Posts by Ammaross Danan
1042 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2009
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Storage Forum
Sad News
The sad news is, RAID5 (and now default RAID6) is the cheapest way to maximize storage space with as few disks as possible. (10x2TB disks in RAID6 gives more space than 10x2TB in RAID10 for instance.) Unfortunately, RAID10 is in the same (but slightly better-but-worse off) position as RAID6. To rebuild a RAID10 failed disk, the system only needs to access a single disk and copy it verbatim. However, with an unrecoverable read error on the single disk (less likely than would happen in a RAID6 btw, do the math!), you end up in the same pecarious boat as RAID6, with less disk space, but better performance.
Now, this segways into the next point to take: SSDs bottleneck RAID cards in any form of checksum (RAID5-ish) setup. Now, with how the firmware for SSDs are designed, a URE is extremely less likely compared to a whole-disk failure, thus proving them likely more ideal in a striping environment (also considering that in a mirroring setup, each drive would theoretically have the same exact writes and wear, assuming the controller doesn't use an RNG for allocation or cleanup, thus suggesting near-same failure times, which isn't seen as often due to varying endurance for each cell). Side note would be that the drive would fail in read-only mode, thus a "custom" RAID solution could use it to rebuild most/all of the replacement disk....but I digress. Disk storage will still be the leader when it comes to shear data storage, thus the need to address resiliency in RAID. An interesting thought/solution would be a RAID0+1+1, which would scale slightly worse (available space-wise) than RAID61, have 1disk less worse-case resiliency, but a lot better rebuild performance and rebuild resiliency (as the first RAID0 would work at full speed and the second would be used for mirrored reads (think read striping across mirrored disks as well as across the stripe), and the one disk that is the second mirror to the disk that failed can be soley dedicated to restoring the missing drive. (Don't bring in the primary, as it would cause head-thrashing on the target rebuild disk since 2:1 read:write would only work if it was appropriately striped reads). A single URE would be protected against due to the dual mirror remaining, or if you're unlucky single disk remaining. Any involvement of checksumming would unfortunately hobble any SSD implementation of such an array, but for disks, it could be acceptible. The caveat for a RAID011 is that it has worst-case resiliency on par with a triple-checksum stripe (RAID7 I believe). It just has the benefits of having low processing overhead and near RAID0 performance even in "degraded" mode, which could be more important than the lower resiliency in some/most cases.
Any other thoughts or flames?
AMD readies answer to Intel's Ultrabook
Trinity will have a slighly upgraded GPU compared to Brazos, however Ivy Bridge will have a significant step up in GPU from Sandy Bridge. Will it bring enough performance to compete against an integrated Radeon? Not a chance. They're mainly trying to include DX11 support and pump out a few more FPS. Trinity's biggest weakness will be the Bulldozer cores, which would hobble any GPU beefier than the built-in one. This is where Ivy Bridge will excel, allowing Intel to significantly underclock/volt their laptop-binned chips and maintain on-par performance (with Trinity) at significantly lower TDPs. With an add-on wifi chip, it will use more power than the built-in WiFi planned for Ivy Bridge, so :( to that too. Will the price save AMD? Likely, as raw CPU performance is no where near as important (or noticable) for the lay user nowadays. The battery life will be a decisive factor though, separating out the long-lifers from the perma-plug users.
Woz praises Android, blasts iPhone limitations
Fresh Apple lawsuits target 15 Samsung gadgets
Shame really....
No one really looks at the "total cost of ownership" for Apple devices. Sure, the device may be of similar price ($500 iPad2 for instance), but when you tack on extra costs (+16GB internal flash due to not having a microSD slot, +$100-$200), cost of HDMI adapter dongle (~$50), i-branded docking stations/speakers/carkits/etc (outrageous), they start to lose their appeal.
