Apple should buy big companies, says Scully - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24489156 <comment><USER2> It's amazing how quickly Sculley reminded me why he had no business running Apple.

"He said it could shift the 'whole landscape of e-commerce' if it bought, for example, eBay."

Why not just buy Amazon? Or the moon? It's really big too.

"... when you look at the Passbook, and fingerprint recognition - what would it mean if Apple went out and bought eBay? And they had PayPal, and integrated that? My guess is you'd suddenly see the whole landscape of e-commerce shift."

It'd shift alright. The efforts toward fingerprint theft and black market print trading would skyrocket, because there would suddenly be a direct financial link to millions of fingerprints. You can change your Visa card, you can change your address, you can change your phone #, you can change your social security #, you can change your name, you can change your password, you can change your PIN #, you can't change your finger prints.

<comment><USER3> +1 for buying the moon strategy.

I hope my next iPod comes bundled with green cheese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Given Sculley's time and "success" at Apple, the data suggests that doing exactly the opposite of what he proposes would be in Apple's best interests.

<comment><USER5> Define success. I watched Triumph of the Nerds last night that somebody linked to here at hn. Sculley led Apple to 10x sales increase and left the company with $2 billion in cash and $200 million of debt. Sounds like a success to me, considering Macintosh was not a sales success people think it was (from the horses mouth from the documentary).

Gil Amelio on the other hand... but at least he brought (bought) Jobs back into Apple, who ousted him soon afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Here's a man who has spent 33 years at Microsoft, loves the company," he said. "He really did not get enough credit for what he did accomplish.

"I can't name a CEO who didn't make some mistakes in the hi-tech industry.

"I think Ballmer has a lot he ought to be proud of. So he didn't get everything right - not many people do."_

Ummm.... Is he suggesting lets celebrate someone who spent a lot of money buying companies that didn't pan out? And better yet, let's suggest the company that destroyed them in the market to switch and follow their vanquished foe's failed strategy?

No wonder he destroyed so much value at Apple!

</comment><comment><USER4> This touches on the issue of why companies have amassed such huge reserves and seem unwilling or unable to spend them. Clayton Christensen (of Innovators Dilemma fame) gave an interesting talk at the RSA last month[1] where he described a possible reason for this. Unfortunately only the audio is up but they do often have video so perhaps that'll be there soon as the slides were very important.

The high-level summary is that in order for companies to develop market- creating changes, they need to be willing to make long-term investments with high probabilities of failure. This hasn't happened because the incentives of the management of the company are to provide short-term results which means they choose to only deliver incremental improvements or cost-savings as it has a greater improvement in the short-term on share prices and their remuneration.

He went into far more detail - listen if this sounds interesting to you.

[1] [http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past- events/2013/the-...](http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past- events/2013/the-capitalists-dilemma)

<comment><USER7> They aren't in a capital intensive business. Does this mean they have to throw away their money on frivolous investments?

Having a ton of cash does not change the economics of any single investment. Every investment decision is based on the individual parameters and expected outcomes and circumstances surrounding it. You don't think, "Hey, this is a shitty investment, but we have a ton of cash, so if this one sucks, who cares!"

So let's say Apple sees value in acquiring eBay (ridiculous, but it's the hypothetical put forward by OP). They take a look at eBay. Nothing about the acquisition changes because Apple happens to have a lot of cash, except for maybe the cost of the purchase, which in current interest rate environments is almost negligible (they can borrow extremely cheaply as evidenced by their latest massive bond sale).

Say Apple wants to build a revolutionary new TV. That is not a huge capital investment. They just keep paying their engineers and designers, perhaps hire a few more. The cost of this labor is not even worth mentioning. The manufacturing is contracted, they don't have to buy a bunch of machinery. In fact, they can announce the product and get a million pre-orders before shipping and pay for the whole thing in an instant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has any big acquisition ever made for a positive integration?

And if Apple wanted to dip into payments, a mobile payment processor is far more compatible with their existing offerings and more Apple-y to boot.

Square would be the obvious choice, not Paypal.

<comment><USER9> > Has any big acquisition ever made for a positive integration?

Exxon/Mobil, AT&T/BellSouth come to mind.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking more about 'acquisitions of a fundamentally different business'.

Mergers of very similar businesses are a little different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple culture is too unique - 80 hour weeks, getting yelled at constantly, crazy secrecy - its hard to match that with other big companies.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, let's listen to the man who almost drove Apple to bankruptcy because he thought computers and soda were sold the same way.

<comment><USER12> He left Apple with $2Billion cash in the bank, and only about $200Million in debt. Hardly bankrupt.

([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley#1983.E2.80.9393:_A...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley#1983.E2.80.9393:_Apple_Inc.))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The worst thing a big company can do is buy another big company. The two will never mesh well - one will be subsumed into the other. It is very, very rare that big acquisitions and mergers work out well. One company is sure to wither on the vine.

If you don't believe me, go ask someone who worked at an EMC company who was part of an acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER14> eBay is an obvious nonsense, there's no link up there that makes sense.

The only largish company that springs to mind that might makes sense is one Apple tried to buy previously and failed - Dropbox. Apple have a weakness in their cloud service offerings that Dropbox might help fill but given what it would likely cost ($5bn+) and how Apple have slowly been improving in this area, I suspect that Apple would be as well just sinking that money into what they're already doing.

<comment> k-mcgrady I agree Apple has been improving in cloud services but did they not completely scrap their Dropbox alternative? (iDisk).

<comment><USER14> iDisk died with mobile me.

Interestingly as an iOS user I don't find Dropbox a great fit because of the jarring of the file system model with the sandbox model. I'm sure that their cloud expertise would be beneficial to Apple but it may be that the optimum time for the two organisations to come together has passed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Instead of buying a company like eBay, Apple should try to acquire a company like Tesla, assuming Elon is ever willing to sell (probably not).

1\. Apple has considered building a car before

2\. Not quite the same but essentially an EV is pretty much a giant computer, and more relevant to Apple's current strength than entering the e-commerce space itself. There is a lot of baggage that comes with the eBay/PayPal business model (I realize this is just an example Scully used) that Apple probably doesn't want even if they were to enter the payment space.

