I think this is an example to cite where a company based on Linux products (Tivo) out-lasted a company with Microsoft based products. I'm not saying that Linux was the only reason, but the way I figure it, it probably wasn't Mike Ramsay either !
Well la-de-da. You have been using 1000BaseT for over a year. You do realize that is 10 times slower than what the poster suggested using, correct? That happened to be my point.
Well doody hooty. Get a life..... and learn to write what you mean to write.
What 10Gbit Ethernet? Obsolete Ethernet is 10Mb. Typical current Ethernet is 100Mb. Up and coming 1Gb Ethernet is appearing.
Where have you been ? I've been using 1000BaseTX ethernet for over a year. Right now I would only buy a machine with a GigE port. The switches are still a little pricey but they will come down.
10 Gbit was ratified last year. See here.
It's only multimode fibre though.
Firewire2 or IEEE1394B is already shipping and purports 3.2Gb/sec.
And how about 10Gbit Ethernet ? What's stopping you from using this as a drive interface ?
It's coming to a point where the difference in connection standards is so unimportant that you can see that in the not so distant future you'll be wiring up every peripheral (including your monitor and keyboard) with the same type of cable and the old Sun adage - "The network is the computer" becomes literal.
Having worked on IRIX, I can say that Linux moves much faster and IRIX will eventually fall behind in features simply because the investment is huge.
When SGI bought Cray and then started the fatal Win32 effort, it was obvious that they were not going to be able to make it succeed without increasing the cost dramatically.
Customers also want Linux now, with IBM pushing Linux, customers want a simpler maintenance strategy. Large outfits with a heterogenous network running AIX, IRIX, HP-UX etc is harder to maintain that a heterogeneous network all running Linux.
SGI is finally making some new products
on
New SGI Altix 3000
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Scientific computing has allways been SGI's niche. They unfortunately stumbled around the time that Belluzzo took the helm and wasted the entire internet bubble recovering from the mess that caused.
It's great to see that they're finally back and doing some really serious new stuff.
It's a shame though that they won't be running the AMD 64 bit chips, although, I'll be someone is looking into that.
The Australian High Court ruling you're referring to was written with a comment that I paraphrase: "The Court interprets the law to be so that the plaintiff can proceed with the case - but this really makes little sense and someone should go and change the law."
I like the Australian decision becuase they are not legislating at the bench but are smart enough to criticize their own law when appropriate.
I realize that the DMCA has a crapload of other stuff that will remain even if parts of it are struck down
Fsck the DCMA - get the legeslative bods to repeal the whole damn thing. Don't wait for the courts. Be an activist and get your buddies in Washinton DC to nuke the legislation outa here.
Most of the storage technology R&D money is going into hard drives which is why they are so inexpensive and will continue to be. Tape storage technology R&D money is simply unable to compete.
I've predicted for a long time that tapes will become obsolete and hard drives will be used to back up hard drives. A very interesting example are firewire hard drives. A small premium on the cost of an already cheap dist drive, you have a fully plug and play high performance solution. For the cost of a tape drive and 10 tapes you can buy 10 firewire hard drives and rotate the drives instead of tapes.
The advantages are enormous.
Fast recovery time
Fast seek time
Proven reliable technology and much more reliable that tape.
Inexpensive and becoming less so
Easily networkable (just mount the drive on the network) and fully supported by any self-respecting OS
When you're done with the backup, you have some spare storage for anyone..
There may be some work to do to make some of the backup software talk to a hard drive, but there are probably so many different solutions you can use, you probably don't need to worry.
I bought 2 firewire drives a while ago and have never looked at tapes since. Love it....
The "edit/compile/link/debug" cycle is not nessasarily smaller for C++. In a previous job I was able to dynamically link in C++ objects into a running apache server. There was a pre-processor, very much like ASP that spat out classes that compiled, linked and loaded straight into a running system. In a debug mode, the pre-processor made it so you could click anywhere in a page and it would take your editor to the line and column where that html was generated. It was a simple save and the file was automatically compiled and the new DLL would automatically be loaded directly into the running apache server. It was sweet and fast and the edit/compile/link cycle was about as fast as aything else. As far as rapid prototyping, I think it was equivalent to any of the scripted languages. It was tightly coupled to the database so that sizes of fields wer directly taken from database definitions where appropriate - no having to keep those in sync; in a prior life I remember endless bugs of input being truncated because the database could not take all the data.
The most important issue when it comes to software development is "mature language". There are plenty of examples of very large, relatively easy to maintain complex systems out there in C++. The fact is that most web systems develop far beyond their original scope. Rapid prototyping can be done simply using plain HTML and a macro language.
I suppose I'm so vocal because it bugs me that people don't see the wood for the trees. Before re-inventing the wheel, make sure you know why the original wheel is the way it is. Maybe this is not a case of this but it sure sounds like it.
The Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems has an excellent background on all kinds of risks. I've been following it for years (since '91). It's the equivalent of slashdot for risks but the moderators are much more sophisticated. It's required reading for anyone serious about quality software in life critical situations.
Patents are held by Allcast and Chaincast. Also commercially done by Bluefalcon, Vtrails etc etc. There are so many of them. All of these companies have commercial solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute ... can you say ... Tivo.
I think this is an example to cite where a company based on Linux products (Tivo) out-lasted a company with Microsoft based products. I'm not saying that Linux was the only reason, but the way I figure it, it probably wasn't Mike Ramsay either !
