I'm not totally sure why you got modded as funny since there is a legitimate fusion reactor being built in France as we speak. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
So while it still will be almost 50 years before we see commercial operating reactors based on this technology, I don't see how this is comically funny. Fusion HAS worked and HAS produced a positive net power output, now we're just working on scaling it and sustaining it.
I agree with most of the points on here. 1) Rackmounts are excessively loud in "most" instances, so unless you need a small height factor or already have a rack to put it in, I'd recommend getting a desktop of some sort. Power usage should be another concern if you're going to have it running 24x7. That being said, ebay is a great place to pick up rack mount computers. One example are the IBM e326 servers which use AMD processors. You can pick up one of those for ~$250 with an Opteron 250 and 1 GB of RAM. (They went for about $2k new).
You can almost always build a niche product cheaper than you can buy it for, but that is beside the point. That little R2 they had running around that guys house was wireless, where is this thing drawing its power from? I'm not sure you can put enough batteries in that thing to run a projector + DVD player for 2+ hours...
Amarok is not a substitute for iTunes. A substitute has the same functionality or at least provides the same primary services. Amarok has no way of updating the software on an iPod, nor does it allow you to purchase content for your iPod from the iTunes store.
I actually agree with the parent post, it's the consumer applications holding linux back but what I do disagree with is that it's not necessarily the professional level applications. Because quite frankly, I'd say the majority of people playing with photoshop are using it illegally anyway. But I'll tell you what one application is holding Linux back: iTunes. You can tell me I'm wrong, but when >70% of the population has a product that almost requires iTunes at the very least for game support and software updates, you need a computer that can run it.
Ubuntu on the server side is still a long ways away from being at the same level as RHEL. While it may be as stable and provide many of the same core technologies, RHEL has much better administration utilities and front-ends for server related components that you just can't find on Ubuntu. I think another dividing line on the server front is which variety of Linux you started off with. If you started on RedHat based systems then you're already familiar with the location of configuration files etc. As someone who tried switching to Ubuntu (and ended up staying with it for desktop use) it can take a lot of time to reacquaint yourself with the filesystem layout, new package manager, etc.
Well, you may not be able to "sell" something that infringes on Apple's patents, but I'm not sure how this limits a company from releasing a multi-touch/gesture capable interface and allowing the user to define their own gestures that are the same as Apple's. You know the Linux community will do it at the very least, they rip off every other interface idea (I mean that in the nicest of ways, but how many icon sets / window manager decorations have you seen that look like a blatant copyright violation;-)). So selling a laptop with a multitouch trackpad and then allowing the user to activate some "apple" (in Linux we'd probably call it Aqua) default gestures seems within the limits to me, am I missing something legally?
It's clear that you're a fan of the Sony platform. As a long time Sony hardware fan I can't criticize you for that, but I think you underestimate the momentum that the XBox 360 still has moving forward. I don't care to look up numbers so yell at me for speculation if you want, but I went out looking to get a PS3/XBOX360 for Christmas and there were fortifications in the Best Buy stores made out of piles of PS3's. I was lucky to find an XBox 360 (other than the Arcade version) at any store. The DVD drive ended up going out on me in a couple of weeks (fulfilling my fear that the hardware would be crap), but I searched in vain for a replacement anyway. Every store in my state was out of stock on 360's other than the arcade version. I'm talking every Target, Gamestop, Best Buy, Walmart, EB Games, and Circuit City. I finally got one off of Amazon and they were out of stock the very next day.
I truly think that all 3 consoles will be around for a good while because I think all 3 of them are fulfilling their own niches. The Wii for the casual SD gamer, the PS3 for the bleeding tech PSP integrating HD gamer, and the 360 for the online multiplaying HD gamer who also likes being able to play media from computers/internet/removable USB drives. The 360's catalogue of games is far too large for it to disappear quietly, and with a 3 year hardware warranty against the RROD problem I don't think people are going to give up on them entirely. I chose them merely because they had the best online system. I could have gotten a PS3 but I don't know anyone else that has one and don't even know what game I would play online with it. With the 360 I have at least a half dozen friends with Halo 3 alone. But I digress.
