In fact, I believe if Microsoft only had to design an OS for two or three active production models at any given time, Windows might be far more reliable than I find it to be.
This is pure, unadulterated, urban legend. A hold over from the days when Microsoft would blame the hardware manufacturers for all their software bugs.
You'll note there are innumerable operating systems out there which are stable as a rock, and yet support a vast range of hardware. Linux/BSD are the first to come to mind, but there are others (Solaris, BeOS, et al.)
No matter what kind of hardware you have, 2+2=4 (Intel CPU bugs aside). Crashes should not happen. Period. Diversity does not contribute to this in the slightest.
It couldn't possibly be down to the fact that it's quite hard to hijack a train and make it crash into a tall building.
Airport security was a major issue long before suicide hijackings. Just by virtue of having several hundred people in a single structure passenger transports are targets in their own right. Note the Madrid train bombings.
I never understood why there are so few high speed trains in the USA.
The US is a rough place.
In most places, there is only one set of tracks that all trains have to share, and very slow freight service gets priority, rather than passengers. And those tracks continue to get more and more congested with freight service.
Building a new set of tracks across the country, to all major cities, would entail the most massive construction project in human history. Just to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (or San Francisco) entails traveling over the San Bernardino mountain range. Going east entails crossing the (absolutely massive) Rocky Mountains (The Continental Divide). Perhaps a hundred bridges to cross rivers, The Grand Canyon, and many other chasms, just to make the short trip from California to Arizona.
Major cities like Flagstaff, AZ, and many others (most of Colorado) are themselves on mountain tops. Mountain passes require extensive destruction to try and reduce the slopes of the terrain to something manageable... You can count on seriously long and winding routes through any mountainous areas (which is most all of the western US). And let's not forget everything has to be completely earthquake proofed... A 7.0 can be expected to hit anywhere in the area, at any time.
And that's the easy part... we're just getting started. If you go just a bit further north, you're going to have to worry about and deal with blizzards, forests. Still plenty of mountains. Many more huge rivers, and seriously flood-prone areas. Crossing the Mississippi will not be trivial.
Trains across France aren't a remotely good comparison. There are many US states where the terrain would be equally easy to traverse, but there you often only have one major city, so very few passengers for a high-speed short-haul train service there. The distribution of population centers happens to be ideal for car travel most of the time, and where it isn't, the terrain is bad enough that flights are far more reliable, and not as expensive as building passenger train lines. Not to mention substantially faster, which is a significant issue with the distances between major US cities.
Keep in mind that unsubsidized flight is lower price than even our heavily subsidized slow trains.
First, US airlines and airports are EXTENSIVELY subsidized.
Secondly, I've never seen a flight less expensive than a train ticket.
It takes about 30 seconds to compare the route prices on Amtrak.com to comparable flights via eg. Travelocity.com . Every time I've checked, Amtrak is about HALF the price, and that's with offering far more leg-room, a reliable schedule, and departing damn close to where you are, rather than a far off major airport.
Now, you still might prefer to spend half a day flying rather than two days on a train, but it is undoubtedly much, much cheaper.
in 2008 we still have to resort to sub-sonic air flights?
Exactly the same reasons we "have to resort to" sub-200MPH car travel...
"Getting there faster" should never be a goal in designing a commercial passenger jet. The vast majority of flights are so short that you spend more time on the ground, in the terminal, than you do in the air, so the overall improvement would be minuscule.
The Boeing 787 significantly reduces fuel consumption, which should reduce ticket prices, and hopefully put airlines in a more tenable position. The Airbus A-380 forgoes any fuel savings, and opts, instead, for fitting far more people in a single plane, which should reduce the epic congestion problem causing delays at airports. Both are laudable goals, and a supersonic aircraft would not-only fail to address either problem, it would make both issues far worse.
The fact that passenger aircraft have increased in speed over the years is really almost accidental. Jets became popular NOT because they were faster for the passengers, but because the maintenance costs were so much lower than traditional propeller aircraft. In fact, even slower turboprops look to be making a comeback, due to their lower fuel costs. If fuel prices continue to rise unchecked, it won't be long before we'll all be back to traveling in passenger trains, and trans-oceanic steamers. Maybe they'll rename "coach" seats "steerage".
