> SAS (serially attached SCSI) drives will be 2.5" and use less power.
I was under the impression that current 10k rpm 3.5" form factor drives actually have 2.5" platters inside. If this is the case, the SAS disks are unlikely to use less power.
> All RAID increases write latencies unless you have a battery backed cache.
I suppose that with a fast RAID1 controller there would be some increase in latency but it is likely to be negligible (he says, pulling it out of his butt since he hasn't actually tested it). Certainly RAID5 will be slow on writes, which is what you were mostly talking about.
Interesting. I only go by what I've heard and seen in reference sources online, but it's been pretty consistent. I'm surprised to hear esp. the comment below that says that 80% ethanol mixes get you about 75% as far as "pure" gasoline (which might in fact have 10% ethanol).
I know that ethanol has the property of boosting octane of gasoline. that's one big reason you commonly see 10% ethanol blends today.
I haven't had a lot of experience with their fibre channel stuff (one system only), but my experience with infortrend SCSI arrays has been very good.
When I worked at UUNET (1997-2000) we had hundreds of servers with infortrend-based arrays as their storage.
I've had reasonable service, great pricing, and bad support from CAEN Engineering, one of their resellers. I have heard good things about Western Scientific.
> But it is not subsidized anymore, and even so it is cheapper than gas.
Do you mean cheaper per liter or cheaper per km travelled?
The energy density of ethanol is a bit over half that of gasoline. Assuming equal efficiency, you'll need nearly twice as much ethanol to travel a given distance. This means more frequent fuel stops or larger fuel tanks (larger fuel tanks, of course, mean lower fuel economy since you're carting around all that fuel).
ethanol ought to cost about half as much per liter as gasoline for it to be cost-equivalent. I don't know what the prices are in Brazil, just pointing that it's not a simple cost per liter comparison.
It's also clear that ethanol production takes lots of arable land, lots of water, and a significant amount of energy to both grow the (corn or whatever) and to distill it into ethanol. Opinions differ but some analyses show that ethanol produced from corn in the US actually is a net energy loss.
of course, oracle's line is that the licensing refers not to the implementation details at the database level (ie, whether you use one db user or 1,000,000) but rather how many human beings are actually using it.
that's what their reps say, anyway. i haven't had an attorney review their contracts but how much you wanna bet they thought of it in the contract?
re: "if you buy cheap you buy twice": that's almost certainly true. In fact, it's generally my goal with technology purchases - spend $100 now and $100 later instead of $250 now.
For stereo purchases, i've done both ways - i have a half-decent adcom & b+w system for the main stereo that i spent real money on, and i have a sony receiver with jvc speakers i spent $120 on (used - probably list price $400 worth of gear) that i use much more often since it's in the kitchen where we spend most of our time. I wouldn't hear the difference with the cheap system. I might, or might not, with the good stuff.
perhaps the real question for me is whether this is a stereo purchase or a technology purchase. it's both, of course, but how do i treat it?
Do you have any knowledge of the quality of the DACs and other components in the Roku soundbridge? These can be had for as little as $100 (m500, now $150 with $50 rebate).
They're even compatible with the slimserver software, which strikes me as a very good solution.
I like the idea of supporting the squeezebox people but i don't like the idea of spending $250 on the thing when there's a $100 alternative. I'm a cheapskate, i know.
presumably you meant "not" instead of now. This is fairly obvious in context, but when arguing about grammar it is good form to take the time to proofread your own writing.
To answer your question, it doesn't have to. "So as to disappear" can be parsed as "really really really small, so small you won't even notice it."
Back to the original argument, I'd be shocked if 64-bit linux users were 1% of the market. Probably closer to 1/100 of 1%. maybe as much as 1/10 of 1%.
It's pretty seldom that folks are travelling to tier one cities with huge expense accounts and nothing to do when they're there.
In my case, back in the boom days, I travelled a bunch to northern virginia, close to DC, and had a reasonable expense account. DC is at least a tier one-and-a-half city if not a tier 1 - and i stayed at marriotts (not paris hilton material but a nice hotel). I and my coworkers who did it hated it, expensive dinners and all. Because we were away from our families & friends.
You do have a good point regarding the sales rep coming to town. Although that kind of thing is happenning less and less, too.
today's point-to-point VC is really not that bad (in terms of ease of use) if you pony up for reasonable equipment and you don't have a firewall in the way.
These are both pretty big IFs, however - especially the firewall part. However, on an internal corporate network it is quite reasonable to expect high success rate.
