OpenSolaris and 8 drive RAIDZ-2. PHYSICALLY disconnect that fileserver (and turn it off) and sync up to it once a month.
Use GlusterFS or RSync to sync that up to your main computer. If you can figure it out, make incrimental backups to DVD once a week (or day, if it's that important). Take those DVDs off-site into a vacuum sealed (not expensive, you can make one that uses a hand pump and a box). If everything goes to hell, restoring from DVDs takes forever but you have that option, and that's what's important.
But you guys also have the biggest allotment of cheap natural gas(to the point where some folks use it in their cars), meaning any process which converts electricity to heat is inherently financially inefficient over there.;)
The moment I find these in stores I am IMMEDIATELY buying a few and replacing every bulb attached to a dimmer switch in my house. Ask anyone with a light dimmer who switched to CFL's, and this'll immediately be their biggest caveat with the tech.
Okay, there's no need to generalize. Let's look at what really happens in ZFS.
1. Data in ZFS is held in blocks. The verification for those blocks is held in their parent blocks. Meaning, a corrupted block whose corruption manages to return a viable checksum in most filesystems would not do so in ZFS. If it's broken, the parent will tell you, and if the parent is broken, the grandparent will tell you. This works all the way to the highest parent (known as the superblock), which has multiple redundant copies of itself. Basically, it's HARD for shit to break in ZFS. 2. RAID and mirroring can tell you if a disk is bad, and if you're rebuilding, if a sector is bad. But the latter doesn't work unless you're scrubbing. ZFS catches errors like that while reading, and then it fixes them while it's sending you the good data. 3. Let's say you have 8 1TB drives in a RAID6 configuration. Let's say you have about two terabytes of data across the whole thing. Let's say a drive fails. You replace it. The entire drive now has to be rebuilt. ZFS only needs to fill the 160 megabytes that drive actually contains. 4. Data in ZFS is held as a tree. This can make some things slower (possibly why ZFS tends to aggressively cache) but it also means that stuff like snapshotting is built into the filesystem and cheap as hell to do. You want to snapshot your OS's root folder before a risky patch? Go ahead! If anything breaks, you can roll back instantly. 4.a. Feel free to correct me on this, as I've never tested it, but as far as I've read, ZFS is probably the only filesystem that could survive an rm -rf / and a (single) accidental dd at the same time, the latter under a RAID-Z2 config. 5. Cloning is just as easy as snapshotting. Lets say you have a developer account or VPN account template? The files that you start out with only need to be held once on your hard drive. Only edits to those files result in new data being stored.
Basically, ZFS works best with the fact that both hard drives and RAM are getting cheaper. You could put together a system with 8 gigs of RAM (more if the motherboard supports it) and 8 terabyte drives (plus a spare) for under a grand. That's 6 terabytes of lightning fast (about 120 megs a second I'd imagine), absurdly reliable (it's statistically nearly impossible for the same block to be broken across two drives, and unlike RAID, ZFS won't stop rebuilding if that happens. It'll just report which files were affected)
It's essentially a filesystem designed for 2009 (or whatever year this happens to be for at least the next 10), and people who need a ridiculously good filesystem on a budget.
Did I forget to mention that adding space is only limited by your hardware? (e.g. available sata slots, or available PCI slots for new sata cards) Or that if a drive gets disconnected (say, you have them all on a USB connection) and you reconnect it, ZFS only adds the missing data since it was disconnected rather than rebuilding the whole drive? (What RAID does, mostly because it doesn't know anything about the underlying filesystem)
Could be one of those "mini" hard drive vaults. How uncommon were 4 320GB drives be back then? (enough to do nearly a terabyte with one drive dedicated to parity, a near-requirement for NAS's like that)
The problem, both legally and morally, is that you probably used Bittorrent to get this game, meaning you also distributed it as well. To this day, pretty much all of the trouble people are getting and giving over P2P is because of distribution. I really doubt your ISP would have given you a warning if you'd used a download service (say, Usenet, or even the Rapidshare/Megaupload/Depositfiles/etc. bunch), partially because it's impossible to scan without outright wiretapping (which is still pretty goddamn illegal for a non-government entity, and especially so for a non-criminal matter), and partially because the hundreds of thousands in damages they warn you about center around distributing (equating you with someone who copies games/movies/music and sells them) material.
