I'm fairly sure it was already banned in concept, just like text messaging for motor vehicles.
You are not allowed to operate a motor vehicle while distracted. Reading and sending texts is a distraction. No new laws were required, the existing laws simply needed to be applied.
The same applied to aircraft, known as the Sterile Cockpit rule. It explicitly stated activities under 10k feet, but other rules apply, and any pilot would know that they are in control of their aircraft and must maintain the safety and security of their aircraft.
Title 14: Aeronautics and Space PART 91--GENERAL OPERATING AND FLIGHT RULES
91.13 Careless or reckless operation.
(a) Aircraft operations for the purpose of air navigation. No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.
(b) Aircraft operations other than for the purpose of air navigation. No person may operate an aircraft, other than for the purpose of air navigation, on any part of the surface of an airport used by aircraft for air commerce (including areas used by those aircraft for receiving or discharging persons or cargo), in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.
So, if the flight crew are playing with their laptops, and not listening to ATC, nor paying attention to their flight, they are in violation. There's no need for extra rules, other than to make it abundantly clear that they are suppose to be flying the plane.
That won't happen. Lawyers are paid by clients to argue either side of any case.
At just about any hearing, there's two lawyers (or two legal teams) who are both arguing that they are right. They both know there is only one right side, yet they'll still fight for the side that is paying them.
If you disbarred every lawyer for fighting for the wrong side, you'd end up disbarring every lawyer. Being a lawyer isn't about truth, it's about money.
Well, it's kind of like the manual that comes with your car. Everyone has one, but no one reads it until they're broken down on the side of the road. Much like Slashdot, it's not very useful except to tell you stuff that you already knew.:)
Lots of places never want to upgrade once they have something that works.
A few years ago, I had a neighboring company come over with a VHS tape from their security camera, and the police. They asked me to burn some of the footage off to DVD.:) The police didn't have anything to play VHS with any more. He was just there to confirm the chain of custody. Our video guy still had his VHS equipment, but hadn't actually used it in years. It took about an hour, but we got them taken care of. I have no idea what the crime was. They just wanted the guys face as he walked by the camera.
As far as I know, they're still using the same security equipment. Occasionally, I see the same type of stuff in other places. When I ask "why are you using that ancient stuff?", they always tell me it's because it still works.
I was fixing a machine for someone, and the damned drivers came as an exe that wanted to write to a floppy disk instead of just unzipping. The machine didn't have a floppy drive. I went on a hunt for a floppy drive, and found one in another machine that was long since forgotten about in a storage room. When I finally opened the case, there wasn't even a place to plug the floppy in.
A little black magic later (like you said), and it was happy.
Someone brought a machine to me a couple hours ago and asked if I wanted any parts from it, before they threw it away. Everything was caked with dust. It did have a floppy drive, but I left it with the machine. I yanked the few useful parts from it (10/100 PCI network card, two old CDRom's, CPU and a really tall heatsink for it's AMD K6-2/350. If anyone wants an old CPU, I'll be more than happy to stuff it in an envelope and mail it off.:)
I'm jealous, but so far no one has posted that they get the speeds that the previous poster claimed (1Gb/s to the residence).
The only time I had access to 1Gb/s was when I worked for a large hosting provider. I'd attach my laptop directly to the switch, but the laptop only had a 100Mb/s port. I'd watch my utilization (we monitored all ports, including the one left for my laptop), and it was pretty rare for me to reach high bandwidth utilization.
Really, I can see it as affordable for providers to offer these high speeds, as they know they will rarely be utilized. Providers oversell bandwidth all the time. Offering 100Mb/s can frequently mean that they've given 10,000 customers 100Mb/s on their GigE circuit, and even still they won't reach 80% utilization on it. If you've ever monitored an office switch, you'll see people in the office have occasional peaks, but the overall curve is pretty tame across the work day. So as to not annoy the other office folks, if I needed ISO's, I'd start their downloads at the end of the work day after everyone left, and I could see my spike when I looked in the morning. That kind of monitoring is useful to catch office folks who have viruses on their machines. I'd walk to their desk and ask "are you uploading something?" When they say no, we'd start looking for malware.
