This seems to be an exact use case for the X4500-type system, which as far as I'm aware is pretty unique.
Indeed. Sun is on a density kick. Check out the X4600, which does for processing power what the X4500 did for storage.
In both cases, there actually are competing products that are sort of the same. The most conspicuous difference is that the Sun versions cram the whole caboodle into 4 rack units per system, about half the space required by their competitors.
The point of these systems is that they take up less expensive rack space than equivalent competitors. They're also "greener": if you broke all that storage and computing power down into less dense systems, you'd need a lot more electricity to run them and keep them cool. That not only saves money, it gives the owner the ability to claim they're working on the carbon footprint.
That's not very specific. "Sun Fire" is a brand that for a while got applied to all of Sun's rack-mount servers (except for NEBS-compliant servers, which were and are called "Sun Netra"). A little confusing, of course, which is why they've started calling new SPARC boxes "Sun SPARC Enterprise" to differentiate them from those mangy x64 "Sun Fire" systems. Except that there are still SPARC systems called "Sun Fire", so I guess the confusion factor didn't get any better...
Anyway, the specific server being used here is the Sun Firex X4500, a system with no less than 48 1 TB disks in a 4U space. Notice that this model is EOLed; presumably iarchive got a deal on some remaindered machines.
The shipping container is something we've seen before.
Went to see Coraline last weekend. Good movie, but the best thing I can say about its use of 3D is that it didn't get in the way. Mostly.
All these idiots who keep pushing 3D media at us. WE DON'T WANT IT. It doesn't make anything "more real". Quite the opposite. Since you can never do it completely right with anything resembling current media, you end up with a lot of half-baked complications (the "foreground" objects in Coraline often look like cardboard cutouts) that make it that much harder to immerse yourself in the movie, the GUI, or whatever.
(When you invent a completely new medium in which 3D makes sense, like those "holodecks" on Star Trek, get back to us.)
And as for GUIs, they make interaction more complicated. The whole point of GUIs is to make interaction simpler. If I want to keep track of a lot of extraneous detail, I'll use a CLI.
I write hardware manuals for a living, and there are some people at our company who want us to start embedding 3D interactive models in the PDF versions of our manuals. If I thought this proposal was going to go anywhere (we don't even have enough resources to do more basic authoring easily) I'd be very noisily opposing it. Lots of extra work, all to make using our manuals a little more difficult. No thanks.
That's a standard goof for the kind of SF Heinlein wrote during his early and middle years. He always assumed that the future would feature technology that was fundamentally the same as what he was familiar with. That allowed him to engage a lot of technically minded readers, because his stories were full of details that made sense to him. The problem with that, of course, is that technology does change, and quickly. Nowadays, technology seems to change much faster than science, while Heinlein's stories basically assumed the opposite!
The misuse of details is also pretty common in all fiction featuring computers. I recently read a detective novel in which a computer "expert" explains that the Internet consists of "layered telnet links". It's funny that writers will ask for expert guidance on medicine, science, business, etc., but not for computers. Or maybe they do, and they end up with one of those "experts" who don't really know as much as they think they do.
I think you overestimate your own relevance. Hackers love Linux because, well, it's easy to hack. But how many computer users are hackers?
Netbooks sold with Linux preinstalled might change this equation. But in the meantime, most Linux systems are servers. And the growth of Linux in the server market is driven by for-profit companies: Red Hat, Novell, Cannonical. Plus the hardware companies (I work for one) that sell servers that run their products.
What kind of school is this where kids are treated as criminals?
A pretty standard one, from what I've seen. A few years back, a high school principal decreed that girls must not wear thongs to dances. Where she got in trouble was inspecting all their underwear personally.
(I hope that was a case of controlfreakism and not the obvious alternative.)
Fact is, schools have always been this way. You have a lot of poorly paid functionaries in charge of maintaining a lot of hormone-driven, self-assertive adolescents. And blame these functionaries if anything goes wrong (like a drug overdose). The result is predictable.
Ironically, schools are (or were) largely repsonsible for pushing ritalyn on kids because it makes them easier to manage.
Correction: because they think it will make kids easier to manage.
I'm speaking from personal experience here, because I have ADHD. Ritalin is effective for my condition because of the so-called paradoxical effect: it stimulates most people but calms people with ADHD. (That's oversimplifing, but it will do.) So if you give it to a kid who isn't hyperactive...
