Indeed, anarchism has fared significantly worse than communism in the putting-food-on-the-table stakes. And communism gave us the forced starvation of tens of millions of people.
I'm sure that even here on Slashdot there are some people who aren't running huge multi-threaded database applications on their desktop machines, and for them, RAID-0 probably isn't going to help much.
But for the majority of us normal people who are running huge multi-threaded database applications on their desktop machines, RAID-0 is much nicer than having to manually allocate all of your database extents across your disks. Of course, RAID-10 would be better, but that would involve spending money...
Pretty much our only hope is a general anti-American sentiment by our leftish government.
The real problem is that it's irrational anti-American sentiment. They don't dislike America for any specific reason; they dislike America because disliking America is what they do.
If they had a rational agenda against - for example - foolish patent laws and the DMCA, then I might support them, but they don't. (Same with the left here in Australia, and in Europe, and in America itself.)
But yes, wherever else your politicial leanings may take you, lobby against the DMCA as hard as you can. It's simply a lousy law.
Not recently, but costs have plummeted since the Southern Cross Cable came online. And retail bandwidth charges have hardly moved.
But it's certainly true that international phone calls are quite a bit cheaper than long distance calls within Australia. At least one company tried routing their Australian traffic via L.A. before Telstra put a stop to it.
Of the big 4, Telstra are evil and Optus are incompetent. AAPT seem to be mostly reasonable. I haven't dealt with either Ozemail or MCI for years, so I have no idea what they're like now.
I've worked in the Telco and ISP industry in Australia for nearly ten years now, and whenever you start to wonder why something is so expensive, I can guarantee that most of the money is ending up in Telstra's pockets. They are incredibly inefficient, and still manage to make immense profits. They do this by ripping off everyone else.
Isn't it ridiculously expensive there compared to North America?
Most ISPs in Australia are thieves. Some, I suppose, are morons who are allowing upstream thieves to rip them off.
I pay $120 per month for a 1.5Mbit ADSL with unlimited downloads. That's ridiculously expensive, and it's the best deal available in Australia.
Telstra/BigPond has something they call "unlimited", but after 10GB of downloads in a month they cut your speed to 64k. Or as an option, you can pay $150 for 1.5Mbit including the first 20GB each month... And another $150 per GB after that.
My ISP has plans which have volume-based charges, and they charge $3 per GB. A couple of other companies charge $4 to $5 per GB. So Telstra (and many other ISPs here) are charging up to 30 to 50 times as much!
As I said, thieves.
I have a web server hosted in the U.S. with 500GB of bandwidth per month. You can imagine how much that would cost down here.
But any company that size will have major political infighting - in this case, between Sony Electronics and Sony Music. From the customers point of view, the result is that Sony appears to be schizophrenic.
I once read an article wherein a senior Sony exec was quoted as saying "Sony Electronics hates Sony Music". I can't find the article online, but this should surprise no-one... Well, except that it was said out loud.
When was the last time you saw Intel or AMD delaying a product by months, and causing problems for suppliers?
Prescott?
Or if I wanted to be really mean I could mention Itanium. That was, what, 5 years late?
AMD tends to be very conservative with its timetables, but even they have experienced problems.
As for IBM, they've run into a wall at 90nm. But so has everyone else. Expect to see lots of announcements of dual-core (and multi-core) chips, and larger caches, but no great increases in clockspeed in the next few years.
There are huge problems with current leakage at the 90nm node. So much so that power requirements have been trending upwards for a given design and clockspeed, for the first time ever. Major major major problem.
This is from Bernie Meyerson, IBM's CTO:
Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice. Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue.
I note the article is about Intel being unable to supply processors on the promised schedule. Yes, I realise that there's AMD around as well, but I don't see how switching to x86 will solve Apple's problems.
The basic issue with Motorola was that Moto weren't interested in developing new high-end CPUs. Apart from Apple, they were only targeting the embedded market.
IBM, on the other hand, has to develop new high-end chips, because they are required for their P-series (RS/6000) and I-series (AS/400) servers. In fact, IBM has already produced the chip that the next-generation PowerPC will be based on - the Power5. (G5 Macs use the PowerPC 970, which is a cut-down version of the Power4.)
The issue with higher clock speeds - whether from IBM or Intel - seems to be an industry-wide problem with the 90nm process. It's so bad that IBM has announced that "scaling is dead". See also the scary power dissipation of the new Pentium 4 chips.
Paul McGeough got the wool pulled over his eyes good and hard, and the Sydney Morning Herald published it without doing any checking whatsoever.
If they had done the slightest bit of research, they would have found dozens of similar rumours circulating Iraq wherein Allawi does in various bad guys, often catching them bloody handed at their crimes.
