There are some absolutes that we CAN be sure of. 1+1=2, not 1.234 today, and 42 tomorrow, and "CAT" the day after.
You believe otherwise, that everything is grey.
You believe you can never know anything for sure. So how do you know that you exist?
I don't need to prove that *I* exist to you, just to me. ""Je pense donc je suis", (Rene Descartes - more familiar in the latin Cogito, ergo sum, but I don't speak latin, I do speak french:-) is sufficient for me to say that "Yes, I exist." That is an absolute certainty, as opposed to what form my existence takes, which is another matter entirely. So, for myself, I can start with that as one absolute, black+white-no_shades_of_grey certainty. My knowledge of the fact that I exist is not limited or tainted - it is a foundational truth.
As for the rest - ""...the latest battle-front between religion and the masses - gays, lesbians, and transsexuals." Between what particular religions and the masses do you refer to? Unless you can elaborate you are stereotyping." - quit hiding behind that lame excuse for willfull ignorance. You know full well what I'm referring to - it's not like the statement was made in a social vacuum.
I don't profess to knowing everything - but I *do* know that god does not exist. This is another absolute truth, same as my existence. Heck, with a few axioms thrown in, I could probably prove that my existence is sufficient to disprove any gods existence - but I don't have to. The concept of god is such that any such god cannot impinge on this universe, and that's sufficient - since this is the universe we live in. After all, the chief argument is that it "needs" a "creator" - so who created god if that's the way it works (he universe doesn't need a creator, btw - that's another flawed extrapolation from common-day experience).
The pope is a troll. He's also now a copyright Nazi. I guess he needs to find new ways to make $$$ to pay off the yet another billion $$$ in child abuse claims.
If god is outside the physics of this universe that we are able to observe, is he actually restricted from interacting with it? why and how?
Yes, because being outside the physics of this universe means that there is no possibility of interaction. If there were the possibility of interaction, then god would NOT be outside the laws of this universe.
God cannot exist in our universe. The concept of god can, but that's not the same, just as a picture of a pizza isn't the same as a pizza.
As for prayer - controlled studies showed that there was no difference in medical outcomes among believers and non-believers. Not even a placebo effect. It's a waste of energy. "Oh, but it makes them feel better." Sure, the same way that if I scam someone, they feel better because they thought they were the ones who came out ahead in the deal. Substitute religion, and it's the same deal. Sorry, but religion is a fraud and deserves to be exposed as mean-spirited and dumb.
Take a look at the latest battle-front between religion and the masses - gays, lesbians, and transsexuals. It wasn't too long ago that interracial marriage was also banned, with the enthusiastic support of religious types. Nowadays those same "religious people" spout nonsense about how gays and lesbians "choose to sin" and "shouldn't be allowed to marry like everyone else", and that transsexuals are just men in dresses when we know better.
Religion without practical effects is useless - James wrote that. Are you going to stand up and condemn religious types for treating gays, lesbians, the transgendered and transsexuals as less than equal, and for falsely, ignorantly, and hypocritically judging, condemning, and treating them as so-called "sinners"? Or is your belief hollow, of no practical effect?
I like the original definition, which is shorter and less complicated: any number evenly divisible by 1 and itself, rather than having 2 distinct divisors, 1 and itself.
I was going to add:
"so, 4 isn't prime?"
"no, but 5 is, and so is 7."
"oh, I get it now - so 9 is also prime!"
"no, but ll and 13 are."
"oh... I see the pattern now... so 15 isn't prime, but 17 and 19 are."
"yes."
"and 21 isn't prime, but 23 and 25 are!"
"25 isn't prime."
"you're just making ths up!"
And you missed the point that a lot of people (especially programmers) also miss - the name of the thing is not the thing. We see this fallacy every day with "object-oriented programming" and "message-passing" when, if you look under the hood, there are no objects, and no message passing.
Most things are not black and white. But, when it comes to the existence of god, it's a logical impossibility according to the rules of this universe, same as 1+1 does not equal 42. In such cases ther is no "grey area", so why sweat it?