Re HD vs. std def - the standard videoconferencing stuff that you see today is H.323 running at, if you're lucky, 768k. Most of the times the cameras are crappy and not well set up in the room to capture the occupants. Doing these things better will improve your videoconf quality a lot - moving to hidef is not necessarily the answer.
there's an app called DVTS (http://www.dvts.jp/en/index.html) that does raw capture of the firewire stream from a DV camera and spews it out the network interface at about 30Mbit. The quality is quite good and the latency is low - both important in a videoconference.
Of course, that's 30 megabits. Doable on a corporate WAN or in higher ed (between internet2 connected institutions) but not quite ready for take-home use.
All you whipper-snappers and your bitmapped graphics.
I am a recovering nethack addict - i have ascended (won the game) several times.
one time, however, I made it all the way down to the wizard, killed him & took the amulet, and slogged my way up with the rotten bastard coming back as a reincarnation over and over.
One time as i was near the top, he got the amulet from me, then went "double trouble" on me. I killed one or both, and picked up the amulet from the pile. I went on and went up from dungeon level one, expecting to enter the first elemental level (i forget now which it was) on my way to the astral plane.
Except I hadn't cast identify on the stupid amulet, and I escaped the dungeon with a cheap plastic imitation of the amulet of yendor.
I think I was more crestfallen then than when my first girlfriend dumped me.
they won't provide the same transfer rate as a 3.5" 7200rpm drive - the linear speed half an inch further away from the spindle will be higher, and thus the transfer rate higher, in the 3.5" unit.
The mac mini's market is *mostly* people to which power & expandability don't matter.
However, it's also cheapskates like me who wouldn't buy a $1300 iMac, but don't want a slow-ass 4200rpm disk drive or to pay $200 for a 40M 7200rpm laptop drive.
that said i haven't seen the mod, and a firewire disk would fix my primary problem.
the $600 card (from dell - the one i've used) is kind of a PITA to work with, whereas just using the serial BIOS is fairly simple to work with if you are a CLI weenie using a CLI OS like i am.
The weasel card is a gross hack but a cool one, i couldn't resist linking to it.
You mention blue screen captures - if you are using windows servers then you probably need a real KVM solution, not merely serial BIOS control.
You're clearly right that investing in a real solution is better than going half-assed.
while we're picking on USB let's remember my two favorites.
1) the connectors don't have a positive lock mechanism
2) A connectors are just as wide as RJ-45 connectors and you can, in fact, plug one in to an ethernet jack. and it seems right since there is no positive lock. but strangely enough it doesn't work.
> I love all these answers about using distros > configured to put the console on a serial tty > when the submitter clearly described needing to > be in the box before the POST splash is up.
So the reasonable solution is not to buy zillions of dollars worth of systems management cards but to buy machines with serial-capable BIOS. Dell's servers do this (the ones i buy anyway). If you want to make this happen for white-box motherboards you can use the PC Weasel: http://realweasel.com/
> Most consumers are deeply suspicious of Microsoft. > They admire MS's success but harbor a deep sense > of dread based on their dependence on that vendor.
This just isn't true. People don't blame microsoft for microsoft's crappy software.
I don't necessarily agree with your overall conclusion (don't do that) but the wattage numbers you state are grossly high for a typical desktop PC.
The rating on your power supply is NOT the amount of power your system draws.
i measured the following with an inline meter - google for "kill-a-watt".
For instance, my P3-600, 256M ram, 5400rpm disk, ethernet, video, draws about 60 watts constant when it's just sitting there running windows. I can't remember, but that may have also included the LCD display attached to it.
My celeron 1000 with four disk drives, an nvidia AGP card, and an adaptec 4-port ethernet (probably power hungry, i expected) pulls under 100 watts. Again, just sitting there, in this case running fedora.
That said, CRT monitors probably draw about whatever it says on the back panel. over 100 watts for a big one.
> Guess which one is most cost-effective > and works best for a 40-mile commute?
It's not entirely clear whether both "cost effective" and "best" referred to "40-mile commute," but as it turns out, per passenger mile travelled, 747s hold up quite well in the cost-effectiveness category.
You're certainly right on the cost of tape but you have either been using crappy tapes and/or drives or you are sniffing glue if you think tape's not reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
> SAS (serially attached SCSI) drives will be 2.5" and use less power.
I was under the impression that current 10k rpm 3.5" form factor drives actually have 2.5" platters inside. If this is the case, the SAS disks are unlikely to use less power.
> All RAID increases write latencies unless you have a battery backed cache.
