What about the lead thats in General Aviation Fuel? Are they doing anything to reduce that? To be clear; the fuel burned by jets is not leaded. This accounts for the vast bulk of aviation fuel consumption. Leaded fuel is used by most piston engined aircraft.
Why couldn't ZFS be distributed separately in kernel module form and installed by the user? Ubuntu and others integrate mscorefonts, NVidia drivers and others this way. Is the OpenSolaris license so heinous that it's worse than those examples?
Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. Sure, the CA legislature isn't going to allow any 'lack of cooperation' on IBM's part influence future contracts. There won't be any sudden desire to 're-evaluate' any purchasing schedules that IBM might have a piece of. Nah.
which will benefit IBM in the long run Teaching your customers that you roll over and write off invoices is a great business precedent. I know I won't mind when one of my employer's govt contracts just walks away with the product.
Grown-ups understand that when some podunk school district runs itself into the ground the state government is where the bill lands. CA pulls down $100,000,000,000 a year in tax revenue. Never mind the municipal, county and other tax and fee revenue. Never mind Federal education dollars. For the state, where this problem belongs, the bill is so small it's difficult to detect, so why are a gang of D-*s parading this 'forgivingness' idea in front of the cameras?
IBM fucked up when they arranged this 15 year no-interest nonsense and now they're getting precisely what they deserve. I feel nothing for IBM in this and if they roll over again I hope every legislature and school district in the nation notices.
There is another angle to this also; How will IBM's (or any other business that has to deal with local school districts) behavior change as a result of getting publicly raked over the 'for the children' coals by these shameless politicians? So much for any leniency in terms for the no-so-well-off school districts. Thanks, CA, keep electing these people.
The first interstellar humans will arrive at the next star in the form of embryos (or their virtual equivalents) to a pre-built space colony constructed by machines. It will take thousands of years. Today we can only begin to speculate about some the technology involved. Several hundred years from now our decedents will have more than speculation to work with.
Charlie Stross is correct within the narrow confines of his self imposed conditions. Physics tells us that the mass and energy involved in sending live people to nearby stars within a lifetime simply does not compute. Now, and perhaps never. Enormous generation ships have rather obvious problems also, the most intractable (after the flight actually begins, some time after the vessel is somehow built) would appear to be the inevitability of multiple in-flight, and possibly fatal, dark ages.
Given our very recent enlightenment about the frequency of extrasolar planets, it's rather likely that most brown/yellow dwarfs have, in addition to large planets, a vast collection of debris. This debris happens to be made of rather useful stuff including ice (water; hydrogen and oxygen,) carbon and metals (silicon, iron, etc.) in effectively unlimited quantities. The stuff is conveniently parked in stable orbits in condensed form with mass low enough to obviate concerns about atmospheres or escape velocity.
We already interact with space debris with fair competence. We fire bullets into comets [1] and skitter around on asteroids [2] with so little collective effort that most people are oblivious to it. Scaling that up a few hundred times may be within the grasp of humans today, never mind what we'll be capable of in 2507.
We know how to collect energy from stars [3]. We've even figured out how to beam it around with reasonable efficiency [4]. Given long enough intervals our ability to gather sufficient energy to refine arbitrary amounts of matter is assured.
Automation is a big missing piece at the moment. We can not yet build machines with enough intellect to operate unassisted in a complex environment. We have a long way to go on this one. However, I nurture a bit of faith on this. It's based on the possibility that we're not as smart as we think and, therefore, the challenge isn't a great as we assume.
Humans operate on the power obtained from plants, bits of meat and common gasses. The mass of the entire human nervous system is measured in tens kilograms and requires only a part of the available energy. The billions of years evolution has had to refine these resources into a competent system has produced complexity that we have only begun to fathom. Yet we progress at an astonishing pace. Contemporary machines can recognize speech, walk, fly, drive, swim, navigate and play games. The computational capacity to do these things must often be mobile and, therefore, small and low power. We are figuring out natures algorithms and I think that eventually we'll be able to produce low mass machines capable of orbital navigation, self-repair and refining operations all driven by enough goal seeking intellect to build habitats without human assistance.
