Licensing fees for MPEG are a part of Windows and Mac OS X price tag. Full stop.
So if IE 9 comes with h.264 support, and it's made available for download for existing Vista and Windows 7 users... what were you saying again? Believe it or not, every now and then, a company doesn't pass down a cost to the consumer in such a direct fashion. And you can't say "well they COULD have lowered the price by $1 instead", since they wouldn't do that to their OS. It's just a cost to them. A cost which helps them protect marketshare.
The ballot screen itself is supposed to only appear when you have IF as your standard browser, and sure enough it didn't appear on any of my computers.
You are the first person I know with IF installed. How's it run?
I bought one. Family site, mostly picture sharing for distant relatives. Saved $8. Still easy for them to remember. Professionally, it's just a $1.99 expense since companya.com wants companya.net, companya.org to protect their rights, even if they don't use the names. Now we need to have them buy.info,.us,.biz etc to be complete if they are worried.
Ok, kidding aside - if you know you're screwed, that means that you have less to risk on a second attempt. He's already an ex-con. When he gets out after this sentence he's going to be...an ex-con. Nothing will have changed, his prospects will be exactly the same. It's a good gamble, if you look at it from a game theory-ish kind of viewpoint.
A sentence of several years suggests he did have a lot to risk, more than versus his first attempt in fact.
The Rockchip processor is capable of 720p video, it's in a lot of the $120 to $160 Chinese MP4 players that you can get from various importers. It's not that the screen supports 1280x720, but rather than you can play your existing files without converting the video down. I recently picked up a Ramos T11TE with a 5" screen, also 800x480. It had 16g internal memory plus a micro SD slot, because it has a Telechips TCC8901 processor, which can handle 1080p versus the more common Rockchip. For $158, I load my MKVs right onto it. It came FAT-32 but supports NTFS (no ExFat), so I can load files over 4gb and play them back. Compared to my own pre-flight method of converting video to MP4/h.264 Simple profile to support my iPhone, this is a much better answer. It even has a mini HDMI port, so I can actually show 1080p if so inclined.
I wonder what the hardware cost for the 3G stuff is? Regardless, prices are set based on what people are willing to pay. I'd wager that being able to browse the internet while loafing around in the park is worth $120 to some people. It seems a bit steep to me too, though, and I have to admit I did a bit of a double-take at the price. The main kick in the balls is that you have to pay $30 a month on top of that for the data plan...
Really? $30 a month is a kick in the balls for data? You may or may not like the iPad, but $30 for unlimited data without the 5GB data cap is pretty damn competitive compared to those USB 3G sticks the carriers typically sell for $80 a month.
Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).
The Times is not printed in NYC for those who receive delivery in remote areas. BusinessWeek pegged the number at around 20 printing plants (owned and contracted), but that was a few years ago.
In any event, it's not a straight forward proposition. If they cancelled ALL printing AND made the price $50 a year, computers and eReaders only, I suspect they'd have to let a LOT of people go.
As more and more organizations close foreign news bureaus, the remaining ones while suffering become even more important. I don't care if the investigative reporting shifts to web based publications, but right now there are newspapers with journalists covering things in-depth that a blog doesn't have the resources to do and the nightly news doesn't cover well enough (if at all) in a 30 minute broadcast.
I own a software development firm. We ask people if they do twitter, facebook, myspace, and other social crap. If they say yes, we immediately tell them "thank you for your time, but I don't think we are interested".
What if the applicant sits during the workday and just posts messages on Slashdot, instead?
Artifically deny your customer the ability to buy your product. They'll love you for it!
In fairness, they are denying you the ability to RENT your product, hoping you'll BUY it. For me, I just move on to what is available. I'm not dropping $15 to $30 to buy something I wanted to rent, nor will I wait to rent - I'll just rent something else. I have a pretty bad memory, too, for anything other than an absurdly popular blockbuster that's all over the media, I'll probably never remember to go back and get that one from Warner. Besides, I hear there's a FEW other ways to see a movie without renting or buying.
Oh please . Can I sign up, get service, and not sign and agreement? NO. Now exactly would I know how good their customer service, the network, or coverage is without signing up with them? Then once I find out how crappy the service for -my- needs I am stuck? Then they can charge -ANY- amount of $$$ to release me from crappy service?
If only there was some sort of short term period wherein you could return the phone for a small "restock" fee (ie: the non return of the activation charge and pay only for your actual usage and have the contract null and void. SIGH!
