First, the average person does understand what's been "stolen", even if the psuedo-intellectuals of slashdot pretend that this is an opaque concept.
Really ? So why is "stealing" of "intellectual property" (by which, presumably, you mean violation of copyright laws) so much more prevalent than "stealing" of just about everything else ?
Could it be that people don't steal things like cars because it's easy to see where the harm goes (and how it might happen to them) ?
Does it not follow, then, that maybe people don't feel downloading music is wrong because it's rather difficult to see how a multi-millionaire "artist" whose music is played half a dozen times a day on the radio is being "harmed" by downloading those same songs ?
The more laws you stack up that the majortiy of the populace simply do not follow (speeding, P2P, etc) the more people break other laws as well.
For example ? Do you have any evidence whatsoever to support your theory that people who, for example, drive at 10km/h over the speed limit and buying region-free DVD players this week are going to start stealing, raping and killing next week ?
At least I assume you're implying people breaking laws regarding "speeding, P2P, etc" are going to move on to bigger and better things and not just ignore other laws against similarly victimless crimes like, say, jaywalking or sitting at home smoking a joint ?
How do they suggest that these items generate income when its equally made available for free as a download by people who have no financial attachments to the creation of the work?
Same way you make *any* product sell in leiu of cheaper alternatives - make the "legitimate" product more attractive than the "free" one.
I've said it a thousand times - if marketeers can convince people to buy bottled water, convincing them to buy movies and/or music should be _trivial_.
You *could* screw up a *nix system with a bad installer, but it is harder to do for a couple of reasons:
Less likely != harder.
you usually only need to run the installer as root if you are doing a system-wide installation.
Saying it's harder for installers to mess up the system in unix by using an example where you don't even try to install to the whole system is a bit apples and oranges, don't you think ?
*nix apps are generally more self-contained than Windows apps.
Right. Which is why the typical unix system has binaries for every program in the same directories, libraries for every program in the same directories, config for every program in the same directories, but on Windows each app (and its unique support libraries) typically get their own directory. Methinks you've got that one arse-about-face.
If program A uses protocol X and program B does so also, installing B may change registry entries concerning protocol X so that they match its needs. Program A stops working with protocol X.
And this is different to changing the same sort of global settings in/etc how, exactly ?
The *nix tradition of self-contained configuration files avoids the collisions that can arise in the registry.
"Collisions" can arise just as easily in/etc as in the Registry. Configuration data in the registry is just as "self-contained" as configuration data in/etc.
So again, YES, it is possible for an installer to completely wreck a *nix box BUT it is much less likely.
This has a lot more to do with unix's (and more importantly, its developers') platform maturity than anything inherent to the system. It's just as easy to wreck a unix system as a Windows system - the difference is the average unix developer cares more about not doing it than the average Windows developer.
This can only be taken so far. Much like Dell shouldn't be responsible if their computers can't handle being thrown out a 5th story window, Microsoft can't be blamed if users deliberately run questionable software from unknown sources.
"Secure" OSs just won't/can't get viruses & spyware.
Where can these "secure" OSes be found ? What software runs on them ?
Worms, rootkits and trojans still must be guarded against, but it's pretty easy for a "desktop user" to do.
It's pretty easy for a "desktop user" to avoid malware as well - they just need to avoid "clicking on random links in spam and downloading the latest new files without thinking".
Skip RAID 0 like the plague if this is your main storage area. Much much better to go with RAID 1+0 or RAID 5. RAID 0 is like tempting the HDD Gods for HDD failure.
Seconded. Go with RAID5 - you only lose one disk's worth of space and since the vast bulk of your data access is going to be reading, the average performance impact will be negligible. When (not if) you have a drive failure, a) you won't have any downtime and b) you won't have to re-rip hundreds of CDs worth of music.
Get some 4 port SATA controllers - heck, with such a low-bandwidth application you wouldn't even have to worry about 64 bit PCI or multiple PCI buses for acceptable performance.
It's not the drives that set you back with RAID 5. It's the RAID card. SATA drives are cheap now. Not everyone can plunk down the cash for a card that will accomodate RAID 5.
Use software RAID. Performance (in this application) will be just as good and you can use cheap, off the shelf 4-port SATA adapters.