My hypothetical mission profile looks something like this:
At some point during the next few centuries there will exist enough wealth, technical knowledge and stability to permit the building, in solar orbit, of a flotilla of moderately sized unmanned interstellar ships. This moment need not be particularly lengthy in duration or broadly coordinated; an important point given the volatility of our species. Once under way, the mission will not be subject to the fate of humans around the native star.
The flotilla will be launched in the direction of some likely star, powered by low thrust high delta-v engines and require centuries or millennia to arrive. Along the way some fraction of the machines will fail and require in-transit repair or recycling on arrival. The remainder will be sufficient. The builders will have high confidence in these devices b
If the NSF wasn't completely dominated by neo-cons it might have funded Kip Thorne and let him build the most sensitive laser interferometer on Earth.
There aren't a dozen people orbiting the planet attempting to assemble the largest space based solar collector in history; the physics involved are far beyond anything practiced in the US. I can just imagine Americans in space, risking life and limb. They'd probably find themselves using staple guns to keep from getting killed on live TV. The US is too cowardly for any of that.
If Europe had only had the wisdom to exclude the US from LHC, Fermilab's mistakes wouldn't have led to their current magnet problems. There's the US again, setting back physics by another decade.
Then there are the beef-eaters in Detroit, oblivious to any concept that doesn't involve guzzling gas.
Those damn Christens did manage to stifle US fusion research; the next big Tokamak is being built in France for crying-out-loud. There's hardly even any US funding involved.
That article is right. The US is nothing but a swill of gun-toting suburbanite consumers, polluting and terrorizing the world.
[1] Watch the quarterly report video on the right panel; bunch of silly US bubba cowboys trying to engineer a rocket. What a laugh.
Didn't perceive any dramatic performance improvement. I'm not surprised because the box I used is fast and however many fewer milliseconds it takes Safari to do something is overwhelmed by the time spent waiting on network traffic. I noted that Safari commits more RAM than either FF or IE. From memory, on startup; 32M for Safari, low 20s for FF and less for IE (18M?). Safari and FF both bring their own GUI framework overhead to the table while IE hides (shares) at lot of its weight, but that still seems like a lot; reminds me of Navigator.
This is a beta of course. On the other hand, today beta often means "not supported" as opposed to "not release quality." iTunes on Windows isn't bug-free or particularly efficient either. Kudos on plug-in compatibility; I noted that several of mine worked out-of-the-box. Not easy to do. Bloody freaking miracle, in fact.
Question: I tried to use Yahoo's hyper Ajax mail system in Safari. Didn't work too well (things not rendering, generally non-functional.) Does it "work" on a Mac with Safari? The question is more about Yahoo than Safari really; writing off a large fraction of users for all that Ajax goodness (?) seems like a bad idea.
Another Question: Where the $explicative is the home button? How did that fall out favor? Yeah, I know about the menu pick and the key-combo. Want a home button, like every other browser for the past 14 odd years. Maybe it's right in front of me and I'm just too uncool to spot it, but there I am...
YAQ: How to turn off link underlining? That led me to dig around in preferences, which I noted were very sparse. I suppose a lot of that stuff is normalized into global OS X preferences.
I use all sorts of platforms (except OS X) so FF is the natural choice; near-browser parity on everything I have to use. Safari would have to be so compelling that it actually makes me accept limiting myself to Windows, and it isn't.
Glad to see Apple do this; one more reason, in addition to the iPhone, for site builders to make their stuff work well across browsers.
No, really, I did. Where's my cookie? The odds are they really will bring ZFS in eventually, but Schwartz has managed to set that back beyond Leopard. Good job Jonathan!
