It seems to me that this has little to do with the interface technology, and a lot more to with the build quality of the drives. Most SATA drives sold are intended for desktops, where cost is king and it is assumed that they are not stressed 24/7. Of course those will fail rapidly in a server.
Do they make server quality SATA drives? And if so, what is the price difference between a server quality SATA and SCSI?
First, a disclaimer: I am a hardware design guy. I know VHDL and circuit board design. I don't do IT.
This is not my area, but it seems to me that if a vendor advertises "hot swap" then they should be able to live up to it without any data loss. If they can't then they are a bad bad vendor, and should be dumped for somebody more respectable. Serious storage costs a LOT of money. A vendor cannot afford a ding to their repuatation by having customers loose data. With the internet, stories of bad hardware can spread quite rapidly and cause a company to lose customers.
So, it comes down to one question: can you trust what the vendor says? If so, go for it. If not, go to another vendor.
Of course you realize that I was joking in my original post. But reading your deadpan reply is the funniest thing that I have read in months. I realized that my idea was absurd, but I did not actually stop to think how absurd.
Thank you for that wonderful post. It brought tears to my eyes.
That guy uses floppies in a RAID setup using a macintosh.
So, my guess is that you do not even need any raid cards. Just a 2nd hand iMac, and about 150,000 USB floppy drives. Of course, you might have to stack a USB hub or two in there.
If you can get your hands on old USB Zip drives, you should only need about 2500 of those.
Who says I don't know how to save a buck. Who needs expensive RAID cards?
More power!!! Bring on the geekyness! I love this....being both a star trek geek and a space nut in general, I think its about time that we have been able to expand more into the world of space travel. Maybe man will finally be able to get out of the solar system.
You are forgetting something.. this thing most likely will not even work at all.
There is a super-secret formula which predicts the mass of fundamental particles, ties the quantum world with relativity, and explains why hot dog buns come in 8 packs, but hot dogs come in 10 packs. Riiiight.
If any of this stuff was for real, physicists would have jumped all over this a couple of decades ago. This work is based on a paper published in the 1970's (from what I understand).
I, for one, hope that it is real. But, if it sounds too good to be true...
Does anybody remember cold fusion? The conecpt is not actually dead, but let's just say that I am still waiting for my water-powered car.
Assume that Google wants to make a super-browser that is nicely-integrated into their services -- including advertising. They add a lot of cool features (who knows what, but let's imagine). They tie in to some advertising. Life is great!
But, it is open-source, so they release the source. Sombody takes the source, keeps the good stuff, and rips out the advertising. Now, Google is still serving up bandwidth, but not getting any advertising links. Huh. Looks like spent all of that time and effort for nothing (from a financial perspective).
when you come in third place in console sales, you have lost the battle, though being bitch slapped might be overly strong terminology. All day long we get to hear from Nintendo fanatics how awesome they are, but yet they remain the minority.
And exactly why is being last considered to be awful? They make a profit. They do well.
Microsoft sold the Xbox at a loss. The ONLY reason that the Xbox still lives that that your "microsoft tax" that you pay for with every PC sold goes to prop up the Xbox. If it was a private company that made the Xbox as its main product line, they would have gone under already. Nintendo does not have an OS monopoly or massive media holdings to prop up its game division, so it has to do thing a little differently -- like make a profit on games.
So, to me, as long as the company is healthy and selling products, does it really matter if they are #1? Let me put it this way: McDonalds is the #1 fast food franchise. Do you expect Taco Bell, Burger King or Wendy's to go under in the next six months because they are not #1? I don't.
The gaming market is big, and I do not mind a little competition. It keeps everybody on their toes. As long as you have three players, you WILL have a #1, a #2, and a #3. And as long as all three remain profitable, this is a good thing. At my house, my only console is a Game Cube. I purchased it because I have small children, and I wanted to be assured of being able to buy games without lots of blood and sex.
The point is, the people running Nintendo have been pretty much saying "We don't care if you like regular controllers. You'll do it our way, or not at all."
Try this: If you want more of the same, try one of the other two. If you want something different, here we are!
This is actually quite smart. They can go head-to-head with Sony and Microsoft and play by their rules, or they can change the rules and occupy a slightly different niche.