Liquid cooling can affect the energy costs in a big way
No, it really can't.
With a system like this centralizing the area where heat is dumped, fluids can be piped out to a radiator sitting outside, so essentially, a large portion of the heat produced from a rack of computers, can be relocated outside of the data center.
You could similarly open up a data center, with just large fans blowing ambient air in and out.
With either method, it just wouldn't work. A $50,000 server rack is not your home PC. It's not okay to let it operate on 40C+ ambient temperatures. It's not specifically out of spec, but it's a very, very high temperature to start off with, which means you don't have a very large margin for error, and you have to be careful of the extra heat output by the server when loaded.
I already also mentioned that, with such a method, you need a MUCH larger radiator, and much higher throughput forced convection, since you're trying to cool it with warm air, rather than chilled datacenter air... The temperature difference is just too low. It quickly gets to the point that your non-optimal cooling solution is almost as expensive as just running an A/C, and allowing less airflow, smaller radiators, etc. Heat-pumps are continually increasing in efficiency, after all.
1. Is a result of the larger heat exchange area. And makes no difference in a data center. 2. No benefit for any practical application. Definitely makes no difference in a data center. 3. Does not affect the cooling costs of a data center in the slightest.
Nothing about water cooling will reduce the cooling and energy costs of a data center IN THE SLIGHTEST. You're doing a lot of magical thinking, with NO experience in the subject.
instead of huge electricity bills for A/C you could just plumb each rack into the building's water system
Or you could use magical pixie dust...
The ONLY THING water cooling does is (potentially) provide a larger surface area to disperse the heat. It does not magically "cool" anything. Unless ambient temperatures are always much lower than you want your datacenter to be, you'll still be running the water through an A/C. And if you're lucky enough to be someplace that ambient temperatures are always that low, you'll need some huge radiatiors... much larger than an equivalent A/C condenser, as the temperature differences involved are much, much lower.
If you want to use a ground-based heat-pump, you can... It's every bit as easy to do with air it is with liquid. And with air, you don't have to spend ludicrous amounts of money and man-hours retrofitting every single server for liquid.
Using remote controlled guns "to avoid friendly casualties" (the invading force) sounds wrong if the kill ratio is so much out of proportion
Kill ratio doesn't mean much of anything. See, eg. a ground war between the US and China. Would you be oh-so-happy about being overrun and wiped out by a horde of Chinese soldiers, because, after all, the kill ratio is much higher on the US side?
The kill ratio in Iraq is, in no small part, because US soldiers DON'T have a kill-bot that they can send in to just take out the sniper among the civilians. For every bomb you drop on a couple insurgents, you get to deal with 10 civilian casualties. Makes for a great kill ratio, though, so we should just keep doing it??
The company is already in court, suing Boeing on an unrelated issue.
But they won't risk violating this terrible patent, why? Clearly they're more than willing to risk a lawsuit from Boeing.
If the patent is so obviously invalid, it won't take much effort to fight and have it invalidated. And on the off chance they fail, they can argue the issue to a judge, who will decide the value of the infringement, as opposed to Boeing, who refuses to budge.
And time on a satellite is very, very expensive, so they will easily be making tens of millions of dollars on the deal, worst case.
This whole story makes no sense. Sounds like something even shadier is going on under the table, and they'd prefer to use this as cover.
it's one thing when there's a MASSIVE jump in technology, like going from VHS to DVD. I mean, with DVD suddenly the discs were a lot higher quality (picture and sound), and were considerably closer to indestructible than VHS tapes (that would wear out over time regardless of how well they were maintained).
Yes, DVD was a whopping 3X higher resolution than VHS, while Blu-ray is only a measly 6X higher resolution.
And that scratch-proof coating on Blu-rays surely won't make them more durable than scratch-happy DVDs.
And then you add the DVD extras as well, it's a slam dunk.
