The point of the shift to 4k sectors (e.g. the WD "Advanced Format" drives) is that the amount of space needed for error correction at ever increasing densities was entering into the bounds of diminishing returns. Larger blocks mean less error correction is needed and thus more storage space for a given platter density. Anand has a pretty good writeup on it here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3691
My point was that IMHO the typical user doesn't have VMs, games, Linux installs, blah - I thought from your post you were saying the assumptions were wrong and that the average user *would* need >120GB, rather than the other way around. Apols for the misunderstanding.
I'm lucky enough to have a spanking new SAN at work, a bunch of iSCSI nodes with dumb discs and smart software. We tier storage over SSD, 10k SAS and 7.2k SATA, the SSD mostly being utilised for performance-critical databases. SATA discs we reserve for file server LUNs, low-I/O VMs (most of them) and the intermediate tier of VM -> LUN -> Tape backups.
As an aside, we choose to use RAID1 for SSD LUNs, as the RAID controllers can't keep up with the parity calculations and we saw a ~40% drop in IOPS when we used RAID6.
If by "cheap" you mean the craptastic OCZ Core series, and the other SSDs of the same gen that used the god-awful JMicron controller, the "cheap" end of the SSD market is full of high-performance drives that don't choke on random I/O. As soon as Intel and Indilinx came out with controllers that were worth the sand they were printed on everyone started doing it, and we've now got a market where the performance delta between "cheap" and "prosumer" SSDs is much, much smaller.
The vast bulk of the cost of the SSD is the flash, which is why if you can find someone still selling Core series SSDs they're only marginally cheaper than an SSD that's actually usable.
IME the average laptop doesn't have WinCE, Ubuntu or games either. I don't expect your typical "home" laptop to start coming with an SSD for another year or two, but there's plenty of businesses that are drooling over the prospect of a) uber-fast laptop drives to make the loading of all that security bloatware bearable and b) laptop drives that are small and don't get stuffed full of files that should have been on the file server in the first place.
My "workstation" laptop has a 500GB drive, and I wouldn't give that up for the world - I need the space for VMs. But my knockabout laptop is a toshiba T110 with an aftermarket 60GB OCZ drive in it. I don't have to worry about it being jiggled, there's a noticeable improvement in battery life and, obviously, I/O responsiveness is much improved (which helps make the laptop feel faster than its wimpy single-core proc would have you believe). Extra space for media or similar is provisioned more easily in the way of USB keys or SD cards.
Moral of the story: IMHO people will go with a best-of-breed solution. Hard discs for people who need the storage, SSDs for people who don't. I think the article is right to assume that the majority of the laptop market can live inside 120GB.
I'd say our current government rates privacy *very* highly - privacy for its citizens should be completely outlawed FOR THE CHILDREN, whilst the politicians themselves should be protected from the damned liberal media prying into their various directorships and subsidiary companies all the time.
The bill is hopelessly vague about what "salt" is.
You must be new h... to politics.
Still, at least this bill would mean no more copper sulphate in my earl grey!
Personally, I'm one of those people who very rarely adds extra salt to a meal... because when I cook it, I put the right amount of salt in to bring out the taste without making it salty - honestly, a tiny pinch of rock or sea salt is more than enough for me. Sure, there's a whole lot of pre-prepared foods out there that are chock full of salt in order to mask the effect of the ingredients themselves tasting like they were regurgitated by Ron Perlman, but banning salt entirely? I would *love* to see how this politician would fare, as his bill would technically allow, on a diet entirely without salt. Hyponatraemia is good for you kids!
Indeedy - it's improved even more by products like FusionIO which can act like a colossal cache between your server and your SAN which get you your craptons of cheap storage plus lightning-fast IO for the bits that matter (assuming they're being used frequently enough).
We were lucky enough to get a good deal and our SAN fabric is all over 10Gb iSCSI, hopefully to be upgraded to FCoE-capable kit in a year or so, and it's pretty easy to saturate that even with plain old SAS/SATA drives (when we got it we played about with a RAID0 array of about 25 drives just to see what the hardware would take).
Your comment on "more like memory" is interesting though - I'm wondering if we'll ever return to the architecture of some mainframes where memory pages are indistinguishable from disc sectors and the two are used interchangeably - i.e. having a filesystem that appears to be an extension of system memory, doing away with the need for virtual memory altogether. IIRC memory pages for x86 and "advanced format" hard drives are both 4k now. Seeing as the performance delta between DRAM and some PCIe-connected NAND is much smaller than that of a spinning platter it might prove feasible.
