But [insert city here] better not hold their breathe if they're expecting somebody else to pay for it all.
Yah, exactly, and if the stories in KC are to be believed the penetration isn't that great anyway. Its just enough to drive down the price of cable/DSL for people who can't get fiber yet. Same thing in Dallas where FIOS was being rolled out. A couple years ago, TW in Dallas would sell you ~4x the bandwidth for 25% less than what they offered customers in Austin.
Basically, its time the people in cities that want better internet connections stand up, and fight the state governments and intrenched interests. Thats part of the reason I had big hopes for WiMax. But then the FCC went and sold it off to the highest bidders rather than creating some kind of open competition where the company willing to offer the best service in each region could put up antennas and provide service without having to negotiate with some big telecom giant. It would have been easy, every 5 years the spectrum becomes available again. Companies bid on the performance/coverage and prices they intend to charge for service. The winner (best speed/coverage, lowest price) has a year to roll the service out.
Then instead of it being a race to give the federal government money and see who can sit on the spectrum the longest, it becomes a race to see who can roll out the best service.
Yah, good luck with that. I remember back when "no servers" was a policy one or two ISP's had, that was worth little more than the paper it was written on. Now I challenge you to fine a residential ISP that doesn't have it, and even worse a huge majority of them actively enforce it via port blocking. TW in Austin started blocking port 80 back 2000/2001 or so because of some worm that was propagating via some crappy web server everyone was running on windows. At least that was their excuse at the time. Now days, when was the last time you hit a machine you knew was hosted at someones house because it was using one of the dynamic DNS services? Frankly, a big risk with giving people connections capable of hosting their own facebook/pictures/videos is that 1/2 of the famous internet companies go out of business. Nearly everyone has a firewall/router that is completely capable of hosing a personal home page.
tick with a variety of crappy ISPs, or consolidate on one that's pretty decent, but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes.
I'm not sure that google is any worse than the alternatives in this regard. TW/at&t/etc are actively watching everything you do just incase you happen to download something they don't think you should have.
Its not much of a stretch to see summary information recorded for long periods of time. Wouldn't surprise me if they have DNS lookup, lists of all outbound IPs you hit, amount of data transferred to each IP, etc stored for "law enforcement" purposes. Heck they can probably skim off your google/bing/etc searches pretty easy if your not using ssl to report to the *** agencies.
He is correct PC's have always been upgraded because the old ones wern't as nice/cheap as the new ones.
The reasons he thinks new PC's aren't as nice as old ones are squarely the fault of the OEM's that think they can continue to sell the same shit they sold 5 years ago with tiny bumps for outrageous sums of money.
The netbook market took off, when you could buy netbooks for $200. But the PC manufactures got scared and promptly started trying to sell them for $400-600.
PC's were also places where the latest and greatest technology was available.
Now the only PC manufacture selling new technology is apple. Please show me a windows machine with a monitor similar to the macbook pro. Where is thunderbolt? Oh yah on the mac. Today I can buy a $400 tablet from google with a better screen than any PC. Heck just about any tablet being sold today that isn't running windows has a better screen.
Then there is windows8 of course...
Bottom line, the PC manufactures have gotten fat/greedy selling garbage and they wonder why their sales have fallen off now that there are other competitors.
I think the point is that DOCSIS 3 is 343Mbitx122Mbit on a 8x4 modem. Which is basically all of them at this point. That is per node and per channel set. They can run more channels on the same wire if necessary. So, TW could easily sell 100x50 and still pack a crapload of customers into a node (at current over-subscription ratios) without getting near any kind of technology limit.
There are places doing over a Gbit on DOCSIS 3. Virgin media in the UK for example.
In Austin Time F**king Warner started rolling out DOCSIS 3 two years ago. or basically about 3 years after everyone else.
Tell me how many eSATA devices came out right after it came out?
Actually a lot, most of them garbage USB/eSATA enclosures for single harddrives sold by chinese manufactures. Probably more than are available now that every x86 motherboard not sold by dell/HP/etc comes with the connectors. Its still the cheapest/fastest way to connect an external drive or two to a PC. A couple of my friends were recently blown away when I compared a little two disk eSATA array I use like a USB harddrive with their USB3 devices. USB3 promises a lot, but seems to sort of suck a lot.
The peak transfer rate for the mini-SAS interface is 3Gbs (3 Gigabits, not bytes, per second) this is an absolute maximum of 375 MB/sec
Uh, that Sans Digital has a SFF-8088 connector, which is a x4 SAS link. AKA SAS is like PCIe, you can gang lanes, and that is exactly what this is doing. So its actually 12Gb/sec not 3. The hard drives are individually 3Gbit, but the backplane is a SAS expander.
