Big drives currently recommended for personal use, like Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2, get at least 53MBps transfer, over 23x as fast as the fastest it will ever really be asked to deliver.
Good point.
Eventually they will start releasing UHDV (7680*4320) content, which has 16* the resolution of HDTV. Good question as to when. I'm guessing at least 10 years away. And that is... a movie/TB?
Several points as to why the need for massive TB of storage of video (backups of course): 1) People wanting a lossless copy of the original media. i.e. purists. 2) Bonus content. 3) HD video. 4) Kids - they will want to watch different movies, over and over and over, at different ages. 5) Watching a movie with friends. 6) Keeping it all out of sight, out of mind. 7) Wanting to keep the NAS within a small power threshold, i.e. more easily done with higher storage density/fewer HDD. Better for the environment too with fewer HDD. 8) Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of HDD. 9) As someone else said, the packrat mentality. Who knows when that movie you want to watch will be out of production or perhaps banned?
It should be obvious though that there exists a pricepoint that Microsoft can't compete at without risking canibalizing their existing monopoly. That market niche will be the wedge that will eventually lever em out of market dominance.
True. The only question is, when will that pricepoint arrive? 2, 5, 10, or even 15 years away?
As someone mentioned, costs to develop an OS are fixed, and the revenue MS makes on Windows is basically all profit past a certain number of units sold. The reason MS has been such a big business is because this fixed cost is much, much smaller than the revenue they take in.
Since Revenue = Number Units Sold * Price/Unit, and when you drop the price typically volume increases (i.e. Number units sold is a function of price). And it may turn out that at a lower price the volume more than makes up for the loss in profit/unit sold. (See Henry Ford and cars.) This works great until the market saturates. That market might take several years to saturate, especially if they draw out incremental improvements in processing power while fitting within the passively cooled/low power/silent/small constraint.
FWIW Even if one of those systems came with Windows I would still instantly reformat and run Linux/BSD. I don't know what it would be like if everyone ran some form of FOSS operating system. On one hand, compatibility issues would be nil, but I haven't had issues with them for a long time. Driver issues would be nil, now that would be a win. On the other hand, there might be all these social engineering attacks on the other side of the bell curve now running Linux, attendent viruses, botnets, etc. etc. That would be a loss.
I think the US substantially values the lives of foreigners and human life in general.
Good point. Why kill random foreigners them when their lives are indeed substantially valuable as cheap/free labor? It is only necessary to kill a few specific uncooperative humans as examples, the rest are better off kept alive and working... at least until further notice.
Exactly. If the US wants to invade, all they have to do is get someone like Colin Powell to give some bogus PowerPoint presentation. They'd probably use someone built up to have "dove" credibility, for example William Fallon. That way the public would think "If HE says it, that means that this time, the pretext is REAL!".
Um...there's already a card game, video games, movies, Halloween costumes...and there's a musical and a fucking Harry Potter theme park in the works. How much more evidence of "pimping" do you need?
Harry Potter - The Flamethrower would be sufficient.
As soon as oil switches to the euro, kiss your ass goodbye, because that enormous stockpile will be worthless, and so will the rest of America's money.
I don't believe that transition will happen without wars and conscription as necessary.
Except that XP, Vista, and Office all work... right out of the box. And updates are free and easy to apply- if you know what you are doing, all your systems on the entire network will auto-update without any work on the part of the IT staff.
Ubuntu seems to update pretty well too. Not only that, every installed package updates as well through the one click and apply. I do not pay a red cent to Ubuntu. I may in future as a gesture of thanks, but until I'm rich chances are it won't be more than I'd pay for one MS install.
Also, in my entire 15+ year career, I've called MS about three times, and two times were for really obscure MS Exchange problems, one time was for an IOMega bug which prevented a Zip Drive from working on NT4 which they had a hotfix for. Never an issue with Windows, or Office... so no paid support required, none of your imaginary $100/hour MS employees. In fact, even our Exchange support was free of charge... and they even flew three people out to work on it!
I've never purchased FOSS support either. They have this thing called a community, through which people interact via emails and web forums. That's if I even need to bother to do more than a google search.
MS also sells paid support btw.
http://www.microsoft.com/services/Microsoftservices/srv_premier.mspx
But that's because when you pay for your software, you are also getting support. That's why enterprise level organizations love the reliablility inherent in commercial software, rather than the "pay for me to fix my bugs" scam that is FOSS.
