Why are they a non-interruptible customer? Datacenters with backup generators should obviously be interruptible customers as long as the cost of peak power is more than the cost of running your own generators, which is probably the case when you have megawatts of local power generation capability.
My RAM usage rarely cracks 1.5GB. Would having 4GB and x64 make my life measurably better? Of course not. It wouldn't make it worse... but that's hardly a reason to upgrade!
If your programs are using 1.5GB of ram then heck yeah moving to 4GB would improve things, the OS would have more than 500MB of ram to play with for cache! A good rule of thumb is for nice performance give the box 2x the working set size in ram. This is true regardless of which modern OS you run, they all rely on the same computer science principals. Some OS's might handle certain edge cases better, such as high load or low ram, but for best performance they are all fairly similar. Of course moving to x64 might mean that you really need 6GB of ram as your working set size might increase with the move to x64.
Hmmm, Sacha Baron Cohen used it quite effectively just a year ago. I guess some peoples sense of what's in is just a tad touchy, even some people who fashion themselves geeks.
Actually the HMO's might have it right. As a human you might think that allowing anyone to die when you could save them is evil, but an economist might very well tell you that saving that person might be MORE evil. If performing miracle operations at costs of millions of dollars means that the insurance company doesn't have the funds to pay for preventative drugs for tens of thousands of their other clients then you might be killing hundreds for every one you save with the surgery. A good example of such false economies is the Alar scare of the late 80's, an economist calculated that the drop in apple and general fruit consumption as a result of the scare killed about 100x more people than even the worst case predictions of cancer from Alar would have. My only problem with insurance companies is that they aren't more upfront about what they will and will not cover, sure it would be bad publicity to say "we won't cover you if you get multiorgan cancer and it will cost x millions to have a chance to save you" but it would probably be good for them and the consumer.
Wow, and the DL580 doesn't support the 5300, so no quad core with large memory support. So unless you are doing one of the small subset of HPC problems that needs pure CPU performance there's very little need. The fact is the Intel systems run out of ram before they run out of CPU power for most real world datacenter needs.
Intel doesn't max out at 4 CPU's, at least not for systems you can actually buy. Since the memory bandwidth isn't there the most you can buy is dual quad core (this is from IBM, HP and Dell). Oh and they max out at 32GB of ram whereas you can get a DL585g2 which can economically go to 64GB and maxes at 128GB with 4GB chips. HP and AMD have committed to supporting Barcelona on the DL585g2 so I expect I will have some 16core 64Gb machines by the end of the year =) Oh and if you are into Sun the x4600 will be able to go to 16cores and 256GB of ram once Barcelona ships.
The problem with that idea is you are setting up another government sponsored oligopoly. There will be a certain(small) number of companies that will grow to a size where their natural efficiencies will become a barrier to entry and they will charge as much as they can without lowering the barrier to entry. In other words they will reap unjustified profit off of simply being a large player in a mandated industry. This is the kind of setup that leads to poor customer service, high prices, and reduced innovation in an industry.
I would think quite the opposite. When the NY transit authority was looking at using massive flywheels and regenerative breaking to lower energy consumption is the subway system they were leaning very heavily towards carbon fiber. The reason is that a ceramic wheels failure mode was to throw out large chunks at bomblike velocities, whereas the carbon fiber disks failure mode was to spin off small chunks who's total energy could be much more easily contained.
I doubt it matters at all financially because there's little chance they would ever try to sell an airframe that's undergone so much stress. Besides with proper instrumentation there's all sorts of good data you can get by pushing the part to destruction. These days they are generally just collecting data to feed back into their design software to tighten up materials predictions for the next generation of designs.
Considering they make high end break pads out of carbon fiber I don't think it's that easy to burn. However it doesn't matter since it's all the carpet, seats, glues, wiring and most importantly JET FUEL that burns in airline accidents =)
Yep. We are implementing a datawarehouse app and after seeing the poor performance we are getting out of Oracle on Windows for our ERP product we are researching different solutions. Right now Sun is in the lead. They are about 20% less than our Windows solution for the overall solution and we expect it to be more scalable as we will only be partially populating the DB server out of the gate. They claim they can do with 4 middle tier boxes what our Windows solution provider has speced 13 Windows boxes for. I can't wait to see the results of the bakeoff. I'm primarily a Windows/Citrix guy but I've admin'd Solaris and Linux in past and I won't ming keeping my Solaris skills up to date if it's the best solution =)
A Cray from 12 years ago would be a T90. The top of the line was the T932 with 32 vector CPU's. It was capable of 57.6 gigaflops and had a total internode I/O bandwidth of 330GB/s. It maxed out at 8GB of main memory. Compare that to an ATI Radeon x1950xtx gpu running folding@home at ~90Gflops with a half gig of ram and ram I/O of 64GB/s, which is significantly faster than a desktop CPU. So, it really depends on what your problems throughput limitation is, CPU/GPU raw power or I/O bandwidth as to whether a current desktop is more or less powerful than a Cray from 12 years ago.
