Posts by Tim Hogard

PCI/DSS?

Any one who has to deal with the PCI/DSS rules of "one server per function" would love these things. Sun used to make these (aka x1 a decade ago) but decided to abandon the market. There is a major market for "appliance" based servers that are low powered.

Green is always good right?

A few years ago I stuck a good power meter on a CFL light bulb. It told me a much different story than the one printed on the shiny box that the CFL came in. I've since stuck more than 100 CFLs into the little test lab that has been augmented with with a light meter. So far this magic 80% efficiency I see printed on the boxes isn't even close. The best I've seen is about 46% and that is only for the 1st 10 hours of the CFLs life. LEDs and Halogens both do better on average that the CFLs I have in my lab yet they are considered more "green". The only green they are involved with is money green.

No product=no sales

@Kleyken and @AC have it right.

There isn't any thing left in the SPARC line to replace the loads of old $1000 and $2000 servers that are reaching the end of their life. We have been using the telco grade Netra 210 since we can slap Sol 9 on then and just move everything over but those machines aren't cheap and are over powered for most appliance like applications. Maybe someone who used to work at Sun could refab the IIIi at 45 and end up with a sweet low power chip for the internet appliance market.

We have been told last order date for the N210 is in about a month and they don't have anything to replace it so we have to come up with a 5 year plan based on rumors. That or we dump Sun which is starting to look like the best option.

n=6?

Amdahl's law has been telling us for over 4 decades that throwing more cores at a problem quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. For the last decade or so the workloads and CPUs dictate that more than about 6 cores doesn't buy much if anything in extra performance. For the average PC, most users won't ever see any improvement with more than 6 cores so I expect that to remain the high performance sweet spot for years to come.

Sometimes you just gots to ho

When you have a major stock holder that wants to bail, your going to get sold when your pimp says so and you can't argue that with out a slap-down. Sun has only one machine in their lineup this month I would buy which is the lowest server count since I started using their hardware in 1987. Its been a nice ride but it looks like we both need to move on. It hasn't been a good sign for the last few years when the grey-beard types are using BSD on sun kit since the new OS is bloat rich and stability free worse that the stuff from Redmond.

Is the problem due to excessive management already?

Is traffic in the UK following the pattern in Melbourne where there congestion is getting worse and worse yet there has been a decrease in total miles driven every year for the last four?

All this newfangled spelling

I love how the British misspell words. It so cute pretending to spell like the French. I have one of the 1st best selling books published in London in 1686 and there isn't a RE ending or an unneeded U anywhere in it. As far as the silent L in solder, its been there along with the silent L in Salmon and other Latin words for over 2000 years.

Do these Cylons come with paperwork with all the corners cut off?

Aren't knee jerk bans great?

The green canvas bags are starting to show up in large numbers in Aussie waterways and beaches. So we have replaced one type of bag for a "green" option that I expect will be worse in the long run. In my house the "canvas" bags last about 100 uses yet they have more than 100 times the plastic as the old type bags and take far more energy and effort to manufacture. Some of them contain 6 types of plastic including nylon that may never break down.

System designed for different addresses

AVS was designed to take advantage of the 9 digit zip codes used in the US which pinpoint down to about a block in most cases combined with the larger 5 digit house numbers that are also often used. That would have meant that a typical house will only share its AVS code with 1 or 2 others in most cases. The problem is people don't seem to remember their 9 digit zip code and tend to remember just the 1st 5 so the zip+4 was dropped. Aussie banks (except Citibank) are going with the excuse that AVS violates privacy so they refused to even do these trivial checks.

Where is the old tech?

The problem is getting bandwidth the DSLAMs in the local exchanges. Maybe Ofcom should reintroduce the concept of party line concept for fibre optics. Most ISP could drastically increase their capacity and decrease their costs with links that only get them to nearby exchanges and they can share a fibre with others thanks to the magic of fibre wavelength division.

I've seen green laser from a plane

On approach to Melbourne I noticed a green laser and it did cause the scratches in the window to light up. It was also very easy to tell where the beam was coming from. If they ban pointing lasers at airplanes, will they also ban pointing lasers at cars or are the revenues too high from the IR lasers the police like to use?

100% uptime?

How you can have 100% uptime when you have to reboot the thing to apply critical patches every few weeks? One of our Solaris 9 boxes went 3 years without needing any patches that required a reboot due to its lean install of less than 10 packages. Our T1000 needs patches every few weeks for lots of really broken things so how can joe's be secure with no real problems if we are both running the same OS and same hardware?

Back to the topic, How will Transitive emulate the sparc security issues on a CPU that has problems? The openbsd guys have found a large list of access control problems on the latest x86 processors where things like page write protect may not work on some cores of a multi-core cpu sometimes.

Follow the money

If we follow the money we find that the plants where these get made pay somewhere about $.004 a kWh if they pay for electricity at all. These plants are subsidised by the Chinese government to grab the long term market share.

What is the power company going to do to homes with bad power factors? Small businesses get hit with more expensive electricity so its just a matter of time before we all do.

Do you have any yellowed CFL? If so they are producing ozone which is far worse as a green house gas than CO2.

So much wrong

There is plenty wrong with the proposed plant location like its too far from where the water needs to go, the currents near the beach aren't very good for this project and the land around the area is not great for large industrial works since its full of holes left from prior mining operations.

The big problem is they are building a plant 4 times the size of the Tampa plant for 24 times the money. The proposed plant's energy consumption is about double what modern plants use. The real question is what will happen early in 2009 when the dams will all run out of water since two years is a long time to go with no water.

Where are the rest of the standard units?

You seemed to have forgotten the standard bribery unit which of course is the Pint of beer.

Backup on the same with bootcamp's help

I used boot-camp to create a partition which I then reformatted and set up as a time machine partition. It won't protect me against hard drive failure but it does protect against accidental file deletions and application bugs. You need about 110% of the size of the data you expect to backup.

More misinformation?

The GPS system works by finding out how long it is between the sats and the receiver. It starts by syncing its time to as many sats as it can see and then figures out the speed of light delay and Doppler shift for the signal from each satellite. It then uses that info to readjust its internal clock and then readjusts all the other timing calculations. Once it has a good fix then it starts feeding in the receivers velocity and temperature change back into the calculations of the Kalman Filter. Deep inside the GPS chips is a time base that will be in sync with the sats to about 90 billions of a second or it won't get a fix. The result is that if it has a good lock on several satellites and has had time to stabilise the oscillations of position, time and speed then its position will be far better than any radar device that simply displays the highest Doppler shift it sees being reflected to it. Radar guns don't measure speed, they only measure the Doppler offset and show what the speed might be if there is no vibration involved. After all the tuning forks they use to calibrate them aren't moving at 100km/hr are they?

Virtual kitchen sink too?

Early versions of containers resulted in a very heavy containers and the root zone still included everything a hacker could dream of. Maybe they should take a lesson from IBM's real big iron from decades ago and create a very light top zone that uses security through simplicity and then let us put what we want in the zones. It would make far more sense from a security perspective especially for those of us paranoid to only want the bare essentials on our servers.