Doesn't beer yeast produce a lot of the B-complex vitamins? Yes, technically yeast is an animal, but I'll bet a lot of vegetarians would drop their objections, especially after a few tasty homebrews.
I always disliked the fact that they almost always walk down these corridors as if subject to exactly 1g. I hate the "we invented artificial gravity" crutch they always use. Unless they have some large space station rotating to simulate 1g at the perimeter, artificial gravity should be banned from scifi. Of course, that just means no more scifi, since it's pretty expensive to film on a movie on a vomit comet. So forget my idea.
Except that you really don't have many useful way points where you can just hang things out there in space, and although your idea would allow a massive mission to be lofted with less than a single massive rocket, the end result would still be a very expensive mission.
Although Lagrange points like L4 and L5 could theoretically be used as way points to hold supplies for a passing ship, my guess is that the most convenient trajectory taken by a Mars mission wouldn't pass through them. Furthermore, you would need to accelerate the drone supply ship from earth at 18k+mph, then decelerate it at the Lagrange point without the benefit of using a gravity well. Not too difficult for a small probe, but fuel-hungry for a supply-laden vessel. Then, to collect your supplies you are going to have to either decelerate your human ship, dock, collect supplies, and re-accelerate, or accelerate your drone to match the human ships' speed, or a combination of both. Lots of burned fuel. IMHO, way points are out.
Deploying drone supply ships into Mars orbit for rendezvous there might make sense though. A return trip based on the lunar orbit rendezvous model of the Apollo missions might make sense, but you'd have to keep in mind that sending 1 or 2 ships massive and well-stocked enough for return flight over to Mars and in s stable orbit for what might be a 5 or more year mission would be no easy (or cheap) feat.
a) Terraform Mars into an earth-like planet with warm, wet conditions.
b) Plant poa pratensis in a small rectangular area.
c) Yell at martian kids to get off your lawn.
Having been raised Catholic, I can safely say that the last group of people to trust on matters relating to sex is a group of men who purposely (try to) avoid it. It's like getting advice about conversational English from someone who has never spoken a word of it.
The analogy is even more flawed than that. The Puritans that landed in what became Massachusetts may have planned on staying, but the Mayflower and her crew sure as hell were counting on a round trip. The furs you mention were a vital part of the ROI the ship's owner(s) were counting on to make the trip worthwhile. Without the round trip, I doubt it would have ever happened.
Understood. It's sort of like having a farm of cheap 1u servers instead of a large SMP box, which actually makes more sense in a lot of applications.
That being said, they are focusing on the up-front cost of their own box, while offerings they are getting from the major vendors likely (I can't tell for sure; they don't give a breakdown) include some level of software licensing plus some level of service agreement.
I'm guessing that the sheer number of these things and the likelihood of failure (which even they acknowledge), coupled with the lack of easy serviceability features will result in higher maintenance time and cost. Also, massive redundancy of lots of spinning disks will drive their power/cooling costs higher than it would be otherwise. In the end, I don't think the price advantage will be nearly as great as the article implies.
I certainly don't fault them for doing this. I just think it is disingenuous to compare $1 or $2 million enterprise hardware/firmware/software to the box they built, because the two are not directly comparable except in raw TB storage. They essentially built their own Sun 4550 server, without many of the the redundancy and serviceability features, for less money.
Sorry for responding to my own post here, yes, I know, bad form and all that.
Holy crap! I glanced briefly at the architecture diagram, saw two power supplies, and assumed that they were there for redundancy. Nope! One supplies the MB, boot disk, some disks & fans. The second powers more disks & fans.
Folks, there is no way in hell this box is anywhere near being an enterprise-class storage box. I am sure that for their purposes, this works fine, and they are happy with it. Heck, I'd love to have one of these, and I don't even come close to needing one. But the comparisons to NetApp, EMC, and others are apples to oranges. Yes, you can build an off-the shelf system more cheaply than you can buy one retail at the same capacity. Yes, you could stack lots of these to achieve redundancy, but in the end, these things just aren't engineered like a branded box.
It would have been nice if they had designed them more for serviceability. No hot swap power supplies (even relatively small storage arrays have had that for years) or disks. Sure, they save on engineering and hardware costs, but it's going to cost them in downtime.