I suppose that with a fast RAID1 controller there would be some increase in latency but it is likely to be negligible (he says, pulling it out of his butt since he hasn't actually tested it). Certainly RAID5 will be slow on writes, which is what you were mostly talking about.
Interesting. I only go by what I've heard and seen in reference sources online, but it's been pretty consistent. I'm surprised to hear esp. the comment below that says that 80% ethanol mixes get you about 75% as far as "pure" gasoline (which might in fact have 10% ethanol).
I know that ethanol has the property of boosting octane of gasoline. that's one big reason you commonly see 10% ethanol blends today.
Plus, you'll spend $25 a month on electricity for it.
I haven't had a lot of experience with their fibre channel stuff (one system only), but my experience with infortrend SCSI arrays has been very good.
When I worked at UUNET (1997-2000) we had hundreds of servers with infortrend-based arrays as their storage.
I've had reasonable service, great pricing, and bad support from CAEN Engineering, one of their resellers. I have heard good things about Western Scientific.
> brazilian ethanol,
> But it is not subsidized anymore, and even so it is cheapper than gas.
Do you mean cheaper per liter or cheaper per km travelled?
The energy density of ethanol is a bit over half that of gasoline. Assuming equal efficiency, you'll need nearly twice as much ethanol to travel a given distance. This means more frequent fuel stops or larger fuel tanks (larger fuel tanks, of course, mean lower fuel economy since you're carting around all that fuel).
ethanol ought to cost about half as much per liter as gasoline for it to be cost-equivalent. I don't know what the prices are in Brazil, just pointing that it's not a simple cost per liter comparison.
It's also clear that ethanol production takes lots of arable land, lots of water, and a significant amount of energy to both grow the (corn or whatever) and to distill it into ethanol. Opinions differ but some analyses show that ethanol produced from corn in the US actually is a net energy loss.
of course, oracle's line is that the licensing refers not to the implementation details at the database level (ie, whether you use one db user or 1,000,000) but rather how many human beings are actually using it.
that's what their reps say, anyway. i haven't had an attorney review their contracts but how much you wanna bet they thought of it in the contract?
thanks for the info.
re: "if you buy cheap you buy twice": that's almost certainly true. In fact, it's generally my goal with technology purchases - spend $100 now and $100 later instead of $250 now.
For stereo purchases, i've done both ways - i have a half-decent adcom & b+w system for the main stereo that i spent real money on, and i have a sony receiver with jvc speakers i spent $120 on (used - probably list price $400 worth of gear) that i use much more often since it's in the kitchen where we spend most of our time. I wouldn't hear the difference with the cheap system. I might, or might not, with the good stuff.
perhaps the real question for me is whether this is a stereo purchase or a technology purchase. it's both, of course, but how do i treat it?
peace
Do you have any knowledge of the quality of the DACs and other components in the Roku soundbridge? These can be had for as little as $100 (m500, now $150 with $50 rebate).
They're even compatible with the slimserver software, which strikes me as a very good solution.
I like the idea of supporting the squeezebox people but i don't like the idea of spending $250 on the thing when there's a $100 alternative. I'm a cheapskate, i know.
presumably you meant "not" instead of now. This is fairly obvious in context, but when arguing about grammar it is good form to take the time to proofread your own writing.
To answer your question, it doesn't have to. "So as to disappear" can be parsed as "really really really small, so small you won't even notice it."
Back to the original argument, I'd be shocked if 64-bit linux users were 1% of the market. Probably closer to 1/100 of 1%. maybe as much as 1/10 of 1%.
static ads don't bother me so much, but blinking, flashing, moving junk drives me nuts.
Flashblock for firefox solves 95% of this problem nicely.
It's pretty seldom that folks are travelling to tier one cities with huge expense accounts and nothing to do when they're there.
In my case, back in the boom days, I travelled a bunch to northern virginia, close to DC, and had a reasonable expense account. DC is at least a tier one-and-a-half city if not a tier 1 - and i stayed at marriotts (not paris hilton material but a nice hotel). I and my coworkers who did it hated it, expensive dinners and all. Because we were away from our families & friends.
You do have a good point regarding the sales rep coming to town. Although that kind of thing is happenning less and less, too.
here's a better link to the actual DVTS software:
http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/DVTS/
today's point-to-point VC is really not that bad (in terms of ease of use) if you pony up for reasonable equipment and you don't have a firewall in the way.
These are both pretty big IFs, however - especially the firewall part. However, on an internal corporate network it is quite reasonable to expect high success rate.
