Use of JGoodies JDisk Report helps me find old & large files easily, on any platform, and take appropriate steps to eradicate the primary offenders. The OP needs a $50 DVD burner and a spool of DVD's rather than that much HDD storage for home.
Having many retail locations to sell computers is not a good business idea - simply more overhead than can be paid for given current commodity pricing. If you need an example, look no further than Gateway. Also, did you ever wonder why Dell's "retail locations" consist primarily of kiosks in the mall? Kiosks are cheap and have high traffic - just like Dell.
Therefore, I could care less if Apple allows resellers to market their products. Mail order [internet] distribution and Apple stores keep Apple's products more cost competitive and eases acquisition for the majority of their customers.
"Linux is winning in large enterprises because its the cheapest, and safest, way to run Oracle RAC and J2EE Application Servers. If you really don't care about the OS (and most of the time you don't) then you might as well pick Linux."
Ummmm, okay, sure. I suppose if you don't care about the OS you might pick Linux because you haven't done your homework and it's the latest buzzword. Ask a true professional or go buy a clue and you will see that Solaris [especially Solaris 10] will beat the doors off of Linux in many cases including cost, security, virtualization...the list goes on. No one OS is the best solution for everything and claiming that Linux is so superior, even on Slashdot, is profoundly haphazard.
I appreciate your input, and you are indeed correct if my
use were to be recurring. However, given my particular needs flexibility
is essential as I never know how to exactly setup the analysis
[developing analytical routines] and have to try a few different iterations for
every dataset - trial and error - to determine the best to tweak. Once a
process or analytical setup is refined it may be programmed.....aye, there's
the rub! Of course, I'd rather not reprogram each test run during the initial phase, and as you can imagine,
its much faster to have a tool to quickly adapt to changing criteria even it
isn't the most efficient setup in recurring use.
Perhaps one of these days I'll break down and buy Mathematica or Matlab and all the necessary tool packs when I have an extra $8,000 lying around? Naaah. I can make Excel work even though it's frustrating at times and fights me kicking and screaming the entire way. 8)
Right, Excel is not a stats package, but even some of the basic stats functions in Excel are "broke" by being based on poor assumptions and degraded accuracy....yes, just basic functionality of stats.
Running a pivot table on external SQL queries is PAINFULLY slow. If I could import 524,288 to a few million rows of data to Excel [stripped excess columns, of course], speed should be improved and save a ton of SQL queries; especially when you have to do it a few times as Excel crashes or complains of being out of memory [not physical - Excel heaps]. During the same or similar processes, multiprocessor support [threading] of Excel leaves much to be desired.
"The real question is: Just how much can you improve an office suite, before it's 'good enough'? Many Office users (my employers included) feel Office 2003 is just fine"
I can tell you that there is great room to improve Excel, good as it is. Many statistical functions in Excel need work in addition to addressing the poor memory limits - and I don't mean a marginal bump as is common with most Excel upgrades. Someday I'd also like to be able to address more than 65,536 rows and 256 columns.
Threading in Excel is poor! Admittedly this is not an issue for your average user.
So basically Microsoft will only marginally update Office for power users needing an extra speed or function fix and totally rework the GUI for the newbies to gawk at. Unfortunately this is a good business move if your business is to simply make as much money as possible from upgrades.
"They should not be able to charge the same price as the original copy as you HAVE already compensated them for the artist's work."
They should be able to charge whatever they want for their services. If they charge too much, competition should provide an alternate route and also enable innovation. YOU as a consumer dictate how much a company can charge - and still remain profitable.
Besides, who is the "artist?" Is not the work of a skillful remastering artist as valuable as a singer/actor/foo? If you don't think so, go see a live concert without lip-syncing....and I am sure you will change your mind!
Just as an FYI, once you download an iTunes track, or 1,000, you can burn to CD or DVD as you see fit. Of course, the quality is not as good as uncompressed audio, but it's considerably better than MP3.
"I SHOULD BE ABLE TO FREELY DOWNLOAD THE NEW VERSIONS as they represent a more accurate representation of the recording I purchased the rights to hear."
Just like you should have the rights to download OS or applicaiton updates forever? If you weren't happy with your music choice at the time you should not have purchased it, simply because it's improved later does NOT give you the right to receive a free upgrade.
"How come no one has ever brought this up?" Because it is a stupid idea.
" Your maximum wait time is one revolution... whether you have one drive or if you have infinite drives, one revolution is the max time."
Doesn't this depend on your RAID level? I would agree with you if you were discussing only RAID 1, but if you go to RAID 5 or RAID 0 are you not waiting for up to 1 revolution on each drive? Therefore, you could be waiting up to three revolutions on a three-disk RAID 5 or RAID 0.