3\. The market for EVs is still tremendously young and in my opinion hugely massive and one worth entering and competing in right now even if it is far from Apple's current product lineup and doesn't sync as well as all of its existing product.

4\. Even with point #3 above, Apple is working with car manufacturers already to integrate Siri and other things probably. This might put a dent in partnerships (maybe) but arguably the EV market is more important than extending a marketing strategy to integrate Siri and other aspects into other major car brands in my opinion.

Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apple should buy TomTom and get their maps sorted out.

<comment><USER17> I think it would be more advantageous for them to heavily invest in promoting Open Street Maps (OSM) contributions and editing. Make it easy, integrate into OSM (although MapBox is doing a fantastic job with the iD editor). Get that up to snuff and then start using solely OSM data... but that's a blue sky and Apple isn't exactly renowned for its use of OpenSource data / software.

<comment><USER18> That's a clever idea. Apple absolutely makes use of Open Source, but only when it makes strategic sense, not out of idealism. (Examples: BSD->OSX, khtml->WebKit, LLVM.) In this case Apple needs a way to massively upgrade the quality of their data-set (they _still_ have fundamental errors right in San Francisco! presumably Cupertino near 1 Infinite Loop is sorted by now). They do not want to be in the business of cultivating a gigantic geographic database, so aligning themselves with the many others out there who would like access too a Google Maps quality db is quite clever. They would have to think carefully about how to present this, to make it clear the data is not theirs, in case there are any horrendous gaffes in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Building great products is hard. Take something hard and try to scale it, you get shit. You have to make it easy first, reduce it to a formula that you can then abstract and export to other domains. Apple has not achieved that. They can't buy up big companies and expect them to suddenly start getting the same results Apple gets. This is pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER20> only works if you immediately fire all top and middle line manages in the aquired company, lest you import a hostile culture and a lot of foreign politics.

HP buying EDS, Atos buying SBS - if you ever talk to employees on the inside you'll hear about what a big aquisition means.

Big Pharma is better in this, buying others is a key market tactic. Pfizer's handling of the Pharmacia merger is a great example of how to do it - go in hard, literally destroy everything in the target.

<comment><USER21> Besides EDS, HP's acquisitions of Palm and Autonomy didn't turn out so well either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe Apple should indeed make some acquisitions with its cash hoard - but it seems to me that the kinds of prospects that would fit best with its vision are companies focused on engineering great hardware-centric products which consumers love. eBay and PayPal don't match that vision.

</comment><comment><USER23> I always thought Yahoo would have been a good acquisition for Apple, back when Yahoo were courting Microsoft and Apple was getting its feet wet with iAds.

Buying eBay/Paypal would be interesting but the same could be said for Google buying them.

<comment><USER24> As a Microsoft employee, I personally would have loved for Apple to catch the bullet we dodged :). I hope yahoo finds it way, but a big company buying them will help no one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _" I think Ballmer has a lot he ought to be proud of. So he didn't get everything right - not many people do."_

The mind boggles. He's probably a nice guy, but there's a reason he doesn't work for Apple anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> 90% of these uber mergers dont really add value and end up destroying companies _snif_ DEC being a premier example - of course merchant bankers and lawyers get a metric shit ton of cash for advice

</comment><comment><USER27> I am surprised that anyone would even solicit the opinion of this bozo.

</comment><comment><USER28> I cannot imagine any use Apple would have for eBay / PayPal. They seem like they would be more effort than they are worth. I could see Adobe and AMD.

<comment><USER29> I agree. What a mistake they would be making to buy eBay. eBay's anti- innovation and stagnation-driven culture would kill everything dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What did Ballmer do right though? I'm serious.

<comment><USER31> Kept Microsoft's enterprise licensing rolling along to continued substantial profits, both by tending to existing "franchises" (Windows, Exchange, SQL Server) and launching new ones (SharePoint is now something like a $2B business).

Ballmer is a sales guy at heart, and I always suspected that his staying power at the company had much to do with his relationships with Microsoft's largest business customers. That someone like the current Ford CEO is considered a candidate to replace him only reinforces that impression.

<comment><USER26> Alans an engineer from what I recall?

<comment><USER31> Sure. My point wasn't that they're considering bringing in another sales guy, but rather they're looking for someone who understands the large enterprise market. Microsoft and its shareholders fear nothing more than waking up to headlines about 100,000+ seat companies, like Ford, launching initiatives to get off of Exchange and onto Gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Absolutely not.

</comment><comment><USER33> [http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EBAY](http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EBAY) $70 Billion market cap so they might need to offer around $90 Billion to be taken seriously. That's a nice chunk.

Maybe they should buy an enterprise company and get serious money from businesses too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Buying back stock is the best use of cash right now.

<comment><USER26> id prefer a dividend give the spare cash directly to the owners.</comment></comment>


Fastmail Failed - <AUTHOR> http://tdh.me/fastmail-failed/ <comment><USER2> Not giving out a clear error message is ugly and the rest is beyond belief, but [0] clearly mentions a limited number of messages, with more details on [1]. The smallest limit there is 400/800 messages per hour/day and rather ridiculously low traffic limits of 60/120 MB per hour/day.

The former shouldn't really be a problem but I can see how the latter are difficult not to exceed regularly, especially if free trial accounts have even stricter limits (they are not detailed in [1]).

[0] <https://www.fastmail.fm/help/email_resource_limits.html>

[1] <https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html>

<comment><USER3> Those numbers are for the "ad free" accounts, which are really lightweight anyway. For instance, the ad free accounts only get 100MB of storage for their email anyway, so a 60MB hourly cap is not entirely unreasonable: that's more than half your mailbox. Of course, for 40 cents a month, I think those numbers are pretty reasonable.

More appropriate would be the "full" accounts, which have a much more reasonable 300MB/600MB hourly/daily data quota. Of course, again, mailbox storage is limited to 1GB there... and so on.

I don't think the quotas are unnatural given the relative mailbox sizes. But, for full disclosure, I am a (happy) Fastmail user.

