Can you name the truck with four wheel drive, Smells like a steak, and seats thirty five? Canyonero! Canyonero! Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down It's the country-fried truck endorsed by a clown Canyonero... Canyonerooo! (Krusty)Hey hey! The federal highway commision has ruled the Canyonero unsafe for highway or city driving. Canyonerooo! Twelve yards long, two lanes wide, sixty-five tons of American pride! Canyonero... Canyonerooo! Top o' the line in utility sports, unexplained fires are a matter for the courts! Canyonero... Canyonerooo! She blinds everybody with her super-high beams, she's a squirrel-squashin', deer-smackin', drivin' machine! Canyonero... Canyonerooo! Yah! Yah, Canyonero! Yah! Whoa, Canyonero! Whoa!
The perfect geek fish are Betas... cool looking, easy to take care of, and a geek can spend from $10/month to easily $500/month of them! What's more geekier than a fish that can breathe air? A dog with gills??
I hope someone with gobs of real ethernet experience and know-how can post some meaty tech specs and info for the 99% of those of us here that only know the basics. I've run Cat5, I have a couple switches and an old hub. I know that Cat5e and Cat6 are better than Cat 5. But that's about all I know, aside from a few brief searches on Google for some gigabit info. Perhaps someone can clear up some of the many misconceptions, myths, and marketing BS by explaining the current state of ethernet in terms the average Slashdotter can understand and respect!?
I have not seen a 48-port GigE switch either, though Extreme does make a 32-port GigE switch (total of 32 10/100/1000BaseTX copper or 1000BaseSX fiber ports).
Second, you need to account for the fact that these macs are not fast. 6100's are barely quick enough to call "slow".
I ran MkLinux on a few 6100 (60 and 66 MHz PPC 601) and 8100 (80, 100, and 110 MHz 601) machines several years ago. Totally unaccelerated X11 was a pain at times, but overall performance was fine... more than enough for a general use screw-around box, especially with lightweight applications. You're not going to want to run GNOME or KDE, but if you want a decent box to learn basic linux/un*x, X11, and networking, it'll suit you fine. As an NFS, web (NCSA HTTPd and later, Apache), bind, and sendmail server, our 6100/60 worked like a charm, and was significantly faster than our Pentium 133 box running NT 3.5 and several commercial daemons. For light graphical and non graphical tasks, a PPC 601 is more than fast enough. There are still many servers still in use running on that CPU, and much slower CPUs as well. NeXTstations and NeXTcubes (Motorola 68030 and 68040 CPUs) running NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP as well as 68030/68040 Macs running A/UX are still common in academia for moderate-use servers in situations where their existing setup "just works". Granted, if such machines were to start grinding on PHP or complex perl scripts, the load average alone would cause a buffer overflow... Note that if you want to use the on-board ethernet of the 6100/7100/8100 machines, you'll need an AAUI->RJ45 transceiver... a little $15 dongle to convert Apple AUI to the more common RJ45. Ditto for Apple's 68040-based Centris and Quadra machines.
From what I understand, this $400 gizmo is geared towards homes and businesses that mostly surf and download on multiple computers. Unless some black magic is used, no *single* download or upload will exceed the thruput provided by the faster of the two internet connections. It's simply not possible... the router has been assigned two IP addresses from two totally different ISPs that don't know anything about each other. It is similar to a single threaded application running on a dual CPU computer -- the application will only take advantage of one CPU. However, if there are more threads running, they'll be balanced across the two. Same goes for this router. If you have multiple downloads running, they'll be spread across the two internet connections at the router. It may not be the end-all solution, but it sure would be handy for a download-happy household.
To do what you are referring to would require a professional router (Cisco, Juniper, linux box with fancy software, etc) with BGP support and ISP(s) that are willing to help you. To use more than one ISP will require your own IP block assigned from the ARIN (not from your ISP's own block of addresses). Work with both of your ISPs to configure routing tables and away you go. Sprintlink, Worldcom, AT&T, Cable&Wireless are very helpful in configuring such a multihomed setup. Below is a link to some info from Sprintlink: http://www.sprint.net/faq/bgp.html
The ARSC is well known for ordering their Crays in custom colors (usually white with black trim). They have some photos of their machine rooms on their website... the only white SV1 I've ever seen! Few other unnaturally white machines too!
