This might be a case where the EFF might be interested to help.

Also, banding all together, you are 35 people strong, considerably lowering expenses.

Markus

The title of this article is bullshit an the contents in large parts. The journalist has apparently no clue what he/she is talking about and just aims to grab attention with a grossly wrong article.

Baki is correct, there are proposals under way to create a new law. Among them an extreme 'full ban'. The likely outcome is something 'eurocompatible', e.g. similar to what the other countries (France, Germany) do.

Markus

I agree. this is the kind of device I want. The sunlight-readable screen and the long battery life are essential. Finally I can read my ebooks on the beach !

I might prefer Chrome-OS or a Linux tablet edition over Android. We'll see.

About the microcode part. The drive pretends to be a 512byte drive, but internally is using 4k sectors and and claims to 'translate transparently'. I can understand that in a random-access scenario it it has to read-modify-write 2 sectors each time and performance suffers (2 additional reads and one additional write). But in a sequential access scenario, the penalty should be once per sequence/file, not once per sector. Here the microcode fails completely to make the best out of the suboptimal situation.

What do you disagree with ? There is a performance problem and the author thinks the kernel people should look into the matter. I don't think they can do much, after all the kernel just writes 4k block to the drive. The problem is with the drive microcode which should attenuate the problem in the case of sequential writes, like the first case. Obviously it does not do that at all. Markus

I've ran through the performance numbers announced by IBM and what I found at spec.org (specint_rate & specfp_rate) of the other CPU's and roughly the following picture (give/take 20%):

• Power6/Power7: about 30 spec_int/fp_rate/core
• Intel Core i7: about 30 spec_int/fp_rate/core
• Sparc: about 10 spec_int/fp_rate/core
• Itanium 2: about 12 spec_int/fp_rate/core

So it looks to me that performance-wise Power and x86_64 are similar. Both seem almost three times as fast as Itanium/Sparc. However. in the commercial world scalability matters and I there are not many big (>4 socket) x86 systems around. Big Power, Sparc and Itanium servers scale to hundreds of cores and are built like mainframes with excellent RAS features. I see high-end kit from both sides, x86 and Power and the margins in the x86 world are not good enough to pay for the engineering it takes to get to the same levels.

If you compare Power and x86_linux with cars:

• You are read to spend some money to drive a nice car with excellent performance and stop at the dealer for inspections regularly then you well of with a Range Rover (=AIX Power server).
• You are going to cross Africa, will be on your own (and have the truck full f spare parts) and are ready to get your hands dirty then you want a Land Rover (=Linux x86).

This picture is far from complete, but shows what the choice is quite well.

Markus

Make sure that your bank uses strong authentication (bejond userid/password) when you access your account. Any strong authentication mechanism (securid token , one-time token, etc.). All Swiss banks provide/require such a method.

I don't know about todays but only some years ago most US banks used vanilla useid/password combinations. With those one can eavesdrop on the line (or just watching you at the internet cafe). That's not safe. If that still is the case with your bank I'd change.

Most other things are either complicated and not practical or don't help safety much in real life.

Markus

I think it shows how Google lives the 'don't do evil' slogan. They try to be a good citizen everywhere. Unfortunately this is not easy, in Chine a good citizen does not talk about certain things, in the US you are not supposed to hide the same things. Sou you can not be a good citizen in both places at the same time. Google could choose not to be in China, but this would not help matters (it would be blocked by the great firewall).

If their president is almost openly like that, drafting laws almost explicitly designed to stop his prosecution, why should other behave better ?

Yup, the Squeezebox family of products is your best bet. It integrates fine with your existing setup (you just need a free aux input on your amp) and can be standalone (Standalone boom box). All of them support WiFi or Ethernet. You can operate each station completely independently or you can synchronize them (same music everywhere). If you have your musick already ripped to mp3 and your tags are clean then most of the work is done. The product family is about a decade old, so it has some history and the bugs are gone.

In addition the server software is open source and quite portable (Windows, Linux, even some NAS boxes are supported). There are plenty of plugins and extensions. Internet Radio is well integrated too.

It is not cheap, but none of the alternatives are cheaper or better either.

Markus

And it has the advantage that Euro-Plugs fit into it.

On neat trick is to buy a Swiss power cord and rip out the third (ground) pin. You get a power cord which fits in all Euro sockets without adapter.

The Swiss plug is the one labelled 'Type 3' on the world map of the Gizmodo article above.

Markus

Yes, good enough is the enemy of perfect everywhere. And I suppose if you know your hammer well you tend to see problems as nails.

In my area there in not much Sun high-end left (1-2 E20k) and plenty of fat IBM boxes (>50), this might explain part of the lack of customer interest...

Markus

I never used Solaris zones, never used the similar AIX 'workload partition' either. But I'm aware of what they do and and how they work.

I (my) experience, if you need isolation, going the entire way and use a separate VM/LPAR with its own OS is the better solution. This is why I am missing this tech on Sun's high-end servers and don't understand that they are not even seem to plan to catch up in the future.

Markus

Solaris Zones, as I understand them, isolate applications from each other, but all are running within/on top of the same Solaris instance. As soon as you want to run different OS levels for the different apps or environments you are out of luck.

For example a new OS maintenance level is usually tested for a while in a test environment before being applied in production. Zones don't help here.

Often we have also incompatible prerequisite requirements of different apps (3rd party apps are terrible in this respect). App1 need at least maintenance level 123, while app2 has not been tested yet on this level and is not supported. If you give each a separate OS image, then you can give everyone what he wants.

You pay a small hardware price: A OS disk (30G) and some memory (512M), but you remove a ton of versioning update scheduling constraints.

Markus

I'm missing indications about better virtualisation features, like I'm used to them on IBM gear. These days all high end installation I see are running tens to hundreds of virtual machines on a single server. It looks to me that virtualisation in this scale is not even on the roadmap.

Markus