What do you disagree with ?
There is a performance problem and the author thinks the kernel people should look into the matter. I don't think they can do much, after all the kernel just writes 4k block to the drive. The problem is with the drive microcode which should attenuate the problem in the case of sequential writes, like the first case. Obviously it does not do that at all.
Markus
I've ran through the performance numbers announced by IBM and what I found at spec.org (specint_rate & specfp_rate) of the other CPU's and roughly the following picture (give/take 20%):
Power6/Power7: about 30 spec_int/fp_rate/core
Intel Core i7: about 30 spec_int/fp_rate/core
Sparc: about 10 spec_int/fp_rate/core
Itanium 2: about 12 spec_int/fp_rate/core
So it looks to me that performance-wise Power and x86_64 are similar. Both seem almost three times as fast as Itanium/Sparc. However. in the commercial world scalability matters and I there are not many big (>4 socket) x86 systems around. Big Power, Sparc and Itanium servers scale to hundreds of cores and are built like mainframes with excellent RAS features. I see high-end kit from both sides, x86 and Power and the margins in the x86 world are not good enough to pay for the engineering it takes to get to the same levels.
If you compare Power and x86_linux with cars:
You are read to spend some money to drive a nice car with excellent performance and stop at the dealer for inspections regularly then you well of with a Range Rover (=AIX Power server).
You are going to cross Africa, will be on your own (and have the truck full f spare parts) and are ready to get your hands dirty then you want a Land Rover (=Linux x86).
This picture is far from complete, but shows what the choice is quite well.
Make sure that your bank uses strong authentication (bejond userid/password) when you access your account. Any strong authentication mechanism (securid token , one-time token, etc.). All Swiss banks provide/require such a method.
I don't know about todays but only some years ago most US banks used vanilla useid/password combinations. With those one can eavesdrop on the line (or just watching you at the internet cafe). That's not safe. If that still is the case with your bank I'd change.
Most other things are either complicated and not practical or don't help safety much in real life.
I think it shows how Google lives the 'don't do evil' slogan. They try to be a good citizen everywhere. Unfortunately this is not easy, in Chine a good citizen does not talk about certain things, in the US you are not supposed to hide the same things. Sou you can not be a good citizen in both places at the same time. Google could choose not to be in China, but this would not help matters (it would be blocked by the great firewall).
Yup, the Squeezebox family of products is your best bet. It integrates fine with your existing setup (you just need a free aux input on your amp) and can be standalone (Standalone boom box). All of them support WiFi or Ethernet. You can operate each station completely independently or you can synchronize them (same music everywhere). If you have your musick already ripped to mp3 and your tags are clean then most of the work is done. The product family is about a decade old, so it has some history and the bugs are gone.
In addition the server software is open source and quite portable (Windows, Linux, even some NAS boxes are supported). There are plenty of plugins and extensions. Internet Radio is well integrated too.
It is not cheap, but none of the alternatives are cheaper or better either.
Yes, good enough is the enemy of perfect everywhere. And I suppose if you know your hammer well you tend to see problems as nails.
In my area there in not much Sun high-end left (1-2 E20k) and plenty of fat IBM boxes (>50), this might explain part of the lack of customer interest...
I never used Solaris zones, never used the similar AIX 'workload partition' either. But I'm aware of what they do and and how they work.
I (my) experience, if you need isolation, going the entire way and use a separate VM/LPAR with its own OS is the better solution. This is why I am missing this tech on Sun's high-end servers and don't understand that they are not even seem to plan to catch up in the future.
Solaris Zones, as I understand them, isolate applications from each other, but all are running within/on top of the same Solaris instance. As soon as you want to run different OS levels for the different apps or environments you are out of luck.
For example a new OS maintenance level is usually tested for a while in a test environment before being applied in production. Zones don't help here.
Often we have also incompatible prerequisite requirements of different apps (3rd party apps are terrible in this respect). App1 need at least maintenance level 123, while app2 has not been tested yet on this level and is not supported. If you give each a separate OS image, then you can give everyone what he wants.
You pay a small hardware price: A OS disk (30G) and some memory (512M), but you remove a ton of versioning update scheduling constraints.
I'm missing indications about better virtualisation features, like I'm used to them on IBM gear. These days all high end installation I see are running tens to hundreds of virtual machines on a single server. It looks to me that virtualisation in this scale is not even on the roadmap.
I've lived a similar story a while back. I was using a perl module from CPAN for a customer project. During the implementation I found some bugs/limitations. After getting in contact with the maintainer he sent me some patches to fix my problems. I used those and my project went into production.
A couple of years later we did migrate the application to a new server and I reinstalled the perl modules from CPAN. I found that the patches I got never made it to the CPAN repository. I still got the original patches and used those to get my project shipshape again.
