Thimerosal has already been phased out or banned outright in most of the world. In Russia, they found direct links to increased rates of serious mental health issues and instituted a strict ban on the stuff. The only people that really want to keep using the stuff is the vaccine companies because it's cheap and they make more money using it. And since the same guys who run those companies also sit on the board of the CDC, you can imagine why the CDC finds no issue with it.
Ron Paul is on the nutty end of the libertarian stick. He has some good thoughts, but no real plans to implement them that I have seen. And no, just saying "shut it down" is not a viable plan. Money is the only reason anyone pays attention to him. I would not jump on his bandwagon for any cause.
Obviously you are not running much in the way of windows guests. There are quite a few micro$oft products that require >= 1GB RAM to even install. Some require >=2GB now or more. Windows 7, SQL Server 2008R2, System Center and TMG Server come to mind as examples...
If the business uses automated acceptance testing, this would is not a big deal. Just run your test suite on the new version and you will know in short order if there is a problem. I think this is really what Mozilla is trying to say: use better development practices and you won't have an issue.
Simple: IPV6, while having more then "sufficient" address space, was poorly conceived, tries to do stuff it doesn't need to and lacks standardization of key items, such as the transition from legacy (IPV4) protocols. I for one would LOVE to see a more elegant, more complete solution that would allow us to quickly implement it and bypass the nightmare that is IPV6. It doesn't need to offer more address space, just implement that space in a way that makes it and the translation to it easy to understand and standardized so you can get some buy in from the world at large.
A Drobo is not really a "SAN". It's a NAS, only the DroboPro and Elite models even meet the minimum requirements of being a SAN...and those start at $2K. In any case, it's really a NAS that would be the appropriate solution for storing a large picture collection as mentioned in the article. That being said, my favorite NAS for home use (and some small business) is the Synology line of NAS products. They are incredibly fast for their price point and offer a rich set of features that should satisfy any home user. They are easy to setup and the software is pretty easy to use (unlike some other NAS products), and the exteriors are pleasing to the eye (important in a household like mine where the wife wants everything to look "nice"). The DS211 would be great for pictures. It takes two 3.5" disks so you can mirror your data to protect from disk failures and have 2TB of space to work with Transfer speeds are excellent and it will even act as an iSCSI target if you want be all high and mighty and call it a SAN. You can put together a DS211 with 2x 2TB drives for around $500,
As others have mentioned, backups should be part of the plan. My wife is a photographer and all images (personal and professional) go onto her laptop but are backed up to external disk or NAS immediately. At the end of each year she has me copy of all the pictures for the previous year to DVD at which time they are purged from the laptop. The DVD archives are kept in a fire safe along with our important documents. So there is always two copies of each image somewhere.
Having worked with sets of comparable cards from Fusion IO and OCZ (IOXtreme and Zdrive), I can give this assessment:
Neither card met the published performance numbers. But the Fusion I/O card came closer to it's published numbers then the OCZ card in basic benchmarks making the Fusion I/O card quite a bit faster for raw throughput. Both cards were blazingly fast though pushing MBps and IOps like no tomorrow.
Real world performance suffered greatly with the Fusion I/O cards due to their software driven architecture. The CPU overhead was significant, even on a powerful multi CPU Xeon server. The OCZ cards did not have this problem.
The Price/performance ratio in real world made OCZ the winner overall. The competition was closest when excluding CPU overhead, but once you include CPU overhead the OCZ cards win hands down.
Support was highly disappointing from Fusion I/O. With OCZ you expect minimal support, but I expected something better from the "premium" Fusion I/O brand (and price point). Unfortunately, their support was no better then OCZ.
We originally evaluated the original Zdrive model which was kindof a rough implementation of the technology. If you are going to buy one now, avoid the old Zdrives...there are several problems with their design. The new R2 Zdrives have fixed these problems and are sold at basically the same price point for similar specs.