An even better question is "If the XBox 360 runs on a powerPC-like CPU, will MSFT start selling W2K for the G5?" that'd be a fine how-do-you-do. "Dear Steve, we're releasing a fully compatible 'Windows 2k5 for OS X'. It's a trick we learned from IBM. gg.--Love, Bill"
Won't happen for the same reasons you won't see OS X on intel - no hardware need, no software available and hence, no market.
Me, I think it is deceptive all-around and all retailers should be required to show both prices. That way the tax itself isn't hidden (by the government in prices), and the retails can't blame their high prices on the tax.
In Australia your receipt ("tax invoice") must indicate whether or not an item had GST attached (some items are GST-exempt), the total cost and the GST component of that total.
Would anyone expect Longhorn to be faster than Windows XP? Or the next iteration of [insert your favourite Linux OS here] to be faster than the previous?
Were previous versions of Windows as poorly performing as previous versions of OS X, yes.
OS X was abominably slow before 10.3. 10.3 made is somewhat usable. 10.4 is approaching snappy. Maybe 10.5 will be as responsive as Windows [anything] is and OS 9 was.
yes, not on secondhand goods, but its 10% tax when its sold wholesale, and another 10% when its sold retail, and all the parts required to make something are 10% more so the final price increases a lot more than 10%
That's not how it works. When a reseller buys items that are subject to GST they are able to claim the GST component as "input credits" (which basically means they don't pay the GST on that item). Effectively, if they are purchasing items to resell, they buy them "GST free".
The *tax code* requires GST only be charged once in the chain of sale - at the end when the customer buys it. Any GST paid at interim steps is 100% refundable (or, rather, deductable) to whoever pays it.
but thats the sneaky beauty of the GST its 10%, but thats 10% each time its sold which adds up to more than 10% for most things and everyone thinks they're only paying 10% more
No, it's not. GST isn't payable on second hand goods.
Re:Reduce expenses by cutting executive salaries?
on
IBM Europe Workers Strike
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I bet there are a couple of executives being laid off. Your opinion might change if you ever work 20 years at a company and actually become an executive.
A person who has worked at an executive level for even a relatively short period of time can comfortably live the rest of their life without ever have to work again (or, if they can't, they don't deserve to).
The same cannot be said for the average grunt worker.
I don't mind people being paid what they're worth, per se, but there's no way any "executive" is worth a wage 100s to 1000s times that of the people who actually keep the wheels of the machine turning. The CEO remuneration orgy is no different from politicians who vote themselves pay rises every year, and should be treated as such.
I'm not a huge fan of government intervention, but the state of executive remuneration packages, coupled with treatment of the average employee has passed into "obscene" territory.
On another note...
The employee's at my company cost roughly 1.3 times their salary.
That's actually pretty damn impressive, usually the "cost" of an employee is closer to 2 or 3x their actual wage.
The second that Apple moves into the market with OS X for x86, MSFT is going to pull Office and render OS X basically useless compared to Windows.
OS X on intel[0] would already be basically useless because they're wouldn't be any software for it.
Apple are using OS X on intel as leverage to keep Office for OS X ? Please. Microsoft make buckets of money selling Office for OS X, and OS X for intel would never be a threat to Windows because it would be doomed before it could even get off the ground.
MSFT knows that if they pulled Office for OS X that Apple could easily release OS X for x86 and enter a new competitor into the OS market.
OS X could never compete head to head with Windows on intel. It's a non starter. The very idea should send anyone with a clue into fits of laughter.
Apple had a reason to consider moving to x86 CPUs back when their mainstream CPU was the obselete, crippled G4. With the G5, they don't anymore. Whatever this might be about, it's certainly not Macintosh CPUs.
[0]By which, presumably, you mean OS X on PC clones, not Macs with x86 CPUs, which are two different prospects.
The "exception" to this performance was when RAID-5 was used. Because RAID-5 requires computational resources above and beyond simply moving data back and forth in order to calculate parity, the host-based RAID solutions couldn't always keep up.
RAID5 isn't slow because of the "computation overhead", it's slow because of the additional disk seeking. Even a paltry 300Mhz P2 has checksumming speeds near a gigabyte a second.
Hardware RAID5 may have outperformed software RAID5 in your comparison, but unless your systems were constantly pegged at 100% CPU usage, it didn't have anything to do with "computational overhead".
This is not surprising in the slightest, the only people who use software RAID are the ones doing it on the cheap.
Not true at all - there are flexibility and robustness advantages to software RAID. We often use a mix of hardware and software RAID on single systems to get the best of both worlds.
