They spent some amount of time and effort on making sure that Windows would not be virtualized under OS/2, and perhaps some effort was spent to make sure it wouldn't under WINE, as well. At this point they may have sunk themselves by making Windows un-virtualizable, at least with reasonable performance levels. In other words, in blocking OS/2 and WINE, they may have blocked that course of action for themselves.
The existence of the Windows XP port to Xen disproves your conspiracy theories.
Which do you think your typical ISV will favor, an open, standardised platform with hundreds of millions of installs, multiple enterprise support vendors, and over a decade of maturity, or a brand new proprietary operating system with at best an emulation of a non-standard API with no formal definition and only one support vendor?
The one their customers want.
My money would be on Microsoft. Heck, I'd expect Apple to do a massive restructure to fill a "Windows void" long before I'd even contemplate some Linux distro doing it.
Consider that the US is the most open economy in the world. And that the poor in the US are much better off than the middle class or rich in most of the world. And yes, I have been to most of the world (well, 94 countries so far).
Then instead of spending time in the Third World, to help reinforce your (presumably libertarian) biases, you should try spending some time in countries that are similar to the US. If I had to pick somewhere in the world to be "poor", then there would be a lot of countries on the list before the US - like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of Western Europe.
And the free market inherently rewards those who grow it the most - the gain the most.
Which explains why, say, a CEO (who is essentially irrelevant in the day-to-day operations of a company) earns tens (if not hundreds) as times as much as the average employee (who is critical to the daily functioning of a company) ?
In actual reality, there's little difference between the boy's club of high-level executives and "elites", and the Monarchies and other "Nobles" of the olden days.
Lets say windows had a way to detect the root kit. Code it in. Make a popup come up every 5 minutes that the rootkit was detected. Cannot be disabled. (period) First thing the developers would do is mod it to hide better. A small war starts. Microsoft being the OS author, WILL win that war eventually. And the enraged customers will force them to remove the rootkit. (all the while the devs are blaming MS of course) Such is life. I wish they'd do that. It'd be messy, but effective.
You're kidding, right ? Whenever something goes wrong on a computer, Microsoft (and Windows) gets the blame by default. One need look no further than the response to UAC (even by supposedly knowledgable people) to see that.
About a year and a half back, I did that for maybe a week. I'd kept all the crit updates in there, and yet the AV software would pop up every few hours announcing that a new gift had arrived on the PC.
Windows XP SP2 was released in mid-2004, and by default enables the Windows firewall. Exactly how were those "gifts" getting in if you didn't manually disable it ?
Update it for the digital age. Microsoft intentionally designs an insecure OS. They could secure it if they wanted to. All they need to do is enforce a UNIX-like security model where processes and services run as a limited-rights user, instead of root, and users aren't root on their own box.
Like when they made Windows NT 15 years ago, you mean ?
Instead, they just take the more profitable solution of leaving it insecure and selling you "protection".
Anti-virus and malware software isn't there to protect users from security holes in the OS. It's there to protect them from themselves.
Now tell me why we can't prosecute them the same way we prosecute mafia thugs running a protection racket?
Because (as is typical when it comes to/. commentaries on Windows or Microsoft) your analogy is wrong. Most malware exploits user stupidity and ignorance, not security holes, and Windows has more than adequate security infrastructure to prevent the ones that don't.
The actual situation is more like shopowners getting robbed because they leave their doors wide open all the time, then the landlord offering them a couple of security guards to stand inside and stop anyone trying to make off with the goods.
If you can't do serious work on a machine other people can do serious work on, that's a comment on you, not on the machine.
No, it's a comment on what they call "serious work".
I don't spend all day every day in front of any laptop. A laptop is by definition what you use when you're away from base - so portability scores hugely over power.
Multiple machines are a PITA. A slight decrease in portability (eg: a 12" ultraportable - still small enough to take pretty much anywhere) is vastly outweighed by the larger benefits of not having to deal with multiple machines.
Leter in my career I was responsible for, among other things, one single 486 box with 2Mb of RAM which supported twenty-five typists. You do not need that much processing power to do efficient work, no matter what work you do. You merely need to learn how to use a computer.