"God" == "supernatural" == "outside of the natural laws of this universe" == "unable to be tested because it is outside the physics of this universe" == "unable to interact with this universe" == "non-existent in this universe" == "same category as Jedi Knights". There's no "grey area". If something is outside of the laws of this universe, we cannot interact with it in any shape, manner or form. Prayer, for example, is useless, and any claim to the contrary is wishful thinking.
Is there such thing as a Cheshire cat? Some would say no, but yes there is, he's a character in a book. Ideas have substance too. "No such thing as god" you say - how is it that you can even mention the concept then?
Same as I can talk about the existence of a vacuum. Or infinity. Or zero. Or darkness. Or silence. What is "The Sound of Silence"? (aside from being a great song:-) I can say silence exists, but I can't hear it. I can say darkness exists, but I can see it. I can grasp the concept of infinity, or zero - but I can't show you "zero pieces of pie" as being different from "zero pieces of cake", but the concepts ARE different, even if they look the same on the empty dessert plate.
Why bother talking about something that to you doesn't exist?
I know Sherlock Holmes doesn't existg, but I still enjoy reading the stories. I know the Martians don't exist, but I'm going to enjoy "The Martian Chronicles" tomorrow. I know "Firefly" and "Serenity" and a Battlestar named Galactica and Cylons and Captain James T Kirk and Mr. Spock don't exist - but I still enjoyed them as well.
You write "No grey in my universe" - wow! How do you do it? I know some pretty smart people (with toweringly high I.Q.s) and even they have grey areas. Seriously - I really want to know.
"even they have grey areas" - so what? IQ has nothing to do with it - that's an "argument from authority" and should set off your BS meter... and if we WERE to use that as qualification for pontificating on the topic, I'm no slouch in that area, but I still should have to give logical reasons for what I say.
There is no proof whatsoever of the existence of any god, and there's a lot of proof that it was made up by people, same as Sherlock Holmes or any other work of fiction. There's more proof for the existence of Gaea than there is for any god - but don't expect me to believe that either. I need real, testable proof.
All the supposedly logical arguments in favour of the existence of one or more gods can be demolished with a bit of thought. For example - "We see that everything that we make has a creator, so the universe has to have a creator as well - it's only logical" is stupid in it's illogic. It would be like saying that just because we see that everything that reproduces does so by either sex or division that cars must reproduce the same way. After all, they have "races" same as people or dogs, they can move, eat, get old and die, and they "obviously" reproduce - they don't just "come into being from inanimate materials".
You can't always assume that you can extend from one set of facts to another.
Another example.
One is prime.
Two is prime.
Three is prime.
A simple-minded observer would go - "Hey, that proves that integers are prime! 4 is prime!"
And they'd be wrong.
Religion is superstition. There is no room in my universe for god or any other superstition - just people being either mistaken or stupid on the topic. Without any proof, or even the possibility of proof, it simply is impossible according th the rules of this universe (because if it were possible to prove, it would in fact be subject to the laws of this universe - which would also mean it's not god, so the concept makes no sense in this universe whatsoever. In other words, the mere existence of god is logically clearly impossible in this universe).
Irish lawmakers have today joined this damp, respect-free group.
Uhm... you misspelled "damned".:-)
Damp? When they passed the law they were totally SLOSHED! Tanked. Wasted. Loaded. Three sheets to the wind. Bombed. Blasted. Pickled. Shit-face silly. Blotto. Boiled. Hammered. Fried. Hugging-the-porelain-god dead DRUNK!
You don't believe, but you don't "not" believe either - this is very important since if you just say "I don't believe" then you only have one half of the story and it is an implicit denial of the proposition you are refuting. Saying you don't believe and that you also don't not believe gives the grey area position that you seek (it does not refute or affirm the proposition you don't have a position on)
As an atheist, I know there is no such thing as god, just mistaken beliefs. There is no grey area in my universe, same as there is no possibility of the existence of god.
The Irish should look up the meaning of the term "blasphemy" in the original greek - "blax" (stupid) + "pheme" (speech) "stupid speech" or "stupid words". Their law is blaspehmous - it's just stupid words. To me, ALL attempts to say that there is a god fit that definition.
Knowing the Irish, they were drunk when they passed it. Let them deal with the massive hangover they've now created.
Data storage gives a nice place to keep everything in sync. It's NOT just about storing any old data.
