While I'm prepared to leave delegates, properties, and multidimensioned arrays on the table, Java *does* [now, at least] have type-safe enum with a new 'enum' keyword, auto-boxing of primitives to their wrapper class, and a modified 'for' syntax that is functionally equivalent to 'foreach' (and yes it works with the new enum as well as any iterable collection). Surprised you didn't list generics/templates, which java now has implemented and backported into the full Collections API. Pretty neat stuff; have been playing with most of this it all week, now.
Is it just the 'google factor' at work for you? (Meaning either that Google did the job or that the interface is streamlined and snappy enough to make 'webmail' really work?) For me, I'm not sure. I've used various clients over the past decade+ myself. OE, Eudora, netscape communicator suite, outlook (work thing), evolution, kmail, other odd-balls, and lately g-mail. (Most anything except Mac system clients, really.) My own recollections are that, for me, OE on win probably worked overall the best, but considering the security record, I haven't touched it in many years. Otherwise, IMO, *all* client-side POP/IMAP clients tend to suck ass in some respect or another. (security, config'ability, encryption support, contact management/import/export, mail format import/export, calendar integration, other misc. bits). Also, being someone who jumps around various OS's, various computers (my own, plus relatives and in-laws), config'ing yet another mail client to get to my mail is a PITA. Let alone that I've never had a dialup ISP provide IMAP.
Now, along comes Google with their AJAX (whatever) web-based thing, and webmail is responsive enough to use withOUT full page-loads any time I click somewhere. I had been just S-POP'ing my gmail to a local client (and to a thumbdrive version of thunderbird), but lately I'm just logging in via the web server and dealing with it there. I will say that I have seen some odd quirks in g-mail's behavior (I reply'ed to a message and it filled out the wrong TO addy) and that there are a few things I'd like thought out differently (various operations and functions are accessed in slightly different ways), so I'm not fully sold there either.
< dear google > If g-mail provided iCal service for people and then linked that over to the gmail accounts, then I'd be a fairly happy guy. </dear google >
Looks like from the Apple site that the "mini" is no longer featured at all... guess "nano" is the new "mini", which makes me wonder about [lack of?] future accessories or software updates for the mini line. Anyone have specific info on this?
I've also not [yet] owned my own Mac, but I think the difference in price is justified in the software. If you ever have the benefit of being in a "Mac" store, check out when they offer a live demo/workshop for iLife. While similar apps for Windows may exist (though notably from disparate companies/people), the obvious simplicity and "right"ness of the iLife apps will jump out at you when you watch a store guy jump them through their nicely co-integrated hoops.
I may not have stated a point as clearly as I'd have liked...
This may be true if you buy your computers from the local corner store, but not quite so with someone like Dell. Do you really think Dell randomly changes motherboards in the middle of a run of Latitude 840s?
That's likely true enough, and if Dell were in fact the only manufacturer assembling PC's and selling addon gadgets, the we'd all (windows and Linux) be doing better on having things work. But there are in fact lots of big, medium, and small-time companies assembling components. (Even the likes of Best Buy and Comp-usa have their own cheapie store brands of components that are hit or miss.) Sometimes companies 'cheap out' on their selections to help them compete on cost. (I'm certainly guilty of this on self-builds, I know one flavor mobo I'll never own again) Anyway, what I believe the 'mad as hell' blogger is lamenting isn't so much that capitalism has brought diversity (and cheap parts) to bear, but that it can be somewhat infuriating to buy a lemon machine/component short of doing a LOT of homework up front and knowing what manufacturer has good/bad reputations. (Unless perhaps if someone buys *everything* from Dell, but I can't ever see that as likely.) For those random few whose time is indeed worth money, a Mac's higher price (due to higher quality and 'just works'-ness) might indeed be an overall better trade.
True enough to that business users (or their IT dept) needs to provide what makes sense for their needs. Still, I am interested in knowing how this pans out for this particular guy.
