This is the perfect Ask Slashdot for me, since I have been wondering about this for some time.
With RAID-5, you can lose one drive and still retain your data. However, there's always that chance that you'll lose a second drive before your spare gets completely rebuilt. In that case, there's no way to recover your data. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Let's say, then, that I want to make a RAID-1 mirror of two RAID-5's. Two racks of drives, each rack in RAID-5 configuration, and I want to mirror those racks, so each set can lose a drive, and/or one rack can lose many drives, and I'll still have my data. Ideally I'd like two controllers, so if a controller fails, I'll still be able to access the data from one side of the mirror.
Is this possible, and if so, does the mirroring of those two controllers have to be done in software? Or is there a RAID controller controller that would allow that kind of operation?
The answer is, don't work any harder than you can handle.
Here's the "overtime trap": You are working at 100% capacity between 8 and 5. They add something on, and since you're flexible, you start working every other lunch to keep up. Since everything is getting done on time and you're not turning away work, they figure you have time available, so they add a little more. It might be something like, "so-and-so quit, can you handle their work until we hire a replacement?" You start putting in a couple hours after five, or even come in for a few hours on the occasional Saturday. Management sees that the work is getting done and nobody's complaining, so why replace that person that left? Next thing you know, you're working 14 hours a day, six days a week, with no paid overtime, and you end up having a heart attack at age 31.
Far fetched? Happened to a friend of mine. He now is back to 8 hours a day, and they hired two full-timers to take some of his work, but he still has that packet of nitro patches hanging on his cubicle wall for when the stress levels get too far up there.
Don't give in a single bit. A one-time emergency once every couple of months is okay, but when you pass 9 hours a day with no increase in pay, you're giving away your life. I will quit and go work at Burger King before I get to that point. (Fortunately, in California I can never be made exempt at my current salary, so there is no push to overwork me.)
I think one of the first games to go down this path is the 7th Guest. Remember that? It was a series of puzzles, with photorealistic graphics and sound, with video clips interspersed. But it was a freaking puzzle game, with only like 7 or 8 puzzles. I spent $50 for this?
Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore. My idea of a long but interesting and challenging game is still Starflight, and one of my favorite LAN games (if you can call it that) is the old Trade Wars on my local BBS.
And we know that the systems are sometimes not calibrated correctly. If I'm pulled over, I can make notes and try to explain the circumstances to the judge later. If I get a ticket a month later, I may not even be aware that I was cited when it happened. What if the camera is wrong? "Uh, I guess my front wheels were over the stop line, but I can't recall." If I had to stop long because the guy behind me was going to hit me, or I had a load shifting in the bed of the truck, or there was a puddle of oil in the lane, do I have to stop and make a note of the intersection, date, time and circumstances in case I get a ticket later?
How about getting stuck behind some asshole with a truckload of furniture/drywall/nails/manure that isn't properly fastened down or covered? Should the entire freeway be stuck behind some guy because he didn't have the sense to secure his cargo?
As for these new sensors that detect when you cross over a yellow line and send you a ticket, I'd be sure to send a repair bill to the government the first time I crashed into a sofa that dropped on the road in front of me, because I'm not allowed to swerve around it.
When it comes to automated systems, the courts aren't nearly as lenient, because they have the photographic evidence before them.
Not only that, it prevents you from mounting a legal defense. If you get pulled over for "running a red light", you at least can gather information about the circumstances. You can note the officer's position of observation, how your vehicle was loaded that might have caused bigger problems, if the yellow was too short, etc. With the red light camera, you just get a picture of your car in the intersection and pay your fine. There's no way to remember what the circumstances were (or even if your car was legally in the intersection, but got snapped by an improperly calibrated camera.)
Second, if running red lights is truly a safety issue, there had better be a goddamn cop there to stop someone who is driving unsafely. If a guy is pissed at his ex-girlfriend and running red light after red light, what's going to stop him from plowing into a car four intersections up? Certainly not a ticket mailed a week later!
However, that's not the point with the/. crowd. It's the geek "cool"ness factor (groan).
Not for me, it isn't. I'm blessed with an office with a G4 tower, Dell laptop and HP LaserJet within 2-4 feet of my ears. I'm ready to buy some extra long keyboard/monitor cables to get some relief from the noise.
Looks like they need to scale the cost down by 80-90% to spark widespread adoption. That's no mean feat...
I dunno, they've managed to scale down the cost of electronic devices by that same factor in less than 20 years. I think it's very possible to do the same with LEDs as manufacturing processes are streamlined.
