I'm not sure why we need to stick with Linux, per se, and what's wrong with OpenSolaris kernel/CDDL. Serious question here: is there something wrong I'm missing?
OpenSolaris was a dead platform the day Oracle bought Sun. You would be utterly insane to use it for anything important, today.
They don't hate the poor, they just want to keep them in their place- where they belong, without the ability to travel that well into other areas where they do not belong.
You don't need a car to travel in most of Europe. For the rare times that you do, renting is vastly cheaper than buying.
Like them or not, contrast the two companies, Apple and Microsoft and where they have come from and what they currently make. Apples main revenue stream did not exist when Apple was formed. Microsoft is still a 2 product company and gets its revenue from the same 2 product lines they started with.
Microsoft was already a decade old when Windows was released, and it was another five years after that before Office hit the market.
Not to mention that if at least two more massive product lines - SQL Server and Exchange - didn't occur to you, how could anyone take your "analysis" seriously ?
Don't be surprised that there are so many Slashdotters who don't get the iPad. No usb port, no flash, no camera, it doesn't run existing programs, integrated battery and multitasking is a joke.
It's not just the iPad, I simply don't get tablet PCs as a whole, outside of specialised niche applications (eg: in hospitals to replace clipboards). None of the features you list would make a tablet (/slate/pad/whatever) any more attractive to me as a tool, if they were present vs if they were not.
I just can't think of any times I'd *want* to interact with a computer in that fashion - having to continually hold it on a visible angle, keyboard input that's barely adequate at best, etc. The whole concept just seems completely inferior to even a netbook (another device I can barely see a use for) for any remotely mainstream computer-based task.
Again with the generalizations... One real world example?
Any SAN with arrays striped over 50 spindles ? That's not exactly uncommon, you know (and on some architectures like XIV, inherent).
And remember, the point is that it's NECESSARY to spread 1GB over 50 drives, not that it's just some random collection of drives on a SAN.
When you're selling a centralised storage resource to others, you generally don't hand-tune the implementation of each chunk of space to each customer. You carve some out of the huge amount of disk you already have.
Why don't they just charge on the actual bandwidth we get? Something along the lines of $1 per minute at 1mbps or something like that.
Primarily because it's simply not economical for the ISPs - it basically rules out any sort of oversubscription model.
The other big reason is because it's basically impossible to sell around such a metric, which is both largely incomprehensible, and mostly irrelevant, to the average user.
Most people care more about how much they can download (eg: 1000 mp3s every day), as compared to how quickly they could download it (eg: get an mp3 in 5 seconds). That's because once you get past the point of being able to receive data faster than you (the human) can process it, volume is a much more relevant measure.
I wonder why they don't sell a Microsoft PC/Xbox? Since they have this crazy desire to enter the hardware market in the first place, why didn't they go all the way?
They seriously don't get it. The very statement that it will be running a derivative of Win7 says that they are doomed from the start. Actually, not that Win7 is bad, on the contrary even as a MacFanBoy I like Win7 but it's not the right OS for a tablet platform. They keep trying to shoehorn the same thing to be a one OS meets all.
Apple seem to be doing it OK with OS X - the iPhone OS running on the iPad is an OS X derivative.
On the contrary, using a derivation of Windows 7 would presumably give MSFT's iPad advantages that the giant iPod touch does not have. Namely, being able to be more like a PC than an iPod Touch.
The iPad runs a derivative of OS X. It's not limited with regards to these things because of the technical capabilities of the software.
1GB spread out over 50 drives?? Besides the fact that I can't imagine it would be any faster with modern hardware (1GB can easily fit entirely in a battery backed up cache on a RAID controller, [...]
Assuming it's in the cache. And doesn't get evicted for something else. Let's not forget the initial read that had to populate the cache in the first place as well.
[...] meaning speed would generally be limited by the controller bus, which for PCIe x16 is not a factor), can you name a practical, real world application that would benefit from this? (I'm not saying there isn't, I just really can't think of one).
Pretty much anything with high IO requirements and multiple IO streams ?
122,880 KB / 16 KB = 7680 IO/S =~ 43 SAS Drives. With no redundancy, we'd need 43 of these drives to saturate even a single gig-e connection.