Even the Rapidshare (Germany) people whose info was revealed were uploading. Lesson: Don't distribute. It's not yours to give away.
You have a really funny idea of the term "profitable". If you don't have a passion to play a real guitar, its worthwhileness as an investment is nil.
Take the amount of time it would take to make it job-worthy (e.g. capable of playing gigs either solo or in a band), take into account how much you'd reasonably expect to make (how common are people who play at bars vs. people with record contracts vs. people with record contracts that actually succeed?), and then compare that to training in any serious field (say, learning how to access a variety of database servers via Java, C++, ASP.net, PHP, VB, etc., or how to manage and administrate a server). Yes, music can make you millions, but so can selling a software company or film scripts.
I think I'll stick to my plastic guitar, and spend the other dozens of hours learning useful shit.
Note the (read:not much) section. I'm not saying it's legal, I'm saying it's not as bad, as say, selling bootleg copies, or, as mentioned, ripping sprites. However, as it's still C&D-able, how "legit" it is is probably a moot point.
Actually, being a ROM hack lends them MORE legitimacy, tho how much more is a subject of debate. (read: likely not much). If it was a windows executable, it would be filled with graphical assets from the game. As it stands, this essentially amounts of a fanfic with a bit of extra work, given that it would be released as a patch and that its copyright infringement would come down to *names* of the characters in the text. If the romhack uses the existing pointers for the character names, it doesn't even have that.
All things considered, there was probably a solid chance that they could've legally released this, save for a C&D which would scare anyone without a stable of lawyers.
Terabit, at the moment, is entirely for enterprise, where the amount of hard drives connected to the bigger machines lies in the triple to quadruple digits. However, 10G is at least useful for higher-end consumers.
8 hard drives in a RAID6 array managing full speed (approx. 20mbytes/sec. per drive?) hits 120 megabytes/sec., already reaching gigabit's limits. Add two more arrays and 10G becomes useful. While I personally can't see much of a use for that beyond, say, murdering load times in modern games (and maybe the scratch disk needed while editing a poster-sized image at 600dpi with several layers), I'm sure plenty of people can find plenty of good uses for such a setup, which is becoming cheaper daily.
It isn't about using up a terabit, it's about getting bottlenecked at the level below it and needing the breathing room.
That depends. If most of your duties revolve around desktop support, and there's more than one of you there, it's incredibly stupid. If you're the only one and you have other important work to do, no, it's not stupid.
On the latter, dumb users make your job more difficult and tedious. On the former, they're your bread 'n butter.
And mind you, this has been the case for ages. Starcraft's installer executable, for instance, is a 600 meg file, due to them packing everything into it.
I don't get all the anger. If you don't like it, use a different format. FLAC 'n OGG work fine for the Rockbox set, and ALAC/AAC are okay for Apple's users.
I see a LOT of use if they can convince the iPod/Portable Audio Device sync programs to play along. Your MP3HD files stay on the home fileserver, where a 200 gigabyte music collection isn't going to strain its capacity. Plug your mp3 player in, however, and it only sends the MP3 data over, leaving you a ton more space for
The market is folks who love to keep their music lossless, but need a smaller mp3-player-friendly copy. From the test shown (e.g. an 8MB MP3 + 14MB of lossless data (22 megs total) compared to a 20MB FLAC is a lot cheaper than a 20MB FLAC and an 8MB MP3 file), I'd be all over this if their "extra" format data also allowed for cover art (e.g. an ID4 or some such for extra info that MP3's don't embed well). iTunes integration would be nice too.
A good TV card won't create substantial lag (e.g. it'll be playable without a noticeable change), especially if you're getting a raw stream instead of an encoded one. However, that doesn't change the fact that the lag on this service (you know, what with the INTERNET CONNECTION between your buttons and the action) will be astronomically higher.
