Only cost is the electricity, and if you're that concerned about your power bill, just replace a few bulbs with compact florescents. While you're at it, get the natural light output bulbs and you can fight winter depression at the same time...
If your computer otherwise dies, odds are it's a defect that would have killed it anyway.
More related to OpenAFS than Coda.... Looked at both extensively recently. OpenAFS scales like a champ, Coda does not. Mostly due to the way Coda stores metadata. You have to run a seperate server instance of Coda for every (approx) 23 gig of file space you serve out. There are other limitations...
OpenAFS seems to be much more open ended at this point, though it does not support Disconnected operation or Read/Write replicas. Though that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Neither likes files >2gig right now.... OpenAFS is still in active developement, but Coda seems stalled at this point.
Get your head out of the sand. Doesn't matter if it's democrats or republicans. Be a bleeding heart lib if it makes you happy, just realize the difference between the two main parties these days is quickly approaching nil.
On the other hand, I've also had both Reiserfs and a Ext3 come back up after a poweroutage and refuse to boot as they needed to be manually fsck'd. Journaling is no magic bullet, though it'll help in a lot of cases.
Both cases were machines with otherwise longish (3+ month) uptimes.
Back in the day when Commodore and the Amiga still roamed... I looked at a Mac Quadra with video ability. The Apple store in Norfolk wanted just under $10,000 for a no-harddrive floppy only machine. They even came right out and told me if I payed list they'd support me, they'd haggle over price, but wouldn't offer support.
The combination of hideous behavior from dealers in the day (snobbishness?) combined with insanely high prices kept me away from Apple.
Pricing now is right in line with equivalent hardware, and I've had much better contacts with Apple Minions.
Nice in theory, wrong in practice. Most end users:
1) Have never met a dialog box they didn't like well enough to hit cancel/no 2) Have never updated their OS in their life, even though Windows Update is fairly easy to use 3) Have no idea they should be updating AV definitions... I have AV on my computer, isn't that enough?
If a program sounds vaguely interesting, joe schmo will download and install it to try, wether it's by MS, or jane's website on Angelfire.
110 user business here. Medical practice using Electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized practice management.
7 Windows 2000 servers (darned vertical apps and Exchange) 4 Linux Servers 112 Workstations total 3 Linux workstations for now (though moving Win98 boxes to Linux + LTSP where possible) Open Office is on 9 boxes as we ran out of MSOffice licenses... 72 other machines have MSOffice, rest run vertical apps only...
OO 8% of all workstations Linux 36% of all servers Linux 2.7% of all clients (mostly due to brain damaged vertical apps blocking deployment)
In the process of testing kerberos + ldap + samba 3.0 to replace the existing W2k ADS servers. These numbers are in spite of 2 hideously evil vertical market apps that must run on Windows that every user must run at least one of. Citrix and Linux + ICA or Windows Terminal Server + RDesktop is your friend. Although one app stores it's print profile in the System hive rather than current user, so while you can use it in Term Services, last person to select a printer wins. =P
Gentoo is on servers and workstations. So yes, it is possible. The key is that management MUST be open to trying new things in the interest of cutting costs, and it requires a certain amount of knowledge to make it happen.
SOP for Linus really. I was at a Linux conference hosted by Red Hat a few years back in North Carolina where Linus was the keynote person. He (jokingly of course) said the best thing that could happen for Linux was if somebody shot Gates.
Linus has never really been a deferential person and says what's on his mind... It seems in some cases without regard to any consequences. To say SCO smokes crack is nothing.
Factor in that a large amount of vertical software out there requires (yes, requires) the user be in the local administrator group of their machine...
It's not just the end users. A lot of clueless developers code that way as it avoids some unpleasant ickiness, never mind the ickiness is there to prevent this very thing.
Actually, in recent years CD quality isn't all of that. CDs today are mixed for play on a radio where they're set to be as loud as phyisically possible. If this means large amounts of clipping and other artifacts, so be it.
AAC on the other hand, does a much better job compressing other bit sizes than 16 bit (CD quality). IIRC all iTunes AAC songs are encoded from 24 bit masters, and are considerably higher quality than can be acheived encoding from 16 bit CD rips. It also neatly avoids the post master mixing that goes on while trying to ramp as much of the song as possible to maximum average volume.
