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Just saw the honour guard for the last flight of an Airbus A300 departing in Hamburg. The Lufthansa stops to use this type of aircraft after several years of service on July, 1st. This A300 is the last one in active service. It will depart the last time with passengers tomorrow from Rome.

Just arrived at the airport in Stuttgart. I have a presentation at the Solaris Day 09 this afternoon: It´s a renewed version of an presentation about the "Less known Features of Solaris" again. I´m just taking a fast coffee and i´m looking for the travel directions at the website at the moment.

Manchmal finde ich es dann doch erstaunlich, wie wenig Ahnung manche Leute der Blogosphäre ausserhalb ihres Fachgebietes von der praktischen Seite der IT haben: Schönes Beispiel ist hier Fefe:

Die RAM-Hersteller (wahrscheinlich nur die chinesischen, nehme ich mal an) lassen ihre RAMs durch die Qualitätsprüfung fahren, und die RAMs, die das überstehen, die gehen in den Export nach Amerika und Europa, und die anderen verscheuern sie dann billig in den Schwellenländern, wo die Leute sich die Export Grade RAMs nicht leisten könnten.

Und wenn ihr das hört, dann denkt mal darüber nach, dass RAMs ja auch in embedded Computern drin ist, wie sie aus China kommen. Man muß da gar nicht über medizinische Geräte oder Reaktorsteuerungen nachdenken, um ein schlechtes Gefühl zu kriegen.

Also, Fefe ... das nennt sich Yield Management und das macht jeder. Nicht nur der Chinese. Oder meinst Du, irgendjemand wirft 90% des Wafers weg, weil die Dies nicht perfekt sind?

Schönes Beispiel ... Prozessoren. Es werden da eigentlich nur die Topprozessoren gefertigt. Das Dumme ist nur: Chipfertigung dauert lange (mehrere Wochen von Waferstart bis Ende), es gibt Fertigungstoleranzen, unterschiedliche Kontaminationen in der Umgebung und das heisst soviel wie. Alle Dies haben eine leicht unterschiedliche Qualität. Alles was den Topqualität nicht besteht, wird einfach dann eingestuft in eine andere Qualitätsstufe. Wird im Volksmund auch Taktung genannt. Wo nen Core kaputt ist ... wird ein TripleCore draus. Für die Leute auch in den Industrieländern, die sich keinen Topprozessore leisten können. Das schöne ist: So kann man mehr vom Wafer verkaufen und hat ein abgestuftes Preismodell. Die nicht ganz so guten Cores zahlen den Wafer, die guten Cores den Gewinn.

Interessanterweise gilt: Je ausgereifter ein Prozess wird, desto weniger Schraddel produziert man. So passiert es oft, das man nicht genügend Schraddel hat, um den Markt zu decken. Was macht man also, man stuft eigentlich bessere Komponenten herunter, um den Bedarf zu bedienen. Bei CPUs und Speicher wird das dann oft als Übertaktungspotenzial genannt, ist aber aber eine Konsequenz aus dem Yield Management. Es ist also wahrscheinlich, bessere Qualität zu erhalten, als eigentlich gekauft.

Im Speicherbereich ist es das selbe: Man bekommt Speicher in "extrem gut, kaum Alterungserscheinungen,nahezu perfekt" über "haelt für normalen Haushaltsgebrauch im PC" bis hin zu "Läuft stabil bei halbiertem Takt". Letzteres verkauft man dann in Anwendungen wie Embedded, wo die hohen Anforderungen von PC-Speicher nicht gestellt werden und Speicher weit unterhalb von seiner Spezifikation läuft.

Klar gibt es da dann immer wieder Leute die noch mal nen Euro oder Yuan sparen wollen, und sich dann über ultrabilligen PC-Speicher freuen, auf dessen Platinen dann irgendeine Hinterhofwerkstatt den Niedrigqualitätsspeicher geloetet hat.

Und mal ganz ehrlich: Das was wir üblicherweise in PC hier in Europa als Speicher stecken, ist auch nur der Mittelqualitätsschraddel.

Wirkliche Spitzenqualität kostet mehr ... sehr viel mehr. Nur das passt nicht mehr ins Preisgefüge eines x86 und oftmals auch nicht in das Preisgefüge eines x86 Servers. Das ist dann eher für Leute, die sich Gedanken darüber machen müssen, das man in einigen Jahren noch Speicher austauschen kann, und der benutzte Speicher nicht soweit aus der Toleranz gelaufen ist, das er mit neuem Speicher nicht mehr laufen kann.

