gives him grounds to sue as a public accusation needs to meet a burden of proof in a court of law.
If they felt they wanted to make a public statement they should have involved the police who would have investigated and found evidence of fraud. He could then be tried in criminal court or civil court if they wanted to make a civil case of it and if the outcome was in company B's favor THEN they can shout it from the rooftops because it is then a legal fact and not libellous.
But until then, company B should have been smart and opened up a can of STFU and simply fired his/her ass. Instead company B is on the defensive which is not where they should be.
And the papers never say someone is guilty unless it is proven... otherwise the couch accusations as questions like "Employee A, Did he fiddle expenses?" or make references to sources / allegations "It is alleged that Employee A may have been fiddling expenses" or "Sources say A may have defrauded B".
I conceed the point that it is more of a branding exercise than a technical merit argument. But I will state that if it is indeed a branding issue then some sort of independent org needs to be set up to create a suitable standard with associated logo that certifies players and gives them a suitlable rating without the commercial angle. Just my opinion.
DivX makes an announcement that thier DivX player can now support a format that even Media Player Classic can play with an open source codec?
First off, MKV is a container which can add features to an encoded video stream such as chapters, subtitles, additional audio streams etc.
The corresponding DivX container (Introduced with DivX6) is far inferior with its limited support for audio codecs and its insistence on DivX video encoding profiles.
DivX the codec is simply a MP4 based video/audio encoder.
You can wrap virtually any video or audio format in an MKV container and it should work just fine. I see no reason why DivX encoded movies could not be wrpped in an MKV container!
I have never tried to encode DivX into an MKV container for several reasons:
1. DivX is not the best MP4 Codec out there, XviD is better and freely availiable (It is a fork of the original OpenDivX).
2. DivX started bundling thier codecs with all sorts of crapware some time ago which really tuned me off the codec.
3. x264 is already availiable for high definition encoding.
4. DivX encoding will cost you money with the Pro version.
5. It is bloatware.
Basically DivX are trying to make money by charging inexperienced users for functionality that is already freely availiable.
If you want to watch virtually every availiable format without problems with a choice of video players I suggest the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net/).
Or you can go ahead and pay the ignorance tax that is DivX.
"Is it possible to get a good IT job without having a BS or other degree?"
For most people, yes. For you? Probably not.
Are game developers developing a distinctly MAFIAA type whiff about them?
I believe, as the other poster put it, she was his wife and she was probably too busy swimming in all the cash, scrooge mcduck style, to care!
I nerfed my karma the last time I said something about Robert Jordan on /. so all I will say is that...
I completely agree with the parent to this reply.
I gave up reading RJ's books some time ago (also around book 5 of WOT) when it became blatantly obvious he was making it up as he went along.
The wheel of time series was one of my main reasons for giving up on the genre altogether.
Is to utilise APC power strips which can be used to powercycle frozen machines (remember to set the bios APM to poer on after ac loss)
SSH for windows servers to give you cli access and VNC for desktop.
Ensure you use srvany to ensure critical apps are run as services with the relevant credentials so that they can be easily reset and can have conditional rules set for failure and dependencies.
If you have money to spend I recommend Kaseya as a most impressive all in one low bandwidth solution that can accommodate flaky connections by queueing up commands ready for collection and execution by agents on the servers regardless of manufacturer.
Comapring the USA to the police is only valid if you are used to the police kicking in your door (shock and awe) without a warrant (no UN mandate) then arresting all the suspects and locking em up wether guilty or not (gitmo & abu graib) and then smacking the suspects around whilst in custody (abu graib, waterboarding) until finally refusing them the right to a fair trial (illegal combatants).
And the worst part was, nobody called them in the first place! (I mean why are we in Iraq anyway?)
Yeah, uh, wasent it the GOP who called for a withdrawl from Somalia? Hmm... I wonder if there is a youtube video of it somewhere....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPyKpcivQYQ
About 50 seconds in should do it... or watch the whole thing for educational purposes.
Also - Truecrypt, whilst a far superior option, lacks the enterprise tools for mass rollout, configuration and ongoing management.
Very often it is management responding to outside influences such as bad press or legislation that prompt the implimentation of whole disk encryption security. No sane IT department takes on the responsibility of whole disk encryption across the whole IT inventory without good reason or suitable resources and funding.
Exceptions can be made for individuals but if you are looking after a sizeable IT inventory it becomes prohibitively expensive to manage security on a case by case basis.
Excellent products, like truecrypt, are designed for personal workstations and lack the enterprise management tools you need when performing mass rollouts and configurations not to mention future management of passwords and data recovery requests. Thats why PGP has become an industry standard.
The marginal loss of performance experienced by the encryption overhead both in termas of performance and hassle of management needs to be offset against the organisations requirments for encryption to comply with legislation or to counter corporate espionage.
