Some of the bigger changes have to do with things like sharepoint integration, which really does work fairly well in newer versions of Office in a corporate setting.
However, it still can be rather buggy, and doesn't play nicely with Chrome unless there is some plugin I'm not aware of (that is, the more web-based parts - if you just directly open a file from Office no browser is involved).
A 480GB Crucial M500 is slightly cheaper per GB than a 4TB spinning drive right now. I think the 960GB SSD is as well.
That comparison is meaningless because a 4TB is at a premium price. If you think you need 500GB, use should compare a 500GB HDD with an SSD (480GB being close enough). I can get a 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive for about $50. A Crucial M500 is about $120. The SSD is 140% more costly or 2.4 times the price per GB.
Even that comparison is a poor one. Really this all depends on your mission.
If all you want is an OS drive for your Chromebook/etc, then you want to look at the cost of 16-32GB of SSD and that is as cheap as any hard drive you could get in that size configuration. The SSD is an obvious choice here.
If you want to store your video collection and your options are RAID HD or SSD, then you don't care how big the individual drives are so you look at price per GB. That usually will end up costing $80-110 for the hard drive in any year - the only thing that changes is the size. That will get you about 2-3TB of HD, which is about 4 cents/GB. Compare that to something like 50 cents/GB for SSD. Clearly if you're storing video the SSD is a really bad choice.
When you look at HD prices you need to stay close to $100. You don't save much money by cutting capacity below that, and you don't get much capacity by spending more than that. I'm not as familiar with the dynamics of SSD, but I imagine that they too tend to have a sweet spot, and it only makes sense to compare apples to apples.
When 2TB ssd come on the market, you'll see the rest drop in price as well. I'm not quite sure where the author is getting their information. Check the price drops over the last two years and you can see they haven't hit bottom yet.
Sure, but neither have hard drives. The 1TB SSD of tomorrow may very well be competitive with the 1TB HD of today, but will it be competitive against the 64TB HD of tomorrow?
No RAID does not allow HDD to perform as SSDs. RAID increases throughput but it does not decrease access time, which in many cases is fare more important than throughput.
Having a seek time of 8ms when you are working with many small files is a huge hit on performance. The seek time of SSDs is well under a millisecond. RAID does not help this no matter how many disks you stripe.
RAID does not always mean stripe. Mirroring does improve seek performance. It increases the chance that a drive has a head closer to the data you want already (if the implementation is smart enough to be aware of this), and it also allows seeks to occur in parallel (which isn't exactly the same as latency reduction, but is fairly equivalent in practice since drives are almost always busy).
That's basically what RAID1 gets you, though at a cost to write performance. You'll never beat SSD random write performance via RAID, though writes on SSDs can leave a bit to be desired as well.
RAID 0 really only buys you throughput, and I don't think SSD really has any advantage over HD for throughput (I'm open to correction there).
The big difference is in seek time. RAID 1 is what buys you seek time for reads, and of course it has no safety issues. There is nothing that limits RAID 1 to only one mirror either beyond the implementation (mdadm supports any number of mirrors and will divide reads across them). Of course, if you have a RAID1 with 8 drives in it, and write is going to block across all 8 of them.
But, write performance on SSD isn't quite as good as read performance either.
So, I imagine whether RAID competes with SSD is going to depend on the task. Of course, you can always put SSDs in a RAID as well.
It's an interesting quandary for the FCC. AT&T and Verizon can and will pay more for the spectrum to be auctioned. That means US taxpayers get more money, which is what is supposed to happen when the government is selling public airwaves.
Only if you look at the sales of the spectrum. Subtract all the monthly cell phone plan payments those taxpayers are making and AT&T/Verizon don't look like such a great deal any longer.
Too big to fail is a recipe for disaster. When a market gets dominated by one or two players, they should be handicapped until their customers have incentive to flee elsewhere and the market share drops to a moderate level. This should be done whether they're doing anything wrong or not - it is just good for the economy. Nothing personal - just business.
As mentioned further below, saving ~$5000/year is possible - maybe throw away that $100/mo TV subscription or something.
Hell, my wife is in her mid 20's and I'm in my early 30's and we manage to squirrel away $28,000 every year on our two salaries (I'm a server admin, she's an engineer). If you're in the right industry and have a modicum of self-restraint it isn't too difficult to save.
