"Some people" is well over 50%. Most people actually watch DVDs for the sole purpose of being entertained, not to nitpick the difference between video resolutions, or to try to see how HDMI looks different from component video. Those crappy 27" tubes render the same plot, characters, and action as the widescreen, hi-def plasmas.
I agree that many people are still using this old technology. When they go to buy their next DVD player, I would think they would opt for a similarlly priced HD-DVD player that is backwards compatible, yet still allows them to access the new media that is being sold.
The point is that HD-DVD is going to _replace_ DVD players in the market, as the costs for both of them will be very similar in the long run. Why build a new DVD only player when the market for them is smaller (however much smaller can be debated, but as long as 1 HD-DVD is sold it is smaller) and the costs are equivalent.
None of this cost cutting is going to happen instantly, but within 2-5 years it will happen.
Actually, no the TV does not have 5.1 speakers or processing built in. It has a digital switch that sends the audio stream to my seperate reciever. When I switch inputs on the TV, the audio signal is automatically switched as well.
I think you are wrong on several fronts. Primarily the adoption rate. I believe that it will be very good.
I also don't agree with your list of 'issues':
complex setups
Ummm, you plug the HDMI connector into the back of the HD-DVD player and the other end into your TV. There is no step 2. Audio and everything is taken care of.
additional expense beyond new DVD players
True I guess if you do not have any HDMI based equipment. Around Seattle, there are a _lot_ of people with Plasma displays and all the recent ones have HDMI. The number of those sets are going to be increasing in the future. And the people that already own HDMI equipment are the same kind of people who want better quality and will go for HD-DVD.
compatibility issues (real or perceived)
I predict that no one will have any compatibility issues. Old DVDs will play fine (and maybe look better because of the HDMI link, as a lot of older DVD players are using Component or worse) and new HD-DVDs will look great.
DRM
In summary, HD-DVD is set for a good run if you ask me. The new players will integrate nicely into newer home-theaters and are going to look stunning. Sure a lot of people who don't spend a ton of money on this stuff are going to be left out in the cold for a while, but remember how expensive DVD players were when they first came out. The price is going to drop.
Also, people who have to view a scaled down image because they don't have compliant equipment are probably not going to notice the difference. Believe it or not, some people watch DVDs on crappy 27" tubes from 1985 through the composite interfaces.
Indeed. Eve Online uses a similar model, with the NPC characters making up less than 10% of the galactic economy.
By far, the most realistic and player driven economy around. It only works because there is 25,000 people playing at the same time, ON A SINGLE SERVER INSTANCE. Try it.
Power is a _big_ deal for those operating large datacenters. Imaging the savings when you are talking of something in the 10-20 megawatt range (and they get much larger than that). 30% of that can ammount to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in the electrical bill. You also save money by not having to AC off the extra wasted heat from the transformers, reduce the UPS loading and also reduce the amount of onsite generation capacity required. So it will add up.
The number of transistors is still doubling at an hectic pace. Maybe you are confused (as are most people) about what Moore's law actually is.
Now with mulit-core processors becoming the norm, and 32 cores per CPU not that far off, it is easy to see that Moore's law is going to keep going strong for at least 5 more years, if not more.
Since these machines are already distributed multi-node systems, a single cpu with 32 cores is going to be generally faster than 32 CPUs in a distributed node configuration. So basically, we may not have it in our latops, but workstations and low-end servers maybe. Higher end servers certainly.
You are technically incorrect on this. The Blue Gene I/O Nodes use Linux. The compute nodes run a custom OS. So they use Linux for accessing hardware devices, and their own custom OS for actually doing the work.
The HRHD+ Series generates compact encrypted archive video clips as self-executable files. Honeywells minibank format produces an executable (.exe) file containing both the video clip and reader
Somehow, I don't think this solution would work for the author. Doesn't seem like he'd be able to use the video files on anything other than a PC running Windows.
Everyone is bitching about writing games that use three threads (xBox 360) or 8 threads (Cell). You want to go and jump right to 32 threads or more. Lets give the programmers some time to adjust to threads > 1, and then lets slowly crank it up.
I'm a beliver in the ability of games to use multiple cores, but I think 32 would be taking it too far. Leave the T1 to what it is good at. Web serving and processing thousands of simultaneous requests.