The only thing levied against Android in TCO was user time (to root the phone, flash CyanogenMod, etc etc as desired). Personally, it works* out of the box for 99% of people, as does the iPhone
* for varying degrees of "works" (functionality, capability, appearance, universality and connectivity)
Boffins quarrel over ridding world of leap seconds
X Prize: Build a Star Trek 'tricorder' and win $10m
Tape lives on: Sony to squeeze out LTO-6
Foreign sabotage suspected in Phobos-Grunt meltdown
DIY virtual machines: Rigging up at home
Doomsday Clock ticks one minute closer to annihilation
Lingo
"Fukishima had a catastrophic meltdown that didn't kill anyone" Doesn't it have to be a catastrophy to be "catastrophic"? Last I checked, Fukishima was a partial meltdown, but no where near a "catastrophy" such as Chernobyl.... As for climate change, the polarization is whether humans are causing it or not. Perhaps the argument should be "no significant [human-caused] warming." Just because our models are flawed (they don't take into account all environmental factors, so you can't say they are not), doesn't mean they're wrong; just inaccurate. It's the fact that our current temperatures are not where they were projected to be that should be more conclusive.Intel demos transparent-lid hybrid PC
Close'n'go
I frequently close'n'go with my laptop. So much so that I tell the "close lid" action to "do nothing." Makes it readily available when I get to the near destination, no need to wait for wireless to rehook, DHCP to resolve, sleep to resume, etc. The ability to see what that email bloop was without having to awkwardly open the laptop is an added bonus. Unfortunately, it sounds like it needs to run Windows 8 to get the featureset....
Apple patent stashes passwords in chargers
Legit
"Looks like a legit patent filing from Apple as well."
I must say, it is a legit patent idea from Apple, for once. The reason no one else thought of it first? They did, but it's obviously a terrible idea, as noted in the article. Lose the adapter with the PC (carrying case anyone?) and you're toast. This may make more sense for a USB-charged phone (as you can have many USB cables, but only one wall-wart USB adapter that is toted around in a bag, but your phone is usually separate in a pocket on one's person. Then again, how many people actually lock their phone with anything harder than 1234 or a 1379 swipe?
Astronomers map largest ever zone of dark matter
Clouds
"Astrophysics are just a bit messed up because we've evidence for things that act in certain ways (for example dark matter and dark energy) but we've not got much evidence yet for what they are"
Galactic dust clouds without an illuminating source.
/mines the one with the flashlight in the pocket
Think twice before moving to SaaS office
SaaS
SaaS makes sense for small biz email, since the internet for the SaaS service is more likely to be up than the small biz. However, I've worked with businesses that utilized SaaS email (most of them just didn't pick the right one) which ended up with a POP3-type service and thought they were good to go because it "worked." At least, until the first computer died. Switching them to a local Exchange server gave them additional functionality, as well as reduced internet load (due to those favorite 4MB attachments not going outside the org anymore).
As the software stack goes up and becomes more complex (real-time links to databases for instance) the performance just gets worse and worse. This is most painfully noticed on software that was designed to run on LANs, but is getting shoe-horned into a "Cloud" server because it looked cheaper on paper. Of course, SaaS like a timecard system or modern web-based software makes more sense. Still, depending on the implementation or data load, it can be lethargically slow. Short of having a P2P T1 (or better) to the SaaS provider, your experience will be at the mercy of your ISP.
Lenovo outs Ice Cream Sarnie telly
Marvell updates hybrid NAND/disk controller
Woot!
"Users can, with the aid of a GUI-based management system, force particular files and folders to be fixed ("pinned") in either flash or on disk."
I would buy one of the devices using this for this feature alone. No matter how good your detection algorithms are, it is nothing like the intimate knowledge the ACTUAL USER has on how they use their data. Pass the power to them and let them reap the benefits (or dig their grave) as they see fit.
Read my past comments. I called for this feature some 6 months or more ago.