McGeoughs evidence? A couple of guys told him. Their stories didn't match - neither one could even remember which day it was supposed to have happened, even though it was less than two weeks previously that they had supposedly seen their Prime Minister personally execute several prisoners.
But that wasn't a problem for McGeough or the Herald.
The reason that you didn't see this in the US media is that unlike the Sydney Morning Herald, they retain some standards.
Did you even read the article you linked to?
There are many versions of the story on the street. In one, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is driving through downtown Baghdad and sees a frail old man being confronted by three armed men attempting to steal his vehicle.
Allawi leaps out of his car and shoots dead the would-be carjackers.
In another, Allawi is in a Baghdad jail where he interviews suspects, hears their confessions, declares "they deserve to die" and shoots them on the spot.
A third version sets the scene of his violent retribution in the Shiite city of Najaf, which has been racked by violence in recent months.
On Friday I was faced with having half a terabyte of data here which really needed to be over there. In a hurry. Unfortunately, the link between here and there was only 100Mbit, so people simply had to wait.
With 10GE it would have taken a few minutes rather than overnight. Or alternately, no time at all, because no-one would care anymore where the data was.
No problem. If all you want is 1.5TB like the IBM autoloader, you can have four-way mirroring. So as long as you don't lose more than three copies of any one disk, you're fine.
When I was in the market for high-end storage, we would always have two separate arrays attached, and use software mirrong across them. Of course, we also backed up to tape *and* replicated our data to a remote site in real time.
Well, if that's the best anyone can do refuting Hitchens' critique, then Hitchens has won hands down. The entire "Shoveling Coal" article is merely a poorly assembled collection of insults, most of them very much wide of the mark.
I'm glad that I don't have to pay to see Fabrication 9/11. I wasn't going to, anyway, but now I can spend my money on Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man instead, and know that (a) I will get facts and (b) the money won't go to a hypocrite who is willing to say anything at all to line his own pockets.
Also, it's great to see the look on the bookstore owner's face when you ask for it.
Seething mass of demented lefty anger arriving in 5... 4... 3...
Hard drive capacity *was* doubling every 12 months for about five years, but that seems to have stopped now. We were due 160GB platters at the start of this year. Still waiting. Hear me, Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu, Western Digital? STILL WAITING!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Your absolutely right I guess, but just replace the examples with something that is more sound.
Such as?
Indeed, anarchism has fared significantly worse than communism in the putting-food-on-the-table stakes. And communism gave us the forced starvation of tens of millions of people.
Everything you said is in perfect agreement with everything I've said.
Our current prime minister was a protester of the Vietnam war. I think that says alot.
Exactly.
I'm sure that even here on Slashdot there are some people who aren't running huge multi-threaded database applications on their desktop machines, and for them, RAID-0 probably isn't going to help much.
But for the majority of us normal people who are running huge multi-threaded database applications on their desktop machines, RAID-0 is much nicer than having to manually allocate all of your database extents across your disks. Of course, RAID-10 would be better, but that would involve spending money...
Pretty much our only hope is a general anti-American sentiment by our leftish government.
The real problem is that it's irrational anti-American sentiment. They don't dislike America for any specific reason; they dislike America because disliking America is what they do.
If they had a rational agenda against - for example - foolish patent laws and the DMCA, then I might support them, but they don't. (Same with the left here in Australia, and in Europe, and in America itself.)
But yes, wherever else your politicial leanings may take you, lobby against the DMCA as hard as you can. It's simply a lousy law.
Have you priced a transit link to the US ?
Not recently, but costs have plummeted since the Southern Cross Cable came online. And retail bandwidth charges have hardly moved.
But it's certainly true that international phone calls are quite a bit cheaper than long distance calls within Australia. At least one company tried routing their Australian traffic via L.A. before Telstra put a stop to it.
Of the big 4, Telstra are evil and Optus are incompetent. AAPT seem to be mostly reasonable. I haven't dealt with either Ozemail or MCI for years, so I have no idea what they're like now.
I've worked in the Telco and ISP industry in Australia for nearly ten years now, and whenever you start to wonder why something is so expensive, I can guarantee that most of the money is ending up in Telstra's pockets. They are incredibly inefficient, and still manage to make immense profits. They do this by ripping off everyone else.
Isn't it ridiculously expensive there compared to North America?
Most ISPs in Australia are thieves. Some, I suppose, are morons who are allowing upstream thieves to rip them off.
I pay $120 per month for a 1.5Mbit ADSL with unlimited downloads. That's ridiculously expensive, and it's the best deal available in Australia.
Telstra/BigPond has something they call "unlimited", but after 10GB of downloads in a month they cut your speed to 64k. Or as an option, you can pay $150 for 1.5Mbit including the first 20GB each month... And another $150 per GB after that.