Ahhh, someone actually remembered the previous story. That's why I said it.
In reality, we already have a look into quite a few homes. Look at all the places people post pictures of themselves at.
Some people are kind enough to put wireless web cams in, on unsecured wireless networks. You can simply park in front of their house, and see inside. Some people use wireless cameras which simply broadcast out the signal if you have the appropriate receiver. Google Maps is nice enough to have a webcam overlay to see webcams in an area.
The 1984 idea of big brother watching through the television isn't really that far off. Big Brother already knows what you're watching through your smart set top box. They already know your recording preferences through your DVR. I'd be willing to bet a good bit of profiling can be done through that information. Does the target watch a lot of "true crime" shows? Either he's interested in watching bad guys get caught, or interested in the methods to avoid detection.
People frequently forget about all those pesky middle parts.
Trees are harvested. They're transported to the location making the paper. It's packaged and distributed to various tiers of warehouses. It's then distributed to retail outlets, and then to the point of use. From there, it's distributed to waste or recycling centers, or specialized centers for proper destruction. I'd be willing to bet the carbon footprint for the transportation is higher than the trees themselves that are used in the process.
Someone had a good point. The carbon is sequestered, assuming the paper is kept. Most places have more paper going in the trash than they do staying in long term storage.
When I was a kid, my parents took about 10 acres of empty land and planted trees on them. It consumed a good bit of time and fuel. Try planting rows upon rows of trees, and you'll find it's not a job to be done by hand. My dad passed away and my mom eventually moved. Google Maps satellite view showed the land to still be full of trees, but the street view (more recent) showed it to have been clear cut for other purposes. I'd guess by the person who bought the house (at least two owners later who renovated it) to sell the entire property as a horse farm. Dense trees don't make for good grazing land for livestock.
Well, I wouldn't say illegal, but it can be downright unhealthy. I've never been on the unhealthy side of a taser, CS gas, nor pepper spray, but I've experienced them as parts of various trainings. Well, only the direct contact stun gun, not the projectile version. None were very pleasant.
I don't particularly like the idea of spending extensive time with a LEO where they're trying to find any reason to take me in. "Have you been drinking" is never best responded with "I haven't, but you sure look drunk."
That's the difference between what law enforcement says, and what the real law says. When a uniformed DHS officer is standing in front of you saying that you're endangering national security you have two choices. You can say "Sorry sir, I won't take any pictures and I will be leaving now.", or you can argue the point, end up in handcuffs and be taken away to jail so your lawyer can (hopefully) argue that there was nothing illegal about doing it. When the representative of the government says "It was for national security issues, which cannot be discussed without everyone having the necessary security clearance, and even then it's on a need to know basis. I therefore cannot disclose the reasons for it. Suffice it to say he was intentionally endangering national security."
We all have to know when is a good time to fight, and when is a time to gracefully step away from a freedom endangering situation. I'm sure there will be better incidents to fight against. In my situation, since there were no witnesses other than myself, a friend, DHS and SO, if I disappeared under the guise of national security, no one would ever know where I went or why.
They wouldn't use nuclear power. They have Naquadah generators. Small, powerful, and if you overload it, strong enough to level a city. Oh, what they would do to Beijing.
... did you happen to notice that there was a police car following the Google car? It was both Big Brother *AND* Google. Road blocks or no road blocks, Google is coming in with a police escort.
Coming soon: Google House View - See the inside of every house.
That's easy. Everyone knows Big Brother is there for their own protection. He sees all to make sure we're safe. we all trust Big Brother to protect us. Well, unless Big Brother sees we did something he didn't like, then there's nowhere to hide.
Google, on the other hand, is just invading our privacy by taking pictures.
