I think the reason Pinball is dying out is purely the cost of playing it.
I mean you pay 50p for three balls. Or 20p for three lives in most other arcade games. You don't spend much time around gamers, do you? I don't know of any gamers who spend the time thinking about how much a 'life' costs them. For gamers, it's about fun, convenience, and hanging out with friends.
Pinball fails on the last two qualities. A pinball machine is outside the budget of casual gamers, so most people have to go to an arcade to play pinball. On the other hand, a gaming console sits conveniently next to their TV at home, allowing them to game whenever they have time.
Pinball has no cooperative component; it's a "single-player" game. Looking at the popularity of multiplayer and online games, I'd say gamers these days value an experience in which their friends can participate. They don't get that with pinball.
I personally love pinball, but it doesn't provide what contemporary gamers want.
Not all hardware controllers will allow you to do a reconstruct to add more space and extend the partitions later on RAID 10 or 1+0. Likewise, many hardware controllers won't let you extend a RAID-5 array, (unless they implement some dynamic stripe size hack, a la ZFS's RAID-Z).
Recovering from a failed 1+0 is ok if it is a "simple" failure. Please explain what a !simple failure would be. Here, let me give you a 'simple' failure case where RAID-5 would be pretty difficult to recover from: a drive fails in your RAID-5 array, and you lose power or experience another hardware failure shortly afterwards, before you can replace the drive. Whoops, you just became another victim of the RAID-5 write-hole (see the section under RAID-5 performance).
OK, here's why we use RAID-10 at my installation: it provides great performance and can survive multiple drive failures without the overhead of something like RAID-6. RAID-10 also has no 'write-hole'. Don't just take my word for it, though, check out this article from Adaptec comparing the merits of all the basic RAID levels and their nested brethren.
Sun donated one of the original T2000 (based on the original 8-core 4-thread/core Niagara processor) systems to a campus organization where I'm a volunteer system administrator, so think I have quite a bit of experience with this processor. Here's my take on the Niagara2, based upon my experiences with the Niagara1:
No, this processor is not going to be the 'fastest' processor out there; this processor is designed primarily for workloads that don't require floating-point calculations (web servers, mail, etc), so it's not going to be the go-to processor for places like rendering farms. In fact, float-point performance on the Niagara1 was so terrible that Sun included a special cryptographic accelerator to help with SSL performance (the primary consumer of floating-point calculations on most web servers).
This processor architecture absolutely rocks for the purpose it was intended, though. It consumes very little power, but handles service loads amazingly well. We also have a Sun v40z (8-core Opteron server) that would barely be able to keep up with the our T2000 (that's saying a lot), and our T2000 consumes only a little more than half as much power going into our v40z (2.6A @ 120VAC compared to 4.6A @ 120VAC).
The inclusion of 10GbE support is going to be absolutely essential and will help make servers based upon the Niagara2 stand-out compared to servers from competing vendors. Why is 10GbE so important? I mean, we already have GbE, and most places barely have an infrastructure for that in place, right? The answer is SAN. 10GbE is going to be necessary if you're going to be using iSCSI to consolidate storage and deliver reasonable performance, and most places are heading in that direction, especially the target market for these systems.
Solaris Logical Domains (not to be confused with Sun Containers or Zones) is a hardware-based virtualization technology that was packaged with the Niagara1 and will probably be included with the Niagara2. Using Logical Domains, you can create independent virtual servers running different operating systems and divide hardware resources up between them, down to the individual CPU thread and PCI Express bus leaf level. Unlike software virtualization solutions, all your virtual servers are never dependent on any single virtual server (global zone, dom0, etc). This technology is making hardware virtualization a possibility for many places.
I think the Niagara is a pretty solid design, but it's not the processor to end all processors. For service workloads, I don't think you can get a better processor, but you probably don't want one of these processors in your workstation. Sun Microsystems is also headed in the right direction, establishing an open-community around these processors and Solaris.
Every one of those ports takes away 1 (or several in the case of parallel/ide) ports that could be something useful, such as USB, FireWire, SATA, or something that people will actually use. If people want to hook up ancient hardware, let them use PCI adapter cards and port replecators. Uh, not quite. Many of the new, high-speed, interfaces are provided by the southbridge, so the number of USB/FireWire/etc ports is entirely limited by what's provided by the manufacturer of the chipset.
Legacy ports have very little to do with that is provided by the southbridge. Most legacy interfaces are provided by a totally independent chip (Super I/O), and most motherboard manufacturers would rather keep that low-cost chip on the motherboard than alienate customers with legacy devices.