One word of advice from me to Slashdot: Don't buy the "Lights of America" brand, they're nothing but trouble.
Agreed. I bought 10 of them, and 5 were dead within 2 months. Most of the others are seeing serious discoloration around the base of the bulb. These are in open air, so I don't think the fixture is causing overheating. Stick with the better brands.
I might argue that Windows 98 was a "bug fix" release of Windows 95, and Windows 98 SE was a "bug fix" release of Windows 98. Why did I have to buy Windows 98 just to get a working USB subsystem? Why did Microsoft drop the ball with Windows 95 OSR2?
In fact, Windows XP is merely a "bug fix" release of Windows 2000 with a new user interface plastered on top. Some features were actually "deleted" (i.e. the "Power Users" group in the Home edition.)
That's because it's a 1U rackmount server. What other 1U server packs in 4 drive bays, redundant power supplies and hot-plug PCI slots? And what brand and model are these "desktop quality" IDE drives? Or does a drive become desktop-quality just because it has an IDE board on the bottom instead of a SCSI board?
The XServe RAID has redundant power supplies, so it's likely the next XServe will too.
Dell Optiplex GX270: Celeron 2.00GHz, 256MB, 80GB HDD, combo drive, 17" monitor, USB WiFi adapter, v.92 modem, XP Pro: $1,352 after $50 rebate.
Apple eMac: G4 1.00GHz, 256MB, 80GB HDD, DVD-R/CD-RW, 17" flat CRT monitor, Airport Extreme, v.92 modem, OS X 10.2: $1,398.
I guess it depends on your definition of "significantly."
And if you thought the Microsoft OS costs were bad, looks at Apple's. OS X launched in 2001, and, if you were a 10.0 buyer, while 10.1 was a free upgrade, 10.2 wasn't, and 10.3 is coming fast! And from the end user perspective, these have all been largely mandatory upgrades -- many apps now won't work unless you are running 10.2, for example.
Windows ME and Windows 2000 were released very close together, if not at the same time, yet you were expected to pay again to go from one to the other. Every machine sold until the release of 10.2 still could run OS 9, and there are plenty of applications available there.
2) Usability. While there are a lot of things that work smoothly under OS X, there are still some issues, ESPECIALLY with Windows interoperability -- and any company of size is going to have a significant overlap. So you'd have to train IT folks (or hire new ones), and still have some userland issues.
Actually, I've found OS X to be easier to integrate into a Windows network than even Windows 95/98. People at my company who come from OS 9 and Windows alike find it very easy to log on to servers use printers. If your users don't like it, OS X can be scripted onto servers just as easily as any other workstation.
The biggest plus is that you don't have to join a domain to access its resources. I had a Powerbook on a Windows-only network for 6 months. Not only was I able to log on to all of the Windows servers, I could administer them with Microsoft's terminal services client for the Mac, and still work through Outlook. Nobody had any idea that there was a Mac on the network--it was that compatible.
Another serious concern for IT has been how quickly Apple has outdated machines. Didn't we just see today that a number of machines aren't going to have proper functionality? Again, this is on fairly new machinery!
The people in my office who are still working away at their Beige G3's would probably disagree. I seem to remember the jump from the 286 to 386 to 486 caused the same issues (and complaints.) My 2000-vintage Pismo Powerbook was the machine I mentioned above. Not only was it able to be quite productive in a Windows-only environment, it has plenty of speed for what most people need it for.
Concerns have to be that Apple is quickly going to invalidate the G3 and G4 (over the next 24-30 months).
Why's that? I seriously doubt that they would shut out machines that are selling even now so soon. In fact, with the G5 becoming the new "high end" processor, it's likely that the G4 will become the new "low end." I expect eventual phase-out of the G3's because of new Altivec-ready applications released down the road, but those who need those applications will upgrade, and those who don't can continue to work with 10.2, or even OS 9.
Really? I'll hand over this Compaq Proliant server, and you try to get a $61 Athlon processor to work in it. What? You mean you can't?
Try apples and apples. You're talking about running a no-name desktop box as a server. For a fair comparison, a Beige G3 can be had for under $200 on eBay, and upgraded to a middle-range G4 for under $100 as well.
Talk to your sales rep. My sales rep told me they can program the phone to lengthen the delay after you release the button so nobody else can get in. Of course, I worked for a very large customer...
