Your use of the phrase "foreign types" represents a racist labeling of everyone and anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.
Actually, it represents a tongue-in-cheek, mocking labeling of everyone and anyone who isn't a US citizen. Which everybody else on Slashdot obviously understood. I'm stunned that you didn't pick it up from the "Manifest Destiny" remark, if nothing else.
As I am sure others will point out, Australia is not twice the size of Europe.
And as I've pointed out, the mistake was mine for not being more clear, but I wasn't wrong. The US is roughly 2-1/2 times the land area of western Europe, and Australia is slightly smaller than the continental US. The figure of "twice the size" stands; I accidentally omitted the word "western," which changed everything. My source is the CIA World Fact Book, but I'm still too lazy to link. Ain't I a stinker?
The variety and quality of programming on U.S. television is determined by the number and independence of the production companies creating that programming, not by the number of individual stations broadcasting that programming.
And what do you think determines the number of television production companies? The size of the market, you idiot. A bigger market obviously means more providers trying to serve that market. Somebody has to fill those 96 million hours a year. Obviously a lot of it is going to be junk. But there's a huge amount of great and wonderful stuff. Even if only one percent of one percent of that is worth watching, that's still nearly 10,000 hours every year of quality stuff.
On average, UK programming is more varied and interesting than U.S. programming
Nope. It's just that there's less programming in the UK, by a factor of about 30. You can find quality TV programming any hour of the day and night in the US, if you're willing to take the time and trouble to look through a thousand channels. Or, if you're clever, if you program your TiVo to do it for you.
What I meant was that Australia is twice the land area of western Europe, which wouldn't include Russia or Scandinavia. My fault for not being more clear.
My source is the CIA World Fact Book, but I'm too lazy to link. Google it. It describes the US as being about 2-1/2 times the size of western Europe, and Australia as being slightly smaller than the continental US. So although I wasn't clear, my figures were pretty close to being accurate.
Accurate Color Matching. Sorry, you just can't do this on an LCD.
Can't do it on a CRT, either, and you're a fool if you think you can. That's why the good lord almighty gave us proofs.
Back when I worked in printing, I used to do all my color corrections in greyscale mode. It's just too easy to get distracted by the colors on the screen. Even when you know, in your head, that they're not accurate, your eye tricks you. That's why you have to get the tone right using greyscale mode, then rely on your colorimeters to get the process mix right.
hey, in France and the UK we still have quality television.
Dude, France has about 600 broadcast TV stations. The UK has about 250.
The United States of America has more than 2,000, and that's just over-the-air stations. We also have over 9,000 local cable TV systems.
Do the arithmetic. The United States of America broadcasts over 96 million hours of television programming every year. There's enough room in America's cultural output for greatness and crap and everything in between, in volumes that would blow your narrow little mind.
A friend of mine just moved to the US from Australia. Not a small country, Australia. Twice the size of Europe. He and his family are bewildered by the sheer amount of everything we have in this country. Took him to a grocery store the other day. Our city is nowhere near a coastline, but we get seafood by the ton flown in every morning. The produce available in our markets comes from every corner of the world, and it's all fresh and unbelievably cheap.
I think you foreign types often fail to grasp just how big and how affluent this country is. Our culture dominates the world not because it's better or worse, but because there's just so much of it.
This is, of course, a good and righteous thing. Manifest Destiny is no myth, my friends.
As an American you are no doubt some fat, ugly overweight child with a penchant for running a machine gun up and down your local school.
You, sir, are obviously an idiot. The weapon of choice for rampaging through public high schools is the semi-automatic handgun. Its small size makes it easy to conceal under clothing or in a bag or backpack. Weapons that fire 9mm rounds present a good compromise between power and magazine capacity, but for real effectiveness against targets at close range, go for the.45.
Saying that Baird invented TV is like saying that Einstein invented the atomic bomb. It's one thing to come up with a principle, or even to demonstrate it in primitive form. It's another thing entirely to come up with a way to use that principle to build a practical device. That's invention.
If it makes you feel better, you could just say that Philo Farnsworth invented the scanning electron picture tube. Without which... and so on.
Well, books have given us some nice moments. But in between all those nice moments has been a high-volume sewer hose of cultural sludge.
You can always tell that a statement is meaningless when you can replace the key noun in it with a different word without changing the degree to which the statement is true. A statement that is always true, regardless of the subject, is dull and pointless.
