I have the luxury of not arguing it to by boss. We've been using sun servers since long before I was hired at my company. If I did have to argue for it, I'd obviously go out to sun's site and grab a bunch of meaningless statistics regarding cost generated by sun - it seems to work for the microsoft guys.
I have no clue what you're talking about when referring to "The software literature" (and I don't really care frankly). I have been writing code professionally for a long time and have worked in shops with very easy to maintain code and very hard to maintain code. Documentation and the way code is broken apart and modularized is what matters. Not how much of it there is.
Lines of code has everything to do with ease of programmer replacment, maintenance costs, and flexibility.
This is about being able to replace your programmers easily if one of them is a pompous ass, being able to move the code base around and adapt it quickly if your OS provider is a pompous ass, and being able to keep maintenance costs down because the overal structure is smaller.
Bullshit. Organization, design and documentation of code has everything to do with ease of programmer replacement, maintenance costs, and flexibility. It's about quality, not quantity. I can have 50,000 lines of code that are split into well concieved, well documented modules that conform to accepted standards. A new programmer can come on board and maintain this code easily. I can have 3000 lines of crap code that they guy who wrote it can't maintain a year later.
Only the fastest Java desktop applications are usable on my PIII 1.2GHz, namely NetBeans and Eclipse, and that's because they don't use Swing. I wrote a Hello World app in C# and it took 2 seconds to start. Language performance will continue to count until we all have 3+ GHz machines.
That's funny because my laptop is a PIII 1.2GHz and I use JBuilder 6 (considered to be one of the slower java IDE's) every day for java development. I thought it was usable but I guess all the applications I've written with it don't actually exist. Damn, I guess the last year of my life has been a figment of my imagination...
I'm not arguing that java and swing perform as well as native code in GUI environments. However, they've come a long way and they are clearly "usable". I'd even venture to say that the performance is "acceptable". Coupled with the fact that the applications can run on multiple operating systems without so much as recompiling the source, I might even call it "useful".
One thing that never seems to be taken into account when it comes to scalability...
I'd rather maintain a cluster of 5 high end Sun boxes than 50+ wintel machines. Maybe most people don't view this as much of a difference but to me it sure feels like a huge savings in cost and frustration even though the initial purchase price is higher.
I have to disagree with a few of your statements. J2EE has its place. It's the best tool out there for many enterprise jobs IMHO. EJB's come at a cost but you get something back for that cost.
I know that when you're doing work for myWannabeEcommerceSite.com, they might not appear to be very useful. However, when you're working in a real enterprise environment where you need assorted systems to interoperate and the flexibility to tie them together in new ways in the future, EJB's are a sound investment. There's a difference between having a 2-way intel box in the corner of your basement running a site with a couple thousand visitors per month and selling products to hundreds of thousands of customers per day on your website while taking phone orders, catalog orders, serving people in over 2000 retail stores and handling your own warehousing/shipping.
EJB's are exceptionally useful in this environment. That's not to say that.Net isn't useful btw, I just feel much more comfortable running our mission critical servers on Sun and IBM hardware and operating systems. Until I'm sold on intel and windows as a reliable and secure server OS,.net will not me an option for me. And being as I would likely use Linux or FreeBSD first on intel hardware, it's probably going to be awhile:)
I disagree. If I write an elegant solution that takes up 500 lines, and you write a clunky solution that takes 1000 lines, who was more productive?
Now if we come up with the same solution, but I just type faster, so i have 1000 lines done, and you have 500 lines done, who is more productive?
Performance of a developer should be measured in (features implemented - bugs found)/time * some_constant_for_how_maintainable_the_code_is
anything else, and you are lying to yourself.
I've said it here before and I'll likely say it again. Lines of code is an absurd measure of anything. It means nothing. A 1000 line source file can be more "elegant" and more readable than a 500 line source file and visa-versa.
And as for your typing speed comment. Anybody who thinks that even 5% of programming is typing the code in has a lot to learn. Good programming is design, documentation, testing, and refactoring. Typing in code should be a relatively small part of your job as a programmer. If it's not, most likely you're doing something wrong. If you're worried about your typing speed, you're doing something wrong. If you can tell me how many lines are in a single source file you've created without checking, you're probably doing something wrong.
The provider with the cheap tiered pricing is WideOpenWest. Competing with them are TimeWarner with Roadrunner, another cable company carrying the Roadrunner brand (not sure how that works), and one other with tiered pricing that I can't remember the name of (they're not available in my specific area).
