Eventually, with extraordinary leaps in nanotechnology we might be able to make sufficiently self-repairing and resilient artificial machines, but by that point, we'd be getting pretty close to a biological system.
And _this_, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what I'm talking about. To the point of extraordinary leaps, I don't think it's that far off. Five decades, maybe seven. Quoting Drexler (which I'm sure is going to dampen my argument), if medical science doesn't drive this, the requirements for computing will.
Furthermore, I'm not talking about stainless steel/transistor/connector type stuff. I'm talking nanomechanical/nanoelectric neuron replacment, along w/ significant changes to the skeletomuscular systems (diamondoid/corundum skeleton using interlocking carbon nanotube muscular replacements). None of the materials could even be attacked in our current environment, and would be highly resistant to acids/bases (altho not indefinitely), vacuum, high pressure (+100psi enviros). Once the problem of existing in a biological neural network is addressed, you can pitch the digestive system, endocrine, lymphatic, circulatory, liver, kidneys, pancreas... I could go on. Add to that the fact that all the raw materials needed for repair are found right at hand in the soil (well, maybe not some of the more exotic metals, but carbon and hydrogen and oxygen are.), and hell, you'd need low-level nanoassemblers to build such a thing in the first place; they'd be kept around for field repairs.
What's probably the greatest single advantage is that it's not all probablistic guesswork. Right now, the fact that all the proteins in your body do their job is because the odds are stacked in their favor. Things still break, but the odds are slim, and if they do go, there's two or more methods that have to break before you're totally screwed. In an engineered system like a car, you need less failsafes, since the odds can be stacked much higher. Assume protein systems have a failure rate of 1 in 100. Artificial mechanical systems have rates of failure approaching 1 in trillions. What's the error rate for your hard disk? And that's achieved with standard bulk matter manufacturing processes! (granted, the average is about 1 in a million, but that's still five orders of magnitude better than the biological rates, even considering a four tier backup system, each w/a 1/10^2 failure rate)
I'm probably off w/ the fail rates for biosystems, but I'm fairly sure I'm within 2 orders of magnitude.
I also think if it would be possible to implant such bacteria for additional computational power in human brains -- just in case we have to upgrade them."
Uhh, screw that... Personally, I think as soon as we're technologically able, we should move away from the whole biology thing. Being in a meat body sucks sledgehammers thru a garden hose. Especially when you're considered lunch for pretty much everything on this earth that can move under it's own power, and several more that can't.
I mean, being a biological organism has hundreds of drawbacks, not the least of which is the extremely limited environment that such organisms must occupy if they want to keep working. Imagine a brain capable of working in temperatures ranging from sub-freezing to plus-boiling, rather than the what, twenty whole degrees we've got now? (ten if you're using Celsius). It frees up a great deal of flexibility for the design of new bodies, and the best part is, nothing naturally occuring on this earth would think we're tasty.
That said, and to get back on topic, I don't think we'll ever really see the day when bacteria are used to manufacture circuits. Trace sizes are already smaller than most living organisms, and they're difficult to work with at best. Plus, in the decade or so that they think it'll take to get this up and running, circuit requirements will be such that even engineered organisms are totally innapropriate for the task. In a few decades more, mass-produced nanoassembly should be the state of the art for this type of manufactured goods.
well, I also know people who have really good luck w/ their products. All I'm saying is that in several years, I've had lots of stuff fail. Now, I leave the machine on constantly. And I do know that each time I get weirdness (polys dropping out in games, screen corruption in Windows) a new card fixes it. It's not possible to simply replace a piece of hardware and have the problem go away w/o it being the hardware that was replaced. The killer for each of these cards was to move them into a different system (and I mean completely. Like going from Intel to AMD), and the problems follow the card. I've never had thermal problems with any other bits of hardware, neither have I run into stuff that's this touchy.
In any event, it's probably that fact that my job function in the computer industry is primarily troubleshooting. Hardware hates me. I just lost _another_ supervisor module in a Cisco 6509 (this is the eleventh), in a datacenter environment. Best thing is that it looks like it may actually be the back plane this time, making it the second in two years. And this is for ENTERPRISE-CLASS hardware. I won't go into the details, but let's say that in those same three years, we've had 40 RMAs for major components, at a cost of around a quarter mil to Cisco. But I digress.
