I'm not sure if there's an offical standard, but generally a lowercase "b" is shorthand for "bit", while an uppercase "B" stands for "byte". The difference is almost an order of magnitude.
Google is offering 1 GB of storage, that is, 1 GigaByte, or roughly 1024 MB.
Many networks now use 1 Gb Ethernet, that is, 1 GigaBit per second, or roughtly 128 MB per second.
Then there's the whole MiB vs MB and GiB vs GB issue... (because 1000 != 1024) ((2^10 = 1024, 10^3 = 1000))
If they did, there's a real chance that there could be no more Internet for a lot of applications: people would just upload their Web pages to Google, users would log on to Google to search, and most email will go through Gmail.
If I invest in Google, I sure hope they will consider web hosting, especially "professional" hosting, not just yahoo-style personal pages. What's good for Google is good for Google's investors.
In the late 1990s, I used Claris Emailer to access my AOL email without actually having to fire up the AOL client. (Though, back then in the days of AOL 2.x, the client fit on a single floppy...)
Claris Emailer was a handy app back then, it was the first GUI mail client I used that could handle more than one email account. I don't know what strings Apple/Claris pulled to get AOL mail access!
I seem to remember that the WebCrawler site used to have a "Powered By NEXTSTEP" badge on it. I can't verify this with web.archive.org as it doesn't seem to go back that far (I started using WebCrawler in 1995). I can't RTFA at the moment, does anyone know what sort of hardware powered the WebCrawler site originally? Did it run on black NeXT hardware? White box PCs running NeXTSTEP? Did they ever utilize the WebObjects framework that NeXT (and later, Apple) used to sell?
Apple also introduced Shake 3.5 for Mac OS X, Linux, and IRIX...
ARAIK, Shake 3.5 for IRIX is in the same "cloak and dagger, last legs" mode that Shake 3.0 for Windows was. It's available, but only for existing customers that want/need the update for some reason.
Shake 3.5 is targeted towards Mac OS X and Linux users only.
Other companies offer SAN control software as well, such as SGI and their CXFS filesystem, part of their InfiniteStorage suite. CXFS supports many different platforms as well as many different models of fibrechannel cards and swtiches. The only catch is that the metadata server must be an SGI Origin 300 or Origin 350. Veritas also makes SAN software and is popular on Solaris and Windows.
If you do the math, Apple's hardware RAID setups and per-seat SAN software prices are the lowest in the industry for now. BUT, the others have much longer feature lists and have many years of market experience. Basiclly, I wouldn't want to be the first one to trust my data to a new Apple SAN. Remeber, on a SAN each machine has direct access to the data via fibrechannel. There is no fileserver involved, just the SAN "traffic cop" management software. When things go bad on a SAN, very bad things can happen.
Yes, Xsan lets several Macs and Xserves share files, but it does so through Fibrechannel, not through a LAN. Several machines can share files and/or cluster their storage together without having to rely on a fileserver. Each machine has direct access to the storage via the fibrechannel switch. No filesharing or networking protocols to get in the way of good perforamnce. Now without some sort of controls in place, this could quickly become a huge mess, that's where the Xsan software comes in. It handles things like connect/disconnect and access privleges.
$999 per machine sounds steep, until you compare that to similar software offered by Veritas and SGI (SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS). Apple's is a bargain.
The Betamax was a superior product, and Sony didn't want to license it to anyone else! I mean come on, theirs was better, right?
There were many reasons for the downfall of Betamax, but that is not one of the major factors... in fact, it's mostly a myth. Sony *did* license Betamax, and they did it early on too.
Between two of my Betamax fan friends, I have seen early-model top-loading Betamax VCRs from Toshiba, Marantz, and Sanyo. By the early 80s there were about 6 or 7 different brands selling front-loading Betamax decks. If you include the clones (some companies licensed not just Betamax, but entire Sony VCR designs... such as Zenith and Pioneer), there were about a dozen Betamax VCR makers by 1983.
Japan had even more Betamax VCR builders, which is one of the reasons why the format dominated for a longer period of time in that country.
"Engineering- based in MN" -- what the hell is MN? Minnesota? Montreal? Mount Nerd?
SGI has engineering campuses in Eagan, Minnesota and Mountain View, California. They also have engineers scattered thruout the USA and world at various field offices. SGI's manufacturing is in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. SGI tech support and sales for American customers is also in the USA.
As for Alias, I don't know. Alias (and Wavefront) were once seperate companies before SGI bought and merged them years ago. Now SGI has sold Alias. Aside from the "aw.sgi.com" subdomain, that company was never really operated (or acted) like a part of SGI, it was truly a subsidiary.
