Interesting. Of course now we have the benefit of having cut out the middleman - by positioning the data center near the highway the truck doesn't have to bother hitting the transformer it can just ram directly into the data center.:)
There's more than servers to consider. DASD doesn't like to get hot - at all. The motors used in the HDA's are not variable speed so they can't be slowed down, they are either on or off. Running DASD hot for any prolonged period of time is a good way to become familiar with the term " . . . may produce unpredictable results" (and none of them are good).
I'm still not clear (and I DID read the article) how their basic power feed is configured. The followup article references that they were switching over to the backup power feed. Why aren't BOTH feeds configured so that when one of them goes poof there's no interruption? All of our data centers have multiple feeds coming in from different grids into different entry points in the buildings and running up different risers until they meet at the distribution point. No single point of failure. And when ComEd craps out (it's a when, not an if, but they are MUCH better than they were not too long ago) it's the generators to the rescue. However I don't believe the HVAC is on the UPS, either, for the same reasons others have posted - so there probably would be an interruption there if we switch to diesel. Something to check into as we are actually in the process of planning (yet another) data center.
The "death knoll" is about 100 yards away from "the grassy knoll" - but nobody knows about it because it was removed from the Warren Commission report before it was published.
Well it will be used to fund the new Department of Internet Tax Revenue Collection, of course. We can't have a tax without a bureaucracy to oversee it and we can't have a bureaucracy without a revenue source.
Don't give up your day job to start a new career handing out legal advice. Unless, of course, your day job IS giving out legal advice in which case you really SHOULD give it up and find something for which you may be better suited. The manner in which you obtain an illegal copy is irrelevant and doesn't magically bless your copy as legal. Is there a serious threat that the RIAA powers that be will be coming after you for your copy? No. Does that make it a legal copy? Also, no.
Well said. I consider myself an early adopter as well, but only when the new (and the associated cost) is markedly better than the old. I will grant that a really good HD-DVD setup is a little better than a really good regular DVD setup (assuming high-quality display, audio, etc.) but it's not jaw-droppingly better . . . at least not yet. I have yet to see any Blu-Ray though the geek in me wants to like it based on the tech specs of what it is capable of doing. In any case, two competing and higher priced formats that obviously won't both survive long-term that aren't dramatically better than the high-end regular DVD system I've put together now . . . well, I'll spend my $$ elsewhere until they settle the format wars and/or show me a 'gotta have' geegaw.
Well now at least they won't be dependent on private citizens to film police beating people on the street. Cutting out the middleman, that's innovation! Cynics might suggest that a logical next step would be that they will arm these benign drones, but not me.
I'm all for true HD content on DVD's. I'm also disgusted by the inability of the two competing groups to work out a standard so that the public (yeah, us suckers that pay real $$ for their products) don't have to make guesses (wagers, really) as to which format is going to be in it for the long haul. There are real benefits to having a true HD content on a portable media source like a DVD. But, the one quoted at the end of the fine article is surely not one of them:
Asked if consumers would have to buy their favorite movies again, Blu-ray spokesman Simonis said: "Of course! But it will enrich your life."
Snort!! Yeah, I'm all just pins and needles waiting for the HD-DVD version of "Dude, where's my car?" because my life just has this incredible void right now. I at least hope he was laughing when Simonis said that.
It does NOT transform a DVD into HD quality. Upconverting from 480i to anything doesn't make it HD anymore than does slapping a snazzy body kit on a Yugo make it suddenly drive like an Aston-Martin. You are still saddled with the limitations of the original, 480i, source material. The promise of HD DVD formats is that the source is actually high quality from the start.
That said I won't be buying one for quite a while as I think it's going to be a long, stupid, battle until one format finally emerges as a 'standard'. Until then I'll keep outputting 480i over HDMI from my Pio 79avi into my Pio 1130 and let the PDP do the heavy lifting for upscaling. It's pretty good but no comparison to REAL HD.
In the meantime I don't expect M$ and others to sit idly by. With the continuing drop in HDD prices and the advent of near plug & play connectivity it's quite conceivable that HTPC's could move into the current DVD space and pre-recorded hard-drives and/or download-on-demand for true HD content could make the whole format debate irrelevant. I'd certainly prefer not to cede M$ yet another potential monopoly position but the idiot$ letting this format war continue don't seem to understand that the clock is ticking.
