Posts by Mad Chaz

Or they could have absolutely nothing against him but needed someone to blame and now his life is ruined even if found innocent.

Just saying.

Quebec as it's share of nice light free zones you can go to and look at the stars. Unfortunatly, the part of this wonderful province of Canada I live in as, this time of year, is not good weather for star gazing.

Either it's snowing and the temperature outside is survivable if it's not too windy or you have wind shelter

or

Clear skies and -30C actual temperature outside (as the mercury calls it) and of you are lucky, not windy. Real lucky ...

Just another post

Hello everyone.

Started reading and then I figured I wanted to ask a few more questions and would make one assumtion. As you spoke about having a rack, I suspect you want to use it. As such, I'll assume you want something that will sit inside the same rack. So physically close.

Now the questions.

First, what kind of storage do you have? As in, what kind of OS do you have on it.

The reason I ask is you might want to actually make use of it. If so, I'd suggest you look into what kind of connectivity you can get to it. This is where the OS becomes important. No clue if you can do this in windows, but it's relatively easy to get either iSCSI (over ethernet, 10g would be best) or fiber cards working on Linux. If your storage boxe(s) have the connectivity and/or free PCIe slots, you can use it for your virtual machine storage. Then you can just skip spending on disks and use those you have.

Getting a motherboard with more then one PCIe port migh then be a good idea, so you can get good connectivity. My personal favorite would be iSCSI over 10G, but that's only because I have made it work on 1G and it was almost trivial. I suggest using the raw exported devices for VM disks instead of sitting things on a file system if you can do it, as that avoids some overhead.

For CPU, I would suggest number of cores over processing power, so go AMD. As this is a `for fun` setup, this gives you better interactivity between machines, as you can limit the number of CPU each can use. Memory is what most people will recommend you spend a lot on, but it depends on what kind of machines you want to run on it. Get a pen and paper our (or notepad) and just add up how much you want to give each, then give yourself some room to play. I have 8G on my home setup and it's swap as never been touched running 8 VMs.

If you want a nice easy GUI to play with, Virtualbox on Linux is nice. You need to do a litle command line to setup the virtual disks if you want to use raw devices, but other then that it's simple as pie.

If the command line doesn't scare you, KVM all the way. The only downside I have found to KVM is the lack of proper USB support. If you do everything over the network, that's not an issue. It's a lot more efficient at idle, so your machine will burn less power when it's not working, as less CPU cycles are wasted. On my own home setup, it's a constant 20W less draw on KVM then Virtualbox at idle, according to the UPS anyway. I've also found you could get a litle more CPU power at full use with KVM then with Virtualbox.

On the legal side, remember that microsoft might not like you using home versions inside virtual machines, but I haven't bothered to read up on it. My understanding, and I'm not a law person, is you can use pro licences fine, as long as it's 1vm, 1 licence. No clue if they put actual technical barriers to it or not. Linux of course doesn't care and works wonderfully under VMs.

Not really surprised. If at least d-link followed wifi standard properly, it would be a huge improvement. The number of dlink routers I've seen that "work fine on the old laptop", but for some reason the latest shinny laptop or tablet they got just can't connect to it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

4k is already pointless

Consider this. Right now, on most big screen tv, if you show a modern DVD vs the BR version, most people can't even tell the difference in picture quality. 4K will be the same thing. We are already hitting a wall in term of TV screen quality. The difference between 1080p and 4k won't show, at all, in any living room.

Not only that, but the 3D fiasco already showed people aren't going to flock to get a new screen anymore, as the perseived increase in image quality by going to HD was more then enough for most of them. Besides, who as a grand or 2 to spend every 2 or 3 years just to upgrade to the latest studio mandated fad?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/30/iphone_not_good_enough_for_real_techies/

Guess someone at BB needs to read el'reg

Some of the larger chains here, and even some of the smaller ones, found a very nice way of dealing with the issue. It involves a rather well tried method of bolting things down. In this case, the P.O.S. terminal. (surprising how many other words I can think to fit to those letters)

This came about after a series of actual replacement of terminals while personel was distracted, usually helping an accomplice with something. Doesn't fix the crooked owner problem, but that can be more easilly spoted when people who start complaining all went to the same place.

"doing things that machines are probably better at doing"

I love how he even admits he as no freaking clue what he's talking about. Yes sir, machines are "probably" better at it, once the humans have properly programmed them, and you'll need humans to look after the automated machines too. Let's call those "system administrators" ....

"The search for more money"

I use my credit card for pretty much everything I can get away with. Why? 1% cash back in the form of points I can use to buy groceries, 2% when I actually do the groceries and some extra points for using re-usable bags. Everyone eats and as it as zero annual fees, it was the best kickback I could find. How much does the card cost me in interest? Nothing, because I pay the balance entirely at the end of every month.

It's kind of nice to get a 100$ of grocery and only pay 20 at the register.

So, it won't be here for at least another 2 years. And that's just for the kits to start being made, never mind actually being put in the home. In the mean time, even in Quebec, we're seeing fiber role outs pretty much everywhere, even less densely populated areas. I somehow doubt this will see any kind of use, ever.

I think it's interesting to be in IT period. A lot of shifts going on right now. Back, middle and front end, as we move back to basically the old mainframe model, on a much much larger scale, in the buisness.

What's disturbing is how it tries to force itself into consumer products in sometimes very stupid ways. Think a router that needs the internet to be configured in the first place, a little while back. I'm also thinking some people who figured it would be a good idea to have all the processing done for games on servers. Both stupid ideas.

In the business, I'm a little worried it often ends up just leading to uncontrolled sprawls of unknown systems with no one competent taking care of them, all sitting in the cloud and getting charged to some company credit card.

Still, all this shift in buzzwords still all sounds like the same kind of challenges we've faced before, only with new buzzwords and with less technically savy salesmen getting in the way of what's really going on.

Most secure OS is one where the most vulnerable element, located generally around 18 inches from the screen, as had proper training in the basic skill of reading.

Unfortunately, those are surprisingly rare.

This would work well in Quebec, where we have a lot of power generation capacity that's clean. Maybe we could stop giving the power away to compagnies owned overseas and use it ourselves ...

Now if they could just apply that same kind of anti-bullshit logic to computer laws ... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/28/doj_cfaa_update/

The more I read on this, the more I realise how important it is to keep these kinds of compagnie from "spilling over".

The SMS part is what bugs me. Sooo, you plan to charge people to whom you send the adds? We had carriers try that here in Canada. They didn't like how it was handled. It basically went like this "Ok, you don't want it opt-in? Fine, but any custumor who calls to have it re-impurse must have it payed back. Oh and they are allowed to call either in bulk, say for all the spam in the month, or for every message. They get to pick".

They soon realised the call center costs were more then the spamvertising revenues.