<comment><USER2> I took the lowest numbers there as some lower lower limit someone could have hit – only the Premium account seems to be somewhat usable from my perspective.

Do you know if and if yes, by how much, trial accounts are further restricted?

<comment><USER3> I was not aware trial accounts are restricted, and I can't find any info online about it, so...

So far, though, I have been quite impressed with Fastmail. (I have an enhanced account.)

<comment><USER4> Same here. Really happy with the service and though I don't make intensive usage of mail I have the Enhanced account[1]. Everything works like a charm, it's very customisable at all levels, I've imported successfully all the emails from my old gmail account and is fast as hell. The service really looks promising.

And about the tech support, I've sent a few mails and they have answered me properly. Sometimes the mail was the tipically pre-made made one though. But it have detailed information about how to solve my problem, so that's cool.

[1] I'm using the 2 month trial. I haven't introduced the credit card yet. Even paying an account is sooo cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Setting up SMTP and IMAP servers isn't that hard[1], and you get a lot of cool features that you don't get anywhere else, like piping email into shell scripts, or the ability to selectively bounce spam (instead of storing it in a spam folder) and reading email via mutt in a pinch (I much prefer that to web frontends). You also get to learn a lot - every hacker should be able to send an email via telnet at least.

[1] It can be hard to get everyone to accept your email, but you can just relay it through an upstream provider like Messagelabs[2] or your ISP to solve that problem.

[2] Not a recommendation, just an example. I'm sure there are better ones out there.

<comment><USER2> If you get a server/VPS at e.g. 1&1, Hetzner or basically any other place, you won't have any problems sending mail. Those are usually priced from ~10€/month, so it shouldn't be much of a problem.

Just make sure not to run an open relay, but that is rather trivial.</comment></comment>


Integrating React with Meteor - <AUTHOR> http://info.meteor.com/blog/meteor-the-missing-infrastructure-for-building-great-react-apps

<comment><USER2> > Meteor: the missing infrastructure for building great React apps

Extremely bold words as usual. I don't think I've ever seen any JS technology that manufactures as much hype as Meteor. Every single article from Meteor makes it sound like the best thing since sliced Jesus.

Are there any reliable numbers on Meteor adoption (and retention)? If you listen to people using Meteor it's already more popular than jQuery but everybody else seems apathetic at best. If you go by Stackoverflow numbers (which Meteor shows off on its homepage), it's merely 1/10th as popular as AngularJS (and roughly as popular as express, which never even came close in terms of hype).

<comment><USER3> If you try building a realtime single page app using Meteor and measure the amount of time it took you to complete it, you'll find that the hype is justified.

<comment><USER4> But at the expense of performance? I've written a number of applications in Meteor and continually struggle to scale them, even to tens of concurrent users.

<comment><USER5> Well [http://mostexclusivewebsite.com/](http://mostexclusivewebsite.com/) currently has 46,000 users concurrently connected, in-line, receiving live updates, waiting for a ticket. So yeah, I would go so far as to say that Meteor can be scaled pretty well.

<comment><USER4> I've just tried to access the site and it's failing to load half the time, and the other half it's taking over a minute to load. It's awesome you're getting traffic but I'm not sure you can say you've successfully scaled your app right at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to see this implemented as a mixin when they just announced yesterday they are fully supporting es6. Looking forward to building some side projects with this and seeing how it compares to using react + flux.

<comment><USER7> Hi, I wrote this blog post.

We were trying to keep our API surface area small with one way to load data into components, but you're right -- we should probably /also/ add a ES6 base class as a second option, and let the people choose which they prefer.

A lot of React developers still prefer mixins -- react-router recently switched from mixins to ES6 classes and then changed their mind "until ES6 classes have better answers to replace what mixins do (like decorators).": [https://github.com/rackt/react- router/blob/master/UPGRADE_GU...](https://github.com/rackt/react- router/blob/master/UPGRADE_GUIDE.md#0132---0133)

<comment><USER8> That is very disappointing. Decorators already exist in Babel and they work perfectly. I don't know what they're waiting for

<comment><USER9> I suspect they're waiting for the proposal to be more stable for the official integration. This seems like a great opportunity for the community to write a decorator and let a convention form before it gets merged into the core framework

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What advantages does a meteor+react setup have vs pouchdb+react (synced to couch in backend)? I would think, with meteor you get the backend rendering (for SEO), and with pouch you get a DB API on the fronted that's available offline.

<comment><USER11> Meteor's story for backend rendering is the spiderable package, which works as follows: "When a spider requests an HTML snapshot of a page the Meteor server runs the client half of the application inside phantomjs, a headless browser, and returns the full HTML generated by the client code."

That's not really a good solution for all the obvious reasons. (Speed, resource usage, dependencies.) Plus, by that logic _every_ client-side webapp supports being rendered on the server, so that's not even a meteor-specific advantage.

Conversely, React actually does supports true universal (aka isomorphic) apps; you can pre-render the app on the server using node ( _without_ needing a headless browser), ship it to the client, and rehydrate it. (Ember is working on shipping the same functionality under the name FastBoot.) Meteor doesn't have anything like that.

I'm sure meteor+react has some advantages over pouchdb+react, but it's not because of server side rendering. :)

(Well, as far as I know. I haven't been paying much attention to Meteor development, so it's possible the story has changed in the last few months. But last I checked, true server-side rendering was easy with react, but not really possible with meteor.)

<comment><AUTHOR> React integration should make implementing good server-side rendering much easier. There is already a discussion and community project around this: [https://github.com/meteor/react- packages/issues/15](https://github.com/meteor/react-packages/issues/15)

<comment><USER11> That's good to hear!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will Meteor work with React Native? I'd guess so, since React Native implements XHR and other non-DOm APIs one might expect to find in a browser.

<comment> drew-y They alluded to it here: [http://info.meteor.com/blog/whats-coming-in- meteor-12-and-be...](http://info.meteor.com/blog/whats-coming-in- meteor-12-and-beyond)

>"Mobile advances. There are many exciting possibilities in the mobile build toolchain, from new technologies like React Native to a wide range of tooling opportunities relating to cross-platform building and debugging.

