>Now, if IBM were to switch their desktops internally to Linux, and publish their results..
Riiight.
They haven't switched because they tried to caclulate and results were less than great. And they said "okay, let's wait until our study can show a lower TCO".
The example you pulled is a good example - indeed, a Mac seems the best solution for that particular case.
I just said that majority of users would do just fine with a freeware firewall (Kerio, etc.) or even with plain Win XP + SP2. Even on OS X you'd probably want to disable some services and close some ports, which means one still needs to spend 5 minutes to tighten security of a Mac and 10 minutes to tighten security on a Win XP box - which to me isn't a big difference to justify a purchase decision. Of course, the morons modded that a flaimbait.
By the way, the latest nVidia nForce4 chipset has a firewall-on-chip (as the on-chip GbE is a part of their chipset) which automatically discards all attacks and spoofed packets and the rest can be configured in a user-friendly GUI (on Win XP).
>Maybe you have been running windows too long
That too, but I have been using Linux for years and have a Linux DSL gateway/firewall at home (and I see it's being constantly probed and attacked, it's unbelievable). But I used to go online with a Win XP (with a freeware firewall) directly connected to the Net and it held up very well. I now use a Linux gateway because I need a Linux box for other things anyway, so I route my 'net traffic through it for better stats and traffic reporting.
>What I suggested was start something of an Opensource UI consulting group, where a bunch of usability experts could pitch in and help out the development of UIs and do some serious usability testing of interfaces.
And that would cost a ton of money and yet no "maintainable" product would come out of it (unless they permanently employ those gurus and then more documentation gurus, and more PM gurus, etc., which Microsoft already does - and that's why it's all as expensive as it is).
That's probably incorrect. Maybe for 10g Standard (the lowest-end stuff). 9i RAC is $60K per processor.
> PostgreSQL has stored procedures, transactions, replication, indexes... all we need.
Because your company, like most others, doesn't need much - you could probably use Ingress, Sybase (for DB under 5GB) or some other free-license database.
SQL Server, not Oracle, is threatened by Ingres, PostreSQL et al. Considering convenient backup, monitoring, tuning and other tools, I'd still buy SQL Server rather than use some free database, unless it's a huge DB and I needed Enterprise Edition ($$$).
*If* one left a computer on the Internet accessible to all kinds of hackers, then blah blah blah
Things like that never happen (what sane person would do that). You want a secure firewall - you get a real firewall (or one of those firewall on floppy thingies). You want a secure server in DMZ? Pretty much any OS will do. You want a secure desktop on LAN? Almost the same - with little precautions taken. It certainly doesn't require a BSD or Mac.
> I hate being locked into a "solution". Choice is key.
What locked? What solution?
I happen to think that you're trolling and full of BS. You can get an AMD system anywhere (the "choice"), with SuSE, without SuSE, with Red Hat, without Red Hat and with Windows 32-bit. Where exactly is the lock you complain about?
> The question I really want answered is when will I be able to guy a laptop from Dell (or anyone else) with Linux pre-installed?
When you get enough money.
>Seems silly to me that so few DO offer a Linux alternative.
Seems silly to me that you complain about the 30 quids (like Dell will go out of their way to bundle SuSE for free!) and make a big story out of nothing. Just install it yourself or buy an HP notebook or whatever.
>IBM dealed with SuSE back in the day where they were a German company.
Yes because IBM Germany was (is?) in charge of much of Linux back then. I think they did a lot of work on Linux for zSeries and pSeries in IBM Germany.
>What kind of mixed messages are they sending there?
How the hell is this insightful?
Can't you read?
They _recommend_ (for whatever reason) Windows XP Pro and they sell whatever makes money. Is that so hard to understand? Or should they stop bundling (or recommending) Windows OS just because they signed just another bundling agreement?
> This effectively means I likely won't ever have Suse on a desktop or server ever again since I'm not going to buy before I try. Now there's no way to try without paying
What's it to you if you'd buy it anyway? Like, you _must_ try it out otherwise you could make a big mistake and spend 90 bucks for software that doesn't work or something?
Besides, SLES9 ISOs are available for free download (although there's nothing to see, it's just an Linux OS with a new kernel which one can try on any of the free distributions - Gentoo, Fedora, etc). Big deal.
>System X cost a total of $6 million, and it's still faster.
