Plus RAID-0 ain't all it's cracked up to be. I had a Dell XPS600 with RAID 0 and one of the drives went kaput. Guess what happens to all the other drives then ? They're useless. 4X drives in RAID-0 means you have four times the chance of having a dead weight for a system.
RAID doesn't improve speed, at least not by a large amount. RAID will save you time if a drive died and you can get your data back quicker. As for normal performance speed you are just as good with 1 drive.
I'm not even saying I run the line 24/7 on full speed.
You certainly appear to be attacking ISPs for only expecting "a mere 1%".
But can't I assume that for 8-12 hours a day the line I'm paying for does what it's supposed to do?
It runs at 6Mbit 24/7. What it might NOT allow is for you to download the maximum theoretical volume this equates to. Bandwidth and volume are two separate things.
I seldomly break 150 Gigs a month.
That is a *massive* amount of data for a home user (shit, it'd be a large amount even for a business). The average customer would download around an order of magnitude less.
All I'm saying is that most ISPs sell products their system can't even handle and they put the pressure on the people not using their lines much even though they paid for it.
No-one sells a (consumer-level) service (internet or otherwise) expecting it to be fully utilised 100% of the time. It would be insanely stupid.
Now if all customers started demanding what they actually paid for the system breaks down.
They haven't paid for a 100% utilised, 6Mbit network connection. They've paid for a 6Mbit connection.
I would call that a flawed system. Either they need to charge me 10 bucks more a month for guaranteed throughput or stop whining about their terrible infrastructure calculation.
Running a (modest, by todays standard) 6Mbit connection at 100% (or, hell, even 50%) utilisation will cost a hell of a lot more than 10 bucks a month. More like thousands.
So they rent lines to people that are supposed to do a mere 1% (6Mbit 24/7 = ~1800GB a month / 20 = ~0.01) of their theoretical throughput.
No, they do not. They rent 6Mbit lines that they do not expect anyone to run 24/7 (not an even remotely unreasonable assumption). Their throughput remains at 6Mbit, whether you're downloading 10MB a day or 1GB a day.
The disingenuous conflating of bandwidth and download volume is extremely common in these sort of discussions, but that does not make it correct. They are separate - albeit somewhat dependent - aspects of an ISP subscription.
More horseshit. I see cars on the side of the road almost daily on my commute. How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
That's not really a fair comparison. Not only are there a helluva lot more cars out there, but aircraft engines probably get an order of magnitude or two more proactive maintenance and attention than 99.9% of car engines.
Ultimately I think we're going to see systems with the OS essentially in ROM on a solid state disk, with room for application installation. Data will end up being stored on a traditional disk. I sincerely hope that the developers of next gen Windows, Linux, MacOS, and others, are taking this scenario and building an OS that is optimized for it. I think Linux certainly has a head start.
Maybe it's just me, but putting the OS data (least performance sensitive and most easily replaced) on the SSD (most reliable and highest performing) seems to defeat the purpose.
The dutch have a great solution to ignorance of the law. Dutch citizen are legally obligated to be familiar with the law. Pleading ignorance of the law is admitting a crime!
What is the extent of "familiar" in this context ? The entire legal code of pretty much any country is too vast and nuanced for even an expert with years (if not decades) of experience to understand, let alone the layman.
The only people who seriously believe "ignorance of the law is not a defense" are those who wish to use it as a tool of oppression.
That is ALL broadcast traffic, which is why all ISP's should block those ports at the customer premise equipment, as well as subnet the customers to keep them from easily spreading their junk.
Such broadcast traffic typically won't be going out the WAN port (ie: "internet activity").
Explain why, Firefox, Opera and Safari (and any other browser) have been trying to make lighter browsers that are fast and take up less resources.
Do you think FF3 takes up less resources than FF1.5 ?
But in general, only MS keeps making slower and slower software. Even Apple has started to make a faster OS that's what Snow Leopard is all about.
Apple started from a position of such mind-bogglingly bad performance they didn't have anywhere to go but up. Snow Leopard is about doing the kind of multi-CPU optimisations to OS X that Windows and Linux had half a decade or more ago.
Also, if you think Linux 2.6 is faster than Linux 1.3 on, say, a 4Mb 386, you're dreaming.
What do you guys think beta means? In my industry, alpha = feature complete, beta = release candidate 1.