Disclaimer: I'm an SSD evangelist, I think they're great and probably the most important thing to happen to storage in at least the last decade.
I was also one of those people who held on to their CRT's for an age because, for me at the time, TFT's provided zero benefit to me. However, a few years later I've found some displays that didn't cost much more than their good quality CRT counterparts used to, as well as being much smaller, sharper and providing almost-as-good colour fidelity.
SSD's, on the other hand, provided immediate benefits to me as soon as I got my hands on one. Not having to wait for rotational disc latency and avoiding disc thrashing are both worth their weight in gold to me, and this goes double for enterprise stuff. Sure, it's great to have a laptop without a slow-ass drive, but with SSD's you can create a storage solution that'll outperform your 24U of short-stroked FC drives at, beleive it or not, a fraction of the cost. You even spend less time having to wrangle oracle and friends to get the most our of your hardware as you now have IOPS coming out of your ears, and more often than not you're limited by the interface rather than the array itself.
Spinning platters aren't going to disappear for a long time yet, especially where storage space is king, and for purely sequential reads/writes where hard discs give you much more storage for your money. But anything where random IO and low latency is important, SSD has been delivering immediate benefits that I think are worth the money - especially in the enterprise where random IO becomes very important. YMMV of course, but I've met alot of people who dismiss SSD out of hand despite never actually having used it.
For a minute there I thought you were joking. One google later shows that turbo tax is only too happy to use people bragging about their personal finances as a marketing tool.
Maybe it's because I started drinking before I started using the internet but I really don't get this obsession with broadcasting absolutely everything in your life to anyone within a mile radius. It's like we're being punished like the Belcebron's in reverse and I get the impression that if I don't start telling everyone how me and my owtrageyusly hawt gf just had sex or that I'm popping out to the garage to get some oil for the lawnmower I'll be looked on as a freakish outcast.
Haven't you heard? If your application doesn't have a synergistic community portal for leveraging paradigm-changing reality matricies you're officially a member of the Software 1.0 generation. I can't wait until the new version of TurboTax comes out with 1-click facebook export, twitter feed for liability expenses and a CoverFlow-alike system for making your tax returns totally pimped.
Never thought I'd be such a cynical old fart at 30, but if I want to socialise with people I'll do it down the fucking pub thank you very much:)
I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.
This is the most artistically selfish comment I've read on/. in *decades*. Congress and I firmly agree that it's whether it enriches our lives that matters.
Reason I started using them at home was due to video editing - not very useful for encoding when you can rarely outpace your CPU's capability to encode stuff, but for random seeking/non-linear stuff/extracting streams/muxing, SSD's are a boon. Depending on your workload you can even get away with using crappy SSD's that are shit at random workloads but awesome at sequential.
TBH though you'll get the most noticeable improvement with using it as your system drive; apps start almost instantly and there's never any thrashing as $bloaty_app loads. Heck, my linux machines boot in 5s with the comparatively cheap OCZ Agility drives; the difference is less noticeable in windows however. Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy:)
The benefits for enterprise users are especially large because 20k of SSD can replace 100k of fibre channel whilst getting 10x the performance and greater reliability. Plus Picard totally loves SSD's as he can rest his tea, earl grey, hot, on them without risking Data loss.
If "almost a halt" is 200MB/s read speeds as opposed to 260, I think I can live with it before I upgrade to my TRIM firmware, which negates the whole issue... whoops, I started using TRIM on my home drives months ago.
Seriously, the SSD market has exploded in the last 12 months. It's gone from being an expensive tool useful to enthusiasts to a not-quite-as-expensive-but-faster-than-any-number-of-hard-drives-can-provide utility that's worth five times it's price, especially for enterprise users.
* Proud owner of 1 intel SSD, 3 OCZ SSD's and administrator of about 3TB of SSD SAN and >8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough
From what I hear, you're required to have a battle.net account to play the game even in single player; this doesn't sit well with some people, including me - I also dislike playing online. Mandatory online-something also suggests that there'll be no provision for LAN play, and since this is generally the only way I like to play RTS games against real people it looks like I'm a bit stuffed. Additionally it means you're at the whim of corporate overlords if you want to play your game in a few years time, or if your activation/DRM goes wrong.
