Actually, Apple did a number of things for the MP3 player world:
1. Created a reliable source of music downloads online for cheap. They brought the a-la-carte music model to consumers. Prior to that, the only ways to get individual songs from major players were to either purchase singles or pirate.
2. Made the product integrate very well into the way people thought about using the product. Their application leveraged "playlists", which you could sync from both your PC player to your iPod.
3. Brought higher quality to portable players by default. (AAC has better compression than MP3. There has yet to be a large overhaul of the current mp3 compression scheme, the ONLY vendor to have done this is Apple. Yes, I'm aware that other codecs DO exist--but Apple is the only one that enforces and encourages their use on their device).
4. The product was simple and easy to use. The wheel concept on the original iPod was fantastic.
5. Ultimately made the new, technical, portable music players "fun" and something that everyone would want to purchase. MP3 players had been out for YEARS prior to Apple, but most of them sucked. Enough to hold barely a couple of songs, I remember the original 64 and 128MB MP3 players. Very few vendors made any appreciably-sized portable music device.
I guess it depends on where you are. Most of the Linux guys I know when you mention Active Directory start immediately jumping into LDAP without ever mentioning the fact that Windows' primary authentication mechanism is in fact Kerberos.
That said, there's a wide variety of skill sets. Some of the deeper Linux gurus I know do indeed know that, but those people that "get it" are very few and far in between.
I generally gauge someone's systems knowledge by throwing out a memory question. VERY few people understand memory usage, even fewer understand OS-specific memory usage, and even fewer understand how both Windows and Linux handle memory and how to troubleshoot OOM issues.
As an example, depending on the job I'm looking for, if someone mentions that Windows is a "waste of memory", I generally don't consider them to be very technical.
Dinner conversations with local nerd groups tend to be very interesting. One of them being a Red Hat employee, and you can very quickly see that HE knows what he's doing versus the rest of the crowd.
Unfortunately, someone like that is a diamond in the rough.
The point being that Red Hat is not competing against Microsoft but rather they are filling a different market than Microsoft. Make no mistake that Red Hat software is cheap. The TCO is fairly high since Linux Admins tend to command a much higher salary, generally don't crossover as much (I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer), and require much more manual care than a Windows environment.
I've found completely different purposes for Windows and Linux environments most of the time, they solve different goals. I prefer IIS/MSSQL/Windows over most stuff in the enterprise but put in Linux when it fills a void in either licensing or application compatibility.
What will happen is that so many employers will require it that it will be impossible to get a job otherwise. You'll be forced to do it if you want to get hired.
The "market" controls nothing. The price is entirely by speculators and investors. Get rid of the buying oil futures or severely limit their overall price and you'll see changes quickly.
What you're meaning to say is "There's no regulation" in the market. Regulation by a regulatory body voted in by the public for the public interest *IS* your "checks and balances", at least it's supposed to be. Getting rid of said regulation is not the answer, however.
The reality is the investors and speculators know we NEED the gasoline, and as long as it doesn't tank the economy, they'll make us pay whatever they want.
I feel like "checks and balances" is an overly used term by people who don't understand what the original intent and meaning was. Amusingly, the phrase is not used in the Constitution anywhere.
desktops? servers that are meticulously maintained and the exact same configuration of software across each in some sort of clustering environment?
There are some huge differences there...
Administratively dividing up both your users AND your systems so that different users across the same system get different configurations? Different users in different areas/departments getting different information? Without massive pre-configuration of where the hell to pull the files from on every boot?
It's funny watching Linux users talk about the desktop but not a single one of the people on here has actually ever managed a large enterprise desktop environment.
Things change very, very quickly when you get to this point. Linux cannot even come close to the manageability of a Windows desktop across hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of machines. You can say "Puppet" all you want but I'd love to see you actually implement that in a 10,000 strong scalable, "just works" environment without locking out your remote users because they can't reach the puppet server.
There is, it's called not fucking our economy over for decades of a recession. It's a direct investment in our country's personal well being. Look a bit further than the tip of your nose when you make comments.
I'd like to think he was implying the light itself bouncing around, which happens so quickly that it would be indistinguishable to simply going through to the human eye.
I've been following the news on this stuff reasonably closely. I've been a big fan of ZFS for years and it's a shame that it never really made it outside of its IP-walled garden, as it could have become the defacto filesystem for Linux a long time ago.
Nice note on btrfs, no fsck for it sucks:( Hopefully they fix that soon, which I'm sure they will.
Even the designer of ext4 has gotten behind btrfs and says it is the future.
Now begs the question, do you say "B T R F S?" or "BTree FS?" or "Butter FS"?
ZFS is a fantastic filesystem, most people who have used it are aware of it--but it has little widespread adoption outside of the Solaris and BSD communities due to licensing.
