The bandwidth hasn't kept up with the size. Even at serial ATA 150MB/Sec, the most you will see from a single 7200 RPM drive is more like 20MB/Sec. Compression still has a place.
It's mostly bullshit, but they probably estimate it by estimating the wear on the moving parts and extending the data out until the parts are so out of spec to cause failure.
These drives will also carry a three-year warranty.
huge capacities up to 320 GB for corporate archiving and media recording; and unique manufacturing and quality for 24/7 operations with mean time to failure (MTTF) rates exceeding one million hours.
Guess all you SCSI zealots are going to have to eat your hat.
All of our large archive arrays at work are already ATA. Not everyone needs high speed and large capacity, a lot of company's data needs just require a lot of space, and speed isn't too critical. ATA is stealing this market away from SCSI and tape very quickly. Maxtor is just filling this niche that already existed.
As a side note, 3ware already has a serial ATA RAID card out with 10 ports per card, and great linux support. 2.5 TB for $4500 in a single full tower case. Nice.
I've not had a merchant account personally, but I have worked freelance for people who do have one, so I have some idea about the costs.
Generally, you have to have a good amount of volume to get below 2.9%, because there are a lot of minimums and fixed costs. If you want an account, some places make you rent a swipe terminal, even if you don't need it, most also have other fixed monthly fees that make the effective percentage much higher for a low volume seller.
Paypal isn't a bad deal, it isn't a great deal like it used to be, but for a small seller that wants to take credit cards, it is almost definitely cheaper than a real merchant account with some place like EFS Concorde.
According to this 5469529 ROL is the average (gross) monthly salary for computer related jobs. This is $165 US Dollars per month. Remember that isn't even take home pay, that is gross pay.
The pay for "Post and telecommunications" which may be closer to IT admin jobs is 10745588 ROL a month, $325 USD a month, $3900 a year, gross.
Other Romanian people I talk to online in sysadmin jobs make more like $5000-$6000 USD a year, apparently they are pretty well paid compared to the average.
Linux can run on low cost computers, the problem is that it's not exactly easy as pie to tune and configure properly. Internationalization is another issue..
The other part to that is that IT labor is often very cheap in other countries. While computer hardware prices are (I assume) approximately equal worldwide, IT labor for the same skill set can vary widely in price.
In countries like the US, especially in the last few years, labor is a dominating factor in the price of corporate computing. In some other countries, this is definitely not the case, IT workers may get paid a tiny fraction of the cost of hardware in a company IT budget.
So to the people who argue "Linux is only free if your time is free", now that statement gets turned around on you, because in a lot of countries, the labor is very cheap compared to license costs or Mac hardware costs.
I don't know why there are so many posts like this. They said world wide. How many computers outside of your own country have you ever seen?
Do you think that some IT department in a country like Romania where the average sysadmin pay is less than $10,000 USD a year is going to have money to pay $3500 per Mac desktops? x86 computers are sub-$500 for about the same level of performance these days.
Without info on methodology, this data is suspect, but it is very plausible. The whole world isn't rich, and Linux and x86 offers a lot of bang for the buck.
SGI is actually the driving force behind a lot of work on linux scalability. SGI submits patches to the kernel, everyone benefits, etc.
Linux isn't really optimized for a lot of processors, but companies like SGI are working to change that, and contributing a lot to the community in the process.
You know what's weird? Go to napster.com now, and they are selling T shirts, and have an "under construction" page up. Looks like maybe their creditors are going to make them try to do something to pay them off?
In short, like the vast majority of people out there (who don't read slashdot and never have heard of Ogg), going to Ogg would be a step backwards for them. They'd have less choice, less options and would be isolating themselves from everyone else.
Not to be rude, but what the fuck are you talking about? How much trouble is it to download and install another plugin for their players? No one has to reencode anything they don't want to. The migration to Ogg can be like the migration from old UNIX compress (.Z) to gzip (.gz). There is no reason someone can't have both at the same time.
Most people will probably be introduced to Ogg when they go to a streaming site, and it says "hey you need to get this player (or plugin) from here to listen, don't worry, it's free, click OK a few times". Then when they see.ogg files on the net, they will double click them, and everything will work automagically.
Personally, I am getting tired of hearing about this "cyber-terrorism".
Me too.
You know it's nonsense. I know it's nonsense.
Yep, for now at least.
Please, let's just drop this. Let's not make it news when somebody Up Top yet again talks about it with furrowed brow.
