The movie theatres participating in the rollout are apparently required to install hand-held "Acceptance keypads" that simply have an "I Agree" and "I Disagree" button.
Upon the commencement of the film, a EULA is slowly scrolled along the theatre's screen and after finished, the patrons are required to press "I Agree" or "I Disagree" on the keypad.
Reports of early beta testers pressing "I Disagree" have resulted in a 007-style ejection seat which launches the moviegoer in a hole in the theatre's roof.
When lawmakers actually make laws about things they understand.
I mean, I know nothing about deep-sea diving. So I guess I'll make a law saying it's illegal to have diving watches with you because they might break underwater and pollute the water.
There was something simliar with smoking hardware that happened where I work--
We had a developer who was coding on a Dell Latitude w/ Dell's huge (and expandable) C/Dock-II. For those who don't know what that is, it's basically an expandable dock with which you can add PCI cards, SCSI, etc..
Anyway, the dock started smoking one day during his coding session. I just happened to be walking by and quickly unplugged it from the wall. Apparently a small capacitor inside the dock exploded and got all over everything, causing it to smoke.
We told the developer that because his code was so ineffecient, his compile had melted the dock.
I'm really getting tired of the whole Mac vs. PC war being based on speed.
I'm not really sure how many times it has to be said, but a great number of Mac users don't use Macs because they're faster. In fact, let me say it again:
It's not about speed
I really can't believe that with the Slashdot community--being so "in tune" with corporate ploys and runaway marketing tactics--still fall for the MHz propaganda, and the speed benchmarks that accompany it.
Since when is the most important thing about a computer the speed? Granted, if you're playing BitchBlaster 2023 that requires a GeForce9000 Mx2+3.144 video card, maybe.
But I'm not sure if people noticed: Most Mac people aren't die-hard gamers. Macs aren't great gaming platforms anyway. They're for people that do work with their computers and rely on them.
These people care not about the absolute speed of their Mac, rather, they care that it works every time that it is booted and that the end-user experience is much more pleasant than someone using something like Windows XP.
So please, people of Slashdot--I know you have above average intelligence:
Actually, I'm really intrigued about the possiblity of having a "strong" shell on Windows. It's one of the main reasons I can't find myself using Windows for much.
Usually, if I had to...I just installed Cygwin and used it from there. However, the interaction between the actual Windows environment and Cygwin was a little cumbersome--but usable. I've written some crazy shell scripts using Cygwin, but trying to run a Windows command using variables from the script can be tricky, for example.
However this opens up some other nice possibilities for a Windows environment. If the shell they create is complete enough, you may not even need stupid "remote control" apps, instead you could just SSH into the box and take care of things.
On the other hand, I guess it just makes Windows easier to crack too;)
Smaller isn't always better either. If you need a multi terabyte array, and rotational latency isn't too critical (near-line storage of massive files), then ATA RAID is perfect for you. SCSI has a place, and that place is in servers with massive amounts of transactions of relatively small files.
Which is what we have. One of our EMC Symmetrix boxes contains nearly 6TB raw space. I suppose you're correct, though...if you're running an archive box or something I could see where this would be beneficial. Running something like that for a database server would be suicide though.
Have you tried hardware ATA RAID like 3ware? Anything else is apples and oranges really, since those SCSI controllers have an i960 or similar to offload the XOR operations of RAID5, like 3ware does for ATA. External ATA boxes with SCSI or FC interfaces in the back of them are also excellent choices when you have a laden host CPU.
Actually, I have in a small workgroup-class box. I was really impressed with the performance, but I have reservations about performance at sustained levels. I can't see ATA-100 IDE disks realistically competing with Ultra-320 disks. Instead of trying to pinch pennies and hope that it would satisfy the requirements, we decided to go with what works.
Maxtor MaxLine II disks will be rated with the same MTBF as their SCSI disks, and are specifically designed for high end enterprise storage. ATA is going to be the standard in enterprise storage, don't miss the boat because your information about ATA is 5 years out of date. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, things have changed with ATA.
