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User: paulhar

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  1. Re:Headline Is So Very Wrong on How Google Avoided Paying $60 Billion In Taxes · · Score: 1

    Rather than being a fairy tale, it is more of a book that attempts to explain what could happen if we continue to attempt to redistribute wealth.

    One basic principle of the book is that if you keep taking from those that produce wealth they choose to give up creating the wealth and then there is nobody to take the wealth from and bad things happen since the whole monetary system collapses.

    You can read part of it here: http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.htm

  2. Re:Headline Is So Very Wrong on How Google Avoided Paying $60 Billion In Taxes · · Score: 0, Troll

    They do not control over 90% of the wealth. They earn over 90% of the wealth. If you do not like it, go earn some wealth.

    I would also suggest you read Atlas Shrugged...

  3. Already has mass storage support on Microsoft Docs Indicate Future Xbox 360 Support For USB Storage · · Score: 4, Informative

    My xbox 360 has a 250GB external USB drive attached to it that is used to store copies of home movies.

    Although the article isn't as clear as it could be, this is really about adding support for Xbox downloadable content to use USB storage.

    Oh, and for a laugh - currently the Xbox can't read NTFS format drives. FAT isn't suitable. So... use a mac, format as HFS+, and the xbox will happily use them.

  4. Availability... on Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > "There is nothing we can't do with our fibre optic cable network,

    Apart from get it anywhere near approximately 50% of the population, and that is mostly in the very dense urban areas. Sure, wonderful if you live in an area that NTL cabled back in the 90s.

  5. Re:$100 discount? on iPad Will Beat Netbooks With "Magic" · · Score: 0

    > It is a less powerful machine that requires a dock for a keyboard, which isn't very portable.

    Except it doesn't require the dock. I'll be using my bluetooth keyboard with it, if, for some reason, the on screen keyboard doesn't cut it. Some of us cope just fine with the iphones keyboard.

    As for portability - I've lugged a 17" laptop with desktop CPU and GPU (6kg) around... and I believe this device will be a little more portable... but that's maybe just me.

    To power. I've used plenty of low power Linux style machines. My home NAS / media server is an eeepc 701 using luks encrypted external drives. It's also painfully slow to do any "hands-on" work. I've also got an iphone. I larger, faster iphone minus the calling and plus applications written for that form factor, is exactly what I want.

    > Android... which IMO is better than the iPhone OS.

    I've not looked aggressively at Android but I believe that platform suffers from the same problems that (the now expired) windows mobile suffers from. So many random form factors, hardware capabilities, and skinned interfaces.

    > iPad isn't even going to be released for another month at least, and given the way new device releases go you probably won't get your hands on one for another two or three months after that, minimum.

    I'm special. Seriously though I'm not sure where you get your time frames from... the only way any company gets money is to deliver products when they're wanted...

  6. Re:$100 discount? on iPad Will Beat Netbooks With "Magic" · · Score: 1

    > The resistive touch screen is pressure sensitive.

    and

    > Does the Touch Book support multitouch?
    > No. And we don't think that it's an issue. Multitouch is interesting when you want to zoom in / zoom out. At 1024×600, the Touch Book screen is big enough so that you don't need to zoom all the time as you have to do it on the iPhone.

    Except when you want to play games that need multitouch, or use an onscreen keyboard with more than one finger (shift key...)

    and

    > OpenOffice will be available in a coming release

    OpenOffice on a machine with a slow CPU and a tiny amount of memory.

    This is the killer though:

      > expect your order to be shipped within two months.

    In two months we'll be using something else...

  7. Re:"Much darker" my ass on Star Wars TV Show Tainted By Memories of Jar Jar · · Score: 1

    > These days "Much darker than its predecessor" has become Hollywood doublespeak. It means nothing.

    Maybe they're much darker because they're 3d?

  8. Re:Two issues here on Genre Wars — the Downside of the RPG Takeover · · Score: 1

    > Fighting in that game was more stressful in the way your body isn't catered to dealing with: Prolonged periods of suspense and fear, with no way to vent it.

    You must have been playing a different game to me. (2004-2009)

    Prolonged periods of gate hugging, station camping, watching a bunch of dreads reinforce a POS while waiting 20-30 minutes for the FC to decide that it's ok to have them jump in.
    Sure, we had fun. We also had suspense, especially when your cloak fails to activate at a gate for some unknown reason and you still manage to escape, or when you decide to try to solo in a low sec system, but as soon as you moved away from carebearing into "serious" 0.0 warfare it became a "we all warp in and watch the repeated warp in, snap back, warp in effect while shields fall and nobody else is on grid... oh look... I'm in a station... didn't even see anyone".

    And no, you can't have my stuff.

