MS probably has the power to change the actions of the cartels right now, but they have no financial interest in so doing since they don't have to give customers what they want in order to sell their product.
Then why do their products consistently improve ? According to your hypothesis we should still be using Windows 3.x or, at best, Windows 95. Vista is _massively_ improved over previous versions - to a similar level that NeXTSTEP went through to get to OS X 10.2 - yet you are insisting Microsoft have had no reason to make those improvements (and hence expend the significant amount of money the cost). Why, then, would they do it ?
MS has been using their monopoly to push DRM for a long time. They bundled Windows Media Player with Windows and PlaysForSure along with it, which they licensed to music player manufacturers. They even set WMP to rip CDs to DRM'd WMP format, by default resulting in the largest number of DRM'd files now in existence, more than are sold by any online store.
According to the 6 machines I have just checked (covering Windows 2000, XP and 2003) WMP only applies DRM to music if the end user has configured it to. It does *NOT* do so by default.
On Windows, using the default, included player and the default settings, as most everyone does, that CD rips to WMP format encumbered with DRM. This is illegal since MS is leveraging their OS monopoly to gain in the music jukebox, music player (licensing cut), and music store (licensing cut) markets.
It's not illegal because it isn't correct. WMP rips to unprotected WMA by default.
For possibly-not-the-last-time, Microsoft are a) big and powerful enough (and with a large enough user base) to be able to protest and change these standards if they want, [...]
You think ? Want to take a stab at what proportion of the RIAA, MPAA, et al content is consumed via PCs running Windows ?
MS is a big promoter of HD DVD (wikipedia lists it as one of the top 5, along with Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, and Intel). They form part of the committee which decides upon these standards.
Deciding on the implementation details != proposing the requirements.
Media companies say "if your new format doesn't support $DRM, we won't publish content on it". The other companies defining the standards for said media shrewdly realise that their format isn't going to be particularly popular with nothing being published on it and hence agree to that request.
In short, there is no use arguing that MS is being "forced" to do this. We all know MS doesn't get "forced" into anything.
The DRM in Vista offers little, if any, direct benefit to Microsoft and costs them significantly in development. It's difficult to see any reason they would implement for the hell of it, when much, much simpler processes (eg: those used by Apple) achieve (effectively) the same result.
The suggestion that the DRM in Vista has been implemented for "lock-in" to Microsoft is ridiculous on its face, since the vast majority of its functionality does _nothing_ to create such "lock-in".
Same way it does in Vista - don't buy DRMed content and you have nothing to worry about.
Do I have to worry about my computer becoming unusable if I change hardware? Do I have to worry about re-registering? Do I have to worry about registering in the first place? The answers are, of course, no, no, and no.
These have about as much to do with "DRM" as Apple's license (and I'm betting in the relatively near future, software) restricting you to only installing OS X on Apple hardware.
So is there a chance Apple will delete software off of my computer without my permission as MS's built in security will? No.
Apple's _updates_ have accidentally deleted data off machines in the past.
(I can only assume you're referring to Windows Defender, which will only delete files under the same conditions other AV and anti-malware tools will - with the users implicit permission.)
So what, exactly, is the issue? There is a chip with an encryption key on it in the box? Okay, so why should I care? I'm a pragmatist. If my files were being DRM'd so I could not move to something else or if Apple was restricting me in any way, maybe I'd care. Apple does put DRM on their music files, they sell, but I generally don't buy from them. I did buy a few songs once that I could not find elsewhere, but I legally stripped the DRM off with a freeware program and backed them up as a regular audio CD with no DRM. What's the problem?
If you're a pragmatist, neither the DRM, nor "activation" in Vista should bother you in the slightest, since the former is applicable on any platform and the latter won't be noticed by 99% of users.
TPM modules aren't inherently bad. It's how they are used that makes the difference. If the owner of the computer is in charge of the module, they are a powerful tool. If someone else is, then it's a problem.
I remember a few years ago, when XP first began phoning home for automatic updates. Some guy at a bank figured out it was actually *illegal to have such software on a bank computer. Federal law, IIRC. Speaking of IIRC, does this sound familiar? Anyone remember the guy's name, or how it turned out?
He was probably duly ignored, since in any remotely well-managed Windows network, machines do not "phone home" for updates, they "phone" the in-house Windows Update server.
I really have to shake my head every time someone raises an "issue" like this. Microsoft generate the vast bulk of their revenue from corporate software sales. Why would anyone seriously consider that they would risk that revenue by releasing a piece of software their customers would be legally barred from using ?
