An example of this in nearly every personal computer is information read from spinning plastic disc media, like CD-ROMs or data DVDs. Typically, the OS will read data from the plastic disc, and store it in memory. If the memory usage becomes tight, that data from the spinning plastic disc will be swapped out to a magnetic disk drive.
No, it won't, it will discard it to shrink the overall size of the cache and free up RAM. I'm not aware of any system that behaves in the way you describe.
He wants the OS to intelligently (and automatically) use an SSD to store the frequently used files from his larger spinning hard disk. It's a great idea and surely Windows will do it soon enough (as much as I hate to say it).
It basically does already (ReadyBoost). I can't imagine there would be much work involved in modifying it to use arbitrary disks like SSDs instead of just thumbdrives. Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a simple Registry setting that decides what devices can and can't be used for ReadyBoost.
You're overextending the point. New (and nowadays quite fully backwards compatible) peripheral buses resulting in new cpu socket? Really?
If they use a new chipset and no effort is being made to retain backwards compatibility (eg: by increasing the bandwidth from chipset to CPU in the new models), then sure, it's quite reasonable.
RAM is less clear of course, and any "forced" change can be understandable here; but again AMD shows it can easily be done.
I don't doubt that it's doable if the requirement exists. My point is that within Intel, the requirement obviously *doesn't* exist.
Remember this isn't black and white, about trying to keep absolute compatibility for as long as possible. Only where it's reasonable. It would be certainly reasonable to expect in the case of TFA. A socket wchich was touted as neccessary for the market (not long after introducing another one), that will live barely more than a year - in light of many murky practices of Intel, does scream that it's intentional obsolescence (why it had to be leaked? Why Intel isn't forthcoming with this information? Could it be that consumers now would prefer something with a little more longevity?...)
In what way is it "intentional obsolescence" in the context of there being no market requirement defined for compatibility to be kept ? On what basis do you make that claim that someone inside Intel redesigned the socket with an explicit objective of making it incompatible with existing hardware ?
Haven't it crossed your mind that what you observe is mostly a peculiarity of your local market?
Over the last 15 years, my "local market" has crossed half a dozen different countries - and that's not including the people I interact with online. I'm pretty confident the sample is representative (if anything, given the field I work in, I expect the proportion of people I see upgrading is vastly *over* represented within my peer group).
Quite wastefull, all things considered, when comparing with many other places where PCs are bought (ah, but I have to concede it has nothing to do with the issue, just becuase you want it so...)
Quite wasteful in what sense ? All those old PCs usually don't get tossed, they get recycled to friends and family, sold on ebay, or donated to charity.
And I didn't mention motherboard there. It was just mentioning that, apart from swapping the CPU, literal addition of those two parts to empty slots and bay will indeed contribute even more to the new life of any machine (if going from 2 to 4 or 6 cores at higher clockspeed wasn't enough...). But for some reason you needed to twist it in a way that's basically just a total swap comparable to the least ideal situation...
I didn't "twist" anything. I pointed out that of the tiny minority of people who do upgrade their PCs by replacing components, they typically do multiple components at a time.
I'm dissapointed you haven't dragged on with "3rd party chipsets = bad". After all, Apple and Intel (sic) certainly didn't know what they're doing...
I never said "3rd party chipsets = bad". I said *most* non-Intel chipsets have been awful, buggy atrocities. This was particularly true in the '95 - '05 timeframe, and while the situation was improved markedly by nVidia and ATI's entrance into the market, both of them had some screwups as well.
The fact that Intel have sold motherboards with SiS chipsets is irrelevant. They sell motherboards with those godawful Realtek NICs on them, too (and they should also be avoided like the plague). The only thing I commented on was Intel's *chipsets*. Apple, of course, have a lot more control over their platform and are able to implement workarounds for problems and push them to a large proportion of their customers, something that is much more difficult in the PC world.
It's definitely easier to keep yourself disciplined by using cash rather than some debit/credit card that could have any amount of money behind it (or none).
Interestingly, I find the complete opposite to be true. Putting everything on the debit or credit card makes it *much* easier to see where my money is going (either by doing my own analysis, or using something like mint.com) than a weekly $200 ATM withdrawal.
Wow. Last time I was in Italy (2006) I had frequent trouble paying for may items without exact change - not everywhere, but enough to tell me that, at least at that time and place m,any cashiers expected exact change. For instance, I tried to get a bottle of water and an apple with a 20 and had to go to three markets before one would take my bill.
