You know, the problem with RAID is that people tend to make general statements based on their own personal observation. You get a lot of "Software RAID sucks because it's slow" statements, and you also get things like "RAID 5 sucks", or "RAID 5 r0x0rz!"
The thing to keep in mind is that these things are very subjective based on what your application is. Let's take for example RAID 5. If your application involves mostly reads, and very few writes, RAID 5 will perform very well because it has the ability to read in parallel across all the disks in the volume. However, if your application is very write intensive, or even worse, if your application does read-modify-writes, RAID 5 is a very bad choice because the parity has to be calculated or re-calculated for every write and you take a big CPU hit.
My favorite type of RAID for any generic situation where I don't know too much about what the activity will be like is RAID 0+1. The cost can be prohibitive for smaller projects, but you get all the performance benefits of striping, plus the redundancy of mirrors. Just keep in mind that the more you know about the application that is primarily running on the box, the easier it is to make an intelligent choice about what type of RAID to use.
For those of you that don't want to go to all of the trouble (not that it's very hard for a sysadmin like myself, but obviously for the author of this article, it was), simply buy a copy of StarOffice 6.0. StarOffice 6.0 comes with a great database program called Adabase that has GUI table design, supports ODBC and MySQL very well. As a matter of fact, from a default install of StarOffice I was able to talk to the MySQL database running on another box immediately just by specifying hostname, port, database name, and username and password for the database.
Worked like a charm, pulled up all my tables in that database and let me add tables, drop tables, add rows, modify rows, delete rows, and basically do anything you could do in a SQL query.
This is really the difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice. Sure they're based on the same code, but Sun has taken the time to make it as easy to use as the MS Office products, and they don't expect their users to be system administrators.
Even if you are a system administrator, how much is your time worth? If it takes 1 or 2 hours of your time to get OpenOffice working properly, wouldn't it be better to just do a 1 hour consulting job instead and buy a copy of StarOffice?
This is something I used to never think about when I was younger, I'd simply spend hours hacking together all the free tools I can find and doing anything to keep from wasting money on something I knew I could get for free. Of course now that I'm getting a little more experienced and older I realize that time is money and that I should probably just buy something that only costs $60 and save myself an hour of my time.
They are talking about battery backup for RAID cache, not UPS. Most high end RAID systems have a battery on the raid controller that keeps current flowing to the cache memory in the event of a main power failure. Then, after you power the box back on, it will flush the cache to disk and you won't lose any data that was written before the power went out. On large hardware RAID configurations this is significant because the cache memory can be 512MB, 1GB, or even several gigabytes. Some high end systems actually have large enough batteries to keep the disks spinning long enough to flush the cache immediately.
Correct, but if you use your debit card like a Visa (signature transaction instead of PIN) then the 3% charge still applies.
I'm lucky enough to have a free checking account at USBank that pays me interest on my balance (no minimum balance), as well as 1% cash back on my credit purchases. So, I try to use the Visa check card for everything... Last year I got $180 back in December. Not bad at all...
Yes, but every merchant you purchase from pays your bank an average of 3% transaction fee, as opposed to a debit (PIN at POS) transaction which doesn't have a fee.
Consumers end up paying for the 3% transaction fees in the end, because the merchant will simply increase the price of merchandise to accomodate it. This is especially true on low-margin items such as groceries and computer parts. Ever notice how a lot of mail order computer resellers you see in Computer Shopper magazine used to say "add 3% to all credit card orders"?
The way I see it there are basically two ways to look at this:
1. The U.S. government has been taking huge political contributions from Microsoft and has had to sit down and listen to their lobbyists give these speeches about how Free Software=Communism and by supporting Free Software you're supporting communism. Thus, they are taking some kind of moral stand because as you know the primary mission of our country is to promote democracy and capitalism throughout the world. I'm saying this all half tongue-in-cheek, but it could be possible that they actually bought into some of the OSS=Communism rhetoric.
2. The more likely probability is that software sold by Microsoft and other closed-source US software companies is billions of dollars in exports from our country. By promoting commercial products that are closed-source in nature our economy gets a boost from all of the international commerce and money coming in from other developing nations. Although this sounds like a shitty way to run a country, this is the way the world works. We have to convince/prod/force other countries to buy our poorly manufactured Microsoft software because it helps our economy...
Oh well. Guess we should all just drop out of the international financial system all together and go back to bartering for goods... Once you work out all of the delivery and manufacturing headaches bartering is actually a very good economic system.
Hey, in the immortal words of BT, one of the worlds best musicians (IMNSHO):
"Midi is a protocol from 1981. The only thing I want from 1981 is a pair of parachute pants."