Now let's assume that you run RAIDZ2 on each server, dedicating 2 of the 48 drives to parity.
No-one would do this in a production environment where performance was even a passing concern (or if they did, they shouldn't have) - firstly, because parity-based RAID configurations are (relatively) slow and secondly because RAIDZ[2] (or parity-based in general, really) arrays shouldn't be any bigger than about 8 drives in total, or performance (and reliability) start to go downhill.
It's reasonable to assume you lose at least half the raw space in redundancy using RAID10 (or equivalent), to get the best performance - probably plus another drive or two for hot spares. So double your estimate of 3 racks to 6.
(I agree 300TB is nothing particularly impressive, however.)
Retail discs include both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries (OEM and VLK discs have separate discs, for some reason).
The reason why OEM discs are like that should be pretty obvious - you (supposedly) buy an OEM copy for a specific machine, so the disc would only have the version of Windows for that specific machine on it.
Not really. The heads of corporations are people too. They can shamed into doing the right things. You might be amazed at how effective a well organized protest campaign can be.
However, you need a better principle than "we want stuff for free", which is unquestionably how any anti-DRM protests would be presented as.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but CRTs are superior to LCDs for gaming in every way but the usual reasons to buy LCD, size and weight. LCDs have one resolution, CRTs can do many resolutions (and true multisync CRTs, which are admittedly a rarity these days, can do all KINDS of things.)
My reasoning is that many home users have computers that are fine for running Windows XP, but are not capable of running Vista without a significant upgrade. Since it is likely that the cost of an upgrade would be expensive, this could result in many home users given both Mac and Linux a serious look.
A Ghz+ processor, 1G of RAM and a US$30 video card is all you need to comfortably run Vista.
Due to this, it has led me to look at both Mac and Linux as an upgrade option since they are both likely to be less expensive than purchasing a new Vista-capable system, a new monitor (I'm currently using a 14" CRT), and new software applications to replace the ones that will not work with Vista.
An entry-level PC capable of comfortably running Vista will set you back about US$500 at most.
If you don't want to use Vista, just say it. Don't use lame "it needs too much hardware" justifications (*especially* when offering OS X as a possible alternative) as an excuse when they are so trivial to demonstrate as ridiculous.
I don't hate Microsoft. But they've ballooned into a company that produces tedious bloated software and OSes that isn't particularly interesting. They're on the way down. They make boring shit.
I think perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Vista will not be a complete flop, but it will sell well under what Microsoft expects.
In pretty much every way (technical, marketing, whatever), Vista is the most significant release of "Windows" since Windows 95. It's difficult to see how it _wouldn't_ be a runaway success.
I have a decade-old iMac (ruby) that runs the very latest version of Macintosh OSX. (10.4) What's that you say? Apple doesn't support legacy hardware?
Your "Ruby" iMac is no older than 8 years (and, incidentally, isn't actually "supported" by OS X, even though it will probably install). The 266Mhz models were introduced in January, 1999 (and had 32M RAM standard). To say they "run OS X 10.4" is little more than sophistry.
Well, try getting Vista to run on a Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM on a 10 GB HDD, which is what was state of the art when the Apple iMac came out.
A "state of the art" PC from the same era would be ca. 450Mhz P2 or P3 (and if you wanted to go high-end, would have multiple processors). I can assure you, from experience, it will run Vista *at least* as well as that old iMac runs OS X (and much better, once you allow for some cheap upgrades - which you need to do for the iMac anyway).
So instead of fixing Windows' security model, or reworking the flawed NTFS filesystem, they patch 'em up and give the patches catchy names!
Windows Defender (and other anti-spyware products don't protext against "flaws" in the security model, they protect against flaws in the user.
The fragmentation issue is _vastly_ overblown and defragging has no impact for 99% of people. It's there to soothe people who have had years of magazines telling them to "defrag" (which followed on from years of the same - actually applicable - advice about FAT[32]).
"Defragging" is much like "fixing permissions" in recent versions of OS X - nothing more than a placebo almost every time it's applied.
Vista went in to RTM in November, so releasing SP1 mid 2007 will leave at 6 to 8 months for bug fixes. Considering how long Vista was in development, [...]
When you're going to talk about code, it's not particularly reasonable to imply Vista was in development for an inordinate amount of time.