I have seen those as well, but real field experience has told me otherwise. There's just not enough quality built into IDE disks to realistically call them server-class material. I have a few old compaq pentium class machines pushing 7 years old that have been running non-stop for all 7 years and not dropped a disk. I've yet to see a IDE disk pull that off.
I do agree with you though, in a small environment where absolute 100% uptime is critical IDE may be an affordable tradeoff. Personally, in our environment it wouldn't make the cut.
The SCSI vs. IDE difference.
on
IDE RAID Examined
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've been working on x86-based servers a long, long time.
There are many reasons one should choose SCSI over IDE, but I want to counter a few of the arguments I've read through the many messages here:
Argument #1: SCSI can have 15 devices per bus, but why buy more smaller and more expensive SCSI drives instead of getting fewer large IDE drives?
Answer: Bigger isn't always better. On large RAID systems (real servers, here people...not Mp3 servers) one of the concepts of RAID5 is to spread out the data among as many drive spindles as possible. This keeps each drive's load level under control, and eliminates hot-spots on individual disks. If you sit down with any SAN vendor, like EMC, they will tell you the same thing.
Argument #2 Sustained IDE Raid performance can equal SCSI This is absolutely incorrect. This may be true on a server with no CPU load. Try this again on a server running SQL and averaging 85% load. You will NOT see the same performance out of an IDE disk layer. There is simply too much CPU overhead on an IDE-based RAID system for heavy-load systems. The idea behind a SCSI controller is that it is free of the system's CPU as a bottleneck. The money saved on non-SCSI hardware will instead need to be spent on faster CPUs.
Argument #3 IDE Disks are just as reliable as SCSI Again, completely false. You get what you pay for. SCSI disks have logic on each disk to control the operations OF that disk. In a RAID array, you want each disk to be completely independant of the others. IDE RAID requires the controller to do all the monitoring (if there is any) of each disk, lowering performance of its primary function--controlling disk I/O. Anyone who has worked on a Compaq server and used Insight Manager will be able to see the advantages of SCSI disks directly. SCSI disks will be more reliable since they are built to be more reliable. IDE disks are meant for cheap deployment on cheap systems.
I'm stating this at a very high-level perspective, but I know Samba is an actual component of OS X Server, and it is known to compile and install on OS X perfectly.
So why not use Samba for integration to Active Directory? I'm not perfectly clear on the details of doing so, but I'm pretty sure you can use Kerberos to hook up to an AD domain, and go from there.
Any reason not to try? After all, Unix folk are generally pretty adamant about not reinventing the wheel:)
We use WebLogic 6.1 heavily on our production website.
We inherited the platform from another development team that was married to MS, and hence put WebLogic on all Win2k servers. On this platform, I've found WebLogic to be stable--but quirky. Getting things tweaked to your liking can be a little strenuous.
We're toying with the Linux version of Weblogic, the biggest plus being that it forces our developers to write code that drops to log files (right now they insist on using Weblogic running in DOS boxes interactively on the desktop(!!!) so they can monitor it realtime).
Early testing is going well, hopefully having a book like this will make the transition a bit easier. I like BEA for supporting the Linux platform, though their support for problems is a little touch 'n go.
I literally just walked out of a meeting were a few of the business-zombies had just quoted "Microsoft has us backed into a corner".
The situation is that we have just divorced our parent company, and all of our MS site licensing went with it...so now we're left with 1000 or so desktop machines with Windows 2000 Pro on them, and Bill & Co. sending us a representative next week to investigate & give us a bill.
During one of their rambles in the meeting, one of the lead "licensing" people actually said, "...and we can't do Linux on the desktop". (We've already successfully implemented Linux in replacment of several Windows servers).
When I asked why (our users run the basic Office apps, with standard email (no Exchange), and all their work is done through a telnet app to an HP-UX server)... no one could give a single reason other than "everyone else uses Windows".
Microsoft has won on that battlefield. Unless technically-inclined people can make it into upper management, MS will win over customers by simply giving false claims of security, lower TOC, and pretty color PowerPoint slides.
It seems that in just about any other industry, a monopoly would be declared foul by business-savvy execs. For some reason, a monopoly in software gives a false sense of security to these people.
Is it fear of the unknown? Is microsoft like the reassuring parent after they've been told a scary ghost story? I'm still trying to figure that out.
Well, wouldn't that be considered typical of any application attempting to run with 10% of the CPU's attention?
Mine is admittedly slow under load as well (running Gentoo = lots of background compiling), but I've never really considered it any slower than expected under those conditions.
The machine I'm working on is a P-III 800, running Win2K.. It's got a buttload of RAM though, so that could have something to do with it.
Comparably, the Windows UI for Mozz seems faster than the Linux one...but that could have everything to do with my laptop running Linux and having a much crappier video card.:)
I haven't really noticed a significant UI slowness in my installs. I'm using the default theme (if it could be called that)... the one that looks like old Netscape 4.x
Will it still be fast enough to overcome the final gripe about Mozilla, namely that it's just too slow?"
Slow at what?
I agree that under Linux mozilla takes forever to come up.
Under OS X its worse.
But under Windows, if allowed to load itself into memory pre-launch (which IE does. Only fair to let Mozilla do it as well) it is as fast or faster than IE.
But as far as rendering, mozilla on my computers tends to be quicker than other browsers I've tried. Under OS X, mozilla (once its loaded;) just runs circles around IE. On Windows, it's just about the same...maybe only slightly slower. And on linux...well, I don't use anything else!
Unless I was lied to, I was supposed to be grandfathered from the original provider's (Flash.net) contract that didn't have a set duration of service. According to that contract I needed to give 30 days (which I did).
I was a completely happy customer with Speakeasy.net DSL in my old apartment. Until I moved...
For some reason Speakeasy.net just couldn't figure out how to cancel my service. It took them nearly 5 months to figure it out and it cost me quite a bit of $$ in the meantime.
Overall, I was darn happy with the service. It never had connectivity problems.
The only suggestion I can make is: 1) Don't move. and 2) Don't cancel.
1) *Your* morals are not based on... modern religions. Please don't say the same for me and many others.
Bah. I say modern religions just took the obvious and were first to write them down.
I'm not going to go around killing everyone. Or stealing stuff. Unless i'm crazy. But then it wouldn't matter anyway.
And I'm not going around sleeping with my neighbor's wife. That commandment is my favorite. Canadian geese don't need Christianity to follow that one--and they're better at it! More Christians cheat on their mates than geese do.
Silly humans. And here we thought we were being creative.
You cannot possibly know that, just as I cannot possibly know that there is an afterlife.
Just as you cannot possibly disprove anything that's not based on fact. uhh...fact?
I believe that "reality" is more than what we observe. Modern physics leans toward this opinion as well. Do disbelieve everything that cannot be seen is not defensible.
I'm all for that one. But I don't think it's an excuse to get lazy stop looking.
A long time ago, people thought the world was flat. Birds knew otherwise, since they could fly and see from the horizon that the place was round. But people were so tied up believing it was flat they gave up without figuring out that building something real tall would prove them wrong, until some guy just sailed around the entire planet and didn't fall off.
Point being, no one could really prove the world was round until we got in space and saw it.
Now I'm just waiting for someone to get above God and do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
In related news...
The movie theatres participating in the rollout are apparently required to install hand-held "Acceptance keypads" that simply have an "I Agree" and "I Disagree" button.
Upon the commencement of the film, a EULA is slowly scrolled along the theatre's screen and after finished, the patrons are required to press "I Agree" or "I Disagree" on the keypad.
Reports of early beta testers pressing "I Disagree" have resulted in a 007-style ejection seat which launches the moviegoer in a hole in the theatre's roof.
When lawmakers actually make laws about things they understand.
I mean, I know nothing about deep-sea diving. So I guess I'll make a law saying it's illegal to have diving watches with you because they might break underwater and pollute the water.
There was something simliar with smoking hardware that happened where I work--
We had a developer who was coding on a Dell Latitude w/ Dell's huge (and expandable) C/Dock-II. For those who don't know what that is, it's basically an expandable dock with which you can add PCI cards, SCSI, etc..
Anyway, the dock started smoking one day during his coding session. I just happened to be walking by and quickly unplugged it from the wall. Apparently a small capacitor inside the dock exploded and got all over everything, causing it to smoke.
We told the developer that because his code was so ineffecient, his compile had melted the dock.
He believed us! har har...
I'm really getting tired of the whole Mac vs. PC war being based on speed.
I'm not really sure how many times it has to be said, but a great number of Mac users don't use Macs because they're faster. In fact, let me say it again:
It's not about speed
I really can't believe that with the Slashdot community--being so "in tune" with corporate ploys and runaway marketing tactics--still fall for the MHz propaganda, and the speed benchmarks that accompany it.
Since when is the most important thing about a computer the speed? Granted, if you're playing BitchBlaster 2023 that requires a GeForce9000 Mx2+3.144 video card, maybe.
But I'm not sure if people noticed: Most Mac people aren't die-hard gamers. Macs aren't great gaming platforms anyway. They're for people that do work with their computers and rely on them.
These people care not about the absolute speed of their Mac, rather, they care that it works every time that it is booted and that the end-user experience is much more pleasant than someone using something like Windows XP.
So please, people of Slashdot--I know you have above average intelligence:
It's not about speed.
Actually, I'm really intrigued about the possiblity of having a "strong" shell on Windows. It's one of the main reasons I can't find myself using Windows for much.
;)
Usually, if I had to...I just installed Cygwin and used it from there. However, the interaction between the actual Windows environment and Cygwin was a little cumbersome--but usable. I've written some crazy shell scripts using Cygwin, but trying to run a Windows command using variables from the script can be tricky, for example.
However this opens up some other nice possibilities for a Windows environment. If the shell they create is complete enough, you may not even need stupid "remote control" apps, instead you could just SSH into the box and take care of things.
On the other hand, I guess it just makes Windows easier to crack too
Smaller isn't always better either. If you need a multi terabyte array, and rotational latency isn't too critical (near-line storage of massive files), then ATA RAID is perfect for you. SCSI has a place, and that place is in servers with massive amounts of transactions of relatively small files.
Which is what we have. One of our EMC Symmetrix boxes contains nearly 6TB raw space. I suppose you're correct, though...if you're running an archive box or something I could see where this would be beneficial. Running something like that for a database server would be suicide though.
Have you tried hardware ATA RAID like 3ware? Anything else is apples and oranges really, since those SCSI controllers have an i960 or similar to offload the XOR operations of RAID5, like 3ware does for ATA. External ATA boxes with SCSI or FC interfaces in the back of them are also excellent choices when you have a laden host CPU.
Actually, I have in a small workgroup-class box. I was really impressed with the performance, but I have reservations about performance at sustained levels. I can't see ATA-100 IDE disks realistically competing with Ultra-320 disks. Instead of trying to pinch pennies and hope that it would satisfy the requirements, we decided to go with what works.
Maxtor MaxLine II disks will be rated with the same MTBF as their SCSI disks, and are specifically designed for high end enterprise storage. ATA is going to be the standard in enterprise storage, don't miss the boat because your information about ATA is 5 years out of date. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, things have changed with ATA.
I have seen those as well, but real field experience has told me otherwise. There's just not enough quality built into IDE disks to realistically call them server-class material. I have a few old compaq pentium class machines pushing 7 years old that have been running non-stop for all 7 years and not dropped a disk. I've yet to see a IDE disk pull that off.
I do agree with you though, in a small environment where absolute 100% uptime is critical IDE may be an affordable tradeoff. Personally, in our environment it wouldn't make the cut.
I've been working on x86-based servers a long, long time.
:-)
There are many reasons one should choose SCSI over IDE, but I want to counter a few of the arguments I've read through the many messages here:
Argument #1:
SCSI can have 15 devices per bus, but why buy more smaller and more expensive SCSI drives instead of getting fewer large IDE drives?
Answer: Bigger isn't always better. On large RAID systems (real servers, here people...not Mp3 servers) one of the concepts of RAID5 is to spread out the data among as many drive spindles as possible. This keeps each drive's load level under control, and eliminates hot-spots on individual disks. If you sit down with any SAN vendor, like EMC, they will tell you the same thing.
Argument #2
Sustained IDE Raid performance can equal SCSI
This is absolutely incorrect. This may be true on a server with no CPU load. Try this again on a server running SQL and averaging 85% load. You will NOT see the same performance out of an IDE disk layer. There is simply too much CPU overhead on an IDE-based RAID system for heavy-load systems. The idea behind a SCSI controller is that it is free of the system's CPU as a bottleneck. The money saved on non-SCSI hardware will instead need to be spent on faster CPUs.
Argument #3
IDE Disks are just as reliable as SCSI
Again, completely false. You get what you pay for. SCSI disks have logic on each disk to control the operations OF that disk. In a RAID array, you want each disk to be completely independant of the others. IDE RAID requires the controller to do all the monitoring (if there is any) of each disk, lowering performance of its primary function--controlling disk I/O. Anyone who has worked on a Compaq server and used Insight Manager will be able to see the advantages of SCSI disks directly. SCSI disks will be more reliable since they are built to be more reliable. IDE disks are meant for cheap deployment on cheap systems.
Thank you, have a nice day
I'm stating this at a very high-level perspective, but I know Samba is an actual component of OS X Server, and it is known to compile and install on OS X perfectly.
:)
So why not use Samba for integration to Active Directory? I'm not perfectly clear on the details of doing so, but I'm pretty sure you can use Kerberos to hook up to an AD domain, and go from there.
Any reason not to try? After all, Unix folk are generally pretty adamant about not reinventing the wheel
A lot of good that does from keeping someone from typing 'rm -rf *'. :)
Yea, I'm all for that... 'cept the Deveopers are lazy and they don't drop stuff to log files (I'm serious!)
They're square, have a C:\ prompt in there.
:)
I call the DOS boxes.
Fine, fine, "Command Prompt" Windows. Same diff.
We use WebLogic 6.1 heavily on our production website.
We inherited the platform from another development team that was married to MS, and hence put WebLogic on all Win2k servers. On this platform, I've found WebLogic to be stable--but quirky. Getting things tweaked to your liking can be a little strenuous.
We're toying with the Linux version of Weblogic, the biggest plus being that it forces our developers to write code that drops to log files (right now they insist on using Weblogic running in DOS boxes interactively on the desktop(!!!) so they can monitor it realtime).
Early testing is going well, hopefully having a book like this will make the transition a bit easier. I like BEA for supporting the Linux platform, though their support for problems is a little touch 'n go.
I could, but I'm not responsible for the desktop end of things...just the back end stuff.
Upper management where I work has the common pointy-finger symptoms of many compaines. They want someone to blame when something goes wrong.
I have mentioned companies in my area that do such things (linuxbox, for one)...
But on a desktop level things get hairy since we don't have a support staff to handle 500 calls/day for 1000 linux desktops.
Absolutely. I proudly claim my usage of OpenOffice on my laptop, and push it whenever the oppurtunity presents itself (no pun intended ;).
You're very right about this.
I literally just walked out of a meeting were a few of the business-zombies had just quoted "Microsoft has us backed into a corner".
The situation is that we have just divorced our parent company, and all of our MS site licensing went with it...so now we're left with 1000 or so desktop machines with Windows 2000 Pro on them, and Bill & Co. sending us a representative next week to investigate & give us a bill.
During one of their rambles in the meeting, one of the lead "licensing" people actually said, "...and we can't do Linux on the desktop". (We've already successfully implemented Linux in replacment of several Windows servers).
When I asked why (our users run the basic Office apps, with standard email (no Exchange), and all their work is done through a telnet app to an HP-UX server)... no one could give a single reason other than "everyone else uses Windows".
Microsoft has won on that battlefield. Unless technically-inclined people can make it into upper management, MS will win over customers by simply giving false claims of security, lower TOC, and pretty color PowerPoint slides.
It seems that in just about any other industry, a monopoly would be declared foul by business-savvy execs. For some reason, a monopoly in software gives a false sense of security to these people.
Is it fear of the unknown? Is microsoft like the reassuring parent after they've been told a scary ghost story? I'm still trying to figure that out.
Hmmm... Which version of Netscape?
Well, wouldn't that be considered typical of any application attempting to run with 10% of the CPU's attention?
Mine is admittedly slow under load as well (running Gentoo = lots of background compiling), but I've never really considered it any slower than expected under those conditions.
The machine I'm working on is a P-III 800, running Win2K.. It's got a buttload of RAM though, so that could have something to do with it.
:)
Comparably, the Windows UI for Mozz seems faster than the Linux one...but that could have everything to do with my laptop running Linux and having a much crappier video card.
Yea, I've noticed that on larger HTML files it tends to take a while to figure out the whole thing.
I'm sure it'll get faster with time.
I haven't really noticed a significant UI slowness in my installs. I'm using the default theme (if it could be called that)... the one that looks like old Netscape 4.x
Is that what you're using as well?
Could be... I'm using a G4 iMac with 768MB.
After loading it once, it of course loads up very quickly from that point on (I think that has more to do with disk cache though).
Slow at what?
I agree that under Linux mozilla takes forever to come up.
Under OS X its worse.
But under Windows, if allowed to load itself into memory pre-launch (which IE does. Only fair to let Mozilla do it as well) it is as fast or faster than IE.
But as far as rendering, mozilla on my computers tends to be quicker than other browsers I've tried. Under OS X, mozilla (once its loaded
Hmm...
Unless I was lied to, I was supposed to be grandfathered from the original provider's (Flash.net) contract that didn't have a set duration of service. According to that contract I needed to give 30 days (which I did).
Who knows!
I was a completely happy customer with Speakeasy.net DSL in my old apartment. Until I moved...
:)
For some reason Speakeasy.net just couldn't figure out how to cancel my service. It took them nearly 5 months to figure it out and it cost me quite a bit of $$ in the meantime.
Overall, I was darn happy with the service. It never had connectivity problems.
The only suggestion I can make is: 1) Don't move. and 2) Don't cancel.
If you follow those you should be just fine
1) *Your* morals are not based on... modern religions. Please don't say the same for me and many others.
Bah. I say modern religions just took the obvious and were first to write them down.
I'm not going to go around killing everyone. Or stealing stuff. Unless i'm crazy. But then it wouldn't matter anyway.
And I'm not going around sleeping with my neighbor's wife. That commandment is my favorite. Canadian geese don't need Christianity to follow that one--and they're better at it! More Christians cheat on their mates than geese do.
Silly humans. And here we thought we were being creative.
You cannot possibly know that, just as I cannot possibly know that there is an afterlife.
Just as you cannot possibly disprove anything that's not based on fact. uhh...fact?
I believe that "reality" is more than what we observe. Modern physics leans toward this opinion as well. Do disbelieve everything that cannot be seen is not defensible.
I'm all for that one. But I don't think it's an excuse to get lazy stop looking.
A long time ago, people thought the world was flat. Birds knew otherwise, since they could fly and see from the horizon that the place was round. But people were so tied up believing it was flat they gave up without figuring out that building something real tall would prove them wrong, until some guy just sailed around the entire planet and didn't fall off.
Point being, no one could really prove the world was round until we got in space and saw it.
Now I'm just waiting for someone to get above God and do the same.