I am itching for the day of fast, inter-galaxy travel to strange habitable planets with vast oceans and crazy giant sea creatures. I just hope they can shoot HBO out there, can't miss the next season of Entourage.
They haven't hit a PB yet, which I'll say up front, and their cost is in line with other commercial storage vendors. But I will say that they are absolutely awesome to work with as far as performance and reliability goes. We installed our cluster about eight months ago. Initially we had a problem, which was tracked back to malformed NFS packets being sent to the network by the storage system the Isilon cluster was replacing. Once that was fixed, the system has been dead quiet. It's one piece of gear that I never worry about.
Last I heard, gaming was a multi-billion dollar industry. That leads me to believe that there are more people buying games than "geeks", and that the industry is not fueled by hardcore gamers trying to amuse each other at the expense of someone who doesn't fall into that category. I know plenty of people who are neither geeks or gamers who buy consoles and the like.
The submitter of this question seems to have confused the two, Cluster and the older replication. Cluster does not in any way rely on a master/slave setup. Think of Cluster as RAID for databases, where you can lose a node (or more, depending on your configuration) before you lose your db. The current drawbacks of cluster are that it is in-memory and doesn't support certain features, such as fulltext indexing. Replication isn't going to cause you to lose data either if your application is designed to handle a situation where the master server (which you kick your writes to) hits the bricks. Have the app go into a read only mode from your slave.
Neither option is really "beautiful", though Cluster has a lot of promise for the future, especially in 5.1.
My company is in a similar situation as the submitter of the question, though not with the same capacity requirements. Originally I was looking at traditional filers from the usual suspects, along with building out our own. For about $10k you can get something around 3.5TB of storage if you really scrape the bottom for the absolute best deal and are going to rely entirely on your own skills to make the software work. However our redundancy requirements were such that it really cut that capacity number down to about 1.6TB, far from enough to cover future growth for very long at our present rate.
At the same time I was looking at that gear from EMC and Sun. It's a step up in that they give you some expansion options, but a lot of what they are offering seems to come from a time when the idea of dealing with as many disks and nodes made possible now by cheap hardware seemed utterly improbable. Then a couple weeks back further research led to clustered storage companies, namely Isilon but also Ibrix and a few others. HP seems to be getting into this arena as well. This really looks like the future as far as creating highly scalable, huge capacity data storage systems go.
I guess it comes down to what you define as 'low budget' in your case. Does that mean $10k or $100k or $1000k? I know the MSRP on a baseline Isilon three node cluster (disk failure and node failure protection, pretty sweet) gets you a little over 4TB for $50k. Considering a bottom line NetApp runs the same a commercial clustered system rather than an old-school filer is probably the better way to go, and leasing gear is almost always an option. If however you are absolutely limited to $25k or less, you're basically screwed and looking at multi-RAID and filer replication of some sort, and a lot of late nights trying to figure out how to make it all work reliably.
Until then, however, customers will have to make a tough decision - purchase a new computer that is guaranteed to be made obsolete or wait two years for machines to be released and software to be natively working.
When was the last time you or I bought any computer which wasn't made "obsolete" in two years? If the author has this problem solved he should be sharing the solution with the rest of us. Of course I routinely use a G4 400 to this day, so obsolete is in the eye of the beerholder. I agree with the point that as things currently appear the move to Intel isn't the drastic, world-changing bomb a lot of people have written about. However I don't think this is some big blunder on their part either.
The author loses some credibility with me in regurgitating the initial announcement propaganda that the move was necessitated by IBM's inability to produce chips. We had a good idea at that moment it was a crock, and IBM confirmed it a couple weeks ago when they put the near-future roadmap for the PowerPC up for the world to see. This was pure economics, not performance or production problems.
This just seems to be another in a long line of articles declaring Apple to be making huge business and social mistakes. They survived incredibly lean times and are now on a boom. Three years from now the processors may be different but the core Apple experience will likely remain the same. Their strategic decisions can be off-putting, but Jobs and company have a specific vision and they'll stick to it until a market shift forces them into a change.
I believe what you are asking for would be made possibly by the per_child MPM in Apache2. It has been many months and one job since it was something I really cared about, but I know that it is still currently in a broken state, even in the new 2.1 branch.
Others will undoubtedly disagree with me but it sure feels like the Apache foundation has forgotten about the httpd and puts most of it's muscle behind the Java projects these days, and everyone else just sort of accepts Apache in all it's cruddy glory.
