It depends on where you are. My CDMA phone on Verizon was dropping three and four calls per night. After switching to AT&T, I drop calls only in a few dead spots.
The locked phones come as a consequece of people wanting cheap phones (subsidized, they call them).
If that were the case, you could easily buy unsubsidized phones in the U.S. At least on Verizon, that isn't even an option. They won't sell you a phone without moving to a new contract, often at a higher rate with fewer minutes or reduced features. That's why I ended up on AT&T. Similarly, if the high cost were due to people wanting cheap phones, we would get a rate cut after the subsidy period like they do in Europe.
The locked phones come as a consequence of the cell service providers seeing an opportunity for customer lock-in and taking advantage of it to the maximum extent possible. Nothing more, nothing less.
The thing is... I've had SD cards fail silently. I'm not so trusting of NAND until it proves itself, and all the reviews are good. I guess you could say, I'm waiting for third gen tech.
I've had USB flash drives fail, too, but those failures were invariably caused by a solder joint failure at the USB connector. Devices that get constant plugging and unplugging see a lot more connector abuse than a hard drive mounted inside a machine with four screws. I wouldn't be at all surprised if SD cards had similar structural flaws, though I wouldn't begin to guess what they are.
1) HDDs don't have excessive wear and tear from use. We don't know how long high end SSDs will last - but HDDs can go years of heavy read/write use.
You're joking, right? One of the most common causes of hard drive failures is damage to the heads from the head ramp. That's mechanical damage every time the heads get parked. And in laptops, the rate of damage is even worse because when they get bumped around, the head arm slams itself against the ramp to protect the platters. And the second most common cause is data corruption of the control track, without which the hard drive becomes a brick; there's a theory from one data recovery company that fluid bearings cause vibration that leads to this corruption. And that's not even counting the fact that you have a head arm moving back and forth, bearings spinning, etc. There's plenty of mechanical wear and tear going on, and some of it can be quite catastrophic.
SSDs have none of those mechanical failure modes. And even the risk of solder ball failure (a common cause of hard drive controller board failure) should be significantly lower because solid state drives generally don't dissipate as much heat as spinning drives. Thus, the failure of a SSD is likely to be fairly predictable in write count to the point that you could set your watch by it, and the exceptions are likely to be much fewer than with hard drives.
To put this in perspective, ask yourself this: when is the last time you had RAM suddenly go bad? In my life, I can only think of one single time when I've seen RAM that worked from the factory stop working, and I'm not 100% sure even of that one. Hard drives? I lost four last year alone. So it's not a question of whether SSDs will be more reliable on average, but how many orders of magnitude more reliable they will be. My money is on either 2 or 3.
2) As prices of SSDs drop, companies will flock to the new market, shovelling out short lived crap. (Same thing happened to HDDs)
Maybe so, but this is what reviews are for.:-)
2) HDDs will have superior capacity for a very long time. It will be hard to match that for the "best value" drives priced at around $100, or even the cheapest ones priced at ~$50.
Again, though, if 95% of customers don't need that capacity, there's no reason for them to buy a less reliable technology. And there's little question, given the failure rates on hard drives, that even the most poorly built junk SSDs are going to be more reliable on average, assuming you ignore all drives that are DOA....
3) HDDs can ramp up the cache to have very awesome performance.
I'd settle for a tenth of hard drive performance to have avoided my four hard drive failures last year. It was a brutal year. As soon as I can move entirely to SSDs, I'm switching and never looking back.
Now picture a modern 3.5" drive with dual or quad heads from WD. Add in 4GB of cache, and make it 10000 RPM. Stick it in a DVD drive bay and include battery backup. The cost would literally be hundreds of dollars, but you'd have something like 8TB of space capable of almost maxing out SATA3. (500MB/sec for short bursts under 3 minutes long isn't unrealistic)
And the average computer user would use... pretty much the 4 GB of cache, and wouldn't ever read or write a single byte to the physical platter except for data reliability reasons.... Saying that hard drive vendors could increase space by fourfold doesn't matter. They could increase it a hundredfold and it wouldn't matter if 95% of the customers don't care. It's like the problem with selling software upgrades. If customers don't see enough value in upgrading, they won't.
The cell phone camera that your average person (sadly) uses for video generates about eight megabytes of video in less than two hours....:-D Okay, I'm purposefully exaggerating for comic effect here, but you get my point....