Don't know what industry that is, but traditionally an alpha is *not* feature-complete, it is feature-completeness that denotes the move from alpha to beta.
You're the first person I've ever heard suggest an alpha should be feature-complete.
What happened to the guys who wrote NT and 2K desktop/server?
Pretty much all the accusations against Vista of "bloat" were made against every earlier version of NT as well (although more so before Windows 2000, since the hardware wasn't progressing quite as quickly during the early/mid 90s as it was later).
Proportionally, Vista is no more "bloated" than earlier versions of Windows (and probably less so compared to NT 3.1 and 3.5).
Even after I explain to them, that it is one of the major reasons to have a CC and that the issuing bank is happy to find out which of their merchants are screw-ups, they only barely believe me. Financial superstition; two evils, together greater than the sum.
Probably because most people are used to banks screwing them at every turn and are, therefore, highly suspicious when a bank appears _not_ to be doing so.
A very common pattern is to see the "standard" corporate image run inside a virtual machine which gives access to the corporate email and other MS apps while the user spends lots of their time in the native machine doing their work.
I don't think "common" is the word you're after here. I struggle to believe such an expensive and complex solution is necessary - let alone desirable - outside of a handful of corner cases.
I must confess I have no idea how much "enterprise" distro charge for support, but I think that if companies are starting to use their own support, it must not be cheap. Maybe this should send a message to RH and company
Depends on the context. If - as we do - you only use RHEL because you need a certified platform for some other obscenely expensive piece of software (eg: Oracle), then the cost of RH's licensing is basically irrelevant.
We use CentOS on pretty much all our 150-odd Linux servers, except for those that require RHEL to be in a supported configuration (Oracle DB, Oracle Appserver, Oracle Financials).
Of course, while we mainly do this to save money, out of the million-plus we pay Oracle, the few thousand in RHEL licenses doesn't even count as a rounding error (hell, compared to Oracle licensing, even the cost of the hardware is irrelevant).
I live in a much bigger world that hasn't heard of the RIAA or MPAA before, the world where most people think "PC" means Windows, the world where Linux doesn't quite exist yet.
Yes. That would be the world where everyone blames Windows (and Microsoft) whenever something goes wrong on their computer.
Is your heard buried in the sand or buried in your world?
Apparently yours is, if you think anyone except Microsoft gets the blame whenever, say, someone's game crashes, or a dodgy video card BSODs their machine.
Microsoft knows the base-line of users it is dealing with. It spends millions knowing the user and user interfaces and the like. It is the same Microsoft that has STILL not taken out the "run on insert" autorun.inf nonsense from many machines.
This is changed in Vista.
It is the same Microsoft that thought it was a good idea to put ActiveX on the Wild-Wild-Web and expect everyone to place nice.
In 1996. Got something a little more up to date ?
The same Microsoft that makes a file executable by all users simply by having a ADE, ADP, BAS, BAT, CHM, CMD, COM, CPL, CRT, DLL, DO*, EXE, HLP, HTA, INF, INS, ISP, JS, JSE,
LNK, MDB, MDE, MSC, MSI, MSP, MST, OCX, PCD, PIF, POT, PPT, REG, SCR, SCT, SHB, SHS, SYS, URL, VB, VBE, VBS, WSC, WSF, WSH or XL* (probably not a complete list) extension on the file name.
You do understand that those files aren't actually "executed", right (well, except for the ones that are actually executables like.exe) ? That the shell just passes them off to whatever program is registered to handle them ?
You know, just like every other remotely user-friendly GUI shell does ?
The same Microsoft who thinks they can set up a stable server on an OS platform designed from the ground up for running user games and applications without consideration of security.
Your understanding of Windows's development is severely deficient.
Microsoft could easily have done what Apple did -- rewrite a new OS and build a compatibility layer for old apps, but they didn't [...]
Yes, they did. They just did it half a decade earlier (like Apple tried, but failed, to do).
[...] and every time they threaten to do that (as in the case of the next version of Windows after Vista) but they back off on it just as they back off on all other challenging improvements to the OS they have promised. In the end, they just repackage everything they made before and sell it to users once again.
There is no need to "rewrite" Windows NT. It is *at least* as technically capable as its peers.
Yes. Microsoft IS in fact the primary enabler. They could have fixed many of the problems I identified more than 10 years ago because they knew of those problems even back then.
