Why would you want to do that? First of all, TPM chips need to be able to be simply updated without affecting the rest of the system and TPM would also need to provide the ability for the end-user to update or delete their keys (in case of theft or unauthorized access), therefore integrating them into the processor would be a Bad Idea (tm) - as soon as somebody does something bad (either a bad firmware update or a hacking attempt) you would brick the whole thing and since it's in the processor, you would have no way of fixing it (since the processor is used by the bootloader or even by the remote debugger). Besides this would also add complexity and suck power for what is in the end a pointless exercise in futility.
TPM is dead and get over it. You can artificially implement TPM in the OS (like requiring signing of apps and content) but people will always be able to control their device. DRM requires that you give your end-user the key to unlock the content whether or not you make it difficult to get to, in the end the key has to go into cleartext somewhere (whether in memory or a dedicated or integrated chip) and with the correct tools somebody will be able to get to it.
That however doesn't seem to apply for most companies though. Dell's systems are more expensive for government than list price for home users, Microsoft licensing is more expensive compared to enterprise customers. All of it is just a difference in the way they package the products and they simply won't offer the cheaper option to government customers and vice versa. Oracle just made a mistake in packaging their products for government customers.
And it's understandable that companies do this. If you sell something to government, you have to invest in lobbyist, sales people and bidding then when you do actually sell something you have to wait months if not years for payment being sent from office to office, waiting for signatures, getting lost,... much like how Vogon's are described.
TRIM doesn't work when your drive is actually filled 100%. I use it as cache, not as a data carrier. Even so, in the datacenter, drives are frequently filled to such a capacity that even TRIM won't do much and TRIM only works when you know what blocks are supposed to be empty something a lot of data carriers (in the datacenter) don't know (eg. RAID controllers, iSCSI targets,...).
Reminds me of a flaw one of my co-workers once found in IIS with ASP.NET. A site on a shared hosting environment could 'root' the IIS service and control all other sites and applications running within IIS even if the configuration had separated them. He reported it but it didn't get fixed for years (it might still not be). He didn't want to publish it though because the company was a Microsoft Gold Partner and both he and the company had a very symbiotic relationship with Microsoft and Microsoft likes to gag everyone in those partnerships that dares to speak against them.
Microsoft will not fix obscure problems even if you report it to them - they must be living on a huge database of reported issues that could potentially ruin their customers. That's both the benefit and the drawbacks of closed source - nobody will know the problem exists but nobody will be around to fix it either.
With Enterprise SSD's (SLC) still in the $100/GB range, we're far away from general acceptance in the datacenter. MLC also has the problem of being slow to write to vs. SLC which is one of the important metrics when considering SSD's to accelerate your classic spindles. SLC's are reliable enough to last for at least 3 years even fully loaded at 3 or 6 Gbps.
I used some Intel X-25-M and Intel X-25-E's in my environment as they are affordable and generally get the highest scores in IOPS and throughput respectively read and write caches and the performance is way under my expectations. The Intel X-25-E's don't work well under heavy loads on LSI controllers (throws errors and SCSI bus resets) while he Intel X-25-M's do work fine. Every other month there is fresh firmware to fix some or another problem and firmware updating is manual labor with a boot CD, not something you can simply schedule at night or do while the system is online so they are what I would call beta-quality. Especially once fully filled the IOPS performance drops from ~3000 IOPS like a brick to ~1000 IOPS which a small set of hard drives can fulfill so the only good thing it's left for is latency.
We'll see what the Vertex 2 EX brings (Sandforce 1500 controller) which has an advertised 50k IOPS although that might be more marketing than anything. I'm still waiting on a decent priced SAS SSD which can actually sustain 5-10000 IOPS by itself even when fully loaded.
Which in Europe is still pretty good wages though. If you don't work (or don't report that you work), you still get paid a minimum wage, your housing and utility costs become subsidized and healthcare is practically free. If you have kids, you get free food and clothing for them. So you get 20k on top of that.
I think the main point here is trying to make a server that can do many non-intensive parallel computations. But then when I look at a GPGPU (such as the Tesla c2050), you can get the same type of performance using a 2kW server in 3U (which I have here). The Atom is ~3GFLOPS per processor making this cluster ~1500GFLOPS strong. A single C2050 has ~500GFLOPS and you can load 4 of them in a single server. nVidia's S2050 has that performance in a single U.