Er, yeah. If you had a SAN with no cache and a 100% random-write access pattern. Not a particularly realistic scenario.
Now, with that said 10Gb *is* a lot of bandwidth, and more than enough for most purposes, but out in the real world it's not that hard to exceed several Gb/sec doing things like backups or storage vMotions, even when your storage system only has a few tens of drives.
(As a matter of curiosity I just pulled up the stats for our NetApp - over the course of the last week week, its FC head (28x15k drives) averages from 500Mbit to 750Mbit, with bursts up to 6Gbit, and the SATA head (28x7.2k drives) averages from 750Mbit to 1Gbit, with bursts up to 6Gbit.)
That's because you get the issue of "jaywalking" a concept from North America which just dosn't exist elsewhere. In Europe you'd typically find that pedestrians always have right of way over motor vehicles. Probably they also have right of way over horse drawn vehicles
No they don't. A vehicle does not have to stop and allow a pedestrian to cross unless there is a marked crossing.
If someone is standing on the side of some random road, with no pedestrian crossing marked, I do *not* have to stop and let them cross. *I* have right of way.
I just had to renew my drivers license here. I've been driving for 20 years. They told me I had to take an exam on the renewal. The exam? A multiple choice test on common road signs. I was laughing while I was taking it, because I had alternative answers that were more entertaining.I know exactly what you mean, because I've only just moved to the states and had to get a local license.
Assuming it would be like Switzerland (where I was living previously), and I'd just be able to exchange my existing QLD (Australia) license for a local one, I was somewhat surprised when I was told I'd need to take a standard driving test. Since it was only $25 (and you get three tries for that), I thought "what the heck" and have it a go.
Without having even read a local driver's handbook, I managed to get only 3 wrong on the written "test" - stumped only by two roadsigns that I'd never seen anything like anywhere before (and haven't even seen any of while driving here) and a question whose "correct" answer I maintain was wrong (do pedestrians have right of way with no marked crossing) - I then went for a 5 minute drive around the block (literally, 6 right turns), and walked away with a freshly minted license about 10 minutes later.
Wow. And I thought it was too easy getting a license in Australia...
"Keep right unless passing" can only work together with "no passing on the right" because otherwise going to the rightmost lane after you've passed a vehicle would be very dangerous.
What if our autobahn, like the German Autobahn, prohibited passing on the right, thus making the far right lane the slowest lane and the far left lane the fastest lane, eliminating large differences in speed between adjacent lanes of traffic?
Still wouldn't work. Lane discipline (and driver awareness in general) in the US is atrocious, and an Autobahn is utterly dependent on good lane discipline to function as intended. You'd just end up with either a) miles of traffic lined up behind some fuckwit in the fast lane pottering along at 85mph awestruck at how fast they were going legally, or b) everyone breaking that law to get past the people in (a).
Incidentally, "no passing on the right" is a bad law, IMHO. "Keep right unless passing" is a much more appropriate way of enforcing lane discipline.
If the US enacted driver training and licensing standards similar to Germany's, Autobahn's might be possible there, but good luck with that.
I am not sure I understand why this suprises you? Where I live (Finland), cops don't care if you go 5kmh (thats 3,1mph) but if you go 10kmh (6,2mph) over the limit, you will be ticketed, end of story.
Because speeding (along with most other traffic infringements - eg: drink-driving ) is neither policed nor punished very severely in the US at all.
and you have the right to face your accuser so you can get out of these tickets pretty easily.
I have never, ever understood this line of reasoning. The accuser is the police department, and you most certainly have an opportunity to face them. The pictures are just evidence.
The reason people don't do so often (or do so and fail), is because whatever convoluted what-if story they might weave is, 9 times out of 10, utter bullshit.
If the camera doesn't show that the light is red, how do you know that the light isn't malfunctioning and taking the picture while yellow or green?
I can't speak for the US cameras, but they *should* be built with a physical connection that prevents the camera from activating unless the light is red.
If you can't see whether you're over the line or not, how do you know that you actually ran it?
Because they don't activate until the light is red. If your picture is taken by one, it's because you ran the red (more accurately, because you crossed the line after the light was red and the camera was activated) - it's not possible for the camera to take a picture otherwise because it's not active.
