Ok, sorry for the bad pun, but I swear it's unintentional; and accurate. That was my first though on watching it last night "Well, it didn't suck".
For those of you not getting the reference, "True Blood" is HBOs new vampire show, based on Charlaine Harrises "Southern Vampire Mysteries"; a wildly popular bestselling series of books in the modern fantasy romance/paranormal fantasy genre that has been so popular for the last five years or so.
The setup, is that vampires are real (and by extension other paranormal beasties, though in the early stages of the story that goes unsaid or is deprecated), and that they revealed themselves to the population at large ("came out of the coffin" as it were) when a synthetic substitute for human blood was developed.
Now, there's a vampire rights movement, vampire cultists, anti-vampire racists, vampire fetishists... basically all the cultural baggage you would expect. There are lots of vampires who've come fully out into the light so to speak, and are trying to live openly in society. There are also large groups of vampires who are unhappy with this turn of events, preferring that normals didn't know they really existed etc... and of course there's the good guys and bad guys. It IS storytelling after all.
All of these are common conceits of the modern vampire genre by the way (excepting synthetic blood. Usually they use pigs blood, and willing donors, to justify the act of vampirism) so if you're familiar with the genre you won't have too much catching up to do.
Well, disregarding the source material, the show has potential. It wasn't great, but it was interesting, well made, and just over the edge of "good", with the promise of better to come as the storyline unfolds and characters develop.
Charlaine Harris is a best selling author for a reason; and the characters and setting offer a lot of opportunity for growth and development.
...Guess I better actually read the books now... I've read "Dead Until Dark", the first in the series, and I liked it; but I'd never bothered with the rest (she's up to 8 in the direct story line now).
Anna Paquin is an odd one for me. She has these flashes of brilliance, mixed with longer periods of irritation. I'm curious to see how she'll do with Sookie. So far she's got the character down, but she's a bit "shiny penny" for me.
...Oh and her teeth bug me. Yes I know it's shallow, but she has very odd teeth, and it makes her mouth shape weird.
Actually, I was most impressed with newcomers Nelsan Ellis (only major credits are 2005 and newer), and Rutina Wesley (this is her second major credit); who could have been little more than ugly stereotypes with less capable acting. Their characters are over the top, but the actors characterizations makes them interesting rather than irritating.
An important note: this IS HBO, and apparently they have decided to push far beyond their normal levels of sexuality. There is a bit of soft-core porn-ish sex; and a not inconsiderable amount of naked sweaty skin (being set in Louisiana of course), and the teasers for future episodes promise much more of the same.
Don't worry, it's not Laurell K. Hamilton level smut ...it's not even skinemax level smut; but it's more explicit and graphic.
Given the general run of "vampire sex" in popular culture these days, and what I saw in the first episode; I'd guess it's going to be a lot "rougher" (in the sense of "rough sex") than most major studio features, or any other HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/FX show I've seen so far, like "the Sopranos", or "Dirt" (I heard Carnival had some rough stuff in it but never watched it).
Also, given the vampire genre, some of the characters in the story, and the producer Alan Ball; I would expect a VERY LARGE amount of explicit homoeroticism. If that makes you uncomfortable, or you just don't want to see it, I'm guessing that later episodes of this show won't be fore you.
All that said, the actual sex bits were maybe five minutes out of an hour show.
Given it IS a modern vampire story of course, sexual tension and innuendo were most of the remaining 50 someodd minutes... (one thing I like about HBO and Showtime shows, is that they actually run more than 42 minutes of content plus titles, running between 52 and 56 minutes plus titles).
We'll see how much they stick to the books, which are balanced between the "modern fantasy romance" and "supernatural detective" genres.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Sunday, September 07, 2008
I Can't Believe it's been Five Years
Warren Zevon died five years ago today.
Fuck.
I remember hearing he was sick... then they did a documentary of him working on his last album and the tribue; and then the collaboration/tribute album came out... I still can't believe it's five years.
So anyway, here's his last appearance (on Letterman, which I watched live the first time around), followed by some other of my favorites:
Now there aren't many Zevon tunes I don't like, but I've got four special favorites:
Unfortunately, there are a few copies of my second favorite Zevon song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me"; but none of them are good enough quality that I want to post them here.
They DO have a good quality copy of my absolute favorite Zevon song though, "Hit Somebody"(with vocals from David Letterman):
So everyone, enjoy every sandwich.
Fuck.
I remember hearing he was sick... then they did a documentary of him working on his last album and the tribue; and then the collaboration/tribute album came out... I still can't believe it's five years.
So anyway, here's his last appearance (on Letterman, which I watched live the first time around), followed by some other of my favorites:
Now there aren't many Zevon tunes I don't like, but I've got four special favorites:
Unfortunately, there are a few copies of my second favorite Zevon song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me"; but none of them are good enough quality that I want to post them here.
They DO have a good quality copy of my absolute favorite Zevon song though, "Hit Somebody"(with vocals from David Letterman):
So everyone, enjoy every sandwich.
Friday, September 05, 2008
And this is from TMZ
Yes, TMZ. With 90,000 respondents to the poll, on the famously "in the tank for Obama" gossip/celeb news site; Palin is the big hero, Biden is the big zero.
They still love Obama and hate McCain though.
Just randomly, one of my favorite songs of all time
Hard to figure out what my favorite Stevie song is really. "I Wish" is close, but so are Superstition, "Higher Ground", "Sir Duke"... hell nearly anything off of "Innervisions", "Talking Book", or "Song in the Key of Life"... or reaching back to "Signed Sealed Delivered" or even "For Once in My Life", or "Uptight".
Funny thing... even if you "don't know any Stevie Wonder" you do, because his music is so widely copied, sampled, covered, and put in the soundtracks of movies, tv shows, and commercials... it's absolutely ingrained in our culture. In fact I'd almost say you'd be hard pressed to watch TV for more than a couple hours and NOT hear something written by Stevie Wonder.
I can't tell you the number of times someone has said to me "oh hey I love that song, who is it", and I'll tell them it's Stevie, and they'll be shocked or just won't believe it; because their mental image of Stevie is "My Cherie Amor" or "Ebony and Ivory" (which I actually like, cheesy as it is) or something similar.
Well as you can tell, I much prefer his blues, soul, and funk tunes. Man, Stevie rocks, aint no two ways about it.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
1, 2, 3, Set'em up, and Knock'em down
So, last night I watched, in succession (through the wonder of teh intartubes) the RNC speeches from Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, and Sarah Palin.
Folks, there has not been a better slate of political speeches in my lifetime. Oh sure, Romney, Huckabee, and Lieberman were in the mix; but their contributions were meaningless and everyone (including them) knew it.
The setup was the 1,2,3.
Fred built the stage:
Rudy warmed up the crowd:
And Sarah knocked'em dead in the aisles:
Whatever you think of the current Republican ticket (or the Republican party in general), you have to acknowledge that this is the single greatest act of political speechmaking since Kennedy; possibly since Churchill at Westminster.
… of course the fact that this is so is sad; given that it was primarily an anti-obama stump set, and the greatest of political speeches should be building things up, not tearing people down… but sometimes a man NEEDS to be torn down… or rather the inflated funhouse mirror image of a man.
Still, I believe it remains the single greatest act of politicial speechmaking in decades.
I say single act, because the three speeches really must (and clearly were intended to be) be taken together to get the full and coordinated impact. Yes, each speech stands as a solid construction on it’s own; but it’s the combination that really achieves the goal.
You can see it in the desperation, and the froth and spittle, and the feces flinging on the left. Shortly, you’ll be seeing it in the poll results… if the left will ever let an honest poll seep into the public perception.
Obamas support has clearly peaked. He’s got all the voters he’s ever going to get… and in fact if the sociology of polling proves true in this case as it has so many times before, even the support he supposedly DOES have may be between 10% and 25% less than reported.
McCain on the other hand keeps gaining support; and the actions and choices of his campaign are just solidifying that.
McCains biggest problem isn’t Obama; it’s the fact that the people who elected George W. Bush twice, mostly don’t much care for McCain. Of course they also mostly don’t care much for Bush anymore, but that’s another issue entirely. Bush has shown that he is not acting in their interests and according to their principles; or that when he is, he is doing so incompetent… but those principles haven’t changed, and those people want someone to represent them.
McCain has the support of the center right, and even much of the center left; that has never been his problem. His problem has been on the right. Up until now, the voters on the right have not believed that a McCain administration would represent them properly.
As of now, problem solved.
Sarah Palin, going on the offensive, these speeches, the choices the Obama campaign is making… McCain has finally got the right behind him.
The only issue I see, is that after this, there is no way McCains speech won’t be a let down.
If McCain manages to pull his off right (short, humble, quiet, dignified but maybe a little angry…), barring major disaster, he’s won the election.
The Republicans have taken the initiative from the democrats. They’ve forced them to react, and are continuing to keep them reacting. They’ve forced them to go to depths of filth that repulse the American people.
Frankly, the Republicans have pushed the left over the edge, and are laughing as the deranged and deluded, fall screaming to their defeat.
Folks, there has not been a better slate of political speeches in my lifetime. Oh sure, Romney, Huckabee, and Lieberman were in the mix; but their contributions were meaningless and everyone (including them) knew it.
The setup was the 1,2,3.
Fred built the stage:
Rudy warmed up the crowd:
And Sarah knocked'em dead in the aisles:
Whatever you think of the current Republican ticket (or the Republican party in general), you have to acknowledge that this is the single greatest act of political speechmaking since Kennedy; possibly since Churchill at Westminster.
… of course the fact that this is so is sad; given that it was primarily an anti-obama stump set, and the greatest of political speeches should be building things up, not tearing people down… but sometimes a man NEEDS to be torn down… or rather the inflated funhouse mirror image of a man.
Still, I believe it remains the single greatest act of politicial speechmaking in decades.
I say single act, because the three speeches really must (and clearly were intended to be) be taken together to get the full and coordinated impact. Yes, each speech stands as a solid construction on it’s own; but it’s the combination that really achieves the goal.
You can see it in the desperation, and the froth and spittle, and the feces flinging on the left. Shortly, you’ll be seeing it in the poll results… if the left will ever let an honest poll seep into the public perception.
Obamas support has clearly peaked. He’s got all the voters he’s ever going to get… and in fact if the sociology of polling proves true in this case as it has so many times before, even the support he supposedly DOES have may be between 10% and 25% less than reported.
McCain on the other hand keeps gaining support; and the actions and choices of his campaign are just solidifying that.
McCains biggest problem isn’t Obama; it’s the fact that the people who elected George W. Bush twice, mostly don’t much care for McCain. Of course they also mostly don’t care much for Bush anymore, but that’s another issue entirely. Bush has shown that he is not acting in their interests and according to their principles; or that when he is, he is doing so incompetent… but those principles haven’t changed, and those people want someone to represent them.
McCain has the support of the center right, and even much of the center left; that has never been his problem. His problem has been on the right. Up until now, the voters on the right have not believed that a McCain administration would represent them properly.
As of now, problem solved.
Sarah Palin, going on the offensive, these speeches, the choices the Obama campaign is making… McCain has finally got the right behind him.
The only issue I see, is that after this, there is no way McCains speech won’t be a let down.
If McCain manages to pull his off right (short, humble, quiet, dignified but maybe a little angry…), barring major disaster, he’s won the election.
The Republicans have taken the initiative from the democrats. They’ve forced them to react, and are continuing to keep them reacting. They’ve forced them to go to depths of filth that repulse the American people.
Frankly, the Republicans have pushed the left over the edge, and are laughing as the deranged and deluded, fall screaming to their defeat.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Fantasy Football
My best friend doesn't have internet access at home or work (or rather his access is limited and intermittent) and he's bad with statistics and the like. I on the other hand spend pretty much 24/7 online (I've got an iPhone after all) and I'm very good with numbers.
So, he wanted to try and play fantasy football last year, but couldnt figure out the details in time to get into a draft. This year he got an invite a couple weeks early, and roped me in to managing the team with him.
Now, no man has a greater love for football than me, but I'm not so sure about the whole fantasy thing... I mean it seems kinda interesting and all, but also kinda wanktastic.
Anyway, our fantasy league is through Yahoo, which has you pre-rank all your players, priorities and positions, and does an autodraft. We have 8 teams in our league, so I made 8 primary and a couple of secondary choices for each position and then put them in our pre-draft player list.
Then I decided where I wanted to put each player in our priorities; which is kinda hard actually, given you have no idea what the other teams are going to do... You could put all your top picks for a particular position up front, but you'd end up week in other positions if you do etc...
Here was our pre-draft list in preference order by position (not in draft preference order which was messy, and I no longer have my notes on it):
Offense
QB - Tom Brady
QB - Peyton Manning
QB - Tony Romo
QB - Eli Manning
QB - Carson Palmer
QB - Jake Delhomme
QB - Ben Roethlisberger
QB - Donovan McNabb
TE - Vernon Davis
TE - Antonio Gates
TE - Tony Gonzales
TE - Dallas Clark
TE - Heath Miller
TE - Jeremy Shockey
TE - Greg Olson
TE - Ben Watson
WR - Randy Moss
WR - Santonio Homes
WR - Calvin Johnson
WR - Reggie Wayne
WR - Sidney Rice
WR - Ted Ginn Jr.
WR - Kevin Walter
WR - Vincent Jackson
RB - Ladanian Tomlinson
RB - Adrian Peterson
RB - Brian Westbrook
RB - Clinton Portis
RB - Joseph Addai
RB - Marchand Lynch
RB - Frank Gore
RB - Marian Barber
PK - Stepehen Gostowski
PK - Adam Viniateri
PK - Josh Brown
PK - Nate Kaeding
PK - Nick Folk
PK - Phil Dawson
PK - Shayne Graham
PK - David Akers
Defense
Defense - Patriots
Defense - Steelers
Defense - Vikings
Defense - Chargers
Defense - Giants
Defense - Bears
Defense - Jets
Defense - Cowboys
Well, our draft was yesterday, and we got first pick (randomly selected):
Starting:
QB: Eli Manning
WR: Vincent Jackson
WR: Santonio Holmes
RB: LaDainian Tomlinson
RB: John Paul Foschi
TE: Vernon Davis
W/R: Hines Ward
K: Steven Gostowski
Defense: Indianapolis Colts
Bench:
QB: Jake Delhomme
WR: Nate Burleson
WR: Marvin Harrison
TE: Ben Watson
K: David Akers
Defense: Jacksonville Jaguars
Waivers:
RB: John Paul Foschi
WR: Marvin Harrison
Adds:
RB: Ricky Williams
RB: Rashard Mendenhall
Overall though I'm happy with the draft, with a couple of exceptions (that I'm trying to fix with waivers and adds).
