A modern Desktop OS should have easy to understand _standard_ sandbox templates that apps would request to be run under, and would be easier for users to get right.
Sounds a lot like SELinux profiles - which can be difficult to deal with, even though the SELinux folks have done wonders to create a huge stable of profiles for most applications.
Give it a few more years, and I suspect the SELinux approach will be the way things go (and maybe OS X will pick it up). RedHat has been using SELinux turned on (in targeted mode) on their server systems for a while now, so SELinux is finally becoming somewhat mainstream in the Linux server world. Which means that it should improve rapidly due to increased usage.
Of course, Microsoft is a NIH (not invented here) shop - so they'll recreate it, poorly.
I wonder whether mdadm would build to the fresh drive using one or both surviving disks in the array. If it only reads from one of the surviving disks in order to build the new mirror, then the other drive doesn't get nearly as much stress and would be a lot less likely to fail at a bad time. Plus, mdadm could use the other surviving drive to service read requests in a timely manner during the rebuild. It's something that I'd have to test (since I have individual lights on each drive in my 3-way RAID1).
Alternately, if we assume that mdadm is going to do a full resync of the array (putting both survivor disks through their paces), I think that the odds of failure of both survivor disks is 1/2 that of a single disk. Assume that there's a 50% chance that a survivor disk will fail during the resync activity required to bring a new spare up to speed as an active member of the array. In order for both disks to fail, you have to flip the coin twice and come up with tails both times. The odds of that are 1:4 (instead of the 1:2 from having only one survivor). So by running 3-way active RAID1, you reduce the risk (by half) of losing the entire array during resync.
At least, I'm pretty sure the math works out that way.
I wonder if a weekly resync (# echo check >/sys/block/md0/md/sync_action) would help ferret out "weak" disks ahead of catastrophic failure.
(Plus HT links are faster in the newest processors, yes?)
That is correct. Newer Athlon64 / Opteron systems have faster HT links. I don't remember whether this also involves changes to the silicon on the motherboard or not (to support the faster HT links). Since I never (well, almost never) upgrade chips on older motherboards, I haven't bothered to find out.
Yes, this low-end dual-core is half the price, but not half the performance. Therefor a real bargain.
For the most part, all of the current Intel/AMD CPUs within the $0-$300 price range all provide nearly equivalent performance for X cost. That is, a $150 AMD chip will perform very similarly to a $150 Intel chip.
Personally, we still buy AMD Athlon64 X2s in the $100-$125 range for our desktops. They were first to market with affordable 64bit dual-core chips and we prefer to keep our systems as homogeneous as possible. For the low-middle range business desktop, an AMD X2 3600+ up through a 4600+ are plenty of power for a reasonable price. (That and we can't be arsed to go looking at Intel solutions since we know exactly what parts to order for an AMD solution.)
The only advantage to buying a RAID controller is that you get a lot of connectors. Otherwise, if you have any even fairly decent CPU, and you're not doing anything but shoveling data and maybe some logging, the main processor beats the living shit out of almost any CPU on any RAID controller. There are limited exceptions but those cards are highly spendy.
And keeping a lot of data off of the interface bus. Hardware RAID controllers are all about delegation. Get the data off the bus and onto the card as fast as possible, without sending it over the bus multiple times. Which is less of a concern in the days of boards with 30+ PCIe lanes.
But back in the PCI days (prior to PCI-X, but it still applied even to PCI-X), trying to do software RAID across the PCI bus would kill performance once you reached more then 4-6 disks. Instead of being able to tell the controller "write these X bytes of data" and only sending X bytes across the PCI bus, with Software RAID, you're probably looking at at least 2x (RAID1) up to 4x (RAID5) the bandwidth usage to write data.
That's where I think that mantra came from. Plus the (misguided?) idea that if a 3Ware / Areca RAID array fails, you can buy support from companies to troubleshoot the issue easily. With Software RAID, it's a lot easier to shift the blame around (making it difficult to get support).
That being said, I prefer the flexibility of Software RAID over the hardware RAID cards and typically use the 12-port 3Ware cards as dumb SATA cards. Mostly as a way of getting enough SATA ports to talk to the 15 drives installed in the hot-swap trays.
Honestly though, for the average user running SMB mounts over a 100bps LAN
I don't know where you've been for the last 2-3 years, but gigabit networks are pretty mainstream at this point. Just about every computer made in the last 3-4 years has gigabit network ports and the small 4/8 port switches are dirt cheap.