While Vista the *product* has been "in development" for ~5 years, Vista the *codebase* has only been in development for ~2 years, after the "Longhorn Reboot" in mid-late 2004.
You would not make such an ignorant claim if you really did know. I am talking about pop culture. Ask anyone under 35 in Taiwan, Hong Kong, any major city of Mainland China, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, etc what "My Sassy Girl" refers to, and they will know either the movie, the tv series or both. The same goes for dozens of other tv series and hundreds of other movies over just the last few years.
Now that you've finished beating that straw man to death, perhaps you'd like to come back to the discussion about mainstream entertainment in countries like the US, UK, Canada and Australia. You know, places that are actually _relevant_ to this discussion about Hollywood, the MPAA, DRM and the like ?
Such non-MPAA entertainment is so widespread and common that just last year, Taiwan's senate debated a bill banning dramas that weren't made in country from prime-time broadcasts, because they were dominating the airwaves.
Needing legislative assurance of airtime is typically not a sign of a strong local arts industry. Quite the opposite, in fact.
A third of the USA speaks spanish - they, and rest of latin america have similarly prodigious entertainment industries - just barely crossing over in the English-speaking world now with remakes like "Ugly Betty." Then there is bollywood, responsible for 2x the number of films that hollywood makes each year and 10x the number of ticket sales among the billion+ population of India. Everyone knows hollywood, but hollywood does not even come close to ruling the world of pop entertainment. Maybe 50 years ago they did, but not any more, not even close.
Right. You're not seriously suggesting these sources of entertainment are going to meangingfully challenge hollywood & co in the US (and similar) countries ?
As an aside, if you think the media companies in those countries aren't going to be heading down the same paths of DRM and the like, you're just naive.)
The followings of asian (mainly Japanese) sourced media (mainly cartoons) is relatively _enormous_, as sorta-non-mainstream-media goes, but it still pales into insignificance compared to the proportion of people consuming standard pop-culture fare.
Jeez. Using Bollywood and Tiawanese TV shows as reasons why Hollywood should be running scared is even sillier than using sales of business desktops and servers.
WTF? What part of HD-DVD editions of PowerDVD and WinDVD did you not understand? Have you really been hitting on this point over and over because you couldn't understand that means EVERY SINGLE HD-DVD CURRENTLY AVAILABLE, ALL 200+? That's your big deal? The one that I trashed in my second post? I thought your wording was strange, it just turns out that yet again, you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Ah, I think we're getting close to the truth now. You don't actually _have_ some piece of media that plays fine in XP but doesn't in Vista, you're just regurgitating what you've been told will happen. "OMG, it says teh Micro$oft will do 3vil so it MUST be true !"
Vista's DRM restrictions are *only* triggered when the _playing_application_ requests them. There is nothing (technical) whatsoever stopping WinDVD from playing back DRM-encumbered media at full quality in Vista, sans DRM-capable hardware, if the developers wanted it to. If WinDVD and co. are playing back DRMed media at fully quality in XP, when they "shouldn't be" but aren't doing the same in Vista, that's either a bug in their software or an inconsistent application of policy. Either way, it's not Vista's fault, and completely the fault of the developers of WinDVD.
You need to get past it yourself and realize that the world is not anywhere near the way hollywood paints it.
Here's a heads-up. I don't even agree with _copyright_, let alone evn stricter laws like the DMCA (and equivalents in other countries). If you think I'm just repeating what Hollywood says because I agree with it, your reading comprehension needs to improve.
I think it important to note that the point I was making was in regard to cheap servers with 2 to 3 disks. If you have mission critical servers in 1U form factor, that is a mistake in itself unless there is some clustering or such to protect.
I would argue that the point I'm making applies to _any_ production server. Disk failures are such a common thing to happen, and RAID is such a trivially quick, simple and cheap means of mitigating most common types of disk-related system failures, that IMHO not using it borders on negligence.
If we have many physical disks attached, we are not in the described scenario. Feel free to have RAID 1 in that case. Not every company decides on a solution that includes a RAID controller.
Servers with only two internal disks for the system and a [large] number of external disks for data are not at all uncommon.
You are changing my argument. I never said RAID 1 is supposed to protect against software errors or admin errors.
Your implication was clearly that it somehow could, given you use an example of software failure as a reason for _not_ using it in your original post.
In fact, I plainly state that it doesn't. It is part of my argument against using RAID 1 when ONLY two disks are available. With a system that contains only two disks, what is the likelihood that it also contains two separate disk controllers? Not likely. Your one hardware failure is still quite capable of taking out both disks and negating the advantage of RAID 1.