If a driver isn't out on day one, there's no way in hell this should be in a press release. I can only hope that it doesn't make it to any of the boxes.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. They also take into account materials used to build them, extraction of those materials, etc.
However, the argument is silly when it comes down to it.
1. The only reason other fuel sources don't have this issue is because they have a constant consumable that is not going to last anywhere near as long as the sun. 2. It completely ignores the possibility of recycling solar panels. 3. It completely ignores the effect that a substantially increased demand for solar power will have on its manufacture. Does the stuff Nanosolar's putting together even HAVE the "takes more energy to make than you'll get from it" problem?!
Seriously, this is the only area where people will suddenly ignore the market. It's not about getting more energy than you put into it, engineers will fix that issue (which is far easier than mass-producing oil) eventually, it's about whether it will pay for itself in energy output compared to its purchase price compared to purchasing power the old fashioned way. If it does, then solar's a good idea. If not, then don't bother.
K3B can't burn ALAC, at least under any Ubuntu package options I can find. Sure, that's what I get for using an apple format, but this wouldn't be an issue if burning wasn't decoupled from the player.
Also, part of the reason I use ALAC instead of FLAC is because ALAC will allow you to embed music covers in a song while FLAC won't. No, cover.jpg in the folder doesn't cut it, because if I just want to transfer a few songs, they're not gonna have the cover. And yes, I've searched long and hard for any ways to easily embed art into FLAC files. If you know of one, it'd be much appreciated.
Also, there's a difference between "replicating functionality" and linking components within the app so you don't need to launch another program to do something. There's a reason KDE4 is moving in precisely this direction: it minimizes filesize and code-rewrite while simultaneously keeping things seamless.
Dear poster : Please, do not start with complaining about iTunes' "lack" of features. Given that BOTH Amarok AND Songbird lack the ability to RIP or BURN music CD's, I don't really wanna hear it.
Part of why iTunes works is because Apple does a pretty damn good job of making a player that does its job : Database player/sync for a portable device that holds all the music you're ever going to buy.
You know how agrivating it is to try to burn a CD and have it re-direct you to K3B, which then errors out because your audio format, which works fine in Amarok, isn't compatible with IT?
Batch encoding is a JOKE in Amarok, which is aggrivating given that you realize you're better off settling for converting to MP3 in iTunes using iTunes' crappy MP3 encoder.
In iTunes, not only is your music added to the player, but so are your playlists, and when you have 10 gigs of music, it's nice to have immediate access to the arrangements of the 20 some odd songs you're enjoying at the moment. I've yet to see a sync app on the market that does this aside from maybe the Zune, and the purchase of that device will happen on a cold day in hell.
Don't talk shit about Apple's setup 'till you can present an app that's better or at least EQUIVILANT. I'm not talking about compatibility with a handful of devices, I'm talking about actually having that great handful of FEATURES in syncing.
Every product that is ever released runs the risk of ending up with a variety of issues that didn't come up in initial testing. There's no way you can account for distribution to a market of millions, and there's always a chance something will go wrong in production, implementation, logic, or who knows what.
It took six months for Nvidia to find out that the Geforce 8 series' second release (Everything that came out after the 8800GTS/GTX/Ultra) was essentially faulty in all parts.
It took eighteen months for Microsoft to find out that Xbox 360's were obscenely faulty (*every person* I personally know who has one, something like a dozen people, including myself, has joined the "red ring" club)
Getting something at launch is almost always a stupid thing to do (save for the occassional niche Capcom game that's going to get an initial batch of 10,000 copies and that's it). Why run the risk of getting a fault that might not show up until after your warranty runs out when you can pick up a product that's had all of its kinks worked out? Is a 10% performance jump really worth it?
1. Given his point, how cross-platform the program was, he's on the mark there. 2. Given that there's plenty of closed source programs (for instance, Skype) that emerge just fine, no, he isn't calling every piece of non-open source software irrelevant.
RAID6 isn't about losing any two disks, it's about having two parity stripes. It's about being able to survive sector errors without any worry.
It's about losing ONE drive and still have enough parity to replace it without any errors.