I wonder whether this is really more than a research project within Apple. There is evidence that Apple has been investigating ZFS, but you have to take any third party claims about the design of future OS X releases with a fist sized salt crystal. Don't be surprised if Apple waits a few days and issues a 'clarification' on the matter. Jonathan Schwartz has set himself up for an embarrassment and, frankly, he deserves a slap for being so naive. They'll deny it even if incorporating ZFS is their intent. The economy sized egos at Apple will not tolerate being both up-staged and obligated by others. Whatever amount less of a splash Apple gets to make on its own as a result of Jonathan's public demonstrations will be accounted for in full, plus interest.
If y'all were building a system for this purpose, how many drives and what size drives would you use and would you do some form of RAID, or what? For what purpose?! You haven't said word one about how this storage will be used. What is it for? Email back end, shared file systems, RDBMS (OLTP or OLAP), streaming loads, D2D backup, etc. Define your use case, please! Post after post on this topic and not one of you ever think to specify what the @!%*$ it is you're trying to do.
Agonizing over the ability to incrementally upgrade an array is a sure sign you have cost at the very top of your list of concerns, with everything else far below. Learn about software RAID. At the throughput levels you're planning for (3 disks?) hardware RAID is a waste; contemporary CPUs can cope with all the parity calculations involved with negligible effort. Save money on proprietary hardware/licenses with Linux+LVM+MD and use the cash to upgrade the drives simultaneously. Or become a guru and figure out how to layer LVs and MDs to use capacity incrementally; the only cost is your time and spare stomach tissue.
If I had to manage fault tolerant storage with mis-matched physical disks and no budget I'd be looking at ZFS. There are other ways of doing it but the ZFS model is so simple and obvious that it has a high probability of actually working in the real world. Right up until it gets corrupted and you learn there is no ZFS fsck...
Clearly these test are inadequate, or at least they haven't disclosed enough information on the testing conditions. As any true audiophile knows, headphone performance is strongly affected by atmospheric conditions; I'll bet that if they had bothered to maintain proper water vapor saturation levels in the test facility the complete the inadequacy of the ear buds would have been obvious to everyone involved, because sensory receptors (hair cells) in the human ear only achieve full sensitively under controlled conditions.
No doubt they also failed to account for magnetic field alignment; the flaws of low bit rate reproductions are much easier to perceive when the listener is not aligned with Earth's natural axial vectors. The solenoidal force lines ruin the high band pass attenuation of any digital audio and will make both low and high bit rate reproductions equally poor, so naturally there wasn't a strong correlation among the test subjects.
Interoperability Executive Customer Council What?! Why are they now using spaces in these new.NET class names? What's wrong with InteroperabilityExecutiveCustomerCouncil? What was so difficult about reading InterlockedCompareExchangeRelease that they have to start with this new convention?
Just read through most of the >0 posts. Admitted I read fast but usually it doesn't take much effort to pick out the posts that explain precisely how this was caused by the US. I assume it was; practically anything that lands on the evil side of the TruthDot ledger is satisfactorily explained by some US policy. Lemme go back and read so more...
Not enough specifics here. I am going to say do your thing. If it works, you're a hero and saved 47k. Not really. The assertion that a 12 spindle NAS box with iSCSI costs 50k is the issue. That level of NAS/iSCSI hardware does not cost 50k. It may have, years ago, from Netapp or someone, but not today. Today such a box will cost around 10k with equivalent storage.
A Netapp S500 with 12 disks and NAS/iSCSI features is a good example. Roughly 10k and you get Netapp's SMB/CIFS implementation (considered excellent), NFS, iSCSI, snapshots, etc. Slightly lower price points can be had through Adaptec Snap Servers. They have a nice SAS JBOD expansion unit for their systems. HP just released new "storage servers" based on Microsoft's storage server OS; heck of a lot of value in those systems.
The delta between 3-4k and 10k isn't trivial, and if your budget is tight perhaps should roll your own. But 10k for supported NAS/iSCSI that functions a few minutes after you get it in the rack isn't a ripoff either. Not by a long shot.
