The largest RAID I've ever set up was 750gb, a RAID 5 of four 250gb drives for $1700, so the following is based on knowledge rather than experience.
If 750gb is not enough, an Apple Xserve RAID will probably meet your needs perfectly, holding up to fourteen 500gb drives for a cost of $13k. That's 7tb with no redundancy, 6tb with minimal redundancy (RAID 50), or 3.5tb with good redundancy (RAID 10).
If 3.5tb is not enough, and you like to live on the edge, I see the possibility of cheaply fitting 48 500gb drives into a single server, using a mix of software and hardware RAIDs to get 12tb of redundant storage, enough for 6000 photo sessions (he does several sessions a day right?). You'll need extra power supplies, and special mounting equipment for all those drives. You get four 12 disk SATA RAID controllers and put them into one system. A software RAID 0 of hardware RAID 10's will probably give better performance with less disk activity, while a software RAID 5 of hardware RAID 50's will eliminate the possibility of two or three drive failures breaking the system. The whole thing can be had for about $20k plus labor, and $5k per year to replace failing drives. That's a lot cheaper per terabyte than the Xserve, but you don't get warranty coverage, tech support, or ease of installation/maintenance.
A cheap, sane alternative would be to compress your photos. JPEG really is good enough for most high quality so long as you disable chroma subsampling, which many photo editing programs have enabled by default. Even PNG can losslessly compress photos a bit, and supports 48 bit if the photographer is crazy about preserving those tiny details that are more likely to be noise than anything else.
What you do is: The person publishing the benchmark does not use Oracle. The Oracle user running the benchmark remains anonymous.
But there are many ways that Oracle (or any other database software) can be made to perform badly in a benchmark that would be no fault of the software. If someone wants to benchmark against Oracle, Oracle wants to make sure they do it correctly, or else not at all. If they didn't have that clause, Microsoft would have dozens of studies and benchmarks saying that Oracle is slower than SQL Server under certain setups, just like those bullshit VeriTest benchmarks they have against crippled setups of Red Hat, Apache, and Samba.
I still look forward to the day when Apple has a good desktop OS.
I run Linux at home and Windows at work (except our servers, which mostly run Linux). There's nothing especially wrong with Linux on the desktop. People expect it to feel like Windows, do everything the Windows way, perfectly run apps written for Windows, contain copyrighted Windows media codecs, break DMCA protected DRM schemes, and violate several well-enforced software patents, all out of the box, for free, or else to them it's crap. A Linux distro that tries to answer those complaints will either be expensive or illegal.
Our servers run the free RHEL clone CentOS. I haven't really had a moment where I wished I could call tech support, because so far everything's been rather straightforward and problem free, and I'm not doing anything especially tricky. The main differences from the real RHEL are the branding and that they suggest using yum instead of up2date.
I really wouldn't mind sending money in Red Hat's direction, except that I'd never be able to justify it nowadays. They charge too much for something I already get for free, and do not accept small donations AFAIK.
Windows Explorer loads before the startup items begin to load, so it's pretty safe to assume that disabling those startup items won't prevent your system from booting to a working desktop. You're unlikely to make it so that you can't easily reenable them.
I first used Red Hat 6.2, and while it was interesting, I didn't really learn a lot about how it worked. Slackware was the first distro that I actually spent a lot of time with. I installed it on a couple home computers and a previously unused server at work. Nowadays, I use mostly Ubuntu and CentOS (RHEL clone), but I do nearly all my administration work from the command line. Slackware is the most logical of the Linux distro's I've tried, and therefore very good for learning. Not too suitable for desktops though. Got a lot of SIGSEGV crashes when I tried KDE on it.
I still hate to use vi though. It's very unintuitive, and sometimes it'll slightly corrupt text files, saving something that does not match what it displayed on the screen or the edits I made. I don't care much for emacs either.
For users behind a firewall, who also run an unpopular browser and email program, every virus must be installed manually. If you don't install viruses, you have little to worry about. In 10 years, my systems have gotten one virus, installed by a family member who used my computer to check their email in Outlook Express, and it was easy to remove.
