Why not? It's a new major version which provides new functionality, and is written in python to make it easier for people to contribute.

Memory and CPU have never been cheaper, if you're still running your samba box on a PIII 450MHz then you'll probably want to stay on Samba 3.

Otherwise upgrade your hardware and move to Samba 4 when it becomes stable.

It *WILL* be slower and it *WILL* use more memory, since it's not stable and it's a major new version with new features.

Sheesh.

Users don't care about who owns their data.

Sit down with the average user and explain to them that Facebook owns their comments, photos, videos, metadata - and they totally don't care. Suggest to them that Facebook might start charging the user for the service (obviously they won't) and the user will freak out as that costs them something real and tangible.

The author of this article is basically saying that Facebook is vulnerable to failure because the mass of people might leave and join another service. The reason for that happening would be to join a free and open network, but as I stated before (without evidence) most users don't care about a company owning their data anyway - so it's not going to happen.

For Facebook to fail it has to stop innovating and offering new features, and a competitor has to come up with something new and cool. People will not "leave" Facebook - they'll sign up with the competitor and forget to go back to Facebook to check on what's going on.

Facebook is going to be around for a while yet, regardless of if geeks "get it" or think it's worth something.

I'm guessing (since I'm a /. user who thinks they're always right) that a £/$1 pair of ear plugs would thwart these 'guns'

The cloud instances or account would be shut down, not the entire cloud hosting provider and all of it's customers. That's why it doesn't matter if its in the cloud, on a dedicated server, on a VPS/shared hosting, slice, instance, etc.

It's completely irrelevant that it's in the cloud - and the OP comment was off topic for a start, since MegaUpload has their own equipment, they just misunderstand what the cloud provides - perhaps thinking that it's like running everything from a single linux box with separate user accounts - which it very much isn't.

What difference does it make it it's cloud storage, rented dedicated servers or the entire datacenter is owned by the company in question?

Whichever way, with a court order, the feds come in and shutdown your shit before any form of due process has taken place.

Gathering evidence ruins the company.

Microsoft now seem to have a really good grasp on how to deal with free software. They know they need to get developers and administrators to incorporate or use their products in part, rather than use the defacto standard free software, and that means they need to be interoperable and compatible.

A conference I attended for CakePHP in Manchester 2011 was sponsored by Microsoft, they provided a 3 course meal and contributed towards the bar tab for attendees.

They know the way to a geeks heart - food and beer - and they also know that they need to get free software communities to build support for Microsoft platforms as well as the free platforms. For example the CakePHP community, Microsoft went to great efforts to ensure that the MSSQL database abstraction class was improved by the core developers to better support the MS platform. Now I can at least choose between MySQL and MSSQL, and there's a chance I'd buy and license it for a particular application.

This attitude from Microsoft isn't new, but I don't really see them being able to execute the "extinguish" part of their normal plan on GPL/BSD/MIT licensed software. Instead I can see them at grassroots level trying to make their platform relevant and make sure people can hook into it, but they get left on the sidelines.

Now Microsoft owns Skype, I wonder if they'll be applying the same intelligent algorithms to voice and video conversations.

Messenger usage must be diminishing, a lot of people seem to use Facebook for IM these days. Anyone more serious about IM who doesn't use Facebook probably uses a different network/client anyway. One which they do control.

Perhaps there was nothing wrong with the old style model of main frames, it's just that not everybody could afford a mainframe for the home.

We just need the personal internet connections/infrastructure for the masses to catch up.

Then it'll be worth uploading CPU intensive tasks to the cloud, as generally the home users most limiting factor at the moment is bandwidth, not CPU.

Awesome monoculture reference :)

If the cloud operator is experiencing any sort of fault, they get dropped from serving the site/services and any DNS pointing to them gets changed to any of the other providers, and more instances spin up. This is either done manually or scripted to monitor the state of the cloud providers.

The point is that using any one provider for anything, cloud or not, isn't a good idea.

I wrote a comment on slashdot a while back which questioned the sensibleness of running services in the cloud. I used to be a sceptic.

Since then I've used Rackspace Cloud and found that it's actually a very good idea, for certain things.

The benefits of using a cloud system are scalability and no commitment- it's not about reliability or higher availability - but you do get a little win in those areas.

To give some examples, I was recently able to play around with mysql clustering. I followed a mysql clustering howto and played around with it, setup a mysql cluster with load balancers. Once I was finished geeking about, I saved the VMs to the file storage and deleted the cloud instances. Total cost a £/$2-3 maximum. I hadn't previously been able to do this, I would have had to rent a dedicated server which would serve websites, email etc. I couldn't really use the dedicated server to play with new technology in case it had a negative impact on the live systems. I did have development box for a while, but it essentially doubled my costs without making any more money, just offering some protecting.

Now I have staging/development instances in the cloud - and no commitments to them - I don't have to worry about a £250 monthly bill or sign a 12 month contract to get my own box. I can fire up some resources, use them, and throw it away when I'm done.

The upshot is that I can play around with other peoples cool open source software without risk or buggering something up on my live box, and the costs are insignificant since I'm only renting it per hour. I can try something new, if it works great - it might go/stay in production. If not, delete it and move onto the next cool thing.

If I need high availability, I would use Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, and I'd ensure that I have a plan to deal with a major outage with any of the providers. Each have APIs, so in theory I could create new instances automagically and failover between different cloud providers with a quick DNS change, while keep costs low.

To recap, the cloud isn't all about high availability - no matter what the marketing says. It's about scaling systems and running resources for small amounts of time, and is perfectly suited to services which have peak demand (ticket sales for example).

*whoosh*

Make all voting done online.

Citizens will have to register on the voting site using their Facebook account and Social Security Number, authenticated by a custom captcha system.

Voting Accounts will be verified by email activation link.

Once logged in the website will pull all of the citizens personal data from the governments databases so the user can ensure the data held is accurate, and any corrections submitted by the user will be saved after being validated with javascript.

Furthermore, this system powered by the Cloud using tried and tested Windows Server technology, ASP, .NET and SQL 2005.

What a strange story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_response_vehicle

Why were you challenged?
You do know that if police point a firearm at you - it has to be justified exactly the same as discharging it.

I say they should have shot you for talking nonsense, your story is full of holes. Even a 7 year old retarded kid would have some questions.

I still have a BT phone line, but my ISP is with BE There, a LLU provider who have their own equipment in my exchange.

It's cheaper and much faster. With BT I was limited to 8/1 mb/s, whereas on BE I get 24/2 mb/s. In practice I sync at 16/2. So it's twice as fast for half the cost. The support is much better, I can use the "Live Chat" feature to make changes to my broadband profile, ask technical and billing questions, without being stuck on the phone. I find writing technical questions much easier than trying to explain it over the phone.

Using smaller LLU companies really offers a lot more value to the consumer.

Friends of mine who aren't really bothered about fast internet speeds are taking our Sky Broadband as part of their satellite TV package, costing an extra £5 or £6 per month. You can't compete against that for the money, single billing provider etc.