http://www.multipath-tcp.org/

of course, this requires the other end to support it, which it probably doesn't.

I've also considered selling "multipath vpn" service... the idea being that people with two DSL providers (and one dsl and one cable) provider would setup their gateway (or use a linux box that I sell them and manage) to send all packets out VPNs on both connections, to my own vpn endpoint in a datacenter. The idea being that then my server on the other end of that connection would take the first packet and send it on to it's destination. Assuming that my datacenter has a good connection, you would suffer less packet loss, and less latency.

My solution here would solve the problem if the problem is latency/loss on your last mile connection. It would not help at all if the problem was further along the connection, while multipath-tcp would

and a business. Sure, if I hire a company to build me a wall and it turns out faulty, I'm going to want /the company/ to come fix it, or at least give me a refund.

However, if I hire a company to build me a wall, I will pay substantially more than the wages of the person doing the building plus the cost of materials. And the employee who built the wall? He or She is going to get paid either way. Of course, if they continue to screw up, they will miss out on promotions/raises and/or will get fired. But they will get paid for the time they worked up until they get fired.

In my jurisdiction, withholding /employee/ wages is extremely illegal. Sure, you can fire under-performers, but you've gotta pay them for the hours they worked.

This is a huge part of the difference between being an employee and being a company. Who takes the risk?

I mean, bandwidth, at their scale, has got to be pretty cheap, and raising prices on existing customers? always pisses people off.

Personally, though, this is okay for me; I use the DVDs and I don't stream, so a small discount is welcome.

yeah, the advantage of bcache is that it will automatically cache the stuff you use often (which yes, can be a disadvantage, too) - I'm just thinking for something like a database server (not that I'd use bcache in a prod database server until it was more stable and until it supported mirroring the SSD) you have large files where parts of the file need caching and other parts of the file don't. A block cache helps with that more than manually symlinking files.

with your own hard drive and your own SSD. It'd probably cost less, too. http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/

Probably the best programmer I know outright states that he can't productively code for more than four hours a day; but he gets more done in those four hours than most people can do in a week.

If you outright tell people to work for 10-11 hours a day, first your good programmers will all leave. Next, those who can't immediately get better jobs will take long lunches, show up a little late and leave a little early. If you enforce time in-seat somehow, you will have more and more people spending time on slashdot or facebook.

it doesn't do much for I/O. ionice, a much newer program does something similar to what 'nice' does for CPU for I/O intensive tasks. It's pretty good, not as good as nice is for cpu-bound tasks, but eh.

If you are doing something non-interactive that uses a lot of I/O, use IOnice. experiment, but I find

  ionice -p [pid] -c 2 -n 7

to produce reasonable results.

is that while my co-author and I split 15% of the wholesale price (about half the cover price) on physical books, we get something closer to 50% of any ebook sales... and, I think, if the ebook was bought direct from the publisher, that's 50% of what was paid. So even though e-book sales are a pretty small portion of total book sales, on the last statement I got from my publisher, ebook sales comprised a rather large portion of the money actually paid to me.

I've you've ever been to the sf bay area during rush hour, most commuters would give their left nut for the ability to drive in HOV lanes. This will be /huge/ - the volt, with it's integrated range extending gas engine seems like a better idea than the all-electric leaf, but the market value of a HOV sticker, even without the rebates has got to be five or ten grand.

yeah, uh, honestly, if I were a cellphone retailer, I'd advertise it as a feature, right next to battery life (though I imagine there is an inverse correlation between battery life and transmitter power)

I think the largest difference between exxon and BP is not who owns the company, but who's front yard you are shitting on. the gulf coast has some seriously expensive real-estate, and lots of people in a position to fight back.

as a previous poster said, this sort of thing usually happens to third world, where the victims don't have nearly the power to fight back that the residents of the gulf coast have. If this happened to the California coast, the outcry would be even greater; simply because more powerful people would have been directly harmed.

 

I think it has more to do with it being a large corporation sh-tting all over our frontyard. I mean, if my business is driving trucks, say, and I don't properly maintain my air pressure and as a result I have a blowout and I run over your minivan, you are going to want me to buy you a new minivan and pay the medical bills, right? and you are probably going to be pretty pissed at me, even if I do manage to pay for all the stuff I broke.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect BP to pay to clean up it's /very expensive/ mess, and considering how long it has taken them to even stem the flow, I think some anger is reasonable, too.

This isn't about being anti-british or even anti-corporate. this is about cleaning up after yourself when you make a mess of other people's property.

In my market, Virtualization means that I will run fewer, much larger (I mean, not /big iron/ ... we're talking dual socket, 16-24 core opterons with 64GiB ram) servers, rather than many smaller servers. The market I rent servers to demands small servers. I can save a lot of money by running one 64GiB, 24 core monster vs 8 8GiB boxes.