...and are married to somebody with comparable income. Swap that wife out for somebody who doesn't make much more than minimum wage, and your $28k/yr basically evaporates. You'd save more being single, but your non-discretionary expenses as a single aren't that much lower than a couple's.
No, but you can start by eliminating that $100/mo TV subscription, and then find some other ways to save money too
I'm constantly amazed at what people spend per month on things they think are "necessary".
Like saving up for retirement? Not sure why having a million dollars to spend in retirement is more important than having $100/month to spend on cable TV today?
No, there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't do anything wrong. People who didn't do something wrong shouldn't be in jail, period.
True. But the defendant doesn't get to define right and wrong. Many murderers don't think they did anything wrong. You might not think it's wrong to refuse a court order. That doesn't make either right.
I never said the defendant doesn't get to define right and wrong. However, people who do nothing wrong shouldn't be harassed by the court, whether what they did was legal or not. That is, courts should be about arriving at justice, not determining if the law was followed.
Is this actually an application, or is it just a hyperlink (which 80% of the apps in the chrome store are, including the regular Gmail app but not the offline gmail app)?
An "real" application is self-contained and can potentially operate even without connecting to a server (though usually it implements some kind of front-end to a web-based service). For example, there are calculator apps or ssh apps that do just what you'd expect a calculator/ssh app to do and work just fine without a route to the internet (though obviously an ssh app needs to be able to reach something running sshd). Apps can store data locally via html5 storage.
Many apps are in the store just for the sake of having an app, but they're really no different from a bookmark. They don't "do" anything but direct the browser to a URL, and they are non-functional if there isn't a network connection.
I think that level of hell is reserved for all the judges and lawyers that don't give a damn about right, wrong, just or unjust but are only concerned that the rules are followed to the dot.
Think about what you just posted. Essentially you are saying that there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't cooperate during the trial but you think the case is really, really important. Not gonna happen my friend.
No, there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't do anything wrong. People who didn't do something wrong shouldn't be in jail, period. People who are innocent shouldn't HAVE to cooperate during the trial - the court should be apologizing to them for dragging them through the trial in the first place.
I think the problem with your argument is that people expect the justice system to deliver justice. If all it does is determine compliance with a set of rules, then why should we spend so much money on it and give it power over our lives?
I actually wonder if the "rule of law" isn't part of the problem. Loopholes and procedural games are really just the natural consequence of the rule of law - you can never codify justice, and laws are rigid while those seeking to evade them are flexible. The result is that you end up with a court system that merely follows a process and metes out the result, without that much regard to the fairness of the result.
When an innocent person ends up in jail, the question is why did the system fail and how can it be fixed, not whether the system failed. The latter is self-evident.
I'm not sure that getting a mortgage is all that hard. Well, assuming you're not trying to spend more than 1/3rd of your income on debt, and that you're not trying to finance more than 100% of what your home is likely worth. If your housing prices never returned to ~2003 levels after the crash then I could see why a bank wouldn't want to let you borrow 105% of that with a payment that requires 2/3rds of your income.
The last time I refinanced I didn't find the process particularly difficult. Sure, it required paperwork more similar to my experience in 2003 than my experiences in 2006, but nothing over-the-top.
Yup. I imagine lots of people would love to work for Google but are turned off by the fact that they tend to want people to come into the office, and they put all their offices in the middle of major urban areas. If I have a need to drive into work at all it only takes me 25min in the middle of rush hour, or 15-20min otherwise. I can also afford a modest house.
Sure, working at Google would be more fun, but it just doesn't seem to be worth the hassle.
Hmm, wasn't aware of that. Still seems far easier to print and file using standard tax software (usually these packages only include a single e-file per license). Plus this does not require divulging your financials to a third party.
That said, if I were a bad guy, the rest of the OpenSSL library's open source would seem like a pretty juicy read right now. Then again, it probably sounds like fun to the good guys too.
Do you think that the bad guys never thought to read the source before now? I'm sure the NSA has a dozen more exploits against every SSL implementation out there, open or closed. It isn't like the Germans published the specs for Enigma, or that the Iranians posted the design of their centrifuges for all to see.
The service you mention is only available to those with low incomes, and generally they don't support itemized deductions.
