Re: Microsoft *has* NOT won. AT ALL.

As a unix user/admin for multiple decades you are completely ignorant of reality. Really look around at the patent fights that are going on, anybody who believes Linux, etc have no infringing patents is just plain stupid. Seriously just look at the things others are getting sued over and now tell me that there is nothing in Linux that infringes. From stupid bounce-back patents to online shopping carts to how music is sorted... heck just last week bunch of podcasters were sued for infringing patents.

The belief that MS has no case is simply void of any actual critical thinking and is more a delusional fantasy... seriously put the smallest amount of mental effort behind it and think for a second.

Re: Outstanding

In 2007 Virgin TV had 3.6 million subscribers, since the numbers of decliens aren't known publicly. I have worked at a monthly subscription based ISP previously the number of declined charges we had were more than 1% of the subscriber base (I don't know the exact numbers but more than 1% and less than 10%), so with ~3.6 million subs no matter where you are in the range (1-10%) we are talking a rather large numbers of declines monthly (30-300k per month), which would be something rather costly to deal with by hand just to catch the odd unformatted text string .

Re: @Tom 35

Do you know why they have an exception in the first place? Over a decade ago, it came up and the reason given that they should be exempt from sales tax is that when it was enacted (Al Gore was still VP) the government ruled that because shopping on the Internet was very new, but they believed it had great potential and didn't want to hinder it's growth. So to give shopping on the Internet an explicit competitive edge to grow into actually something, they decided to not tax it until it got big enough to sustain itself. Is there any doubt anymore that shopping on the Internet is now able to stand on it's own two feet and no longer needs help from the government anymore? Why does shopping on the Internet need a government mandated cost advantage anymore? I think the Internet has grown up from the 90's and doesn't require getting a government advantage to compete with every other business anymore...

Re: Do your civic duty

Spread over only 144 total cameras all things being equal that averages to a income of $730.59 per day per camera.... holy shikey

Re: Yes but

Problem is that from a normal home power plug estimates a 2 day charge time, which means that you wouldn't be able to have a full charge daily.

The other big massive hole I see in this is that unless I keep my garage heated I will be losing money. Where gas powered vehicles, the power source just gets cold with the Tesla it goes poof into the air so it probably is dramatically worse for the environment as it consumed electricity from the grid, the cold whether took it away and you have to pay and use more resources from the grid to recharge a vehicle sitting still.

Re: How fast?

Assume a fully pegged 10gig network interface usable capacity is ~2.8TB/hour (1000MB/sec * 3600sec * 80% usable). So to hit a rate of 16.3 TB/hr means it would need to support a sustained injest rate of 5.6x 10gig ethernet interfaces fully consumed.

If they can actually get anywhere near that for non perfectly designed benchmarketing workloads color me surprised... as I'm guessing that it's simply another storage vendor magical stat.

Re: Meanwhile KVM gets more developers

Better performance? That's very subjective and not what I've experienced. I would say that the general consensus on the net is that KVM trails ESX but true the gap that KVM is behind isn't as wide as it used to be.

Yup KVM doesn't have a license cost

Flexibility? Again depends, I'd say ESX has given me more much more flexibility then KVM does, sure you've got access to a more feature full hypervisor-ish layer where you can run apps on the host system rather than only in the guest, but does that functionality there mean the guests have more functionality... I've found it to be lacking. As your own post mentions even now the owners of KVM (Redhat) still don't have an officially supported method of taking online snapshots like vmware; now if you want to run production on a product that you can't call support on, and was released less than a month ago have at it.

Ummm... your example of upcoming KVM snapshots look surprisingly like vmware implementation. A separate file containing disk changes pointing back to the original... which is the same method vmware has been doing for years. By copying vmware's implementation KVM will have the same issues as vmware. So welcome to the party you are a few years late but you eventually did show up.

Re: Jobs

Even more so since he made that statement in Auguest 2007, just 2 months after the first iphone and a year before the first android phone. It really shows that Apple didn't start suing because all the phone guys were suing them first, like people like to claim.

Re: But...

What the two of you both failed to do is properly convert kb to mb. 56kb = .055mb (technically .0546875mb), you divide kb by 1024 to get to mb. That is unless you are a disk drive manufacturer doing bad math.

