Perhaps this suggests that some of that 'old tech' should be kept working and around just in case... I probably have a modem in a basement somewhere and I'm equally sure I've thrown a bunch out thinking that they'd never be need again
Actually it is a hard choice. What we can say is that sans the rapid expansion of the human population none of the major changes that have occurred in the last 200 years would have. This itself is a reason to aim for producing changes to return things to the levels they were in the 1500's. The reason? Because the earth like and dynamic system works best when changes are gradual and therefor are less likely to push you into an instability that causes a major change of state. Both for our own good and the good of all life on the planet, we need to change our habits. That is unless we don't mind the idea of humanity (or all life) being wiped out in a few thousand years if we screw up. Your suggestion that continuing is as dangerous as trying to return to conditions pre-massive human industrial expansion isn't correctly balanced. Yes, if we reduced emissions and changed things in directions other than those that had existed for tens of thousands of years we might be in a much danger. Just remember, we can adapt to things if they happen slowly. If they happen too quickly its called extinction.
I would like to second this comment. I had a bum PowerBook that had problems from almost day one--it was back in the 1400 days-and eventually, after documenting all the problems and being polite I got them to replace the whole unit. This worked great. Unfortunately, I am probably about to do all this again as my PBG4 is also in for repairs. I suggest that we might want to try to get a sense of just how big this PBg4 problem is (on apple.slashdot.org maybe?) as that would give all of us some leverage.
You can still only (in a normal market) lower your price... So Apple has also given themselves room to add new models at this opening price, while lowering the price on the 'older' models to compete further down the offering--further increasing their market share. One thing that will allow them to do this is increased volume and production improvements. They will be able to lower their own costs as they sell more Minis, thereby opening a place for a lower priced model.
Had they started selling the iPod Mini for say $149.99 US, they would not have been able to lower their price without hitting their margins. And--as people remind us regularly on/.--Apple is a hardware company. iTMS is a mechanism for selling iPods. I think this was a very shrewd move. I should think in time for the next Christmas season we'll see a new Mini and the current ones selling for $50 less, cutting further into that flash market share.
When the next Minis come out, maybe I'll get a first generation one at the reduced price.... until then, I'll probably upgrade my original iPod (5G) to one of the large ones. But that's because I use my iPod as a way to carry a large percentage of my music Library. My runner friends are already converting to Minis.
There is also a direct trade-off between more general purpose systems and systems custom tailored to a task. Good examples are Deep Blue and Blue Gene. Both of these systems are designed with a particular task in mind (i.e. chess and protein folding) and therefor are able to leverage knowledge about the problem space to constrain the kind of hardware, the particular low-level instructions and the information flow within the system while achieving signifigantly greater performance on a small class of problems. I work with clusters that are used in scientific communities that have various researchers working on various problems. In these cases, the questions are about basic applicability of a particular problem to a particular architecture. For example a cluster with high-speed interconnects made of good COTS hardware will allow a user with a very granular problem to effectively use the cluster and it will also allow a user who needs the high speed interconnect because the problem space demands a high degree of internal communication. But the first researcher might also be able to make use of a grid of (for instance) many more computers with a total lower cost because (s)he doesn't need the high speed interconnect. The Earth Simulator gains a lot of performance (on a class of problems) because of the underlying vector processor architecture. Given the right internal bus it is conceivable that adding vector processor daughter boards to the next generation of COTS clusters could achieve similar results--but, of course, only for problem spaces that make efficient use of such processors and aren't bottlenecked by the communication requirements.
Real answers are always more complicated. For example: the equations needed for nuclear simulation will probably require dedicated hardware (as the need for protein folding has lead to Blue Gene) to achieve the results that the Pentagon needs. But for many super computing tasks, the flexibility of COTS clusters will still be compelling, especially for areas where the algorithms are not yet fully developed (e.g. brain simulation). An interesting keynote at OLS 2003 argued that (some of) the problems are not going to be the local computing power but the need to move large quantities of data between research labs across the world and combine computational systems using the 'grid.' (For a down home examples of problems that have been successfully tackled through course granular distribution just look at SETI@Home and Distributed.Net. So its not just the flops anymore...
Or just use OpenBSD. Their ftp server is solid and their approch to security should minimize risks. If you need security, use an appropriate OS--and untill (a distro of) Linux has the track record of OpenBSD they might as well use a known, reliable platform for their ftp server. After all this system, by its nature, will be voulnerable to potential threats.
I will second this suggestion. I believe no matter what you choose in the end, the life expectancy of the device should only be about a year. If you are a consultant, in the US and are using this for work, you can capitalize the expense each year giving you a full tax write-off (obviously at the loss of the cash difference). You can resell the old unit each year and you do all right. You will be taking a loss, because if you purchase the top-of-the-line product the cost of taking it out of the box is very high. Remember, this is a business expense--treat it like one.
So the really important question is: do you really need this or would it make your life easier? What is the value to you of this convenience (the expected loss each year over the gain in your time). And can you get away with a powerful machine at home and a compromise machine for the road? (If your type of work allows it, you can even use your home machine on the road via ssh, VNC, Citrix, etc.)
