That's already how many datacenters do it. Still, that capacity takes about 2-10 minutes to come up to speed so you still need somewhat of a buffer. What they need is instant-on servers which the big guys are experimenting with but the problem is not Google or Netflix or Facebook, they run a pretty efficient operation, it's the rest of the business world who'd rather buy an IBM or HP honking piece of metal that converts 20% of it's power to heat before anything remotely useful has been done than experimenting with what they need and could do to improve on such designs.
What kind of tech journalism has emerged lately? It seems like every other story on Slashdot I'm yelling at the journalism and I'm not even a journalist.
a) iPhone's never had turn-by-turn direction built-in, this is a new feature which the Google Maps app never had. b) iPhone's used to have Google Maps app built-in, this will simply be released by Google for free. A 1 minute workaround which most if not all iPhone users are already familiar with. Apple used to have a contract to build-in Google apps, they don't anymore for whatever reason so they rolled a better solution themselves. c) Apple is not preventing Google or anyone else to continue using the Google Maps features. It still works in the Safari browser including current location through HTML5.
This is yet another guy trolling for page views about things that everyone already knew months ago and nobody complained because it's not a big deal. I don't know why/. is enabling such people.
Any PIC or microcontroller should be fast enough to handle keyboard input and put it onto an LCD display. If you have PS/2 keyboards it should be really simple, USB may require a bit of implementation (like a USB host with HID support) but it shouldn't be too much work for an average programmer.
They do but the capital has to come from somewhere. In the instance of insurance companies, their customers provide the capital to put in investments and hedge funds.
For a desktop system it is currently low-end. I also gave the Arduino and together with the Android devices those are really low-end while we still want the full-blown graphics we have gotten used to.
Sure, we could go back to running CP/M but we want KDE/Gnome/Compiz graphics (ideally) from the equivalent of a 486 chip.
That's easy to do too. The server can just send the data of players to a random group of clients for collision detection and probability calculations (what's the probability of a guy going from height 0 to 10 at that location). If a certain number of clients tells you the results are erroneous, mark them as hackers and kick them or ban them or move them to a cheater's server.
But not everyone is going to be a good programmer. I think the 80/20 rule applies here too. 80% of programmers can program, 20% can do it efficiently.
I see examples of bad programming all the time (or you can just read thedailywtf.com) and currently it doesn't matter all that much whether you spend 100,000 extra cycles in a loop. But we're heading once again to a level where efficient programming is going to become more important (low-end, cheap devices like Arduino and Raspberry for the consumer-end and high-end multi-processor systems like GPGPU and shared clusters on a pay-per-cycle on the other end).
In a GPGPU scientific environment (where I work) shaving 10ms off a single looped calculation can easily end up giving you a result 7 days faster. Finding out that a buffer gets flushed every 64-bytes or every 100 microseconds and understanding why filling up a buffer with 0's (and how to do it efficiently) is faster than waiting for a timer to expire is real programmer's work but none of the documentation or even advanced classes on the subjects don't explain such things.
Any. Most programmers I have ever met are not religious at all. Then again, 90% of the population is not religious when it comes down to it but people in jobs that have college education have lower religious representation in general than jobs/education that doesn't require critical thinking.
The whole article is fluff link bait. It's a blog post on someone's opinion spread over three pages (2.25 actually, 5 sentences on the last page) to increase ad revenue.
I cringed at that notion as well and it was misinterpreted from it's source by a dipwit that claimed to do research at the outset of the article but simply Google'd some links together that are basic speculation and rumors.
There were no tests done, there were no graphics, not even a source for the technical data (not that the author would be able to interpret it correctly). Also, mixing the 3G and 2G capabilities and not understanding or explaining the difference and which one would be used at any point in time. Also, the iPhone's don't have Li-Ion batteries, they have Li-Polymer, a huge difference.