The good news is you'll get the last word if you reply, since I have neither the need nor desire to continue this all night. In closing:
No, I simply went from saying it was never needed to pointing out how your perceived "need" is actually a result of shortcomings of the design you were hinting at.
I'm sorry you think you have the smallest bit of insight into our infrastructure, the data centers they are in, the hardware and software configurations, the software we design as well as the packaged bits we use based on a couple of Slashdot postings. I'm not hinting at any design. It's neither on topic, nor brief enough to fit in a reply.
Which are running on hosts apparently designed to sometimes fail in packs of 16...
Interestingly enough, that's not true. I'm not sure how intimate you are with the latest gen of blade chassis, but I do know you're not intimately aware of how we use them as a small subset of our infrastructure. That said, there are certain applications in play that benefit greatly from the technology, especially our reduced maintenance and repair cost, and reduced power bill. Last I checked, our most important stuff doesn't sit there, since the latest blade chassis have "no single point of failure", but actually still have a couple, vendor claims aside. But keep on thinking whatever you think, yes, there is a place for blades in the enterprise.
No, again, I simply pointed out that your perceived need for a VMotion-based "solution" is in fact the result of poor overall design, design which you were hinting at yourself.
We're quite pleased with several aspects of our VMware deployments. Not all these apply to every thing we've virtualized, but we've enjoyed consolidation, power reduction, increased per-server utilization, easier hardware maintenance, easier migrations and upgrades, more flexibility on the desktop than our old, old Metaframe system, oh and incidentally, we actually have some clustered apps residing within ESX hosts, since one is not mutually exclusive to the other.
Sorry, life isn't blanket black and white. Sometimes we use thin provisioning for storage. Sometimes we don't. Some apps run on SATA. Some run on FC. Some run on SAS, and soon I predict we'll move a little bit towards flash. Some of our stuff is Enterprise Plus licensed. A few of our things run on free ESXi. We have a few Xen boxes mostly because the apps on them work, aren't too important, and we haven't bothered to do much more than watch them run. We have a couple of really small branch locations that run Hyper-V, because that's what worked best for that particular location.
But hey, if you can do better, you should send in a resume. Assuming you aren't always arrogant, we always are looking for good engineers. Just don't be that guy who comes in and can redo everything today the way it should be. That always works out great, right?
Which of course can be achieved by taking offline and upgrading individual SANs in the redundant storage cluster and then re-syncing them back. I assume you are using redundant SAN arrays, having been on this self-professed bleeding edge of hyper-super-critical everything.
Depends on the application. For some lesser ones, no, one SAN in a primary, one mirrored in a backup. Some downtime would be acceptable, but we'd prefer not to. Since some of these apps have some failover time (takes about an hour), we'd rather not have to, but can temporarily piggyback off another SAN. In reality, this hasn't really been needed yet, since all of our stuff is either strong enough to upgrade online, or nearline for backups and easily brought down. But strange, you went from saying it was never needed, to just arguing against my setup, knowing about 1% or less of how our actual infrastructure is designed.
LOL. Some mission critical setup you got there! All this pontificating... and then you have a massive single-point failure spot like a chassis holding 16 hosts! It just figures. All shiny V-motion-this and V-motion-that toys and no design forethought whatsoever.
I suppose if ALL we had was one blade chassis, you might be right. You see, we have many, many, many servers. Multiple chassis, and by the way, most of our infrastructure is not blade based. But again, you went from arguing against any need for 24x7 or VMotion into trying to pick apart someone's infrastructure while not knowing anything about it.
Nice try, but truly robust systems like Google do not use virtualization in a way even remotely similar to yours, instead using custom close-to-the-OS cluster configurations written from the ground up for this purpose. They are in fact the very anathema of what you are doing.
True, which is why it was an example of a business that chooses to need to be 24x7, not a selling point for VMware. I'll let VMware sell their stuff.
Oh there is no doubt that there is market for all that nonsense, like there is also robust market for penis extensions, but this alone does not in any way have any bearing on the point I was making. VMotion is a solution looking for a problem precisely because if you do truly need VMotion, it is a sure fire indicator of you having screwed the pooch royally when it came to overall design of your fault tolerant systems.