And mini-ITX systems are not inexpensive (except in terms of running cost). You can put together an X2 3800+ system w/ 2GB of RAM and a decent motherboard for around $250-$300 (depending on memory prices). I have both a 600MHz C3 (fanless) and an Athlon64 X2 3800+ system (the 35W 3600+ CPUs are hard to find and rather expensive).
On the whole, I prefer my X2 system over the C3 mini-ITX. Yeah, the mini-ITX is cool and fanless and super tiny and really cool... but replacement parts are a wrench. If that little PSU conks out in my Morex Venus case, I have to hope that I can still buy the somewhat proprietary shaped replacement PSU from Morex. On the X2 system, it's in a bog-standard Antec p160 case with a standard ATX PSU. I always have a spare ATX PSU laying around, so it would take me all of 30 minutes to get the unit back up and running. Worst case, I could run around to the corner electronics shop and replace every component in the system with equivalent standard PC parts.
Proprietary or hard-to-replace-quickly hardware sucks.
OTOH, if you're going to be doing mirrored drives with a dedicated hot-spare... why do it as a (2) disk active (1) disk as hot-spare setup? Why not make it a (3) disk active RAID1 setup where all three drives are in use at all time.
You cut your recovery window (the time period during which you're only running on a single drive) down to zero. You'll have to experience a triple failure (not just a double failure) before losing the entire array. You're less likely to have your last remaining disk fail when you start stressing the system to bring that hot-spare up to speed.
(This is pretty easy to do with Software RAID. Possibly the more expensive hardware RAID cards might offer the capability as well. Other then the wear and tear on the 3rd hard drive, which would normally be idle, there's not much downside at all.)
3-way RAID1 also makes for a nice "shove it in a closet and forget it" setup. When that drive does fail, you've got a bigger buffer to get in there and swap out the bad drive.
That sounds overstated. Even an old P3 1.8GHz w/ cruddy S3 Savage graphics can display HD content encoded in the various MPEG4 codecs. And that's a 5+ year old system. For a more modern system, an Athlon X2 3600+ with just about any video card made in the last 3 years (NVIDIA GeForce 6200 LE or the 6150 built into motherboards) can display high def content.
Are you kidding me? You expect these people, who are the low-paid,
bottom-of-the-IT-food-chain to have ethics? Why are they any different
from a parking lot attendant or car wash guy? Because they're techies?
Don't kid yourself.
Frankly, I expect *everyone* to have ethics, no matter their income level... sadly, humans are sinful by nature.
not sure if he taped it or melted it, but they held on pretty well
Analog magnetic tape (and possibly digital) can be "spliced" using splicing tape.
It was a pretty common endeavor back in the 80s. Audio cassette tape (or even reel-to-reel) was often mangled by audio decks, so you'd have to trim out the mangled portion and salvage the rest by cutting the tape diagonally and then putting splice tape across the ends.
I wasn't aware that there were VHS tape splicing kits, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I don't know, maybe it's normal in some cultures, but I still can't get past people clapping after the plane lands -- if I though landing a plane was some work of art, I would never have boarded!
Try a landing in a crosswind situation? It definitely looks pretty difficult. Check out some of the videos on Youtube (search for "crosswind").
Or maybe the passengers are simply happy that their ordeal is at an end?
Actually, I was thinking the other day about why someone wouldn't praise someone else for effort, even expected effort. There are a lot of folks out there who won't say "Thank you" or "Good job", even though it doesn't cost them anything. Are they afraid (or believe) that by building someone else up, they're making themselves look worse? Or are they simply too self-centered to value giving praise to others? And I'm sure there are other motivations that I haven't listed.
So, why can't you get past people clapping when the plane lands? Why not join in? It may be nothing more then a spontaneous celebration of safe arrival.
I was thinking about this the other day... and finding that I miss CompuServe (even though it was expensive, slow, and proprietary).
What's annoying today is that nobody has managed to come up with a messaging / discussion system that truly "works" (in both online and offline modes). USENET is great... except that very few people go there (and Thunderbird's USENET support is sucky, at best). Lots of folks like to use Web Forums, which have their advantages (e-mail notification of replies, ability to mark up text or insert images). Other folks like to use mailing lists (threaded message support in most e-mail clients, easy to reply off-list, easy to take on the road).
What I'd like to see in a messaging system:
- Moderation capability (all 3 systems do offer this).
- Offline ability (USENET and e-mail lists). Now if we could just get the phpBB systems of the world to figure out how to offer offline capabilities.
- The ability to join a community and read the archives. E-mail lists fall short on this, very rarely do they allow you to download past messages into your e-mail client. So you have two time frames - "before you joined" which usually requires dealing with a crappy web interface to the e-mail archives, or maybe a USENET group if you're lucky. And the "after you joined" where all of the messages are in your e-mail reader and you have all of the e-mail reader tools at your disposal.