If Apple's market share is - depending on when the question is asked and of whom - somewhere between 2.4 and 2.8% - then in response to the question of "These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?" isn't the real answer/question do more than 97% of computer users actually care?
How ironic. Older people discovering (?) that high pitched sounds annoy teenagers. Teenagers use low pitched sounds (boom cars playing overamped bass-heavy music) to annoy old people. So who speaks for the mid-range?
Yet another mainframe dinosaur laughing at all the friggin' primadonnas that built their own ivory towers long after we disassembled ours. Unix is way better than Windows as an OS yet the holier-than-thou crowd that surround so many unix systems made it so hard to use (like my crowd did way back when with mainframes) that the people that actually use (and pay for!) computing systems turned to (gasp) Windows. Surprise! It's the business, stupid!
Up until a year ago when we outsourced our printer operations we ran 9 of these - a mix of 3900's and 4000's. When you have a large peak cycle like month-end/quarter-end to print massive volumes of customer statements - where a single customer's statement itself can be hundreds of pages - the capability of large thruput machines like these is essential.
For internal printing these types of machines actually allowed us to SAVE paper. Once upon a time hardcopy was pretty much the only way to view your output. Even once we had a terminal on everyone's desk there was the predictable pushback to use online vs. print because "that's the way we've always done it". To reduce the amount of paper we changed the default print format for internal printing for a lot of the standard stuff to be double sided and "2-up", using AFP (Advanced
Function Printing). Yeah, they print faster but with a little thoughtful management injected into the process they can print SMARTER, too.
That's just piss-poor operations management. Any well run computer/print facility simply doesn't allow that to happen - just because somebody places something onto spool doesn't mean it's automatically printed unless there's a total breakdown in spool management and print controls.
As a STK (and SUN) customer I'm not real happy about this deal. Sun has a great rep of taking decent companies and making them disappear. We still use Solaris but buy Fujitsu servers to run it, because from both a price/performance and a realiability standpoint Fujitsu leaves Sun in the dust. This will be a real tricky deal to work out with all the cross-vendor sales channels at work. Sun sells HDS DASD at the high-end (rebranded). Will STK reps now be marketing HDS DASD along with the lower-end LSI as well as their tape libraries. Will Sun fund STK well enough to stay on pace with both mainframe and open systems technology advances (every time IBM tweaks a channel spec it takes STK forever to catch up - see chapter 1 (ESCON) and then chapter 2 (FICON)). I simply don't see the clear-cut synergy that will be formed by this acquisition and I suspect neither will investors.
It's interesting to read all the responses and, as is typical of many things on/., some are informed, some are mistaken, and some are clueless.
I'm currently leading a project at a large US finanical services firm to switch from one email archival/management/compliance product to another so I have a bit of insight on what is fact and what is fiction.
First, as a few others here have written, both the title and the categorization are misleading. This is about corporate email and litigation and has nothing to do with Your Rights Online. Second, M-S isn't being fined for "deleting emails" - they are losing the judgement because (again, as somebody else correctly posted) for *repeatedly* affirming to the judge that they had found all emails requested in discovery and turned them over . . . then finding more. This eventually honked the judge off and she made her ruling.
Some blanket statements have been made that aren't true (some as a result of broad generalizations made in the article, perhaps a predictable side-effect of such a short article on such a detailed subject).
Point - Financial Services firms (at least U.S.) do NOT have to keep all emails for 3 years. There are specific laws and regulations that state that SOME emails have certain retention periods but by no means ALL. SEC 17-4A, for example, spells out that emails pertaining to the sale of securities need to be retained for a minimum of 3 years and be stored on non-alterable media (WORM). So, in this case, basically the emails to and from anyone with a broker/dealer license are subject but not those of the guy that installs the PC on their desk (or Carol in HR or Joe in Marketing, etc.).
Point - similarly, Sarbanes-Oxley does NOT state that all emails need to be kept for 3 years. Again, emails pertaining to specific subjects (typically accounting/financial reporting and controls over same) have specific retention requirements. The hard part here is that defining which emails those are is a lot harder than it is with the broker-dealers. Typically a review is done of who in the company has the ability/authority to have impact on that reporting or the controls and then their email accounts are made members of groups for specific retention policies.