VMotion and Storage VMotion are needed in a well designed setup like a pair of boils on one's buttocks. VMotion, and particularly automated performance based VMotion encourage throwing lazilly and incoherently mis-matched VMs at bunches of inadequate hosts only to see the VMs hopping about the hosts like a bunch of deranged rabbits instead of having them stay put in a well estimated and adequate hosts. All Storage VMotion does is to encourage lazy, resource consuming activities like shuffling contents of multi-terabyte arrays back and forth for no good reason whatsoever, while at the same time hiding serious shortcomings in storage and host points of failure.
Yeah, that's it. Sure thing pal. You are clearly, 100% right, and like most arguments, of course it's black or white. VMotion is horrible, all engineers that incorporate it into their plan are incompetent, and there's always a better way. PS: Even when there is a better way, sometimes the budget precludes that option. Other times, it's just a good way to go. But keep assuming you understand everybody's environment and are smarter than all of us.
All of your scenarios make an implicit (and incorrect) assumption that all (or even most) companies deploying large VMWare setups expect their production servers to run 24/7.
No, all of my scenarios make an implicit and correct assumption that I expect my production servers to run 24/7. Considering my industry (Healthcare) and some of the information coming in (diagnosis information from caregivers, to name one), that's an absolutely fair requirement. It's actually YOUR original assumption that it was a solution seeking a problem that implied that nobody needed this type of availability. Hey, here's another scenario. Before healthcare, I was working on Wall Street, for a HUGE bank on trading systems. Considering the sheer number of countries and time zones that were being traded, that to was a 24x7 requirement.
And so in all of the cases you described the standard procedure is simply to shut down the VMs on a host in question and then simply restart them after upgrade or on another host.
Ummm... no. Maybe for your firm, but that's just not the case.
VMotion is only useful in 24/7 operations where server downtime for scheduled maintenance is wholly unacceptable (and thus guest VMs cannot be Windows OS based... or must be clustered and what not - which of course defeats the need for VMotion).
What? Nobody runs Windows in a 24x7 environment hoping to achieve 4 or 5 nines of uptime? Seriously, I'm the ONLY one? By the way, clustered apps are great, but doesn't Storage VMotion come in handy to say... upgrade a SAN without massive downtime? Or what about using VMotion to replace an entire blade chassis without downing 16 hosts and untold guests?
There are very few such scenarios in real life, although a lot of corporate IT types like to pretend otherwise, I guess it somehow bolsters their egos or something, I not sure why, really.
I'm not much for pretending anything when it comes to whether or not my business needs to be 24x7. From our board on down it's been told to me that it's a requirement for some (but not all) of our services. It's also an expectation of our caregivers, and in turn our patients. I don't do it for fun. Oh well, at least your username fits. There's a lot of other scenarios where a business should be 24x7, even if a life isn't at stake. Or should Google shut down at the whim of their engineers?
Your own statement that the "Vast majority of businesses operate 9-5 (or similar) hours and have no such requirement" kinda proves my point. That some (even if a vast minority) *DO* have such a requirement. And MANY of the rest have loftier goals than 9x5 uptime. Of course VMware is not for EVERY situation, especially in it's Enterprise Plus with SRM bolted on top incarnation. But it's reinvented the way many of us keep things online that need to be. Oh, and like it or not, DRS/DPM have reinvented the way some of us provide better performance and reduced power consumption.
Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a problem in many real-life scenarios anyway, given that server failures where the VM still keeps running sufficiently to be spirited away alive to another host are as about as numerous as hen's teeth).
Seriously? VMotion is a solution looking for a problem? I use VMotion ALL the time. Here's two simple scenarios. 1) Server updates such as BIOS patches, RAID controller firmware updates, etc. Or on the hardware side - adding a new NIC. VMotion all your servers off, and you can do these types of things without downtime. 2) DRS and DPM combined to increase resource availability (move guests that start consuming a lot of resources to a more idle server) and decrease power usage (move into a datacenter that offers metered power). The former lets me concentrate on sizing production servers and stop worrying about all the surprises from our development environments. The latter lets me shut down hardware that isn't being used without anybody noticing - to save on power consumption, which is both green and saves money. Oh and then there was the time we did a spinoff, and had an entire environment ready to go before the new SAN and new blades had even arrived. Between VMotion and Storage VMotion we just moved it all onto our new infrastructure once it was arrived, configured and burned in, and continued on our merry way.
What next, you can't think of a reason anyone would ever need SRM?
