Original GameBoy and GameBoy Pocket were the same hardware in different packages, but they played the same games. If you had a GameBoy, you didn't need a GBP.
GameBoy Color added a faster CPU, but GBC games were still playable on GB and GBP, and all the old non-color games were playable on the GBC. If you had a GB or a GBP, you didn't need a GBC.
The GBA was the first one that offered something really new, requiring a new purchase. But it was still backwards compatible with the GB/GBP/GBC. If you had a GB/GBP/GBC, you could get a GBA and still keep playing all your old games.
The GBA Slim (or whatever that ugly folding brick thing was called) was the same hardware as the GBA but in a different package. If you had a GBA, you didn't need a GBAS.
The DS is the only line where they've changed things enough that you almost have to have all the different variations. The original DS played GBA games. The DSi doesn't. The DS Lite is the same as the DS, and the DSi XL is the same as the DSi.
IOW, you only need 1 version from each line. Just because there are dozens of variations of the hardware in each line doesn't mean you have to get each one in order to keep playing your games. A single GB/GBP/GBC, a single GBA/GBAS/GBAM, a single DS/DSL/DSi.
In Canada the Wii costs around 200 bucks at Costco, which is the cheapest I've seen it, and around 200 dollars cheaper than the xbox. But you need to get a nunchuk to play certain games: 25 dollars. A second controller and nunchuk, around 50 bucks total. Want to get motionplus for both of those to improve the motion sensing? 50 dollars. You're now at 325
The Wii comes with 1 wiimote and 1 nunchuk. And you can now buy Wiimote+MotionPlus in one box, for less than buying a Wiimote and a MotionPlus separately. The total price is still below $300 CDN for everything you need for 2 players.
Sit on a bus, subway, train, back seat for 20-60 minutes, and you'll discover just how convenient it is having mobile browsing, or video, or games, or whatever in your pocket.
Fuel refills automatically, within 24 hours, probably closer to 12 hours.
Anyone with a Holiday Tree and received presents should now have a tonne of Fuel refills to use.
And everyone with a Tractor, Harvester, or Seeder will get free Fuel Refills starting tomorrow, for one week.
Thus, there is absolutely no reason to spend money, real or virtual, on Fuel in Farmville. Anyone that does so is either crazy, delusional, insane, a fool, or ADHD.:) All it takes is time. And if you block your character in, so that it can't move around the screen, then you don't even need a tractor.
And how much of it is automated and remotely accessible.
For example, our IT department has 15 people: 1 Director 1 Manager of Systems Admin 1 Manager of App Devel 1 WAN Specialist 1 Programmer 1 Helpdesk 4 High School Techs (each looks after 2 or 3 schools) 2 Elem School Techs (each looks after 15 schools) 1 Electrician 1 Hardware Tech 1 Videoconferencing Tech
We support over 5000 computers, over 100 servers, in about 70 buildings. 13,000 student accounts, and 1,600 staff accounts (at the district level, another ~1,600 at the school level).
Between the WAN, programmer, and helpdesk, we remotely support 90% of the computers and all of the servers, since just about all of the servers are Linux or FreeBSD, and almost all of the computers are diskless Linux stations booting off the network. Pretty much everything is automated, and the individual computers have been reduced to appliances (no harddrive, no cd-rom, all onboard video/sound). When one breaks, we just swap in a new one, update the DHCP config, and they're off. Less than 5 minute turn around.
We're actually looking at expanding the helpdesk and videoconf side of things, as the school techs are having less and less to do.
If you can centralise the management, you can do with fewer staff. If you have to touch each individual workstation for updates or installs, then you will need more staff.
And then there are the phones that do both, like my Sony Ericsson w580i, my wife's Nokia ExpressMusic, the Nokia phones we had before that, and my original Panasonic TX220. They have local clocks, so the time stays current when the phone is off, when out of cell service, and when in "airplane mode" where the cell radio is off. They also keep the local clock sync'd to the network clock. And will update the time when you cross timezones (they can all be configured to update the time automatically, or alert you to give you the option of updating or not).
Granted, these (except the Panasonic, which was TDMA) are all GSM phones on Rogers in Canada. Maybe GSM really is better? Maybe Rogers does have the most reliable network? Maybe we just select better phones?