People who run virus scanners tend to develop a false sense of security, and will catch more viruses in the end than someone who simply knows better than to take risks, and their apps will take longer to start. The cure is worse than the problem. A malfunctioning virus scanner will run your system performance into the ground. The few months that I ran Norton Antivirus, and the couple months that I ran AVG, I had more freezes and other slowness than ever, and they never stopped a single virus because there was never anything to stop.
I was assuming they might have a poor connection. It turns out that if you're too far out to get cable, you're probably too far out to get a good quality phone line too. Back when I had dialup, I regularly connected at 19.2k with my 56k modem, with 10-30% packet loss. Random disconnects about every hour. Occasional 20 second pauses where no packets got through. After I moved, sure, I probably could have gotten 48k with very rare packet loss, but why ever use dialup when you can have cable for the same price?
It'll probably only take you 2-3 days to download. It's 541 mb, and BitTorrent downloads are resumable. You can also try having a friend download and burn it to CD.
Despite the small sample size, I think most of the error was skew/bias. 1000 Linux admins still would have taken longer with the backward set of tasks they gave them. They dictated that certain tasks should be done the wrong way. Naturally, being required to do something the wrong way will sometimes cause problems.
Most of it won't run on Mac either. It's not their fault.
Sometimes I get lucky with wine. I generally don't try to make my Linux systems into fake Windows systems though. I just find similar Linux software which meets my needs. Nothing will ever run Windows programs as good as Windows.
affect n.
Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: "The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect."
I reinstall my primary desktop about every 3 months, and it runs Linux. I mostly reinstall out of boredom or curiosity. There's always some other distro I'd like to try for a while. I can't do that with Windows. There's just Windows XP, or something older.
Run msconfig. Despite what your better judgement might say, you can safely disable everything in the startup tab. Then glance through the list and recheck anything that you can both identity and wish to have running in the background.
Other small speedups: Switch to the classic win2k theme. If your wallpaper is a gif or jpeg, replace it with a bmp and disable active desktop. For anything other than bmps, it uses Internet Explorer to render your desktop. Get more ram. If less than about 20% disk free, delete stuff you don't need and then defrag. Disable window animations and other eye candy. Check for malware. Install and run ShellExView. Some programs install shell extensions which can (but not usually) cause slowdowns and pauses in Windows Explorer. It should color code items depending on if they come with windows, if they are known, if they are known to be bad, or if they are unknown. I encountered a system where a Eudora shellexecute hook was causing the system to freeze for 2 minutes whenever you tried to start a program. Disable the indexing service. Disable/uninstall your virus scanner, if you're the type who never installs viruses. 16bit color is sometimes faster. You'll have to test for yourself.
Sometimes I get lucky with this one: In control panel->hardware->device manager, open the properties for the "Primary IDE Channel" and see whether it's in DMA or PIO mode. If it's in PIO mode, right click the "Primary IDE Channel" and click remove/uninstall, and reboot. I've encountered several systems where this was the cause of major slowdown. Windows occasionally encounters timeouts reading from the hard drive, and sometimes mistakingly assumes that stepping down to a slower transfer mode will solve the problem. I see it happen most on systems that go to sleep a lot. Microsoft's website says it's fixed, and shouldn't happen much at all in the future, but you'll still need to do the fix I described on systems that already have the problem.
Some people suggest removing System Restore. I've had occasions where it helped out a lot, like when a Microsoft Windows Update badly broke my system, so I can't recommend disabling it unless you don't mind the occasional reinstall.
I'm typing this on Linux, so some of the above instructions might be slightly off, but are generally correct.
Slashdot Mirror
The largest RAID I've ever set up was 750gb, a RAID 5 of four 250gb drives for $1700, so the following is based on knowledge rather than experience.
If 750gb is not enough, an Apple Xserve RAID will probably meet your needs perfectly, holding up to fourteen 500gb drives for a cost of $13k. That's 7tb with no redundancy, 6tb with minimal redundancy (RAID 50), or 3.5tb with good redundancy (RAID 10).