Yes and in the meantime the Tugnsten has been in production for over a year now.
And after the initial setup VT have spent an additional year to upgrade. That cost them US$600K (more than 10% of the initial h/w cost) for a 20% or so gain in performance. If you add depreciation of the existing equipment, I'm sure it's over 20% of the total cost - in other words, the gain has been negative.
>Nice try at trolling, but next time don't be so obvious and pathetic about it
I think they'll be beaten handsomely by a number of Intel and AMD based systems within the next six months as Infiniband and kernel 2.6 enter the field.
I don't know how much Dell's Tungsten cluster cost but those guys went online last year and got ranked #4 (just behind this Mac cluster) and they're #5 or something now. These bozos have spent a year fscking around with upgrades and from the theoretical #3 (as they were taken out since the cluster couldn't enter production) will have dropped to #7 or more in the next ranking....
Wired's quote of the Virginia Tech guy: "We're very happy," he said. "The numbers are good. They are about 20 percent higher than they used to be."
For Christ, of course it's 20% higher than it used to be since a year has passed since they ran the benchmark last time. Has he ever heard of Moore's Law?
Later (after I posted the joke) I found out that those social program participants aren't the underprivideged themselves ("recipients") but regular folks who _were helping_ ("participants") program execution. So my joke doesn't stand but it's even worse than I thought...
Yes, RAID-5 is great but you still need to back it up somehow. How can a home user can backup 750GB of data (it'd take some 200 DVDs) unless he has a tape drive (not exactly a popular item) or yet another RAID-5 for disk-based backup which means the user would need two RAID-5 disks - impossible with nForce4 which supports up to four SATA disks.
That's what I'm talking about - it *was* for the day or week they tested it, but it was probably crashing or something - in any case, they couldn't/wouldn't use it as it was, so they embarked on an upgrade (or "tuning" i.e. debugging) program.
A year (!) later the hardware has deprecated some 33% (3 year period, US$5.2m), they've _wasted_ US$1.716m and they're still not using it.
That's laughable. What kind of success story is that?
Oh yes, it required an expert to conclude that "one day" RAID-5 will become a non-feature included for free.
And you kindly offered a solution to those who want RAID-5 included - which is... to wait 2 years until that happens. Very insightful.
RAID-5 doesn't make much sense because it requires many (or more than RAID-0 in any case) disk drives which in turn requires a fairly big chassis. People who really need RAID-5 would get a real server system (with two or three onboard 3Com or Intel NICs, management features, etc.). And in case you haven't noticed, the chipset has one on-chip GbE NIC, and to get data in and out fast (like when you want to back-up 700GB over LAN or when you serve the files to clients) you'd need more GbE NICs which means even with RAID-5 included one would need to add several LAN cards. As the grandparent post said, the chipset is made for workstations (performance = RAID0) and temporary storage.
And finally, as nForce4 supports only four SATA disks, one could build a very basic 3+1 RAID-5 array which is the one and only reasonable choice (as 2+1 would perform much slower and leave one disk in a non-RAID configuration). Most users serious about RAID-5 would rather buy a separate add-on card which can stripe across at least five-six disks and not three or two.
I wouldn't speculate about nForce4 design but it's possible that RAID-5 would be a bit too much for the chipset as it is more compute-intensive.
RTFA - it is Google's search index that is accessible, it has nothing to do with permissions on user's files per-se.
As not all Windows have the ability to set per-user permissions, they should have password-protect their software so that the search index file is accessible/usable only when the user is logged in to Google desktop search engine.
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>Now, if IBM were to switch their desktops internally to Linux, and publish their results..
Riiight.
They haven't switched because they tried to caclulate and results were less than great.
And they said "okay, let's wait until our study can show a lower TCO".
The example you pulled is a good example - indeed, a Mac seems the best solution for that particular case.
I just said that majority of users would do just fine with a freeware firewall (Kerio, etc.) or even with plain Win XP + SP2.
Even on OS X you'd probably want to disable some services and close some ports, which means one still needs to spend 5 minutes to tighten security of a Mac and 10 minutes to tighten security on a Win XP box - which to me isn't a big difference to justify a purchase decision.
Of course, the morons modded that a flaimbait.
By the way, the latest nVidia nForce4 chipset has a firewall-on-chip (as the on-chip GbE is a part of their chipset) which automatically discards all attacks and spoofed packets and the rest can be configured in a user-friendly GUI (on Win XP).
