… which is why I haven’t commented on a number of interesting things. Hope to return to full capability over the next few days. Some bug decided to kick me hard a few hours after I wrote the previous post. Rehydrating and recovering.

Twas the night before xmas, and all through the HPC solutions house, the disks were moving, just not the mouse … The workers had gone home to their families, and shipped the last JackRabbit of the year, while the benchmarker cackled and tuned, making the ΔV faster.

Thought a few people would like to see this. 8GB RAM machine, 24 drives, 36TB raw, 31.5 raw after RAID6 with 1 hot spare. 29TB usable (there is some serious rounding error in many of the tools as I have discovered last night :( 1 TiB = 1.0995 1TB, and 29T = 31.8 TB … go figure …) root@dv4:~# df -h /data Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md0 29T 24G 29T 1% /data and the file root@dv4:~# ls -alFh /data/big.

[ ](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/windows_for_submarines_rollout/) the line about “almost never need to give their command systems autonomous firing authority” does little to comfort me. Given the apparent ease at which external regimes can crack into the US DoD machines via virus/malware on windows systems … this … well … doesn’t strike me as the smartest idea I have ever heard. It gives the phrase “blue screen of death” a whole new, and quite unwelcome, meaning.

Oh yeah. Thats why. Thanks AT&T;, we really appreciate it.

The insecurity and potential compromise of serious and exploitable “mis-feature” in a browser (causing the browser maker to suggest using a competitive browser platform), or the security theatre at all of the banks we deal with who write their web pages specifically for that browser, so that no other browsers will work properly with it, regardless of platform, and whose representitives insist in meetings with you that they are indeed secure … see the little lock they ask me derisively?

I have commented in the past on the … er … uh … missing 64 bit Java plugins for Linux and other OSes. Well, Sun appears to have finally addressed this. Good job Sun. Better (6 years) late than never.

Some sort of fire at a local substation knocked power offline. Mail may bounce … my apologies. Will try to re-route to here for the moment until we can get power restored. I have to verify that the building owner will allow generators on the premises … [update] power is back up. New generator sitting in the loading bay area. Manual setup when we need it. Not needed now as the power came back on just when we were delivering the generator.

From the mailing list …

The Register has an article on this. As I noted in the previous post (the linked article really), ASP reborn is a hard model to make work. You have to deliver what customers want, and do so inexpensively. Amazon is succeeding at this in spades. Sun originally had the right idea … then someone decided to make Network.com into a massive Solaris marketing tool rather than a resource you could run what you needed.