RAID6 on 5 drives is retarded, tho, because it leaves you absurdly close to RAID1 in kept space. RAID6 is for when you have 8-10 drives. At that point you barely notice the (N - 2) effect and you have a fast (provided your processor can handle it all) chunk of throughput along with an incredibly reliable system. Well, N-3 with a hotswap.
Personally, I think I'd go RAID-Z2 via ZFS if only because it's a little bit sturdier a filesystem to begin with.
Okay, seriously? This is bullshit. Know what I did for comparison?
1. Hop on Newegg. 2. Look up "Geforce 9600M" (the chip that comes in the Macbook Pro!). 3. Sort by "lowest price".
What do I get? An HP laptop that's $1100. What's it come with?
- 17 inch screen - 2 GHZ Core 2 Duo, Geforce 9600M (surprise?) - 512 megs dedicated to the Geforce (The same amount in the nicer $2500 Macbook pro) - 4 gigs of RAM - Bluray Drive that burns DVD's - Bluetooth (just noted, as many notebooks don't have it built-in) - 320GB hard drive, multi-card reader, 4 USB ports, real HDMI out, VGA out. - Built-in camera (just in case someone brings it up) - Wireless N, modem for those times you get stuck in a crappy motel
So for $200 less than the new Macbook, we've got a computer that rivals the nicer Macbook pro in everything but CPU speed. Yes, the Apple tax is fucking high. No, comparing a Mac to the most overpriced piece of shit (as far as Sony is concerned, anyway) notebooks on the market isn't a COMPARISON. It's a RATIONALIZATION.
Hell, if that Mac usb dongle was available as a PCMCIA card, I'd pick that fucker up with a copy of Leopard right now and still come out on top to an absurd degree.:: drops mic::
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The iPod got its touch wheel in 2002. Prior art. End of discussion.
OpenSolaris and 8 drive RAIDZ-2. PHYSICALLY disconnect that fileserver (and turn it off) and sync up to it once a month.
Use GlusterFS or RSync to sync that up to your main computer. If you can figure it out, make incrimental backups to DVD once a week (or day, if it's that important). Take those DVDs off-site into a vacuum sealed (not expensive, you can make one that uses a hand pump and a box). If everything goes to hell, restoring from DVDs takes forever but you have that option, and that's what's important.
Just as long as those PSA's don't air right before my (store-purchased) game's title screen loads. Seriously, that shit is how violence happens.
But you guys also have the biggest allotment of cheap natural gas(to the point where some folks use it in their cars), meaning any process which converts electricity to heat is inherently financially inefficient over there. ;)
The moment I find these in stores I am IMMEDIATELY buying a few and replacing every bulb attached to a dimmer switch in my house. Ask anyone with a light dimmer who switched to CFL's, and this'll immediately be their biggest caveat with the tech.
Okay, there's no need to generalize. Let's look at what really happens in ZFS.
1. Data in ZFS is held in blocks. The verification for those blocks is held in their parent blocks. Meaning, a corrupted block whose corruption manages to return a viable checksum in most filesystems would not do so in ZFS. If it's broken, the parent will tell you, and if the parent is broken, the grandparent will tell you. This works all the way to the highest parent (known as the superblock), which has multiple redundant copies of itself. Basically, it's HARD for shit to break in ZFS.
2. RAID and mirroring can tell you if a disk is bad, and if you're rebuilding, if a sector is bad. But the latter doesn't work unless you're scrubbing. ZFS catches errors like that while reading, and then it fixes them while it's sending you the good data.
3. Let's say you have 8 1TB drives in a RAID6 configuration. Let's say you have about two terabytes of data across the whole thing. Let's say a drive fails. You replace it. The entire drive now has to be rebuilt. ZFS only needs to fill the 160 megabytes that drive actually contains.
4. Data in ZFS is held as a tree. This can make some things slower (possibly why ZFS tends to aggressively cache) but it also means that stuff like snapshotting is built into the filesystem and cheap as hell to do. You want to snapshot your OS's root folder before a risky patch? Go ahead! If anything breaks, you can roll back instantly.
