The difference is that in a non-software product, if 5% of the units fail, it's often because 5% of the units are actually different than the other 95%, due to shoddy manufacturing. In Microsoft's case, the 95% of copies of Vista that work and the 5% that don't are exactly the same - only the rest of the computer is different, not Microsoft's product.
The vast amount of third-party software and, in particular, hardware drivers, disagree with your assumption.
I disagree, see my post above. The Microsoft GUI was specifically (re)designed to discourage multithreading the gui within an application and that destroys responsiveness. It's a matter of gui design and of the design of the threading in the windowing system.
Yet of the "big four" - GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows, Windows has the most responsive GUI.
It was far easier to use than MacOS or MS-Windows, had the full memory protection of Unix, and was all-around a superior OS to MS-Windows.
Bollocks. Even with all the work Apple has done to NeXT since buying it, NT is *still* better in many ways (anything to do with multiple CPUs, for example).
The fact that MS-Windows was sold by all PC vendors is what killed NeXT. It was stillborn.
Uh, no. The $10,000 workstation you had to buy to use it was what killed NeXT.
It's hard to enter a market in which the only real player won't let you on the playground. Be Inc. offered to let PC vendors install BeOS for free, even in a dual-boot configuration. According to Jean-Louis Gassée, the PC manufacturers told him their deals with Microsoft wouldn't let them.
I'm sure BeOS's still-beta status, dismal hardware and software support and complete lack of presence outside a tiny core of geeks had nothing at all to do with their decision.
They never bothered making the OS interface (Explorer) multithreaded, which is why on XP you can still crash Explorer and thus your entire desktop (although Explorer restarts after a few seconds).
Explorer has been multithreaded, well, basically forever. Certainly since at _least_ Windows 2000 and I'd happily wager since Windows 95 and NT4.
P>The reason your Desktop disappears if Explorer crashes is because it's Explorer that is responsible for drawing the Desktop (and the Taskbar/Start Menu).
No, they are not. Rights in no way shape or form are dependent on a "moral" code.
Yes, they are. If they weren't, everyone the world over would be in agreement over what constituted "rights".
That means if the moral code changes, your "rights" can be taken away and then they were never rights in the first place.
Correct.
A right is not something that can be decided or bestowed.
Most certainly it is. Primarily because it is dependant upon protection by the law - and hence by the government responsible for enforcing that law.
You either have it as a virtue of existence or you don't. In modern liberal societies (especially those, like the US, that have based their philosphy on the writings of people like Locke) we recognize that you have three natural, inalienable rights: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Those rights do not come from some moral code but are founded upon your existence as a living, reasoning being capable of making your own choices in life. The rights are based on the idea that as an independent, living being you alone own yourself and since you are your own property there are certain things about yourself that are within only your control. All other things claimed as rights must descend directly from these three principles and must do so in a way that does not infringe upon the already established rights of others. Morality does not matter.
I find it amusing that you are using the example of a codification of rights in one country, based on writings of philosophers, as support for your argument that morals have no impact on rights and laws, universally.
In some places of the world is not immoral to kill people who do not follow the your religion. That does not mean said person does not have a right to continue living.
To you and me, maybe. People from that place (and especially that religion) would probably disagree. Indeed, they might even argue it is their "right" to kill a non-believer.
The concept of "rights" is an extension of the concept of law. Laws are written by those in power, to impose their morals on those without power. Morals are, inescapably, tied to both laws and rights.
That, and (as MSFT later proved head-on w/ their TCP/IP implementations), the classic BSD license really doesn't protect against theft and proprietary lock-down of improvements.
Please explain how it is possible to "steal" BSD-licensed code. The whole *point* of the license is that it allows anyone to take the source code and do whatever they want with it.
There are few things that identify a GPL-zealot more effectively than talking about code being "stolen" because someone else's changes to it were not "shared". It's like making a speech in public and then complaining about how all the people who heard it "stole" from you.
Morals have no place in an argument about rights and law. Rights are self evident and law exists to protect them.
Morals most certainly have a place in such an argument, because rights and laws are inherently dependent upon the moral codes of those people defining them.
It isn't always applicable though. Apple isn't becoming MS in their quest to defeat them. Apple's products remain attractive and easy to use.
Apple has always been just as bad as Microsoft. Their products - much like Microsoft's - "remain attractive and easy to use" only so long as you use them within the boundaries Apple expects you to.
It better be short, it better list what they are looking for at the top, and your first sentence needs to make them want to read more.
I believe this might be a US thing. Here in Australia, multi-page Resumes are the norm, and if you don't have enough information on your Resume to give the person reading it a fairly good idea of your skills and experience, they'll just bin it.
As an Australian, working for a US company, that has to interview US applicants, I find the "one-page Resume" to be incredibly frustrating. There's never enough information included to tell anything useful about the applicant unless it's either a) an applicant who's very new to the industry or b) an entry-level job like L1 helpdesk where applicants don't really need many skills past a pulse. This means I have to do, at the very least, a preliminary phone interview to find out whether or not the applicant is even worth bringing in for a "real" interview - an annoying and time-consuming proposition (doubly so for me since I have to line-up timezones appropriately to call people in the US).
Contrast this to the Resumes I receive from Australian applicants, who typically include academic qualifications, industry qualifications and job histories *with details* of responsibilities, achievements, skills gained, procedures, etc. Sure, there's a one-page summary that has a brief outline (what an American applicant would call the whole Resume) but it *also* includes more in-depth information allowing me to get a good feel for how the applicant has spent the last few years of their working life, in terms of gaining/exercising skills and experience.
