Ditto on the prior ART. I have done "modular data Centre" before - on two scales - one involving a dozen-plus racks in a mobile room, such as this, and the other being a single rack, will power/air/storage/etc in one rack...
regarding Cisco's "first" 802.11N product. Doesn't Cisco own Linksys?
I have a Linksys 802.11N WRT300N Router. Isn't that -N? Mind you, there hasn't been a firmware release for draft 2.0 yet... (and I have asked Linksys support...)
Having Scuba Dived regular on 100-150 ft deep wrecks, I too find this a little hard to believe. Even at that depth the amount of light getting through, the colour of the "wreck" and so on, would suggest that this is unlikely, even more so at greater depths. And that was in the pristine waters of PNG.
We found that the best mechanisms for finding as yet unfound wrecks were plain old research. We requested and got a copy of the microfilms of the WW2 records for the area from the US Archives. Slowly and meticulously (reading Microfilm projected onto the fridge door), following each report, we ultimately ended up finding around half a dozen new wrecks. The report of a Corsair that clipped a tree, while trying to line up for the airstrip, and spun into the bay, prompted a search for a tree stump, and and following a logical path to the airstrip, a probably location - sure enough a deep dive (180 ft - lots of decompression) found it. Biggest coup was the talk of an abandoned airstrip on a remote island in the Solomon Islands. Sure enough, worked out roughly where, found a single like reference to the "local name" for it, and sure enough, found three WWII fighters still sitting at the end of a punched metal runway, as if waiting for orders...
As someone said, an archaeologist developing software that the spooks, and/or mining types haven't been able to. That's a bit far fetched.
I would suggest "text scans" of historical documents may be more useful.
Given that Slashdot tends to have a technology focus let me tell you about a State government health system, that I had to deal with.
Was hired into a project to make the 30+ hospital infrastructure "better". The powers that be felt the way to achieve this was to consolidate all hardware into a single data centre.
I suggested that a precursor to "everything" was to establish future application direction and formulate a corporate data model (just a "what volume of data needs to be where and when").
huh? blank stares...
Nope, we just want new servers (and SANs etc) and we want all of them in Head Office, not the remote hospitals...
How many do you have, said I...
Don't know, we might as Mr X.
Asked Mr X, who had been working on an Audit for a Year. He didn't know - he had created a template spreadsheet to capture that into and sent to every hospital admin mgr every two weeks, but only two of the forty or so, had replied...
So we hacked up a network probe applications, and SNMP'ed out to anything that would talk back to us, and then dug into their mibs.
First bit of news - about 80 more servers than they thought.
second bit of news - the complaints about old overworked equipment seemed strange as the config and performance stats that the systems returned indicated an average age of 14 months, and CPU utilization of about 4%.
SO I suggested that replacing everything would be over kill, and that we do a lifecycle management program. How much will that cost us, they asked. I responded - about 10 million per year (These people thought they had about 800Million in IT Assets)
Too Much..
I left...
Meanwhile 5 years later, they are still running the "project" to work out what they need to do and how... (Annual Operating Costs for the ongoing evaluation project are around $6M per year - They have program directors, running program managers, running project directors, running project managers, with advisors and architects and so on and so forth...
Meanwhile, you go to most of the major hospitals. ON admission, they have to key you separately into the admission system, then the pathology and radiology systems, then catering to ensure you get fed, then accounting. Last time I looked all of your details had to be retyped 9 times. Which invariably led to identity problems. (No food for Mr Smith, but we have a Mr Dmith who we can find...)
On departure, you would hope that your patient records we profiled to help with the planning of healthcare infrastructure.. bzzt And you would hope that they would be retrievable if you came back to this (or any of the related hospitals) bzzt again...
As a security geek, and an aussie, they are, as can be expected barking up the wrong tree. The issue is not whether we have identity cards, or how they are tracked in government databases, but are.
a) are they of benefit to the general population. i.e. will it be possible to include say, bank account, or medical details onto the card.
b) does the government protect us, from abuse internal to the government in relation to them. Trust me, it happens, The TAX Office (aka IRS) has had several instances of employees doing the "wrong thing" with peoples tax records. I personally was working in a government department (not even the police) who looked after police records - They were kept in boxes stacked in a spare office. I have also worked in the State Health System - there is ZERO security within their systems.
