I think your viewpoint is skewed. Other OSs have moved on, while WindowsXP still infests computers. If Microsoft had provided a progressive OS during the 2000's, we wouldn't have this issue.
In any case, if it is important for an old OS to work properly with 4k sector sizes, a patch can be built. I'd like to see a jumper that would set the reported sector size as 4K or 512b. Sure, the performance of the 512b sectors will be problematic on a 4K drive, but the performance improvement for those OSs that can work in 4K blocks won't then be impacted by an ineffective default setting.
With simple NAT today, a bad guy can't attack the systems behind my NAT solution. I can control access via NAT and define what gets back in.
With real (IPv6) routing, I now have to install firewalls on all of my systems and maintain them individually.
Yes, NAT sucks, but maintaining 30 firewalls when a single NAT firewall was sufficient is simply impractical.
Think of it another way - older folks (parental units) don't even understand their current NAT cable modems. If you introduce (and require) true routing to non-techies, the security exposures become ridiculously easy to propagate.
The data loss and corruption that the parent is talking about is the fault of crap hardware. In almost every case, USB is involved, or more rarely the lack of ECC ram. It is true that ZFS is less tolerant of bad hardware.
What good is a fault tolerant file system if it isn't tolerant of faults?
What you're talking about (fault tolerance) on top of a single drive makes exactly no sense. In no circumstance does ZFS do worse than HFS+ on data corruption. If you want to pull your USB stick out -- good luck with your data being intact regardless of the filesystem in use.
With such hardware, it is impossible for any filesystem to function reliably.
Quite incorrect.
USB and Firewire bridges are notorious for this. If you care about your data, you should run the other way if you happen upon one.
Well, golly, those only happen to be the way 99.999% of Apple's customers attach exernal drives, not to mention 99.9% of all of the rest of the world.
The answer doesn't have to be ZFS for everything. If ZFS doesn't work for unreliable USB drives, don't use it. Use HFS+ instead. However, for my 1TB drive, I really want to know if the drive is corrupting my data! HFS+ silently loses a few blocks, and suddenly all my work is suspect. I'll take ZFS over any filesystem that doesn't verify the file integrity. And no, a fsck doesn't verify the file integrity. It verifies only that the metadata looks ok.
I've been using ZFS for years on both server equipment and OSX. It's fantastic software that tells me when things are wrong, and, has features far beyond any filesystem available elsewhere today. Apple, if you're listening, please make ZFS available to regular OSX!
Using that same reasoning, should I ask my local communist party what food I should eat? I can afford a lot of different food, but to be responsible, shouldn't I eat what others tell me I should eat?
/ SARCASM
In other words, your argument is complete BS. There are many factors that determine whether I should or shouldn't do something. Public opinion is VERY low on that factor list.
Just because you don't agree with what I do doesn't mean you get a gold star for pointing out the difference.
I believe in freedom for this exact reason. I can do what I like when I like, as long as I'm not hurting another person when I do it.
An no, driving a truck isn't hurting another person. I've never been in an accident in my truck, and I drive in some horrible conditions.
I find it interesting that nobody has drawn a parallel between the IP network industry and the telephone companies. Telephone companies charge large amounts of money for ridiculously small amounts of bandwidth. It can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for a 9.6kbit leased line for an ATM connection.
Comcast and other ISPs want to get out of the 'all you can eat' business and into the 'ala carte' business. If they can charge $10 per MBbit today, when the network is upgraded in the future to 100x the speed their revenue increases proportionally.
Today, if you download a movie at 6MBits/sec, it can take hours to download the movie. This makes interactive media impractical. In the future, it will take only seconds to download a movie. If the ISPs can introduce a charge-by-byte (or charge by bandwidth usage) model today, when that high speed future arrives, they can charge a proportionally larger amount.
I believe this is the true goal of the ISPs: Switch to a charge-by-use model so that future network bandwidth increases are matched by a revenue increase.
You've confused 1080 with the first number. In reality, 1080 refers to the 2nd entry, 768, in your case. A 1080i or 1080p TV uses a resolution of 1920x1080.
Boy, you are naive. What are supercomputers used for in the DOD? Nuclear weapon simulations. By simulating the nuclear weapon, you can test your designs without needing to (re)build a bunch of bombs.
If Iran builds a nuclear weapon, the entire middle east landscape changes. Iran can now threaten Saudi Arabia, Israel and others with the use of nuclear weapons. It takes them from a bunch-of-religious-radicals with guns to a bunch-of-religious-radicals with a nuclear bomb.
