Well, that's what all the characters said, but what, exactly, did he do to demonstrate such power? He didn't help the Fellowship at all - you could make a better argument for Boromir being more powerful, since he actually accomplished something. Don't get me wrong: I love Tolkien, but the entire Bombadil thing was just bad storywriting.
Actually, that helps the metaphor. The Tea Party, if you listen to the news, is powerful and will probably wipe out at least one of the major parties, if not upset the entire two-party system. But from what I see, they haven't done anything. They're just the same Republican party, except without the now-damaged brand identity.
If any LOTR character is a good match for the Tea Party, I would have to go with Tom Bombadil. Completely fucking nuts, make absolutely no sense, have an annoying tendency to speak in song, and (hopefully) forgotten by the end of the first book.
Sure, IT pros are probably more likely to want IPv6. But most of the survey questions were action ones - what have you done about IPv6? When a quarter say they've already started rolling out internal IPv6, and 13% more say they're done, that says a lot. The numbers are similar for web servers with public IPv6 - 20% have started, 13% are already done. It would appear that this is a technical problem that can be explained to the bosses easily: "I'm sorry, but the Internet is full. We need to upgrade to the new Internet if we want to add more stuff. We'll still work with the old Internet, so we won't lose customers, and we're only going to need to replace ___, ___ and maybe ___."
Try Internet Explorer - they just got around to supporting SVG, they should be occupied for at least a few years adding full CSS3 support and such before they start adding built-in email clients or PDF readers.
Mozilla's just competing with everyone else. Everyone's doing stupid shit like this - Chrome has built in Flash, PDF, and all that, plus the Chrome OS thing; Opera has more integrated software than anyone needs (seriously, don't they have a web server in the browser now?); even Internet Explorer is doing more and more besides "browse the internet".
Ironically, the best "pure" web browser may soon be the Steam integrated browser. It's designed to run while the computer is already under extremely heavy load, so it's resource-light; it's WebKit-based so it's relatively standards-compliant and fast; it's not a major priority for the developers, so they don't have any impetus to add stupid stuff like RSS feeds or themes or whatnot. The only thing you've objected to that it has is the themes support - only in a roundabout way, since you have to apply a skin to the entire Steam app.
I've always wanted to see benchmarks comparing that browser to others in the same category - I'm sure there's plenty of other apps with integrated web browsers that you could compare it to. Hell, benchmark it against Real Browsers under load - boot up Crysis, alt-tab back into Firefox, and see how badly it performs when 99% of the computer is being used rendering self-shadowed anti-aliased penumbras on dense jungle foliage. Might make for a decent/. article, even.
I use 2 major Java apps. The first is Minecraft, aka "game that became insanely popular for a few months but has kinda faded away now". The second is GanntProject, a free and open-source project-management tool.
Other than those two, the only Java apps I have are the ones I wrote for a college class, which I haven't touched since I took said class.
Yeah. Total capacity: 126GB. Total usable in current config: 72GB. Hey, at least I stuck Linux on it. The rate I'm doing that, pretty soon the only Windows-running server on the network will be the domain controller.
Probably. My knowledge of RAID is mostly theoretical at this point - I got to set up a server last week, used a five-disk RAID 5 plus two hot spares. Nothing's failed yet, although I expect to experience a failure within a year, as the disks are over a decade old.
Well, let's do some math now. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports gives you... two gigabits of data. That's equal to a single PCIe 1.0 link, or half the bandwidth of a PCIe 2.0 link. Those are x1 links, I remind you - the smallest and slowest PCIe gets. That's also just a bit under the 2400 mbit/s of SATA 2 (or SAS, if you like). And very few hard drives can sustain 2400mbit/s of read - even a 10krpm drive will barely reach half of that. So even accounting for system-generated traffic (RAID maintenance, etc.), you've got more than enough bandwidth internally for the network to be the bottleneck.
And you seem to have missed the point - you don't even NEED high performance. They're offsite backups - why do you need high I/O performance for something that gets written to once a week or so (daily, at most), and gets accessed even less frequently. Taking your "it could be performing better so why don't they ___" logic to its absurd extremes, they should be stuffing them with SSDs (gotta get that seek time down!), and it should all be on 40GBASE-X Ethernet, if not a nice thick Infiniband. Oh, and they absolutely need quadruple Xeons in each, otherwise you'd be bottlenecking that poor processor, and we can't have that.