While the Govt geeks get excited about smart cards, the real solution is a) governance within the government (there is a strange concept), and b) not storing "data" on the smart cards, but simply storing a range (hierarchical or other wise) of access keys... i.e. Medical Records - the information that a paramedic needs, versus a GP (MD) versus a Health Fund (HMO) are different, and access to one's "data" should be very specific to the requirements at hand.
Personally, I think that this is just a step along the way. If some of the above could be guaranteed, then I would gladly have a subcutaneous ID implant, to replace all of my credit cards, driver's license, passport etc.
Given the popularity of tattoos nowadays, maybe we should consider tattooing barcodes on the back of our necks instead...
I have met and spoken with Allan Paull (here in Brisbane) on a number of occassions. THese guys are leading the field, in several other aspects - "wind tunnnels" simulations, and guidance systems.
He did point out that in their earlier tests, it wasn't so much a matter of forming a crater on impact. The earth would fossilize on impact, and become rock hard, and make it almost impossible to remove the rocket...
I am consulting to a very large corporation, about technology direction... They thought of themselves as a "Sun" Shop, and by the way, they outsource a large amount of their operations to CSC, and aren't impressed with their track record. They are also moderately unhappy with their Sun Platforms, and considering a change in the next 18 months. Do I have a strange sense of Deja Vu here?
A real audit, turns out that the bigger slice of their in house technology is actually running on Vaxes (OpenVMS) and has been ticking along forever with little or now maintenance.
Just a day or two ago, I spotted something that indicated that HP was considering buying into CSC to strengthen it's service arm, Yet this was what CPQ bought DEC for. It had it's faults, but DEC did a lot of things right...
Which also brings me to Alpha. HP pulled the Pin on EV7.9, EV8 could ship now, it was done, ready in the bag, set to rock and roll. It was an eight-way, superscalar, multithreaded engine. Still streets ahead of the competition. Sitting behind it, perhaps several months of design effort remaining was the Ev9. Specs for this talked about 16 on-chip RAMBUS channels, and 77 Gflops per CPU.
EV10, and Ev11 generation designs were already in the works, when the plugs were pulled.
(This is one of the things i loved about DEC (I worked there) - their forward thinking in the technical side. Alpha was designed with a REAL 30 year life span. I was working in the labs on VMS V5.last and VMS 6.0, VMS 6.1 and 6.2 and 6.3 were already in varying stages of development (showing a forward plan that had structure, rather than the reactive crap we see today...) Heck, their storage folks were thinking about SANs back in the mid 80's.
If Hurd has an ounce of brains, he would gamble about 1 of those 10 Billion dollars on restarting Alpha. Engineers would come out of the woodwork, and sacrifice their souls to work on it. Customers would flock back to them. They wouldn't need to "buy" a services arm (again)....
And everyone becomes an expert in medicine, because they have watch srubs and ER. (Just like everyone is an expert in forensics, because they watch CSI).
A good friend is a long practising OBGYN. A few years back, a woman came to him part way through her pregnancy. She had a drug habit, and continued to smoke (tobacco) through her pregnancy, against his repeated advice. Her Baby was born nearly a month premature, and barely made it - that he survived was a credit to the experience of said medico. Said woman, tried suing the doctor for malpractice, because her baby wasn't healthy.
Way too many folk base defamatory accusations (on the web or otherwise) on their own inadequate knowledge, or lack of willingness to listen to sound advise from professionals.
Way back when, when I was fixing computers for a living (When computers were computers, not the toys of today.), I went to fix an LA36 DECprinter in a food warehouse. I opened the back door, to find two live rats staring at me...
