Posts by foxyshadis

Fiber people are used to that

Try using any SFP in another vendor's system, or even an older version in newer kit. Ethernet people are routinely shocked that anyone would still pay for such heavily locked-down equipment.

That's why I see iSCSI a lot more than FCoE, it is NOT quite as "just works" and "plug-and-play", but it's also not as locked into one vendor. Burned once, twice shy. Once there is an actual FCoE standard with cross-industry interop, it will probably surpass iSCSI because it's technically superior, but until then hardly anyone is going to be willing to trust all of their eggs in one vendor's basket.

That's a solved problem

Most tablets now have an attachable keyboard option, some even come with usb ports for your own keyboards & mice, particularly wireless ones. What's not as easy to solve is making them easy to hold for long periods of time without forcing people to adjust to the same compromises as using a laptop comfortably.

WTF are you on about

They already did! Apple pays them millions, possibly tens of millions of dollars a year, for nothing but use of their name. Millions more to carry the Beatles albums. Were you asleep the last ten years or what?

Read carefully

That was in reference to Ubuntu not working, not Windows. He meant have a fully-configured and working free OS, whether it's Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever.

@MacroRodent - don't forget RMS

Richard Stallman has long since proved that he's willing to pursue legal action against GPL violators, no matter how high or low profile they are. He probably wouldn't have the resources to win against Google, but he could certainly force concessions if the matter.

Not over firewire or USB!

Do a little more research next time before you call shenanigans: The Firewire and USB drivers only supported 48-bit addressing up until 10.5, because it's part of the USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 specs! Leopard introduced full 64-bit LBA drivers with USB 3.0 and FW 1600 support, and certain tweaks to its FW 800 drivers to support 64-bit addressing.

eSATA has a similar issue: Many older eSATA cards and mobos only support 48-bit LBA. All newer ones support 64-bit and use the OS SATA drivers, so you get support in 10.2.

Also, there are issues with GPT over Firewire even today, disks larger than 2TB can cause problems on some Macs even on 10.7.

@AC

In some cases they delayed repairs for up to six months at a time, resulting in numerous IT teams learning to do their own capacitor buying and fixing, or buying new machines until they were swapped, even with those next-day service contracts. Not to mention the tremendous amount of wasted time involved in doing basic troubleshooting on each one before they'd send out a tech (later thy did just start sending them right away). That's where the damages come from.

Not necessarily physical

Sounds like the interesting part is that if there's any kind of exploit or buffer overflow in the code, you might be able to use that to flash the firmware remotely, at least enough to add a rootkit. However, it becomes very NIC-specific, with a half-dozen different routines all targeting different versions of different cards.

And yes, event digital certs verified with TPM won't matter if hardware has the ability to fake out every piece of the puzzle.

That's a bizarre conspiracy theory

But more likely, it'll go the same way it has for years: Lots of wailing, a lot of infringement, some high-profile suits, a few patents thrown out, and a moderate amount of research into creating improved processes that aren't under corporate patent protection.

Only RAMdisk can use that much bandwidth

And you're usually better off putting them on extra main memory slots, not PCIe. A single SSD will be quite happy on PCIe 2.0 x1.

@Giles

The steampunk laptops I've seen look nothing like furniture, they're just goofy wooden/metal shells that intentionally call attention to themselves. Given that smartphones have as much power as small supercomputers of a decade ago, you'd think it would be easier to put a standard low-power PC into a fashionable shell, such as the underside of a desk or the headboard of a bed. I guess it's not important enough to most people.

Trouble is, no one wants to look at furniture all day, so using furniture as a screen is out. I keep my PCs and hard drives as hidden inside the furniture as possible, though. Would be nice to meld them together.

True, except...

All of them routinely use 5-platter discs, aside from Samsung, Deathstar never stopped them. Hitachi's first 1TB was 5 platters, Seagate's current 3TB is 5-platters, etc.

Dell is very much a part of HPC

Dell is pretty much identical to HP in the x86 market, don't judge them only by their junk desktops and desktop printers. Remember that it wasn't too many years ago that both HP and Dell were known for superior quality and service, now they're both known for a race to the bottom in price and quality in consumer & small biz, but their server lines & support are almost indistinguishable, and both are gaining traction in the mainframe and HPC biz as well (obviously HP is much longer in mainframes; Dell is throwing an enormous amount of money and freshly-plucked engineering talent at breaking in because the margins are so huge).