Yeah, but that's *Italy*. You're probably lucky they didn't try and barter something with you in lieu of money.:)
What? I have paid with an 500 euros ($667) on an movie theater. They sure took it, but the teens besides us looked at us with a weird smile.
It's a different situation in Europe (and many other countries like Australia), probably in no small part because of their much higher costs of living (ie: you need more money to do anything). I've paid for a *slice of pizza* in Switzerland with a CHF 1000.- note and the vendor didn't even blink.
Just because you don't carry doesn't mean nobody does.
The US runs on $20 bills, much like the UK runs on 20-quid notes. Seeing anything larger is extremely unusual (or, at least, I have yet to see anything bigger than a $20 after 6 months of living in the US, and pulling ~500 pounds out of an ATM whenever I visit London has never delivered anything bigger than a 20).
Additionally, from what I've seen so far - and one of the few ways the money system here isn't utterly crazy - people in the US use debit cards *much* more than cash (I'm sure there's some historical reason for this but I've never researched it), to the point of buying single items like chewing gum or newspapers with a card swipe. Cash is relatively uncommon here to start with, and large bills even less so (contrast again to Switzerland where it's not at all uncommon to use cash for purchases in the hundreds or thousands of Francs range). Saying "nobody carries hundreds" is quite reasonable - even Bill Gates himself probably doesn't have anything bigger than a twenty in his wallet.
Realistically, in the timescale involved, only one type of memory change (which is still ongoing), one which doesn't matter much in context (since even upcoming CPUs from AMD will be able to use old one, and since Intel made clean break together with other important changes). But most importantly nowhere near as problematic as in the old days, with incompatibilities frequently introduced (heck, even modules of hypothetically correct type would often refuse to work...). Both PCIe are fully compatible, and without much difference to the user really (not across one generation). Core 2 & Core i7 - sure, that change was reasonable. But the one from TFA not even close.
You're missing the point. All of these changes could quite reasonably result in a new socket design, if no particular effort was being made to get them working with existing sockets. Making no effort to retain backwards compatibility (because the cost/benefit analysis says it's not worth it) is a significantly different intent to actively breaking backwards compatibility. There is much evidence and reasoning to support the former situation, and very little to support the latter.
Yes, few people upgrade...again, we can't really know what is fully the cause and what is the effect (they don't have to upgrade by themselves, you know; "making computer faster cheaply" is easy to understand).
We can quite easily infer the cause and effect simply by observing that outside of computer enthusiasts, virtually no-one upgrades *any component* of their PC at all - when they want a more capable machine they buy a new one. There is zero evidence to suggest waves of people eager to upgrade their PC's CPUs, if only Intel made a more backwards-compatible socket.
But you have to agree there has been, over the years, quite a lot of waste with thrashing perfectly good machines... (quite recently mostly revolving about low RAM, which was often easily corrected; changing CPU could be often icing on the cake)
That has zero to do with whether or not Intel happens to support multiple CPU families on a single socket.
And where have I said you have to upgrade only the CPU? Sure, throw in more RAM and new HDD, all the better. If you can, of course...
The whole discussion is about Intel not keeping backwards compatibility in their CPU sockets, thus meaning upgrades can't be only the CPU. If you're [also] going to upgrade the motherboard/RAM type/video card/whatever, then the criticism that you can't replace just the CPU is moot.
Now the situation is different, with official Intel "tick tock" approach (it would be easy to anticipate future compatibility for process shrink...), quite stable situation with RAM & interfaces (yes, USB3...still hardly here, and the last version lasted a decade) and processors with 2, 4, and soon more cores.
There's been 3 different memory type changes (DDR1-3) and two bus changes (PCIe 1 and 2), to say nothing of the fundamental interconnect change between Core 2 and Core i7 & co. Chipset and socket changes don't seem unreasonable along with any of them.
Of course hardly anyone expects upgrading...but to what extent that's a reason, and to what an effect?
Few people upgrade because to most of them a computer is an appliance, not a bunch of individual components. "Upgrading the CPU" to most people would make about as much sense as "upgrading the motor" in their vacuum cleaner.
Even amongst the few people I do know who upgrade their PCs, I can't think of single one who has ever upgraded only the CPU, even when that was possible and would have been a significant raw performance improvement in and of itself.
