As Alan Cox alluded to, there are benchmarks for data transfers, web performance, etc, etc, etc, but none for data integrity, it's kind of assumed, even if it perhaps shouldn't be. It also reminds me of various cluster software which will happily crash a node rather than risk data corruption (Sun Cluster & Oracle RAC both do this). What do you [em]really[/em] want? Lightning fast performance, or the comfort of knowing that your data is intact & correct? For something like a rendering farm, you can probably tolerate a pixel or two being the wrong shade. If you're dealing with money, you want the data to be 100% correct, otherwise there's a world of hurt waiting to happen...
Hrm, wonder how Solaris does it? You can have multiple schedulers running under a single OS instance, although using different ones in the same processor set means you might not get the results you're after. Source is in Open Solaris, so there may be scope to re-use it elsewhere, dependant on licensing restrictions.
For those who wonder, default schedulers under Solaris 10 include TS (Timeshare, the default), IA (Interactive), FSS (Fair share scheduler, workload management), RT (Real Time), FX (Fixed) and SYS (System). You can, if you really want, run processes under all of these on the same processor, but it wouldn't be recommended:P
Of course, here in the UK we just have to put one X in one of half-a-dozen boxes You didn't vote in Scotland at the last elections, did you? See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6637387.stm for some info
I agree. The main reason I don't buy MP3s from iTunes or whatever is that I play them in more than just my iPod, sometimes xmms, winamp or my Squeezebox, none of which support DRM. I'd live with a watermark that basically says "if you share this, we know who you are and where you live", because I don't plan to share it.
Obviously, the information watermarked needs to be limited to an identifier rather than encoding the name in for privacy, but if they know that the MP3 with the watermark 19584202984512903 was sold to me, they can track it back if they find it on P2P without exposing my personal information.
Microsoft didn't invest on porting a subset of the.NET framework to Mac only to deprecate it. LMAO... Are you serious? It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they did that. They pay lip service to "cross-platform", get everyone to invest their futures in it, get locked in and then they stop maintaining it. That way, everyone now has a load of windows-only stuff that they're stuck with.
Fundamentally, though, it's easier to find generic admins and pay for support than it is to find suitably qualified sysadmins who are willing and able to poke into the code to fix bugs.
I work in a team of about 15 Unix admins across HP-UX, Solaris & AIX. Out of that team, maybe 2 or 3 people would have half a chance in being able to diagnose a bug in source code. In order for us, as a team, to be able to support a product without some 3rd party supplying bug fixes would require either a lot of training or recruiting new appropriately skilled staff, neither of which are likely to happen.
Longer term, it might be cheaper and more dynamic to support these things in house, but if you've got an established team who don't have the necessary skills, you need that support agreement.
Multithreaded CPUs are become more and more common, yes, look at Sun's Niagra with 8 cores & 4 threads per core (looks like 32 CPUs from the OS...). In the consumer desktop space, Intel/AMD both have 4-core CPUs either in the market or coming soon.
As for applications - if you're running 5 applications, multi-cores will help without recompiling assuming the kernel's scheduler is reasonably sane and kernel writers are getting smarter at writing different schedulers. If you are running one single-threaded app, multiple cores aren't going to help you much at all. Of course, the other advantage of multi-threading apps (even on a single core) is that if the app is blocking on one thing (I/O is most common for blocking), the other threads can carry on doing work.
Not sure about "up with the times". I have yet to see any convincing explanation of what amazing features ZFS offers which hasn't been in AIX's logical volume management system for years.
Ok, I'll bite on this one.
Ability to detect & disk corruption. Say you get a bad block/corruption on the bus/bug in a driver; your lovely mirror now has 2 different sets of data. Under every other volume manager I'm aware of, you have to guess which one has the correct data and resync (generally the whole drive). ZFS will automatically detect the corruption, figure out which drive has the correct data (using a checksum) and resync the data to the "bad" disk.
Filesystems grow & shrink on the fly with no intervention. You have a 100GB disk (mirrored of course...) with two filesystems on it, but due to workloads, data moves between them. During the day,/data1 has 80GB,/data2 has 10GB. At night,/data1 shrinks to 40GB but/data2 expands to 50GB during the batch; ZFS will let this happen with no intervention. You can also, if you want, allocate a minfree and max size of a filesystem if you want more control. You can shrink filesystems as of AIX 5.2 or 5.3, but that's fairly new and you'd need to manage it manually.
Snapshots. They've been in various other VMs (e.g. Veritas) or filesystems (UFS snapshots have been in Solaris since Solaris 8 IIRC) but I don't recall them in AIX.
As for booting ZFS, the fact you could shrink or grow root & var filesystems is something new - Certainly, Solaris does not support resizing the root filesystem on the fly, even with Veritas on your root disks. The only way to resize is a backup/restore cycle (booting from CD) or using something like Live Upgrade (build a new image on some spare disks, then boot into it).
Mary Wilson, who with Diana Ross and Florence Ballard formed the original Supremes, said the exemption was unfair and forced older musicians to continue touring to pay their bills.