I went off at an angle to be sure. The machine in question has very little to do with a Beowulf cluster. It's more like a SGI Origin that happens to run Linux as the OS.
No particular design makes sense in all situations. Hrm. Come to think about it, my knee jerk reaction would be fine comparing Linux Beowulf clusters to an Apple Beowulf cluster, but doesn't have much to do with the SGI box.
Rendevous will be used in 10.3 with Xcode to discover resources and distribute software builds across available 10.3 machines. If there's a perceived benefit to Apple, do you honestly think there's anything preventing the next version 10.4 from having distributed capabilities?
You can already compile programs with LAM-MPI support, so in reality there is nada stopping you from building a Beowulf cluster of XServes. There may even be a compelling reason to use XServes over x86 boxes after XServers are updated to G5s.
Rumor was the original XServes were built to spec for a distributed cluster for a Blast! genome search engine.
People get hung up on Beowulf = Linux, and that isn't necessarily the case if you take Beowulf to mean a cluster of inexpensive machines.
OS 10.2+ with Rendevouz autodiscovery using LAM-MPI for communicating could just be a killer configuration. Lord knows cluster management/monitoring would be outstanding, though perhaps the setup would not be as simple initially.
And there doesn't need to be a fan--the difference in charge pulls the air. It's actual physics, and it definately works. Take a plastic spoon and rub it a bunch of times against wool. Then, go to your nearest sink and turn on the water so that you have a nice, smooth flow. Hold the spoon next to the water, and it bends near the spoon. Same principal.
Sorry, no. The spoon and water effect you're talking about is actually the "Coanda Effect," first described by Henri Coanda, and has nothing to do with electrostatic buildup.
Yep, and in the spirit of complete disclosure, the Linux gurus are JUST as guilty. Read the article about features missing in 2.6 and how the kernel writers are unabashedly telling any kernel module maker that isn't GPL'd to go take a flying leap.
-- Vendor intimidation (yep, forcing vendors selling products for Linux that use kernel modules to be gpl or not be able to tie into the kernel) -- semi-legal, prohibitive licensing practices (see GPL and arguments about it's viral nature) -- market control (not allowing vendors to substitute kernel symbols unless module is GPL) -- FUD (see any./ comments) -- product tying (best performance on Linux uses real time signals X15 server, which is not portable across multiple Unix flavors) -- hiding software features (ok, not guilty) -- employee abuse (tongue in cheek, but have you ever read some of the flamage on Linux Kernel? =) )
A corporation does not evil make. Apple has been one of the banner bearers for opensource, something I really expected IBM to have a bigger profile in. They do choose their battles, and while there is some fallout, most things make some modicum of sense. Apple doesn't do DRM beyond a sticker that says don't steal, if they allowed this plugin to florish, RIAA would be on them in a heartbeat due to copyright violation.
I would not be suprised to eventually see an iTunes that allows you to view and stream others playlists via Rendevous, but it will most definately not allow sharing if they can help it.
Some people shout the virtues too much, other scream about evils. Guess what, it's shades of grey. Apple's just a bit lighter than MS.
It is not just the costs of the raw disk space, but the enormous time and expense required to maintain/backup/restore a large database. Your 25 cents will not go very far.
Any system out there addressing this much data would most likely use minimally an LVM(EVMS) solution for disk storage, better yet a NAS/SAN such as those by Network Appliances. Both permit snapshots in time. With Network Appliances providing a mirror capability. Link two together at seperate sites.
In a day and age where IDE systems are starting to outperform SCSI, and an IDE disk drive costs $304 for a 200 gig drive (approximately $0.0012 cents per meg)... I would seriously doubt they store even a meg per character (most should be keys to static tables in any case...).
Also, the access times would increase with more data to churn through, causing complaints about lag. These raise their CS costs and also cause bad word of mouth on the boards.
Only poor design would result in this. Any optimized database with proper indexes will process data fast enough that those using the server should never experience lag induced by database lookups. No matter the data size.
