Certainly. Personally I regard anything religious as being damaging to mental health (ranging from the extreme hardcore of scientology and other sects, through the monotheists, to the less offensive philosophy-bordering buddhism), and would rather not see young people exposed to such unhealthy materials. And hey, considering the lack of people killing each other in the name of Gay, my list appears to have more solid underpinnings for what's 'inappropriate'.
So if you think that some things are not appropriate for everyone to see (as opposed to not appropriate/mandatory for everyone to show, which may have specific reasons), then come up with reasonable answers to one of these:
* Scientific criteria for what should be considered 'inappropriate' and why. (ie, actual quantifiable demonstrations of 'harm' caused by the viewing of the material) * An explanation why some specific groups definition of 'inappropriate' should take precedence over every other groups definition of 'inappropriate' * An agreement that I'm the one who gets to have the final word on what is offensive and inappropriate. I'd be ok with that. I'm not sure that everyone else would be, but then again, personally I wouldn't be the one insisting that everyone should only get to see what I say they should see.
I still don't know why ppl drool for Netbooks either
They're still a bit large and unwieldy, but they're at the point where you can stick'em in a coat pocket or trivially fit them into a fairly small backpack. And large though my coat pockets may be, there's simply no way I'll fit a full size keyboard in it.
Personally I don't get why people have ordinary laptops; they have nowhere near the screen space or performance to act as a decent replacement for a desktop, nor are they portable enough to do much but lug them between workplaces and, perhaps, meetings.
And of course, I don't get the 'flat' or 'thin' thing at all. The 'flatness' criteria falls somewhere below 'amount of rose scent emitted' for a computing device for me...
But hey, I guess we've all got different uses for our devices:).
Yes, you can compare. You need to set the parameters for the comparison and decide how to measure, etc, but yes, you really can compare.
The figure you mention is certainly in the ballpark of SAN storage I've seen. I content that most enterprise SAN storage is both grossly misapplied and often a huge waste of money, and further the actual criteria necessary can often be reached with far cheaper hardware.
Of course, the biggest waste is probably the misapplication, which is perhaps a bit beside the point, but still; in the name of that 'easy to manage' theory, everything from word documents to high-performance databases gets stored on high-performance FC disks, reached over redundant FC SAN, connected through a redundant FC fabric.
At a ballpark, I'd say about 80% or more of the stored data in a large corporation could be stuck on USB disks and run through the metal shredder once they're filled. Much of the data is simply unimportant junk that could be lost and nobody would care. ISO images of installations, temporary backups, web caches, etc, etc. None of it has performance requirements, and none of has availability requirements beyond getting it back within a week if service is disrupted. When you could hire another employee for the same cost of storing Linux ISOS and RPMs locally, and there is no other alternative available, there's a problem.
$30 per gigabyte is justifiable when we're talking the most important applications, but it simply isn't when we're talking the junk data. And like most high-end hardware, high-end SAN equipment is not subject to economies of scale; use more of it and it gets _more_ expensive, not less. The more of it you use, the faster fabric you need, the bigger switches you need to serve the high-end case appropriately because that expensive fabric is clogged by crap.
all the sudden the entire solution becomes dramatically cheaper, easier to manage, easier to cool
I'm certainly not arguing against SAN when used appropriately. Heck, I consolidated my storage at home several years ago and run most my stuff off iSCSI, with exactly the advantages you name.
Correctly implemented and highly tiered SAN storage, even with expensive disks in some places, can certainly be cost effective. But don't mistake the solutions the vendors will try to sell you for being the cheapest or most appropriate way to do things.
And don't say you can't compare; it's data of varying importance on some type of media. Any storage technology can be trunked, raided, copied, distributed, to obtain any specific criteria (look at google as an example). The only interesting part is what price you pay to store at the criteria you have, and price per unit may not correlate with anything but how gullible the marks are. Sifting through the smoke you'll get blown to actual analysis like the article here is necessary to avoid paying far more than you have to for your storage.
Looks like you need to go over your math. The only way it makes sense is if IOPS/watt is the only thing that matters to you and you have very small amounts of data.
The rest of us that actually need to store things on our SAN will find we get a vastly higher storage density in GB/watt or GB/sq foot with SATA disks.
Yes, actually, it does make calls. But with your following questions it sounds like you're interested in using it as an actual everyday phone.
It's not.
It's possible to get it somewhat functional as such, but you'd probably be sacrificing most of the reasons to actually get one to get the stability, reliability and battery time needed to use it as a basic, main, phone.
You'll be much more satisfied if you regard it as a small form factor embedded Linux development platform with GSM capablities. Want to get in to actual cell phone development? Experiment with hand held applications? Got a great idea and would like to start up a company producing gadgets but need a cheap way to see if it flies first? Want to experiment with miniature touch-screen UI's to see what works?
Then it might be the thing you're looking for. I certainly love mine. But don't get it if a phone is all you're looking for.
I don't think that's entirely true, Sun is quite good at building hype around certain of their products (witness the ZFS! Dtrace! crowd).