Every DVD player that I know of can be flashed with new firmware
You just don't know of many, then.
This was very true back in the day, and is a big reason I go to great lengths to keep two of my old VCR-sized monster DVD players working.
However, when the DVD-CCA got upset about all the workarounds, and when price competition drove DVD players down to $50, the ability to flash firmware was entirely removed from the vast majority of DVD players. ROM is cheaper, and fewer instructions in the firmware means you need even less of it. Not to mention you don't get numerous player returns due to failed flashes of buggy and unofficial firmware that people deny they were doing...
VHS was good enough for most people (they didn't buy LaserDiscs, did they?).
640k was good enough for everybody.
Blu-Ray doesn't really confer the same advantage over DVD that DVDs did over VHS.
Yes, 1080p is a mere 6X increase in resolution over DVDs... Whereas DVDs were a "whopping" 3X increase in resolution over VHS.
Meanwhile, DVDs were highly vulnerable to scratches (Blu-ray is not), and Blu-ray includes much more advanced interactivity, and enough room for far more added features.
One of the real subtle reasons why DVDs eventually added extra features is because it increased the size of the discs to where you'd need to have a dual layer to copy all the data.
This is COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, and UTTERLY WRONG.
It's common practice, when ripping DVDs, to just discard extra features. It's an absolutely trivial step. It does not stop or slow down ANYONE. It is the main feature (the movie) that is encoded at a high enough bitrate that they total about 7GBs.
You'd be able to fit if it was "just a movie" onto a regular 2.4gig DVD easily,
First, single-layer DVDs are 4.7GBs. Second, that is not necessarily enough to "easily" fit a movie... Single layer DVDs are what they use in 3rd world countries, to sell a dirt cheap (~$3) "just slightly better than VCD" quality movie and not having to worry about them being mass-exported to the US and Europe. Although they intentionally don't try to make full use of the single layer in doing so.
In any case, any movie longer than 90 minutes will look terrible lowered down to a bitrate that will allow it to fit on a single layer. And frankly, even with the 90 minute movies, I'm GLAD they almost always use a dual-layer DVD. Video compression isn't perfect, and the crappy encoders and terrible settings they use make things worse. A higher bitrate can only help to make the movie look better. If they do it to make copying more expensive, then I give my thanks to the copiers. Whatever it takes to get them to give a good-quality video is fine by me.
Unfortunately, sometimes they do use a single layer for some movies, such as The Prophecy 1/2, and The Mask. Three DVDs that happen to look awful.
My house has 3 functioning TVs -- none of them HD compatible.
How long do you expect all your TVs going to continue to function?
You can't really buy a new TV that isn't HD, and even if you could, the price difference is minimal now, so why would you want to?
The digital switchover is in less than 1 year. Things are going very fast now. Converter boxes went from being non-existent to being widespread in about a month. You can expect the percentage of homes with at least 1 HDTV to dramatically increase in short order.
when a 20-year veteran of an industry takes an hour out of his day to educate you, it's a common courtesy to reply.
Either you have a very different set of values than the majority of the rest of the world and haven't handled the adjustment communications on the internet well... Or you are just an incredibly self-centered person, and assume your time and opinion is worth much, much more than anyone else here.
google the phrase "self-supporting utility" (394 pages of results) and "tax-supported utility" (10 pages of results),
Anecdotes aren't conclusive. Google isn't a structured database of organizations and events, either.
Your experience is an interesting footnote, but that's about it. My points are all based on fully researched accounting figures of several specific utilities around my area... Although my knowledge of the subject certainly isn't necessarily a conclusive and balance view of things on a larger scale, and can't necessarily be extrapolated as such, it is certainly far more credible evidence than you've offered, and I will continue to prefer my sources to your word.
Now, do you feel better that I wasted a few more minutes and replied? Do you feel better having wasted even more of your time complaining that I hadn't?
Ma Bell is alive and well, and living under the name "AT&T" these days
Yes everyone, Verizon is just a figment of your imagination.
(I know the preceding paragraph is nearly incoherent. The business relationships are completely incestuous.)
It needn't be complex.
