Recently, my lesbian boss became pregnant. Don't worry, I didn't ask.
I'm the person who always names the kids in our deparment before they're born, sort of like when you code name a project. For example, I named the son of one coworker (I'll call him Ken) "Baby Chewbacca".
But Ken's wife is pregnant again, and my boss is having twins, so I had to come up with a new way to name everything, and it goes a little something like this:
-In programs, variables are named from the book "1001 Baby Names"
-Servers are named after *former* employees. That way, then they depreciate in 2-3 years, you get to get rid of them AGAIN!
Seriously, this is what I've leaned:
-Servers named after famous computer people (Babbage, Hollerith, Turning, Hopper, etc) always break.
-Servers named after their function (Helpdesk, Development1, Payroll) always get reallocated to do something else, resulting in the "adverb-errata" (New_Helpdesk, Current_Development, Payroll_Prime)
What we do is name the server whatever the hell we want (we just got 3 Sun V880s we've named fooEarth, fooWind, and fooFire) and then we CNAME them in DNS to their function (helpdesk.domain.org, development.domain.org, payroll.domain.org). That way, no one is ever dependant on the name if we decide to change it. We've even started abstacting services on the same box.
Whatever you do, don't call your server "late_to_dinner.domain.com", that would be rude.
If your color printer is CMYK, then you're already saving as much money as you could. Granted, you're shortening the life of the fuser by running more pages through it, but in the end the cost is so minimal that one person printing wedding shower invitations will blow your savings to hell.
Now, if your color printer is RGB, then you are printing RGB black and it is costing you more. My suggestion (if you really want to save money in the long run) is to get a CMYK color printer to do double duty. You'll only be using one printer to do all your printing, and as the parent post said the black toner is a lot cheaper than the color.
Note: to my knowledge, the HP color printers are all RGB. Coming from a print environment, this does really suck.
If you're not handy with a soldering iron, or some of the other approaches listed don't help, this one is pretty easy and has worked every time I've done it:
-Buy a harddrive of the exact same make and model -Unscrew and disconnect the controller board from the drive. It should be held with about 4 tiny screws and one ribbon cable. Don't snap this cable too you ape! -Transplant the controller board, reconnecting the tiny cable correctly and actually screwing all the screws back in (I'm not good about screws). -Plug it in and go to town.
Back in the old days (circa 1998) I worked in a computer store while I was in college. For some people, the two or three hundred dollars for another drive (to throw away) was cheaper than data recovery when they'd screwed it up.
Some of us silly Americans not only know where Saskatchewan is, and that the Capital is Saskatoon, but that it's near the left coast after British Colombia and Alberta (and I'm an east coast American myself).
As for your sig:
You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, you can pick your friend's nose, but you can't pick your nose's friends.
This quote is from page 15 of the OpenVMS at 20 publication that Digital Published in 1997. The PDF is available from Compaq.
During the cold war, VAX systems could not be sold behind the Iron Curtain. Recognizing superior technology, technical people cloned VAX systems in Russia, Hungary, and China. After learning that VAX systems were being cloned, DIGITAL had the following words etched on the CVAX chip, "VAX...when you care enough to steal the very best."
Like the other posters said, start with ditching RAID 5 for RAID 10/0+1 (depending on your preference). RAID 10 (Mirror + Stripe) is my preference because of the higher redundacy - if one disk dies the whole stripe doesn't drop out. RAID 0+1 is faster but slightly less redundant. Either way, the parity overhead generated by RAID 5 is the death of a database.
Your controllers are pretty fast, it's more likely your software config or your network. Are you running MS SQL Server, or something else? MS SQL Server requires some pretty specific tuning to get good performance (like telling it *not* to use all the RAM). How well are you objects tuned?
How about your OS? What filesystem are the datafiles living on? Oracle supports RAW partitions, which allows you to eliminate the OS overhead from the database. We're testing the performace now of Oracle on different Solaris filesystems. You'd be surprised the differences between UFS, UFS with Logging, and Veritas File System.
While I won't deny that gigabit ethernet is fast, it's kind of expensive (especially if your network infastucture isn't equipped to handle it). If cost is a concern, and you're in a switched enviroment (no hubs) you can add more 100Mb Ethernet NICs and trunk them for more bandwidth. In reality, I've never choked a 100Mb connection unless something was wrong (like end users writing nasty Crystal Reports).
I'd like to see more books like "OS/400 for UNIX Admins", "VMS for UNIX Admins", "AIX for VMS Admins". Someone suggested Linux for NT users, which is fine, but what about those of us who know big systems who need to know other big systems in a very short amount of time.
On the same vein, development: "COBOL for C++ programmers", "Flat File Database Design for Relational Database Developers", "Perl for Visual Basic Programmers". Something that presents to similar ideas (Programming) that have very different approaches (COBOL uses Verbs and Paragraphs where C++ users functions and reserved words) and presents them in a way the reader can understand.
