1) Licensing fees. Small companies hate to pay license fees. It's been a constant battle for me to keep things on the up and up about paying for every bit of commercial software that we have. We spend at least $600 per desktop (on hardware that is only worth $600) for commercial software licenses. At that point, eyes start to open in the CxO offices when they realize that their desktop PC budget is being eaten alive by licensing costs.
It's no longer $2000-$3000 machines with $300 of software on top. Hardware costs have plummeted, but software costs have remained the same or increased over the past 20 years.
2) Hassles of license tracking. I dislike the need to track licenses, or pushing through a purchase order for additional licenses. Not to mention the need to periodically audit all of the machines to make sure that nobody has circumvented licensing provisions.
Or finding out that the company will no longer sell me a license for the version that we're using and they want us to do a mass upgrade to the latest shiny version. At which point we're forced to migrate if we want to stay 100% legal.
3) Virtualization.
I think this is probably the killer deal for Linux servers making inroads. If your company is on the fence, put Linux on the server and run Windows Server inside of a VM. Now you have the best of both worlds because you can still use Windows, but can start making a push towards moving server-side work to Linux.
It may even end up as the solution for the desktop, depending on how good VM software gets. OS X Parallels software is pretty darn good, as an example.
No, Dune is the classic slow-starter. Anathem is the latest in a string.
Hah... I'll go you one better.
Try Les Miserables by Victor Hugo on for size sometime.
You'll go 50-100 pages in (I don't remember how far) before you even meet the protagonist.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
... I agree with Max's review. I'm almost halfway through Anathem and it's simply not compelling at this point. The made-up words that littered the first part of the story were amazingly painful to slog through, at least in the beginning. I either don't notice them so much now or their usage is toned down a little. They're still irritating, though.
So, not only has he not gotten better then the train wreck that was Snow Crash, he's gotten worse? The author sorely needs an editor who can tell him where his faults are. And I consider Snow Crash to be a primary example of a book that needed to be reworked.
But then RH has got RHEL, which they won't as much let anybody use for free or make available as free download... Where is the download link for RHEL, Max ? The same RHEL that benefits from community contributions. Instead community is left to only use Fedora!
RHEL is a for-pay product. It gives you the right to use Red Hat servers to get your packages from. I think it also gets you a bit of support. But mostly, RHEL is about getting packages from RH's servers.
Seriously, if you don't want to pay. Go visit CentOS, which is binary compatible, provides servers for free, but comes with zero support (although you can purchase support separately).
IIRC, Red Hat doesn't actually mind people making and distributing RHEL rebuilds. People that are unwilling to pay for a support contract are not customers that Red Hat is interested in, so they don't mind them going to CentOS instead. It is also better than having them go to Ubuntu, because with a CentOS deployment, if they change their minds later on, migrating them to RHEL would be a piece of cake.
Spot on. That's the primary reason that we started using CentOS over some other distros for our new Linux servers. Down the road, we have the option to move up to a RHEL version if we decide that we absolutely need support for key servers.
It's also a lot easier to call up a local support contractor and get support for CentOS/RHEL rather then some odd-ball distro. Or to find books about RHEL that (mostly) apply to CentOS servers.
Red Hat makes a very good, production level, stable distro. Good for server work where things need to be reliable and where the repository folks care about it. (Unlike some other distros that are much too bleeding edge and cavalier about what makes it into their package systems.)
The halcyon days of drive by download malware are OVER with IE7 and Vista. You haven't noticed that? These days they have to get lusers to click on malware - they can't just auto-load it when you click a questionable link anymore.
Assuming that you run IE7 as a limited-user account, the same is true of WinXP.
It was even true of IE6.
But if you run ANY web browser in an administrator-level account, you WILL get hacked sooner or later by a drive-by piece of malware.
(Been there, fought the battles, have the scars. On the upside, it finally convinced upper management to let us lock down the machines like we've wanted to for five years.)
All things considered, I think you'll have to be pretty cheap to care all that much about the power dissipation of your CPU. Even if it's 100W greater, you're looking at about 50 bucks a year at 6c/kWh if you're maxed out every day. That seems to me like the smallest cost involved.
