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 | Off The Wall Calilasseia Editorial :) |
Calilasseia    *Ultimate Fish Guru* Panda Funster Posts: 5496 Kudos: 2828 Votes: 731 Registered: 10-Feb-2003   | Board Upgrade Day Dream No doubt Adam will read this little piece of mine with a wry smile on his face, but I decided, by way of a change from covering fishes of one sort or another, to cover a different topic - the dream setup for the Board. Apart from the recent archiving upheaval, which has prompted some robust commentary of late, one of the reasons I began thinking about this was my experience with links from the Board to Fishba  First of all, a complete taxonomic 'family tree' of the Superclass Pisces, up to date with the latest information, would probably make FishProfiles a sky-high desirable site to visit for fish lovers around the world, both amateur and professional. Likewise, upgrading the species profiles so that just about everything short of a Whale Shark was covered would again be a magnet to surfing aquarists worldwide. But, even if the entire collective membership of the Board beavered away for at least eight hours per day for the next five years producing this little wish list, the space required to host it all would be, to put it mildly, prodigious. And that's just text. Throw in images, and the space requirements don't so much go into orbit as take a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri. I sat down and put together a little calculation as to how much this lot would require, alongside all the other Board services we all know and love such as the Forums. Ready for this? First, let's cover some storage units. Everyone is familiar with how much storage is encompassed by a megabyte, and a gigabyte. Well, the next step up is a terabyte. That's 1,024 gigabytes. Is this enough? Nope. Next step up from this is a pedabyte. That's 1,024 terabytes. Is this enough? That's more like it. Space enough to spare for the foreseeable future. This brings its own interesting problems, however. Currently, giving FishProfiles a pedabyte of storage to play with would require filling Adam's living room with disc drives. Assuming that his living room is the same size as mine, of course (if it was an aquarium, it would hold 10,000 gallons ). That's before one decides to make this little lot a RAID 5 setup for security and safety. Unless of course some genius devises an ultra high density optical read-write drive that matches current magnetic discs for speed and reliability, in which case we could probably fit this lot of storage on 25 disc drives.Even if we managed to reduce the drive count this way, however, we'd still need a pretty beefy server to handle it all. A standard PC just wouldn't cut the mustard. The sort of kit required for this operation would be one of those juicy multi-processor Alpha servers Compaq make to order for the likes of the US Department of Defense. These things boast AXP21164 Alpha processors, which are 64-bit RISC chips that make a Pentium IV look like a one-legged dog trying to chase a Ferrari down the road. But, not content with being fast individually, these beasties can work together in multiprocessor setups (as they were designed to do) and do so with a 64-bit address space. That's a LOT of RAM. Even Windows XP would have its work cut out finding ways to fill up that address space with useless dross. So, let's wheel into Adam's living room a 32-processor Alpha server. Which, if someone else is paying for it, he'll accept with a huge grin on his face. Not least because to take delivery of one of these beasts, you, the paying customer, will have to write out a cheque for around £50,000 UK. That's before you take into account the expense of plumbing it into its own cooling system. This baby is liquid cooled. And needs to be with 32 processors running at around 2GHz each. The motherboard alone is two feet square. Plus, the heat being dumped out of the case would probably make life uncomfortable for Adam, living as he does in Australia, which isn't noted for its snowy winters. Still, he could always move to Norway.  Once we've installed this piece of kit, we need an operating system. Sorry, Microsnot, but XP just isn't up to the job. We're looking at a fully-fledged UNIX system here. Which means [1] finding a volunteer among the Board members to play UNIX system administrator full-time to this baby, or [2] hiring one. And UNIX system admins command hefty salaries. When you see the skill set these people need, it's not surprising. UNIX is a proper, grown up operating system, bomb proofed over 35 years of continual development, and supported by tens of thousands of UNIX gurus around the world, a fair proportion of these being Ph.Ds or even fully-fledged university professors. While quite a few of these hand out their wisdom in user groups for free, our 32-processor server will still need a full-time system admin to keep it ticking over while Adam runs the Board. Which won't be cheap. So, we've got our flash server in place, someone to tend to it lovingly, enough disc storage to ensure that FishProfiles won't run out of space for the next 25 years, what next? To cope with the demand once this baby is out of its nappies and walking under its own steam, Adam will need some means of connecting it to the Net. And once word gets around that FishProfiles has a pedabyte of storage online, a LOT of fishkeepers will want to come and take a peek at the goodies. Which means Adam's back garden will be playing host to a 20-foot satellite dish to handle a dedicated T3 connection. Another £25,000 UK - ker-ching. Actually, we're now at the stage where Adam's buying the house next door to his, and converting it into a fully-fledged IT lab, so that he has room in his own house for any fish he wants to keep. That way, we can also have a FishProfiles web cam pointing at a purpose-built aquarium full of Panda Corys without intruding on Adam's private life. By the time we've travelled this far down the road, FishProfiles is on its way to becoming a global institution deserving of funding from the United Nations. With all the administrative headaches that involves. Which means Adam delegating yet more tasks to yet more paid professionals. And a move to a purpose-built headquarters, complete with mirror server, two backups, and a UPS facility comprising ba Now, chances are this scenario is about as likely to happen as my being filmed live by a CNN camera crew while in flagrante delicto with Helena Bonham Carter on a king-sized waterbed situated on the bridge of an Independence Day flying saucer en route to Betelgeuse. But, I thought it would amuse people if I indulged in this off-the-wall piece of fantasising for a moment - FishProfiles as a kind of aquarist bulletin board superpower. Whether Adam would want the superpower