Also, Practical Approaches to setting up a system. We just got Sun V880s, and we've had a bunch of Netras and smaller systems, we've used Veritas Volume Manager before, and we've setup big Alpha systems before, but we've never setup a big Sun. It'd be nice to pick up a book that walked through best practices of how to setup a system from beginning to end in all aspects, not just Alternate Pathing or just disk quotas or just security. A big picture book, with big pictures.
There are two parts to this (most of which makes my post redundant):
1) Can it be done/has it been done? Yes and yes. Mainframes used to do this. The OS/400 on the AS/400 uses basically this same idea. Apple tried to do this with Hypercard. Oracle does this with iFS. Microsoft wants to do this (and had plans to for a long time).
2) Should you do this? No. You're quickly leaning why NAS is so cheap. What if you or someone else leaves you business? There's nothing elegant about something so complex no one can come in after you and figure it out (screw job security - there's plenty of other shit to do).
Adding a database wrapper to an already complex web of file system objects is only going to make things worse. Get out a whiteboard and start drawing pictures until you find the end of the knot and start undoing it. I'd offer more helpful advice, but I'd need more information about how things are laid out.
Consider a fiber channel SAN and sleep well at night knowing you have virtual disk extraction of this mess - this morning I concatinated a 10GB volume segment onto a Netware server and moved a virtual disk from a dead Sun Netra to a new one.
We just replaced out Nextel phones at work with T900s and Skytel service. So far, we've been very happy.
The keyboard on the T900 is easy to use, takes about an hour to get used to (quicker and faster than grafitti). 1 AA battery will last you a month, where the Palm VII seems to eat AAA batteries (2 at a time).
The only issue with Skytel service is that you pay a per-page fee after 500 each month.
On the other hand, service for the Palm VII is still pretty high - $50 a month plus bandwidth. We have those at work too and I'm not real impressed with them. We're trying Blackberrys now - might want to look into those.
Considering that whatever you do, you need to get 2, I think the 2 way pager will be your best bet. More so if your wife isn't a geek - the T900 is not imposing like most tech devices.
I know how you feel. I hated programming in college.
When I started in the industry, I was a Network Administrator (in name only - certainly not in pay). For me, it wasn't about the money, it was the thirst for knowledge.
I had been dabbling in Linux for a few years at that point, and I knew Windows 9X and Netware, but I didn't know NT. I learned NT inside and out in four months, went on to infrastructure - first LANs (switches are our friends, collision domains are not) and then WANs.
When that got old I took interest in my then company's AS/400. I changed jobs, and did the Network thing a little a couple other places until I got here. After all, who was going to pay me for what I didn't know?
Apparently, my current company was. My boss asked me if I wanted to try being a DBA since we didn't really have one, and the amount of data we managed had grown in a pretty short period of time. That was two years ago. Not only do I love being a DBA, but it gave me a new appreciation for programming I never had when I was in college. I avoided it for years, and by giving myself a break and a chance to do other things I had come to appreciate it again.
"As an entry for the 1998 Gordon Bell price/performance prize, we present two calculations from the disciplines of condensed matter physics and astrophysics. The simulations were performed on a 70 processor DEC Alpha cluster (Avalon) constructed entirely from commodity personal computer technology and freely available software, for a cost of 152 thousand dollars.
Avalon performed a 60 million particle molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of shock-induced plasticity using the SPaSM MD code. The beginning of this simulation sustained approximately 10 Gflops over a 44 hour period, and saved 68 Gbytes of raw data. The resulting price/performance is $15/Mflop, or equivalently, 67 Gflops per million dollars."
That's the first one I grabbed. Go beat on your PeeCee Coward.
The Pentium Pro was a RISC microcore with a CISC instruction set. That technology, and everything born out of it (Klamath, Deschutes, Katmai, et cetera ad infinitum) are based on technology Intel stole from a Chicago startup. SMP on the x86 was flaky because the instruction timing is far less exact than on RISC.
Hardware super instructions are an idea whose time should have been gone a decade ago. This concept was born out of systems with slow access to ram and i/o. Memory is cheap now - why we encorage Intel to keep producing crap that is too hot and too slow because it has so much junk as hardware is beyond me. I haven't given those idiots a penny since 1994.
Yeah, the Pentium Pro Core - technology Intel stole from a Chicago start up.
It's still the same outdated instuction set, and the only thing the RISC microcode does is stabalize the instruction timing to give SMP an actual chance on that platform.
If Alpha's are so outdated, why is it that the fastest computer on the face of the earth is a cluster of Alpha's? The Human Genome project uses GS-320 clusters running Tru-64 to crunch all their numbers.
CISC was a good idea when memory was expensive and access to peripherals and even RAM was slow - now none of that is a factor. Alpha was designed as the modern, RISC replacement to the dated CISC design of the VAX. The x86 is also based on that outdated CISC design.
MMX, SIMD (KNI), and 3D Now that you speak of are super instuctions - hardware designed to do the work software should. While they are faster, few applications make use of them (RC5 loves them...)
