Archive for: server
Emailing Steve Jobs is now about as synonymous with writing Santa for presents. If you have a wish/problem, Steve will respond. Sort of different than your parents posing as the man himself. But hey, you get the picture.
A French Xserv user who was saddened and upset by Apple’s decision to nix the high-end hardware shot off an email to none other than Steve Jobs. Hopefully he wasn’t looking for a long, detailed explanation, because as we all know, Steve Jobs’ responses are anything but. On that note, the official word according to Steve: “Hardly anyone was buying them.”
Shocking — I know. Sarcasm aside, it’s sad to see such a powerful piece of hardware die. Not to mention, Mac Pros just don’t fit into server racks quite as nicely.
Hop inside for a picture of the actual email exchange.
- September 9, 2010 7:07 am
Tech bloggers and smartphone junkies alike may be rantin’ and ravin’ over the upcoming ARM Cortex A9 processor and it’s lofty 1.5GHz speeds and dual-core possibilities, but there are much greater things on the horizon.
Introducing the ARM Cortex A15. This architecture, codenamed “Eagle”, will usher in heaping amounts of digital masculinity in the form of 2.5GHz clock speeds as well as dual and quad-core designs. Even more mind boggling, the A15 will feature support for up to 1TB of RAM. Yes, a 2.5GHz quad-core CPU on a phone. For the record, expect this processor of the gods to come in 32nm and 28nm variants, with plans to also take on server roles in their next life. Interesting…
Of course, the A9 isn’t even publicly available yet in any form. So to say the A15 is coming “soon” is slightly misleading. Then again, all things considered, 2013 isn’t that far off, is it? Larger pic of the A15 architecture and upcoming ARM roadmap after the jump…
…and for pre-orders! Of course, the record number of pre-orders could be from people tired of waiting in line. Though I’d be willing to say a few more stragglers who’ve been putting off jumping over to team Apple were finally wooed by the iPhone 4.
Either way, for AT&T to not expect massive customer upgrades and subsequently prepare for the onslaught on a day such as today is downright ridiculous. While true, that Apple has been having issues all day as well, make note that Apple has to check back to AT&T servers for upgrades — precisely what the majority of people are likely doing today. (Tons of iPhone 3G users and even some 3GS users are primed and eligible for upgrade.)
So in the end, AT&T has somehow managed to fail for a 4th time. Could this be a foreshadowing to the type of delays, headaches, and overall service we can come to expect when iPhone 4 officially launches and starts showing up in end users’ hands? It’s only the same thing we’ve been dealing with for the last three years…
We rag on Ubisoft pretty hard here. But it isn’t without merit. Ubi’s blind love for customer slaying DRM is disgusting and shameful. All the while Ubi goes on proclaiming how great it is for consumers and how much we love it….right. Blizzard on the other hand understands customers (and Ubi’s customers no less) as the company has come forward stating that they will be taking a different approach…
Crafty fellows we nerds are. Servers are a rather utilitarian affair normally. It’s just a bunch of computer parts in a box designed to connect many devices together and manage multiple services. The Millennium Falcon server mod however eschews the simple designs of the normal server and instead draws on one thing that makes many a geek tick — space/sci-fi/Star Wars.
The outer shell is a 1979 Millennium Falcon model with Apple G4 internals plugging away at the daily grind. It’s a pretty sweet mod for sure and one more example of how Star Wars can literally be integrated into pretty much anything you think of. Think you can top this…?
Speed, like drugs, hobbies, food, and smoking is addictive. With speed, the adrenaline rush that follows is the natural high for some. In the tech world, while we ourselves may not be moving hundreds of miles per hour in the dopest ride, we do have certain objects that move at high velocity — hard drives. As far as old spinners go, the general rule of thumb is that the faster the drive spins, the faster it will perform. Now, this isn’t exact as a few other factors such as connection interface, number of platters, and cache size also affect the end result. But if you want to soon move from merely “fast” to really fast, Western Digital has a new set of VelociRaptor hard drives they’d love you to take a look at.
While not technically revealed “officially” yet, the announcement is due soon..as in within the next couple weeks soon. The new found speed will come courtesy of the drives utilizing the newer, faster data SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) protocol. Other notable mentions that have no tie to speed include a small 2.5″ form factor wrapped in the 3.5″ “IcePack” cooler allowing easy installation in your standard sized drive bay. Another nod goes to the 3ms average latency time which I might add is pretty damn fast for your standard “moving” hard drive.