  9. Re:Um. on HandBrake Abandons DivX As an Output Format · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately the mp4 playback on the XBOX doesn't have 5.1 stereo. If you want 5.1 then you have to use AVI.

    http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/xbox360/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx

  10. Re:Why an MMO? on BioWare Targeting Spring 2011 For Star Wars: The Old Republic Launch · · Score: 1

    It's hard to pirate an MMO since you're paying for access to the server and the server is under their control...

  11. Re:user-friendly? on Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac · · Score: 1

    Were you saying that having to right click is difficult, or that any interface that relies on right clicking to bring up a different interface is less than ideal?

    I'd agree with the second but have no trouble right clicking with my trackpad/magic mouse.

  12. Re:Fire your boss for overstepping his authority on Music While Programming? · · Score: 1

    Just cut and paste text from articles into your private correspondence. That way you haven't typed it on your keyboard.

    WoRKEs GREAt wHeN you ARe wriTING randS0M NOtES toO.

  13. Re:More reason to be a ZFS fanboy on ZFS Gets Built-In Deduplication · · Score: 2, Informative

    TCP overhead at 1GbE for a modern processor is negligible - you're only talking about processing 120MB/sec or so.

    Here is a document including a pretty graph: http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3628.pdf

    "...enabling the TCP Offload Engine (TOE) on the Linux hosts did not noticeably affect performance on the IBM blade side."

  14. Re:That's a bit harsh on SCO Terminates Darl McBride · · Score: 1

    Did they send someone back through time to do it?

  15. Thinking differently on Why Cloud Storage Is Lousy For Enterprises (and Individuals) · · Score: 1

    If the data is processed and lives in the cloud then bandwidth is no longer a major issue. As an example:

    In one world you could have the Exchange servers backups pushed out to a cloud provider. This would result in many hours to get the data out there, and the challenge of restoring it in the event of a problem. As the OP indicated.

    Or...

    Push the Exchange server and it's data into a "cloud" provider. Now the clients access the data from the Exchange server in the "cloud" and the "cloud" provider provides DR copies of that data at their network bandwidth to their correctly managed data centers. The cloud provider could manage that Exchange server on your behalf or just provide the infrastructure.

    Now when some disaster strikes the DR is performed in the "cloud", at local speeds.

    I.e. Why have any local services at all? [assuming security is covered elsewhere... a traditional challenge that exists even in internal datacentres where the local internal admin can access data they shouldn't be able to and backups they shouldn't be able to]

    If you're using your applications entirely in the cloud suddenly it all looks a bit of a different problem. How do I get my apps into the cloud, how do I move my apps between cloud providers, how do I ensure my cloud provider is delivering an SLA that is appropriate for my business.

  16. Re:That's nothing on Kindle Finally Ready For Global Distribution · · Score: 1

    P.S. The VAT on ebooks is 17.5%, unfortunately. They're not books but electronic downloads and are taxed as such.

  17. Re:VAT on Books in Europe Trending Towards 0%-5% on Kindle Finally Ready For Global Distribution · · Score: 1

    Except, unfortunately, an electronic book isn't a book so they attract the full UK 17.5% VAT rate.

  18. Re:Why single out games? on The Nickel & Dime Generation · · Score: 1

    We don't have HBO here but we have Sky with Sky Sports. You pay for the Sports channel and get it, except for the premium content (boxing matches etc) where you have to pay extra to see the event (PPV).

    When I buy a car I'm asked "oh well, if you want bigger alloys and a bad boy spoiler then you have to pay another £5,000".

    Instead of complaining that once you've got something that everything else derived from it must be free (included) why not just be happy with whatever you get for whatever you've paid for. If new content comes along that is compelling to you - buy it, or don't.

  19. Re:simple idea on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're not likely to see 30k RPM drives any time soon. The speed of a 15k drive means that the outer edge of the 3 1/2" drive is spinning pretty fast... getting close to the speed of sound and the lions share of power consumed by 15k drives is consumed in counteracting the air buffeting the heads. With 2 1/2" drives we could go faster but while drives are open to the air it's not likely we'll see much in the short term.

    It's why CDROM speeds haven't gone up much since the old day of 52x.

    As areal density improves the drives will be able to push out more raw MB/sec just like DVD is better than CD, but in terms of IOPs it's not likely to dramatically improve.

  20. Re:RAID is here to stay on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 2, Interesting

    RAID 1 has much less reliability than RAID 6. Assume a typical case: one disk totally fails. You then start to reconstruct - in a RAID 1 scheme a single sector error will result in the rebuild failing. Not great.