It's even more than that. Nextel's PTT uses less bandwidth than regular phone calls because it uses a lower sampling rate, and conversations are always half-duplex. (Even when only one person is talking, a phone conversation is full-duplex.) PTT eliminates the call setup time (more bandwidth), and also eliminates going through the public switched telephone network, so Nextel doesn't pay long distance carriers to carry those conversations.
True, but Microsoft would settle for millions of dollars of "coupons" toward "future purchases" from Microsoft and whatever software companies were in its bed at the time. (At least, that's what's happened with every Microsoft settlement thus far.)
Slashdot Mirror
With RAID-5, you can lose one drive and still retain your data. However, there's always that chance that you'll lose a second drive before your spare gets completely rebuilt. In that case, there's no way to recover your data. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Let's say, then, that I want to make a RAID-1 mirror of two RAID-5's. Two racks of drives, each rack in RAID-5 configuration, and I want to mirror those racks, so each set can lose a drive, and/or one rack can lose many drives, and I'll still have my data. Ideally I'd like two controllers, so if a controller fails, I'll still be able to access the data from one side of the mirror.
Is this possible, and if so, does the mirroring of those two controllers have to be done in software? Or is there a RAID controller controller that would allow that kind of operation?
Here's the "overtime trap": You are working at 100% capacity between 8 and 5. They add something on, and since you're flexible, you start working every other lunch to keep up. Since everything is getting done on time and you're not turning away work, they figure you have time available, so they add a little more. It might be something like, "so-and-so quit, can you handle their work until we hire a replacement?" You start putting in a couple hours after five, or even come in for a few hours on the occasional Saturday. Management sees that the work is getting done and nobody's complaining, so why replace that person that left? Next thing you know, you're working 14 hours a day, six days a week, with no paid overtime, and you end up having a heart attack at age 31.
Far fetched? Happened to a friend of mine. He now is back to 8 hours a day, and they hired two full-timers to take some of his work, but he still has that packet of nitro patches hanging on his cubicle wall for when the stress levels get too far up there.
Don't give in a single bit. A one-time emergency once every couple of months is okay, but when you pass 9 hours a day with no increase in pay, you're giving away your life. I will quit and go work at Burger King before I get to that point. (Fortunately, in California I can never be made exempt at my current salary, so there is no push to overwork me.)
Maybe I'm not the target audience anymore. My idea of a long but interesting and challenging game is still Starflight, and one of my favorite LAN games (if you can call it that) is the old Trade Wars on my local BBS.
And we know that the systems are sometimes not calibrated correctly. If I'm pulled over, I can make notes and try to explain the circumstances to the judge later. If I get a ticket a month later, I may not even be aware that I was cited when it happened. What if the camera is wrong? "Uh, I guess my front wheels were over the stop line, but I can't recall." If I had to stop long because the guy behind me was going to hit me, or I had a load shifting in the bed of the truck, or there was a puddle of oil in the lane, do I have to stop and make a note of the intersection, date, time and circumstances in case I get a ticket later?
Or if the roadside sender on the onramp is malfunctioning, so everyone entering the freeway from that onramp is still doing 25 mph.
As for these new sensors that detect when you cross over a yellow line and send you a ticket, I'd be sure to send a repair bill to the government the first time I crashed into a sofa that dropped on the road in front of me, because I'm not allowed to swerve around it.
Not only that, it prevents you from mounting a legal defense. If you get pulled over for "running a red light", you at least can gather information about the circumstances. You can note the officer's position of observation, how your vehicle was loaded that might have caused bigger problems, if the yellow was too short, etc. With the red light camera, you just get a picture of your car in the intersection and pay your fine. There's no way to remember what the circumstances were (or even if your car was legally in the intersection, but got snapped by an improperly calibrated camera.)
Second, if running red lights is truly a safety issue, there had better be a goddamn cop there to stop someone who is driving unsafely. If a guy is pissed at his ex-girlfriend and running red light after red light, what's going to stop him from plowing into a car four intersections up? Certainly not a ticket mailed a week later!
"Hey, look kids! There's Big Ben, Parliament. Again."
Like my dad said once, "No, that's not a threat. That's a promise."
Not for me, it isn't. I'm blessed with an office with a G4 tower, Dell laptop and HP LaserJet within 2-4 feet of my ears. I'm ready to buy some extra long keyboard/monitor cables to get some relief from the noise.
I dunno, they've managed to scale down the cost of electronic devices by that same factor in less than 20 years. I think it's very possible to do the same with LEDs as manufacturing processes are streamlined.
