October 2013 - luv-talk

The Age today: 30-year-old railway computers take a byte out of the past
by Petros 06 Nov '13

06 Nov '13

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/30yearold-railway-compu… 1982.. 1982? What do they use here? Anyway, may explain why I needed 40 minutes yesterday, 20 each way Southern Cross to Macauley, 2 stations, 5km, more parking than moving.. just a normal day commuting. Regards Peter

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hard drive sizes
by Russell Coker 05 Nov '13

05 Nov '13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#Capacity Currently the biggest available 3.5" SATA disks are 4TB according to Wikipedia. Has anyone seen announcements of bigger hard drives? One of my clients has a zpool of 3TB disks that is at 79% capacity so it's time to start thinking of adding more capacity. Upgrading from 4*3TB to 5*4TB would be barely worth doing. But upgrading from 4*3TB to 5*5TB would more than double the capacity and thus be a better option than buying an external case for adding more disks. So I'm wondering whether 5TB disks will go on sale before my client runs out of space. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Melbourne Cup talk: The Pragmatic Limits of Scientism in the New Atheism
by Lev Lafayette 02 Nov '13

02 Nov '13

This might interest a few people, especially if they're not doing anything on the traditional night of LUV meetings... ATHEIST SOCIETY - 8pm Tuesday 12 November 2013 Free public lecture followed by questions and discussion: "The Pragmatic Limits of Scientism in the New Atheism". Speaker - Lev Lafayette Venue - Unitarian Hall, 110 Grey Street, East Melbourne. Enquiries - David Miller, Secretary. Tel: 9467 2063 Email - atheist_agnostic(a)lycos.com .. Of course, if you're intending to go to LUV as well, you'll have to put up with my voice two days in a row! -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), GCertPM, MBA mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt

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Re: [luv-talk] The Age today: 30-year-old railway computers take a byte out of the past
by Petros 17 Oct '13

17 Oct '13

From: "Les Kitchen" <ljk(a)csse.unimelb.edu.au> > Responding to what Petros said: >> I keep an half inch tape from a K1630, an East German PDP-11 clone. > > We'd often have four or five simultaneous users on the PDP-11 at > CVL (out of about 30 in the Lab with accounts on the machine), > doing image processing and analysis, and I remember interactive > performance (editing, shell) was generally pretty good. But we > had a strong culture of nicing any non-interactive processes > (like compiles and image processing). Do you remember what OS > you ran on the K1630? Maybe it didn't have a convenient nice. It was MOOS 1600(RSX-11 compatible), not Unix. There was MUTOS available, a Unix (System 7?) but it was not installed on the machine we used. I do not remember whether RSX-11 had a "nice" but I am sure we did not use it in the first week of studies. I read a book about the internals of RSX-11 short time afterwards, it was a copy on a microfiche. It was quite difficult to get a hand on literature like this when living on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Regards Peter

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Re: [luv-talk] The Age today: 30-year-old railway computers take a byte out of the past
by Petros 16 Oct '13

16 Oct '13

From: "Duncan16v" > Oops. I stand corrected. PDP-11/74 then PDP-11/80 > > http://irse.org.au/index.php/en/component/docman/doc_download/569-metrol-co… I keep an half inch tape from a K1630, an East German PDP-11 clone. In the first week studying back in 1987 they gave access to a K1630, three students at the time. They shared the CPU and 256kByte of RAM. When one started compiling the editing became slow, when two compiled the third student could go out for a coffee. When you were patient enough to endure it they gave you another challenge, a GD-80 vector graphics system from Hungary, looking like a radar screen and programmable with Logo and Turtle Graphics. After that you were qualified to use faster equipment. Amongst others we had two VAX-11/780 then, using Schneider PCs with a VT-320 emulation. The K1630 retired in (Northern) spring 1990. The paper strips were used for the carnival. That was its last job I know of. We just had a new building finished when the wall came down. The K1630 was already planned to stay behind and not to move into the new house - and the donations from the West (introducing SPARCstations, HPs, DECstations to us) were the final nail in the coffin. Unbelievable to find PDP-11s in use, here and now! Regards Peter

