We use them because the traffic patterns on our websites include 10x (and up) spikes in traffic during news and weather events.
These events are specifically times when we CANNOT be unavailable. We live and die by those events.
But, those events are not very often - perhaps a few per month.
Akamai allows us to serve this massive traffic spikes without requring us to maintain a massive overhead in servers and bandwidth that goes unused most of the time.
Each site in our network has a geographically localized audience, but across the network as a whole, we have users everwhere.
Edge Serving allows us to provide extremely low latency service to all of those users - and providing a much greater resistance to core internet connection issues.
Further, Akamai provides us with massive redundancy. A single (or group of few) datacenter, not matter how large and well designed, is still not as redundant as the Akamai network.
Finally, if our origins become unavailable for whatever reason, our sites live on, completely available on the edge (albeit, growing stale as time goes on) while we restore origin connectivity.
Then we have EdgeJava, Akamai Network Storage, the video serving, etc.
Our latest web project (which will become quite popular in mid-late August) will be served entirely from the Edge using Akamai.
My guess is cooling. I can't find it mentioned anywhere, but if it is a fanless design, engineering a convection cooling design that would work at any angle would be a pretty serious feat of engineering.
I'm sure they thought about it, and maybe even tested it.
"How the hell do they propose to offer both HDTV and data at the same time? A 1080i video stream can easily take the full 20Mbps 8VSB channel.
The truth is, they have no intention of carrying HDTV programming, because that would take up all the bandwidth."
This is not accurate.
Theoretically, the HD signal would take up most of the channel, but practically, with the latest generation of encoders, and the use of variable bitrates, there is always quite a bit of headroom left over.
This generally ranges from about 2Mb/s to over 8 or 9Mb/s depending on the program being broadcast.
Broadcasters can also choose to deliberately reduce the bandwidth even on a 1080i feed to make sure there is headroom. Nobody would really notice with the current generation of HDTV sets available anyway.
WRAL in Raleigh has been doing Datacast for almost a year in conjunction with DTVPlus.
They broadcast a special version of the WRAL website, as well as "video on demand". Basically, the most popular video clips on the website, as well as the various news broadcasts, are sent in a fairly high-speed version and stored on the receiving computers.
Most TV stations expect to be able to, with current and upcoming encoding technology, deliver an HDTV channel, at least one SD channel (albeit a low bitrate channel, such as a weather channel, or classified ads, or something similar), and some sort of datafeed.
An interesting development lately is that Networks seem to be putting in clauses in their affiliate contracts to reserve the excess data bandwidth for the network. I'm not sure how that's going over, but with most local stations being so technology ignorant, I wouldn't be suprised if its getting accepted alot.
Re:/.ers: Don't get too cocky...
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From what we've heard from CNN, they were serving over 9 million pages per hour, or about 2,500 pages per second. This seems to follow the 50K hits per second quoted above.
Our network of local news sites (http://www.ibsys.com) peaked at above 1.5M pages per hour - about 425 pages per second.
We got slow in the morning, but recovered by about noon - where we were serving pretty quickly.
Interestingly, our biggest problem is that we use Akamai extensively for image serving, and Akamai fell apart early in the day and took a while to recover.
Between pages and video, and our local bandwidth and Akamai/IBEAM video serving, we peaked at about 450Mb/s...
You should be able to enter 2" by 1" in coreldraw.
You should be able to say to your computer, "format the hard drive - make it 1/3 of available space." Especially if you don't really care exactly how big it is - which most people don't.
The software interfaces do not properly model the way that humans accomplish tasks.
This is probably the biggest growth area I can imagine in software development.
I mean, look at the Easel, KDE and Gnome - Brand new user interface layers, and what are they? More of the same old thing - with different pictures and colors.
Humans are NOT exact things - computer/human interfaces should be designed to interact with humans, not humans having to be trained to become explicit and precise.
Unless you want to maintain a techno-elite, which I think, perhaps, many people here do want to do.
When your friends ask you how your day was, do you type your response to them, or do you speak (assuming your friends are in the same room). Actually, most slashdotters probably do type to each other, even in the same room...
But to speak more directly to your argument, when you are doing a task that is analogous to, say, putting together a word processing document, how do you do it?
Lets say, you are rearranging the furniture in the living room. Which might be easier, saying "move the mauve sofa 3 feet from the south wall and 2 feet from the east wall. Place the couch facing north, with a 30 degree angle from the east wall," or "Put that {point} there {point} and aim it towards there {point}.