We got our top pic in Ladainian Tomlinson, which I'm very happy about, and our top pick for kicker in Gostowski. I'm also pleased we got Holmes, Jackson, and Davis
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the other teams in our league put our top few choices for RB and QB in their lists, at higher priorities than ours, so we ended up with a two middle of the road QBs, a secondary runningback I've never even heard of (he wasn't on our list at all), and we ended up heavy on wide recievers.
Also we didn't get any of our choices of defense, which is weird because two of our top 8 picks went undrafted; but I'm not really unhappy with what we've got either.
It seems that the autodraft software is a bit buggy. Somehow we ended up with a couple players I put on the exclusion list as definitely NOT wanting. Also some of our picks weren't chosen by any other team in the league, but we were given players lower in our priority list, and the players we prioritized higher went undrafted... and for some reason we cannot now pick those players to replace the ones we got.
Anyway, I'm trying to compensate for that by adding and dropping as best I can before this weekend (the first trade/add/drop deadline is Friday).
Overall though, I think we're looking very competitive. I just need to shore up that secondary running back (I REALLY wanted Addai, Westbrook, Lynch, Gore, or Barber... and who the hell is Foschi?)... and we've got a nice deep bench, with good trade prospects.
So, he wanted to try and play fantasy football last year, but couldnt figure out the details in time to get into a draft. This year he got an invite a couple weeks early, and roped me in to managing the team with him.
Now, no man has a greater love for football than me, but I'm not so sure about the whole fantasy thing... I mean it seems kinda interesting and all, but also kinda wanktastic.
Anyway, our fantasy league is through Yahoo, which has you pre-rank all your players, priorities and positions, and does an autodraft. We have 8 teams in our league, so I made 8 primary and a couple of secondary choices for each position and then put them in our pre-draft player list.
Then I decided where I wanted to put each player in our priorities; which is kinda hard actually, given you have no idea what the other teams are going to do... You could put all your top picks for a particular position up front, but you'd end up week in other positions if you do etc...
Here was our pre-draft list in preference order by position (not in draft preference order which was messy, and I no longer have my notes on it):
Offense
QB - Tom Brady
QB - Peyton Manning
QB - Tony Romo
QB - Eli Manning
QB - Carson Palmer
QB - Jake Delhomme
QB - Ben Roethlisberger
QB - Donovan McNabb
TE - Vernon Davis
TE - Antonio Gates
TE - Tony Gonzales
TE - Dallas Clark
TE - Heath Miller
TE - Jeremy Shockey
TE - Greg Olson
TE - Ben Watson
WR - Randy Moss
WR - Santonio Homes
WR - Calvin Johnson
WR - Reggie Wayne
WR - Sidney Rice
WR - Ted Ginn Jr.
WR - Kevin Walter
WR - Vincent Jackson
RB - Ladanian Tomlinson
RB - Adrian Peterson
RB - Brian Westbrook
RB - Clinton Portis
RB - Joseph Addai
RB - Marchand Lynch
RB - Frank Gore
RB - Marian Barber
PK - Stepehen Gostowski
PK - Adam Viniateri
PK - Josh Brown
PK - Nate Kaeding
PK - Nick Folk
PK - Phil Dawson
PK - Shayne Graham
PK - David Akers
Defense
Defense - Patriots
Defense - Steelers
Defense - Vikings
Defense - Chargers
Defense - Giants
Defense - Bears
Defense - Jets
Defense - Cowboys
Well, our draft was yesterday, and we got first pick (randomly selected):
Starting:
QB: Eli Manning
WR: Vincent Jackson
WR: Santonio Holmes
RB: LaDainian Tomlinson
RB: John Paul Foschi
TE: Vernon Davis
W/R: Hines Ward
K: Steven Gostowski
Defense: Indianapolis Colts
Bench:
QB: Jake Delhomme
WR: Nate Burleson
WR: Marvin Harrison
TE: Ben Watson
K: David Akers
Defense: Jacksonville Jaguars
Waivers:
RB: John Paul Foschi
WR: Marvin Harrison
Adds:
RB: Ricky Williams
RB: Rashard Mendenhall
Overall though I'm happy with the draft, with a couple of exceptions (that I'm trying to fix with waivers and adds).
We got our top pic in Ladainian Tomlinson, which I'm very happy about, and our top pick for kicker in Gostowski. I'm also pleased we got Holmes, Jackson, and Davis
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the other teams in our league put our top few choices for RB and QB in their lists, at higher priorities than ours, so we ended up with a two middle of the road QBs, a secondary runningback I've never even heard of (he wasn't on our list at all), and we ended up heavy on wide recievers.
Also we didn't get any of our choices of defense, which is weird because two of our top 8 picks went undrafted; but I'm not really unhappy with what we've got either.
It seems that the autodraft software is a bit buggy. Somehow we ended up with a couple players I put on the exclusion list as definitely NOT wanting. Also some of our picks weren't chosen by any other team in the league, but we were given players lower in our priority list, and the players we prioritized higher went undrafted... and for some reason we cannot now pick those players to replace the ones we got.
Anyway, I'm trying to compensate for that by adding and dropping as best I can before this weekend (the first trade/add/drop deadline is Friday).
Overall though, I think we're looking very competitive. I just need to shore up that secondary running back (I REALLY wanted Addai, Westbrook, Lynch, Gore, or Barber... and who the hell is Foschi?)... and we've got a nice deep bench, with good trade prospects.
Appleseed and gun nuts
So, I called in to Caleb and Squeakys blogtalk radio show "Gun Nuts - The Next Generation" last night, to share my experience with the appleseed program.
Now, just so people know where I'm coming from, I've had both military and civilian pistol and rifle training from several shooting classes and schools, from the beginner to the advanced level. I've been to two appleseeds, one taught by Fred himself and one where I didn't shoot (I wasn't feeling well). I shot in one and scored quite well despite injuries and an AR that became a straight pull boltie half way through (bad ammo resulted in a gummed up chamber, a weak extractor, and a gummed up gas tube).
I'm also a qualified instructor myself, and have been in the past a firearms safety, basic handgun shooting, basic firearms ownership and safety, and defensive shooting instructor. I have also developed and delivered individualized firearms instruction.
Outside of formalized firearms education, I've been a shooter for 25 years (since I was a young boy); and as part of my profession, an instructor in physical and information security for over 10 years.
I got a great deal out of my Appleseed experience, but I don't think it's for everyone; and importantly, as it is today, I don't think it's really for beginners, as some seem to promote it as.
You don't need to be an advanced shooter, in fact I think you'll get more out of it if you arent; but I think you need to have some basic shooting skills and experience before you take the appleseed program, so you can make the best use of the lessons you learn there, and so that you learn them in a way that is useful to you.
I think that from a technical standpoint the fundamental marksmanship they teach is good; and presuming the volunteer instructors are good, you should have a good and useful training experience as well as a good time. I also think the political message behind the program is fundamentally good.
Where I think they go wrong, is that they market themselves as good for absolute beginners, and then deliver training that I think is not the best for absolute beginners; as well as load that training with a lot of politics (both intentionally to some degree, and unintentionally by the atmosphere, environment, and participants).
Anyway, listen to the whole show here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gunnuts
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
What the MSM and the Leftroots...
don't understand is how they can drag out so much "dirt" about Gov. Palin and we can still love her so much.
Aren't we conservative? Don't teen pregnancy and drunk driving bother us?
Sure, it bothers us. So why don't we hate her? And as importantly, how can we love her so much but hate Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and William Jefferson so much? Aren't all "scandals" alike?
No, not really.
Here's the deal. I think honestly the reason we like Gov. Palin so much is because she's so much LIKE US.
Think of your immediate family, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I can almost guarantee you that somewhere in that group of relations there is at least one
A.) teen pregnancy and/or marriage,
B.) DUI,
C.) blue collar worker,
D.) special needs child and
E.) mother who works.
In my case I have 4 of option A, countless of option B (not me of course), at least 50% of my family fits C, there's a couple of option D, and almost all of us mothers are option E.
However, no where in my family line (and I'm guessing this applies to most other people as well) do I have
A.) a man who got a blowjob in public office on public property and then lied about it in open court,
B.) a man who cheated on his terminally ill wife, and
C.) a man who filled his freezer with bribes accepted while in public office.
We hate the Democrats who did these things because honestly, besides being absolutely sleazy, every single one of those actions was an egregious violation of trust, either the trust of the public or the trust of their families (or both).
The thing the MSM doesn't understand about Palin's scandals is that they're everyone's scandals. Who doesn't have a bit of that family drama going around? Who doesn't have someone in their family who, every time someone speaks of them the first comment is ," what did they do this time?" We all have at least one embarrassment in our family line somewhere, and if that's all it takes to disqualify us from public office, how would anyone get elected without large amounts of money and a huge cleanup crew?
But that's really the point isn't it?
Somehow limiting ourselves to the option of the extremely moral and self-sacrificing candidate or the rich elitist with enough money to shut everyone up doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies.
Mel
cross-posted at Mrs. Anarchangel
Aren't we conservative? Don't teen pregnancy and drunk driving bother us?
Sure, it bothers us. So why don't we hate her? And as importantly, how can we love her so much but hate Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and William Jefferson so much? Aren't all "scandals" alike?
No, not really.
Here's the deal. I think honestly the reason we like Gov. Palin so much is because she's so much LIKE US.
Think of your immediate family, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I can almost guarantee you that somewhere in that group of relations there is at least one
A.) teen pregnancy and/or marriage,
B.) DUI,
C.) blue collar worker,
D.) special needs child and
E.) mother who works.
In my case I have 4 of option A, countless of option B (not me of course), at least 50% of my family fits C, there's a couple of option D, and almost all of us mothers are option E.
However, no where in my family line (and I'm guessing this applies to most other people as well) do I have
A.) a man who got a blowjob in public office on public property and then lied about it in open court,
B.) a man who cheated on his terminally ill wife, and
C.) a man who filled his freezer with bribes accepted while in public office.
We hate the Democrats who did these things because honestly, besides being absolutely sleazy, every single one of those actions was an egregious violation of trust, either the trust of the public or the trust of their families (or both).
The thing the MSM doesn't understand about Palin's scandals is that they're everyone's scandals. Who doesn't have a bit of that family drama going around? Who doesn't have someone in their family who, every time someone speaks of them the first comment is ," what did they do this time?" We all have at least one embarrassment in our family line somewhere, and if that's all it takes to disqualify us from public office, how would anyone get elected without large amounts of money and a huge cleanup crew?
But that's really the point isn't it?
Somehow limiting ourselves to the option of the extremely moral and self-sacrificing candidate or the rich elitist with enough money to shut everyone up doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies.
Mel
cross-posted at Mrs. Anarchangel
God Damn It.... Another Great Voice Dies Today
Country music legend, singer, guitar player, and actor Jerry Reed died today, at 71.
I think we all know this one, whether you're a redneck or not:
I s'pose most folks not fans of fingerstyle guitar remember him for being Cletus the "snowman" in "Smokey and the Bandit".
What most folks DON'T know, is that he was a singer, guitar player, producer, and a songwriter in Nashville for 'round 45 years; writing with and for Johnny Cash, Elvis, Glen Campbell, Chet Atkins and many others.
He was also one of the best fingerpickers out there. You can see in this (and many other) videos, that he had no problem holding his own with his good friend Chet Atkins (who actually considered Jerry the better fingerstyle player):
Amazingly, Jerry didn't have a very high opinion of his own musicianship, thinking of himself more as a songwriter.... and yet he could do this:
Reed always had a great sense of fun, with songs like "Amos Moses":
and "She got the gold mine, I got the shaft":
Rest in peace guitarman.
I think we all know this one, whether you're a redneck or not:
I s'pose most folks not fans of fingerstyle guitar remember him for being Cletus the "snowman" in "Smokey and the Bandit".
What most folks DON'T know, is that he was a singer, guitar player, producer, and a songwriter in Nashville for 'round 45 years; writing with and for Johnny Cash, Elvis, Glen Campbell, Chet Atkins and many others.
He was also one of the best fingerpickers out there. You can see in this (and many other) videos, that he had no problem holding his own with his good friend Chet Atkins (who actually considered Jerry the better fingerstyle player):
Amazingly, Jerry didn't have a very high opinion of his own musicianship, thinking of himself more as a songwriter.... and yet he could do this:
Reed always had a great sense of fun, with songs like "Amos Moses":
and "She got the gold mine, I got the shaft":
Rest in peace guitarman.
Longer review to come - One line about "Tropic Thunder"
Tropic thunder is literally the funniest movie I've seen in years; and if you don't see it you are depriving yourself of the best "laugh out loud so hard you cry" comedy since Mel Brooks last made a good movie.
Pop Culture Loses an Icon
Don La Fontaine Passed on yesterday.
Yeah, his style might be it's own parody at this point, but you know what? People are reassured by that voice. It's a deeply ingrained part of our cultural experience, and I think everyone will miss it.
The other ultra-famous "deep voice" guy is Hal Douglas, and unfortunately he's probably not going to be with us much longer either (he's 84):
Other "deep voice guys" like Ashton Smith, Peter Cullen, Nick Tate, Al Chalk, and John Leader owe their whole style to La Fontaine and Douglas (who claim to have both independently come up with the catchphrase "in a world"); who brought trailers from the "high energy action man" voiceover, into the "deep voice" style in the mid 70s.
Other than the more lighthearted (and higher pitched) sound favored by some comedies and most disney/pixar/dreamworks animated movies (mostly voiced by Mark Elliot); most every trailer you hear these days will be voiced in the LaFontaine style, or the Douglas style.
One should note, that La Fontaine was not only a voiceover artist, he basically created the modern style of trailer (for good or ill) with his production company... which is actually how he ended up doing voice overs in the first place.