From the sparse sources claimed and misinterpreted in this article I can see: On 2G: iPhone - 8h talk time, 250h standby iPhone 3G - 10h talk time, 300h standby iPhone 3GS - 12h talk time, 300h standby iPhone 4 - 14h talk time, 300h standby
On 3G: iPhone - non-existent (but we'll take 8 as the base) iPhone 3G - ~8h talk time iPhone 3GS - ~8h talk time iPhone 4 - 7h talk time iPhone 4S - 8h talk time iPhone 5 - 8h talk time
Has the battery decreased? Not really. Give or take a few given the circumstances (signal strength etc.) but probably not noticeable. Have the features and speed increased? Yes.
When does your phone (any, not just limited to iPhone) use 3G vs 2G: It depends. The cell phone operator (or more accurately the tower) makes that decision based on the capabilities of your phone, availability of the spectrum and congestion. Which is better: 3G. Why: less congestion and more bandwidth. Why does it use more power: better voice quality, different frequencies and also continues receiving other data (e-mail and such) in the background.
There, I re-wrote the article probably much better from a technical viewpoint and it fits in a Slashdot comment.
Christians and Jews go around blowing up busses and airplanes trying to kill as many people as possible to make their point. - Some have and the point is not to kill as many as possible, the point is to seed terror in a population.
They regularly storm embassies and kill artists who say things they don't agree with. - Again, some have, read your history. Hitler was a Christian and so were most of his troops and they were all blessed by their churches too.
They also routinely preach from the pulpit that people of a certain nationality are evil and should be purged from the earth. - Read your Bible, it's full of it. And most evangelical christians would probably agree that non-whites or non-christians are evil and should or will be purged.
I think you have quite some observation bias. How long ago was the last terrorist attack on US soil by Muslims? How long ago was the last attack on US soil by Christians? The last terrorist attack on US soil was by Christians against Muslims in 2010 where they tried blowing up a mosque.
Likewise, I don't know of any Muslim or Jew or any other religion that kills over an insult since strictly speaking any holy book condemns it and disqualifies such persons from being of such faith.
But there are plenty of examples: Since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.
Same goes for Muslims. Most moderate Muslims condemn this shit while the extremists are simply allowed to continue since they are of the same religion after all.
Same goes for Christians. Most moderate Christians would allow for LGBT rights and even abortion while the extremists are simply allowed to continue allowing their own children to die, set policy in this country etc since they are of the same religion after all (see current political climate in the US, see attacks on abortion clinics facilities, see attacks on stem cell research facilities, see attacks on gays, see KKK, Westboro,...)
DLNA is a proprietary format by Sony/Microsoft and requires certification. I don't know any open source applications with DLNA receiver support (XBMC can access (pull) media on certain DLNA devices but I can't send (push) anything to it).
DAAP is a proprietary format by Apple but has been implemented by several open source applications because the availability of the libraries. XBMC can both access (pull) and receive (push) DAAP content, it actually shows up as a legitimate AirPlay device in iTunes, iOS devices and Mountain Lion's Screen Sharing.
AES encryption has been there by default since the 3GS and requires the entry of your keycode (which can be set to alphanumeric) before the filesystem is unlocked. Law enforcement is having major "issues" getting to data on the iPhone.
The great thing is (for developers) that the 3G -> 4S versions of the phone have the same screen dimensions and proportions and same goes for iPad. You can simply give greater detail in the retina displays by adding higher res artwork but that will be automatically a lower res version for the older versions. Also iPhone apps run on the iPad by simply doubling the size of the pixels. The 5 has a letterbox mode which will allow the developers to keep their apps running at the same size if they so incline but it gives them a little extra space where needed. Also, the development environment has the ability to add springs and struts to automatically resize your app to the desired screen size (such as for use on Mac OS X). It is possible to make a single app, a single interface and have it compile for all Apple platforms or a single app that has multiple interfaces for the different platforms.
I trust my single-purpose RAID controller card a lot more than my general purpose operating system to get the write right
You know why Sun invented ZFS right? Or many of the IBM big clusters (Blue Gene) have no hardware controllers beyond simple SAS/FC HBA's for their data stores? I wouldn't trust any particular part in a computer to get it right, all it takes is 1 flipped bit. And HW RAID is particularly bad in keeping data portable.
