Between seven or eight years ago my then boss and I discussed and designed just such a solution.
Being from the earthquake-prone isles of New Zealand we decided we required a relocatable, and rapidly-deployable datacentre. The year after I moved to the UK, my former employer then proceeded to build one and I visited it when I was home a little over three years ago.
Admittedly, Sun's does look a lot stealthier in black.
Earthlight always was home to a bunch of crazy geniuses!
At the very least, it's a humorous coincidence. Perhaps the studio should have made light of the Cheyenne Mountain mothballing in their announcment.;-)
As saving files is one of the more common functions, why do we not have a "Save" (current file to disk) key? Or how about making "Print Screen" just "Print" (the current document to the printer). Maybe a help key.
I know we have combo's or function keys that do things like this already Ctrl+S, Ctrl+P and F1 but dedicated keys would still be better.
Actually what would be great is a key that actually immediately halts the current action - it sucks when a web-page slowly loads, you hit the "Stop" button on the toolbar, yet the damn app grinds on and on. When you tell an app to stop, it should stop NOW goddammit! (Somewhat akin to a "PANIC" key as well...)
What the hell?
So much vapourware if you ask me - this holy grail has been oft-promised and never delivered. What's the point anyway? Ultrium LTO3 is *already* at 800GB (400G @ 2x compression) and every new generation from 4 through the roadmapped 6 is slated to double capacity with every iteration.
Call me a cynic but this tech is like AI - it's always "just around the corner". It will be a reality - just in time for us to fit it to starships with warpdrive technology. Believe it when you see it.
*disclaimer* - I work with LTO solutions.
How many of these folks that are complaining about the windmills are volunteering to have a power plant (nuclear or otherwise) built next to them? Come to think of it, how many of them are being as energy-efficient as they can be to stave off construction of new generation for as long as possible?
I'm currently living in the UK and thay have a great word here (not sure if it's in the USA too): NIMBYs - Not In My Back Yarders. People want reliable cheap energy, but none of them are prepared to put up with the prod to their comfort zone it requires to generate it.
The only problem I forsee with the nuclear industry in the west are the incumbent interests who will ensure that big (expensive), outdated, military-derived, pressure-vessel contained reactors get built. That said even if entirely new generations of civil-designed systems like pebble-beds and Toshiba 4S's get built you will STILL have the folks who don't want ANY sort of construction blotting their pretty little landscape.
Somebody, somewhere, always has to bite the bullet and in our majority-rules system, the city populations will always out-gun the sparsely-populated countryside. It ain't fair, but it's the reality.
Oh really? Pray, tell me Einstein, just where does the radiation go? "Oh it's in the ashes." you say. Ah, so now we have radioactive ash to deal with instead of it being spread as an aerosol into the local atmosphere. So now your clean coal plant is producing radioactive ashes that must be disposed of. Just where is Europe putting it's "clean" coal ashes? Are they dumping it in your backyard?
Seems to me that the challenge of dealing with nuclear power generation's highly radioactive by-products is referring to them as "waste". It's not waste - they are a danger because of the high levels of energy they release - energy that we simply haven't found a suitable way of harvesting yet.
So really it's just an energy resource we haven't figured out how to exploit. Come up with a way of utilising that radioactivity other than burying it.
One of the design issues facing the designers of the Yucca facility is the large amounts of heat generated by the decaying substances stored there.
Heat you say? Er seems like we're missing something there. Maybe Yucca could generate it's own electricity...?
Totally agree, my first thought was "Just shoot the f'ing robot."
Countermeasures will come but in the meantime this will be useful. Shame about the poor bloke who gets nailed on the snipers first shot! "Bummer of a birthmark Hal.";-)
A *really* clever robot would spot the sniper *before* he fires.
As a commercial pilot friend of mine likes to point out, it's aeroplane, (cf: hydroplane). "Airplanes" don't exist (well, as a machine) - that describes a flat section of air, not a flying machine.
Not quite - the only native mammals in NZ when humans arrived were three species of bat (the long-tailed bat (Chalinolobus) and two short-tailed bats (Mystacina robusta and M. tuberculata)).
Most people forget about the bats back home (or don't even know we have 'em as they are so hardly seen).