Photography is illegal, or so I was told when I was taking photographs from a public road. It's amazing how quick you can get the sheriffs department and Homeland Security on you for just having a camera in the wrong place. Apparently you can request a photography pass, but you have to apply for it in advance, and the request won't be granted.
Now I've opted for photography with a DSLR mounted on a telescope. It's obvious when I'm taking photos from 100 feet away, but less obvious when I'm taking the same photo from a few miles away.:)
Consider that it's vehicle based, and they drive an awful lot. To get that much shooting done, they're using a belt fed gun. Magazines are for portability. Belts are for throwing lots of ammunition down range.:)
Ok, I agree with that. If I'm drunk I'm going to call it a toy.;)
I understand the change thing. People generally like bigger better things, but they don't deal well with change. But along those lines, I've known people who keep using the same computer til it dies, even though it's ancient. Why? Because they're afraid to even get a new computer.
And to add a car analogy..:) A long time ago, I used to spend a good amount of time at an auto repair shop. On occasion people would come in with an old beat up broken car that should have been retired a decade before. They'd be presented with an estimate that was more than the car was worth and would be a very hefty down payment on a new car. One of them once said, "I know what's wrong with this car. I don't know what would be wrong with another car I bought." So, instead of taking several thousand dollars and buying a good used car, they'd spend it on their old piece of junk.
My ex-wife had a small import SUV, with a book value of $2,800. The transmission went out in it. That transmission was only used in that model, for one model year. It cost just about $4,000 to have the transmission rebuilt. I told her that we could sell this one as junk, and buy a newer one that looked and worked better for the cost of the transmission. I lost, and it got fixed.
The same has applied to computers. After Win2k and WinXP came out, I found a lot of people still using Win95 or Win98. There was basically no resale value on their computers because they were so old. Even when told that the hard drive was toast, the CD ROM didn't work, and it didn't have enough memory to run anything remotely recent, they'd insist that they wouldn't change.
No, the proper term is buzz word driven sales. Apple has done pretty well there. People need their iMac, iPod, iPhone, and now iPad. All the cool kids have it, so why don't you too?
I used someone's iPhone, and was generally annoyed with it. I haven't had a chance to play with an iPad yet, but I suspect it'll be like all of the other Apple products I've used since my Apple IIe. It's pretty to look at, but I'll still call my PC based Linux/Windows machine a computer. (I either have one of each or dual boot).
I was kind of stunned that at one place I worked, they bought several of the x86 Mac's, and went straight out and got their dual boot toy ("bootcamp", if I remember correctly), and used it as a Windows machine. No one could satisfactorily answer the question "Why did you spend more on that than a x86 Windows PC?" If you're going to buy an Apple to use an Apple, why would you make it run like an orange?
I saw that in the summary and had to laugh. But you're right, we see these planets as blobs in the sky. The closest we've been to checking the surface has been Mars, and the square footage of the surface that we've actually seen isn't enough to eliminate the possibility of cows.:)
Then again, if a rover went around a rock and found a cow, someone's going to have a cow.
Ahh, if only I worked for NASA. Inject some footage of a cow grazing into the incoming feed, and people would be freaking out. Well, just until I lost my job there. Maybe that's why NASA won't let me work for them.:) It's probably similar to my idea to set up an AWACS plane with Chrismas lights around the dish and have it fly over roads in the middle of nowhere just to get the phones ringing off the hook about UFO sightings.
PCIe 1.0, released in 2004, could only push 250Mb/s.
PCIe 2.0 x1 lanes, released in 2007, could push 500Mb/s per lane. The x16 lanes were reserved for graphics. The spec does have provisions for a x32 lane which can handle 16Gb/s aggregate.
PCIe 3.0 was announced in 2007, but the final spec isn't due until second quarter of 2010 (like, real soon). It should double the PCIe 2.0 spec.
These were specification release dates, not when the actual hardware was available. I stopped working there in 2006, so the maximum throughput we could have hoped to accomplish was 250Mb/s.
