In balance...

I live "in the sticks" (Holmfirth) and my line only sync's at 5.8Mb/s down and 1.3Mb/s up. I can download at 640Kb/s at any time of day or night without exception. I'm not a gamer, and as such don't investigate the latency on my connection as a matter of course but sites do load snappily which wouldn't be the case if I were experiencing some of the hiseoudly high ping times other people are reporting (I can currently PING www.google.co.uk at an average of 130ms @ 20:40). I'm personally convinced that Be aren't traffic shaping.

I like their service and the fact that I have a control panel where I can adjust the SNR on my line and turn on/off fastpath endears them to me greatly. In my experience they are a reliable as Zen (my previous ISP) and the price is right, too. Customer service isn't as good as Zen, sure, but I never need them - reliability is rock-solid. In addition, their generous upstream bandwidth means that I can use high definition video conferencing with work. I recommend them to anyone, based on my own experiences.

Eh?

So if the problems with iSCSI are down to the drawbacks imposed by ethernet (latency, retransmission-induced latency) and iSCSI works happily over 10GigE as well (why wouldn't it - it's all ethernet after all) then surely the question should be....

"Why would anyone bother with this new fangled FCoE when iSCSI is already doing this?"

Or am I missing something....

Tee hee.

@ Chris W.

The earth doesn't spin because the wind pushes it. Neither is it flat, the moon made of cheese etc. Very cute.

The Earth has been spinning since accretion formed it. It would take quite a few propellors being wafted around to counteract the spin, especially as their rotating mass is *slightly* insignificant compared to that of the planet itself. Note also that their blades aren't being driven directly by the fabric of space-time itself, rather the gas that is spinning along with the planet.

Look at it this way - the only thing that has *any effect at all* on the Earth's spin is the moon, and if the gravitational pull of an object weighing it at 7.3477×1022 kg which is "only" 300,000ish kilometres away has little effect, then the counter-rotating mass of a few whirlygigs will do sod all.

Unfortunate timing...

As the world's first petaflop supercomputer is unveiled, based around [...drumroll...] AMD Opterons and IBM Cell processors!

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

A somewhat apples and oranges comparison, I freely admit, but it does detract from the statement that the Cell architecture is an "accelerator weakling".