14 direct replies to remind me that my chemistry skills are not what they should be. I'm sure more will come soon.
Actually, contrary to one post my comment wasn't a troll - it was a misconceived belief. Thanks to the thread I now know more obout the hydrogen fuel issue than I did before, so thank you.
I'm very aware of how IBM runs -- I've been tied to them in terms of my own work for many years and know a good many people up to the vp level. The thing about IBM is that they rarely "go after" anyone without there being some pretty compelling reason to do so. They are more like a sleeping bear than the Nazgul.
...down the line, hydrogen is the way to go -- maybe fuel cells. There's just so much energy available in what is the most available substance in the universe that the better we get at working with it the better off we are.
Ideally, I'd like to see home or neighborhood sized power generation. This would DRASTICALLY reduce the total amount needed due to loss in transmission lines. I read somewhere that this nears 50% of what's generated.
Since the "waste" of a fuel cell running on hydrogen is heat and water, wouldn't it be great to water the garden with that waste product, and perhaps cool the fuel cell using a heat transfer coil that used that heated water to warm the pool, or pre-warm that hot water for the house? Obviously its not perfect and you'd probably generate less heat than you need overall -- but every bit counts, right?
I've wanted to do this with a home air conditioner for a long time. Why not cool the condenser with water using a heat exchanger and dump that heat to the pool?
Thanks. That's good to know. I've found the problem with outsourcing is that you get exactly what you ask for without regard to what you actually need.
I'd assumed most of the "support" was done remotely and had been outsourced to some forsaken bit of the world with bad water but good IP connection.
I'm about to "upgrade" and move to a larger server there. I plan to require it be in the VA data center I think. If you have any advice on dealing with them or what to ask for versus what to avoid, it would sure be appreciated.
What little experience of their datacenter monkeys I've had isn't really very positive. I stay with them because for now I havne't come across a better deal. The next machine I switch to will be in their Virginia or LA data center though -- not in San Antonio which I did not sign up for and didn't realize until I'd been placed there.
I've had a couple of instances of processor overheat and had to auto-reboot. I've had two instances of routing problems on their end, and in both cases it took WAY too long to fix and at no time did they even bother to update the ticket to say they were working on it. Once, when only one of 5 addresses wasn't routing, the minute they got the ticket they took the whole rest of the server offline for hours until they fixed their routing problem.
As I live in a rural location, until recently I had a $1500/mo. Level 3 T1, but I've since outsourced my public facing servers to rented boxes at ServerBeach. Now its just consumer grade IP for me (which sucks if you have to upload anything).
When I had the addition put on the house, the walls were opened up enough so I ran 5000 feet of cat5e. Now every room has at least one network drop box, which has 4 cat5e RJ45 ports and 2 RJ11. The master bedroom and living room have two of these and my office has 4.
The drops come back to the server room off my office. They terminate in a 96 port patch panel. Patch cables tie them to 100mb Ethernet switches, and one gigabit switch. The servers and the machines in my office use the gigabit switch.
There is a sonicwall that ties the cable connection in to the network. Good device, crappy company. Its a leftover from when I had the T1. There is also DSL, which comes into one of three Linksys WRT-54G routers. The linksys routers run Alchemy firmware, and work as a single cloud. The secondary ones simply act as repeaters. As a result I serve IP to my neighbors across the street and next door.
I leave the wifi "open" and free to use, but consider it "hostile" so the next stop is a Fedora Core 4 linux box acting as a firewall for the dsl side. (The next step, not yet taken, is to set up bandwidth optimized and failover based routing, using both data paths to terminate at my linux box at serverbeach. This should resolve the slow upload issue).
As you can see, I believe in failover. Every piece of equipment is protected by line stabilizing UPS units, and an LP Gas standby generator (15kw) kicks on within a minute if there is a power loss. Remember, I'm rural. In addition, because I'm an officer with a call fire department, when we do lose power, I'm not there to pull out a portable. I'm on a fire truck keeping the idiots away from the down lines.
