We have a couple of VXA2 drives at work, but we haven't had the chance to test their durability. For personal use, they'd be great. They store a decent amount of data (80GB native, I think) and they're reasonably fast. The problem is they're way too expensive for personal use.
For business use, they're not so great. 80GB native can't even touch my employer's current requirements for backup, so we're working on buying an LTO3 library. It's outrageously expensive (about $22000), in my opinion, but data loss in our business is unacceptable.
I wish tape manufacturers would get their acts together and come up with a decent technology for both home (100-200GB native for less than $500) and business (15-20TB native for less than $8000).
VMware's HA will automatically restart your VMs on other physical hosts in your HA cluster.
I have someone trying to sell me VMware right now, and he implies one of your physical machines can crash and VMware can restart the image on another machine with no downtime, at all. However, I can't believe it can do that without at least dropping existing TCP connections. (I mean, the memory on the two machines would have to be mirrored up to the latest memory access, right?) Can VMware actually do that, and if so, do you know how?
Sorry, I can't agree with you, there. We have a couple of AIX servers here (a pSeries 550 and a 6F1) and I can tell you, unless IBM gets their act together before we need to replace them, they will not be replaced with IBM servers. My experience with IBM is that, if you're not willing to spend $500,000 or more on a machine, they don't want to be bothered.
As long as we're on the subject, does anyone have any opinions about whether VMware or Windows Virtual Server is better and why? We're actually in the process of spec-ing out our first virtual server, as we speak, and we're having an argument over which one to use. Are there any other virtualization technologies we should be considering?
Most sensible managers will want to pay a fair salary for the job they're having done
Except that, as someone above mentioned, most managers aren't in control of the purse strings. My manager is always complaining about how he'd like to pay more, because he's having an incredibly hard time finding applicants who'll work for what we're willing to pay. Unfortunately, his manager won't let him. Now, I suppose that could be an act, but as far as I can tell, he's not that kind of a guy.
Big deal. At least it gets a discussion going. If you follow it, you might even learn something.
Personally, I think salaries shouldn't be secret. It's one of the ways "the man keeps us down" and nepotism runs rampant. A company should be able to justify the salary - higher or lower than normal - of every one of its employees.
I don't have a degree yet I make 6 digit income (US dollars) as a Linux sysadmin
Wow. Sorry this is a little off-topic, but I have to ask: do you live in an expensive area of the country (SF Bay area, LA, NE)? I'm a Unix/Linux sysadmin with more than 20 years of experience, and I don't make that much. Now, I'm in a part of the country where the wages are lower, but I didn't think they were that much lower.
Your Google fu is weak, glasshoppa. The actual quote is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and Carl Sagan said it (mostly in reference to UFOs).
Try finding an 8" Shugart disk, the interface is pretty close to the PC interface
I know it used to be possible to buy an 8" drive that had an actual PC interface. I've seen a few, but they're pretty rare. I wish I could find one of those. Someone told me about an adapter you could buy (for about $70 US) that would allow you to connect a DEC 8" floppy drive to a PC.
provided your floppy controller can read the low (150kbps?) bit rate on those drives
A Catweasel can read anything, provided you can write a driver for it. My 8" disks are about 4.5k bytes per track, RS232/FM encoded (20 bits/byte) so that's about 4.5 * 20 * 6(rps) = 540k bits per second.
Just out of curiosity, did you happen to notice you responded to two of my posts in this thread, even though they were completely unrelated? Did you do that on purpose?:-)
ZIP disks WERE poised to take over the floppy market
And yet, they didn't even outlast the floppies they were supposed to replace.
So, your first 600MB with a CD burner back then cost you roughly $3000
Maybe that was true in Cananda, but here in the US, I seem to remember them being around $500 - $600, while Zip drives were initially around $200. That's more than 6 times the storage for 2.5 times the price.
I'll agree that, for a while there, it was close. My wife was getting her master's degree, at the time, and her college required her to turn in her assignments on a Zip disk. (Personally, I'd be pissed at my university, if I was her.) I can't help but wonder what kind of media they're using now, and what they did with all those Zip drives they had in their workstations.
I have to admit, I'm surprised the parent was modded insightful.
when I first got an Iomega Zip disk, I was sure that it was going to replace floppies completely.
