It's not misleading. If you buy a typical PC - especially from most of the big name vendors - it will come with Windows included. Ergo, Windows is not an additional cost. Ie: it is "free" from the purchaser's point of view.
Every legit installation of Windows costs someone and ultimately that cost is transferred to the consumer.
Yes. And ?
The argument I responded to was not whether or not the cost of Windows is captured as part of the cost of the computer, it was that Linux presents no additional cost to the consumer and this is a reason to prefer Linux to Windows. My point was that it is equally true of Windows (because Windows either comes with the computer, or they can pirate it), and is therefore NOT a reason.
Context: It's helpful.
The cost of Windows may be $20 for the OEM but it is sold at a mark up of nearly $50 or more (as per when Dell used to allow you to prove you hadn't agreed to the EULA and wanted a refund -- which they do no longer). AND the LOWEST cost for an upgrade of Windows 7 (single user upgrade) is $120.00 (we need not haggle over a penny here or there).
Completely irrelevant. If I walk into a store and buy a PC that comes with Windows - or buy a naked PC then download Windows from thepiratebay, then neither how much it costs OEM, nor retail, are relevant to a financial decision whether or not to prefer Windows over Linux.
There's the doctrine of first sale which says that if you bought it you can resell it. I don't need to resell Linux. I can just give it away. I won't be violating anyone's license just by giving it away or by installing it hundreds of times on people's computers. MICROSOFT's warning was that you can have your right to use it yanked and they can refuse to allow you to continue to use it for any reason at any time. This cannot ever happen under Linux.
Now you are moving the goalposts from an issue of ownership to an issue of (certain types of) use.
I'm not familiar with the Microsoft "warning" you refer to, either. Link ?
What you are describing is far different than what I pointed out initially.
You claimed no-one "owns" their copy of Windows. I pointed out the same is true of their copies of Linux. "Ownership" implies complete control. You do not have complete control over a copy of Linux, you are restricted in what you can do with it by the GPL, just as Microsoft restrict when you can do with Windows by their EULA.
The GPL does not limit me like Microsoft's EULA.
I never said it did. That you might prefer one form of restriction over the other, is not relevant to the original statement you made about _ownership_.
I can do just about anything I want with the code.
I can do everything I _want_ to with my copies of Windows. I might not be able to do everything *you* want to do, but that is of little concern to *me*.
I think you mistake the GPL for something it is not.
I'm pretty sure I don't.
I am, however, quite confident that your irrational hatred of Microsoft has made you build up a massive straw man argument, just to merrily rip it apart.
Not quite that simple. For the first 2 years of HDD life, that is only true above 45C.
The big problem with using the Google study is that their temperature numbers basically don't go above 45C (which isn't surprising given all their drives would have been in temperature-controlled environments). A drive in a fairly normal PC will easily hit 40C in localities with higher ambient temps (say, 30C+), 50C if there are multiple drives in close proximity, and in small enclosures (like, say, an iMac), 60C or more.
FWIW, I've had home servers with anywhere from 6-16 drives in them for about 15 years now, and drive failures have been noticably reduced since I started putting the drives into multi-drive enclosures with active cooling (ie: fans), keeping the temps around the 30-35 range (ambient of 20 - 30C). My observation - based on home and work servers - is that once drive temperatures are consistently over 40C, reliability starts to go down.
Yes, and then you have posters like the previous poster who bash "consumer grade" drives and instead push the more-expensive "enterprise-grade" drives. Now maybe I'm missing something, but my understanding is that one of the big differences between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives is the speed they operate at. You're not going to find a 5400 rpm "green" drive in the high-end space; instead, they're usually 10k or even 15k rpm.
There's several "Enterprise" class 7200 rpm (and maybe even 5400s, for archival storage) drives out there as well (also often called "Nearline"). I don't know exactly what's different about them compared to consumer drives, but I have noted:
* They typically have a much higher MTBF
* They've always come with five year warranties (and still do, even after these recent changes)
* They're typically noticably heavier (so something in the physical construction is clearly different)
* They often have a SAS interface instead of SATA (means little to the average punter, but is important if you're putting them into a multipathed enclosure)
Windows does not come free on new desktops. I find you saying that misleading.
You might find it misleading, but it's nevertheless true. The small cost of OEM Windows ($0-40 or so, depending on what other kickbacks the reseller gets) is part of the purchase cost of "the computer". Ie: it's not considered an additional cost by anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind. Ie: it's "free".