For servers I have a W2k3 box (for now) and a fedora core 4 linux box, as well as an old win2k box. These can all be consolidated to a good linux box when I get time.
Workstation is a P4 2.8ghz HT w/ a pair of SATA 80gb drives in RAID-0 and 2gb of ram. A Radeon 128 serves a 19" NEC monitor and a 17" Viewsonic.
Laptop is an Inspiron 8200 -- due for replacement when I can reasonably buy an Athlon 64 dual core tablet machine with a 17" screen and 2gb of ram. I travel with Dlink router and an IAXY device from Digium so that my phone follows me to whatever hotel room I'm in.
Spousal unit has a P4 2.8ghz HT machine with 1gb. Two kids have old Celeron based workstations for schoolwork and internet (Squid proxy & Dan's Guardian prevents the 12 year old from porn surfing). Third child is using an old iMac G3 Blueberry. A G4 eMac with 1gb sits in the living room. Mostly it just holds down the table.
Phone system is entirely Asterisk based, trunked to the production box at serverbeach.
Cell phone is a Motorola e815 because with sdk I could open the bluetooth, it does 80% of what an expensive PDA can do, and when I rush to the firestation and and it skitters across the floor while I'm jumping into my gear, I'm not losing $500 worth of kit.
Lots of other stuff, but it mostly sits on shelves.
...forget proprietary solutions. Most mobile devices have programming languages based on.net or java now. Those which support wifi can use any voip protocol someone writes a client for.
The key here will be when a good SIP, IAX2, h.323, or whatever -- stack exists through LGPL so that most programmers can easily use it to create those clients.
So, the Stack-Geek types need to get those open stacks written and out there so the UI-Geek types can use them to make clever VoIP clients.
VoIP is so much more than just phone calls -- as these stacks emerge using a VoIP stream to carry all kind of real time data will become very commmon.
Regardless of what humans can or can't see in it, there will be byte for byte differences and patterns to those differences. If there weren't, the watermarking couldn't be spotted in the files later found to be pirated.
At the very worst, a simple matter of re-encoding the file in memory from digital to analog and back would insert enough variation due to nothing more than the variance introduced by floating point math to make the process easily circumvented.
Aren't people transcoding iTunes stuff now by just letting it play and re-recording it? If done in memory, I don't know how lossy that is, but I'm sure its going to produce "good enough" sound for most people, no? Those who care enough to claim they can tell the difference are not the ones pirating music anyway, AFAIK.
The plastic distribution industry (formerly known as the record industry) is spending stupid amounts of capitol to preserve a business model that rewards the distributor of the plastic on which content resides over the artist who made it or the consumer who bought it. Ultimately, that model will fail simply because it no longer makes economic sense.
You'd see the I specifically referenced video transcoding as an exception -- and that for people doing this a great deal, a faster bus would allow inexpensive dedicated processing products to handle this much more efficiently for the processor.
So far, the I've found the best way to avoid outsourcing is to continue to be creative and actually help people get things done. I've had my own business now for 15 years, and still have my first client. Outsourcing comes, and outsourcing goes -- and its not really the fault of the people in the sweatshops. When you outsource, you get exactly what you ask for. Nothing less, but nothing more -- and most clients don't know to ask for the right things, so it fails.
Is my code work boring? Well, I'm having fun with it -- and its saving lives & property. You?
Its really only very recently that bus speeds have been so far outstripped by processor speeds. If memory serves - as late as 1991, when I was still doing cube farm work, I was given an NEC desktop machine in which one key selling point was that it had a bus path to the IDE drive at the same speed as the process in mhz. Literally a 1:1 ratio. Today, a quad core 3ghz processor would be (in theory) handling something not quite equivilant to 12ghz, but talking to i/o on a bus of what, 800mhz or perhaps 1ghz if things progress as they have been? That's a 12:1 ratio.
Yes, I understand that multiplying the speeds like that is overly simplistic. An arguement could be made that its really more like 3:1 -- but since all the cores are using the same bus, I don't agree with that arguement.