Cameras take multiple pictures that are reviewed. Just stopping over the line probably won't net you a fine (thought it's usually illegal). You'll almost always need to be caught on multiple pictures actually driving through the intersection to get fined.
It shouldn't take anyone of even average intelligence more than a few minutes to come up with a system that's immune to nearly every type of false positive. The handful of scenarios that can't be accounted for should be easily identifiable and defendable in court.
The drivers zip around the circle as if they think they're on the Daytona 500 speedway, and I'm often afraid I'll get rear-ended or side-swiped when I enter the circle. I wish I could see the accident statistics - I bet they went up.
A better idea is to keep the yellow the same duration, and install a countdown timer: 20 seconds before the light turns yellow show a countdown to the yellow light.
I can't imagine those countdowns are particularly readable in a useful fashion.
A better and cheaper method - define a standard minimum duration for an amber light and make sure all drivers are aware of that (or have no excuse for not being aware). This is, as far as I know, the solution implemented throughout most of the world.
And a Xeon with ECC RAM. You left that part out. Don't compare a commodity i7 custom build to an OEM Xeon-based workstation. They aren't the same thing.
A quad-core Dell T3500 will match a Mac Pro hardware-wise for ca. $1000 less.
So, how do you move backward in the browser window history?
Click one of the the two mouse buttons under my thumb, some way I've been doing it for a decade or so now.
How do you rotate or scale a picture?
I'm actually trying to remember the last time I ever rotated a picture and I really can't. As for scaling, a mouse wheel is far superior than the gestures, based on my experiences with the iPhone and iPad.
I noticed that they've implemented the same usability abortion as the MacBooks and made the whole thing a button, too, thus turning any sort of click-drag interaction into a frustrating and painful experience.
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I'm not sure why we need to stick with Linux, per se, and what's wrong with OpenSolaris kernel/CDDL. Serious question here: is there something wrong I'm missing?
OpenSolaris was a dead platform the day Oracle bought Sun. You would be utterly insane to use it for anything important, today.
They don't hate the poor, they just want to keep them in their place- where they belong, without the ability to travel that well into other areas where they do not belong.
You don't need a car to travel in most of Europe. For the rare times that you do, renting is vastly cheaper than buying.
None of you are looking at the big picture. Microsoft started out selling operating systems quickly followed by Office products.
Actually they started out selling compilers, then operating systems, then other productivity software.
The bulk of their revenue and profit today is from operating systems ( I would include Exchange and SQL in the lot) [...]
By that logic you may as well say iPods count as computers and Apple are still in the same business they always were.
Like them or not, contrast the two companies, Apple and Microsoft and where they have come from and what they currently make. Apples main revenue stream did not exist when Apple was formed. Microsoft is still a 2 product company and gets its revenue from the same 2 product lines they started with.
Microsoft was already a decade old when Windows was released, and it was another five years after that before Office hit the market.
Not to mention that if at least two more massive product lines - SQL Server and Exchange - didn't occur to you, how could anyone take your "analysis" seriously ?
Don't be surprised that there are so many Slashdotters who don't get the iPad. No usb port, no flash, no camera, it doesn't run existing programs, integrated battery and multitasking is a joke.
It's not just the iPad, I simply don't get tablet PCs as a whole, outside of specialised niche applications (eg: in hospitals to replace clipboards). None of the features you list would make a tablet (/slate/pad/whatever) any more attractive to me as a tool, if they were present vs if they were not.
I just can't think of any times I'd *want* to interact with a computer in that fashion - having to continually hold it on a visible angle, keyboard input that's barely adequate at best, etc. The whole concept just seems completely inferior to even a netbook (another device I can barely see a use for) for any remotely mainstream computer-based task.
Again with the generalizations... One real world example?
Any SAN with arrays striped over 50 spindles ? That's not exactly uncommon, you know (and on some architectures like XIV, inherent).
And remember, the point is that it's NECESSARY to spread 1GB over 50 drives, not that it's just some random collection of drives on a SAN.
When you're selling a centralised storage resource to others, you generally don't hand-tune the implementation of each chunk of space to each customer. You carve some out of the huge amount of disk you already have.
Why don't they just charge on the actual bandwidth we get? Something along the lines of $1 per minute at 1mbps or something like that.