Connect it to a RAID card, and you should be able to pull pretty nice numbers (they claim close to 800MB/sec). That said, Sans digital tends to be a little low end. Modern SAS JBODs are 6Gbit SAS, many come with a pair of x4 links (48Gbit for those counting). So, its completely possible to pull >2GBytes/sec out of a low end SAS/JBOD connected to a ~$250 RAID controller. Double that (~4GB/sec as the GP said) if you want to spend some money and buy a real RAID.
If your really cost sensitive, you can get a good raid controller with 4-8 internal connectors and one of the dozens of (see supermicro for example) cases with internal SAS/Sata expanders for a few hundred more. If you pick the right motherboard it might even be integrated. These machines can easily break 1.5GB/sec without even trying.
Thunderbolt is faster than SAS, SATA and SATA II. Thunderbolt is faster than 2, 4 and 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel
You of course realize that FC is currently 16Gbit full duplex, and FCoE is available at 40Gbit, and that its a switched topology with trunking and long distance interconnect capabilities? Plus there are "proprietary" up-link extensions like the qlogic XPAC format that runs at 64Gbit full duplex? Here is a switch that supports all of the above. (http://www.qlogic.com/Products/Switches/Pages/ConvergedSwitches.aspx).
Furthermore, FC cards regularly come in 2 and 4 port models. And the boards support NPIV, PCI SR-IOV, load balancing, and other vitalization technologies that allow you to mix and match the physical and virtual port layouts to split/combine bandwidth to a single server as necessary.
And if that isn't enough, there is still infiniband. See mellanox's latest offering.
The bottom line, is that thunderbolt is a nice cable for laptops, but it in no way competes with modern interconnects available on servers and high end workstations. Especially for storage and networking, if for no other reason than the existing systems are switched and allow multiple adapters per machine. I have choked the memory/bus system on high end server class machines by zoning a large number of FC disks to a single node with multiple adapters. The memory/PCIe bandwidth on a quad socket machine gets maxed out before the FC port count gets exhausted.
Given the prevalence of low end SAS/SATA port expanders and 4-32 channel RAID cards it doesn't really look particularly inexpensive either.
If you like pinball, and are in Austin, look up pinballz http://www.pinballzarcade.com/. It totally old school, they have pinball machines from the early 60's that don't even have transistors (think lots of relays) to modern ones and everything in between.. I've been going there on an off for a couple years, and lately the place gets really busy in the evenings/weekends. For a while almost all the machines were for sale, and a lot of really cool ones have apparently been sold, but they still have ~100 on the floor.
having a battery like this in a place with no fire extinguisher
Uh, once a LCO battery goes, your not putting it out with a "fire extinguisher". These things are nasty, and the lithium itself burns so hot that its damn hard to contain it.
Its not that Austin is particularly cool, its just that Texas really SUCKS. So, its sort of a reality distortion field. Not helped at all, that Austin is busy trying to be the next Houston.
Gob snots of people moving here for the last 25+ years, and zero dollars being spent on anything outside of corporate incentives. So, the roads/flights/public transportation sucks, the parks are small and crowded, there aren't any museums, or sports teams. And for a city that calls itself the live music capital its basically a 3rd rate location for US tour stops. Its has all the inconvenience of a city of 100k, with 1.2 million people bidding up the cost of everything, strip malling and single family homing every square inch in a 50 mile radius.
My sister can get Grande South of 2222 a 5 minute slow walk from my house. 7 years later they have not jumped 2222
Cause its part of the franchise agreements with the city. There isn't a single place in town where you can choose between TW or Grande, its one or the other. Basically, TW is in all the locations that were considered desirable and high penetration 25 years ago. Grande has the scraps TW didn't want.
Utterly wrong, and ignorant of the very definition of "competition". Usually regulation works to PREVENT competition by helping a large entity prevent smaller competitors from succeeding.
Maybe, i'm feeding the troll here, but its pretty much impossible to study business/economics and not discover abuse of monopoly power, price fixing, collusion, and dozens of other practices that are outlawed because they allow a larger competitor to simply crush any upstarts. The GP is right, competition requires regulation to assure a level playing field. That regulation can be used to lock upstarts out of a field is just another case of monopoly abuse. The wierd thing is that there is plenty of "regulations" that could be repealed (see real-estate agents/broker laws for example) but that isn't the regulation that is being repealed. Instead its regulation to assure that I can't dump toxic sludge into the local creek thereby shifting a cost of business onto society.
Because, its not the same thing. Because, writing another "The C++ Programming Language" is a huge task, and probably not particularly useful for a student outside of a reference book. "Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++" is probably a better book for a student, and its only ~$40 and can probably be resold for $20. So, as textbooks go that's pretty inexpensive.
