this was an interesting quote:
In Fulton, poll workers also reported the machines mysteriously switching from demonstration mode to election mode, Champion said. But state election officials and the company that makes the machines, Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, said that's virtually impossible and instead suggest untrained workers were to blame.
Dynamic: currently mod_perl but open to something faster (if there is a proven faster technology).
Apache: current 1.3.x move to 2.0.x when it's ready for prime time.
OS/Hardware: open, currently Solaris/Sun, open to quad Xeon/Linux if it has the performance.
The reason for asking about a single vs multiple machines is that I wanted to get a handle on what one box could do as opposed to the gut reaction to just keep adding servers.
Although I'm not expecting magic I didn't want to get too specific because I'm interested in feedback from across the board, for example how does Orbitz or Yahoo or *New York Times* maintain uptime? I haven't found anywhere that discusses places like that.
Thanks for the info, I left the specifics out since I'm looking for generic feedback (for the learning).
The site will be mostly serving dynamic content with the average page being about 60-120k of code and around 10k of images. And yes, that's a lot of code but the site is serving up reports and whatnots. There are small pages between reports and the usual login, etc screens.
The real purpose of the question was to see how different tuning is being used in the real world, as the web has matured there has to be some interesting information on keeping the systems up 24/7, etc.
For example we're looking into a replicated database with just the important info (and I know that important is a real fuzzy term) for periods when we need to bring the primary database down.
what would be interesting is the proactive analysis (when do you add more hardware, etc) that is done on a live running system.
I'm currently going through the UofP program. I have a 2 year degree (from a long long time ago) and recognize that while this isn't MIT it is a degree. My take on it is that it may help keep my resume from being thrown out when the job requires a BS of some sort. I figure that there are front end people (you might even call them human resources) that look at a resume for buzzwords and key stuff (one of them being a degree) and chuck the ones that don't have them.
That said this isn't easier than going to class, they do pile on the work so beware that it's not something that you can do over lunch...
After using Vaios for a long time and hating the battery life I just upgraded to a Fujitsu S Series and got the 2nd battery. You can get embedded ethernet (although I went with the firewire instead), and with the primary battery I get over 2 hours doing perl development at the airport/on the airplane. I also got the optional battery that takes the place of the dvd/cdrw and get about 5+ hours. This of course depends on what you are doing. For example converting a video project (raw) to mpeg will kill my battery in not time.
I'm doing all of this on w2k, your linux mileage will be different.
back in the 80's when I was working on medical equipment, the ultrasound equipment had this feature. You could hit freeze and go back and forth a bunch of frames to pick the one you want to print. They also spooled to a beta vcr..
can I get pointers to the fact that US customs has the largest db in the world. I would think that there are some really really big Teradata systems out there (and I'm sure NSA has a really big db but won't tell us). Last I heard Walmart was over 100Tb and there were rumors of larger systems out there. (I might be wrong here)
wow, C++ came out in the early 60's. Then when did C come out?
I thought that C++ was a product of the 80's?
While I agree that LISP is cool, they did'nt:
1: do the whole thing in LISP,
2: are killer programmers so any language would have probably worked.
Could it be possible that they actually built an extensible product and had a small enough team that they were able to implement functionality quickly and easily, it's probably just that they like LISP and decided to use that.
It is sad that he doesn't explain why he needs C for other parts of the system.
I'm sure that he's only trying to make a point in that people over 25 won't learn new languages but I'm wondering if that also applies to him?
even better than that would be to use a device like the longwire from cybex. It allows you to remote audio, video, serial and keyboard across a single cat5 cable. I have it with a omniview on the other side so the office is real quiet and all of the computers are somewhere else...
I work on reservation systems and trust me the volume that we get from the web is nothing compared to the volume from other sources.
fyi: we (and most of the large hotel chains) use Informix, it rocks.
however for really really really big databases nothing can touch Teradata. It's not fancy but is really impressive on the performance we've gotten from it.
There once was a site called desktop.com that had (IMHO) a really app server. You wrote your app in perl and it seemed to work well.
Right now we are attempting to keep from having to write yet another VB app and migrate to the web based apps.
Does anyone know what happened to the desktop.com stuff and if there is anything like it (in the way of dev tools). Note: the desktop.com stuff was totally DHTML and scripting, no java on the client.
Now I'm confused, they did 17% more business this year than last year but missed estimates of 119% growth. My gawd, what a bunch of fools.
Isn't 17% growth decent anymore? Unrealistic growth is going to be traced to the real cause of the recession. If you grow at 17% a year isn't that enough. What growth is needed to make a viable business?
