Depends on what model and type you're talking about for Dell's wares. All Dell Servers and most business desktops usually have a "No OS" option (we've ordered most of ours that way), and the servers do have an option for RHEL pre-installed + RHEL subscription IIRC. They even have dedicated Linux guys at the help desk (which you always seem to have to go through even if you're just wanting to replace a bum hard drive... urgh).
"Any new drive announcement triggers me to think about backing that bitch up."
I've found that counting the amount of actual data the customer/client needs stored, as opposed to the drive capacity, keeps the blood pressure nice and low.:)
"My clients always want the latest new hardware, with no thought as how to protect their data."
Part of being a sysadmin is to help guide them back into reality:) I'm kinda fortunate in that most corporate folks that I know give me the opposite problem - they want it cheap, damnit - and will only stand for purchasing just enough 'oomph' to do the job over a given period of time.
But... if you do build that time machine, can I go with you and help kill the DLT guy? We'll take a detour on the way back and get the DAT guy while we're at it.
"I have no idea why people ever stick with tape at all these days other than for nostalgia."
...because it's easier (and far less nerve-wracking) to hand over a case full of tapes to the offsite storage courier, knowing full well that he's prolly going to just (literally) throw the thing into the back of his truck and hurry off to the next client?
True disaster recovery planning involves offsite storage of data IMHO, and tape is hella easier to transport than HDDs. Also, you don't have to worry about what order you stick tapes in, whereas with disk storage, re-assembling a RAID array would be a PITA, even with labelling.
(maybe someday tapes will be replaced with big-assed flash-storage devices? But until then, dropping a tape isn't as likely to make you wet your pants as dropping a big-arsed tape would)./P
...the tape will be in a cartridge that holds a spool 65cm in diameter, holds approximately 600TB (1200TB w/ compression) and will require an autoloader that eats at least one rack for the entry-level 8-tape kit./dev/nst0 will weigh in at 38kg, and cleaning will require a tape w/ 6000-grit sandpaper in place of media.
All BS aside: you do bring up an excellent point. I'm a guy who has to do backup/recovery, and I've found that even a fully compressed LTO-3 will barely --just barely-- hold up to 1.2TB if you rig it right (by combining hardware/software compression, and the love that Bacula gives it (though admittedly sparse file handling most likely has inflated the reported amount of stuff).
Anyrate, that boils down to --maybe-- two full HDD's if the two are 500GB SATAs.
The good news is, after you pare down the crap you really don't need to backup, it usually isn't all that much for most companies. You can safely exclude out most of the OS itself for starters... w/ kickstart on RHEL and a.ks file that replicates what you've got on a given server (partitions, packages, etc), you can cut a LOT out.
Even more good news - if you get up a monster RAID array of similar drives (full SAN kitting or just attached to a big ol' server, no biggie), you can use it instead of tapes for most of your day-to-day backup. Then latch your tape drive or autoloader onto it and only commit to tape the reallly vital stuff that requires a long retention period. Most backup software suites (even Bacula) support writing to file as well as tape, so this shouldn't be too big of a problem for a sysadmin if s/he knows what s/he's doing.
Adaptation and all that.
But then, most of the servers in my care consist of a pile of RAID5'ed SCSI drives that range 36-140GB in size... and I doubt that most of them will get much bigger before it's time to replace the servers themselves. Just because you can get monster capacity on a single drive, doesn't mean that you need to or even want to.
Now if I already had a monster robotic multi-drive tape library running 24/7 now, and the boss wants to up the HDD capacity on a given pile of servers because he pretty much has to? Yeah. That would require a lot more thought and planning, and at that stage of the game a disk backup solution similar to what's been outlined above would be big and ugly, but would pretty much be what you're stuck with having to do.
Ah, but I did... that 70 bn tons is but a drop in the bucket compared to the overall size of the entire Atmosphere. Compare that to factors which mitigate atmospheric CO2, and while not perfect, it is a perspective. Denial doesn't make that automatically go away, y'know...;)
"The point of my post is that we have fewer carbon sequestering plants each day..."
