While I'm a big believer in the power of science the fact is the methods aren't uncorruptable or infallible. While I find the current "he said she said" state of the media despicable, it's at least refreshing to see results challenged.
There tends to be an assumption that most science is conducted by people who are only seeking the truth. The problem is that it's human nature to seek money and recognition. A scientist working at a university who studies things and concludes everything is going fine is much less likely to receive acclaim and/or additional funding than someone who shows evidence that the sky is falling.
We have put a lot of faith in science but we have to remember that scientists are people with all the limitations and weaknesses associated with that.
Lets not minimize the importance of what's being discussed here. Doctors make recommendations to patients based on medical studies. From this come great blunders like "cut out eggs to improve heart health" and "use margarine not butter to improve heart health" which have since been proven wrong. Theres lots of other examples of things doctors have accepted as true and handed out advice based on that have proven suspect or flat out false: "Sunscreen prevents skin cancer", "Obesity is the #2 killer in the US" etc.
Don't think that's so important? Statistically speaking, people surely died from this bad advice. The next time a doctor recommends you to do something, think about that. What if the advice they give turns you into one of those statistics because it is based on a flawed study.
It's too easy design a study to have a desired outcome. Doing a risk analysis on vaccines?... Do you study the impact on the rates of bipolar syndrome that occur 15-20 years later? Of course not, the drug company that makes the vaccine that's funding your study doesn't want to wait that long for data that can only be damaging, so you study what they want you to and, what a surprise.. there's barely any risk at all. Vaccines for everyone!
We need to apply the old Regan motto "Trust, but verify" to the results coming out of these medical journals. Assume they probably are right and follow up with more comprehensive studies. All new drugs should be extensively tracked as they are introduced to the population. You can't just do a 500 person trial and call a drug good for all time. Conversely, though, once you do a 500 person trial and it comes out good, you shouldn't necessarily keep a beneficial drug from the market. This two tier system of "unapproved" and "approved" simply doesn't make sense. There should be at least one more tier which is a probationary phase where it's generally available but it's impact on the general population is carefully monitored.
The good news is I see much more willingness among the medical community to criticize itself lately. Only through that process can real improvements be made that will end this era of physicians regularly, systematically doing their patients harm.
Any time you're going to be challenging the mental giants that are in charge, ALWAYS have a lawyer in your pocket and all your ducks in a row. And offsite backups.
I absolutely agree. Speak softly and carry a big stick.
This was a loud letter full of scarrey words for a CEO like "illegal" and "under explicit management direction" and it ends with "notifying the appropriate authorities". Hell, if I was a CEO and I got this letter, I'd freak out too.
DON'T EVER send a letter like this without already having talked to a lawyer and given the lawyer everything you'd need. The unfortunate fact is that police will raid the house of an employee in a heartbeat, take all your computers with evidence on them and hand them over to the criminal employer who can then accidentally delete all the evidence. There's no way in hell they'd be able to get to anything you've given your lawyer though.
Honestly.. I'd want to have already talked to the appropriate authorities before sending a letter as explosive as the one he sent.
Try expressing this opinion in your country and see how compliant with the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights they are:
I think the most powerful artistic testimants to the beauty of Gods creation and the miracle of life are pictures of naked children going about their lives like this one. They are beautfiful and society as a whole needs to be exposed to them more.
Call me from prison and let me know how it turned out.
Every country that I know of censors what people can express on their web sites and honestly, most people concider it to be a good thing. Replace "going about their lives" with "being molested" in the above statement and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who thinks it shouldnt be censored. The plain fact is that people have become accustomed to censorship. This singular argument has been enough to convince people that the concept of freedom of expression is flawed and that everything everywhere should be subject to censorship.
I personally believe that all censorship is evil and only serves to delay dealing with important issues. People who shield the issue from discussion are guilty of causing it to continue (i.e. people who vote for anti-child porn laws cause child molestation.) Most people don't seem to share that opinion though.
I've mentioned this before but i'll harp on it again.
Regardless of what the truth turns out to be, something desperately needs to be changed. Medicine, for a long time now, has been a fake science. They start with the conclusion they want and work from there. Medicine is full of monopolies, conflicts of interest, and hipocrocy. The prevailing mentality that ethical issues are only important for lesser beings is a great example of the view the medical community has of itself.
