I wouldn't be very concerned with Theo's rant. I don't believe the industry at large is pushing VMs as a security solution. Vmware doesn't even mention it as a reason for virtualization, and they sure as hell would if it was a good one. Maybe security is used as a pitch elsewhere, who knows. Somewhere this thing snowballed into a straw man, from the actual posts, to kerneltrap, to Slashdot, we get "Virtualization Decreases Security"... *facepalm* It gets harder and harder to read Slashdot every day.
This started when a guy on his message list suggested that OpenBSD get a Xen port and believed "Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits."
Theo responds by insulting him, then downplaying virtualization as if it were some kind of toy.
You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty colours, and you've bought it.
That's all x86 virtualization is. Further down the postings, you get a better idea of what Theo's opinion of VMs.
If people were saying:
"Yes, it increased hardware utilization, and the nasty
security impact might be low"
it would be fine.
But instead we have many uneducated people saying:
"Yes, it increased hardware utilization, and it improved security too".
And that's complete and utter bullshit. All that can be taken from this silly "news" here on Slashdot is that NOBODY had better use security as an excuse to weasel something past Theo de Raadt. He apparetnly has a very good nose for both weasels and security.
Sure it has ECC memory and high raw cpu power
i can get a much better desktop tower for an all-purpose computer That's your first problem, it's not a desktop tower, it's a high end work station. When you start throwing in features like ECC the price goes up steeply. Some people (obviously not you) want or need those features.
Similar machines are just as pricey... The Sun has a max of 8GB memory, Apple's is 16GB. The Apple uses a pricier Xeon processor. The Mac also has more FireWire and USB ports, Sun doesn't specify FW 400 or 800. The Sun has more up to date graphics available, but they have a deal with NVidia, and I can't tell if an off the shelf card will work with it. The Sun (unsurprisingly) seems to have a stronger IO architecture.
Anyways, because you don't seem to understand the difference between a desktop system and a workstation system, I thought I'd point out some differences between those two workstations. Obviously there's a market for them, and there are other competitors as well.
Maybe what you should be complaining about is why Apple doesn't make a cheap tower desktop. They aren't blind, they have to see that short road to gaining heaps of market share, but they aren't taking it for some reason. I think it's because they have better plans.
I think you'll find that rumble is nice when you have it but you'll almost never miss it when it's gone. It's not the same as say.. going to HD then back to SD again. You can buy a new controller if you really want it. It's not worth picking on unless you're the type that one that only uses the single controller that comes with your console for the life of the thing. New controller types have always been added to console platforms over their lifetime. Light guns, arcade pads, rumble packs, the first Dual Shock, programable macros, rapid fire toggles, steering wheels, etc.
Other than that, the only thing that might improve on a PS3 is the harddrive size, and that's a user replaceable part if you feel a bigger one is needed later. Sony hasn't added any new features to the base system (like HDMI ports), but they might trim a few features to bring the price down.
Why are you worrying about the typical PC, car, CE, lawnmower, power tool, garden hose fitting, *yawn*.... problem of a better one coming out next week?
Enterprise users have had enterprise backup solutions for... how old are you? Does VSS change anything at all about what I said? Does it add any value over existing backup solutions? Is it any more visible to end users? No, Barely, and No. The VSC client isn't even included in the client OS. VSS is kind of/sort of complementary to existing backup software, and the only VSS Writer that would be worth a damn are the Exchange or SQL ones, and you STILL have to verify Exchange VSS backups with eseutil. Please, VSS is nothing to brag about, it's just a Windows native version of third party software that still does a better job. It's a good compromise for shops wanting to keep as many things as possible under one vendor. *shudder*...'all Microsoft' VS. 'Microsoft & third party' software has got to be the worst decision IT managers ever have to make.
