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BTJunkie No More? 328

Posted by samzenpus
Social Networks

Study Finds Social Media Harder To Resist Than Cigarettes, Alcohol 134

Posted by samzenpus
from the friends-list-fix dept.

Comment: Re:So tell me (Score 1) 418

by robathome (#36255266) Attached to: PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College

Your comment completely disregards the benefits of the social and emotional learning done in college. Also known as making friends (with a diverse set of people) and getting laid.

And none of this happens in the workplace? I beg to differ... apart from the getting laid part, perhaps. Dunno what your company policy is like.

It also assumes that someone working as an IT monkey will spend free time learning but that someone in college won't.

No, it assumes that both will continue to learn on their own, and thus end up at about par for the time spent. The experience may differ between the practical and theoretical, the mechanics and the concepts. I am assuming a self-motivated, intelligent individual in both cases. But my point isn't that one is better than the other, but that a degree is not necessary to be successful in the field, contrary to the previous poster.

Comment: Re:So tell me (Score 4, Insightful) 418

by robathome (#36251424) Attached to: PayPal Co-Founder Gives Out $100,000 To Not Go To College

As a blanket statement? For the IT field? Bullshit.






Comment: Re:Go for it (Score 2, Informative) 1065

by robathome (#34277388) Attached to: US May Disable All Car Phones, Says Trans. Secretary

I'm going to go all terminology-pedant on you, because I've been hearing the wingnut teabaggers misuse "communist", "socialist", and "fascist" for a while now as fear words.

Communism is a *socioeconomic* philosophy, where property is held in common, particularly means of production, with common access to means of consumption. It has nothing to do with quantity or quality of government regulation.

Totalitarianism is a *political* philosophy where the state recognizes no bounds to its power to control the actions and lives of its citizens/subjects.

Many Communist countries also had Totalitarian governments, because unless you have a very small, commonly-aligned populace, everyone must be forced to participate in a communist system for it to function as intended. However, you can have one without the other.

You say "communist", you mean "totalitarian."

+ - NTP Sues Over Wireless Email Patents->

Submitted by rgraham


Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Didn't Produce Transistors? Oh Come On! (Score 2, Informative) 170

by robathome (#31036676) Attached to: Graphene Transistors 10x Faster Than Silicon

The link you provide speaks to the problems of bit-packing on the symbol states, and the solution of Trellis Modulation, which I mentioned. Trellis coding allowed for packing more than 4 bits to each symbol without increasing the error rate, leading to the development of the v.32bis standard and 14.4Kbps modems. Which is what I said - it wasn't high baud rates, but better bit packing that realized faster speeds.

And you're still saying "baud" when you mean "bits per second".

Comment: Re:Didn't Produce Transistors? Oh Come On! (Score 5, Informative) 170

by robathome (#31036164) Attached to: Graphene Transistors 10x Faster Than Silicon

I think you're just misunderstanding the problem.

The "baud rate" of telephone lines is pretty slow. Baud rate is the number of symbol transitions per second the media can support. Baud rate and bits/second have not been equivalent since Bell103a/V.21 frequency-shift-keyed modems, where 300 baud meant 300 bps, each state transition being a discrete tone that indicated a "mark" or "space" (0/1). From then on, Bell 212a/V.22 used phase-shift keying to get 1200 bps out of a 600 BAUD symbol rate, encoding two bits of information per symbol.

POTS lines are pretty pokey - the practical maximum BAUD rate is less than 3500 symbols/sec. Where speed advancements were made in later evolutions of POTS modems were in the number of bits that could be encoded per symbol, using QAM and Trellis Modulation. A 33.6 kbps modem is encoding 10 bits per symbol onto a 3429 baud carrier.

So, when you kept hearing "phone lines max out at less than 4800 baud", that was correct. The engineers kept wringing higher bit rates out of narrow-band POTS by putting more information on each of the symbols transmitted.

