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It's software; the number of copies made has nothing whatsoever to do with the effort required to create it.

Poor choice of words on my part. By "volume" I mean amount of time spent on developing F/OSS. Indeed it doesn't matter how many times the bits were downloaded. But your time is finite, and short of leaving your day job you can do only so much.

Because their customers CHOOSE to pay them for their services

I can only confirm that. At my last job an expensive multi-core server got RH installed; in part thanks to Xilinx supporting their toolchain on Linux. Everyone is happy. And the IT people needed that support from RH when they had a problem integrating with the Windows infrastructure (domain) already in place. The Windows Server option was considered and rejected because it supports *less* functionality than Linux, and that is because some UNIX heads at Xilinx (who I met) chose to use some UNIX technologies that are poorly done in Windows.

And how many of those commercial jobs done in months were rush jobs that were released full of holes and bugs?

True, that happens pretty often (we don't need to go beyond Windows Update to prove that.) But overall, commercial outfits are driven by the need for revenue, and as a side effect it also pleases the customers who get the product sooner. It is important to note that most customers don't need perfect software that is too late, they'd rather use imperfect software now, as long as they can manage the crashes. This is not a guess on my part, most of my professional experience is surrounded by such software. I'd gladly take an app that is perfect and does what I need, but there is no such thing (examples: CST, Xilinx etc.)

Even in less exotic areas the GIMP is often rejected by power users in favor of Photoshop because, for example, Photoshop has more smarts to do things, whereas the GIMP gives you mostly the basic tools to move pixels around. The billion dollar company can throw money at the problem to add intelligence into the product, whereas GIMP is limited by a few factors, such as the number of man-hours of coders, expertise of coders (how many of them do AI for image recognition?) and by interests of those coders, because the work is voluntary. If only the GIMP project could afford to pay a top notch AI specialist to code the advanced tools of Photoshop. But they can't, and even the GUI of the GIMP is not as polished as Photoshop's, even though probably everyone on GIMP's team is qualified to code that.

It's software; the number of copies made has nothing whatsoever to do with the effort required to create it.

Poor choice of words on my part. By "volume" I mean amount of time spent on developing F/OSS. Indeed it doesn't matter how many times the bits were downloaded. But your time is finite, and short of leaving your day job you can do only so much.

Because their customers CHOOSE to pay them for their services

I can only confirm that. At my last job an expensive multi-core server got RH installed; in part thanks to Xilinx supporting their toolchain on Linux. Everyone is happy. And the IT people needed that support from RH when they had a problem integrating with the Windows infrastructure (domain) already in place. The Windows Server option was considered and rejected because it supports *less* functionality than Linux, and that is because some UNIX heads at Xilinx (who I met) chose to use some UNIX technologies that are poorly done in Windows.

And how many of those commercial jobs done in months were rush jobs that were released full of holes and bugs?

True, that happens pretty often (we don't need to go beyond Windows Update to prove that.) But overall, commercial outfits are driven by the need for revenue, and as a side effect it also pleases the customers who get the product sooner. It is important to note that most customers don't need perfect software that is too late, they'd rather use imperfect software now, as long as they can manage the crashes. This is not a guess on my part, most of my professional experience is surrounded by such software. I'd gladly take an app that is perfect and does what I need, but there is no such thing (examples: CST, Xilinx etc.)

Even in less exotic areas the GIMP is often rejected by power users in favor of Photoshop because, for example, Photoshop has more smarts to do things, whereas the GIMP gives you mostly the basic tools to move pixels around. The billion dollar company can throw money at the problem to add intelligence into the product, whereas GIMP is limited by a few factors, such as the number of man-hours of coders, expertise of coders (how many of them do AI for image recognition?) and by interests of those coders, because the work is voluntary. If only the GIMP project could afford to pay a top notch AI specialist to code the advanced tools of Photoshop. But they can't, and even the GUI of the GIMP is not as polished as Photoshop's, even though probably everyone on GIMP's team is qualified to code that.

The whole thing is pointless - why not just put 64GBs of ram in your PC and let it fill it up with disk cache. This makes no sense. If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides. The data is vulnerable, it's massively expensive and an inefficient use of the RAM modules. Madness.

Well, from everything on this product that slashdot has mentioned, just sticking RAM on a motherboard would be a better solution. It's not always the best though.

I've wanted one of these things for awhile:
http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Storage-Devices/CENATEK-Rocket-Drive-SSD/
But could never justify the cost to myself. Were real RAM drives comes into their stride is any app that is HD I/O bound gets hugely speed up. You've also got to consider that this stuff is scaled down industrial stuff. I'd glance at the real 64 GB RAM disk and the all cost around 40-50K. They weren't for joe slashdot home user unless you had a few tens of K you wanted to spend. Now the real stuff had a builtin HD that the RAM was mirrored and it wasn't that difficult for them to convince business users to use a good UPS on the thing. You wouldn't believe the differences sticking any DB app on one of these things makes. Trust me you know when you really need one of these.