Unless you were a teenager (or younger) when Zip disks came out, I'd really have to question your intelligence, here. It was obvious, to me, if no one else, that Zip disks were a dead end from the get-go. CD-ROM burners came out around the same time and, while they were much more expensive than Zip drives at the time, it was only a matter of time before the cost came down. CDs could also store more than 6 times as much data. CDs were also an ISO standard, while Zip disks were proprietary. As far as I'm concerned, Iomega came out with the Zip disk to sell to a bunch of suckers who couldn't wait for CDs to become more cost-effective and they knew - in advance - Zips weren't going to be around for more than a few years.
Personally, I wish MO disks would have caught on. They were fast, durable, and stored a lot of data. They probably could have, too, but I think the manufacturers were trying to market them as a high-end storage device, rather than as a floppy replacement.
Taught me two good lessons
Here's another: proprietary storage devices are non-starters. Stay away from them.
We're still here. I have tons (at least 100) of floppies at home. Most are 3.5" PC floppies.
Twenty or thirty are 5.25" floppies from various systems, including a few Apple II floppies. I still have a Catweasel flopy controller and a 5.25" drive in one of my systems to read them.
I even have four 8" floppies. Now, if I could just find an 8" drive to hook up to my PC...
Ain't revisionist history fun to use when your worldview is upset?
Yeah, whatever. If you don't like that reference, try this one. While a few scientists expressed concern, most admitted they didn't have enough data, at the time, to make any real predictions.
What I don't get is why there are still so many people who don't get the whole "follow the money" concept. Where is there more money: fossil fuel companies or universities? Duh.
I wonder if anyone breadboards anything but the simplest circuits, anymore. If you want to do something really serious, involving some ICs with 100 pins or more, could you really do that on a breadboard?
I come from the days when computers ran at 5Mhz
Yeah... well... I come from the days when computers only ran at 1Mhz (Apple II and OSI) and we liked them!:-)
I've been using Legato (now EMC) Networker at a number of different sites for over ten years now.
Not that my opinion means anything, but I'm surprised to hear anyone say that about Legato, especially 10 years ago. I used to work for a Unix VAR and, when we discovered it, we tried to sell it to 3 or 4 customers. They were so annoyed by it, every one of them insisted we replace it. I wrote shell scripts (using tar) for them and they've been happy ever since.
I suppose the Windows version could be significantly different from the Unix version, but I'd be surprised if that was the case.
Yeah, but water is one of the few (only?) materials whose liquid is denser than its solid and, as a result, freezes from the top down, rather than the bottom up. That's pretty strange, in my book.
It also has one of the highest specific heats of any material. (Highest of any common material.)
Using Gmail and flash can be interesting for a 64-bit Linux distro - Mozilla just crashes.
I'm running SuSE 10.0 on my HP Athlon 64 laptop and, surprisingly, I don't have that problem. I just installed Flash - 9.0 beta, no less - and it just worked.
Flash 9 is a big step up from Flash 7, too. For instance, on version 7, it was rare for the audio to be in sync with the video. That works perfectly in version 9.
the only thing I need to be worried about, is that I play a game that can be paused
I've discovered it's much easier to play games where it's possible to play just a few minutes at a time. I can't even start a game like Unreal, or Civilization, or Sim City, anymore. Sure you can pause them or, in the case of turn-based games, walk away for a short while, but when kids are involved, that "short while" invariably becomes a long while. By that time, you've completely forgotten what you were doing and the game is ruined.
Nowadays, it's games like Stinkoman and Super Monkey Ball, for me.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the "mouseball" story that was in one the popular computer magazines, 10 or 15 years ago.
Some columnist had an IBM PC with a mouse and his kids removed the ball and lost it outside. Apparently, the whole mouse cost something like $100 and, not surprisingly, he didn't want to pay that much, when he just needed a new ball. He went through an enormous amount of trouble to buy one, but IBM couldn't sell it to him, because they didn't have a part number for just the ball. They finally just gave him one and indicated it wouldn't happen again.
type II supernovas take an awful long time to mature
I'm pretty sure that's not true. Remember: the larger the star, the shorter its life. Really large stars have lifetimes of just a few tens of millions of years, while red dwarfs can live trillions, according to current theory. While a 20 solar mass star isn't that big, I imagine it still didn't last long.
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We have a couple of VXA2 drives at work, but we haven't had the chance to test their durability. For personal use, they'd be great. They store a decent amount of data (80GB native, I think) and they're reasonably fast. The problem is they're way too expensive for personal use.