I don't think there's as much to worry about as this article indicates. In a free market, tiered plans that are overpriced and overly restricted will ultimately fail to competition. People in small markets might be hurt for a little while until competition moves in, but it is only a matter of time.
There are actually two providers here in Columbus now that have tiered plans but they're both based on throughput, not total monthly bandwidth used. In fact, it's actually pretty sweet. One of the companies offers 150kbs down and 75kbs up for $4.95 per month. Their "power user" package is 1.5mbit down and 300k up for $15.95. One of my friends is going to try it out for a month or two and compare it to roadrunner. I guarantee if it's as good as it sounds, half my office will be switching within a month.
It's actually tempting to grab the lower tiered service and adjust to the slower speed just for the price savings. $4.95 is stupid cheap for broadband internet acess.
This sort of thing makes for great corporate performance art, but honestly... does it make the average person want to choose them as their ISP? If not, then they might as well make origami out of their money and set it on fire.
Sometimes marketting isn't about making people want your product. Sometimes it's about making sure people know your product exists.
Here's a significant, non-infringing use for p2p...
http://www.furthurnet.org/
Although I don't know how I feel about it given the parties involved, there's also the video that Microsoft is launching on Kazaa using DRM. I'd also call that significant and non-infringing. Then there's also these guys...
http://www.brilliantdigital.com/
They're seeding p2p searches with results containing links to legally purchase stuff and such. Probably very annoying for users but legal and likely to be lucrative while there's not much competition.
There are very few arguments that you can make for shutting down p2p services that couldn't be applied to the net period. There are a million and a half ways to use the net for piracy or other illegal activities. That's not grounds to attack the technology. That's grounds to attack the users involved in those activities.
p2p is not the enemy. Apparently poor college kids, and fans with large, legally purchased CD libraries are the enemy.
I agree that you'd have to let people know it's CD-R media because of compatibility issues.
I just thought I'd point out that the vast majority of cd players will play CD-R's, even really really old ones. CD-R's were designed to be compatible with existing players. There are just isolated players here and there that can't handle them. They're the exception, not the rule. It's pretty unpredictable too. I had a PoS sanyo CD player made sometime around 1986 that played CD-R's fine but had the misfortune of buying a fairly expensive car stereo in 1997 that couldn't handle them.
1) I would argue that it does matter. I would argue that the technology and the creators of the technology are being unfairly blamed for illegal and or immoral acts (depending on your viewpoint) committed by its users. It would be like taking Ford to court because I transported a bomb in my car and committed a terrorist act using it. There are plenty of legal uses for p2p and they're starting to recieve more notice - look at furthur.net or cases in which people have benefitted from releasing their own work on p2p networks...
2) Not to knitpick, but in this case the artists don't have a right to control who can copy their work. The copyright holders do. The copyright holders are not the artists. They're the record companies. There are plenty of reasons to feel sorry for artists given the current state of the industry. However most of them don't stem from p2p, they stem from the actions of the RIAA and the virtual distribution/promotion monopoly that is collectively held by their members.
Isn't unfinished songs being distributed a security issue more than a p2p piracy issue? Seriously, aren't their actions like leaving a 20 bill sitting on your front porch and then bitching at the wind that blows it into the hands of somebody walking down the sidewalk? If they had trustworthy people working for them in the studio and they were careful about who they gave unreleased stuff to, the tracks wouldn't be able to make it onto Napster. Last I checked, studios didn't use Napster to store audio files.
What makes an object a planet? Size? The presence of its own sattelites? An atmosphere? What separates planets from large asteroids?
It seems to me the astronomy community can't decide. How hard can it be? It's an arbitrary classification that doesn't actually mean anything. It's all just hunks of rock orbiting the sun. It's a classification that doesn't actually mean anything. Somebody just make a decision and let's all stick to it. It's annoying not knowing how many planets have been discovered in our own solar system.
Is it the governments job to take tax-money payed by all of us and put them into projects that competes (unfairly) with the products we make?
Is the government supposed to squander our tax money on over-priced software produced by a company constantly in court due to anticompetitive business practices and abuse of its monopoly? I see where you're coming from but it's not that simple. Frankly I'd rather compete against open source apps in a truly open market than compete with microsoft.
Also, there's the whole quality issue too. I record 90% of the shows I record at the lowest quality, I'd be able to record everything at high quality if I had that sort of space.