I think Microsoft did fine in choosing to offer the HD-DVD route. It was cheap, had a decent initial industry backing, and allowed you to buy it when you were ready. Now they're in a position to transition to Blu-Ray if it seems prudent. I couldn't really care less.
You got modded as funny but I think this is the most insightful comment on this page and I was thinking the exact same thing. That's great if we can use TV-like waves to blanket a large area with low power, reasonable bandwidth internet access. But how the hell is the upload signal going to work? My homeowner's associate even tries to prevent us from having TV antennas on our roofs (which is against the law for them to prohibit, but that's another story). But if the signal really is pretty low power, maybe a small return signal can be sent using only a modest sized/powered home antenna, who knows?
As he states, he's using a jail-break version to make his video. Therefore, he can change the banner to say whatever he wants. It actually changes several times throughout the video showing 3G, WiMax, 700MHz and others. This is NOT a leak of a new version of the iPhone. Sorry, I would have been happy too.
Well I wasn't intending to troll, I'm far too busy to waste time with that. I'm just posing the observation that console prices are quickly approaching the prices of the games we play on them and wondering how other people feel about that. You and someone else have both posted that yes, that price does include "hardware". In the case of guitar hero III for the wii that means they give you a plastic controller shaped like a guitar with a few buttons on it. Worth $40? I'd wager not since it's really just using the Wiimote to do all the hard work.
But that point aside, I just find it interesting that we're heading in that direction. What will game prices be like for the next generation? $70 - $80 per game?
So the CEO of a game company that sells . . . oh let's start with Rock Band, for about $170 to run on a game console that he wants to cost $200. I'm not sure if this is a sign of good things (e.g., hardware costs coming down so you're only spending money on content), or content prices going up to compete with hardware costs. I mean, remember the day when your computer costs $2k and games were $30 to $40? Is that easier or harder to stomach when hardware costs are equivalent to only 3 or 4 games? I, for one, was a little outraged to find that Guitar Hero III for the Wii was $90. For what? Well, music licensing I guess, but still, $90 for a game.
In fact, I have. I have a Mac Pro at home and 2 mac pro servers at work. I administer all of them and have been unable to get them to spin up their fans beyond the 600 RPM's that they idle at. Specifically, my system at home is currently transcoding some video while running 4 threads of SETI@home. CPU A has a die temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit while CPU B has a die temp of 99. Ambient temperature in the office is around 72 degrees. The exhaust fan is at 600 RPM's, CPU fan is at 500, power supply is at 600, and hard drive is at 500. I'm running 3 internal 7200 RPM drives and an ATI x1900XT which contributes some of the heat to the hard drive area. The two systems at work are in more of a controlled environment with the A/C set to 68 and 40% relative humidity. One acts as the email/ftp/web/ldap server while the other is out main compilation system for development work but also doubles as a ldap replicator and file host. Both of them have also never spun their fans up beyond the levels I've indicated.
I do NOT have info on the eight core machines, but I think I've made my point that under moderate to heavy loads the Intel processors run fairly cool without the need for extravagant cooling solutions. If you still don't believe me, then I encourage you to go to your local Apple store, fire up a couple instances of terminal and your favorite infinite loop and stick your ear up to the case and tell me how long you stand there before you hear the system struggle to cool itself down.
Actually, one of the reasons that Apple jumped off of the PowerPC platform was BECAUSE of their power inefficiency. The G5 processors were incredibly power hungry, enough so that they could never get one cool enough to run in a laptop and actually offered the Mac Pro line with liquid cooling. Compare that to the new quad-core and eight-core mac pro's and dual core laptops that run very effectively with very minimal air cooling.
