The very fact that they took things in Unix that had worked for 20 years and broke them for no good reason except they didn't fit their idea of how something should work is asinine.
How do you sell it to the business if their budget is getting squeezed (I know this applies to physical servers as well, but if you have capacity in the virtual cluster to fit their app in it's a lot harder to say no).
Oh, you're looking at it from a salesman's point of view, rather than a customer's. That can't be good for your customer. Since Xen is an open source project RedHat's new approach using KVM could prove more interesting.
1 dual processor/8 core server running Oracle with in-memory cache option and support: roughly $200,000.
50 dual processor/8 core servers each running several VM's of postgresql with pgpool-II and memcached: roughly $200,000. The freedom to PXEBoot a blank box into a replicant node faster than you can rack a box: priceless.
Depending on your customer's workload, one of these choices might be better than the other and vice versa. Now, which one are you going to recommend in every case?
"We're a Windows shop." You only hint at your real concerns -- that license tracking and organizational inertia prevents it in your case. That's too bad for you.
The technology is obviously available and immensely powerful. Some will use it, some will shun it. In the corporate world which do you suppose is going to out-compete the other?
I'm liking the LTSP model because I can do it without investing my time writing code. I intend to pull up an on demand render farm without writing a single line of code.
I am also interested in the potential of exploiting the unused resources of desktop computers to turn an entire organization into an on-demand compute cluster and/or distributed redundant storage. Joe the typist doesn't need a quad-core 4GB machine to draft a letter, but as long as he's got one we may as well do something useful under the screensaver that's playing on it 90% of the time.
But I would love to hear some details about your config. Are you PXE booting? How do you get the virtual machines to launch correctly? Is there a common package for the management piece?
Of course with a good dynamic provisioning system a single host failure doesn't matter because that new VM will just get spun up on a different host that's woken up.
Bingo. A node is just a node. A decent control system will detect a node failing to come up, flag it for service and bring up another one. In some datacenters not designed for this sort of redundancy a server failure is a big deal where people have to come in on a holiday weekend. If you do it right the dead server just sits there until you get around to that rack in the regular course.
This is actually getting remarkably easy for Linux clusters, and the help is coming from a bizarre source - LTSP.
I wrote a journal piece about it just recently. I'm setting this up for me and it's interesting.
People are doing some interesting stuff with LTSP -- call centers with IP softphones, render farms. Soon we may see entire infrastructure with redundant servers powering on to serve demand spikes and shutting off when not in use.
Don't forget the supercomputer geeks. I'm sure they'd like to write an order for 4000 of those Tflop graphics cards and 2000 maxed out server procs to the guy that wants to be number one on Top500.org next year.
Dell makes the drive mfr put the images on the drives before delivery. The mfr doesn't care what image goes on - they used to put just zeros or test pattern data I believe.
One or the other makes no difference to Dell.
This is about getting people to take the Vista on the PC and then install the XP themselves so people will quit whining about MS overcounting Vista sales.
They've tried a few pilots in the lowest density counties that major providers refused to serve. They deliver 100Mbps for about $50 a month. The fiber hardware goes to gigabit. Apparently it's embarrassing for a government agency to make that much of a profit even at that rate. There won't be any new pilots I don't think.
The bill on its first reading was received so well that they pulled its teeth without it actually being read. The revised bill is not going to get any more or better broadband to the people than have it now - not that it stands a chance of passing anyway.
The incumbent providers have divvied up the market and they have figured out that $60-80 is what people can pay no matter how fast it is. They're not going to invest in infrastructure to make it faster with no competition and no hope of higher revenues.
Every government agency I know of either has online information access or is busting their hump to provide it. It's a shame they won't come the last mile, even to serve the disabled who can't get in the car and drive down to the DMV. The Internet really is the post road of the 21st century. The government should just mandate it -- serve these customers, or we will. But they won't. Incumbent providers have this one in the bag.
It's not the grand Longhorn promise of a secure seamless powerful new architecture so it doesn't renew our indenture to this monopolist for another decade. Some few don't hit the pain points and can come to like it so they latch onto it like it's garlic at a vampire festival. It's going to be really hard to pry it away from those folks. It not quite lame enough to give a total pass -- there's always a chance with this tweak and that patch and the other workaround and all new hardware (again!) it might make a good golden image though that keeps not panning out so far. It has just the precise level of fail needed to cause the maximum amount of ire amongst purchasers of Microsoft products, leading them to ask "why, again, do we buy products from this company?" It has motivated far more people to see the hazard of single-sourcing your server and desktop architecture, particularly with this company as the source.