To answer your question better, it would help if you explained what the work was (in general). I would recommend the top of the line Apple TiBook, which can take 1GB of RAM and (if you write your own code or are doing work that involves PhotoShop, OpenGL, etc.) you get a benefit from the AltiVec unit. It probably doesn't have the best I/O available, but it is a very reasonable performance/usability compromise. I use one for consulting and complex simulation work. The development environment (Cocoa) and MacOS X are a bonus for me--but I dual boot into GNU/Linux for some work.
Actually the Mach kernel is MUCH older than Linux--started in 1985 and has a long and rich development history. Apple bought NeXT, and used OpenStep as the basis for OS X. OpenStep/NeXTStep was based on Mach. Also see the HURD.
And it has worked since the first verion of the OS. Now, admitedly it's not a network file server, but it does preform the same function for the user--they think they deleted the file (thrown it out) but they can still rescue it until they run out of disk space and 'empty the trash can.' But, I would suggest that in this case what you really need is an addition/mofification to the samba codebase which would allow your windows SMB shares (what it sounds like you really care about) to not delete files when the appropriate network APIs are called, but rather move the files to a temporary directory which could opperate as a FIFO queue or a 'empty manually when it gets full' system.
I mentioned this in the article on shipping CM corn out of the US, but it is important to note that the production of corn in the US is highly artificial, and the press release from the USDA does not provide enough information to verify that the overall equation is reasonable. If the efficiency of the farms is high enough to produce ethanol only because of other subsidies (specificly for cattle feed), it doesn't suggest that the net equation (Is the use of corn based ethanol a truely renewable fuel) is really positive Also, it ignores the other issues relating to our other problematic uses of corn which enable the mass production of corn efficiently. See the discussion that was hosted on US GM production on The Connection recently for a full discussion. The same program also discussed the corn production problems during a discussion of fast food beef production. Also, NPR reported on 'All Things Considered' that ethanol has negitive enviromental impacts (by releasing volital organic compounds) during processing. Also, note this bill. From my perspective this is probobly more a Bush/Republican PR push to demonstrate both their 'environmental friendly' policies and garner farm state votes.
There have been a couple of articles and books released recently (I am too lasy to look up this links right now, but start with a program aired recently on The Connection which discussed the issue at length. We have GM corn largely because our subsidy model encourages the production of far more corn than we can use. Then, in an attempt to keep polititions in office, attempts to find new ways to use the corn in an attempt to keep the farmers happy. The patent issues IMO are a big concern, but the bigger problem is the really broken way the industry works in the US. If we didn't propagate the broken system, we would have (most likely) some non-GM corn/soy/wheat... which the rest of the world would like. As other posters have noted: there is more than enough production in the world without greater efficiences (for now) politics, dictators, and human stupidity and lack of empathy is the source of most hunger.
Apple includes UFS becuase all Cocoa applications will run correctly with UFS, and Carbon applications (if written correctly) will also run correctly. Apple uses its previously published standards (see Netatalk list archive for a discussion) to seperate the data and resource forks. The problem is that many MacOS applications--and the entire classic environment--require HFS compatibility. Many applications will not even install onto a UFS drive. If your environment is mostly Unix, and you are a developer or a web designer, having the same case-preserving, case-sensitive file system symantics that other Unix implementations may be a benifit. Otherwise, stick to HFS+. I, for one, have signed and recommend that other sign the Metadata petition which calls for Apple to move towarsd a modern file system which has multiple streams (as apposed to two fixed streams) and a generalized metadata implementation a la BeFS or Attributed FS to provide the core HFS compatible metadata with the ability to extend the metadata use into new areas. A journaled file system would also be a plus. HFS+ is a reasonably efficient and Unix like file system. The only difference is the case-preserving, case-insensitive file symantics, which is arguably (many discussions abound) is preferable for a GUI, and human UI in general.
A big bonus would be implementing posix compliant multiple stream bsd userland commands like cp so that you don't axe your resource fork when you cp a file from the command line, etc.
If we are to really believe some of Apple recent rhetoric, they are listening to the community. There was a proposal floating around the net and a petition to support it. Also the 'Feedback' button on the MacOS X support page apparently is attached to some Apple interns or some such who actually sort through the comments. The fact that the resources to start adding more meta data and journaling to HFS+ are available at Apple may indicate that they are listening. The way to find out is to continue to let Apple know that the BFS and its features (along with the features of other good, modern file systems) should be brought to HFS+ and that meta data as the primary MacOS X file association system should grow, rather than diminish.
No, it has integrated iLink, not integrated FireWire. FireWire (the name, I mean) applies to the six-pin implementation of IEEE 1394; FireWire can carry power as well as data on the cable.
I believe this is simply wrong. Apple and Sony, both members of the IEEE 1394 task force, each decided to trademark a name for 1394, Apple has 'FireWire' and Sony 'iLink'. Both Sony and Apple supply cables which go from the 4 pin standard to the 6 pin standard. Only the 6pin to 6pin cables carry power. The standard does not require that you carry power. If your IEEE 1394 computer/laptop does not supply power and your device requires it to operate, there are cables which are 4pin + power(converter) to 6pin which solve this problem.
