Well I haven't found a customer willing to pay for offline or nearline spare capacity. And an online HACMP failover cluster is very expensive. We would need a completely different service model to rent capacity on demand. Probably in 2-3 years we'll be able to do that reliably. In the meantime, sure, we need a better approach that just sucking volts out of the wall for nothing.
But perhaps someone here could answer the question of: in the real world are the heating demands of spooling server in and out of an idle state worse or better than leaving it on?
You make some good points. Unfortunately it hasn't been my experience that customers would even be willing to pay less for power thrifty service. Even if they get 1 hit an hour they all seem convinced that the giant whale of all hits is comming and they have to be prepared for it.
The problem with load balancers is that if you've built them right they're always busy and every node in the clusted is always doing something, say @ 25-35% capacity. Else you've wasted your cluster dollars if you have a whole node doing nothing for a period of time.
We have about 50,000 sq ft and it's the raised floor cooling, AC, lights that suck current. We also have a ton of routers and switches and firewalls that can't power down. We have load balancing clusters that are always running.
In a commercial environment you can't get away with an SLA that says "we'll power down your servers at random which will create 30% greater latency".
As long as we can recycle them again. Cheapo limited use phones - RU kidding, this is great. Give them out in malls and amusement parks to keep track of people, give them out in parks for day trippers in case they get lost. Give them out on field trips, the kids, etc. When its done just toss it in the phone recycle bin and pick up another. For the price of phone card you could have minutes and a phone. Are you kidding this is great.
At least to your corporate masters it does. Ah yes I can picture the conversation now...
"If you code monkeys knew what the fuck you were doing in the first place you wouldn't be whining at me for more time. Go back and fix the shit you built as all fuck to begin with. Move!"
Whereas if you fix something, even if what you do it a piece of shit drive-by chunk of crap, then you're a fucking hero !
The customer won't notice or care about the difference and if it runs like shit blame it on the hardware or the sysadmins or the crappy db design. Or the H1B that touched it last.
Plus if you patch vs. rebuild you never have to hear from someone else that what you did was a horrible design.
That's what I would do if I were cynical but of course I'm not.
Here in the states there is a quiet debate about e911 services - the ability to locate and track any cell phone that is on. The ability to determine who is at a meeting in the proximity of whom. Divorce lawyers are foaming at the mouth to get this. This is being done in the name of 'public safety' whereby the police would be able to find you if you had an emergency, blah blah blah. At any rate we hear the same empty policy statements: "we won't sell the information to anyone, we won't give it up in bulk without a subpoena, it's protected, woof woof woof" But since the Republicrats have moved larger and larger portions of the implementation and execution of public policy to private enterprise there are few if any controls and no incentive whatsoever to comply with even that fluffing. You will be tracked you will be recorded.
So most of you are coming off the greatest economic boom seen since the invention of cross border sea trade in the Mediterranean with the Minoans. And so most of think that either bad things can never happen to you or bad things can't happen.
tsk tsk tsk you poor innocent children. Let me educate you.
You work a bunch of hours now and say it's ok because you feel you're being compensated for it. Look out into the future. You're now older, have more responsibilities are expected to work the same or more hours and since the Great Downturn of 01 you haven't had a raise or much of one for 6 years, your job is less stable than ever and your CEO just cashed out to the tune of $100 million dollars because he/she train-wrecked the company the likes of which we haven't seen since Mike Armstrong managed to take ATT the most powerful monopoly in the country and screw it into the ground.
There's a new crop of freshly scrubbed help desk meat coming the door and they are grateful for the opportunity to get shit and shot for a few months at maybe 60% of what a geezer like you makes. But still you're confident. After all you're the greatest fucking programmer since the invention of hex and as long as the company keeps making the doorways big enough to fit your ego through you're good to go! But what's that sound - OH YEAH the phone's ringing and your manager wants you to sit down with a consulting company to give them skill sets and develop requirements for the new programmers that are going to be outsourced in Ireland and India. Yeah I know - tough break, you tried to get all those H1B's in the door at start your own internal group but you couldn't get the numbers and REAL AMERICAN programmers cost too much. You want to fork back your equity to pay for them?
