And the eternal copyright of such essential works as "100 Polka Classics: The Greatest Accordion Collection On Earth" have turned me off of commercial music for good. There is no way that anybody involved in that making that work got paid if I pay to download it.
BTW: Track 41 isn't bad: "Yes, we have no bananas."
Computing power is about transistor density, so he's right in a way. At least it is if the transistors are well used. If the transistors are not well used then Moore's law is about waste. "Our ability to waste processing power will double every two years" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Alan Turing didn't use Windows. The sight of it might have caused him to kill himself.
A point I wouldn't argue. Like I said, the MSA is inadequate for this task - as is the EVA. We're talking about an entirely different tier of performance storage here. You're not going to hit 250K IOPs in an EVA, no matter what you put in it.
He's got a point - the embedded RAID controllers in boxes like the HP MSA70 just aren't up to the challenge of sustaining the IOPS of SSDs. They weren't designed for that, so you can't get a million I/Os per second by accident. You have to know what you're doing and build out an architecture that can support it.
OTOH: Who pays 100K for one of those? That has to be including the Enterprise 120GB SSD's at $4k each, right?
There are quite often deserts that verge on the sea, and this is one. It's green because of imported water, not because of precipitation. OK - it's just barely not a desert - the dictionary definition of desert is 10" of annual rainfall and they get 12". I grew up there and I can tell you how much water falls from the sky matters little - the rainfall is toxic. There's no green space to speak of for it to fall on so the storm drains carry it out to sea. If there were groundwater you would not want to drink it, trust me. There's not a non-irrigated plant within 50 miles of there, and that irrigation water comes from where I said it does - as does the toilet flushing, showering, dish washing and other water. It's a desert sustained by leaching the water from far away.
/Not going back there. The natives are not friendly.
You would have to keep around last 3 snapshots just to be safe from a failed/bad update.
Yes you would. Sorry I left that out.
Using VMs means you can start with a bare windows install fully updated, and save a copy, or "snapshot" of that. Then you can add security layers on top and save a snapshop of that "snap that". A few at a time you can add your critical apps and make snaps until you have a lot of snapshot VMs that take a lot of space - but these days space is cheap. You can store 200 10GB Windows images on a 2TB external drive, and that's not a large external storage device today. Storing your basic images on an external drive also keeps your images safe from really clever malware that might evolve to corrupt even inactive OS VM images.
For the advanced class, you can mount a VM of OpenFiler with a reasonable disk pool, mount that iSCSI volume on your VM and install Windows onto it. Then you can take thin differential snapshots. If OpenFiler won't do what you need then HP's free Virtual SAN Appliance will, or there are other options. Me, I just reinstall the OS in a VM when I have to rebuild because it's a rare thing and dealing with that once a year or so is easier than setting up infrastructure that may change. But one day older versions of Windows will no longer install, so that bare image will have to do.
Wood chips are combustible. They live in a desert. That's a fire hazard. Better to pave it over and paint it green.
Speaking of which... they live in a desert. The only reason they ever had water to put on their lawn is that they import it via aqueducts over 200 miles, transforming the source from a formerly verdant valley into an arid desert.
I'm not sure where the city/county is trying to go here. Normally they pretend to try and be a little eco-friendly in granolaland.
If you have a decently powerful computer you can use virtualization like KVM (KVM can be a bear to install, but it is probably available in a package for your Linux) or VMWare Player (easy). Build an XP VM with all your Windows tools and antimalware and antivirus and whatnot, install a good hosts file and patch it. Then turn it off, write protect it and clone it. Only use the clones, and toss them now and then. That way you don't have to reboot your main PC just to open some stupid Windows app, and if you need Windows for something risky (like, say, a Webex) you can use it once and discard it, and your Windows always has that fresh "just installed" snappiness that wears off after six months. More importantly you can fire up the VM and shut it down without rebooting your real box. Windows belongs in a VM.
Then all you need to actually boot a Windows box for is to play some games, if you're into that, and not even that much longer. PCI passthrough feature is on its way and when it's here you'll be able to pass that hot graphics card through to the VM when you need to, which is the only part of the Windows experience that doesn't cross over.
