All well and good if you can predict your data flow over the time you own the gear. (Riiight...) More often than not things change and it's critical to have the flexibility to use *any* port for *any* IO pattern due to things happening you didn't plan for, whether it be faster growth, mergers, consolidation, or worst of all being successful at your job and people discover the wonders of SAN backup, or VMware which consolidates IO big time.
The MDS 9500 line will not have local switching unless they fundamentally redesign -- the central arbiter in the supervisors is the choke point and unless they figure out a way to distribute that all local IO will have to check there and pass through the crossbar. IOS â SAN-OS, and different chipsets. I'd be impressed if they could figure it out but it's been 4 years and if it hasn't happened yet, I don't think it will never happen in the MDS. Nexus -- we'll see, but that doesn't support FC.
If you're in the single switch range, you're fine, but I know too many guys above 100 ports growing at 30-100% a year -- knowing neighboring ports can talk at line rate regardless of the other IO patterns makes for a great insurance policy and happy management.
These guys are all pretty small networking are storage players. They're not getting anywhere in the enterprise with iSCSI and they think 10Gb ethernet is going to save them.
Guess what -- I/O takes CPU. Somewhere you're doing about a GHz of CPU to drive a Gbit of I/O. This might be on a TOE, or an HBA, or on the CPU itself, but it's happening somewhere...
Remember also that 10GbE is not lossless Data Center Ethernet / Converged Enhanced Ethernet. Storage does NOT like lost packets, and you have to compensate for that. That eats CPU cycles and takes away from bandwidth, or adds costs if you offload it.
While I understand the desire to consolidate cables, think of what happens to your computer when you pull out your ethernet cable, and when you pull out your hard drive... It seems like the ethernet guys want to reinvent the ethernet and make it more like Fibre Channel (lossless, low latency, etc). So why not just use FC?
Don't get me wrong, I definitely see network convergence over the next decade. I just think the Ethernet evangalists are naive in how quickly it will happen. Standards, interoperability, QoS and reliability are a bitch and take more time than you ever thought possible.
I have a feeling storage over ethernet is going to look a lot like the issues we saw with backup-over-the-LAN, and how people were surprised how it affected their other network traffic...
The 9513 not 528 x 4Gb ports -- take another look at that web page. There's no local switching on Cisco FC linecards, so with 48Gb per slot, it's really just 528 x 1Gb ports. A port can do 4Gb, but it's stealing bandwidth from neighboring ports because of that 48Gb limit.
Brocade can do more bandwidth per slot -- 64Gb in the 48000 (16 x 4Gb ports per slot), and you can get 4Gb on up to 48 ports per slot if you locally switch the other 32 ports.
The DCX has 256Gb per slot and can do 4Gb on every port without needing to locally switch. It can do 256 ports of 8Gb, any to any, and 384 if you use local switching.
The DCX also has a 1/2 terabit interconnect so you can attach two chassis and get 768 ports talking at a better subscription ratio that the 528 ports in the 9513.
10 years ago, NetApp put out white papers saying that they could make Oracle run over NFS. Could you? Sure. Would you, if you wanted to keep your job? No.
The Canadians pulled the same trick on the British in an naval exercise this year. Check out the picture the HMCS Corner Brook took of the HMS Illustrious.
- slide in your LP, both sides get scanned simultaneously -- maybe two passes and a slightly different angle to get the benefit of 3-D - the software converts the grooves into mp3 / m4a, figures out where the tracks are - pings CDDB with the name of the album and artist to get the track names (while CDDB and vinyl is flaky due to the track length varying between the vinyl and CD versions, I'm sure you could constrain the search) - slide in the album cover, both images get scanned (and maybe use OCR to get the text, and perhaps even the track names...)
Ta da, your records are in iTunes, tracks and album art. And the RIAA is livid. Everyone wins!
This is an effective way to get a bigger HD for the ol' PowerBook and give the old one a place to live.
The 100 GB in my 17' PB was full so rather than buy a naked 160GB, I bought the 160GB FW800 cased version. I removed it from the casing, took out the 100GB inside the PB, replaced it with the 160B, and put the 100GB back in casing.
I now have a nice backup 100GB hard drive that I can travel with and even boot off of without needing a power supply. Otherwise, I can keep it at home and attach it to my server. This has the added bonus of giving my home access to my music library and other files on the home server as well.