Am I the only one that thinks that BattleBots is rather lame. Why don't they call them what they are: Radio Controlled Devices. There isn't any 'botness to them.
Luckly for me I have Tivo and watch the whole show in 9 minutes (3 bouts, max 3 minutes each).
Didn't the NASA channel have a bot's competition where they really were robots (no human intervention)?
If you build your database correctly you shouldn't have a problem with blobs. They won't effect searching or caching since you queries will be against the non-blob fields. The really nice thing is that you can use the database backup utilities to save all of your data.
You would have to build a front end to fetch and insert pictures but that shouldn't be too hard and you'll probably want that anyway to support stuff like version archiving, etc.
One plus of everything in the database is that you can fetch the data across the network with having to share a drive via samba or NFS.
With the better databases you can even share the data via replication.
The downsides are that you would basically have to become a database administrator to take care of the system and stuff like that.
I'm looking at getting DSL in Roseville, CA and the phone CO uses a fujitisu (sp?) box, they want $350 for it and I know there are better solutions available for half that price (the linksys is a good example). Has anyone been able to get a telco to not use the company default device?
says that the iopener runs qnx, that would be cool, but the lack of drivers would be a problem. The big question would be how to get into it to see what's going on.
It appears to use a 200Mhz processor so you can't expect too much. However as a remote terminal it would be very nice. Now, how to hack it...
Has anyone here found a device that emulates a phone system so I can put one of these in the kitchen and have it talk to my server? (I also have a apple desktop tv system (the pippen) that would also benefit from this. Heck if I could browse using webTV without the service that would be nice.
Actually Gamasutra is good reading for non-game developers. The lessons learned can apply to many areas. The postmortem articles give interesting insight to development of products that I haven't seen from other places. Esp. the what went wrong and what we would do different parts. When was the lasttime anyone read an article about 's product and what went wrong in the development?
The problem is that it's hard to believe an AC when they say that anything that can't be backed up. Perhaps of an example or real name would help.
btw: we tried a java client and it failed due to being too early too soon. AWT just didn't cut it and the kicker was that we were win based for the whole project. I think swing might be better but the client load times are still too long.
OK, I guess if you ship millions of packages a day you'll be able to find some folks who got screwed one way or the other. My UPS karma is real great, My FedEx karma is good, My AirBorne karma sucks big time. I mean, they let my dog sign for a touch screen and the dog ate it! I have floppy disks with teeth bites through them. Of course Airborne said not our problem.
Stuff like this happens, I don't like it and just won't use them, luckly we still have choices.
I use the Omniview Pro and have a 6port SE version off one of the ports. Lately I've been buying cheap alternate systems off ebay to get a better understanding of the os's and to just play around. So now I have a couple sparc's, a couple HP9000/715's, a Indy2 and an RS6000 on the way as well as a couple macs and a bunch of PCs. Belkin has a box to convert the sparcs to ps/2 and handles the video just fine. The HPs use PS2 and normal video, the Indy needs a converter cable for the video as well as the RS6k. I'm using a video adapter and keyboard/mouse converter from Silicon Valley Bus for the Macs (although they only use a serial mouse). Belkin also has a converter for Macs. The Belkin converters are the cheapest (cost wise) that I've found and should work with any KMV.
The important thing is to get the biggest switch you can afford cause if you frequent/. then you'll most likely have bunches of systems in the future.
The next goal is to get a KVM extender/remote that will allow me to move a bunch of the machines to another place in the house to cut down on the noise. The one I bought was from Cybex and passes video, sound, mouse and keyboard across cat5 up to a couple hundred feet. The systems that I don't stick disks into very often will be moved just leaving the the systems that deal with the scanner, etc in the office.
I also do use vnc but only when computing from another room, there isn't a comparison between vnc and direct connect.
I don't think it will happen (I would like for it to happen), Sun hasn't really done anything for the linux community. The released a sorta free version of solaris and someone came up with an app that will run linux apps under solaris but they don't really seem to want to work in the linux world. Can anyone tell what they've released that is Linux based?
Of course I could just be too paranoid but I doubt it. Lots of folks see MS as the big evil threat but I think that Sun is also doing stuff, just not as obvious...
And remember that MS doesn't have the large system market, those are solaris machines we're going up against when Linux scales better. (And I can get a 16 processor AMD card:-> ).
Slashdot Mirror
this was an interesting quote: In Fulton, poll workers also reported the machines mysteriously switching from demonstration mode to election mode, Champion said. But state election officials and the company that makes the machines, Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, said that's virtually impossible and instead suggest untrained workers were to blame.