True. The tapes appear cheaper for me at around £25 each - which for 400GB native is a lot cheaper than disk (200GB, 7200rpm, 8MB cache = approx £129 retail). Tape also scales massive storage amounts easier.
I have an HP ESL E-series (with 16 gen3 drives), ESL 9000 (gen2), EML E-series (which is very nifty IMHO), and most of the other doo-dads here.
My SAN is one of these throwing data over 2Gbps fiber through Brocade and Cisco switches.
The cool thing about the ESL E-series is that you can bolt multiple units together for more drives and slots (as you see fit) I think the (theoretical - no-one's built one) maximum is 25!
Hate to burst your bubble their laddie, but this says "up to 850GB" well here we've already got 800GB (compressed) on Ultrium3.
So far every generation has doubled capacity and throughput to the point that generation-3 fiber-channel drives are just beginning to have their interfaces saturated by the (74.5TB) SAN in my lab. The latest Gen3 units I took delivery of are dual-ported fiber-channel (and we're only using one so far).
Gen4 should continue the doubling trend.
Currently working on a plan for a 2PB library (end of year 1) that will scale to a 5PB library (end of year 2) when disk can do that without a re-enforced floor and at as low a level (thus cheap to run) of electricity usage (not to mention heat), get back to me.
True, true, although today I'd say it would be even easier because every doo-dad in my server room right now has hot-swap PSU's that could be DC units (I'm not sure what the EVA8000 draws at peak, though that's a wattage/current issue really) and all the LCD screens have AC/DC adaptors that could be redundant.
You could use low voltage fluro's for lighting, or even LED lighting.
That said, I should have clarified, you really only need the racks DC wired, not the whole room, lights, etc. could still be AC but what the heck, you might as well go the whole hog!:-)
Granted, the odd terminal or management PC could be used but those would simply require a "houshold" mains plug, not the 240VAC 20A suckers we have under the floor at the moment.
I remember seeing the COLUSSUS rebuild at Bletchly Park - 400VDC rails! Nifty!
You could eve run the backup generator off biodiesel. Hmm...
As I recall, a while back Compaq used to make DC power supplies that you could order as an option for your server to go in the hot-swap slots instead of the AC units.
The Datacentre was wired for DC instead and all the power conversion was done ONCE from the mains feed by a big AC/DC converter (basically what a UPS does anyway).
As the AC/DC conversion was already done, the DC power supplies ran cool, the failure rate was lower, the AirCon bill was lower and the power bill was lower (the single point for AC/DC conversion was more efficient). Oh, it was quieter too (less fans!)
Shame was as it required a fully DC-wired datacentre the concept never really flew, shame really.
Actually, by removing treatment for HIV from Africa, you stand a better chance of breeding immune humans. (Sure, a lot of people will have to die, but evolution will work it out in the end.)
Secondly your ignorant "They fuck like rabbits..." statement shows a basic lack of understanding of mammalian biology and human social systems.
When placed under biological stress, mammalian rates of fecundity have a tendancy to rise (their fertility rates go up) - this is simply because the species has built in mechanisims for survival. Birth rates go up because having lots of offspring increases the likelihood of species survivability through times of stress.
Socially those populations have many children simply because in those societies, your children go on to work your land, take over from you and care for you in old age. It's always been good to have many children, especially boys. Less than 100 years ago here in the West it was common for families to have up to 12 children, many of whom would never reach adulthood due to infant mortality rates.
The only reason we have fewer children today is because we live in a culture of abundance and excellent post-natal healthcare. (Check out the increasing rates of cesarian section deliveries, premature baby survival rates and obesity for a clue.)
The west has now got an aging population because we do not breed like we used to - because we can afford not to, we don't need so many children for our bloodlines to survive.
(Our aging populations are bringing a new set of problems to our future anyway that the Third World does not have to deal with.)
Also, assuming you're a westerner (as am I) then biologically speaking, you have very little pressure on you required to survive. Indeed, those peoples having to fight disease with their immune system rather than medication have a *greater* chance of surviving a new plague than we do - especially within our densely populated mega-cities which are a haven for rapidly spreading contagious diseases (witness SARS).