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
I've got this feeling,so appealing
for us to get together and sing - SING!
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding, Donana phone
It grows in bunches, I've got my hunches
Its the best, beats the rest
cellular, modular, interactivodular
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ping pong ping pong ping pong ping, Ponana phone
Its no baloney, It aint a phony
My cellular Bananular phone
Don't need quarters, don't need dimes, to call a friend of mine, dont need computer or tv, to have a real good time
I'll call for pizza, I'll call my cat
I'll call the whitehouse, have a chat
I'll place a call around the world
Operator get me beijing jing jing jing
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ying yang ying yang ying yang ying, Yanana phone
It's a real live mama and papa phone
a brother and sister and a dogaphone
a grandpa phone and a grandma phone too - oh yeah
my cellular bananular phone
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
Its a phone with appeal (a peel)
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
Now you can have your phone and eat it too
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
This song drives me.... bananas
Cingular charges 60 cents per minute to call CANADA for god's sake... Don't have to make too many calls for it to make a difference.
You will say, "Hey, you can pay an extra fee each month to have cheaper international calls!" Ooookay, so that drops it to 20 cents a minute. This still sucks. Cingular is ripping me off. What, am I calling freakin' Ghana or Ascension Island? I get Canada for free with Vonage.
I'd love to be able to route or do some sort of bounce or callback so I can leverage my Vonage account from my cell. Oh well, one day...
Bits of these movies are still stuck in my head. Testament, where they try to figure if they should still hold school, or where the wife hears the last message from her husband when she tries to get the batteries out of the answering machine. Threads, where the cop finds the staff of the emergency command centre weeks after they died. The Day After, where the homeless guy offered the the doctor an onion in the ruins of his house...
I'd never heard of Miracle Mile, may have to check it out.
I wonder if Russian kids had any nuclear disaster movies to scare the living crap out of them in the early 80s?
This quote evolved from a NYT interview with Einstein in 1919. The NYT sent its golf correspondent who made stuff up in his story, and these exaggerations made it in the headline of the article itself. I quote Bill Bryson in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (who in turn is quoting David Bodanis in "E=mc squared" (both of which I recommend...)
"Almost at once his theories of relativity developed a reputation for being impossible for an ordinary person to grasp. Matters were not helped... when the New York Times decided to do a story, and -- for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder -- sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.
Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong. Among the more lasting errors in his report was the assertion that Einstein had found a publisher daring enough to publish a book that only twelve men 'in all the world could comprehend'. There was no such book, no such publisher, no such circle of learned men, but the notion stuck anyway. Soon the number of people who could grasp relativity had been reduced even further in the popular imagination -- and the scientific establishment, in must be said, did little to disturb the myth." [He then mentions Eddington's "I'm trying to think of the third person" quote.]
Here's the link to the original 1919 NYT article. (yes, you have to pay, but you can see the headline for free...)
I've never understood why companies allow one, "el", zero and "oh" in license numbers that have to be manually entered by end-users -- why not tell your license generator to exclude those four characters and save everyone the trouble?
uControl nixes Caps Lock on Mac OS X
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
uControl is a nice little Mac OS X hack that disables/remaps Caps Lock and other modifier keys on PowerBooks.
I also used it to remap the "Enter" key to the right of the spacebar on my 15" TiBook to "Command" -- I have no clue why Apple thought that was a good idea, but uControl saved the day.
It's very well designed -- if it thinks there's going to be a conflict when booting into an upgraded OS it will disable itself (vs. barfing and causing a system panic...)
While the majority of stuff over on alt.sex.stories is crap, a real jewel is "Aftermath" by Al Steiner a couple of years back that fits into the big-space-rock-hits-earth-and-wipes-out-life genre...
A comet hits off the Pacific, and half mile tidal waves moving at 600 miles an hour finish off what the earthquakes didn't. Those remaining fight to survive, and those with guns survive longer.
An off-duty cop (a gulf war vet) who was camping in the woods fights to survive, and ends up using his skills rallying a neighbourhood east of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills against militias. (Lots of widowed housewives too, thus the s in the a.s.s.t.r...) Again, surprisingly well done and gripping.
