There were so many well-publicized hacks to SETI@home that I'll bet that there will be a lot of skepticism about any results even if we discover a jpeg file of an Arcturian time machine in there.
A better question would be how the/. servers can routinely deal with the user traffic, while those of much larger organizations cannot. Screw selling banner ads, you guys, sell the secret technology you use for serving up so many freakin web hits!
There are some huge weaknesses in this product. First, the RAID controllers are NOT redundant. Read carefully and you will see that each one is only attached to 7 of the disks. This means you need two hot spares in one shelf, it means that you can't present all the data across one of the FC ports, it means that the failure of either one of the RAID cards means that half of your data becomes unavailable, it means that for RAID 3 or 5 you need two parity drives per shelf, it means that the RAID controllers are not hot pluggable if the host is live, and it means that the write data cache is not mirrored. In short, it has nothing that an active/active RAID controller user would expect to see from redundant controllers. What a blunder!
You know, it's all in how you look at it. Since Comdex was surrounded by clouds of doom, virtually none of my competitors exhibited and thus anyone looking for my type of product had little else to do but to visit my booth. We got a thousand leads during the week, and many of these have turned into sales (we make expensive enterprise stuff, so a handful of orders can pay for the show). Another interesting thing was that due to the shitty economy, it seemed like the only people walking the hall were people who worked for companies who actually needed to buy things. Nobody was sending people to Comdex just for the hell of it. So there were a lot fewer morons asking for shirts, pens, mouse pads, and, of course, nobody asked for a cloth. I do agree, though, with previous posters who rail against paying $25 to rent a $3.99 power strip, and other such atrocities. How someone can go bankrupt doing this is beyond me.
Forgot to mention that the 300 MB/s stuff in SATA 2.0 is actually useful for another reason, when this becomes available you will be able to use SATA outside the box, and run a single 300 MB/s link to a port expander chip inside a external chassis, which will in turn connect to a bunch of 150 or 300 MB/s disk drives. So when you aggregate five to ten drives, the extra performance headroom is necessary.
I'm playing with my first two SATA drives, and one thing I find very careless is that the connectors are very easy to knock off the drives. This is not a problem for me as I am designing a RAID box where they slide in, but for a PC, somebody is going to have to add detents or friction locks to these connectors or we are in a world o' hurt. By the way, my IBM SATA drives have the conventional Molex 4 pin power connector for legacy PC applications which you can use instead of the SATA power connector. Seagate was too lazy to put one on their drive, or maybe they need the 3.3V input on the SATA power connector which is not provided for on the Molex connector which is only 5V/12V. Oh, and one other thing, SATA 2.0 phase 2 which will be 300 MB/s won't help at all with performance until and unless the drives go past their present 50 MB/s native transfer rate. Hell, the 150 vs 133 vs 100 agrument of SATA vs PATA is silly when you consider the modest speed requirements of the drives being built today. Raw transfer rate only appears to be increasing 25% per year anyway, so it will be years before we even give a damn about the 150 MB/s "limit".
Whatever happened to the Xserve RAID box which was supposed to be shipping by the end of last year? This is the one with 14 ATA disks and dual Fibre Channel host ports...
I read this story on Cryptome before the/. effect took hold -- what happened is some jerkoff is sending around fake emails with forged headers which purport to come from a legit company essentially trying to extort money from people to keep their personal data private. Obviously, the DA has a suspect and a grand jury has been empaneled to try to indict the guy behind the joe job, and they are hoping that the perp has been accessing the cryptome site (less likely, but possible, is that it's a fishing expedition and they will simply check everybody who surfed that page during the timeframe in question). The story has almost nothing to do with the true mission of the cryptome site. As far as posting the subpoena, there is a clear notice on the cryptome site declaring their intention to post the contents of all such legal notices unless it is illegal for John Young (a resident of New York IIRC) to post them.
One minor point, if you use a 25V cap on the 5V rails the cap will be less effective at high frequencies. The real problem is that the working life of the caps is very low these days, partly because they are Viet Cong crap, but also because consumer A/V equipment often runs very hot (nobody likes to use fans any more), and heat reduces lifetime. Hint - if your cable TV or satellite box goes bad, open it up and replace all the electrolytic caps and there is at least a 75% chance it will start working again.
