Once I found the means to locate it, I was amazed at the amount of good stuff available. The corporate marketing carpet bombing had more or less turned me off music completely. Until I found last.fm, and located tons of new stuff for my taste.
Hopefully another decade will see music marketing dead and replaced with social networks. Perhaps then we can get back to actually enjoying music.
Well, to be fair, eMusic has a vastly different model to Napster. For Napster you pay per month for access to their library, while for eMusic you basically buy music for a fixed sum per month. Personally I'm perfectly happy with eMusic (some labels may not be there, but frankly, that's their problem (and I hope their artists dump them and go with some brighter label)), and I'm spending more money on music than I have ever done before.
"Regardless of whether the IT sector is _technically_ in the wrong it's commonly accepted that in this area we work with powers of two."
No it isnt. It may be commonly accepted among some semi computer literate, but most knowledgable techs will know both the debate and understand that the original usage is too far off the rounding errors to be incorrect for some situations by now (not to mention that anyone the least interested in science or history will understand the idiocy of perpetrating the same kind of errors our less educated ancestors did that left half the world on inconsistent measurements that still occasionally result in blown spacecraft).
KB never, ever, meant 1024 bytes. It meant 'close enough to 1024 bytes that you'll get the drift'. Anyone thinking otherwise obviously missed the classes explaining SI prefixes.
I'm sure the HDD manufacturers used the most favourable measurement, but the fact is that they're correct. And even more, for most people it simply doesnt matter, because as long as they all use the same labelling, even the 10% difference they can get if they're misinformed today will not change the decision to buy the particular disk.
Actually, it did. However, Amazon sent in several revised iterations with various unicode variants of letters that sorta look like 'one click', until, eventually, it didnt turn up.
"If the USPTO are not prepared to accept liability"
Nobody in the pro-IP camp is prepared to accept any liability, or even responsibility for the costs of the system.
A first step towards a saner patent system would be to simply recognize patents as delegated taxation rights, and require any patent derived revenues to be accounted for as a separate post within the government budget. Then we'd get the actual cost of the system on paper, and we could get an actual discussion of wether we're getting our money's worth for what it costs the economy. And we could get a frank discussion about wether having civil servants handing out unsupervised taxation rights is a really a good thing.
If we at all want a system for encouraging creative arts, the modern way to do it would be a tax/benefit scheme. Calling it 'copyright' instead and delegating the taxation rights to music industry doesnt make it any less of a tax as far as the cost to the economy is concerned. In fact, the inefficiencies and corruption factors inherent in monopoly rights is likely to cost the economy far more than a plain tax/benefit system. Not to mention that taxes are, unlike intellectual 'property', at least somewhat under democratic control, they are budgeted, and they can be analysed for efficiency (if, for example, the taxpayers money are mostly spent on marketing, obviously we're paying too much, as the funds would be intended to reward creative endeavors).
Of course, the best step to take would be to simply remove any rights from the music industry, allow them to publish and distribute whatever they want and simply slap a 50% tax on revenue (payable to the creative talent for any particular work), effectively replacing the whole 'signing' deal with a standardized compensation for reproduction. Which could then be tuned to the most equitable system that gets us the maximum production.
The charge of 'outrage' may sound weird, but to quote the Washington Post:' Under Alabama law, the rare claim of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."'
But if you really want a complete list of the exact charges brought against Monsanto around the world over the years you should research them yourself. Personally I was just irritated by their patent antics before I did. After I'd read up on them I cannot fathom how a company with consistent behaviour like that is allowed to exist, or how its leadership is allowed to run a business (or even walk free).
Monsanto is pretty much the poster boy for corporate death penalty. The company has been found guilty of bribery, suppression of truth, negligence, wantonness and outrage. It's poisoned people and environment with PCB, sarin, and mustard gas. The company has shown that it will knowingly and willingly expose workers and environment to toxic substances, and it will continue doing it until it's forced to stop through legal action.
This company is one that the world would far better off without.
"If your goal is to have someone to drag into court when it breaks"
And throw even more good money after the bad, you mean. Obtaining actual damages representing fictional costs of downtime is, as far as I know, a mirage. I dont think I've ever heard of a corporate support contract ever actually resulting in any damages (and I suspect that any such contract that would actually be enforcable would cost exactly the max penalty sum plus costs). Usually you'll just get a best-effort out of the vendor, so it pretty much amounts to hand holding.