Awesome! So if I were a terrorist, all I would have to do is leave a bag with impact detonated explosives laying around, and security will set it off for me? Sweet!
Correct. Granted, it will be done in a place and a way that nobody gets injured and no infrastructure gets damaged, but sure, they will explode it for you.
The problem isn't struggling with the GPS(at least not in the sense of "Oh noes, the UI is just too hard!). The question is whether or not the GPS UI is distracting the driver's attention enough to make them especially vulnerable to doing stupid(which in a car means dangerous) things.
Yeah... but if not for looking at my GPS, plus listening to it's voice prompts, plus hitting the traffic map button, plus texting from my iPhone, and using the camera to snap a picture of the traffic to send to my buddy to explain why I'm late and using my bluetooth speakerphone, and drinking my Starbucks and eating that Big Mac... what else am I going to do while in the car?
Personalized ads, fair enough. But i can understand perfectly well that people don't feel comfortable about this. It's so damn uncanny. For me it's more than enough that google search is my 'window to the internet'. I don't need them to store my documents, my mail, my chat, and now my dns lookups.
I have a great solution. Keep using Google search. But don't use Google Docs, Gmail, Google Talk or Google DNS. For me, I will switch to their DNS because Bellsouth's is so unreliable and OpenDNS has a much worse service full of unwanted redirects.
i played with it for 30 minutes today. the entire thing is a web browser and they have some non Google stuff there to keep the DoJ away.
Yup, good thing they did that. Would hate to see Chrome abuse it's monopoly. But that's not enough, they should open source Chromiu... oh wait. What's the OS' market share again?
And that makes it okay? Advertised or not, MMS was on like every cell phone when the iPhone came out and I completely would have assumed the iPhone, being this awesome new multimedia phone/gadget/computer-thing, would have included such a basic feature that my old brick I got for free at the time included. People who still excuse Apple and AT&T for not providing such a basic feature such as sending a picture to someone on a smartphone touted to bring such a rich multimedia experience to our pockets is probably why they got away with it for so long.
Yeah, it does make it ok. Nobody cared about MMS - millions, and millions of people who bought the iPhone and didn't care. There's a huge difference between "advertised" or "not". And in this case, it wasn't. By the way, I did it (once) when it came out (out of curiosity). I wasn't impressed. Emailed video clips are of a higher resolution. My wife had never heard of MMS, so she wasn't missing it either. I'm not excusing them... I just honestly couldn't care. I was too busy making calls (and three way conference calls which are ten thousand times easier on the iPhone) and emails and web browsing and playing MP3 and watching M4V and playing games and using Google Maps which until Google made their own phone OS was ten thousand times better than any other phone's Google Maps.
By the way:
In fact MMS was advertised on iPhones after 3.0 in the packaging, yet was still not capable of MMS for another few months without modding. So yes there was a period of time where it was advertised and not delivered.
Packaging? Have you ever seen the iPhone's packaging? Nobody would pick up that box (1G, 3G or 3GS) and assume MMS was there or not there, it's an exercise in minimalism. I don't think they've ever "advertised" MMS, although they did announce it at the iPhone event as a "coming soon" feature, and explicitly mentioned that it would show up last on AT&T, which it sure did.
But go ahead and get all hot and bothered because by the time they finally announced it, it was turned on for AT&T customers a few weeks later than in Europe.
Just off the top of my head, picture messaging was one of the very basic things that an unmodded iPhone couldn't do for a number of years that every other seemingly piece of crap free phone could do just fine since the beginning of the decade.
The AC you quoted was asking what basic functionality that was advertised that the phone couldn't do. I don't recall MMS being an advertised feature of the original iPhone.
Thus far, except for me, the only reason I can justify ripping things to FLAC is because I can then convert the file to whatever loss compression format is needed, MP3, AAC, OOG, etc.for portable music players (yes people, the iPod is not the only music player), without the double compression loss.
It may not be the only music player, but which one do you have that doesn't work with MP3, which also very easily syncs to an iPod?
Hosted exchange? Who said anything about hosted exchange. And who said microsoft's danger was related to GoogleApps. I said people are talking about the dangers of the cloud. Jokingly I suggested it's a great sales pitch for exchange. You know, the non-hosted variety.
Slashdot Mirror
Licensing fees for MPEG are a part of Windows and Mac OS X price tag. Full stop.