>Maybe you have been running windows too long
That too, but I have been using Linux for years and have a Linux DSL gateway/firewall at home (and I see it's being constantly probed and attacked, it's unbelievable).
But I used to go online with a Win XP (with a freeware firewall) directly connected to the Net and it held up very well. I now use a Linux gateway because I need a Linux box for other things anyway, so I route my 'net traffic through it for better stats and traffic reporting.
>What I suggested was start something of an Opensource UI consulting group, where a bunch of usability experts could pitch in and help out the development of UIs and do some serious usability testing of interfaces.
And that would cost a ton of money and yet no "maintainable" product would come out of it (unless they permanently employ those gurus and then more documentation gurus, and more PM gurus, etc., which Microsoft already does - and that's why it's all as expensive as it is).
> Oracle: $6K for a single-processor license.
That's probably incorrect. Maybe for 10g Standard (the lowest-end stuff). 9i RAC is $60K per processor.
> PostgreSQL has stored procedures, transactions, replication, indexes... all we need.
Because your company, like most others, doesn't need much - you could probably use Ingress, Sybase (for DB under 5GB) or some other free-license database.
SQL Server, not Oracle, is threatened by Ingres, PostreSQL et al.
Considering convenient backup, monitoring, tuning and other tools, I'd still buy SQL Server rather than use some free database, unless it's a huge DB and I needed Enterprise Edition ($$$).
What the hell does that mean?
*If* one left a computer on the Internet accessible to all kinds of hackers, then blah blah blah
Things like that never happen (what sane person would do that). You want a secure firewall - you get a real firewall (or one of those firewall on floppy thingies). You want a secure server in DMZ? Pretty much any OS will do.
You want a secure desktop on LAN? Almost the same - with little precautions taken. It certainly doesn't require a BSD or Mac.
>Any ideas?
Yeah - go to Google or some clustering forum/mailing list.
>Consider--your ATA RAID controller dies three years down the road. What if the manufacturer no longer makes it?
Buy a different controller or use software RAID to create a new RAID.
Then restore your backup data.
As I use multiple distros, I guess that makes me a Linux equivalent of Ted Bundy or someone with the split personality.
> I hate being locked into a "solution". Choice is key.
What locked? What solution?
I happen to think that you're trolling and full of BS.
You can get an AMD system anywhere (the "choice"), with SuSE, without SuSE, with Red Hat, without Red Hat and with Windows 32-bit.
Where exactly is the lock you complain about?
> The question I really want answered is when will I be able to guy a laptop from Dell (or anyone else) with Linux pre-installed?
When you get enough money.
>Seems silly to me that so few DO offer a Linux alternative.
Seems silly to me that you complain about the 30 quids (like Dell will go out of their way to bundle SuSE for free!) and make a big story out of nothing. Just install it yourself or buy an HP notebook or whatever.
>IBM dealed with SuSE back in the day where they were a German company.
Yes because IBM Germany was (is?) in charge of much of Linux back then. I think they did a lot of work on Linux for zSeries and pSeries in IBM Germany.
>What kind of mixed messages are they sending there?
How the hell is this insightful?
Can't you read?
They _recommend_ (for whatever reason) Windows XP Pro and they sell whatever makes money. Is that so hard to understand? Or should they stop bundling (or recommending) Windows OS just because they signed just another bundling agreement?
> This effectively means I likely won't ever have Suse on a desktop or server ever again since I'm not going to buy before I try. Now there's no way to try without paying
What's it to you if you'd buy it anyway?
Like, you _must_ try it out otherwise you could make a big mistake and spend 90 bucks for software that doesn't work or something?
Besides, SLES9 ISOs are available for free download (although there's nothing to see, it's just an Linux OS with a new kernel which one can try on any of the free distributions - Gentoo, Fedora, etc). Big deal.
>System X cost a total of $6 million, and it's still faster.
Yes and in the meantime the Tugnsten has been in production for over a year now.
And after the initial setup VT have spent an additional year to upgrade. That cost them US$600K (more than 10% of the initial h/w cost) for a 20% or so gain in performance. If you add depreciation of the existing equipment, I'm sure it's over 20% of the total cost - in other words, the gain has been negative.
>Nice try at trolling, but next time don't be so obvious and pathetic about it
Of course I have to be obvious to state my point.