All Apple brings to the table is a flashy 3d interface which raises suspicions of 'style over substance'. Apple's 'flashy 3d interface' brings style to an area of computing that desperately needed a breath of fresh air. I JUST told you (in the post you replied to but didn't read) the problem with existing backup solutions is awareness and trust of end users. Do you disagree with that, or are you going to keep throwing Microsoft solutions that don't fix that problem at me?
you are using a redundant network drive, aren't you... What a very naive question. I said "enterprise backup admin" son. I've worked with more SAN devices than you can shake a stick at.
When console games get a frustrating to tweak as PC games, I quit. I really appreciate being able to buy the latest, greatest, Hi Def game and have it run exactly as intended. That would be a shame to give up for the sake of making things easier on game publishers/developers.
If the middleware could automatically detect and enable features, and scaled from low end hardware to high end hardware nicely, it might work.
Why do you (and many others) downplay Time Machine? I'm an enterprise backup admin, and anything that pushes backup awareness to end users is golden. I'd been dreaming of something like this since before Time Machine was announced. Most computer users don't understand what backups are or how to do them properly, or what good backup software should do. I wouldn't expect anyone but backup admins to understand what most of this means, but they should at least understand what a proper backup solution PROVIDES. For a surprising number of people, copying some of their data to another (or same) volume counts as a "backup".
Outside of developers who use version control systems, a great deal of even IT workers don't understand the concept of point-in-time recovery. Time Machine is a blessing, and all OSes should have a well built backup/recovery client integrated. Hopefully it will promote the idea that backup services shouldn't just be used in emergencies. That's the way most are used today and why nobody trusts them. Trusting a backup solution is HUGE and very underrated. You only get there by using it.
I believe that effect was due to 300+ ms ping times that modem players usually had. The whole jump to cover, then dying a moment later due to lag was annoying, but without client side prediction it's nearly impossible to do something simple like run and jump at the same time with high latencies. It would have been nice if Quake displayed a ghost image or something so you could see your real position.
I was very surprised when I got my first iMac two years ago. I hadn't heard of half the neat stuff this thing (or laptop models) can do. I don't understand why Apple doesn't run something like it's iPhone adds for it's other hardware. Show off the actual features instead of the silly skits they do now. Almost like they're TRYING to hold back:\
The machine in question is meant to be a server right? Sure it might do some swapping, not out of necessity, but just to make room for more filesystem cache. For that, all he needs a bit of harddrive space. If the machine is swapping because real memory is low (why else would you be concerned with swap performance?), then add more RAM. Simple. If there is a funky server process that needs to be highly responsive but sleeps long periods of time in between use, Linux has parameters to encourage it not to be swapped out.
Have enough RAM + don't take stuff out of RAM if you still need it = who needs swap?? Having more RAM is ALWAYS better than scavenging some from old processes. Swapping just improves the efficiency of available RAM for people who couldn't get more of it.
like the early ps3s The first PS3s had full BC hardware, did you pull that 40% out of your ass?
$400 for a brand new, high end, consumer electronics, entertainment device isn't quite the same thing as a fifteen year old $400 motorcycle. Besides, cheap, new dirtbikes might go for ~$4000, real motorcycles mostly start at the high end dirt bike prices and go all the way to $15K or even higher. What exactly are you comparing?
Multiplayer gaming on the PC was free before, during, and after those services were active, with a few exceptions.
Those services were hardly a requirement to play anything online, but maybe a few small games on MPlayer or others. There was some service that allowed IPX games to play over TCP/IP, for a fee, but that serviced died out long ago with IPX games. QSpy/GameSpy was free and could browse and launch for a ton of games. There wasn't just a couple of free multiplayer online games, MOST were. Doom 95, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3...... Command & Conquer XYZ123, Warcrafts were free modem to modem, heh. Those were just the big ones, there are a boatload more. Maybe you forgot to install the TCP/IP drivers in Windows 95?
My experience (3 broken consoles) isn't typical of people I know who have one, but I don't regret getting one. Plus I figure I get to play games for several uninterrupted months at a time while I wait for them to "fix it", and, eventually, I'll have one of the "fixed" ones. If ANYTHING in my house broke that often, to hell with the warranty, I'd buy a different brand. You seem to be taking the whole "glass is half full" thing a bit too far.
