RAID5 storage capacity is easy to figure: capacity of drive*(number of drives+).
So, in hard drive marketing terms: 3.5TB for 8 500 GB drives In software terms: 500 GB is really 465 GB, 465*7/1024= 3.2TB or so.
Oh wait, maybe you meant 8 300 GB drives, in which case 2TB is a good approximation... Good luck finding an appropriate consumer grade case to accomodate 8 drives (space and cooling being the issues of concern, surprising to some people that hard drives don't actually draw much power apart from initial spinup in the scheme of a computer's power draw).
While that can apply to SCSI and IDE to a large extent, SATA has dedicated connections to each drive, therefore the sky is the limit as far as multi-drive performance goes (as far as SATA standard is concerned, of course system I/O capabilities and controller capabilities will still limit, but SATA as a standard doesn't impose performance limits in that regard). With SATA assuming a controller can saturate each of it's on board ports, no drive's data transfers would consume data transfer resources from other drives, as is the case with SCSI/IDE (IDE only for two devices of course).
Is why in the storage realm, everytime they hit some stupid short-sighted limitation, they implement some new addressing scheme or something as a band aid, (LBA, etc etc), which is suboptimal, but somewhat understandable, *BUT* the solution itself is very short sighted, providing for capacities of 25-30% more than the limitation hit, but will break beyond that, and do the same thing after a few months when their capacities hit the new limit. I figured at least with SATA they had a chance to mostly start from scratch with a new protocol and do it right for a long time, but no, they inherit some of the very same pathetic limitations and have already had at least one iteration of addressing change.
Why is it that we see more and more jumpers on drives, and have to update motherboards/bioses again and again and again as the capacities increase and addressing scheme of the day breaks?
The benefit of the laser scope on a weapon is that it is coupled and nicely aligned with a magnifier. The chances of someone able to hold and know they are hitting it just using a laser pointer and the naked eye is slim (the laser is a small dot, on things far away, not visible unless you have a scope pointed in the right direction).
To be fair, we have *not* seen a sentence of 25 years, we haven't even seen a *conviction*, we are seeing the theoretical maximum sentence for what they are charging him with. The lenient sentences for atrocious crimes people note are almost always nowhere near the maximum sentence under the law the person was charged with.
Photoshop isn't a bad name by his guidelines. Now if it were "Adobe Photo Editor", yes, that would be annoying on google searches... It doesn't take much to make a name sufficiently different from a generic name to make it less confusing (Apple, for example, just slaps an i at the beginning, see how easy it can be?)
Excel and Powerpoint are nice, distinct, non generic names to google for, google for 'word' or 'media player' and you'll either perceive too heavy of a MS bias if not looking for MS software, or too much non-MS stuff if seeking MS stuff, so no one wins in that scenario, not even microsoft.
Since in space things orbit other things, it means things are experiencing gravitational forces, and therefore, in some reference frame, weigh something. Maybe they don't weigh much, but if things in space were truly weightless, they wouldn't be in orbit. If he said things are not massless, that would've been meaningless to his point about drifting. If something is truly weightless, it would mean it experiences absolutely 0 gravitational force. It may feel weightless, and it is about as weightless as it gets, but it is not truly weightless.
Generally insightful, but it wouldn't really be shedding new light on the ROTJ duel, in the movie the message from the emperor to luke is 'finish him and take his place at my side'. This is just a sort of reaffirmation of what has already been the case. It in all likelihood is as you say, an identical, ritualistic practice set up as a foil to Luke's duel in ROTJ.
I seriously doubt Windows pages out much of the resources regarding the GUI. That is part of the reason why X can get really sluggish under memory intensive operations (users of X occasionally can really tell when something is getting read into memory from swap), and Windows GUI tends to stay more responsve....
That said, honestly the resources the GUI takes are largely a red herring, the resources the GUI requires if truly left idle are not very significant in the scheme of modern systems' resources. And besides that, I have seen at least a couple of Windows systems where the GUI didn't actually start locally (it is strange, the boot progress splash screen stops, as if the system locked up, but that is when the system is up and ready).
Of course, I strongly prefer linux for clustering applications. The whole system is very manageable via nothing more than a serial console or ssh. It lends itself better for scripting, and the debatable advantages that Windows may possess are a moot point in the environment. If both your OS and BIOS work great with a serial console, Serial Over LAN or, worst case, serial terminal servers are much cheaper than KVM solutions for large numbers of systems, particularly network accessible KVMs.
