"Independent" would be great, but media companies have to be funded somehow. Depending on your definition of independent, there may be issues.
For instance, I've become quite aware of the pro-business stance of Australia's commercial channels recently, and the only conclusion I can come to is that they don't want to jeopardise their ad revenue by emphasising bad stories about business (HIH, Telstra etc..). The ABC, Australia's analogue of the BBC, has no such restraint and regularly skewers business, and to be perfectly fair to them they also do the same to government. I remember the BBC being similarly willing to skewer anyone regardless of any backroom diplomacy, as part of the Beeb's grand tradition. It would be a crying shame to see this change because of a change in oversight rules.
However, from the article I see the Licence Fee funding for the BBC will stay in place, which would mitigate some of these concerns for my former home's broadcaster, thank the stars, however I'm sure we'll see some changes in how reporting is handled.
It's funny how many people I know don't even think about using XBoxes for actual gaming.
Dunno about big numbers, but I've got a couple of mates who eye my XBox up covetously every time they come round, with the words 'cheap linux box' on their lips...
fairly baffled by that one, though by my experience, maybe he needs 16GB+ in order to run Steam without his system taking a massive dump./me resentful of Steam
Poster should also keep in mind the heat, noise and power considerations of a box this size
Hell yeah. Monster UPS underneath, to hold up the servers, switches, blah blah in the event of power outage, also the server room lights and the aircon and the security thereof so you can maintain operation or at least gracefully shut down in the event of outage. It has to be in a decent room of its own - you don't want the sound of a jet taking off in the corner of your open-plan office.
And failover? if you're gonna go one-big-box, then you're in the single point of failure area (ooh, we're back to clustering again).
Of course you may just want an impressive box in the corner and not really worry enormously about 24x7 ops. If that's the motivation though, why not just buy an impressive case with a bunch of flashing lights?
We've had lots of problems with our Dell hradware.
As you mention that, we've had a whole string of HDD failures at work on our new Precision Workstations - not Dell directly of course - they just put the things together, but it's emblematic. Having said that, my two Dell notebooks have been pretty solid so far, aside from a(nother) broken HDD which was likely caused by rough handling. It was a good excuse for extra capacity anyway.
If you're in the Exchange area, you're actually limited to 64Gb even though available hardware can go to 128Gb+ - Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 is trapped at 64Gb at present. Not sure if the forthcoming HPC edition or the R2 release will go further. Not even sure if Exchange 2k3 can harness that amount of RAM (not my area).
IBM servers have been great in my experience so far, I must say. I've also been an admin for some old HP Servers which have been running fairly reliably since NT4 was in short pants (one node of the RAID 4 failed about two years back, that's about it even though we had to get a bunch of spares to keep in reserve after that). The only other screwups have been software-based.
Agreed; farms/clusters seem to be the thing - I mean, look at what Google are doing - If I was looking at a big installation tomorrow I'd be inclined to take a set of blades or a bunch of generic-internal 1RU units from Dell or someone stacked together on a hefty gigabit network, though I suppose it really depends on what you want from the server at the end of the day.
I haven't kept up with software on render farms since I left my last design agency (now at a large software company which often contains $ in the name), but I would think if the software doesn't scale well right now, it's only a matter of time before the ability is easily within reach for even small studios.
The IBM seems a little light on maximum quoted disk as compared to the other two, which in themselves don't seem that massive (my desktop box has 280Gb, though admittedly not in a fault-tolerant config).
High-end databases would have been the first thing I'd have thought of actually. I was under the impression that render farms, as they don't have to run 24x7 for years on end, tend to be more in the vein of mahoosive clusters of cheaper boxes than a concentrated small cluster as you'd use for big databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server)
Because if you're a company looking for reliability and ongoing maintenance, a self-build isn't necessarily the first thing you think of. You're a beancounter looking for an ongoing support contract from a reputable OEM you've heard of before, possibly with onsite or couriered-in replacement clause.
I'd like to throw out the possibility of clustering instead, though (mostly cause it's on my mind because I've been dealing with several support cases on clusters recently). Why is this not an option for extra power, resilience, etc..
Google is not in the business of free internet service provision. Their business model is utterly different to what your parent is talking about.
Google is, in essence*, in the business of
a) Content Provision b) Advertising
to run an ISP for free is a fairly difficult proposition. I have friends in the business and they provide "free" internet, but in the end someone has to pay up - in the case of pubnet, the pubs pay, and the punters surf for free. What I'm saying is the money has to come from somewhere.
