Posts by Chris_Maresca
116 posts • joined Monday 23rd November 2009 17:32 GMT
Re: Excuse me, sir...
Thing is in most jurisdictions, photo tickets are illegal in a variety of ways and very, very easy to defeat. BTDT twice. Most people loose in court because they are using some random excuse, not a technicality based in law. One of the easiest ways to defeat it is to do a discovery request on the contract between the municipality & the photo company. 9 out of 10 times this will be refused and your case will be dismissed.
Re: Amurrica Strong!!
LOL, that's very funny.
You mean like what happened in Cuba? Or perhaps Korea? And what will the Europeans do when the Russians come knocking? Perhaps they will throw Euros at them...
I was on a flight a week ago - of the people in my row, only I powered down my device - pretty sure everyone else just put theirs in airplane mode...
How do I know? Well, on landing, the others were instantly using their iPhones - mine took about a minute to boot up....
I actually think that people believe that airplane mode is all that's required and don't actually know how to fully power off their devices. My guess is that only 30% of fliers actually power off their devices.
Re: The Tree is Dead
I have the exact reverse - HP has always been much better to me (once even did a 2-day turn around on broken laptop over a weekend during x-mas holidays...) than Dell (my experience mirrors the above script...) over the last 20 years. So much so that I would never, ever buy another Dell, although I might buy an HP. That said, I mostly only use Macs these days which rarely fail and manage to retain their value for more than six months....
More than anything, this just shows the stupidity of Google's interview process....
Kevin Lynch has no vision...
In 2006, I was hired by Adobe to do a strategy review of mobile flash. What I said was that there was an opportunity for flash to be the default UI for mobile, but only if they open sourced it as it was clear that some sort of Linux on mobile (aka Android) would emerge as the leader and an ecosystem would form around it.
Kevin was aggressively against the idea, couldn't see where mobile was headed, that flash was in danger of being an also ran and that there was an opportunity for Adobe to lead in a new market of mobile, apps and data.
I hope Apple understands that they are hiring mr status quo. Actually, they probably do since they are coasting on the energy & innovation of Jobs. This is just another sign of a long, slow decline....
??????
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/globalinfrastructure/#reglink-eu
RFID/iButton Access Control system
I'm building an RFID/iButton access control system for a warehouse where I have a workshop.
Basically 3-4 readers, 2-3 doors, logging and a web interface (though not hooked up to the net). Also looking at bluetooth + phone app as another 'key'.
Not that secure
A friend of mine has a twin brother and they regularly used to fool the biometric readers at a datacenter we used to work at. They used a similar 'vein pattern' technology.
Needless to say, the security guards were pretty freaked out....
Re: Or, maybe ...
Living here in Silicon Valley and interacting quite frequently with Googlers, I would say that this is spot on. It's like they don't even bother using their own search software to see if anyone else has already BTDT...
Google is a cult, at least for the people working there, quite a few of whom will (inadvertently?) refer to it as 'home'...
Re: Hey, Jack ...
Maybe he has 480v industrial at home, how do you know? Quite a lot of older converted buildings still have that...
Posted in Why you need a home lab to keep your job
AWS anyone?
Seriously, there are few reasons to have a lot of servers at home, particularly if you are focused on software. Learn how to build, deploy & manage cloud infrastructure - that's high value and you don't need a rack full of servers in your house.
I used to have a 'home lab' as well, but I've moved on to more modern infrastructure hosted elsewhere....
They should shut it down and give shareholders their money back
Michael Dell was right.... He should listen to his own advice
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html
Re: Shooting themselves in the foot? - yes, by releasing Win 8.
Funny enough, Windows 7 is far better than Linux on my laptop - battery life is around 30% longer and all the hardware works perfectly. The reality is that, as a consumer desktop, Linux still has a long, long way to go, although I agree that OSX is far better than either Windows or Linux.
Linux is usable on the desktop, but it's not nearly as easy for the average person as either OSX or Win7. And those people don't know what a command lines, file paths or directory layouts are. And the fact that you focus on these things as why Windows sucks is exactly why Linux is still a crappy desktop...
Posted in WTF is... WebRTC?
Re: WebRTC==Wannabes encouraging boys Reacting To Crap
I start using new technologies when they solve problems for me
Er, that's exactly what I did - that was my point.
For some segment of the population, it's useful, just because you can't see that doesn't mean it's worthless.
Peering agreements vs depeering
Why is this surprising? Google is exactly like any other large network operator, it negotiates peering agreements with other networks. When there is a traffic imbalance, peering agreements often move from settlement-free peering to depeering, where one network pays another to carry the excess traffic.