Plus if there was hardly any money in chipset business (remember, using obsolete fabs), Intel wouldn't be so agressive in driving out any competition (which already had very little share of Intel platform)
Pretty much all non-intel chipsets have been crap - and that's a phenomenon dating back to the days of the original Pentium. There are very, very good reasons there's not a lot of competition in that market, and 90% of them involve bad (sometimes incredibly bad) products. Low quality chipsets are also one of the major reasons AMD does not have a larger slice of the pie (VIA did more to harm AMD than Intel could ever have hoped to in its wildest dreams).
No, because in the current topic thread what someone wanted was a GUI to look at a firewall, not an enterprise application run by a well designed GUI. It would help if you followed the thread.
I am following the thread. The arguments against GUIs are nearly all predicated on using them to management complex, "enterprise" environments. Therefore, either the arguments are invalid in context (because the environment is not complex or "enterprise"), or we can proceed with the assumption that any such GUI would be "an enterprise application".
Please graph a firewall configuration in a manner that is meaningful in this discussion for configuring firewalls.
C (www) --- | ---> S
This simple diagram above showing a firewall rule allowing web traffic from one or more clients to one or more webservers could quite easily represent multiple lines of "tabular data" defining a firewall configuration, yet it can be quickly and intuitively understood even by people with little knowledge of how that specific firewall is configured, let alone the commands and syntax required to actually implement the rule(s).
The topic started with the whine that firewalls are too difficult, and gee, wouldn't it be nice to just drag n drop firewall configs....
And ? "Easier" does not implicitly mean "less capable".
I'm well aware that a proper interface to a firewall could be written. It will still require almost as much understanding to use as the current effort to write scripts.
It would not, because you would not need intricate knowledge of command syntax and scripting languages.
If you were to make it easier, then you're dumbing it down and "flattening" the problem domain, and all above mentioned criticisms are valid.
There is absolutely no inherent reason for a solution that makes a process easier to also make the results less complete. None.
What you would be doing, would be isolating the "problem domains" (managing a firewall, knowing the syntax of that specific firewall, knowing how to script changes) and removing the ones that are not essential (knowing the syntax of that specific firewall, knowing how to script changes) from the solution.
But remember we're talking about a company which tried to block later s370 from working in slotkeys, activelly blocked possibility of dual cpu operation, used illegal tricks to ensure maintaining upper hand, goes far with castrating cheap CPUs from features, tried hard and succeeded in killing "alien" chipsets for their CPUs (hence ensuing profit for their own...now, how to ensure more will be sold?...)
All of which have clear and obvious benefits for segmenting the market and significantly increasing revenue.
Actively trying to block the fractional percentage of people who want to upgrade only their CPUs, however, is a completely different matter. There's simply not enough money involved for any but the paranoid to try and argue it would happen. It would probably cost more just in the people time of developing a strategy (let alone actually implementing it) than they would ever make back in increased sales.
It's like trying to argue that multipliers are disabled to stop people overclocking and "force" them to buy faster CPUs. It doesn't even pass a few seconds worth of cost/benefit analysis.
Intel have been well aware of the miniscule interest in CPU upgrades since the mid-'90s, with their "Overdrive" processors. Nearly everyone just gets a new PC, and of the tiny percentage left, most of them will use upgrading as an excuse to get a new motherboard and/or video card and/or RAM, etc.
Take government healthcare, if it becomes expensive treating people for a particular preventable condition you can guarantee that the action that causes the problem will be banned.
So can you point to this ever actually happening ? I mean, most of the civilised world has had universal healthcare for at least a few decades, so there should be plentiful examples available of at least something so obviously harmful as smoking being banned.
....how are they going to know who's driving the car and then who to issue the tickets too?
In most places, the owner of the vehicle is responsible for its use. That means they either have to nominate who was driving, or take the penalty themselves.
The advantage of average speed cameras for you (and me), the speeder, is that your average speed is likely to be lower than your top speed.
If you're going to slow down (or stop) such that your average speed is under the limit, it's a struggle to understand why you just wouldn't drive at that limit anyway, since you essentially gain nothing from speeding.
It's a criticism of both. GUIs by nature are ad-hoc tools that allow individual tweaking - that's their purpose in life.
Rubbish.
Granted, you could create a tool that would allow for a creation of settings that could then be applied across multiple systems, but that would be much more than a mere GUI tool.
Why ? Because anything that's useful must be "more than a mere GUI tool" ?
No, it doesn't. While scripts can be run by individuals with no sense or knowledge, at least the initial creation and testing of such scripts were done by someone that knew enough to create them.
