14Pb for 170k employees isn't so much - 83 gigabytes per person.
If you add up the total disk space in an average office you'll get more than that. If I add up all my external disks, etc. I've got more than a terabyte on my desktop.
You'd find a lot of the 83GB on a typical office PC is crap you're not going to put in a SAN, my boot drive without data has 50GB used and other than the pain in the arse of re-installing I couldn't give a toss if I lost all that "data". Yes I've got a TB of storage too but subtract p0rn, DVDs and other contents that would get me sacked if I worked in a corporate environment, subtract the large amount of reference material (that would be shared between users in a corporate environment) and all my original work for the past 10 years amounts to well under 10GB.
The data use has little use to do with the number of employees - it amounts to how much data you are getting from external sources whether they be a large number of customers or data acquisition (such as digital photographs). If you're talking text for example a fast typist is probably hitting something like 10 characters per second, a whopping 280K per working day, 70MB per working year, 3.5GB over their life.
You can set up a scheduled task to backup the MSDE databases to a directory and automatically purge old versions just like you would do with full-blown SQL/Server. This gives a bit of extra when on-site because if a consultant accidentally drops a table or the like as they have previous versions and potentially journalling to recover from. I now use SQL Express 2005 on my laptop and if you search for "Expressmaint" you'll find some free scripts to replace the automatic maintenance procedures missing from the Express versions of SQL/Server. I can't remember the name but there is an equivalent for the older MSDE versions. Use the Windows scheduler to start the job when the laptop is started each day and periodically throughout.
Assuming the consultants are in the head office occasionally on a LAN then use the free Microsoft Robocopy command-line utilitity to sync the database backup folder and other source code / documents to the server. This could be dropped into the network login script. If they are not in the office this step could also be performed via an Internet VPN connection obviously at a slower rate so maybe it is something they would do overnight at home. Put an additional backup in the script before it starts to get the very latest backup of the databases.
For the final step you need a way to check the users are actually running Robocopy to sync the documents. If you give each user a different directory on the server you can either manually or via a script check the last modification date on the folders. I've been doing things this way for a while and both SQL/Server backup and Robocopy and quite fast so it's not too bothersome.
The obvious market for water cooled CPU's is to achieve maximum performance. While quiet is good for the consumer sector in general do people really find HDD noise annoying enough at 7.5K rotational speeds to justify the extra cost and complexity? And surely those running 15K drives and hyper-fast CPUs for server and high-performance applications already have so much cooling in place that a little extra drive noise makes little difference.
The ineffiency comes from the steam exiting the system so most of the energy is released out the rear-end. In systems used for power generation the steam is fed back into the system and a variety of other techniques are used to avoid wasted heat so efficiency tends to me more in the 50-90% region. I assume for this application where maximum power output versus weight and size was the main goal it wasn't practical given the extra weight, complexity and cost that would add.
Exactly, and why the chip is sold as 2.66GHz not the 3.92GHz that the marketing department would prefer. Semiconductor manufacturers do a stellar job of testing and specifying things over the complete operating range of the device. Ignoring obvious differences in things like ambient temperature and power supply fluctuations when you overclock a device you risk a number of factors for reliability. Any temperature measurement is always taken at a single point and if another point on the surface of the silicon is hotter, for example because your application of heatsink compound was not so great or it contains higher speed switching and more dense circuitry in that area you always run the risk of frying things.
Not to mention there is a difference between running a game that might place peak demands on the CPU and allow it to cool versus compute-intensive applications where you might want to drive all cores at 100% over a long period. And they might be using a different section of the processor, and your CPU might be from a different batch, and...
Rather than having every key with an in-built display what would be more practical is leaving the alphanumeric keys as standard and just having the displays on the left block of special function keys and F1-F15. Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages I can't think of any reason re-programming the standard keys is useful and it must add stacks to the cost. I'd go for one at $200 odd if when I switched applications I could replace the function keys with alternative icons and alternative keystroke codes. No wonder the unit cost is so high though - they don't seem to be planning to manufacture many units so it seems to be aimed at people with a surplus of cash.
Any tips on how to win the prize?
Do experiments! Use Mathematica to do computer experiments
I'm not too much into theoretical computing but are there any practical reasons that such a small Turing machine would be of any practical purpose? Surely when such a simple machine is fabricated in hardware the transistor count of giving it any reasoable I/O and storage would outweight by far the benefits even in small embedded systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Or was permission to publish just a Grumble from the Grave?