It then turns from a discussion of equals in the middle east to a discussion of nuclear powers (Israel and Iran) and everybody else.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Thanks! I needed a laugh today, and saying that a shell can use up to a gig of memory provided that laugh.
Let's see on my Mac with OS X, my bash shells, which admittedly aren't being used semi-heavily, are using: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND nobody 879 0.7 -0.0 27816 856 p3 Ss 11:06AM 0:00.12 bash nobody 281 0.0 -0.1 27816 1472 p1 S+ 11:09PM 0:00.17 -bash nobody 348 0.0 -0.0 27816 904 p2 S+ 11:37PM 0:00.16 -bash
Hmmm... that comes to an average of 1078kb of memory per shell. And PowerShell can use up to a GIGABYTE?
Umm, no. Intel is a chip company. They've tried hard to become a hardware company, but haven't succeeded, as yet. VERY few systems ship with true intel motherboards.
"If the Apple business model were to prevail... this has the potential to make the development of Linux N times harder"
I don't think you know much about Apple hardware. It has followed open standards for years. It's no worse than the current PC hardware out there today.
Replace Apple with HP, and you'll find the issues remain the same. Some hardware is easily open-sourced, while others (notably broadcom wireless cards) are not.
"And how is Apple's DRM 1/10th as bad?"
It's reversible. I can burn a CD with DRM'd songs, and re-rip them as native. You can't do that with Vista or any other DRM out there.
I don't like DRM, but Apple at least makes is palatable for the vast majority of people.
"Mark my words.."
I will. In 10 years, the computing industry will look similar to how it does today. It will take a disruptive technology to change the direction of the industry, and DRM and game consoles won't be it.
When typical families run into MS Vista DRM lock-in, that will be the last time they'll buy that technology. The market will determine who will be the winners, and the winners will be the consumer.
Stupid lock-in by corporations will continue to fail, as consumers won't buy locked products.
For a home user, ZFS could handle backups trivially by plugging in a large flash drive and adding it to the pool. I suspect this will be one mechanism Time Machine will use. Due to the way ZFS works, you can just mirror a part of the directory tree (e.g./Users/aUser) onto the external disk.
It doesn't work that way. As an alternative you could use ZFS send/receive, but adding a disk to a pool temporarily is similar to adding a disk to a RAID-5 set temporarily.
Another option would be to add it as a mirror disk, but that gets pretty complicated pretty fast. I'd recommend adding another disk and using ZFS send/receive.
Personally, I can't wait until I can use ZFS on my external firewire drives. The ability to check the drives for errors periodically is a great feature. It helps to diagnose connectivity and/or hardware issues.
Whether it's Linux, Mac OSX or some other platform, the fundamental problem for other platforms is time. You can buy NWN2 now on a windows platform. You can buy NWN2 on Linux or Mac in a year or perhaps never. So, most people buy NWN2 for Windows today.
The game is only new once. In a year, there are other games to attract buyers.
I don't see other platforms being a decisive factor until game manufacturers bring out the game on multple platforms at the launch*.
Me, I would have bought NWN2 on the Mac in a heartbeat. However, I have to settle for maintaining a Windows box for gaming, and if I want the Mac version, I have to wait, and re-purchase it.
... perceived reliability improvements (difficult to prove)
I live in the Colorado front range in a new(er) development. My power is underground. When a thundstorm rolls through, I don't have to worry about the power being knocked out. I hear from older above-ground local neighborhoods periodically how their power was out for 4-8 hours due to a lightning strike.
I may see a disturbance periodically (I keep the stuff I care about on UPS), but I haven't seen it go out.
I consider that proof.
Add to that threats from ice storms, weather, trees growing into power lines, and the reliability benefits only increase.
>1) A WiFi access point. This is reasonably easy, even if you have to make it play nice on the plane. Flight safety certification/qualification is difficult. The FAA is (understandably) paranoid about such things and I'm glad they are.
I've got a real problem with this. WTF is up with this 'understandably paranoid' statement? The FAA doesn't know what will happen, and refuses to test and qualify *anything* to do with wireless or computers. They refuse to come up with acceptable RF leakage standards, they refuse to come up with a test method so that equipment can be qualified, and they continue to say on each flight "please turn everything off".
It's laziness. They don't know and they don't want to find out. What do we pay them for, again?
Come on FAA, it's time to step up and figure out what equipment can be certified for use on planes, and (more importantly) come up with standards around RF leakage so that planes don't incur needless risk due to a poorly designed piece of hardware.