Those power users are also the 5% case. The top 5% of users do drive the quest for more capacity, but the 95% provide the economies of scale that make it feasible by buying 250 GB drives when they really only need 30 GB. Without their support, the price per gig on hard drives will go up. It's pretty much inevitable.
Sounds more like.... for an extra five bonus points, provide the synonym for "risk" that is the former name of his company and/or the two concatenated adjectives meaning small and not hard that are the current name.:-)
Where do you pull that figure from? How much disk space are you using *right now*?
It's basically a guesstimate based on what I've seen from my own use after excluding all the stuff I do that normal people don't (massive multitrack audio, large video editing projects, my servers, and so on). After a few searches, I've concluded that this estimate was actually high. Apparently, the real-world numbers are actually low double digits on average. I've seen estimates as low as 10 GB and as high as 30 GB. Your usage is very unusual, as is mine. The mere fact that you're posting on Slashdot pretty much automatically puts you into the "power user" category without further question.:-)
That is an interesting way to frame it provided you dont adjust for inflation, which would make the cost lower every year.
Negligibly, yes. And I think there has been a small drop in the base price as well, IIRC. The point was that the drop in flash prices has been much more precipitous.
Most home computer users won't notice or care. The future of large quantities of storage for power users, however, is almost certainly much higher prices in the medium term until flash catches up in capacity. The Seagate person is probably right about that being 2020 or later....
Pretty much. And the Seagate folks are forgetting the fixed costs in their estimates. There are a lot of fixed costs that go into manufacturing hard drives. That's the reason prices on HDs aren't dropping. Instead, capacity is increasing, giving the perception that storage is getting cheap. It isn't, though, unless you really expect to use all of that 1 TB capacity. The average computer user uses maybe 1-200 gigs. For them, the effective price of HD storage hasn't changed significantly in about five years.
The price of SSDs is going down because most of their cost can still be reduced by economies of scale. At some point---probably within a couple of years---the price of a SSD will drop to the point where you can get a 256 GB drive for $100. At that point, it doesn't matter how big the hard drive vendors make their drive capacity; they're through. Most people will buy the much more reliable SSDs over the larger HDs once the price is about the same. At that point, the tables will turn, HD manufacturing will be relegated to power users, and hard drive prices will skyrocket. I'd give them five years. At most.
Their statement reads like a press release by a company that sees the writing on the wall and is trying to keep stock prices propped up as long as they can. Just saying.
Myspace, maybe. Facebook is an incredible way to keep in touch with old friends from high school and college. If you haven't tried it, you don't know what you're missing. It's as though all of your friends had a blog and you put them all in an aggregator.
The sorts of people who get excited about new filesystems are already Linux users, generally speaking. Therefore, using that to drive Linux adoption is an exercise in futility.:-)
Also, a filesystem that cannot be used on multiple platforms is vendor lock-in, and whether it comes from Linux or Microsoft, it is just as wrong.
Even if BTRFS were technically perfect, it would still have one fatal flaw that ensures it will never get any serious adoption outside of Linux: its license. The GPL is to commercial adoption what a moat filled with alligators was to knights in the Middle Ages. If they were seriously trying to replace ZFS, they should have started with a license that is more palatable outside of the Linux community.
Besides, doesn't somebody already have a business method patent on suing everybody who's got a name even vaguely similar to yours when you don't have a legitimate case?
And in general, you cannot trademark an English word when used for descriptive purposes. Given that SparkFun makes products that when constructed by hobbyists, almost certainly do precisely what their name implies, in order for SparkFun to be infringing, SPARC would have to claim that they hold the trademark for the word "Spark" when used descriptively, which simply cannot be the case. My prediction? If this went to court, SPARC would almost certainly get their asses handed to them, and SparkFun would probably get treble damages in their countersuit.
Oh, no, it's far worse than that. As soon as I read that suggestion, I immediately had words going through my mind that I won't say in public, even on Slashdot. If your backups are online AT ALL, you have no backups. All it takes is one malicious employee who decides to nuke all your systems at once, and you've lost everything. Not to mention that if those systems are part of your normal operation, that usually means they're in the same building as your normal operations center, and thus all it takes is one fire and you've lost everything.
