Actually, they can't. It's the quality of the results that makes Google search useful. Such an attack would eliminate the value of Google's product- credibility - and only destroy themselves. They would then be just another Bing. They know this, so this can't happen.
I think the point of that particular line was that if you're choosing a language to program in, one that's more unpleasant than is needful probably should be your first choice. We're pretty spoiled these days.
The subtle nuances of the various rights, whether to whistle four notes from a song is infringing based on where and when it's done. With hundreds of years of case law precedents to follow, thousands of pages of legal jargon, each a solid rule for "this is mine, all mine!" This leads to a need for an experienced intellectual property law guide, one who can navigate through the shoals of rights - or better yet one who knows that if you want to call someone a thief there's a law for it somewhere.
We'd be better off if we just led such people into the desert and left them there.
Nothing less than to abolish copyright will do. Copyrights and patents prevent progress in the sciences and the useful arts. They were an experiment that utterly failed.
Seems Microsoft actually has people that know their market better than slashdot UID #646467.
Snirk. Yeah, that would totally explain Vista and Kin, Plays For Now, Zune and Bing. They have Vision. They have Skills. They are Learned in the arts of the graphs and the Powerpoints. If they only spend a few more tens of $Billions on awkward ads, they can put it over. You so totally dominated me with your argument I must defer to your superior knowledge.
At this point there's nobody reading this but you and me so it's ok to get a little off-topic.
When you're finding in the charts the information you want to find regardless of the later outcome, you might as well be looking at Tarot cards or bird entrails. It's clear you and I are not going to agree on how to project the uptake curve of W7 against XP. I see W7 at 15 to 20% at the end of July, nearly a year after RTM, and having gotten nearly all of that from the much reviled and structurally similar Windows Vista. The plateau is plain as day. Though the Vista base continues to erode, adoption by XP users is levelling off and it never was much. To expect to get from 20% to 50% in another year would presume an upward curve to the line rather than the levelling one that is shown. I'll go ahead and project that W7 will not achieve 50% share on an average of the top five metrics in CY2011. Hell, I'll go ahead and say it won't get 40% as measured in the single month December 2011 in an average of the top five metrics. I'd go as far as to bet a beer on it. A risky thing, this fortune telling is. I can't delete this slashdot comment, so if I'm wrong you'll be able to throw it in my face forever after, and that means a lot to me.
Microsoft has renewed the family pack offer for W7, but you still have to have W7 capable hardware in order to be even slightly interested. Some people may be buying new hardware and unable to avoid W7, but they're handing their old hardware down mostly, so each unit should count only as a half-step rather than a whole one. To get a whole step that old PC has to go in the landfill rather than being given away or resold on Ebay, and I don't see that happening. XP may be discontinued, but "W7 pre-downgraded to XP" seems to be a popular netbook option even today, particularly on Intel Atom netbooks which don't run W7 well. Considering that XP is in fact still selling well at retail calls the lie to its demise in the context of browser share. Those are backsteps that cost double. Microsoft may want us to let go of XP, but internally one must presume they are conflicted since W7 doesn't work well on a netbook and they don't want to dismiss the migration to mobile because that's where the crowd is going. If the OS is still for sale on emerging platforms today, how dead could it be? A lot of users still use W2K because they have apps from dead companies that they still need to do what they do, and W2K had a relatively brief moment of dominance compared to XP. XP in actual use is going to be a significant share for a very long time, even if people have to license W7 to get it.
And then there's the migration to mobile. We're going to ARM. We're giving up on Intel, the storied company that brought forth the computer revolution, founded by the inventor of the transistor, just to get away from you. That's got to make you proud.
But yeah, internally in Redmond go ahead and spread the word that W7 is being embraced by the masses, that XP is seen by the bloggerati as completely croaked. We need you to be oblivious to Android on the desktop and as a VDI solution so that when it's time to lead you out behind the barn you come along meekly. The more you make your own apps incompatible with your own operating systems the better off we are.
Paint it pretty as you like. They're either unable or unwilling to build it for 70% of the world's platforms. Neither speaks well for the company or the product.
