LTO3 Tape costs about the same for just the tapes as cheap SATA drives - without considering the cost of the tape drive ($1200?). I think it's the cheapest per GB today.
I think you're looking for this PDF. Oh, and I found a web page with a long list of links. It's here. Some days it seems like that website has everything.
This is a bad idea. Yes, the manufacturer gets a little more reliability - no contacts to corrode or lose contact. They save a few cents on the connector they don't use and a process on the insertion of the removable media. But SSD storage is doubling every year, so in the three year life span of a computer your storage would get 8x capacity - for the eeepc from 8GB to 64.
I know they opt to save the pennies. They shouldn't because this is a feature that drives the long tail of sales.
Your discussion about SAS, SSD, SATA notwithstanding, your dig on fibre channel makes no sense. You say that FC is dead, but offer no alternative architectures that provide what FC provides, such as multi-host connectivity, storage sharing among multiple hosts, storage mirroring over distance and replication.
The last link in my post goes to the product page for a SAS array that offers all these things.
I had prepared a long and eloquent disposition on how stupid your statements are. Regrettably my toddler stepped on the power switch before I clicked Submit. Since my comment was not yet commited to disk, it's lost forever.
Let me just say that available individual SSDs are capable of 200,000 IOPS and 1.5GB/s (not Gb/s. It's not a typo.) both read and write. They RAID as well as spinning discs do.
If you are trying to create a database server that is going to be doing hundreds of thousands of updates a day... you are NOT going to succeed doing it with SSD drives.
If you are trying to create a database server that is going to be doing hundreds of thousands of updates a second... you are NOT going to succeed doing it with Magnetomechanical drives.
In short, your information is about ten years old. Get with the program if you're going to try to school people on/.
SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.
The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.
The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.
The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.
The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).
Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.
Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App
I post this same post every time we have a computerized vote counting thread. My objection to this has nothing to do with whether it's a secret proprietary process or a totally open FOSS solution. With each generation of computer technology we gain the opportunity to go wrong with greater speed than ever before. Yes, proprietary solutions are horrid and there's some evidence that they've been used to steal votes and they're truly evil. Unfortunately, FOSS tools can be abused too.
I guess my point is that the process of counting votes using humans is an important part of representative democracy because it doesn't just achieve the goal of "counting the vote". It also impresses on the participants the importance of sanity and trust and impartiality in the process, without which constant reinforcement we can expect democracy to rapidly go off the rails. Compared to that social good, the importance of getting same-day results fades in importance.
All this is very basic finance 101 but is widely misunderstood.
This is very basic finance 101 and is widely understood: if your retirement fund doesn't see returns, you will never be able to retire because inflation eats your early contributions.
They did not think of that because they have no intention of letting any currently held copyright expire, ever. They will just continue to extend the term to "Another 50 years" every 50 years.
In the end Microsoft and IBM are companies limited in their scope. IBM is more narrowly focused than Microsoft, but that's only marginally a problem. In it's core mainframe and server business, IBM executes really well. In its Operating systems and productivity software realms Microsoft also owns their market. The problem for both of them is that they need to pierce the funnel customers see them in. IBM is in the better position here, since every time Microsoft branches out they spend a lot of money gaining control of a dead product, or embarassing themselves and harming their main brand. There's no evidence this trend won't continue.
Consumer electronics is where the money's at. Somebody always has money to buy toys, and neither one of them is going to see that money.
Both of them could use some management that didn't exclusively consist of idiots. Seriously, how did that happen? Is there no process control in the head geek selection process?
If IBM doesn't want the history of their company to read "They died defending control of a market that had shrinking share" they need a visionary to step up and speak to their people about warming the chair that's sliding to hell. It's a comfy seat on a train you don't want to be on. Every single person at IBM needs to be focused on turning the train. Or they can be Novell. Whatever.
I happened to notice today that Apple surpassed IBM in market capitalization (the total value of their stock) about a month ago. Apple has been on a tear for the last five years, growing about 24x. Even though IBM has a valued brand, a deep patent portfolio, committed customers and a broad portfolio they haven't kept up with that pace. I think that the last technology company Apple has to surpass in company value is Microsoft - and they're closing in. Apple's executing well not just in PC Hardware (where they've cornered the market on premium PCs at over 80%), but in media where they've pretty much taken all of the market for online distribution of music (and they're working on video), and in cellular phones where they're a serious threat to Blackberry. So Apple is not just in a wider base of markets than IBM and Microsoft - they're winning in all the markets they're in. They're executing well.