But in all seriousness, MIDI is not widely used in a lot of modern studios. Most digital musicians prefer sample accurate equipment because MIDI always has small amounts unpredictable latency.
I know Slashdot is typically very Tivo friendly, and I personally think Tivo makes a great product, but nobody seems to have noticed that Dish networks won the CES best of show award for their new HDTV PVR, the Dish PVR-921.
Please, mod this guy down... There is no such thing as a BIOS (TSOP) upgrade for the Xbox from software. If there was, you wouldn't need a modchip, you could just flash whatever BIOS you wanted on your TSOP and play backups of games.
XBox Live updates your dashboard to a newer version when you install it. The only thing that would prevent this from working properly is if you modded your XBox and replaced your dashboard with something else.
This law is a token offering at best, and was probably written by the Cable monopolies and pushed through congress with heavy greasing of the palms of various legislators... Here is the relevant section:
"8) Buy-through of other tiers prohibited
(A) Prohibition
A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis."
The reason why it doesn't work is because every single channel on their digital lineup is only offered in a tier! They've effectively blocked the intent of the law by only offering channel groups in tiers and not offering any single channel ala-carte. I suggest everyone reading this please contact your local Public Utilities Commision (PUC) and voice your protest to this. Cable rates are getting ridiculous and I am frankly fed up with having to pay for 20 different QVC shopping channels just to get a few Discovery channels, TLC, and the History channel that I watch... The PUC is about the only organization in your community that has a chance to enforce this law.
First of all, I have a small MIDI studio at home. Linux is nowhere near being able to provide support for most of the DAW (digital audio workstation) hardware that's available. Not to mention that I can't get Cubase or any of the other major DAW software on Linux. I'm a Unix Sysadmin (Solaris) for my day job, and I use Solaris 9 at work. BTW, as soon as someone can make a decent linux distro for Solaris with 64-bit userland support I will happily switch my workstation to Linux. As far as a desktop OS goes, Linux is light years ahead of the commercial unices in terms of useability.
Windows XP seems to have resolved most of the so-called reliability issues that older versions used to have, primarily by using signed device drivers. I frequently have 60-90 days of uptime on my main digital audio workstation (AMD Athlon XP 1700 w/ IDE RAID), and I only need to reboot whenever MS releases one of their "critical security updates". I haven't seen a BSOD for over a year now.
Having said all that, I would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if Steinberg, the manufacturers of Cubase, ported it, and if the newer firewire digital i/o devices got linux driver support.
Infiniband will be the replacement for the PCI bus. For more information, see the Infiniband Trade Association. It offers speeds of 2.5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 30 Gbps. It also allows multiple hosts to connect to an "Infiniband Fabric", where they can share I/O devices. Don't expect to see desktop implementations for 5 years or so, but server implementations will be out in the next few months in the form of a PCI-to-Infiniband adapter.
This is already being done by eDonkey2000. EDonkey is a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing systems where you download small blocks of each file from many different clients, thereby speeding up the transfer, and there are already 32-bit CRC checks done on each block, so if I'm receiving a file from 5 different clients at once, and one of them is attempting to "poison" the file by injecting bad blocks, my client automatically compares the CRC of the blocks I'm receiving from the poisoning client and knows they are bad, and rejects them. If one client sends me too many bad blocks, my client will automatically disconnect from them and look elsewhere for the file. It really is a superior system and works for any type of file, but especially well on large files such as ISOs and DIVX movies. Try it out.
Take 2 chicken breasts, boil them in water until cooked thoroughly. Drain water, dice into small, bite size chicken pieces. It's ok to kind of shred it into chicken fragments. Add 1 stick of Philly Cream Cheese, 1 16oz. bottle of your favorite salsa. Cook over low heat until cream cheese melts. Stir frequently. Serve with tortilla chips.
This makes the best salsa you'll ever taste in your life, plus it only takes about 15 minutes. Perfect for the LAN party, or just for munchies for any occasion. Try it, it's really simple to make and tastes awesome. All of my friends that have tried it begged me to tell them how to make it, even the ones that don't know how to cook.
This article is pretty much an advertisement masquerading as journalism. I know this because we have these Motorola Timeport pagers at my work and every day I get these MSNBC market updates sponsored by Volvo... At the bottom of each message it says:
"Shouldn't the car of your dreams be the car in your driveway? Visit www.volvocars.com today."
