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.

VoIP handsets. it sounds like this is attempting to be an extension/ technological upgrade of that corporate communications device market.

I mean, if you even /consider/ cisco gear, that usually means you have lots of other people's money and want a solution that 'just works' - Cisco does not compete on price.

Further, unless you are targeting /very small/ companies where the guy making the decision is the owner, and thus is spending his own money, competing on price is rarely a winning strategy. Corporate decision makers make decisions based on "what is least likely to get me fired if things go south" - joe middle manager is unlikely to get a bonus if he saves a couple million going with a cheaper router that works out well, but he will get fired if he buys the cheap router and it goes poorly. The value proposition of cisco is that if you buy cisco kit and it ends up not working? you are less likely to be blamed. I mean, it's cisco. It's usually pretty good shit, even if it is rather overpriced. Also, that's what everyone else is using, 'best practices' right? if the middle manager follows 'best practices' then he's doing his job, right?

now, the thing about competing on price is that in areas where there is quick innovation, you don't see a lot of companies competing on price, so often you can get pretty good margin while still flying under your competition. this is my niche right now; Sure, no large corp would look at me twice, but small companies do, and price-wise, none of my competitors even want to be thought of as my competitors, which is good for me. There is money to be made competing on price in markets that change quickly; it's just your customers, in that case, are not large corporations that spend other people's money.

but my point is that this is not cisco's niche. Cisco, in fact, probably wants to price it's product higher than the 'consumer grade' ipad. the cisco is 'enterprise grade' and we all know that 'enterprise' is code for 'expensive.'

I think that they get a worse rap than they deserve in the open source world. BTRFS anyone? it's not like they don't contribute at all.

I think the problem is twofold: first, they focus on marketing to the PHB- This is likely to get you a bad reputation amongst the techies, unless you are really careful about it. (hell, look at redhat; they deserve an awesome reputation amongst techies, considering the number of linux people they employ and how much they contribute. they have a mediocre reputation.) Second, Oracle seems to have a bad reputation amongst their Engineering staff, and guess what? we talk.

But overall, Oracle is very helpful towards linux; according to the linux foundation, they are in the top 10 companies contributing towards linux[1] (as measured by the number of changes submitted)

So yeah; I mean, I'm not switching to unbreakable linux any time soon, and they certainly aren't red hat, I do think Oracle's reputation should not be as bad as it is.

[1]http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf

is that it's too full of exploitable security holes. I don't run flash (or accoread) on security sensitive computers myself.

seems like paypal would be better off saying so up front; My first reaction was that it was likely more of paypals seemingly racist 'fraud prevention'