Because, for this project, raw storage capacity is much more important than performance. Besides, they claim their main bottleneck is the gigabit Ethernet interface - even software RAID, the PCIe x1, and the raw drive performance is less of a limiting factor.
Yeah, in a situation where you need high I/O performance, this design would be less than ideal. But they don't - they're providing backup storage. They don't need heavy write performance, they don't need heavy read performance. They just need to put a lot of data on a disk and not break anything.
PS: SAS doesn't really provide much better performance than SATA, and it's a lot more expensive. Same for hardware RAID - using those would easily octuple the cost of the entire system.
Common usage for the past 50 years has been that, in the context of computer memory capacity, 'tera-" is to be interpreted as 2^40 (with "giga-" being 2^30, and so on). You'll note that I included a sidenote on 'tebibytes" to appease revisionists like you.
PS: It's rather ironic that someone accusing me of bastardizing SI prefixes can't even spell 'terabytes" properly. Unless you're somehow referring to Earth Bytes or something.
Yes, 2TB drives are more cost-effective (price per terabyte) than the 3TB drives. But one of the major costs for Backblaze is power and space. They pay about $2,000 per month per rack in space rental, power and bandwidth, regardless of whether that rack is using 3TB drives of 300gb drives. So the difference in hardware costs is payed back by the increased density.
No. most manufacturers define the terms as 1024 bytes per kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes per megabyte, 1000 megabytes per gigabyte, and 1000 gigabytes per terabyte. Which gets really confusing sometimes - they can't even stay consistent within their own system.
I haven't checked how Hitachi does it, but that's how Seagate and Western Digital do it. I would assume Hitachi marks them the same way.
The article says it uses RAID 6 - 45 hard drives are in the pod, which are grouped into an arrays of 15 that use RAID 6 (the groups being combined by logical volumes), which gives you an actual data capacity of 39TB per group (3TB * (15 - 2) = 39TB), which then becomes 117TB usable space (39TB * 3 = 117TB). The 135TB figure is what it would be if you used RAID 1, or just used them as normal drives (45 * 3TB = 135TB).
And these are all "manufacturer's terabytes", which is probably 1,024,000,000,000 bytes per terabyte instead of 1,099,511,627,776 (2^40) bytes per terabyte like it should be. So it's a mere 108 terabytes, assuming you use the standard power-of-two terabyte ("tebibyte', if you prefer that stupid-sounding term).
Exactly. Nobody is looking for an actual sword-fighting robot, other than (perhaps) people looking for something to practice against. Not a huge market there, and some might not even want one that fights properly (I can imagine usage in some Disney park attraction where that would be undesirable).
The military (historically the main user of sword-related technology) already has robots for combat that are literally centuries ahead of this sword-bot - they've got UAVs with guided missiles, tank-bots with.30-caliber machine guns, even sentry robots that can independently authorize themselves to open fire with a 40mm grenade launcher. They don't need something that can hit someone with a sword - they have things that can hit someone with high explosives from half a kilometer away.
The point to this was two-fold. One, give a bunch of students something to do. Two, do something "cool". Real swordfights are sometimes quite boring (lot of time just circling and maneuvering), and might also be too fast for it to track (seriously - I can swing a zweihander faster than that robot was swinging a stick, and skilled fencers move at "blink and you'll miss it" speeds). Most importantly, there's no point in making it fight properly - it doesn't help achieve either purpose.
To be fair, I mainly used them in TI-BASIC. Which has no real function or subroutine functionality (only option was to call a separate program) - goto was required for pretty much everything. Even some high-level functions took labels as arguments. To make things worse, labels had a two-character limit - you had to keep track of what each label meant on your own.
I look at code I wrote a few months ago, and I cringe. I look at code I wrote years ago, and I feel like inventing a time machine just so I can slap past-me in the face for being so stupid.
I mean, seriously, why did I use #DEFINES so much for constant variables? And goto... I still have nightmares about some of my older code. And I'm sure that 2 years from now I'll look back at the code I wrote now and feel just as ashamed.
Programming skills don't really age. Some of my best code styles have come from looking back at ancient stuff - LISP in particular, but I have style quirks I picked up from almost every language I know. Sure, I write everything in more-or-less modern languages (C++ is still modern, right?), but that's just syntax. If you know the heart of programming, you can only get better as time goes on.