4.a. Feel free to correct me on this, as I've never tested it, but as far as I've read, ZFS is probably the only filesystem that could survive an rm -rf / and a (single) accidental dd at the same time, the latter under a RAID-Z2 config.
5. Cloning is just as easy as snapshotting. Lets say you have a developer account or VPN account template? The files that you start out with only need to be held once on your hard drive. Only edits to those files result in new data being stored.
Basically, ZFS works best with the fact that both hard drives and RAM are getting cheaper. You could put together a system with 8 gigs of RAM (more if the motherboard supports it) and 8 terabyte drives (plus a spare) for under a grand. That's 6 terabytes of lightning fast (about 120 megs a second I'd imagine), absurdly reliable (it's statistically nearly impossible for the same block to be broken across two drives, and unlike RAID, ZFS won't stop rebuilding if that happens. It'll just report which files were affected)
It's essentially a filesystem designed for 2009 (or whatever year this happens to be for at least the next 10), and people who need a ridiculously good filesystem on a budget.
Did I forget to mention that adding space is only limited by your hardware? (e.g. available sata slots, or available PCI slots for new sata cards) Or that if a drive gets disconnected (say, you have them all on a USB connection) and you reconnect it, ZFS only adds the missing data since it was disconnected rather than rebuilding the whole drive? (What RAID does, mostly because it doesn't know anything about the underlying filesystem)
Could be one of those "mini" hard drive vaults. How uncommon were 4 320GB drives be back then? (enough to do nearly a terabyte with one drive dedicated to parity, a near-requirement for NAS's like that)
The problem, both legally and morally, is that you probably used Bittorrent to get this game, meaning you also distributed it as well. To this day, pretty much all of the trouble people are getting and giving over P2P is because of distribution. I really doubt your ISP would have given you a warning if you'd used a download service (say, Usenet, or even the Rapidshare/Megaupload/Depositfiles/etc. bunch), partially because it's impossible to scan without outright wiretapping (which is still pretty goddamn illegal for a non-government entity, and especially so for a non-criminal matter), and partially because the hundreds of thousands in damages they warn you about center around distributing (equating you with someone who copies games/movies/music and sells them) material.
Even the Rapidshare (Germany) people whose info was revealed were uploading. Lesson: Don't distribute. It's not yours to give away.
You have a really funny idea of the term "profitable". If you don't have a passion to play a real guitar, its worthwhileness as an investment is nil.
Take the amount of time it would take to make it job-worthy (e.g. capable of playing gigs either solo or in a band), take into account how much you'd reasonably expect to make (how common are people who play at bars vs. people with record contracts vs. people with record contracts that actually succeed?), and then compare that to training in any serious field (say, learning how to access a variety of database servers via Java, C++, ASP.net, PHP, VB, etc., or how to manage and administrate a server). Yes, music can make you millions, but so can selling a software company or film scripts.
I think I'll stick to my plastic guitar, and spend the other dozens of hours learning useful shit.
Note the (read:not much) section. I'm not saying it's legal, I'm saying it's not as bad, as say, selling bootleg copies, or, as mentioned, ripping sprites. However, as it's still C&D-able, how "legit" it is is probably a moot point.
Actually, being a ROM hack lends them MORE legitimacy, tho how much more is a subject of debate. (read: likely not much). If it was a windows executable, it would be filled with graphical assets from the game. As it stands, this essentially amounts of a fanfic with a bit of extra work, given that it would be released as a patch and that its copyright infringement would come down to *names* of the characters in the text. If the romhack uses the existing pointers for the character names, it doesn't even have that.
All things considered, there was probably a solid chance that they could've legally released this, save for a C&D which would scare anyone without a stable of lawyers.
Terabit, at the moment, is entirely for enterprise, where the amount of hard drives connected to the bigger machines lies in the triple to quadruple digits. However, 10G is at least useful for higher-end consumers.