So you have to keep working to get money? What a novel concept. No-one else in the population has to work until retirement age, do they?
"The creation of music is suffering because of declining sales," said RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol.
The implication is that people aren't writing music because they're not getting enough money and no-one will ever want to be in a band because of it. I'll take that with a large pinch of salt. However, the next line really clarifies his position:
"We clearly have a more difficult time tolerating gaps in revenues that should be there."
Nope, it's the successor of the Power 5 chips used in Intel pSeries servers (primarily running AIX, but you can run linux). The PowerPC chips had some similarities with Power, but they're not the same chip by a long chalk. Power 6 is unlike to appear on anything smaller than a 2 CPU server.
"We have not heard a convincing reason why a composer and his or her heirs should benefit from a term of copyright which extends for lifetime and beyond, but a performer should not," the report said.
You know, you're right. Reduce the composer's copyright to 50 years as well.
Also, this is akin to me turning round to an ex employer and saying "you're still using that script I wrote, pay me more money for doing that". It's a bullshit argument, they've had 50 years to rake it in and that should be enough.
Quick gripe - fibre has resistance of a sort. The signal strength (i.e. brightness of light) will deteriorate over distance. It'll probably still be a "cleaner" signal over the same distance, but saying it has no resistance is false.
Also, you're probably underestimating the clumsiness of the typical consumer. Consumers will bend, kink and otherwise break fibre leads because they're used to being able to do that with almost complete impunity on copper wires. Hell, I'd probably break them and I know that they're more fragile.
Some said Amen to just writing code, I'm saying Amen to this. You don't need a full functional spec, but spend some time (might just need 5 minutes) writing down what you want the app to do at a basic level, a few bullet points is probably all you really need. Some simple pointers like this will get you thinking about how to structure your code now so you can build on it rather than having a hotch-potch of code which barely does what you want and you daren't touch for fear of breaking it.
Depends; you can get much more energy efficient CPUs these days and if you used to by cutting edge, it may not be the most efficient. There's a balance somewhere between pollution (toxic chemicals in components) versus power draw; I'm not 100% sure where it lies...
As others have pointed out, it's not always practical to use "hot-swap" laptops - what's cheaper, buying a rugged laptop, or having your field engineers running back to base every time they drop their laptop?
When you're talking about engineers whose main tools are a screwdriver & spanner, they probably treat laptops with the same level of harsh use.
Germany has a good board game following - many of the best games originate from there. This means you have an audience who will be interested, but also some intense competition.
The tone I was getting was that he was in favour of real corrections, cutting out the plain untruths that the Wikipedia entries are garnering. If he does this in the name of truth & correct reporting, I'm all for it. Bear in mind you'll be able to track what changes he makes and if you don't think they're accurate, you can make your own edits back.
Vendor support - you'll get full support for things like Oracle, SAP, etc, etc on Solaris easier than Linux (yes, I know you can get Oracle on Linux, but only certain versions, mainly Redhat)
Support for huge boxes. The Solaris 10 you run on a single CPU sunblade 100 is the same OS as will run on a 144-core loaded 25K - there's also very little real difference in the OS between SPARC & x86 (main differences are boot loaders & X-windows).
Then there's feature set - zones, dtrace, ZFS, workload management & so on all come out of the box. Most linux software will run with a recompile.
The biggest problem with this is that at any point in time, any one of those organisations can now spoof themselves as you because they now know the "thing you have", i.e. your RSA code. While you can probably assume that a couple of banks would be secure enough, can you guarantee they're all secure? What about employee X from bank A? He could steal money from your account at bank B with a bit of data engineering.
I also don't think that RSA don't run the software back-end - I work in a bank which uses RSA secure-id to control access to various DMZs - I think that we own & run those servers, although RSA supply & support the relevant software on them.
To me, it's like playing cards against someone who won't tell you what the rules are, only that you have to draw 2 cards, discard 1 and oh, you've lost, better luck next time without telling you why.
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As Alan Cox alluded to, there are benchmarks for data transfers, web performance, etc, etc, etc, but none for data integrity, it's kind of assumed, even if it perhaps shouldn't be. It also reminds me of various cluster software which will happily crash a node rather than risk data corruption (Sun Cluster & Oracle RAC both do this). What do you [em]really[/em] want? Lightning fast performance, or the comfort of knowing that your data is intact & correct? For something like a rendering farm, you can probably tolerate a pixel or two being the wrong shade. If you're dealing with money, you want the data to be 100% correct, otherwise there's a world of hurt waiting to happen...
For those who wonder, default schedulers under Solaris 10 include TS (Timeshare, the default), IA (Interactive), FSS (Fair share scheduler, workload management), RT (Real Time), FX (Fixed) and SYS (System). You can, if you really want, run processes under all of these on the same processor, but it wouldn't be recommended :P
Obviously, the information watermarked needs to be limited to an identifier rather than encoding the name in for privacy, but if they know that the MP3 with the watermark 19584202984512903 was sold to me, they can track it back if they find it on P2P without exposing my personal information.
