Not to be too critical, but did you actually read all of the post you responded to? I know expecting one to read the summary is a bit much, and expecting one to read the fine article is completely out of the question on modern slashdot, but at least reading the comment you're responding to still seems to be a reasonable expectation.
And if you do need a big SSD Kingston has had a laptop 512GB SSD out since May with huge performance, and this month Toshiba and Samsung will both step up to compete and bring the price down. We're getting close to retiring mechanical media in the first tier. Intel's research shows failure rates of SSD at 10% that of mechanical media. Google will probably have a whitepaper out in the next six months on this issue too.
This is essential because for server consolidation and VDI the storage bottleneck has become an impassable gate with spinning media. These SSDs are being used in shared storage devices (SANs) to deliver the IOPs required to solve this problem. Because incumbent vendors make millions from each of their racks-of-disks SANs, they're not about to migrate to inexpensive SSD, so you'll see SAN products from startups take the field here. The surest way to get your startup bought by an old-school SAN vendor for $Billions is to put a custom derivative of OpenFiler on a dense rack of these SSDs and dish it up as block storage over the user's choice of FC, iSCSI or Infiniband as well as NFS and SAMBA file based storage. To get the best bang for the buck, adapt the BackBlaze box for SFF SSD drives. Remember to architect for differences in drive bandwidths or you'll build in bottlenecks that will be hard to overcome later and drive business to your competitors with more forethought. Hint: When you're striping in a Commit-on-Write log-based storage architecture it's OK to oversubscribe individual drive bandwiths in your fanout to a certain multiple because the blocking issue is latency, not bandwidth. For extra credit, implement deduplication and back the SSD storage with supercapacitors and/or an immense battery powered write cache RAM for nearly instantaneous reliable write commits.
I should probably file for a patent on that, but I won't. If you want to then let me suggest "aggregation of common architectures to create synergistic fusion catalysts for progress" as a working title.
That leaves the network bandwidth problem to solve, but I guess I can leave that for another post.
All of the tech we actually purchase comes out of tech published in articles like this one. Processor process technologies, bus evolutions, memory architectures, advancements in lithography are printed here and wind up in the products you buy. Not all of the articles are successful technologies but all of the successful technologies have articles and the time reading about the failures are the price we pay to know about such things in advance. Most of us don't mind, because there are lessons in failures too. Did you read the top of the page where it says "News for nerds."? Are you lost?
They see they've missed the transition to mobile, they feel their empire slipping away. Deliberate incompatibility isn't working any more, so this is the change-up. Don't be confused though - as an entity Microsoft still sees open source as "open sores" - a cancer, in Steve Ballmer's words. They just realize that in some markets they have to be more diplomatic now.
In others? Well I'll just quote the first comment from the fine article:
Nicer? Not really!
Here is an excerpt from an invitation for a seminar by Microsoft in Budapest/Hungary on 8.30.2010.
"Program:
9:30 - 10:30 The art of selling against free, opensource Office competitors by Moritz Berger /
Enterprise Tech Strategist (in English)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 - 12:00 Technical teardown of OpenOffice by Moritz Berger / Enterprise Tech Strategist"
by Anonymous (not verified) on 8/30/10 at 4:43 pm
I get these invitations from Microsoft too. Everybody in tech does. If they want to fool the public into believing they're all about competing on an open field they're going to have to get all of their messaging in-line everywhere, because we have this "Internet" thing now.
When we run out of possibilities in shrinking the process we go vertical and take advantage of the third dimension. Moore's law is safe for a good long time.
This tech is still several years out from production but other 3D silicon options are in testing, and some are in production.
When the Z density matches the X and Y density in fifteen years or so we'll be ready for optical or quantum tech.
I hate to bust your bubble, but it ain't over. It could be years yet before the shambling hulk is chopped to bits, burned and its ashes scattered. At least twice there have been property transfers that could resurrect the case once that's done.
This one could be with us for a long while yet. Dammit.
If you had such a huge responsibility and needed to make plans that took decades to complete you would be frustrated by being reorganized and reprioritized each time we changed presidential administrations. And that's just the president. Their funding comes through the Congress, which to them must seem like being funded by a squabbling raucous gang of greedy fourth graders.
They now face the prospect that whatever they do they can't plan missions that lift off later than 2017 with any degree of confidence, and even 2013 with as much confidence as they would like. It's sad that America's space effort depends on this nonsense, but there it is.
They wouldn't. There only way bringing asteroid minerals to Earth is economically feasible is in a situation where the important consideration is which cities they wipe out when they arrive. For everything else, getting the equipment out of our gravity well costs far more than sifting a mountain of terrestrial ore for your kilo of unobtainium.