The simple fact is that there's rarely a price difference between a PC that comes with Windows and a PC that comes with Linux, from the sellers most people buy from. Ergo, Windows is "free" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Microsoft gets paid for every copy of Windows. The OEMs pay Microsoft and mark it up to you via the price of the whole computer.
Yes. And ?
The cost of the hardware comes down but the cost of Windows never does. It will continue to remain $50 or more for OEM preinstalls and $120 for the lowest upgrade retail copy.
OEMs probably pay more like $20 for their copy of Windows. Many effectively get it free thanks to kickbacks from vendors bundling other software on their PCs.
Keep in mind that Microsoft just put out a public reminder that you do not own that copy installed on your computer.
You don't "own" your copy of Linux, either. If you think you do, I suggest trying to modify and redistribute it on terms not compliant with the GPL.
If Windows is so easy to configure then why is it misconfigured so horribly?
Driving a car in most conditions is a trivially simple exercise. Yet thousands upon thousands of people every day crash - and die - because they can't manage to do it correctly.
That is how people act when their lives are at stake. Why do you think they'd be any different with someone as consequence-free as bad sysadminning ?
So if they want something premade, why would they choose Linux instead of OSX or Windows?
Indeed. I spent the better part of ten years as a Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux sysadmin, and I can't think of any reason I'd switch from Windows to Linux on my regular desktop PC. Nor to OS X, for that matter, and our household owns four Macs.
Users can just pick the breed of Linux that suits them and be immediately productive.
And by "immediately" you mean 6 months after they start sampling all those different linux variants to actually find the one that "suits them", right ?
User figures out a better way to do something, IT blocks it.
Something like the security, integrity and compliancing nightmare that is DropBox, you mean ?
Prescribed methods of doing things don't work well; user goes around them, IT blocks or complains to management.
You mean like running a collaboration tool full of irreplaceable customer and business data on their desktop PC with no backups, no redundancy and no access control ?
User wants something done, IT demands business justification and signatures from at least two executive VPs. User does it himself, IT finds out and makes him stop.
Yes. That's because when one of the numerous and entirely predictable disasters involving lawsuits, data loss, productivity loss, and general hair-tearing eventuate because the kind of ignorant, short-sighted fool responsible for the examples listed above actually got away with it, IT is the one getting blamed.
You damn well better believe IT makes him stop. In other news, if you use the corporate credit card to buy yourself a new laptop you might find that the finance department will stop you, and if you start putting buckets of paint over doors as a "prank", the HR department will stop you.
No it isn't morally ok, you are depriving the creator their choice in where and how their creation is distributed.
*Reality* "deprives" the creator of that "choice". P2P is merely a manifestation of the simple fact that information is trivial to create and duplicate, and nearly impossible to destroy. Go back millennia or so and "P2P" was someone wandering around the countryside singing songs beside the campfire every night.
so that rather than individuals being expected to bear the loss of however much work time, by having to take time off without pay, we shift it to requiring employers to bear the cost by paying someone who isn't working?
Yes. It's a cost of doing business in a stable society with a functioning legal system.
Why is it perfectly normal for public funds to pay the judge, the balliff, the clerk, the chap who maintains the building, etc., but everyone suddenly baulks at using them to pay jurors?
I don't baulk at it at all. I merely recognise that someone on anything resembling a decent income has a strong financial incentive to avoid jury duty, and that disadvantages the system as a whole. The proper solution there is that people should not have that disincentive, and should be paid the same while on jury duty as they would be otherwise. Requiring the employer to do this directly, rather than through multiple layers of taxation and bureaucracy, is a simpler and more efficient way to achieve this result.
You can consider the employer paying his employees while they are on jury duty as a form of taxation if that helps you understand.
Yes, you did. You went from automating installs to talk of permissions and compatibility, completely separate topics.
Its the total cost of ownership concept but in total cost of deployment terms. If any random person can do the one thing, but the other is only available to specific people, its different, isn't it? And worth noting.
Why would "any random person" be creating automated installs ? Why would someone with a need to create automated installs not have "rights" to do their job ?
PS the above guide is only to make a USB bootable installation image, not a fully automated self-installing image that could be used on a headless system, or for PXE deployment. Those were the original goalposts.
Indeed they were. But then you posted a link to a process for nothing more than rolling some custom RPMs into an ISO image, so I assumed that's all you were talking about. Hence my comment of "If that's your idea of "create their own custom CentOS distribution for installation over PXE""...
Feel free to post the instructions for Windows for someone to follow;
There's a zillion guides out there on making a bootable USB key (preferable) or DVD to install Windows from. It's about 5 steps. Here is one example. After that's done, you just copy whatever custom software you want onto the USB key and you've achieved the same result as that link you gave.
including rights required and hardware compatibility issues.