If 3.5tb is not enough, and you like to live on the edge, I see the possibility of cheaply fitting 48 500gb drives into a single server, using a mix of software and hardware RAIDs to get 12tb of redundant storage, enough for 6000 photo sessions (he does several sessions a day right?). You'll need extra power supplies, and special mounting equipment for all those drives. You get four 12 disk SATA RAID controllers and put them into one system. A software RAID 0 of hardware RAID 10's will probably give better performance with less disk activity, while a software RAID 5 of hardware RAID 50's will eliminate the possibility of two or three drive failures breaking the system. The whole thing can be had for about $20k plus labor, and $5k per year to replace failing drives. That's a lot cheaper per terabyte than the Xserve, but you don't get warranty coverage, tech support, or ease of installation/maintenance.
A cheap, sane alternative would be to compress your photos. JPEG really is good enough for most high quality so long as you disable chroma subsampling, which many photo editing programs have enabled by default. Even PNG can losslessly compress photos a bit, and supports 48 bit if the photographer is crazy about preserving those tiny details that are more likely to be noise than anything else.
What you do is:
The person publishing the benchmark does not use Oracle.
The Oracle user running the benchmark remains anonymous.
But there are many ways that Oracle (or any other database software) can be made to perform badly in a benchmark that would be no fault of the software. If someone wants to benchmark against Oracle, Oracle wants to make sure they do it correctly, or else not at all. If they didn't have that clause, Microsoft would have dozens of studies and benchmarks saying that Oracle is slower than SQL Server under certain setups, just like those bullshit VeriTest benchmarks they have against crippled setups of Red Hat, Apache, and Samba.
I still look forward to the day when Apple has a good desktop OS.
I run Linux at home and Windows at work (except our servers, which mostly run Linux). There's nothing especially wrong with Linux on the desktop. People expect it to feel like Windows, do everything the Windows way, perfectly run apps written for Windows, contain copyrighted Windows media codecs, break DMCA protected DRM schemes, and violate several well-enforced software patents, all out of the box, for free, or else to them it's crap. A Linux distro that tries to answer those complaints will either be expensive or illegal.
Our servers run the free RHEL clone CentOS. I haven't really had a moment where I wished I could call tech support, because so far everything's been rather straightforward and problem free, and I'm not doing anything especially tricky. The main differences from the real RHEL are the branding and that they suggest using yum instead of up2date.
I really wouldn't mind sending money in Red Hat's direction, except that I'd never be able to justify it nowadays. They charge too much for something I already get for free, and do not accept small donations AFAIK.
Firefox simply never releases memory, AFAIK. But it'll reuse the memory.
Almost nobody who says they're intoxicated online really is.
Very likely never. You'll have to wait for the next major release, or install "unstable" packages.
Google's New Free Anonymous Online Dating Service.
Finally, I can talk dirty to call-center chicks with complete anonymity, without paying a dime.
[*] Leave copy of mail on server.
Delete after [ x ] days.
Windows Explorer loads before the startup items begin to load, so it's pretty safe to assume that disabling those startup items won't prevent your system from booting to a working desktop. You're unlikely to make it so that you can't easily reenable them.
I first used Red Hat 6.2, and while it was interesting, I didn't really learn a lot about how it worked. Slackware was the first distro that I actually spent a lot of time with. I installed it on a couple home computers and a previously unused server at work. Nowadays, I use mostly Ubuntu and CentOS (RHEL clone), but I do nearly all my administration work from the command line. Slackware is the most logical of the Linux distro's I've tried, and therefore very good for learning. Not too suitable for desktops though. Got a lot of SIGSEGV crashes when I tried KDE on it.
I still hate to use vi though. It's very unintuitive, and sometimes it'll slightly corrupt text files, saving something that does not match what it displayed on the screen or the edits I made. I don't care much for emacs either.
For users behind a firewall, who also run an unpopular browser and email program, every virus must be installed manually. If you don't install viruses, you have little to worry about. In 10 years, my systems have gotten one virus, installed by a family member who used my computer to check their email in Outlook Express, and it was easy to remove.