With your help, we'll have more to say about these over the coming months."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I made a toy project once shortly after meteor had just been released. I just kept bricking myself that I'd overlook some security setting that would allow people to run arbitrary queries against my DB. When I also looked into scaling I gave up.

Now with the way things have gone with an emphasis on mobile, most sites I'd want to make would be better written as REST-style app servers with pluggable clients.

<comment><USER5> Firstly, your concern about security is completely unfounded; Meteor only allows you to run queries against the database if you write specific ALLOW/DENY rules to let them through. Otherwise, all DB calls go through Meteor methods that are run both on the client (for optimistic updates) and on the server (in a controlled environment). So you let through whatever you _choose_ to let through.

Secondly, Meteor has several modules that allow you to expose Meteor methods as a REST frontend, so it's a trivial change to get that functionality added in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like to see this with es6 components

<comment><USER15> You mean web components? I'm not sure it's possible to pass in anything other then strings as values via their attribute changed callback. They simply aren't as well designed and powerful as React components.

<comment><USER2> By ES6 components OP likely means React components defined using the ES2015 (aka ES6) "class" syntax. The most notable difference is that they don't support mixins, which Meteor seems to take for granted.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are Wikipedia's costs higher for page views or page edits? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to understand the economics of hosting a large scale wiki system. Is it more expensive for Wikipedia to serve page views, or to serve page edits?
I don't know enough about this to calculate this myself. My guess is that edits are more expensive ( diffs, history, few caching opportunities ) but less numerous, while views are more numerous but less expensive. I don't have experience or knowledge about this to know where these numbers sit tho.
I hoping someone can speak to this or suggest some information that would make it possible to estimate. <comment><USER2> • Wikimedia keeps detailed statistics which look like what you want, but I haven't dug too deep so it may be lacking in some way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Web_statistics_tool](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Web_statistics_tool)

[https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/)

• There is also an API: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php)

You could probably get an estimate of edits per day by requesting versioning metadata (i.e. each version being an edit) on a sample of documents.

• I think it will be essential for you to run tests using the actual configuration that you plan to have. Server hardware and the software stack and their respective configurations are a significant factor in the cost of running something like this and are nearly impossible to estimate. There are cases where modifying a single configuration flag can multiply the requests per second you're able to serve.

• Additionally, you should probably factor in business-level projections based on the market your project is aimed it - ask yourself: will your project be as popular as wikipedia? Will your users have the same ratio of pure consumers to editors as wikipedia?

Consider identifying user characteristics in your market segments which correlate with whether someone is a pure consumer vs. an editor.

</comment><comment><USER3> The most expensive are logged in views because these are custom rendered pages that can't be completely cached and they happen a lot, a lot more often than edits.

Anyway mediawiki runs pretty well on basic hardware but if you think it's going to be really big you have to think about scaling horizontally anyway.</comment>


Build System Rules and Algorithms [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://gittup.org/tup/build_system_rules_and_algorithms.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This is off of a posting over on the GNU Make Help mailing list: [http://www.nabble.com/build-system-rules---algorithms- td2395...](http://www.nabble.com/build-system-rules---algorithms- td23953920.html)</comment>


My first app: Locate your friends at festivals w/ BTLE (Couchbase + bonjour) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wandertheapp.com/ <comment><USER2> I'll give this a shot. We used to use google latitude to good effect, but it didn't survive.

I like that it tries to use a ad hoc mesh network as sometimes the crowd kills the cell network. One hopes its good on batteries.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's pretty decent on batteries. It only wakes up when a friend is actively searching for you, and only for ~4 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice tool, is there a way to have a compass / direction arrow pointed at the direction of your nearby friend?

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a good idea. I'll try to add something like that to the next release.

In the current version, you can tap the navigate icon on the top-right of the map and the map will rotate to follow your heading. Then you can just point it towards any of your friends. But you're right, a simple compass could be better.</comment></comment>


Online museum of vintage, abandoned, and pre-release software - <AUTHOR> https://winworldpc.com/home <comment><USER2> Here's another [http://www.oldversion.com](http://www.oldversion.com) \- where i find old versions of software that do not have built in mechanisms to serve ads.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was just reminiscing with a friend about 3d landscape generator/modeller VistaPro last week, and here it is, along with a great many other nostalgia- inducing things. Thanks!</comment>


John Carmack's Keynote at Oculus 4 Live Stream [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/oculusvr/videos/vb.270208243080697/1189602884474557/?type=3&theater <comment><USER2> I think John Carmack is one of my favorite people to watch present. If you haven't watched his long rants about using FP in game dev @ QuakeCon a few years back you should.

It was QuakeCon 2013, although I'm not sure which part: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUxcVzpeFqc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUxcVzpeFqc)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, he is really quite good at this. (I wonder if it came naturally to him, or if it's just a matter of practicing very regularly for like 20 years?)

I wish he would give Elon Musk some mentoring on how to communicate with a technical audience. Or just a regular audience, I guess.

<comment><USER4> I'm under the hypothesis that (good) game developers know how to talk to people (or at least how to present things to people) because part of game design is thinking about how to manipulate people's emotions into wanting to (or even being eager to!) face a challenge you've set out for them.

It's similar but not identical to the reasoning for actors and directors to be good entertainers and interviewers. Those folks constantly think about manipulating people's emotions in general, but game design is completely focussed on just manipulating people into excitement or flow states — and that just so happens to be the emotion you (usually) want people to have in reaction to a presentation: the feeling of "I'm going to go out— _and buy their thing_ —and change the world."

<comment><USER5> Carmack is more of a game engine engineer than a game designer, as evidenced by the lacklustre design of id games after Romero left.

<comment><USER6> Quake 3 Arena is still one of the best multiplayer shooters ever, so I can't agree with your statement.

<comment><USER7> While surely being a marvel of software engineering and level design, it had nothing in common with Quake I and II. It is not my intent to be critical here, but QA3 felt like a circus, especially compared with other multiplayer shooters such as the original Unreal Tournament, which had a wonderful mysterious atmosphere to it.