The best way is to look for forums devoted to the type of product that you are looking for. Read the posts from other people. The more active the forum is, the better. Most forums should have some sort of "hot deals" section. If you read those, often a person will say "XXX is on sale at $yyy over at ZZZ.com." If several people reply "I would never buy from ZZZ.com", then you know. On the other hand, if people reply "I like ZZZ.com", then buy with confidence.
Of course, this takes a little time, but it really is the best way.
OK. Let's assume that you are 100% correct. I wish to report a faudulent site: www.amazon.com. Or, how about www.newegg.com, www.bhphotovideo.com, www.buy.com. The point is that all of these web sites that I have listed are 100% legitimate. But how are YOU supposed to know that. Let's assume that 10 people report problems with a vendor. Are they annoyed customers, or shills for the competition? How do you know? What criteria is needed in order to make this determination.
Also, no company can achieve 100% satisfaction. Things happen, people get pissed off. B&H Photo is at the upper end of satisfaction, and the Brooklyn camera & electronics stores are at the other end. Where is the dividing line? The point is that the Brooklyn store WILL sell you a camera (if you also buy the $50 tripod, $20 battery, and the $100 extended warranty). Even Best Buy sells a warranty (which some people would argue is a scam). So this is not a black & white issue. Some stores (like Amazon) are white. Nigerian scammers are black. Brooklyn camera stores are more of a dark grey. So, what is the cut-off line, and how much homework should a search engine do before de-listing a company?
In principle, your ideas are sound, but are quite difficult in a "rubber meets the road" kind of way.
As long as you have a decent firewall on your PC, you can update at your leisure. If your firewall is working, then the bad guys are kept out. Of course, you can always get past the firewall by opening up an OUTBOUND connection (web brwoser, e-mail, etc.). In that case, worry.
For the paranoid running XP, here is what I would do;
1) Connect to the internet through a cheap and properly configured NAT box (if possible) 2) Update firewall 3) Update windows 3) Download any update for other programs that you use (Firefox, Thundebird, etc.)
BTW: I hope that you are not using Outlook and IE.
If this is just an attempt at reducing power usage, why not use an old mobo/processor and underclock the thing to death. You should be able to get an Athlon 64 to run at 500 MHz or so by scaling back the multiplier and FSB speed. You would likely not even need any fans, except possibly for the power supply. And even if this is not exactly the most optimal solution, the money saved in purchasing used, cheap hardware will more than offset the amount of extra electricity that this thing might take when compared to a real SBC.
Of course, if this thing is intended for a special application, such as a space-limited or power-limited use (in a car, or battery powered, etc.), then feel free to ignore me.
Thank you for proving my point. That $99 kit that you linked to has a Spartan 2 XC3S200. That part has the equivalent of 200,000 gates. Do you really think that you could put an UltraSparc in that little space? You would want something with a gate count in the millions. And even if you could fit it in there, that part only has 27KB of block ram, so your cache would be quite small. Performace would, in a word, suck.
So, yes, it would take hundreds of dollars. Look to the higher-end Vertex II parts, or possibly even the Vertex 4.
And when I say hundreds of hours, that includes getting up to speed with the FPGA software, and interfacing the system to other devices. At the very least, you will need an DRAM interface, or some sort of "northbridge" interface to something that can talk to DRAM. And after that, you will need to get an OS running on it in order to really do anything with it. This entire process can take hundreds of hours and will stretch you in hardware and software.
I work with FPGAs for a living, so I know a little about this. I am a lot more fuzzy on what it would take to put Linux on a new processor, but it can't exactly be trivial, especially since the processor would be embedded in what amounts to custom hardware.
But the short of it is that you buy an FPGA evaluation board. You compile and place-and-route the compiled code onto the FPGA. Add some memory and peripherals, and you are off and running.
Needless to say, this is not a beginners project by any means. But is it possible for a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours.
As a more extreme example, a Stephen King novel will be $25 or so hardback (and around $6 when it gets to paperback) -- and these will sell millions. It is not uncommon for textbooks to be $100 or more, and will likely sell a few thousand.
So, the lesson from the book industry is that greater sales = lower prices.
One solution is of course to run in a more protected user mode where you're requested of admin rights when it has to do something to the system, and the upcoming version of Windows will do exactly this, and what *nix desktop managers have had for years.