So, the command line is not the most natural way to interact with a computer for all cases. In fact, in most cases, it is not the most natural way to do it. A GUI is not the most natural way to interact with a computer either, but it is very useful for certain tasks as well.
There is a school of design that says that human-user interface processes should be modeled after real-world processes. From this stems the desktop, the trashcan, folders, etc. This is a valid design process, but bad designers sometimes take this too far (such as the Apple Quicktime player interface - what the hell is a rotary control doing on software?)
The command line might be the most natural interface for you, and specifically for the tasks that you do, but it would be interesting to see you create an illustration with a CLI.
Interface design is about modeling the task process, and developing an interface that best facilitates that process.
I personally belive that the evolution of human-computer interfaces will produce game interfaces - all tasks will be accomplished through play. This is the most natural and rewarding process I can imagine.
"No store owner would be satisfied if 5% of all customers were turned away at the door; likewise I'm sure no e-commerce website owner would be satisfied that 5% of visitors were being turned away."
They'd be plenty satisfied if it cost more to allow those 5% then would be spent by those 5%. Otherwise, they're losing money. Why spend $10 to make $5?
I could see Sun buying SGI just for the NUMA technology licenses. Didn't they license the technology (for the Gigaplane) from Cray before SGI bought Cray?
I wrote a book, thought it was horrible, and shelved it, that I wouldn't have any rights because I wasn't selling it?
What difference would it make to you, financially or otherwise (HINT: none). These spurious strawman arguments only prove the weakness of the corpratist point of view.
Well, this is not exactly true. What if the contents of the book, or the quality of the book compromises my future earnings or ability to get a job. Lets say, the book was so bad, and so offensive that if anybody saw it, I wouldn't be able every publish another book again my reputation would be destroyed. By releasing that book, you could do financial harm to me. Don't I have the right to privacy? Don't I have the right for you NOT to expose me?
Of course, this argument isn't exactly relavant to abandonware, because the IP we're talking about IS published.
Are you proposing doing away with copyright entirely, or just returning it to a "founding-fathers" level?
Slashdot Mirror
Do I REALLY have to reach around the back side of my Mac Mini to plug in my new iPod Shuffle to load songs?
Silly.
(yes, I know, usb extension cable, usb port on keyboard, etc. etc. etc.)
Wouldn't it seem a bit more, I don't know, integrated if I didn't have to do that?
...at least from a customer's prospective.
We're one of Akamai's larger customers.
We use them because the traffic patterns on our websites include 10x (and up) spikes in traffic during news and weather events.
These events are specifically times when we CANNOT be unavailable. We live and die by those events.
But, those events are not very often - perhaps a few per month.
Akamai allows us to serve this massive traffic spikes without requring us to maintain a massive overhead in servers and bandwidth that goes unused most of the time.
Each site in our network has a geographically localized audience, but across the network as a whole, we have users everwhere.
Edge Serving allows us to provide extremely low latency service to all of those users - and providing a much greater resistance to core internet connection issues.
Further, Akamai provides us with massive redundancy. A single (or group of few) datacenter, not matter how large and well designed, is still not as redundant as the Akamai network.
Finally, if our origins become unavailable for whatever reason, our sites live on, completely available on the edge (albeit, growing stale as time goes on) while we restore origin connectivity.
Then we have EdgeJava, Akamai Network Storage, the video serving, etc.
Our latest web project (which will become quite popular in mid-late August) will be served entirely from the Edge using Akamai.
No, I look at the things that I've printed out as much as I want, over and over.
WARNING!!
This DiVX download link is to the spyware version that includes Gator.
Even after uninstalling, Gator will still persist.
I've got moderation points, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to mod the original post as "-1 Moronic".
Help!
My guess is cooling. I can't find it mentioned anywhere, but if it is a fanless design, engineering a convection cooling design that would work at any angle would be a pretty serious feat of engineering.
I'm sure they thought about it, and maybe even tested it.
This is not accurate.
Theoretically, the HD signal would take up most of the channel, but practically, with the latest generation of encoders, and the use of variable bitrates, there is always quite a bit of headroom left over.
This generally ranges from about 2Mb/s to over 8 or 9Mb/s depending on the program being broadcast.
Broadcasters can also choose to deliberately reduce the bandwidth even on a 1080i feed to make sure there is headroom. Nobody would really notice with the current generation of HDTV sets available anyway.
