I mean, yes, technically it is a dupe, and its obviously adwords spam that Taco should have stopped (I think he lets timothy post using his account now)...
But its the first time I've seen this story on slashdot. Its not a dupe for me simply because I've blocked several of the retarded editors, one of which approved the previous submission of this story.
So yea, it is technically a dupe, but an expected one since most people avoid whatever douche bag editor posted the previous version. Seems though that Taco now needs to be added to the douche bag editor list for contributing spam himself.
Really? I'm a fanboy because I'm confident that the device will be something I want based on my experience with the first couple I've owned?
Yea, I guess I am.
I need a new phone, my current one is a iPhone 3G ( not 3GS) that is physically broken in multiple ways. I would have bought an iPhone 4, but the next one is right around the corner and so far, the new releases have always been wanted so it seems logical to wait for the next model at this point since my current on is 3 years old... I don't want to start out behind the curve.
Samba, due to the switch to GPLv3 is no longer something Apple wants anything at all to do with. That kinda knocks a hole into your 'already developed' since they no longer consider that software to be acceptable to them.
why not just go Linux, since it's pretty much the same posix compliant *nix system.
Except its not.
Linux is not posix compliant, a few distros are close, but those cost you as much as an OSX box.
Linux is not UNIX, it never will be, it doesn't want to be. It intentionally goes against the UNIX standard for its own reasons (not saying good or bad, its just not trying to be UNIX compliant). OSX is a certified UNIX, one of the few operating systems left that can claim that status. Certainly not the only one though, pretty much all the real server OSes are UNIX compliant.
And FreeBSD is far more like OSX than Linux will ever be... since you know, OSX is based a great deal on the FBSD 4.x user land, both of which are doing their absolute best to get away from GNU/GPL based software as quickly as possible.
You really don't know much about any of the things you mentioned do you?
Well, I can think of three. FreeBSD performs better than XNU on the same hardware - several orders of magnitude better in anything that makes heavy use of pthread mutexes (at least in 10.6).
If you're using pthreads in 10.6, you're doing it wrong. You should be using GCD related primatives, which will run circles around pthreads.
You can pick up a 1U server with RAID and a redundant PSU for about £200. In Apple-land, that buys you half a Mac Mini, with one disk and one PSU.
For $400? I'd put my data on the half a mac mini will before I'd put any data on a 1U server with raid and redundant PSU for that price. It can not possibly be quality hardware for that rate. That thing will be an over heating death trap with 'redundantly unstable power supplies'
Yea, making things harder to use is always the right thing to do.
Its rather retarded to think this is a good thing, I for the life of me can't understand why people prefer command line to GUI.
I completely understand preferring command line to SHITTY GUI, which is what it was, but you're just an idiot if you think the command line is better.
Not sure about what you're expecting from the config files as far as documentation, its not like they are different in OSX than say... any other OS... considering the servers are all standard OSS software anyway. You've got the same documentation in OSX as you do in Linux.
Mail.app + iCal.app + Address Book.app + something I'm missing I'm sure give you pretty much all the functionality of Outlook including the ability to use plugins (although plugins are unofficial)
That combination with Google Apps works great since both Google and Apple use standard protocols for everything and though they are seperate apps they integrate well with each other.
Can you explain why I can search gmail in milliseconds, but exchange takes an hour?
Well, A) Your Exchange server is fucked up. I search a 16 GB exchange mailbox far faster than that, but yes far slower than Google because...
B) Google indexes the ever living fuck out of your messages when they come in the door in order to serve you adds when you view them. Google sacrifices disk space for search speed to facilitate their business model, which is a lot different than your IT department, who isn't throwing ads at you.
Can you also explain why it's unusable over a mid-latency link (say 200-600ms)?
You or some other dumbass in your organization turned off caching in Outlook would be my guess. No reason why it doesn't work, since well, it works for lots of other people. See item A above.
Is it that they have more, or openly admit to and fix more?
I'm asking seriously, as an Apple owner, I'm aware of the statistics and that OSX is not at the top of the ladder in security.
I don't have a problem with exploit count when you're forging unknown territory, new ideas are going to be abused in new ways that we can't always see coming no matter how good we are.
I'm more concerned with what the chance of those things causing me problems than how many their are.