We eventually returned the Fusion I/O cards due to their ridiculous CPU penalty. We still have the OCZ cards, but have stopped using them in favor of normal SAS controllers with hot swap SSD drives. It's just not convenient to shut down a server and crack open the case just to replace a failed SSD...and SSDs do fail:) At this point, PCIe SSD cards seem better suited to high end workstation applications where it's not as big of a deal to crack open the box for maintenance.
I would say the main reason it didn't start happening in 2005 is that IPV6 was/is over-complicated and tries to do too much beyond what is needed: a bigger address space. Why make the addresses so un-readable? Why not put a translation standard into the main standard instead of letting others come up with multiple non-compatible standards that to this day are not resolved? Why make it such a potential security nightmare? People like me hesitated to make any effort to use it because we hoped and prayed that something better structured would come along and we would be able to ignore IPV6. As it is, we are still not using IPv6 anywhere in our organization because (a) we still see no clear upgrade path after 6 years of it being a "standard", even though all of our stuff now technically support it and (b) our ISPs still don't support it...presumably due to (a).
Social programs just cause the population to become stagnant, unproductive and boring. Space programs encourage new technologies, new industries, promote productivity, and can be quite interesting. The "social programs spending" arguement is bunk.
Certain models of Adaptec controllers with recent firmware (since April 2010) support SSDs and platter drives on the same mirror array (RAID 1 or 10). The controller intelligently sends all reads to the SSD unless it goes offline. It's not at all an advertised feature, I have only ever seen mention of it in the firmware release notes. Note that this is not the same thing as what their "MAXIQ" product does, which is essentially add more cache to the controller in the form of a small SSD attached to one of the controller's ports.
While I am all for attempts to preserve history in general, I have to mention another perspective...
When we as a society become "packrats" and attempt to preserve every obscure product, prototype, document, and recording of things of the past, it dilutes the value of the things preserved overall. You get to a point where the volume of items is overwhelming to someone wishing to do legitimate historical research and the "collector" value from a monetary perspective is also diluted as the object becomes just "one of many examples surviving of this ____ (fill in the blank)." So I pose the question: "Might it actually be healthy for things of a bygone age to naturally 'decay' over time in to a more manageable and valuable sub-set?"
Parent has an excellent point. Utilization is not always about how full the disk is...especially in a data center where there is frequently large database operations requiring extreme amounts of IOPS. In the past, the answer was to throw "more spindles" at it. At which point you could theoretically end up with a 20GB database spread across 40 SAS disks making available ~1.5TB of space using the typical 73GB size disks just to reach the IOPS capacity needed to handle heavy update/insert/read operations. Huge waste of space, but only way to do it with spinning disks. SSDs of course can solve the problem, but most SAN vendors are still charging insane prices for what meager SSD options they offer, with some vendors not even offering SSD options yet. And then you can end up on the other end of the scale, with having to buy more IOPS capacity then you need just to get enough SSD space for your data. Adaptec has some cool technology for "hybrid" arrays consisting of both SSDs and spindle disks in the same array (I have heard the latest versions of Solaris can do this with ZFS too). But the applications for Hybrid arrays are somewhat limited because write performance still sucks once any available write cache is saturated (and especially if the controller/software array has no cache).
The number of cores and the speed per core becomes vitally important when you start doing virtualization. Since Windows 7 has this out of the box and Macs use it all over the place and everybody and their cousin are running VMware (or insert your favorite VM environment here), yes, I think alot of people care. That's not even starting to talk about the server space where almost everything is virtualized these days and more cores can mean more VMs (especially on Hyper-V).
I don't want to leave the enthusiasts out, so I will just say for their benefit that seeing all those core graphs lined up in task manager is a major rush and should not be discounted as users look to buy processors (though I guess Intel has that covered with "hyper-threading":P
How about establishing "jurisdiction" for software patent cases. It seems stupid to me that they get to cherry pick courts just because it's difficult to say "where" the problem happened. Jurisdiction should be well defined for these types of cases, such as going to the court presiding over the locality the copyrite/patent owner resides (in the case of corporate entities, the locale of their primary place of business [IE: Corporate office location]). And all other courts can/must say "not my problem [Jurisdiction]". Establishing "shared" court facilities to allow plaintiffs and defendants to attend hearings and present evidence "remotely" as the parent mentioned would complete the picture.
