Posts by Ian Michael Gumby

Lets get real...

"Over eight out of ten climate scientists believe that human activity contributes to global warming: http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html ."

So does the human population contribute to global warming? Probably. Lots of people aka bio mass, lots of cars polluting the environment. Coal power plants...

The point is that there is some truth to that statement.

But what's not true is the portrayal that its the human element that is the cause for the global warming.

The only positive thing from all of the bogus spew is that the "green" idjits who were anti-nuclear are now opening their eyes and are seeing the potential of nuclear power.

Yeah er Riiiight.!

I'll believe it when I see it.

Sorry but none of these trade organizations are trust worthy. Or rather there's no true enforcement of when their "members" behave badly.

Sorry, but I'll stick to NoScript and stop the tracking that way.

(Or at least hinder it.)

What's really interesting is the addition of social networking to site like CNN, Chicago Tribune (Tribune company run a couple of news papers across the US.) which require people who wish to post comments on articles/editorials, must sign in using their Twiiter/Google/Facebook login.

Gee I wonder why? :-(

But hey! I have nothing to hide... right?

Hmmm here's an idea!

Instead of putting up umbrellas or plants, why not make a grid of solar cells that can offer some shade and convert that sun energy in to electricity.

The upside is that marketing could spin this as a way to make the building greener and reduce their operating costs. Plus they probably could get a tax credit too.

Simple solution that the hotel could afford and get some good publicity out of it.

Should we care about Paris?

Kudos to the Japanese that have low tolerance for stars behaving badly. Not to mention Paris really isn't a star and is only famous for being famous.

Sorry but this puff piece has no relevance except for the Paris icon.

Not really 'price fixing'...

The argument about price-fixing could be used in any business that sells a commodity product.

An example... you have a group of cattle ranchers who are bringing their herd to auction. Would you call it price fixing if the ranchers decide not to sell their herds because the market prices at auction are too low and they'd be selling their cattle at a loss?

Looking at the hotel industry...

If they are being forced to sell a limited number of rooms at a loss, so that they can get more visibility, it means that they will have to sell more rooms at a higher price than their minimum price so that they can remain profitable. Hotels publish a set Rack Rate which is the 'list price' of the room even though they will sell rooms for less. Also note that they will increase the price of the rooms based on availability within the region. So if there's a large convention in town and all of the hotels are going to be booked, then they will sell the rooms at a rate closer to the published rack rate. Now is this price fixing or collusion if all of the hotels do this independently because of market pressure? (Supply and Demand.)

There's nothing wrong here unless Hilton, Hyatt, etc ... all go in to a back room and agree that they won't offer a room to a reseller for x% points off rack.

Its also not illegal if Hilton says that they aren't going to offer any rooms to a reseller for less than %40 of rack rate, and then other hotels do the same. We saw this in the airline industry with baggage fees....

Paris because well she's a Hilton...

Translation of 'Do No Evil'

Google has the right to believe what they believe. However, its a bit disingenuous to cry foul and claim governments are doing evil because they censor Google provided content.

So is it evil for the German government to censor Google links that may reference neo-nazi hate groups and fascist memorabilia that is sold around the world yet is illegal in Germany? (And for a good reason.)

The true meaning to 'Do No Evil' isn't a statement of Google not doing evil but those around them are doing 'evil' by doing anything which may be detrimental to Google's best interest. After all because anything good for Google must be good for all of man kind.

The flame is for Google. They truly are evil.

Who buys TOR 1GBe switches?

Lots of people.

Looking at Blade Network's 10GBe offering, it retails around 13K (USD) versus 6K (USD) for the mix of 1GBe and 10GBe.

This switch actually makes sense. In building a Hadoop Cloud, a node w 8 2TB SATA drives will experience a bottleneck on disk i/o before hitting a 1GBe networking bottleneck. (YMMV) but you can cheaply solve this via port bonding. Then you'll only be slow on the trunk (uplink) from rack to backbone. There the 10GB should be enough...

So the product fits an immediate need where customers can't yet justify the higher cost of switches and nic cards.

What? No sample photo's?

I'd have figured El Reg would have gotten their hands on one to really take it for a test drive.

The flame because the article was too short and a full review needs to happen. :-(

The Reg report tries to grok Unix and fails...

Perhaps it is that the reporter in trying to hype a good tool (webmin) that he lost style points with the audience.

Using Webmin makes life easier than trying to remember all of the different flavors of *nix that exist. Not to mention that gui based tools have been around for a long time with Sun system admins really doing most from the command lines. (Back in the 90's you had SAM (IBM) and SMIT (HP-UX)

So it made life easier for the system admins who had to manage multiple machines from different types of vendors and/or had to trouble shoot various systems.

