You can backup the drive, but only onto another branded xbox drive (which cost several times as much as a generic sata drive of the same capacity)...
But the games, even if they let you install the game to the hd you usually can't actually play it without having the original media in the drive. If you let kids play on the console, and a lot of kids play games consoles, the risks of damaging the games increases massively.
Terms of service usually place lots of burden on you, and very little on the company operating the service...
They will send out already banned consoles as warranty repairs, and your screwed... They will ban you for things other than having a modded console, playing a game before release date will get you banned (people who work in game stores can often get games before release for example). Also using peripherals (like hard drives) which you bought in another region, or playing a console from another region are all things that have got people banned without any mods.
And the user is pretty much screwed, despite the unfairness of this.
If they refuse to pay, then the postal service will end up responsible for dealing with the junk... They will open it to look for any return address inside, and failing that will have to dispose of the remains.
Instead of storing multiple copies of the same data in memory, it stores a single read-only copy and points the others to it. If you try to write to it, it traps, creates a new read/write instance which is exclusive to you and then points you at it...
Shared libraries work in much the same way. Shared libraries been implemented pretty securely for many years now.
I would prefer to use EXT2 on small sdcards, so as to support filesystem permissions... Or how about something like jffs2 - a filesystem actually designed for flash media.
FAT32 is a pretty garbage filesystem, and it's patent encumbered, an open filesystem without the weaknesses of fat32 and which is supported everywhere would be extremely useful. It won't happen tho so long as MS have sufficient market share to bury any open filesystem, they want people locked in to their proprietary patented filesystems and use their weight to prevent any other fs from gaining traction.
But even assuming ms would use an open filesystem, they would want to alter it to make it incompatible with everyone else's implementation... And they can't do that very well if people are able to download the source.
MS will never support a filesystem they don't control unless forced to, and certainly won't make it the default...
BSD, Solaris and OSX all support UFS, as does Linux.... Linux also supports the hfs+ filesystem currently used by OSX, not sure if bsd/solaris do but there are bsd licensed drivers for it so no reason not to.
I have a system running a 2.6.32-rc6 kernel with KSM and the latest kvm (which includes support for this, but its turned off by default)... Because i run a number of virtual images that boot the same kernel and system libs (different apps ofcourse), it saved me over 1gb of memory on the host.
Microsoft need to get hurt by enough of these patent trolls that they put their weight behind doing something about the broken patent system that makes things like this possible...
More importantly for them, it discourages startups and individuals from entering the market... Microsoft know how to deal with commercial competition, they are big enough that they can drive them bankrupt or buy them out. Competing against open source is much more difficult for them.
Open standards also apply to the efficient search engine, the more the search engine knows about the structure of the data, the more efficiently it can index it (assuming the data structure is sane in the first place)...
Another very important point you missed tho, keep it simple! Don't provide lots of functionality people don't need...
If you provide people access to the internet, then you now have significant administrative and technical overhead to ensure they don't introduce malware into the network... Similarly with removable media devices.... If you provide full blown fat clients, you have a lot of additional work to ensure people don't run their own programs (either intentionally or otherwise) on them...
I very much see your point tho, common implementations get staff to write their notes into a proprietary application, which stores files in a proprietary format probably located on the workstation itself rather than somewhere centrally, it provides no benefit but is slower... Consequently, people just circumvent the inefficient system and write their notes by hand instead thus wasting all the money spent on it. Also, doctors handwriting is notoriously difficult to read...
There are clear benefits of the new system so I am confident to say that not only is it more efficient and will save money compared to a manual system, but it will also do the same compared to our other two clinic management packages - one is old and reliable (accessed through VT220 terminals or PCs running an emulation package) but very outdated and has no serious reporting or connectivity abilities, the other is 'modern' but buggy (crashes often), poorly written with a bad database schema that is totally space inefficient.
