And of course, more modding down for any post that even offers the whiff of a suggestion that an Apple device might be useful for the slightest waif of a task.
Great hardware, stable software, and features that actually work as advertised are what these people are hating on.
If only all of those Windows CE devices had functioned according to advertised specs, or the Palm devices, or the Symbian devices, the landscape would be radically different right now. But instead all of them bullet-pointed a whole bunch of features without asterisks that carried Empire-State-Building-sized asterisks in practice, while Apple continues to deliver on their promises (good and bad) more or less exactly.
Lesson: Apple knows how to build things that work. Others know how to advertise things that work that don't actually work. Slashdotters don't care whether something works, as long as it appears as unrefined and kludgy enough to emphasize their "geek" credentials as they stand next to it.
as Linux slid into obsolescence and/or irrelevance alongside the Windows-vs-Linux debate. Basically, it's one more community that time has left behind and that doesn't realize it, a network of enthusiasts-of-the-anachronistic.
"It looks like Apple's hyped iPad tablet may find a functional use beyond the early technology adopter set."
Is it possible to mention Apple or Apple devices on Slashdot without gratuitous and misguided denigration, even if implied?
The iPad is a perfectly workable tablet device. In fact, it is the cheapest tablet device in its class (quality level, feature set) and also the first to market, and also the one with the largest number of applications and the largest installed user base.
It clearly has uses beyond the early technology adopter set given the anecdotal array of adoptions in vertically integrative environments/scenarios.
In my own case, I use it for teaching. The iPad offers a minimal, lightweight platform on which to track attendance, grades, lesson plans, and so on and to connect them to projection devices for showing media of various kinds, from outlines and presentation slides to YouTube videos that supplement the lecture.
Come on. This is supposed to be a technology blog. Instead, it's a bunch of why teenagers with strong, if ill-informed, political-affective poses.
"OSX is for teh gays! Even n00bs prefer Windows! Mac is dying if not for the Jobs reality distortion field, and Jobs is dying, so Netcraft confirms it, OSX is dying HaHa!"
"It's all just industry standard anyway, Apple doesn't do anything special, there's no difference but the price! LOLZ"
"OWAIT, Apple is teh Eeeeeeeevil! Teh Eeeeeeevil Mmmmmmpire OMG WTF?!?!?!"
Filesystem:/Applications,/Users, and/System vs./bin/etc/home/sbin/usr etc. If you think the latter's more intuitive OR more easy to manage in terms of the way each tree is organized, you haven't been using Unix long enough.
MacPorts: Suit yourself. And tell all the Gentoo fanboys that you don't like source-based ports systems. Oh, and while you're at it, tell that "open source" crowd around here that keeps saying "You have the source, edit and compile yourself."
Concise: "Brief, yet expressing all important information." As in, how many directories in the / tree in OSX vs. traditional Unices, and/or how many distinct operational elements are present in the desktop GUI in OSX vs. traditional Unices. OSX does more with a lot less, and clarity is the very admirable result.
Applications: Nope, there are none on Linux. Well, there's GIMP and OpenOffice.org, but that's about it. Beyond that, of course, is all of the stuff narcissistic geeks don't care about. "Photoshop? iMovie? WriteRoom? Evernote? iTunes? Who uses that stuff?! Nobody I know..." (No doubt.)
Gimmick: That's right. Desktop voice recognition = gimmick. Just like the totally inflexible Time Machine, the absolutely worthless Creative Suite, and the silly and gadgety sheet-feed straight-to-PDF scanners and digital pens out there. REAL USERS just need a command line (oh, and a bunch of X11 applications, apparently...)
X11 integration: Any newer or 'drag and drop capable' X11 applications are put to shame by Mac OS X native equivalents. Any older and/or specialized X11 applications for research/industry/development/etc. don't support drag and drop in the first place, ergo, you're not losing anything. The only way this matters to you is if you want to run GNOME on OSX or similar... which was the point of my post in the first place. A lot of people don't want to run GNOME or KDE at all these days. Look around you.
you still have a minimize button, a dock, and launchers, and you don't have to deal with GConf. When GNOME does it, you get GConf for your preferences and windows you can't conveniently maximize or minimize.