If you're deploying even one unit of any OS and aren't customizing the heck out of it, you are negligent. The defaults are never appropriate. BSD may be an exception, but I don't know of any others.
Give some of this money to artists? That's crazy talk. The media companies have expenses and the artists have signed contracts for net after expenses. The levy could be over $100 per Brazilian (which would of course be hundreds of $Brazilians) and there would still be no net profit. The media giants are going to need vast buckets of money to pay their lawers to sue each other over the fractions, and probably have so little left they'll be buying their cocaine by the ounce rather than the kilo. They'll be so improverished they'll probably have to procure second-tier hookers to snort their blow off of (artist management entertainment expense). To expect them to have money left to pay artists is unfair.
And artists with no contract? Why would they get money even if their content is an appreciable proportion of the shared content? They don't have representation.
The question I have is, is $1.74 a month fair? No doubt once the media conglomerates have gained a levy tap on connectivity they'll need to open it a bit to improve their profits and "right size" the payment - which is only fair since they contribute so much to the culture and bandwidth is improving over time. Under two bucks a month per connected citizen seems far too little to preserve our culture and enterprise-class multisite archival of these priceless works doesn't come cheap. They're probably agreeing to this agregiously unfair compensation scheme as a foundation for their right to levy fees as tax. Once it's in place it's natural they'll push for fair compensation rather than this modest placeholder.
DRM is essential to preserving the motivation of these artists to create. If there was no DRM, common folk might be stealing their output rather than studio executives. That's hardly fair. Artists are motivated to preserve the studio executives' right to consume vast quantities of cocaine off the asses of the best hookers their art can motivate their fans to pay for. That's why they create these timeless works of art to preserved by copyright in perpetuity protected by the conglomerates they assigned their rights to in return for a modest advance payment. It's a selfless dedication to the indulgence of the media moguls' decadent tastes that motivates the modern artist to create the works we know and love. What every garage band craves is that their agent and his media contact fly to their venues in a decent jet rather than trudge it out on the aging decrepit rented tour bus with them, stinking of stale beer and groupie sweat.
Obviously the fair thing to do is to grant the media cooperative direct access to the national bank so they can levy their compensation against the GDP as they feel is appropriate. Also, remote management of every device capable of playing or recording audio or video should be required so that they can measure and account for usage. To be completely fair, remote access to every camera on every device so they can monitor the environment of net-enabled people is best. That way they can judge whether environmental music fees are due in domestic venues. One can never tell if people are publishing car audio for example, unless they can survey whether the windows are down in the car by looking throught the iPhone webcam.
The iPad is only a few months old. We'll be finding new uses for it for a long time. Now that the order backlog is done we should start to see enterprises, schools and whole nations ordering them in bulk for various purposes. I'm already seeing them as premiums with a new car purchase, door prizes, SWAG and so on.
If it's OK to do this with a game you like a lot, with terms hidden deep in the fine print of the EULA, then it's also OK for every cheesy browser plugin and toolbar extension and Java Applet.
Sure, you're OK with one hidden P2P client on your system. How would you feel about 175 of them?
This is basically what I did except that I left it with the basic log in, click icon experience. The keyboards and mice are going to die, weekly. Get over it. Go to the computer surplus store and buy them by the 24-pack and save yourself some stress. Headphones from the dollar store. I get the PCs at surplus too, and fix them up - you can get a 3Ghz P4 for $20 now on Ebay, and it's right as rain with a couple 1GB DIMMS. They get their own PC at two. At five I expect them to maintain it. By seven or eight, simple repairs like replacing a drive or video card should be in their skillset. The older kids don't have any trouble installing an OS or building out a home network while they're still in Middle School. Usually by High School we're comparing code.
For the first few weeks or so the kids had to have help to log in and launch their websites and apps. They figured out how to do it because they didn't want to wait for mom & dad to get up on Saturday mornings. We didn't teach them how - they figured it out from watching and doing. My youngest daughter just turned four and she now navigates the web about as well as some experienced office workers I've known. Her reading skills are about par for a fourth grader. Not everybody is going to get these results - my kids are, well, precocious. They're also self-centered greedy little monsters with poor interpersonal skills - but I can live with that. They take after their dad.