A UPS is not infallible since your server's operating system is subject to other failures such as someone yanking the power cord(s), hitting the reset button on the server, or an operating system crash. A hardware RAID card is not subject to any of these failures, if the power is yanked before it writes data, it will remain in the cache to be retried when the disks are available.
Again, problems which have been solved by most if not all current file systems (except NTFS). The problem with those hardware RAID cards of yours is also that they need batteries to keep such data in cache. If the controller dies or the batteries die or the memory dies or the connection between the disks severs during a reboot (at least 4 points of failure) the array is still corrupted. And I have seen very few internal cards that have failover memory and controllers which ZFS makes it possible to have the solid state cache in a mirrored configuration.
Filesystem journalling is independent of RAID level, most people using a journalling filesystem on top of RAID to protect against filesystem corruption from a server crash, which has nothing to do with RAID level. Typically only the filesystem metadata is journalled, so data corruption is still possible even with journalling. (data journalling is possible, but is rare since it means writing a second copy of data.
Again, problems which have been solved by most if not all current file systems (except NTFS). All journalling file systems I can think of the top of my head do have atomic writes (Ext4, Btrfs, ZFS). You also seem to have no idea how journaling works, data corruption should not happen in a journaled file system because the journal is updated only after the data has been successfully written. A synced write does not return until the journal is updated.
Well actually I guess the RAID controller write cache is somewhat like a data journal
No IT IS NOT! It's merely a crutch to speed up writes to slow disks. Just as SSD's in ZFS configurations are there to enable high speed writes and to combine many write IOPS into a single write. Journaling GUARANTEES that regardless of what happens next the data has been committed to disk. Write cache BBU does not guarantee that, it merely guarantees this given a certain set of circumstances which occur 99% of the time the data may be committed to disk.
Another advantage of Hardware RAID is that it's typically much faster than software RAID especially with RAID-5 and 6.
Recent benchmarking (the last 5 years especially) has shown this claim to be patently false, another reason ZFS and BtrFS were created in the first place. Besides RAID6 calculations, you can also do inline compression and deduplication much faster than the 300MHz SOC you find on most cards. I have an external RAID controller with 1.2GHz Intel SOC and 2GB BBU RAM the IOPS (4k) to that thing is somewhere under 3000 at a cool 300MBps read/write to 12 15k RPM disks, cost me $24,000 ($2000/slot). Directly attached SAS with SSD cache does well over 10,000 IOPS, 300MBps to an array with the same amount of 7200RPM disks and has 90GB of read/write cache (amount of RAM) and nearly 1TB of read cache which can read out at a blistering 50,000 IOPS, this setup costs me $12,000 with 12 SAS disks and 4 SAS SSD's but has 8 times as much storage.
Your write only has to hit the cache on the RAID controller to be "complete", while a less-than-full-stripe wr
Yes they do. I work in education, I see everyday what people get away with. Some of them are really good teachers who have their heart in it and those are the stories that make the news of seemingly underpaid, really good teachers, but most of them are overpaid and underperforming sacks of shit who couldn't care less about anything but their pay check and the only reason they still have a job is because they are part of a union who will raise hell if not everyone gets the same income and benefits regardless of their performance. That's why the really good teachers are underpaid, because the unions strive for and encourage everyone to become the lowest common denominator.
iPad's are under a $1000 so probably not even considered as a capital expense so almost no approval was needed and this just came out of some budget. Almost everything else in a school is over $1000 so that requires heaven and earth to be moved in order to get it through the review committee's and budget commissions which by the time it is done, the tech will be 3 years old. Where I work for example the furniture is contracted out to a company who charges about $7,000 for a teacher's desk. They get away with it because all local businesses know that when they deliver they probably won't get paid for (literally) 9 months to 3 years as the paperwork goes through several government bureaucracies.