I would like to note (as someone else did) that StorageReview was attempting to build a reliability database, in addition to reviewing units themselves. Tho they seem to have intended to make money, they have subsequently followed the dot-bust and are going to end their site when their current funding runs out. It would be a shame to lose the data. Anyone interested should email them and ask them to make the database public domain, and then see if there is enough support for someone to host it. This would be a valuable resource. There is no substitute for good statistical data analysis. The only other thing you can review is manufacturer claimed MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). If your drive bites the dust outside a statistically likely variance from the manufacturers claim, at least call them up and ask that they give you a new drive.
That said, you should use HW RAID and SCSI if you want reliablity. Otherwise, simply buy a good tape backup device and backup regularly. IDE drives are a commodity item, and are basicly least-common-denominator products where whoever can cut a corner to bring down the price will. Given that, use equipment aimed at business/enterprise/professionals and use HW RAID if the data needs to have reliable uptime.
I have used Mylex RAID controllers very successfully with the older kernels on Linux (I run debian-stable) and on FreeBSD. Hot-Swap worked fine, and the on-board BIOS could be used for all configurations, plus there was adequate information from the kernel on RAID state. So, unless they have become significantly worse recently, I would at least consider Mylex.
But, you might want to consider one of the alternatives like RaidTec or its ilk. These are large boxes with RAID controllers built in and capacity for a fair number of disk enclosures. The RaidTec, for instance, can take 512GB+ (maybe 768GB+ now) and has options for redundant controllers, either fiber channel or SCSI. Just shows up as drive space. I haven't yet had a RaidTec unit up with Linux, but they claim it's fine. There are many others, with the EMC units being at the top of the cost heap.
The reason that FireWire was developed (and I believe it was begun before USB development was begun) was a need for a simple, hot-swapable bus which would allow different kinds of digital devices to connect together with a trivial 'plug it in an forget it' user operation. The team behind the development included Apple, which had for years used a high speed serial bus for networking (AppleTalk over LocalTalk) and a lower speed serial bus (Apple Desktop Bus) for connecting a variety of peripherals, including keyboards and mice. The original use for firewire on Apple computers was (I believe) going to replace all serial devices with this one bus. Then a second team, lead I believe by IBM developed USB as a replacement for the serial ports and the PS2 style keyboard/mouse interfaces. USB does not have the device density per port that FireWire has. The system was NOT intended to allow high speed transfer of large volumes of information. FireWire was targeted at DV cameras, Digital Cameras, consumer electronics, etc. USB was going to connect low-bandwith serial devices. FireWire can string an extremely large number of devices on one serial chain. FireWire was intended to be universal.
Then USB took off becuase of the marketing muscle of the consortium behind it, the lower cost and the inclusion of USB on most PC motherboards. Apple decided not to release a FireWire only set of machines and instead began using USB for keybords and mice (cost savings, compatibility) and to allow for access to the increasing number of USB consumer devices. But, USB was still 40 times slower than FireWire (which is the IEEE 1394 standard) and so FireWire (or iLink as Sony branded it) was included for uses that Apples had relied on SCSI for like connecting scanners, removeable media and other devices which you may add or remove from time to time and require reasonoble bandwidth. It still wanted FireWire for connecting to FireWire consumer devices too. SCSI still has a place as well, but not everybody needs SCSI now that IDE has been improved (it was really lousy to begin with) and that FireWire could be used for expansion of capacity for average users. SCSI still has much higher bandwidth capacities and burst capacities. Servers and video editors will still use SCSI. Likewise, Ethernet was intented for asyncronise networking. Yet a different purpose. Ethernet uses a convoluted (but useful for its purpose) networking model in the common TCP/IP application with at least hardware, protocol and session layers which must be negotiated and maintained. Normally, you only see about 60% of the theoritical maximum capacity. So while Gigabit ethernet is good for networking, it is not necessarily appropriate for the purposes FireWire was intended. Think: what is the intended purpose for BlueTooth versus 802.11b? Design criteria matter: e.g. BlueTooth uses many times less power but is intended for short small communications needs; FireWire can provide power to devices (like my iPod) and Gigbit Ethernet cannot. In most cases, having too few standards and too few options is just as bad as having too many options and no standards. Choose the standard which makes sense for your application.
There is a Linux ICA client, which would allow you to deploy X terminals and present ICA clients to them from a Linux concentrator which would make the ICA connections to your WinNT/2K box. The disadvantage of this is the need to deploy both X and ICA to every client when you only need one or the other in practice normally. On the other hand, if you actually have the option of presenting Linux as an alternative, you can run your Windows apps in Application Publication mode and simply present them inside a Gnome or KDE environment on your X terms.
The performance will depend on the application mix you are using. How much data can the drive continiously stream in/out which is the dependant on the drive and the bandwidth of the controller. Are you needs read intensive, write intensive, random or linear in nature? I would almost always recommend using hardware raid to anyone because you get reliability, which is probably more imporant anyway. A stripped RAID array will be able to provide better read throughput, especially as the number of drives goes up and the reads can be spread accross multiple heads. If you are doing random editing of high bandwidth video, however, you probobly want mirrored high RPM drives. This allows for full spead reads and writes, and redundancy. If you are doing lots of writes, especially in small chunks, stripped RAID is not going to be as fast--too much parity calculation. Also, it depends on the quality of the hardware RAID implementation, the saturation of the bus (are you going to run your ATA/100 drives as masters in independant channels?) etc.