The ipod is, as no doubt has been mentioned above, also cool for the younger set if you must buy today. My six year old son played with it for five minutes, then summoned his mom so he could teach her how to use it. As I type this he's right next to me teaching his little sister how to browse YouTube. It's awesome to watch him figure out ways to work the thing that I don't know about - and I've had it for months. It took my daughter about five seconds to figure out how to roll back a video. She just said "I wish we had another one of those." I'll probably be buying tablets for Christmas. It's pretty much the same with everybody I show this iPad to. They get it intuitively and want it immediately. I wish I had a deal to sell the things - that would be easy money.
Before anybody bashes me for being an Apple fanboi, I'm not. I don't have Apples at home. This thing is from work, and from my point of view the iPad is about work. Its real purpose is remote management of my servers and as a thin client for VDI demos with Citrix. I also use it to pull up reference docs, do slideshows, show network diagrams and web management interfaces and other stuff for work. That it does Hi-Def Netflix and streams videos over the network effortlessly is just bonus. We like it, but I'm probably holding out for Android tablets under my tree. I like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but it's only available in the 3G version through mobile carriers and there's no way I'm splurging on the mobile contracts. That would be too much money. We don't need that anyway - all of our phones do Wi-fi tethering so we would have Internet on the go with a wi-fi tablet and don't need the extra bill. For some of us I'd like 10 inch displays and for some 7 inch, but I'm OK with widescreen for all. For gifts for the Fam, Webcam chat is a must-have but cellular contracts are a no-go. Any display pixel technology is ok if the rez is nice and high, but we're going capacitive multitouch rather than resistive touch on the screens - the responsiveness is more important than the resolution, and multitouch is awesome. If the right Android tablets don't come out in time at the right price point, well, I guess we'll have to settle for iPads but I won't be happy about it.
In Malthus' day there were only a billion humans. By happenstance, today there are almost exactly a billion undernourished humans out of our teeming 6 billion according to the WHO. It seems unlikely that we'll get to 36 billion souls 200 years from now, but if we do it seems nearly certain that there will be as many starving then as are alive today at least.
I must admit that Linux adoption seems to have slowed and the amount of press has considerably declined.
Hm. Last I heard Google was moving over 200,000 units a day just with Android, and that all together the different versions of Linux accounted for a full half of all smartphone operating systems. I also heard that the rate continues to accellerate.
Linux does not appear to be slowing down. Instead it looks like Linux is leading the shift to mobile platforms, a full peer with Apple.
I would guess your experience is atypical, but you seem to have a good handle on the metrics. It seems likely your servers aren't maxing their I/O, so you're distributing the load appropriately to get good response times for your use case. I'll bet those servers could grind up your SAN if they tried. The HP EVA (all versions) maxes out at 8x 72GB SSD's per array so you're unlikely to get a lot of VDI images on that after it's RAIDed and carved into LUNs. A single W7 image runs 10GB or more with Office. Even with smartclones most people need several images for production and several more for test/dev and that capacity runs out quick.
You're right on the VDI TCO calc too. We need that cheap SSD SAN to bring the storage cost down. RAM is still a bit high, and with ASLR and large memory pages you don't get the returns on RAM dedupe that VMWare would like to advertise, so the RAM requirements are the same and in VDI it's more expensive RAM than the desktop replacement RAM that's the alternative. Most of the sales folk are pushing the manageability and security aspect therefore, but to me it doesn't make sense unless you can deliver a better experience to the end customer than he had before, and that means IOPs. If you can do Android desktops you're in the money today though.
The fine article holds an example of a technology that requires less power per transistor or unit of area. I recommend reading it if you can find the time. It's not the only such.
I was thinking millions of layers rather than thousands of course, but we'll start with two. That's the way of such things. Remember that at the same time we're going vertical the process size will still be shrinking with advancements in process technologies. We won't need any cache because the RAM will be inside the CPU - it will all be cache. Some of the technologies that cost a lot of power to get around the fact that some parts are "far" will go away because the processor will be folded into three dimensions.