Speaking from experience, i've used both hardware and software RAID. I don't think there is a single person here who doesn't understand the disadvantages of software RAID.
Funny, from the comments I read in the typical RAID thread on/., I'd say there's only a tiny minority of people here who have even the vaguest notion of not only the inherent advantages and disadvantages of the various RAID configurations, but how to actually go about comparing those relative merits to individual situations.
*Both* software and hardware RAID have their place in _all_ environments.
If you upload at 5k/s, you download at 5k/s,but if you can do 30k/s you usualy get 30k/s.
I don't know what the exact relationship between upload and download speeds is in BT, but it's not 1:1 as you indicate here. I regularly have torrents running at 80k/s - 150k/s *sustained* with my upload rate capped at 10k/s or 15k/s and have even seen it get as high as 400k/s (and stay there until the torrent was finished). Indeed, even with my upload capped at 3k/s I've seen d/l speeds of 50k/s.
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Really ? So why is "stealing" of "intellectual property" (by which, presumably, you mean violation of copyright laws) so much more prevalent than "stealing" of just about everything else ?
Could it be that people don't steal things like cars because it's easy to see where the harm goes (and how it might happen to them) ?
Does it not follow, then, that maybe people don't feel downloading music is wrong because it's rather difficult to see how a multi-millionaire "artist" whose music is played half a dozen times a day on the radio is being "harmed" by downloading those same songs ?
For example ? Do you have any evidence whatsoever to support your theory that people who, for example, drive at 10km/h over the speed limit and buying region-free DVD players this week are going to start stealing, raping and killing next week ?
At least I assume you're implying people breaking laws regarding "speeding, P2P, etc" are going to move on to bigger and better things and not just ignore other laws against similarly victimless crimes like, say, jaywalking or sitting at home smoking a joint ?
Same way you make *any* product sell in leiu of cheaper alternatives - make the "legitimate" product more attractive than the "free" one.
I've said it a thousand times - if marketeers can convince people to buy bottled water, convincing them to buy movies and/or music should be _trivial_.
Less likely != harder.
you usually only need to run the installer as root if you are doing a system-wide installation.
Saying it's harder for installers to mess up the system in unix by using an example where you don't even try to install to the whole system is a bit apples and oranges, don't you think ?
*nix apps are generally more self-contained than Windows apps.
Right. Which is why the typical unix system has binaries for every program in the same directories, libraries for every program in the same directories, config for every program in the same directories, but on Windows each app (and its unique support libraries) typically get their own directory. Methinks you've got that one arse-about-face.
If program A uses protocol X and program B does so also, installing B may change registry entries concerning protocol X so that they match its needs. Program A stops working with protocol X.
And this is different to changing the same sort of global settings in /etc how, exactly ?
The *nix tradition of self-contained configuration files avoids the collisions that can arise in the registry.
"Collisions" can arise just as easily in /etc as in the Registry. Configuration data in the registry is just as "self-contained" as configuration data in /etc.
So again, YES, it is possible for an installer to completely wreck a *nix box BUT it is much less likely.
This has a lot more to do with unix's (and more importantly, its developers') platform maturity than anything inherent to the system. It's just as easy to wreck a unix system as a Windows system - the difference is the average unix developer cares more about not doing it than the average Windows developer.
Which OS are you thinking of where that *can't* happen ?
This can only be taken so far. Much like Dell shouldn't be responsible if their computers can't handle being thrown out a 5th story window, Microsoft can't be blamed if users deliberately run questionable software from unknown sources.
Where can these "secure" OSes be found ? What software runs on them ?
Worms, rootkits and trojans still must be guarded against, but it's pretty easy for a "desktop user" to do.
It's pretty easy for a "desktop user" to avoid malware as well - they just need to avoid "clicking on random links in spam and downloading the latest new files without thinking".
Been doing it for nearly 10 years. No heart problems yet.
Seconded. Go with RAID5 - you only lose one disk's worth of space and since the vast bulk of your data access is going to be reading, the average performance impact will be negligible. When (not if) you have a drive failure, a) you won't have any downtime and b) you won't have to re-rip hundreds of CDs worth of music.
Get some 4 port SATA controllers - heck, with such a low-bandwidth application you wouldn't even have to worry about 64 bit PCI or multiple PCI buses for acceptable performance.
Use software RAID. Performance (in this application) will be just as good and you can use cheap, off the shelf 4-port SATA adapters.
No, they said taking out IE would break Windows (which is perfectly true).