The requirements for a proper backup are that it must be A. periodically checked for functionality, B. off-site, and C. not connected to the Internet in any way. The ideal implementation involves a vault made of 30 feet of concrete. Most people forget that first one, admittedly, and that causes a lot of problems when disaster strikes. That's still no excuse for ignoring the last two instead.
An online hot swap spare is not a real backup, period, no matter how you use it or implement it. It's great for getting up and running again quickly, but when the hackers compromise your password database, your replicated hot swap spare is compromised, too. When you accidentally introduce a bug that treats social security number 999-99-9999 as an end of record marker and causes records of resident aliens to be deleted or corrupted, your replicated hot swap spare is corrupted, too. Online spares (in any capacity) are to backup as RAID is to backup. They solve a limited class of failures, but do nothing whatsoever for several much larger classes of failures.
Indeed, it is this sort of thinking that is costing Microsoft a pretty penny. Given that the Danger incident just happened a few weeks ago (and they're still cleaning up the mess even today), it's amazing to me that a VP of a computer firm could have already forgotten it. It is this very sort of recommendation from so-called "consultants" that ends up utterly destroying companies in spectacular ways when a real disaster actually happens. To the VP in question, please stop giving such TERRIBLE advice.
Neither. The original joke was that it was successful with that concept when it actually flopped. I was taking the joke one step further by joking that the company was doing well as a result, when in reality, it was dissolved due to insolvency. And by saying that, I think both I and the post I replied to were further implying that Disney is next.
My point was that flu is airborne, so you have to treat every single person who comes in with a head cold as though they might potentially have flu. That's a significant change from the way things work normally. Normally, people who come in with such symptoms end up sharing a waiting room for an hour just waiting to see a doctor, contaminating all the people with sprained wrists in the process. When they finally do get in to see a doctor, the doctors and nurses aren't wearing masks because they aren't in a hospital TB ward where airborne pathogens are expected to be present in large numbers....
If someone is sick enough to end up in ER, then yes, they are isolated and people wear masks consistently, but I predict we'll see robot doctors long before we see human doctors wearing a new mask for every patient in a clinic setting.
Personally? The new Wiki Server. It's designed for normal people to use (WYSIWYG editing). There are still some things I wish it could do that it doesn't handle well, but it's pretty slick on the whole.
That and getting MySQL security fixes via software updates instead of having to watch for them myself. And i think spam filtering is preconfigured in the mail server, which would save a lot of hassle. Oh, and push email for my iPhone.:-)
As for whether those things are worth $200 for my personal server, I already own my hardware and don't plan to upgrade soon, so no. If I were buying one today, I'm not sure which way I'd go; it's at least cheap enough now that I wouldn't immediately dismiss it.
Also, now that I do the actual math, it's probably only about $150. The HD is about $30 more expensive than a DVD burner, and the other HD is probably about $20 more than the smaller one in the non-server config. And if you were planning to install a second HD upgrade anyway (not me, but maybe somebody), since you can't get one without the internal optical drive, the effective cost of Mac OS X Server drops to only $100....:-)
The big deal is that Mac OS X Server just became a $200 add-on for the Mini instead of $500, or a year ago, $1000.:-)
BTW, I do the same thing with X client on a Mini. Works fine for me, but I do wish they'd had this option when I bought mine a couple of years ago. At $1000, it was completely out of reach for a hobby server. At $200, it is more within the realm of possibility.
Never mind development boxes, there are companies that specialise in Mac Mini colocation!
Thanks for mentioning that. I was about to bring up www.macminicolo.net and others like it. Lots of colo sites love the mini because they are only equivalent to 1/2U of rack space (about 1/3U wide x 1.5U tall), but a mere fraction of the depth of most rackmount server gear. In terms of server hardware, you can't even approach that level of density without using blade servers, and you'll spend more for an empty blade server chassis than you spend for two decked out Mini servers running Mac OS X Server (at the new price).
I'm kind of curious how they managed to fit two drives in, the ones I've opened up didn't have a great deal of space inside and storage capacity has always been a bit of problem because they only take 2.5 inch drives.
Easy. The server model has no optical drive. This means that you'll have to have another Mac (remote optical thing) or an external drive when you need to upgrade the OS. Otherwise, for a server box, you'll never use one anyway, so it makes a lot of sense.:-)
For whatever it's worth, I'm using a Mac Mini for my personal server and couldn't be happier. I used to run an old Mac G4 tower, but wanted to be able to do faster photo rendering for generating thumbnails, etc. The Mini fit the bill perfectly, bringing the time per photo down from 30 seconds per RAW file to about 5 seconds, and a subsequent software rewrite from using dcraw and Imlib2 to using sips (Mac OS X's built-in image processing tool) cut that time in half again.