Sonic Blue, RIP. Long live Tivo.
Well doody hooty. Get a life. .... and learn to write what you mean to write.
Where have you been ? I've been using 1000BaseTX ethernet for over a year. Right now I would only buy a machine with a GigE port. The switches are still a little pricey but they will come down.
10 Gbit was ratified last year. See here. It's only multimode fibre though.
Firewire2 or IEEE1394B is already shipping and purports 3.2Gb/sec.
And how about 10Gbit Ethernet ? What's stopping you from using this as a drive interface ?
It's coming to a point where the difference in connection standards is so unimportant that you can see that in the not so distant future you'll be wiring up every peripheral (including your monitor and keyboard) with the same type of cable and the old Sun adage - "The network is the computer" becomes literal.
TNG - The Next Generation
Having worked on IRIX, I can say that Linux moves much faster and IRIX will eventually fall behind in features simply because the investment is huge.
When SGI bought Cray and then started the fatal Win32 effort, it was obvious that they were not going to be able to make it succeed without increasing the cost dramatically.
Customers also want Linux now, with IBM pushing Linux, customers want a simpler maintenance strategy. Large outfits with a heterogenous network running AIX, IRIX, HP-UX etc is harder to maintain that a heterogeneous network all running Linux.
Scientific computing has allways been SGI's niche. They unfortunately stumbled around the time that Belluzzo took the helm and wasted the entire internet bubble recovering from the mess that caused.
It's great to see that they're finally back and doing some really serious new stuff.
It's a shame though that they won't be running the AMD 64 bit chips, although, I'll be someone is looking into that.
Congrats SGI !
The Australian High Court ruling you're referring to was written with a comment that I paraphrase: "The Court interprets the law to be so that the plaintiff can proceed with the case - but this really makes little sense and someone should go and change the law."
I like the Australian decision becuase they are not legislating at the bench but are smart enough to criticize their own law when appropriate.
Hence I like both.
I realize that the DMCA has a crapload of other stuff that will remain even if parts of it are struck down
Fsck the DCMA - get the legeslative bods to repeal the whole damn thing. Don't wait for the courts. Be an activist and get your buddies in Washinton DC to nuke the legislation outa here.
Most of the storage technology R&D money is going into hard drives which is why they are so inexpensive and will continue to be. Tape storage technology R&D money is simply unable to compete.
I've predicted for a long time that tapes will become obsolete and hard drives will be used to back up hard drives. A very interesting example are firewire hard drives. A small premium on the cost of an already cheap dist drive, you have a fully plug and play high performance solution. For the cost of a tape drive and 10 tapes you can buy 10 firewire hard drives and rotate the drives instead of tapes.
The advantages are enormous.
Fast recovery time
Fast seek time
Proven reliable technology and much more reliable that tape.
Inexpensive and becoming less so
Easily networkable (just mount the drive on the network) and fully supported by any self-respecting OS
When you're done with the backup, you have some spare storage for anyone..
There may be some work to do to make some of the backup software talk to a hard drive, but there are probably so many different solutions you can use, you probably don't need to worry.
I bought 2 firewire drives a while ago and have never looked at tapes since. Love it....
From the presentation:
Tradeoffs: App Logic in C++
Advantages
- fast execution speed
- strongly typed, mature language
Disadvantages
- edit, compile, link, debug cycle
- not conducive to rapid prototyping
- too easy to make mistakes with memory
The "edit/compile/link/debug" cycle is not nessasarily smaller for C++. In a previous job I was able to dynamically link in C++ objects into a running apache server. There was a pre-processor, very much like ASP that spat out classes that compiled, linked and loaded straight into a running system. In a debug mode, the pre-processor made it so you could click anywhere in a page and it would take your editor to the line and column where that html was generated. It was a simple save and the file was automatically compiled and the new DLL would automatically be loaded directly into the running apache server. It was sweet and fast and the edit/compile/link cycle was about as fast as aything else. As far as rapid prototyping, I think it was equivalent to any of the scripted languages. It was tightly coupled to the database so that sizes of fields wer directly taken from database definitions where appropriate - no having to keep those in sync; in a prior life I remember endless bugs of input being truncated because the database could not take all the data.
The most important issue when it comes to software development is "mature language". There are plenty of examples of very large, relatively easy to maintain complex systems out there in C++. The fact is that most web systems develop far beyond their original scope. Rapid prototyping can be done simply using plain HTML and a macro language.
I suppose I'm so vocal because it bugs me that people don't see the wood for the trees. Before re-inventing the wheel, make sure you know why the original wheel is the way it is. Maybe this is not a case of this but it sure sounds like it.
The Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems has an excellent background on all kinds of risks. I've been following it for years (since '91). It's the equivalent of slashdot for risks but the moderators are much more sophisticated. It's required reading for anyone serious about quality software in life critical situations.
Go off and register - 'pengina.org' (peng Is Not AOL(tm)) or 'pengloa.org' (peng line on America)
Shoutcast and a fractional t1 will get you 50 simultaneuous listeners.
Check out Arbitron and you can see that you're not going to go far with a fractional T1.
p2p radio is patented ...
Patents are held by Allcast and Chaincast. Also commercially done by Bluefalcon, Vtrails etc etc. There are so many of them. All of these companies have commercial solutions.