They have always been a bit unfocused tho, undermining other marketing efforts (x86! (but use Sparc!) No x86! x86 again!). Interspersed with some plain odd campaigns (was there an actual point to naming everything Java or was it just to outdo Microsoft in relabeling unrelated things by including the ticker?).
It would indeed be sad to see them go or get assimilated by one of the many possible bad partners, but the company frankly got quite wrecked by the web boom/bust and has not yet recovered in many ways.
Lethal injection at least it seems like a painless death.
Yes, it seems that way. Horribly enough, that may be because the subjects are paralyzed while they are suffocated and their veins are burned from the inside.
At least that's certainly a possibility as what little research there is done on the subject indicates that the anesthesia may be far below what would be used for surgical procedures or animal euthanasia, suggesting it may very well be possible that the subjects lose consciousness for a couple of minutes after which they regain consciousness in a paralyzed state to enjoy the effects of suffocation and excruciating pain from the potassium chloride.
But hey, at least it's less spectacular and easier on the audience.
Yep, the more extensive calculations I've seen come up with approximately equivalent prices per IOPS when all the factors you mention are accounted for. At least one of which then extended the analysis into really bizarre arguments about watt per IOPS being of supreme importance while ignoring the 3-5 times as large storage volume.
You're right that volume isn't a concern in the cases when performance is the objective, but in my experience (and yours may differ), in consolidated storage environments the complaints about low performance storage being expensive outnumber the complaints about high-performance storage being slow by several times. Adding massive amounts of very low-cost but near zero IOPS storage would reduce problems and costs associated with everything from employees storing data on USB drives to the man hours spent sorting out data and mail that they're certain they can throw away. So if you can triple the volume by doing a near-zero cost benefit substitution of fast disks for more spindles with equivalent IOPS, you can get a significant benefit in another segment of storage.
but additional storage space is not always an added benefit
True, you need a matching use case for it too. However, in my experience there's a huge pent up demand for cheap low-performance storage in enterprise environments (further indicated by in-vogue pitches about cost reduction through 'deduplication'), so while putting another database on the spindles with free space is a no-no, you might be able to match the space up with backups, archived user data or similar low priority data that won't interfere with peak load performance.
It may not be trivial to accomplish such pooling with storage vendor tools, but hey, the whole sales pitch for SANs was that it was more manageable, and supposed to somehow be cost effective (which is obviously not what's happening when companies are worrying about storage cost for power point presentations and email archives at a time when you can get storage enough for every bit of data most employees generate over a lifetime for less than the cost of their office chair).
Of course, SAS drives are also often too expensive to survive a purely cost/benefit driven analysis. For many real-world loads you're better off adding more spindles which can give you similar iops per dollar but with the added benefit of vastly more storage space.
There's a lot of snake oil and very little quality analysis in enterprise storage these days, so it's good to see at least some do attempt to do actual real-world cost/benefit calculations before jumping onto the marketing train.
I haven't seen much evidence for the idea that public companies are significantly more susceptible to rot than private companies.
Not significantly, no, the difference is that in private companies it is at least possible to keep the rot out. IKEA would be one example of a large privately held company that seems fairly successful at keeping the rot at bay.
I'm not saying that management professionals are the problem, I'm saying that it's hard to separate actual management professionals from perk seekers and drains who are good at gaming pay systems and creating bad performance indicators. When it's not your money there may simply not be enough incentive to do so, nor the political will or power; those who make themselves look good make you look good whether it's real or not. And if it blows up, you can usually play the 'but everybody else' game; witness many of the big public banks.
there are certain inherent problems such as agency problems on the part of employees.
Indeed, but with the publicly held companies there can also to a larger extent exist agency problems with the board.
Frankly, I suspect unions is much less of a problem than the white collar and management parts of the work force. Administration and process related overhead tends to grow with the age of large companies, and if there's anything such overhead is good at it's at hiding its own cost.
Toyota is starting to have problems as they slowly turn into the next GM.
It's probably unavoidable at large public companies. If they're not defectivized from within early on, it's just a matter of time until some buddy circle of fund managers and professional board members get onto the board and they bring in their pals. Then it'll just rot as job protectors, back-patters, yes-men and others turn a viable business into a bureaucracy and feeding trough.
Companies that get too big need to get bankrupted, chopped up, sold off, and remade as viable companies again. Burying two or three barely functional economic drains could spawn thirty new nimble companies that could actually produce desired products at reasonable costs.
Nah, in 18 month's it's 30 minutes. Gotta love lithium ion bomb, eh, battery technology.
No mention of any price either; one article mentions it'd cost 1/2 to 1/4 of an ordinary car in city driving, but I'd bet that neither includes capital cost or battery replacement cost.
Companies like Tata are so going to eat GM's lunch.
As far as I recall, even the first iteration of NetBooks had more than enough oomph to run XP.
Yep. At that point in time it was the imminent canning of XP as a platform that made it unsuitable.