All that said, its probably possible to expand the teaching curriculum and distil a semester or two of C++ into a few dozen pages, similar to many of the online tutorials that can be found. It might not sound impressive, but a student probably should be spending the majority of their time writing code, not reading about writing code. So, with that said, a tutorial that covers the usual variables, arrays, loops, functions, classes, and stops before getting into multiple inheritance, operator overloading, templates, exceptions and dozens of other C++ concepts that are deep dark holes (especially when combined) isn't really going to be that large. The problem of course is, that if you choose to ignore 50% of the keywords that aren't strictly necessary to write useful programs, the students will be left in the dark about a lot of the ugly edge cases. Take exceptions, its entirely possible to go a whole semester or two, and not have to teach anything about C++ exceptions. Of course, the resulting code won't be checking for new/construction failures.
Frankly, teaching one of the large programming languages (like C++, Java, C#, etc) at the university is going to be helpful for industry, but the vast majority of the students aren't even going to score "proficient" in those languages after just a couple semesters. The whole CS program is going to have to standardize on C++ for all the classes, and even then a graduating student simply isn't going to have the time to learn enough about C++ that they won't have to be on a tight leash for the first year or 5 of their career. C++ is a fantastic language for professional development. Its problem is that your average programer probably has to write 100k lines of C++ code and read a similar amount of other peoples code before they are proficient enough to be trusted. Part of the problem is the environment C++ programs run in. POSIX and windows both are full of gremlins, just waiting for the newbie programmer to miss some esoteric edge condition that happens on real hardware..
Well the cleartype tuner can fix problems when cleartype gets the subpixel layout wrong (cause you rotated the monitor or whatnot). But it never seems to work correctly when multiple tune settings are required for multi head configurations.
Or you know, just turn it off, that gets rid of all the rainbow colored text too. Cleartype, even when its working correctly reminds me of the bad old days of poorly constructed apple II fonts. So I turn it off as much as possible. If MS spent half the effort getting the OEMs to ship computers with decent screens they spent trying to make those crappy screens usable the world would be a better place.
Because 1TB SSDs are expensive. Yes, SSD is faster than a HDD, but that does not allow me to store more files on it. On the other hand, I would like a laptop with a 3.5" HDD.
Might I suggest NAS? Or for that matter remote computing. RDP/etc clients on tablets/etc provide a pretty darn convincing environment for data heavy applications where the end result isn't a game. The end user can crunch high IO/CPU problem sets on a desktop/server somewhere while using the tablet as little more than a dumb terminal.
The window between common storage capacities on a laptop and what is possible in a portable form factor is a shrinking market. As that market gets smaller the price will increase further tilting the playing field to SSD.
Look at Microsoft's sales figures. They aren't selling legacy they are selling new features
Thats what they think, but they are wrong. They sell new features on legacy systems. That is a successful model for MS.
If MS weren't selling legacy, then we would all be running windows on powerpc/itanium, etc. They were selling legacy, because for over a decade they produced products where they went to great lengths to guarantee they didn't break applications. That made them a reasonable platform to invest in for small software companies selling into niche markets. They realized that the windows ecology was their most important asset. That all started to change in the early 2000's. Now, its a lot harder to find innovative small companies producing business products on windows. Between the internet, linux and the proliferation of hand held computing devices MS has suddenly realized they have been missing the boat again.
So they have been hoping to match the moves of apple (and doing it badly) rather than finding solutions to their problems without hammering at the foundations of their core business. So they have taken to gambling the whole business rather than slogging out a new xbox style model to run along side and compete with their legacy model.
To reply to myself.. The harddrives were quantum's. Here is an article in infoworld from 89 about it. Titled "Mac IICX, SE/30 users report drive failures"
He he he, course they do have job security past 35... For the simple reason no one who has used a computer in the last 20 years wants to learn mvs/zos if they don't already know it.
Bitmaps so it only works on a very small range of DPIs and screen sizes No support for touch No support for voice No support for notification systems
Outside of maybe touch, those aren't problems with the model. In fact the DPI problem has pretty much been solved since vista, and the voice issues aren't any better in modern windows than any other version since maybe 2000. Actually, the DPI issue was more a bug than any kind of problem because windows has been able to actually scale things since they started adding the accessibility layers in windows 95. Just because they tried to scale it via layout/font changes in 2k/XP doesn't mean there were alternatives that worked. Sure an app written for a 75DPI device with fixed bitmaps etc tends to look like crap when scaled, but I don't think MS really has fixed that problem even though dozens of 3rd party layout managers have shown the way.
Besides, MS has yet to show me anything to make me think they even considered the DPI issues in windows. Show me a windows 8 device with better than 1080p _AND_ better than 200 DPI.
Oh, and apple didn't have to rework their whole UI when they doubled the DPI on the ipad (or doubled the resolution of IOS going from iphone to ipad) even though they had many of the same problems with fixed DPI applications.
Touch might be the one valid point, but I don't think MS has shown that touch is going to even be valid in a desktop/server environment (aka their existing customers).
I've been predicting the 2.5" form factor being a dead end for a couple years now.
The reasons are simple. The places where a 2.5" form factor excel are the markets that the SSDs are going to take over. For laptops, the power, physical size and physical ruggedness constraints are strongly in SSD's favor. Especially given the capacity constraints already in place for 2.5" hard drives.