Chrome beta promises super-fast URL loads
Nah
IE group-sources a file's malicious intent, just as much as Chrome likely will. Several tools and installers (php5 win32 installer for instance) get flagged as "not often downloaded" and you have to overwrite the system by using "Actions..." rather than the default DELETE button. As annoying as this may be, I am willing to bet it's saved countless computards from installing crapware since they can't figure out where the "Open" button is now. Looks like Chrome is just following suit. Just means less money for us free-lance virii cleaners....
Broadcom uncloaks zippy '5G WiFi' chippery
Google grabs yet more patents from IBM war chest
Upside
"a method of playing audible advertisements to mobile users before they make a call"
There's an upside: it may make the kiddies NOT actually want to make that call to their friend, especially if it is a 30sec advert.
I'd get one simply to give the kids for simple "call me when the movie is over" comms. Beats having to do an extra cell phone on a family plan (price-wise).
Xbox 720 to double-up as a DVR
HTPC
One would wonder huh? Would be funny to see MS sue an HTPC company using Windows as the "interface" that integrates a DVR viewer (Windows Media Player) with a gaming console (think having Steam open in another window would count?).
The miracle would be if they make the nextbox power-efficient enough in "off"-but-DVR-mode to keep your front room ambient temp lower than the 80*F the XBox360 makes it....
Microsoft de-cloaks Windows 8 push-button lifesaver
List of Apps
"Providing a list of desktop apps that were installed and allowing you to choose which ones to reinstall would be better than ditching all of them though."
Not if that list has "Windows Antivirus 2011" or other such malware in it....Users were fooled enough to think it was a good program when ransomed to pay for it, what makes you think they won't think it's a good app upon refresh?
PCIe flashers bash storage networks
"CPU cycles as the most precious data centre resource..." again
The OP still missed it. CPUs are cheap. The Author's slight sounded like a stab at Virtualization, where apparently his mantra is "squeeze every bit out of the CPU as we can!". This is false. Businesses don't virtualize to drive up CPU utilization; they virtualize to reduce hardware count. Sure, a 10-core CPU goes mostly wasted being a mail server with 15K SAS disks. Stuffing PCIe flash won't improve the matter any. However, treat the SERVER as the most precious data centre resource, stack it high with VMs to utilize the CPU and RAM, you'll need something with high IOPS (be it remote or local storage) since hosting 10 VMs all doing various loads of sequential and random access will look like a bunch of random access requests (think, two sequential reads will have to interleave the segments, causing the heads to jump across the disk swapping back and forth, unless it prioritizes a whole file ahead of the other, which disk access doesn't really do). This is why high IOPS is in demand in virtualized environments. Each server is doing its own thing. If a server was I/O bound as bare-metal, think of how behind it gets when stacked with 6 other (even occassionally) I/O bound VMs.
The one good mark I can give is that the Author stressed that NAS/SAN isn't dead, but that they just need flash too, and that there are limits to the benefits of DAS. Unfortunately, that's about all of the topic the author seems to grasp.
Virtual sanity: How to get a grip on your home PCs
Crosses Fine
Just the other day, I restored a Clonezilla image of a Win7 box from Intel SNB hardware to a Core2 system (both HP biz fortunately). Runs fine. Took the hard drive out of an AMD AM2+ mobo system and plopped it in a AM3 mobo system. The only glitch was the nVidia drivers needed to be removed beforehand so the AMD Radeon vid card switch-in wouldn't toast the OS on load (still was able to remove the vid drivers by swapping the old vid card into the new system, remove the drivers, then pop the Radeon back in). Simples.
Win7 isn't as bad off as XP when it comes to underlying hardware change. You can even move from SATA IDE emulation mode to AHCI with a one-liner registry change.
Trevor, your setup sounds quite extravagant, and I do hope your SNB $750 HTPC runs well hosting the 3 or 4 XP VMs that you allocate for "all your computing needs except gaming." However, I for one know that it would not work for most tech-savy users, as my web-browsing alone takes up over 750MB of RAM (yes, I have lots of research threads open, usually 6 or 7 separate browser windows with multiple tabs each). Hope you decked out that SNB with 16GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD, which is the only way it would be tolerable if both you and your family are using it concurrently.