But I digress, a few years later, I ran a Disaster Recovery Project. A Lot of equipment covered with rust particles (incorrectly installed fire prevention equipment). We used a Company (Sydney, Australia) called Relectronic Remech. I believe they were/are global, as they were bringing staff in from all over on that project... They would dismantle, chem-bath, scrub, bake, whatever was appropriate and needed, and return the equipment to full vendor satisfaction... Saved us Millions.
FOr the last half dozen or so companies that I have contracted to, when presented with an employee/contractor agreement, I have crossed out and initialled the clauses that I don't agree to. (Such as 24 hour rights to IP) On only one occasion has anyone got upset, and then when I explained why, they conceded.
Back when I swung a screwdriver with a vengeance, I was called out late one night to fix a problem at a very large customer site. They were running a VAXCluster, with RP06 disk drives. RP06's were large washing machine sized disks.
I told the lead operator to shutdown, remove their disk pack from the system drive, and insert the test pack that I handed to him.
When done, I asked if he had done as I asked - yes he confirmed - I didn't want to write diagnostic data across their production disk.
So I fired up the diagnostic program on my "scratch pack". Needless to say, the diag program works the drive hard, and in those days. that meant that the drive would almost start to move across the floor.
All of a sudden, a resounding thud, heard from the other end of the computer room. We wnet to investigate. The operator, had removed their pack, installed mine, and sat their pack on the "top" of the drive. The top of the drive, on this was a narrow area, that angled back at about 5 degrees. With the Vigorous testing, their system pack, had vibrated off the top of the drive and onto the floor. A Visual check showed a number of platters in contact with each other....
Fortunately, they had run their weekly backup of that drive only a few hours before....
What I find incredibly amusing, is the fact that a similar size loss has occurred to Apple in a nearby area. Optus Communications, Australias second largest telco, has been a MAC Shop since it started, but is slowly changing away. And slowly is the operative word, as it has been found that the "amount of hardware" and inherent cost has increased dramatically in the Wintel world...
Probably because it has outsourced it's IT to Compaq, and then HP (With IBM GSA Doing application design in the wings) disentangling the incumbent MAC components has been a nightmare for them, predominantly because of hardware vendors more focused on selling new widgets than working out what flavour of widgets the customer required.
But then, this is the same company that has a Billing System that runs just fine on VAXes, that they haven't been able to "beat" with applications runing on Sun E10000's and HP Superdomes...
I don't know what all of the fuss is about - The Team at the University of QLD has had a number of successfull hypersonic flights... (ANd their budget is way below the US spend).
Re scramjets and human flight --- the acceleration will kill you. These things will be good as a) missiles, b) anti-missile missiles, and c) Launch LEO (Low Earth Orbit) Satellites.
Indeed, now let me see. I could buy a PA-Risc... (Not!), or an IBM/Motorola Chipped thingie (Small market, bounded technology), or a Sparc box - small market bounded technology, arrogant supplier, single source.
Or I could buy an Alpha. A commitment of at least a Decade of support (What was I using 10 years ago, and what land fill is it in now..) A proven track record of meeting or beating the promises on performance.
Oh no, wait. I'll get an itanic. What you mean they are only available in limited quantities, and at vastly inflated prices. Oh, and the ones that everyone is raving about aren't going to me around for another 2-3 years. Hey, it takes that long to get orders through purchasing, who is worried...
And what's that. Adaptive partitioning within the box, (dynamically changable SMP and Clustering). Clustering that is more than Me and a standby mini-me. Couldn't be? When dod they get that working...
Note that the new Alpha moves the ES40/ES45 range out to GS (Big MF) nomenclature...
The one saving grace, is that scuttlebutt says that based on the intel thef acquisition of Alpha, that post-Madison Itanics will actually look more like an Alpha than a traditional Intel.
More things to file in my "I told you so" list, for later...
The issue of needing remedial work on things that no longer have documentation or ownership, is different from allowing open access to formats.
I have long espoused the concept that any organization worth it's salt, would mandate that it's software suppliers provide proof that they have put source code, and/or design documentation into Escrow with a third party, to prevent harm to their customers, in the event of the failure of the suppliers.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto on the prior ART. I have done "modular data Centre" before - on two scales - one involving a dozen-plus racks in a mobile room, such as this, and the other being a single rack, will power/air/storage/etc in one rack...
regarding Cisco's "first" 802.11N product. Doesn't Cisco own Linksys?