politics that would inevitably go hand in hand with such a scenario is a moot point, and again, he's probably reading this thinking that he'd really like to shake me warmly by the throat for dropping him into this wacky plot. Just so long as he leaves me alive at the end of it so I can continue watching my Panda Corys spawn, I think I can handle that. But on reflection, while it would be ever so nice to have lots of Board goodies and unlimited space, making that happen would mean turning Adam's volunteer enterprise into something more akin to a multi-national corporation. And multi-national corporations are not usually noted for being friendly toward the little people - i.e., you, me, and all the other posters in this forum. And since friendliness is one of the major selling attributes of this Board, and one of the reasons it's consistently picking up podium places on AquaRank, it's debatable whether most of us, on reflection, would swap it for shiny toys. Consequently, while it would be nice to let Adam play with chunky hardware, no worries about storage space, and supply a band of little helpers to oil and polish everything, leaving him free to devote all of his Board time to the kind of developments I've cited above in the 'wish list', converting that day dream into operational reality would involve tradeoffs that I suspect might be less than wholly welcome once the full import of such became manifest. We may not be the biggest kids on the block, Adam might wish sometimes that he had time to catch up on the 1,500 or so things on the "to do" list that sometimes smirk evilly at him and issue catcalls of "you'll never get us all finished!", but all in all, we're a happy band, occasional flame wars of the kind that are an occupational hazard of all such Boards notwithstanding, and most of us on here have a hell of a lot of fun. I know I enjoyed writing this before posting it, not least because it made me sit back and acquire some perspective. Take my main aquarium - it would be wonderful if I could create a giant sized version of it with 50 Panda Corys and 200 Cardinals frolicking about an underwater jungle, but would I be able to live with the scaled up version, or would it overwhelm me? What I've got now may be small, but I'm pretty damn pleased with the way it's turned out, not least because as I write this, Mata Hari and the gang are spawning yet again, and it's almost exactly the aquarium I wanted to build back as a teenager. Took me 29 years to get there, but hey, I did it. While Adam might have a long "to do" list pulling tongues at him, I'd like to think that when it's time for bed, he enjoys the same feeling of a job well done that I do with the Panda Palace. And I'd like to think that, minor niggles such as sig restoration aside, the rest of us look at Adam's handiwork and think to ourselves that while it may not be the biggest Board around, and doesn't have a jewel encrusted exterior, it's probably the best place a fish fan can come to on the Net. That's the thing about day dreams of this sort. They're a bit like Jennifer Lopez - nice to fantasise about for a while, but would you want to live the rest of your life with her?  |
 Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 |      |
garyroland    ---Prime Fish--- Posts: 7878 Kudos: 4010 Votes: 103 Registered: 31-Dec-2001  | I just love long, drawn-out fantasies full of adjectives... Somewhere the frequent paragraph was forgotten, a paragraph that would minimize the total suffering brought on by an awful mixture of simplicity and silliness. Oh well, some have the time and energy to type away, never considering the boredom that sets in from a frequent loss of intended subject matter. Or, maybe it depends on the reader. --garyroland. --Vero Beach, Florida |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
tiny_clanger  Fish Guru Posts: 2563 Kudos: 571 Votes: 12 Registered: 17-Sep-2002  | Or, maybe it depends on the reader. oh yeah - it does, Gazza!! ------------------------------------------------- I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 |  |
| garyroland ---Prime Fish--- Posts: 7878 Kudos: 4010 Votes: 103 Registered: 31-Dec-2001 | Atta girl, Tiny... You gotta visit Vero Beach someday. --garyroland. Vero Beach, Florida. |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| Daniel Banned Posts: 600 Kudos: 524 Votes: 12 Registered: 25-Jul-2002 | When I become supreme ruler of the world, I will buy all of this for Adam... I'll also move his little house in australia onto the moon and buy him his own dedicated satellite. But with all the money it takes to do this, I can just hire the brightest minds in the world to do all my fishie work for me... |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| tiny_clanger Fish Guru Posts: 2563 Kudos: 571 Votes: 12 Registered: 17-Sep-2002 | You gotta visit Vero Beach someday. oh, I will - in about 10 years when the US government will let me in without prolonged interrogation ]:|]:| ------------------------------------------------- I like to think that whoever designed marine life was thinking of it as basically an entertainment medium. That would explain some of the things down there, some of the unearthly biological contraptions |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
Callatya  Moderator The girl's got crabs! Posts: 9662 Kudos: 5261 Registered: 16-Sep-2001   | I think Adam's significant other might have a word or two to say about her house being turned into a world dominating superpower HQ... But we could always ask her, just in case |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| Daniel Banned Posts: 600 Kudos: 524 Votes: 12 Registered: 25-Jul-2002 | Significant? No no I believe adam prefers us just to call her the other . J/k. I want to go to florida too gary... but would I be welcome or shunned? |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| Dave. Banned Posts: 823 Kudos: 265 Votes: 11 Registered: 03-Jun-2002 | Daniel, you're an idiot. |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| Daniel Banned Posts: 600 Kudos: 524 Votes: 12 Registered: 25-Jul-2002 | easy now dave its all in good fun. |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| garyroland ---Prime Fish--- Posts: 7878 Kudos: 4010 Votes: 103 Registered: 31-Dec-2001 | Just tell them you know me, Tiny... That should get you anywhere in the States. You'll be interested in knowing my last name is common in the UK. (Roland is my middle name) --garyroland. Vero Beach, Florida |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
| Callatya Moderator The girl's got crabs! Posts: 9662 Kudos: 5261 Registered: 16-Sep-2001 | That would explain why none of us could find your phone number to check up on you after the hurricane duh! |
| Posted 26-Jan-2006 11:30 | |
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