Personally I don't see the point, but if people want to spend time with their hands contorted onto a tiny keyboard, squinting at a tiny screen, bully for them.
Pretty much what I say about normal laptops used as desktop replacements. Netbooks on the other hand can fill a different purpose, in the mobile computing range, as opposed to 'portable workspace'. Screen size and keyboard size aren't so much an issue, because you wouldn't spend significant time using them.
Of course, the manufacturers are largely drifting towards the laptop segment; personally I'd be more interested in actual 7 inch versions and smaller than in 10 inch versions, but I guess that'll come from elsewhere.
Oh, very true, and the damage would be horrific, most likely very few survivors within several kilometers from ground zero. But what's certainly overkill for strategic military and political purposes against a conventional enemy may not serve to exterminate guerilla recruitment base; you can't blanket a country with a multimegaton device every few kilometers. And leaving many survivors may not be a good idea in such a case; once you irradiate someone you're never going to be sure he doesn't hold a grudge.
Defensive use against conventional enemies is certainly another use case altogether; once you're dealing with cohesive state run organizations backing political will and intent, then they may certainly serve a purpose and be effective for that. But that's basically on the scale they are; they can change and remove conventional fundamental 'winning' scenarios. And, yes, it may be possible that a country could get away with defensive use in a case where it was significantly endangered by a large scale invasion in its own territory.
Still, I'm not sure how useful that would be in the end, any invading force would certainly have evaluated such a scenario and would have dealt with it, so if you ever get to actually using them they've already been ineffective for their most useful purpose: deterrence.
You overestimate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. In Hiroshima there were survivors in reasonably sturdy buildings 100 meters from the center of the blast. Even a fairly severe use of them would not evaporate enough people to significantly impair guerilla recruitment; to engage in bombings in the amount necessary to achieve any kind of extermination would cause significant fallout elsewhere on intolerable levels.
In fact, the result would probably be to provide them with a whole host of recruits locally as radiation poisoned individuals may not have significant compunctions about going down fighting. And it would most likely result in significant blow back from the nuclear aggressors own population, as well as from non-involved parties.
Nuclear weapons may be useful against conventional armies with conventional leaders in countries with conventional population. They destroy enough infrastructure and kill enough people in the longer term to change the political game, and may make any state concept of 'winning' irrelevant, but the use of any non-tactical nuclear weapon against guerilla forces would be largely ineffective (compared to conventional weapons) and most likely seriously counterproductive.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral
Hardly. Political and practical would come highest on the list, using nuclear weapons would remove any chance of reaching any possible current goals, ie, make any 'winning' essentially impossible.
Further, a nuclear first strike would make the rest of the nuclear powers so jittery we'd rename the Cold War the Slightly Chilly War. Friendlier, more interdependent world or not, the ability of the rest of them to tolerate a first-strike nuclear power would be limited.
Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it
Ah, no. CentOS is a free version of Redhat. Fedora is what you use if you like time warps into the future to explore what may work in a year or two and eventually get merged into Redhat when it's stable. Or if you have need for some bleeding edge hardware drivers that aren't going to get back ported into point updates of Redhat. Or if you just generally like being on the bleeding edge.
It's nice enough and personally I use it for desktop stuff as I'm going to have to deal with the news eventually anyway, but it's not going to remain unchanged for any longer interval, nor it it going to be particularly low maintenance.
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
Let me know at the end of April, if the amount is significantly lower than March.
It will most likely be significantly lower than March. This years March, however, was almost double last years March, so one might expect this years April to be more in line with last years April.
Look at the longer term statistics at http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums/Stockholm_GE.html and you'll note that the change in traffic isn't so much a drop as it is a return to normal after a massive 6-9 month spike. People aren't downloading less than usual, they have been downloading much much more than usual just in case.
the summary may be right that this is a sign the legislation is working.
Not really. If you look at the longer term statistics the actual situation is that in the last 6 months prior to the legislation coming into effect there was a massive drawn out flood of traffic, almost doubling ordinary levels. What's happening now is that it's falling back to what it was before.
So the only effect was that people started downloading like crazy just in case, in anticipation of an event of unknown consequences. That it's only dropped back to normal levels is more surprising really; with the previous levels of traffic one might assume that some may have material to last them for years.
Yep, looked there, there are no published TPC results for mainframes, all the DB2 results are on AIX, Windows or x86 Linux. Same with SPEC. There is an IBM sortof-benchmark for the mainframes called LSPR which can somewhat indicate relative performance within the families, but they're never run on anything but mainframes. It's not hard to get excuses (with varying validity) as to why the lack of comparable benchmarks is, but it is hard to find any actual hard data.
What there is is various disparate measurements at some points in time on some specific hardware that you can find if googling enough, some equivalency tables of various qualities, some mainframe-to-mainframe comparisons and various things you can infer from equivalent hardware and architecture similarities. But there's a bit too much guesswork and you end up with the conclusion that there is nothing indicating that a mainframe would outperform on some specific area any more. It's certainly nice hardware and at least it should be a reasonably high-end performer, but there's nothing particularly exclusive in it and factor in price...
