I believe that they still have a slide rule as standard issue equipment on NASA space missions. It's hard to argue with the cost associated with adding an additional layer of fault tolerance... If it could, in a pinch, be used to plot a survivable reentry or a similarly life saving task when they sent the first rockets to space it can still serve the same function today. Sort of like the saying, "an elevator can't break, it can only become stairs."

That is a gnu'ism. It isn't "standard unix".

1500 MB/s is because it is constrained by the disks. Point being that I agree that IB is awesome.

How do you figure? Infiniband is the absolute final word in minimizing cost per port/density and provides rdma and ultra low latency on crazy high bandwidth connections. There is a reason that companies like NetApp use infiniband for their clustering solutions ;good luck maintaining cache coherency between two or more nodes over something else. Check out how scalable informatics is using IB links on storage boxes that can do over 5k iops at 1500 MB/s

As with most things I find that the best solution is actually some reasonable balance of the two diametrically opposed sides. When naming servers I often use a whimsical name which provides a hint as to the purpose but without being so specific that should it's purpose change the name will prove to be confusing. For instance I often name monitoring servers after the various heads of the US intelligence community. A name like Tenet or Goss is easily parsable as a functional name for me as I am familiar with the scheme and the intended purpose. To those without knowledge of the basis of the scheme it is just a abitrary name as good as any other. These types of schemes are easy enough to come up with and have very little downside. For instance you could name bootservers after shoe companies or fileservers after types of files (keyhole, finisher, shaping) etc...

As an unrelated aside I'm typing this from a machine named angilas which is a godzilla monster. The rest of my general purpose machines are all named after godzilla monsters too :)

I've had plenty of experience with "true" hardware raid cards to be able to say that in the best cases they will be faster than software on a given system, but if you use the same money you spent on the specialized hardware instead on improving the base config and using a more traditional non-raid drive controller you can often match or exceed the performance and you will always have a more clear upgrade path as you needn't be tied to a given manufacturer or involve your self with a build a temporary data store migrate between older and newer hardware. Look at Sun's ZFS storage boxes that use non-raid sata and sas controllers as an example. Even some of netapp and EMC boxes are primarily general purpose hardware inside and just use highly optimized software raid with tight integration into software volume management and filesystem.

Look at people who spent big bucks on SSL cards or TCP offload ethernet cards only a few years ago and are now left with hardware that is slower than software only solutions for these tasks on more modern GP hardware.

Of course there are some edge cases where this doesn't matter as perhaps you need the absolute highest performance right now and are already maxed out on the rest of the GP gear. Or maybe in some very atypical load situations.

TrueCrypt suffers from much of the same blackbox behavior as the parent post explains with regards to this hardware encryption scheme. Open, Free, software based encryption is more secure in that it is open to analysis every step along the way, however it suffers from a different set of potential pitfalls that go along with crowd sourced designed by committee software. I'd choose the more open solution personally, but just because you have the source code doesn't mean that you or any other interested party has properly validated it against potential flaws in the implementation of even the most mathematically sound encryption. You all remember the recent fiasco with ssh key generation on debian based distros I'm sure.

I wish I had a mod point for this, but mine expired yesterday. This is true and insightful and exactly the sort of comment that slashdot needs to see more of.

Good controllers let you set the behaviors as do good implementations of software raid. For instance on Solaris with SVM you can set a raid 1 to read only from a the primary, roundrobin alternation, or (my favorite) read from whichever drive that has a head in position closest to the requested block. For random read biased application the final option wins hands down on latency, for sequential streaming reads the roundrobin seems to be the best option, and for absolute hardware reliability the "read from primary" ensures that your secondary drive gets far less activity than your primary and reduces the chances of "walking dead" failures which are no uncommon in 2 disk mirrors. I.E. the primary fails and the secondary fails within minutes or hours of the primary since their usage patterns are basically identical.

I wish I had mod points to apply to this comment. It has just the right sort of "you know it when you see it" practicality that we should use to measure colloquial terms. Maybe there isn't some deifnitive line in the sand as others in this thread have pointed out. I can't stick a price or level of particular inconvenience onto the level of busted which qualifies as "bricked". I can however tell you that when a person of average knowledge and average means can easily repair it that it is not bricked. I.E. while it may be possible for me to use a logic analyzer and signal injector to unbrick a looped bootloader on a integrated circuit I can be reasonably sure that the effort cost of doing such would be so prohibitive as to make it a practical impossibility. This is how I've most commonly heard the term used and it has been applied to all types of consumer electronics from video game consoles (bad mod chip) to fuel injection computers to cell phones and wifi routers.

This is a ridiculous slippery slope argument and one which has very little merit to begin with. Basically you arguing that providing a fair trial is prohibitive to the prosecution. While the truth of the matter is that the prosecution is attempting to take the shortest easiest path to convictions and they are attempting to do so at the expense of juris prudence. This ruling doesn't mean that breathalyzer evidence can't be used; quite to the contrary. It simply says that the bar for evidence should be held higher and that should a prosecution want to use scientific evidence it must be actual science which is used. Real science doesn't involve trusting data spit out of black boxes ipso facto if you make the box transparent you make the evidence stronger. Evidence has no bias for or against the accused and as such your stronger evidence may prove guilt or may prove innocence but in the end it will actually prove something. Whereas right now the only thing being shown by the evidence is that a black box says a number and the government is supposed to trust that a private entity which manufacturers the box is somehow more trustworthy than the word of any other person who challenges them in court.

This sounds like a classic bad motherboard situation. I too have had systems run fine for several weeks and then suddenly go tits up with similar symptoms. I'm curious what make of ram and MB you have actually.

Likewise I'm finding that Windows 7 feels subjectively more responsive than XP on the same hardware. So far I'm really liking the beta, but as a microsoftie friend of mine pointed out, "the vista betas worked really well too...." I'm not going to go off the handle and run this on my laptop or work machines (instead of linux), but I could easily see keeping this as the OS on my one windows desktop machine that I use for gaming...