It's not odd, new or bad. It's the way all networks have operated since the beginning of networks, although internet traffic was often not imbalanced between networks, so settlement-free peering was the norm for a long time. However, that has not been the case for a while, people have been paying for various forms of depeering for at least 10 years, either through edge-caching, via telco-run carrier hotels or simply paying for fatter pipes/cache co-location directly to telco-owned ISPs...
I'm not surprised France Telecom/Orange are making money from Google. They are a virtual monopoly in France, both on the bulk carrier and ISP sides, and probably in carrier hotel as well. They are also a major mobile carrier in globally (another form of ISP these days) and probably have a dominant position in most of Francophone Africa.
I'd be shocked if France Telecom/Orange were not making millions from Google through selling them fat pipes (dark & live) and co-location at their network edges, never mind datacenter space...
Posted in WTF is... WebRTC?
Re: WebRTC==Wannabes encouraging boys Reacting To Crap
Really? I built an internal app in about 20 minutes that allows the scanning of pages via a webcam.....
Show me how to do that quickly in any other way that's capable of deploying across 3 different operating systems...
While I understand the motivation...
... it might be a lot easier & cheaper to just license MedSphere, which is built on an open-source version of Vista EHR and is fully commercial supported.
Re: Torvalds is the greatest manager of them all
I suggest you lookup 'flame war".
This is hardly abuse in the context of what is the equivalent of a bunch of programmers meeting & discussing other people's code, particularly on a mailing list. And, you know nothing of either the way programmers discuss code or of the relationship between the people involved. The only thing you see is a snippet of a discussion and draw conclusions from only that
Oh, and Linus doesn't have any managerial duties at the Linux Foundation.
Re: Err...
Sometimes it's management who isn't listening and you have to get angry for them to listen.
It's sometimes referred to as being 'passionate' but often dismissed as being 'emotional'. In some places, people getting angry is the ONLY thing management responds to....
But, hey, perhaps you've only worked in blessed places where this never happens.
Re: You actually use 19th avenue to get to the GG bridge?
SF had freeways. They ruined the city and threatened to fall down in an earthquake (see the Oakland freeway circa 1989), thus were torn down in the early '90s.
The real problem is all the people who think that living in Marin and working in Palo Alto is a good plan. Note, those are the same people who fought against extending BART to Marin because it would bring 'undesirable people' over the bridge.....
You need to architect for AWS
Reducing costs by hosting on AWS is not just about re-provisioning existing systems with AWS instances, you have to architect apps to take advantage of the way AWS works. This requires an understanding off all AWS services and figuring out how to map those to your needs.
I spent the last 5 months doing this with a client's application and we reduced hosting costs to roughly 10% of what they were compared to traditional hosting.... Of course we spent about 3 months re-engineering parts of the application, but in the end that work also made it more robust and scalable.
Also, if you have an app with spiky demand that needs to scale rapidly (e.g. customer facing) then AWS is a great solution - see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/30/inside_pinterest_virtual_data_center/ for Pinterest experience in doing this and keeping their hosting costs to $35-$52/hr.
Re: We could try making some stuff ourselves
Not necessarily. GE is bringing back appliance manufacturing & cutting the price by 30%
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing-boom/309166/
Re: Twelve channels of CCTV bleating the wonders of BeiJing policies
Easy to hide satellite dish. A friend of mine spent quite a lot of the late 80's installing them all over latin america.
All you need is a pond or a pool. Drain it, put you dish in it, put a tarp over it. God know how many tarp covered unfinished 'construction projects' there are all over China....
Or you can get the best of both worlds....
Murfie will store both your physical CDs and give you streaming access to them through their service.
https://www.murfie.com/features
Of course, you can also have a local electronic copies of your music as well....
Posted in Intel launches Atom S Series at servers
Re: Anyone else thinking...
Probably not. I remember reading that electricity in large internet co's is close to 50% of the operating costs (I don't remember any more detail than that and no link, sorry). In that context, any reduction in usage is pure profit.
I had a 2 lb laptop in 1995
It was a Fujitsu, don't remember the model. Minimal set of ports, 1/2 in thick. Came with a very cool docking station that had a full set of ports & a CD-ROM drive. It was actually lighter than the 1st gen Air (had one of those as well....), with roughly similar battery life (2hrs if you were lucky). Not as thin and all plastic, 'tho.
Apple is not the first one to build a minimalist light laptop, although I had a PowerBook Duo back in the day that came pretty close - it was replaced by the Fujitsu, then by an Acer of similar spec, but with a 14" screen...
Re: I have been
Might check out the Toshiba z830. Similar spec, lighter weight and seems to be on sale everywhere. It's a late 2011 model, so it's much cheaper (e.g. 1/2 the price). I just got one for cheap, seems pretty good so far. Battery life is supposedly upwards of 7+ hours.
