Not to say that ATA disks aren't reliable, but the components that are used in ATA disks are typically those that were outside the absurdly strict tolerances that are required for "enterprise-class" drives.
And yes, when it comes to speed, SCSI tends to rule the roost. Not only because you can throw 320MB/s down each individual channel, but you can toss enough devices on that channel to keep that overall speed sustained over longer periods of time.
Drives have very high burst speeds, but have it do lots of random data access constantly and watch speeds plummet. That's why a 10-disk striped array (with another 10-disks to mirror if you require redundancy, likely on another channel) tends to kick considerable ass. Because even if you're only sustaining say... 10MB/sec per disk, it's now 100MB/sec over the channel.
ATA storage is definitely cheap. If all that is required is just LOTS of storage, and performance and reliability isn't really critical, ATA is a pretty good choice. Of course then you could use robotic tape libraries as well.
SCSI also really ruled the server rooms because those expensive servers and storage systems simply didn't have ATA support. Period.
These would be on the designers and developers desktops. These should be reasonably fast (~2GHz) single CPU machines with probably need at least 2 GB RAM. The simulations we run do not benefit from dual CPUs. They probably don't even need SCSI. I'm thinking a $2k PC should work.
A 2.4GHz chip is $160. 2GB of memory is around $500 (1.5G? More like $250). $85 for a DVD/CD-RW, $150 for a board with onboard sound, $60 for a decent video card, $80 for a good case, $15 floppy, $30 on KB and optical mouse... with a 19" Monitor for $249. XP Pro is $140 for OEM to buy yourself, though the major OEMs get it FAR cheaper
Figure $1400-1500 a PC, even from a major OEM, tops. Anymore and you're getting hosed.
We were supposed to write something which was to raise the productivity of salespeople.
First it was just a training tool. Then it was used to create quotes and toss them into the backend systems. Then to look up customer history. Then it became a CRM apps.
I called it RUST, because it was a Randomly Useful Sales Tool. It was also an old crufty hack, which fit since things that are rusty are often old and kludgy.
The name has stuck since, and I believe the company still relies on the system. No reported bugs in 18 months, but it was written without a spec and in less than a month. Huge hack.;)
About 8 months ago a customer in Indonesia came to us (a fiber optic distributor) to buy an expensive Seiko Instruments polishing machine.
These are used to polish the ferrule endfaces on single mode fiber. These machines aren't cheap. This particular machine was about $25,000, plus a $7000 connector plate, plus supplies. All in all I think the invoice was for some $40,000.
Now, this didn't raise a flag, as we sell these suckers all the time, including overseas. What SHOULD'VE raised a red flag, is the guy wanted to pay with NINE different credit cards.
The OTHER mistake the company made is SENDING the machine out before processing payment. In which the credit card company basically said they were all stolen cards.
Fortunately, no one was charged. Fortunate for us, we were able to stop the carrier (FedEx I think) from completing the shipment. Yet it ended up being stuck in Indonesian customs. It took a lot of writing to our state rep to get it out of Indonesia, and even then, it took MONTHS.
Amazingly the equipment came back in one piece. No one had any fraudulent charges made.
I don't know what happened to who ordered it. It likely wasn't a legitimate company, but possibly a government that isn't allowed to buy these things because it could be used for weapons construction such as cruise missiles.
Guy in graphics managed to score a the new 11MP Canon.
Photos are around 80MB uncompressed. He brings a laptop with him wherever he goes to take photos because 640MB flash cards hold crap. He's ECSTATIC about the new 4GB Flash cards -- even though they're $1500 a card.
HighPoint makes a 4-Channel IDE controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD.
Maxtor makes 250GB ATA disks as well.
With 3 controller cards, 6TB (before formatting) is possible. With LVM, you could manage a single volume nearing 3TB in size. Without it, you could have three 2TB volumes, striped, in hardware. Or three 1TB volumes striped and mirrored.
That's a lot of stinkin' space!
Cost? $300 for 3 controllers, about $7000 for drives. Plus, oh, a few power supplies. Figure $8,000, $8500 with a box to hook it up to.
I'd actually like you to explain your interpretation on how they'd be used. I've watched Demolition Man a few times and have wondered it myself, but I'm still to come up with something.