Alpha does not support as many operating systems as the PC (largely because x86 has been cheaper for so long) but it supports better OSes - Tru64 (your commercial Unix), OpenVMS ("unhackable" by DefCon standards), Linux, FreeBSD, and NT4 SP3. They were never designed to be cheap, mass market machines, they are big iron - except by that standard they are super fast and dirt cheap.
Perhaps you should reexamine your perception of what is and isn't outdated, limited abandonware.
My original commet on/. when the Compaq --> Intel transfer was announced:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12932&cid=13 00 07
My website comment on the same topic:
http://eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/alpha.html
We're actually discussing a move from Office 97 to Office XP internally now, but that looks to be so much of a problem we may move to Star Office.
We investiaged alternative to MS Office some time ago, and there are some issues:
-While most free software can open Word Docs with considerable accuracy, the problem becomes embedded OLE objects. Now, Word Docs are written in a bidirectional COM stream (similar in ways to Mac Data Fork/Resource Fork). If you open an XP Document on Office 97, what you get is an RTF-like rendering of the source. No OLE, no red lining (for example), but the text and it's formatting. Same thing with Star Office and MS Office - open an MS Office document under Star and you get an RTF rendering of the source. I have not tried this with Star Office 6, but I did extensive testing with 5.x. Our solution to the OLE problem (since it does creep up on Macs with MS Office as well) was to render each and every incoming Word Document as a PDF via a robot (print to file --> make a postscript --> distill). We have a 99%+ success rate with this.
-One thing you should understand about understand that PDF's are largely untouchable. You either need to open it in Acrobat Exchange to make changes or use another tool (we bought Solvero and Asura which were $40,000 for one copy - excellent tools but expensive).
-Star Office 6 supports XML as the file format. We think this is great because it makes writing import filters for layout software a snap. We're just waiting for it to mature a little before we dive in (we figure Q2 2002 before we take a serious look).
Now, those are the technical issues, which are the easy ones. The hard issue is going to be selling your users on a change to a free office product. A lot of it will depend on how many users you have, what their role is (if they're just saving documents for internal use vs. documents they need to send out to the public vs. documents they need to share with 100 different agencies who've all standardized on Office), what features of MS Office they use, and how much your company is willing to spend. The cost savings alone could make it an easier sell. If they won't take the jump to something free, suggest Word Perfect Office (which is compatible, slick, supported, and not free).
Email me if you wish to discuss this further. Best of luck!
I've taken a design course here which teaches fundamentals in psuedo code. We covered both structured programming and OOP. While this book is *very* English like, it does a good job of scratching the surface.
I think you'll find it's easier to teach OOP if the students understand structured programming first.
I can tell you why it happens in Long Island and Staten Island:
Neighborhoods connect to Central Offices, but there is really only one or two connects from the island(s) to the mainland, where their calls are switched back into the network.
NYC also *still* has a lot of copper. Rain and flooding will cause far more problems with copper than fiber (i.e. a rural area).
Commercially, you have Files-11 ODS-2 for OpenVMS (which is really neat if you've never used it), Netware also has a salvage queue for Traditional FS as well as their journaling file system (whose name escapes me at the moment).
You could also look into Oracle Intermedia, which lets you store files of any type in a transaction database.
Otherwise, you could kludge something with CVS/cron/tar. I've seen some interesting things done during the day with software mirrors splitting for backups (OpenVMS volume shadowing or Solaris Disk Suite), but you risk hosing open files at that point.
As for a former New York Telephone/NYNEX/Bell Atlantic/Verizon employee, this is no surprise. Everytime there was heavy rains in lower NY State Long Island and Staten Island (516) could only get the operator - switching in and out of that area would shit.
The large scale upgrades to digital switching in the early 90s happened (sadly) under the reigns of NYNEX - the cheapest RBOC in history (they still printed paychecks on NYTEL check stock).
The biggest nightmare of the NYNEX/Bell Atlantic years was OSDI. After TOPS and TSPS, Operator Services contracted to get a new switchboard system called Operator Services Digital Integration, which didn't work. Only thanks to NYNEX Science and Technologies were they able to make it work.
More horrors on my webpage:
http://eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/bellatlantic.htm l
SSD's have been around for quite some time. Compaq had several commercial offerings based on Quantum's SSD. There are also several no-name companies that manufacture solid state drives (Memtech being just one: http://www.memtech.com/Prodinfo.htm).
We actually got our Alpha vendor to let us try an SSD for 30 days. The drive was fast, but we found that we quickly saturated the controller (something a couple U160 drives can easily do). In that regard, it wasn't that fast at all.
And, as has been said in other posts, it's not really economically fesible. We tested a 3.2GB SSD last Christmas that cost $25,000. For that application, we thought it was a good fit. But if you're concerned about capacity, we just bought some 180GB drives for our SAN for about $5,000.00 each.
While the RAM and disk capacity available now is amazing, I don't think we'll ever see the dollar/cost ratio for RAM beat the dollar/cost ratio for disks.
