If Wal*Mart serves me badly, against what I consider a profitable exchange, I stop shopping there.
Based on your unrealistic and hardcore free-market stance, I can see where you're taking this - privatising the Police (and, by extension, the entire legal system).
Sounds like a great idea. I can't wait to have the local mafia extorting money out of me so I (and my family) don't have any "accidents".
Then why do different "races" have different physiologies (eg: asians have less alcohol tolerance, negros are more susceptible to certain diseases, etc) ?
It is, it's just not 2.5TB _usable_. The *array size* is 2.5TB (well, it might be 2TB with a hot spare, but I sincerely doubt it).
It's 1.5 TB assuming he's running with a hot spare. (Everyone has a hot spare, right?)
Not a good assumption. The wording of the post, plus the "odd" number of drives suggests a DIY job. Most DIYers are after maximum space/$, not reliability or performance. Heck, even most "professionals" don't use a HS.
In today's world of big SATA disk arrays and RAID6/RAID-DP/RAIDZ2/$DUAL_PARITY_RAID_SCHEME, anyone still using RAID5 (with or without a HS) is borderline negligent, IMHO.
Unlike cars which have decreased gas consumption per vehicle on average of only about 20% while carying the same number of passangers per vehicle [...]
Is this a statistic referring to vehicles in the US, or some other country ?
Nonsense, if Micro$oft never bought the CPM rip-off 86-DOS and renamed it "PC-DOS 1.0" Gary Kildall at Digital Research would have just marked CPM directly to IBM and today we'd all be running GEM XP.
He did. IBM would sell you a PC with CP/M if you wanted it.
However, a bigger problem with your argument is that the underlying logic dictates you can't give anyone/anything credit for any achievement, since "if they hadn't done it, someone else would have".
Damn straight. The only reason I spent the money for 4GB of RAM is so I can brag on Slashdot. I'd never actually want that RAM to get used !
Silent background optimization powered by microsoft. I dont think ive ever written a scarier sentance.
Microsoft's "silent background optimisation" is there hoping to make your end user experience better than a Mac. $LINUX_DISTRO's is there so some pimply teenager feels l33t. Which motivation would you prefer ?
Do you remember findfast.exe? I still have nightmares.
Right. Because something meant for indexing documents so searching them is faster is such an awful idea. Who would ever do that ?
We geeks may hope a bigger better shinier OS will run more efficiently and securely, with better support for newer hardware that an older OS might not have had the resources to deal with effectively.
A goal every new version of Windows has satisified.
Administrators maybe, most users don't care about Active Directory.
Sure they do, they just don't know that's what it's called.
You could get the "Windows 2000 shell" on NT4 (and Windows 95, for that matter) by installing IE4. The idea that businesses (and even end users, what few of them there were) were upgrading to Windows 2000 just to do that is laughable.
Steve, if you are listening, give your customers an upgradeable Intel-based mid-tower please.
Power users have been yelling for a machine like this since at least the first G4-based Macs. Since it hasn't happened yet, I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon.
The reason, IMHO, is because such a machine would absolutely slaughter Mac Pro sales unless it were very obviously crippled in some way (eg: maximum of 2G RAM, a sort-of semi-proprietry expansion slot like the Cube had, etc). And, of course, if it were so obviously kneecapped, most of the people after it wouldn't be interested any more.
Your best bet is to wait until Apple refreshes the Mac Pros (or releases an entirely new machine to replace them) and grab either a refurb or second-hand first-generation machine.
That is a pretty nice deal. Thanks. The only problem I have is, how speedy is the G4?
It's not. The G4 is in the same class as the Pentium 3. So a 1Ghz G4 ~= 1Ghz P3. For a P4 comparison, add about 50% clock speed (1.33Ghz G4 ~= 2Ghz P4).
No G4-anything is going to come within a bull's roar of the performance your iMac has. Heck, your iMac would probably beat the fastest G4-based Mac even with one of its CPU cores disabled.
Added to that, GP is full of shit - Windows is _far_ friendlier to older machines than OS X, which struggles to turn in decent performance on anything less than a G5.
Question- what are the things Windows has that you like that OS X doesn't? Just wondering.
* GUI Responsiveness (teh snappay)
* Performance (better & finer-grained locking, IO & threading at the kernel level means Windows makes better use of high end machines with multiple processors, more RAM, etc)
* Explorer (Finder sucks for non-trivial file management without a split directory tree + file list mode)
* Quicker/easier/better access to network resources (Win+R -> \\server[\share[\file]])
* The Taskbar (the Dock is a UI train wreck)
* The Start Menu (bring back the Apple menu !)