The end result is that I can spend 30 - 60 seconds looking at each Resume's summary page, to quickly weed out people who are clearly unsuitable (eg: Electrical Engineering degree, about 30 years old, last 3 jobs in another country, applying for a L1 helpdesk job), then go back and spend 2 - 10 minutes for each Resume in the remaining pool finding the people who actually look suitable for the job, and make the shortlist for interviewing. Thus, by the time I actually get around to calling them in for an interview, I am already reasonably confident they have the requisite skills and experience, and the interview becomes about a) *verifying* (as opposed to discovering) their technical abilities (easier, relatively speaking) and determining whether or not they have the right attitude and personality.
I have yet to see a "single page Resume" that has told me anything truly useful about an applicant. A page's worth of bulleted previous employers, boilerplate "skills" and "responsibilities" one-liners, and "achievements" of maybe a sentence or two each, just doesn't have enough meat in it to determine whether or not an applicant is capable (purely from a skills and experience perspective) of doing the job. Subsequently, I've ended up getting in further contact with some applicants who were clueless and, I'm sure, missing a few that would have made excellent employees.
Slashdotters, what's it like in the UK, Canada, etc ? What style of Resume is typical in those places - just the one-page summary, or a one-page summary backed up by a relatively detailed explanation ?
This kind of sadistic user hostile sort of environment didn't stop Windows or MS-DOS when the main competitor was a vastly superior Macintosh.
Firstly, the Mac was significantly more expensive in the '80s and '90s.
Secondly, the end user demographic in that time period (well, up to the early '90s) was very different. The average computer user then was *interested in computers* and hence prepared to both learn more about how they worked and to use them, and put up with more teething problems in a rapidly evolving market.
The situation is very different today, the comparison doesn't hold. Users have higher expectations and most of them now have zero interest in how the machine works and learning about it.
I live in the UK. We have a relatively capitalist economy. Sure, we have some nationalised industries and a legal minimum wage, but in practice a lot of things that ought to be provided by the state according to the rules of the game and the taxes we pay aren't, and businesses are mostly unregulated in practice. This is one reason why a lot of people are upset at Blair's administration: the more we've tended towards outright socialism in recent years, the worse things have got for almost everyone except the millions of benefits scroungers.
By what metrics are things worse ? (I don't follow UK politics and economics closely, so you may well be right, but people are whinging similarly here in Australia, despite pretty much everyone being far better off in pretty much every way than they ever have been before).
But even with the recent tax hikes and giving out bazillions in benefits, we're still a long way from the collective ownership ideal of socialism. Try looking the the former USSR or China if you want to see serious socialist tendencies. Remind me again how they've been doing relative to the West?
But that's a strawman, your criticism about socialism wasn't relative to the West, it was relative to the *past*. At least, I assume that's what you mean by using words like "evolution" and "forever".
So, taking the USSR and China as examples of "socialism", you will still have a very difficult time indeed convincing me that while people in those countries might not be as well off as we in the "West", they're _worse_ off than they were, say, a few hundred (or thousand) years ago.
There is no individual compromise in doing your fair part and getting your fair reward.
Of course there is - because "your fair part" is a) practically impossible to define and b) perceived very differently by dfferent people.
Looking after the injured or elderly is closer to real socialism, but again, these people would generally be expected to play their part when they could. After all, a tribe with too many mouths to feed and not enough hunters would not eat well and eventually the weak would die.
In most "socialist" countries, people *are* expected to play their part, eventually. Welfare is considered by most to be a temporary assistance. Universal health care is there so people who can't afford expensive bills can still be treated and go on to contribute to society. Worker protections exist so people are not forced to take unsafe jobs, or work excessive hours to the detriment of both their immediate families and society as a whole.
The real test is how many tribes can you find where someone wasn't pulling their weight for no particular reason, yet was carried along by the others anyway? I think you'll find that in most cases, this has been frowned upon, so while the bounty from the hunt might be shared among the collective, those who did not contribute fairly were still effectively excluded.
I don't understand why you're using this line of argument. Actual implementations of "socialism" only loosely follow the doctrines you are criticising, so while your criticisms are somewhat valid from an academic perspective, they're not really applicable in real life.
In the Western world, the countries that are (relatively) more socialist are the ones that score the highest on pretty much all quality of life metrics. Arguing that socialism is a net negative influence is damn near impossible. Arguing that socialism is a bad thing full stop, as you appear to be trying to do (that is, arguing everyone is worse off because if it) doesn't even pass the laugh test.
His comparison was 60 Dell rackmounts were equal in *price* to 1 AS/400. I believe my criticism was accurate, and not mere nitpicking.
I didn't say it was. I just said that the magnitude of many of the problems you raise is significantly reduced by substituting blade servers for 1U pizza-box style servers.
HP has iLO, and that uses an ethernet connection. The way you describe DRAC, it looks like the same thing. So, if the network goes away, how do you administer 60 rackmount servers?
The same way you administer your AS/400 when all of its connectivity disappears - you don't.
I've put this last, since your new example has veered away from comparing on the basis of price (60 for 1) into how many one can cram into a 48U rack *at any price*. HP's C-class will get you 64 half-height blades with 4 chassis in one rack, but is that feasible? Let's fully load it like you say. Each chassis has 6 13.8A @ 240V inputs which means 24 power drops requiring a total of 240V/360A service, just for that one rack. There are two ethernet switches @ 8 ports each on the chassis, plus another 4 ports for the OA/iLO (we're going for redundancy here, right?) for a total of 68 GigE drops. For fibre channel, since you're using the half-height blades, we'll only count 4 FC switches per chassis (only the full-heights have 3 HBAs) @ 8 outbound ports each multiplied by 4 chassis which equals 128 4Gb FC cable drops. By the way, (I know its anecdotal as I don't have an empirical BTU figure) those chassis run HOT when fully loaded and all are running IO.