I've always thought that a PC manufacturer could use the thousand or so PCs that are in burn-in at any given time for render farms or other parallelized projects.
For some reason I can't read the.pdf file. Got the latest M$ XP Pro, and Adobe...
Recording to ATA arrays
on
Net Vegas
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The latest gizmo at the casinos is recording the video directly to arrays of ATA hard drives. Not only does this save a lot of labor, but also the security team can review recorded video without pausing the recording in process, kinda like TiVo. With 250GB ATA drives costing less than $300, you are going to see a lot more tape applications being replaced by hard drives. In the case of the casinos, they keep one or two tape units handy for saving evidence, but basically there is a definite trend to elimitate the old fashioned VCR.
Well, no I haven't actually tried these tools on wine -- I just assumed with all the security dongle stuff it wouldn't work. We'll give it a try and see what kind of damage it causes. Obviously, we have to be careful as these packages are very expensive and it wouldn't do to have the suppliers flag us as using pirate software. We would also need to do extensive tests as you can imagine an undetected flaw in an inner layer of a board, or worse, in an ASIC, would be a disaster.
Half of my engineers just switched to Linux plus StarOffice for their day-to-day communications. So far, so good. If these emulators get good enough to run OrCAD, Modelsim, and the FPGA development packages, then we can lose Windows completely from our R&D operation.
An example of a company which makes laptops and notebooks for major companies is Quanta Computer in Taiwan. There are dozens of these companies. You even have situations where companies like Maxtor have "manufacturing partners" who do all the actual assembly work on their high end drives.
I'd accept a few degrees hotter silicon for the huge reliability boost of getting rid of the fans on the processor and graphics card (MTBF circa 15,000 hours in the real world contrary to their b.s. specs, divided by two since there are two of the little bastards). Your remaining fan in the PSU case needs a fan rotation alarm on it, and if unattended, some kind of thermal shut-off or redundant fan. One nice trick for quiet fans is to use one much bigger than you need and then run it at a slower speed. Another tip is to mount the disk drive and fans on Sorbothane standoffs, and maybe stick a couple of slabs of Sorbothane on the walls of the PC case. One quibble with the article -- for best cooling, you want as small a case as possible, not as big as possible. The objective should be to maximize the velocity of the airflow over the heatsinks, and you do this by constricting the space around them. One innovative way this has been done is through the use of engineering foams like E-PAC which allows the designer to create engineered air ducting which forces the airflow over the parts where it is needed. Some other people have asked why the PSU fan is necessary -- having just gone through CE and UL testing on one of my products, you can't imagine the kind of pain the test lab would make you go through if you took the PSU fan out of the PSU case. It's only a practical proposal for a major corporation with a lot of money and time to throw at it.
Oviously there is a market for super-fast processors to those of us on/., but aren't we at a point where currently available processors are fast enough for more and more user segments? What I mean is, people who do Word and Excel were happy along about 800 MHz and ordinary CAD people like me don't need more than about 2 gig. There are only two guys in my organization (running VHDL simulations day in and day out) who have any need for faster processors. Will we soon get to a point where the total market size of gamers and/. people will not pay for another processor spin?
If you check the usenet sci.crypt FAQ it ridicules the steady stream of people who invent "unbreakable" encryption techniques. You might give it a read. Most of the time it turns out that there are one or (usually) more fatal flaws in new encryption schemes.
I think chicks dig men who know the difference between "it's" and "its", unlike the author of the original/. post. Now, trying to swerve this off-topic thread back into line, maybe it's time to develop artificial intelligence software here on Earth which knows its contractions and possessive pronouns. If you aggregate all the spare CPU cycles on all the computers on Earth, you might be able to assemble enough computing horsepower to correct all the improper uses of the word "it's" on the web. It could even be a screen saver, where you get to watch it crawl the web, hack to root, and correct web sites for people.
Re:Most Resume Advice is Totally Subjective?
on
Resume Tips For Jobs
·
· Score: 1
re: "You have an AOL email account. When I sort resumes, they'd go right in the trash with the first round of rejections. Might as well write your resume with crayon."
Don't be a dork. I have a proper email account at my company. The AOL account is just a convenient spam receptical which I sometimes check for incoming mail.
Slashdot Mirror
There were so many well-publicized hacks to SETI@home that I'll bet that there will be a lot of skepticism about any results even if we discover a jpeg file of an Arcturian time machine in there.
A better question would be how the /. servers can routinely deal with the user traffic, while those of much larger organizations cannot. Screw selling banner ads, you guys, sell the secret technology you use for serving up so many freakin web hits!
There are some huge weaknesses in this product. First, the RAID controllers are NOT redundant. Read carefully and you will see that each one is only attached to 7 of the disks. This means you need two hot spares in one shelf, it means that you can't present all the data across one of the FC ports, it means that the failure of either one of the RAID cards means that half of your data becomes unavailable, it means that for RAID 3 or 5 you need two parity drives per shelf, it means that the RAID controllers are not hot pluggable if the host is live, and it means that the write data cache is not mirrored. In short, it has nothing that an active/active RAID controller user would expect to see from redundant controllers. What a blunder!
The RAID controllers are not hot swappable or redundant. Each one controls a dedicated group of 7 disk drives.
You know, it's all in how you look at it. Since Comdex was surrounded by clouds of doom, virtually none of my competitors exhibited and thus anyone looking for my type of product had little else to do but to visit my booth. We got a thousand leads during the week, and many of these have turned into sales (we make expensive enterprise stuff, so a handful of orders can pay for the show). Another interesting thing was that due to the shitty economy, it seemed like the only people walking the hall were people who worked for companies who actually needed to buy things. Nobody was sending people to Comdex just for the hell of it. So there were a lot fewer morons asking for shirts, pens, mouse pads, and, of course, nobody asked for a cloth. I do agree, though, with previous posters who rail against paying $25 to rent a $3.99 power strip, and other such atrocities. How someone can go bankrupt doing this is beyond me.
Forgot to mention that the 300 MB/s stuff in SATA 2.0 is actually useful for another reason, when this becomes available you will be able to use SATA outside the box, and run a single 300 MB/s link to a port expander chip inside a external chassis, which will in turn connect to a bunch of 150 or 300 MB/s disk drives. So when you aggregate five to ten drives, the extra performance headroom is necessary.
I'm playing with my first two SATA drives, and one thing I find very careless is that the connectors are very easy to knock off the drives. This is not a problem for me as I am designing a RAID box where they slide in, but for a PC, somebody is going to have to add detents or friction locks to these connectors or we are in a world o' hurt. By the way, my IBM SATA drives have the conventional Molex 4 pin power connector for legacy PC applications which you can use instead of the SATA power connector. Seagate was too lazy to put one on their drive, or maybe they need the 3.3V input on the SATA power connector which is not provided for on the Molex connector which is only 5V/12V. Oh, and one other thing, SATA 2.0 phase 2 which will be 300 MB/s won't help at all with performance until and unless the drives go past their present 50 MB/s native transfer rate. Hell, the 150 vs 133 vs 100 agrument of SATA vs PATA is silly when you consider the modest speed requirements of the drives being built today. Raw transfer rate only appears to be increasing 25% per year anyway, so it will be years before we even give a damn about the 150 MB/s "limit".
Whatever happened to the Xserve RAID box which was supposed to be shipping by the end of last year? This is the one with 14 ATA disks and dual Fibre Channel host ports...
I read this story on Cryptome before the /. effect took hold -- what happened is some jerkoff is sending around fake emails with forged headers which purport to come from a legit company essentially trying to extort money from people to keep their personal data private. Obviously, the DA has a suspect and a grand jury has been empaneled to try to indict the guy behind the joe job, and they are hoping that the perp has been accessing the cryptome site (less likely, but possible, is that it's a fishing expedition and they will simply check everybody who surfed that page during the timeframe in question). The story has almost nothing to do with the true mission of the cryptome site. As far as posting the subpoena, there is a clear notice on the cryptome site declaring their intention to post the contents of all such legal notices unless it is illegal for John Young (a resident of New York IIRC) to post them.
One minor point, if you use a 25V cap on the 5V rails the cap will be less effective at high frequencies. The real problem is that the working life of the caps is very low these days, partly because they are Viet Cong crap, but also because consumer A/V equipment often runs very hot (nobody likes to use fans any more), and heat reduces lifetime. Hint - if your cable TV or satellite box goes bad, open it up and replace all the electrolytic caps and there is at least a 75% chance it will start working again.