Re: WTF?
i just bought a Toshiba Z830 - it has a backlit keyboard. It also weighs 1/2 lb less than an Air, has 3 hours more battery life and a full set of ports. Oh, and it costs $500, not $1000+.
That said, the resell value in 2 years will be exactly zero - while the Air will probably still be worth 70% of the purchase price...
Been using Fuduntu
... which, despite the name, is actually a Fedora fork. It's got, IMHO, the best UI of any desktop distro.
Check it out at http://www.fuduntu.org
Re: Why the NDA?
Of course, if it gets to court, you could file a discovery motion for all the NDAs.....
Their website doesn't seem to work right in Chrome, no wonder nobody buys their stuff...
Posted in Ten four-bay NAS boxes
Re: What I'd be looking for in such a thing
I have an NV+, it's pretty quiet except when it wakes up and the fan goes full bore.
Had a Thecus, it was AWEFUL. The UI sometimes wouldn't refresh properly, it was slow, very loud, prone to burnt out power supplies and the fan was not adequate enough to cool the drives... It did run Linux on x86, which was nice, but there is very little in the way of community, which is important if you have a problem.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd get a Synology hands down. The NetGear ReadyNAS is nice, but Synology has a much better community & ecosystem.
Posted in Sandy takes out NYC colo facility
Re: 9 hours of unplanned downtime in 12 years is pretty good
For a relatively cheap hosting, it's about as good as it gets. Even Amazon's vaunted redundant 'cloud' isn't as good.... Besides, a wealth of sites with vastly more resources went down as well, from Gizmodo to the Huffington Post, so I think we've done very well with our meager resources.
The reality of infrastructure is that almost no one needs 'five nines' and even fewer people are willing or in a position to pay for it. It's a nice marketing term, but five-nines of the people who throw it around have zero need for it.
Besides, in the modern world, you would want to achieve high-reliability through application architecture as well as good infrastructure. In our case, we could have failed over to a backup datacenter on the West coast, but the question was how long the NYC datacenter would be out, and if it was a good use of our time to migrate everything (it's a cold standby). In our case, the answer is no as we risked some data sync issues and our downtime was during the dead of night for all our customers (and they were all aware of the issues).
Had it not come back up before end-of-day today, we might have considered differently. It's still touch & go, so we might migrate after all.
Posted in Sandy takes out NYC colo facility
Re: The building in not a dedicated colo
Everything came back up (as expected) about a 1/2 hour ago.
I've used this same facility for the last 12 years across 4 different companies and the only other unplanned downtime was a failed switch for two hours about 6 years ago.
This particular outage was a total of 7 hours during what is being described as a 'catastrophic' storm. Overall, I would say that 9 hours of unplanned downtime in 12 years is pretty good.
Posted in Sandy takes out NYC colo facility
The building in not a dedicated colo
The tanks were likely underground as that was where building codes required them to be. Since fire is much more likely than a 100-year flood event, it's pretty sensible. Still, I fail to see why the pumps should fail...
Anyway, I have servers in that colo - they went offline at exactly 8:33 PM PST, according to our monitoring. Here's a link to the location https://maps.google.com/maps?q=75+broad+st,+nyc&hl=en&sll=40.72586,-73.957644&sspn=0.050671,0.129175&gl=us&hnear=75+Broad+St,+New+York,+10004&t=m&z=17
Also, it seems that trans-Atlantic cables are starting to go dark - https://twitter.com/skeevestevens/status/263137865578450944
Easily solved
Laser guided missile - the first kill would put a stop to this instantly. Doesn't even need an armed head, just fill it with paintball paint.
Posted in Apple MacBook Air 13in review
No depreciation
It doesn't matter that XXX brand costs 10x less. After 18 months, brand XXX will be worth exactly 1% of what you paid for it.
In contrast, pretty much any Apple hardware will retain the vast majority of it's value for years. I just sold a 2008 MacBook Air for $630, just as an example. Show me a non-Apple machine from ANY brand that's worth more than 5% of it's value after four years....
Just looking at the initial cost of the machine is shortsighted - over the long term, the Mac's deliver much better TCO.
Of course, if you don't have the money for a new Mac, then it's a moot point. Even then, you should still buy a used Mac, even if you are only going to run Windows on it. Anything else and you are just burning money...
Posted in Carbon fiber MacBooks to appear soon?
Apple TV
It's probably for the Apple TV. TVs are too big to machine out of single block of aluminum and they would be too heavy if you did. CF is a modern and good looking alternative...
Posted in Microsoft promises two-step IE fix
Re: Just fix it quick please
Er, Chromium?
http://www.chromium.org/Home - Fully open source Google Chrome
http://www.apple.com/safari/ - If you'd like to give your data to Apple...