Looking at CDW's site for PCIe cards, the affordable ones are x1. They have more expensive ones. The cheapest is a $200 x4 card with two ports. I don't know if that's 2 lanes per port, or if they're aggregated and then divided. That should happily accomplish 1Gb/s per port. The question then becomes, do you have any other bottlenecks that would hinder your performance.
Most likely, if your machine says "GigE", the most you can push through is 250Mb/s. Check your specs and you'll have a better idea. Just because it says "GigE" doesn't mean it can do "GigE". It will at very least exceed the ability of a 100baseTX card.
I don't recall any Cisco products using Intel x86 processors, except for the original Cisco PIX ("classic") in the 4u chassis. We had a Cisco PIX 10000, which had a Pentium Pro in it, and barfed when we upgraded our fractional T3 to full line speed. It got replaced with an x86 box running Slackware, which took it like a champ.:) It didn't fail because of the throughput speed, it failed because of the PPS rate we needed to accomplish.
Well, 700Mb/s wouldn't have done it, since we would have sometimes reached over 900Mb/s if we had other datacenter failures. We ran out of at least 3 at the time, and our networks were segmented within those for each GigE line, but still it could happen. We planned growth for when we reached 80% of a line under normal conditions, leaving room for disaster situations which would increase our utilization beyond normal.
I wish I was still there, so I could play with it more with modern hardware and find its limitations. It's just not the same doing it at home with generated traffic. Real world traffic is always different. Even in our test rigs, we could come close to real world situations, but throwing it up into the real world showed all the weird stuff that could happen.
When you tested your traffic, were you just doing large files, or small ones? You'll find many small connections are a lot harder to manage than a few large ones. Downloading a few dozen ISO's is nothing compared to thousands of people grabbing web pages and images smaller than 100k.
For those that don't know, the big Cisco Catalysts need at least one "Supervisor" card to run things. Two is preferred so it will have a hot spare. Then you have to add in cards for the interfaces that you want. You can get line cards to do just about anything you want. If you want GigE to each port, you have to (obviously) get GigE line cards, and a supervisor that can support it and the expected pps rates.
The biggest one I set up was a 13 slot Catalyst 5000, with 360 Ethernet ports (about 180 100baseTX, and 180 10baseTX for a specific application), and two supervisors. If the machines could saturate the port, it wouldn't hurt anything except the other port that it was sending to/from. That was a large office configuration with the switch being in their internal use server room. I would have some fun flooding one desktop from several others (20Mb/s from 6 machines would do it). I never managed to make any significant load on that switch, which was a definite improvement from the chaos of small consumer grade switches that it replaced.
I will say it takes a good bit of planning so you don't get confused on what is attached to each port.:)
I'm a little behind on the way they're doing it, but the way it was just a few years ago was this....
If you were in the datacenter, they gave you eithernet, either attached to a FastEthernet port of a GigE interface. Some of them were gearing up for 10GigE interfaces, but when I was purchasing we were still limited to buying multiple GigE interfaces.
Bringing connectivity out of a datacenter, we'd buy T1/DS1 circuits for 1.544Mb/s or less. For 3Mb/s you'd buy two T1's and bind them. Above that you'd buy a T3/DS3 and they'd provision it for the fraction. For example, a place I worked years ago had a 4Mb/s circuit, which was a fractional T3.
I don't know that anyone provides 100Mb/s over fiber as a commercial line. They'd usually do like an OC3. More recently I know they've done GigE fiber with 1000baseLX/LH for up to 10Km, and 1000baseZX for up to 70km. I'd never heard of anyone getting a GigE loop over about 15 miles (about 25km).
It was definitely cheaper to keep our servers in the datacenters, and avoided all kinds of pesky problems like local loops, maintaining reliable power at our site, etc, etc. We'd maintain minimal servers at our locations, and let the datacenters do the real work.
