Yeah, really. I haven't figured out what the deal is with the yearly rash of large-scale layoffs from various companies in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I *really* love the ones where a plant closes with no notice on the day before Thanksgiving, with a whopping 2 weeks severance for people who've worked their entire lives there but were e.g. contractors so had no pension.
Obviuosly Scrooge owns a lot more companies than anyone realized. I really should start making a formal blacklist of companies that do stooopid things like this and others. Lessee, GM's on the list (see "Who Killed the Electic Car") along with the obvious Microsoft, SCO, Walmart, etc.
I haven't ever bought regular bulbs so I can't be certain, but I would highly doubt that they are anywhere near the 10x range you imply.
- are a bit dimmer than their stated wattage equivalent standard bulbs
I haven't really found this to be the case, and even if it is true for a given brand of bulb, getting a higher wattage bulb to compensate still leaves you with 70+% energy headroom.
- take a bit of time to warm up
The latest bulbs I've purchased turn on instantly and are at 80-85% brightness right away. The warmup period is short, but long enough to not be visible.
- don't have quite the same color temperature as standard bulbs
You can find them in any number of colors, though granted most of them suck. A bit of experimenting would be in order, though I'm wondering this: where on earth has Consumer Reports been?? Maybe the light and color-measurement tools I'm slowly building up for LEDs should be put to use building a basic site with solid numbers for each of the bazillions of bulbs out there.
- sometimes don't fit under (e.g.) ceiling fan light domes, especially the 100W equivalent models
As stated in the article (a fundamental premise of which is that all of these concerns are now effectively solved...), "100W" bulbs are now getting compact enough for straight replacement. It just depends on the brand.
However, the main beef I have with the assertions the article makes is that CFL bulbs last 10 years. Maybe this is a function of older designs, but we haven't found CFLs to effectively last any longer than standard incandescent. Either the electronics crap out early, or the bulb dims and radically changes color (purple is popular) fairly quickly. The latest round seems to be a lot better, but they still buzz well within my hearing range.
FWIW, I've personally settled on Commercial Electric bulbs from Home Depot. They turn on instantly to very near full brightness, are bright and have a very nice color temperature (neither too sickly yellow/green, nor glaring "cool" blue). So far so good as far as lifetime...
Um, I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about using existing microcontrollers (e.g. PIC, AVR, lesser ARMs, etc.) in projects, not designing new processors...
I've done commercial projects of such a nature myself, with only a tiny bit of formal training. Such things are trivially within the grasp of a 2-year degree holder with appropriate training.
> The article itself isn't very insightful, and FWIW, it's pretty badly written. "abecedarian"? How about learning to walk before trying to fly?
Amen. That has got to be one of the most pretentious yet utterly incoherent articles I've ever read. About half the time I came to the end of a sentence, I had to back up, read it over again, then read it backwards, and then guess at the intended meaning. The author writes as if he thinks he's being clever with the language, but in reality he's just totally mangling it.
If this is indicative of what people are being taught (or rather, what they're learning) in schools these days (sheesh, I'm talking like an old fogey, and I'm not even 30 yet...), then, well, <sigh>
That's a good point to make. It's pretty clear that the Mark of the Beast is something that is very explicitly tied to renouncing Christ, and there's not gonna be any mistake about it. Those who say "ah, whatever" will have had plenty of evidence one way or another, and deciding "not to decide" (and thus taking the mark) is in fact a decision (and a really bad one at that).
Now, that's not to say that RFIDs may end up becoming the vehicle for this at some point in the future, just as barcodes could have and still might. The foretold regime could easily use RFIDs or whatever's the latest in the series (barcodes, RFIDs, ???s) in conjunction with the very explicit decision one way or the other. Then it's time to "choose wisely"...
Last I checked, pretty much every data center worth its name has a bank of UPSs. That means that power is coming in AC, and being converted to DC to charge the batteries. AFAIK any decent UPS in use in a server these days is "on-line", which means that instead of attempting a fast switchout between mains and battery, all outgoing AC power is re-generated from the DC battery bus. If you assume a 10% loss in both steps, you're at 81% right away. Add a bazillion AC power supplies at 10% loss and you're down to less than 73% efficiency.
