Meanwhile, on this very comment page for this very article about how MacKeeper is spreading malware... there are two ads on this page pushed by Slashdot for.... wait for it... MacKeeper.

So, will Bingbooks hit a price point that makes them reach a critical mass, or will it be yet another swing-and-miss?

Or a film studio!

There's this annoying ad for Staples office supply store on
tv. I call up directory assistance, get their number, and give
'em a buzz.

          "Hello, is this Staples?"
          "Yes it is. How may I help you."
          Too eager to please.
          "I was just wondering how you came up with the name of the
store. I mean, you sell staples, right?"
          "Yes we do. We're the one-stop off--"
          "Yes, I'm sure you are, but tell me. John Wanamaker's. Do
they sell wanamakers?"
          "Well, I--"
          "Do you even know what a wanamaker is?"
          "I think--"
          "No, of course you don't. What do you make? Minimum? Less?
Christ, you sound young, had your first period yet?"
          "Exc--"
          "Use tampons or pads? You know if you use tampons, no guy'll
believe you're a virgin. Then you'll get a reputation and you'll
never get married. And--"
          "I don't--"
          "Excuse me. I digressed. Now tell me, you sell file cabinets,
right?"
          "Yes we do."
          "And you sell those little mail trays you put on your desk
that say 'In' and 'Out', right?"
          "Yes we do. We're the one-stop--"
          But you don't call yourself 'File cabinets', right? I mean,
that's a pretty stupid name. And you sure as hell don't call
yourself 'Those little mail trays you put on your desk that say
"In" and "Out"', right? I mean, that name really sucks."
          "Why, why are--"
          "All right, follow me here. What does a supermarket sell?"
          "F-food."
          "Good. Shit, you should earn more than minimum. Christ, I
could have my old man put you on the payroll down here. . .Shit,
what was I--oh yeah, food, right? But does the supermarket call
itself 'Food'? Noooo. It's called a supermarket."
          "I-I didn't--"
          "Listen, I'd love to stay and talk to you longer, but I gotta
go do something to my dog. You understand."
          "Waaahhhhh. . ."
          So it wasn't such a bad day after all.

RICHH

---- From the RICHH Archives (http://www.lunabase.org/~faber/RICHH/)

I suggest you do not Google "How to get 12 year olds excited."

Yammer is like Facebook, but for business!

Facebook At Work is like Facebook, but for business!

So Yammer copied Facebook, and Facebook copied Yammer... where's the egg?

That's cute.

You like to throw jabs and insults, yet you don't actually back any of it up. I'm impressed by you. Really.

... or I know plenty, and didn't feel the need to wave my nerd around to show you how big it is.

100GBASE-LR4 is still a multiplex. It runs over a single physical fiber pair. That doesn't mean it's a 100Gbps signaling rate.

My comment was to the one above mine, not to the one my magic hat predicted from you in the future. In the comment to which I replied, the poster was grumbling that 100Gbps ethernet is commercially available today in contrast to "something which runs at 25Gb, over 32 fiber pairs."

Was my statement wrong? Or did I just not feel the need to enumerate every single PHY variant to satisfy you?

And 100Gbps ethernet runs over 10 fiber pairs.

Your point?

For many consumer-level printers, it's often cheaper to buy 2 new printers than replace the toner/ink.

Or at least pretty damn close in many cases.

For many consumer-level printers, it's often cheaper to buy a new printer than replace the toner/ink.

Landfills are printer graveyards.

No, what you're describing is virtualization.

Virtualization management tools do exactly what you just said. You add resources to your pool, and your VM management system decides how to utilize the backend resources within the guidelines that you've configured. VMware, as one example, uses what they call DRS ( Distributed Resources Scheduler) to monitor and reallocate VM load across physical hosts.

Managing VMs with abstraction tools is not a "cloud." It's managing your virtualization infrastructure.

This reinforces my earlier point exactly -- the term "cloud" is far too ambiguous. Virtualization management is *part* of what makes a "cloud" but it does not make a cloud on its own (by most definitions).

What you're describing is virtualization.

"Cloud" is a stupid buzzword that quite simply means "resides on someone else's stuff."

Whether it's Amazon's stuff, Rackspace's stuff, or Microsoft's stuff -- it's not your stuff. You don't worry about physical servers, disks, or OS (in many cases.) Take it a level higher and if your cloud service includes databases or middleware, you don't worry about that either. Or even applications. Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk basically lets you publish your website code directly to it and the rest is magic that you don't have to mess with.

Then we turn it all around and create "private clouds" which means "we want to be trendy but don't trust someone else's stuff."

The pundits and pedants will mix in all kinds of semi-fabricated points about things that "must" be true in order for something to qualify as a "cloud," private or not, such as auto-provisioning and/or automated management, etc.

We used to call it "hosted services." Some marketing knob decided that the industry needed a more bandwagonny word for people to latch onto. Thus the term "cloud" was born, and it continues to be confused, misunderstood, and abused in perpetuity -- a condition that illustrates what a huge failure the very forces that coined this nonsense have done in making it clear to the consuming public what it actually is supposed to be about.

If you can disable them, how are you not given a choice?

Your disagreeing with their default state is not equivalent to not having a choice.

My kingdom for some mod points...