My favorite story about well trained guards involves Marines on a Naval base. The Marines are the guards for any area where nuclear weapons or fuel are stored. My dad's friend's brother is a Read Admiral on a carrier, when taking my dad on a tour of the base the quickest way from one area to another involved a brief trip through a controlled area (though nowhere near the munitions facility). The two Marines stopped my dad and his escort at gunpoint, had them place their ID on the ground and step back some number of paces, they then checked the ID and confirmed that they were the people pictured and that they were authorized for that area. After visiting the other part of base they headed back to the ship, where they again encountered the same guards. Despite the fact that they had just passed through the area not 30 minutes prior, and that my dad's escort was a flag officer, they went through the same procedure including the pointing of rifles. The point is, those guards did NOT get complacent just because of routine or familiarity, they stuck to their procedure and followed it to the letter.
How is simulating weapon decay nefarious? There's been some talk about new weapon design being done with the DoE computers, but there is no way in hell the military will deploy a weapon system without thorough real world testing, and even Bush hasn't been stupid enough to break the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Huh? Windows 2000 Professional and Server are in extended support until Jan 31, 2010. There won't be any non-security related hotfixes anymore but how many people still running 2000 want anything BUT security hotfixes?
Depends on how well mastered the recording is. I know with my Tool cd's and my new midrange speaker system I've heard things that I've never even heard in concert due to shitty road consoles. I know that the majority of mass consumed music is compressed to within an inch of its life with the gain pushed to 11, but there are still some studio guys that enjoy producing good albums =)
Better yet go with DC power supplies. If you design a datacenter from the getgo to be DC you can save a significant fraction of total power usage. You save on the DC->AC inverter in your UPS and on the AC->DC step in the power supply in the servers. Add to that the lower AC demands from the more efficient power usage and your total savings are around 20% of total power budget, which is significant.
I assume this is for a total Datacenter upgrade. You rarely just upgrade the electric, you usually upgrade all the facility elements together since all the systems are usually designed with some kind of balance, eg you don't put in 200tons of AC for a 100ton electric load. Since commercial datacenter projects are running into the hundreds of millions I have no doubt that with typical government inefficiency a large datacenter project could run to a billion.
I know that the scientists who were doing deep underground cosmic ray detection found an interesting way to shield their equipment from all but the most high energy of particles, they bought WWII battleship hulls. The steel in those hulls is very thick and contains much less radiation than anything made today thanks to all the nuclear tests and coal burning we have done since the end of WWII. I would guess that putting something in a mine shielded by such old steel would be effective since they reported neutrino interactions on the order of strikes per month for a pool of material tens of thousands of gallons in capacity.
Dude, if your PC sucks down 150W doing nothing but HTPC it sucks. I have an Athlon 64x2 4200 with 2GB of ram, two 7200rpm SATA HDD's, and a Geforce 7600GS which is WAY overkill for a HTPC and doing most things it barely uses over 50W, playing games it's barely over 150W!
How about buy a used HP Laserjet 4 or 5 for almost nothing but the cost of shipping and send photos to a photo lab to be printed on real photo paper (not the stuff they sell consumers as "photo paper")? The LJ4+ and 5si regularly go 1 million pages without anything but consumables so buying used isn't a problem. Inkjet technology inherently sucks, some vendors have figured out ways to make particular aspects of it suck less, but the only inkjet I was ever really impressed by was the Epson Stylus Pro 10000. But, it was several thousand dollars. Of course the dye tanks were only ~$100 per color for a half liter!
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Why are they a non-interruptible customer? Datacenters with backup generators should obviously be interruptible customers as long as the cost of peak power is more than the cost of running your own generators, which is probably the case when you have megawatts of local power generation capability.