I guess to be honest, I've got the worst luck with video hardware my friends have ever seen. And I'll leave it at that.
I kinda figured that with the way nVidia's hardware likes to pop like lightbulbs, eventually they'd release a card that was dead out of the box. To date, I've had a grand total of seven nvidia products die on me. The first was a TNT2 Ultra, followed by a TNT, followed by the replacement Ultra, then two TNT2 ultras at work, then my Geforce4 4400, then it's replacement, another 4400. This doesn't include the number of cards that my friends have had fail. The number would then be into the twenties.
If the 4200 I'm using as a replacement for the 4400 dies, I'm going to ATI, and not looking back.
I don't believe that Nvidia has enough overhead in the FX to play their usual driver games.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "game". I suspect that they're off their cycle due to a massive change in chipset architecture at a transistor level, and that comes with delays as engineers try to wrap their brain around a new way of doing the same old thing. Remember, they went six generations of architecture w/ the old system, and by now understand all the implications of that method of turning numbers into pretty graphics. Now that they're doing something different in silicon, it's going to take some time before they reach that level of familiarity. I think they'll come along nicely in the months ahead.
yah, but not every system ships w/ the most uber card out there. Granted, you can order such a system, but odds are it's a top-of-the-line, $3000 workstation (or game box). Most vendors won't put the latest-and-greatest card in the system until there's a lower-cost alternative version of the card. For example, any of the GeForce 4 MX cards, or the Ti4200 64MB. Or for that matter the Radeon 9000/9500.
As for the shipping CPU type, Intel has, by far, the lion's share of the market. PC/Mac ratios run what, 50:1, and of the PC's shipped, some 80% of them are Intel? And I think I'm being conservative. The ratios there are probably much worse (for the little guy).
I'm willing to bet that there's another 20-30% in the FX due to driver tuning. nVidia typically releases a new product, then, after about two to three months, releases a driver that actually makes the card fast.
Plus, if this is the first of the GigaPixel cores, then there should definitely be more in it, and the fact that it's down on memory B/W shouldn't make much of a difference.
What I am surprised about though is that prices are so high for graphics cards still even with relatively good competition in the marketplace. I mean even the Parhelia debuted at like $400 didn't it?
It's mostly due to high-end video chipsets costing so much, plus the added expense of the uber-fast memory that these cards require, but mostly, it's driven by ultimate demand for these products. Everyone needs a P4/Athlon XP, but only a few people need the absolute fastest display adapter out there. As a result, fewer units get produced, as fewer units will actually sell. Combine that with the already higher cost of producing core logic that's 1.5-2x the transistor count of high-end CPUs and RAM that's 2-3x faster than desktop stuff, and you've got a recipe for pricey hardware.
Also, don't forget that most products these days are priced at what the market will bear. People will pay $400 for the fastest thing on the block, so that's what they sell for. My general rule of thumb is to wait a month or two after the new, fast, whiz-bang product, then buy whatever card has the fewest problems and costs $300.
One, there is no such thing as social diversity. Cultural yes, but society is defined as the total set of ethics and ideals. If these are significantly diverse, you have no society, simply a group of individuals w/ no common ties, and probably a desire to end each other as a result of no recognition of each other in their familial group. Extreme social diversity does not breed cooperation. Do you think gypsies contributed all that much to the societies around which they operate? At some point, there has to be societal cohesiveness, and some kind of conformity for things to work.
Two, the wealthy already have an enormous tax burden. In fact, they regularly pay for services they never use. Sorry, but in this country, if you have an income of over two hundred kilodollars, you pay 39.6% of that to the federal government. This is nearly impossible to get around. These CEOs you talk about? They've got salaries that are on the books. Their stock option grants? That goes under capital gains with a tax rate of 40%-50%, and there's no real way to get around that, either. I don't know what the fix for this is, but a significant amount of money goes to fund our federal government, an entity which was never supposed to have all that much power in the first place. In fact, the income tax was explicitly illegal in the first place, but the various Powers That Be manipulated the downtrodden masses into agreeing to something that the wealthy said was a Bad Idea. Now look where we are...