Except that the average gamer is going to see "Windows 8: Now Compatible with XBox360 Games", and then wonder why their pile of game discs don't work. There's no way Microsoft will be able to get every developer to recompile their games - after 6 years on the market, many developers have gone out of business, or lost their license for whatever IP they used, or something else. Others have already ported their games to the PC (or wrote them originally for the PC, with the 360 version being the port), and might not want to cooperate.
Plus, a simple recompile won't fix certain issues. PC gamers expect and demand games to work with a mouse/keyboard setup. Very, very few 360 games do that - so you'd have to recode at least some stuff to get a decent port of earlier titles.
The problem is that emulation is NEVER equal in speed to the original. In fact, emulating PowerPC is usually
The GPU, however, is actually much easier to emulate. Especially given the non-ISA-specific nature of them - even the XBox uses the same shaders and functions that PC games use.
The "Windows 8 will play XBox360 games" rumor is COMPLETELY FALSE. It's economically infeasible - emulating that system playably would require either a breakthrough in emulation, or a set of system requirements so high as to be unheard of (I'm talking "dual-socket server processors", something very, very few PC gamers have, let alone XBox gamers).
Now, maybe, just maybe, they'll be offering compatibility with the original XBox - that's completely feasible, although not very high-demand. Or, perhaps, they'll be offering a single programming environment for both, beyond the level XNA already provides, such that porting a game from the 360 to the PC requires just a recompile. Or maybe their next-gen console will be x86-based again, which would make emulation less performance-intensive. All of those rumors are plausible enough to believe, even though I doubt either would be true. But can we at least keep the physically-impossible rumors off/.?
I'm wondering how we can use that to fight bandwidth caps. Start streaming school lessons in full 4K resolution every day, then go "OH NOES! IF YOU HAVE A BANDWIDTH CAP, THE CHILDREN WILL GROW UP ILLITERATE AND IGNORANT! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?"
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Well, that's what all the characters said, but what, exactly, did he do to demonstrate such power? He didn't help the Fellowship at all - you could make a better argument for Boromir being more powerful, since he actually accomplished something. Don't get me wrong: I love Tolkien, but the entire Bombadil thing was just bad storywriting.
Actually, that helps the metaphor. The Tea Party, if you listen to the news, is powerful and will probably wipe out at least one of the major parties, if not upset the entire two-party system. But from what I see, they haven't done anything. They're just the same Republican party, except without the now-damaged brand identity.
If any LOTR character is a good match for the Tea Party, I would have to go with Tom Bombadil. Completely fucking nuts, make absolutely no sense, have an annoying tendency to speak in song, and (hopefully) forgotten by the end of the first book.
Sure, IT pros are probably more likely to want IPv6. But most of the survey questions were action ones - what have you done about IPv6? When a quarter say they've already started rolling out internal IPv6, and 13% more say they're done, that says a lot. The numbers are similar for web servers with public IPv6 - 20% have started, 13% are already done. It would appear that this is a technical problem that can be explained to the bosses easily: "I'm sorry, but the Internet is full. We need to upgrade to the new Internet if we want to add more stuff. We'll still work with the old Internet, so we won't lose customers, and we're only going to need to replace ___, ___ and maybe ___."
Try Internet Explorer - they just got around to supporting SVG, they should be occupied for at least a few years adding full CSS3 support and such before they start adding built-in email clients or PDF readers.
Mozilla's just competing with everyone else. Everyone's doing stupid shit like this - Chrome has built in Flash, PDF, and all that, plus the Chrome OS thing; Opera has more integrated software than anyone needs (seriously, don't they have a web server in the browser now?); even Internet Explorer is doing more and more besides "browse the internet".
Ironically, the best "pure" web browser may soon be the Steam integrated browser. It's designed to run while the computer is already under extremely heavy load, so it's resource-light; it's WebKit-based so it's relatively standards-compliant and fast; it's not a major priority for the developers, so they don't have any impetus to add stupid stuff like RSS feeds or themes or whatnot. The only thing you've objected to that it has is the themes support - only in a roundabout way, since you have to apply a skin to the entire Steam app.