Not correct. Actually, the Moxi includes a built in 802.11a access point and allows you to have up to 3 remote set top boxes that receive digital video and audio wirelessly. Talk about a cool concept. Not only that, it also accepts an ethernet feed from your broadband provider and acts as a cable/dsl router, provides NAT, and rebroadcasts your internet signal in glorious 54 megabits throughout your humble abode...
I used to work for an internet service provider a few years ago and we decided to provide the governor with free service, as a kind of publicity thing. Well, since I was the head network/router guy they sent me out to his house to install an ISDN router. It was a great experience. I got to meet the governor in person; he was wearing levis and a t-shirt, not what I expected, but he is a down-to-earth guy. His house is normal sized (probably 2500 sq. feet) but there are security cameras all around it and a 100 ft. tall microwave tower that beams the signals from the cameras down to the capitol building so his staff can watch out for him.
Anyways, a lot of politicians know the concepts behind technology, but not very many of them actually use it hands on. You'd be surprised how many have staffers that read their email for them. Governor Leavitt is not one of those. He had a nice computer, a PDA, a Nokia flip/phone/computer like in that James Bond movie. He really gets into technology, even the geeky side of it. He asked me what I studied in school, I said "Computer Science", and we immediately began a discussion about distance learning. Keep in mind this is back in 1997. He told me about the distance learning initiatives that he is sponsoring with the University of Utah. Some of the things they are doing are years ahead of any other state in the country. I was personally surprised, but his basic philosophy is that technology will make the world a better place to live and I was very impressed.
After spending about a half hour setting up his ISDN router, I spent a couple of hours just surfing the web with him and showing him sites that had broadband content. I was thoroughly impressed.
The equipment is provided by Hybrid Networks, based out of Cupertino California. The Cybermanager has to run on a Sun Sparcstation, their code is proprietary closed source and only runs on Sun Sparc. As someone who's been to Hybrid training and participated in the rollout of many of these same wireless installations I know that this is the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Any chance you have a link to that story on NPR? I would love to hear that part of the show.
Thanks!
You know, the problem with RAID is that people tend to make general statements based on their own personal observation. You get a lot of "Software RAID sucks because it's slow" statements, and you also get things like "RAID 5 sucks", or "RAID 5 r0x0rz!"
The thing to keep in mind is that these things are very subjective based on what your application is. Let's take for example RAID 5. If your application involves mostly reads, and very few writes, RAID 5 will perform very well because it has the ability to read in parallel across all the disks in the volume. However, if your application is very write intensive, or even worse, if your application does read-modify-writes, RAID 5 is a very bad choice because the parity has to be calculated or re-calculated for every write and you take a big CPU hit.
My favorite type of RAID for any generic situation where I don't know too much about what the activity will be like is RAID 0+1. The cost can be prohibitive for smaller projects, but you get all the performance benefits of striping, plus the redundancy of mirrors. Just keep in mind that the more you know about the application that is primarily running on the box, the easier it is to make an intelligent choice about what type of RAID to use.
For those of you that don't want to go to all of the trouble (not that it's very hard for a sysadmin like myself, but obviously for the author of this article, it was), simply buy a copy of StarOffice 6.0. StarOffice 6.0 comes with a great database program called Adabase that has GUI table design, supports ODBC and MySQL very well. As a matter of fact, from a default install of StarOffice I was able to talk to the MySQL database running on another box immediately just by specifying hostname, port, database name, and username and password for the database.
Worked like a charm, pulled up all my tables in that database and let me add tables, drop tables, add rows, modify rows, delete rows, and basically do anything you could do in a SQL query.
This is really the difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice. Sure they're based on the same code, but Sun has taken the time to make it as easy to use as the MS Office products, and they don't expect their users to be system administrators.
Even if you are a system administrator, how much is your time worth? If it takes 1 or 2 hours of your time to get OpenOffice working properly, wouldn't it be better to just do a 1 hour consulting job instead and buy a copy of StarOffice?
This is something I used to never think about when I was younger, I'd simply spend hours hacking together all the free tools I can find and doing anything to keep from wasting money on something I knew I could get for free. Of course now that I'm getting a little more experienced and older I realize that time is money and that I should probably just buy something that only costs $60 and save myself an hour of my time.
They are talking about battery backup for RAID cache, not UPS. Most high end RAID systems have a battery on the raid controller that keeps current flowing to the cache memory in the event of a main power failure. Then, after you power the box back on, it will flush the cache to disk and you won't lose any data that was written before the power went out. On large hardware RAID configurations this is significant because the cache memory can be 512MB, 1GB, or even several gigabytes. Some high end systems actually have large enough batteries to keep the disks spinning long enough to flush the cache immediately.