I've heard it said since the DOS days you never buy the.0 version of any MS product, for good reason. Now it's "never buy prior to the first or second service pack." Don't try to tell me that MS doesn't use the customer base as beta testers, of course they do. And what's worse, they make you pay lots of money up front for it!
Also, no organization I've ever worked for has had trouble with MS Office documents or formats.
I don't notice any productivity enhancements with anything post Office 97. Even better, it had all the help offline, you didn't have to connect to MS to use their help. Of course, Office 97 couldn't read the newer formats, which everyone started using so you had to upgrade.
Overall, if FOSS software was such a scam, I would have been forced to pay for support and not donated any money.
From your posts you sound like a person who has his whole income stream tied up with installing and maintaining MS systems. You don't notice the money going towards MS' coffers, but its there and far more than what most companies pay for FOSS. I'd suggest that you suck it up and learn a bit about FOSS, it may help you in your career. Note that for any service you provide, so long as Your Service Fee Best alternative closed source license/support cost + IT fees, you can be extracting some of the money MS used to and it's still a good deal (provided the end result is as good or better than MS).
That's the MS business model, which is why MS is dumping money into Teh Vista and Teh Office. Get companies locked into your software, then charge them up the whazoo for not only support, but licenses as well, as you randomly change undocumented file formats on them and stop updating perfectly good software.
It's really great, because rather than having the up-front costs involved in planning out what you are going to do, then hiring quality programmers to implement it, spending time testing, etc... you just sucker people and companies into volunteering to test your software for you. Then when you get someone dumb enough to pay for support, they are really paying you to debug your code... something which would... ah... nevermind.
Closed source is a really lucrative scam, if you play your cards right. Just ask that armada of $100+/hour MS employees who have been raping the world for the past several decades (and have lots of happy botnet owners to show for their work).
You type an address, they mail you a stack of CDs - High quality OS, Applications, web based updates - And THEY PAY FOR SHIPPING. Not a single Virus, malware, trojan etc., How much more FREE can anything get?
AOL. They're so FREE you don't even have to give them your address!
If someone can come up with a way to make GPL'd open source product so well made it doesn't *need* support, and still manage to sell the darn thing and make money at it, they will resolve this dichotomy. I'm not sure I see how to do it (yet), but it seems to me to be the problem that needs resolved.
I don't think that problem can be completely resolved. Businesses that provide too good a service do themselves out of business unfortunately. It's just one of those problems with a capitalist system. For example, there is always going to be more money in selling tobacco than in telling people to give up smoking. And even those people who have a business in getting people to quit smoking (e.g. nicotine patches) make more money with a good relapse rate. Doh.
However, going above that level... does FOSS need money to excel? Is it even a problem? For whatever reason, altruism exists. Software is also something that once it gets to a certain level of completeness it needs only slight maintenance if any. There is software like PostgreSQL that works very well, is very complex, is very actively developed and does not seem to need a Canonical to get where it has gotten. I'm sure there are other examples.
I think that for a given application there are a given number of programmer hours per year that will be given gratis for whatever reason. For any application, there are a given number of programmer hours required to create something equal to a commercial offering. So for any application, it is not a question of if it reaches completion but when. Progress is cumulative.
What about the moving goalpost? I'd contend that eventually that goalpost stops or slows down to the point of moving imperceptibly. Eventually exponential growth curves in the real world hit a wall. In the paid software world it means that they change the wallpaper and pay for a study on productivity, and miraculously every time that nice consultant says yes, there are indeed productivity improvements that conveniently work out to more than the upgrade cost. Win win!
The best thing about the various FOSS licenses is that they are resilient to companies "going bad". If Ubuntu starts getting to the point where the average person feels compelled to provide support because it is intentionally coded that way, it will get forked and the best fork will gain adherents rapidly. The switch will be easy to make because it will be exactly the same as a previous version of Ubuntu. That keeps Canonical honest.
Everything is in place to create any kind of application, securely, from a Compiz-enabled desktop to a POS register. That's more than I can say for Windows, despite it being deployed on these platforms. I think you are being too harsh. Windows ME is widely regarded as the gold standard of POS operating systems. Vista comes close, at least on slashdot.
I would have loved to have seen the difference in seconds between SSD and HDD in the following: -openoffice load time -time to switch a tab in firefox -time to switch or minimize a window -boot time -loading a large spreadsheet
Preferably, times between a fast and a slow CPU should be compared.