I want them to find a rock on Mars that is actually a meteorite from that got ejected from Earth that was actually a meteorite that got ejected from Mars...
In all seriousness, has anyone ever found meteorites that may have come from Venus? Or is it more likely for ejected planetary meteorites to make their way down the Sun's gravity well?
Random shuffle is your friend. It wants to help you. I just wish there were a way to quickly switch out of random to play more of that particular artist or album.
Click and hold on the centre button doesn't seem to be used for anything when a song is playing. I'd love a mini-menu to pop up:
- play more of this artist - play more of this album - play more of this genre
A couple of times, I've forgotten to turn on random shuffle. The songs were playing in alphabetical order, but it seemed pretty damn random to me until I noticed the pattern...\._/ (go canuckleheads!)
A couple of people have already mentioned the NTSC = "Never Thrice the Same Colour" wag, but New Scientist published a funny story for the 40th anniversary that shows that the RCA techs who developed the standard were a little worried about the colour fidelity.
A journalist who used to cover the NTSC told us recently of a lighter moment at the laboratories of the record company RCA in Princeton, New Jersey, where the system was developed. Team leader George Brown laid on a final transmission test. A colour camera was focused on a bowl of colourful fruit in one lab, and the received signal was displayed in another lab on a prototype colour tube. Just before the test Brown took a banana from the bowl and painted it blue.
For the rest of the day the engineers at the receiving end struggled desperately to find out how their new system was faithfully reproducing the colour of red apples, orange oranges and green grapes, but resolutely converting yellow into blue.
I guess the moral of the story still applies today -- check the basic stuff first. (Can't tell you how many times I've "troubleshot" an unplugged cable...)
George Brown's book, "Part of Which I Was" covers the history of his time at RCA. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but he sounds like a good guy.:) Also, Ed Reitan has a pretty interesting page on the history of colour TV. RCA actually demonstrated a electronic colour TV system to the FCC in Feb 1940, so happy 64th! (CBS had some crazy-ass mechanical systems with spinning colour wheels). It's a fascinating site, well worth the read.
Slashdot Mirror
All well and good if you can predict your data flow over the time you own the gear. (Riiight...) More often than not things change and it's critical to have the flexibility to use *any* port for *any* IO pattern due to things happening you didn't plan for, whether it be faster growth, mergers, consolidation, or worst of all being successful at your job and people discover the wonders of SAN backup, or VMware which consolidates IO big time.
The MDS 9500 line will not have local switching unless they fundamentally redesign -- the central arbiter in the supervisors is the choke point and unless they figure out a way to distribute that all local IO will have to check there and pass through the crossbar. IOS â SAN-OS, and different chipsets. I'd be impressed if they could figure it out but it's been 4 years and if it hasn't happened yet, I don't think it will never happen in the MDS. Nexus -- we'll see, but that doesn't support FC.
If you're in the single switch range, you're fine, but I know too many guys above 100 ports growing at 30-100% a year -- knowing neighboring ports can talk at line rate regardless of the other IO patterns makes for a great insurance policy and happy management.
These guys are all pretty small networking are storage players. They're not getting anywhere in the enterprise with iSCSI and they think 10Gb ethernet is going to save them.
Guess what -- I/O takes CPU. Somewhere you're doing about a GHz of CPU to drive a Gbit of I/O. This might be on a TOE, or an HBA, or on the CPU itself, but it's happening somewhere...
Remember also that 10GbE is not lossless Data Center Ethernet / Converged Enhanced Ethernet. Storage does NOT like lost packets, and you have to compensate for that. That eats CPU cycles and takes away from bandwidth, or adds costs if you offload it.
While I understand the desire to consolidate cables, think of what happens to your computer when you pull out your ethernet cable, and when you pull out your hard drive... It seems like the ethernet guys want to reinvent the ethernet and make it more like Fibre Channel (lossless, low latency, etc). So why not just use FC?
Don't get me wrong, I definitely see network convergence over the next decade. I just think the Ethernet evangalists are naive in how quickly it will happen. Standards, interoperability, QoS and reliability are a bitch and take more time than you ever thought possible.
I have a feeling storage over ethernet is going to look a lot like the issues we saw with backup-over-the-LAN, and how people were surprised how it affected their other network traffic...
There's a newer power calculator at
http://brocade.com/power
The DCX is under half a watt per Gbit.