Anyhow, I have a couple extended family members and a couple -in-law relatives with Dell's... the have just as odd problems as any other vendor (high or low cost). Some is user error, some is windows quirks, but some is, IMO, H/W. While I appreciate the work Dell does do here, it isn't like they create the spec and have manufacturers build to it... they pick and choose like anyone, though ideally with better care and some testing. Still my experience with them (experience by proxy, granted) leaves a little to be desired here. [shrug]
As an 8+ year Linux user, I will readily admit I have several similar complaints. Note the columnist presents a large chunk of reasons for switching as being related to H/W working (or not). Rather than bashing on about "windows is teh suck" or anything, he's citing the dizzying array of mobo's, memory, BIOS's, peripherals, and [re]releases of OS's as being a leading reason why a windows box Just Can't Work. Too many variations; nearly impossible to build two identical boxes unless you specifically do so at the outset. That Apple controls the H/W in their boxes to a greater degree may mean less choice and higher price, but with that comes greater overall reliability. I'm officially saving some cash to buy that reliability for myself/family.
As for "why not Linux", then consider that, from a H/W point of view, a Linux-based system doesn't fare much better. The core O/S kernel may indeed be more secure (I agree that it is), but when a particular flavor of USB widget card, sound card, camera, or whatever isn't supported, it's largely -- I think -- for the same reaons: too many combinations of H/W, chipset, BIOS, and whatnot, and not enough people who have scratched a given itch to get it working in a particular combination. I've abandoned my particular install of MDK 10 due less to the OS and more to the ability for it to have H/W work without hassle.
which is likely true to a varing degree depending on implementation
For ad-hoc networks, that's part of the point. Sure, all of/. will have an old dusty 386 running dhcp/bind for all the systems in their little batcave making zeroconf a zero-value-add. If your systems are configured to *need* DHCP, BIND, etc., then it's partly your headache to workaround or disable the failover to zeroconf, IMO.
OTOH, assuming my mom and dad got separate systems and just barely knew enough to plug cat5 between them, the fact that both systems will decide to use 169.254.x.y (and all decide their domain is ".local") and w/ the assumption they're running an mDNS responder of some variety, both systems can "find" each other without me twiddling around in two separate networking wizards, setting up a host file, and/or whatever else. Ideally, they have no idea how complicated it *might* be. (Granted, all the magic that truly benefits the end-user happens at the application level, such as in IE, some printer wizard, a multiplayer game, what-have-you.)
True. Perhaps to clarify, Ti-alloys can (and are) used in compressor sections, but there can arise a set of conditions (near the aft-end of the compressor if/when it does) that makes Ti a bad choice. My aero education (primarily theory) didn't mention practical aspects like this (namely that Ti can *burn*), so I was just throwing out what I found an interesting point. (Otherwise, no offense on the "parts" tutorial... didn't want other people to mis-read between us, what with Joe Common referring to all bladed sections as "turbines".)
I was actually referring to the compressor blades/vanes (before the "burner" section) being subject to this condition. (The normal cycle being (1) compress air (2) burn fuel at high pressure (3) allow air to re-expand through turbines.) Not really pushing the envelope much. [Total] Pressure ratios reaching up to 20:1 (relative to ambient) are common enough and one wouldn't have to say "modern" as a caveat. But yes, I believe Nickel alloys are used where needed.
As for the post-burner "turbine" sections, they're subject to temperatures quite above the metal's melting point. The gimmick commonly employed in the industry is to `drill' lots of teensy holes in the turbine blades/vanes (elsewhere, as needed) and force cool[er] air through them to "shield" them from direct contact with burner-temp air. (That and some other materials- and aerodynamic voodoo. Consider the difficulty in supplying air to an assembly rotating several thousand RPMs.) HTH.
Also, titanium is *very* fatigue resistant, and aircraft with titanium structural components have sometimes even been found to be stronger after being flown a few times than when they were built.
As an mildly interesting bullet to follow that of parent's, titanium can apparently "catch fire" under the right conditions (that being high temperature and pressure). I hadn't conceived of this until working at my current engineer job where commercial and military aircraft engines get made... past a certain point in the compressor section, Ti can't be used any more for fear of wholly losing the rotor/stator part to "titanium fire". (Aside from chem-geeks, who knew?)
I use "please check I.D." as well. My experience is that the frequency they actually asked me (and cross-check) went way up when I added the "please" in front. (Previously I was using "check I.D.") I have wondered whether seeing "please" reassures some young-ish sales person that I would very much like to be asked (as opposed to making them feel they need to presume upon me to ask since their boss told them to)... or whether there is some other unrelated factor at play.
I'm not sure how many nay-sayers this "shocking news" might bring out, but my opinion is that if he fights his desktop environment less for day-to-day tasks, he might have more time, energy, and mental resources to code the linux kernel. Just my two cents on something that probably doesn't matter anyway.