Posted in Peugeot 508 RXH estate car review
Re: Couple of questions
It's because cars typically have much higher compression ratios than industrial equipment. Industrial equipment is probably 8 to 1 and most cars are 10 to 1 or more.
Takes a lot more power to compress the fuel for starting....
Re: IT Pros?
Hmm, I'm in Silicon Valley where we have a lot of experience devs, to say the least.
Macs are by FAR the most common computer in use, probably 80-90% of devs use them, particularly laptops. Going to a conference, you are surrounded by a see of Macs, other machines stick out like a sore thumb. No only that, but a small but significant portion of devs is switching to iPads (with external keyboards).
Here, basically 'IT pros' are anti anything NOT Apple (at least for desktops & laptops). It's the PHBs who argue for MSFT, mostly due to cost and accounting systems running only on Windows. Like someone else said, Google runs on Macs, so do most startups. MacBook + Amazon + coffee = Silicon Valley startup.
Re: OK I'll feed the troll
@ribosome
I think you'll find the TCO of Apple laptops/desktops is actually significantly lower than other brands due to the insane resale values. This is particularly true if you buy refurbished gear direct from Apple, which usually yields a 20-30% discount over list, basically new products and a full warranty.
Just as an example, I sold a 4 year old MacBook Air a few weeks ago for 70% what I had pay for it...
I'm not saying you have to run OSX on your hardware (you could run Windows or Linux), but from a purely economic standpoint, buying Apple gear makes sense. This is also true for tablets & phones, although then you are pretty much stuck with iOS.
Resale value
One thing that drives new adoption is resale value. Apple products have huge resale value. Amazon is currently offering $350 for used iPhone 4s. If you have a subsidized phone that you pay $300 for, you can actually make a little money by upgrading...
And it's not just phones, I sold two 4 year old MacBook Air for 60% of what a new one costs, and an iPad 1 for 90% of what an iPad 2 costs...
I suspect that a lot of the Apple marketplace is driven by these dynamics, which are unique in the computer world. Most other brands loose all their value after 12-18 months.
Re: Smartphone/touch screen history
I had a P800 - you had to use a stylus and it was slow. It was all plastic, the screen was terrible. Battery life was good and voice quality was better than an iPhone, but it was probably the worst smartphone of it's time.
Re: phones moving to touchscreen - yeah, but Apple moved the goal posts for everyone - it was not an incremental rev, it was a huge leap & mindset change. Capacitive, fast reaction, universal connectivity (e.g. cell data & wifi), high build quality (how's the front keyboard working on your P800?), etc. It's the accumulation of technology AND the slick integration that delivered a far better device than anything before it. And it benefited hugely from being an iPod successor, which already had huge adoption.
Never mind that Apple's been trying to create the ultimate portable computer since 1987 (see Newton), this is not just a one off effort but the result of a lot of R&D and failed products.
Re: Let me guess
They'd probably just claim breach of contract, terminate the deal and buy them from somewhere else (like Intel, who can manage the volume).
Or just use a single digit percentage of their cash mountain to build a fab or two.
Re: AC @ 14:28
I guess you missed it:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2012/08/21/apple-now-most-valuable-company-in-history/
Apple Mkt Cap $620b
Samsung Mkt Cap $162b
Game over.
Re: Tumbleweed Moment
Hmm, I had a touchscreen Samsung in 1999 or 2000 - ran PalmOS. Also had every Treo phone out there.
All that said, they were in no way comparable to even a 1st gen iPhone. Apple made a HUGE leap with the touchscreen by using a highly sensitive capacitive touchscreen vs all the previous resistive touch screens, most of which required a stylus to properly use. Never mind easy to dismiss things like UI responsiveness & the tile centric interface.
I was working with Palm & Motorola around the time the iPhone came out and it had a profound effect on some people - others described it as a fad - I'm sure both camps now wish they had an iPhone like fad. There is no doubt that Apple redefined the modern phone interface, so much so that even feature & home phones are getting similar interfaces. And at the time I had a Blackberry....
As far as Apple not having engineering talent - you've got to be kidding. This is a company that built it's reputation on engineering consistently great, easy to use hardware & software and that takes very difficult, complicated engineering, much more difficult than just being first to market with some new thing. Just go look up the story about Steve Jobs obsession with power supplies to understand how deeply high-end engineering is embedded at Apple.
You may not like or use Apple products, but it's hard to deny that they have had engineering excellence and industry defining products for the last 30 years.
"in use for over a decade"
Much, much longer than that. I remember dragging around a SecurID credit-cardy thing in 1994 and various un*x tools have implemented OTP for at least 25 years...