This is where I differ. This is like pretending someone can't see you if you shut your eyes real hard. It might work in the mind of a 5 year old, but I think we need to be a little more intelligent than that.
Ignoring this will not make it go away. What we see as news doesn't matter to most of the people out there. Organizations like CNN drive what is considered "news" for most people. We need to keep watch on what is happening, so it doesn't catch us off guard when the latest anti-terrorist bill includes DMCA-II.
In cases like this, with lots of discrete logic, the software IS the hardware. I doubt much of this is a general purpose computer in the way you would think of it.
As to the people suggessting C++ or Java, get real. I would sooner buy an MS product than trust my life to C++ or Java programming. Keep it simple. Also, I think it's a sad state of affairs when discrete logic chips are getting hard to find... how will people ever learn to build computers from scratch anymore? We will be in danger of losing basic knowledge to levels of abstraction, which is very dangerous indeed.
Degeneration of the genre into mainstream garbage?
I'm not too worried about it, if sci-fi get too far away from the original intent, it will branch and expand, etc. Art isn't something that is every a static target, it's always evolving, my rant was mostly about the lack of "hard" sci-fi on the channel with the same name.
I have a lot of respect for the bands that put their music up on epitonic.com for download. No, they don't all put a lot of songs up, some only one or two per album, but I still appreciate them as artists that are willing to give a little to get a lot back.
I don't buy RIAA CDs generally, and I don't have respect for the latest Spice Brittney Backstreet Kids On the Block band either. Some great bands are unfortunately involved in major record labels, like Pink Floyd, but those bands for the most part no longer exist, and signed on in general before the labels were too obnoxious.
What commercial interests are doing is destroying respect for the art, and the artist, by forcing commercialization down the throat of the "consumer". When their customers stopped being fans and became "consumers" is pretty much when the problems started.
The same thing is happening in software. I have a lot of respect for open source programmers, I respect their work, their art. I try to contract out to open source programmers whenever I can. I respect their license terms, even though it's almost trivially easy to rip them off in a lot of cases.
This DRM stuff pushes one world view, that art, software, is a product, that should be mass produced and sold to "consumers". The farther you are seperated from the programmer/artist, the less respect you have for them, and the less personal it is to steal their work. DRM almost guarantees that people will feel no guilt in bypassing it, for these reasons.
A side effect is that a media company could create data that is trusted - aka signed using PKI - so that only correspondigly signed code can access it. This of course is problematic because then that code would determine what rights to bestow the user.
This requires closed source software. You cannot have open source software restrict the rights of the user, that is the whole point of open source.
So basically you have admitted that this system will effectively lock out all open source programs that want to access trusted data.
That would passify most of the people angry about Palladium/TCPA/DRM.
I doubt it. Being forced to only choose closed source software to access any "trusted" data is going to piss a lot of people off, no matter if there is some mechanism of "fair use" or not.
There is a significant number of people who are simply against IP in all senses.
If you really think that all people who are opposed to DRM fall into this category, you are sorely mistaken. We want the freedom to access data with the programs that we choose, not the programs that some corporation forces us to choose. When a large chunk of the data on the net is "trusted", MS has effectively killed open source software.
Now, where do you get such a certificate to run or release your own programs? Entities that issue certificates. I imagine Versign will be one. But under TCPA you or your system administrator or boss or vendor will define which certificates to trust. It is very similiar to how SSL works.
You don't think that having to buy a certificate from Verisign will stifle a lot of small programmers? I write up a little shell script that gets called from my web server and I have to spend $100 or more to get it to run? That sounds like a load of horse shit to me. That model may work in the prepackaged, "don't think outside the box", MS world, but in the land of UNIX like OS, a lot of things are done ad-hoc.
CVS was an ad-hoc system of shell scripts at first, under this system, CVS may never have been created!
Slashdot Mirror
Except these drives are going to look more like 298 GB when you put them in your computer, because hard disk manufacturers use base 10 megabytes.
The bandwidth hasn't kept up with the size. Even at serial ATA 150MB/Sec, the most you will see from a single 7200 RPM drive is more like 20MB/Sec. Compression still has a place.
It's mostly bullshit, but they probably estimate it by estimating the wear on the moving parts and extending the data out until the parts are so out of spec to cause failure.
:)
1 million hours is 114 years.
