Imagepile.net to host Fedora Mirror and other updates

We here at Imagepile are firm believers in the opensource community and all that it represents, we run a multitude of opensource programs to power Imagepile and we thank anyone who supports or participates in the community.  So.. we figured it was time to give something back, the imagepile crew has for a long time used the Fedora core distro and the previous RedHat series that came before it.  That being the case in anticipation of the upcoming release of Fedora Core 6 and the lack of.. or better put, demand for mirror bandwidth to help distribute those cd’s has become incredible, when Fedora Core 5 was released the collective pool of Fedora mirrors pushed over 50Gbps for more than 2 weeks.  That speak volumes about the demand for opensource software and what it brings to the table.

Anyways, we will be donating a 100Mbps server to the fedora mirror project for the upcoming release to do our part in distributing this fantastic (and free) Operating system 🙂

In other news we have successfully upgraded the imagepile forums to vBulletin 3.6.0 I think this change will bring added functionality and more community spirit to the Imagepile project.

Thanks 🙂

Does Microsoft even want anyone to use Vista?

From Slashdot:

“Pity the Vista user with a 32-bit CPU. Senior Program Manager Steve Riley announced today at Tech.Ed Australia that full HD content shall only be played at the full resolution where only signed drivers are used — only in the 64-bit version of Vista. From the article: ‘”Any next-generation high definition content will not play in x32 at all,” said Riley. “This is a decision that the Media Player folks made because there are just too many ways right now for unsigned kernel mode code [to compromise content protection]. The media companies asked us to do this and said they don’t want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this.”‘”

It seems more and more that Microsoft does not even want anyone to use their “new” operating system with all these restrictions they are putting on the normal user!

New generator hath arrived.

Well it’s FINALLY here… the big beast of a generator I’ve been waiting so long for, it’s a full 3/4 megawatt generator with a 3,000 gallon tank for diesel. It should be able to power the entire datacenter with HVAC at only baout 30% load which gives us plenty of room for expansion 🙂

Pictures to follow a bit later today

edit:

PICTURES!!

Generator

Microsoft will never get it

“Microsoft has shipped a ‘Vista Industrial Design Toolkit’ to PC manufacturers meant to encourage them to design computers that are more visually appealing. From the article: ‘From color palettes to suggestions about how the power and reset buttons should appear, the kit basically describes Microsoft’s vision of what a Vista PC should look like. The look features accelerated curves and purposeful contrast, among other qualities.’ The report goes on to say that Microsoft wants ‘PCs to be objects of pure desire.’ Sound familiar? It’s hard to see budget-conscious OEMs stepping up to this.”

Windows XP is 4 years old… there have been 3 releases of most opensource OS’s this year alone… will Microsoft ever put functionality over form? probably not.  I think most people will agree with me that I would rather have a computer function properly than “look pretty” or should I say what M$ says “visually appealing”.

[If anyone wonders I’m running Fedora Core 5 which is switched to (the Fedora line) 8 mos ago and haven’t looked back, hell you can run VMWare and have windows on your Linux… it even runs faster! 😉 ]

Imagepile migration

So I’ve finally started migrating imagepile to the new datacenter here @ Login. It should be interesting to see what kind of bandwidth we can push now that we basically have unlimited resources…. we’ve got about 1.5Gbps of headroom in the datacenter currently and even that is on multi-pair multi-mode OC class circuits that we can upgrade in 24hrs. I’m excited to see what kind of traffic I can really push on a multihomed connection (imagepile used to only be on Verio).

And we’ve served over 250 million images now 😉