10 Gigabit Ethernet can be effectively used. I've seen transfer rates of over 850 MB/s on a single 10gbs link.
You might be right in that a single consumer drive can not make use of that storage, but there are systems out there that can saturate a 10gbs link many times over.
Just because you can not fathom a use for the technology, does not make it pointless. Just try managing an environment with 50+ backup servers (because of the 1gbs and 100mbit links to those servers) compared to an environment that has 5 backup servers connected via redundant 10gbs links to the core switches in a datacenter.
Not only do we get *more* done with 1/10 the number of servers, we have reduced the management and administrative workload and made administrators time available to work on important things like disaster recovery.
As long as storage and disks keep growing, we _have_ to keep increasing the speeds of the links between them. If we don't, the amount of time it takes to access and back up those disks will increase exponentially along with thier capacity.
I've moved from playing SWG to Eve Online. It is a bit of a different experience, but I like it.
Much (but not all) of the economy is player controlled, and there are a nearly infinte amount of ways to play the game.
My favorite part though is that leveling is not a grind. Each skill takes a certain amout of time to train, and keeps training even when you log out. So as long as you can log in for a few minutes a week, you can keep advancing your character, just as fast as anyone else.
I've also noticed that the people I play with and against don't seem to act like the WOW-Tards I've seen on other MMORPGs
Maybe the terrorists are not rational. Maybe they just hate us.
Why do people always look to place blame internally? If you think that we can end terrorism by appeasment, then you are wrong. Failed with Hitler, and it will fail again. The only way to stop it is to remove them completely from the face of the Earth. Country by country, terrorist by terrorist.
I for one am glad that the majority of the losses in the war on terror have a) not been on American soil and b) not been our boys.
Maybe you're right, we should invite all of them irrational terrorists to a big meeting and see if we can 'pound' out a resolution.
I'm interested in this approach, but have always had concerns on the effect of constant power cycling on the drives. Have you seen a reduction in lifespan on the drives from this on-off-on-off behavior? Does this increased failure rate, and the increase in the number of drives to 'dial in the reliability' end up costing more in the long run?
For the full meal deal? Probably nobody - but it makes a hell of an advertisement for the smaller systems in the same product line.
I'd bet you that you are wrong on this. EMC is going to sell a lot of these systems.
Previously you could get a 230 TB (? might be off, going from memory?) DMX3000 array. EMC has a lot of customers with several (many in some instances) of these installed. A good percentage of these customers would probably consolidate into a single array. Some customers like the advantages of many smaller arrays.
But certainly EMC is going to sell more than 0 of these. This year.
WHile not wanting to say too much, that cost is definitely reasonable considering the benefits.
Imagine just once, you had to wait 4 hours for some tapes to come back onsite. Now that is four hours times approx 40,000 people (number of employees unable to work). That one outage just cost you 160,000 hours of downtime, where you could not serve your customers. Assuming you pay on average $25/per employee/per hour you've paid for the system in one go.
This is not including the amount of money lost because product has not been sold, or customers who got bad treatment and left.
Also, while the company certainly has people with the skills to assemble a large array, I can say that we would never do it. It is much easier to offload the support and performance worries to a vendor.
If this was slightly less high-end disk (DMX's are EMC's top of the line) it would be perfect for disk-to-disk backups. We send approx 50 TB a day of data to tape to send offsite. I would *love* to have the last 50 days data on disk, onsite for instant restores.
I guess I feel that the method in which the drives are connected to the RAID controller doesn't really matter. Any RAID head with enough cache and bandwidth is going to perform well, no matter if it is using SCSI, FC or SATA drives. The important part is how that data is shared in the datacenter, and how the data makes it way to the clients. iSCSI is a revolution in this area.
eSATA is getting closer, but I believe the real long term answer is going to be iSCSI.
I used to be really against iSCSI, as the native stacks on various OSes just did not deal with it well. By that I mean that a 50 MB/s file transfer would consume almost 100% of a 3ghz CPU. Also, the hard limit on gig-e transfers of 85 MB/s (TCP/IP overhead + iSCSI overhead) was just too low.
Now, that has all changed. Not only can you get TCP/IP Offload Engines for just about every OS (I don't work with Windows, so I don't know what the status of that is). Also, 10 gigabit ethernet has become financially reasonable.
For instance, the T210-cx is around $800, and will deliver a sustained 600 MB/s (not peak or any other crap). Also, the latency on a 1500 MTU 10-gbs ethernet fabric is something to behold.