Oops, the link should have been this
From the story:
These drives will also carry a three-year warranty.
huge capacities up to 320 GB for corporate archiving and media recording; and unique manufacturing and quality for 24/7 operations with mean time to failure (MTTF) rates exceeding one million hours.
Guess all you SCSI zealots are going to have to eat your hat.
All of our large archive arrays at work are already ATA. Not everyone needs high speed and large capacity, a lot of company's data needs just require a lot of space, and speed isn't too critical. ATA is stealing this market away from SCSI and tape very quickly. Maxtor is just filling this niche that already existed.
As a side note, 3ware already has a serial ATA RAID card out with 10 ports per card, and great linux support. 2.5 TB for $4500 in a single full tower case. Nice.
I've not had a merchant account personally, but I have worked freelance for people who do have one, so I have some idea about the costs.
Generally, you have to have a good amount of volume to get below 2.9%, because there are a lot of minimums and fixed costs. If you want an account, some places make you rent a swipe terminal, even if you don't need it, most also have other fixed monthly fees that make the effective percentage much higher for a low volume seller.
Paypal isn't a bad deal, it isn't a great deal like it used to be, but for a small seller that wants to take credit cards, it is almost definitely cheaper than a real merchant account with some place like EFS Concorde.
Good rebuttal, shows all the maturity of a 12 year old.
Monthly Salary report for June 2002 in Romania
According to this 5469529 ROL is the average (gross) monthly salary for computer related jobs. This is $165 US Dollars per month. Remember that isn't even take home pay, that is gross pay.
The pay for "Post and telecommunications" which may be closer to IT admin jobs is 10745588 ROL a month, $325 USD a month, $3900 a year, gross.
Other Romanian people I talk to online in sysadmin jobs make more like $5000-$6000 USD a year, apparently they are pretty well paid compared to the average.
Linux can run on low cost computers, the problem is that it's not exactly easy as pie to tune and configure properly. Internationalization is another issue ..
The other part to that is that IT labor is often very cheap in other countries. While computer hardware prices are (I assume) approximately equal worldwide, IT labor for the same skill set can vary widely in price.
In countries like the US, especially in the last few years, labor is a dominating factor in the price of corporate computing. In some other countries, this is definitely not the case, IT workers may get paid a tiny fraction of the cost of hardware in a company IT budget.
So to the people who argue "Linux is only free if your time is free", now that statement gets turned around on you, because in a lot of countries, the labor is very cheap compared to license costs or Mac hardware costs.
I don't know why there are so many posts like this. They said world wide. How many computers outside of your own country have you ever seen?
Do you think that some IT department in a country like Romania where the average sysadmin pay is less than $10,000 USD a year is going to have money to pay $3500 per Mac desktops? x86 computers are sub-$500 for about the same level of performance these days.
Without info on methodology, this data is suspect, but it is very plausible. The whole world isn't rich, and Linux and x86 offers a lot of bang for the buck.
That's about the only use I can see for it. I could easily replace every workstation and server in our building with one of these.
:)
Wow, that's going to be expensive, and how will they fit those in their cubicles?
Imagine an openMosix cluster of these though.
SGI is actually the driving force behind a lot of work on linux scalability. SGI submits patches to the kernel, everyone benefits, etc.
Linux isn't really optimized for a lot of processors, but companies like SGI are working to change that, and contributing a lot to the community in the process.
Yeah, I know. :)
Heh, and what do they pay you with? Inherently worthless pieces of paper (money). :)
You know what's weird? Go to napster.com now, and they are selling T shirts, and have an "under construction" page up. Looks like maybe their creditors are going to make them try to do something to pay them off?
I'd buy a dead kitty T-shirt hehe.
I thought he already quit a few weeks ago?
In short, like the vast majority of people out there (who don't read slashdot and never have heard of Ogg), going to Ogg would be a step backwards for them. They'd have less choice, less options and would be isolating themselves from everyone else.
.ogg files on the net, they will double click them, and everything will work automagically.
Not to be rude, but what the fuck are you talking about? How much trouble is it to download and install another plugin for their players? No one has to reencode anything they don't want to. The migration to Ogg can be like the migration from old UNIX compress (.Z) to gzip (.gz). There is no reason someone can't have both at the same time.
Most people will probably be introduced to Ogg when they go to a streaming site, and it says "hey you need to get this player (or plugin) from here to listen, don't worry, it's free, click OK a few times". Then when they see
Personally, I am getting tired of hearing about this "cyber-terrorism".
Me too.
You know it's nonsense. I know it's nonsense.