Not many men will ever have that kind of impact on a culture.
Rest in Peace, Don La Fontaine.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Infuriating, but unsurprising
I've been talking about RFID as a security risk for a long time now... Now, my card companies have sent me two cards that have RFID tags in them, without my requesting it or approving it; and there is no option NOT to have this "feature".
Of course now all passports have an RFID tag embedded in them (mine doesn't yet... next year).
Again, no option to NOT have this "feature".
...So I have an RFID blocking wallet, and passport folio.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Now that's a helluva storm
Whenever I run into a new transplant to Phoenix I always have to warn them about the weather. Monsoon season storms here are legendary.
A couple of weeks ago I met a woman who had just moved here from Cali. I warned her about the storms, and she replied, "oh those storms we had a few weeks ago? Those weren't so bad."
I told her she hadn't seen anything yet.
Current radar for Phoenix:
I haven't seen a storm this bad in years. High winds, lightning, absolute downpour, and hail. I got drenched in the minute and a half it took me to get the flag down and bring it in. I've lived here 23 out of my 27 years, and I know this kind of storm. Whole neighborhoods will lose electricity, ancient trees will break free and destroy houses and vehicles, idiots will try to cross usually bone dry washes in their 4x4s and have to be rescued or just get carried away by the floods. This kind of storm kills people annually, usually with the help of their own stupidity.
Chris and John are at the other side of the Phoenix metro area attending a concert. Those big red splotches are moving towards them. Word from Chris is that the storm is raging on all around them while Judas Priest plays, which I'm sure is an awesome experience.
I just hope they manage to get to the house without running into the idiots on the road.
Mel
A couple of weeks ago I met a woman who had just moved here from Cali. I warned her about the storms, and she replied, "oh those storms we had a few weeks ago? Those weren't so bad."
I told her she hadn't seen anything yet.
Current radar for Phoenix:
I haven't seen a storm this bad in years. High winds, lightning, absolute downpour, and hail. I got drenched in the minute and a half it took me to get the flag down and bring it in. I've lived here 23 out of my 27 years, and I know this kind of storm. Whole neighborhoods will lose electricity, ancient trees will break free and destroy houses and vehicles, idiots will try to cross usually bone dry washes in their 4x4s and have to be rescued or just get carried away by the floods. This kind of storm kills people annually, usually with the help of their own stupidity.Chris and John are at the other side of the Phoenix metro area attending a concert. Those big red splotches are moving towards them. Word from Chris is that the storm is raging on all around them while Judas Priest plays, which I'm sure is an awesome experience.
I just hope they manage to get to the house without running into the idiots on the road.
Mel
You Got Another Thing Coming Tonight
JohnOC and I are going to see the ULTIMATE METAL SHOW EVER tonight.
Some VERY good advice
Straight up, NEVER talk to any investigator for any reason, even if you think it will help you. You are wrong.
If you don't speak, most of the time, they can't convict you (guilty or innocent).
If you DO speak, most of the time, they WILL convict you (guilty or innocent).
EVERYONE is guilty of something. EVERYONE. Talk, and they will find it. Don't talk, and they may find something, they may not; but talk and they WILL find SOMETHING... ANYTHING to convict you of.
I'll say this flat out, I believe that every person in this country is guilty of a federal or state level felony. It is almost impossible not to be, because of the way the laws are written.
If a prosecutor wants to convict you, they're going to find SOMETHING.
DON'T SAY A WORD except, "I'm sorry, I will not answer any questions except my name without an attorney".
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
STOP FUCKING WITH MY MOUNTAIN DEW
Note to Pepsi product management:
NO-ONE WANTS MOUNTAIN DEW WITH REFRESHING WILD BERRY FRUIT FLAVOR, AND GINSNeG.
No, seriously, they don't.
They also don't want strawberry melon and ginseng....
Ok, I'll grant you some MIGHT be interested in raspberry citrus mountain dew (I have a feelign the 'dew fanbase has some crossover with the raspberry lime ricky fan base), but YOU CAN LEAVE OFF THE FUCKING GINSENG.
What exactly am I speaking of?
Mountain dew has expanded its flavor line to elevntyjillon, with new:
Mountain Dew Voltage (Raspberry Citrus)
Mountain Dew Revolution (Wild Berry)
Mountain Dew Supernova (Strawberry Melon)
Let me tell you what they taste like...
Imagine a melted popsicle... now add some corn syrup; oh and grind up an aspirin in there... and then pour in a pixie stick....
Yeah that's about right.
NO-ONE WANTS MOUNTAIN DEW WITH REFRESHING WILD BERRY FRUIT FLAVOR, AND GINSNeG.
No, seriously, they don't.
They also don't want strawberry melon and ginseng....
Ok, I'll grant you some MIGHT be interested in raspberry citrus mountain dew (I have a feelign the 'dew fanbase has some crossover with the raspberry lime ricky fan base), but YOU CAN LEAVE OFF THE FUCKING GINSENG.
What exactly am I speaking of?
Mountain dew has expanded its flavor line to elevntyjillon, with new:
Mountain Dew Voltage (Raspberry Citrus)
Mountain Dew Revolution (Wild Berry)
Mountain Dew Supernova (Strawberry Melon)
Let me tell you what they taste like...
Imagine a melted popsicle... now add some corn syrup; oh and grind up an aspirin in there... and then pour in a pixie stick....
Yeah that's about right.
All the worlds gear queers spontaneously orgasm...
Behold, the high cap mag for your high cap mags:
MUCH more on this at Mil-Spec Monkey.
Honestly, I don't think I'd trust my life to the thing in a firefight; I certainly have reliability concerns; but I bet threegunners everywhere are drooling right now.
Also, it's clearly significantly bulkier than the three mags it holds... in fact I'd guess its total bulk is around that of six mags (though not the weight).
Yes, there is at least some speed advantage there, and it's nice to be able to always index your hand back to the same place; but I'd bet that rangerplates or magpuls cut that speed advantage way down; and they add very little to the bulk of your kit.
The reloading motion from that indexed position is probably better in cramped quarters, but it's probably worse prone, so it kinda cancels out.
Oh and can you say battle rattle?
I bet it'd be spectacular vehicle mounted in a firing position on a bird, or light armor etc...
MUCH more on this at Mil-Spec Monkey.
Honestly, I don't think I'd trust my life to the thing in a firefight; I certainly have reliability concerns; but I bet threegunners everywhere are drooling right now.
Also, it's clearly significantly bulkier than the three mags it holds... in fact I'd guess its total bulk is around that of six mags (though not the weight).
Yes, there is at least some speed advantage there, and it's nice to be able to always index your hand back to the same place; but I'd bet that rangerplates or magpuls cut that speed advantage way down; and they add very little to the bulk of your kit.
The reloading motion from that indexed position is probably better in cramped quarters, but it's probably worse prone, so it kinda cancels out.
Oh and can you say battle rattle?
I bet it'd be spectacular vehicle mounted in a firing position on a bird, or light armor etc...
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Build or Buy updated for 2008
'Round last Christmas I wrote this piece:
So, the first thing is, re-read the 2007 article; because those two big questions (and the smaller ones interspersed), and the general advice I give there are still completely relevant.
Also, surprisingly, most of what I wrote in terms of technical detail and product selection still applies. This last year hasn't seen much in the way of fundamental changes in the market; though there have been some nice price drops.
If you are waiting for a major change in overall performance, you're going to have to wait til the middle of next year, when the Intel Nehalem processors (now renamed Core i7) go mainstream.
Where we HAVE seen major movement is in price, and specifically price to performance ratio for memory and graphics.
The memory market saw a huge amount of overcapacity this year, cutting basic memory prices in half, and making DDR3 semi-affordable (if you want to pay for the motherboard to go with it of course.
Graphics saw the biggest change in hardware this year, with a new generation of graphics cards appearing on shelves in the last three months; presenting nearly double the performance of the last generations top of the line, at the same price (or equal performance at half the price).
On the lowest end, the near thin client level hardware offered by Asus, MSI, HP, and others at the under $500 price point have completely flipped the market on its head.
If all you are doing is email, web surfing, and basic word processing and spreadsheets, these $400-$600 machines are EXCELLENT. They have so little to go wrong, that they are near perfect grandma PCs.
Also, and I think this is probably the biggest change in PCs in a long time, and certainly the biggest change in software since windows 95; is that Vista 64 bit is now a very valid choice for both general purpose computing and gaming.
Software and driver support is finally to the point where I am recommending either XP pro (if you don't want Vista), or Vista 64 Premium.
So, I'm going to do things a bit differently this time around. last year, I recommended three sample configurations, a value box, a mid range box, and a god box. This year, I'm going to recommend mix and match components that I think represent the best value for money for each of the basic functions.
Also, I want to renew my recommendation from last year that if you aren't going to spend at least $800, you should just buy one of the better factory systems when they go on sale.
Right now, you can get a Core 2 quad 6600 system with 4 gigs of RAM, 2x 500 gig hard drives, a low end video card and a video capture/TV tuner card for $600 to $800 on sale. You simply cannot build a box to that spec, for that much money.
The reason to build your own system, is to get BETTER than the factory; not to save money; because you cannot build cheaper than HP, Dell, or Gateway. Pick the products that meet your needs better, and make your life easier as a system builder.
Alright lets break it down.
Case: Coolermaster RC690 - $160 with PSU
PSU: Included
Motherboard: any of the top tier manufacturers boards - $150
Processor: Core 2 Duo 7200 - $120
Memory: 2x 2 gig DDR2 stick - $80
Video: Radeon HD 4850 - $180
Hard Drive: 1x 500 gig drive - $80
Optical Drives: 2x SATA DVD burners, one of which is a blu-ray reader - $200
Total: $960
For that $960 you're going to get a better PC than 99% of all factory machines; and at less than half the cost of a factory "gaming" PC.
If you want to build your maximum performance with value, your looking at something like this:
Case: CoolerMaster Cosmos - $200
PSU: Any of the modular PSUs in the $150 price range will do it - $150
Motherboard: any of the top tier manufacturers boards with multi PCIe slots- $200
Processor: Core 2 Quad 6600 - $180
Memory: 4x 2 gig DDR2 stick - $160
Video: Nividia GTX280 - $420
Hard Drive: 1x 500 gig drive, plus 2x 1tb drive in a software RAID - $380
Optical Drives: 2x SATA DVD burners, one of which is a blu-ray writer - $300
Total: $2080
Seriously, the only way you're going to get more performance out of a home PC, is to double your video card (an additional $420), push your mobo up to $650 (+ $450), and your CPU up to $3000 (+ $2800) with a dual skulltrail platform... and even then, you're only going to see maybe a 35% boost for your additional $3670.
Nearly triple the total price for 35%performance boost? No thanks.
The only thing good about that price, is that it's about $2000 less than you'd pay a major manufacturer for the privilege of buying an equivalent system from them.
"So, I'm giving computers as gifts to a half dozen people this year; and every time I've mentioned it, I've had someone ask for computer advice.Earlier today, a reader asked me to update the article for this year. Since I've got a couple of system building related tech articles simmering, I figured, why not.
So, continuing on my gadgetary thrust for the end of the year, lets talk about computers.
Now, the first question is always "build or buy"; by which I mean do you buy a pre-built system from a major vendor, or do you build your own.
Generally speaking, this is a two part question:
1. Does it make sense technically
2. Does it make sense in terms of value"
So, the first thing is, re-read the 2007 article; because those two big questions (and the smaller ones interspersed), and the general advice I give there are still completely relevant.
Also, surprisingly, most of what I wrote in terms of technical detail and product selection still applies. This last year hasn't seen much in the way of fundamental changes in the market; though there have been some nice price drops.
If you are waiting for a major change in overall performance, you're going to have to wait til the middle of next year, when the Intel Nehalem processors (now renamed Core i7) go mainstream.
Where we HAVE seen major movement is in price, and specifically price to performance ratio for memory and graphics.
The memory market saw a huge amount of overcapacity this year, cutting basic memory prices in half, and making DDR3 semi-affordable (if you want to pay for the motherboard to go with it of course.
Graphics saw the biggest change in hardware this year, with a new generation of graphics cards appearing on shelves in the last three months; presenting nearly double the performance of the last generations top of the line, at the same price (or equal performance at half the price).
On the lowest end, the near thin client level hardware offered by Asus, MSI, HP, and others at the under $500 price point have completely flipped the market on its head.
If all you are doing is email, web surfing, and basic word processing and spreadsheets, these $400-$600 machines are EXCELLENT. They have so little to go wrong, that they are near perfect grandma PCs.
Also, and I think this is probably the biggest change in PCs in a long time, and certainly the biggest change in software since windows 95; is that Vista 64 bit is now a very valid choice for both general purpose computing and gaming.
Software and driver support is finally to the point where I am recommending either XP pro (if you don't want Vista), or Vista 64 Premium.
So, I'm going to do things a bit differently this time around. last year, I recommended three sample configurations, a value box, a mid range box, and a god box. This year, I'm going to recommend mix and match components that I think represent the best value for money for each of the basic functions.
Also, I want to renew my recommendation from last year that if you aren't going to spend at least $800, you should just buy one of the better factory systems when they go on sale.
Right now, you can get a Core 2 quad 6600 system with 4 gigs of RAM, 2x 500 gig hard drives, a low end video card and a video capture/TV tuner card for $600 to $800 on sale. You simply cannot build a box to that spec, for that much money.
The reason to build your own system, is to get BETTER than the factory; not to save money; because you cannot build cheaper than HP, Dell, or Gateway. Pick the products that meet your needs better, and make your life easier as a system builder.
Alright lets break it down.
So, right now, if you want to better the factory boxes, you're looking at something like the following:
1. Case:
This year, I'm making a STRONG recommendation, that you spend a little extra money on the case. I'm tired of noisy, hard to work with cases; and extra money spent here is really giving you value.
I'm going to recommend a few cases that I think are well made, easy to work with, and represent a good value.
CoolerMaster Cosmos - several models between $190 and $290
Coolermaster RC690 - $85 without PSU, or $150 with a decent 550 watt
Antec Mini P180 - $129 to $159
Antec P182 - about $110
In my personal opinion, the CoolerMaster Cosmos is the best full size personal computer case on the market today. It has the best cooling of any quiet case I've ever seen, and it's the second quietest case I've ever used (that wasn't a special silencer case).