This machine doesn't run "Windows", it runs some other product that is derived from the Windows NT code base.
It's the same as the difference between "Ubuntu" and "Linux".
Windows NT is not derived from OS/2.
which is based on the Mach kernel...
Neither are based on Mach (although NT is at least microkernel-ish).
which is pretty much BSD/QNX/UNIX based...
No, it's not.
Won't happen for the same reasons you won't see OS X on intel - no hardware need, no software available and hence, no market.
In Australia your receipt ("tax invoice") must indicate whether or not an item had GST attached (some items are GST-exempt), the total cost and the GST component of that total.
Were previous versions of Windows as poorly performing as previous versions of OS X, yes.
OS X was abominably slow before 10.3. 10.3 made is somewhat usable. 10.4 is approaching snappy. Maybe 10.5 will be as responsive as Windows [anything] is and OS 9 was.
That's not how it works. When a reseller buys items that are subject to GST they are able to claim the GST component as "input credits" (which basically means they don't pay the GST on that item). Effectively, if they are purchasing items to resell, they buy them "GST free".
The *tax code* requires GST only be charged once in the chain of sale - at the end when the customer buys it. Any GST paid at interim steps is 100% refundable (or, rather, deductable) to whoever pays it.
No, it's not. GST isn't payable on second hand goods.
A person who has worked at an executive level for even a relatively short period of time can comfortably live the rest of their life without ever have to work again (or, if they can't, they don't deserve to).
The same cannot be said for the average grunt worker.
I don't mind people being paid what they're worth, per se, but there's no way any "executive" is worth a wage 100s to 1000s times that of the people who actually keep the wheels of the machine turning. The CEO remuneration orgy is no different from politicians who vote themselves pay rises every year, and should be treated as such.
I'm not a huge fan of government intervention, but the state of executive remuneration packages, coupled with treatment of the average employee has passed into "obscene" territory.
On another note...
The employee's at my company cost roughly 1.3 times their salary.
That's actually pretty damn impressive, usually the "cost" of an employee is closer to 2 or 3x their actual wage.
Ugh. Should be "there".
OS X on intel[0] would already be basically useless because they're wouldn't be any software for it.
Apple are using OS X on intel as leverage to keep Office for OS X ? Please. Microsoft make buckets of money selling Office for OS X, and OS X for intel would never be a threat to Windows because it would be doomed before it could even get off the ground.
MSFT knows that if they pulled Office for OS X that Apple could easily release OS X for x86 and enter a new competitor into the OS market.
OS X could never compete head to head with Windows on intel. It's a non starter. The very idea should send anyone with a clue into fits of laughter.
Apple had a reason to consider moving to x86 CPUs back when their mainstream CPU was the obselete, crippled G4. With the G5, they don't anymore. Whatever this might be about, it's certainly not Macintosh CPUs.
[0]By which, presumably, you mean OS X on PC clones, not Macs with x86 CPUs, which are two different prospects.
RAID5 isn't slow because of the "computation overhead", it's slow because of the additional disk seeking. Even a paltry 300Mhz P2 has checksumming speeds near a gigabyte a second.
Hardware RAID5 may have outperformed software RAID5 in your comparison, but unless your systems were constantly pegged at 100% CPU usage, it didn't have anything to do with "computational overhead".
Not true at all - there are flexibility and robustness advantages to software RAID. We often use a mix of hardware and software RAID on single systems to get the best of both worlds.
Speaking from experience, i've used both hardware and software RAID. I don't think there is a single person here who doesn't understand the disadvantages of software RAID.
Funny, from the comments I read in the typical RAID thread on /., I'd say there's only a tiny minority of people here who have even the vaguest notion of not only the inherent advantages and disadvantages of the various RAID configurations, but how to actually go about comparing those relative merits to individual situations.
*Both* software and hardware RAID have their place in _all_ environments.
I don't know what the exact relationship between upload and download speeds is in BT, but it's not 1:1 as you indicate here. I regularly have torrents running at 80k/s - 150k/s *sustained* with my upload rate capped at 10k/s or 15k/s and have even seen it get as high as 400k/s (and stay there until the torrent was finished). Indeed, even with my upload capped at 3k/s I've seen d/l speeds of 50k/s.
Not often you see that combination of words when referring to network cards...
High *service* uptime != high *server* uptime. I doubt there's many individual pieces of telco equipment that achieve six 9s.