Except that the only people out there that could pass said stringent tests for teachers will constantly find themselves wooed away by offers of triple their salary in the private sector. Now, would you advocate that they make such great sacrifice to help our nation's children? Even if you do, will you follow your own advice? Probably not. Neither did I. I'd _love_ to teach, at any level. I'm pretty good at explaining things, at least that's what my coworkers say. However, I would have to get a roommate to afford rent in this city, and a house is Right Out. There's a reason why most teachers are the wives of someone making a Real Living, it's because you can't have a decent life on a teacher's pay. You double the salary, I'm there _tomorrow_.
I don't completely disagree w/ your ideas, but usually, the smart work gets done by the smart people, and money is how we encourage them to seek out those jobs.
Cisco owns RFC 2281 Hot-Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), a work-alike to VRRP. For all intents and purposes, they perform the exact same function, using extremely similar mechanisms. I don't think there are any real patent issues, since the state path each protocol uses is quite dissimilar, but due to the fact they both solve the exact same problem, the internals are somewhat alike (the hello interval/timer, the fail interval/timer, etc.) I don't know if Cisco's ever pushed the issue; perhaps someone could elaborate on that. Although I do know that HSRP has been around longer.
Re:HSRP can be a pain in the ass.
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IMO, that's a Passport problem. What? Nortel? Yah, I remember them. Worst support in the industry. Didn't they buy Bay Networks? SNMP hell what?
I don't know if you've looked at the packet formatting and design of HSRP versus VRRP, but they're pretty much the same. They both implement a multicast group to which both sides broadcast, sourcing from the configured interface IP, at regular intervals. They both use a half-duplex configuration mode a-la PPP's LCP negotiation, at which point they elect the virtual MAC and decide who's going to own it. After that, they make an ARP broadcast so that all the hosts on the segment know where their virtual gateway is. If the hellos ever fail to arrive in a timely fashion to the secondary (or tertiary or whatever, priority is configurable for both protocols), the secondary sends the same ARP broadcast to updated the L2 forwarding database and the hosts' ARP tables. Depending on how you set it up, when connectivity to the primary is restored, it either takes back ownership of the virtual gateway, or leaves it on the secondary.
As for standards-based, HSRP is described in detail in RFC 2281.
VRRP isn't the end-all-be-all
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I've run into countless failure scenarios where VRRP ends up being mostly useless. Scenario one where the gateway segment and server segements don't both fail simultaneously is one, where the primary stays up on the front end, but the server segment fails over.
Also, there's the issue of the L2 packets being broadcast, so that when the switch you're connected to stops forwarding unicast (oh, but broadcast and multicast still work just fine, thank you very much), VRRP is pretty much useless. It'll never realize that something's gone horribly wrong, and that failing over is necessary.
I guess my point is that most of the "automated failover" solutions out there either are or have been pretty much worthless given the failures I've seen, and that VRRP, for all it's good points, only covers about ten percent of failure situations. For straight up gateway reachability, it does just fine (in fact, it's a nearly complete rip of Cisco's HSRP, altho I'm not exactly sure of the timeline for each protocol), and in fact it's a superior solution in that regard, but for anything else other than L3 gateway services where all you're doing is plain-vanilla IP routing, it's pretty lousy.
What I'd like to see is a unicast-based, fully-configurable hot-standby solution. Something where you're forced to enter the IP of the other partners in the redundancy group. Simply sticking to broadcast- or multicast-based solutions isn't going to cut it in a fully switched environment. Granted, the above is going to require a bit more configurationbut come on, it would add what, one, maybe two lines to each configured group? Hell, my environment has two hundred configured interfaces like this, and I'd put up w/ the extra work if it would have saved me from some of the failures I've had.
I've been wondering when something along these lines would be available.
[devil's advocate] However, how do we know that the pregenerated checksums are correct? Who watches the watchers? [/devil's advocate]
Yah, yah, I know, the easiest way is to inspect the source for the minicompiler, the main compiler, and the program by hand, then build all of them step-by-step until you're done, then use the final binary to generate your hash. I wonder, tho, how much drift might there be in using a pre-built compiler (say I D/Led the binaries for GCC and the libraries to go with it). One tiny change in machine state (or any other number of things I would suppose) could result in the final binary being a single byte off, and the whole thing's a wash.
Granted, I may be talking out of my ass here, could someone w/ some hard-core coding knowledge or CS experience expound on the above?
I have to filter approximately 20 messages daily from my inbox, and they've gotten worse as the holidays approached. I guess everyone out there's hung up on the rampant consumerism and decided that they could "make money at home with your computer" to afford a new bike for Jonny or some other such rot.