I thought about going the unlocked route, mostly to get a Z200 (hooray clamshell without stubby antenna) and dump my shitty 8265. However the burning hate caused by carrying a cell really won't let me justify spending a few hundred bucks on such a thing. There is such a big price difference between unlocked and carrier-discounted phones that it just ends up being cheaper to let the new carrier basically buy your new phone for you if you need to switch.
Maybe the only US-bound phone I'd consider buying unlocked to keep long term would be the Razr. At $700 though that isn't too likely to happen.
I remember one of the things said to have given away the HL2 going gold hoax a couple weeks back is that Gabe Newell doesn't make short, one line posts to web forums. Am I the only person who finds it funny that he has now apparently made a one line web forum announcement? I say apparently because the site be down, Cap'n.
They actually scored a TD? It must be another old Madden bug from the Genesis days cropping up. Even with the 'help trailing team' option turned off the AI would complete almost every pass and break off big runs until they were back to within 14 points.
That would get me so worked up I'd go to a total ball control game just to gain the satisfaction of winning 50-0 rather than 70-20.
As electric bicycles aren't exactly what China needs at the moment, seeing as they need, you know, electricity. Most of China's electrical power is generated from coal in factories which have pollution controls making the U.S. coal factories look impeccably clean. Along with this the Chinese are becoming just as car crazy as us wacky Americans only once again to fuel their 8% annual economic increase they have instituted almost zero pollution control laws. Those shiny cars they drive may look modern but most are 20+ years behind when it comes to emissions; just take a look at the haze over Shanghai, it's like Los Angeles circa 1990. At their current rate China will overtake the U.S. as the World's leading emitter of greenhouse gases in a relatively short amount of time.
So like I said, not exactly leading the green revolution.
I would have to argue that the smog problem in LA is actually improving; the brownish cloud and air quality seems much better now than it did ten years ago. This is likely due to the vast improvements in emissions made over the past fifteen years rather than gasoline additives but things are getting better regardless.
Of course I still hate ethanol in gas but simply for the fact it makes my cars run like shit. Here in MN our state government is big on the ethanol.
This would be more accurate if Intel and AMD were stuck in the 32-bit world, but with Itanium and more affordably Opteron, it's not really a valid argument anymore. Unless you're needing more than 8-way (in this case we're looking at a single CPU model), then the non-Sun options are looking mighty fine and can be much more cost effective. I have never been in an academic or business environment where someone wasn't always jonesing for a faster machine.
NAT and CIDR have been two rather nice side effects of the small IPv4 address space. I see all these people commenting on how it is a problem that they can't give their toaster and "personal massager" a publicly accessible address; yet myself and many other friends are perfectly content with leaving anything but a server behind NAT simply because it's a fairly decent and cheap security measure. The only reason I want IPv6 to go live is so that everyone shuts up about the problems with IPv4.
The doom & gloom of an exhausted IPv4 address space has been touted every three months for as long as I can remember. Yet all these years later we don't really seem to be any closer to that happening; maybe if we increase the frequency of reporting the address space will actually increase in size, sort of like Superman turning back time by changing the Earth's rotation.
I'd say the submitter hasn't checked out the latest from Shuttle, the SB61G2, which by comparison will blow this Iwill machine to pieces. The Iwill box uses the dated 845 chipset while the new Shuttle not only has more expansion options it also uses the 865 chipset. Check out some reviews and you'll see it can keep up with even the most powerful full size desktops.
So very typical. Elected officials are never willing to say no to any proposed project, they wouldn't want to lose a potential vote, so everything gets approved and the bills have all kinds of unrelated riders to drive the cost up even further. How do we solve the money issue? Golly, let's tax people even more! I pay state incoming tax, federal income tax, sales tax, gas tax, license tab tax, social security, and really tax on just about everything. The only thing a local or federal government hasn't instituted is a tax on tax.
If we're going to have a sales tax then we should have no state income taxes. If we're going to have a federal income tax there should be no additional social security charge.
People have let the government become a crutch and in the long run this does more harm than good. It's like a crappy parent who sends their kid off with someone they don't know very well who ends up beating the shit out of their child. Sure that person will probably get what is coming to them but then the question also gets asked of the parents, "What the hell were you thinking to begin with?"
I dispise the garbage which goes on just outside of public view in corporations, and the consolidation and crushing of creativity they inevitably lead to, but I think they will be the driving factor in space as time goes on. It's certainly not an original idea and is slowly starting to happen (see shooting average people into space for cash). Only they can make it affordable and cost effective though.
Whereas the US Government will tack on all kinds of crap and forces the taxpayer to pony up for it whether they like it or not, corps have to answer to money hungry shareholders who will demand it be cheap and fast and cost efficient. It's basically a trade between paying for pork to being subjected to more advertising and corporate greed, but at least you can ignore advertising.
