The maintenance would be a freaking nightmare, you're totally right there...I'm assuming no hotswap here, because a adding hotswap for that many drives on otc hardware would be expensive as hell.
You'd be getting about 2.4Tb off each of those machines, (assuming raid5) so that would be 417 of those machines for a Pb. With 12 harddrives per machine, and 300Gb (serial ATA) harddrives costing about 135 on Newegg, you're talking 675,540 dollars in harddrives alone, and with 5,004 harddrives the odds of one going south are pretty high, but we're not even going there.
So we're at 675,540 in harddrives. I'd say double that for the whole systems, what the hell it's only money, right? So we're at 1.3 million, and we have 417 computers sitting in a field somewhere. We could put 'em in a warehouse...If we had all the output fans pointing in one direction, we could sell it as the world's most sweltering windtunnel. You could probably run a rotissery turkey business back there...
I think this is one of those situations where the only good way to go about it is to talk to Sun or IBM, because building this with over the counter hardware is a joke, and not a funny one. Any system that has 417*13 or so points of failure is scary enough, but then you think about the failure rates associated with retail hardware, AND the fact that it's going to cost millions and still suck...There is no need to go on there.
Though 2.4 Terabytes of storage is clearly pretty feasable for the home, if you can get a box big enough to hold all the drives...Pretty cool.
One of the things I used to do is put together a nice solid system on a lan party box, then take it to the company I was trying to sell to, plug it in, and let it do it's stuff. Usually the sight of hardware that you can just plug in and have working in minutes was enough to cinch the sale.
I know a guy who developed this crazy thin client app/server setup, piped through pptp, that booted off a USB key. So he'd take it to a potential customer, jack it into one of their computers and it would hook into his servers, and download the whole system. Ran fast as hell. Pretty incredible. He'd jack it into an old system, and be zipping through heavy applications like Photoshop so quickly that the old graphics card couldn't keep up. Impressed the hell out of people.
One, if you're a lowbie in your department, no, you shouldn't be taking it on yourself to manage this sort of thing...But if you're not, if you're responsible for maintaining the service, then you should have the ability to reallocate liscenses and such.
As for the application end, unless your company has some ferocious internal development, you probably won't have anything that's going to be seriously effected by a move from MS Filesharing to samba...It was just the opposite here, because I could make the linux box play nice with appletalk, and windows absolutely hated that, so people noticed the performance increase.
I do agree with you in regards to leaving rubble strewn in your wake...Nothing worse than coming in and finding a jury-rigged, undocumented solution sitting in a corner, running some vital piece of infrastructure. My current environment is unfortunately conducive to that, due to the numberous hacks I've had to implement to enforce cross cross cross platform compatibility. But I've seen many situations where the same thing has been achieved with closed source, and I think it's more of an issue of general professionalism than a OSS/CSS conflict.
I think the bottom line is, if you're professional and do a good job no one will care how you did what you did. But if either of those things don't fly, they will nail your ass to the wall.
I don't anymore, unfortunately. But I'm on one of the craziest networks you can imagine right now: Windows, Unix, Linux, BSD, OSX, and OS 8-9, and I can drive hardware choice depending on the type of solutions I develop.
If you've got a choice, and someone asks for a product without telling you how to do it, do it the right way, and don't give them too much information.
I have to agree with the guy quoted in the article. DON'T TELL THE PHBs.
Don't waste your time doing a cost benefit analysis. Don't waste your time trying to educate them. They've got other things on their minds, and they won't really understand it anyway. They have their job, and you have your job.
It's one thing if you want to try linux on the desktop or some other radical solution, but switching to a Samba fileserver or a Linux router/firewall? They don't need to know. As long as their files are where they want them to be, when they want them to be there, you'll be fine.
Was at a business once, where I was trying to talk the CEO into using a Linux solution, an idea to which he was VIOLENTLY opposed, said Windows had worked great for him. So eventually, I gave in and drew up a Windows solution. He wanted to know if it was goign to have all the functions that the current system had, and was leery because I was using a different version of windows.