In 1994, which I had a 486/DX2 66 (which came with 4MB Ram), I bought 16MB of RAM for $560.00. Quake was 15MB, so I could load it into a ram drive and play from there. Guess what? It wasn't noticably faster than my IDE hard drive, but Windows screamed. =)
I have an IBM 4.3GB LVD SCSI, 9GB IDB, and (2) 45GB IDE Deskstars - all running flawlessly. I switched to IBM after Western Digial got bad (around the time 4GB was the largest you could get).
Maxtor has always always always been slow, loud, prone to failure shit. When I was a pup and I managed a comptuer store we had the most problem with Maxtor. Where I work now we have about 350 Dell Optiplex's, and the ones with Maxtor's die the most often. The fact that their cheap doesn't outweigh the fact that they're junk.
The people who watch EFC are divided into two camps: those who hate it because of the number of cast changes, and those who love it. I'm among the latter. I've been hooked since the pilot.
The underlying plot is simple: a race of aliens called the Taelons come to Earth "on a mission of peace". They cure our diseases, end famine, and gives of loads of neat technology (Interdimensional Portals just to name one).
But thinks aren't so rosy. There is an underground resistance who believe the Taelons aren't so benevolant, and it appears they're right. The Taelons are dying, and they're being hunted by their ancestreral cousins the Jaridins. Both races have been at work for thousands of years, and the Taelons have come to Earth in search of an army.
Along the way, they've created Cyber-Viral Implants (CVIs) which expand memory, recall, and give the owner a motivational imperitive to serve the Taelons. They've enslaved a race called Skrills and bioengineered them so humans with CVIs have a powerful weapon.
But that only scratches the surface. There is a complex political stugle among the Taelons - to enslave or not to enslave. The leader of the Taelon synod, Qu'on, is killed in the beginning of Season 2 leaving the strugle for power between Da'an (the American Companion) and Zo'or (the UN Companion, and Da'an's child). Along the way, many people die while the resistance is constantly frustrated that their exposure of Taelon atrocities are ignored because humanity is more concerned with owning the latest gadget.
So if you're interested in catching up, Sci Fi is rerunning all the episodes starting this Monday.
Check out Sci Fi: http://www.scifi.com/efc/
Or the official site: http://www.efc.com/
"People of Earth, we are the Companions. People of Earth, we are here to help."
The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and say what you're really feeling.
Intel has made a fortune selling garbage. The x86 architecture is just that - garbage. CISC is dead, and has been for a long time. They couldn't make a decent SMP setup until they stole technology from a International Meta Systems (P6). The flaw in CISC is the inclusion of superinstructions - why add hardware to perform a partial arctangent when memory is cheap? Wait! I have an idea...let's add 57 new ones and call them MMX. Wait! How about 72 news ones called KNI/Streaming SIMD.
Could I do it better? No. But Alpha was truely, without a question in my mind, the finestest CPU ever engineered. It's a pleasure to work on, it's fast, it scales well, and it does out of order execution, which gives it a leg up on the Ultra Sparc.
This has caused a pretty big uproar on comp.os.vms as well. As you may or may not know, OpenVMS, which at one time was THE operating system to run (if you weren't blue) only runs on the VAX and Alpha. Well, Compaq quit making the VAX in September 2000, so this is it. While Compaq claims OpenVMS will be ported to IA-64, it's hardly comparable. There are VAXen in production that haven't been rebooted in a decade. Software in place that hasn't changed in years...and this is how it's going to end? Compaq gives away Alpha technology so they can focus on the iPaq?
These are the issues raised in comp.os.vms:
Will *every* Compaq product which is sold for Alpha VMS today ( or last week ) be ported to IA64? Will they all be available by January 2004? Do they have commitments from Oracle to meet that schedule ( Oracle appear to be "excited" about Tru64 on IA64 but didn't mention if they cared VMS would be available there )? Will all existing LP licenses be transferrable to IA64 at no cost ( to systems
of comparable size)? [anyone who went through a VAX to Alpha transition will understand this question]
Will Compaq provide assistance to 3rd party vendors to move their products to IA64? Will IA64 ports be a straight "recompile and link" or will some programs require substantial changes ( eg device drivers and privileged code )?
My point was that it seems to get limited respect within Compaq. I've been told ( sorry I can't remember the source ) that it was a last minute decision to port it to Alpha and that it wasn't in the original game plan. My concern is the same thing could happen in the Alpha-IA64 transition.
FMS is another product I worry about. I understand it also wasn't going to be ported, until they realized that All-in-1 needed it. FMS was not
recoded for Alpha it was just VESTed. Will it be possible to re-VEST it to run on IA64? Will it be done?
And the quote that sums the whole thing up, from Bill Gunshannon:
Of course, this means congratulations are in order for it's grandfather. The PDP-11 architecture has now not only outlasted the VAX, but also the Alpha.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, my lesbian boss became pregnant. Don't worry, I didn't ask.
e
I'm the person who always names the kids in our deparment before they're born, sort of like when you code name a project. For example, I named the son of one coworker (I'll call him Ken) "Baby Chewbacca".