As noted, the PS3 is more of a single core PPC processor plus 6 SSE-on-steroids units. Whilst it's true that parallelism needs to be incorporated into the engine design, the tasks you'd farm out to the SPE's or whatever they're called are very different from what you'd ask core3 to do on your x86 processor.
The CPU in the 360, however, is a genuine triple-core PPC processor.
What with nVidia's unceremonious exit from the IGP market thanks to Intel's licensing, and the introduction of every-Intel-chip-comes-with-a-GPU, tech like this is a shrewd, and pretty essential, move by nVidia in order to remain relevant in the middle tiers. If people, whether on a laptop or desktop, can get the power savings of an Intel IGP with the ability to fall back on to a decent GPU, they'll claw back a good deal of marketshare from "prosumers" and the like. Conversely, ATI has made incredible improvements in the idle power savings of their GPUs, so it remains to be seen if process technology makes the software complexity worth it.
The only question is whether they'll stick at it in terms of driver support. IIRC their hybrid power initiative lasted only for a couple of card revs a year or two ago. Didn't RTFA but suspect this'll only work on Win7 where the WDDM allows for two different GPU HALs whereas Vista did not.
Same here. unetbootin is great for blowing a Linux ISO onto a USB stick, but I've yet to see it work with any ISO that's not Linux-based and it doesn't seem to deal with multiple images on the same stick very well. What I really want is a USB bootloader that you can just point at a list of ISO files and boot straight from them, as 95% of the CD's I burn are fiddly 1-5MB firmware/BIOS updaters which'll only be used once or twice. Similarly, it'd be great to have an 8GB USB stick with a truckload of ISOs on it to allow you to carry your entire wallet of diagnostic/recovery discs on your keyring.
GRUB2 is meant to have this functionality but I've never managed to get it to work. Shall give GRUB4DOS a whirl perhaps, it seems alot more clear cut.
Since no Tukwila servers have been announced, we don't even know how much they will cost.
As a sysadmin for a company with POWER5 and 6 equipment, all I can say is if you have to ask you can't afford it. Part of the reason why jumping ship to RHEL + Oracle running on a VMware cluster is looking increasingly appealing to managment.
I sincerely fucking hope not; I'm one of those annoying people that can't see 3D without concentrating, with the result that I get a splitting headache from pretty much any enforced stereoscopy after a minute or two, similarly I can't see magic eye images. Last I read something like 10% of the western population have this defect; it's sometime correctable but I was advised against it; I was told I'd likely lose my 25/20 and 20/20 vision
I've not been able to see Avatar anywhere since there's no cinemas near me that aren't showing it in 3D; likewise I don't see any point in forking out extra for a 3D telly that'll look like shit to anyone not wearing silly goggles.
Pratchett has done alot to provoke intelligent debate on assisted suicide and related matters, thankfully without much in the way of people shouting him down - I'm a firm believer that one should be able to put a "Please kill me nicely" card in their wallet/will, in the same way that people use donor cards to say "Yep, why the hell not use my liver as I'm not really in a position to care about it any more". Lying on a bed in a hospital for the last five years of my life, forgotten by and an embarrassment to my friends and family is my idea of hell.
Note that I don't know anyone who's been in a coma or a PVS but I know for damn sure that the person and the flesh and blood they used to live in aren't the same thing.
...isn't it going to be a *really* long walk between platforms at the interchange stations? Having a single station span the entire galactic centre doesn't really make any sense as it's generally too large to walk across (or so I've been told - I generally prefer to stay north of the galactic centre as it's much more civilised). Hopefully TfMW will install travelators at the stations to ease the morning commute.
If you're flush enough, City airport is awesome for flying around Europe. It's primarily designed for business travellers, and is notable being the only airport I've seen where you can get from the station platform to your plane seat in seven minutes. Last time my girlfriends and I flew to Berlin, I insisted we fly via City on a Lufthansa business and stumped up her ticket fare myself; in the end it only cost us about 30% more in ticket prices (half of which we got back by not having to buy the stupidly expensive trains tickets that run to the airports). The gf had never flown from City before, was astonished at the lack of queues, the *polite and friendly* security staff; we fly out of there at every opportunity now.