The method may be similar, but the results are very different.
they think that computers ARE for designing the UI and showing it off... and little else. Any UI is merely a bootstrapping tool to help design the next UI. Other kinds of work... Wait, there are other kinds of work?
And now I wouldn't go back. OS X is Unix for the desktop done right. The filesystem, the simplicity, the consistency... And I still have my command line, and emacs, and all of my old bash shell scripts still work.
Here's what to do for a Linux-like experience:
1. Copy your.profile to the OS X/Users/youracct directory. 2. Install Xcode from your OS X Snow Leopard disk for development tools. 3. Download and install the latest MacPorts. 4. Download and install iTerm. 5. Navigate to/System/Library/CoreServices and start the 'Directory Utility' application. 6. In Directory Utility, select Edit -> Enable Root User to make root accessible via the 'su' command. 7. No that you have root, MacPorts, and iTerm, start iTerm, su to root, and do "port install coreutils" to install GNU utilities. 8. Edit the PATH statement in your profile and add '/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/libexec/gnubin' to the front. 9. If you're an Emacs lover, also download Emacs from http://emacsformacosx.com/ and add/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS to your PATH.
Now you have a more-or-less Linux-like command line environment complete with development tools, ports tree, and GNU utilities like the color 'ls' command and the enhanced 'tar' command. You can start Emacs via command line to open text files (keeping in mind that you need to use capital 'E' if you want the GUI version).
And you have a rock-solid, highly usable, very logical, concise, and efficient desktop environment without all of the silliness that increasingly mar the KDE and GNOME worlds. Not to mention that you also have native access to tons of accessories and applications without the need for emulation or virtual machines, as well as some things that never worked in Linux even with emulation and/or virtual machines (i.e. desktop voice recognition, a lot of specialized peripherals, and so on).
Now it appears to update/refresh fine as you work, but then suddenly stops at some random point an hour or two into your use session and you're back to I-have-to-drag-Firefox-1mm-to-the-right-or-left-each-time-I-want-an-update territory.
Would be nice if they could get basic functionality like drawing on the screen down once and for all.
Every FF4 beta before this simply didn't work on Mac OS X either with my desktop or my MacBook Pro. Up until about b8, it would suck 100% CPU usage (both cores) and do absolutely nothing in exchange, and I'd have to go to the command line and issue a SIGKILL to get my machine back. With b9-b11, it worked in theory, but all window and UI updates weren't actually "drawn" on the screen, needing a refresh in order to appear. In practical terms, any change to window contents was invisible until the window was dragged. This meant that trying to use FF4 even after the CPU issue was fixed was pointless because of the totally nonfunctional UI: click, then wait some abitrary amount of time (because you can't see any updates in the window to tell you how things are progressing), then drag the window a millimeter or two, if it's not done, wait a while longer and drag again, if it is done, begin again with click, then wait... no way to choose what's in a drop-down list because you click, you can't see it until you drag the window, but you click the window title bar and of course the drop-down closes... etc.
I'd switched entirely to Chrome for day-to-day browsing but kept FF4 around until b11 and finally last night just blew it away entirely along with my user data on the MacBook. The b12 release is the first FF4 that I can actually use to get some sense of FF4 as a browser and I saw the Slashdot story just as I was about to blow FF4 away on my desktop, too.
My first reaction is that it's plenty fast and actually has a much nicer *looking* UI than all previous FF releases, but my immediate caveats are (1) but it's ass-backward to fix such a critical bug for any testing or use cases all the way down the list at the b12 stage, (2) none of the most important plugins for my workflow are FF4-ready yet, and (3) now I'm really, really happy with Chrome and wonder whether I can be brought back. FF4 is faster, but only slightly. Chrome, on the other hand, is cleaner, lighter, and more intuitive.