Those are the only areas of obvious slowness I see on a day to day basis on my 4 year old laptop, and they all strike me as bottlenecked by random access rather than CPU. I don't think any of those applications involved reading a long contiguous file like a DVD for example.
It might turn out that if you want to upgrade, you might get away with just a switch to SSD for the most noticeable speed improvement for the price; from what I have found, anything beyond the first 10 Gb is luxury in the form of music, photos or movies. So you really don't need an 80Gb drive for that application.
Perhaps more important than the 1-2 Watts you might be saving by switching from 2.5" HDD to SDD is the perceived speed increase in opening applications and booting. This means you can run a slower CPU for the same performance while saving much more power.
"If it were my ass on the line, I'd assume that the NSA can crack PGP."
That would be my guess too. They are about the last organization that would trumpet their ability to crack it. They have nothing to gain by doing so. In fact, judging by past wars governments do everything in their power to indicate that they can't decrypt communication, e.g. sending "scouts" to "see" enemy movement they knew was there all along.
Ideally, any security organization wants everyone else to be using encryption it knows how to decrypt, while reserving the best possible encryption for its own use.
Arguing about impossibility of cracking it is irrelevant - NSA can afford better mathematicians, better computer engineers to design the hardware, and can also afford to silence anyone who divulges secrets, making an example of a few from time to time. More so than any other organization I am aware of.
Once those ports are open you also have to prevent unauthorized access once she is up and running. The last thing you want is your girlfriend to be pwned or perhaps worse, infested with viruses.
For the paranoid, good physical security (preferably chained to concrete) coupled with frequent monitoring of logs is also suggested.
I agree that getting one Linux distro to the point where the lowest common denominator can run it is a worthwhile goal. However, there are limitations of budget. You are talking about a company with what, about $10 million dollars worth of capital versus a $277 Billion behemoth. That's a difference on the scale of 5 orders of magnitude. If we go with Apple instead of MSFT, we are still at $150 billion, again, 5 orders of magnitude difference.
It's obvious that Shuttleworth knows about the gorilla of which you speak, it is also obvious that he knows something about budget constraints relative to his goal. Simply: asymmetric differences in budget require asymmetric techniques of warfare. A latter twentieth century nation state thinks in terms of winning wars and battles with overwhelming firepower. A guerilla thinks more along the lines of 'How do I continue to resist indefinitely in a self-sufficient fashion, while sapping the will of the occupying force?' and 'How do I (or my children) eventually construct a situation where there is no net benefit in occupying my country?'.
Operating systems are somewhat different, but the analogy holds. Shuttleworth will be thinking how he can get the most bang for buck out of the paid and unpaid developers, while running a business that can sustain itself with profits. That bang for buck comes from increasing the number of users incrementally, and cheaply, and eventually providing a situation where there is as little net benefit to staying with MS as possible. Maximum mindshare per dollar rather than per unit time. Another way of looking at it: every engineer has heard of the phrase "good, fast, cheap", pick any two. Desktop linux has to make do with good and cheap, while taking a long time, since 1991 in fact.
So rather than hire heaps of paid documentation staff, Shuttleworth spent the time thinking "How do I set the ground rules of an internet forum such that it provides superb documentation for free?" Once that's done, it's fire and forget. The answer is not amazing - create an environment where the newbie is unafraid to ask the question 1000 other people are thinking (i.e. rtfm, google it etc are banned), and reward those who are providing help with "status" in the form of a metric, i.e. "thanked x times in n posts".
Allow me to second that. =10W (even including a laptop drive in external enclosure), silent, for any application that needs less than about 3MB/s, 1MB/s over sshfs. Brilliant.
Whatever you do, don't use the stock Linksys OS. nslu2-linux.org has everything you need.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point.
Eventually they will start releasing UHDV (7680*4320) content, which has 16* the resolution of HDTV. Good question as to when. I'm guessing at least 10 years away. And that is... a movie/TB?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:UHDV.svg
Several points as to why the need for massive TB of storage of video (backups of course):
1) People wanting a lossless copy of the original media. i.e. purists.
2) Bonus content.
3) HD video.
4) Kids - they will want to watch different movies, over and over and over, at different ages.
5) Watching a movie with friends.
6) Keeping it all out of sight, out of mind.
7) Wanting to keep the NAS within a small power threshold, i.e. more easily done with higher storage density/fewer HDD. Better for the environment too with fewer HDD.
8) Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of HDD.
