Being an administrator of some 24-way boxes, I have to ask a more detailed question about the error handling. Is the L2 cache in the CPUs just ECC'd, Parity, or fully mirrored? You'll find that on a large installation of CPUs, not being fully mirrored on your L2 will cause quite a bit of downtime over the course of a year with that many CPUs. I don't have those Itanium 2 specs. Anyone?
UPDATE: I looked. Itanium 2's L2 cache is ECC. It'll correct a 1 bit failure, detect and die on a 2 bit failure. Believe it or not, on a large number of CPUs running over a long period of time, it happens more often than you think. It also says it has an L3. No idea on the L3 cache protection method used. Because they don't say, I'd also guess ECC. Wheee! Lots of high speed RAM around the CPU with ECC protection. Well, nobody called this an enterprise solution, so I guess its okay.
Also, you're going to have regular issues with soft ECC errors on that many TB of RAM. And then your eventual outright failures that'll bring down the whole image of the OS. (An OS could potentially handle it 'gracefully' by seeing if there is a userspace process on that page and killing/segfaulting it, but that's more of an advanced OS feature.)
Boy, I'd really hate to be the guy in charge of hardware maintenance on THAT platform.
Actually, it'll add to the character of the cars. I remember with fondness how I had to turn on the headlights in order to get the cigarette lighter to work. Some of you have forgotten the other FIAT acronyms, which fit well with this story...
Fix It Again Tomorrow Feeble Italian Attempt at Technology (now: Feeble Italian/American Technology) Fix It All the Time Found In A Trench Failure in Automotive Technology Fired Idiot Assembled This
If you confuse this with flamebait, then you're clearly not an American who has or currently owns a Fiat. They're really neat cars, but they're also really that bad. Draw what further comparisons you may.
Its very interesting all these mentions of coin and Cave. It hit right on my search for games by CAVE. They've made some great games like DoDonPachi, which you can find here.
The best place to get experience is starting _while_ you are in college and to do it at a mom and pop or otherwise small company. A small ISP is probably still great. The pay will be crappy, but you can get yourself quite the experience _and_ a track record that a resume needs.
I landed my first big job afte college when I spent years at a local ISP while I was going through college. A few of my customers from time to time kept biting on me to join them. I finally went with one, and it was a great decision.
If you truly can shine, you'll want to have a job where you 'perform' in front of as many people as possible.
My company is a big [VENDOR X] shop. We have an internal '[VENDOR X] help desk'. This is comprised of first level employees who have been through [VENDOR X] training and passed their [VENDOR X] Systems Administration test. 100% [VENDOR X] Certified Employees. They're tier 1 ticket-takers who answer the calls, do some minor lookups for tickets, toss the tickets around, track things, and generally play go between. Little to no hands-on real-world experience, and their training decays quickly from lack of use.
The tier 2 employees? Tier 3? Many had some form of [VENDOR X] training years ago. The last time the company authorized training for most of them was in either 1999 or 2000. Most are not certified. The vast majority (especially after rounds of eliminations over the years) are very competent and some even quite excellent in their technical knowledge.
The company only minorly encourages the Tier 2 and 3 employees to get certified. The Tier 1 certification is required via contract with [VENDOR X] as part of their agreement.I think this pretty much spells a company that knows that certs are meaningless. Clued managers don't look for certs. But there certainly are some organizations out there for who certifications are everything.
[VENDOR X] used to allow plausable deniability that we're talking about any vendor under the sun, and not one in particular. Apologies.
Correction for the obtuse who need their comparisons to be more 1:1 in nature: "So, you could say that Mr. Gore was the fertility doctor of the Internet, yes?"
Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, nobody can deny that they are serious about taking on spam.
Oh. I thought you said they were serious about talking on spam! The first company to successfully break the spam barrier could be quite rich. (Assuming it is patentable or otherwise controllable, and people would accept that.)
Your message probably best sums up the response to this, and nothing else really needs to be said by anyone. If you create a list of email addresses and attach to it an American law governing their use, then someone from China isn't going to care one bit. The global nature of the Internet (which defies censorship) is also the same thing that allows for spam.
Personally, I'd get a little scared if they can legalize away spam. Although a different medium, if they go all-out for spam, it probably makes for a good sign/precident for 'other things' to be eliminated from the Internet. (Be it pirated files, porn, 'ideas that my citizens shouldn't be having', etc.)
But I still wish spam would go away, like everyone else.
I've really struggled to keep my Yahoo! Mail account in check. There are a lot of messages that I want to archive. At the same time, I'm constantly getting new email that I need to read or file. 4mb has added up to 205 email messages for me. I, for one, welcome the new 100mb upgrade.