Yeah, and we should all go back to using horses and buggies because a couple of hundred years ago people got around in them just fine.
The fact I can get _some_ work done on an underpowered box does not negate the fact I can get _more_ work done on something with a little more poke.
Your bias is showing (as, clearly, is that of the people who modded my OP -1). For example, people whose "real work" is something like video editing would laugh you out of the room if you said something as stupid as "you do not need that much processing power to do efficient work, no matter what work you do" to them.
I use an Eeepc and just today I had a OpenOffice document open, a dictionary, Firefox, and was touching up some pictures with Gimp. Never felt slow really, and remember my 701 has a 650mhz processor.
For a light workload like that I would hope it "never felt slow". Heck, I used to run more things than that on my old 100Mhz Pentium.
No, it's not. I've tried doing "serious work" on laptops with a bit higher specs than these "UMPCs" (eg: Dell D410) and was noticably less productive.
My best laptop ever was a Toshiba Libretto - a little smaller than a standard paperback book. Yes, you can type perfectly well on a keyboard that size. Yes, Emacs runs just fine - and if you don't like the keymappings, remap them for heaven's sake!
No number pad, alone, is a showstopper for a "serious work" keyboard as far as I'm concerned. This is before even getting into the generally smaller keys, cramped layout and things like Pageup/down either being in a weird place or modifiers of other keys.
If the screen hadn't died I'd still be using it now. 'Smaller' and 'lighter' (and 'reasonable batter life') are what I want from a laptop.
If you can claim you'd rather spend all day, every day, in front of an Eee (or equivalent) than a machine with dual cores, 4G RAM and a 30" monitor, then you're either lying, a masochist, or you don't do much work.
This is to say nothing of actual productivity differences.
People who think these are low power machines simply don't understand computing.
I understand computing perfectly well, and they're low-powered machines. My (not even top end at the time) desktop PC from 2000 and 12", ~1.5kg Dell D400 _notebook_ from 2003 had more processing power. The screens are so tiny and low-res you'd barely be able to have more than a single terminal visible, to say nothing of email, browsers, PDFs, spreadsheets, VNC sessions, RDP sessions, chat windows, et al, that make up my typical workload. Not to mention the couple of VMs I like to have ticking along in the background.
These things are toys. Heck, in these days of Youtube and Flash games, they'd barely even be able to handle the average end users idle web browsing.
Man, I don't know when a 1.6 GHz Intel and a gig of RAM became "lacking", but you must have had trouble using computers before about two years ago.
Ca. 2000 - nearly a decade ago - my desktop PC was a dual 1Ghz P3, which would be 1.5x - 2x as fast as a 1.6Ghz Atom. My machines haven't gotten any slower since then.
The Atom is quick for what it is, but it is by no means "fast".
Today, I typically keep open half a dozen Firefox windows with 10-15 tabs each, a few dozen putty windows, some Excel spreadsheets, Thunderbird and a few emails, Outlook, several VNC sessions, a few X apps, a few RDP sessions, a few PDFs, etc. Even before getting into how the tiny screen would make that, at best, utterly impractical, it would be (based on the 2GB RAM, 2Ghz Pentium-M I sometimes use) annoyingly slow.
That's extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons.
Regardless of whether it's short-sighted, your answers are nothing but strawmen because you ignore his point.
They're spending more time on replicating DNA than they are on devising new ways to grow food.
No, they're not. There are generally two reasons why "poor people" have more children:
* The need for more humans in places where manual labour is the rule, rather than the exception.
* Very poor (if any) access to sexual education and contraception (or extensive brainwashing that contraception and/or sex is a "sin").
Poor and dumb people aren't spending any more time fucking than rich and smart people. In fact, given how much less leisure time they typically have, they're probably spending a lot less.
There is no way you can do some serious work without those keys.
There's no way you can do "serious work" on these machines at all. Tiny keyboards, tiny, low-res screens, slow CPUs, etc, etc.
A docking station might bring them close to be useful for "serious work", but even then they're lacking in things like CPU power, RAM and disk space.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
That's true, and when software RAID6 (or even hardware for that matter) gives reasonable speed (and I'm quite conservative about this speed) I'll certainly change my advise. From my tests RAID6 is sorrily sloooooooooowwwwww.
