Server disk space has costs other than that of the disk itself. You need a server to hold the disk, a rack to hold the server, a data center to hold the rack, and real estate to put the data center on. All these things cost. And costs aside, you can't create new data center space overnight: you have to buy the real-estate and convert/build the necessary floor space. We're talking a couple years between identifying the need and actually going online.
There used to be a big surplus of DC space, due to the dotcom bust. But it's all gone now, and everybody's scrambling to find more. That the rationale behind the products like Sun's Black Box.
That said, I pretty much agree with you. It does make sense to save everything: the extra disk space doesn't cost that much. But our IT people, like the rest of the company, are under extreme pressure to cut costs wherever they can. So I expect that they'll continue to hassle me about mailbox space.
Actually, I use IMAP at home and at work, but I don't know how to use it efficiently: since I have over 5,000 emails (much more in fact), many that I want/need to keep for work-related purposes, I move them in specific folders. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of IMAP?
Which purpose is that, and how is using folders defeating it? Somehow, I doubt that IMAP's designers added support for folders (and many folder features) but didn't intend folks to use them.
I myself have almost 6000 messages in my work IMAP account. Unlike you, I don't have a good reason for having so many email messages — I've just been lazy about cleaning out obsolete stuff. IT is probably not happy with me for wasting so much sever disk space, but it doesn't seem to slow things down at all.
IMAP is not meant for syncing thousands of emails, am I wrong?
Strictly speaking IMAP isn't for syncing at all. It's POP that relies on syncing, because you have to download your email in order to read it. Typically, you download a message each time you read it.
But maybe you're talking about Thunderbird's ability to download folders so you can work with them offline. I actually use this, even though I never browse email offline, because it makes my mailboxes visible to Google Desktop. I haven't had a lot of performance problems because of this. If you have, perhaps your mail server is overburdened or you need to compress your email folders.
I always felt that even if my email is IMAP, this was more or less useless since my email archive is not IMAP compatible because if its size.There's no size limit on IMAP. If there's a limit on your account, it's because your provider has imposed a quota. I don't have a quota because my IMAP provider is also my web presence provider, and any mailbox space I use comes out of my web allocation.
...and switching email clients is never as straightforward as one would like.
I'm guessing that you receive your email via a POP server. If you used an IMAP server, and you could switch between clients 10 times a day with no grief.
That said, I agree with you about Thunderbird's shortcomings. So why do I stick with it? Because other email programs usually have more features, but their implementation is always too Rube Goldberg. Usually, I can't even find a simple obvious way to say "show me the next unread message"!
Early on, you were REQUIRED to use the Bell phones and a replacement phone cost $80 (remember that the above figures are 1970s dollars).
Huh? I'm old enough to remember the Ma Bell period, and I don't recall that. Indeed, my dad once lost his temper at the phone and destroyed it (don't ask) and Pacific Telephone (remember them?) replaced it without charge.
Maybe you're referring to things like business sets. And you're certainly right about the high rental fees. Although few people realized they were paying them, since it wasn't a separate item on their phone bill.
Basically, you want to do stuff yourself because you think the data center folks are incompetent. If that's really the case, why are you letting them have custody of your precious machines? Data center ineptitude would seem to be the proximate cause of most downtime. TFA certainly backs up (no pun intended) that theory.
The irony is--- where are you going to go? How many N+1 datacenters are in driving distance of San Francisco? 365Main was supposed to be one of the best datacenters in terms of power.
Time for a commercial:
Are you paying too much for rack space because you need to be near your servers? Try the Sun Fire X4100, X4200, and X4600 servers. They come with Integrated Lights Out Management. This allows a remote admin to do everything. Need to power the system up or down? You can do it remotely. Need to wipe the disk and install a new OS? Put your install CD on a local image file so your ILOM Service Processor can access it over IP. Service? Use remote diagnostics to determine what's wrong and have the hosting provider swap in a replacement from your on-site spares.