Also, it simply doesn't scale. Not with the way that individuals today are consuming gigabytes every day. It only provides a benefit if multiple users are hitting the same data sources - same as any other caching scheme - and then we again run into the problem of keeping all these edge caches in sync. It absolutely doesn't scale, and will generate substantially more network traffic than hitting a central server would - and you'd have to hit the central server anyway, to maintain data coherency.
It also assumes something that is absolutely false - that there is a *need* for this. Back when 40 megs of hd space was $500, sure... but cheap terabyte drives remove the need for a lot of the centralized stuff - there's no reason that peer-to-peer collaborative efforts can't be better for things like two or more people working on the same project/document, or distributing files (bittorrent has certainly proven THAT), or anything else.
The nature of the problem has changed, and centralized servers will not be the future... the cloud is just another re-working of client-server, and when all devices can talk directly to each other (hello, IPv6 where ARE YOU?) the cloud will vanish. In 2020 we'll be thinking of cloud computing the same way we though of those brick cell phones from the 80s.
IPv6, good-enough computing, wide-spread broadband, cheap storage - it's this confluence of events that is a real game-changer. Those hooked on the concept of cloud computing aren't thinking very far ahead.
Ok, so help me picture how this might work. Let's say I have a database. How do I put the database on two machines (presumably at two separate physical locations, as a lightning strike could take out both servers, no?) in such a way that the data is in sync on both machines? Now, how do I do it in a way with acceptable performance?
Your hypothetical lightning strike (or someone unplugging something or spilling something or kicking something) is more likely to take out your single raid than to take out two machines in the above scenario, even located at the same location. Stop being childish.
One of the truisms of engineering is that you get longer between failures when you reduce the component count. That's why we went to integrated circuits - a gig of ram done in discrete components would have a mtbf that would be shorter than the boot time. Ditto for cpus.
Reduce the # of drives by buying larger drives, not by building a raid. Do your backups like you're supposed to. Use rsync, a hot-sync utility, logs, or whatever it takes to make sure your backup is reasonably up-to-date. The definition of "reasonable" depends on the application. To paraphrase Whoopie Goldberg, obviously banking db needs to be "up-to-date up-to-date", whereas a web server db just needs to be "up-to-date".
"Reasonable" means different things in different scenarios, and raid doesn't supply the answer for backups. You'll need that backup one way or another some day no matter what, because the bigger the raid, the higher your component count. It's never a question of IF you'll get into a situation where you can't recover from drive failures, but WHEN.
It's cheaper and better to just have redundant machines. We no longer need lots of cheap little hard disks to simulate one big expensive hard disk, which was the reason for raid in the first place - we have cheap large hard disks and cheap machines. The same $10k that bought a crappy desktop setup 20 years ago buys a nice box nowadays.
This way you can tolerate EVERY failure mode on a box.
No - redundant boxes are the way to go. We're at the point where we should be thinking "redundant array of inexpensive computers".
But what about the data?
Put it on two machines, duh! It should be in two separate locations anyway - power supply failures can take out multiple hard drives and your raid is then a total waste.
Look at this quote from the authors' conclusions: "With advantages cost-performance, reliability, power consumption, and modular growth, we expect RAIDS to replace SLEDS in future I/O systems."
SLEDs - Single Large Expensive Drives (for the sizes and price ranges they were talking about) no longer exist - they've been replaced by Single WAY Much Larger Disposable Drives. For the original designers, even a gigabyte on a single 2-1/2" drive was simply way beyond their horizon back in 1988.
http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks/raid-vs-sled---now-with-ssds.php
The IBM 3380 used as an example in Patterson's paper had 4 independent head positioners and could deliver 200 IOPs, but that complexity drove the price up to $15/MB and power consumption to over 6KW for a single 7.5GB drive. While the 14" diameter of the platters made room for 4 head combs it also made spinning the disk faster impractical. This technology had reached its zenith.
6 kilowatts, $112,000, for 7.5 gigs. $15,000 a gigabyte. A teraybye drive at those prices would be $15 MILLION and use 6 megawatts. You could run 1,500 homes on that. Now a terabyte will cost you less than 1/000 what a gigabyte cost then (so less than 1 millionth the cost). Their expectations didn't hold up because disks are CHEAP and disposable. Shit happens. Plan for it. Let the disks have different wear patterns instead of sticking them in a raid - it's one less complication, and makes it less likely for multiple disk failures to leave you hanging.