I'm guessing 10GbitE will be used for inter-switch and inter-router connections long before it gets to the desktop. Ever looked at performance comparisions between 100BT and 1000BT between just two PCs? A couple years ago the difference wasn't much... NICs weren't efficent enough and the host PC's didn't have enough CPU power to handle that many tiny packets per second. Jumboframes and faster CPUs have helped a lot since then, but we're still a long ways away from even 90% utilization between two PCs with 1000BT. And here we are with 10GigE, with 10x as many packets per second.
I'm I the only one that thinks the only efficent 10GigE NICs are going to be PCI-X cards with an onboard 2.6 GHz P4 co-processor and 512 MB of buffer?
My building recently had new copper installed. Previously had Cat5 (great for 100BaseT) but was upgraded to cable meeting the specs for the latest Cat6 draft spec (rather than just Cat5e).
Is 1000BaseTX the end of the line for copper? Or will there eventually by a 10000BaseT that will run on Cat6?
SGI's follow-through in recent years has been pretty good. The NT and IA-32 Linux experiments didn't go too well, but they've been supporting IRIX on MIPS better than I could have ever asked.
The funky SGI building on the corner of Shoreline and 101 is *old*. Drive down the street a ways towards their funky newer buildings... built just a couple years ago.
I think part of the reason that small towns in North Dakota can get DSL..... Senator Byron Dorgan is now a pretty powerful figure.....
Could be. But another big plus from what I understand (and as another poster pointed out) the numerous clued small telephone companies and rural telephone co-ops have used their heads and offered some pretty decent DSL solutions. Then there's also the whole "what else are you going to do while snowed in" thing!:-)
There needs to be a statewide solution, and we've not had much luck finding one yet. Any ideas?
You may want to email Colin Anderson (colin at beyondboxes dot com), he's my former roommate and seems to be on top of many ND broadband deployments. At one point he became so fed up that he had a T1 installed to his rural farmhouse for several different projects!
I'm going to zip him an email too, letting him know about this thread. Not sure what he's up to these days, but it's worth a shot.
In my PC, I tend to upgrade at least one significant component every two or three months. What's interesting about the computer industry today is that often times, by the time I've done some research and talked with users of some new component, there's already a cheaper/better/faster replacement!
Not that I'm complaing... it's just so different from the original Pentium days. Heck, that Pentium 60 lasted me for almost two years! My gosh how times have changed... my 1 GHz PIII was quite outdated just eight months after it was built... and ancient a few months after that. Today, overclocked, it's my wife's MSIE/Office box.
What a crazy industry... I wonder where it's headed next?!
I have several friends from the upper midwest (North Dakota and South Dakota). While dialup is available everywhere and DSL within 18K - 30K feet from small towns, there really is no broadband solution for the fairly large number of homes located 15 - 30 miles from a town with any services. Some areas are more than 50 miles from anything modern. Montana and Wyoming are even worse.
What would be *really* helpful would be some solar+battery powered WiFi repeaters located thruout the countryside (perhaps bolted on the side of analog cell towers?) to serve these areas.
We often laugh about the upgrade craze, but I think we all feel the upgrade urge, especially when running games at high resolutions and also simply using several of the latest and greatest desktop apps and diversions. The slowest machine still in use in our home is my wife's ancient 1 GHz PIII overclocked to 1.33 GHz. A hellofa machine in it's day, but even with 512 MB of PC133, Internet Explorer will chug pretty hard when loading a page using one or more newer plugins. A fresh reinstall of XP and installation of the latest revs of her apps and plugins speeds things up a good deal, but still nowhere near as fast as our faster machines... and it just goes downhill from there with the 5 month cycle of "Windows Rot".
And me... well, as I keep upgrading, I get spoiled and used to things happening faster and faster with each new machine. I'm sure someday I'll look back and laugh about the days when a kernel compile took more than a few seconds!