Microsoft wants to be Apple but Zune, Plays For Now and the Microsoft Danger FaceKick isn't going to gain them new customers in the new markets they need to win. The have a considerablenegativepartneringhistory to overcome. If Steve Jobs got a good stock incentive to come back and rescue Apple in 1996 he should die the world's richest man. Since I'm talking about how smart he is, here's a quote:
"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will."
IBM could do these things and the fine article is an indication that they're slowly interested in doing so. I wish them well - I prefer committed open source to Apple's exploitation of BSD's liberal terms, though I have to admit it's more of a personal bias than a difference in utility. I don't think IBM can pull this off without outside help. The Boys From Boca thing was, as far as I can tell from subsequent history, a one-off incident of accidental genius.
This is a valid, but unlikely Premium Microsoft eXperience (PMX) endgame scenario. 2014: Microsoft is suffering diminishing sales and shares, beaten on one side by an Apple grown to a media/technology giant five times their size and on the other side by hardware partners also grown much larger than them desperately trying to compete but weighed down by a pathetic Windows 8 demanding near zero pricing for OS software both on the server and the client. Unable to drive the hard bargains they historically had, Microsoft finally admits they want to own everything. They launch an own-branded mobile thin client solution with Mesh MiWi, three day battery life, serving the desktop experience with their full software suite through their own-branded cellular data plan at $100.00. Naturally this blows up in their face as a blizzard of court filings bury them in paperwork first from their partners and then for their customers. The product is their most popular ever - right up until they get 10% market penetration and their network goes down at the same time their storage service consumes everyone's data. Ultimately the whole thing implodes. As the Sheriff is escorting him out of the building, Steve Ballmer has a stroke leaving him as aware as ever, but unable to move or speak.
2016:Apple Studios announce the summer blockbuster of 2017 will be "The Road Behind", the epic story from the beginning to its conclusion. Ballmer will be played by Scott Thompson and lured back from retirement for the role many believe he was born to play, Mark Hamill will be Bill Gates. Release will be by the usual streaming hi-def to pocket theatres worldwide as pay-per-view over the Apple 5G network. 2017:Widely panned by critics as low comedy that doesn't quite rise to cult status, it's rereleased immediately to Pico-SD where it sees a modest but profitable run.
Really, I need some insightful analysis from Forrester or Gartner before I can make up my mind. They at least are impartial analysts of key trends, backing their statements with real credible verifiable data and rigorous adherence to reporting standards.
Yes, the US incarcerates far too many. Worse, the demographics of the incarcerated population indicate racial bias. We really need to work on that. But I don't know what the cure would be - ending prohibition might be an answer, but at what social cost? The practice of criminal prosecution in the US is also horribly tilted against the poor - almost as much so as was the case before the right to an attorney was established. The whole system needs work, and there are entrenched and politically active factions well motivated to keep things the way they are because incarcerating people is a huge fraction of our economy.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this concept. Why would the spamers not just exploit the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft anti-spam solution? No doubt the Microsoft solution involved executing every attachment to ensure that it was safe, which would have compromised their filtering engine in under 50ms.
The leave behind the by-blows of countless teens left home alone, single moms dancing to pay for college, and girls who briefly fell in love with a swarthy foreigner whose name they never knew.
In short we've had the best of them, and good riddance to the rest.
Bill knows and has always known that he's not inventing anything and he never has. He's quite proud of the fact. He's a pirate in the literal, not the BSA sense. As long as you're a "Windows shop" all your base are belong to him, and that causes him no end of glee.
While those things are deplorable, the trouble isn't that the US is the worst in the world as it is that we can do better.
Saying that "We" are guilty of these thing isn't true - though some few of us are and no doubt we can do better. We should do better. We should encourage each other to improve and not despair.
On the other hand: Slavery is still a common practice in large parts of the world, particularly Asia (and to some degree in the US too). China harvests organs from political prisoners. In Russia the rule of law is still privately funded and enforced. Rape of political prisoners to discourage dissent is reportedly practiced in Iran. Female genital mutilation, "honor" killings and simply setting your wife on fire are practiced in many places. As I write this one billion of my six billion fellow humans is starving. And let's not even talk about the pit of hell that is Africa. And then there's the deplorable incremental loss of human rights caused by busybodies determined to legislate every possible human action from marriage to business to whether you wear seatbelts in your car to whether you have seventeen forms of insurance; from what you read and watch and say to who you associate with to where you travel. To count our ills as Men is perhaps counterproductive. It's probably better to count our blessings and be happy with our lot, and then reach out and do what we can to improve the lot of others - but without risking so much that we become part of the problem.
If you really think our country is that bad, the exit is here. Be careful, though. It's a one-way door. And don't let it hit ya where the good Lord split ya.