Does MySQL still truncate data that doesn't fit? I recall similar lists of criticisms posted here and elsewhere about MySQL and one of the entries is that numbers 'too large' or strings 'too long' for a given column are just silently whacked down to size. I thought then and persist in thinking that this behavior is pretty damning.
Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run. Question: Circa 2013* or so when a replacement for Vista actually appears, exactly how many "first-generation" Intel Mac operators that actually use their by-then 7 year old systems to run Microsoft operating systems will actually care?
Answer: Both.
Please. I wouldn't be surprised or disturbed to learn the latest version of OS X isn't be supported on 32 bit Macs by the time Microsoft replaces Vista. If history is any guide there is at least one processor architecture change-over in store for Apple between now and then.
* Figuring XP-to-Vista development time as the lower bound for Vista's replacement.
Doesn't seem like the smartest thing to let potential enemies know of such plans in advance. Of course, if the Secret Service just went ahead and jammed phones without giving notice good old TruthDot would not have found it necessary to entertain articles about the facism of Bush taking over communication networks in foreign countries. Nah, that wouldn't happen.
Intel released its first Quad almost 6 months ago and by all accounts there are plenty of customers. So, either you're correct and these buyers are morons making ~$300 [1] mistakes or you're wrong and people with the dough to pay for it actually need [2] it.
Which do you think it is?
[1] The delta between a Kentsfield and the same frequency dual-core. [2] You opinion on the definition of 'need' not withstanding.
A lot of the problem with these systems is that they're intractable... no sooner do you think you've smoothed everything off and sealed the source code does someone get a bright idea of making the system worth with another area of your business. Strange. That's what most ERP/CRM vendors call a success.
If it isn't being adopted by new users then it's being rejected and you're not helping the business.
IANAA, rather a laymen at best. However JWST is hardly news; anyone that bothers to browse nasa.gov knows about it. As a result I have also wondered about the choice of wavelength for this instrument.
The resolution of this instrument will not be so good because of the longer wavelength. I don't want to hear that. Don't misunderstand; I don't begrudge a single dime spent on it. I take it on faith that those who know best are building something incredible. Analysis of the early universe is crucial to cosmology. I get it.
The high-resolution "pretty pictures" aspect of Hubble means a lot. Perhaps more that is appreciated in academia. If all the money and drama of NASA produced nothing but Hubble it has been worth it. NASA is billing JWST as Hubble's replacement. Is it? Really? Honestly?
Personally, the most thrilling aspect of contemporary astronomy is extrasolar planets. The ESA is detecting Earth size objects from the ground. Will JWST be able to contribute to this? I can't help but wonder what sort of space-based planet finding/resolving capability could be had for $4.5G.
Note all the question marks. I'm not making an argument. I just haven't got a frig'n clue what to think about JWST as a "Hubble replacement." Convince me. I want to hear that this machine will carry on producing the sort of output that inspires the public to keep NASA funded because, one way or another, Hubble is going down and this is what we're going to be left with, if we're fortunate.
this is VERY different. Indeed. Clinton was actually charged with crimes by a special prosecutor. Kucinich is a grandstanding presidential candidate wannabe with no support; they man didn't even have tacit agreement with his parties leadership before blundering out to the cameras. I must agree; VERY different.
When Murtha, Pelosi, Kennedy and the rest step up and stand behind (or in front of, more likely) Kucinich supporting an impeachment of the VP it will dominate the news cycle just like it did for Clinton. Until then claims of media conspiracy are just fringe truther noise. Grist for the truthers to cream over here on Truth-Dot.
The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. While I've seen many people saddled with low-end laptops I have never spent less than $2K for a personal laptop or had an employer pay less for hardware with which I was expected to do my job. Breaking $2K for a laptop is easy; just spec enough resolution and RAM for the desktop replacement role and you're there. I have also spent >$500 on good disks for both personal and professional use.
