Interesting trivia for the/. crowd: Armadillo Aerospace was founded by John Carmack, id Software programmer.
This is Slashdot...anyone in this 'crowd' who didn't know that Armadillo Aerospace was founded by JC (peace be upon him) needs to turn in their geek cred card for incineration.
The problem is that going from 15k drives to 20k drives means going from roughly 150 IOPS to 200 IOPS.
That's it.
SSDs are getting 20,000 IOPS, and some specialized SSD and RAM systems like FusionIO and Violin memory are getting 120,000 to 1,000,000 IOPS (these are not typos)
Sure, SSDs are expensive but spinning disks are beginning to look more and more like an evolutionary dead end, at least for IOPS.
This is because, while ethanol has a lower energy density per volume of fuel, it has a much higher octane rating and a higher synchromatic reatio (you can burn more fuel for a particular volume of air.)
I think the phrase you are looking for is stoichiometric ratio ("synchromatic" seems to be some sort of guitar)
They were also gonna go back and recapture that famous 1983 photo of Gates laying across the desk all sultry-like, but he broke a hip trying to strike his pose...
Don't worry, according to the task force for 10GBASE-T (IEEE 802.3an), cat6 can support 10Gbit up to 55m. The proposed cat6a will support it out to the usual 300m.
Not to be a cabling nazi but I think you meant 328 feet (100 meters equivalent) not 300 meters, right?
About a year ago I needed a lappie and was low on cash. I found an Acer 3680 "Best Buy special" for $400. This is a standard 15.4" screen-size laptop BUT they put a 14.1" in to save a bit of money. It's still 1280x800 and very readable. Other specs:
* About 6lbs.
That's the whole point right there. 6lb is a LOT more than 2lbs. 6lbs, you might just leave your messenger bag in the car sometimes because you just don't wanna sling it
TFA explicitly SAID that they have Ipods ON THE SHUTTLE, it's just that they must have the lithium battery removed and replaced with alkaline batteries.
Where the Ipods are NOT allowed is ON THE SPACE STATION, as the Ipod isn't certified on the space station yet.
So, to summarize for the reading impaired:
Ipod on shuttle = allowed Ipod on International Space Station = not allowed (currently)
You don't want to start arguing with your PocketPC about traffic and directions: No, I said Springfield, not Slingblade! *crash* It could be worse, much much worse: No, I said goats, not goatse! My eyes!
The first thing to do is reduce our impact on the planet: make technologies more efficient and our cities, transport systems and industrial processes less damaging to ecosystems. We rely on the web of life to sustain us: we need bees to pollinate, trees to make oxygen and worms to aerate the soil, or we would swiftly perish.
And after that? Do we mandate population controls? Do we nominate an arbitrary age at which people need to 'retire', as in the dystopian fictional vision of Logan's Run? Because populations will continue to grow, especially as child mortality falls and science finds ways of extending human lives. The logical thing to do is to expand beyond Earth: to build colonies on Mars, floating habitats in Earth's Lagrange orbits, mines on the Moon and the asteroids, and expand deeper into our Solar System.
So if I'm understanding correctly, his proposal is that after the Earth is 'full' at some optimal value x, any excess population is then shipped off into space?
Since the world population http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop has a net increase of about 2 or 3 people per second, or about 200000 people a day, he just needs to figure out how to build enough starships to ship 200000 people offworld every day.
SpaceX believes that $500 per pound to orbit is achieveable http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=10. Assuming each of those 200000 people weighs an average of 150 lbs (and ignoring things like, oh, I dunno, air, water, food, and habitable space), his proposal would be expending $15,000,000,000 per day, forever, to keep the population of Earth at some optimal number.
Now, I'm all for keeping an open mind about spreading humanity's risk of complete annhilation by spreading to other planets if possible, but to use the argument that this will solve Earth's putative population problem seems...flawed.
This is gonna be the next big thing in all kinds of PC's. Flash drives. We'll be able to say bye-bye to the last of the important moving parts in a PC, that happens to be the most defect prone (because of moving parts), and also the most important (assuming your data is worth more than your hardware). I've been wanting these for years for reliability reasons at work. I can't wait until these things get shoved in a vanilla IDE (or is it SATA these days?) format. Hard drives with platters will be completely extinct in 5 years.