I would definitely let my 2 year old play with that switch. That would be as much for for me as it would be for her.
Seriously though, there does need to be some type of consequences for leaders who violate the constitution/laws, make bad decisions, and spend our money frivolously. Right now the worst we can do is vote them out and bring a law suit to try to reverse whatever evil they imposed. I mean imagine if you were part owner of a company and the CEO funneled vast amounts of the company's money into other companies that he owned, did some insider trading, used company lawyers on company payroll to take legal action on his personal cases, and spent all the company's money on dumb stuff like lifetime supplies of fast food for all employees. Then imagine that the only consequence available for all that crap was to fire him and bring a lawsuit that seeks to "undo" everything (which of course is impossible). No criminal charges for embezzling, fraud, and not even monetary damages for all the money that was blown. That is exactly the corporate version of how our government currently works.
Waxing playful once again (but still remaining mostly-serious), I would LOVE to have a button that activates mechanical boots that kick each politician in the nuts every time they do something unconstitutional, illegal, or unjust. To be equal opportunity (and create jobs), just hire some people to slap all the women politicians at the same time.
OK, lets get right down to the meat of the matter. What I'm not seeing so far in this thread is the root of the problem: the format of Twitter is such that not much of any real value can be published through it. The limit on how much a "tweet" can contain is simply too small. If the same limit was imposed on Slashdot stories nobody would be on here because none of us are stupid enough to click blind links and there wouldn't be enough space to put a decent description. This really sums up my first thought when I tried Twitter for 15 minutes "back in the day": "140 characters should be enough for everyone? What the *ell are we supposed to do with that?".
"Twitter" is not a universally accepted and standardized form of communication like a telephone or fax machine. Therefore it should not be treated the same by a news person. The correct form would be "President Obama earlier today published a statement addressing corruption allegations via the "Twitter" internet social networking service. This would allow anyone not familiar with Twitter to easily understand basically what occurred (including future historians who may not not know what Twitter is without referencing other historical materials to find out).
Hate to break it to you, but the wealth of mineral deposits in Afghanistan has been well known for quite some time. Light mining has been going on since the 50s at least and the Soviets did extensive surveys in the 70s and discovered most of it. There is a PDF on the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines website that shows where most of the major deposits are (including the Lithium) dated 2007. But according to that document, no major mining has gone on due to the "ongoing conflict in the region". Don't tell me this information didn't play a large role in the decision to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Yes, all that nice stuff is going on, but it's just a means to an end. The goal is to pacify the people so "stability and security" can be brought to the region. Which is a noble thing in itself, but really is just a means to profit from the resources.
It is sloppy journalism. Being able to read and understand what is written in a newspaper today 100 years from now when "twitter" is something of the distant past is just as important, if not more important then how readable it is to people today. Good journalism seeks to make what is written clear and understandable to anyone who has at least a "basic" understanding of the language. The lazy gits that piss and moan about having to make their wording clear need a lesson in what being a journalist is.
As the OLPC project well demonstrated, giving laptops to children only results in them surfing more porn then they did before. So this is really more of a "sex ed" project then anything...whether they want to admit it or not.
So that would mean an AVERAGE of roughly 200Kb/sec non-stop all month long? Given this is a 3G connection we are talking about, that's either not possible or means they are pretty much saturating their connections all the time. Does it seem likely that there are 26,000 users who bought phones solely to dedicate to tethering and bittorrent (I can't think of any other application that would produce those results). Or maybe 26,000 people with malware infected phones sending spam all day long? Or maybe the carrier's stats are just shit? Or maybe "3G" means something different in the UK (where I'm at it means an average of 100-200Kb/sec depending on where you happen to be standing at the time). Feel free to correct any of my assumptions or my math if necessary:)
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Thimerosal has already been phased out or banned outright in most of the world. In Russia, they found direct links to increased rates of serious mental health issues and instituted a strict ban on the stuff. The only people that really want to keep using the stuff is the vaccine companies because it's cheap and they make more money using it. And since the same guys who run those companies also sit on the board of the CDC, you can imagine why the CDC finds no issue with it.