Processors need to keep getting faster -- of course they do. Dual core is absolutely better than single core, and I'd never buy another new processor that wasn't dual core. I've enough experience on just hyperthreading chips to know for a fact that it "feels" smoother to operate the machine.
My point is only that this isn't the biggest factor any more. Until a better bus becomes popular and can handle the through put to support these supercomputers-on-a-chip, they won't continue to provide the kinds of "real world" performance increase that we'd expect.
What I think you may be missing, is that with a stronger FSB or some similar path to external tools, the processing power you want can be added more easily and cheaply as purpose built asic processors -- RISC chips with specific purpose.
An example I gave earlier is FFT for scientific work (converting analog signal data over time into frequency blocks). This algorythm is the same for a huge amount of tasks, is very processor intensive, and is common but used widely for different things. IOW, perfect to offload from the processor.
A really good FSB path that didn't block processing other things, could solve your processing power issues much more effectively with a plug in hardware solution to offload.
Use of these kinds of purpose built processing circuits is limited by the FSB. Graphics cards work well, but remember, the ultimate output is to the monitor, not back to the system. The calculation is passed through the bus, but the result is not. Even with that compromise, bus speeds limit the solution so much that AGP and PCI-E have been invented as a way around the lack of a really fast general bus.
Just imagine if you could offload that heavy calc work to a purpose built card -- or potentially a whole additional computer, what the result would be for performance.
Presumably, you get some kind of software driver to talk to with your own software so you can feed it the time domain in real time and get back blocks of frequency domain data without burdening your processor.
If you're doing serious scientific analysis on live analog data streams (SETI anyone?) this would really help you out a lot. I'd bet one of these could really jump your SETI@HOME scores up pretty quickly.
...on the person, no? I'm no doctor, was just looking for a funny line to relate to "blocked up" -- oh well. As Steve Martin said...."Everyone THINKS they have a sense of humor.":-)
...other than that (which admittedly will dim the lights), I've never kept even a hyperthreading P4 pegged solid for more than a short time. I've written multithreaded audio processing software than can pick DTMF or Motorola QC-II tones out of a live audio stream with good reliability, and I've written anti-spam software that in test processes more than a million messages per hour. In neither case did I overwhelm the processors.
Neither of these tasks is important for a desktop user. Large software compiles, scientific analysis -- these are specialized tasks and sure multiprocessor machines will help. The market for these, however, is specialized and limited.
IMO - there will be external specialized processor blocks for these kinds of tasks. For example, an external FFT processor board would make a great deal of sense. Its a well known algorythm, used in a huge variety of analysis -- and is easy to predefine with parameters. Think of a PCI-Express board with its own set of RISC processors dedicated to performing FFT transforms in the same way modern graphics work is offloaded. You define in the drive the frame size, domain size, etc etc.. and get back the results as fast as you can pass them in.
The point is, what holds back solutions like this the most -- is the front side bus.
Processing power is rarely the problem. Graphics processing is already handed off, and unless you're trying to crack encryption, most software isn't bound by processor speed anyway.
Software performance is bound by I/O limitations. It FEELS like processor power because threads on hold for I/O block a core up like cheescake to a lactose intollerant grandparent.
Until I can index on disk at about 100 times the current speed, these processors won't help what I'm doing.
....slashdot did not figure out? "..back and forth debate over ethereal concepts that can neither be proven or disproven..." is what we do here. The alternative is spending time with our families. Can you imagine?
I'm fairly sure Marx would have agreed with your view of utlimate amoral capitolism. Of course, for some reason he also believed that comunism would not suffer the same amoral failings. Interesting how one man can be so right and so wrong at the same time, no?
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14 direct replies to remind me that my chemistry skills are not what they should be. I'm sure more will come soon.
Actually, contrary to one post my comment wasn't a troll - it was a misconceived belief. Thanks to the thread I now know more obout the hydrogen fuel issue than I did before, so thank you.
I'm very aware of how IBM runs -- I've been tied to them in terms of my own work for many years and know a good many people up to the vp level. The thing about IBM is that they rarely "go after" anyone without there being some pretty compelling reason to do so. They are more like a sleeping bear than the Nazgul.