Free speech is not ever to be deprived by anyone but yourself if you choose to do so. If you sign an NDA, you deprive YOURSELF to exercise your right to free speech on a particular matter. On the other hand, such NDA's and other contracts cannot be overly broad as to limit one's constitutional rights in all aspects of life.
As of Snow Leopard there is a service similar to 'Sleep Proxy' in the Bonjour (mDNS) protocol. I forgot what it was called and how to use it but it's somewhere in the docs that I read.
30% is a lot and there are no other options to fill that 30% void - sure you can ask more from others but they will ask more for it (supply & demand you see) and probably won't be able to fill demand until their prices are on par with those of OPEC. If OPEC decides to charge more, the price of oil will go up. Maybe not 1:1 but definitely noticeable.
A single disk might not but I get a throughput of 800MB/s on a small disk array. The cost is similar to the same capacity in tape robot and space taken is also similar using 3.5" drives. You can get 96TB of raw disk storage (no compression or de-duplication) in 4U for $20k. You can get 1 tape library with 2 heads for $12k and $5k worth of tapes which will store 40TB raw.
The main problem with tapes is the number of heads - if you need to read a couple of single files, the thing will be busy for a good 5 minutes trying to read, rewind and shift tapes around while on a disk array it takes a couple of seconds. And then you got to manually take them out every so often and replace them or your tapes will be toast before you (don't) know it. If you want more heads and more tapes and a more automated way of doing it, the prices will skyrocket (we have the tape libraries that take a couple of racks with robotic arms, barcodes and 50 heads).
There is still a need for tapes but with ZFS and MAID there is a revolution for those looking to press down on the price of backups. I have talked to many companies that only do backup (backups in the cloud) and none of them use tape anymore. Most of them have 2 or 3 data centers with disk stores as both primary and secondary backup (D2D2D backup).
In either case the Mac's would become a lot like Windows PC's. There is good reason that Mac's are slightly higher priced that DIY boxes. I actually started purchasing Apple hardware for Windows purely because of their warranty service.
There is no good reason that Dell is generally higher priced (feature-for-feature, not their discounted yesterday's technology - Pentium M - seriously?) in my market (workstations, education, research) than Apple. There is also no good reason that some other manufacturers ship their products with half-dead motherboards and PS/2 keyboards/mice in this day and age.
XP before SP2 (the time period between 2001 and 2004) was about just as bad as Windows ME. Windows 7 before SP3 (what you might know as Windows Vista) was also just as bad as Windows ME.
It has happened in the past. See Gutenberg. Before him, people would copy books by painstakingly rewriting the whole thing. Gutenberg came along and made it into a repeatable process and it became the ground work for the circulation of new ideas and theories in grand scale. Books fueled the renaissance, scientific research, reformation and a whole lot of other things the rich classes, ruling classes and the Catholic Church (comparable to big business, government and ideological institutions like the RIAA in our times) didn't like but within the next 200 years, the world was better off in general because of it. The same is happening to the Internet and there will be book burnings (Internet disconnects by government and ideological institutions) and there will be witch hunts (so-called pirates) but within a couple of hundred years people like Jamie and NYCountryLawyer will be noted in history just like Gutenberg and William Tyndale
Most likely it'll end up being made in South America and India. The wages are low there but they are also very close to their main markets (S. America is close to N. America, India is both close to Europe and Asia) which saves on logistics costs. Eventually there will be a shift the other way around as the current 'west' becomes poorer and the rest starts to become industrialized and has less to offer in the global market because of patenting, copyright, stupid laws, bad schools, lawyers and unions but we got a decade or so left before that happens.
Are you being sarcastic or just plain dumb? AT&T increases their prices from $20 unlimited to $30 with a 2GB cap. How is that going to save costs for ANY consumer? And 2GB is not a whole lot. If I sync my e-mail box to the device for the first time, I will have eaten half the limit. I used to have a 2GB limit, on my dial up in 1990 (literally).
And people that say that data streams are like electricity is just not technical enough to understand how computer networks work and not bright enough to understand their own phone/internet bills. We have been paying an extra surcharge on all phone and data bills since the early 90's so that the carriers could expand their networks. However since the middle of the dotcom bubble none of the biggest carriers have actually significantly increased their capacity. And whether or not end-users use the network, the capacity is always there, the switches remain on, the dns servers keep humming, the electric bills to the carriers don't go down. There is a limit in the spectrum (number of megabits/seconds) which if the megabytes per month reflects their full capacity would mean that they only have the capacity to carry 60 bits/s per customer (calculated with a 100:1 overbooking of actual bandwidth) - in comparison, dial up has 56000 bits/second.