Ma Bell was broken up into regional bells, including Verizon and SBC. AT&T was allowed to continue as a long-distance (non-local) service.
SBC cheated and stole well enough that they ended up with enough money to buy a large number of other regional bells when the regulations were lifted (Verizon did the same thing, though not nearly as bad behaving as SBC). SBC didn't have any cross-country links of its own, which was costing them quite a bit, so they bought AT&T, and decided to take the unsoiled name for themselves and try to make people forget they're still the same "SBC" that's been screwing them over for decades. Simple.
Slashdot Mirror
This is pure, unadulterated, urban legend. A hold over from the days when Microsoft would blame the hardware manufacturers for all their software bugs.
You'll note there are innumerable operating systems out there which are stable as a rock, and yet support a vast range of hardware. Linux/BSD are the first to come to mind, but there are others (Solaris, BeOS, et al.)
No matter what kind of hardware you have, 2+2=4 (Intel CPU bugs aside). Crashes should not happen. Period. Diversity does not contribute to this in the slightest.
Airport security was a major issue long before suicide hijackings. Just by virtue of having several hundred people in a single structure passenger transports are targets in their own right. Note the Madrid train bombings.
The US is a rough place.
In most places, there is only one set of tracks that all trains have to share, and very slow freight service gets priority, rather than passengers. And those tracks continue to get more and more congested with freight service.
Building a new set of tracks across the country, to all major cities, would entail the most massive construction project in human history. Just to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (or San Francisco) entails traveling over the San Bernardino mountain range. Going east entails crossing the (absolutely massive) Rocky Mountains (The Continental Divide). Perhaps a hundred bridges to cross rivers, The Grand Canyon, and many other chasms, just to make the short trip from California to Arizona.
Major cities like Flagstaff, AZ, and many others (most of Colorado) are themselves on mountain tops. Mountain passes require extensive destruction to try and reduce the slopes of the terrain to something manageable... You can count on seriously long and winding routes through any mountainous areas (which is most all of the western US). And let's not forget everything has to be completely earthquake proofed... A 7.0 can be expected to hit anywhere in the area, at any time.
And that's the easy part... we're just getting started. If you go just a bit further north, you're going to have to worry about and deal with blizzards, forests. Still plenty of mountains. Many more huge rivers, and seriously flood-prone areas. Crossing the Mississippi will not be trivial.
Trains across France aren't a remotely good comparison. There are many US states where the terrain would be equally easy to traverse, but there you often only have one major city, so very few passengers for a high-speed short-haul train service there. The distribution of population centers happens to be ideal for car travel most of the time, and where it isn't, the terrain is bad enough that flights are far more reliable, and not as expensive as building passenger train lines. Not to mention substantially faster, which is a significant issue with the distances between major US cities.
First, US airlines and airports are EXTENSIVELY subsidized.
Secondly, I've never seen a flight less expensive than a train ticket.
It takes about 30 seconds to compare the route prices on Amtrak.com to comparable flights via eg. Travelocity.com . Every time I've checked, Amtrak is about HALF the price, and that's with offering far more leg-room, a reliable schedule, and departing damn close to where you are, rather than a far off major airport.
Now, you still might prefer to spend half a day flying rather than two days on a train, but it is undoubtedly much, much cheaper.
It's almost amusing to see you continually backpedaling, after every factually incorrect statement...
Good luck with your subterranean server farm.
Exactly the same reasons we "have to resort to" sub-200MPH car travel...
"Getting there faster" should never be a goal in designing a commercial passenger jet. The vast majority of flights are so short that you spend more time on the ground, in the terminal, than you do in the air, so the overall improvement would be minuscule.
The Boeing 787 significantly reduces fuel consumption, which should reduce ticket prices, and hopefully put airlines in a more tenable position.
The Airbus A-380 forgoes any fuel savings, and opts, instead, for fitting far more people in a single plane, which should reduce the epic congestion problem causing delays at airports.
Both are laudable goals, and a supersonic aircraft would not-only fail to address either problem, it would make both issues far worse.