Well, now that "we" and "our" stuff is irrelevant, since I'm not working. Now it's all "they", and the "I" part of it does little things for friends from home.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of reminds me of the coloring book scene in Air America. :)
I'm fairly sure it was already banned in concept, just like text messaging for motor vehicles.
You are not allowed to operate a motor vehicle while distracted. Reading and sending texts is a distraction. No new laws were required, the existing laws simply needed to be applied.
The same applied to aircraft, known as the Sterile Cockpit rule. It explicitly stated activities under 10k feet, but other rules apply, and any pilot would know that they are in control of their aircraft and must maintain the safety and security of their aircraft.
So, if the flight crew are playing with their laptops, and not listening to ATC, nor paying attention to their flight, they are in violation. There's no need for extra rules, other than to make it abundantly clear that they are suppose to be flying the plane.
That won't happen. Lawyers are paid by clients to argue either side of any case.
At just about any hearing, there's two lawyers (or two legal teams) who are both arguing that they are right. They both know there is only one right side, yet they'll still fight for the side that is paying them.
If you disbarred every lawyer for fighting for the wrong side, you'd end up disbarring every lawyer. Being a lawyer isn't about truth, it's about money.
How about a company named for a giant fireball. Oh wait, that's Sun. :)
Well, it's kind of like the manual that comes with your car. Everyone has one, but no one reads it until they're broken down on the side of the road. Much like Slashdot, it's not very useful except to tell you stuff that you already knew. :)
Lots of places never want to upgrade once they have something that works.
A few years ago, I had a neighboring company come over with a VHS tape from their security camera, and the police. They asked me to burn some of the footage off to DVD. :) The police didn't have anything to play VHS with any more. He was just there to confirm the chain of custody. Our video guy still had his VHS equipment, but hadn't actually used it in years. It took about an hour, but we got them taken care of. I have no idea what the crime was. They just wanted the guys face as he walked by the camera.
As far as I know, they're still using the same security equipment. Occasionally, I see the same type of stuff in other places. When I ask "why are you using that ancient stuff?", they always tell me it's because it still works.
I was fixing a machine for someone, and the damned drivers came as an exe that wanted to write to a floppy disk instead of just unzipping. The machine didn't have a floppy drive. I went on a hunt for a floppy drive, and found one in another machine that was long since forgotten about in a storage room. When I finally opened the case, there wasn't even a place to plug the floppy in.
A little black magic later (like you said), and it was happy.
Someone brought a machine to me a couple hours ago and asked if I wanted any parts from it, before they threw it away. Everything was caked with dust. It did have a floppy drive, but I left it with the machine. I yanked the few useful parts from it (10/100 PCI network card, two old CDRom's, CPU and a really tall heatsink for it's AMD K6-2/350. If anyone wants an old CPU, I'll be more than happy to stuff it in an envelope and mail it off. :)
Hmmm.. Ya, that'd do it too. :)
I'm jealous, but so far no one has posted that they get the speeds that the previous poster claimed (1Gb/s to the residence).
The only time I had access to 1Gb/s was when I worked for a large hosting provider. I'd attach my laptop directly to the switch, but the laptop only had a 100Mb/s port. I'd watch my utilization (we monitored all ports, including the one left for my laptop), and it was pretty rare for me to reach high bandwidth utilization.
Really, I can see it as affordable for providers to offer these high speeds, as they know they will rarely be utilized. Providers oversell bandwidth all the time. Offering 100Mb/s can frequently mean that they've given 10,000 customers 100Mb/s on their GigE circuit, and even still they won't reach 80% utilization on it. If you've ever monitored an office switch, you'll see people in the office have occasional peaks, but the overall curve is pretty tame across the work day. So as to not annoy the other office folks, if I needed ISO's, I'd start their downloads at the end of the work day after everyone left, and I could see my spike when I looked in the morning. That kind of monitoring is useful to catch office folks who have viruses on their machines. I'd walk to their desk and ask "are you uploading something?" When they say no, we'd start looking for malware.