Then, with V.70 and V.90, the modulation schemes took advantage of certain characteristics of non-muxed POTS lines to use PCM digital encoding instead of an analog audio carrier. Unfortunately, if you were serviced through a SLC-96 ("Slick") muxed subscriber loop, which multiplexed the signal from your subscriber line to the central office, you could only connect with older analog modulation schemes such as v.32/v.32bis/v.34.

Comment: Re:Do I get at least a pair of rubber gloves? (Score 1) 135

by robathome (#30130582) Attached to: Cooling Bags Could Cut Server Cooling Costs By 93%


I've got stack of servers in my datacenter that are allocatable on demand. Any unused server blade is a potential spare. If a production blade tips over with a CPU fault, memory error, or similar crash, its personality (FC WWN's, MAC's, boot and data volumes, etc.) are moved to another blade and powered on through an automated process. Since the OS and apps live on the SAN, both VMs and dedicated server hardware can be abstracted away from the actual services they provide.

This is a product my company's selling to the market at large right now, and that I designed. Any of our IaaS customers can take advantage of the redundancy and fault tolerance built into the system. Even the six-server small IT shop.

Even then, a small IT organization can easily virtualize and provide some level of HA services in hypervisor clusters now. It's just not that hard anymore. Take the handful of servers you're running on now, replace them with an equal number of nodes in a VMM cluster, and go to town. Any of those systems fails, shift the load to the other nodes and effect repairs.

Comment: Re:SOX HIPPA etc (Score 1, Insightful) 157

by robathome (#28795855) Attached to: Cloud-Sourcing's Long-Term Impact On IT Careers

"Cloud computing," while it has very nearly achieved meaningless buzzword status, is an attempt by the business and marketing types to get their heads around what is a very real evolutionary transformation occurring in IT. The drivers are the drying up of CapEx budgets, the need to reduce service delivery time, and the requirement to purchase and pay for only what an organization needs to fulfill their business requirements.

Capital expenditures are coming under increased scrutiny, and are under constant budgetary pressure. "Cloud" based, on demand services allow IT service procurers to shift from a CapEx based model of owning the infrastructure to an OpEx model. Operational expenditures are typically larger chunks of budget than capital purchases, and moving IT services there can allow them to get "lost in the noise". Less red tape, less stringent approval processes, etc.

Time to deliver service is a labor cost, and if a procurer can shift that operational expense from internal overhead required to deploy an IT architecture to acquiring those same services from a cloud provider, it's perceived as a big win. The provider gets to deal with the headaches of capacity management, infrastructure design and integration, and delivering IT resources. The purchaser gets the luxury of simply specifying how much they want, for how long, and letting the provider leverage its economies of scale and automated processes to deliver the resources within the terms of the provider's SLA. The tradeoff is that the consumer of cloud services loses the ability to specify the platform and all its parameters in exchange for rapid delivery of a standardized service.

IT organizations are also under increased pressure to abandon the concept of designing and purchasing for peak capacity. Cloud providers are specifically addressing these needs by allowing their customers to pay only for what they use, not the spare capacity. Since the "cloud" capacity is shared, reused, and managed by the provider, the customer is afforded the ability to scale their environment dynamically to meet the needs of the business and its budget.

Now, how this ties into Web Services is important. Web Services, for a long time, was a solution in search of a well-defined problem. Now, with the "cloud" becoming a workable construct, Web Services come to the forefront as the way that stateless platforms can interact without intimate knowledge of the underlying infrastructure. Web Services will become more and more important as IT services are increasingly abstracted away from the hardware and OS platform. As I've worked for the past two years as a design architect for an infrastructure-as-a-service type platform, I can say with some authority that they're are an integral part of how we're going to need to deal with virtualized environments and stateless service contexts as they become pervasive elements of IT solutions.


Secret EU Open Source Migration Study Leaked 311

Posted by kdawson
Data Storage

New York Times Wipes Journalist's Online Corpus 94

Posted by timothy
from the check-the-unpersonals dept.
The Courts

3D Realms Sued Over Failed Duke Nukem Forever Plans 180

Posted by Soulskill
from the ponzi-would-be-proud dept.

Computers With Opinions On Visual Aesthetics 125

Posted by timothy
from the artificial-fastidiousness dept.