* Windows can be resized from any side/corner
* More encompassing, more consistent and more usable "keyboardability"
* Relatively, next to zero hardware lock-in
In my "dreamworld" the winner of the Golden Age award would be someone who manufactured a commercially available, big-budget operating system that didn't suck, wasn't booby-trapped, and helped me work instead of getting in my way.
You'll need to translate that into something more meaningful than subjective handwaving, if you want anyone to actually take any notice.
"Doesn't suck" is about as useful to a product designed as "make it better".
Meanwhile, Vista requires pretty stiff hardware upgrades, and even most systems IN STORES NOW are underpowered with regards to what Vista requires. Consumers don't run bleeding edge hardware.
Utter rubbish. Vista's hardware requirements aren't even particularly high, these days, let alone unreasonable.
Apart from the $30 you might have to spend to get a DX9 video card, you can comfortably run Vista on machines seven years old.
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software
What is your moral basis for asserting these are "freedoms" (or, "rights", if you prefer) ?
XGL and AIGLX are OpenGL-accelerated drawing through and through (in fact, XGL can simply run entirely on top of OpenGL). Compiz and Beryl are based on a general purpose compositing architecture. Apple has nothing like Compbiz/Beryl, and probably still won't have by the time those systems ship with every Linux system.
So, it's like, what ? 47.8% betterer ?
The excitement about those systems isn't because of some pissing contest with Apple, it's because people like those features and because they are well designed and well implemented, and they enable some powerful new functionality.
But apparently they didn't like them a few years ago, despite the systems being capable ?
The reason why you see all three major desktop environments adopt them now is simply because graphics cards have finally gotten cheap enough so that it's worth putting in the effort for mainstream desktop environments.
Graphics cards have been cheap enough since 2002, if not earlier. That's when OS X's first 3D-accelerated version hit, and it was targeting machines that were already available. Vista shoots a little higher, requiring video cards that only started appearing ca. 2003. Of course, the Linux folks keep telling us how much better their solution is because it doesn't require the "high end" hardware of OS X and Vista - so lets say their minimum requirements are targeting hardware that's been around since, say, 2000.
In short, the "because the hardware has only recently become available" argument is bunk.
Trying to imply (as people like you do) that Apple is leading and others follow is bullshit; Apple is just following trends and costs. (Look at the iPhone/Prada thing for another example of Apple's false claims of leadership.)
I made no such implication. I stated the the Linux equivalents to Aqua and Aero, which the OSS community touts as being just as good - if not better - aren't even close.
(I must say I find it hilarious to be called an Apple fanboy, however, good work.)
Neither is "I don't want to buy a supported Linux computer." or "I can't get Linux to work on my Windows PC hardware."
But I *do* have hardware that's supposed to be supported by Linux, and I *can* get it working on my hardware, it's just unreliable (the compositing part, that is - Linux in general is ok).
The best thing you can say about compositing window managers and the like on Linux at the moment, is that they're reasonable proof-of-concept demos.
Mac OS X 10.0 was released to the public March 24, 2001. Sorry, but both Linux and Microsoft are way behind the curve on this one.
10.2 was the first to actually have the 3D _acceleration_ part (ie: use the GPU), however. It was released in August, 2002 and, quite arguably, is the release that 10.0 *should* have been (Apple had an even worse time getting "OS X" to market than Microsoft did with Vista, though, so they had to get _something_ out the door).
Beryl and and Compiz go far beyond the released versions of either OS X or Vista, both in functionality and in architecture.
Really ? How ?
Current OS X and Vista-like functionality have been in X11 desktops since before they were included in Apple's and Microsoft's commercial releases.
Right. Which is why the OSS community is making such a big deal of them *now* - because the functionality has been around for ages ? Maybe that would also explain why, until quite recently, those fancy features were nowhere to be seen ?
(I can just see that you're going to pull out some example from SGI or similar, thus providing another excellent example of "just another day in Linux land".)
There are no installation issues with Beryl and Compiz: you install them using the package manager, like everything else. It's just that Beryl is not part of any release yet, and your graphics card many not be supported either.
Damn, talk about shooting yourself in the foot. I think you took your whole leg off !