The story states the issue is compatibility with Office documents. Windows 8-powered tablets will have the same problem as they don't display legacy Office documents the same way as the desktop versions of Office would. Even among the desktop versions of Office there are differences in how they are displayed.
MS Office IS NOT a typesetting application people. It's really horrible at document editing, it doesn't even do a good job at typesetting.
You know that MS Office is available for Mac's as well? The fact that Microsoft is notoriously bad at supporting their own document formats across versions (even on the same platform) is not because the platform is bad, you just have really shitty software.
Just because you and your company is bad at support and not knowledgeable about anything doesn't mean x is a bad choice. It just means that you are in a big corporation and half your team should probably be fired.
If your software cannot survive a platform switch (whether that be WinXP->Win7 or SCO Linux -> Mac) you have made a bad choice in purchasing that software and it should probably not exist.
So do iPad's, they have a file system and any app worth it's salt should be able to access it and set up a sync between your computer or a server. There is also WebDAV support for local file shares.
The problem is that these iPad's weren't setup or monitored or even researched. They were just replaced, nobody concerned themselves with how it would actually integrate with legacy components, nobody concerned themselves with how it would be set up and distributed. The fact that they have issues with the AppleTV system alone shows that they didn't research it. The AppleTV solution is one of the most solid and least taxing wireless streaming devices I have ever seen (and I have experience with the most expensive solutions from Cisco and Tandberg as well as cheap products like wireless VGA and USB crap) but if you think that everyone will be streaming 1080p over a single 802.11b/g router, well physics still apply to Apple products.
This "project" would be akin to giving everybody in the school a C64 or Amiga back in the day, sure it was great tech but most didn't know how to use it correctly besides for games or their specific application. Just throwing money at teachers won't help them get the job done any better. You can see the same problem with 'digital' whiteboards, e-books for students, online testing, Blackboard,... - if the teachers don't know how to use them it's just a big waste of money.
Besides that you won't need surge protectors on your cable (you should really talk to your insurance company and sue them as that is bordering on negligent) you're forgetting that Fiber is capable of seemingly infinite bandwidth. Now it's gigabit, 10GbE is already very affordable and 100GbE is available as well if you have a little bank. But a single strand of fiber can carry 100Tbps over 100 miles with current technology and we've seen researchers find many solutions to those limitations as well while copper (although theoretically possible over very short distances) has too much problems with noise and filtering to make it usable. We have some stretch left in copper (DOCSIS3 could give you 500Mbps) but if you're going to re-invest you may as well start fibering the place.
That is not because you have too much bandwidth, that is because your bandwidth is so oversold that you simply NEVER HAVE IT.
We have 2x 500Mbps fiber at work ($10,000/month), I regularly pull well over 50 Mbps from Apple, Amazon S3, Google and several other sites (basically seconds for just about anything). Ubuntu comes in literally under a minute and that's from a site 2 states away, the Adobe CS6 DVD in about 10 minutes.
It's not that it's not available or useful, it's just that nobody in the US has that kind of access besides large business. I have 10/1Mbps from TW but only get between 1 and 8 Mbps throughput from my job site which has the same fucking provider connected to the same PoP a mile or two away.
But that goes in all directions. Germans were killed using German-made guns and ammo, Americans were killed by Germans using American-made guns and ammo. As a matter of fact, most of the companies that are still around today had some kind of hand in the atrocities of WWII (which was on all sides, concentration camps were in the UK, US, Japan, Russia as well as Germany). Just to throw some names around who were on all sides: Krupp (sold weapons on both sides), IBM, Kodak, Hugo Boss (clothiers), JPMorgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs, Ford, Bayer, Iveco (truck manufacturer, delivered portable gas chambers), Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, Boeing, Mitsubishi.
In the end, the only people benefiting from war are the corporations that sell the goods.
Slashdot Mirror
That's already how many datacenters do it. Still, that capacity takes about 2-10 minutes to come up to speed so you still need somewhat of a buffer. What they need is instant-on servers which the big guys are experimenting with but the problem is not Google or Netflix or Facebook, they run a pretty efficient operation, it's the rest of the business world who'd rather buy an IBM or HP honking piece of metal that converts 20% of it's power to heat before anything remotely useful has been done than experimenting with what they need and could do to improve on such designs.