If you have a disk failure with no RAID, the situation is, "oh crap, I have to restore from backup."
No - redundant boxes are the way to go. We're at the point where we should be thinking "redundant array of inexpensive computers".
IMHO everything is wrong with C as first language. It gives you dreadful programming style and is not a right tool for application programming. You can mod me as a troll if you want but you've got to chose the best tool for the job and C is a tool for writing operating systems for fuck's sake. It isn't even a high level language. All those buffer overflow security holes happen because of both typical "clever hack" C programming style and choice of using a language for writing operating systems to write business applications.
So teach him assembler as a first language, and EVERYTHING else will look simple in comparison!
Seriously, start him with either the java console (system.out stuff) so he can do "Hello, world!", or start him with html+javascript.
Programming today isn't like when we were kids. In those days, you did whole applications with ONE technology and ONE package - dbase, clipper, turbo c, delphi, dbfast...
Now? The database is decoupled from the app logic. The app logic is decoupled from the presentation, which could be a program or a web app. We wanted separation of the storage from the logic from the front end, and we're there. The kid will get more fun doing simple web pages that he can see results in right away (important to get that positive feedback going, or he'll go back to his psp or wii or xbox or whatever). html+javascript gives him that, plus you don't need anything to start except a web browser and a text editor, - not even a web server.
raid was not supposed to be about fault tolerance. Look at the name - redundant array of inexpensive disks. The idea was to make a bunch of cheap disks look like one big expensive disk - the "redundant" just happened to be a misnomer, because it really doesn't have a heck of a lot of redundancy with only one parity drive (or a mirror of one drive, or, worst-case - no parity in a jbod). Even a few years ago, almost 20% of all raid failures resulted in total loss of the raid because a second drive would fail during rebuilding. "Silent failures" are only detected during the rebuild, so it doesn't matter how much you mix drives by manufacturer and batch and age - your risks of a total loss increase with individual disk size.
Anyone using a raid a decade from now will be looked upon as a blithering idiot.
To me, anyone who makes confident predictions about what the computing landscape will look like in 10 years looks like a blathering idiot.
How about this one - a lot of people using raid with drives over 1tb next year are going to lose all their data when they try to recover.
raid is not a backup, but people take the "redundant" part and think - "I can recover from a failure" when in many cases that's simply not true, especially if it's a controller failure and the company is no longer in business (case in point - 6-drive raid, 2 sets of parity data, one drive failed, then a bit later another drive + the controller died pretty much simultaneously, after years of flawless performance. Total loss. So much for the "hardware raid is better" crowd).
Large disks are incredibly cheap compared to historic prices. Keep multiple backups on a couple of machines instead of a raid.
Our family has always had dogs (and a few dog-wolf mixes), and the range of personality traits, and what you can learn about "people behaviour" just by applying your observations from dogs, is amazing. At what point do we stop saying "it's instinct" (in dogs OR humans) when the objective behaviour and outcome are the same?
Of course they're scarce. In the meantime... buy the cheap stuff. It's not like 15k drives are 3x as fast, since the drive is only part of the equation, so if it's the capacity that's needed, your only realistic option is the slower, cheaper drives anyway. Jst saying.
If money were no object, you wouldn't bother with drives - just boxes stuffed with battery-backed dram chips.
So just buy a few 750 gig 2.5" laptop sata2 drives - they're $150 a piece, and the 5400 rpm run cooler than the more expensive 7200 rpm. The 1TB ones are still pricey at $250, but they'll come down in price.
Doesn't matter any more - there are onty one or two manufacturers for some of the critical components (for example, the majority of heads are made by one manufacturer).
And as quality control gets better, you can expect failures of drives from different batches to fail identically, since for all practical purposes, they WILL be identical, and subject (when employed in a raid) to identical wear patterns.
Raid is quickly becoming obsolete, both due to better database partitioning schemes, larger capacity single drives, and to "too-good" quality control.
Of course they do. However, they don't typically fail simultaneously without some sort of outside influence.
