Does OS X actually recognize modern mice with *more* than three buttons?
Yes. I use a Logitech G5 with OSX and all buttons function the same as they do under Windows. I didn't even need to install a driver, which I seem to recall having to do using the same mouse on XP.
It varies over time. When I started working in data centers, almost 18 years ago, it was all halon gas, which is lethal to humans,so we all learnt the evacuation procedures pretty well! Then they moved to isolated sprinklers.... the sprinklers would only activate in the vicinity of the detected fire, thereby only destroying 2 or 3 racks rather than the whole room. Now, I think they've gone back to gas.
I don't have or want an iPhone, but I do have an iPod Touch. When I have internet connectivity on it, multitouch is awesome. Or even when I'm just showing off photos, being able to zoom in and out of web pages and photos so easily continues to amaze me after over a year of using the thing.
I am not a "fanboy", and haven't really seen any of the Android stuff, or other alternatives, but... I really think multitouch is a great innovation - not a gimmick.
But simple things like typing text, and looking up contacts continue to suck on the iPod Touch/iPhone. Hence, I'll stick with my bog standard Nokia phone for.... the phone stuff.
But nobody stores stuff on 1,000 DVDs; they use tape storage, which maxes out at 1TB per tape.
Who wouldn't trade 2 random access 500GB discs that can be switched out in seconds for a 1TB tape that takes 62 seconds to mount? Everybody would and will.
I do agree with your point, except the everybody bit. It depends on the market and what type of data you're talking about. On the corporate backup system I look after, we fit over 2 TB on a tape, which costs about $100. It takes about 15 seconds to load and another 10-15 to locate to any position on the tape. When you're talking about backing up multi-terabyte databases, 30 second access time is not a big issue. I see up to 160 MB/sec throughput, with hardware compression. That's 160 MegaBYTES per second. The drives are rated to about 250 MB/sec, so I think the bottleneck is our crummy old 2Gb/sec FC switch. And tape is rewritable. There are several thousand tapes in our libraries.
Admittedly, the drives cost in the tens of $thousands, and the robotic library in the hundreds of $thousands. But my point is, I can't see everybody abandoning tape for holographic storage in the near future.
The number one, top tier, highest revenue producing application at the company I work for is single threaded. It was originally written about 15 years ago, and I guess they didn't think multi-threading was worth worrying about at the time.
It used to be OK - CPUs kept getting faster. As the work this application needed to do increased, so did CPU operations per second, so they'd just upgrade the RISC based servers.
But now the few CPU developers left are concentrating on more cores, rather than faster processing per core (Moore's law? I guess). Multiple cores doesn't really help a single threaded application.
The company has outsourced all of their development to India. They know they need to rewrite the whole application to be multi-threaded, but they've got a snowball's chance in hell of this happening with their current developers.
For 8-10 users, you could probably even get away with running it on a "desktop class" machine running VMware Player with a static IP address for the appliance VM.
I have seen one of those massive floppies in real life.
Until just recently, I saw one of these massive floppies almost every day. I had it pinned on the partition behind my monitor. It was right next to my 3380 disk platter, and my (much later) quote for 300GB of SCSI disk for about $USD500,000.
It was my own mini-museum of data storage.
Yeah, I'm nostalgic. *shrug*
Sidenote for anyone who knows what a 3380 was (or is interested) : I once new a guy who used a 3380 HDA as a base for a glass coffee table.
I have something similar happen to me from time to time. But for me, I am driving a car, and I need to brake, but no matter how hard I try to push down my foot on the pedal, the car won't slow down.
This has happened to me for so long that, now, when it does happen, I realise I am dreaming. Most of the time I freak out (either at the "Oh crap, I'm gonna crash" thought, or the "Oh wow, I'm dreaming" thought) and wake up. But a few times recently I have managed to stay asleep for a bit, although I've never been able to really "control" the dream once I realised what was happening.