What kind of tech journalism has emerged lately? It seems like every other story on Slashdot I'm yelling at the journalism and I'm not even a journalist.
a) iPhone's never had turn-by-turn direction built-in, this is a new feature which the Google Maps app never had.
b) iPhone's used to have Google Maps app built-in, this will simply be released by Google for free. A 1 minute workaround which most if not all iPhone users are already familiar with. Apple used to have a contract to build-in Google apps, they don't anymore for whatever reason so they rolled a better solution themselves.
c) Apple is not preventing Google or anyone else to continue using the Google Maps features. It still works in the Safari browser including current location through HTML5.
This is yet another guy trolling for page views about things that everyone already knew months ago and nobody complained because it's not a big deal. I don't know why /. is enabling such people.
Any PIC or microcontroller should be fast enough to handle keyboard input and put it onto an LCD display. If you have PS/2 keyboards it should be really simple, USB may require a bit of implementation (like a USB host with HID support) but it shouldn't be too much work for an average programmer.
They do but the capital has to come from somewhere. In the instance of insurance companies, their customers provide the capital to put in investments and hedge funds.
For a desktop system it is currently low-end. I also gave the Arduino and together with the Android devices those are really low-end while we still want the full-blown graphics we have gotten used to.
Sure, we could go back to running CP/M but we want KDE/Gnome/Compiz graphics (ideally) from the equivalent of a 486 chip.
They are generalizations of well-publicized scientific results.
http://hirr.hartsem.edu/about/news_and_notes_vol4no1.html shows a scientific study which shows only 20% of the population actually shows up to church.
There are many other studies that notice a strong negative correlation between attendance and education.
That's easy to do too. The server can just send the data of players to a random group of clients for collision detection and probability calculations (what's the probability of a guy going from height 0 to 10 at that location). If a certain number of clients tells you the results are erroneous, mark them as hackers and kick them or ban them or move them to a cheater's server.
But not everyone is going to be a good programmer. I think the 80/20 rule applies here too. 80% of programmers can program, 20% can do it efficiently.
I see examples of bad programming all the time (or you can just read thedailywtf.com) and currently it doesn't matter all that much whether you spend 100,000 extra cycles in a loop. But we're heading once again to a level where efficient programming is going to become more important (low-end, cheap devices like Arduino and Raspberry for the consumer-end and high-end multi-processor systems like GPGPU and shared clusters on a pay-per-cycle on the other end).
In a GPGPU scientific environment (where I work) shaving 10ms off a single looped calculation can easily end up giving you a result 7 days faster. Finding out that a buffer gets flushed every 64-bytes or every 100 microseconds and understanding why filling up a buffer with 0's (and how to do it efficiently) is faster than waiting for a timer to expire is real programmer's work but none of the documentation or even advanced classes on the subjects don't explain such things.
Any. Most programmers I have ever met are not religious at all. Then again, 90% of the population is not religious when it comes down to it but people in jobs that have college education have lower religious representation in general than jobs/education that doesn't require critical thinking.
iPhone owner: but my phone doesn't crash and hang, doesn't drain the battery in a day and generally lasts longer than 6 months even under heavy abuse.
The whole article is fluff link bait. It's a blog post on someone's opinion spread over three pages (2.25 actually, 5 sentences on the last page) to increase ad revenue.
I cringed at that notion as well and it was misinterpreted from it's source by a dipwit that claimed to do research at the outset of the article but simply Google'd some links together that are basic speculation and rumors.
There were no tests done, there were no graphics, not even a source for the technical data (not that the author would be able to interpret it correctly). Also, mixing the 3G and 2G capabilities and not understanding or explaining the difference and which one would be used at any point in time. Also, the iPhone's don't have Li-Ion batteries, they have Li-Polymer, a huge difference.