For enterprise use, the need for IOPS was the driving factor in packing more hard drives into smaller packages. Enterprise users were often strongly in favor of loosing capacity and paying significantly more for small increase in IOP performance. In comes SSD's which are stunning IOP devices. I've seen cases where a single desktop SSD can outrun a hundred thousand dollars of enterprise disk. At those kinds of performance deltas enterprise SSD's are dirt cheap.
In the end, its simple, you need price sensitive capacity you pick 3.5" hard drives, otherwise you pick SSDs. The additional price/GB increase for 2.5" storage puts it to close to ignore the advantages of SSD. Frankly, just for windows desktop usage replacing a harddrive with an SSD is such a huge advantage its amazing anyone sells laptops with hard drives anymore.
The sequential throughput rates for 5400 RPM hard drives are not noticeably different from 7200 rpm hard drives. At least not as much as a naive assumption of the ratio between rotational rates and a fixed areal density would make you believe (and the density isn't fixed). The big performance advantage of faster spinning harddrives is due to the reductions in rotational latency. For problems where large buffers can be sequentially filled or written between seeks (aka video) you won't notice a difference. At 20MB/sec just about any drive on the market can sustain 4+ streams if the buffers are > than a few MB. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but the increases in density have made modern 5400 RPM drives considerably faster than the 7200 or 10k drives from years past (for problems not related to seeking).
And the simple truth is that Apple build quality was tops in the personal computing industry between about the Macintosh Plus and the Macintosh IIci, and it went downhill thereafter but again, very sharply towards the end of the Performa line.
Well, I partially agree, having had a lot of experience with an SE30, I can tell you, much like some of apples recently design decisions, the SE30 was a pain to work on (apple cracker and all that) and wasn't particularly reliable. The sony (IIRC) hard drives they shipped in the things were total garbage and tended to die every 6 months. My quadro is another case of apple being different, but not in a better way. But, my profile harddrive (circa 1983) was recently booted on my IIGS...
More recently I picked up a quad g5 mac. I remember everyone talking about how great the design was. But it took about 5 minutes before I decided the case is pretty much garbage. Its larger than pretty much any PC I have, and yet it only has space for two harddrives, the water cooling is abysmal (and is well known for leaking). The dumb thing about the harddrives is that they are cabled and the cables are two short to easily remove the SATA harddrives. With such a proprietary case layout I don't understand why they didn't just put a backplane in the case and plug the harddrives into that.
I also had to take it apart because one of the CPU's water blocks were clogged. That was such an insane nightmare I almost parted the machine out on ebay. In the end I ended up getting it working, but I had to rework the cooling system because there isn't a way to bleed 100% of the air. I'm convinced apple assembled the cooling loop in a submerged tank. More annoying than anything is that apple changed a bunch of things mid production. I need a new front facing fan set for the CPU, but there are literally 4 or 5 different pin-out connector locations apple used for the stupid fan assembly and I can't find one for my machine.
Don't they know IBM is still selling mainframes? Wanna know why? Its not because they are these mythic beasts capable of running your IT needs at 100x the performance (they can't) or because they are an inexpensive solution. IBM continues to sell mainframes because its less expensive for big enterprises to rewrite software they have literally spent tens/hundreds of millions of dollars on since the 1960s. They don't have to rewrite that software because a modern mainframe can pretty much still run the same code, and users trained in the 60's,70's, etc, don't need retraining.
For some reason MS has failed to understand that every time they update their UI, or break some portion of their applications, they upset their core user base which is now business. All the cool trendy people have moved to Apple, the hardcore geeks to linux, the gamers are on ps/xboxes/etc, and the agnostic grandmas are being converted to apple/android devices.
The only remaining user base is the captive one. If MS continues to make it hard to upgrade, either in the form of retraining, or breaking application compatibility (requiring everyone to upgrade their entire software stack), they will soon be written into the dustbin of failed computer companies.
So no one in the US cares, the plan is to pump the value up before you actually have to sell any product. Then sell the company for so much profit that it takes the next 50 years to pay off the debt. That way a bunch of leaches can skim out all the profits without having to do any actual work.
It was all over for American business when the banksters decided that it was more profitable to take over well run companies with large investments that were only paying back at a few percent and sell the whole thing off to the highest bidder than be satisfied with 10% returns until the end of time. Combined with a business attitude of locking customers in, and milking them for everything they are worth rather than providing a decent product at a decent price, its only a matter of time before the US takes a big hit and places like mexico look like the land of opportunity.
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But [insert city here] better not hold their breathe if they're expecting somebody else to pay for it all.
Yah, exactly, and if the stories in KC are to be believed the penetration isn't that great anyway. Its just enough to drive down the price of cable/DSL for people who can't get fiber yet. Same thing in Dallas where FIOS was being rolled out. A couple years ago, TW in Dallas would sell you ~4x the bandwidth for 25% less than what they offered customers in Austin.