Now, surely there are more than a quarter of a million computers on the Net, so how will this enable us to track a device uniquely?
After reading this several times on this thread, it occurs to me that 'common sense' on the investigators part might fill the gap: If a particular [dynamic] IP address did something naughty and a clock skew was logged, then the Fed's can watch all traffic coming from the ISP's net block for that particular clock skew again (or something like that). Surely these guys know there isn't resolution to track across the full range of 'Net-connected computers w/out some way of cutting the sample size down before hand. Like many tools, it isn't a magic bullet, but does add one more tool which can be useful in the right set of circumstances.
Just by way of cutting you with the other edge of your question, my mom's been running Windows for a lot longer than I've run Linux, but she's still a noob, and I'm at least moderately knowledgeable about Linux. Your question fails to account for whether someone has any personal desire and/or need to really muck around with things at a level of detail to "grok" things about the system. Asking something more inline with what level of admin/maintenance was done on the linux systems (if any, beyond clickety-surf web and clickety-check e-mail) would seem more appropriate.
True, but in terms of trying to make sense of the orbital mechanics of things (and for sake of being a minor pedant), one generally can make a safe assumption of reference point being that which exerts the dominant [gravitational] influence. (E.g., satellites with respect to the planet, planets w.r.t. their star, a star w.r.t. the galactic center). Unless more precisely worded, it's probably safe to assume the question was w.r.t. the galactic center in this case.
I'm not close enough to the IT side of the company to know... it's been a recent enough failure that such a thing as H/W drive recovery may be currently underway. In the meantime, meaning now and the forseeable future, data is just gone relative to the engineers that need it. I believe they've already went through a process of checking the original data acquisition systems, etc., and asking engineers if they might have personal archives of various tests to piece-meal whatever they can, so I would hope this means IT is willing to do whatever is necessary. (If you have more familiarity with this, what sort of time frame might you expect recovery to take place, accounting for red-tape and contract negotiations and all?)
Talk about bad luck on archivals and that one-in-a-billion catastrophic failure... the aerospace company I'm an engineer at lost a good deal of test data for a few aircraft engine performance tests in that (1) a disc in a RAID server failed... I think it must've been RAID-5 or whatever lets one disc crap out... (2) while replacing that disc, multiple other discs failed. The remainder of the RAID array now being worthless, (3) the IT/data company went to pull tape backups, and for much of that data (I think on two separate tape systems) the data was corrupt/useless. I never heard total volume that was irreplaceable and lost (there'd never be enough time OR millions of dollars thrown at it, considering the data spanned *years*), but I'd estimate it's measured in the low TB range.
That it seems to be causing a stir seems to indicate that MS *does* think it competes with the iPod. As another poster pointed out, MS gets money in liscensing the WMA format out to other people who are in hardware competition with the iPod, so in an indirect way, it makes sense if they take notice.
I am sure most of these programs are small and maintained by a few people. So does it matter if it is ugly?
Wrong on both counts. I am engineer (and code jock) in an aerospace company. I'm the person responsible (by default) of a behemoth code which we can only estimate has 1/4 of a million lines of code spread over hundreds of subroutines and include files (and which still calls out to other company-developed libraries)... and speaking in terms of computation effort, this code runs an analysis in a few minutes, whereas we have other codes that, collectively, take DAYS to run a full single analysis case for. (Here's where I wonder if I'm feeding a troll. Ah well.)
As to the second point... HELL YES it matters the code is ugly. First, I'm not "young" by any modern standard, but a lot of deep voodoo in what I'm caretaker over is older than me, written by who knows how many people, across different OS platforms (and thus different language versions and vendor implementations of FORTRAN). Given the vintage, the early guys had to do some positively evil things to make the code work at all. The code remains ugly to this day simply b/c there's NO way a mountain of money large enough could ever be thrown at it to clean it up, and even if so, I'm personally doubtful a clean version would "work" properly. (Of course, this means the same input gives the same output we're calibrated against.) This creates a vicious cycle as new tricks the code has to do just make it uglier and less comprehensible.
This is all common old-industry type stuff that designs a lot of things you all bet your lives on everyday. School does not (and cannot) prepare and engineering grad against this.