I back it up with Time Machine to the same Airport base station that I use for backing up my laptop, so I just don't have to think about it. It just runs. Every so often, I turn on the monitor and log in to install software updates or security updates. Would I expect my parents to run a server like that? Probably not. Do I think the Mini makes a great personal server for the sorts of people who are inclined to use one? Absolutely.
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It depends on where you are. My CDMA phone on Verizon was dropping three and four calls per night. After switching to AT&T, I drop calls only in a few dead spots.
If that were the case, you could easily buy unsubsidized phones in the U.S. At least on Verizon, that isn't even an option. They won't sell you a phone without moving to a new contract, often at a higher rate with fewer minutes or reduced features. That's why I ended up on AT&T. Similarly, if the high cost were due to people wanting cheap phones, we would get a rate cut after the subsidy period like they do in Europe.
The locked phones come as a consequence of the cell service providers seeing an opportunity for customer lock-in and taking advantage of it to the maximum extent possible. Nothing more, nothing less.
I've had USB flash drives fail, too, but those failures were invariably caused by a solder joint failure at the USB connector. Devices that get constant plugging and unplugging see a lot more connector abuse than a hard drive mounted inside a machine with four screws. I wouldn't be at all surprised if SD cards had similar structural flaws, though I wouldn't begin to guess what they are.
You're joking, right? One of the most common causes of hard drive failures is damage to the heads from the head ramp. That's mechanical damage every time the heads get parked. And in laptops, the rate of damage is even worse because when they get bumped around, the head arm slams itself against the ramp to protect the platters. And the second most common cause is data corruption of the control track, without which the hard drive becomes a brick; there's a theory from one data recovery company that fluid bearings cause vibration that leads to this corruption. And that's not even counting the fact that you have a head arm moving back and forth, bearings spinning, etc. There's plenty of mechanical wear and tear going on, and some of it can be quite catastrophic.
SSDs have none of those mechanical failure modes. And even the risk of solder ball failure (a common cause of hard drive controller board failure) should be significantly lower because solid state drives generally don't dissipate as much heat as spinning drives. Thus, the failure of a SSD is likely to be fairly predictable in write count to the point that you could set your watch by it, and the exceptions are likely to be much fewer than with hard drives.
To put this in perspective, ask yourself this: when is the last time you had RAM suddenly go bad? In my life, I can only think of one single time when I've seen RAM that worked from the factory stop working, and I'm not 100% sure even of that one. Hard drives? I lost four last year alone. So it's not a question of whether SSDs will be more reliable on average, but how many orders of magnitude more reliable they will be. My money is on either 2 or 3.
Maybe so, but this is what reviews are for. :-)
Again, though, if 95% of customers don't need that capacity, there's no reason for them to buy a less reliable technology. And there's little question, given the failure rates on hard drives, that even the most poorly built junk SSDs are going to be more reliable on average, assuming you ignore all drives that are DOA....
I'd settle for a tenth of hard drive performance to have avoided my four hard drive failures last year. It was a brutal year. As soon as I can move entirely to SSDs, I'm switching and never looking back.
And the average computer user would use... pretty much the 4 GB of cache, and wouldn't ever read or write a single byte to the physical platter except for data reliability reasons.... Saying that hard drive vendors could increase space by fourfold doesn't matter. They could increase it a hundredfold and it wouldn't matter if 95% of the customers don't care. It's like the problem with selling software upgrades. If customers don't see enough value in upgrading, they won't.
The cell phone camera that your average person (sadly) uses for video generates about eight megabytes of video in less than two hours.... :-D Okay, I'm purposefully exaggerating for comic effect here, but you get my point....
Those power users are also the 5% case. The top 5% of users do drive the quest for more capacity, but the 95% provide the economies of scale that make it feasible by buying 250 GB drives when they really only need 30 GB. Without their support, the price per gig on hard drives will go up. It's pretty much inevitable.