Something you might want to look into is an nCompute setup. Works like RDP, but is a separate physical thinbox client. It's more seamless than a Wyse or the like, and gives you a more-native view than an RDP session. Also would save you having to run your i5 w/ an nVidia power-sucker just so you can tote around the internet in an RDP session.
UK's solar 'leccy cash slash ruled unlawful
Apple land-grabs fuel cells for mobiles
AMD claims 'world's fastest GPU' title
GPU
Based on the cursory overview provided, it actually sounds like a nice GPU. Granted, with the performance improvement in "performancy/sq mm", it leads me to think there's only a small 110% speed bump over the last-gen 6970. Even so, the feature set will be nice. If their ZeroCore works as one would hope, perhaps we'll have a GPU that fair better than 120W at "idle" (rendering desktop only). Incorporating Turbo Boost is an interesting ploy too, as it allows that OCers may have been doing manually/semi-automatically for some time: cranking the GPU into OC mode during game play, and reverting to normal/underclock for desktop use (especially considering that the GPU in some cases sucks more watts than the rest of the computer combined). Wasn't that the point of leaving the Intel HD gfx core on Sandy Bridge strapped to your monitor with a bit of Virtu magic to (hopefully, but didn't work very well) put your gfx card in idle outside of games?
Apple wins skirmish in HTC-Google patent war
Android gets 'flashy', 'social' holiday treats
Blast at Apple gear factory hurts 61
Parody is illegal, say barmy bureaucrats
Satire
"...and the strange notion that parody and satire are illegal in the UK."
Perhaps you should restrict your speaking on "works of satire" to music and media. If not, you should read a good piece of satire named "A Modest Proposal," which is satire of a different sort from what you're writing about.
Swiss-based Balesio takes the knife to PDF files
Garbage collection
Ever try saving a Word doc as html? There are <font> and style tags around EVERY block of text, not to mention the style tags in each <p> or <td>. Simply removing these for a top-level CSS style would save space. Likely it is these type of tricks that are employed in "native format optimization" since, by definition, they can not use 3rd party compression methods.
Seagate matches and raises WD disk warranty cuts
Dying
The only thing dying about Seagate is likely the company itself due to a bad reputation on hard disk failures. HDDs won't be killed by SSDs anytime soon as SSDs are limited by the die-size of the cells (currently dropping to around 22nm). Once they hit a point of diminishing returns (7-12nm likely), they'll have to start going to 3-level MLC or higher, and likely have to stack chips to up their density. Regardless, HDDs still have a higher bit density and easier/lower cost to manufacture. Furthermore, we know that NAND flash is running the end of its era and that other flash technologies will be stepping in within the next 3 years, hopefully yielding better densities and economies of scale, but we know there are similar "new" techs being developed by HDD companies (BPM, HAMR, etc) that will allow HDDs to easily reach 10TB with only 3 platters in the next 5 years.
WD slashes warranty periods on Blue and Green drives
OCZ wheels out lower octane SSD for Sunday drives
Feds propose 50-state ban on mobile use while driving
Other People
"The pickup was then struck from behind by a school bus, which was plowed into by a second school bus. Two people were killed and 38 were injured.
...In addition, the driver of the first bus had been distracted by a motorcoach that had pulled to the side of the road, and the driver of the second bus was faulted for following the first bus too closely."
I'm glad the article continued to quote and included the excuses of the two bus drivers. However bad the texting lad (who died) was doing, the two bus drivers (who were not using PEDs per their statement) STILL ran into him. PEDs are killers for sure, but no worse than DUI, makeup, smoking, playing with the radio dials, etc, etc, etc. Unfortunately, texting while driving is about as enforceable as DUI, but instead of a breathalizer, they need a laptop with your cell records.
Cosmic Cannonball snapped blazing a bloody trail of star guts
Overthinking....