I'm one of those people paying for both; I own a Kindle and several iDevices. I am very happy to pay for them.
And for all of the bitching and moaning, you cannot get the same experience with Android or Sony e-readers (no, no, no, you cannot; you can get some alternative that open-sourcers are happy to prefix with the words "all you have to do" or "you just" which really means "it isn't the same at all").
I've also sunk $1k+ on software in the last year after not buying software and using OSS from 1993 through mid-2009.
Know what? There is a difference. A big difference. There is, in fact, a significant value-add coming from Apple, from Amazon, and from many other sellers of "closed" technologies. Yes, they're also closed. But in many cases they're much faster, much cleaner, much more reliable and stable, and much more accessible than their open alternatives.
I love the iPhone App Store, so there, and what's more, I'm willing to pay a PREMIUM for books that I can get in the Kindle store versus paper. In fact, I'll happily pay 2x-3x as much for the Kindle version, where everything I highlight automatically goes into a clippings file that I can quickly inject into my personal notes database, all text is searchable, and an entire library of texts can be carried with me all the time, with new titles able to be added instantly, the moment I need them, without delay.
As someone who was born in the U.S. but grew up in a Chinese family, let me tell you that the differences are stark. The U.S. is already a third world country by ideological and cultural standards. The population is lazy, self-entitled, undereducated, science-illiterate, unversed in either informal or formal logic, and completely averse to quality standards, quality control, or doing quality work.
All that's left is the resultant 1-or-2 generation slide into broken economy, broken infrastructure, broken governmental systems, etc. America is getting by on inertia and its population isn't doing the work to maintain its current standard of living and production, much less return it to some past glory or other.
China, on the other hand, is ruthlessly pragmatic, wholly rational-instrumental in its current approach to the world, science and math obsessed, achievement-oriented, and completely cold-blooded about it. The achievements are stunning to anyone that looks at what has been done in a few short years, and the expectations and determination are much higher. People that are busy worrying about "human rights" in China really don't get it; most of the Chinese couldn't care less about human rights right now. They want Progress, capital "P", they believe it comes from science, work, and sacrifice, and they're willing to give up almost anything to get it. They want to dominate the world economy and they're well on their way.
The recent furor over Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" demonstrates at the micro-level, in very clear terms, why China will shortly surpass the U.S. Incidentally, I grew up in a family much like that. Grades were all-important, people were called "trash" and "garbage" when they didn't achieve or perform, and standards were witheringly high. I resented it very much when I was a teenager. By the time I was in my 20s, I recalled it all with fondness and in my 30s I wish I had worked even harder than I did to meet those expectations. And at the end of the day, I don't feel "abused" at all and plan to work hard to raise my own daughter with very high academic and intellectual standards.
My wife and I are currently trying to decide whether this process will require us to leave the U.S. for either China or Eastern Europe (where she's from, and was a child prodigy at top schools under the old Soviet satellite system) in order to get a good education and avoid the dead weight of American anti-intellectual culture holding our daughter back.
are reasonable, because it has been water-cooler discussion for quite some time that Beck/Palin/Hannity/House Repubs et. al. continually call for political violence and subversive unrest rather than civil political activity.
for a very long time, and wants more. They continue to call for it, on the air, every day, at various events. They have some of the highest-paid political voices in the nation on their side, actively encouraging people to pick up arms and "defend" America from "socialists," which happen to be anyone that is not a far-right ideologue.
Whether or not this particular incident was driven by right-wing ideology, the Republican party and the Tea Party wanted this and wanted it bad, and they continue to want more. Or, the voices that they promote and that are supported by their rank-and-file are lying through their teeth on the air every day.
required both an "interface board" (SCSI on one end, ST-412 on the other) and a "host adapter" board (SCSI on one end to connect to the interface board, and the system bus on the other to connect to the SSB mini on the other end). Thing sucked power, made enough heat to cook eggs, and the whole setup cost nearly $2,000 in 1985.
Later, in 1988, was shocked and awed to pick up a used 10MB ST-506 hard drive for $300 locally from a business going out of business.