Don't believe me? Well.. then listen to the Doctors. Stop eating eggs, stop eating butter, use margerine instead and get all your booster shots. Of course that's the right thing to do. Doctors wouldn't be recommending that people do something that was BAD for them would they?
Trust your doctor, just don't trust the guy who's telling him what to say.
War is death. War is slaughter, but governments and militaries had an easy time convincing people that war was noble and patriotic and good. And easy time, that is, until those two bombs got dropped.
War was easy to paint as an epic struggle for what is or should be yours where soldiers die heroically for the cause. An aggressive leader had little to lose by attacking when they could clearly win. Offensive wars were fought in other people's countries, your population didn't care much. Men who went to war were heroes, soldiers battling for the benefit of the people at home and were easily recruited. The cycle of countries attacking because they could was getting faster and more deadly every decade. The use of nuclear weapons utterly shattered that cycle by shattering the image.
One could argue that it was the existence and threat of the bomb that caused this to happen. There will always be debate about that but just like it's easy for Pat Robinson to convince people to give him money, it's easy for a leader to convince his soldiers that there is no such thing as a nuclear weapon as long as there are no smoking holes in the ground that used to be a city. It would have had to be used eventually and if there was ever a more appropriate enemy to use it on, it would truly be a horrible, horrible thing.
Piercings and tatoos say something about a person. What they say varies, just like with any art, but many of them say "I'm angry and I make bad life choises." Those are the ones I'd avoid in IT.
Asuming everyone has a computer, playing a $50 game on a $300 console = $350. Playing a $50 game on a computer costs $50. The day where a faimily has one computer is rapidly coming to an end. The prices are down, networking is getting easy and dad doesn't want to put up with Jr's games and music clogging his harddrive. As long as you already have the computer, the cost is only the game. As computers plummet in price and the console increases, the console looks much less attractive.
Besides, now that us Nintendo kids have kids of our own, the console market is dead.
His point was that computers should be simple reliable things that you turn on and use then turn off. All of this crashing and being taken over and all that crap shouldn't happen. You don't have a corperate admin locking you out of your palm pilot do you?
Why should you be locked out of your Windows box unless Windows is just simply insecure.
People who get an H1 have to prove their education and ability to get one. H1B's are not DONATED by the USA government.
What's your point? That companies aren't using H1B's for unskilled labor? I haven't seen any myself but I've heard it happens.
I want to clarify: I'm not saying people who get H1B's shouldn't be allowed to work in the US. I'm saying they should be welcomed to come and stay here as long as they want and if they lose their job they should be allowed to stay and look for a new job. They should be granted much more rights than they are. I'm in favor of welcoming skilled people into our society, it can only help us.
H1B = Indentured Servitude. The program is pure evil. Corporate America loves it for the same reason everyone who has indentured servants loves them: cheep easy to control labor.
I'm not saying companies shouldn't be able to bring in useful talent from other countries. If someone has such unique talents important to our economy absolutely let them work here, however, those people should be welcome to stay as long as they like and work for whomever they like without having "Work harder for less or I'll deport you" hung over their heads.
Companies also use H1B to hire unskilled labor. That is simply wrong. Those people are ripe for all kinds of exploitation.
H1B is an abomination, an assault on everything that has made America great and it needs to go.
Charities are a lousy way to get things done and are often less than honorable causes. Most of them never solve the problem they are setup to help. If they did they'd go away and everyone working there would lose their job and whoever is running it would lose their power. Instead, they thrive on the perpetuation of the issue and do just enough to maintain the appearance of helping. They're just a black pit where people can throw their money to make themselves feel like they are doing some good.
You want your money to help needy people? Increase education spending. Smarter workers are more employable and start more businesses and create more jobs. Don't give the man a fish, teach him! Better yet, fix the system so everyone like him gets taught.
That said.. support the EFF! Defending freedom is honorable.
It's time to move the hard drives out of computers. We should create cheap fast easy to setup OS storage outside the computer so that we can remove those power & space hungry hard drives from the box. Bootable IP based block devices with small 'usb key' style local boot partitions seems like a reasonable way to make this happen. Linux is probably flexible enough to make this happen quickly but to work right network block devices should be fully integrated into the kernel. Windows might have more trouble.
Network block devices would allow the storage for many machines to be centralized and managed and it could be done in a much more cost effective and flexible way than SAN's allow. With gigabit ethernet, networks are now fast enough to make network based storage plenty fast for most applications and, with well designed centralized storage systems, they could be even faster than local storage.
i-scsi is promising but the cards are ridiculously expensive and you need a separate connection for storage and regular networking, something that won't be practical for widespread deployment to desktops, a place where network block devices would provide a huge benefit. A software mode i-scsi driver and the ability to bootstrap to the point where you could use it would probably cover things.