I've seen plenty of hard drives fail, but I have never had 2/3 of them fail all at once. That feels like a fairly rare event to me.
The more exacting and alike two or more items are made, the more likely that they will experience near-simultaneous failure when doing the exact same task - which is the behaviour you'll see in a raid setup. Simultaneous raid failures will become not just more and more common as any two hard drives become more identical, but will eventually be the *normal* failure mode. This is the downside of better quality control - when any two parts are identical, they'll fail in identical ways.
With slightly poorer quality control, you could expect some of the "worst" drives to fail early, giving you a broader band over which failures could be spread.
Anyone using a raid a decade from now will be looked upon as a blithering idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some absolutes that we CAN be sure of. 1+1=2, not 1.234 today, and 42 tomorrow, and "CAT" the day after.
You believe otherwise, that everything is grey.
You believe you can never know anything for sure. So how do you know that you exist?
I don't need to prove that *I* exist to you, just to me. ""Je pense donc je suis", (Rene Descartes - more familiar in the latin Cogito, ergo sum, but I don't speak latin, I do speak french :-) is sufficient for me to say that "Yes, I exist." That is an absolute certainty, as opposed to what form my existence takes, which is another matter entirely. So, for myself, I can start with that as one absolute, black+white-no_shades_of_grey certainty. My knowledge of the fact that I exist is not limited or tainted - it is a foundational truth.
As for the rest - ""...the latest battle-front between religion and the masses - gays, lesbians, and transsexuals." Between what particular religions and the masses do you refer to? Unless you can elaborate you are stereotyping." - quit hiding behind that lame excuse for willfull ignorance. You know full well what I'm referring to - it's not like the statement was made in a social vacuum.
I don't profess to knowing everything - but I *do* know that god does not exist. This is another absolute truth, same as my existence. Heck, with a few axioms thrown in, I could probably prove that my existence is sufficient to disprove any gods existence - but I don't have to. The concept of god is such that any such god cannot impinge on this universe, and that's sufficient - since this is the universe we live in. After all, the chief argument is that it "needs" a "creator" - so who created god if that's the way it works (he universe doesn't need a creator, btw - that's another flawed extrapolation from common-day experience).
The pope is a troll. He's also now a copyright Nazi. I guess he needs to find new ways to make $$$ to pay off the yet another billion $$$ in child abuse claims.
Yes, because being outside the physics of this universe means that there is no possibility of interaction. If there were the possibility of interaction, then god would NOT be outside the laws of this universe.
God cannot exist in our universe. The concept of god can, but that's not the same, just as a picture of a pizza isn't the same as a pizza.
As for prayer - controlled studies showed that there was no difference in medical outcomes among believers and non-believers. Not even a placebo effect. It's a waste of energy. "Oh, but it makes them feel better." Sure, the same way that if I scam someone, they feel better because they thought they were the ones who came out ahead in the deal. Substitute religion, and it's the same deal. Sorry, but religion is a fraud and deserves to be exposed as mean-spirited and dumb.
Take a look at the latest battle-front between religion and the masses - gays, lesbians, and transsexuals. It wasn't too long ago that interracial marriage was also banned, with the enthusiastic support of religious types. Nowadays those same "religious people" spout nonsense about how gays and lesbians "choose to sin" and "shouldn't be allowed to marry like everyone else", and that transsexuals are just men in dresses when we know better.
Religion without practical effects is useless - James wrote that. Are you going to stand up and condemn religious types for treating gays, lesbians, the transgendered and transsexuals as less than equal, and for falsely, ignorantly, and hypocritically judging, condemning, and treating them as so-called "sinners"? Or is your belief hollow, of no practical effect?
Only because they decided to change the definition a century ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#Primality_of_one
I like the original definition, which is shorter and less complicated: any number evenly divisible by 1 and itself, rather than having 2 distinct divisors, 1 and itself.
I was going to add:
"so, 4 isn't prime?" ... I see the pattern now ... so 15 isn't prime, but 17 and 19 are."
"no, but 5 is, and so is 7."
"oh, I get it now - so 9 is also prime!"
"no, but ll and 13 are."
"oh
"yes."