You're going to watch these commercials and you're going to like it! If you don't you'll be getting no desert. Also, we will cancel your cable subscription and take you to court and make it a law that you are required to enjoy advertising.
The extinction of the Admin is management's wet dream. At my previous job, an ISP with other little crazy bits, the CEO and his underlings all regarded the small technical staff as economic blackholes and had nothing but utter disdain for us. However we were reminded on a daily basis just how indispensible we were when even ridiculously stupid "problems" would arise and suddenly these geniuses couldn't generate one collective IQ point. Of course right after the situation is resolved it's right back to being in the crosshairs.
Anyone who deals with other companies that manage their own mail or web service probably has had similar experiences as myself, in that if they don't have someone who really knows a thing about them (which is most companies) then they tend to hose up stuff on a pretty regular basis and come running for an admin; and typically these are those dreaded systems with lots of pointing and clicking and at least in comparison to UNIX verbose explanations.
Managers and marketing dorks can tout the death of the admin all they want, but it's pretty unlikely we'll be going away anytime soon.
As in from the time long ago when men were manly and women were June Cleaver. That's just not going to work for me. I agree that you need to talk to them & ask questions just like they're one of your best friends, but your motives for doing so are quite gross.
From what you've said, it seems the only reason to be nice to a woman is on the outside chance she'll make your bed in the morning and let you see her bits once in awhile. That's a pretty messed up way of thinking. If I want a slave, I'll go hang out at the local S&M places.
As for your idea that she shouldn't be a geek, and probably shouldn't be involved in computers, that would present problems for me. Sure I don't live & breathe the things, but it sure would be nice to be able to sit around somewhere and be able to talk like a total nerdy luser and not have to explain everything.
Your theory might work in 1960, but it's not going to work most of the time these days, thank Bob.
I think it was an Entertainment Weekly interview with Duchovny where he said he was leaving, and that he though Carter was going to kill the series after this season.
Infact, in EW's fall show preview issue coverage of the X-Files, they confirm this is the last season and Mulder and Scully will do something they've never done before.
Slashdot Mirror
I am itching for the day of fast, inter-galaxy travel to strange habitable planets with vast oceans and crazy giant sea creatures. I just hope they can shoot HBO out there, can't miss the next season of Entourage.
They haven't hit a PB yet, which I'll say up front, and their cost is in line with other commercial storage vendors. But I will say that they are absolutely awesome to work with as far as performance and reliability goes. We installed our cluster about eight months ago. Initially we had a problem, which was tracked back to malformed NFS packets being sent to the network by the storage system the Isilon cluster was replacing. Once that was fixed, the system has been dead quiet. It's one piece of gear that I never worry about.
Last I heard, gaming was a multi-billion dollar industry. That leads me to believe that there are more people buying games than "geeks", and that the industry is not fueled by hardcore gamers trying to amuse each other at the expense of someone who doesn't fall into that category. I know plenty of people who are neither geeks or gamers who buy consoles and the like.
The submitter of this question seems to have confused the two, Cluster and the older replication. Cluster does not in any way rely on a master/slave setup. Think of Cluster as RAID for databases, where you can lose a node (or more, depending on your configuration) before you lose your db. The current drawbacks of cluster are that it is in-memory and doesn't support certain features, such as fulltext indexing. Replication isn't going to cause you to lose data either if your application is designed to handle a situation where the master server (which you kick your writes to) hits the bricks. Have the app go into a read only mode from your slave.
Neither option is really "beautiful", though Cluster has a lot of promise for the future, especially in 5.1.
My company is in a similar situation as the submitter of the question, though not with the same capacity requirements. Originally I was looking at traditional filers from the usual suspects, along with building out our own. For about $10k you can get something around 3.5TB of storage if you really scrape the bottom for the absolute best deal and are going to rely entirely on your own skills to make the software work. However our redundancy requirements were such that it really cut that capacity number down to about 1.6TB, far from enough to cover future growth for very long at our present rate.
At the same time I was looking at that gear from EMC and Sun. It's a step up in that they give you some expansion options, but a lot of what they are offering seems to come from a time when the idea of dealing with as many disks and nodes made possible now by cheap hardware seemed utterly improbable. Then a couple weeks back further research led to clustered storage companies, namely Isilon but also Ibrix and a few others. HP seems to be getting into this arena as well. This really looks like the future as far as creating highly scalable, huge capacity data storage systems go.
