They're only spending $15k. They'll sell a few thousand copies as college textbooks for useless social sciences courses over the next five to ten years and turn a tidy profit.
It might give their competition some idea of what they're going to have to compete with. If ID had some secret killer feature it's not a secret anymore.
Easy. When you pulled the trigger, the screen flashed a different single frame that was white with a pinkish dot where you could successfully "hit". If the gun saw the dot while the trigger was in you hit what you were shooting at.
The review says that the reciever is keyed to the device and the device to the reciever. In other words, you need to use a USB port for this thing even if you already have bluetooth support.
THe school I wen to has a license transferral clause in their MS site license. Any student can install any of the software on their machine while they are in school there. Upon graduation, a license transfer is granted to each machine the student owns with the software installed on it. That meanse you don't have to stop using the software until you get a new machine. The school doesn't have a special arrangement, they have a standard MS educational site license, so many other schools with an MS site license will have the same clause.
There's a huge MS fee in your bill every semester, so you damn well better be allowed to kep the software you paid for.
That also means, that as soon as you graduate, you must STOP USING IT... People need to actually READ the eulas they agree to...
FUD is bad no matter which side it comes from. Please don't make statements based on your assumptions. Make sure you are correct before you spread information.
I've noticed that it seems like Echostar customers are pro-merger, and DirecTV customers are anti-merger. It's probably because a post-merger service will look more like DishNetwork than DirecTV, and all the people who specifficly chose DirecTV over DishNetwork will get screwed. Based on that, I'd venture to guess that most slasdot readers who are also dish owners subscribe to DishNetwork.
Personally, I have DirecTV, and I'm against the merger. DirectTV tends to support any third party equipment you want to use (read: PVRs) where DishNetowrk wants total control. Total control is bad. I want to be able to do what I damn well please with the video signal coming into my house.
While I'm sure you already know this, there's a big difference between having a "working" multi-initiator setup, and having one that doesn't corrupt your data. It's fairly easy to get it working in an active/passive setup. But to get both nodes actively accessing the same SCSI devices requires a little more care.
Agreed that once you want active/active you need to be a little more careful, but the cheaper SCSI adapters are actually more likely to work in these cases, because they have no cache on them. Once you're using RAID boxes or host based RAID, multi-initiator SCSI becomes a much harder problem. Almost every vendor that has redundant RAID controllers in their storage box does it correctly (Clariion included), but you really need to be careful with PCI RAID adapters. Most of them won't work as expected no matter what the configuration.
I believe they recommend using remotely controllable power switches so that one server can kill the power to the other in the event of failover, ensuring that a dual-mounted filesystem cannot occur;... If you're going to implement a manual solution (and you're careful) then you don't need to worry about this (but HA vendor manuals are still useful for the hardware setup details).
Because we're talking about failure situations, there is no guarantee that a failed node will be well behaved. There absolutely MUST be some sort of I/O barrier preventing the failed node from corrupting your data. Other vendors use SCSI reservations, which can be just as effective, but is more difficult to work with. Bottom line: use either the power switch option, or the reservation option, but do something or you'll be sorry.
I mean honestly, what is more likely to die, a PC or a hard drive? I don't think this has been thought through all the way. It would at least have to be a shared raid array, not just a single shared drive. Preferably hot-swap.
Actually, what's most likely to fail is the software, but NIC failures, accidental cable pulls, and other hardware failures do happen. The trick is setting it up so there is no single point of failure. There are lots of papers available on the web that describe how to do this, and many of them talk about how to do it cheaply. You can set up two systems with no single point of failure (Redundant shared SCSI driver, host based RAID, dual NICs in each system, remote power control) and automatic failover for under $2500.
Good luck. My company just spent 150k+ on a sun/veritas solution to do exactly this. Our storage is all SAN.
No offence, but your company spent too much. Your typical off the shelf PCI scsi adapter, in fact ANY scsi adapter that can set it's own ID works in a multi-host setup. If somebody from Sun or Veritas told you otherwise, they were lying. There are multiple companies (including the one I work for) that make software to manage the setup under linux. In fact our software is included in Debian 3.0 and RedHat advanced server, so you don't even need to spend any money on software unless you want bells and whistles (Graphical setup, support, NFS lock maintanance across failover...). It even comes with scripts to interoperate with your favorite database server.