Contrast this with a properly designed DC system a la old-school telco: The same front-end of the UPS is used, with a 10% loss converting AC to battery voltage. Then you run that into DC supplies that, with modern electronics, are going to be doing a lot better than an AC supply, so let's say 5% loss. That puts you at better than 85% efficiency.
The critics cited in the article are actually probably not far off in calling the Rackable solution over-hyped, if you only take into account the isolated-rack design. Rackable puts 2-3U of beefy redundant supplies at the top of the rack and does DC to the servers. Efficiency-wise this is only fractionally better than a bazillion AC supplies, and quite possibly dead even because of the DC->DC losses in each server on top of the AC->DC->AC->DC setup implicit with AC-based UPS systems. However, AFAICT from a glance at their site, Rackable's systems are designed to drop right into existing DC datacenters, which eliminates the AC supplies at the top and the DC->AC->DC stages.
The issue is what kind of infrastructure is needed to feed the selected DC voltage (which is going to be -48VDC) into the racks with the lowest bus losses, but this is someone I would expect is either a) already solved by the decades-old telco industry, or b) going to be solved in at the appropriate 384-cores-and-100TB-per-7ft-rack scale RSN, by "the market".
I know that if I were in the position of designing a big datacenter right now, I would be looking very hard at DC systems.
Doesn't look fixed to me when a Gnome app can't save a file somewhere that the users (who don't give a d*mn what Gnome or KDE are) can see just fine in their KDE file browser. In my book that's called a "bug".
Then fix it. Creating multiple wholly-incompatible VFS layers that make it utterly impossible for applications to actually work together is really lame. Whining about lack of features in the more appropriate lower layer is a cop-out IMO. Modern SELinux-derived security methods (not to mention the time-tested standby sudo) should easily be up to the task.
Obviously you didn't read the whopping 3 paragraphs and look at the screenshot that makes it quite clear that what they're doing is making it actually easy to use an encrypted filesystem from a desktop GUI. The instructions you post don't integrate into the desktop, nor are they by any means easy, sorry.
KDE does something similar, shoehorning in an ssh filesystem that only works in K-apps. There's a userspace sshfs which I'm going to try since I don't use K much, but this is all unnecessary duplication of effort.
Yes, this disparity between the kernel VFS and the Gnome or KDE or XYZ VFS is very annoying. I was called over to figure out how to save scanned files from a Linux box across to a Windows share. They could browse over to the Windows share just fine in Konq, but when it came time to use a Gnome-based scanner app, there was no such possibility. I had to hunt down a KDE scanning app and install that, which has an exceedingly stupid interface IMO (not that the Gnome that tne was that much better), just so these end-users could save files to a network share.
Why can't these VFS layers make use of the existing VFS, and instead of magically making network shares exist in their little universe, actually mount the share in question using the existing kernel-level tools? Then it's <gasp> magically available to all apps!
If you're just storing bare drives, try to get ahold of the shipping boxes that manufacturers send 20-packs in. If you're storing that many drives, they're probably going to be the most efficient and safest way to do it. If you're *buying* drives in that quantity, or can consider doing so in the future, you can probably manage to make sure you'll get the box too. You might be able to scam them off of local computer stores too. You could probably glue a laminated sheet of paper to it with a template and [dry|wet]-erase mark what's in each slot on the outside. Make sure you have plenty of good-condition static bags though.
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"these rely on credulousness, which has a finite supply"
I don't know what planet the author of this piece is living on, but around here the place is filled with morons who wouldn't know a phishing scam from a hole in the head.
What I utterly fail to understand is why NASA thinks they can get away with scrapping the only computer on the planet that can read the tapes, without spending a few days to read the tapes off first????? What kind of <oxymoron>brilliant NASA administrator<oxymoron> thought that was even remotely a good idea?
AFAICT, They are fully aware of the fact that they have data that defines priceless, and they're just going to toss it in the trash along with the computer because they got tired of trying to figure it out.