From the sparse sources claimed and misinterpreted in this article I can see:
On 2G:
iPhone - 8h talk time, 250h standby
iPhone 3G - 10h talk time, 300h standby
iPhone 3GS - 12h talk time, 300h standby
iPhone 4 - 14h talk time, 300h standby
On 3G:
iPhone - non-existent (but we'll take 8 as the base)
iPhone 3G - ~8h talk time
iPhone 3GS - ~8h talk time
iPhone 4 - 7h talk time
iPhone 4S - 8h talk time
iPhone 5 - 8h talk time
Has the battery decreased? Not really. Give or take a few given the circumstances (signal strength etc.) but probably not noticeable.
Have the features and speed increased? Yes.
When does your phone (any, not just limited to iPhone) use 3G vs 2G: It depends. The cell phone operator (or more accurately the tower) makes that decision based on the capabilities of your phone, availability of the spectrum and congestion. Which is better: 3G. Why: less congestion and more bandwidth. Why does it use more power: better voice quality, different frequencies and also continues receiving other data (e-mail and such) in the background.
There, I re-wrote the article probably much better from a technical viewpoint and it fits in a Slashdot comment.
Christians and Jews go around blowing up busses and airplanes trying to kill as many people as possible to make their point. - Some have and the point is not to kill as many as possible, the point is to seed terror in a population.
They regularly storm embassies and kill artists who say things they don't agree with. - Again, some have, read your history. Hitler was a Christian and so were most of his troops and they were all blessed by their churches too.
They also routinely preach from the pulpit that people of a certain nationality are evil and should be purged from the earth. - Read your Bible, it's full of it. And most evangelical christians would probably agree that non-whites or non-christians are evil and should or will be purged.
I think you have quite some observation bias. How long ago was the last terrorist attack on US soil by Muslims? How long ago was the last attack on US soil by Christians? The last terrorist attack on US soil was by Christians against Muslims in 2010 where they tried blowing up a mosque.
Likewise, I don't know of any Muslim or Jew or any other religion that kills over an insult since strictly speaking any holy book condemns it and disqualifies such persons from being of such faith.
But there are plenty of examples: Since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.
Same goes for Muslims. Most moderate Muslims condemn this shit while the extremists are simply allowed to continue since they are of the same religion after all.
Same goes for Christians. Most moderate Christians would allow for LGBT rights and even abortion while the extremists are simply allowed to continue allowing their own children to die, set policy in this country etc since they are of the same religion after all (see current political climate in the US, see attacks on abortion clinics facilities, see attacks on stem cell research facilities, see attacks on gays, see KKK, Westboro, ...)
DLNA is a proprietary format by Sony/Microsoft and requires certification. I don't know any open source applications with DLNA receiver support (XBMC can access (pull) media on certain DLNA devices but I can't send (push) anything to it).
DAAP is a proprietary format by Apple but has been implemented by several open source applications because the availability of the libraries. XBMC can both access (pull) and receive (push) DAAP content, it actually shows up as a legitimate AirPlay device in iTunes, iOS devices and Mountain Lion's Screen Sharing.
AES encryption has been there by default since the 3GS and requires the entry of your keycode (which can be set to alphanumeric) before the filesystem is unlocked. Law enforcement is having major "issues" getting to data on the iPhone.
The great thing is (for developers) that the 3G -> 4S versions of the phone have the same screen dimensions and proportions and same goes for iPad. You can simply give greater detail in the retina displays by adding higher res artwork but that will be automatically a lower res version for the older versions. Also iPhone apps run on the iPad by simply doubling the size of the pixels. The 5 has a letterbox mode which will allow the developers to keep their apps running at the same size if they so incline but it gives them a little extra space where needed. Also, the development environment has the ability to add springs and struts to automatically resize your app to the desired screen size (such as for use on Mac OS X). It is possible to make a single app, a single interface and have it compile for all Apple platforms or a single app that has multiple interfaces for the different platforms.