9) As someone else said, the packrat mentality. Who knows when that movie you want to watch will be out of production or perhaps banned?
As someone mentioned, costs to develop an OS are fixed, and the revenue MS makes on Windows is basically all profit past a certain number of units sold. The reason MS has been such a big business is because this fixed cost is much, much smaller than the revenue they take in.
Since Revenue = Number Units Sold * Price/Unit, and when you drop the price typically volume increases (i.e. Number units sold is a function of price). And it may turn out that at a lower price the volume more than makes up for the loss in profit/unit sold. (See Henry Ford and cars.) This works great until the market saturates. That market might take several years to saturate, especially if they draw out incremental improvements in processing power while fitting within the passively cooled/low power/silent/small constraint.
FWIW Even if one of those systems came with Windows I would still instantly reformat and run Linux/BSD. I don't know what it would be like if everyone ran some form of FOSS operating system. On one hand, compatibility issues would be nil, but I haven't had issues with them for a long time. Driver issues would be nil, now that would be a win. On the other hand, there might be all these social engineering attacks on the other side of the bell curve now running Linux, attendent viruses, botnets, etc. etc. That would be a loss.
Exactly. If the US wants to invade, all they have to do is get someone like Colin Powell to give some bogus PowerPoint presentation. They'd probably use someone built up to have "dove" credibility, for example William Fallon. That way the public would think "If HE says it, that means that this time, the pretext is REAL!".
"Rolling Stones" seems to underrate the learning curve involved.
slackware:linux::A guitar:Rock&Roll
I assume you are referring to this event, which would be the obvious start to any war (and not by the BSD folks):
http://bsd.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/156258
That's the MS business model, which is why MS is dumping money into Teh Vista and Teh Office. Get companies locked into your software, then charge them up the whazoo for not only support, but licenses as well, as you randomly change undocumented file formats on them and stop updating perfectly good software.
It's really great, because rather than having the up-front costs involved in planning out what you are going to do, then hiring quality programmers to implement it, spending time testing, etc... you just sucker people and companies into volunteering to test your software for you. Then when you get someone dumb enough to pay for support, they are really paying you to debug your code... something which would... ah... nevermind.
Closed source is a really lucrative scam, if you play your cards right. Just ask that armada of $100+/hour MS employees who have been raping the world for the past several decades (and have lots of happy botnet owners to show for their work).
I don't think that problem can be completely resolved. Businesses that provide too good a service do themselves out of business unfortunately. It's just one of those problems with a capitalist system. For example, there is always going to be more money in selling tobacco than in telling people to give up smoking. And even those people who have a business in getting people to quit smoking (e.g. nicotine patches) make more money with a good relapse rate. Doh.
However, going above that level... does FOSS need money to excel? Is it even a problem? For whatever reason, altruism exists. Software is also something that once it gets to a certain level of completeness it needs only slight maintenance if any. There is software like PostgreSQL that works very well, is very complex, is very actively developed and does not seem to need a Canonical to get where it has gotten. I'm sure there are other examples.
I think that for a given application there are a given number of programmer hours per year that will be given gratis for whatever reason. For any application, there are a given number of programmer hours required to create something equal to a commercial offering. So for any application, it is not a question of if it reaches completion but when. Progress is cumulative.
What about the moving goalpost? I'd contend that eventually that goalpost stops or slows down to the point of moving imperceptibly. Eventually exponential growth curves in the real world hit a wall. In the paid software world it means that they change the wallpaper and pay for a study on productivity, and miraculously every time that nice consultant says yes, there are indeed productivity improvements that conveniently work out to more than the upgrade cost. Win win!
The best thing about the various FOSS licenses is that they are resilient to companies "going bad". If Ubuntu starts getting to the point where the average person feels compelled to provide support because it is intentionally coded that way, it will get forked and the best fork will gain adherents rapidly. The switch will be easy to make because it will be exactly the same as a previous version of Ubuntu. That keeps Canonical honest.
Everything is in place to create any kind of application, securely, from a Compiz-enabled desktop to a POS register. That's more than I can say for Windows, despite it being deployed on these platforms.
I think you are being too harsh. Windows ME is widely regarded as the gold standard of POS operating systems. Vista comes close, at least on slashdot.
Comments like these are why i still read at -1!
Exactly... often the fragments of genius are at either end of the spectrum.
I would have loved to have seen the difference in seconds between SSD and HDD in the following:
-openoffice load time
-time to switch a tab in firefox
-time to switch or minimize a window
-boot time
-loading a large spreadsheet
Preferably, times between a fast and a slow CPU should be compared.