I've said many times that if I had to choose a corporate mortal enemy, I'd pick IBM. They just aren't so good at "smiting their enemies".
...down the line, hydrogen is the way to go -- maybe fuel cells. There's just so much energy available in what is the most available substance in the universe that the better we get at working with it the better off we are.
Ideally, I'd like to see home or neighborhood sized power generation. This would DRASTICALLY reduce the total amount needed due to loss in transmission lines. I read somewhere that this nears 50% of what's generated.
Since the "waste" of a fuel cell running on hydrogen is heat and water, wouldn't it be great to water the garden with that waste product, and perhaps cool the fuel cell using a heat transfer coil that used that heated water to warm the pool, or pre-warm that hot water for the house? Obviously its not perfect and you'd probably generate less heat than you need overall -- but every bit counts, right?
I've wanted to do this with a home air conditioner for a long time. Why not cool the condenser with water using a heat exchanger and dump that heat to the pool?
Thanks. That's good to know. I've found the problem with outsourcing is that you get exactly what you ask for without regard to what you actually need.
I'd assumed most of the "support" was done remotely and had been outsourced to some forsaken bit of the world with bad water but good IP connection.
I'm about to "upgrade" and move to a larger server there. I plan to require it be in the VA data center I think. If you have any advice on dealing with them or what to ask for versus what to avoid, it would sure be appreciated.
What little experience of their datacenter monkeys I've had isn't really very positive. I stay with them because for now I havne't come across a better deal. The next machine I switch to will be in their Virginia or LA data center though -- not in San Antonio which I did not sign up for and didn't realize until I'd been placed there.
I've had a couple of instances of processor overheat and had to auto-reboot. I've had two instances of routing problems on their end, and in both cases it took WAY too long to fix and at no time did they even bother to update the ticket to say they were working on it. Once, when only one of 5 addresses wasn't routing, the minute they got the ticket they took the whole rest of the server offline for hours until they fixed their routing problem.
Good price, decent box, crappy support so far.
AP
As I live in a rural location, until recently I had a $1500/mo. Level 3 T1, but I've since outsourced my public facing servers to rented boxes at ServerBeach. Now its just consumer grade IP for me (which sucks if you have to upload anything).
When I had the addition put on the house, the walls were opened up enough so I ran 5000 feet of cat5e. Now every room has at least one network drop box, which has 4 cat5e RJ45 ports and 2 RJ11. The master bedroom and living room have two of these and my office has 4.
The drops come back to the server room off my office. They terminate in a 96 port patch panel. Patch cables tie them to 100mb Ethernet switches, and one gigabit switch. The servers and the machines in my office use the gigabit switch.
There is a sonicwall that ties the cable connection in to the network. Good device, crappy company. Its a leftover from when I had the T1. There is also DSL, which comes into one of three Linksys WRT-54G routers. The linksys routers run Alchemy firmware, and work as a single cloud. The secondary ones simply act as repeaters. As a result I serve IP to my neighbors across the street and next door.
I leave the wifi "open" and free to use, but consider it "hostile" so the next stop is a Fedora Core 4 linux box acting as a firewall for the dsl side. (The next step, not yet taken, is to set up bandwidth optimized and failover based routing, using both data paths to terminate at my linux box at serverbeach. This should resolve the slow upload issue).
As you can see, I believe in failover. Every piece of equipment is protected by line stabilizing UPS units, and an LP Gas standby generator (15kw) kicks on within a minute if there is a power loss. Remember, I'm rural. In addition, because I'm an officer with a call fire department, when we do lose power, I'm not there to pull out a portable. I'm on a fire truck keeping the idiots away from the down lines.
For servers I have a W2k3 box (for now) and a fedora core 4 linux box, as well as an old win2k box. These can all be consolidated to a good linux box when I get time.
Workstation is a P4 2.8ghz HT w/ a pair of SATA 80gb drives in RAID-0 and 2gb of ram. A Radeon 128 serves a 19" NEC monitor and a 17" Viewsonic.