I don't worry about mac exploits for the same reason I don't on Windows, I don't put myself in harms way, and I admit, I also believe that OSX (just like Linux) is a much smaller profit to hax0rs than Windows, so they aren't going to waste their time with me. Its not cost effective to exploit me or a Linux box (desktop Linux, servers are obviously much more common and a valid target). We all know it can be done, on both, almost as easy as windows using 'user exploits' (i.e. make the stupid user run something that infects them rather than an actual exploit)
Which is a distinct possibility if you end up with a shitty chinese counterfeit. I'm all for protecting idiots from that, as I'm liable to be on the airplane with some moron who tried to find the cheapest fucking battery they could, which they ordered direct from china since we'd never allow that sort of shit to be sold here.
Second, if you can pay $2500 for a laptop, you can pay $100 every couple of years for a new battery from Apple, they really aren't THAT much more expensive, even if they are ripping you off. I'm not against others companies selling ACCEPTABLE batteries.
And, why can't we just have standard-size batteries anyway? That and standard size oil filters while we're at it...
Sure, we can do that, and your iPod will have the same battery as say... my RC heli or my rc cars, or my laptop. And I seriously doubt you want to put the oil filter on either one of my vehicles on your car, unless you like over kill. Between my big ass truck with matching big ass oil filter, and my sports car with its high flow rate requirements, I'm fairly certain you don't want to have large portions of your car redesigned in order to make room for them considering that are probably both far larger than yours (assuming typical passenger car).
The point? We have standard sized batteries where we can, but different requirements require different components. Part of the design of these batteries is just FITTING INTO THE SPACE PROVIDED. A lot of laptop batteries are built to fit, the laptop is not designed around the battery, the battery is designed to fit in the space the laptop has available. Standard sizes would change the design requirements. Apple specifically cares about form, I don't think they are completely form over function, but I'll admit they seem to be pretty close, so you're never going to see Apple give up form for standard.
In principle I am 100% in agreement with your post in every way. I can not stress how much I agree with you in principle. Its just not possible from a practical perspective, and companies being greedy makes it worse.
A virus that kills the host before it can spread is a shitty virus. Blaster never wanted to kill the host, which is about all you can accomplish with this, temporarily kill the host.
My mbp runs for about 5 hours playing eve online without external power. Doing normal work is much better, web browsing will get me 10 from a full charge. I don't have a reason to swap batteries, no bullet point needed, there is only a problem if I go for days without power. Which happens when I go camping, intentionally getting away from technology... No where in the civilized world have I ever run out of power on my mbp.
Perhaps you should stop buying shitty laptops that require a nuclear pile to run more than an hour or two?
That's the first part of you answer. Why? Because it has to. You don't understand how these batteries work.
Making it updatable is a convience feature. This problem can be fixed... Via a firmware update, no need to physically take the device to Apple to get it replaced, just install OSX 10.6.9 or 10.7.1 and it's no longer an issue.
I don't want to send my battery off to get a silly bug fixed.
For the record: you need root or physical battery access to do this. So this is another one of those, oh look when someone has owned you... They can do bad things. No shit. The battery is the least of my concerns.
The hacked fix is easy. OSX just verifies the firmware at boot and fixes it it doesn't verify. So the worst thing this can do? Make you need to plugin a power cord to boot.
If you didn't read the article:
"I started out thinking I wanted to see if a bad guy could make your laptop blow up. But that didn't happen," he said. "There are all kinds of things engineers build into these batteries to make them safe, and this is just one of them. I don't know if you could really melt the thing down."
The firmware is what makes it work. A simple passive circuit won't work for shit here. The controller plans for the future and considers the past. It looks at heat build up, charge rate, measures charge hold and internal resistance, and all sorts of other things to make the most out of the battery.
This processor also makes sure that the voltage and current into the battery are consistent because when it isn't... These batteries burst into flames! No bullshit, charge them or discharge them in the wrong way even a little and you have a fire.
I race rc cars, I have refused to use a non Smart chargers since 1996. The advantages are mind blowing. Now days we use lithium polymer batteries. You can not charge them with a dumb charger, they will explode. Even these batteries, the good ones anyway have built in micro controllers for safety, to disable bad cells or abort a charge/discharge if the cells become unbalanced or obviously about to do something bad.
Thats not a charge accident, but the broke the case, removed the safety circuit then over discharged it... Ie they dead shorted it with all the protections removed.