Or, release the pilot (or pilot and a couple episodes) for free, and offer the rest of the season for $0.50 an episode. Put a simple "This episode sponsored by BigCompanyX" at the beginning of the show, and run it without commercials. Good shows would quickly become self-supporting. Bad shows would be dropped due to lack of funding. And people could watch what they want, when they want.
Video-on-demand is where it is at. But it's still too cumbersome and expensive.
Create a backup server that does remote backups of hundreds of Linux and Windows servers and what do you get? Multiple copies of identical OS system files all taking up space. Add dedupe and you can cut the storage requirements by a whole lot.
Create a VM host server running multiple VMs using the same guest OS and what do you get? Multiple copies of identical OS systems files all taking up space. Add dedupe and you can cut the storage requirements by a whole lot.
There are other situations where you end up with lots of identical files/blocks on a storage pool. Dedupe may not be useful on a single OS system, but that doesn't make it useless.
Or, use ZFS to create a SAN for your other servers. Just create a ZVol, and share it out via iSCSI. On Solaris, it's as simple as setting shareiscsi for the dataset. On FreeBSD, you have to install an iSCSI target (there are a handful available in the ports tree) and configure it to share out the ZVol.
Do a google search sometime for KDE and kiosk. It's very easy to lock down a desktop system running KDE. We use it in the local school system quite successfully.
The difference is that ZFS resilver only rebuilds data that existed on the failed drive. Normal hardware RAID rebuild touches every sector of the disk.
Thus, a ZFS rebuild of a 50% full disk will only touch 50% of the disk. A rebuild of a normal array would touch 100% of the disk.
Wait until your ZFS array is at 80% full and try to resilver a failed drive.;)
And when you get into TB-sized arrays, rebuilds take a lot longer than on GB-sized arrays.
This is where CompactFlash-to-SATA adapters come in handy. Especially when they are small enough that you can put two into the case, and RAID1 them for the boot drive. 4 GB is plenty for a boot drive and OS install.
Or, if you're really on a budget, grab a pair of 2 or 4 GB USB sticks, mirror them together, and boot off those.
Having a non-redundant boot drive is just ridiculous in a storage box like that.
We did something similar using off-the-shelf hardware, FreeBSD, and ZFS. Ours came out to just under $10,000 CDN, but we used 3Ware RAID controllers instead of generic SATA controllers, Tyan server-class motherboards, server-grade redundant/modular PSU, and Intel multi-port gigabit NICs.
It's still a lot less expensive than some of the backup systems I've seen school districts "convinced" to use.
Drive from the Canadian border, down through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, etc on the way South to Nevada, and you'll find lots of 83 and 85 octane gas pumps. We thought we were lucky, hitting all the really cheap gas prices... until I actually looked at the pumps and realised why the prices were so low. 87 and 89 octane gas at those stations were quite a bit more expensive.
The first Matrix movie was superb. I remember literally leaping out of my seat in the theater while watching it. It was incredible. The second movie suggested some fantastic things but really hinged on the third movie to determine whether it was great or not - were those hinted elements executed properly or were those hints just me reading into things? And the third movie sucked so hard that it actually dragged down the first movie's greatness while simultaneously revealing just how terrible the second movie really was. In the second movie, they hinted at and suggested some elements which would have created a wonderful lore for the franchise but their complete lack of ability to craft a story (it's now widely known that the first movie's plot was actually stolen from another author, Sophia Stewart) and their inability to subtly finesse a plot showed through in glaring detail when the third movie came out. Their special effects and fight sequences have had a profound impact on action/sci-fi movies since but, as storytellers, they are enormously subpar, to say the least.
I agree. The way the first movie ended ("Look, I can stop bullets inside the Matrix") and the way the second movie ended ("Look, I can stop the squid in the real wolrd") set things up so nicely for a Matrix-inside-the-Matrix-inside-the-Matrix, with multiple layers of false reality that would shine a new light on the whole "blue pill/red pill" scene (remember Morpheus' whole speech about the mind needing to choose?). Unfortunately, the third movie threw all that away for a stupid "sacrifice the Messiah to save mankind" story-line. What a let down.
Great special effects are never enough to cover for a poor storyline.:(
The more correct (and formal) usage would be to use the abbreviations by themselves, but to expand them the first time they are used. It's not a "PIN number" or "PIN code" it's just a "PIN". It's not "an ATM machine", it's just "an ATM".