You will probobly be better off getting something which meets your needs rather that worrying about the best performance. So my suggestion would be RAID for the added safety value (not to mention that unless you need it, more space will probobly be worth more than a few milliseconds of performance gain). Remember though, RAID doesn't save you from powerfailures! If you are going to have any stripped RAID array, even hardware, you must have it on a UPS so that it is not left in an inconsistant state! Good hunting!
I don't like the idea that economic renumeration should take the form of micropayments in the OSS model, let alone the FSF model. Fundementally, OSS is about colaberation and the contribution of time and energy to a project. The problem that occurs when people use OSS and don't return to the project is not that they cannot find a way to make payments (which only makes sense if you are attempting to tie the traditional Capitalist structures onto a concept which does not conform to them). The problem is that they don't necessarily contribute to the pool of resources and energy that the community needs to thrive.
The FS (e.g. FSF) movement is even farther from needing payments. Afterall the notion of Free as in Speech is that the work is simple a presentation to the world and our global knowledge. The ideas that are contained in FS are supposed to be given away. The protections in the copyleft are intended to keep them that way. Now there is an implicit assumption that this system works becuase everbody chooses to participate in our global comminity. But I don't have to share my ideas with anyone if I don't want to. The difference is obligation.
As the article mentioned the problem currently is not with the OSS movement but with the companies which are trying to make money through it. The real problem as I see it is not getting payments into the OSS system, but getting companies to understand that the correct response to OSS is the return of energy, resources, and knowledge to the community.
Here is an example of how this could work:
A large organization like the Mexico City or City of Largo (also) and, possibly, City of Turku, Finland (Finnish) can contribute by hiring programmers for to work on the projects which they are using (and relying on). The number of programmers should be proportional to the needs of the organization and the savings from the conventional CSS model. If, for example the savings over a conventional solution over 2 years was $500,000, then the organization could spend $200,000 on programmers to both solve problems that the organization needs resolved (and which would be contributed back to OSS) and additionally provide 50% of their time to contribute to the OSS projects they are relying on (bug fixes, improvements, research). All numbers are merely examples. You get the idea.
A smaller organization could contibute some of the time of its staff and provide some resource (server, hardware donations, software donations, etc.) I am working with many clients who are just beginning to understand how FS/OSS may fit into thier business models. Give them time and help them to understand that correct response to the benefits of using FS/OSS is direct contributions to the community and our world.
But, this doesn't fit into the 'Modern Western World View.' Modern (American) capitalism is a beast whose fundemental tenents no longer bare any resemblance to reality. Informed consumers are not only idealized, but necessarily fictional because there is too much information for any consumer to possibly be informed on all their desicsions. This is what keeps product, techniques and services which are sub-optimal or even harmful (or at the very least no good) in the market. Other forces besides supply and demand control the system: Monopolies, Ologopolies, price fixing, political manipulation through PACs, financial contributions, etc.
Clearly, the relationships between those inside OSS community and those on the outside who adopt OSS can be changed by showing the adoptors that the correct adoption of OSS is not merely the use of the code, but involvement in the community--and by doing this, the question of renumeration becomes irrelevant.
I agree that the real danger is long term storage. There was a really good article in Scientific American about three years ago (long enough that I cannot reference it easily) which went in careful detail through the diffrerences between digital storage (or any non human readable storage) and traditional methods. The long and short of it was that even though we require some translation system to crack a written language, linguists will tell you that there is enough commonality in all human languages that you can recover a written langauge with only a little help (Rosetta Stone) or a lot of time. Pictures are even easier. Think of all the frescos, paintings, stone carvings. Even the cave paintings are still 'interpretable' today.
But digital (and other arbirarily encoded media) are different. If the original translation schema is lost the task of decoding becomes almost impossible. In fact, if you really had no information and had to assume some arbitrary transform, there are an inifinite number of possible 'interpretable' decondings. Obviously, if people have access to the media 5,000 years from now, then the media will have been preserved in a non-normal method. Unlike paper, painting, and to some degree film, you must not only maintain the media but the media players. This means that I cannot read the PDP-11 tapes created by a business 20 years ago easily. In fact, to get access to the data (which in the past would have left a massive paper trail) I would have to have the technology and the decoding system (software) to read the tapes. This combined with the frailty of even the best of digital media leads me to worry alot.
I just spent a few weeks in France and spent a fair amount of time looking at things which humanity had made over 500 years ago. In fact, I was able to spend time looking at things which had been preserved over a 1000 years. Paintings from 900AD, and Buildings from the eleventh century. One thing I noted was the unbelievable paper trail left by much of humanities activities. All this is in danger. And while it may seem trite, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history unless you know about them. You'll probobly make them anyway, but at least you can see them comming.
Sigh.
Re:A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else
on
Apple releases iPod
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It should be noted that 'FireWire' is IEEE 1394 and is availible BUILT IN to many Sony PC products under the 'iLink' name, and is availble to any other PC user in the form of a IEEE 1394 card.
It seems like a good way to provide non-content protected MP3 technology to the masses, which is good for those of us who don't want the masses to support RIAA crippleware or other protected options. Remember, if you don't support the reasonably good products, the even worse ones will take over.