The fact that passenger aircraft have increased in speed over the years is really almost accidental. Jets became popular NOT because they were faster for the passengers, but because the maintenance costs were so much lower than traditional propeller aircraft. In fact, even slower turboprops look to be making a comeback, due to their lower fuel costs. If fuel prices continue to rise unchecked, it won't be long before we'll all be back to traveling in passenger trains, and trans-oceanic steamers. Maybe they'll rename "coach" seats "steerage".
No, it really can't.
You could similarly open up a data center, with just large fans blowing ambient air in and out.
With either method, it just wouldn't work. A $50,000 server rack is not your home PC. It's not okay to let it operate on 40C+ ambient temperatures. It's not specifically out of spec, but it's a very, very high temperature to start off with, which means you don't have a very large margin for error, and you have to be careful of the extra heat output by the server when loaded.
I already also mentioned that, with such a method, you need a MUCH larger radiator, and much higher throughput forced convection, since you're trying to cool it with warm air, rather than chilled datacenter air... The temperature difference is just too low. It quickly gets to the point that your non-optimal cooling solution is almost as expensive as just running an A/C, and allowing less airflow, smaller radiators, etc. Heat-pumps are continually increasing in efficiency, after all.
Do you have ANY experience with ANY air conditioning? You don't see to have the foggiest idea how they fundamentally work.
An A/C will work superbly underground, with less work on the building itself (ie. never mind the per-machine hook-ups).
The same is equally true for an A/C unit, as it is for a liquid system.
1. Is a result of the larger heat exchange area. And makes no difference in a data center.
2. No benefit for any practical application. Definitely makes no difference in a data center.
3. Does not affect the cooling costs of a data center in the slightest.
Nothing about water cooling will reduce the cooling and energy costs of a data center IN THE SLIGHTEST. You're doing a lot of magical thinking, with NO experience in the subject.
Or you could use magical pixie dust...
The ONLY THING water cooling does is (potentially) provide a larger surface area to disperse the heat. It does not magically "cool" anything. Unless ambient temperatures are always much lower than you want your datacenter to be, you'll still be running the water through an A/C. And if you're lucky enough to be someplace that ambient temperatures are always that low, you'll need some huge radiatiors... much larger than an equivalent A/C condenser, as the temperature differences involved are much, much lower.
If you want to use a ground-based heat-pump, you can... It's every bit as easy to do with air it is with liquid. And with air, you don't have to spend ludicrous amounts of money and man-hours retrofitting every single server for liquid.
Kill ratio doesn't mean much of anything. See, eg. a ground war between the US and China. Would you be oh-so-happy about being overrun and wiped out by a horde of Chinese soldiers, because, after all, the kill ratio is much higher on the US side?
The kill ratio in Iraq is, in no small part, because US soldiers DON'T have a kill-bot that they can send in to just take out the sniper among the civilians. For every bomb you drop on a couple insurgents, you get to deal with 10 civilian casualties. Makes for a great kill ratio, though, so we should just keep doing it??
Okay, so the patent won't stand up to scrutiny.
The company is already in court, suing Boeing on an unrelated issue.
But they won't risk violating this terrible patent, why? Clearly they're more than willing to risk a lawsuit from Boeing.
If the patent is so obviously invalid, it won't take much effort to fight and have it invalidated. And on the off chance they fail, they can argue the issue to a judge, who will decide the value of the infringement, as opposed to Boeing, who refuses to budge.
And time on a satellite is very, very expensive, so they will easily be making tens of millions of dollars on the deal, worst case.
This whole story makes no sense. Sounds like something even shadier is going on under the table, and they'd prefer to use this as cover.
Whether you copy implementation details from a document or not has no bearing on patent rights.
Yes, DVD was a whopping 3X higher resolution than VHS, while Blu-ray is only a measly 6X higher resolution.
And that scratch-proof coating on Blu-rays surely won't make them more durable than scratch-happy DVDs.
So that's when you decided to invade Iraq?
I like pudding.
You can get an HDTV for under $300. Mine was $400 a couple years ago.