So the moral of the story is, if it costs you more than you can afford to have downtime, then you'd better design sufficient redundancy into your systems that you dont have it. Or you should have alternate or manual fallbacks to mitigate the damages.
"As silly as it might sound, some people/companys don't really care if their system is fixed fast (or at all) as long as they can recover the costs in court."
Yep, and that's probably part of why courts frown upon punitive damages. If the company really cared about the system they'd do what they could to avoid the problem/resolve it asap. If they come to the court whining about a contract, the issue apparently wasnt that important to them...
"That, or what we'll start seeing is Bittorrent clients that simply start ignoring those packets."
That might be a bit harder to do tho; been a while since I did socket programming, but iirc, the RST gets dealt with on the os layer so the client just gets the connection terminated/EOF'ed. So you'd have to filter the forged packets before they can interact with the IP stack and do what they were intended to do.
Of course, if this becomes common practice (iirc, it's used by China in their firewalls too) we'll probably see a reengineering of the protocol stack in operating systems to add cryptographically signed RST's or something to restore the functionality without leaving it vulnerable to this kind of interference.
You could probably configure a linux firewall to simply drop any RST packets on the port in question tho.
Way to turn the internet into an internot. Blatant protocol disruptions like this should be considered equal to system intrusions, and the responsible people at Comcast prosecuted for sabotage. These people cannot be trusted with important infrastructure, and the company should be prohibited from claiming they in any way connect you to, or provide internet access.
'Note that man-made and "from fossil fuels" are not the same.'
And beyond that, fossil fuel releases are not necessarily man-made. The potential release due to plate tectonic movements resulting in fossil fuel burnoff can easily dwarf man-made CO2. As good as we are at drilling and burning oil, tectonic pressure pushing carbon rich deposits into lava is simply a lot more efficient.
With the end result that with todays technology we basically cant do jack about several factors in the long-term gas content of the atmosphere. We'd be far better off working on ways to counter the effects of such changes instead; things like increasing particle emissions to reduce incoming heat, etc.
"Ideally, if these two people actually invented the technology, then they should get paid for it."
If you think inventors should get paid, then lobby for actual payments to inventors. Monopoly rights are neither good for the industry nor for the small time inventor; they're notoriously hard to convert into actual cash, and they're exceedingly rarely a profitable proposition.
If anyone really wanted inventors to get paid we'd have an incentive system structured like any other modern incentive system; a tax on something appropriate (like a 1% invention tax on goods that use inventions, or better, on older, less efficient products, thus encouraging adoption of better technology), and then we'd pay out to inventors according to measurable performance targets, like inventions used or products sold with invention in it, etc, to ensure we actually got the taxpayers moneys worth (as opposed to, for example, the pharmaceutical industry situation in which a minimum 80% of the money paid is wasted, ie, we'd get more than 5 times the research if we just outright paid for it, instead of having the patent system).
No, the current system has its roots in medevial aristocratic indirect taxation; the crown delegating taxation (equivalent to monopoly) rights to its friends in exchange for services. And it shows.
"Without patents, large companies could steal the technology and there would be no monetary reward for small inventors."
And with patents, large companies can spread patent minefields to keep the smaller competition out, and usually get away with stealing the technology anyway.
And again, a patent is not a monetary reward, it's a monopoly right of dubious economic prospects. The only ones for which it is an actual monetary reward is the lawyers.
You misunderstand the point of insurance. If every insurance customer was profitable, there would be no point in getting any insurance; you'd be better off simply saving the money yourself. Some insurers attempt to get closer to that point to increase profitability and/or to assign a cost to risky behaviour, but once you have perfect prediction of the cost of a customer you have no customers anymore.
The point of insurance is distributed risk. Everyone saving money enough to cover the costs of all their risks would mean a huge pile of unused money. By instead distributing the risk, some customers will be unprofitable, but the total pile will be much much smaller, and still leave a tidy sum over for the managers of the pile.
"Unless doing research on the Internet is part of your job description,"
I'd suggest the only jobs that dont implicitly include doing research on the internet today would be those for whom you dont even need to have finished primary school to be qualified for.