Well, I tried to do this -- and I am back to being an admin 100% of the time. The problem is stupid applications that REQUIRE admin access in order to work. Specifically, I had a problem with Winamp. It crashed unless ran as admin. This is very stupid, I know. And I could probably find a replacement for Winamp if I had to. The other problem is my Logitech drivers (both keyboard and webcam). The Webcam software is the worst. If you install as an admin and then go to use it as a user, it is possible to reliably crash explorer. I would have thought that Logitech would know better, but I guess not. My opinion is that Logitech has awesome hardware, but fair to poor drivers and software.
A NAT box does indeed protect from incoming connections (provided that you do not use DMZ and port forwarding). This may indeed be considered to be a side-effect, but that does not mean that it does not work. How well these routers work for gaming is another matter entirely. And as far as gaming goes, I am certainly not an expert as I am not into on-line games, but each game should specify which ports it uses so that you can open those ports in your NAT box. Having to use DMZ for a game is silly and dangerous.
As what the GP post said is correct. Software firewalls offer outbound protections. You are right that their first purpose is to protect from inbound threats, but if you have a NAT, you have NO inbound threats (except perhaps for those ports used for games when your game software is not running). Filtering outbound connections is the only reason that I use a software firewall. In fact, my software firewall has NEVER had to block an incoming connection since I built my present computer over a year ago, thanks to my NAT box.
In the grand-parent post, there is a link to a BBC article. Here is a quote from the article:
The company hopes to see the first pads on sale by the end of the year, costing between $25 and $50.
It is very interesting that the article came out in March 1993, so we should have seen these for sale by December of 2003. It is now almost two years past this deadline, and I still don't see these at Best Buy yet.
I am not sure that inductive technology would ever take off... It seems rather inefficient would make any device using it more expensive.
But how about manufacturers getting together and coming up with a couple of common voltage/plug combinations? Maybe every house should have a power supply capable of supplying +6V on one size of plug, and +12V on another size. Then, every device could just use one of those?
Of course, you still have problem like varying current capabilites. A power supply capable of recharging your cell phone might not be up to snuff when it comes to powering your WiFi router. But I am sure that the manufacturers could come together and figure something out if they had to.
I've heard it said that Tomb Raider was made for under $9 million, excluding salaries. The "official" budget on paper was ten times that amount. Where did the rest of the money go? Back into the investors' pockets, of course, but now completely tax-deductable.
Do you know why Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was such a big deal? It was made for practically nothing. The stated $30-mil figure was totally bogus. Thanks to some budget manipulation, it turned a profit for the production company long before the first reel was shipped. Any profits from theaters or DVD were just icing on the cake.
Links? Proof?
"I've heard it said that" there are cars that get 50 miles per gallon -- gallon of water. I don't mean to be a smart-ass, but anybody can say anything. I am not sayin that I don't believe you or that I think that you are lying -- just that I would require more proof to make up my mind.
From what I understnad, tax loopholes might reduce your tax burden if you have millions in other income. But blowing your money still seems foolish, unless the tax rate is over 100%. Disclaimer: I have never had anywhere close to a million dollars, so I have no first-hand experience. But if anybody cares to donate...;)
So, how can you loose, say, $10 million in making a movie and come out ahead. Surely Germany will not actually GIVE you $10 million in replacement. Can sombody explain this or provide hard numbers for the financially challenged?
Of course, if investors are involved, and you could claim your investors losses as your own, this might work -- if you could avoid prison.
Well, your "yearly update" is part of the problem. If you have "Power Nose-Ball 2005," will you pay $60 for "Power Nose-Ball 2006" which is the exact same game, just with a different roster of players, and perhaps slightly improved textures?
But one point of the article that I agree with is a lack of creativity. Look at the following genres:
How many games do not fit neatly into one of those categories? Very few. A few years ago, I would have listed "Adventure" as a genre. But that genre is a niche market for PCs, and dead for consoles.
Some companies can make games that fit neatly into a genre, and still be well-done and fun to play, but this is sort of like making a new copy of your favorite well-worn sneakers. It is nice and comfortable, but you don't get that "new" feeling.