There are two very different sides to modern weather modeling and display...
1) The acutal hardcore computation (done on huge, non-graphical SGI, HP, and Cray boxes with more GB of ram than I have harddrive space).
2) The on-air graphics boxes that make pretty pictures for television and website weather.
The first requires insane amounts of CPU, large caches, lots of ram, and gobs of thruput between CPUs. The second requires graphics hardware capable of generating television-resolution static images or a few frame of animation from pre-processed data.
Both areas are constantly growing, especially the back-end number crunching. On air graphics continue to become more complex, especially with 3D cloud displays that some weather reports show. But even the SGI O2, introduced in 1996 and ending production in 2002, is more than powerful enough for this task. The Weather Channel is working on putting together a solution to eventually replace their 5000 rackmount O2s located across the country in cable headends generating on-air graphics ("and now your local forecast"). They're also getting ready for HD televison resolutions... something the O2 cannot handle (the Octane can, but that'll cost ya $40K). As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.
Exactly how powerfull do you think an o2 is compared to an 8500 and a 2 ghz x86 chip for what the weather channel is doing?
On-air weather graphics don't take too much horsepower to produce... especially when "your local weather" is only show about once every eight minutes... much of which is repeat data.
The Weather Channel buys a great deal of model data from various providers and also grinds its own data with several gigantic SGI Origin servers and a big HP box. The rackmount headend machines simply display the data that's been sent to them. Sure, there's some rendering work done before display, but it's pretty basic.
SGI recently announced the end of production of the O2 and O2+.... and there really is no replacement. It only makes sense that The Weather Channel is seeking alternatives, especially cheaper alternatives. Their current system works quite well and they're still upgrading much older machines (the old white text on blue background and low-res non-animated map displays) and constantly tweaking software.
The Weather Channel's current headend rackmount machines are based on the Silicon Graphics O2. SGI has announced the End Of Production of the O2 and O2+, they will no longer be made as of November 2002. There is no similar replacement. The O2 was/is one hell of a video box... it's performance and capabilites were great for NTSC/PAL resolution video... that's what the box was designed for. But alas, there really is no replacement... The closest thing is the Octane2, but it's almost 3x the size... 2-4x the cost, uses about 3x the power.... and the only video option available for Octane is very expensive as it does mutliple channels of HD and SD video. There really is no O2 replacement.
I'm sure the Weather Channel has bought a few extras (they've already bought thousands) but is seeking some newer/better/cheaper alternative. Because the station, it's workstations, headends, and its network is mostly Unix based (mostly SGI IRIX, some HP-UX), Linux makes sense... especially with some of SGI's opensource offerings (XFS, Failsafe, and others).
What's interesting is that The Weather Channel continues to buy big SGI Origin servers and wiz-bang workstations (Octane2, Fuel) for internal use. It's also interesting to note that they are still in the process of upgrading many of the older headends to the latest (O2 based) hardware and newer software revisions.
I don't think they'll be switching really soon... but it is very cool to see that it's going to be a friendly community effort.
I see that their onboard computer and even their dashboard is controlled by LabView. Any idea the specs are on the computer that's driving this? I'm curious as to the CPU/Ram and power supply choices.
Slashdot Mirror
(Kissing my Karma goodbye...)
Can you name the truck with four wheel drive,
Smells like a steak, and seats thirty five?
Canyonero! Canyonero!
Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down
It's the country-fried truck endorsed by a clown
Canyonero...
Canyonerooo!
(Krusty)Hey hey!
The federal highway commision has ruled the Canyonero unsafe for highway or city driving.
Canyonerooo!
Twelve yards long, two lanes wide, sixty-five tons of American pride!
Canyonero...
Canyonerooo!
Top o' the line in utility sports,
unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!
Canyonero...
Canyonerooo!
She blinds everybody with her super-high beams,
she's a squirrel-squashin', deer-smackin', drivin' machine!
Canyonero...
Canyonerooo!
Yah!
Yah, Canyonero!
Yah!