Basically, its time the people in cities that want better internet connections stand up, and fight the state governments and intrenched interests. Thats part of the reason I had big hopes for WiMax. But then the FCC went and sold it off to the highest bidders rather than creating some kind of open competition where the company willing to offer the best service in each region could put up antennas and provide service without having to negotiate with some big telecom giant. It would have been easy, every 5 years the spectrum becomes available again. Companies bid on the performance/coverage and prices they intend to charge for service. The winner (best speed/coverage, lowest price) has a year to roll the service out.
Then instead of it being a race to give the federal government money and see who can sit on the spectrum the longest, it becomes a race to see who can roll out the best service.
Yah, good luck with that. I remember back when "no servers" was a policy one or two ISP's had, that was worth little more than the paper it was written on. Now I challenge you to fine a residential ISP that doesn't have it, and even worse a huge majority of them actively enforce it via port blocking. TW in Austin started blocking port 80 back 2000/2001 or so because of some worm that was propagating via some crappy web server everyone was running on windows. At least that was their excuse at the time. Now days, when was the last time you hit a machine you knew was hosted at someones house because it was using one of the dynamic DNS services? Frankly, a big risk with giving people connections capable of hosting their own facebook/pictures/videos is that 1/2 of the famous internet companies go out of business. Nearly everyone has a firewall/router that is completely capable of hosing a personal home page.
tick with a variety of crappy ISPs, or consolidate on one that's pretty decent, but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes.
I'm not sure that google is any worse than the alternatives in this regard. TW/at&t/etc are actively watching everything you do just incase you happen to download something they don't think you should have.
Its not much of a stretch to see summary information recorded for long periods of time. Wouldn't surprise me if they have DNS lookup, lists of all outbound IPs you hit, amount of data transferred to each IP, etc stored for "law enforcement" purposes. Heck they can probably skim off your google/bing/etc searches pretty easy if your not using ssl to report to the *** agencies.
He is correct PC's have always been upgraded because the old ones wern't as nice/cheap as the new ones.
The reasons he thinks new PC's aren't as nice as old ones are squarely the fault of the OEM's that think they can continue to sell the same shit they sold 5 years ago with tiny bumps for outrageous sums of money.
The netbook market took off, when you could buy netbooks for $200. But the PC manufactures got scared and promptly started trying to sell them for $400-600.
PC's were also places where the latest and greatest technology was available.
Now the only PC manufacture selling new technology is apple. Please show me a windows machine with a monitor similar to the macbook pro. Where is thunderbolt? Oh yah on the mac. Today I can buy a $400 tablet from google with a better screen than any PC. Heck just about any tablet being sold today that isn't running windows has a better screen.
Then there is windows8 of course...
Bottom line, the PC manufactures have gotten fat/greedy selling garbage and they wonder why their sales have fallen off now that there are other competitors.
I think the point is that DOCSIS 3 is 343Mbitx122Mbit on a 8x4 modem. Which is basically all of them at this point. That is per node and per channel set. They can run more channels on the same wire if necessary. So, TW could easily sell 100x50 and still pack a crapload of customers into a node (at current over-subscription ratios) without getting near any kind of technology limit.
There are places doing over a Gbit on DOCSIS 3. Virgin media in the UK for example.
In Austin Time F**king Warner started rolling out DOCSIS 3 two years ago. or basically about 3 years after everyone else.
Tell me how many eSATA devices came out right after it came out?
Actually a lot, most of them garbage USB/eSATA enclosures for single harddrives sold by chinese manufactures. Probably more than are available now that every x86 motherboard not sold by dell/HP/etc comes with the connectors. Its still the cheapest/fastest way to connect an external drive or two to a PC. A couple of my friends were recently blown away when I compared a little two disk eSATA array I use like a USB harddrive with their USB3 devices. USB3 promises a lot, but seems to sort of suck a lot.
The peak transfer rate for the mini-SAS interface is 3Gbs (3 Gigabits, not bytes, per second) this is an absolute maximum of 375 MB/sec
Uh, that Sans Digital has a SFF-8088 connector, which is a x4 SAS link. AKA SAS is like PCIe, you can gang lanes, and that is exactly what this is doing. So its actually 12Gb/sec not 3. The hard drives are individually 3Gbit, but the backplane is a SAS expander.
Connect it to a RAID card, and you should be able to pull pretty nice numbers (they claim close to 800MB/sec). That said, Sans digital tends to be a little low end. Modern SAS JBODs are 6Gbit SAS, many come with a pair of x4 links (48Gbit for those counting). So, its completely possible to pull >2GBytes/sec out of a low end SAS/JBOD connected to a ~$250 RAID controller. Double that (~4GB/sec as the GP said) if you want to spend some money and buy a real RAID.