Another upside of this is that you get to do the VM thing more. VMs are cool. You can do things like test drive clusters of OpenFiler boxes and see how virtual IP addressing helps with transparent failover. You can stand up an entire network of BSD routers and grasp some more challenging routing convergence problems. You can build an encrypted VM to hide your "research" in. All sorts of things.
The other tricks are metered service where you don't know what you're going to pay from month to month. Thanks, but I'll stay with my "throttled" unlimited service with predictable billing - especially since they've never limited me yet in several years. If I wanted terabytes of storage and a guaranteed 25Mbps of upstream bandwidth, I'd go back to paying Comcast the extra $10/month for an extra 4 IP addresses and host it myself.
That you post like a prick to defend your precious meme does neither yourself, nor the meme any good.
The planet is warming. Yeah, fine. It's been warming for 30,000 years, and you can't blame all of that on coal or Men. If we've accellerated the process slightly, so what? We don't have more fossil fuels left than we've burned already. When these fossil fuels were laid down the Earth was in no danger of a runaway greenhouse and it isn't now.
It's made up. It's a fiction. You are going to be embarassed when you discover that the End is not nigh. The climate is, was, and always will be changing. We can't push it much one way or the other, because we're just not that important. Bacteria hold more sway than us.
Toward the end of this year Intel and Micron will release 25nm flash chips, and drive manufacturers will produce drives, capable of more than saturating a SAS/SATA 6G connection in densities up to 2TB in a 2.5" form factor, or 12TB in a 3.5" form factor. It's only natural to assume that an interim solution to this problem will be drives that connect with 4x6G connections. The very same controllers that served 300 spinning discs in 8U of external storage would then serve individual flash drives internal to the server. The flash drives in addition to supporting the volume being more performant in IOPs, might therefore support more virtual machines or virtual desktops. Current technology includes virtual machines to make these drives shared iSCSI, rather than dedicated SAS storage.
Since new processor technologies are coming out at the same time, we have a decision point where people might close a deal on the wrong side of the cusp. A friend would advise them to wait until they grok the situation in full.
You'll be glad to hear that in the SFF (2.5") form factor consumer SSDs have now reached density parity (512GB) with enterprise SAS spinning discs, and passed FC SFF SSDs in price parity ($4k/TB). That's still spendy for consumer gear, but for enterprise drives it's cheaper and the 50x IOPs make it better. Intel and Micron's 25nm technology has not yet hit the market but when it does density will double and performance will quadruple. These individual chips deliver 200MB/s, and individual devices will be able to deliver 2GB/s and/or insane IOPs. Large (128MB or more) RAM cache on individual drives is now in the consumer market, and enterprise drives include supercapacitors to ensure writes for data integrity. The advent of these technologies will push down prices of currently available gear at the (as you noted) accellerated rate. The conversion will now begin. These flash drives have a better MTBF, and a better failure mode (fail on write rather than fail on read). TRIM support is looking good in W7 and Linux, but array controller firmwares need to be updated to support it, and they're working on that at a furious pace.
TRIM drivers for XP and Server 2003 would be the courteous thing for Microsoft to do for its committed Software Assurance customers who just can't migrate yet because they bought into that whole IE6/iis/.NET V1 thing - but I don't see Microsoft doing that because they want to shuffle those customers on to W7 and Server 2008 whether they're ready or not. What are they going to do if Microsoft doesn't enable TRIM support on legacy platforms - migrate to Linux? Not likely: they're Microsoft shops and they'll take what Redmond gives them.
We need a new interconnect to pull this all together because bandwidth and IOPs are getting out of hand. lightpeak looks like it if it has the right features. We've passed the performance abilities of copper, so something optical will be the order of the day. If LightPeak doesn't cut it, we can consider PCIe-F (PCI Express over Fibre) or some new thing.
The times, they are a-changing. Spinning disk is the new tape. Tape? Hopefully the kids coming up today will be challenged by the question "what was data tape?" With luck they will be confused by the ambiguity between punched paper and magnetic tape and not pursue that shameful episode further.
Securing is not taking. Making the animal safe does not deprive the owner of the use of it, nor does using the shared wireless. You're reaching so hard it's obvious you have an agenda. What is it?
If AGW were so factual, its proponents would not be so adamant about hiding data. A scientist has not so much to hide even when he harbors doubts about his conclusions because his overriding concern is not to be right or to profit, but that the Truth is discovered and by provable steps Knowledge progresses.