- Notification of replies. E-Mail lists and web forums offer this, USENET doesn't. It was nice with CompuServe that I could login and know that I had replies to messages.
There's an awful lot of e-mail lists that I subscribe to, even though I don't read them regularly. Just so that I don't have to deal with the before/after issue - that and it gives me a searchable offline knowledgebase.
I have seen good forums flip, and the group of insightful posters get displaced by smaller more malignant group.
That's a common scenario in a lot of social situations. Forums, guilds, gaming clans, businesses, social clubs, etc.
The factor seems to be how many EGR (Extra Grace Required) there are compared to normal supportive members. EGR folks are either abusive towards others, disrespectful, or require extra attention. Hence the term "EGR" which means that you have to have extra grace in order to deal with them (carrying the load that they're not, dealing with their problems, smoothing over misunderstandings, etc).
Too many EGRs, and the group implodes as people start tuning out or leaving.
A lot of support groups will remind group leaders that they need to limit their intake of EGR people. Not that EGRs don't deserve help/support - but because they put the group or community at risk of dying instead of growing. Leaders are instructed to be firm but polite in telling EGRs that they need to seek help from somewhere else (or having the organization move EGRs to another group).
Yup, only downside would be the single point of failure for say, all of the company's servers. One job/one box has its benefits.
Typically, if you're going to virtualize - the minimum number for physical boxes is probably 3. During normal operations, you run your load spread across all 3 boxes, with the option to consolidate down to 2 boxes if one goes down. You can do it with just 2 boxes, but it's not going to be as nice. Naturally, if you have the server load to require 4+ boxes, it becomes much easier to move things around.
Virtualization is definitely not a cure-all. It requires some forward thinking and planning to make sure that you can handle (or avoid) outages by having redundancy built-in to all aspects of the system. Everything from power, UPSs, head servers, the switch fabric, network cabling, backups and SAN units.
(Currently moving towards a 3-4 box setup for our company. It'll cost us around $65,000 over 3 years to complete the migration to a virtualized environment.)
I'm betting that whichever e-ink book reader manufacturer that provides a seamless interface to Project Gutenberg files will probably take the kitty. Especially if they come up with an open-source / open-spec / no-patent specification for handling user notes, highlighting, and other marking up of the text.
I've been looking at the Sony reader. I think it's probably the closest of the bunch, but I'm not convinced yet (Sony tends to be too proprietary in their thinking).
My system is 100% stable (as far as I know, based on a 36-hour two-process Prime95 run that pegged both cores at 100%, and based on a 12 hour Memtest86+ run).
That's a pretty good stability test - but may want to also be exercise the disks at the same time. I've seen a situation in the past where the disk controller would corrupt data when the CPU was under load. That one was a real bear - get the OS installed, start using it, then start getting all sorts of odd errors.
(And Prime95 is a lot better for finding transient or timing errors then MemTest86+.)
True, most people don't even scratch the surface of what their PC can do. That's why they don't want to spend much when comes to a new system. Most people figure that the cheapest PC will suit their needs.....until they realize how slow the thing is! There is something to be said for getting the latest technology but mostly only real geeks are going to care whether a CPU actually is capable of the claims made by the manufacturer.:')
The trick (if you're giving good general advice) is to steer the person towards something that is just slightly more expensive, but will result in better performance. Such as ordering a machine with 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB (for WinXP) then scaling back slightly on the CPU speed (go with the 2.2GHz instead of the 2.4GHz).
Personally, I won't recommend anything less then dual-core w/ 2GB of RAM. Dual-core (or dual-CPU) makes a huge difference in responsiveness, and 2GB of RAM is fairly inexpensive at the moment. (That's been our baseline system for the last year at work. Now that CPU prices are dropping, we're starting to buy the faster dual-core CPUs.)
was going to say that the Intel motherboards where a little more expensive than AM2 motherboards but I am shocked that this is no longer so.
Off-hand, I'd say that in reality AMD and Intel boards of equal (and moderate) capability are almost always within a few dollars of each other. Go take a look at prices on pricescan.com or MWave's motherboard bundles. Last year at this time, Intel board were running about $10 more expensive, but it seesaws back and forth.
It's only the esoteric motherboards (all multi-CPU boards are expensive - and high performance SLI boards are pricey) where this may not hold true. But in those boards, when you're paying $300+, a few dollars either way isn't much.