Internet access has bypassed having an education in importance for how well educated and informed your workforce is. Educations fade, get outdated, and the human brain is notoriously bad at accurate recollection of rarely used data, things that internet access is particularly good at making up for.
"then almost everything one does on the Internet (as opposed to an Intranet) is for personal use."
Yeah, well, half the stuff I do at home is for work use, so I could send them a bill. Probably more common in the IT industry, but still.
DNA is the security equivalent of dropping postit notes with your PIN's everywhere you go. And fingerprints are the equivalent of gluing a rubber stamp with your PIN to your finger and leaving it on anything you touch. Remember the part about not writing down your password and attaching it to your screen? Putting it in a photocopier, printing five million copies and leaving it everywhere you go can actually be a worse policy than attaching it to your screen.
So, please, dont feed the biometric 'security' fraud. Or at least use some actual biometric you dont leave everywhere (like, for example, the allusion in Futurama to banks using a colonic map as ID for a period). For people who dont like shoving sensors where the sun dont shine for every authentication they do, biometrics just Aint It. (And even things you dont leave around everywhere will eventually leak from databases, making their persistence and unchangeability the thing that makes them useless).
Eh, well, except it was actually AOL buying Time-Warner. Merger, wherein AOL owners got 55% of the new merged company stock.
They later changed the name and refocused as the dot-com bubble collapsed and the 'AOL' part approached worthlessness in evaluation, and the company didnt exactly need the loadstone of a posterboy for the bubble as a name.
As to the flash-forward, the merger structure and name changes makes it fairly difficult to figure out exactly who the most stupid party was, but anyone left holding stock in the joint company probably had more left than if they'd been holding only AOL stock. Which doesn't exactly make them less stupid for touching AOL stock at all.
It's sortof sad how the high-flying corporate execs appear to have learned very little about how to avoid getting brainslugged by clever marketers.
SuSE the company had a long history of straddling the fence, never quite embracing the freedom in free software. The Novell takeover seemed promising for a while, but now it's back to the old proprietary language and attitude.
I find such vendors inherently untrustworthy. Perhaps it's internal wrangling or bad habits from a long history in the proprietary business, but it makes it very difficult to extend any benefit of the doubt to them.
"There are better distros out there anyway."
Yep. There are several Linux vendors who have consistently shown their dedication to free software in both words and actions. Personally I prefer doing business with people who've shown themselves to have a solid sense of business ethics any day.
"I mean, the sad thing is I can't really be bothered"
Personally I'm tempted to go solely by the shop rating - that $xx rating thing they have. As I understand it, the lower the numbers after the $ sign are, the better.
Seriously. Old benchmarking sites and hardware guides have become close to unusable due to overadvertizing, and performance has come so far it's rarely I find CPU capacity an issue. Just buy whatever's in the cheap range and you'll get less screwed than if you buy the expensive stuff (unless you have some very specific requirements, in which case some very time consuming research may be in order).
"The way free software works is that if you want something done, you either do it yourself, or you pay somebody to do it for you."
More appropriately these days, I think it's 'if you want something done, odds are it's already been done, someone is already doing it, or there is some very good reasons your desire is either unfeasible or too unspecific'.
Arrogant is to think you're the first to want something done. Usually that just means you havent done your homework.
"To me, the most impressive aspect is the well founded claim that ray tracing scales *nearly linearly with number of cores*."
Yes, well, it's not exactly surprising that Intel is working on selling raytracing as renderer for game engines. Finally something that can actually use multiple cores (I mean, once they get to 8 cores it will start to get embarrasing explaining to the customers why their computer is slow even tho their 'performance monitor' shows it runs at just an 8th CPU used...).
I tend to agree tho, raytracing is, in the long run, the best way to go.
Heck, it would be awesome if such engines actually included a network-capable renderer so you could use multiple computers to boost rendering performance.:)
Good examples of business uses, but still comparatively small (depending on company size). Compare with PVR storage, mpeg files, etc.
There are, of course, larger storage needs for some applications, particularly in large companies, but I see more and more cases of formerly huge applications where I had a terabyte storage ten years ago and the disk arrays were awe inspiring (and cost a fortune). Now the same systems will have a terabyte and a half storage, and there are almost consumer grade disks that large.
