"The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
China and Russia both are big time into state-sponsored computer/network infiltration. In a country like China, it wouldn't be surprising at all that the government would co-opt companies - especially anti-virus companies - to make them help the Chinese government open back doors, exfiltrate data, etc.
The very last piece of software I would ever install on my own computers would be a Chinese or Russian anti-virus package. Sure, it may finger other viruses, but it might also allow free access to the "right" people.
I know this sounds somewhat like tinfoil hat territory, but the SANS organization is frequently publishing articles about state-sponsored hacking/attacks. Why give them an easy pass? A perfect easy pass to use your system in electronic warfare against any country - especially the USA? It is at least something to be aware of and to consider.
Rising Star antivirus? Who's star is rising? China's? And by what means?
But as you load the server with more than just telling everyone where everyone else is and such, you now make the server have to be more powerful and maybe even exotic to be able to be simultaneously monitoring every player's environment, making decisions, checking for cheating, etc.
It's a distraction. Google is now as evil as they come - Chinese censorship, logging people's searches, identifying people by their searches, invasive street-level photography, invasive satellite photos, you name it.
But they are. They are the ones that handed over their employee records and calling histories to the Bush administration with nary so much as a warrant. Same for Verizon.
Qwest did not. They said get a warrant and the Bush administration dropped the request. Looks like hunting terrorists wasn't that important for the Bush admin, doesn't it.
I'll never pay AT&T or Verizon another cent. AT&T was my ISP and Verizon was my cell company. I dropped them both and went to Qwest for all services.
About those stupid answers - they just might be on purpose for the person who obviously is not making an honest effort to find something out on their own.
Frequently question/answer boards and forums light up with questions around finals/semester project/term paper times. It gets really old and it's unfair to those who actually do their own research instead of leeching off the good will of others to the detriment of their classmates.
That is frequently why a lot of people will give bogus answers - to catch the freeloaders.
Maybe at your data center. Maybe I shouldn't have said most data centers. And we aren't running underdesigned systems. We are running the fastest and biggest we can get. For modelling and simulation work, the loads are high and pretty continuous.
I've seen a number of posts about how smart it would be to use laptop components in servers. I disagree.
Most server farms are running at full speed 24 hours a day. They don't throttle back and would not spend much if any time at a low-power idle.
There are job scheduling programs where if servers aren't doing real-time stuff, they are backfilling with other jobs. Stuff gets queued up for literally weeks. It has been my experience that users demand more cycles -- not that the systems sit there idle just heating air. The systems run full speed as long as they are up. You can't idle down drives either - both for reliability (will it spin back up?), data latency, and just the fact that a data center is pretty much constantly riding a disk farm and if anything, you would want even more bandwidth than you already have.
Having them go to a low-power state when idle would really only benefit when we take the machines for software upgrades and such and we already try to minimize that time as much as possible. The bigger benefits will come from making everything as efficient as possible - i.e. power supplies, processors (and yes - even having those cut out parts that aren't being used when not used), cooling, etc.
Laptops like to idle between keystrokes and when data on drives isn't being accessed. Those stuations are really not seen in data centers.
It actually does not force the AC to work overtime. You are merely blowing hot air into the next rack to cool it - which it does less effectively. The parts in the second rack just run hotter. Overall, the AC actually will ultimately carry the same load. Your boxes will just overheat. The heat load on the room is just the power you supply to your boxes. They are, in effect, nothing but space heaters.
Data centers recirculate the same air generally because it is cheaper in the building design, more reliable, etc. Plus the AC has to control the humidity as well - not easy to do if you are consatantly changing your source air supply, its temperature, and its humidity.
As to rack cooling, you also have to watch out for eddy flows around the ends of rack rows and over the tops as well. If the room is not well designed, end racks in a row will run hot due to air short circuiting and just rolling around from bact to front again. Over the top is bad too and a reason high ceilings help.
It's actually very common to have one box get elected to do any number of things - serve files, whatever. If it goes down for some reason, another takes over that function. It's redundancy and failover for reliability.
"Why can I sit here and type this on a laptop that is faster than a top-of-the-line 1U rack from 1 year ago, and yet data centers are still loaded with power-sucking 3 year old machines by the thousands?"
Uh... Cost? How much would thousands of your laptop cost to replace them every year to keep up with the latest technology?
Like most computer buyers, you get on that treadmill when you have to. At first you have the fastest machine on the block (depending on your price range), but then as it gets older, newer equipment is faster and costs less. But only fools spend money like crazy to stay on the crest of that curve.
Plus it costs a bundle to rip out thousands of computers, possibly rewire to meet new power desity requirements, and then bring in the new boxes, bring up the new system, run acceptance tests, reconfigure software so old code runs on the new boxes (changes in OS happen too you know), retrain for maintenance, and then finally put the new boxes into production.
