There is one truth (somewhere)

After reading this i thought about the future of FSC ("Fujitsu Siemens").

I am certain that the FSC joint venture is coming trough an end after
the expiration of Fujitsus and Siemens agreement in 2009.

While Fujitsu makes nice stuff, the Siemens part of the FSC joint venture
only puts his name on it. FSC is a distribution company, a better VAR maybe thats it.
The consumer products like there line of Amilo notebooks and all the other home user
stuff is all bought from ODMs. Nor Fujitsu or Siemens is involved with any technical
design of that products.

The only real product that Siemens brings to the table is there mainframe stuff.
FSC ships BS2000/OSD and VM2000 (an underlaying hypervisor) on three architectures.
The S series is based on mips/risc and the SX series is based on SPARC.
The newest system is the recently announced Intel Xeon (yes X86) based SQ series,
on which FSC ported of BS2000/OSD and VM2000 via Linux-XEN (X2000?).

VM2000 allows FSC to run multiple instances of BS2000/OSD and Linux, or back in the days SINIX,
on there mips based platform. On there SPARC based systems FSC can run  BS2000/OSD and Solaris side by side.
On the new systems of the SQ series FCS can run BS2000/OSD (either directly or with a VM2000 layer),
Linux and Windows on one system.
I think its highly doubtful that a solution based on XEN and X86 can deliver mainframe like reliability.
The performance might be slower then SX series, but i would not be surprised if it could beat the S series.

As you can see in this paper from FSC, the SQ series is supposed to replace there SPARC based SX series by 2009.
For Fujitsu this does not make sense since they earn the most from the SPARC based series.
Siemens actions in the recent past, show there concentration on there core business.
This is reflected in the sale of there mobile phone division, followed spinning by of there telecommunications division,
in a joint venture with Nokia called "Nokia Siemens Networks".

To me the remaining question in the case of the mainframe business is if it stays in the company Siemens
or if FSC will spin it of. I don’t see Fujitsu keeping it or another it-company buying it.

Fujitsus future looks quite clear to me. Fujitsu will keep their hardware brands Primergy (X86 server),
Primepower (there own sparc server), "SPARC Enterprise" (servers in joint venture with "Sun Microsystems"),
Primequest (Intel Itanium) and Lifebook (X86 laptops).

The consulting (mostly SAP?) business of FSC will go to either Fujitsu, will be sold to a company like IBM
or FSC will just it spin off.

What does that mean for "Sun Microsystems"? Fujitsu will stay in the SPARC business which is great, since in the price
range and the field of operation of such machines you want to have multiple vendors down to the chiplevel.

Achtung:

Auch dieses Jahr wieder finden die  MetaRheinMain Chaosdays  in Darmstadt statt.
Es werden Vorträge, Workshops und anderer interessanter Inhalte gesucht.

Überblick

Die MetaRheinMain Chaosdays 111b sind ein jährlich stattfindender Kongress,
der dieses Jahr mit den Themenschwerpunkten Journalismus,
Gesellschaft und Technik vom c3f2m Frankfurt, CCCmz(Mainz/Wiesbaden),
der Hochschulgruppe Chaos Darmstadt, dem AK Vorrat und weiteren
regionalen Gruppen im Rhein-Main-Neckargebiet organisiert wird.

Die MRMCDs finden dieses Jahr vom 05.09-07.09.2008 an der Technischen
Universität Darmstadt statt. Drei Tage lang werden Vorträge,
Diskussionen und ein Hackcenter geboten.

Den kompletten Call for Papers mit allen relevanten Informationen
findet ihr hier (deutsch, englisch).

achtung achtung:

- these are the ingredients for some big big trouble

basically i could not use any OpenType Fonts (otf).

my system installed with Windows Xp sp3 said the fonts are either not there or damaged. i could use normal truetype fonts (ttf) but no otf.

after hours of search i finally stumbled across that on some systems with sp3 and ati cards there could arise these problems.

i had drivers installed from laptopvideo2go.com which are newer then the drivers samsung provides for my laptop (samsung r70) which has a nvidia 8600gs. version was forceware 175.xx.