The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of security problems on Windows (or, indeed, on any platform) are due to end users and third party software, outside of Microsoft's control. The only way in which Microsoft is an "enabler" is by being in the position of providing the most widely-used platform.
Public opinion of Microsoft is a strange thing. When viruses and worms live in the holes and cracks of the Windows platform, people blame the writers of said malware exclusively and hold Microsoft blameless, or worse, paint them as the victim of being so successful.
What world do you live in ? Microsoft consistently get the blame for just about everything that goes wrong with computers in general, even when it's not even remotely their fault.
Microsoft is the enabler in most of these situations and the public needs to be reminded of that fact until it is generally accepted and understood.
By far the most common "enabler" in all computer-security-related incidents is the user.
If you need more than 16GB of OS and apps, you don't need a laptop really. Or if you do you're a power user with unusual needs - you're not in the "most people" zone where the price/performance sweet spot is. About 4GB is an XP install with Office, for 8GB you can have Ubuntu and a few hundred of your favorite free apps. If your system image is >12GB, you have other issues and you should expect to pay more. 16GB for OS & apps, 16GB for data is plenty for almost anybody.
If you're one of the growing number of people who use (or want to use) a laptop as their only computer, this idea is a non-starter.
Constant flipping of cards is not a solution, either. Even ignoring the massive potential for data loss, it's just damn inconvenient (as are external hard disks).
It is by NOT dealing with issues, but avoiding them, that is the real reason such a large percentage of Americans are in prison - more per capita than any nation bar China.
I thought so many Americans were in prison because of stupid drug laws ?
Yeah, but what is justice? Or, to be more precise, why do we punish people?
In the civilised world, we don't "punish people", we isolate them from the rest of society to restrict the amount of further harm they can do (sometimes permanently), or we ask them to pay restitution (either in hard cash, or labour).
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Plus RAID-0 ain't all it's cracked up to be. I had a Dell XPS600 with RAID 0 and one of the drives went kaput. Guess what happens to all the other drives then ? They're useless. 4X drives in RAID-0 means you have four times the chance of having a dead weight for a system.
RAID0: Optimised for failure.
RAID doesn't improve speed, at least not by a large amount. RAID will save you time if a drive died and you can get your data back quicker. As for normal performance speed you are just as good with 1 drive.
Uh.... What ?
I'm not even saying I run the line 24/7 on full speed.
You certainly appear to be attacking ISPs for only expecting "a mere 1%".
But can't I assume that for 8-12 hours a day the line I'm paying for does what it's supposed to do?
It runs at 6Mbit 24/7. What it might NOT allow is for you to download the maximum theoretical volume this equates to. Bandwidth and volume are two separate things.
I seldomly break 150 Gigs a month.
That is a *massive* amount of data for a home user (shit, it'd be a large amount even for a business). The average customer would download around an order of magnitude less.
All I'm saying is that most ISPs sell products their system can't even handle and they put the pressure on the people not using their lines much even though they paid for it.
No-one sells a (consumer-level) service (internet or otherwise) expecting it to be fully utilised 100% of the time. It would be insanely stupid.
Now if all customers started demanding what they actually paid for the system breaks down.
They haven't paid for a 100% utilised, 6Mbit network connection. They've paid for a 6Mbit connection.
I would call that a flawed system. Either they need to charge me 10 bucks more a month for guaranteed throughput or stop whining about their terrible infrastructure calculation.
Running a (modest, by todays standard) 6Mbit connection at 100% (or, hell, even 50%) utilisation will cost a hell of a lot more than 10 bucks a month. More like thousands.
So they rent lines to people that are supposed to do a mere 1% (6Mbit 24/7 = ~1800GB a month / 20 = ~0.01) of their theoretical throughput.
No, they do not. They rent 6Mbit lines that they do not expect anyone to run 24/7 (not an even remotely unreasonable assumption). Their throughput remains at 6Mbit, whether you're downloading 10MB a day or 1GB a day.
The disingenuous conflating of bandwidth and download volume is extremely common in these sort of discussions, but that does not make it correct. They are separate - albeit somewhat dependent - aspects of an ISP subscription.