I don't need somebody to figure out my taxes for me. I just want to be able to fill in the forms.
But hey, if Congress wants to keep taking bribes I can keep hitting file-print and mailing the stack of documents in. As thick as they are, they still qualify for a single stamp. I never get a refund, so it really just delays the government getting its due.
I'm quite happy that third parties are wiling to perform this service.
I'm even more unhappy that ONLY third parties are allowed to perform this service. My state used to have a perfectly simple to use online tax form. No doubt due to pressure from lobbyists they stripped this down considerably so that the new form is quite painful to use (it makes you do your own math, and redundantly fill in info that appears on multiple forms.
So, I print all my returns and mail them in, which just costs the government more to process. I'm not going to pay more money to file my taxes when I can just do it for the cost of a stamp and a few pieces of paper.
Apparently you need to go through one of the participating companies, but the filing is free if you meet that company's criteria. I suppose it is seen as a win-win: for the Government, free filing for low income people, and for the companies, a sales pitch complete with (I'm sure) plenty of opportunities for the person to be upsold on the "premium" versions.
I'm not low-income. Why should I have to pay to e-file?
So I don't. I just print out a big stack of forms, and stick it in the envelope. Then the IRS gets to pay to digitize all my tax return data which was already electronic to begin with. That's efficiency.
No reason this couldn't happen in the US but for this lobbying. The IRS already knows all your income/etc, and if you fill out the forms wrong they'll send you a letter telling you to fix it.
Unless the IRS thinks you were failing to report income, in which case it's 6 years. But more to the point: if I have to verify everything in the IRS return anyways, how exactly does this system save me time?
It is a HECK of a lot easier look at a form and see if it is accurate vs having to fill out and mail it in yourself. 99.99% of the time it would probably be error-free, meaning that you wouldn't need to do anything.
It is the difference between having your bank mail you a monthly statement, or being forced to mail THEM a monthly statement lest they just take your money. You can still check their statement for errors and once I even found an error (in my favor) on one.
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Some of the bigger changes have to do with things like sharepoint integration, which really does work fairly well in newer versions of Office in a corporate setting.
However, it still can be rather buggy, and doesn't play nicely with Chrome unless there is some plugin I'm not aware of (that is, the more web-based parts - if you just directly open a file from Office no browser is involved).
A 480GB Crucial M500 is slightly cheaper per GB than a 4TB spinning drive right now. I think the 960GB SSD is as well.
That comparison is meaningless because a 4TB is at a premium price. If you think you need 500GB, use should compare a 500GB HDD with an SSD (480GB being close enough). I can get a 500GB 7200RPM SATA drive for about $50. A Crucial M500 is about $120. The SSD is 140% more costly or 2.4 times the price per GB.
Even that comparison is a poor one. Really this all depends on your mission.
If all you want is an OS drive for your Chromebook/etc, then you want to look at the cost of 16-32GB of SSD and that is as cheap as any hard drive you could get in that size configuration. The SSD is an obvious choice here.
If you want to store your video collection and your options are RAID HD or SSD, then you don't care how big the individual drives are so you look at price per GB. That usually will end up costing $80-110 for the hard drive in any year - the only thing that changes is the size. That will get you about 2-3TB of HD, which is about 4 cents/GB. Compare that to something like 50 cents/GB for SSD. Clearly if you're storing video the SSD is a really bad choice.
When you look at HD prices you need to stay close to $100. You don't save much money by cutting capacity below that, and you don't get much capacity by spending more than that. I'm not as familiar with the dynamics of SSD, but I imagine that they too tend to have a sweet spot, and it only makes sense to compare apples to apples.
When 2TB ssd come on the market, you'll see the rest drop in price as well. I'm not quite sure where the author is getting their information. Check the price drops over the last two years and you can see they haven't hit bottom yet.
Sure, but neither have hard drives. The 1TB SSD of tomorrow may very well be competitive with the 1TB HD of today, but will it be competitive against the 64TB HD of tomorrow?
No RAID does not allow HDD to perform as SSDs. RAID increases throughput but it does not decrease access time, which in many cases is fare more important than throughput.
Having a seek time of 8ms when you are working with many small files is a huge hit on performance. The seek time of SSDs is well under a millisecond. RAID does not help this no matter how many disks you stripe.