You're talking about making a shared storage HA-cluster. The company I work for makes software to do exactly that, and for typical applications, you can get it for *FREE*. Go to oss.missioncriticallinux.com and look at kimberlite. It makes sure that only one system is using the disk at a time, and automatically switches to the othe machine when one breaks. It's also well documented, and the engineers that work on are good about responding to questions over e-mail.
If you use debian, installation is as easy as apt-get install kimberlite. If you want to use it as an NFS server, you'll need to buy the commercial version for full support, but it's not very expensive.
Ignore the people in this thread who are talking out of their asses and saying multi-host scsi doesn't work well. They just didn't know how to set it up right or have never actually tried it. It's very common, and people have been using it for decades.
So stop complaining and buy the PC version, flash the rom, and use it in your mac. I've got a flashed Radeon 8500 and a flashed adaptec SCSI card in my mac. The SCSI card was the real no-brainer. $100 instead of $369, and flashing it for use in a mac is a supported operation. All the tools are available on the Adaptec site and run in MacOS X.
I think the high price on "Mac" stuff that's clearly identical to PC stuff (Drives, USB stuff, Memory, Many PCI cards) is just a "stupid" tax.
Wasn't the stuff IBM used supposed to wash off with rain? That's a big difference compared to cleaning up plastic butterflys that probably would have been found along streets for years.
"If you want our skills, here's how we define 'fair treatment.'"
That's a convienient little leap of logic in your argument there. What should that definition be? Why should the definition of 'fair treatment' be one sided, when there are potentially three sides? How long do you think 'fair treatment' will stay 'fair' when it's dictated by one party. Here's a hint: Is it fair when it's defined solely by the employer? What about people who are unemployed, and are willing to work in conditions that a union is protesting. Companies aren't allowed to ditch the greedy union members for a new workforce. The law doesn't provide exceptions to that protection, and it gives unions too much power.
Put down your cyberpunk novel for a minute and realize that the assembly-line was created by Henry Ford specifically to commoditize auto labor, to take as much skill as possible out of the profession. And it worked, while everyone else thought it was impossible. Who'll be the Henry Ford of geekdom? Want to bet your future that one will never appear?
Welcome to real life. When your skills are no longer needed you need new skills. The correct solution to the problem, should the Heny Ford of geekdom ever come along, will be to get jobs doing something else. The solution is not to force the use of outdated labor on an industry to preserve unnecissary jobs. People with your attitude will end up in mediocrity, their jobs only existing because they are leveraging the power of a union, not because they are truely useful. The rest of us will adapt to a changing environment and accept the risks of life in exchange for the potential rewards. The best part is that even if the risk doesn't pay of financially all the time, life will be much more interesting and flexable along the way.
Ok, say for sake of discussion the top 20 guys take a million apiece, thus leaving $5 million for 300 people. That's nearly $17k per person. If that's bending over for the company, let me be the first one to grab my ankles.
Say you make $90-120k/year. (Not hard to do... Even a few years out of college) If you make that much money, and your current employer considers you a "key" employee, there's a good chance that there is job available for you at another company because if you weren't good at what you do, you wouldn't both be making that much money, and be considered a "key" employee. Now, if you were making that much money at a company that just filed for bankruptcy, and were offered another job at a company that wasn't bankrupt for the same salary, how much would it cost to keep you working at the bankrupt company? As somebody who went through this recently, I can tell you that $17k was not enough for me.
Oh, believe me, I know. Compare my e-mail address with the list of vendors that support their platform. If you think the current boards are finicky, you should have seen the early prototypes.:-)
No offence to you, Sivar, since you're an innocent victim of this offtopic rant, but it's unfortunate that you can click a box to disable peoples.sigs, but there's no box to disable comments about people's sigs. If only...
Easy to do (If you've got lots of money)
on
Build Your Own PowerPC?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If you really want to build a system from parts there are several places you can go. Motorola sells evaluation platforms that consisto of a motherboard (essentially a backplane) and CPU modules that plug into it. It's calld Sandpoint. You can get third party CPU modules for it from Tundra (who also sells whole kits with their own system board). Marvell/Galileo sells a platform that is well suited to building a PC style machine with PPC hardware, and you can get a variety of processor cards for it ranging from low end G3 style processors up to dual 7450 processors.
Some of the best PPC machines available right now can't be built from parts simply because they're on a single board. My current to y is the cyclades TS-100 it's only 1"x3"x3", has dual CPUs and can be had for under $200.
