Back in the day (mid 1970s) when IBM appended "AM" (for Access Method) to all of their protocols, we had BTAM (Basic Telecommunications), TCAM (TeleCommunications), and VTAM (Virtual Telecommunications, which is still around today) to move data. It was widely acknowledged that when it came to raw bandwidth, even over long distances, PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method) beat them all. You load up a pickup truck with hundreds or thousands of 200MB tapes and drive it across the country.
With 16GB micro SD cards, the statement holds true even today.
The Wirtz pump was invented in 1746, lost, then rediscovered in 1972 and successfully patented in 1976. Check out http://lurkertech.com/water/pump/belcher/fish/ (scroll down for history).
Back in the mid 1970s, IBM did a storage presentation for the company where I worked. The presenter had been part of the team that engineered those first platters. He told an interesting story about their very first effort.
The setup was a large aluminum platter mounted on an ordinary record player turntable with the speed set on 78 RPM. Several technicians were standing around it in their clean white lab coats as the turntable came up to speed. The idea was to suspend iron oxide in a paint base and pour it onto the platter near the center, letting the centrifugal force spread the slurry out toward the rim. This should, in theory, yield a thin, uniform coating.
Our presenter held a Dixie cup full of slurry over the center of the platter and glanced around at his associates. They all nodded and he proceeded to pour out the contents of the Dixie cup. As he told it, "At that point, we all looked down at the brown stripe across all of our nice clean lab coats and decided that maybe we should turn the speed down to 45 RPM."
Are mainframes really 6 times more power efficient per MFLOP (or whatever unit) than blade servers?
Probably not on a per MFLOP basis, but the reality is that most common business computing isn't all that floating-point intensive. SQL/DB2 servers, for example, execute primarily integer math instructions and do a boatload of I/O. And yes, mainframes are awesome when it comes to I/O bandwidth.
The savings comes from the sharing of resources such as CPU and RAM among many applications. When a blade is idle (because nobody's using its services at the moment) it still draws power. It's more efficient to toss all of your resources in one big pot than to try to balance usage across many smaller pots. (Of course, this leads to frustration for less-favored users due to slower response times during peak load, but that's been an issue since the first mainframe time-share system was introduced back in the '60s. It's also been a source of income for performance analysts.:-) )
Maybe it's just my monitor, but the scales don't line up exactly. The B and C scales should be exactly the same.
BTW - my old high school Trig/Physics teacher had an accurate mental image of a slide rule in his head and could mentally manipulate the sliders. He could reliably do any calculation to slide rule accuracy in his head - including square and cube roots!
IBM's most popular punch cards from the 1920's onwards were 12 rows by 80 columns. A standard 80 x 25 video display can thus display two such cards stacked atop each other, with one row left over for displaying status information.
Dude, that is so not true.
Each column of a punched card was one byte. Each card contained 80 bytes of data, which was one line on a terminal.
RAID-1 or RAID-5 is great if the data is constantly updated and losing a day's worth of updates would be a hardship.
A media collection is typically not highly active data. That is, files are added occasionally but not often updated.
For this application, a single large drive would be fine if you can find a single drive that is large enough. A second drive of the same size would be mounted in a external case and newly added files would be periodically copied to the external drive. The external drive would be kept offline except during syncing and would therefore be immune to power hits, accidental finger-checks and perils of that nature.
When you need to upgrade to larger drives later on, you just buy two of them and copy the files over.
Most inventions of merit have come from backyard hobby/hackers/dreamers.
Yeah. Look at the transistor. Some guys foolin' around in a barnyard stuffed some horse manure in between two cow patties and hooked it up to the 'lecric fence. A little bit of development work at Bell Labs, and the rest is history.
What are they claiming is the cause of the toxicity?
From TFA: "MON863 is a genetically modified corn that expresses a Bt-toxin. This toxin is a modified version of the delta endotoxin Cry3Bb1 which originates from the microorganism Bacillus thuringiensis. The genetic manipulation is aimed at protecting maize plants against a pest called corn rootworm (Diabrotica spp.)."