OK, no wonder I didn't get the joke... I've been using OS X since it was called Rhapsody in the earliest developer preview days. (Followed by "Kodiak" Public Beta, 10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, and 10.2 Jaguar). I've been using 10.3 Panther for about 6 months, currently using 10.3.3 (Darwin kernel 7.2).
I guess Mandrake should change the default desktop to Blackbox if they want to be like OS X. Panther = black fur. Blackbox. Get it? *Ba-dum* *ching* But seriously, folks...
Mandrake is just trying to trick people into thinking that it's OS X. It'll never work! Mandrake doesn't come with white spots!
OK, I don't get it. What white spots?
Are you talking about the first production run of the 15" Aluminum PowerBooks, which had white spots on the LCD due to pressure from standoffs behind the panel? I don't think that was an operating system issue.
Also try Learning Cocoa, an updated NeXT book
on
Cocoa in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Nutshell books make for great reference material, but developers new to the NeXT / Mac OS X world would be better served by ORA's other book, Learning Cocoa. I paged thru this book a few weeks ago at a Barnes and Noble... the book is an updated version of the getting started guide NeXT published years ago... I highly recommended the original back then and still think it's a great way to learn NS / Cocoa as well as Objective C.
If the speed is measured in gigaflops, or it looks fancy and new, it's a supercomputer. If it can interface with teletypes, chain printers, reel to reel tape drives, or punchcard readers, it's a mainframe... Mainframes are always huge, and are all about reliability. They run great, because the current ones were designed in the 1970s, and have had nothing but bug fixes since then.
A modern IBM S/390 zSeries mainframe may have an overall design from the 1970s, but its individual components (CPUs, I/O controllers, etc), as well as the thruput of the busses is very modern. A recent mainframe could easily benchmark in the multiple gigaflops range of raw performance, but that isn't the point. Mainframes are all about moving important data reliably (and, if possible, fairly fast). A credit card company isn't going to trust a Cray and a scientist isn't going to do his simulations in COBOL on an IBM S/390.
In addition to mainframes, there's also the minicomputer (sometimes called "midrange"). IBM's AS/400 iSeries is such a beast.
Minis don't typically have as many layers of fault tolerance or as much I/O as a mainframe of the same age, but they're close, and a mini is typically far more reliable (in both HW and SW) by design than a big iron unix server (think Sun).
AS400.NE. mainframe. System 390.EQ. mainframe. He never said AS/400 ws a mainframe. He talked about both mainframes and minicomputers. In fact, if you look at his post again, he said his business has 75 AS/400s and 3 mainframes.
And for those that don't already know this: even a big Unix server is still a Microcomputer. Takes more fault tolerance and funky system architecture than what a Sun has to be called a Mini.
Which brings up the question: is an HP/Tandam NonStop Himalaya a mini or a mainframe?
I clicked submit too early... I should also point out that one potential solution may be to buy "thin" x86 workstations, just a cheap PC with lots of RAM, no drives, and a simple BIOS that supports netbooting. It's *nix, I know, but a netboot X terminal may be the way to go. Some scripts could be written to allow for local storage for those that need it. (Sun is doing the same thing with the SunRay, they have a USB storage patch now).
Take a good look at the SunRay terminals that Sun is offering. Rather than hack and patch Windows, they simply made a few modifications to X, most of the client-server tech was already in place.
Thin Client Windows has been a nightmare, and it's only getting worse. One of the original incarnations, WinDD hosted by a Tektronix-modified version of Windows NT 3.5, wasn't so bad... Windows was simpler back then. But all of the "ease of use" and "zero administration" crap Microsoft and Citrix have built up since then has made thin client Windows a miserable beast to deal with. I know many administrators who swear a building full of plain PCs and a good Norton Ghost setup is easier to maintain.
There's also the trivial exercise of using iTunes to burn a CD then re-ripping the music. Of course the music has then been lossily encoded twice, with different encoders, so it's sorta like listening to a copy of a tape of a FM broadcast.
You haven't done this before, have you? The sound quality is lower, but it's not *that bad*. I would compare the original to CD quality and the re-ripped / twice-encoded version to FM radio quality (and really, no worse than most of the less common pirated MP3s floating around in cyberspace).
Here's what I noticed about the quality difference: I started off with a song bought via iTunes... sounds great via my iPod and via the stereo connected to my PC. I burnt a playlist of my songs to CD. I then ripped the songs back into iTunes, encoding as 192kbps AAC. Playing back the song, it sounded just as good as the original... or so it seemed to me at first. I then played the original.... a-hah!... in a back-to-back comparison, the original sounds much better... but its not something you will really notice otherwise.