Your analogy isn't quite right. He's stating that receiving signals from extra-terrestrial beings is an all or nothing event and until you've received a signal the only progress you can report is: "We've searched X% of the sky, trying again." With science research like you propose, fusion and AI, incremental steps can be made to show progress. In the case of fusion, you can start by showing that you can create a fusion reaction. Then, that you can develop containment for it. Next, that you can keep a sustained reaction going. (For the record, all of these have been accomplished already and more so you might choose something else as an example next time, mind you that our first full scale fusion test reactor is under construction in France). For AI, you can demonstrate simple problem solving, things like finding the optimal choice amongst many possible solutions, simulated emotional responses, pain avoidance, and then novel situation problem solving through the integration of past experiences. Many of these have also been accomplished. In either case, there are incremental milestones that can be accomplished and documented throughout the process.
OK, I concede that the price isn't as much of a factor. The problem is I can pay them $40-$50 / mo for a 256k line or get comcast/verizon at 6-10Mb for the same price. So it's only more $$ when you look at bandwith / cost.
Sometimes it's not even as simple as just changing the "brand" of your high speed internet. In our town there is also a local provider called TBC for DSL internet. However, if you dig deep enough you find out they are just reselling you a Verizon DSL line. Congrats on limiting the damage to one company so far, I hope that our options continue to increase;-)
I have to agree with the other poster whose comment got modded down. While I agree that not buying services from these companies would hurt them (duh), it isn't feasible. In most parts of the country you don't have too many options for a) land telephone, b) internet access, c) cell phone w/ reception. Odds are that in order to get at least one of those three services you're going to have to pony up to Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint. T-Mobile and US Cellular have pretty poor reception where I am. Verizon and Comcast are the only internet providers (and that's really a lesser of two evils) unless you want to go wireless (satellite, etc, $$$). And Verizon is the only POTS provider. So the only way that I can hurt them is to cease my communication to the outside world.
The size of these companies and their control are beyond the scope of what consumers can affect. They muscle competition off of the playing field which has led to the helplessness of consumers at this point. But hey, it's part of the cycle. Another decade or so, after AT&T/Verizon/Sprint have all merged again and widened our collective sphincters a good couple of inches, maybe the governemtn will break them up and we'll start the whole cycle again.
Well, NTFS may be a major pain when it comes to fragmentation and journalling support, but it does have one of the best security systems out there in terms of cascading permissions. Most *NIX filesystems only provide you with three tiers of controls: owner, group, everyone. On XP/Vista/NT you can provide as many levels of permissions for as many users as you want with much finer control than just read, write, access. With this in mind, we shouldn't say that microsoft is completely insecure. It's much easier to secure a service that's proprietary in nature and runs on a single maintained backbone than it is to provide security for an OS with some near billion number of users on everything kind of crap hardware imaginable.
Now, I'm not proposing that Microsoft should be the ones in charge of such a project, in fact it makes me shudder at the thought. It would even sound better if they were just being contracted by one of the other organizations that was mentioned instead of the other way around. But if not MS, then who? You asked who does have more secure products and I'm not sure there's a good answer to that. Every OS has security vulnerabilities (as anyone on here will tell you). And most people will agree that those exploits aren't a huge concern when you only make up ~1-5% of the computer market.
In a situation where you're setting up a massive database of personal information, you immediately supercede any metric for target size and jump straight to the top of the "attack me" list. So which OS / Company / Organization should head such a product. Haha, or better yet, choose between microsoft and the government . . . you may not get a third option!
Actually, that's not far from the truth. It's long been known that buying a phone through the provider gets you a discount on the phone at the expense of not being the one who actually owns the phone with full rights, etc. It seems that any phone you buy at a discount becomes an unsupported timebomb as soon as you try and hack it to provide functionality that the carrier doesn't want you to have. I don't see why anyone thinks the iPhone would be any different.
One other comment that bears to be added, there aren't really and PC manufacturers today that are selling upgradable computers. That's not to say that you can't rip it open and do some dirty work, but you're almost certainly voiding any chance of warranty support that you have. Most laptops are this way, as well as desktops. Sure, you can open a Mac Pro and swap in an 8-core xeon setup for your 4-core, but don't go crying to an Apple store when something goes wrong. As far as iMac's go though, their very nature makes them difficult to upgrade since the design is based around compactness, not accessibility. When you have to disassemble a 20-24" LCD to get at inner components, it's hard to tell your customers that they can "upgrade" the computer on their own.