I work in a team of about 15 Unix admins across HP-UX, Solaris & AIX. Out of that team, maybe 2 or 3 people would have half a chance in being able to diagnose a bug in source code. In order for us, as a team, to be able to support a product without some 3rd party supplying bug fixes would require either a lot of training or recruiting new appropriately skilled staff, neither of which are likely to happen.
Longer term, it might be cheaper and more dynamic to support these things in house, but if you've got an established team who don't have the necessary skills, you need that support agreement.
As for applications - if you're running 5 applications, multi-cores will help without recompiling assuming the kernel's scheduler is reasonably sane and kernel writers are getting smarter at writing different schedulers. If you are running one single-threaded app, multiple cores aren't going to help you much at all. Of course, the other advantage of multi-threading apps (even on a single core) is that if the app is blocking on one thing (I/O is most common for blocking), the other threads can carry on doing work.
- Ability to detect & disk corruption. Say you get a bad block/corruption on the bus/bug in a driver; your lovely mirror now has 2 different sets of data. Under every other volume manager I'm aware of, you have to guess which one has the correct data and resync (generally the whole drive). ZFS will automatically detect the corruption, figure out which drive has the correct data (using a checksum) and resync the data to the "bad" disk.
- Filesystems grow & shrink on the fly with no intervention. You have a 100GB disk (mirrored of course...) with two filesystems on it, but due to workloads, data moves between them. During the day,
/data1 has 80GB, /data2 has 10GB. At night, /data1 shrinks to 40GB but /data2 expands to 50GB during the batch; ZFS will let this happen with no intervention. You can also, if you want, allocate a minfree and max size of a filesystem if you want more control. You can shrink filesystems as of AIX 5.2 or 5.3, but that's fairly new and you'd need to manage it manually.
- Snapshots. They've been in various other VMs (e.g. Veritas) or filesystems (UFS snapshots have been in Solaris since Solaris 8 IIRC) but I don't recall them in AIX.
As for booting ZFS, the fact you could shrink or grow root & var filesystems is something new - Certainly, Solaris does not support resizing the root filesystem on the fly, even with Veritas on your root disks. The only way to resize is a backup/restore cycle (booting from CD) or using something like Live Upgrade (build a new image on some spare disks, then boot into it).Nope, it's the successor of the Power 5 chips used in Intel pSeries servers (primarily running AIX, but you can run linux). The PowerPC chips had some similarities with Power, but they're not the same chip by a long chalk. Power 6 is unlike to appear on anything smaller than a 2 CPU server.
Also, this is akin to me turning round to an ex employer and saying "you're still using that script I wrote, pay me more money for doing that". It's a bullshit argument, they've had 50 years to rake it in and that should be enough.
Also, you're probably underestimating the clumsiness of the typical consumer. Consumers will bend, kink and otherwise break fibre leads because they're used to being able to do that with almost complete impunity on copper wires. Hell, I'd probably break them and I know that they're more fragile.
Some said Amen to just writing code, I'm saying Amen to this. You don't need a full functional spec, but spend some time (might just need 5 minutes) writing down what you want the app to do at a basic level, a few bullet points is probably all you really need. Some simple pointers like this will get you thinking about how to structure your code now so you can build on it rather than having a hotch-potch of code which barely does what you want and you daren't touch for fear of breaking it.
Depends; you can get much more energy efficient CPUs these days and if you used to by cutting edge, it may not be the most efficient. There's a balance somewhere between pollution (toxic chemicals in components) versus power draw; I'm not 100% sure where it lies...
I'm sure both people who actually used it are gutted...
But we will get asked about Vista as various friend & family resident gurus... - having something to tell people to look at will solve a lot of time.
When you're talking about engineers whose main tools are a screwdriver & spanner, they probably treat laptops with the same level of harsh use.
Germany has a good board game following - many of the best games originate from there. This means you have an audience who will be interested, but also some intense competition.
The tone I was getting was that he was in favour of real corrections, cutting out the plain untruths that the Wikipedia entries are garnering. If he does this in the name of truth & correct reporting, I'm all for it. Bear in mind you'll be able to track what changes he makes and if you don't think they're accurate, you can make your own edits back.
Support for huge boxes. The Solaris 10 you run on a single CPU sunblade 100 is the same OS as will run on a 144-core loaded 25K - there's also very little real difference in the OS between SPARC & x86 (main differences are boot loaders & X-windows).
Then there's feature set - zones, dtrace, ZFS, workload management & so on all come out of the box. Most linux software will run with a recompile.
No, you're only required to supply a state/province if you in USA or Canada.
I also don't think that RSA don't run the software back-end - I work in a bank which uses RSA secure-id to control access to various DMZs - I think that we own & run those servers, although RSA supply & support the relevant software on them.
To me, it's like playing cards against someone who won't tell you what the rules are, only that you have to draw 2 cards, discard 1 and oh, you've lost, better luck next time without telling you why.
Only on Slashdot could that be considered "insightful"....