It's been a year since I last flew out of there so I dunno if the thermite-panted idiot has changed things much there, but City has always been a cut above hellpits like Heathrow. It doesn't have much in the way of long distance because the approach path limits the types of planes that can take off from there but I'd heartily recommend it to any traveller wanting less stress on their way out of London.
I'm in my early 30's now, and got my first computer as a late 21st birthday present because my handwriting was so bad no-one could read my uni assignments. I hated using computers at the cluster rooms, hated using my computer at home a little less... because I just couldn't understand how they work. I hadn't really had enough exposure to them, other than basic IT lessons in school.
My dad designs medical equipment and we're a scientific family in general; I spent half my childhood dismantling and re-assembling various machines that were lying around the house. Indeed, Tim Hunkin's masterful "The Secret Life of Machines" was one of those magical programs from my childhood that inspired my interest in science and engineering. This is basically what I did with my first computer - instead of doing any actual uni work on it, I spend months taking windows to bits via snippets of info I found on google. Predictably, I broke the computer and had to figure out how to put it back together again (I was lucky I'd opted for windows 2000 instead of ME). Rinse and repeat about twenty times and I'd pretty much taught myself a huge amount about how computers work, both electrically, mechanically and as a software stack. I barely scrape through my geology degree, but due to an accidentally awesome interview I end up starting work in the computer industry, and I've risen over people supposedly better qualified than me based solely on merit (cue the usual bitching about ); all the best people (and my bosses too, thankfully) I know in this industry know that common sense, experience and a desire to learn is worth a hundred MCSE's.
Having an accessible computer certainly helped immensely (as did google and copious free time), but the key element was being brought up in an environment where tinkering was actively encouraged; if you don't get the bug for "how does it work?" (I'm not really comfortable using anything unless I know how it works) at an early age your capacity for learning new tech is significantly diminished.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the shift to 4k sectors (e.g. the WD "Advanced Format" drives) is that the amount of space needed for error correction at ever increasing densities was entering into the bounds of diminishing returns. Larger blocks mean less error correction is needed and thus more storage space for a given platter density. Anand has a pretty good writeup on it here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3691
WinCE? Oh dear, brainfart :o
My point was that IMHO the typical user doesn't have VMs, games, Linux installs, blah - I thought from your post you were saying the assumptions were wrong and that the average user *would* need >120GB, rather than the other way around. Apols for the misunderstanding.
Oddly enough... increasingly so.
I'm lucky enough to have a spanking new SAN at work, a bunch of iSCSI nodes with dumb discs and smart software. We tier storage over SSD, 10k SAS and 7.2k SATA, the SSD mostly being utilised for performance-critical databases. SATA discs we reserve for file server LUNs, low-I/O VMs (most of them) and the intermediate tier of VM -> LUN -> Tape backups.
As an aside, we choose to use RAID1 for SSD LUNs, as the RAID controllers can't keep up with the parity calculations and we saw a ~40% drop in IOPS when we used RAID6.
If by "cheap" you mean the craptastic OCZ Core series, and the other SSDs of the same gen that used the god-awful JMicron controller, the "cheap" end of the SSD market is full of high-performance drives that don't choke on random I/O. As soon as Intel and Indilinx came out with controllers that were worth the sand they were printed on everyone started doing it, and we've now got a market where the performance delta between "cheap" and "prosumer" SSDs is much, much smaller.
The vast bulk of the cost of the SSD is the flash, which is why if you can find someone still selling Core series SSDs they're only marginally cheaper than an SSD that's actually usable.
IME the average laptop doesn't have WinCE, Ubuntu or games either. I don't expect your typical "home" laptop to start coming with an SSD for another year or two, but there's plenty of businesses that are drooling over the prospect of a) uber-fast laptop drives to make the loading of all that security bloatware bearable and b) laptop drives that are small and don't get stuffed full of files that should have been on the file server in the first place.
My "workstation" laptop has a 500GB drive, and I wouldn't give that up for the world - I need the space for VMs. But my knockabout laptop is a toshiba T110 with an aftermarket 60GB OCZ drive in it. I don't have to worry about it being jiggled, there's a noticeable improvement in battery life and, obviously, I/O responsiveness is much improved (which helps make the laptop feel faster than its wimpy single-core proc would have you believe). Extra space for media or similar is provisioned more easily in the way of USB keys or SD cards.