I'm of course assuming you aren't making this silly statement because you don't understand what the word firmware means. Firmware is just another name for software that the user generally doesn't mess with. Examples: pc bios or efi, video card bios, smbus bios, hard drive bios, carom bios. All of them use firmware. If you have a programable component in the circuit, you have firmware. The only electric device in my home I can think of without firmware are the incandescent bulbs above our shower. Even our toaster and blender have firmware.
For one thing, Amazon provides you with "99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year"
Wrong, they ADVERTISE that.
They've proven this year already they can not possibly maintain such a record, they will be unable to make such a claim for several years to come... unless they just ignore previous years performance... and if you do that, you're an idiot.
Marketing fluff != reality. Amazon isn't anywhere near what they claim to be. Useful? Sure. Living up to their marketing? Not unless you your math somehow lets you get 99.9999999% reliability when you're down for a couple of days straight.
At 99.99% you have less than an hour of downtime at your hands per year. Amazon will take decades before than can legitimately again claim 99.99% reliability. Ignoring previous events is just fucking retarded so this 'given year' shit is just a 'we don't actually mean what we say, but if we twist the words JUST RIGHT, idiots will believe its REALLY safe regardless of actual evidence to the contrary being all over the news'
For reference however, Amazon claims 99.95%, which is roughly 4.5 hours... so lets see, given that they were down for over... oh I donno some were down over 36 for sure (waving my hand being one of them) which means... they need about 8 years of absolutely flawless service before they can legitimately claim 99.95%.
My servers are 100% reliable over any give period that they are online and functional. Isn't marketing bullshit fun?! And actually, my servers are more reliable than amazons, I've never in my life had a critical server/service down for an hour that wasn't planned well in advance. I admit, some of that is luck, and I'll probably get struck by lightening (or my servers will) for saying it, but if Amazon impresses you, you should not be making IT related decisions for anyone.
I do know some companies with projects who's design documents and related materials easily exceed terabytes per project.
Think about a project like the space shuttle, an Airbus 380, or a big ass Boeing jumbo jet.
You and I aren't going to be accessing those projects (well, I'm not, maybe you get lucky enough to work with some of those guys) but there are plenty of engineers who would have a reason to do so. I've seen far larger stores than this at a company which designs large aircraft for that very purpose.
Wise men learned long ago that when sharing large amounts of files... you mail a hard drive to someone.
My friends and I have a large drive that rotates between a few of us. When you get the drive, you pull all the new stuff off of it, and put all of your new stuff on it, then ship the drive to the next person. Continue. Works even better when several of the people on the list all work together so there isn't any mail time between updates.
We could easily fill that array up in a couple of weeks with no Internet connection between all of us.
Let see... first thing I see when I click on hard drives on new egg is a 3TB drive for $180.
So.
135/3 = 45 45 * $180 = 8100
Thats just drives, no raid, no controllers, no chassis/cass.
With more digging I find a 5400 RPM drive for 139... so...
45 * 140 = 6300, but still just the drives... and no RAID.
Can you find cheaper drives? I'm sure, I spent all of about 10 seconds looking, but I doubt you're going to want to.
You guys are all wondering around arguing over the silliness of their slashvertisment (which it most certainly is) and various software implementations that would take the place of theirs and be better (which I don't disagree with one bit) but... you entirely over looked the fact that their statements are bold faced lies. They didn't build it for that much. They may have ignored a bunch of costs and said 'we built it for X amount', but thats like saying the space program only cost American Tax payers the cost of shutting it down because we already did the other stuff so it doesn't count against the cost!
Slashdot Mirror
Stalingrad wasn't named after Stalin.
Stalin named Stalingrad. He changed the name.
Thats entirely different than other people changing a name because they think highly of you.
The fear of being 'disappeared' causing a name change is not impressive or even the same thing as what happened to Lucas.
Anything that blocks signal just because of how you hold the phone is crap.
$100 says that even when you hold the iPhone4 'wrong' so that it gets bad reception ... it still beats the ever living fuck out of whatever you own.
There are 3rd party tests by plenty of geeks to confirm what is reality versus your wet dreams.
Yes, reception drops off when you hold it ... and its STILL BETTER THAN 95% of the phones out there by a large margin.
I mean, yes, technically it is a dupe, and its obviously adwords spam that Taco should have stopped (I think he lets timothy post using his account now) ...
But its the first time I've seen this story on slashdot. Its not a dupe for me simply because I've blocked several of the retarded editors, one of which approved the previous submission of this story.