WRAL in Raleigh has been doing Datacast for almost a year in conjunction with DTVPlus.
They broadcast a special version of the WRAL website, as well as "video on demand". Basically, the most popular video clips on the website, as well as the various news broadcasts, are sent in a fairly high-speed version and stored on the receiving computers.
Most TV stations expect to be able to, with current and upcoming encoding technology, deliver an HDTV channel, at least one SD channel (albeit a low bitrate channel, such as a weather channel, or classified ads, or something similar), and some sort of datafeed.
An interesting development lately is that Networks seem to be putting in clauses in their affiliate contracts to reserve the excess data bandwidth for the network. I'm not sure how that's going over, but with most local stations being so technology ignorant, I wouldn't be suprised if its getting accepted alot.
Our network of local news sites (http://www.ibsys.com) peaked at above 1.5M pages per hour - about 425 pages per second.
We got slow in the morning, but recovered by about noon - where we were serving pretty quickly.
Interestingly, our biggest problem is that we use Akamai extensively for image serving, and Akamai fell apart early in the day and took a while to recover.
Between pages and video, and our local bandwidth and Akamai/IBEAM video serving, we peaked at about 450Mb/s...
The first couple of version of Art Technology Group's Dynamo application server were written in Scheme. Then they switched to Java.
So, what you're saying is that software sucks.
You should be able to enter 2" by 1" in coreldraw.
You should be able to say to your computer, "format the hard drive - make it 1/3 of available space." Especially if you don't really care exactly how big it is - which most people don't.
The software interfaces do not properly model the way that humans accomplish tasks.
This is probably the biggest growth area I can imagine in software development.
I mean, look at the Easel, KDE and Gnome - Brand new user interface layers, and what are they? More of the same old thing - with different pictures and colors.
Humans are NOT exact things - computer/human interfaces should be designed to interact with humans, not humans having to be trained to become explicit and precise.
Unless you want to maintain a techno-elite, which I think, perhaps, many people here do want to do.
When your friends ask you how your day was, do you type your response to them, or do you speak (assuming your friends are in the same room). Actually, most slashdotters probably do type to each other, even in the same room... But to speak more directly to your argument, when you are doing a task that is analogous to, say, putting together a word processing document, how do you do it? Lets say, you are rearranging the furniture in the living room. Which might be easier, saying "move the mauve sofa 3 feet from the south wall and 2 feet from the east wall. Place the couch facing north, with a 30 degree angle from the east wall," or "Put that {point} there {point} and aim it towards there {point}. So, the command line is not the most natural way to interact with a computer for all cases. In fact, in most cases, it is not the most natural way to do it. A GUI is not the most natural way to interact with a computer either, but it is very useful for certain tasks as well. There is a school of design that says that human-user interface processes should be modeled after real-world processes. From this stems the desktop, the trashcan, folders, etc. This is a valid design process, but bad designers sometimes take this too far (such as the Apple Quicktime player interface - what the hell is a rotary control doing on software?) The command line might be the most natural interface for you, and specifically for the tasks that you do, but it would be interesting to see you create an illustration with a CLI. Interface design is about modeling the task process, and developing an interface that best facilitates that process. I personally belive that the evolution of human-computer interfaces will produce game interfaces - all tasks will be accomplished through play. This is the most natural and rewarding process I can imagine.
I could see Sun buying SGI just for the NUMA technology licenses. Didn't they license the technology (for the Gigaplane) from Cray before SGI bought Cray?
Some tobacco companies were sued for the health problems of smokers that started smoking AFTER the warning labels were placed on the packaging: http://www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/07/1 6/tobacco.smokers/
Some gun manufacturers are being sued for crimes using guns: http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/08/09/ crime.guns.reut/
Well, this is not exactly true. What if the contents of the book, or the quality of the book compromises my future earnings or ability to get a job. Lets say, the book was so bad, and so offensive that if anybody saw it, I wouldn't be able every publish another book again my reputation would be destroyed. By releasing that book, you could do financial harm to me. Don't I have the right to privacy? Don't I have the right for you NOT to expose me?
Of course, this argument isn't exactly relavant to abandonware, because the IP we're talking about IS published.
Are you proposing doing away with copyright entirely, or just returning it to a "founding-fathers" level?
It essentially patents off-line web browsing.
http://164.195 .100.11/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF &d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1& f=G&l=50&s1='5,978,807'.WKU.&OS=PN/5,978,807&RS=PN /5,978,807