Oh? Considering that North America has a growing number of overall plant life (as compared to, say, 1900), it tends to mitigate the ever-holy Amazon (not to mention the actual shrinkage of the Sahara Desert as it surrenders to plant life, coupled with various other places... it's a toss-up, really if one were to guess, given current information). Given all that, your premise (that we're losing plant life at some sort of alarming rate) is rather fallacious.
"...at a constantly declining rate due to the finite capacity of water to hold dissolved carbon at atmospheric pressure and biological constraints..."
IIRC, we're supposed to be losing ice (as in - the premise of this article?)... as it turns into water. Also, the act of evaporation sends largely CO2-free water back into the air (assuming the CO2 was otherwise fixated by soil or plant processes before evaporation). Water absoprtion isn't exactly the zero-sum game you paint it to be.
This all means that the alarmism may not be (I said may not be, not is not, as no model is complete enough to tell for sure)...warranted.
Two things you forgot when rattling off that number:
1) The Earth's atmosphere weighs in at roughly 441,000 billion ^ 10 tons (or roughly 4.41 million billion tons, using British/UK counting of "billion", meaning a hell of a lot more than what most Americans would think upon seeing such a number).
2) Plants, Ocean/River/Lake Water, Precipitation... all of it removes or dissolves CO2 from the air, and prolly not at a trivial rate.
If you're going to lash out with a really big number, at least put it in perspective, yes?
"Probably a set of major contributing factors that did not include climate change, as can be inferred from the quote."
Like what - really big polar bears coveringing by the thousands and dancing a stomp in unison?
No, really... that's a whole lot of ice, and Canada isn't exactly known as a geological hotbed of earthquakes or volcanoes, so...?
Not saying it's not possible for an earthquake to be the cause, but ruling out a huge factor such as climate entirely seems rather absurd, all things considered.
I don't disagree at all that a person (or group of people, e.g. Mssrs Hewlett and Packard) can be the source of vision and be the very heart of a company. My assertion is that somehow the writer thinks that Apple would collapse into some sort of corporate supermassive black hole 5 minutes after Jobs cleaned out his desk and left the offices at Cupertino.
Seriously - Intel didn't implode when Andy Grove left. GE seems to be holding up okay minus Jack Welch... and both of them were HUGE driving forces in where their respective companies got to upon the corporate scene.
While I admit that Jobs has a bit more of a cult following among his employees than, say, Scott McNealy (but then most of Sun employees prolly though their former CEO to be a screaming bastard anyhoo if memory serves), Jobs isn't exactly the only source of vision - he can't afford to be if he expects Apple to outlast him.
""Apple is in a much more difficult position than other companies in the backdating morass, because a significant portion of its market valuation is based on Steve Jobs staying at his job," he said."
Ah, and I suppose that if Bill Gates ever left Microsoft, Microsoft's stock would be doing just fine? (Note that there was a recent story from CNet news in which Gates went out of his way to say that he wasn't quite leaving MSFT yet...)
Geez - it's not as if Steve Jobs is God or anything (zealots' assertions to the contrary, of course. IMHO the only reason Jobs' return to Apple was hailed so highly in the first place was because the people he replaced were as incompetent as Hell).
"Name one major program released in the last 4 years that will not run on Vista."
I can name TONS of OpenGL-reliant 3D/CG apps that don't run AT ALL on Vista, or if they do, fail at one or more major video-related tasks (e.g. rendering, raytracing, IBL/AOL, preview panes, UI operation, etc)... and in some cases, it's not just OGL that's hanging up in there.
We can start with Maya = R9 has had mixed results, usually bad. I doubt that anyone who uses either professionally (esp. freelance) is going to run out and blow 4 figures on upgrades (for core proggie + plugins) just because Microsoft's little ~$400 OS decided to stop supporting their particular version.
Sorry, but I had to call 'shenanigans' on that one...
"...if you take two years to evaluate software, you're absurdly under-resourced (or just incompetent). What did you think you were going to learn after the first couple of times you installed it on a trial network and checked that everything you needed was working?"
I don't know about you, but if that OS was being adapted to, oh, aircraft flight control systems or the like, I'd like the IT department to spend more time than just a couple of installs and a quick check to see if everything was working on a trial network...
