This is the best advice so far. A busy Yahoo!-Groups mailing list will attract a truckload of spam. On a low-volume list, you can watch the spam roll in after a handful of messages to the list. Whenever activity spikes like this, the spam to the group-subscribed email address cranks up a few notches until the activity level dies down again.
Domain registration is also very good advice. Most of the spam I receive comes in this way.
Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and other neo-cons were pushing for a second invasion of Iraq ten years ago.
They weren't looking for political and social pressure points in Iraq, they weren't pushing for the country to be broken into three ethnocentric states (against the preferences of our "allies" in the region), they were pushing for war. And when they came to power, they got war.
There were a lot of non-invasion possibilities when W came into office. Most of them were still viable after September 11, 2001. But they wouldn't result in massive public works projects (rebuild Iraq) or military hardware purchases (resupply and expand the military). Scientists aren't alone in their addiction to Pentagon funding...
Non-violence as a preferred method of problem solving didn't start or end in the US during the 1960's. This moral position - non-violence is better than violence - has some well-known proponents (Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, and so on) who were not involved in protesting the Vietnam war or the Clinton administration. The preference for non-violent conflict resolution is morally superior to the preference for violent conflict resolution.
By working for the Pentagon or a defense contracor, you might consider yourself neutral. You support people (the military services) who support policy made elsewhere. If you know that policy is immoral, you're knowingly contributing to that immoral position. If you know that policies are more likely to be immoral than moral, the position isn't that different.
As to building an effective defense - this isn't really a deterrent against suicidal fanatics. A 50%-more-bulletproof flak jacket or a 20%-more-accurate cruise missile is pretty irrelevant to someone blowing up a bridge or an embassy or [insert non-military target]. If there were a credible conventional or nuclear power threatening our security, your argument might make more sense.
Addressing the social/political/religious/economic problems which cause terrorism with military force and superior killing technology just doesn't make any sense. Violence begets violence. Hate begets hate. These are old concepts.
The idea that military force must be used to solve big problems is an unfounded assumption underpinning your argument. War doesn't have to happen. That's not idealism, it's just true. People committed to non-violence can do some amazing things.
Rumor has it that Microsoft licensing prevents a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine
Rumor may have it wrong.
PC's for Everyone in (Cambridge, Mass, US) offers pre-loaded Red Hat or SuSE or Windows 2000 or XP Home/Pro. I don't think they'd risk their Windows reseller status to build (I'm guessing) a low volume of Windows/Linux boxes for enthusiasts-who-don't-want-to-do-it-themselves.
They'll do dual-boot setups for an extra $49.
While the cost isn't trivial, and you pay for two operating systems, it might be useful for a corporate pilot, a QA environment, etc.
Small shops like this are good for giving you customized builds with good install procedures (properly routed cabling, OS+hardware testing, etc). Of course, they don't stock low-volume parts like 1GB DIMM's, but if you want to keep your costs down without sacrificing quality components, small vendors like this can be really great. I've bought six dual-athlon development servers from them and I couldn't be happier with the price/performance ratio.
There are alternatives to big vendors and build-it-yourself, but they aren't without trade-offs.
Reading of data is considerably faster since the controller reads the data from the drive that has a head closest to the data.
Two disks in a RAID 1 mirrored pair will not improve read performance over a single disk of the same type. The disk controller has no real information about the drive's physical geometry. So a RAID 1 controller cannot accurately determine which disk's heads are closer to the next data to be read.
There was a time when the hard disk controller knew about the actual physical layout of the disk - how many physical heads, how many cylinders, how many sectors, and so on.
But for many years, hard drives have obscured their physical characteristics from the disk controller. This was done to overcome BIOS and OS limitations on the number of addressable cylinders. You've probably heard of this development - Logical Block Addressing.
SCSI drives, however, have always used LBA addressing, which describes the disk as a linear, sequentially-numbered set of blocks. SCSI mode page commands can be used to get the physical specifications of the disk, but this is not used to read or write data; this is an artifact of the early days of SCSI, when a disk attached to a SCSI bus could just as well be an ST-506 or ESDI drive attached through a bridge (and therefore having a CHS configuration that was subject to change) as it could a native SCSI device. Because PCs use CHS addressing internally, the BIOS code on PC SCSI host adapters does CHS-to-LBA translation, and provides a set of CHS drive parameters that tries to match the total number of LBA blocks as closely as possible.
ATA drives can either use their native CHS parameters (mainly on early drives; most hard drives made since the early 1990s use multiple-zone recording, and thus don't have a set number of sectors per track), use a "translated" CHS profile (similar to what SCSI host adapters provide), or run in ATA LBA mode, as specified by ATA-2; LBA mode generally has to be requested explicitly by the host computer. ATA drives larger than 8 GB are always accessed by LBA, due to the 8GB limit described above.