You almost certainly don't need to fill up all the external connectivity, especially if you're comparing a rack full of servers to a "single" box. Further, it's highly unlikely you even need a rack full of servers to meet similar levels of functionality and reliability (where the two are reasonably comparable). More likely a pair of chassis half-filled (or less) would be more than adequate adequate, in which case you're looking at 8-12 ethernet (and 4-8 FC, if applicable) drops (2 ethernet and 2 FC switches per chassis, each with 1 uplink, plus two DRAC/ILOM links per chassis). Further, the power supplies are N+N redundant, so even at full blast, a chassis doesn't use more than 3 of them - for two half-filled bladecentres, your power calculation above is overestimated by a factor of 8.
So yeah, you can beat an AS/400 in raw computing power per dollar and per rackspace, but I never tried to disprove that. The argument I responded to was reliability per dollar and my counterpoint was to consider all the hidden costs in having true reliability.
My point was not so much about raw power/$ (although I included that because it is a factor to be considered), but more that if you have an architecture where redundancy (and performance) is trivial to improve simply by dropping in another server, then blades offer an excellent platform on which to base it, for the price, because it's easy to put a lot of machines into a small space. Think of it as the "Google principle" - if your application architecture is suitable, individual server failures become irrelevant, and thus lots of cheap "unreliable" machines become more economical than one or two "reliable" but order-of-magnitude-more-expensive boxes - and blades are the best way to stuff lots of servers into a rack.
Have you accounted for the difference in payroll requirements to support 1 AS400 vs a rack full of servers. It's not a trivial amount of money, especially over 5 years.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. My point is that most of human evolution has happened without the need for socialism.
Most of human evolution has happened without things like electricity, sanitation and computers as well, but that doesn't make them bad and it most certainly doesn't mean modern society as we know it could exist without them.
Interesting question. Given that most of the industrialised nations run with capitalist tendencies over the past few decades are doing considerably better by just about any metric than most of the industrialised nations run with a heavily socialist philosophy, would you like to continue?
Most industrialised nations are quite "socialist", especially if your benchmark is America. Universal healthcare, welfare and minimum wages you can actually live on, strong worker protections, etc. None of these things seem to have caused countries like Australia, the UK, Canada, Switzerland and the like significantly more grief than the more capitalist "every man for himself" direction of the USA. Quite the contrary, if anything. I certainly know there's a long list of countries I'd move (away from Australia) to before the US.
That's not socialism; it's simply groups of people working together for mutual advantage.
That's socialism, for any useful definition of the word. Co-operation and individual compromise for the greater benefit of all.
In your example, socialism would be four members of a tribe getting together to hunt a lion, and then sharing the results with a load of other tribesmen who sat around all day doing nothing in return.
Like, say, the women who sat back in the hut doing nothing because they were pregnant ? Or maybe the 3 men who were injured on the last hunt and still recovering ? Or maybe the children who were too young to do anything except play ? Or the tribe elder who can barely walk ?
I suspect historical examples of that are not so easy to come by.
I would expect examples of groups of people helping each other out in such a fashion would be trivially simple to find. Further, I'd confidently assert they existed long before even verbal histories were being recorded and would expect to easily find examples of it amongst primates and other animals.
Sorry, but "evolution" does offer any refuge for people who want to be selfish arseholes.
Having used both IBM and Dell, I'd pick Dell every time - and not just because I could buy nearly twice as many of them for the same price.
I've not used the HP ones personally, but on paper they're technically superior to both IBM and Dell. Sun's in there as well, but their blades are targeting different requirements. I would have liked to get the HP's instead of the Dell's we just bought, but the extra cost wasn't justified by the advantages they offered, for our purposes.
But for the SAN, you can forget iSCSI (too complex) or fibre HBAs - just use the second ethernet port on the Dell rackmounts and run Coraid's AOE. Awesome reliability and throughput, at a tenth of the cost and complexity of any equivalent solution; add Red Hat's GFS file system (that they bought from Sistina) and you get full-on storage clustering.
Your solution has single points of failure for two critical aspects of system functionality (network access and storage). That's not "reliable". At the very _least_ you should be bonding both your two onboard NICs together and using two vlans over the bonded link, and ideally you should have another two switches in the BC and the dual-port ethernet expansion cards in your blades dedicated to AoE connectivity.
An iSCSI initiator is included with, and officially supported on, multiple commercial OS platforms (including VMWare). Further, iSCSI support is very widespread amongst commercial storage vendors and has been for years - it's well understood and widely used. For reasons like this AoE is a non-starter for many environments (including ours), especially when its advantages over iSCSI are minor.
iSCSI is going to own the low-end and mid-range SAN market within 5 years. AoE is hihgly unlikely to ever be more than a niche player.
By what measure ? What reasonable quality-of-life measure are you claiming has declined over time (and especially "very recently") ?
Socialism is a very recent invention in the grand scheme of things.
So are long lifespans, widespread good health, free society and large-scale prosperity. Correlation or causation ?
It is effectively a prop for the weak, and counter to survival instinct. Of course, we might reasonably decide as a responsible society that supporting those weaker than ourselves is the ethical thing to do. But how many historical records are there of four members of a tribe donating a limb each to the lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest of them for dinner?
Non-sequitor. There are uncountable examples of four members of a tribe getting together to *hunt* a lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest one for dinner.
I don't doubt your numbers, but I believe you're leaving a lot out. Let's analyze this:
I'm not going to call a rack full of servers a drop-in replacement for a mainframe, but a lot of your criticisms are significantly reduced when using Blade Servers instead of 1U pizza boxes.
You'll pay a lot more than Dell, but HP's blades will let you get 64 8-core, 32G RAM blades into a single rack. For probably half the cost, Dell will get you 50 blades. That's a *lot* of computing horsepower and a lot of (whole machine) redundancy. Especially if you combine it with virtualisation.
(Steer well clear of IBM blades - overpriced and underfeatured.)
If your application(s) is/are even remotely horizontally scalable, a rack full of servers is almost certainly a better option - especially if large amounts of disk I/O and/or space are not a critical requirement.