I predict Dell will be surprised by the number of customers that opt for this. Disks are slow, vulnerable power sinks. A laptop with a solid-state disk offers a lot of value. These disks are small but size is only one factor; speed, reliability and efficiency are all equally valid and flash disks measure up well.
Yes, this is early adopter stuff, but $500 is not a deal killer even now. Doesn't really matter much; a year or two from now and it'll be $250-300 and 4-5 years from now it will be default on all but low end products. Think of it this way; prior to sufficiently large solid-state disks the only option was traditional hard drives. All of the people who might have paid more but couldn't now have a choice. Guaranteed success.
It's not on the front page for most of the MSM right now because Slashdot is two days behind the news cycle on this one.
Took about 2 minutes to find those stories and provide links. Easier to believe it's a corporate media conspiracy eh? I could provide a few hundred more but you truthers aren't worth the time.
What exactly does Oracle offer besides database offerings? Three different widespread ERPs (Oracle E-Business, PeopleSoft and JDE,) Siebel, a Java IDE (at one time quite popular,) a database design platform, OLAP stuff (their own and now Hyperion) and application containers. They also have some not so widely used products including a collaboration system (email, etc.) and some sort of Oracle backed file system. They have a cluster file system for Linux that's gotten some play. Oh, and they're an OS vendor now with their 'Unbreakable Linux' thing.
Oracle is a monster.
"wireless developers" Yeah, I don't get that either. All I can say for sure is that I have no wires sticking out of me anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Why couldn't ZFS be distributed separately in kernel module form and installed by the user? Ubuntu and others integrate mscorefonts, NVidia drivers and others this way. Is the OpenSolaris license so heinous that it's worse than those examples?
I doubt it.
Grown-ups understand that when some podunk school district runs itself into the ground the state government is where the bill lands. CA pulls down $100,000,000,000 a year in tax revenue. Never mind the municipal, county and other tax and fee revenue. Never mind Federal education dollars. For the state, where this problem belongs, the bill is so small it's difficult to detect, so why are a gang of D-*s parading this 'forgivingness' idea in front of the cameras?
IBM fucked up when they arranged this 15 year no-interest nonsense and now they're getting precisely what they deserve. I feel nothing for IBM in this and if they roll over again I hope every legislature and school district in the nation notices.
There is another angle to this also; How will IBM's (or any other business that has to deal with local school districts) behavior change as a result of getting publicly raked over the 'for the children' coals by these shameless politicians? So much for any leniency in terms for the no-so-well-off school districts. Thanks, CA, keep electing these people.
The first interstellar humans will arrive at the next star in the form of embryos (or their virtual equivalents) to a pre-built space colony constructed by machines. It will take thousands of years. Today we can only begin to speculate about some the technology involved. Several hundred years from now our decedents will have more than speculation to work with.
Charlie Stross is correct within the narrow confines of his self imposed conditions. Physics tells us that the mass and energy involved in sending live people to nearby stars within a lifetime simply does not compute. Now, and perhaps never. Enormous generation ships have rather obvious problems also, the most intractable (after the flight actually begins, some time after the vessel is somehow built) would appear to be the inevitability of multiple in-flight, and possibly fatal, dark ages.
Given our very recent enlightenment about the frequency of extrasolar planets, it's rather likely that most brown/yellow dwarfs have, in addition to large planets, a vast collection of debris. This debris happens to be made of rather useful stuff including ice (water; hydrogen and oxygen,) carbon and metals (silicon, iron, etc.) in effectively unlimited quantities. The stuff is conveniently parked in stable orbits in condensed form with mass low enough to obviate concerns about atmospheres or escape velocity.
We already interact with space debris with fair competence. We fire bullets into comets [1] and skitter around on asteroids [2] with so little collective effort that most people are oblivious to it. Scaling that up a few hundred times may be within the grasp of humans today, never mind what we'll be capable of in 2507.