Well, it would be nice with some actual validated numbers either way.
Seriously, I've fairly recently gone through every single benchmark, comparison, inference, etc, that I've been able to find on the subject (they're not exactly sprinkled all over the place) and I can't find any indications anywhere that mainframe hardware can surpass modern commodity hardware on any measurement. On price/performance variants it's not rare to see it outclassed more than an order of magnitude, and in absolute performance, well, there's very little magic hardware in the mainframe either anymore, it's pretty much the same silicon as anywhere else; Power CPU's, DDR infiniband, CPU to SC bandwidth almost equivalent to Hypertransport, same SAN as is used anywhere else, and as far as I can tell, to my horror, DDR2 533 memory(??). Please, correct me if I'm wrong and I very well may be, because actual specs aren't exactly flaunted. I mean, it's nice enough, but it's hardly magic.
Sure, there's the old trick of moving system and IO load into extra dedicated CPUs, but that's becoming less and less relevant as pretty much any significant IO load has long since moved to dedicated ASICs that do DMA on their own without any CPU cost, and things like encryption accelerators aren't that hard to find. And it's not like you're not paying for the assist processors.
Two or three years ago it might have been conceivable that it could have had at least a possibility of being superior in consolidation capabilities like being able to have the most unused OS instances running at a time, but with paravirtualized xen-derived tech commodity x86 hardware can accomplish the same or higher density. I can't say I've tried running 1500 instances, but for fun I did try running 100 instances on 5 years old junked x86 hardware which went fine until I ran out of memory at 6GB on the (like I said, junk) hardware in question. No significant performance degradation in relation to load versus what could be expected of the hardware, all 100 instances fully loaded both IO and CPU for a week to test for any throughput issues or over-time degradation, but that worked as well.
IE, no practical limit for any non-contrived consolidation situation, and I have no doubt that it scales fine up to 1500 instances on reasonably modern hardware as well as it did on that hardware (and if you need higher density than that you should seriously be considering why you're using that number of OS instances that don't appear to actually be doing anything or consider moving to system-level virtualization like vserver or openvz)).
So have you found any measurements that I couldn't find that you could point out that demonstrate lingering categories in which a mainframe might consistently outperform commodity hardware (ie, any measurement that is or can be compared to another at least somewhat related measurement on commodity hardware which demonstrates an advantage for the mainframe)?
Outside pure performance there is the in-system redundancy which is nice in theory but which in practice seems to rarely result in higher actual uptime (mainframes appear to require an inordinate amount of scheduled service time and admins often engage in a disturbingly high IPL frequency).
There is also the consistent load levels they tend to get (which seems to be largely due to culture, load selection and ROI requirements, rather than any inherent capacity), but beyond that it seems that the remaining aura of capability doesn't have much basis in reality anymore.
The masses lack of desire to pay is really a minor part of the problem. The fact is that there is a vast overproduction of media; it's still geared towards smaller scale distribution. The single content creator who took up the time of five thousand eyeballs two decades ago can now take up the time of ten million eyeballs without any high distribution costs, yet we haven't gotten several thousand times as many hours per day to actually read it all.
Add to that various other issues such as the (unpaid) comments on most sites being variously more interesting and/or accurate than the actual content, the excessive pandering of media to various influences, etc, and you have a situation where there simply is close to no scarcity vs. demand to capitalize upon.
a lot of actually creative people in the process who would, you know, like to continue eating.
They're welcome to get a day job and blog about their opinions or about what's happening like the rest of the world. You don't get paid to do something you want to, you get paid to do something you otherwise don't want to do. The lucky few who get to combine enjoyment and pay are those whose enjoyment is so deviant as to be in a field with scarcity.
The desire to create, write, express and communicate is simply larger than the capacity for consumers to consume it. With the end result that there is no scarcity to make available any financial incentives.
Well, even removing the nonsensical and otherwise disqualified versions it'd be quite a few truckloads. Not outside of realm of possibility, altho I suspect the environmental impact would make publication an issue.
On the issue of your novel work of art, a quick search on google reveals that there are at least people who have stated their intention to light their reproductive organs on fire, using sentences very close to yours. Altho they lack specificity as to what method of ignition they intend to use, I suspect that you may not actually be the first one to say that.
There's a certain level of creativity and uniqueness needed for something to be considered a 'work' too; a single sentence or two are not automatically copyrighted with any certainty or you could be sued for writing just about anything. I haven't seen any fixed length anywhere, but you can probably expect anything that could ever be uttered during a reasonably normal conversation to be unprotected by itself (compare poems that may qualify under creativity or uniqueness, etc).
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not everything is appropriate for everyone to see
Certainly. Personally I regard anything religious as being damaging to mental health (ranging from the extreme hardcore of scientology and other sects, through the monotheists, to the less offensive philosophy-bordering buddhism), and would rather not see young people exposed to such unhealthy materials. And hey, considering the lack of people killing each other in the name of Gay, my list appears to have more solid underpinnings for what's 'inappropriate'.