As far as resale value goes, if an object has a higher initial price, it almost goes without saying that it's resale value will be higher as well. Especially given point #1 above.
I call bullshit. It doesn't matter how expensive your PC was when you bought it, it's still (practically) worthless 4 years later. The key here is what percentage of it's original value it retains over time. Macs retain a higher percentage of their value over their lifetime then PCs do.
If anything I much prefer retailers having to make the effort than having to pay higher taxes so that the state can better enforce it.
Why? You pay the costs either way, and the choice of making the retailers do the work will limit your choices in retailers by raising the barriers to entry. Worse, the distributed costs of having each retailer increase their paperwork by 50x is likely higher than the collection being centralized in government, so not only do these states want out of state businesses to enforce their use tax, they want to increase the tax and disguise the tax increase from consumers as price increases in your favorite catalog. Even after all that, the revenue from mail order taxes will likely be miniscule compared to traditional sales tax, and enforcement will still be a problem!
Bars use more resources than coffeeshops (ie, cops to break up fights). Do bars pay higher taxes?
Yes. In many states there is a (much) higher tax on alcohol than on other food and beverages. Some localities have an additional alcohol tax on top of that, and yet others don't allow alcohol to be serverd in public places at all.
What was your argument again?
Bottom line is we need a comprehensive tax policy that includes the net. Especially with the steadily blurring line between clicks and bricks. Best case is a tax policy that isn't an obscene burden to collect but which allows localities to collect taxes.
Sales tax is broken. We have property tax and income tax already, and we're begining to see the problems that localized sales taxes cause. The best comprehensive sales tax policy is to have no sales tax.
The states instead would like to simplify the taxation process so that they can rely on online retailers to withhold sales tax.
That's certainly a nice way to put it. I prefer this way:
The states instead would like to transfer the enormous costs of enforcing their use tax to online retailers, since the cost of accurately collecting use tax from individuals is typically higher than the revenue that is generated.
Slashdot Mirror
They're only spending $15k. They'll sell a few thousand copies as college textbooks for useless social sciences courses over the next five to ten years and turn a tidy profit.
Consider it a fund raiser.
It might give their competition some idea of what they're going to have to compete with. If ID had some secret killer feature it's not a secret anymore.
Easy. When you pulled the trigger, the screen flashed a different single frame that was white with a pinkish dot where you could successfully "hit". If the gun saw the dot while the trigger was in you hit what you were shooting at.
The review says that the reciever is keyed to the device and the device to the reciever. In other words, you need to use a USB port for this thing even if you already have bluetooth support.
I neglected to post a link to the license I mentioned in my previous post. Check out section 6(a) of the following license:
Microsoft® Campus License Agreement
Basically you're just totally incorrect.
THe school I wen to has a license transferral clause in their MS site license. Any student can install any of the software on their machine while they are in school there. Upon graduation, a license transfer is granted to each machine the student owns with the software installed on it. That meanse you don't have to stop using the software until you get a new machine. The school doesn't have a special arrangement, they have a standard MS educational site license, so many other schools with an MS site license will have the same clause.
There's a huge MS fee in your bill every semester, so you damn well better be allowed to kep the software you paid for.
That also means, that as soon as you graduate, you must STOP USING IT... People need to actually READ the eulas they agree to...
FUD is bad no matter which side it comes from. Please don't make statements based on your assumptions. Make sure you are correct before you spread information.
I've noticed that it seems like Echostar customers are pro-merger, and DirecTV customers are anti-merger. It's probably because a post-merger service will look more like DishNetwork than DirecTV, and all the people who specifficly chose DirecTV over DishNetwork will get screwed. Based on that, I'd venture to guess that most slasdot readers who are also dish owners subscribe to DishNetwork.
Personally, I have DirecTV, and I'm against the merger. DirectTV tends to support any third party equipment you want to use (read: PVRs) where DishNetowrk wants total control. Total control is bad. I want to be able to do what I damn well please with the video signal coming into my house.
While I'm sure you already know this, there's a big difference between having a "working" multi-initiator setup, and having one that doesn't corrupt your data. It's fairly easy to get it working in an active/passive setup. But to get both nodes actively accessing the same SCSI devices requires a little more care.
Agreed that once you want active/active you need to be a little more careful, but the cheaper SCSI adapters are actually more likely to work in these cases, because they have no cache on them. Once you're using RAID boxes or host based RAID, multi-initiator SCSI becomes a much harder problem. Almost every vendor that has redundant RAID controllers in their storage box does it correctly (Clariion included), but you really need to be careful with PCI RAID adapters. Most of them won't work as expected no matter what the configuration.