6 monitors? That is a totally non standard configuration of course things don't work well. OSX was never designed to support that kind of setup.
The problem exists whenever the monitor count is greater than one. To suggest multi-monitor scenarios weren't considered when OS X's UI was being built would beggar belief.
If you have some literature or benchmarks showing that a SSD drive (with no cache) can write more than 350-400 IOPS, please share, I would be thrilled to try one.
I think you need to expand a bit more on exactly what and how you're benchmarking, because even consumer-grade (ie: buy it from Newegg) SLC drives are reported to hit a couple of thousand IOPS in 4k random write benchmarks. 1500 read also seems ludicrously pessimistic.
(Not to mention even 350-400 IOPS is still twice the performance you'd get out of a 15k spindle.)
Reading from SSD is insanely faster than reading from SAS. Writing to SSD is much slower. There is no way around that.
Where do I find a SAS drive that can do a couple of thousand write IOPS ?
Those hybrids products are simply a futile tentative to come up with a cheap alternative to what is really needed: adding a decent cache on SSD controllers so the write buffer is big enough to mitigate the write penalty, and adding enough processing power to perform destaging properly.
I wouldn't claim to be an SSD expert, but I'm pretty sure that happened a year or two ago.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not misleading. If you buy a typical PC - especially from most of the big name vendors - it will come with Windows included. Ergo, Windows is not an additional cost. Ie: it is "free" from the purchaser's point of view.
Yes. And ?
The argument I responded to was not whether or not the cost of Windows is captured as part of the cost of the computer, it was that Linux presents no additional cost to the consumer and this is a reason to prefer Linux to Windows. My point was that it is equally true of Windows (because Windows either comes with the computer, or they can pirate it), and is therefore NOT a reason.
Context: It's helpful.
Completely irrelevant. If I walk into a store and buy a PC that comes with Windows - or buy a naked PC then download Windows from thepiratebay, then neither how much it costs OEM, nor retail, are relevant to a financial decision whether or not to prefer Windows over Linux.
Now you are moving the goalposts from an issue of ownership to an issue of (certain types of) use.
I'm not familiar with the Microsoft "warning" you refer to, either. Link ?
You claimed no-one "owns" their copy of Windows. I pointed out the same is true of their copies of Linux. "Ownership" implies complete control. You do not have complete control over a copy of Linux, you are restricted in what you can do with it by the GPL, just as Microsoft restrict when you can do with Windows by their EULA.
I never said it did. That you might prefer one form of restriction over the other, is not relevant to the original statement you made about _ownership_.
I can do everything I _want_ to with my copies of Windows. I might not be able to do everything *you* want to do, but that is of little concern to *me*.
I'm pretty sure I don't.
I am, however, quite confident that your irrational hatred of Microsoft has made you build up a massive straw man argument, just to merrily rip it apart.
No, it ensures they are allocated to where they can be most *afforded*.
The two are not synonyms.
The big problem with using the Google study is that their temperature numbers basically don't go above 45C (which isn't surprising given all their drives would have been in temperature-controlled environments). A drive in a fairly normal PC will easily hit 40C in localities with higher ambient temps (say, 30C+), 50C if there are multiple drives in close proximity, and in small enclosures (like, say, an iMac), 60C or more.
FWIW, I've had home servers with anywhere from 6-16 drives in them for about 15 years now, and drive failures have been noticably reduced since I started putting the drives into multi-drive enclosures with active cooling (ie: fans), keeping the temps around the 30-35 range (ambient of 20 - 30C). My observation - based on home and work servers - is that once drive temperatures are consistently over 40C, reliability starts to go down.
There's several "Enterprise" class 7200 rpm (and maybe even 5400s, for archival storage) drives out there as well (also often called "Nearline"). I don't know exactly what's different about them compared to consumer drives, but I have noted:
* They typically have a much higher MTBF
* They've always come with five year warranties (and still do, even after these recent changes)
* They're typically noticably heavier (so something in the physical construction is clearly different)
* They often have a SAS interface instead of SATA (means little to the average punter, but is important if you're putting them into a multipathed enclosure)
You might find it misleading, but it's nevertheless true. The small cost of OEM Windows ($0-40 or so, depending on what other kickbacks the reseller gets) is part of the purchase cost of "the computer". Ie: it's not considered an additional cost by anyone who doesn't have an axe to grind. Ie: it's "free".