Laptop is an Inspiron 8200 -- due for replacement when I can reasonably buy an Athlon 64 dual core tablet machine with a 17" screen and 2gb of ram. I travel with Dlink router and an IAXY device from Digium so that my phone follows me to whatever hotel room I'm in.
Spousal unit has a P4 2.8ghz HT machine with 1gb. Two kids have old Celeron based workstations for schoolwork and internet (Squid proxy & Dan's Guardian prevents the 12 year old from porn surfing). Third child is using an old iMac G3 Blueberry. A G4 eMac with 1gb sits in the living room. Mostly it just holds down the table.
Phone system is entirely Asterisk based, trunked to the production box at serverbeach.
Cell phone is a Motorola e815 because with sdk I could open the bluetooth, it does 80% of what an expensive PDA can do, and when I rush to the firestation and and it skitters across the floor while I'm jumping into my gear, I'm not losing $500 worth of kit.
Lots of other stuff, but it mostly sits on shelves.
...forget proprietary solutions. Most mobile devices have programming languages based on .net or java now. Those which support wifi can use any voip protocol someone writes a client for.
The key here will be when a good SIP, IAX2, h.323, or whatever -- stack exists through LGPL so that most programmers can easily use it to create those clients.
So, the Stack-Geek types need to get those open stacks written and out there so the UI-Geek types can use them to make clever VoIP clients.
VoIP is so much more than just phone calls -- as these stacks emerge using a VoIP stream to carry all kind of real time data will become very commmon.
At least we'll have enough space to store it!
...it will start offering account notifications by email based on triggers I set up like wire transfers and such. Great.
Regardless of what humans can or can't see in it, there will be byte for byte differences and patterns to those differences. If there weren't, the watermarking couldn't be spotted in the files later found to be pirated.
At the very worst, a simple matter of re-encoding the file in memory from digital to analog and back would insert enough variation due to nothing more than the variance introduced by floating point math to make the process easily circumvented.
Aren't people transcoding iTunes stuff now by just letting it play and re-recording it? If done in memory, I don't know how lossy that is, but I'm sure its going to produce "good enough" sound for most people, no? Those who care enough to claim they can tell the difference are not the ones pirating music anyway, AFAIK.
The plastic distribution industry (formerly known as the record industry) is spending stupid amounts of capitol to preserve a business model that rewards the distributor of the plastic on which content resides over the artist who made it or the consumer who bought it. Ultimately, that model will fail simply because it no longer makes economic sense.
Out: Cute, high-tech, 'Hello Kitty' backpackets with built in tablet PC's.
In: Using those backpack touch screens to plan suicide with 40 year old American men pretending to be other Japanese Schoolgirls online.
You'd see the I specifically referenced video transcoding as an exception -- and that for people doing this a great deal, a faster bus would allow inexpensive dedicated processing products to handle this much more efficiently for the processor.
So far, the I've found the best way to avoid outsourcing is to continue to be creative and actually help people get things done. I've had my own business now for 15 years, and still have my first client. Outsourcing comes, and outsourcing goes -- and its not really the fault of the people in the sweatshops. When you outsource, you get exactly what you ask for. Nothing less, but nothing more -- and most clients don't know to ask for the right things, so it fails.
Is my code work boring? Well, I'm having fun with it -- and its saving lives & property. You?
Its really only very recently that bus speeds have been so far outstripped by processor speeds. If memory serves - as late as 1991, when I was still doing cube farm work, I was given an NEC desktop machine in which one key selling point was that it had a bus path to the IDE drive at the same speed as the process in mhz. Literally a 1:1 ratio. Today, a quad core 3ghz processor would be (in theory) handling something not quite equivilant to 12ghz, but talking to i/o on a bus of what, 800mhz or perhaps 1ghz if things progress as they have been? That's a 12:1 ratio.
Yes, I understand that multiplying the speeds like that is overly simplistic. An arguement could be made that its really more like 3:1 -- but since all the cores are using the same bus, I don't agree with that arguement.