Much more likely the user will experience lag (ala Anarchy Online) where the necessity of loading textures from local disk causes slowdown. Nothing you can do about that really. A person with a low performing pc will always lag.
They are trying to attract mainstream folks who have never tried evercrack and want something more than Sims Online. This means not catering to the muling that the average person would find unfair.
Agreed. Had this been the primary thrust of the message, then I would have no issue with it. Attempting to blow up the importance and cost of disk storage though is a copout, and they should be called on it.
Why absurd? It could be argued that redundancy is endemic to evolution. Two eyes, two hands... Go even deeper and there are large sections of our basic DNA code that is inactive... Perhaps to protect the actual data in a redundant way.
History has shown the brain has rather amazing abilities to redirect functions to areas not normally associated with that function in the event of disease or catastrophic illness.
Not only would I consider it not absurd, but I'd say it would be required that the mind be much more capable than the work a day usage would need.
This is pretty much acknowledged by everyone on the list. There are a couple of issues, not the least is that there is only one color scheme that works well, the others are very very slow.
Second seems to be an alignment issue in how java (and the underlying gcc math libs) are compiled. Doubles are misaligned which is a big hit on PPC platforms.
According to the Java Developer's list for Apple, these issues were basically unfixable with the existing 1.3.1 due to time constraints and underlying Sun code. I'd expect the eventual release of 1.4.1 to be much faster.
Our facility was 802.11a (using Intel APs). The amount of trouble we had was just this side of insurmountable. Fortunately, thanks to a manufacturing defect in the Intel APs, we got to send them back for replacement 802.11b units.
The real world:
The shorter range means a much greater density of units in any facility of any size. Fourty feet is the normal range.
If you have an older building with lots of brick/cement/steel, 802.11a will not penetrate nearly as well. Expect your range to drop to as little as 20 feet in a dense structure.
Many of the currently available access points will not roam properly(Intel at least).
There are no readily available antennas yet available for increasing range baring some nice directionals.
Average throughput in our environment was 6Mbs due to roaming computer(Medical practice) problems. They would authenticate to one unit, but never roam until they lost all signal from the first.
That said, a small office or home that can be covered by a single unit should work acceptably. I would wait for 802.11g before installing a large number of units based on 802.11a, especially for any core business use.
A user must authenticate to NetInfo before making changes, they can't just waltz in and edit.
Only the first user created is flagged as Administrator by default, any additional users need to be flagged as such if you intend to let them control the machine.
OS X is actually fairly secure, but not obnoxiously so out of the box. If I want, as Admin, I can set up a laptop such that Joe user can edit network configs, etc, but lock down other capabilites as I wish.
As those of you who played the Star Trek role playing game, back when it was a licensed deal, would know. There are two types of Klingons. Imperial (Worf style), and Fusions.
Fusions were created genetically when the Klingons encountered a race, by fusing Imperial with the encountered race's DNA. Those Fusions could then be used in all contacts (providing obfuscation as to who the real Klingons were) and as spies within the alien race.
Wonder if I could still find that box up in the closet? Hmm...
They aren't talking about programming hooks. They are talking about Pro* (Pro*C/C++, Pro*COBOL, Pro*Fortran) which allows you to directly embed SQL into an application without hooks. You basically run a precompiler over your code which validates the SQL itself, allows runtime diagnostics at the client level, clean type conversion, etc. Personally I prefer OCI, but that's just me.
Most of my work involves programming against Oracle Databases, primarily in Java. While I used the sqlj translator for the first major project, I chose not to from then on. Mostly due to JDBC being rather well implemented, and the fact that by using JDBC directly, I can eliminate the runtime components and cut down on the memory footprint of my apps.
As far as PL/SQL goes, my preference is for Java functions in Oracle 8i. From my background, it's just more efficient for me to work this angle. Only major beef I have with Oracle with these is the thread model they use inside Oracle is not pre-emptive. Have to be careful.
If the SDK was only that, an add on to the OS that allowed developement, yes, $100 would be silly. However, the SDK also contains the complete OS, etc. They are not shooting for "open source" but for something different. Frankly, the direction they are going is simply amazing.