Ignoring the game-based benchmarks - which are somewhat interesting, I think the most useful information is the Windows Media Encoding & LAME encoding (page 6). And some of the other charts on other CPU-focused benchmarks.
It shows that for the CPUs priced under $250-$300, there's not a lot of difference in performance for a particular dollar value. Both AMD and Intel seem to be on parity in that market segment in terms of performance per dollar. (One exception would seem to be benchmarks like POVRay/Cinebench where there's a distinct gap between the two product lines, which flips around on the Myrimatch/STARS page.)
ESX pricing is in the multiple-thousands of dollars per machine. Which, if you're putting together a collection of $20k-$30k machines probably isn't that bad.
But it's horribly overpriced for the smaller market. Picture a small company with 4-12 servers in the $3k-$5k range and a $10k SAN unit. They'd like to be able to pool their servers so that if one box goes down due to hardware failure, services continue to be available.
VMWare's pricing makes that a non-starter.
Xen Enterprise pricing is a lot more reasonable for a small/medium business. VMWare only seems interested in the "big iron" shops who have budgets of $500k+ per year to spend on software licenses.
Hell, in a small business, you don't even care if there's a few minutes of downtime. At least, ss long as you can get things back up and running quickly on one of the less-utilized servers.
Pity that the old 386s didn't have good enough virtualization support like modern CPUs.
I used OS/2 from the 2.0 days up through Warp 3.0 or 3.1. I eventually jumped ship for NT v4 - mostly because the price for OS/2's development kit was a bit steep. And also because NT v4 was being adopted more so then OS/2 (I had a choice of NT v4 or Win95...).
I don't know, it was a screwed up time. I remember the optimism back in the OS/2 1.3 days ('88-'90), thinking that everyone would go from using Win 3.x to OS/2 1.x which supported real multi-tasking. Then the partnership fell apart and IBM couldn't figure out how to out-market and out-FUD Microsoft.
It probably didn't help that OS/2 really needed 16MB of RAM (or more) to run well, while you could get away with 4/8/16MB for Win3x and Win95. RAM was pretty expensive back then (heck, machines were expensive back then too). The OEM lock-ins (can't sell anything but Win9x if you want the best price) didn't help either.
Support options and community was also rough. CompuServe was still "big" (with heavily trafficked forums - but was a pay service) and the web was just getting off the ground (and we thought that 30 hours of dial-up for $30/mo was a good price). So unlike today where there are dozens of forums where you can go for OS X help and everyone knows how to use a web browser; it was a lot trickier back then to find like minded individuals.
A lot of newer cars ship with CD players that can read MP3 files off of the CDs.
Which is the solution I've used for the past 8 years. Pack about 8-10 hours of audio per CD, which is enough to provide variety while allowing each CD to be a particular style.
But I'm simply not mobile enough in my day-to-day life to need an iPod. Digital audio files on a fileshare at home, MP3 CDs in the car (that I don't care if they get scratched / stolen), and a small SD flash player for the rare times that I'm mobile.
(The JVC CD player that I have in the car will even allow you to plug in a USB thumb drive with files on it.)
If you can grit your way to get to God, Emporer of Dune, you should. It hearkens back to the roots of the original. I still read the entire Dune series every few years and that one is quite memorable.
Chapterhouse was also interesting, except for all the loose threads that it leaves hanging all over the place.
Running a CINEbench that lasts 18 seconds is not a decent test of stability. Even hobbyist overclockers ultimately aim to end up with a system that they can use day in, day out for several hours at a time.
We run Prime95 for at least 48-72 hours - while also exercising the disks in the system (and the graphics card if possible). While Prime95 is mainly used for a distributed computing project, it's proven so sensitive to CPU/RAM issues that it ships with a "torture test mode". The calculations that it performs are extremely complex and really exercise the CPU, RAM and cache. I've seen Prime95 uncover issues that went unnoticed by MemTest86, such as mis-matched memory timings that only caused intermittent errors and crashes in the EQ client.
(And I'm not even an over-clocker - I just like to burn-in my systems for a few days before releasing them to end-users.)
Maxtor support always sucked. Getting an RMA for a drive is like pulling teeth. They want you to run their diagnostic software, which won't work on newer chipsets, before giving out an RMA. Hmm, I just poked through my drive pile and I don't have any Maxtor drives that are still under warranty.
On the flip side, I've never had issues with Hitachi (and previously IBM). Plug the serial number in, give a vague reason as to why the drive is dead, get an RMA. Hell, I just checked, I didn't even have to give a reason for the RMA. As long as the drive is in warranty, they'll give me one.