More horseshit. I see cars on the side of the road almost daily on my commute. How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
That's not really a fair comparison. Not only are there a helluva lot more cars out there, but aircraft engines probably get an order of magnitude or two more proactive maintenance and attention than 99.9% of car engines.
Ultimately I think we're going to see systems with the OS essentially in ROM on a solid state disk, with room for application installation. Data will end up being stored on a traditional disk. I sincerely hope that the developers of next gen Windows, Linux, MacOS, and others, are taking this scenario and building an OS that is optimized for it. I think Linux certainly has a head start.
Maybe it's just me, but putting the OS data (least performance sensitive and most easily replaced) on the SSD (most reliable and highest performing) seems to defeat the purpose.
The speed of the development of flash drives will make the optical drives obsolete.
Much as I'd like to see 32-64G flash drives selling for a buck or so, I can't see it happening even in 5 years.
The dutch have a great solution to ignorance of the law. Dutch citizen are legally obligated to be familiar with the law. Pleading ignorance of the law is admitting a crime!
What is the extent of "familiar" in this context ? The entire legal code of pretty much any country is too vast and nuanced for even an expert with years (if not decades) of experience to understand, let alone the layman.
The only people who seriously believe "ignorance of the law is not a defense" are those who wish to use it as a tool of oppression.
Been to the UK lately?
Yes. Apart from speed limits and beer, they use metric.
That is ALL broadcast traffic, which is why all ISP's should block those ports at the customer premise equipment, as well as subnet the customers to keep them from easily spreading their junk.
Such broadcast traffic typically won't be going out the WAN port (ie: "internet activity").
If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards [...]
Re-establish ? At which point was it established in the first place ?
Explain why, Firefox, Opera and Safari (and any other browser) have been trying to make lighter browsers that are fast and take up less resources.
Do you think FF3 takes up less resources than FF1.5 ?
But in general, only MS keeps making slower and slower software. Even Apple has started to make a faster OS that's what Snow Leopard is all about.
Apple started from a position of such mind-bogglingly bad performance they didn't have anywhere to go but up. Snow Leopard is about doing the kind of multi-CPU optimisations to OS X that Windows and Linux had half a decade or more ago.
Also, if you think Linux 2.6 is faster than Linux 1.3 on, say, a 4Mb 386, you're dreaming.
What do you guys think beta means? In my industry, alpha = feature complete, beta = release candidate 1.
Don't know what industry that is, but traditionally an alpha is *not* feature-complete, it is feature-completeness that denotes the move from alpha to beta.
You're the first person I've ever heard suggest an alpha should be feature-complete.
What happened to the guys who wrote NT and 2K desktop/server?
Pretty much all the accusations against Vista of "bloat" were made against every earlier version of NT as well (although more so before Windows 2000, since the hardware wasn't progressing quite as quickly during the early/mid 90s as it was later).
Proportionally, Vista is no more "bloated" than earlier versions of Windows (and probably less so compared to NT 3.1 and 3.5).
Even after I explain to them, that it is one of the major reasons to have a CC and that the issuing bank is happy to find out which of their merchants are screw-ups, they only barely believe me. Financial superstition; two evils, together greater than the sum.
Probably because most people are used to banks screwing them at every turn and are, therefore, highly suspicious when a bank appears _not_ to be doing so.
Methinks you be comparing Apples to some other fruit.
A very common pattern is to see the "standard" corporate image run inside a virtual machine which gives access to the corporate email and other MS apps while the user spends lots of their time in the native machine doing their work.
I don't think "common" is the word you're after here. I struggle to believe such an expensive and complex solution is necessary - let alone desirable - outside of a handful of corner cases.
I must confess I have no idea how much "enterprise" distro charge for support, but I think that if companies are starting to use their own support, it must not be cheap. Maybe this should send a message to RH and company
Depends on the context. If - as we do - you only use RHEL because you need a certified platform for some other obscenely expensive piece of software (eg: Oracle), then the cost of RH's licensing is basically irrelevant.
We use CentOS on pretty much all our 150-odd Linux servers, except for those that require RHEL to be in a supported configuration (Oracle DB, Oracle Appserver, Oracle Financials).
Of course, while we mainly do this to save money, out of the million-plus we pay Oracle, the few thousand in RHEL licenses doesn't even count as a rounding error (hell, compared to Oracle licensing, even the cost of the hardware is irrelevant).