Carbon is a precious resource we should preserve because we need it. It's an important part of the photosynthesis process that plants use to store solar energy into a form that's remarkably compact and has incredible utility both for energy dense uses like transportation and accomodation of humans' thermal needs, but in the production of food. We are not well served by giving it to phytoplankton that feed zooplankton that sequester it in calcium deposits on the floor of the oceans.
We live in an interglacial age. By fits and starts the temperature is rising as it is expected to - and we should be glad of that. A habitably warm Earth is not by any measure the norm in geological time, especially for our teeming billions. A glacial age just will not support 6 billion people. The skewed graphs that made the end of the last millenium into a hockey stick that implied a runaway greenhouse effect have been thoroughly debunked. We're still contributing CO2, and the warming stopped. If the spike existed at all, and was not an artifact of the interpretation of the data, the point remains that fifteen years on, the global climate did not increase by 5c. The sky did not fall. We are not being punished by brutal hurricanes. The Himalayan glaciers are still there, receding at the expected rate. If Men have an impact on climate, it is so small as to be unworthy of notice. Even if we used up all of the fraction of carbon fuels left accessible to us as wastefully as possible, we could not impact the climate once again as much as we have already. If anything, the arable zone has moved closer to the landmass and that's not a bad thing.
All of that carbon was once in the air. Let's not forget that. That's how it came to be in the form and location it is in. It was sequestered by plants once before and it will be again. Far more carbon than this was once in the air and is sequestered in limestone deposits which are even now being subducted into the Earth's mantle to be seen again nevermore. If you think a Hummer produces a lot of CO2, you should look at Mayan plaster. You need not go so far as South America though - wander down to the Home Depot and read the ingredients on the box of Beadex texture (pdf) that your contractor textured the walls of your home with (Limestone, >85% by weight). The Earth was once much warmer than it is, even in human history. When that carbon (both the limestone and the fossil fuels) was in the air before, the Earth did not turn into Venus and it won't this time either because we could not with all our technolgy even release all of the carbon that was in the air before. Most of it is now dissolved into the Earth's core - and even when it was in the air Earth still went through glacial cycles and didn't runaway into Venus. It just can't happen. It was life that transformed the Earth into an environment habitable by humans, and it's life that will defend that equilibrium. We're rich, we're smart, and we're active, but we're a fraction of a percent a percent of the planet's biomass. We're just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Yes, climate change means the oceans rise - as they always have. At mere millimeters per year the message really shouldn't be "Run for your lives" - but more like "It might be wise to encourage your children to build their huts a few meters further from the rising sea". Yes, the Sahel region of Africa and the Chinese Gobi desert and a thin strip of South America will become less habitable over time as part of this natural cycle. If humans
The use of shared wireless is not stealing. The only purpose for publishing the SSID of an unsecured wireless network is to make the network available to anyone who wants to connect to it. If people want to share their wireless, that's their business - not the court's. If that violates their terms of service that's a contractual issue between them and their ISP.
And talk of hanging people for using shared wireless? That's just madness. To use the same metaphor if your neighbor lets his horses, cattle and dogs roam onto your property or public rights-of-way then securing them isn't theft - it's being neighborly. Accepting the gift of anonymous free speech freely given? There's nothing at all wrong with that.
You're looking for a DWIM (Do What I Meant) interpreter with PDCH (Predictive Digital Concierge Heuristics). While the technology is available it's currently quite costly. Bugs, errata, and maintenance can deliver less than an optimal experience. Might I instead offer you this mail order bride? We have imported personal assistants in stock from less privileged nations - and if you have the means we can outsource minute-to-minute management of them to our Bangalore VPDT (Virtual Presence Discipline Team). Please consult your accountant and tax lawyer concerning withholding for personal staff, particularly if you intend to pursue public service.
Slashdot Mirror
And the eternal copyright of such essential works as "100 Polka Classics: The Greatest Accordion Collection On Earth" have turned me off of commercial music for good. There is no way that anybody involved in that making that work got paid if I pay to download it.
BTW: Track 41 isn't bad: "Yes, we have no bananas."
Computing power is about transistor density, so he's right in a way. At least it is if the transistors are well used. If the transistors are not well used then Moore's law is about waste. "Our ability to waste processing power will double every two years" doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Alan Turing didn't use Windows. The sight of it might have caused him to kill himself.