I'd like to see someone modify the Fedora installer to allow installation to network block device based root partitions using a bootable USB key as the/boot partition. I'd also like to see motherboard manufacturers integrating reasonably sized (128+ MB) permanently attached bootable USB keys onto motherboards.
Since the US government has proven repeatedly in the last 50 years that it cares nothing for the suffering of people in other nations
WTF are you talking about! We're constantly butting in to stop suffering. It pisses me off. Let them suffer, WTF Do I care. Give me my stupid tax dollars back so I can fuel my SUV!
In all seriousness, we get just as much crap about caring too much and intervening when it's not appropriate as we do about not doing enough so apparently we have the balance just about right.
He had oil, but wasn't able to sell any real amount of it
Define real? How much US cash did they find he had gathered? I believe it was around 900 million dollars in cash hidden in various walls and palaces. That's just what he had converted into US cash and hidden! Granted.. he didn't have as much as he could have had without sanctions, but that doesn't change the fact that he was a madman with a lot of money and a lot of power and the willingness to use both to do horrible things.
a logical way to make oil less valuable is to make vehicles that use 4 to 6 times less
Logically.. using 4 to 6 times less would reduce oil's value slightly, however, the US only uses 1/4 of the worlds oil supply and only half of that goes to cars. Even if all US cars stopped using oil instantly, 7/8ths of the world's oil demand would remain.
Also, using 4 to 6 times less fuel just isn't practical.
Commercial vehicle fuel use (tractor trailers for transport, electricians, plumbers, cable, phone, dump trucks, etc) accounts for a significant part of the US's fuel consumption. I couldn't find any statistics but I'd guess from the numbers I did see (and I looked at a lot) that it accounts for about 1/3rd of our consumption. (Please let me know if you can find hard stats.. I goggled for this for a long time.) You'll be hard pressed to find a lot of waste there. Companies save money wherever they can and gas costs money.
Even if we replaced every personal vehicle you could with a mini that got 55mpg you wouldn't cut fuel use anywhere near as much as you think. I drive a nice big SUV and it gets around 20 miles per gallon (19.6). Sure, there are behemoths that get 8 or 10 mpg but they are much more rare than you'd think. Used ones are selling real cheep now because nobody wants them unless they really need them, in which case a 55mpg tiny car simply isn't going to work. In fact, there's no way I personally could drive a mini, even if it was just for commuting. The headroom is about 1.5 inches lower than the lowest I fit in. It doesn't take a very big person to not fit in those stupid minis and they have horrible ground clearance. This low roofline and low ground clearance is a great way to make good fuel economy but it makes for an uncomfortable car that isn't very versatile (or safe for that matter.) In fact, there's barely a car made after 1990 that I fit in. Tightening fuel efficiency laws forced car's rooflines down to the point where I just can't use them.
Pretty much all the minivans would have to stay. People drive them because the need the room. Those usually get between 15 and 20 mpg. There aren't any 55mpg minivans. Once you look carefully at it, there is a very small percentage of people who are driving cars that are too big for them and they usually have too much money and would throw it into something stupid like a boat if they didn't get their Hummer. You think SUV's suck gas... take a look at motor boats!
If you really want to curb gas consumption, raise the gas tax $0.20/gallon. Use the money raised to build new roads that eliminate traffic jams and provide more efficient routes to where people need to go. That would work. Trying to guilt trip people into buying miniature cars isn't going to change a thing.
Take the example of going to your friends house to pick up something big that they are giving you. You have a Mini which is incapable of transporting said large object you head over to a U-Haul and get something that will. Look at the overhead involved in doing that! First, you have to spend the time and gas to drive there, and drive back. The further out of your way that is the bigger the expense. When you are there you talk to a guy, who's entire job is dealing with people like you. That guy has a manager, a HR person, an IT guy who's entire job is supporting people like you. There's also a marketing department who's entire reason for being is to to convince you to go to U-Haul and they support newspapers, radio, and TV stations with their adds. All of that overhead is just so that you can drive a Mini instead of a mini-van.
