There's ways to mitigate it. I'm not familiar with Azure, but I do work in Amazon EC2 all day - we spread our virtual private cloud across 3 availability zones in one datacenter, and use a VPN tunnel connected to another virtual private cloud in another datacenter on the other side of the continent. Because everything for standing up instances is automated, we can rebuild our whole platform in about 30 minutes including data and applications on the other side of the country.
Yes, there is still points of failure, but we're not running anything in AWS that absolutely has to be up for 99.999%. If something vomits, we can take a day or two to get it back. We're far more worried about security than we are about system availability.
And what do you do about the 14 hours of no sun that the northern hemisphere is experiencing right now?
Solar panels don't do jack shit when the sun is on the other side of the planet. There will either need to be a massive increase in energy storage, or you'll always need some type of auxiliary generation.
Or I guess we can all stop having light, heat, and electricity after the sun goes down, which should be especially pleasant in Michigan and New Hampshire in January.
Gas taxes are usage fees that pay for road maintenance. Or, at least, they were before expensive mass transit projects started getting construction capital from fuel tax revenues.
Electric vehicles do just as much damage to the roadways as they use them as the non-electric cars. However, there's no convenient way to assess a usage fee that people will accept - mileage taxes have been roundly rejected every time they've been proposed.
Are you saying that our roads should deteriorate even more than they already are if mass adoption of EVs was to take place? The Interstate Highway Trust Fund is already experiencing solvency issues as it is, due to being raided for billion dollar rail projects that do little to ease congestion.
People that buy an EV are going to buy an EV regardless of if there is a road use tax applied. Nobody says "Oh, I was going to buy that $50,000 electric car, but that extra $2,000 tax added on just priced it out of my range." You either have the money or credit to buy it, or you don't; and that extra bit of tax isn't going to make even one person change their mind, considering how much fuel they won't be buying over the life of the vehicle.
Good thing most power bills have both a generation, delivery, and connection charges then? It conveniently takes care of your argument if you are doing any type of on-site generation and using the grid for backup. You pay for what you use, as well as kick in for the maintenance of the grid connection.
Traditional auto manufacturers and dealerships now have no reason to exist. We may see electric cars built entirely by robots in the near future and garage mechanics will need to learn a new trade. These folks are the buggy whip people of this era. They are going down and will crash hard.
Step back from the pitcher of Kool Aid, please.
Who builds the robots? Who installs the robots? You think that current IC-powered cars aren't built by robots? Who makes the parts that the robots use in assembly?
Mechanical things break, and you need someone to fix it. Just because it's a car powered by a battery and electric motors doesn't mean that all of a sudden wheel bearings don't degrade and need replacement, and steering knuckles don't need to be lubricated. And, of course, we all know that the batteries will last forever and never be changed out. Oh, and tires last forever regardless of the source of energy causing them to turn. And brake pads? They don't wear AT ALL if you are using an electric motor rather than a petroleum engine.
Is Tesla changing the game a bit? Sure, just like every disruptive technology that came before them. Is Tesla going to put every car stealership and mechanic out of work? No, that's fucking ridiculous. And you know that, which is why you posted as an anonymous coward.
Last point - you're on the Internet and it would literally take seconds to look up Chernobyl to spell it properly. If you're going to demagogue something, please at least get the basic spelling right.
Here's one that isn't as large as some, because of the convenient river that runs directly from coal country to their furnaces, and it's STILL HUGE. You can see this thing from miles away.
Oh, and this isn't an eyesore at all, especially not all that crap blowing out of the foreground exhaust stack...
Not to defend something I'm too lazy to scroll up to read, but coal is the incumbent energy generation technology. One needs not mention coal in a discussion of electrical generation, because it's what's being replaced by *anything else* being discussed.
Yeah, I'm so glad that this is upwind of the city I live in. At least it's downriver, so if that dike between the settling pond on the left and the Ohio River bursts, the drinking water... well, MY city's drinking water... won't be poisoned. Sorry, Louisville, you're fucked!
You think asshole HOAs think that solar isn't an eyesore? I guarantee that overbearing control freaks everywhere are drafting rules for consideration right now.
