That's odd, cos I clicked on the red hat, then on the "Find Files" menu item and it brought up a "Find Files" desktop search dialog, AKA KFind. Course, Gnome has a desktop search capability too with gnome-find. So I guess Linux users have the best of all worlds.
Index updates are slow operations. It's the reason DBAs drop them all before doing loads into the databases, then recreate them afterwards. So if you have a filesystem that is really an RDBMS which indexes the contents of a file as it's created in the filesystem, expect it to be slow.
Simply not true. In the corporate and academic environments both diskless workstations and Xterms were widely used and were (and are) *extremely* effective at reducing operating costs.
They did suffer in the past from high capital costs, the workstations and Xterms were extremely expensive, and the very large servers required to run the systems were also extremely expensive to purchase and maintain. Also when a system went down large numbers were unable to work. A team of 3 administrators[1] could however manage a site of several thousand users quite easily.
Today, diskless workstations and Xterms are an even more compelling proposition. The workstations and xterms themselves can be very cheap 200 quid desktop systems and the servers can be an array of cheap ix86 based Linux boxes. This gives a spectacularly low implementation cost and extremely low running costs. It's also an amazingly scalable system architecture, (Assuming Linux) I can take the capacity from 10 to 1000 to 10000 users simply by adding capacity in parallel. I don't even need any downtime.
With the fact that you are now using arrays of servers to run the login and application services there is also no single point of failure except the client and the network the client is on. If that goes down these days nobody can work anyway.
[1] And you really only need 3 in order to handle holidays, illness and out of hours support rotas.
Yeah, i'll sign up with my $50k today. Oh wait... You mean not *all* of the technology to do it is in place? I'm sure that's just a minor oversight and won't matter a jot. $50 grand cheque coming up.
These CHP & DH systems don't provide electricity *or* heat. They make use of the waste heat which is created in the production of electricity. You're currently producing the electricity anyway and throwing most of the energy into the rivers and air, might as well make use of it. Waste heat can BTW, also provide air conditioning.
"How are you going to ship heat 200 to 2000 kilometers without electricity?"
Don't be obtuse. You put the power stations where the requirement for heat and electricity is. i.e. locally.
"lossy infrastructure"
*Lossy* infrastructure? It's *WASTE* heat. You're pumping this waste heat into rivers, the oceans and the atmosphere *right* now! Anything which is used is saved energy.
"that only heats 4-5 months a year, sometimes less, depending on location?"
And the rest of the time burns electricity in order to cool. "Waste" heat can also be used to power air conditioning. Right now for every gigawatt of electricity produced, 1.5 gigawatts of heat is pumped directly into the environment as waste heat.
"Would you suggest the U.S. put a bunch of coal-burning plants in downtown Manhattan for fuel efficiency?"
Who mentioned coal? Coal's just one of the fuels used excruciatingly inefficiently, even nuclear power is only 40% efficient. Hell, coal can even be turned into gas if necessary and the gas can be pumped directly to homes to fire central heating.
Saying it can't be done is *stupid*. The reason you aren't doing it is that you do literally have money to burn.
"there is no public transportation infrastructure that can route people across 1000 square miles or so in low to moderate population densities,"
It's called the bus, and it can go just about anywhere the car can go.
Or at least, I took it out the box and plugged it in. With the help of the vendor engineers. Cost quarter of a million quid.
HTH.
In the UK
on
Quantum Wires
·
· Score: 2, Informative
on average around 2% of energy is lost during transmission over power lines. It'll be different in different countries. It all depends how far you are from the station.
On the other hand, convertng fuel to heat in order to generate electricity is typically around 40% efficient with a 60% loss of energy. Combined cycle power stations are closer to 60% efficient with a 40% loss of energy. The laugh is that the single largest use of electricity is to produce heat, but we're only doing it at around 40% efficiency with a 60% loss.
What we should be doing is using that 60% waste heat from the power stations to heat our houses and offices directly and using the electricity to power stuff. It's called Combined Heat and Power (CHP) or District Heating (DH). We'd then be closer to 80% -> 90% efficient.
CHP and DH systems have already been in use in northern european countries (Denmark, Finland etc) for decades, they are nothing new. I guess the UK and USA literally have money to burn.