The most important mineral for asteroid mining is water. That makes the likely target Ceres, since it's mostly water. The water would be used for drinking of course, and fuel, and air. Water is also used in much refining operations because it's a solvent. Ceres would make a nice spaceport too and is likely littered with billions of asteroids from impacts. That's probably preferable to hunting all over the asteroid belt for them. That would give a huge amount of data as well as provide the necessary other minerals in a low gravity field. After that, all kinds of metals. But these things aren't for return to Earth - they're for use in the interplanetary economy. If humans are to establish an interplanetary culture we'll need to have the facility to make all sorts of things in space - up to and including foundries.
Since Ceres is so big there should be ample opportunity to dig ice caves or something for shelter on a future mission, and it's not likely to have frequent impacts. Escape velocity is 500m/s, which isn't too bad.
The unmanned dawn mission launched in 2007 will arrive at Ceres in 2015, hopefully set up orbit and begin surveying the dwarf planet.
I didn't phrase that as gracefully as I should have, you're right. I'm sure Intel is as frustrated with the situation as consumers are. They want to sell lots of chips. They want to win in the tablet and mobile space. As he said, they're promoting Moblin and MeeGo and other stuff, which would actually be pretty cool on an Atom chip. If that stuff shipped it would move a grip of units.
But the OS that ships on the platform isn't selected by the processor vendor. It's selected by the OEM. No large OEM is going to ship a credible Linux mobile platform on Intel processors. Be realistic. It's just not going to happen. So what we get instead is sample quantities of overpriced underperforming Windows on tablets that don't sell well enough to get economies of scale. And some interesting niche gear from third tier vendors. That's it. And the Atom platforms don't take off like they should, because they really are very nice gear. Intel gets to sit out the migration to mobile, not because they didn't give with the engineering, but because of this very issue.
I never said Intel was pushing Windows. I don't think they are.
I didn't say Intel was pushing Windows. Intel's interest and motion are irrelevant to the question. To pretend you don't know this is to pretend to be ignorant of one of the primary factors controlling the market. If the platform will run Windows - no matter how poorly - it will come with Windows. Therefore the Atom is less interesting as a platform because with Windows the experience is poor. If Intel wants to get people excited, they should make a low power mobile CPU that's not Windows compatible.
Atom is doing much better these days on the power budget, though of course you're right the Atom chips aren't quite there yet. The ARM chips are clocking up and multi-coring up which increases their power needs so there's an vector intersect here. At the rate they're going they will approach ARM soon, maybe next year. The reason why I'm not hopeful for any product with Atoms being in my mobile arsenal is quite simple. Intel platforms run Windows. If the platform runs Windows, the manufacturers will be "encouraged" to ship with Windows to the exclusion of all else. At that point my desires for Utility, practicality, features and benefits, security and stability are lower in precedence to getting the thing to run Windows. If it can run Windows, it ships with Windows, no matter how bad the user experience is, no matter if it doesn't meet the consumer's need.
I prefer a product with its utility to me as the primary design factor. After that, maybe safety. The business interests of third parties completely unrelated to the transaction isn't just not in the top five, it had better not even be considered. Unless Intel makes the Atom incompatible with Windows, Atom is not for me in a lifestyle device. I do like to play with them in my lab though.
We like the Gates Borg icon. That's enough. It's not denigrating. The Borg are powerful and near immortal, technologically far superior.
It speaks to the power of Microsoft's business model of innovation through acquisition, their dominant influence in all the fields they enter.
Bill Gates is still Chairman of the Board so he helps set policy at the highest level. He's the largest stockholder. He formulated the business strategies that persist to this day being executed less subtly by others. As the iconic figurehead he still talks on Microsoft's behalf to the general public, heads of state, Congress. He's still a public speaker promoting their interests. He is not gone.
In a sudden break from tradition Microsoft has announced a new strategy: Open Systems. A keystone of this system will be the idea that for progress to occur in the information processing space of the future, separate and independent entities must be able to work together cooperatively. By publishing some components of their systems they hope to create a new field: a Free and Open Software System. For now some trivial portions of their proprietary works will remain a company secret, but they hope the rest of the world will join them in adopting this new model.
Speaking at a Redmond press conference, Microsoft Open Systems spokesman Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf said: "Although Microsoft's software has always had fully open specifications, independent software vendors have been respond in kind. This makes it difficult to integrate our offerrings with things like Google Docs and Facebook. By making more information available under free software licenses we hope to create a groundswell of support for this new model. Microsoft will leverage our innovation in this field to bring about a new era of cooperation and rapid innovation."