Re: Copycat Microsoft

You do of course know that XBOX has been able to use Netflix, selling full tv/movies videos via their XBOX marketplace, streaming via DLNA and even usable as a media center extender for YEARS before Apple TV came out. If anything Apple has copied Microsoft as a media device.

The bottom line that TV is changing for Microsoft is that it sells XBOX units. I'm actually considering getting another XBOX to use with my bedroom TV, not because I want it to play games but because I can get to Comcast XFinity ondemand content since they have an app that Apple TV doesn't have, PS3 doesn't have, Roku doesn't have, Tivo doesn't have, but Microsoft XBOX does have. The Apple TV sucks compared to the XBOX for a multimedia device, it does everything it does and more.

And if anybody has vendor lock in it's Apple, dear god they threatened to pull their products out of an entire country if they had to license their DRM to third parties to allow itunes purchased content to play on something else.

Re: Apple users still win...

I'm pretty sure that is not allowed as part of Apple's app store terms, under the Trademark & trade dress section of their rules:

"Apps which appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product or advertising theme will be

rejected"

Apple won't let Firefox into the app store because iOS already has a browser providing similar functionality, if they allow Google maps into the app store they will be two-faced on that rule. I think they will cause a shit storm of complaints on randomly following their own rules and some big names might take them to court over it, either forcing Apple to accept apps they don't want (along with Google maps) or forcing them to reject apps they do want in the store.

Re: What's the point?

Instead of thinking of how it directly benefits the candidates, think of how it benefits the people they giving money to make ads. Something like getting a certain amount of $$ per view, and that being able to increase the ammount of people you sent the ad to equating to getting more money from a candidate. Wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for someone to pay to signup a bunch of followers prior to an ad campaign inexpensively and then be able to charge more because of the increase number of "people" who were sent the ad.

your post is a perfect example of what's wrong

Your post is a shining example of why politics is broken. It's obvious from your post that you pretty much believe only people who are already behind a candidate would want to listen to what they say. Personally I believe in having an open mind and listening to what everybody says rather than closing myself off from them.

Re: Hashing is not encryption

He said *double* ROT13... so rot13 your text and then rot13 it again and just try and guess how that might relate to the original unencrypted data. Actually I believe he is a person who works in security, as double rot13 is kind of a "trick" of the trade these days.

Re: Today's shiny new Smart TV = Tomorrow's dated set you're already wanting to replace

I completely agree, unfortunately you hardly can find a mid to upper end TV that's not had the not-so "smart" additions. I just went through the exercise of replacing my 10 year old rear projection TV this year as it started to go it did 1080i fine until it kicked the bucket and I've got multiple external devices to do all the "smart" goodness (Tivo, Xbox, Blu-Ray, etc) so I didn't really want a smart TV. I ended up getting a "smart" one but don't use any of those features and still let my external devices do their thing.

From my experience is it seems TV manufacturers are separating their high end from their low end how much additional non-tv tasks it can do. The difference between the $500 and $800 model is the $800 can do Netflix (or you could buy the cheap TV and 3x AppleTV's), it costs them next to nothing to put that piece of software on add $1.00 for a ethernet and you've got a nice chunk of profit. You want a high end panel with good response time, etc that is purely a display only device I was unable to really find any in the $2-3k range, if you want to jump to the $5-6k on a TV they have a few that are non-polluted (but that's changing as well). Only the low end models any more are a "dumb" old traditional TV.

Re: Netapp has another ace

What??? Pretty much everybody in the storage industry is saying the exact opposite, NetApp doesn't have a flash/ssd solution and that EMC does. Just look on the blogs, NetApp has been talking how they don't need a flsh/ssd solution because their PAM cards are all that's needed... but are now changing that tune as they have a product. In fact EMC have an all SSD array already shipping that you can purchase. Rather than saying EMC needed it to compete with NetApp, the reality is more that EMC purchased it to keep NetApp from competing with them, delaying their entry into the market EMC is already in and shipping a product for. You gotta have deep, deep pockets but the fact is they have a product and NetApp doesn't.