I totally agree. No effort has been made to figure out the security aspects of the solution. How do I know that my data is distinct from any other companies' data? Also, when it comes to big compute farms, doesn't that mean that I'm working on HUGE datasets? How do I get TB's of data to the gride farm and then get it *back*?
Seems like a "you build it and they will come" mentality. In the days of laptops with good compute facilities, I have to think this represents dinosaur thinking.
Communigate Pro http://www.stalker.com/ is a drop-in replacement for exchange with minimal changes.
However, if I were to want a solution that blows exchange away, I'd look to: Oracle Collaboration Suite http://www.oracle.com/collabsuite/index.html, which goes far beyond Exchange into voicemail, desktop sharing, and remote access. It's simply amazing.
I have to second this. Companies in america have no focus. They are interested in same-job-different-day and always-cutting-cost. They are not interested in leading, only in propping up their stock price.
As someone said above, if you want to program and be a leader, start your own software development firm. Either you will succeed and become a large software vendor, or, you will sell your company for millions of dollars and retire.
Sadly, nobody wants to build corporate empires anymore.
Innovation doesn't exist in the corporations anymore. All of the work is "business process re-engineering". Which means that your users are under-trained, and you're trying to streamline (e.g. dumb down) your systems rather than train them appropriately.
I beg to differ. I purchased the Lord of the Rings pinball last year, and I am VERY impressed by the play. The construction feels solid, and I am never tired of the game. I highly recommend the game.
After all, hearing Gimli say "Extra Ball!" and Frodo "We go through Moria!" is really fun.
Slashdot Mirror
I use laptop SATA 7200RPM drives in my home servers all the time. They're small, efficient, cheap and fast.
I'd use SAS if I could easily add SAS to a home server for less than THOUSANDS of dollars.
If Seagate won't make the product, WD will. They'll get my business. I vote with my dollars.
I'm glad I sold my STX stock. This is a bad business decision.
This is the same channel that is taking G4 from a tech channel to the Brave New World of reality TV and informercials.
I've given up on SyFy. Let's hope the next reboot doesn't load a virus as this one did.
And a few hours after you've re-imaged the OS, the problem returns. Now what?
While re-imaging may fix some errors, it doesn't fix all, and rarely fixes performance issues.
If the USPS stops saturday delivery, what's next? Monday?
Cutting back on the service is just the first step towards elimination of the service.
Rather than cutting service, I think it makes more sense to focus on the costs of USPS.
Perhaps consolidate mailboxes to centralized locations rather than individual delivery?
Ah, a newbie.
If backspace doesn't work, just just kill (ctrl-u) to clear your input. Then you can re-type your input.
I haven't encountered a situation where kill doesn't work. Backspace may be ctrl-h or delete, but kill is always ctrl-u.
I think your viewpoint is skewed. Other OSs have moved on, while WindowsXP still infests computers. If Microsoft had provided a progressive OS during the 2000's, we wouldn't have this issue.
In any case, if it is important for an old OS to work properly with 4k sector sizes, a patch can be built. I'd like to see a jumper that would set the reported sector size as 4K or 512b. Sure, the performance of the 512b sectors will be problematic on a 4K drive, but the performance improvement for those OSs that can work in 4K blocks won't then be impacted by an ineffective default setting.
Thanks for the paper. From the paper, you gain a 7-11% increase in capacity due to the consolidation of multiple CRCs and inter-block gaps.
Does anybody know if/when SSD's will go to a 4k block size?
A 7-11% gain in SSD capacity is a BIG deal.
What bugs me is this:
With simple NAT today, a bad guy can't attack the systems behind my NAT solution. I can control access via NAT and define what gets back in.
With real (IPv6) routing, I now have to install firewalls on all of my systems and maintain them individually.
Yes, NAT sucks, but maintaining 30 firewalls when a single NAT firewall was sufficient is simply impractical.
Think of it another way - older folks (parental units) don't even understand their current NAT cable modems. If you introduce (and require) true routing to non-techies, the security exposures become ridiculously easy to propagate.
I'll stick with NAT.
The data loss and corruption that the parent is talking about is the fault of crap hardware. In almost every case, USB is involved, or more rarely the lack of ECC ram. It is true that ZFS is less tolerant of bad hardware.
What good is a fault tolerant file system if it isn't tolerant of faults?
What you're talking about (fault tolerance) on top of a single drive makes exactly no sense. In no circumstance does ZFS do worse than HFS+ on data corruption. If you want to pull your USB stick out -- good luck with your data being intact regardless of the filesystem in use.
With such hardware, it is impossible for any filesystem to function reliably.