I am quite thankful that the house I bought a few months back is not in an HOA neighborhood. Instead, of having rules that everyone get along and not do stupid things, everyone is just nice and gets along and doesn't do stupid things. It's a novel concept!
the general expectation is that a service will be running when it needs to be running.
And this expectation can be filled with something like Apple's launchd (open source) which has the ability to spawn or respawn jobs on demand; or monitor them and reload them if they die, throttled in case of crash.
So, patch the files, then kill the process. launchd then respawns it. Downtime? Less than a second. No reboot needed. The user can be notified by a box saying "The patch has been installed successfully" with a big green check mark.
I'm more annoyed by the architecture of Windows that requires reboots for a ridiculous amount of updates. Why haven't they figured out how to stop a service, update it, and then start it again? Why does everything require a reboot?
I understand kernel-level updates will require a reboot, and do on every OS out there. But there are far more reboots in patching Windows than any other platform.
There is also thermochemical cracking which could solve two problems at once - use waste heat from a high-temperature nuclear reactor to make hydrogen as well as conventional baseload generation.
Or, just use concentrating solar - some of these projects reach the temperatures necessary as well.
1. generate a certificate, and add it to the system keychain 2. sign modified kext with new certificate, using the kext signing process outlined 5 months ago at WWDC 3. ??? 4. Profit!
In fact if you used this hack in the past, the first time you boot to Yosemite it tells you that the software that performed that hack is not compatible and shitcans it.
At least that's exactly what happened on my Mac Pro.
This is truly a "We're not done until 3rd party stuff doesn't work" situation that everyone always suggested MS had (and MS probably did have to some extent).
That's truly what this is - an unintended consequence of making things more secure and accidentally breaking a completely unsupported modification of the operating system. Would I like to see TRIM enabled on 3rd party drives? Absolutely, as I have two of them in my Mac Pro. But let's not fly off the axle attributing this massively over-scoped change to the incredibly small minority of people that not only put in a 3rd party SSD, but enabled TRIM via this guy's binary patch of Apple's driver.
This is unintended, or at the very worst, a happy coincidence for Apple. Consider the bullet-point version of this scenario:
- Apple's AHCI driver doesn't enable TRIM on non-Apple SSDs. Apple made a decision way back at the beginning of SSD support to not enable TRIM because of buggy firmware on early SSDs. They decided to eat a performance hit rather than have a crap drive eat user data. They likely have never revisited the issue, because those drives are still out there.
- 3rd party SSD manufacturers don't bother supplying OS X drivers that enable TRIM, favoring their customers to use a commonly available hack instead.
- commonly available hack modifies Apple's AHCI driver to do it's thing.
- Apple enabled driver signing in the latest OS to increase kernel-mode security. Something that everyone should be happy about.
- commonly available hack can no longer modify Apple's AHCI driver, because the signing would no longer be valid.
- 3rd party SSD manufacturers still don't bother supplying an OS X driver that enables TRIM.
- Apple gets hammered on Slashdot because they increased the security of ALL kexts, because one out of the over 200 kexts installed with Yosemite was being hacked by a 3rd party software to enable a feature on a 3rd party device. Shame on them!
The funny bit, is that you can turn off the driver signing requirement and hack the AHCI kext anyway, but OMG EVIL APPLE DOES EVIL!!! handwaving will drown that out.
in fact it appears to exist solely to stop third party SSDs performing as well as Apple ones
Really? Requiring all kernel-mode drivers to be signed is specifically to stop 3rd party SSDs from using TRIM? Are you cracked?
This is an unintended side-effect of enacting a higher-security-by-default policy. Otherwise, this is an incredibly inefficient and massively over-scoped way to put a finger in someone's eye for having the gall to buy an aftermarket SSD.
Do you really think that in a room somewhere, the discussion went like the following?