Sounds more like.... for an extra five bonus points, provide the synonym for "risk" that is the former name of his company and/or the two concatenated adjectives meaning small and not hard that are the current name. :-)
It's basically a guesstimate based on what I've seen from my own use after excluding all the stuff I do that normal people don't (massive multitrack audio, large video editing projects, my servers, and so on). After a few searches, I've concluded that this estimate was actually high. Apparently, the real-world numbers are actually low double digits on average. I've seen estimates as low as 10 GB and as high as 30 GB. Your usage is very unusual, as is mine. The mere fact that you're posting on Slashdot pretty much automatically puts you into the "power user" category without further question. :-)
Negligibly, yes. And I think there has been a small drop in the base price as well, IIRC. The point was that the drop in flash prices has been much more precipitous.
Most home computer users won't notice or care. The future of large quantities of storage for power users, however, is almost certainly much higher prices in the medium term until flash catches up in capacity. The Seagate person is probably right about that being 2020 or later....
But most SSDs are designed for laptops because that's where hard drives are most at risk. A 500 GB laptop drive does cost almost $100.
Pretty much. And the Seagate folks are forgetting the fixed costs in their estimates. There are a lot of fixed costs that go into manufacturing hard drives. That's the reason prices on HDs aren't dropping. Instead, capacity is increasing, giving the perception that storage is getting cheap. It isn't, though, unless you really expect to use all of that 1 TB capacity. The average computer user uses maybe 1-200 gigs. For them, the effective price of HD storage hasn't changed significantly in about five years.
The price of SSDs is going down because most of their cost can still be reduced by economies of scale. At some point---probably within a couple of years---the price of a SSD will drop to the point where you can get a 256 GB drive for $100. At that point, it doesn't matter how big the hard drive vendors make their drive capacity; they're through. Most people will buy the much more reliable SSDs over the larger HDs once the price is about the same. At that point, the tables will turn, HD manufacturing will be relegated to power users, and hard drive prices will skyrocket. I'd give them five years. At most.
Their statement reads like a press release by a company that sees the writing on the wall and is trying to keep stock prices propped up as long as they can. Just saying.
Myspace, maybe. Facebook is an incredible way to keep in touch with old friends from high school and college. If you haven't tried it, you don't know what you're missing. It's as though all of your friends had a blog and you put them all in an aggregator.
The sorts of people who get excited about new filesystems are already Linux users, generally speaking. Therefore, using that to drive Linux adoption is an exercise in futility. :-)
Also, a filesystem that cannot be used on multiple platforms is vendor lock-in, and whether it comes from Linux or Microsoft, it is just as wrong.
Even if BTRFS were technically perfect, it would still have one fatal flaw that ensures it will never get any serious adoption outside of Linux: its license. The GPL is to commercial adoption what a moat filled with alligators was to knights in the Middle Ages. If they were seriously trying to replace ZFS, they should have started with a license that is more palatable outside of the Linux community.
I believe Radio Shack might....
And in general, you cannot trademark an English word when used for descriptive purposes. Given that SparkFun makes products that when constructed by hobbyists, almost certainly do precisely what their name implies, in order for SparkFun to be infringing, SPARC would have to claim that they hold the trademark for the word "Spark" when used descriptively, which simply cannot be the case. My prediction? If this went to court, SPARC would almost certainly get their asses handed to them, and SparkFun would probably get treble damages in their countersuit.
Oh, no, it's far worse than that. As soon as I read that suggestion, I immediately had words going through my mind that I won't say in public, even on Slashdot. If your backups are online AT ALL, you have no backups. All it takes is one malicious employee who decides to nuke all your systems at once, and you've lost everything. Not to mention that if those systems are part of your normal operation, that usually means they're in the same building as your normal operations center, and thus all it takes is one fire and you've lost everything.
The requirements for a proper backup are that it must be A. periodically checked for functionality, B. off-site, and C. not connected to the Internet in any way. The ideal implementation involves a vault made of 30 feet of concrete. Most people forget that first one, admittedly, and that causes a lot of problems when disaster strikes. That's still no excuse for ignoring the last two instead.
An online hot swap spare is not a real backup, period, no matter how you use it or implement it. It's great for getting up and running again quickly, but when the hackers compromise your password database, your replicated hot swap spare is compromised, too. When you accidentally introduce a bug that treats social security number 999-99-9999 as an end of record marker and causes records of resident aliens to be deleted or corrupted, your replicated hot swap spare is corrupted, too. Online spares (in any capacity) are to backup as RAID is to backup. They solve a limited class of failures, but do nothing whatsoever for several much larger classes of failures.