The QUIETEST case I've ever used that wasn't a special silencer case is the Antec Mini P180. It is also one of the best ventilated, and best organized cases I've ever used in terms of disk options, and cable management.
2. PSU:
It's hard to make specific power supply recommendations, because every system has different needs, but again this year I'm going to recommend that you spend a little extra money on some features to make your life easier.
From now on I don't want to build another system that doesn't have a modular power supply. They make cable management so much easier, and keep your case so much cooler and neater, that they are worth the extra $25 to $50 they cost over an equivalently sized non-modular power supply.
Size wise, I'm going to recommend that you don't go below 450 watts, and you don't go above 650 watts unless you are putting more than 4 hard drives and 2 video cards in a box.
As to brands, I'm a big fan of the modular models from Thermaltake, Antecs higher end line, CoolerMasters higher end line, PC Power and Cooling, OCZ, and Corsair.
You're looking at around $150 for a 550 watt modular power supply.
3. Motherboard:
Right now, it's hard to find a bad motherboard from Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, EVGA, or MSI.
Personally, I would take any one of those brands, with any model board that meets your basic needs. I do recommend that you choose a motherboard with as many SATA ports as possible; and I personally like to have more than one PCIe x16 slot, to use either SLI, or for higher performance IO cards.
I would stay away from Foxconn, DFI, ECS, PcChips, Jetway, Elitegroup, or Biostar personally. Sometimes they do good things, sometimes not; and none of them have support worth a damn.
You're looking at $150 for a very good single processor motherboard with a lot of good features, and no SLI. Add $25 to $50 for SLI support, all the way up to about $250 for the top of the line single processor motherboards.
Oh, and get some good onboard sound; because with good onboard sound there is really no need to spend a slot on a soundcard.
Oh and at this point I don't think a multi cpu box makes sense for home users from a value perspective. Even most professional graphics applications wont see much advantage from two quad core cpus instead of one.
4. CPU:
Firstly, AMD is in trouble at the moment. They aren't offering any CPU that presents a more compelling value to the enthusiast user than Intel.
As of today, there are a couple conspicuous and outstanding values from the Intel side.
Core 2 Duo 7200 - This new 45nm low power consumption dual core can be had for $120 on sale with a decent CPU cooler. It's an automatic overclock to 3 ghz, and can esily hit 3.2 and even 3.4 ghz.
Core 2 Quad 6600 - This is still the quad core value leader, with the effortless overclock to 3.2ghz on any motherboard, and prices as low as $180; you still can't beat it, 19 months (and $650 cheaper) after it was released.
Honestly, I don't think you should even consider any other CPU right now. You cannot get higher performance per dollar, or for that matter significantly higher performance overall, no matter how many dollars you spend.
5. Memory:
Pretty simple picture right now really. Buy either 2, or 4, 2 gig sticks from Crucial, Kingston, Mushkin, Corsair, or OCZ. 2 sticks if you're going 32 bit, 4 sticks if you're going 64 bit.
Premium 2 gig DDR2 sticks are running from $40 to $60 on sale these days; and theres no reason to bother with anything cheaper.
Now, you have to decide if you want to go to DDR3 yet or not. If you pick out a motherboard that supports it, it gives you a BIG boost in memory performance, though overall you'll only see about a 10% inprovement; and it's double the memory cost.
Personally... I still say skip it.
6. Video:
This is the interesting one...
Both Nvidia, and ATI/AMD released their next generation cards in the last two months, and both are excellent.
Right now each chipset maker has two price points set.
Nvidia has their GTX 260, from between $250 and $399 (depending on memory and extras), and the GTX 280 at $399 to $599 (again depending on memory and extras).
ATI has their absolute value leading Radeon HD4850 at $180 to $230; and their 4870 at $280 to $320.
Both vendors are also still putting out dual GPU cards (though nvidia hasn't put out a dual 260 or 280 yet); but I don't think they present a good value. Also, all of the cards mentioned above support multi-card (SLI or crossfire); but again I don't think those configurations present good value.
The Nvidia offerings are more expensive, but they are also higher performance. Unfortunately, their performance per dollar isn't nearly as good as the ATI cards, which are frankly spectacular. You are getting twice the performance per dollar as last years mid range and top end cards.
Honestly, I think all four options present good value, and you just have to decide whether you want the best price, or the best performance.
If you don't feel like spending the extra cash for the next gen cards, the Nvidia 8800gt 512 is still the best bargain in the video card market (as it has been since it was released), at a price as low as $125.
7. Hard drives:
Simple question, how much storage do you need?
With 500 gig 7200 rpm 32mb cache hard drives as cheap as $80 and 1tb drives as low as $150, you can pretty much do whatever you want here.
8. Optical drives:
There's no point in not having at least a dual DVD burner setup at this point; and I'd recommend going SATA with everything.
Also, at $150 to add blu-ray reading capability, there is no reason not to.
The only real question is, do you want a blu-ray burner or not. Personally, at as low as $269, I think it's worth it; but you may not.
Case: Coolermaster RC690 - $160 with PSU
PSU: Included
Motherboard: any of the top tier manufacturers boards - $150
Processor: Core 2 Duo 7200 - $120
Memory: 2x 2 gig DDR2 stick - $80
Video: Radeon HD 4850 - $180
Hard Drive: 1x 500 gig drive - $80
Optical Drives: 2x SATA DVD burners, one of which is a blu-ray reader - $200
Total: $960
For that $960 you're going to get a better PC than 99% of all factory machines; and at less than half the cost of a factory "gaming" PC.
If you want to build your maximum performance with value, your looking at something like this:
Case: CoolerMaster Cosmos - $200
PSU: Any of the modular PSUs in the $150 price range will do it - $150
Motherboard: any of the top tier manufacturers boards with multi PCIe slots- $200
Processor: Core 2 Quad 6600 - $180
Memory: 4x 2 gig DDR2 stick - $160
Video: Nividia GTX280 - $420
Hard Drive: 1x 500 gig drive, plus 2x 1tb drive in a software RAID - $380
Optical Drives: 2x SATA DVD burners, one of which is a blu-ray writer - $300
Total: $2080
Seriously, the only way you're going to get more performance out of a home PC, is to double your video card (an additional $420), push your mobo up to $650 (+ $450), and your CPU up to $3000 (+ $2800) with a dual skulltrail platform... and even then, you're only going to see maybe a 35% boost for your additional $3670.
Nearly triple the total price for 35%performance boost? No thanks.
The only thing good about that price, is that it's about $2000 less than you'd pay a major manufacturer for the privilege of buying an equivalent system from them.
Monday, August 25, 2008
17 feet high and rising
I've said before, we have a lot more stuff than storage space. Or house isn't exactly large, but it's not exactly small either; and other than bedroom closets, we have very little inbuilt storage (1 broom closet, 1 utility closet, kitchen cabinets and that's it).
Our biggest storage problem is books. Together, Mel and I have about 2000 books (that's after seriously aggressive pruning, sending perhaps half of our books to donation and/or used book stores), several hundred dvds, several hundred more CDs, and a substantial home theater setup
Several hundred of our books are in our bedroom, my office, and her office; but the majority of them are currently shelved two deep in out living room; or boxed up due to lack of room.
We've decided that the only way to deal with the living room properly, is putting up custom builtins. Thankfully I've done it before, and have the tools to do it right.
That's going to be a 'nother post... or more likely series of posts; and it's going to be a while from now, since the materials are going to run at least a grand, and honestly there are higher priorities right now.
So, my main task this weekend was to reorganize the storage in our bedroom; no small task. Actually, the only room in my house with enough storage is my bedroom; which is amazing given how small it is (12x14 with attached 4x8 3/4 bath).
We've got a 5 foot high 3 foot wide 5 drawer bureau; a six foot long, 8 drawer, counter height vanity dresser; a 5 foot high, 2 foot wide, 5 drawer chest that fits in between our his and hers closets; the aforementioned two, 7 foot wide (one full wall of our 12x14 bedroom) 2.5ft deep his and hers closets; a night stand with two VERY large drawers that act as my desk drawers; and full length underbed storage accessible on one side of our queen bed (it's backed into into a corner which is why only one side is accessible)
Other than in the living room, mostly we use steel wire shelving. It isn't the BEST looking stuff, but it's sturdy, and it can hold a hell of a lot.
So as of Sunday, I've got a 3ft wide seven tier (14" deep) unit for hardcovers, and 2x 2 foot wide 4 tier units for paperbacks.
I have a 4 foot long counter height desk in my bedroom, and the 4 tier shelves are set up as it's kick panel; with the seven tier unit on the wall perpendicular.
...No, there are no blank walls left in my house that don't have shelving or a drawer unit on them.
Anyway, before this weekend, we didn't have near enough shelving in our bedroom to hold our entire "to read" pile (well... mostly MY to read pile. Mels is like a dozen books); and books to be read were in a bunch of amazon boxes etc... so I couldn't get a good count, and sometimes couldn't find one of the books when I wanted to read it.
That is no longer a problem. In fact with the new 7 tier unit in place, we have enough shelving in the bedroom for about twice as many books as we did before.
Of course this means that now I have a good count of my pile...
... whoooo boy....
(that's a trimmed down export from our excellent catalog software, Readerware)
175 books in the to read pile... 17 linear feet of books, with a collective page count of about 61,000.
Now, I read fast. In fact, I can average over a page a minute when I'm into it... but even at my best rate of around 100 pages an hour, that would be about 610 hours of nonstop reading.
If I could manage two hours a day of recreational book reading (vs the 12+ hours of reading a day I already do between work and websites)... which is at least somewhat realistic; it would take me about a year of reading.
... and it's only getting bigger. They're releasing good books faster than I can read them.
On the one hand, great, I'll never run out of reading material. On the other hand, seems like I'll never get to some of those books I want to read.
Our biggest storage problem is books. Together, Mel and I have about 2000 books (that's after seriously aggressive pruning, sending perhaps half of our books to donation and/or used book stores), several hundred dvds, several hundred more CDs, and a substantial home theater setup
Several hundred of our books are in our bedroom, my office, and her office; but the majority of them are currently shelved two deep in out living room; or boxed up due to lack of room.
We've decided that the only way to deal with the living room properly, is putting up custom builtins. Thankfully I've done it before, and have the tools to do it right.
That's going to be a 'nother post... or more likely series of posts; and it's going to be a while from now, since the materials are going to run at least a grand, and honestly there are higher priorities right now.
So, my main task this weekend was to reorganize the storage in our bedroom; no small task. Actually, the only room in my house with enough storage is my bedroom; which is amazing given how small it is (12x14 with attached 4x8 3/4 bath).
We've got a 5 foot high 3 foot wide 5 drawer bureau; a six foot long, 8 drawer, counter height vanity dresser; a 5 foot high, 2 foot wide, 5 drawer chest that fits in between our his and hers closets; the aforementioned two, 7 foot wide (one full wall of our 12x14 bedroom) 2.5ft deep his and hers closets; a night stand with two VERY large drawers that act as my desk drawers; and full length underbed storage accessible on one side of our queen bed (it's backed into into a corner which is why only one side is accessible)
Other than in the living room, mostly we use steel wire shelving. It isn't the BEST looking stuff, but it's sturdy, and it can hold a hell of a lot.
So as of Sunday, I've got a 3ft wide seven tier (14" deep) unit for hardcovers, and 2x 2 foot wide 4 tier units for paperbacks.
I have a 4 foot long counter height desk in my bedroom, and the 4 tier shelves are set up as it's kick panel; with the seven tier unit on the wall perpendicular.
...No, there are no blank walls left in my house that don't have shelving or a drawer unit on them.
Anyway, before this weekend, we didn't have near enough shelving in our bedroom to hold our entire "to read" pile (well... mostly MY to read pile. Mels is like a dozen books); and books to be read were in a bunch of amazon boxes etc... so I couldn't get a good count, and sometimes couldn't find one of the books when I wanted to read it.
That is no longer a problem. In fact with the new 7 tier unit in place, we have enough shelving in the bedroom for about twice as many books as we did before.
Of course this means that now I have a good count of my pile...
... whoooo boy....
(that's a trimmed down export from our excellent catalog software, Readerware)
175 books in the to read pile... 17 linear feet of books, with a collective page count of about 61,000.
Now, I read fast. In fact, I can average over a page a minute when I'm into it... but even at my best rate of around 100 pages an hour, that would be about 610 hours of nonstop reading.
If I could manage two hours a day of recreational book reading (vs the 12+ hours of reading a day I already do between work and websites)... which is at least somewhat realistic; it would take me about a year of reading.
... and it's only getting bigger. They're releasing good books faster than I can read them.
On the one hand, great, I'll never run out of reading material. On the other hand, seems like I'll never get to some of those books I want to read.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Oversold
So, the question was asked, how much does hosting a website like theguncounter.com cost?
Well, thankfully, Combat Controller is piggybacking our hosting on his colo account, and we're using open source software,so it isn't costing us anything but time; but generally speaking for a site like ours, you'd expect a minimum of $20 to a maximum of about $80 a month for hosting charges, including bandwidth.
At least from a reputable company that actually charges what a service is worth, and then actually provides that level of services.
The followup question was of course "why does it cost that much, when companies like dreamhost sell high bandwidth hosting for $8 a month".
Well... yes and no.
Application services hosting is an interesting business. When most people think of web hosting, they think there's some server somewhere chugging out your pages, just for you.
In reality, all application service hosting (web services are just one of the applications you can host) is virtualized; meaning in this case, that there are many different applications, and sites, running from a single piece of hardware.
Of course it's not like one box can serve an infinite number of applications; so you have to carefully balance how many applications you provision on a given set of computing resources, and a given bandwidth and storage allocation, against how much you charge; to both remain competitive, and make a profit.
It's a tricky balancing act really, and it's one that unfortunately most companies do badly.
Part of this balancing act, is the concept of overselling; which means selling more resources than you actually have (it's also called oversubscribing, which is the same thing, except without the selling part).
This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's the industry standard; because most applications don't need 100% power, all the time. In fact most only need 10% power or less 90% of the time, and 100% power 10% of the time.