The way WAFL works is that it always does full raid writes to avoid a penalty of having to read in existing data from disk. The entire point of WAFL is to avoid the partial raid write latency impact of rotating rust, using flash storage removes the rotating disk latency impact so the value of WAFL on flash becomes pretty much null. If you have enough cache in the array any array can do full raid writes just like NetApp (that cache might have to be infinitely large though), WAFL just allows it to write "anywhere" in an aggregate so blocks generally are not sequentially close to each other. If you go to an advanced NetApp performance class the instructor (at least ours did) will directly say that NetApp's are designed for high write performance not read performance because of this. I've found from our NetApp's that reads are generally the speed of a drive seek, for random read workload doesn't impact much, but if your workload has any sequential work load you can drive seek yourself into very slow performance.

Re: Isilon slow?

The Isilon has two series: the X series geared towards sequential video streams (like NetApp's LSI arrays) and the S series geared towards random I/O.

From the specfs benchmark which does test a good chunk of random workload: the Isilon S200 series hits 1.6 million and the largest 24x node NetApp 8.1 cluster hits 1.5 million. So I'd say that fully popped either platform can do an "oh my god" level of random I/O for an "oh my god" price point.

Re: Kismet

Why would they capture the data? Because SSID's are generally unique to an area, add in more than one and you have a fairly specific physical location reference. GPS doesn't work everywhere (outside around tall buildings, inside buildings, etc), but using the not that acurate cell tower triangulation with wifi SSID's and you can get a fairly specific physical location reference without any GPS signal at all.

I have a Motorolla Razr Maxx and it has an option to due certain things based upon location (i.e. at work change cell phone ring to vibrate, at home audible ring, etc). It uses wifi ssid to identify when you are at each location.

Apple uses (or possibly used now and built their own database) Skyhook for non GPS location via wifi and cell tower mapping.

http://www.skyhookwireless.com/location-technology/coverage.php

Re: Thanks GOP

Why do you think I'm a member of the GOP? Oh I get it in your world anybody who is against something is automatically a member of the GOP... a closed minded political bigot. Good to know.

I find it very interesting you intentionally forget to mention that it was unanimously passed in the House, and unanimously passed in the Senate and signed into law by Clinton... but it was only one party who is responsible. It's not like the current VP of the US was invited to a special event by the RIAA/MPAA to honor his and 3x other members of the legislature on getting it through or anything. Oh sure it's just the GOP, not like everybody or anything; oh to be able to live in your black and white world....

On net neutrality have you read the law (also do you know it was sponsored by both GOP & DEM)? I have a similar problems with it... it doesn't do what most people think it does. It only protects lawful data (paragraph 64), so if you are downloading some content not available in your country via an in country proxy net neutrality doesn't protect you at all. Additionally there is no real prevention of degrading service, they can't degrade your torrent download/ netflix stream to where it's unusable but they can make it run at less than a MB legally (paragraph 66). ISP's are still allowed to degrade the service of people who use more than others (paragraph 73), don't get me started on how bizarre they are applying rules to mobile internet. Again like the idea, like most of it, but there are some real problems in the FCC rules.

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1223/FCC-10-201A1.pdf

We should *always* be worried about badly worded bills from both parties, I still don't understand why you seem think that a poorly written bill is just "peachy keen".

As I'm a registered independent who has an open mind and willing to call both parties out, I'm not getting into your whole GOP is evil and Dem are just fine (emphasized by your intentional lack of any complaints about them). But I will disagree in your supposition in that this amendment was good, it was bad, very bad period.

Re: Thanks GOP

Maybe if the writers would actually write a good bill people would vote for it.

I'd vote for an amendment saying that "individuals can not be required or coerced to disclose personal account or password information to current or prospective employers".

I would not for vote an amendment saying that "Congress will give FCC the power to regulate privacy on the internet which also includes the ability to make rules about mandating disclosure of passwords by job applicants ".

If you can't understand the difference between the two than you are simply an idiot. Write a good law to begin with and people from either party will vote for it, write a poorly drafted one even if it has good intentions behind it and (smart) people will not vote for it. What part of that is hard to understand for you?

Really, do you want another poorly written DMCA type law on the books? Because that's what this amendment is another crappy reaction that has basically good intentions but written horribly, how hard would it be to re-write that paragraph to contain what I wrote vs the broad sweeping crat that was actually in the amendment... but I guess you are all for DMCA type laws based on emotion rather than intelligence. Me, I prefer to have a well written law that explicitly says employers can't look at my stuff rather than saying if the FCC decides to in the future do something they can but they don't have to.