For me, the Mini comes with perfect timing. I'm running three boxes now (dialup/firewall, and two multi-boot desktops), and the overall footprint and noise of having all three on most of the time is really starting to bother me. (Not so much 'quality of life' bother as much as 'environment aesthetics' bother... maybe that's the same to some though.) I just purchased a smaller form factor case for my dialup/firewall box and am generally happier with it compared to the waste-of-volume that was a mini-tower case. Given the mini is all of 'small', 'quiet', and 'OS X', they've sold me at least one (well, when I set aside money to order one)... maybe two. Others are pointing out that expandability isn't such a bit issue what with USB/Firewire ports, and with lots of things going over to bluetooth/wifi...
So my big question, besides the obvious price drop from normal Apple systems and putting aside the whole Mac vs. x86 platform, is where is the real price savings for a new user buying a new home computer? Granted the 15% off is a big factor, but Dell runs similar specials all the time.
You just discounted the reason with your "besides" stipulation... it isn't "price" saved as much as its "value" earned -- specifically because of Mac vs. x86 platform. On one hand you have hardware and software quality controlled by Apple (plus customer goodwill, or so I hear), on the other hand, you have parts and software from different places (with different quality control standards) that Dell is just assembling and/or rebadging, deciding "yep, it works", and moving it out the door. Even not winning on bottom-line price, many people feel the value in "Mac" goodness (including OS X's UNIX-ness for people here in/.) still wins in the end. Plus, for me, size and noise are a big issue... just how small/quiet is that Dell system, anyway? (Dual optical drives makes me think tower...)
I find it fairly interesting that one could `s/FFXI/EQ/g` and basically get my reasons for dropping EQ... never had large enough (4+ hr) blocks of time to get in a well-formed group at a spot that wasn't over-camped to ever get one of my characters out of the low 30's, and if RL-friends had slightly less life than I did, they seemed to outlevel me anyway. There wasn't any other in-game content (other than maybe guild chat channel) that made it worth me logging in. (No, I haven't played "2"; if it is honestly that different from "1", feel free to inform me how so.) Nevermind that items for level X are similarly only dropped by mobs for group level 2X, the hyper inflation on useful items when mobs around my level dropped jack for coin/items, etc, etc. Sounds very familiar.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm prepared to leave delegates, properties, and multidimensioned arrays on the table, Java *does* [now, at least] have type-safe enum with a new 'enum' keyword, auto-boxing of primitives to their wrapper class, and a modified 'for' syntax that is functionally equivalent to 'foreach' (and yes it works with the new enum as well as any iterable collection). Surprised you didn't list generics/templates, which java now has implemented and backported into the full Collections API. Pretty neat stuff; have been playing with most of this it all week, now.
Is it just the 'google factor' at work for you? (Meaning either that Google did the job or that the interface is streamlined and snappy enough to make 'webmail' really work?) For me, I'm not sure. I've used various clients over the past decade+ myself. OE, Eudora, netscape communicator suite, outlook (work thing), evolution, kmail, other odd-balls, and lately g-mail. (Most anything except Mac system clients, really.) My own recollections are that, for me, OE on win probably worked overall the best, but considering the security record, I haven't touched it in many years. Otherwise, IMO, *all* client-side POP/IMAP clients tend to suck ass in some respect or another. (security, config'ability, encryption support, contact management/import/export, mail format import/export, calendar integration, other misc. bits). Also, being someone who jumps around various OS's, various computers (my own, plus relatives and in-laws), config'ing yet another mail client to get to my mail is a PITA. Let alone that I've never had a dialup ISP provide IMAP.
/dear google >
;-)
Now, along comes Google with their AJAX (whatever) web-based thing, and webmail is responsive enough to use withOUT full page-loads any time I click somewhere. I had been just S-POP'ing my gmail to a local client (and to a thumbdrive version of thunderbird), but lately I'm just logging in via the web server and dealing with it there. I will say that I have seen some odd quirks in g-mail's behavior (I reply'ed to a message and it filled out the wrong TO addy) and that there are a few things I'd like thought out differently (various operations and functions are accessed in slightly different ways), so I'm not fully sold there either.
< dear google >
If g-mail provided iCal service for people and then linked that over to the gmail accounts, then I'd be a fairly happy guy.
<
Call me picky, I guess... it'd be fair enough.
Looks like from the Apple site that the "mini" is no longer featured at all... guess "nano" is the new "mini", which makes me wonder about [lack of?] future accessories or software updates for the mini line. Anyone have specific info on this?