I believe they recommend using remotely controllable power switches so that one server can kill the power to the other in the event of failover, ensuring that a dual-mounted filesystem cannot occur; ... If you're going to implement a manual solution (and you're careful) then you don't need to worry about this (but HA vendor manuals are still useful for the hardware setup details).
Because we're talking about failure situations, there is no guarantee that a failed node will be well behaved. There absolutely MUST be some sort of I/O barrier preventing the failed node from corrupting your data. Other vendors use SCSI reservations, which can be just as effective, but is more difficult to work with. Bottom line: use either the power switch option, or the reservation option, but do something or you'll be sorry.
I mean honestly, what is more likely to die, a PC or a hard drive? I don't think this has been thought through all the way. It would at least have to be a shared raid array, not just a single shared drive. Preferably hot-swap.
Actually, what's most likely to fail is the software, but NIC failures, accidental cable pulls, and other hardware failures do happen. The trick is setting it up so there is no single point of failure. There are lots of papers available on the web that describe how to do this, and many of them talk about how to do it cheaply. You can set up two systems with no single point of failure (Redundant shared SCSI driver, host based RAID, dual NICs in each system, remote power control) and automatic failover for under $2500.
Good luck. My company just spent 150k+ on a sun/veritas solution to do exactly this. Our storage is all SAN.
No offence, but your company spent too much. Your typical off the shelf PCI scsi adapter, in fact ANY scsi adapter that can set it's own ID works in a multi-host setup. If somebody from Sun or Veritas told you otherwise, they were lying. There are multiple companies (including the one I work for) that make software to manage the setup under linux. In fact our software is included in Debian 3.0 and RedHat advanced server, so you don't even need to spend any money on software unless you want bells and whistles (Graphical setup, support, NFS lock maintanance across failover...). It even comes with scripts to interoperate with your favorite database server.
You're talking about making a shared storage HA-cluster. The company I work for makes software to do exactly that, and for typical applications, you can get it for *FREE*. Go to oss.missioncriticallinux.com and look at kimberlite. It makes sure that only one system is using the disk at a time, and automatically switches to the othe machine when one breaks. It's also well documented, and the engineers that work on are good about responding to questions over e-mail.
If you use debian, installation is as easy as apt-get install kimberlite. If you want to use it as an NFS server, you'll need to buy the commercial version for full support, but it's not very expensive.
Ignore the people in this thread who are talking out of their asses and saying multi-host scsi doesn't work well. They just didn't know how to set it up right or have never actually tried it. It's very common, and people have been using it for decades.
The difference?
Zilch. Zero. Fuck all.
So stop complaining and buy the PC version, flash the rom, and use it in your mac. I've got a flashed Radeon 8500 and a flashed adaptec SCSI card in my mac. The SCSI card was the real no-brainer. $100 instead of $369, and flashing it for use in a mac is a supported operation. All the tools are available on the Adaptec site and run in MacOS X.
I think the high price on "Mac" stuff that's clearly identical to PC stuff (Drives, USB stuff, Memory, Many PCI cards) is just a "stupid" tax.
It didn't wash off. Some people used paint in places.
Still, it was intended to wash off.
From CNN:
"The signs are made from biodegradable chalk, she added, and can be removed easily.
"It washes right off, so it will be removed the next time it rains."
It rained in San Francisco Wednesday evening, but the penguins were still there Thursday morning, smiling broadly."
Wasn't the stuff IBM used supposed to wash off with rain? That's a big difference compared to cleaning up plastic butterflys that probably would have been found along streets for years.
"If you want our skills, here's how we define 'fair treatment.'"
That's a convienient little leap of logic in your argument there. What should that definition be? Why should the definition of 'fair treatment' be one sided, when there are potentially three sides? How long do you think 'fair treatment' will stay 'fair' when it's dictated by one party. Here's a hint: Is it fair when it's defined solely by the employer? What about people who are unemployed, and are willing to work in conditions that a union is protesting. Companies aren't allowed to ditch the greedy union members for a new workforce. The law doesn't provide exceptions to that protection, and it gives unions too much power.
Put down your cyberpunk novel for a minute and realize that the assembly-line was created by Henry Ford specifically to commoditize auto labor, to take as much skill as possible out of the profession. And it worked, while everyone else thought it was impossible. Who'll be the Henry Ford of geekdom? Want to bet your future that one will never appear?
