Tag Archives: SMART

J&J Subsidiary Cordis Buys Flexible Stenting Solutions

By Dan Carroll, The Motley Fool

Filed under:

Johnson & Johnson interventional vascular technology subsidiary Cordis has finished its acquisition of stent maker Flexible Stenting Solutions. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, according to a Tuesday press release from J&J.

Cordis currently produces and markets the SMART self-expanding vascular stent and recently won regulatory approval to expand its use in other arteries. Flexible Stenting Solutions‘ FlexStent, another self-expanding stent, will allow Cordis to field a product to treat peripheral artery disease (PAD), a condition that affects an estimated 27 million patients in Europe and North America.

The FlexStent won CE Mark approval in Europe in 2009, winning FDA clearance later in the year. Johnson & Johnson expects also to apply for U.S. regulatory approval to use the FlexStent to treat superficial femoral artery disease.

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The article J&J Subsidiary Cordis Buys Flexible Stenting Solutions originally appeared on Fool.com.

Fool contributor Dan Carroll has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Johnson & Johnson. The Motley Fool owns shares of Johnson & Johnson. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Rejected Ad Shows Detroit’s Religious Hypocrisy

By B. Christopher Agee

Atheist SC Rejected ad shows Detroits religious hypocrisy

Despite backlash from a variety of Christian groups, atheist billboards and ads have gone up across the nation in an attempt to bring their anti-God message to the public.

One such ad, sponsored by the Detroit Coalition of Reason, has been displayed in Detroit’s public transportation system (the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transport) in recent months.

The ad, featuring white letters over a backdrop of a clear, blue sky, simply says “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone” and includes the group’s website for those seeking more information.

Seeing an opportunity to test the agency’s First Amendment fortitude, Pamela Gellar of the American Freedom Defense Initiative submitted a design effectively duplicating the Coalition of Reason ad with one change: the word “God” was replaced with “Muhammad.”

AFDI has created waves in the past with ads critical of Islam, though this particular attempt proves how duplicitous regulators can be in determining whose speech is protected.

“Since [the anti-God ads] were accepted, I modeled this ad after them to see if the freedom of speech applied to criticism of Islam in our cowardly and politically correct age,” Gellar said.

She explained this is not the first battle AFDI has fought with the Detroit transit system over such issues.

SMART is the same government agency that refused to run our ‘Leaving Islam?’ ads that have helped many Muslim girls who want to lead more Western lives escape dangerous, devout households,” Gellar said. “When we tried to run them, SMART refused. We sued. We won.”

She is not taking the defeat lying down, as plans are already in the works to bring this recent decision before a judge.

Whether one personally agrees with an advertisement’s message is wholly irrelevant, as evidenced by SMART’s decision to plaster posters bashing God throughout its buses.

Decisions such as this originate from the complete spinelessness of government officials afraid to anger powerful Islamic groups. In Detroit, especially, that particular lobby holds incredible sway among local lawmakers.

Fortunately for the defenders of our Bill of Rights, groups such as AFDI will stand up for universal free speech rights even in the face of inconceivable opposition.
Click here to get B. Christopher Agee’s latest book for less than $5! Like his Facebook page for engaging, relevant conservative content daily.

Photo credit: reuvenim (Creative Commons)

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism

Reuse old/configured server for new purpose problems.

By RedSpyder

Greetings.

First of all I consider myself a newbe in Linux, that’s why I’m seeking your help so please be patient!

I was given an old server (Solaris) that has Oracle (10.2.0) installed with a few databases. I’m supposed to reuse this server for this new application which will process data and create reports with a web interface (so Ill have to install tomcat,glassfish etc..)

My problems:

1. The server has been previously configured for something else, so I have no password for Oracle.
2. I thought of reinstalling Oracle but I have no idea how because of the way things have been partitioned


Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d10 15G 13G 1.2G 93% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc
mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 6.7G 1.7M 6.7G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object
sharefs 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/dfs/sharetab
/platform/SUNW,T5240/lib/libc_psr/libc_psr_hwcap2.so.1
15G 13G 1.2G 93% /platform/sun4v/lib/libc_psr.so.1
/platform/SUNW,T5240/lib/sparcv9/libc_psr/libc_psr_hwcap2.so.1
15G 13G 1.2G 93% /platform/sun4v/lib/sparcv9/libc_psr.so.1
fd 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/fd
swap 6.7G 64K 6.7G 1% /tmp
swap 6.7G 72K 6.7G 1% /var/run
app 667G 44K 748M 1% /app
app/backup 40G 45K 40G 1% /backup
oslocal/export_home 60G 15G 45G 26% /export/home
app/home_app 12G 3.5G 8.5G 30% /home/app
app/oradata_smart_ora1
13G 1.1G 12G 9% /oradata/SMART/ora1
app/oradata_smart_ora2
18G 7.1G 11G 40% /oradata/SMART/ora2
app/oradata_smart_ora3
36G 20G 16G 56% /oradata/SMART/ora3
app/oradata_smart_ora4
166G 136G 30G 82% /oradata/SMART/ora4
app/oradata_smart_ora5
55G 12G 43G 22% /oradata/SMART/ora5
app/oradata_smart_ora6
75G 47G 28G 63% /oradata/SMART/ora6
app/oradata_smart_ora7
147G 122G 25G 84% /oradata/SMART/ora7
app/oradata_smart_redo1
3.0G 601M 2.4G 20% /oradata/SMART/redo1
app/oradata_smart_redo2
3.0G 601M 2.4G 20% /oradata/SMART/redo2
app/oradata_smart_redo3
3.0G 601M 2.4G 20% /oradata/SMART/redo3
oslocal 100G 20K 25G 1% /oslocal
app/smart 95G 45K 95G 1% /smart