As a side note, since we're comparing "used" prices here, Mac Pro's start at $1899, not $2500+. And the Mac Mini's start at $429 refurbished and you can upgrade the memory, processor, and hard drive on that.
I was going to write a long post regarding this article but it looks like you covered it already. Good work, cause I couldn't agree more. The only reason that we see a linux distro preinstalled on Dell computers, for example, is because of the strides made by the Ubuntu team in creating a distro that is easy for a Windows-level user to sit down and interact with.
I'm the first to agree that in a high-tech-level setting Ubuntu has MANY shortcomings. As an example, it takes me about 5 seconds to get a RedHat based machine configured on our Kerberos network using authconfig. I spent a half hour with it (I'm no Kerberos expert), and I still can't get Ubuntu working correctly since I have to do everything manually. My point, however, is that NO home user is EVER going to want to set up Kerberos, so that's not what Ubuntu is geared for and I can't get upset with them for that. Same goes for partitioning in the installer. Anyone remember the options in the Windows installer? They're on the same level: let the installer wipe the drive and commit it to Linux, or set up a few paritions on your own and tell the installer which one it can use.
Lastly, I have to disagree with the author regarding the user account classifications. He claims, erroneously, that by allowing for the use of 'sudo', an attacker only needs one password to break a system, whereas with a root account he claims you need 2. Umm . . . hello . . . you still only need one password, root's password! Unless your savy enough to not allow root logins . . . It seems perfectly acceptable to me to provide those three levels of user accounts and even that is more than most people will need.
Over and over again people try and compare the efficiencies between two "seemingly" identical servers / machines. But truly, how can you declare a winner (and base it on something like a 5% efficiency margin) when the two machines are using different power supplies? A 600 Watt for the Intel, 500 Watt for the AMD. I can't find those models listed on Delta's website at quick glance, but it'd be a stretch to imagine that two different power supplies have the exact same efficiency curves. I mean, I'd believe if they were accurate to within maybe 3%, so now we're arguing over whether or not Intel and AMD are more than 2% different in efficiency? Come on people. The whitepaper does say they assume there might be a 1% difference between the two power supplies, but that's based on "eyeballing" the efficiency curves.
We know that Intel takes a hit with FB-DIMM memory especially as you add more memory modules.
Another inconsistency appears to be related to the case design, where the cases for the Intel machines appeared to be providing inadequate cooling for the memory modules, causing the system management controller to bump up fan speed considerably. So now we're comparing two systems with different power supplies and with different requirements for cooling which may or may not be related to the actual architecture but may be impacted by a design consideration made by the case manufacturer. How would these results change with different power supplies or a different case. Are the differences the same in a 2U case? A tower? Does it get worse? Better? I know that our Mac Pro's NEVER speed up the fans above the 500/600 RPM's that they bottom out at.
As noted by others, the paper is completely devoid of any discussion regarding CPU frequency / voltage scaling that may or may not be handled by the BIOS or Linux resident programs (cpuspeed daemon). It's possible they haven't even checked for it. As our company has both Intel and AMD linux boxes, I can testify that linux is very sensitive to motherboard/cpu combinations when it comes to cpu scaling and it's "possible" that this could be playing a MAJOR role in the idle performance values. It'd be nice to see it addressed.
Lastly, there's no discussion as to the optimizations made to the software being run on each of the boxes. Is the code compiled for each architecture individually taking into account support for 3DNow / SSE instructions, cache sizes, etc? Obviously more efficient or less efficient code execution would have a MAJOR impact on these studies, enough so that companies usually spend a large amount of time playing with compiler options to get the best performance on a given architecture. And when you're arguing over performance comparisons in the sub 20% difference arena, code efficiency should be addressed, especially if it's not a big commercial package that "everyone" in the industry would be using. Anyhoo, just my thoughts.
Unforunately, like most things in the enterprise, there will still be a demand for PATA for years to come. Hell, even Apple's current xServe RAID assemblies only use PATA drives and they're not alone. Enterprise tends to extend the life of things that most consumers just assume get rid of due to incredible age.