My RAM usage rarely cracks 1.5GB. Would having 4GB and x64 make my life measurably better? Of course not. It wouldn't make it worse... but that's hardly a reason to upgrade!
If your programs are using 1.5GB of ram then heck yeah moving to 4GB would improve things, the OS would have more than 500MB of ram to play with for cache! A good rule of thumb is for nice performance give the box 2x the working set size in ram. This is true regardless of which modern OS you run, they all rely on the same computer science principals. Some OS's might handle certain edge cases better, such as high load or low ram, but for best performance they are all fairly similar. Of course moving to x64 might mean that you really need 6GB of ram as your working set size might increase with the move to x64.
Hmmm, Sacha Baron Cohen used it quite effectively just a year ago. I guess some peoples sense of what's in is just a tad touchy, even some people who fashion themselves geeks.
Actually the HMO's might have it right. As a human you might think that allowing anyone to die when you could save them is evil, but an economist might very well tell you that saving that person might be MORE evil. If performing miracle operations at costs of millions of dollars means that the insurance company doesn't have the funds to pay for preventative drugs for tens of thousands of their other clients then you might be killing hundreds for every one you save with the surgery. A good example of such false economies is the Alar scare of the late 80's, an economist calculated that the drop in apple and general fruit consumption as a result of the scare killed about 100x more people than even the worst case predictions of cancer from Alar would have. My only problem with insurance companies is that they aren't more upfront about what they will and will not cover, sure it would be bad publicity to say "we won't cover you if you get multiorgan cancer and it will cost x millions to have a chance to save you" but it would probably be good for them and the consumer.
Wow, and the DL580 doesn't support the 5300, so no quad core with large memory support. So unless you are doing one of the small subset of HPC problems that needs pure CPU performance there's very little need. The fact is the Intel systems run out of ram before they run out of CPU power for most real world datacenter needs.
Intel doesn't max out at 4 CPU's, at least not for systems you can actually buy. Since the memory bandwidth isn't there the most you can buy is dual quad core (this is from IBM, HP and Dell). Oh and they max out at 32GB of ram whereas you can get a DL585g2 which can economically go to 64GB and maxes at 128GB with 4GB chips. HP and AMD have committed to supporting Barcelona on the DL585g2 so I expect I will have some 16core 64Gb machines by the end of the year =) Oh and if you are into Sun the x4600 will be able to go to 16cores and 256GB of ram once Barcelona ships.
The problem with that idea is you are setting up another government sponsored oligopoly. There will be a certain(small) number of companies that will grow to a size where their natural efficiencies will become a barrier to entry and they will charge as much as they can without lowering the barrier to entry. In other words they will reap unjustified profit off of simply being a large player in a mandated industry. This is the kind of setup that leads to poor customer service, high prices, and reduced innovation in an industry.
Well, then you get all the fuel back since the burrito is already going to produce a ton of methane =)
That the mines of the next century will be our garbage mountains. It will be the place with the highest density of easily obtainable materials.
I would think quite the opposite. When the NY transit authority was looking at using massive flywheels and regenerative breaking to lower energy consumption is the subway system they were leaning very heavily towards carbon fiber. The reason is that a ceramic wheels failure mode was to throw out large chunks at bomblike velocities, whereas the carbon fiber disks failure mode was to spin off small chunks who's total energy could be much more easily contained.
I doubt it matters at all financially because there's little chance they would ever try to sell an airframe that's undergone so much stress. Besides with proper instrumentation there's all sorts of good data you can get by pushing the part to destruction. These days they are generally just collecting data to feed back into their design software to tighten up materials predictions for the next generation of designs.
Considering they make high end break pads out of carbon fiber I don't think it's that easy to burn. However it doesn't matter since it's all the carpet, seats, glues, wiring and most importantly JET FUEL that burns in airline accidents =)
Yep. We are implementing a datawarehouse app and after seeing the poor performance we are getting out of Oracle on Windows for our ERP product we are researching different solutions. Right now Sun is in the lead. They are about 20% less than our Windows solution for the overall solution and we expect it to be more scalable as we will only be partially populating the DB server out of the gate. They claim they can do with 4 middle tier boxes what our Windows solution provider has speced 13 Windows boxes for. I can't wait to see the results of the bakeoff. I'm primarily a Windows/Citrix guy but I've admin'd Solaris and Linux in past and I won't ming keeping my Solaris skills up to date if it's the best solution =)
Uh, because you can now get a relatively cheap 8 core Intel box that will wipe the floor with the G5 tower and not consume much more power?