"Several readers wrote to me from.mac addresses, and one of them actually looked into this. He wrote to an Apple representative and asked, "Is Apple willing to license FairPlay to other hardware vendors and/or other online download providers? If so, can you send me details about the licensing agreement?" The short but sweet reply he received from her was, "The answer is no."
FairPlay is not an Apple technology, it belongs to VeriDisc, a DRM startup.
http://64.244.235.240/info_about.asp
No clue why their domain isn't resolving... they're probably already making more than enough money from Apple to care.
1. Dump my trusty Firefox browser for a resource hogging piece of proprietary software iTunes is a music player/ripper/burner/manager, not a web browser. It's pretty lean on OS X, but even the Windows version isn't bad if you know how to disable unneeded services. (I'm a typical Mac user and even I customize which services are enabled and disabled when I use Windows). You won't want to run iTunes on a 266 MHz PII with 128 MB RAM, but it runs as good as can be on a 500 MHz PIII w/ 512 MB.
Proprietary?? More proprietary than WMP or MusicMatch?? iTunes runs on OS X *and* Windows. MP3 and AAC are open standards. Even the FairPlay DRM is available to any potential licensee. The source isn't open, but at least it's free... and the last time I checked, WinAMP wasn't open source either.
2. Stop using the media player that I use for all the other music I have I'll give you that. I love iTunes, but I still wish other media players would support AAC + FairPlay.
3. Buy an overpriced, overhyped, overengineered piece of hardware Either you're broke and bitter or you've never used an iPod or iPod Mini before.
4. Deal with a company that historically shown itself to be one of the worst managed companies in America. One that shoots it own foot off whenver it sniffs a little success. You're forgetting SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc)
Slashdot Mirror
They're very smart offering the 1Gb storage.
I'm not sure if there's an offical standard, but generally a lowercase "b" is shorthand for "bit", while an uppercase "B" stands for "byte". The difference is almost an order of magnitude.
Google is offering 1 GB of storage, that is, 1 GigaByte, or roughly 1024 MB.
Many networks now use 1 Gb Ethernet, that is, 1 GigaBit per second, or roughtly 128 MB per second.
Then there's the whole MiB vs MB and GiB vs GB issue... (because 1000 != 1024) ((2^10 = 1024, 10^3 = 1000))
If they did, there's a real chance that there could be no more Internet for a lot of applications: people would just upload their Web pages to Google, users would log on to Google to search, and most email will go through Gmail.
If I invest in Google, I sure hope they will consider web hosting, especially "professional" hosting, not just yahoo-style personal pages. What's good for Google is good for Google's investors.
In the late 1990s, I used Claris Emailer to access my AOL email without actually having to fire up the AOL client. (Though, back then in the days of AOL 2.x, the client fit on a single floppy...)
Claris Emailer was a handy app back then, it was the first GUI mail client I used that could handle more than one email account. I don't know what strings Apple/Claris pulled to get AOL mail access!
I seem to remember that the WebCrawler site used to have a "Powered By NEXTSTEP" badge on it. I can't verify this with web.archive.org as it doesn't seem to go back that far (I started using WebCrawler in 1995). I can't RTFA at the moment, does anyone know what sort of hardware powered the WebCrawler site originally? Did it run on black NeXT hardware? White box PCs running NeXTSTEP? Did they ever utilize the WebObjects framework that NeXT (and later, Apple) used to sell?
Ok, I didn't bother to read enough of TFA...
Xsan is an Apple-branded, Mac OS X version of Vertias' CVFS SAN filesystem. This is one of the oldest and most respected SAN setups out there.
Kudos to Apple for going with something proven and not trying to reinvent the wheel for something this simple but crucial.
Apple also introduced Shake 3.5 for Mac OS X, Linux, and IRIX...
ARAIK, Shake 3.5 for IRIX is in the same "cloak and dagger, last legs" mode that Shake 3.0 for Windows was. It's available, but only for existing customers that want/need the update for some reason.
Shake 3.5 is targeted towards Mac OS X and Linux users only.
Other companies offer SAN control software as well, such as SGI and their CXFS filesystem, part of their InfiniteStorage suite. CXFS supports many different platforms as well as many different models of fibrechannel cards and swtiches. The only catch is that the metadata server must be an SGI Origin 300 or Origin 350. Veritas also makes SAN software and is popular on Solaris and Windows.