We know how to collect energy from stars [3]. We've even figured out how to beam it around with reasonable efficiency [4]. Given long enough intervals our ability to gather sufficient energy to refine arbitrary amounts of matter is assured.
Automation is a big missing piece at the moment. We can not yet build machines with enough intellect to operate unassisted in a complex environment. We have a long way to go on this one. However, I nurture a bit of faith on this. It's based on the possibility that we're not as smart as we think and, therefore, the challenge isn't a great as we assume.
Humans operate on the power obtained from plants, bits of meat and common gasses. The mass of the entire human nervous system is measured in tens kilograms and requires only a part of the available energy. The billions of years evolution has had to refine these resources into a competent system has produced complexity that we have only begun to fathom. Yet we progress at an astonishing pace. Contemporary machines can recognize speech, walk, fly, drive, swim, navigate and play games. The computational capacity to do these things must often be mobile and, therefore, small and low power. We are figuring out natures algorithms and I think that eventually we'll be able to produce low mass machines capable of orbital navigation, self-repair and refining operations all driven by enough goal seeking intellect to build habitats without human assistance.
My hypothetical mission profile looks something like this:
At some point during the next few centuries there will exist enough wealth, technical knowledge and stability to permit the building, in solar orbit, of a flotilla of moderately sized unmanned interstellar ships. This moment need not be particularly lengthy in duration or broadly coordinated; an important point given the volatility of our species. Once under way, the mission will not be subject to the fate of humans around the native star.
The flotilla will be launched in the direction of some likely star, powered by low thrust high delta-v engines and require centuries or millennia to arrive. Along the way some fraction of the machines will fail and require in-transit repair or recycling on arrival. The remainder will be sufficient. The builders will have high confidence in these devices b
It's too bad the US isn't building a National Ignition Facility to produce fusion in the laboratory using the largest lasers on the planet.
If only there were physicists scrutinizing the data produced by something like Gravity Probe B here in the US.
Something like a Z Machine would be really useful for high energy physics, but the fundies in the US won't allow it.
Then there is NASA, sitting its laurels of times long past, not making any effort to replace [1] the ill-conceived shuttle.
The US isn't attempting to measure the rate of polar ice cap melting using precise measurements of the exact center of mass of the entire planet. No, because physics in the US sucks and that sort of work is best left to others.
If the NSF wasn't completely dominated by neo-cons it might have funded Kip Thorne and let him build the most sensitive laser interferometer on Earth.
There aren't a dozen people orbiting the planet attempting to assemble the largest space based solar collector in history; the physics involved are far beyond anything practiced in the US. I can just imagine Americans in space, risking life and limb. They'd probably find themselves using staple guns to keep from getting killed on live TV. The US is too cowardly for any of that.
If Europe had only had the wisdom to exclude the US from LHC, Fermilab's mistakes wouldn't have led to their current magnet problems. There's the US again, setting back physics by another decade.
Then there are the beef-eaters in Detroit, oblivious to any concept that doesn't involve guzzling gas.
Those damn Christens did manage to stifle US fusion research; the next big Tokamak is being built in France for crying-out-loud. There's hardly even any US funding involved.
That article is right. The US is nothing but a swill of gun-toting suburbanite consumers, polluting and terrorizing the world.
[1] Watch the quarterly report video on the right panel; bunch of silly US bubba cowboys trying to engineer a rocket. What a laugh.
Didn't perceive any dramatic performance improvement. I'm not surprised because the box I used is fast and however many fewer milliseconds it takes Safari to do something is overwhelmed by the time spent waiting on network traffic. I noted that Safari commits more RAM than either FF or IE. From memory, on startup; 32M for Safari, low 20s for FF and less for IE (18M?). Safari and FF both bring their own GUI framework overhead to the table while IE hides (shares) at lot of its weight, but that still seems like a lot; reminds me of Navigator.