In parallel I tried to get in contact with the original maintainer, but I never got a reply. It looked like he dropped off the planet. After a while I applied for co-maintainer status of the module on CPAN. This was granted when I could plausibly demonstrate that I tried to talk to the original maintainer. Since then I'm now the 'official' maintainer of the module and do integrate patches and help users.
We don't know about your modul en and its infrastructure (homepage., mailing list, etc.). Perl modules live on CPAN, so it is a good start to start there. You'll have to see where your program lives and go from there.
In my view he is the responsible for some of the unethical beaviour of Microsoft. I'm thinking of the famous 'if DRDos then crash' in Windows 95, among others.
I'd move on. Not for any particular feature, but to stay closer to the mainstream for the next years. The 2.4 kernel, not for any technical reason, becomes increasingly exotic as people move on to 2.6.
You'll have to maintain your existing 2.4 skills for another decade when all others have moved.
Over here in Europe we have seen the advantage of high gas prices lately. When the barrels went from $40 to $160 (up 400%) our gas at the pump went up from CHF 1.4 to CHF 2.0 (up 40%). Still a hike, but not something to change economics of driving dramatically. The high taxes, besides funding decent roads and non-collapsing bridges, provide a nice cushion against the volatility of the oil market.
Of course, due to the higher price level our cars are in general smaller and more economical anyway.
What exactly can you do only with firewire ?
Is a USB-Firewire converter cable not be an option ?
The only time I even needed Firewire is for my Sony DV camera who only has a Firewire port. Firewire has some advantages, but since USB 2.0 they look largely theoretical to me. Where is the beef ?
For the individual, personal computer, such a model will not fly, as outlined.
However, in the enterprise market this is already there. IBM is using such a 'on-demand' model for its Series P hardware since a couple of years. For a small fee, IBM is installing a bigger configuration (CPU, memory) than the customer bought. The additional hardware is used automatically in case of a failure (built-in replacement parts) or can be unlocked by the customer on the fly.
In the enterprise case it makes sense:
In enterprise servers the hardware cost is small, compared to the engineering cost. So installing additional hardware does not cost much. A GB of memory costs much more for a high end Unix server than for a PC, even if the technology of the components (simm's) is the same. The difference is in the much lower number of these servers sold and the additional complex engineering needed to build these machines.
The additional hardware is already there and can be unlocked and added to the configuration on-line. For man enterprise applications this alone is a huge advantage as maintenance windows are scarce. Typically you have a maintenance window four times a year between Sunday 23:00 and Monday 02:30.
Markus
Re:LCD uses less electricity
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
No, they don't.
This is is myth dating from the days people were comparing the power consumption of a 50" plasma (300W+) to a 26" LCD (100W). For big pictures sizes all technologies use a lot of power. It just take a lot of electricity to light of a large surface brightly.
I'd like a JavaScript based shell for my shell programming tasks. At the moment I'm confined to either bsh/ksh or perl. The shells [bk]sh are just too limited for many tasks, perl just has a too wierd syntax for many things.
The obvious answer is 'just do it', but this need time and between work and famliy there is not much left...
When shopping for an additional drive for my linux box a couple of months ago I went with a Barracuda 7200.9 because of its low noise and low power consumption. At the time I was comparing the.9 with the.10 and found that the.10 had a 30-40% higher power consumption at the same capacity.
I'm still amazed that the newer drive consumes much more power (and runs hotter in consequence) with not much benefits at the same capacity.
I suppose it depends how the device works. I'd imagine something like a red warning light in the speedometer and an optional sound. The speed limiter would prevent accellerating beyond the speed limit. An override, a bit like the kick-down on automatic transmissions would allow to override the limiter when necessary (overtaking, for example).
I haven't seen anything like it yet. The biggest challenge is to collect an reliable database with speed limits.
I'd like a device like this for myself. It would need to know the speed-limit of all roads and warn me when I'm over the limit. There could even be a speed-limiter (easily to disable, if necessary).
Not that I'm speeding a lot, but once in a while I find myself too fast because I'm not aware of the limit.
I don't, the new model work much better for me (and my customers) because:
My customers want a stable, certified environment where their applications work reliably. Commercial linux distros (RedHat, SuSE) provide this very nicely. The kernel used there is usually quite old, but remains the same over years.
At thome a want the leading edge stuff to play. Stability is less important, but support for the latest gadgets is. The kernels I use tend to be the latest from kernel.org or gentoo (if I'm lazy...).
I'm ready to suffer, otherwise I'd use Ubunto, Debian or something similarly maintained.
Yup, there will be no physical harm. However, even most road accidents cause only financial damage too.
For Joe consumer it makes little difference if he pays $500 to fix his car after an accident or $500 to clean/reinstall his PC after a virus infection.