Enterprise storage simply isnt growing that fast anymore, nor is most of it extreme. The litigation support apps, financial records and email archives grow at a snail pace compared to things like PVR applications that record many hours worth of video per day (and that's not even in HD).
"Why waste all that 'spensive storage just to make workstations diskless?"
You use the cheapo storage instead. Gigabit ethernet and cheapo (well, cheap-er at least, and actually cheap if you can live with a diy solution) iSCSI servers are perfectly adequate for workstation use.
"you're stuck storing an OS install for each workstation."
Depends on how you do it. If you're on linux and for something like classroom use, you can use unionfs to overlay a shared image and save that space too.
But even if you are stuck using an OS install for each workstation, the fact is you need far less OS diskspace per client than the smallest available disks these days. Add to that the ability to non-destructively change OS images with a simple reboot rather than a reinstall, coupled with easier backups, better data control, etc, and there are several compelling advantages to it.
"For home use doesn't and workstations does NAS make more sense than SAN? I am on a small network so we only use NAS for shared drives."
Yes and no. Shared storage such as home directories, shared files, etc, are better on a NAS.
The advantage of SAN connections for the desktop lies in the OS and paging space area, for speed critical applications, and more in the area of maintenance and support than in convenience. Getting rid of the local disk gives you the ability to do things like migrate clients to new operating systems with a simple reboot (and still have the old disk image to fall back on), take snapshots of client disks, save large amounts of space by buying more cost effective disks (smallest disks available today are, like, 80 gb, where the OS needs maybe 10. And larger disks are far more cost effective per gigabyte, so sharing them is cheaper). Etc.
Basically you get most of the advantages of thin-client hardware, without suffering from as many of the disadvantages.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is good stuff still coming out"
Once I found the means to locate it, I was amazed at the amount of good stuff available. The corporate marketing carpet bombing had more or less turned me off music completely. Until I found last.fm, and located tons of new stuff for my taste.
Hopefully another decade will see music marketing dead and replaced with social networks. Perhaps then we can get back to actually enjoying music.
Well, to be fair, eMusic has a vastly different model to Napster. For Napster you pay per month for access to their library, while for eMusic you basically buy music for a fixed sum per month. Personally I'm perfectly happy with eMusic (some labels may not be there, but frankly, that's their problem (and I hope their artists dump them and go with some brighter label)), and I'm spending more money on music than I have ever done before.
"Regardless of whether the IT sector is _technically_ in the wrong it's commonly accepted that in this area we work with powers of two."
No it isnt. It may be commonly accepted among some semi computer literate, but most knowledgable techs will know both the debate and understand that the original usage is too far off the rounding errors to be incorrect for some situations by now (not to mention that anyone the least interested in science or history will understand the idiocy of perpetrating the same kind of errors our less educated ancestors did that left half the world on inconsistent measurements that still occasionally result in blown spacecraft).
KB never, ever, meant 1024 bytes. It meant 'close enough to 1024 bytes that you'll get the drift'. Anyone thinking otherwise obviously missed the classes explaining SI prefixes.
I'm sure the HDD manufacturers used the most favourable measurement, but the fact is that they're correct. And even more, for most people it simply doesnt matter, because as long as they all use the same labelling, even the 10% difference they can get if they're misinformed today will not change the decision to buy the particular disk.
Actually, it did. However, Amazon sent in several revised iterations with various unicode variants of letters that sorta look like 'one click', until, eventually, it didnt turn up.
Think '0ne c1ick'.
"If the USPTO are not prepared to accept liability"
Nobody in the pro-IP camp is prepared to accept any liability, or even responsibility for the costs of the system.
A first step towards a saner patent system would be to simply recognize patents as delegated taxation rights, and require any patent derived revenues to be accounted for as a separate post within the government budget. Then we'd get the actual cost of the system on paper, and we could get an actual discussion of wether we're getting our money's worth for what it costs the economy. And we could get a frank discussion about wether having civil servants handing out unsupervised taxation rights is a really a good thing.