Somewhat more on topic, I have no idea whether I dream in colour or monochrome. Since I've never noticed, I guess it is colour. I grew up in the days of colour TV (barely).
if the authorities feel you are being disrepectful, they will become far more inquisitive. And if you get "uppity"--particularly if you start shooting off your mouth about your constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms (while entering another country) you are just begging to get hassled.
Absolutely.
In the early nineties, so well before 9/11 induced terrorism hysteria, myself and 2 friends were returning home to Australia from our first overseas holiday in Hawaii. Upon arrival at Australian customs, the goons saw 3 scruffy 21 year old guys with a LOT of luggage and decided that we were worthy of a random check.
None of us had anything to hide. Myself and friend#1 simply complied and opened up one suitcase each. The officials just had a quick glance, didn't even bother touching anything, and waved us through.
However, friend#2 got very "uppity" and started claiming it was a violation of privacy and they had no right, etc, etc. So they took him into another room, and proceeded to completely empty each of his suitcases and examine every smelly sock and soiled pantiloon. He was in there for at least 45 minutes.
>If you take a good, unbiased look at what's out there right now, there's little reason for everything to be so lopsided for/against any particular platform, or architecture even.
Agreed.
These discussions are always frustrating on/. because you end up with opinions across all ranges of the spectrum, from the person who tried to install Linux on their desktop once 5 years ago and gave up because it didn't automatically recognise their USB wi-fi adapter, to someone who maintains hundreds of servers running a mix of Linux, Solaris, HPUX, Windows, zOS (MVS - IBM mainframe), and whatever else.
On the desktop, I run Windows XP. I do have an affection for Linux, and have for a long time. The first Linux distribution I installed was downloaded on my 28.8kbps modem, saved to several floppy disks, and installed on an Intel 486 based PC with a whopping 4MB of RAM. I think the distribution was called "Yggdrasil". That would have been about 1994. Back then, I enjoyed tinkering with my computer at home. It was kinda fun, but I eventually switched back to Windows. I have tried heaps of distributions since then, and it is easier these days with VMware, but the parent post is right when he says "it hasn't gotten any better at it since the mid 90's". When I try a Linux desktop, I STILL end up spending hours and hours trying to get basic functionality working. I don't enjoy that any more. I just want my home computer to browse the internet and play my media. I don't want to mess around with config files at home - that's what I do at work.
When I do my next desktop refresh, I will probably go Mac. I've always stuck with Windows because I liked to play the occasional game, but I don't game much these days, and OSX looks great, and has a nice, accessible, Unix-ish heart (ie - a real command line).
At work, I look after storage - SANs and data backup systems. When I started, it was all IBM mainframe. Then it went Solaris and HP-UX, with a bit of AIX. A bit later, Windows as a server started encroaching, which was a complete pain in the butt.
Of those Operating Systems, the MVS mainframe was the most reliable (and still is), but also the most.... inflexible. But putting the mainframe aside, Solaris was by far the easiest to work with, the easiest to pinpoint problems, the least troublesome of them all. And compared to the HP-UX and Windows servers at the time, it's performance ROCKED.
I went and worked for Sun for a while - just when Solaris 10 came out, and their T1000 and T2000 models. I still think they are awesome boxen and am sad that I haven't had a chance to work with them.
I went back to the company I started with. Today, the highest profile project running is the "RISC to Intel" project. They are moving all of their back-end Tier 1 servers off HP-UX and Solaris, and onto Redhat Linux on IBM servers.
The decision to move to Linux was not made due to any technical or cost benefits, really. It was made because the company I work for "partnered" with IBM. And IBM have pushed Linux on IBM hardware to the upper level management.
At first, I was really worried about this. REALLY worried.
However, after a year or so of running several Tier 1 applications (Oracle, mainly) on Redhat, and setting up and maintaining a relatively high-throughput Netbackup system running on Redhat and IBM 3850 servers, it has all been more stable than I was expecting. I am getting great throughput on those 3850s.