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I'm not totally sure why you got modded as funny since there is a legitimate fusion reactor being built in France as we speak. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
So while it still will be almost 50 years before we see commercial operating reactors based on this technology, I don't see how this is comically funny. Fusion HAS worked and HAS produced a positive net power output, now we're just working on scaling it and sustaining it.
I agree with most of the points on here. 1) Rackmounts are excessively loud in "most" instances, so unless you need a small height factor or already have a rack to put it in, I'd recommend getting a desktop of some sort. Power usage should be another concern if you're going to have it running 24x7. That being said, ebay is a great place to pick up rack mount computers. One example are the IBM e326 servers which use AMD processors. You can pick up one of those for ~$250 with an Opteron 250 and 1 GB of RAM. (They went for about $2k new).
You can almost always build a niche product cheaper than you can buy it for, but that is beside the point. That little R2 they had running around that guys house was wireless, where is this thing drawing its power from? I'm not sure you can put enough batteries in that thing to run a projector + DVD player for 2+ hours ...
Amarok is not a substitute for iTunes. A substitute has the same functionality or at least provides the same primary services. Amarok has no way of updating the software on an iPod, nor does it allow you to purchase content for your iPod from the iTunes store.
I actually agree with the parent post, it's the consumer applications holding linux back but what I do disagree with is that it's not necessarily the professional level applications. Because quite frankly, I'd say the majority of people playing with photoshop are using it illegally anyway. But I'll tell you what one application is holding Linux back: iTunes. You can tell me I'm wrong, but when >70% of the population has a product that almost requires iTunes at the very least for game support and software updates, you need a computer that can run it.
Ubuntu on the server side is still a long ways away from being at the same level as RHEL. While it may be as stable and provide many of the same core technologies, RHEL has much better administration utilities and front-ends for server related components that you just can't find on Ubuntu. I think another dividing line on the server front is which variety of Linux you started off with. If you started on RedHat based systems then you're already familiar with the location of configuration files etc. As someone who tried switching to Ubuntu (and ended up staying with it for desktop use) it can take a lot of time to reacquaint yourself with the filesystem layout, new package manager, etc.
Well, you may not be able to "sell" something that infringes on Apple's patents, but I'm not sure how this limits a company from releasing a multi-touch/gesture capable interface and allowing the user to define their own gestures that are the same as Apple's. You know the Linux community will do it at the very least, they rip off every other interface idea (I mean that in the nicest of ways, but how many icon sets / window manager decorations have you seen that look like a blatant copyright violation ;-)). So selling a laptop with a multitouch trackpad and then allowing the user to activate some "apple" (in Linux we'd probably call it Aqua) default gestures seems within the limits to me, am I missing something legally?
It's clear that you're a fan of the Sony platform. As a long time Sony hardware fan I can't criticize you for that, but I think you underestimate the momentum that the XBox 360 still has moving forward. I don't care to look up numbers so yell at me for speculation if you want, but I went out looking to get a PS3/XBOX360 for Christmas and there were fortifications in the Best Buy stores made out of piles of PS3's. I was lucky to find an XBox 360 (other than the Arcade version) at any store. The DVD drive ended up going out on me in a couple of weeks (fulfilling my fear that the hardware would be crap), but I searched in vain for a replacement anyway. Every store in my state was out of stock on 360's other than the arcade version. I'm talking every Target, Gamestop, Best Buy, Walmart, EB Games, and Circuit City. I finally got one off of Amazon and they were out of stock the very next day.
I truly think that all 3 consoles will be around for a good while because I think all 3 of them are fulfilling their own niches. The Wii for the casual SD gamer, the PS3 for the bleeding tech PSP integrating HD gamer, and the 360 for the online multiplaying HD gamer who also likes being able to play media from computers/internet/removable USB drives. The 360's catalogue of games is far too large for it to disappear quietly, and with a 3 year hardware warranty against the RROD problem I don't think people are going to give up on them entirely. I chose them merely because they had the best online system. I could have gotten a PS3 but I don't know anyone else that has one and don't even know what game I would play online with it. With the 360 I have at least a half dozen friends with Halo 3 alone. But I digress.