In about 1994, I remember once again being shocked and awed to pick up a 680MB ESDI hard drive for about the same $300.
Later again, in 1998 or so, I think, I scored a great deal on a series of 9GB Micropolis 1991 drives. These were also full-height, but they had integrated Fast SCSI-II interfaces and seemed blindingly fast. The total cost for the was about $1,000 as I recall, and they were put into a large RAID case for a project I was working on to yield a massive 45GB of storage. They were the size of a small dorm fridge/freezer when all set up, and we were thrilled at the nearly 14MB/sec sustained read rate of the RAID, as I recall.
This week, just put a second 1TB RAID-1 in my hackintosh. Fits inside the case. The removable sleds were $9 each, the Western Digital caviar green 1TB drives were $59 each (total cost: $140), and the whole thing fits inside a mini-ATX tower, takes next to no power, and offers sustained reads of about 80MB/sec. For booting the same machine, I'm replacing my 40GB Intel X-25V SSD with an 80GB Intel X-25M. Cost? About $100 new on eBay. Sustained read: 200MB/sec. Power: basically none.
Hard drive technology has moved massively fast over the last 20-25 years, and of course, before my time, for the 20-25 years before that. At any particular moment, it seems that people are often bemoaning stagnation, but the big picture is that it is truly remarkable to see 3TB drives coming out in a 3.5" form factor that generate virtually no heat, use very little power, and are as reliable as they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, methinks you're talking out your ass, and it shows.
The eee tablet line includes multiple products.
The capacitive touch product that is in the same class as the iPad runs Android. Fewer apps.
The Windows product that has more apps has a Wacom digitizer, not capacitive touch. Different product class. Not comparable.
You are, in short, wrong.
And of course, more modding down for any post that even offers the whiff of a suggestion that an Apple device might be useful for the slightest waif of a task.
Wow.
Meanwhile, Slashdot continues to brush the neckbeard hairs out of their $350 Linux netbooks.
Spot on.
Great hardware, stable software, and features that actually work as advertised are what these people are hating on.
If only all of those Windows CE devices had functioned according to advertised specs, or the Palm devices, or the Symbian devices, the landscape would be radically different right now. But instead all of them bullet-pointed a whole bunch of features without asterisks that carried Empire-State-Building-sized asterisks in practice, while Apple continues to deliver on their promises (good and bad) more or less exactly.
Lesson: Apple knows how to build things that work. Others know how to advertise things that work that don't actually work. Slashdotters don't care whether something works, as long as it appears as unrefined and kludgy enough to emphasize their "geek" credentials as they stand next to it.
as Linux slid into obsolescence and/or irrelevance alongside the Windows-vs-Linux debate. Basically, it's one more community that time has left behind and that doesn't realize it, a network of enthusiasts-of-the-anachronistic.
"It looks like Apple's hyped iPad tablet may find a functional use beyond the early technology adopter set."
Is it possible to mention Apple or Apple devices on Slashdot without gratuitous and misguided denigration, even if implied?
The iPad is a perfectly workable tablet device. In fact, it is the cheapest tablet device in its class (quality level, feature set) and also the first to market, and also the one with the largest number of applications and the largest installed user base.
It clearly has uses beyond the early technology adopter set given the anecdotal array of adoptions in vertically integrative environments/scenarios.
In my own case, I use it for teaching. The iPad offers a minimal, lightweight platform on which to track attendance, grades, lesson plans, and so on and to connect them to projection devices for showing media of various kinds, from outlines and presentation slides to YouTube videos that supplement the lecture.
Come on. This is supposed to be a technology blog. Instead, it's a bunch of why teenagers with strong, if ill-informed, political-affective poses.
the only sane post in the entire discussion. Slashdot has certainly gone downhill in recent years.
"Android FTW! Global iPhone influence is nil!"
"OSX is for teh gays! Even n00bs prefer Windows! Mac is dying if not for the Jobs reality distortion field, and Jobs is dying, so Netcraft confirms it, OSX is dying HaHa!"