Yes, prisoners raping each other is a despicable act and it occurs far more often than it should. It's not as common as people seem to think though and most of the people who joke about it don't do so because they approve of it. Voluntary "situational" homosexuality during incarceraton is far more common, as it is in polygamous cultures and other cases and doesn't get nearly as much discussion. Like most other fonts of humor like death and toilets and sex people joke about it because making light of the human condition is how humans deal with things that make us uncomfortable. It's how we let go of the inevitable sadness so we can cope. It's a joke. Laugh.
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Don't care for the DRM. I could really use a book reader though, and the Android version once liberated may have interesting other applications.
I'm going to endorse this proposal. I would prefer there be some bacon as well.
LTO3 Tape costs about the same for just the tapes as cheap SATA drives - without considering the cost of the tape drive ($1200?). I think it's the cheapest per GB today.
I think you're looking for this PDF. Oh, and I found a web page with a long list of links. It's here. Some days it seems like that website has everything.
This is a bad idea. Yes, the manufacturer gets a little more reliability - no contacts to corrode or lose contact. They save a few cents on the connector they don't use and a process on the insertion of the removable media. But SSD storage is doubling every year, so in the three year life span of a computer your storage would get 8x capacity - for the eeepc from 8GB to 64.
I know they opt to save the pennies. They shouldn't because this is a feature that drives the long tail of sales.
Your discussion about SAS, SSD, SATA notwithstanding, your dig on fibre channel makes no sense. You say that FC is dead, but offer no alternative architectures that provide what FC provides, such as multi-host connectivity, storage sharing among multiple hosts, storage mirroring over distance and replication.
The last link in my post goes to the product page for a SAS array that offers all these things.
I had prepared a long and eloquent disposition on how stupid your statements are. Regrettably my toddler stepped on the power switch before I clicked Submit. Since my comment was not yet commited to disk, it's lost forever.
Let me just say that available individual SSDs are capable of 200,000 IOPS and 1.5GB/s (not Gb/s. It's not a typo.) both read and write. They RAID as well as spinning discs do.
If you are trying to create a database server that is going to be doing hundreds of thousands of updates a day... you are NOT going to succeed doing it with SSD drives.
If you are trying to create a database server that is going to be doing hundreds of thousands of updates a second ... you are NOT going to succeed doing it with Magnetomechanical drives.
In short, your information is about ten years old. Get with the program if you're going to try to school people on /.
SATA attach SSD has achieved price parity with enterprise SAS, the density is almost there, and the performance completely blows it away. We're not at the end of spinning disc, but you can see it from here.
The new performance tier of storage is PCIe attach SSD. At two terabytes of storage and 1.5GB/s per slot, we're getting close to what we used to get from Ramdisk in performance and adequate density at 3TB per rack unit including server (HP DL785 G5 or equivalent). Yes, this is expensive right now, but the performance tier always has been. This is for trading platforms, HPC and such. These are approaching 2M IOPS and 40TB per 7U server.
The second tier is 2.5" 256GB SATA SSDs. You get 3TB per rack unit including the server. About the same cost as SAS for 10x the performance. Software options enable you to scale this to infinity in both bulk and performance. Great for databases, VMDK files and iSCSI. Get the hot-swap version and leave some open bays so that when the 1TB 2.5" SSDs come out you can migrate your LUNS with no downtime.
The third tier is SAS spinning disk. At something like 20TB/Rack unit (excluding servers) you can use this to serve frequently used files.
The fourth tier now is SATA spinning disk. At roughly the same density as SAS spinning disk for one-fourth the cost, this is a good candidate for deduplicated targets like virtual tape libraries or deduplicated NAS. It's also a good place to store your snapshots. With modern snapshot technologies there's no good reason to not store snaps every 15 minutes or so. Typically you would park this storage offsite for DR purposes so you can avoid the Premium Microsoft danger eXperience(**).
Storage pros probably would note that I neglected to mention tape and Fiber Channel. That's neither accident nor ignorance. The only reason for tape is legally mandated tape backups, and I consider this the IT equivalent of legally mandated hitching posts outside every business (which laws persist in some places) - if you gotta, you gotta, but there's no reason any more to consider it a necessary or good practice. As for Fiber Channel, it just doesn't fit in the model any more. I know this hurts the feelings of folks who just dropped a million bucks for a single rack of SAN storage with 100TB, or worse - popped for the new 8GBit stuff complete with a converged ethernet/FCoE solution, but it's true. There's just no reason for fiber channel any more. It just doesn't have the bandwidth to support a modern storage solution and it costs too much. Sure, it's got redundancy from the disc to the file server, but so what: modern file servers use redundant storage and clustered redundancy and don't need the diminishing returns of embarassingly expensive drives, head nodes, capacity licensing and annual support contracts. By the time you figure in oversubscribed ports in your FC network, you've lost the supposed reliable performance benefit of the whole thing. This isn't bad news for Cisco - they're going to sell a lot of 10Gbit Ethernet ports before they get cheap and they haven't lost anything by being also compatible with FC. It really bites to be EMC this week, but they'll figure it out.