Or you simply care about noise. It's a lot easier to cool a 45W or 60W part then a 125W or 150W part.
And up here on Long Island, NY, we pay closer to $0.17 per kWh (Spring 2008 prices). So for a system that is used 2000 hours per year (basically business hours), you're paying $34 for every 100W. Or $149 per year per 100W if the system runs 24x7.
When the wind really kicks in and pushes the grid to its limits, other parts have to lower production. In our case, this means letting a lot more water spill over the dams. This, in turn, tends to introduce way too much nitrogen into the water, which harms the fishies. Or so goes the theory.
Unless there is nitrogen in the spillway - why would there be more nitrogen in the water?
The water going over a dam goes either through the turbines or through the spillway. All they're doing (when they don't need to run as many turbines) is to divert water that would go through turbines to instead go over the spillway.
(The amount of water that flows past the dam, either through turbines or spillways, is determined by the level of water in the reservoir combined with the amount of incoming water from the source streams/rivers. If the incoming water feeds are too large, and the reservoir is already close to capacity, you have to allow that excess flow to bleed off at a faster rate then normal.)
The problem is not that letting more water over the spillway causes more nitrogen. The problem is that there was more nitrogen already in the water when it entered the reservoir. Which probably points back to either local industry or farming.
Sometimes the deregulation can get out of hand. In Miami, the independent Jitneys would cut in front of buses to pick up passengers at city bus stops for something like $0.10 per ride less than the city bus. Ha! Stick it to the man, you say? All was fun and games until three and four Jitneys would start competing on the same route, at the same time, not only looking ridiculous, but completely snarling traffic since they blocked all lanes trying to cut in front of each other to get to the bus stops first. I think they were shut down before any really dramatic safety problems came up...
So they should have been fined based on breaking existing traffic laws.
Even with RAID 10, if the behavior occurs in less time than synching the mirror takes you are screwed.
For the truly paranoid... you setup RAID-10 as a RAID-0 array over top of triple-mirror RAID-1. (Triple mirror meaning that each mirror is comprised of three active drives instead of just two.)
So to lose data, you would have to have at least 3 drives all die at the same time. Of course, the net capacity of the array would be below 33%.
I'm not sure if he chose Palin because he liked her, or because his Masters told him too. Either way, she is not a good candidate for VP by any stretch of the imagination.
I would have probably voted for McCain except for a few things:
Palin: What an absolute disaster of a choice.
Joe the Plumber: Stop harping about Joe. Joe needs to learn to obey laws.
Attacks: Tell me how you're going to get things done if elected. Don't sit there and tell me how your opponent isn't going to get things done. The unity message is a lot stronger then attacking.
Palin: Did I forget to emphasize how much of a disaster she was as a choice? A strong example of everything that is wrong with the Republican party. Why couldn't he pick someone like Lieberman?
Veering Right: Instead of appealing to the middle, the Republicans continue to believe that they can govern by only appealing to the ultra-right wing.
I think the election would have been a lot closer if McCain had picked a better VP and shown more independence from the Republican party.
Obama's no dummy. I think he realizes that he needs to govern from the center, reaching across the aisle to get things done.
The secondary problem, as you alluded to, is that nearly every game uses a completely different system for representing the world. Different combat types, different terrain, different environments.
Which makes it extremely difficult to build upon previous work.
Jumping from 2.2ghz quad-core to 3.2ghz quad-core is not going to bring you to a new utopia in desktop performance (like upgrading from a P3 to AMD64 was).
Assuming a simple scaling, you're talking about roughly 50% more performance.
Which, in the mid-late 2000s era is huge.
A lot of games that folks play are CPU-constrained. So that's 50% more framerate, or the difference between something that feels pokey vs something that works well.
That's 50% faster encoding / transcoding for videos.
Yeah, it's not the doubling of performance every 18 months like we had back in the 90s... but it's a pretty darn good improvement if it is 50% better.
It's a moot point. It's likely that processors will eventually have more than 256 cores, but that's going to take a long time, I'm not necessarily convinced that we will. At some point we will hit the smallest possible transister size and I'm not sure that will leave physical room for all the extra cores without moving to a much larger chip size.