How about a features that allows parents to read their kids' email with one click? With Carnivore it shouldn't be too hard to intercept email from flagged accounts (let the parents register em) and forward it to a cache ready for a parent's perusal. After all, if they're under 18 they don't deserve privacy, do they?
And by god, if I catch Jenny looking at that birth control website again she's gonna get the beating of her life.....
As this is only my opinion, I'll say what I think.
There needs to be a simplification of roles. Either a child is given privacy and all the responsibilities that come with it, or the parent must be able to check on their child.
We're living in a time where parents can be held responsible for a child's actions, and must pick up the peices when a child makes a mistake. Never mind the fact that the child made the mistake under the protection of privacy, thus the parents had no way of knowing what was going on.
Which is it? Jenny has privacy and freedom to view a site on birth control, screw up usage instructions, and then the parents must take up the bill for her mistake? Or allow the parents to see this behavior and perhaps (assuming rational parents) give her direction to the right decision? Parents giving direction? Well, yes, that is their job after all.
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Only cost is the electricity, and if you're that concerned about your power bill, just replace a few bulbs with compact florescents. While you're at it, get the natural light output bulbs and you can fight winter depression at the same time...
If your computer otherwise dies, odds are it's a defect that would have killed it anyway.
More related to OpenAFS than Coda.... Looked at both extensively recently. OpenAFS scales like a champ, Coda does not. Mostly due to the way Coda stores metadata. You have to run a seperate server instance of Coda for every (approx) 23 gig of file space you serve out. There are other limitations...
OpenAFS seems to be much more open ended at this point, though it does not support Disconnected operation or Read/Write replicas. Though that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Neither likes files >2gig right now.... OpenAFS is still in active developement, but Coda seems stalled at this point.
*cough* OnStar *cough* ... And there's your transponder that's slowly leaking into the market, now even on Saturns as an option.
Get your head out of the sand. Doesn't matter if it's democrats or republicans. Be a bleeding heart lib if it makes you happy, just realize the difference between the two main parties these days is quickly approaching nil.
On the other hand, I've also had both Reiserfs and a Ext3 come back up after a poweroutage and refuse to boot as they needed to be manually fsck'd. Journaling is no magic bullet, though it'll help in a lot of cases.
Both cases were machines with otherwise longish (3+ month) uptimes.
Back in the day when Commodore and the Amiga still roamed... I looked at a Mac Quadra with video ability. The Apple store in Norfolk wanted just under $10,000 for a no-harddrive floppy only machine. They even came right out and told me if I payed list they'd support me, they'd haggle over price, but wouldn't offer support.
The combination of hideous behavior from dealers in the day (snobbishness?) combined with insanely high prices kept me away from Apple.
Pricing now is right in line with equivalent hardware, and I've had much better contacts with Apple Minions.
Nice in theory, wrong in practice. Most end users:
1) Have never met a dialog box they didn't like well enough to hit cancel/no
2) Have never updated their OS in their life, even though Windows Update is fairly easy to use
3) Have no idea they should be updating AV definitions... I have AV on my computer, isn't that enough?
If a program sounds vaguely interesting, joe schmo will download and install it to try, wether it's by MS, or jane's website on Angelfire.
110 user business here. Medical practice using Electronic medical records (EMR) and computerized practice management.
7 Windows 2000 servers (darned vertical apps and Exchange)
4 Linux Servers
112 Workstations total
3 Linux workstations for now (though moving Win98 boxes to Linux + LTSP where possible)
Open Office is on 9 boxes as we ran out of MSOffice licenses... 72 other machines have MSOffice, rest run vertical apps only...
OO 8% of all workstations
Linux 36% of all servers
Linux 2.7% of all clients (mostly due to brain damaged vertical apps blocking deployment)
In the process of testing kerberos + ldap + samba 3.0 to replace the existing W2k ADS servers. These numbers are in spite of 2 hideously evil vertical market apps that must run on Windows that every user must run at least one of. Citrix and Linux + ICA or Windows Terminal Server + RDesktop is your friend. Although one app stores it's print profile in the System hive rather than current user, so while you can use it in Term Services, last person to select a printer wins. =P
Gentoo is on servers and workstations. So yes, it is possible. The key is that management MUST be open to trying new things in the interest of cutting costs, and it requires a certain amount of knowledge to make it happen.