That's 50 days of straight programming. 50 days, 24 hours a day.
It's cool, but come on, it's unnecessary. If you are 1200 hours behind in programming, you are just not going to catch up, period.
Actually, there are certain shows that I save to videotape for later referece. Sometimes I get a lot of shows that I intend to dump to VHS backed up on my drive and it takes a couple of weekends to dump them. If I had 1200 hours of programming, the TiVo itself could become my video library. There are of course some issues regarding backing up the data and such but still, I'd love to have my entire library of VHS tapes sitting on one harddrive instead.
Also, when you live in a household with more than one person, you'd be suprised how much space you can eat up. I have 80 hours of capacity on my TiVo and it very rarely actually has space to record TiVo suggestions.
What I really need to do is get an ethernet card installed and figure out how to share the video files but I say bring it on, I'll take all the space I can get.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
I cannot believe they actually post a word-for-word transcript in a press release on the white house website. It cracks me up. We elected a fucking rocket scientist didn't we?
Linux is very quickly becoming ready for Joe (or Jane) User.
I still don't understand how ANYONE on/. is qualified to make this assertion. Our perspective is incredibly skewed because of our expertise. Sure, every "Linux on the Desktop" article comes with posts about peoples moms, wifes, grandpa's using Linux just fine, accept not everyone has a relative that can install and support them on it either.
Yes, I'm sure I'm biased by my technical expertise. However, it's also one of the reasons I feel I can make that assertion. I'm a software developer. I work with users every day to assure that the programs I've written are easily usable and understood. I've sat behind one-way glass and watched users interact with my software. I have a pretty good handle on what's easy for a novice to use and what isn't. Developments like Lindow's "click and run" are breaking new ground in linux's ease of use for general consumers even though we may scoff at them. If you don't think that usability has been improving and improving rapidly, go ahead and pick up an old linux book with an early version of slackware off a discount book rack then download the latest readhat.iso's. Install both of them on a machine. Find somebody who has installed Lindows or HomeBase Desktop and try it out. Compare where things were 5 years ago to where they are today. The difference is impressive.
As for Windows OEM fees, while I was in college, I worked for a music store that also custom built PC's and sold retail/studio accounting packages (don't ask me how they got into that business). At the time, an OEM copy of Windows 95 was $99. I have no reason to believe this has changed
Good point. Come to think of it, I do know a couple of non-techies that use linux for reasons other than saving money. My ex-wife's father started out a mac user with no technical background. He was an artist and teacher - not a geek by any means. The last time I saw him, he'd become a hard-core linux PPC user. He was even learning C so that he could contribute to some of his favorite open source applications. I was very impressed. I think he was drawn in by the community and collaborative aspects of OSS. Unfortunately, I still think that those people are in the minority these days and that money will be the driving force behind most of linux's success.
Then again, I could discover that it's just the cheap bastards I hang out with coloring my viewpoint;)
If you were paying more attention, you'd notice that your argument is rapidly becoming outdated.
Until Linux comes to a level of user-friendliness much more advanced than it's at now, Linux is not going to enter the general consumer market
Linux is very quickly becoming ready for Joe (or Jane) User. Look at recent deveopments such as Lindows or OEone's HomeBase Desktop. The momentum is building. Look at Open Office and Mozilla. Linux is not all that far away from being viable as a desktop operating system my grandmother could use. In fact, I'm convinced that I could already set up a system for her that would allow her to do everything she does now on her windows box with close to the same level of ease.
They are blissful on Windows, have no desire to switch over and dont really know about (nor do they care about) the Windows vs. *nix vs. whatever.
Well, first off, I don't know any novice users that would describe their experience as "blissful". Secondly, you're right. They don't care about windows vs. *nix. However, they do care about buying the same PC for $100 less. That's what's going to drive Linux into the consumer market - not users suddenly getting the urge to become a hard-core linux hacker.
One of the four wd drives in the server was IDE - all it contained was the os and a handful of utilities. The other 3 drives were indeed wd SCSI drives. I want to say the IDE drive was around 2 gigs and the scsi drives were a bit bigger, roughly 4 gigs.
The wd drives in our desktops that were prone to failing were all IDE. They were 1.6 gig caviar drives if memory serves.
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I have the luxury of not arguing it to by boss. We've been using sun servers since long before I was hired at my company. If I did have to argue for it, I'd obviously go out to sun's site and grab a bunch of meaningless statistics regarding cost generated by sun - it seems to work for the microsoft guys.