Moral of the story: IMHO people will go with a best-of-breed solution. Hard discs for people who need the storage, SSDs for people who don't. I think the article is right to assume that the majority of the laptop market can live inside 120GB.
I'd say our current government rates privacy *very* highly - privacy for its citizens should be completely outlawed FOR THE CHILDREN, whilst the politicians themselves should be protected from the damned liberal media prying into their various directorships and subsidiary companies all the time.
You must be new h... to politics.
Still, at least this bill would mean no more copper sulphate in my earl grey!
Personally, I'm one of those people who very rarely adds extra salt to a meal... because when I cook it, I put the right amount of salt in to bring out the taste without making it salty - honestly, a tiny pinch of rock or sea salt is more than enough for me. Sure, there's a whole lot of pre-prepared foods out there that are chock full of salt in order to mask the effect of the ingredients themselves tasting like they were regurgitated by Ron Perlman, but banning salt entirely? I would *love* to see how this politician would fare, as his bill would technically allow, on a diet entirely without salt. Hyponatraemia is good for you kids!
Indeedy - it's improved even more by products like FusionIO which can act like a colossal cache between your server and your SAN which get you your craptons of cheap storage plus lightning-fast IO for the bits that matter (assuming they're being used frequently enough).
We were lucky enough to get a good deal and our SAN fabric is all over 10Gb iSCSI, hopefully to be upgraded to FCoE-capable kit in a year or so, and it's pretty easy to saturate that even with plain old SAS/SATA drives (when we got it we played about with a RAID0 array of about 25 drives just to see what the hardware would take).
Your comment on "more like memory" is interesting though - I'm wondering if we'll ever return to the architecture of some mainframes where memory pages are indistinguishable from disc sectors and the two are used interchangeably - i.e. having a filesystem that appears to be an extension of system memory, doing away with the need for virtual memory altogether. IIRC memory pages for x86 and "advanced format" hard drives are both 4k now. Seeing as the performance delta between DRAM and some PCIe-connected NAND is much smaller than that of a spinning platter it might prove feasible.
Disclaimer: I'm an SSD evangelist, I think they're great and probably the most important thing to happen to storage in at least the last decade.
I was also one of those people who held on to their CRT's for an age because, for me at the time, TFT's provided zero benefit to me. However, a few years later I've found some displays that didn't cost much more than their good quality CRT counterparts used to, as well as being much smaller, sharper and providing almost-as-good colour fidelity.
SSD's, on the other hand, provided immediate benefits to me as soon as I got my hands on one. Not having to wait for rotational disc latency and avoiding disc thrashing are both worth their weight in gold to me, and this goes double for enterprise stuff. Sure, it's great to have a laptop without a slow-ass drive, but with SSD's you can create a storage solution that'll outperform your 24U of short-stroked FC drives at, beleive it or not, a fraction of the cost. You even spend less time having to wrangle oracle and friends to get the most our of your hardware as you now have IOPS coming out of your ears, and more often than not you're limited by the interface rather than the array itself.
Spinning platters aren't going to disappear for a long time yet, especially where storage space is king, and for purely sequential reads/writes where hard discs give you much more storage for your money. But anything where random IO and low latency is important, SSD has been delivering immediate benefits that I think are worth the money - especially in the enterprise where random IO becomes very important. YMMV of course, but I've met alot of people who dismiss SSD out of hand despite never actually having used it.
For a minute there I thought you were joking. One google later shows that turbo tax is only too happy to use people bragging about their personal finances as a marketing tool.
Un. Fucking. Believable.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/02/03/turbo-tax-uses-facebook-connect-to-allow-friends-to-spread-the-word/
Maybe it's because I started drinking before I started using the internet but I really don't get this obsession with broadcasting absolutely everything in your life to anyone within a mile radius. It's like we're being punished like the Belcebron's in reverse and I get the impression that if I don't start telling everyone how me and my owtrageyusly hawt gf just had sex or that I'm popping out to the garage to get some oil for the lawnmower I'll be looked on as a freakish outcast.
Haven't you heard? If your application doesn't have a synergistic community portal for leveraging paradigm-changing reality matricies you're officially a member of the Software 1.0 generation. I can't wait until the new version of TurboTax comes out with 1-click facebook export, twitter feed for liability expenses and a CoverFlow-alike system for making your tax returns totally pimped.
Never thought I'd be such a cynical old fart at 30, but if I want to socialise with people I'll do it down the fucking pub thank you very much :)
I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.