BTW - does anyone make a wristwatch that syncs to a time source (cell net or whatever)?
There are so-called 'atomic' wristwatches, but they should be called 'radio-controlled' watches - they listen for a time-synchronization beacon from an atomic clock in Colorado and set themselves. The radio signal covers most of the US and Canada, and there are a few other time signal stations around the planet (although they may or may not work with specific watches)
Supposedly, TRUE atomic watches should be available once 'chip scale atomic clocks' become commoditized:
http://www.darpa.mil/mto/csac/
Those'll be neat - you'll never need to set your watch again.
I just left LA today (Friday), the conference ended yesterday (Thursday) and now I'm freaking stuck at O'Hare overnight because they cancelled outgoing flights due to weather...so I'll write up some of the interesting stuff I saw.
Most interesting comment - During Partner Day, Karthik Rau (the Vice President of Product Management) during his presention made a comment that 'Windows Vista may be the last OS of it's type', which drew a gasp from partners around me. Hyperbole? Well, we'll see.
Market Penetration - had some discussions with partners and pretty much everyone agreed that VMware will saturate the enterprise market in just a few years (5? 7?). The benefits are just too compelling esp for DR. Sure, not every workload is suitable for virtualization (maybe 20% of workloads out there are better left running physical) but that means that 80% of servers ARE suitable for virtualization. Anyone in an IT position should at least be looking a good look at this stuff if you don't know it already.
VMware ESX 3.0 - bigger and better. Lots of places with more info about ESX 3.0, but the HA and DRS are probably the key improvements (basically, machine automated VMotion). I guess the 4-way vSMP is cool too. And the support for NAS and iSCSI. And the improved snapshots. And so on...
Vmware Lab Manager - this is SLICK for dev/test/QA. Formerly known as Akimbi Slingshot before they were bought out by VMware, Lab Manager lets you suspend a set of machine states and store them all in a library, and you can pull them all out at the same time right on your network and the don't interfere with anything because they have a 'network fence' option which lets you keep all the network settings. All set up for self-service - no admin required (a developer can web-browse to the Lab Manager and grab machine sets themselves). Will probably use a ton of storage, but very neat.
VMware and Hardware Assist (Intel VT/AMD Pacifica) - the first generation of HW assist from either vendor doesn't help VMware much - VMware's Binary Translation (BT) method of capturing kernel calls is so heavily optimized that doing the same thing with VT/Pacifica will actually be slower. So VMware won't actually use VT/Pacifica much. (Hardware assist IS useful for Xen though)
However, the next round of hardware assist, which concentrates on optimizing virtualized memory performance, WILL be of benefit to VMware. Don't know when those chips will be out.
Oh, for the big night out (Wednesday) they closed off a big section of Universal Studio's Theme park for us. No lineups for rides! (Well, really short ones). Not every ride was available but heck it was fun esp. with all the alcohol.
Met lots of cool guys from all around the world there (Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and of course Americans and Canadians)...but sure wish there were more hot chicks (in my dreams!)
Not having been in LA before, the weather there is AWESOME. I wanna live there! Shame about the housing prices...
Now, if only my flight would finally come at 7 am.... Oh my aching back...
Actually, there are at least 3 writers who've written of futuristic 'post-scarcity' economies:
Iain M. Banks - any of the Culture novels Neal Stephenson - "The Diamond Age" Charles Stross - "Singularity Sky"
and those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty more.
Worth exploring, if you are interested in how some writers have handled the situation. And it makes for interesting storylines - because once you've taken 'struggle' out of life, what is there? Read and find out what some writers think.
Funnily enough, Oracle did this with the Oracle Appliance for 8i and 9i. They never made an Oracle 10g appliance. It was exactly as you outline above - it's a preconfigured software stack to run Oracle. Everything already set up in a basic form. Made life very easy when needing to test a DB agnostic app against Oracle.
Oracle have since removed reference to it from their site.
Any speculation as to why they stopped developing it? (or am I missing something?)
Re:A solution in search of a problem.
on
New Jet Engine Tested
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating.