Its easier to prevent a fire by notifying management to fix the sparking wires than to put one out after notifying a world full of pyros to come dump gasoline on it.
It is sad, but these days, nothing gets fixed until AFTER the fire has started, no matter how much notice that you give.
F-Secure should have made this public 30 days after notifying Sony. This way, at least Sony has a chance to fix this. And if they didn't too bad for them and they deserve what they get.
Of course, for all we know F-Secure might have planned to do this. The rootkit was made public slightly less than 30 days after Sony was informed. Perhpas a couple of days later, F-Secure would have blown the whistle.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that this has little to do with the interface technology, and a lot more to with the build quality of the drives. Most SATA drives sold are intended for desktops, where cost is king and it is assumed that they are not stressed 24/7. Of course those will fail rapidly in a server.
Do they make server quality SATA drives? And if so, what is the price difference between a server quality SATA and SCSI?
First, a disclaimer: I am a hardware design guy. I know VHDL and circuit board design. I don't do IT.
This is not my area, but it seems to me that if a vendor advertises "hot swap" then they should be able to live up to it without any data loss. If they can't then they are a bad bad vendor, and should be dumped for somebody more respectable. Serious storage costs a LOT of money. A vendor cannot afford a ding to their repuatation by having customers loose data. With the internet, stories of bad hardware can spread quite rapidly and cause a company to lose customers.
So, it comes down to one question: can you trust what the vendor says? If so, go for it. If not, go to another vendor.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
And you also learned an important lesson about backups, I bet.
Of course you realize that I was joking in my original post. But reading your deadpan reply is the funniest thing that I have read in months. I realized that my idea was absurd, but I did not actually stop to think how absurd.
Thank you for that wonderful post. It brought tears to my eyes.
You can do it even cheaper. Check out this page:
http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
That guy uses floppies in a RAID setup using a macintosh.
So, my guess is that you do not even need any raid cards. Just a 2nd hand iMac, and about 150,000 USB floppy drives. Of course, you might have to stack a USB hub or two in there.
If you can get your hands on old USB Zip drives, you should only need about 2500 of those.
Who says I don't know how to save a buck. Who needs expensive RAID cards?
Let me know how it turns out.
There is a super-secret formula which predicts the mass of fundamental particles, ties the quantum world with relativity, and explains why hot dog buns come in 8 packs, but hot dogs come in 10 packs. Riiiight.
If any of this stuff was for real, physicists would have jumped all over this a couple of decades ago. This work is based on a paper published in the 1970's (from what I understand).
I, for one, hope that it is real. But, if it sounds too good to be true...
Does anybody remember cold fusion? The conecpt is not actually dead, but let's just say that I am still waiting for my water-powered car.
OK. Let's look at your argument.
Assume that Google wants to make a super-browser that is nicely-integrated into their services -- including advertising. They add a lot of cool features (who knows what, but let's imagine). They tie in to some advertising. Life is great!
But, it is open-source, so they release the source. Sombody takes the source, keeps the good stuff, and rips out the advertising. Now, Google is still serving up bandwidth, but not getting any advertising links. Huh. Looks like spent all of that time and effort for nothing (from a financial perspective).
So, this Opera thing, if true, makes sense.
And exactly why is being last considered to be awful? They make a profit. They do well.
Microsoft sold the Xbox at a loss. The ONLY reason that the Xbox still lives that that your "microsoft tax" that you pay for with every PC sold goes to prop up the Xbox. If it was a private company that made the Xbox as its main product line, they would have gone under already. Nintendo does not have an OS monopoly or massive media holdings to prop up its game division, so it has to do thing a little differently -- like make a profit on games.
So, to me, as long as the company is healthy and selling products, does it really matter if they are #1? Let me put it this way: McDonalds is the #1 fast food franchise. Do you expect Taco Bell, Burger King or Wendy's to go under in the next six months because they are not #1? I don't.
The gaming market is big, and I do not mind a little competition. It keeps everybody on their toes. As long as you have three players, you WILL have a #1, a #2, and a #3. And as long as all three remain profitable, this is a good thing. At my house, my only console is a Game Cube. I purchased it because I have small children, and I wanted to be assured of being able to buy games without lots of blood and sex.
