You are a sucker if you accept $147 for a new 60 GB hard disk.
Whoosh.
I'd rather open the box myself and replace the drive or, if I am a computer illiterate person, ask a friend.
I just built a machine out of parts from Newegg. You and I are the tiny minority, even if it doesn't seem like it because our friends are doing the same thing. A lot of people have a geek friend they can call on, but computer repair shops don't seem to be going away.
$279 buys you a very basic machine [...]
Remember, you are Joe Sixpack replacing your dead Dell. The new cheap Dell is better than your old one, so why not?
It's way better, especially in this economic situation, to just grab a $60 500 GB hard drive and do the job yourself.
You and I know that, but I'm not talking about us. I was talking about why the average person off the street might buy a new computer instead of fixing an old one, since that was the question we were addressing.:-)
Ugh, I meant to say more before I posted. Anyway, here's the rest:
The main reason I mentioned publicly addressable hosts was that the OP brought it up when he mentioned UPnP in conjunction with NAT. No, you don't need (or want) every host to be directly reachable. When you do, though, a real end-to-end solution like IPv6 is vastly preferable to a slew of machines behind the NAT asking for port allocations.
God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.
And everyone who's a network admin knows that it is.
Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
Great, so I can re-write every application to support a half-assed workaround like NAT. I'd much rather have each host bugging the crap out of the router to forward a specific port, please! than to just get the migration over with and be done with it. If you think that NAT+uPNP is a replacement for IPv6, then you need to find a hobby more suited to your skill level.
Does this happen in USA a lot? if a light in the fridge goes out, do you buy a new one? when a tire is blown out, do you buy a new car?
No, but it's a little different with electronics in general. First, assume here that we're talking about out-of-warranty items so that the owner is responsible for costs. Each town used to have several TV repair shops, but it came to be that it wasn't any cheaper to fix one than to replace it. The same with a clock radio; while you might be able to find someone qualified to troubleshoot and fix it, it'd probably be cheaper just to buy a new one. Well, a lot of people lump computers into the same category. If the hard drive (or CPU or RAM or video card) fails, then they figure it might be cheaper to buy a new one than to replace the bad parts.
Honestly, they're probably right. Suppose you're Joe Sixpack with a busted Dell and take it to Best Buy so their experts [1] can check it out. They quote you $147 for a new 60GB hard drive [2] plus $75 in labor. You're looking at $200+ to fix a two-year-old PC. Being the frugal type, you check out dell.com and see that you can buy a brand new one for $279 that's faster, has more storage, and has that Mojave thing so you can view photos. I won't really hold it against you for spending an extra $50 to get a new, better computer with a full warranty [3].
[1] Work with me here.
[2] You could get a 750GB drive for the same price, but your computer was "designed for a 60GB drive", and they're hard to get now. Luckily for you, they were able to find one in the warehouse.
[3]...which will run out the week before the embedded graphics chipset overheats.
The problem with a strongly isolating VM system on Amiga was that it would have basically broken message passing. If program Foo wanted to send a request to program Bar, it would write the request directly into Bar's memory at a specific address. Bar would check for requests by reading it's own memory and acting depending on what it found there. I wish your idea of using the MMU to fix fragmentation was used, though. It was incredibly annoying to have 127MB free but no contiguous block larger than 2MB available.
When the program says, "read from memory address 0x(some huge number)"
I haven't messed with this since college where we had to write a VM simulator for an OS class. In our project, each program had an address space that started at 0x0 and worked its way up. The VM would map "process 1, address 0x0" to "physical address 0xFOO" and "process 2, address 0x0" to "physical address 0xBAR".
How does this actually work in current OSes? If I malloc() some RAM, does the address I get actually refer to something tangible (if only momentarily before the program is swapped out and back in at a different physical range)? Do programs have their own virtual address space, or do they generally start at some fixed address and grow from there (regardless of where they actually live in RAM)?
It will page things out even when there is tons of ram available.
Well, if it actually removes the copy in RAM, that'd be a flaw. Note that I drew a distinction between "copying" and "moving", so the OS doesn't actually have to choose between freeing the RAM and resuming the idle process until one or the other comes up.