Engineer: "So we had this idea to require kext signing to increase security. What do you think?" Manager: "PERFECT. This will totally fuck over all those cheap bastards that buy a 3rd party SSD and then turn on TRIM anyway! I LOVE IT!!" Engineer: "Uhm... we were talking about a security issue. How did you leap to one minor only-experienced-by-a-small-subset-of-users thing instantly?" Manager: "Because I'm an EVIL MONEY GRUBBING CORPORATE OVERLORD, and this is a hypothetical conversation on Slashdot!" Engineer: "..."
Is that more likely than this is merely an undesirable side-effect of Apple making their OS more secure? They don't turn on TRIM because there are older drives out there that totally suck at it and vomit on themselves if it's enabled - which is why Linux has a blacklist in it's AHCI drivers. Apple isn't going to test TRIM functionality on every SSD ever manufactured - they're going to QA against what they ship, like any other company would.
Besides, it's trivial to turn off the kext signing and re-enable TRIM if you're that worked up about it. sudo nvram boot-args=kext-dev-mode=1
Just don't ever clear the nvram and reboot, or you won't be able to load your hacked AHCI kext until you re-introduce that NVRAM flag from recovery mode.
The NT 4 MCSE exams were a joke, because Microsoft was still trying to get people in the door against Novell.
Once word got back to Microsoft that nobody cared about the MCSE battery of certifications because they were viewed as being slightly tougher than CompTIA certs, they revamped the entire thing for Windows 2000, and made it actually something you needed to study for.
But it was too late - even 14 years later everyone views the MCSE as a joke.
The days of the NT 4 paper MCSE are over - Microsoft fixed that by making the infrastructure exam a complete bitch several years back.
MCP is only one of the MCSE tests though, so pick the easiest (workstation cert) and get yourself a certificate in about an hour of brain dump reading.
Slashdot Mirror
There's ways to mitigate it. I'm not familiar with Azure, but I do work in Amazon EC2 all day - we spread our virtual private cloud across 3 availability zones in one datacenter, and use a VPN tunnel connected to another virtual private cloud in another datacenter on the other side of the continent. Because everything for standing up instances is automated, we can rebuild our whole platform in about 30 minutes including data and applications on the other side of the country.
Yes, there is still points of failure, but we're not running anything in AWS that absolutely has to be up for 99.999%. If something vomits, we can take a day or two to get it back. We're far more worried about security than we are about system availability.
The grid providers can, and do, charge connection fees.
If the fee they are charging is not sufficient to maintain the grid, they should probably be talking to their local PUC about that.
And what do you do about the 14 hours of no sun that the northern hemisphere is experiencing right now?
Solar panels don't do jack shit when the sun is on the other side of the planet. There will either need to be a massive increase in energy storage, or you'll always need some type of auxiliary generation.
Or I guess we can all stop having light, heat, and electricity after the sun goes down, which should be especially pleasant in Michigan and New Hampshire in January.
Gas taxes are usage fees that pay for road maintenance. Or, at least, they were before expensive mass transit projects started getting construction capital from fuel tax revenues.
Electric vehicles do just as much damage to the roadways as they use them as the non-electric cars. However, there's no convenient way to assess a usage fee that people will accept - mileage taxes have been roundly rejected every time they've been proposed.
Are you saying that our roads should deteriorate even more than they already are if mass adoption of EVs was to take place? The Interstate Highway Trust Fund is already experiencing solvency issues as it is, due to being raided for billion dollar rail projects that do little to ease congestion.
People that buy an EV are going to buy an EV regardless of if there is a road use tax applied. Nobody says "Oh, I was going to buy that $50,000 electric car, but that extra $2,000 tax added on just priced it out of my range." You either have the money or credit to buy it, or you don't; and that extra bit of tax isn't going to make even one person change their mind, considering how much fuel they won't be buying over the life of the vehicle.
Good thing most power bills have both a generation, delivery, and connection charges then? It conveniently takes care of your argument if you are doing any type of on-site generation and using the grid for backup. You pay for what you use, as well as kick in for the maintenance of the grid connection.
Traditional auto manufacturers and dealerships now have no reason to exist. We may see electric cars built entirely by robots in the near future and garage mechanics will need to learn a new trade. These folks are the buggy whip people of this era. They are going down and will crash hard.
