I believe the storage engine came from Ericsson, who developed it for phone switches. So, we should be asking if phone-switch manufacturers know anything about the robustness that needs to accompany "five nines"
Well, first, I was giong to suggest, "Dude, April Fool's Day was, like, 2 weeks ago", but then I read the article.
Clearly, companies that rely on LANs will go to places that don't tax LANs. Like neighboring states, or non-neighboring states, or non-neighboring countries. I'm sure the tax assessor is not thinking of the medium to long-term consequences.
Do they tax LANs in India? Russia? Other countries?
A friend of mine worked for a travel industry joint venture that went down the gurgler big time about 13-14 years ago. It cost the investors a couple of hundred million at the time. He told me that he just put a couple of years federal prison on his resume as he's more likely to get hired.
I'm thinking that SCO employees might be taking this approach a couple of years from now...
I'm a triathlete and runner, we've been using RFID to track athletes for years. The main company doing this is Champion Chip. It's a small plastic device that you attach to your shoe or put on an ankle strap.
The tracking lets them do severl things. First, they get accurate timing and immediate results. They can also track where you've been to make sure that people haven't cut parts off the course. Some people are too creative, a few years back a women hopped on the subway for part of the Boston marathon, but she went "too fast", they got suspicious and reviewed the surveillance cameras in the subway.
The latest cool thing was in Ironman Hawaii. They had video cameras setup on the course and the chip strapped to your ankle let them know your location all day. Then, you could order a personalized DVD with video of your race. Pretty cool idea, though I didn't personally buy one.
Some may see this as big brother, or a harbinger of things to come. Some of us, however, have been happily tracked by RFID for years - voluntarily! I wouldn't want this to be 7*24, without my permission.
climbing stairs was very difficult and running was out of the question
Not sure what they're fitting for these guys, but there are a number of amputees out there running road races. A couple of months ago I was passed on the run in the Hawaii Ironman by a guy with a prosthetic leg.
I'm not convinced that cable really has an advantage over the phone company. The cable company doesn't get 7*24 at all...
If it rains, we have an outage.
If the weather's hot, we have an outage.
If our cat farts within ten feet of the modem, we have an outage.
Yes, I like my cable modem for the download speed, but I won't give them my phone service anytime soon. Calling tech support is often an exercise in futility.
BTW - I have no land line, my wife and I use wireless only. It's not as reliable as a land line, but it's actually cheaper and works pretty damn well.
Perhaps I should have said a significant single workload. Workload management and power consumption is critical and definitely in favor of VM and z/Linux when you have many, many underutilized servers.
It all comes down to crunching the numbers. I think IBM is actually pretty honest about z/Linux, they're not trying to sell it as a supercomputer but rather as a consolidation solutions.
FWIW - I work for a very large company with thousands of servers. We have dozens of them with utilization of approximately zero, including some very large machines (such as an E10K doing the work of a PC). This is not unusual...
BTW - I've ported a number of programs to Linux/390 (an IBM G6 mainframe) and compared them to Linux on my 1 GHz Athlon cobbled together from left over parts and a motherboard from Fry's. The net result is that the Athlon is about twice as fast as the G6 mainframe.
The latest and greatest mainframes are about twice as fast as a G6, but PCs have come a long way since 1 GHz. Currently, 1 CPU on a mainframe running Linux costs about $100K, you can buy a pretty impressive Intel server for that price.
So, Linux on S/390 is only effective when you have a bunch of machines with utilization close to zero - let's call it "epsilon", which is what we mathematicians say when we really want to say zero but still need to divide by it. You buy the box for VM, which can run hundreds or even thousands of instances, securely and stably, so long as most of them are doing nothing.
Linux/390 is great for experimental servers, test systems, etc. OTOH - if you have any significant workload, buy a rack-mount PC.
The problem is that most airline reservations systems don't even do lower-case. They're based on outmoded 6-bit teletype character sets. There is a TCP/IP mapping (MATIP) that is only just starting to get implemented, but that doesn't do Unicode either.
They forget to mention that even if you can have more than 4gb on xeon machine you cannot address any single block of more than 4gb.
True
Forget about putting your oracle db into memory.
Not true
On a Xeon machine, Oracle will let you put up to 62GB in memory. The trick is an operating system call that fiddles the page table and "swaps" pages from areas you can't see to areas inside your address space. It works well for applications that aer conscious of 4K pages and not page thrashing. Databases are the prime example, executing a few dozen privileged instructions and changing the page tables is much faster than going to disk.
Several carriers are removing / cutting off in-flight phone service. The systems are expensive, very few people use it, so it was a money loser. Having used it once or twice, I can also tell you that you can barely have a conversation over the noise of the engines.
During boom times, airlines love to add all sorts of bells and whistles, just to have superior service. Then, at every downturn, they rip out the stuff that doesn't make them any money.
Now is certainly not the time to put WiFi in planes.
RAID level 01/10 is both expensive *and* pointless
Well, maybe for the average power user, but not the real power users. Pretty much every stock exchange, airline reservations system, credit card switching system in the world uses mirroring and striping. Operating systems such as HP's Non-Stop Kernel (from Tandem) and IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) work this way and run these mission critical systems.