What? Try and follow the thread. The original poster asked what's sorts of things could go wrong with source since they use the same compiler. I pointed out several things.
Speaking as the original poster, I have to chime in here with a "nuh-uh." First of all, my original point was to say that the vast majority of all possible code will compile without modification on both Linux and OS X. Notice I said the vast majority of all possible code, not the majority of programs. Most of the APIs provided by Linux and common libraries are available on OS X. For example, today I needed to do some work on part of our software that uses OpenSSL. So I FTP'd it from my build server (a Linux box) to my Power Mac and messed around with it. I didn't have to change anything, not even the makefile. All of the required libraries were available, including libcrypto, in the default OS X installation. And I got to use Project Builder, which was a little bit of a "woo hoo."
And finally, I don't think four really qualifies as "several," especially when the fourth one is basically just "anything that depends on something that's affected by items one, two, or three."
You just have to ensure that, on a particular machine, each of its NICs gets an address from a different IP subnet.
Can somebody please tell me how this relates to iSCSI being easier to manage than SCSI over Fibre Channel? Running two separate subnets and two Ethernet drops to each client on the network sounds like a terrible way to scale.
At this point Linux is the Unix with the most broad support and widest range of Unix apps. If you are running Unix apps Linux makes sense.
What do you want to run under Linux that you can't run under OS X? I mean, we're talking about stuff you'd want to compile from scratch, here, because this is PowerPC rather than IA-32. If it doesn't talk directly to the hardware, you should be able to compile it on OS X with only, at most, minor trouble.
Hell, it's even the same compiler:
Reading specs from/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.1/specs Thread model: posix Apple Computer, Inc. GCC version 1161, based on gcc version 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)
Granted this screenshot isn't OS X, it should work there as well.
Sorry, nesthigh, I think you missed it. The OP was talking about running OS X inside a MOL instance, and in order to run MOL you have to be on PowerPC hardware. VirtualPC emulates Intel hardware, not PowerPC hardware. So you couldn't do it.
Your screen shot was obviously taken on a Mac running Linux, which was running MOL, which was running VirtualPC, but the chain ends there.
But I have to chime in with others on this one. Given that Mac OS X is superior in every stinkin' way to Linux (flame on!), why-- other than the mountain climber answer-- would you do this?
Why would it be a routing nightmare? Just assign a second IP to the second lun and network adapter, easy as can be.
Can your OS handle two IPs on the same network segment? None of the ones I know of can. You see, you can only have one route to a given network. So you might have two interfaces on the same network, but all your traffic is going to go through just one of them. The other one sits there and does nothing at all.
The fact is that very few machines really need much more than 50-100MB/s because the clients arent going to be able to get data much more quickly than that anyways.
Depends on your situation. In some cases, 640 K really is enough for anybody. For the rest of us, though....
Um, dosen't FireWire already have the capacity to transmit uncompressed digital video?
It has the bandwidth (SDI only requires 270 Mbps; FireWire is 400 Mbps) but I don't know if anybody has used it for uncompressed video. People use it all the time for DV-compressed video, of course.
But, as you noted, that's merely TV-resolution data. DVI, on the other hand, can handle up to 5 Gbps, if I remember correctly. That's a big difference.
What we really need is something like SGI's XIO...
No, I don't think so. XIO uses a hundred pins. No hundred-pin interface could ever be that reliable. What we really need is a super-fast serial connection, like FireWire-only-a-lot-faster. With the price of fiber optics coming down steadily, I wonder whether it would be practical to try to design a rugged two-strand cable with roughly the same diameter as a FireWire cable, or less. That effectively removes the bandwidth problem from the connector and puts it into the transceivers, where it ought to be.
In fact there is a standard for this, USB. (Universal) It supports almost everything that can be added, although currently does not support the bandwidth requirements for some peripherals.
You're reading my mind. I was thinking that in the instant that I hit the "Submit" button. USB does seem to have a lot of the characteristics of a universal port, with some exceptions. It has nowhere near the signal bandwidth necessary to drive a monitor, for example.
It's really nice to be able to reboot, hold 't' and plug my laptop into another Mac and have its hard disk appear on the desktop as though it was an external Firewire disk.
I agree, but I really don't find that feature as useful as I thought I would years ago when it first became available. (Back then, it was SCSI target mode instead of FireWire, but it's the same thing.)