My ISP has plans which have volume-based charges, and they charge $3 per GB. A couple of other companies charge $4 to $5 per GB. So Telstra (and many other ISPs here) are charging up to 30 to 50 times as much!
As I said, thieves.
I have a web server hosted in the U.S. with 500GB of bandwidth per month. You can imagine how much that would cost down here.
The PDP-10, which preceded the VAX (and had a 36-bit word size) is considered by many to have been a mainframe.
Nice operating system you have here. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it...
But any company that size will have major political infighting - in this case, between Sony Electronics and Sony Music. From the customers point of view, the result is that Sony appears to be schizophrenic.
I once read an article wherein a senior Sony exec was quoted as saying "Sony Electronics hates Sony Music". I can't find the article online, but this should surprise no-one... Well, except that it was said out loud.
When was the last time you saw Intel or AMD delaying a product by months, and causing problems for suppliers?
Prescott?
Or if I wanted to be really mean I could mention Itanium. That was, what, 5 years late?
AMD tends to be very conservative with its timetables, but even they have experienced problems.
As for IBM, they've run into a wall at 90nm. But so has everyone else. Expect to see lots of announcements of dual-core (and multi-core) chips, and larger caches, but no great increases in clockspeed in the next few years.
This is from Bernie Meyerson, IBM's CTO:
I note the article is about Intel being unable to supply processors on the promised schedule. Yes, I realise that there's AMD around as well, but I don't see how switching to x86 will solve Apple's problems.
The basic issue with Motorola was that Moto weren't interested in developing new high-end CPUs. Apart from Apple, they were only targeting the embedded market.
IBM, on the other hand, has to develop new high-end chips, because they are required for their P-series (RS/6000) and I-series (AS/400) servers. In fact, IBM has already produced the chip that the next-generation PowerPC will be based on - the Power5. (G5 Macs use the PowerPC 970, which is a cut-down version of the Power4.)
The issue with higher clock speeds - whether from IBM or Intel - seems to be an industry-wide problem with the 90nm process. It's so bad that IBM has announced that "scaling is dead". See also the scary power dissipation of the new Pentium 4 chips.
We don't have any idea how AMD is doing with 90nm, because they haven't shipped anything at 90nm yet.
SOI (Silicon on Insulator) yes, and that seems to have given them a bit of a boost, but no 90nm.
Paul McGeough got the wool pulled over his eyes good and hard, and the Sydney Morning Herald published it without doing any checking whatsoever.
If they had done the slightest bit of research, they would have found dozens of similar rumours circulating Iraq wherein Allawi does in various bad guys, often catching them bloody handed at their crimes.
McGeoughs evidence? A couple of guys told him. Their stories didn't match - neither one could even remember which day it was supposed to have happened, even though it was less than two weeks previously that they had supposedly seen their Prime Minister personally execute several prisoners.
But that wasn't a problem for McGeough or the Herald.
The reason that you didn't see this in the US media is that unlike the Sydney Morning Herald, they retain some standards.
Did you even read the article you linked to?
Gets around a bit, does Allawi.With 10GE it would have taken a few minutes rather than overnight. Or alternately, no time at all, because no-one would care anymore where the data was.
Lots of money? Uh, you've never met a physicist, have you?
Damn, my mod points have expired. Someone mod mbauser2 up.
Yes, NNTP is the absolute friggin' obvious solution to the problem. Tested, scalable, works. already in place, widely supported. Grrr. Grrr, I say!
Yep, good old New York Times, never missing a chance to sneer at popular culture.
After all, if people actually like it, it can't possibly be good.
No problem. If all you want is 1.5TB like the IBM autoloader, you can have four-way mirroring. So as long as you don't lose more than three copies of any one disk, you're fine.
When I was in the market for high-end storage, we would always have two separate arrays attached, and use software mirrong across them. Of course, we also backed up to tape *and* replicated our data to a remote site in real time.
Oddly enough, I have three fully licensed copies of Photoshop. (Long story.)
Err... And I don't use it. Mostly I use Fireworks these days. Or Gimp when I need to do something simple and I'm on Linux.
I'm glad that I don't have to pay to see Fabrication 9/11. I wasn't going to, anyway, but now I can spend my money on Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man instead, and know that (a) I will get facts and (b) the money won't go to a hypocrite who is willing to say anything at all to line his own pockets.
Also, it's great to see the look on the bookstore owner's face when you ask for it.
Seething mass of demented lefty anger arriving in 5... 4... 3...
Bah! NNTP or nothing!
Hard drive capacity *was* doubling every 12 months for about five years, but that seems to have stopped now. We were due 160GB platters at the start of this year. Still waiting. Hear me, Maxtor, Seagate, Fujitsu, Western Digital? STILL WAITING!!!
:(
And now Moore's Law has died too