Just how much medical knowledge do you expect school administrators to have, that they could judge which drugs are ok for which students?
We're not talking medical school here. We're talking an extremely common drug that a child can actually walk into a store and buy without getting parental permission. If the clerk at Safeway doesn't need "medical knowledge" before deciding to let the kid have the pills, why does the school administrator?
Yes, I know, these were prescription strength. That just means that one pill was equivalent to two OTC pills.
So stupid ideas are fine as long as people don't apply them? Small problem: people do apply them. Always. Let's take responsibility for our collective stupidity for once, instead of hiding behind hypocritical self-righteousness.
I think a better comparison would be a helicopter that can also drive down the street. As if the convenience of not having to switch to a car outweighed the risk of accidentally decapitating pedestrians.
Just because the student was 13 doesnt mean she doesnt have constitutional rights.
I don't disagree with that. But all this focus on legalities (I'm tempted to go into my usual "slashdotters think too highly of their own legal expertise" rant) kind of misses the most important point: these school administrators humiliated a 13-year-old, all in the name of verifying that she wasn't "smuggling" some pills that aren't even for a drug of abuse! Rather than parsing the fine points of case law, we should be asking what kind of mentality makes this acceptable, legal or not.
"Newspeak?" The first time I heard the term "Zero Tolerance" was from that bastion of old-fashioned values, the Reagan Administration.
You're taking my argument and using it to say exactly the opposite of what I'm saying: that's it's all the fault of those stupid school district hacks. Frankly, your willingness to offload responsibility by pointing fingers shows exactly the same kind of stupidity.
Not to defend the school district (total assholes), but they're not the problem The problem is the "zero tolerance" mentality. It says that there are no gray areas, no innocent people who are only technically breaking the rules.
In this case, "zero tolerance" means that the mere suspicion the student was hiding prescription strength ibuprofen (I guess OTC ibuprofen is OK!) is enough to justify the total humiliation of a student.
And the school district bozos are only following society in general. Lately, we've been sneering at Dubya for saying "I don't do nuance." But he's only following a path we've been running down for a couple of decades now. Zero Tolerance for Drugs! Zero Tolerance for Terrorism! Zero tolerance for Opponents of the Permanent Majority!
That last one has finally convinced most people that we've gone too far. (Though Rush Limbaugh doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.) None too soon, either.
Wasn't there something like 4000 deaths in a few weeks in Victorian-era England due to coal smoke and a bad inversion?
I think you're confusing the Victorian coal smoke problem with the killer smog during the 1950s. Though all those coal fires must have put out enough particulate to kill a lot of people, I doubt if there are any hard numbers.
An ironic detail: London used to be famous for its fog. A good way to add atmosphere to movies and fiction. There's even a brand of raincoat (American, of course) called "London Fog". Alas, the London Fog is no more: it was caused by that same particulate that killed so many people.
Anti SCoC: "The Obama administration has clearly dropped the ball by allowing AIG to pay bonuses. However we will support a bill to tax them back."
Pro SoS: "The Obama administration's proposal to tax the AIG bonuses is just a cynical ploy to deflect attention from the question of when they learned about these bonuses."
I would guess this is partially to allocate coding time to different platforms, and partially to give the consoles an exclusive over the PC market for a while.
UCapcom has no reason to hold back any port of the game except the extra cost of developing it. Not being able to release it at the same time as the other versions actually hurts sales. The PC version doesn't compete with the console version — if you have a console, you buy the console version, even if you have a PC. But if you only have a PC, the buzz around the initial release is going to have a lot less influence six months down the road.
Developing multiple ports of any software product is expensive. Doing all your ports at once is really expensive (especially for games), because you have to hire a lot of people with redundant skill sets. If the RE franchise weren't already established as a really profitable entity, they'd probably do it one platform at a time. And the PC version is a particular pain, which the user gets some glimpse of when he tries to work around the various glitches that seem to occur on his particular system and nobody else's.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be an exact use case for the X4500-type system, which as far as I'm aware is pretty unique.
Indeed. Sun is on a density kick. Check out the X4600, which does for processing power what the X4500 did for storage.
In both cases, there actually are competing products that are sort of the same. The most conspicuous difference is that the Sun versions cram the whole caboodle into 4 rack units per system, about half the space required by their competitors.