It's a misconception that the developing and third worlds are unable to grow their own food and feed themselves. They can, and they don't even need genetically modified crops to do it.
What they need is well run, stable governments. Take a look at Zimbabwe. Used to be fairly stable and able to feed itself. Not anymore, expect to see and hear of famine and death from that region in the near future.
It's a similar story throughout Africa. Corruption, poor government, poor planning all mean that any problems such as drought are massively exaggerated and kill millions.
Of course, import tariffs on food, created by developed countries in order to protect their domestic agriculture don't help even a little bit.
Is that a sexual euphemism?
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"designed to take advantage of all this muscle"
Y'know, like "to fuck with", "to shag" etc?
I never can tell with MS, after all they have redefined the meaning of so many words and terms; innovation, secure, reliable, scalable etc etc.
Sure, but with tape, the drive performs the compression, not the client or server. This means that backups during the day for instance have a rather lower impact on client responsiveness to the user.
Attempting the same thing having a client system perform the compression will significantly affect either the client's performance or the backup performance from that client. I would only ever have a client system perform compression if the network is otherwise inadequate. Having the backup server perform the compression severely limits the performance of the backup system as a whole.
For this reason, making use of compression on a tape drive is standard practice, and why compression is not standard practice when not backing up using tape drives.
" nightly update via RSync for ~400GB of total data is around an hour on average"
Ah. That explains it. 400Gb is what I'd describe as a small system. We do an incremental of around 16Tb and we're not a particularly large site. Pushing 400Gb over a WAN is expensive enough, try it with a bit more data.
"I could restore right now, in literally 10 seconds, any file on our network shares exactly as it was at the end of any working day between now and the 5th of January. Perhaps more importantly, pretty much any competent user can do the same, without having to bother me. Show me a tape system which will do that!"
Binaries, word docs, text, database files all compress well on to tape. 1.3TB is about the average of what we get onto the cartridges. RDBMS files and engineering data sets in particular compress to far higher densities, 5TB -> 10TB per cartridge. The drive does the compression so it doesn't impact the client systems too badly.
You can have an external SAIT drive for around £2500. Ours are in big (Hundreds of TB) libraries and cost a bit more. They are actually physically a lot smaller than they used to be.
The point is that hard disk backups are for small networks. People who say tape is dead, back up to hard disk RAID arrays are people who back up small systems or sites.
An average of 2.6:1 compression is perfectly reasonable, we get that on normal files, on our RDBMS files we get far higher, data rates of 78MB/s or better and 1.3TB capacity are easily atainable.
I've restored many 7 year old tapes. It's perfectly possible. Take it you leave yours out in the sun to ferment?
Which is great till you start thinking about stuff like disaster recovery, offsite copies etc.
Tape's fine if you have decent software managing it. My personal recommendation is Tivoli Storage Manager if you have money to throw at it and if you don't then Bacula. More are however a little more than simple network backup systems and may be overkill on a small network.
Shouldn't the system back up to a disk spool and then to tape for offsite storage? Hell, even the freebies Amanda and Bacula do that already. And Yup, Bacula is available for Windows.
It does have to be said though that some very expensive commercial backup systems are only just managing to include disk spooling prior to tape ( Having had to deal with it for several years, I refer to that steaming pile of dung which is Netbackup).
Time and or space? If someone buys time on a channel or space in a publication for political purposes, require them to provide equal time and or space to all of his political opponents for free. It kills two birds with one stone.
1: Free speech. The people with money get to say what they like about their opponents, and the people without money get equal exposure.
2: Fewer political adverts. There's then a disincentive for taking political advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
You know this eliminates the possibility of terraforming Mars, don't you. We'll have "Save the microbe" campaigns every time a mission is sent there.
That's odd, cos I clicked on the red hat, then on the "Find Files" menu item and it brought up a "Find Files" desktop search dialog, AKA KFind. Course, Gnome has a desktop search capability too with gnome-find. So I guess Linux users have the best of all worlds.
Seriously.
Index updates are slow operations. It's the reason DBAs drop them all before doing loads into the databases, then recreate them afterwards. So if you have a filesystem that is really an RDBMS which indexes the contents of a file as it's created in the filesystem, expect it to be slow.
I suppose you could try throwing hardware at it.
"None ever saw widespread popularity."