This is actually quite smart. They can go head-to-head with Sony and Microsoft and play by their rules, or they can change the rules and occupy a slightly different niche.
The best way is to look for forums devoted to the type of product that you are looking for. Read the posts from other people. The more active the forum is, the better. Most forums should have some sort of "hot deals" section. If you read those, often a person will say "XXX is on sale at $yyy over at ZZZ.com." If several people reply "I would never buy from ZZZ.com", then you know. On the other hand, if people reply "I like ZZZ.com", then buy with confidence.
Of course, this takes a little time, but it really is the best way.
OK. Let's assume that you are 100% correct. I wish to report a faudulent site: www.amazon.com. Or, how about www.newegg.com, www.bhphotovideo.com, www.buy.com. The point is that all of these web sites that I have listed are 100% legitimate. But how are YOU supposed to know that. Let's assume that 10 people report problems with a vendor. Are they annoyed customers, or shills for the competition? How do you know? What criteria is needed in order to make this determination.
Also, no company can achieve 100% satisfaction. Things happen, people get pissed off. B&H Photo is at the upper end of satisfaction, and the Brooklyn camera & electronics stores are at the other end. Where is the dividing line? The point is that the Brooklyn store WILL sell you a camera (if you also buy the $50 tripod, $20 battery, and the $100 extended warranty). Even Best Buy sells a warranty (which some people would argue is a scam). So this is not a black & white issue. Some stores (like Amazon) are white. Nigerian scammers are black. Brooklyn camera stores are more of a dark grey. So, what is the cut-off line, and how much homework should a search engine do before de-listing a company?
In principle, your ideas are sound, but are quite difficult in a "rubber meets the road" kind of way.
As long as you have a decent firewall on your PC, you can update at your leisure. If your firewall is working, then the bad guys are kept out. Of course, you can always get past the firewall by opening up an OUTBOUND connection (web brwoser, e-mail, etc.). In that case, worry.
For the paranoid running XP, here is what I would do;
1) Connect to the internet through a cheap and properly configured NAT box (if possible)
2) Update firewall
3) Update windows
3) Download any update for other programs that you use (Firefox, Thundebird, etc.)
BTW: I hope that you are not using Outlook and IE.
If this is just an attempt at reducing power usage, why not use an old mobo/processor and underclock the thing to death. You should be able to get an Athlon 64 to run at 500 MHz or so by scaling back the multiplier and FSB speed. You would likely not even need any fans, except possibly for the power supply. And even if this is not exactly the most optimal solution, the money saved in purchasing used, cheap hardware will more than offset the amount of extra electricity that this thing might take when compared to a real SBC.
Of course, if this thing is intended for a special application, such as a space-limited or power-limited use (in a car, or battery powered, etc.), then feel free to ignore me.
Thank you for proving my point. That $99 kit that you linked to has a Spartan 2 XC3S200. That part has the equivalent of 200,000 gates. Do you really think that you could put an UltraSparc in that little space? You would want something with a gate count in the millions. And even if you could fit it in there, that part only has 27KB of block ram, so your cache would be quite small. Performace would, in a word, suck.
So, yes, it would take hundreds of dollars. Look to the higher-end Vertex II parts, or possibly even the Vertex 4.
And when I say hundreds of hours, that includes getting up to speed with the FPGA software, and interfacing the system to other devices. At the very least, you will need an DRAM interface, or some sort of "northbridge" interface to something that can talk to DRAM. And after that, you will need to get an OS running on it in order to really do anything with it. This entire process can take hundreds of hours and will stretch you in hardware and software.
I work with FPGAs for a living, so I know a little about this. I am a lot more fuzzy on what it would take to put Linux on a new processor, but it can't exactly be trivial, especially since the processor would be embedded in what amounts to custom hardware.
Look HERE for more details on how this works.
But the short of it is that you buy an FPGA evaluation board. You compile and place-and-route the compiled code onto the FPGA. Add some memory and peripherals, and you are off and running.
Needless to say, this is not a beginners project by any means. But is it possible for a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours.
As a more extreme example, a Stephen King novel will be $25 or so hardback (and around $6 when it gets to paperback) -- and these will sell millions. It is not uncommon for textbooks to be $100 or more, and will likely sell a few thousand.
So, the lesson from the book industry is that greater sales = lower prices.