I have no clue what you're talking about when referring to "The software literature" (and I don't really care frankly). I have been writing code professionally for a long time and have worked in shops with very easy to maintain code and very hard to maintain code. Documentation and the way code is broken apart and modularized is what matters. Not how much of it there is.
Lines of code has everything to do with ease of programmer replacment, maintenance costs, and flexibility.
This is about being able to replace your programmers easily if one of them is a pompous ass, being able to move the code base around and adapt it quickly if your OS provider is a pompous ass, and being able to keep maintenance costs down because the overal structure is smaller.
Bullshit. Organization, design and documentation of code has everything to do with ease of programmer replacement, maintenance costs, and flexibility. It's about quality, not quantity. I can have 50,000 lines of code that are split into well concieved, well documented modules that conform to accepted standards. A new programmer can come on board and maintain this code easily. I can have 3000 lines of crap code that they guy who wrote it can't maintain a year later.
Only the fastest Java desktop applications are usable on my PIII 1.2GHz, namely NetBeans and Eclipse, and that's because they don't use Swing. I wrote a Hello World app in C# and it took 2 seconds to start. Language performance will continue to count until we all have 3+ GHz machines.
That's funny because my laptop is a PIII 1.2GHz and I use JBuilder 6 (considered to be one of the slower java IDE's) every day for java development. I thought it was usable but I guess all the applications I've written with it don't actually exist. Damn, I guess the last year of my life has been a figment of my imagination...
I'm not arguing that java and swing perform as well as native code in GUI environments. However, they've come a long way and they are clearly "usable". I'd even venture to say that the performance is "acceptable". Coupled with the fact that the applications can run on multiple operating systems without so much as recompiling the source, I might even call it "useful".
One thing that never seems to be taken into account when it comes to scalability...
I'd rather maintain a cluster of 5 high end Sun boxes than 50+ wintel machines. Maybe most people don't view this as much of a difference but to me it sure feels like a huge savings in cost and frustration even though the initial purchase price is higher.
I have to disagree with a few of your statements. J2EE has its place. It's the best tool out there for many enterprise jobs IMHO. EJB's come at a cost but you get something back for that cost.
.Net isn't useful btw, I just feel much more comfortable running our mission critical servers on Sun and IBM hardware and operating systems. Until I'm sold on intel and windows as a reliable and secure server OS, .net will not me an option for me. And being as I would likely use Linux or FreeBSD first on intel hardware, it's probably going to be awhile :)
I know that when you're doing work for myWannabeEcommerceSite.com, they might not appear to be very useful. However, when you're working in a real enterprise environment where you need assorted systems to interoperate and the flexibility to tie them together in new ways in the future, EJB's are a sound investment. There's a difference between having a 2-way intel box in the corner of your basement running a site with a couple thousand visitors per month and selling products to hundreds of thousands of customers per day on your website while taking phone orders, catalog orders, serving people in over 2000 retail stores and handling your own warehousing/shipping.
EJB's are exceptionally useful in this environment. That's not to say that
I disagree. If I write an elegant solution that takes up 500 lines, and you write a clunky solution that takes 1000 lines, who was more productive?
Now if we come up with the same solution, but I just type faster, so i have 1000 lines done, and you have 500 lines done, who is more productive?
Performance of a developer should be measured in (features implemented - bugs found)/time * some_constant_for_how_maintainable_the_code_is
anything else, and you are lying to yourself.
I've said it here before and I'll likely say it again. Lines of code is an absurd measure of anything. It means nothing. A 1000 line source file can be more "elegant" and more readable than a 500 line source file and visa-versa.
And as for your typing speed comment. Anybody who thinks that even 5% of programming is typing the code in has a lot to learn. Good programming is design, documentation, testing, and refactoring. Typing in code should be a relatively small part of your job as a programmer. If it's not, most likely you're doing something wrong. If you're worried about your typing speed, you're doing something wrong. If you can tell me how many lines are in a single source file you've created without checking, you're probably doing something wrong.
The provider with the cheap tiered pricing is WideOpenWest. Competing with them are TimeWarner with Roadrunner, another cable company carrying the Roadrunner brand (not sure how that works), and one other with tiered pricing that I can't remember the name of (they're not available in my specific area).