Sony's as bad if not worse. You're kidding right? The storage may vary (and you can replace the drives yourself, it's covered in the manual), but ALL PS3s have a harddrive. USB ports? They almost have too many. WTF do you need four for? Thats as much as most PCs. For what? Bluetooth is standard, the controllers are all Bluetooth, not wired like your xbox. A Printer, a legacy headset, and still charge two controllers at the same time? Do you need that many?
So, why is Sony as bad or worse? Standard Full HD, standard Bluetooth, internet access standard (no subscription), standard hard drive. They've dropped HW BC to be more price competitive with the xbox, and they've added rumble to controllers. A PS3 has more features, but costs more. I bought one because I wanted the best gaming console, NOT a PC. As a platform, the PS3 is MUCH more stable (careful, talking about features here) than a 360. Microsoft built a cheaper base platform with a hundred different configurations to make it as feature competitive as a PS3. It's nearly a PC, like you said. Sony is not even close to that situation. Again, what kind of amazing logic did you use to get "Sony is as bad or worse"?
What is with you people.
"It costs too much." "I don't want feature X, it should be optional, I don't have enough money for it" "I wanted feature X" "There are too many different configurations"
All with a one or two year agreement! Gee, it's no wonder people are sticking with cable. They've combined the worst pricing schemes of both cable and cellular companies. 30MB for $180, what a deal, it's like paying for four cable lines every month.
FAST Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps A $99 value - 1st month FREE Just $29.99/mo. for months 2-7 $39.99
FASTER Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps A $109 value - 1st month FREE Just $39.99/mo. for months 2-7 $49.99
FASTEST Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps 1st month FREE $179.95
Most (all but what you spotted) are regional carriers. If you want a dirt cheap plan with horrible roaming rates outside your state or county, go with them. As for unlimited EDGE, most people on those carriers would be lucky to have EDGE access at all.
Slashdot Mirror
If "cartoony" is the only requirement to be "Pixar-like", I've got some Pixar-like material right here on my notepad.
Play the R&C demo, and you'll better understand what they mean.
You never played that "one of these things doesn't look like the others" game as a kid huh?
Also, the only thing that Sony seems to have in common with the others are their Memory Sticks.
All of five seconds of googling turns up this
And here's a press release.
The other two, Micron/Lexar and Samsung, good question.
This started when a guy on his message list suggested that OpenBSD get a Xen port and believed "Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits."
Theo responds by insulting him, then downplaying virtualization as if it were some kind of toy. You've seen something on the shelf, and it has all sorts of pretty
colours, and you've bought it.
That's all x86 virtualization is. Further down the postings, you get a better idea of what Theo's opinion of VMs. If people were saying:
"Yes, it increased hardware utilization, and the nasty
security impact might be low"
it would be fine.
But instead we have many uneducated people saying:
"Yes, it increased hardware utilization, and it improved security too".
And that's complete and utter bullshit. All that can be taken from this silly "news" here on Slashdot is that NOBODY had better use security as an excuse to weasel something past Theo de Raadt. He apparetnly has a very good nose for both weasels and security.
Similar machines are just as pricey...
The Sun has a max of 8GB memory, Apple's is 16GB. The Apple uses a pricier Xeon processor. The Mac also has more FireWire and USB ports, Sun doesn't specify FW 400 or 800. The Sun has more up to date graphics available, but they have a deal with NVidia, and I can't tell if an off the shelf card will work with it. The Sun (unsurprisingly) seems to have a stronger IO architecture.
Anyways, because you don't seem to understand the difference between a desktop system and a workstation system, I thought I'd point out some differences between those two workstations. Obviously there's a market for them, and there are other competitors as well.
Maybe what you should be complaining about is why Apple doesn't make a cheap tower desktop. They aren't blind, they have to see that short road to gaining heaps of market share, but they aren't taking it for some reason. I think it's because they have better plans.