IIRC within a zfs pool (collection of drives) you can make different 'filesystems' mirrored or striped, so you can have a/video that is striped and ultra-fast whereas/home is mirrored and fault-tolerant. No, you can't mix and match. When you create a zpool, you get to choose between the equivalents of RAID-0 (striped), RAID-1 (mirrored), and RAID-5/6 (striped with parity). You can nest the various RAID levels, but whatever you choose will apply to all the file systems in your storage pool. If you want to have/video and/home under different RAID levels, you'll need to create two different zpools.
Now, this wouldn't be a big issue, as you could normally just partition up your drives to make the separate zpools, but Sun highly recommends allowing ZFS to manage entire disk drives (it's a volume manager along with a file system). If you create zpools out of partitions instead of drives, you lose a lot of neat features like automatic disk cache management and the soon-to-be-merged SMART awareness.
Since we're thinking about ditching email, when are we going to ditch snail mail?
Anyways, these suggestions for improving email are full of fancy features (hashing and compression!) but all they really serve to do is complicate the protocol. Right now, SMTP is so simple that it can be implemented by the tiniest of embedded systems. Take that away and whatever protocol you come up with probably will never be as popular SMTP.
Besides, most of these proposed changes don't do too much to prevent spam without any of the questionable side-effects encountered with the current proposals to counter spam (ex., lost of anonymity, cost, proving identity a la SSL certs)...
Yeah, but having Xen in the kernel mainline gives the project much more credibility and exposure.
A problem with Xen has been facing is keeping up with all the changes occuring in 2.6. If Xen is merged into mainline, there's a much better chance that Xen will be able to support the features and bug/security fixes that get added to 2.6 with each release.
For example, the current Xen stable (2.0.7) supports kernel 2.6.11.12. Every time a new security hole is discovered, system administrators using Xen have to manually backport a fix from the latest kernel. Having Xen in mainline should make this process much easier.
These guys(Xen) have all these companies donating money to them, but have been beaten to kernel inclusion by UML.
Being the first to the party doesn't always mean you're going to the best; see DevFS vs. udev.
Xen has much greater performance than UML and supports more operating systems. While UML is currently more mature and stable than Xen, it's only a matter of time before Xen surpasses UML as the preferred virtual server technology. Hell, even Linode, a strong proponent of UML technology and virtual server hosting provider is migrating to Xen.
FYI, I'm currently running a Xen-based system with 15 virtual server instances for a system administration course at UC Berkeley on a server built with cheap off the shelf components (AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 1 GB RAM) and everything is quite snappy. It'd be difficult to even approach such usability with UML, and I'm using Xen 2.0.7. I can't see what Xen 3.0 will bring.
While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?
Perhaps because vservers lack some of the neat features of Xen, such as on-the-fly instance migration and full iptables support?
Furthermore, vservers is, for the foreseeable future, a Linux-only project. So far, NetBSD and Solaris have been ported to Xen, and basic support for FreeBSD as a guest host is available. Once Intel VT and AMD Pacifica are available, Xen will also support Windows XP SP2.
Given just these benefits (and Xen has many more), it's no surprise that Xen appeals to more people and applications.
Given the strength of baggage and package handling unions, this comes as no surprise. The idea of a nearly-fully-automated system that could eliminate many human jobs in the name of efficency must have really stirred them into action.
Systems like these work for Fedex and UPS, so why couldn't it work for bags?
Walking right past the line is actually pretty nice.
If you're just concerned about walking past the lines, try and see if your local theatre has one of the automated consoles. Just choose the tickets you want, swipe your credit card, and -- presto! -- instantly printed tickets with no service charge.
At the Sony Metreon in San Francisco, practically nobody uses the consoles, so there's never a line.
Placing granular dry-ice into a copper container next to your CPU/GPU isn't going to result in very efficient heat transfer. If you're really going to try this, I recommend floating the dry ice in some sort of organic solvent (don't try water, as it'll freeze) and setting up some sort of agitator system.
An even better setup would be to setup a water-cooling-like system, with dry ice in a container filled with solvent above the system. The solvent would be fed into a heat exchanger on top of the CPU/GPU. No pump would be necessary, because, as the solvent in the heat exchanger heats up, it'll float up to the top, where it'll be cooled down again by the dry ice.
In any case, the costs of such a system would probably outweigh any benefit of using it.