I actually have a fair amount of respect...
on
LokiTorrent vs. MPAA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
For both sides this time.
On LokiTorrent and it's community's behalf, they seem to actually be standing up for themselves, which at least hints at a sense of them sincerely thinking there is legitimacy in what thay are doing. I disagree with them on their apparent stance in defending distribution of copyrighted works, but they seem to be playing by the rules in trying to stand up and defend and believe in what they do. Other sites just kind of rolled over, pretty much acknowledging that they were illegitimate and were just going until they get called on it. Ok, maybe that is a tad harsh as the cost of defending oneself is unwieldy, but it is at least the impression given.
On MPAA's behalf, this is probably one of the more sane ways of going against copyright infringement, *if* I'm understanding the cease and desist right. Seems they are only requesting removal of copyrighted material torrents, not shutdown of the site. Certainly not dismantling of BitTorrent technology. Of course, this is a *very* specific circumstance, and on other fronts they push for more fair-use violations in the name of protecting IP (DRM, attempts to essentially destroy/outlaw good technologies with fair use applications). This is about as fair and 'nice' as these companies have played to date (only other major thing which might have been construed as 'fair' was certainly not nice, the RIAA pursuing individual file sharer's seeking actual monetary damages). One can nitpick about whether distributing mere torrents is 'technically' violating copyright, but rather a sort of map to where the actual content is, but these specific torrents are certainly against the spirit of copyright when utilized against the wishes of the copyright holders.
Badmouth the MPAA/RIAA all we want about their price fixing, scamming the artists, overpriced crap, and their attempts to royally screw over technology for their benefit, but we can't meet their wrongs with wrongs of our own. If you think really nasty and slimy people run a store or chain of stores, you shouldn't feel you are then entitled to shoplift. I disagree with their strategies and pricing levels, and I express this via my purchasing decisions. If I think a price is too high for a crappy experience, I decline to pay. My standards for what is justified is highly increased knowing what they want to do to fair use, and I actively seek non MPAA, non RIAA entertainment over MPAA/RIAA content.
All these scary things being discussed, asteroids hitting the earth, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, terrorism, all this fear in general of something to become an extinction level event.
I am *so* confident that the human race will not go extinct in the next 30 years, that I will bet 1 million dollars, double or nothing that the human race will not be extinct in 2035. Any takers?;)
True serial console, already there for a lot of x86 servers, and besides, that wouldn't even be a Unix issue, it is a platform issue. IPMI 2.0 will allow a standard way to remotely access that serial console via network, but 20 years ago the machines didn't have that capability, and it has always been the case that Cyclades, MRV, Equinox, and the like make money off of equipment to make serial consoles net accessible. Besides, the non-x86 systems still today most all have the same serial console support of 20 years ago.
Privileged port is pretty much as you say, a joke. I am particularly amused by IRC servers dependence on ident responses as a way to validate a user connecting
The info format was meant to supercede man pages. There is a lot more flexibility, but I am torn. In day to day use I find a preference for man pages, simple, easy to search. However, man pages don't scale that well (man bash for example), and sometimes the typical string search for what you want will take forever to iterate through. Arguably more widespread html documentation coupled with text web browsers like links would give more flexible options in a more comfortable way.
What exactly is your complaint about/usr/local? Anyway, it wasn't really intended to distinguish GNU from non-GNU, it was largely meant as a site/workgroup wide repository for shared binaries/applications. My complaint about it used in this fashion is that it wasn't engineered well for multiple platforms (i.e. standard requiring arch/platform named directories to hold executables/libraries)/bin and/sbin are not boring/redundant with/usr/bin, and/usr/sbin. While many many systems nowadays use one filesystem to contain more, some systems still have/usr as a separate partition, and / containing things useful to get system to boot/mount and do recovery tasks is good for those environments.
As far as all the directories and where things go, there are pretty established standards, the problem being, of course, that not all groups know them well or bother to follow them, so they kind of get trashed. I personally think mostly self contained application/library suite directories are nice (ROX file manager supports it). I.e. the entirety of GTK would be/usr/lib/GTK/, including documentation, default configs, libraries, executables) Of course, PATH variable would get badly mangled, or else you have ludicrous fs structure (very simple apps needing directory entries, ls, rm, etc if strict, when they share a lot of documentation). It really is a hard thing to address.
Most everything else I can't disagree with. Particularly the notion of detachable X11 sessions ala screen for terminals.