In other words, the corn produces its own insect killer. It's like sprinkling a little Sevin on your corn flakes. Bon apetite!
It may not stop the authorities from accessing your data, but it will sure make it more interesting for them to do so. Especially if the unlock code is a hissing, spitting, scratching ball of feline fury.
Forensic Team Leader: Joe! Blow-dart that damned cat. Now!!
The obvious difference is in the cover, but if you look inside you'll find that the illustrations are less cartoonish and more... dignified, I guess.
The text is the same, unless you compare the US vs. the UK versions. I haven't seen the Hindi, French, Spanish, etc. so who knows, maybe they have different text, too.
Stupid comment of the day, courtesy of the article: In addition, Bainwol said, the ability of consumers to use legally purchased tunes on different devices is not crippled by DRM systems per se. "We're for interoperability," he said, "and there's nothing intrinsic to DRM that prevents interoperability."
Translation: The music sucks just as much, no matter what device it's played on.
It is alarming how many people object to diversity in thought. I do not understand where they think they have derived the right to force everyone to think the same way they do.
Allow me to enlighten you: I'm old. I did my best thinking when I was much younger. To rethink old ideas would require a LOT of mental strength, which I no longer have, and there is the likelihood that I'd get it wrong this time around. So I'll just remember my old opinions and solutions, thank you very much, and I'll also thank you to not question them.
"That's Random???... Why is it telling me to kill my neighbour's dog...? -_-;"
It's all about choices. You and your nieghbour randomly chose to live near each other; your neighbour chose to get a random dog. Now you'll both have to live with the consequences. I'm not sure whether the dog gets a vote.
By the time you're done adding motors, sensors and processing power to make it walk, I imagine there's precious little left to make it actually *do* anything useful.
I suppose the same could be said about me, but I find it immensely fulfilling just to be.
Judging from the photomicrograph on their web site, it's not core. I was suspecting magnetic serial "bubble" memory, which was used in products in the late '80s, but they don't really say what the technology is.
The old "bubble" memory was sandwiched between two strong permanent magnets to force tiny magnetic fields on the die into tiny "bubbles" that could be manipulated electronically. They were moved along an oval "track" on the die and written/read serially at the "start/finish line". I saw a lab film of this taken through a microscope back in the mid-70s, so this is quite old stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day (mid 1970s) when IBM appended "AM" (for Access Method) to all of their protocols, we had BTAM (Basic Telecommunications), TCAM (TeleCommunications), and VTAM (Virtual Telecommunications, which is still around today) to move data. It was widely acknowledged that when it came to raw bandwidth, even over long distances, PTAM (Pickup Truck Access Method) beat them all. You load up a pickup truck with hundreds or thousands of 200MB tapes and drive it across the country.
With 16GB micro SD cards, the statement holds true even today.
That's scary that you used the HALT-AND-CATCH-FIRE opcode so often that you still remember its decimal equivalent!
... under "squatters".
Can you give some examples?
The Wirtz pump was invented in 1746, lost, then rediscovered in 1972 and successfully patented in 1976.
Check out http://lurkertech.com/water/pump/belcher/fish/ (scroll down for history).
Back in the mid 1970s, IBM did a storage presentation for the company where I worked. The presenter had been part of the team that engineered those first platters. He told an interesting story about their very first effort.
The setup was a large aluminum platter mounted on an ordinary record player turntable with the speed set on 78 RPM. Several technicians were standing around it in their clean white lab coats as the turntable came up to speed. The idea was to suspend iron oxide in a paint base and pour it onto the platter near the center, letting the centrifugal force spread the slurry out toward the rim. This should, in theory, yield a thin, uniform coating.
Our presenter held a Dixie cup full of slurry over the center of the platter and glanced around at his associates. They all nodded and he proceeded to pour out the contents of the Dixie cup. As he told it, "At that point, we all looked down at the brown stripe across all of our nice clean lab coats and decided that maybe we should turn the speed down to 45 RPM."
Probably not on a per MFLOP basis, but the reality is that most common business computing isn't all that floating-point intensive. SQL/DB2 servers, for example, execute primarily integer math instructions and do a boatload of I/O. And yes, mainframes are awesome when it comes to I/O bandwidth.