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What he said. Cross platform is not "on every Microsoft platform".
A point I wouldn't argue. Like I said, the MSA is inadequate for this task - as is the EVA. We're talking about an entirely different tier of performance storage here. You're not going to hit 250K IOPs in an EVA, no matter what you put in it.
Is that the EVA that caps out at 8 SSD drives? That doesn't sound like it's going to get the IOPs.
He's got a point - the embedded RAID controllers in boxes like the HP MSA70 just aren't up to the challenge of sustaining the IOPS of SSDs. They weren't designed for that, so you can't get a million I/Os per second by accident. You have to know what you're doing and build out an architecture that can support it.
OTOH: Who pays 100K for one of those? That has to be including the Enterprise 120GB SSD's at $4k each, right?
What 200k IOPs might look like (not mine).
Did you try Google, Kansas?
An in this vertant oasis the first three settlements were lost without a trace.
There are quite often deserts that verge on the sea, and this is one. It's green because of imported water, not because of precipitation. OK - it's just barely not a desert - the dictionary definition of desert is 10" of annual rainfall and they get 12". I grew up there and I can tell you how much water falls from the sky matters little - the rainfall is toxic. There's no green space to speak of for it to fall on so the storm drains carry it out to sea. If there were groundwater you would not want to drink it, trust me. There's not a non-irrigated plant within 50 miles of there, and that irrigation water comes from where I said it does - as does the toilet flushing, showering, dish washing and other water. It's a desert sustained by leaching the water from far away.
/Not going back there. The natives are not friendly.
You would have to keep around last 3 snapshots just to be safe from a failed/bad update.
Yes you would. Sorry I left that out.
Using VMs means you can start with a bare windows install fully updated, and save a copy, or "snapshot" of that. Then you can add security layers on top and save a snapshop of that "snap that". A few at a time you can add your critical apps and make snaps until you have a lot of snapshot VMs that take a lot of space - but these days space is cheap. You can store 200 10GB Windows images on a 2TB external drive, and that's not a large external storage device today. Storing your basic images on an external drive also keeps your images safe from really clever malware that might evolve to corrupt even inactive OS VM images.
For the advanced class, you can mount a VM of OpenFiler with a reasonable disk pool, mount that iSCSI volume on your VM and install Windows onto it. Then you can take thin differential snapshots. If OpenFiler won't do what you need then HP's free Virtual SAN Appliance will, or there are other options. Me, I just reinstall the OS in a VM when I have to rebuild because it's a rare thing and dealing with that once a year or so is easier than setting up infrastructure that may change. But one day older versions of Windows will no longer install, so that bare image will have to do.
Wood chips are combustible. They live in a desert. That's a fire hazard. Better to pave it over and paint it green.
Speaking of which... they live in a desert. The only reason they ever had water to put on their lawn is that they import it via aqueducts over 200 miles, transforming the source from a formerly verdant valley into an arid desert.
I'm not sure where the city/county is trying to go here. Normally they pretend to try and be a little eco-friendly in granolaland.
If you have a decently powerful computer you can use virtualization like KVM (KVM can be a bear to install, but it is probably available in a package for your Linux) or VMWare Player (easy). Build an XP VM with all your Windows tools and antimalware and antivirus and whatnot, install a good hosts file and patch it. Then turn it off, write protect it and clone it. Only use the clones, and toss them now and then. That way you don't have to reboot your main PC just to open some stupid Windows app, and if you need Windows for something risky (like, say, a Webex) you can use it once and discard it, and your Windows always has that fresh "just installed" snappiness that wears off after six months. More importantly you can fire up the VM and shut it down without rebooting your real box. Windows belongs in a VM.
Then all you need to actually boot a Windows box for is to play some games, if you're into that, and not even that much longer. PCI passthrough feature is on its way and when it's here you'll be able to pass that hot graphics card through to the VM when you need to, which is the only part of the Windows experience that doesn't cross over.
Another upside of this is that you get to do the VM thing more. VMs are cool. You can do things like test drive clusters of OpenFiler boxes and see how virtual IP addressing helps with transparent failover. You can stand up an entire network of BSD routers and grasp some more challenging routing convergence problems. You can build an encrypted VM to hide your "research" in. All sorts of things.