Ich denke nicht, das man da verwundert tun muss. Das ist Business-as-usual.

The nice thing about Perl is the point, that there is always someone who has solved the problem you have at the moment. Yesterday i had the idea to put all articles in an addtional category based on their language as this is an bilingual blog. With a article count heading towards 6000, a manual process to do so, was out of question. Thus i´ve searched for an automatic way to do this. After googling for the problem i found the Lingua::Identify module. The usage of the module made the rest easy. The following script puts articles in a Serendipity-based blog in a category based on the English. 41 is the category ID for English articles, 42 is the category for articles in German. Interestingly articles with many HTML tags are frequently identified as written in Danish.


#!/usr/bin/perl

use Lingua::Identify qw(:language_identification);
use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI:mysql:databasename","username","password") || die "Database connection not made: $DBI::errstr";

my $sql = qq{SELECT id,body FROM serendipity_entries};
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
$sth->execute();
whileergebnis=$sth->fetchrow_array)
{
$id=$ergebnis[0];
$body =$ergebnis[1];
$lang =langof($body);
if (($lang ne "en") and ($lang ne "de")) {
next;
}
$cat=41 if $lang eq "en";
$cat=42 if $lang eq "de";
print "INSERT INTO serendipity_entrycat(entryid,categoryid) values($id,$cat);\n";
}

$sth->finish();
$dbh->disconnect();


Neben Kinderpornographie, Raubkopieren wird das Internet jetzt auch noch für den Zusammenbruch der Demokratie verantwortlich gemacht. Denn jetzt wird gemutmasst, das die Veröffentlichung von Nachrichten auf Twitter zur Ungültigkeit einer Wahl führen könnte. Naja ... nach der Zensursula-Nummer könnte ich mir jetzt auch lebhaft vorstellen, das man auch Wahlnachrichten der Netzsperre unterwirft.

... you don´t need enemies. Sun has a good working relationship with Intel. Thus i would expect better articles like this one at the Server Room Blog. While i understand that a Intel guy wants to pitch the processors of his employer, i don´t understand why he talks about Solaris and AIX, when he really wants to say SPARC and Power. Okay, Power and AIX are dependent from each other.

But you can run Solaris at x86 as well and it runs especially well on Nehalem based systems. Ken Lloyd does the mistake of many people by thinking about Solaris: Thinking about SPARC when thinking about Solaris and connecting Linux with x86. When your cost structure mandates x86 your could easily use Solaris as well.

It´s the same RedHat tries to tell you: Obviously Linux on a brand new Xeon is cheaper when you compare with Solaris on an old E250 Server.

Ken writes:

It is reasonable to say Xeon can deliver better performance, better value, and equal or better reliability

I would like to answer to this quote with a quote of Jonathan Heiliger, the vice president of technical operations for Facebook:

The biggest thing ? was less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures, so new CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD. The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications," Heiliger told the audience.

As the GHz race has ceased and the Intel/AMD fraction goes into multicores as well, they run in pretty much the same problem as Sun since 2005. Not every customers application is multicore friendly. And by the way:The Nehalem just got in the same range of per socket performance like the UltraSPARC T2 processor, a processor that hit the market in 2007. Does Ken really thinks that we don´t develop a successor to UltraSPARC T2? When you look at performance of SPARC just look at the SPARC64 VIIIfx.

10 GBit/s or crypto acceleration on die has to be seen on Intel procs ... so much to the "value" moniker. And Xeon is nowhere near to UltraSPARC T or even SPARC64 VII in term of reliability.

By the way: I find this reliability discussion on CPU basis really funny. Reliability is a systemic property, not a component property. Even the best CPU is helpless, when the system around it doesn´t hold to the standards of the CPU. A CPU can´t work in a reliable way, when you just put the cheapest memory from the spot market into the system.

The mentioned Machine Check Architecture architecture mentioned in the blog entry is just a reporting system of errors (something SPARC, Power and all the other RISC architectures do since the last century). It needs the OS to react on the error. So the dismissal of Solaris is really strange,too: Linux doesn´t have something like the Fault Management Architecture of Solaris, but you need exactly something like the FMA to take advantage of MCA.