> you may want to look at the Parahelia line from Matrox
Except for the fact that Matrox specializes in 2D (specifically, quad-head wide displays for stock traders, and medical imaging), and the OP asked about a solution that is faster at 3D than SGI's hardware. A Parhelia doesn't have a chance at competing with that kind of 3D horsepower.
The best solution might be to see if an SLI-class motherboard (two x16 PCI-E slots) can be loaded with two dual-headed cards, and all four heads run independently. I'd hope they could, but it wouldn't surprise me if the SLI-isms are very specifically tuned to actually force you into doing SLI, which won't help in this case. Of course, esp. with NVidia, Linux drivers to support such a quad-headed setup with full 3D acceleration on all heads might be nonexistant.
Also, the person asking the question doesn't seem to understand the difference between PCI-X and PCI Express. PCI-X is just a faster/wider version of normal parallel PCI, while PCI Express is a serialized version. Those cards will not work in that server, or *any* server I've seen.
That said, I have personally done the multi-seat thing, with the appropriate X patches (built into Ubuntu's x.org, had to patch Debian's xfree86) and the right hardware. I'm going to be deploying quad-seat machines to a small town in Bolivia. But it's not the simplest thing to do (yet), and I had no luck with Userful's software. Maybe now that I have more homogenous hardware it might work better.
Thanks. You prompted me to finally get off my butt for once and write something up. Here it is:
I was thrilled to discover that should I ever need to apply for a Federal grant, I must give my hard-earned money to Microsoft, before I am even allowed to view the application, let alone fill it in.
Good to see that the government really does take its own judicial rulings seriously, and really puts the clamps on a (twice) convicted monopolist.
It's also good to see that the government communicates smoothly and efficiently, so that when the Office of Management and Budget requires that all new government purchase *not* require specific brands (such as Microsoft) when there is no reason whatsoever to do so, and the Department of Homeland Security *STRONGLY* suggests that people avoid Microsoft software in any situation where security is even remotely important (like say submarines <cough>), other branches of government actually pay attention and adjust their practices accordingly.
And I'm glad to be informed that Adobe Acrobat, which is available for all major platforms, is shockingly not sufficient for the process of filling out forms on the computer. I never would have guessed, having done my taxes via that method just days ago.
Oh, and you might be glad to have me tell you that this message is *dripping* with sarcasm. Very appropriately deserved sarcasm, for a very stupid, wasteful, and inappropriate decision to require Windows.
Thanks for spending my tax dollars so wisely! (sarcasm again, in case you somehow missed it)
Everyone reading this story should take a few minutes out of their day and call ChoicePoint, and ask them a few, um, "point"ed questions. According to their page at http://www.choicepoint.com/privacy.html you can call them at 1-877-301-7097. Call them up, take some of their precious time (they're taking yours, it's only fair) and phone bill, and ask them directly if your private, personal information was involved in this theft. I'll be doing so tomorrow, and making as much of a pain of myself as I can. Supervisor, here I come!
A year or so ago I was running scripts to download all the aerial photographs from portlandmaps.com. Imagine my surprise when I got a phone call the next morning from the admin of the site, begging me to stop killing their servers! Turns out the GIS server really didn't like the particular requests I was sending it, and I'd actually crashed one of them.
Of course, they charge $900/seat for the "license" as mentioned in the article, and I questioned that on the spot saying that it was a city-acquired resource, and as someone paying taxes in the county I figured I had a right to the data. The admin (or someone I called later, I forget) explained that the "Corporate GIS" entity was set up in order to get the data to every city entity that needed it, and that the seat license were the way that all the various city agencies (no comment on our ludicrously overblown and retarded city government....) paid into the pot in order to manage the data. In other words, the only stated reason for the seat license was to implement the equivalent of back-door cost centers. GAH!