So if you think that some things are not appropriate for everyone to see (as opposed to not appropriate/mandatory for everyone to show, which may have specific reasons), then come up with reasonable answers to one of these:
* Scientific criteria for what should be considered 'inappropriate' and why. (ie, actual quantifiable demonstrations of 'harm' caused by the viewing of the material)
* An explanation why some specific groups definition of 'inappropriate' should take precedence over every other groups definition of 'inappropriate'
* An agreement that I'm the one who gets to have the final word on what is offensive and inappropriate. I'd be ok with that. I'm not sure that everyone else would be, but then again, personally I wouldn't be the one insisting that everyone should only get to see what I say they should see.
I still don't know why ppl drool for Netbooks either
They're still a bit large and unwieldy, but they're at the point where you can stick'em in a coat pocket or trivially fit them into a fairly small backpack. And large though my coat pockets may be, there's simply no way I'll fit a full size keyboard in it.
Personally I don't get why people have ordinary laptops; they have nowhere near the screen space or performance to act as a decent replacement for a desktop, nor are they portable enough to do much but lug them between workplaces and, perhaps, meetings.
And of course, I don't get the 'flat' or 'thin' thing at all. The 'flatness' criteria falls somewhere below 'amount of rose scent emitted' for a computing device for me...
But hey, I guess we've all got different uses for our devices :).
You really can't compare the cost per gigabyte
Yes, you can compare. You need to set the parameters for the comparison and decide how to measure, etc, but yes, you really can compare.
The figure you mention is certainly in the ballpark of SAN storage I've seen. I content that most enterprise SAN storage is both grossly misapplied and often a huge waste of money, and further the actual criteria necessary can often be reached with far cheaper hardware.
Of course, the biggest waste is probably the misapplication, which is perhaps a bit beside the point, but still; in the name of that 'easy to manage' theory, everything from word documents to high-performance databases gets stored on high-performance FC disks, reached over redundant FC SAN, connected through a redundant FC fabric.
At a ballpark, I'd say about 80% or more of the stored data in a large corporation could be stuck on USB disks and run through the metal shredder once they're filled. Much of the data is simply unimportant junk that could be lost and nobody would care. ISO images of installations, temporary backups, web caches, etc, etc. None of it has performance requirements, and none of has availability requirements beyond getting it back within a week if service is disrupted. When you could hire another employee for the same cost of storing Linux ISOS and RPMs locally, and there is no other alternative available, there's a problem.
$30 per gigabyte is justifiable when we're talking the most important applications, but it simply isn't when we're talking the junk data. And like most high-end hardware, high-end SAN equipment is not subject to economies of scale; use more of it and it gets _more_ expensive, not less. The more of it you use, the faster fabric you need, the bigger switches you need to serve the high-end case appropriately because that expensive fabric is clogged by crap.
all the sudden the entire solution becomes dramatically cheaper, easier to manage, easier to cool
I'm certainly not arguing against SAN when used appropriately. Heck, I consolidated my storage at home several years ago and run most my stuff off iSCSI, with exactly the advantages you name.
Correctly implemented and highly tiered SAN storage, even with expensive disks in some places, can certainly be cost effective. But don't mistake the solutions the vendors will try to sell you for being the cheapest or most appropriate way to do things.
And don't say you can't compare; it's data of varying importance on some type of media. Any storage technology can be trunked, raided, copied, distributed, to obtain any specific criteria (look at google as an example). The only interesting part is what price you pay to store at the criteria you have, and price per unit may not correlate with anything but how gullible the marks are. Sifting through the smoke you'll get blown to actual analysis like the article here is necessary to avoid paying far more than you have to for your storage.
Looks like you need to go over your math. The only way it makes sense is if IOPS/watt is the only thing that matters to you and you have very small amounts of data.
The rest of us that actually need to store things on our SAN will find we get a vastly higher storage density in GB/watt or GB/sq foot with SATA disks.
Yes, actually, it does make calls. But with your following questions it sounds like you're interested in using it as an actual everyday phone.
It's not.
It's possible to get it somewhat functional as such, but you'd probably be sacrificing most of the reasons to actually get one to get the stability, reliability and battery time needed to use it as a basic, main, phone.
You'll be much more satisfied if you regard it as a small form factor embedded Linux development platform with GSM capablities. Want to get in to actual cell phone development? Experiment with hand held applications? Got a great idea and would like to start up a company producing gadgets but need a cheap way to see if it flies first? Want to experiment with miniature touch-screen UI's to see what works?
Then it might be the thing you're looking for. I certainly love mine. But don't get it if a phone is all you're looking for.
I don't think that's entirely true, Sun is quite good at building hype around certain of their products (witness the ZFS! Dtrace! crowd).
They have always been a bit unfocused tho, undermining other marketing efforts (x86! (but use Sparc!) No x86! x86 again!). Interspersed with some plain odd campaigns (was there an actual point to naming everything Java or was it just to outdo Microsoft in relabeling unrelated things by including the ticker?).