Whether or not it works (and I'm not sure how well it does), there's something odd about swapping out RAM contents to disk so that you can mirror disk contents in RAM.
Not if you consider your HD to be a big, slow chunk of memory. The more likely you are to use a byte, the closer it moves to the CPU (HD -> RAM -> L2 -> L1 -> registers). The less likely you are to need it again, the farther it moves back along the same path.
I have had good experience with Fast defrag freeware from http://www.amsn.ro/
Ah, the joy of running closed-source system-level software of dubious necessity from a tiny shop in a Warsaw Pact country. Was it recommended by the new Nigerian friend that you're helping transfer money?
Most people are not incredibly knowledgeable about computers. There's a big difference.
Well, when you work tech support for any length of time, you learn that many people utterly lack any problem-solving skills. Geeks often equate problem-solving skills with intelligence, hence the (not unreasonable) impression that many people are not very smart.
Example: people calling to complain that the ISP I worked for sucked and was a pack of incompetent jackasses because they couldn't dial in. More specifically, they could not turn their computer on. This was because lightning had struck the house and destroyed the entertainment center and kitchen appliance, and presumably their computer as well. Their interpretation of events was that they couldn't turn on their computer because we ran a poor ISP.
Granted, the perception is exacerbated because by definition you only get the people unable to fix their own problems. Still, it's hard to answer "do I have to plug in my CPU (modem) to check my email?" a few hundred times without losing a little faith in humanity.
And the presence of swap causes a problem why? Again, I have 3GB free right now. I'm pretty positive that FreeBSD isn't going to page out httpd so that updatedb can prance through the filesystem.
One will insist that, no matter how much memory is currently allocated, it makes more sense to swap out that which isn't needed in order to keep more free physical ram.
Most of the people in this camp are coming from a Unix background where this is actually implemented effectively. For example, the FreeBSD machine next to my desk has 6GB of RAM, but even with about 3GB free, I'm currently about 1GB into my 16GB of swap. (Why 16? Because it's bigger than 6 but still a tiny part of my 750GB main drive.)
FreeBSD, and I assume most other modern Unixes, will copy idle stuff from RAM to swap when it's sufficiently bored. Note that it doesn't actually delete the pages in physical memory! Instead, it just marks them as copied. If those processes suddenly become active, they're already in RAM and go on about their business. If another process suddenly needs a huge allocation, like if my site's getting Slashdotted, then it can discard the pages in RAM since they've already been copied to disk.
That is why many Unix admins recommend swap. It helps the system effectively manage its resources without incurring a penalty, so why wouldn't you?
It's my understanding that Windows never managed to get this working right, so a lot of MS guys probably prefer to avoid it.
Because currently, modern systems leak. A cold re-start puts things back into a fresh state - and we need that.
Since I've never seen a Unix system that had to be rebooted to free memory, and I've never heard anyone refer to Windows as a modern system, I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to.
Compaq bought one license for MS-DOS from Microsoft for each PC they built
Psystar bought one license for OS X from Apple for each clone they built.
If, on the other hand, IBM had released their own OS and had an EULA prohibiting its use on clones, then it would be the same thing as Compaq's cloning.
So the real question is how binding that EULA will be on someone who is not the end user.
"Pirating" is a stupid term for copyright infringement.
I used to think so, except that it goes back to at least 1703. Additionally,
Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603.
It seems that you and I have lost that argument.
Copyright infringement is not stealing it is making copies without having a license.
It sounds like their argument is that they pay full retail price for each copy and therefore have the full right to use it. I'd be hard pressed to disagree.
Even if they just ship the disks and a blank machine, they're encouraging others to violate Apple's copyright and profiting in the process which makes them guilty of contributory copyright infringement (what Napster was busted for).
It's hard to prove damages when the defendants have the receipt showing that they paid for it.
Good and bad are relative. We're talking about legal and illegal.
At any rate, I was replying to the story's author who made Psystar sound like fraudsters, to the point of being "fly-by-night". That's a judgment of their relative goodness and I don't believe anyone's shown that they've acted unethically, even if they're eventually found liable.