I use the term "power" there advisedly, because oversubscribing isn't just part of the hosting business, and it isn't a rare thing; service providers in every area oversubscribe or oversell. Phone companies don't have enough circuits for every customer to call all at once, power companies don't produce enough power for every household to draw 200 amps all at once etc...
Every hosting provider oversubscribes; some are more honest about it, some less.
Ok, so how does oversubscription work exactly? I mean how can you sell four people 100% power on the same computer? Didn't Mel Brooks write a movie about a play about that kind of thing.. and then a play about a movie... Ok, it's complicated...
Actually, it's pretty simple. Let's say you have 1 cpu, and a particular application may need 1 full cpu worth of power when it's doing heavy processing; however, you know that it only needs that much power 25% of the time or less. If you have four other applications like that, so long as they don't need the CPU all at the same time, you can sell each of them 1 cpus worth of power; and everyone will GET one CPU worth of power.
At that point you've oversold by 4 to 1, but each application is still getting 100% of their needs met, and they're paying MUCH less than they would if you had to provision a full cpu for each of them; just to have that CPU sit idle 75% of the time.
Now remember, every hosting business and every ISP do this, for all but the busiest sites they host.
Only when a customer pays for a true dedicated server will they ever NOT be virtualized, and only very rarely will virtualized hosts not be oversold.
Oh and in my experience, most customer who pay for a dedicated server don't actually need one; and many customer that DO need them try to economize by NOT paying for one.
When you first try to explain all of this to customers, they often feel a sense of outrage, or like they are being cheated. What they don't realize is just how expensive it is to host applications, and that without oversubscription, they would be paying FAR more for their services.
Oversubscription isn't cheating, it's just how the game is played.
I play this game for a living; except the game I play has higher stakes than small scale commercial web hosting, because instead of doing it for web hosts, I do it for business critical applications in a bank (I'm the chief architect for one of the major divisions of one of the worlds top 10 banks). If we have outages, we can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute in revenue, and receive fines in the millions.
Because of this, though we do virtualize many applications, we don't oversubscribe anything above a tier 3 application (there are five tiers), and we do a minimum oversubscription on anything lower. No more than 2.5 to 1 on anything other than low load internal web pages, ever.
Of course we have a LOT of low load internal web pages (thousands), and to save server costs, we oversubscribe them as far as we can get away with.
There's no way we could ever make money doing that as a business; because the market pressures are insane. Every competitor in the hosting market is being pressured to offer more and more services at lower and lower prices; and they could never oversell at such a low ratio and still stay in business.
In this business you have whats called the 60/40 rule. You try and load your hardware up to 40% sustained utilization at least 60% of the time, and 60% peak utilization no more than 40% of the time. You peak to 100% actually, but you only peak for a few seconds or a minute at a time, and it gets averaged out over 15 minute increments, so it comes out to 60%.
When you hit 60% sustained utilization (more than 60% utilized for more than 40% of the time) it's time to upgrade, because you don't have enough capacity to maintain consistent quality of service for the applications on those systems.
So long as you obey the 60/40 rule, and make intelligent decisions about how to allocate applications across your hardware, you should be OK. In a shared web hosting environment you would be amazed at how many relatively busy websites can be hosted on a single server without hitting that 40% mark never mind the 60% mark.
It may seem odd to someone not familair with the business, that you could theoretically host hundreds of applications (usually small web pages) on a single server, and every site will work very well; but as long as you keep to the 60/40 rule, it really works.
It's when you start trying to stretch beyond 60/40 that you start running into problems.
So let's look at what the numbers really are like shall we?
The bread and butter building block of hosting services is the 1u or 2u mid-range rack server. They're generally built with 2 processors, and most of them now have 4 cores each processor (basically 8 processors total), and these days 8 or 16gb of RAM (you try to make it 2gb of RAM per core these days).
They take up just 1.75"x19"x32" (or 3.5" instead of 1.75 depending); which are industry standard rack units; and generally use less than 500 watts of power at normal load (though you have to account for twice that for power and cooling because you have two PSUs that COULD draw 500 each.)
Generally speaking, the servers cost anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 each (with a hardware service contract) if you buy them in bulk. Let's presume it's $3000 (a good price from a top tier vendor to a high volume customer), and you're running on the industry standard depreciation cycle of 36 months; for a cost of about $85 a month
It is entirely possible to fit several THOUSAND websites on a single mid priced server; though a few dozen small to medium sites, or 4-8 larger sites is more common. The resources provisioned for each site are called a virtual host.
Basically a standard "large" virtualhost will have 1 or 2 full cpus worth of resources available to it at peak, and the associated memory and I/O. You can push a lot of data with a 2 cpu 4 gig server.
Actually, it's MUCH better if you use a pair of servers, both of which are managed to never be at more than 40% capacity; so if one fails it can take all the load for the other.
Better hosting companies will offer that service, or simply build it in; so they don't have downtime and contract penalties. It's a lot less expensive to build services that don't break as easily, and fail gracefully when they do; than to try and save cost by building cheap, to minimum standards.
Spreading the load across 4 servers is even better, because a single failure will have a lower impact with the load spread across three additional systems than one, and because you could sustain multiple failures and still maintain service at reduced performance.
Importantly, you aren't really adding capacity, and you aren't adding additional hardware cost; because you're not buying more hardware than you would have if you were provisioning to the same hardware utilization level on single servers. What you're doing by clustering is adding resiliency and improved availability.
If you architect it properly though, there is no reason why you can't fit 4-8 very large very busy web sites, for which you charge at least $80, and up to $200 a month in hosting fees if you're a good outfit; on that one server... Or even better 32 sites, at $80 a month each virtual host; for 32 sites on a 4 server cluster, generating $2560 a month in revenue, and costing $340 a month in raw hardware costs.
Of course the raw hardware costs are only a small fraction of the total costs of providing hosting.
The hosting business has such tight margins, that they tend to operate at a 60/80 rule, or even an 80/60 80/80, or 80/90 rule, which seriously strains systems... but even then, so long as you keep on top of things, you should be alright (well.. not really with the 80/90... but if you're clustered and REALLY on top of things, you can usually get away with it).
Funny thing is, if you actually are really on top of things, it's pretty easy to manage very highly utilized servers. The real problems come in when you're overselling disk space and bandwidth; but again, if you manage it intelligently, you can still maintain quality of service.
I think you can see where I'm going with this.
There is no industry standard for provisioning storage; because needs vary WILDLY. Generally speaking though, we presume a MONTHLY cost of about $4 per gigabyte minimum, for datacenter storage (it can easily get up over $40 a gig for high performance highly available storage with high performance archive and long retention times etc...).
Why so high when you can buy a 1tb hard drive at your local electronics store for $200?
...Because enterprise class storage doesn't use 1tb consumer grade drives, it uses 146gb or 320gb enterprise class drives that cost $300-400 each in bulk; and you provision it in 8 drive RAID groups, that have an available space of about 2tb (after the filesystem is put on. The raw space is 2560 gigs,) for $3200 raw storage cost. Then you have to put those drives in something; and enterprise class storage arrays are not cheap. Figure $32,000 minimum (plus disk) for an array that can hold 6 of those RAID groups. Then you need to set up the storage network to get the storage to your servers, and that's not cheap either, at a minimum about $16,000 for enough ports to fill up the array.
That's $67,200 for 12 terabytes, not $2400; and a cost of about $5.60 a gig (not including cabling or backup).
You can cut that price a bit by using SAS or SATA drives instead of standard SCSI, and by using larger arrays (up to a point the cost per slot goes down. Get beyond that point, it doubles, then starts going down again); and get it down to around $4 a gig, especially now that 1tb SAS drives are becoming available; but most aren't using them yet.
So yeah, $4 a gig is a hard minimum right now; unless you want to go to dumb storage (storage that doesnt have intelligent management and caching), and use consumer grade drives. It's a bad idea, but some will try and save on costs by doing so.
Above, I noted that it is cheaper to build resilient systems than it is to fix non-resilient systems when they break. This is one of the prime examples. Companies wouldn't pay for enterprise storage if it werent saving them money in the long run.
So, if we presume each of our very busy 32 sites is using 5GB (most likely a drastic overestimation, but that is a common allocation for a low priced hosting account) then it would cost us $20 per site per month just for the storage; or about $640 per month. That's without overselling.
The industry standard for overselling bandwidth for shared services while maintaining quality of service is 7 to 1 for median usage, 4 to 1 for heavy usage, and 12 to 1 for light usage.
That means that generally, if you sell 7 customers a maximum bandwidth of 3 megabit per second, and a bandwidth cap of 500 gigabytes a month; you only need to provision 3 megabit and 500 gigabytes; not 21 megabits and 3500 gigabytes.
Bandwidth costs can vary wildly; but as a general planning number, it currently cost about $250 a month to provide that level of service (raw service charges).
Let's get back to our heavily used 32 virtual host cluster, and say we can oversell them at 4-1. They each want 3 megabits per second of maximum bandwidth, and 1 terabyte a month of transfer. It costs us about $1000 a month to provide enough bandwidth to oversell those 32 virtual servers at 4 to 1 on 3mbit; so about $30 per host.
Now, let's add up the costs so far, to provide excellent quality of service and oversell within industry standards. It's about $2000 a month aggregate RAW COST, not including staffing, overhead, or profit, just for those 32 virtual hosts.
The general IT industry standard admin to server ratio for web servers (real servers not virtual hosts) is 32 to 1 (hosting providers tend to operated at a higher ratio though); and a basic level full time server admin costs you a minimum of $5000 a month. Then you need at least two NOC monkeys for that same server load, at a minimum of about $3000 a month each. So that's $11,000 a month in raw staffing. Industry standard overhead calculation is to double the staffing cost (its a minimum of 1.6 times up to a maximum of about 2.4 so double is a good average) so $22,000 a month to admin 32 servers; and we're admining 4 servers, so our portion of that cost is $2750.
So, our total incremental cost to provide those 32 high utilization virtual hosts, at 3gbps maximum bandwidth, 1TB transfer, and 5gb storage; at industry standard QOS for overselling and staffing, is $4750; or just under $150 a month per virtual host.
Presuming we take $80 a month for them, we're losing $70 a month.
This is why good hosting companies charge so much more than the $10 a month places; because services cost money, and a good host will give you the service you pay for.
Ok, let's say we stretch it out, go to the 80/60 rule and provision 48 virtual servers on the same hardware; then go to a minimum QOS oversell of 12 to 1; and we oversell the storage at 10 to 1 (unfortunately typical).
Our hardware cost remains the same at $340 a month , our storage costs go down to about $100 a month, we go to $500 a month on bandwidth, and our staffing cost remains the same at $2750... $3690, divided by 48 is $76.88.
Wow, we can just about cover it at $80 a month, with a meager $3.12 a month profit each on 48 accounts... and of course we haven't even discussed the marketing costs of getting those accounts in the first place; which is typically 5 times the monthly cost of provisioning the customer, so actually your first five months for that customer cost you double. At that rate, it will take 3 years for you to see a profit on just that one customer.
Remember when I said the hosting business runs on very tight margins?
If as a hosting provider you choose to use the 80/60 rule, you're already stretching your QOS minimums. If you then choose to provision all your customers at the 12 to 1 level, you're stretching things further.
..but, you're still being ethical, because there is a reasonable expectation that you will be able to maintain quality of service across all your customers; providing you have a top notch NOC and datacenter staff, and keep on top of capacity and maintenance.
Now, look at a company like Dreamhost (I chose them because they are one of the few companies that admit to overselling). They are theoretically selling that same level of service, only they are selling at at $8 a month, not $80 a month.
Obviously that is impossible. They cannot possibly provide the minimum QOS that they are selling. However, for $8 a month, who in their right mind would expect them to.
Basically, they are lying to the customer, because everyone else competing in the market is lying to the customer. The customer pretends to believe he can get $80 a month worth of service for $8 a month, and the host pretends to sell it to him.
In order to make any money at all on that price, they need to do some crazy things.
Note, I won't say these exact numbers apply to dreamhost in particular, because I don't know what their provisioning looks like; I'm just using their pricing example to show you how it has to be done to reach that price.
They will sell HUNDREDS of sites on a single server, and generally they don't cluster for their lower tier offerings (they do for higher tier, higher usage sites etc...). For high utilization systems, instead of running at 8 to one, they run at 24 to 1.
For bandwidth and storage, they follow the same 24 to 1 ratio.
Most importantly, they deliberately keep staff levels to a minimum, to cut overhead. Staffing costs are by far the largest proportion of the cost of providing service, so instead of the industry standard 32 to 1, they run at 256 to 1.
So, for our original 32 virtual hosts, this brings their cost down to $113 a month for the raw hardware, $167 for bandwidth, $27 for storage, and about $115 per month for staffing.
That's still $13.75 a month per virtual host.
So for every customer that they have to provision even that degraded quality of service for, they're losing $6 a month.
The only way they are able to sustain this model, is because they have tens of thousand of accounts at $8 a month, literally 90% (or more) of which never use more than one 12,000th of a server (less than 1 minute of CPU time per day on an 8 core box); and require essentially zero admin time. For those sites, they put a couple hundred of them on a box, not just 24; they use 1/100th the bandwidth of the larger virtual hosts, do 1/100th the transfer, and rarely use more than about 10mb of storage.
Basically they take the possible but not very ethical 80/60 level I describe above, and they multiply the loading by 5 (or more).
Again, I should emphasize; for the vast majority of their users, this is just fine; and they are completely satisfied, because they are paying a very low price, and getting their needs met.
The hosts cost to provision those 90% customer is about $3 a month; and those 90% are perfectly happy, because they think they're getting enterprise class service and in effect they do because their needs are never more than 1/100th that of a "real" server.
So if 9 out 10 of your accounts costs you $3, the tenth costs you $13.75 and you take in $80 for the whole lot... hey, that's a decent profit. You're averaging $4 a month profit across all your accounts... which is a little bit more than the company who stretches it out to 80/60, that I described above (they're making $3.12 an account).
However, in order to sustain that model, no account can EVER exceed the usage needed to ensure the 24-1 oversell, and you have to keep that 9/10 ratio of high utilization to low. Otherwise, you're sunk.
So, if you're a home user, that $8 a month is attractive, because in all likelihood you'll never use 1% of what you're theoretically paying for never mind 10%.