Quad core is pretty much mainstream now. Having two CPUs on the board is not far out of the realm of possiblity, and quad-CPU systems are a staple of the server level. So individual chips only need to reach 64 cores before Windows 7 starts to run into its limit.
Figure quad cores this year. We'll probably see 8 cores per CPU by 2010, with 16 cores by 2012. And if the # of cores per chip starts doubling every 15 months instead of every 24... we approach 256 cores inside of a server box even quicker.
The open question at the moment is whether we'll really see 8-16 general purpose cores inside of a single CPU by 2012. Or will it switch over to a non-uniform style of CPU cores where you have 8 general purpose and 8 special purpose cores?
It's become trivially easy to meet Vista's hardware requirements as a mass market price.
Memory is currently extremely inexpensive.
The price for 4GB of RAM could easily go back up to $150-$200 again. (We've seen it happen before. Or at least we've seen price swings of that magnitude in the past few years.)
I just built a bunch of office machines, simple little things really. Core-2 Duo, WD 500gb drive, Antec chassis... Those cheap little things are perfectly noiseless, I shit you not. You could stick your ear right up to the hard drive and barely hear the modest clicking of the heads seeking around. In fact, the Antec 120mm fan, even at 800rpm, is easily the loudest component. Now, Antec doesn't make the quietest fans, but they're certainly in the Top 5.
Yah, we're a big fan of the Antec Sonata cases as well. The only thing the user's don't care for overly much is the front door (some remove it).
But for a stock case, it's extremely quiet.
(We go for the 45W and 65W CPUs so that the case/CPU fans don't have to work so much.)
We use Wildfire (a.k.a. Openfire) with Pandion (on the Windows machines) and iChat on the Macs. Some folks use Miranda or other chats. Openfire/Wildfire ties nicely into Active Directory, letting you populate user lists and do authentication against the AD.
We're using SSL to secure the transport protocol.
I'm serious. Stop doing the things that put you at risk for viruses and you won't have to run anti-virus.
Unfortunately, it's no longer that simple. There are enough browser exploits out there (for both IE and Firefox) that visiting normal (not fringe or adult) sites is enough to land a trojan/virus file on your hard drive. The bot-herders are a lot more sophisticated now in their toolset.
A/V software is simply another line of defense, along with firewalls, security restrictions, and the other tricks of the trade. Also known as defense-in-depth, so it continues to be a good idea to keep A/V software on the clients.
If you use SoftwareRAID in Linux, don't do a single RAID-6 array across your disks. Instead, divide the disk up into parts (say 1/4 of the disk for each) and do four separate RAID-6 arrays.
Now, obviously, if a disk goes completely kaput - you're in the standard situation. But a single read-error on a single-disk, will only knock out one of the four RAID-6 arrays. And since the array only spans 1/4 of the disk, it rebuilds faster. Hopefully before a 2nd error occurs.
It doesn't help much for situations where you need one BIG disk. (And you could always LVM across multiple RAID arrays.) But there could be some pretty good advantages in other situations (such as making the stripe size on one of the arrays smaller then stripe size on the rest of the arrays).
Where I work they buy recycled toner cartridges at half the price of new ones. The trouble is, you only get 1/10th as many pages before they peter out, and usually spill toner all over the inside of the printer, necessitating repairs.
So start printing out the page counters every time you change the cartridge. Keep records of how many pages each toner cartridge printed. Give them data to backup a decision.
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Here's why I think things will push forward:
1) Licensing fees. Small companies hate to pay license fees. It's been a constant battle for me to keep things on the up and up about paying for every bit of commercial software that we have. We spend at least $600 per desktop (on hardware that is only worth $600) for commercial software licenses. At that point, eyes start to open in the CxO offices when they realize that their desktop PC budget is being eaten alive by licensing costs.
It's no longer $2000-$3000 machines with $300 of software on top. Hardware costs have plummeted, but software costs have remained the same or increased over the past 20 years.