So we went back into his "server room" (think ventillated broom closet) to look at the machine...Which turned out to be headless, which surprised me a bit, as it was supposed to be an NT box. As it turned out it WAS like an NT box in that it had an NT sticker on it, and NT rhymes with 7.3, as in Redhat 7.3 (uptime 518 days), running on a PIII coppermine with so much dust on the heatsink that I wasn't quite sure what it was at first.
Needless to say, he went with a linux system, and now he brags about it all over the place. I learned my lesson...Don't start talking software with the bosses. You'll only make more problems for yourself. If you don't absolutely HAVE to justify it to someone, don't do it.
Not sure where you're going with that...Speaking as a "so called Independent", I think both sides are a bunch of wankers, and both sides do stuff that makes me want to slap the crap out of them on a regular basis. The Dems are so sorry that they're not even managing to sucessfully capitalize on the current landslide of Republican troubles...It's pretty pathetic when you can watch one party self-destruct and have the other parties approval rating stay exactly the same.
This is a truly minor league shenanigan; the Onion has some rights toward the seal for use in satire, but frankly it'd be classy of them to use a modified seal if the executive branch has got valid issues with them using the real one, which they do. End of story.
Like many of your kind, you find the idea of an enterprise that isn't dedicated to enriching itself or spreading your crap ideology to be "Leftist" or "Socialist".
I am far from a leftist. I am a gun-toting, pro-death penalty, little government, big military guy from freaking Georgia...I am also pro-choice, anti-patent, pro-first amendment, and pro-environment Wikipedia contributor.
In other words, I am a moderate. I don't run a private smear game on everyone I disagree with, as you do. I don't automatically dismiss things I don't understand, as you seem to. I don't try to hijack topics in order to push my narrow agenda as you have done.
You and the other extremists just love throwin labels around. Joe McCarthy did it years ago, and hell, you haven't even moved on from those days. Leftists? Socialists? Oooo no, big commies are coming to get us. Ignorant and transparent fear-mongering that was outdated fifty years ago...But it doesn't surprise me that your kind would seek to relive their glory days. Not that the extreme left is any better...equally stupid and petty, just as prone to labels and posturing and utter lack of compromise.
You and everyone like you, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, are a stain on the world.
I don't think Php is inherently unreadable. With good formatting, well-named variables, and intelligent use of functions, it's just as readable as anything else.
I think it's a bit more readable than Perl, simply because Perl lets you get away with things that php does not. $_ leaps to mind.
But Perl gets a bad rep from people who write sloppy Perl code. If you break things out into packages and functions and aren;t afraid to use linebreaks, the code doesn't become an illegible snarled mess. The things I see that make most people throw their hands up are undocumented regular expressions...If you're good with regex you look at it and go, "eh, email address validator", but if you're not it looks like someone wiped their nose on the number bar while alternately whacking the shift key.
Well, by "Knows" in this case I mean, "Has x amount of verifiable application development experience in Php."
There is a world of difference between being able to look at php and say, "It looks familiar, shouldn't be any problem to code in it" and saying, "Yea, I've written seven majors apps in php, of the following types..."
Yea. You can write good code in Php, but I've seen a lot of slop as well, and I've talked to a lot of "Php programmers" who don't know the first thing about datastructures---unsuprising since php really doesn't have anything besides a weird hash-array-stack thing with ad hoc support for multidimensions, and don't understand reusable objects or abstraction.
Does definitely remind me of VB, though the syntax isn't as screwy.
Like I care what he thinks. But PHB's everywhere are reading it, and absorbing the idea that php is teh good, and the next time I'm looking for a job, they'll be like, "Hmmmmm, he knows Php...We should pay him more."
Oh yea.
But I agree somewhat. I'd rather be doing Java, though for some of the stuff I'm doing, Java would be a waste, and Php is easier to maintain than Perl.
Well, as a Java coder who's been coding almost exclusively in php for a year or so, I have to say it makes me feel better about my time spent. Php is definitely easy to work with, though that creates the opportunity for some seriously scary code.