"There aren't any installation issues with Berly and Compiz. Except for the massive problems involving hardware support and the actual installation process (ranging from the good old "compile the latest source from CVS following this poorly written guide in an email posting" all the way to the technological marvel of hacked-together shell scripts to try and automate the same process)."
In fact, you may never be able to run Beryl or Compiz reliably on your hardware because your hardware may never be fully supported.
Oh, I can. At least some days. Then the next update breaks something (or maybe it fixes something the last update broke).
That's the problem - it's a lottery, not functionality.
That has nothing to do with the maturity or usability of Beryl or Compiz.
Yes, yes it does. It has _everything_ to do with it.
Heck, there are some "pretty hefty usability issues" getting OS X to work on my PC hardware--does that mean that OS X isn't mature yet?
"I don't want to buy a Mac" isn't a usability issue.
(Unless you wrote the whole post tongue-in-cheek - I couldn't decide so I flipped a coin before replying.)
Apparently what is probably the premier desktop-oriented Linux distro doesn't think it's stable enough to include, but it's just as good - nay, better - than Aqua and Aero ?
Sounds like just another day in Linux-land to me:).
(Aside: I've used Beryl, etc on Ubuntu and it definitely does some cool stuff. To try and suggest it's anything close to the equivalent of OS X's and Vista's offerings, however, ignores some pretty hefty usability issues with regards to getting - and keeping - it working.)
There's not really any reason to turn Aero off - if you have the video hardware to accelerate it (and if you don't, the $30 is well spent), turning it off will make things slower.
The "hardware benefit" of a Mac is indirect. It is actually the benefit of having the company build "the whole widget" which allows them to have full control of drivers, etc. etc.
An "advantage" which is highly questionable. For example, Apple _still_ haven't fixed their nvidia drivers to handle display rotation.
Slashdot Mirror
If Wal*Mart serves me badly, against what I consider a profitable exchange, I stop shopping there.
Based on your unrealistic and hardcore free-market stance, I can see where you're taking this - privatising the Police (and, by extension, the entire legal system).
Sounds like a great idea. I can't wait to have the local mafia extorting money out of me so I (and my family) don't have any "accidents".
Race is a social construction.
Then why do different "races" have different physiologies (eg: asians have less alcohol tolerance, negros are more susceptible to certain diseases, etc) ?
Consider how far we've come in the last few hundred years. Consider how far along we'll be in a thousand years.
Now consider the few thousand years _preceding_ the last few hundred.
5x500 in RAID 5 is not 2.5 TB.
It is, it's just not 2.5TB _usable_. The *array size* is 2.5TB (well, it might be 2TB with a hot spare, but I sincerely doubt it).
It's 1.5 TB assuming he's running with a hot spare. (Everyone has a hot spare, right?)
Not a good assumption. The wording of the post, plus the "odd" number of drives suggests a DIY job. Most DIYers are after maximum space/$, not reliability or performance. Heck, even most "professionals" don't use a HS.
In today's world of big SATA disk arrays and RAID6/RAID-DP/RAIDZ2/$DUAL_PARITY_RAID_SCHEME, anyone still using RAID5 (with or without a HS) is borderline negligent, IMHO.
Unlike cars which have decreased gas consumption per vehicle on average of only about 20% while carying the same number of passangers per vehicle [...]
Is this a statistic referring to vehicles in the US, or some other country ?
I think we need a corporate records retention law to help avoid these sorts of situations.
Good point. Accurate and long-term recording of, say, username <-> timestamp <-> IP mappings would be great for some lawsuits...
Nonsense, if Micro$oft never bought the CPM rip-off 86-DOS and renamed it "PC-DOS 1.0" Gary Kildall at Digital Research would have just marked CPM directly to IBM and today we'd all be running GEM XP.
He did. IBM would sell you a PC with CP/M if you wanted it.
However, a bigger problem with your argument is that the underlying logic dictates you can't give anyone/anything credit for any achievement, since "if they hadn't done it, someone else would have".
These days when you are as large as microsoft is, it doesnt really matter if you break the law.
On the flipside, when you're as large as Microsoft, it doesn't really matter if you don't break the law - you'll still get sued by gold-diggers.
Had good luck with more recent Western Digital drives. Put 5 x 500GB in a RAID-5 server, and they're running great!
A 2.5TB RAID5 ? Brave man...
What's the rebuild time on that baby ?
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that mate.
Damn straight. The only reason I spent the money for 4GB of RAM is so I can brag on Slashdot. I'd never actually want that RAM to get used !