If anything, it gives my inbox the chance to grow as big as my "Bulk" (spam) folder. I haven't cleaned it out since 05/29 (two and a half weeks), and I've got 1790 messages waiting for me to review if they're real or not. The good thing is, the bulk folder doesn't count against your quota. (Sounds like a feature that is ripe for a 'sploit, to me.)
I look at this from a higher level perspective. It is a choice of paradigms. And this goes back to the core underlying battle between Windows and Linux. (Or Bill Gates and the hackers. His age-old battle he started with the Homebrew Computer Club.)
One side is all about commercialization. This is good and this is bad. It is a trade-off. There can be some really great software made for Windows. At the same time, I've got people trying to monetize my desktop by loading spyware and every turn of a web page. I've got a corporation supporting me, which is good and bad.
The other side is all about freedom (free $$ and free ideas). This is a good and a bad thing as well. There isn't much big commercial user software with superadvanced features. But there is superadvanced server software. And most things are customizable out the wazoo. Lack of commercial games. But I've got a community supporting me, which is good and bad.
Yes, each individual point here can be wrangled to death with points and counterpoints. But what is stopping me from going back to windows is the following:
1] Spyware/security/email nightmare. 2] Power of small tools working together. 3] Customization. 4] Additional cost over what I already have.
At best, I can spend a lot of money to get something equal to what I have now. Some $$$ to Microsoft, some to others. It just isn't cost efficient to go back to Windows.
> MAME user: I wish the law wasn't so ambiguous about playing ROMs.
I wish the law just made sense when it comes to playing ROMs! I mean, by the strictest of interpretations, if I physically move the ROMs off of my boardsets and plug them into the computer where they are read (and not cached) as the game is played, then it is probably legal.
But if I emulate Pac-Man with a copy of the ROMs on my computer and not on the actual ones in my game room, then I'm a criminal. Oh. And I'm stealing from Namco, too.
I now run my native desktop as Linux. But I've done a speed comparison with some games between MAME under Linux and MAME under DOS. It isn't necessarily Linux's fault, but MAME under DOS just runs faster than Linux, and that means that more games can run at faster framerates with lesser hardware.
I'm trying to see a compelling reason to run a Linux based MAME cabinet, as opposed to an MSDOS dedicated MAME cabinet? The speed issue really hurts.
A year ago, I would have laughed this notion off as absurd, but I'm starting to give it more credit. I'm easily dumping 75-100 messages out of my junk folder each day (after a very quick review of the header information). That is so where I can receive maybe 1-5 legitimate emails a day.
I suppose I'll just have to wait for the problem to get worse for everyone else before the world wakes up and realizes the current system is just plain broke.
I inform the internal technical support that there is a problem with the LDAP server. He tells me that there is no corporate LDAP server. Then I forced him into admitting he didn't know what an LDAP server was. But because he has no documentation on it, it therefore isn't a problem, and he will not escalate it to the back-line support either. This is what happens when you fire all the intelligent technical people in your help desk and replace them with cookbook readers and rules people who don't take ownership and pride in their work.
You know you've been collecting games too long....
on
Video T-shirts
·
· Score: 1
...when the first thing that comes to mind when you hear, "I, Robot" is Atari, and not Isaac Asimov. And here I thought it was a movie based off of the video game. D'oh!:)
In the video, right as they start typing in a command line order for pizza, above the line, you'll see "See the man page for more details on accounts, confiuration files, and batch ordering."
I don't think I've ever reported a typo that I've observered from a video.
In the game of Paranoia...
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 1
We had intelligent land minds that could move and reorganize themselves. Of course, their most favorite activity was to find someone walking nearby and to move themselves under their foot. You really had to be careful with those things around!
Megapixels aren't the end...
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I personally am waiting for a good Megavoxel camera. If you think pixels are good, imagine the images that can be rendered with voxels! It is incredible!;)
I concede to your worst case scenerio. It is far worse than mine. Actually, this reminds me of an example from work...
Person 1: "So, worst case scenerio, how long will it take for our disaster recovery process to bring this one critical system back online?"
Person 2: "Worst case?"
Person 1: "Yes, worst case."
Person 2: "Never. It will never come back up."
Person 1: "No, seriously. I need a time."
Person 2: "The backups are gone, the off-site backup facility is destroyed, everyone who knew anything about the system is dead. We have no electricity. Our telecommunications system is down. That system isn't coming back up."
Slashdot Mirror
Being an administrator of some 24-way boxes, I have to ask a more detailed question about the error handling. Is the L2 cache in the CPUs just ECC'd, Parity, or fully mirrored? You'll find that on a large installation of CPUs, not being fully mirrored on your L2 will cause quite a bit of downtime over the course of a year with that many CPUs. I don't have those Itanium 2 specs. Anyone?