Ahhh, someone actually remembered the previous story. That's why I said it.
In reality, we already have a look into quite a few homes. Look at all the places people post pictures of themselves at.
Some people are kind enough to put wireless web cams in, on unsecured wireless networks. You can simply park in front of their house, and see inside. Some people use wireless cameras which simply broadcast out the signal if you have the appropriate receiver. Google Maps is nice enough to have a webcam overlay to see webcams in an area.
The 1984 idea of big brother watching through the television isn't really that far off. Big Brother already knows what you're watching through your smart set top box. They already know your recording preferences through your DVR. I'd be willing to bet a good bit of profiling can be done through that information. Does the target watch a lot of "true crime" shows? Either he's interested in watching bad guys get caught, or interested in the methods to avoid detection.
People frequently forget about all those pesky middle parts.
Trees are harvested. They're transported to the location making the paper. It's packaged and distributed to various tiers of warehouses. It's then distributed to retail outlets, and then to the point of use. From there, it's distributed to waste or recycling centers, or specialized centers for proper destruction. I'd be willing to bet the carbon footprint for the transportation is higher than the trees themselves that are used in the process.
Someone had a good point. The carbon is sequestered, assuming the paper is kept. Most places have more paper going in the trash than they do staying in long term storage.
When I was a kid, my parents took about 10 acres of empty land and planted trees on them. It consumed a good bit of time and fuel. Try planting rows upon rows of trees, and you'll find it's not a job to be done by hand. My dad passed away and my mom eventually moved. Google Maps satellite view showed the land to still be full of trees, but the street view (more recent) showed it to have been clear cut for other purposes. I'd guess by the person who bought the house (at least two owners later who renovated it) to sell the entire property as a horse farm. Dense trees don't make for good grazing land for livestock.
Well, I wouldn't say illegal, but it can be downright unhealthy. I've never been on the unhealthy side of a taser, CS gas, nor pepper spray, but I've experienced them as parts of various trainings. Well, only the direct contact stun gun, not the projectile version. None were very pleasant.
I don't particularly like the idea of spending extensive time with a LEO where they're trying to find any reason to take me in. "Have you been drinking" is never best responded with "I haven't, but you sure look drunk."
That's the difference between what law enforcement says, and what the real law says. When a uniformed DHS officer is standing in front of you saying that you're endangering national security you have two choices. You can say "Sorry sir, I won't take any pictures and I will be leaving now.", or you can argue the point, end up in handcuffs and be taken away to jail so your lawyer can (hopefully) argue that there was nothing illegal about doing it. When the representative of the government says "It was for national security issues, which cannot be discussed without everyone having the necessary security clearance, and even then it's on a need to know basis. I therefore cannot disclose the reasons for it. Suffice it to say he was intentionally endangering national security."
We all have to know when is a good time to fight, and when is a time to gracefully step away from a freedom endangering situation. I'm sure there will be better incidents to fight against. In my situation, since there were no witnesses other than myself, a friend, DHS and SO, if I disappeared under the guise of national security, no one would ever know where I went or why.
If you're interested, these are the photos that weren't shot.
Why do I hear silent black helicopters over my house, and what's that black van doing parked out front?
That's a strong justification for government mandated gun control. Every bullet should hit its target. The people need to be trained better.
They wouldn't use nuclear power. They have Naquadah generators. Small, powerful, and if you overload it, strong enough to level a city. Oh, what they would do to Beijing.
Coming soon: Google House View - See the inside of every house.
That's easy. Everyone knows Big Brother is there for their own protection. He sees all to make sure we're safe. we all trust Big Brother to protect us. Well, unless Big Brother sees we did something he didn't like, then there's nowhere to hide.
Google, on the other hand, is just invading our privacy by taking pictures.
Photography is illegal, or so I was told when I was taking photographs from a public road. It's amazing how quick you can get the sheriffs department and Homeland Security on you for just having a camera in the wrong place. Apparently you can request a photography pass, but you have to apply for it in advance, and the request won't be granted.