50 bucks says that Superbowl L will be called Superball 50 since the American public is way too stupid to associate the Roman numerial L to 50.
The E10 is cool but doesn't have a removable lense.
Dynamic: currently mod_perl but open to something faster (if there is a proven faster technology).
Apache: current 1.3.x move to 2.0.x when it's ready for prime time.
OS/Hardware: open, currently Solaris/Sun, open to quad Xeon/Linux if it has the performance.
The reason for asking about a single vs multiple machines is that I wanted to get a handle on what one box could do as opposed to the gut reaction to just keep adding servers.
Although I'm not expecting magic I didn't want to get too specific because I'm interested in feedback from across the board, for example how does Orbitz or Yahoo or *New York Times* maintain uptime? I haven't found anywhere that discusses places like that.
The site will be mostly serving dynamic content with the average page being about 60-120k of code and around 10k of images. And yes, that's a lot of code but the site is serving up reports and whatnots. There are small pages between reports and the usual login, etc screens.
The real purpose of the question was to see how different tuning is being used in the real world, as the web has matured there has to be some interesting information on keeping the systems up 24/7, etc.
For example we're looking into a replicated database with just the important info (and I know that important is a real fuzzy term) for periods when we need to bring the primary database down.
what would be interesting is the proactive analysis (when do you add more hardware, etc) that is done on a live running system.
thanks
I'm currently going through the UofP program. I have a 2 year degree (from a long long time ago) and recognize that while this isn't MIT it is a degree. My take on it is that it may help keep my resume from being thrown out when the job requires a BS of some sort. I figure that there are front end people (you might even call them human resources) that look at a resume for buzzwords and key stuff (one of them being a degree) and chuck the ones that don't have them.
That said this isn't easier than going to class, they do pile on the work so beware that it's not something that you can do over lunch...
After using Vaios for a long time and hating the battery life I just upgraded to a Fujitsu S Series and got the 2nd battery. You can get embedded ethernet (although I went with the firewire instead), and with the primary battery I get over 2 hours doing perl development at the airport/on the airplane. I also got the optional battery that takes the place of the dvd/cdrw and get about 5+ hours. This of course depends on what you are doing. For example converting a video project (raw) to mpeg will kill my battery in not time.
I'm doing all of this on w2k, your linux mileage will be different.
back in the 80's when I was working on medical equipment, the ultrasound equipment had this feature. You could hit freeze and go back and forth a bunch of frames to pick the one you want to print. They also spooled to a beta vcr..
so what kind of hardware is all this running on?
can I get pointers to the fact that US customs has the largest db in the world. I would think that there are some really really big Teradata systems out there (and I'm sure NSA has a really big db but won't tell us). Last I heard Walmart was over 100Tb and there were rumors of larger systems out there. (I might be wrong here)
wow, C++ came out in the early 60's. Then when did C come out?
I thought that C++ was a product of the 80's?
While I agree that LISP is cool, they did'nt:
1: do the whole thing in LISP,
2: are killer programmers so any language would have probably worked.
Could it be possible that they actually built an extensible product and had a small enough team that they were able to implement functionality quickly and easily, it's probably just that they like LISP and decided to use that.
It is sad that he doesn't explain why he needs C for other parts of the system.
I'm sure that he's only trying to make a point in that people over 25 won't learn new languages but I'm wondering if that also applies to him?
even better than that would be to use a device like the longwire from cybex. It allows you to remote audio, video, serial and keyboard across a single cat5 cable. I have it with a omniview on the other side so the office is real quiet and all of the computers are somewhere else...
I work on reservation systems and trust me the volume that we get from the web is nothing compared to the volume from other sources.
fyi: we (and most of the large hotel chains) use Informix, it rocks.
however for really really really big databases nothing can touch Teradata. It's not fancy but is really impressive on the performance we've gotten from it.
There once was a site called desktop.com that had (IMHO) a really app server. You wrote your app in perl and it seemed to work well.
Right now we are attempting to keep from having to write yet another VB app and migrate to the web based apps.
Does anyone know what happened to the desktop.com stuff and if there is anything like it (in the way of dev tools). Note: the desktop.com stuff was totally DHTML and scripting, no java on the client.
Now I'm confused, they did 17% more business this year than last year but missed estimates of 119% growth. My gawd, what a bunch of fools.
Isn't 17% growth decent anymore? Unrealistic growth is going to be traced to the real cause of the recession. If you grow at 17% a year isn't that enough. What growth is needed to make a viable business?