<comment><USER8> I was just playing something recently and thought "This feels like an Unreal Tournament Space Castle." Can't remember what game it was.

UT99 had some fantastic level design. Facing Worlds, Phobos, HyperBlast, Deck 16, Coret, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huge fan of John Carmack!

These quotes from the keynote really stand out to me:

"If you think you've got that new killer app by all means go ahead and work on it but otherwise you can always spend time improving the existing applications and those are good muscles to exercise so even if it turns out that it wasn't the magic app - going through the disciplined work of making it as good as it can possibly be is whats going to need to be applied when you eventually get the magical application"

"Embrace the grind. You've all shown that you're bold by starting to work on an emerging platform that is not mainstream yet but it takes more than just being bold - you have to actually work really hard and you've got to fill your products with give a damn, to really care about every aspect of them."

"Success isn't about that one brilliant idea. Its about doing the one thousand little things right and getting it all done."

<comment><USER10> Thanks for this I wonder if someone is compiling all of his quotes from other lectures into a handbook.

<comment><USER11> Here's a huge archive of them. I shipped it to PrintMe1 and had it spiral bound for reading.

[http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc- interviews.pdf](http://fd.fabiensanglard.net/doom3/pdfs/johnc-interviews.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How much runway does Oculus have left? They're 5 years in.

VR headset unit sales to March, 2017:

\- Sony: 915,000

\- HTC: 420,000

\- Oculus: 243,000

Will Facebook keep pouring money in, or pull the plug?

[1] [https://haptic.al/latest-virtual-reality-headset-sales-so- fa...](https://haptic.al/latest-virtual-reality-headset-sales-so- far-9553e42f60b5)

<comment><USER13> Those are low numbers for everyone involved.

I think this is a longterm space that Facebook is definitely not interested in missing out on, so they'll keep it going.

How much does it cost really, in the scheme of things? If anything, I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the talent away from the competitors, they have the cash to do it and I'm sure people would be happy to work under Carmack.

<comment><USER14> > I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the > talent away

To what end though? Say they could spend $10 million and quadruple the resolution, halve the price, and reduce the barf factor of a Rift v2 in a year. What then?

They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try to find something compelling to do with the current generation of hardware. It's cool for some types of games, but a market that's a subset of a subset isn't going to set the world on fire. It's easy to come up with a cool demo and hard to come up with a good application.

<comment><USER15> > They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try to find > something compelling to do with the current generation of hardware.

As a completely separate peripheral? Generally speaking most external peripherals sell to niche markets.

<comment><USER14> I was thinking more about some compelling application. The current generation of headsets is pretty neat.

In the current form factor, I just can't see it moving beyond a gaming peripheral anytime soon and the market for that is limited. I was excited when Facebook got into this because _appealing to everybody_ is what they do. But there's been nothing.

I'm starting to think VR is a dead end. There _is_ a market for it, but maybe it's not very big.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any restreams that don't require a login?

Edit found one: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=sjOKx5yntC4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=sjOKx5yntC4)

<comment><USER17> Try using a private window. It only makes you log in if it detects certain FB cookies and thinks you're a user.

<comment><USER18> Interestingly, this works on desktop but not on mobile

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> John Carmack is the most natural presenter i have ever seen he just dumps his thoughts in a clear informative way.

Not afraid of anything.

It certainly helps that he thinks about this topic from dusk till dawn. He has interesting comments and thoughts about everything the questioners mentions.

<comment><USER20> John Carmack once wrestled a bear for 6 hours until the bear tired out and admitted defeat.

After the contest, he picked two bushels of berries and fed them to the bear just to show there were no hard feelings.

They are still friends to this day....

<comment><USER21> Sounds likely given the events of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X68Mm_kYRjc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X68Mm_kYRjc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> my favorite Facebook comment from the live stream: Artificial Intelligence does exist. This guy is clearly not human

</comment><comment><USER23> Facebook, I don't want to log into your fucking website. Can you please get that fucking button out of the way, so I can watch the video?

</comment><comment><USER24> "I do my morning trawl of Twitter and Hacker News inside the browser, in Oculus, inside the Go"

</comment><comment><USER25> The record: [https://youtu.be/vlYL16-NaOw](https://youtu.be/vlYL16-NaOw)

</comment><comment><USER26> Is there any good software yet for Gear VR (which could thus be used on Oculus Go) for emulating multiple monitors?

<comment><USER27> Might be worth asking why you want it? Simulated monitor(s) in VR on the first generation of VR hardware run into blurriness problems from having low resolution displays relative to the monitors they're simulating.

<comment><USER26> I work remotely and travel all the time. It would be great to have a VR headset that doesn't require a desktop and provides expanded screen real estate. I know this is something that many people besides myself want.

The oculus go sounds like it solves the major blocking issue since it is stand alone and thus doesn't depend on the computer for the 3d rendering capacity. There is still the question of if using the VR device for work is feasible/productive, but at least it is now possible which I why I was curious as to if any such software exists.

Some of the resolution mismatch could be solved by simply expanding the virtual screen and/or setting the computer to display at a lower resolution so that the resolutions match closer. Some of this is probably helped by using a cylindrical surface in the VR environment.

<comment><USER28> The resolution you would have to use to do this without excessive head movement would probably be more appropriate for mobile UI than desktop UI. I don't think the current gen headsets can provide a satisfactory Excel experience for example. Also, the relatively small 'sweet spot' that current gen headsets provide make extended reading uncomfortable since it requires head movement for what would usually be accomplished by eye movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So no new higher resolution devices yet? That's a bit disappointing. Any other events in the pipeline where such may be announced?

<comment> loup-vaillant Having tried a couple VR headsets (including the Vive), I'm pretty sure resolution is good enough for now. Yes, it needs improvement, but it wouldn't be my top priority.

I currently have two pet peeves: wireless latencies, and hand tracking. I want to cut the cable, which is cumbersome, causes problems if I spin too much, and tether me to a small area. I also want to track free hands (perhaps with gloves), for fine grained hand gestures (the Vive controller is good, but still a bit intrusive).