I think Microsoft did fine in choosing to offer the HD-DVD route. It was cheap, had a decent initial industry backing, and allowed you to buy it when you were ready. Now they're in a position to transition to Blu-Ray if it seems prudent. I couldn't really care less.
You got modded as funny but I think this is the most insightful comment on this page and I was thinking the exact same thing. That's great if we can use TV-like waves to blanket a large area with low power, reasonable bandwidth internet access. But how the hell is the upload signal going to work? My homeowner's associate even tries to prevent us from having TV antennas on our roofs (which is against the law for them to prohibit, but that's another story). But if the signal really is pretty low power, maybe a small return signal can be sent using only a modest sized/powered home antenna, who knows?
As he states, he's using a jail-break version to make his video. Therefore, he can change the banner to say whatever he wants. It actually changes several times throughout the video showing 3G, WiMax, 700MHz and others. This is NOT a leak of a new version of the iPhone. Sorry, I would have been happy too.
Well I wasn't intending to troll, I'm far too busy to waste time with that. I'm just posing the observation that console prices are quickly approaching the prices of the games we play on them and wondering how other people feel about that. You and someone else have both posted that yes, that price does include "hardware". In the case of guitar hero III for the wii that means they give you a plastic controller shaped like a guitar with a few buttons on it. Worth $40? I'd wager not since it's really just using the Wiimote to do all the hard work.
But that point aside, I just find it interesting that we're heading in that direction. What will game prices be like for the next generation? $70 - $80 per game?
So the CEO of a game company that sells . . . oh let's start with Rock Band, for about $170 to run on a game console that he wants to cost $200. I'm not sure if this is a sign of good things (e.g., hardware costs coming down so you're only spending money on content), or content prices going up to compete with hardware costs. I mean, remember the day when your computer costs $2k and games were $30 to $40? Is that easier or harder to stomach when hardware costs are equivalent to only 3 or 4 games? I, for one, was a little outraged to find that Guitar Hero III for the Wii was $90. For what? Well, music licensing I guess, but still, $90 for a game.
In fact, I have. I have a Mac Pro at home and 2 mac pro servers at work. I administer all of them and have been unable to get them to spin up their fans beyond the 600 RPM's that they idle at. Specifically, my system at home is currently transcoding some video while running 4 threads of SETI@home. CPU A has a die temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit while CPU B has a die temp of 99. Ambient temperature in the office is around 72 degrees. The exhaust fan is at 600 RPM's, CPU fan is at 500, power supply is at 600, and hard drive is at 500. I'm running 3 internal 7200 RPM drives and an ATI x1900XT which contributes some of the heat to the hard drive area. The two systems at work are in more of a controlled environment with the A/C set to 68 and 40% relative humidity. One acts as the email/ftp/web/ldap server while the other is out main compilation system for development work but also doubles as a ldap replicator and file host. Both of them have also never spun their fans up beyond the levels I've indicated.
I do NOT have info on the eight core machines, but I think I've made my point that under moderate to heavy loads the Intel processors run fairly cool without the need for extravagant cooling solutions. If you still don't believe me, then I encourage you to go to your local Apple store, fire up a couple instances of terminal and your favorite infinite loop and stick your ear up to the case and tell me how long you stand there before you hear the system struggle to cool itself down.
Actually, one of the reasons that Apple jumped off of the PowerPC platform was BECAUSE of their power inefficiency. The G5 processors were incredibly power hungry, enough so that they could never get one cool enough to run in a laptop and actually offered the Mac Pro line with liquid cooling. Compare that to the new quad-core and eight-core mac pro's and dual core laptops that run very effectively with very minimal air cooling.
Your analogy isn't quite right. He's stating that receiving signals from extra-terrestrial beings is an all or nothing event and until you've received a signal the only progress you can report is: "We've searched X% of the sky, trying again." With science research like you propose, fusion and AI, incremental steps can be made to show progress. In the case of fusion, you can start by showing that you can create a fusion reaction. Then, that you can develop containment for it. Next, that you can keep a sustained reaction going. (For the record, all of these have been accomplished already and more so you might choose something else as an example next time, mind you that our first full scale fusion test reactor is under construction in France). For AI, you can demonstrate simple problem solving, things like finding the optimal choice amongst many possible solutions, simulated emotional responses, pain avoidance, and then novel situation problem solving through the integration of past experiences. Many of these have also been accomplished. In either case, there are incremental milestones that can be accomplished and documented throughout the process.