Slashdot Mirror
as far as I know google scholar is still alive and well... http://scholar.google.com/
Perhaps this suggests that some of that 'old tech' should be kept working and around just in case... I probably have a modem in a basement somewhere and I'm equally sure I've thrown a bunch out thinking that they'd never be need again
Actually it is a hard choice. What we can say is that sans the rapid expansion of the human population none of the major changes that have occurred in the last 200 years would have. This itself is a reason to aim for producing changes to return things to the levels they were in the 1500's. The reason? Because the earth like and dynamic system works best when changes are gradual and therefor are less likely to push you into an instability that causes a major change of state. Both for our own good and the good of all life on the planet, we need to change our habits. That is unless we don't mind the idea of humanity (or all life) being wiped out in a few thousand years if we screw up. Your suggestion that continuing is as dangerous as trying to return to conditions pre-massive human industrial expansion isn't correctly balanced. Yes, if we reduced emissions and changed things in directions other than those that had existed for tens of thousands of years we might be in a much danger. Just remember, we can adapt to things if they happen slowly. If they happen too quickly its called extinction.
I would like to second this comment. I had a bum PowerBook that had problems from almost day one--it was back in the 1400 days-and eventually, after documenting all the problems and being polite I got them to replace the whole unit. This worked great. Unfortunately, I am probably about to do all this again as my PBG4 is also in for repairs. I suggest that we might want to try to get a sense of just how big this PBg4 problem is (on apple.slashdot.org maybe?) as that would give all of us some leverage.
You can still only (in a normal market) lower your price... So Apple has also given themselves room to add new models at this opening price, while lowering the price on the 'older' models to compete further down the offering--further increasing their market share. One thing that will allow them to do this is increased volume and production improvements. They will be able to lower their own costs as they sell more Minis, thereby opening a place for a lower priced model.
/.--Apple is a hardware company. iTMS is a mechanism for selling iPods. I think this was a very shrewd move. I should think in time for the next Christmas season we'll see a new Mini and the current ones selling for $50 less, cutting further into that flash market share.
Had they started selling the iPod Mini for say $149.99 US, they would not have been able to lower their price without hitting their margins. And--as people remind us regularly on
When the next Minis come out, maybe I'll get a first generation one at the reduced price.... until then, I'll probably upgrade my original iPod (5G) to one of the large ones. But that's because I use my iPod as a way to carry a large percentage of my music Library. My runner friends are already converting to Minis.
And it is cute...
There is also a direct trade-off between more general purpose systems and systems custom tailored to a task. Good examples are Deep Blue and Blue Gene. Both of these systems are designed with a particular task in mind (i.e. chess and protein folding) and therefor are able to leverage knowledge about the problem space to constrain the kind of hardware, the particular low-level instructions and the information flow within the system while achieving signifigantly greater performance on a small class of problems. I work with clusters that are used in scientific communities that have various researchers working on various problems. In these cases, the questions are about basic applicability of a particular problem to a particular architecture. For example a cluster with high-speed interconnects made of good COTS hardware will allow a user with a very granular problem to effectively use the cluster and it will also allow a user who needs the high speed interconnect because the problem space demands a high degree of internal communication. But the first researcher might also be able to make use of a grid of (for instance) many more computers with a total lower cost because (s)he doesn't need the high speed interconnect. The Earth Simulator gains a lot of performance (on a class of problems) because of the underlying vector processor architecture. Given the right internal bus it is conceivable that adding vector processor daughter boards to the next generation of COTS clusters could achieve similar results--but, of course, only for problem spaces that make efficient use of such processors and aren't bottlenecked by the communication requirements.
Real answers are always more complicated. For example: the equations needed for nuclear simulation will probably require dedicated hardware (as the need for protein folding has lead to Blue Gene) to achieve the results that the Pentagon needs. But for many super computing tasks, the flexibility of COTS clusters will still be compelling, especially for areas where the algorithms are not yet fully developed (e.g. brain simulation). An interesting keynote at OLS 2003 argued that (some of) the problems are not going to be the local computing power but the need to move large quantities of data between research labs across the world and combine computational systems using the 'grid.' (For a down home examples of problems that have been successfully tackled through course granular distribution just look at SETI@Home and Distributed.Net. So its not just the flops anymore...
Or just use OpenBSD. Their ftp server is solid and their approch to security should minimize risks. If you need security, use an appropriate OS--and untill (a distro of) Linux has the track record of OpenBSD they might as well use a known, reliable platform for their ftp server. After all this system, by its nature, will be voulnerable to potential threats.
I will second this suggestion. I believe no matter what you choose in the end, the life expectancy of the device should only be about a year. If you are a consultant, in the US and are using this for work, you can capitalize the expense each year giving you a full tax write-off (obviously at the loss of the cash difference). You can resell the old unit each year and you do all right. You will be taking a loss, because if you purchase the top-of-the-line product the cost of taking it out of the box is very high. Remember, this is a business expense--treat it like one.
So the really important question is: do you really need this or would it make your life easier? What is the value to you of this convenience (the expected loss each year over the gain in your time). And can you get away with a powerful machine at home and a compromise machine for the road? (If your type of work allows it, you can even use your home machine on the road via ssh, VNC, Citrix, etc.)