<comment><USER29> I'm mainly into simulators such as DCS, Elite Dangerous and iRacing for VR. My understanding is that increased resolution would make those titles better; conversely, none require / would benefit greatly from hand tracking, so it's all about different needs. :-)

I was hoping to see a new Rift to address this, but as such I'm happily staying on my 95hz 34" 3440x1440 with TrackIR a bit longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's the recording: [https://www.facebook.com/oculusvr/videos/1189602884474557](https://www.facebook.com/oculusvr/videos/1189602884474557)

</comment><comment><USER31> This stuff is compelling, especially after having recently read Ready Player One. However, how do you type? There's all this talk of how this tech is great for programmers, with tons more screen space, etc... but unless I just missed it somehow, don't see where a normal keyboard fits into the picture.

<comment><USER32> I already use a Das Ultimate keyboard. No key caps. It's pretty straightforward to learn the keyboard if you don't fall back on looking. It's like full immersion in a foreign language. If you _have_ remember things, then you will.

So I can type while wearing an Oculus Rift. It's not a problem. And I'm sure you can do it too.

<comment><USER31> That's not exactly what I mean. It looks like most VR rigs these days are using some sort of control thing that you hold in your hand. Doesn't look like you could type (with more than one finger of each hand) and hold it at the same time.

On the other hand, maybe lightweight haptic gloves are a thing already and I just don't know about it.

<comment><USER33> Gloves aren't really a mainstream consumer product yet in a way that you'd expect in the future. When I'm typing in VR, I have to put my controllers down to the side of the keyboard. Easy to pick them back up though. It certainly would be nice to have the keyboard tracked so I don't have to slide my hands on the desk to look for it, but once I grab it, typing is fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bow to the king.

</comment><comment><USER35> Tl;dw anyone?

<comment><USER36> Noes. Only you.

<comment><USER35> Would you be so kind to give a summary of what you've seen?

<comment><USER37> There are some excerpts in other comments, but it's essentially a dense brain dump for almost 2 hours. I dont think you can get a meaningful "tl;dr"-style summary short enough that you wouldn't just ask tl;dr again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gruber Hints at iPad 3 Coming this Summmer - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/09/hp-touchpad-veer-pre

<comment><USER2> that wasnt a hint, he was referring to ipad's release in spring 2012..

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure? He refers to the iPad 2 and then the iPad 3. In this follow up post (<http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/the_next_six_months>) he refers to the iPad 3 as potentially shipping in Fall 2012.

<comment><USER2> yeah you're right. techcrunch picked up on it too:

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/09/ipad-3/></comment></comment></comment>


How New Entrepreneurs Are Taking Advantage of the Great Reset - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/entrepreneurs-great-reset/

<comment><USER2> This article makes no claims, offers no evidence, and says nothing.

I humbly suggest you spend your holiday time elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> What robfitz said...

But I will see robfitz's "humbly" and raise it "greatly"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A total fluff piece for someone pushing their new book.</comment>


LXC container networking deep dive - <AUTHOR> http://www.flockport.com/flockport-labs-extending-layer-2-across-container-hosts/ <comment><USER2> TLDR; author looks quickly at options for layer 2 sharing between containers on physically disparate hosts.

That said, note that this is a very bad idea in most cases because you are increase network complexity, expose additional code (both points bad for security) and create startup latency. The only excuse for this normally would be an application clearly requiring layer two connectivity that you are prepared to test, maintain and debug across flaky somehow-encapsulated WAN infrastructure.

As the maintainer of _lxc-gentoo_ and an early LXC adopter (5 years), I applaud the author for bothering to look at things instead of jumping on one of the PaaS bandwagons. However, one should be careful of designing spherical cows.

Personally I recommend the following for container networking:

(1) Use _veth_ device pairs. These are host-to-container and provide you with per-container isolated networking and accounting very cheaply.

(2) Preconfigure your interfaces with static IPs from the host side by generating an appropriate _lxc.container.conf_ and network up script to configure the host-side interface. This removes any latency in interface configuration due to layer two issues such as spanning tree protocols, and layer three issues such as DHCP. Note that you may have to set _resolv.conf_ using a similar automated process.

(3) Provide outbound (internet) or inter-container connectivity to the various container _veth_ interfaces on the host via explicit rules on a per-guest _iptables_ chain that can be conveniently and precisely destroyed with the termination of each guest system. Treat in-kernel bridges as a hack with STP hassles, like they are.

<comment><USER3> veth pairs are a reasonable default for simple single-host connectivity (it's the default for Docker, for example). But for high-throughput production deployments where latency matters, you may need to look at other options. This is what we most commonly see when Docker is deployed in production (note that the lesson applies to any orchestration system based on linux containers, not just Docker):

\- Sometimes people dedicate a whole physical interface for the sole use of a container, by moving it into the namespace. The downside is that the interface is completely unavailable to other namespaces, including the host.

\- macvlan is pretty popular, it allows multiple containers to share access of the same physical interface, without conflicts and without the performance overhead of a veth+bridge combination.

\- you can also connect your container to an overlay network using a variety of tunneling systems. vxlan is the _flavor du jour_ but there is a flurry of competing standards and implementations in that area.

By far the coolest part about container networking on Linux is that _it 's just regular linux networking_. The entire stack, and all the tooling that comes with it, is available to containers. You just need to glue it together. And of course these options are not mutually exclusive: a namespace can contain as many network interfaces as you want.

Disclaimer: I am not a networking expert, but a lot of networking experts want their favorite toys natively integrated into Docker, so they take the time to explain to me how they work.

<comment><USER2> _It is unsurprising that it is easy to beat a general system by specializing it._ \- Schwarzkopf et al, 'The seven deadly sins of cloud computing research' (2014)

 _A general-purpose product is harder to design well than a special-purpose one._ \- Frederick P. Brooks, 'The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist' (2010)

 _10th Fundamental Truth of Networking: One size never fits all._ \- RFC1925 (1996)

[https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is an excellent post about why you dont want layer 2 tunnels here [http://markburgess.org/blog_broadcast.html](http://markburgess.org/blog_broadcast.html)

<comment><USER5> Did he end up suggesting... NAT?