For business use, they're not so great. 80GB native can't even touch my employer's current requirements for backup, so we're working on buying an LTO3 library. It's outrageously expensive (about $22000), in my opinion, but data loss in our business is unacceptable.
I wish tape manufacturers would get their acts together and come up with a decent technology for both home (100-200GB native for less than $500) and business (15-20TB native for less than $8000).
VMware's HA will automatically restart your VMs on other physical hosts in your HA cluster.
I have someone trying to sell me VMware right now, and he implies one of your physical machines can crash and VMware can restart the image on another machine with no downtime, at all. However, I can't believe it can do that without at least dropping existing TCP connections. (I mean, the memory on the two machines would have to be mirrored up to the latest memory access, right?) Can VMware actually do that, and if so, do you know how?
Yes. AIX.
Sorry, I can't agree with you, there. We have a couple of AIX servers here (a pSeries 550 and a 6F1) and I can tell you, unless IBM gets their act together before we need to replace them, they will not be replaced with IBM servers. My experience with IBM is that, if you're not willing to spend $500,000 or more on a machine, they don't want to be bothered.
As long as we're on the subject, does anyone have any opinions about whether VMware or Windows Virtual Server is better and why? We're actually in the process of spec-ing out our first virtual server, as we speak, and we're having an argument over which one to use. Are there any other virtualization technologies we should be considering?
Most sensible managers will want to pay a fair salary for the job they're having done
Except that, as someone above mentioned, most managers aren't in control of the purse strings. My manager is always complaining about how he'd like to pay more, because he's having an incredibly hard time finding applicants who'll work for what we're willing to pay. Unfortunately, his manager won't let him. Now, I suppose that could be an act, but as far as I can tell, he's not that kind of a guy.
This is just blatant advertising
Big deal. At least it gets a discussion going. If you follow it, you might even learn something.
Personally, I think salaries shouldn't be secret. It's one of the ways "the man keeps us down" and nepotism runs rampant. A company should be able to justify the salary - higher or lower than normal - of every one of its employees.
I don't have a degree yet I make 6 digit income (US dollars) as a Linux sysadmin
Wow. Sorry this is a little off-topic, but I have to ask: do you live in an expensive area of the country (SF Bay area, LA, NE)? I'm a Unix/Linux sysadmin with more than 20 years of experience, and I don't make that much. Now, I'm in a part of the country where the wages are lower, but I didn't think they were that much lower.
Wouldn't you know, I just lost my mod points. :-(
I can't recall who said it
Your Google fu is weak, glasshoppa. The actual quote is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and Carl Sagan said it (mostly in reference to UFOs).
Try finding an 8" Shugart disk, the interface is pretty close to the PC interface
:-)
I know it used to be possible to buy an 8" drive that had an actual PC interface. I've seen a few, but they're pretty rare. I wish I could find one of those. Someone told me about an adapter you could buy (for about $70 US) that would allow you to connect a DEC 8" floppy drive to a PC.
provided your floppy controller can read the low (150kbps?) bit rate on those drives
A Catweasel can read anything, provided you can write a driver for it. My 8" disks are about 4.5k bytes per track, RS232/FM encoded (20 bits/byte) so that's about 4.5 * 20 * 6(rps) = 540k bits per second.
Just out of curiosity, did you happen to notice you responded to two of my posts in this thread, even though they were completely unrelated? Did you do that on purpose?
ZIP disks WERE poised to take over the floppy market
And yet, they didn't even outlast the floppies they were supposed to replace.
So, your first 600MB with a CD burner back then cost you roughly $3000
Maybe that was true in Cananda, but here in the US, I seem to remember them being around $500 - $600, while Zip drives were initially around $200. That's more than 6 times the storage for 2.5 times the price.
I'll agree that, for a while there, it was close. My wife was getting her master's degree, at the time, and her college required her to turn in her assignments on a Zip disk. (Personally, I'd be pissed at my university, if I was her.) I can't help but wonder what kind of media they're using now, and what they did with all those Zip drives they had in their workstations.
"...then I'm happy and sad for it"
I have to admit, I'm surprised the parent was modded insightful.
when I first got an Iomega Zip disk, I was sure that it was going to replace floppies completely.
Unless you were a teenager (or younger) when Zip disks came out, I'd really have to question your intelligence, here. It was obvious, to me, if no one else, that Zip disks were a dead end from the get-go. CD-ROM burners came out around the same time and, while they were much more expensive than Zip drives at the time, it was only a matter of time before the cost came down. CDs could also store more than 6 times as much data. CDs were also an ISO standard, while Zip disks were proprietary. As far as I'm concerned, Iomega came out with the Zip disk to sell to a bunch of suckers who couldn't wait for CDs to become more cost-effective and they knew - in advance - Zips weren't going to be around for more than a few years.
