A while back I ran across these little boxes. They were being phased out, and were on sale. I bought one, and found that VMware ESXi works great on the... so I got 5 more ;)

I set them up with ESXi, and put 5 1TB drives in a midtower case running Linux with 3 GigE NICs, and setup NFS shares and iSCSI targets (just to play around). Bond the NICs and have ESX use it for datastores... all for $3,600.

Tada! Instant "blade" environment w/SAN! Sure, the performance isn't quite the same, but for proving out concepts and experimenting, it's awesome. And ESX is fun to play with compared to plain old Server (1 or 2). Not to be biased, but VMware is by far the most well stocked, feature wise, virtualization solution out there. I've personally used it since pre-1.0 back in 1999-2000.

I'm mentioning this since you mentioned VMware, and I thing someone above me mentioned it as well, but it's a important point; VMware ESXi is by far more picky about hardware than Linux. If you want to play with it at some point, make sure whatever you buy will work with it. Check out vm-help.com, which gives you more hardware compatibility insight than VMware's documentation.

Have fun!

This is correct. Diagnosing bandwidth issues between two points on the internet is extremely non-trivial. If you don't have access to every device between you and someone else, the best you can do is make educated guesses. Now, if he looked in the debugging info and saw:

"Throttling this luser's stream to 48Kbps, mwuahahahaha!"

THEN, that'd be something worth reporting ;)

On a side note, my data center's main bandwidth is provided by Limelight Networks. Some offsite backups are sent to a separate office building using Time Warner's commercial cable. Eight months ago, our throughput dropped from a steady 10Mbps to 30Kbps... for a month straight. Many hours of phone calls resulted in everyone finger pointing at everyone else. In the mean time, I setup a VPN between the two sites using IPSec, and was able to initiate a transfer through it at 10Mbps. The same transfer, outside the VPN, resulted in 30Kbps throughput. IPSec hides even the Transport layer data, so only source and destination IPs are visible (no TCP/UDP port numbers can been peeked at by prying eyes). Once they couldn't classify the service (SSH, HTTP, etc), whoever was throttling just let it pass.

Interestingly, once I harped on this enough to higher level managers, the problem disappeared :)

Don't trust anyone.

They do it because people were posting benchmarks based on mis-configured systems. It would be like running a 3D benchmark on the latest-n-greatest new $600 video card, but without installing 3D accelerated drivers. If it were your product, you'd want competent people posting "authoritative" benchmarks (that laymen would consider "authoritation").

Think about it.

BTW, don't lick your mod chip before you insert it... they taste funny.

Nah, they'll still loan us money. They'll just find something harder to detect than lead to put in our kids' toys.

More to the point, can it juggle my coconuts while in-flight?

Just as automation hurt the factory line workers? Just as email hurt the postal industry? Just as any advancement displaces people and shuffles them around to other uses.

Advancements, by their very nature, must take a process that required a set amount of effort to complete and reduce that amount... otherwise they wouldn't be advancements.

We can't be stuck worrying if someone's feelings will be hurt or someone's job becomes obsolete. It's that kind of self-centered viewpoint that stifles innovation and the forward movement of society at the benefit of the minority.

I agree, though, that it's unlikely hardcore audio book audiences will substitute a Kindle with a real professional audio book. Even when the technology makes the two indistinguishable, there'll be those elitist's who insist on the human reader. Also, what about books available electronically that have no audio version? Indi books from outside the Guild?

I wonder if they've considered the consequences of jail time... throw a bunch of pissed off computer geeks in the slammer together (I know not everyone who shares copyrighted data is a geek, but just employ your suspension of disbelief for a nano second). Hell, throw in some geeks who haven't downloaded a single "illegal" thing in their life, just for good measure (no innocent people have ever been convicted of a crime, that's unfair to all those guilty people!). Now, simmer on medium heat for 3-5 years, good behavior.

I predict a huge swell in the number of computer criminals actually doing harm to society in the next, say... 10 years. Those geeks are going to get out of prison and wreak havoc. And all because someone couldn't adapter their business model. Hope those media companies and their lawyers have no fear of identity theft ;)

So, at first, I was intrigued by this innocent technological advancement in the name of medicine.
That was before I watched the video.
Now, re-reading the /. summary, my mind is performing regex:

s/(\w+?(ator))/vibr$3/g

Uranus.

The software is released free and open source, however you have to pay shipping+handling for the patented white medical mask.

<g>