There are huge costs in the machine, infrastructure, down time, etc. That's why. You need to have a system up long enough to get useful work out of it before you chase the next innovation.
DC/AC conversion? The bigger data centers can't use batteries - too many, too big of a hazard, etc. They use rotational UPS's. These stay AC all the way.
Additionally - power distribution is better at higher voltages. It's that current squared thing. More and more equipment is also going to higher voltage distribution on the boards with local DC/DC conversion at the load. For the exact same reason. Our center distributes at 208 volts.
The argument against a raised floor is bogus. That acts (and is necessary) not only for cabling, but also for air distribution. Heated air rises. Feeding cold air up from the floor to where it flows into the racks to be heated and then recovered at the ceiling is the most efficient way for air. The fact that the floor is not insulated is a non-issue. The whole room is being cooled. The temperature is the same on either side of the floor tiles.
And about the face to face and back to back layout of racks - every single one of our racks is already in that orientation for exactly that reason. We have hot aisles and cold aisles and the temperature difference between them is pretty marked.
The next wave is a move back to "water" cooling. Either plumbing liquid to each rack where in the rack it locally grabs heat from circulated air within the rack, or plumbing into the boxes themselves. This is simply because heat loads are going up and it gets harder (and louder) to pump enough air through a building to cool the more dense newer equipment. Plus people don't have to put on jackets to go out on the floor or yell to be heard in a big data center.
You know, what happened to the scientist that just did their research and made their contribution to society without all the ego self-masturbation, self promotion, self-written bios that basically compare themselves to God? I understand that a certain amount of self promotion is sometimes necessary when forming companies, etc. But these guys take it to levels that would make Lord Farquar jealous.
This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos.
Slashdot Mirror
"The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
0 .html
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21994224-2,0
I just post it...
China and Russia both are big time into state-sponsored computer/network infiltration. In a country like China, it wouldn't be surprising at all that the government would co-opt companies - especially anti-virus companies - to make them help the Chinese government open back doors, exfiltrate data, etc.
The very last piece of software I would ever install on my own computers would be a Chinese or Russian anti-virus package. Sure, it may finger other viruses, but it might also allow free access to the "right" people.
I know this sounds somewhat like tinfoil hat territory, but the SANS organization is frequently publishing articles about state-sponsored hacking/attacks. Why give them an easy pass? A perfect easy pass to use your system in electronic warfare against any country - especially the USA? It is at least something to be aware of and to consider.
Rising Star antivirus? Who's star is rising? China's? And by what means?
But as you load the server with more than just telling everyone where everyone else is and such, you now make the server have to be more powerful and maybe even exotic to be able to be simultaneously monitoring every player's environment, making decisions, checking for cheating, etc.
It's a distraction. Google is now as evil as they come - Chinese censorship, logging people's searches, identifying people by their searches, invasive street-level photography, invasive satellite photos, you name it.
Goggle has gone dark.
Dang - use preview! I meant customer records - not employee. Sigh.
But they are. They are the ones that handed over their employee records and calling histories to the Bush administration with nary so much as a warrant. Same for Verizon.
Qwest did not. They said get a warrant and the Bush administration dropped the request. Looks like hunting terrorists wasn't that important for the Bush admin, doesn't it.
I'll never pay AT&T or Verizon another cent. AT&T was my ISP and Verizon was my cell company. I dropped them both and went to Qwest for all services.
If so, then we need to get Charlton Heston to yell how Vivoleum Green is People!
"George W. Bush is the best president the U.S. has ever had."
(sigh)
George, aren't you supposed to be "idiotified" again by Vladimir Putin here in a few minutes? What are you doing posting on Slashdot?
About those stupid answers - they just might be on purpose for the person who obviously is not making an honest effort to find something out on their own.
Frequently question/answer boards and forums light up with questions around finals/semester project/term paper times. It gets really old and it's unfair to those who actually do their own research instead of leeching off the good will of others to the detriment of their classmates.
That is frequently why a lot of people will give bogus answers - to catch the freeloaders.
I thought that the newsgroups had pretty much deteriorated into porn images and a way to download all the spam and trojans you ever wanted...
Maybe at your data center. Maybe I shouldn't have said most data centers. And we aren't running underdesigned systems. We are running the fastest and biggest we can get. For modelling and simulation work, the loads are high and pretty continuous.
I've seen a number of posts about how smart it would be to use laptop components in servers. I disagree.
Most server farms are running at full speed 24 hours a day. They don't throttle back and would not spend much if any time at a low-power idle.
There are job scheduling programs where if servers aren't doing real-time stuff, they are backfilling with other jobs. Stuff gets queued up for literally weeks. It has been my experience that users demand more cycles -- not that the systems sit there idle just heating air. The systems run full speed as long as they are up. You can't idle down drives either - both for reliability (will it spin back up?), data latency, and just the fact that a data center is pretty much constantly riding a disk farm and if anything, you would want even more bandwidth than you already have.