So, just like a GUI, then ?
Graphical representation of tabular data is easier and faster to understand than... tabular data?
Almost always. The easiest and most obvious example: graphs.
Really? GUIs are repeatable? Have you ever done web QA? The only time it's repeatable is when the system is completely locked down and nothing changes outside of your control. And even then....
You seem to be using a different definition of "repeatable" than any I know. If it's "repeatable" it means the same actions produce the same results.
When the system behind a GUI has deep dependencies that the GUI glosses over or "flattens" for "ease of understanding", then there's plenty of openings for new unexpected behavior to crop up.
There is no inherent need for a GUI interface to be oversimplified, or less capable.
The answer - to me - is pretty clear. The bottleneck to implementation is the software.
I'd rather have whichever one is more cost-effective, and I sincerely doubt it's going to be the ARM solution.
I'd like to see some evidence that an ARM CPU provides two orders of magnitude better processing power/watt than a Xeon CPU.
Then you might want to consider how much power consumption the order of magnitude greater supporting electronics (motherboards, RAM, switches, etc) is going to add to the ARM solution.
*Then* you might want to consider the cost of people to handle the additional administrative overhead in managing and order of magnitude more machines, and the additional physical space required.
Strange - didn't you guys say if I had nothing to hide, privacy didn't matter?
No, they said if you willingly broadcast your life all over the intarclouds they you have no grounds to complain about your privacy being violated when others (ab)use that information.
I can think of lots of reasons. The only reason I can think of having a GUI automated management tool is so some dumbass that doesn't know what he's doing can appear to manage firewalls.
That is a criticism of the user, not the tool. A criticism that applies equally to a collection of automated scripts.
Now, I can see the purpose of a GUI inspection tool for independent verification. But even then, I believe automated scripts are better.
Why ? Graphical representations of complex systems are nearly always easier and quicker to understand than lines of text describing same.
GUI tools cannot. They're a nicety for inspection for those that cannot read or understand the scripts, however.
GUIs are most certainly repeatable and their results can absolutely be inspected and verified.
The thing is the GUI design is very difficult. You need to know your users and their tasks in advance.
Which shouldn't be a significant problem for a domain as narrow as firewall management. Particularly given that the majority of firewalls are going to have large proportions of their configurations be very similar, if not completely identical.
The tool is not going to be simpler than the problem, so I think the best you could get would be some sort of iptables IDE, and that is not what came to my mind when I read "a GUI tool".
Consider something simple like adding a host to a standard ACL list for webservers. Why should it be any harder than dragging an icon for the server into a "Webservers" group, ticking a "webserver" box next to the hostname, or attaching a "webserver" profile ?
Why should any of these things require manual, slow, error-prone meddling into a text configuration interface ?
..and rubbish. I manage over 90 firewalls as a fraction of my full-time duties and it's a cakewalk. Why? I'm competent with unix (and a bunch of scripting languages). GUI's are for the command-line challenged..
Perhaps you can elaborate on the functional difference between automation via GUI and automation via scripting.
None of this proves or disproves the concept of evolution, but it does make it a much more mysterious process than we are usually led to believe. It's the kind of thing I hope science one day has a better understanding of.
There are few theories that are understood better than Evolution.
Keeping the games on an SSD is silly since the only thing it will effect is loading times.
Which is still a lot more than it will affect holding only the OS files (nearly all of which will be cached in RAM shortly after the system has finished booting, assuming you aren't memory starved).
Dear lord, gui based management of a fleet of firewalls? You want to drag and drop things and make magic happen when you do that? Sounds pretty reckless and dangerous to me. That's like saying because you can ride a bicycle, you should be allowed to drive a hazmat semi at top speed through downtown LA. If you don't understand what the rules are and how they will be applied in the first place, you are likely just going to cause problems (like accidentally shutting off your company's ability to sell their trinkets online because you locked it down on accident.)
I can't think of a single reason why knowing what the rules do precludes using a GUI tool to simplify and automate management.
Manually editing text is time-consuming, fatiguing and error prone. Have a tool to automate that sort of thing is one of the fundamental reasons for having computers in the first place.
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An example of this in nearly every personal computer is information read from spinning plastic disc media, like CD-ROMs or data DVDs. Typically, the OS will read data from the plastic disc, and store it in memory. If the memory usage becomes tight, that data from the spinning plastic disc will be swapped out to a magnetic disk drive.