I got the shots I wanted (for some estimates of long-shot wireless potential between a few sites), but I really wouldn't mind having the whole dataset available. If the original poster has any luck getting the dataset under a viable license (FREE, as it should be for something I ALREADY PAID FOR ), I wouldn't mind arranging to get a copy via a USB hard drive or somesuch. Dunno how many DVDs it would take, but quite a few... One CD holds 1 foot aerial imagery centered on the Burnside bridge out just about to the Freddies on NE 30th. Try going to Gresham or Hillsboro and you're talking quite a few DVDs.
See, you're not the only one that can screw up an election! And I'm not just talking about Ohio, either. Nossir, we'll be in the record books for good. Or until the next guys come along.
I wasn't really under the impression that there were any significant voting irregularites (~700 ballots out of several million don't count as significant, especially as I have heard of no allegations of selective bias), even though 13% of voters (extrapolated from 2000 Census via Wikipedia) used e-voting systems.
Not really sure how that counts as one-upping Florida.
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Yeah, really. I haven't figured out what the deal is with the yearly rash of large-scale layoffs from various companies in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I *really* love the ones where a plant closes with no notice on the day before Thanksgiving, with a whopping 2 weeks severance for people who've worked their entire lives there but were e.g. contractors so had no pension.
Obviuosly Scrooge owns a lot more companies than anyone realized. I really should start making a formal blacklist of companies that do stooopid things like this and others. Lessee, GM's on the list (see "Who Killed the Electic Car") along with the obvious Microsoft, SCO, Walmart, etc.
I haven't ever bought regular bulbs so I can't be certain, but I would highly doubt that they are anywhere near the 10x range you imply.
- are a bit dimmer than their stated wattage equivalent standard bulbs
I haven't really found this to be the case, and even if it is true for a given brand of bulb, getting a higher wattage bulb to compensate still leaves you with 70+% energy headroom.
- take a bit of time to warm up
The latest bulbs I've purchased turn on instantly and are at 80-85% brightness right away. The warmup period is short, but long enough to not be visible.
- don't have quite the same color temperature as standard bulbs
You can find them in any number of colors, though granted most of them suck. A bit of experimenting would be in order, though I'm wondering this: where on earth has Consumer Reports been?? Maybe the light and color-measurement tools I'm slowly building up for LEDs should be put to use building a basic site with solid numbers for each of the bazillions of bulbs out there.
- sometimes don't fit under (e.g.) ceiling fan light domes, especially the 100W equivalent models
As stated in the article (a fundamental premise of which is that all of these concerns are now effectively solved...), "100W" bulbs are now getting compact enough for straight replacement. It just depends on the brand.
However, the main beef I have with the assertions the article makes is that CFL bulbs last 10 years. Maybe this is a function of older designs, but we haven't found CFLs to effectively last any longer than standard incandescent. Either the electronics crap out early, or the bulb dims and radically changes color (purple is popular) fairly quickly. The latest round seems to be a lot better, but they still buzz well within my hearing range.
FWIW, I've personally settled on Commercial Electric bulbs from Home Depot. They turn on instantly to very near full brightness, are bright and have a very nice color temperature (neither too sickly yellow/green, nor glaring "cool" blue). So far so good as far as lifetime...
I've done commercial projects of such a nature myself, with only a tiny bit of formal training. Such things are trivially within the grasp of a 2-year degree holder with appropriate training.
St. IgNUDEcius <shudder>
> The article itself isn't very insightful, and FWIW, it's pretty badly written. "abecedarian"? How about learning to walk before trying to fly?
Amen. That has got to be one of the most pretentious yet utterly incoherent articles I've ever read. About half the time I came to the end of a sentence, I had to back up, read it over again, then read it backwards, and then guess at the intended meaning. The author writes as if he thinks he's being clever with the language, but in reality he's just totally mangling it.
If this is indicative of what people are being taught (or rather, what they're learning) in schools these days (sheesh, I'm talking like an old fogey, and I'm not even 30 yet...), then, well, <sigh>
Now, that's not to say that RFIDs may end up becoming the vehicle for this at some point in the future, just as barcodes could have and still might. The foretold regime could easily use RFIDs or whatever's the latest in the series (barcodes, RFIDs, ???s) in conjunction with the very explicit decision one way or the other. Then it's time to "choose wisely"...