Ron Paul is on the nutty end of the libertarian stick. He has some good thoughts, but no real plans to implement them that I have seen. And no, just saying "shut it down" is not a viable plan. Money is the only reason anyone pays attention to him. I would not jump on his bandwagon for any cause.
If the "occupy wall st" people added dissolution of the TSA to their agenda, I might join them at this point...
Obviously you are not running much in the way of windows guests. There are quite a few micro$oft products that require >= 1GB RAM to even install. Some require >=2GB now or more. Windows 7, SQL Server 2008R2, System Center and TMG Server come to mind as examples...
If the business uses automated acceptance testing, this would is not a big deal. Just run your test suite on the new version and you will know in short order if there is a problem. I think this is really what Mozilla is trying to say: use better development practices and you won't have an issue.
Simple: IPV6, while having more then "sufficient" address space, was poorly conceived, tries to do stuff it doesn't need to and lacks standardization of key items, such as the transition from legacy (IPV4) protocols. I for one would LOVE to see a more elegant, more complete solution that would allow us to quickly implement it and bypass the nightmare that is IPV6. It doesn't need to offer more address space, just implement that space in a way that makes it and the translation to it easy to understand and standardized so you can get some buy in from the world at large.
A Drobo is not really a "SAN". It's a NAS, only the DroboPro and Elite models even meet the minimum requirements of being a SAN...and those start at $2K. In any case, it's really a NAS that would be the appropriate solution for storing a large picture collection as mentioned in the article. That being said, my favorite NAS for home use (and some small business) is the Synology line of NAS products. They are incredibly fast for their price point and offer a rich set of features that should satisfy any home user. They are easy to setup and the software is pretty easy to use (unlike some other NAS products), and the exteriors are pleasing to the eye (important in a household like mine where the wife wants everything to look "nice"). The DS211 would be great for pictures. It takes two 3.5" disks so you can mirror your data to protect from disk failures and have 2TB of space to work with Transfer speeds are excellent and it will even act as an iSCSI target if you want be all high and mighty and call it a SAN. You can put together a DS211 with 2x 2TB drives for around $500,
As others have mentioned, backups should be part of the plan. My wife is a photographer and all images (personal and professional) go onto her laptop but are backed up to external disk or NAS immediately. At the end of each year she has me copy of all the pictures for the previous year to DVD at which time they are purged from the laptop. The DVD archives are kept in a fire safe along with our important documents. So there is always two copies of each image somewhere.
Having worked with sets of comparable cards from Fusion IO and OCZ (IOXtreme and Zdrive), I can give this assessment:
Neither card met the published performance numbers. But the Fusion I/O card came closer to it's published numbers then the OCZ card in basic benchmarks making the Fusion I/O card quite a bit faster for raw throughput. Both cards were blazingly fast though pushing MBps and IOps like no tomorrow.
Real world performance suffered greatly with the Fusion I/O cards due to their software driven architecture. The CPU overhead was significant, even on a powerful multi CPU Xeon server. The OCZ cards did not have this problem.
The Price/performance ratio in real world made OCZ the winner overall. The competition was closest when excluding CPU overhead, but once you include CPU overhead the OCZ cards win hands down.
Support was highly disappointing from Fusion I/O. With OCZ you expect minimal support, but I expected something better from the "premium" Fusion I/O brand (and price point). Unfortunately, their support was no better then OCZ.
We originally evaluated the original Zdrive model which was kindof a rough implementation of the technology. If you are going to buy one now, avoid the old Zdrives...there are several problems with their design. The new R2 Zdrives have fixed these problems and are sold at basically the same price point for similar specs.
We eventually returned the Fusion I/O cards due to their ridiculous CPU penalty. We still have the OCZ cards, but have stopped using them in favor of normal SAS controllers with hot swap SSD drives. It's just not convenient to shut down a server and crack open the case just to replace a failed SSD...and SSDs do fail:) At this point, PCIe SSD cards seem better suited to high end workstation applications where it's not as big of a deal to crack open the box for maintenance.
