What I'm saying is that if I spent the same amount of time training/tailoring home users for Linux as I did training and tailoring their Windows boxes, there'd be a lot more Linux users out there. The only reason I don't get to is that they've all 'heard that it's a few years from being ready'.
Almost every one of my clients has had to have expensive service done due to the 'default configuration' of Windows boxes. They learn quick to call me up when they get a new PC so I can protect them from themselves. If I did the same but loaded Linux, they'd be just as happy (if not more).
If Linux isn't ready for the desktop, how did my otherwise computer illiterate ex-girlfriend start using it for web/email/AIM/wordproc? How do people who come over my house know how to use the 'weird' machine? How is it a more pleasant desktop experience than XP for most people who try it out on a managed (read: not the 'everything installed' default system)?
Linux is ABSOLUTELY ready for the desktop, but like any new OS, you need someone who knows what they're doing to show it (and tailor it) to each individual newbie. Average folks weren't BORN with the Windows way of doing things already in their heads. The lack of Linux on the desktop is the result of several factors:
1. Not large enough expert userbase to provide 'neighborhood support'. 2. No marketing to the home market. 3. Total disregard/denial of desktop viability by admins and managers afraid of an OS that isn't their current bread-and-butter. 4. People like you.
In any case, Linus is as responsible for Linux GUI usability as You or I, that being 'not at all'. You can't blame a kernel hacker for the faults of the designers of the windowing environment, toolkits, and desktops.
I'm not denyig that atmospheric pollution isn't going to raise temperatures, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that the temperature doesn't change dramatically all on it's own.
By focusing on 'greenhouse' gasses and relatively harmless stuff like NO2 and CO2, we're losing track of the really dangerous TOXIC stuff getting dumped all over the planet in the air, ground, and water.
Listen, even if we raise the temperature some it's no big deal compared to the destruction of higher life in the seas. If we keep up our current levels of pollution, were going to be hard-pressed to drink clean water, breathe clean air, and swim with anything beyond jellyfish and red tides.
'Global Warming' is, in my opinion, a massive DISTRACTION from the real problems that are lurking right around the bend.
Terrasoft Solutions Briq, a G3 or G4 computer in a CD-ROM drive form factor. They're basically uber-low power CPUs with network cards. I like these things, but can't afford one for myself.
It would be very cool to strap a SATA card into one and place the Briq inside a PC enclosure, sort of like a storage server turned inside-out.
Finding software for OS X/x86 will be just as hard, if not HARDER than it is for PPC. I don't own a Mac, actually, I use x86 hardware at home, but admin about 200 Macs at work. We don't have trouble finding software for them at all. There's good software in almost every category for OS X, and I've found that Apple's free development tools and NeXT-derived libraries lead even shareware apps to be of great quality and usability.
I know that EFI BIOS is coming, but it's still not here. I've been enjoying a 32-bit BIOS with a GUI bootloader, network booting, single-image support, and no hassles since the Blue and White G3 came out in 1999.
Most Mac setups have a LOT simpler cabling than their PC counterparts. I set these things up for a living. Macs typically install in about half the time from 'boxed' to 'bootup'. I've got a G4 on my desk at work, and an ADC monitor. My monitor gets signal, power, and USB on ONE cable to the CPU. The powered speakers get power and signal on one Y-cable, as opposed to a stereo cable, a left-to-right cable, and a power cable on the PCs. I've got ONE cable coming from the back of my screen to my keyboard, which has a built-in hub for the mouse and my flash-reader. Macs have a lot less cables when properly purchased and set up.
As for 'screwed when the monitor gives out', there are NO machines that Apple ships without external video. I just bought an iBook for my sister and she hooked it up to her monitor witht he included VGA adapter. My desktop G4 at work has both ADC and DVI out. Even the iMacs have VGA-out.
Where's the HUGE price difference? I don't buy 'low end' hardware, be it Mac or PC. Once you get to the 'good stuff' with name-brand components, quality hard drives and memory, and all the fixin's the price difference on both sides is close to zero. Apple's iBooks actually beat Dell laptops hands-down on price and value. The $300 difference on desktops like the iMac is easily accounted for in power savings (which also carry to lower AC bills), high-quality LCD screens, and time to setup and maintain. Once again, I sound like a fanboy, but I'm out there doing price/performance comparisons for my work all day.
If Apple switched to x86 (well, x86-64 now), they wouldn't let it run on your commodity boxes. You'd have an expensive (although less so than PPC) x86-64 box with OpenFirmware BIOS and a few Apple ASICs to provide the same functionality that Apple has on the PPC. You'd be buying Apple hardware to run it on, without a doubt.