I encounter situations like this a LOT... There will be an old system which is perfectly reliable, has been running for years and everyone can access it using whatever ancient terminals they have at their disposal. And it will usually be quite efficiently written because it runs on old hardware. Then some vendor will come along and blind management with a pretty graphical frontend, so they sign up and begin a transition to a new fancy looking graphical system which looked very pretty to the management types who quickly demoed it at the vendors offices...
Of course, the vendors setup will have a very small data set, will be carefully set up to look as good as it can (they might not even let you touch it, just demo it themselves being very careful to avoid features which are known to be buggy), and the management types won't have tested it for very long (or at all) before they decided to buy, and these same management types won't have to use the resulting system once it's installed.
Costs will rapidly escalate as you have to replace all your ancient terminals with new fancy equipment designed to handle the pretty graphics... You start loading your live data into the new system and find that when it has actual data in it, the new system is very slow and inefficient (but still looks nice!) because it was never tested under any realistic usage cases... You find that the original quoted hardware requirement was already insufficient (to make it look cheaper), and coupled with how slow the new system runs with real data you now have to increase your hardware budget...
And once the system is finally installed and people start using it, you find that... While the app looks very pretty to management types, the people who actually have to use it find that the pretty graphics get in the way, and that the new app is far less usable than the old one. Your users were used to the old system, and don't like the new one, but this gets dismissed as "users dont like change" and blamed on them wether that's the case or not. Even new users who weren't used to the old system have trouble with the new one.. When under actual load, the performance issues are even worse.. The new system has lots of bugs, which the vendor expects you to adjust your working practice around rather than bothering to fix them... The new system also has a different workflow, which again the vendor expects you to adjust your working practice around. The new system brings with it a lot of unnecessary functionality which you don't need, and which will get abused by staff and external hackers alike (people didn't spend all day using facebook on green screen terminals, and didn't browse websites or view files which try to exploit your machine and own it).. As a result of the unnecessary functionality and new security risks, your administrative burden is now much higher (or the vendor convinces you otherwise, and you coast along for a while before you start having major problems).
Computers installed and maintained in a competent fashion, running software which is appropriate to the job at hand and being used by staff who are proficient with that software can save money, potentially a lot of it...
On the other hand, many IT projects are terribly mismanaged, poorly budgeted, installed by cheap unqualified staff, running unsuitable software which expects people to adapt to its way of doing things rather than the other way round, and used by staff who are unsure how to use the system correctly and are often too fearful to touch it unless forced to.. Ask the average joe on the street, and they will tell you that computers are extremely unreliable black boxes, they have no idea how they work and are very fearful of touching them incase they break, especially at work where they're likely to face disciplinary action for breaking the computers.
In a lot of cases, computers are simply not appropriate, and in many more cases computers in the form that get installed are completely unsuitable for the task and are actually inferior to what they replaced.
You also have the attitude of third party suppliers and corrupt people high up in the client organizations where the situation changes from "what do we need" to "how can we justify purchasing something from "... IT is one of the worst affected industries for this, because people generally have less understanding and are therefore easier to fool.
The goals of these people is not to save money, it's not their money to save, it's someone else's money that they are in charge of, and their primary goal is to siphon as much of it out and into their own pockets as possible.
Mass produced stuff (like ragu) is constantly being cheapened, you frequently see "new improved recipe" being advertised, which translates as "now cheaper to produce, but sold for the same price"... I don't think i've ever encountered a "new improved recipe" which tasted better than what it replaced.
In processed food, it's very hard to tell what actually went in... The actual contents of some of the cheaper processed foods are pretty nasty.
Quite often you will be loading a website, and be staring at a blank screen with "making connection to ads.blablabla" at the bottom.... The page itself has loaded, but won't display until the browser has managed to retrieve the ads.
Also you will see ad servers in completely different locations to the site you're viewing, and therefore much slower.
Also, some ads are especially large, especially animated flash ones, and can add a noticeable delay to a page load even if the ad server isn't slow or lagged.