Okay - on a not-so-extreme level, I can see how it would take more time to test compatibility with delicate or critical items in the fields of medical IT, Civil Engineering, and the like (especially if it interacts with custom apps). An OS that --for example-- introduces subtle errors into calculations, errors that may one day affect life and limb, deserves a bit more than a cursory look, no?
Now in a typical business environment, okay - I don't really see much need to exacerbate testing. OTOH, even that depends on the business. Even a services company with custom java-based apps (the one I work at ferinstance) may find that additional testing is necessary if Java itself isn't perfectly compatible with Windows in the first place, and may end up being less so with Vista. It's kinda nice for the code-monkeys to know what they can and cannot do with the combination before we shove it in their direction as a done deal, y'know? Such a situation takes a lot more time than just the basic 'do-our-fave-proggies-launch-or-GPF-on-this-thing? ' testing. (which prolly explains why we run more Linux and FreeBSD-based servers than anything else...)
"Eight Core Mac Pro- just so Apple can advertise the most powerful personal computer EVAR"
I think Tom's Hardware did just that awhile back with some Intel Woodcrest chips. (and damn - for a guy who does 3d artwork and hates long render times, that would be pure frickin' nirvana... if only half of the software I use supported SMP/hyperthreading...)
"Apple needs a mid-tower computer between the mini and the Pro. The iMac doesn't cut it. Steve's cube fetish will resurface here"
Damnit, sometimes I MISS my old Cube! No fans in it, hopped-up to a 1.2GHz G4, shoe-horning a Radeon vidcard in it... and still it trooped on. But you're right - the iMac ain't cutting it, and the Minis are too small (spec-wise as well as otherwise). I just had to bite the bullet and save my pennies for a dual G5, which is still plugging along quite nicely, two years after I bought it (I may bother with replacing it next year at this time... it's still that damned good performance-wise IMHO).
Why? Well, it's like this: After seeing how diesel-powered consumer-grade pickup trucks* belch out a dozen cubic yards of black smoke whenever its driver wants to pass someone on the highway, I shudder to think of what a road full of those things would do to the air...
*yes, that includes even the brand-new ones in many cases
Gasoline isn't the majority of what oil is used for.
In order to get off the "foreign oil tit", as you put it, we'd have to do alternatives for lubricants, plastics, asphalt, jet fuel, diesel oil, heating oil, etc.
Sure, there are alternatives for may of those (biodiesel, corn-starch plastics, electricity generation fueled by something besides oil, etc), but the alternatives are often more costly (and less efficient) to create than the original... or can be worse for the environment (e.g. coal-fired electrical generation vs. oil-fired). Until oil is expensive enough to make those alternatives more attractive, we're kinda stuck.
I once used an iPAQ (w/ a brick-sized battery pack/PCMCIA slot accessory on it) almost religiously several years back. At that time, the iPAQ was great for keeping appointments, a few games stashed onboard, and to top it off, I could shove a PC Card adapter and a CF card full of mp3's in it, or a PC Card-based 802.11b card. It was fun to mess with and was even halfway practical.
Nowadays I can do pretty much all of that (and more) with an iPod and a decent cell phone - or just a really decent cell phone, methinks (except mine doesn't do mp3's, so...) So where does a stand-alone PDA fit in these days? Crackberries, yeah, I can see that - but it appears (IMHO) to be nothing more than a glorified cell phone with a really big screen, and definitely not something you'd want to tinker with under-the-hood too awful much, like you could with a PDA.
I guess I'm just curious, now with the increased power of mobile phone devices glommed together w/ PDA functions, if Palm's core business model even has a future, or if someday they'll just be sucked up by, say, Nokia or Motorola...
Does anyone actually use straight-up PDA's anymore?
...his big worry is to avoid having the SEC discover his little pump+dump scheme.
I'm pretty sure he knew SCO was going toes-up in 2003, and didn't like what he saw. OTOH, making a monster and --to any stock investor with lots of money and tech-ignorance combined-- adventure against a big fat (and rich!) company would surely boost the stocks high enough to dump a few (but not enough to arouse suspicion!) and retire off the results.
As it is, McBride and most of his board are now a multi-millionaires because of that, where before he really didn't have near as much cash.