To answer your question better, it would help if you explained what the work was (in general). I would recommend the top of the line Apple TiBook, which can take 1GB of RAM and (if you write your own code or are doing work that involves PhotoShop, OpenGL, etc.) you get a benefit from the AltiVec unit. It probably doesn't have the best I/O available, but it is a very reasonable performance/usability compromise. I use one for consulting and complex simulation work. The development environment (Cocoa) and MacOS X are a bonus for me--but I dual boot into GNU/Linux for some work.
Actually the Mach kernel is MUCH older than Linux--started in 1985 and has a long and rich development history. Apple bought NeXT, and used OpenStep as the basis for OS X. OpenStep/NeXTStep was based on Mach. Also see the HURD.
And it has worked since the first verion of the OS. Now, admitedly it's not a network file server, but it does preform the same function for the user--they think they deleted the file (thrown it out) but they can still rescue it until they run out of disk space and 'empty the trash can.' But, I would suggest that in this case what you really need is an addition/mofification to the samba codebase which would allow your windows SMB shares (what it sounds like you really care about) to not delete files when the appropriate network APIs are called, but rather move the files to a temporary directory which could opperate as a FIFO queue or a 'empty manually when it gets full' system.
I mentioned this in the article on shipping CM corn out of the US, but it is important to note that the production of corn in the US is highly artificial, and the press release from the USDA does not provide enough information to verify that the overall equation is reasonable. If the efficiency of the farms is high enough to produce ethanol only because of other subsidies (specificly for cattle feed), it doesn't suggest that the net equation (Is the use of corn based ethanol a truely renewable fuel) is really positive Also, it ignores the other issues relating to our other problematic uses of corn which enable the mass production of corn efficiently. See the discussion that was hosted on US GM production on The Connection recently for a full discussion. The same program also discussed the corn production problems during a discussion of fast food beef production. Also, NPR reported on 'All Things Considered' that ethanol has negitive enviromental impacts (by releasing volital organic compounds) during processing. Also, note this bill. From my perspective this is probobly more a Bush/Republican PR push to demonstrate both their 'environmental friendly' policies and garner farm state votes.
There have been a couple of articles and books released recently (I am too lasy to look up this links right now, but start with a program aired recently on The Connection which discussed the issue at length. We have GM corn largely because our subsidy model encourages the production of far more corn than we can use. Then, in an attempt to keep polititions in office, attempts to find new ways to use the corn in an attempt to keep the farmers happy. The patent issues IMO are a big concern, but the bigger problem is the really broken way the industry works in the US. If we didn't propagate the broken system, we would have (most likely) some non-GM corn/soy/wheat... which the rest of the world would like. As other posters have noted: there is more than enough production in the world without greater efficiences (for now) politics, dictators, and human stupidity and lack of empathy is the source of most hunger.
Apple includes UFS becuase all Cocoa applications will run correctly with UFS, and Carbon applications (if written correctly) will also run correctly. Apple uses its previously published standards (see Netatalk list archive for a discussion) to seperate the data and resource forks. The problem is that many MacOS applications--and the entire classic environment--require HFS compatibility. Many applications will not even install onto a UFS drive. If your environment is mostly Unix, and you are a developer or a web designer, having the same case-preserving, case-sensitive file system symantics that other Unix implementations may be a benifit. Otherwise, stick to HFS+. I, for one, have signed and recommend that other sign the Metadata petition which calls for Apple to move towarsd a modern file system which has multiple streams (as apposed to two fixed streams) and a generalized metadata implementation a la BeFS or Attributed FS to provide the core HFS compatible metadata with the ability to extend the metadata use into new areas. A journaled file system would also be a plus. HFS+ is a reasonably efficient and Unix like file system. The only difference is the case-preserving, case-insensitive file symantics, which is arguably (many discussions abound) is preferable for a GUI, and human UI in general.
A big bonus would be implementing posix compliant multiple stream bsd userland commands like cp so that you don't axe your resource fork when you cp a file from the command line, etc.
If we are to really believe some of Apple recent rhetoric, they are listening to the community. There was a proposal floating around the net and a petition to support it. Also the 'Feedback' button on the MacOS X support page apparently is attached to some Apple interns or some such who actually sort through the comments. The fact that the resources to start adding more meta data and journaling to HFS+ are available at Apple may indicate that they are listening. The way to find out is to continue to let Apple know that the BFS and its features (along with the features of other good, modern file systems) should be brought to HFS+ and that meta data as the primary MacOS X file association system should grow, rather than diminish.
No, it has integrated iLink, not integrated FireWire. FireWire (the name, I mean) applies to the six-pin implementation of IEEE 1394; FireWire can carry power as well as data on the cable.
I believe this is simply wrong. Apple and Sony, both members of the IEEE 1394 task force, each decided to trademark a name for 1394, Apple has 'FireWire' and Sony 'iLink'. Both Sony and Apple supply cables which go from the 4 pin standard to the 6 pin standard. Only the 6pin to 6pin cables carry power. The standard does not require that you carry power. If your IEEE 1394 computer/laptop does not supply power and your device requires it to operate, there are cables which are 4pin + power(converter) to 6pin which solve this problem.
