It’s an accepted fact that a VDI environment can create some challenges for the IT infrastructure. Mashing hundreds of desktop workloads onto a disk array that was designed for more general-purpose applications can lead to poor or inconsistent performance. This can lead to another challenge, meeting user expectations.
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Performance and Expectations
When a VDI project is undertaken, it’s assumed that the user ‘experience’, how responsive their desktop applications are, will be the same or better than with the legacy infrastructure. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case, based in the storage challenges that often accompany a VDI project. Making things worse, many users are getting spoiled by the performance of flash in tablets and flash boot drives in laptops.
This combination of demanding storage requirements and heightened user expectations has driven many companies to conclude that their VDI project must be supported by a…
RotoMAAK: Rotocasting Done Right | EE Times. After the printing press was invented, there was a long lag in between when Photocopying was invented. It’s time to do the same for 3D printing. Don’t print all originals, duplicate them instead with a Rotocaster like the RotoMAAK. Make sense doesn’t it? Especially considering the cost of materials. Why just today the Guiness Book of World records is attempting to measure a feat of 3D printing using 50 printers running parallel. Wouldn’t it be just as efficient to create one single model and cast the 50 copies in a shorter period of time? But consider this, Lulzbot a contract manufacturer has that many and more that CAN print the same object simultaneously: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jUObUGLTA 109 Lulzbots all working printing the same exact item, printing all originals from the same 3D design file. Still this seems wasteful to me given the amount of material used in each one. Knowing there’s a potentially faster, cheaper alternative like photocopying when Xerox hit the big time in the early 1960s, now THAT to me is the killer app. 3D Printing or CNC milling operations are stupendous at making the one off, the original the bespoke item you need. But for multiples? Just seems like a unproductive time sync that other existing industrial processes could be used to help speed up and make less expensive. So if given the choice between casting versus printing multiple originals, just try costing out short runs of cast items. You might surprise yourself and get it faster, cheaper and higher quality in the end.
Wow this has gotten my brain to working overtime. How small can you go with System on Chip like fully integrated Raspberry Pi modules? Could you fit this not just on an SO-DIMM but also maybe an SDXC sized memory card? Or a Micro-SDXC card? Imagine that. And if you want to see an even better write-up of this announcement, go over to Make magazines online website here:
They’ve got Vimeo video and other great analysis looking at this system on an SO-DIMM board. Very interesting stuff.
Lithium ion battery by Varta (Museum Autovision Altlußheim, Germany) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
A pair of battery vendors are hoping that a new design which incorporates the use of an ultracapacitor material will help to improve and extend the life of lithium-ion battery packs.
First a little background info on what is a capacitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracapacitor#History
In short it’s like a very powerful, high density battery for smoothing out the “load” of an electrical circuit. It helps prevent spikes and dips in the electricity as it flows through a device. But with recent work done on ultra-capacitors they can be more like a full-fledged battery that doesn’t ever lose it’s charge over time. When they are combined up with a real live battery you can do some pretty interesting things to both the capacitor and the battery to help them work together, allowing longer battery life, higher total amount of charge capacity. Many things can flow from combining ultracapacitors with a really high end Lithium ion battery.
Any technology, tweak or improvement that promises at minimum 10% improvement over current Lithium ion battery designs is worth a look. They’re claiming a full 15% in this story from The Reg. And due to the re-design it would seem it needs to meet regulatory/safety approval as well. Having seen the JAL Airlines suffer battery issues on the Boeing 787, I couldn’t agree more.
There will be some heavy lifting needing to be done between now and when a product like this hits the market. Testing and failure analysis will ultimately decide whether or not this ultra-capacitor/Lithium ion hybrid is safe enough to use for consumer electronics. I’m also hoping Apple and other manufacturer/design outfits like Apple are putting some eyes, ears and phone calls on this to learn more. Samsung too might be interested in this, but are seemingly more reliant for battery designs outside of their company. That’s where Apple has the upperhand long term, they will design every part if needed in order to keep ahead of the competition.
Just a sample of what’s yet to come when Oculus Rift eventually hits the market. Jaunt is developing the hardware/software required to shoot cinematic 3D movies. It is in prototype now. And it is very early days still even with the Oculus Rift VR head set. But now is the time for companies like Jaunt to stake their claim, and start up before the VR land rush occurs.
A children’s choir is circled around me, singing. Individual voices become clear and then fade away again as I turn from side to side, listening as the notes mix and blend together before disappearing into the vaulted ceiling above our heads.
The choir fades to black, reminding me of where I really am: a dark room in Palo Alto with a set of Oculus Rift goggles strapped to my head. What I just watched is akin to the most advanced home movie ever filmed. The children were not actually singing to me, but to a ball-like camera that films video and audio in 360 degrees.
Jaunt, a Palo Alto startup that revealed itself today with news of $6.8 million in venture funding, intends to use its unique camera to prove that virtual reality is not just for gaming. The company is developing an assortment of software and hardware that will allow Hollywood — and potentially anyone — to…
Flash has certainly become more affordable over the past several years and we continue to see more and more storage products introduced that include flash in one form or another. But most flash implementations are hybrid in nature, requiring that the ‘right’ data be positioned in flash at the right time. This usually means caching or tiering algorithms to move that data around or simply pinning an application’s entire data set in flash while it’s being run.