It's kind of funny because it was over five years ago that Microsoft "got it" and started reducing the attack surface in their operating systems.
Practicing your Monologue on slasdot, Jay? You know normal people aren't going to get this joke.
Non-essential services were disabled by default for instance.
Stop it! You're killing me!
Major attack vector: Acrobat Reader. Security company publishes intrusion analysis in pdf format. If you clicked it, you may be part of the problem.
The roads must roll.
The other tricks are metered service where you don't know what you're going to pay from month to month. Thanks, but I'll stay with my "throttled" unlimited service with predictable billing - especially since they've never limited me yet in several years. If I wanted terabytes of storage and a guaranteed 25Mbps of upstream bandwidth, I'd go back to paying Comcast the extra $10/month for an extra 4 IP addresses and host it myself.
That you post like a prick to defend your precious meme does neither yourself, nor the meme any good.
The planet is warming. Yeah, fine. It's been warming for 30,000 years, and you can't blame all of that on coal or Men. If we've accellerated the process slightly, so what? We don't have more fossil fuels left than we've burned already. When these fossil fuels were laid down the Earth was in no danger of a runaway greenhouse and it isn't now.
It's made up. It's a fiction. You are going to be embarassed when you discover that the End is not nigh. The climate is, was, and always will be changing. We can't push it much one way or the other, because we're just not that important. Bacteria hold more sway than us.
Toward the end of this year Intel and Micron will release 25nm flash chips, and drive manufacturers will produce drives, capable of more than saturating a SAS/SATA 6G connection in densities up to 2TB in a 2.5" form factor, or 12TB in a 3.5" form factor. It's only natural to assume that an interim solution to this problem will be drives that connect with 4x6G connections. The very same controllers that served 300 spinning discs in 8U of external storage would then serve individual flash drives internal to the server. The flash drives in addition to supporting the volume being more performant in IOPs, might therefore support more virtual machines or virtual desktops. Current technology includes virtual machines to make these drives shared iSCSI, rather than dedicated SAS storage.
Since new processor technologies are coming out at the same time, we have a decision point where people might close a deal on the wrong side of the cusp. A friend would advise them to wait until they grok the situation in full.
You'll be glad to hear that in the SFF (2.5") form factor consumer SSDs have now reached density parity (512GB) with enterprise SAS spinning discs, and passed FC SFF SSDs in price parity ($4k/TB). That's still spendy for consumer gear, but for enterprise drives it's cheaper and the 50x IOPs make it better. Intel and Micron's 25nm technology has not yet hit the market but when it does density will double and performance will quadruple. These individual chips deliver 200MB/s, and individual devices will be able to deliver 2GB/s and/or insane IOPs. Large (128MB or more) RAM cache on individual drives is now in the consumer market, and enterprise drives include supercapacitors to ensure writes for data integrity. The advent of these technologies will push down prices of currently available gear at the (as you noted) accellerated rate. The conversion will now begin. These flash drives have a better MTBF, and a better failure mode (fail on write rather than fail on read). TRIM support is looking good in W7 and Linux, but array controller firmwares need to be updated to support it, and they're working on that at a furious pace.
TRIM drivers for XP and Server 2003 would be the courteous thing for Microsoft to do for its committed Software Assurance customers who just can't migrate yet because they bought into that whole IE6/iis/.NET V1 thing - but I don't see Microsoft doing that because they want to shuffle those customers on to W7 and Server 2008 whether they're ready or not. What are they going to do if Microsoft doesn't enable TRIM support on legacy platforms - migrate to Linux? Not likely: they're Microsoft shops and they'll take what Redmond gives them.
We need a new interconnect to pull this all together because bandwidth and IOPs are getting out of hand. lightpeak looks like it if it has the right features. We've passed the performance abilities of copper, so something optical will be the order of the day. If LightPeak doesn't cut it, we can consider PCIe-F (PCI Express over Fibre) or some new thing.
The times, they are a-changing. Spinning disk is the new tape. Tape? Hopefully the kids coming up today will be challenged by the question "what was data tape?" With luck they will be confused by the ambiguity between punched paper and magnetic tape and not pursue that shameful episode further.