Now I tend to think, taking all of the above into account, is that the operating system is kinda irrelevant, at least from my perspective as a storage person. As long as the O/S is efficient and can drive the hardware to it's limit, then, these days, I couldn't care less what O/S it's running.
As long as it's not Windows.
And as long as you can work out some of the obscure Redhat commands - like to scan for a new SAN attached tape drive... I don't have the exact command handy, b
I live about 2 KMs from Melbourne CBD, but I only get about 5,000 Kbps on ADSL2+, because I'm over 3 KMs from my exchange:/
My friend who lives in the outer, outer suburbs of Melbourne gets 8,000 Kbps on ADSL (not 2+), but he is almost next door to his exchange.
I am an Internode customer and am very happy with their service, but have you checked if any other ISPs have hardware in your local exchange? This site is useful : http://adsl2exchanges.com.au/
Honestly, who wants to watch the USA go in, and then sit there for another 3 hours while the other 150 nations march in with their 4 athletes a piece, and THEN come back to watch them light the torch?
I live in a country that starts with an A, so we are usually one of the first few teams to come out, and we are sports-mad, so our team is relatively large. I think it is kinda cool to be the first "big" team to come out. This time, we were one of the last.
Who wants to learn that there's a place called "Micronesia"
Umm, people who have an interest in the world outside their own borders?
Originally I thought that when they asked "paper or plastic" they wanted to know if I wanted to pay with paper notes or a plastic credit card.)
Ha!
I'm Australian, but the first time I went to a supermarket in the States and was asked "Paper or plastic?", I had no idea what she was asking. I had to ask her to repeat herself a few times. Eventually, I answered "Uh... cash?".
Another example of an every-day question in the US which had me stumped was "How do you want your eggs?". "Uhh.... fried?"
Nearly all music from the last 10 years is so overcompressed as to be unlistenable
Absolutely. It drives me crazy. But most people seem to be happy to listen to badly compressed MP3s through crappy tinny earphones, so what can ya do?
Re:I'm surprisingly upset
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Out of curiosity, what do you mean by Irwin reminding you of the way you really are?"
Most Australians hadn't even heard of Steve Irwin before he was very popular in the USA and other places. I think my first reaction when seeing him the first time was "Oh no, he's another Crocodile Dundee".
But after a while we saw that that seems to be his genuine character. Some years ago, most Australian men were very similar in many ways to Steve Irwin. Nowadays, in the larger cities, there's a diverse mix of "personalities". Some people might think Aussies like Irwin don't really exist anymore, and that his persona was not genuine. But you just have to drive 50 kilometres out of the city, and there are Iriwns-aplenty.
We Australians are tragically prone to cultural cringe. (We invented the term, in fact). I think it's a result of spending the last 200 years as a distant, disregarded, relatively lightly populated colony of England, who still thought of us as a bunch of convicts. Recently we seem to have largely transferred the attention of our collective inferiorty complex to the USA.
Comparing this to 9/11, is hardly relevant (I know parent AC didn't raise the subject). Irwin was one man who died because of his own misadventures.
Being Australian and having known quite a few that are as "ocker" as Steve Irwin was, I don't think he'd be offended by the "Crikey! Did you see that little bugger? He got me right in the chest!" joke. I think he would expect it, and would probably get a laugh out of it.
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Does OS X actually recognize modern mice with *more* than three buttons?
Yes. I use a Logitech G5 with OSX and all buttons function the same as they do under Windows. I didn't even need to install a driver, which I seem to recall having to do using the same mouse on XP.
There is nothing more eerie than the sound of a busy computer room suddenly going silent.
It varies over time. When I started working in data centers, almost 18 years ago, it was all halon gas, which is lethal to humans,so we all learnt the evacuation procedures pretty well! Then they moved to isolated sprinklers.... the sprinklers would only activate in the vicinity of the detected fire, thereby only destroying 2 or 3 racks rather than the whole room. Now, I think they've gone back to gas.