I've also not [yet] owned my own Mac, but I think the difference in price is justified in the software. If you ever have the benefit of being in a "Mac" store, check out when they offer a live demo/workshop for iLife. While similar apps for Windows may exist (though notably from disparate companies/people), the obvious simplicity and "right"ness of the iLife apps will jump out at you when you watch a store guy jump them through their nicely co-integrated hoops.
I may not have stated a point as clearly as I'd have liked...
This may be true if you buy your computers from the local corner store, but not quite so with someone like Dell. Do you really think Dell randomly changes motherboards in the middle of a run of Latitude 840s?
That's likely true enough, and if Dell were in fact the only manufacturer assembling PC's and selling addon gadgets, the we'd all (windows and Linux) be doing better on having things work. But there are in fact lots of big, medium, and small-time companies assembling components. (Even the likes of Best Buy and Comp-usa have their own cheapie store brands of components that are hit or miss.) Sometimes companies 'cheap out' on their selections to help them compete on cost. (I'm certainly guilty of this on self-builds, I know one flavor mobo I'll never own again) Anyway, what I believe the 'mad as hell' blogger is lamenting isn't so much that capitalism has brought diversity (and cheap parts) to bear, but that it can be somewhat infuriating to buy a lemon machine/component short of doing a LOT of homework up front and knowing what manufacturer has good/bad reputations. (Unless perhaps if someone buys *everything* from Dell, but I can't ever see that as likely.) For those random few whose time is indeed worth money, a Mac's higher price (due to higher quality and 'just works'-ness) might indeed be an overall better trade.
True enough to that business users (or their IT dept) needs to provide what makes sense for their needs. Still, I am interested in knowing how this pans out for this particular guy.
... the have just as odd problems as any other vendor (high or low cost). Some is user error, some is windows quirks, but some is, IMO, H/W. While I appreciate the work Dell does do here, it isn't like they create the spec and have manufacturers build to it ... they pick and choose like anyone, though ideally with better care and some testing. Still my experience with them (experience by proxy, granted) leaves a little to be desired here. [shrug]
Anyhow, I have a couple extended family members and a couple -in-law relatives with Dell's
As an 8+ year Linux user, I will readily admit I have several similar complaints. Note the columnist presents a large chunk of reasons for switching as being related to H/W working (or not). Rather than bashing on about "windows is teh suck" or anything, he's citing the dizzying array of mobo's, memory, BIOS's, peripherals, and [re]releases of OS's as being a leading reason why a windows box Just Can't Work. Too many variations; nearly impossible to build two identical boxes unless you specifically do so at the outset. That Apple controls the H/W in their boxes to a greater degree may mean less choice and higher price, but with that comes greater overall reliability. I'm officially saving some cash to buy that reliability for myself/family.
As for "why not Linux", then consider that, from a H/W point of view, a Linux-based system doesn't fare much better. The core O/S kernel may indeed be more secure (I agree that it is), but when a particular flavor of USB widget card, sound card, camera, or whatever isn't supported, it's largely -- I think -- for the same reaons: too many combinations of H/W, chipset, BIOS, and whatnot, and not enough people who have scratched a given itch to get it working in a particular combination. I've abandoned my particular install of MDK 10 due less to the OS and more to the ability for it to have H/W work without hassle.
which is likely true to a varing degree depending on implementation
Exactly...
For ad-hoc networks, that's part of the point. Sure, all of /. will have an old dusty 386 running dhcp/bind for all the systems in their little batcave making zeroconf a zero-value-add. If your systems are configured to *need* DHCP, BIND, etc., then it's partly your headache to workaround or disable the failover to zeroconf, IMO.
OTOH, assuming my mom and dad got separate systems and just barely knew enough to plug cat5 between them, the fact that both systems will decide to use 169.254.x.y (and all decide their domain is ".local") and w/ the assumption they're running an mDNS responder of some variety, both systems can "find" each other without me twiddling around in two separate networking wizards, setting up a host file, and/or whatever else. Ideally, they have no idea how complicated it *might* be. (Granted, all the magic that truly benefits the end-user happens at the application level, such as in IE, some printer wizard, a multiplayer game, what-have-you.)
Maybe you should point it how it hasn't started minting $20 bills yet either...
True. Perhaps to clarify, Ti-alloys can (and are) used in compressor sections, but there can arise a set of conditions (near the aft-end of the compressor if/when it does) that makes Ti a bad choice. My aero education (primarily theory) didn't mention practical aspects like this (namely that Ti can *burn*), so I was just throwing out what I found an interesting point. (Otherwise, no offense on the "parts" tutorial... didn't want other people to mis-read between us, what with Joe Common referring to all bladed sections as "turbines".)