So if IE 9 comes with h.264 support, and it's made available for download for existing Vista and Windows 7 users... what were you saying again? Believe it or not, every now and then, a company doesn't pass down a cost to the consumer in such a direct fashion. And you can't say "well they COULD have lowered the price by $1 instead", since they wouldn't do that to their OS. It's just a cost to them. A cost which helps them protect marketshare.
"These are not the dorks you are looking for."
I'm not surprised he was out of work. His sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped him find a job.
The ballot screen itself is supposed to only appear when you have IF as your standard browser, and sure enough it didn't appear on any of my computers.
You are the first person I know with IF installed. How's it run?
I bought one. Family site, mostly picture sharing for distant relatives. Saved $8. Still easy for them to remember. Professionally, it's just a $1.99 expense since companya.com wants companya.net, companya.org to protect their rights, even if they don't use the names. Now we need to have them buy .info, .us, .biz etc to be complete if they are worried.
Ok, kidding aside - if you know you're screwed, that means that you have less to risk on a second attempt. He's already an ex-con. When he gets out after this sentence he's going to be...an ex-con. Nothing will have changed, his prospects will be exactly the same. It's a good gamble, if you look at it from a game theory-ish kind of viewpoint.
A sentence of several years suggests he did have a lot to risk, more than versus his first attempt in fact.
The Rockchip processor is capable of 720p video, it's in a lot of the $120 to $160 Chinese MP4 players that you can get from various importers. It's not that the screen supports 1280x720, but rather than you can play your existing files without converting the video down. I recently picked up a Ramos T11TE with a 5" screen, also 800x480. It had 16g internal memory plus a micro SD slot, because it has a Telechips TCC8901 processor, which can handle 1080p versus the more common Rockchip. For $158, I load my MKVs right onto it. It came FAT-32 but supports NTFS (no ExFat), so I can load files over 4gb and play them back. Compared to my own pre-flight method of converting video to MP4/h.264 Simple profile to support my iPhone, this is a much better answer. It even has a mini HDMI port, so I can actually show 1080p if so inclined.
I wonder what the hardware cost for the 3G stuff is? Regardless, prices are set based on what people are willing to pay. I'd wager that being able to browse the internet while loafing around in the park is worth $120 to some people. It seems a bit steep to me too, though, and I have to admit I did a bit of a double-take at the price. The main kick in the balls is that you have to pay $30 a month on top of that for the data plan...
Really? $30 a month is a kick in the balls for data? You may or may not like the iPad, but $30 for unlimited data without the 5GB data cap is pretty damn competitive compared to those USB 3G sticks the carriers typically sell for $80 a month.
Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).
The Times is not printed in NYC for those who receive delivery in remote areas. BusinessWeek pegged the number at around 20 printing plants (owned and contracted), but that was a few years ago.
In any event, it's not a straight forward proposition. If they cancelled ALL printing AND made the price $50 a year, computers and eReaders only, I suspect they'd have to let a LOT of people go.
As more and more organizations close foreign news bureaus, the remaining ones while suffering become even more important. I don't care if the investigative reporting shifts to web based publications, but right now there are newspapers with journalists covering things in-depth that a blog doesn't have the resources to do and the nightly news doesn't cover well enough (if at all) in a 30 minute broadcast.
I own a software development firm. We ask people if they do twitter, facebook, myspace, and other social crap. If they say yes, we immediately tell them "thank you for your time, but I don't think we are interested".
What if the applicant sits during the workday and just posts messages on Slashdot, instead?
Artifically deny your customer the ability to buy your product. They'll love you for it!
In fairness, they are denying you the ability to RENT your product, hoping you'll BUY it. For me, I just move on to what is available. I'm not dropping $15 to $30 to buy something I wanted to rent, nor will I wait to rent - I'll just rent something else. I have a pretty bad memory, too, for anything other than an absurdly popular blockbuster that's all over the media, I'll probably never remember to go back and get that one from Warner. Besides, I hear there's a FEW other ways to see a movie without renting or buying.
Oh please . Can I sign up, get service, and not sign and agreement? NO. Now exactly would I know how good their customer service, the network, or coverage is without signing up with them? Then once I find out how crappy the service for -my- needs I am stuck? Then they can charge -ANY- amount of $$$ to release me from crappy service?
If only there was some sort of short term period wherein you could return the phone for a small "restock" fee (ie: the non return of the activation charge and pay only for your actual usage and have the contract null and void. SIGH!