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A modern Desktop OS should have easy to understand _standard_ sandbox templates that apps would request to be run under, and would be easier for users to get right.
Sounds a lot like SELinux profiles - which can be difficult to deal with, even though the SELinux folks have done wonders to create a huge stable of profiles for most applications.
Give it a few more years, and I suspect the SELinux approach will be the way things go (and maybe OS X will pick it up). RedHat has been using SELinux turned on (in targeted mode) on their server systems for a while now, so SELinux is finally becoming somewhat mainstream in the Linux server world. Which means that it should improve rapidly due to increased usage.
Of course, Microsoft is a NIH (not invented here) shop - so they'll recreate it, poorly.
I wonder whether mdadm would build to the fresh drive using one or both surviving disks in the array. If it only reads from one of the surviving disks in order to build the new mirror, then the other drive doesn't get nearly as much stress and would be a lot less likely to fail at a bad time. Plus, mdadm could use the other surviving drive to service read requests in a timely manner during the rebuild. It's something that I'd have to test (since I have individual lights on each drive in my 3-way RAID1).
/sys/block/md0/md/sync_action) would help ferret out "weak" disks ahead of catastrophic failure.
Alternately, if we assume that mdadm is going to do a full resync of the array (putting both survivor disks through their paces), I think that the odds of failure of both survivor disks is 1/2 that of a single disk. Assume that there's a 50% chance that a survivor disk will fail during the resync activity required to bring a new spare up to speed as an active member of the array. In order for both disks to fail, you have to flip the coin twice and come up with tails both times. The odds of that are 1:4 (instead of the 1:2 from having only one survivor). So by running 3-way active RAID1, you reduce the risk (by half) of losing the entire array during resync.
At least, I'm pretty sure the math works out that way.
I wonder if a weekly resync (# echo check >
(Plus HT links are faster in the newest processors, yes?)
That is correct. Newer Athlon64 / Opteron systems have faster HT links. I don't remember whether this also involves changes to the silicon on the motherboard or not (to support the faster HT links). Since I never (well, almost never) upgrade chips on older motherboards, I haven't bothered to find out.
Yes, this low-end dual-core is half the price, but not half the performance. Therefor a real bargain.
For the most part, all of the current Intel/AMD CPUs within the $0-$300 price range all provide nearly equivalent performance for X cost. That is, a $150 AMD chip will perform very similarly to a $150 Intel chip.
Personally, we still buy AMD Athlon64 X2s in the $100-$125 range for our desktops. They were first to market with affordable 64bit dual-core chips and we prefer to keep our systems as homogeneous as possible. For the low-middle range business desktop, an AMD X2 3600+ up through a 4600+ are plenty of power for a reasonable price. (That and we can't be arsed to go looking at Intel solutions since we know exactly what parts to order for an AMD solution.)
The only advantage to buying a RAID controller is that you get a lot of connectors. Otherwise, if you have any even fairly decent CPU, and you're not doing anything but shoveling data and maybe some logging, the main processor beats the living shit out of almost any CPU on any RAID controller. There are limited exceptions but those cards are highly spendy.
And keeping a lot of data off of the interface bus. Hardware RAID controllers are all about delegation. Get the data off the bus and onto the card as fast as possible, without sending it over the bus multiple times. Which is less of a concern in the days of boards with 30+ PCIe lanes.
But back in the PCI days (prior to PCI-X, but it still applied even to PCI-X), trying to do software RAID across the PCI bus would kill performance once you reached more then 4-6 disks. Instead of being able to tell the controller "write these X bytes of data" and only sending X bytes across the PCI bus, with Software RAID, you're probably looking at at least 2x (RAID1) up to 4x (RAID5) the bandwidth usage to write data.
That's where I think that mantra came from. Plus the (misguided?) idea that if a 3Ware / Areca RAID array fails, you can buy support from companies to troubleshoot the issue easily. With Software RAID, it's a lot easier to shift the blame around (making it difficult to get support).
That being said, I prefer the flexibility of Software RAID over the hardware RAID cards and typically use the 12-port 3Ware cards as dumb SATA cards. Mostly as a way of getting enough SATA ports to talk to the 15 drives installed in the hot-swap trays.
Honestly though, for the average user running SMB mounts over a 100bps LAN
I don't know where you've been for the last 2-3 years, but gigabit networks are pretty mainstream at this point. Just about every computer made in the last 3-4 years has gigabit network ports and the small 4/8 port switches are dirt cheap.
And mini-ITX systems are not inexpensive (except in terms of running cost). You can put together an X2 3800+ system w/ 2GB of RAM and a decent motherboard for around $250-$300 (depending on memory prices). I have both a 600MHz C3 (fanless) and an Athlon64 X2 3800+ system (the 35W 3600+ CPUs are hard to find and rather expensive).