It would indeed be sad to see them go or get assimilated by one of the many possible bad partners, but the company frankly got quite wrecked by the web boom/bust and has not yet recovered in many ways.
Lethal injection at least it seems like a painless death.
Yes, it seems that way. Horribly enough, that may be because the subjects are paralyzed while they are suffocated and their veins are burned from the inside.
At least that's certainly a possibility as what little research there is done on the subject indicates that the anesthesia may be far below what would be used for surgical procedures or animal euthanasia, suggesting it may very well be possible that the subjects lose consciousness for a couple of minutes after which they regain consciousness in a paralyzed state to enjoy the effects of suffocation and excruciating pain from the potassium chloride.
But hey, at least it's less spectacular and easier on the audience.
You need 2-3x as many SATA drives
Yep, the more extensive calculations I've seen come up with approximately equivalent prices per IOPS when all the factors you mention are accounted for. At least one of which then extended the analysis into really bizarre arguments about watt per IOPS being of supreme importance while ignoring the 3-5 times as large storage volume.
You're right that volume isn't a concern in the cases when performance is the objective, but in my experience (and yours may differ), in consolidated storage environments the complaints about low performance storage being expensive outnumber the complaints about high-performance storage being slow by several times. Adding massive amounts of very low-cost but near zero IOPS storage would reduce problems and costs associated with everything from employees storing data on USB drives to the man hours spent sorting out data and mail that they're certain they can throw away. So if you can triple the volume by doing a near-zero cost benefit substitution of fast disks for more spindles with equivalent IOPS, you can get a significant benefit in another segment of storage.
but additional storage space is not always an added benefit
True, you need a matching use case for it too. However, in my experience there's a huge pent up demand for cheap low-performance storage in enterprise environments (further indicated by in-vogue pitches about cost reduction through 'deduplication'), so while putting another database on the spindles with free space is a no-no, you might be able to match the space up with backups, archived user data or similar low priority data that won't interfere with peak load performance.
It may not be trivial to accomplish such pooling with storage vendor tools, but hey, the whole sales pitch for SANs was that it was more manageable, and supposed to somehow be cost effective (which is obviously not what's happening when companies are worrying about storage cost for power point presentations and email archives at a time when you can get storage enough for every bit of data most employees generate over a lifetime for less than the cost of their office chair).
Of course, SAS drives are also often too expensive to survive a purely cost/benefit driven analysis. For many real-world loads you're better off adding more spindles which can give you similar iops per dollar but with the added benefit of vastly more storage space.
There's a lot of snake oil and very little quality analysis in enterprise storage these days, so it's good to see at least some do attempt to do actual real-world cost/benefit calculations before jumping onto the marketing train.
I haven't seen much evidence for the idea that public companies are significantly more susceptible to rot than private companies.
Not significantly, no, the difference is that in private companies it is at least possible to keep the rot out. IKEA would be one example of a large privately held company that seems fairly successful at keeping the rot at bay.
I'm not saying that management professionals are the problem, I'm saying that it's hard to separate actual management professionals from perk seekers and drains who are good at gaming pay systems and creating bad performance indicators. When it's not your money there may simply not be enough incentive to do so, nor the political will or power; those who make themselves look good make you look good whether it's real or not. And if it blows up, you can usually play the 'but everybody else' game; witness many of the big public banks.
there are certain inherent problems such as agency problems on the part of employees.
Indeed, but with the publicly held companies there can also to a larger extent exist agency problems with the board.
why unions can be a problem
Frankly, I suspect unions is much less of a problem than the white collar and management parts of the work force. Administration and process related overhead tends to grow with the age of large companies, and if there's anything such overhead is good at it's at hiding its own cost.
Toyota is starting to have problems as they slowly turn into the next GM.
It's probably unavoidable at large public companies. If they're not defectivized from within early on, it's just a matter of time until some buddy circle of fund managers and professional board members get onto the board and they bring in their pals. Then it'll just rot as job protectors, back-patters, yes-men and others turn a viable business into a bureaucracy and feeding trough.
Companies that get too big need to get bankrupted, chopped up, sold off, and remade as viable companies again. Burying two or three barely functional economic drains could spawn thirty new nimble companies that could actually produce desired products at reasonable costs.
Nah, in 18 month's it's 30 minutes. Gotta love lithium ion bomb, eh, battery technology.
No mention of any price either; one article mentions it'd cost 1/2 to 1/4 of an ordinary car in city driving, but I'd bet that neither includes capital cost or battery replacement cost.
Companies like Tata are so going to eat GM's lunch.
And really. I'd rather buy a Nano.
As far as I recall, even the first iteration of NetBooks had more than enough oomph to run XP.
Yep. At that point in time it was the imminent canning of XP as a platform that made it unsuitable.
Personally I don't see the point, but if people want to spend time with their hands contorted onto a tiny keyboard, squinting at a tiny screen, bully for them.