2) Hassles of license tracking. I dislike the need to track licenses, or pushing through a purchase order for additional licenses. Not to mention the need to periodically audit all of the machines to make sure that nobody has circumvented licensing provisions.
Or finding out that the company will no longer sell me a license for the version that we're using and they want us to do a mass upgrade to the latest shiny version. At which point we're forced to migrate if we want to stay 100% legal.
3) Virtualization.
I think this is probably the killer deal for Linux servers making inroads. If your company is on the fence, put Linux on the server and run Windows Server inside of a VM. Now you have the best of both worlds because you can still use Windows, but can start making a push towards moving server-side work to Linux.
It may even end up as the solution for the desktop, depending on how good VM software gets. OS X Parallels software is pretty darn good, as an example.
No, Dune is the classic slow-starter. Anathem is the latest in a string.
Hah... I'll go you one better.
Try Les Miserables by Victor Hugo on for size sometime.
You'll go 50-100 pages in (I don't remember how far) before you even meet the protagonist.
... I agree with Max's review. I'm almost halfway through Anathem and it's simply not compelling at this point. The made-up words that littered the first part of the story were amazingly painful to slog through, at least in the beginning. I either don't notice them so much now or their usage is toned down a little. They're still irritating, though.
So, not only has he not gotten better then the train wreck that was Snow Crash, he's gotten worse? The author sorely needs an editor who can tell him where his faults are. And I consider Snow Crash to be a primary example of a book that needed to be reworked.
But then RH has got RHEL, which they won't as much let anybody use for free or make available as free download... Where is the download link for RHEL, Max ? The same RHEL that benefits from community contributions. Instead community is left to only use Fedora!
RHEL is a for-pay product. It gives you the right to use Red Hat servers to get your packages from. I think it also gets you a bit of support. But mostly, RHEL is about getting packages from RH's servers.
Seriously, if you don't want to pay. Go visit CentOS, which is binary compatible, provides servers for free, but comes with zero support (although you can purchase support separately).
IIRC, Red Hat doesn't actually mind people making and distributing RHEL rebuilds. People that are unwilling to pay for a support contract are not customers that Red Hat is interested in, so they don't mind them going to CentOS instead. It is also better than having them go to Ubuntu, because with a CentOS deployment, if they change their minds later on, migrating them to RHEL would be a piece of cake.
Spot on. That's the primary reason that we started using CentOS over some other distros for our new Linux servers. Down the road, we have the option to move up to a RHEL version if we decide that we absolutely need support for key servers.
It's also a lot easier to call up a local support contractor and get support for CentOS/RHEL rather then some odd-ball distro. Or to find books about RHEL that (mostly) apply to CentOS servers.
Red Hat makes a very good, production level, stable distro. Good for server work where things need to be reliable and where the repository folks care about it. (Unlike some other distros that are much too bleeding edge and cavalier about what makes it into their package systems.)
Remember when XP was released, too. Back then 256Mb was very adequate, and XP and the MSOffice of the day (2003) ran fine on that.
Nah, 256MB was never enough for WinXP. The rule of thumb back around 2000 was:
128MB for WinNT v4
256MB for Win2000
512MB for WinXP
And things worked a LOT better if you could get XP up to 1GB.
Every Win2k machine that was fitted with only 128MB ran like a dog, same thing for a WinXP box with only 256MB of RAM.
The halcyon days of drive by download malware are OVER with IE7 and Vista. You haven't noticed that? These days they have to get lusers to click on malware - they can't just auto-load it when you click a questionable link anymore.
Assuming that you run IE7 as a limited-user account, the same is true of WinXP.
It was even true of IE6.
But if you run ANY web browser in an administrator-level account, you WILL get hacked sooner or later by a drive-by piece of malware.
(Been there, fought the battles, have the scars. On the upside, it finally convinced upper management to let us lock down the machines like we've wanted to for five years.)
All things considered, I think you'll have to be pretty cheap to care all that much about the power dissipation of your CPU. Even if it's 100W greater, you're looking at about 50 bucks a year at 6c/kWh if you're maxed out every day. That seems to me like the smallest cost involved.
Or you simply care about noise. It's a lot easier to cool a 45W or 60W part then a 125W or 150W part.