I've always wanted to see benchmarks comparing that browser to others in the same category - I'm sure there's plenty of other apps with integrated web browsers that you could compare it to. Hell, benchmark it against Real Browsers under load - boot up Crysis, alt-tab back into Firefox, and see how badly it performs when 99% of the computer is being used rendering self-shadowed anti-aliased penumbras on dense jungle foliage. Might make for a decent /. article, even.
I use 2 major Java apps. The first is Minecraft, aka "game that became insanely popular for a few months but has kinda faded away now". The second is GanntProject, a free and open-source project-management tool.
Other than those two, the only Java apps I have are the ones I wrote for a college class, which I haven't touched since I took said class.
Yeah. Total capacity: 126GB. Total usable in current config: 72GB.
Hey, at least I stuck Linux on it. The rate I'm doing that, pretty soon the only Windows-running server on the network will be the domain controller.
Probably. My knowledge of RAID is mostly theoretical at this point - I got to set up a server last week, used a five-disk RAID 5 plus two hot spares. Nothing's failed yet, although I expect to experience a failure within a year, as the disks are over a decade old.
Well, let's do some math now. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports gives you... two gigabits of data. That's equal to a single PCIe 1.0 link, or half the bandwidth of a PCIe 2.0 link. Those are x1 links, I remind you - the smallest and slowest PCIe gets. That's also just a bit under the 2400 mbit/s of SATA 2 (or SAS, if you like). And very few hard drives can sustain 2400mbit/s of read - even a 10krpm drive will barely reach half of that. So even accounting for system-generated traffic (RAID maintenance, etc.), you've got more than enough bandwidth internally for the network to be the bottleneck.
And you seem to have missed the point - you don't even NEED high performance. They're offsite backups - why do you need high I/O performance for something that gets written to once a week or so (daily, at most), and gets accessed even less frequently. Taking your "it could be performing better so why don't they ___" logic to its absurd extremes, they should be stuffing them with SSDs (gotta get that seek time down!), and it should all be on 40GBASE-X Ethernet, if not a nice thick Infiniband. Oh, and they absolutely need quadruple Xeons in each, otherwise you'd be bottlenecking that poor processor, and we can't have that.
Dammit, why do I keep getting those mixed up?
Huh. That's odd - I distinctly remember seeing otherwise. Oh well - guess I was wrong.
Because, for this project, raw storage capacity is much more important than performance. Besides, they claim their main bottleneck is the gigabit Ethernet interface - even software RAID, the PCIe x1, and the raw drive performance is less of a limiting factor.
Yeah, in a situation where you need high I/O performance, this design would be less than ideal. But they don't - they're providing backup storage. They don't need heavy write performance, they don't need heavy read performance. They just need to put a lot of data on a disk and not break anything.
PS: SAS doesn't really provide much better performance than SATA, and it's a lot more expensive. Same for hardware RAID - using those would easily octuple the cost of the entire system.
Common usage for the past 50 years has been that, in the context of computer memory capacity, 'tera-" is to be interpreted as 2^40 (with "giga-" being 2^30, and so on). You'll note that I included a sidenote on 'tebibytes" to appease revisionists like you.
PS: It's rather ironic that someone accusing me of bastardizing SI prefixes can't even spell 'terabytes" properly. Unless you're somehow referring to Earth Bytes or something.
According to TFA's TFA, the company has a total capacity of 16 petabytes, using only 201 pods (many being the old 1.0 pods with 67TB storage).
Yes, 2TB drives are more cost-effective (price per terabyte) than the 3TB drives. But one of the major costs for Backblaze is power and space. They pay about $2,000 per month per rack in space rental, power and bandwidth, regardless of whether that rack is using 3TB drives of 300gb drives. So the difference in hardware costs is payed back by the increased density.
No. most manufacturers define the terms as 1024 bytes per kilobyte, 1000 kilobytes per megabyte, 1000 megabytes per gigabyte, and 1000 gigabytes per terabyte. Which gets really confusing sometimes - they can't even stay consistent within their own system.
I haven't checked how Hitachi does it, but that's how Seagate and Western Digital do it. I would assume Hitachi marks them the same way.
The article says it uses RAID 6 - 45 hard drives are in the pod, which are grouped into an arrays of 15 that use RAID 6 (the groups being combined by logical volumes), which gives you an actual data capacity of 39TB per group (3TB * (15 - 2) = 39TB), which then becomes 117TB usable space (39TB * 3 = 117TB). The 135TB figure is what it would be if you used RAID 1, or just used them as normal drives (45 * 3TB = 135TB).
