Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you'll know that while malware in Windows can spread when the user inadvertently executes something (which Linux does protect you against), it also frequently spreads by tricking the user into thinking they want to execute it (which Linux can't protect against) or taking advantages of security holes (which Linux can't protect against).
If SCO pull something out of their collective backsides to try and continue this (which I wouldn't be surprised to see - it's really quite incredible what Darl McBride has stuffed up his arse), I rather suspect this will wind up going on longer than the Bush administration.
I actually re-read this post several times because I wasn't too keen on the tone. I'm not having a go at you, but I was running the numbers myself on a spreadsheet only about a month ago and was expecting similar results to what you suggest.
I was totally wrong. Right now, for any non-trivial quantity of data which is expanding at any non-trivial rate, LTO4 is the most cost-effective solution. (Actually, the most cost-effective solution is probably an LTO-5 drive but use LTO-4 tapes until the LTO-5 tapes come down a bit in price).
100MB/s is plenty. Consider the cost of the whole deal: interface card, drive, cleaning tape, aggravation of having to switch tapes/run cleaning job, and so on. Three external USB 2.0 drives beat that speed, and cost a whopping $420 at Walmart, of all places.
Please explain to me how you maintain 100MB/s write speed on a bus which can - on a good day - manage just under half of that. And usually manages more like about a third.
Assumptions: - the tape has a lifetime of 300 passes, capacity of 1.5TB and $100 cost
Or you could buy LTO4 tapes which will write just fine in an LTO5 drive and right now are quite a bit cheaper per gigabyte.
- the drive lasts 3 years and costs $2000 (given my experience with LTO, that's optimistic)
Are you not getting a 3 year warranty on your drive?
Assuming that nothing gets any cheaper over time,
Really? I'm buying LTO3 tapes for about a third what I was paying a couple of years ago.
With my luck, half of the tapes had errors after one year, and that was on a lower density tape (VS160).
Seriously, if half your tapes have errors after just one year, there is something seriously wrong. I don't know if it's power, environmental factors, cheap tapes or what but there is no way you should see a failure rate that high.
For LTO, I'd think that you'd want the backup will be written, then verified, and then any data that had errors will be written again. So the number of passes available from the tape's life shrinks by half to 150.
You are aware that the LTO specifications include automatic verification as part of the writing process? You generally can't turn this off.
150 passes lets you use one tape to store and verify a total of 225 TB of data over its lifetime.
Splitting hairs, but LTO writes a full tape in several passes. A tape will last several thousand passes, but probably only about ~150-200 complete fills.
How does that stack up to the hard drive? A USB 2 hard drive will transfer 3.9 TB per day,
Unless your users will put up with the performance hit that comes from taking backups during the working day, it doesn't really matter how much you can transfer per day. What matters is how much you can transfer during your backup window.
Now knowing that tape prices don't really drop much with time,
Which is wrong.
With USB or eSata HDs, the interface costs are essentially nil, and most any current server comes with enough connectors to plug in several external drives at once, and the chipset is fast enough to keep them saturated if your source storage allows. You won't really be throwing multiple $2k tape drives at a bandwidth problem, but with USB or eSATA HD, the bandwidth comes essentially for free: as long as you have enough drives, each drive adds to the bandwidth.
Not true, you'll be limited by the bus speed very quickly indeed. Just because your system has 8 USB ports does not mean you can expect to see 8x480Mbps when you've got 8 hard disks plugged in.
That I see as part of the problem. You shouldn't be able to get the qualification of this title by simply paying for the privilage. Am I correct that 80pounds / year is all you need and you can instantly put MBCS on your business card?
Pretty much. You need an accredited degree (which is, AFAICT, most computing-related degrees from most universities) and/or a certain amount of experience for MBCS, but for the vast majority of IT professionals that's a non-issue.