My pet hate btw, are ads which have sound... I find that EXTREMELY annoying and quickly block access to any ad provider which serves such things.
Not so much meaningless, it's just that the lowest common denominator is much closer to what you're likely to have, eg first gen athlon64 vs 386.
That said there are enough differences between AMD/Intel and different models that there are still minor gains to be had. Try some benchmarks, set the cpu type to athlon64, generic, barcelona or core2 and you get varying results (tested on my core2 quad q6600).. The differences may be fairly small, but they're free and add up.
If you put an arbitrary limit on wages, then companies will just snap up all the 30k/year programmers... So long as they can make something that *works*, then that's good enough... That the code is slow, bloated and extremely buggy is largely unimportant to most business types, if it works some of the time then it can be sold. A lot of commercial software i encounter, especially smaller niche products are extremely buggy like this, and yet customers keep lapping them up and cheerfully working around all the ridiculous bugs that should really be fixed.
The thing is, the vast majority of computers run in english... A lot of applications are simply not available with non english language sets, and when they are the non english versions don't quite work right, dialogs are usually sized for the english text and the non english text doesn't quite fit properly, and the translation is often incomplete in that you still get occasional english words or phrases popping up, especially error messages.
Unfortunately that's not the case... I encounter a large number of companies that sell products based on extremely crufty code which is written and maintained by novice (read: cheap) programmers. When new versions come out, they just look slightly different but are still based on the same broken backend code that's been around for years. Many of these companies have no incentive to fix anything because customers are locked in or there aren't any alternatives in their fields anyway. There are bugs so simple, and yet have been around for so long... One particular application i encountered, where you need to enter a number of hours per day for something... If your total hours per day is greater than 24 rather than an error message pointing out that >24 hours per day is impossible, the entire program crashes and loses any other unsaved data. This bug has existed for years, and still exists in current versions of this software being sold today.
If you make programming more accessible to people with limited knowledge in the field, you will end up with lots of barely working programs... Some of these programs will get used in situations where they really shouldn't, and are likely to have lots of bugs and/or security holes. You already see it, it's very easy for novices to write programs in visual basic or php, so you see lots of very sloppy programs out there with lots of security holes...
As someone who runs a webserver hosting sites for other people, a lot of these people upload very shoddily written php code that gets exploited. I had a spam outbreak a couple of days ago because someone managed to find a vulnerability in a php script that let them run arbitrary commands as the webserver user.
That said, i think computers should encourage users to learn by default, like they used to do in the days of BASIC being built in. Computer back then had a relatively simple programming language built in, and would come with big thick printed manuals encouraging you to learn about it... Today you get thin paper instructions that barely cover how to unpack the box, and software that goes out of its way to hide the underlying system from the pretty interface.
Modern CPUs are fast enough that for any typical connection, a relatively modern cpu is able to do wirespeed AES256... For users on the service described on the article, the most they will ever have is 50mbit downstream and considerably less upstream, unless you're trying to torrent from an embedded device like a phone almost anything should be able to handle that... I'm sure even the atom based netbooks could handle encrypting that without issues, and some of the embedded cpus like the ones from via have hardware aes engines.
Only they wouldn't because that would cost more... They will just have less people working from home, which will cost their staff more and cause more environmental impact (more travel, more cars etc)
Using a service which has all your contact details and can log exactly what you download, is the way to go? It only works because its a niche right now, very few people use it so it hasn't caught any attention from media groups... Once they notice, it won't take long for them to subpoena the premium service providers to hand over their logs.
And where is the usenet server hosted? At the moment the *AA are interested in torrents and don't care much about usenet because relatively few people use it, but sooner or later they will go to the companies hosting these servers and sue them for the server logs which implicate you.
Slashdot Mirror
You can backup the drive, but only onto another branded xbox drive (which cost several times as much as a generic sata drive of the same capacity)...