The X4500 doesn't have any write cache beyond what's in the drives themselves, which means it can have awful performance for some types of write-heavy loads. It's not difficult to find tasks where a small RAID array, with only a few disks, running with a good RAID controller having a 256MB write cache can outperform an X4500.
The x4500 takes (at least) 16GB of RAM. How much more "write cache" do you want ?
(To say nothing of the massive internal bus bandwidth it sports.)
I doubt you can find any situation where " a small RAID array, with only a few disks, running with a good RAID controller having a 256MB write cache can outperform an X4500".
Re:I understand why you`d want to go pre-built
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
The @ sign. For whatever stupid reason, a fair number of OS X programs create files with that in the name.
NTFS handles the @ sign just fine:
C:\Temp>copy con "me@home.txt"
test
^Z
1 file(s) copied.
C:\Temp>dir me@home.txt
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 740C-9C2A
Whatever your problem is, it's not NTFS. Heck, even Explorer lets you create a filename with '@' in it.
NTFS can handle any Unicode character in a filename. The character restrictions you refer to (eg: '\') are enforced by the shell (Explorer, cmd, etc), not the filesystem.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
raid10 is just ineffecent and no better than raid5 on a harware controler - (software raid some times runs 10 better than 5)
RAID10 is substantially faster than RAID6 if your performance profile is random writes.
Whether the RAID is implemented on a hardware controller or in software is, these days, basically irrelevant as far as performance is concerned.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
Low-end controllers tend to have crappy processors on them. Crappy processors cannot compute a checksum very quickly. But modern non-crappy processors are insanely fast compared to modern disk.
The bottleneck from parity-based RAID systems comes from the higher number of IOs required, _not_ the "checksum computing".
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 1
What about RAID-Z? I've been interested in RAID-Z for a while for the snapshotting, the redundancy vs JBOD and cheap (don't need $200 controller cards). I'm not really sure how I could, or if I could, do a Hot Spare with that...
RAIDZ = RAID5 (in the context of this discussion). You want RAIDZ2 (which is essentially RAID6).
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Now: for the same dollars go with RAID5+Hot spare: [...]
Or use RAID6, giving you essentially the best of both worlds.
Personally, I wouldn't touch RAID5 with big SATA drives with a 10 foot pole. Drives tend to go around the same time and if your second drive goes during the rebuild (which I've seen happen on several occasions) then your data is toast.
There are three types of RAID levels worth considering today. RAID6 if you need space more than speed, RAID10 if you need speed more than space, and RAID1 if you only have two drives.
Sure it is. Just try typing in a web addy in windows xp at the explorer bar. Iexplore.exe doesnt launch, but the internet sure does (this computer has IE6 on it if you care, though I don't use it or allow it on the net). Try uninstalling IE in windows, it's also near impossible because it's so closely tied into the windows kernel.
Because the scenario being described is interactive, multi-user servers. Which bears no resemblance to any market Apple is interested in (largely because, these days, it's a tiny niche).
They have xserves which, from what I've seen, are mostly configured with a GUI. I know they have some remote GUI management tools to some of this, but having a graphical connection back to the server is also a helpful think to have at times. Why wouldn't they want something that works better than the current tools?
Graphical, centralised management is better done with (scriptable) client/server tools (as on Windows), not some equivalent of VNCing in.
The fact it's tied in directly to the kernel of every Windows OS otherwise just makes it unusable.
In no version of Windows ever released, is IE "tied directly to the kernel". It is, and always has been, a user space application. It's no different to its various equivalents in KDE, GNOME, OS X, etc.
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They spent some amount of time and effort on making sure that Windows would not be virtualized under OS/2, and perhaps some effort was spent to make sure it wouldn't under WINE, as well. At this point they may have sunk themselves by making Windows un-virtualizable, at least with reasonable performance levels. In other words, in blocking OS/2 and WINE, they may have blocked that course of action for themselves.
The existence of the Windows XP port to Xen disproves your conspiracy theories.