By and large, 7 has some nice improvements over XP. Off the top of my head:
- The taskbar is a vast improvement. You can click on an icon and see the windows associated with an application in a smaller window. They're also brought to foreground on the desktop, so you can find the right window for your application quickly and easily. - Microsoft have finally figured out that we are no longer using 14" CRT screens at 640x480 resulting in applications being more-or-less unusable unless maximised to fill the screen. Well done, chaps, only took you 12 years. As a result, you can easily snap windows to take up a proportion of your desktop. - Following on from this, the UI icons are vector based and icons, text and window decorations are resized to account for screen resolution. No longer do you find yourself stuck between lowering the screen resolution (and making everything look like Noddy in Toytown) and increasing text size (and finding that a large chunk of the UI doesn't quite work properly). Full disclosure: I haven't checked how this impacts applications in any great detail. - When updates are downloaded, you no longer spend the rest of the day clicking "Restart later" every 10 minutes - you can tell it to go away and hassle you again some time later. (Seriously, who the hell approved Windows XP's behaviour in the first place?) - The OS is designed to be rolled out using an imaging-based system, and images are fairly hardware-independent (Another case where Microsoft have taken 15 years to catch up with the real world). Unfortunately it seems to be fairly oriented towards OEMs - Sysprep is used to render the image hardware-independent and your options with sysprep are "Reboot in Audit Mode" (reboot to a desktop and run sysprep again on reboot) and "Reboot with Out of Box Experience" (take PC off the domain, when it next boots it'll give a welcome screen, drag you through choosing your keyboard type and setting up a local user). There's no "Reboot to a join domain screen" option.
NOTE: I've only been using Win7 in my own employer for about a week. Correct me if I'm wrong with any of these.
Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
AFAICT, the strongest argument against migrating off Windows is:
One or two applications we depend on have no realistic alternative on Linux or OS X and we're not about to jeopardise our support contract by running it under Wine or under Terminal Services (Before you flame me, I've spent serious time looking at this and there are plenty of applications for which this is absolutely true. Accounting and payroll are the most obvious, though I'm sure there are plenty of others). These applications may only be used by a handful of people, but we don't want to mess around with two different OSs so instead we'll keep the entire business running Windows.
Bear in mind that I'm entirely in the realms of hypothesis at this point.
About the only evidence that would be even remotely interesting would be some sort of written evidence of two-way communication with any aliens - and it'd immediately be denounced as fake regardless of how true it really was.
(I don't actually think it's terribly likely - any alien species that had the ability to cover the distances required to visit us would be so far advanced that there would be no point whatsoever in bothering).
You're missing the point. The exact hourly rate isn't what the parent was getting at, the issue is that many businesses have listened to the old "Good, fast cheap - pick any two" adage and made their decision.
You mean the same way saying you're a level 70 Mage in world of warcraft is?
That's a pretty good description.
I got the impression it's more like a social club for people looking for other techies to go for a drink with.
It's not even very good for that - I was a member for a while and the locations they chose for meetings were invariably out-of-town hotels and conference centres you'd need to drive to.
I was a member for a while, I cancelled the membership when I figured I was paying £80/year for the privilege of putting MBCS after my name and... er... that was about it.
The only way I can see it being important is if the computing industry ever reaches the point where there's a real benefit in being able to call yourself a "Chartered IT Professional" or somesuch (much as you can be a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Accountant or Chartered Surveyor and if you are, you're legally allowed to do some things you wouldn't otherwise be able to).
The idea that we've already been contacted by UFOs is seen as so ridiculous by the majority of people that the more evidence you provide, the more it appears that you're a raving nutjob.
In short, if they were really trying to hide such evidence (wholly unnecessary), they wouldn't need to have him killed. In fact, it's probably better to let him live because it'll mean that any evidence that does come out (however genuine it is) will be viewed with a pretty high degree of scepticism.
IIRC EFI also defines a standard way for the OS to update settings. So you could update BIOS settings on the fly without having to reboot.
Quite what the benefit of this is when any modern OS basically ignores the BIOS as soon as the kernel has started running is a separate issue entirely....