I have to say, just not working with Tomcat is a plus (though I give major Props to the Fedora team for the option to install Tomcat right off the install disks)...When gcj finally catches up, I'll be a happy puppy.
People throw out the contractor figure a lot. Hell I've billed 150+ an hour for certain types of programming and database work.
That is NOT the same as making $150 an hour, working a full time job. Not even remotely close. You're lucky if you can pull ten hours a week at those rates, assuming you lack big industry contracts, and it's unlikely you'd be able to do THAT two weeks in a row.
And then there is all the work you have to do, but can't get paid for. Marketing, billing, accounting, keeping your own equipment and skills up. Travel time...Sometimes you can bill for it, sometimes you can't. If you can't, then you're talking an hour or so wasted in transit. Nothing worse than having to drive in, and finding out the problem is a user error that takes 5 minutes to fix...Even if you normally bill at a hour minimum, if you charge someone $180 bucks for typing one command, they'll never call you again...I always charged a 40 dollar call fee, but that's not worth the damn time it takes to get there and back.
Freelance is nice, if the work comes in by itself. If it doesn't, it can be hell.
How do they know the site exists without being told what the domain name is? Search engine. Or an advertisment. As for the last time, I had to remember an IP, I'd say today, because the webserver entry in the corporate DNS points the same name to five different machines. Even discounting my work habits, I'm old enough to remember BBS's where you had to know the number to get anywhere.
And, as for keeping search engines in line, I'd say impossible. They're all in different countries, they're all owned by different groups, and they're pretty much all for-profit companies. The real worst case scenario is losing all the search engines, or having them all compromised. THAT would be censorship. Anything else is just an inconvenience.
Temporary setback at best. And, yes domain names are useful, but the point is that removing a domain name is not an effective method of censorship. It's like scratching the title off a book, but leaving the card catalog number on the back. It's just as easy to find, and contains all the same information.
Until they can take away your right to an IP address, which is controlled by Tier 1 ISPs and ARIN type registries and not ICANN, your content is still available, and can still be picked up by a search engine, and thus found in the way that almost all content is found these days. When you're looking for censored content, do you pull out a dictionary and start going through likely domain names? Do you see how stupid that is?
Taking away your domain name does NOTHING. Google "New York Times". Do you get "Newyorktimes.com"? No. It's not even in the top ten. They could lapse their domain names, and you would still be able to find the site by looking it up with a search engine.
I am so fricking tired of people screaming censorship. How is it censorship when you have to get "www.notmyfirstchoice.com" instead of whatever you actually wanted? You're probably going to have to do that under the current system. Even if they don't give you a domain name, your provider will still give you an IP, and search engines will still index it, and it'll still pop up when someone searches for whatever you've got to say that you think is so damn important.
Okay? Everyone understand? These days names don't mean dick, and that is ALL THAT ICANN CONTROLS.
"...by failing to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs"
Uhhh, riiiiiight.
After we called it off prematurely the last time, we had no justification for going in this time. We should have done it right the first time, or stayed the hell out.
I got no problem with war. But when someone trumps up a reason to do it, it pisses me off.
The great thing is, NOW YOU CAN! They can't prove a joke is not a technological invention! And since they dismiss prior art in favor of patent whores all the time, the world is yours for the taking, thanks to our friends at the USPTO.
Fortunately no one has yet patented "Going down to the patent office with a bat" so I won't owe anyone a nickel when I finally snap.
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The maintenance would be a freaking nightmare, you're totally right there...I'm assuming no hotswap here, because a adding hotswap for that many drives on otc hardware would be expensive as hell.
You'd be getting about 2.4Tb off each of those machines, (assuming raid5) so that would be 417 of those machines for a Pb. With 12 harddrives per machine, and 300Gb (serial ATA) harddrives costing about 135 on Newegg, you're talking 675,540 dollars in harddrives alone, and with 5,004 harddrives the odds of one going south are pretty high, but we're not even going there.