Primarily because it's simply not economical for the ISPs - it basically rules out any sort of oversubscription model.
The other big reason is because it's basically impossible to sell around such a metric, which is both largely incomprehensible, and mostly irrelevant, to the average user.
Most people care more about how much they can download (eg: 1000 mp3s every day), as compared to how quickly they could download it (eg: get an mp3 in 5 seconds). That's because once you get past the point of being able to receive data faster than you (the human) can process it, volume is a much more relevant measure.
I wonder why they don't sell a Microsoft PC/Xbox? Since they have this crazy desire to enter the hardware market in the first place, why didn't they go all the way?
Antitrust.
They seriously don't get it. The very statement that it will be running a derivative of Win7 says that they are doomed from the start. Actually, not that Win7 is bad, on the contrary even as a MacFanBoy I like Win7 but it's not the right OS for a tablet platform. They keep trying to shoehorn the same thing to be a one OS meets all.
Apple seem to be doing it OK with OS X - the iPhone OS running on the iPad is an OS X derivative.
On the contrary, using a derivation of Windows 7 would presumably give MSFT's iPad advantages that the giant iPod touch does not have. Namely, being able to be more like a PC than an iPod Touch.
The iPad runs a derivative of OS X. It's not limited with regards to these things because of the technical capabilities of the software.
1GB spread out over 50 drives?? Besides the fact that I can't imagine it would be any faster with modern hardware (1GB can easily fit entirely in a battery backed up cache on a RAID controller, [...]
Assuming it's in the cache. And doesn't get evicted for something else. Let's not forget the initial read that had to populate the cache in the first place as well.
[...] meaning speed would generally be limited by the controller bus, which for PCIe x16 is not a factor), can you name a practical, real world application that would benefit from this? (I'm not saying there isn't, I just really can't think of one).
Pretty much anything with high IO requirements and multiple IO streams ?
122,880 KB / 16 KB = 7680 IO/S =~ 43 SAS Drives. With no redundancy, we'd need 43 of these drives to saturate even a single gig-e connection.
Er, yeah. If you had a SAN with no cache and a 100% random-write access pattern. Not a particularly realistic scenario.
Now, with that said 10Gb *is* a lot of bandwidth, and more than enough for most purposes, but out in the real world it's not that hard to exceed several Gb/sec doing things like backups or storage vMotions, even when your storage system only has a few tens of drives.
(As a matter of curiosity I just pulled up the stats for our NetApp - over the course of the last week week, its FC head (28x15k drives) averages from 500Mbit to 750Mbit, with bursts up to 6Gbit, and the SATA head (28x7.2k drives) averages from 750Mbit to 1Gbit, with bursts up to 6Gbit.)
That's because you get the issue of "jaywalking" a concept from North America which just dosn't exist elsewhere. In Europe you'd typically find that pedestrians always have right of way over motor vehicles. Probably they also have right of way over horse drawn vehicles
No they don't. A vehicle does not have to stop and allow a pedestrian to cross unless there is a marked crossing.
pedestrians always have the right of way. Always.
No they don't.
If someone is standing on the side of some random road, with no pedestrian crossing marked, I do *not* have to stop and let them cross. *I* have right of way.
I just had to renew my drivers license here. I've been driving for 20 years. They told me I had to take an exam on the renewal. The exam? A multiple choice test on common road signs. I was laughing while I was taking it, because I had alternative answers that were more entertaining.I know exactly what you mean, because I've only just moved to the states and had to get a local license.
Assuming it would be like Switzerland (where I was living previously), and I'd just be able to exchange my existing QLD (Australia) license for a local one, I was somewhat surprised when I was told I'd need to take a standard driving test. Since it was only $25 (and you get three tries for that), I thought "what the heck" and have it a go.
Without having even read a local driver's handbook, I managed to get only 3 wrong on the written "test" - stumped only by two roadsigns that I'd never seen anything like anywhere before (and haven't even seen any of while driving here) and a question whose "correct" answer I maintain was wrong (do pedestrians have right of way with no marked crossing) - I then went for a 5 minute drive around the block (literally, 6 right turns), and walked away with a freshly minted license about 10 minutes later.
Wow. And I thought it was too easy getting a license in Australia...