If you do the math, Apple's hardware RAID setups and per-seat SAN software prices are the lowest in the industry for now. BUT, the others have much longer feature lists and have many years of market experience. Basiclly, I wouldn't want to be the first one to trust my data to a new Apple SAN. Remeber, on a SAN each machine has direct access to the data via fibrechannel. There is no fileserver involved, just the SAN "traffic cop" management software. When things go bad on a SAN, very bad things can happen.
You're missing the whole point of SAN...
Yes, Xsan lets several Macs and Xserves share files, but it does so through Fibrechannel, not through a LAN. Several machines can share files and/or cluster their storage together without having to rely on a fileserver. Each machine has direct access to the storage via the fibrechannel switch. No filesharing or networking protocols to get in the way of good perforamnce. Now without some sort of controls in place, this could quickly become a huge mess, that's where the Xsan software comes in. It handles things like connect/disconnect and access privleges.
$999 per machine sounds steep, until you compare that to similar software offered by Veritas and SGI (SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS). Apple's is a bargain.
The Betamax was a superior product, and Sony didn't want to license it to anyone else! I mean come on, theirs was better, right?
There were many reasons for the downfall of Betamax, but that is not one of the major factors... in fact, it's mostly a myth. Sony *did* license Betamax, and they did it early on too.
Between two of my Betamax fan friends, I have seen early-model top-loading Betamax VCRs from Toshiba, Marantz, and Sanyo. By the early 80s there were about 6 or 7 different brands selling front-loading Betamax decks. If you include the clones (some companies licensed not just Betamax, but entire Sony VCR designs... such as Zenith and Pioneer), there were about a dozen Betamax VCR makers by 1983.
Japan had even more Betamax VCR builders, which is one of the reasons why the format dominated for a longer period of time in that country.
"Engineering- based in MN" -- what the hell is MN? Minnesota? Montreal? Mount Nerd?
SGI has engineering campuses in Eagan, Minnesota and Mountain View, California. They also have engineers scattered thruout the USA and world at various field offices. SGI's manufacturing is in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. SGI tech support and sales for American customers is also in the USA.
As for Alias, I don't know. Alias (and Wavefront) were once seperate companies before SGI bought and merged them years ago. Now SGI has sold Alias. Aside from the "aw.sgi.com" subdomain, that company was never really operated (or acted) like a part of SGI, it was truly a subsidiary.
Jaguars have white spots. OS X is called Jaguar.
OK, no wonder I didn't get the joke... I've been using OS X since it was called Rhapsody in the earliest developer preview days. (Followed by "Kodiak" Public Beta, 10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, and 10.2 Jaguar). I've been using 10.3 Panther for about 6 months, currently using 10.3.3 (Darwin kernel 7.2).
I guess Mandrake should change the default desktop to Blackbox if they want to be like OS X. Panther = black fur. Blackbox. Get it? *Ba-dum* *ching* But seriously, folks...
Mandrake is just trying to trick people into thinking that it's OS X. It'll never work! Mandrake doesn't come with white spots!
:)
Oooh, OK, I get it now, someone pointed out that Jaguars have white spots and Mac OS X 10.2 was codenamed Jaguar.
It didn't click because I've been using 10.3 Panther for about 6 months!
Mandrake is just trying to trick people into thinking that it's OS X. It'll never work! Mandrake doesn't come with white spots!
OK, I don't get it. What white spots?
Are you talking about the first production run of the 15" Aluminum PowerBooks, which had white spots on the LCD due to pressure from standoffs behind the panel? I don't think that was an operating system issue.
The Nutshell books make for great reference material, but developers new to the NeXT / Mac OS X world would be better served by ORA's other book, Learning Cocoa. I paged thru this book a few weeks ago at a Barnes and Noble... the book is an updated version of the getting started guide NeXT published years ago... I highly recommended the original back then and still think it's a great way to learn NS / Cocoa as well as Objective C.
If the speed is measured in gigaflops, or it looks fancy and new, it's a supercomputer. If it can interface with teletypes, chain printers, reel to reel tape drives, or punchcard readers, it's a mainframe...
Mainframes are always huge, and are all about reliability. They run great, because the current ones were designed in the 1970s, and have had nothing but bug fixes since then.
A modern IBM S/390 zSeries mainframe may have an overall design from the 1970s, but its individual components (CPUs, I/O controllers, etc), as well as the thruput of the busses is very modern. A recent mainframe could easily benchmark in the multiple gigaflops range of raw performance, but that isn't the point. Mainframes are all about moving important data reliably (and, if possible, fairly fast). A credit card company isn't going to trust a Cray and a scientist isn't going to do his simulations in COBOL on an IBM S/390.
In addition to mainframes, there's also the minicomputer (sometimes called "midrange"). IBM's AS/400 iSeries is such a beast.