Further thought for this mode of operation, have lots of memory and only access the flash memory to load into ramdisk. It is very common practice in embedded devices to, but somehow a lot of home users who use flash memory overlook this possiblity.
So why not have a visual cue for it? Mozilla has Ctrl+L mentioned in the menu. Hell, even Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V in all applications is shown, despite being *much* more widely known than Ctrl+L.
No, the complaint is the complete lack of visual cue for a pretty frequent operation that is very handy. Ctrl+L is not as well established of a convention as, say Ctrl+c for Copy, and Ctrl+v is for paste, yet you see visual cues for ctrl+c/ctrl+v in any well designed application reminding/informing the user of their existance.
Sure you can acheive the 'power-user' functionality of the old dialog, but you have to know the secret combination, and anyone who thinks users would have been confused by a text entry element is misguided (if Windows/KDE users are never confounded by it, why would Gnome users be?). I know it is worship of MacOS UI that prompted such a ridiculous change, but even the high-and-mighty Mac UI designers aren't perfect.
I always do wxPyhton for cross platform. Even if you give GTK a theme that looks mostly like native, some aspects of the look and feel simply won't be addressed by theming... wxWidgets is a truly underrated approach to cross-platform native applications...
Companies used to buy high-priced workstations because they really got their money's worth in terms of differences with respect to 'commodity' PCs. PCs were of course more expensive, and reliability of hardware and software (Linux was immature/nonexistant depending on time period, Windows before W2k was too flaky to seriously consider a contender), and the performance was crappy. Professional workstations ran good, solid OSes, had clean system designs overall using quality components, and were frequently orders of magnitude more powerful, and not as many times expensive as they are today. For example, in 1996 the cutting edge commodity PCs could barely compete with 6 year old Sun workstations.
Now, the PC industry has a wider range (reliable system designs with quality components, all the way down to eMachines), is priced at bargain basement prices compared to a few years ago, and frequently delivers performance on the level or beyond expensive workstations, which have not come down in price much at all. Sun's seen the writing on the wall and thus we saw more and more PC hardware components used in their Ultra 5/10s, and now embracing more Opteron and Linux, and still not seeing as bright a light at the end of the tunnel. The only contender not showing much compromise is IBM with their Power servers and workstations, which have kept good pace performance wise with the PC market, but the quality/performance of the hardware has little to do with how they compete at their price point, and has most everything to do with delivering good service/support. Considered as standalone boxes without IBM's name/organization behind it, they are incredibly overpriced.
So why haven't professional workstation companies been able to continue to pump out the same difference in performance as they did 8 years ago? It's hard to justify any workstation on the market when overall the performance difference is neglible with commodity PCs, and there are vendors that provide good reliability (hot-swap for likely failure devices, good components all around) at 1/4th of the price of the comparable workstation?
You obviously don't work in any place of large scale without a large population of college students as cheap labor.
The manufacturing and service of large organizations' is a highly unwieldy task. The benefits of supplying manufacturing, minimal design, and maintenance yourself evaporates at scale.
Sounds like a neat idea, but such a long shot into a quite possibly miniscule market, I doubt it would make a sound business case. IBM is probably quite content to let Apple feed their desktop-level PPC consumption. They may also may want to enrich pSeries margins, or make pSeries systems more cost competitive and ship in higher volumes, which is closer to your supposition, but more purely targeted at high end workstation and server segment, which IBM will continue to play in with respect the x86 & x86_64.
More likely, this move is strengthening Power as a basis for embedded devices. A lot of IBM branded equipment and research has been oriented towards using embedded PPC variants. They see the huge market that things like ARM and Xscale, etc. play in, and want to make Power a more aggresive architecture for embedded applications.
Firefox 1.0 initially acted like a giant steaming pile... I then blew away my profile from pre 1.0 (saving bookmarks), and started over, and it has been great ever since... Not necessarily what you want to have to do, but I'll accept it since it was technicall 'pre-release' until now.
Those samples are ridiculous, but selective quoting of ridiculous complaints doesn't invalidate some of the truly braindead management activities going on, formost being a lack of work-life balance respect.
Of course, this is pretty indemic to the industry as a whole, so maybe EA isn't much worse, but it really is a pattern that is not good.
Slashdot Mirror
RAID5 storage capacity is easy to figure:
capacity of drive*(number of drives+).
