Now that IBM has dumped their Intel PC business, they can afford to take off the gloves, and not have to worry about making nice in the morning.
And the converse is true, as well. Intel can go full throttle against IBM without risking any business, except maybe those 4 Itanium servers a year that IBM moves for them.
Mod parent way up. Coal plants exhaust much more radioactive pollution than any nuke plant (at equivalent power output). Let's not even mention all other nasty pollutants that carbon or oil plants throw out.
Nuclear power is the most viable clean energy we have today. Tomorrow it will probably be fusion, but until then....
What about all those weapons pointed at Taiwan? Surely you have a humane and acceptable explanation as to why the chinese government has always had a policy of total annihilation towards the "rebel province".
My boss and I have been just talking about this. HP is junking all of their best technologies. Ttu64 had a best of breed clustering. So, what does HP do? Junk it and buy the technology from Veritas.
No surprise they junked the Alpha. No surprise they even junked the PA-RISC. No wonder they are becoming another Dell. Yep, HP used to mean quality at a higher cost - but people were willing to put up with that because HP anything was going to work with precision, reliably for the next century. Now, the HP servers and spares we are getting are less and less reliable.
My experience has been that performance of RAID 1 + 0 is better than RAID 5. And it has a bit more rendundancy: you can have 2 drives fail, and it will still work (as long as the 2 drives are not part of the same mirror).
These 4 disks are striped (RAID 0), which is great for performance, but if any of the drives fails, you lost all the 1.6 TB of data. Given that there are 4 drives in the enclosure, your chances of a disk failure are about 4 times higher than that of a single drive.
Bear in mind that typically, these disk enclosures for home use have poor ventilation, so the likelyhood of a drive failing is higher than with the PCs internal drives.
For me, the odds don't seem good. I would much rather have RAID 1 + 0 (two mirrored disksets that are then striped) with half the capacity but better protection from data loss.
This is precisely the reason why I am holding off from buying one of these disk boxes, even though I like the idea of having a place to store all my CD images - and more.
the hardware industry is based on obsolescence. A company like Nvidia wants to have their -current- and -in production- card to be as fast as possible. Once it's not in production anymore, they don't care. If they released the drivers and (expecially) the specs to the card, someone(s) could improve the driver, and thus make the card perform better, or add a useful property, thus making it more attractive and thus hurting sales of the current card. An opensource driver and specs would also mean that obscure/niche OSs (BeOS, neutrino, skyOS etc.) could be supported by the older card, thus making it moore attractive and....
This, in addition to the very god point made by the poster above.
I'm not going to argue with you on this. Perhaps it can be implemented in some way or the other, so that you back up your own data more frequently.
However, I just realized that there is a solution already existing, which is not very expensive at all, and offers unlimited (or 10^8 writes at least, depending on the type of memory) writes at close to SRAM access times! It's called FRAM (or ferromagnetic RAM). An FRAM drive - now that's something I would love to see in all my computers.
You have to look at how those figures are measured: they need to level the writes, and the Flahs must be well sectored. It also requres some additional Flash for rendundancy and some logic for error detection.
In short, those drives are expenisve, while I thought we were talking about storage for a US $100 computer.
You make it sound like your personal data was uninportant - who cares if you get soft errors on that.
I would say that your personal data is more important than the OS + app data, because that can be easily recovered, while your own work can not, or at least not so easily.
Typical flash today is good for a million writes per cell.
You wish. It's more like 10.000. 1.000.000 is the figure for EEPROM, but there the access time is quite a bit longer.
The second problem with Flash: the access is not on the "cell" level (I guess you meant each bit or addressable word), but by sector in the best case scenario. Sectored Flash RAM is a bit more expensive, and sectors tend to be large: 64 KBytes for an 8 Mbit (! MByte) Flash RAM, for example.
Provided that these prove wildly succesful, the C-64 installed base will increase by a cool 1/4 million. I know there is still a lot of folks out there that use their C-64 on a regular basis, mostly for games (but not only).
What are the chances that a small software company ("one-man band") will find some financial interest in developing C-64 software? Same goes for hardware: I guess you could make an adapter to hook your existing carts and C-64 periferals to this thingy.
Well, then I might just get me a good Athlon andunderclock it... quite a bit. And under-voltage it. That way I will have a silent system, and still have a good reserve of performance in the sack, for those long gaming nights....
It also says "Supported by... RedHat". RedHat, as far as I know, is the #1 in Linux marketshare and is certainly more readily associated with Linux than Novell!
Slashdot Mirror
I've been into Sybase 4 or 5 years ago. My verdict would be that Sybase is nothing to sneeze at. An ill-fated DB, really, considering it's power.
But, so was Informix, which, IMHO, at a certain point was right there with Oracle and DB2, if not better.
Now that IBM has dumped their Intel PC business, they can afford to take off the gloves, and not have to worry about making nice in the morning.
And the converse is true, as well. Intel can go full throttle against IBM without risking any business, except maybe those 4 Itanium servers a year that IBM moves for them.
Well said.
/. environment) modded up.
I don't often see such a courageous statement (in
It does because none of Belarus has been evacuated much less made uninhabitable.
Chernobyl only released only 2 MC and made a good portion of Belarus uninhabitable.