Of course this deep in the thread it's entirely possible I'm talking to somebody who knows more about the physics involved than I do.
Tens of thousands of IOPs (assuming a reasonable block size and write fraction) is a typical metric for a single industry standard server running consolidated workloads with dual Westmere processors and 192GB of RAM. For the same single server doing VDI in an 8AM boot storm condition it's nowhere near enough. Servers aren't going to become less capable next year, and high end servers with 64 cores and 2TB of RAM can already grind that much spinning disc SAN to dust today, saturating bandwidth, disk, cache and processor simultaneously. God forbid you should connect that SAN to a blade system with 16 such servers, let alone a few racks of them. The poor thing would give up.
I hear the RAMSAN dishes the IOPs, but it's spendy.
They're all over that. As the transistors shrink they give off less heat. New transistor technologies also use less energy each per square nanometer, and there's new ones in the pipe. Not all of the parts of a CPU, SSD cell or RAM chip are working at the same time so intelligent distribution of the loads give more thermal savings. Then there are new technologies for conducting the heat out of the hotspots, including using artificial diamond as a substrate rather than silicon, or as an intermediary electrical isolation layer as well as a thermal conductor. If they can solve the carbon or silicon layer deposition issues the thermal issues will be OK.
An interesting evolution of 3D in semiconductors will be leveraging different parts of the processor in three dimensions. This should resolve many of the speed-of-light and latency issues designers have struggled with for some years.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they can't. It's the quality of the results that makes Google search useful. Such an attack would eliminate the value of Google's product- credibility - and only destroy themselves. They would then be just another Bing. They know this, so this can't happen.
Dave Heiner, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. You're looking for Paragraph 6 if the whole thing is TL;DR. Completely admits they've been behind some of these hijinks at the DOJ and the European Commission, and so on.
I think the point of that particular line was that if you're choosing a language to program in, one that's more unpleasant than is needful probably should be your first choice. We're pretty spoiled these days.
Ah, yes. There is much wisdom to be found in "The Tao of Programming". For example:
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
The subtle nuances of the various rights, whether to whistle four notes from a song is infringing based on where and when it's done. With hundreds of years of case law precedents to follow, thousands of pages of legal jargon, each a solid rule for "this is mine, all mine!" This leads to a need for an experienced intellectual property law guide, one who can navigate through the shoals of rights - or better yet one who knows that if you want to call someone a thief there's a law for it somewhere.
We'd be better off if we just led such people into the desert and left them there.
What is the best in life?
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Nothing less than to abolish copyright will do. Copyrights and patents prevent progress in the sciences and the useful arts. They were an experiment that utterly failed.
Seems Microsoft actually has people that know their market better than slashdot UID #646467.
Snirk. Yeah, that would totally explain Vista and Kin, Plays For Now, Zune and Bing. They have Vision. They have Skills. They are Learned in the arts of the graphs and the Powerpoints. If they only spend a few more tens of $Billions on awkward ads, they can put it over. You so totally dominated me with your argument I must defer to your superior knowledge.
At this point there's nobody reading this but you and me so it's ok to get a little off-topic.
When you're finding in the charts the information you want to find regardless of the later outcome, you might as well be looking at Tarot cards or bird entrails. It's clear you and I are not going to agree on how to project the uptake curve of W7 against XP. I see W7 at 15 to 20% at the end of July, nearly a year after RTM, and having gotten nearly all of that from the much reviled and structurally similar Windows Vista. The plateau is plain as day. Though the Vista base continues to erode, adoption by XP users is levelling off and it never was much. To expect to get from 20% to 50% in another year would presume an upward curve to the line rather than the levelling one that is shown. I'll go ahead and project that W7 will not achieve 50% share on an average of the top five metrics in CY2011. Hell, I'll go ahead and say it won't get 40% as measured in the single month December 2011 in an average of the top five metrics. I'd go as far as to bet a beer on it. A risky thing, this fortune telling is. I can't delete this slashdot comment, so if I'm wrong you'll be able to throw it in my face forever after, and that means a lot to me.