So, in hard drive marketing terms:
3.5TB for 8 500 GB drives
In software terms:
500 GB is really 465 GB,
465*7/1024= 3.2TB or so.
Oh wait, maybe you meant 8 300 GB drives, in which case 2TB is a good approximation... Good luck finding an appropriate consumer grade case to accomodate 8 drives (space and cooling being the issues of concern, surprising to some people that hard drives don't actually draw much power apart from initial spinup in the scheme of a computer's power draw).
While that can apply to SCSI and IDE to a large extent, SATA has dedicated connections to each drive, therefore the sky is the limit as far as multi-drive performance goes (as far as SATA standard is concerned, of course system I/O capabilities and controller capabilities will still limit, but SATA as a standard doesn't impose performance limits in that regard). With SATA assuming a controller can saturate each of it's on board ports, no drive's data transfers would consume data transfer resources from other drives, as is the case with SCSI/IDE (IDE only for two devices of course).
Is why in the storage realm, everytime they hit some stupid short-sighted limitation, they implement some new addressing scheme or something as a band aid, (LBA, etc etc), which is suboptimal, but somewhat understandable, *BUT* the solution itself is very short sighted, providing for capacities of 25-30% more than the limitation hit, but will break beyond that, and do the same thing after a few months when their capacities hit the new limit. I figured at least with SATA they had a chance to mostly start from scratch with a new protocol and do it right for a long time, but no, they inherit some of the very same pathetic limitations and have already had at least one iteration of addressing change.
Why is it that we see more and more jumpers on drives, and have to update motherboards/bioses again and again and again as the capacities increase and addressing scheme of the day breaks?
The benefit of the laser scope on a weapon is that it is coupled and nicely aligned with a magnifier. The chances of someone able to hold and know they are hitting it just using a laser pointer and the naked eye is slim (the laser is a small dot, on things far away, not visible unless you have a scope pointed in the right direction).
To be fair, we have *not* seen a sentence of 25 years, we haven't even seen a *conviction*, we are seeing the theoretical maximum sentence for what they are charging him with. The lenient sentences for atrocious crimes people note are almost always nowhere near the maximum sentence under the law the person was charged with.
Photoshop isn't a bad name by his guidelines. Now if it were "Adobe Photo Editor", yes, that would be annoying on google searches... It doesn't take much to make a name sufficiently different from a generic name to make it less confusing (Apple, for example, just slaps an i at the beginning, see how easy it can be?)
Excel and Powerpoint are nice, distinct, non generic names to google for, google for 'word' or 'media player' and you'll either perceive too heavy of a MS bias if not looking for MS software, or too much non-MS stuff if seeking MS stuff, so no one wins in that scenario, not even microsoft.
IIRC, they had expected the solar panels to be covered up, and the climate has been surprisingly helpful in keeping the dust off the panels...
Since in space things orbit other things, it means things are experiencing gravitational forces, and therefore, in some reference frame, weigh something. Maybe they don't weigh much, but if things in space were truly weightless, they wouldn't be in orbit. If he said things are not massless, that would've been meaningless to his point about drifting. If something is truly weightless, it would mean it experiences absolutely 0 gravitational force. It may feel weightless, and it is about as weightless as it gets, but it is not truly weightless.
Generally insightful, but it wouldn't really be shedding new light on the ROTJ duel, in the movie the message from the emperor to luke is 'finish him and take his place at my side'. This is just a sort of reaffirmation of what has already been the case. It in all likelihood is as you say, an identical, ritualistic practice set up as a foil to Luke's duel in ROTJ.
I seriously doubt Windows pages out much of the resources regarding the GUI. That is part of the reason why X can get really sluggish under memory intensive operations (users of X occasionally can really tell when something is getting read into memory from swap), and Windows GUI tends to stay more responsve....
That said, honestly the resources the GUI takes are largely a red herring, the resources the GUI requires if truly left idle are not very significant in the scheme of modern systems' resources. And besides that, I have seen at least a couple of Windows systems where the GUI didn't actually start locally (it is strange, the boot progress splash screen stops, as if the system locked up, but that is when the system is up and ready).
Of course, I strongly prefer linux for clustering applications. The whole system is very manageable via nothing more than a serial console or ssh. It lends itself better for scripting, and the debatable advantages that Windows may possess are a moot point in the environment. If both your OS and BIOS work great with a serial console, Serial Over LAN or, worst case, serial terminal servers are much cheaper than KVM solutions for large numbers of systems, particularly network accessible KVMs.