I don't have or want an iPhone, but I do have an iPod Touch. When I have internet connectivity on it, multitouch is awesome. Or even when I'm just showing off photos, being able to zoom in and out of web pages and photos so easily continues to amaze me after over a year of using the thing.
.... the phone stuff.
I am not a "fanboy", and haven't really seen any of the Android stuff, or other alternatives, but... I really think multitouch is a great innovation - not a gimmick.
But simple things like typing text, and looking up contacts continue to suck on the iPod Touch/iPhone. Hence, I'll stick with my bog standard Nokia phone for
But nobody stores stuff on 1,000 DVDs; they use tape storage, which maxes out at 1TB per tape.
Who wouldn't trade 2 random access 500GB discs that can be switched out in seconds for a 1TB tape that takes 62 seconds to mount? Everybody would and will.
I do agree with your point, except the everybody bit. It depends on the market and what type of data you're talking about. On the corporate backup system I look after, we fit over 2 TB on a tape, which costs about $100. It takes about 15 seconds to load and another 10-15 to locate to any position on the tape. When you're talking about backing up multi-terabyte databases, 30 second access time is not a big issue. I see up to 160 MB/sec throughput, with hardware compression. That's 160 MegaBYTES per second. The drives are rated to about 250 MB/sec, so I think the bottleneck is our crummy old 2Gb/sec FC switch. And tape is rewritable. There are several thousand tapes in our libraries.
Admittedly, the drives cost in the tens of $thousands, and the robotic library in the hundreds of $thousands. But my point is, I can't see everybody abandoning tape for holographic storage in the near future.
>>there is more Solaris in the market place then Linux.
>That depends on what segment of the marketplace you are talking about.
Agreed. I work for large enterprises too, and most places I see are involved in some kind of "RISC to Intel" migration.
And by "RISC to Intel", I don't mean "Solaris on RISC to Solaris on X86". It's Solaris and HPUX to Linux.
I don't necessarily like it, but that's the way it's going, from what I see.
That's not a moon - it's a space station.
*ducks*
The number one, top tier, highest revenue producing application at the company I work for is single threaded. It was originally written about 15 years ago, and I guess they didn't think multi-threading was worth worrying about at the time.
It used to be OK - CPUs kept getting faster. As the work this application needed to do increased, so did CPU operations per second, so they'd just upgrade the RISC based servers.
But now the few CPU developers left are concentrating on more cores, rather than faster processing per core (Moore's law? I guess). Multiple cores doesn't really help a single threaded application.
The company has outsourced all of their development to India. They know they need to rewrite the whole application to be multi-threaded, but they've got a snowball's chance in hell of this happening with their current developers.
I'm not a programmer. I'm an architect / sysadmin type person.
/var/log/messages. It depends what I'm working on.
First monitor - Putty, Word, Visio, or the admin GUI for whatever system I'm looking after at the moment.
Second monitor - either Outlook, or tail -f
Magic Eye posters...
Wow, it's a schooner!
Since the CFO bought an iPhone and now wants to read his Exchange email on it, so he doesn't have to carry his Blackberry too?
Do you have VMware?
We've been looking at this Mediawiki appliance.
For 8-10 users, you could probably even get away with running it on a "desktop class" machine running VMware Player with a static IP address for the appliance VM.
I have seen one of those massive floppies in real life.
Until just recently, I saw one of these massive floppies almost every day. I had it pinned on the partition behind my monitor. It was right next to my 3380 disk platter, and my (much later) quote for 300GB of SCSI disk for about $USD500,000.
It was my own mini-museum of data storage.
Yeah, I'm nostalgic. *shrug*
Sidenote for anyone who knows what a 3380 was (or is interested) : I once new a guy who used a 3380 HDA as a base for a glass coffee table.
I worked at a defence org a couple of times.
....
....correct. And they take it very seriously.