Damage aside, it's a pretty solidly-run con IMHO. So what if IBM/Novell/etc wins? The company chokes, but Darl still gets to keep his own dough, and come out of it a whole LOT wealthier than he would have otherwise.
Oh, c'mon... it's a pretty good improvement over the ungodly tired routine of bad car analogies, "In Soviet Russia...", and the near-constant practice of welcoming new overlords (and no, we won't even go near the hot grits, thanks much).
(insert "I for one welcome our new Burma Shave overlords" here)
It could too easily be construed as proof of a "Hostile Environment" if a female employee walks in on some slob surfing pr0n.
Personally, forget the click-through stuff... what about the piece of paper that the guy had to sign before he even got his logon? I mean, WTF - any sysadmin/IT dep't with working brain cells is going to have an AUP on paper which all new employees have to sign, right? That would make it a binding contract right off...
...so why would anyone be surprised when the black-hat set starts busting into machinery for much the same reasons that the criminals in GITS did (albeit this time it doesn;t involve hacking another person's actual brain, but still...)
Now if only we could authorize a company of elite paramilitary types to give script kiddies and spammers the same treatment... (evil grin).
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I think you may have stumbled on the root cause - I commend you, sir!
I bet Sony still wishes their Vaio line had a Ferrari-logoed laptop right about now...
I've found that counting the amount of actual data the customer/client needs stored, as opposed to the drive capacity, keeps the blood pressure nice and low. :)
"My clients always want the latest new hardware, with no thought as how to protect their data."
Part of being a sysadmin is to help guide them back into reality :) I'm kinda fortunate in that most corporate folks that I know give me the opposite problem - they want it cheap, damnit - and will only stand for purchasing just enough 'oomph' to do the job over a given period of time.
But... if you do build that time machine, can I go with you and help kill the DLT guy? We'll take a detour on the way back and get the DAT guy while we're at it.
True disaster recovery planning involves offsite storage of data IMHO, and tape is hella easier to transport than HDDs. Also, you don't have to worry about what order you stick tapes in, whereas with disk storage, re-assembling a RAID array would be a PITA, even with labelling.
(maybe someday tapes will be replaced with big-assed flash-storage devices? But until then, dropping a tape isn't as likely to make you wet your pants as dropping a big-arsed tape would). /P
All BS aside: you do bring up an excellent point. I'm a guy who has to do backup/recovery, and I've found that even a fully compressed LTO-3 will barely --just barely-- hold up to 1.2TB if you rig it right (by combining hardware/software compression, and the love that Bacula gives it (though admittedly sparse file handling most likely has inflated the reported amount of stuff).
Anyrate, that boils down to --maybe-- two full HDD's if the two are 500GB SATAs.
The good news is, after you pare down the crap you really don't need to backup, it usually isn't all that much for most companies. You can safely exclude out most of the OS itself for starters... w/ kickstart on RHEL and a .ks file that replicates what you've got on a given server (partitions, packages, etc), you can cut a LOT out.
Even more good news - if you get up a monster RAID array of similar drives (full SAN kitting or just attached to a big ol' server, no biggie), you can use it instead of tapes for most of your day-to-day backup. Then latch your tape drive or autoloader onto it and only commit to tape the reallly vital stuff that requires a long retention period. Most backup software suites (even Bacula) support writing to file as well as tape, so this shouldn't be too big of a problem for a sysadmin if s/he knows what s/he's doing.
Adaptation and all that.
But then, most of the servers in my care consist of a pile of RAID5'ed SCSI drives that range 36-140GB in size... and I doubt that most of them will get much bigger before it's time to replace the servers themselves. Just because you can get monster capacity on a single drive, doesn't mean that you need to or even want to.
Now if I already had a monster robotic multi-drive tape library running 24/7 now, and the boss wants to up the HDD capacity on a given pile of servers because he pretty much has to? Yeah. That would require a lot more thought and planning, and at that stage of the game a disk backup solution similar to what's been outlined above would be big and ugly, but would pretty much be what you're stuck with having to do.
Ah, but I did... that 70 bn tons is but a drop in the bucket compared to the overall size of the entire Atmosphere. Compare that to factors which mitigate atmospheric CO2, and while not perfect, it is a perspective. Denial doesn't make that automatically go away, y'know... ;)
"The point of my post is that we have fewer carbon sequestering plants each day..."