The 9513 not 528 x 4Gb ports -- take another look at that web page. There's no local switching on Cisco FC linecards, so with 48Gb per slot, it's really just 528 x 1Gb ports. A port can do 4Gb, but it's stealing bandwidth from neighboring ports because of that 48Gb limit.
Brocade can do more bandwidth per slot -- 64Gb in the 48000 (16 x 4Gb ports per slot), and you can get 4Gb on up to 48 ports per slot if you locally switch the other 32 ports.
The DCX has 256Gb per slot and can do 4Gb on every port without needing to locally switch. It can do 256 ports of 8Gb, any to any, and 384 if you use local switching.
The DCX also has a 1/2 terabit interconnect so you can attach two chassis and get 768 ports talking at a better subscription ratio that the 528 ports in the 9513.
That should read:
"10 GbE does not equal 10 Gb FCoE."
10 GbE 10 Gb FCoE.
FCoE is about making Ethernet more like Fibre Channel.
10 years ago, NetApp put out white papers saying that they could make Oracle run over NFS. Could you? Sure. Would you, if you wanted to keep your job? No.
The Canadians pulled the same trick on the British in an naval exercise this year. Check out the picture the HMCS Corner Brook took of the HMS Illustrious.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/gotcha-canuck-s.html
Ironically Canada bought these subs from the British.
I'm thinking a dozen more electric boats once the Northwest Passage will do nicely.
Oh, so it's like Calvinball!
http://www.simplych.com/cb_rules.htm
I'd like to see a double-sided scanner.
- slide in your LP, both sides get scanned simultaneously -- maybe two passes and a slightly different angle to get the benefit of 3-D
- the software converts the grooves into mp3 / m4a, figures out where the tracks are
- pings CDDB with the name of the album and artist to get the track names (while CDDB and vinyl is flaky due to the track length varying between the vinyl and CD versions, I'm sure you could constrain the search)
- slide in the album cover, both images get scanned (and maybe use OCR to get the text, and perhaps even the track names...)
Ta da, your records are in iTunes, tracks and album art. And the RIAA is livid. Everyone wins!
This is an effective way to get a bigger HD for the ol' PowerBook and give the old one a place to live.
The 100 GB in my 17' PB was full so rather than buy a naked 160GB, I bought the 160GB FW800 cased version. I removed it from the casing, took out the 100GB inside the PB, replaced it with the 160B, and put the 100GB back in casing.
I now have a nice backup 100GB hard drive that I can travel with and even boot off of without needing a power supply. Otherwise, I can keep it at home and attach it to my server. This has the added bonus of giving my home access to my music library and other files on the home server as well.
Nah, the antennas are easy -- you just stack the rocks and make sure the inukshuk's arm is pointing at its neighbour...
__ __
___ ___
__________ >>>>> __________ >>>>>
___ ___
_______ _______
__ __ __ __
__ __ __ __
I am so using that to tape my hockey stick...
Looks like Raffi almost had it right... (though the first person to make this a ringtone on their ApplePhone gets shot.)
.... bananas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananaphone
http://gprime.net/flash.php/bananaphone
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
I've got this feeling,so appealing
for us to get together and sing - SING!
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding, Donana phone
It grows in bunches, I've got my hunches
Its the best, beats the rest
cellular, modular, interactivodular
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ping pong ping pong ping pong ping, Ponana phone
Its no baloney, It aint a phony
My cellular Bananular phone
Don't need quarters, don't need dimes, to call a friend of mine, dont need computer or tv, to have a real good time
I'll call for pizza, I'll call my cat
I'll call the whitehouse, have a chat
I'll place a call around the world
Operator get me beijing jing jing jing
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring, Banana phone
Ying yang ying yang ying yang ying, Yanana phone
It's a real live mama and papa phone
a brother and sister and a dogaphone
a grandpa phone and a grandma phone too - oh yeah
my cellular bananular phone
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
Its a phone with appeal (a peel)
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
Now you can have your phone and eat it too
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
This song drives me
Banana phone, ring... ring... ring...
Bo ba do ba do do doob
Cingular charges 60 cents per minute to call CANADA for god's sake... Don't have to make too many calls for it to make a difference.