So you passed on the management track to 'Stay Technical' and now you're not in a position to decide your own fate. You the alpha nerd are now the target of every cost reduction scheme. Dozens of other alpha nerds and nerdettes (AN/AN-F) are looking over their shoulders hoping its not them that gets the ax. All of a sudden project status meetings stop. You can't decide if its because the projects are dead or simply because managers are afraid to share any information with each other anymore. Sr. Team leads are 'encouraged' to look for savings in their own ranks. Remember 1 AN/AN-F = a multiple of baby nerds so you have to decide do you toss some qualified experienced bodies on pyre or do you commit the children to the flames. Either way, the only way out is up the chimney. 3QTR analysts hammer the stock and your options are officially so far under water you'd need the Glomar Challenger to get them back. Now you become aware that the work groups have been informally broken into 2 factions. The An/AN-F's and a junior group headed by new junior team leads who are going through the same exercise as you, looking for places to carve flesh. Flash forward. It's the next day and whole development group is scattered in a bloody heap. Scraps of bodies here, carnage, gore, goo over there. All killed off in a paranoid orgy of hate mistrust miscommunication and manipulation. The executives that are left are bought off to the tune of millions, the development assets are sold off to the offshore company and company ceases to exist. The workers did the knacking job themselves because they had no power position in the company and no stance from which to apply leverage to management.
If you think this story is scary just consider that it is true.
Does it REALLY have to make toast, brush your hair, whisper in your ear, service the wife, numerically prove the existance of an afterlife, feed the world and have good beat you can dance to?
C'mon scope creep and stupid fucking requirements (SFR) are what generate sucktocity and general sucktitude. How many times have you listened to some account weenie get on all 4s and scarf the customer over and over. "Sure we can do that, no problem !!!!!!!"
In a dense pack server farm, a dense rack or CoLo cage the enemy is heat. The heat pumps grow much faster than server capacity the denser you pack them. So anything you can do to reduce heat is a good thing assuming of course that under typical load a Crusoe is actually cooler. That is, if it's never idle is it cooler than Intel machines?
I was working on Wall Street when the Shuttle blew up. We were putting together a big IMS DB/DC and CICS system. OVer a hundred people on the project. A few folks who babysat conversion runs overnight had TV sets and more or less left them on all the time. After all a shuttle launch is a big deal especially that one with all the Christa McAuliffe hype. A contractor came into my cube and said the shuttle blew up. He had to repeat himself 3 or 4 times before I really understood what he was talking about. So a bunch of us just congregated around a TV running the story. We stood there pretty much speechless for long while. I can't remember anything else that happened that day.
I set to (2) so hopefully much of the crud is screened out but I'm amazed that the discussion basically breaks down into:
(1) Ya can't fight city hall so don't try.
(2) Lie Lie Lie.
(3) No privacy is the price ya pay for keeping molesters off the street.
(4) Privacy is an overrated concept promoted by those socialist pussies in Europe.
And they call me cynical?
If you think laws guaranty your personal emotional completeness you are a delusional weenie. That doesn't mean we don't need to have some standards and guidelines.
How do you know you weren't turned down for a loan, not because of your credit risk but because of your medical history.
How do you know you weren't turned down for a job because of your video tape rental records.
The point is, children, that you need to establish some basic protections or expectations of privacy in order to claim that they exist at all. Or would you rather see an eBay marketplace with lists of all of the a.b.p.e newsgroups you fetish around in?
That's a little disingenuous because credit risk is already built into the loan. To front a credit risk and then deny a loan becaue it might be risky is very close to charging everyone else a premium for the banks' double dipping into the risk pool. It's akin to an insurance company only taking healthy people and then dropping them or charging them more if they file a claim. True any bank should be allowed to decide who gets a loan and who doesn't but wouldn't differential rates be just as effective. They do that now with PMI vs. no PMI.
All this stuff was well and good when it was a ploy to get the 3CP to bankrupt itself to keep up. Who we gonna use this stuff against? The next threat will be against Harpoon type anti ship missles, short-medium range tactical-nuclear-chemical-bio tips and the proverbial terrorist truck. You can see the logistical problem already. In the field in battle conditions you need one laser hog being directed by one AWACS being protected by a fighter screen being fueled by a KC-10, supported by a ground facility and so on. Why The Fuck do you think that it was easier to fly from Missouri to Iraq and back again in a B-2 than it was to screw around with trying to build a multibillion dollar support structure from scratch?
Any idiot can see that. What else IS? On the desktop any encroachment on something you completely own is a threat. If MS only had 40% of the desktop market then Lunix would be just another desktop scrabbling for scraps. When they have almost 100% then its an encroachment on their personal kingdom. What about the LAN space? IBM Lambserver? Novell? Ack. Midrange? Other than the usual gang of suspects nothing else new here besides Lunix. What did you expect them to say? That they plan to dedicate the focus of the company to unseat high end IBM SP's and z/OS mainframes? So of course they're going to go after the server space. Its where they are popular and vulnerable at the same time.