I don't understand why you just don't get a NIC and use that (it has a few limitations but not too many). A plus is that it already runs Linux.
Am I the only one that thinks that BattleBots is rather lame. Why don't they call them what they are: Radio Controlled Devices. There isn't any 'botness to them.
Luckly for me I have Tivo and watch the whole show in 9 minutes (3 bouts, max 3 minutes each).
Didn't the NASA channel have a bot's competition where they really were robots (no human intervention)?
If you build your database correctly you shouldn't have a problem with blobs. They won't effect searching or caching since you queries will be against the non-blob fields. The really nice thing is that you can use the database backup utilities to save all of your data.
You would have to build a front end to fetch and insert pictures but that shouldn't be too hard and you'll probably want that anyway to support stuff like version archiving, etc.
One plus of everything in the database is that you can fetch the data across the network with having to share a drive via samba or NFS.
With the better databases you can even share the data via replication.
The downsides are that you would basically have to become a database administrator to take care of the system and stuff like that.
I'm looking at getting DSL in Roseville, CA and the phone CO uses a fujitisu (sp?) box, they want $350 for it and I know there are better solutions available for half that price (the linksys is a good example). Has anyone been able to get a telco to not use the company default device?
the following:
e r_Appliances/other_appliances_6.html
http://devices.internet.com/other_appliance/Oth
says that the iopener runs qnx, that would be cool, but the lack of drivers would be a problem. The big question would be how to get into it to see what's going on.
It appears to use a 200Mhz processor so you can't expect too much. However as a remote terminal it would be very nice. Now, how to hack it...
Has anyone here found a device that emulates a phone system so I can put one of these in the kitchen and have it talk to my server? (I also have a apple desktop tv system (the pippen) that would also benefit from this. Heck if I could browse using webTV without the service that would be nice.
Actually Gamasutra is good reading for non-game developers. The lessons learned can apply to many areas. The postmortem articles give interesting insight to development of products that I haven't seen from other places. Esp. the what went wrong and what we would do different parts. When was the lasttime anyone read an article about 's product and what went wrong in the development?
The problem is that it's hard to believe an AC when they say that anything that can't be backed up. Perhaps of an example or real name would help.
btw: we tried a java client and it failed due to being too early too soon. AWT just didn't cut it and the kicker was that we were win based for the whole project. I think swing might be better but the client load times are still too long.
OK, I guess if you ship millions of packages a day you'll be able to find some folks who got screwed one way or the other. My UPS karma is real great, My FedEx karma is good, My AirBorne karma sucks big time. I mean, they let my dog sign for a touch screen and the dog ate it! I have floppy disks with teeth bites through them. Of course Airborne said not our problem.
Stuff like this happens, I don't like it and just won't use them, luckly we still have choices.
I use the Omniview Pro and have a 6port SE version off one of the ports. Lately I've been buying cheap alternate systems off ebay to get a better understanding of the os's and to just play around. So now I have a couple sparc's, a couple HP9000/715's, a Indy2 and an RS6000 on the way as well as a couple macs and a bunch of PCs. Belkin has a box to convert the sparcs to ps/2 and handles the video just fine. The HPs use PS2 and normal video, the Indy needs a converter cable for the video as well as the RS6k. I'm using a video adapter and keyboard/mouse converter from Silicon Valley Bus for the Macs (although they only use a serial mouse). Belkin also has a converter for Macs. The Belkin converters are the cheapest (cost wise) that I've found and should work with any KMV.
/. then you'll most likely have bunches of systems in the future.
The important thing is to get the biggest switch you can afford cause if you frequent
The next goal is to get a KVM extender/remote that will allow me to move a bunch of the machines to another place in the house to cut down on the noise. The one I bought was from Cybex and passes video, sound, mouse and keyboard across cat5 up to a couple hundred feet. The systems that I don't stick disks into very often will be moved just leaving the the systems that deal with the scanner, etc in the office.
I also do use vnc but only when computing from another room, there isn't a comparison between vnc and direct connect.
bobm
I don't think it will happen (I would like for it to happen), Sun hasn't really done anything for the linux community. The released a sorta free version of solaris and someone came up with an app that will run linux apps under solaris but they don't really seem to want to work in the linux world. Can anyone tell what they've released that is Linux based?
:-> ).
Of course I could just be too paranoid but I doubt it. Lots of folks see MS as the big evil threat but I think that Sun is also doing stuff, just not as obvious...
And remember that MS doesn't have the large system market, those are solaris machines we're going up against when Linux scales better. (And I can get a 16 processor AMD card
Now if I could just figure out IBMs motives..
bobm