Whoa, Canyonero!
Whoa!
... you have 5 MacQuariums!
"Macintosh" (128K/512K)
Mac Plus
Mac SE
Mac Classic
Mac Color Classic
iMac
Ok, so I'm still working on the iMacQuarium! I'd also like to find an old Macintosh TV (the black Mac LC 520 with built-in TV tuner).
The perfect geek fish are Betas... cool looking, easy to take care of, and a geek can spend from $10/month to easily $500/month of them! What's more geekier than a fish that can breathe air? A dog with gills??
s /b etta_more.htm
http://www.aquariumfish.net/catalog_pages/betta
http://beta-fighting-fish.com/
Plus, any true geek will love the name!
I hope someone with gobs of real ethernet experience and know-how can post some meaty tech specs and info for the 99% of those of us here that only know the basics. I've run Cat5, I have a couple switches and an old hub. I know that Cat5e and Cat6 are better than Cat 5. But that's about all I know, aside from a few brief searches on Google for some gigabit info. Perhaps someone can clear up some of the many misconceptions, myths, and marketing BS by explaining the current state of ethernet in terms the average Slashdotter can understand and respect!?
I have not seen a 48-port GigE switch either, though Extreme does make a 32-port GigE switch (total of 32 10/100/1000BaseTX copper or 1000BaseSX fiber ports).
s /summit7i.asp
http://www.extremenetworks.com/products/datasheet
64 Gbps switching fabric and 48 Mpps switching performance... you're not going to find this at CompUSA and I think the list price would scare me!
Second, you need to account for the fact that these macs are not fast. 6100's are barely quick enough to call "slow".
I ran MkLinux on a few 6100 (60 and 66 MHz PPC 601) and 8100 (80, 100, and 110 MHz 601) machines several years ago. Totally unaccelerated X11 was a pain at times, but overall performance was fine... more than enough for a general use screw-around box, especially with lightweight applications. You're not going to want to run GNOME or KDE, but if you want a decent box to learn basic linux/un*x, X11, and networking, it'll suit you fine.
As an NFS, web (NCSA HTTPd and later, Apache), bind, and sendmail server, our 6100/60 worked like a charm, and was significantly faster than our Pentium 133 box running NT 3.5 and several commercial daemons.
For light graphical and non graphical tasks, a PPC 601 is more than fast enough. There are still many servers still in use running on that CPU, and much slower CPUs as well. NeXTstations and NeXTcubes (Motorola 68030 and 68040 CPUs) running NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP as well as 68030/68040 Macs running A/UX are still common in academia for moderate-use servers in situations where their existing setup "just works". Granted, if such machines were to start grinding on PHP or complex perl scripts, the load average alone would cause a buffer overflow...
Note that if you want to use the on-board ethernet of the 6100/7100/8100 machines, you'll need an AAUI->RJ45 transceiver... a little $15 dongle to convert Apple AUI to the more common RJ45. Ditto for Apple's 68040-based Centris and Quadra machines.
From what I understand, this $400 gizmo is geared towards homes and businesses that mostly surf and download on multiple computers. Unless some black magic is used, no *single* download or upload will exceed the thruput provided by the faster of the two internet connections. It's simply not possible... the router has been assigned two IP addresses from two totally different ISPs that don't know anything about each other. It is similar to a single threaded application running on a dual CPU computer -- the application will only take advantage of one CPU. However, if there are more threads running, they'll be balanced across the two. Same goes for this router. If you have multiple downloads running, they'll be spread across the two internet connections at the router. It may not be the end-all solution, but it sure would be handy for a download-happy household.
To do what you are referring to would require a professional router (Cisco, Juniper, linux box with fancy software, etc) with BGP support and ISP(s) that are willing to help you. To use more than one ISP will require your own IP block assigned from the ARIN (not from your ISP's own block of addresses). Work with both of your ISPs to configure routing tables and away you go. Sprintlink, Worldcom, AT&T, Cable&Wireless are very helpful in configuring such a multihomed setup. Below is a link to some info from Sprintlink:
http://www.sprint.net/faq/bgp.html
You forgot the old lady closing line when the (friendly) toy robot comes into the room!