Welcome to real life. When your skills are no longer needed you need new skills. The correct solution to the problem, should the Heny Ford of geekdom ever come along, will be to get jobs doing something else. The solution is not to force the use of outdated labor on an industry to preserve unnecissary jobs. People with your attitude will end up in mediocrity, their jobs only existing because they are leveraging the power of a union, not because they are truely useful. The rest of us will adapt to a changing environment and accept the risks of life in exchange for the potential rewards. The best part is that even if the risk doesn't pay of financially all the time, life will be much more interesting and flexable along the way.
Oh joy! He combined the syntax of makefiles with python! It's going to be so much fun to use! I can't wait!
(</sarcasm>)
Ok, say for sake of discussion the top 20 guys take a million apiece, thus leaving $5 million for 300 people. That's nearly $17k per person. If that's bending over for the company, let me be the first one to grab my ankles.
Say you make $90-120k/year. (Not hard to do... Even a few years out of college) If you make that much money, and your current employer considers you a "key" employee, there's a good chance that there is job available for you at another company because if you weren't good at what you do, you wouldn't both be making that much money, and be considered a "key" employee. Now, if you were making that much money at a company that just filed for bankruptcy, and were offered another job at a company that wasn't bankrupt for the same salary, how much would it cost to keep you working at the bankrupt company? As somebody who went through this recently, I can tell you that $17k was not enough for me.
Oh, believe me, I know. Compare my e-mail address with the list of vendors that support their platform. If you think the current boards are finicky, you should have seen the early prototypes. :-)
No offence to you, Sivar, since you're an innocent victim of this offtopic rant, but it's unfortunate that you can click a box to disable peoples .sigs, but there's no box to disable comments about people's sigs. If only...
If you really want to build a system from parts there are several places you can go. Motorola sells evaluation platforms that consisto of a motherboard (essentially a backplane) and CPU modules that plug into it. It's calld Sandpoint. You can get third party CPU modules for it from Tundra (who also sells whole kits with their own system board). Marvell/Galileo sells a platform that is well suited to building a PC style machine with PPC hardware, and you can get a variety of processor cards for it ranging from low end G3 style processors up to dual 7450 processors.
Some of the best PPC machines available right now can't be built from parts simply because they're on a single board. My current to y is the cyclades TS-100 it's only 1"x3"x3", has dual CPUs and can be had for under $200.
As far as resale value goes, if an object has a higher initial price, it almost goes without saying that it's resale value will be higher as well. Especially given point #1 above.
I call bullshit. It doesn't matter how expensive your PC was when you bought it, it's still (practically) worthless 4 years later. The key here is what percentage of it's original value it retains over time. Macs retain a higher percentage of their value over their lifetime then PCs do.
If anything I much prefer retailers having to make the effort than having to pay higher taxes so that the state can better enforce it.
Why? You pay the costs either way, and the choice of making the retailers do the work will limit your choices in retailers by raising the barriers to entry. Worse, the distributed costs of having each retailer increase their paperwork by 50x is likely higher than the collection being centralized in government, so not only do these states want out of state businesses to enforce their use tax, they want to increase the tax and disguise the tax increase from consumers as price increases in your favorite catalog. Even after all that, the revenue from mail order taxes will likely be miniscule compared to traditional sales tax, and enforcement will still be a problem!
Bars use more resources than coffeeshops (ie, cops to break up fights). Do bars pay higher taxes?
Yes. In many states there is a (much) higher tax on alcohol than on other food and beverages. Some localities have an additional alcohol tax on top of that, and yet others don't allow alcohol to be serverd in public places at all.
What was your argument again?
Bottom line is we need a comprehensive tax policy that includes the net. Especially with the steadily blurring line between clicks and bricks. Best case is a tax policy that isn't an obscene burden to collect but which allows localities to collect taxes.
Sales tax is broken. We have property tax and income tax already, and we're begining to see the problems that localized sales taxes cause. The best comprehensive sales tax policy is to have no sales tax.
The states instead would like to simplify the taxation process so that they can rely on online retailers to withhold sales tax.
That's certainly a nice way to put it. I prefer this way:
The states instead would like to transfer the enormous costs of enforcing their use tax to online retailers, since the cost of accurately collecting use tax from individuals is typically higher than the revenue that is generated.