Choice of RAID level should always consider data availability as well as drive latency and throughput.
Re:Writing has been on the wall
on
Dell Dumping Itanium
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"It has no technical merit."
Excuse me? Modded +5 Interesting, but incorrect on this one point.
I hope you just made an honest mistake and don't really believe that nonsense.
I would imagine you could do this with the Ubuntu live CD as its also Debian based like Knoppix, so try to find the comparable "knoppix toram" boot argument command to load the entire CD contents to memory (for machines with 2Gb or RAM or more) for excellent performance of the OS...after the CD loads.
That confirms it then. We should all scrap Java because you've had a timeout on yours and a co-workers Java applet.
Did you ever consider that could be your OS and not Java causing that problem? Like many, my work uses Windows and it is a pain and lags frequently - not just Java but Java does lags as an indirect result. Java on Solaris, Linux, or OS X is very good.
Find the real cause of your woes and it won't likely be Java.
Exactly. Get a Sun workstation that is certified to run Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Use Netbeans or whatever you like as your IDE and have a nice workstation cabpable, and certified, to run your OS of choice.
I know I change OS's from time to time to see what else is out there, but Solaris is home. If you get a second workstation, get a Mac and you'll have the market cornered.
Now that you can get a 'real' UNIX for free, what are the compelling reasons to use Slackware GNU/Linux whose primary function is to be "...the most "UNIX-like" Linux distribution out there."
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they add an IRC client and HTML editor!
Well damn, why not integrate it with OpenOffice and OoMyGod.
Use of JGoodies JDisk Report helps me find old & large files easily, on any platform, and take appropriate steps to eradicate the primary offenders. The OP needs a $50 DVD burner and a spool of DVD's rather than that much HDD storage for home.
Having many retail locations to sell computers is not a good business idea - simply more overhead than can be paid for given current commodity pricing. If you need an example, look no further than Gateway. Also, did you ever wonder why Dell's "retail locations" consist primarily of kiosks in the mall? Kiosks are cheap and have high traffic - just like Dell.
Therefore, I could care less if Apple allows resellers to market their products. Mail order [internet] distribution and Apple stores keep Apple's products more cost competitive and eases acquisition for the majority of their customers.
"Linux is winning in large enterprises because its the cheapest, and safest, way to run Oracle RAC and J2EE Application Servers. If you really don't care about the OS (and most of the time you don't) then you might as well pick Linux."
Ummmm, okay, sure. I suppose if you don't care about the OS you might pick Linux because you haven't done your homework and it's the latest buzzword. Ask a true professional or go buy a clue and you will see that Solaris [especially Solaris 10] will beat the doors off of Linux in many cases including cost, security, virtualization...the list goes on. No one OS is the best solution for everything and claiming that Linux is so superior, even on Slashdot, is profoundly haphazard.
Finally! 18,446,744,073,709,600,000 rows should last for some time to come.
I appreciate your input, and you are indeed correct if my use were to be recurring. However, given my particular needs flexibility is essential as I never know how to exactly setup the analysis [developing analytical routines] and have to try a few different iterations for every dataset - trial and error - to determine the best to tweak. Once a process or analytical setup is refined it may be programmed.....aye, there's the rub! Of course, I'd rather not reprogram each test run during the initial phase, and as you can imagine, its much faster to have a tool to quickly adapt to changing criteria even it isn't the most efficient setup in recurring use.
Perhaps one of these days I'll break down and buy Mathematica or Matlab and all the necessary tool packs when I have an extra $8,000 lying around? Naaah. I can make Excel work even though it's frustrating at times and fights me kicking and screaming the entire way. 8)
"Ability to use Excel PivotTables on large (>65,536 rows) datasets? Not yet a reality...."
Okay, this is possible now, but nowhere near reliable, fast, or easy to use....thus the request for more space, memory and otherwise, in Excel.
Without PivotTables I could really care less, but PivotTables [DataPilot in OpenOffice] are a fantastic feature.
Relational database? Check. [PostgreSQL and MySQL]
Non-spreadsheet calc program with easily audited formulas? Check. [MathCad]
Ability to use Excel PivotTables on large (>65,536 rows) datasets? Not yet a reality....
To clarify, I meant open natively within Excel rather than import that data.
And a relational database is already in use; just trying to use Excel to effectively analyze some of that data can be quite a pain.
Right, Excel is not a stats package, but even some of the basic stats functions in Excel are "broke" by being based on poor assumptions and degraded accuracy....yes, just basic functionality of stats.