But the games, even if they let you install the game to the hd you usually can't actually play it without having the original media in the drive. If you let kids play on the console, and a lot of kids play games consoles, the risks of damaging the games increases massively.
Terms of service usually place lots of burden on you, and very little on the company operating the service...
They will send out already banned consoles as warranty repairs, and your screwed...
They will ban you for things other than having a modded console, playing a game before release date will get you banned (people who work in game stores can often get games before release for example). Also using peripherals (like hard drives) which you bought in another region, or playing a console from another region are all things that have got people banned without any mods.
And the user is pretty much screwed, despite the unfairness of this.
If they refuse to pay, then the postal service will end up responsible for dealing with the junk...
They will open it to look for any return address inside, and failing that will have to dispose of the remains.
Instead of storing multiple copies of the same data in memory, it stores a single read-only copy and points the others to it. If you try to write to it, it traps, creates a new read/write instance which is exclusive to you and then points you at it...
Shared libraries work in much the same way. Shared libraries been implemented pretty securely for many years now.
I would prefer to use EXT2 on small sdcards, so as to support filesystem permissions...
Or how about something like jffs2 - a filesystem actually designed for flash media.
FAT32 is a pretty garbage filesystem, and it's patent encumbered, an open filesystem without the weaknesses of fat32 and which is supported everywhere would be extremely useful. It won't happen tho so long as MS have sufficient market share to bury any open filesystem, they want people locked in to their proprietary patented filesystems and use their weight to prevent any other fs from gaining traction.
But even assuming ms would use an open filesystem, they would want to alter it to make it incompatible with everyone else's implementation... And they can't do that very well if people are able to download the source.
MS will never support a filesystem they don't control unless forced to, and certainly won't make it the default...
BSD, Solaris and OSX all support UFS, as does Linux.... Linux also supports the hfs+ filesystem currently used by OSX, not sure if bsd/solaris do but there are bsd licensed drivers for it so no reason not to.
I have a system running a 2.6.32-rc6 kernel with KSM and the latest kvm (which includes support for this, but its turned off by default)... Because i run a number of virtual images that boot the same kernel and system libs (different apps ofcourse), it saved me over 1gb of memory on the host.
Microsoft need to get hurt by enough of these patent trolls that they put their weight behind doing something about the broken patent system that makes things like this possible...
More importantly for them, it discourages startups and individuals from entering the market...
Microsoft know how to deal with commercial competition, they are big enough that they can drive them bankrupt or buy them out. Competing against open source is much more difficult for them.
Open standards also apply to the efficient search engine, the more the search engine knows about the structure of the data, the more efficiently it can index it (assuming the data structure is sane in the first place)...
Another very important point you missed tho, keep it simple!
Don't provide lots of functionality people don't need...
If you provide people access to the internet, then you now have significant administrative and technical overhead to ensure they don't introduce malware into the network...
Similarly with removable media devices....
If you provide full blown fat clients, you have a lot of additional work to ensure people don't run their own programs (either intentionally or otherwise) on them...
I very much see your point tho, common implementations get staff to write their notes into a proprietary application, which stores files in a proprietary format probably located on the workstation itself rather than somewhere centrally, it provides no benefit but is slower... Consequently, people just circumvent the inefficient system and write their notes by hand instead thus wasting all the money spent on it. Also, doctors handwriting is notoriously difficult to read...
There are clear benefits of the new system so I am confident to say that not only is it more efficient and will save money compared to a manual system, but it will also do the same compared to our other two clinic management packages - one is old and reliable (accessed through VT220 terminals or PCs running an emulation package) but very outdated and has no serious reporting or connectivity abilities, the other is 'modern' but buggy (crashes often), poorly written with a bad database schema that is totally space inefficient.
I encounter situations like this a LOT... There will be an old system which is perfectly reliable, has been running for years and everyone can access it using whatever ancient terminals they have at their disposal. And it will usually be quite efficiently written because it runs on old hardware.