Like many other hard drives coming onto the market, the new VelociRaptors will also feature a “NoTouch Ramp” technology which simply means the drive head never touches the actual drive meaning longer life all around and less chances for hard drive failures — yay.
Finally, one corporate-grade feature that is moving down to this prosumer drive is that of “Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF)” This little spiffy piece of tech will help the drive cope with high vibration situations. In the corporate world, certain environments such as the drive being stuffed in a large drive array within a server farm is the most obvious image that comes immediately to mind. For consumers who won’t really ever move their computer or face the same levels of vibration in the home environment, this feature likely won’t return any investment. Still, it’s nice that WD included it.
In my personal experience with a few VelociRaptor drives currently on the market as well as seeing countless reviews, benchmarks, and hands-on videos comparing these drives to comparable SSD’s has left me rather unimpressed. The price premium for the ‘Raptors doesn’t come anywhere close to balancing out on any return in investment (read: speed). Even still, these new drives will no doubt win over countless geeks and speed freaks for yet another generation.
Will WD actually hit that claimed 15% increase in speed on this next generation of ‘Raptor drives?
Bright Side of News
Simply put: DRM sucks. It’s bad for consumers and it’s bad for CS at the companies that decide to use it. The only people who are harmed are the very people the companies claim to protect. This time, it wasn’t another Ubisoft snafu (they had their stint over the weekend). Instead, just as Ubisoft begins to rub the weekend hangover junk out of their eyes, EA figures it’s time to have a miniature catastrophe of their own. Yes, EA’s DRM servers crashed too…
One of the more popular and newest games affected by this outage is none other than Bad Company 2. A perfect way to install confidence and entice gamers isn’t it? Joke’s and criticism aside, at least EA was lighter on their feet and got their ducks back up and running in just over an hour or two — leaps and bounds better than Ubisoft’s multi-day outage.
We could nitpick about the various companies’ use of DRM and how they implement it, but it’s all the same. DRM needs to die. The more DRM becomes a factor, the more people will pirate, the more money will be lost (for companies employing DRM), and the more consumers will resent said companies. I certainly know I can sleep at night…
CrunchGear
Well, this could be seen as a potential problem…
RSA encryption has been cracked — 1024-bit encryption to be more precise. If you’re wondering who had the time and money to put together the necessary machinery to trim a several hundred year job (at best) down to a few months? It’s not quite as simple as you’d think. The more common way of breaking such security is by brute force. But the brute force needed to crack 1024 the “standard” way is simply not attainable by any one human or company as the costs for owning and maintaining computer would be astronomical.
So how exactly do you break 1′s and 0′s that are 1024-bit strong? Put the CPU on a diet of course. It’s rather simple if you don’t look into all of the science or other technical mumbo jumbo. All that’s needed is some voltage modifications causing a single error per clock cycle. During these errors, the CPU will actually flip bits, making them completely open for the world to see and giving researchers a slow but steady way of putting the password puzzle together.
Don’t go running just yet. While this is no doubt a major development in technology/encryption/security, the team who accomplished this task used no less than 81 Pentium 4 machines all churning towards the same goal which was completed in a rather brisk. Still, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know anyone with that many computers. A malicious government we still have to worry about, but some angry computer junky aiming to rewrite the world — not so much.
Engadget
That old saying “what kool aid are you drinking” couldn’t be any more perfect in the situation involving Ubisoft and their new “always on” DRM. We’ve already ranted about it several times before for it’s awful implementaion and methodology. Yesterday we found out just how much it sucks when a game that requires a live connection to a remote server has said server go down…for hours on end. Common sense would have the company admitting they screwed up and at the very least apologizing for shoddy maintenance and upkeep on their servers. Silly human.
Ubisoft instead has come out blindly swinging, stating that beacause of “extreme demand and popularity” their frail little servers just couldn’t dish out the 1′s and 0′s fast enough. *puke* I for one hope those of you out there who actually care about this stuff aren’t fooled by their blatent lies. The real reason for the Ubisoft outage — DOS attack from some not so happy gamers.
Is it the best solution to protesting DRM? No. But anything that hurts Ubisoft at this point is fine by me. Will they listen or are we going to have to boycott any and every piece of junk they lace with digital cancer?
CrunchGear > Destructoid