BTRFS has yet to become the defacto file system in any linux distro today that I'm aware of, but it's well under way. That said, BTRFS will be a complete replacement for ext4, while ReFS is being phased in with a cautious approach (no system drives on ReFS).
The filesystem thing is definitely a natural evolution, it's like saying features of ZFS were copied into BTRFS--of course they were--ZFS isn't widely adopted in the Linux world. Just like BTRFS won't be adopted in the Microsoft World.
I'd love to see some performance numbers between the two, but I suspect ReFS will be a "try it and see how it works" thing first. I suspect it will do wonders for Home Servers, and I can't wait!
Though I'm being a pedantic dick here, in IPv6, IP's checksum was removed because it is a function carried out both above and below the IP layer, in Ethernet and in TCP as needed.
Do you really, honestly, truly believe that the US Government needs its own CAs and can't simply ask Verisign/Symantec to hand over a valid CA for a domain they want?
A lot of the comments here are missing some information, so let's put it this way:
The throttling argument started a while ago when gamers detected problems with World of Warcraft on the Rogers network. In fact, Blizzard Entertainment personally spent a ridiculous amount of resources to try contact Rogers but Rogers spent the whole time insisting that their throttling was not affecting WoW, even though gamers and Blizzard had found concrete proof otherwise.
Interestingly enough, if you switch your connection to a wholesale distributors of Rogers Internet, TekSavvy, in the affected areas, the throttling problem goes away--even though it's going over the same network backbone as if you were provided a Rogers pipe directly.
Blizzard also attempted to limit the ports used for WoW back to the original game ports (3724), but this was only a temporary solution as they wanted the other connections to help with reliability.
Long story short, a WoW community member living in Canada kind of spearheaded this and has been a part of this from the absolute very beginning.
It grew to the point that the CRTC has investigated itself, and this is where we stand now.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding me? haha. No wonder they're losing money hand over fist. This kind of hostility to its customers is NOT going to help.
All the reward points aside, I might start purchasing my games at Game Stop now...
Actually, Apple did a number of things for the MP3 player world:
1. Created a reliable source of music downloads online for cheap. They brought the a-la-carte music model to consumers. Prior to that, the only ways to get individual songs from major players were to either purchase singles or pirate.
2. Made the product integrate very well into the way people thought about using the product. Their application leveraged "playlists", which you could sync from both your PC player to your iPod.
3. Brought higher quality to portable players by default. (AAC has better compression than MP3. There has yet to be a large overhaul of the current mp3 compression scheme, the ONLY vendor to have done this is Apple. Yes, I'm aware that other codecs DO exist--but Apple is the only one that enforces and encourages their use on their device).
4. The product was simple and easy to use. The wheel concept on the original iPod was fantastic.
5. Ultimately made the new, technical, portable music players "fun" and something that everyone would want to purchase. MP3 players had been out for YEARS prior to Apple, but most of them sucked. Enough to hold barely a couple of songs, I remember the original 64 and 128MB MP3 players. Very few vendors made any appreciably-sized portable music device.
I guess it depends on where you are. Most of the Linux guys I know when you mention Active Directory start immediately jumping into LDAP without ever mentioning the fact that Windows' primary authentication mechanism is in fact Kerberos.
That said, there's a wide variety of skill sets. Some of the deeper Linux gurus I know do indeed know that, but those people that "get it" are very few and far in between.
I generally gauge someone's systems knowledge by throwing out a memory question. VERY few people understand memory usage, even fewer understand OS-specific memory usage, and even fewer understand how both Windows and Linux handle memory and how to troubleshoot OOM issues.
As an example, depending on the job I'm looking for, if someone mentions that Windows is a "waste of memory", I generally don't consider them to be very technical.
Dinner conversations with local nerd groups tend to be very interesting. One of them being a Red Hat employee, and you can very quickly see that HE knows what he's doing versus the rest of the crowd.
Unfortunately, someone like that is a diamond in the rough.
I wish I could mod you up because the parent definitely seems to be significantly ignorant, rofl.
The point being that Red Hat is not competing against Microsoft but rather they are filling a different market than Microsoft. Make no mistake that Red Hat software is cheap. The TCO is fairly high since Linux Admins tend to command a much higher salary, generally don't crossover as much (I know plenty of Windows guys that do all around IT and fewer Linux guys that know Windows....far-fewer), and require much more manual care than a Windows environment.
I've found completely different purposes for Windows and Linux environments most of the time, they solve different goals. I prefer IIS/MSSQL/Windows over most stuff in the enterprise but put in Linux when it fills a void in either licensing or application compatibility.
What will happen is that so many employers will require it that it will be impossible to get a job otherwise. You'll be forced to do it if you want to get hired.
The "market" controls nothing. The price is entirely by speculators and investors. Get rid of the buying oil futures or severely limit their overall price and you'll see changes quickly.