For both sides this time.
On LokiTorrent and it's community's behalf, they seem to actually be standing up for themselves, which at least hints at a sense of them sincerely thinking there is legitimacy in what thay are doing. I disagree with them on their apparent stance in defending distribution of copyrighted works, but they seem to be playing by the rules in trying to stand up and defend and believe in what they do. Other sites just kind of rolled over, pretty much acknowledging that they were illegitimate and were just going until they get called on it. Ok, maybe that is a tad harsh as the cost of defending oneself is unwieldy, but it is at least the impression given.
On MPAA's behalf, this is probably one of the more sane ways of going against copyright infringement, *if* I'm understanding the cease and desist right. Seems they are only requesting removal of copyrighted material torrents, not shutdown of the site. Certainly not dismantling of BitTorrent technology. Of course, this is a *very* specific circumstance, and on other fronts they push for more fair-use violations in the name of protecting IP (DRM, attempts to essentially destroy/outlaw good technologies with fair use applications). This is about as fair and 'nice' as these companies have played to date (only other major thing which might have been construed as 'fair' was certainly not nice, the RIAA pursuing individual file sharer's seeking actual monetary damages). One can nitpick about whether distributing mere torrents is 'technically' violating copyright, but rather a sort of map to where the actual content is, but these specific torrents are certainly against the spirit of copyright when utilized against the wishes of the copyright holders.
Badmouth the MPAA/RIAA all we want about their price fixing, scamming the artists, overpriced crap, and their attempts to royally screw over technology for their benefit, but we can't meet their wrongs with wrongs of our own. If you think really nasty and slimy people run a store or chain of stores, you shouldn't feel you are then entitled to shoplift. I disagree with their strategies and pricing levels, and I express this via my purchasing decisions. If I think a price is too high for a crappy experience, I decline to pay. My standards for what is justified is highly increased knowing what they want to do to fair use, and I actively seek non MPAA, non RIAA entertainment over MPAA/RIAA content.
All these scary things being discussed, asteroids hitting the earth, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, terrorism, all this fear in general of something to become an extinction level event.
;)
I am *so* confident that the human race will not go extinct in the next 30 years, that I will bet 1 million dollars, double or nothing that the human race will not be extinct in 2035. Any takers?
True serial console, already there for a lot of x86 servers, and besides, that wouldn't even be a Unix issue, it is a platform issue. IPMI 2.0 will allow a standard way to remotely access that serial console via network, but 20 years ago the machines didn't have that capability, and it has always been the case that Cyclades, MRV, Equinox, and the like make money off of equipment to make serial consoles net accessible. Besides, the non-x86 systems still today most all have the same serial console support of 20 years ago.
/usr/local? Anyway, it wasn't really intended to distinguish GNU from non-GNU, it was largely meant as a site/workgroup wide repository for shared binaries/applications. My complaint about it used in this fashion is that it wasn't engineered well for multiple platforms (i.e. standard requiring arch/platform named directories to hold executables/libraries) /bin and /sbin are not boring/redundant with /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin. While many many systems nowadays use one filesystem to contain more, some systems still have /usr as a separate partition, and / containing things useful to get system to boot/mount and do recovery tasks is good for those environments.
/usr/lib/GTK/, including documentation, default configs, libraries, executables) Of course, PATH variable would get badly mangled, or else you have ludicrous fs structure (very simple apps needing directory entries, ls, rm, etc if strict, when they share a lot of documentation). It really is a hard thing to address.
Privileged port is pretty much as you say, a joke. I am particularly amused by IRC servers dependence on ident responses as a way to validate a user connecting
The info format was meant to supercede man pages. There is a lot more flexibility, but I am torn. In day to day use I find a preference for man pages, simple, easy to search. However, man pages don't scale that well (man bash for example), and sometimes the typical string search for what you want will take forever to iterate through. Arguably more widespread html documentation coupled with text web browsers like links would give more flexible options in a more comfortable way.
What exactly is your complaint about
As far as all the directories and where things go, there are pretty established standards, the problem being, of course, that not all groups know them well or bother to follow them, so they kind of get trashed. I personally think mostly self contained application/library suite directories are nice (ROX file manager supports it). I.e. the entirety of GTK would be
Most everything else I can't disagree with. Particularly the notion of detachable X11 sessions ala screen for terminals.