Point - Spam. We all hate it and some posters correctly noted issues with having to deal with mandated minimum archival of email vs. desire to delete spam. Who wants to be forced to keep spam for 3 years (or longer)? That's just rubbing salt in the wound. This is one the reasons that many companies (mine included) engage 3rd party services to pre-filter spam prior to the email arriving at the corporate gateway. It's not 100% but I saw my spamrate drop from 300-500/day (yeah, somebody really had my number) to 10-20/day. You don't have to archive what you never received.
Point - absent any regulatory reason why email should be retained for a specific period of time a company is free to delete those OTHER emails however they see fit. To do it properly means crafting a policy and then having a process that CONSISTENTLY enforces the policy. If the policy is that after 6 months all email not otherwise subject to compliance-related archival is deleted that's fine - so long as that's what they actually do. Note that most companies add more granularity as, presumably, email also can have business value not just regulatory value. It's more typical to see that email that isn't refiled out of the default inbox/sent folders is deleted after some specific time period.
Now where it's easy to run afoul here is that (A) many email administrators aren't operating at a high enough level to be aware of the legal landmines out there and (B) the people that are crafting the policies aren't technically savvy enough to fully understand the nuances of data/email management.
So a common scenario at a company near you may be that a compliance committee composed of people from HR, Legal, and whatever else but NOT IT will hammer out a policy
How tall of a ladder do you have to climb up on to your high horse . . . and how long does it take you? Please explain how entering a publicly accessable url into your browser's address bar and clicking could in any way be considered "a hack" (your words).
Pivot table is hardly an 'obscure' feature. I'm as anti-Gates as the next fellow but I also try to remain objective in reviewing features of software. In general all of MS Office is horribly bloated and serves up features that a large portion of its users will never exploit . . . but Pivot Table is not one of those features. I'm surprised at the number of/. readers that don't know what it is - do you all live in caves are has your anti-MS bias really clouded your judgement that much?
Slashdot Mirror
|Either live in reality, or keep your delusions to yourself. You can't reason with people that get all their news from Bill O'Reilly.
Interesting. Of course now we have the benefit of having cut out the middleman - by positioning the data center near the highway the truck doesn't have to bother hitting the transformer it can just ram directly into the data center. :)
There's more than servers to consider. DASD doesn't like to get hot - at all. The motors used in the HDA's are not variable speed so they can't be slowed down, they are either on or off. Running DASD hot for any prolonged period of time is a good way to become familiar with the term " . . . may produce unpredictable results" (and none of them are good).
I'm still not clear (and I DID read the article) how their basic power feed is configured. The followup article references that they were switching over to the backup power feed. Why aren't BOTH feeds configured so that when one of them goes poof there's no interruption? All of our data centers have multiple feeds coming in from different grids into different entry points in the buildings and running up different risers until they meet at the distribution point. No single point of failure. And when ComEd craps out (it's a when, not an if, but they are MUCH better than they were not too long ago) it's the generators to the rescue. However I don't believe the HVAC is on the UPS, either, for the same reasons others have posted - so there probably would be an interruption there if we switch to diesel. Something to check into as we are actually in the process of planning (yet another) data center.
. . . only if you steal bread. Patent trolls employ lawyers and, well, Alberto does need a new job . . .
The "death knoll" is about 100 yards away from "the grassy knoll" - but nobody knows about it because it was removed from the Warren Commission report before it was published.
I don't know about the return rate but I'll bet they have a VERY favorable response rate to the question "Would you like to SuperSize that?"
Well it will be used to fund the new Department of Internet Tax Revenue Collection, of course. We can't have a tax without a bureaucracy to oversee it and we can't have a bureaucracy without a revenue source.
But my ID isn't unique! It's "Linksys", just like all my neighbors!
Don't give up your day job to start a new career handing out legal advice. Unless, of course, your day job IS giving out legal advice in which case you really SHOULD give it up and find something for which you may be better suited. The manner in which you obtain an illegal copy is irrelevant and doesn't magically bless your copy as legal. Is there a serious threat that the RIAA powers that be will be coming after you for your copy? No. Does that make it a legal copy? Also, no.
Well said. I consider myself an early adopter as well, but only when the new (and the associated cost) is markedly better than the old. I will grant that a really good HD-DVD setup is a little better than a really good regular DVD setup (assuming high-quality display, audio, etc.) but it's not jaw-droppingly better . . . at least not yet. I have yet to see any Blu-Ray though the geek in me wants to like it based on the tech specs of what it is capable of doing. In any case, two competing and higher priced formats that obviously won't both survive long-term that aren't dramatically better than the high-end regular DVD system I've put together now . . . well, I'll spend my $$ elsewhere until they settle the format wars and/or show me a 'gotta have' geegaw.