I'm no rocket scientist but I thought scramjets actually want to maintain a steady speed RELATIVE to the air density (i.e. in thinner air, it has to move faster).
Sure, if it was going HORIZONTALLY it would optimally maintain the same speed, but wouldn't the decreasing air density as one moved up in the atmosphere naturally cause the scramjet to "want" to go faster?
Well, you could mod me down for this, but I think it would depend if it was a 'Turing test' of poker play vs tryng to build a system that can recognize tells/expressions.
If the game is completely online, then in terms of 'reading' players, the only available information is remembering what cards that people had - assuming that they were forced to display them.
A bot could have a perfect memory of a player's betting patterns in previous rounds and what their cards were, and could use this info in subsequent rounds - just like real players, except the bot would have a perfect analysis vs fuzzy human memory.
As well, managing hand-strength as the number of players decreases is something a computer may do better than a human.
I believe Limit Holdem is much more probability-based than No-Limit - I would assume that strong Limit Holdem bots would be designed first...
>Works great as long as you don't mind the fact >that your data could become corrupt at any time.
>Heck yeah!! Why would anyone mind their data >becoming corrupt at anytime?
I think he meant that using an old laptop drive suspected of damage is the source of potential corruption. I don't think there is anything inherently 'corrupting' due to the enclosure and associated electronics.
...Longhorn is going the way of Chicago and NT 5.0. Those, if you'll recall, were overly-hyped software releases
'Overly-hyped'?
I'm no Microsoft apologist but Chicago became Windows 95 which completely dominated the desktop, and NT 5.0 became Windows 2000, which is probably the most popular, stable server OS Microsoft ever made...both of these operating systems made a kajillion-bazillion dollars for Microsoft. That's not just hype.
Although I will concede that they took a long time to make it to market...
It wouldn't cost much to make them, they would probably imbed them right into the paper just like the faint blue and red threads in current bills. Or like the mylar strip in the larger denominations.
They're so cheap you could probably put dozens or hundreds of them into a single bill. Even if a few conk out, you just need one to respond.
On the other hand, if you had all these little RFID tags lying around...a few would fall out in your wallet, in your pants pockets, etc...I wonder what the implications are?
The "racks" look like commercial grade restaurant shelving, if you've used them in real life you would know they are really strong - they're usually rated at 500 lbs per shelf and can be attached to each other.
The shelves have a wire lip, so things don't slide off too easily.
Funny thing is I use the exact same shelving to hold MY computers!! Cheap, lots of places to run wires, you can ground the whole thing, you can even get it with wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting trivia for the /. crowd: Armadillo Aerospace was founded by John Carmack, id Software programmer.
This is Slashdot...anyone in this 'crowd' who didn't know that Armadillo Aerospace was founded by JC (peace be upon him) needs to turn in their geek cred card for incineration.
The problem is that going from 15k drives to 20k drives means going from roughly 150 IOPS to 200 IOPS.
That's it.
SSDs are getting 20,000 IOPS, and some specialized SSD and RAM systems like FusionIO and Violin memory are getting 120,000 to 1,000,000 IOPS (these are not typos)
Sure, SSDs are expensive but spinning disks are beginning to look more and more like an evolutionary dead end, at least for IOPS.
This is because, while ethanol has a lower energy density per volume of fuel, it has a much higher octane rating and a higher synchromatic reatio (you can burn more fuel for a particular volume of air.)
I think the phrase you are looking for is stoichiometric ratio ("synchromatic" seems to be some sort of guitar)
references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-fuel_ratio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoichiometric
My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
Not to be a cabling nazi but I think you meant 328 feet (100 meters equivalent) not 300 meters, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6_cable
That's the whole point right there. 6lb is a LOT more than 2lbs. 6lbs, you might just leave your messenger bag in the car sometimes because you just don't wanna sling it
2lbs, you'd barely notice it.
TFA explicitly SAID that they have Ipods ON THE SHUTTLE, it's just that they must have the lithium battery removed and replaced with alkaline batteries.
Where the Ipods are NOT allowed is ON THE SPACE STATION, as the Ipod isn't certified on the space station yet.