<comment><USER4> No. ipv6 if you don't have enough ipv4 addresses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok this is a great article... but what is Flockport stuff? I'm kinda shying away from Docker since their move from LXC... This looks really neat!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi author here, thanks, glad you liked it! Flockport provides ready to deploy containers of popular apps based on LXC. We like the simplicity of LXC containers and find it easier to use.

The comments are spot on, most networking gurus appear to be strictly against extending layer 2 as we note in the post but we wanted to put the options out there. You definitely need to address latency and mtu issues across remote hosts that will crop up, but with standards like VXLAN based on extending layer 2 perhaps we will soon start seeing interesting workarounds.</comment></comment>


VMWare Screw Customers - <AUTHOR> http://communities.vmware.com/thread/320877?start=0&tstart=0

<comment><USER2> Having worked with VMware in the past and spent literally millions of dollars in licenses, I had the opportunity to meet lots of VMware employees. My observations is that the company had some very technically brilliant people, but also a lot of people that epitomize the super smart MBA that but naïve MBA that can understand high level business models and financial cleverness, but that are terrible business people because they are completely oblivious to the skill that all great business people have and that is empathy for your customer. This is ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I am their customer anymore.

<comment><USER3> VMware has had some significant management changes: [http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update-t...](http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update- to-recent-vmware-ceo-change.html) so you are maybe right about the MBA, non- founder thinking at the C-level there.

Compare VMware's 20110331 net income to 20101231 net income: [https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii) \- note how it has flattened.

Since VMware is public quarterly results are vital to the naive MBA. Said MBA might decide to improve profitability by pushing small customers to cloud services (Amazon) who are already customers of VMware.

This also has the advantage eliminating VMware as a competitor to some of VMware's largest customers.

ESXi is already free with limitations. This will definitely be the reasoning if we see VMware make workstation free thereby bring even more potential users in.

<comment><USER4> Amazon uses Xen, they probably don't pay VMware or Citrix for any licensing.

<comment><USER2> They don't. Amazon is built off the FOSS version of Xen - <http://xen.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> VMware Customer here.

Lots of FUD coming from the community- at first glance it sounds bad, but a lot of us should do the math before getting the pitchfork ready. ( Script to help "do the math" <http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/> )

We will actually be saving money with the vRAM licensing changes.

<comment><USER6> It looks like by changing the pricing to reflect more of the provisioning they're encouraging people to stick more CPUs per guest. I guess the more people are overloading their hardware at the moment, the bigger the license price jump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On the original page's comments some people mention it might even be cheaper to buy hardware instead of licenses, anyone have a take on that?

Example:

a) 1 x Large Server + VMware licenses

-or-

b) N x Small Servers

If b) is more cost-effective then VMWare definitely dropped the ball here...

<comment><USER8> Many large enterprises are exceptionally bad at managing physical hardware. And if they are ok at it, they spend obscene amounts of money to do so.

One of the key advantages of VMWare from a operational point of view is the management capability, which is either much better than what most people have for physical hardware or much cheaper. Even with this new licensing model, VMWare still offers a positive ROI for a large customer, since that customer would also need to buy more licenses for products like IBM/Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC, etc. Those products are mega-buck, and enterprise customers are/were realizing cost savings by getting rid of them.

It's hard to see this from a small/mid-size enterprise perspective. Imagine $2M in recurring licensing charges and $750k in annual consulting expenses for a product functionally similar or inferior to Nagios. Or spending $20M annually on maintenance on software that you don't use. This happens every day in the Fortune 500 and government spaces.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I work at a small company and IT is just me and another guy. We have 2 physical servers, but probably 6, and growing, virtual servers. If we had 6 physical servers, even if it was cheaper, we'd need to hire another 'guy' to manage them. A 'guy' costs the same as 5-10 physical servers, per year...

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry to be blunt but a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins:servers means you are doing it very, very wrong. 1:300 is not uncommon these days with the right tools.

<comment><USER11> That really depends how much of the additional "IT guy" hours are going into desktop support of the (presumably) more complex configuration.

I'd say a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins to servers is actually pretty common -if- the sysadmins also do desktop support for the organization. At one of my ISP jobs the customer/production servers had a 1:50 or so ratio (but a lot of time was spent on new products/features, maintenance could easily have been 1:200 and our automation was mediocre) but the internal IT dept was around the 1:3 mark.

And he said "IT is just me and another guy", not "systems is just me and another guy", so I suspect that's the case for him.

<comment><USER12> Depends on how large that organization is, and how much IT junk, like mail, etc.. is outsourced.

(I'm sole sysadmin for a search engine, and I handle 200 servers.)

<comment><USER13> What search engine?

<comment><USER12> picsearch.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Red Hat and Oracle should start making some sales calls, right about now. They should capitalize on this opportunity to convert some disaffected VMWare customers, and fund software development for migrating off the VMWare stack.

<comment><USER15> Oracle is just as bad, in it's way, with respect to licensing.

<comment><USER16> Actually, worse.

I've been involved in a project where we have actually had to change the direction of technology as well as deployment schedule to avoid incurring a massive (think over $100 million) license upcharge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.

<comment><USER18> We were faced with a very similar dilemma when we set up our virtualized cluster... Do we go with a free open-source solution like KVM, forgoing an easy-to-use GUI, or do we go with a more expensive solution such as VMware?

We eventually decided to build a KVM-based cluster, and while we were already extremely glad we did before the vSphere 5 licensing change, this latest development only serves to confirm the wisdom of our choice. We have enterprise-level support if we need it, the virsh command-line interface is very straightforward and easy to pick up, and we have not shackled our fates to an organization that can yank the rug out from under us whenever they like. Moreover, for Linux-based folks who find themselves pondering their options, consider that VMware requires that you run Windows in your cluster if you want the full advantages of vSphere (e.g., live migration). Because of the added maintenance and security concerns, we were quite loathe to introduce any Windows operating systems into our cluster environment, and the unfortunate state of the VMware world is that it's extremely Windows-centric.