The savings comes from the sharing of resources such as CPU and RAM among many applications. When a blade is idle (because nobody's using its services at the moment) it still draws power. It's more efficient to toss all of your resources in one big pot than to try to balance usage across many smaller pots. (Of course, this leads to frustration for less-favored users due to slower response times during peak load, but that's been an issue since the first mainframe time-share system was introduced back in the '60s. It's also been a source of income for performance analysts.
Maybe it's just my monitor, but the scales don't line up exactly. The B and C scales should be exactly the same.
BTW - my old high school Trig/Physics teacher had an accurate mental image of a slide rule in his head and could mentally manipulate the sliders. He could reliably do any calculation to slide rule accuracy in his head - including square and cube roots!
Dude, that is so not true.
Each column of a punched card was one byte. Each card contained 80 bytes of data, which was one line on a terminal.
First Question: How active is the data?
RAID-1 or RAID-5 is great if the data is constantly updated and losing a day's worth of updates would be a hardship. A media collection is typically not highly active data. That is, files are added occasionally but not often updated.
For this application, a single large drive would be fine if you can find a single drive that is large enough. A second drive of the same size would be mounted in a external case and newly added files would be periodically copied to the external drive. The external drive would be kept offline except during syncing and would therefore be immune to power hits, accidental finger-checks and perils of that nature.
When you need to upgrade to larger drives later on, you just buy two of them and copy the files over.
You forgot to factor inflation into your argument. When I was in high school, gas was $.23 per gallon. Do the math.
Created on..............: Fri, May 21, 2004
Expires on..............: Mon, May 21, 2007
Interesting that the expiration date was the day before this story broke.
Yeah. Look at the transistor. Some guys foolin' around in a barnyard stuffed some horse manure in between two cow patties and hooked it up to the 'lecric fence. A little bit of development work at Bell Labs, and the rest is history.
From TFA:
"MON863 is a genetically modified corn that expresses a Bt-toxin. This toxin is a modified
version of the delta endotoxin Cry3Bb1 which originates from the microorganism Bacillus
thuringiensis. The genetic manipulation is aimed at protecting maize plants against a pest
called corn rootworm (Diabrotica spp.)."
In other words, the corn produces its own insect killer. It's like sprinkling a little Sevin on your corn flakes. Bon apetite!
I depends on whether you jog on two legs or four.
But, but, but, I though money = votes.
Was that a trick question?
Forensic Team Leader: Joe! Blow-dart that damned cat. Now!!
The obvious difference is in the cover, but if you look inside you'll find that the illustrations are less cartoonish and more... dignified, I guess. The text is the same, unless you compare the US vs. the UK versions. I haven't seen the Hindi, French, Spanish, etc. so who knows, maybe they have different text, too.
Technical issues aside, it would be 30 years before the images could be de-classified.
Translation: The music sucks just as much, no matter what device it's played on.
They've been doing that in the big cities for a long time. It's called prostitution. I'd stay away from the $1 ones, though.
Allow me to enlighten you: I'm old. I did my best thinking when I was much younger. To rethink old ideas would require a LOT of mental strength, which I no longer have, and there is the likelihood that I'd get it wrong this time around. So I'll just remember my old opinions and solutions, thank you very much, and I'll also thank you to not question them.
"That's Random??? ... Why is it telling me to kill my neighbour's dog...? -_-;"
It's all about choices. You and your nieghbour randomly chose to live near each other; your neighbour chose to get a random dog. Now you'll both have to live with the consequences. I'm not sure whether the dog gets a vote.Also, in addition to eliminating the weight of stealth paint, it actually removes a tiny amount of the metal. Every ounce helps.
I suppose the same could be said about me, but I find it immensely fulfilling just to be.
The old "bubble" memory was sandwiched between two strong permanent magnets to force tiny magnetic fields on the die into tiny "bubbles" that could be manipulated electronically. They were moved along an oval "track" on the die and written/read serially at the "start/finish line". I saw a lab film of this taken through a microscope back in the mid-70s, so this is quite old stuff.