If you DIY, you have yourself to rely on not just for the break/fix stuff, but for the testing of compatibility issues. What happens if a couple years from now, a controller card goes bad, and the updated firmware on the replacement card they buy from Newegg causes an unexpected problem? Say what you want about cost, but the OEMs typically have a lab full of people and stuff that check this stuff exhaustively and publish compatibility matrices. If you as a DIY guy can vet out 99.9% of potential problems in your homebrewed storage, and the OEM can give a 99.99% assurance, that may be a relatively small difference in terms of absolute percentage, but it is a large amount of business exposure. Since downtime = -$, there is incentive to pay big bucks to avoid it.
Also, there is political risk. If your homebrewed storage node fails, you own the stink. If it has an EMC badge on it, the stink belongs to someone else.
A drive or storage node failure in any enterprise storage environment shouldn't result in "your data is still gone and your business is down the drain", because you're doing backups, right?
Don't get me wrong; I love what they've done. But there's a reason major systems vendors charge (and get) the money they do.
As evidence of that, I submit that dozens of companies like the one in this article have existed over the years, and only a handful of them still exist. Those that still do have either exited the storage array business, or have evolved their offerings into something that costs a lot more to build and support than a pile of disks.
Or they have been bought by one of the bigger storage companies.
Lock up one network admin, and you can get another to do his job. Lock up every dick on slashdot, and email will be downgraded to pony express within a week.
On the other hand, the signal-to-noise ratio would get a lot better around here.
None of the above. CO2 contributes to global warming by agitating liberals to a constant state of excitation, and their increased energy is thrown off as heat. If they don't calm down soon, the ice caps might begin to melt, swamping low-lying countries and drying the Amazon.
This is exacerbated by conservatives who generate copious amounts of hot air and CO2 trying to deny climate change.
But the biggest threat isn't CO2, it's methane, and right now the bullshit from both sides is generating methane so fast, we're pretty much screwed even if we stopped generating CO2 today.
Slashdot Mirror
but I am pretty sure they're able to be dissatisfied with living their entire lives in an overcrowded box doing nothing but gaining weight.
Funny ... that's pretty much what lots of people do without much complaint. Maybe if we gave the animals TV and Xbox ...
Doesn't beer yeast produce a lot of the B-complex vitamins? Yes, technically yeast is an animal, but I'll bet a lot of vegetarians would drop their objections, especially after a few tasty homebrews.
Was Mohammed Atta a sovereign nation? Because he's the type this is aimed at.
I always disliked the fact that they almost always walk down these corridors as if subject to exactly 1g. I hate the "we invented artificial gravity" crutch they always use. Unless they have some large space station rotating to simulate 1g at the perimeter, artificial gravity should be banned from scifi. Of course, that just means no more scifi, since it's pretty expensive to film on a movie on a vomit comet. So forget my idea.
Except that you really don't have many useful way points where you can just hang things out there in space, and although your idea would allow a massive mission to be lofted with less than a single massive rocket, the end result would still be a very expensive mission.
Although Lagrange points like L4 and L5 could theoretically be used as way points to hold supplies for a passing ship, my guess is that the most convenient trajectory taken by a Mars mission wouldn't pass through them. Furthermore, you would need to accelerate the drone supply ship from earth at 18k+mph, then decelerate it at the Lagrange point without the benefit of using a gravity well. Not too difficult for a small probe, but fuel-hungry for a supply-laden vessel. Then, to collect your supplies you are going to have to either decelerate your human ship, dock, collect supplies, and re-accelerate, or accelerate your drone to match the human ships' speed, or a combination of both. Lots of burned fuel. IMHO, way points are out.
Deploying drone supply ships into Mars orbit for rendezvous there might make sense though. A return trip based on the lunar orbit rendezvous model of the Apollo missions might make sense, but you'd have to keep in mind that sending 1 or 2 ships massive and well-stocked enough for return flight over to Mars and in s stable orbit for what might be a 5 or more year mission would be no easy (or cheap) feat.
a) Terraform Mars into an earth-like planet with warm, wet conditions.
b) Plant poa pratensis in a small rectangular area.
c) Yell at martian kids to get off your lawn.
Having been raised Catholic, I can safely say that the last group of people to trust on matters relating to sex is a group of men who purposely (try to) avoid it. It's like getting advice about conversational English from someone who has never spoken a word of it.
The analogy is even more flawed than that. The Puritans that landed in what became Massachusetts may have planned on staying, but the Mayflower and her crew sure as hell were counting on a round trip. The furs you mention were a vital part of the ROI the ship's owner(s) were counting on to make the trip worthwhile. Without the round trip, I doubt it would have ever happened.
Is there a Cheney corollary to Godwin's Law?
Let it go, dude.
Firing lasers and rocks ... simultaneously fighting with hardware from the 21st century AD and BC.