1. It's 'sense' not 'sence' 2. It's 'lousy' not 'lausy' 3. So Spitting Image's utter lack of subtlety is somehow 'better' than Little Britain? Wouldn't the better comparison (given the political content of Spitting Image) be Spitting Image and Brass Eye, or Dead Ringers? Or The Day Today?
Define 'The British Sense Of Humour' before you harp on about its extinction, please. For me, the epitome of that has been summed up by the word 'dryness'*. Spitting Image was anything but dry, and as such could be classed as an anomaly. The new generation has taken 'dry' and added 'disturbing', to its credit. Take League Of Gentlemen for instance. Dry and disturbing.
It's evolved, but I don't know you you equate this to extinction, exactly.
* Add absurdity if you like, for example much Monty Python, but absurdity is a comedy universal, IMO.
This is true, but in the Windows world the single-user OS is now dead, or at least will be, whenever the 9x series falls out of support. There's a lot of talk about running as LUA rather than privileged user. This talk is irrelevant to the personal computer paradigm, as is the entire debate about games not runing as LUA.
Very good point, but not necessarily relevant to what I was saying, from a Win point of view
Nice note that OSX doesn't allow direct access. I haven't run a Mac since OS 9, so I don't know, but how do games on MacX verify their disks? or don't they? And if they do it without direct access, why aren't windows game developers doing this?
Games usually require admin privs because of the way they verify the CD is genuine. usually there's a 'bad' sector on the disk, which the OS ignores. This sector has a signature in it on the 'real' disk.
To read the bad sector, the game has to step outside the OS's access and read the CD 'in the raw'. hence the need for Admin access.
There are other reasons, too, mostly under the heading of Bad Programming.
Slashdot Mirror
"Independent" would be great, but media companies have to be funded somehow. Depending on your definition of independent, there may be issues.
For instance, I've become quite aware of the pro-business stance of Australia's commercial channels recently, and the only conclusion I can come to is that they don't want to jeopardise their ad revenue by emphasising bad stories about business (HIH, Telstra etc..). The ABC, Australia's analogue of the BBC, has no such restraint and regularly skewers business, and to be perfectly fair to them they also do the same to government. I remember the BBC being similarly willing to skewer anyone regardless of any backroom diplomacy, as part of the Beeb's grand tradition. It would be a crying shame to see this change because of a change in oversight rules.
However, from the article I see the Licence Fee funding for the BBC will stay in place, which would mitigate some of these concerns for my former home's broadcaster, thank the stars, however I'm sure we'll see some changes in how reporting is handled.
Salon.com requires a soul-sucking registration link.
No it doesn't. the linked story is from their RSS feed. And if you want it in graphical glory, just take a day pass.
April Fool's day must be early this year by common consent. I got sent this this morning
Minis would be great, although I'm not sure how you'd rack 'em up, and I'm not aware of how their cooling will work in a situation like this.
My industry segment means I'd probably be more likely to be working with Windows though
... possibly just me but for now it looks like the fabled slashdot effect is in early action here
It's funny how many people I know don't even think about using XBoxes for actual gaming.
Dunno about big numbers, but I've got a couple of mates who eye my XBox up covetously every time they come round, with the words 'cheap linux box' on their lips...
bastards
aha!
/me resentful of Steam
Good point. I am blind after all.
fairly baffled by that one, though by my experience, maybe he needs 16GB+ in order to run Steam without his system taking a massive dump.
Poster should also keep in mind the heat, noise and power considerations of a box this size
Hell yeah. Monster UPS underneath, to hold up the servers, switches, blah blah in the event of power outage, also the server room lights and the aircon and the security thereof so you can maintain operation or at least gracefully shut down in the event of outage. It has to be in a decent room of its own - you don't want the sound of a jet taking off in the corner of your open-plan office.
And failover? if you're gonna go one-big-box, then you're in the single point of failure area (ooh, we're back to clustering again).
Of course you may just want an impressive box in the corner and not really worry enormously about 24x7 ops. If that's the motivation though, why not just buy an impressive case with a bunch of flashing lights?
We've had lots of problems with our Dell hradware.
As you mention that, we've had a whole string of HDD failures at work on our new Precision Workstations - not Dell directly of course - they just put the things together, but it's emblematic. Having said that, my two Dell notebooks have been pretty solid so far, aside from a(nother) broken HDD which was likely caused by rough handling. It was a good excuse for extra capacity anyway.
If you're in the Exchange area, you're actually limited to 64Gb even though available hardware can go to 128Gb+ - Windows 2003 Enterprise x64 is trapped at 64Gb at present. Not sure if the forthcoming HPC edition or the R2 release will go further. Not even sure if Exchange 2k3 can harness that amount of RAM (not my area).