I'm not trying to be asinine either. Please divulge the secret.
I'm going to agree with you here, and SPARCWare isn't terribly expensive. For about $300 I managed to snag an Ultra5 on eBay with a 333MHz UltraSPARC IIi (with 2MB L2) 512M of memory, picked up a Type5 keyboard and mouse, and threw in a 20G 7200rpm disk.
Why? I ran Solaris for x86 and it was more trouble than it was worth. Performance wasn't exactly fantastic either. I picked up the Ultra5 and haven't had any real regrets since.
User is still using one of the older monitors (15" Trinitron tubes) and made a requisition, complaining for a better monitor. Well, they clamored enough for a while we were told to give her a 19". I set it up during her lunch, and set it to 1024x768.
I thought I was being very conservative with that resolution, because everyone seems to complain about their eyesight.
Next day I walked by it and she apparently set it to 640x480 with large icon and large fonts. She wears glasses too.
It's an NT shop (was when I got there). Right now we use Trend Micro's OfficeScan for the anti-virus, and their ScanMail (with the eManager module) for the mail filtering.
The only reason we decided to purchase it is because doing something like this ourselves for Exchange was a royal pain in the arse to write. If we ran qmail or something, I'm sure I would've written a collection of scripts to do it. -----
Good filtering software, along with good filters, really makes the difference.
At work I use a product which allows me to filter on multiple levels:
1. Allow. If it's on the domain list, IP list, or if the message contains any of the keywords in the list, it's allowed through.
2. IP blacklisting. IP address matches? Delete it.
3. Domain name blacklisting. Domain name matches? Delete it.
4. Content filtering. Meets any of the content filters? Quarantine it.
5. Attachment blocking..cmd?.bat?.vbs? The other 18 I specified? Matched something in the antivirus pattern file? Delete the attachment, regardless of the source.
Virus infections in the past year? 0 workstations, 0 servers. Number of spams/day before companywide? Averaged about 800 for 25 users. Now? About 20 for 25 users.
Cost of the product? $1500 for the server license for both products. I'm happy.
What we've resorted to, with great success, is a combination of domain and content filtering.
So yes, if we get spam from "wesendgoatporn.com" guess what, "wesendgoatporn.com" is added to our blacklist.
But also, we block ALL messages containing "free" AND "goat" AND "porn" as well. So even if they change their domain name, or if someone else tries to send us free goat porn, it's blocked automagically.
This is what we've done to stop a lot of the spam, and I mean a lot. 400/day company wide (for a company of 25 people) dwindled to about 20/day now, which is a 95% reduction. And out of the thousands of emails filtered out, only a small handful (less than 10) were legitimate emails. And when a legit email is caught, we simply tune the filters, and those incidents are now fewer and rarer.
By the end of the year, the filters should be solid enough that we should see a 99% spam reduction, and an error rate 0.001%. A lot of products are out there that do content filtering too, and many are inexpensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just fast, but reliable.
Not to say that ATA disks aren't reliable, but the components that are used in ATA disks are typically those that were outside the absurdly strict tolerances that are required for "enterprise-class" drives.
And yes, when it comes to speed, SCSI tends to rule the roost. Not only because you can throw 320MB/s down each individual channel, but you can toss enough devices on that channel to keep that overall speed sustained over longer periods of time.
Drives have very high burst speeds, but have it do lots of random data access constantly and watch speeds plummet. That's why a 10-disk striped array (with another 10-disks to mirror if you require redundancy, likely on another channel) tends to kick considerable ass. Because even if you're only sustaining say... 10MB/sec per disk, it's now 100MB/sec over the channel.
ATA storage is definitely cheap. If all that is required is just LOTS of storage, and performance and reliability isn't really critical, ATA is a pretty good choice. Of course then you could use robotic tape libraries as well.
SCSI also really ruled the server rooms because those expensive servers and storage systems simply didn't have ATA support. Period.
-----
These would be on the designers and developers desktops. These should be reasonably fast (~2GHz) single CPU machines with probably need at least 2 GB RAM. The simulations we run do not benefit from dual CPUs. They probably don't even need SCSI. I'm thinking a $2k PC should work.