Contrast this with a properly designed DC system a la old-school telco: The same front-end of the UPS is used, with a 10% loss converting AC to battery voltage. Then you run that into DC supplies that, with modern electronics, are going to be doing a lot better than an AC supply, so let's say 5% loss. That puts you at better than 85% efficiency.
The critics cited in the article are actually probably not far off in calling the Rackable solution over-hyped, if you only take into account the isolated-rack design. Rackable puts 2-3U of beefy redundant supplies at the top of the rack and does DC to the servers. Efficiency-wise this is only fractionally better than a bazillion AC supplies, and quite possibly dead even because of the DC->DC losses in each server on top of the AC->DC->AC->DC setup implicit with AC-based UPS systems. However, AFAICT from a glance at their site, Rackable's systems are designed to drop right into existing DC datacenters, which eliminates the AC supplies at the top and the DC->AC->DC stages.
The issue is what kind of infrastructure is needed to feed the selected DC voltage (which is going to be -48VDC) into the racks with the lowest bus losses, but this is someone I would expect is either a) already solved by the decades-old telco industry, or b) going to be solved in at the appropriate 384-cores-and-100TB-per-7ft-rack scale RSN, by "the market".
I know that if I were in the position of designing a big datacenter right now, I would be looking very hard at DC systems.
Doesn't look fixed to me when a Gnome app can't save a file somewhere that the users (who don't give a d*mn what Gnome or KDE are) can see just fine in their KDE file browser. In my book that's called a "bug".
Then fix it. Creating multiple wholly-incompatible VFS layers that make it utterly impossible for applications to actually work together is really lame. Whining about lack of features in the more appropriate lower layer is a cop-out IMO. Modern SELinux-derived security methods (not to mention the time-tested standby sudo) should easily be up to the task.
Obviously you didn't read the whopping 3 paragraphs and look at the screenshot that makes it quite clear that what they're doing is making it actually easy to use an encrypted filesystem from a desktop GUI. The instructions you post don't integrate into the desktop, nor are they by any means easy, sorry.
KDE does something similar, shoehorning in an ssh filesystem that only works in K-apps. There's a userspace sshfs which I'm going to try since I don't use K much, but this is all unnecessary duplication of effort.
Yes, this disparity between the kernel VFS and the Gnome or KDE or XYZ VFS is very annoying. I was called over to figure out how to save scanned files from a Linux box across to a Windows share. They could browse over to the Windows share just fine in Konq, but when it came time to use a Gnome-based scanner app, there was no such possibility. I had to hunt down a KDE scanning app and install that, which has an exceedingly stupid interface IMO (not that the Gnome that tne was that much better), just so these end-users could save files to a network share.
Why can't these VFS layers make use of the existing VFS, and instead of magically making network shares exist in their little universe, actually mount the share in question using the existing kernel-level tools? Then it's <gasp> magically available to all apps!
If you're just storing bare drives, try to get ahold of the shipping boxes that manufacturers send 20-packs in. If you're storing that many drives, they're probably going to be the most efficient and safest way to do it. If you're *buying* drives in that quantity, or can consider doing so in the future, you can probably manage to make sure you'll get the box too. You might be able to scam them off of local computer stores too. You could probably glue a laminated sheet of paper to it with a template and [dry|wet]-erase mark what's in each slot on the outside. Make sure you have plenty of good-condition static bags though.
"these rely on credulousness, which has a finite supply"
I don't know what planet the author of this piece is living on, but around here the place is filled with morons who wouldn't know a phishing scam from a hole in the head.
Play it safe, practice abstinence:
Use Firefox!
Wow, how intellegent. I forget one character in a fake tag and I'm now a Grade A "dumbass".
What, are you sore because they didn't pick you as the new pope? Apparently you're so perfect they should have.
What I utterly fail to understand is why NASA thinks they can get away with scrapping the only computer on the planet that can read the tapes, without spending a few days to read the tapes off first????? What kind of <oxymoron>brilliant NASA administrator<oxymoron> thought that was even remotely a good idea?