Check the specs on this server, this card, this drive and this array. This is off-the-shelf stuff, not pie in the sky. The interconnect people need to get off their butts, but this is all doable right now. The compute side becomes an almost trivial cost of what it takes to maintain this storage bandwidth and capacity. If you like proprietary solutions HP sells a thing called the LeftHand Virtual San App
Once they've been granted suffrage. Not before.
I post this same post every time we have a computerized vote counting thread. My objection to this has nothing to do with whether it's a secret proprietary process or a totally open FOSS solution. With each generation of computer technology we gain the opportunity to go wrong with greater speed than ever before. Yes, proprietary solutions are horrid and there's some evidence that they've been used to steal votes and they're truly evil. Unfortunately, FOSS tools can be abused too.
I guess my point is that the process of counting votes using humans is an important part of representative democracy because it doesn't just achieve the goal of "counting the vote". It also impresses on the participants the importance of sanity and trust and impartiality in the process, without which constant reinforcement we can expect democracy to rapidly go off the rails. Compared to that social good, the importance of getting same-day results fades in importance.
Let Me Google That for you: Karmic Koala Mobile Broadband 5101
All this is very basic finance 101 but is widely misunderstood.
This is very basic finance 101 and is widely understood: if your retirement fund doesn't see returns, you will never be able to retire because inflation eats your early contributions.
They did not think of that because they have no intention of letting any currently held copyright expire, ever. They will just continue to extend the term to "Another 50 years" every 50 years.
In the end Microsoft and IBM are companies limited in their scope. IBM is more narrowly focused than Microsoft, but that's only marginally a problem. In it's core mainframe and server business, IBM executes really well. In its Operating systems and productivity software realms Microsoft also owns their market. The problem for both of them is that they need to pierce the funnel customers see them in. IBM is in the better position here, since every time Microsoft branches out they spend a lot of money gaining control of a dead product, or embarassing themselves and harming their main brand. There's no evidence this trend won't continue.
Consumer electronics is where the money's at. Somebody always has money to buy toys, and neither one of them is going to see that money.
Both of them could use some management that didn't exclusively consist of idiots. Seriously, how did that happen? Is there no process control in the head geek selection process?
If IBM doesn't want the history of their company to read "They died defending control of a market that had shrinking share" they need a visionary to step up and speak to their people about warming the chair that's sliding to hell. It's a comfy seat on a train you don't want to be on. Every single person at IBM needs to be focused on turning the train. Or they can be Novell. Whatever.
There's no doubt Linux has room for improvement. I think we're past that now. It's "good enough". That's all that matters.
This is not off-topic.
I happened to notice today that Apple surpassed IBM in market capitalization (the total value of their stock) about a month ago. Apple has been on a tear for the last five years, growing about 24x. Even though IBM has a valued brand, a deep patent portfolio, committed customers and a broad portfolio they haven't kept up with that pace. I think that the last technology company Apple has to surpass in company value is Microsoft - and they're closing in. Apple's executing well not just in PC Hardware (where they've cornered the market on premium PCs at over 80%), but in media where they've pretty much taken all of the market for online distribution of music (and they're working on video), and in cellular phones where they're a serious threat to Blackberry. So Apple is not just in a wider base of markets than IBM and Microsoft - they're winning in all the markets they're in. They're executing well.
Microsoft wants to be Apple but Zune, Plays For Now and the Microsoft Danger FaceKick isn't going to gain them new customers in the new markets they need to win. The have a considerable negative partnering history to overcome. If Steve Jobs got a good stock incentive to come back and rescue Apple in 1996 he should die the world's richest man. Since I'm talking about how smart he is, here's a quote:
"There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will."
IBM could do these things and the fine article is an indication that they're slowly interested in doing so. I wish them well - I prefer committed open source to Apple's exploitation of BSD's liberal terms, though I have to admit it's more of a personal bias than a difference in utility. I don't think IBM can pull this off without outside help. The Boys From Boca thing was, as far as I can tell from subsequent history, a one-off incident of accidental genius.
This might hurt your feelings but: you're a Canadian. Most Americans don't consider you ever.