If your really cost sensitive, you can get a good raid controller with 4-8 internal connectors and one of the dozens of (see supermicro for example) cases with internal SAS/Sata expanders for a few hundred more. If you pick the right motherboard it might even be integrated. These machines can easily break 1.5GB/sec without even trying.
Thunderbolt is faster than SAS, SATA and SATA II. Thunderbolt is faster than 2, 4 and 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel
You of course realize that FC is currently 16Gbit full duplex, and FCoE is available at 40Gbit, and that its a switched topology with trunking and long distance interconnect capabilities? Plus there are "proprietary" up-link extensions like the qlogic XPAC format that runs at 64Gbit full duplex? Here is a switch that supports all of the above. (http://www.qlogic.com/Products/Switches/Pages/ConvergedSwitches.aspx).
Furthermore, FC cards regularly come in 2 and 4 port models. And the boards support NPIV, PCI SR-IOV, load balancing, and other vitalization technologies that allow you to mix and match the physical and virtual port layouts to split/combine bandwidth to a single server as necessary.
And if that isn't enough, there is still infiniband. See mellanox's latest offering.
The bottom line, is that thunderbolt is a nice cable for laptops, but it in no way competes with modern interconnects available on servers and high end workstations. Especially for storage and networking, if for no other reason than the existing systems are switched and allow multiple adapters per machine. I have choked the memory/bus system on high end server class machines by zoning a large number of FC disks to a single node with multiple adapters. The memory/PCIe bandwidth on a quad socket machine gets maxed out before the FC port count gets exhausted.
Given the prevalence of low end SAS/SATA port expanders and 4-32 channel RAID cards it doesn't really look particularly inexpensive either.
If you like pinball, and are in Austin, look up pinballz http://www.pinballzarcade.com/. It totally old school, they have pinball machines from the early 60's that don't even have transistors (think lots of relays) to modern ones and everything in between.. I've been going there on an off for a couple years, and lately the place gets really busy in the evenings/weekends. For a while almost all the machines were for sale, and a lot of really cool ones have apparently been sold, but they still have ~100 on the floor.
having a battery like this in a place with no fire extinguisher
Uh, once a LCO battery goes, your not putting it out with a "fire extinguisher". These things are nasty, and the lithium itself burns so hot that its damn hard to contain it.
Check out https://leehamnews.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/airbus-examines-lithium-battery-safety-fire-suppression/
Its not that Austin is particularly cool, its just that Texas really SUCKS. So, its sort of a reality distortion field. Not helped at all, that Austin is busy trying to be the next Houston.
Gob snots of people moving here for the last 25+ years, and zero dollars being spent on anything outside of corporate incentives. So, the roads/flights/public transportation sucks, the parks are small and crowded, there aren't any museums, or sports teams. And for a city that calls itself the live music capital its basically a 3rd rate location for US tour stops. Its has all the inconvenience of a city of 100k, with 1.2 million people bidding up the cost of everything, strip malling and single family homing every square inch in a 50 mile radius.
My sister can get Grande South of 2222 a 5 minute slow walk from my house. 7 years later they have not jumped 2222
Cause its part of the franchise agreements with the city. There isn't a single place in town where you can choose between TW or Grande, its one or the other. Basically, TW is in all the locations that were considered desirable and high penetration 25 years ago. Grande has the scraps TW didn't want.
Utterly wrong, and ignorant of the very definition of "competition". Usually regulation works to PREVENT competition by helping a large entity prevent smaller competitors from succeeding.
Maybe, i'm feeding the troll here, but its pretty much impossible to study business/economics and not discover abuse of monopoly power, price fixing, collusion, and dozens of other practices that are outlawed because they allow a larger competitor to simply crush any upstarts. The GP is right, competition requires regulation to assure a level playing field. That regulation can be used to lock upstarts out of a field is just another case of monopoly abuse. The wierd thing is that there is plenty of "regulations" that could be repealed (see real-estate agents/broker laws for example) but that isn't the regulation that is being repealed. Instead its regulation to assure that I can't dump toxic sludge into the local creek thereby shifting a cost of business onto society.
Because, its not the same thing. Because, writing another "The C++ Programming Language" is a huge task, and probably not particularly useful for a student outside of a reference book. "Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++" is probably a better book for a student, and its only ~$40 and can probably be resold for $20. So, as textbooks go that's pretty inexpensive.
All that said, its probably possible to expand the teaching curriculum and distil a semester or two of C++ into a few dozen pages, similar to many of the online tutorials that can be found. It might not sound impressive, but a student probably should be spending the majority of their time writing code, not reading about writing code. So, with that said, a tutorial that covers the usual variables, arrays, loops, functions, classes, and stops before getting into multiple inheritance, operator overloading, templates, exceptions and dozens of other C++ concepts that are deep dark holes (especially when combined) isn't really going to be that large. The problem of course is, that if you choose to ignore 50% of the keywords that aren't strictly necessary to write useful programs, the students will be left in the dark about a lot of the ugly edge cases. Take exceptions, its entirely possible to go a whole semester or two, and not have to teach anything about C++ exceptions. Of course, the resulting code won't be checking for new/construction failures.