If we at all want a system for encouraging creative arts, the modern way to do it would be a tax/benefit scheme. Calling it 'copyright' instead and delegating the taxation rights to music industry doesnt make it any less of a tax as far as the cost to the economy is concerned. In fact, the inefficiencies and corruption factors inherent in monopoly rights is likely to cost the economy far more than a plain tax/benefit system. Not to mention that taxes are, unlike intellectual 'property', at least somewhat under democratic control, they are budgeted, and they can be analysed for efficiency (if, for example, the taxpayers money are mostly spent on marketing, obviously we're paying too much, as the funds would be intended to reward creative endeavors).
Of course, the best step to take would be to simply remove any rights from the music industry, allow them to publish and distribute whatever they want and simply slap a 50% tax on revenue (payable to the creative talent for any particular work), effectively replacing the whole 'signing' deal with a standardized compensation for reproduction. Which could then be tuned to the most equitable system that gets us the maximum production.
The charge of 'outrage' may sound weird, but to quote the Washington Post:' Under Alabama law, the rare claim of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."'
But if you really want a complete list of the exact charges brought against Monsanto around the world over the years you should research them yourself. Personally I was just irritated by their patent antics before I did. After I'd read up on them I cannot fathom how a company with consistent behaviour like that is allowed to exist, or how its leadership is allowed to run a business (or even walk free).
Monsanto is pretty much the poster boy for corporate death penalty. The company has been found guilty of bribery, suppression of truth, negligence, wantonness and outrage. It's poisoned people and environment with PCB, sarin, and mustard gas. The company has shown that it will knowingly and willingly expose workers and environment to toxic substances, and it will continue doing it until it's forced to stop through legal action.
This company is one that the world would far better off without.
"If your goal is to have someone to drag into court when it breaks"
And throw even more good money after the bad, you mean. Obtaining actual damages representing fictional costs of downtime is, as far as I know, a mirage. I dont think I've ever heard of a corporate support contract ever actually resulting in any damages (and I suspect that any such contract that would actually be enforcable would cost exactly the max penalty sum plus costs). Usually you'll just get a best-effort out of the vendor, so it pretty much amounts to hand holding.
So the moral of the story is, if it costs you more than you can afford to have downtime, then you'd better design sufficient redundancy into your systems that you dont have it. Or you should have alternate or manual fallbacks to mitigate the damages.
"As silly as it might sound, some people/companys don't really care if their system is fixed fast (or at all) as long as they can recover the costs in court."
Yep, and that's probably part of why courts frown upon punitive damages. If the company really cared about the system they'd do what they could to avoid the problem/resolve it asap. If they come to the court whining about a contract, the issue apparently wasnt that important to them...
"That, or what we'll start seeing is Bittorrent clients that simply start ignoring those packets."
That might be a bit harder to do tho; been a while since I did socket programming, but iirc, the RST gets dealt with on the os layer so the client just gets the connection terminated/EOF'ed. So you'd have to filter the forged packets before they can interact with the IP stack and do what they were intended to do.
Of course, if this becomes common practice (iirc, it's used by China in their firewalls too) we'll probably see a reengineering of the protocol stack in operating systems to add cryptographically signed RST's or something to restore the functionality without leaving it vulnerable to this kind of interference.
"It is still going to send RST packets"
You could probably configure a linux firewall to simply drop any RST packets on the port in question tho.
Way to turn the internet into an internot. Blatant protocol disruptions like this should be considered equal to system intrusions, and the responsible people at Comcast prosecuted for sabotage. These people cannot be trusted with important infrastructure, and the company should be prohibited from claiming they in any way connect you to, or provide internet access.
'Note that man-made and "from fossil fuels" are not the same.'
And beyond that, fossil fuel releases are not necessarily man-made. The potential release due to plate tectonic movements resulting in fossil fuel burnoff can easily dwarf man-made CO2. As good as we are at drilling and burning oil, tectonic pressure pushing carbon rich deposits into lava is simply a lot more efficient.
With the end result that with todays technology we basically cant do jack about several factors in the long-term gas content of the atmosphere. We'd be far better off working on ways to counter the effects of such changes instead; things like increasing particle emissions to reduce incoming heat, etc.
"Ideally, if these two people actually invented the technology, then they should get paid for it."