When I lived in the US no one managed to explain to me why the same business logic doesn't apply there
They do. It's called a credit card.
I live in a much bigger world that hasn't heard of the RIAA or MPAA before, the world where most people think "PC" means Windows, the world where Linux doesn't quite exist yet.
Yes. That would be the world where everyone blames Windows (and Microsoft) whenever something goes wrong on their computer.
Is your heard buried in the sand or buried in your world?
Apparently yours is, if you think anyone except Microsoft gets the blame whenever, say, someone's game crashes, or a dodgy video card BSODs their machine.
Microsoft knows the base-line of users it is dealing with. It spends millions knowing the user and user interfaces and the like. It is the same Microsoft that has STILL not taken out the "run on insert" autorun.inf nonsense from many machines.
This is changed in Vista.
It is the same Microsoft that thought it was a good idea to put ActiveX on the Wild-Wild-Web and expect everyone to place nice.
In 1996. Got something a little more up to date ?
The same Microsoft that makes a file executable by all users simply by having a ADE, ADP, BAS, BAT, CHM, CMD, COM, CPL, CRT, DLL, DO*, EXE, HLP, HTA, INF, INS, ISP, JS, JSE, LNK, MDB, MDE, MSC, MSI, MSP, MST, OCX, PCD, PIF, POT, PPT, REG, SCR, SCT, SHB, SHS, SYS, URL, VB, VBE, VBS, WSC, WSF, WSH or XL* (probably not a complete list) extension on the file name.
You do understand that those files aren't actually "executed", right (well, except for the ones that are actually executables like .exe) ? That the shell just passes them off to whatever program is registered to handle them ?
You know, just like every other remotely user-friendly GUI shell does ?
The same Microsoft who thinks they can set up a stable server on an OS platform designed from the ground up for running user games and applications without consideration of security.
Your understanding of Windows's development is severely deficient.
Microsoft could easily have done what Apple did -- rewrite a new OS and build a compatibility layer for old apps, but they didn't [...]
Yes, they did. They just did it half a decade earlier (like Apple tried, but failed, to do).
[...] and every time they threaten to do that (as in the case of the next version of Windows after Vista) but they back off on it just as they back off on all other challenging improvements to the OS they have promised. In the end, they just repackage everything they made before and sell it to users once again.
There is no need to "rewrite" Windows NT. It is *at least* as technically capable as its peers.
Yes. Microsoft IS in fact the primary enabler. They could have fixed many of the problems I identified more than 10 years ago because they knew of those problems even back then.
The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of security problems on Windows (or, indeed, on any platform) are due to end users and third party software, outside of Microsoft's control. The only way in which Microsoft is an "enabler" is by being in the position of providing the most widely-used platform.
Public opinion of Microsoft is a strange thing. When viruses and worms live in the holes and cracks of the Windows platform, people blame the writers of said malware exclusively and hold Microsoft blameless, or worse, paint them as the victim of being so successful.
What world do you live in ? Microsoft consistently get the blame for just about everything that goes wrong with computers in general, even when it's not even remotely their fault.
Microsoft is the enabler in most of these situations and the public needs to be reminded of that fact until it is generally accepted and understood.
By far the most common "enabler" in all computer-security-related incidents is the user.
If you need more than 16GB of OS and apps, you don't need a laptop really. Or if you do you're a power user with unusual needs - you're not in the "most people" zone where the price/performance sweet spot is. About 4GB is an XP install with Office, for 8GB you can have Ubuntu and a few hundred of your favorite free apps. If your system image is >12GB, you have other issues and you should expect to pay more. 16GB for OS & apps, 16GB for data is plenty for almost anybody.
If you're one of the growing number of people who use (or want to use) a laptop as their only computer, this idea is a non-starter.
Constant flipping of cards is not a solution, either. Even ignoring the massive potential for data loss, it's just damn inconvenient (as are external hard disks).
It is by NOT dealing with issues, but avoiding them, that is the real reason such a large percentage of Americans are in prison - more per capita than any nation bar China.
I thought so many Americans were in prison because of stupid drug laws ?
Yeah, but what is justice? Or, to be more precise, why do we punish people?
In the civilised world, we don't "punish people", we isolate them from the rest of society to restrict the amount of further harm they can do (sometimes permanently), or we ask them to pay restitution (either in hard cash, or labour).