So, to summarize for the reading impaired:
Ipod on shuttle = allowed
Ipod on International Space Station = not allowed (currently)
The goggles do nothing!
So if I'm understanding correctly, his proposal is that after the Earth is 'full' at some optimal value x, any excess population is then shipped off into space?
Since the world population http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop has a net increase of about 2 or 3 people per second, or about 200000 people a day, he just needs to figure out how to build enough starships to ship 200000 people offworld every day.
SpaceX believes that $500 per pound to orbit is achieveable http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=10. Assuming each of those 200000 people weighs an average of 150 lbs (and ignoring things like, oh, I dunno, air, water, food, and habitable space), his proposal would be expending $15,000,000,000 per day, forever, to keep the population of Earth at some optimal number.
Now, I'm all for keeping an open mind about spreading humanity's risk of complete annhilation by spreading to other planets if possible, but to use the argument that this will solve Earth's putative population problem seems...flawed.
Touche!
Your wait should be over soon, as Samsung has already announced their solid state drives...perhaps you missed this article on Slashot: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/ 25/1324200
BTW - does anyone make a wristwatch that syncs to a time source (cell net or whatever)?
There are so-called 'atomic' wristwatches, but they should be called 'radio-controlled' watches - they listen for a time-synchronization beacon from an atomic clock in Colorado and set themselves. The radio signal covers most of the US and Canada, and there are a few other time signal stations around the planet (although they may or may not work with specific watches)
Supposedly, TRUE atomic watches should be available once 'chip scale atomic clocks' become commoditized: http://www.darpa.mil/mto/csac/ Those'll be neat - you'll never need to set your watch again.I just left LA today (Friday), the conference ended yesterday (Thursday) and now I'm freaking stuck at O'Hare overnight because they cancelled outgoing flights due to weather...so I'll write up some of the interesting stuff I saw.
Most interesting comment - During Partner Day, Karthik Rau (the Vice President of Product Management) during his presention made a comment that 'Windows Vista may be the last OS of it's type', which drew a gasp from partners around me. Hyperbole? Well, we'll see.
Market Penetration - had some discussions with partners and pretty much everyone agreed that VMware will saturate the enterprise market in just a few years (5? 7?). The benefits are just too compelling esp for DR. Sure, not every workload is suitable for virtualization (maybe 20% of workloads out there are better left running physical) but that means that 80% of servers ARE suitable for virtualization. Anyone in an IT position should at least be looking a good look at this stuff if you don't know it already.
VMware ESX 3.0 - bigger and better. Lots of places with more info about ESX 3.0, but the HA and DRS are probably the key improvements (basically, machine automated VMotion). I guess the 4-way vSMP is cool too. And the support for NAS and iSCSI. And the improved snapshots. And so on...
Vmware Lab Manager - this is SLICK for dev/test/QA. Formerly known as Akimbi Slingshot before they were bought out by VMware, Lab Manager lets you suspend a set of machine states and store them all in a library, and you can pull them all out at the same time right on your network and the don't interfere with anything because they have a 'network fence' option which lets you keep all the network settings. All set up for self-service - no admin required (a developer can web-browse to the Lab Manager and grab machine sets themselves). Will probably use a ton of storage, but very neat.
VMware and Hardware Assist (Intel VT/AMD Pacifica) - the first generation of HW assist from either vendor doesn't help VMware much - VMware's Binary Translation (BT) method of capturing kernel calls is so heavily optimized that doing the same thing with VT/Pacifica will actually be slower. So VMware won't actually use VT/Pacifica much. (Hardware assist IS useful for Xen though)
However, the next round of hardware assist, which concentrates on optimizing virtualized memory performance, WILL be of benefit to VMware. Don't know when those chips will be out.
Oh, for the big night out (Wednesday) they closed off a big section of Universal Studio's Theme park for us. No lineups for rides! (Well, really short ones). Not every ride was available but heck it was fun esp. with all the alcohol.
Met lots of cool guys from all around the world there (Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and of course Americans and Canadians)...but sure wish there were more hot chicks (in my dreams!)
Not having been in LA before, the weather there is AWESOME. I wanna live there! Shame about the housing prices...