Microsoft has renewed the family pack offer for W7, but you still have to have W7 capable hardware in order to be even slightly interested. Some people may be buying new hardware and unable to avoid W7, but they're handing their old hardware down mostly, so each unit should count only as a half-step rather than a whole one. To get a whole step that old PC has to go in the landfill rather than being given away or resold on Ebay, and I don't see that happening. XP may be discontinued, but "W7 pre-downgraded to XP" seems to be a popular netbook option even today, particularly on Intel Atom netbooks which don't run W7 well. Considering that XP is in fact still selling well at retail calls the lie to its demise in the context of browser share. Those are backsteps that cost double. Microsoft may want us to let go of XP, but internally one must presume they are conflicted since W7 doesn't work well on a netbook and they don't want to dismiss the migration to mobile because that's where the crowd is going. If the OS is still for sale on emerging platforms today, how dead could it be? A lot of users still use W2K because they have apps from dead companies that they still need to do what they do, and W2K had a relatively brief moment of dominance compared to XP. XP in actual use is going to be a significant share for a very long time, even if people have to license W7 to get it.
And then there's the migration to mobile. We're going to ARM. We're giving up on Intel, the storied company that brought forth the computer revolution, founded by the inventor of the transistor, just to get away from you. That's got to make you proud.
But yeah, internally in Redmond go ahead and spread the word that W7 is being embraced by the masses, that XP is seen by the bloggerati as completely croaked. We need you to be oblivious to Android on the desktop and as a VDI solution so that when it's time to lead you out behind the barn you come along meekly. The more you make your own apps incompatible with your own operating systems the better off we are.
Wait, there's also the operators "^" and "/" to consider. Maybe those are the variables.
Paint it pretty as you like. They're either unable or unwilling to build it for 70% of the world's platforms. Neither speaks well for the company or the product.
Here's a nice pdf archived by wikimedia that shows where the problem is: AOL/NCSA Online Safety Study (2004).
I can't believe I'd never seen this before today.
IE9 may as well be Mac software for most people. It will only work in Windows 7 and Vista.
If you're deploying even one unit of any OS and aren't customizing the heck out of it, you are negligent. The defaults are never appropriate. BSD may be an exception, but I don't know of any others.
Give some of this money to artists? That's crazy talk. The media companies have expenses and the artists have signed contracts for net after expenses. The levy could be over $100 per Brazilian (which would of course be hundreds of $Brazilians) and there would still be no net profit. The media giants are going to need vast buckets of money to pay their lawers to sue each other over the fractions, and probably have so little left they'll be buying their cocaine by the ounce rather than the kilo. They'll be so improverished they'll probably have to procure second-tier hookers to snort their blow off of (artist management entertainment expense). To expect them to have money left to pay artists is unfair.
And artists with no contract? Why would they get money even if their content is an appreciable proportion of the shared content? They don't have representation.
The question I have is, is $1.74 a month fair? No doubt once the media conglomerates have gained a levy tap on connectivity they'll need to open it a bit to improve their profits and "right size" the payment - which is only fair since they contribute so much to the culture and bandwidth is improving over time. Under two bucks a month per connected citizen seems far too little to preserve our culture and enterprise-class multisite archival of these priceless works doesn't come cheap. They're probably agreeing to this agregiously unfair compensation scheme as a foundation for their right to levy fees as tax. Once it's in place it's natural they'll push for fair compensation rather than this modest placeholder.
DRM is essential to preserving the motivation of these artists to create. If there was no DRM, common folk might be stealing their output rather than studio executives. That's hardly fair. Artists are motivated to preserve the studio executives' right to consume vast quantities of cocaine off the asses of the best hookers their art can motivate their fans to pay for. That's why they create these timeless works of art to preserved by copyright in perpetuity protected by the conglomerates they assigned their rights to in return for a modest advance payment. It's a selfless dedication to the indulgence of the media moguls' decadent tastes that motivates the modern artist to create the works we know and love. What every garage band craves is that their agent and his media contact fly to their venues in a decent jet rather than trudge it out on the aging decrepit rented tour bus with them, stinking of stale beer and groupie sweat.