OK, personal interest here: I work for the x64 part of Sun, and feel a certainly personal loyalty to these boxes. But to be perfectly honest, Lights Out Management is a pretty common feature these days.
Well, that's not the only scenario — but all the other ones I can think of call for even higher levels of stupidity. Maybe they had enough backup, but somebody forgot to buy diesel. Maybe the widget that's supposed to make backup come on automatically hadn't been properly maintained.
I myself had the misfortune to be working the help desk at a colo provider when some clueless tech working in the battery room disconnected the wrong cable and powered down the whole building. The really unpleasant part was answering the question every caller asked: "DON'T YOU IDIOTS HAVE BACKUP POWER?"
When you buy rack space, you naturally expect to get backup power. All providers claim to have it, but over and over your hear reports of outages where backup didn't kick in. What's needed is some independent authority to certify that the provider not only has adequate backup, but also has all the maintenance and testing procedures in place that guarantee that the bloody thing works.
Yeah, kids are way better off in religious schools where they're taught that science is "just theory" and that the world will end next week.
And here's a hot flash for you: there is no single group of people called "the government" off plotting to zombify you. "The government" is just a lot of people, not unlike you (maybe a little smarter) who are just trying to do their jobs. Sure, they often do a lousy job, but when they do, you're supposed to go out and do something about it, not just sit around talking about how evil they are.
Come to think of it, outhouse libertarians like you are as much a part of "the government" as any Beltway bureaucrat. Politicians are so busy trying to buy your votes with braindead policies that nothing ever gets done.
So your postivie experience is proof that everything's hunky-dory, but my negative experience is just anecdotal? You're really good at cherry-picking your evidence. Have you thought of going to work for the White House?
You would be making sense if people always bought all their hardware from the same manufacturer. Remember, drivers aren't just for internal stuff. If I were to move to XP 64, I'd have to discard my scanner, my printer, my PDA... OK, no biggie, I was tired of them anyway. But now I can only buy gadgets that have XP64 drivers. Which drastically limits my choices.
Actually, you're kind of lucky. You can always go back to the 32-bit XP world, where everything you need is support. Perhaps you'll feel a little silly have paid extra for an x64 when you can't even run 64-bit apps. But if you don't say, "I wish I hadn't bought that" now and then, you're not a true technonerd!
On the other hand, I'm sort of screwed by the whole Vista debacle. You see, I went out and bought a Motion Computing tablet. Which I love, except those idiots at MS decided not to make the handwriting recognition trainable. When they finally realized that was why nobody was buying tablets, they added handwriting trainability — to Vista! So I can put up with horrible handwriting recognition, or I can confront the nightmare that is a Vista upgrade.
Your post exemplifies why I hate the term "FUD". People tend to use it with little or no evidence. In this case, you're full of shit. My comments on XP 64 were based on personal experience. As for Vista 64 working "just fine", I can only ask: Dude, what planet do you live on?
Not everyone is a big boy, nor has the need to compete with them.
No, but they do buy a lot of hardware. Enough so that you shouldn't generalize without considering them. And for them, those extra 32 bits we definitely a "need", not a "want".
Most of the problems you point out stem from one simple fact: the books are an afterthought. His original project was to create some imaginary languages. Since he was a philologist, language made no sense to him except in a historical context, so he created an imaginary history to go with the imaginary languages. Only then did he start writing fiction set in painstakingly detailed imaginary universe.
So of course the story has pacing issues and the characters have no control over events. Because storytelling just isn't a prime purpose here. It's all about taking a chunk of Middle Earth "history" and translating it into mass-market form.
Which is actually Ok. People who read this stuff (including me) find all that invention interesting and are willing to overlook a lot of literary lapses. My only problem is that now everybody thinks that's the only way to write SF or fantasy. So authors end up creating more characters, more backstory, and more technical detail then they know what to do with. Which is why it's harder and harder to find imaginative fiction that isn't a bloated mess.
There has yet to be a dire 'need' for 64 bit processing...
As usual, slashdotters are critiquing the computer marketplace as if it were all about them. It's not.