SOP for Linus really. I was at a Linux conference hosted by Red Hat a few years back in North Carolina where Linus was the keynote person. He (jokingly of course) said the best thing that could happen for Linux was if somebody shot Gates.
Linus has never really been a deferential person and says what's on his mind... It seems in some cases without regard to any consequences. To say SCO smokes crack is nothing.
Factor in that a large amount of vertical software out there requires (yes, requires) the user be in the local administrator group of their machine...
It's not just the end users. A lot of clueless developers code that way as it avoids some unpleasant ickiness, never mind the ickiness is there to prevent this very thing.
Actually, in recent years CD quality isn't all of that. CDs today are mixed for play on a radio where they're set to be as loud as phyisically possible. If this means large amounts of clipping and other artifacts, so be it.
AAC on the other hand, does a much better job compressing other bit sizes than 16 bit (CD quality). IIRC all iTunes AAC songs are encoded from 24 bit masters, and are considerably higher quality than can be acheived encoding from 16 bit CD rips. It also neatly avoids the post master mixing that goes on while trying to ramp as much of the song as possible to maximum average volume.
I went off at an angle to be sure. The machine in question has very little to do with a Beowulf cluster. It's more like a SGI Origin that happens to run Linux as the OS.
No particular design makes sense in all situations. Hrm. Come to think about it, my knee jerk reaction would be fine comparing Linux Beowulf clusters to an Apple Beowulf cluster, but doesn't have much to do with the SGI box.
Definately need more caffiene.
Rendevous will be used in 10.3 with Xcode to discover resources and distribute software builds across available 10.3 machines. If there's a perceived benefit to Apple, do you honestly think there's anything preventing the next version 10.4 from having distributed capabilities?
You can already compile programs with LAM-MPI support, so in reality there is nada stopping you from building a Beowulf cluster of XServes. There may even be a compelling reason to use XServes over x86 boxes after XServers are updated to G5s.
Rumor was the original XServes were built to spec for a distributed cluster for a Blast! genome search engine.
People get hung up on Beowulf = Linux, and that isn't necessarily the case if you take Beowulf to mean a cluster of inexpensive machines.
OS 10.2+ with Rendevouz autodiscovery using LAM-MPI for communicating could just be a killer configuration. Lord knows cluster management/monitoring would be outstanding, though perhaps the setup would not be as simple initially.
Sorry, no. The spoon and water effect you're talking about is actually the "Coanda Effect," first described by Henri Coanda, and has nothing to do with electrostatic buildup.
A very interesting man.
Yep, and in the spirit of complete disclosure, the Linux gurus are JUST as guilty. Read the article about features missing in 2.6 and how the kernel writers are unabashedly telling any kernel module maker that isn't GPL'd to go take a flying leap.
./ comments)
-- Vendor intimidation (yep, forcing vendors selling products for Linux that use kernel modules to be gpl or not be able to tie into the kernel)
-- semi-legal, prohibitive licensing practices (see GPL and arguments about it's viral nature)
-- market control (not allowing vendors to substitute kernel symbols unless module is GPL)
-- FUD (see any
-- product tying (best performance on Linux uses real time signals X15 server, which is not portable across multiple Unix flavors)
-- hiding software features (ok, not guilty)
-- employee abuse (tongue in cheek, but have you ever read some of the flamage on Linux Kernel? =) )
A corporation does not evil make. Apple has been one of the banner bearers for opensource, something I really expected IBM to have a bigger profile in. They do choose their battles, and while there is some fallout, most things make some modicum of sense. Apple doesn't do DRM beyond a sticker that says don't steal, if they allowed this plugin to florish, RIAA would be on them in a heartbeat due to copyright violation.
I would not be suprised to eventually see an iTunes that allows you to view and stream others playlists via Rendevous, but it will most definately not allow sharing if they can help it.
Some people shout the virtues too much, other scream about evils. Guess what, it's shades of grey. Apple's just a bit lighter than MS.
Any system out there addressing this much data would most likely use minimally an LVM(EVMS) solution for disk storage, better yet a NAS/SAN such as those by Network Appliances. Both permit snapshots in time. With Network Appliances providing a mirror capability. Link two together at seperate sites.