Actually, even dead-simple basic security like closing ports by default, reducing default services, not including the current working directory in the executable or library search paths, not auto-running anything, reducing app attack surface by turning off embedded format decode by default and a vast many other things are completely off the table at Microsoft. Doing security breaks backward compatibility. It removes popular features, and the fact that the features are in and of themselves the security vulnerability makes it a no go.
They see these essential vulnerabilities a large part of their value-add. It's not that they're afraid - it's that basic security primitives we've known about for decades are antithetical to their culture. As long as they hold that strategic position, discussing minor tactical matters like how they compose applications for security is simply a waste of time.
That's not the GPL's fault. It's the fault of the IP lawyers who are dicing permissions exceedingly fine. The GPL is designed to guarantee certain freedoms at the cost of others. It does its job very well, and is well architected with a lot of forethought considering we're only on version three after 21 years. At least one of those two revisions can be blamed not on the faults of the license but on the changing legal and IP environment.
Believe it or not once upon a time if you wrote some code somebody found interesting you just sent it to them. No patents. No copyrights. No approvals from management or legal. You just sent it, happy that someone else might benefit from not redoing the work you'd done once already. The idea of profiting from the derivatives they might make, or the derivatives of the derivatives, was simply not an idea that would occur to a normal person. If you had suggested such a thing at that time we'd have thought it hilarious.
And now I have to point to the onion on my belt, which was the fashion in my day.
Starting? HP Blades have had dual 10Gbps Ethernet ports on the motherboard for over a year. They're starting to have dual FCoE ports now. AFAIK, when the ports come integrated on the motherboard we can consider them mainstream.
Like this: "I approve of this sentiment and approve wholeheartedly this comment." Typically this statement can be summarized in a number of ways for brevity, such as:
THIS
What he said
Me too
MOD PARENT UP
Typically one would append some sort of affirmative punctuation as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be too critical, but did you actually read all of the post you responded to? I know expecting one to read the summary is a bit much, and expecting one to read the fine article is completely out of the question on modern slashdot, but at least reading the comment you're responding to still seems to be a reasonable expectation.
And if you do need a big SSD Kingston has had a laptop 512GB SSD out since May with huge performance, and this month Toshiba and Samsung will both step up to compete and bring the price down. We're getting close to retiring mechanical media in the first tier. Intel's research shows failure rates of SSD at 10% that of mechanical media. Google will probably have a whitepaper out in the next six months on this issue too.
This is essential because for server consolidation and VDI the storage bottleneck has become an impassable gate with spinning media. These SSDs are being used in shared storage devices (SANs) to deliver the IOPs required to solve this problem. Because incumbent vendors make millions from each of their racks-of-disks SANs, they're not about to migrate to inexpensive SSD, so you'll see SAN products from startups take the field here. The surest way to get your startup bought by an old-school SAN vendor for $Billions is to put a custom derivative of OpenFiler on a dense rack of these SSDs and dish it up as block storage over the user's choice of FC, iSCSI or Infiniband as well as NFS and SAMBA file based storage. To get the best bang for the buck, adapt the BackBlaze box for SFF SSD drives. Remember to architect for differences in drive bandwidths or you'll build in bottlenecks that will be hard to overcome later and drive business to your competitors with more forethought. Hint: When you're striping in a Commit-on-Write log-based storage architecture it's OK to oversubscribe individual drive bandwiths in your fanout to a certain multiple because the blocking issue is latency, not bandwidth. For extra credit, implement deduplication and back the SSD storage with supercapacitors and/or an immense battery powered write cache RAM for nearly instantaneous reliable write commits.
I should probably file for a patent on that, but I won't. If you want to then let me suggest "aggregation of common architectures to create synergistic fusion catalysts for progress" as a working title.
That leaves the network bandwidth problem to solve, but I guess I can leave that for another post.
All of the tech we actually purchase comes out of tech published in articles like this one. Processor process technologies, bus evolutions, memory architectures, advancements in lithography are printed here and wind up in the products you buy. Not all of the articles are successful technologies but all of the successful technologies have articles and the time reading about the failures are the price we pay to know about such things in advance. Most of us don't mind, because there are lessons in failures too. Did you read the top of the page where it says "News for nerds."? Are you lost?
Digg is over here.
They see they've missed the transition to mobile, they feel their empire slipping away. Deliberate incompatibility isn't working any more, so this is the change-up. Don't be confused though - as an entity Microsoft still sees open source as "open sores" - a cancer, in Steve Ballmer's words. They just realize that in some markets they have to be more diplomatic now.