This morning I posted the opinion that if you believe the figures churned out by those that are heavily anti-piracy (BSA, RIAA, MPAA), eliminating piracy would double the GDP of the entire planet overnight. Hyperbole? Well, I didn't think so, though I had one reply that implied it might be.
And this afternoon, we have the RIAA demanding approximately the GDP of Brazil on the basis of damages from one product.
It may be possible to quantify piracy but I'm quite sure the numbers being banded around right now are complete garbage, if only because if you believe them you also have to believe that the GDP of the planet would double overnight if you were to eliminate it.
If you were to believe all the numbers bandied around about piracy, then you would have to believe that if it were to be eliminated the GDP of the planet would double overnight.
A study is just a variant on the good old fashioned scientific experiment where you start with a hypothesis, devise some method to determine whether or not your hypothesis is correct, carry out this method and draw conclusions based on the results. The only difference is that many of these studies are operated backwards - you decide what you wish to conclude, invent results which support these conclusions and devise a method which could reasonably produce such results.
A culture where the last few generations have been indoctrinated from cradle to grave to believe that they live in a wonderful country which is so great they're not allowed to cross the border to see how others live - but why would you want to anyway, citizen?
Thinking about it, it sounds an awful lot like a cult but on a much larger scale. And the great majority of cult members really do believe everything their wonderful leader says, otherwise there wouldn't be any such things as cults.
Unless they're selling hardware at silly prices, I wouldn't bet on that. Profit margins for most hardware are so low they'd probably make more money to charge for a few hours of cleanup.
Frankly, if they charge per hour it and she didn't have restoration disks, it probably was unsalvageable - at least, not without incurring more cost than the value of the computer.
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Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, you'll know that while malware in Windows can spread when the user inadvertently executes something (which Linux does protect you against), it also frequently spreads by tricking the user into thinking they want to execute it (which Linux can't protect against) or taking advantages of security holes (which Linux can't protect against).
It only pains me to see you've been modded +5.
The parent only said it COULD be PHP. If only IIS sites are affected, I'd imagine it's probably a language that's exclusive to Windows.
If SCO pull something out of their collective backsides to try and continue this (which I wouldn't be surprised to see - it's really quite incredible what Darl McBride has stuffed up his arse), I rather suspect this will wind up going on longer than the Bush administration.
I actually re-read this post several times because I wasn't too keen on the tone. I'm not having a go at you, but I was running the numbers myself on a spreadsheet only about a month ago and was expecting similar results to what you suggest.
I was totally wrong. Right now, for any non-trivial quantity of data which is expanding at any non-trivial rate, LTO4 is the most cost-effective solution. (Actually, the most cost-effective solution is probably an LTO-5 drive but use LTO-4 tapes until the LTO-5 tapes come down a bit in price).
100MB/s is plenty. Consider the cost of the whole deal: interface card, drive, cleaning tape, aggravation of having to switch tapes/run cleaning job, and so on. Three external USB 2.0 drives beat that speed, and cost a whopping $420 at Walmart, of all places.
Please explain to me how you maintain 100MB/s write speed on a bus which can - on a good day - manage just under half of that. And usually manages more like about a third.
Assumptions:
- the tape has a lifetime of 300 passes, capacity of 1.5TB and $100 cost
Or you could buy LTO4 tapes which will write just fine in an LTO5 drive and right now are quite a bit cheaper per gigabyte.
- the drive lasts 3 years and costs $2000 (given my experience with LTO, that's optimistic)
Are you not getting a 3 year warranty on your drive?
Assuming that nothing gets any cheaper over time,
Really? I'm buying LTO3 tapes for about a third what I was paying a couple of years ago.
With my luck, half of the tapes had errors after one year, and that was on a lower density tape (VS160).
Seriously, if half your tapes have errors after just one year, there is something seriously wrong. I don't know if it's power, environmental factors, cheap tapes or what but there is no way you should see a failure rate that high.
For LTO, I'd think that you'd want the backup will be written, then verified, and then any data that had errors will be written again. So the number of passes available from the tape's life shrinks by half to 150.