I think by the end of this year, we will see iSCSI devices on 10gbe that out-perform traditional SAN equipment in the 2gbs evironment, in every respect (including price), by a large margin. 4gbs SAN could come close, but I still think hardware accelerated iSCSI has a _ton_ of potential.
If I were starting a storage company today, I would be focusing exclusively on the 10gbs iSCSI market. It is going to explode this year.
This is absolutely correct. The very first thing you should do is get some monitoring gear in place so that you can tell what is going on in real time, and find the sources and causes of those high peaks.
Once you get a feel for how the datacenter is 'breathing' (i.e. watch the usage graphs and become familiar with the pulse of workload, etc) you should be able to come up with good solutions to your problems (like starting your monthly billing processes 2 days early, so you can only run the batch processes at night when the power is cheaper).
Also, never underestimate the cost of lighting and A/C. Maybe you can get by with only turning on every 3rd fluorescent light. Maybe you can use exhaust fans instead of A/C in a colder climate.
The point is you'll never know what problems you need to address unless you monitor your DC.
Exactly which AMD processor would you place in the iMac? Without having to increase its size or volume to account for the cooling required? I could see maybe a single Athalon 64, but the X2 is clearly out. I don't think a single Athalon is going to beat the new Core Duo.
Right now the number of people who browse the Web from a PC greatly outweighs the number of people who do so from a phone/PDA.
_Right now_ is the keyword here. To me, Google has always been a longer term thinking company. Maybe they are planning for a future where mobile devices are more important. Possibly they are thinking about _making_ mobile devices more important.
The parents point about Mobile devices is important, and is really the only possible conclusion you could draw from this situation.
While in principle I have to agree with you, I think that your post a little off.
Personally, my ultimate setup would be completely mirrored disks. Given that the performance of todays drives outpaces my needs (probably by a few orders of magnitude), and the price of the drives, just using two is good enough for me.
I believe that a mirrored 2 disk array, is much less suseptible to failure than your 5 disk RAID 5. Having only two components, the chances of failure are _MUCH_ lower than 5 disks, and with mirroring you get solid performance with exellent reliability. Plus, are you _SURE_ you could recover from a failed disk in a RAID5 setup? Have you praciced that recovery? RAID 1 is so much easier. A good deal of data is lost while admins try to recover from failed drives, sometimes this loss is caused by the admins actions. Having a simpler solution makes things much safer.
RAID 5 was for a time when small disks were the norm. When you can have a single disk that has 10x the space your needs require, RAID1 makes the most sense to me.
Maybe it is possible to use technology and experience to make up for that gap. Sure we are very clean, very well paid and pampered, but if we have machines doing 95% of the work, the percentage of the cost cosumed by our lavish employee protection and morality laws drops considerably.
My main concern would be access to capital required to create this new manufacturing capacity.
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I agree that many people are still using this old technology. When they go to buy their next DVD player, I would think they would opt for a similarlly priced HD-DVD player that is backwards compatible, yet still allows them to access the new media that is being sold.
The point is that HD-DVD is going to _replace_ DVD players in the market, as the costs for both of them will be very similar in the long run. Why build a new DVD only player when the market for them is smaller (however much smaller can be debated, but as long as 1 HD-DVD is sold it is smaller) and the costs are equivalent.
None of this cost cutting is going to happen instantly, but within 2-5 years it will happen.
Made things a _lot_ easier.
I also don't agree with your list of 'issues':
complex setups
Ummm, you plug the HDMI connector into the back of the HD-DVD player and the other end into your TV. There is no step 2. Audio and everything is taken care of.
additional expense beyond new DVD players
True I guess if you do not have any HDMI based equipment. Around Seattle, there are a _lot_ of people with Plasma displays and all the recent ones have HDMI. The number of those sets are going to be increasing in the future. And the people that already own HDMI equipment are the same kind of people who want better quality and will go for HD-DVD.
compatibility issues (real or perceived)
I predict that no one will have any compatibility issues. Old DVDs will play fine (and maybe look better because of the HDMI link, as a lot of older DVD players are using Component or worse) and new HD-DVDs will look great.
DRM
In summary, HD-DVD is set for a good run if you ask me. The new players will integrate nicely into newer home-theaters and are going to look stunning. Sure a lot of people who don't spend a ton of money on this stuff are going to be left out in the cold for a while, but remember how expensive DVD players were when they first came out. The price is going to drop.