There are several reasons for this:
1. Apple makes a lot of money on their hardware. 2. OS X has limited driver support, opening up to all breeds of hardware would slow the development of the OS down and reduce stability. 3. There's stuff you have on Macs that just doesn't exist with your typical PC BIOS, stuff like target-mode and netboot (much better implmentation than PXE). 4. Apple are about the total experience of the platform, putting OS X on your Dell with it's rat's-nest of cabling is something that makes Steve Jobs cry. Steve has a VISION, and a huge part of it is massive reduction in cabling.
Don't hold your breath for OS X on commodity x86 boxes, it'll NEVER happen. Apple might switch to x86-64 someday if the PPC architecture hits a dead-end, but I find it more likely that the opposite is true.
I will also venture to say that the submitter of this story has something wrong with him if he prefers x86 over PowerPC. The PPC architecture is beautiful, simple, and clean. And Apple isn't the only company selling PowerPC hardware.
We've got a SCSI-based Dell NAS here trying hard to be a file server. I tell you, I've never seen a crappier implementation in my life. x86 servers seem so cheesy compared to the real metal, and Dell's hardware is sub-par at best.
Re:I find this funny.
on
EMC Buying Dantz
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There's more to it than that.
Apple's xSan (real soon now) and the xServe RAID are actually generating interest in the enterprise market. Lots of net admins KNOW that they need something more 'beefy' than Windows to run their SANs, and Apple is making what looks like drop-dead easy and super-cheap SANs a reality.
Trust me, the admin at my work came to my desk yesterday and asked if I could prepare a report for consolidating storage on Apple metal instead of Dell. Dell wants to sell us more SCSI equipment, which is total overkill for our needs. We don't need the throughput of 36 SCSI drives in a RAID5, it's not worth the cost compared to something like the xServe RAID.
Also, our CIO has been pushing for OpenDirectory instead of AD, to make it easier for our databases, vendors, and appliances to tie-in. And I can make OD and SAMBA work together and perform better than AD. All this is probably gonna happen on Apple metal, at least until the admins are comfy enough with *NIX to move to straight-BSD.
EMC's purchase of Dantz is part of EMC's long-term plan to become a software vendor. I bet they license retrospect to Apple in the xSan, and other vendors in their NAS and SAN projects.
it's better to be extra-cautious IMO than to go around screwing whomever carelessly
BINGO! You're agreeing with me. What I'm saying is that it's perfectly fine to not use protection providing you are selective and honest and have a good enough sense of caution.
When I'm about to bag some skank at a party, you bet I strap on some rubber (if I bother at all), but if I'm in any sort of sexual relation with someone beyond that, I like to 'keep it real'. I seriously have a lot of trouble fscking plastic baggies, I'd rather just not have sex.
Maybe I'm spoiled, maybe it's pride, maybe I'm just honestly saying what most guys don't like to admit. Condoms suck, and the only time I use them is when the territory is uncharted or questionable, and usually I'm only there in the 'spirit of conquest'.
And virtually everyone has one form of HPV or another.
Last I heard, there were over 90 strains, and several are common on even non sexually-active folks.
HPV transmits through skin contact, so rubbers won't prevent it. But the VAST majority of the time it does NOTHING, no warts, no cancers, NOTHING. Certain combinations of strains seem to cause the warts, and that's far less common than having no symptoms at all.
Overall, I think there's a LOT of fear mongering about STDs. The problem is really much more prevalent amongst the poor and uneducated. If you pick your partners right, and 'look before you leap' you have pretty good chances of coming out OK. It's good to get your partner to prove no infection before you hit it raw though, and you should go 'get swabbed' every year or so.
Also remember, there are less than 100,000 women with HIV in the United States. Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500. Your chances of CONTRACTING HIV from that would be under 1 in 30,000. For non-junkie heterosexual men seeking women in the USA, your chance of being infected with HIV is almost nothing. Worry about the nasty STDs instead.
Ahh. Too late. I'm down to about three cigarettes a day now, which is the absolute minimum I can do without quitting totally. I plan to quit when I get a long enough contiguous vacation from work to get over the initial hump of withdrawl.
I quit for a year about two years ago, it was horrible for months. I was jittery and sore for about four months. I don't recall exactly how I got started again, but I know alcohol was involved.
I guess I'm one of those easily-addicted people. I used to take a lot of speed when I was a teenager, which I gave up after I got my career started.
Alcohol is another story, I overdid it when I was young and had to stop drinking altogether at 17. I slowly eased myself back into normal levels of drinking, of being able to limit and control it after I turned 20. It's not worth it to get totally smashed these days, I feel it so much more in the morning than when I was 15.
Once I accidentally took heroin, not mainlined obviously. I still get all teary-eyed when I think back to what that was like. I was laying on the beach under the sun and it felt like heaven, like it was day and night and summer and winter all at once. The guy I was with always talks about getting more, and I've physically hit him when he's gotten too excited about it. I remember hearing in the way back of my mind the P.A. system on the beach saying that "the beach was closing in 30 minutes... 15... 5... closed. The beach patrol is coming." time just passed so... magically. Feling apathy like that, not even being able to care if you wanted to, is why I know I can never do that again.
I drink four cups of strong coffee to wake up. I have about an hour from when I wake until I need that caffiene. Without it I get HORRIBLE headaches, cannot concentrate, lose a lot of motor function, clench my jaw, don't have any appetite, and my sinuses get blocked. All can be 'fixed' in fifteen minutes by a cup of coffee.
Half way through the day, at about noon, I start wanting more coffee. Soda can do the trick, but I can't realistically drink sixty ounces of soda without burning my teeth out. I leave work and hit the local coffee shop, where they know exactly what I want. If I don't do this, I am apt to completely forget what I'm doing at work and waste the rest of the day wandering around trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
I did start two weeks ago to cut my consumption. I've been drinking about five to ten cups a day since I was in sixth grade (when the ritalin wore out, I'd drink coffee). Now I'm down to about four cups. So far today it's been three, and the last one I might sub some tea.
I fear hospitalization, because there's NO WAY I can heal without a caffiene drip. Recovery from trauma is no time to recover from severe addiction. I have written on my 'just-in-case' card to give me a 20mg/hour drip of caffiene if I am unconscious.
I've lost two friends to heroin, and several others to all sorts of other drugs. I also support legalization and regulation.
You probably don't know, because you've never bought 'dirty' coke, heroin, or ecstasy. If the quality were regulated and poisonous additives were disbarred the drugs would be a lot safer, there would be a huge reduction in hospitalization costs and long-term damage to abusers.
I think the prices for the legal drugs should be set by the state government though, and the MINIMUM price should be the 'street price' today, adjusted annually for inflation. The huge revenues would go towards rehabilitation, prevention, and then to general education funds. We could also stop subsidizing farmers domestically because they'd finally have a new viable cash crop.
Heroin should be sold in small doses (2 hits?) at a time, in a packet with an appropriate number of needles, to prevent HIV spread.
The countries that have legalized drug sales haven't properly implemented a way to capture the value of the sales back into the government, they only 'solved' the enforcement side of the problem, and at the same time have LOWERED the cost of the drugs, which spurs use.
In my plan, use would not increase at all because the costs would be higher. The black market of drug trade would end, thus ending the violence caused by drug market cluture. Enforcement costs would turn into 'violation revenues.' Addicts would get treatment, proper treatment in in-house programs that have a net-zero cost because they'd be funded by the revenues off the sales.
I just want to chime in here. I'm NOT one of the 'OS X on x86!!!' fanboys, but I have a few points of the matter:
1. Maintaining x86 compatability in-house is trivial if done from the get-go. This is essentially insurance in the case of...
PowerPC vendors (motorola and IBM) stop being friendly or providing adequate product.
or
commodity prices on x86-64 hardware drop to such low levels that Apple has to jump to AMD to remain at all viable.
If Apple DID switch to x86-64, you can bet that they'll sell an OS that only works on Apple-branded open-firmware-based AMD x86-64 boxes. Just because Apple switches to x86 doesn't mean you can go out and buy a copy to slap on your Dell. Features like the seamless audio support, quartz extreme, single-image-fits-all, and boot options from open firmware (read: target mode/netboot) are all things that will nescesitate specific hardware.
Apple saves a LOT of money and time by not having to have drivers for every chipset out there, they can only have a great OS at this time if they control the hardware it runs on.
Overall, I don't really mind what architecture the OS runs on. I really do like PPC for the cool-running CPUs, but the recent stuff out of AMD seems to do just as well in that department.
unless you want to go to jail, you should stop trading copyrighted material
WOAH. Stop and think for a second. Copyright enforcement is NOT the job of the government, it's permission from the government for private parties to protect their intellectual property through civil courts. Under NO circumstances should your tax dollars be going into enforcement of private copyrights.
I hold copyright on a fair amount of stuff that's out there in the wild, and I know that it's been misappropriated and abused before, but I don't expect Uncle Sam to go and hunt those folks down, the onus of that responsibility lies on me.
If the record companies want to nail file-swappers, let them do it with their own money and army of lawyers, don't DARE use my tax dollars to protect individual copyrights and patents.
This really bothers me, because there are all sorts of different levels of crime, and it's VERY important to keep police and the FBI on-task of hunting criminals, not chasing down file-swappers.
If you violate copyright, you are committing a crime of commerce, if anyone had intended it otherwise it would have originated with punishments as harsh as 'real' theft.
very few business apps needed a FPU, so it was a fair tradeoff
And then the 3D FPS was invented. DOOM and QUAKE really needed that FPU to work properly (QUAKE required one, IIRC). That's the real reason the FPU made it's way back into the mainstream chips, gaming made it a must-have.
Before that, the FPU only made a difference if you were doing SERIOUS number crunching, and I'm not talking about excel.
Look, the vast majority of the people playing your game without paying for it wouldn't have ever paid for it if you had some sort of magic copy-protection technology.
You sure do have a right to royalties from the sale of your game, and should be flattered that people want to play it.
I find that MOST people out there do have a conscience, they will go out and buy stuff they use a lot, be it music, movies, or games. I remember a few years ago a VCD of Mallrats went to each of my friends, one of us had a CD burner. Now, of that group of ten or so people, three went out and BOUGHT the DVD. So seven people are watching it 'free', but three people bought it, and that's two more than if we didn't have the VCD in circulation.
IIRC, Sony realized about two years ago that they could massively cut costs if they drop their part count and use more 'unified' chipsets in their products. They realized that they had over 120 VENDORS to build a PS2, and it was a disaster in corporate relations and design.
So this is probably the result of a good consolidation of parts.
I had a Quadra 660AV and the BSD and Linux drivers for the SCSI were so broken it was useless, and the 10MBit LAN was weak as well.
For similar power draw you can run a G3 tower with about thirty times the performance.
I do wonder what would happen if I managed to build the OS bottom-up from source for the 68040 instead of using the generic '020 you get from the ISOs online. Has anyone done this with a recent version of GCC?
There was a thread on gentoo forums about modifying the build scripts to let you bootstrap the PowerPC distro on a debian 68k box, but it fizzled-out. I think enabling the "ppc" keyword would be somewhat safe since the PPC and 68k are endian-compatable, and that's the most common problem with new software on those systems.
Also, the last kernel that I heard about running full-force on a 68k was 2.2. Has anyone had an ancient Mac running 2.6? Geeyrt is still contributing 68k stuff to the kernel, is it all in vain?
I think a better choice would be an old Apple G3 blue'n'white tower. The CPU in them runs at a powerful (for the clock) 300-450MHz, it takes standard components, it has no fans besides the main system fan, has 100Mbit ethernet, and can be had with an OEM SCSI card and drive.
I've been using one as a file/print/DNS/DHCP/wireless/NAT server for about five years now. Only had to replace a drive once, it runs cool and quiet, and I'm sure the wattage is VERY low (considering the heat output).
It will run Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or OS X Server quite well, and the CPU can be underclocked to 300MHz (to save power) with no performance decrease after you set it up.
Another advantage is that running the PowerPC might protect you from some exploits, since it's not very common to run non-x86 code in the wild these days.
I've got money saved up for the first company to produce an open PowerPC 750 GX system at the right price. All I want is mini-ATX form, reputable GigE onboard, SATA or SCSI, and serial console support built in. Don't say Pegasos, because it's way behind and still expensive.
Well the password thing is probably just because your SAMBA config is pulling passwords from/etc/smbpasswd, while the windows box might have to query an active directory, which is an order-of-magnitude more complex.
I've got an OS X SAMBA box at work authenticating users against our Windows 2000 Active Directory, and it's a bit slower than authenticating against local password files.
But I've noticed overall that SAMBA seems to handle SMB better than Windows. It DOES seem faster, has cool options like case-conversion-without-sensitivity, *NIX permissions to *NIX CIFS clients, and hard-settable no-bullshit browse master settings.
I have a lot of OS X boxes that keep their home folders on SMB, and it's a LOT better when I host their folders on the SAMBA box than on the Windows box. When I put users on the Windows box they get filename errors when downloading long filenames, and firefox won't work. When I put them on SAMBA they notice a speed boost and everything starts working right again.
You laugh, but if I could get SAMBA for Windows I could slowly convert my workplace to OSS while making my job easier, and the enduser experience better.
SAMBA, in my experience, serves Windows clients better than Microsoft's servers do.
HA! It'll be a short trial, and a short sentence, and even less time served.
I want to live in a place where people who enter other people's homes to steal their shit don't make it out alive.
If we're going to imprison so many people, we may as well make them work for us too, prison should be more than waiting to get out, it should be either school, work, addiction treatment, or labor.
Tagged Command Queing is possible with PATA, it just isn't typically implemented. All you have to do is access the drive as ATAPI instead of raw-ATA, and have the drive and drivers support it. There is a bit more overhead with ATAPI, but with big enough bufers on the drive (8MB should be adequate) to hold the upcoming commands, things should go well.
SATA is better though, it's not 'faster' than PATA yet, but it's a modern interface replacing an ancient one, and it has room to grow where PATA is near the end of it's abilities. Also, SATA (and USB, 1394, and several PATA implementations) is typically implemented as a SCSI driver, which makes adding TCQ trivial compared to the ATAPI hack I mentioned earlier.
Well the drivers from ATI are closed, but if you run an RV280 or older (IIRC), you can use the driver from XFree/XOrg that's been written by and for the open source community. The newer cards are only 2D acceleratesd, but the RV280 and older drivers have full 3D acceleration.