Frankly, teaching one of the large programming languages (like C++, Java, C#, etc) at the university is going to be helpful for industry, but the vast majority of the students aren't even going to score "proficient" in those languages after just a couple semesters. The whole CS program is going to have to standardize on C++ for all the classes, and even then a graduating student simply isn't going to have the time to learn enough about C++ that they won't have to be on a tight leash for the first year or 5 of their career. C++ is a fantastic language for professional development. Its problem is that your average programer probably has to write 100k lines of C++ code and read a similar amount of other peoples code before they are proficient enough to be trusted. Part of the problem is the environment C++ programs run in. POSIX and windows both are full of gremlins, just waiting for the newbie programmer to miss some esoteric edge condition that happens on real hardware..
The sun emits energy far beyond what is safe, posing skin, eye and fire hazards.
Well the cleartype tuner can fix problems when cleartype gets the subpixel layout wrong (cause you rotated the monitor or whatnot). But it never seems to work correctly when multiple tune settings are required for multi head configurations.
Or you know, just turn it off, that gets rid of all the rainbow colored text too. Cleartype, even when its working correctly reminds me of the bad old days of poorly constructed apple II fonts. So I turn it off as much as possible. If MS spent half the effort getting the OEMs to ship computers with decent screens they spent trying to make those crappy screens usable the world would be a better place.
Because 1TB SSDs are expensive. Yes, SSD is faster than a HDD, but that does not allow me to store more files on it. On the other hand, I would like a laptop with a 3.5" HDD.
Might I suggest NAS? Or for that matter remote computing. RDP/etc clients on tablets/etc provide a pretty darn convincing environment for data heavy applications where the end result isn't a game. The end user can crunch high IO/CPU problem sets on a desktop/server somewhere while using the tablet as little more than a dumb terminal.
The window between common storage capacities on a laptop and what is possible in a portable form factor is a shrinking market. As that market gets smaller the price will increase further tilting the playing field to SSD.
Look at Microsoft's sales figures. They aren't selling legacy they are selling new features
Thats what they think, but they are wrong. They sell new features on legacy systems. That is a successful model for MS.
If MS weren't selling legacy, then we would all be running windows on powerpc/itanium, etc. They were selling legacy, because for over a decade they produced products where they went to great lengths to guarantee they didn't break applications. That made them a reasonable platform to invest in for small software companies selling into niche markets. They realized that the windows ecology was their most important asset. That all started to change in the early 2000's. Now, its a lot harder to find innovative small companies producing business products on windows. Between the internet, linux and the proliferation of hand held computing devices MS has suddenly realized they have been missing the boat again.
So they have been hoping to match the moves of apple (and doing it badly) rather than finding solutions to their problems without hammering at the foundations of their core business. So they have taken to gambling the whole business rather than slogging out a new xbox style model to run along side and compete with their legacy model.
To reply to myself.. The harddrives were quantum's. Here is an article in infoworld from 89 about it. Titled "Mac IICX, SE/30 users report drive failures"
http://books.google.com/books?id=wDAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT32&lpg=PT32&dq=mac+SE30+hard+drive+failures&source=bl&ots=O-OI7Qd-Z2&sig=Wd2zMHjgAu5Afr0NhURcAoRqwUc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6L4yUYfaAo2LrQH32oC4AQ&ved=0CHEQ6AEwCQ
You're right. They need retiring.
He he he, course they do have job security past 35... For the simple reason no one who has used a computer in the last 20 years wants to learn mvs/zos if they don't already know it.
Bitmaps so it only works on a very small range of DPIs and screen sizes
No support for touch
No support for voice
No support for notification systems
Outside of maybe touch, those aren't problems with the model. In fact the DPI problem has pretty much been solved since vista, and the voice issues aren't any better in modern windows than any other version since maybe 2000. Actually, the DPI issue was more a bug than any kind of problem because windows has been able to actually scale things since they started adding the accessibility layers in windows 95. Just because they tried to scale it via layout/font changes in 2k/XP doesn't mean there were alternatives that worked. Sure an app written for a 75DPI device with fixed bitmaps etc tends to look like crap when scaled, but I don't think MS really has fixed that problem even though dozens of 3rd party layout managers have shown the way.
Besides, MS has yet to show me anything to make me think they even considered the DPI issues in windows. Show me a windows 8 device with better than 1080p _AND_ better than 200 DPI.
Oh, and apple didn't have to rework their whole UI when they doubled the DPI on the ipad (or doubled the resolution of IOS going from iphone to ipad) even though they had many of the same problems with fixed DPI applications.