There is another alternative to this complexity of worrying about which data is hot and which is cold and whether there’s enough flash capacity available at the right time; the All-Flash Array. These arrays greatly simplify this entire data management process since everything that’s stored on them is accelerated. They’re pretty much a ‘set and forget’ solution that eliminates performance problems, in most cases.
I got the updates (as far as I know) off of that New Zealand file share about 2 weeks ago. Everything seems to be working fine where I’ve done the upgrade. It does make Win8.1 more palatable. I think now MS should just keep refining it ever quarter or so. One of these versions will be the one that people will migrate to.
English: Code for America Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is incidentally what’s so fascinating about the government technology position I’m in at Code for America. I believe that we’re in the midst of a shift in power from abusive tech vendor relationships to something driven by a city’s own digital capabilities. The amazing thing about GOV.UK is that a government has decided it has the know-how to hire its own team of designers and developers, and exercised its authority. That it’s a cost-saving measure is beside the point. It’s the change I want to see in the world: for governments large and small to stop copy-pasting RFP line items and cargo-culting tech trends (including the OMFG Ur On Github trend) and start thinking for themselves about their relationship with digital communication.
My apologies to the original article’s author Mike Migurski. He was only mentioning cargo-culting in passing while he developed the greater thesis of different styles of managers. But the term cargo-culting was just too good to pass up because it’s so descriptive and so critical as to question the fundamental beliefs and arguments people make for wanting some new, New thing.
Cargo-culting. Yeah baby. Now that’s what I’m talking about. I liken this to “fashion” and trends coming and going. For instance where I work digital signage is the must have technology that everyone is begging for. Giant displays with capacitive touch capability, like 70″ iPads strapped motionless, monolithically to a wall. That’s progress. And better yet when they are unattended not being used they are digital advertising, yay! We win! It’s a win-win-win situation.
Sadly the same is true in other areas that indirectly affect where I work. Trends in Instructional Technology follow cargo-culting trends like flipping the classroom. Again people latch onto something and they have to have it regardless of the results or the benefits. None of the outcomes really enter into the decision to acquire the “things” people want. Flipping a classroom is a non-trivial task in that first you have to restructure how you teach the course. That’s a pretty steep requirement alone, but the follow-on item is to then record all your lectures in advance of the class meetings where you will then work with students to find the gaps in their knowledge. Nobody does the first part, or rarely do it because what they really want is the seemingly less difficult task they can delegate. Order up someone to record all my lectures, THEN I’ll flip my classroom. It’s a recipe for wasted effort and potential disaster.
Don’t let yourself fall victim to cargo-culting in the workplace. Know the difference between that which is new and that which is useful. Everyone will benefit from this when you can at least cast a hairy eye-ball at the new, new thing and ask simply, Why? Don’t settle for an Enron-like “Ask Why”, no. Keep working at the fundamental assumptions and arguments, justifications and rationalizations for wanting the New, new thing. If it’s valid, worthy and beneficial it will stand up to the questioning. Otherwise it will dodge, skirt, shirk, bob and weave the questions and try to subvert the process of review (accelerated, fast-tracked).
I feel a little back for Rackspace. If I was doing any hosting of web apps or hosting, I would definitely choose RackSpace as they seemed to cater to individuals and business as well. And they had good packaged up services like WordPress hosting and the like. I would hate for RackSpace to become a victim in the AWS and Google price war. Hopefully all will survive this period and come out stronger on the other side.
Google’s newfound cloud prowess was the major theme of our Structure Show podcast this week. Barb Darrow and I discussed reactions to the news and what it means for other top-tier cloud providers such as IBM(s ibm) Softlayer, Microsoft(s msft) and Rackspace. Our guest, Ben Whaley of Anki (it makes an artificial intelligence-based toy racing system), said that although his startup is a happy AWS shop, Google looks a…
The first DDR4 memory module was manufactured by Samsung and announced in January 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The current paradigm has become increasingly complex, said Black, and HMC is a significant shift. It uses a vertical conduit called through-silicon via (TSV) that electrically connects a stack of individual chips to combine high-performance logic with DRAM die. Essentially, the memory modules are structured like a cube instead of being placed flat on a motherboard. This allows the technology to deliver 15 times the performance of DDR3 at only 30% of the power consumption.
Even though DDR4 memory modules have been around in quantity for a short time, people are resistant to change. And the need for speed, whether it’s SSD’s stymied by SATA-2 data throughput or being married to DDR4 ram modules, is still pretty constant. But many manufacturers and analysts wonder aloud, “isn’t this speed good enough?”. That is true to an extent, the current OSes and chipset/motherboard manufacturers are perfectly happy cranking out product supporting the current state of the art. But know one wants to be the first to continue to push the ball of compute speed down the field. At least this industry group is attempting to get a plan in place for the next gen DDR memory modules. With any luck this spec will continue to evolve and sampled products will be sent ’round for everyone to review.
Given changes/advances in the storage and CPUs (PCIe SSDs, and 15 core Xeons), eventually a wall will be hit in compute per watt or raw I/O. Desktops will eventually benefit from any speed increases, but it will take time. We won’t see 10% better with each generation of hardware. Prices will need to come down before any of the mainstream consumer goods manufacturers adopt these technologies. But as previous articles have stated the “time to idle” measurement (which laptops and mobile devices strive to achieve) might be reason enough for the tablet or laptop manufacturers to push the state of the art and adopt these technologies faster than desktops.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 