Silent background optimization powered by microsoft. I dont think ive ever written a scarier sentance.
Microsoft's "silent background optimisation" is there hoping to make your end user experience better than a Mac. $LINUX_DISTRO's is there so some pimply teenager feels l33t. Which motivation would you prefer ?
Do you remember findfast.exe? I still have nightmares.
Right. Because something meant for indexing documents so searching them is faster is such an awful idea. Who would ever do that ?
We geeks may hope a bigger better shinier OS will run more efficiently and securely, with better support for newer hardware that an older OS might not have had the resources to deal with effectively.
A goal every new version of Windows has satisified.
Administrators maybe, most users don't care about Active Directory.
Sure they do, they just don't know that's what it's called.
You could get the "Windows 2000 shell" on NT4 (and Windows 95, for that matter) by installing IE4. The idea that businesses (and even end users, what few of them there were) were upgrading to Windows 2000 just to do that is laughable.
For business users, 2000 was just a prettier shell on top of NT4, just like XP and Vista.
Uh, no. For business users, Windows 2000 was Active Directory.
Steve, if you are listening, give your customers an upgradeable Intel-based mid-tower please.
Power users have been yelling for a machine like this since at least the first G4-based Macs. Since it hasn't happened yet, I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon.
The reason, IMHO, is because such a machine would absolutely slaughter Mac Pro sales unless it were very obviously crippled in some way (eg: maximum of 2G RAM, a sort-of semi-proprietry expansion slot like the Cube had, etc). And, of course, if it were so obviously kneecapped, most of the people after it wouldn't be interested any more.
Your best bet is to wait until Apple refreshes the Mac Pros (or releases an entirely new machine to replace them) and grab either a refurb or second-hand first-generation machine.
That is a pretty nice deal. Thanks. The only problem I have is, how speedy is the G4?
It's not. The G4 is in the same class as the Pentium 3. So a 1Ghz G4 ~= 1Ghz P3. For a P4 comparison, add about 50% clock speed (1.33Ghz G4 ~= 2Ghz P4).
No G4-anything is going to come within a bull's roar of the performance your iMac has. Heck, your iMac would probably beat the fastest G4-based Mac even with one of its CPU cores disabled.
Added to that, GP is full of shit - Windows is _far_ friendlier to older machines than OS X, which struggles to turn in decent performance on anything less than a G5.
Question- what are the things Windows has that you like that OS X doesn't? Just wondering.
* GUI Responsiveness (teh snappay)
* Performance (better & finer-grained locking, IO & threading at the kernel level means Windows makes better use of high end machines with multiple processors, more RAM, etc)
* Explorer (Finder sucks for non-trivial file management without a split directory tree + file list mode)
* Quicker/easier/better access to network resources (Win+R -> \\server[\share[\file]])
* The Taskbar (the Dock is a UI train wreck)
* The Start Menu (bring back the Apple menu !)
* Windows can be resized from any side/corner
* More encompassing, more consistent and more usable "keyboardability"
* Relatively, next to zero hardware lock-in
In my "dreamworld" the winner of the Golden Age award would be someone who manufactured a commercially available, big-budget operating system that didn't suck, wasn't booby-trapped, and helped me work instead of getting in my way.
You'll need to translate that into something more meaningful than subjective handwaving, if you want anyone to actually take any notice.
"Doesn't suck" is about as useful to a product designed as "make it better".
Meanwhile, Vista requires pretty stiff hardware upgrades, and even most systems IN STORES NOW are underpowered with regards to what Vista requires. Consumers don't run bleeding edge hardware.
Utter rubbish. Vista's hardware requirements aren't even particularly high, these days, let alone unreasonable.
Apart from the $30 you might have to spend to get a DX9 video card, you can comfortably run Vista on machines seven years old.
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software
What is your moral basis for asserting these are "freedoms" (or, "rights", if you prefer) ?
XGL and AIGLX are OpenGL-accelerated drawing through and through (in fact, XGL can simply run entirely on top of OpenGL). Compiz and Beryl are based on a general purpose compositing architecture. Apple has nothing like Compbiz/Beryl, and probably still won't have by the time those systems ship with every Linux system.
So, it's like, what ? 47.8% betterer ?
The excitement about those systems isn't because of some pissing contest with Apple, it's because people like those features and because they are well designed and well implemented, and they enable some powerful new functionality.
But apparently they didn't like them a few years ago, despite the systems being capable ?