Not a Dell fanboi, but know your enemies at least as well as you know your friends.

Funny

How every one of those steps applies to my SLED and RHEL installs as well. Not "activation" but I still have to go find the serial key somewhere whenever I get fed up with an old version or accumulated cruft.

Double the length of the list if you intend to compile your own install and apps, including having to come back and check on it every hour to type the next step, and make it every other month instead of every other year. Believe me, I've been there too many times.

But I understand, it's easy to ignore what you can't gloat about.

I guess you forget

That he was also the man who created all of that shareholder value in the first place. Without him there likely would have been no Sun Microsystems, at least not for long.

Look at the timetables

Silverlight came out long before HTML5 was nailed down. At the time, there was no consensus on what features would go in or how, the one early implementation had to waste a lot of time cutting and reorganizing features as the spec evolved.

I have that problem

But it's because the RealTek gigabit card I bought is a complete piece of junk. It overheated after being on for a few weeks once (note, my system isn't overclocked and temps are always fine), and since then it sometimes shows up for an hour after booting, but it's always gone by then. I'm stuck on the 100mbps onboard again - kind of pointless upgrading to a gigabit router now.

If you have a realtek card or onboard NIC, get rid of it.

I guess I'll have to pry a crowbar in my wallet and get a server-level card, even though I don't want 90% of the features.

A half dozen called

To report that their internet was down, in my company of 300. A couple after I blasted an email around to everyone to try Bing or Google before calling.

@AC

Why on earth wouldn't a company that presumably has a web site or web-based internal apps test them against the next version, so that it can be made compatible before the final release?

Can't speak for anyone else

But I've been enormously happy with the improvements in MySQL 5.5 (and 5.6 preview). I've started using 5.5 over the last few months and finally put it into production now that it's RC stage. The number of improvements in each point release are staggering, and add up to a much faster, more reliable, and less disk-gobbling database.

My big downer is that I never know whether Oracle is going to keep the mainline open source or kill it like OpenSolaris. If it turns into a no more previews, no more betas, just closed updates here on out, I'll probably look elsewhere.

Advanced databases

Advanced database support always comes to startup projects as soon as someone's willing to pay for it. In fact, that's probably one of their top line items, everyone wants some combination of postgre, sql server, db2, or oracle support. (Do people still use informix?)

If you don't live here now, you really have no idea...

The reality doesn't really match the news reports; San Jose, San Diego, and the Central Valley are still some of the most conservative in the nation. SF and Berkeley are still the only real liberal's playgrounds; the rest of the state is more dead set on keeping taxes low and getting through another year than any ideology, like most of the country.

Just because you can't see well doesn't mean nobody can

The text is so much clearer on an iPhone 4 compared next to a 3GS, it's striking just how much it looks like real paper instead of just a computer screen. I can't speak for everyone, but I squint less and read more comfortably for long periods than on a junk desktop monitor resolution, or even the 3GS's already decent resolution.

An odd question

In that case, you may have essentially sampled/remixed the photo, so it's no longer provable that it has any provenance and possibly falls under fair use anyway, so you're off the hook. If it did come up, you could just supply your original - if it was even possible to take an exactly identical photo, which it really isn't. In the end, if you can't convince the judge with some evidence, you get screwed, even if you were right all along.

But in any case, why would you consider contorting your actions to such great lengths just to take a nearly identical picture? It sounds more like asking "how far do I have to go to hide the fact that I ripped off a photo" - you have to change it enough that it isn't recognizably the original anymore, in effect making it a new piece of work anyway.

Are you thinking clearly?

The optical drive wouldn't be spinning - the idea is to reclaim otherwise wasted physical space with a few GB of extra SSD cache. In case you hadn't noticed many netbooks and SFF subnotebooks already have an optical drive, so why not have the option of using the existing data link. Don't buy this or any optical drive if battery life is your number one criteria, but some people still need one. If you need more than 64GB of storage, you can get it for a small fraction of the cost of going full SSD by pairing a drive set to go on and off quickly with a small hybrid cache.

I can guarantee the margins aren't high enough on desktop parts to ever see something like this available to the consumer, on Newegg or such.

Because regular chips aren't much higher

Compared to the 840 (the only one likely to ever reach 45W) the 860S isn't really much higher. And if you lock it to a certain maximum, either in the BIOS or with one of a number of multiplier-tweaking tools for Windows or Linux, you get the same power output. By locking a 970 even lower, you get even more out of it at the same TDP, but those are insanely expensive and the power savings will never add up to the cost difference. Once the 32nm parts come downlevel just a little more, they would make much more sense for servers than mobile parts.

iirc, the boards for Dothan or Merom were only being made up until Conroe was widely available, since Conroe could likewise be equivalently clocked down.

That's barely adequate specs

You used to be able to get PCs that put that to shame: 1920x1200 in 15". What happened? Was that just a seasonal fad, then people figured out that software hadn't quite caught up to the hardware, or OEMs had no idea how to preconfigure font scaling? (Though OS font scaling and browser pic scaling seems to work fine these days.)

Not impossible, hardly even difficult

Even if they gave you an interface to forward ports? Many ISPs will routinely block ports 25, 135, 137, 445 and don't much like 80 or 8080 either, but thanks to the nature of many protocols that are suck to advertise on alternate ports (HTTP, SMTP, HTTPS), the ISP can use the host header to proxy from the outside to the correct customer. Most other service ports are easily and commonly altered anyway, so it won't be a problem to use any random port.

We already NAT or Proxy everything off of two IPs (and one is nothing but a second RDP address, could be modified if it was a problem), it used to be nearly a dozen. Gave back all but a handful.

very wrong indeed

Obviously meant "britch" there, guv. Got to have yur clean security britches!

I think you missed the boat

I've already filled up a 2TB drive and two 1TB drives at home, and at the office, we have a brand spanking new SAN with 10 1TB drives (and 20 300GB) that are rapidly being filled up from all of the clunky old SANs.

A 2TB drive takes about 30-40 hours to format or copy.

Itanium sales have sunk every year.

So where does PA RISC fit into this analysis, the original dead chip?

And Intel has killed chips it committed to in the past. HP is practically the only vendor left in the Itanic market giving it more than a token effort, everyone else has moved everything to Power or x64.

NTFS certainly has some issues, but worst modern fs is pretty harsh.

When my #1 qualification is compression, I have one choice: NTFS. For some reason *nix folks not only refused to add compression to their filesystems and largely ignored pleas and projects to include it, they ignored and outright handwaved away both theoretical arguments and hard benchmarks proving that compression was almost always a net win on modern systems ten years ago. I know because I made and was involved in some of them. A decade later, with ZFS showing how dedup and compression trounces older fs, we finally get some pushes to include it in the mainstream. That kind of blindness in the pursuit of narrow perfection is what separates Linux development from those that need sales to survive - and this from a regular user of Linux.

He'll be out on parole within 18 months, perhaps even 6

Isn't prison overcrowding wonderful?

Real databases cost real money

MySQL costs nothing but the admin time, which is often less than an Oracle DBA's cost anyway. In Facebook's world, real cost still outweighs a certain amount of opportunity cost.

Your FCC regs are mixed up

That's FCC Part 15.5(b), part of Subpart A, and that's not what it means; by regulation it has to accept any signal that it could physically receive without causing a fire/short or spewing further interference into the air. Any device is always allowed and encouraged to filter extraneous signals once it's accepted them. Too bad that despite the prevalence of good OEM implementations, cheap Chinese versions are as likely as not to randomly unlock or start the panic mode when hit with interference.

Car alarms would fall under 15 Subpart C anyway, not B, since they transmit signals.

It's basically there for high-end workloads...

If Larry Ellison wasn't committed, the chip would have died a quiet death within a week of the buyout, and nothing more would ever have been heard of it. Obviously, he thinks it's something worth sinking money into. Sun really did do some excellent engineering, it was their sales that stunk.

That was true for hubs...

And promptly obsolete once proper switches came out. Token ring switching turned out to be much more difficult and expensive than Ethernet switching, which was the real reason it failed.

Definitely, in the beginning quite a bit of "100mbps" was really closer to 20-40mbps in reality and prone to collisions and bad drivers, but it was faster than 10 so many didn't care too much, same with early and cheap low-end gigabit this generation. IBM didn't let anyone get away with those shenanigans, but ethernet prices fell every year far more than token ring.