The biggest difference is that the culprit in a car accident is relatively easy to identify (the guy/gal sitting in the drivers seat of the vehicle running into you), where there will be hundreds of people sending you nasty stuff without even beeing aware of it.
Prosecuting the single individual who just caused $2k of damage to your car is relaitively simple and straightforward. Prosecuting everybody who sends you a virus causing $50 (1/2 hours) is not practical, so nobody gets punished.
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What do you disagree with ? There is a performance problem and the author thinks the kernel people should look into the matter. I don't think they can do much, after all the kernel just writes 4k block to the drive. The problem is with the drive microcode which should attenuate the problem in the case of sequential writes, like the first case. Obviously it does not do that at all. Markus
I've ran through the performance numbers announced by IBM and what I found at spec.org (specint_rate & specfp_rate) of the other CPU's and roughly the following picture (give/take 20%):
So it looks to me that performance-wise Power and x86_64 are similar. Both seem almost three times as fast as Itanium/Sparc. However. in the commercial world scalability matters and I there are not many big (>4 socket) x86 systems around. Big Power, Sparc and Itanium servers scale to hundreds of cores and are built like mainframes with excellent RAS features. I see high-end kit from both sides, x86 and Power and the margins in the x86 world are not good enough to pay for the engineering it takes to get to the same levels.
If you compare Power and x86_linux with cars:
This picture is far from complete, but shows what the choice is quite well.
Markus
Make sure that your bank uses strong authentication (bejond userid/password) when you access your account. Any strong authentication mechanism (securid token , one-time token, etc.). All Swiss banks provide/require such a method.
I don't know about todays but only some years ago most US banks used vanilla useid/password combinations. With those one can eavesdrop on the line (or just watching you at the internet cafe). That's not safe. If that still is the case with your bank I'd change.
Most other things are either complicated and not practical or don't help safety much in real life.
Markus
I think it shows how Google lives the 'don't do evil' slogan. They try to be a good citizen everywhere. Unfortunately this is not easy, in Chine a good citizen does not talk about certain things, in the US you are not supposed to hide the same things. Sou you can not be a good citizen in both places at the same time. Google could choose not to be in China, but this would not help matters (it would be blocked by the great firewall).
If their president is almost openly like that, drafting laws almost explicitly designed to stop his prosecution, why should other behave better ?
Yup, the Squeezebox family of products is your best bet. It integrates fine with your existing setup (you just need a free aux input on your amp) and can be standalone (Standalone boom box). All of them support WiFi or Ethernet. You can operate each station completely independently or you can synchronize them (same music everywhere). If you have your musick already ripped to mp3 and your tags are clean then most of the work is done. The product family is about a decade old, so it has some history and the bugs are gone.
In addition the server software is open source and quite portable (Windows, Linux, even some NAS boxes are supported). There are plenty of plugins and extensions. Internet Radio is well integrated too.
It is not cheap, but none of the alternatives are cheaper or better either.
Markus
And it has the advantage that Euro-Plugs fit into it.
On neat trick is to buy a Swiss power cord and rip out the third (ground) pin. You get a power cord which fits in all Euro sockets without adapter.
The Swiss plug is the one labelled 'Type 3' on the world map of the Gizmodo article above.
Markus
Yes, good enough is the enemy of perfect everywhere. And I suppose if you know your hammer well you tend to see problems as nails.
In my area there in not much Sun high-end left (1-2 E20k) and plenty of fat IBM boxes (>50), this might explain part of the lack of customer interest...
Markus
I never used Solaris zones, never used the similar AIX 'workload partition' either. But I'm aware of what they do and and how they work.
I (my) experience, if you need isolation, going the entire way and use a separate VM/LPAR with its own OS is the better solution. This is why I am missing this tech on Sun's high-end servers and don't understand that they are not even seem to plan to catch up in the future.
Markus
Solaris Zones, as I understand them, isolate applications from each other, but all are running within/on top of the same Solaris instance. As soon as you want to run different OS levels for the different apps or environments you are out of luck.
For example a new OS maintenance level is usually tested for a while in a test environment before being applied in production. Zones don't help here.
Often we have also incompatible prerequisite requirements of different apps (3rd party apps are terrible in this respect). App1 need at least maintenance level 123, while app2 has not been tested yet on this level and is not supported. If you give each a separate OS image, then you can give everyone what he wants.
You pay a small hardware price: A OS disk (30G) and some memory (512M), but you remove a ton of versioning update scheduling constraints.
Markus
I'm missing indications about better virtualisation features, like I'm used to them on IBM gear. These days all high end installation I see are running tens to hundreds of virtual machines on a single server. It looks to me that virtualisation in this scale is not even on the roadmap.
Markus
I've lived a similar story a while back. I was using a perl module from CPAN for a customer project. During the implementation I found some bugs/limitations. After getting in contact with the maintainer he sent me some patches to fix my problems. I used those and my project went into production.