I'm kind of disappointed by the brevity of the answers. I was hoping for Mr. Shatner to go into some detail regarding the questions asked. IMO, the whole thing smacks of "oh, the little people have deigned to interview me, I suppose I'll humor them." It's like we don't matter.
Although, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that's the case; assuming Mr. Shatner's stayed on top of his finances, he's probably quite well off, and doesn't need to work anymore.
This is quite possibly the best "intro to computers" on a high level that I've ever seen, and it even delves into some of the more specifics of CPU operation. Kudos to Ars...
However, I still don't see how this is relevant to Hammer, as the article doesn't even go into detail about different takes on architecture vis a vis Intel and AMD. There's a few links at the end to a discussion of the diffs in the G4e and the P4, but nothing on the AMD side.
[offtopic] Personally, I'm getting wary of various AMD products. I continually see issues w/ AMD and games (the EQ debacle being one of them), I see general weirdness w/ my software on my Athlon, and it just reminds me of all the hideously weird incompatibilities I've had over the years (some that aren't even regularly reproduceable, maybe it's a bad mobo?), and it makes me recall a discussion w/ some of my friends:
"If you want it to run right, use Intel. Everyone, _everyone_ tests w/ Intel stuff first. From MS (yah, boo, whatever) to id, from nVidia to Creative Labs, everyone tests on Intel _first_."
I'm not trying to bash AMD, it's just that, well, every time I use an AMD system, I end up experiencing weird glitchy errors, that come and go as they please. While my Athlon setup has been orders of magnitude more stable than past AMD systems, it's still not the rock that my P3 was. [/offtopic]
Now, however, if two vlans get bridged (a computer with a wire in one vlan, and a wireless card in another vlan), the forwarding tables on the switches get confused because there are multiple paths to the same stp root.
Excuse me? Since when do end hosts forward BPDUs? Since when do end hosts forward _anything_, for that matter?
Unless you're going the el cheapo route, there's no reason that individual computers should be forwarding traffic. Okay, I'm sure some of you could show me valid scenarios, but I'll bet that none of them are realistic production environments (unless management has been incredibly stupid).
To begin with, it's unlikely a CCIE would have required a consultation w/ the inventor of the protocol, as they'd already have a firm understanding of the inner workings of STP. And there is no "quick start" to a CCIE. That's why there's less than 10,000 of them in the world. And why, even in the depressed tech market, CCIEs are still follwed by headhunters bearing offers of $100K+/yr jobs...
Cisco only runs per-VLAN spanning tree if you're using ISL as your trunking protocol. The reason you don't get it on Extreme Networks stuff is because they use 802.1q. In fact, Cisco devices trunking w/ the IEEE protocol run single instances, just like the Extreme product.
There are tradeoffs, of course. STP recalculations (when running) can be kind of intensive, and if you've got to run them for each of your 200 VLANs, it can take a while. However, for my particular environment, per-VLAN STP is a better solution.
isn't that hard to troubleshoot. You look at the device ID that most recently made a Topology Change Notification, and then start looking at the hardware diagnostics for that system. If they're showing clean, reboot the switch. If, while the device is rebooting, the network stabilizes, you've found the problem. When the system finishes it's boot, check the hardware diagnostics again (Ciscos only run H/W diags at POST, and a reset is the only way to re-run them); odds are that you'll see there's a failed component.
A previous poster nailed it too, simply back out the changes you made (obviously the problem you were fixing is of a lower magnitude than a total outage), and things should start working again.
Because the average human is a loathsome, greedy, insensitive fool. As a result of this story, along with hundreds of others reported over the past decade or so (about how long I've really been following things), I am now convinced that our species will not survive past the next century.
And that's kinda sad. Unfortunately, someone's going to have to die on this hill (perhaps literally) before we get that shred of freedom back.
to quote Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
What's worse, is that now that someone making "subversive speech" can be labeled a terrorist, they can be treated as an enemy of the state, regardless of their citizenship or the rights therein guaranteed by the Constitution.
And you actually think your vote matters? The people you elect are going to do the exact same thing, because that's what the money that bought them the election wants them to do. There is no hope.