"and 21 isn't prime, but 23 and 25 are!"
"25 isn't prime."
"you're just making ths up!"
And you missed the point that a lot of people (especially programmers) also miss - the name of the thing is not the thing. We see this fallacy every day with "object-oriented programming" and "message-passing" when, if you look under the hood, there are no objects, and no message passing.
Most things are not black and white. But, when it comes to the existence of god, it's a logical impossibility according to the rules of this universe, same as 1+1 does not equal 42. In such cases ther is no "grey area", so why sweat it?
"God" == "supernatural" == "outside of the natural laws of this universe" == "unable to be tested because it is outside the physics of this universe" == "unable to interact with this universe" == "non-existent in this universe" == "same category as Jedi Knights". There's no "grey area". If something is outside of the laws of this universe, we cannot interact with it in any shape, manner or form. Prayer, for example, is useless, and any claim to the contrary is wishful thinking.
Same as I can talk about the existence of a vacuum. Or infinity. Or zero. Or darkness. Or silence. What is "The Sound of Silence"? (aside from being a great song :-) I can say silence exists, but I can't hear it. I can say darkness exists, but I can see it. I can grasp the concept of infinity, or zero - but I can't show you "zero pieces of pie" as being different from "zero pieces of cake", but the concepts ARE different, even if they look the same on the empty dessert plate.
I know Sherlock Holmes doesn't existg, but I still enjoy reading the stories. I know the Martians don't exist, but I'm going to enjoy "The Martian Chronicles" tomorrow. I know "Firefly" and "Serenity" and a Battlestar named Galactica and Cylons and Captain James T Kirk and Mr. Spock don't exist - but I still enjoyed them as well.
"even they have grey areas" - so what? IQ has nothing to do with it - that's an "argument from authority" and should set off your BS meter ... and if we WERE to use that as qualification for pontificating on the topic, I'm no slouch in that area, but I still should have to give logical reasons for what I say.
There is no proof whatsoever of the existence of any god, and there's a lot of proof that it was made up by people, same as Sherlock Holmes or any other work of fiction. There's more proof for the existence of Gaea than there is for any god - but don't expect me to believe that either. I need real, testable proof.
All the supposedly logical arguments in favour of the existence of one or more gods can be demolished with a bit of thought. For example - "We see that everything that we make has a creator, so the universe has to have a creator as well - it's only logical" is stupid in it's illogic. It would be like saying that just because we see that everything that reproduces does so by either sex or division that cars must reproduce the same way. After all, they have "races" same as people or dogs, they can move, eat, get old and die, and they "obviously" reproduce - they don't just "come into being from inanimate materials".
You can't always assume that you can extend from one set of facts to another.
Another example.
One is prime.
Two is prime.
Three is prime.
A simple-minded observer would go - "Hey, that proves that integers are prime! 4 is prime!"
And they'd be wrong.
Religion is superstition. There is no room in my universe for god or any other superstition - just people being either mistaken or stupid on the topic. Without any proof, or even the possibility of proof, it simply is impossible according th the rules of this universe (because if it were possible to prove, it would in fact be subject to the laws of this universe - which would also mean it's not god, so the concept makes no sense in this universe whatsoever. In other words, the mere existence of god is logically clearly impossible in this universe).
Damp? When they passed the law they were totally SLOSHED! Tanked. Wasted. Loaded. Three sheets to the wind. Bombed. Blasted. Pickled. Shit-face silly. Blotto. Boiled. Hammered. Fried. Hugging-the-porelain-god dead DRUNK!
They're Irish, you ignorant clod! :-)
As an atheist, I know there is no such thing as god, just mistaken beliefs. There is no grey area in my universe, same as there is no possibility of the existence of god.
The Irish should look up the meaning of the term "blasphemy" in the original greek - "blax" (stupid) + "pheme" (speech) "stupid speech" or "stupid words". Their law is blaspehmous - it's just stupid words. To me, ALL attempts to say that there is a god fit that definition.
Knowing the Irish, they were drunk when they passed it. Let them deal with the massive hangover they've now created.
The only "blasphemy" you can commit with the Irish is to say that there's such a thing as "too much drink".
They were probably drunk when they passed it.