If you think inventors should get paid, then lobby for actual payments to inventors. Monopoly rights are neither good for the industry nor for the small time inventor; they're notoriously hard to convert into actual cash, and they're exceedingly rarely a profitable proposition.
If anyone really wanted inventors to get paid we'd have an incentive system structured like any other modern incentive system; a tax on something appropriate (like a 1% invention tax on goods that use inventions, or better, on older, less efficient products, thus encouraging adoption of better technology), and then we'd pay out to inventors according to measurable performance targets, like inventions used or products sold with invention in it, etc, to ensure we actually got the taxpayers moneys worth (as opposed to, for example, the pharmaceutical industry situation in which a minimum 80% of the money paid is wasted, ie, we'd get more than 5 times the research if we just outright paid for it, instead of having the patent system).
No, the current system has its roots in medevial aristocratic indirect taxation; the crown delegating taxation (equivalent to monopoly) rights to its friends in exchange for services. And it shows.
"Without patents, large companies could steal the technology and there would be no monetary reward for small inventors."
And with patents, large companies can spread patent minefields to keep the smaller competition out, and usually get away with stealing the technology anyway.
And again, a patent is not a monetary reward, it's a monopoly right of dubious economic prospects. The only ones for which it is an actual monetary reward is the lawyers.
"why bother investing time and money into inventing something that you know will just be stolen by other companies"
Because otherwise the other companies will produce better products than you and you'll go out of business.
It's called competition. It's considered a good thing.
"The word unprofitable there is the key though."
You misunderstand the point of insurance. If every insurance customer was profitable, there would be no point in getting any insurance; you'd be better off simply saving the money yourself. Some insurers attempt to get closer to that point to increase profitability and/or to assign a cost to risky behaviour, but once you have perfect prediction of the cost of a customer you have no customers anymore.
The point of insurance is distributed risk. Everyone saving money enough to cover the costs of all their risks would mean a huge pile of unused money. By instead distributing the risk, some customers will be unprofitable, but the total pile will be much much smaller, and still leave a tidy sum over for the managers of the pile.
"Tell me, when RMS does what he believes is right in the face of opposition, what is he?"
Usually he's right.
See the difference?
"Unless doing research on the Internet is part of your job description,"
I'd suggest the only jobs that dont implicitly include doing research on the internet today would be those for whom you dont even need to have finished primary school to be qualified for.
Internet access has bypassed having an education in importance for how well educated and informed your workforce is. Educations fade, get outdated, and the human brain is notoriously bad at accurate recollection of rarely used data, things that internet access is particularly good at making up for.
"then almost everything one does on the Internet (as opposed to an Intranet) is for personal use."
Yeah, well, half the stuff I do at home is for work use, so I could send them a bill. Probably more common in the IT industry, but still.
"You mean like DNA?"
DNA is the security equivalent of dropping postit notes with your PIN's everywhere you go. And fingerprints are the equivalent of gluing a rubber stamp with your PIN to your finger and leaving it on anything you touch. Remember the part about not writing down your password and attaching it to your screen? Putting it in a photocopier, printing five million copies and leaving it everywhere you go can actually be a worse policy than attaching it to your screen.
So, please, dont feed the biometric 'security' fraud. Or at least use some actual biometric you dont leave everywhere (like, for example, the allusion in Futurama to banks using a colonic map as ID for a period). For people who dont like shoving sensors where the sun dont shine for every authentication they do, biometrics just Aint It. (And even things you dont leave around everywhere will eventually leak from databases, making their persistence and unchangeability the thing that makes them useless).
Eh, well, except it was actually AOL buying Time-Warner. Merger, wherein AOL owners got 55% of the new merged company stock.
They later changed the name and refocused as the dot-com bubble collapsed and the 'AOL' part approached worthlessness in evaluation, and the company didnt exactly need the loadstone of a posterboy for the bubble as a name.
As to the flash-forward, the merger structure and name changes makes it fairly difficult to figure out exactly who the most stupid party was, but anyone left holding stock in the joint company probably had more left than if they'd been holding only AOL stock. Which doesn't exactly make them less stupid for touching AOL stock at all.
It's sortof sad how the high-flying corporate execs appear to have learned very little about how to avoid getting brainslugged by clever marketers.
