I was at the event last night with Woz, and I can say this is more about skill sets in developing technology that just "teaching people to write code" The focus is more on innovation and engineering, building folks with the skills to do jobs that may not even exist yet. If all you are doing is learning to code, then yes, you will be supplanted by someone who can code cheaper... You must differentiate yourself from the pack if you wish to be seen as more valued than the next person. Personally I think it will be great if this is successful as there is a dearth of skilled folks to work on cutting edge projects.
The bigger question is, is it still your data in the cloud? If you miss a bill payment will you be able to access it? If the cloud owner doesn't pay the telecom provider or the data center will you be able to access it? What if they file for bankruptcy? Or have their servers repossessed? How ironclad is that contract? They may have oodles of security but is that really what you would base your business decision on? Just some things to think about...
That will get me to cancel my subscription, I don't need to watch most of the crap on there anyway and I gladly pay other services to NOT have to endure advertisements, we are constantly bombarded enough so any escape is good!
Agreed, just do the metrics of what it costs to run your workload on Amazon, when the Amazon price becomes cheaper then look for another job... This is the way it will go as IT infrastructure is a utility, nothing more. Now if you are doing specialized IT (HPC, healthcare, R&D) that can't be easily moved to the "cloud" it will be staved off a few more years, but in the end I would expect 90%+ of all computing to be done at large data centers that sell cycles... After all it is the bean counters who tend to run everything and unless there is competitive advantage to doing it yourself then why would you want to?
Can you send some of these well experienced 20 year olds over to me? I don't know if I would be willing to bet the security and integrity of my company's data on somebody who ran the servers for LAN parties in the dorms.... There is a big difference between someone who can install and run these apps and someone who can do so in a safe, secure, repeatable manner. If you don't care about things like PCI, HIPPA or SOX then no problem, the minute you are held accountable for what is happening in the IT environment I suspect the calculus changes dramatically. Cowboys and script kiddies need not apply...
Well for one thing, once it has been "applefied" it will be safe and warm and fuzzy, not scary like those crazy open source things or locked down in a corporate way like those evil microsoft things.. Taste the soylent green... mmmmmm.....
Aspera actually works quite well for transferring large data-sets such as these, it can fully saturate a 100Mb internet connection without a problem, it is only limited by connectivity and disk speed, and not troubled by things such as latency as opposed to TCP based transfer tools.
Reviews for this sort of equipment are pretty much meaningless. I might buy a 16-way server to run Oracle, you might buy the same system to run large scale data analysis. PCs are easy to review and evaluate, they are commodity; can be used for any of multiple purposes. When I buy a large SMP system, I am buying it for a specific purpose, and the chances are it will never be re-purposed. So before spending uberbucks on a system I want to talk to the vendors other customers who are running similar workloads on the same tin. If the vendor gives me a long list of folks who use their systems for similar applications that is usually a good sign, if they can't then I move on.
Large scale SMP systems require a slightly different mentallity than PC systems, as anyone who has managed a P690 or E10k will attest. You expect performance, you expect reliablity, you expect service, and for what you pay you better get it!
I think with the release of the new IBM Power 720 line it is clear that they are gunning full steam for Intel with the power architecture. IBM is making it clear that they see the future of the Power as being quite lucrative for them, and they do have a compelling story to tell about how the basic Power architecture is seen from embedded devices to the high-end SMP machines. Intel is still trapped in a 32 bit world, the Itanium is just about DOA, and the new Xeon EMT is a kludged answer to similar AMD offerings. The choice right now is easy, if you want 32-bit and have NO plans to migrate to 64, then Intel is still a good choice, however if you have ANY desire to move to a 64-bit architecture then AMD or IBM is the way to go.
This is an insightful comment, I look at my kids and their love for video games, however my wife and I carefully monitor the content of the games they play. I like to play some violent games, but don't allow my kids to. It comes down to being a responsible parent, not letting your 10 year old play GTA for example. As for obesity, kids are encouraged to stay home, I know I don't feel comfortable letting my 8 year old daughter outdoors on her own, you read about some sickos picking up kids all of the time, and yes in my nice quiet suburban neighborhood! So as a parent I feel more secure knowing where she is and being protective. I don't think the game industry is to blame for violent acts, I mean the Vikings certainaly could be considered violent, and I don't think that they had video games back then! On the other hand the comment that the games reflect culture I would have to agree with. Look at what the media focuses on, murder, mayhem, war, so of course that is what our attention spans (short as they are) are drawn to. So to conclude, video games are not bad, people are bad, and people are influenced by popular media... no huge revelation here.. move along please!