Then some vendor will come along and blind management with a pretty graphical frontend, so they sign up and begin a transition to a new fancy looking graphical system which looked very pretty to the management types who quickly demoed it at the vendors offices...
Of course, the vendors setup will have a very small data set, will be carefully set up to look as good as it can (they might not even let you touch it, just demo it themselves being very careful to avoid features which are known to be buggy), and the management types won't have tested it for very long (or at all) before they decided to buy, and these same management types won't have to use the resulting system once it's installed.
Costs will rapidly escalate as you have to replace all your ancient terminals with new fancy equipment designed to handle the pretty graphics...
You start loading your live data into the new system and find that when it has actual data in it, the new system is very slow and inefficient (but still looks nice!) because it was never tested under any realistic usage cases...
You find that the original quoted hardware requirement was already insufficient (to make it look cheaper), and coupled with how slow the new system runs with real data you now have to increase your hardware budget...
And once the system is finally installed and people start using it, you find that...
While the app looks very pretty to management types, the people who actually have to use it find that the pretty graphics get in the way, and that the new app is far less usable than the old one.
Your users were used to the old system, and don't like the new one, but this gets dismissed as "users dont like change" and blamed on them wether that's the case or not.
Even new users who weren't used to the old system have trouble with the new one..
When under actual load, the performance issues are even worse..
The new system has lots of bugs, which the vendor expects you to adjust your working practice around rather than bothering to fix them...
The new system also has a different workflow, which again the vendor expects you to adjust your working practice around.
The new system brings with it a lot of unnecessary functionality which you don't need, and which will get abused by staff and external hackers alike (people didn't spend all day using facebook on green screen terminals, and didn't browse websites or view files which try to exploit your machine and own it)..
As a result of the unnecessary functionality and new security risks, your administrative burden is now much higher (or the vendor convinces you otherwise, and you coast along for a while before you start having major problems).
There's a lot to be said for keeping it simple!
There are too many variables...
Computers installed and maintained in a competent fashion, running software which is appropriate to the job at hand and being used by staff who are proficient with that software can save money, potentially a lot of it...
On the other hand, many IT projects are terribly mismanaged, poorly budgeted, installed by cheap unqualified staff, running unsuitable software which expects people to adapt to its way of doing things rather than the other way round, and used by staff who are unsure how to use the system correctly and are often too fearful to touch it unless forced to..
Ask the average joe on the street, and they will tell you that computers are extremely unreliable black boxes, they have no idea how they work and are very fearful of touching them incase they break, especially at work where they're likely to face disciplinary action for breaking the computers.
In a lot of cases, computers are simply not appropriate, and in many more cases computers in the form that get installed are completely unsuitable for the task and are actually inferior to what they replaced.
You also have the attitude of third party suppliers and corrupt people high up in the client organizations where the situation changes from "what do we need" to "how can we justify purchasing something from "... IT is one of the worst affected industries for this, because people generally have less understanding and are therefore easier to fool.
The goals of these people is not to save money, it's not their money to save, it's someone else's money that they are in charge of, and their primary goal is to siphon as much of it out and into their own pockets as possible.
Agree wholeheartedly...
Mass produced stuff (like ragu) is constantly being cheapened, you frequently see "new improved recipe" being advertised, which translates as "now cheaper to produce, but sold for the same price"... I don't think i've ever encountered a "new improved recipe" which tasted better than what it replaced.
In processed food, it's very hard to tell what actually went in... The actual contents of some of the cheaper processed foods are pretty nasty.
Quite often you will be loading a website, and be staring at a blank screen with "making connection to ads.blablabla" at the bottom.... The page itself has loaded, but won't display until the browser has managed to retrieve the ads.
Also you will see ad servers in completely different locations to the site you're viewing, and therefore much slower.
Also, some ads are especially large, especially animated flash ones, and can add a noticeable delay to a page load even if the ad server isn't slow or lagged.