Isn't the TV named after the bright star, Vega?
I think it's just a stylized double "V"
Maybe I'm wrong...
The ARSC is well known for ordering their Crays in custom colors (usually white with black trim). They have some photos of their machine rooms on their website... the only white SV1 I've ever seen! Few other unnaturally white machines too!
Check out the ARSC's website... they have some pretty snazzy hardware! SV1ex, few other Crays, several big SGIs...
.edu had that kind of money!
Wish my
I'm guessing 10GbitE will be used for inter-switch and inter-router connections long before it gets to the desktop. Ever looked at performance comparisions between 100BT and 1000BT between just two PCs? A couple years ago the difference wasn't much... NICs weren't efficent enough and the host PC's didn't have enough CPU power to handle that many tiny packets per second. Jumboframes and faster CPUs have helped a lot since then, but we're still a long ways away from even 90% utilization between two PCs with 1000BT. And here we are with 10GigE, with 10x as many packets per second.
I'm I the only one that thinks the only efficent 10GigE NICs are going to be PCI-X cards with an onboard 2.6 GHz P4 co-processor and 512 MB of buffer?
My building recently had new copper installed. Previously had Cat5 (great for 100BaseT) but was upgraded to cable meeting the specs for the latest Cat6 draft spec (rather than just Cat5e).
Is 1000BaseTX the end of the line for copper? Or will there eventually by a 10000BaseT that will run on Cat6?
SGI's follow-through in recent years has been pretty good. The NT and IA-32 Linux experiments didn't go too well, but they've been supporting IRIX on MIPS better than I could have ever asked.
The funky SGI building on the corner of Shoreline and 101 is *old*. Drive down the street a ways towards their funky newer buildings... built just a couple years ago.
I think part of the reason that small towns in North Dakota can get DSL..... Senator Byron Dorgan is now a pretty powerful figure.....
:-)
Could be. But another big plus from what I understand (and as another poster pointed out) the numerous clued small telephone companies and rural telephone co-ops have used their heads and offered some pretty decent DSL solutions. Then there's also the whole "what else are you going to do while snowed in" thing!
But as yet another poster mentioned, there are still many problems to overcome.
Either way, it looks as though things are slowly improving.
There needs to be a statewide solution, and we've not had much luck finding one yet. Any ideas?
You may want to email Colin Anderson (colin at beyondboxes dot com), he's my former roommate and seems to be on top of many ND broadband deployments. At one point he became so fed up that he had a T1 installed to his rural farmhouse for several different projects!
I'm going to zip him an email too, letting him know about this thread. Not sure what he's up to these days, but it's worth a shot.
In my PC, I tend to upgrade at least one significant component every two or three months. What's interesting about the computer industry today is that often times, by the time I've done some research and talked with users of some new component, there's already a cheaper/better/faster replacement!
Not that I'm complaing... it's just so different from the original Pentium days. Heck, that Pentium 60 lasted me for almost two years! My gosh how times have changed... my 1 GHz PIII was quite outdated just eight months after it was built... and ancient a few months after that. Today, overclocked, it's my wife's MSIE/Office box.
What a crazy industry... I wonder where it's headed next?!
I have several friends from the upper midwest (North Dakota and South Dakota). While dialup is available everywhere and DSL within 18K - 30K feet from small towns, there really is no broadband solution for the fairly large number of homes located 15 - 30 miles from a town with any services. Some areas are more than 50 miles from anything modern. Montana and Wyoming are even worse.
What would be *really* helpful would be some solar+battery powered WiFi repeaters located thruout the countryside (perhaps bolted on the side of analog cell towers?) to serve these areas.
We often laugh about the upgrade craze, but I think we all feel the upgrade urge, especially when running games at high resolutions and also simply using several of the latest and greatest desktop apps and diversions. The slowest machine still in use in our home is my wife's ancient 1 GHz PIII overclocked to 1.33 GHz. A hellofa machine in it's day, but even with 512 MB of PC133, Internet Explorer will chug pretty hard when loading a page using one or more newer plugins. A fresh reinstall of XP and installation of the latest revs of her apps and plugins speeds things up a good deal, but still nowhere near as fast as our faster machines... and it just goes downhill from there with the 5 month cycle of "Windows Rot".