"It's all just industry standard anyway, Apple doesn't do anything special, there's no difference but the price! LOLZ"
"OWAIT, Apple is teh Eeeeeeeevil! Teh Eeeeeeevil Mmmmmmpire OMG WTF?!?!?!"
There's a lot of you, personally in there.
Here you go, fast:
Filesystem: /Applications, /Users, and /System vs. /bin /etc /home /sbin /usr etc. If you think the latter's more intuitive OR more easy to manage in terms of the way each tree is organized, you haven't been using Unix long enough.
MacPorts: Suit yourself. And tell all the Gentoo fanboys that you don't like source-based ports systems. Oh, and while you're at it, tell that "open source" crowd around here that keeps saying "You have the source, edit and compile yourself."
Concise: "Brief, yet expressing all important information." As in, how many directories in the / tree in OSX vs. traditional Unices, and/or how many distinct operational elements are present in the desktop GUI in OSX vs. traditional Unices. OSX does more with a lot less, and clarity is the very admirable result.
Applications: Nope, there are none on Linux. Well, there's GIMP and OpenOffice.org, but that's about it. Beyond that, of course, is all of the stuff narcissistic geeks don't care about. "Photoshop? iMovie? WriteRoom? Evernote? iTunes? Who uses that stuff?! Nobody I know..." (No doubt.)
Gimmick: That's right. Desktop voice recognition = gimmick. Just like the totally inflexible Time Machine, the absolutely worthless Creative Suite, and the silly and gadgety sheet-feed straight-to-PDF scanners and digital pens out there. REAL USERS just need a command line (oh, and a bunch of X11 applications, apparently...)
X11 integration: Any newer or 'drag and drop capable' X11 applications are put to shame by Mac OS X native equivalents. Any older and/or specialized X11 applications for research/industry/development/etc. don't support drag and drop in the first place, ergo, you're not losing anything. The only way this matters to you is if you want to run GNOME on OSX or similar... which was the point of my post in the first place. A lot of people don't want to run GNOME or KDE at all these days. Look around you.
'nuff said.
But not GUI-based XEmacs.
but because it mentions Apple, it gets modded down.
somebody's not as big a "geek" as they think they are. Way to reveal your Windows roots.
you still have a minimize button, a dock, and launchers, and you don't have to deal with GConf. When GNOME does it, you get GConf for your preferences and windows you can't conveniently maximize or minimize.
The method may be similar, but the results are very different.
to the dock on your Mac by clicking, you guessed it, the minimize button.
Bingo.
they think that computers ARE for designing the UI and showing it off... and little else. Any UI is merely a bootstrapping tool to help design the next UI. Other kinds of work... Wait, there are other kinds of work?
KDE and GNOME have both gone off the rails.
Switched to Mac OS X. Last fall.
NeuKDE + NeuGNOME = Linux desktop fail.
And now I wouldn't go back. OS X is Unix for the desktop done right. The filesystem, the simplicity, the consistency... And I still have my command line, and emacs, and all of my old bash shell scripts still work.
Here's what to do for a Linux-like experience:
1. Copy your .profile to the OS X /Users/youracct directory. /System/Library/CoreServices and start the 'Directory Utility' application. /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS to your PATH.
2. Install Xcode from your OS X Snow Leopard disk for development tools.
3. Download and install the latest MacPorts.
4. Download and install iTerm.
5. Navigate to
6. In Directory Utility, select Edit -> Enable Root User to make root accessible via the 'su' command.
7. No that you have root, MacPorts, and iTerm, start iTerm, su to root, and do "port install coreutils" to install GNU utilities.
8. Edit the PATH statement in your profile and add '/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/libexec/gnubin' to the front.
9. If you're an Emacs lover, also download Emacs from http://emacsformacosx.com/ and add
Now you have a more-or-less Linux-like command line environment complete with development tools, ports tree, and GNU utilities like the color 'ls' command and the enhanced 'tar' command. You can start Emacs via command line to open text files (keeping in mind that you need to use capital 'E' if you want the GUI version).
