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Comment Re:The 2nd Amendment could help cure this disease (Score 1) 299

Not true responsible, legal citizens cannot have guns in these areas leaving only the criminals to get them. And the criminals don't care about the proper, legal process of getting a concealed weapon permit. If you make it legal for people to privately carry and defend themselves, the crime rate will drop. There are statistics proving this: http://www.humanevents.com/2009/01/26/concealed-carry-permits-are-life-savers/ "But since adopting a concealed carry law Florida’s total violent crime rate has dropped 32% and its homicide rate has dropped 58%. Floridians, except for criminals, are safer due to this law. And Florida is not alone. Texas’ violent crime rate has dropped 20% and homicide rate has dropped 31%, since enactment of its 1996 carry law."

Comment Re:Christmas Bonuses For All (Score 3, Insightful) 130

Or if this other comment is true: "From what I hear, based on the StackExchange podcast, and the tweets that went out from SquareSpace and StackExchange during the whole idea is that Peer1 had a complete failure, and it was only due to the hard work of their customers (SE and SquareSpace) that the datacenter was able to remain operational. If your customers have to start carrying buckets of diesel up 17 flights of starirs, you, as a datacenter have failed. Peer1, left to their own devices would have just let the thing shutdown, and apparently head office wasn't aware of how bad things even were." then you better give your customers some free months of service for doing your job for you. Either way, figure out who kept it going and reward them handsomely or you suck!!!

Comment The 2nd Amendment could help cure this disease (Score 1) 299

Funny getting a concealed permit in NJ is next to impossible. In other recent news they're talking about the high crime rate in Chicago another city known for not allowing concealed weapons. Rather than study the problem, how 'bout letting the honest, law abiding citizens carry legally and watch the crime rate drop drastically as it has in other places? Places that allow private, honest, law abiding citizens that pass background checks to carry weapons have drastically lower crime rates. All the liberal, leftist, gun controlling areas that won't let someone have the right to defend themselves have higher crime rates. Statistics prove this. Stop wasting time and money researching murder as a disease and just let people exercise their rights and the rest will take care of itself.

Comment its possible, but risky (Score 1) 405

If you're willing to deal with the time it will take to write it all out, then its doable. You need a backup software that supports VTL (virtual tape library). With this, the physical drives are seen as tape devices. So it will start writing to drive #1 and when its full it will say "out of media" and it *should* pause for new media. You "eject" the drive, attach a fresh one, and hit continue. Then wash, rinse, repeat til complete. As others pointed out, it will take some time. You can speed it up with eSATA or USB 3. If you're on a Mac, you can speed it up using t-bolt. I believe Arkeia still offers a free version and they did/do support VTL. Haven't been current on free backup wares for a while. One thing to bear in mind as well once you write this 24Tb to a collection of media any single media failure will result in all data being unrecoverable. So you might opt for doubling your backup window and making a duplicate copy. Otherwise your best bet is to put all the drives in a NAS configuration (think FreeNAS) with a RAID6 structure, then have the backup s/w use this as its destination. You could do this with an 8 drive chassis of 8x4Tb SATA disks (2 lost for RAID6, leaves 6x4TB=24Tb raw). A similar idea could be accomplished with ZFS, but its future is somewhat unknown with Oracle these days. If you need longevity, I'd stick with a more open/compatibly filesystem. If you manage to setup it correctly and use exFAT, you could mount the backup volume to any current Linux, Windows, or Mac system and if the backup s/w runs on all platforms you'd have a lot more compatibility and recovery options.

Comment Re:Not like we used it anyway (Score 3, Insightful) 233

Ironically, since the Safari web app came out, people have been asking for this especially since many of the videos won't play in the native app anyway you need the web app or Vevo, etc. Yet as soon as they pull it, people start making a big deal out of it. Sure Apple is distancing themselves from Google a bit, but its not like this broke something. It would be different if Google Voice was built into IOS like it is on Android and then Apple removed it. That would have some impact. But simply removing the YouTube app? Not so much.