I would like to note (as someone else did) that StorageReview was attempting to build a reliability database, in addition to reviewing units themselves. Tho they seem to have intended to make money, they have subsequently followed the dot-bust and are going to end their site when their current funding runs out. It would be a shame to lose the data. Anyone interested should email them and ask them to make the database public domain, and then see if there is enough support for someone to host it. This would be a valuable resource. There is no substitute for good statistical data analysis. The only other thing you can review is manufacturer claimed MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). If your drive bites the dust outside a statistically likely variance from the manufacturers claim, at least call them up and ask that they give you a new drive.
That said, you should use HW RAID and SCSI if you want reliablity. Otherwise, simply buy a good tape backup device and backup regularly. IDE drives are a commodity item, and are basicly least-common-denominator products where whoever can cut a corner to bring down the price will. Given that, use equipment aimed at business/enterprise/professionals and use HW RAID if the data needs to have reliable uptime.
I have used Mylex RAID controllers very successfully with the older kernels on Linux (I run debian-stable) and on FreeBSD. Hot-Swap worked fine, and the on-board BIOS could be used for all configurations, plus there was adequate information from the kernel on RAID state. So, unless they have become significantly worse recently, I would at least consider Mylex.
But, you might want to consider one of the alternatives like RaidTec or its ilk. These are large boxes with RAID controllers built in and capacity for a fair number of disk enclosures. The RaidTec, for instance, can take 512GB+ (maybe 768GB+ now) and has options for redundant controllers, either fiber channel or SCSI. Just shows up as drive space. I haven't yet had a RaidTec unit up with Linux, but they claim it's fine. There are many others, with the EMC units being at the top of the cost heap.
The reason that FireWire was developed (and I believe it was begun before USB development was begun) was a need for a simple, hot-swapable bus which would allow different kinds of digital devices to connect together with a trivial 'plug it in an forget it' user operation. The team behind the development included Apple, which had for years used a high speed serial bus for networking (AppleTalk over LocalTalk) and a lower speed serial bus (Apple Desktop Bus) for connecting a variety of peripherals, including keyboards and mice. The original use for firewire on Apple computers was (I believe) going to replace all serial devices with this one bus. Then a second team, lead I believe by IBM developed USB as a replacement for the serial ports and the PS2 style keyboard/mouse interfaces. USB does not have the device density per port that FireWire has. The system was NOT intended to allow high speed transfer of large volumes of information. FireWire was targeted at DV cameras, Digital Cameras, consumer electronics, etc. USB was going to connect low-bandwith serial devices. FireWire can string an extremely large number of devices on one serial chain. FireWire was intended to be universal.
Then USB took off becuase of the marketing muscle of the consortium behind it, the lower cost and the inclusion of USB on most PC motherboards. Apple decided not to release a FireWire only set of machines and instead began using USB for keybords and mice (cost savings, compatibility) and to allow for access to the increasing number of USB consumer devices. But, USB was still 40 times slower than FireWire (which is the IEEE 1394 standard) and so FireWire (or iLink as Sony branded it) was included for uses that Apples had relied on SCSI for like connecting scanners, removeable media and other devices which you may add or remove from time to time and require reasonoble bandwidth. It still wanted FireWire for connecting to FireWire consumer devices too. SCSI still has a place as well, but not everybody needs SCSI now that IDE has been improved (it was really lousy to begin with) and that FireWire could be used for expansion of capacity for average users. SCSI still has much higher bandwidth capacities and burst capacities. Servers and video editors will still use SCSI. Likewise, Ethernet was intented for asyncronise networking. Yet a different purpose. Ethernet uses a convoluted (but useful for its purpose) networking model in the common TCP/IP application with at least hardware, protocol and session layers which must be negotiated and maintained. Normally, you only see about 60% of the theoritical maximum capacity. So while Gigabit ethernet is good for networking, it is not necessarily appropriate for the purposes FireWire was intended. Think: what is the intended purpose for BlueTooth versus 802.11b? Design criteria matter: e.g. BlueTooth uses many times less power but is intended for short small communications needs; FireWire can provide power to devices (like my iPod) and Gigbit Ethernet cannot. In most cases, having too few standards and too few options is just as bad as having too many options and no standards. Choose the standard which makes sense for your application.
There is a Linux ICA client, which would allow you to deploy X terminals and present ICA clients to them from a Linux concentrator which would make the ICA connections to your WinNT/2K box. The disadvantage of this is the need to deploy both X and ICA to every client when you only need one or the other in practice normally. On the other hand, if you actually have the option of presenting Linux as an alternative, you can run your Windows apps in Application Publication mode and simply present them inside a Gnome or KDE environment on your X terms.
The performance will depend on the application mix you are using. How much data can the drive continiously stream in/out which is the dependant on the drive and the bandwidth of the controller. Are you needs read intensive, write intensive, random or linear in nature? I would almost always recommend using hardware raid to anyone because you get reliability, which is probably more imporant anyway. A stripped RAID array will be able to provide better read throughput, especially as the number of drives goes up and the reads can be spread accross multiple heads. If you are doing random editing of high bandwidth video, however, you probobly want mirrored high RPM drives. This allows for full spead reads and writes, and redundancy. If you are doing lots of writes, especially in small chunks, stripped RAID is not going to be as fast--too much parity calculation. Also, it depends on the quality of the hardware RAID implementation, the saturation of the bus (are you going to run your ATA/100 drives as masters in independant channels?) etc.