Yep, for now at least.
Please, let's just drop this. Let's not make it news when somebody Up Top yet again talks about it with furrowed brow.
This is where I differ. This is like pretending someone can't see you if you shut your eyes real hard. It might work in the mind of a 5 year old, but I think we need to be a little more intelligent than that.
Ignoring this will not make it go away. What we see as news doesn't matter to most of the people out there. Organizations like CNN drive what is considered "news" for most people. We need to keep watch on what is happening, so it doesn't catch us off guard when the latest anti-terrorist bill includes DMCA-II.
Try drinking salt water or urine, then you'll understand.
Man, I just drank a big glass of fresh urine, but I don't feel any smarter. Did I do something wrong?
heh
In cases like this, with lots of discrete logic, the software IS the hardware. I doubt much of this is a general purpose computer in the way you would think of it.
As to the people suggessting C++ or Java, get real. I would sooner buy an MS product than trust my life to C++ or Java programming. Keep it simple. Also, I think it's a sad state of affairs when discrete logic chips are getting hard to find... how will people ever learn to build computers from scratch anymore? We will be in danger of losing basic knowledge to levels of abstraction, which is very dangerous indeed.
They are still worthless pieces of paper, sorry.
What's the harm in it?
Degeneration of the genre into mainstream garbage?
I'm not too worried about it, if sci-fi get too far away from the original intent, it will branch and expand, etc. Art isn't something that is every a static target, it's always evolving, my rant was mostly about the lack of "hard" sci-fi on the channel with the same name.
You are correct, in a sense.
I have a lot of respect for the bands that put their music up on epitonic.com for download. No, they don't all put a lot of songs up, some only one or two per album, but I still appreciate them as artists that are willing to give a little to get a lot back.
I don't buy RIAA CDs generally, and I don't have respect for the latest Spice Brittney Backstreet Kids On the Block band either. Some great bands are unfortunately involved in major record labels, like Pink Floyd, but those bands for the most part no longer exist, and signed on in general before the labels were too obnoxious.
What commercial interests are doing is destroying respect for the art, and the artist, by forcing commercialization down the throat of the "consumer". When their customers stopped being fans and became "consumers" is pretty much when the problems started.
The same thing is happening in software. I have a lot of respect for open source programmers, I respect their work, their art. I try to contract out to open source programmers whenever I can. I respect their license terms, even though it's almost trivially easy to rip them off in a lot of cases.
This DRM stuff pushes one world view, that art, software, is a product, that should be mass produced and sold to "consumers". The farther you are seperated from the programmer/artist, the less respect you have for them, and the less personal it is to steal their work. DRM almost guarantees that people will feel no guilt in bypassing it, for these reasons.
A side effect is that a media company could create data that is trusted - aka signed using PKI - so that only correspondigly signed code can access it. This of course is problematic because then that code would determine what rights to bestow the user.
This requires closed source software. You cannot have open source software restrict the rights of the user, that is the whole point of open source.
So basically you have admitted that this system will effectively lock out all open source programs that want to access trusted data.
That would passify most of the people angry about Palladium/TCPA/DRM.
I doubt it. Being forced to only choose closed source software to access any "trusted" data is going to piss a lot of people off, no matter if there is some mechanism of "fair use" or not.
There is a significant number of people who are simply against IP in all senses.
If you really think that all people who are opposed to DRM fall into this category, you are sorely mistaken. We want the freedom to access data with the programs that we choose, not the programs that some corporation forces us to choose. When a large chunk of the data on the net is "trusted", MS has effectively killed open source software.
Now, where do you get such a certificate to run or release your own programs?
Entities that issue certificates. I imagine Versign will be one. But under TCPA you or your system administrator or boss or vendor will define which certificates to trust. It is very similiar to how SSL works.
You don't think that having to buy a certificate from Verisign will stifle a lot of small programmers? I write up a little shell script that gets called from my web server and I have to spend $100 or more to get it to run? That sounds like a load of horse shit to me. That model may work in the prepackaged, "don't think outside the box", MS world, but in the land of UNIX like OS, a lot of things are done ad-hoc.
CVS was an ad-hoc system of shell scripts at first, under this system, CVS may never have been created!
Yet again, MS stifles innovation.
plus in Canada they have totally nude bars, not this topless shit we have in the US.
:)
Wow, isn't that dangerous? How do the waitresses serve hot food?
I know what everyone will say,"very carefully".