Incidentally, if anything your analysis was generous with regards to physical connectivity. You'd want dual power and network connections for all the servers, doubling the number of physical NIC and power connections you estimated (and for fibre channel, if applicable). Unless the levels of IO were relatively light, you'd also want at least dedicated dual-port NICs for the iSCSI option (ie: another 120 switchports). No need for 60 KVM ports, however, even with individual servers, just use the onboard DRAC management cards - albeit at the cost of another 60 switchports - then you also get handy features like virtual CDROM and floppy drives.
I have to say I fully agree with you contender. This is some sort of Labour party/Socialist disease of the mind. Why do I say this? Because this is a pattern in the Left world-wide. They keep wanting to legislate on every aspect of a citizen's life (and, by the way, this is where christo-fascists, nazis, islamofascists and socialists all meet). The State will "protect" you. Fuck that. Fuck Socialism, fuck lefties.
Uh, what ? Most governments in power today in the western world are - relative to their respective local average political leanings - notably right wing. Indeed, left-wing parties the world over are wringing their hands in despair about their inability to drum up any sort of voter interest.
They sure as hell aren't "left" - or, at least, not in the sense that the vast, vast, vast majority of the populance perceive "left".
It's not the loony left that's in the process of taking away your "freedoms", it's the right-wing whackos.
Where the product model will disappear, is in the mass market arena, where there is a big push to create applications so that companies and end users aren't locked in to highly expensive proprietary apps.
In the "mass market arena", very few (if any) proprietry apps are expensive. It's the niche markets where software costs serious money (tens of thousands of dollars).
It's also the niche market that, by it's nature, has very high barriers to entry for OSS.
Uh, why ? Relatively speaking, OS X uses default fonts on the larger side. Added to that, Macs with built-in screens tend to have resolutions that are on the low side for their screen size.
Plus (and I say this as someone who is also shortsighted), you should be wearing glasses when you use a computer.
As new files are added/edited, each zone has their own copy, but 90% of the files are shared, so we avoid wasting disk space. If we could do that with UML or Xen, we would. But we can't, so we don't.
Do it exactly the same way. Install your master VM to an LV. Take [a] snapshot(s) of the LV. Use the snapshot(s) for your new VMs.
(With that said, I believe snapshots in LVM have a much greater overhead than they do in ZFS.)
Her reasoning is she'd have to learn a whole new way of navigating through an os and all that. She says this while she's bopping around on her Vista laptop. Yeah.
And ? Vista's no bigger a change than other versions of Windows have been in the last decade, or OS X has undergone from 10.0 to 10.4 (and smaller than, say MacOS Classic to OS X, or NeXTSTEP to OS X). The fundamental UI elements and procedures are still the same as Windows 95.
We got nearly 2x that number. The limiting factor was incoming power, with the need to avoid tripping circuit breakers or upgrading the utility connection. Cooling was a very serious problem as well. Some of the possible electrical upgrades (which we avoided) made the computers look really cheap. We chose tiny low-power motherboards and minimal power supplies to solve the problem.
The only equation swings further and further in favour of blades and virtualisation the more machines you're talking about. Low-end 1U servers really only make sense if you're buying a small number of them, or if virtualisation raises other problems (eg: Oracle Appserver is not supported for production use in virtualised environments).
Dell blades are a horrible rip-off. Note that Dell only advertizes the per-blade cost. They avoid telling you the cost of the chassis. I don't recall, but US$35k sounds like what we got quoted for an empty chassis. (we pretty much had to pretend we'd already bought the blades to get that quote!) If you're thinking about Dell blades, I think you need to investigate a bit more.
I've just spent several weeks researching blade servers and dealing with competitive bids. Admittedly this was in Australia, but I sincerely doubt the numbers are (relatively speaking) any different in the US (and I say that with some background knowledge - we have a couple of IBM Bladecentres in a US colocation).
Dell's blade servers are - *by far* - the cheapest (of Dell, IBM and HP) on the market. The chassis is only about AU$8k, and that was including two switch modules. IBM's and HP's were both around twice as much, although this is somewhat offset by their higher density (Dell 7U/10 servers, IBM 7U/14 blades, HP 10U/16 blades). Density wasn't one of our primary requirements, however (we have an on-site server room and lots of rack space, power and cooling), so that wasn't really relevant.
Then there's the blade servers themselves. Again, Dell's are significantly cheaper (over 50% less by list price, around 20% less after discounting). We paid about AU$9k each for our 8x2.33Ghz, 16G RAM blades. Dell blades also had a couple of notable superiorities over IBM's, by virtue of 8 DIMM slots, hot-swappable drives and SATA drive options. HP's blades are nicer than both technology- and design-wise, but we couldn't justify the additional cost for the extra features that were mostly fluff in our environment (would have been different if we were buying for a remote datacentre - HP would be a clear winner).
I'm not throwing around idle comments here. I've just spent significant time and effort doing the numbers for our company. As I said, it's difficult to find any reason why anyone would be buying 1U servers in bulk (of any sort, but especially low-end ones), without some sort of unusual circumstances. Blades are significantly more cost-effective, energy and space efficient and have substantial manageability advantages. Going back to the hypothetical 40 VMs on 3 blade servers scenario, including storage, you'd be looking at about 1.5kW in power draw, which effectively works out to around 37W per "server". I sincerely doubt any 1U boxes are going to come close to matching that. Heck, a Mac Mini would probably have trouble matching it.
It's difficult to imagine even Google are still pursuing their 1U-server model. Multicore - especially quad-core - CPUs have changed the landscape significantly in the last 12 months or so.
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The difference is that in a non-software product, if 5% of the units fail, it's often because 5% of the units are actually different than the other 95%, due to shoddy manufacturing. In Microsoft's case, the 95% of copies of Vista that work and the 5% that don't are exactly the same - only the rest of the computer is different, not Microsoft's product.