Thing is, it requires not one reboot, but two. Now, particularly with OS X 10.2 and Rendezvous, I find myself much more likely to just hook two machines together with an Ethernet patch cable and do an FTP. Since no IP configuration is necessary, it's a quick-and-easy solution. And between any combination of Power Macs and PowerBooks, you're running Gigabit Ethernet. Peppy.
I agree that FireWire target mode is cool and nice, but it's just not that useful, IMO.
(a 64bit 1Gbs network addapter is often as fast as disk anyway pratically speaking)
If you're lucky-- without serious tweaking, I mean-- you can get 50 MB/s over gigabit ethernet. That's what I get using FTP between two SGI boxes using the SGI-approved 64-bit card and jumbo frames. Yes, this is faster than the ATA hard drive in your laptop, Chaz.
Using a single fibre channel loop, each of my lab systems gets about 95 MB/s from its RAID. (Small RAID, with [I think] 8 drives.)
Using multiple fibre channel loops, my servers pull about 400 MB/s off their RAIDs. And that's using 1 Gbps FC. If we decided to upgrade to 2 Gbps FC, we could get twice that performance, because the disks are capable of it.
There's the rub, right there. It's trivial to put a second FC adapter in your system and double your storage performance; just map a second LUN to the other port and stripe your disk accesses across both LUNs. How can you do that over iSCSI? That'd be a routing nightmare.
Are you kidding? When was the last time you used Fibre Channel? Its mostly optical now. All the new HBA's come with optical GBIC's.
You're both wrong. FC is neither "mostly optical" or "mostly copper." Devices like HBAs and switches that use GBICs (modular media adapters) can be either optical or copper depending on the GBIC used, and switched on the fly. You choose optical or copper cables depending on your environment. Copper cables have shorter runs than optical cables-- they can only run 30 feet or so, as opposed to miles for optical-- and they much more bulky. So in a data center where you have literally hundreds of FC cables, you'd probably choose optical to keep the physical size of the cable bundles from getting out of control. For connecting two devices in a rack, you can choose copper cables.
I think the "fiber optic is expensive" thing is a myth, though. I can't say for certain, but I think I remember that the outfit that sells us our patch cables sells 4-wire copper cables and optical cables at roughly the same price.
There are WAY to many people that are not bright enought to know where to hook up the cable. You will have SCSI devices being pluged in to a Floppy port. CD ROM drives in to sound cards. You see my point?
We see your point, but I think you missed the OP's point. (Or at the very least, his implication.)
In a magical happy land with gumdrop houses on lollypop lane, it wouldn't matter where these bits and pieces got plugged in. Your computer would have one or more Ports on the back. Got a monitor? Plug it into a Port. Got an external drive? Plug it into a Port. Got network access? Plug it into a Port. All the Ports are the same, and figuring out which device does what is handled in software. So it doesn't matter where you plug things in.
I agree with you that it won't happen. I'm not completely sure I agree that it shouldn't. I think it probably could, but like many thing, the expense and overhead seems disproportionate to the scale of the problem.
Nor have I ever understood the difference between a "Storage Area Network" and a "pre-packaged Novell file server with all permissons set to RWX", except that the SAN is priced 10 times higher!
Would you like to?
There are basically two types of SANs. The two types are not mutually exclusive; they can coexist on the same network.
The first type is exclusive access to shared storage. Let's say you have a big enterprise storage system, like an IBM Shark or an HDS 9960 or an EMC Symmetrix. These devices are basically giant RAIDs with fibre channel switches built right in. You can connect one computer-- PC, Unix system, supercomputer, whatever-- to each fibre channel port on the storage system, then use the storage system's software to carve it up into LUNs. Let's say the Windows server gets 5 TB, and the Oracle cluster gets 20 TB, and the compute server gets 1 TB. You create RAID sets using the storage system's control software, then assign each set (5 TB, 20 TB, 1 TB) to a fibre channel port. Each machine thinks it has a directly attached storage device, when actually it's just getting a piece of the big storage device in the basement. The point is that you can put all your eggs in one exceptionally good basket, reducing maintenance costs, and you can reconfigure things on the fly without moving any cables around. It's handy, especially in a big data center environment. You can also take advantage of some cleverness inside the storage system this way, using features like point-in-time snapshots, serverless backup, or filesystem mirroring. One data center I work with has two HDS 9960 systems, one in one city and another in another city, connected by some big pipe (OC-3? OC-12? I forget.) They run some special Hitachi software on the two storage systems that keeps the two devices in sync all the time. Basically, an atomic bomb could take out the entire data center and the city around it, but the data would be safe.
