... since the unexpected end of the century in '99.
(What is actually surprising is that the internet still hasn't widely adopted IP6, and ISPs are now turning to ludicrous measures - NAT - to keep avoiding what makes sense.)
Wow, that was unexpected that the century ended a full year earlier than it was supposed to.
Not necessarily. I am a religious fundamentalist, and science is all well and good in my book, to a point. And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
Really though, not trying to troll. Just saying those two groups are not necessarily mutually inclusive, though sometimes that is the case.
Wow, just wow. You say that science is all well and good, as long as it is within the realms of "this is what we've been able to prove thus far." Whereas I can understand the logic behind that reasoning, it runs completely contradictory to you being a religious fundamentalist. You're willing to blindly believe in the stories from some old tribal book, but you only believe in science if it is concretely proven?
Hypocrite much?
LOL, how appropriate.
i have a desktop, laptop, and iPad. Since buying the iPad I have only used my desktop or laptop twice. Once for downloading from Bittorrent last week when my crappy Time Warner DVR crapped out and didn't record LOST, and I didn't want to wait until the next day for it to appear in ABC's iPad app. The second time was when I wanted to transfer an hour of HD video from my video camera to my computer.
So yes the iPad isn't perfect for every job, but neither is a desktop or a laptop computer for most people. Most people can make due with one computer, whether it is a desktop, laptop, or iPad.
WebOS is the best mobile OS available, with Android a close second, so there is plenty of value there. Palm also hold a lot of valuable IP and Patents.
Wow, got blinders? Good job ignoring the 800 pound Apple shaped gorilla in the room. You know, the company that actually makes the best OS and the best hardware, which is backed up by their sales figures, and people actually want and buy it. There are tons of Android phones on the market and they can't even compete with a single Apple phone with regards to marketshare?
If you guys want a better browser download the 99 cent Atomic Browser. It has tabbed browsing (and opens tabs in the background if you want it to), and you can load as many tabs as you want. With Mobile Safari you're limited to like 8 "windows" I think. With Atomic Browser not only can you open as many as you want, but when you switch back to the first tabs you opened it doesn't reload the page like Mobile Safari does (Safari kicks old windows out of RAM to make room for new ones, forcing you to reload when you return to the page, Atomic Browser keeps them all loaded. This is more noticeable with the iPad where you're lucky to get 4-5 pages before Mobile Safari starts reloading old ones). The only downside to Atomic Browser is that when you close the app and open it back up, it reloads every tab. I spoke with the developer about it, and he says it is a limitation of the iPhone SDK, but the new "saved state" feature in iPhone OS 4.0 may allow for him to keep the tabs between sessions without having to reload them.
If you don't want to pay the buck download the free version which has some limitations but it gives you a good sense of the browser.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with this developer I just recently found this app and am telling everyone about it because it is leaps and bounds ahead of Mobile Safari.
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/566/
I mean seriously, do they have to invade Poland?
Wow, Godwined already. Only at Slashdot can an article about a computer manufacturer and a supermarket chain get godwined so quickly.
Many of the apps we used (hello, Oracle Colaboration suite, looking at you) require really messing with system files to make work decent. This makes other programs very unhappy, so apps like these really need to run on their own box.
This makes sense now: incompetent server developers are the driver behind this aspect of VMs. Other aspects are independent of this, but a lot of people responding here have simply taken for granted that most servers are written by monkeys, and are therefore unable to play nicely with others.
I kind of figured this was the case, having written server code (back in the '90's) and seen the gyrations my team went through to make sure we were able to run without requiring a stepped-on environment, but I found it hard to believe that badly-written server code had become so common as to make virtualization the only viable solution.
Yes and no. As I said before a server typically runs at 5%-15% utilization. So if you want to get the most out of your hardware without virtualization, you'd need to run the equivalent of 6-20 servers' worth of applications on there. So that means that for example you may have a domain controller, a print server, a file server, an IIS server, an Apache server, a Tomcat server, the backup server, etc. all on one box. So if the backup server isn't doing anything and you want to install a patch and reboot it, you now bring down all of those other services, or you have to wait until off hours to do it.
Yes, poorly written code and custom configuration is a good reason to go to virtualization, but even properly written software works better when a server is isolated for one or a few select purposes, in the sense that you won't effect other systems when you need to be brought down.
I've never really understood the fuss around VMs. Sure , they're useful if you want to test run an OS install or run a different OS on top of another. But otherwise whats the point? Instead of having app + OS you end up with app + VM + OS so how exactly is that benefiting anyone other than the power company for the extra electricity used?
Because for the most part, most servers don't run anywhere near full capacity (and if they do, then they are probably not good candidates for virtualization, except possibly for high availability purposes which I will go over in the second paragraph). I forget the study but I read once that on average a typical server sits at 5-15% utilization. So the idea behind products like VMware ESX is that if you need 5 unique servers, instead of buying 5 servers at $5,000 a piece, you buy 1 server for $5,000 + 1 $5,000 VMware license, and run the 5 virtual servers on that. So you spend $10,000 instead of $25,000, and your footprint is 1/5th of what it was before, meaning less racks, less cooling, less power, etc. And the numbers I gave are very conservative. A lot of people do 10-20 VMs per server easily.
So cost, power, and cooling issues aside, there are other issues. In a typical server environment, if a physical server suffers from a catastrophic hardware failure, that server is down until someone can walk over and swap the hardware. With VMware, if a VM is running on a server and that server fails, the VM is cold booted on another ESX server automatically, and is typically up in 30-60 seconds. With the newest release of ESX server, called vSphere, they take it a step further. You can optionally choose to have A VM mirror itself on to another physical ESX server. So in the event of a hardware failure, the VM keeps running on the mirrored host. And then, it becomes the primary VM and sets itself up to mirror automatically on another ESX server. So you have ZERO downtime and the app re-mirrors itself. These are just some of the many useful features in VMware.
And no, I do not work for VMware. I am a contractor for the Air Force and over the past 2 years I have converted almost 200 physical servers to VMs. We are a relatively small program, but our projections show that we will save $2,000,000 over 10 years just on the cost of servers (and yes, i have added in the cost of VMware licenses and support into that equation), and that doesn't even account for power and cooling savings. We've gone from almost 200 physical servers distributed over 7 full racks racks down to 28 servers in 2 racks (2 racks only because they are two separate facilities. Each rack only contains a single HP c-class chassis)
I think the real question is, how can you NOT understand the fuss around VMs?
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