But Ken's wife is pregnant again, and my boss is having twins, so I had to come up with a new way to name everything, and it goes a little something like this:
-In programs, variables are named from the book "1001 Baby Names"
struct candice (
int terry;
float timmy;
char sam[30];
bool jennifer;
) ann-marie[100];
-Babies are named from the OpenVMS password generator:
muldedie
nicatway
worrawic
prigence
pillenn
metypnot
nobilers
crignies
-Servers are named after *former* employees. That way, then they depreciate in 2-3 years, you get to get rid of them AGAIN!
Seriously, this is what I've leaned:
-Servers named after famous computer people (Babbage, Hollerith, Turning, Hopper, etc) always break.
-Servers named after their function (Helpdesk, Development1, Payroll) always get reallocated to do something else, resulting in the "adverb-errata" (New_Helpdesk, Current_Development, Payroll_Prime)
What we do is name the server whatever the hell we want (we just got 3 Sun V880s we've named fooEarth, fooWind, and fooFire) and then we CNAME them in DNS to their function (helpdesk.domain.org, development.domain.org, payroll.domain.org). That way, no one is ever dependant on the name if we decide to change it. We've even started abstacting services on the same box.
Whatever you do, don't call your server "late_to_dinner.domain.com", that would be rude.
Chances are yes - the printer already does that.
If your color printer is CMYK, then you're already saving as much money as you could. Granted, you're shortening the life of the fuser by running more pages through it, but in the end the cost is so minimal that one person printing wedding shower invitations will blow your savings to hell.
Now, if your color printer is RGB, then you are printing RGB black and it is costing you more. My suggestion (if you really want to save money in the long run) is to get a CMYK color printer to do double duty. You'll only be using one printer to do all your printing, and as the parent post said the black toner is a lot cheaper than the color.
Note: to my knowledge, the HP color printers are all RGB. Coming from a print environment, this does really suck.
If you're not handy with a soldering iron, or some of the other approaches listed don't help, this one is pretty easy and has worked every time I've done it:
-Buy a harddrive of the exact same make and model
-Unscrew and disconnect the controller board from the drive. It should be held with about 4 tiny screws and one ribbon cable. Don't snap this cable too you ape!
-Transplant the controller board, reconnecting the tiny cable correctly and actually screwing all the screws back in (I'm not good about screws).
-Plug it in and go to town.
Back in the old days (circa 1998) I worked in a computer store while I was in college. For some people, the two or three hundred dollars for another drive (to throw away) was cheaper than data recovery when they'd screwed it up.
Good luck.
Totally OT:
Some of us silly Americans not only know where Saskatchewan is, and that the Capital is Saskatoon, but that it's near the left coast after British Colombia and Alberta (and I'm an east coast American myself).
As for your sig:
You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, you can pick your friend's nose, but you can't pick your nose's friends.
This quote is from page 15 of the OpenVMS at 20 publication that Digital Published in 1997. The PDF is available from Compaq.
During the cold war, VAX systems could not be sold behind the Iron Curtain. Recognizing superior technology, technical people cloned VAX systems in Russia, Hungary, and China. After learning that VAX systems were being cloned, DIGITAL had the following words etched on the CVAX chip, "VAX...when you care enough to steal the very best."
Check out http://www.dslreports.com for more information
Like the other posters said, start with ditching RAID 5 for RAID 10/0+1 (depending on your preference). RAID 10 (Mirror + Stripe) is my preference because of the higher redundacy - if one disk dies the whole stripe doesn't drop out. RAID 0+1 is faster but slightly less redundant. Either way, the parity overhead generated by RAID 5 is the death of a database.
Your controllers are pretty fast, it's more likely your software config or your network. Are you running MS SQL Server, or something else? MS SQL Server requires some pretty specific tuning to get good performance (like telling it *not* to use all the RAM). How well are you objects tuned?
How about your OS? What filesystem are the datafiles living on? Oracle supports RAW partitions, which allows you to eliminate the OS overhead from the database. We're testing the performace now of Oracle on different Solaris filesystems. You'd be surprised the differences between UFS, UFS with Logging, and Veritas File System.
While I won't deny that gigabit ethernet is fast, it's kind of expensive (especially if your network infastucture isn't equipped to handle it). If cost is a concern, and you're in a switched enviroment (no hubs) you can add more 100Mb Ethernet NICs and trunk them for more bandwidth. In reality, I've never choked a 100Mb connection unless something was wrong (like end users writing nasty Crystal Reports).
I'd like to see more books like "OS/400 for UNIX Admins", "VMS for UNIX Admins", "AIX for VMS Admins". Someone suggested Linux for NT users, which is fine, but what about those of us who know big systems who need to know other big systems in a very short amount of time.
On the same vein, development: "COBOL for C++ programmers", "Flat File Database Design for Relational Database Developers", "Perl for Visual Basic Programmers". Something that presents to similar ideas (Programming) that have very different approaches (COBOL uses Verbs and Paragraphs where C++ users functions and reserved words) and presents them in a way the reader can understand.