God I want to mod you up NC buddy, but you're already at 5 ;-)
OK, I concede that the price isn't as much of a factor. The problem is I can pay them $40-$50 / mo for a 256k line or get comcast/verizon at 6-10Mb for the same price. So it's only more $$ when you look at bandwith / cost.
Sometimes it's not even as simple as just changing the "brand" of your high speed internet. In our town there is also a local provider called TBC for DSL internet. However, if you dig deep enough you find out they are just reselling you a Verizon DSL line. Congrats on limiting the damage to one company so far, I hope that our options continue to increase ;-)
I have to agree with the other poster whose comment got modded down. While I agree that not buying services from these companies would hurt them (duh), it isn't feasible. In most parts of the country you don't have too many options for a) land telephone, b) internet access, c) cell phone w/ reception. Odds are that in order to get at least one of those three services you're going to have to pony up to Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint. T-Mobile and US Cellular have pretty poor reception where I am. Verizon and Comcast are the only internet providers (and that's really a lesser of two evils) unless you want to go wireless (satellite, etc, $$$). And Verizon is the only POTS provider. So the only way that I can hurt them is to cease my communication to the outside world.
The size of these companies and their control are beyond the scope of what consumers can affect. They muscle competition off of the playing field which has led to the helplessness of consumers at this point. But hey, it's part of the cycle. Another decade or so, after AT&T/Verizon/Sprint have all merged again and widened our collective sphincters a good couple of inches, maybe the governemtn will break them up and we'll start the whole cycle again.
Well, NTFS may be a major pain when it comes to fragmentation and journalling support, but it does have one of the best security systems out there in terms of cascading permissions. Most *NIX filesystems only provide you with three tiers of controls: owner, group, everyone. On XP/Vista/NT you can provide as many levels of permissions for as many users as you want with much finer control than just read, write, access. With this in mind, we shouldn't say that microsoft is completely insecure. It's much easier to secure a service that's proprietary in nature and runs on a single maintained backbone than it is to provide security for an OS with some near billion number of users on everything kind of crap hardware imaginable.
Now, I'm not proposing that Microsoft should be the ones in charge of such a project, in fact it makes me shudder at the thought. It would even sound better if they were just being contracted by one of the other organizations that was mentioned instead of the other way around. But if not MS, then who? You asked who does have more secure products and I'm not sure there's a good answer to that. Every OS has security vulnerabilities (as anyone on here will tell you). And most people will agree that those exploits aren't a huge concern when you only make up ~1-5% of the computer market.
In a situation where you're setting up a massive database of personal information, you immediately supercede any metric for target size and jump straight to the top of the "attack me" list. So which OS / Company / Organization should head such a product. Haha, or better yet, choose between microsoft and the government . . . you may not get a third option!
Actually, that's not far from the truth. It's long been known that buying a phone through the provider gets you a discount on the phone at the expense of not being the one who actually owns the phone with full rights, etc. It seems that any phone you buy at a discount becomes an unsupported timebomb as soon as you try and hack it to provide functionality that the carrier doesn't want you to have. I don't see why anyone thinks the iPhone would be any different.
One other comment that bears to be added, there aren't really and PC manufacturers today that are selling upgradable computers. That's not to say that you can't rip it open and do some dirty work, but you're almost certainly voiding any chance of warranty support that you have. Most laptops are this way, as well as desktops. Sure, you can open a Mac Pro and swap in an 8-core xeon setup for your 4-core, but don't go crying to an Apple store when something goes wrong. As far as iMac's go though, their very nature makes them difficult to upgrade since the design is based around compactness, not accessibility. When you have to disassemble a 20-24" LCD to get at inner components, it's hard to tell your customers that they can "upgrade" the computer on their own.