No, it won't, it will discard it to shrink the overall size of the cache and free up RAM. I'm not aware of any system that behaves in the way you describe.
He wants the OS to intelligently (and automatically) use an SSD to store the frequently used files from his larger spinning hard disk. It's a great idea and surely Windows will do it soon enough (as much as I hate to say it).
It basically does already (ReadyBoost). I can't imagine there would be much work involved in modifying it to use arbitrary disks like SSDs instead of just thumbdrives. Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a simple Registry setting that decides what devices can and can't be used for ReadyBoost.
You're overextending the point. New (and nowadays quite fully backwards compatible) peripheral buses resulting in new cpu socket? Really?
If they use a new chipset and no effort is being made to retain backwards compatibility (eg: by increasing the bandwidth from chipset to CPU in the new models), then sure, it's quite reasonable.
RAM is less clear of course, and any "forced" change can be understandable here; but again AMD shows it can easily be done.
I don't doubt that it's doable if the requirement exists. My point is that within Intel, the requirement obviously *doesn't* exist.
Remember this isn't black and white, about trying to keep absolute compatibility for as long as possible. Only where it's reasonable. It would be certainly reasonable to expect in the case of TFA. A socket wchich was touted as neccessary for the market (not long after introducing another one), that will live barely more than a year - in light of many murky practices of Intel, does scream that it's intentional obsolescence (why it had to be leaked? Why Intel isn't forthcoming with this information? Could it be that consumers now would prefer something with a little more longevity?...)
In what way is it "intentional obsolescence" in the context of there being no market requirement defined for compatibility to be kept ? On what basis do you make that claim that someone inside Intel redesigned the socket with an explicit objective of making it incompatible with existing hardware ?
Haven't it crossed your mind that what you observe is mostly a peculiarity of your local market?
Over the last 15 years, my "local market" has crossed half a dozen different countries - and that's not including the people I interact with online. I'm pretty confident the sample is representative (if anything, given the field I work in, I expect the proportion of people I see upgrading is vastly *over* represented within my peer group).
Quite wastefull, all things considered, when comparing with many other places where PCs are bought (ah, but I have to concede it has nothing to do with the issue, just becuase you want it so...)
Quite wasteful in what sense ? All those old PCs usually don't get tossed, they get recycled to friends and family, sold on ebay, or donated to charity.
And I didn't mention motherboard there. It was just mentioning that, apart from swapping the CPU, literal addition of those two parts to empty slots and bay will indeed contribute even more to the new life of any machine (if going from 2 to 4 or 6 cores at higher clockspeed wasn't enough...). But for some reason you needed to twist it in a way that's basically just a total swap comparable to the least ideal situation...
I didn't "twist" anything. I pointed out that of the tiny minority of people who do upgrade their PCs by replacing components, they typically do multiple components at a time.
I'm dissapointed you haven't dragged on with "3rd party chipsets = bad". After all, Apple and Intel (sic) certainly didn't know what they're doing...
I never said "3rd party chipsets = bad". I said *most* non-Intel chipsets have been awful, buggy atrocities. This was particularly true in the '95 - '05 timeframe, and while the situation was improved markedly by nVidia and ATI's entrance into the market, both of them had some screwups as well.
The fact that Intel have sold motherboards with SiS chipsets is irrelevant. They sell motherboards with those godawful Realtek NICs on them, too (and they should also be avoided like the plague). The only thing I commented on was Intel's *chipsets*. Apple, of course, have a lot more control over their platform and are able to implement workarounds for problems and push them to a large proportion of their customers, something that is much more difficult in the PC world.
It's definitely easier to keep yourself disciplined by using cash rather than some debit/credit card that could have any amount of money behind it (or none).
Interestingly, I find the complete opposite to be true. Putting everything on the debit or credit card makes it *much* easier to see where my money is going (either by doing my own analysis, or using something like mint.com) than a weekly $200 ATM withdrawal.
Wow. Last time I was in Italy (2006) I had frequent trouble paying for may items without exact change - not everywhere, but enough to tell me that, at least at that time and place m,any cashiers expected exact change. For instance, I tried to get a bottle of water and an apple with a 20 and had to go to three markets before one would take my bill.
Yeah, but that's *Italy*. You're probably lucky they didn't try and barter something with you in lieu of money. :)
What? I have paid with an 500 euros ($667) on an movie theater. They sure took it, but the teens besides us looked at us with a weird smile.