So that's one type of SAN. It's about centralizing exclusive access to shared storage. These kinds of SANs make a ton of sense under some circumstances. You generally have to have at least dozens of servers, each with their own storage requirements, before it makes sense to bother with this kind of thing.
The other type of SAN is about shared access to shared storage. This requires a special type of filesystem, like Centravision CVFS or SGI CXFS. (There are some hybrid solutions out there, like Sanergy. I haven't worked with Sanergy myself, but I've heard bad things about it.) With these SANs, each client has read-write access to the same filesystem. It's kind of like what you described-- a server with wide-open file permissions-- but without the server. Access to the filesystem is at fibre channel wire speeds, 100 MB per second or more, with really low latency. This kind of system has serious drawbacks, though. SAN or cluster filesystems are complex, and that makes them more prone to failure of some kind. Heterogeneous host support is also a challenge. Finally, SANs like this just don't scale, because of contention. If you have a hundred clients reading data from a server, the server will put the IO requests in a queue and cache them intelligently. Read some data from A, cache it and stream it out the network interface while reading some data from B, and so on. You can sustain relatively high data transfer efficiency that way, as long as your server is beefy enough. But with a shared-access SAN, there's no caching request arbitrator in the middle. There's just your computer and that other computer, giving the disks conflicting instructions. Even with the biggest, smartest RAID controller, you're still going to run into disk access contention issues pretty quickly. I've seen a shared-access filesystem grind to a halt when as few as four computers were all hitting the disks at once. The heads were spending more time seeking than they were spending reading. That's kind of a bad example, though, because that system used a really shitty RAID controller for its storage device. But it proves the principle of what I'm saying.
Because of these drawbacks, shared-access SANs really work best for server clustering. If you have a parallel cluster of servers all accessing the same database-- particularly if they're just query servers and the database is read-only-- then it makes sense to consider putting the tables on a shared-access SAN to keep storage costs low. Especially if you have ten servers and a 10 TB database; you can save 90 TB of disk by using a shared-access SAN.
So yeah, there's a huge difference between a SAN and a file server with wide-open permissions. They're different tools, and you should use them for different sorts of jobs. Anybody who tries to tell you, though, that a SAN can replace a file server in a typical network-attached storage environment doesn't know what he's talking about.
Okay, I think I see your point. But this brings up another issue. (Sorry to sound argumentative.) Others have asserted, and I believe, that when you give the user two mechanisms for accomplishing the same thing, the user wastes more time deciding which to use than he would have spent using the either of the two methods. So choice is not always a good thing. It seems that sometimes, when designing user interfaces, that it's better to pick one way of doing things and make it consistent. So while choice and flexibility are all fine and good in principle, they're often bad for usability.
with the clipboard, there is no visual indication at all
In the Finder, last item under the Edit menu. "Show Clipboard." It's pretty neat. Been there since, oh, at least System 6, and probably earlier than that.
(I didn't even bother to mention middle-mouse-button paste).
I agree with what some of what you said, and I disagree with some. But this is just wrong. X11's cut-and-paste behavior is just dreadful. Once you get used to it, it's not so bad, but I've been using X11 on my desktop for years and years now, and it still frustrates me regularly. I don't know how many times I've highlighted something, moved to another window, accidentally or thoughtlessly highlighted something else, then tried to paste the first thing I highlighted. Oops.
By your logic, it's the licensing that makes the algorithm secure. They are not mutually exclusive.
No, no, no, no, no. You're putting words in my mouth. I never suggested that licensing "makes the algorithm secure." I'm saying that having a secure algorithm is more important to me than having one that's unrestricted by patent or other rights. As I said, in many cases-- not all, but many-- the best algorithms are patented. The original poster said, "too bad," or something like that, implying that patents qua patents are a bad thing. I'm saying that the fact that an algorithm is patented, and that I have to pay a fee to use it, isn't the only deciding factor for me. I'm not trying to say that only patented algorithms are good, or vice versa. I'm just trying to say that I will happily pay a licensing fee to use a trusted algorithm when the alternative is an algorithm that's not so trusted.
Slashdot Mirror
Your use of the phrase "foreign types" represents a racist labeling of everyone and anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.