Now where Cenatek came along they tried to cut the cost for a PCI plugin board to $500-600 and then charged you a bit for the different amounts of RAM you'd put in their device. Sure it had to be externally powered or go dead. That's a draw back. But it did do "cheaply" what the real RAM drives did for the big boys. So if you really could afford it, you could stick your OS and favorite apps on there and notice a very responsive increase. They really started selling that thing somewhere between Win2000-WinXP when anything over 1 GB was rarely seen in a desktop. (It was easier adding a PCI card with 4 GB RAM than changing mother boards.)

Now a days with 3-4 GBs in "budget" desktops, I'd want a 64 or 128 GB RAM drive, but I'm also kinda like you, if I had the money I'd most likely see more immediate bang for the buck just adding system RAM. You do see really big increases though in real RAM drives. Then again how many mother boards do you see that'll let you plug in 64 GB of RAM? Actually, I think that some of this is just a stop gap especially at any individually affordable price. Just wait until you see 128 GB RAM in the $200 walmart special desktop.

Two people have pointed out "AAC" refers to the wrong part of this discussion -- the audio encoding, not the DRM encoding. They're right. I know better now. Thanks.

The Cellar

The ER1

The Barhand

or, of course, Koolio

[Please, I beg you for a mod up. I've learned my lesson about trolling, I swear.]

Unfortunately, it's bulky and heavy, and retails for US$1,300. I could see a professional sound engineer justifying the purchase of one of these, but it makes very little sense for anyone else. Then again, neither does dumping your computer in a vat full of oil. :)

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

Ah, perhaps you should google around a bit first:

From this review:

Compatibility*: The Rocket DriveTM supports the following operating systems:

* Microsoft® Windows® 2000, XP and NT 4.
* Red Hat Linux® 7.3
* Free BSD®
* Solaris® 8/UltraSPARC II

Under Development: MAC® OS X; HP-UX®; AIX®; MS-DOS®; and Microsoft Windows 98, Millennium Edition

And judging by some of their press releases from a few years ago, the company realizes that their potential clients for something like this run Linux and BSD servers.

There's a (full sized) PC case specially designed for this.

[goes looking]
Ahhh.. here it is.

You can of course, build quieter by using slower parts, but that may be too much of a trade-off for some people.

http://forums.devhardware.com/archive/t-27188%5CTh ermal-conductivity

"De-ionized water may be non-conductive, but it is corrosive to metals. When it dissolves those metals, it immediately becomes conductive, as it now has an ample supply of ions. De-ionized water doesn't stay de-ionized. Even CO2 from air will dissolve into de-ionized water and (through a chain of reactions) result in a supply of negative and positive ions. Cars use "antifreeze" for this reason. Antifreeze (either ethylene glycol or propylene glycol) is a chelating agent. This means that they actually bind with metal ions in solution (before they deposit on the opposite surface), form complexes that are stable in water, and thus prevent an electric circuit from forming. With galvanic corrosion, the voltage that exists between dissimilar metals rips metal ions from one side and transports them to the other. With a chelating agent like ethylene glycol, those ions are intercepted and trapped before they reach the other side and start to deposit. However, because there is a set amount of ethylene glycol molecules in the coolant, they will all eventually chelate metals so you must change and refresh the coolant mixture. Otherwise, when the chelating agent is used up, you no longer have any protection."

I guess the question now becomes, "How long can water stay pure..."

Hm. I don't think > 100 is 99.8 percentile. I type around 180 on www.typingmaster.com for the Huckle Berry Finn test. I never took a typing class, but I had repeated experience from my mother guiding me on a computer when I was two years old. I am now 18. I was kicked out of a typing class in 8th grade for typing 130 wpm and suspended for cheating. I don't think typing should be taught in school, but early emphasis of a computer can prove to be a lot more effective. Computer Use a Boost to Young Minds, Study Finds Realistically, I don't think this study is accurate. I have over five friends who type over 100 words per minute.

• alt.os.development
• devhardware.com
• Linux Kernel Mailing List (asking who owns Linux)
• WebMaster World

Interesting...! I think I'll email PJ with this little lot!

J.

The fact doesn't change that ipod is considerably more expensive then other alternatives on the market.
I chose to buy a Creative Zen Jukebox due to it's built-in 60gb disk and fair price. It also has superior soundquality compared to the ipod, according to the zen zealots out there (Including me) :).
Appearently it's a normal 2,5 laptop harddrive so it's possible to switch it for a larger one in the future.

For more on the "ipod vs jukebox war" see the forum at devhardware.com.