Given these conditions, a controller (SCSI or ATA or SATA) is presented with sectors as a linear sequence. So when the controller receives the request for data at sector 20, it needs to determine "Is the distance from sector 10 to sector 20 further than 110 to 20?" The controller cannot really answer that question.
That's because it's a 1U rackmount server. What other 1U server packs in 4 drive bays, redundant power supplies and hot-plug PCI slots? And what brand and model are these "desktop quality" IDE drives? Or does a drive become desktop-quality just because it has an IDE board on the bottom instead of a SCSI board?"
The HP Proliant DL360 G3 can be fitted with dual power supplies, dual processors, has dual on-board gigabit nic's, up to 8 GB RAM and (only) two hot-plug SCSI Ultra-320 disk bays. I also like the 64MB on-board RAID controller. I've got six and I'd recommend them to anybody.
While SCSI, by itself, isn't necessarily better than IDE, you'd have a hard time finding a hot-pluggable, 15,000 RPM IDE drive.
I don't have anything against the XServe servers, but I don't think Apple is prepared to support enterprise users at the same level as HP, IBM or even Dell.
I attended Columbia till 1991 and you are only partially correct.
The Mac labs were full of Macs. Most liberal arts students (most of Columbia College) used the Mac labs exclusively.
The programming labs in the engineering school were full of IBM PC's running something with an X front-end.
The NeXT lab was full of a dozen NeXTmachines with big grayscale, display-postscript monitors and your choice of command shell underneath. Maybe you saw the NeXTmachines in the International Affairs building, upstairs from the Mac lab? The computers were black, the lab opened in 1990, there was a student purchase program for NeXTmachines - ring any bells? Optional WORM drives?
The terminal labs (in many dorms and scattered about) had DEC terminals connected to VAX systems.
All of these labs were connected to the internet. All of them. But there were no web browsers yet. It was all text-mode with Pine (I think) on a DEC VAX for email services. Everyone I knew in Engineering or the College had their own email address @columbia.edu. Maybe you just missed that boat.
...are there really that many truckers hauling around laptops?
There are indeed.
"There is a horrible misconception that truckers are technologically incompetent people," says Robert P. May, PNV's CEO. "In truth, they are independent, smart people who like to figure things out." In fact, May says, close to 25 percent of the country's truck drivers have their own laptops and 50 percent have computers at home.
Based on 2001 data, about 20 percent of truckers carried laptops in their trucks and 54 percent of those who owned and operated their own trucks carried laptops.
It's true, there may be a major architecture shift in the near future. I don't doubt that you've seen this before and your procurement strategy is sound. But I don't think the situation with new PowerPC's is particularly special.
Consider:
DDR-400 motherboards have just recently become available - is now the time to buy an Athlon XP system?
AMD-64 boards and processors are close at hand - should a prospective buyer wait?
Intel's Itanium2 processors will jump from 3MB to 6MB of L3 cache this year - should a prospective buyer wait for that revision?
nVidia and ATI are moving to GDDR3 RAM for their next generation graphics cards - should a prospectiver buyer wait for this leap in memory bandwidth?
nVidia's new graphics cards will migrate from the AGP8x interface to PCI-Express from Q4-2003 to Q1-2004 - should a prospective buyer make sure her motherboard purchases accomodate this forthcoming, untested, unreleased technology?
I agree that 64-bit processing across the Mac platform, when it happens, will be a big deal. It may even be the most important development in computer hardware this year. But it will be surrounded by many other important developments in computer hardware.
If the original poster is planning to select a hardware standard for the next twelve months, then it's probably worth waiting to see if the rumors are true (while doing other relevant research).
If we're talking about a discrete purchase, there are clear advantages to buying the OSX-capable hardware available today vs. sticking with older, slower, out-of-warranty hardware.
Hold off on purchasing new hardware for a few weeks to see if the 970 rumours are true. How dumb would it be to hold off this long only to purchase new hardware at the worst possible time?
"The present" is always the worst possible time to purchase new hardware.
"Three months from now" is a good time to buy new hardware.
Some consider "this time next year" to be an even better time to buy new hardware.
SBC Communication's claim of ownership for a common Web site formatting tool is based on a pair of patents, U.S. Patent No. 5,933,841, having a grant date of August 1999, and U.S. Patent No. 6,442,574, which issued three years later in 2002. Both patents cover a "structured document browser" having an invention date at least as early as May 1996, which is the filing date for both the original application that matured into the '841 patent and the continuation application that resulted in the '574 patent. The claimed browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized with embedded codes specifying the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to a set of icons which, when selected, will result in the browser displaying a section of the document structure corresponding to the selected icon, while preserving the user interface.
Didn't just about every Windows 3.x and Macintosh OS 6.x application with a settings/preferences/options window do just this? In, say, 1989?
