Banias loading one ThinkPad }x{31 opening to the public! (via AltaVista Babel Fish, Korean to English translation of ThinkPad X31 preview at IDF 2002)
Completely un-related: clearance on ThinkPad X30s
Category: Legacy
- AC&NC Disk I/O Benchmarks – good listing of benchmarks
- stress – nice little stress testing tool
- Server Conformanc Tester – looks not so useful
Holy crap, forget this hard drive business, the RAM-SAN 520 (by Texas Memory Systems), which uses SDRAM for storage, provides over 3GB/s of bandwidth, 20µs latency, and 500,000 IOPS! (servicing up to 15 Fiber Channel interfaces simultaneously) I’m not even going to ask what it costs.
Hmm, here’s an announcement for their Tera-RamSan (2 million IOPS):
More details are available at www.superSSD.com. The Tera-RamSan costs $1.6 million, making it a great value for those demanding the best performance in a storage subsystem.
A great value. I’ll take two! 🙂
These bullet impact pictures reminded me about linking the Shooting Holes in Wounding Theories: The Mechanics of Terminal Ballistics paper. Related: Kinetic Pulse, Wound Ballistics, Modeling the Wounded Soldier, How a high-speed bullet damages an organ, PETA: The Military’s War on Animals
Nice, a 1.7T of storage (see /. thread) on a consumer PC. For a while I’ve been thinking about doing something similar myself. Here’s the cost analysis:
| Qty | Component | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enermax FS2000BB (alt: Jinco case) | $330 |
| 2 | Antec True550 550Watt | $200 |
| 1 | Tyan Thunder i7501 Pro (S2721GN) | $400 |
| 1 | Intel Xeon 2.0GHz (533MHz bus) | $230 |
| 1 | 512MB DDR PC2100 ECC | $150 |
| 2 | 3Ware Escalade 7500-4LP | $480 | 8 | Western Digital 200GB Caviar w/ 8MB cache (WD2000JB) | $1920 |
The total cost of this comes out to just over $3700, and running two RAID 5 sets, that’d give you 1.2TB of storage, or about $3/GB. Which ain’t too bad (You’ll pay about $6500 for a 1-1.2TB RAID-5 NAS). Oh, while Apple’s Xserve RAID ain’t bad, their quotes and pricing figures are slightly misleading as they are using RAID 0 (striping, no reduncancy). For RAID 5, multiply their cost/GB by 7/6, and for capacity, multiply by 6/7. (7/5, 5/7 figuring in a hot-spare).
Notes:
- 2 3ware 7500’s instead of one SATA 8500-8 because the 8500’s are effectively the same card. The price is about the same, as is the perfomance. The 2 7500’s most likely would actually perform better with PCI peering as the cards are only 64/33 PCI. At this point, it’d probably be best to wait around for the 3ware PCI-X card or related SATA competition. Of course, if you’re going for SATA, SATA-II will have stuff like native command queuing (!)
- I didn’t give too much thought to the motherboard decision. It’s just based on what has at least one PCI-X slot for future compatibility, and at least 2 peered PCI buses (AMD can’t compete in the server-space because it doesn’t have either!) Went with the Tyan because it was competitively priced and I like the company.
- If we’re concerned about uninterrupted service, you could get a real redundant power supply, which might push your price up by about $1-200 (also, use one of the drives as a hot spare, and get hotswap cages for all the drives). In fact, don’t use this homebrew solution at all as IOPs are rediculously low and consumer drivers aren’t rated for 100% util 24/7 operation
- if you’re aiming for absolute lowest cost, you can go w/ an AMD MP/MPX based chip/board which will shave off around $200. Also, the monster case is mostly for fun (and hot swapping), you should have no problem fitting 8 drives into a normal mid or full tower, which would shave off another $250. You could also go for cheaper drives, which would shave off another $400 or so, bringing your price/performance to about $2.30/GB
- the pricing table is styled w/ adjacent sibling selectors. I would have used colgroup, but it’s way too verbose
Yep, it has tabs.
Todd Dominey posted about his CSS footer problems last week, generating some good comments. Anyone who’s done much CSS work has come across this problem (other inadequacies: mixing fixed and variable width columns, subtractive box model math, centering, full window heights, floats in flow, reserving white space—basically anything that tables could do easily). The only CSS-only solutions I’ve had success with for multi-column footers: using floats (not absolute), nested DIVs, and a spacer (clear:both) to clear the floats [examples: Gettingit.com, Ticketstubs]
This nesting method is what Scott’s template uses. Hmm, here’s an interesting footer method by another Scott. It sits at the bottom of the viewport unless the page is bigger than the viewport. Still does some nesting, but seems cleaner. Does it work in multiple columns? Hmm…
Great Doctorow interview on O’Reilly Network.
Tor did a print run of 8,500 copies for Down and Out. In all likelihood, that’s the total amount of bound books that will ever be created. There have been 75,000 downloads of the book directly from Doctorow’s site, and no one knows how many other copies have been emailed between friends or downloaded from KaZaa. So, point proven: for those of us who believe in the Net to spread information and knowledge, Doctorow gets lots of Whuffie.
Insanely Great Crappy
After giving up on Apple’s tremendously lame Terminal.app, and trying out iTerm (it’ll get better), I’ve now switched to running xterms on Apple’s X11 build. It’s not too bad. A few annoyances (can’t map quick key to application launch, doesn’t support Apple Copy/Paste mapping into an xterm, .xsession doesn’t seem to be working), but those might be workaround-able with something like Youpi Key or a Window Manager. If not, I can give GLterm a try I suppose. Sad thing? X11 loads only just a hair slower than the Terminal.app [in case you didn’t already know that Terminal.app was a big bloated piece of crap].
Simon points out Håvard Eide’s PHP5 notes (a bunch of experiments based on a PHP5 CVS snapshot