I contributed a plugin to XBMC that scrapes content from a site and shows youtube videos. I'm in the US and as far as I know everything I did was legal. Technically I don't play the videos, I just hand them over to the youtube plugin.

My preference would be to show youtube ads so the site I'm showing videos for gets revenue for users of the plugin, but I think the youtube plugin automatically bypasses ads, or doesn't have provisions to play them.

Regardless, XBMC has problems that have nothing to do with playback or copyrighted video. Crashes, the fact that the whole thing is a single-tasking system which can be hung by any misbehaving plugin, the inability to integrate web content or windowed content (the latter might be a skin thing that could be feasible, but you would still be stuck with a system very much prone to crashing)

You can help the XBMC team with real problems and not worry about video playback. Technically, the DRM piece in XBMC is probably an imported ffmpeg library anyway.

I agree somewhat. I was turned off by the silly naming of their daemons.

Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Horizon, Keystone, Glance, Ceilometer, Heat, Trove.

It's like they're trying to be old sysadmins and naming their boxes after their favorite pokemon until they run out of names and start using Star Trek episode names midway through. No context in the names so you can't figure out what anything does without a reference.

That said, I've looked at it several times because of the things it might do for me that ESXi doesn't (without costing a fortune). I wish it were less flakey. I've worked with people who managed Openstack in large clusters and had plenty of difficulties. It's a work in progress though. I imagine in a couple more years it will be rock solid.

It installed in less than 2 minutes because there is no software, as you stated in your post.

I use debian preseed and install my systems via PXE in 5 minutes. Of course I tell it not to install any software, so that is part of the reason it installs quickly. The other part being that it doesn't have to ask questions. We could get that time down a bunch by throwing away compatibility with 90% of the hardware. Solaris on Sun hardware used to install relatively quickly, and was very reliable (in some ways) because they always knew what hardware was there.

Honestly, on a workstation boot time is 1000% more important to me than install time. If windows 8 takes 45 minutes to install and boots in 3 seconds then fine, I'll accept a windows update if I'm not doing anything at the moment. If Linux can install in 5 minutes but takes 2 minutes to reboot then I don't want to reboot. Which is fine unless I'm using a laptop..

so it integrates mail and calendar, as well as two things you just made up that nobody uses?

Please cite sources for the core melting through to the water table. Accounts that I've seen say the steam explosions are from the cooling loop and secondary explosions are due to hydrogen. Most of the dispersal was due to the fire which burned for days.

If you begin a search with the question mark it doesn't do a DNS lookup, it just sends it straight to search.

So searching for:

?these are my search terms

does what you want.

Different kinds of batteries too. Rather than a deep cycle full discharge you're only using the battery when accelerating and recharging it when braking. They need to consider this when designing the battery system. Although I don't think anyone does, you could use giant capacitors instead of true batteries since that is how you're using them for energy storage. If you did use capacitors I think the reliability would go up but the fire/explosion risk might go up too, so maybe that is why they don't do it.

Some strange hybrids like one of the Ferrari's uses a compressed air cylinder instead of batteries. You could also use a flywheel but then you've got gyroscopic forces on the car. London's subway trains use hills as an energy recovery mechanism. They go up a hill when pulling into a station (slowing down) and go down a hill when pulling out (speeding up). Not practical for a car but kinda neat.

I would like to see performance numbers on who's malloc is terrible anyway. This was true in ancient times on some systems, to the point where people specifically did what they're doing, but I haven't profiled it in forever and I always assumed it had gone away.

I'm wondering if they cargo-culted their allocator, or if their software just happens to be old enough to fall in that range of things that ran on junky hardware from long ago. It's one of those things where if you're going to leave it in then it should be extensively documented. Not "some systems are slow" but "these exact systems have problems"

While I don't doubt your experiences were sucky, I think this could be overcome if they designed the computers and the datacenter with it in mind. You could make the boards be pullable cards from above. Depending on the size of the chassis they might use a robot crane to retrieve the cards or it might be by hand (the crane would mean the entire datacenter floor could be liquid and the cards would be brought to a place where they could be serviced without messing up the place)

As far as the plumbing getting in the way, I imagine that would be something they would have to address before this became practical. Most of it could be routed according to purpose so it doesn't obstruct but if the CPU board needed active cooling I think there would be more problems like you described.

If it saves enough money people will do it no matter the mess. They might make sealed pods that need to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair.