I resolved the issue with installing the drivers from samsung which are forceware 101.19 from last year. they are freaking old!

i will try some other versions, i read somewhere 16x.xx series should do.

the bug itself seems to be in the driver and in the engine windows uses to render (postscript based) otf fonts witch they licensed from adobe. nice team work guys!

• how the fuck can such things happen and why cant you find anything about it!
• why the hell i can only get drivers from my laptop vendor and why are they so freaking old?

another problem i have (or had) is tearing mostly bad not only in videos.

its also hard to understand why it seems to be impossible to use directx on dual head, means games or movies.

i will certainly look at other operating systems again now…

sometimes you can see the devil walk on earth:

PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP

666 noaccess   90M   63M sleep   59    0   0:01:01 0,4% java/24

All the teasing (last video from jonathan) in the last time pointed at an outcome like getting zfs/dtrace and maybe the rest of opensolaris under a second license gpl v2/3.

Now we got the entry on Jeff Bonwick’s blog. Look at the pics and read the text between them…

(if you don’t know, Bonwick is the leader of the ZFS design team and Sun’s CTO of Storage Technologies)

To understand the text between watch the video of the "Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups" comercial.

For me the only questions left are just how much of opensolaris will be dual licensed, under which gpl version (v2 or v3), did SUN already port the zfs to linux and will they hire Linus (heaven forbid)

Hier eine wichtige Durchsage:

Bürgerrechtler rufen für Samstag, den 31. Mai 2008 bundesweit zur Teilnahme an Aktionen gegen die ausufernde Überwachung durch Wirtschaft und Staat auf. Im ganzen Land werden besorgte Bürgerinnen unter dem Motto “Freiheit statt Angst - Stoppt den Überwachungswahn!” auf die Straße gehen.

Im Rhein-Main-Gebiet ruft daher ein breites Bündnis aus Organisationen und Parteien zu einer großen und bunten Demonstration in Frankfurt auf. Treffpunkt ist die Alte Oper um 14.00 Uhr.

Der Überwachungswahn greift um sich. Staat und Unternehmen registrieren, überwachen und kontrollieren uns immer vollständiger. Egal, was wir tun, mit wem wir sprechen oder telefonieren, wohin wir uns bewegen oder fahren, mit wem wir befreundet sind, wofür wir uns interessieren, in welchen Gruppen wir engagiert sind - der “große Bruder” Staat und die “kleinen Brüder” aus der Wirtschaft wissen es immer ganz genau.

Nach der Vorratspeicherung der gesamten elektronischen Telekommunikation seit Januar 2008 stehen nun mit der heimlichen Online-Durchsuchung von Computern, der elektronischen Gesundheitskarte und geheimdienstlichen Befugnissen für das BKA (BKA-Novelle) weiter verschärfte Überwachungsbefugnisse auf der unersättlichen politischen Agenda. Dabei bewirkt die zunehmende elektronische Erfassung und Überwachung der gesamten Bevölkerung keinen verbesserten Schutz vor Kriminalität, kostet Millionen von Euro und gefährdet die Privatsphäre aller BürgerInnen. Wo Angst und Aktionismus regieren, bleiben gezielte und nachhaltige Maßnahmen zur Stärkung der Sicherheit ebenso auf der Strecke wie ein Angehen der wirklichen, alltäglichen Probleme der Menschen.

Hinzu kommt: Wer sich ständig überwacht und beobachtet fühlt, kann sich nicht mehr unbefangen und mutig für seine Rechte und eine gerechte Gesellschaft einsetzen. Es entsteht allmählich eine unkritische Konsumgesellschaft von Menschen, die “nichts zu verbergen” haben und dem Staat gegenüber - zur vermeintlichen Gewährleistung totaler Sicherheit - ihre Freiheitsrechte aufgeben. Eine solche Gesellschaft wollen wir nicht!