I was actually referring to the compressor blades/vanes (before the "burner" section) being subject to this condition. (The normal cycle being (1) compress air (2) burn fuel at high pressure (3) allow air to re-expand through turbines.) Not really pushing the envelope much. [Total] Pressure ratios reaching up to 20:1 (relative to ambient) are common enough and one wouldn't have to say "modern" as a caveat. But yes, I believe Nickel alloys are used where needed.
As for the post-burner "turbine" sections, they're subject to temperatures quite above the metal's melting point. The gimmick commonly employed in the industry is to `drill' lots of teensy holes in the turbine blades/vanes (elsewhere, as needed) and force cool[er] air through them to "shield" them from direct contact with burner-temp air. (That and some other materials- and aerodynamic voodoo. Consider the difficulty in supplying air to an assembly rotating several thousand RPMs.) HTH.
Also, titanium is *very* fatigue resistant, and aircraft with titanium structural components have sometimes even been found to be stronger after being flown a few times than when they were built.
... past a certain point in the compressor section, Ti can't be used any more for fear of wholly losing the rotor/stator part to "titanium fire". (Aside from chem-geeks, who knew?)
As an mildly interesting bullet to follow that of parent's, titanium can apparently "catch fire" under the right conditions (that being high temperature and pressure). I hadn't conceived of this until working at my current engineer job where commercial and military aircraft engines get made
Not only were Ramanujan and Hardy an odd pair, but they were also a genious comedy duo!
;-)
Well that's just great... this is another fine troll^W mess you've gotten us all into.
I use "please check I.D." as well. My experience is that the frequency they actually asked me (and cross-check) went way up when I added the "please" in front. (Previously I was using "check I.D.") I have wondered whether seeing "please" reassures some young-ish sales person that I would very much like to be asked (as opposed to making them feel they need to presume upon me to ask since their boss told them to) ... or whether there is some other unrelated factor at play.
I'm not sure how many nay-sayers this "shocking news" might bring out, but my opinion is that if he fights his desktop environment less for day-to-day tasks, he might have more time, energy, and mental resources to code the linux kernel. Just my two cents on something that probably doesn't matter anyway.
Now, surely there are more than a quarter of a million computers on the Net, so how will this enable us to track a device uniquely?
After reading this several times on this thread, it occurs to me that 'common sense' on the investigators part might fill the gap: If a particular [dynamic] IP address did something naughty and a clock skew was logged, then the Fed's can watch all traffic coming from the ISP's net block for that particular clock skew again (or something like that). Surely these guys know there isn't resolution to track across the full range of 'Net-connected computers w/out some way of cutting the sample size down before hand. Like many tools, it isn't a magic bullet, but does add one more tool which can be useful in the right set of circumstances.
Just by way of cutting you with the other edge of your question, my mom's been running Windows for a lot longer than I've run Linux, but she's still a noob, and I'm at least moderately knowledgeable about Linux. Your question fails to account for whether someone has any personal desire and/or need to really muck around with things at a level of detail to "grok" things about the system. Asking something more inline with what level of admin/maintenance was done on the linux systems (if any, beyond clickety-surf web and clickety-check e-mail) would seem more appropriate.
> Speed is relative, after all.
True, but in terms of trying to make sense of the orbital mechanics of things (and for sake of being a minor pedant), one generally can make a safe assumption of reference point being that which exerts the dominant [gravitational] influence. (E.g., satellites with respect to the planet, planets w.r.t. their star, a star w.r.t. the galactic center). Unless more precisely worded, it's probably safe to assume the question was w.r.t. the galactic center in this case.
I'm not close enough to the IT side of the company to know... it's been a recent enough failure that such a thing as H/W drive recovery may be currently underway. In the meantime, meaning now and the forseeable future, data is just gone relative to the engineers that need it. I believe they've already went through a process of checking the original data acquisition systems, etc., and asking engineers if they might have personal archives of various tests to piece-meal whatever they can, so I would hope this means IT is willing to do whatever is necessary. (If you have more familiarity with this, what sort of time frame might you expect recovery to take place, accounting for red-tape and contract negotiations and all?)
