I really dig the idea (and as such, will claim it as my own to my non-geeky friends) however, how feasible is it to get a ring made of *pure* Iridium? Its properties make it fairly difficult to work with so even if you manage to purchase a chunk of it I can't see you just showing up to a jeweler and asking them to make you a ring.. How did you plan on actually procuring/creating said ring?
Forget the optimus, what about a touch screen keyboard? Sure, there's no feedback (yet) but the user could change the input style at will, using it as a mouse/tablet/music mixing device etc.
Many of the miners working in Mount Isa do so in rotation and don't actually reside in the town. From what I hear, it's typical for someone to work for two weeks out at the mines and then take a week off, flying to nearby Townsville, Cairns or Mackay where the male to female ratios are normal and many miners actually have a wife and kids waiting for them.
I wonder if the 5:1 ratio is derived from the people in the town at any one time or people who are actually permanent residents and don't fly out on their weeks off. I would guess the former if the data is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics who derive this sort of information from who was in town on census night rather than something like electoral enrolment.
I run a similar setup for my home file server however, I found Linux md to be a more satisfying experience over cheap raid cards.
- Equal (if not superior) performance until you get to $400+ raid cards
- no worrying about weird bios', poor quality raid implementations and driver issues with cheap cards
- Painless to setup - many distros will create raids for you at install time, otherwise you can use mdadm after the fact (which allows for some advanced options and performance tuning too)
- More flexible - md is controller agnostic so if your controller dies, no scrambling to find the same controller or the same brand card, just plug it into another controller and you're up and running again. You can create a raid spanning controllers too.
- Partition level raids - an example of using a partition level raid is grabbing 3 x 250gb drives and 2 x 320gb drives. Partition off the first 70gb of the 320gb drives and set those up as a mirror for the OS. Then, get the remaining 250gb from those drives and setup a 5 disk (well, partition) raid5 array.
Did I mention mdadm sends me an email when a drive dies?;)
The only negative I should mention is I've had difficulties in the past with the initrd assigning md devices random numbers depending on the order they were detected at boot time which didn't match up with fstab. Yaird created a suitable initrd but I believe these problems have been sorted out now with newer versions.
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I really dig the idea (and as such, will claim it as my own to my non-geeky friends) however, how feasible is it to get a ring made of *pure* Iridium? Its properties make it fairly difficult to work with so even if you manage to purchase a chunk of it I can't see you just showing up to a jeweler and asking them to make you a ring.. How did you plan on actually procuring/creating said ring?
Forget the optimus, what about a touch screen keyboard? Sure, there's no feedback (yet) but the user could change the input style at will, using it as a mouse/tablet/music mixing device etc.
Many of the miners working in Mount Isa do so in rotation and don't actually reside in the town. From what I hear, it's typical for someone to work for two weeks out at the mines and then take a week off, flying to nearby Townsville, Cairns or Mackay where the male to female ratios are normal and many miners actually have a wife and kids waiting for them.
I wonder if the 5:1 ratio is derived from the people in the town at any one time or people who are actually permanent residents and don't fly out on their weeks off. I would guess the former if the data is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics who derive this sort of information from who was in town on census night rather than something like electoral enrolment.
I run a similar setup for my home file server however, I found Linux md to be a more satisfying experience over cheap raid cards.
- Equal (if not superior) performance until you get to $400+ raid cards
- no worrying about weird bios', poor quality raid implementations and driver issues with cheap cards
- Painless to setup - many distros will create raids for you at install time, otherwise you can use mdadm after the fact (which allows for some advanced options and performance tuning too)
- More flexible - md is controller agnostic so if your controller dies, no scrambling to find the same controller or the same brand card, just plug it into another controller and you're up and running again. You can create a raid spanning controllers too.
- Partition level raids - an example of using a partition level raid is grabbing 3 x 250gb drives and 2 x 320gb drives. Partition off the first 70gb of the 320gb drives and set those up as a mirror for the OS. Then, get the remaining 250gb from those drives and setup a 5 disk (well, partition) raid5 array.
Did I mention mdadm sends me an email when a drive dies? ;)
The only negative I should mention is I've had difficulties in the past with the initrd assigning md devices random numbers depending on the order they were detected at boot time which didn't match up with fstab. Yaird created a suitable initrd but I believe these problems have been sorted out now with newer versions.