Running a pivot table on external SQL queries is PAINFULLY slow. If I could import 524,288 to a few million rows of data to Excel [stripped excess columns, of course], speed should be improved and save a ton of SQL queries; especially when you have to do it a few times as Excel crashes or complains of being out of memory [not physical - Excel heaps]. During the same or similar processes, multiprocessor support [threading] of Excel leaves much to be desired.
Hopefully by the time Office 12 is released in the second half of 2006 Apple will have their rumored spreadsheet component ["Cells"?] available.
"The real question is: Just how much can you improve an office suite, before it's 'good enough'? Many Office users (my employers included) feel Office 2003 is just fine"
I can tell you that there is great room to improve Excel, good as it is. Many statistical functions in Excel need work in addition to addressing the poor memory limits - and I don't mean a marginal bump as is common with most Excel upgrades. Someday I'd also like to be able to address more than 65,536 rows and 256 columns.
Threading in Excel is poor! Admittedly this is not an issue for your average user.
So basically Microsoft will only marginally update Office for power users needing an extra speed or function fix and totally rework the GUI for the newbies to gawk at. Unfortunately this is a good business move if your business is to simply make as much money as possible from upgrades.
No thanks. I'd rather NOT be in a room full of chairs at Microsoft just in case Ballmer walks in.
"They should not be able to charge the same price as the original copy as you HAVE already compensated them for the artist's work."
They should be able to charge whatever they want for their services. If they charge too much, competition should provide an alternate route and also enable innovation. YOU as a consumer dictate how much a company can charge - and still remain profitable.
Besides, who is the "artist?" Is not the work of a skillful remastering artist as valuable as a singer/actor/foo? If you don't think so, go see a live concert without lip-syncing....and I am sure you will change your mind!
iTunes is great.
Just as an FYI, once you download an iTunes track, or 1,000, you can burn to CD or DVD as you see fit. Of course, the quality is not as good as uncompressed audio, but it's considerably better than MP3.
"I SHOULD BE ABLE TO FREELY DOWNLOAD THE NEW VERSIONS as they represent a more accurate representation of the recording I purchased the rights to hear."
Just like you should have the rights to download OS or applicaiton updates forever? If you weren't happy with your music choice at the time you should not have purchased it, simply because it's improved later does NOT give you the right to receive a free upgrade.
"How come no one has ever brought this up?"
Because it is a stupid idea.
And it's call Apple OS X Tiger (10.4) with Spotlight.
If you've never used it, try it sometime.
Google needen't tie itself to any hardware or OS platform, they are [and should be] tied to information in all forms.
" Your maximum wait time is one revolution... whether you have one drive or if you have infinite drives, one revolution is the max time."
Doesn't this depend on your RAID level? I would agree with you if you were discussing only RAID 1, but if you go to RAID 5 or RAID 0 are you not waiting for up to 1 revolution on each drive? Therefore, you could be waiting up to three revolutions on a three-disk RAID 5 or RAID 0.
Choice of RAID level should always consider data availability as well as drive latency and throughput.
"It has no technical merit."
Excuse me? Modded +5 Interesting, but incorrect on this one point.
I hope you just made an honest mistake and don't really believe that nonsense.
Much has already been said on the topic.
See these forums (front page of first link even):
Solaris Support & Training Forum for x86
Sun Solaris Developer Forums
I would imagine you could do this with the Ubuntu live CD as its also Debian based like Knoppix, so try to find the comparable "knoppix toram" boot argument command to load the entire CD contents to memory (for machines with 2Gb or RAM or more) for excellent performance of the OS...after the CD loads.
That confirms it then. We should all scrap Java because you've had a timeout on yours and a co-workers Java applet.
Did you ever consider that could be your OS and not Java causing that problem? Like many, my work uses Windows and it is a pain and lags frequently - not just Java but Java does lags as an indirect result. Java on Solaris, Linux, or OS X is very good.
Find the real cause of your woes and it won't likely be Java.
Exactly. Get a Sun workstation that is certified to run Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Use Netbeans or whatever you like as your IDE and have a nice workstation cabpable, and certified, to run your OS of choice.
I know I change OS's from time to time to see what else is out there, but Solaris is home. If you get a second workstation, get a Mac and you'll have the market cornered.
...simply block the mailinator.com domain? Or websites refuse to take email addresses from that domain?
Otherwise, a good idea.
Now that you can get a 'real' UNIX for free, what are the compelling reasons to use Slackware GNU/Linux whose primary function is to be "...the most "UNIX-like" Linux distribution out there."