Having them go to a low-power state when idle would really only benefit when we take the machines for software upgrades and such and we already try to minimize that time as much as possible. The bigger benefits will come from making everything as efficient as possible - i.e. power supplies, processors (and yes - even having those cut out parts that aren't being used when not used), cooling, etc.
Laptops like to idle between keystrokes and when data on drives isn't being accessed. Those stuations are really not seen in data centers.
It actually does not force the AC to work overtime. You are merely blowing hot air into the next rack to cool it - which it does less effectively. The parts in the second rack just run hotter. Overall, the AC actually will ultimately carry the same load. Your boxes will just overheat. The heat load on the room is just the power you supply to your boxes. They are, in effect, nothing but space heaters.
Data centers recirculate the same air generally because it is cheaper in the building design, more reliable, etc. Plus the AC has to control the humidity as well - not easy to do if you are consatantly changing your source air supply, its temperature, and its humidity.
As to rack cooling, you also have to watch out for eddy flows around the ends of rack rows and over the tops as well. If the room is not well designed, end racks in a row will run hot due to air short circuiting and just rolling around from bact to front again. Over the top is bad too and a reason high ceilings help.
It's actually very common to have one box get elected to do any number of things - serve files, whatever. If it goes down for some reason, another takes over that function. It's redundancy and failover for reliability.
"Why can I sit here and type this on a laptop that is faster than a top-of-the-line 1U rack from 1 year ago, and yet data centers are still loaded with power-sucking 3 year old machines by the thousands?" Uh... Cost? How much would thousands of your laptop cost to replace them every year to keep up with the latest technology?
Like most computer buyers, you get on that treadmill when you have to. At first you have the fastest machine on the block (depending on your price range), but then as it gets older, newer equipment is faster and costs less. But only fools spend money like crazy to stay on the crest of that curve.
Plus it costs a bundle to rip out thousands of computers, possibly rewire to meet new power desity requirements, and then bring in the new boxes, bring up the new system, run acceptance tests, reconfigure software so old code runs on the new boxes (changes in OS happen too you know), retrain for maintenance, and then finally put the new boxes into production.
There are huge costs in the machine, infrastructure, down time, etc. That's why. You need to have a system up long enough to get useful work out of it before you chase the next innovation.
Lots of errors in your suppositions.
DC/AC conversion? The bigger data centers can't use batteries - too many, too big of a hazard, etc. They use rotational UPS's. These stay AC all the way.
Additionally - power distribution is better at higher voltages. It's that current squared thing. More and more equipment is also going to higher voltage distribution on the boards with local DC/DC conversion at the load. For the exact same reason. Our center distributes at 208 volts.
The argument against a raised floor is bogus. That acts (and is necessary) not only for cabling, but also for air distribution. Heated air rises. Feeding cold air up from the floor to where it flows into the racks to be heated and then recovered at the ceiling is the most efficient way for air. The fact that the floor is not insulated is a non-issue. The whole room is being cooled. The temperature is the same on either side of the floor tiles.
And about the face to face and back to back layout of racks - every single one of our racks is already in that orientation for exactly that reason. We have hot aisles and cold aisles and the temperature difference between them is pretty marked.
The next wave is a move back to "water" cooling. Either plumbing liquid to each rack where in the rack it locally grabs heat from circulated air within the rack, or plumbing into the boxes themselves. This is simply because heat loads are going up and it gets harder (and louder) to pump enough air through a building to cool the more dense newer equipment. Plus people don't have to put on jackets to go out on the floor or yell to be heard in a big data center.
The GPS functionality is used to augment location by cell tower in case of 911 calls.
The unwashed masses have Paris Hilton, we geeks have the iPhone...
I'm willing to bet a lot of slashdotters will have both... in the virtual sense that is.
Kleenex!
Uh, the keymap is nothing but software...
This is taking things too far. A vague law banning photography without a permit? No real definition of professional vs. amateur?
Is NYC run by total morons?
I guess that's one city I can take off the list of places to visit.
You know, what happened to the scientist that just did their research and made their contribution to society without all the ego self-masturbation, self promotion, self-written bios that basically compare themselves to God? I understand that a certain amount of self promotion is sometimes necessary when forming companies, etc. But these guys take it to levels that would make Lord Farquar jealous.
You have to be talking about Stephen Wolfram.
OK, Craig Venter is humble compared to that moron. Smart - but still a moron.
But did your professor/teacher tell you how much of an egocentric ass Craig Venter is?
This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos.
Only needs a TRS-80 to do his simulation -- and even with that, they have to screw up the dictionary and logic packages.