Re: Thanks GOP

I'd suggest you read the amendment first (it's literally a paragraph long)... it was way over reaching and removed much of the power from the legislature and gave it to the FCC... as such it *should* have been dumped like the DMCA, not a completely horrible idea but a completely horribly written law.

It was giving the FCC additional power to create rules over *all* privacy matters, not just job seeking social network passwords. It didn't even say that the FCC had to prevent it, it was all about giving the FCC direct power to make rules about online privacy without the need of any congressional oversight and if the future they were to make a rule it could possibly include one about social media passwords and the legislature couldn't do anything about it no matter how bad or good it is. Having seen how messed up the FCC is about showing a nipple on TV, I'm not ready to give them that power; not sure why any sane person would want to give them that power either. Granting power to groups of the government (especially one that isn't voted in by the people) needs to be *explicitly* stated instead of wide sweeping grant of power to regulate all of something. With this amendment, the FCC could make a requirement that everything needs to go through a "great wall of US" firewall to protect the privacy of US citizens from other countries, extreme example yes, but this amendment would allow them to do that completely legally and there really would be no person to vote out of (or into) office about it.

1 SEC. 5. PROTECTING THE PASSWORDS OF ONLINE USERS.

2 Nothing in this Act or any amendment made by this

3 Act shall be construed to limit or restrict the ability of

4 the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a rule

5 or to amend an existing rule to protect online privacy, in

6 cluding requirements in such rule that prohibit licensees

7 or regulated entities from mandating that job applicants

8 or employees disclose confidential passwords to social net

9 working web sites.

No it doesn't say:

"it could be losing as much as 24 billion tons OR as little as zero".

It says that "it could be losing as much as 24 billion tons or GAINING as much as 16 billion. For some reason you decided to forget about half of the the plus or minus part.

If you are going to go around correcting people, if you don't want to look like a complete ass your complaint should really be correct... or maybe your agenda is showing.

Hmmm... would you care to provide some facts to backup your data?

Please feel free to backup your statement with some actual documentation that it is *not* illegal. What I've found is that there is quite a bit of murkiness as to it's legality but you have made a very definitive statement that it is not illegal. There is no question in your statement, so please provide some evidence that is as conclusive as you make it to be.

From what I know, there was a previous situation in the UK with the website tv-links which would seem to imply that it's not that legal in the UK.

http://www.fact-uk.org.uk/site/latest_news/October2007.htm

The site, TV Links (www.tv-links.co.uk), was providing links to illegal film content that has been camcorded from within a cinema and then uploaded to the Internet. The site additionally provided links to TV shows that were also being illegally distributed.

takes a lot less than 30% for music???

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Apple-iTunes-Royalties-music,news-2665.html

"Currently iTunes charges 99-cents a song, with 61-cents of that going to the record industry, 9-cents of it going to the artists and the rest going to Apple."

$0.29 / $.99 = 29.29% is what iTunes take or basically 30% of the take per song.

Will it be different for Apples cloud offering and be as you say "a lot less than 30%"? Well lets take a look shall we?

http://theunlockr.com/2011/06/05/apples-100m-payout-to-music-giants-for-icloud-launch/

"Apple has agreed to pay each music label between $25 million to $50 million for their services. The music labels will then share the cost with Apple; 30% will go to Apple, 12% will go to the music publishers, and the remaining will be left to the labels to pay out their artists"

Feel free to bring some factual data along with your posts...

US has one of the highest Corp tax rates in the world

President Obama in his State of the Union speech this very year says the US has one of the *highest* corporate tax rates in the world, and politifact did a verification check and validated that the US does have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Would you care to bring some facts to the table?

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/25/barack-obama/barack-obama-state-union-says-us-corporate-tax-rat/

"Over the years," he said, "a parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries. Those with accountants or lawyers to work the system can end up paying no taxes at all. But all the rest are hit with one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and it has to change."

We found that for 2010, the U.S ranked second to Japan by a fraction of a percentage point -- 39.54 percent for Japan to 39.21 percent for the U.S. But that figure is already outdated: Japan has moved to cut its rate for 2011 by 5 percentage points, leaving the U.S. with the highest corporate tax rate among OECD nations.

No you aren't going to look like a complete twunt

That is unless you go running around making a big scare about it to management, and then later have to look like an idiot.