"Keep right unless passing" can only work together with "no passing on the right" because otherwise going to the rightmost lane after you've passed a vehicle would be very dangerous.
Why ?
My quick back-of-napkin math... I can build a 100TB storage system in one 42U rack for ~150k -- and that's with "enterprise" 450G 15k RPM SAS drives.
What's managing it and how are you connecting to it ?
What if our autobahn, like the German Autobahn, prohibited passing on the right, thus making the far right lane the slowest lane and the far left lane the fastest lane, eliminating large differences in speed between adjacent lanes of traffic?
Still wouldn't work. Lane discipline (and driver awareness in general) in the US is atrocious, and an Autobahn is utterly dependent on good lane discipline to function as intended. You'd just end up with either a) miles of traffic lined up behind some fuckwit in the fast lane pottering along at 85mph awestruck at how fast they were going legally, or b) everyone breaking that law to get past the people in (a).
Incidentally, "no passing on the right" is a bad law, IMHO. "Keep right unless passing" is a much more appropriate way of enforcing lane discipline.
If the US enacted driver training and licensing standards similar to Germany's, Autobahn's might be possible there, but good luck with that.
I am not sure I understand why this suprises you? Where I live (Finland), cops don't care if you go 5kmh (thats 3,1mph) but if you go 10kmh (6,2mph) over the limit, you will be ticketed, end of story.
Because speeding (along with most other traffic infringements - eg: drink-driving ) is neither policed nor punished very severely in the US at all.
and you have the right to face your accuser so you can get out of these tickets pretty easily.
I have never, ever understood this line of reasoning. The accuser is the police department, and you most certainly have an opportunity to face them. The pictures are just evidence.
The reason people don't do so often (or do so and fail), is because whatever convoluted what-if story they might weave is, 9 times out of 10, utter bullshit.
If the camera doesn't show that the light is red, how do you know that the light isn't malfunctioning and taking the picture while yellow or green?
I can't speak for the US cameras, but they *should* be built with a physical connection that prevents the camera from activating unless the light is red.
If you can't see whether you're over the line or not, how do you know that you actually ran it?
Because they don't activate until the light is red. If your picture is taken by one, it's because you ran the red (more accurately, because you crossed the line after the light was red and the camera was activated) - it's not possible for the camera to take a picture otherwise because it's not active.
Cameras take multiple pictures that are reviewed. Just stopping over the line probably won't net you a fine (thought it's usually illegal). You'll almost always need to be caught on multiple pictures actually driving through the intersection to get fined.
It shouldn't take anyone of even average intelligence more than a few minutes to come up with a system that's immune to nearly every type of false positive. The handful of scenarios that can't be accounted for should be easily identifiable and defendable in court.
The drivers zip around the circle as if they think they're on the Daytona 500 speedway, and I'm often afraid I'll get rear-ended or side-swiped when I enter the circle. I wish I could see the accident statistics - I bet they went up.
I can't speak for any specific implementations, but generally speaking roundabouts reduce accidents of all kinds.
Compared to the insanity of the 4-way and 3-way stop signs that are so prevalent in the US, they're a godsend.
A better idea is to keep the yellow the same duration, and install a countdown timer: 20 seconds before the light turns yellow show a countdown to the yellow light.
I can't imagine those countdowns are particularly readable in a useful fashion.
A better and cheaper method - define a standard minimum duration for an amber light and make sure all drivers are aware of that (or have no excuse for not being aware). This is, as far as I know, the solution implemented throughout most of the world.
And a Xeon with ECC RAM. You left that part out. Don't compare a commodity i7 custom build to an OEM Xeon-based workstation. They aren't the same thing.
A quad-core Dell T3500 will match a Mac Pro hardware-wise for ca. $1000 less.
So, how do you move backward in the browser window history?
Click one of the the two mouse buttons under my thumb, some way I've been doing it for a decade or so now.
How do you rotate or scale a picture?
I'm actually trying to remember the last time I ever rotated a picture and I really can't. As for scaling, a mouse wheel is far superior than the gestures, based on my experiences with the iPhone and iPad.
I noticed that they've implemented the same usability abortion as the MacBooks and made the whole thing a button, too, thus turning any sort of click-drag interaction into a frustrating and painful experience.