This is a beta of course. On the other hand, today beta often means "not supported" as opposed to "not release quality." iTunes on Windows isn't bug-free or particularly efficient either. Kudos on plug-in compatibility; I noted that several of mine worked out-of-the-box. Not easy to do. Bloody freaking miracle, in fact.
Question: I tried to use Yahoo's hyper Ajax mail system in Safari. Didn't work too well (things not rendering, generally non-functional.) Does it "work" on a Mac with Safari? The question is more about Yahoo than Safari really; writing off a large fraction of users for all that Ajax goodness (?) seems like a bad idea.
Another Question: Where the $explicative is the home button? How did that fall out favor? Yeah, I know about the menu pick and the key-combo. Want a home button, like every other browser for the past 14 odd years. Maybe it's right in front of me and I'm just too uncool to spot it, but there I am...
YAQ: How to turn off link underlining? That led me to dig around in preferences, which I noted were very sparse. I suppose a lot of that stuff is normalized into global OS X preferences.
I use all sorts of platforms (except OS X) so FF is the natural choice; near-browser parity on everything I have to use. Safari would have to be so compelling that it actually makes me accept limiting myself to Windows, and it isn't.
Glad to see Apple do this; one more reason, in addition to the iPhone, for site builders to make their stuff work well across browsers.
No, really, I did. Where's my cookie? The odds are they really will bring ZFS in eventually, but Schwartz has managed to set that back beyond Leopard. Good job Jonathan!
I saw this story in Firehose and thought; interesting story, too bad the puerile wording will keep it off the front page...
I wonder whether this is really more than a research project within Apple. There is evidence that Apple has been investigating ZFS, but you have to take any third party claims about the design of future OS X releases with a fist sized salt crystal. Don't be surprised if Apple waits a few days and issues a 'clarification' on the matter. Jonathan Schwartz has set himself up for an embarrassment and, frankly, he deserves a slap for being so naive. They'll deny it even if incorporating ZFS is their intent. The economy sized egos at Apple will not tolerate being both up-staged and obligated by others. Whatever amount less of a splash Apple gets to make on its own as a result of Jonathan's public demonstrations will be accounted for in full, plus interest.
Agonizing over the ability to incrementally upgrade an array is a sure sign you have cost at the very top of your list of concerns, with everything else far below. Learn about software RAID. At the throughput levels you're planning for (3 disks?) hardware RAID is a waste; contemporary CPUs can cope with all the parity calculations involved with negligible effort. Save money on proprietary hardware/licenses with Linux+LVM+MD and use the cash to upgrade the drives simultaneously. Or become a guru and figure out how to layer LVs and MDs to use capacity incrementally; the only cost is your time and spare stomach tissue.
If I had to manage fault tolerant storage with mis-matched physical disks and no budget I'd be looking at ZFS. There are other ways of doing it but the ZFS model is so simple and obvious that it has a high probability of actually working in the real world. Right up until it gets corrupted and you learn there is no ZFS fsck...
Clearly these test are inadequate, or at least they haven't disclosed enough information on the testing conditions. As any true audiophile knows, headphone performance is strongly affected by atmospheric conditions; I'll bet that if they had bothered to maintain proper water vapor saturation levels in the test facility the complete the inadequacy of the ear buds would have been obvious to everyone involved, because sensory receptors (hair cells) in the human ear only achieve full sensitively under controlled conditions.
No doubt they also failed to account for magnetic field alignment; the flaws of low bit rate reproductions are much easier to perceive when the listener is not aligned with Earth's natural axial vectors. The solenoidal force lines ruin the high band pass attenuation of any digital audio and will make both low and high bit rate reproductions equally poor, so naturally there wasn't a strong correlation among the test subjects.
Idiots.
</sarcasm>
Just read through most of the >0 posts. Admitted I read fast but usually it doesn't take much effort to pick out the posts that explain precisely how this was caused by the US. I assume it was; practically anything that lands on the evil side of the TruthDot ledger is satisfactorily explained by some US policy. Lemme go back and read so more...