X-ray imaging works by looking at a shadow, since what we're looking at (bone and the like) doesn't normally emit enough x-rays to get a good image. HOWEVER, gas clouds, supernovae, and the like DO emit x-rays and thus would be quite detectable by someone who's vision worked in the x-ray band rather than in the "visible light" band. Basically, your vision would work the same, just objects would likely have a different "brightness" to them.
Winamp mends trio of old-school security holes
Still Good
joejack: "But yeah, if I'm on win7 I still use winamp. I don't install video or modern skins or a lot of the other crap. Stays out of the way, low footprint, syncs playlists to portables, good hotkey support, great for ripping/reencoding, all the old plugins still work"
Which is exactly why I still use it. Global Hotkeys work great, even in full-screen ancient apps (think Diablo 2). The thing to love is startup time, low CPU use, and next to no memory footprint. Compare this vs Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or (ugh) iTunes (to name a popular trio) and you feel better about running old-school.
Greenland 'lurched upward' in 2010 as 100bn tons of ice melted
99%....
99%? Let alone ones not using the ficticious data coming from a certain major climatology centre...?
Anyway, "might accelerate massively in a runaway positive feedback loop if global temperatures climb, and so become a major problem"
The world will quake in fear at a whole 2mm (guess based on only 0.25 coming from a major melt of Greenland) sea-level rise annually. Perhaps in 10 years, that one whole inch worth of extra sea-level will cover my sand castle....
Survey: Apprenticeships will fix IT skills gap
Experience
5 years experience in 1yr-old tech is HR slapping their "minimum requirements" stamp on a job position, which is half the problem to begin with...
HOWEVER, the job posting usually lists experience in A CRAP TON of various softwares and (sometimes) languages, which sometimes is mutually exclusive in a workspace (VMWare, KVM, and Xen for instance). Then, of course, is the wage of 25-35k/year. So very much peanuts.
Google's Schmidt strikes Carrier IQ off Xmas card list
Netflix set to make your video history public
Intel, Micron double single-chip flash capacity
Packages
"Intel says that one-terabit densities can be achieved in "a single fingertip-size package" consisting of eight of the new parts"
Question is, does this mean a flash chip that hosts 8 dies (as opposed to the practice of 4 dies in current 512GB+ drives)? Surely, since 4 dies per chip causes interleaving bottlenecks to the dies, dropping 8 dies on a chip could cause similar (worse?) issues if the controller isn't striping the data efficiently? Perhaps an upgrade to channels from the controller is in order...
IMFT exposes its incredible shrinking NAND
Missed
"The last time I read on the subject, SSD's built from current chips were expected to last many decades based on about 100,000 P/E cycles for commercially produced NAND chips"
There's a difference between referring to a "chip" as a whole, and what the OP to your comment was referring to: the erase-endurance of a particular 2-bit NAND cell, which does have 3000-5000 erase cycles at 25nm. However, when you take the whole drive into account (say 120GB), with decent wear leveling algorithms and such, it would take many years to burn through those erase cycles even pushing 7GB/day of data writes. And, of course, if you're using an SSD to edit uncompressed video or the like, you likely are a numpty or have enough money to toss your SSD once a year.
US military pays SETI to check Kepler-22b for aliens
Ice Cream Sandwich
Adverts
"Not that there's any difference between Google and MS and Apple. Except Apple will take $hundreds of you first and then extract advertising revenue from your data."
Apple doesn't really make much in adverts (yet). However, they do gouge the heck out of developers, which you then must pay for in (semi)inflated prices. Or you do could do what Apple intended all along and just use their sources (iTunes, iBook, The Daily).
iOS 5.1 name-checks next-gen iPad, iPhone
"J33 is something altogether new: Apple's own-brand television""
If the J33 is an Apple-branded TV, it's likely a 33" only because "you don't need any other size." (like the iPad's set size).
Of course, I don't partake the fruit of a company that tries to dictate how I use my device(s). (Yes, there are more than just Apple, but they're quite famous for draconian control)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