Correct, but if you use your debit card like a Visa (signature transaction instead of PIN) then the 3% charge still applies.
I'm lucky enough to have a free checking account at USBank that pays me interest on my balance (no minimum balance), as well as 1% cash back on my credit purchases. So, I try to use the Visa check card for everything... Last year I got $180 back in December. Not bad at all...
Yes, but every merchant you purchase from pays your bank an average of 3% transaction fee, as opposed to a debit (PIN at POS) transaction which doesn't have a fee.
Consumers end up paying for the 3% transaction fees in the end, because the merchant will simply increase the price of merchandise to accomodate it. This is especially true on low-margin items such as groceries and computer parts. Ever notice how a lot of mail order computer resellers you see in Computer Shopper magazine used to say "add 3% to all credit card orders"?
The way I see it there are basically two ways to look at this:
1. The U.S. government has been taking huge political contributions from Microsoft and has had to sit down and listen to their lobbyists give these speeches about how Free Software=Communism and by supporting Free Software you're supporting communism. Thus, they are taking some kind of moral stand because as you know the primary mission of our country is to promote democracy and capitalism throughout the world. I'm saying this all half tongue-in-cheek, but it could be possible that they actually bought into some of the OSS=Communism rhetoric.
2. The more likely probability is that software sold by Microsoft and other closed-source US software companies is billions of dollars in exports from our country. By promoting commercial products that are closed-source in nature our economy gets a boost from all of the international commerce and money coming in from other developing nations. Although this sounds like a shitty way to run a country, this is the way the world works. We have to convince/prod/force other countries to buy our poorly manufactured Microsoft software because it helps our economy...
Oh well. Guess we should all just drop out of the international financial system all together and go back to bartering for goods... Once you work out all of the delivery and manufacturing headaches bartering is actually a very good economic system.
Hey, in the immortal words of BT, one of the worlds best musicians (IMNSHO):
"Midi is a protocol from 1981. The only thing I want from 1981 is a pair of parachute pants."
But in all seriousness, MIDI is not widely used in a lot of modern studios. Most digital musicians prefer sample accurate equipment because MIDI always has small amounts unpredictable latency.
Here is a picture of the new DirecTV version of the box.
I know Slashdot is typically very Tivo friendly, and I personally think Tivo makes a great product, but nobody seems to have noticed that Dish networks won the CES best of show award for their new HDTV PVR, the Dish PVR-921.
Read about it here.
It looks like Dish will beat Tivo to the market, as they are entering beta immediately and planning for an April or May release date.
Here is an article in the San Jose Mercury News about it.
Religious leader to teenage boy: "Son, do you have any problems with masturbation?"
Teenage boy: "No, works just fine for me!"
Please, mod this guy down... There is no such thing as a BIOS (TSOP) upgrade for the Xbox from software. If there was, you wouldn't need a modchip, you could just flash whatever BIOS you wanted on your TSOP and play backups of games.
XBox Live updates your dashboard to a newer version when you install it. The only thing that would prevent this from working properly is if you modded your XBox and replaced your dashboard with something else.
This law is a token offering at best, and was probably written by the Cable monopolies and pushed through congress with heavy greasing of the palms of various legislators... Here is the relevant section:
"8) Buy-through of other tiers prohibited
(A) Prohibition
A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis."
The reason why it doesn't work is because every single channel on their digital lineup is only offered in a tier! They've effectively blocked the intent of the law by only offering channel groups in tiers and not offering any single channel ala-carte. I suggest everyone reading this please contact your local Public Utilities Commision (PUC) and voice your protest to this. Cable rates are getting ridiculous and I am frankly fed up with having to pay for 20 different QVC shopping channels just to get a few Discovery channels, TLC, and the History channel that I watch... The PUC is about the only organization in your community that has a chance to enforce this law.
I already have this identical setup at my house, and it works like a dream.
Here are the components:
XBox - $199
Matrix modchip - $50
802.11b access point running in wireless client mode - $99
Now I can stream JPEG photos, MP3s, MPEG, AVI, and Divx movies to my television from a RelaX media server running Linux.
Xbox Media Player 2.0 is GPL, gives you a great user interface and is very user friendly. If you haven't checked it out, please do so.
First of all, I have a small MIDI studio at home. Linux is nowhere near being able to provide support for most of the DAW (digital audio workstation) hardware that's available. Not to mention that I can't get Cubase or any of the other major DAW software on Linux. I'm a Unix Sysadmin (Solaris) for my day job, and I use Solaris 9 at work. BTW, as soon as someone can make a decent linux distro for Solaris with 64-bit userland support I will happily switch my workstation to Linux. As far as a desktop OS goes, Linux is light years ahead of the commercial unices in terms of useability.