In others? Well I'll just quote the first comment from the fine article:
Nicer? Not really! Here is an excerpt from an invitation for a seminar by Microsoft in Budapest/Hungary on 8.30.2010. "Program: 9:30 - 10:30 The art of selling against free, opensource Office competitors by Moritz Berger / Enterprise Tech Strategist (in English) 10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break 11:00 - 12:00 Technical teardown of OpenOffice by Moritz Berger / Enterprise Tech Strategist" by Anonymous (not verified) on 8/30/10 at 4:43 pm
I get these invitations from Microsoft too. Everybody in tech does. If they want to fool the public into believing they're all about competing on an open field they're going to have to get all of their messaging in-line everywhere, because we have this "Internet" thing now.
When we run out of possibilities in shrinking the process we go vertical and take advantage of the third dimension. Moore's law is safe for a good long time.
This tech is still several years out from production but other 3D silicon options are in testing, and some are in production.
When the Z density matches the X and Y density in fifteen years or so we'll be ready for optical or quantum tech.
In the recent months MSFT has been pushing PHP on IIS...
If this isn't evil, I don't know what is.
Oh, yeah it's a trap. It's always a trap.
Sorry, I read that as "liquify" the first time. I would definitely PPV that.
I hate to bust your bubble, but it ain't over. It could be years yet before the shambling hulk is chopped to bits, burned and its ashes scattered. At least twice there have been property transfers that could resurrect the case once that's done.
This one could be with us for a long while yet. Dammit.
If you had such a huge responsibility and needed to make plans that took decades to complete you would be frustrated by being reorganized and reprioritized each time we changed presidential administrations. And that's just the president. Their funding comes through the Congress, which to them must seem like being funded by a squabbling raucous gang of greedy fourth graders.
They now face the prospect that whatever they do they can't plan missions that lift off later than 2017 with any degree of confidence, and even 2013 with as much confidence as they would like. It's sad that America's space effort depends on this nonsense, but there it is.
They wouldn't. There only way bringing asteroid minerals to Earth is economically feasible is in a situation where the important consideration is which cities they wipe out when they arrive. For everything else, getting the equipment out of our gravity well costs far more than sifting a mountain of terrestrial ore for your kilo of unobtainium.
The most important mineral for asteroid mining is water. That makes the likely target Ceres, since it's mostly water. The water would be used for drinking of course, and fuel, and air. Water is also used in much refining operations because it's a solvent. Ceres would make a nice spaceport too and is likely littered with billions of asteroids from impacts. That's probably preferable to hunting all over the asteroid belt for them. That would give a huge amount of data as well as provide the necessary other minerals in a low gravity field. After that, all kinds of metals. But these things aren't for return to Earth - they're for use in the interplanetary economy. If humans are to establish an interplanetary culture we'll need to have the facility to make all sorts of things in space - up to and including foundries.
Since Ceres is so big there should be ample opportunity to dig ice caves or something for shelter on a future mission, and it's not likely to have frequent impacts. Escape velocity is 500m/s, which isn't too bad.
The unmanned dawn mission launched in 2007 will arrive at Ceres in 2015, hopefully set up orbit and begin surveying the dwarf planet.
I didn't phrase that as gracefully as I should have, you're right. I'm sure Intel is as frustrated with the situation as consumers are. They want to sell lots of chips. They want to win in the tablet and mobile space. As he said, they're promoting Moblin and MeeGo and other stuff, which would actually be pretty cool on an Atom chip. If that stuff shipped it would move a grip of units.
But the OS that ships on the platform isn't selected by the processor vendor. It's selected by the OEM. No large OEM is going to ship a credible Linux mobile platform on Intel processors. Be realistic. It's just not going to happen. So what we get instead is sample quantities of overpriced underperforming Windows on tablets that don't sell well enough to get economies of scale. And some interesting niche gear from third tier vendors. That's it. And the Atom platforms don't take off like they should, because they really are very nice gear. Intel gets to sit out the migration to mobile, not because they didn't give with the engineering, but because of this very issue.
I never said Intel was pushing Windows. I don't think they are.
Also, 1985 may have been more than 15 years ago.
I didn't say Intel was pushing Windows. Intel's interest and motion are irrelevant to the question. To pretend you don't know this is to pretend to be ignorant of one of the primary factors controlling the market. If the platform will run Windows - no matter how poorly - it will come with Windows. Therefore the Atom is less interesting as a platform because with Windows the experience is poor. If Intel wants to get people excited, they should make a low power mobile CPU that's not Windows compatible.