Maybe someone, somewhere remembers Hypercard? This guy does.
Didn't ProComm Plus for Windows 3.1 have a BBS list with the features described above?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the subject or text of the original post could mention that.
-Don
You mean re-release, right?
-Don
Domain registration is also very good advice. Most of the spam I receive comes in this way.
-Don
- Don't plan on getting married. Your new wife/husband probably won't enjoy USAF accomodations as much as you do.
- Don't plan on raising children. You won't be able to afford clothing or food or school for them.
-donWolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and other neo-cons were pushing for a second invasion of Iraq ten years ago.
They weren't looking for political and social pressure points in Iraq, they weren't pushing for the country to be broken into three ethnocentric states (against the preferences of our "allies" in the region), they were pushing for war. And when they came to power, they got war.
There were a lot of non-invasion possibilities when W came into office. Most of them were still viable after September 11, 2001. But they wouldn't result in massive public works projects (rebuild Iraq) or military hardware purchases (resupply and expand the military). Scientists aren't alone in their addiction to Pentagon funding...
Non-violence as a preferred method of problem solving didn't start or end in the US during the 1960's. This moral position - non-violence is better than violence - has some well-known proponents (Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, and so on) who were not involved in protesting the Vietnam war or the Clinton administration. The preference for non-violent conflict resolution is morally superior to the preference for violent conflict resolution.
By working for the Pentagon or a defense contracor, you might consider yourself neutral. You support people (the military services) who support policy made elsewhere. If you know that policy is immoral, you're knowingly contributing to that immoral position. If you know that policies are more likely to be immoral than moral, the position isn't that different.
As to building an effective defense - this isn't really a deterrent against suicidal fanatics. A 50%-more-bulletproof flak jacket or a 20%-more-accurate cruise missile is pretty irrelevant to someone blowing up a bridge or an embassy or [insert non-military target]. If there were a credible conventional or nuclear power threatening our security, your argument might make more sense.
Addressing the social/political/religious/economic problems which cause terrorism with military force and superior killing technology just doesn't make any sense. Violence begets violence. Hate begets hate. These are old concepts.
The idea that military force must be used to solve big problems is an unfounded assumption underpinning your argument. War doesn't have to happen. That's not idealism, it's just true. People committed to non-violence can do some amazing things.
-Don
Rumor may have it wrong.
PC's for Everyone in (Cambridge, Mass, US) offers pre-loaded Red Hat or SuSE or Windows 2000 or XP Home/Pro. I don't think they'd risk their Windows reseller status to build (I'm guessing) a low volume of Windows/Linux boxes for enthusiasts-who-don't-want-to-do-it-themselves.
They'll do dual-boot setups for an extra $49.
While the cost isn't trivial, and you pay for two operating systems, it might be useful for a corporate pilot, a QA environment, etc.
Small shops like this are good for giving you customized builds with good install procedures (properly routed cabling, OS+hardware testing, etc). Of course, they don't stock low-volume parts like 1GB DIMM's, but if you want to keep your costs down without sacrificing quality components, small vendors like this can be really great. I've bought six dual-athlon development servers from them and I couldn't be happier with the price/performance ratio.
There are alternatives to big vendors and build-it-yourself, but they aren't without trade-offs.
-don
Reading of data is considerably faster since the controller reads the data from the drive that has a head closest to the data.
Two disks in a RAID 1 mirrored pair will not improve read performance over a single disk of the same type. The disk controller has no real information about the drive's physical geometry. So a RAID 1 controller cannot accurately determine which disk's heads are closer to the next data to be read.
There was a time when the hard disk controller knew about the actual physical layout of the disk - how many physical heads, how many cylinders, how many sectors, and so on.
But for many years, hard drives have obscured their physical characteristics from the disk controller. This was done to overcome BIOS and OS limitations on the number of addressable cylinders. You've probably heard of this development - Logical Block Addressing.
From http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#Operating _system_use_of_hard_disks:
SCSI drives, however, have always used LBA addressing, which describes the disk as a linear, sequentially-numbered set of blocks. SCSI mode page commands can be used to get the physical specifications of the disk, but this is not used to read or write data; this is an artifact of the early days of SCSI, when a disk attached to a SCSI bus could just as well be an ST-506 or ESDI drive attached through a bridge (and therefore having a CHS configuration that was subject to change) as it could a native SCSI device. Because PCs use CHS addressing internally, the BIOS code on PC SCSI host adapters does CHS-to-LBA translation, and provides a set of CHS drive parameters that tries to match the total number of LBA blocks as closely as possible.