The vast amount of third-party software and, in particular, hardware drivers, disagree with your assumption.
I disagree, see my post above. The Microsoft GUI was specifically (re)designed to discourage multithreading the gui within an application and that destroys responsiveness. It's a matter of gui design and of the design of the threading in the windowing system.
Yet of the "big four" - GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows, Windows has the most responsive GUI.
It was far easier to use than MacOS or MS-Windows, had the full memory protection of Unix, and was all-around a superior OS to MS-Windows.
Bollocks. Even with all the work Apple has done to NeXT since buying it, NT is *still* better in many ways (anything to do with multiple CPUs, for example).
The fact that MS-Windows was sold by all PC vendors is what killed NeXT. It was stillborn.
Uh, no. The $10,000 workstation you had to buy to use it was what killed NeXT.
It's hard to enter a market in which the only real player won't let you on the playground. Be Inc. offered to let PC vendors install BeOS for free, even in a dual-boot configuration. According to Jean-Louis Gassée, the PC manufacturers told him their deals with Microsoft wouldn't let them.
I'm sure BeOS's still-beta status, dismal hardware and software support and complete lack of presence outside a tiny core of geeks had nothing at all to do with their decision.
It wasn't until MS-Windows 2k that MS-Windows was even close to NeXTStep in features, and the cost was a lack of simplicity.
Depends on what you're measuring. NT had (still has, comparing to OS X) better internals - SMP, fine-grained locking, etc, etc.
They never bothered making the OS interface (Explorer) multithreaded, which is why on XP you can still crash Explorer and thus your entire desktop (although Explorer restarts after a few seconds).
Explorer has been multithreaded, well, basically forever. Certainly since at _least_ Windows 2000 and I'd happily wager since Windows 95 and NT4. P>The reason your Desktop disappears if Explorer crashes is because it's Explorer that is responsible for drawing the Desktop (and the Taskbar/Start Menu).
No, they are not. Rights in no way shape or form are dependent on a "moral" code.
Yes, they are. If they weren't, everyone the world over would be in agreement over what constituted "rights".
That means if the moral code changes, your "rights" can be taken away and then they were never rights in the first place.
Correct.
A right is not something that can be decided or bestowed.
Most certainly it is. Primarily because it is dependant upon protection by the law - and hence by the government responsible for enforcing that law.
You either have it as a virtue of existence or you don't. In modern liberal societies (especially those, like the US, that have based their philosphy on the writings of people like Locke) we recognize that you have three natural, inalienable rights: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Those rights do not come from some moral code but are founded upon your existence as a living, reasoning being capable of making your own choices in life. The rights are based on the idea that as an independent, living being you alone own yourself and since you are your own property there are certain things about yourself that are within only your control. All other things claimed as rights must descend directly from these three principles and must do so in a way that does not infringe upon the already established rights of others. Morality does not matter.
I find it amusing that you are using the example of a codification of rights in one country, based on writings of philosophers, as support for your argument that morals have no impact on rights and laws, universally.
In some places of the world is not immoral to kill people who do not follow the your religion. That does not mean said person does not have a right to continue living.
To you and me, maybe. People from that place (and especially that religion) would probably disagree. Indeed, they might even argue it is their "right" to kill a non-believer.
The concept of "rights" is an extension of the concept of law. Laws are written by those in power, to impose their morals on those without power. Morals are, inescapably, tied to both laws and rights.
That, and (as MSFT later proved head-on w/ their TCP/IP implementations), the classic BSD license really doesn't protect against theft and proprietary lock-down of improvements.
Please explain how it is possible to "steal" BSD-licensed code. The whole *point* of the license is that it allows anyone to take the source code and do whatever they want with it.
There are few things that identify a GPL-zealot more effectively than talking about code being "stolen" because someone else's changes to it were not "shared". It's like making a speech in public and then complaining about how all the people who heard it "stole" from you.
Morals have no place in an argument about rights and law. Rights are self evident and law exists to protect them.
Morals most certainly have a place in such an argument, because rights and laws are inherently dependent upon the moral codes of those people defining them.
It isn't always applicable though. Apple isn't becoming MS in their quest to defeat them. Apple's products remain attractive and easy to use.
Apple has always been just as bad as Microsoft. Their products - much like Microsoft's - "remain attractive and easy to use" only so long as you use them within the boundaries Apple expects you to.
It better be short, it better list what they are looking for at the top, and your first sentence needs to make them want to read more.
I believe this might be a US thing. Here in Australia, multi-page Resumes are the norm, and if you don't have enough information on your Resume to give the person reading it a fairly good idea of your skills and experience, they'll just bin it.
As an Australian, working for a US company, that has to interview US applicants, I find the "one-page Resume" to be incredibly frustrating. There's never enough information included to tell anything useful about the applicant unless it's either a) an applicant who's very new to the industry or b) an entry-level job like L1 helpdesk where applicants don't really need many skills past a pulse. This means I have to do, at the very least, a preliminary phone interview to find out whether or not the applicant is even worth bringing in for a "real" interview - an annoying and time-consuming proposition (doubly so for me since I have to line-up timezones appropriately to call people in the US).
Contrast this to the Resumes I receive from Australian applicants, who typically include academic qualifications, industry qualifications and job histories *with details* of responsibilities, achievements, skills gained, procedures, etc. Sure, there's a one-page summary that has a brief outline (what an American applicant would call the whole Resume) but it *also* includes more in-depth information allowing me to get a good feel for how the applicant has spent the last few years of their working life, in terms of gaining/exercising skills and experience.