On top of that, those in the Third World possess a greater range of survival skills than Western city-dwellers in the event of a cataclysmic event (such as a deep impact - which you are more likely to die from in your lifetime than dying in an airliner crash). The harshness of their lives makes them a much tougher nut with a better chance of survival than you would be with your cushy lifestyle taken away from you.
Our reliance on technologies to survive is breeding in biological weakness. So yes, stop trying to help those folks in the Third World - it will assist in breeding a stronger human race.
Yeah, I've never understood why we can't shove it down into a subduction zone. Admittedly the issues with anything underground have concerns about groundwater, but that would have boiled off well before getting down to superhot rock.
Actually grinding it into fine particulates and releasing it into the atmosphere would be a very bad thing as inhaling fine radioactive dusts (or gases) is, apart from extreme rad exposure, one of the fastest ways to get killed by radiation.
Not to mention the fact that the stuff would settle on cropping regions and build up in the surface soil and the oceans, thus contaminating food sources (living cells have a tendancy to accumulate heavy metals). Essentially what you would create is fallout.
To follow-up - you miss the point - rights do not exist. Period. Ever. Never have.
The UN, anyone, anywhere, anytime, whatever can say whatever they like, but at the end of the day humanity existed for thousands of years before any sort of formal organisztions like these came into existence and then, just as now, rights were ultimately determined by the authority in society at the business end of a weapon.
Anyone can take away every right you have simply by shooting you.
So, again, to re-iterate they do NOT exist. Period.
To speak of inherency is a red herring - such ideals were only created by us (mostly here in the wealthy, white, west) and as such are, like rights, an abstract so the idea of them being inherent is no more real then the abstract concept of "rights". If they do not exist, then they cannot be inherent.
Slashdot Mirror
Between seven or eight years ago my then boss and I discussed and designed just such a solution.
Being from the earthquake-prone isles of New Zealand we decided we required a relocatable, and rapidly-deployable datacentre. The year after I moved to the UK, my former employer then proceeded to build one and I visited it when I was home a little over three years ago.
Admittedly, Sun's does look a lot stealthier in black.
Earthlight always was home to a bunch of crazy geniuses!
At the very least, it's a humorous coincidence. Perhaps the studio should have made light of the Cheyenne Mountain mothballing in their announcment. ;-)
As saving files is one of the more common functions, why do we not have a "Save" (current file to disk) key? Or how about making "Print Screen" just "Print" (the current document to the printer). Maybe a help key.
I know we have combo's or function keys that do things like this already Ctrl+S, Ctrl+P and F1 but dedicated keys would still be better.
Actually what would be great is a key that actually immediately halts the current action - it sucks when a web-page slowly loads, you hit the "Stop" button on the toolbar, yet the damn app grinds on and on. When you tell an app to stop, it should stop NOW goddammit! (Somewhat akin to a "PANIC" key as well...)
What the hell?
So much vapourware if you ask me - this holy grail has been oft-promised and never delivered. What's the point anyway? Ultrium LTO3 is *already* at 800GB (400G @ 2x compression) and every new generation from 4 through the roadmapped 6 is slated to double capacity with every iteration.
Call me a cynic but this tech is like AI - it's always "just around the corner". It will be a reality - just in time for us to fit it to starships with warpdrive technology. Believe it when you see it.
*disclaimer* - I work with LTO solutions.
The one time two dickheads jumped and hospitalised [five hours in an ER] me, they were both good little white boys [like me].
You're a human and you all suck equally, deal with it.
Oh, and never leave your victim alive, because he's going to even the odds one day and come back for your kneecaps.
VZ-200
A Zilog Z80 CPU that screamed along at 3.6MHz (give or take...) and a whopping 8k of RAM! IIRC, my first 486 had 8k of on-chip primary cache...
Oh man, waiting for programs to load off audio tape or typing in piles of code and having the save-to-tape fail - arrrrgh!
How many of these folks that are complaining about the windmills are volunteering to have a power plant (nuclear or otherwise) built next to them? Come to think of it, how many of them are being as energy-efficient as they can be to stave off construction of new generation for as long as possible?
I'm currently living in the UK and thay have a great word here (not sure if it's in the USA too): NIMBYs - Not In My Back Yarders. People want reliable cheap energy, but none of them are prepared to put up with the prod to their comfort zone it requires to generate it.