Which do you think your typical ISV will favor, an open, standardised platform with hundreds of millions of installs, multiple enterprise support vendors, and over a decade of maturity, or a brand new proprietary operating system with at best an emulation of a non-standard API with no formal definition and only one support vendor?
The one their customers want.
My money would be on Microsoft. Heck, I'd expect Apple to do a massive restructure to fill a "Windows void" long before I'd even contemplate some Linux distro doing it.
Consider that the US is the most open economy in the world. And that the poor in the US are much better off than the middle class or rich in most of the world. And yes, I have been to most of the world (well, 94 countries so far).
Then instead of spending time in the Third World, to help reinforce your (presumably libertarian) biases, you should try spending some time in countries that are similar to the US. If I had to pick somewhere in the world to be "poor", then there would be a lot of countries on the list before the US - like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of Western Europe.
And the free market inherently rewards those who grow it the most - the gain the most.
Which explains why, say, a CEO (who is essentially irrelevant in the day-to-day operations of a company) earns tens (if not hundreds) as times as much as the average employee (who is critical to the daily functioning of a company) ?
In actual reality, there's little difference between the boy's club of high-level executives and "elites", and the Monarchies and other "Nobles" of the olden days.
Lets say windows had a way to detect the root kit. Code it in. Make a popup come up every 5 minutes that the rootkit was detected. Cannot be disabled. (period) First thing the developers would do is mod it to hide better. A small war starts. Microsoft being the OS author, WILL win that war eventually. And the enraged customers will force them to remove the rootkit. (all the while the devs are blaming MS of course) Such is life. I wish they'd do that. It'd be messy, but effective.
You're kidding, right ? Whenever something goes wrong on a computer, Microsoft (and Windows) gets the blame by default. One need look no further than the response to UAC (even by supposedly knowledgable people) to see that.
About a year and a half back, I did that for maybe a week. I'd kept all the crit updates in there, and yet the AV software would pop up every few hours announcing that a new gift had arrived on the PC.
Windows XP SP2 was released in mid-2004, and by default enables the Windows firewall. Exactly how were those "gifts" getting in if you didn't manually disable it ?
Update it for the digital age. Microsoft intentionally designs an insecure OS. They could secure it if they wanted to. All they need to do is enforce a UNIX-like security model where processes and services run as a limited-rights user, instead of root, and users aren't root on their own box.
Like when they made Windows NT 15 years ago, you mean ?
Instead, they just take the more profitable solution of leaving it insecure and selling you "protection".
Anti-virus and malware software isn't there to protect users from security holes in the OS. It's there to protect them from themselves.
Now tell me why we can't prosecute them the same way we prosecute mafia thugs running a protection racket?
Because (as is typical when it comes to /. commentaries on Windows or Microsoft) your analogy is wrong. Most malware exploits user stupidity and ignorance, not security holes, and Windows has more than adequate security infrastructure to prevent the ones that don't.
The actual situation is more like shopowners getting robbed because they leave their doors wide open all the time, then the landlord offering them a couple of security guards to stand inside and stop anyone trying to make off with the goods.
7. MS Outlook 2007
That's a bit weird. Why would anyone buy Outlook on its own ?
If you can't do serious work on a machine other people can do serious work on, that's a comment on you, not on the machine.
No, it's a comment on what they call "serious work".
I don't spend all day every day in front of any laptop. A laptop is by definition what you use when you're away from base - so portability scores hugely over power.
Multiple machines are a PITA. A slight decrease in portability (eg: a 12" ultraportable - still small enough to take pretty much anywhere) is vastly outweighed by the larger benefits of not having to deal with multiple machines.
Leter in my career I was responsible for, among other things, one single 486 box with 2Mb of RAM which supported twenty-five typists. You do not need that much processing power to do efficient work, no matter what work you do. You merely need to learn how to use a computer.
Yeah, and we should all go back to using horses and buggies because a couple of hundred years ago people got around in them just fine.
The fact I can get _some_ work done on an underpowered box does not negate the fact I can get _more_ work done on something with a little more poke.
Your bias is showing (as, clearly, is that of the people who modded my OP -1). For example, people whose "real work" is something like video editing would laugh you out of the room if you said something as stupid as "you do not need that much processing power to do efficient work, no matter what work you do" to them.