Ken, the managers you mention as those negelecting the business aren´t idiots. They just don´t believe everything Intel, the Linux business and the media tries to implant in their mind without questioning everything. At last your article is just a good example for marketing piece trying to pitch the products of your employer by repeating the same stuff again and again. But that doesn´t make it true.

Brendan wrote a great blog entry about the impact of the separated log and shows two things with his article "SLOG Screenshots": At one hand the article is a nice example how Storage Analytics can give you a deep insight into your system. At the other hand, it shows how effective the separate log device accelerates sync write heavy workloads.

Did i mentioned so far, that i start to hate the FTL lounge in Dresden. Lost to many hours in this lounge. When you meeting ends on 12 or 13 o´clock you have at sit at least 3.5 to 2.5 hours waiting for your aircraft. Because of the even worser train connections to Hamburg, you are much later in at home, even when you give the train a 3-4 hours headstart. However: the DRS lounge is especially boring you can´t even look out of the window on the runway ... and even then: There aren´t many starting or landing flights here ...

It´s the first canceling of an 787 order after the announcement of the first flight delay - but i don´t think it will be the last one:Boeing loses $3 billion Qantas order for 787.

By the way: A sure sign that 787 is in deep trouble is the announcement of the administration in washington that they want to open a new trade dispute at the WTO about loans to Airbus. Well, they doesn´t get their 787 baked (in the truest sense of the word) and now they want to open another frontline. I wouldn´t be really surprised if A350XWB (first flight in two years) and B787 will have their entry into service in the same year.

A while ago i wrote about the Basic Accounting and Reporting tool (BART) as a part LKSF tutorials. Ben Rockwood published a nice script to do automatic runs of BART with logging via syslog: Solaris Automated File Integrity Checking: bartlog.

The Flightblogger posted an update to the structural issues with the 787:

On the inboard side of the wing box where the 17 stringers end and connect to the center wing box, each has what is known as a 'stringer cap' that widens at the end and actually makes the hard connection between Section 11 and Section 12 on the side of body. The stringer caps on ZY997 sustained damage, albeit repairable, when the wings were flexed in late May.

Boeing confirms that small areas of the wing structure separated or "disbonded" from the wing skin, though declined to specify exactly where. Sources directly familiar with the situation say the shifting tension load from the stringer to fastener head also caused damage on the structure.

It´s reallly strange, that the Flightblogger compares the ruptured wing of the A380 at 147 percent load with the problem with 787 with a wing sustaining damage at 120-130%.

Ben Sandiland wrote some good comments in his blogs about the current situation. There are some really good quotes about the problems. in one article the commented about the Boeing comments i a sarcastic way:

Boeing has a new definition of wing. It is ?side of airplane?.

This means it wasn?t really the wing that was starting to break two months ago under static testing, it was just the side of the Dreamliner. Easily fixed. Could have flown on time. Nothing to worry about.
(Qantas review of 787 program moving toward conclusion)

In an other blog article he writes about the possible impacts to the proram:

Last night Plane Talking received confirmation that the fault Boeing discovered in April cannot be patched as easily as suggested by the company without testing that establishes beyond doubt that once patched weaknesses will not appear further out toward the middle wing and wing tip areas.

This issue, so lightly air brushed by Boeing when it cancelled the first flight, is turning into a very large question mark over the future direction and timing of the program.
(Dreamliner ?Neverliner? bonanza for Airbus-up to 12 more A330s for Jetstar, maybe.)

This sounds somehow reasonable as this matches my personal experience - when you repair something and reinforce it, it breaks left or right of the last break, perhaps just at a slightly higher load . And this is valid for wooden bedframes, bones, ...

At last i can talk a little bit more about an upcoming product. Talking about it . I'm following the genesis of this product for quite a time now - at eWeek your will find an article about the products Sun is presenting and previewing at the ISC ´09 (an event in Hamburg at the moment)

In another preview, Sun is showing off its flash array for the enterprise, with up to 2TB of storage in a 1U (1.75-inch) system. It will offer I/O rates equivalent to 3,000 disk drives while consuming 300 watts of power, which fits well with the push for more energy-efficient data centers, Brown said.

I won´t comment about exact specifications, but this upcoming product is really interesting. When i´ve read first about this design i just thought "Wow! Excellent idea".

Just think, what you could do with 1 or 2 TB of flash. You could use it as a huge L2ARC device for ZFS or for multiple TB worth of ultrafast swap space ... or just keeping you complete database on such a device.