That seems like grasping at straws. The fact of the matter is we've all used sliders in real life. Air conditioner controls on old cars being a good example. Apple took a concept everyone understood and made a modern look to it, but it could still be a virtual representation of a physical slider.

What needs to be asked is if this patent brought anything to the table or is it superfluous? My question isn't if sliders are innovative since they obviously are not, but is the concept of "slide to unlock your phone" innovative?

I could say no but I'd be lying if I didn't think they might have a case there. From what I remember the iphone was the first slide-to-unlock phone, and now all the smartphones seem to have it.

If it's subject to interference caused by someone broadcasting on the same channel and it can't compensate for it by switching channels or in some way authenticate it's control traffic, then it's a poorly designed toy and shouldn't be used commercially.

Reading the article:

"Operators of all unmanned drones used in a commercial capacity are required to be certified.
Neither Mr Abrams nor his business appear on the list of the 92 operators certified nationally."

So it sounds like he should be charged with some form of negligence if that is applicable to Australia. In the US the FAA would also probably be fining him.

The dynamics have changed somewhat. Mainly because ISPs became monopolies when dialup died. Remember Earthlink or Mindspring, Speakeasy? Or Netzero? Big old ISPs that nobody uses now because they were merged into global conglomerates or went out of business.

In the old days Netflix could say "hmm, we're an outbound only company with lots of cash and nobody will peer with us.. why don't we buy an eyeball company and balance our traffic so peering is fair"

Now there is nobody to buy, unless you want to buy some giant companies.. or get bought by one of them.

Also, ratio based peering was a model that made sense in the old days because it was the easiest way to determine fairness amongst multiple providers. Even in/out means you aren't stealing my eyeball customers and I'm not stealing your server customers right? Or at least we're stealing both in equal amounts?

Now that argument doesn't hold true when you're talking about Amazon or Google or Netflix, or Rackspace or anyone else doing cloud business. They aren't eyeballs and don't want your eyeball customers. Most of the time if you talk to them directly they'll peer based on your inbound traffic from them. The same applies to CDNs like Akamai or Cloudflare. Again, they aren't getting in the residential market and aren't your competitor so why not peer to ease congestion?

Ok, so big monopoly telcos that do both content and customers don't understand this, their arguments are pretty feeble.. "it costs big $$ to peer!" Well, run a dark fiber down the street and peer out of joes basement peering for $10/xconnect .. "but optic costs!!".. are cheap if you're doing 10gig MM or SM with no fancy wavelengths. "Port costs?" Same.. buy cheaper gear.

The only question is if netflix and friends end up flinching and paying to connect to AT&T and Comcast, then nothing will change.

You should set it up so their only ingress is through a reverse ssh tunnel outward. Preferably secured with a key you send to them so their reused passwords aren't the only thing keeping people out. You should also restrict it by IP range to whatever machine they're coming from.

If the vendor refused any of my security stipulations for their audit I'd invite them to come to me and do the audit onsite. Of course they might threaten to shutdown your CRM but then you can always sue for breach, or better yet just name and shame them online since obviously they don't care about their customers security. Usually if you're processing credit cards anywhere then PCI compliance dictates the exact ways they can be provided access for the audit.

Make sure you have a permanently opened bug report about the security problems. Maybe they do look at those and want to fix them but other priorities come first, or their developers could be hopelessly unaware even though support/engineering knows how bad it is. Most of the time there is someone in the organization that knows and cares but doesn't have the ability to task anyone to fix it. In any case, it's helpful to reference this ticket each year when the auditors want to know why you aren't rolling over and playing nice like the rest of their customers.

You aren't supposed to use a phone in a theater. It's courtesy not to use a phone in lots of cases.. in the line while waiting for your sandwich, in a meeting or conference with lots of other people, etc.

Make a courtesy area that people are allowed to use their phone and make an airline rule that you can't use a phone and that is fine. Making it illegal because you think it's rude is ridiculous. What if there is an ACTUAL emergency. My parents aren't very good with text and they always know when I'm on a flight. If I got a call from them while I was flying it might be a life-or-death thing.

Your wife is 9 months pregnant and you get a call from her doctor, do you answer it?

I doubt the viewers are actually that unhappy. By saying this rogue is stirring up controversy, it in fact will stir up controversy. People who don't care will start tuning in to see what the fuss is about. Regular watchers will keep watching to see if he finally fails.

If it's too distruptive I'm sure they'll change the rules, but right now they're probably just loving the extra attention for the show.