Atom is doing much better these days on the power budget, though of course you're right the Atom chips aren't quite there yet. The ARM chips are clocking up and multi-coring up which increases their power needs so there's an vector intersect here. At the rate they're going they will approach ARM soon, maybe next year. The reason why I'm not hopeful for any product with Atoms being in my mobile arsenal is quite simple. Intel platforms run Windows. If the platform runs Windows, the manufacturers will be "encouraged" to ship with Windows to the exclusion of all else. At that point my desires for Utility, practicality, features and benefits, security and stability are lower in precedence to getting the thing to run Windows. If it can run Windows, it ships with Windows, no matter how bad the user experience is, no matter if it doesn't meet the consumer's need.
I prefer a product with its utility to me as the primary design factor. After that, maybe safety. The business interests of third parties completely unrelated to the transaction isn't just not in the top five, it had better not even be considered. Unless Intel makes the Atom incompatible with Windows, Atom is not for me in a lifestyle device. I do like to play with them in my lab though.
I would love to see stories like this tagged "oldmanyellsatcloud".
We like the Gates Borg icon. That's enough. It's not denigrating. The Borg are powerful and near immortal, technologically far superior.
It speaks to the power of Microsoft's business model of innovation through acquisition, their dominant influence in all the fields they enter.
Bill Gates is still Chairman of the Board so he helps set policy at the highest level. He's the largest stockholder. He formulated the business strategies that persist to this day being executed less subtly by others. As the iconic figurehead he still talks on Microsoft's behalf to the general public, heads of state, Congress. He's still a public speaker promoting their interests. He is not gone.
The GatesBorg icon should stay.
Dateline: Redmond, August 29, 2010.
In a sudden break from tradition Microsoft has announced a new strategy: Open Systems. A keystone of this system will be the idea that for progress to occur in the information processing space of the future, separate and independent entities must be able to work together cooperatively. By publishing some components of their systems they hope to create a new field: a Free and Open Software System. For now some trivial portions of their proprietary works will remain a company secret, but they hope the rest of the world will join them in adopting this new model.
Speaking at a Redmond press conference, Microsoft Open Systems spokesman Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf said: "Although Microsoft's software has always had fully open specifications, independent software vendors have been respond in kind. This makes it difficult to integrate our offerrings with things like Google Docs and Facebook. By making more information available under free software licenses we hope to create a groundswell of support for this new model. Microsoft will leverage our innovation in this field to bring about a new era of cooperation and rapid innovation."
Actually, even dead-simple basic security like closing ports by default, reducing default services, not including the current working directory in the executable or library search paths, not auto-running anything, reducing app attack surface by turning off embedded format decode by default and a vast many other things are completely off the table at Microsoft. Doing security breaks backward compatibility. It removes popular features, and the fact that the features are in and of themselves the security vulnerability makes it a no go.
They see these essential vulnerabilities a large part of their value-add. It's not that they're afraid - it's that basic security primitives we've known about for decades are antithetical to their culture. As long as they hold that strategic position, discussing minor tactical matters like how they compose applications for security is simply a waste of time.
This is not the Special Olympics.
That's not the GPL's fault. It's the fault of the IP lawyers who are dicing permissions exceedingly fine. The GPL is designed to guarantee certain freedoms at the cost of others. It does its job very well, and is well architected with a lot of forethought considering we're only on version three after 21 years. At least one of those two revisions can be blamed not on the faults of the license but on the changing legal and IP environment.
Believe it or not once upon a time if you wrote some code somebody found interesting you just sent it to them. No patents. No copyrights. No approvals from management or legal. You just sent it, happy that someone else might benefit from not redoing the work you'd done once already. The idea of profiting from the derivatives they might make, or the derivatives of the derivatives, was simply not an idea that would occur to a normal person. If you had suggested such a thing at that time we'd have thought it hilarious.
And now I have to point to the onion on my belt, which was the fashion in my day.
No, Sun used CDDL to be deliberately incompatible with the GPL because they knew the good bits would get assimilated into Linux if they didn't.
Starting? HP Blades have had dual 10Gbps Ethernet ports on the motherboard for over a year. They're starting to have dual FCoE ports now. AFAIK, when the ports come integrated on the motherboard we can consider them mainstream.
Too little, too late. Long live WebM.
How do you even reply to a comment like this?
Like this: "I approve of this sentiment and approve wholeheartedly this comment." Typically this statement can be summarized in a number of ways for brevity, such as:
Typically one would append some sort of affirmative punctuation as well.
Now instead of an autorun that says 'do nothing' to launch my evil .exe, I have to plant a standard file format and an evil .dll on the pen.
That's like a whole extra step. It could take almost as long as typing this comment did.
Remember to submit a followup article, win or lose. The outcome will be interesting.