You are also assuming that a small car is appropriate for day-to-day activities. This is often not the case. If you have a 4 person family who needs to head out to take the kids to some sporting event and you need to stop by the grocery store on the way home a Mini isn't going to work. A normal sedan isn't going to work. You need something big.
I submit that some people need big cars in order to run their lives efficiently. Anything big displaces lots of air as it passes through it. Displacing more air takes more energy. Generating more energy takes more fuel. It's basic physics, nothing special here. Therefore, for them, driving cars that get bad gas milege is the most efficient way to get their jobs done.
Sadam was dangerous because he was a mad dictator with oil.
Oil is valuable and can be exchanged for money.
Money can fuel a powerful military that can do evil things.
Sadam used the oil to get money to build a military that he used to do evil things.
I'm no pro-war advocate but pretending that we went there for their oil is just stupid. Yes, we went there because there was oil there. No, it wasn't because we drive SUV's and therfor needed that oil. Pull your head out of your butt and smell the dung you're shoveling every once in a while.
Americans like Big and Cheap...and you make the insightful implication that this is a bad thing. Getting more for less, how horrible. We should really put an end to nasty things like that. How dreadfully "inefficient".
But we call the Centerra a "data jail". It's like the roach motel..
Ug. It's just not true. Most applications that are built to work with Centera include functionality to migrate in/out of the system just like most applications that are built to work with tape can both put data on and get it back. The difference is tape sucks, Centera doesn't.
It can't scale beyond a 42U rack enclosure.
Also not true. I have worked extensively with a 3 rack install with about 50tb of data on it. I believe all versions of Centera since the very first are capable of scaling to 4 racks and some are capable of going to 8 racks. Lots of customers have 2 rack installs. Raw storage on the currently shipping nodes is over 1 tb per node and you can put 32 nodes in a rack. Do the math, a 4 rack Centera is quite big even after taking mirroring or CPP into account.
It's a bunch of little servers striped together to form a big NAS with a metedata controller in the middle.
No. No No.
It IS a bunch of little servers but no they are not "striped together", and no they don't form a NAS. There is no "metadata controller" and there certainly isn't one in the middle. It is a storage cluster that has features specifically designed to store fixed content. Centera is not a simple Linux hack to make a bunch of boxes look like a storage cluster. It's a robust, flexible, well thought out piece of clustering software that is built on top of a Linux base.
Centera hardware is good stuff too. It has redundant externally facing servers (access nodes) so that if one fails, applications can keep working. Both back end switches are linked to every node so everything has redundant data paths. Data is stored in such a way that no data is unavailable if any single node fails or goes offline for any reason.
It's easy to dismiss Centera because it's so different from the standard storage systems who's basic interfaces really haven't changed in 3+ decades. It's not a block device. It's not a filesystem. It's not a mountable share. It's a storage cluster with functionality specifically designed to manage fixed content. It is accessed only through a client side API that talks to the cluster over IP. It isn't easy to wrap your head around.
Perlfs looks interesting but it appears as though it hasn't been updated in a while
Sorry about that. I'm busy. You did get me motivated to put up the new multi-threaded capable version of perlfs today though. Maybe I'll even edit the home page at some point.
And yes.. it's somewhat actively maintained. No, I haven't worked on it with the 2.6 kernels yet.:)
But last I heard you still needed to write to the Centera API, no block access for you (or real NAS type either). But I did hear murmers of this changing.
There are at least two products you can put in front of Centera to make it look like a standard filesystem: CUA (a Centera specific EMC product) and Legato Disk Extender. The tradeoff is that by interfacing with it like a filesystem you re-introduce the limitations of filesystems and lose all the automatic functionality the API gives you. If you look at a program that writes files vs one that writes to a Centera, the Centera one is usually simpler and works better. The API has limited language support (C and Java) but since it talks C its usually easy to build bridges from other languages.
This type of storage just isn't block or file level. It's higher level than that. Because of that, just like programming in java vs C, you loose a little control over how things are done but in the end, if they are done right.. who cares?
I think once standard interfaces to this type of storage are built, using it will be a no brainier.
Again.. I work for EMC them but I don't speak for them, my thoughts are my own.
FYI.. The multi-threaded filesystem version exists, I just haven't bundled it up pretty for distribution. Now someone needs to create a multi-threaded samba to share it out.
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While I'm a big believer in the power of science the fact is the methods aren't uncorruptable or infallible. While I find the current "he said she said" state of the media despicable, it's at least refreshing to see results challenged.