Actually, it represents a tongue-in-cheek, mocking labeling of everyone and anyone who isn't a US citizen. Which everybody else on Slashdot obviously understood. I'm stunned that you didn't pick it up from the "Manifest Destiny" remark, if nothing else.
As I am sure others will point out, Australia is not twice the size of Europe.
And as I've pointed out, the mistake was mine for not being more clear, but I wasn't wrong. The US is roughly 2-1/2 times the land area of western Europe, and Australia is slightly smaller than the continental US. The figure of "twice the size" stands; I accidentally omitted the word "western," which changed everything. My source is the CIA World Fact Book, but I'm still too lazy to link. Ain't I a stinker?
The variety and quality of programming on U.S. television is determined by the number and independence of the production companies creating that programming, not by the number of individual stations broadcasting that programming.
And what do you think determines the number of television production companies? The size of the market, you idiot. A bigger market obviously means more providers trying to serve that market. Somebody has to fill those 96 million hours a year. Obviously a lot of it is going to be junk. But there's a huge amount of great and wonderful stuff. Even if only one percent of one percent of that is worth watching, that's still nearly 10,000 hours every year of quality stuff.
On average, UK programming is more varied and interesting than U.S. programming
Nope. It's just that there's less programming in the UK, by a factor of about 30. You can find quality TV programming any hour of the day and night in the US, if you're willing to take the time and trouble to look through a thousand channels. Or, if you're clever, if you program your TiVo to do it for you.
What I meant was that Australia is twice the land area of western Europe, which wouldn't include Russia or Scandinavia. My fault for not being more clear.
My source is the CIA World Fact Book, but I'm too lazy to link. Google it. It describes the US as being about 2-1/2 times the size of western Europe, and Australia as being slightly smaller than the continental US. So although I wasn't clear, my figures were pretty close to being accurate.
Accurate Color Matching. Sorry, you just can't do this on an LCD.
Can't do it on a CRT, either, and you're a fool if you think you can. That's why the good lord almighty gave us proofs.
Back when I worked in printing, I used to do all my color corrections in greyscale mode. It's just too easy to get distracted by the colors on the screen. Even when you know, in your head, that they're not accurate, your eye tricks you. That's why you have to get the tone right using greyscale mode, then rely on your colorimeters to get the process mix right.
hey, in France and the UK we still have quality television.
Dude, France has about 600 broadcast TV stations. The UK has about 250.
The United States of America has more than 2,000, and that's just over-the-air stations. We also have over 9,000 local cable TV systems.
Do the arithmetic. The United States of America broadcasts over 96 million hours of television programming every year. There's enough room in America's cultural output for greatness and crap and everything in between, in volumes that would blow your narrow little mind.
A friend of mine just moved to the US from Australia. Not a small country, Australia. Twice the size of Europe. He and his family are bewildered by the sheer amount of everything we have in this country. Took him to a grocery store the other day. Our city is nowhere near a coastline, but we get seafood by the ton flown in every morning. The produce available in our markets comes from every corner of the world, and it's all fresh and unbelievably cheap.
I think you foreign types often fail to grasp just how big and how affluent this country is. Our culture dominates the world not because it's better or worse, but because there's just so much of it.
This is, of course, a good and righteous thing. Manifest Destiny is no myth, my friends.
As an American you are no doubt some fat, ugly overweight child with a penchant for running a machine gun up and down your local school.
.45.
You, sir, are obviously an idiot. The weapon of choice for rampaging through public high schools is the semi-automatic handgun. Its small size makes it easy to conceal under clothing or in a bag or backpack. Weapons that fire 9mm rounds present a good compromise between power and magazine capacity, but for real effectiveness against targets at close range, go for the
What a moron.
Saying that Baird invented TV is like saying that Einstein invented the atomic bomb. It's one thing to come up with a principle, or even to demonstrate it in primitive form. It's another thing entirely to come up with a way to use that principle to build a practical device. That's invention.
If it makes you feel better, you could just say that Philo Farnsworth invented the scanning electron picture tube. Without which... and so on.
Well, books have given us some nice moments. But in between all those nice moments has been a high-volume sewer hose of cultural sludge.
You can always tell that a statement is meaningless when you can replace the key noun in it with a different word without changing the degree to which the statement is true. A statement that is always true, regardless of the subject, is dull and pointless.
What? Try and follow the thread. The original poster asked what's sorts of things could go wrong with source since they use the same compiler. I pointed out several things.