No, I simply went from saying it was never needed to pointing out how your perceived "need" is actually a result of shortcomings of the design you were hinting at.
I'm sorry you think you have the smallest bit of insight into our infrastructure, the data centers they are in, the hardware and software configurations, the software we design as well as the packaged bits we use based on a couple of Slashdot postings. I'm not hinting at any design. It's neither on topic, nor brief enough to fit in a reply.
Which are running on hosts apparently designed to sometimes fail in packs of 16 ...
Interestingly enough, that's not true. I'm not sure how intimate you are with the latest gen of blade chassis, but I do know you're not intimately aware of how we use them as a small subset of our infrastructure. That said, there are certain applications in play that benefit greatly from the technology, especially our reduced maintenance and repair cost, and reduced power bill. Last I checked, our most important stuff doesn't sit there, since the latest blade chassis have "no single point of failure", but actually still have a couple, vendor claims aside. But keep on thinking whatever you think, yes, there is a place for blades in the enterprise.
No, again, I simply pointed out that your perceived need for a VMotion-based "solution" is in fact the result of poor overall design, design which you were hinting at yourself.
We're quite pleased with several aspects of our VMware deployments. Not all these apply to every thing we've virtualized, but we've enjoyed consolidation, power reduction, increased per-server utilization, easier hardware maintenance, easier migrations and upgrades, more flexibility on the desktop than our old, old Metaframe system, oh and incidentally, we actually have some clustered apps residing within ESX hosts, since one is not mutually exclusive to the other.
Sorry, life isn't blanket black and white. Sometimes we use thin provisioning for storage. Sometimes we don't. Some apps run on SATA. Some run on FC. Some run on SAS, and soon I predict we'll move a little bit towards flash. Some of our stuff is Enterprise Plus licensed. A few of our things run on free ESXi. We have a few Xen boxes mostly because the apps on them work, aren't too important, and we haven't bothered to do much more than watch them run. We have a couple of really small branch locations that run Hyper-V, because that's what worked best for that particular location.
But hey, if you can do better, you should send in a resume. Assuming you aren't always arrogant, we always are looking for good engineers. Just don't be that guy who comes in and can redo everything today the way it should be. That always works out great, right?
Which of course can be achieved by taking offline and upgrading individual SANs in the redundant storage cluster and then re-syncing them back. I assume you are using redundant SAN arrays, having been on this self-professed bleeding edge of hyper-super-critical everything.
Depends on the application. For some lesser ones, no, one SAN in a primary, one mirrored in a backup. Some downtime would be acceptable, but we'd prefer not to. Since some of these apps have some failover time (takes about an hour), we'd rather not have to, but can temporarily piggyback off another SAN. In reality, this hasn't really been needed yet, since all of our stuff is either strong enough to upgrade online, or nearline for backups and easily brought down. But strange, you went from saying it was never needed, to just arguing against my setup, knowing about 1% or less of how our actual infrastructure is designed.
LOL. Some mission critical setup you got there! All this pontificating ... and then you have a massive single-point failure spot like a chassis holding 16 hosts! It just figures. All shiny V-motion-this and V-motion-that toys and no design forethought whatsoever.
I suppose if ALL we had was one blade chassis, you might be right. You see, we have many, many, many servers. Multiple chassis, and by the way, most of our infrastructure is not blade based. But again, you went from arguing against any need for 24x7 or VMotion into trying to pick apart someone's infrastructure while not knowing anything about it.
Nice try, but truly robust systems like Google do not use virtualization in a way even remotely similar to yours, instead using custom close-to-the-OS cluster configurations written from the ground up for this purpose. They are in fact the very anathema of what you are doing.
True, which is why it was an example of a business that chooses to need to be 24x7, not a selling point for VMware. I'll let VMware sell their stuff.
Oh there is no doubt that there is market for all that nonsense, like there is also robust market for penis extensions, but this alone does not in any way have any bearing on the point I was making. VMotion is a solution looking for a problem precisely because if you do truly need VMotion, it is a sure fire indicator of you having screwed the pooch royally when it came to overall design of your fault tolerant systems. VMotion and Storage VMotion are needed in a well designed setup like a pair of boils on one's buttocks. VMotion, and particularly automated performance based VMotion encourage throwing lazilly and incoherently mis-matched VMs at bunches of inadequate hosts only to see the VMs hopping about the hosts like a bunch of deranged rabbits instead of having them stay put in a well estimated and adequate hosts. All Storage VMotion does is to encourage lazy, resource consuming activities like shuffling contents of multi-terabyte arrays back and forth for no good reason whatsoever, while at the same time hiding serious shortcomings in storage and host points of failure.