The best part? Not only do we have a fast, rock-solid virtualization solution in place, but the easy-to-use GUI we wanted is also on the horizon. Take one look at the Archipel Project at <http://archipelproject.org/>, and I think you'll agree its interface puts vSphere to shame. Archipel is not yet ready for critical production environments and (last I checked) currently lacks full support for libvirt-based storage APIs (e.g., for LVM-backed virtual storage pools), but development is progressing steadily. I, for one, am looking forward to getting the best of both worlds (liberated + easy-to-administer software) in our data center when the time is right. If that interests you, head on over to <https://github.com/primalmotion/archipel> and fork away!

<comment><USER19> If you have a blog, would you write something up about Archipel? That looks pretty damned nice, and I'd like to hear the perspective of an implementer (alongside reading docs).

I'm all about getting FOSS some visibility in my company.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. I'm already half-way done writing an article on Archipel, and I'll be sure it gets posted to HN when it's ready.

As an aside, Antoine (the author of Archipel) just told me that beta 3 will be released next week, after which he'll be focusing on expanding the VM storage options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is really the primary value proposition of Free and Open Source Software. No matter what happens down the road, no one can suddenly jack up licensing fees. Even if one company decides to try to change the direction of a project (Oracle; OpenOffice), another group can fork it to keep it going (LibreOffice).

Alternatives to VMware like KVM aren't just a better version of VMware that happens to be free, but it's fundamentally better because it is free (as in speech, of course).

<comment><USER21> There's also XenServer that's free as in beer and speech. But the freedom in speech is mostly theoretical, because it's so hard to build.

<comment><USER22> XenServer is actually the product name from Citrix. Xen is the open source project that is Open Source.

I know its being a stickler for the tiny facts, but when you are a XenServer admin find the differences rather quickly.

<comment><USER21> Xen is a hypervisor. XenServer is the product name from Citrix which uses Xen underneath. Xen Cloud Platform is actually the name of opensource xenserver.

You wouldn't use just Xen as a hypervisor, in most cases. Amazon uses Xen plus their own stuff on top.

To make it more complicated, there's also XenClient, which also builds on Xen. It's also mostly open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why use proprietary (less tested, less stable) solutions while there is community-tested and community-supported ones? ^_^

People still stuck with a stereotype that most brilliant programmers work for corporations. This is, obviously, not true. Most of corporations outsource their R&D and QA and spend for marketing instead. That is a very common strategy.

Now tell me - how this strategy correlates with a quality of a code or services? ^_^

Oracle vs. MySQL is a very good example - high quality community code is usually much better and well tested. (hint: it is about comparing the code quality, not a feature lists)

Being attached and depended (that is exactly what their marketing department is for) or not is your own choice. In some cases, like SAP, there is no community-supported alternatives, but it this case there is more than one.

Some people could say that we really need all those modern features, such as iscsi per lun mirroring, etc. But it is exactly this code is less tested and lower quality.

One cannot compete with Linux (Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS) communities in matters of testing and code quality. No code is better tested than those included in mainstream kernel or a polular distribution.

<comment><USER6> Has anyone had any experience with VMware's products being untested or unstable? I've heard annectodally that VMware's hypervisor is miles ahead of the others in terms of performance and useful features. Does anyone have any info on this?

<comment><USER23> I have seen crashed ESX servers with unreadable error messages while no information or support except PR and forums full of new users trying to convince themselves they did right choice. (post-purchase rationalizations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the conceptual switch in licensing model is fair.. from cpu-cores to vRAM entitlement.. But the vRAM allocations per license are not right. It puts sysadmins in a real bind.. having to report bad news to mgmt.

They need to to the right thing and adjust the vRAM untitlements. Sad thing is.. people are so locked in to VMWare infrastructure that they'll likely make money short term, at the expense of pissing of customers. Oracle plays this game too..

<comment><USER25> Their marketing materials say this is much easier but it doesn't seem easier to me. Right now, we have a three node Enterprise Plus, six CPU cluster. This is six licenses period.

Now, I have to track vRAM usage and decide to purchase EP licenses for all available RAM or just go with usage + growth for the year...or something. I'm not sure how that's easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a mean price increase.

<comment><USER27> Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers.

The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.

<comment><USER26> Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though.

But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

<comment><USER28> Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.

<comment><USER29> Those "ECC requirements" really make a difference though. And whoever is running servers without ECC memory in production should be shot dead (just wait until you have data corruption because of a faulty memory module to see what pain is).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Proxmox.com integrates OpenVZ and KVM virtualization with a decent Web GUI. Might be just the ticket for those not needing all of the ESX features.

</comment><comment><USER31> VMWare have started Screwing their Customers? Thats quite a diversion from virtualized operating systems. Does it scale?

<comment><USER32> +1 for making me spit out my drink in a hearty chortle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Did anyone else see this?

<http://i.imgur.com/5OyW7.png>

</comment><comment><USER34> A strong open source alternative is sure to come now.

<comment><USER35> Red Hat's been working on it for years and they're still years behind VMware. I don't think they could go any faster.

<comment><USER36> Yeah, but its not surprising that converting from a .net codebase to a java code base takes a few years.... they should have just re-written from scratch.... Once RHEV-3.0 is released though RHAT will open source it, so watch the product grow at that point, just like KVM has been growing in leaps and bounds recently.

I say that as someone who was part of the RHEV support team at launch.... RHEV 2 was a mistake. Red Hat should never have sold a product that depends on windows. They just don't know how to support it.

<comment><USER35> Is that what they're doing? I thought maybe the new RHEV manager would be built on oVirt.

<comment><USER36> Would you believe I heard something being bandied around about a $200 bit of software that converted c# code to java... and then have the devs fix the 20% that didn't convert.... I kid you not....

There was also talk about bringing in parts of the JBOSS stack... and I am not exactly sure why... but synergy might have something to do with it.

RHEV 3 will use more oVirt developed technologies (libvirt, etc) but now they have Enterprise customers who need compatibility for an extended period... so its going to be the ugly stepchild of RHEV2 (aka Qumranet's Product) and oVirt (redhats R&D). I suspect that RHEV is going to be carrying around baggage for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Companies care about Profits. Everything else is secondary for them.</comment>