There tends to be an assumption that most science is conducted by people who are only seeking the truth. The problem is that it's human nature to seek money and recognition. A scientist working at a university who studies things and concludes everything is going fine is much less likely to receive acclaim and/or additional funding than someone who shows evidence that the sky is falling.
We have put a lot of faith in science but we have to remember that scientists are people with all the limitations and weaknesses associated with that.
Following doctors advice shouldn't kill you!
Lets not minimize the importance of what's being discussed here. Doctors make recommendations to patients based on medical studies. From this come great blunders like "cut out eggs to improve heart health" and "use margarine not butter to improve heart health" which have since been proven wrong. Theres lots of other examples of things doctors have accepted as true and handed out advice based on that have proven suspect or flat out false: "Sunscreen prevents skin cancer", "Obesity is the #2 killer in the US" etc.
Don't think that's so important? Statistically speaking, people surely died from this bad advice. The next time a doctor recommends you to do something, think about that. What if the advice they give turns you into one of those statistics because it is based on a flawed study.
It's too easy design a study to have a desired outcome. Doing a risk analysis on vaccines?... Do you study the impact on the rates of bipolar syndrome that occur 15-20 years later? Of course not, the drug company that makes the vaccine that's funding your study doesn't want to wait that long for data that can only be damaging, so you study what they want you to and, what a surprise.. there's barely any risk at all. Vaccines for everyone!
We need to apply the old Regan motto "Trust, but verify" to the results coming out of these medical journals. Assume they probably are right and follow up with more comprehensive studies. All new drugs should be extensively tracked as they are introduced to the population. You can't just do a 500 person trial and call a drug good for all time. Conversely, though, once you do a 500 person trial and it comes out good, you shouldn't necessarily keep a beneficial drug from the market. This two tier system of "unapproved" and "approved" simply doesn't make sense. There should be at least one more tier which is a probationary phase where it's generally available but it's impact on the general population is carefully monitored.
The good news is I see much more willingness among the medical community to criticize itself lately. Only through that process can real improvements be made that will end this era of physicians regularly, systematically doing their patients harm.
This is why web browsers need a tag.
Any time you're going to be challenging the mental giants that are in charge, ALWAYS have a lawyer in your pocket and all your ducks in a row. And offsite backups.
I absolutely agree. Speak softly and carry a big stick.
This was a loud letter full of scarrey words for a CEO like "illegal" and "under explicit management direction" and it ends with "notifying the appropriate authorities". Hell, if I was a CEO and I got this letter, I'd freak out too.
DON'T EVER send a letter like this without already having talked to a lawyer and given the lawyer everything you'd need. The unfortunate fact is that police will raid the house of an employee in a heartbeat, take all your computers with evidence on them and hand them over to the criminal employer who can then accidentally delete all the evidence. There's no way in hell they'd be able to get to anything you've given your lawyer though.
Honestly.. I'd want to have already talked to the appropriate authorities before sending a letter as explosive as the one he sent.
I've only had to resort to this tactic once, but it saved my job and cost the Veep his.... was it worth the $20????
Or.. just keep your laptop around with some handy software on it. It's a noise activated audio recording device hiding in plain sight.
You shouldn't need something like this often, but if you ever do, its there.
Every country that I know of censors what people can express on their web sites and honestly, most people concider it to be a good thing. Replace "going about their lives" with "being molested" in the above statement and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who thinks it shouldnt be censored. The plain fact is that people have become accustomed to censorship. This singular argument has been enough to convince people that the concept of freedom of expression is flawed and that everything everywhere should be subject to censorship.
I personally believe that all censorship is evil and only serves to delay dealing with important issues. People who shield the issue from discussion are guilty of causing it to continue (i.e. people who vote for anti-child porn laws cause child molestation.) Most people don't seem to share that opinion though.
I've mentioned this before but i'll harp on it again.
Regardless of what the truth turns out to be, something desperately needs to be changed. Medicine, for a long time now, has been a fake science. They start with the conclusion they want and work from there. Medicine is full of monopolies, conflicts of interest, and hipocrocy. The prevailing mentality that ethical issues are only important for lesser beings is a great example of the view the medical community has of itself.
Don't believe me? Well.. then listen to the Doctors. Stop eating eggs, stop eating butter, use margerine instead and get all your booster shots. Of course that's the right thing to do. Doctors wouldn't be recommending that people do something that was BAD for them would they?
Trust your doctor, just don't trust the guy who's telling him what to say.