This is the most artistically selfish comment I've read on /. in *decades*. Congress and I firmly agree that it's whether it enriches our lives that matters.
Sincerely, the RIAA
If you water me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
- Arnica Montana
Irish coffee's bring out the best in everyone ;)
Reason I started using them at home was due to video editing - not very useful for encoding when you can rarely outpace your CPU's capability to encode stuff, but for random seeking/non-linear stuff/extracting streams/muxing, SSD's are a boon. Depending on your workload you can even get away with using crappy SSD's that are shit at random workloads but awesome at sequential.
TBH though you'll get the most noticeable improvement with using it as your system drive; apps start almost instantly and there's never any thrashing as $bloaty_app loads. Heck, my linux machines boot in 5s with the comparatively cheap OCZ Agility drives; the difference is less noticeable in windows however. Try running a laptop off an SSD for a month and then go back to a mechanical drive - the apparent slowness will drive you crazy :)
The benefits for enterprise users are especially large because 20k of SSD can replace 100k of fibre channel whilst getting 10x the performance and greater reliability. Plus Picard totally loves SSD's as he can rest his tea, earl grey, hot, on them without risking Data loss.
If "almost a halt" is 200MB/s read speeds as opposed to 260, I think I can live with it before I upgrade to my TRIM firmware, which negates the whole issue... whoops, I started using TRIM on my home drives months ago.
Seriously, the SSD market has exploded in the last 12 months. It's gone from being an expensive tool useful to enthusiasts to a not-quite-as-expensive-but-faster-than-any-number-of-hard-drives-can-provide utility that's worth five times it's price, especially for enterprise users.
* Proud owner of 1 intel SSD, 3 OCZ SSD's and administrator of about 3TB of SSD SAN and >8GB FusionIO cache with a bunch of spinning magnetic domains in the background that we can't get rid of fast enough
From what I hear, you're required to have a battle.net account to play the game even in single player; this doesn't sit well with some people, including me - I also dislike playing online. Mandatory online-something also suggests that there'll be no provision for LAN play, and since this is generally the only way I like to play RTS games against real people it looks like I'm a bit stuffed. Additionally it means you're at the whim of corporate overlords if you want to play your game in a few years time, or if your activation/DRM goes wrong.
As noted, the PS3 is more of a single core PPC processor plus 6 SSE-on-steroids units. Whilst it's true that parallelism needs to be incorporated into the engine design, the tasks you'd farm out to the SPE's or whatever they're called are very different from what you'd ask core3 to do on your x86 processor.
The CPU in the 360, however, is a genuine triple-core PPC processor.
What with nVidia's unceremonious exit from the IGP market thanks to Intel's licensing, and the introduction of every-Intel-chip-comes-with-a-GPU, tech like this is a shrewd, and pretty essential, move by nVidia in order to remain relevant in the middle tiers. If people, whether on a laptop or desktop, can get the power savings of an Intel IGP with the ability to fall back on to a decent GPU, they'll claw back a good deal of marketshare from "prosumers" and the like. Conversely, ATI has made incredible improvements in the idle power savings of their GPUs, so it remains to be seen if process technology makes the software complexity worth it.
The only question is whether they'll stick at it in terms of driver support. IIRC their hybrid power initiative lasted only for a couple of card revs a year or two ago. Didn't RTFA but suspect this'll only work on Win7 where the WDDM allows for two different GPU HALs whereas Vista did not.
Same here. unetbootin is great for blowing a Linux ISO onto a USB stick, but I've yet to see it work with any ISO that's not Linux-based and it doesn't seem to deal with multiple images on the same stick very well. What I really want is a USB bootloader that you can just point at a list of ISO files and boot straight from them, as 95% of the CD's I burn are fiddly 1-5MB firmware/BIOS updaters which'll only be used once or twice. Similarly, it'd be great to have an 8GB USB stick with a truckload of ISOs on it to allow you to carry your entire wallet of diagnostic/recovery discs on your keyring.
GRUB2 is meant to have this functionality but I've never managed to get it to work. Shall give GRUB4DOS a whirl perhaps, it seems alot more clear cut.
Since no Tukwila servers have been announced, we don't even know how much they will cost.