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Eventually, with extraordinary leaps in nanotechnology we might be able to make sufficiently self-repairing and resilient artificial machines, but by that point, we'd be getting pretty close to a biological system.
And _this_, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what I'm talking about. To the point of extraordinary leaps, I don't think it's that far off. Five decades, maybe seven. Quoting Drexler (which I'm sure is going to dampen my argument), if medical science doesn't drive this, the requirements for computing will.
Furthermore, I'm not talking about stainless steel/transistor/connector type stuff. I'm talking nanomechanical/nanoelectric neuron replacment, along w/ significant changes to the skeletomuscular systems (diamondoid/corundum skeleton using interlocking carbon nanotube muscular replacements). None of the materials could even be attacked in our current environment, and would be highly resistant to acids/bases (altho not indefinitely), vacuum, high pressure (+100psi enviros). Once the problem of existing in a biological neural network is addressed, you can pitch the digestive system, endocrine, lymphatic, circulatory, liver, kidneys, pancreas... I could go on. Add to that the fact that all the raw materials needed for repair are found right at hand in the soil (well, maybe not some of the more exotic metals, but carbon and hydrogen and oxygen are.), and hell, you'd need low-level nanoassemblers to build such a thing in the first place; they'd be kept around for field repairs.
What's probably the greatest single advantage is that it's not all probablistic guesswork. Right now, the fact that all the proteins in your body do their job is because the odds are stacked in their favor. Things still break, but the odds are slim, and if they do go, there's two or more methods that have to break before you're totally screwed. In an engineered system like a car, you need less failsafes, since the odds can be stacked much higher. Assume protein systems have a failure rate of 1 in 100. Artificial mechanical systems have rates of failure approaching 1 in trillions. What's the error rate for your hard disk? And that's achieved with standard bulk matter manufacturing processes! (granted, the average is about 1 in a million, but that's still five orders of magnitude better than the biological rates, even considering a four tier backup system, each w/a 1/10^2 failure rate)
I'm probably off w/ the fail rates for biosystems, but I'm fairly sure I'm within 2 orders of magnitude.
I also think if it would be possible to implant such bacteria for additional computational power in human brains -- just in case we have to upgrade them."
Uhh, screw that... Personally, I think as soon as we're technologically able, we should move away from the whole biology thing. Being in a meat body sucks sledgehammers thru a garden hose. Especially when you're considered lunch for pretty much everything on this earth that can move under it's own power, and several more that can't.
I mean, being a biological organism has hundreds of drawbacks, not the least of which is the extremely limited environment that such organisms must occupy if they want to keep working. Imagine a brain capable of working in temperatures ranging from sub-freezing to plus-boiling, rather than the what, twenty whole degrees we've got now? (ten if you're using Celsius). It frees up a great deal of flexibility for the design of new bodies, and the best part is, nothing naturally occuring on this earth would think we're tasty.
That said, and to get back on topic, I don't think we'll ever really see the day when bacteria are used to manufacture circuits. Trace sizes are already smaller than most living organisms, and they're difficult to work with at best. Plus, in the decade or so that they think it'll take to get this up and running, circuit requirements will be such that even engineered organisms are totally innapropriate for the task. In a few decades more, mass-produced nanoassembly should be the state of the art for this type of manufactured goods.
well, I also know people who have really good luck w/ their products. All I'm saying is that in several years, I've had lots of stuff fail. Now, I leave the machine on constantly. And I do know that each time I get weirdness (polys dropping out in games, screen corruption in Windows) a new card fixes it. It's not possible to simply replace a piece of hardware and have the problem go away w/o it being the hardware that was replaced. The killer for each of these cards was to move them into a different system (and I mean completely. Like going from Intel to AMD), and the problems follow the card. I've never had thermal problems with any other bits of hardware, neither have I run into stuff that's this touchy.
In any event, it's probably that fact that my job function in the computer industry is primarily troubleshooting. Hardware hates me. I just lost _another_ supervisor module in a Cisco 6509 (this is the eleventh), in a datacenter environment. Best thing is that it looks like it may actually be the back plane this time, making it the second in two years. And this is for ENTERPRISE-CLASS hardware. I won't go into the details, but let's say that in those same three years, we've had 40 RMAs for major components, at a cost of around a quarter mil to Cisco. But I digress.
I guess to be honest, I've got the worst luck with video hardware my friends have ever seen. And I'll leave it at that.