Re HD vs. std def - the standard videoconferencing stuff that you see today is H.323 running at, if you're lucky, 768k. Most of the times the cameras are crappy and not well set up in the room to capture the occupants. Doing these things better will improve your videoconf quality a lot - moving to hidef is not necessarily the answer.
there's an app called DVTS (http://www.dvts.jp/en/index.html) that does raw capture of the firewire stream from a DV camera and spews it out the network interface at about 30Mbit. The quality is quite good and the latency is low - both important in a videoconference.
Of course, that's 30 megabits. Doable on a corporate WAN or in higher ed (between internet2 connected institutions) but not quite ready for take-home use.
you sound like you don't do much travel yourself. PHBs, like anyone else, don't like spending that much time away from their families.
business travel once a quarter might be fun - once a week it is much less so.
All you whipper-snappers and your bitmapped graphics.
I am a recovering nethack addict - i have ascended (won the game) several times.
one time, however, I made it all the way down to the wizard, killed him & took the amulet, and slogged my way up with the rotten bastard coming back as a reincarnation over and over.
One time as i was near the top, he got the amulet from me, then went "double trouble" on me. I killed one or both, and picked up the amulet from the pile. I went on and went up from dungeon level one, expecting to enter the first elemental level (i forget now which it was) on my way to the astral plane.
Except I hadn't cast identify on the stupid amulet, and I escaped the dungeon with a cheap plastic imitation of the amulet of yendor.
I think I was more crestfallen then than when my first girlfriend dumped me.
they won't provide the same transfer rate as a 3.5" 7200rpm drive - the linear speed half an inch further away from the spindle will be higher, and thus the transfer rate higher, in the 3.5" unit.
The mac mini's market is *mostly* people to which power & expandability don't matter.
However, it's also cheapskates like me who wouldn't buy a $1300 iMac, but don't want a slow-ass 4200rpm disk drive or to pay $200 for a 40M 7200rpm laptop drive.
that said i haven't seen the mod, and a firewire disk would fix my primary problem.
the $600 card (from dell - the one i've used) is kind of a PITA to work with, whereas just using
the serial BIOS is fairly simple to work with if you are a CLI weenie using a CLI OS like i am.
The weasel card is a gross hack but a cool one, i couldn't resist linking to it.
You mention blue screen captures - if you are using windows servers then you probably need a real KVM solution, not merely serial BIOS control.
You're clearly right that investing in a real solution is better than going half-assed.
while we're picking on USB let's remember my two favorites.
1) the connectors don't have a positive lock mechanism
2) A connectors are just as wide as RJ-45 connectors and you can, in fact, plug one in to an ethernet jack. and it seems right since there is no positive lock. but strangely enough it doesn't work.
it's not perl - it's the C library.
man 3 localtime
> I love all these answers about using distros
> configured to put the console on a serial tty
> when the submitter clearly described needing to
> be in the box before the POST splash is up.
So the reasonable solution is not to buy zillions of dollars worth of systems management cards but to buy machines with serial-capable BIOS. Dell's servers do this (the ones i buy anyway). If you want to make this happen for white-box motherboards you can use the PC Weasel: http://realweasel.com/
> Most consumers are deeply suspicious of Microsoft.
> They admire MS's success but harbor a deep sense
> of dread based on their dependence on that vendor.
This just isn't true. People don't blame microsoft for microsoft's crappy software.
I don't necessarily agree with your overall conclusion (don't do that) but the wattage numbers you state are grossly high for a typical desktop PC.
The rating on your power supply is NOT the amount of power your system draws.
i measured the following with an inline meter - google for "kill-a-watt".
For instance, my P3-600, 256M ram, 5400rpm disk, ethernet, video, draws about 60 watts constant when it's just sitting there running windows. I can't remember, but that may have also included the LCD display attached to it.
My celeron 1000 with four disk drives, an nvidia AGP card, and an adaptec 4-port ethernet (probably power hungry, i expected) pulls under 100 watts. Again, just sitting there, in this case running fedora.
That said, CRT monitors probably draw about whatever it says on the back panel. over 100 watts for a big one.
> Guess which one is most cost-effective
> and works best for a 40-mile commute?
It's not entirely clear whether both "cost effective" and "best" referred to "40-mile commute," but as it turns out, per passenger mile travelled, 747s hold up quite well in the cost-effectiveness category.
You're certainly right on the cost of tape but you have either been using crappy tapes and/or drives or you are sniffing glue if you think tape's not reliable.