I would say the main reason it didn't start happening in 2005 is that IPV6 was/is over-complicated and tries to do too much beyond what is needed: a bigger address space. Why make the addresses so un-readable? Why not put a translation standard into the main standard instead of letting others come up with multiple non-compatible standards that to this day are not resolved? Why make it such a potential security nightmare? People like me hesitated to make any effort to use it because we hoped and prayed that something better structured would come along and we would be able to ignore IPV6. As it is, we are still not using IPv6 anywhere in our organization because (a) we still see no clear upgrade path after 6 years of it being a "standard", even though all of our stuff now technically support it and (b) our ISPs still don't support it...presumably due to (a).
Social programs just cause the population to become stagnant, unproductive and boring. Space programs encourage new technologies, new industries, promote productivity, and can be quite interesting. The "social programs spending" arguement is bunk.
Certain models of Adaptec controllers with recent firmware (since April 2010) support SSDs and platter drives on the same mirror array (RAID 1 or 10). The controller intelligently sends all reads to the SSD unless it goes offline. It's not at all an advertised feature, I have only ever seen mention of it in the firmware release notes. Note that this is not the same thing as what their "MAXIQ" product does, which is essentially add more cache to the controller in the form of a small SSD attached to one of the controller's ports.
While I am all for attempts to preserve history in general, I have to mention another perspective...
When we as a society become "packrats" and attempt to preserve every obscure product, prototype, document, and recording of things of the past, it dilutes the value of the things preserved overall. You get to a point where the volume of items is overwhelming to someone wishing to do legitimate historical research and the "collector" value from a monetary perspective is also diluted as the object becomes just "one of many examples surviving of this ____ (fill in the blank)." So I pose the question: "Might it actually be healthy for things of a bygone age to naturally 'decay' over time in to a more manageable and valuable sub-set?"
Parent has an excellent point. Utilization is not always about how full the disk is...especially in a data center where there is frequently large database operations requiring extreme amounts of IOPS. In the past, the answer was to throw "more spindles" at it. At which point you could theoretically end up with a 20GB database spread across 40 SAS disks making available ~1.5TB of space using the typical 73GB size disks just to reach the IOPS capacity needed to handle heavy update/insert/read operations. Huge waste of space, but only way to do it with spinning disks. SSDs of course can solve the problem, but most SAN vendors are still charging insane prices for what meager SSD options they offer, with some vendors not even offering SSD options yet. And then you can end up on the other end of the scale, with having to buy more IOPS capacity then you need just to get enough SSD space for your data. Adaptec has some cool technology for "hybrid" arrays consisting of both SSDs and spindle disks in the same array (I have heard the latest versions of Solaris can do this with ZFS too). But the applications for Hybrid arrays are somewhat limited because write performance still sucks once any available write cache is saturated (and especially if the controller/software array has no cache).
The number of cores and the speed per core becomes vitally important when you start doing virtualization. Since Windows 7 has this out of the box and Macs use it all over the place and everybody and their cousin are running VMware (or insert your favorite VM environment here), yes, I think alot of people care. That's not even starting to talk about the server space where almost everything is virtualized these days and more cores can mean more VMs (especially on Hyper-V).
I don't want to leave the enthusiasts out, so I will just say for their benefit that seeing all those core graphs lined up in task manager is a major rush and should not be discounted as users look to buy processors (though I guess Intel has that covered with "hyper-threading":P
How about establishing "jurisdiction" for software patent cases. It seems stupid to me that they get to cherry pick courts just because it's difficult to say "where" the problem happened. Jurisdiction should be well defined for these types of cases, such as going to the court presiding over the locality the copyrite/patent owner resides (in the case of corporate entities, the locale of their primary place of business [IE: Corporate office location]). And all other courts can/must say "not my problem [Jurisdiction]". Establishing "shared" court facilities to allow plaintiffs and defendants to attend hearings and present evidence "remotely" as the parent mentioned would complete the picture.