Minis don't typically have as many layers of fault tolerance or as much I/O as a mainframe of the same age, but they're close, and a mini is typically far more reliable (in both HW and SW) by design than a big iron unix server (think Sun).
AS400 .NE. mainframe. System 390 .EQ. mainframe.
He never said AS/400 ws a mainframe. He talked about both mainframes and minicomputers. In fact, if you look at his post again, he said his business has 75 AS/400s and 3 mainframes.
And for those that don't already know this: even a big Unix server is still a Microcomputer. Takes more fault tolerance and funky system architecture than what a Sun has to be called a Mini.
Which brings up the question: is an HP/Tandam NonStop Himalaya a mini or a mainframe?
I clicked submit too early... I should also point out that one potential solution may be to buy "thin" x86 workstations, just a cheap PC with lots of RAM, no drives, and a simple BIOS that supports netbooting. It's *nix, I know, but a netboot X terminal may be the way to go. Some scripts could be written to allow for local storage for those that need it. (Sun is doing the same thing with the SunRay, they have a USB storage patch now).
Take a good look at the SunRay terminals that Sun is offering. Rather than hack and patch Windows, they simply made a few modifications to X, most of the client-server tech was already in place.
Thin Client Windows has been a nightmare, and it's only getting worse. One of the original incarnations, WinDD hosted by a Tektronix-modified version of Windows NT 3.5, wasn't so bad... Windows was simpler back then. But all of the "ease of use" and "zero administration" crap Microsoft and Citrix have built up since then has made thin client Windows a miserable beast to deal with. I know many administrators who swear a building full of plain PCs and a good Norton Ghost setup is easier to maintain.
its right on the front page of their website, claiming the g5 is the fastest prossesor.
I hate it just as much as you do, but sadly those are merely quotes by other people.
Also, it seems Apple has stopped using the "fastest processor" claim, or at least that's what they said when Dell sigged the BBB after them last week.
mod this AC up... there's finally another person here who gets it!!
There's also the trivial exercise of using iTunes to burn a CD then re-ripping the music. Of course the music has then been lossily encoded twice, with different encoders, so it's sorta like listening to a copy of a tape of a FM broadcast.
You haven't done this before, have you? The sound quality is lower, but it's not *that bad*. I would compare the original to CD quality and the re-ripped / twice-encoded version to FM radio quality (and really, no worse than most of the less common pirated MP3s floating around in cyberspace).
Here's what I noticed about the quality difference:
I started off with a song bought via iTunes... sounds great via my iPod and via the stereo connected to my PC. I burnt a playlist of my songs to CD. I then ripped the songs back into iTunes, encoding as 192kbps AAC. Playing back the song, it sounded just as good as the original... or so it seemed to me at first. I then played the original.... a-hah!... in a back-to-back comparison, the original sounds much better... but its not something you will really notice otherwise.
"Several readers wrote to me from .mac addresses, and one of them actually looked into this. He wrote to an Apple representative and asked, "Is Apple willing to license FairPlay to other hardware vendors and/or other online download providers? If so, can you send me details about the licensing agreement?" The short but sweet reply he received from her was, "The answer is no."
FairPlay is not an Apple technology, it belongs to VeriDisc, a DRM startup.
http://64.244.235.240/info_about.asp
No clue why their domain isn't resolving... they're probably already making more than enough money from Apple to care.
1. Dump my trusty Firefox browser for a resource hogging piece of proprietary software
iTunes is a music player/ripper/burner/manager, not a web browser. It's pretty lean on OS X, but even the Windows version isn't bad if you know how to disable unneeded services. (I'm a typical Mac user and even I customize which services are enabled and disabled when I use Windows). You won't want to run iTunes on a 266 MHz PII with 128 MB RAM, but it runs as good as can be on a 500 MHz PIII w/ 512 MB.
Proprietary?? More proprietary than WMP or MusicMatch?? iTunes runs on OS X *and* Windows. MP3 and AAC are open standards. Even the FairPlay DRM is available to any potential licensee. The source isn't open, but at least it's free... and the last time I checked, WinAMP wasn't open source either.
2. Stop using the media player that I use for all the other music I have
I'll give you that. I love iTunes, but I still wish other media players would support AAC + FairPlay.
3. Buy an overpriced, overhyped, overengineered piece of hardware
Either you're broke and bitter or you've never used an iPod or iPod Mini before.
4. Deal with a company that historically shown itself to be one of the worst managed companies in America. One that shoots it own foot off whenver it sniffs a little success.
You're forgetting SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc)
11 cents :)
And yeah, iTunes is great... though my wallet may not agree!