Certainly, but a physical disk failure is vastly more likely than a controller failure. Just because you can't have an ideal configuration doesn't mean you shouldn't try to have the best one available.
Your point about taking a while to bring up disks could be extended to refer to NAS and SAN disks. With Journaled Filesystems the time to bring them up should be reduced.
I was actualy thinking of physically connected disks and the innitial spin-up and initialisation sequences.
I'm not dogmatic about this if the data in an environment sways the balance toward RAID.
I am simply struggling to see a situation where a RAID1 for the system drive is _not_ the best solution.
t is be nice to have both and sleep well at night with a quiet beeper/mobile. My argument was in reference to when you cannot have both.
Again, it's difficult to see a properly configured environment where you cannot have both RAID1 on the systems and backups. Even the incredibly budget-constrained low-end environments where "backups" are an external USB drive attached to each server are capable.
It's just that any way I try to look at it, using the other half of the mirror as both backup and redundancy actually _reduces_ the reliability and increases the complexity of a system.
The human body is not designed to consume animal products.
Correct. However, it has most certainly _evolved_ to consume "animal products" (else it would be physically incapable of deriving nutritional value from them like, say, herbivorous animals).
Humans can't chase and kill 99.9% of wild animals.
Sure they can. Or are you trying to suggest people didn't hunt animals before they days of guns ?
Humans would never naturally suck milk from a cow's breast, or from any other animal's. Humans might naturally eat the occasional egg, but that's about it.
Anyone who thinks humans aren't omnivores is either stupid, or ignorant.
But hey - you were brought up to believe that killing animals is 'normal', so let's not question it!
It is *far* more "normal" than a vegan diet, which - especially in the absence of modern food processing techniques - is quite difficult to live healthily on.
It's a pretty good analogy. RAID isn't supposed to protect you against software failures (be they in the operating system or the operator), it's supposed to protect you against hardware failure.
Saying you don't use RAID because it doesn't protect you against software error is, very much, like saying you don't wear a seatbelt because it won't stop the engine catching fire.
Dead disk. If this happens with Raid 1 you are usually OK. There are sometimes problems with performance as the drive dies but with a good RAID controller or software LVM, nothing dramatic should occur. With a dd copy or offline mirror you get a crash and boot from the alternate copy. If things are pretty static on that drive, little to no loss. You get a small amount of downtime. [Logs should go to a log server.]
Rebooting a server takes on the order of minutes (many minutes, if it has a lot of physical drives attached to it). How much money does your company lose in a few minutes while the relevant service(s) is/are down ? Would it be enough to pay for a RAID controller ?
I'm not saying mirrors are bad, if I have three disks I keep two in a mirror and another as an offline mirror. With Solaris, I break the mirror and apply patches to the offline copy and then boot from it saving me time at night and reducing the patch window.
This is a reasonable methodology to use (and quite common among Solaris admins, I believe), personally I prefer staging/certification environments, however - but it's not really relevant to this discussion though.
I just prefer the offline mirror because it covers my ass in two ways vs RAID 1 that only covers my ass in case of disk failure.
No, it doesn't (well, it sort of does if you have the 2 online + 1 offline configuration you mentioned earlier, but that configuration - while quite valid - is hardly what most people think of when they hear "RAID1").
If you have a two-disk RAID1 with one drive offline, you are not protected against the hardware failure of your active drive. If it dies, the system will almost certainly suffer an unplanned outage. This is what RAID is there to protect you against.
If you disagree, then that's OK. There are many ways to admin boxes. As long as you have a justification and rationale for your decisions that make sense, you'll have a good reasoned response for the CEO when things fail. And they will. RAID protects you against hardware failure.
Backups (your "offline mirror") protect you against software failure.
You need _both_ to have a reliable server (outside of some external functionality, like clustering).
Slashdot Mirror
MS probably has the power to change the actions of the cartels right now, but they have no financial interest in so doing since they don't have to give customers what they want in order to sell their product.
Then why do their products consistently improve ? According to your hypothesis we should still be using Windows 3.x or, at best, Windows 95. Vista is _massively_ improved over previous versions - to a similar level that NeXTSTEP went through to get to OS X 10.2 - yet you are insisting Microsoft have had no reason to make those improvements (and hence expend the significant amount of money the cost). Why, then, would they do it ?