So we're at 675,540 in harddrives. I'd say double that for the whole systems, what the hell it's only money, right? So we're at 1.3 million, and we have 417 computers sitting in a field somewhere. We could put 'em in a warehouse...If we had all the output fans pointing in one direction, we could sell it as the world's most sweltering windtunnel. You could probably run a rotissery turkey business back there...
I think this is one of those situations where the only good way to go about it is to talk to Sun or IBM, because building this with over the counter hardware is a joke, and not a funny one. Any system that has 417*13 or so points of failure is scary enough, but then you think about the failure rates associated with retail hardware, AND the fact that it's going to cost millions and still suck...There is no need to go on there.
Though 2.4 Terabytes of storage is clearly pretty feasable for the home, if you can get a box big enough to hold all the drives...Pretty cool.
One of the things I used to do is put together a nice solid system on a lan party box, then take it to the company I was trying to sell to, plug it in, and let it do it's stuff. Usually the sight of hardware that you can just plug in and have working in minutes was enough to cinch the sale.
I know a guy who developed this crazy thin client app/server setup, piped through pptp, that booted off a USB key. So he'd take it to a potential customer, jack it into one of their computers and it would hook into his servers, and download the whole system. Ran fast as hell. Pretty incredible. He'd jack it into an old system, and be zipping through heavy applications like Photoshop so quickly that the old graphics card couldn't keep up. Impressed the hell out of people.
This isn't my experience.
One, if you're a lowbie in your department, no, you shouldn't be taking it on yourself to manage this sort of thing...But if you're not, if you're responsible for maintaining the service, then you should have the ability to reallocate liscenses and such.
As for the application end, unless your company has some ferocious internal development, you probably won't have anything that's going to be seriously effected by a move from MS Filesharing to samba...It was just the opposite here, because I could make the linux box play nice with appletalk, and windows absolutely hated that, so people noticed the performance increase.
I do agree with you in regards to leaving rubble strewn in your wake...Nothing worse than coming in and finding a jury-rigged, undocumented solution sitting in a corner, running some vital piece of infrastructure. My current environment is unfortunately conducive to that, due to the numberous hacks I've had to implement to enforce cross cross cross platform compatibility. But I've seen many situations where the same thing has been achieved with closed source, and I think it's more of an issue of general professionalism than a OSS/CSS conflict.
I think the bottom line is, if you're professional and do a good job no one will care how you did what you did. But if either of those things don't fly, they will nail your ass to the wall.
I don't anymore, unfortunately. But I'm on one of the craziest networks you can imagine right now: Windows, Unix, Linux, BSD, OSX, and OS 8-9, and I can drive hardware choice depending on the type of solutions I develop.
If you've got a choice, and someone asks for a product without telling you how to do it, do it the right way, and don't give them too much information.
I have to agree with the guy quoted in the article. DON'T TELL THE PHBs.
Don't waste your time doing a cost benefit analysis. Don't waste your time trying to educate them. They've got other things on their minds, and they won't really understand it anyway. They have their job, and you have your job.
It's one thing if you want to try linux on the desktop or some other radical solution, but switching to a Samba fileserver or a Linux router/firewall? They don't need to know. As long as their files are where they want them to be, when they want them to be there, you'll be fine.
Was at a business once, where I was trying to talk the CEO into using a Linux solution, an idea to which he was VIOLENTLY opposed, said Windows had worked great for him. So eventually, I gave in and drew up a Windows solution. He wanted to know if it was goign to have all the functions that the current system had, and was leery because I was using a different version of windows.
So we went back into his "server room" (think ventillated broom closet) to look at the machine...Which turned out to be headless, which surprised me a bit, as it was supposed to be an NT box. As it turned out it WAS like an NT box in that it had an NT sticker on it, and NT rhymes with 7.3, as in Redhat 7.3 (uptime 518 days), running on a PIII coppermine with so much dust on the heatsink that I wasn't quite sure what it was at first.