You do NOT need any kind of receiver to watch Blu-ray discs. That's only for OTA broadcast TV, and still, those are under $100.
You just don't know of many, then.
This was very true back in the day, and is a big reason I go to great lengths to keep two of my old VCR-sized monster DVD players working.
However, when the DVD-CCA got upset about all the workarounds, and when price competition drove DVD players down to $50, the ability to flash firmware was entirely removed from the vast majority of DVD players. ROM is cheaper, and fewer instructions in the firmware means you need even less of it. Not to mention you don't get numerous player returns due to failed flashes of buggy and unofficial firmware that people deny they were doing...
VHS was good enough for most people (they didn't buy LaserDiscs, did they?).
640k was good enough for everybody.
Yes, 1080p is a mere 6X increase in resolution over DVDs... Whereas DVDs were a "whopping" 3X increase in resolution over VHS.
Meanwhile, DVDs were highly vulnerable to scratches (Blu-ray is not), and Blu-ray includes much more advanced interactivity, and enough room for far more added features.
Clearly, nothing.
This is COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, and UTTERLY WRONG.
It's common practice, when ripping DVDs, to just discard extra features. It's an absolutely trivial step. It does not stop or slow down ANYONE. It is the main feature (the movie) that is encoded at a high enough bitrate that they total about 7GBs.
First, single-layer DVDs are 4.7GBs. Second, that is not necessarily enough to "easily" fit a movie... Single layer DVDs are what they use in 3rd world countries, to sell a dirt cheap (~$3) "just slightly better than VCD" quality movie and not having to worry about them being mass-exported to the US and Europe. Although they intentionally don't try to make full use of the single layer in doing so.
In any case, any movie longer than 90 minutes will look terrible lowered down to a bitrate that will allow it to fit on a single layer. And frankly, even with the 90 minute movies, I'm GLAD they almost always use a dual-layer DVD. Video compression isn't perfect, and the crappy encoders and terrible settings they use make things worse. A higher bitrate can only help to make the movie look better. If they do it to make copying more expensive, then I give my thanks to the copiers. Whatever it takes to get them to give a good-quality video is fine by me.
Unfortunately, sometimes they do use a single layer for some movies, such as The Prophecy 1/2, and The Mask. Three DVDs that happen to look awful.
In which case, there is no "demand" from them. ECON 101.
Clearly, then, Sony is doomed.
How long do you expect all your TVs going to continue to function?
You can't really buy a new TV that isn't HD, and even if you could, the price difference is minimal now, so why would you want to?
The digital switchover is in less than 1 year. Things are going very fast now. Converter boxes went from being non-existent to being widespread in about a month. You can expect the percentage of homes with at least 1 HDTV to dramatically increase in short order.
Either you have a very different set of values than the majority of the rest of the world and haven't handled the adjustment communications on the internet well... Or you are just an incredibly self-centered person, and assume your time and opinion is worth much, much more than anyone else here.
Anecdotes aren't conclusive. Google isn't a structured database of organizations and events, either.
Your experience is an interesting footnote, but that's about it. My points are all based on fully researched accounting figures of several specific utilities around my area... Although my knowledge of the subject certainly isn't necessarily a conclusive and balance view of things on a larger scale, and can't necessarily be extrapolated as such, it is certainly far more credible evidence than you've offered, and I will continue to prefer my sources to your word.
Now, do you feel better that I wasted a few more minutes and replied? Do you feel better having wasted even more of your time complaining that I hadn't?
Yes everyone, Verizon is just a figment of your imagination.
It needn't be complex.
Ma Bell was broken up into regional bells, including Verizon and SBC. AT&T was allowed to continue as a long-distance (non-local) service.
SBC cheated and stole well enough that they ended up with enough money to buy a large number of other regional bells when the regulations were lifted (Verizon did the same thing, though not nearly as bad behaving as SBC). SBC didn't have any cross-country links of its own, which was costing them quite a bit, so they bought AT&T, and decided to take the unsoiled name for themselves and try to make people forget they're still the same "SBC" that's been screwing them over for decades. Simple.