MS has been using their monopoly to push DRM for a long time. They bundled Windows Media Player with Windows and PlaysForSure along with it, which they licensed to music player manufacturers. They even set WMP to rip CDs to DRM'd WMP format, by default resulting in the largest number of DRM'd files now in existence, more than are sold by any online store.
According to the 6 machines I have just checked (covering Windows 2000, XP and 2003) WMP only applies DRM to music if the end user has configured it to. It does *NOT* do so by default.
On Windows, using the default, included player and the default settings, as most everyone does, that CD rips to WMP format encumbered with DRM. This is illegal since MS is leveraging their OS monopoly to gain in the music jukebox, music player (licensing cut), and music store (licensing cut) markets.
It's not illegal because it isn't correct. WMP rips to unprotected WMA by default.
For possibly-not-the-last-time, Microsoft are a) big and powerful enough (and with a large enough user base) to be able to protest and change these standards if they want, [...]
You think ? Want to take a stab at what proportion of the RIAA, MPAA, et al content is consumed via PCs running Windows ?
MS is a big promoter of HD DVD (wikipedia lists it as one of the top 5, along with Toshiba, NEC, Sanyo, and Intel). They form part of the committee which decides upon these standards.
Deciding on the implementation details != proposing the requirements.
Media companies say "if your new format doesn't support $DRM, we won't publish content on it". The other companies defining the standards for said media shrewdly realise that their format isn't going to be particularly popular with nothing being published on it and hence agree to that request.
In short, there is no use arguing that MS is being "forced" to do this. We all know MS doesn't get "forced" into anything.
The DRM in Vista offers little, if any, direct benefit to Microsoft and costs them significantly in development. It's difficult to see any reason they would implement for the hell of it, when much, much simpler processes (eg: those used by Apple) achieve (effectively) the same result.
The suggestion that the DRM in Vista has been implemented for "lock-in" to Microsoft is ridiculous on its face, since the vast majority of its functionality does _nothing_ to create such "lock-in".
So if I buy a mac, how does the DRM affect me?
Same way it does in Vista - don't buy DRMed content and you have nothing to worry about.
Do I have to worry about my computer becoming unusable if I change hardware? Do I have to worry about re-registering? Do I have to worry about registering in the first place? The answers are, of course, no, no, and no.
These have about as much to do with "DRM" as Apple's license (and I'm betting in the relatively near future, software) restricting you to only installing OS X on Apple hardware.
So is there a chance Apple will delete software off of my computer without my permission as MS's built in security will? No.
Apple's _updates_ have accidentally deleted data off machines in the past.
(I can only assume you're referring to Windows Defender, which will only delete files under the same conditions other AV and anti-malware tools will - with the users implicit permission.)
So what, exactly, is the issue? There is a chip with an encryption key on it in the box? Okay, so why should I care? I'm a pragmatist. If my files were being DRM'd so I could not move to something else or if Apple was restricting me in any way, maybe I'd care. Apple does put DRM on their music files, they sell, but I generally don't buy from them. I did buy a few songs once that I could not find elsewhere, but I legally stripped the DRM off with a freeware program and backed them up as a regular audio CD with no DRM. What's the problem?
If you're a pragmatist, neither the DRM, nor "activation" in Vista should bother you in the slightest, since the former is applicable on any platform and the latter won't be noticed by 99% of users.
TPM modules aren't inherently bad. It's how they are used that makes the difference. If the owner of the computer is in charge of the module, they are a powerful tool. If someone else is, then it's a problem.
WOW ! Just like DRM !
That's correct. Windows is REQUIRED for many applications due to its MONOPOLY position.
Funny, I thought it was REQUIRED because the APPLICATION DEVELOPERS chose not to write cross-platform software...
I remember a few years ago, when XP first began phoning home for automatic updates. Some guy at a bank figured out it was actually *illegal to have such software on a bank computer. Federal law, IIRC. Speaking of IIRC, does this sound familiar? Anyone remember the guy's name, or how it turned out?
He was probably duly ignored, since in any remotely well-managed Windows network, machines do not "phone home" for updates, they "phone" the in-house Windows Update server.
I really have to shake my head every time someone raises an "issue" like this. Microsoft generate the vast bulk of their revenue from corporate software sales. Why would anyone seriously consider that they would risk that revenue by releasing a piece of software their customers would be legally barred from using ?
Now let's assume that you run RAIDZ2 on each server, dedicating 2 of the 48 drives to parity.