On the whole, I prefer my X2 system over the C3 mini-ITX. Yeah, the mini-ITX is cool and fanless and super tiny and really cool... but replacement parts are a wrench. If that little PSU conks out in my Morex Venus case, I have to hope that I can still buy the somewhat proprietary shaped replacement PSU from Morex. On the X2 system, it's in a bog-standard Antec p160 case with a standard ATX PSU. I always have a spare ATX PSU laying around, so it would take me all of 30 minutes to get the unit back up and running. Worst case, I could run around to the corner electronics shop and replace every component in the system with equivalent standard PC parts.
Proprietary or hard-to-replace-quickly hardware sucks.
A third hard drive for a fast unattended rebuild
OTOH, if you're going to be doing mirrored drives with a dedicated hot-spare... why do it as a (2) disk active (1) disk as hot-spare setup? Why not make it a (3) disk active RAID1 setup where all three drives are in use at all time.
You cut your recovery window (the time period during which you're only running on a single drive) down to zero. You'll have to experience a triple failure (not just a double failure) before losing the entire array. You're less likely to have your last remaining disk fail when you start stressing the system to bring that hot-spare up to speed.
(This is pretty easy to do with Software RAID. Possibly the more expensive hardware RAID cards might offer the capability as well. Other then the wear and tear on the 3rd hard drive, which would normally be idle, there's not much downside at all.)
3-way RAID1 also makes for a nice "shove it in a closet and forget it" setup. When that drive does fail, you've got a bigger buffer to get in there and swap out the bad drive.
That sounds overstated. Even an old P3 1.8GHz w/ cruddy S3 Savage graphics can display HD content encoded in the various MPEG4 codecs. And that's a 5+ year old system. For a more modern system, an Athlon X2 3600+ with just about any video card made in the last 3 years (NVIDIA GeForce 6200 LE or the 6150 built into motherboards) can display high def content.
Are you kidding me? You expect these people, who are the low-paid, bottom-of-the-IT-food-chain to have ethics? Why are they any different from a parking lot attendant or car wash guy? Because they're techies? Don't kid yourself.
Frankly, I expect *everyone* to have ethics, no matter their income level... sadly, humans are sinful by nature.
not sure if he taped it or melted it, but they held on pretty well
Analog magnetic tape (and possibly digital) can be "spliced" using splicing tape.
It was a pretty common endeavor back in the 80s. Audio cassette tape (or even reel-to-reel) was often mangled by audio decks, so you'd have to trim out the mangled portion and salvage the rest by cutting the tape diagonally and then putting splice tape across the ends.
I wasn't aware that there were VHS tape splicing kits, but it wouldn't surprise me.
I don't know, maybe it's normal in some cultures, but I still can't get past people clapping after the plane lands -- if I though landing a plane was some work of art, I would never have boarded!
Try a landing in a crosswind situation? It definitely looks pretty difficult. Check out some of the videos on Youtube (search for "crosswind").
Or maybe the passengers are simply happy that their ordeal is at an end?
Actually, I was thinking the other day about why someone wouldn't praise someone else for effort, even expected effort. There are a lot of folks out there who won't say "Thank you" or "Good job", even though it doesn't cost them anything. Are they afraid (or believe) that by building someone else up, they're making themselves look worse? Or are they simply too self-centered to value giving praise to others? And I'm sure there are other motivations that I haven't listed.
So, why can't you get past people clapping when the plane lands? Why not join in? It may be nothing more then a spontaneous celebration of safe arrival.
I was thinking about this the other day... and finding that I miss CompuServe (even though it was expensive, slow, and proprietary).
What's annoying today is that nobody has managed to come up with a messaging / discussion system that truly "works" (in both online and offline modes). USENET is great... except that very few people go there (and Thunderbird's USENET support is sucky, at best). Lots of folks like to use Web Forums, which have their advantages (e-mail notification of replies, ability to mark up text or insert images). Other folks like to use mailing lists (threaded message support in most e-mail clients, easy to reply off-list, easy to take on the road).
What I'd like to see in a messaging system:
- Moderation capability (all 3 systems do offer this).
- Offline ability (USENET and e-mail lists). Now if we could just get the phpBB systems of the world to figure out how to offer offline capabilities.