No, but one could use the much simpler "ATM" and "PIN". Everyone knows the former is a machine, and the latter is a number. To be most correct, and formal, one could even expand the abbreviation the first time it is used.
What you do know is that when you read a block of data back from the disk, that block is what was supposed to be written to the disk.
If a file that is never read is corrupted somehow, then you will only discover that corruption when you read the file.
With ZFS, you can do a manual zpool scrub at any time, and it will go through all the data on the disk(s), check the file/metadata/block checksums, and repair any corrupted blocks using redundant data from elsewhere in the pool. This is a low-priority task that can run in the background, although running it at a time when there is no other I/O will allow it to complete quicker.
Thus, you can check for corrupted data in files that aren't being used, or haven't been used in a long time, or that won't be used for a very long time. No need to wait.
No. I was alluding to GP's failure to make a good argument for supporting ZFS, using sound reasoning. I'm saying the truth of the premises doesn't imply the truth of the consequent.
ZFS on supported hardware is actually superior to ext4 on certain technical merits; primarily data integrity (checksumming), random write performance, and read performance (when massive amounts of RAM are available), and more advanced features (snapshots).
On the other hand, ext4 works on 32-bit processors (ZFS is only recommended to be used on 64-bit procs) with small amounts of RAM available, less than a GB; the minimum amount of RAM one should use ZFS with is 2gb, and 4gb or more is strongly recommended, above and beyond any RAM required by apps running on the machine.
ZFS can be used on low-memory, 32-bit machines. Or, at least, the ZFS support in FreeBSD works quite well on 32-bit machines with as little as 768 MB of RAM. There are a lot of FreeBSD users with laptops using ZFS, as well as a lot of test boxes setup with
Yes, ZFS works best on 64-bit systems with 4+ GB of RAM, but that's mainly due to the aggressive caching that ZFS does. The more RAM you have, the more caching it does, and the faster things are.
But that doesn't mean that it can't be tuned to work in RAM-constrained situations.
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Original GameBoy and GameBoy Pocket were the same hardware in different packages, but they played the same games. If you had a GameBoy, you didn't need a GBP.
GameBoy Color added a faster CPU, but GBC games were still playable on GB and GBP, and all the old non-color games were playable on the GBC. If you had a GB or a GBP, you didn't need a GBC.
The GBA was the first one that offered something really new, requiring a new purchase. But it was still backwards compatible with the GB/GBP/GBC. If you had a GB/GBP/GBC, you could get a GBA and still keep playing all your old games.
The GBA Slim (or whatever that ugly folding brick thing was called) was the same hardware as the GBA but in a different package. If you had a GBA, you didn't need a GBAS.
The DS is the only line where they've changed things enough that you almost have to have all the different variations. The original DS played GBA games. The DSi doesn't. The DS Lite is the same as the DS, and the DSi XL is the same as the DSi.
IOW, you only need 1 version from each line. Just because there are dozens of variations of the hardware in each line doesn't mean you have to get each one in order to keep playing your games. A single GB/GBP/GBC, a single GBA/GBAS/GBAM, a single DS/DSL/DSi.
The Wii comes with 1 wiimote and 1 nunchuk. And you can now buy Wiimote+MotionPlus in one box, for less than buying a Wiimote and a MotionPlus separately. The total price is still below $300 CDN for everything you need for 2 players.
Sit on a bus, subway, train, back seat for 20-60 minutes, and you'll discover just how convenient it is having mobile browsing, or video, or games, or whatever in your pocket.
Fuel refills automatically, within 24 hours, probably closer to 12 hours.
Anyone with a Holiday Tree and received presents should now have a tonne of Fuel refills to use.
And everyone with a Tractor, Harvester, or Seeder will get free Fuel Refills starting tomorrow, for one week.
Thus, there is absolutely no reason to spend money, real or virtual, on Fuel in Farmville. Anyone that does so is either crazy, delusional, insane, a fool, or ADHD. :) All it takes is time. And if you block your character in, so that it can't move around the screen, then you don't even need a tractor.
And how much of it is automated and remotely accessible.
For example, our IT department has 15 people:
1 Director
1 Manager of Systems Admin
1 Manager of App Devel
1 WAN Specialist
1 Programmer
1 Helpdesk
4 High School Techs (each looks after 2 or 3 schools)
2 Elem School Techs (each looks after 15 schools)
1 Electrician
1 Hardware Tech
1 Videoconferencing Tech
We support over 5000 computers, over 100 servers, in about 70 buildings. 13,000 student accounts, and 1,600 staff accounts (at the district level, another ~1,600 at the school level).
Between the WAN, programmer, and helpdesk, we remotely support 90% of the computers and all of the servers, since just about all of the servers are Linux or FreeBSD, and almost all of the computers are diskless Linux stations booting off the network. Pretty much everything is automated, and the individual computers have been reduced to appliances (no harddrive, no cd-rom, all onboard video/sound). When one breaks, we just swap in a new one, update the DHCP config, and they're off. Less than 5 minute turn around.
We're actually looking at expanding the helpdesk and videoconf side of things, as the school techs are having less and less to do.
If you can centralise the management, you can do with fewer staff. If you have to touch each individual workstation for updates or installs, then you will need more staff.
Most of Google's local/native apps were not developed in house, and are the result of company acquisitions. For example, Picassa.
And then there are the phones that do both, like my Sony Ericsson w580i, my wife's Nokia ExpressMusic, the Nokia phones we had before that, and my original Panasonic TX220. They have local clocks, so the time stays current when the phone is off, when out of cell service, and when in "airplane mode" where the cell radio is off. They also keep the local clock sync'd to the network clock. And will update the time when you cross timezones (they can all be configured to update the time automatically, or alert you to give you the option of updating or not).
Granted, these (except the Panasonic, which was TDMA) are all GSM phones on Rogers in Canada. Maybe GSM really is better? Maybe Rogers does have the most reliable network? Maybe we just select better phones?
Or, release the pilot (or pilot and a couple episodes) for free, and offer the rest of the season for $0.50 an episode. Put a simple "This episode sponsored by BigCompanyX" at the beginning of the show, and run it without commercials. Good shows would quickly become self-supporting. Bad shows would be dropped due to lack of funding. And people could watch what they want, when they want.
Video-on-demand is where it is at. But it's still too cumbersome and expensive.
Create a backup server that does remote backups of hundreds of Linux and Windows servers and what do you get? Multiple copies of identical OS system files all taking up space. Add dedupe and you can cut the storage requirements by a whole lot.
Create a VM host server running multiple VMs using the same guest OS and what do you get? Multiple copies of identical OS systems files all taking up space. Add dedupe and you can cut the storage requirements by a whole lot.
There are other situations where you end up with lots of identical files/blocks on a storage pool. Dedupe may not be useful on a single OS system, but that doesn't make it useless.
Or, use ZFS to create a SAN for your other servers. Just create a ZVol, and share it out via iSCSI. On Solaris, it's as simple as setting shareiscsi for the dataset. On FreeBSD, you have to install an iSCSI target (there are a handful available in the ports tree) and configure it to share out the ZVol.
Do a google search sometime for KDE and kiosk. It's very easy to lock down a desktop system running KDE. We use it in the local school system quite successfully.
The difference is that ZFS resilver only rebuilds data that existed on the failed drive. Normal hardware RAID rebuild touches every sector of the disk.
Thus, a ZFS rebuild of a 50% full disk will only touch 50% of the disk. A rebuild of a normal array would touch 100% of the disk.
Wait until your ZFS array is at 80% full and try to resilver a failed drive. ;)
And when you get into TB-sized arrays, rebuilds take a lot longer than on GB-sized arrays.
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=3689&highlight=zfs+remote+backup
And shortly, NetBSD. They've started porting it, and have it almost usable (for testing).
LVM snapshots and ZFS snapshots are nothing alike, and can't be compared except in that they have the same name.
Nope, it's in there:
Because it's designed in such a way that mainline would never be interested
in adopting it, which is how I like it.
This is where CompactFlash-to-SATA adapters come in handy. Especially when they are small enough that you can put two into the case, and RAID1 them for the boot drive. 4 GB is plenty for a boot drive and OS install.
Or, if you're really on a budget, grab a pair of 2 or 4 GB USB sticks, mirror them together, and boot off those.
Having a non-redundant boot drive is just ridiculous in a storage box like that.
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=3689
We did something similar using off-the-shelf hardware, FreeBSD, and ZFS. Ours came out to just under $10,000 CDN, but we used 3Ware RAID controllers instead of generic SATA controllers, Tyan server-class motherboards, server-grade redundant/modular PSU, and Intel multi-port gigabit NICs.
It's still a lot less expensive than some of the backup systems I've seen school districts "convinced" to use.
Drive from the Canadian border, down through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, etc on the way South to Nevada, and you'll find lots of 83 and 85 octane gas pumps. We thought we were lucky, hitting all the really cheap gas prices ... until I actually looked at the pumps and realised why the prices were so low. 87 and 89 octane gas at those stations were quite a bit more expensive.
Don't know anything about mpg, as I am used to Kilometers per liter :-P. (near 19 on the Hyundai and 16 on the Daewoo)
Yeah, cause it's so hard to convert from kpl to mpg. :) 19 * 3.6 / 1.6 = 42.75 mpg (3.6 L/g and 1.6 km/mi)
The first Matrix movie was superb. I remember literally leaping out of my seat in the theater while watching it. It was incredible. The second movie suggested some fantastic things but really hinged on the third movie to determine whether it was great or not - were those hinted elements executed properly or were those hints just me reading into things? And the third movie sucked so hard that it actually dragged down the first movie's greatness while simultaneously revealing just how terrible the second movie really was. In the second movie, they hinted at and suggested some elements which would have created a wonderful lore for the franchise but their complete lack of ability to craft a story (it's now widely known that the first movie's plot was actually stolen from another author, Sophia Stewart) and their inability to subtly finesse a plot showed through in glaring detail when the third movie came out. Their special effects and fight sequences have had a profound impact on action/sci-fi movies since but, as storytellers, they are enormously subpar, to say the least.
I agree. The way the first movie ended ("Look, I can stop bullets inside the Matrix") and the way the second movie ended ("Look, I can stop the squid in the real wolrd") set things up so nicely for a Matrix-inside-the-Matrix-inside-the-Matrix, with multiple layers of false reality that would shine a new light on the whole "blue pill/red pill" scene (remember Morpheus' whole speech about the mind needing to choose?). Unfortunately, the third movie threw all that away for a stupid "sacrifice the Messiah to save mankind" story-line. What a let down.
Great special effects are never enough to cover for a poor storyline. :(
The more correct (and formal) usage would be to use the abbreviations by themselves, but to expand them the first time they are used. It's not a "PIN number" or "PIN code" it's just a "PIN". It's not "an ATM machine", it's just "an ATM".
No, but one could use the much simpler "ATM" and "PIN". Everyone knows the former is a machine, and the latter is a number. To be most correct, and formal, one could even expand the abbreviation the first time it is used.
What you do know is that when you read a block of data back from the disk, that block is what was supposed to be written to the disk.
If a file that is never read is corrupted somehow, then you will only discover that corruption when you read the file.
With ZFS, you can do a manual zpool scrub at any time, and it will go through all the data on the disk(s), check the file/metadata/block checksums, and repair any corrupted blocks using redundant data from elsewhere in the pool. This is a low-priority task that can run in the background, although running it at a time when there is no other I/O will allow it to complete quicker.
Thus, you can check for corrupted data in files that aren't being used, or haven't been used in a long time, or that won't be used for a very long time. No need to wait.
No. I was alluding to GP's failure to make a good argument for supporting ZFS, using sound reasoning. I'm saying the truth of the premises doesn't imply the truth of the consequent.
ZFS on supported hardware is actually superior to ext4 on certain technical merits; primarily data integrity (checksumming), random write performance, and read performance (when massive amounts of RAM are available), and more advanced features (snapshots).
On the other hand, ext4 works on 32-bit processors (ZFS is only recommended to be used on 64-bit procs) with small amounts of RAM available, less than a GB; the minimum amount of RAM one should use ZFS with is 2gb, and 4gb or more is strongly recommended, above and beyond any RAM required by apps running on the machine.
ZFS can be used on low-memory, 32-bit machines. Or, at least, the ZFS support in FreeBSD works quite well on 32-bit machines with as little as 768 MB of RAM. There are a lot of FreeBSD users with laptops using ZFS, as well as a lot of test boxes setup with
Yes, ZFS works best on 64-bit systems with 4+ GB of RAM, but that's mainly due to the aggressive caching that ZFS does. The more RAM you have, the more caching it does, and the faster things are.
But that doesn't mean that it can't be tuned to work in RAM-constrained situations.