Vista just might be the product to free us from the clutches of this monster. So yeah, I'm starting to appreciate it in my own way. =)
You actually told me when I shouldn't do that, that I should wait until I'm somewhere else, and even claimed that you don't see why anyone would want to do that then.
If you have plans for or photos of a computer you can use in midstream while you're fishing, while you're boarding an airplane, and while your pants are around your ankles and the images are safe for work, I'd love to see them. I'm sure the rest of the slashdot crowd would find it interesting too. Go ahead and post a link.
The reason why your post is moderated funny here on slashdot is because Sony thinks buying out the HD-DVD consortium means anything to the consumer. It doesn't. That was billions of yen wasted. I could tell Sony how to make their format win. But I won't and so they will waste more billions. So sad.
Yeah, it's really serious. Apparently the process of soldering and desoldering creates lead fumes that can kill you in high dosages or cause birth defects in the children of women so exposed. The more you know...
Believe it or not, some people read their bounce messages.
For a spammer who's looking for every low volume avenue this is a gift. If a message is sent from a falsified sender to your mail host and you send the content of the message or some other way to read it back with the bounce to the claimed sender, you've served the spammer by delivering their message to its intended target. Congratulations. You're part of the problem.
I also don't see why it can't grow to do more later, in a few Moore cycles.
In a few more "Moore cycles" this will be that and the game will have changed again. What you want will have changed again too. Get over it. This is Progress. By the time That is this wireless broadband will be assumed and you will have forgotten the question.
No, I'm not telling you what to do with your computer and where or when. I'm telling you how to do what you want with your computer right now wherever you want. I really don't think the difference is subtle at all and I don't thing being this helpful is presumptive. If you do, well I'm sorry. Let me recommend a
solution.
It's really not that hard. There's a reason why the reaction mass in a nuclear reactor is called a "pile". If you assemble enough of the right material in a certain volume, stuff gets hot and if you overdo it the boomyness happens (praise be to Allah). Believe it or not the Earth itself has created a number of fission reactors without even the benefit of motive.
Now making that happen in the minimum quantity of special materials was a closely guarded secret... until 2003 apparently.
In short, of all the stuff I've read on slashdot this is the one that trumps. If this could be undone I would if I could give Microsoft the entire OS and applications market. I would praise Vista. I would learn.NET. All my documents would be OOXML. Alas, Schroedinger's cat is out of the bag. I hope whatever form of life survives this learns well how foolish we were.
Perhaps there was something meaningful in the Drake equation that we missed in haste.
except the part where these operations have to happen on your mini laptop. Have you not heard of Citrix? Remote Desktop? Cellular modems? It's possible to have all of this happening on your mainframe, the attached supercomputer cluster, and a few thousand desktops and access them all from the laptop referenced in the fine article via VPN tunnel over wireless modem, public wi-fi, hotel room Internet, or any other mode you choose. I actually do this all day.
I know of no reason why I'd need to debug an Oracle database, edit a photo for press, or update my CAD drawing while I was mid-stream fishing, nor while I was boarding a plane. For some things you just have to wade to shore, wait until the flight is airborne, pull up your pants. This laptop will not play consumer games nor will it run Vista well. If you want one that can join your AD domain you have to get the Linux one -- the XP home or Vista Basic one isn't up for that. For everything else, this laptop is fine.
There is no laptop that will impress your gamer friends. The minimum bar to clear there starts at a kilowatt. They're disgusting.
One more time... these things cost five hundred clams. They do all the stuff laptops do, including run business productivity apps. They're cute and they fit on the plane well. They last all day on one charge. They play media. They have USB ports. They have wireless. They support all of the remote desktop technologies you've ever heard of. They come with software that's truly free, and you can install as much more as you want for free via the Applications menu. They play video and audio. Your choice of operating systems are available. Some of them have firewire. FSM preserve us what the heck do you want from a mini laptop for a measly five Benjamins? Sex?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey... It's been working for Microsoft.