All of the mustang variants I'm aware of are done through cooperation and permission with Ford.
I have first-hand knowledge of Mustang modifiers who have no affiliation with Ford. On a larger scale, watch shows like "Unique Whips" on the Speed channel. They do pretty outlandish modifications to regular cars, but no one thinks much of it.
It's also in the nature of a car to be modified by its owners and resold--the car is primarily a functional item, rather than an expression.
Is that not precisely true of software? It takes special tools and knowledge, but so do cars.
And, really, it doesn't matter if the students being targeted were guilty.
Nitpick: in our society, no one is guilty until a court has found them so. The students (and speeders and murderers and pedophiles) are innocent until that instant, which is why every deserves good representation.
So back to my car example: all sorts of people sell performance-tuned or otherwise modified versions of major-brand cars. For example, Shelby and Saleen have been making hopped-up Mustangs for decades. Why is it OK to hack a car but not a book?
(You're not my lawyer, I'm not paying you for advice, etc.)
The unique EULA terms OSX uses to assert that it binds the user to use it with Apple branded hardware MIGHT apply.
Actually, they say "Apple labeled" hardware. The difference is that I fully expect Psystar to state that the end user applying the stickers ("labels") that Apple includes with OS X would make the hardware "Apple labeled".
While the legal situation is murky, it seems to me to be inherently obvious that you ought to have the right to use something you purchase as you see fit. If you buy something, you should be able to modify and resell it, regardless of the wishes of the original owner. Buying, modifying and reselling a copy of OSX does not seem to me to be any more "wrong" than buying, modifying, and reselling a car or a house, or highlighting and selling a used textbook
Exactly. Software seems to be on an unjustified pedestal that few (no?) other products get to enjoy. I don't care what you do with software I've written as long as you honor my copyright. Beyond that, have at!
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You are a sucker if you accept $147 for a new 60 GB hard disk.
Whoosh.
I'd rather open the box myself and replace the drive or, if I am a computer illiterate person, ask a friend.
I just built a machine out of parts from Newegg. You and I are the tiny minority, even if it doesn't seem like it because our friends are doing the same thing. A lot of people have a geek friend they can call on, but computer repair shops don't seem to be going away.
$279 buys you a very basic machine [...]
Remember, you are Joe Sixpack replacing your dead Dell. The new cheap Dell is better than your old one, so why not?
It's way better, especially in this economic situation, to just grab a $60 500 GB hard drive and do the job yourself.
You and I know that, but I'm not talking about us. I was talking about why the average person off the street might buy a new computer instead of fixing an old one, since that was the question we were addressing. :-)
Just what are you writing that your apps require a public IP?
As mentioned in another comment, I was responding to the OP's mention of NAT+UPnP as a substitute for public addressing.
Ugh, I meant to say more before I posted. Anyway, here's the rest:
The main reason I mentioned publicly addressable hosts was that the OP brought it up when he mentioned UPnP in conjunction with NAT. No, you don't need (or want) every host to be directly reachable. When you do, though, a real end-to-end solution like IPv6 is vastly preferable to a slew of machines behind the NAT asking for port allocations.
Most machines don't need an externally accessible IP.
Unless they want to use something as exotic and unpopular as BitTorrent, you might be right.
God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.
And everyone who's a network admin knows that it is.
Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
Great, so I can re-write every application to support a half-assed workaround like NAT. I'd much rather have each host bugging the crap out of the router to forward a specific port, please! than to just get the migration over with and be done with it. If you think that NAT+uPNP is a replacement for IPv6, then you need to find a hobby more suited to your skill level.
Does this happen in USA a lot? if a light in the fridge goes out, do you buy a new one? when a tire is blown out, do you buy a new car?
No, but it's a little different with electronics in general. First, assume here that we're talking about out-of-warranty items so that the owner is responsible for costs. Each town used to have several TV repair shops, but it came to be that it wasn't any cheaper to fix one than to replace it. The same with a clock radio; while you might be able to find someone qualified to troubleshoot and fix it, it'd probably be cheaper just to buy a new one. Well, a lot of people lump computers into the same category. If the hard drive (or CPU or RAM or video card) fails, then they figure it might be cheaper to buy a new one than to replace the bad parts.