I claim he was just painting angular, childish drawings requiring no particular talent
I respectfully beg to differ. When you or any child can paint something as nice as Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, I'll admit that Picasso was without talent. Sure, a lot of 'modern' art these days is bunk, but Picasso shouldn't be classified with that junk.
Furthermore, IIS performs better than Apache under light to moderate loads. Once you start moving to heavy loads, IIS begins to choke and eventually just can't handle any more clients. Apache just happily continues running.
However, this might be more an effect of the underlying operating system than the actual server program. I haven't seen a comparison of Win32 Apache versus IIS, so I don't know.
Most people would rather have you text than yap loudly on the phone in public places.
Don't get me wrong, voice chat is usually more efficient, but text messaging is a whole lot more discreet. My friends and I use it to schedule study-groups - that way, we can notify someone of a meeting later that day while they're still in class.
Unless you have a roof the size of large chemical processing plant, your house won't appear to be more than a speck of dust.
The satellite imagery for this is being recorded at a resolution of 300 m. For comparison, the most zoomed in you can get on GoogleMaps is 2 m per a pixel.
Slashdot Mirror
ALL laptop displays are "unacceptable" for serious graphics work, because they are all TN-type (TN is the thinnest).
Not completely true. The currently shipping Lenovo X200 Tablet and X301 laptops are available with IPS displays.
I mean you pay 50p for three balls. Or 20p for three lives in most other arcade games. You don't spend much time around gamers, do you? I don't know of any gamers who spend the time thinking about how much a 'life' costs them. For gamers, it's about fun, convenience, and hanging out with friends.
Pinball fails on the last two qualities. A pinball machine is outside the budget of casual gamers, so most people have to go to an arcade to play pinball. On the other hand, a gaming console sits conveniently next to their TV at home, allowing them to game whenever they have time.
Pinball has no cooperative component; it's a "single-player" game. Looking at the popularity of multiplayer and online games, I'd say gamers these days value an experience in which their friends can participate. They don't get that with pinball.
I personally love pinball, but it doesn't provide what contemporary gamers want.
space and extend the partitions later on RAID 10 or 1+0. Likewise, many hardware controllers won't let you extend a RAID-5 array, (unless they implement some dynamic stripe size hack, a la ZFS's RAID-Z). Recovering from a failed 1+0 is ok if it is a "simple" failure. Please explain what a !simple failure would be. Here, let me give you a 'simple' failure case where RAID-5 would be pretty difficult to recover from: a drive fails in your RAID-5 array, and you lose power or experience another hardware failure shortly afterwards, before you can replace the drive. Whoops, you just became another victim of the RAID-5 write-hole (see the section under RAID-5 performance).
OK, here's why we use RAID-10 at my installation: it provides great performance and can survive multiple drive failures without the overhead of something like RAID-6. RAID-10 also has no 'write-hole'. Don't just take my word for it, though, check out this article from Adaptec comparing the merits of all the basic RAID levels and their nested brethren.
I think the Niagara is a pretty solid design, but it's not the processor to end all processors. For service workloads, I don't think you can get a better processor, but you probably don't want one of these processors in your workstation. Sun Microsystems is also headed in the right direction, establishing an open-community around these processors and Solaris.
Legacy ports have very little to do with that is provided by the southbridge. Most legacy interfaces are provided by a totally independent chip (Super I/O), and most motherboard manufacturers would rather keep that low-cost chip on the motherboard than alienate customers with legacy devices.
Since we're thinking about ditching email, when are we going to ditch snail mail?
Anyways, these suggestions for improving email are full of fancy features (hashing and compression!) but all they really serve to do is complicate the protocol. Right now, SMTP is so simple that it can be implemented by the tiniest of embedded systems. Take that away and whatever protocol you come up with probably will never be as popular SMTP.
Besides, most of these proposed changes don't do too much to prevent spam without any of the questionable side-effects encountered with the current proposals to counter spam (ex., lost of anonymity, cost, proving identity a la SSL certs)...
What is the point of this discussion other than to show off?
Yeah, but having Xen in the kernel mainline gives the project much more credibility and exposure.
A problem with Xen has been facing is keeping up with all the changes occuring in 2.6. If Xen is merged into mainline, there's a much better chance that Xen will be able to support the features and bug/security fixes that get added to 2.6 with each release.
For example, the current Xen stable (2.0.7) supports kernel 2.6.11.12. Every time a new security hole is discovered, system administrators using Xen have to manually backport a fix from the latest kernel. Having Xen in mainline should make this process much easier.