The end result is that I can spend 30 - 60 seconds looking at each Resume's summary page, to quickly weed out people who are clearly unsuitable (eg: Electrical Engineering degree, about 30 years old, last 3 jobs in another country, applying for a L1 helpdesk job), then go back and spend 2 - 10 minutes for each Resume in the remaining pool finding the people who actually look suitable for the job, and make the shortlist for interviewing. Thus, by the time I actually get around to calling them in for an interview, I am already reasonably confident they have the requisite skills and experience, and the interview becomes about a) *verifying* (as opposed to discovering) their technical abilities (easier, relatively speaking) and determining whether or not they have the right attitude and personality.
I have yet to see a "single page Resume" that has told me anything truly useful about an applicant. A page's worth of bulleted previous employers, boilerplate "skills" and "responsibilities" one-liners, and "achievements" of maybe a sentence or two each, just doesn't have enough meat in it to determine whether or not an applicant is capable (purely from a skills and experience perspective) of doing the job. Subsequently, I've ended up getting in further contact with some applicants who were clueless and, I'm sure, missing a few that would have made excellent employees.
Slashdotters, what's it like in the UK, Canada, etc ? What style of Resume is typical in those places - just the one-page summary, or a one-page summary backed up by a relatively detailed explanation ?
This kind of sadistic user hostile sort of environment didn't stop Windows or MS-DOS when the main competitor was a vastly superior Macintosh.
Firstly, the Mac was significantly more expensive in the '80s and '90s.
Secondly, the end user demographic in that time period (well, up to the early '90s) was very different. The average computer user then was *interested in computers* and hence prepared to both learn more about how they worked and to use them, and put up with more teething problems in a rapidly evolving market.
The situation is very different today, the comparison doesn't hold. Users have higher expectations and most of them now have zero interest in how the machine works and learning about it.
I live in the UK. We have a relatively capitalist economy. Sure, we have some nationalised industries and a legal minimum wage, but in practice a lot of things that ought to be provided by the state according to the rules of the game and the taxes we pay aren't, and businesses are mostly unregulated in practice. This is one reason why a lot of people are upset at Blair's administration: the more we've tended towards outright socialism in recent years, the worse things have got for almost everyone except the millions of benefits scroungers.
By what metrics are things worse ? (I don't follow UK politics and economics closely, so you may well be right, but people are whinging similarly here in Australia, despite pretty much everyone being far better off in pretty much every way than they ever have been before).
But even with the recent tax hikes and giving out bazillions in benefits, we're still a long way from the collective ownership ideal of socialism. Try looking the the former USSR or China if you want to see serious socialist tendencies. Remind me again how they've been doing relative to the West?
But that's a strawman, your criticism about socialism wasn't relative to the West, it was relative to the *past*. At least, I assume that's what you mean by using words like "evolution" and "forever".
So, taking the USSR and China as examples of "socialism", you will still have a very difficult time indeed convincing me that while people in those countries might not be as well off as we in the "West", they're _worse_ off than they were, say, a few hundred (or thousand) years ago.
There is no individual compromise in doing your fair part and getting your fair reward.
Of course there is - because "your fair part" is a) practically impossible to define and b) perceived very differently by dfferent people.
Looking after the injured or elderly is closer to real socialism, but again, these people would generally be expected to play their part when they could. After all, a tribe with too many mouths to feed and not enough hunters would not eat well and eventually the weak would die.
In most "socialist" countries, people *are* expected to play their part, eventually. Welfare is considered by most to be a temporary assistance. Universal health care is there so people who can't afford expensive bills can still be treated and go on to contribute to society. Worker protections exist so people are not forced to take unsafe jobs, or work excessive hours to the detriment of both their immediate families and society as a whole.
The real test is how many tribes can you find where someone wasn't pulling their weight for no particular reason, yet was carried along by the others anyway? I think you'll find that in most cases, this has been frowned upon, so while the bounty from the hunt might be shared among the collective, those who did not contribute fairly were still effectively excluded.
I don't understand why you're using this line of argument. Actual implementations of "socialism" only loosely follow the doctrines you are criticising, so while your criticisms are somewhat valid from an academic perspective, they're not really applicable in real life.
In the Western world, the countries that are (relatively) more socialist are the ones that score the highest on pretty much all quality of life metrics. Arguing that socialism is a net negative influence is damn near impossible. Arguing that socialism is a bad thing full stop, as you appear to be trying to do (that is, arguing everyone is worse off because if it) doesn't even pass the laugh test.
His comparison was 60 Dell rackmounts were equal in *price* to 1 AS/400. I believe my criticism was accurate, and not mere nitpicking.
I didn't say it was. I just said that the magnitude of many of the problems you raise is significantly reduced by substituting blade servers for 1U pizza-box style servers.
HP has iLO, and that uses an ethernet connection. The way you describe DRAC, it looks like the same thing. So, if the network goes away, how do you administer 60 rackmount servers?
The same way you administer your AS/400 when all of its connectivity disappears - you don't.
I've put this last, since your new example has veered away from comparing on the basis of price (60 for 1) into how many one can cram into a 48U rack *at any price*. HP's C-class will get you 64 half-height blades with 4 chassis in one rack, but is that feasible? Let's fully load it like you say. Each chassis has 6 13.8A @ 240V inputs which means 24 power drops requiring a total of 240V/360A service, just for that one rack. There are two ethernet switches @ 8 ports each on the chassis, plus another 4 ports for the OA/iLO (we're going for redundancy here, right?) for a total of 68 GigE drops. For fibre channel, since you're using the half-height blades, we'll only count 4 FC switches per chassis (only the full-heights have 3 HBAs) @ 8 outbound ports each multiplied by 4 chassis which equals 128 4Gb FC cable drops. By the way, (I know its anecdotal as I don't have an empirical BTU figure) those chassis run HOT when fully loaded and all are running IO.