If only people were trustworthy and the world was a nicer place then we wouldnt need it at all but to quote Gunnery Sgt. Hartmann "If assholes like you didnt leave footlockers unlocked there would be no thievery!" (Not verbatim, I know, but apt!)
To quote the man himself:
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
If it did you may have outlived us all. Thanks for everything Arthur, rest easy.
Clinton gets a blowjob by an intern and everyone screams "Impeach!!!"
Bush/Cheney f*cks the whole nation and gets a second term!
The USA - Home of the weird!
Is it just me or is /. really struggling for content these days? Carrying the obit of, and lets face it, a very mediocre fantasy author is hardly "Stuff that Matters". Sad and tragic yes but Robert Jordan?
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series was a bloated, padded, self indulgent money spinning exercise. I personally couldn't make it past book 4 as the sheer frustration at his tendency to "make it up as he went along" approach left me tired, bored and longing for a Unix manual which would have least have had an ending! Anyone who is striving to read all that dross must be a masochist, bored, insane or possibly all 3.
Mod me down as a troll or flaimbait if you must but lets try to get a grip on the editorial section here ppl. "Stuff that matters" not "Stiff that doesent matter"
Think outside the technology box for a second and see the business case for .NET vs OSS.
I am a business. I make software product X for Market Y. I started small and in order to keep costs down I chose OSS. Free, customizable, accessible. My target customers in Market Y had the same goals as me, keep costs down and maximize returns. My software gave them what they wanted and they really didn't care about development platforms as long as I delivered on my promise.
Now my business is growing, and so are my customers. Suddenly my sales guys are pitching to businesses who are Microsoft houses and who DO care about my development platform as it needs to fit in with theirs. They want to create custom interfaces into my product using their existing developers and methods.
So I have a choice, try and sell LAMP to a Microsoft house or sell them something written on a platform designed to integrate with their business.
There is nothing wrong with LAMP. I as a technology manager love it. But with my business manager hat on I know that decisions I make have to fit in with my customers requirements if im gonna put food on the table.
It all comes down to the money in the end. If I want to make any I have to bow to the customers wishes and the market demand.
Sad, yes, but true.
Hmmm... how about this scenario rather....
Big bad Microsoft bigwig says "How we gonna get the punters to buy our stuff and not use the free open sauce thingys?", marketing droid says "Give em a free sample of the full product that is hobbled just enough to make it useful! Then, when they want to do something _really_ useful with it they have to come and buy the full version!" "Brilliant!" says exec "bonuses all round!"
Next day "hey, someone made our free version do something useful!" says exec... "They cant do that with our products! Who do these customers think they are?!?!? Get me the firm of Sue, Grabbit & Run on the line! We will sue innovation out of this market if it kills us!"
One man band developer "But I didnt do anything wrong apart from improve on a product... I didnt say they had to give it away for free! And Im not charging for my "Free" version"
Dev Community "WTF!!! hmmmm Open Source looks that bit more attractive now!"
Microsoft "Whew, that was close, almost had someone innovating there! Why is my foot so sore? And whats that gunpowder smell?"
I Disagree....
Lets be honest here, The express edition is restricted in such a way that if you want more features you have to opt for the full product. Cansdale simply developed something which undermined the value of the full product which, in the gorilla's eyes, was somebody going for their bananas so they slapped him.
But the truth is it is a useful feature, written independently and without violating the EULA.
To hear you blather on about fairness and spirit of agreements in relation to Microsoft is laughable.
C.
A case of many a true word spoken in jest....
Oligarch #1: There seems to be a trend towards downloading content...
Oligarch #2: Really, wow, what should we do about that? Leverage the new technology to our advantage?
Oligarch #1: Naaa, lets bury our head in the sand and pretend its not happening! That way we dont have to do any actual work and can continue to skim traditional channels for the bulk of the cash!
Oligarch #2: Cool, and lets sue the internet!
Oligarch #1: Yeah, that will work! Kinda like our "fart vs thunder" collegues in the RIAA!
Please please please... do not fuck this up!
Please.
Oh please.... thats akin to saying because all graphics subsystems use directx all games look the same. We're talking CREATIVITY here.... you can build your own combat / pvp / pve / rp environments using the engine. Or have you not bothered to even download it yet. Sheesh.
Oh please....
Google's head of webspam has posted a full write-up [mattcutts.com].
Read this first and then step up to the plate. They e-mailed and also let him know via well established channels. If the guy uses sloppy code and lets a spammer cause him to be delisted its his problem.
He aint missing jack! You are!
I logged into Second Life to see what all the fuss was about. It had all the action of a retiremnt home and all the allure of a burnt out cortina. In order to actually enjoy second life you really are saying you have no life.