Step back from the pitcher of Kool Aid, please.
Who builds the robots? Who installs the robots? You think that current IC-powered cars aren't built by robots? Who makes the parts that the robots use in assembly?
Mechanical things break, and you need someone to fix it. Just because it's a car powered by a battery and electric motors doesn't mean that all of a sudden wheel bearings don't degrade and need replacement, and steering knuckles don't need to be lubricated. And, of course, we all know that the batteries will last forever and never be changed out. Oh, and tires last forever regardless of the source of energy causing them to turn. And brake pads? They don't wear AT ALL if you are using an electric motor rather than a petroleum engine.
Is Tesla changing the game a bit? Sure, just like every disruptive technology that came before them. Is Tesla going to put every car stealership and mechanic out of work? No, that's fucking ridiculous. And you know that, which is why you posted as an anonymous coward.
Last point - you're on the Internet and it would literally take seconds to look up Chernobyl to spell it properly. If you're going to demagogue something, please at least get the basic spelling right.
Here's one that isn't as large as some, because of the convenient river that runs directly from coal country to their furnaces, and it's STILL HUGE. You can see this thing from miles away.
Oh, and this isn't an eyesore at all, especially not all that crap blowing out of the foreground exhaust stack...
Not to defend something I'm too lazy to scroll up to read, but coal is the incumbent energy generation technology. One needs not mention coal in a discussion of electrical generation, because it's what's being replaced by *anything else* being discussed.
Yeah, I'm so glad that this is upwind of the city I live in. At least it's downriver, so if that dike between the settling pond on the left and the Ohio River bursts, the drinking water... well, MY city's drinking water... won't be poisoned. Sorry, Louisville, you're fucked!
What, you're saying that this is an eyesore?
You think asshole HOAs think that solar isn't an eyesore? I guarantee that overbearing control freaks everywhere are drafting rules for consideration right now.
I am quite thankful that the house I bought a few months back is not in an HOA neighborhood. Instead, of having rules that everyone get along and not do stupid things, everyone is just nice and gets along and doesn't do stupid things. It's a novel concept!
the general expectation is that a service will be running when it needs to be running.
And this expectation can be filled with something like Apple's launchd (open source) which has the ability to spawn or respawn jobs on demand; or monitor them and reload them if they die, throttled in case of crash.
So, patch the files, then kill the process. launchd then respawns it. Downtime? Less than a second. No reboot needed. The user can be notified by a box saying "The patch has been installed successfully" with a big green check mark.
Well, for one thing, it was meant to be kind of funny.
Second: I really only have to look after a handful of Windows servers, because we do 90% of everything on Linux.
Third: it's all VMs, and we have snapshots. If something breaks, we disable the patch and roll back. Oh, that was hard.
I'm more annoyed by the architecture of Windows that requires reboots for a ridiculous amount of updates. Why haven't they figured out how to stop a service, update it, and then start it again? Why does everything require a reboot?
I understand kernel-level updates will require a reboot, and do on every OS out there. But there are far more reboots in patching Windows than any other platform.
I love nothing better than starting out my Tuesday with rebooting every Windows box...
There is also thermochemical cracking which could solve two problems at once - use waste heat from a high-temperature nuclear reactor to make hydrogen as well as conventional baseload generation.
Or, just use concentrating solar - some of these projects reach the temperatures necessary as well.
1. generate a certificate, and add it to the system keychain
2. sign modified kext with new certificate, using the kext signing process outlined 5 months ago at WWDC
3. ???
4. Profit!
In fact if you used this hack in the past, the first time you boot to Yosemite it tells you that the software that performed that hack is not compatible and shitcans it.
At least that's exactly what happened on my Mac Pro.
This is truly a "We're not done until 3rd party stuff doesn't work" situation that everyone always suggested MS had (and MS probably did have to some extent).
Yeah, them turning on a policy that says all kernel-mode drivers need to be signed was clearly a response to one guy writing a binary patch hack to add TRIM support to 3rd party SSDs using Apple's AHCI kext.