Also, Practical Approaches to setting up a system. We just got Sun V880s, and we've had a bunch of Netras and smaller systems, we've used Veritas Volume Manager before, and we've setup big Alpha systems before, but we've never setup a big Sun. It'd be nice to pick up a book that walked through best practices of how to setup a system from beginning to end in all aspects, not just Alternate Pathing or just disk quotas or just security. A big picture book, with big pictures.
There are two parts to this (most of which makes my post redundant):
1) Can it be done/has it been done? Yes and yes. Mainframes used to do this. The OS/400 on the AS/400 uses basically this same idea. Apple tried to do this with Hypercard. Oracle does this with iFS. Microsoft wants to do this (and had plans to for a long time).
2) Should you do this? No. You're quickly leaning why NAS is so cheap. What if you or someone else leaves you business? There's nothing elegant about something so complex no one can come in after you and figure it out (screw job security - there's plenty of other shit to do).
Adding a database wrapper to an already complex web of file system objects is only going to make things worse. Get out a whiteboard and start drawing pictures until you find the end of the knot and start undoing it. I'd offer more helpful advice, but I'd need more information about how things are laid out.
Consider a fiber channel SAN and sleep well at night knowing you have virtual disk extraction of this mess - this morning I concatinated a 10GB volume segment onto a Netware server and moved a virtual disk from a dead Sun Netra to a new one.
We just replaced out Nextel phones at work with T900s and Skytel service. So far, we've been very happy.
The keyboard on the T900 is easy to use, takes about an hour to get used to (quicker and faster than grafitti). 1 AA battery will last you a month, where the Palm VII seems to eat AAA batteries (2 at a time).
The only issue with Skytel service is that you pay a per-page fee after 500 each month.
On the other hand, service for the Palm VII is still pretty high - $50 a month plus bandwidth. We have those at work too and I'm not real impressed with them. We're trying Blackberrys now - might want to look into those.
Considering that whatever you do, you need to get 2, I think the 2 way pager will be your best bet. More so if your wife isn't a geek - the T900 is not imposing like most tech devices.
Best of luck to your wife.
I know how you feel. I hated programming in college.
When I started in the industry, I was a Network Administrator (in name only - certainly not in pay). For me, it wasn't about the money, it was the thirst for knowledge.
I had been dabbling in Linux for a few years at that point, and I knew Windows 9X and Netware, but I didn't know NT. I learned NT inside and out in four months, went on to infrastructure - first LANs (switches are our friends, collision domains are not) and then WANs.
When that got old I took interest in my then company's AS/400. I changed jobs, and did the Network thing a little a couple other places until I got here. After all, who was going to pay me for what I didn't know?
Apparently, my current company was. My boss asked me if I wanted to try being a DBA since we didn't really have one, and the amount of data we managed had grown in a pretty short period of time. That was two years ago. Not only do I love being a DBA, but it gave me a new appreciation for programming I never had when I was in college. I avoided it for years, and by giving myself a break and a chance to do other things I had come to appreciate it again.
Change it up man - it will do you good.
Yes, Alpha's Price/Performace Ratio is AWEFUL!
http://loki-www.lanl.gov/papers/sc98/
"As an entry for the 1998 Gordon Bell price/performance prize, we present two calculations from the disciplines of condensed matter physics and astrophysics. The simulations were performed on a 70 processor DEC Alpha cluster (Avalon) constructed entirely from commodity personal computer technology and freely available software, for a cost of 152 thousand dollars.
Avalon performed a 60 million particle molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of shock-induced plasticity using the SPaSM MD code. The beginning of this simulation sustained approximately 10 Gflops over a 44 hour period, and saved 68 Gbytes of raw data. The resulting price/performance is $15/Mflop, or equivalently, 67 Gflops per million dollars."
That's the first one I grabbed. Go beat on your PeeCee Coward.
The Pentium Pro was a RISC microcore with a CISC instruction set. That technology, and everything born out of it (Klamath, Deschutes, Katmai, et cetera ad infinitum) are based on technology Intel stole from a Chicago startup. SMP on the x86 was flaky because the instruction timing is far less exact than on RISC.
Hardware super instructions are an idea whose time should have been gone a decade ago. This concept was born out of systems with slow access to ram and i/o. Memory is cheap now - why we encorage Intel to keep producing crap that is too hot and too slow because it has so much junk as hardware is beyond me. I haven't given those idiots a penny since 1994.
Yeah, the Pentium Pro Core - technology Intel stole from a Chicago start up.
It's still the same outdated instuction set, and the only thing the RISC microcode does is stabalize the instruction timing to give SMP an actual chance on that platform.
If Alpha's are so outdated, why is it that the fastest computer on the face of the earth is a cluster of Alpha's? The Human Genome project uses GS-320 clusters running Tru-64 to crunch all their numbers.
/. when the Compaq --> Intel transfer was announced:
3 00 07
CISC was a good idea when memory was expensive and access to peripherals and even RAM was slow - now none of that is a factor. Alpha was designed as the modern, RISC replacement to the dated CISC design of the VAX. The x86 is also based on that outdated CISC design.
MMX, SIMD (KNI), and 3D Now that you speak of are super instuctions - hardware designed to do the work software should. While they are faster, few applications make use of them (RC5 loves them...)