More absurdly-dense Sun products:
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4240/
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4140/
The point of these systems is that they take up less expensive rack space than equivalent competitors. They're also "greener": if you broke all that storage and computing power down into less dense systems, you'd need a lot more electricity to run them and keep them cool. That not only saves money, it gives the owner the ability to claim they're working on the carbon footprint.
The new data center houses 63 Sun Fire servers
That's not very specific. "Sun Fire" is a brand that for a while got applied to all of Sun's rack-mount servers (except for NEBS-compliant servers, which were and are called "Sun Netra"). A little confusing, of course, which is why they've started calling new SPARC boxes "Sun SPARC Enterprise" to differentiate them from those mangy x64 "Sun Fire" systems. Except that there are still SPARC systems called "Sun Fire", so I guess the confusion factor didn't get any better...
Anyway, the specific server being used here is the Sun Firex X4500, a system with no less than 48 1 TB disks in a 4U space. Notice that this model is EOLed; presumably iarchive got a deal on some remaindered machines.
The shipping container is something we've seen before.
Yes.
Went to see Coraline last weekend. Good movie, but the best thing I can say about its use of 3D is that it didn't get in the way. Mostly.
All these idiots who keep pushing 3D media at us. WE DON'T WANT IT. It doesn't make anything "more real". Quite the opposite. Since you can never do it completely right with anything resembling current media, you end up with a lot of half-baked complications (the "foreground" objects in Coraline often look like cardboard cutouts) that make it that much harder to immerse yourself in the movie, the GUI, or whatever.
(When you invent a completely new medium in which 3D makes sense, like those "holodecks" on Star Trek, get back to us.)
And as for GUIs, they make interaction more complicated. The whole point of GUIs is to make interaction simpler. If I want to keep track of a lot of extraneous detail, I'll use a CLI.
I write hardware manuals for a living, and there are some people at our company who want us to start embedding 3D interactive models in the PDF versions of our manuals. If I thought this proposal was going to go anywhere (we don't even have enough resources to do more basic authoring easily) I'd be very noisily opposing it. Lots of extra work, all to make using our manuals a little more difficult. No thanks.
That's a standard goof for the kind of SF Heinlein wrote during his early and middle years. He always assumed that the future would feature technology that was fundamentally the same as what he was familiar with. That allowed him to engage a lot of technically minded readers, because his stories were full of details that made sense to him. The problem with that, of course, is that technology does change, and quickly. Nowadays, technology seems to change much faster than science, while Heinlein's stories basically assumed the opposite!
The misuse of details is also pretty common in all fiction featuring computers. I recently read a detective novel in which a computer "expert" explains that the Internet consists of "layered telnet links". It's funny that writers will ask for expert guidance on medicine, science, business, etc., but not for computers. Or maybe they do, and they end up with one of those "experts" who don't really know as much as they think they do.
I think you overestimate your own relevance. Hackers love Linux because, well, it's easy to hack. But how many computer users are hackers?
Netbooks sold with Linux preinstalled might change this equation. But in the meantime, most Linux systems are servers. And the growth of Linux in the server market is driven by for-profit companies: Red Hat, Novell, Cannonical. Plus the hardware companies (I work for one) that sell servers that run their products.
Also, Canonical, like Red Hat, offers both desktop and server versions of its distro. Care to guess which will turn a profit first?
I don't think you can separate a simplistic mentality from simplistic actions.
A flying car that can only fly directly over roads 3 inches off the ground.
At least she had a real knife. One kid got in trouble over a toy gun. A two-inch toy gun!
What kind of school is this where kids are treated as criminals?
A pretty standard one, from what I've seen. A few years back, a high school principal decreed that girls must not wear thongs to dances. Where she got in trouble was inspecting all their underwear personally.
(I hope that was a case of controlfreakism and not the obvious alternative.)
Fact is, schools have always been this way. You have a lot of poorly paid functionaries in charge of maintaining a lot of hormone-driven, self-assertive adolescents. And blame these functionaries if anything goes wrong (like a drug overdose). The result is predictable.
Ironically, schools are (or were) largely repsonsible for pushing ritalyn on kids because it makes them easier to manage.
Correction: because they think it will make kids easier to manage.
I'm speaking from personal experience here, because I have ADHD. Ritalin is effective for my condition because of the so-called paradoxical effect: it stimulates most people but calms people with ADHD. (That's oversimplifing, but it will do.) So if you give it to a kid who isn't hyperactive...
Just how much medical knowledge do you expect school administrators to have, that they could judge which drugs are ok for which students?