This is a valid, but unlikely Premium Microsoft eXperience (PMX) endgame scenario. 2014: Microsoft is suffering diminishing sales and shares, beaten on one side by an Apple grown to a media/technology giant five times their size and on the other side by hardware partners also grown much larger than them desperately trying to compete but weighed down by a pathetic Windows 8 demanding near zero pricing for OS software both on the server and the client. Unable to drive the hard bargains they historically had, Microsoft finally admits they want to own everything. They launch an own-branded mobile thin client solution with Mesh MiWi, three day battery life, serving the desktop experience with their full software suite through their own-branded cellular data plan at $100.00. Naturally this blows up in their face as a blizzard of court filings bury them in paperwork first from their partners and then for their customers. The product is their most popular ever - right up until they get 10% market penetration and their network goes down at the same time their storage service consumes everyone's data. Ultimately the whole thing implodes. As the Sheriff is escorting him out of the building, Steve Ballmer has a stroke leaving him as aware as ever, but unable to move or speak.
2016:Apple Studios announce the summer blockbuster of 2017 will be "The Road Behind", the epic story from the beginning to its conclusion. Ballmer will be played by Scott Thompson and lured back from retirement for the role many believe he was born to play, Mark Hamill will be Bill Gates. Release will be by the usual streaming hi-def to pocket theatres worldwide as pay-per-view over the Apple 5G network. 2017:Widely panned by critics as low comedy that doesn't quite rise to cult status, it's rereleased immediately to Pico-SD where it sees a modest but profitable run.
Really, I need some insightful analysis from Forrester or Gartner before I can make up my mind. They at least are impartial analysts of key trends, backing their statements with real credible verifiable data and rigorous adherence to reporting standards.
That had to hurt.
Yes, the US incarcerates far too many. Worse, the demographics of the incarcerated population indicate racial bias. We really need to work on that. But I don't know what the cure would be - ending prohibition might be an answer, but at what social cost? The practice of criminal prosecution in the US is also horribly tilted against the poor - almost as much so as was the case before the right to an attorney was established. The whole system needs work, and there are entrenched and politically active factions well motivated to keep things the way they are because incarcerating people is a huge fraction of our economy.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this concept. Why would the spamers not just exploit the vulnerabilities in the Microsoft anti-spam solution? No doubt the Microsoft solution involved executing every attachment to ensure that it was safe, which would have compromised their filtering engine in under 50ms.
The leave behind the by-blows of countless teens left home alone, single moms dancing to pay for college, and girls who briefly fell in love with a swarthy foreigner whose name they never knew.
In short we've had the best of them, and good riddance to the rest.
Bill knows and has always known that he's not inventing anything and he never has. He's quite proud of the fact. He's a pirate in the literal, not the BSA sense. As long as you're a "Windows shop" all your base are belong to him, and that causes him no end of glee.
While those things are deplorable, the trouble isn't that the US is the worst in the world as it is that we can do better.
Saying that "We" are guilty of these thing isn't true - though some few of us are and no doubt we can do better. We should do better. We should encourage each other to improve and not despair.
On the other hand: Slavery is still a common practice in large parts of the world, particularly Asia (and to some degree in the US too). China harvests organs from political prisoners. In Russia the rule of law is still privately funded and enforced. Rape of political prisoners to discourage dissent is reportedly practiced in Iran. Female genital mutilation, "honor" killings and simply setting your wife on fire are practiced in many places. As I write this one billion of my six billion fellow humans is starving. And let's not even talk about the pit of hell that is Africa. And then there's the deplorable incremental loss of human rights caused by busybodies determined to legislate every possible human action from marriage to business to whether you wear seatbelts in your car to whether you have seventeen forms of insurance; from what you read and watch and say to who you associate with to where you travel. To count our ills as Men is perhaps counterproductive. It's probably better to count our blessings and be happy with our lot, and then reach out and do what we can to improve the lot of others - but without risking so much that we become part of the problem.
If you really think our country is that bad, the exit is here. Be careful, though. It's a one-way door. And don't let it hit ya where the good Lord split ya.
Yes, prisoners raping each other is a despicable act and it occurs far more often than it should. It's not as common as people seem to think though and most of the people who joke about it don't do so because they approve of it. Voluntary "situational" homosexuality during incarceraton is far more common, as it is in polygamous cultures and other cases and doesn't get nearly as much discussion. Like most other fonts of humor like death and toilets and sex people joke about it because making light of the human condition is how humans deal with things that make us uncomfortable. It's how we let go of the inevitable sadness so we can cope. It's a joke. Laugh.