So yea, it is technically a dupe, but an expected one since most people avoid whatever douche bag editor posted the previous version. Seems though that Taco now needs to be added to the douche bag editor list for contributing spam himself.
Really? I'm a fanboy because I'm confident that the device will be something I want based on my experience with the first couple I've owned?
Yea, I guess I am.
I need a new phone, my current one is a iPhone 3G ( not 3GS) that is physically broken in multiple ways. I would have bought an iPhone 4, but the next one is right around the corner and so far, the new releases have always been wanted so it seems logical to wait for the next model at this point since my current on is 3 years old ... I don't want to start out behind the curve.
Samba, due to the switch to GPLv3 is no longer something Apple wants anything at all to do with. That kinda knocks a hole into your 'already developed' since they no longer consider that software to be acceptable to them.
why not just go Linux, since it's pretty much the same posix compliant *nix system.
Except its not.
Linux is not posix compliant, a few distros are close, but those cost you as much as an OSX box.
Linux is not UNIX, it never will be, it doesn't want to be. It intentionally goes against the UNIX standard for its own reasons (not saying good or bad, its just not trying to be UNIX compliant). OSX is a certified UNIX, one of the few operating systems left that can claim that status. Certainly not the only one though, pretty much all the real server OSes are UNIX compliant.
And FreeBSD is far more like OSX than Linux will ever be ... since you know, OSX is based a great deal on the FBSD 4.x user land, both of which are doing their absolute best to get away from GNU/GPL based software as quickly as possible.
You really don't know much about any of the things you mentioned do you?
Well, I can think of three. FreeBSD performs better than XNU on the same hardware - several orders of magnitude better in anything that makes heavy use of pthread mutexes (at least in 10.6).
If you're using pthreads in 10.6, you're doing it wrong. You should be using GCD related primatives, which will run circles around pthreads.
You can pick up a 1U server with RAID and a redundant PSU for about £200. In Apple-land, that buys you half a Mac Mini, with one disk and one PSU.
For $400? I'd put my data on the half a mac mini will before I'd put any data on a 1U server with raid and redundant PSU for that price. It can not possibly be quality hardware for that rate. That thing will be an over heating death trap with 'redundantly unstable power supplies'
Yea, making things harder to use is always the right thing to do.
Its rather retarded to think this is a good thing, I for the life of me can't understand why people prefer command line to GUI.
I completely understand preferring command line to SHITTY GUI, which is what it was, but you're just an idiot if you think the command line is better.
Not sure about what you're expecting from the config files as far as documentation, its not like they are different in OSX than say ... any other OS ... considering the servers are all standard OSS software anyway. You've got the same documentation in OSX as you do in Linux.
Apple Mail?
Mail.app + iCal.app + Address Book.app + something I'm missing I'm sure give you pretty much all the functionality of Outlook including the ability to use plugins (although plugins are unofficial)
That combination with Google Apps works great since both Google and Apple use standard protocols for everything and though they are seperate apps they integrate well with each other.
Can you explain why I can search gmail in milliseconds, but exchange takes an hour?
Well, A) Your Exchange server is fucked up. I search a 16 GB exchange mailbox far faster than that, but yes far slower than Google because ...
B) Google indexes the ever living fuck out of your messages when they come in the door in order to serve you adds when you view them. Google sacrifices disk space for search speed to facilitate their business model, which is a lot different than your IT department, who isn't throwing ads at you.
Can you also explain why it's unusable over a mid-latency link (say 200-600ms)?
You or some other dumbass in your organization turned off caching in Outlook would be my guess. No reason why it doesn't work, since well, it works for lots of other people. See item A above.
Is it that they have more, or openly admit to and fix more?
I'm asking seriously, as an Apple owner, I'm aware of the statistics and that OSX is not at the top of the ladder in security.
I don't have a problem with exploit count when you're forging unknown territory, new ideas are going to be abused in new ways that we can't always see coming no matter how good we are.
I'm more concerned with what the chance of those things causing me problems than how many their are.
I don't worry about mac exploits for the same reason I don't on Windows, I don't put myself in harms way, and I admit, I also believe that OSX (just like Linux) is a much smaller profit to hax0rs than Windows, so they aren't going to waste their time with me. Its not cost effective to exploit me or a Linux box (desktop Linux, servers are obviously much more common and a valid target). We all know it can be done, on both, almost as easy as windows using 'user exploits' (i.e. make the stupid user run something that infects them rather than an actual exploit)
Or, maybe it works just fine but it undercuts the vendor's market.