I think they'll be beaten handsomely by a number of Intel and AMD based systems within the next six months as Infiniband and kernel 2.6 enter the field.
I don't know how much Dell's Tungsten cluster cost but those guys went online last year and got ranked #4 (just behind this Mac cluster) and they're #5 or something now. These bozos have spent a year fscking around with upgrades and from the theoretical #3 (as they were taken out since the cluster couldn't enter production) will have dropped to #7 or more in the next ranking....
Wired's quote of the Virginia Tech guy: "We're very happy," he said. "The numbers are good. They are about 20 percent higher than they used to be."
For Christ, of course it's 20% higher than it used to be since a year has passed since they ran the benchmark last time. Has he ever heard of Moore's Law?
>there are also multiple high quality audio channels.
It's not like they have to clean the audio. Besides, size of audio data is usually much smaller than size of video data.
Well you can buy one and ask them to give you the OS and GPL part of the code... If they don't, ask for refund :-)
I'm curious what would happen in such situation but I don't really need a portable player right now so I'm not in a position to try.
> this isn't what the average free software Joe is crying out for.
Yeah, it isn't and the probable reason is that there's only about 50,000 of average free software Joes compared to 2 billion of all average Joes.
Not to mention that this tiny market segment isn't exactly known for their generosity and lavish spending habits.
Could be. And they made their point :-)
Later (after I posted the joke) I found out that those social program participants aren't the underprivideged themselves ("recipients") but regular folks who _were helping_ ("participants") program execution. So my joke doesn't stand but it's even worse than I thought...
>And don't give me shit about servers.
Ouch!
Yes, RAID-5 is great but you still need to back it up somehow.
How can a home user can backup 750GB of data (it'd take some 200 DVDs) unless he has a tape drive (not exactly a popular item) or yet another RAID-5 for disk-based backup which means the user would need two RAID-5 disks - impossible with nForce4 which supports up to four SATA disks.
> Check back to the last list genius
I will, can you please provide the URL?
> it was in third place
That's what I'm talking about - it *was* for the day or week they tested it, but it was probably crashing or something - in any case, they couldn't/wouldn't use it as it was, so they embarked on an upgrade (or "tuning" i.e. debugging) program.
A year (!) later the hardware has deprecated some 33% (3 year period, US$5.2m), they've _wasted_ US$1.716m and they're still not using it.
That's laughable. What kind of success story is that?
Oh yes, it required an expert to conclude that "one day" RAID-5 will become a non-feature included for free.
And you kindly offered a solution to those who want RAID-5 included - which is... to wait 2 years until that happens. Very insightful.
RAID-5 doesn't make much sense because it requires many (or more than RAID-0 in any case) disk drives which in turn requires a fairly big chassis. People who really need RAID-5 would get a real server system (with two or three onboard 3Com or Intel NICs, management features, etc.). And in case you haven't noticed, the chipset has one on-chip GbE NIC, and to get data in and out fast (like when you want to back-up 700GB over LAN or when you serve the files to clients) you'd need more GbE NICs which means even with RAID-5 included one would need to add several LAN cards. As the grandparent post said, the chipset is made for workstations (performance = RAID0) and temporary storage.
And finally, as nForce4 supports only four SATA disks, one could build a very basic 3+1 RAID-5 array which is the one and only reasonable choice (as 2+1 would perform much slower and leave one disk in a non-RAID configuration). Most users serious about RAID-5 would rather buy a separate add-on card which can stripe across at least five-six disks and not three or two.
I wouldn't speculate about nForce4 design but it's possible that RAID-5 would be a bit too much for the chipset as it is more compute-intensive.
"..personal data on a staggering 1.4 million Californians who participated in a state social program, officials said Tuesday"
State social program participants?
Too fscking bad for this hacker - it's going to be pretty hard to scam out anything from the underprivileged crowd.
> I just picked up an MPIO HD300 over an ipod because it does ogg vorbis.
You bought it just to be able to write about it here.
Really, everyone is concerned about "egg vomits" support - just look how much iPod suffered because they don't support it!
RTFA - it is Google's search index that is accessible, it has nothing to do with permissions on user's files per-se.
As not all Windows have the ability to set per-user permissions, they should have password-protect their software so that the search index file is accessible/usable only when the user is logged in to Google desktop search engine.