Why? I/O throughput and redundancy in applications that can't afford to fail. The disks aren't expensive compared to the rest of the system and even less expensive than the downtime.
These aren't Linux systems, but as Linux scales up there will be times when it will necessarily copy from mainframe-class systems.
We have the same problem where work, people who sit in meetings and work their email, pounding away with their thumbs and not paying attention. Many of these people don't really contribute to the meetings anyway, so it's not that great a problem.
As for universities, grades are the answer. My guess is that these students want to work chat and email in class, yet pull an easy "A" at the end of the semester. When they get a "C", or fail a class, perhaps they will make the right decision. If not, it's evolution in action.
We see a similar effect where I work, an NT box costs us about 30% less to run than a Solaris box.
Why?
There are less mission-critical systems running on NT, so there are less DBAs, less backup, etc. The print server sits in the corner and gets a 3-finger salute if it plays up, so it's cheap to run. The mission-critical boxes, running web servers, databases, etc can't go down, so we have administrators to look after them.
IMNSHO - if we normalized for what each box is doing, Linux and Unix are cheaper to run.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the storage engine came from Ericsson, who developed it for phone switches. So, we should be asking if phone-switch manufacturers know anything about the robustness that needs to accompany "five nines"
Alan.
.
Well, first, I was giong to suggest, "Dude, April Fool's Day was, like, 2 weeks ago", but then I read the article.
Clearly, companies that rely on LANs will go to places that don't tax LANs. Like neighboring states, or non-neighboring states, or non-neighboring countries. I'm sure the tax assessor is not thinking of the medium to long-term consequences.
Do they tax LANs in India? Russia? Other countries?
Alan.
A friend of mine worked for a travel industry joint venture that went down the gurgler big time about 13-14 years ago. It cost the investors a couple of hundred million at the time. He told me that he just put a couple of years federal prison on his resume as he's more likely to get hired.
I'm thinking that SCO employees might be taking this approach a couple of years from now...
I'm a triathlete and runner, we've been using RFID to track athletes for years. The main company doing this is Champion Chip. It's a small plastic device that you attach to your shoe or put on an ankle strap.
The tracking lets them do severl things. First, they get accurate timing and immediate results. They can also track where you've been to make sure that people haven't cut parts off the course. Some people are too creative, a few years back a women hopped on the subway for part of the Boston marathon, but she went "too fast", they got suspicious and reviewed the surveillance cameras in the subway.
The latest cool thing was in Ironman Hawaii. They had video cameras setup on the course and the chip strapped to your ankle let them know your location all day. Then, you could order a personalized DVD with video of your race. Pretty cool idea, though I didn't personally buy one.
Some may see this as big brother, or a harbinger of things to come. Some of us, however, have been happily tracked by RFID for years - voluntarily! I wouldn't want this to be 7*24, without my permission.
Alan.
Thanks for the info...
Has Simon Cowell (American Idol) reviewed this software?
Am I the only one wondering how long before there's an O'Reilly book on how to hack this? What animal would they put on the cover?
I can think of a couple of hacks to do:
1) Disable it
2) Stop other people's cars
Any other thoughts?
climbing stairs was very difficult and running was out of the question
Not sure what they're fitting for these guys, but there are a number of amputees out there running road races. A couple of months ago I was passed on the run in the Hawaii Ironman by a guy with a prosthetic leg.
I'm not convinced that cable really has an advantage over the phone company. The cable company doesn't get 7*24 at all...
If it rains, we have an outage.
If the weather's hot, we have an outage.
If our cat farts within ten feet of the modem, we have an outage.
Yes, I like my cable modem for the download speed, but I won't give them my phone service anytime soon. Calling tech support is often an exercise in futility.
BTW - I have no land line, my wife and I use wireless only. It's not as reliable as a land line, but it's actually cheaper and works pretty damn well.
Alan.
NEC funded study shows that multiple monitors are good for you.
MS funded study shows that Linux is bad for you.
Phillip Morris funded study shows that smoking is good for you.
I think I'm beginning to see a pattern...
This new story could have been a great lead-in:
How long before the RIAA finds this MP3 on your hard drive and sues you?
Better yet, how about a song praising Linux, then ask:
Who sues you first?
1) RIAA
2) SCO
3) Cowboy Neal
This story could have so much mileage...
Perhaps I should have said a significant single workload. Workload management and power consumption is critical and definitely in favor of VM and z/Linux when you have many, many underutilized servers.
It all comes down to crunching the numbers. I think IBM is actually pretty honest about z/Linux, they're not trying to sell it as a supercomputer but rather as a consolidation solutions.
FWIW - I work for a very large company with thousands of servers. We have dozens of them with utilization of approximately zero, including some very large machines (such as an E10K doing the work of a PC). This is not unusual...
Yes, you're right on the "not cost effective".
BTW - I've ported a number of programs to Linux/390 (an IBM G6 mainframe) and compared them to Linux on my 1 GHz Athlon cobbled together from left over parts and a motherboard from Fry's. The net result is that the Athlon is about twice as fast as the G6 mainframe.