IBM servers have been great in my experience so far, I must say. I've also been an admin for some old HP Servers which have been running fairly reliably since NT4 was in short pants (one node of the RAID 4 failed about two years back, that's about it even though we had to get a bunch of spares to keep in reserve after that). The only other screwups have been software-based.
Agreed; farms/clusters seem to be the thing - I mean, look at what Google are doing - If I was looking at a big installation tomorrow I'd be inclined to take a set of blades or a bunch of generic-internal 1RU units from Dell or someone stacked together on a hefty gigabit network, though I suppose it really depends on what you want from the server at the end of the day.
I haven't kept up with software on render farms since I left my last design agency (now at a large software company which often contains $ in the name), but I would think if the software doesn't scale well right now, it's only a matter of time before the ability is easily within reach for even small studios.
The IBM seems a little light on maximum quoted disk as compared to the other two, which in themselves don't seem that massive (my desktop box has 280Gb, though admittedly not in a fault-tolerant config).
I'd be looking at extra storage too. SAN?
where does it say desktop in the post? I'm going blind!
High-end databases would have been the first thing I'd have thought of actually. I was under the impression that render farms, as they don't have to run 24x7 for years on end, tend to be more in the vein of mahoosive clusters of cheaper boxes than a concentrated small cluster as you'd use for big databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server)
Because if you're a company looking for reliability and ongoing maintenance, a self-build isn't necessarily the first thing you think of. You're a beancounter looking for an ongoing support contract from a reputable OEM you've heard of before, possibly with onsite or couriered-in replacement clause.
I'd like to throw out the possibility of clustering instead, though (mostly cause it's on my mind because I've been dealing with several support cases on clusters recently). Why is this not an option for extra power, resilience, etc..
Google is not in the business of free internet service provision. Their business model is utterly different to what your parent is talking about.
Google is, in essence*, in the business of
a) Content Provision
b) Advertising
to run an ISP for free is a fairly difficult proposition. I have friends in the business and they provide "free" internet, but in the end someone has to pay up - in the case of pubnet, the pubs pay, and the punters surf for free. What I'm saying is the money has to come from somewhere.
* simplifying
Am I to assume you're yet another American unaware of the definition of irony?
Not at all. expat brit (Limey).
the irony was in the way all the comments about dupes were in themselves, essentially, dupes. as if you didn't spot that.
sort-of agreed. But how come the permeation is unidirectional?
are USAians downloading british shows (The Office?) pre-US release, or not?
This is stupid.
The irony! The fucking painful irony!
1. It's 'sense' not 'sence'
2. It's 'lousy' not 'lausy'
3. So Spitting Image's utter lack of subtlety is somehow 'better' than Little Britain? Wouldn't the better comparison (given the political content of Spitting Image) be Spitting Image and Brass Eye, or Dead Ringers? Or The Day Today?
Define 'The British Sense Of Humour' before you harp on about its extinction, please. For me, the epitome of that has been summed up by the word 'dryness'*. Spitting Image was anything but dry, and as such could be classed as an anomaly. The new generation has taken 'dry' and added 'disturbing', to its credit. Take League Of Gentlemen for instance. Dry and disturbing.
It's evolved, but I don't know you you equate this to extinction, exactly.
* Add absurdity if you like, for example much Monty Python, but absurdity is a comedy universal, IMO.
You're being a spelling nazi about "sentence" in a thread with an AC grammar nazi who spelled it "gramer"?
Ironic, isn't it?
Sorry, I just couldn't resist it...
Nice to talk orthography when you can't spell 'sentence', isn't it?
This is true, but in the Windows world the single-user OS is now dead, or at least will be, whenever the 9x series falls out of support. There's a lot of talk about running as LUA rather than privileged user. This talk is irrelevant to the personal computer paradigm, as is the entire debate about games not runing as LUA.
Very good point, but not necessarily relevant to what I was saying, from a Win point of view
Nice note that OSX doesn't allow direct access. I haven't run a Mac since OS 9, so I don't know, but how do games on MacX verify their disks? or don't they? And if they do it without direct access, why aren't windows game developers doing this?
Games usually require admin privs because of the way they verify the CD is genuine. usually there's a 'bad' sector on the disk, which the OS ignores. This sector has a signature in it on the 'real' disk.
To read the bad sector, the game has to step outside the OS's access and read the CD 'in the raw'. hence the need for Admin access.
There are other reasons, too, mostly under the heading of Bad Programming.
The Sub Etha Sens-o-matic and the Thumb are two different devices, I always thought. One for sensing, one for hitching.
I kinda wondered why they weren't a unified device. now I wonder if my perception was wrong...