You will say, "Hey, you can pay an extra fee each month to have cheaper international calls!" Ooookay, so that drops it to 20 cents a minute. This still sucks. Cingular is ripping me off. What, am I calling freakin' Ghana or Ascension Island? I get Canada for free with Vonage.
I'd love to be able to route or do some sort of bounce or callback so I can leverage my Vonage account from my cell. Oh well, one day...
I remember that -- it was set in Charleston, maybe 1983 or so?
Aha, you can actually BUY this. Shocking.
In fact, here's a pretty lengthy list of nuclear disaster movies.
Bits of these movies are still stuck in my head. Testament, where they try to figure if they should still hold school, or where the wife hears the last message from her husband when she tries to get the batteries out of the answering machine. Threads, where the cop finds the staff of the emergency command centre weeks after they died. The Day After, where the homeless guy offered the the doctor an onion in the ruins of his house...
I'd never heard of Miracle Mile, may have to check it out.
I wonder if Russian kids had any nuclear disaster movies to scare the living crap out of them in the early 80s?
We may let Americans browse the Canadian store, but when Canadians log in, here's what *we* actually see...
But you'd only be able to download cover songs sung by Sandy McTire...
This quote evolved from a NYT interview with Einstein in 1919. The NYT sent its golf correspondent who made stuff up in his story, and these exaggerations made it in the headline of the article itself. I quote Bill Bryson in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (who in turn is quoting David Bodanis in "E=mc squared" (both of which I recommend...)
"Almost at once his theories of relativity developed a reputation for being impossible for an ordinary person to grasp. Matters were not helped... when the New York Times decided to do a story, and -- for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder -- sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.
Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong. Among the more lasting errors in his report was the assertion that Einstein had found a publisher daring enough to publish a book that only twelve men 'in all the world could comprehend'. There was no such book, no such publisher, no such circle of learned men, but the notion stuck anyway. Soon the number of people who could grasp relativity had been reduced even further in the popular imagination -- and the scientific establishment, in must be said, did little to disturb the myth." [He then mentions Eddington's "I'm trying to think of the third person" quote.]
Here's the link to the original 1919 NYT article. (yes, you have to pay, but you can see the headline for free...)
Also, here's
I've never understood why companies allow one, "el", zero and "oh" in license numbers that have to be manually entered by end-users -- why not tell your license generator to exclude those four characters and save everyone the trouble?
uControl is a nice little Mac OS X hack that disables/remaps Caps Lock and other modifier keys on PowerBooks.
I also used it to remap the "Enter" key to the right of the spacebar on my 15" TiBook to "Command" -- I have no clue why Apple thought that was a good idea, but uControl saved the day.
It's very well designed -- if it thinks there's going to be a conflict when booting into an upgraded OS it will disable itself (vs. barfing and causing a system panic...)
The archive is over at asstr,org
A comet hits off the Pacific, and half mile tidal waves moving at 600 miles an hour finish off what the earthquakes didn't. Those remaining fight to survive, and those with guns survive longer.
An off-duty cop (a gulf war vet) who was camping in the woods fights to survive, and ends up using his skills rallying a neighbourhood east of Sacramento in the Sierra foothills against militias. (Lots of widowed housewives too, thus the s in the a.s.s.t.r...) Again, surprisingly well done and gripping.
I want them to find a rock on Mars that is actually a meteorite from that got ejected from Earth that was actually a meteorite that got ejected from Mars...
In all seriousness, has anyone ever found meteorites that may have come from Venus? Or is it more likely for ejected planetary meteorites to make their way down the Sun's gravity well?
Random shuffle is your friend. It wants to help you. I just wish there were a way to quickly switch out of random to play more of that particular artist or album.
._/ (go canuckleheads!)
Click and hold on the centre button doesn't seem to be used for anything when a song is playing. I'd love a mini-menu to pop up:
- play more of this artist
- play more of this album
- play more of this genre
A couple of times, I've forgotten to turn on random shuffle. The songs were playing in alphabetical order, but it seemed pretty damn random to me until I noticed the pattern...\
An RPG would be much more effective for getting samples inside rocks than that wimpy drill. Bruce Cockburn would be so proud...
George Brown's book, "Part of Which I Was" covers the history of his time at RCA. Unfortunately, it's out of print, but he sounds like a good guy.