There is no 'chain of evidence' with radar guns either. Most of the time, the cop has it placed on the dashboard and keeps one eye open on the speed readout while he takes a nap or talks on his cell phone to his girlfriend. The ticket doesn't show anything related to the evidence, just an observation by a cop. I've been ticketed before by cops guessing my speed, there's nothing new about that, it's just that now it's enshrined in law.
Who cares when the internet is down at 2am? Nobody's there to complain. But if you're running your own datacenter, T1 is necessary. However common-access Internet for most offices is not necessarily that critical. As the article says, there is plenty of dark fiber to go around especially in the big cities which might require some upfront investment and administrating your own equipment but it will save you a lot over time.
If fashion was copyrightable/patentable we would all be walking around in loincloths as only the richest would be able to afford clothing. Currently clothing only has a small profit margin because everybody can make pants. If pants/skirts/... were patented or copyrighted by a company similar to Microsoft we would be paying through the nose for even the simplest pants and all other clothing would only fit with items from the same manufacturer.
You can also see by mapping patents to clothing how patents really kill innovation - if a pair of pants can only be made by one person/company then that person/company doesn't have the incentive to create better/other/flavored versions simply because most designers stick to certain color palettes and patterns. Other clothing makers can't create better fitting versions, oversized versions,..., the variety we have in the average department store.
I don't know what browser/OS/computer you got but on my PowerMac G4 (single processor ~9 years old) this still runs perfectly while Flash doesn't work a bit. Even on a handheld the Google doodle works fine. Oh, you're running IE/Windows/Dell.
Slashdot Mirror
What did you expect?
Why would you want to do that? First of all, TPM chips need to be able to be simply updated without affecting the rest of the system and TPM would also need to provide the ability for the end-user to update or delete their keys (in case of theft or unauthorized access), therefore integrating them into the processor would be a Bad Idea (tm) - as soon as somebody does something bad (either a bad firmware update or a hacking attempt) you would brick the whole thing and since it's in the processor, you would have no way of fixing it (since the processor is used by the bootloader or even by the remote debugger). Besides this would also add complexity and suck power for what is in the end a pointless exercise in futility.
TPM is dead and get over it. You can artificially implement TPM in the OS (like requiring signing of apps and content) but people will always be able to control their device. DRM requires that you give your end-user the key to unlock the content whether or not you make it difficult to get to, in the end the key has to go into cleartext somewhere (whether in memory or a dedicated or integrated chip) and with the correct tools somebody will be able to get to it.
That however doesn't seem to apply for most companies though. Dell's systems are more expensive for government than list price for home users, Microsoft licensing is more expensive compared to enterprise customers. All of it is just a difference in the way they package the products and they simply won't offer the cheaper option to government customers and vice versa. Oracle just made a mistake in packaging their products for government customers.
And it's understandable that companies do this. If you sell something to government, you have to invest in lobbyist, sales people and bidding then when you do actually sell something you have to wait months if not years for payment being sent from office to office, waiting for signatures, getting lost, ... much like how Vogon's are described.
TRIM doesn't work when your drive is actually filled 100%. I use it as cache, not as a data carrier. Even so, in the datacenter, drives are frequently filled to such a capacity that even TRIM won't do much and TRIM only works when you know what blocks are supposed to be empty something a lot of data carriers (in the datacenter) don't know (eg. RAID controllers, iSCSI targets, ...).
Pliant technologies - ls300s - $10,631/300GB = $35/GB (that's one of the cheaper ones). STEC Zeus (high IOPS): $16,911/18GB = $939/GB
Reminds me of a flaw one of my co-workers once found in IIS with ASP.NET. A site on a shared hosting environment could 'root' the IIS service and control all other sites and applications running within IIS even if the configuration had separated them. He reported it but it didn't get fixed for years (it might still not be). He didn't want to publish it though because the company was a Microsoft Gold Partner and both he and the company had a very symbiotic relationship with Microsoft and Microsoft likes to gag everyone in those partnerships that dares to speak against them.