"I've always liked SUSE as a distro"
SuSE the company had a long history of straddling the fence, never quite embracing the freedom in free software. The Novell takeover seemed promising for a while, but now it's back to the old proprietary language and attitude.
I find such vendors inherently untrustworthy. Perhaps it's internal wrangling or bad habits from a long history in the proprietary business, but it makes it very difficult to extend any benefit of the doubt to them.
"There are better distros out there anyway."
Yep. There are several Linux vendors who have consistently shown their dedication to free software in both words and actions. Personally I prefer doing business with people who've shown themselves to have a solid sense of business ethics any day.
"I mean, the sad thing is I can't really be bothered"
Personally I'm tempted to go solely by the shop rating - that $xx rating thing they have. As I understand it, the lower the numbers after the $ sign are, the better.
Seriously. Old benchmarking sites and hardware guides have become close to unusable due to overadvertizing, and performance has come so far it's rarely I find CPU capacity an issue. Just buy whatever's in the cheap range and you'll get less screwed than if you buy the expensive stuff (unless you have some very specific requirements, in which case some very time consuming research may be in order).
"The way free software works is that if you want something done, you either do it yourself, or you pay somebody to do it for you."
More appropriately these days, I think it's 'if you want something done, odds are it's already been done, someone is already doing it, or there is some very good reasons your desire is either unfeasible or too unspecific'.
Arrogant is to think you're the first to want something done. Usually that just means you havent done your homework.
"I know which side I'm on."
Yep, same here.
"To me, the most impressive aspect is the well founded claim that ray tracing scales *nearly linearly with number of cores*."
:)
Yes, well, it's not exactly surprising that Intel is working on selling raytracing as renderer for game engines. Finally something that can actually use multiple cores (I mean, once they get to 8 cores it will start to get embarrasing explaining to the customers why their computer is slow even tho their 'performance monitor' shows it runs at just an 8th CPU used...).
I tend to agree tho, raytracing is, in the long run, the best way to go.
Heck, it would be awesome if such engines actually included a network-capable renderer so you could use multiple computers to boost rendering performance.
"What about email archives for compliance?"
Good examples of business uses, but still comparatively small (depending on company size). Compare with PVR storage, mpeg files, etc.
There are, of course, larger storage needs for some applications, particularly in large companies, but I see more and more cases of formerly huge applications where I had a terabyte storage ten years ago and the disk arrays were awe inspiring (and cost a fortune). Now the same systems will have a terabyte and a half storage, and there are almost consumer grade disks that large.
Enterprise storage simply isnt growing that fast anymore, nor is most of it extreme. The litigation support apps, financial records and email archives grow at a snail pace compared to things like PVR applications that record many hours worth of video per day (and that's not even in HD).
"Why waste all that 'spensive storage just to make workstations diskless?"
You use the cheapo storage instead. Gigabit ethernet and cheapo (well, cheap-er at least, and actually cheap if you can live with a diy solution) iSCSI servers are perfectly adequate for workstation use.
"you're stuck storing an OS install for each workstation."
Depends on how you do it. If you're on linux and for something like classroom use, you can use unionfs to overlay a shared image and save that space too.
But even if you are stuck using an OS install for each workstation, the fact is you need far less OS diskspace per client than the smallest available disks these days. Add to that the ability to non-destructively change OS images with a simple reboot rather than a reinstall, coupled with easier backups, better data control, etc, and there are several compelling advantages to it.
"For home use doesn't and workstations does NAS make more sense than SAN? I am on a small network so we only use NAS for shared drives."
Yes and no. Shared storage such as home directories, shared files, etc, are better on a NAS.
The advantage of SAN connections for the desktop lies in the OS and paging space area, for speed critical applications, and more in the area of maintenance and support than in convenience. Getting rid of the local disk gives you the ability to do things like migrate clients to new operating systems with a simple reboot (and still have the old disk image to fall back on), take snapshots of client disks, save large amounts of space by buying more cost effective disks (smallest disks available today are, like, 80 gb, where the OS needs maybe 10. And larger disks are far more cost effective per gigabyte, so sharing them is cheaper). Etc.
Basically you get most of the advantages of thin-client hardware, without suffering from as many of the disadvantages.