8 hard drives in a RAID6 array managing full speed (approx. 20mbytes/sec. per drive?) hits 120 megabytes/sec., already reaching gigabit's limits. Add two more arrays and 10G becomes useful. While I personally can't see much of a use for that beyond, say, murdering load times in modern games (and maybe the scratch disk needed while editing a poster-sized image at 600dpi with several layers), I'm sure plenty of people can find plenty of good uses for such a setup, which is becoming cheaper daily.
It isn't about using up a terabit, it's about getting bottlenecked at the level below it and needing the breathing room.
That depends. If most of your duties revolve around desktop support, and there's more than one of you there, it's incredibly stupid. If you're the only one and you have other important work to do, no, it's not stupid.
On the latter, dumb users make your job more difficult and tedious. On the former, they're your bread 'n butter.
And mind you, this has been the case for ages. Starcraft's installer executable, for instance, is a 600 meg file, due to them packing everything into it.
I don't get all the anger. If you don't like it, use a different format. FLAC 'n OGG work fine for the Rockbox set, and ALAC/AAC are okay for Apple's users.
I see a LOT of use if they can convince the iPod/Portable Audio Device sync programs to play along. Your MP3HD files stay on the home fileserver, where a 200 gigabyte music collection isn't going to strain its capacity. Plug your mp3 player in, however, and it only sends the MP3 data over, leaving you a ton more space for
The market is folks who love to keep their music lossless, but need a smaller mp3-player-friendly copy. From the test shown (e.g. an 8MB MP3 + 14MB of lossless data (22 megs total) compared to a 20MB FLAC is a lot cheaper than a 20MB FLAC and an 8MB MP3 file), I'd be all over this if their "extra" format data also allowed for cover art (e.g. an ID4 or some such for extra info that MP3's don't embed well). iTunes integration would be nice too.
A good TV card won't create substantial lag (e.g. it'll be playable without a noticeable change), especially if you're getting a raw stream instead of an encoded one. However, that doesn't change the fact that the lag on this service (you know, what with the INTERNET CONNECTION between your buttons and the action) will be astronomically higher.
If a driver isn't out on day one, there's no way in hell this should be in a press release. I can only hope that it doesn't make it to any of the boxes.
Bullshit like that shouldn't be legal.
Well, that's not entirely accurate. They also take into account materials used to build them, extraction of those materials, etc.
However, the argument is silly when it comes down to it.
1. The only reason other fuel sources don't have this issue is because they have a constant consumable that is not going to last anywhere near as long as the sun.
2. It completely ignores the possibility of recycling solar panels.
3. It completely ignores the effect that a substantially increased demand for solar power will have on its manufacture. Does the stuff Nanosolar's putting together even HAVE the "takes more energy to make than you'll get from it" problem?!
Seriously, this is the only area where people will suddenly ignore the market. It's not about getting more energy than you put into it, engineers will fix that issue (which is far easier than mass-producing oil) eventually, it's about whether it will pay for itself in energy output compared to its purchase price compared to purchasing power the old fashioned way. If it does, then solar's a good idea. If not, then don't bother.
It's packed with Chinese-made parts that have to adhere to American safety regulations.
Is this batch of 10,000 going to do the same?
It's a serious question, btw. At $22k a pop this could very well be the case.
K3B can't burn ALAC, at least under any Ubuntu package options I can find. Sure, that's what I get for using an apple format, but this wouldn't be an issue if burning wasn't decoupled from the player.
Also, part of the reason I use ALAC instead of FLAC is because ALAC will allow you to embed music covers in a song while FLAC won't. No, cover.jpg in the folder doesn't cut it, because if I just want to transfer a few songs, they're not gonna have the cover. And yes, I've searched long and hard for any ways to easily embed art into FLAC files. If you know of one, it'd be much appreciated.
Also, there's a difference between "replicating functionality" and linking components within the app so you don't need to launch another program to do something. There's a reason KDE4 is moving in precisely this direction: it minimizes filesize and code-rewrite while simultaneously keeping things seamless.
Dear poster :
Please, do not start with complaining about iTunes' "lack" of features. Given that BOTH Amarok AND Songbird lack the ability to RIP or BURN music CD's, I don't really wanna hear it.