Microsoft will not fix obscure problems even if you report it to them - they must be living on a huge database of reported issues that could potentially ruin their customers. That's both the benefit and the drawbacks of closed source - nobody will know the problem exists but nobody will be around to fix it either.
With Enterprise SSD's (SLC) still in the $100/GB range, we're far away from general acceptance in the datacenter. MLC also has the problem of being slow to write to vs. SLC which is one of the important metrics when considering SSD's to accelerate your classic spindles. SLC's are reliable enough to last for at least 3 years even fully loaded at 3 or 6 Gbps.
I used some Intel X-25-M and Intel X-25-E's in my environment as they are affordable and generally get the highest scores in IOPS and throughput respectively read and write caches and the performance is way under my expectations. The Intel X-25-E's don't work well under heavy loads on LSI controllers (throws errors and SCSI bus resets) while he Intel X-25-M's do work fine. Every other month there is fresh firmware to fix some or another problem and firmware updating is manual labor with a boot CD, not something you can simply schedule at night or do while the system is online so they are what I would call beta-quality. Especially once fully filled the IOPS performance drops from ~3000 IOPS like a brick to ~1000 IOPS which a small set of hard drives can fulfill so the only good thing it's left for is latency.
We'll see what the Vertex 2 EX brings (Sandforce 1500 controller) which has an advertised 50k IOPS although that might be more marketing than anything. I'm still waiting on a decent priced SAS SSD which can actually sustain 5-10000 IOPS by itself even when fully loaded.
Which in Europe is still pretty good wages though. If you don't work (or don't report that you work), you still get paid a minimum wage, your housing and utility costs become subsidized and healthcare is practically free. If you have kids, you get free food and clothing for them. So you get 20k on top of that.
You're still free to jailbreak your phone and the iPhone emulator in the iPhone SDK allows you to run any program you want AND decompile/debug it.
You're full of FUD and I suggest you get off the Internet. Now!
Maybe they got the 2000/2004 Presidential election machines back and just changed the names but forgot to adjust the random vote generator.
I think the main point here is trying to make a server that can do many non-intensive parallel computations. But then when I look at a GPGPU (such as the Tesla c2050), you can get the same type of performance using a 2kW server in 3U (which I have here). The Atom is ~3GFLOPS per processor making this cluster ~1500GFLOPS strong. A single C2050 has ~500GFLOPS and you can load 4 of them in a single server. nVidia's S2050 has that performance in a single U.
Free speech is not ever to be deprived by anyone but yourself if you choose to do so. If you sign an NDA, you deprive YOURSELF to exercise your right to free speech on a particular matter. On the other hand, such NDA's and other contracts cannot be overly broad as to limit one's constitutional rights in all aspects of life.
As of Snow Leopard there is a service similar to 'Sleep Proxy' in the Bonjour (mDNS) protocol. I forgot what it was called and how to use it but it's somewhere in the docs that I read.
30% is a lot and there are no other options to fill that 30% void - sure you can ask more from others but they will ask more for it (supply & demand you see) and probably won't be able to fill demand until their prices are on par with those of OPEC. If OPEC decides to charge more, the price of oil will go up. Maybe not 1:1 but definitely noticeable.
A single disk might not but I get a throughput of 800MB/s on a small disk array. The cost is similar to the same capacity in tape robot and space taken is also similar using 3.5" drives. You can get 96TB of raw disk storage (no compression or de-duplication) in 4U for $20k. You can get 1 tape library with 2 heads for $12k and $5k worth of tapes which will store 40TB raw.
The main problem with tapes is the number of heads - if you need to read a couple of single files, the thing will be busy for a good 5 minutes trying to read, rewind and shift tapes around while on a disk array it takes a couple of seconds. And then you got to manually take them out every so often and replace them or your tapes will be toast before you (don't) know it. If you want more heads and more tapes and a more automated way of doing it, the prices will skyrocket (we have the tape libraries that take a couple of racks with robotic arms, barcodes and 50 heads).
There is still a need for tapes but with ZFS and MAID there is a revolution for those looking to press down on the price of backups. I have talked to many companies that only do backup (backups in the cloud) and none of them use tape anymore. Most of them have 2 or 3 data centers with disk stores as both primary and secondary backup (D2D2D backup).
In either case the Mac's would become a lot like Windows PC's. There is good reason that Mac's are slightly higher priced that DIY boxes. I actually started purchasing Apple hardware for Windows purely because of their warranty service.