UPDATE: I looked. Itanium 2's L2 cache is ECC. It'll correct a 1 bit failure, detect and die on a 2 bit failure. Believe it or not, on a large number of CPUs running over a long period of time, it happens more often than you think. It also says it has an L3. No idea on the L3 cache protection method used. Because they don't say, I'd also guess ECC. Wheee! Lots of high speed RAM around the CPU with ECC protection. Well, nobody called this an enterprise solution, so I guess its okay.
Also, you're going to have regular issues with soft ECC errors on that many TB of RAM. And then your eventual outright failures that'll bring down the whole image of the OS. (An OS could potentially handle it 'gracefully' by seeing if there is a userspace process on that page and killing/segfaulting it, but that's more of an advanced OS feature.)
Boy, I'd really hate to be the guy in charge of hardware maintenance on THAT platform.
Actually, it'll add to the character of the cars. I remember with fondness how I had to turn on the headlights in order to get the cigarette lighter to work. Some of you have forgotten the other FIAT acronyms, which fit well with this story...
Fix It Again Tomorrow
Feeble Italian Attempt at Technology (now: Feeble Italian/American Technology)
Fix It All the Time
Found In A Trench
Failure in Automotive Technology
Fired Idiot Assembled This
If you confuse this with flamebait, then you're clearly not an American who has or currently owns a Fiat. They're really neat cars, but they're also really that bad. Draw what further comparisons you may.
Lt. Deanna Troi, please report to the bridge immediately!
Its very interesting all these mentions of coin and Cave. It hit right on my search for games by CAVE. They've made some great games like DoDonPachi, which you can find here.
The best place to get experience is starting _while_ you are in college and to do it at a mom and pop or otherwise small company. A small ISP is probably still great. The pay will be crappy, but you can get yourself quite the experience _and_ a track record that a resume needs.
I landed my first big job afte college when I spent years at a local ISP while I was going through college. A few of my customers from time to time kept biting on me to join them. I finally went with one, and it was a great decision.
If you truly can shine, you'll want to have a job where you 'perform' in front of as many people as possible.
My company is a big [VENDOR X] shop. We have an internal '[VENDOR X] help desk'. This is comprised of first level employees who have been through [VENDOR X] training and passed their [VENDOR X] Systems Administration test. 100% [VENDOR X] Certified Employees. They're tier 1 ticket-takers who answer the calls, do some minor lookups for tickets, toss the tickets around, track things, and generally play go between. Little to no hands-on real-world experience, and their training decays quickly from lack of use.
The tier 2 employees? Tier 3? Many had some form of [VENDOR X] training years ago. The last time the company authorized training for most of them was in either 1999 or 2000. Most are not certified. The vast majority (especially after rounds of eliminations over the years) are very competent and some even quite excellent in their technical knowledge.
The company only minorly encourages the Tier 2 and 3 employees to get certified. The Tier 1 certification is required via contract with [VENDOR X] as part of their agreement.I think this pretty much spells a company that knows that certs are meaningless. Clued managers don't look for certs. But there certainly are some organizations out there for who certifications are everything.
[VENDOR X] used to allow plausable deniability that we're talking about any vendor under the sun, and not one in particular. Apologies.
Correction for the obtuse who need their comparisons to be more 1:1 in nature:
"So, you could say that Mr. Gore was the fertility doctor of the Internet, yes?"
But let's not run a joke into the ground, okay?
Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, nobody can deny that they are serious about taking on spam.
Oh. I thought you said they were serious about talking on spam! The first company to successfully break the spam barrier could be quite rich. (Assuming it is patentable or otherwise controllable, and people would accept that.)
Your message probably best sums up the response to this, and nothing else really needs to be said by anyone. If you create a list of email addresses and attach to it an American law governing their use, then someone from China isn't going to care one bit. The global nature of the Internet (which defies censorship) is also the same thing that allows for spam.
Personally, I'd get a little scared if they can legalize away spam. Although a different medium, if they go all-out for spam, it probably makes for a good sign/precident for 'other things' to be eliminated from the Internet. (Be it pirated files, porn, 'ideas that my citizens shouldn't be having', etc.)
But I still wish spam would go away, like everyone else.
So you could say that Mr. Gore was the fertility clinic of the Internet, yes?
I've really struggled to keep my Yahoo! Mail account in check. There are a lot of messages that I want to archive. At the same time, I'm constantly getting new email that I need to read or file. 4mb has added up to 205 email messages for me. I, for one, welcome the new 100mb upgrade.
If anything, it gives my inbox the chance to grow as big as my "Bulk" (spam) folder. I haven't cleaned it out since 05/29 (two and a half weeks), and I've got 1790 messages waiting for me to review if they're real or not. The good thing is, the bulk folder doesn't count against your quota. (Sounds like a feature that is ripe for a 'sploit, to me.)