Of course nobody's running 64-bit applications at home on at the office. Because the dominant player there is Microsoft — whose 64-bit support on the desktop is either lame (try to find even basic drivers for XP-64) or a nightmare (try to run Vista-64 at all!). Can't really run 64-bit apps without a 64-bit OS, can you?
On the other hand, there's a huge demand for 64-bit apps that run on high end workstations and servers. How do think AMD managed to grab so much market share so quickly? By finding a way to meet that demand ahead of Intel, that's how.
If it weren't for this demands I wouldn't have a job — documenting x64 servers for Sun. Yes, Sun. Its a big profit center for them these days.
At work, I'm the Sysadmin for a dedicated hosting company (Linux, mostly Gentoo), and even in that market I don't know of any of my users running 64bit. any performance advantages are outweighed by incompatibilities and plain old PITA to get things working.
All that tells us is that Gentoo 64-bit support sucks and that you're not supporting any high-end applications. What have you got, some low volume commerce and web presence sites? If you were doing millions of transactions a day, you'd be needing to squeeze all the performance out of your servers you could manage. Which is why the big boys run serious 64-bit OSs: RHEL, SLES, Solaris, Windows 2003.
The MAD scenario only applies when both sides are capable of obliterating each other. If it applies to software litigation, than there has to be an OSS company with the resources to out-litigate MS. Which is absurd. Red Hat (for example) has annual revenue out of about $60 million. Microsoft makes twice that much in one day.
You seem to suffer from the quaint notion that litigation is always decided on its merits. Just not true. Litigation is expensive, especially when you're up against somebody who can afford to hire hundreds of lawyers to nitpick every filing you make. Unless you have the resources, you haven't a prayer, no matter how good your case is in theory.
Sci Fi's programming choices make no sense from the viewer's POV. But when you run a cable channel, you don't worry that much about keeping your programming non-ripoffy and consistent with your theme. You mainly worry about keeping your costs down without losing too much audience. It's not like cable companies can say, "Our viewers are sick of the Sci-Fi channel, we're going to drop it in favor of..." For one thing, there isn't anything else that appeals to the same audience. For another, Sci-Fi belongs to NBC-Universal and is sold as part of a bundle — which cable companies have to order, because it includes must have stuff. In particular, it includes the programming from the local NBC affiliate, which they are required to show.
If you're really pissed off by Sci Fi's programming decisions, write your congressperson and the FCC and tell them you think that bundling should be outlawed. Me, I don't care that much, because I've opted out of the whole cable TV ripoff. Which means waiting for shows to come out on DVD, but hey, I already have a 3-year backlog in my Netflix queue.
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If these jokes are so obvious, why are they funny?
You don't need to run your own server. Find a web hosting provider that throws in IMAP accounts. That's what I use for my personal email.
Of course, that doesn't help you at work. Perhaps you should talk to somebody about the false economy of low email quotas.
Server disk space has costs other than that of the disk itself. You need a server to hold the disk, a rack to hold the server, a data center to hold the rack, and real estate to put the data center on. All these things cost. And costs aside, you can't create new data center space overnight: you have to buy the real-estate and convert/build the necessary floor space. We're talking a couple years between identifying the need and actually going online.
There used to be a big surplus of DC space, due to the dotcom bust. But it's all gone now, and everybody's scrambling to find more. That the rationale behind the products like Sun's Black Box.
That said, I pretty much agree with you. It does make sense to save everything: the extra disk space doesn't cost that much. But our IT people, like the rest of the company, are under extreme pressure to cut costs wherever they can. So I expect that they'll continue to hassle me about mailbox space.
I myself have almost 6000 messages in my work IMAP account. Unlike you, I don't have a good reason for having so many email messages — I've just been lazy about cleaning out obsolete stuff. IT is probably not happy with me for wasting so much sever disk space, but it doesn't seem to slow things down at all.Strictly speaking IMAP isn't for syncing at all. It's POP that relies on syncing, because you have to download your email in order to read it. Typically, you download a message each time you read it.