You said each of your hypervisors have 48GB of RAM in them so having to buy more licenses would make you look bad, however having more license capacity probably wouldn't make you look bad.

An ESX server has a minimum requirement of 2x CPU's (it's base requirement), so taking the absolute worst case situation and you have a two socket CPU configuration you are covered. With the Enterprise license you have 32GB of vram per CPU, since you already have to have 2x CPU's per server by basic requirement you are already have a minimum of 2x Enterprise CPU licenses which give 64GB of RAM per server which is more RAM than you have stated you have in your hypervisor (48GB). In fact you could have just the essential edition and still be covered (24GB/CPU * 2x CPU = 48GB)

I believe he's meaning in aggregate broadcast

With broadcast there is no bandwidth increase based on the number of customers. i.e. 1,000 customers have the same bandwidth requirement a 100,000 to watch a single show at the same time (US HDTV spec has a peak of ~19mb/sec which you never get but that's the spec), ignoring requirements for repeaters, etc you have a constant peak requirement of 19mb/sec. With Netflix, etc (anything that isn't using multicast to send the data) everybody gets their own point in time, you aren't tapping into a constant feed. Minimum bandwidth for a HD Netflix show is around 6mb (it can go higher, lower generally is SD).

So 1000 users watching the same HD show simultaneously

Broadcast = 19mb/sec peak

Netflix = 6,000mb/sec minimum

To put it another way: Comcast has 16.3 million cable customers, if 50% of them are watching something at the same time. It would require 48,900,000 mb/sec or ~46.6 terabit of bandwidth.

Assuming the same 50% of the Comcast customers are watching something, and lets say they are even spread across 200 different shows simultaneously at the peak load of 19.6mb per show that would require at max 798,700mb or ~0.76 terabit of bandwidth.

789700mb / 48900000mb == 1.633% == the percentage 19mb broadcast bandwidth stream requires compared to a 6mb non-broadcast stream for the same number of customers.

I'd say that the current method of "on demand" HD streaming isn't sustainable right now for everybody (maybe in a few years that will change but it won't be cheap), but if there is a switch to multicast or equivalent it could be.

Oracle on the T* boxes

We've had nothing but problems with running Oracle on our T* boxes. The M* series is much, much more suited for it and find the performance of the T* boxes inadequate for what we need it to do. Fewer CPU's with more ooomph per core is much better than lots of slower threads for 99% of all the database instances we have (both OLTP and data warehouse ).

If you do a search on the web our experience with T series and Oracle seems to be the norm rather the oddity. (there's a reason licensing is so cheap for Oracle on the threads... it generally sucks)

Allways have that argument without merit

As a person who's been around some version of unix (workstation to server) for over 2x decades, the argument that unix workstations are safer because people *have* to escalate their privileges for a number of tasks is without merit. (Note the word workstation)

If I download some app off the web that wipes all of my personal photos, do I really care that much that /bin/sh was not able to be modified? Do I care if the browser has a malware addon giving out my bank information to someone else that only gives out information for when I login but not when the the root user does. If my doctoral thesis I've been working on for the past 5 years gets blown away, I really care about it and having to type a password to become root doesn't protect me.

I find the often used argument that a user on a workstation can operate a lower level "protects us" completely devoid of reality. It sounds blasphemous but I don't really care about protecting my workstation OS, that's the last thing I really care about, it's pretty much a throwaway (I have no love for the version of /bin/bash and require keeping it); but I do care a whole hell of a lot about protecting all the things I've done with the OS: i.e. not having files deleted, not having personal files copied, not having my browser leak information, etc. Running as a non-privileged user will not protect you against that. The ability to break into root on a workstation might get headlines but for the most part who cares if all your user data is gone?

Comcast are pretty much static

@Anton

Ummm... until they did some network changes here, I've had the exact same comcast ip for over a year. That was during power outages, etc. where the routers and cable modem were rebooted. I've also had a port nailed open for multiple days (actually more like multiple weeks) so they don't kick connections either. They definetly don't flip ip's or drop every 24h, not sure where you got that information from. Sure they assign me a dynamic ip address, but if that dynamic address doesn't change for over a year (through reboots, etc) you can hardly say that ip tracking isn't useful. Additionally even modem banks which have a high-rate of change per customer haae a small finite range of ip's it will use. Using that finite range combined with other data (time of day, etc) u can identify an individual fairly easily as well.