Also, people who have to view a scaled down image because they don't have compliant equipment are probably not going to notice the difference. Believe it or not, some people watch DVDs on crappy 27" tubes from 1985 through the composite interfaces.
By far, the most realistic and player driven economy around. It only works because there is 25,000 people playing at the same time, ON A SINGLE SERVER INSTANCE. Try it.
Power is a _big_ deal for those operating large datacenters. Imaging the savings when you are talking of something in the 10-20 megawatt range (and they get much larger than that). 30% of that can ammount to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in the electrical bill. You also save money by not having to AC off the extra wasted heat from the transformers, reduce the UPS loading and also reduce the amount of onsite generation capacity required. So it will add up.
Now with mulit-core processors becoming the norm, and 32 cores per CPU not that far off, it is easy to see that Moore's law is going to keep going strong for at least 5 more years, if not more.
Since these machines are already distributed multi-node systems, a single cpu with 32 cores is going to be generally faster than 32 CPUs in a distributed node configuration. So basically, we may not have it in our latops, but workstations and low-end servers maybe. Higher end servers certainly.
You are technically incorrect on this. The Blue Gene I/O Nodes use Linux. The compute nodes run a custom OS. So they use Linux for accessing hardware devices, and their own custom OS for actually doing the work.
The HRHD+ Series generates compact encrypted archive video clips as self-executable files. Honeywells minibank format produces an executable (.exe) file containing both the video clip and reader
Somehow, I don't think this solution would work for the author. Doesn't seem like he'd be able to use the video files on anything other than a PC running Windows.
I'm a beliver in the ability of games to use multiple cores, but I think 32 would be taking it too far. Leave the T1 to what it is good at. Web serving and processing thousands of simultaneous requests.
You might be right in that a single consumer drive can not make use of that storage, but there are systems out there that can saturate a 10gbs link many times over.
Just because you can not fathom a use for the technology, does not make it pointless. Just try managing an environment with 50+ backup servers (because of the 1gbs and 100mbit links to those servers) compared to an environment that has 5 backup servers connected via redundant 10gbs links to the core switches in a datacenter.
Not only do we get *more* done with 1/10 the number of servers, we have reduced the management and administrative workload and made administrators time available to work on important things like disaster recovery.
As long as storage and disks keep growing, we _have_ to keep increasing the speeds of the links between them. If we don't, the amount of time it takes to access and back up those disks will increase exponentially along with thier capacity.
Much (but not all) of the economy is player controlled, and there are a nearly infinte amount of ways to play the game.
My favorite part though is that leveling is not a grind. Each skill takes a certain amout of time to train, and keeps training even when you log out. So as long as you can log in for a few minutes a week, you can keep advancing your character, just as fast as anyone else.
I've also noticed that the people I play with and against don't seem to act like the WOW-Tards I've seen on other MMORPGs
Why do people always look to place blame internally? If you think that we can end terrorism by appeasment, then you are wrong. Failed with Hitler, and it will fail again. The only way to stop it is to remove them completely from the face of the Earth. Country by country, terrorist by terrorist.
I for one am glad that the majority of the losses in the war on terror have a) not been on American soil and b) not been our boys.
Maybe you're right, we should invite all of them irrational terrorists to a big meeting and see if we can 'pound' out a resolution.
I'm interested in this approach, but have always had concerns on the effect of constant power cycling on the drives. Have you seen a reduction in lifespan on the drives from this on-off-on-off behavior? Does this increased failure rate, and the increase in the number of drives to 'dial in the reliability' end up costing more in the long run?
I'd bet you that you are wrong on this. EMC is going to sell a lot of these systems.
Previously you could get a 230 TB (? might be off, going from memory?) DMX3000 array. EMC has a lot of customers with several (many in some instances) of these installed. A good percentage of these customers would probably consolidate into a single array. Some customers like the advantages of many smaller arrays.
But certainly EMC is going to sell more than 0 of these. This year.
Imagine just once, you had to wait 4 hours for some tapes to come back onsite. Now that is four hours times approx 40,000 people (number of employees unable to work). That one outage just cost you 160,000 hours of downtime, where you could not serve your customers. Assuming you pay on average $25/per employee/per hour you've paid for the system in one go.