And up here on Long Island, NY, we pay closer to $0.17 per kWh (Spring 2008 prices). So for a system that is used 2000 hours per year (basically business hours), you're paying $34 for every 100W. Or $149 per year per 100W if the system runs 24x7.
When the wind really kicks in and pushes the grid to its limits, other parts have to lower production. In our case, this means letting a lot more water spill over the dams. This, in turn, tends to introduce way too much nitrogen into the water, which harms the fishies. Or so goes the theory.
Unless there is nitrogen in the spillway - why would there be more nitrogen in the water?
The water going over a dam goes either through the turbines or through the spillway. All they're doing (when they don't need to run as many turbines) is to divert water that would go through turbines to instead go over the spillway.
(The amount of water that flows past the dam, either through turbines or spillways, is determined by the level of water in the reservoir combined with the amount of incoming water from the source streams/rivers. If the incoming water feeds are too large, and the reservoir is already close to capacity, you have to allow that excess flow to bleed off at a faster rate then normal.)
The problem is not that letting more water over the spillway causes more nitrogen. The problem is that there was more nitrogen already in the water when it entered the reservoir. Which probably points back to either local industry or farming.
I watched a show about these on "future weapons" last year. they have been in production for over 3 years now.
I think it was even used on CSI:NY within the past few years as well. A tactical assault team tossed one into an apartment prior to entry.
Sometimes the deregulation can get out of hand. In Miami, the independent Jitneys would cut in front of buses to pick up passengers at city bus stops for something like $0.10 per ride less than the city bus. Ha! Stick it to the man, you say? All was fun and games until three and four Jitneys would start competing on the same route, at the same time, not only looking ridiculous, but completely snarling traffic since they blocked all lanes trying to cut in front of each other to get to the bus stops first. I think they were shut down before any really dramatic safety problems came up...
So they should have been fined based on breaking existing traffic laws.
64GB 2.5" SSD disks are now below $200. The 128GB 2.5" SSD disks are now below $400.
They're getting real close to being inexpensive enough. Maybe not this year or next, but I think we're rapidly approaching "soon".
It will be interesting in 2010 to see whether SSD sales take off as capacity rises enough to be useful for the majority of users.
Even with RAID 10, if the behavior occurs in less time than synching the mirror takes you are screwed.
For the truly paranoid... you setup RAID-10 as a RAID-0 array over top of triple-mirror RAID-1. (Triple mirror meaning that each mirror is comprised of three active drives instead of just two.)
So to lose data, you would have to have at least 3 drives all die at the same time. Of course, the net capacity of the array would be below 33%.
I'm not sure if he chose Palin because he liked her, or because his Masters told him too. Either way, she is not a good candidate for VP by any stretch of the imagination.
I would have probably voted for McCain except for a few things:
Palin: What an absolute disaster of a choice.
Joe the Plumber: Stop harping about Joe. Joe needs to learn to obey laws.
Attacks: Tell me how you're going to get things done if elected. Don't sit there and tell me how your opponent isn't going to get things done. The unity message is a lot stronger then attacking.
Palin: Did I forget to emphasize how much of a disaster she was as a choice? A strong example of everything that is wrong with the Republican party. Why couldn't he pick someone like Lieberman?
Veering Right: Instead of appealing to the middle, the Republicans continue to believe that they can govern by only appealing to the ultra-right wing.
I think the election would have been a lot closer if McCain had picked a better VP and shown more independence from the Republican party.
Obama's no dummy. I think he realizes that he needs to govern from the center, reaching across the aisle to get things done.
I greatly enjoy the AI in FEAR - I think they did an outstanding job.
The secondary problem, as you alluded to, is that nearly every game uses a completely different system for representing the world. Different combat types, different terrain, different environments.
Which makes it extremely difficult to build upon previous work.
Jumping from 2.2ghz quad-core to 3.2ghz quad-core is not going to bring you to a new utopia in desktop performance (like upgrading from a P3 to AMD64 was).
Assuming a simple scaling, you're talking about roughly 50% more performance.
Which, in the mid-late 2000s era is huge.