I guess it comes down to what you define as 'low budget' in your case. Does that mean $10k or $100k or $1000k? I know the MSRP on a baseline Isilon three node cluster (disk failure and node failure protection, pretty sweet) gets you a little over 4TB for $50k. Considering a bottom line NetApp runs the same a commercial clustered system rather than an old-school filer is probably the better way to go, and leasing gear is almost always an option. If however you are absolutely limited to $25k or less, you're basically screwed and looking at multi-RAID and filer replication of some sort, and a lot of late nights trying to figure out how to make it all work reliably.
From the article:
Until then, however, customers will have to make a tough decision - purchase a new computer that is guaranteed to be made obsolete or wait two years for machines to be released and software to be natively working.
When was the last time you or I bought any computer which wasn't made "obsolete" in two years? If the author has this problem solved he should be sharing the solution with the rest of us. Of course I routinely use a G4 400 to this day, so obsolete is in the eye of the beerholder. I agree with the point that as things currently appear the move to Intel isn't the drastic, world-changing bomb a lot of people have written about. However I don't think this is some big blunder on their part either.
The author loses some credibility with me in regurgitating the initial announcement propaganda that the move was necessitated by IBM's inability to produce chips. We had a good idea at that moment it was a crock, and IBM confirmed it a couple weeks ago when they put the near-future roadmap for the PowerPC up for the world to see. This was pure economics, not performance or production problems.
This just seems to be another in a long line of articles declaring Apple to be making huge business and social mistakes. They survived incredibly lean times and are now on a boom. Three years from now the processors may be different but the core Apple experience will likely remain the same. Their strategic decisions can be off-putting, but Jobs and company have a specific vision and they'll stick to it until a market shift forces them into a change.
I believe what you are asking for would be made possibly by the per_child MPM in Apache2. It has been many months and one job since it was something I really cared about, but I know that it is still currently in a broken state, even in the new 2.1 branch.
Others will undoubtedly disagree with me but it sure feels like the Apache foundation has forgotten about the httpd and puts most of it's muscle behind the Java projects these days, and everyone else just sort of accepts Apache in all it's cruddy glory.
I thought about going the unlocked route, mostly to get a Z200 (hooray clamshell without stubby antenna) and dump my shitty 8265. However the burning hate caused by carrying a cell really won't let me justify spending a few hundred bucks on such a thing. There is such a big price difference between unlocked and carrier-discounted phones that it just ends up being cheaper to let the new carrier basically buy your new phone for you if you need to switch.
Maybe the only US-bound phone I'd consider buying unlocked to keep long term would be the Razr. At $700 though that isn't too likely to happen.
I remember one of the things said to have given away the HL2 going gold hoax a couple weeks back is that Gabe Newell doesn't make short, one line posts to web forums. Am I the only person who finds it funny that he has now apparently made a one line web forum announcement? I say apparently because the site be down, Cap'n.
They actually scored a TD? It must be another old Madden bug from the Genesis days cropping up. Even with the 'help trailing team' option turned off the AI would complete almost every pass and break off big runs until they were back to within 14 points.
That would get me so worked up I'd go to a total ball control game just to gain the satisfaction of winning 50-0 rather than 70-20.
I wouldn't call it a laptop if it weighs 100lbs, unless it gets to sit on my lap while I'm in space.
This is 2004, who says I have to post from something so archaic as a computer?
As electric bicycles aren't exactly what China needs at the moment, seeing as they need, you know, electricity. Most of China's electrical power is generated from coal in factories which have pollution controls making the U.S. coal factories look impeccably clean. Along with this the Chinese are becoming just as car crazy as us wacky Americans only once again to fuel their 8% annual economic increase they have instituted almost zero pollution control laws. Those shiny cars they drive may look modern but most are 20+ years behind when it comes to emissions; just take a look at the haze over Shanghai, it's like Los Angeles circa 1990. At their current rate China will overtake the U.S. as the World's leading emitter of greenhouse gases in a relatively short amount of time.
So like I said, not exactly leading the green revolution.
I would have to argue that the smog problem in LA is actually improving; the brownish cloud and air quality seems much better now than it did ten years ago. This is likely due to the vast improvements in emissions made over the past fifteen years rather than gasoline additives but things are getting better regardless.
Of course I still hate ethanol in gas but simply for the fact it makes my cars run like shit. Here in MN our state government is big on the ethanol.
This would be more accurate if Intel and AMD were stuck in the 32-bit world, but with Itanium and more affordably Opteron, it's not really a valid argument anymore. Unless you're needing more than 8-way (in this case we're looking at a single CPU model), then the non-Sun options are looking mighty fine and can be much more cost effective. I have never been in an academic or business environment where someone wasn't always jonesing for a faster machine.