You almost certainly don't need to fill up all the external connectivity, especially if you're comparing a rack full of servers to a "single" box. Further, it's highly unlikely you even need a rack full of servers to meet similar levels of functionality and reliability (where the two are reasonably comparable). More likely a pair of chassis half-filled (or less) would be more than adequate adequate, in which case you're looking at 8-12 ethernet (and 4-8 FC, if applicable) drops (2 ethernet and 2 FC switches per chassis, each with 1 uplink, plus two DRAC/ILOM links per chassis). Further, the power supplies are N+N redundant, so even at full blast, a chassis doesn't use more than 3 of them - for two half-filled bladecentres, your power calculation above is overestimated by a factor of 8.
So yeah, you can beat an AS/400 in raw computing power per dollar and per rackspace, but I never tried to disprove that. The argument I responded to was reliability per dollar and my counterpoint was to consider all the hidden costs in having true reliability.
My point was not so much about raw power/$ (although I included that because it is a factor to be considered), but more that if you have an architecture where redundancy (and performance) is trivial to improve simply by dropping in another server, then blades offer an excellent platform on which to base it, for the price, because it's easy to put a lot of machines into a small space. Think of it as the "Google principle" - if your application architecture is suitable, individual server failures become irrelevant, and thus lots of cheap "unreliable" machines become more economical than one or two "reliable" but order-of-magnitude-more-expensive boxes - and blades are the best way to stuff lots of servers into a rack.
Have you accounted for the difference in payroll requirements to support 1 AS400 vs a rack full of servers. It's not a trivial amount of money, especially over 5 years.
That depends a great deal on what you're doing.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. My point is that most of human evolution has happened without the need for socialism.
Most of human evolution has happened without things like electricity, sanitation and computers as well, but that doesn't make them bad and it most certainly doesn't mean modern society as we know it could exist without them.
Interesting question. Given that most of the industrialised nations run with capitalist tendencies over the past few decades are doing considerably better by just about any metric than most of the industrialised nations run with a heavily socialist philosophy, would you like to continue?
Most industrialised nations are quite "socialist", especially if your benchmark is America. Universal healthcare, welfare and minimum wages you can actually live on, strong worker protections, etc. None of these things seem to have caused countries like Australia, the UK, Canada, Switzerland and the like significantly more grief than the more capitalist "every man for himself" direction of the USA. Quite the contrary, if anything. I certainly know there's a long list of countries I'd move (away from Australia) to before the US.
That's not socialism; it's simply groups of people working together for mutual advantage.
That's socialism, for any useful definition of the word. Co-operation and individual compromise for the greater benefit of all.
In your example, socialism would be four members of a tribe getting together to hunt a lion, and then sharing the results with a load of other tribesmen who sat around all day doing nothing in return.
Like, say, the women who sat back in the hut doing nothing because they were pregnant ? Or maybe the 3 men who were injured on the last hunt and still recovering ? Or maybe the children who were too young to do anything except play ? Or the tribe elder who can barely walk ?
I suspect historical examples of that are not so easy to come by.
I would expect examples of groups of people helping each other out in such a fashion would be trivially simple to find. Further, I'd confidently assert they existed long before even verbal histories were being recorded and would expect to easily find examples of it amongst primates and other animals.
Sorry, but "evolution" does offer any refuge for people who want to be selfish arseholes.
The Dell blades are lame, haven't used the HP.
Having used both IBM and Dell, I'd pick Dell every time - and not just because I could buy nearly twice as many of them for the same price.
I've not used the HP ones personally, but on paper they're technically superior to both IBM and Dell. Sun's in there as well, but their blades are targeting different requirements. I would have liked to get the HP's instead of the Dell's we just bought, but the extra cost wasn't justified by the advantages they offered, for our purposes.
But for the SAN, you can forget iSCSI (too complex) or fibre HBAs - just use the second ethernet port on the Dell rackmounts and run Coraid's AOE. Awesome reliability and throughput, at a tenth of the cost and complexity of any equivalent solution; add Red Hat's GFS file system (that they bought from Sistina) and you get full-on storage clustering.
Your solution has single points of failure for two critical aspects of system functionality (network access and storage). That's not "reliable". At the very _least_ you should be bonding both your two onboard NICs together and using two vlans over the bonded link, and ideally you should have another two switches in the BC and the dual-port ethernet expansion cards in your blades dedicated to AoE connectivity.
An iSCSI initiator is included with, and officially supported on, multiple commercial OS platforms (including VMWare). Further, iSCSI support is very widespread amongst commercial storage vendors and has been for years - it's well understood and widely used. For reasons like this AoE is a non-starter for many environments (including ours), especially when its advantages over iSCSI are minor.
iSCSI is going to own the low-end and mid-range SAN market within 5 years. AoE is hihgly unlikely to ever be more than a niche player.
Since forever.
By what measure ? What reasonable quality-of-life measure are you claiming has declined over time (and especially "very recently") ?
Socialism is a very recent invention in the grand scheme of things.
So are long lifespans, widespread good health, free society and large-scale prosperity. Correlation or causation ?
It is effectively a prop for the weak, and counter to survival instinct. Of course, we might reasonably decide as a responsible society that supporting those weaker than ourselves is the ethical thing to do. But how many historical records are there of four members of a tribe donating a limb each to the lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest of them for dinner?
Non-sequitor. There are uncountable examples of four members of a tribe getting together to *hunt* a lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest one for dinner.
I don't doubt your numbers, but I believe you're leaving a lot out. Let's analyze this:
I'm not going to call a rack full of servers a drop-in replacement for a mainframe, but a lot of your criticisms are significantly reduced when using Blade Servers instead of 1U pizza boxes.
You'll pay a lot more than Dell, but HP's blades will let you get 64 8-core, 32G RAM blades into a single rack. For probably half the cost, Dell will get you 50 blades. That's a *lot* of computing horsepower and a lot of (whole machine) redundancy. Especially if you combine it with virtualisation.
(Steer well clear of IBM blades - overpriced and underfeatured.)
If your application(s) is/are even remotely horizontally scalable, a rack full of servers is almost certainly a better option - especially if large amounts of disk I/O and/or space are not a critical requirement.