I'm not a big fan of protecting consumers from themselves, or vendors from competition.
They are protecting consumers from this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCWdnjLqVWw
Which is a distinct possibility if you end up with a shitty chinese counterfeit. I'm all for protecting idiots from that, as I'm liable to be on the airplane with some moron who tried to find the cheapest fucking battery they could, which they ordered direct from china since we'd never allow that sort of shit to be sold here.
Second, if you can pay $2500 for a laptop, you can pay $100 every couple of years for a new battery from Apple, they really aren't THAT much more expensive, even if they are ripping you off. I'm not against others companies selling ACCEPTABLE batteries.
And, why can't we just have standard-size batteries anyway? That and standard size oil filters while we're at it...
Sure, we can do that, and your iPod will have the same battery as say ... my RC heli or my rc cars, or my laptop. And I seriously doubt you want to put the oil filter on either one of my vehicles on your car, unless you like over kill. Between my big ass truck with matching big ass oil filter, and my sports car with its high flow rate requirements, I'm fairly certain you don't want to have large portions of your car redesigned in order to make room for them considering that are probably both far larger than yours (assuming typical passenger car).
The point? We have standard sized batteries where we can, but different requirements require different components. Part of the design of these batteries is just FITTING INTO THE SPACE PROVIDED. A lot of laptop batteries are built to fit, the laptop is not designed around the battery, the battery is designed to fit in the space the laptop has available. Standard sizes would change the design requirements. Apple specifically cares about form, I don't think they are completely form over function, but I'll admit they seem to be pretty close, so you're never going to see Apple give up form for standard.
In principle I am 100% in agreement with your post in every way. I can not stress how much I agree with you in principle. Its just not possible from a practical perspective, and companies being greedy makes it worse.
A virus that kills the host before it can spread is a shitty virus. Blaster never wanted to kill the host, which is about all you can accomplish with this, temporarily kill the host.
Will include an EFI update which verifies the battery firmware and overwrites it if the firmware doesn't match on boot.
Of course, you need root to do any of this, and by the time someone has root on your machine, they can brick it in several other ways now days.
Well, okay, you can't really brick it ... but I'm using bring in the same sense as the article, where its used incorrectly.
Yea... I have a unibody mbp. The hard part is the 3 screws at the back, they take at least 3 times as many turns!
Seriously, you just unscrew the bottom cover, unscrew the battery itself, one screw, unplug the battery. Revese process with new battery.
Total time? 10 minutes the first time you do it cause your looking at other things while your in there
My mbp runs for about 5 hours playing eve online without external power. Doing normal work is much better, web browsing will get me 10 from a full charge. I don't have a reason to swap batteries, no bullet point needed, there is only a problem if I go for days without power. Which happens when I go camping, intentionally getting away from technology ... No where in the civilized world have I ever run out of power on my mbp.
Perhaps you should stop buying shitty laptops that require a nuclear pile to run more than an hour or two?
These arent nicads were dealing with.
Your comparing the little generator on your bicycle to a nuclear reactor like three mile island.
The only thing you called is yourself; ignorant.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2343986&cid=36856156
That's the first part of you answer. Why? Because it has to. You don't understand how these batteries work.
Making it updatable is a convience feature. This problem can be fixed ... Via a firmware update, no need to physically take the device to Apple to get it replaced, just install OSX 10.6.9 or 10.7.1 and it's no longer an issue.
I don't want to send my battery off to get a silly bug fixed.
For the record: you need root or physical battery access to do this. So this is another one of those, oh look when someone has owned you ... They can do bad things. No shit. The battery is the least of my concerns.
The hacked fix is easy. OSX just verifies the firmware at boot and fixes it it doesn't verify. So the worst thing this can do? Make you need to plugin a power cord to boot.
If you didn't read the article:
"I started out thinking I wanted to see if a bad guy could make your laptop blow up. But that didn't happen," he said. "There are all kinds of things engineers build into these batteries to make them safe, and this is just one of them. I don't know if you could really melt the thing down."
The firmware is what makes it work. A simple passive circuit won't work for shit here. The controller plans for the future and considers the past. It looks at heat build up, charge rate, measures charge hold and internal resistance, and all sorts of other things to make the most out of the battery.