- The ability to join a community and read the archives. E-mail lists fall short on this, very rarely do they allow you to download past messages into your e-mail client. So you have two time frames - "before you joined" which usually requires dealing with a crappy web interface to the e-mail archives, or maybe a USENET group if you're lucky. And the "after you joined" where all of the messages are in your e-mail reader and you have all of the e-mail reader tools at your disposal.
- Notification of replies. E-Mail lists and web forums offer this, USENET doesn't. It was nice with CompuServe that I could login and know that I had replies to messages.
There's an awful lot of e-mail lists that I subscribe to, even though I don't read them regularly. Just so that I don't have to deal with the before/after issue - that and it gives me a searchable offline knowledgebase.
I have seen good forums flip, and the group of insightful posters get displaced by smaller more malignant group.
That's a common scenario in a lot of social situations. Forums, guilds, gaming clans, businesses, social clubs, etc.
The factor seems to be how many EGR (Extra Grace Required) there are compared to normal supportive members. EGR folks are either abusive towards others, disrespectful, or require extra attention. Hence the term "EGR" which means that you have to have extra grace in order to deal with them (carrying the load that they're not, dealing with their problems, smoothing over misunderstandings, etc).
Too many EGRs, and the group implodes as people start tuning out or leaving.
A lot of support groups will remind group leaders that they need to limit their intake of EGR people. Not that EGRs don't deserve help/support - but because they put the group or community at risk of dying instead of growing. Leaders are instructed to be firm but polite in telling EGRs that they need to seek help from somewhere else (or having the organization move EGRs to another group).
Yup, only downside would be the single point of failure for say, all of the company's servers. One job/one box has its benefits.
Typically, if you're going to virtualize - the minimum number for physical boxes is probably 3. During normal operations, you run your load spread across all 3 boxes, with the option to consolidate down to 2 boxes if one goes down. You can do it with just 2 boxes, but it's not going to be as nice. Naturally, if you have the server load to require 4+ boxes, it becomes much easier to move things around.
Virtualization is definitely not a cure-all. It requires some forward thinking and planning to make sure that you can handle (or avoid) outages by having redundancy built-in to all aspects of the system. Everything from power, UPSs, head servers, the switch fabric, network cabling, backups and SAN units.
(Currently moving towards a 3-4 box setup for our company. It'll cost us around $65,000 over 3 years to complete the migration to a virtualized environment.)
I'm betting that whichever e-ink book reader manufacturer that provides a seamless interface to Project Gutenberg files will probably take the kitty. Especially if they come up with an open-source / open-spec / no-patent specification for handling user notes, highlighting, and other marking up of the text.
I've been looking at the Sony reader. I think it's probably the closest of the bunch, but I'm not convinced yet (Sony tends to be too proprietary in their thinking).
My system is 100% stable (as far as I know, based on a 36-hour two-process Prime95 run that pegged both cores at 100%, and based on a 12 hour Memtest86+ run).
That's a pretty good stability test - but may want to also be exercise the disks at the same time. I've seen a situation in the past where the disk controller would corrupt data when the CPU was under load. That one was a real bear - get the OS installed, start using it, then start getting all sorts of odd errors.
(And Prime95 is a lot better for finding transient or timing errors then MemTest86+.)
True, most people don't even scratch the surface of what their PC can do. That's why they don't want to spend much when comes to a new system. Most people figure that the cheapest PC will suit their needs.....until they realize how slow the thing is! There is something to be said for getting the latest technology but mostly only real geeks are going to care whether a CPU actually is capable of the claims made by the manufacturer. :')
The trick (if you're giving good general advice) is to steer the person towards something that is just slightly more expensive, but will result in better performance. Such as ordering a machine with 1GB of RAM instead of 512MB (for WinXP) then scaling back slightly on the CPU speed (go with the 2.2GHz instead of the 2.4GHz).
Personally, I won't recommend anything less then dual-core w/ 2GB of RAM. Dual-core (or dual-CPU) makes a huge difference in responsiveness, and 2GB of RAM is fairly inexpensive at the moment. (That's been our baseline system for the last year at work. Now that CPU prices are dropping, we're starting to buy the faster dual-core CPUs.)
was going to say that the Intel motherboards where a little more expensive than AM2 motherboards but I am shocked that this is no longer so.
Off-hand, I'd say that in reality AMD and Intel boards of equal (and moderate) capability are almost always within a few dollars of each other. Go take a look at prices on pricescan.com or MWave's motherboard bundles. Last year at this time, Intel board were running about $10 more expensive, but it seesaws back and forth.
It's only the esoteric motherboards (all multi-CPU boards are expensive - and high performance SLI boards are pricey) where this may not hold true. But in those boards, when you're paying $300+, a few dollars either way isn't much.