Oh? Considering that North America has a growing number of overall plant life (as compared to, say, 1900), it tends to mitigate the ever-holy Amazon (not to mention the actual shrinkage of the Sahara Desert as it surrenders to plant life, coupled with various other places... it's a toss-up, really if one were to guess, given current information). Given all that, your premise (that we're losing plant life at some sort of alarming rate) is rather fallacious.
"...at a constantly declining rate due to the finite capacity of water to hold dissolved carbon at atmospheric pressure and biological constraints..."
IIRC, we're supposed to be losing ice (as in - the premise of this article?)... as it turns into water. Also, the act of evaporation sends largely CO2-free water back into the air (assuming the CO2 was otherwise fixated by soil or plant processes before evaporation). Water absoprtion isn't exactly the zero-sum game you paint it to be.
This all means that the alarmism may not be (I said may not be, not is not, as no model is complete enough to tell for sure) ...warranted.
1) The Earth's atmosphere weighs in at roughly 441,000 billion ^ 10 tons (or roughly 4.41 million billion tons, using British/UK counting of "billion", meaning a hell of a lot more than what most Americans would think upon seeing such a number).
2) Plants, Ocean/River/Lake Water, Precipitation... all of it removes or dissolves CO2 from the air, and prolly not at a trivial rate.
If you're going to lash out with a really big number, at least put it in perspective, yes?
Like what - really big polar bears coveringing by the thousands and dancing a stomp in unison?
No, really... that's a whole lot of ice, and Canada isn't exactly known as a geological hotbed of earthquakes or volcanoes, so...?
Not saying it's not possible for an earthquake to be the cause, but ruling out a huge factor such as climate entirely seems rather absurd, all things considered.
Seriously - Intel didn't implode when Andy Grove left. GE seems to be holding up okay minus Jack Welch... and both of them were HUGE driving forces in where their respective companies got to upon the corporate scene.
While I admit that Jobs has a bit more of a cult following among his employees than, say, Scott McNealy (but then most of Sun employees prolly though their former CEO to be a screaming bastard anyhoo if memory serves), Jobs isn't exactly the only source of vision - he can't afford to be if he expects Apple to outlast him.
Ah, and I suppose that if Bill Gates ever left Microsoft, Microsoft's stock would be doing just fine? (Note that there was a recent story from CNet news in which Gates went out of his way to say that he wasn't quite leaving MSFT yet...)
Geez - it's not as if Steve Jobs is God or anything (zealots' assertions to the contrary, of course. IMHO the only reason Jobs' return to Apple was hailed so highly in the first place was because the people he replaced were as incompetent as Hell).
"...Maya versions earlier than 8 for starters - 3D Studio Max >= R9 had mixed results - usually bad."
st00poid non-caffienated posting habits that forget all about HTML... grrrrr.
Okay, carry on.
I can name TONS of OpenGL-reliant 3D/CG apps that don't run AT ALL on Vista, or if they do, fail at one or more major video-related tasks (e.g. rendering, raytracing, IBL/AOL, preview panes, UI operation, etc)... and in some cases, it's not just OGL that's hanging up in there.
We can start with Maya = R9 has had mixed results, usually bad. I doubt that anyone who uses either professionally (esp. freelance) is going to run out and blow 4 figures on upgrades (for core proggie + plugins) just because Microsoft's little ~$400 OS decided to stop supporting their particular version.
Sorry, but I had to call 'shenanigans' on that one...
I don't know about you, but if that OS was being adapted to, oh, aircraft flight control systems or the like, I'd like the IT department to spend more time than just a couple of installs and a quick check to see if everything was working on a trial network...
Okay - on a not-so-extreme level, I can see how it would take more time to test compatibility with delicate or critical items in the fields of medical IT, Civil Engineering, and the like (especially if it interacts with custom apps). An OS that --for example-- introduces subtle errors into calculations, errors that may one day affect life and limb, deserves a bit more than a cursory look, no?