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What I'm saying is that if I spent the same amount of time training/tailoring home users for Linux as I did training and tailoring their Windows boxes, there'd be a lot more Linux users out there. The only reason I don't get to is that they've all 'heard that it's a few years from being ready'.
Almost every one of my clients has had to have expensive service done due to the 'default configuration' of Windows boxes. They learn quick to call me up when they get a new PC so I can protect them from themselves. If I did the same but loaded Linux, they'd be just as happy (if not more).
Hey there!
If Linux isn't ready for the desktop, how did my otherwise computer illiterate ex-girlfriend start using it for web/email/AIM/wordproc? How do people who come over my house know how to use the 'weird' machine? How is it a more pleasant desktop experience than XP for most people who try it out on a managed (read: not the 'everything installed' default system)?
Linux is ABSOLUTELY ready for the desktop, but like any new OS, you need someone who knows what they're doing to show it (and tailor it) to each individual newbie. Average folks weren't BORN with the Windows way of doing things already in their heads. The lack of Linux on the desktop is the result of several factors:
1. Not large enough expert userbase to provide 'neighborhood support'.
2. No marketing to the home market.
3. Total disregard/denial of desktop viability by admins and managers afraid of an OS that isn't their current bread-and-butter.
4. People like you.
In any case, Linus is as responsible for Linux GUI usability as You or I, that being 'not at all'. You can't blame a kernel hacker for the faults of the designers of the windowing environment, toolkits, and desktops.
Hey there!
I'm not denyig that atmospheric pollution isn't going to raise temperatures, but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that the temperature doesn't change dramatically all on it's own.
By focusing on 'greenhouse' gasses and relatively harmless stuff like NO2 and CO2, we're losing track of the really dangerous TOXIC stuff getting dumped all over the planet in the air, ground, and water.
Listen, even if we raise the temperature some it's no big deal compared to the destruction of higher life in the seas. If we keep up our current levels of pollution, were going to be hard-pressed to drink clean water, breathe clean air, and swim with anything beyond jellyfish and red tides.
'Global Warming' is, in my opinion, a massive DISTRACTION from the real problems that are lurking right around the bend.
Terrasoft Solutions Briq, a G3 or G4 computer in a CD-ROM drive form factor. They're basically uber-low power CPUs with network cards. I like these things, but can't afford one for myself.
It would be very cool to strap a SATA card into one and place the Briq inside a PC enclosure, sort of like a storage server turned inside-out.
Alright! Round two!
Finding software for OS X/x86 will be just as hard, if not HARDER than it is for PPC. I don't own a Mac, actually, I use x86 hardware at home, but admin about 200 Macs at work. We don't have trouble finding software for them at all. There's good software in almost every category for OS X, and I've found that Apple's free development tools and NeXT-derived libraries lead even shareware apps to be of great quality and usability.
I know that EFI BIOS is coming, but it's still not here. I've been enjoying a 32-bit BIOS with a GUI bootloader, network booting, single-image support, and no hassles since the Blue and White G3 came out in 1999.
Most Mac setups have a LOT simpler cabling than their PC counterparts. I set these things up for a living. Macs typically install in about half the time from 'boxed' to 'bootup'. I've got a G4 on my desk at work, and an ADC monitor. My monitor gets signal, power, and USB on ONE cable to the CPU. The powered speakers get power and signal on one Y-cable, as opposed to a stereo cable, a left-to-right cable, and a power cable on the PCs. I've got ONE cable coming from the back of my screen to my keyboard, which has a built-in hub for the mouse and my flash-reader. Macs have a lot less cables when properly purchased and set up.
As for 'screwed when the monitor gives out', there are NO machines that Apple ships without external video. I just bought an iBook for my sister and she hooked it up to her monitor witht he included VGA adapter. My desktop G4 at work has both ADC and DVI out. Even the iMacs have VGA-out.
Where's the HUGE price difference? I don't buy 'low end' hardware, be it Mac or PC. Once you get to the 'good stuff' with name-brand components, quality hard drives and memory, and all the fixin's the price difference on both sides is close to zero. Apple's iBooks actually beat Dell laptops hands-down on price and value. The $300 difference on desktops like the iMac is easily accounted for in power savings (which also carry to lower AC bills), high-quality LCD screens, and time to setup and maintain. Once again, I sound like a fanboy, but I'm out there doing price/performance comparisons for my work all day.
If Apple switched to x86 (well, x86-64 now), they wouldn't let it run on your commodity boxes. You'd have an expensive (although less so than PPC) x86-64 box with OpenFirmware BIOS and a few Apple ASICs to provide the same functionality that Apple has on the PPC. You'd be buying Apple hardware to run it on, without a doubt.
There are several reasons for this:
1. Apple makes a lot of money on their hardware.
2. OS X has limited driver support, opening up to all breeds of hardware would slow the development of the OS down and reduce stability.