Well now at least they won't be dependent on private citizens to film police beating people on the street. Cutting out the middleman, that's innovation! Cynics might suggest that a logical next step would be that they will arm these benign drones, but not me.
I'm all for true HD content on DVD's. I'm also disgusted by the inability of the two competing groups to work out a standard so that the public (yeah, us suckers that pay real $$ for their products) don't have to make guesses (wagers, really) as to which format is going to be in it for the long haul. There are real benefits to having a true HD content on a portable media source like a DVD. But, the one quoted at the end of the fine article is surely not one of them: Asked if consumers would have to buy their favorite movies again, Blu-ray spokesman Simonis said: "Of course! But it will enrich your life." Snort!! Yeah, I'm all just pins and needles waiting for the HD-DVD version of "Dude, where's my car?" because my life just has this incredible void right now. I at least hope he was laughing when Simonis said that.
It does NOT transform a DVD into HD quality. Upconverting from 480i to anything doesn't make it HD anymore than does slapping a snazzy body kit on a Yugo make it suddenly drive like an Aston-Martin. You are still saddled with the limitations of the original, 480i, source material. The promise of HD DVD formats is that the source is actually high quality from the start.
That said I won't be buying one for quite a while as I think it's going to be a long, stupid, battle until one format finally emerges as a 'standard'. Until then I'll keep outputting 480i over HDMI from my Pio 79avi into my Pio 1130 and let the PDP do the heavy lifting for upscaling. It's pretty good but no comparison to REAL HD.
In the meantime I don't expect M$ and others to sit idly by. With the continuing drop in HDD prices and the advent of near plug & play connectivity it's quite conceivable that HTPC's could move into the current DVD space and pre-recorded hard-drives and/or download-on-demand for true HD content could make the whole format debate irrelevant. I'd certainly prefer not to cede M$ yet another potential monopoly position but the idiot$ letting this format war continue don't seem to understand that the clock is ticking.
If Apple's market share is - depending on when the question is asked and of whom - somewhere between 2.4 and 2.8% - then in response to the question of "These won't be out until 2007, but it still raises the question: did Apple jump the gun by switching to Intel?" isn't the real answer/question do more than 97% of computer users actually care?
How ironic. Older people discovering (?) that high pitched sounds annoy teenagers. Teenagers use low pitched sounds (boom cars playing overamped bass-heavy music) to annoy old people. So who speaks for the mid-range?
Wait - I though unix is unix is . . .
Did somebody lie to me? Who do I sue?
Yet another mainframe dinosaur laughing at all the friggin' primadonnas that built their own ivory towers long after we disassembled ours. Unix is way better than Windows as an OS yet the holier-than-thou crowd that surround so many unix systems made it so hard to use (like my crowd did way back when with mainframes) that the people that actually use (and pay for!) computing systems turned to (gasp) Windows. Surprise! It's the business, stupid!
Up until a year ago when we outsourced our printer operations we ran 9 of these - a mix of 3900's and 4000's. When you have a large peak cycle like month-end/quarter-end to print massive volumes of customer statements - where a single customer's statement itself can be hundreds of pages - the capability of large thruput machines like these is essential. For internal printing these types of machines actually allowed us to SAVE paper. Once upon a time hardcopy was pretty much the only way to view your output. Even once we had a terminal on everyone's desk there was the predictable pushback to use online vs. print because "that's the way we've always done it". To reduce the amount of paper we changed the default print format for internal printing for a lot of the standard stuff to be double sided and "2-up", using AFP (Advanced Function Printing). Yeah, they print faster but with a little thoughtful management injected into the process they can print SMARTER, too.
That's just piss-poor operations management. Any well run computer/print facility simply doesn't allow that to happen - just because somebody places something onto spool doesn't mean it's automatically printed unless there's a total breakdown in spool management and print controls.