RAID does not always mean stripe. Mirroring does improve seek performance. It increases the chance that a drive has a head closer to the data you want already (if the implementation is smart enough to be aware of this), and it also allows seeks to occur in parallel (which isn't exactly the same as latency reduction, but is fairly equivalent in practice since drives are almost always busy).
That's basically what RAID1 gets you, though at a cost to write performance. You'll never beat SSD random write performance via RAID, though writes on SSDs can leave a bit to be desired as well.
RAID 0 really only buys you throughput, and I don't think SSD really has any advantage over HD for throughput (I'm open to correction there).
The big difference is in seek time. RAID 1 is what buys you seek time for reads, and of course it has no safety issues. There is nothing that limits RAID 1 to only one mirror either beyond the implementation (mdadm supports any number of mirrors and will divide reads across them). Of course, if you have a RAID1 with 8 drives in it, and write is going to block across all 8 of them.
But, write performance on SSD isn't quite as good as read performance either.
So, I imagine whether RAID competes with SSD is going to depend on the task. Of course, you can always put SSDs in a RAID as well.
It's an interesting quandary for the FCC. AT&T and Verizon can and will pay more for the spectrum to be auctioned. That means US taxpayers get more money, which is what is supposed to happen when the government is selling public airwaves.
Only if you look at the sales of the spectrum. Subtract all the monthly cell phone plan payments those taxpayers are making and AT&T/Verizon don't look like such a great deal any longer.
Too big to fail is a recipe for disaster. When a market gets dominated by one or two players, they should be handicapped until their customers have incentive to flee elsewhere and the market share drops to a moderate level. This should be done whether they're doing anything wrong or not - it is just good for the economy. Nothing personal - just business.
And that's hard?
As mentioned further below, saving ~$5000/year is possible - maybe throw away that $100/mo TV subscription or something.
Hell, my wife is in her mid 20's and I'm in my early 30's and we manage to squirrel away $28,000 every year on our two salaries (I'm a server admin, she's an engineer). If you're in the right industry and have a modicum of self-restraint it isn't too difficult to save.
...and are married to somebody with comparable income. Swap that wife out for somebody who doesn't make much more than minimum wage, and your $28k/yr basically evaporates. You'd save more being single, but your non-discretionary expenses as a single aren't that much lower than a couple's.
No, but you can start by eliminating that $100/mo TV subscription, and then find some other ways to save money too
I'm constantly amazed at what people spend per month on things they think are "necessary".
Like saving up for retirement? Not sure why having a million dollars to spend in retirement is more important than having $100/month to spend on cable TV today?
Count yourself lucky. Most of them seem to be about ad sales.
No, there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't do anything wrong. People who didn't do something wrong shouldn't be in jail, period.
True. But the defendant doesn't get to define right and wrong. Many murderers don't think they did anything wrong. You might not think it's wrong to refuse a court order. That doesn't make either right.
I never said the defendant doesn't get to define right and wrong. However, people who do nothing wrong shouldn't be harassed by the court, whether what they did was legal or not. That is, courts should be about arriving at justice, not determining if the law was followed.
Is this actually an application, or is it just a hyperlink (which 80% of the apps in the chrome store are, including the regular Gmail app but not the offline gmail app)?
An "real" application is self-contained and can potentially operate even without connecting to a server (though usually it implements some kind of front-end to a web-based service). For example, there are calculator apps or ssh apps that do just what you'd expect a calculator/ssh app to do and work just fine without a route to the internet (though obviously an ssh app needs to be able to reach something running sshd). Apps can store data locally via html5 storage.
Many apps are in the store just for the sake of having an app, but they're really no different from a bookmark. They don't "do" anything but direct the browser to a URL, and they are non-functional if there isn't a network connection.
I think that level of hell is reserved for all the judges and lawyers that don't give a damn about right, wrong, just or unjust but are only concerned that the rules are followed to the dot.
Think about what you just posted. Essentially you are saying that there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't cooperate during the trial but you think the case is really, really important. Not gonna happen my friend.
No, there should be a Get Out of Jail Free card at the end because you didn't do anything wrong. People who didn't do something wrong shouldn't be in jail, period. People who are innocent shouldn't HAVE to cooperate during the trial - the court should be apologizing to them for dragging them through the trial in the first place.