Further thought for this mode of operation, have lots of memory and only access the flash memory to load into ramdisk. It is very common practice in embedded devices to, but somehow a lot of home users who use flash memory overlook this possiblity.
Though it adds a layer of obscurity, BitTorrent itself is not private, therefore the trackers in the torrent would be obvious.
So why not have a visual cue for it? Mozilla has Ctrl+L mentioned in the menu. Hell, even Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V in all applications is shown, despite being *much* more widely known than Ctrl+L.
No, the complaint is the complete lack of visual cue for a pretty frequent operation that is very handy. Ctrl+L is not as well established of a convention as, say Ctrl+c for Copy, and Ctrl+v is for paste, yet you see visual cues for ctrl+c/ctrl+v in any well designed application reminding/informing the user of their existance.
Sure you can acheive the 'power-user' functionality of the old dialog, but you have to know the secret combination, and anyone who thinks users would have been confused by a text entry element is misguided (if Windows/KDE users are never confounded by it, why would Gnome users be?). I know it is worship of MacOS UI that prompted such a ridiculous change, but even the high-and-mighty Mac UI designers aren't perfect.
So there is nothing sexy about humans (humans are animals, therefore...)
I always do wxPyhton for cross platform. Even if you give GTK a theme that looks mostly like native, some aspects of the look and feel simply won't be addressed by theming... wxWidgets is a truly underrated approach to cross-platform native applications...
I think this is really the heart of the matter.
Companies used to buy high-priced workstations because they really got their money's worth in terms of differences with respect to 'commodity' PCs. PCs were of course more expensive, and reliability of hardware and software (Linux was immature/nonexistant depending on time period, Windows before W2k was too flaky to seriously consider a contender), and the performance was crappy. Professional workstations ran good, solid OSes, had clean system designs overall using quality components, and were frequently orders of magnitude more powerful, and not as many times expensive as they are today. For example, in 1996 the cutting edge commodity PCs could barely compete with 6 year old Sun workstations.
Now, the PC industry has a wider range (reliable system designs with quality components, all the way down to eMachines), is priced at bargain basement prices compared to a few years ago, and frequently delivers performance on the level or beyond expensive workstations, which have not come down in price much at all. Sun's seen the writing on the wall and thus we saw more and more PC hardware components used in their Ultra 5/10s, and now embracing more Opteron and Linux, and still not seeing as bright a light at the end of the tunnel. The only contender not showing much compromise is IBM with their Power servers and workstations, which have kept good pace performance wise with the PC market, but the quality/performance of the hardware has little to do with how they compete at their price point, and has most everything to do with delivering good service/support. Considered as standalone boxes without IBM's name/organization behind it, they are incredibly overpriced.
So why haven't professional workstation companies been able to continue to pump out the same difference in performance as they did 8 years ago? It's hard to justify any workstation on the market when overall the performance difference is neglible with commodity PCs, and there are vendors that provide good reliability (hot-swap for likely failure devices, good components all around) at 1/4th of the price of the comparable workstation?
And then replied to undo your mod ;)
You obviously don't work in any place of large scale without a large population of college students as cheap labor.
The manufacturing and service of large organizations' is a highly unwieldy task. The benefits of supplying manufacturing, minimal design, and maintenance yourself evaporates at scale.
Sounds like a neat idea, but such a long shot into a quite possibly miniscule market, I doubt it would make a sound business case. IBM is probably quite content to let Apple feed their desktop-level PPC consumption. They may also may want to enrich pSeries margins, or make pSeries systems more cost competitive and ship in higher volumes, which is closer to your supposition, but more purely targeted at high end workstation and server segment, which IBM will continue to play in with respect the x86 & x86_64.
More likely, this move is strengthening Power as a basis for embedded devices. A lot of IBM branded equipment and research has been oriented towards using embedded PPC variants. They see the huge market that things like ARM and Xscale, etc. play in, and want to make Power a more aggresive architecture for embedded applications.
Firefox 1.0 initially acted like a giant steaming pile... I then blew away my profile from pre 1.0 (saving bookmarks), and started over, and it has been great ever since... Not necessarily what you want to have to do, but I'll accept it since it was technicall 'pre-release' until now.
Those samples are ridiculous, but selective quoting of ridiculous complaints doesn't invalidate some of the truly braindead management activities going on, formost being a lack of work-life balance respect.
Of course, this is pretty indemic to the industry as a whole, so maybe EA isn't much worse, but it really is a pattern that is not good.