The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,828 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Cloud’ Category

Next Entries »

Less than two decades of Google Data Centers – from corkboard x86 hardware via GPU to TPU – now they make their own chips too

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/05/20

First corkboard production server by Google in 1998

First corkboard production server by Google in 1998

Remember the image on the right? It was the first “corkboard” production server Google used in 1998 (it’s a museum piece now).

From there they were using commodity-class x86 server computers running customized versions of Linux for a “long” time which around 2005 even got their own 12V battery as UPS inside the machine and running 1160 machines in a 1AAA shipping container.

Later whey started using a mix of CPU and GPU increasing the performance per watt and recently went from 12V to 48V and even contributed 48V DC Data Center Rack to Open Compute.

In the mean time, Tensor Flow and AI got even more important for Google and during the Google I/O 2016 keynote, they revealed yet another step: TPU chips especially made for TensorFlow providing even better performance per watt for machine learning than GPU. The TPUs are not FPGAs (popular for instance when mining BitCoins), but ASICs that perform orders of magnitude better.

So in about 18 years, Google moved from cleverly assembled commodity hardware to highly specialised custom chips.

Exciting times are ahead of us. I’m really looking forward to the next steps.

–jeroen

Sources:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Google, History, Infrastructure, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Two opinions on Netflix and blocking: they hate Netflix or contact tr@netflix.com and try to solve …

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/03/28

Basically there are two opinions on Netflix and blocking:

  • TL;DR: People use VPNs for security, Netflix fucks them up, they hate Netflix for that and just torrent that shit.
  • tl;dr If you have issues with Netflix on public Wifi, contact the provider and forward tr@netflix.com to them so they can settle issues.

I’m not a netflix user (or user of any form of DRM) as I really dislike the fact that DRM means for any reason your license can be ended. I’ve seen too many players going out of business or taking decisions turning.

So I buy CDs, DVDs, BlueRays or DRM-free media files. Now it’s my problem of making proper back-ups to ensure future access to them (:

The DRM walls and ladders war^w game has gone so far that in this case, Netflix is blocking even though the WiFi provider / proxy / VPN is in the same country like the below imgur image:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Infrastructure, Netflix, Network-and-equipment, Power User, VPN | Leave a Comment »

It was fun while it lasted: Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life

Posted by jpluimers on 2016/02/05

Copy had some advantages and disadvantages. For instance, it was better handling long file names, character encodings in filenames and a lot easier to configure over a CNTLM proxy than DropBox, but unlike DropBox didn’t keep history of changes.

Alas no more copy.com as of 20160501: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Copy End-of-Life.

They suggest using [WayBack] Mover with OneDrive as target: [WayBack] Barracuda Copy – Moving Your Data from Copy

Note that Mover has many more connectors, including cloud storage ones (Box, Copy, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Yandex.Disk are free):

[WayBack] Connectors • Mover: FTP, Dropbox, Box, GoogleDrive, Copy, Egnyte, Amazon S3, SharePoint, MySQL the list goes on!

For me it means it’s time to think about what kinds of cloud storage I want to use and how to share what data with others at which access level. As I’m already contemplating on how to use ZFS, I now have two storage concepts to think about.

–jeroen

Posted in Cloud, Cloud Apps, Cntlm, Copy.com, DropBox, Infrastructure, NTLM, Power User, SocialMedia, Windows, Windows-Http-Proxy | Leave a Comment »

Was ist Cloud? Great presentation including transcript by Kristian Köhntopp.

Posted by jpluimers on 2015/08/23

When one of my DevOps friends asks: Was ist Cloud?.

Kristian Köhntopp even published it as a SlideShare deck with transcript: Was ist Cloud?.

There is even a video: Froscon “Was ist Cloud?” – Video.

Thanks a million, Kris, this is very much worth reading for anybody doing Ops, Dev or DevOps.

There is even a

If you can’t read German: tough luck (;

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Development, Firewall, Infrastructure, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Next Entries »