3. There's stuff you have on Macs that just doesn't exist with your typical PC BIOS, stuff like target-mode and netboot (much better implmentation than PXE).
4. Apple are about the total experience of the platform, putting OS X on your Dell with it's rat's-nest of cabling is something that makes Steve Jobs cry. Steve has a VISION, and a huge part of it is massive reduction in cabling.
Don't hold your breath for OS X on commodity x86 boxes, it'll NEVER happen. Apple might switch to x86-64 someday if the PPC architecture hits a dead-end, but I find it more likely that the opposite is true.
I will also venture to say that the submitter of this story has something wrong with him if he prefers x86 over PowerPC. The PPC architecture is beautiful, simple, and clean. And Apple isn't the only company selling PowerPC hardware.
We've got a SCSI-based Dell NAS here trying hard to be a file server. I tell you, I've never seen a crappier implementation in my life. x86 servers seem so cheesy compared to the real metal, and Dell's hardware is sub-par at best.
There's more to it than that.
Apple's xSan (real soon now) and the xServe RAID are actually generating interest in the enterprise market. Lots of net admins KNOW that they need something more 'beefy' than Windows to run their SANs, and Apple is making what looks like drop-dead easy and super-cheap SANs a reality.
Trust me, the admin at my work came to my desk yesterday and asked if I could prepare a report for consolidating storage on Apple metal instead of Dell. Dell wants to sell us more SCSI equipment, which is total overkill for our needs. We don't need the throughput of 36 SCSI drives in a RAID5, it's not worth the cost compared to something like the xServe RAID.
Also, our CIO has been pushing for OpenDirectory instead of AD, to make it easier for our databases, vendors, and appliances to tie-in. And I can make OD and SAMBA work together and perform better than AD. All this is probably gonna happen on Apple metal, at least until the admins are comfy enough with *NIX to move to straight-BSD.
EMC's purchase of Dantz is part of EMC's long-term plan to become a software vendor. I bet they license retrospect to Apple in the xSan, and other vendors in their NAS and SAN projects.
it's better to be extra-cautious IMO than to go around screwing whomever carelessly
BINGO! You're agreeing with me. What I'm saying is that it's perfectly fine to not use protection providing you are selective and honest and have a good enough sense of caution.
When I'm about to bag some skank at a party, you bet I strap on some rubber (if I bother at all), but if I'm in any sort of sexual relation with someone beyond that, I like to 'keep it real'. I seriously have a lot of trouble fscking plastic baggies, I'd rather just not have sex.
Maybe I'm spoiled, maybe it's pride, maybe I'm just honestly saying what most guys don't like to admit. Condoms suck, and the only time I use them is when the territory is uncharted or questionable, and usually I'm only there in the 'spirit of conquest'.
And virtually everyone has one form of HPV or another.
Last I heard, there were over 90 strains, and several are common on even non sexually-active folks.
HPV transmits through skin contact, so rubbers won't prevent it. But the VAST majority of the time it does NOTHING, no warts, no cancers, NOTHING. Certain combinations of strains seem to cause the warts, and that's far less common than having no symptoms at all.
Overall, I think there's a LOT of fear mongering about STDs. The problem is really much more prevalent amongst the poor and uneducated. If you pick your partners right, and 'look before you leap' you have pretty good chances of coming out OK. It's good to get your partner to prove no infection before you hit it raw though, and you should go 'get swabbed' every year or so.
Also remember, there are less than 100,000 women with HIV in the United States. Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500. Your chances of CONTRACTING HIV from that would be under 1 in 30,000. For non-junkie heterosexual men seeking women in the USA, your chance of being infected with HIV is almost nothing. Worry about the nasty STDs instead.
Ahh. Too late. I'm down to about three cigarettes a day now, which is the absolute minimum I can do without quitting totally. I plan to quit when I get a long enough contiguous vacation from work to get over the initial hump of withdrawl.
I quit for a year about two years ago, it was horrible for months. I was jittery and sore for about four months. I don't recall exactly how I got started again, but I know alcohol was involved.
I guess I'm one of those easily-addicted people. I used to take a lot of speed when I was a teenager, which I gave up after I got my career started.
Alcohol is another story, I overdid it when I was young and had to stop drinking altogether at 17. I slowly eased myself back into normal levels of drinking, of being able to limit and control it after I turned 20. It's not worth it to get totally smashed these days, I feel it so much more in the morning than when I was 15.
Once I accidentally took heroin, not mainlined obviously. I still get all teary-eyed when I think back to what that was like. I was laying on the beach under the sun and it felt like heaven, like it was day and night and summer and winter all at once. The guy I was with always talks about getting more, and I've physically hit him when he's gotten too excited about it. I remember hearing in the way back of my mind the P.A. system on the beach saying that "the beach was closing in 30 minutes... 15... 5... closed. The beach patrol is coming." time just passed so... magically. Feling apathy like that, not even being able to care if you wanted to, is why I know I can never do that again.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's me.