The simple fact is that there's rarely a price difference between a PC that comes with Windows and a PC that comes with Linux, from the sellers most people buy from. Ergo, Windows is "free" in any meaningful sense of the word.
Yes. And ?
OEMs probably pay more like $20 for their copy of Windows. Many effectively get it free thanks to kickbacks from vendors bundling other software on their PCs.
You don't "own" your copy of Linux, either. If you think you do, I suggest trying to modify and redistribute it on terms not compliant with the GPL.
Driving a car in most conditions is a trivially simple exercise. Yet thousands upon thousands of people every day crash - and die - because they can't manage to do it correctly.
That is how people act when their lives are at stake. Why do you think they'd be any different with someone as consequence-free as bad sysadminning ?
Can you provide a link to these tests ?
No-one pays "more" for a copy of Windows. They either get it "free" with the new PC they buy every 3-4 years, or they download it from thepiratebay.
Indeed. I spent the better part of ten years as a Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux sysadmin, and I can't think of any reason I'd switch from Windows to Linux on my regular desktop PC. Nor to OS X, for that matter, and our household owns four Macs.
And by "immediately" you mean 6 months after they start sampling all those different linux variants to actually find the one that "suits them", right ?
Something like the security, integrity and compliancing nightmare that is DropBox, you mean ?
You mean like running a collaboration tool full of irreplaceable customer and business data on their desktop PC with no backups, no redundancy and no access control ?
Yes. That's because when one of the numerous and entirely predictable disasters involving lawsuits, data loss, productivity loss, and general hair-tearing eventuate because the kind of ignorant, short-sighted fool responsible for the examples listed above actually got away with it, IT is the one getting blamed.
You damn well better believe IT makes him stop. In other news, if you use the corporate credit card to buy yourself a new laptop you might find that the finance department will stop you, and if you start putting buckets of paint over doors as a "prank", the HR department will stop you.
*Reality* "deprives" the creator of that "choice". P2P is merely a manifestation of the simple fact that information is trivial to create and duplicate, and nearly impossible to destroy. Go back millennia or so and "P2P" was someone wandering around the countryside singing songs beside the campfire every night.
Right. Because there's never, ever been a movie, song, poem, book, story, or anything else created to demonstrate and explain "reality".
a) It's not random.
b) It's not plugging a budget hole. It's fixing a problem in the system.
Yes. It's a cost of doing business in a stable society with a functioning legal system.
I don't baulk at it at all. I merely recognise that someone on anything resembling a decent income has a strong financial incentive to avoid jury duty, and that disadvantages the system as a whole. The proper solution there is that people should not have that disincentive, and should be paid the same while on jury duty as they would be otherwise. Requiring the employer to do this directly, rather than through multiple layers of taxation and bureaucracy, is a simpler and more efficient way to achieve this result.
You can consider the employer paying his employees while they are on jury duty as a form of taxation if that helps you understand.
Yes, you did. You went from automating installs to talk of permissions and compatibility, completely separate topics.
Why would "any random person" be creating automated installs ? Why would someone with a need to create automated installs not have "rights" to do their job ?
Indeed they were. But then you posted a link to a process for nothing more than rolling some custom RPMs into an ISO image, so I assumed that's all you were talking about. Hence my comment of "If that's your idea of "create their own custom CentOS distribution for installation over PXE""...
There's a zillion guides out there on making a bootable USB key (preferable) or DVD to install Windows from. It's about 5 steps. Here is one example. After that's done, you just copy whatever custom software you want onto the USB key and you've achieved the same result as that link you gave.
Now you're moving the goalposts.
Export the relevant entries to a .reg file. Carry it around with you. Double-click the file whenever you're on a new machine.
The problem exists whenever the monitor count is greater than one. To suggest multi-monitor scenarios weren't considered when OS X's UI was being built would beggar belief.
The proper solution is a law requiring employers to treat Jury Duty the same as paid leave.
I'm pretty willing to bet that the Windows 8 installed on the average tablet isn't going to have all the stuff the Windows 8 on the average PC does.
Uh, iOS *is* a stripped-down version of OS X with a touch-optimised UI stuck on top...
I think you need to expand a bit more on exactly what and how you're benchmarking, because even consumer-grade (ie: buy it from Newegg) SLC drives are reported to hit a couple of thousand IOPS in 4k random write benchmarks. 1500 read also seems ludicrously pessimistic.
(Not to mention even 350-400 IOPS is still twice the performance you'd get out of a 15k spindle.)
Where do I find a SAS drive that can do a couple of thousand write IOPS ?
I wouldn't claim to be an SSD expert, but I'm pretty sure that happened a year or two ago.