Yeah, that's it. Sure thing pal. You are clearly, 100% right, and like most arguments, of course it's black or white. VMotion is horrible, all engineers that incorporate it into their plan are incompetent, and there's always a better way. PS: Even when there is a better way, sometimes the budget precludes that option. Other times, it's just a good way to go. But keep assuming you understand everybody's environment and are smarter than all of us.
All of your scenarios make an implicit (and incorrect) assumption that all (or even most) companies deploying large VMWare setups expect their production servers to run 24/7.
No, all of my scenarios make an implicit and correct assumption that I expect my production servers to run 24/7. Considering my industry (Healthcare) and some of the information coming in (diagnosis information from caregivers, to name one), that's an absolutely fair requirement. It's actually YOUR original assumption that it was a solution seeking a problem that implied that nobody needed this type of availability. Hey, here's another scenario. Before healthcare, I was working on Wall Street, for a HUGE bank on trading systems. Considering the sheer number of countries and time zones that were being traded, that to was a 24x7 requirement.
And so in all of the cases you described the standard procedure is simply to shut down the VMs on a host in question and then simply restart them after upgrade or on another host.
Ummm... no. Maybe for your firm, but that's just not the case.
VMotion is only useful in 24/7 operations where server downtime for scheduled maintenance is wholly unacceptable (and thus guest VMs cannot be Windows OS based ... or must be clustered and what not - which of course defeats the need for VMotion).
What? Nobody runs Windows in a 24x7 environment hoping to achieve 4 or 5 nines of uptime? Seriously, I'm the ONLY one? By the way, clustered apps are great, but doesn't Storage VMotion come in handy to say... upgrade a SAN without massive downtime? Or what about using VMotion to replace an entire blade chassis without downing 16 hosts and untold guests?
There are very few such scenarios in real life, although a lot of corporate IT types like to pretend otherwise, I guess it somehow bolsters their egos or something, I not sure why, really.
I'm not much for pretending anything when it comes to whether or not my business needs to be 24x7. From our board on down it's been told to me that it's a requirement for some (but not all) of our services. It's also an expectation of our caregivers, and in turn our patients. I don't do it for fun. Oh well, at least your username fits. There's a lot of other scenarios where a business should be 24x7, even if a life isn't at stake. Or should Google shut down at the whim of their engineers?
Your own statement that the "Vast majority of businesses operate 9-5 (or similar) hours and have no such requirement" kinda proves my point. That some (even if a vast minority) *DO* have such a requirement. And MANY of the rest have loftier goals than 9x5 uptime. Of course VMware is not for EVERY situation, especially in it's Enterprise Plus with SRM bolted on top incarnation. But it's reinvented the way many of us keep things online that need to be. Oh, and like it or not, DRS/DPM have reinvented the way some of us provide better performance and reduced power consumption.
Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a problem in many real-life scenarios anyway, given that server failures where the VM still keeps running sufficiently to be spirited away alive to another host are as about as numerous as hen's teeth).
Seriously? VMotion is a solution looking for a problem? I use VMotion ALL the time. Here's two simple scenarios. 1) Server updates such as BIOS patches, RAID controller firmware updates, etc. Or on the hardware side - adding a new NIC. VMotion all your servers off, and you can do these types of things without downtime. 2) DRS and DPM combined to increase resource availability (move guests that start consuming a lot of resources to a more idle server) and decrease power usage (move into a datacenter that offers metered power). The former lets me concentrate on sizing production servers and stop worrying about all the surprises from our development environments. The latter lets me shut down hardware that isn't being used without anybody noticing - to save on power consumption, which is both green and saves money. Oh and then there was the time we did a spinoff, and had an entire environment ready to go before the new SAN and new blades had even arrived. Between VMotion and Storage VMotion we just moved it all onto our new infrastructure once it was arrived, configured and burned in, and continued on our merry way.
What next, you can't think of a reason anyone would ever need SRM?
Awesome! So if I were a terrorist, all I would have to do is leave a bag with impact detonated explosives laying around, and security will set it off for me? Sweet!