But if you're a business, or a web site used by hundreds or thousands of people, and you want to actually get anywhere near what you're theoretically paying for; you have to actually pay for what it costs, plus a little bit extra to allow the company to make a profit. That means that $80 hosting account is the minimum real world, for an application that needs a guaranteed quality of service.
'Course thanks to better virtualization technologies, and higher density servers, we're putting four times as much computing power into the same physical space, and at the same cost, as we were 2 years ago. Labor costs aren't going down, so it's not a 75% reduction; but two years from now, we might be able to provision that same quality of service for $60 instead of $80.
Well, thankfully, Combat Controller is piggybacking our hosting on his colo account, and we're using open source software,so it isn't costing us anything but time; but generally speaking for a site like ours, you'd expect a minimum of $20 to a maximum of about $80 a month for hosting charges, including bandwidth.
At least from a reputable company that actually charges what a service is worth, and then actually provides that level of services.
The followup question was of course "why does it cost that much, when companies like dreamhost sell high bandwidth hosting for $8 a month".
Well... yes and no.
Application services hosting is an interesting business. When most people think of web hosting, they think there's some server somewhere chugging out your pages, just for you.
In reality, all application service hosting (web services are just one of the applications you can host) is virtualized; meaning in this case, that there are many different applications, and sites, running from a single piece of hardware.
Of course it's not like one box can serve an infinite number of applications; so you have to carefully balance how many applications you provision on a given set of computing resources, and a given bandwidth and storage allocation, against how much you charge; to both remain competitive, and make a profit.
It's a tricky balancing act really, and it's one that unfortunately most companies do badly.
Part of this balancing act, is the concept of overselling; which means selling more resources than you actually have (it's also called oversubscribing, which is the same thing, except without the selling part).
This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's the industry standard; because most applications don't need 100% power, all the time. In fact most only need 10% power or less 90% of the time, and 100% power 10% of the time.
I use the term "power" there advisedly, because oversubscribing isn't just part of the hosting business, and it isn't a rare thing; service providers in every area oversubscribe or oversell. Phone companies don't have enough circuits for every customer to call all at once, power companies don't produce enough power for every household to draw 200 amps all at once etc...
Every hosting provider oversubscribes; some are more honest about it, some less.
Ok, so how does oversubscription work exactly? I mean how can you sell four people 100% power on the same computer? Didn't Mel Brooks write a movie about a play about that kind of thing.. and then a play about a movie... Ok, it's complicated...
Actually, it's pretty simple. Let's say you have 1 cpu, and a particular application may need 1 full cpu worth of power when it's doing heavy processing; however, you know that it only needs that much power 25% of the time or less. If you have four other applications like that, so long as they don't need the CPU all at the same time, you can sell each of them 1 cpus worth of power; and everyone will GET one CPU worth of power.
At that point you've oversold by 4 to 1, but each application is still getting 100% of their needs met, and they're paying MUCH less than they would if you had to provision a full cpu for each of them; just to have that CPU sit idle 75% of the time.
Now remember, every hosting business and every ISP do this, for all but the busiest sites they host.
Only when a customer pays for a true dedicated server will they ever NOT be virtualized, and only very rarely will virtualized hosts not be oversold.
Oh and in my experience, most customer who pay for a dedicated server don't actually need one; and many customer that DO need them try to economize by NOT paying for one.
When you first try to explain all of this to customers, they often feel a sense of outrage, or like they are being cheated. What they don't realize is just how expensive it is to host applications, and that without oversubscription, they would be paying FAR more for their services.
Oversubscription isn't cheating, it's just how the game is played.
I play this game for a living; except the game I play has higher stakes than small scale commercial web hosting, because instead of doing it for web hosts, I do it for business critical applications in a bank (I'm the chief architect for one of the major divisions of one of the worlds top 10 banks). If we have outages, we can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute in revenue, and receive fines in the millions.
Because of this, though we do virtualize many applications, we don't oversubscribe anything above a tier 3 application (there are five tiers), and we do a minimum oversubscription on anything lower. No more than 2.5 to 1 on anything other than low load internal web pages, ever.
Of course we have a LOT of low load internal web pages (thousands), and to save server costs, we oversubscribe them as far as we can get away with.
There's no way we could ever make money doing that as a business; because the market pressures are insane. Every competitor in the hosting market is being pressured to offer more and more services at lower and lower prices; and they could never oversell at such a low ratio and still stay in business.
In this business you have whats called the 60/40 rule. You try and load your hardware up to 40% sustained utilization at least 60% of the time, and 60% peak utilization no more than 40% of the time. You peak to 100% actually, but you only peak for a few seconds or a minute at a time, and it gets averaged out over 15 minute increments, so it comes out to 60%.
When you hit 60% sustained utilization (more than 60% utilized for more than 40% of the time) it's time to upgrade, because you don't have enough capacity to maintain consistent quality of service for the applications on those systems.
So long as you obey the 60/40 rule, and make intelligent decisions about how to allocate applications across your hardware, you should be OK. In a shared web hosting environment you would be amazed at how many relatively busy websites can be hosted on a single server without hitting that 40% mark never mind the 60% mark.
It may seem odd to someone not familair with the business, that you could theoretically host hundreds of applications (usually small web pages) on a single server, and every site will work very well; but as long as you keep to the 60/40 rule, it really works.
It's when you start trying to stretch beyond 60/40 that you start running into problems.
So let's look at what the numbers really are like shall we?
The bread and butter building block of hosting services is the 1u or 2u mid-range rack server. They're generally built with 2 processors, and most of them now have 4 cores each processor (basically 8 processors total), and these days 8 or 16gb of RAM (you try to make it 2gb of RAM per core these days).
They take up just 1.75"x19"x32" (or 3.5" instead of 1.75 depending); which are industry standard rack units; and generally use less than 500 watts of power at normal load (though you have to account for twice that for power and cooling because you have two PSUs that COULD draw 500 each.)
Generally speaking, the servers cost anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 each (with a hardware service contract) if you buy them in bulk. Let's presume it's $3000 (a good price from a top tier vendor to a high volume customer), and you're running on the industry standard depreciation cycle of 36 months; for a cost of about $85 a month
It is entirely possible to fit several THOUSAND websites on a single mid priced server; though a few dozen small to medium sites, or 4-8 larger sites is more common. The resources provisioned for each site are called a virtual host.
Basically a standard "large" virtualhost will have 1 or 2 full cpus worth of resources available to it at peak, and the associated memory and I/O. You can push a lot of data with a 2 cpu 4 gig server.
Actually, it's MUCH better if you use a pair of servers, both of which are managed to never be at more than 40% capacity; so if one fails it can take all the load for the other.
Better hosting companies will offer that service, or simply build it in; so they don't have downtime and contract penalties. It's a lot less expensive to build services that don't break as easily, and fail gracefully when they do; than to try and save cost by building cheap, to minimum standards.
Spreading the load across 4 servers is even better, because a single failure will have a lower impact with the load spread across three additional systems than one, and because you could sustain multiple failures and still maintain service at reduced performance.
Importantly, you aren't really adding capacity, and you aren't adding additional hardware cost; because you're not buying more hardware than you would have if you were provisioning to the same hardware utilization level on single servers. What you're doing by clustering is adding resiliency and improved availability.
If you architect it properly though, there is no reason why you can't fit 4-8 very large very busy web sites, for which you charge at least $80, and up to $200 a month in hosting fees if you're a good outfit; on that one server... Or even better 32 sites, at $80 a month each virtual host; for 32 sites on a 4 server cluster, generating $2560 a month in revenue, and costing $340 a month in raw hardware costs.
Of course the raw hardware costs are only a small fraction of the total costs of providing hosting.
The hosting business has such tight margins, that they tend to operate at a 60/80 rule, or even an 80/60 80/80, or 80/90 rule, which seriously strains systems... but even then, so long as you keep on top of things, you should be alright (well.. not really with the 80/90... but if you're clustered and REALLY on top of things, you can usually get away with it).
Funny thing is, if you actually are really on top of things, it's pretty easy to manage very highly utilized servers. The real problems come in when you're overselling disk space and bandwidth; but again, if you manage it intelligently, you can still maintain quality of service.
I think you can see where I'm going with this.
There is no industry standard for provisioning storage; because needs vary WILDLY. Generally speaking though, we presume a MONTHLY cost of about $4 per gigabyte minimum, for datacenter storage (it can easily get up over $40 a gig for high performance highly available storage with high performance archive and long retention times etc...).
Why so high when you can buy a 1tb hard drive at your local electronics store for $200?
...Because enterprise class storage doesn't use 1tb consumer grade drives, it uses 146gb or 320gb enterprise class drives that cost $300-400 each in bulk; and you provision it in 8 drive RAID groups, that have an available space of about 2tb (after the filesystem is put on. The raw space is 2560 gigs,) for $3200 raw storage cost. Then you have to put those drives in something; and enterprise class storage arrays are not cheap. Figure $32,000 minimum (plus disk) for an array that can hold 6 of those RAID groups. Then you need to set up the storage network to get the storage to your servers, and that's not cheap either, at a minimum about $16,000 for enough ports to fill up the array.
That's $67,200 for 12 terabytes, not $2400; and a cost of about $5.60 a gig (not including cabling or backup).
You can cut that price a bit by using SAS or SATA drives instead of standard SCSI, and by using larger arrays (up to a point the cost per slot goes down. Get beyond that point, it doubles, then starts going down again); and get it down to around $4 a gig, especially now that 1tb SAS drives are becoming available; but most aren't using them yet.
So yeah, $4 a gig is a hard minimum right now; unless you want to go to dumb storage (storage that doesnt have intelligent management and caching), and use consumer grade drives. It's a bad idea, but some will try and save on costs by doing so.
Above, I noted that it is cheaper to build resilient systems than it is to fix non-resilient systems when they break. This is one of the prime examples. Companies wouldn't pay for enterprise storage if it werent saving them money in the long run.
So, if we presume each of our very busy 32 sites is using 5GB (most likely a drastic overestimation, but that is a common allocation for a low priced hosting account) then it would cost us $20 per site per month just for the storage; or about $640 per month. That's without overselling.
The industry standard for overselling bandwidth for shared services while maintaining quality of service is 7 to 1 for median usage, 4 to 1 for heavy usage, and 12 to 1 for light usage.
That means that generally, if you sell 7 customers a maximum bandwidth of 3 megabit per second, and a bandwidth cap of 500 gigabytes a month; you only need to provision 3 megabit and 500 gigabytes; not 21 megabits and 3500 gigabytes.
Bandwidth costs can vary wildly; but as a general planning number, it currently cost about $250 a month to provide that level of service (raw service charges).
Let's get back to our heavily used 32 virtual host cluster, and say we can oversell them at 4-1. They each want 3 megabits per second of maximum bandwidth, and 1 terabyte a month of transfer. It costs us about $1000 a month to provide enough bandwidth to oversell those 32 virtual servers at 4 to 1 on 3mbit; so about $30 per host.
Now, let's add up the costs so far, to provide excellent quality of service and oversell within industry standards. It's about $2000 a month aggregate RAW COST, not including staffing, overhead, or profit, just for those 32 virtual hosts.
The general IT industry standard admin to server ratio for web servers (real servers not virtual hosts) is 32 to 1 (hosting providers tend to operated at a higher ratio though); and a basic level full time server admin costs you a minimum of $5000 a month. Then you need at least two NOC monkeys for that same server load, at a minimum of about $3000 a month each. So that's $11,000 a month in raw staffing. Industry standard overhead calculation is to double the staffing cost (its a minimum of 1.6 times up to a maximum of about 2.4 so double is a good average) so $22,000 a month to admin 32 servers; and we're admining 4 servers, so our portion of that cost is $2750.
So, our total incremental cost to provide those 32 high utilization virtual hosts, at 3gbps maximum bandwidth, 1TB transfer, and 5gb storage; at industry standard QOS for overselling and staffing, is $4750; or just under $150 a month per virtual host.
Presuming we take $80 a month for them, we're losing $70 a month.
This is why good hosting companies charge so much more than the $10 a month places; because services cost money, and a good host will give you the service you pay for.
Ok, let's say we stretch it out, go to the 80/60 rule and provision 48 virtual servers on the same hardware; then go to a minimum QOS oversell of 12 to 1; and we oversell the storage at 10 to 1 (unfortunately typical).
Our hardware cost remains the same at $340 a month , our storage costs go down to about $100 a month, we go to $500 a month on bandwidth, and our staffing cost remains the same at $2750... $3690, divided by 48 is $76.88.
Wow, we can just about cover it at $80 a month, with a meager $3.12 a month profit each on 48 accounts... and of course we haven't even discussed the marketing costs of getting those accounts in the first place; which is typically 5 times the monthly cost of provisioning the customer, so actually your first five months for that customer cost you double. At that rate, it will take 3 years for you to see a profit on just that one customer.
Remember when I said the hosting business runs on very tight margins?
If as a hosting provider you choose to use the 80/60 rule, you're already stretching your QOS minimums. If you then choose to provision all your customers at the 12 to 1 level, you're stretching things further.
..but, you're still being ethical, because there is a reasonable expectation that you will be able to maintain quality of service across all your customers; providing you have a top notch NOC and datacenter staff, and keep on top of capacity and maintenance.
Now, look at a company like Dreamhost (I chose them because they are one of the few companies that admit to overselling). They are theoretically selling that same level of service, only they are selling at at $8 a month, not $80 a month.
Obviously that is impossible. They cannot possibly provide the minimum QOS that they are selling. However, for $8 a month, who in their right mind would expect them to.
Basically, they are lying to the customer, because everyone else competing in the market is lying to the customer. The customer pretends to believe he can get $80 a month worth of service for $8 a month, and the host pretends to sell it to him.
In order to make any money at all on that price, they need to do some crazy things.
Note, I won't say these exact numbers apply to dreamhost in particular, because I don't know what their provisioning looks like; I'm just using their pricing example to show you how it has to be done to reach that price.
They will sell HUNDREDS of sites on a single server, and generally they don't cluster for their lower tier offerings (they do for higher tier, higher usage sites etc...). For high utilization systems, instead of running at 8 to one, they run at 24 to 1.