Um gegen Sicherheitswahn und die ausufernde Überwachung zu protestieren, gehen wir am Samstag, den 31.Mai 2008 in Frankfurt am Main unter dem Motto “Freiheit statt Angst - Stoppt den Überwachungswahn!” auf die Straße. Treffpunkt ist die Alte Oper um 14:00 Uhr. Der Protestmarsch durch die Stadt wird unter anderem über den Bahnhofsplatz führen, bevor er mit einer Abschlusskundgebung wieder vor der Alten Oper enden wird.

Wir rufen alle Bürgerinnen und Bürger auf, an der Demonstration teilzunehmen. Die Politiker sollen sehen, dass die Bürger für ihre Freiheiten wieder auf die Straße gehen! Auf der Demoseite (http://www.FreiheitstattAngst.de) finden sich jeweils die neuesten Infos und Verweise auf die lokalen Aktionen.

Die detaillierten Forderungen sowie die Liste der Unterstützter findet sich auf:
http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Freiheit_statt_Angst_2008/Frankfurt/Pressemitteilung

Die Planungsseite zur Demo findet sich auf:
http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Freiheit_statt_Angst_2008/Frankfurt_am_Main

ill just finished it up! it sounds nice and crystal clear!

now it only lacks a proper casing…

After reading the last piece of storagemojo on flash based ssd, i thought i throw in my two cents:

Why use them?

• In the notebook.

Having a disk that spins with 5200 rpm in computer system, that you move a lot, does not look desirable to me.

The only thing that made me excited about the mac book air was the rumor it would come with a ssd as only option. That would have been the right sign for the market, kind of when apple made the switch to flash based ipods. Higher production volume would be the solution to many ssd problems, like first of all the price, the quality and even the speed, since the main reason for switching to new chips is the price advantage for the vendor.

Saying that ssds don’t come with a power consumption advantage might be right with our systems atm. But i think the software vendors could do a lot on this.
With a classic harddisk you don’t want to lay down the disk to sleep that fast and often since it takes to much time to have it on speed after waking it up and it reduces also the lifetime of the disks. With ssds you don’t have such problems, you can power down the harddisk whenever the system is not using it.

• In the desktop.

Who likes noisy pcs? No one does. Many people like the idea of centralized storage at home, using network harddisk at the low end and home servers on the other. Those devices you can place where ever your network reaches, you can access them via your desktop, laptop, the media player attached to your big screen, ipod, handy, the mp3 player in the kitchen and so on. So why not replace that noisy disk in the desktop with a ssd?

Cooperate desktops are another thing. For cooperate use, i would choose thinclients, like sunrays etc. So no need for any kind of "masstorage" there.

• In the server.

Well, atm i would not want them for all my storage, but they can speed up my storage a lot. I can use them to store my meta-data, in zfs i can use them for the intent log and there are several other nice things to do with them.

If the price would drop, they would be superior on the enterprise sector. Normal harddisks do spin at all time in your arrays, with ssds powering down disks would be possible.
One of the biggest issue with big arrays is the mechanical movement, with ssds it be can reduced to near zero. Heat and space are the second big problems in a modern datacenter.
Storage products like suns thumper aim to pack a big number of disk on as low numbers of HEs as possible. Why not produce a ssd in the size of a whole HE?
Who wants to switch hds anyways? Just take enough of the disk as failover storage and you are good.

Conclusion

We need bigger production volumes to lower the prices, to increase quality and performance.

Performance and better energy efficiency has to come not only from the ssd vendors (research and better production technics), but also from the operating system vendors.

The needed demand for ssds will most likely come from the emerging sub 500$/ sub 10" screen size notebook market.

I’m pretty sure when the first transistors came up, there where enough people that where unwilling seeing a need for it, since there trusty vacuum tubes where cheaper, proven to work etc.

my fingers hurt from building inductors:

I finished up building the kit to the point where i can test the powersupply. Unfortunately i am missing fuses and such to start testing so i have to wait till tomorrow

I think this looks good! let me know if you think different.