Talk about bad luck on archivals and that one-in-a-billion catastrophic failure... the aerospace company I'm an engineer at lost a good deal of test data for a few aircraft engine performance tests in that (1) a disc in a RAID server failed... I think it must've been RAID-5 or whatever lets one disc crap out... (2) while replacing that disc, multiple other discs failed. The remainder of the RAID array now being worthless, (3) the IT/data company went to pull tape backups, and for much of that data (I think on two separate tape systems) the data was corrupt/useless. I never heard total volume that was irreplaceable and lost (there'd never be enough time OR millions of dollars thrown at it, considering the data spanned *years*), but I'd estimate it's measured in the low TB range.
That it seems to be causing a stir seems to indicate that MS *does* think it competes with the iPod. As another poster pointed out, MS gets money in liscensing the WMA format out to other people who are in hardware competition with the iPod, so in an indirect way, it makes sense if they take notice.
I am sure most of these programs are small and maintained by a few people. So does it matter if it is ugly?
Wrong on both counts. I am engineer (and code jock) in an aerospace company. I'm the person responsible (by default) of a behemoth code which we can only estimate has 1/4 of a million lines of code spread over hundreds of subroutines and include files (and which still calls out to other company-developed libraries)... and speaking in terms of computation effort, this code runs an analysis in a few minutes, whereas we have other codes that, collectively, take DAYS to run a full single analysis case for. (Here's where I wonder if I'm feeding a troll. Ah well.)
As to the second point... HELL YES it matters the code is ugly. First, I'm not "young" by any modern standard, but a lot of deep voodoo in what I'm caretaker over is older than me, written by who knows how many people, across different OS platforms (and thus different language versions and vendor implementations of FORTRAN). Given the vintage, the early guys had to do some positively evil things to make the code work at all. The code remains ugly to this day simply b/c there's NO way a mountain of money large enough could ever be thrown at it to clean it up, and even if so, I'm personally doubtful a clean version would "work" properly. (Of course, this means the same input gives the same output we're calibrated against.) This creates a vicious cycle as new tricks the code has to do just make it uglier and less comprehensible.
This is all common old-industry type stuff that designs a lot of things you all bet your lives on everyday. School does not (and cannot) prepare and engineering grad against this.
For me, the Mini comes with perfect timing. I'm running three boxes now (dialup/firewall, and two multi-boot desktops), and the overall footprint and noise of having all three on most of the time is really starting to bother me. (Not so much 'quality of life' bother as much as 'environment aesthetics' bother... maybe that's the same to some though.) I just purchased a smaller form factor case for my dialup/firewall box and am generally happier with it compared to the waste-of-volume that was a mini-tower case. Given the mini is all of 'small', 'quiet', and 'OS X', they've sold me at least one (well, when I set aside money to order one) ... maybe two. Others are pointing out that expandability isn't such a bit issue what with USB/Firewire ports, and with lots of things going over to bluetooth/wifi ...
So my big question, besides the obvious price drop from normal Apple systems and putting aside the whole Mac vs. x86 platform, is where is the real price savings for a new user buying a new home computer? Granted the 15% off is a big factor, but Dell runs similar specials all the time.
/.) still wins in the end. Plus, for me, size and noise are a big issue... just how small/quiet is that Dell system, anyway? (Dual optical drives makes me think tower...)
You just discounted the reason with your "besides" stipulation... it isn't "price" saved as much as its "value" earned -- specifically because of Mac vs. x86 platform. On one hand you have hardware and software quality controlled by Apple (plus customer goodwill, or so I hear), on the other hand, you have parts and software from different places (with different quality control standards) that Dell is just assembling and/or rebadging, deciding "yep, it works", and moving it out the door. Even not winning on bottom-line price, many people feel the value in "Mac" goodness (including OS X's UNIX-ness for people here in
I find it fairly interesting that one could `s/FFXI/EQ/g` and basically get my reasons for dropping EQ... never had large enough (4+ hr) blocks of time to get in a well-formed group at a spot that wasn't over-camped to ever get one of my characters out of the low 30's, and if RL-friends had slightly less life than I did, they seemed to outlevel me anyway. There wasn't any other in-game content (other than maybe guild chat channel) that made it worth me logging in. (No, I haven't played "2"; if it is honestly that different from "1", feel free to inform me how so.) Nevermind that items for level X are similarly only dropped by mobs for group level 2X, the hyper inflation on useful items when mobs around my level dropped jack for coin/items, etc, etc. Sounds very familiar.