* Posts by James Gibbons

58 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2008

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Dublin airport was crippled by flakey network card

James Gibbons
Paris Hilton

NICs can take whole networks down

I once had a NIC go bad and take a whole network down. It was on a switch but that didn't isolate it. All the other computer's went off the network and nothing worked unless I shut everything down and powered back up. I had to power each computer off and check each one out until I found the problem. It was also intermittent at first.

A totally redundant link on all the computers could have still allowed operation, but it's also possible the bad link might have shut the other one down too. Off the shelf network gear might not solve this but one might need to design custom hardware to get past it. I suspect the industrial redundant ring switches like the ones from Sixnet would have still failed in this case.

Paris because she knows all about networking of videos.

Phoenix spies probable Martian water ice

James Gibbons
Black Helicopters

@AC

"Until their clever little oven says its water"

It will be interesting to see if they can break the ice up small enough to get it past the screens into the oven! I think they made a major engineering goof with those screens because the soil and ice doesn't break up easily.

Big TV flips ad blockers the bird

James Gibbons

@AC

"... and it doesn't carry much in the way of good tv shows either."

So Sir Hitchcock and Rod Serling not very good. My wife won't watch the any of the Hitchcock shows because they remind her too much of Psycho. And the Serling show with Phyllis Diller as the nagging wife ghost - also a classic. Guess you didn't look very hard.

Actually, I don't find the ads all that bad. They are usually 15 to 30 seconds, not even enough time to get up off the couch.

Windows Vista has been battered, says Wall Street fan

James Gibbons
Paris Hilton

@calculating time remaining

The copy speed problem was caused by the gigabit network stack being throttled down to make sure audio played without gaps. This isn't really necessary with a efficient OS and good hardware, but MS seemed to think different. This was fixed somewhat in SP1.

Mark Russinovich explains it:

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx

And Robert Love pointed out how Vista's TCP stack sucks compared to Linux:

http://blog.rlove.org/2007/08/those-dang-dpcs-clogging-mmcss.html

Paris because she's napping like Vista

Multi-threaded development joins Gates as yesterday's man

James Gibbons

Multi-Core is Good!

Almost any real-time processing can benefit from multi-core CPUs. I specify quad cores whenever I come across a difficult process control problem that needs to respond quickly. There is a little threading problem called priority inversion that can cause delays in processing on single core systems and multi-cores solve it by allowing the lower priority locking thread to run along side the higher priority thread that would normally use a single core. Multiple cores can also process interrupts quicker and schedule independent threads running in parallel.

As for the suitability of a certain language for multi-core work, I find that C++ can work as well as most any other. C# and Java have a little problem called garbage collection that tends to kick in and cause problems with thread execution. Microsoft has gone through many iterations of their garbage collector to try to fix this. C++ also has problems (memory allocation from the heap usually cause a global lock) but garbage collection can shut down multi-threading for long periods.

The Intel C++ thread libraries, OpenMP and the new Qt 4.4 QtConcurrent module make multi-core work in C++ quite easy. The hard part is designing the program to make efficient use of the threading library. Holding onto critical sections during heavy computing periods will make any system run slow.

Windows Vista update 'kills' USB devices

James Gibbons
Thumb Down

For anyone who thinks Linux drivers are difficult

Matrox Imaging still hasn't delivered Vista drivers for their camera grab boards. They are scheduled for 2008 Q3. And now we will have Windows 7 coming out a year after that! The sound drivers for Creative boards are in a similar state as noted here too. Sounds like M$ is starting to learn some lessons from Linux's driver model. M$ said they were going to be more like open source and I guess that is true now...

Move over Storm - there's a bigger, stealthier botnet in town

James Gibbons
Linux

EXE attachments

Our ISP mail provider shut off EXE type attachments a long time ago for both send and receive. Why is ANYONE allowing EXE attachments in this day and age?

LINUX because it won't run them!

Microsoft admits big delay on Home Server bug fix

James Gibbons
Black Helicopters

@AC Monopolist arrogance

"How long would it take a decent storage vendor to correct a known bug that is causing data corruption ... or if it was just about any other OS product? Even free software would have a fix available in days, if not hours."

How about the D-Link DNS-323, a cute little Linux Toaster NAS. Took a year of firmware upgrades to fix the problem with it freezing every 2 weeks. I never lost data, but I wasn't driving it very hard. I only used it as a backup device for some other servers.

I quickly purchased a real quad core system and built out a proper Linux system using some large SATA drives, and only used the DNS-323 for non-critical use until the firmware was fixed. Not a bad little unit once they fixed it.

Not all vendors are equal, but free software and Linux is not the solution.

Even hardware sometimes has problems (Intel bug on a Server-2003 system):

http://www.folding-hyperspace.com/bugs_p4.htm

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