Pretty much what I say about normal laptops used as desktop replacements. Netbooks on the other hand can fill a different purpose, in the mobile computing range, as opposed to 'portable workspace'. Screen size and keyboard size aren't so much an issue, because you wouldn't spend significant time using them.
Of course, the manufacturers are largely drifting towards the laptop segment; personally I'd be more interested in actual 7 inch versions and smaller than in 10 inch versions, but I guess that'll come from elsewhere.
but there are plenty of larger weapons
Oh, very true, and the damage would be horrific, most likely very few survivors within several kilometers from ground zero. But what's certainly overkill for strategic military and political purposes against a conventional enemy may not serve to exterminate guerilla recruitment base; you can't blanket a country with a multimegaton device every few kilometers. And leaving many survivors may not be a good idea in such a case; once you irradiate someone you're never going to be sure he doesn't hold a grudge.
Defensive use against conventional enemies is certainly another use case altogether; once you're dealing with cohesive state run organizations backing political will and intent, then they may certainly serve a purpose and be effective for that. But that's basically on the scale they are; they can change and remove conventional fundamental 'winning' scenarios. And, yes, it may be possible that a country could get away with defensive use in a case where it was significantly endangered by a large scale invasion in its own territory.
Still, I'm not sure how useful that would be in the end, any invading force would certainly have evaluated such a scenario and would have dealt with it, so if you ever get to actually using them they've already been ineffective for their most useful purpose: deterrence.
You overestimate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. In Hiroshima there were survivors in reasonably sturdy buildings 100 meters from the center of the blast. Even a fairly severe use of them would not evaporate enough people to significantly impair guerilla recruitment; to engage in bombings in the amount necessary to achieve any kind of extermination would cause significant fallout elsewhere on intolerable levels.
In fact, the result would probably be to provide them with a whole host of recruits locally as radiation poisoned individuals may not have significant compunctions about going down fighting. And it would most likely result in significant blow back from the nuclear aggressors own population, as well as from non-involved parties.
Nuclear weapons may be useful against conventional armies with conventional leaders in countries with conventional population. They destroy enough infrastructure and kill enough people in the longer term to change the political game, and may make any state concept of 'winning' irrelevant, but the use of any non-tactical nuclear weapon against guerilla forces would be largely ineffective (compared to conventional weapons) and most likely seriously counterproductive.
The reason nukes aren't being used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is a moral
Hardly. Political and practical would come highest on the list, using nuclear weapons would remove any chance of reaching any possible current goals, ie, make any 'winning' essentially impossible.
Further, a nuclear first strike would make the rest of the nuclear powers so jittery we'd rename the Cold War the Slightly Chilly War. Friendlier, more interdependent world or not, the ability of the rest of them to tolerate a first-strike nuclear power would be limited.
Most people I hear of using it do so because they're used to Red Hat and want a free version of it
Ah, no. CentOS is a free version of Redhat. Fedora is what you use if you like time warps into the future to explore what may work in a year or two and eventually get merged into Redhat when it's stable. Or if you have need for some bleeding edge hardware drivers that aren't going to get back ported into point updates of Redhat. Or if you just generally like being on the bleeding edge.
It's nice enough and personally I use it for desktop stuff as I'm going to have to deal with the news eventually anyway, but it's not going to remain unchanged for any longer interval, nor it it going to be particularly low maintenance.
Sure it does, 'Enterprise Solution' is an industrial grade solvent used for dissolving piles of money stuck to the floor of vaults. It's also available in 25ml bottles for removing embarrassingly large numbers on corporate bank account statements.
Let me know at the end of April, if the amount is significantly lower than March.
It will most likely be significantly lower than March. This years March, however, was almost double last years March, so one might expect this years April to be more in line with last years April.
Look at the longer term statistics at http://stats.autonomica.se/mrtg/sums/Stockholm_GE.html and you'll note that the change in traffic isn't so much a drop as it is a return to normal after a massive 6-9 month spike. People aren't downloading less than usual, they have been downloading much much more than usual just in case.
the summary may be right that this is a sign the legislation is working.
Not really. If you look at the longer term statistics the actual situation is that in the last 6 months prior to the legislation coming into effect there was a massive drawn out flood of traffic, almost doubling ordinary levels. What's happening now is that it's falling back to what it was before.
So the only effect was that people started downloading like crazy just in case, in anticipation of an event of unknown consequences. That it's only dropped back to normal levels is more surprising really; with the previous levels of traffic one might assume that some may have material to last them for years.
Yep, looked there, there are no published TPC results for mainframes, all the DB2 results are on AIX, Windows or x86 Linux. Same with SPEC. There is an IBM sortof-benchmark for the mainframes called LSPR which can somewhat indicate relative performance within the families, but they're never run on anything but mainframes. It's not hard to get excuses (with varying validity) as to why the lack of comparable benchmarks is, but it is hard to find any actual hard data.