The only problem I forsee with the nuclear industry in the west are the incumbent interests who will ensure that big (expensive), outdated, military-derived, pressure-vessel contained reactors get built. That said even if entirely new generations of civil-designed systems like pebble-beds and Toshiba 4S's get built you will STILL have the folks who don't want ANY sort of construction blotting their pretty little landscape.
Somebody, somewhere, always has to bite the bullet and in our majority-rules system, the city populations will always out-gun the sparsely-populated countryside. It ain't fair, but it's the reality.
...are what's going on at sites 1 through 50.
I mean, this is site number 51 - what's going on at the first fifty?!
Oh really? Pray, tell me Einstein, just where does the radiation go? "Oh it's in the ashes." you say. Ah, so now we have radioactive ash to deal with instead of it being spread as an aerosol into the local atmosphere. So now your clean coal plant is producing radioactive ashes that must be disposed of. Just where is Europe putting it's "clean" coal ashes? Are they dumping it in your backyard?
Seems to me that the challenge of dealing with nuclear power generation's highly radioactive by-products is referring to them as "waste". It's not waste - they are a danger because of the high levels of energy they release - energy that we simply haven't found a suitable way of harvesting yet.
So really it's just an energy resource we haven't figured out how to exploit. Come up with a way of utilising that radioactivity other than burying it.
One of the design issues facing the designers of the Yucca facility is the large amounts of heat generated by the decaying substances stored there.
Heat you say? Er seems like we're missing something there. Maybe Yucca could generate it's own electricity...?
You've never seen "Fight Club" huh? :-)
Damn, I so wish I had mod points right now. Go to the front of the class :-)
Countermeasures will come but in the meantime this will be useful. Shame about the poor bloke who gets nailed on the snipers first shot! "Bummer of a birthmark Hal." ;-)
A *really* clever robot would spot the sniper *before* he fires.
From o.p: "...two airplanes..."
As a commercial pilot friend of mine likes to point out, it's aeroplane, (cf: hydroplane). "Airplanes" don't exist (well, as a machine) - that describes a flat section of air, not a flying machine.
Well, there goes what little karma I have...
Not quite - the only native mammals in NZ when humans arrived were three species of bat (the long-tailed bat (Chalinolobus) and two short-tailed bats (Mystacina robusta and M. tuberculata)).
Most people forget about the bats back home (or don't even know we have 'em as they are so hardly seen).
True. The tapes appear cheaper for me at around £25 each - which for 400GB native is a lot cheaper than disk (200GB, 7200rpm, 8MB cache = approx £129 retail). Tape also scales massive storage amounts easier.
:-)
I have an HP ESL E-series (with 16 gen3 drives), ESL 9000 (gen2), EML E-series (which is very nifty IMHO), and most of the other doo-dads here.
My SAN is one of these throwing data over 2Gbps fiber through Brocade and Cisco switches.
The cool thing about the ESL E-series is that you can bolt multiple units together for more drives and slots (as you see fit) I think the (theoretical - no-one's built one) maximum is 25!
Nice toys
Hate to burst your bubble their laddie, but this says "up to 850GB" well here we've already got 800GB (compressed) on Ultrium3.
So far every generation has doubled capacity and throughput to the point that generation-3 fiber-channel drives are just beginning to have their interfaces saturated by the (74.5TB) SAN in my lab. The latest Gen3 units I took delivery of are dual-ported fiber-channel (and we're only using one so far).
Gen4 should continue the doubling trend.
Currently working on a plan for a 2PB library (end of year 1) that will scale to a 5PB library (end of year 2) when disk can do that without a re-enforced floor and at as low a level (thus cheap to run) of electricity usage (not to mention heat), get back to me.
Tape is dead? Newbie.
Why thank-you sir, I'll be sure to check it out!
True, true, although today I'd say it would be even easier because every doo-dad in my server room right now has hot-swap PSU's that could be DC units (I'm not sure what the EVA8000 draws at peak, though that's a wattage/current issue really) and all the LCD screens have AC/DC adaptors that could be redundant.
:-)
You could use low voltage fluro's for lighting, or even LED lighting.
That said, I should have clarified, you really only need the racks DC wired, not the whole room, lights, etc. could still be AC but what the heck, you might as well go the whole hog!