But maybe you're talking about Thunderbird's ability to download folders so you can work with them offline. I actually use this, even though I never browse email offline, because it makes my mailboxes visible to Google Desktop. I haven't had a lot of performance problems because of this. If you have, perhaps your mail server is overburdened or you need to compress your email folders.
That said, I agree with you about Thunderbird's shortcomings. So why do I stick with it? Because other email programs usually have more features, but their implementation is always too Rube Goldberg. Usually, I can't even find a simple obvious way to say "show me the next unread message"!
Maybe you're referring to things like business sets. And you're certainly right about the high rental fees. Although few people realized they were paying them, since it wasn't a separate item on their phone bill.
Quite true. I certainly don't deserve to read such a trite comment.
When was Dvorak an actual writer? I first noticed him 25 years ago, and he was a nonsequitarian flamebaiter even then.
They were thinking, "lets force our readers to look at as many ads as we can get away with."
Basically, you want to do stuff yourself because you think the data center folks are incompetent. If that's really the case, why are you letting them have custody of your precious machines? Data center ineptitude would seem to be the proximate cause of most downtime. TFA certainly backs up (no pun intended) that theory.
Are you paying too much for rack space because you need to be near your servers? Try the Sun Fire X4100, X4200, and X4600 servers. They come with Integrated Lights Out Management. This allows a remote admin to do everything. Need to power the system up or down? You can do it remotely. Need to wipe the disk and install a new OS? Put your install CD on a local image file so your ILOM Service Processor can access it over IP. Service? Use remote diagnostics to determine what's wrong and have the hosting provider swap in a replacement from your on-site spares.
OK, personal interest here: I work for the x64 part of Sun, and feel a certainly personal loyalty to these boxes. But to be perfectly honest, Lights Out Management is a pretty common feature these days.
Well, that's not the only scenario — but all the other ones I can think of call for even higher levels of stupidity. Maybe they had enough backup, but somebody forgot to buy diesel. Maybe the widget that's supposed to make backup come on automatically hadn't been properly maintained.
I myself had the misfortune to be working the help desk at a colo provider when some clueless tech working in the battery room disconnected the wrong cable and powered down the whole building. The really unpleasant part was answering the question every caller asked: "DON'T YOU IDIOTS HAVE BACKUP POWER?"
When you buy rack space, you naturally expect to get backup power. All providers claim to have it, but over and over your hear reports of outages where backup didn't kick in. What's needed is some independent authority to certify that the provider not only has adequate backup, but also has all the maintenance and testing procedures in place that guarantee that the bloody thing works.
Yeah, kids are way better off in religious schools where they're taught that science is "just theory" and that the world will end next week.
And here's a hot flash for you: there is no single group of people called "the government" off plotting to zombify you. "The government" is just a lot of people, not unlike you (maybe a little smarter) who are just trying to do their jobs. Sure, they often do a lousy job, but when they do, you're supposed to go out and do something about it, not just sit around talking about how evil they are.
Come to think of it, outhouse libertarians like you are as much a part of "the government" as any Beltway bureaucrat. Politicians are so busy trying to buy your votes with braindead policies that nothing ever gets done.
You're good at throwing out nasty words like "FUD" and "straw man" and "ad hominem". Next time such a word occurs to you, try looking in a mirror.
So your postivie experience is proof that everything's hunky-dory, but my negative experience is just anecdotal? You're really good at cherry-picking your evidence. Have you thought of going to work for the White House?
You would be making sense if people always bought all their hardware from the same manufacturer. Remember, drivers aren't just for internal stuff. If I were to move to XP 64, I'd have to discard my scanner, my printer, my PDA... OK, no biggie, I was tired of them anyway. But now I can only buy gadgets that have XP64 drivers. Which drastically limits my choices.
You define "plenty" as "everybody I know". I define "plenty" as "a significant fraction of the marketplace".