My pet hate btw, are ads which have sound... I find that EXTREMELY annoying and quickly block access to any ad provider which serves such things.
Not so much meaningless, it's just that the lowest common denominator is much closer to what you're likely to have, eg first gen athlon64 vs 386.
That said there are enough differences between AMD/Intel and different models that there are still minor gains to be had. Try some benchmarks, set the cpu type to athlon64, generic, barcelona or core2 and you get varying results (tested on my core2 quad q6600).. The differences may be fairly small, but they're free and add up.
If you put an arbitrary limit on wages, then companies will just snap up all the 30k/year programmers...
So long as they can make something that *works*, then that's good enough... That the code is slow, bloated and extremely buggy is largely unimportant to most business types, if it works some of the time then it can be sold. A lot of commercial software i encounter, especially smaller niche products are extremely buggy like this, and yet customers keep lapping them up and cheerfully working around all the ridiculous bugs that should really be fixed.
The thing is, the vast majority of computers run in english...
A lot of applications are simply not available with non english language sets, and when they are the non english versions don't quite work right, dialogs are usually sized for the english text and the non english text doesn't quite fit properly, and the translation is often incomplete in that you still get occasional english words or phrases popping up, especially error messages.
Unfortunately that's not the case...
I encounter a large number of companies that sell products based on extremely crufty code which is written and maintained by novice (read: cheap) programmers. When new versions come out, they just look slightly different but are still based on the same broken backend code that's been around for years. Many of these companies have no incentive to fix anything because customers are locked in or there aren't any alternatives in their fields anyway.
There are bugs so simple, and yet have been around for so long... One particular application i encountered, where you need to enter a number of hours per day for something... If your total hours per day is greater than 24 rather than an error message pointing out that >24 hours per day is impossible, the entire program crashes and loses any other unsaved data.
This bug has existed for years, and still exists in current versions of this software being sold today.
If you make programming more accessible to people with limited knowledge in the field, you will end up with lots of barely working programs... Some of these programs will get used in situations where they really shouldn't, and are likely to have lots of bugs and/or security holes. You already see it, it's very easy for novices to write programs in visual basic or php, so you see lots of very sloppy programs out there with lots of security holes...
As someone who runs a webserver hosting sites for other people, a lot of these people upload very shoddily written php code that gets exploited. I had a spam outbreak a couple of days ago because someone managed to find a vulnerability in a php script that let them run arbitrary commands as the webserver user.
That said, i think computers should encourage users to learn by default, like they used to do in the days of BASIC being built in. Computer back then had a relatively simple programming language built in, and would come with big thick printed manuals encouraging you to learn about it...
Today you get thin paper instructions that barely cover how to unpack the box, and software that goes out of its way to hide the underlying system from the pretty interface.
Modern CPUs are fast enough that for any typical connection, a relatively modern cpu is able to do wirespeed AES256...
For users on the service described on the article, the most they will ever have is 50mbit downstream and considerably less upstream, unless you're trying to torrent from an embedded device like a phone almost anything should be able to handle that... I'm sure even the atom based netbooks could handle encrypting that without issues, and some of the embedded cpus like the ones from via have hardware aes engines.
Only they wouldn't because that would cost more...
They will just have less people working from home, which will cost their staff more and cause more environmental impact (more travel, more cars etc)
Using a service which has all your contact details and can log exactly what you download, is the way to go?
It only works because its a niche right now, very few people use it so it hasn't caught any attention from media groups... Once they notice, it won't take long for them to subpoena the premium service providers to hand over their logs.
Why should they?
They can inspect the server logs and see exactly what their users are downloading, no need for packet inspection.
And where is the usenet server hosted?
At the moment the *AA are interested in torrents and don't care much about usenet because relatively few people use it, but sooner or later they will go to the companies hosting these servers and sue them for the server logs which implicate you.