Those are the only areas of obvious slowness I see on a day to day basis on my 4 year old laptop, and they all strike me as bottlenecked by random access rather than CPU. I don't think any of those applications involved reading a long contiguous file like a DVD for example.
It might turn out that if you want to upgrade, you might get away with just a switch to SSD for the most noticeable speed improvement for the price; from what I have found, anything beyond the first 10 Gb is luxury in the form of music, photos or movies. So you really don't need an 80Gb drive for that application.
Perhaps more important than the 1-2 Watts you might be saving by switching from 2.5" HDD to SDD is the perceived speed increase in opening applications and booting. This means you can run a slower CPU for the same performance while saving much more power.
Get yourself a better computer.
http://ozguru.mu.nu/Photos/2005-11-11--Dilbert_Unix.jpg
When about to be accused of murder, next time purchase the books on "murder trials" as well as those on "police murder investigations".
"If it were my ass on the line, I'd assume that the NSA can crack PGP."
That would be my guess too. They are about the last organization that would trumpet their ability to crack it. They have nothing to gain by doing so. In fact, judging by past wars governments do everything in their power to indicate that they can't decrypt communication, e.g. sending "scouts" to "see" enemy movement they knew was there all along.
Ideally, any security organization wants everyone else to be using encryption it knows how to decrypt, while reserving the best possible encryption for its own use.
Arguing about impossibility of cracking it is irrelevant - NSA can afford better mathematicians, better computer engineers to design the hardware, and can also afford to silence anyone who divulges secrets, making an example of a few from time to time. More so than any other organization I am aware of.
Once those ports are open you also have to prevent unauthorized access once she is up and running. The last thing you want is your girlfriend to be pwned or perhaps worse, infested with viruses.
For the paranoid, good physical security (preferably chained to concrete) coupled with frequent monitoring of logs is also suggested.
I agree that getting one Linux distro to the point where the lowest common denominator can run it is a worthwhile goal. However, there are limitations of budget. You are talking about a company with what, about $10 million dollars worth of capital versus a $277 Billion behemoth. That's a difference on the scale of 5 orders of magnitude. If we go with Apple instead of MSFT, we are still at $150 billion, again, 5 orders of magnitude difference.
It's obvious that Shuttleworth knows about the gorilla of which you speak, it is also obvious that he knows something about budget constraints relative to his goal. Simply: asymmetric differences in budget require asymmetric techniques of warfare. A latter twentieth century nation state thinks in terms of winning wars and battles with overwhelming firepower. A guerilla thinks more along the lines of 'How do I continue to resist indefinitely in a self-sufficient fashion, while sapping the will of the occupying force?' and 'How do I (or my children) eventually construct a situation where there is no net benefit in occupying my country?'.
Operating systems are somewhat different, but the analogy holds. Shuttleworth will be thinking how he can get the most bang for buck out of the paid and unpaid developers, while running a business that can sustain itself with profits. That bang for buck comes from increasing the number of users incrementally, and cheaply, and eventually providing a situation where there is as little net benefit to staying with MS as possible. Maximum mindshare per dollar rather than per unit time. Another way of looking at it: every engineer has heard of the phrase "good, fast, cheap", pick any two. Desktop linux has to make do with good and cheap, while taking a long time, since 1991 in fact.
So rather than hire heaps of paid documentation staff, Shuttleworth spent the time thinking "How do I set the ground rules of an internet forum such that it provides superb documentation for free?" Once that's done, it's fire and forget. The answer is not amazing - create an environment where the newbie is unafraid to ask the question 1000 other people are thinking (i.e. rtfm, google it etc are banned), and reward those who are providing help with "status" in the form of a metric, i.e. "thanked x times in n posts".
It works.
"There, I've taken care of those responses, you can stick to ones that actually address what I've said."
If you are smart enough to program, perhaps you'd find a statistics class elucidating.
"It is VERY exicting news though. Element 122 with such a massive nucleaus will have a number of very special properties. "
Yes, I can just imagine Iraq (or Iran?) littered with fragments of depleted unobtanium.
Allow me to second that. =10W (even including a laptop drive in external enclosure), silent, for any application that needs less than about 3MB/s, 1MB/s over sshfs. Brilliant.
Whatever you do, don't use the stock Linksys OS. nslu2-linux.org has everything you need.