The IPod interfaces well with the Mac, I have used both versions, and iTunes on the Mac is much faster and more consistant with MacOSX. I still have an x86 machine for running windows, but my most of my work is done on my Powerbook. Once you have tried the Mac it is hard to go back to the Windows box.. So from personal experience, I believe this could be true.
But you forget IBM, who at the moment, has the most compelling UNIX hardware out there, SUN used to be the leader, HP was catching up (But I think the Itanium dooms their commercial UNIX) Now I believe that IBM is king of the hill.. As for Sun selling Opteron boxes.. I don't think the margins on those are as good as for the IBM Pseries boxen..:-)
Since I administer a fairly large cluster, I can say that the answer is "It depends" (Of course that is ALWAYS the answer!). It depends on the codes being run, it depends upon the interconnect optimization.(yes myrinet is fast, but the real key is that it has much lower latency and this has to be engineered carefully if using more than one switch) My cluster runs both myrinet and Gig/E, some codes run well on the the ethernet interfaces (take codes like mpiblast for instance) while others (NAMD comes to mind) run faster on the myrinet. However this machine may be fast, but I have some large SMP boxes (IBM P-series) that cycle for cycle SMOKE the performance of the x86 boxes. But you have to remember that the cluster computers cost about $3000/node while the SMP boxes with a similar config cost about $13,000 apiece, and even more if you want a box that supports more than 8 CPUs (think 1 million and up) So once again, it comes down to the types of jobs, and how much you are willing to pay to get those jobs done in a hurry! A Cluster is still great, I have just completed some jobs that consumed over 12 years of CPU time, in 1 week of wall-clock time!
Slashdot Mirror
I was at the event last night with Woz, and I can say this is more about skill sets in developing technology that just "teaching people to write code" The focus is more on innovation and engineering, building folks with the skills to do jobs that may not even exist yet. If all you are doing is learning to code, then yes, you will be supplanted by someone who can code cheaper... You must differentiate yourself from the pack if you wish to be seen as more valued than the next person. Personally I think it will be great if this is successful as there is a dearth of skilled folks to work on cutting edge projects.
The bigger question is, is it still your data in the cloud? If you miss a bill payment will you be able to access it? If the cloud owner doesn't pay the telecom provider or the data center will you be able to access it? What if they file for bankruptcy? Or have their servers repossessed? How ironclad is that contract? They may have oodles of security but is that really what you would base your business decision on? Just some things to think about...
That will get me to cancel my subscription, I don't need to watch most of the crap on there anyway and I gladly pay other services to NOT have to endure advertisements, we are constantly bombarded enough so any escape is good!
Red box
Agreed, just do the metrics of what it costs to run your workload on Amazon, when the Amazon price becomes cheaper then look for another job... This is the way it will go as IT infrastructure is a utility, nothing more. Now if you are doing specialized IT (HPC, healthcare, R&D) that can't be easily moved to the "cloud" it will be staved off a few more years, but in the end I would expect 90%+ of all computing to be done at large data centers that sell cycles... After all it is the bean counters who tend to run everything and unless there is competitive advantage to doing it yourself then why would you want to?
Can you send some of these well experienced 20 year olds over to me? I don't know if I would be willing to bet the security and integrity of my company's data on somebody who ran the servers for LAN parties in the dorms.... There is a big difference between someone who can install and run these apps and someone who can do so in a safe, secure, repeatable manner. If you don't care about things like PCI, HIPPA or SOX then no problem, the minute you are held accountable for what is happening in the IT environment I suspect the calculus changes dramatically. Cowboys and script kiddies need not apply...
Just run a Linux Distro on it like DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/IPv6
The firmware it comes with is crappy anyway...
I mean they are robots, guarding nuclear weapons....
Electric companies already do this, its called Time of Use
Since there were like 5 articles linked perhaps being more explicit next time will help those of us who are less wizened than yourself.
Hmmm did RTFA, and didn't see any kind of update about this.. nice try though..
Well for one thing, once it has been "applefied" it will be safe and warm and fuzzy, not scary like those crazy open source things or locked down in a corporate way like those evil microsoft things.. Taste the soylent green ... mmmmmm.....
A moat of course. A water barrier is quite effective keeping out the vandals and goths, not to mention pesky viking raiders.