I just wrote a post about my experience there, but then thought "maybe I shouldn't do that", and deleted it before posting.
All I'll say is
separate networks with no physical connection to the Internet
"Oh dear," says God "I hadn't thought of that", and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
I have something similar happen to me from time to time. But for me, I am driving a car, and I need to brake, but no matter how hard I try to push down my foot on the pedal, the car won't slow down.
This has happened to me for so long that, now, when it does happen, I realise I am dreaming. Most of the time I freak out (either at the "Oh crap, I'm gonna crash" thought, or the "Oh wow, I'm dreaming" thought) and wake up. But a few times recently I have managed to stay asleep for a bit, although I've never been able to really "control" the dream once I realised what was happening.
Somewhat more on topic, I have no idea whether I dream in colour or monochrome. Since I've never noticed, I guess it is colour. I grew up in the days of colour TV (barely).
if the authorities feel you are being disrepectful, they will become far more inquisitive. And if you get "uppity"--particularly if you start shooting off your mouth about your constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms (while entering another country) you are just begging to get hassled.
Absolutely.
In the early nineties, so well before 9/11 induced terrorism hysteria, myself and 2 friends were returning home to Australia from our first overseas holiday in Hawaii. Upon arrival at Australian customs, the goons saw 3 scruffy 21 year old guys with a LOT of luggage and decided that we were worthy of a random check.
None of us had anything to hide. Myself and friend#1 simply complied and opened up one suitcase each. The officials just had a quick glance, didn't even bother touching anything, and waved us through.
However, friend#2 got very "uppity" and started claiming it was a violation of privacy and they had no right, etc, etc. So they took him into another room, and proceeded to completely empty each of his suitcases and examine every smelly sock and soiled pantiloon. He was in there for at least 45 minutes.
>If you take a good, unbiased look at what's out there right now, there's little reason for everything to be so lopsided for/against any particular platform, or architecture even.
/. because you end up with opinions across all ranges of the spectrum, from the person who tried to install Linux on their desktop once 5 years ago and gave up because it didn't automatically recognise their USB wi-fi adapter, to someone who maintains hundreds of servers running a mix of Linux, Solaris, HPUX, Windows, zOS (MVS - IBM mainframe), and whatever else.
.... inflexible. But putting the mainframe aside, Solaris was by far the easiest to work with, the easiest to pinpoint problems, the least troublesome of them all. And compared to the HP-UX and Windows servers at the time, it's performance ROCKED.
Agreed.
These discussions are always frustrating on
On the desktop, I run Windows XP. I do have an affection for Linux, and have for a long time. The first Linux distribution I installed was downloaded on my 28.8kbps modem, saved to several floppy disks, and installed on an Intel 486 based PC with a whopping 4MB of RAM. I think the distribution was called "Yggdrasil". That would have been about 1994. Back then, I enjoyed tinkering with my computer at home. It was kinda fun, but I eventually switched back to Windows. I have tried heaps of distributions since then, and it is easier these days with VMware, but the parent post is right when he says "it hasn't gotten any better at it since the mid 90's". When I try a Linux desktop, I STILL end up spending hours and hours trying to get basic functionality working. I don't enjoy that any more. I just want my home computer to browse the internet and play my media. I don't want to mess around with config files at home - that's what I do at work.
When I do my next desktop refresh, I will probably go Mac. I've always stuck with Windows because I liked to play the occasional game, but I don't game much these days, and OSX looks great, and has a nice, accessible, Unix-ish heart (ie - a real command line).
At work, I look after storage - SANs and data backup systems. When I started, it was all IBM mainframe. Then it went Solaris and HP-UX, with a bit of AIX. A bit later, Windows as a server started encroaching, which was a complete pain in the butt.
Of those Operating Systems, the MVS mainframe was the most reliable (and still is), but also the most
I went and worked for Sun for a while - just when Solaris 10 came out, and their T1000 and T2000 models. I still think they are awesome boxen and am sad that I haven't had a chance to work with them.