As a sysadmin for a company with POWER5 and 6 equipment, all I can say is if you have to ask you can't afford it. Part of the reason why jumping ship to RHEL + Oracle running on a VMware cluster is looking increasingly appealing to managment.
I sincerely fucking hope not; I'm one of those annoying people that can't see 3D without concentrating, with the result that I get a splitting headache from pretty much any enforced stereoscopy after a minute or two, similarly I can't see magic eye images. Last I read something like 10% of the western population have this defect; it's sometime correctable but I was advised against it; I was told I'd likely lose my 25/20 and 20/20 vision
I've not been able to see Avatar anywhere since there's no cinemas near me that aren't showing it in 3D; likewise I don't see any point in forking out extra for a 3D telly that'll look like shit to anyone not wearing silly goggles.
Hopefully this'll be available outside of the UK but this is Terry Pratchett giving a lecture on his Alzheimers and legalised euthanasia from a few days ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qmfgn. Guardian article covering the same subject here http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/feb/02/terry-pratchett-assisted-suicide-tribunal
Pratchett has done alot to provoke intelligent debate on assisted suicide and related matters, thankfully without much in the way of people shouting him down - I'm a firm believer that one should be able to put a "Please kill me nicely" card in their wallet/will, in the same way that people use donor cards to say "Yep, why the hell not use my liver as I'm not really in a position to care about it any more". Lying on a bed in a hospital for the last five years of my life, forgotten by and an embarrassment to my friends and family is my idea of hell.
Note that I don't know anyone who's been in a coma or a PVS but I know for damn sure that the person and the flesh and blood they used to live in aren't the same thing.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/opponents-of-assisted-suicide-still-convinced-it's-any-of-their-business-201002012428/
...isn't it going to be a *really* long walk between platforms at the interchange stations? Having a single station span the entire galactic centre doesn't really make any sense as it's generally too large to walk across (or so I've been told - I generally prefer to stay north of the galactic centre as it's much more civilised). Hopefully TfMW will install travelators at the stations to ease the morning commute.
If you're flush enough, City airport is awesome for flying around Europe. It's primarily designed for business travellers, and is notable being the only airport I've seen where you can get from the station platform to your plane seat in seven minutes. Last time my girlfriends and I flew to Berlin, I insisted we fly via City on a Lufthansa business and stumped up her ticket fare myself; in the end it only cost us about 30% more in ticket prices (half of which we got back by not having to buy the stupidly expensive trains tickets that run to the airports). The gf had never flown from City before, was astonished at the lack of queues, the *polite and friendly* security staff; we fly out of there at every opportunity now.
It's been a year since I last flew out of there so I dunno if the thermite-panted idiot has changed things much there, but City has always been a cut above hellpits like Heathrow. It doesn't have much in the way of long distance because the approach path limits the types of planes that can take off from there but I'd heartily recommend it to any traveller wanting less stress on their way out of London.
This +10.
I'm in my early 30's now, and got my first computer as a late 21st birthday present because my handwriting was so bad no-one could read my uni assignments. I hated using computers at the cluster rooms, hated using my computer at home a little less... because I just couldn't understand how they work. I hadn't really had enough exposure to them, other than basic IT lessons in school.
My dad designs medical equipment and we're a scientific family in general; I spent half my childhood dismantling and re-assembling various machines that were lying around the house. Indeed, Tim Hunkin's masterful "The Secret Life of Machines" was one of those magical programs from my childhood that inspired my interest in science and engineering. This is basically what I did with my first computer - instead of doing any actual uni work on it, I spend months taking windows to bits via snippets of info I found on google. Predictably, I broke the computer and had to figure out how to put it back together again (I was lucky I'd opted for windows 2000 instead of ME). Rinse and repeat about twenty times and I'd pretty much taught myself a huge amount about how computers work, both electrically, mechanically and as a software stack. I barely scrape through my geology degree, but due to an accidentally awesome interview I end up starting work in the computer industry, and I've risen over people supposedly better qualified than me based solely on merit (cue the usual bitching about ); all the best people (and my bosses too, thankfully) I know in this industry know that common sense, experience and a desire to learn is worth a hundred MCSE's.
Having an accessible computer certainly helped immensely (as did google and copious free time), but the key element was being brought up in an environment where tinkering was actively encouraged; if you don't get the bug for "how does it work?" (I'm not really comfortable using anything unless I know how it works) at an early age your capacity for learning new tech is significantly diminished.