    In RAID 6 you start the rebuild and you get a single sector error from one of the drives you're rebuilding from. At that point you've got yet another parity scheme available (in the form of the RAID 6 bit) that figures out what that sector should have been and then continues the rebuild. Then you go back and decide what to do about that drive that had the second error.

    A lot of drive failures aren't full head crashes or motor errors but just single sector, track, bits of dirt on the platter style errors. Other than the affected area the drive can be read.

    With RAID 6 you can fail two disks completely and still access the data. You're still reading from the same ten 10TB disks in your example and if the implementation of RAID 6 is optimal (RAID-DP) you aren't having to read additional data from the same physical disks.

    In the world you describe with 10TB drives it sounds like you'd just not be able to use the disks at all since any process that reads from the disks will kill them. There are a few things that could happen:

    1. Disks get more reliable. Hasn't happened much yet but...
    2. We switch to different packaging. Instead of making disks larger we cram more of them into the same space similar to CPU cores - same MTBF per disk but lots of them presented out by one physical interface.
    3. We change technologies completely. SSD (interesting failure modes there too... needs RAID)

    I guess we'll find out in only a few years...

  21. Re:simple idea on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 3, Informative

    They do to varying degrees of success but just because a disk can't read a particular sector doesn't mean that the drive is faulty - it could be a simple error on the onboard controller that is causing the issue.

    FC/SAS drives mostly leave error handling up to the array rather than doing it themselves because the arrays can typically make better decisions as to how to deal with the problem and helps cope with time sensitive applications. The array can choose to issue additional retries, reboot the drive while continuing to use RAID to serve the data, etc.

    Consumer SAS drives on the other hand try really hard to recover from the problem - for example retrying again and again with different methods to get the sector and while admiral that leads to behaviours we see in consumer land where the PC just "locks up". The assumption here is that there is no RAID available and so reporting an error back to the host is "a bad thing". The enterprise SAS drives we're seeing on the market are starting to disable this automatic functionality to make them behave correctly when inserted into RAID arrays.

    Usually ;-)

  22. Re:Hardware RAID is dead on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 2, Informative

    > First of all, "Hardware RAID" is still software, just executed by dedicated circuits. The distinction is kind of moot.

    I'm not sure where in my post you saw anything about a comparison between Hardware RAID or Software RAID.

    > So my guess is that you're not working for a storage vendor. I haven't seen many people switch to SW RAID recently.

    I work for NetApp. I didn't think it mattered much in the post I made though. To your second point, as all of the NetApp Enterprise storage systems use software based RAID I can happily confirm that many hundreds of thousands of customers have switched to software RAID.

    As you mentioned earlier though the point is moot since when you're delivering an enterprise array to a customer it doesn't matter if the array uses RAID cards provided by a 3rd party vendor, uses RAID cards built in-house, or uses software RAID to write the data that the customer gives you. The ingress point for the customer is a physical port (IP/FC typcially) and that port provides RAID capabilities. Maybe that's also hardware RAID?

  23. RAID is here to stay on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Disclaimer: I work for a storage vendor.

    > FTA: The real fix must be based on new technology such as OSD, where the disk knows what is stored on it and only has to read and write the objects being managed, not the whole device
    OSD doesn't change anything. The disk has failed. How has OSD helped?

    > FTA: or something like declustered RAID
    Just skimming that document it seems to claim: only reconstruct data, not white space, and use a parity scheme that limits damage. Enterprise arrays that have native filesystem virtualisation (WAFL for example) already do this. RAID 6 arrays do this.

    Lets recap. Physical devices including SSDs will fail. You need to be able to recover from failure. The failure could be as bad as the entire physical device failing, or as bad as a single sector being unreadable. In the former case a RAID reconstruct will recover the data but you'll hit RAID recovery errors due to the raw amount of data that needs to be recovered. Enterprise arrays mitigate the risk of recovery errors by using RAID 6. They could even recover the data from a DR mirrored system as part of the recovery scheme.

    And when RAID 6 has a high enough risk that it's worth expanding the scheme everyone will start switching from double parity schemes to triple parity schemes since their much less expensive in terms of spindle count than RAID 6+1.

    One assumption is, at some point in the future, reconstructions will be a continual occurring background task just like any other background task that enterprise arrays handle. As long as there is enough resiliency and performance isn't impacted then it doesn't matter if a disk is being rebuilt.

  24. Re:simple idea on RAID's Days May Be Numbered · · Score: 4, Informative

    Enterprise arrays copy all the good data off the drive to a spare drive, use RAID to recover the failed sector(s), then fail the broken disk.

  25. Amazing patent on Patent Trolls Target Small East Texas Companies · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Having just read the patent claims it seems that this patent is on the ability for a linked list to be cleared of expired items. Truly a ground breaking, patent worthy invention!