Correct. Granted, it will be done in a place and a way that nobody gets injured and no infrastructure gets damaged, but sure, they will explode it for you.
The problem isn't struggling with the GPS(at least not in the sense of "Oh noes, the UI is just too hard!). The question is whether or not the GPS UI is distracting the driver's attention enough to make them especially vulnerable to doing stupid(which in a car means dangerous) things.
Yeah... but if not for looking at my GPS, plus listening to it's voice prompts, plus hitting the traffic map button, plus texting from my iPhone, and using the camera to snap a picture of the traffic to send to my buddy to explain why I'm late and using my bluetooth speakerphone, and drinking my Starbucks and eating that Big Mac... what else am I going to do while in the car?
Personalized ads, fair enough. But i can understand perfectly well that people don't feel comfortable about this. It's so damn uncanny. For me it's more than enough that google search is my 'window to the internet'. I don't need them to store my documents, my mail, my chat, and now my dns lookups.
I have a great solution. Keep using Google search. But don't use Google Docs, Gmail, Google Talk or Google DNS. For me, I will switch to their DNS because Bellsouth's is so unreliable and OpenDNS has a much worse service full of unwanted redirects.
That's going in my signature!
Great, once I see it, I'll finally know who this "Anonymous Coward" guy is that keeps posting hundreds of comments on every story.
i played with it for 30 minutes today. the entire thing is a web browser and they have some non Google stuff there to keep the DoJ away.
Yup, good thing they did that. Would hate to see Chrome abuse it's monopoly. But that's not enough, they should open source Chromiu... oh wait. What's the OS' market share again?
And that makes it okay? Advertised or not, MMS was on like every cell phone when the iPhone came out and I completely would have assumed the iPhone, being this awesome new multimedia phone/gadget/computer-thing, would have included such a basic feature that my old brick I got for free at the time included. People who still excuse Apple and AT&T for not providing such a basic feature such as sending a picture to someone on a smartphone touted to bring such a rich multimedia experience to our pockets is probably why they got away with it for so long.
Yeah, it does make it ok. Nobody cared about MMS - millions, and millions of people who bought the iPhone and didn't care. There's a huge difference between "advertised" or "not". And in this case, it wasn't. By the way, I did it (once) when it came out (out of curiosity). I wasn't impressed. Emailed video clips are of a higher resolution. My wife had never heard of MMS, so she wasn't missing it either. I'm not excusing them... I just honestly couldn't care. I was too busy making calls (and three way conference calls which are ten thousand times easier on the iPhone) and emails and web browsing and playing MP3 and watching M4V and playing games and using Google Maps which until Google made their own phone OS was ten thousand times better than any other phone's Google Maps.
By the way:
In fact MMS was advertised on iPhones after 3.0 in the packaging, yet was still not capable of MMS for another few months without modding. So yes there was a period of time where it was advertised and not delivered.
Packaging? Have you ever seen the iPhone's packaging? Nobody would pick up that box (1G, 3G or 3GS) and assume MMS was there or not there, it's an exercise in minimalism. I don't think they've ever "advertised" MMS, although they did announce it at the iPhone event as a "coming soon" feature, and explicitly mentioned that it would show up last on AT&T, which it sure did.
But go ahead and get all hot and bothered because by the time they finally announced it, it was turned on for AT&T customers a few weeks later than in Europe.
But hey... there's always Windows Mobile.
Just off the top of my head, picture messaging was one of the very basic things that an unmodded iPhone couldn't do for a number of years that every other seemingly piece of crap free phone could do just fine since the beginning of the decade.
The AC you quoted was asking what basic functionality that was advertised that the phone couldn't do. I don't recall MMS being an advertised feature of the original iPhone.
Thus far, except for me, the only reason I can justify ripping things to FLAC is because I can then convert the file to whatever loss compression format is needed, MP3, AAC, OOG, etc.for portable music players (yes people, the iPod is not the only music player), without the double compression loss.
It may not be the only music player, but which one do you have that doesn't work with MP3, which also very easily syncs to an iPod?
"How many times have you bit into a piece of fruit only to find that you're also chomping on a sticker label?"
Umm... never? Seriously... are there legions of people biting into fruit and choking on stickers?
Hosted exchange? Who said anything about hosted exchange. And who said microsoft's danger was related to GoogleApps. I said people are talking about the dangers of the cloud. Jokingly I suggested it's a great sales pitch for exchange. You know, the non-hosted variety.