Oh, you're looking at it from a salesman's point of view, rather than a customer's. That can't be good for your customer. Since Xen is an open source project RedHat's new approach using KVM could prove more interesting.
1 dual processor/8 core server running Oracle with in-memory cache option and support: roughly $200,000.
50 dual processor/8 core servers each running several VM's of postgresql with pgpool-II and memcached: roughly $200,000. The freedom to PXEBoot a blank box into a replicant node faster than you can rack a box: priceless.
Depending on your customer's workload, one of these choices might be better than the other and vice versa. Now, which one are you going to recommend in every case?
Maybe if we abolish copyright they'll hear us then.
"Can you hear me now?"
"We're a Windows shop." You only hint at your real concerns -- that license tracking and organizational inertia prevents it in your case. That's too bad for you.
The technology is obviously available and immensely powerful. Some will use it, some will shun it. In the corporate world which do you suppose is going to out-compete the other?
I'm liking the LTSP model because I can do it without investing my time writing code. I intend to pull up an on demand render farm without writing a single line of code.
I am also interested in the potential of exploiting the unused resources of desktop computers to turn an entire organization into an on-demand compute cluster and/or distributed redundant storage. Joe the typist doesn't need a quad-core 4GB machine to draft a letter, but as long as he's got one we may as well do something useful under the screensaver that's playing on it 90% of the time.
But I would love to hear some details about your config. Are you PXE booting? How do you get the virtual machines to launch correctly? Is there a common package for the management piece?
Bingo. A node is just a node. A decent control system will detect a node failing to come up, flag it for service and bring up another one. In some datacenters not designed for this sort of redundancy a server failure is a big deal where people have to come in on a holiday weekend. If you do it right the dead server just sits there until you get around to that rack in the regular course.
This is actually getting remarkably easy for Linux clusters, and the help is coming from a bizarre source - LTSP.
I wrote a journal piece about it just recently. I'm setting this up for me and it's interesting.
People are doing some interesting stuff with LTSP -- call centers with IP softphones, render farms. Soon we may see entire infrastructure with redundant servers powering on to serve demand spikes and shutting off when not in use.
Wikipedia can be your friend.
Microsoft didn't invent X.
Do you think this linux box was on the bargain rack at wal-mart?
beowulf cluster of hot grits, etc.
Don't forget the supercomputer geeks. I'm sure they'd like to write an order for 4000 of those Tflop graphics cards and 2000 maxed out server procs to the guy that wants to be number one on Top500.org next year.
Supercomputer geeks don't run windows.
Three or more, it's research.
Dell makes the drive mfr put the images on the drives before delivery. The mfr doesn't care what image goes on - they used to put just zeros or test pattern data I believe.
One or the other makes no difference to Dell.
This is about getting people to take the Vista on the PC and then install the XP themselves so people will quit whining about MS overcounting Vista sales.
They've tried a few pilots in the lowest density counties that major providers refused to serve. They deliver 100Mbps for about $50 a month. The fiber hardware goes to gigabit. Apparently it's embarrassing for a government agency to make that much of a profit even at that rate. There won't be any new pilots I don't think.
The bill on its first reading was received so well that they pulled its teeth without it actually being read. The revised bill is not going to get any more or better broadband to the people than have it now - not that it stands a chance of passing anyway.
The incumbent providers have divvied up the market and they have figured out that $60-80 is what people can pay no matter how fast it is. They're not going to invest in infrastructure to make it faster with no competition and no hope of higher revenues.
Every government agency I know of either has online information access or is busting their hump to provide it. It's a shame they won't come the last mile, even to serve the disabled who can't get in the car and drive down to the DMV. The Internet really is the post road of the 21st century. The government should just mandate it -- serve these customers, or we will. But they won't. Incumbent providers have this one in the bag.
To permit some public entity like, say, power districts, to provide citizens access to the post roads of the 21st century.
I read about that somewhere, but I've misplaced the reference...
These problems would all go away if we just abolished copyright altogether.
