Slashdot Mirror
New NASA Budget Woes
Abcd1234 writes "The last few months have seen NASA the focal point of high drama, the most obvious example being the controversy surrounding the next Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission. Well, the drama continues with NASA reporting to a Senate subcommitee that it currently faces a $2 billion budget shortfall which could result in the downsizing, delaying, or outright cancellation of a number of NASA missions, including the Space Interferometry Mission and Terrestrial Planet Finder, which may be delayed, and the James Webb Space Telescope, often cited as the successor to the HST, which faces potential cancellation. Among the reasons for the shortfall: cost overruns in a number of missions, including the shuttle return-to-flight program, resumption of the Hubble servicing mission, and mandated congressional expenditures (a.k.a 'pork')."
Your sig:
:)
Why doesn't Wikipedia have a Slashdot article? [wikipedia.org]
Wikipedia DOES have a slashdot entry.
don't believe me ?
see --> http://img212.echo.cx/img212/6633/slashdot8aj.png
Next time search properly before making your sig.
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
I'm pretty sure they're using gallium [wikipedia.org]. It melts at 85F, is nontoxic (unlike mercury), and is nonflammable (unlike rubidium, cesium, sodium, and potassium, the only other metals I know of that melt at reasonable temperatures for a graphics card). Gallium also has almost exactly 65 times the thermal conductivity of water.
--
NU MA NU MA IEI!
Please explain, that was a little cryptic.
I think the real surprise for me is that SW RAID is 95% as fast as HW RAID without the pricey board, not that SW RAID is slower.
Also, another surprise is that a SATA RAID (speed) performs about as well as a SCSI RAID. Whether SATA drives are as reliable is a different matter, but with the cost savings, it is easier to have more spare drives on hand.
From a system bus bandwidth perspective, it would seem that the chief difference between HW and SW RAID would be that SW RAID requires some more housekeeping bits, the biggest one being the data from the parity drive goes over the system bus for SW, but it stays local to the RAID controller for HW.
From a CPU perspective, for SW, the CPU would have to compute the XORs rather than offloading them to the dedicated hardware, which are compute cycles and pages that could be done for other tasks in a HW setup.
For me, the speed difference is kind of moot though. If I want RAID, it would be for the redundancy and spanning multiple drives, not speed. Also, I have systems with 64/66 PCI and a system with PCI-X, so that bus isn't an issue.
Look at a lot of the Anonymous Coward replies to this story. They have signatures, and all seem to be in response to something different, a cell phone story.
Wacky.