Now in a typical business environment, okay - I don't really see much need to exacerbate testing. OTOH, even that depends on the business. Even a services company with custom java-based apps (the one I work at ferinstance) may find that additional testing is necessary if Java itself isn't perfectly compatible with Windows in the first place, and may end up being less so with Vista. It's kinda nice for the code-monkeys to know what they can and cannot do with the combination before we shove it in their direction as a done deal, y'know? Such a situation takes a lot more time than just the basic 'do-our-fave-proggies-launch-or-GPF-on-this-thing? ' testing. (which prolly explains why we run more Linux and FreeBSD-based servers than anything else...)
I think Tom's Hardware did just that awhile back with some Intel Woodcrest chips. (and damn - for a guy who does 3d artwork and hates long render times, that would be pure frickin' nirvana... if only half of the software I use supported SMP/hyperthreading...)
"Apple needs a mid-tower computer between the mini and the Pro. The iMac doesn't cut it. Steve's cube fetish will resurface here"
Damnit, sometimes I MISS my old Cube! No fans in it, hopped-up to a 1.2GHz G4, shoe-horning a Radeon vidcard in it... and still it trooped on. But you're right - the iMac ain't cutting it, and the Minis are too small (spec-wise as well as otherwise). I just had to bite the bullet and save my pennies for a dual G5, which is still plugging along quite nicely, two years after I bought it (I may bother with replacing it next year at this time... it's still that damned good performance-wise IMHO).
*yes, that includes even the brand-new ones in many cases
In order to get off the "foreign oil tit", as you put it, we'd have to do alternatives for lubricants, plastics, asphalt, jet fuel, diesel oil, heating oil, etc.
Sure, there are alternatives for may of those (biodiesel, corn-starch plastics, electricity generation fueled by something besides oil, etc), but the alternatives are often more costly (and less efficient) to create than the original... or can be worse for the environment (e.g. coal-fired electrical generation vs. oil-fired). Until oil is expensive enough to make those alternatives more attractive, we're kinda stuck.
I once used an iPAQ (w/ a brick-sized battery pack/PCMCIA slot accessory on it) almost religiously several years back. At that time, the iPAQ was great for keeping appointments, a few games stashed onboard, and to top it off, I could shove a PC Card adapter and a CF card full of mp3's in it, or a PC Card-based 802.11b card. It was fun to mess with and was even halfway practical.
Nowadays I can do pretty much all of that (and more) with an iPod and a decent cell phone - or just a really decent cell phone, methinks (except mine doesn't do mp3's, so...) So where does a stand-alone PDA fit in these days? Crackberries, yeah, I can see that - but it appears (IMHO) to be nothing more than a glorified cell phone with a really big screen, and definitely not something you'd want to tinker with under-the-hood too awful much, like you could with a PDA.
I guess I'm just curious, now with the increased power of mobile phone devices glommed together w/ PDA functions, if Palm's core business model even has a future, or if someday they'll just be sucked up by, say, Nokia or Motorola...
Does anyone actually use straight-up PDA's anymore?
I'm pretty sure he knew SCO was going toes-up in 2003, and didn't like what he saw. OTOH, making a monster and --to any stock investor with lots of money and tech-ignorance combined-- adventure against a big fat (and rich!) company would surely boost the stocks high enough to dump a few (but not enough to arouse suspicion!) and retire off the results.
As it is, McBride and most of his board are now a multi-millionaires because of that, where before he really didn't have near as much cash.
Damage aside, it's a pretty solidly-run con IMHO. So what if IBM/Novell/etc wins? The company chokes, but Darl still gets to keep his own dough, and come out of it a whole LOT wealthier than he would have otherwise.
(insert "I for one welcome our new Burma Shave overlords" here)
Now someone like, say, China or Russia having incredibly high broadband penetration? That would be damned impressive.
It could too easily be construed as proof of a "Hostile Environment" if a female employee walks in on some slob surfing pr0n.
Personally, forget the click-through stuff... what about the piece of paper that the guy had to sign before he even got his logon? I mean, WTF - any sysadmin/IT dep't with working brain cells is going to have an AUP on paper which all new employees have to sign, right? That would make it a binding contract right off...
Now if only we could authorize a company of elite paramilitary types to give script kiddies and spammers the same treatment... (evil grin).