I trust my single-purpose RAID controller card a lot more than my general purpose operating system to get the write right
You know why Sun invented ZFS right? Or many of the IBM big clusters (Blue Gene) have no hardware controllers beyond simple SAS/FC HBA's for their data stores? I wouldn't trust any particular part in a computer to get it right, all it takes is 1 flipped bit. And HW RAID is particularly bad in keeping data portable.
A UPS is not infallible since your server's operating system is subject to other failures such as someone yanking the power cord(s), hitting the reset button on the server, or an operating system crash. A hardware RAID card is not subject to any of these failures, if the power is yanked before it writes data, it will remain in the cache to be retried when the disks are available.
Again, problems which have been solved by most if not all current file systems (except NTFS). The problem with those hardware RAID cards of yours is also that they need batteries to keep such data in cache. If the controller dies or the batteries die or the memory dies or the connection between the disks severs during a reboot (at least 4 points of failure) the array is still corrupted. And I have seen very few internal cards that have failover memory and controllers which ZFS makes it possible to have the solid state cache in a mirrored configuration.
Filesystem journalling is independent of RAID level, most people using a journalling filesystem on top of RAID to protect against filesystem corruption from a server crash, which has nothing to do with RAID level. Typically only the filesystem metadata is journalled, so data corruption is still possible even with journalling. (data journalling is possible, but is rare since it means writing a second copy of data.
Again, problems which have been solved by most if not all current file systems (except NTFS). All journalling file systems I can think of the top of my head do have atomic writes (Ext4, Btrfs, ZFS). You also seem to have no idea how journaling works, data corruption should not happen in a journaled file system because the journal is updated only after the data has been successfully written. A synced write does not return until the journal is updated.
Well actually I guess the RAID controller write cache is somewhat like a data journal
No IT IS NOT! It's merely a crutch to speed up writes to slow disks. Just as SSD's in ZFS configurations are there to enable high speed writes and to combine many write IOPS into a single write. Journaling GUARANTEES that regardless of what happens next the data has been committed to disk. Write cache BBU does not guarantee that, it merely guarantees this given a certain set of circumstances which occur 99% of the time the data may be committed to disk.
Another advantage of Hardware RAID is that it's typically much faster than software RAID especially with RAID-5 and 6.
Recent benchmarking (the last 5 years especially) has shown this claim to be patently false, another reason ZFS and BtrFS were created in the first place. Besides RAID6 calculations, you can also do inline compression and deduplication much faster than the 300MHz SOC you find on most cards. I have an external RAID controller with 1.2GHz Intel SOC and 2GB BBU RAM the IOPS (4k) to that thing is somewhere under 3000 at a cool 300MBps read/write to 12 15k RPM disks, cost me $24,000 ($2000/slot). Directly attached SAS with SSD cache does well over 10,000 IOPS, 300MBps to an array with the same amount of 7200RPM disks and has 90GB of read/write cache (amount of RAM) and nearly 1TB of read cache which can read out at a blistering 50,000 IOPS, this setup costs me $12,000 with 12 SAS disks and 4 SAS SSD's but has 8 times as much storage.
Your write only has to hit the cache on the RAID controller to be "complete", while a less-than-full-stripe wr
Yes they do. I work in education, I see everyday what people get away with. Some of them are really good teachers who have their heart in it and those are the stories that make the news of seemingly underpaid, really good teachers, but most of them are overpaid and underperforming sacks of shit who couldn't care less about anything but their pay check and the only reason they still have a job is because they are part of a union who will raise hell if not everyone gets the same income and benefits regardless of their performance. That's why the really good teachers are underpaid, because the unions strive for and encourage everyone to become the lowest common denominator.
iPad's are under a $1000 so probably not even considered as a capital expense so almost no approval was needed and this just came out of some budget. Almost everything else in a school is over $1000 so that requires heaven and earth to be moved in order to get it through the review committee's and budget commissions which by the time it is done, the tech will be 3 years old. Where I work for example the furniture is contracted out to a company who charges about $7,000 for a teacher's desk. They get away with it because all local businesses know that when they deliver they probably won't get paid for (literally) 9 months to 3 years as the paperwork goes through several government bureaucracies.