The latest and greatest mainframes are about twice as fast as a G6, but PCs have come a long way since 1 GHz. Currently, 1 CPU on a mainframe running Linux costs about $100K, you can buy a pretty impressive Intel server for that price.
So, Linux on S/390 is only effective when you have a bunch of machines with utilization close to zero - let's call it "epsilon", which is what we mathematicians say when we really want to say zero but still need to divide by it. You buy the box for VM, which can run hundreds or even thousands of instances, securely and stably, so long as most of them are doing nothing.
Linux/390 is great for experimental servers, test systems, etc. OTOH - if you have any significant workload, buy a rack-mount PC.
Alan.
Yep - hauling out my piano and dumping it. It's time to learn to play guitar.
I wanna support these guys and I'd feel pretty silly just buying strings.
Alan.
Unicode, Unicode, Unicode. There, I can say it.
The problem is that most airline reservations systems don't even do lower-case. They're based on outmoded 6-bit teletype character sets. There is a TCP/IP mapping (MATIP) that is only just starting to get implemented, but that doesn't do Unicode either.
Yeah, we all love the idea of open Beos...
But maybe there's at least 10 or 15 lines that look vaguely like some code SCO that probably took from BSD in the first place.
I wonder how much SCO could extort from the Beos community? Gotta be at least $3.
Alan.
Since RFC 1149 clearly works, then a few minutes of interplanetary delay shouldn't be too much of a problem.
How about frigging feral robot dogs with frigging laser beams on their heads?
Yeah baby!
Alan.
Wow - we've had a story up about somebody's website for at least 10 minutes and we haven't slashdotted it yet. Am I the only one who's noticed?
Alan.
I was speaking at a conference in Europe last year and was invited to participate in a Gartner Group roundtable with several large companies.
..."
One worried executive asked, "Do you think we should
The response was, "We don't make recommendations, we just raise issues that you should think about."
Still, no company openly ignores the analysts, as the analysts will start dissing them by raising more and more issues.
Industry analysts, like economsits only exist to make astrologers look good.
They forget to mention that even if you can have more than 4gb on xeon machine you cannot address any single block of more than 4gb.
True
Forget about putting your oracle db into memory.
Not true
On a Xeon machine, Oracle will let you put up to 62GB in memory. The trick is an operating system call that fiddles the page table and "swaps" pages from areas you can't see to areas inside your address space. It works well for applications that aer conscious of 4K pages and not page thrashing. Databases are the prime example, executing a few dozen privileged instructions and changing the page tables is much faster than going to disk.
Here's a description of how to do it on Linux:
For Windows, it's called Address Windowing Extensions (AWE).
I think MySQL supports these tricks too
Alan.
Several carriers are removing / cutting off in-flight phone service. The systems are expensive, very few people use it, so it was a money loser. Having used it once or twice, I can also tell you that you can barely have a conversation over the noise of the engines.
During boom times, airlines love to add all sorts of bells and whistles, just to have superior service. Then, at every downturn, they rip out the stuff that doesn't make them any money.
Now is certainly not the time to put WiFi in planes.
RAID level 01/10 is both expensive *and* pointless
Well, maybe for the average power user, but not the real power users. Pretty much every stock exchange, airline reservations system, credit card switching system in the world uses mirroring and striping. Operating systems such as HP's Non-Stop Kernel (from Tandem) and IBM's Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) work this way and run these mission critical systems.
Why? I/O throughput and redundancy in applications that can't afford to fail. The disks aren't expensive compared to the rest of the system and even less expensive than the downtime.
These aren't Linux systems, but as Linux scales up there will be times when it will necessarily copy from mainframe-class systems.
Just curious, I download a free operating system, then buy:
- Tivoli / Openview / Unicenter / whatever
- Oracle / DB2 / etc
- Storage manager (Veritas?)
- Enterprise backup software
- Four other things I forgot
- yet more stuff
- yada, yada, yada
- etc, etc
Once you add a gajillion dollars worth of 3rd-party software, do you still have a free-OS?
FWIW - I'm pro-Linux, I just don't recognize it beneath all this other stuff.....
Alan.
We have the same problem where work, people who sit in meetings and work their email, pounding away with their thumbs and not paying attention. Many of these people don't really contribute to the meetings anyway, so it's not that great a problem.
As for universities, grades are the answer. My guess is that these students want to work chat and email in class, yet pull an easy "A" at the end of the semester. When they get a "C", or fail a class, perhaps they will make the right decision. If not, it's evolution in action.
We see a similar effect where I work, an NT box costs us about 30% less to run than a Solaris box.
Why?
There are less mission-critical systems running on NT, so there are less DBAs, less backup, etc. The print server sits in the corner and gets a 3-finger salute if it plays up, so it's cheap to run. The mission-critical boxes, running web servers, databases, etc can't go down, so we have administrators to look after them.
IMNSHO - if we normalized for what each box is doing, Linux and Unix are cheaper to run.
Alan.