This processor also makes sure that the voltage and current into the battery are consistent because when it isn't ... These batteries burst into flames! No bullshit, charge them or discharge them in the wrong way even a little and you have a fire.
I race rc cars, I have refused to use a non Smart chargers since 1996. The advantages are mind blowing. Now days we use lithium polymer batteries. You can not charge them with a dumb charger, they will explode. Even these batteries, the good ones anyway have built in micro controllers for safety, to disable bad cells or abort a charge/discharge if the cells become unbalanced or obviously about to do something bad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vYn2lbBh0Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Thats not a charge accident, but the broke the case, removed the safety circuit then over discharged it ... Ie they dead shorted it with all the protections removed.
I'm of course assuming you aren't making this silly statement because you don't understand what the word firmware means. Firmware is just another name for software that the user generally doesn't mess with. Examples: pc bios or efi, video card bios, smbus bios, hard drive bios, carom bios. All of them use firmware. If you have a programable component in the circuit, you have firmware. The only electric device in my home I can think of without firmware are the incandescent bulbs above our shower. Even our toaster and blender have firmware.
For one thing, Amazon provides you with "99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year"
Wrong, they ADVERTISE that.
They've proven this year already they can not possibly maintain such a record, they will be unable to make such a claim for several years to come ... unless they just ignore previous years performance ... and if you do that, you're an idiot.
Marketing fluff != reality. Amazon isn't anywhere near what they claim to be. Useful? Sure. Living up to their marketing? Not unless you your math somehow lets you get 99.9999999% reliability when you're down for a couple of days straight.
At 99.99% you have less than an hour of downtime at your hands per year. Amazon will take decades before than can legitimately again claim 99.99% reliability. Ignoring previous events is just fucking retarded so this 'given year' shit is just a 'we don't actually mean what we say, but if we twist the words JUST RIGHT, idiots will believe its REALLY safe regardless of actual evidence to the contrary being all over the news'
For reference however, Amazon claims 99.95%, which is roughly 4.5 hours ... so lets see, given that they were down for over ... oh I donno some were down over 36 for sure (waving my hand being one of them) which means ... they need about 8 years of absolutely flawless service before they can legitimately claim 99.95%.
My servers are 100% reliable over any give period that they are online and functional. Isn't marketing bullshit fun?! And actually, my servers are more reliable than amazons, I've never in my life had a critical server/service down for an hour that wasn't planned well in advance. I admit, some of that is luck, and I'll probably get struck by lightening (or my servers will) for saying it, but if Amazon impresses you, you should not be making IT related decisions for anyone.
I wouldn't.
I do know some companies with projects who's design documents and related materials easily exceed terabytes per project.
Think about a project like the space shuttle, an Airbus 380, or a big ass Boeing jumbo jet.
You and I aren't going to be accessing those projects (well, I'm not, maybe you get lucky enough to work with some of those guys) but there are plenty of engineers who would have a reason to do so. I've seen far larger stores than this at a company which designs large aircraft for that very purpose.
Wise men learned long ago that when sharing large amounts of files ... you mail a hard drive to someone.
My friends and I have a large drive that rotates between a few of us. When you get the drive, you pull all the new stuff off of it, and put all of your new stuff on it, then ship the drive to the next person. Continue. Works even better when several of the people on the list all work together so there isn't any mail time between updates.
We could easily fill that array up in a couple of weeks with no Internet connection between all of us.
Let see... first thing I see when I click on hard drives on new egg is a 3TB drive for $180.
So.
135/3 = 45
45 * $180 = 8100
Thats just drives, no raid, no controllers, no chassis/cass.
With more digging I find a 5400 RPM drive for 139 ... so ...
45 * 140 = 6300, but still just the drives ... and no RAID.
Can you find cheaper drives? I'm sure, I spent all of about 10 seconds looking, but I doubt you're going to want to.
You guys are all wondering around arguing over the silliness of their slashvertisment (which it most certainly is) and various software implementations that would take the place of theirs and be better (which I don't disagree with one bit) but ... you entirely over looked the fact that their statements are bold faced lies. They didn't build it for that much. They may have ignored a bunch of costs and said 'we built it for X amount', but thats like saying the space program only cost American Tax payers the cost of shutting it down because we already did the other stuff so it doesn't count against the cost!
Have you seen what excel is capable of? Or what it was capable of 10 years ago?
Their examples are hardly impressive.
Yea, in that 'Exactly like GPL' sort of way