Honestly, they're probably right. Suppose you're Joe Sixpack with a busted Dell and take it to Best Buy so their experts [1] can check it out. They quote you $147 for a new 60GB hard drive [2] plus $75 in labor. You're looking at $200+ to fix a two-year-old PC. Being the frugal type, you check out dell.com and see that you can buy a brand new one for $279 that's faster, has more storage, and has that Mojave thing so you can view photos. I won't really hold it against you for spending an extra $50 to get a new, better computer with a full warranty [3].
[1] Work with me here. ...which will run out the week before the embedded graphics chipset overheats.
[2] You could get a 750GB drive for the same price, but your computer was "designed for a 60GB drive", and they're hard to get now. Luckily for you, they were able to find one in the warehouse.
[3]
The problem with a strongly isolating VM system on Amiga was that it would have basically broken message passing. If program Foo wanted to send a request to program Bar, it would write the request directly into Bar's memory at a specific address. Bar would check for requests by reading it's own memory and acting depending on what it found there. I wish your idea of using the MMU to fix fragmentation was used, though. It was incredibly annoying to have 127MB free but no contiguous block larger than 2MB available.
When the program says, "read from memory address 0x(some huge number)"
I haven't messed with this since college where we had to write a VM simulator for an OS class. In our project, each program had an address space that started at 0x0 and worked its way up. The VM would map "process 1, address 0x0" to "physical address 0xFOO" and "process 2, address 0x0" to "physical address 0xBAR".
How does this actually work in current OSes? If I malloc() some RAM, does the address I get actually refer to something tangible (if only momentarily before the program is swapped out and back in at a different physical range)? Do programs have their own virtual address space, or do they generally start at some fixed address and grow from there (regardless of where they actually live in RAM)?
And the standard response: "they'll just say it's your fault. Why won't you just make it work?"
It will page things out even when there is tons of ram available.
Well, if it actually removes the copy in RAM, that'd be a flaw. Note that I drew a distinction between "copying" and "moving", so the OS doesn't actually have to choose between freeing the RAM and resuming the idle process until one or the other comes up.
Which is complemented by their complete lack of patience in following the process of problem isolation.
Oh, ain't that the truth.
Tech: OK, let's try it again so that I can watch it fail and get the same error message.
User: But I want you to fix it!
Whether or not it works (and I'm not sure how well it does), there's something odd about swapping out RAM contents to disk so that you can mirror disk contents in RAM.
Not if you consider your HD to be a big, slow chunk of memory. The more likely you are to use a byte, the closer it moves to the CPU (HD -> RAM -> L2 -> L1 -> registers). The less likely you are to need it again, the farther it moves back along the same path.
I have had good experience with Fast defrag freeware from http://www.amsn.ro/
Ah, the joy of running closed-source system-level software of dubious necessity from a tiny shop in a Warsaw Pact country. Was it recommended by the new Nigerian friend that you're helping transfer money?
Most people are not incredibly knowledgeable about computers. There's a big difference.
Well, when you work tech support for any length of time, you learn that many people utterly lack any problem-solving skills. Geeks often equate problem-solving skills with intelligence, hence the (not unreasonable) impression that many people are not very smart.
Example: people calling to complain that the ISP I worked for sucked and was a pack of incompetent jackasses because they couldn't dial in. More specifically, they could not turn their computer on. This was because lightning had struck the house and destroyed the entertainment center and kitchen appliance, and presumably their computer as well. Their interpretation of events was that they couldn't turn on their computer because we ran a poor ISP.
Granted, the perception is exacerbated because by definition you only get the people unable to fix their own problems. Still, it's hard to answer "do I have to plug in my CPU (modem) to check my email?" a few hundred times without losing a little faith in humanity.
And the presence of swap causes a problem why? Again, I have 3GB free right now. I'm pretty positive that FreeBSD isn't going to page out httpd so that updatedb can prance through the filesystem.
One will insist that, no matter how much memory is currently allocated, it makes more sense to swap out that which isn't needed in order to keep more free physical ram.