I kinda figured that with the way nVidia's hardware likes to pop like lightbulbs, eventually they'd release a card that was dead out of the box. To date, I've had a grand total of seven nvidia products die on me. The first was a TNT2 Ultra, followed by a TNT, followed by the replacement Ultra, then two TNT2 ultras at work, then my Geforce4 4400, then it's replacement, another 4400. This doesn't include the number of cards that my friends have had fail. The number would then be into the twenties.
If the 4200 I'm using as a replacement for the 4400 dies, I'm going to ATI, and not looking back.
I don't believe that Nvidia has enough overhead in the FX to play their usual driver games.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "game". I suspect that they're off their cycle due to a massive change in chipset architecture at a transistor level, and that comes with delays as engineers try to wrap their brain around a new way of doing the same old thing. Remember, they went six generations of architecture w/ the old system, and by now understand all the implications of that method of turning numbers into pretty graphics. Now that they're doing something different in silicon, it's going to take some time before they reach that level of familiarity. I think they'll come along nicely in the months ahead.
yah, but not every system ships w/ the most uber card out there. Granted, you can order such a system, but odds are it's a top-of-the-line, $3000 workstation (or game box). Most vendors won't put the latest-and-greatest card in the system until there's a lower-cost alternative version of the card. For example, any of the GeForce 4 MX cards, or the Ti4200 64MB. Or for that matter the Radeon 9000/9500.
As for the shipping CPU type, Intel has, by far, the lion's share of the market. PC/Mac ratios run what, 50:1, and of the PC's shipped, some 80% of them are Intel? And I think I'm being conservative. The ratios there are probably much worse (for the little guy).
I'm willing to bet that there's another 20-30% in the FX due to driver tuning. nVidia typically releases a new product, then, after about two to three months, releases a driver that actually makes the card fast.
Plus, if this is the first of the GigaPixel cores, then there should definitely be more in it, and the fact that it's down on memory B/W shouldn't make much of a difference.
What I am surprised about though is that prices are so high for graphics cards still even with relatively good competition in the marketplace. I mean even the Parhelia debuted at like $400 didn't it?
It's mostly due to high-end video chipsets costing so much, plus the added expense of the uber-fast memory that these cards require, but mostly, it's driven by ultimate demand for these products. Everyone needs a P4/Athlon XP, but only a few people need the absolute fastest display adapter out there. As a result, fewer units get produced, as fewer units will actually sell. Combine that with the already higher cost of producing core logic that's 1.5-2x the transistor count of high-end CPUs and RAM that's 2-3x faster than desktop stuff, and you've got a recipe for pricey hardware.
Also, don't forget that most products these days are priced at what the market will bear. People will pay $400 for the fastest thing on the block, so that's what they sell for. My general rule of thumb is to wait a month or two after the new, fast, whiz-bang product, then buy whatever card has the fewest problems and costs $300.
Two things from your post:
One, there is no such thing as social diversity. Cultural yes, but society is defined as the total set of ethics and ideals. If these are significantly diverse, you have no society, simply a group of individuals w/ no common ties, and probably a desire to end each other as a result of no recognition of each other in their familial group. Extreme social diversity does not breed cooperation. Do you think gypsies contributed all that much to the societies around which they operate? At some point, there has to be societal cohesiveness, and some kind of conformity for things to work.
Two, the wealthy already have an enormous tax burden. In fact, they regularly pay for services they never use. Sorry, but in this country, if you have an income of over two hundred kilodollars, you pay 39.6% of that to the federal government. This is nearly impossible to get around. These CEOs you talk about? They've got salaries that are on the books. Their stock option grants? That goes under capital gains with a tax rate of 40%-50%, and there's no real way to get around that, either. I don't know what the fix for this is, but a significant amount of money goes to fund our federal government, an entity which was never supposed to have all that much power in the first place. In fact, the income tax was explicitly illegal in the first place, but the various Powers That Be manipulated the downtrodden masses into agreeing to something that the wealthy said was a Bad Idea. Now look where we are...