Alpha does not support as many operating systems as the PC (largely because x86 has been cheaper for so long) but it supports better OSes - Tru64 (your commercial Unix), OpenVMS ("unhackable" by DefCon standards), Linux, FreeBSD, and NT4 SP3. They were never designed to be cheap, mass market machines, they are big iron - except by that standard they are super fast and dirt cheap.
Perhaps you should reexamine your perception of what is and isn't outdated, limited abandonware.
My original commet on
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12932&cid=1
My website comment on the same topic:
http://eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/alpha.html
We're actually discussing a move from Office 97 to Office XP internally now, but that looks to be so much of a problem we may move to Star Office.
We investiaged alternative to MS Office some time ago, and there are some issues:
-While most free software can open Word Docs with considerable accuracy, the problem becomes embedded OLE objects. Now, Word Docs are written in a bidirectional COM stream (similar in ways to Mac Data Fork/Resource Fork). If you open an XP Document on Office 97, what you get is an RTF-like rendering of the source. No OLE, no red lining (for example), but the text and it's formatting. Same thing with Star Office and MS Office - open an MS Office document under Star and you get an RTF rendering of the source. I have not tried this with Star Office 6, but I did extensive testing with 5.x. Our solution to the OLE problem (since it does creep up on Macs with MS Office as well) was to render each and every incoming Word Document as a PDF via a robot (print to file --> make a postscript --> distill). We have a 99%+ success rate with this.
-One thing you should understand about understand that PDF's are largely untouchable. You either need to open it in Acrobat Exchange to make changes or use another tool (we bought Solvero and Asura which were $40,000 for one copy - excellent tools but expensive).
-Star Office 6 supports XML as the file format. We think this is great because it makes writing import filters for layout software a snap. We're just waiting for it to mature a little before we dive in (we figure Q2 2002 before we take a serious look).
Now, those are the technical issues, which are the easy ones. The hard issue is going to be selling your users on a change to a free office product. A lot of it will depend on how many users you have, what their role is (if they're just saving documents for internal use vs. documents they need to send out to the public vs. documents they need to share with 100 different agencies who've all standardized on Office), what features of MS Office they use, and how much your company is willing to spend. The cost savings alone could make it an easier sell. If they won't take the jump to something free, suggest Word Perfect Office (which is compatible, slick, supported, and not free).
Email me if you wish to discuss this further. Best of luck!
I've taken a design course here which teaches fundamentals in psuedo code. We covered both structured programming and OOP. While this book is *very* English like, it does a good job of scratching the surface.
I think you'll find it's easier to teach OOP if the students understand structured programming first.
I can tell you why it happens in Long Island and Staten Island:
Neighborhoods connect to Central Offices, but there is really only one or two connects from the island(s) to the mainland, where their calls are switched back into the network.
NYC also *still* has a lot of copper. Rain and flooding will cause far more problems with copper than fiber (i.e. a rural area).
Commercially, you have Files-11 ODS-2 for OpenVMS (which is really neat if you've never used it), Netware also has a salvage queue for Traditional FS as well as their journaling file system (whose name escapes me at the moment).
You could also look into Oracle Intermedia, which lets you store files of any type in a transaction database.
Otherwise, you could kludge something with CVS/cron/tar. I've seen some interesting things done during the day with software mirrors splitting for backups (OpenVMS volume shadowing or Solaris Disk Suite), but you risk hosing open files at that point.
Best of luck.
As for a former New York Telephone/NYNEX/Bell Atlantic/Verizon employee, this is no surprise. Everytime there was heavy rains in lower NY State Long Island and Staten Island (516) could only get the operator - switching in and out of that area would shit.
m l
The large scale upgrades to digital switching in the early 90s happened (sadly) under the reigns of NYNEX - the cheapest RBOC in history (they still printed paychecks on NYTEL check stock).
The biggest nightmare of the NYNEX/Bell Atlantic years was OSDI. After TOPS and TSPS, Operator Services contracted to get a new switchboard system called Operator Services Digital Integration, which didn't work. Only thanks to NYNEX Science and Technologies were they able to make it work.
More horrors on my webpage:
http://eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/bellatlantic.ht
I forgot: I wrote a white paper on our SSD testing:
t in g.pdf
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen/misc/ssdtes
SSD's have been around for quite some time. Compaq had several commercial offerings based on Quantum's SSD. There are also several no-name companies that manufacture solid state drives (Memtech being just one: http://www.memtech.com/Prodinfo.htm).
We actually got our Alpha vendor to let us try an SSD for 30 days. The drive was fast, but we found that we quickly saturated the controller (something a couple U160 drives can easily do). In that regard, it wasn't that fast at all.
And, as has been said in other posts, it's not really economically fesible. We tested a 3.2GB SSD last Christmas that cost $25,000. For that application, we thought it was a good fit. But if you're concerned about capacity, we just bought some 180GB drives for our SAN for about $5,000.00 each.