And these are all "manufacturer's terabytes", which is probably 1,024,000,000,000 bytes per terabyte instead of 1,099,511,627,776 (2^40) bytes per terabyte like it should be. So it's a mere 108 terabytes, assuming you use the standard power-of-two terabyte ("tebibyte', if you prefer that stupid-sounding term).
Exactly. Nobody is looking for an actual sword-fighting robot, other than (perhaps) people looking for something to practice against. Not a huge market there, and some might not even want one that fights properly (I can imagine usage in some Disney park attraction where that would be undesirable).
The military (historically the main user of sword-related technology) already has robots for combat that are literally centuries ahead of this sword-bot - they've got UAVs with guided missiles, tank-bots with .30-caliber machine guns, even sentry robots that can independently authorize themselves to open fire with a 40mm grenade launcher. They don't need something that can hit someone with a sword - they have things that can hit someone with high explosives from half a kilometer away.
The point to this was two-fold. One, give a bunch of students something to do. Two, do something "cool". Real swordfights are sometimes quite boring (lot of time just circling and maneuvering), and might also be too fast for it to track (seriously - I can swing a zweihander faster than that robot was swinging a stick, and skilled fencers move at "blink and you'll miss it" speeds). Most importantly, there's no point in making it fight properly - it doesn't help achieve either purpose.
To be fair, I mainly used them in TI-BASIC. Which has no real function or subroutine functionality (only option was to call a separate program) - goto was required for pretty much everything. Even some high-level functions took labels as arguments. To make things worse, labels had a two-character limit - you had to keep track of what each label meant on your own.
Because using const means you get actual type-safety. Along with being able to debug it better.
I look at code I wrote a few months ago, and I cringe. I look at code I wrote years ago, and I feel like inventing a time machine just so I can slap past-me in the face for being so stupid.
I mean, seriously, why did I use #DEFINES so much for constant variables? And goto... I still have nightmares about some of my older code. And I'm sure that 2 years from now I'll look back at the code I wrote now and feel just as ashamed.
Programming skills don't really age. Some of my best code styles have come from looking back at ancient stuff - LISP in particular, but I have style quirks I picked up from almost every language I know. Sure, I write everything in more-or-less modern languages (C++ is still modern, right?), but that's just syntax. If you know the heart of programming, you can only get better as time goes on.
Except that the average gamer is going to see "Windows 8: Now Compatible with XBox360 Games", and then wonder why their pile of game discs don't work. There's no way Microsoft will be able to get every developer to recompile their games - after 6 years on the market, many developers have gone out of business, or lost their license for whatever IP they used, or something else. Others have already ported their games to the PC (or wrote them originally for the PC, with the 360 version being the port), and might not want to cooperate.
Plus, a simple recompile won't fix certain issues. PC gamers expect and demand games to work with a mouse/keyboard setup. Very, very few 360 games do that - so you'd have to recode at least some stuff to get a decent port of earlier titles.
The problem is that emulation is NEVER equal in speed to the original. In fact, emulating PowerPC is usually
The GPU, however, is actually much easier to emulate. Especially given the non-ISA-specific nature of them - even the XBox uses the same shaders and functions that PC games use.
The "Windows 8 will play XBox360 games" rumor is COMPLETELY FALSE. It's economically infeasible - emulating that system playably would require either a breakthrough in emulation, or a set of system requirements so high as to be unheard of (I'm talking "dual-socket server processors", something very, very few PC gamers have, let alone XBox gamers).
Now, maybe, just maybe, they'll be offering compatibility with the original XBox - that's completely feasible, although not very high-demand. Or, perhaps, they'll be offering a single programming environment for both, beyond the level XNA already provides, such that porting a game from the 360 to the PC requires just a recompile. Or maybe their next-gen console will be x86-based again, which would make emulation less performance-intensive. All of those rumors are plausible enough to believe, even though I doubt either would be true. But can we at least keep the physically-impossible rumors off /.?
I'm wondering how we can use that to fight bandwidth caps. Start streaming school lessons in full 4K resolution every day, then go "OH NOES! IF YOU HAVE A BANDWIDTH CAP, THE CHILDREN WILL GROW UP ILLITERATE AND IGNORANT! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?"