I don't think there's as much to worry about as this article indicates. In a free market, tiered plans that are overpriced and overly restricted will ultimately fail to competition. People in small markets might be hurt for a little while until competition moves in, but it is only a matter of time.
There are actually two providers here in Columbus now that have tiered plans but they're both based on throughput, not total monthly bandwidth used. In fact, it's actually pretty sweet. One of the companies offers 150kbs down and 75kbs up for $4.95 per month. Their "power user" package is 1.5mbit down and 300k up for $15.95. One of my friends is going to try it out for a month or two and compare it to roadrunner. I guarantee if it's as good as it sounds, half my office will be switching within a month.
It's actually tempting to grab the lower tiered service and adjust to the slower speed just for the price savings. $4.95 is stupid cheap for broadband internet acess.
This sort of thing makes for great corporate performance art, but honestly... does it make the average person want to choose them as their ISP? If not, then they might as well make origami out of their money and set it on fire.
Sometimes marketting isn't about making people want your product. Sometimes it's about making sure people know your product exists.
Here's a significant, non-infringing use for p2p...
http://www.furthurnet.org/
Although I don't know how I feel about it given the parties involved, there's also the video that Microsoft is launching on Kazaa using DRM. I'd also call that significant and non-infringing. Then there's also these guys...
http://www.brilliantdigital.com/
They're seeding p2p searches with results containing links to legally purchase stuff and such. Probably very annoying for users but legal and likely to be lucrative while there's not much competition.
There are very few arguments that you can make for shutting down p2p services that couldn't be applied to the net period. There are a million and a half ways to use the net for piracy or other illegal activities. That's not grounds to attack the technology. That's grounds to attack the users involved in those activities.
p2p is not the enemy. Apparently poor college kids, and fans with large, legally purchased CD libraries are the enemy.
I agree that you'd have to let people know it's CD-R media because of compatibility issues.
I just thought I'd point out that the vast majority of cd players will play CD-R's, even really really old ones. CD-R's were designed to be compatible with existing players. There are just isolated players here and there that can't handle them. They're the exception, not the rule. It's pretty unpredictable too. I had a PoS sanyo CD player made sometime around 1986 that played CD-R's fine but had the misfortune of buying a fairly expensive car stereo in 1997 that couldn't handle them.
1) I would argue that it does matter. I would argue that the technology and the creators of the technology are being unfairly blamed for illegal and or immoral acts (depending on your viewpoint) committed by its users. It would be like taking Ford to court because I transported a bomb in my car and committed a terrorist act using it. There are plenty of legal uses for p2p and they're starting to recieve more notice - look at furthur.net or cases in which people have benefitted from releasing their own work on p2p networks...
2) Not to knitpick, but in this case the artists don't have a right to control who can copy their work. The copyright holders do. The copyright holders are not the artists. They're the record companies. There are plenty of reasons to feel sorry for artists given the current state of the industry. However most of them don't stem from p2p, they stem from the actions of the RIAA and the virtual distribution/promotion monopoly that is collectively held by their members.
Isn't unfinished songs being distributed a security issue more than a p2p piracy issue? Seriously, aren't their actions like leaving a 20 bill sitting on your front porch and then bitching at the wind that blows it into the hands of somebody walking down the sidewalk? If they had trustworthy people working for them in the studio and they were careful about who they gave unreleased stuff to, the tracks wouldn't be able to make it onto Napster. Last I checked, studios didn't use Napster to store audio files.
What makes an object a planet? Size? The presence of its own sattelites? An atmosphere? What separates planets from large asteroids?
It seems to me the astronomy community can't decide. How hard can it be? It's an arbitrary classification that doesn't actually mean anything. It's all just hunks of rock orbiting the sun. It's a classification that doesn't actually mean anything. Somebody just make a decision and let's all stick to it. It's annoying not knowing how many planets have been discovered in our own solar system.
Is it the governments job to take tax-money payed by all of us and put them into projects that competes (unfairly) with the products we make?
Is the government supposed to squander our tax money on over-priced software produced by a company constantly in court due to anticompetitive business practices and abuse of its monopoly? I see where you're coming from but it's not that simple. Frankly I'd rather compete against open source apps in a truly open market than compete with microsoft.
I can't fathom why this post was modded down to -1.
How can you write an article arguing against use of the Atkins diet and miss the obvious and deadly mental health problem it presents?
You can't drink beer for two weeks!!!
I'd rather be a fatass than sober...