A lot of games that folks play are CPU-constrained. So that's 50% more framerate, or the difference between something that feels pokey vs something that works well.
That's 50% faster encoding / transcoding for videos.
Yeah, it's not the doubling of performance every 18 months like we had back in the 90s... but it's a pretty darn good improvement if it is 50% better.
It's a moot point. It's likely that processors will eventually have more than 256 cores, but that's going to take a long time, I'm not necessarily convinced that we will. At some point we will hit the smallest possible transister size and I'm not sure that will leave physical room for all the extra cores without moving to a much larger chip size.
Quad core is pretty much mainstream now. Having two CPUs on the board is not far out of the realm of possiblity, and quad-CPU systems are a staple of the server level. So individual chips only need to reach 64 cores before Windows 7 starts to run into its limit.
Figure quad cores this year. We'll probably see 8 cores per CPU by 2010, with 16 cores by 2012. And if the # of cores per chip starts doubling every 15 months instead of every 24... we approach 256 cores inside of a server box even quicker.
The open question at the moment is whether we'll really see 8-16 general purpose cores inside of a single CPU by 2012. Or will it switch over to a non-uniform style of CPU cores where you have 8 general purpose and 8 special purpose cores?
It's become trivially easy to meet Vista's hardware requirements as a mass market price.
Memory is currently extremely inexpensive.
The price for 4GB of RAM could easily go back up to $150-$200 again. (We've seen it happen before. Or at least we've seen price swings of that magnitude in the past few years.)
They should also be mounted to the ground plane (which is the PC case.)
The power cable probably takes care of that issue.
If they really needed to be grounded, they'd probably come with a grounding strap...
I just built a bunch of office machines, simple little things really. Core-2 Duo, WD 500gb drive, Antec chassis... Those cheap little things are perfectly noiseless, I shit you not. You could stick your ear right up to the hard drive and barely hear the modest clicking of the heads seeking around. In fact, the Antec 120mm fan, even at 800rpm, is easily the loudest component. Now, Antec doesn't make the quietest fans, but they're certainly in the Top 5.
Yah, we're a big fan of the Antec Sonata cases as well. The only thing the user's don't care for overly much is the front door (some remove it).
But for a stock case, it's extremely quiet.
(We go for the 45W and 65W CPUs so that the case/CPU fans don't have to work so much.)
We use Wildfire (a.k.a. Openfire) with Pandion (on the Windows machines) and iChat on the Macs. Some folks use Miranda or other chats. Openfire/Wildfire ties nicely into Active Directory, letting you populate user lists and do authentication against the AD. We're using SSL to secure the transport protocol.
I'm serious. Stop doing the things that put you at risk for viruses and you won't have to run anti-virus.
Unfortunately, it's no longer that simple. There are enough browser exploits out there (for both IE and Firefox) that visiting normal (not fringe or adult) sites is enough to land a trojan/virus file on your hard drive. The bot-herders are a lot more sophisticated now in their toolset.
A/V software is simply another line of defense, along with firewalls, security restrictions, and the other tricks of the trade. Also known as defense-in-depth, so it continues to be a good idea to keep A/V software on the clients.
If you use SoftwareRAID in Linux, don't do a single RAID-6 array across your disks. Instead, divide the disk up into parts (say 1/4 of the disk for each) and do four separate RAID-6 arrays.
Now, obviously, if a disk goes completely kaput - you're in the standard situation. But a single read-error on a single-disk, will only knock out one of the four RAID-6 arrays. And since the array only spans 1/4 of the disk, it rebuilds faster. Hopefully before a 2nd error occurs.
It doesn't help much for situations where you need one BIG disk. (And you could always LVM across multiple RAID arrays.) But there could be some pretty good advantages in other situations (such as making the stripe size on one of the arrays smaller then stripe size on the rest of the arrays).
Where I work they buy recycled toner cartridges at half the price of new ones. The trouble is, you only get 1/10th as many pages before they peter out, and usually spill toner all over the inside of the printer, necessitating repairs.
So start printing out the page counters every time you change the cartridge. Keep records of how many pages each toner cartridge printed. Give them data to backup a decision.