Now I've opted for photography with a DSLR mounted on a telescope. It's obvious when I'm taking photos from 100 feet away, but less obvious when I'm taking the same photo from a few miles away. :)
Consider that it's vehicle based, and they drive an awful lot. To get that much shooting done, they're using a belt fed gun. Magazines are for portability. Belts are for throwing lots of ammunition down range. :)
Ok, I agree with that. If I'm drunk I'm going to call it a toy. ;)
I understand the change thing. People generally like bigger better things, but they don't deal well with change. But along those lines, I've known people who keep using the same computer til it dies, even though it's ancient. Why? Because they're afraid to even get a new computer.
And to add a car analogy.. :) A long time ago, I used to spend a good amount of time at an auto repair shop. On occasion people would come in with an old beat up broken car that should have been retired a decade before. They'd be presented with an estimate that was more than the car was worth and would be a very hefty down payment on a new car. One of them once said, "I know what's wrong with this car. I don't know what would be wrong with another car I bought." So, instead of taking several thousand dollars and buying a good used car, they'd spend it on their old piece of junk.
My ex-wife had a small import SUV, with a book value of $2,800. The transmission went out in it. That transmission was only used in that model, for one model year. It cost just about $4,000 to have the transmission rebuilt. I told her that we could sell this one as junk, and buy a newer one that looked and worked better for the cost of the transmission. I lost, and it got fixed.
The same has applied to computers. After Win2k and WinXP came out, I found a lot of people still using Win95 or Win98. There was basically no resale value on their computers because they were so old. Even when told that the hard drive was toast, the CD ROM didn't work, and it didn't have enough memory to run anything remotely recent, they'd insist that they wouldn't change.
No, the proper term is buzz word driven sales. Apple has done pretty well there. People need their iMac, iPod, iPhone, and now iPad. All the cool kids have it, so why don't you too?
I used someone's iPhone, and was generally annoyed with it. I haven't had a chance to play with an iPad yet, but I suspect it'll be like all of the other Apple products I've used since my Apple IIe. It's pretty to look at, but I'll still call my PC based Linux/Windows machine a computer. (I either have one of each or dual boot).
I was kind of stunned that at one place I worked, they bought several of the x86 Mac's, and went straight out and got their dual boot toy ("bootcamp", if I remember correctly), and used it as a Windows machine. No one could satisfactorily answer the question "Why did you spend more on that than a x86 Windows PC?" If you're going to buy an Apple to use an Apple, why would you make it run like an orange?
I saw that in the summary and had to laugh. But you're right, we see these planets as blobs in the sky. The closest we've been to checking the surface has been Mars, and the square footage of the surface that we've actually seen isn't enough to eliminate the possibility of cows. :)
Then again, if a rover went around a rock and found a cow, someone's going to have a cow.
Ahh, if only I worked for NASA. Inject some footage of a cow grazing into the incoming feed, and people would be freaking out. Well, just until I lost my job there. Maybe that's why NASA won't let me work for them. :) It's probably similar to my idea to set up an AWACS plane with Chrismas lights around the dish and have it fly over roads in the middle of nowhere just to get the phones ringing off the hook about UFO sightings.
PCIe 1.0, released in 2004, could only push 250Mb/s.
PCIe 2.0 x1 lanes, released in 2007, could push 500Mb/s per lane. The x16 lanes were reserved for graphics. The spec does have provisions for a x32 lane which can handle 16Gb/s aggregate.
PCIe 3.0 was announced in 2007, but the final spec isn't due until second quarter of 2010 (like, real soon). It should double the PCIe 2.0 spec.
These were specification release dates, not when the actual hardware was available. I stopped working there in 2006, so the maximum throughput we could have hoped to accomplish was 250Mb/s.