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Re: [luv-talk] Red Hat Technical Deep Dive Series: An introduction to Red Hat OpenStack
by Russell Coker 08 Oct '13

08 Oct '13

This Red Hat presentation is on the 24th of Oct from 16:30 onwards in Melbourne. It seems interesting and fun. If you'd like to attend then email Amy (I'm sure that she will welcome LUV members) or email me and I'll try and get a URL from their site that doesn't refer to me. On Tue, 8 Oct 2013, "Red Hat" <engage(a)redhat.com> wrote: > Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform combines the power of Red Hat > Enterprise Linux with the OpenStack cloud platform to deliver a scalable > and secure foundation for building both private or public clouds. Designed > to meet the needs of advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, > Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers, Red > Hat Enterprise OpenStack Platform integrates the world’s leading > enterprise Linux and the industry’s fastest growing cloud infrastructure > platform to give organizations the agility to scale and quickly meet > customer demands without compromising on availability, security, and > performance. Join us at one of our technical deep dive sessions to learn > more about Red Hat's enterprise ready version of OpenStack and see where > OpenStack fits within Red Hat's vision of the Open Hybrid Cloud. Focus > areas will include; > * What is OpenStack > * OpenStack vs traditional virtualisation > * Understanding cloud workloads > * How Red Hat OpenStack is different from community distributions > * RDO, and what value does it add to the OpenStack community > * Red Hat’s OpenStack strategy > * Enterprise ready Red Hat OpenStack 3.0 and beyond > * Open Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure from Red Hat > > We hope you can join us. > For further event information or general enquiries please email Amy Ho > <mailto:amy.ho@redhat.com?subject=TechnicalDeepDives>. Kind regards > Red Hat Technical Team -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Arjen in MEL Mon-Tue
by Arjen Lentz 06 Oct '13

06 Oct '13

Hiya all Will be in #MEL Monday-Tuesday this week, visiting clients. Still free Monday eve. Anyone for dinner? I can catch a tram into town. (text my mobile, you probably already have the #) Cheers, Arjen. -- Exec.Director @ Open Query (http://openquery.com) MariaDB/MySQL services Sane business strategy explorations at http://upstarta.com.au Personal blog at http://lentz.com.au/blog/

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RACV elections
by Rodney Brown 05 Oct '13

05 Oct '13

A reminder that should RACV members on the list wish to vote on 2 members of the RACV board, in the light of the RACV's "forthrigh support for the east-west link", votes must be received by Friday. https://newmatilda.com/2013/10/03/toll-roads-and-other-mumbo-jumbo http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/racv-carculture-politics-attacked-2013083…

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Intel processor confusion
by Brian May 05 Oct '13

05 Oct '13

Hello, Looking at these pages: http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/67456/Ivy-Bridge-E http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/29902/ What does "Formerly Ivy Bridge E" and "Formerly Ivy Bridge" mean? Are these 3rd generation/Ivy Bridge? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture) Or 4th generation/Haswell? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell-E Reason for asking is that I am looking purchasing a computer that is advertised as using 4th generation chips, and it uses "Formally Ivy Bridge E" chips. Which appear to be 3rd generation not 4th generation. I contacted the seller and got a response that confused me even more (they are based on 3rd generation Ivy Bridge E but released as 4th generation??), so just trying to work out what the situation is. Thanks -- Brian May <brian(a)microcomaustralia.com.au>

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Boat people somewhere else
by Petros 03 Oct '13

03 Oct '13

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24380247 "At least 130 African migrants have died and many more are missing after a boat carrying them to Europe sank off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa." It is one of the worst such disasters to occur off the Italian coast in recent years; Prime Minister Enrico Letta tweeted that it was "an immense tragedy". The government has declared a day of national mourning on Friday. "There is no miraculous solution to the migrant exodus issue," said Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino. "If there were we would have found it and put it into action." The number of those arriving by sea to Italy this year until 30 September stood at 30,100, according to the UN. --- Regards Peter

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