While the RAM and disk capacity available now is amazing, I don't think we'll ever see the dollar/cost ratio for RAM beat the dollar/cost ratio for disks.
In 1994, which I had a 486/DX2 66 (which came with 4MB Ram), I bought 16MB of RAM for $560.00. Quake was 15MB, so I could load it into a ram drive and play from there. Guess what? It wasn't noticably faster than my IDE hard drive, but Windows screamed. =)
IBM does not ship Maxtors.
Generally:
IBM == quality
Maxtor == shit
I have an IBM 4.3GB LVD SCSI, 9GB IDB, and (2) 45GB IDE Deskstars - all running flawlessly. I switched to IBM after Western Digial got bad (around the time 4GB was the largest you could get).
Maxtor has always always always been slow, loud, prone to failure shit. When I was a pup and I managed a comptuer store we had the most problem with Maxtor. Where I work now we have about 350 Dell Optiplex's, and the ones with Maxtor's die the most often. The fact that their cheap doesn't outweigh the fact that they're junk.
The people who watch EFC are divided into two camps: those who hate it because of the number of cast changes, and those who love it. I'm among the latter. I've been hooked since the pilot.
The underlying plot is simple: a race of aliens called the Taelons come to Earth "on a mission of peace". They cure our diseases, end famine, and gives of loads of neat technology (Interdimensional Portals just to name one).
But thinks aren't so rosy. There is an underground resistance who believe the Taelons aren't so benevolant, and it appears they're right. The Taelons are dying, and they're being hunted by their ancestreral cousins the Jaridins. Both races have been at work for thousands of years, and the Taelons have come to Earth in search of an army.
Along the way, they've created Cyber-Viral Implants (CVIs) which expand memory, recall, and give the owner a motivational imperitive to serve the Taelons. They've enslaved a race called Skrills and bioengineered them so humans with CVIs have a powerful weapon.
But that only scratches the surface. There is a complex political stugle among the Taelons - to enslave or not to enslave. The leader of the Taelon synod, Qu'on, is killed in the beginning of Season 2 leaving the strugle for power between Da'an (the American Companion) and Zo'or (the UN Companion, and Da'an's child). Along the way, many people die while the resistance is constantly frustrated that their exposure of Taelon atrocities are ignored because humanity is more concerned with owning the latest gadget.
So if you're interested in catching up, Sci Fi is rerunning all the episodes starting this Monday.
Check out Sci Fi: http://www.scifi.com/efc/
Or the official site: http://www.efc.com/
"People of Earth, we are the Companions. People of Earth, we are here to help."
The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and say what you're really feeling.
Intel has made a fortune selling garbage. The x86 architecture is just that - garbage. CISC is dead, and has been for a long time. They couldn't make a decent SMP setup until they stole technology from a International Meta Systems (P6). The flaw in CISC is the inclusion of superinstructions - why add hardware to perform a partial arctangent when memory is cheap? Wait! I have an idea...let's add 57 new ones and call them MMX. Wait! How about 72 news ones called KNI/Streaming SIMD.
Could I do it better? No. But Alpha was truely, without a question in my mind, the finestest CPU ever engineered. It's a pleasure to work on, it's fast, it scales well, and it does out of order execution, which gives it a leg up on the Ultra Sparc.
This has caused a pretty big uproar on comp.os.vms as well. As you may or may not know, OpenVMS, which at one time was THE operating system to run (if you weren't blue) only runs on the VAX and Alpha. Well, Compaq quit making the VAX in September 2000, so this is it. While Compaq claims OpenVMS will be ported to IA-64, it's hardly comparable. There are VAXen in production that haven't been rebooted in a decade. Software in place that hasn't changed in years...and this is how it's going to end? Compaq gives away Alpha technology so they can focus on the iPaq?
These are the issues raised in comp.os.vms:
Will *every* Compaq product which is sold for Alpha VMS today ( or last week ) be ported to IA64? Will they all be available by January 2004? Do they have commitments from Oracle to meet that schedule ( Oracle appear to be "excited" about Tru64 on IA64 but didn't mention if they cared VMS would be available there )? Will all existing LP licenses be transferrable to IA64 at no cost ( to systems of comparable size)? [anyone who went through a VAX to Alpha transition will understand this question]
Will Compaq provide assistance to 3rd party vendors to move their products to IA64? Will IA64 ports be a straight "recompile and link" or will some programs require substantial changes ( eg device drivers and privileged code )?
My point was that it seems to get limited respect within Compaq. I've been told ( sorry I can't remember the source ) that it was a last minute decision to port it to Alpha and that it wasn't in the original game plan. My concern is the same thing could happen in the Alpha-IA64 transition.
FMS is another product I worry about. I understand it also wasn't going to be ported, until they realized that All-in-1 needed it. FMS was not recoded for Alpha it was just VESTed. Will it be possible to re-VEST it to run on IA64? Will it be done?
And the quote that sums the whole thing up, from Bill Gunshannon:
Of course, this means congratulations are in order for it's grandfather. The PDP-11 architecture has now not only outlasted the VAX, but also the Alpha.
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