Looking at CDW's site for PCIe cards, the affordable ones are x1. They have more expensive ones. The cheapest is a $200 x4 card with two ports. I don't know if that's 2 lanes per port, or if they're aggregated and then divided. That should happily accomplish 1Gb/s per port. The question then becomes, do you have any other bottlenecks that would hinder your performance.
Most likely, if your machine says "GigE", the most you can push through is 250Mb/s. Check your specs and you'll have a better idea. Just because it says "GigE" doesn't mean it can do "GigE". It will at very least exceed the ability of a 100baseTX card.
I don't recall any Cisco products using Intel x86 processors, except for the original Cisco PIX ("classic") in the 4u chassis. We had a Cisco PIX 10000, which had a Pentium Pro in it, and barfed when we upgraded our fractional T3 to full line speed. It got replaced with an x86 box running Slackware, which took it like a champ. :) It didn't fail because of the throughput speed, it failed because of the PPS rate we needed to accomplish.
Well, 700Mb/s wouldn't have done it, since we would have sometimes reached over 900Mb/s if we had other datacenter failures. We ran out of at least 3 at the time, and our networks were segmented within those for each GigE line, but still it could happen. We planned growth for when we reached 80% of a line under normal conditions, leaving room for disaster situations which would increase our utilization beyond normal.
I wish I was still there, so I could play with it more with modern hardware and find its limitations. It's just not the same doing it at home with generated traffic. Real world traffic is always different. Even in our test rigs, we could come close to real world situations, but throwing it up into the real world showed all the weird stuff that could happen.
When you tested your traffic, were you just doing large files, or small ones? You'll find many small connections are a lot harder to manage than a few large ones. Downloading a few dozen ISO's is nothing compared to thousands of people grabbing web pages and images smaller than 100k.
Ya, I left out planning of components. :)
For those that don't know, the big Cisco Catalysts need at least one "Supervisor" card to run things. Two is preferred so it will have a hot spare. Then you have to add in cards for the interfaces that you want. You can get line cards to do just about anything you want. If you want GigE to each port, you have to (obviously) get GigE line cards, and a supervisor that can support it and the expected pps rates.
The biggest one I set up was a 13 slot Catalyst 5000, with 360 Ethernet ports (about 180 100baseTX, and 180 10baseTX for a specific application), and two supervisors. If the machines could saturate the port, it wouldn't hurt anything except the other port that it was sending to/from. That was a large office configuration with the switch being in their internal use server room. I would have some fun flooding one desktop from several others (20Mb/s from 6 machines would do it). I never managed to make any significant load on that switch, which was a definite improvement from the chaos of small consumer grade switches that it replaced.
I will say it takes a good bit of planning so you don't get confused on what is attached to each port. :)
I'm a little behind on the way they're doing it, but the way it was just a few years ago was this....
If you were in the datacenter, they gave you eithernet, either attached to a FastEthernet port of a GigE interface. Some of them were gearing up for 10GigE interfaces, but when I was purchasing we were still limited to buying multiple GigE interfaces.
Bringing connectivity out of a datacenter, we'd buy T1/DS1 circuits for 1.544Mb/s or less. For 3Mb/s you'd buy two T1's and bind them. Above that you'd buy a T3/DS3 and they'd provision it for the fraction. For example, a place I worked years ago had a 4Mb/s circuit, which was a fractional T3.
I don't know that anyone provides 100Mb/s over fiber as a commercial line. They'd usually do like an OC3. More recently I know they've done GigE fiber with 1000baseLX/LH for up to 10Km, and 1000baseZX for up to 70km. I'd never heard of anyone getting a GigE loop over about 15 miles (about 25km).
It was definitely cheaper to keep our servers in the datacenters, and avoided all kinds of pesky problems like local loops, maintaining reliable power at our site, etc, etc. We'd maintain minimal servers at our locations, and let the datacenters do the real work.
Well, now that "we" and "our" stuff is irrelevant, since I'm not working. Now it's all "they", and the "I" part of it does little things for friends from home.