Touch might be the one valid point, but I don't think MS has shown that touch is going to even be valid in a desktop/server environment (aka their existing customers).
I've been predicting the 2.5" form factor being a dead end for a couple years now.
The reasons are simple. The places where a 2.5" form factor excel are the markets that the SSDs are going to take over. For laptops, the power, physical size and physical ruggedness constraints are strongly in SSD's favor. Especially given the capacity constraints already in place for 2.5" hard drives.
For enterprise use, the need for IOPS was the driving factor in packing more hard drives into smaller packages. Enterprise users were often strongly in favor of loosing capacity and paying significantly more for small increase in IOP performance. In comes SSD's which are stunning IOP devices. I've seen cases where a single desktop SSD can outrun a hundred thousand dollars of enterprise disk. At those kinds of performance deltas enterprise SSD's are dirt cheap.
In the end, its simple, you need price sensitive capacity you pick 3.5" hard drives, otherwise you pick SSDs. The additional price/GB increase for 2.5" storage puts it to close to ignore the advantages of SSD. Frankly, just for windows desktop usage replacing a harddrive with an SSD is such a huge advantage its amazing anyone sells laptops with hard drives anymore.
The sequential throughput rates for 5400 RPM hard drives are not noticeably different from 7200 rpm hard drives. At least not as much as a naive assumption of the ratio between rotational rates and a fixed areal density would make you believe (and the density isn't fixed). The big performance advantage of faster spinning harddrives is due to the reductions in rotational latency. For problems where large buffers can be sequentially filled or written between seeks (aka video) you won't notice a difference. At 20MB/sec just about any drive on the market can sustain 4+ streams if the buffers are > than a few MB. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but the increases in density have made modern 5400 RPM drives considerably faster than the 7200 or 10k drives from years past (for problems not related to seeking).
And the simple truth is that Apple build quality was tops in the personal computing industry between about the Macintosh Plus and the Macintosh IIci, and it went downhill thereafter but again, very sharply towards the end of the Performa line.
Well, I partially agree, having had a lot of experience with an SE30, I can tell you, much like some of apples recently design decisions, the SE30 was a pain to work on (apple cracker and all that) and wasn't particularly reliable. The sony (IIRC) hard drives they shipped in the things were total garbage and tended to die every 6 months. My quadro is another case of apple being different, but not in a better way. But, my profile harddrive (circa 1983) was recently booted on my IIGS...
More recently I picked up a quad g5 mac. I remember everyone talking about how great the design was. But it took about 5 minutes before I decided the case is pretty much garbage. Its larger than pretty much any PC I have, and yet it only has space for two harddrives, the water cooling is abysmal (and is well known for leaking). The dumb thing about the harddrives is that they are cabled and the cables are two short to easily remove the SATA harddrives. With such a proprietary case layout I don't understand why they didn't just put a backplane in the case and plug the harddrives into that.
I also had to take it apart because one of the CPU's water blocks were clogged. That was such an insane nightmare I almost parted the machine out on ebay. In the end I ended up getting it working, but I had to rework the cooling system because there isn't a way to bleed 100% of the air. I'm convinced apple assembled the cooling loop in a submerged tank. More annoying than anything is that apple changed a bunch of things mid production. I need a new front facing fan set for the CPU, but there are literally 4 or 5 different pin-out connector locations apple used for the stupid fan assembly and I can't find one for my machine.
Don't they know IBM is still selling mainframes? Wanna know why? Its not because they are these mythic beasts capable of running your IT needs at 100x the performance (they can't) or because they are an inexpensive solution. IBM continues to sell mainframes because its less expensive for big enterprises to rewrite software they have literally spent tens/hundreds of millions of dollars on since the 1960s. They don't have to rewrite that software because a modern mainframe can pretty much still run the same code, and users trained in the 60's,70's, etc, don't need retraining.
For some reason MS has failed to understand that every time they update their UI, or break some portion of their applications, they upset their core user base which is now business. All the cool trendy people have moved to Apple, the hardcore geeks to linux, the gamers are on ps/xboxes/etc, and the agnostic grandmas are being converted to apple/android devices.
The only remaining user base is the captive one. If MS continues to make it hard to upgrade, either in the form of retraining, or breaking application compatibility (requiring everyone to upgrade their entire software stack), they will soon be written into the dustbin of failed computer companies.
So no one in the US cares, the plan is to pump the value up before you actually have to sell any product. Then sell the company for so much profit that it takes the next 50 years to pay off the debt. That way a bunch of leaches can skim out all the profits without having to do any actual work.
It was all over for American business when the banksters decided that it was more profitable to take over well run companies with large investments that were only paying back at a few percent and sell the whole thing off to the highest bidder than be satisfied with 10% returns until the end of time. Combined with a business attitude of locking customers in, and milking them for everything they are worth rather than providing a decent product at a decent price, its only a matter of time before the US takes a big hit and places like mexico look like the land of opportunity.