Just a small correction: Chernobil is in the Ukraine, not Belarus.
Mod parent way up. Coal plants exhaust much more radioactive pollution than any nuke plant (at equivalent power output). Let's not even mention all other nasty pollutants that carbon or oil plants throw out.
Nuclear power is the most viable clean energy we have today. Tomorrow it will probably be fusion, but until then....
Iceland has very mild winters, thanks to the northatlantic conveyer.
Now, if the melting of the ice stops it, then things could turn ugly for them. But so will for Britain and most of Northern Europe.
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
I guess you can't answer me, so you swindle the question. I am not surprised, but I thought you'd be more subtle in your avoidance.
What about all those weapons pointed at Taiwan? Surely you have a humane and acceptable explanation as to why the chinese government has always had a policy of total annihilation towards the "rebel province".
My boss and I have been just talking about this. HP is junking all of their best technologies. Ttu64 had a best of breed clustering. So, what does HP do? Junk it and buy the technology from Veritas.
No surprise they junked the Alpha. No surprise they even junked the PA-RISC. No wonder they are becoming another Dell. Yep, HP used to mean quality at a higher cost - but people were willing to put up with that because HP anything was going to work with precision, reliably for the next century. Now, the HP servers and spares we are getting are less and less reliable.
My experience has been that performance of RAID 1 + 0 is better than RAID 5. And it has a bit more rendundancy: you can have 2 drives fail, and it will still work (as long as the 2 drives are not part of the same mirror).
But, performance mostly.
These 4 disks are striped (RAID 0), which is great for performance, but if any of the drives fails, you lost all the 1.6 TB of data. Given that there are 4 drives in the enclosure, your chances of a disk failure are about 4 times higher than that of a single drive.
Bear in mind that typically, these disk enclosures for home use have poor ventilation, so the likelyhood of a drive failing is higher than with the PCs internal drives.
For me, the odds don't seem good. I would much rather have RAID 1 + 0 (two mirrored disksets that are then striped) with half the capacity but better protection from data loss.
This is precisely the reason why I am holding off from buying one of these disk boxes, even though I like the idea of having a place to store all my CD images - and more.
the hardware industry is based on obsolescence. A company like Nvidia wants to have their -current- and -in production- card to be as fast as possible. Once it's not in production anymore, they don't care. If they released the drivers and (expecially) the specs to the card, someone(s) could improve the driver, and thus make the card perform better, or add a useful property, thus making it more attractive and thus hurting sales of the current card. An opensource driver and specs would also mean that obscure/niche OSs (BeOS, neutrino, skyOS etc.) could be supported by the older card, thus making it moore attractive and....
This, in addition to the very god point made by the poster above.
I'm not going to argue with you on this. Perhaps it can be implemented in some way or the other, so that you back up your own data more frequently.
However, I just realized that there is a solution already existing, which is not very expensive at all, and offers unlimited (or 10^8 writes at least, depending on the type of memory) writes at close to SRAM access times! It's called FRAM (or ferromagnetic RAM). An FRAM drive - now that's something I would love to see in all my computers.
You have to look at how those figures are measured: they need to level the writes, and the Flahs must be well sectored. It also requres some additional Flash for rendundancy and some logic for error detection.
In short, those drives are expenisve, while I thought we were talking about storage for a US $100 computer.
You make it sound like your personal data was uninportant - who cares if you get soft errors on that.
I would say that your personal data is more important than the OS + app data, because that can be easily recovered, while your own work can not, or at least not so easily.
Typical flash today is good for a million writes per cell.
You wish. It's more like 10.000. 1.000.000 is the figure for EEPROM, but there the access time is quite a bit longer.
The second problem with Flash: the access is not on the "cell" level (I guess you meant each bit or addressable word), but by sector in the best case scenario. Sectored Flash RAM is a bit more expensive, and sectors tend to be large: 64 KBytes for an 8 Mbit (! MByte) Flash RAM, for example.
OK, this IS encouraging, I must admit.
And at a rate of 92 reviews of ANY game in 11 months (let alone C-64), that must be a VERY busy site!
Provided that these prove wildly succesful, the C-64 installed base will increase by a cool 1/4 million. I know there is still a lot of folks out there that use their C-64 on a regular basis, mostly for games (but not only).
What are the chances that a small software company ("one-man band") will find some financial interest in developing C-64 software? Same goes for hardware: I guess you could make an adapter to hook your existing carts and C-64 periferals to this thingy.
Well, then I might just get me a good Athlon andunderclock it... quite a bit. And under-voltage it. That way I will have a silent system, and still have a good reserve of performance in the sack, for those long gaming nights....
I'm looking forward to read your article (as soon as the slashdot effect eases a bit), but from the sound of it, this is exactly what I need.
I'd like to know about prices and where to buy, if you're not in the glorious US of A, i.e. an affordable and dependable webshop.
It also says "Supported by... RedHat". RedHat, as far as I know, is the #1 in Linux marketshare and is certainly more readily associated with Linux than Novell!
You have to replace step 5. with "???".
Nah, he's just wearing the "Kill Bill" promotional shirt.
Well said. I'm glad that I find people like you on Slashdot, from time to time.