Maybe we miss games where you could do this (slightly exaggerated):
~
alias rapid "toggleauto; bind t single"
alias single "togglesingle; bind t rapid"
rapid
I think you'll find that rumble is nice when you have it but you'll almost never miss it when it's gone. It's not the same as say.. going to HD then back to SD again. You can buy a new controller if you really want it. It's not worth picking on unless you're the type that one that only uses the single controller that comes with your console for the life of the thing. New controller types have always been added to console platforms over their lifetime. Light guns, arcade pads, rumble packs, the first Dual Shock, programable macros, rapid fire toggles, steering wheels, etc.
.... problem of a better one coming out next week?
Other than that, the only thing that might improve on a PS3 is the harddrive size, and that's a user replaceable part if you feel a bigger one is needed later.
Sony hasn't added any new features to the base system (like HDMI ports), but they might trim a few features to bring the price down.
Why are you worrying about the typical PC, car, CE, lawnmower, power tool, garden hose fitting, *yawn*
Does VSS change anything at all about what I said? Does it add any value over existing backup solutions? Is it any more visible to end users?
No, Barely, and No. The VSC client isn't even included in the client OS. VSS is kind of/sort of complementary to existing backup software, and the only VSS Writer that would be worth a damn are the Exchange or SQL ones, and you STILL have to verify Exchange VSS backups with eseutil.
Please, VSS is nothing to brag about, it's just a Windows native version of third party software that still does a better job. It's a good compromise for shops wanting to keep as many things as possible under one vendor. *shudder*
I JUST told you (in the post you replied to but didn't read) the problem with existing backup solutions is awareness and trust of end users. Do you disagree with that, or are you going to keep throwing Microsoft solutions that don't fix that problem at me? you are using a redundant network drive, aren't you... What a very naive question. I said "enterprise backup admin" son. I've worked with more SAN devices than you can shake a stick at.
When console games get a frustrating to tweak as PC games, I quit. I really appreciate being able to buy the latest, greatest, Hi Def game and have it run exactly as intended. That would be a shame to give up for the sake of making things easier on game publishers/developers.
If the middleware could automatically detect and enable features, and scaled from low end hardware to high end hardware nicely, it might work.
Why do you (and many others) downplay Time Machine? I'm an enterprise backup admin, and anything that pushes backup awareness to end users is golden. I'd been dreaming of something like this since before Time Machine was announced. Most computer users don't understand what backups are or how to do them properly, or what good backup software should do. I wouldn't expect anyone but backup admins to understand what most of this means, but they should at least understand what a proper backup solution PROVIDES. For a surprising number of people, copying some of their data to another (or same) volume counts as a "backup".
Outside of developers who use version control systems, a great deal of even IT workers don't understand the concept of point-in-time recovery. Time Machine is a blessing, and all OSes should have a well built backup/recovery client integrated. Hopefully it will promote the idea that backup services shouldn't just be used in emergencies. That's the way most are used today and why nobody trusts them. Trusting a backup solution is HUGE and very underrated. You only get there by using it.
I believe that effect was due to 300+ ms ping times that modem players usually had. The whole jump to cover, then dying a moment later due to lag was annoying, but without client side prediction it's nearly impossible to do something simple like run and jump at the same time with high latencies. It would have been nice if Quake displayed a ghost image or something so you could see your real position.
psst... 360 failures are common and ARE all over news sites.
Don't USB card readers use the same spec as USB hard drives? Mass Storage Device or something.
and my PS3 has a $500 Blu-ray player, $249 media server, $109 wireless adaptor, $67 Upscaling DVD player, a $65 60GB 2.5" harddrive, a $30 bluetooth adapter, a $23 multi flash card reader, a $5 web browser, and a game console for free. It's amazing everyone doesn't have one. That's well over $1000 in value for only $600... no, $400!
Question, if I sit on it, can I claim an another $25 value as a butt warmer?
IBM mainframes look like some kind of warp reactor. I thought they produced their own energy!
Seriously though... We had a z800 swapped out with a z9 at work. It looked like IBM added a supercharger and changed warp core elements.