As a STK (and SUN) customer I'm not real happy about this deal. Sun has a great rep of taking decent companies and making them disappear. We still use Solaris but buy Fujitsu servers to run it, because from both a price/performance and a realiability standpoint Fujitsu leaves Sun in the dust. This will be a real tricky deal to work out with all the cross-vendor sales channels at work. Sun sells HDS DASD at the high-end (rebranded). Will STK reps now be marketing HDS DASD along with the lower-end LSI as well as their tape libraries. Will Sun fund STK well enough to stay on pace with both mainframe and open systems technology advances (every time IBM tweaks a channel spec it takes STK forever to catch up - see chapter 1 (ESCON) and then chapter 2 (FICON)). I simply don't see the clear-cut synergy that will be formed by this acquisition and I suspect neither will investors.
It's interesting to read all the responses and, as is typical of many things on /., some are informed, some are mistaken, and some are clueless.
I'm currently leading a project at a large US finanical services firm to switch from one email archival/management/compliance product to another so I have a bit of insight on what is fact and what is fiction.
First, as a few others here have written, both the title and the categorization are misleading. This is about corporate email and litigation and has nothing to do with Your Rights Online. Second, M-S isn't being fined for "deleting emails" - they are losing the judgement because (again, as somebody else correctly posted) for *repeatedly* affirming to the judge that they had found all emails requested in discovery and turned them over . . . then finding more. This eventually honked the judge off and she made her ruling.
Some blanket statements have been made that aren't true (some as a result of broad generalizations made in the article, perhaps a predictable side-effect of such a short article on such a detailed subject).
Point - Financial Services firms (at least U.S.) do NOT have to keep all emails for 3 years. There are specific laws and regulations that state that SOME emails have certain retention periods but by no means ALL. SEC 17-4A, for example, spells out that emails pertaining to the sale of securities need to be retained for a minimum of 3 years and be stored on non-alterable media (WORM). So, in this case, basically the emails to and from anyone with a broker/dealer license are subject but not those of the guy that installs the PC on their desk (or Carol in HR or Joe in Marketing, etc.).
Point - similarly, Sarbanes-Oxley does NOT state that all emails need to be kept for 3 years. Again, emails pertaining to specific subjects (typically accounting/financial reporting and controls over same) have specific retention requirements. The hard part here is that defining which emails those are is a lot harder than it is with the broker-dealers. Typically a review is done of who in the company has the ability/authority to have impact on that reporting or the controls and then their email accounts are made members of groups for specific retention policies.
Point - Spam. We all hate it and some posters correctly noted issues with having to deal with mandated minimum archival of email vs. desire to delete spam. Who wants to be forced to keep spam for 3 years (or longer)? That's just rubbing salt in the wound. This is one the reasons that many companies (mine included) engage 3rd party services to pre-filter spam prior to the email arriving at the corporate gateway. It's not 100% but I saw my spamrate drop from 300-500/day (yeah, somebody really had my number) to 10-20/day. You don't have to archive what you never received.
Point - absent any regulatory reason why email should be retained for a specific period of time a company is free to delete those OTHER emails however they see fit. To do it properly means crafting a policy and then having a process that CONSISTENTLY enforces the policy. If the policy is that after 6 months all email not otherwise subject to compliance-related archival is deleted that's fine - so long as that's what they actually do. Note that most companies add more granularity as, presumably, email also can have business value not just regulatory value. It's more typical to see that email that isn't refiled out of the default inbox/sent folders is deleted after some specific time period.
Now where it's easy to run afoul here is that (A) many email administrators aren't operating at a high enough level to be aware of the legal landmines out there and (B) the people that are crafting the policies aren't technically savvy enough to fully understand the nuances of data/email management.
So a common scenario at a company near you may be that a compliance committee composed of people from HR, Legal, and whatever else but NOT IT will hammer out a policy
How tall of a ladder do you have to climb up on to your high horse . . . and how long does it take you? Please explain how entering a publicly accessable url into your browser's address bar and clicking could in any way be considered "a hack" (your words).
Sure, and I can do it in SAS as well. The relevance of either SQL or SAS to a book review on an Excel feature is . . .?
Pivot table is hardly an 'obscure' feature. I'm as anti-Gates as the next fellow but I also try to remain objective in reviewing features of software. In general all of MS Office is horribly bloated and serves up features that a large portion of its users will never exploit . . . but Pivot Table is not one of those features. I'm surprised at the number of /. readers that don't know what it is - do you all live in caves are has your anti-MS bias really clouded your judgement that much?
Hey, if you don't like the system then vote to change it!!! Oh, wait, ummmm . . . . never mind.