There is no good reason that Dell is generally higher priced (feature-for-feature, not their discounted yesterday's technology - Pentium M - seriously?) in my market (workstations, education, research) than Apple. There is also no good reason that some other manufacturers ship their products with half-dead motherboards and PS/2 keyboards/mice in this day and age.
XP before SP2 (the time period between 2001 and 2004) was about just as bad as Windows ME. Windows 7 before SP3 (what you might know as Windows Vista) was also just as bad as Windows ME.
It has happened in the past. See Gutenberg. Before him, people would copy books by painstakingly rewriting the whole thing. Gutenberg came along and made it into a repeatable process and it became the ground work for the circulation of new ideas and theories in grand scale. Books fueled the renaissance, scientific research, reformation and a whole lot of other things the rich classes, ruling classes and the Catholic Church (comparable to big business, government and ideological institutions like the RIAA in our times) didn't like but within the next 200 years, the world was better off in general because of it. The same is happening to the Internet and there will be book burnings (Internet disconnects by government and ideological institutions) and there will be witch hunts (so-called pirates) but within a couple of hundred years people like Jamie and NYCountryLawyer will be noted in history just like Gutenberg and William Tyndale
Most likely it'll end up being made in South America and India. The wages are low there but they are also very close to their main markets (S. America is close to N. America, India is both close to Europe and Asia) which saves on logistics costs. Eventually there will be a shift the other way around as the current 'west' becomes poorer and the rest starts to become industrialized and has less to offer in the global market because of patenting, copyright, stupid laws, bad schools, lawyers and unions but we got a decade or so left before that happens.
Are you being sarcastic or just plain dumb? AT&T increases their prices from $20 unlimited to $30 with a 2GB cap. How is that going to save costs for ANY consumer? And 2GB is not a whole lot. If I sync my e-mail box to the device for the first time, I will have eaten half the limit. I used to have a 2GB limit, on my dial up in 1990 (literally).
And people that say that data streams are like electricity is just not technical enough to understand how computer networks work and not bright enough to understand their own phone/internet bills. We have been paying an extra surcharge on all phone and data bills since the early 90's so that the carriers could expand their networks. However since the middle of the dotcom bubble none of the biggest carriers have actually significantly increased their capacity. And whether or not end-users use the network, the capacity is always there, the switches remain on, the dns servers keep humming, the electric bills to the carriers don't go down. There is a limit in the spectrum (number of megabits/seconds) which if the megabytes per month reflects their full capacity would mean that they only have the capacity to carry 60 bits/s per customer (calculated with a 100:1 overbooking of actual bandwidth) - in comparison, dial up has 56000 bits/second.
No zero day -> You're probably safe for the next 24 hours, less if you're on Windows.
There is no 'chain of evidence' with radar guns either. Most of the time, the cop has it placed on the dashboard and keeps one eye open on the speed readout while he takes a nap or talks on his cell phone to his girlfriend. The ticket doesn't show anything related to the evidence, just an observation by a cop. I've been ticketed before by cops guessing my speed, there's nothing new about that, it's just that now it's enshrined in law.
Who cares when the internet is down at 2am? Nobody's there to complain. But if you're running your own datacenter, T1 is necessary. However common-access Internet for most offices is not necessarily that critical. As the article says, there is plenty of dark fiber to go around especially in the big cities which might require some upfront investment and administrating your own equipment but it will save you a lot over time.
If fashion was copyrightable/patentable we would all be walking around in loincloths as only the richest would be able to afford clothing. Currently clothing only has a small profit margin because everybody can make pants. If pants/skirts/... were patented or copyrighted by a company similar to Microsoft we would be paying through the nose for even the simplest pants and all other clothing would only fit with items from the same manufacturer.
You can also see by mapping patents to clothing how patents really kill innovation - if a pair of pants can only be made by one person/company then that person/company doesn't have the incentive to create better/other/flavored versions simply because most designers stick to certain color palettes and patterns. Other clothing makers can't create better fitting versions, oversized versions, ..., the variety we have in the average department store.
I don't know what browser/OS/computer you got but on my PowerMac G4 (single processor ~9 years old) this still runs perfectly while Flash doesn't work a bit. Even on a handheld the Google doodle works fine. Oh, you're running IE/Windows/Dell.