You'd find a lot of the 83GB on a typical office PC is crap you're not going to put in a SAN, my boot drive without data has 50GB used and other than the pain in the arse of re-installing I couldn't give a toss if I lost all that "data". Yes I've got a TB of storage too but subtract p0rn, DVDs and other contents that would get me sacked if I worked in a corporate environment, subtract the large amount of reference material (that would be shared between users in a corporate environment) and all my original work for the past 10 years amounts to well under 10GB.
The data use has little use to do with the number of employees - it amounts to how much data you are getting from external sources whether they be a large number of customers or data acquisition (such as digital photographs). If you're talking text for example a fast typist is probably hitting something like 10 characters per second, a whopping 280K per working day, 70MB per working year, 3.5GB over their life.
You can set up a scheduled task to backup the MSDE databases to a directory and automatically purge old versions just like you would do with full-blown SQL/Server. This gives a bit of extra when on-site because if a consultant accidentally drops a table or the like as they have previous versions and potentially journalling to recover from. I now use SQL Express 2005 on my laptop and if you search for "Expressmaint" you'll find some free scripts to replace the automatic maintenance procedures missing from the Express versions of SQL/Server. I can't remember the name but there is an equivalent for the older MSDE versions. Use the Windows scheduler to start the job when the laptop is started each day and periodically throughout.
Assuming the consultants are in the head office occasionally on a LAN then use the free Microsoft Robocopy command-line utilitity to sync the database backup folder and other source code / documents to the server. This could be dropped into the network login script. If they are not in the office this step could also be performed via an Internet VPN connection obviously at a slower rate so maybe it is something they would do overnight at home. Put an additional backup in the script before it starts to get the very latest backup of the databases.
For the final step you need a way to check the users are actually running Robocopy to sync the documents. If you give each user a different directory on the server you can either manually or via a script check the last modification date on the folders. I've been doing things this way for a while and both SQL/Server backup and Robocopy and quite fast so it's not too bothersome.
The obvious market for water cooled CPU's is to achieve maximum performance. While quiet is good for the consumer sector in general do people really find HDD noise annoying enough at 7.5K rotational speeds to justify the extra cost and complexity? And surely those running 15K drives and hyper-fast CPUs for server and high-performance applications already have so much cooling in place that a little extra drive noise makes little difference.
But I'd put the wobbly boots down to being pissed.
The ineffiency comes from the steam exiting the system so most of the energy is released out the rear-end. In systems used for power generation the steam is fed back into the system and a variety of other techniques are used to avoid wasted heat so efficiency tends to me more in the 50-90% region. I assume for this application where maximum power output versus weight and size was the main goal it wasn't practical given the extra weight, complexity and cost that would add.
Exactly, and why the chip is sold as 2.66GHz not the 3.92GHz that the marketing department would prefer. Semiconductor manufacturers do a stellar job of testing and specifying things over the complete operating range of the device. Ignoring obvious differences in things like ambient temperature and power supply fluctuations when you overclock a device you risk a number of factors for reliability. Any temperature measurement is always taken at a single point and if another point on the surface of the silicon is hotter, for example because your application of heatsink compound was not so great or it contains higher speed switching and more dense circuitry in that area you always run the risk of frying things. Not to mention there is a difference between running a game that might place peak demands on the CPU and allow it to cool versus compute-intensive applications where you might want to drive all cores at 100% over a long period. And they might be using a different section of the processor, and your CPU might be from a different batch, and...
Rather than having every key with an in-built display what would be more practical is leaving the alphanumeric keys as standard and just having the displays on the left block of special function keys and F1-F15. Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages I can't think of any reason re-programming the standard keys is useful and it must add stacks to the cost. I'd go for one at $200 odd if when I switched applications I could replace the function keys with alternative icons and alternative keystroke codes. No wonder the unit cost is so high though - they don't seem to be planning to manufacture many units so it seems to be aimed at people with a surplus of cash.
Not to mention software sales:
Any tips on how to win the prize? Do experiments! Use Mathematica to do computer experiments
I'm not too much into theoretical computing but are there any practical reasons that such a small Turing machine would be of any practical purpose? Surely when such a simple machine is fabricated in hardware the transistor count of giving it any reasoable I/O and storage would outweight by far the benefits even in small embedded systems.