Aspera actually works quite well for transferring large data-sets such as these, it can fully saturate a 100Mb internet connection without a problem, it is only limited by connectivity and disk speed, and not troubled by things such as latency as opposed to TCP based transfer tools.
This should be no suprise. After all the name
"Short-limp horn" is not nearly as compelling!
They retired it because it ran on NT4.0 ....
Big Iron = > $250,000.00
Reviews for this sort of equipment are pretty much meaningless. I might buy a 16-way server to run Oracle, you might buy the same system to run large scale data analysis. PCs are easy to review and evaluate, they are commodity; can be used for any of multiple purposes. When I buy a large SMP system, I am buying it for a specific purpose, and the chances are it will never be re-purposed. So before spending uberbucks on a system I want to talk to the vendors other customers who are running similar workloads on the same tin. If the vendor gives me a long list of folks who use their systems for similar applications that is usually a good sign, if they can't then I move on.
Large scale SMP systems require a slightly different mentallity than PC systems, as anyone who has managed a P690 or E10k will attest. You expect performance, you expect reliablity, you expect service, and for what you pay you better get it!
I think with the release of the new IBM Power 720 line it is clear that they are gunning full steam for Intel with the power architecture. IBM is making it clear that they see the future of the Power as being quite lucrative for them, and they do have a compelling story to tell about how the basic Power architecture is seen from embedded devices to the high-end SMP machines. Intel is still trapped in a 32 bit world, the Itanium is just about DOA, and the new Xeon EMT is a kludged answer to similar AMD offerings. The choice right now is easy, if you want 32-bit and have NO plans to migrate to 64, then Intel is still a good choice, however if you have ANY desire to move to a 64-bit architecture then AMD or IBM is the way to go.
This is an insightful comment, I look at my kids and their love for video games, however my wife and I carefully monitor the content of the games they play. I like to play some violent games, but don't allow my kids to. It comes down to being a responsible parent, not letting your 10 year old play GTA for example. As for obesity, kids are encouraged to stay home, I know I don't feel comfortable letting my 8 year old daughter outdoors on her own, you read about some sickos picking up kids all of the time, and yes in my nice quiet suburban neighborhood! So as a parent I feel more secure knowing where she is and being protective.
I don't think the game industry is to blame for violent acts, I mean the Vikings certainaly could be considered violent, and I don't think that they had video games back then! On the other hand the comment that the games reflect culture I would have to agree with. Look at what the media focuses on, murder, mayhem, war, so of course that is what our attention spans (short as they are) are drawn to.
So to conclude, video games are not bad, people are bad, and people are influenced by popular media... no huge revelation here.. move along please!
The IPod interfaces well with the Mac, I have used both versions, and iTunes on the Mac is much faster and more consistant with MacOSX. I still have an x86 machine for running windows, but my most of my work is done on my Powerbook. Once you have tried the Mac it is hard to go back to the Windows box.. So from personal experience, I believe this could be true.
But you forget IBM, who at the moment, has the most compelling UNIX hardware out there, SUN used to be the leader, HP was catching up (But I think the Itanium dooms their commercial UNIX) Now I believe that IBM is king of the hill.. As for Sun selling Opteron boxes.. I don't think the margins on those are as good as for the IBM Pseries boxen.. :-)
Since I administer a fairly large cluster, I can say that the answer is "It depends" (Of course that is ALWAYS the answer!). It depends on the codes being run, it depends upon the interconnect optimization.(yes myrinet is fast, but the real key is that it has much lower latency and this has to be engineered carefully if using more than one switch) My cluster runs both myrinet and Gig/E, some codes run well on the the ethernet interfaces (take codes like mpiblast for instance) while others (NAMD comes to mind) run faster on the myrinet. However this machine may be fast, but I have some large SMP boxes (IBM P-series) that cycle for cycle SMOKE the performance of the x86 boxes. But you have to remember that the cluster computers cost about $3000 /node while the SMP boxes with a similar config cost about $13,000 apiece, and even more if you want a box that supports more than 8 CPUs (think 1 million and up)
So once again, it comes down to the types of jobs, and how much you are willing to pay to get those jobs done in a hurry! A Cluster is still great, I have just completed some jobs that consumed over 12 years of CPU time, in 1 week of wall-clock time!
Yeah, tell that to all of the NT4 users out there..
No...
Sorry couldn't resist!