Most of the people in this camp are coming from a Unix background where this is actually implemented effectively. For example, the FreeBSD machine next to my desk has 6GB of RAM, but even with about 3GB free, I'm currently about 1GB into my 16GB of swap. (Why 16? Because it's bigger than 6 but still a tiny part of my 750GB main drive.)
FreeBSD, and I assume most other modern Unixes, will copy idle stuff from RAM to swap when it's sufficiently bored. Note that it doesn't actually delete the pages in physical memory! Instead, it just marks them as copied. If those processes suddenly become active, they're already in RAM and go on about their business. If another process suddenly needs a huge allocation, like if my site's getting Slashdotted, then it can discard the pages in RAM since they've already been copied to disk.
That is why many Unix admins recommend swap. It helps the system effectively manage its resources without incurring a penalty, so why wouldn't you?
It's my understanding that Windows never managed to get this working right, so a lot of MS guys probably prefer to avoid it.
Because currently, modern systems leak. A cold re-start puts things back into a fresh state - and we need that.
Since I've never seen a Unix system that had to be rebooted to free memory, and I've never heard anyone refer to Windows as a modern system, I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to.
Compaq bought one license for MS-DOS from Microsoft for each PC they built
Psystar bought one license for OS X from Apple for each clone they built.
If, on the other hand, IBM had released their own OS and had an EULA prohibiting its use on clones, then it would be the same thing as Compaq's cloning.
So the real question is how binding that EULA will be on someone who is not the end user.
"Pirating" is a stupid term for copyright infringement.
I used to think so, except that it goes back to at least 1703. Additionally,
It seems that you and I have lost that argument.
Copyright infringement is not stealing it is making copies without having a license.
It sounds like their argument is that they pay full retail price for each copy and therefore have the full right to use it. I'd be hard pressed to disagree.
Even if they just ship the disks and a blank machine, they're encouraging others to violate Apple's copyright and profiting in the process which makes them guilty of contributory copyright infringement (what Napster was busted for).
It's hard to prove damages when the defendants have the receipt showing that they paid for it.
Good and bad are relative. We're talking about legal and illegal.
At any rate, I was replying to the story's author who made Psystar sound like fraudsters, to the point of being "fly-by-night". That's a judgment of their relative goodness and I don't believe anyone's shown that they've acted unethically, even if they're eventually found liable.
All of the mustang variants I'm aware of are done through cooperation and permission with Ford.
I have first-hand knowledge of Mustang modifiers who have no affiliation with Ford. On a larger scale, watch shows like "Unique Whips" on the Speed channel. They do pretty outlandish modifications to regular cars, but no one thinks much of it.
It's also in the nature of a car to be modified by its owners and resold--the car is primarily a functional item, rather than an expression.
Is that not precisely true of software? It takes special tools and knowledge, but so do cars.
And, really, it doesn't matter if the students being targeted were guilty.
Nitpick: in our society, no one is guilty until a court has found them so. The students (and speeders and murderers and pedophiles) are innocent until that instant, which is why every deserves good representation.
I have never said that Psystar claimed not to have changed anything.
So back to my car example: all sorts of people sell performance-tuned or otherwise modified versions of major-brand cars. For example, Shelby and Saleen have been making hopped-up Mustangs for decades. Why is it OK to hack a car but not a book?
(You're not my lawyer, I'm not paying you for advice, etc.)
The unique EULA terms OSX uses to assert that it binds the user to use it with Apple branded hardware MIGHT apply.
Actually, they say "Apple labeled" hardware. The difference is that I fully expect Psystar to state that the end user applying the stickers ("labels") that Apple includes with OS X would make the hardware "Apple labeled".
While the legal situation is murky, it seems to me to be inherently obvious that you ought to have the right to use something you purchase as you see fit. If you buy something, you should be able to modify and resell it, regardless of the wishes of the original owner. Buying, modifying and reselling a copy of OSX does not seem to me to be any more "wrong" than buying, modifying, and reselling a car or a house, or highlighting and selling a used textbook
Exactly. Software seems to be on an unjustified pedestal that few (no?) other products get to enjoy. I don't care what you do with software I've written as long as you honor my copyright. Beyond that, have at!