As a side note, since we're comparing "used" prices here, Mac Pro's start at $1899, not $2500+. And the Mac Mini's start at $429 refurbished and you can upgrade the memory, processor, and hard drive on that.
I was going to write a long post regarding this article but it looks like you covered it already. Good work, cause I couldn't agree more. The only reason that we see a linux distro preinstalled on Dell computers, for example, is because of the strides made by the Ubuntu team in creating a distro that is easy for a Windows-level user to sit down and interact with.
I'm the first to agree that in a high-tech-level setting Ubuntu has MANY shortcomings. As an example, it takes me about 5 seconds to get a RedHat based machine configured on our Kerberos network using authconfig. I spent a half hour with it (I'm no Kerberos expert), and I still can't get Ubuntu working correctly since I have to do everything manually. My point, however, is that NO home user is EVER going to want to set up Kerberos, so that's not what Ubuntu is geared for and I can't get upset with them for that. Same goes for partitioning in the installer. Anyone remember the options in the Windows installer? They're on the same level: let the installer wipe the drive and commit it to Linux, or set up a few paritions on your own and tell the installer which one it can use.
Lastly, I have to disagree with the author regarding the user account classifications. He claims, erroneously, that by allowing for the use of 'sudo', an attacker only needs one password to break a system, whereas with a root account he claims you need 2. Umm . . . hello . . . you still only need one password, root's password! Unless your savy enough to not allow root logins . . . It seems perfectly acceptable to me to provide those three levels of user accounts and even that is more than most people will need.
Over and over again people try and compare the efficiencies between two "seemingly" identical servers / machines. But truly, how can you declare a winner (and base it on something like a 5% efficiency margin) when the two machines are using different power supplies? A 600 Watt for the Intel, 500 Watt for the AMD. I can't find those models listed on Delta's website at quick glance, but it'd be a stretch to imagine that two different power supplies have the exact same efficiency curves. I mean, I'd believe if they were accurate to within maybe 3%, so now we're arguing over whether or not Intel and AMD are more than 2% different in efficiency? Come on people. The whitepaper does say they assume there might be a 1% difference between the two power supplies, but that's based on "eyeballing" the efficiency curves.
We know that Intel takes a hit with FB-DIMM memory especially as you add more memory modules.
Another inconsistency appears to be related to the case design, where the cases for the Intel machines appeared to be providing inadequate cooling for the memory modules, causing the system management controller to bump up fan speed considerably. So now we're comparing two systems with different power supplies and with different requirements for cooling which may or may not be related to the actual architecture but may be impacted by a design consideration made by the case manufacturer. How would these results change with different power supplies or a different case. Are the differences the same in a 2U case? A tower? Does it get worse? Better? I know that our Mac Pro's NEVER speed up the fans above the 500/600 RPM's that they bottom out at.
As noted by others, the paper is completely devoid of any discussion regarding CPU frequency / voltage scaling that may or may not be handled by the BIOS or Linux resident programs (cpuspeed daemon). It's possible they haven't even checked for it. As our company has both Intel and AMD linux boxes, I can testify that linux is very sensitive to motherboard/cpu combinations when it comes to cpu scaling and it's "possible" that this could be playing a MAJOR role in the idle performance values. It'd be nice to see it addressed.
Lastly, there's no discussion as to the optimizations made to the software being run on each of the boxes. Is the code compiled for each architecture individually taking into account support for 3DNow / SSE instructions, cache sizes, etc? Obviously more efficient or less efficient code execution would have a MAJOR impact on these studies, enough so that companies usually spend a large amount of time playing with compiler options to get the best performance on a given architecture. And when you're arguing over performance comparisons in the sub 20% difference arena, code efficiency should be addressed, especially if it's not a big commercial package that "everyone" in the industry would be using. Anyhoo, just my thoughts.
Unforunately, like most things in the enterprise, there will still be a demand for PATA for years to come. Hell, even Apple's current xServe RAID assemblies only use PATA drives and they're not alone. Enterprise tends to extend the life of things that most consumers just assume get rid of due to incredible age.