In a day and age where IDE systems are starting to outperform SCSI, and an IDE disk drive costs $304 for a 200 gig drive (approximately $0.0012 cents per meg)... I would seriously doubt they store even a meg per character (most should be keys to static tables in any case...).
Only poor design would result in this. Any optimized database with proper indexes will process data fast enough that those using the server should never experience lag induced by database lookups. No matter the data size.
Much more likely the user will experience lag (ala Anarchy Online) where the necessity of loading textures from local disk causes slowdown. Nothing you can do about that really. A person with a low performing pc will always lag.
Agreed. Had this been the primary thrust of the message, then I would have no issue with it. Attempting to blow up the importance and cost of disk storage though is a copout, and they should be called on it.
Why absurd? It could be argued that redundancy is endemic to evolution. Two eyes, two hands... Go even deeper and there are large sections of our basic DNA code that is inactive... Perhaps to protect the actual data in a redundant way.
History has shown the brain has rather amazing abilities to redirect functions to areas not normally associated with that function in the event of disease or catastrophic illness.
Not only would I consider it not absurd, but I'd say it would be required that the mind be much more capable than the work a day usage would need.
This is pretty much acknowledged by everyone on the list. There are a couple of issues, not the least is that there is only one color scheme that works well, the others are very very slow.
Second seems to be an alignment issue in how java (and the underlying gcc math libs) are compiled. Doubles are misaligned which is a big hit on PPC platforms.
According to the Java Developer's list for Apple, these issues were basically unfixable with the existing 1.3.1 due to time constraints and underlying Sun code. I'd expect the eventual release of 1.4.1 to be much faster.
The real world:
That said, a small office or home that can be covered by a single unit should work acceptably. I would wait for 802.11g before installing a large number of units based on 802.11a, especially for any core business use.
Nice fud.
A user must authenticate to NetInfo before making changes, they can't just waltz in and edit.
Only the first user created is flagged as Administrator by default, any additional users need to be flagged as such if you intend to let them control the machine.
OS X is actually fairly secure, but not obnoxiously so out of the box. If I want, as Admin, I can set up a laptop such that Joe user can edit network configs, etc, but lock down other capabilites as I wish.
Fusions were created genetically when the Klingons encountered a race, by fusing Imperial with the encountered race's DNA. Those Fusions could then be used in all contacts (providing obfuscation as to who the real Klingons were) and as spies within the alien race.
Wonder if I could still find that box up in the closet? Hmm...
Most of my work involves programming against Oracle Databases, primarily in Java. While I used the sqlj translator for the first major project, I chose not to from then on. Mostly due to JDBC being rather well implemented, and the fact that by using JDBC directly, I can eliminate the runtime components and cut down on the memory footprint of my apps.
As far as PL/SQL goes, my preference is for Java functions in Oracle 8i. From my background, it's just more efficient for me to work this angle. Only major beef I have with Oracle with these is the thread model they use inside Oracle is not pre-emptive. Have to be careful.
That license was acknowledged to be bad, and Amiga, Inc released a new agreement. Check the page or the mailing list. That was long since past.
If the SDK was only that, an add on to the OS that allowed developement, yes, $100 would be silly. However, the SDK also contains the complete OS, etc. They are not shooting for "open source" but for something different. Frankly, the direction they are going is simply amazing.
And by god, if I catch Jenny looking at that birth control website again she's gonna get the beating of her life.....
As this is only my opinion, I'll say what I think.
There needs to be a simplification of roles. Either a child is given privacy and all the responsibilities that come with it, or the parent must be able to check on their child.
We're living in a time where parents can be held responsible for a child's actions, and must pick up the peices when a child makes a mistake. Never mind the fact that the child made the mistake under the protection of privacy, thus the parents had no way of knowing what was going on.
Which is it? Jenny has privacy and freedom to view a site on birth control, screw up usage instructions, and then the parents must take up the bill for her mistake? Or allow the parents to see this behavior and perhaps (assuming rational parents) give her direction to the right decision? Parents giving direction? Well, yes, that is their job after all.