You are aware that the LTO specifications include automatic verification as part of the writing process? You generally can't turn this off.
150 passes lets you use one tape to store and verify a total of 225 TB of data over its lifetime.
Splitting hairs, but LTO writes a full tape in several passes. A tape will last several thousand passes, but probably only about ~150-200 complete fills.
Pictures explain this far more clearly than text at http://www.lto.org/technology/primer2.html
How does that stack up to the hard drive? A USB 2 hard drive will transfer 3.9 TB per day,
Unless your users will put up with the performance hit that comes from taking backups during the working day, it doesn't really matter how much you can transfer per day. What matters is how much you can transfer during your backup window.
Now knowing that tape prices don't really drop much with time,
Which is wrong.
With USB or eSata HDs, the interface costs are essentially nil, and most any current server comes with enough connectors to plug in several external drives at once, and the chipset is fast enough to keep them saturated if your source storage allows. You won't really be throwing multiple $2k tape drives at a bandwidth problem, but with USB or eSATA HD, the bandwidth comes essentially for free: as long as you have enough drives, each drive adds to the bandwidth.
Not true, you'll be limited by the bus speed very quickly indeed. Just because your system has 8 USB ports does not mean you can expect to see 8x480Mbps when you've got 8 hard disks plugged in.
With tapes,
Fat chance. Monitor panel resolutions (except for pretty esoteric models) appear to have levelled out - I'd imagine they're just using panels for TVs.
That I see as part of the problem. You shouldn't be able to get the qualification of this title by simply paying for the privilage. Am I correct that 80pounds / year is all you need and you can instantly put MBCS on your business card?
Pretty much. You need an accredited degree (which is, AFAICT, most computing-related degrees from most universities) and/or a certain amount of experience for MBCS, but for the vast majority of IT professionals that's a non-issue.
By and large, 7 has some nice improvements over XP. Off the top of my head:
- The taskbar is a vast improvement. You can click on an icon and see the windows associated with an application in a smaller window. They're also brought to foreground on the desktop, so you can find the right window for your application quickly and easily.
- Microsoft have finally figured out that we are no longer using 14" CRT screens at 640x480 resulting in applications being more-or-less unusable unless maximised to fill the screen. Well done, chaps, only took you 12 years. As a result, you can easily snap windows to take up a proportion of your desktop.
- Following on from this, the UI icons are vector based and icons, text and window decorations are resized to account for screen resolution. No longer do you find yourself stuck between lowering the screen resolution (and making everything look like Noddy in Toytown) and increasing text size (and finding that a large chunk of the UI doesn't quite work properly). Full disclosure: I haven't checked how this impacts applications in any great detail.
- When updates are downloaded, you no longer spend the rest of the day clicking "Restart later" every 10 minutes - you can tell it to go away and hassle you again some time later. (Seriously, who the hell approved Windows XP's behaviour in the first place?)
- The OS is designed to be rolled out using an imaging-based system, and images are fairly hardware-independent (Another case where Microsoft have taken 15 years to catch up with the real world). Unfortunately it seems to be fairly oriented towards OEMs - Sysprep is used to render the image hardware-independent and your options with sysprep are "Reboot in Audit Mode" (reboot to a desktop and run sysprep again on reboot) and "Reboot with Out of Box Experience" (take PC off the domain, when it next boots it'll give a welcome screen, drag you through choosing your keyboard type and setting up a local user). There's no "Reboot to a join domain screen" option.
NOTE: I've only been using Win7 in my own employer for about a week. Correct me if I'm wrong with any of these.
AFAICT, the strongest argument against migrating off Windows is:
One or two applications we depend on have no realistic alternative on Linux or OS X and we're not about to jeopardise our support contract by running it under Wine or under Terminal Services (Before you flame me, I've spent serious time looking at this and there are plenty of applications for which this is absolutely true. Accounting and payroll are the most obvious, though I'm sure there are plenty of others). These applications may only be used by a handful of people, but we don't want to mess around with two different OSs so instead we'll keep the entire business running Windows.