Also, there's the whole quality issue too. I record 90% of the shows I record at the lowest quality, I'd be able to record everything at high quality if I had that sort of space.
That's 50 days of straight programming. 50 days, 24 hours a day.
It's cool, but come on, it's unnecessary. If you are 1200 hours behind in programming, you are just not going to catch up, period.
Actually, there are certain shows that I save to videotape for later referece. Sometimes I get a lot of shows that I intend to dump to VHS backed up on my drive and it takes a couple of weekends to dump them. If I had 1200 hours of programming, the TiVo itself could become my video library. There are of course some issues regarding backing up the data and such but still, I'd love to have my entire library of VHS tapes sitting on one harddrive instead.
Also, when you live in a household with more than one person, you'd be suprised how much space you can eat up. I have 80 hours of capacity on my TiVo and it very rarely actually has space to record TiVo suggestions.
What I really need to do is get an ethernet card installed and figure out how to share the video files but I say bring it on, I'll take all the space I can get.
Actually, according to the transcript at whitehouse.gov, the actual quote is:
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
I cannot believe they actually post a word-for-word transcript in a press release on the white house website. It cracks me up. We elected a fucking rocket scientist didn't we?
Linux is very quickly becoming ready for Joe (or Jane) User.
/. is qualified to make this assertion. Our perspective is incredibly skewed because of our expertise. Sure, every "Linux on the Desktop" article comes with posts about peoples moms, wifes, grandpa's using Linux just fine, accept not everyone has a relative that can install and support them on it either.
.iso's. Install both of them on a machine. Find somebody who has installed Lindows or HomeBase Desktop and try it out. Compare where things were 5 years ago to where they are today. The difference is impressive.
I still don't understand how ANYONE on
Yes, I'm sure I'm biased by my technical expertise. However, it's also one of the reasons I feel I can make that assertion. I'm a software developer. I work with users every day to assure that the programs I've written are easily usable and understood. I've sat behind one-way glass and watched users interact with my software. I have a pretty good handle on what's easy for a novice to use and what isn't. Developments like Lindow's "click and run" are breaking new ground in linux's ease of use for general consumers even though we may scoff at them. If you don't think that usability has been improving and improving rapidly, go ahead and pick up an old linux book with an early version of slackware off a discount book rack then download the latest readhat
As for Windows OEM fees, while I was in college, I worked for a music store that also custom built PC's and sold retail/studio accounting packages (don't ask me how they got into that business). At the time, an OEM copy of Windows 95 was $99. I have no reason to believe this has changed
Good point. Come to think of it, I do know a couple of non-techies that use linux for reasons other than saving money. My ex-wife's father started out a mac user with no technical background. He was an artist and teacher - not a geek by any means. The last time I saw him, he'd become a hard-core linux PPC user. He was even learning C so that he could contribute to some of his favorite open source applications. I was very impressed. I think he was drawn in by the community and collaborative aspects of OSS. Unfortunately, I still think that those people are in the minority these days and that money will be the driving force behind most of linux's success.
;)
Then again, I could discover that it's just the cheap bastards I hang out with coloring my viewpoint
If you were paying more attention, you'd notice that your argument is rapidly becoming outdated.
Until Linux comes to a level of user-friendliness much more advanced than it's at now, Linux is not going to enter the general consumer market
Linux is very quickly becoming ready for Joe (or Jane) User. Look at recent deveopments such as Lindows or OEone's HomeBase Desktop. The momentum is building. Look at Open Office and Mozilla. Linux is not all that far away from being viable as a desktop operating system my grandmother could use. In fact, I'm convinced that I could already set up a system for her that would allow her to do everything she does now on her windows box with close to the same level of ease.
They are blissful on Windows, have no desire to switch over and dont really know about (nor do they care about) the Windows vs. *nix vs. whatever.
Well, first off, I don't know any novice users that would describe their experience as "blissful". Secondly, you're right. They don't care about windows vs. *nix. However, they do care about buying the same PC for $100 less. That's what's going to drive Linux into the consumer market - not users suddenly getting the urge to become a hard-core linux hacker.
One of the four wd drives in the server was IDE - all it contained was the os and a handful of utilities. The other 3 drives were indeed wd SCSI drives. I want to say the IDE drive was around 2 gigs and the scsi drives were a bit bigger, roughly 4 gigs.
The wd drives in our desktops that were prone to failing were all IDE. They were 1.6 gig caviar drives if memory serves.