I drink four cups of strong coffee to wake up. I have about an hour from when I wake until I need that caffiene. Without it I get HORRIBLE headaches, cannot concentrate, lose a lot of motor function, clench my jaw, don't have any appetite, and my sinuses get blocked. All can be 'fixed' in fifteen minutes by a cup of coffee.
Half way through the day, at about noon, I start wanting more coffee. Soda can do the trick, but I can't realistically drink sixty ounces of soda without burning my teeth out. I leave work and hit the local coffee shop, where they know exactly what I want. If I don't do this, I am apt to completely forget what I'm doing at work and waste the rest of the day wandering around trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
I did start two weeks ago to cut my consumption. I've been drinking about five to ten cups a day since I was in sixth grade (when the ritalin wore out, I'd drink coffee). Now I'm down to about four cups. So far today it's been three, and the last one I might sub some tea.
I fear hospitalization, because there's NO WAY I can heal without a caffiene drip. Recovery from trauma is no time to recover from severe addiction. I have written on my 'just-in-case' card to give me a 20mg/hour drip of caffiene if I am unconscious.
I've lost two friends to heroin, and several others to all sorts of other drugs. I also support legalization and regulation.
You probably don't know, because you've never bought 'dirty' coke, heroin, or ecstasy. If the quality were regulated and poisonous additives were disbarred the drugs would be a lot safer, there would be a huge reduction in hospitalization costs and long-term damage to abusers.
I think the prices for the legal drugs should be set by the state government though, and the MINIMUM price should be the 'street price' today, adjusted annually for inflation. The huge revenues would go towards rehabilitation, prevention, and then to general education funds. We could also stop subsidizing farmers domestically because they'd finally have a new viable cash crop.
Heroin should be sold in small doses (2 hits?) at a time, in a packet with an appropriate number of needles, to prevent HIV spread.
The countries that have legalized drug sales haven't properly implemented a way to capture the value of the sales back into the government, they only 'solved' the enforcement side of the problem, and at the same time have LOWERED the cost of the drugs, which spurs use.
In my plan, use would not increase at all because the costs would be higher. The black market of drug trade would end, thus ending the violence caused by drug market cluture. Enforcement costs would turn into 'violation revenues.' Addicts would get treatment, proper treatment in in-house programs that have a net-zero cost because they'd be funded by the revenues off the sales.
I just want to chime in here. I'm NOT one of the 'OS X on x86!!!' fanboys, but I have a few points of the matter:
1. Maintaining x86 compatability in-house is trivial if done from the get-go. This is essentially insurance in the case of...
PowerPC vendors (motorola and IBM) stop being friendly or providing adequate product.
or
commodity prices on x86-64 hardware drop to such low levels that Apple has to jump to AMD to remain at all viable.
If Apple DID switch to x86-64, you can bet that they'll sell an OS that only works on Apple-branded open-firmware-based AMD x86-64 boxes. Just because Apple switches to x86 doesn't mean you can go out and buy a copy to slap on your Dell. Features like the seamless audio support, quartz extreme, single-image-fits-all, and boot options from open firmware (read: target mode/netboot) are all things that will nescesitate specific hardware.
Apple saves a LOT of money and time by not having to have drivers for every chipset out there, they can only have a great OS at this time if they control the hardware it runs on.
Overall, I don't really mind what architecture the OS runs on. I really do like PPC for the cool-running CPUs, but the recent stuff out of AMD seems to do just as well in that department.
unless you want to go to jail, you should stop trading copyrighted material
WOAH. Stop and think for a second. Copyright enforcement is NOT the job of the government, it's permission from the government for private parties to protect their intellectual property through civil courts. Under NO circumstances should your tax dollars be going into enforcement of private copyrights.
I hold copyright on a fair amount of stuff that's out there in the wild, and I know that it's been misappropriated and abused before, but I don't expect Uncle Sam to go and hunt those folks down, the onus of that responsibility lies on me.
If the record companies want to nail file-swappers, let them do it with their own money and army of lawyers, don't DARE use my tax dollars to protect individual copyrights and patents.
This really bothers me, because there are all sorts of different levels of crime, and it's VERY important to keep police and the FBI on-task of hunting criminals, not chasing down file-swappers.
If you violate copyright, you are committing a crime of commerce, if anyone had intended it otherwise it would have originated with punishments as harsh as 'real' theft.
very few business apps needed a FPU, so it was a fair tradeoff
And then the 3D FPS was invented. DOOM and QUAKE really needed that FPU to work properly (QUAKE required one, IIRC). That's the real reason the FPU made it's way back into the mainstream chips, gaming made it a must-have.
Before that, the FPU only made a difference if you were doing SERIOUS number crunching, and I'm not talking about excel.
You shouldn't be angry at all.