War is death. War is slaughter, but governments and militaries had an easy time convincing people that war was noble and patriotic and good. And easy time, that is, until those two bombs got dropped.
War was easy to paint as an epic struggle for what is or should be yours where soldiers die heroically for the cause. An aggressive leader had little to lose by attacking when they could clearly win. Offensive wars were fought in other people's countries, your population didn't care much. Men who went to war were heroes, soldiers battling for the benefit of the people at home and were easily recruited. The cycle of countries attacking because they could was getting faster and more deadly every decade. The use of nuclear weapons utterly shattered that cycle by shattering the image.
One could argue that it was the existence and threat of the bomb that caused this to happen. There will always be debate about that but just like it's easy for Pat Robinson to convince people to give him money, it's easy for a leader to convince his soldiers that there is no such thing as a nuclear weapon as long as there are no smoking holes in the ground that used to be a city. It would have had to be used eventually and if there was ever a more appropriate enemy to use it on, it would truly be a horrible, horrible thing.
Piercings and tatoos say something about a person. What they say varies, just like with any art, but many of them say "I'm angry and I make bad life choises." Those are the ones I'd avoid in IT.
Which goes to show why software engineers shouldn't design houses.
That house is great combination of stupidity and pop science with a little lack of common sense mixed in.
Asuming everyone has a computer, playing a $50 game on a $300 console = $350. Playing a $50 game on a computer costs $50. The day where a faimily has one computer is rapidly coming to an end. The prices are down, networking is getting easy and dad doesn't want to put up with Jr's games and music clogging his harddrive. As long as you already have the computer, the cost is only the game. As computers plummet in price and the console increases, the console looks much less attractive.
Besides, now that us Nintendo kids have kids of our own, the console market is dead.
His point was that computers should be simple reliable things that you turn on and use then turn off. All of this crashing and being taken over and all that crap shouldn't happen. You don't have a corperate admin locking you out of your palm pilot do you?
Why should you be locked out of your Windows box unless Windows is just simply insecure.
People who get an H1 have to prove their education and ability to get one. H1B's are not DONATED by the USA government.
What's your point? That companies aren't using H1B's for unskilled labor? I haven't seen any myself but I've heard it happens.
I want to clarify: I'm not saying people who get H1B's shouldn't be allowed to work in the US. I'm saying they should be welcomed to come and stay here as long as they want and if they lose their job they should be allowed to stay and look for a new job. They should be granted much more rights than they are. I'm in favor of welcoming skilled people into our society, it can only help us.
H1B = Indentured Servitude. The program is pure evil. Corporate America loves it for the same reason everyone who has indentured servants loves them: cheep easy to control labor.
I'm not saying companies shouldn't be able to bring in useful talent from other countries. If someone has such unique talents important to our economy absolutely let them work here, however, those people should be welcome to stay as long as they like and work for whomever they like without having "Work harder for less or I'll deport you" hung over their heads.
Companies also use H1B to hire unskilled labor. That is simply wrong. Those people are ripe for all kinds of exploitation.
H1B is an abomination, an assault on everything that has made America great and it needs to go.
Charities are a lousy way to get things done and are often less than honorable causes. Most of them never solve the problem they are setup to help. If they did they'd go away and everyone working there would lose their job and whoever is running it would lose their power. Instead, they thrive on the perpetuation of the issue and do just enough to maintain the appearance of helping. They're just a black pit where people can throw their money to make themselves feel like they are doing some good.
You want your money to help needy people? Increase education spending. Smarter workers are more employable and start more businesses and create more jobs. Don't give the man a fish, teach him! Better yet, fix the system so everyone like him gets taught.
That said.. support the EFF! Defending freedom is honorable.
It's time to move the hard drives out of computers. We should create cheap fast easy to setup OS storage outside the computer so that we can remove those power & space hungry hard drives from the box. Bootable IP based block devices with small 'usb key' style local boot partitions seems like a reasonable way to make this happen. Linux is probably flexible enough to make this happen quickly but to work right network block devices should be fully integrated into the kernel. Windows might have more trouble.
/boot partition. I'd also like to see motherboard manufacturers integrating reasonably sized (128+ MB) permanently attached bootable USB keys onto motherboards.