Comment Re:Appeal just waiting to happen (Score 1) 372

Also, his comparison to pharma is a bit off. Sure they invest years into stuff, but how many of them do we later find out faked tests or results and years later are being sued for killing or harming thousands? Not to mention the idea of gene patents and such. Even worse, for most of the psychological drugs out there, the pharmas don't really even know how they work. Sure they know they're affecting neurotransmitters or serotonin levels, etc, but whereas a technology patent such as Apple might have is intended to do one specific thing or one way of doing, they know how its done. Most of the drugs on the market are still sort of voodoo. Yes, we know they affect this level or that, etc etc... but we don't 100% know how it works and why which is why there are so many off-market or other uses and why the long term effects often result in death/harm and subsequent lawsuits. Yet, Posner thinks its okay for the pharmas to get a patent for years of work, but Apple or Samsung or Motorola don't deserve the same thing? Also, worth noting that the only reason pharmas invest so many years into their works and patents is because they have to: its called clinical trials. If pharmas could move as fast as tech companies, they would. But fortunately for us, testing needs to be done and it takes time and refinement. The comparison of fast tech to pharma doesn't equate.

Comment Appeal just waiting to happen (Score 3, Interesting) 372

Its starting to sound like Posner had a specific agenda. After all, he volunteered for this one. It would seem that instead of being a judge and enforcing or enacting the law, he used this as his proverbial soapbox and to make a point. I can't wait for Apple to realize this (they probably already have) and appeal for a new trial to go forward thanks to Posner expressing his opinions, etc. The fact is, Posner doesn't make the laws; he interprets and applies them. By volunteering for the case, then shooting it down, then talking about his discontent with technological patents, he's made it pretty clear he has an agenda.

Comment Yes, this is legit and no, we're not idiots (Score 5, Informative) 387

For everyone that thinks I trolled slashdot... here's the quick backstory behind my question(s): Our organization received a grant to pay for this from a private philanthropist that has a medical issue that is currently being researched by one of our labs (this happens to us not to infrequently). We have an existing HPC of roughly 300 nodes and 1200 cores that's all 1Gbps connected and running Rocks 5.1. The grant money came in in two different payments. We used the first payment to buy the nodes (which are in route to arrive in 2 weeks or so). The second payment was going to pay for the GPU's and the extra infrastructure (storage is one thing we currently have plenty of... both SAN and NAS). Unfortunately, we hit two issues: 1) one of our more seasoned enterprise admins took a new job at Apple's new NC datacenter and 2) our cluster admin passed away from a heart attack about a week after the purchase was made. This put us into a bit of a holding pattern. We're in the process of replacing both of them, but in the meantime we A) have the equipment arriving soon and B) have the second round of the grant money in hand now. We're smart enough to know that we lost two very valuable resources and we decided to step back, pause, and re-evaluate. The servers are already bought. The infrastructure, interconnects, and GPU's are not. The old admin knew which GPU's he wanted; unfortunately we haven't found his research anywhere to know what and why. He had also planned to go with the latest release of Rocks, but only because he was very familiar with it. We know there are other options out there and we've no idea how well Rocks can scale. Additionally, I don't see an option for chargeback with Rocks (at least not from a Google search), plus we've heard they recently lost a core developer. Thus, we went to the Slashdot community for advice. So I've already seen some good info on the IB versus 10GbE question and its much appreciated. We're still looking for info on which Linux distro and which GPU to go for. We want to make the best decision we can and use the money as wisely as possible. But we also realize that we know what we don't know and thought the Slashdot community could provide some experience to help us make the right decisions.
Linux

Submission + - Best Use For A New SuperComputer (HPC) 3

Supp0rtLinux writes: In about 2 weeks time I will be receiving everything necessary to build out the largest x86_64-based supercomputer on the east coast of the US (at least until someone takes the title away from us). Its spec'd to start with 1200 servers with dual socket, six core configs. We primarily do life-science/health/bio related tasks on our existing (and fairly small) HPC. We intend to continue this usage, but to also open it up for new uses (energy comes to mind). Additionally, we'd like to lease out access to recoup some of our costs. So what's the best Linux distro for something of this size and scale? Any that include a chargeback option/module built-in? Additionally, due to cost, we have to choose either IB or 10GbE for the backend, we cannot have both. Either way, all nodes will have 4 x 1Gbps ports available. Would Slashdot readers go with IB or 10GbE if they had to choose? And last, all nodes include only a basic onboard GPU. We intend to put powerful GPU's onto the PCI-e slot and open up the new HPC for GPU related crunching. Any suggestions on the most power, Linux-driver friendly, PCI-e based GPU available?

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