AFAICT, They are fully aware of the fact that they have data that defines priceless, and they're just going to toss it in the trash along with the computer because they got tired of trying to figure it out.
Now that's a FAQ for you, Planetary Society...
> you may want to look at the Parahelia line from Matrox
Except for the fact that Matrox specializes in 2D (specifically, quad-head wide displays for stock traders, and medical imaging), and the OP asked about a solution that is faster at 3D than SGI's hardware. A Parhelia doesn't have a chance at competing with that kind of 3D horsepower.
The best solution might be to see if an SLI-class motherboard (two x16 PCI-E slots) can be loaded with two dual-headed cards, and all four heads run independently. I'd hope they could, but it wouldn't surprise me if the SLI-isms are very specifically tuned to actually force you into doing SLI, which won't help in this case. Of course, esp. with NVidia, Linux drivers to support such a quad-headed setup with full 3D acceleration on all heads might be nonexistant.
I Am Doctorate!
Depending on exactly what position you have, you'll get this to varying degrees <rimshot>, but you will get it.
Also, the person asking the question doesn't seem to understand the difference between PCI-X and PCI Express. PCI-X is just a faster/wider version of normal parallel PCI, while PCI Express is a serialized version. Those cards will not work in that server, or *any* server I've seen.
That said, I have personally done the multi-seat thing, with the appropriate X patches (built into Ubuntu's x.org, had to patch Debian's xfree86) and the right hardware. I'm going to be deploying quad-seat machines to a small town in Bolivia. But it's not the simplest thing to do (yet), and I had no luck with Userful's software. Maybe now that I have more homogenous hardware it might work better.
Thanks. You prompted me to finally get off my butt for once and write something up. Here it is:
There's a really easy solution to this problem:
The VoIP relay refuses to pass any calls unless the 911 setup has been performed.
There: problem solved, no one is going to "forget" to set it up.
Is it really so hard? They call these things "firmware updates" last I heard.
Everyone reading this story should take a few minutes out of their day and call ChoicePoint, and ask them a few, um, "point"ed questions. According to their page at http://www.choicepoint.com/privacy.html you can call them at 1-877-301-7097. Call them up, take some of their precious time (they're taking yours, it's only fair) and phone bill, and ask them directly if your private, personal information was involved in this theft. I'll be doing so tomorrow, and making as much of a pain of myself as I can. Supervisor, here I come!
A year or so ago I was running scripts to download all the aerial photographs from portlandmaps.com. Imagine my surprise when I got a phone call the next morning from the admin of the site, begging me to stop killing their servers! Turns out the GIS server really didn't like the particular requests I was sending it, and I'd actually crashed one of them.
Of course, they charge $900/seat for the "license" as mentioned in the article, and I questioned that on the spot saying that it was a city-acquired resource, and as someone paying taxes in the county I figured I had a right to the data. The admin (or someone I called later, I forget) explained that the "Corporate GIS" entity was set up in order to get the data to every city entity that needed it, and that the seat license were the way that all the various city agencies (no comment on our ludicrously overblown and retarded city government....) paid into the pot in order to manage the data. In other words, the only stated reason for the seat license was to implement the equivalent of back-door cost centers. GAH!
I got the shots I wanted (for some estimates of long-shot wireless potential between a few sites), but I really wouldn't mind having the whole dataset available. If the original poster has any luck getting the dataset under a viable license (FREE, as it should be for something I ALREADY PAID FOR ), I wouldn't mind arranging to get a copy via a USB hard drive or somesuch. Dunno how many DVDs it would take, but quite a few... One CD holds 1 foot aerial imagery centered on the Burnside bridge out just about to the Freddies on NE 30th. Try going to Gresham or Hillsboro and you're talking quite a few DVDs.
You've got it all wrong. We have to fight the alien TERRA-ists.
I wasn't really under the impression that there were any significant voting irregularites (~700 ballots out of several million don't count as significant, especially as I have heard of no allegations of selective bias), even though 13% of voters (extrapolated from 2000 Census via Wikipedia) used e-voting systems.
Not really sure how that counts as one-upping Florida.