Needless to say, he went with a linux system, and now he brags about it all over the place. I learned my lesson...Don't start talking software with the bosses. You'll only make more problems for yourself. If you don't absolutely HAVE to justify it to someone, don't do it.
"So called Independents"?
Not sure where you're going with that...Speaking as a "so called Independent", I think both sides are a bunch of wankers, and both sides do stuff that makes me want to slap the crap out of them on a regular basis. The Dems are so sorry that they're not even managing to sucessfully capitalize on the current landslide of Republican troubles...It's pretty pathetic when you can watch one party self-destruct and have the other parties approval rating stay exactly the same.
This is a truly minor league shenanigan; the Onion has some rights toward the seal for use in satire, but frankly it'd be classy of them to use a modified seal if the executive branch has got valid issues with them using the real one, which they do. End of story.
You sir, are a jackass.
Like many of your kind, you find the idea of an enterprise that isn't dedicated to enriching itself or spreading your crap ideology to be "Leftist" or "Socialist".
I am far from a leftist. I am a gun-toting, pro-death penalty, little government, big military guy from freaking Georgia...I am also pro-choice, anti-patent, pro-first amendment, and pro-environment Wikipedia contributor.
In other words, I am a moderate. I don't run a private smear game on everyone I disagree with, as you do. I don't automatically dismiss things I don't understand, as you seem to. I don't try to hijack topics in order to push my narrow agenda as you have done.
You and the other extremists just love throwin labels around. Joe McCarthy did it years ago, and hell, you haven't even moved on from those days. Leftists? Socialists? Oooo no, big commies are coming to get us. Ignorant and transparent fear-mongering that was outdated fifty years ago...But it doesn't surprise me that your kind would seek to relive their glory days. Not that the extreme left is any better...equally stupid and petty, just as prone to labels and posturing and utter lack of compromise.
You and everyone like you, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, are a stain on the world.
Great, now you've pissed off the five people who live there and have internet.
Way to go. The ensuing flamewar to end all flamewars in on your head.
I don't think Php is inherently unreadable. With good formatting, well-named variables, and intelligent use of functions, it's just as readable as anything else.
I think it's a bit more readable than Perl, simply because Perl lets you get away with things that php does not. $_ leaps to mind.
But Perl gets a bad rep from people who write sloppy Perl code. If you break things out into packages and functions and aren;t afraid to use linebreaks, the code doesn't become an illegible snarled mess. The things I see that make most people throw their hands up are undocumented regular expressions...If you're good with regex you look at it and go, "eh, email address validator", but if you're not it looks like someone wiped their nose on the number bar while alternately whacking the shift key.
Well, by "Knows" in this case I mean, "Has x amount of verifiable application development experience in Php."
There is a world of difference between being able to look at php and say, "It looks familiar, shouldn't be any problem to code in it" and saying, "Yea, I've written seven majors apps in php, of the following types..."
Yea. You can write good code in Php, but I've seen a lot of slop as well, and I've talked to a lot of "Php programmers" who don't know the first thing about datastructures---unsuprising since php really doesn't have anything besides a weird hash-array-stack thing with ad hoc support for multidimensions, and don't understand reusable objects or abstraction.
Does definitely remind me of VB, though the syntax isn't as screwy.
Like I care what he thinks. But PHB's everywhere are reading it, and absorbing the idea that php is teh good, and the next time I'm looking for a job, they'll be like, "Hmmmmm, he knows Php...We should pay him more."
Oh yea.
But I agree somewhat. I'd rather be doing Java, though for some of the stuff I'm doing, Java would be a waste, and Php is easier to maintain than Perl.
Well, as a Java coder who's been coding almost exclusively in php for a year or so, I have to say it makes me feel better about my time spent. Php is definitely easy to work with, though that creates the opportunity for some seriously scary code.
I have to say, just not working with Tomcat is a plus (though I give major Props to the Fedora team for the option to install Tomcat right off the install disks)...When gcj finally catches up, I'll be a happy puppy.