Actually, you're kind of lucky. You can always go back to the 32-bit XP world, where everything you need is support. Perhaps you'll feel a little silly have paid extra for an x64 when you can't even run 64-bit apps. But if you don't say, "I wish I hadn't bought that" now and then, you're not a true technonerd!
On the other hand, I'm sort of screwed by the whole Vista debacle. You see, I went out and bought a Motion Computing tablet. Which I love, except those idiots at MS decided not to make the handwriting recognition trainable. When they finally realized that was why nobody was buying tablets, they added handwriting trainability — to Vista! So I can put up with horrible handwriting recognition, or I can confront the nightmare that is a Vista upgrade.
Your post exemplifies why I hate the term "FUD". People tend to use it with little or no evidence. In this case, you're full of shit. My comments on XP 64 were based on personal experience. As for Vista 64 working "just fine", I can only ask: Dude, what planet do you live on?
Most of the problems you point out stem from one simple fact: the books are an afterthought. His original project was to create some imaginary languages. Since he was a philologist, language made no sense to him except in a historical context, so he created an imaginary history to go with the imaginary languages. Only then did he start writing fiction set in painstakingly detailed imaginary universe.
So of course the story has pacing issues and the characters have no control over events. Because storytelling just isn't a prime purpose here. It's all about taking a chunk of Middle Earth "history" and translating it into mass-market form.
Which is actually Ok. People who read this stuff (including me) find all that invention interesting and are willing to overlook a lot of literary lapses. My only problem is that now everybody thinks that's the only way to write SF or fantasy. So authors end up creating more characters, more backstory, and more technical detail then they know what to do with. Which is why it's harder and harder to find imaginative fiction that isn't a bloated mess.
No biggie. We'll all just move to China.
Of course nobody's running 64-bit applications at home on at the office. Because the dominant player there is Microsoft — whose 64-bit support on the desktop is either lame (try to find even basic drivers for XP-64) or a nightmare (try to run Vista-64 at all!). Can't really run 64-bit apps without a 64-bit OS, can you?
On the other hand, there's a huge demand for 64-bit apps that run on high end workstations and servers. How do think AMD managed to grab so much market share so quickly? By finding a way to meet that demand ahead of Intel, that's how.
If it weren't for this demands I wouldn't have a job — documenting x64 servers for Sun. Yes, Sun. Its a big profit center for them these days.
All that tells us is that Gentoo 64-bit support sucks and that you're not supporting any high-end applications. What have you got, some low volume commerce and web presence sites? If you were doing millions of transactions a day, you'd be needing to squeeze all the performance out of your servers you could manage. Which is why the big boys run serious 64-bit OSs: RHEL, SLES, Solaris, Windows 2003.
The MAD scenario only applies when both sides are capable of obliterating each other. If it applies to software litigation, than there has to be an OSS company with the resources to out-litigate MS. Which is absurd. Red Hat (for example) has annual revenue out of about $60 million. Microsoft makes twice that much in one day.
You seem to suffer from the quaint notion that litigation is always decided on its merits. Just not true. Litigation is expensive, especially when you're up against somebody who can afford to hire hundreds of lawyers to nitpick every filing you make. Unless you have the resources, you haven't a prayer, no matter how good your case is in theory.
Sci Fi's programming choices make no sense from the viewer's POV. But when you run a cable channel, you don't worry that much about keeping your programming non-ripoffy and consistent with your theme. You mainly worry about keeping your costs down without losing too much audience. It's not like cable companies can say, "Our viewers are sick of the Sci-Fi channel, we're going to drop it in favor of ..." For one thing, there isn't anything else that appeals to the same audience. For another, Sci-Fi belongs to NBC-Universal and is sold as part of a bundle — which cable companies have to order, because it includes must have stuff. In particular, it includes the programming from the local NBC affiliate, which they are required to show.
If you're really pissed off by Sci Fi's programming decisions, write your congressperson and the FCC and tell them you think that bundling should be outlawed. Me, I don't care that much, because I've opted out of the whole cable TV ripoff. Which means waiting for shows to come out on DVD, but hey, I already have a 3-year backlog in my Netflix queue.