Network block devices would allow the storage for many machines to be centralized and managed and it could be done in a much more cost effective and flexible way than SAN's allow. With gigabit ethernet, networks are now fast enough to make network based storage plenty fast for most applications and, with well designed centralized storage systems, they could be even faster than local storage.
i-scsi is promising but the cards are ridiculously expensive and you need a separate connection for storage and regular networking, something that won't be practical for widespread deployment to desktops, a place where network block devices would provide a huge benefit. A software mode i-scsi driver and the ability to bootstrap to the point where you could use it would probably cover things.
I'd like to see someone modify the Fedora installer to allow installation to network block device based root partitions using a bootable USB key as the
Since the US government has proven repeatedly in the last 50 years that it cares nothing for the suffering of people in other nations
WTF are you talking about! We're constantly butting in to stop suffering. It pisses me off. Let them suffer, WTF Do I care. Give me my stupid tax dollars back so I can fuel my SUV!
In all seriousness, we get just as much crap about caring too much and intervening when it's not appropriate as we do about not doing enough so apparently we have the balance just about right.
He had oil, but wasn't able to sell any real amount of it
Define real? How much US cash did they find he had gathered? I believe it was around 900 million dollars in cash hidden in various walls and palaces. That's just what he had converted into US cash and hidden! Granted.. he didn't have as much as he could have had without sanctions, but that doesn't change the fact that he was a madman with a lot of money and a lot of power and the willingness to use both to do horrible things.
a logical way to make oil less valuable is to make vehicles that use 4 to 6 times less
Logically.. using 4 to 6 times less would reduce oil's value slightly, however, the US only uses 1/4 of the worlds oil supply and only half of that goes to cars. Even if all US cars stopped using oil instantly, 7/8ths of the world's oil demand would remain.
Also, using 4 to 6 times less fuel just isn't practical.
Commercial vehicle fuel use (tractor trailers for transport, electricians, plumbers, cable, phone, dump trucks, etc) accounts for a significant part of the US's fuel consumption. I couldn't find any statistics but I'd guess from the numbers I did see (and I looked at a lot) that it accounts for about 1/3rd of our consumption. (Please let me know if you can find hard stats.. I goggled for this for a long time.) You'll be hard pressed to find a lot of waste there. Companies save money wherever they can and gas costs money.
Even if we replaced every personal vehicle you could with a mini that got 55mpg you wouldn't cut fuel use anywhere near as much as you think. I drive a nice big SUV and it gets around 20 miles per gallon (19.6). Sure, there are behemoths that get 8 or 10 mpg but they are much more rare than you'd think. Used ones are selling real cheep now because nobody wants them unless they really need them, in which case a 55mpg tiny car simply isn't going to work. In fact, there's no way I personally could drive a mini, even if it was just for commuting. The headroom is about 1.5 inches lower than the lowest I fit in. It doesn't take a very big person to not fit in those stupid minis and they have horrible ground clearance. This low roofline and low ground clearance is a great way to make good fuel economy but it makes for an uncomfortable car that isn't very versatile (or safe for that matter.) In fact, there's barely a car made after 1990 that I fit in. Tightening fuel efficiency laws forced car's rooflines down to the point where I just can't use them.
Pretty much all the minivans would have to stay. People drive them because the need the room. Those usually get between 15 and 20 mpg. There aren't any 55mpg minivans. Once you look carefully at it, there is a very small percentage of people who are driving cars that are too big for them and they usually have too much money and would throw it into something stupid like a boat if they didn't get their Hummer. You think SUV's suck gas... take a look at motor boats!
If you really want to curb gas consumption, raise the gas tax $0.20/gallon. Use the money raised to build new roads that eliminate traffic jams and provide more efficient routes to where people need to go. That would work. Trying to guilt trip people into buying miniature cars isn't going to change a thing.
For most people, big SUVs are not efficient.
That depends.
Take the example of going to your friends house to pick up something big that they are giving you. You have a Mini which is incapable of transporting said large object you head over to a U-Haul and get something that will. Look at the overhead involved in doing that! First, you have to spend the time and gas to drive there, and drive back. The further out of your way that is the bigger the expense.
When you are there you talk to a guy, who's entire job is dealing with people like you. That guy has a manager, a HR person, an IT guy who's entire job is supporting people like you. There's also a marketing department who's entire reason for being is to to convince you to go to U-Haul and they support newspapers, radio, and TV stations with their adds. All of that overhead is just so that you can drive a Mini instead of a mini-van.