GUI tools also made it easier so you didn't have to memorize all of the options or constantly flip back to the man pages ...

I took offense at the El Reg reporter who slammed the senior admin types who tease newbies for asking stupid questions when they could easily google or RTFM. System Admins tend to remain old school when it comes to training the next generation. Now if only software developers retained that same standard, we might actually have better code...

(If you're a software developer and don't understand the difference between today's environment and 'old school', well that's too bad...)

What? No mention of Illustra?

I'm curious why no mention of Stonebraker's Illustra.

Why its important is Mike Olsen.

Olsen is one of the founders of Cloudera.

Putting this in perspective...

While Google has their internal code... The rest of the world has Map/Reduce in Hadoop and BigTable in HBase.

Translation...

"To be clear, we aren't changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable."

This is translated to mean...

Hi, this is Google, your friendly neighborhood 'chocolate factory'.

We just want to remind you that anything you do online which comes across one of our sites/services and/or our 'partner sites' is now the property of Google and we have the right to do whatever we want to do with information about you and your online activities.

We wanted to make it perfectly clear that we own the internet and your viewing/use of said internet. We say that we're doing this to enhance your online experience, but in short, the truth is that we make money by destroying your privacy, with your permission, so that we can charge outrageous amount of money to advertisers and people who want to know your surfing habits.

We want to make it perfectly clear that we're too big to prosecute and too big to fail because if we did, the internet will come crashing down. We after all own 1/3rd of the internet....

Thank you and have a nice day!

Just some stuff to consider....

First no one's talked about the cross sectional view on radar. (How stealthy the craft?)

Ceiling? Usually that's classified, so I question the 30K ceiling request.

As to having to counter the fact that the craft gets lighter as they burn off fuel...

I wonder why they can't pull water vapor and condense it and store it in to ballast tanks?

Trivial to do.

(Especially if you're using some solar collectors to generate electricity.)

The other thing people have to realize is size... not easy to spot from the ground.

If the ground enemy had radar, they'd be easier to pinpoint... ;-)

But with respect to the original airship... Maybe they should consider using it to help fight forest fires?

Go HP! GO!

I almost said speed racer... but well... ok call me silly in being excited.

The fact that this is a radical game changer that could help keep up Moore's Law.

The really cool thing is that if successful you can remove the spinning hard drive out of the equation if you can make these dense enough, and durable enough to last at least 5+ years.

Taken with a grain of salt, she kind of has a point...

I think you have to take what she says, add kosher salt (larger crystals) and translate it to the techno educated folk speak... ;-)

She makes a couple of valid points.

First, full disclosure... I grew up in the 70's in Cleveland, so yeah I your typical rock n roll kid.

As a kid, someone would fork over a couple of buck for the album. We'd share it, or share a tape copy of the album. If we liked it, we would then buy our own copies of the album, make our own tapes because you didn't want to scratch the album... While the tapes weren't as good as the album, they were 'good enough'

We supported our favorite bands by buying their albums and t-shirts. When they produced crap, they knew it when we didn't buy their albums and stopped wearing their band's t-shirts.

The only exception was the Grateful Dead.

Because of music, there was face to face social interaction.

Speed forward to today...

You don't have albums, you have mp3 cuts that are all digital. You download the music instead of buying a CD SACD or whatever. Each copy is as perfect as the original.

So when you shared the music, you didn't need to go out and buy the album, you had a copy that was the exact same.

Instead of heading over to 'Jimmy's house' to head down to his basement crawl space that was converted in to a 'pit', you just put on a set of ear buds and listen on your own.

Again, the music is no longer shared, but now enjoyed individually.

So I can agree that the social dynamics of how we listen to and enjoy music today is different.

Do we blame the technology? Maybe not.

Her criticism of Russia and China is based on the notion that most are downloading their music illegally from sites hosted in those countries where the laws are less stringent and harder to chase down those who would break the law...

Here I do agree that both Russia and China's enforcement of cyber law are weak and China has a dismal record on protecting intellectual property and copyright laws. So again, taking what she said with a grain of salt, there is some truth to her view of the world.

And this is a shock?

Unfortunately that photo will become the property of Coke and Facebook and will be linked to your online identity forever.

This may seem harmless, but lets propagate the idea to lets say DAB hosting a Spring Break party in Cabo or something. That picture of a red plastic cup may contain water, but no one will know and the under aged student drinking will have some explaining to do. (Guilty until proven innocent.)

Call me paranoid, but too many people aren't paranoid enough and don't realize until after the fact that unlike a tattoo, what you toss out in to cyberspace can't be removed. ;-)

And people think IM Gumby is my real name. :-P