... with a 19" Monitor for $249. XP Pro is $140 for OEM to buy yourself, though the major OEMs get it FAR cheaper
A 2.4GHz chip is $160. 2GB of memory is around $500 (1.5G? More like $250). $85 for a DVD/CD-RW, $150 for a board with onboard sound, $60 for a decent video card, $80 for a good case, $15 floppy, $30 on KB and optical mouse
Figure $1400-1500 a PC, even from a major OEM, tops. Anymore and you're getting hosed.
-----
We were supposed to write something which was to raise the productivity of salespeople.
;)
First it was just a training tool. Then it was used to create quotes and toss them into the backend systems. Then to look up customer history. Then it became a CRM apps.
I called it RUST, because it was a Randomly Useful Sales Tool. It was also an old crufty hack, which fit since things that are rusty are often old and kludgy.
The name has stuck since, and I believe the company still relies on the system. No reported bugs in 18 months, but it was written without a spec and in less than a month. Huge hack.
-----
About 8 months ago a customer in Indonesia came to us (a fiber optic distributor) to buy an expensive Seiko Instruments polishing machine.
These are used to polish the ferrule endfaces on single mode fiber. These machines aren't cheap. This particular machine was about $25,000, plus a $7000 connector plate, plus supplies. All in all I think the invoice was for some $40,000.
Now, this didn't raise a flag, as we sell these suckers all the time, including overseas. What SHOULD'VE raised a red flag, is the guy wanted to pay with NINE different credit cards.
The OTHER mistake the company made is SENDING the machine out before processing payment. In which the credit card company basically said they were all stolen cards.
Fortunately, no one was charged. Fortunate for us, we were able to stop the carrier (FedEx I think) from completing the shipment. Yet it ended up being stuck in Indonesian customs. It took a lot of writing to our state rep to get it out of Indonesia, and even then, it took MONTHS.
Amazingly the equipment came back in one piece. No one had any fraudulent charges made.
I don't know what happened to who ordered it. It likely wasn't a legitimate company, but possibly a government that isn't allowed to buy these things because it could be used for weapons construction such as cruise missiles.
-----
6?
Guy in graphics managed to score a the new 11MP Canon.
Photos are around 80MB uncompressed. He brings a laptop with him wherever he goes to take photos because 640MB flash cards hold crap. He's ECSTATIC about the new 4GB Flash cards -- even though they're $1500 a card.
---
HighPoint makes a 4-Channel IDE controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD.
Maxtor makes 250GB ATA disks as well.
With 3 controller cards, 6TB (before formatting) is possible. With LVM, you could manage a single volume nearing 3TB in size. Without it, you could have three 2TB volumes, striped, in hardware. Or three 1TB volumes striped and mirrored.
That's a lot of stinkin' space!
Cost? $300 for 3 controllers, about $7000 for drives. Plus, oh, a few power supplies. Figure $8,000, $8500 with a box to hook it up to.
$8500 for 3TB, fault tolerant, is cheap.
-----
I feel your pain.
::sigh::
$30 a cartridge?
----
Go into the kitchen and drink everything under the sink. Completely. Even the stuff that burns your mouth.
It will uh... raise your Charisma to 18!
-----
Melt soap and ditch the tallows. What's left? Glycerine.
Want nitric acid? Frozen orange juice concentrate.
Mix them together? Nitrogylcerine.
Why, with enough soap, you could blow up just about anything...
-----
I actually thought it wasn't being cancelled, but it was being "ultra cancelled".
-----
I'd actually like you to explain your interpretation on how they'd be used. I've watched Demolition Man a few times and have wondered it myself, but I'm still to come up with something.
I'm not trying to be asinine either. Please divulge the secret.
-----
Does it use a PS/2 keyboard? If so...
Key Katcher
Expensive, but will work on anything using a PS/2 keyboard.
-----
I'm going to agree with you here, and SPARCWare isn't terribly expensive. For about $300 I managed to snag an Ultra5 on eBay with a 333MHz UltraSPARC IIi (with 2MB L2) 512M of memory, picked up a Type5 keyboard and mouse, and threw in a 20G 7200rpm disk.