NAT and CIDR have been two rather nice side effects of the small IPv4 address space. I see all these people commenting on how it is a problem that they can't give their toaster and "personal massager" a publicly accessible address; yet myself and many other friends are perfectly content with leaving anything but a server behind NAT simply because it's a fairly decent and cheap security measure. The only reason I want IPv6 to go live is so that everyone shuts up about the problems with IPv4.
The doom & gloom of an exhausted IPv4 address space has been touted every three months for as long as I can remember. Yet all these years later we don't really seem to be any closer to that happening; maybe if we increase the frequency of reporting the address space will actually increase in size, sort of like Superman turning back time by changing the Earth's rotation.
I'd say the submitter hasn't checked out the latest from Shuttle, the SB61G2, which by comparison will blow this Iwill machine to pieces. The Iwill box uses the dated 845 chipset while the new Shuttle not only has more expansion options it also uses the 865 chipset. Check out some reviews and you'll see it can keep up with even the most powerful full size desktops.
So very typical. Elected officials are never willing to say no to any proposed project, they wouldn't want to lose a potential vote, so everything gets approved and the bills have all kinds of unrelated riders to drive the cost up even further. How do we solve the money issue? Golly, let's tax people even more! I pay state incoming tax, federal income tax, sales tax, gas tax, license tab tax, social security, and really tax on just about everything. The only thing a local or federal government hasn't instituted is a tax on tax.
If we're going to have a sales tax then we should have no state income taxes. If we're going to have a federal income tax there should be no additional social security charge.
People have let the government become a crutch and in the long run this does more harm than good. It's like a crappy parent who sends their kid off with someone they don't know very well who ends up beating the shit out of their child. Sure that person will probably get what is coming to them but then the question also gets asked of the parents, "What the hell were you thinking to begin with?"
I dispise the garbage which goes on just outside of public view in corporations, and the consolidation and crushing of creativity they inevitably lead to, but I think they will be the driving factor in space as time goes on. It's certainly not an original idea and is slowly starting to happen (see shooting average people into space for cash). Only they can make it affordable and cost effective though.
Whereas the US Government will tack on all kinds of crap and forces the taxpayer to pony up for it whether they like it or not, corps have to answer to money hungry shareholders who will demand it be cheap and fast and cost efficient. It's basically a trade between paying for pork to being subjected to more advertising and corporate greed, but at least you can ignore advertising.
You're going to watch these commercials and you're going to like it! If you don't you'll be getting no desert. Also, we will cancel your cable subscription and take you to court and make it a law that you are required to enjoy advertising.
The extinction of the Admin is management's wet dream. At my previous job, an ISP with other little crazy bits, the CEO and his underlings all regarded the small technical staff as economic blackholes and had nothing but utter disdain for us. However we were reminded on a daily basis just how indispensible we were when even ridiculously stupid "problems" would arise and suddenly these geniuses couldn't generate one collective IQ point. Of course right after the situation is resolved it's right back to being in the crosshairs.
Anyone who deals with other companies that manage their own mail or web service probably has had similar experiences as myself, in that if they don't have someone who really knows a thing about them (which is most companies) then they tend to hose up stuff on a pretty regular basis and come running for an admin; and typically these are those dreaded systems with lots of pointing and clicking and at least in comparison to UNIX verbose explanations.
Managers and marketing dorks can tout the death of the admin all they want, but it's pretty unlikely we'll be going away anytime soon.
I wasn't even aware Microsoft was gone!
As in from the time long ago when men were manly and women were June Cleaver. That's just not going to work for me. I agree that you need to talk to them & ask questions just like they're one of your best friends, but your motives for doing so are quite gross.
From what you've said, it seems the only reason to be nice to a woman is on the outside chance she'll make your bed in the morning and let you see her bits once in awhile. That's a pretty messed up way of thinking. If I want a slave, I'll go hang out at the local S&M places.
As for your idea that she shouldn't be a geek, and probably shouldn't be involved in computers, that would present problems for me. Sure I don't live & breathe the things, but it sure would be nice to be able to sit around somewhere and be able to talk like a total nerdy luser and not have to explain everything.
Your theory might work in 1960, but it's not going to work most of the time these days, thank Bob.
I think it was an Entertainment Weekly interview with Duchovny where he said he was leaving, and that he though Carter was going to kill the series after this season.
Infact, in EW's fall show preview issue coverage of the X-Files, they confirm this is the last season and Mulder and Scully will do something they've never done before.