Personally, I wish MO disks would have caught on. They were fast, durable, and stored a lot of data. They probably could have, too, but I think the manufacturers were trying to market them as a high-end storage device, rather than as a floppy replacement.
Taught me two good lessons
Here's another: proprietary storage devices are non-starters. Stay away from them.
Where is the older generation?
We're still here. I have tons (at least 100) of floppies at home. Most are 3.5" PC floppies.
Twenty or thirty are 5.25" floppies from various systems, including a few Apple II floppies. I still have a Catweasel flopy controller and a 5.25" drive in one of my systems to read them.
I even have four 8" floppies. Now, if I could just find an 8" drive to hook up to my PC...
Works fine for me, and I'm using Flash 9 on an Athlon 64.
Ain't revisionist history fun to use when your worldview is upset?
Yeah, whatever. If you don't like that reference, try this one. While a few scientists expressed concern, most admitted they didn't have enough data, at the time, to make any real predictions.
What I don't get is why there are still so many people who don't get the whole "follow the money" concept. Where is there more money: fossil fuel companies or universities? Duh.
...breadboarded that 555 IC alarm system...
:-)
I wonder if anyone breadboards anything but the simplest circuits, anymore. If you want to do something really serious, involving some ICs with 100 pins or more, could you really do that on a breadboard?
I come from the days when computers ran at 5Mhz
Yeah... well... I come from the days when computers only ran at 1Mhz (Apple II and OSI) and we liked them!
I've been using Legato (now EMC) Networker at a number of different sites for over ten years now.
Not that my opinion means anything, but I'm surprised to hear anyone say that about Legato, especially 10 years ago. I used to work for a Unix VAR and, when we discovered it, we tried to sell it to 3 or 4 customers. They were so annoyed by it, every one of them insisted we replace it. I wrote shell scripts (using tar) for them and they've been happy ever since.
I suppose the Windows version could be significantly different from the Unix version, but I'd be surprised if that was the case.
Yeah, but water is one of the few (only?) materials whose liquid is denser than its solid and, as a result, freezes from the top down, rather than the bottom up. That's pretty strange, in my book.
It also has one of the highest specific heats of any material. (Highest of any common material.)
Using Gmail and flash can be interesting for a 64-bit Linux distro - Mozilla just crashes.
I'm running SuSE 10.0 on my HP Athlon 64 laptop and, surprisingly, I don't have that problem. I just installed Flash - 9.0 beta, no less - and it just worked.
Flash 9 is a big step up from Flash 7, too. For instance, on version 7, it was rare for the audio to be in sync with the video. That works perfectly in version 9.
the only thing I need to be worried about, is that I play a game that can be paused
I've discovered it's much easier to play games where it's possible to play just a few minutes at a time. I can't even start a game like Unreal, or Civilization, or Sim City, anymore. Sure you can pause them or, in the case of turn-based games, walk away for a short while, but when kids are involved, that "short while" invariably becomes a long while. By that time, you've completely forgotten what you were doing and the game is ruined.
Nowadays, it's games like Stinkoman and Super Monkey Ball, for me.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the "mouseball" story that was in one the popular computer magazines, 10 or 15 years ago.
Some columnist had an IBM PC with a mouse and his kids removed the ball and lost it outside. Apparently, the whole mouse cost something like $100 and, not surprisingly, he didn't want to pay that much, when he just needed a new ball. He went through an enormous amount of trouble to buy one, but IBM couldn't sell it to him, because they didn't have a part number for just the ball. They finally just gave him one and indicated it wouldn't happen again.
today the Smithsonian launched an online exhibition called Earth from Space which uses a version of Flash not available (yet) on Linux.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. It works fine for me.
Did you really just compare Gandhi's fight for freedom from British rule in India to the OS "wars"?
s .html
What... you've never seen "Truth Happens"?
http://www.redhat.com/truthhappens/videos/ourfilm
type II supernovas take an awful long time to mature
I'm pretty sure that's not true. Remember: the larger the star, the shorter its life. Really large stars have lifetimes of just a few tens of millions of years, while red dwarfs can live trillions, according to current theory. While a 20 solar mass star isn't that big, I imagine it still didn't last long.