I have a Linksys 802.11N WRT300N Router. Isn't that -N? Mind you, there hasn't been a firmware release for draft 2.0 yet... (and I have asked Linksys support...)
Having Scuba Dived regular on 100-150 ft deep wrecks, I too find this a little hard to believe. Even at that depth the amount of light getting through, the colour of the "wreck" and so on, would suggest that this is unlikely, even more so at greater depths. And that was in the pristine waters of PNG.
We found that the best mechanisms for finding as yet unfound wrecks were plain old research. We requested and got a copy of the microfilms of the WW2 records for the area from the US Archives. Slowly and meticulously (reading Microfilm projected onto the fridge door), following each report, we ultimately ended up finding around half a dozen new wrecks. The report of a Corsair that clipped a tree, while trying to line up for the airstrip, and spun into the bay, prompted a search for a tree stump, and and following a logical path to the airstrip, a probably location - sure enough a deep dive (180 ft - lots of decompression) found it. Biggest coup was the talk of an abandoned airstrip on a remote island in the Solomon Islands. Sure enough, worked out roughly where, found a single like reference to the "local name" for it, and sure enough, found three WWII fighters still sitting at the end of a punched metal runway, as if waiting for orders...
As someone said, an archaeologist developing software that the spooks, and/or mining types haven't been able to. That's a bit far fetched.
I would suggest "text scans" of historical documents may be more useful.
q
Given that Slashdot tends to have a technology focus let me tell you about a State government health system, that I had to deal with.
Was hired into a project to make the 30+ hospital infrastructure "better".
The powers that be felt the way to achieve this was to consolidate all hardware into a single data centre.
I suggested that a precursor to "everything" was to establish future application direction and formulate a corporate data model (just a "what volume of data needs to be where and when").
huh? blank stares...
Nope, we just want new servers (and SANs etc) and we want all of them in Head Office, not the remote hospitals...
How many do you have, said I...
Don't know, we might as Mr X.
Asked Mr X, who had been working on an Audit for a Year. He didn't know - he had created a template spreadsheet to capture that into and sent to every hospital admin mgr every two weeks, but only two of the forty or so, had replied...
So we hacked up a network probe applications, and SNMP'ed out to anything that would talk back to us, and then dug into their mibs.
First bit of news - about 80 more servers than they thought.
second bit of news - the complaints about old overworked equipment seemed strange as the config and performance stats that the systems returned indicated an average age of 14 months, and CPU utilization of about 4%.
SO I suggested that replacing everything would be over kill, and that we do a lifecycle management program. How much will that cost us, they asked. I responded - about 10 million per year (These people thought they had about 800Million in IT Assets)
Too Much..
I left...
Meanwhile 5 years later, they are still running the "project" to work out what they need to do and how... (Annual Operating Costs for the ongoing evaluation project are around $6M per year - They have program directors, running program managers, running project directors, running project managers, with advisors and architects and so on and so forth...
Meanwhile, you go to most of the major hospitals. ON admission, they have to key you separately into the admission system, then the pathology and radiology systems, then catering to ensure you get fed, then accounting. Last time I looked all of your details had to be retyped 9 times. Which invariably led to identity problems. (No food for Mr Smith, but we have a Mr Dmith who we can find...)
On departure, you would hope that your patient records we profiled to help with the planning of healthcare infrastructure.. bzzt And you would hope that they would be retrievable if you came back to this (or any of the related hospitals) bzzt again...
As a security geek, and an aussie, they are, as can be expected barking up the wrong tree. The issue is not whether we have identity cards, or how they are tracked in government databases, but are.
a) are they of benefit to the general population. i.e. will it be possible to include say, bank account, or medical details onto the card.
b) does the government protect us, from abuse internal to the government in relation to them. Trust me, it happens, The TAX Office (aka IRS) has had several instances of employees doing the "wrong thing" with peoples tax records. I personally was working in a government department (not even the police) who looked after police records - They were kept in boxes stacked in a spare office. I have also worked in the State Health System - there is ZERO security within their systems.