If you're ever charged, just say you were "under the influence" at the time ... the judge can relate to that.
Data storage gives a nice place to keep everything in sync. It's NOT just about storing any old data.
Also, it simply doesn't scale. Not with the way that individuals today are consuming gigabytes every day. It only provides a benefit if multiple users are hitting the same data sources - same as any other caching scheme - and then we again run into the problem of keeping all these edge caches in sync. It absolutely doesn't scale, and will generate substantially more network traffic than hitting a central server would - and you'd have to hit the central server anyway, to maintain data coherency.
It also assumes something that is absolutely false - that there is a *need* for this. Back when 40 megs of hd space was $500, sure ... but cheap terabyte drives remove the need for a lot of the centralized stuff - there's no reason that peer-to-peer collaborative efforts can't be better for things like two or more people working on the same project/document, or distributing files (bittorrent has certainly proven THAT), or anything else.
The nature of the problem has changed, and centralized servers will not be the future ... the cloud is just another re-working of client-server, and when all devices can talk directly to each other (hello, IPv6 where ARE YOU?) the cloud will vanish. In 2020 we'll be thinking of cloud computing the same way we though of those brick cell phones from the 80s.
IPv6, good-enough computing, wide-spread broadband, cheap storage - it's this confluence of events that is a real game-changer. Those hooked on the concept of cloud computing aren't thinking very far ahead.
[X] "I'm a Neanderthal, you ignorant clod!"
They invented agriculture, animal husbandry, art, language, fashion ("Nice furs!!!") - homo sapiens has just been building on that.
Everyone knows that un the end, they were eaten by brain-eating zombies.
It's because data storage will ALWAYS be relevant (talk to any Alzheimers' patient if you don't believe me) that access speeds are a concern.
We already know that the bios is locked down, and it only runs approved web apps. It's a welfarebook, not a netbook.
Attempting to change it will trigger a re-imaging.
Your hypothetical lightning strike (or someone unplugging something or spilling something or kicking something) is more likely to take out your single raid than to take out two machines in the above scenario, even located at the same location. Stop being childish.
One of the truisms of engineering is that you get longer between failures when you reduce the component count. That's why we went to integrated circuits - a gig of ram done in discrete components would have a mtbf that would be shorter than the boot time. Ditto for cpus.
Reduce the # of drives by buying larger drives, not by building a raid. Do your backups like you're supposed to. Use rsync, a hot-sync utility, logs, or whatever it takes to make sure your backup is reasonably up-to-date. The definition of "reasonable" depends on the application. To paraphrase Whoopie Goldberg, obviously banking db needs to be "up-to-date up-to-date", whereas a web server db just needs to be "up-to-date".
"Reasonable" means different things in different scenarios, and raid doesn't supply the answer for backups. You'll need that backup one way or another some day no matter what, because the bigger the raid, the higher your component count. It's never a question of IF you'll get into a situation where you can't recover from drive failures, but WHEN.
It's cheaper and better to just have redundant machines. We no longer need lots of cheap little hard disks to simulate one big expensive hard disk, which was the reason for raid in the first place - we have cheap large hard disks and cheap machines. The same $10k that bought a crappy desktop setup 20 years ago buys a nice box nowadays.
This way you can tolerate EVERY failure mode on a box.
Put it on two machines, duh! It should be in two separate locations anyway - power supply failures can take out multiple hard drives and your raid is then a total waste.
SLEDs - Single Large Expensive Drives (for the sizes and price ranges they were talking about) no longer exist - they've been replaced by Single WAY Much Larger Disposable Drives. For the original designers, even a gigabyte on a single 2-1/2" drive was simply way beyond their horizon back in 1988. http://www.networkcomputing.com/tapes-and-disks/raid-vs-sled---now-with-ssds.php
6 kilowatts, $112,000, for 7.5 gigs. $15,000 a gigabyte. A teraybye drive at those prices would be $15 MILLION and use 6 megawatts. You could run 1,500 homes on that. Now a terabyte will cost you less than 1/000 what a gigabyte cost then (so less than 1 millionth the cost). Their expectations didn't hold up because disks are CHEAP and disposable. Shit happens. Plan for it. Let the disks have different wear patterns instead of sticking them in a raid - it's one less complication, and makes it less likely for multiple disk failures to leave you hanging.