Securing is not taking. Making the animal safe does not deprive the owner of the use of it, nor does using the shared wireless. You're reaching so hard it's obvious you have an agenda. What is it?
If AGW were so factual, its proponents would not be so adamant about hiding data. A scientist has not so much to hide even when he harbors doubts about his conclusions because his overriding concern is not to be right or to profit, but that the Truth is discovered and by provable steps Knowledge progresses.
Carbon is a precious resource we should preserve because we need it. It's an important part of the photosynthesis process that plants use to store solar energy into a form that's remarkably compact and has incredible utility both for energy dense uses like transportation and accomodation of humans' thermal needs, but in the production of food. We are not well served by giving it to phytoplankton that feed zooplankton that sequester it in calcium deposits on the floor of the oceans.
We live in an interglacial age. By fits and starts the temperature is rising as it is expected to - and we should be glad of that. A habitably warm Earth is not by any measure the norm in geological time, especially for our teeming billions. A glacial age just will not support 6 billion people. The skewed graphs that made the end of the last millenium into a hockey stick that implied a runaway greenhouse effect have been thoroughly debunked. We're still contributing CO2, and the warming stopped. If the spike existed at all, and was not an artifact of the interpretation of the data, the point remains that fifteen years on, the global climate did not increase by 5c. The sky did not fall. We are not being punished by brutal hurricanes. The Himalayan glaciers are still there, receding at the expected rate. If Men have an impact on climate, it is so small as to be unworthy of notice. Even if we used up all of the fraction of carbon fuels left accessible to us as wastefully as possible, we could not impact the climate once again as much as we have already. If anything, the arable zone has moved closer to the landmass and that's not a bad thing.
All of that carbon was once in the air. Let's not forget that. That's how it came to be in the form and location it is in. It was sequestered by plants once before and it will be again. Far more carbon than this was once in the air and is sequestered in limestone deposits which are even now being subducted into the Earth's mantle to be seen again nevermore. If you think a Hummer produces a lot of CO2, you should look at Mayan plaster. You need not go so far as South America though - wander down to the Home Depot and read the ingredients on the box of Beadex texture (pdf) that your contractor textured the walls of your home with (Limestone, >85% by weight). The Earth was once much warmer than it is, even in human history. When that carbon (both the limestone and the fossil fuels) was in the air before, the Earth did not turn into Venus and it won't this time either because we could not with all our technolgy even release all of the carbon that was in the air before. Most of it is now dissolved into the Earth's core - and even when it was in the air Earth still went through glacial cycles and didn't runaway into Venus. It just can't happen. It was life that transformed the Earth into an environment habitable by humans, and it's life that will defend that equilibrium. We're rich, we're smart, and we're active, but we're a fraction of a percent a percent of the planet's biomass. We're just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Yes, climate change means the oceans rise - as they always have. At mere millimeters per year the message really shouldn't be "Run for your lives" - but more like "It might be wise to encourage your children to build their huts a few meters further from the rising sea". Yes, the Sahel region of Africa and the Chinese Gobi desert and a thin strip of South America will become less habitable over time as part of this natural cycle. If humans
The use of shared wireless is not stealing. The only purpose for publishing the SSID of an unsecured wireless network is to make the network available to anyone who wants to connect to it. If people want to share their wireless, that's their business - not the court's. If that violates their terms of service that's a contractual issue between them and their ISP.
And talk of hanging people for using shared wireless? That's just madness. To use the same metaphor if your neighbor lets his horses, cattle and dogs roam onto your property or public rights-of-way then securing them isn't theft - it's being neighborly. Accepting the gift of anonymous free speech freely given? There's nothing at all wrong with that.
You're looking for a DWIM (Do What I Meant) interpreter with PDCH (Predictive Digital Concierge Heuristics). While the technology is available it's currently quite costly. Bugs, errata, and maintenance can deliver less than an optimal experience. Might I instead offer you this mail order bride? We have imported personal assistants in stock from less privileged nations - and if you have the means we can outsource minute-to-minute management of them to our Bangalore VPDT (Virtual Presence Discipline Team). Please consult your accountant and tax lawyer concerning withholding for personal staff, particularly if you intend to pursue public service.
/At your service!
This may be true, but there exist some plaforms that exhibit more uptime than others. Can it be that the admins of the former have greater skill?