It's not the grand Longhorn promise of a secure seamless powerful new architecture so it doesn't renew our indenture to this monopolist for another decade. Some few don't hit the pain points and can come to like it so they latch onto it like it's garlic at a vampire festival. It's going to be really hard to pry it away from those folks. It not quite lame enough to give a total pass -- there's always a chance with this tweak and that patch and the other workaround and all new hardware (again!) it might make a good golden image though that keeps not panning out so far. It has just the precise level of fail needed to cause the maximum amount of ire amongst purchasers of Microsoft products, leading them to ask "why, again, do we buy products from this company?" It has motivated far more people to see the hazard of single-sourcing your server and desktop architecture, particularly with this company as the source.
Vista just might be the product to free us from the clutches of this monster. So yeah, I'm starting to appreciate it in my own way. =)
Nintendo marketing and software can turn some shit hardware into the shit game in no time.
Gotta give up the respect for our asian friends at Nintendo.
If you have plans for or photos of a computer you can use in midstream while you're fishing, while you're boarding an airplane, and while your pants are around your ankles and the images are safe for work, I'd love to see them. I'm sure the rest of the slashdot crowd would find it interesting too. Go ahead and post a link.
The reason why your post is moderated funny here on slashdot is because Sony thinks buying out the HD-DVD consortium means anything to the consumer. It doesn't. That was billions of yen wasted. I could tell Sony how to make their format win. But I won't and so they will waste more billions. So sad.
Yeah, it's really serious. Apparently the process of soldering and desoldering creates lead fumes that can kill you in high dosages or cause birth defects in the children of women so exposed. The more you know...
Believe it or not, some people read their bounce messages.
For a spammer who's looking for every low volume avenue this is a gift. If a message is sent from a falsified sender to your mail host and you send the content of the message or some other way to read it back with the bounce to the claimed sender, you've served the spammer by delivering their message to its intended target. Congratulations. You're part of the problem.
In a few more "Moore cycles" this will be that and the game will have changed again. What you want will have changed again too. Get over it. This is Progress. By the time That is this wireless broadband will be assumed and you will have forgotten the question.
No, I'm not telling you what to do with your computer and where or when. I'm telling you how to do what you want with your computer right now wherever you want. I really don't think the difference is subtle at all and I don't thing being this helpful is presumptive. If you do, well I'm sorry. Let me recommend a solution.
It's really not that hard. There's a reason why the reaction mass in a nuclear reactor is called a "pile". If you assemble enough of the right material in a certain volume, stuff gets hot and if you overdo it the boomyness happens (praise be to Allah). Believe it or not the Earth itself has created a number of fission reactors without even the benefit of motive.
Now making that happen in the minimum quantity of special materials was a closely guarded secret... until 2003 apparently.
In short, of all the stuff I've read on slashdot this is the one that trumps. If this could be undone I would if I could give Microsoft the entire OS and applications market. I would praise Vista. I would learn .NET. All my documents would be OOXML. Alas, Schroedinger's cat is out of the bag. I hope whatever form of life survives this learns well how foolish we were.
Perhaps there was something meaningful in the Drake equation that we missed in haste.
We could just nuke everybody and they'd stop burning all of our precious oil.
except the part where these operations have to happen on your mini laptop. Have you not heard of Citrix? Remote Desktop? Cellular modems? It's possible to have all of this happening on your mainframe, the attached supercomputer cluster, and a few thousand desktops and access them all from the laptop referenced in the fine article via VPN tunnel over wireless modem, public wi-fi, hotel room Internet, or any other mode you choose. I actually do this all day.
I know of no reason why I'd need to debug an Oracle database, edit a photo for press, or update my CAD drawing while I was mid-stream fishing, nor while I was boarding a plane. For some things you just have to wade to shore, wait until the flight is airborne, pull up your pants. This laptop will not play consumer games nor will it run Vista well. If you want one that can join your AD domain you have to get the Linux one -- the XP home or Vista Basic one isn't up for that. For everything else, this laptop is fine.
There is no laptop that will impress your gamer friends. The minimum bar to clear there starts at a kilowatt. They're disgusting.
One more time... these things cost five hundred clams. They do all the stuff laptops do, including run business productivity apps. They're cute and they fit on the plane well. They last all day on one charge. They play media. They have USB ports . They have wireless. They support all of the remote desktop technologies you've ever heard of. They come with software that's truly free, and you can install as much more as you want for free via the Applications menu. They play video and audio. Your choice of operating systems are available. Some of them have firewire. FSM preserve us what the heck do you want from a mini laptop for a measly five Benjamins? Sex?