It's a different situation in Europe (and many other countries like Australia), probably in no small part because of their much higher costs of living (ie: you need more money to do anything). I've paid for a *slice of pizza* in Switzerland with a CHF 1000.- note and the vendor didn't even blink.
Just because you don't carry doesn't mean nobody does.
The US runs on $20 bills, much like the UK runs on 20-quid notes. Seeing anything larger is extremely unusual (or, at least, I have yet to see anything bigger than a $20 after 6 months of living in the US, and pulling ~500 pounds out of an ATM whenever I visit London has never delivered anything bigger than a 20).
Additionally, from what I've seen so far - and one of the few ways the money system here isn't utterly crazy - people in the US use debit cards *much* more than cash (I'm sure there's some historical reason for this but I've never researched it), to the point of buying single items like chewing gum or newspapers with a card swipe. Cash is relatively uncommon here to start with, and large bills even less so (contrast again to Switzerland where it's not at all uncommon to use cash for purchases in the hundreds or thousands of Francs range). Saying "nobody carries hundreds" is quite reasonable - even Bill Gates himself probably doesn't have anything bigger than a twenty in his wallet.
Realistically, in the timescale involved, only one type of memory change (which is still ongoing), one which doesn't matter much in context (since even upcoming CPUs from AMD will be able to use old one, and since Intel made clean break together with other important changes). But most importantly nowhere near as problematic as in the old days, with incompatibilities frequently introduced (heck, even modules of hypothetically correct type would often refuse to work...). Both PCIe are fully compatible, and without much difference to the user really (not across one generation). Core 2 & Core i7 - sure, that change was reasonable. But the one from TFA not even close.
You're missing the point. All of these changes could quite reasonably result in a new socket design, if no particular effort was being made to get them working with existing sockets. Making no effort to retain backwards compatibility (because the cost/benefit analysis says it's not worth it) is a significantly different intent to actively breaking backwards compatibility. There is much evidence and reasoning to support the former situation, and very little to support the latter.
Yes, few people upgrade...again, we can't really know what is fully the cause and what is the effect (they don't have to upgrade by themselves, you know; "making computer faster cheaply" is easy to understand).
We can quite easily infer the cause and effect simply by observing that outside of computer enthusiasts, virtually no-one upgrades *any component* of their PC at all - when they want a more capable machine they buy a new one. There is zero evidence to suggest waves of people eager to upgrade their PC's CPUs, if only Intel made a more backwards-compatible socket.
But you have to agree there has been, over the years, quite a lot of waste with thrashing perfectly good machines... (quite recently mostly revolving about low RAM, which was often easily corrected; changing CPU could be often icing on the cake)
That has zero to do with whether or not Intel happens to support multiple CPU families on a single socket.
And where have I said you have to upgrade only the CPU? Sure, throw in more RAM and new HDD, all the better. If you can, of course...
The whole discussion is about Intel not keeping backwards compatibility in their CPU sockets, thus meaning upgrades can't be only the CPU. If you're [also] going to upgrade the motherboard/RAM type/video card/whatever, then the criticism that you can't replace just the CPU is moot.
Now the situation is different, with official Intel "tick tock" approach (it would be easy to anticipate future compatibility for process shrink...), quite stable situation with RAM & interfaces (yes, USB3...still hardly here, and the last version lasted a decade) and processors with 2, 4, and soon more cores.
There's been 3 different memory type changes (DDR1-3) and two bus changes (PCIe 1 and 2), to say nothing of the fundamental interconnect change between Core 2 and Core i7 & co. Chipset and socket changes don't seem unreasonable along with any of them.
Of course hardly anyone expects upgrading...but to what extent that's a reason, and to what an effect?
Few people upgrade because to most of them a computer is an appliance, not a bunch of individual components. "Upgrading the CPU" to most people would make about as much sense as "upgrading the motor" in their vacuum cleaner.
Even amongst the few people I do know who upgrade their PCs, I can't think of single one who has ever upgraded only the CPU, even when that was possible and would have been a significant raw performance improvement in and of itself.
Plus if there was hardly any money in chipset business (remember, using obsolete fabs), Intel wouldn't be so agressive in driving out any competition (which already had very little share of Intel platform)
Pretty much all non-intel chipsets have been crap - and that's a phenomenon dating back to the days of the original Pentium. There are very, very good reasons there's not a lot of competition in that market, and 90% of them involve bad (sometimes incredibly bad) products. Low quality chipsets are also one of the major reasons AMD does not have a larger slice of the pie (VIA did more to harm AMD than Intel could ever have hoped to in its wildest dreams).