Bear in mind that I'm entirely in the realms of hypothesis at this point.
About the only evidence that would be even remotely interesting would be some sort of written evidence of two-way communication with any aliens - and it'd immediately be denounced as fake regardless of how true it really was.
(I don't actually think it's terribly likely - any alien species that had the ability to cover the distances required to visit us would be so far advanced that there would be no point whatsoever in bothering).
You're missing the point. The exact hourly rate isn't what the parent was getting at, the issue is that many businesses have listened to the old "Good, fast cheap - pick any two" adage and made their decision.
It's "Fast and cheap".
You mean the same way saying you're a level 70 Mage in world of warcraft is?
That's a pretty good description.
I got the impression it's more like a social club for people looking for other techies to go for a drink with.
It's not even very good for that - I was a member for a while and the locations they chose for meetings were invariably out-of-town hotels and conference centres you'd need to drive to.
Seconded.
I was a member for a while, I cancelled the membership when I figured I was paying £80/year for the privilege of putting MBCS after my name and... er... that was about it.
The only way I can see it being important is if the computing industry ever reaches the point where there's a real benefit in being able to call yourself a "Chartered IT Professional" or somesuch (much as you can be a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Accountant or Chartered Surveyor and if you are, you're legally allowed to do some things you wouldn't otherwise be able to).
The idea that we've already been contacted by UFOs is seen as so ridiculous by the majority of people that the more evidence you provide, the more it appears that you're a raving nutjob.
In short, if they were really trying to hide such evidence (wholly unnecessary), they wouldn't need to have him killed. In fact, it's probably better to let him live because it'll mean that any evidence that does come out (however genuine it is) will be viewed with a pretty high degree of scepticism.
Congratulations, you've just invented Open Firmware.
IIRC EFI also defines a standard way for the OS to update settings. So you could update BIOS settings on the fly without having to reboot.
Quite what the benefit of this is when any modern OS basically ignores the BIOS as soon as the kernel has started running is a separate issue entirely....
This morning I posted the opinion that if you believe the figures churned out by those that are heavily anti-piracy (BSA, RIAA, MPAA), eliminating piracy would double the GDP of the entire planet overnight. Hyperbole? Well, I didn't think so, though I had one reply that implied it might be.
And this afternoon, we have the RIAA demanding approximately the GDP of Brazil on the basis of damages from one product.
It may be possible to quantify piracy but I'm quite sure the numbers being banded around right now are complete garbage, if only because if you believe them you also have to believe that the GDP of the planet would double overnight if you were to eliminate it.
If you were to believe all the numbers bandied around about piracy, then you would have to believe that if it were to be eliminated the GDP of the planet would double overnight.
You answered your own question.
A study is just a variant on the good old fashioned scientific experiment where you start with a hypothesis, devise some method to determine whether or not your hypothesis is correct, carry out this method and draw conclusions based on the results. The only difference is that many of these studies are operated backwards - you decide what you wish to conclude, invent results which support these conclusions and devise a method which could reasonably produce such results.
That's easy, superglue it to a cat.
How effective does propaganda need to be when you never get any means to calibrate your bullshit filter?
You are talking about a wholly different culture.
A culture where the last few generations have been indoctrinated from cradle to grave to believe that they live in a wonderful country which is so great they're not allowed to cross the border to see how others live - but why would you want to anyway, citizen?
Thinking about it, it sounds an awful lot like a cult but on a much larger scale. And the great majority of cult members really do believe everything their wonderful leader says, otherwise there wouldn't be any such things as cults.
Unless they're selling hardware at silly prices, I wouldn't bet on that. Profit margins for most hardware are so low they'd probably make more money to charge for a few hours of cleanup.
I'll do better than that, I'll show you an entire range of them and a company that sells little else:
http://www.matobshop.co.uk/
Frankly, if they charge per hour it and she didn't have restoration disks, it probably was unsalvageable - at least, not without incurring more cost than the value of the computer.