For bandwidth and storage, they follow the same 24 to 1 ratio.
Most importantly, they deliberately keep staff levels to a minimum, to cut overhead. Staffing costs are by far the largest proportion of the cost of providing service, so instead of the industry standard 32 to 1, they run at 256 to 1.
So, for our original 32 virtual hosts, this brings their cost down to $113 a month for the raw hardware, $167 for bandwidth, $27 for storage, and about $115 per month for staffing.
That's still $13.75 a month per virtual host.
So for every customer that they have to provision even that degraded quality of service for, they're losing $6 a month.
The only way they are able to sustain this model, is because they have tens of thousand of accounts at $8 a month, literally 90% (or more) of which never use more than one 12,000th of a server (less than 1 minute of CPU time per day on an 8 core box); and require essentially zero admin time. For those sites, they put a couple hundred of them on a box, not just 24; they use 1/100th the bandwidth of the larger virtual hosts, do 1/100th the transfer, and rarely use more than about 10mb of storage.
Basically they take the possible but not very ethical 80/60 level I describe above, and they multiply the loading by 5 (or more).
Again, I should emphasize; for the vast majority of their users, this is just fine; and they are completely satisfied, because they are paying a very low price, and getting their needs met.
The hosts cost to provision those 90% customer is about $3 a month; and those 90% are perfectly happy, because they think they're getting enterprise class service and in effect they do because their needs are never more than 1/100th that of a "real" server.
So if 9 out 10 of your accounts costs you $3, the tenth costs you $13.75 and you take in $80 for the whole lot... hey, that's a decent profit. You're averaging $4 a month profit across all your accounts... which is a little bit more than the company who stretches it out to 80/60, that I described above (they're making $3.12 an account).
However, in order to sustain that model, no account can EVER exceed the usage needed to ensure the 24-1 oversell, and you have to keep that 9/10 ratio of high utilization to low. Otherwise, you're sunk.
So, if you're a home user, that $8 a month is attractive, because in all likelihood you'll never use 1% of what you're theoretically paying for never mind 10%.
But if you're a business, or a web site used by hundreds or thousands of people, and you want to actually get anywhere near what you're theoretically paying for; you have to actually pay for what it costs, plus a little bit extra to allow the company to make a profit. That means that $80 hosting account is the minimum real world, for an application that needs a guaranteed quality of service.
'Course thanks to better virtualization technologies, and higher density servers, we're putting four times as much computing power into the same physical space, and at the same cost, as we were 2 years ago. Labor costs aren't going down, so it's not a 75% reduction; but two years from now, we might be able to provision that same quality of service for $60 instead of $80.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
A Pints a Pound the World 'Round
... Actually a pint's more like about £2 in the UK (a reader writes it's more like £2.70 where he is)
Would that it were only so here in the U.S.
A friend of mine from the UK, currently living in rural Spain, was wondering how much we paid for drink here.
A sad story really.
In general, we pay MUCH more for drink than you do in Europe and the U.K.
When I lived in Ireland, a pint of Guinness was cheaper than a pint of coke in most bars (and of course no free refills). Here the reverse is very definitely true.
For a British pint (570ml), of a half decent beer, we'll pay somewhere from $5 to $8 in most bars or restaurants. Prices vary widely, and a true imperial pint is rare.
We get 16oz pints in the U.S. which are 100ml (3-1/4 oz) less than imperial; and are typically $4.50 to $6.50. A lot of places will serve a 20oz or 22oz mugs for $1 or $2 more than their 16oz price.
However, we usually don't even get pints. Generally, beer is served by the glass (350ml) here, and in most places a domestic glass is $3.50 to $5.50, and an import or microbrew will be $1 more; though cheaper bars may serve as low as $2.50 for domestics. Often the cheapest beer in the bar will be sold at $1 a glass specials on certain days and certain hours etc...
Wine is generally sold by the 750ml bottle here, or by the 175ml glass (and often you won't even get that much. Many bars try to pour their wine to get six glasses per bottle, at 125ml per glass) and the cheapest acceptable (seriously I really mean the cheapest that are at all drinkable) wines will typically run around $15 per bottle, or $4 per glass in a bar... and that's an $8 bottle in the shop.
Wines that would sell for $15 in the shop would typically be sold for between $20 and $25 in the bar or restaurant; and at $6 a glass; and the prices only get worse from there.
Hard liquor is the worst here though. First, although the world standard shot is 35ml (1.25oz), legally a shot is defined as 29.72ml (1oz)... though at least most bars serve the 1.25oz version when you are ordering a neat shot, they may not when you order a mixed drink.
You'll find that most mixed drinks only get a pony (1oz) in a restaurant; especially in restaurants that have those auto drink mixing systems (so the bartenders can't steal).
Also, in many places when you ask for a double (what should be 2oz if using the legal measure, or 2.5 oz for full measure) you'll get a jigger (1.5oz) or a double pony (2oz); though at least they'll generally only charge you for the jigger or double pony, not twice price of a full shot.
You'll find the same practice in almost ALL mixed drinks in restaurants, and unfortunately in many bars. Ask for a double, or if the recipe calls for a double, and you'll get a jigger.
A 750ml bottle of hard liquor that costs $25 in the store, will be sold for $45-55 in the bar or restaurant; or as $4 to $6 dollar shots. Counting wastage, a bar SHOULD only count on being able to get 18 shots from a bottle, or at the very most 20; but many bars and restaurants (again, especially restaurants) have a policy mandating 22 shots (which is actually less than 35ml). I've even heard of places that mandate 24 shots.
Yes, $4 to $6 for a 35ml OR LESS shot, from a 750ml bottle that costs $25 at retail. 22 shots at $6 a shot... $132 from a $25 bottle..... it's nearly criminal.
This is why they say restaurants live and die by their bar by the way. Food keeps the lights on and the bar pays the salaries.
What's sad though is that even at those markups, most bars and restaurants can't make any damn money; even if they're full all the time. 80% of all restaurants close within 2 years of opening.
Would that it were only so here in the U.S.
A friend of mine from the UK, currently living in rural Spain, was wondering how much we paid for drink here.
A sad story really.
In general, we pay MUCH more for drink than you do in Europe and the U.K.
When I lived in Ireland, a pint of Guinness was cheaper than a pint of coke in most bars (and of course no free refills). Here the reverse is very definitely true.
For a British pint (570ml), of a half decent beer, we'll pay somewhere from $5 to $8 in most bars or restaurants. Prices vary widely, and a true imperial pint is rare.
We get 16oz pints in the U.S. which are 100ml (3-1/4 oz) less than imperial; and are typically $4.50 to $6.50. A lot of places will serve a 20oz or 22oz mugs for $1 or $2 more than their 16oz price.
However, we usually don't even get pints. Generally, beer is served by the glass (350ml) here, and in most places a domestic glass is $3.50 to $5.50, and an import or microbrew will be $1 more; though cheaper bars may serve as low as $2.50 for domestics. Often the cheapest beer in the bar will be sold at $1 a glass specials on certain days and certain hours etc...
Wine is generally sold by the 750ml bottle here, or by the 175ml glass (and often you won't even get that much. Many bars try to pour their wine to get six glasses per bottle, at 125ml per glass) and the cheapest acceptable (seriously I really mean the cheapest that are at all drinkable) wines will typically run around $15 per bottle, or $4 per glass in a bar... and that's an $8 bottle in the shop.
Wines that would sell for $15 in the shop would typically be sold for between $20 and $25 in the bar or restaurant; and at $6 a glass; and the prices only get worse from there.
Hard liquor is the worst here though. First, although the world standard shot is 35ml (1.25oz), legally a shot is defined as 29.72ml (1oz)... though at least most bars serve the 1.25oz version when you are ordering a neat shot, they may not when you order a mixed drink.
You'll find that most mixed drinks only get a pony (1oz) in a restaurant; especially in restaurants that have those auto drink mixing systems (so the bartenders can't steal).
Also, in many places when you ask for a double (what should be 2oz if using the legal measure, or 2.5 oz for full measure) you'll get a jigger (1.5oz) or a double pony (2oz); though at least they'll generally only charge you for the jigger or double pony, not twice price of a full shot.
You'll find the same practice in almost ALL mixed drinks in restaurants, and unfortunately in many bars. Ask for a double, or if the recipe calls for a double, and you'll get a jigger.
A 750ml bottle of hard liquor that costs $25 in the store, will be sold for $45-55 in the bar or restaurant; or as $4 to $6 dollar shots. Counting wastage, a bar SHOULD only count on being able to get 18 shots from a bottle, or at the very most 20; but many bars and restaurants (again, especially restaurants) have a policy mandating 22 shots (which is actually less than 35ml). I've even heard of places that mandate 24 shots.
Yes, $4 to $6 for a 35ml OR LESS shot, from a 750ml bottle that costs $25 at retail. 22 shots at $6 a shot... $132 from a $25 bottle..... it's nearly criminal.
This is why they say restaurants live and die by their bar by the way. Food keeps the lights on and the bar pays the salaries.
What's sad though is that even at those markups, most bars and restaurants can't make any damn money; even if they're full all the time. 80% of all restaurants close within 2 years of opening.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
How to feed your PoodleShooter
So, I've talked a LOT about what types of ammunition to use in ARs, what bullets work best, what barrel twist works with what ammo... why the AR exist in the first place and uses the ammo that it does...
Somehow I never managed to get around to talking much about magazines; except to note they are the single biggest point of failure for the AR platform, and the first thing to consider when things go wrong.
Well they ARE. I harp on it for a reason.
Somehow though I never managed to talk about what magazines to buy, or not to buy, and how to pick'em.
Well, a friend of mine was heading to the gunshow this past weekend, and he asked for advice on mags; so I wrote this up for him, and I thought I'd share it with the rest of you.
Ok, let's break it down.
First things first, don't buy mags at the gun show (or at the gun shop for that matter), unless they're a spectacular bargain... or a reasonable price, but new in the plastic with the original manufacturers imprint on them, and/or in a sealed crate with a trademark you can read.
I don't trust mags bought at gunshows very much, and unfortunately most gunshops are only one step above that... after all most of the guys selling dodgy, mismarked, clearly fraudulent crap mags at gunshows, are gunshops.
Honestly, if they aren't 100% quality and cheaper than $20 don't bother, just order from Brownells. In fact I'd say cheaper than $15; and that's for brand new.
Second, what to buy and what to avoid.
Let's piss some people off shall we?
For aluminum commercial mags, Brownells mags are excellent; and are available straight from Brownells with an upgraded follower, spring and baseplate for $2-$6 extra. They are both the best value in commercial magazines, and the best quality. I recommend them over all other commercial magazines.
Bushmasters all metal mags are good, but avoid the ones with the plastic baseplates (they are reliable, but can't be rebuilt).
HK mags are also excellent, and actually worth a couple extra bucks, but not the $40+ that they charge for them (remember "HK, because you suck, and we hate you"). In that same vein, Colt commercial mags are good, but they try to charge a large premium for them just because of the name, and they aren't worth it.
C-products mags are generally very good, and they are the only manufacturer I know who sells new mag bodies only, in bulk, to the general public (convenient if you want to use your own spring, baseplate, and follower). They're also VERY reasonably priced.
Cammenga makes a new "speedloader" type magazine, that actually splits apart (the front of the mag slides down), to let you rapidly load them. Reports on them are good so far; but they're only a couple years old and havent seen much hard use yet. I'd be worried about fine dust and the like jamming them up... but for a range mag it seems like a great idea.
The Beta C-mag from Betaco is a heck of a beast. It's the only reliable drum magazine for the AR (and most other 5.56 rifles, and the M14 and others by the by) on the market, and it's great fun... but I don't know that I'd trust my life to one exclusively. Also, REALLY expensive.
That said, I do have one, and I love it. If you can afford one, it's the perfect companion for a heavy barreled AR on a bipod. You can just sit their and pick targets off all day long.
Aluminum USGI mags... a mixed bunch to be honest. First of all, frauds abound. Second, honestly, some of them just aren't that great, even though they are "mil spec".
Also it is VERY IMPORTANT to remember that a lot of the USGI magazines that end up on the commercial market are there because they were rejected by the Gov't (it's illegal to sell rejected USGI mags, but it happens all the time anyway). They may be generally good with a small flaw, or they may be unreliable POSes.
I have never seen Brownells USGI mags for sale commercially, but as I said, they are the best.
Sabre are excellent (their commercial and gov't contract mags are the same).
Bushmaster USGI mags are excellent (better than their commercial).
FN mags are generally good, but their springs are iffy on their USGI mags. I personally have seen failures in their springs, baseplates tabs, and feed lips to a higher extent than other manufacturers; but anecdote != data.
Colt mil-spec mags, if real, are excellent, as are Okay industries/OK, Universal Industries, Simmonds Precision, Knights armament, and original Armalite. They should be, they are all from the same manufacturer (OK). Again though, watch out because frauds are everywhere (usually made in Taiwan or Singapore).
LaBelle mags are excellent, in fact probably the best older USGI mags (Brownells and HK are the best commercial, and better than LaBelle by a small amount). DPMS labeled mags are from LaBelle, as are newer Armalite, Knights, Stoner, Smith and Wesson, General Stamping, Eagle Arms (not Eagle or American Eagle) and some others.
If your AR is from a reputable manufacturer other than Bushmaster, FN, Colt, or Sabre (who all make their own) and it came with an own brand stamped magazine; it's probably a LaBelle... or rather NOW a "General Stamping" as they bought LaBelle some years ago; though I believe they continue to use BOTH imprints.
Adventure Arms, Adventure Line, Center Industries and Parsons, are all also the same manufacturer, and pretty good.
Take this as you will, but as of today, there are only three certified providers of contract USGI AR magazines, Brownells, Center Industries, and OK industries.
Everybody elses aluminum mags , I'd stay away from.
Sanchez mags are not very good. Cooper mags are horrible.
Remember, all legitimate USGI mags, and U.S. commercial mags will have the manufacturer clearly stamped on the baseplate; however with used mags, it's entirely likely the baseplate won't reflect the original manufacturer of the other components, as things get mixed around with cleanign etc...
The Singapore and UK steel mags are excellent if you don't mind the weight, but the lips can gall and bind on steel ammo. Other then c-products, I haven't seen any good commercial steel mags.