A couple of years later we did migrate the application to a new server and I reinstalled the perl modules from CPAN. I found that the patches I got never made it to the CPAN repository. I still got the original patches and used those to get my project shipshape again.
In parallel I tried to get in contact with the original maintainer, but I never got a reply. It looked like he dropped off the planet. After a while I applied for co-maintainer status of the module on CPAN. This was granted when I could plausibly demonstrate that I tried to talk to the original maintainer. Since then I'm now the 'official' maintainer of the module and do integrate patches and help users.
We don't know about your modul en and its infrastructure (homepage., mailing list, etc.). Perl modules live on CPAN, so it is a good start to start there. You'll have to see where your program lives and go from there.
Markus
I don't understand all the hate for Bill.
In my view he is the responsible for some of the unethical beaviour of Microsoft. I'm thinking of the famous 'if DRDos then crash' in Windows 95, among others.
Markus
I'd move on. Not for any particular feature, but to stay closer to the mainstream for the next years. The 2.4 kernel, not for any technical reason, becomes increasingly exotic as people move on to 2.6.
You'll have to maintain your existing 2.4 skills for another decade when all others have moved.
Markus
Over here in Europe we have seen the advantage of high gas prices lately. When the barrels went from $40 to $160 (up 400%) our gas at the pump went up from CHF 1.4 to CHF 2.0 (up 40%). Still a hike, but not something to change economics of driving dramatically. The high taxes, besides funding decent roads and non-collapsing bridges, provide a nice cushion against the volatility of the oil market.
Of course, due to the higher price level our cars are in general smaller and more economical anyway.
Markus
What exactly can you do only with firewire ? Is a USB-Firewire converter cable not be an option ? The only time I even needed Firewire is for my Sony DV camera who only has a Firewire port. Firewire has some advantages, but since USB 2.0 they look largely theoretical to me. Where is the beef ?
For the individual, personal computer, such a model will not fly, as outlined.
However, in the enterprise market this is already there. IBM is using such a 'on-demand' model for its Series P hardware since a couple of years. For a small fee, IBM is installing a bigger configuration (CPU, memory) than the customer bought. The additional hardware is used automatically in case of a failure (built-in replacement parts) or can be unlocked by the customer on the fly.
In the enterprise case it makes sense:
Markus
No, they don't.
This is is myth dating from the days people were comparing the power consumption of a 50" plasma (300W+) to a 26" LCD (100W). For big pictures sizes all technologies use a lot of power. It just take a lot of electricity to light of a large surface brightly.
Markus
I'd like a JavaScript based shell for my shell programming tasks. At the moment I'm confined to either bsh/ksh or perl. The shells [bk]sh are just too limited for many tasks, perl just has a too wierd syntax for many things.
The obvious answer is 'just do it', but this need time and between work and famliy there is not much left...
Markus
When shopping for an additional drive for my linux box a couple of months ago I went with a Barracuda 7200.9 because of its low noise and low power consumption. At the time I was comparing the .9 with the .10 and found that the .10 had a 30-40% higher power consumption at the same capacity.
I'm still amazed that the newer drive consumes much more power (and runs hotter in consequence) with not much benefits at the same capacity.
Markus
I suppose it depends how the device works. I'd imagine something like a red warning light in the speedometer and an optional sound. The speed limiter would prevent accellerating beyond the speed limit. An override, a bit like the kick-down on automatic transmissions would allow to override the limiter when necessary (overtaking, for example).
I haven't seen anything like it yet. The biggest challenge is to collect an reliable database with speed limits.
Markus
I'd like a device like this for myself. It would need to know the speed-limit of all roads and warn me when I'm over the limit. There could even be a speed-limiter (easily to disable, if necessary).
Not that I'm speeding a lot, but once in a while I find myself too fast because I'm not aware of the limit.
Markus
I don't, the new model work much better for me (and my customers) because:
I'm ready to suffer, otherwise I'd use Ubunto, Debian or something similarly maintained.
Markus
Yup, there will be no physical harm. However, even most road accidents cause only financial damage too.
For Joe consumer it makes little difference if he pays $500 to fix his car after an accident or $500 to clean/reinstall his PC after a virus infection.
The biggest difference is that the culprit in a car accident is relatively easy to identify (the guy/gal sitting in the drivers seat of the vehicle running into you), where there will be hundreds of people sending you nasty stuff without even beeing aware of it.
Prosecuting the single individual who just caused $2k of damage to your car is relaitively simple and straightforward. Prosecuting everybody who sends you a virus causing $50 (1/2 hours) is not practical, so nobody gets punished.
Markus
As soon as you connect it somehow to the (public) Internet.
A virus-infected computer is a danger to other connected computers as a drunken driver is for other users of the road.
Markus