No-one would do this in a production environment where performance was even a passing concern (or if they did, they shouldn't have) - firstly, because parity-based RAID configurations are (relatively) slow and secondly because RAIDZ[2] (or parity-based in general, really) arrays shouldn't be any bigger than about 8 drives in total, or performance (and reliability) start to go downhill.
It's reasonable to assume you lose at least half the raw space in redundancy using RAID10 (or equivalent), to get the best performance - probably plus another drive or two for hot spares. So double your estimate of 3 racks to 6.
(I agree 300TB is nothing particularly impressive, however.)
Apple doesn't even use CD keys.
Indeed. Instead they use dongles.
--
BSD code is free code to be used in software.
GPL code is code to be used in GPL software.
Fixed that for you.
Retail discs include both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries (OEM and VLK discs have separate discs, for some reason).
The reason why OEM discs are like that should be pretty obvious - you (supposedly) buy an OEM copy for a specific machine, so the disc would only have the version of Windows for that specific machine on it.
Not really. The heads of corporations are people too. They can shamed into doing the right things. You might be amazed at how effective a well organized protest campaign can be.
However, you need a better principle than "we want stuff for free", which is unquestionably how any anti-DRM protests would be presented as.
Note: I disagree that the iPod is defective by design, because it does not require DRM. It still works with the open formats of MP3, AAC and AIFF.
Just like Vista, you mean ?
You wouldn't need these mammoth processors in the first place. And having one would be a huge benefit, not a marginal one.
And you base this on what, exactly ?
Everytime I read anything about Vista's new features, I hear myself saying "fucking finally" like half a dozen times.
Funny, I think exactly the same thing almost every time I hear about the latest "innovation" in Linux or OS X.
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but CRTs are superior to LCDs for gaming in every way but the usual reasons to buy LCD, size and weight. LCDs have one resolution, CRTs can do many resolutions (and true multisync CRTs, which are admittedly a rarity these days, can do all KINDS of things.)
What do you mean by "true multisync" ?
My reasoning is that many home users have computers that are fine for running Windows XP, but are not capable of running Vista without a significant upgrade. Since it is likely that the cost of an upgrade would be expensive, this could result in many home users given both Mac and Linux a serious look.
A Ghz+ processor, 1G of RAM and a US$30 video card is all you need to comfortably run Vista.
Due to this, it has led me to look at both Mac and Linux as an upgrade option since they are both likely to be less expensive than purchasing a new Vista-capable system, a new monitor (I'm currently using a 14" CRT), and new software applications to replace the ones that will not work with Vista.
An entry-level PC capable of comfortably running Vista will set you back about US$500 at most.
If you don't want to use Vista, just say it. Don't use lame "it needs too much hardware" justifications (*especially* when offering OS X as a possible alternative) as an excuse when they are so trivial to demonstrate as ridiculous.
I don't hate Microsoft. But they've ballooned into a company that produces tedious bloated software and OSes that isn't particularly interesting. They're on the way down. They make boring shit.
Compared to _what_ ?
I think perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Vista will not be a complete flop, but it will sell well under what Microsoft expects.
In pretty much every way (technical, marketing, whatever), Vista is the most significant release of "Windows" since Windows 95. It's difficult to see how it _wouldn't_ be a runaway success.
I have a decade-old iMac (ruby) that runs the very latest version of Macintosh OSX. (10.4) What's that you say? Apple doesn't support legacy hardware?
Your "Ruby" iMac is no older than 8 years (and, incidentally, isn't actually "supported" by OS X, even though it will probably install). The 266Mhz models were introduced in January, 1999 (and had 32M RAM standard). To say they "run OS X 10.4" is little more than sophistry.
Well, try getting Vista to run on a Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM on a 10 GB HDD, which is what was state of the art when the Apple iMac came out.
A "state of the art" PC from the same era would be ca. 450Mhz P2 or P3 (and if you wanted to go high-end, would have multiple processors). I can assure you, from experience, it will run Vista *at least* as well as that old iMac runs OS X (and much better, once you allow for some cheap upgrades - which you need to do for the iMac anyway).
So instead of fixing Windows' security model, or reworking the flawed NTFS filesystem, they patch 'em up and give the patches catchy names!
Windows Defender (and other anti-spyware products don't protext against "flaws" in the security model, they protect against flaws in the user.
The fragmentation issue is _vastly_ overblown and defragging has no impact for 99% of people. It's there to soothe people who have had years of magazines telling them to "defrag" (which followed on from years of the same - actually applicable - advice about FAT[32]).