People who run virus scanners tend to develop a false sense of security, and will catch more viruses in the end than someone who simply knows better than to take risks, and their apps will take longer to start. The cure is worse than the problem. A malfunctioning virus scanner will run your system performance into the ground. The few months that I ran Norton Antivirus, and the couple months that I ran AVG, I had more freezes and other slowness than ever, and they never stopped a single virus because there was never anything to stop.
I hear the graphics are pretty.
I was assuming they might have a poor connection. It turns out that if you're too far out to get cable, you're probably too far out to get a good quality phone line too. Back when I had dialup, I regularly connected at 19.2k with my 56k modem, with 10-30% packet loss. Random disconnects about every hour. Occasional 20 second pauses where no packets got through. After I moved, sure, I probably could have gotten 48k with very rare packet loss, but why ever use dialup when you can have cable for the same price?
It'll probably only take you 2-3 days to download. It's 541 mb, and BitTorrent downloads are resumable. You can also try having a friend download and burn it to CD.
Did you at least watch it until the Babylon 5 crossover?
Try a Sharpie!
Fighting day after day to defend impressionable children from inappropriate, uh, role models.
Despite the small sample size, I think most of the error was skew/bias. 1000 Linux admins still would have taken longer with the backward set of tasks they gave them. They dictated that certain tasks should be done the wrong way. Naturally, being required to do something the wrong way will sometimes cause problems.
Most of it won't run on Mac either. It's not their fault.
Sometimes I get lucky with wine. I generally don't try to make my Linux systems into fake Windows systems though. I just find similar Linux software which meets my needs. Nothing will ever run Windows programs as good as Windows.
There were perhaps a dozen slashdot articles on this already. We even interviewed the guy. Now we're back to article #2.
Maybe if the gun came preloaded, with the safety off.
affect
n.
Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: "The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect."
I reinstall my primary desktop about every 3 months, and it runs Linux. I mostly reinstall out of boredom or curiosity. There's always some other distro I'd like to try for a while. I can't do that with Windows. There's just Windows XP, or something older.
Run msconfig. Despite what your better judgement might say, you can safely disable everything in the startup tab. Then glance through the list and recheck anything that you can both identity and wish to have running in the background.
Other small speedups:
Switch to the classic win2k theme.
If your wallpaper is a gif or jpeg, replace it with a bmp and disable active desktop. For anything other than bmps, it uses Internet Explorer to render your desktop.
Get more ram.
If less than about 20% disk free, delete stuff you don't need and then defrag.
Disable window animations and other eye candy.
Check for malware.
Install and run ShellExView. Some programs install shell extensions which can (but not usually) cause slowdowns and pauses in Windows Explorer. It should color code items depending on if they come with windows, if they are known, if they are known to be bad, or if they are unknown. I encountered a system where a Eudora shellexecute hook was causing the system to freeze for 2 minutes whenever you tried to start a program.
Disable the indexing service.
Disable/uninstall your virus scanner, if you're the type who never installs viruses.
16bit color is sometimes faster. You'll have to test for yourself.
Sometimes I get lucky with this one: In control panel->hardware->device manager, open the properties for the "Primary IDE Channel" and see whether it's in DMA or PIO mode. If it's in PIO mode, right click the "Primary IDE Channel" and click remove/uninstall, and reboot. I've encountered several systems where this was the cause of major slowdown. Windows occasionally encounters timeouts reading from the hard drive, and sometimes mistakingly assumes that stepping down to a slower transfer mode will solve the problem. I see it happen most on systems that go to sleep a lot. Microsoft's website says it's fixed, and shouldn't happen much at all in the future, but you'll still need to do the fix I described on systems that already have the problem.
Some people suggest removing System Restore. I've had occasions where it helped out a lot, like when a Microsoft Windows Update badly broke my system, so I can't recommend disabling it unless you don't mind the occasional reinstall.
I'm typing this on Linux, so some of the above instructions might be slightly off, but are generally correct.