While the Govt geeks get excited about smart cards, the real solution is a) governance within the government (there is a strange concept), and b) not storing "data" on the smart cards, but simply storing a range (hierarchical or other wise) of access keys... i.e. Medical Records - the information that a paramedic needs, versus a GP (MD) versus a Health Fund (HMO) are different, and access to one's "data" should be very specific to the requirements at hand.
Personally, I think that this is just a step along the way. If some of the above could be guaranteed, then I would gladly have a subcutaneous ID implant, to replace all of my credit cards, driver's license, passport etc.
Given the popularity of tattoos nowadays, maybe we should consider tattooing barcodes on the back of our necks instead...
q
I have met and spoken with Allan Paull (here in Brisbane) on a number of occassions. THese guys are leading the field, in several other aspects - "wind tunnnels" simulations, and guidance systems.
He did point out that in their earlier tests, it wasn't so much a matter of forming a crater on impact. The earth would fossilize on impact, and become rock hard, and make it almost impossible to remove the rocket...
q
If this wasn't so sad, it would be funny.
I am consulting to a very large corporation, about technology direction... They thought of themselves as a "Sun" Shop, and by the way, they outsource a large amount of their operations to CSC, and aren't impressed with their track record. They are also moderately unhappy with their Sun Platforms, and considering a change in the next 18 months. Do I have a strange sense of Deja Vu here?
A real audit, turns out that the bigger slice of their in house technology is actually running on Vaxes (OpenVMS) and has been ticking along forever with little or now maintenance.
Just a day or two ago, I spotted something that indicated that HP was considering buying into CSC to strengthen it's service arm, Yet this was what CPQ bought DEC for. It had it's faults, but DEC did a lot of things right...
Which also brings me to Alpha. HP pulled the Pin on EV7.9, EV8 could ship now, it was done, ready in the bag, set to rock and roll. It was an eight-way, superscalar, multithreaded engine. Still streets ahead of the competition. Sitting behind it, perhaps several months of design effort remaining was the Ev9. Specs for this talked about 16 on-chip RAMBUS channels, and 77 Gflops per CPU.
EV10, and Ev11 generation designs were already in the works, when the plugs were pulled.
(This is one of the things i loved about DEC (I worked there) - their forward thinking in the technical side. Alpha was designed with a REAL 30 year life span. I was working in the labs on VMS V5.last and VMS 6.0, VMS 6.1 and 6.2 and 6.3 were already in varying stages of development (showing a forward plan that had structure, rather than the reactive crap we see today...) Heck, their storage folks were thinking about SANs back in the mid 80's.
If Hurd has an ounce of brains, he would gamble about 1 of those 10 Billion dollars on restarting Alpha. Engineers would come out of the woodwork, and sacrifice their souls to work on it. Customers would flock back to them. They wouldn't need to "buy" a services arm (again)....
And everyone becomes an expert in medicine, because they have watch srubs and ER. (Just like everyone is an expert in forensics, because they watch CSI).
A good friend is a long practising OBGYN. A few years back, a woman came to him part way through her pregnancy. She had a drug habit, and continued to smoke (tobacco) through her pregnancy, against his repeated advice. Her Baby was born nearly a month premature, and barely made it - that he survived was a credit to the experience of said medico. Said woman, tried suing the doctor for malpractice, because her baby wasn't healthy.
Way too many folk base defamatory accusations (on the web or otherwise) on their own inadequate knowledge, or lack of willingness to listen to sound advise from professionals.
Yeahbut, not as shiny, I'll bet...
q
Way back when, when I was fixing computers for a living (When computers were computers, not the toys of today.), I went to fix an LA36 DECprinter in a food warehouse. I opened the back door, to find two live rats staring at me...