"Defragging" is much like "fixing permissions" in recent versions of OS X - nothing more than a placebo almost every time it's applied.
Vista went in to RTM in November, so releasing SP1 mid 2007 will leave at 6 to 8 months for bug fixes. Considering how long Vista was in development, [...]
When you're going to talk about code, it's not particularly reasonable to imply Vista was in development for an inordinate amount of time.
While Vista the *product* has been "in development" for ~5 years, Vista the *codebase* has only been in development for ~2 years, after the "Longhorn Reboot" in mid-late 2004.
You would not make such an ignorant claim if you really did know. I am talking about pop culture. Ask anyone under 35 in Taiwan, Hong Kong, any major city of Mainland China, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, etc what "My Sassy Girl" refers to, and they will know either the movie, the tv series or both. The same goes for dozens of other tv series and hundreds of other movies over just the last few years.
Now that you've finished beating that straw man to death, perhaps you'd like to come back to the discussion about mainstream entertainment in countries like the US, UK, Canada and Australia. You know, places that are actually _relevant_ to this discussion about Hollywood, the MPAA, DRM and the like ?
Such non-MPAA entertainment is so widespread and common that just last year, Taiwan's senate debated a bill banning dramas that weren't made in country from prime-time broadcasts, because they were dominating the airwaves.
Needing legislative assurance of airtime is typically not a sign of a strong local arts industry. Quite the opposite, in fact.
A third of the USA speaks spanish - they, and rest of latin america have similarly prodigious entertainment industries - just barely crossing over in the English-speaking world now with remakes like "Ugly Betty." Then there is bollywood, responsible for 2x the number of films that hollywood makes each year and 10x the number of ticket sales among the billion+ population of India. Everyone knows hollywood, but hollywood does not even come close to ruling the world of pop entertainment. Maybe 50 years ago they did, but not any more, not even close.
Right. You're not seriously suggesting these sources of entertainment are going to meangingfully challenge hollywood & co in the US (and similar) countries ?
As an aside, if you think the media companies in those countries aren't going to be heading down the same paths of DRM and the like, you're just naive.)
The followings of asian (mainly Japanese) sourced media (mainly cartoons) is relatively _enormous_, as sorta-non-mainstream-media goes, but it still pales into insignificance compared to the proportion of people consuming standard pop-culture fare.
Jeez. Using Bollywood and Tiawanese TV shows as reasons why Hollywood should be running scared is even sillier than using sales of business desktops and servers.
WTF? What part of HD-DVD editions of PowerDVD and WinDVD did you not understand? Have you really been hitting on this point over and over because you couldn't understand that means EVERY SINGLE HD-DVD CURRENTLY AVAILABLE, ALL 200+? That's your big deal? The one that I trashed in my second post? I thought your wording was strange, it just turns out that yet again, you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Ah, I think we're getting close to the truth now. You don't actually _have_ some piece of media that plays fine in XP but doesn't in Vista, you're just regurgitating what you've been told will happen. "OMG, it says teh Micro$oft will do 3vil so it MUST be true !"
Vista's DRM restrictions are *only* triggered when the _playing_application_ requests them. There is nothing (technical) whatsoever stopping WinDVD from playing back DRM-encumbered media at full quality in Vista, sans DRM-capable hardware, if the developers wanted it to. If WinDVD and co. are playing back DRMed media at fully quality in XP, when they "shouldn't be" but aren't doing the same in Vista, that's either a bug in their software or an inconsistent application of policy. Either way, it's not Vista's fault, and completely the fault of the developers of WinDVD.
You need to get past it yourself and realize that the world is not anywhere near the way hollywood paints it.
Here's a heads-up. I don't even agree with _copyright_, let alone evn stricter laws like the DMCA (and equivalents in other countries). If you think I'm just repeating what Hollywood says because I agree with it, your reading comprehension needs to improve.
I think it important to note that the point I was making was in regard to cheap servers with 2 to 3 disks. If you have mission critical servers in 1U form factor, that is a mistake in itself unless there is some clustering or such to protect.
I would argue that the point I'm making applies to _any_ production server. Disk failures are such a common thing to happen, and RAID is such a trivially quick, simple and cheap means of mitigating most common types of disk-related system failures, that IMHO not using it borders on negligence.
If we have many physical disks attached, we are not in the described scenario. Feel free to have RAID 1 in that case. Not every company decides on a solution that includes a RAID controller.