Well, I tried to do this -- and I am back to being an admin 100% of the time. The problem is stupid applications that REQUIRE admin access in order to work. Specifically, I had a problem with Winamp. It crashed unless ran as admin. This is very stupid, I know. And I could probably find a replacement for Winamp if I had to. The other problem is my Logitech drivers (both keyboard and webcam). The Webcam software is the worst. If you install as an admin and then go to use it as a user, it is possible to reliably crash explorer. I would have thought that Logitech would know better, but I guess not. My opinion is that Logitech has awesome hardware, but fair to poor drivers and software.
You are picking nits...
A NAT box does indeed protect from incoming connections (provided that you do not use DMZ and port forwarding). This may indeed be considered to be a side-effect, but that does not mean that it does not work. How well these routers work for gaming is another matter entirely. And as far as gaming goes, I am certainly not an expert as I am not into on-line games, but each game should specify which ports it uses so that you can open those ports in your NAT box. Having to use DMZ for a game is silly and dangerous.
As what the GP post said is correct. Software firewalls offer outbound protections. You are right that their first purpose is to protect from inbound threats, but if you have a NAT, you have NO inbound threats (except perhaps for those ports used for games when your game software is not running). Filtering outbound connections is the only reason that I use a software firewall. In fact, my software firewall has NEVER had to block an incoming connection since I built my present computer over a year ago, thanks to my NAT box.
In the grand-parent post, there is a link to a BBC article. Here is a quote from the article:
It is very interesting that the article came out in March 1993, so we should have seen these for sale by December of 2003. It is now almost two years past this deadline, and I still don't see these at Best Buy yet.
I am not sure that inductive technology would ever take off... It seems rather inefficient would make any device using it more expensive.
But how about manufacturers getting together and coming up with a couple of common voltage/plug combinations? Maybe every house should have a power supply capable of supplying +6V on one size of plug, and +12V on another size. Then, every device could just use one of those?
Of course, you still have problem like varying current capabilites. A power supply capable of recharging your cell phone might not be up to snuff when it comes to powering your WiFi router. But I am sure that the manufacturers could come together and figure something out if they had to.
"I've heard it said that" there are cars that get 50 miles per gallon -- gallon of water. I don't mean to be a smart-ass, but anybody can say anything. I am not sayin that I don't believe you or that I think that you are lying -- just that I would require more proof to make up my mind.
I fall firmly in the "show me proof" camp.
;)
From what I understnad, tax loopholes might reduce your tax burden if you have millions in other income. But blowing your money still seems foolish, unless the tax rate is over 100%. Disclaimer: I have never had anywhere close to a million dollars, so I have no first-hand experience. But if anybody cares to donate...
So, how can you loose, say, $10 million in making a movie and come out ahead. Surely Germany will not actually GIVE you $10 million in replacement. Can sombody explain this or provide hard numbers for the financially challenged?
Of course, if investors are involved, and you could claim your investors losses as your own, this might work -- if you could avoid prison.
Well, your "yearly update" is part of the problem. If you have "Power Nose-Ball 2005," will you pay $60 for "Power Nose-Ball 2006" which is the exact same game, just with a different roster of players, and perhaps slightly improved textures?
But one point of the article that I agree with is a lack of creativity. Look at the following genres:
1) FPS
2) Strategy
3) RPG
4) Sports
5) Platform
6) Car Race
7) Flight/space sim.
How many games do not fit neatly into one of those categories? Very few. A few years ago, I would have listed "Adventure" as a genre. But that genre is a niche market for PCs, and dead for consoles.
Some companies can make games that fit neatly into a genre, and still be well-done and fun to play, but this is sort of like making a new copy of your favorite well-worn sneakers. It is nice and comfortable, but you don't get that "new" feeling.
But if they are not destroyed, then they will be most likely be given away as a prize to the ninth caller to your local Clear Channel radio station.
F-Secure should have made this public 30 days after notifying Sony. This way, at least Sony has a chance to fix this. And if they didn't too bad for them and they deserve what they get.
Of course, for all we know F-Secure might have planned to do this. The rootkit was made public slightly less than 30 days after Sony was informed. Perhpas a couple of days later, F-Secure would have blown the whistle.