This is not including the amount of money lost because product has not been sold, or customers who got bad treatment and left.
Also, while the company certainly has people with the skills to assemble a large array, I can say that we would never do it. It is much easier to offload the support and performance worries to a vendor.
If this was slightly less high-end disk (DMX's are EMC's top of the line) it would be perfect for disk-to-disk backups. We send approx 50 TB a day of data to tape to send offsite. I would *love* to have the last 50 days data on disk, onsite for instant restores.
I guess I feel that the method in which the drives are connected to the RAID controller doesn't really matter. Any RAID head with enough cache and bandwidth is going to perform well, no matter if it is using SCSI, FC or SATA drives. The important part is how that data is shared in the datacenter, and how the data makes it way to the clients. iSCSI is a revolution in this area.
I used to be really against iSCSI, as the native stacks on various OSes just did not deal with it well. By that I mean that a 50 MB/s file transfer would consume almost 100% of a 3ghz CPU. Also, the hard limit on gig-e transfers of 85 MB/s (TCP/IP overhead + iSCSI overhead) was just too low.
Now, that has all changed. Not only can you get TCP/IP Offload Engines for just about every OS (I don't work with Windows, so I don't know what the status of that is). Also, 10 gigabit ethernet has become financially reasonable.
For instance, the T210-cx is around $800, and will deliver a sustained 600 MB/s (not peak or any other crap). Also, the latency on a 1500 MTU 10-gbs ethernet fabric is something to behold.
I think by the end of this year, we will see iSCSI devices on 10gbe that out-perform traditional SAN equipment in the 2gbs evironment, in every respect (including price), by a large margin. 4gbs SAN could come close, but I still think hardware accelerated iSCSI has a _ton_ of potential.
If I were starting a storage company today, I would be focusing exclusively on the 10gbs iSCSI market. It is going to explode this year.
Once you get a feel for how the datacenter is 'breathing' (i.e. watch the usage graphs and become familiar with the pulse of workload, etc) you should be able to come up with good solutions to your problems (like starting your monthly billing processes 2 days early, so you can only run the batch processes at night when the power is cheaper).
Also, never underestimate the cost of lighting and A/C. Maybe you can get by with only turning on every 3rd fluorescent light. Maybe you can use exhaust fans instead of A/C in a colder climate.
The point is you'll never know what problems you need to address unless you monitor your DC.
Personally, I can't wait. VMWare is better in just about every respect than Virtual PC.
Exactly which AMD processor would you place in the iMac? Without having to increase its size or volume to account for the cooling required? I could see maybe a single Athalon 64, but the X2 is clearly out. I don't think a single Athalon is going to beat the new Core Duo.
I live on the East Side of Seattle, and know very few people that do _NOT_ have HD televisions or displays.
To these people, the 360 (and the PS3) present compelling enough visual improvements to make them worth while.
HD Sets are falling in price rapidly, and will be the norm for American homes sooner than later. That is why the console makers are embracing it.
_Right now_ is the keyword here. To me, Google has always been a longer term thinking company. Maybe they are planning for a future where mobile devices are more important. Possibly they are thinking about _making_ mobile devices more important.
The parents point about Mobile devices is important, and is really the only possible conclusion you could draw from this situation.
While in principle I have to agree with you, I think that your post a little off.
Personally, my ultimate setup would be completely mirrored disks. Given that the performance of todays drives outpaces my needs (probably by a few orders of magnitude), and the price of the drives, just using two is good enough for me.
I believe that a mirrored 2 disk array, is much less suseptible to failure than your 5 disk RAID 5. Having only two components, the chances of failure are _MUCH_ lower than 5 disks, and with mirroring you get solid performance with exellent reliability. Plus, are you _SURE_ you could recover from a failed disk in a RAID5 setup? Have you praciced that recovery? RAID 1 is so much easier. A good deal of data is lost while admins try to recover from failed drives, sometimes this loss is caused by the admins actions. Having a simpler solution makes things much safer.
RAID 5 was for a time when small disks were the norm. When you can have a single disk that has 10x the space your needs require, RAID1 makes the most sense to me.
Maybe it is possible to use technology and experience to make up for that gap. Sure we are very clean, very well paid and pampered, but if we have machines doing 95% of the work, the percentage of the cost cosumed by our lavish employee protection and morality laws drops considerably.
My main concern would be access to capital required to create this new manufacturing capacity.