And me... well, as I keep upgrading, I get spoiled and used to things happening faster and faster with each new machine. I'm sure someday I'll look back and laugh about the days when a kernel compile took more than a few seconds!
Have you been to weather.com lately? :)
Oh dear lord!
I haven't been there in ages (I use www.nws.noaa.gov and Kavouras via DTN)....
It's almost as bad as Netscape.com!
Check this out, it's very interesting.
c al/index.html
u ne/navy_weather.html
http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/dec/fleet_numeri
http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/jun/weather/
http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2001/j
There are two very different sides to modern weather modeling and display...
1) The acutal hardcore computation (done on huge, non-graphical SGI, HP, and Cray boxes with more GB of ram than I have harddrive space).
2) The on-air graphics boxes that make pretty pictures for television and website weather.
The first requires insane amounts of CPU, large caches, lots of ram, and gobs of thruput between CPUs. The second requires graphics hardware capable of generating television-resolution static images or a few frame of animation from pre-processed data.
Both areas are constantly growing, especially the back-end number crunching. On air graphics continue to become more complex, especially with 3D cloud displays that some weather reports show. But even the SGI O2, introduced in 1996 and ending production in 2002, is more than powerful enough for this task. The Weather Channel is working on putting together a solution to eventually replace their 5000 rackmount O2s located across the country in cable headends generating on-air graphics ("and now your local forecast"). They're also getting ready for HD televison resolutions... something the O2 cannot handle (the Octane can, but that'll cost ya $40K). As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.
Exactly how powerfull do you think an o2 is compared to an 8500 and a 2 ghz x86 chip for what the weather channel is doing?
On-air weather graphics don't take too much horsepower to produce... especially when "your local weather" is only show about once every eight minutes... much of which is repeat data.
The Weather Channel buys a great deal of model data from various providers and also grinds its own data with several gigantic SGI Origin servers and a big HP box. The rackmount headend machines simply display the data that's been sent to them. Sure, there's some rendering work done before display, but it's pretty basic.
SGI recently announced the end of production of the O2 and O2+.... and there really is no replacement. It only makes sense that The Weather Channel is seeking alternatives, especially cheaper alternatives. Their current system works quite well and they're still upgrading much older machines (the old white text on blue background and low-res non-animated map displays) and constantly tweaking software.
A few points to add to this excellent post...
The Weather Channel's current headend rackmount machines are based on the Silicon Graphics O2. SGI has announced the End Of Production of the O2 and O2+, they will no longer be made as of November 2002. There is no similar replacement. The O2 was/is one hell of a video box... it's performance and capabilites were great for NTSC/PAL resolution video... that's what the box was designed for. But alas, there really is no replacement... The closest thing is the Octane2, but it's almost 3x the size... 2-4x the cost, uses about 3x the power.... and the only video option available for Octane is very expensive as it does mutliple channels of HD and SD video. There really is no O2 replacement.
I'm sure the Weather Channel has bought a few extras (they've already bought thousands) but is seeking some newer/better/cheaper alternative. Because the station, it's workstations, headends, and its network is mostly Unix based (mostly SGI IRIX, some HP-UX), Linux makes sense... especially with some of SGI's opensource offerings (XFS, Failsafe, and others).
What's interesting is that The Weather Channel continues to buy big SGI Origin servers and wiz-bang workstations (Octane2, Fuel) for internal use. It's also interesting to note that they are still in the process of upgrading many of the older headends to the latest (O2 based) hardware and newer software revisions.
I don't think they'll be switching really soon... but it is very cool to see that it's going to be a friendly community effort.
I see that their onboard computer and even their dashboard is controlled by LabView. Any idea the specs are on the computer that's driving this? I'm curious as to the CPU/Ram and power supply choices.