Quite incorrect.
USB and Firewire bridges are notorious for this. If you care about your data, you should run the other way if you happen upon one.
Well, golly, those only happen to be the way 99.999% of Apple's customers attach exernal drives, not to mention 99.9% of all of the rest of the world.
The answer doesn't have to be ZFS for everything. If ZFS doesn't work for unreliable USB drives, don't use it. Use HFS+ instead. However, for my 1TB drive, I really want to know if the drive is corrupting my data! HFS+ silently loses a few blocks, and suddenly all my work is suspect. I'll take ZFS over any filesystem that doesn't verify the file integrity. And no, a fsck doesn't verify the file integrity. It verifies only that the metadata looks ok.
I've been using ZFS for years on both server equipment and OSX. It's fantastic software that tells me when things are wrong, and, has features far beyond any filesystem available elsewhere today. Apple, if you're listening, please make ZFS available to regular OSX!
SARCASM
Using that same reasoning, should I ask my local communist party what food I should eat? I can afford a lot of different food, but to be responsible, shouldn't I eat what others tell me I should eat?
/ SARCASM
In other words, your argument is complete BS. There are many factors that determine whether I should or shouldn't do something. Public opinion is VERY low on that factor list.
Just because you don't agree with what I do doesn't mean you get a gold star for pointing out the difference.
I believe in freedom for this exact reason. I can do what I like when I like, as long as I'm not hurting another person when I do it.
An no, driving a truck isn't hurting another person. I've never been in an accident in my truck, and I drive in some horrible conditions.
Dibs: Microsoft and the Blue Cloud of Death
I find it interesting that nobody has drawn a parallel between the IP network industry and the telephone companies. Telephone companies charge large amounts of money for ridiculously small amounts of bandwidth. It can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for a 9.6kbit leased line for an ATM connection.
Comcast and other ISPs want to get out of the 'all you can eat' business and into the 'ala carte' business. If they can charge $10 per MBbit today, when the network is upgraded in the future to 100x the speed their revenue increases proportionally.
Today, if you download a movie at 6MBits/sec, it can take hours to download the movie. This makes interactive media impractical. In the future, it will take only seconds to download a movie. If the ISPs can introduce a charge-by-byte (or charge by bandwidth usage) model today, when that high speed future arrives, they can charge a proportionally larger amount.
I believe this is the true goal of the ISPs: Switch to a charge-by-use model so that future network bandwidth increases are matched by a revenue increase.
You've confused 1080 with the first number. In reality, 1080 refers to the 2nd entry, 768, in your case. A 1080i or 1080p TV uses a resolution of 1920x1080.
Try that resolution on your 17" CRT.
Boy, you are naive. What are supercomputers used for in the DOD? Nuclear weapon simulations. By simulating the nuclear weapon, you can test your designs without needing to (re)build a bunch of bombs.
If Iran builds a nuclear weapon, the entire middle east landscape changes. Iran can now threaten Saudi Arabia, Israel and others with the use of nuclear weapons. It takes them from a bunch-of-religious-radicals with guns to a bunch-of-religious-radicals with a nuclear bomb.
It then turns from a discussion of equals in the middle east to a discussion of nuclear powers (Israel and Iran) and everybody else.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Thanks! I needed a laugh today, and saying that a shell can use up to a gig of memory provided that laugh.
Let's see on my Mac with OS X, my bash shells, which admittedly aren't being used semi-heavily, are using:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
nobody 879 0.7 -0.0 27816 856 p3 Ss 11:06AM 0:00.12 bash
nobody 281 0.0 -0.1 27816 1472 p1 S+ 11:09PM 0:00.17 -bash
nobody 348 0.0 -0.0 27816 904 p2 S+ 11:37PM 0:00.16 -bash
Hmmm... that comes to an average of 1078kb of memory per shell. And PowerShell can use up to a GIGABYTE?
I'm still laughing.
"Apple is a hardware company.. So is Intel"
Umm, no. Intel is a chip company. They've tried hard to become a hardware company, but haven't succeeded, as yet. VERY few systems ship with true intel motherboards.
"If the Apple business model were to prevail... this has the potential to make the development of Linux N times harder"
I don't think you know much about Apple hardware. It has followed open standards for years. It's no worse than the current PC hardware out there today.
Replace Apple with HP, and you'll find the issues remain the same. Some hardware is easily open-sourced, while others (notably broadcom wireless cards) are not.
"And how is Apple's DRM 1/10th as bad?"