And you have a rock-solid, highly usable, very logical, concise, and efficient desktop environment without all of the silliness that increasingly mar the KDE and GNOME worlds. Not to mention that you also have native access to tons of accessories and applications without the need for emulation or virtual machines, as well as some things that never worked in Linux even with emulation and/or virtual machines (i.e. desktop voice recognition, a lot of specialized peripherals, and so on).
Try it. You probably won't go back.
Now it appears to update/refresh fine as you work, but then suddenly stops at some random point an hour or two into your use session and you're back to I-have-to-drag-Firefox-1mm-to-the-right-or-left-each-time-I-want-an-update territory.
Would be nice if they could get basic functionality like drawing on the screen down once and for all.
They might have just kept a user.
Every FF4 beta before this simply didn't work on Mac OS X either with my desktop or my MacBook Pro. Up until about b8, it would suck 100% CPU usage (both cores) and do absolutely nothing in exchange, and I'd have to go to the command line and issue a SIGKILL to get my machine back. With b9-b11, it worked in theory, but all window and UI updates weren't actually "drawn" on the screen, needing a refresh in order to appear. In practical terms, any change to window contents was invisible until the window was dragged. This meant that trying to use FF4 even after the CPU issue was fixed was pointless because of the totally nonfunctional UI: click, then wait some abitrary amount of time (because you can't see any updates in the window to tell you how things are progressing), then drag the window a millimeter or two, if it's not done, wait a while longer and drag again, if it is done, begin again with click, then wait... no way to choose what's in a drop-down list because you click, you can't see it until you drag the window, but you click the window title bar and of course the drop-down closes... etc.
I'd switched entirely to Chrome for day-to-day browsing but kept FF4 around until b11 and finally last night just blew it away entirely along with my user data on the MacBook. The b12 release is the first FF4 that I can actually use to get some sense of FF4 as a browser and I saw the Slashdot story just as I was about to blow FF4 away on my desktop, too.
My first reaction is that it's plenty fast and actually has a much nicer *looking* UI than all previous FF releases, but my immediate caveats are (1) but it's ass-backward to fix such a critical bug for any testing or use cases all the way down the list at the b12 stage, (2) none of the most important plugins for my workflow are FF4-ready yet, and (3) now I'm really, really happy with Chrome and wonder whether I can be brought back. FF4 is faster, but only slightly. Chrome, on the other hand, is cleaner, lighter, and more intuitive.
I'm one of those people paying for both; I own a Kindle and several iDevices. I am very happy to pay for them.
And for all of the bitching and moaning, you cannot get the same experience with Android or Sony e-readers (no, no, no, you cannot; you can get some alternative that open-sourcers are happy to prefix with the words "all you have to do" or "you just" which really means "it isn't the same at all").
I've also sunk $1k+ on software in the last year after not buying software and using OSS from 1993 through mid-2009.
Know what? There is a difference. A big difference. There is, in fact, a significant value-add coming from Apple, from Amazon, and from many other sellers of "closed" technologies. Yes, they're also closed. But in many cases they're much faster, much cleaner, much more reliable and stable, and much more accessible than their open alternatives.
I love the iPhone App Store, so there, and what's more, I'm willing to pay a PREMIUM for books that I can get in the Kindle store versus paper. In fact, I'll happily pay 2x-3x as much for the Kindle version, where everything I highlight automatically goes into a clippings file that I can quickly inject into my personal notes database, all text is searchable, and an entire library of texts can be carried with me all the time, with new titles able to be added instantly, the moment I need them, without delay.
Yeah, that's worth money to me.
As someone who was born in the U.S. but grew up in a Chinese family, let me tell you that the differences are stark. The U.S. is already a third world country by ideological and cultural standards. The population is lazy, self-entitled, undereducated, science-illiterate, unversed in either informal or formal logic, and completely averse to quality standards, quality control, or doing quality work.