You are also assuming that a small car is appropriate for day-to-day activities. This is often not the case. If you have a 4 person family who needs to head out to take the kids to some sporting event and you need to stop by the grocery store on the way home a Mini isn't going to work. A normal sedan isn't going to work. You need something big.
I submit that some people need big cars in order to run their lives efficiently. Anything big displaces lots of air as it passes through it. Displacing more air takes more energy. Generating more energy takes more fuel. It's basic physics, nothing special here. Therefore, for them, driving cars that get bad gas milege is the most efficient way to get their jobs done.
Pay attention this time!
Sadam used the oil to get money to build a military that he used to do evil things.
I'm no pro-war advocate but pretending that we went there for their oil is just stupid. Yes, we went there because there was oil there. No, it wasn't because we drive SUV's and therfor needed that oil. Pull your head out of your butt and smell the dung you're shoveling every once in a while.
Americans like Big and Cheap ...and you make the insightful implication that this is a bad thing. Getting more for less, how horrible. We should really put an end to nasty things like that. How dreadfully "inefficient".
Oh yea.. I forgot the obligatory..
I work for EMC but I don't speak for them, my thoughts are my own even if I sound like an EMC cheerleader/sock puppet.
But we call the Centerra a "data jail". It's like the roach motel..
Ug. It's just not true. Most applications that are built to work with Centera include functionality to migrate in/out of the system just like most applications that are built to work with tape can both put data on and get it back. The difference is tape sucks, Centera doesn't.
It can't scale beyond a 42U rack enclosure.
Also not true. I have worked extensively with a 3 rack install with about 50tb of data on it. I believe all versions of Centera since the very first are capable of scaling to 4 racks and some are capable of going to 8 racks. Lots of customers have 2 rack installs. Raw storage on the currently shipping nodes is over 1 tb per node and you can put 32 nodes in a rack. Do the math, a 4 rack Centera is quite big even after taking mirroring or CPP into account.
It's a bunch of little servers striped together to form a big NAS with a metedata controller in the middle.
No. No No.
It IS a bunch of little servers but no they are not "striped together", and no they don't form a NAS. There is no "metadata controller" and there certainly isn't one in the middle. It is a storage cluster that has features specifically designed to store fixed content. Centera is not a simple Linux hack to make a bunch of boxes look like a storage cluster. It's a robust, flexible, well thought out piece of clustering software that is built on top of a Linux base.
Centera hardware is good stuff too. It has redundant externally facing servers (access nodes) so that if one fails, applications can keep working. Both back end switches are linked to every node so everything has redundant data paths. Data is stored in such a way that no data is unavailable if any single node fails or goes offline for any reason.
It's easy to dismiss Centera because it's so different from the standard storage systems who's basic interfaces really haven't changed in 3+ decades. It's not a block device. It's not a filesystem. It's not a mountable share. It's a storage cluster with functionality specifically designed to manage fixed content. It is accessed only through a client side API that talks to the cluster over IP. It isn't easy to wrap your head around.
Perlfs looks interesting but it appears as though it hasn't been updated in a while
:)
Sorry about that. I'm busy. You did get me motivated to put up the new multi-threaded capable version of perlfs today though. Maybe I'll even edit the home page at some point.
And yes.. it's somewhat actively maintained. No, I haven't worked on it with the 2.6 kernels yet.
But last I heard you still needed to write to the Centera API, no block access for you (or real NAS type either). But I did hear murmers of this changing.
There are at least two products you can put in front of Centera to make it look like a standard filesystem: CUA (a Centera specific EMC product) and Legato Disk Extender. The tradeoff is that by interfacing with it like a filesystem you re-introduce the limitations of filesystems and lose all the automatic functionality the API gives you. If you look at a program that writes files vs one that writes to a Centera, the Centera one is usually simpler and works better. The API has limited language support (C and Java) but since it talks C its usually easy to build bridges from other languages.
This type of storage just isn't block or file level. It's higher level than that. Because of that, just like programming in java vs C, you loose a little control over how things are done but in the end, if they are done right.. who cares?
I think once standard interfaces to this type of storage are built, using it will be a no brainier.
Again.. I work for EMC them but I don't speak for them, my thoughts are my own.
If you want to try building it, I'd suggest you start with a nice high level method of creating linux based filesytems:
http://perlfs.sourceforge.net/
Build it first, optimize later.
FYI.. The multi-threaded filesystem version exists, I just haven't bundled it up pretty for distribution. Now someone needs to create a multi-threaded samba to share it out.