Obviously the fair thing to do is to grant the media cooperative direct access to the national bank so they can levy their compensation against the GDP as they feel is appropriate. Also, remote management of every device capable of playing or recording audio or video should be required so that they can measure and account for usage. To be completely fair, remote access to every camera on every device so they can monitor the environment of net-enabled people is best. That way they can judge whether environmental music fees are due in domestic venues. One can never tell if people are publishing car audio for example, unless they can survey whether the windows are down in the car by looking throught the iPhone webcam.
The iPad is only a few months old. We'll be finding new uses for it for a long time. Now that the order backlog is done we should start to see enterprises, schools and whole nations ordering them in bulk for various purposes. I'm already seeing them as premiums with a new car purchase, door prizes, SWAG and so on.
If it's OK to do this with a game you like a lot, with terms hidden deep in the fine print of the EULA, then it's also OK for every cheesy browser plugin and toolbar extension and Java Applet.
Sure, you're OK with one hidden P2P client on your system. How would you feel about 175 of them?
This is basically what I did except that I left it with the basic log in, click icon experience. The keyboards and mice are going to die, weekly. Get over it. Go to the computer surplus store and buy them by the 24-pack and save yourself some stress. Headphones from the dollar store. I get the PCs at surplus too, and fix them up - you can get a 3Ghz P4 for $20 now on Ebay, and it's right as rain with a couple 1GB DIMMS. They get their own PC at two. At five I expect them to maintain it. By seven or eight, simple repairs like replacing a drive or video card should be in their skillset. The older kids don't have any trouble installing an OS or building out a home network while they're still in Middle School. Usually by High School we're comparing code.
For the first few weeks or so the kids had to have help to log in and launch their websites and apps. They figured out how to do it because they didn't want to wait for mom & dad to get up on Saturday mornings. We didn't teach them how - they figured it out from watching and doing. My youngest daughter just turned four and she now navigates the web about as well as some experienced office workers I've known. Her reading skills are about par for a fourth grader. Not everybody is going to get these results - my kids are, well, precocious. They're also self-centered greedy little monsters with poor interpersonal skills - but I can live with that. They take after their dad.
The ipod is, as no doubt has been mentioned above, also cool for the younger set if you must buy today. My six year old son played with it for five minutes, then summoned his mom so he could teach her how to use it. As I type this he's right next to me teaching his little sister how to browse YouTube. It's awesome to watch him figure out ways to work the thing that I don't know about - and I've had it for months. It took my daughter about five seconds to figure out how to roll back a video. She just said "I wish we had another one of those." I'll probably be buying tablets for Christmas. It's pretty much the same with everybody I show this iPad to. They get it intuitively and want it immediately. I wish I had a deal to sell the things - that would be easy money.
Before anybody bashes me for being an Apple fanboi, I'm not. I don't have Apples at home. This thing is from work, and from my point of view the iPad is about work. Its real purpose is remote management of my servers and as a thin client for VDI demos with Citrix. I also use it to pull up reference docs, do slideshows, show network diagrams and web management interfaces and other stuff for work. That it does Hi-Def Netflix and streams videos over the network effortlessly is just bonus. We like it, but I'm probably holding out for Android tablets under my tree. I like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but it's only available in the 3G version through mobile carriers and there's no way I'm splurging on the mobile contracts. That would be too much money. We don't need that anyway - all of our phones do Wi-fi tethering so we would have Internet on the go with a wi-fi tablet and don't need the extra bill. For some of us I'd like 10 inch displays and for some 7 inch, but I'm OK with widescreen for all. For gifts for the Fam, Webcam chat is a must-have but cellular contracts are a no-go. Any display pixel technology is ok if the rez is nice and high, but we're going capacitive multitouch rather than resistive touch on the screens - the responsiveness is more important than the resolution, and multitouch is awesome. If the right Android tablets don't come out in time at the right price point, well, I guess we'll have to settle for iPads but I won't be happy about it.