These guys(Xen) have all these companies donating money to them, but have been beaten to kernel inclusion by UML.
Being the first to the party doesn't always mean you're going to the best; see DevFS vs. udev.
Xen has much greater performance than UML and supports more operating systems. While UML is currently more mature and stable than Xen, it's only a matter of time before Xen surpasses UML as the preferred virtual server technology. Hell, even Linode, a strong proponent of UML technology and virtual server hosting provider is migrating to Xen.
FYI, I'm currently running a Xen-based system with 15 virtual server instances for a system administration course at UC Berkeley on a server built with cheap off the shelf components (AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 1 GB RAM) and everything is quite snappy. It'd be difficult to even approach such usability with UML, and I'm using Xen 2.0.7. I can't see what Xen 3.0 will bring.
While Xen appears as a neat package, why choose Xen instead of vservers?
Perhaps because vservers lack some of the neat features of Xen, such as on-the-fly instance migration and full iptables support?
Furthermore, vservers is, for the foreseeable future, a Linux-only project. So far, NetBSD and Solaris have been ported to Xen, and basic support for FreeBSD as a guest host is available. Once Intel VT and AMD Pacifica are available, Xen will also support Windows XP SP2.
Given just these benefits (and Xen has many more), it's no surprise that Xen appeals to more people and applications.
Thank God this arrived just in time:
Nobel Prize Awarded for Stomach Ulcer Discovery
Given the strength of baggage and package handling unions, this comes as no surprise. The idea of a nearly-fully-automated system that could eliminate many human jobs in the name of efficency must have really stirred them into action.
Systems like these work for Fedex and UPS, so why couldn't it work for bags?
Given the power requirements of such a setup, I bet burning a plain old Duraflame log is going to be better for the environment.
Besides, if you want something even more clean burning, why not use natural gas?
For those with Nokia Series 60 phones, here's an app that will let you type in SMS using morse code: http://laivakoira.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/morse_t exter.html
Walking right past the line is actually pretty nice.
If you're just concerned about walking past the lines, try and see if your local theatre has one of the automated consoles. Just choose the tickets you want, swipe your credit card, and -- presto! -- instantly printed tickets with no service charge.
At the Sony Metreon in San Francisco, practically nobody uses the consoles, so there's never a line.
Microsoft 'under attack' On All Fours
Placing granular dry-ice into a copper container next to your CPU/GPU isn't going to result in very efficient heat transfer. If you're really going to try this, I recommend floating the dry ice in some sort of organic solvent (don't try water, as it'll freeze) and setting up some sort of agitator system.
An even better setup would be to setup a water-cooling-like system, with dry ice in a container filled with solvent above the system. The solvent would be fed into a heat exchanger on top of the CPU/GPU. No pump would be necessary, because, as the solvent in the heat exchanger heats up, it'll float up to the top, where it'll be cooled down again by the dry ice.
In any case, the costs of such a system would probably outweigh any benefit of using it.
I claim he was just painting angular, childish drawings requiring no particular talent
I respectfully beg to differ. When you or any child can paint something as nice as Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, I'll admit that Picasso was without talent. Sure, a lot of 'modern' art these days is bunk, but Picasso shouldn't be classified with that junk.
Reminds me the futurist painters in the 1920s and 30s.
They were called cubists.
Furthermore, IIS performs better than Apache under light to moderate loads. Once you start moving to heavy loads, IIS begins to choke and eventually just can't handle any more clients. Apache just happily continues running.
However, this might be more an effect of the underlying operating system than the actual server program. I haven't seen a comparison of Win32 Apache versus IIS, so I don't know.
Or just use zeros and ones for dots and dashes...
Me: "Hey mom, I'm texting in morse code!"
Mom: "Looks like binary."
it doesn't make you look like an idiot
Newsflash:
Most people would rather have you text than yap loudly on the phone in public places.
Don't get me wrong, voice chat is usually more efficient, but text messaging is a whole lot more discreet. My friends and I use it to schedule study-groups - that way, we can notify someone of a meeting later that day while they're still in class.
Unless you have a roof the size of large chemical processing plant, your house won't appear to be more than a speck of dust.
The satellite imagery for this is being recorded at a resolution of 300 m. For comparison, the most zoomed in you can get on GoogleMaps is 2 m per a pixel.
It's true! Just look here.
Let's hope a vessel doesn't go too far west of North America.