What you're meaning to say is "There's no regulation" in the market. Regulation by a regulatory body voted in by the public for the public interest *IS* your "checks and balances", at least it's supposed to be. Getting rid of said regulation is not the answer, however.
The reality is the investors and speculators know we NEED the gasoline, and as long as it doesn't tank the economy, they'll make us pay whatever they want.
I feel like "checks and balances" is an overly used term by people who don't understand what the original intent and meaning was. Amusingly, the phrase is not used in the Constitution anywhere.
desktops? servers that are meticulously maintained and the exact same configuration of software across each in some sort of clustering environment?
There are some huge differences there...
Administratively dividing up both your users AND your systems so that different users across the same system get different configurations? Different users in different areas/departments getting different information? Without massive pre-configuration of where the hell to pull the files from on every boot?
It's funny watching Linux users talk about the desktop but not a single one of the people on here has actually ever managed a large enterprise desktop environment.
Things change very, very quickly when you get to this point. Linux cannot even come close to the manageability of a Windows desktop across hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of machines. You can say "Puppet" all you want but I'd love to see you actually implement that in a 10,000 strong scalable, "just works" environment without locking out your remote users because they can't reach the puppet server.
There is, it's called not fucking our economy over for decades of a recession. It's a direct investment in our country's personal well being. Look a bit further than the tip of your nose when you make comments.
Cut out everything you said....replace "Government" with "Corporatist profiting gluttons"
Problem fixed.
He didn't sell out. His family was threatened.
He made a mistake.
So what you're saying is you don't like when people blow the whistle on shit they know is illegal/wrong?
8,760 hours in the year
4 9's (99.99%) uptime is 8759.124 hours.
That means to achieve 4 9's you can only have < 1 hour of downtime per year. This is possible.
Microsoft being out for 7+ hours is a nightmare.
4 9's of downtime is < 1 hour in the entire year, just an FYI.
Most reasonable datacenters can do 4 9's in all aspects whether it be networking or physical power.
I'd like to think he was implying the light itself bouncing around, which happens so quickly that it would be indistinguishable to simply going through to the human eye.
I've been following the news on this stuff reasonably closely. I've been a big fan of ZFS for years and it's a shame that it never really made it outside of its IP-walled garden, as it could have become the defacto filesystem for Linux a long time ago.
:( Hopefully they fix that soon, which I'm sure they will.
Nice note on btrfs, no fsck for it sucks
Even the designer of ext4 has gotten behind btrfs and says it is the future.
Now begs the question, do you say "B T R F S?" or "BTree FS?" or "Butter FS"?
ZFS is a fantastic filesystem, most people who have used it are aware of it--but it has little widespread adoption outside of the Solaris and BSD communities due to licensing.
BTRFS has yet to become the defacto file system in any linux distro today that I'm aware of, but it's well under way. That said, BTRFS will be a complete replacement for ext4, while ReFS is being phased in with a cautious approach (no system drives on ReFS).
The filesystem thing is definitely a natural evolution, it's like saying features of ZFS were copied into BTRFS--of course they were--ZFS isn't widely adopted in the Linux world. Just like BTRFS won't be adopted in the Microsoft World.
I'd love to see some performance numbers between the two, but I suspect ReFS will be a "try it and see how it works" thing first. I suspect it will do wonders for Home Servers, and I can't wait!
Wow I totally misread that as something else...but I'm tired and sick, so :P
Most companies don't need "mainframes" or "supercomputers", that said, there are benefits to using Linux--cost usually isn't one of them.
Though I'm being a pedantic dick here, in IPv6, IP's checksum was removed because it is a function carried out both above and below the IP layer, in Ethernet and in TCP as needed.
Do you really, honestly, truly believe that the US Government needs its own CAs and can't simply ask Verisign/Symantec to hand over a valid CA for a domain they want?
A lot of the comments here are missing some information, so let's put it this way:
The throttling argument started a while ago when gamers detected problems with World of Warcraft on the Rogers network. In fact, Blizzard Entertainment personally spent a ridiculous amount of resources to try contact Rogers but Rogers spent the whole time insisting that their throttling was not affecting WoW, even though gamers and Blizzard had found concrete proof otherwise.
Interestingly enough, if you switch your connection to a wholesale distributors of Rogers Internet, TekSavvy, in the affected areas, the throttling problem goes away--even though it's going over the same network backbone as if you were provided a Rogers pipe directly.
Blizzard also attempted to limit the ports used for WoW back to the original game ports (3724), but this was only a temporary solution as they wanted the other connections to help with reliability.
Long story short, a WoW community member living in Canada kind of spearheaded this and has been a part of this from the absolute very beginning.
It grew to the point that the CRTC has investigated itself, and this is where we stand now.