No - redundant boxes are the way to go. We're at the point where we should be thinking "redundant array of inexpensive computers".
So teach him assembler as a first language, and EVERYTHING else will look simple in comparison!
Seriously, start him with either the java console (system.out stuff) so he can do "Hello, world!", or start him with html+javascript.
Programming today isn't like when we were kids. In those days, you did whole applications with ONE technology and ONE package - dbase, clipper, turbo c, delphi, dbfast ...
Now? The database is decoupled from the app logic. The app logic is decoupled from the presentation, which could be a program or a web app. We wanted separation of the storage from the logic from the front end, and we're there. The kid will get more fun doing simple web pages that he can see results in right away (important to get that positive feedback going, or he'll go back to his psp or wii or xbox or whatever). html+javascript gives him that, plus you don't need anything to start except a web browser and a text editor, - not even a web server.
You should see my second entry. If you're a "geek" typo-squatter, you'll be going "WTF!?! How did someone let that lapse for almost 5 YEARS????"
RAID has uses beyond fault tolerance,
raid was not supposed to be about fault tolerance. Look at the name - redundant array of inexpensive disks. The idea was to make a bunch of cheap disks look like one big expensive disk - the "redundant" just happened to be a misnomer, because it really doesn't have a heck of a lot of redundancy with only one parity drive (or a mirror of one drive, or, worst-case - no parity in a jbod). Even a few years ago, almost 20% of all raid failures resulted in total loss of the raid because a second drive would fail during rebuilding. "Silent failures" are only detected during the rebuild, so it doesn't matter how much you mix drives by manufacturer and batch and age - your risks of a total loss increase with individual disk size.
How about this one - a lot of people using raid with drives over 1tb next year are going to lose all their data when they try to recover.
raid is not a backup, but people take the "redundant" part and think - "I can recover from a failure" when in many cases that's simply not true, especially if it's a controller failure and the company is no longer in business (case in point - 6-drive raid, 2 sets of parity data, one drive failed, then a bit later another drive + the controller died pretty much simultaneously, after years of flawless performance. Total loss. So much for the "hardware raid is better" crowd).
Large disks are incredibly cheap compared to historic prices. Keep multiple backups on a couple of machines instead of a raid.
Great phrase.
Our family has always had dogs (and a few dog-wolf mixes), and the range of personality traits, and what you can learn about "people behaviour" just by applying your observations from dogs, is amazing. At what point do we stop saying "it's instinct" (in dogs OR humans) when the objective behaviour and outcome are the same?
Of course they're scarce. In the meantime ... buy the cheap stuff. It's not like 15k drives are 3x as fast, since the drive is only part of the equation, so if it's the capacity that's needed, your only realistic option is the slower, cheaper drives anyway. Jst saying.
If money were no object, you wouldn't bother with drives - just boxes stuffed with battery-backed dram chips.
So just buy a few 750 gig 2.5" laptop sata2 drives - they're $150 a piece, and the 5400 rpm run cooler than the more expensive 7200 rpm. The 1TB ones are still pricey at $250, but they'll come down in price.
No scientist has been doing this for millions of years, on the scale of a planet. Do the math ... it IS inevitable.
Doesn't matter any more - there are onty one or two manufacturers for some of the critical components (for example, the majority of heads are made by one manufacturer).
And as quality control gets better, you can expect failures of drives from different batches to fail identically, since for all practical purposes, they WILL be identical, and subject (when employed in a raid) to identical wear patterns.
Raid is quickly becoming obsolete, both due to better database partitioning schemes, larger capacity single drives, and to "too-good" quality control.
The more exacting and alike two or more items are made, the more likely that they will experience near-simultaneous failure when doing the exact same task - which is the behaviour you'll see in a raid setup. Simultaneous raid failures will become not just more and more common as any two hard drives become more identical, but will eventually be the *normal* failure mode. This is the downside of better quality control - when any two parts are identical, they'll fail in identical ways.
With slightly poorer quality control, you could expect some of the "worst" drives to fail early, giving you a broader band over which failures could be spread.
Anyone using a raid a decade from now will be looked upon as a blithering idiot.