I use an Eeepc and just today I had a OpenOffice document open, a dictionary, Firefox, and was touching up some pictures with Gimp. Never felt slow really, and remember my 701 has a 650mhz processor.
For a light workload like that I would hope it "never felt slow". Heck, I used to run more things than that on my old 100Mhz Pentium.
This is complete rubbish.
No, it's not. I've tried doing "serious work" on laptops with a bit higher specs than these "UMPCs" (eg: Dell D410) and was noticably less productive.
My best laptop ever was a Toshiba Libretto - a little smaller than a standard paperback book. Yes, you can type perfectly well on a keyboard that size. Yes, Emacs runs just fine - and if you don't like the keymappings, remap them for heaven's sake!
No number pad, alone, is a showstopper for a "serious work" keyboard as far as I'm concerned. This is before even getting into the generally smaller keys, cramped layout and things like Pageup/down either being in a weird place or modifiers of other keys.
If the screen hadn't died I'd still be using it now. 'Smaller' and 'lighter' (and 'reasonable batter life') are what I want from a laptop.
If you can claim you'd rather spend all day, every day, in front of an Eee (or equivalent) than a machine with dual cores, 4G RAM and a 30" monitor, then you're either lying, a masochist, or you don't do much work.
This is to say nothing of actual productivity differences.
People who think these are low power machines simply don't understand computing.
I understand computing perfectly well, and they're low-powered machines. My (not even top end at the time) desktop PC from 2000 and 12", ~1.5kg Dell D400 _notebook_ from 2003 had more processing power. The screens are so tiny and low-res you'd barely be able to have more than a single terminal visible, to say nothing of email, browsers, PDFs, spreadsheets, VNC sessions, RDP sessions, chat windows, et al, that make up my typical workload. Not to mention the couple of VMs I like to have ticking along in the background.
These things are toys. Heck, in these days of Youtube and Flash games, they'd barely even be able to handle the average end users idle web browsing.
Man, I don't know when a 1.6 GHz Intel and a gig of RAM became "lacking", but you must have had trouble using computers before about two years ago.
Ca. 2000 - nearly a decade ago - my desktop PC was a dual 1Ghz P3, which would be 1.5x - 2x as fast as a 1.6Ghz Atom. My machines haven't gotten any slower since then.
The Atom is quick for what it is, but it is by no means "fast".
Today, I typically keep open half a dozen Firefox windows with 10-15 tabs each, a few dozen putty windows, some Excel spreadsheets, Thunderbird and a few emails, Outlook, several VNC sessions, a few X apps, a few RDP sessions, a few PDFs, etc. Even before getting into how the tiny screen would make that, at best, utterly impractical, it would be (based on the 2GB RAM, 2Ghz Pentium-M I sometimes use) annoyingly slow.
That's extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons.
Regardless of whether it's short-sighted, your answers are nothing but strawmen because you ignore his point.
They're spending more time on replicating DNA than they are on devising new ways to grow food.
No, they're not. There are generally two reasons why "poor people" have more children:
* The need for more humans in places where manual labour is the rule, rather than the exception.
* Very poor (if any) access to sexual education and contraception (or extensive brainwashing that contraception and/or sex is a "sin").
Poor and dumb people aren't spending any more time fucking than rich and smart people. In fact, given how much less leisure time they typically have, they're probably spending a lot less.
Because they can, I guess. Here is a page with some links: Rip-off Britain [wikipedia.org].
It's not so much that the UK is expensive, just that pretty much everything in the US is - comparitively - dirt cheap.
For example, an 8G iPod Nano costs less in the UK than it does here in Switzerland, and pretty much exactly the same as it does in Australia.
There is no way you can do some serious work without those keys.
There's no way you can do "serious work" on these machines at all. Tiny keyboards, tiny, low-res screens, slow CPUs, etc, etc.
A docking station might bring them close to be useful for "serious work", but even then they're lacking in things like CPU power, RAM and disk space.
That's true, and when software RAID6 (or even hardware for that matter) gives reasonable speed (and I'm quite conservative about this speed) I'll certainly change my advise. From my tests RAID6 is sorrily sloooooooooowwwwww.