A Cray from 12 years ago would be a T90. The top of the line was the T932 with 32 vector CPU's. It was capable of 57.6 gigaflops and had a total internode I/O bandwidth of 330GB/s. It maxed out at 8GB of main memory. Compare that to an ATI Radeon x1950xtx gpu running folding@home at ~90Gflops with a half gig of ram and ram I/O of 64GB/s, which is significantly faster than a desktop CPU. So, it really depends on what your problems throughput limitation is, CPU/GPU raw power or I/O bandwidth as to whether a current desktop is more or less powerful than a Cray from 12 years ago.
My favorite story about well trained guards involves Marines on a Naval base. The Marines are the guards for any area where nuclear weapons or fuel are stored. My dad's friend's brother is a Read Admiral on a carrier, when taking my dad on a tour of the base the quickest way from one area to another involved a brief trip through a controlled area (though nowhere near the munitions facility). The two Marines stopped my dad and his escort at gunpoint, had them place their ID on the ground and step back some number of paces, they then checked the ID and confirmed that they were the people pictured and that they were authorized for that area. After visiting the other part of base they headed back to the ship, where they again encountered the same guards. Despite the fact that they had just passed through the area not 30 minutes prior, and that my dad's escort was a flag officer, they went through the same procedure including the pointing of rifles. The point is, those guards did NOT get complacent just because of routine or familiarity, they stuck to their procedure and followed it to the letter.
How is simulating weapon decay nefarious? There's been some talk about new weapon design being done with the DoE computers, but there is no way in hell the military will deploy a weapon system without thorough real world testing, and even Bush hasn't been stupid enough to break the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Huh? Windows 2000 Professional and Server are in extended support until Jan 31, 2010. There won't be any non-security related hotfixes anymore but how many people still running 2000 want anything BUT security hotfixes?
Depends on how well mastered the recording is. I know with my Tool cd's and my new midrange speaker system I've heard things that I've never even heard in concert due to shitty road consoles. I know that the majority of mass consumed music is compressed to within an inch of its life with the gain pushed to 11, but there are still some studio guys that enjoy producing good albums =)
You know you can remove him from your authors list in your preferences, right?
Better yet go with DC power supplies. If you design a datacenter from the getgo to be DC you can save a significant fraction of total power usage. You save on the DC->AC inverter in your UPS and on the AC->DC step in the power supply in the servers. Add to that the lower AC demands from the more efficient power usage and your total savings are around 20% of total power budget, which is significant.
I assume this is for a total Datacenter upgrade. You rarely just upgrade the electric, you usually upgrade all the facility elements together since all the systems are usually designed with some kind of balance, eg you don't put in 200tons of AC for a 100ton electric load. Since commercial datacenter projects are running into the hundreds of millions I have no doubt that with typical government inefficiency a large datacenter project could run to a billion.
I know that the scientists who were doing deep underground cosmic ray detection found an interesting way to shield their equipment from all but the most high energy of particles, they bought WWII battleship hulls. The steel in those hulls is very thick and contains much less radiation than anything made today thanks to all the nuclear tests and coal burning we have done since the end of WWII. I would guess that putting something in a mine shielded by such old steel would be effective since they reported neutrino interactions on the order of strikes per month for a pool of material tens of thousands of gallons in capacity.
Dude, if your PC sucks down 150W doing nothing but HTPC it sucks. I have an Athlon 64x2 4200 with 2GB of ram, two 7200rpm SATA HDD's, and a Geforce 7600GS which is WAY overkill for a HTPC and doing most things it barely uses over 50W, playing games it's barely over 150W!
How about buy a used HP Laserjet 4 or 5 for almost nothing but the cost of shipping and send photos to a photo lab to be printed on real photo paper (not the stuff they sell consumers as "photo paper")? The LJ4+ and 5si regularly go 1 million pages without anything but consumables so buying used isn't a problem. Inkjet technology inherently sucks, some vendors have figured out ways to make particular aspects of it suck less, but the only inkjet I was ever really impressed by was the Epson Stylus Pro 10000. But, it was several thousand dollars. Of course the dye tanks were only ~$100 per color for a half liter!