Look, the vast majority of the people playing your game without paying for it wouldn't have ever paid for it if you had some sort of magic copy-protection technology.
You sure do have a right to royalties from the sale of your game, and should be flattered that people want to play it.
I find that MOST people out there do have a conscience, they will go out and buy stuff they use a lot, be it music, movies, or games. I remember a few years ago a VCD of Mallrats went to each of my friends, one of us had a CD burner. Now, of that group of ten or so people, three went out and BOUGHT the DVD. So seven people are watching it 'free', but three people bought it, and that's two more than if we didn't have the VCD in circulation.
IIRC, Sony realized about two years ago that they could massively cut costs if they drop their part count and use more 'unified' chipsets in their products. They realized that they had over 120 VENDORS to build a PS2, and it was a disaster in corporate relations and design.
So this is probably the result of a good consolidation of parts.
What OS do you run on it?
I had a Quadra 660AV and the BSD and Linux drivers for the SCSI were so broken it was useless, and the 10MBit LAN was weak as well.
For similar power draw you can run a G3 tower with about thirty times the performance.
I do wonder what would happen if I managed to build the OS bottom-up from source for the 68040 instead of using the generic '020 you get from the ISOs online. Has anyone done this with a recent version of GCC?
There was a thread on gentoo forums about modifying the build scripts to let you bootstrap the PowerPC distro on a debian 68k box, but it fizzled-out. I think enabling the "ppc" keyword would be somewhat safe since the PPC and 68k are endian-compatable, and that's the most common problem with new software on those systems.
Also, the last kernel that I heard about running full-force on a 68k was 2.2. Has anyone had an ancient Mac running 2.6? Geeyrt is still contributing 68k stuff to the kernel, is it all in vain?
I think a better choice would be an old Apple G3 blue'n'white tower. The CPU in them runs at a powerful (for the clock) 300-450MHz, it takes standard components, it has no fans besides the main system fan, has 100Mbit ethernet, and can be had with an OEM SCSI card and drive.
I've been using one as a file/print/DNS/DHCP/wireless/NAT server for about five years now. Only had to replace a drive once, it runs cool and quiet, and I'm sure the wattage is VERY low (considering the heat output).
It will run Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or OS X Server quite well, and the CPU can be underclocked to 300MHz (to save power) with no performance decrease after you set it up.
Another advantage is that running the PowerPC might protect you from some exploits, since it's not very common to run non-x86 code in the wild these days.
I've got money saved up for the first company to produce an open PowerPC 750 GX system at the right price. All I want is mini-ATX form, reputable GigE onboard, SATA or SCSI, and serial console support built in. Don't say Pegasos, because it's way behind and still expensive.
Well the password thing is probably just because your SAMBA config is pulling passwords from /etc/smbpasswd, while the windows box might have to query an active directory, which is an order-of-magnitude more complex.
I've got an OS X SAMBA box at work authenticating users against our Windows 2000 Active Directory, and it's a bit slower than authenticating against local password files.
But I've noticed overall that SAMBA seems to handle SMB better than Windows. It DOES seem faster, has cool options like case-conversion-without-sensitivity, *NIX permissions to *NIX CIFS clients, and hard-settable no-bullshit browse master settings.
I have a lot of OS X boxes that keep their home folders on SMB, and it's a LOT better when I host their folders on the SAMBA box than on the Windows box. When I put users on the Windows box they get filename errors when downloading long filenames, and firefox won't work. When I put them on SAMBA they notice a speed boost and everything starts working right again.
You laugh, but if I could get SAMBA for Windows I could slowly convert my workplace to OSS while making my job easier, and the enduser experience better.
SAMBA, in my experience, serves Windows clients better than Microsoft's servers do.
HA! It'll be a short trial, and a short sentence, and even less time served.
I want to live in a place where people who enter other people's homes to steal their shit don't make it out alive.
If we're going to imprison so many people, we may as well make them work for us too, prison should be more than waiting to get out, it should be either school, work, addiction treatment, or labor.
Tagged Command Queing is possible with PATA, it just isn't typically implemented. All you have to do is access the drive as ATAPI instead of raw-ATA, and have the drive and drivers support it. There is a bit more overhead with ATAPI, but with big enough bufers on the drive (8MB should be adequate) to hold the upcoming commands, things should go well.
SATA is better though, it's not 'faster' than PATA yet, but it's a modern interface replacing an ancient one, and it has room to grow where PATA is near the end of it's abilities. Also, SATA (and USB, 1394, and several PATA implementations) is typically implemented as a SCSI driver, which makes adding TCQ trivial compared to the ATAPI hack I mentioned earlier.
Well the drivers from ATI are closed, but if you run an RV280 or older (IIRC), you can use the driver from XFree/XOrg that's been written by and for the open source community. The newer cards are only 2D acceleratesd, but the RV280 and older drivers have full 3D acceleration.