It's reversible. I can burn a CD with DRM'd songs, and re-rip them as native. You can't do that with Vista or any other DRM out there.
I don't like DRM, but Apple at least makes is palatable for the vast majority of people.
"Mark my words.."
I will. In 10 years, the computing industry will look similar to how it does today. It will take a disruptive technology to change the direction of the industry, and DRM and game consoles won't be it.
When typical families run into MS Vista DRM lock-in, that will be the last time they'll buy that technology. The market will determine who will be the winners, and the winners will be the consumer.
Stupid lock-in by corporations will continue to fail, as consumers won't buy locked products.
It doesn't work that way. As an alternative you could use ZFS send/receive, but adding a disk to a pool temporarily is similar to adding a disk to a RAID-5 set temporarily.
Another option would be to add it as a mirror disk, but that gets pretty complicated pretty fast. I'd recommend adding another disk and using ZFS send/receive.
Personally, I can't wait until I can use ZFS on my external firewire drives. The ability to check the drives for errors periodically is a great feature. It helps to diagnose connectivity and/or hardware issues.
Whether it's Linux, Mac OSX or some other platform, the fundamental problem for other platforms is time. You can buy NWN2 now on a windows platform. You can buy NWN2 on Linux or Mac in a year or perhaps never. So, most people buy NWN2 for Windows today.
The game is only new once. In a year, there are other games to attract buyers.
I don't see other platforms being a decisive factor until game manufacturers bring out the game on multple platforms at the launch*.
Me, I would have bought NWN2 on the Mac in a heartbeat. However, I have to settle for maintaining a Windows box for gaming, and if I want the Mac version, I have to wait, and re-purchase it.
... perceived reliability improvements (difficult to prove)
I live in the Colorado front range in a new(er) development. My power is underground. When a thundstorm rolls through, I don't have to worry about the power being knocked out. I hear from older above-ground local neighborhoods periodically how their power was out for 4-8 hours due to a lightning strike.
I may see a disturbance periodically (I keep the stuff I care about on UPS), but I haven't seen it go out.
I consider that proof.
Add to that threats from ice storms, weather, trees growing into power lines, and the reliability benefits only increase.
>1) A WiFi access point. This is reasonably easy, even if you have to make it play nice on the plane. Flight safety certification/qualification is difficult. The FAA is (understandably) paranoid about such things and I'm glad they are.
I've got a real problem with this. WTF is up with this 'understandably paranoid' statement? The FAA doesn't know what will happen, and refuses to test and qualify *anything* to do with wireless or computers. They refuse to come up with acceptable RF leakage standards, they refuse to come up with a test method so that equipment can be qualified, and they continue to say on each flight "please turn everything off".
It's laziness. They don't know and they don't want to find out. What do we pay them for, again?
Come on FAA, it's time to step up and figure out what equipment can be certified for use on planes, and (more importantly) come up with standards around RF leakage so that planes don't incur needless risk due to a poorly designed piece of hardware.
Ignorance is not bliss.
I totally agree. No effort has been made to figure out the security aspects of the solution. How do I know that my data is distinct from any other companies' data? Also, when it comes to big compute farms, doesn't that mean that I'm working on HUGE datasets? How do I get TB's of data to the gride farm and then get it *back*?
Seems like a "you build it and they will come" mentality. In the days of laptops with good compute facilities, I have to think this represents dinosaur thinking.
There are drop-in replacements for exchange:
Communigate Pro http://www.stalker.com/ is a drop-in replacement for exchange with minimal changes.
However, if I were to want a solution that blows exchange away, I'd look to:
Oracle Collaboration Suite http://www.oracle.com/collabsuite/index.html, which goes far beyond Exchange into voicemail, desktop sharing, and remote access. It's simply amazing.
I have to second this. Companies in america have no focus. They are interested in same-job-different-day and always-cutting-cost. They are not interested in leading, only in propping up their stock price.
As someone said above, if you want to program and be a leader, start your own software development firm. Either you will succeed and become a large software vendor, or, you will sell your company for millions of dollars and retire.
Sadly, nobody wants to build corporate empires anymore.
Innovation doesn't exist in the corporations anymore. All of the work is "business process re-engineering". Which means that your users are under-trained, and you're trying to streamline (e.g. dumb down) your systems rather than train them appropriately.
You exchanged a word:
It's Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.
I beg to differ. I purchased the Lord of the Rings pinball last year, and I am VERY impressed by the play. The construction feels solid, and I am never tired of the game. I highly recommend the game.
After all, hearing Gimli say "Extra Ball!" and Frodo "We go through Moria!" is really fun.