The hole. It's full of stars.
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 2
"What's going to happen to me Dave?"
"Something wonderful."
Ka-Booom
It's like an Arthur Clarke widget
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 2
Sometimes when you read ACC, you come across a description of some all powerful complex device with a spooky name. But if you think about it and try to draw it you'll see a theromocouple or a rheostat.
Not those damn earthlings again! dump 'em in the bit bucket and block all future messages. Stupid kindergarten drivel !!!! Stupid earth trolls. Fuck em.
I worked for company where that was standard policy. Instead of telling you you were terminated you were dragged down to HR told that you would be escorted back to your desk by security, given a box, told to fill it with your stuff and then you would be escorted out of the building never to return. Rarely if ever were you told a reason in person. That would follow by mail.
It shows what you can do with no budget limitations. This is just sound engineering for a SIGINT facility. Things like fully steerable 2 axis antennae are because the NSA was in the SIGINT business, scarfing communications signals from wherever so they had to be able to pick out any satellite moving in any direction and track it.
I work for a very very large computer company and our policy is very straightforward. Basically anything related to your work or work product or their equipment or dealings with other employees or any other party with a relationship to the company, primarily a financial one, is not private. You have no expectation of privacy. Does this translate to everyone is monitored? No. Just that there is no expectation of privacy. If there was something they wanted to go after they would on that basis alone.
It's not relevant here. Of course it is relevant otherwise and those are very importantlessons to learn but not here as to the precise application of some other country's laws. What I meant to say is that it is not relevant to have a long discourse on why some person thinks that the application of this law is unfair. As in a pseudo factual lecture about how the swastika come from India and it's not really a Nazi symbol...blah blah blah.
My point was that there are many things that are offensive. Some of them you will agree with some you will not. What I don't want is a justification of why what you want is ok but what I want is not. Thems the laws. In France and Germany there is ample justification for doing away with these symbols regardless of how Americans think about it. Likewise one of the most popular symbols of hate in Germany today is the Confederate flag. So while it is perfectly ok to block its display at the S. Carolina statehouse it's probably not ok to complain that those items are on sale in Munich.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I haven't found a customer willing to pay for offline or nearline spare capacity. And an online HACMP failover cluster is very expensive. We would need a completely different service model to rent capacity on demand. Probably in 2-3 years we'll be able to do that reliably. In the meantime, sure, we need a better approach that just sucking volts out of the wall for nothing.
But perhaps someone here could answer the question of: in the real world are the heating demands of spooling server in and out of an idle state worse or better than leaving it on?
You make some good points. Unfortunately it hasn't been my experience that customers would even be willing to pay less for power thrifty service. Even if they get 1 hit an hour they all seem convinced that the giant whale of all hits is comming and they have to be prepared for it.
The problem with load balancers is that if you've built them right they're always busy and every node in the clusted is always doing something, say @ 25-35% capacity. Else you've wasted your cluster dollars if you have a whole node doing nothing for a period of time.
We have about 50,000 sq ft and it's the raised floor cooling, AC, lights that suck current. We also have a ton of routers and switches and firewalls that can't power down. We have load balancing clusters that are always running.
In a commercial environment you can't get away with an SLA that says "we'll power down your servers at random which will create 30% greater latency".
As long as we can recycle them again. Cheapo limited use phones - RU kidding, this is great. Give them out in malls and amusement parks to keep track of people, give them out in parks for day trippers in case they get lost. Give them out on field trips, the kids, etc. When its done just toss it in the phone recycle bin and pick up another. For the price of phone card you could have minutes and a phone. Are you kidding this is great.
Ok so it should say:
"Any retard could do it"
There. Happy now?
I swear that guy is Frank Zappa.
Let's rename it "foster child".
At least to your corporate masters it does. Ah yes I can picture the conversation now...
"If you code monkeys knew what the fuck you were doing in the first place you wouldn't be whining at me for more time. Go back and fix the shit you built as all fuck to begin with. Move!"
Whereas if you fix something, even if what you do it a piece of shit drive-by chunk of crap, then you're a fucking hero !
The customer won't notice or care about the difference and if it runs like shit blame it on the hardware or the sysadmins or the crappy db design. Or the H1B that touched it last.
Plus if you patch vs. rebuild you never have to hear from someone else that what you did was a horrible design.
That's what I would do if I were cynical but of course I'm not.