Incidentally, if anything your analysis was generous with regards to physical connectivity. You'd want dual power and network connections for all the servers, doubling the number of physical NIC and power connections you estimated (and for fibre channel, if applicable). Unless the levels of IO were relatively light, you'd also want at least dedicated dual-port NICs for the iSCSI option (ie: another 120 switchports). No need for 60 KVM ports, however, even with individual servers, just use the onboard DRAC management cards - albeit at the cost of another 60 switchports - then you also get handy features like virtual CDROM and floppy drives.
I have to say I fully agree with you contender. This is some sort of Labour party/Socialist disease of the mind. Why do I say this? Because this is a pattern in the Left world-wide. They keep wanting to legislate on every aspect of a citizen's life (and, by the way, this is where christo-fascists, nazis, islamofascists and socialists all meet). The State will "protect" you. Fuck that. Fuck Socialism, fuck lefties.
Uh, what ? Most governments in power today in the western world are - relative to their respective local average political leanings - notably right wing. Indeed, left-wing parties the world over are wringing their hands in despair about their inability to drum up any sort of voter interest.
They sure as hell aren't "left" - or, at least, not in the sense that the vast, vast, vast majority of the populance perceive "left".
It's not the loony left that's in the process of taking away your "freedoms", it's the right-wing whackos.
The other is that people survived for a very long time without a socialist state to back them up.
When in the past are you referring to when people "survived" better, on average, than they do today ? What are your metrics ?
Where the product model will disappear, is in the mass market arena, where there is a big push to create applications so that companies and end users aren't locked in to highly expensive proprietary apps.
In the "mass market arena", very few (if any) proprietry apps are expensive. It's the niche markets where software costs serious money (tens of thousands of dollars).
It's also the niche market that, by it's nature, has very high barriers to entry for OSS.
(nearsighted + Mac UI = bad)
Uh, why ? Relatively speaking, OS X uses default fonts on the larger side. Added to that, Macs with built-in screens tend to have resolutions that are on the low side for their screen size.
Plus (and I say this as someone who is also shortsighted), you should be wearing glasses when you use a computer.
As new files are added/edited, each zone has their own copy, but 90% of the files are shared, so we avoid wasting disk space. If we could do that with UML or Xen, we would. But we can't, so we don't.
Do it exactly the same way. Install your master VM to an LV. Take [a] snapshot(s) of the LV. Use the snapshot(s) for your new VMs.
(With that said, I believe snapshots in LVM have a much greater overhead than they do in ZFS.)
Her reasoning is she'd have to learn a whole new way of navigating through an os and all that. She says this while she's bopping around on her Vista laptop. Yeah.
And ? Vista's no bigger a change than other versions of Windows have been in the last decade, or OS X has undergone from 10.0 to 10.4 (and smaller than, say MacOS Classic to OS X, or NeXTSTEP to OS X). The fundamental UI elements and procedures are still the same as Windows 95.
We got nearly 2x that number. The limiting factor was incoming power, with the need to avoid tripping circuit breakers or upgrading the utility connection. Cooling was a very serious problem as well. Some of the possible electrical upgrades (which we avoided) made the computers look really cheap. We chose tiny low-power motherboards and minimal power supplies to solve the problem.
The only equation swings further and further in favour of blades and virtualisation the more machines you're talking about. Low-end 1U servers really only make sense if you're buying a small number of them, or if virtualisation raises other problems (eg: Oracle Appserver is not supported for production use in virtualised environments).
Dell blades are a horrible rip-off. Note that Dell only advertizes the per-blade cost. They avoid telling you the cost of the chassis. I don't recall, but US$35k sounds like what we got quoted for an empty chassis. (we pretty much had to pretend we'd already bought the blades to get that quote!) If you're thinking about Dell blades, I think you need to investigate a bit more.
I've just spent several weeks researching blade servers and dealing with competitive bids. Admittedly this was in Australia, but I sincerely doubt the numbers are (relatively speaking) any different in the US (and I say that with some background knowledge - we have a couple of IBM Bladecentres in a US colocation).
Dell's blade servers are - *by far* - the cheapest (of Dell, IBM and HP) on the market. The chassis is only about AU$8k, and that was including two switch modules. IBM's and HP's were both around twice as much, although this is somewhat offset by their higher density (Dell 7U/10 servers, IBM 7U/14 blades, HP 10U/16 blades). Density wasn't one of our primary requirements, however (we have an on-site server room and lots of rack space, power and cooling), so that wasn't really relevant.
Then there's the blade servers themselves. Again, Dell's are significantly cheaper (over 50% less by list price, around 20% less after discounting). We paid about AU$9k each for our 8x2.33Ghz, 16G RAM blades. Dell blades also had a couple of notable superiorities over IBM's, by virtue of 8 DIMM slots, hot-swappable drives and SATA drive options. HP's blades are nicer than both technology- and design-wise, but we couldn't justify the additional cost for the extra features that were mostly fluff in our environment (would have been different if we were buying for a remote datacentre - HP would be a clear winner).
I'm not throwing around idle comments here. I've just spent significant time and effort doing the numbers for our company. As I said, it's difficult to find any reason why anyone would be buying 1U servers in bulk (of any sort, but especially low-end ones), without some sort of unusual circumstances. Blades are significantly more cost-effective, energy and space efficient and have substantial manageability advantages. Going back to the hypothetical 40 VMs on 3 blade servers scenario, including storage, you'd be looking at about 1.5kW in power draw, which effectively works out to around 37W per "server". I sincerely doubt any 1U boxes are going to come close to matching that. Heck, a Mac Mini would probably have trouble matching it.
It's difficult to imagine even Google are still pursuing their 1U-server model. Multicore - especially quad-core - CPUs have changed the landscape significantly in the last 12 months or so.