Simply not true. In the corporate and academic environments both diskless workstations and Xterms were widely used and were (and are) *extremely* effective at reducing operating costs.
They did suffer in the past from high capital costs, the workstations and Xterms were extremely expensive, and the very large servers required to run the systems were also extremely expensive to purchase and maintain. Also when a system went down large numbers were unable to work. A team of 3 administrators[1] could however manage a site of several thousand users quite easily.
Today, diskless workstations and Xterms are an even more compelling proposition. The workstations and xterms themselves can be very cheap 200 quid desktop systems and the servers can be an array of cheap ix86 based Linux boxes. This gives a spectacularly low implementation cost and extremely low running costs. It's also an amazingly scalable system architecture, (Assuming Linux) I can take the capacity from 10 to 1000 to 10000 users simply by adding capacity in parallel. I don't even need any downtime.
With the fact that you are now using arrays of servers to run the login and application services there is also no single point of failure except the client and the network the client is on. If that goes down these days nobody can work anyway.
[1] And you really only need 3 in order to handle holidays, illness and out of hours support rotas.
I get a real 72mpg, my vehicle does 0->60 in less than 4 seconds, *and* I never get stuck in traffic.
Having looked at the thing I recommend the following:
"AirScooter, the Segway of the air!"
Yeah, i'll sign up with my $50k today. Oh wait... You mean not *all* of the technology to do it is in place? I'm sure that's just a minor oversight and won't matter a jot. $50 grand cheque coming up.
These CHP & DH systems don't provide electricity *or* heat. They make use of the waste heat which is created in the production of electricity. You're currently producing the electricity anyway and throwing most of the energy into the rivers and air, might as well make use of it. Waste heat can BTW, also provide air conditioning.
"How are you going to ship heat 200 to 2000 kilometers without electricity?"
Don't be obtuse. You put the power stations where the requirement for heat and electricity is. i.e. locally.
"lossy infrastructure"
*Lossy* infrastructure? It's *WASTE* heat. You're pumping this waste heat into rivers, the oceans and the atmosphere *right* now! Anything which is used is saved energy.
"that only heats 4-5 months a year, sometimes less, depending on location?"
And the rest of the time burns electricity in order to cool. "Waste" heat can also be used to power air conditioning. Right now for every gigawatt of electricity produced, 1.5 gigawatts of heat is pumped directly into the environment as waste heat.
"Would you suggest the U.S. put a bunch of coal-burning plants in downtown Manhattan for fuel efficiency?"
Who mentioned coal? Coal's just one of the fuels used excruciatingly inefficiently, even nuclear power is only 40% efficient. Hell, coal can even be turned into gas if necessary and the gas can be pumped directly to homes to fire central heating.
Saying it can't be done is *stupid*. The reason you aren't doing it is that you do literally have money to burn.
"there is no public transportation infrastructure that can route people across 1000 square miles or so in low to moderate population densities,"
It's called the bus, and it can go just about anywhere the car can go.
Or at least, I took it out the box and plugged it in. With the help of the vendor engineers. Cost quarter of a million quid.
HTH.
on average around 2% of energy is lost during transmission over power lines. It'll be different in different countries. It all depends how far you are from the station.
On the other hand, convertng fuel to heat in order to generate electricity is typically around 40% efficient with a 60% loss of energy. Combined cycle power stations are closer to 60% efficient with a 40% loss of energy. The laugh is that the single largest use of electricity is to produce heat, but we're only doing it at around 40% efficiency with a 60% loss.
What we should be doing is using that 60% waste heat from the power stations to heat our houses and offices directly and using the electricity to power stuff. It's called Combined Heat and Power (CHP) or District Heating (DH). We'd then be closer to 80% -> 90% efficient.
CHP and DH systems have already been in use in northern european countries (Denmark, Finland etc) for decades, they are nothing new. I guess the UK and USA literally have money to burn.
It's a misconception that the developing and third worlds are unable to grow their own food and feed themselves. They can, and they don't even need genetically modified crops to do it.
What they need is well run, stable governments. Take a look at Zimbabwe. Used to be fairly stable and able to feed itself. Not anymore, expect to see and hear of famine and death from that region in the near future.
It's a similar story throughout Africa. Corruption, poor government, poor planning all mean that any problems such as drought are massively exaggerated and kill millions.