There are several on ebay right now. Just search for "iped".
I would definitely let my 2 year old play with that switch. That would be as much for for me as it would be for her.
Seriously though, there does need to be some type of consequences for leaders who violate the constitution/laws, make bad decisions, and spend our money frivolously. Right now the worst we can do is vote them out and bring a law suit to try to reverse whatever evil they imposed. I mean imagine if you were part owner of a company and the CEO funneled vast amounts of the company's money into other companies that he owned, did some insider trading, used company lawyers on company payroll to take legal action on his personal cases, and spent all the company's money on dumb stuff like lifetime supplies of fast food for all employees. Then imagine that the only consequence available for all that crap was to fire him and bring a lawsuit that seeks to "undo" everything (which of course is impossible). No criminal charges for embezzling, fraud, and not even monetary damages for all the money that was blown. That is exactly the corporate version of how our government currently works.
Waxing playful once again (but still remaining mostly-serious), I would LOVE to have a button that activates mechanical boots that kick each politician in the nuts every time they do something unconstitutional, illegal, or unjust. To be equal opportunity (and create jobs), just hire some people to slap all the women politicians at the same time.
OK, lets get right down to the meat of the matter. What I'm not seeing so far in this thread is the root of the problem: the format of Twitter is such that not much of any real value can be published through it. The limit on how much a "tweet" can contain is simply too small. If the same limit was imposed on Slashdot stories nobody would be on here because none of us are stupid enough to click blind links and there wouldn't be enough space to put a decent description. This really sums up my first thought when I tried Twitter for 15 minutes "back in the day": "140 characters should be enough for everyone? What the *ell are we supposed to do with that?".
"Twitter" is not a universally accepted and standardized form of communication like a telephone or fax machine. Therefore it should not be treated the same by a news person. The correct form would be "President Obama earlier today published a statement addressing corruption allegations via the "Twitter" internet social networking service. This would allow anyone not familiar with Twitter to easily understand basically what occurred (including future historians who may not not know what Twitter is without referencing other historical materials to find out).
Hate to break it to you, but the wealth of mineral deposits in Afghanistan has been well known for quite some time. Light mining has been going on since the 50s at least and the Soviets did extensive surveys in the 70s and discovered most of it. There is a PDF on the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines website that shows where most of the major deposits are (including the Lithium) dated 2007. But according to that document, no major mining has gone on due to the "ongoing conflict in the region". Don't tell me this information didn't play a large role in the decision to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Yes, all that nice stuff is going on, but it's just a means to an end. The goal is to pacify the people so "stability and security" can be brought to the region. Which is a noble thing in itself, but really is just a means to profit from the resources.
It is sloppy journalism. Being able to read and understand what is written in a newspaper today 100 years from now when "twitter" is something of the distant past is just as important, if not more important then how readable it is to people today. Good journalism seeks to make what is written clear and understandable to anyone who has at least a "basic" understanding of the language. The lazy gits that piss and moan about having to make their wording clear need a lesson in what being a journalist is.
4-5 Mb/s is generally considered "4G" here is in the US. Yes, we suck.
As the OLPC project well demonstrated, giving laptops to children only results in them surfing more porn then they did before. So this is really more of a "sex ed" project then anything...whether they want to admit it or not.
I think they will still have to cut down some trees to make these (with a herring!)
In all seriousness though. What a complete waste of time. I think I might be able to walk faster then that thing.
So that would mean an AVERAGE of roughly 200Kb/sec non-stop all month long? Given this is a 3G connection we are talking about, that's either not possible or means they are pretty much saturating their connections all the time. Does it seem likely that there are 26,000 users who bought phones solely to dedicate to tethering and bittorrent (I can't think of any other application that would produce those results). Or maybe 26,000 people with malware infected phones sending spam all day long? Or maybe the carrier's stats are just shit? Or maybe "3G" means something different in the UK (where I'm at it means an average of 100-200Kb/sec depending on where you happen to be standing at the time). Feel free to correct any of my assumptions or my math if necessary:)