Except that the only people out there that could pass said stringent tests for teachers will constantly find themselves wooed away by offers of triple their salary in the private sector. Now, would you advocate that they make such great sacrifice to help our nation's children? Even if you do, will you follow your own advice? Probably not. Neither did I. I'd _love_ to teach, at any level. I'm pretty good at explaining things, at least that's what my coworkers say. However, I would have to get a roommate to afford rent in this city, and a house is Right Out. There's a reason why most teachers are the wives of someone making a Real Living, it's because you can't have a decent life on a teacher's pay. You double the salary, I'm there _tomorrow_.
I don't completely disagree w/ your ideas, but usually, the smart work gets done by the smart people, and money is how we encourage them to seek out those jobs.
Cisco owns RFC 2281 Hot-Standby Router Protocol (HSRP), a work-alike to VRRP. For all intents and purposes, they perform the exact same function, using extremely similar mechanisms. I don't think there are any real patent issues, since the state path each protocol uses is quite dissimilar, but due to the fact they both solve the exact same problem, the internals are somewhat alike (the hello interval/timer, the fail interval/timer, etc.) I don't know if Cisco's ever pushed the issue; perhaps someone could elaborate on that. Although I do know that HSRP has been around longer.
IMO, that's a Passport problem. What? Nortel? Yah, I remember them. Worst support in the industry. Didn't they buy Bay Networks? SNMP hell what?
I don't know if you've looked at the packet formatting and design of HSRP versus VRRP, but they're pretty much the same. They both implement a multicast group to which both sides broadcast, sourcing from the configured interface IP, at regular intervals. They both use a half-duplex configuration mode a-la PPP's LCP negotiation, at which point they elect the virtual MAC and decide who's going to own it. After that, they make an ARP broadcast so that all the hosts on the segment know where their virtual gateway is. If the hellos ever fail to arrive in a timely fashion to the secondary (or tertiary or whatever, priority is configurable for both protocols), the secondary sends the same ARP broadcast to updated the L2 forwarding database and the hosts' ARP tables. Depending on how you set it up, when connectivity to the primary is restored, it either takes back ownership of the virtual gateway, or leaves it on the secondary.
As for standards-based, HSRP is described in detail in RFC 2281.
I've run into countless failure scenarios where VRRP ends up being mostly useless. Scenario one where the gateway segment and server segements don't both fail simultaneously is one, where the primary stays up on the front end, but the server segment fails over.
Also, there's the issue of the L2 packets being broadcast, so that when the switch you're connected to stops forwarding unicast (oh, but broadcast and multicast still work just fine, thank you very much), VRRP is pretty much useless. It'll never realize that something's gone horribly wrong, and that failing over is necessary.
I guess my point is that most of the "automated failover" solutions out there either are or have been pretty much worthless given the failures I've seen, and that VRRP, for all it's good points, only covers about ten percent of failure situations. For straight up gateway reachability, it does just fine (in fact, it's a nearly complete rip of Cisco's HSRP, altho I'm not exactly sure of the timeline for each protocol), and in fact it's a superior solution in that regard, but for anything else other than L3 gateway services where all you're doing is plain-vanilla IP routing, it's pretty lousy.
What I'd like to see is a unicast-based, fully-configurable hot-standby solution. Something where you're forced to enter the IP of the other partners in the redundancy group. Simply sticking to broadcast- or multicast-based solutions isn't going to cut it in a fully switched environment. Granted, the above is going to require a bit more configurationbut come on, it would add what, one, maybe two lines to each configured group? Hell, my environment has two hundred configured interfaces like this, and I'd put up w/ the extra work if it would have saved me from some of the failures I've had.
oh whatever, it's late, and I'm on only a few hours sleep. cut me some slack :) I got it right later on...
could someone who doesn't want to punk me out give some insight to my earlier question?
I've been wondering when something along these lines would be available.
[devil's advocate] However, how do we know that the pregenerated checksums are correct? Who watches the watchers? [/devil's advocate]
Yah, yah, I know, the easiest way is to inspect the source for the minicompiler, the main compiler, and the program by hand, then build all of them step-by-step until you're done, then use the final binary to generate your hash. I wonder, tho, how much drift might there be in using a pre-built compiler (say I D/Led the binaries for GCC and the libraries to go with it). One tiny change in machine state (or any other number of things I would suppose) could result in the final binary being a single byte off, and the whole thing's a wash.
Granted, I may be talking out of my ass here, could someone w/ some hard-core coding knowledge or CS experience expound on the above?