You will probobly be better off getting something which meets your needs rather that worrying about the best performance. So my suggestion would be RAID for the added safety value (not to mention that unless you need it, more space will probobly be worth more than a few milliseconds of performance gain). Remember though, RAID doesn't save you from powerfailures! If you are going to have any stripped RAID array, even hardware, you must have it on a UPS so that it is not left in an inconsistant state! Good hunting!
I don't like the idea that economic renumeration should take the form of micropayments in the OSS model, let alone the FSF model. Fundementally, OSS is about colaberation and the contribution of time and energy to a project. The problem that occurs when people use OSS and don't return to the project is not that they cannot find a way to make payments (which only makes sense if you are attempting to tie the traditional Capitalist structures onto a concept which does not conform to them). The problem is that they don't necessarily contribute to the pool of resources and energy that the community needs to thrive.
The FS (e.g. FSF) movement is even farther from needing payments. Afterall the notion of Free as in Speech is that the work is simple a presentation to the world and our global knowledge. The ideas that are contained in FS are supposed to be given away. The protections in the copyleft are intended to keep them that way. Now there is an implicit assumption that this system works becuase everbody chooses to participate in our global comminity. But I don't have to share my ideas with anyone if I don't want to. The difference is obligation.
As the article mentioned the problem currently is not with the OSS movement but with the companies which are trying to make money through it. The real problem as I see it is not getting payments into the OSS system, but getting companies to understand that the correct response to OSS is the return of energy, resources, and knowledge to the community.
Here is an example of how this could work:
A large organization like the Mexico City or City of Largo (also) and, possibly, City of Turku, Finland (Finnish) can contribute by hiring programmers for to work on the projects which they are using (and relying on). The number of programmers should be proportional to the needs of the organization and the savings from the conventional CSS model. If, for example the savings over a conventional solution over 2 years was $500,000, then the organization could spend $200,000 on programmers to both solve problems that the organization needs resolved (and which would be contributed back to OSS) and additionally provide 50% of their time to contribute to the OSS projects they are relying on (bug fixes, improvements, research). All numbers are merely examples. You get the idea.
A smaller organization could contibute some of the time of its staff and provide some resource (server, hardware donations, software donations, etc.) I am working with many clients who are just beginning to understand how FS/OSS may fit into thier business models. Give them time and help them to understand that correct response to the benefits of using FS/OSS is direct contributions to the community and our world.
But, this doesn't fit into the 'Modern Western World View.' Modern (American) capitalism is a beast whose fundemental tenents no longer bare any resemblance to reality. Informed consumers are not only idealized, but necessarily fictional because there is too much information for any consumer to possibly be informed on all their desicsions. This is what keeps product, techniques and services which are sub-optimal or even harmful (or at the very least no good) in the market. Other forces besides supply and demand control the system: Monopolies, Ologopolies, price fixing, political manipulation through PACs, financial contributions, etc.
Clearly, the relationships between those inside OSS community and those on the outside who adopt OSS can be changed by showing the adoptors that the correct adoption of OSS is not merely the use of the code, but involvement in the community--and by doing this, the question of renumeration becomes irrelevant.
I agree that the real danger is long term storage. There was a really good article in Scientific American about three years ago (long enough that I cannot reference it easily) which went in careful detail through the diffrerences between digital storage (or any non human readable storage) and traditional methods. The long and short of it was that even though we require some translation system to crack a written language, linguists will tell you that there is enough commonality in all human languages that you can recover a written langauge with only a little help (Rosetta Stone) or a lot of time. Pictures are even easier. Think of all the frescos, paintings, stone carvings. Even the cave paintings are still 'interpretable' today.
But digital (and other arbirarily encoded media) are different. If the original translation schema is lost the task of decoding becomes almost impossible. In fact, if you really had no information and had to assume some arbitrary transform, there are an inifinite number of possible 'interpretable' decondings. Obviously, if people have access to the media 5,000 years from now, then the media will have been preserved in a non-normal method. Unlike paper, painting, and to some degree film, you must not only maintain the media but the media players. This means that I cannot read the PDP-11 tapes created by a business 20 years ago easily. In fact, to get access to the data (which in the past would have left a massive paper trail) I would have to have the technology and the decoding system (software) to read the tapes. This combined with the frailty of even the best of digital media leads me to worry alot.
I just spent a few weeks in France and spent a fair amount of time looking at things which humanity had made over 500 years ago. In fact, I was able to spend time looking at things which had been preserved over a 1000 years. Paintings from 900AD, and Buildings from the eleventh century. One thing I noted was the unbelievable paper trail left by much of humanities activities. All this is in danger. And while it may seem trite, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history unless you know about them. You'll probobly make them anyway, but at least you can see them comming.
Sigh.
It should be noted that 'FireWire' is IEEE 1394 and is availible BUILT IN to many Sony PC products under the 'iLink' name, and is availble to any other PC user in the form of a IEEE 1394 card.
It seems like a good way to provide non-content protected MP3 technology to the masses, which is good for those of us who don't want the masses to support RIAA crippleware or other protected options. Remember, if you don't support the reasonably good products, the even worse ones will take over.