This whole idea is a pipe dream unless it is really MS saying the all other countries should be bullied into adopting the US patent system.
I'm pretty sure that's what MS has in mind.
I'm trying to figure out what "Get the f**k outta here" sounds like in a Chinese accent.
No way this thing is going worldwide without China's okay, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Understood. It's sort of like having a farm of cheap 1u servers instead of a large SMP box, which actually makes more sense in a lot of applications.
That being said, they are focusing on the up-front cost of their own box, while offerings they are getting from the major vendors likely (I can't tell for sure; they don't give a breakdown) include some level of software licensing plus some level of service agreement.
I'm guessing that the sheer number of these things and the likelihood of failure (which even they acknowledge), coupled with the lack of easy serviceability features will result in higher maintenance time and cost. Also, massive redundancy of lots of spinning disks will drive their power/cooling costs higher than it would be otherwise. In the end, I don't think the price advantage will be nearly as great as the article implies.
I certainly don't fault them for doing this. I just think it is disingenuous to compare $1 or $2 million enterprise hardware/firmware/software to the box they built, because the two are not directly comparable except in raw TB storage. They essentially built their own Sun 4550 server, without many of the the redundancy and serviceability features, for less money.
Sorry for responding to my own post here, yes, I know, bad form and all that.
Holy crap! I glanced briefly at the architecture diagram, saw two power supplies, and assumed that they were there for redundancy. Nope! One supplies the MB, boot disk, some disks & fans. The second powers more disks & fans.
Folks, there is no way in hell this box is anywhere near being an enterprise-class storage box. I am sure that for their purposes, this works fine, and they are happy with it. Heck, I'd love to have one of these, and I don't even come close to needing one. But the comparisons to NetApp, EMC, and others are apples to oranges. Yes, you can build an off-the shelf system more cheaply than you can buy one retail at the same capacity. Yes, you could stack lots of these to achieve redundancy, but in the end, these things just aren't engineered like a branded box.
It would have been nice if they had designed them more for serviceability. No hot swap power supplies (even relatively small storage arrays have had that for years) or disks. Sure, they save on engineering and hardware costs, but it's going to cost them in downtime.
If you DIY, you have yourself to rely on not just for the break/fix stuff, but for the testing of compatibility issues. What happens if a couple years from now, a controller card goes bad, and the updated firmware on the replacement card they buy from Newegg causes an unexpected problem? Say what you want about cost, but the OEMs typically have a lab full of people and stuff that check this stuff exhaustively and publish compatibility matrices. If you as a DIY guy can vet out 99.9% of potential problems in your homebrewed storage, and the OEM can give a 99.99% assurance, that may be a relatively small difference in terms of absolute percentage, but it is a large amount of business exposure. Since downtime = -$, there is incentive to pay big bucks to avoid it.
Also, there is political risk. If your homebrewed storage node fails, you own the stink. If it has an EMC badge on it, the stink belongs to someone else.
A drive or storage node failure in any enterprise storage environment shouldn't result in "your data is still gone and your business is down the drain", because you're doing backups, right?
Don't get me wrong; I love what they've done. But there's a reason major systems vendors charge (and get) the money they do.
"Sorry, I have to stay late tonight honey, ... I'm hard at work."
As evidence of that, I submit that dozens of companies like the one in this article have existed over the years, and only a handful of them still exist. Those that still do have either exited the storage array business, or have evolved their offerings into something that costs a lot more to build and support than a pile of disks.
Or they have been bought by one of the bigger storage companies.
Lock up one network admin, and you can get another to do his job. Lock up every dick on slashdot, and email will be downgraded to pony express within a week.
On the other hand, the signal-to-noise ratio would get a lot better around here.
It radiates back out into space, like most of the rest of the solar energy that makes its way into our bubble.
We love all new technology, but we love complaining more. We like to think of it as preemptive troubleshooting.
Yes he the did. What's the the problem?
Are you suggesting this is a new, secret Japanese whaling program? I can hardly wait to see the Sea Shepherds' response to this ...
None of the above. CO2 contributes to global warming by agitating liberals to a constant state of excitation, and their increased energy is thrown off as heat. If they don't calm down soon, the ice caps might begin to melt, swamping low-lying countries and drying the Amazon.
This is exacerbated by conservatives who generate copious amounts of hot air and CO2 trying to deny climate change.
But the biggest threat isn't CO2, it's methane, and right now the bullshit from both sides is generating methane so fast, we're pretty much screwed even if we stopped generating CO2 today.
[/humor]