A Netapp S500 with 12 disks and NAS/iSCSI features is a good example. Roughly 10k and you get Netapp's SMB/CIFS implementation (considered excellent), NFS, iSCSI, snapshots, etc. Slightly lower price points can be had through Adaptec Snap Servers. They have a nice SAS JBOD expansion unit for their systems. HP just released new "storage servers" based on Microsoft's storage server OS; heck of a lot of value in those systems.
The delta between 3-4k and 10k isn't trivial, and if your budget is tight perhaps should roll your own. But 10k for supported NAS/iSCSI that functions a few minutes after you get it in the rack isn't a ripoff either. Not by a long shot.
Enjoy Memorial Day weekend.
Does MySQL still truncate data that doesn't fit? I recall similar lists of criticisms posted here and elsewhere about MySQL and one of the entries is that numbers 'too large' or strings 'too long' for a given column are just silently whacked down to size. I thought then and persist in thinking that this behavior is pretty damning.
Answer: Both.
Please. I wouldn't be surprised or disturbed to learn the latest version of OS X isn't be supported on 32 bit Macs by the time Microsoft replaces Vista. If history is any guide there is at least one processor architecture change-over in store for Apple between now and then.
* Figuring XP-to-Vista development time as the lower bound for Vista's replacement.
Intel released its first Quad almost 6 months ago and by all accounts there are plenty of customers. So, either you're correct and these buyers are morons making ~$300 [1] mistakes or you're wrong and people with the dough to pay for it actually need [2] it.
Which do you think it is?
[1] The delta between a Kentsfield and the same frequency dual-core.
[2] You opinion on the definition of 'need' not withstanding.
If it isn't being adopted by new users then it's being rejected and you're not helping the business.
The high-resolution "pretty pictures" aspect of Hubble means a lot. Perhaps more that is appreciated in academia. If all the money and drama of NASA produced nothing but Hubble it has been worth it. NASA is billing JWST as Hubble's replacement. Is it? Really? Honestly?
Personally, the most thrilling aspect of contemporary astronomy is extrasolar planets. The ESA is detecting Earth size objects from the ground. Will JWST be able to contribute to this? I can't help but wonder what sort of space-based planet finding/resolving capability could be had for $4.5G.
Note all the question marks. I'm not making an argument. I just haven't got a frig'n clue what to think about JWST as a "Hubble replacement." Convince me. I want to hear that this machine will carry on producing the sort of output that inspires the public to keep NASA funded because, one way or another, Hubble is going down and this is what we're going to be left with, if we're fortunate.
When Murtha, Pelosi, Kennedy and the rest step up and stand behind (or in front of, more likely) Kucinich supporting an impeachment of the VP it will dominate the news cycle just like it did for Clinton. Until then claims of media conspiracy are just fringe truther noise. Grist for the truthers to cream over here on Truth-Dot.
I predict Dell will be surprised by the number of customers that opt for this. Disks are slow, vulnerable power sinks. A laptop with a solid-state disk offers a lot of value. These disks are small but size is only one factor; speed, reliability and efficiency are all equally valid and flash disks measure up well.
Yes, this is early adopter stuff, but $500 is not a deal killer even now. Doesn't really matter much; a year or two from now and it'll be $250-300 and 4-5 years from now it will be default on all but low end products. Think of it this way; prior to sufficiently large solid-state disks the only option was traditional hard drives. All of the people who might have paid more but couldn't now have a choice. Guaranteed success.
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It's not on the front page for most of the MSM right now because Slashdot is two days behind the news cycle on this one.
Took about 2 minutes to find those stories and provide links. Easier to believe it's a corporate media conspiracy eh? I could provide a few hundred more but you truthers aren't worth the time.
Oracle is a monster. "wireless developers" Yeah, I don't get that either. All I can say for sure is that I have no wires sticking out of me anywhere.