I have to filter approximately 20 messages daily from my inbox, and they've gotten worse as the holidays approached. I guess everyone out there's hung up on the rampant consumerism and decided that they could "make money at home with your computer" to afford a new bike for Jonny or some other such rot.
I'm kind of disappointed by the brevity of the answers. I was hoping for Mr. Shatner to go into some detail regarding the questions asked. IMO, the whole thing smacks of "oh, the little people have deigned to interview me, I suppose I'll humor them." It's like we don't matter.
Although, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if that's the case; assuming Mr. Shatner's stayed on top of his finances, he's probably quite well off, and doesn't need to work anymore.
This is quite possibly the best "intro to computers" on a high level that I've ever seen, and it even delves into some of the more specifics of CPU operation. Kudos to Ars...
However, I still don't see how this is relevant to Hammer, as the article doesn't even go into detail about different takes on architecture vis a vis Intel and AMD. There's a few links at the end to a discussion of the diffs in the G4e and the P4, but nothing on the AMD side.
[offtopic]
Personally, I'm getting wary of various AMD products. I continually see issues w/ AMD and games (the EQ debacle being one of them), I see general weirdness w/ my software on my Athlon, and it just reminds me of all the hideously weird incompatibilities I've had over the years (some that aren't even regularly reproduceable, maybe it's a bad mobo?), and it makes me recall a discussion w/ some of my friends:
"If you want it to run right, use Intel. Everyone, _everyone_ tests w/ Intel stuff first. From MS (yah, boo, whatever) to id, from nVidia to Creative Labs, everyone tests on Intel _first_."
I'm not trying to bash AMD, it's just that, well, every time I use an AMD system, I end up experiencing weird glitchy errors, that come and go as they please. While my Athlon setup has been orders of magnitude more stable than past AMD systems, it's still not the rock that my P3 was.
[/offtopic]
Now, however, if two vlans get bridged (a computer with a wire in one vlan, and a wireless card in another vlan), the forwarding tables on the switches get confused because there are multiple paths to the same stp root.
Excuse me? Since when do end hosts forward BPDUs? Since when do end hosts forward _anything_, for that matter?
Unless you're going the el cheapo route, there's no reason that individual computers should be forwarding traffic. Okay, I'm sure some of you could show me valid scenarios, but I'll bet that none of them are realistic production environments (unless management has been incredibly stupid).
To begin with, it's unlikely a CCIE would have required a consultation w/ the inventor of the protocol, as they'd already have a firm understanding of the inner workings of STP. And there is no "quick start" to a CCIE. That's why there's less than 10,000 of them in the world. And why, even in the depressed tech market, CCIEs are still follwed by headhunters bearing offers of $100K+/yr jobs...
Cisco only runs per-VLAN spanning tree if you're using ISL as your trunking protocol. The reason you don't get it on Extreme Networks stuff is because they use 802.1q. In fact, Cisco devices trunking w/ the IEEE protocol run single instances, just like the Extreme product.
There are tradeoffs, of course. STP recalculations (when running) can be kind of intensive, and if you've got to run them for each of your 200 VLANs, it can take a while. However, for my particular environment, per-VLAN STP is a better solution.
isn't that hard to troubleshoot. You look at the device ID that most recently made a Topology Change Notification, and then start looking at the hardware diagnostics for that system. If they're showing clean, reboot the switch. If, while the device is rebooting, the network stabilizes, you've found the problem. When the system finishes it's boot, check the hardware diagnostics again (Ciscos only run H/W diags at POST, and a reset is the only way to re-run them); odds are that you'll see there's a failed component.
A previous poster nailed it too, simply back out the changes you made (obviously the problem you were fixing is of a lower magnitude than a total outage), and things should start working again.
Because the average human is a loathsome, greedy, insensitive fool. As a result of this story, along with hundreds of others reported over the past decade or so (about how long I've really been following things), I am now convinced that our species will not survive past the next century.
And that's kinda sad. Unfortunately, someone's going to have to die on this hill (perhaps literally) before we get that shred of freedom back.
to quote Voltaire: "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
What's worse, is that now that someone making "subversive speech" can be labeled a terrorist, they can be treated as an enemy of the state, regardless of their citizenship or the rights therein guaranteed by the Constitution.
And you actually think your vote matters? The people you elect are going to do the exact same thing, because that's what the money that bought them the election wants them to do. There is no hope.