Here in the states there is a quiet debate about e911 services - the ability to locate and track any cell phone that is on. The ability to determine who is at a meeting in the proximity of whom. Divorce lawyers are foaming at the mouth to get this. This is being done in the name of 'public safety' whereby the police would be able to find you if you had an emergency, blah blah blah. At any rate we hear the same empty policy statements: "we won't sell the information to anyone, we won't give it up in bulk without a subpoena, it's protected, woof woof woof" But since the Republicrats have moved larger and larger portions of the implementation and execution of public policy to private enterprise there are few if any controls and no incentive whatsoever to comply with even that fluffing. You will be tracked you will be recorded.
So most of you are coming off the greatest economic boom seen since the invention of cross border sea trade in the Mediterranean with the Minoans. And so most of think that either bad things can never happen to you or bad things can't happen.
tsk tsk tsk you poor innocent children. Let me educate you.
You work a bunch of hours now and say it's ok because you feel you're being compensated for it. Look out into the future. You're now older, have more responsibilities are expected to work the same or more hours and since the Great Downturn of 01 you haven't had a raise or much of one for 6 years, your job is less stable than ever and your CEO just cashed out to the tune of $100 million dollars because he/she train-wrecked the company the likes of which we haven't seen since Mike Armstrong managed to take ATT the most powerful monopoly in the country and screw it into the ground.
There's a new crop of freshly scrubbed help desk meat coming the door and they are grateful for the opportunity to get shit and shot for a few months at maybe 60% of what a geezer like you makes. But still you're confident. After all you're the greatest fucking programmer since the invention of hex and as long as the company keeps making the doorways big enough to fit your ego through you're good to go! But what's that sound - OH YEAH the phone's ringing and your manager wants you to sit down with a consulting company to give them skill sets and develop requirements for the new programmers that are going to be outsourced in Ireland and India. Yeah I know - tough break, you tried to get all those H1B's in the door at start your own internal group but you couldn't get the numbers and REAL AMERICAN programmers cost too much. You want to fork back your equity to pay for them?
So you passed on the management track to 'Stay Technical' and now you're not in a position to decide your own fate. You the alpha nerd are now the target of every cost reduction scheme. Dozens of other alpha nerds and nerdettes (AN/AN-F) are looking over their shoulders hoping its not them that gets the ax. All of a sudden project status meetings stop. You can't decide if its because the projects are dead or simply because managers are afraid to share any information with each other anymore. Sr. Team leads are 'encouraged' to look for savings in their own ranks. Remember 1 AN/AN-F = a multiple of baby nerds so you have to decide do you toss some qualified experienced bodies on pyre or do you commit the children to the flames. Either way, the only way out is up the chimney. 3QTR analysts hammer the stock and your options are officially so far under water you'd need the Glomar Challenger to get them back. Now you become aware that the work groups have been informally broken into 2 factions. The An/AN-F's and a junior group headed by new junior team leads who are going through the same exercise as you, looking for places to carve flesh. Flash forward. It's the next day and whole development group is scattered in a bloody heap. Scraps of bodies here, carnage, gore, goo over there. All killed off in a paranoid orgy of hate mistrust miscommunication and manipulation. The executives that are left are bought off to the tune of millions, the development assets are sold off to the offshore company and company ceases to exist. The workers did the knacking job themselves because they had no power position in the company and no stance from which to apply leverage to management.
If you think this story is scary just consider that it is true.
Does it REALLY have to make toast, brush your hair, whisper in your ear, service the wife, numerically prove the existance of an afterlife, feed the world and have good beat you can dance to?
C'mon scope creep and stupid fucking requirements (SFR) are what generate sucktocity and general sucktitude. How many times have you listened to some account weenie get on all 4s and scarf the customer over and over. "Sure we can do that, no problem !!!!!!!"
But it's an SFR and it will kill you.
It
will
kill
you.
In a dense pack server farm, a dense rack or CoLo cage the enemy is heat. The heat pumps grow much faster than server capacity the denser you pack them. So anything you can do to reduce heat is a good thing assuming of course that under typical load a Crusoe is actually cooler. That is, if it's never idle is it cooler than Intel machines?
I was working on Wall Street when the Shuttle blew up. We were putting together a big IMS DB/DC and CICS system. OVer a hundred people on the project. A few folks who babysat conversion runs overnight had TV sets and more or less left them on all the time. After all a shuttle launch is a big deal especially that one with all the Christa McAuliffe hype. A contractor came into my cube and said the shuttle blew up. He had to repeat himself 3 or 4 times before I really understood what he was talking about. So a bunch of us just congregated around a TV running the story. We stood there pretty much speechless for long while. I can't remember anything else that happened that day.
