Sun Microsystems Inc. will begin building servers with Windows preinstalled.

The agreement announced Wednesday is the latest twist in a truce the companies, once bitter rivals, hammered out in 2004, when Sun pocketed $1.95 billion in a settlement payout from Microsoft over antitrust and patent allegations, and both companies vowed to make their products work better together.

Sun will begin incorporating Microsoft’s Windows Server 2003 software into its so-called x64 servers, which are corporate computers that run on 64-bit microprocessors from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Servers are the computers in corporate data centers that process large amounts of data such as Internet traffic or financial calculations.

The companies said in a joint statement that Sun’s machines with Windows pre-installed will be available within 90 days.

Although Sun customers have been able to run Microsoft’s operating system on Sun servers for several years, Sun would not install it in the factory. That left customers who wanted Windows in the lurch unless they wanted to install in on their own or already had licensing contracts with Microsoft, in which case Sun would install it.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, stands to gain from the agreement because of Sun’s reach in the server world. Sun is the world’s No. 3 server seller with 13 percent of the worldwide market, behind IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co., according to the latest data from market researcher IDC.

The agreement includes a nod from Sun and Microsoft to the momentum surrounding so-called virtualization technology, which allows computers to run more than one operating system, saving hardware and electricity costs while boosting the performance of giant, energy-sapping machines.

Sun and Microsoft vowed to make sure their respective operating systems worked well with one another’s virtualization technologies, a commitment that could help both companies prosper from the trend toward data center consolidation and urgent efforts by technology managers to reduce energy costs.

The further embrace of Microsoft highlights Sun’s attempts to shed its image as that of a quarrelsome startup that in the late 1990s was eager to pick public fights with big rivals. Instead, Sun is becoming a more restrained and inclusive company willing to forge alliances, including the announcement last month of a partnership with longtime rival IBM Corp. that will allow Sun’s Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers.

It’s a crucial element of Sun’s turnaround strategy, and a formula that Sun management said is necessary to ensure the company’s long-term financial success.

Two things to note in this posting, Google is hosting the content from the news source. The other is Virtualization of Solaris on Windows and vice versa. This is great. Anyone who has tried running any form of linux or unix in Windows Virtual Server or Virtual PC knows that it is far from ideal.

http://mnathani.com/time/

This was really easy to do, using google’s time search operator. This feature has now been removed without word from Google as to why or if it will be coming back.

Ryerson Library News

Thursday, August 23, 2007

The Library and Facebook

Search the Ryerson Library from your Facebook account. The Ryerson Library has developed a Facebook application that allows you to search the Library catalogue and view Library web pages from within Facebook. To do this check the Ryerson U Facebook application instructions.

Really cool, the instructions provided actually promote the use of Firefox and Greasemonkey (a scripts tool which provides additional functionality to websites) in order to integrate it with Google Scholar.

Another major change is the removal of adsense. This might have had something to do with Darren Rowse at Problogger.net removing them from his blog. I have however included a single Amazon referral link on the top right corner and hope that it generates some revenue.

Something else that has changed is I have stopped del.icio.us daily blog posts from submitting the links that I bookmark everyday to this blog. Instead, I created a separate blog here. The primary reason for having them here is so I could keep a ‘backup’ in the even that del.icio.us was unavailable.

The theme being used right now is one from Semiologic. Their themes are really great and allow a lot of customizations.

I would be interested in your thoughts about the changes and what you feel would help me improve this blog’s image.

Essentially you get a new credit card number each time you want to buy something at a semi trustworthy site.

Very cool.

(more…)

Google does restrict this function to being used 1000 times per spreadsheet. Rightly so in my opinion to reduce load on their servers.

An example query to get the birth date of president Bush:

=googlelookup(”George W Bush”,”date of birth”)

The bad thing about using Godaddy to find domains you might be interested in is that if you don’t buy the domain that is availble right away, Godaddy might snap it up, register it for themselves and put it for sale at a huge premium.

Case in point: I wanted to register a new domain name for doing some consulting work here in Toronto. I checked out a bunch of domains similar to : TorontoITconsult.com which I ended  up registering. Another domain I was considering was TorontoITconsulting.com . That domain is no longer availible. Was registered 1 day after I registered my domain and is on sale now for $850. (By Godaddy nonetheless)

Lesson to learn: Don’t use Godaddy to search for avalible domain names if you dont want to purchase them right away.

An outline of the problem so far: Godaddy claims the server should have access to 100mbit of bandwidth. Even in a busy datacentre I would expect atleast 10mbit acheiveble bandwith on this connection.

Speed tests done at the server show that its more like a residential cable/dsl connection with downloads in the range of 2mbits and upload in the range of 400 kbits.

They call this a dedicated server and assure you that they have redundant network connections, great uptime, dedicated bandwidth. etc. They sell you a maximum of 2000 Gb / month of transfer per server.

Showing the 2mbits connection sustained over a one month period:

2mbits/sec x 1 mB/8 mbits x 1 GB / 1024mB x 1 min/60 sec x 1 hour/60 min x 1 day/24 hours x 1 month/30 days

This gives a grand total of : 632 GB /month.

Anyone with any experience with servers knows that it is not possible to sustain any connection at 100 % saturation for extended periods of time.

I would be interested in knowing if any Godaddy dedicated server users are able to push more than 500 GB of data per month.

Getting back to the original problem, Godaddy claimed to have increased the port speed to 100 mbits after a support ticket request. No change in speed was realized though.

Define:segway

Have requested 100 mbps now, will see what the results are.

PS: the 10mbps maxed out at 2mbps for some reason.

Dave wrote:
Dedicated Hosting servers are on high speed, redundant networks, connected to our access switches at 100 Mbps. There is a policy on them that limits bandwidth leaving your server to 10 Mbps. This is a safety valve, for your convenience. For most customers, keeps them from grossly overrunning their bandwidth limit in case of a break out. For most, 10 Mbps is an adequate speed to host several web sites. If you need the full 100 Mbps, ask, our level 2 customer support staff can change you to a 20 Mbps policy or unleash you at 100 Mbps.

The performance of the Core 2 Duo systems is very good. It’s plenty of horsepower for the needs of our customers.
However, there is an untapped market for high end, like Xeon, and other goodies like private networks and load balancing. We’re investigating this exciting avenue with our market analysts and engineers.

Dave.

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Human solvers

CAPTCHA is vulnerable to a relay attack that uses humans to solve the puzzles. One approach involves relaying the puzzles to a sweatshop of human operators who can solve CAPTCHAs. In this scheme, a computer fills out a form and when it reaches a CAPTCHA, it gives the CAPTCHA to the human operator to solve. If the humans are dedicated employees who receive minimum wage this is not likely to be viable. Another variation of this technique involves copying the CAPTCHA images and using them as CAPTCHAs for a high-traffic site owned by the attacker. With enough traffic, the attacker can get a solution to the CAPTCHA puzzle in time to relay it back to the target site.