For polymer mags, Magpuls pmags are excellent. Thermold and Orlite mags are also very good. In any polymer mag though (even new ones), be very careful about cracks and warping.
The REAL israeli milspec polymer (Orlite, but may not be labled as such) and milspec metal mags are very good, but fakes are everywhere. Same thing for the South African mags.
USA mags, Triple K mags, Promags, National, Eagle, American Eagle, (but not Eagle Arms) and American Magazine are all horrible.
Any magazine with a finish other than than phosphated (parkerized), teflon coated, or epoxy coated, should be avoided as well; as no matter what the markings are, they are either cheap foreign made crap, refinished by god knows who concealing god knows what problems, or a fake.
For ANY of the above magazine, commercial or USGI, I'd change the followers to magpul followers. They're about $2 a piece. You can also buy Brownells mags with them installed already, and of course all magpul mags have them. Oh and HK has a direct ripoff of the magpul follower that they refused to license (they do that sort of thing).
What about used, or mag kits?
You can pick up mags with perfectly good bodies but with the older black follower design very cheap, as people read "green follower" on the net, and all of a sudden black follower mags are anathema. Well, the green follower isn't very good either, and for $2 you can change the follower to magpul, and get a real bargain in the process.
All USGI mag springs prior to the late 80s are suspect. I change them out for Wolff and Brownells springs as a matter of course. I would also recommend replacing the springs and followers of any used magazines you by as a matter of course (you just don't know where they've been so to speak).
Magpul and Brownells both sell rebuild kits that include a new spring and follower for around $5. Baseplates are cheap. If you can get a deal on good USGI, or good qaulity commercial (you'll have to look for proofmarks) mag bodies, you might want to consider it.
What to look for (and hopefully not find).
When you're evaluating a mag, the first place to look is the feed lips. They should be free of ripples, dings, gouges, nicks or burrs, and they should be even and smooth.
The feed lips are the second most common failure point on the AR mags behind the springs. A bad spring is fixable though; if you have bad feedlips, you've got a bad mag.
Then look at the base plate and see if it's secure. Are the body tabs good, does the plate move without too much binding, but not so loosely that it will vibrate out? Does the base plate bend and stay bent (bad. The mag is either old and abused, or a forgery. The plate should spring back)? Is there any discoloration, cracks, or burrs in the tabs, and do the tabs bend easily under finger pressure (they shouldn't)?
Use something to depress the follower as far as it will go. Make sure you're pressing down in the center as you push, and check to make sure it doesn't bind excessively (a very little bit is normal), or tilt excessively (again a little bit is normal).
Check the entire body for dings or gouges. Even if the finish is worn off it could be a good mag, so long as the body is sound.
Check the welds. They should be clean, neat, and evenly spaced. There should be a minimum of 4 of them front and back, and as many as 7 (different manufacturers at different times, have used different numbers of welds). Some earlier (or cheaper made) USGI and commercial magazines only had 3 welds and should be avoided. Current Milspec is 6 welds, front and back.
Try to twist the top and base of the mag in different directions; you shouldn't be able to or at least not to any significant degree. If you can, the welds are bad, the aluminum sheet is too thin, the aluminum alloy used is wrong, or it hasn't been properly heat treated (or possibly not at all).
Remember, AR mags are essentially disposable.
Excepting HK (remember, HK because you suck and we hate you) and the Beta-C mag, they sell for $10 to $20, and a slight structural defect is not worth trying to fix or work around.
If you start thinking of them as something other than disposable, you'll be tempted to keep them when they malfunction.
The HK mags are a special case here, in that HK may charge more for them, but they really take the disposable aspect seriously. HK mags are designed to be absolutely reliable, for 100 reloads. After that, HK doesn't care; and they have done their metallurgy to reflect this. They are known to develop feeding problems with extended use because of spring wear, and mag lip deformation.
AR mags always have been designed to be disposable, and you should treat them as such. You can replace springs and followers, but once the feed lips or the baseplate tabs go wonky, they cannot be recovered. You MAY use them as a range mag, but I just crushem or use them as targets.
Most "unreliable" ARs (from reputable manufacturers anyway) are just fine; they're just using bad mags (and usually bad ammo too. Cheap out on one thing, they're probably cheaping out on another).
It's very cathartic packing a bad magazine full of reactive explosives and blowing it up. Just stay at least 50 yards away, those aluminum bits can fly pretty far.
Oh and just on a note of personal preference, may I suggest 20 round mags over 30 rounders. I personally think they work better in general, and they're a lot easier to deal with at the range,
prone, on the bench etc... I prefer the straight bodied ones myself.
For more, and more detailed info, check out Troys Mag FAQ.
Somehow I never managed to get around to talking much about magazines; except to note they are the single biggest point of failure for the AR platform, and the first thing to consider when things go wrong.
Well they ARE. I harp on it for a reason.
Somehow though I never managed to talk about what magazines to buy, or not to buy, and how to pick'em.
Well, a friend of mine was heading to the gunshow this past weekend, and he asked for advice on mags; so I wrote this up for him, and I thought I'd share it with the rest of you.
Ok, let's break it down.
First things first, don't buy mags at the gun show (or at the gun shop for that matter), unless they're a spectacular bargain... or a reasonable price, but new in the plastic with the original manufacturers imprint on them, and/or in a sealed crate with a trademark you can read.
I don't trust mags bought at gunshows very much, and unfortunately most gunshops are only one step above that... after all most of the guys selling dodgy, mismarked, clearly fraudulent crap mags at gunshows, are gunshops.
Honestly, if they aren't 100% quality and cheaper than $20 don't bother, just order from Brownells. In fact I'd say cheaper than $15; and that's for brand new.
Second, what to buy and what to avoid.
Let's piss some people off shall we?
For aluminum commercial mags, Brownells mags are excellent; and are available straight from Brownells with an upgraded follower, spring and baseplate for $2-$6 extra. They are both the best value in commercial magazines, and the best quality. I recommend them over all other commercial magazines.
Bushmasters all metal mags are good, but avoid the ones with the plastic baseplates (they are reliable, but can't be rebuilt).
HK mags are also excellent, and actually worth a couple extra bucks, but not the $40+ that they charge for them (remember "HK, because you suck, and we hate you"). In that same vein, Colt commercial mags are good, but they try to charge a large premium for them just because of the name, and they aren't worth it.
C-products mags are generally very good, and they are the only manufacturer I know who sells new mag bodies only, in bulk, to the general public (convenient if you want to use your own spring, baseplate, and follower). They're also VERY reasonably priced.
Cammenga makes a new "speedloader" type magazine, that actually splits apart (the front of the mag slides down), to let you rapidly load them. Reports on them are good so far; but they're only a couple years old and havent seen much hard use yet. I'd be worried about fine dust and the like jamming them up... but for a range mag it seems like a great idea.
The Beta C-mag from Betaco is a heck of a beast. It's the only reliable drum magazine for the AR (and most other 5.56 rifles, and the M14 and others by the by) on the market, and it's great fun... but I don't know that I'd trust my life to one exclusively. Also, REALLY expensive.
That said, I do have one, and I love it. If you can afford one, it's the perfect companion for a heavy barreled AR on a bipod. You can just sit their and pick targets off all day long.
Aluminum USGI mags... a mixed bunch to be honest. First of all, frauds abound. Second, honestly, some of them just aren't that great, even though they are "mil spec".
Also it is VERY IMPORTANT to remember that a lot of the USGI magazines that end up on the commercial market are there because they were rejected by the Gov't (it's illegal to sell rejected USGI mags, but it happens all the time anyway). They may be generally good with a small flaw, or they may be unreliable POSes.
I have never seen Brownells USGI mags for sale commercially, but as I said, they are the best.
Sabre are excellent (their commercial and gov't contract mags are the same).
Bushmaster USGI mags are excellent (better than their commercial).
FN mags are generally good, but their springs are iffy on their USGI mags. I personally have seen failures in their springs, baseplates tabs, and feed lips to a higher extent than other manufacturers; but anecdote != data.
Colt mil-spec mags, if real, are excellent, as are Okay industries/OK, Universal Industries, Simmonds Precision, Knights armament, and original Armalite. They should be, they are all from the same manufacturer (OK). Again though, watch out because frauds are everywhere (usually made in Taiwan or Singapore).
LaBelle mags are excellent, in fact probably the best older USGI mags (Brownells and HK are the best commercial, and better than LaBelle by a small amount). DPMS labeled mags are from LaBelle, as are newer Armalite, Knights, Stoner, Smith and Wesson, General Stamping, Eagle Arms (not Eagle or American Eagle) and some others.
If your AR is from a reputable manufacturer other than Bushmaster, FN, Colt, or Sabre (who all make their own) and it came with an own brand stamped magazine; it's probably a LaBelle... or rather NOW a "General Stamping" as they bought LaBelle some years ago; though I believe they continue to use BOTH imprints.
Adventure Arms, Adventure Line, Center Industries and Parsons, are all also the same manufacturer, and pretty good.
Take this as you will, but as of today, there are only three certified providers of contract USGI AR magazines, Brownells, Center Industries, and OK industries.
Everybody elses aluminum mags , I'd stay away from.
Sanchez mags are not very good. Cooper mags are horrible.
Remember, all legitimate USGI mags, and U.S. commercial mags will have the manufacturer clearly stamped on the baseplate; however with used mags, it's entirely likely the baseplate won't reflect the original manufacturer of the other components, as things get mixed around with cleanign etc...
The Singapore and UK steel mags are excellent if you don't mind the weight, but the lips can gall and bind on steel ammo. Other then c-products, I haven't seen any good commercial steel mags.
For polymer mags, Magpuls pmags are excellent. Thermold and Orlite mags are also very good. In any polymer mag though (even new ones), be very careful about cracks and warping.
The REAL israeli milspec polymer (Orlite, but may not be labled as such) and milspec metal mags are very good, but fakes are everywhere. Same thing for the South African mags.
USA mags, Triple K mags, Promags, National, Eagle, American Eagle, (but not Eagle Arms) and American Magazine are all horrible.
Any magazine with a finish other than than phosphated (parkerized), teflon coated, or epoxy coated, should be avoided as well; as no matter what the markings are, they are either cheap foreign made crap, refinished by god knows who concealing god knows what problems, or a fake.
For ANY of the above magazine, commercial or USGI, I'd change the followers to magpul followers. They're about $2 a piece. You can also buy Brownells mags with them installed already, and of course all magpul mags have them. Oh and HK has a direct ripoff of the magpul follower that they refused to license (they do that sort of thing).
What about used, or mag kits?
You can pick up mags with perfectly good bodies but with the older black follower design very cheap, as people read "green follower" on the net, and all of a sudden black follower mags are anathema. Well, the green follower isn't very good either, and for $2 you can change the follower to magpul, and get a real bargain in the process.
All USGI mag springs prior to the late 80s are suspect. I change them out for Wolff and Brownells springs as a matter of course. I would also recommend replacing the springs and followers of any used magazines you by as a matter of course (you just don't know where they've been so to speak).
Magpul and Brownells both sell rebuild kits that include a new spring and follower for around $5. Baseplates are cheap. If you can get a deal on good USGI, or good qaulity commercial (you'll have to look for proofmarks) mag bodies, you might want to consider it.
What to look for (and hopefully not find).
When you're evaluating a mag, the first place to look is the feed lips. They should be free of ripples, dings, gouges, nicks or burrs, and they should be even and smooth.
The feed lips are the second most common failure point on the AR mags behind the springs. A bad spring is fixable though; if you have bad feedlips, you've got a bad mag.
Then look at the base plate and see if it's secure. Are the body tabs good, does the plate move without too much binding, but not so loosely that it will vibrate out? Does the base plate bend and stay bent (bad. The mag is either old and abused, or a forgery. The plate should spring back)? Is there any discoloration, cracks, or burrs in the tabs, and do the tabs bend easily under finger pressure (they shouldn't)?
Use something to depress the follower as far as it will go. Make sure you're pressing down in the center as you push, and check to make sure it doesn't bind excessively (a very little bit is normal), or tilt excessively (again a little bit is normal).
Check the entire body for dings or gouges. Even if the finish is worn off it could be a good mag, so long as the body is sound.
Check the welds. They should be clean, neat, and evenly spaced. There should be a minimum of 4 of them front and back, and as many as 7 (different manufacturers at different times, have used different numbers of welds). Some earlier (or cheaper made) USGI and commercial magazines only had 3 welds and should be avoided. Current Milspec is 6 welds, front and back.
Try to twist the top and base of the mag in different directions; you shouldn't be able to or at least not to any significant degree. If you can, the welds are bad, the aluminum sheet is too thin, the aluminum alloy used is wrong, or it hasn't been properly heat treated (or possibly not at all).
Remember, AR mags are essentially disposable.
Excepting HK (remember, HK because you suck and we hate you) and the Beta-C mag, they sell for $10 to $20, and a slight structural defect is not worth trying to fix or work around.
If you start thinking of them as something other than disposable, you'll be tempted to keep them when they malfunction.
The HK mags are a special case here, in that HK may charge more for them, but they really take the disposable aspect seriously. HK mags are designed to be absolutely reliable, for 100 reloads. After that, HK doesn't care; and they have done their metallurgy to reflect this. They are known to develop feeding problems with extended use because of spring wear, and mag lip deformation.
AR mags always have been designed to be disposable, and you should treat them as such. You can replace springs and followers, but once the feed lips or the baseplate tabs go wonky, they cannot be recovered. You MAY use them as a range mag, but I just crushem or use them as targets.
Most "unreliable" ARs (from reputable manufacturers anyway) are just fine; they're just using bad mags (and usually bad ammo too. Cheap out on one thing, they're probably cheaping out on another).
It's very cathartic packing a bad magazine full of reactive explosives and blowing it up. Just stay at least 50 yards away, those aluminum bits can fly pretty far.
Oh and just on a note of personal preference, may I suggest 20 round mags over 30 rounders. I personally think they work better in general, and they're a lot easier to deal with at the range,
prone, on the bench etc... I prefer the straight bodied ones myself.
For more, and more detailed info, check out Troys Mag FAQ.
A Little Busy Today...
The data piece is going to have to wait a few hours. In the mean time, I've got a short piece on AR mags.
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