What there is is various disparate measurements at some points in time on some specific hardware that you can find if googling enough, some equivalency tables of various qualities, some mainframe-to-mainframe comparisons and various things you can infer from equivalent hardware and architecture similarities. But there's a bit too much guesswork and you end up with the conclusion that there is nothing indicating that a mainframe would outperform on some specific area any more. It's certainly nice hardware and at least it should be a reasonably high-end performer, but there's nothing particularly exclusive in it and factor in price...
Well, it would be nice with some actual validated numbers either way.
by others they don't.
Seriously, I've fairly recently gone through every single benchmark, comparison, inference, etc, that I've been able to find on the subject (they're not exactly sprinkled all over the place) and I can't find any indications anywhere that mainframe hardware can surpass modern commodity hardware on any measurement. On price/performance variants it's not rare to see it outclassed more than an order of magnitude, and in absolute performance, well, there's very little magic hardware in the mainframe either anymore, it's pretty much the same silicon as anywhere else; Power CPU's, DDR infiniband, CPU to SC bandwidth almost equivalent to Hypertransport, same SAN as is used anywhere else, and as far as I can tell, to my horror, DDR2 533 memory(??). Please, correct me if I'm wrong and I very well may be, because actual specs aren't exactly flaunted. I mean, it's nice enough, but it's hardly magic.
Sure, there's the old trick of moving system and IO load into extra dedicated CPUs, but that's becoming less and less relevant as pretty much any significant IO load has long since moved to dedicated ASICs that do DMA on their own without any CPU cost, and things like encryption accelerators aren't that hard to find. And it's not like you're not paying for the assist processors.
Two or three years ago it might have been conceivable that it could have had at least a possibility of being superior in consolidation capabilities like being able to have the most unused OS instances running at a time, but with paravirtualized xen-derived tech commodity x86 hardware can accomplish the same or higher density. I can't say I've tried running 1500 instances, but for fun I did try running 100 instances on 5 years old junked x86 hardware which went fine until I ran out of memory at 6GB on the (like I said, junk) hardware in question. No significant performance degradation in relation to load versus what could be expected of the hardware, all 100 instances fully loaded both IO and CPU for a week to test for any throughput issues or over-time degradation, but that worked as well.
IE, no practical limit for any non-contrived consolidation situation, and I have no doubt that it scales fine up to 1500 instances on reasonably modern hardware as well as it did on that hardware (and if you need higher density than that you should seriously be considering why you're using that number of OS instances that don't appear to actually be doing anything or consider moving to system-level virtualization like vserver or openvz)).
So have you found any measurements that I couldn't find that you could point out that demonstrate lingering categories in which a mainframe might consistently outperform commodity hardware (ie, any measurement that is or can be compared to another at least somewhat related measurement on commodity hardware which demonstrates an advantage for the mainframe)?
Outside pure performance there is the in-system redundancy which is nice in theory but which in practice seems to rarely result in higher actual uptime (mainframes appear to require an inordinate amount of scheduled service time and admins often engage in a disturbingly high IPL frequency).
There is also the consistent load levels they tend to get (which seems to be largely due to culture, load selection and ROI requirements, rather than any inherent capacity), but beyond that it seems that the remaining aura of capability doesn't have much basis in reality anymore.
The masses just don't want to pay.
The masses lack of desire to pay is really a minor part of the problem. The fact is that there is a vast overproduction of media; it's still geared towards smaller scale distribution. The single content creator who took up the time of five thousand eyeballs two decades ago can now take up the time of ten million eyeballs without any high distribution costs, yet we haven't gotten several thousand times as many hours per day to actually read it all.
Add to that various other issues such as the (unpaid) comments on most sites being variously more interesting and/or accurate than the actual content, the excessive pandering of media to various influences, etc, and you have a situation where there simply is close to no scarcity vs. demand to capitalize upon.
a lot of actually creative people in the process who would, you know, like to continue eating.
They're welcome to get a day job and blog about their opinions or about what's happening like the rest of the world. You don't get paid to do something you want to, you get paid to do something you otherwise don't want to do. The lucky few who get to combine enjoyment and pay are those whose enjoyment is so deviant as to be in a field with scarcity.
The desire to create, write, express and communicate is simply larger than the capacity for consumers to consume it. With the end result that there is no scarcity to make available any financial incentives.
Well, even removing the nonsensical and otherwise disqualified versions it'd be quite a few truckloads. Not outside of realm of possibility, altho I suspect the environmental impact would make publication an issue.
On the issue of your novel work of art, a quick search on google reveals that there are at least people who have stated their intention to light their reproductive organs on fire, using sentences very close to yours. Altho they lack specificity as to what method of ignition they intend to use, I suspect that you may not actually be the first one to say that.
There's a certain level of creativity and uniqueness needed for something to be considered a 'work' too; a single sentence or two are not automatically copyrighted with any certainty or you could be sued for writing just about anything. I haven't seen any fixed length anywhere, but you can probably expect anything that could ever be uttered during a reasonably normal conversation to be unprotected by itself (compare poems that may qualify under creativity or uniqueness, etc).