I've always thought that a PC manufacturer could use the thousand or so PCs that are in burn-in at any given time for render farms or other parallelized projects.
Is it too late to change the GPL to prohibit the use of GPL'd code at any company which is a member of RIAA?
For some reason I can't read the .pdf file. Got the latest M$ XP Pro, and Adobe...
The latest gizmo at the casinos is recording the video directly to arrays of ATA hard drives. Not only does this save a lot of labor, but also the security team can review recorded video without pausing the recording in process, kinda like TiVo. With 250GB ATA drives costing less than $300, you are going to see a lot more tape applications being replaced by hard drives. In the case of the casinos, they keep one or two tape units handy for saving evidence, but basically there is a definite trend to elimitate the old fashioned VCR.
One thing I've often wondered is whether a typical solar cell produces more energy in its lifetime than it takes to manufacture it?
Well, no I haven't actually tried these tools on wine -- I just assumed with all the security dongle stuff it wouldn't work. We'll give it a try and see what kind of damage it causes. Obviously, we have to be careful as these packages are very expensive and it wouldn't do to have the suppliers flag us as using pirate software. We would also need to do extensive tests as you can imagine an undetected flaw in an inner layer of a board, or worse, in an ASIC, would be a disaster.
Half of my engineers just switched to Linux plus StarOffice for their day-to-day communications. So far, so good. If these emulators get good enough to run OrCAD, Modelsim, and the FPGA development packages, then we can lose Windows completely from our R&D operation.
An example of a company which makes laptops and notebooks for major companies is Quanta Computer in Taiwan. There are dozens of these companies. You even have situations where companies like Maxtor have "manufacturing partners" who do all the actual assembly work on their high end drives.
Screw the kernel, I want to hear more about these geek cruises!
I'd accept a few degrees hotter silicon for the huge reliability boost of getting rid of the fans on the processor and graphics card (MTBF circa 15,000 hours in the real world contrary to their b.s. specs, divided by two since there are two of the little bastards). Your remaining fan in the PSU case needs a fan rotation alarm on it, and if unattended, some kind of thermal shut-off or redundant fan. One nice trick for quiet fans is to use one much bigger than you need and then run it at a slower speed. Another tip is to mount the disk drive and fans on Sorbothane standoffs, and maybe stick a couple of slabs of Sorbothane on the walls of the PC case. One quibble with the article -- for best cooling, you want as small a case as possible, not as big as possible. The objective should be to maximize the velocity of the airflow over the heatsinks, and you do this by constricting the space around them. One innovative way this has been done is through the use of engineering foams like E-PAC which allows the designer to create engineered air ducting which forces the airflow over the parts where it is needed. Some other people have asked why the PSU fan is necessary -- having just gone through CE and UL testing on one of my products, you can't imagine the kind of pain the test lab would make you go through if you took the PSU fan out of the PSU case. It's only a practical proposal for a major corporation with a lot of money and time to throw at it.
Oviously there is a market for super-fast processors to those of us on /., but aren't we at a point where currently available processors are fast enough for more and more user segments? What I mean is, people who do Word and Excel were happy along about 800 MHz and ordinary CAD people like me don't need more than about 2 gig. There are only two guys in my organization (running VHDL simulations day in and day out) who have any need for faster processors. Will we soon get to a point where the total market size of gamers and /. people will not pay for another processor spin?
Why should webcasters have to pay more per listener than a major FM radio station?
If you check the usenet sci.crypt FAQ it ridicules the steady stream of people who invent "unbreakable" encryption techniques. You might give it a read. Most of the time it turns out that there are one or (usually) more fatal flaws in new encryption schemes.
I think chicks dig men who know the difference between "it's" and "its", unlike the author of the original /. post. Now, trying to swerve this off-topic thread back into line, maybe it's time to develop artificial intelligence software here on Earth which knows its contractions and possessive pronouns. If you aggregate all the spare CPU cycles on all the computers on Earth, you might be able to assemble enough computing horsepower to correct all the improper uses of the word "it's" on the web. It could even be a screen saver, where you get to watch it crawl the web, hack to root, and correct web sites for people.
re: "You have an AOL email account. When I sort resumes, they'd go right in the trash with the first round of rejections. Might as well write your resume with crayon." Don't be a dork. I have a proper email account at my company. The AOL account is just a convenient spam receptical which I sometimes check for incoming mail.