All that's left is the resultant 1-or-2 generation slide into broken economy, broken infrastructure, broken governmental systems, etc. America is getting by on inertia and its population isn't doing the work to maintain its current standard of living and production, much less return it to some past glory or other.
China, on the other hand, is ruthlessly pragmatic, wholly rational-instrumental in its current approach to the world, science and math obsessed, achievement-oriented, and completely cold-blooded about it. The achievements are stunning to anyone that looks at what has been done in a few short years, and the expectations and determination are much higher. People that are busy worrying about "human rights" in China really don't get it; most of the Chinese couldn't care less about human rights right now. They want Progress, capital "P", they believe it comes from science, work, and sacrifice, and they're willing to give up almost anything to get it. They want to dominate the world economy and they're well on their way.
The recent furor over Chua's "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" demonstrates at the micro-level, in very clear terms, why China will shortly surpass the U.S. Incidentally, I grew up in a family much like that. Grades were all-important, people were called "trash" and "garbage" when they didn't achieve or perform, and standards were witheringly high. I resented it very much when I was a teenager. By the time I was in my 20s, I recalled it all with fondness and in my 30s I wish I had worked even harder than I did to meet those expectations. And at the end of the day, I don't feel "abused" at all and plan to work hard to raise my own daughter with very high academic and intellectual standards.
My wife and I are currently trying to decide whether this process will require us to leave the U.S. for either China or Eastern Europe (where she's from, and was a child prodigy at top schools under the old Soviet satellite system) in order to get a good education and avoid the dead weight of American anti-intellectual culture holding our daughter back.
are reasonable, because it has been water-cooler discussion for quite some time that Beck/Palin/Hannity/House Repubs et. al. continually call for political violence and subversive unrest rather than civil political activity.
for a very long time, and wants more. They continue to call for it, on the air, every day, at various events. They have some of the highest-paid political voices in the nation on their side, actively encouraging people to pick up arms and "defend" America from "socialists," which happen to be anyone that is not a far-right ideologue.
Whether or not this particular incident was driven by right-wing ideology, the Republican party and the Tea Party wanted this and wanted it bad, and they continue to want more. Or, the voices that they promote and that are supported by their rank-and-file are lying through their teeth on the air every day.
required both an "interface board" (SCSI on one end, ST-412 on the other) and a "host adapter" board (SCSI on one end to connect to the interface board, and the system bus on the other to connect to the SSB mini on the other end). Thing sucked power, made enough heat to cook eggs, and the whole setup cost nearly $2,000 in 1985.
Later, in 1988, was shocked and awed to pick up a used 10MB ST-506 hard drive for $300 locally from a business going out of business.
In about 1994, I remember once again being shocked and awed to pick up a 680MB ESDI hard drive for about the same $300.
Later again, in 1998 or so, I think, I scored a great deal on a series of 9GB Micropolis 1991 drives. These were also full-height, but they had integrated Fast SCSI-II interfaces and seemed blindingly fast. The total cost for the was about $1,000 as I recall, and they were put into a large RAID case for a project I was working on to yield a massive 45GB of storage. They were the size of a small dorm fridge/freezer when all set up, and we were thrilled at the nearly 14MB/sec sustained read rate of the RAID, as I recall.
This week, just put a second 1TB RAID-1 in my hackintosh. Fits inside the case. The removable sleds were $9 each, the Western Digital caviar green 1TB drives were $59 each (total cost: $140), and the whole thing fits inside a mini-ATX tower, takes next to no power, and offers sustained reads of about 80MB/sec. For booting the same machine, I'm replacing my 40GB Intel X-25V SSD with an 80GB Intel X-25M. Cost? About $100 new on eBay. Sustained read: 200MB/sec. Power: basically none.
Hard drive technology has moved massively fast over the last 20-25 years, and of course, before my time, for the 20-25 years before that. At any particular moment, it seems that people are often bemoaning stagnation, but the big picture is that it is truly remarkable to see 3TB drives coming out in a 3.5" form factor that generate virtually no heat, use very little power, and are as reliable as they are.