Speaking as the original poster, I have to chime in here with a "nuh-uh." First of all, my original point was to say that the vast majority of all possible code will compile without modification on both Linux and OS X. Notice I said the vast majority of all possible code, not the majority of programs. Most of the APIs provided by Linux and common libraries are available on OS X. For example, today I needed to do some work on part of our software that uses OpenSSL. So I FTP'd it from my build server (a Linux box) to my Power Mac and messed around with it. I didn't have to change anything, not even the makefile. All of the required libraries were available, including libcrypto, in the default OS X installation. And I got to use Project Builder, which was a little bit of a "woo hoo."
And finally, I don't think four really qualifies as "several," especially when the fourth one is basically just "anything that depends on something that's affected by items one, two, or three."
You just have to ensure that, on a particular machine, each of its NICs gets an address from a different IP subnet.
Can somebody please tell me how this relates to iSCSI being easier to manage than SCSI over Fibre Channel? Running two separate subnets and two Ethernet drops to each client on the network sounds like a terrible way to scale.
At this point Linux is the Unix with the most broad support and widest range of Unix apps. If you are running Unix apps Linux makes sense.
/usr/libexec/gcc/darwin/ppc/3.1/specs
What do you want to run under Linux that you can't run under OS X? I mean, we're talking about stuff you'd want to compile from scratch, here, because this is PowerPC rather than IA-32. If it doesn't talk directly to the hardware, you should be able to compile it on OS X with only, at most, minor trouble.
Hell, it's even the same compiler:
Reading specs from
Thread model: posix
Apple Computer, Inc. GCC version 1161, based on gcc version 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)
Uh... Why not?
Granted this screenshot isn't OS X, it should work there as well.
Sorry, nesthigh, I think you missed it. The OP was talking about running OS X inside a MOL instance, and in order to run MOL you have to be on PowerPC hardware. VirtualPC emulates Intel hardware, not PowerPC hardware. So you couldn't do it.
Your screen shot was obviously taken on a Mac running Linux, which was running MOL, which was running VirtualPC, but the chain ends there.
But I have to chime in with others on this one. Given that Mac OS X is superior in every stinkin' way to Linux (flame on!), why-- other than the mountain climber answer-- would you do this?
Why would it be a routing nightmare? Just assign a second IP to the second lun and network adapter, easy as can be.
Can your OS handle two IPs on the same network segment? None of the ones I know of can. You see, you can only have one route to a given network. So you might have two interfaces on the same network, but all your traffic is going to go through just one of them. The other one sits there and does nothing at all.
The fact is that very few machines really need much more than 50-100MB/s because the clients arent going to be able to get data much more quickly than that anyways.
Depends on your situation. In some cases, 640 K really is enough for anybody. For the rest of us, though....
Um, dosen't FireWire already have the capacity to transmit uncompressed digital video?
It has the bandwidth (SDI only requires 270 Mbps; FireWire is 400 Mbps) but I don't know if anybody has used it for uncompressed video. People use it all the time for DV-compressed video, of course.
But, as you noted, that's merely TV-resolution data. DVI, on the other hand, can handle up to 5 Gbps, if I remember correctly. That's a big difference.
What we really need is something like SGI's XIO...
No, I don't think so. XIO uses a hundred pins. No hundred-pin interface could ever be that reliable. What we really need is a super-fast serial connection, like FireWire-only-a-lot-faster. With the price of fiber optics coming down steadily, I wonder whether it would be practical to try to design a rugged two-strand cable with roughly the same diameter as a FireWire cable, or less. That effectively removes the bandwidth problem from the connector and puts it into the transceivers, where it ought to be.
In fact there is a standard for this, USB. (Universal) It supports almost everything that can be added, although currently does not support the bandwidth requirements for some peripherals.
You're reading my mind. I was thinking that in the instant that I hit the "Submit" button. USB does seem to have a lot of the characteristics of a universal port, with some exceptions. It has nowhere near the signal bandwidth necessary to drive a monitor, for example.
It's really nice to be able to reboot, hold 't' and plug my laptop into another Mac and have its hard disk appear on the desktop as though it was an external Firewire disk.
I agree, but I really don't find that feature as useful as I thought I would years ago when it first became available. (Back then, it was SCSI target mode instead of FireWire, but it's the same thing.)