Windows XP seems to have resolved most of the so-called reliability issues that older versions used to have, primarily by using signed device drivers. I frequently have 60-90 days of uptime on my main digital audio workstation (AMD Athlon XP 1700 w/ IDE RAID), and I only need to reboot whenever MS releases one of their "critical security updates". I haven't seen a BSOD for over a year now.
Having said all that, I would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if Steinberg, the manufacturers of Cubase, ported it, and if the newer firewire digital i/o devices got linux driver support.
Infiniband will be the replacement for the PCI bus. For more information, see the Infiniband Trade Association. It offers speeds of 2.5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 30 Gbps. It also allows multiple hosts to connect to an "Infiniband Fabric", where they can share I/O devices. Don't expect to see desktop implementations for 5 years or so, but server implementations will be out in the next few months in the form of a PCI-to-Infiniband adapter.
This is already being done by eDonkey2000. EDonkey is a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing systems where you download small blocks of each file from many different clients, thereby speeding up the transfer, and there are already 32-bit CRC checks done on each block, so if I'm receiving a file from 5 different clients at once, and one of them is attempting to "poison" the file by injecting bad blocks, my client automatically compares the CRC of the blocks I'm receiving from the poisoning client and knows they are bad, and rejects them. If one client sends me too many bad blocks, my client will automatically disconnect from them and look elsewhere for the file. It really is a superior system and works for any type of file, but especially well on large files such as ISOs and DIVX movies. Try it out.
Take 2 chicken breasts, boil them in water until cooked thoroughly.
Drain water, dice into small, bite size chicken pieces. It's ok to kind of shred it into chicken fragments.
Add 1 stick of Philly Cream Cheese, 1 16oz. bottle of your favorite salsa.
Cook over low heat until cream cheese melts. Stir frequently.
Serve with tortilla chips.
This makes the best salsa you'll ever taste in your life, plus it only takes about 15 minutes. Perfect for the LAN party, or just for munchies for any occasion. Try it, it's really simple to make and tastes awesome. All of my friends that have tried it begged me to tell them how to make it, even the ones that don't know how to cook.
This article is pretty much an advertisement masquerading as journalism. I know this because we have these Motorola Timeport pagers at my work and every day I get these MSNBC market updates sponsored by Volvo... At the bottom of each message it says:
"Shouldn't the car of your dreams be the car in your driveway? Visit www.volvocars.com today."
Just goes to show that money can buy journalism.
Not correct. Actually, the Moxi includes a built in 802.11a access point and allows you to have up to 3 remote set top boxes that receive digital video and audio wirelessly. Talk about a cool concept. Not only that, it also accepts an ethernet feed from your broadband provider and acts as a cable/dsl router, provides NAT, and rebroadcasts your internet signal in glorious 54 megabits throughout your humble abode...
Check the Moxi website at http://www.moxi.com
Would that be such a bad thing, really?
I used to work for an internet service provider a few years ago and we decided to provide the governor with free service, as a kind of publicity thing. Well, since I was the head network/router guy they sent me out to his house to install an ISDN router. It was a great experience. I got to meet the governor in person; he was wearing levis and a t-shirt, not what I expected, but he is a down-to-earth guy. His house is normal sized (probably 2500 sq. feet) but there are security cameras all around it and a 100 ft. tall microwave tower that beams the signals from the cameras down to the capitol building so his staff can watch out for him.
Anyways, a lot of politicians know the concepts behind technology, but not very many of them actually use it hands on. You'd be surprised how many have staffers that read their email for them. Governor Leavitt is not one of those. He had a nice computer, a PDA, a Nokia flip/phone/computer like in that James Bond movie. He really gets into technology, even the geeky side of it. He asked me what I studied in school, I said "Computer Science", and we immediately began a discussion about distance learning. Keep in mind this is back in 1997. He told me about the distance learning initiatives that he is sponsoring with the University of Utah. Some of the things they are doing are years ahead of any other state in the country. I was personally surprised, but his basic philosophy is that technology will make the world a better place to live and I was very impressed.
After spending about a half hour setting up his ISDN router, I spent a couple of hours just surfing the web with him and showing him sites that had broadband content. I was thoroughly impressed.
The equipment is provided by Hybrid Networks, based out of Cupertino California. The Cybermanager has to run on a Sun Sparcstation, their code is proprietary closed source and only runs on Sun Sparc. As someone who's been to Hybrid training and participated in the rollout of many of these same wireless installations I know that this is the case.
More Technical Specs can be found here.