Indeed, it is this sort of thinking that is costing Microsoft a pretty penny. Given that the Danger incident just happened a few weeks ago (and they're still cleaning up the mess even today), it's amazing to me that a VP of a computer firm could have already forgotten it. It is this very sort of recommendation from so-called "consultants" that ends up utterly destroying companies in spectacular ways when a real disaster actually happens. To the VP in question, please stop giving such TERRIBLE advice.
Neither. The original joke was that it was successful with that concept when it actually flopped. I was taking the joke one step further by joking that the company was doing well as a result, when in reality, it was dissolved due to insolvency. And by saying that, I think both I and the post I replied to were further implying that Disney is next.
My point was that flu is airborne, so you have to treat every single person who comes in with a head cold as though they might potentially have flu. That's a significant change from the way things work normally. Normally, people who come in with such symptoms end up sharing a waiting room for an hour just waiting to see a doctor, contaminating all the people with sprained wrists in the process. When they finally do get in to see a doctor, the doctors and nurses aren't wearing masks because they aren't in a hospital TB ward where airborne pathogens are expected to be present in large numbers....
If someone is sick enough to end up in ER, then yes, they are isolated and people wear masks consistently, but I predict we'll see robot doctors long before we see human doctors wearing a new mask for every patient in a clinic setting.
Yeah, and now CIrcuit City is one of the richest companies in the world.... No, wait....
Explain to me how these contact rules are supposed to prevent transmission of an airborne virus.... That's just not sufficient.
Personally? The new Wiki Server. It's designed for normal people to use (WYSIWYG editing). There are still some things I wish it could do that it doesn't handle well, but it's pretty slick on the whole.
That and getting MySQL security fixes via software updates instead of having to watch for them myself. And i think spam filtering is preconfigured in the mail server, which would save a lot of hassle. Oh, and push email for my iPhone. :-)
As for whether those things are worth $200 for my personal server, I already own my hardware and don't plan to upgrade soon, so no. If I were buying one today, I'm not sure which way I'd go; it's at least cheap enough now that I wouldn't immediately dismiss it.
Also, now that I do the actual math, it's probably only about $150. The HD is about $30 more expensive than a DVD burner, and the other HD is probably about $20 more than the smaller one in the non-server config. And if you were planning to install a second HD upgrade anyway (not me, but maybe somebody), since you can't get one without the internal optical drive, the effective cost of Mac OS X Server drops to only $100.... :-)
The old live vaccine, I assume?
The big deal is that Mac OS X Server just became a $200 add-on for the Mini instead of $500, or a year ago, $1000. :-)
BTW, I do the same thing with X client on a Mini. Works fine for me, but I do wish they'd had this option when I bought mine a couple of years ago. At $1000, it was completely out of reach for a hobby server. At $200, it is more within the realm of possibility.
Thanks for mentioning that. I was about to bring up www.macminicolo.net and others like it. Lots of colo sites love the mini because they are only equivalent to 1/2U of rack space (about 1/3U wide x 1.5U tall), but a mere fraction of the depth of most rackmount server gear. In terms of server hardware, you can't even approach that level of density without using blade servers, and you'll spend more for an empty blade server chassis than you spend for two decked out Mini servers running Mac OS X Server (at the new price).
Easy. The server model has no optical drive. This means that you'll have to have another Mac (remote optical thing) or an external drive when you need to upgrade the OS. Otherwise, for a server box, you'll never use one anyway, so it makes a lot of sense. :-)
For whatever it's worth, I'm using a Mac Mini for my personal server and couldn't be happier. I used to run an old Mac G4 tower, but wanted to be able to do faster photo rendering for generating thumbnails, etc. The Mini fit the bill perfectly, bringing the time per photo down from 30 seconds per RAW file to about 5 seconds, and a subsequent software rewrite from using dcraw and Imlib2 to using sips (Mac OS X's built-in image processing tool) cut that time in half again.
I back it up with Time Machine to the same Airport base station that I use for backing up my laptop, so I just don't have to think about it. It just runs. Every so often, I turn on the monitor and log in to install software updates or security updates. Would I expect my parents to run a server like that? Probably not. Do I think the Mini makes a great personal server for the sorts of people who are inclined to use one? Absolutely.