Servers with only two internal disks for the system and a [large] number of external disks for data are not at all uncommon.
You are changing my argument. I never said RAID 1 is supposed to protect against software errors or admin errors.
Your implication was clearly that it somehow could, given you use an example of software failure as a reason for _not_ using it in your original post.
In fact, I plainly state that it doesn't. It is part of my argument against using RAID 1 when ONLY two disks are available. With a system that contains only two disks, what is the likelihood that it also contains two separate disk controllers? Not likely. Your one hardware failure is still quite capable of taking out both disks and negating the advantage of RAID 1.
Certainly, but a physical disk failure is vastly more likely than a controller failure. Just because you can't have an ideal configuration doesn't mean you shouldn't try to have the best one available.
Your point about taking a while to bring up disks could be extended to refer to NAS and SAN disks. With Journaled Filesystems the time to bring them up should be reduced.
I was actualy thinking of physically connected disks and the innitial spin-up and initialisation sequences.
I'm not dogmatic about this if the data in an environment sways the balance toward RAID.
I am simply struggling to see a situation where a RAID1 for the system drive is _not_ the best solution.
t is be nice to have both and sleep well at night with a quiet beeper/mobile. My argument was in reference to when you cannot have both.
Again, it's difficult to see a properly configured environment where you cannot have both RAID1 on the systems and backups. Even the incredibly budget-constrained low-end environments where "backups" are an external USB drive attached to each server are capable.
It's just that any way I try to look at it, using the other half of the mirror as both backup and redundancy actually _reduces_ the reliability and increases the complexity of a system.
The human body is not designed to consume animal products.
Correct. However, it has most certainly _evolved_ to consume "animal products" (else it would be physically incapable of deriving nutritional value from them like, say, herbivorous animals).
Humans can't chase and kill 99.9% of wild animals.
Sure they can. Or are you trying to suggest people didn't hunt animals before they days of guns ?
Humans would never naturally suck milk from a cow's breast, or from any other animal's. Humans might naturally eat the occasional egg, but that's about it.
Anyone who thinks humans aren't omnivores is either stupid, or ignorant.
But hey - you were brought up to believe that killing animals is 'normal', so let's not question it!
It is *far* more "normal" than a vegan diet, which - especially in the absence of modern food processing techniques - is quite difficult to live healthily on.
Not really. Nice try with the bad analogy though.
It's a pretty good analogy. RAID isn't supposed to protect you against software failures (be they in the operating system or the operator), it's supposed to protect you against hardware failure.
Saying you don't use RAID because it doesn't protect you against software error is, very much, like saying you don't wear a seatbelt because it won't stop the engine catching fire.
Dead disk. If this happens with Raid 1 you are usually OK. There are sometimes problems with performance as the drive dies but with a good RAID controller or software LVM, nothing dramatic should occur. With a dd copy or offline mirror you get a crash and boot from the alternate copy. If things are pretty static on that drive, little to no loss. You get a small amount of downtime. [Logs should go to a log server.]
Rebooting a server takes on the order of minutes (many minutes, if it has a lot of physical drives attached to it). How much money does your company lose in a few minutes while the relevant service(s) is/are down ? Would it be enough to pay for a RAID controller ?
I'm not saying mirrors are bad, if I have three disks I keep two in a mirror and another as an offline mirror. With Solaris, I break the mirror and apply patches to the offline copy and then boot from it saving me time at night and reducing the patch window.
This is a reasonable methodology to use (and quite common among Solaris admins, I believe), personally I prefer staging/certification environments, however - but it's not really relevant to this discussion though.
I just prefer the offline mirror because it covers my ass in two ways vs RAID 1 that only covers my ass in case of disk failure.
No, it doesn't (well, it sort of does if you have the 2 online + 1 offline configuration you mentioned earlier, but that configuration - while quite valid - is hardly what most people think of when they hear "RAID1").
If you have a two-disk RAID1 with one drive offline, you are not protected against the hardware failure of your active drive. If it dies, the system will almost certainly suffer an unplanned outage. This is what RAID is there to protect you against.
If you disagree, then that's OK. There are many ways to admin boxes. As long as you have a justification and rationale for your decisions that make sense, you'll have a good reasoned response for the CEO when things fail. And they will.
RAID protects you against hardware failure.
Backups (your "offline mirror") protect you against software failure.
You need _both_ to have a reliable server (outside of some external functionality, like clustering).