Thing is, it requires not one reboot, but two. Now, particularly with OS X 10.2 and Rendezvous, I find myself much more likely to just hook two machines together with an Ethernet patch cable and do an FTP. Since no IP configuration is necessary, it's a quick-and-easy solution. And between any combination of Power Macs and PowerBooks, you're running Gigabit Ethernet. Peppy.
I agree that FireWire target mode is cool and nice, but it's just not that useful, IMO.
(a 64bit 1Gbs network addapter is often as fast as disk anyway pratically speaking)
If you're lucky-- without serious tweaking, I mean-- you can get 50 MB/s over gigabit ethernet. That's what I get using FTP between two SGI boxes using the SGI-approved 64-bit card and jumbo frames. Yes, this is faster than the ATA hard drive in your laptop, Chaz.
Using a single fibre channel loop, each of my lab systems gets about 95 MB/s from its RAID. (Small RAID, with [I think] 8 drives.)
Using multiple fibre channel loops, my servers pull about 400 MB/s off their RAIDs. And that's using 1 Gbps FC. If we decided to upgrade to 2 Gbps FC, we could get twice that performance, because the disks are capable of it.
There's the rub, right there. It's trivial to put a second FC adapter in your system and double your storage performance; just map a second LUN to the other port and stripe your disk accesses across both LUNs. How can you do that over iSCSI? That'd be a routing nightmare.
Are you kidding? When was the last time you used Fibre Channel? Its mostly optical now. All the new HBA's come with optical GBIC's.
You're both wrong. FC is neither "mostly optical" or "mostly copper." Devices like HBAs and switches that use GBICs (modular media adapters) can be either optical or copper depending on the GBIC used, and switched on the fly. You choose optical or copper cables depending on your environment. Copper cables have shorter runs than optical cables-- they can only run 30 feet or so, as opposed to miles for optical-- and they much more bulky. So in a data center where you have literally hundreds of FC cables, you'd probably choose optical to keep the physical size of the cable bundles from getting out of control. For connecting two devices in a rack, you can choose copper cables.
I think the "fiber optic is expensive" thing is a myth, though. I can't say for certain, but I think I remember that the outfit that sells us our patch cables sells 4-wire copper cables and optical cables at roughly the same price.
There are WAY to many people that are not bright enought to know where to hook up the cable. You will have SCSI devices being pluged in to a Floppy port. CD ROM drives in to sound cards. You see my point?
We see your point, but I think you missed the OP's point. (Or at the very least, his implication.)
In a magical happy land with gumdrop houses on lollypop lane, it wouldn't matter where these bits and pieces got plugged in. Your computer would have one or more Ports on the back. Got a monitor? Plug it into a Port. Got an external drive? Plug it into a Port. Got network access? Plug it into a Port. All the Ports are the same, and figuring out which device does what is handled in software. So it doesn't matter where you plug things in.
I agree with you that it won't happen. I'm not completely sure I agree that it shouldn't. I think it probably could, but like many thing, the expense and overhead seems disproportionate to the scale of the problem.
Nor have I ever understood the difference between a "Storage Area Network" and a "pre-packaged Novell file server with all permissons set to RWX", except that the SAN is priced 10 times higher!
Would you like to?
There are basically two types of SANs. The two types are not mutually exclusive; they can coexist on the same network.
The first type is exclusive access to shared storage. Let's say you have a big enterprise storage system, like an IBM Shark or an HDS 9960 or an EMC Symmetrix. These devices are basically giant RAIDs with fibre channel switches built right in. You can connect one computer-- PC, Unix system, supercomputer, whatever-- to each fibre channel port on the storage system, then use the storage system's software to carve it up into LUNs. Let's say the Windows server gets 5 TB, and the Oracle cluster gets 20 TB, and the compute server gets 1 TB. You create RAID sets using the storage system's control software, then assign each set (5 TB, 20 TB, 1 TB) to a fibre channel port. Each machine thinks it has a directly attached storage device, when actually it's just getting a piece of the big storage device in the basement. The point is that you can put all your eggs in one exceptionally good basket, reducing maintenance costs, and you can reconfigure things on the fly without moving any cables around. It's handy, especially in a big data center environment. You can also take advantage of some cleverness inside the storage system this way, using features like point-in-time snapshots, serverless backup, or filesystem mirroring. One data center I work with has two HDS 9960 systems, one in one city and another in another city, connected by some big pipe (OC-3? OC-12? I forget.) They run some special Hitachi software on the two storage systems that keeps the two devices in sync all the time. Basically, an atomic bomb could take out the entire data center and the city around it, but the data would be safe.