I set to (2) so hopefully much of the crud is screened out but I'm amazed that the discussion basically breaks down into:
(1) Ya can't fight city hall so don't try.
(2) Lie Lie Lie.
(3) No privacy is the price ya pay for keeping molesters off the street.
(4) Privacy is an overrated concept promoted by those socialist pussies in Europe.
And they call me cynical?
If you think laws guaranty your personal emotional completeness you are a delusional weenie. That doesn't mean we don't need to have some standards and guidelines.
How do you know you weren't turned down for a loan, not because of your credit risk but because of your medical history.
How do you know you weren't turned down for a job because of your video tape rental records.
The point is, children, that you need to establish some basic protections or expectations of privacy in order to claim that they exist at all. Or would you rather see an eBay marketplace with lists of all of the a.b.p.e newsgroups you fetish around in?
That's a little disingenuous because credit risk is already built into the loan. To front a credit risk and then deny a loan becaue it might be risky is very close to charging everyone else a premium for the banks' double dipping into the risk pool. It's akin to an insurance company only taking healthy people and then dropping them or charging them more if they file a claim. True any bank should be allowed to decide who gets a loan and who doesn't but wouldn't differential rates be just as effective. They do that now with PMI vs. no PMI.
All this stuff was well and good when it was a ploy to get the 3CP to bankrupt itself to keep up. Who we gonna use this stuff against? The next threat will be against Harpoon type anti ship missles, short-medium range tactical-nuclear-chemical-bio tips and the proverbial terrorist truck. You can see the logistical problem already. In the field in battle conditions you need one laser hog being directed by one AWACS being protected by a fighter screen being fueled by a KC-10, supported by a ground facility and so on. Why The Fuck do you think that it was easier to fly from Missouri to Iraq and back again in a B-2 than it was to screw around with trying to build a multibillion dollar support structure from scratch?
Any idiot can see that. What else IS? On the desktop any encroachment on something you completely own is a threat. If MS only had 40% of the desktop market then Lunix would be just another desktop scrabbling for scraps. When they have almost 100% then its an encroachment on their personal kingdom. What about the LAN space? IBM Lambserver? Novell? Ack. Midrange? Other than the usual gang of suspects nothing else new here besides Lunix. What did you expect them to say? That they plan to dedicate the focus of the company to unseat high end IBM SP's and z/OS mainframes? So of course they're going to go after the server space. Its where they are popular and vulnerable at the same time.
"What's going to happen to me Dave?"
"Something wonderful."
Ka-Booom
Sometimes when you read ACC, you come across a description of some all powerful complex device with a spooky name. But if you think about it and try to draw it you'll see a theromocouple or a rheostat.
Not those damn earthlings again! dump 'em in the bit bucket and block all future messages. Stupid kindergarten drivel !!!! Stupid earth trolls. Fuck em.
New media golly gee whiz bang internet moguls call their flunkies CTOs while old school fat bastard white guys call theirs CIOs. It's that simple.
I worked for company where that was standard policy. Instead of telling you you were terminated you were dragged down to HR told that you would be escorted back to your desk by security, given a box, told to fill it with your stuff and then you would be escorted out of the building never to return. Rarely if ever were you told a reason in person. That would follow by mail.
It shows what you can do with no budget limitations. This is just sound engineering for a SIGINT facility. Things like fully steerable 2 axis antennae are because the NSA was in the SIGINT business, scarfing communications signals from wherever so they had to be able to pick out any satellite moving in any direction and track it.
I work for a very very large computer company and our policy is very straightforward. Basically anything related to your work or work product or their equipment or dealings with other employees or any other party with a relationship to the company, primarily a financial one, is not private. You have no expectation of privacy. Does this translate to everyone is monitored? No. Just that there is no expectation of privacy. If there was something they wanted to go after they would on that basis alone.
It's not relevant here. Of course it is relevant otherwise and those are very importantlessons to learn but not here as to the precise application of some other country's laws. What I meant to say is that it is not relevant to have a long discourse on why some person thinks that the application of this law is unfair. As in a pseudo factual lecture about how the swastika come from India and it's not really a Nazi symbol...blah blah blah.
My point was that there are many things that are offensive. Some of them you will agree with some you will not. What I don't want is a justification of why what you want is ok but what I want is not. Thems the laws. In France and Germany there is ample justification for doing away with these symbols regardless of how Americans think about it. Likewise one of the most popular symbols of hate in Germany today is the Confederate flag. So while it is perfectly ok to block its display at the S. Carolina statehouse it's probably not ok to complain that those items are on sale in Munich.