I went back to the company I started with. Today, the highest profile project running is the "RISC to Intel" project. They are moving all of their back-end Tier 1 servers off HP-UX and Solaris, and onto Redhat Linux on IBM servers.
The decision to move to Linux was not made due to any technical or cost benefits, really. It was made because the company I work for "partnered" with IBM. And IBM have pushed Linux on IBM hardware to the upper level management.
At first, I was really worried about this. REALLY worried.
However, after a year or so of running several Tier 1 applications (Oracle, mainly) on Redhat, and setting up and maintaining a relatively high-throughput Netbackup system running on Redhat and IBM 3850 servers, it has all been more stable than I was expecting. I am getting great throughput on those 3850s.
Now I tend to think, taking all of the above into account, is that the operating system is kinda irrelevant, at least from my perspective as a storage person. As long as the O/S is efficient and can drive the hardware to it's limit, then, these days, I couldn't care less what O/S it's running.
As long as it's not Windows.
And as long as you can work out some of the obscure Redhat commands - like to scan for a new SAN attached tape drive... I don't have the exact command handy, b
Which CBD?
:/
My friend who lives in the outer, outer suburbs of Melbourne gets 8,000 Kbps on ADSL (not 2+), but he is almost next door to his exchange.
I live about 2 KMs from Melbourne CBD, but I only get about 5,000 Kbps on ADSL2+, because I'm over 3 KMs from my exchange
I am an Internode customer and am very happy with their service, but have you checked if any other ISPs have hardware in your local exchange? This site is useful : http://adsl2exchanges.com.au/
Honestly, who wants to watch the USA go in, and then sit there for another 3 hours while the other 150 nations march in with their 4 athletes a piece, and THEN come back to watch them light the torch?
I live in a country that starts with an A, so we are usually one of the first few teams to come out, and we are sports-mad, so our team is relatively large. I think it is kinda cool to be the first "big" team to come out. This time, we were one of the last.
Who wants to learn that there's a place called "Micronesia"
Umm, people who have an interest in the world outside their own borders?
Originally I thought that when they asked "paper or plastic" they wanted to know if I wanted to pay with paper notes or a plastic credit card.)
Ha! I'm Australian, but the first time I went to a supermarket in the States and was asked "Paper or plastic?", I had no idea what she was asking. I had to ask her to repeat herself a few times. Eventually, I answered "Uh... cash?".
Another example of an every-day question in the US which had me stumped was "How do you want your eggs?". "Uhh.... fried?"
The attacks were probably coming from other infected PCs within the college network.
"Out of curiosity, what do you mean by Irwin reminding you of the way you really are?"
Most Australians hadn't even heard of Steve Irwin before he was very popular in the USA and other places. I think my first reaction when seeing him the first time was "Oh no, he's another Crocodile Dundee".
But after a while we saw that that seems to be his genuine character. Some years ago, most Australian men were very similar in many ways to Steve Irwin. Nowadays, in the larger cities, there's a diverse mix of "personalities". Some people might think Aussies like Irwin don't really exist anymore, and that his persona was not genuine. But you just have to drive 50 kilometres out of the city, and there are Iriwns-aplenty.
We Australians are tragically prone to cultural cringe. (We invented the term, in fact). I think it's a result of spending the last 200 years as a distant, disregarded, relatively lightly populated colony of England, who still thought of us as a bunch of convicts. Recently we seem to have largely transferred the attention of our collective inferiorty complex to the USA.
Sigh. You asked...
Comparing this to 9/11, is hardly relevant (I know parent AC didn't raise the subject). Irwin was one man who died because of his own misadventures.
Being Australian and having known quite a few that are as "ocker" as Steve Irwin was, I don't think he'd be offended by the "Crikey! Did you see that little bugger? He got me right in the chest!" joke. I think he would expect it, and would probably get a laugh out of it.