I think the problem with your argument is that people expect the justice system to deliver justice. If all it does is determine compliance with a set of rules, then why should we spend so much money on it and give it power over our lives?
I actually wonder if the "rule of law" isn't part of the problem. Loopholes and procedural games are really just the natural consequence of the rule of law - you can never codify justice, and laws are rigid while those seeking to evade them are flexible. The result is that you end up with a court system that merely follows a process and metes out the result, without that much regard to the fairness of the result.
When an innocent person ends up in jail, the question is why did the system fail and how can it be fixed, not whether the system failed. The latter is self-evident.
Don't get me started...
Hmm, wasn't aware of that.
So you didn't actually bother visiting the link that was given before spouting off on what was/was not available? Good job.
I had visited it, and that option did not exist at the time I visited it.
I'm not sure that getting a mortgage is all that hard. Well, assuming you're not trying to spend more than 1/3rd of your income on debt, and that you're not trying to finance more than 100% of what your home is likely worth. If your housing prices never returned to ~2003 levels after the crash then I could see why a bank wouldn't want to let you borrow 105% of that with a payment that requires 2/3rds of your income.
The last time I refinanced I didn't find the process particularly difficult. Sure, it required paperwork more similar to my experience in 2003 than my experiences in 2006, but nothing over-the-top.
Yup. I imagine lots of people would love to work for Google but are turned off by the fact that they tend to want people to come into the office, and they put all their offices in the middle of major urban areas. If I have a need to drive into work at all it only takes me 25min in the middle of rush hour, or 15-20min otherwise. I can also afford a modest house.
Sure, working at Google would be more fun, but it just doesn't seem to be worth the hassle.
Hmm, wasn't aware of that. Still seems far easier to print and file using standard tax software (usually these packages only include a single e-file per license). Plus this does not require divulging your financials to a third party.
That said, if I were a bad guy, the rest of the OpenSSL library's open source would seem like a pretty juicy read right now. Then again, it probably sounds like fun to the good guys too.
Do you think that the bad guys never thought to read the source before now? I'm sure the NSA has a dozen more exploits against every SSL implementation out there, open or closed. It isn't like the Germans published the specs for Enigma, or that the Iranians posted the design of their centrifuges for all to see.
The service you mention is only available to those with low incomes, and generally they don't support itemized deductions.
I don't need somebody to figure out my taxes for me. I just want to be able to fill in the forms.
But hey, if Congress wants to keep taking bribes I can keep hitting file-print and mailing the stack of documents in. As thick as they are, they still qualify for a single stamp. I never get a refund, so it really just delays the government getting its due.
I'm quite happy that third parties are wiling to perform this service.
I'm even more unhappy that ONLY third parties are allowed to perform this service. My state used to have a perfectly simple to use online tax form. No doubt due to pressure from lobbyists they stripped this down considerably so that the new form is quite painful to use (it makes you do your own math, and redundantly fill in info that appears on multiple forms.
So, I print all my returns and mail them in, which just costs the government more to process. I'm not going to pay more money to file my taxes when I can just do it for the cost of a stamp and a few pieces of paper.
Apparently you need to go through one of the participating companies, but the filing is free if you meet that company's criteria. I suppose it is seen as a win-win: for the Government, free filing for low income people, and for the companies, a sales pitch complete with (I'm sure) plenty of opportunities for the person to be upsold on the "premium" versions.
I'm not low-income. Why should I have to pay to e-file?
So I don't. I just print out a big stack of forms, and stick it in the envelope. Then the IRS gets to pay to digitize all my tax return data which was already electronic to begin with. That's efficiency.
No reason this couldn't happen in the US but for this lobbying. The IRS already knows all your income/etc, and if you fill out the forms wrong they'll send you a letter telling you to fix it.
Unless the IRS thinks you were failing to report income, in which case it's 6 years. But more to the point: if I have to verify everything in the IRS return anyways, how exactly does this system save me time?
It is a HECK of a lot easier look at a form and see if it is accurate vs having to fill out and mail it in yourself. 99.99% of the time it would probably be error-free, meaning that you wouldn't need to do anything.
It is the difference between having your bank mail you a monthly statement, or being forced to mail THEM a monthly statement lest they just take your money. You can still check their statement for errors and once I even found an error (in my favor) on one.