I was very surprised when I got my first iMac two years ago. I hadn't heard of half the neat stuff this thing (or laptop models) can do. I don't understand why Apple doesn't run something like it's iPhone adds for it's other hardware. Show off the actual features instead of the silly skits they do now. Almost like they're TRYING to hold back :\
The machine in question is meant to be a server right? Sure it might do some swapping, not out of necessity, but just to make room for more filesystem cache. For that, all he needs a bit of harddrive space. If the machine is swapping because real memory is low (why else would you be concerned with swap performance?), then add more RAM. Simple.
If there is a funky server process that needs to be highly responsive but sleeps long periods of time in between use, Linux has parameters to encourage it not to be swapped out.
Have enough RAM + don't take stuff out of RAM if you still need it = who needs swap??
Having more RAM is ALWAYS better than scavenging some from old processes. Swapping just improves the efficiency of available RAM for people who couldn't get more of it.
$400 for a brand new, high end, consumer electronics, entertainment device isn't quite the same thing as a fifteen year old $400 motorcycle. Besides, cheap, new dirtbikes might go for ~$4000, real motorcycles mostly start at the high end dirt bike prices and go all the way to $15K or even higher. What exactly are you comparing?
Does it really count if it was only released in a particular region? I mean, us Slashdotters are among the few who are even aware of it.
Multiplayer gaming on the PC was free before, during, and after those services were active, with a few exceptions.
Those services were hardly a requirement to play anything online, but maybe a few small games on MPlayer or others. There was some service that allowed IPX games to play over TCP/IP, for a fee, but that serviced died out long ago with IPX games.
QSpy/GameSpy was free and could browse and launch for a ton of games. There wasn't just a couple of free multiplayer online games, MOST were. Doom 95, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3...... Command & Conquer XYZ123, Warcrafts were free modem to modem, heh. Those were just the big ones, there are a boatload more. Maybe you forgot to install the TCP/IP drivers in Windows 95?
You backup your PC, you don't buy a backup PC just in case your primary one fails. You should have just bought a better PC to begin with.
The storage may vary (and you can replace the drives yourself, it's covered in the manual), but ALL PS3s have a harddrive.
USB ports? They almost have too many. WTF do you need four for? Thats as much as most PCs. For what? Bluetooth is standard, the controllers are all Bluetooth, not wired like your xbox. A Printer, a legacy headset, and still charge two controllers at the same time? Do you need that many?
So, why is Sony as bad or worse? Standard Full HD, standard Bluetooth, internet access standard (no subscription), standard hard drive. They've dropped HW BC to be more price competitive with the xbox, and they've added rumble to controllers. A PS3 has more features, but costs more. I bought one because I wanted the best gaming console, NOT a PC. As a platform, the PS3 is MUCH more stable (careful, talking about features here) than a 360. Microsoft built a cheaper base platform with a hundred different configurations to make it as feature competitive as a PS3. It's nearly a PC, like you said. Sony is not even close to that situation. Again, what kind of amazing logic did you use to get "Sony is as bad or worse"?
What is with you people.
"It costs too much."
"I don't want feature X, it should be optional, I don't have enough money for it"
"I wanted feature X"
"There are too many different configurations"
HINT: They can probably fix ONE.
From what I can tell, all current Blu-ray players can play DVDs.
From About.com
From Verizon
All with a one or two year agreement! Gee, it's no wonder people are sticking with cable. They've combined the worst pricing schemes of both cable and cellular companies.
30MB for $180, what a deal, it's like paying for four cable lines every month.
FAST Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps
A $99 value - 1st month FREE
Just $29.99/mo. for months 2-7
$39.99
FASTER Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps
A $109 value - 1st month FREE
Just $39.99/mo. for months 2-7
$49.99
FASTEST Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps
1st month FREE
$179.95
Most (all but what you spotted) are regional carriers. If you want a dirt cheap plan with horrible roaming rates outside your state or county, go with them. As for unlimited EDGE, most people on those carriers would be lucky to have EDGE access at all.