Ignoring the game-based benchmarks - which are somewhat interesting, I think the most useful information is the Windows Media Encoding & LAME encoding (page 6). And some of the other charts on other CPU-focused benchmarks.
It shows that for the CPUs priced under $250-$300, there's not a lot of difference in performance for a particular dollar value. Both AMD and Intel seem to be on parity in that market segment in terms of performance per dollar. (One exception would seem to be benchmarks like POVRay/Cinebench where there's a distinct gap between the two product lines, which flips around on the Myrimatch/STARS page.)
ESX pricing is in the multiple-thousands of dollars per machine. Which, if you're putting together a collection of $20k-$30k machines probably isn't that bad.
But it's horribly overpriced for the smaller market. Picture a small company with 4-12 servers in the $3k-$5k range and a $10k SAN unit. They'd like to be able to pool their servers so that if one box goes down due to hardware failure, services continue to be available.
VMWare's pricing makes that a non-starter.
Xen Enterprise pricing is a lot more reasonable for a small/medium business. VMWare only seems interested in the "big iron" shops who have budgets of $500k+ per year to spend on software licenses.
Hell, in a small business, you don't even care if there's a few minutes of downtime. At least, ss long as you can get things back up and running quickly on one of the less-utilized servers.
Pity that the old 386s didn't have good enough virtualization support like modern CPUs.
I used OS/2 from the 2.0 days up through Warp 3.0 or 3.1. I eventually jumped ship for NT v4 - mostly because the price for OS/2's development kit was a bit steep. And also because NT v4 was being adopted more so then OS/2 (I had a choice of NT v4 or Win95...).
I don't know, it was a screwed up time. I remember the optimism back in the OS/2 1.3 days ('88-'90), thinking that everyone would go from using Win 3.x to OS/2 1.x which supported real multi-tasking. Then the partnership fell apart and IBM couldn't figure out how to out-market and out-FUD Microsoft.
It probably didn't help that OS/2 really needed 16MB of RAM (or more) to run well, while you could get away with 4/8/16MB for Win3x and Win95. RAM was pretty expensive back then (heck, machines were expensive back then too). The OEM lock-ins (can't sell anything but Win9x if you want the best price) didn't help either.
Support options and community was also rough. CompuServe was still "big" (with heavily trafficked forums - but was a pay service) and the web was just getting off the ground (and we thought that 30 hours of dial-up for $30/mo was a good price). So unlike today where there are dozens of forums where you can go for OS X help and everyone knows how to use a web browser; it was a lot trickier back then to find like minded individuals.
A lot of newer cars ship with CD players that can read MP3 files off of the CDs.
Which is the solution I've used for the past 8 years. Pack about 8-10 hours of audio per CD, which is enough to provide variety while allowing each CD to be a particular style.
But I'm simply not mobile enough in my day-to-day life to need an iPod. Digital audio files on a fileshare at home, MP3 CDs in the car (that I don't care if they get scratched / stolen), and a small SD flash player for the rare times that I'm mobile.
(The JVC CD player that I have in the car will even allow you to plug in a USB thumb drive with files on it.)
If you can grit your way to get to God, Emporer of Dune, you should. It hearkens back to the roots of the original. I still read the entire Dune series every few years and that one is quite memorable.
Chapterhouse was also interesting, except for all the loose threads that it leaves hanging all over the place.
Running a CINEbench that lasts 18 seconds is not a decent test of stability. Even hobbyist overclockers ultimately aim to end up with a system that they can use day in, day out for several hours at a time.
We run Prime95 for at least 48-72 hours - while also exercising the disks in the system (and the graphics card if possible). While Prime95 is mainly used for a distributed computing project, it's proven so sensitive to CPU/RAM issues that it ships with a "torture test mode". The calculations that it performs are extremely complex and really exercise the CPU, RAM and cache. I've seen Prime95 uncover issues that went unnoticed by MemTest86, such as mis-matched memory timings that only caused intermittent errors and crashes in the EQ client.
(And I'm not even an over-clocker - I just like to burn-in my systems for a few days before releasing them to end-users.)
Maxtor support always sucked. Getting an RMA for a drive is like pulling teeth. They want you to run their diagnostic software, which won't work on newer chipsets, before giving out an RMA. Hmm, I just poked through my drive pile and I don't have any Maxtor drives that are still under warranty.
On the flip side, I've never had issues with Hitachi (and previously IBM). Plug the serial number in, give a vague reason as to why the drive is dead, get an RMA. Hell, I just checked, I didn't even have to give a reason for the RMA. As long as the drive is in warranty, they'll give me one.