The reason why you see all three major desktop environments adopt them now is simply because graphics cards have finally gotten cheap enough so that it's worth putting in the effort for mainstream desktop environments.
Graphics cards have been cheap enough since 2002, if not earlier. That's when OS X's first 3D-accelerated version hit, and it was targeting machines that were already available. Vista shoots a little higher, requiring video cards that only started appearing ca. 2003. Of course, the Linux folks keep telling us how much better their solution is because it doesn't require the "high end" hardware of OS X and Vista - so lets say their minimum requirements are targeting hardware that's been around since, say, 2000.
In short, the "because the hardware has only recently become available" argument is bunk.
Trying to imply (as people like you do) that Apple is leading and others follow is bullshit; Apple is just following trends and costs. (Look at the iPhone/Prada thing for another example of Apple's false claims of leadership.)
I made no such implication. I stated the the Linux equivalents to Aqua and Aero, which the OSS community touts as being just as good - if not better - aren't even close.
(I must say I find it hilarious to be called an Apple fanboy, however, good work.)
Neither is "I don't want to buy a supported Linux computer." or "I can't get Linux to work on my Windows PC hardware."
But I *do* have hardware that's supposed to be supported by Linux, and I *can* get it working on my hardware, it's just unreliable (the compositing part, that is - Linux in general is ok).
The best thing you can say about compositing window managers and the like on Linux at the moment, is that they're reasonable proof-of-concept demos.
Mac OS X 10.0 was released to the public March 24, 2001. Sorry, but both Linux and Microsoft are way behind the curve on this one.
10.2 was the first to actually have the 3D _acceleration_ part (ie: use the GPU), however. It was released in August, 2002 and, quite arguably, is the release that 10.0 *should* have been (Apple had an even worse time getting "OS X" to market than Microsoft did with Vista, though, so they had to get _something_ out the door).
Beryl and and Compiz go far beyond the released versions of either OS X or Vista, both in functionality and in architecture.
Really ? How ?
Current OS X and Vista-like functionality have been in X11 desktops since before they were included in Apple's and Microsoft's commercial releases.
Right. Which is why the OSS community is making such a big deal of them *now* - because the functionality has been around for ages ? Maybe that would also explain why, until quite recently, those fancy features were nowhere to be seen ?
(I can just see that you're going to pull out some example from SGI or similar, thus providing another excellent example of "just another day in Linux land".)
There are no installation issues with Beryl and Compiz: you install them using the package manager, like everything else. It's just that Beryl is not part of any release yet, and your graphics card many not be supported either.
Damn, talk about shooting yourself in the foot. I think you took your whole leg off !
"There aren't any installation issues with Berly and Compiz. Except for the massive problems involving hardware support and the actual installation process (ranging from the good old "compile the latest source from CVS following this poorly written guide in an email posting" all the way to the technological marvel of hacked-together shell scripts to try and automate the same process)."
In fact, you may never be able to run Beryl or Compiz reliably on your hardware because your hardware may never be fully supported.
Oh, I can. At least some days. Then the next update breaks something (or maybe it fixes something the last update broke).
That's the problem - it's a lottery, not functionality.
That has nothing to do with the maturity or usability of Beryl or Compiz.
Yes, yes it does. It has _everything_ to do with it.
Heck, there are some "pretty hefty usability issues" getting OS X to work on my PC hardware--does that mean that OS X isn't mature yet?
"I don't want to buy a Mac" isn't a usability issue.
(Unless you wrote the whole post tongue-in-cheek - I couldn't decide so I flipped a coin before replying.)
Apparently what is probably the premier desktop-oriented Linux distro doesn't think it's stable enough to include, but it's just as good - nay, better - than Aqua and Aero ?
Sounds like just another day in Linux-land to me :).
(Aside: I've used Beryl, etc on Ubuntu and it definitely does some cool stuff. To try and suggest it's anything close to the equivalent of OS X's and Vista's offerings, however, ignores some pretty hefty usability issues with regards to getting - and keeping - it working.)
(which unlike Vista's Aero can't be turned off)
There's not really any reason to turn Aero off - if you have the video hardware to accelerate it (and if you don't, the $30 is well spent), turning it off will make things slower.
The "hardware benefit" of a Mac is indirect. It is actually the benefit of having the company build "the whole widget" which allows them to have full control of drivers, etc. etc.
An "advantage" which is highly questionable. For example, Apple _still_ haven't fixed their nvidia drivers to handle display rotation.