That's truly what this is - an unintended consequence of making things more secure and accidentally breaking a completely unsupported modification of the operating system. Would I like to see TRIM enabled on 3rd party drives? Absolutely, as I have two of them in my Mac Pro. But let's not fly off the axle attributing this massively over-scoped change to the incredibly small minority of people that not only put in a 3rd party SSD, but enabled TRIM via this guy's binary patch of Apple's driver.
This is unintended, or at the very worst, a happy coincidence for Apple. Consider the bullet-point version of this scenario:
- Apple's AHCI driver doesn't enable TRIM on non-Apple SSDs. Apple made a decision way back at the beginning of SSD support to not enable TRIM because of buggy firmware on early SSDs. They decided to eat a performance hit rather than have a crap drive eat user data. They likely have never revisited the issue, because those drives are still out there.
- 3rd party SSD manufacturers don't bother supplying OS X drivers that enable TRIM, favoring their customers to use a commonly available hack instead.
- commonly available hack modifies Apple's AHCI driver to do it's thing.
- Apple enabled driver signing in the latest OS to increase kernel-mode security. Something that everyone should be happy about.
- commonly available hack can no longer modify Apple's AHCI driver, because the signing would no longer be valid.
- 3rd party SSD manufacturers still don't bother supplying an OS X driver that enables TRIM.
- Apple gets hammered on Slashdot because they increased the security of ALL kexts, because one out of the over 200 kexts installed with Yosemite was being hacked by a 3rd party software to enable a feature on a 3rd party device. Shame on them!
The funny bit, is that you can turn off the driver signing requirement and hack the AHCI kext anyway, but OMG EVIL APPLE DOES EVIL!!! handwaving will drown that out.
in fact it appears to exist solely to stop third party SSDs performing as well as Apple ones
Really? Requiring all kernel-mode drivers to be signed is specifically to stop 3rd party SSDs from using TRIM? Are you cracked?
This is an unintended side-effect of enacting a higher-security-by-default policy. Otherwise, this is an incredibly inefficient and massively over-scoped way to put a finger in someone's eye for having the gall to buy an aftermarket SSD.
So disable the kext signing and stop crying.
sudo nvram boot-args=kext-dev-mode=1
Do you really think that in a room somewhere, the discussion went like the following?
Engineer: "So we had this idea to require kext signing to increase security. What do you think?"
Manager: "PERFECT. This will totally fuck over all those cheap bastards that buy a 3rd party SSD and then turn on TRIM anyway! I LOVE IT!!"
Engineer: "Uhm... we were talking about a security issue. How did you leap to one minor only-experienced-by-a-small-subset-of-users thing instantly?"
Manager: "Because I'm an EVIL MONEY GRUBBING CORPORATE OVERLORD, and this is a hypothetical conversation on Slashdot!"
Engineer: "..."
Is that more likely than this is merely an undesirable side-effect of Apple making their OS more secure? They don't turn on TRIM because there are older drives out there that totally suck at it and vomit on themselves if it's enabled - which is why Linux has a blacklist in it's AHCI drivers. Apple isn't going to test TRIM functionality on every SSD ever manufactured - they're going to QA against what they ship, like any other company would.
Besides, it's trivial to turn off the kext signing and re-enable TRIM if you're that worked up about it. sudo nvram boot-args=kext-dev-mode=1
Just don't ever clear the nvram and reboot, or you won't be able to load your hacked AHCI kext until you re-introduce that NVRAM flag from recovery mode.
The NT 4 MCSE exams were a joke, because Microsoft was still trying to get people in the door against Novell.
Once word got back to Microsoft that nobody cared about the MCSE battery of certifications because they were viewed as being slightly tougher than CompTIA certs, they revamped the entire thing for Windows 2000, and made it actually something you needed to study for.
But it was too late - even 14 years later everyone views the MCSE as a joke.
The days of the NT 4 paper MCSE are over - Microsoft fixed that by making the infrastructure exam a complete bitch several years back.
MCP is only one of the MCSE tests though, so pick the easiest (workstation cert) and get yourself a certificate in about an hour of brain dump reading.