The story states the issue is compatibility with Office documents. Windows 8-powered tablets will have the same problem as they don't display legacy Office documents the same way as the desktop versions of Office would. Even among the desktop versions of Office there are differences in how they are displayed.
MS Office IS NOT a typesetting application people. It's really horrible at document editing, it doesn't even do a good job at typesetting.
You know that MS Office is available for Mac's as well? The fact that Microsoft is notoriously bad at supporting their own document formats across versions (even on the same platform) is not because the platform is bad, you just have really shitty software.
Just because you and your company is bad at support and not knowledgeable about anything doesn't mean x is a bad choice. It just means that you are in a big corporation and half your team should probably be fired.
If your software cannot survive a platform switch (whether that be WinXP->Win7 or SCO Linux -> Mac) you have made a bad choice in purchasing that software and it should probably not exist.
So do iPad's, they have a file system and any app worth it's salt should be able to access it and set up a sync between your computer or a server. There is also WebDAV support for local file shares.
The problem is that these iPad's weren't setup or monitored or even researched. They were just replaced, nobody concerned themselves with how it would actually integrate with legacy components, nobody concerned themselves with how it would be set up and distributed. The fact that they have issues with the AppleTV system alone shows that they didn't research it. The AppleTV solution is one of the most solid and least taxing wireless streaming devices I have ever seen (and I have experience with the most expensive solutions from Cisco and Tandberg as well as cheap products like wireless VGA and USB crap) but if you think that everyone will be streaming 1080p over a single 802.11b/g router, well physics still apply to Apple products.
This "project" would be akin to giving everybody in the school a C64 or Amiga back in the day, sure it was great tech but most didn't know how to use it correctly besides for games or their specific application. Just throwing money at teachers won't help them get the job done any better. You can see the same problem with 'digital' whiteboards, e-books for students, online testing, Blackboard, ... - if the teachers don't know how to use them it's just a big waste of money.
Besides that you won't need surge protectors on your cable (you should really talk to your insurance company and sue them as that is bordering on negligent) you're forgetting that Fiber is capable of seemingly infinite bandwidth. Now it's gigabit, 10GbE is already very affordable and 100GbE is available as well if you have a little bank. But a single strand of fiber can carry 100Tbps over 100 miles with current technology and we've seen researchers find many solutions to those limitations as well while copper (although theoretically possible over very short distances) has too much problems with noise and filtering to make it usable. We have some stretch left in copper (DOCSIS3 could give you 500Mbps) but if you're going to re-invest you may as well start fibering the place.
That is not because you have too much bandwidth, that is because your bandwidth is so oversold that you simply NEVER HAVE IT.
We have 2x 500Mbps fiber at work ($10,000/month), I regularly pull well over 50 Mbps from Apple, Amazon S3, Google and several other sites (basically seconds for just about anything). Ubuntu comes in literally under a minute and that's from a site 2 states away, the Adobe CS6 DVD in about 10 minutes.
It's not that it's not available or useful, it's just that nobody in the US has that kind of access besides large business. I have 10/1Mbps from TW but only get between 1 and 8 Mbps throughput from my job site which has the same fucking provider connected to the same PoP a mile or two away.
But that goes in all directions. Germans were killed using German-made guns and ammo, Americans were killed by Germans using American-made guns and ammo. As a matter of fact, most of the companies that are still around today had some kind of hand in the atrocities of WWII (which was on all sides, concentration camps were in the UK, US, Japan, Russia as well as Germany). Just to throw some names around who were on all sides: Krupp (sold weapons on both sides), IBM, Kodak, Hugo Boss (clothiers), JPMorgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs, Ford, Bayer, Iveco (truck manufacturer, delivered portable gas chambers), Coca-Cola, Standard Oil, Boeing, Mitsubishi.
In the end, the only people benefiting from war are the corporations that sell the goods.