Why? I ran Solaris for x86 and it was more trouble than it was worth. Performance wasn't exactly fantastic either. I picked up the Ultra5 and haven't had any real regrets since.
Nitric acid + hydrazine = bad.
Anyone who inhales that stuff will die a horrible death by asphyxiation within 48 hours of contact.
-----
Tell that to some of the people in my company.
User is still using one of the older monitors (15" Trinitron tubes) and made a requisition, complaining for a better monitor. Well, they clamored enough for a while we were told to give her a 19". I set it up during her lunch, and set it to 1024x768.
I thought I was being very conservative with that resolution, because everyone seems to complain about their eyesight.
Next day I walked by it and she apparently set it to 640x480 with large icon and large fonts. She wears glasses too.
-----
You can mine data to look for hidden business trends. If you mine the data really hard, you can see messages from GOD.
Ah...
The days of using a 2400 baud modem on my 486 to dial in to the local high school. You had shell on a VAX, you used lynx and kermit.
All for $10 a year! This was when ISPs where still hourly!
Ah... I remember upgrading to 9600 baud, and 14400 (PPP!). Those were the days...
-----
Yokomo I forgot for some reason. Heck if I know why I forgot Losi.
And I'll say it's dorky at the least. I've seen a handful of women ever running a car, and the ones that come along were dragged along.
-----
Seriously. The ZipZaps, and most of the stuff from Tyco and Nikko aren't that fantastic.
Get the real deals. 1/18th, 1/10th, or 1/8th. Electric or nitro. On-road or off.
HPI
Kyosho
Serpent
Tamiya
Team Associated
Team X-Ray
Traxxas
RC racing has got to be one of the geekiest and most rewarding hobbies to boot. Meet a lot of nice people this way at events.
-----
It's an NT shop (was when I got there). Right now we use Trend Micro's OfficeScan for the anti-virus, and their ScanMail (with the eManager module) for the mail filtering.
The only reason we decided to purchase it is because doing something like this ourselves for Exchange was a royal pain in the arse to write. If we ran qmail or something, I'm sure I would've written a collection of scripts to do it.
-----
Good filtering software, along with good filters, really makes the difference.
.cmd? .bat? .vbs? The other 18 I specified? Matched something in the antivirus pattern file? Delete the attachment, regardless of the source.
At work I use a product which allows me to filter on multiple levels:
1. Allow. If it's on the domain list, IP list, or if the message contains any of the keywords in the list, it's allowed through.
2. IP blacklisting. IP address matches? Delete it.
3. Domain name blacklisting. Domain name matches? Delete it.
4. Content filtering. Meets any of the content filters? Quarantine it.
5. Attachment blocking.
Virus infections in the past year? 0 workstations, 0 servers. Number of spams/day before companywide? Averaged about 800 for 25 users. Now? About 20 for 25 users.
Cost of the product? $1500 for the server license for both products. I'm happy.
-----
The Polo R looks nice, and even comes with the slot-loading DVD/RW combo drive.
... plus custom duty. Too much. Sorry.
But... $673... plus tax... plus shipping
What we've resorted to, with great success, is a combination of domain and content filtering.
So yes, if we get spam from "wesendgoatporn.com" guess what, "wesendgoatporn.com" is added to our blacklist.
But also, we block ALL messages containing "free" AND "goat" AND "porn" as well. So even if they change their domain name, or if someone else tries to send us free goat porn, it's blocked automagically.
This is what we've done to stop a lot of the spam, and I mean a lot. 400/day company wide (for a company of 25 people) dwindled to about 20/day now, which is a 95% reduction. And out of the thousands of emails filtered out, only a small handful (less than 10) were legitimate emails. And when a legit email is caught, we simply tune the filters, and those incidents are now fewer and rarer.
By the end of the year, the filters should be solid enough that we should see a 99% spam reduction, and an error rate 0.001%. A lot of products are out there that do content filtering too, and many are inexpensive.
You can pay $200 for XP Home Full in the store, or $90 OEM at anyplace like Googlegear.com or Directron or whoever.
AIT-2 can store 130GB/tape. AIT-3 can store 250G+.
Some versions of DLT I *think* can store around 400GB per cartridge.
-----