No, because in the current topic thread what someone wanted was a GUI to look at a firewall, not an enterprise application run by a well designed GUI. It would help if you followed the thread.
I am following the thread. The arguments against GUIs are nearly all predicated on using them to management complex, "enterprise" environments. Therefore, either the arguments are invalid in context (because the environment is not complex or "enterprise"), or we can proceed with the assumption that any such GUI would be "an enterprise application".
Please graph a firewall configuration in a manner that is meaningful in this discussion for configuring firewalls.
C (www) --- | ---> S
This simple diagram above showing a firewall rule allowing web traffic from one or more clients to one or more webservers could quite easily represent multiple lines of "tabular data" defining a firewall configuration, yet it can be quickly and intuitively understood even by people with little knowledge of how that specific firewall is configured, let alone the commands and syntax required to actually implement the rule(s).
The topic started with the whine that firewalls are too difficult, and gee, wouldn't it be nice to just drag n drop firewall configs....
And ? "Easier" does not implicitly mean "less capable".
I'm well aware that a proper interface to a firewall could be written. It will still require almost as much understanding to use as the current effort to write scripts.
It would not, because you would not need intricate knowledge of command syntax and scripting languages.
If you were to make it easier, then you're dumbing it down and "flattening" the problem domain, and all above mentioned criticisms are valid.
There is absolutely no inherent reason for a solution that makes a process easier to also make the results less complete. None.
What you would be doing, would be isolating the "problem domains" (managing a firewall, knowing the syntax of that specific firewall, knowing how to script changes) and removing the ones that are not essential (knowing the syntax of that specific firewall, knowing how to script changes) from the solution.
But remember we're talking about a company which tried to block later s370 from working in slotkeys, activelly blocked possibility of dual cpu operation, used illegal tricks to ensure maintaining upper hand, goes far with castrating cheap CPUs from features, tried hard and succeeded in killing "alien" chipsets for their CPUs (hence ensuing profit for their own...now, how to ensure more will be sold?...)
All of which have clear and obvious benefits for segmenting the market and significantly increasing revenue.
Actively trying to block the fractional percentage of people who want to upgrade only their CPUs, however, is a completely different matter. There's simply not enough money involved for any but the paranoid to try and argue it would happen. It would probably cost more just in the people time of developing a strategy (let alone actually implementing it) than they would ever make back in increased sales.
It's like trying to argue that multipliers are disabled to stop people overclocking and "force" them to buy faster CPUs. It doesn't even pass a few seconds worth of cost/benefit analysis.
Intel have been well aware of the miniscule interest in CPU upgrades since the mid-'90s, with their "Overdrive" processors. Nearly everyone just gets a new PC, and of the tiny percentage left, most of them will use upgrading as an excuse to get a new motherboard and/or video card and/or RAM, etc.
Take government healthcare, if it becomes expensive treating people for a particular preventable condition you can guarantee that the action that causes the problem will be banned.
So can you point to this ever actually happening ? I mean, most of the civilised world has had universal healthcare for at least a few decades, so there should be plentiful examples available of at least something so obviously harmful as smoking being banned.
In most places, the owner of the vehicle is responsible for its use. That means they either have to nominate who was driving, or take the penalty themselves.
The advantage of average speed cameras for you (and me), the speeder, is that your average speed is likely to be lower than your top speed.
If you're going to slow down (or stop) such that your average speed is under the limit, it's a struggle to understand why you just wouldn't drive at that limit anyway, since you essentially gain nothing from speeding.
That's to be expected if for many systems sensible upgrades are blocked. Anyway, if the group willing to upgrade is so small...why Intel blocks it?
They don't block it, they just don't cater to it.
"Yes, let's force users to upgrade all their hardware when they want a new CPU! Show me the money!"
I'd be astounded if the percentage of people who have ever upgraded only their CPU was a meaningful fraction of 1%.
As apposed to giving the web server a name in the firewall and adding that name to the web server group?
So, two possibilities for a simple typo to cause problems from benign to catastrophic ?
It's a criticism of both. GUIs by nature are ad-hoc tools that allow individual tweaking - that's their purpose in life.
Rubbish.
Granted, you could create a tool that would allow for a creation of settings that could then be applied across multiple systems, but that would be much more than a mere GUI tool.