People throw out the contractor figure a lot. Hell I've billed 150+ an hour for certain types of programming and database work.
That is NOT the same as making $150 an hour, working a full time job. Not even remotely close. You're lucky if you can pull ten hours a week at those rates, assuming you lack big industry contracts, and it's unlikely you'd be able to do THAT two weeks in a row.
And then there is all the work you have to do, but can't get paid for. Marketing, billing, accounting, keeping your own equipment and skills up. Travel time...Sometimes you can bill for it, sometimes you can't. If you can't, then you're talking an hour or so wasted in transit. Nothing worse than having to drive in, and finding out the problem is a user error that takes 5 minutes to fix...Even if you normally bill at a hour minimum, if you charge someone $180 bucks for typing one command, they'll never call you again...I always charged a 40 dollar call fee, but that's not worth the damn time it takes to get there and back.
Freelance is nice, if the work comes in by itself. If it doesn't, it can be hell.
How do they know the site exists without being told what the domain name is? Search engine. Or an advertisment. As for the last time, I had to remember an IP, I'd say today, because the webserver entry in the corporate DNS points the same name to five different machines. Even discounting my work habits, I'm old enough to remember BBS's where you had to know the number to get anywhere.
And, as for keeping search engines in line, I'd say impossible. They're all in different countries, they're all owned by different groups, and they're pretty much all for-profit companies. The real worst case scenario is losing all the search engines, or having them all compromised. THAT would be censorship. Anything else is just an inconvenience.
Temporary setback at best. And, yes domain names are useful, but the point is that removing a domain name is not an effective method of censorship. It's like scratching the title off a book, but leaving the card catalog number on the back. It's just as easy to find, and contains all the same information.
THAT DOESN'T MATTER.
Until they can take away your right to an IP address, which is controlled by Tier 1 ISPs and ARIN type registries and not ICANN, your content is still available, and can still be picked up by a search engine, and thus found in the way that almost all content is found these days. When you're looking for censored content, do you pull out a dictionary and start going through likely domain names? Do you see how stupid that is?
Taking away your domain name does NOTHING. Google "New York Times". Do you get "Newyorktimes.com"? No. It's not even in the top ten. They could lapse their domain names, and you would still be able to find the site by looking it up with a search engine.
I am so fricking tired of people screaming censorship. How is it censorship when you have to get "www.notmyfirstchoice.com" instead of whatever you actually wanted? You're probably going to have to do that under the current system. Even if they don't give you a domain name, your provider will still give you an IP, and search engines will still index it, and it'll still pop up when someone searches for whatever you've got to say that you think is so damn important.
Okay? Everyone understand? These days names don't mean dick, and that is ALL THAT ICANN CONTROLS.
So lets move on to a more interesting topic, eh?
Storms...At 24 kilometers in the air? Not going to happen. That's in the stratosphere, well above even commerical airline flightpaths.
The winds up there are more sedate, though they do exist, especially toward the tropics.
"...by failing to prove that he had destroyed his WMDs"
Uhhh, riiiiiight.
After we called it off prematurely the last time, we had no justification for going in this time. We should have done it right the first time, or stayed the hell out.
I got no problem with war. But when someone trumps up a reason to do it, it pisses me off.
Yea, Saddam shoulda known better than to rule a country with all that oil...Man he was asking for it!
And "they're".
All the correct usages put together in a sentence would look like: "There going over their to play with they'reselves."
Or something.
It's called The Fallacy of Composition, and it basically states that what is true of some individual parts cannot be said to be true of the whole.
The great thing is, NOW YOU CAN! They can't prove a joke is not a technological invention! And since they dismiss prior art in favor of patent whores all the time, the world is yours for the taking, thanks to our friends at the USPTO.
Fortunately no one has yet patented "Going down to the patent office with a bat" so I won't owe anyone a nickel when I finally snap.
Time to go patent all my fiction writings, before someone else does it.
This is the dumbest thing I've ever even imagined. Just when you think it cannot possibly get any worse.