What's the access pattern you're "testing" with ?
The X4500 doesn't have any write cache beyond what's in the drives themselves, which means it can have awful performance for some types of write-heavy loads. It's not difficult to find tasks where a small RAID array, with only a few disks, running with a good RAID controller having a 256MB write cache can outperform an X4500.
The x4500 takes (at least) 16GB of RAM. How much more "write cache" do you want ?
(To say nothing of the massive internal bus bandwidth it sports.)
I doubt you can find any situation where " a small RAID array, with only a few disks, running with a good RAID controller having a 256MB write cache can outperform an X4500".
The @ sign. For whatever stupid reason, a fair number of OS X programs create files with that in the name.
NTFS handles the @ sign just fine:
C:\Temp>copy con "me@home.txt"
test
^Z
1 file(s) copied.
C:\Temp>dir me@home.txt
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 740C-9C2A
Directory of C:\Temp
01/07/2008 12:46 AM 6 me@home.txt
1 File(s) 6 bytes
0 Dir(s) 19,463,835,648 bytes free
C:\Temp>type me@home.txt
test
C:\Temp>
Whatever your problem is, it's not NTFS. Heck, even Explorer lets you create a filename with '@' in it.
NTFS can handle any Unicode character in a filename. The character restrictions you refer to (eg: '\') are enforced by the shell (Explorer, cmd, etc), not the filesystem.
raid10 is just ineffecent and no better than raid5 on a harware controler - (software raid some times runs 10 better than 5)
RAID10 is substantially faster than RAID6 if your performance profile is random writes.
Whether the RAID is implemented on a hardware controller or in software is, these days, basically irrelevant as far as performance is concerned.
Low-end controllers tend to have crappy processors on them. Crappy processors cannot compute a checksum very quickly. But modern non-crappy processors are insanely fast compared to modern disk.
The bottleneck from parity-based RAID systems comes from the higher number of IOs required, _not_ the "checksum computing".
What about RAID-Z? I've been interested in RAID-Z for a while for the snapshotting, the redundancy vs JBOD and cheap (don't need $200 controller cards). I'm not really sure how I could, or if I could, do a Hot Spare with that...
RAIDZ = RAID5 (in the context of this discussion). You want RAIDZ2 (which is essentially RAID6).
Now: for the same dollars go with RAID5+Hot spare: [...]
Or use RAID6, giving you essentially the best of both worlds.
Personally, I wouldn't touch RAID5 with big SATA drives with a 10 foot pole. Drives tend to go around the same time and if your second drive goes during the rebuild (which I've seen happen on several occasions) then your data is toast.
There are three types of RAID levels worth considering today. RAID6 if you need space more than speed, RAID10 if you need speed more than space, and RAID1 if you only have two drives.
Sure it is. Just try typing in a web addy in windows xp at the explorer bar. Iexplore.exe doesnt launch, but the internet sure does (this computer has IE6 on it if you care, though I don't use it or allow it on the net). Try uninstalling IE in windows, it's also near impossible because it's so closely tied into the windows kernel.
You are clueless.
What makes you say this?
Because the scenario being described is interactive, multi-user servers. Which bears no resemblance to any market Apple is interested in (largely because, these days, it's a tiny niche).
They have xserves which, from what I've seen, are mostly configured with a GUI. I know they have some remote GUI management tools to some of this, but having a graphical connection back to the server is also a helpful think to have at times. Why wouldn't they want something that works better than the current tools?
Graphical, centralised management is better done with (scriptable) client/server tools (as on Windows), not some equivalent of VNCing in.
The fact it's tied in directly to the kernel of every Windows OS otherwise just makes it unusable.
In no version of Windows ever released, is IE "tied directly to the kernel". It is, and always has been, a user space application. It's no different to its various equivalents in KDE, GNOME, OS X, etc.
Sure, IE was eroding Netscape user base through illegal browser bundling and other evil practices [...]
No, it was "eroding Netscape's user base" because it was better . It was the "unbundled" IE4 that "eroded" (=destroyed) Netscape's marketshare.
Netscape "lost" because their product at the time sucked. Which anyone who actually had to use Navigator >=4.x would be well aware of.