Now, if only my flight would finally come at 7 am.... Oh my aching back...
Actually, there are at least 3 writers who've written of futuristic 'post-scarcity' economies:
Iain M. Banks - any of the Culture novels
Neal Stephenson - "The Diamond Age"
Charles Stross - "Singularity Sky"
and those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are plenty more.
Worth exploring, if you are interested in how some writers have handled the situation. And it makes for interesting storylines - because once you've taken 'struggle' out of life, what is there? Read and find out what some writers think.
MeepMeep
Funnily enough, Oracle did this with the Oracle Appliance for 8i and 9i. They never made an Oracle 10g appliance. It was exactly as you outline above - it's a preconfigured software stack to run Oracle. Everything already set up in a basic form. Made life very easy when needing to test a DB agnostic app against Oracle.
Oracle have since removed reference to it from their site.
Any speculation as to why they stopped developing it? (or am I missing something?)
Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating.
I'm no rocket scientist but I thought scramjets actually want to maintain a steady speed RELATIVE to the air density (i.e. in thinner air, it has to move faster).
Sure, if it was going HORIZONTALLY it would optimally maintain the same speed, but wouldn't the decreasing air density as one moved up in the atmosphere naturally cause the scramjet to "want" to go faster?
MeepMeep
Well, you could mod me down for this, but I think it would depend if it was a 'Turing test' of poker play vs tryng to build a system that can recognize tells/expressions.
If the game is completely online, then in terms of 'reading' players, the only available information is remembering what cards that people had - assuming that they were forced to display them.
A bot could have a perfect memory of a player's betting patterns in previous rounds and what their cards were, and could use this info in subsequent rounds - just like real players, except the bot would have a perfect analysis vs fuzzy human memory.
As well, managing hand-strength as the number of players decreases is something a computer may do better than a human.
I believe Limit Holdem is much more probability-based than No-Limit - I would assume that strong Limit Holdem bots would be designed first...
Just my two cents
MeepMeep
Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization.
Intel's Vanderpool Virtualization Technology should be coming soon - hopefully a significant step for virtualization support in the cpu itself.
By the way, here is a good series on how Vanderpool benefits virtualization:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21448
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21449
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21450
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21451
>Works great as long as you don't mind the fact >that your data could become corrupt at any time.
>Heck yeah!! Why would anyone mind their data >becoming corrupt at anytime?
I think he meant that using an old laptop drive suspected of damage is the source of potential corruption. I don't think there is anything inherently 'corrupting' due to the enclosure and associated electronics.
(Disclaimer - I do the same thing)
MeepMeep
...Longhorn is going the way of Chicago and NT 5.0. Those, if you'll recall, were overly-hyped software releases
'Overly-hyped'?
I'm no Microsoft apologist but Chicago became Windows 95 which completely dominated the desktop, and NT 5.0 became Windows 2000, which is probably the most popular, stable server OS Microsoft ever made...both of these operating systems made a kajillion-bazillion dollars for Microsoft. That's not just hype.
Although I will concede that they took a long time to make it to market...
MeepMeep
>But how do we protect ourselves when people with skills start writing malware?
Can you imagine what sort of virus Carmack could write?
The mind boggles.
> I don't know how durable it would be though?
It wouldn't cost much to make them, they would probably imbed them right into the paper just like the faint blue and red threads in current bills. Or like the mylar strip in the larger denominations.
They're so cheap you could probably put dozens or hundreds of them into a single bill. Even if a few conk out, you just need one to respond.
On the other hand, if you had all these little RFID tags lying around...a few would fall out in your wallet, in your pants pockets, etc...I wonder what the implications are?
I remember their sites being quite excellent. Bit of an 'Apple' feel, very clean and usable.
http://www.37signals.com
That's not your back muscle...more of a 'front' muscle...
The "racks" look like commercial grade restaurant shelving, if you've used them in real life you would know they are really strong - they're usually rated at 500 lbs per shelf and can be attached to each other.
The shelves have a wire lip, so things don't slide off too easily.
Funny thing is I use the exact same shelving to hold MY computers!! Cheap, lots of places to run wires, you can ground the whole thing, you can even get it with wheels.
MeepMeep