Part of why iTunes works is because Apple does a pretty damn good job of making a player that does its job : Database player/sync for a portable device that holds all the music you're ever going to buy.
You know how agrivating it is to try to burn a CD and have it re-direct you to K3B, which then errors out because your audio format, which works fine in Amarok, isn't compatible with IT?
Batch encoding is a JOKE in Amarok, which is aggrivating given that you realize you're better off settling for converting to MP3 in iTunes using iTunes' crappy MP3 encoder.
In iTunes, not only is your music added to the player, but so are your playlists, and when you have 10 gigs of music, it's nice to have immediate access to the arrangements of the 20 some odd songs you're enjoying at the moment. I've yet to see a sync app on the market that does this aside from maybe the Zune, and the purchase of that device will happen on a cold day in hell.
Don't talk shit about Apple's setup 'till you can present an app that's better or at least EQUIVILANT. I'm not talking about compatibility with a handful of devices, I'm talking about actually having that great handful of FEATURES in syncing.
UGH. >_
Every product that is ever released runs the risk of ending up with a variety of issues that didn't come up in initial testing. There's no way you can account for distribution to a market of millions, and there's always a chance something will go wrong in production, implementation, logic, or who knows what.
It took six months for Nvidia to find out that the Geforce 8 series' second release (Everything that came out after the 8800GTS/GTX/Ultra) was essentially faulty in all parts.
It took eighteen months for Microsoft to find out that Xbox 360's were obscenely faulty (*every person* I personally know who has one, something like a dozen people, including myself, has joined the "red ring" club)
Getting something at launch is almost always a stupid thing to do (save for the occassional niche Capcom game that's going to get an initial batch of 10,000 copies and that's it). Why run the risk of getting a fault that might not show up until after your warranty runs out when you can pick up a product that's had all of its kinks worked out? Is a 10% performance jump really worth it?
1. Given his point, how cross-platform the program was, he's on the mark there.
2. Given that there's plenty of closed source programs (for instance, Skype) that emerge just fine, no, he isn't calling every piece of non-open source software irrelevant.
Scrub once a week, or once every two weeks.
RAID6 isn't about losing any two disks, it's about having two parity stripes. It's about being able to survive sector errors without any worry.
It's about losing ONE drive and still have enough parity to replace it without any errors.
RAID6 on 5 drives is retarded, tho, because it leaves you absurdly close to RAID1 in kept space. RAID6 is for when you have 8-10 drives. At that point you barely notice the (N - 2) effect and you have a fast (provided your processor can handle it all) chunk of throughput along with an incredibly reliable system. Well, N-3 with a hotswap.
Personally, I think I'd go RAID-Z2 via ZFS if only because it's a little bit sturdier a filesystem to begin with.
Okay, seriously? This is bullshit. Know what I did for comparison?
1. Hop on Newegg.
2. Look up "Geforce 9600M" (the chip that comes in the Macbook Pro!).
3. Sort by "lowest price".
What do I get? An HP laptop that's $1100. What's it come with?
- 17 inch screen
- 2 GHZ Core 2 Duo, Geforce 9600M (surprise?)
- 512 megs dedicated to the Geforce (The same amount in the nicer $2500 Macbook pro)
- 4 gigs of RAM
- Bluray Drive that burns DVD's
- Bluetooth (just noted, as many notebooks don't have it built-in)
- 320GB hard drive, multi-card reader, 4 USB ports, real HDMI out, VGA out.
- Built-in camera (just in case someone brings it up)
- Wireless N, modem for those times you get stuck in a crappy motel
So for $200 less than the new Macbook, we've got a computer that rivals the nicer Macbook pro in everything but CPU speed. Yes, the Apple tax is fucking high. No, comparing a Mac to the most overpriced piece of shit (as far as Sony is concerned, anyway) notebooks on the market isn't a COMPARISON. It's a RATIONALIZATION.
Hell, if that Mac usb dongle was available as a PCMCIA card, I'd pick that fucker up with a copy of Leopard right now and still come out on top to an absurd degree. :: drops mic ::