We're not talking medical school here. We're talking an extremely common drug that a child can actually walk into a store and buy without getting parental permission. If the clerk at Safeway doesn't need "medical knowledge" before deciding to let the kid have the pills, why does the school administrator?
Yes, I know, these were prescription strength. That just means that one pill was equivalent to two OTC pills.
So stupid ideas are fine as long as people don't apply them? Small problem: people do apply them. Always. Let's take responsibility for our collective stupidity for once, instead of hiding behind hypocritical self-righteousness.
I think a better comparison would be a helicopter that can also drive down the street. As if the convenience of not having to switch to a car outweighed the risk of accidentally decapitating pedestrians.
Just because the student was 13 doesnt mean she doesnt have constitutional rights.
I don't disagree with that. But all this focus on legalities (I'm tempted to go into my usual "slashdotters think too highly of their own legal expertise" rant) kind of misses the most important point: these school administrators humiliated a 13-year-old, all in the name of verifying that she wasn't "smuggling" some pills that aren't even for a drug of abuse! Rather than parsing the fine points of case law, we should be asking what kind of mentality makes this acceptable, legal or not.
"Newspeak?" The first time I heard the term "Zero Tolerance" was from that bastion of old-fashioned values, the Reagan Administration.
You're taking my argument and using it to say exactly the opposite of what I'm saying: that's it's all the fault of those stupid school district hacks. Frankly, your willingness to offload responsibility by pointing fingers shows exactly the same kind of stupidity.
Not to defend the school district (total assholes), but they're not the problem The problem is the "zero tolerance" mentality. It says that there are no gray areas, no innocent people who are only technically breaking the rules.
In this case, "zero tolerance" means that the mere suspicion the student was hiding prescription strength ibuprofen (I guess OTC ibuprofen is OK!) is enough to justify the total humiliation of a student.
And the school district bozos are only following society in general. Lately, we've been sneering at Dubya for saying "I don't do nuance." But he's only following a path we've been running down for a couple of decades now. Zero Tolerance for Drugs! Zero Tolerance for Terrorism! Zero tolerance for Opponents of the Permanent Majority!
That last one has finally convinced most people that we've gone too far. (Though Rush Limbaugh doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.) None too soon, either.
Wasn't there something like 4000 deaths in a few weeks in Victorian-era England due to coal smoke and a bad inversion?
I think you're confusing the Victorian coal smoke problem with the killer smog during the 1950s. Though all those coal fires must have put out enough particulate to kill a lot of people, I doubt if there are any hard numbers.
An ironic detail: London used to be famous for its fog. A good way to add atmosphere to movies and fiction. There's even a brand of raincoat (American, of course) called "London Fog". Alas, the London Fog is no more: it was caused by that same particulate that killed so many people.
They're not "pointing out" anything. They're making allegations, devoid of evidence and deliberately vague.
Anti SCoC: "The Obama administration has clearly dropped the ball by allowing AIG to pay bonuses. However we will support a bill to tax them back."
Pro SoS: "The Obama administration's proposal to tax the AIG bonuses is just a cynical ploy to deflect attention from the question of when they learned about these bonuses."
The OED (a British dictionary, I believe) says otherwise.
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/display/50002101?keytype=ref&ijkey=BW.ifJFCYzhE6
It also says it's an American coinage.
Of course I know what "Whisky Tango Foxtrot" means. Somebody even wrote a book about it.
I'd flame you for not getting my joke, except I have to admit the joke was pretty lame.
I would guess this is partially to allocate coding time to different platforms, and partially to give the consoles an exclusive over the PC market for a while.
UCapcom has no reason to hold back any port of the game except the extra cost of developing it. Not being able to release it at the same time as the other versions actually hurts sales. The PC version doesn't compete with the console version — if you have a console, you buy the console version, even if you have a PC. But if you only have a PC, the buzz around the initial release is going to have a lot less influence six months down the road.
Developing multiple ports of any software product is expensive. Doing all your ports at once is really expensive (especially for games), because you have to hire a lot of people with redundant skill sets. If the RE franchise weren't already established as a really profitable entity, they'd probably do it one platform at a time. And the PC version is a particular pain, which the user gets some glimpse of when he tries to work around the various glitches that seem to occur on his particular system and nobody else's.
Testing, <abbr>testing</abbr>. Nope doesn't work. Slash strips them out.
I know that WTF stand for Whisky Tango Foxtrot, but I don't know what it means.