So that's one type of SAN. It's about centralizing exclusive access to shared storage. These kinds of SANs make a ton of sense under some circumstances. You generally have to have at least dozens of servers, each with their own storage requirements, before it makes sense to bother with this kind of thing.
The other type of SAN is about shared access to shared storage. This requires a special type of filesystem, like Centravision CVFS or SGI CXFS. (There are some hybrid solutions out there, like Sanergy. I haven't worked with Sanergy myself, but I've heard bad things about it.) With these SANs, each client has read-write access to the same filesystem. It's kind of like what you described-- a server with wide-open file permissions-- but without the server. Access to the filesystem is at fibre channel wire speeds, 100 MB per second or more, with really low latency. This kind of system has serious drawbacks, though. SAN or cluster filesystems are complex, and that makes them more prone to failure of some kind. Heterogeneous host support is also a challenge. Finally, SANs like this just don't scale, because of contention. If you have a hundred clients reading data from a server, the server will put the IO requests in a queue and cache them intelligently. Read some data from A, cache it and stream it out the network interface while reading some data from B, and so on. You can sustain relatively high data transfer efficiency that way, as long as your server is beefy enough. But with a shared-access SAN, there's no caching request arbitrator in the middle. There's just your computer and that other computer, giving the disks conflicting instructions. Even with the biggest, smartest RAID controller, you're still going to run into disk access contention issues pretty quickly. I've seen a shared-access filesystem grind to a halt when as few as four computers were all hitting the disks at once. The heads were spending more time seeking than they were spending reading. That's kind of a bad example, though, because that system used a really shitty RAID controller for its storage device. But it proves the principle of what I'm saying.
Because of these drawbacks, shared-access SANs really work best for server clustering. If you have a parallel cluster of servers all accessing the same database-- particularly if they're just query servers and the database is read-only-- then it makes sense to consider putting the tables on a shared-access SAN to keep storage costs low. Especially if you have ten servers and a 10 TB database; you can save 90 TB of disk by using a shared-access SAN.
So yeah, there's a huge difference between a SAN and a file server with wide-open permissions. They're different tools, and you should use them for different sorts of jobs. Anybody who tries to tell you, though, that a SAN can replace a file server in a typical network-attached storage environment doesn't know what he's talking about.
Okay, I think I see your point. But this brings up another issue. (Sorry to sound argumentative.) Others have asserted, and I believe, that when you give the user two mechanisms for accomplishing the same thing, the user wastes more time deciding which to use than he would have spent using the either of the two methods. So choice is not always a good thing. It seems that sometimes, when designing user interfaces, that it's better to pick one way of doing things and make it consistent. So while choice and flexibility are all fine and good in principle, they're often bad for usability.
with the clipboard, there is no visual indication at all
In the Finder, last item under the Edit menu. "Show Clipboard." It's pretty neat. Been there since, oh, at least System 6, and probably earlier than that.
(I didn't even bother to mention middle-mouse-button paste).
I agree with what some of what you said, and I disagree with some. But this is just wrong. X11's cut-and-paste behavior is just dreadful. Once you get used to it, it's not so bad, but I've been using X11 on my desktop for years and years now, and it still frustrates me regularly. I don't know how many times I've highlighted something, moved to another window, accidentally or thoughtlessly highlighted something else, then tried to paste the first thing I highlighted. Oops.
Explicit cut-and-paste is better by a mile.
Can I get a "booyah"?
Um... no.
By your logic, it's the licensing that makes the algorithm secure. They are not mutually exclusive.
No, no, no, no, no. You're putting words in my mouth. I never suggested that licensing "makes the algorithm secure." I'm saying that having a secure algorithm is more important to me than having one that's unrestricted by patent or other rights. As I said, in many cases-- not all, but many-- the best algorithms are patented. The original poster said, "too bad," or something like that, implying that patents qua patents are a bad thing. I'm saying that the fact that an algorithm is patented, and that I have to pay a fee to use it, isn't the only deciding factor for me. I'm not trying to say that only patented algorithms are good, or vice versa. I'm just trying to say that I will happily pay a licensing fee to use a trusted algorithm when the alternative is an algorithm that's not so trusted.
Can you name one of those cases where the only available algorithms need licensing? I can't think of a single one.
How about RSA? Of course, the patent has expired now, but as of a few years ago, it was only available with a license.