Agreed. I bought 10 of them, and 5 were dead within 2 months. Most of the others are seeing serious discoloration around the base of the bulb. These are in open air, so I don't think the fixture is causing overheating. Stick with the better brands.
"No, no. We need to freeze his hot heart with a cool island song."
Buy my book!
Buy my book!
Buy (POW!)
I love that show.
Go here and scroll down to "South Park." Basically it's a way of using misdirection to confuse a jury into voting your way.
And then report it to OSHA. No reason for anybody to die over some PHB being a cheapskate.
Insert "brown ring of quality" joke here.
In fact, Windows XP is merely a "bug fix" release of Windows 2000 with a new user interface plastered on top. Some features were actually "deleted" (i.e. the "Power Users" group in the Home edition.)
The XServe RAID has redundant power supplies, so it's likely the next XServe will too.
Dell Optiplex GX270: Celeron 2.00GHz, 256MB, 80GB HDD, combo drive, 17" monitor, USB WiFi adapter, v.92 modem, XP Pro: $1,352 after $50 rebate.
Apple eMac: G4 1.00GHz, 256MB, 80GB HDD, DVD-R/CD-RW, 17" flat CRT monitor, Airport Extreme, v.92 modem, OS X 10.2: $1,398.
I guess it depends on your definition of "significantly."
And if you thought the Microsoft OS costs were bad, looks at Apple's. OS X launched in 2001, and, if you were a 10.0 buyer, while 10.1 was a free upgrade, 10.2 wasn't, and 10.3 is coming fast! And from the end user perspective, these have all been largely mandatory upgrades -- many apps now won't work unless you are running 10.2, for example.
Windows ME and Windows 2000 were released very close together, if not at the same time, yet you were expected to pay again to go from one to the other. Every machine sold until the release of 10.2 still could run OS 9, and there are plenty of applications available there.
2) Usability. While there are a lot of things that work smoothly under OS X, there are still some issues, ESPECIALLY with Windows interoperability -- and any company of size is going to have a significant overlap. So you'd have to train IT folks (or hire new ones), and still have some userland issues.
Actually, I've found OS X to be easier to integrate into a Windows network than even Windows 95/98. People at my company who come from OS 9 and Windows alike find it very easy to log on to servers use printers. If your users don't like it, OS X can be scripted onto servers just as easily as any other workstation.
The biggest plus is that you don't have to join a domain to access its resources. I had a Powerbook on a Windows-only network for 6 months. Not only was I able to log on to all of the Windows servers, I could administer them with Microsoft's terminal services client for the Mac, and still work through Outlook. Nobody had any idea that there was a Mac on the network--it was that compatible.
Another serious concern for IT has been how quickly Apple has outdated machines. Didn't we just see today that a number of machines aren't going to have proper functionality? Again, this is on fairly new machinery!
The people in my office who are still working away at their Beige G3's would probably disagree. I seem to remember the jump from the 286 to 386 to 486 caused the same issues (and complaints.) My 2000-vintage Pismo Powerbook was the machine I mentioned above. Not only was it able to be quite productive in a Windows-only environment, it has plenty of speed for what most people need it for.
Concerns have to be that Apple is quickly going to invalidate the G3 and G4 (over the next 24-30 months).
Why's that? I seriously doubt that they would shut out machines that are selling even now so soon. In fact, with the G5 becoming the new "high end" processor, it's likely that the G4 will become the new "low end." I expect eventual phase-out of the G3's because of new Altivec-ready applications released down the road, but those who need those applications will upgrade, and those who don't can continue to work with 10.2, or even OS 9.
Try apples and apples. You're talking about running a no-name desktop box as a server. For a fair comparison, a Beige G3 can be had for under $200 on eBay, and upgraded to a middle-range G4 for under $100 as well.
Talk to your sales rep. My sales rep told me they can program the phone to lengthen the delay after you release the button so nobody else can get in. Of course, I worked for a very large customer...
It's even more than that. Nextel's PTT uses less bandwidth than regular phone calls because it uses a lower sampling rate, and conversations are always half-duplex. (Even when only one person is talking, a phone conversation is full-duplex.) PTT eliminates the call setup time (more bandwidth), and also eliminates going through the public switched telephone network, so Nextel doesn't pay long distance carriers to carry those conversations.
Yeah, except that XP is one of the vulnerable systems, whereas NT/95/98/ME are not.
True, but Microsoft would settle for millions of dollars of "coupons" toward "future purchases" from Microsoft and whatever software companies were in its bed at the time. (At least, that's what's happened with every Microsoft settlement thus far.)