Why ? Because anything that's useful must be "more than a mere GUI tool" ?
No, it doesn't. While scripts can be run by individuals with no sense or knowledge, at least the initial creation and testing of such scripts were done by someone that knew enough to create them.
So, just like a GUI, then ?
Graphical representation of tabular data is easier and faster to understand than... tabular data?
Almost always. The easiest and most obvious example: graphs.
Really? GUIs are repeatable? Have you ever done web QA? The only time it's repeatable is when the system is completely locked down and nothing changes outside of your control. And even then....
You seem to be using a different definition of "repeatable" than any I know. If it's "repeatable" it means the same actions produce the same results.
When the system behind a GUI has deep dependencies that the GUI glosses over or "flattens" for "ease of understanding", then there's plenty of openings for new unexpected behavior to crop up.
There is no inherent need for a GUI interface to be oversimplified, or less capable.
The answer - to me - is pretty clear. The bottleneck to implementation is the software.
I'd rather have whichever one is more cost-effective, and I sincerely doubt it's going to be the ARM solution.
I'd like to see some evidence that an ARM CPU provides two orders of magnitude better processing power/watt than a Xeon CPU.
Then you might want to consider how much power consumption the order of magnitude greater supporting electronics (motherboards, RAM, switches, etc) is going to add to the ARM solution.
*Then* you might want to consider the cost of people to handle the additional administrative overhead in managing and order of magnitude more machines, and the additional physical space required.
Strange - didn't you guys say if I had nothing to hide, privacy didn't matter?
No, they said if you willingly broadcast your life all over the intarclouds they you have no grounds to complain about your privacy being violated when others (ab)use that information.
I can think of lots of reasons. The only reason I can think of having a GUI automated management tool is so some dumbass that doesn't know what he's doing can appear to manage firewalls.
That is a criticism of the user, not the tool. A criticism that applies equally to a collection of automated scripts.
Now, I can see the purpose of a GUI inspection tool for independent verification. But even then, I believe automated scripts are better.
Why ? Graphical representations of complex systems are nearly always easier and quicker to understand than lines of text describing same.
GUI tools cannot. They're a nicety for inspection for those that cannot read or understand the scripts, however.
GUIs are most certainly repeatable and their results can absolutely be inspected and verified.
The thing is the GUI design is very difficult. You need to know your users and their tasks in advance.
Which shouldn't be a significant problem for a domain as narrow as firewall management. Particularly given that the majority of firewalls are going to have large proportions of their configurations be very similar, if not completely identical.
The tool is not going to be simpler than the problem, so I think the best you could get would be some sort of iptables IDE, and that is not what came to my mind when I read "a GUI tool".
Consider something simple like adding a host to a standard ACL list for webservers. Why should it be any harder than dragging an icon for the server into a "Webservers" group, ticking a "webserver" box next to the hostname, or attaching a "webserver" profile ?
Why should any of these things require manual, slow, error-prone meddling into a text configuration interface ?
Perhaps you can elaborate on the functional difference between automation via GUI and automation via scripting.
None of this is the "amoeba to human" (to use a figure of speech) evolution that explains the appearance of highly complex organisms on Earth.
No-one makes claims about "amoeba to human" (to use a figure of speech) evolution, except Creationists.
In fact I've never seen a scientific, proven example of a mutation that added new genetic information that did not previously exist.
This should get you started.
None of this proves or disproves the concept of evolution, but it does make it a much more mysterious process than we are usually led to believe. It's the kind of thing I hope science one day has a better understanding of.
There are few theories that are understood better than Evolution.
Keeping the games on an SSD is silly since the only thing it will effect is loading times.
Which is still a lot more than it will affect holding only the OS files (nearly all of which will be cached in RAM shortly after the system has finished booting, assuming you aren't memory starved).
Dear lord, gui based management of a fleet of firewalls? You want to drag and drop things and make magic happen when you do that? Sounds pretty reckless and dangerous to me. That's like saying because you can ride a bicycle, you should be allowed to drive a hazmat semi at top speed through downtown LA. If you don't understand what the rules are and how they will be applied in the first place, you are likely just going to cause problems (like accidentally shutting off your company's ability to sell their trinkets online because you locked it down on accident.)
I can't think of a single reason why knowing what the rules do precludes using a GUI tool to simplify and automate management.
Manually editing text is time-consuming, fatiguing and error prone. Have a tool to automate that sort of thing is one of the fundamental reasons for having computers in the first place.