But I digress, a few years later, I ran a Disaster Recovery Project. A Lot of equipment covered with rust particles (incorrectly installed fire prevention equipment). We used a Company (Sydney, Australia) called Relectronic Remech. I believe they were/are global, as they were bringing staff in from all over on that project... They would dismantle, chem-bath, scrub, bake, whatever was appropriate and needed, and return the equipment to full vendor satisfaction... Saved us Millions.
Mister Q
FOr the last half dozen or so companies that I have contracted to, when presented with an employee/contractor agreement, I have crossed out and initialled the clauses that I don't agree to. (Such as 24 hour rights to IP) On only one occasion has anyone got upset, and then when I explained why, they conceded.
MisterQ
Back when I swung a screwdriver with a vengeance, I was called out late one night to fix a problem at a very large customer site. They were running a VAXCluster, with RP06 disk drives. RP06's were large washing machine sized disks.
I told the lead operator to shutdown, remove their disk pack from the system drive, and insert the test pack that I handed to him.
When done, I asked if he had done as I asked - yes he confirmed - I didn't want to write diagnostic data across their production disk.
So I fired up the diagnostic program on my "scratch pack". Needless to say, the diag program works the drive hard, and in those days. that meant that the drive would almost start to move across the floor.
All of a sudden, a resounding thud, heard from the other end of the computer room. We wnet to investigate. The operator, had removed their pack, installed mine, and sat their pack on the "top" of the drive. The top of the drive, on this was a narrow area, that angled back at about 5 degrees. With the Vigorous testing, their system pack, had vibrated off the top of the drive and onto the floor. A Visual check showed a number of platters in contact with each other....
Fortunately, they had run their weekly backup of that drive only a few hours before....
Q
What I find incredibly amusing, is the fact that a similar size loss has occurred to Apple in a nearby area. Optus Communications, Australias second largest telco, has been a MAC Shop since it started, but is slowly changing away. And slowly is the operative word, as it has been found that the "amount of hardware" and inherent cost has increased dramatically in the Wintel world...
Probably because it has outsourced it's IT to Compaq, and then HP (With IBM GSA Doing application design in the wings) disentangling the incumbent MAC components has been a nightmare for them, predominantly because of hardware vendors more focused on selling new widgets than working out what flavour of widgets the customer required.
But then, this is the same company that has a Billing System that runs just fine on VAXes, that they haven't been able to "beat" with applications runing on Sun E10000's and HP Superdomes...
I don't know what all of the fuss is about - The Team at the University of QLD has had a number of successfull hypersonic flights... (ANd their budget is way below the US spend).
Re scramjets and human flight --- the acceleration will kill you. These things will be good as a) missiles, b) anti-missile missiles, and c) Launch LEO (Low Earth Orbit) Satellites.
Peer
Indeed, now let me see. I could buy a PA-Risc... (Not!), or an IBM/Motorola Chipped thingie (Small market, bounded technology), or a Sparc box - small market bounded technology, arrogant supplier, single source.
Or I could buy an Alpha. A commitment of at least a Decade of support (What was I using 10 years ago, and what land fill is it in now..) A proven track record of meeting or beating the promises on performance.
Oh no, wait. I'll get an itanic. What you mean they are only available in limited quantities, and at vastly inflated prices. Oh, and the ones that everyone is raving about aren't going to me around for another 2-3 years. Hey, it takes that long to get orders through purchasing, who is worried...
And what's that. Adaptive partitioning within the box, (dynamically changable SMP and Clustering). Clustering that is more than Me and a standby mini-me. Couldn't be? When dod they get that working...
Note that the new Alpha moves the ES40/ES45 range out to GS (Big MF) nomenclature...
The one saving grace, is that scuttlebutt says that based on the intel thef acquisition of Alpha, that post-Madison Itanics will actually look more like an Alpha than a traditional Intel.
More things to file in my "I told you so" list, for later...
The issue of needing remedial work on things that no longer have documentation or ownership, is different from allowing open access to formats.
I have long espoused the concept that any organization worth it's salt, would mandate that it's software suppliers provide proof that they have put source code, and/or design documentation into Escrow with a third party, to prevent harm to their customers, in the event of the failure of the suppliers.