ATA drives can either use their native CHS parameters (mainly on early drives; most hard drives made since the early 1990s use multiple-zone recording, and thus don't have a set number of sectors per track), use a "translated" CHS profile (similar to what SCSI host adapters provide), or run in ATA LBA mode, as specified by ATA-2; LBA mode generally has to be requested explicitly by the host computer. ATA drives larger than 8 GB are always accessed by LBA, due to the 8GB limit described above.
Given these conditions, a controller (SCSI or ATA or SATA) is presented with sectors as a linear sequence. So when the controller receives the request for data at sector 20, it needs to determine "Is the distance from sector 10 to sector 20 further than 110 to 20?" The controller cannot really answer that question.
-Don
The HP Proliant DL360 G3 can be fitted with dual power supplies, dual processors, has dual on-board gigabit nic's, up to 8 GB RAM and (only) two hot-plug SCSI Ultra-320 disk bays. I also like the 64MB on-board RAID controller. I've got six and I'd recommend them to anybody.
While SCSI, by itself, isn't necessarily better than IDE, you'd have a hard time finding a hot-pluggable, 15,000 RPM IDE drive.
I don't have anything against the XServe servers, but I don't think Apple is prepared to support enterprise users at the same level as HP, IBM or even Dell.
-Don
Surely the moderators want to avoid obscure, insider references, don't they?
-Don
The Mac labs were full of Macs. Most liberal arts students (most of Columbia College) used the Mac labs exclusively.
The programming labs in the engineering school were full of IBM PC's running something with an X front-end.
The NeXT lab was full of a dozen NeXTmachines with big grayscale, display-postscript monitors and your choice of command shell underneath. Maybe you saw the NeXTmachines in the International Affairs building, upstairs from the Mac lab? The computers were black, the lab opened in 1990, there was a student purchase program for NeXTmachines - ring any bells? Optional WORM drives?
The terminal labs (in many dorms and scattered about) had DEC terminals connected to VAX systems.
All of these labs were connected to the internet. All of them. But there were no web browsers yet. It was all text-mode with Pine (I think) on a DEC VAX for email services. Everyone I knew in Engineering or the College had their own email address @columbia.edu. Maybe you just missed that boat.
Then again, you graduated. So I guess we're even.
-Don
There are indeed.
"There is a horrible misconception that truckers are technologically incompetent people," says Robert P. May, PNV's CEO. "In truth, they are independent, smart people who like to figure things out." In fact, May says, close to 25 percent of the country's truck drivers have their own laptops and 50 percent have computers at home.
from Buddy for the Long Haul
July 1, 2000 Issue of CIO Magazine
and, a little more current
Based on 2001 data, about 20 percent of truckers carried laptops in their trucks and 54 percent of those who owned and operated their own trucks carried laptops.
from Company Trucks Along
Austin Business Journal, June 2, 2003
It's true, there may be a major architecture shift in the near future. I don't doubt that you've seen this before and your procurement strategy is sound. But I don't think the situation with new PowerPC's is particularly special.
Consider:
I agree that 64-bit processing across the Mac platform, when it happens, will be a big deal. It may even be the most important development in computer hardware this year. But it will be surrounded by many other important developments in computer hardware.
If the original poster is planning to select a hardware standard for the next twelve months, then it's probably worth waiting to see if the rumors are true (while doing other relevant research).
If we're talking about a discrete purchase, there are clear advantages to buying the OSX-capable hardware available today vs. sticking with older, slower, out-of-warranty hardware.
-Don
"The present" is always the worst possible time to purchase new hardware.
"Three months from now" is a good time to buy new hardware.
Some consider "this time next year" to be an even better time to buy new hardware.
-Don
Hmm. I was joking, but perhaps the hyperbole wasn't strong enough for /.
I can just imagine all the inside Star Trek jokes and Linux references on his new show.
Who says he's typecast as Wesley Crusher? Go Wil!
SBC Communication's claim of ownership for a common Web site formatting tool is based on a pair of patents, U.S. Patent No. 5,933,841, having a grant date of August 1999, and U.S. Patent No. 6,442,574, which issued three years later in 2002. Both patents cover a "structured document browser" having an invention date at least as early as May 1996, which is the filing date for both the original application that matured into the '841 patent and the continuation application that resulted in the '574 patent. The claimed browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized with embedded codes specifying the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to a set of icons which, when selected, will result in the browser displaying a section of the document structure corresponding to the selected icon, while preserving the user interface.
Didn't just about every Windows 3.x and Macintosh OS 6.x application with a settings/preferences/options window do just this? In, say, 1989?
Maybe someone, somewhere remembers Hypercard? This guy does.
Didn't ProComm Plus for Windows 3.1 have a BBS list with the features described above?
You could do the same thing in NextStep, especially in their network browser. See Dummies guide to NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP or NeXTstation - Timeline & Specifications.
Someone at MuseumTour.com should jump on the prior-art side of this argument...
-Don