Processors need to keep getting faster -- of course they do. Dual core is absolutely better than single core, and I'd never buy another new processor that wasn't dual core. I've enough experience on just hyperthreading chips to know for a fact that it "feels" smoother to operate the machine.
My point is only that this isn't the biggest factor any more. Until a better bus becomes popular and can handle the through put to support these supercomputers-on-a-chip, they won't continue to provide the kinds of "real world" performance increase that we'd expect.
What I think you may be missing, is that with a stronger FSB or some similar path to external tools, the processing power you want can be added more easily and cheaply as purpose built asic processors -- RISC chips with specific purpose.
An example I gave earlier is FFT for scientific work (converting analog signal data over time into frequency blocks). This algorythm is the same for a huge amount of tasks, is very processor intensive, and is common but used widely for different things. IOW, perfect to offload from the processor.
A really good FSB path that didn't block processing other things, could solve your processing power issues much more effectively with a plug in hardware solution to offload.
Use of these kinds of purpose built processing circuits is limited by the FSB. Graphics cards work well, but remember, the ultimate output is to the monitor, not back to the system. The calculation is passed through the bus, but the result is not. Even with that compromise, bus speeds limit the solution so much that AGP and PCI-E have been invented as a way around the lack of a really fast general bus.
Just imagine if you could offload that heavy calc work to a purpose built card -- or potentially a whole additional computer, what the result would be for performance.
For example, Blackfin makes one.
Presumably, you get some kind of software driver to talk to with your own software so you can feed it the time domain in real time and get back blocks of frequency domain data without burdening your processor.
If you're doing serious scientific analysis on live analog data streams (SETI anyone?) this would really help you out a lot. I'd bet one of these could really jump your SETI@HOME scores up pretty quickly.
http://www.eg3.com/WebID/dsp/fft/
...on the person, no? I'm no doctor, was just looking for a funny line to relate to "blocked up" -- oh well. As Steve Martin said...."Everyone THINKS they have a sense of humor." :-)
...other than that (which admittedly will dim the lights), I've never kept even a hyperthreading P4 pegged solid for more than a short time. I've written multithreaded audio processing software than can pick DTMF or Motorola QC-II tones out of a live audio stream with good reliability, and I've written anti-spam software that in test processes more than a million messages per hour. In neither case did I overwhelm the processors.
Neither of these tasks is important for a desktop user. Large software compiles, scientific analysis -- these are specialized tasks and sure multiprocessor machines will help. The market for these, however, is specialized and limited.
IMO - there will be external specialized processor blocks for these kinds of tasks. For example, an external FFT processor board would make a great deal of sense. Its a well known algorythm, used in a huge variety of analysis -- and is easy to predefine with parameters. Think of a PCI-Express board with its own set of RISC processors dedicated to performing FFT transforms in the same way modern graphics work is offloaded. You define in the drive the frame size, domain size, etc etc.. and get back the results as fast as you can pass them in.
The point is, what holds back solutions like this the most -- is the front side bus.
Processing power is rarely the problem. Graphics processing is already handed off, and unless you're trying to crack encryption, most software isn't bound by processor speed anyway.
Software performance is bound by I/O limitations. It FEELS like processor power because threads on hold for I/O block a core up like cheescake to a lactose intollerant grandparent.
Until I can index on disk at about 100 times the current speed, these processors won't help what I'm doing.
....slashdot did not figure out? "..back and forth debate over ethereal concepts that can neither be proven or disproven..." is what we do here. The alternative is spending time with our families. Can you imagine?
I'm fairly sure Marx would have agreed with your view of utlimate amoral capitolism. Of course, for some reason he also believed that comunism would not suffer the same amoral failings. Interesting how one man can be so right and so wrong at the same time, no?
At least not on my planet.
They are not free like beer, and they are not free like speach. If anything, they are free like taxes.
What on earth makes you think "Capping" telco higher-ups is even remotely a good idea, or a likely result of market economics?