Granted, the odd terminal or management PC could be used but those would simply require a "houshold" mains plug, not the 240VAC 20A suckers we have under the floor at the moment.
I remember seeing the COLUSSUS rebuild at Bletchly Park - 400VDC rails! Nifty!
You could eve run the backup generator off biodiesel. Hmm...
As I recall, a while back Compaq used to make DC power supplies that you could order as an option for your server to go in the hot-swap slots instead of the AC units.
The Datacentre was wired for DC instead and all the power conversion was done ONCE from the mains feed by a big AC/DC converter (basically what a UPS does anyway).
As the AC/DC conversion was already done, the DC power supplies ran cool, the failure rate was lower, the AirCon bill was lower and the power bill was lower (the single point for AC/DC conversion was more efficient). Oh, it was quieter too (less fans!)
Shame was as it required a fully DC-wired datacentre the concept never really flew, shame really.
Actually, by removing treatment for HIV from Africa, you stand a better chance of breeding immune humans. (Sure, a lot of people will have to die, but evolution will work it out in the end.)
Secondly your ignorant "They fuck like rabbits..." statement shows a basic lack of understanding of mammalian biology and human social systems.
When placed under biological stress, mammalian rates of fecundity have a tendancy to rise (their fertility rates go up) - this is simply because the species has built in mechanisims for survival. Birth rates go up because having lots of offspring increases the likelihood of species survivability through times of stress.
Socially those populations have many children simply because in those societies, your children go on to work your land, take over from you and care for you in old age. It's always been good to have many children, especially boys. Less than 100 years ago here in the West it was common for families to have up to 12 children, many of whom would never reach adulthood due to infant mortality rates.
The only reason we have fewer children today is because we live in a culture of abundance and excellent post-natal healthcare. (Check out the increasing rates of cesarian section deliveries, premature baby survival rates and obesity for a clue.)
The west has now got an aging population because we do not breed like we used to - because we can afford not to, we don't need so many children for our bloodlines to survive.
(Our aging populations are bringing a new set of problems to our future anyway that the Third World does not have to deal with.)
Also, assuming you're a westerner (as am I) then biologically speaking, you have very little pressure on you required to survive. Indeed, those peoples having to fight disease with their immune system rather than medication have a *greater* chance of surviving a new plague than we do - especially within our densely populated mega-cities which are a haven for rapidly spreading contagious diseases (witness SARS).
On top of that, those in the Third World possess a greater range of survival skills than Western city-dwellers in the event of a cataclysmic event (such as a deep impact - which you are more likely to die from in your lifetime than dying in an airliner crash). The harshness of their lives makes them a much tougher nut with a better chance of survival than you would be with your cushy lifestyle taken away from you.
Our reliance on technologies to survive is breeding in biological weakness. So yes, stop trying to help those folks in the Third World - it will assist in breeding a stronger human race.
Centrino + Turion = Centurion...?
There's gotta be a Cylon joke in there somewhere...
Yeah, I've never understood why we can't shove it down into a subduction zone. Admittedly the issues with anything underground have concerns about groundwater, but that would have boiled off well before getting down to superhot rock.
Actually grinding it into fine particulates and releasing it into the atmosphere would be a very bad thing as inhaling fine radioactive dusts (or gases) is, apart from extreme rad exposure, one of the fastest ways to get killed by radiation.
Not to mention the fact that the stuff would settle on cropping regions and build up in the surface soil and the oceans, thus contaminating food sources (living cells have a tendancy to accumulate heavy metals). Essentially what you would create is fallout.
To follow-up - you miss the point - rights do not exist. Period. Ever. Never have.
The UN, anyone, anywhere, anytime, whatever can say whatever they like, but at the end of the day humanity existed for thousands of years before any sort of formal organisztions like these came into existence and then, just as now, rights were ultimately determined by the authority in society at the business end of a weapon.
Anyone can take away every right you have simply by shooting you.
So, again, to re-iterate they do NOT exist. Period.
To speak of inherency is a red herring - such ideals were only created by us (mostly here in the wealthy, white, west) and as such are, like rights, an abstract so the idea of them being inherent is no more real then the abstract concept of "rights". If they do not exist, then they cannot be inherent.