False positives on spam detection? What false positives? Clearly, they don't exist, because I never see them! ;)
Home Lineage: [Atari 8-bit] -> [MSDOS] -> [Windows 3.1] -> [Windows for Workgroups] -> [Windows 95] -> [Windows 98] -> [Mandrake Linux]
I look at this from a higher level perspective. It is a choice of paradigms. And this goes back to the core underlying battle between Windows and Linux. (Or Bill Gates and the hackers. His age-old battle he started with the Homebrew Computer Club.)
One side is all about commercialization. This is good and this is bad. It is a trade-off. There can be some really great software made for Windows. At the same time, I've got people trying to monetize my desktop by loading spyware and every turn of a web page. I've got a corporation supporting me, which is good and bad.
The other side is all about freedom (free $$ and free ideas). This is a good and a bad thing as well. There isn't much big commercial user software with superadvanced features. But there is superadvanced server software. And most things are customizable out the wazoo. Lack of commercial games. But I've got a community supporting me, which is good and bad.
Yes, each individual point here can be wrangled to death with points and counterpoints. But what is stopping me from going back to windows is the following:
1] Spyware/security/email nightmare.
2] Power of small tools working together.
3] Customization.
4] Additional cost over what I already have.
At best, I can spend a lot of money to get something equal to what I have now. Some $$$ to Microsoft, some to others. It just isn't cost efficient to go back to Windows.
I don't know. I mean, have you actually seen or used a Deramcast? For all we know, they could weigh as much as a missile!
PS: Okay. You're right.
> MAME user: I wish the law wasn't so ambiguous about playing ROMs.
I wish the law just made sense when it comes to playing ROMs! I mean, by the strictest of interpretations, if I physically move the ROMs off of my boardsets and plug them into the computer where they are read (and not cached) as the game is played, then it is probably legal.
But if I emulate Pac-Man with a copy of the ROMs on my computer and not on the actual ones in my game room, then I'm a criminal. Oh. And I'm stealing from Namco, too.
Solid fill unshaded polygons.
I now run my native desktop as Linux. But I've done a speed comparison with some games between MAME under Linux and MAME under DOS. It isn't necessarily Linux's fault, but MAME under DOS just runs faster than Linux, and that means that more games can run at faster framerates with lesser hardware.
I'm trying to see a compelling reason to run a Linux based MAME cabinet, as opposed to an MSDOS dedicated MAME cabinet? The speed issue really hurts.
Is this the beginning of the end of e-mail?
A year ago, I would have laughed this notion off as absurd, but I'm starting to give it more credit. I'm easily dumping 75-100 messages out of my junk folder each day (after a very quick review of the header information). That is so where I can receive maybe 1-5 legitimate emails a day.
I suppose I'll just have to wait for the problem to get worse for everyone else before the world wakes up and realizes the current system is just plain broke.
I inform the internal technical support that there is a problem with the LDAP server. He tells me that there is no corporate LDAP server. Then I forced him into admitting he didn't know what an LDAP server was. But because he has no documentation on it, it therefore isn't a problem, and he will not escalate it to the back-line support either. This is what happens when you fire all the intelligent technical people in your help desk and replace them with cookbook readers and rules people who don't take ownership and pride in their work.
...when the first thing that comes to mind when you hear, "I, Robot" is Atari, and not Isaac Asimov. And here I thought it was a movie based off of the video game. D'oh! :)
In the video, right as they start typing in a command line order for pizza, above the line, you'll see "See the man page for more details on accounts, confiuration files, and batch ordering."
I don't think I've ever reported a typo that I've observered from a video.
We had intelligent land minds that could move and reorganize themselves. Of course, their most favorite activity was to find someone walking nearby and to move themselves under their foot. You really had to be careful with those things around!
I personally am waiting for a good Megavoxel camera. If you think pixels are good, imagine the images that can be rendered with voxels! It is incredible! ;)
I concede to your worst case scenerio. It is far worse than mine. Actually, this reminds me of an example from work...
Person 1: "So, worst case scenerio, how long will it take for our disaster recovery process to bring this one critical system back online?"
Person 2: "Worst case?"
Person 1: "Yes, worst case."
Person 2: "Never. It will never come back up."
Person 1: "No, seriously. I need a time."
Person 2: "The backups are gone, the off-site backup facility is destroyed, everyone who knew anything about the system is dead. We have no electricity. Our telecommunications system is down. That system isn't coming back up."
Person 1: "So, I should put two months?"
Person 2: "Yes, that should work nicely."
Worst case scenerio?
Global warming not only increases, but accelerates in a self-feeding reaction that extinguishes all life* on the planet Earth.
Don't you love worst case scenerios?
* - Well, any life worth talking about, anyhow. Do we really have to count those microscopic volcanic organisms?