One chip that takes a whole 300mm wafer? I'm thinking it's cheap enough for satellite astronomers.
Maybe they could sell some advertising space on their website. I hear they get a lot of traffic.
In Malthus' day there were only a billion humans. By happenstance, today there are almost exactly a billion undernourished humans out of our teeming 6 billion according to the WHO. It seems unlikely that we'll get to 36 billion souls 200 years from now, but if we do it seems nearly certain that there will be as many starving then as are alive today at least.
No, really.
I must admit that Linux adoption seems to have slowed and the amount of press has considerably declined.
Hm. Last I heard Google was moving over 200,000 units a day just with Android, and that all together the different versions of Linux accounted for a full half of all smartphone operating systems. I also heard that the rate continues to accellerate.
Linux does not appear to be slowing down. Instead it looks like Linux is leading the shift to mobile platforms, a full peer with Apple.
I would guess your experience is atypical, but you seem to have a good handle on the metrics. It seems likely your servers aren't maxing their I/O, so you're distributing the load appropriately to get good response times for your use case. I'll bet those servers could grind up your SAN if they tried. The HP EVA (all versions) maxes out at 8x 72GB SSD's per array so you're unlikely to get a lot of VDI images on that after it's RAIDed and carved into LUNs. A single W7 image runs 10GB or more with Office. Even with smartclones most people need several images for production and several more for test/dev and that capacity runs out quick.
You're right on the VDI TCO calc too. We need that cheap SSD SAN to bring the storage cost down. RAM is still a bit high, and with ASLR and large memory pages you don't get the returns on RAM dedupe that VMWare would like to advertise, so the RAM requirements are the same and in VDI it's more expensive RAM than the desktop replacement RAM that's the alternative. Most of the sales folk are pushing the manageability and security aspect therefore, but to me it doesn't make sense unless you can deliver a better experience to the end customer than he had before, and that means IOPs. If you can do Android desktops you're in the money today though.
It's late, and I'm off to bed. G'nite.
The fine article holds an example of a technology that requires less power per transistor or unit of area. I recommend reading it if you can find the time. It's not the only such.
I was thinking millions of layers rather than thousands of course, but we'll start with two. That's the way of such things. Remember that at the same time we're going vertical the process size will still be shrinking with advancements in process technologies. We won't need any cache because the RAM will be inside the CPU - it will all be cache. Some of the technologies that cost a lot of power to get around the fact that some parts are "far" will go away because the processor will be folded into three dimensions.
Of course this deep in the thread it's entirely possible I'm talking to somebody who knows more about the physics involved than I do.
Tens of thousands of IOPs (assuming a reasonable block size and write fraction) is a typical metric for a single industry standard server running consolidated workloads with dual Westmere processors and 192GB of RAM. For the same single server doing VDI in an 8AM boot storm condition it's nowhere near enough. Servers aren't going to become less capable next year, and high end servers with 64 cores and 2TB of RAM can already grind that much spinning disc SAN to dust today, saturating bandwidth, disk, cache and processor simultaneously. God forbid you should connect that SAN to a blade system with 16 such servers, let alone a few racks of them. The poor thing would give up.
I hear the RAMSAN dishes the IOPs, but it's spendy.
They're all over that. As the transistors shrink they give off less heat. New transistor technologies also use less energy each per square nanometer, and there's new ones in the pipe. Not all of the parts of a CPU, SSD cell or RAM chip are working at the same time so intelligent distribution of the loads give more thermal savings. Then there are new technologies for conducting the heat out of the hotspots, including using artificial diamond as a substrate rather than silicon, or as an intermediary electrical isolation layer as well as a thermal conductor. If they can solve the carbon or silicon layer deposition issues the thermal issues will be OK.
An interesting evolution of 3D in semiconductors will be leveraging different parts of the processor in three dimensions. This should resolve many of the speed-of-light and latency issues designers have struggled with for some years.