Of course, import tariffs on food, created by developed countries in order to protect their domestic agriculture don't help even a little bit.
"designed to take advantage of all this muscle"
Y'know, like "to fuck with", "to shag" etc?
I never can tell with MS, after all they have redefined the meaning of so many words and terms; innovation, secure, reliable, scalable etc etc.
Sure, but with tape, the drive performs the compression, not the client or server. This means that backups during the day for instance have a rather lower impact on client responsiveness to the user.
Attempting the same thing having a client system perform the compression will significantly affect either the client's performance or the backup performance from that client. I would only ever have a client system perform compression if the network is otherwise inadequate. Having the backup server perform the compression severely limits the performance of the backup system as a whole.
For this reason, making use of compression on a tape drive is standard practice, and why compression is not standard practice when not backing up using tape drives.
" nightly update via RSync for ~400GB of total data is around an hour on average"
c ts/st orage-mgr/
Ah. That explains it. 400Gb is what I'd describe as a small system. We do an incremental of around 16Tb and we're not a particularly large site. Pushing 400Gb over a WAN is expensive enough, try it with a bit more data.
"I could restore right now, in literally 10 seconds, any file on our network shares exactly as it was at the end of any working day between now and the 5th of January. Perhaps more importantly, pretty much any competent user can do the same, without having to bother me. Show me a tape system which will do that!"
Already mentioned it:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/produ
Binaries, word docs, text, database files all compress well on to tape. 1.3TB is about the average of what we get onto the cartridges. RDBMS files and engineering data sets in particular compress to far higher densities, 5TB -> 10TB per cartridge. The drive does the compression so it doesn't impact the client systems too badly.
You can have an external SAIT drive for around £2500. Ours are in big (Hundreds of TB) libraries and cost a bit more. They are actually physically a lot smaller than they used to be.
The point is that hard disk backups are for small networks. People who say tape is dead, back up to hard disk RAID arrays are people who back up small systems or sites.
An average of 2.6:1 compression is perfectly reasonable, we get that on normal files, on our RDBMS files we get far higher, data rates of 78MB/s or better and 1.3TB capacity are easily atainable.
I've restored many 7 year old tapes. It's perfectly possible. Take it you leave yours out in the sun to ferment?
A SAIT cartridge is about 10cm square and weighs what? 200 grams? *That's* portable. The drive is capable of 78MB/s sustained, 50% faster than USB 2.
Course, you've got to pay for performance.
Hard drives have a place in backup, but it isn't for very high capacities or offsite storage.
1.3 TB. Also spools at a sustained rate of around 78MB/s so you basically also need a network interface for each drive unless you stick it on a SAN.
4
e.g.
http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/333
And you can throw the tape in a box and take it off site in case there's a disaster, which we all know is waiting to happen.
Which is great till you start thinking about stuff like disaster recovery, offsite copies etc.
Tape's fine if you have decent software managing it. My personal recommendation is Tivoli Storage Manager if you have money to throw at it and if you don't then Bacula. More are however a little more than simple network backup systems and may be overkill on a small network.
Haven't RTFA because I couldn't be arsed.
Shouldn't the system back up to a disk spool and then to tape for offsite storage? Hell, even the freebies Amanda and Bacula do that already. And Yup, Bacula is available for Windows.
It does have to be said though that some very expensive commercial backup systems are only just managing to include disk spooling prior to tape ( Having had to deal with it for several years, I refer to that steaming pile of dung which is Netbackup).
Time and or space? If someone buys time on a channel or space in a publication for political purposes, require them to provide equal time and or space to all of his political opponents for free. It kills two birds with one stone.
1: Free speech. The people with money get to say what they like about their opponents, and the people without money get equal exposure.
2: Fewer political adverts. There's then a disincentive for taking political advertising.
So what these statistics really say is that somewhere around 80% of Americans are idiots.
I don't really think that the 20% of Americans who are not idiots or the rest of the world will be too surprised.
MMMMmmmmm. Government by the majority. Tasty.
Cue announcements from IBM of the largest losses in recorded history.
I don't know if you've noticed but the US is now requiring biometric passports to allow entry on the Visa Waiver Program.
m s/telegr ams_1393.html
e.g.
http://travel.state.gov/visa/laws/telegra
So, next time the bombers will have to get visas to enter the country... Just like last time.