3. I will need to maximize space for the application since I theres q requirement of 400GB+

4. I really really really want to avoid wiping the server and configuring from scratch…

What are your thoughts of this? What approach should I take? If you need more information let me know…

Thanks in advance

Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

Scott James Remnant: Goodbye Ubuntu

Today marks the beginning of the end of me having an Ubuntu machine at home, and I have mixed feelings about that. By the weekend the last machine that I do have, my network file server and general dogsbody machine, will have been replaced and its replacement will not be running Ubuntu.

The primary purpose of the machine is to be a point of backup for my laptop and other devices, as well as a host for the large and valuable content collections such as my photos, music, purchased TV shows, movies, etc.

Since this collection is multiple terabytes in size there just isn’t a viable cloud storage solution. Firstly getting content to the cloud would be a long and difficult process, secondly the actual costs of that much storage are still reasonably prohibitive compared to home solutions and thirdly since a lot of this content is in the form of high quality media, while my home Internet connection can stream it, the download bandwidth costs of cloud storage providers are equally cost prohibitive.

So I still need some form of fast and reliable file storage at home, at least for the foreseeable future. And this is where Ubuntu comes up short.

For the last few years I’ve done what anyone would have done, I purchased a small form-factor machine, loaded it with SATA drives and installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS using Software RAID to deal with the reliability factor.

This has all worked fine, the box even survived a transatlantic voyage; what it hasn’t survived is the upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. At some point after the upgrade the box did not come back up after a reboot; after searching for a monitor to plug into it to find out what was going on, I was dismayed to see a message about the RAID being in degraded mode and the boot not continuing.

My first reaction, naturally, was that one of the disks had finally given out; so, knowing that the Ubuntu initramfs is too limited to debug, I booted a USB image and grabbed the various SMART utilities to figure out which disk had been thrown and needed replacing.

Mysteriously they all checked out. I rebooted back into Ubuntu, and it came up just fine. Weird. And a subsequent reboot works fine too.

At this point my disk utilization is well over 90% and I’m already starting to consider my options for expanding it, I’m still thinking dodgy disk and so begin accelerating that process. The most obvious option is just to buy larger disks; the next option would be to buy more smaller disks, but this would require additional SATA capacity in the machine; the final option would be to buy a proper RAID array or even a NAS of some description.

I’m wary of NAS, the last one I bought, while admittedly a relatively budget option, ie. under $1,000, just didn’t perform. It didn’t have the power to actually get data from its disks and out of the network port in anything like a timely manner, certainly not enough for 1080p 7.1 streaming, for example.

And then the server throws a disk again, but at least this time a monitor is plugged into it so I can see the messages I missed last time. And this time I stay in the initramfs and do a little bit of poking around.

I realize there’s nothing wrong with the disks at all.

The problem is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

I do what anyone else would do with a problem, and hit Google, Stack Overflow and Launchpad to find a workaround. And what I find saddens me; huge numbers of people reporting that their RAIDs frequently boot in degraded mode. Bugs are marked “Invalid”, “Won’t Fix” or “Unassigned”.

Now I know this used to work, because I wrote unreasonable amounts of the code that did it. So I quickly dived in to see if there was an obvious bug fix to find that all the code I’d written had been ripped out, not replaced with anything better, just gone. All that remained was the “upstream” code that had existed before I started, or at least an updated version of it.

I dug through the history to figure out if I was missing something, expecting that things were no longer required and that new ways of doing things had been put in place, but that wasn’t the case either. The history clearly showed a different story: faced with the pressure of updating to a newer upstream release of various utilities, for no reason other than to keep roughly in step with Debian, all of the bug fixes, patches and changes to make things work had been dropped because they were “hard to merge”.

Now I don’t want to come across as bitter at this point that my work had been dropped, because that’s not my feeling at all. I entirely understand and appreciate the decision that must have happened here.

Canonical has limited resources of its own, and a small hobbyist developer community around it. Those resources have to be spent wisely and not squandered. The Ubuntu focus right now is on the desktop, and on Unity; the Server focus is a lesser one, and entirely aimed at cloud hosting and guests — though given that the Canonical VP of Cloud couldn’t even be bothered to turn up for his scheduled panel at the most recent CloudOpen conference, it’s hard to fathom how much of a focus even that is for them anymore.

So if they have a low server focus, and what they do have is for cloud, then it’s no surprising that support for things like Software RAID aren’t a priority worth spending resource on. Cloud guests and hosts access storage over a network using protocols like NFS or (ugh) iSCSI.

Simply put, the home server is a uninteresting and dying product, and I’m a weird outlier for still having one at all.

This wasn’t quite the end though, I still had disks to replace and storage to sort out. If Ubuntu couldn’t do Software RAID reliably anymore, it could still at least do Hardware RAID. I looked around for Hardware RAID boxes, especially single enclosure ones that could just plug into the box and go.

This seemed like a good plan except that high performance Hardware RAID devices come in two fundamental flavors: Thunderbolt, which Ubuntu does not support; and Ethernet, which means the Ubuntu machine is superfluous to requirements.

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu