because by definition, primes are elements of your current ring that generate a proper ideal. The ideal generated by a unit element in the ring is obviously the entire ring, i,e. not proper; and in the ring of integers, 1 is most definitely a unit.
Please take a math class before posting on this subject.
you're actually better off by breaking in and stealing 1000 dvd's!
No. Stealing 1000 DVD's would put you in felony territory in pretty much all states; that is to say, you get to spend some time in a mound-me-in-the-ass-state-prison, you lose the right to vote, you will have problems getting firearms legally (if that's your thing), and you will have great difficulties finding an employer willing to hire you. In the US, it really sucks to be a former felon trying to lead a normal life. On the other hand, stealing 5 DVD's is only a misdemeanor, so if you are caught, you might get off with a $500 fine and some community service.
I don't even understand how this person became President of such an organization. His writing styles is absolutely atrocious. He offers no supporting evidence for any of his points.
Sir, it is clear that you admire a polished writing style complemented by compelling supporting evidence. In that case, first, where is your evidence for the atrociousness of his writing style? Can you cite missed commas, grammatical errors, overuse of cliches, or at least something? And second, I think that "writing styles is absolutely atrocious" doesn't validate as English grammar...
I'm very sorry to see that the ALA Prez (an org I respect) cannot see past his dead trees. Yes, blogspace is hard to archive, and much of it low quality -- because it hasn't been selected [censored] by printing press owners. There are also some gems.
Let me counter your Gandhi with the traditional monkey analogy. If you have a couple million monkeys hammering away at their keyboards for a few years, undoubtedly they will produce some remarkable works. Not Shakespeare perhaps, but quite possibly e.e.cummings (which is still literature, of sorts).
The problem, of course, is that to get those rare gems of the blogosphere, you have to wade through seventy metric fucktons of monkey shit (99% of lj etc). I am not in the mood for such adventures. I wait for people or organizations whom I trust (/., boingboing, etc.) to give me the links. In short, access the blogosphere through a publisher.
Allofmp3 used a provision (loophole?) in the Russian copyright law that basically allows you to distribute music online if you pay the Russian music copyright clearing house a standard (and quite low) charge per song download. The clearing house then distributes the profits back to the artists. My guess is that Russian bureaucracy doesn't make it easy for Western artists to register with the clearing house or get their money from it -- not even considering the fact that any western record company would consider the clearing house charges per download laughably small.
all the information about the customers (logs, purchase profiles, IP addresses, credit card numbers (if they keep those on file),...) doesn't eventually end up in the hands of the Moscow police. It's not the most trustworthy police organization. </understatement>
You missed the part where a 4-month long software development project is vastly more likely to succeed if you interact with your target users on a daily basis in face-to-face conversations, and get immediate feedback on any features or misfeatures you introduce. Waterfall design just plain doesn't work if your manpower and time resources are limited.
Truth be told, first and second year calculus hasn't changed much nearly 200 years.
Well... First of all, the notation changed quite a bit. There was no set theory before Cantor (and its notation didn't stabilize until the 1950's); Newtonian notation is now used only for differential equations (in late 1700's, British mathematicians used it everywhere); vectors are now represented as column matrices instead of row matrices; numerical problems don't use Imperial units; etc.
Second, there were some discoveries in the past 200 years that made their way into basic calculus coursees. 200 years ago, there was no real understanding of differential equations (no proof of existence/uniqueness of solutions, not many methods for generating exact solutions, no real understanding of qualitative behavior of a system) -- and now they are often introduced in basic classes. Weierstrass and friends made many fundamental discoveries about infinite series that are used in basic calc. I believe that basic differential geometry -- Green's theorem in all of its various forms, for example -- wasn't really established until mid 19th century. And of course you can't talk about fractals, nonmeasurable sets, etc. without early 20th century mathematics.
Third, there has been a shift of emphasis. For instance, in the olden days, there was much more advanced linear algebra involved in calculus; everyone had to know tensor analysis cold. Today, that sort of knowledge is reserved for engineers.
If they can't get fixes for this, how are they going to get fixes for bugs in the programs? And don't try to tell me that the programs are 100% bug-free...
They test the custom stuff thoroughly (i.e. running old data sets through, and comparing results to their old calculations) before using it in their research. It does have bugs in the sense of "program crashes if I do x, then y, then z". It does not have bugs in the sense of "produces incorrect data". If they want to add major features, they invite the programmers back into the US for a few months of contract work, which generally involves a few extra months beforehand of making the INS bureaucracy issue a visa (and since 9/11, those delays have gotten much worse).
One of my relatives works in a biochemical research lab. All of their computers are WinXP Sp1 because Sp2 basically broke every single program and driver they relied on for their daily calculations, data acquisition, and analysis (some of the software is commercial, and some was custom-written by people who are currently residing in Eastern Europe and Brazil). Naturally, every worm outbreak hits them hard -- but they think it's worth it to clean up a worm once every couple of months rather than struggle with their bread-and-butter programs locking up on Sp2.
Sp2 is great for the average Joe who uses his box for email and pr0n, but if you are using your computer as a scientific instrument, then installing Sp2 changes (and breaks) too many things.
(In case you are wondering, the reason they don't switch to Linux is that some of their data acquisition hardware doesn't have good Linux drivers)
Throughout Europe, telephone service used to be state-run. All of them have noticed how bad this system was and some are still in the progress of moving away from it.
Very true. That is why, IMHO, municipal-run broadband and wifi should be 1) used only as a means of last resort (i.e. when the local telcos and cable companies refuse to provide a certain service in a certain area -- which is true for many rural parts of the United States); and 2) the municipal ISP must be self-funding and independently managed, much like the US Post Office or the BBC; and 3) it should not be a monopoly (i.e. the municipality may not prevent companies from competing with the municipal ISP -- provided that the companies are actually willing to offer competing services).
Europe's experience shows that unless it's implemented very carefully, a government telecom might fuck up royally.
That means physical accress to the machine, does it not?
No, it doesn't. All it requires is exploiting the user's account. For instance, if your browser uses a vulnerable version of libpng, and you visit a malicious site, I can theoretically make your browser start a customized version of telnet (or sshd, or vpn, or...) that listens on an unprivileged port (e.g. port 31337) and runs/bin/sh for whoever accesses the port. (I would probably do so by making the browser download a certain binary, have the browser use the chmod syscall to make the binary executable, and place the binary in an autostart directory -- on Linux, that's/home/yourname/Desktop/Autostart. Then, so as not to have to wait for you to log in and out, I would have the browser fork() and then execv() to run that custom executable. This is all quite possible on any Unix-like system -- and on Windows, of course, the process is even easier.) Such an exploit -- a remote exploit, I might add -- is called "shell access".
But neither of those are on by default. Printer sharing and Samba are off by default, which again leads back to my argument of the reduced user base you can hit.
Sure, CUPS and Samba servers are off by default. The same is not true of CUPS and Samba clients -- the only way to turn those off is to block them at the firewall level, or to not install them in the first place. Convincing an exploitable client to browse to a share controlled by a malicious server can be as bad as letting a malicious client access an exploitable server -- although in practice, attacking servers is usually easier (unless, of course, the client is called "Internet Explorer").
But basicaly just shipping without services enabled is a huge step, it's one thing to probe system and break in and quite another to lure people into even an exploit on a web site somewhere.
All Linux distros and BSD's that I've installed recently (Gentoo, Debian, Redhat Enterprise, Fedora, FreeBSD) come with exactly only one server turned on by default : openssh (which is probably the most secure open-source project out there -- and which you need, because Linux is typically installed on headless servers). If you are using your Linux box as a webserver, you turn on Apache; if you are running a fileserver, you turn on Samba or nfsd; etc. The process is just the same as on OSX, except that instead of clicking on a button, you type "/etc/init.d/samba start". It is true that in the ancient times, Redhat 5 came with all services turned on, but you should realize that Redhat 5's competitors were the amazingly insecure Win9x and old versions of Solaris.
Of course, default Linux installs could be more secure. PAM might be configured for full paranoid mode;/tmp might be on a separate partition from/; loading kernel modules might be disabled; the swap partition might be mounted in aes loopback mode (for that matter, the entire filesystem might be encrypted); the passwd file might use a modern hash algorithm (e.g. Whirlpool) instead of 3DES+salt; SELinux might be enabled by default; no users would be granted access to potentially dangerous hardware like video cards without explicit admin intervention; if a certain USB token is not present in the machine, the system might be set to delete/home and/var; etc. However, that's tinfoil-hat and OpenBSD territory.
R00tkits will get installed on Macs the same way they get installed on Linux: through a combination of two exploits. First, the hacker uses an exploit to obtain shell access with an unprivileged account Typical exploits include holes in Samba or CUPS (which OSX also uses), browser bugs (e.g. libpng overflows), holes in various daemons (if you use your OSX as a server), or even simply using a keylogger on a public machine to catch a user's password.
Then, the hacker uses a second exploit to elevate his local shell access to local root. Typical exploits of this nature include thread race conditions in the kernel, the kernel failing to properly sanitize input, or problems when a process is shifted from one kernel security infrastructure to another. The Linux kernel had a number of local root exploits in the past few months. IIRC Apple usually doesn't publish its list of security vulnerabilities (it just puts the fixes on Sofware Update, without fully explaining what they fix), so I can't comment on the security of the darwin xnu kernel.
Thus, I would say it's about as easy to install a rootkit on a Linux workstation as on an OSX desktop (and similarly, it's as easy to install a rootkit on a Linux server as on an OSX server). In other words, you need an unpatched system vulnerable to a specific pair of exploits, a clueless admin, and a skilled hacker -- which is not an impossible combination.
All benchmarks I've read show that firewire has much worse latency than IDE. A quick google revealed that average IO response time is 17.8ms for firewire and 0.12ms for IDE for a particular Maxtor drie (note: the 0.12ms figure is almost certainly because they were hitting data in the hd cache; otherwise it should have been more like 5 ms for the ide case). I am guessing that if you are streaming data, firewire is not too bad, but random access on a firewire drive will not give you good performance.
I recommend you to run a benchmark after connecting your drive directly to your machine's IDE cable.
It completely ruins the point of having a Mac mini. Frickin' ugly as hell too.
I don't buy computers for the aesthetics. If I wanted aesthetics, I would buy a painting and hang it on my wall. The Mac Mini is the first apple that I actually find affordable, except the case sucks (sucks functionally - I don't care if it's beautifuL): there is too little airflow (so no overclocking), and not enough space for a decent hard drive. Fortunately, a $50 PC case can remedy the situation.
Mac Mini server = $500 + $200 for good 250G IDE hard drive + $50 for case = $750.
Xserve = $3000, and you still need to buy another drive (shipping 80G hard drives in a $3000 server? pathetic).
Now, you might have a spare two grand lying around. I don't. If I want a ppc server, Mac Mini is what I am getting.
I imagine that with the low price, low power usage, and ppc architecture (not many binary sploits for Linux on ppc...) many people would want to use these things as small servers. The problem is that the Mac Mini hard drive sucks ass - it's slow, only 40G, and the small form factor means upgrades are expensive. Perhaps the most important part of a server is a good hard drive.
By putting the Mini into a PC case, you get the room to add a large fast hard drive, and the air flow needed to cool it.
There are some problems with using the Cell as a Linux chip. First and foremost, the Cell is a much "dumber" processor than anything that has been on the market for the past 10 years - for instance, it uses the OS (or the application) to manage each core's cache. (Most modern CPU's try to hide the complexity of their internal implementation from software - the Cell, however, requires programs to explicitly use all of its hardware internals) Modifying the Linux kernel so that it can manage nine cache banks while maintaining both good security and reasonable performance will be an interesting research project - and it won't be done in one day.
Add to it the fact that Linux is really designed as a general-purpose OS for general-purpose hardware. Implementing NUMA took years of work from SGI and IBM. I imagine that adding efficient support for the Cell's bizarre asymmetric 9-core design (keeping each core fed, not overloading the Cell's internal bus, etc.) will be a multi-year chore. Then, all the applications (or at least all the major libraries) will have to be rewritten to take advantage of the Cell's design. And even then, gcc won't produce efficient code for it -- you really need a good compiler to take advantage of the Cell, and gcc's main focus is portability, not performance...
I can see something like a PS3 using the Cell -- after all, all the games are hand-coded for the processor, and there isn't much of an OS. I can see IBM using the cell as addon accelerator cards for its AIX systems, since it controls the entire AIX stack. I don't see Linux being able to take good advantage of a Cell system for a while.
The two basic problems are sanitation and security. Who cleans the place up if a homeless guy pisses in the stairwell? Who cleans the place up if beer is spilled on your chair? Is the office bathroom designed to handle a dozen people washing themselves in the sinks every night?
As for security, unless every single thing is bolted down, your office will suddenly need a much larger budget to replace disappearing paper, pens, coffee, computer parts and the like. And considering that a typical PC is completely vulnerable to physical access attacks - would you feel comfortable typing anything secure on a keyboard in an office that is lived in by unknown non-company-employees?
I am not saying that your idea is impossible - however, it will not be easy to implement, especially in a way that office occupants find agreeable.
Sure, the Economist has an obvious bias (free markets, privatized everything, western democracy, and modest but well-enforced government regulation). Sure, it makes mistakes (lauding Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, etc.) However, if you compare it to pretty much any other English-language press -- the BBC, any American newspaper or magazine, or (deity forbid) American television -- you will see that it stands out as the lone isle in a sea of shite.
If the only language is English, and you have any ability at all to filter editorial statements out of news stories, you should subscribe to the economist -- and I say this even though I am a registered pinko commie bastard.
I have experienced the same type of problems as the author, albeit about a year and a half ago. I spent a couple of weeks trying to get everything just plain working. I did eventually get it all working, but after using it for a couple more weeks, I got tired of searching Google for solutions to things that should be self explanitory. I told myself that I'd try Linux again in a couple of years, when there'd been more time to get the bugs out.
So did I. Basically, I did not check whether my video card had proper X drivers (this was back around 1998 or so). Naturally, it didn't work. So, I spent futile weeks digging through mailing lists for some driver that didn't lock up or crash the machine (note: 1998, so search engines were in their infancy - even if google existed, it doubt it crawled the entire web).
However, the difference between you and me is that I learned from my mistake. The next time I installed Linux, I checked hardware compatibility for everything. It installed and ran perfectly (until the hard drive head crashed into the disk platter a few years later - but that's what one gets for buying cheap hard drives).
Perhaps your next project should be getting GNU HURD/L4 on a Mac Mini working with a firewire video capture device...
I have no clue what that means. I'm sure IT departments everywhere are howling at that one, though.
I recommend you to scan through slashdot stories posted on the same day as TFA (namely, Feb 4, 2005). I am sure you will learn many wonderful things in addition to the reason why my joke is funny.
Why are most cars sold nowadays equipped with automatic transmission?
Only in the US. Everywhere else in the world, manual is king (for passenger cars; new European trucks are mostly automatic nowadays). In most countries, driving automatic is equivalent to admitting you have too much money and don't care about your car's performance...
Linux is for experts who like to tinker. I don't. I like using my computer, not fixing it.
I think there is a company called Apple whose products you might want to look into. Neither Linux nor Microsoft will satisfy your criteria.
For a few months back, any time you visited a site (even slashdot) extolling the virtues of Linux, you got a banner ad for the low TCO of Windows (it was the study comparing the TCO of Windows on el-cheapo Dells with the TCO of Linux on IBM's zSeries mainframes - quite funny actually, once you dig through the fud).
Personally, I see nothing wrong with such ads. I like Linux; other people like Windows. Both are operating systems. Both compete in the same market niches. For some applications, it's a tossup as to which one is actually better. So why not carry the ads? Problems only arise if the ads are misleading (such as the fud-full campaign I described above) - in which case/., el reg, ars and others pick up the fact that MS is fudding, and MS takes down the fud in embarassment.
Slashdot Mirror
because by definition, primes are elements of your current ring that generate a proper ideal. The ideal generated by a unit element in the ring is obviously the entire ring, i,e. not proper; and in the ring of integers, 1 is most definitely a unit.
Please take a math class before posting on this subject.
you're actually better off by breaking in and stealing 1000 dvd's!
No. Stealing 1000 DVD's would put you in felony territory in pretty much all states; that is to say, you get to spend some time in a mound-me-in-the-ass-state-prison, you lose the right to vote, you will have problems getting firearms legally (if that's your thing), and you will have great difficulties finding an employer willing to hire you. In the US, it really sucks to be a former felon trying to lead a normal life. On the other hand, stealing 5 DVD's is only a misdemeanor, so if you are caught, you might get off with a $500 fine and some community service.
I don't even understand how this person became President of such an organization. His writing styles is absolutely atrocious. He offers no supporting evidence for any of his points.
Sir, it is clear that you admire a polished writing style complemented by compelling supporting evidence. In that case, first, where is your evidence for the atrociousness of his writing style? Can you cite missed commas, grammatical errors, overuse of cliches, or at least something? And second, I think that "writing styles is absolutely atrocious" doesn't validate as English grammar...
I'm very sorry to see that the ALA Prez (an org I respect) cannot see past his dead trees. Yes, blogspace is hard to archive, and much of it low quality -- because it hasn't been selected [censored] by printing press owners. There are also some gems.
Let me counter your Gandhi with the traditional monkey analogy. If you have a couple million monkeys hammering away at their keyboards for a few years, undoubtedly they will produce some remarkable works. Not Shakespeare perhaps, but quite possibly e.e.cummings (which is still literature, of sorts).
The problem, of course, is that to get those rare gems of the blogosphere, you have to wade through seventy metric fucktons of monkey shit (99% of lj etc). I am not in the mood for such adventures. I wait for people or organizations whom I trust (/., boingboing, etc.) to give me the links. In short, access the blogosphere through a publisher.
Allofmp3 used a provision (loophole?) in the Russian copyright law that basically allows you to distribute music online if you pay the Russian music copyright clearing house a standard (and quite low) charge per song download. The clearing house then distributes the profits back to the artists. My guess is that Russian bureaucracy doesn't make it easy for Western artists to register with the clearing house or get their money from it -- not even considering the fact that any western record company would consider the clearing house charges per download laughably small.
all the information about the customers (logs, purchase profiles, IP addresses, credit card numbers (if they keep those on file), ...) doesn't eventually end up in the hands of the Moscow police. It's not the most trustworthy police organization. </understatement>
You missed the part where a 4-month long software development project is vastly more likely to succeed if you interact with your target users on a daily basis in face-to-face conversations, and get immediate feedback on any features or misfeatures you introduce. Waterfall design just plain doesn't work if your manpower and time resources are limited.
Truth be told, first and second year calculus hasn't changed much nearly 200 years.
Well... First of all, the notation changed quite a bit. There was no set theory before Cantor (and its notation didn't stabilize until the 1950's); Newtonian notation is now used only for differential equations (in late 1700's, British mathematicians used it everywhere); vectors are now represented as column matrices instead of row matrices; numerical problems don't use Imperial units; etc.
Second, there were some discoveries in the past 200 years that made their way into basic calculus coursees. 200 years ago, there was no real understanding of differential equations (no proof of existence/uniqueness of solutions, not many methods for generating exact solutions, no real understanding of qualitative behavior of a system) -- and now they are often introduced in basic classes. Weierstrass and friends made many fundamental discoveries about infinite series that are used in basic calc. I believe that basic differential geometry -- Green's theorem in all of its various forms, for example -- wasn't really established until mid 19th century. And of course you can't talk about fractals, nonmeasurable sets, etc. without early 20th century mathematics.
Third, there has been a shift of emphasis. For instance, in the olden days, there was much more advanced linear algebra involved in calculus; everyone had to know tensor analysis cold. Today, that sort of knowledge is reserved for engineers.
If they can't get fixes for this, how are they going to get fixes for bugs in the programs? And don't try to tell me that the programs are 100% bug-free...
They test the custom stuff thoroughly (i.e. running old data sets through, and comparing results to their old calculations) before using it in their research. It does have bugs in the sense of "program crashes if I do x, then y, then z". It does not have bugs in the sense of "produces incorrect data". If they want to add major features, they invite the programmers back into the US for a few months of contract work, which generally involves a few extra months beforehand of making the INS bureaucracy issue a visa (and since 9/11, those delays have gotten much worse).
One of my relatives works in a biochemical research lab. All of their computers are WinXP Sp1 because Sp2 basically broke every single program and driver they relied on for their daily calculations, data acquisition, and analysis (some of the software is commercial, and some was custom-written by people who are currently residing in Eastern Europe and Brazil). Naturally, every worm outbreak hits them hard -- but they think it's worth it to clean up a worm once every couple of months rather than struggle with their bread-and-butter programs locking up on Sp2.
Sp2 is great for the average Joe who uses his box for email and pr0n, but if you are using your computer as a scientific instrument, then installing Sp2 changes (and breaks) too many things.
(In case you are wondering, the reason they don't switch to Linux is that some of their data acquisition hardware doesn't have good Linux drivers)
Throughout Europe, telephone service used to be state-run. All of them have noticed how bad this system was and some are still in the progress of moving away from it.
Very true. That is why, IMHO, municipal-run broadband and wifi should be
1) used only as a means of last resort (i.e. when the local telcos and cable companies refuse to provide a certain service in a certain area -- which is true for many rural parts of the United States); and
2) the municipal ISP must be self-funding and independently managed, much like the US Post Office or the BBC; and
3) it should not be a monopoly (i.e. the municipality may not prevent companies from competing with the municipal ISP -- provided that the companies are actually willing to offer competing services).
Europe's experience shows that unless it's implemented very carefully, a government telecom might fuck up royally.
Typo.
...)" with "(or sshd, or vnc, or ...)"
Replace "(or sshd, or vpn, or
That means physical accress to the machine, does it not?
No, it doesn't. All it requires is exploiting the user's account. For instance, if your browser uses a vulnerable version of libpng, and you visit a malicious site, I can theoretically make your browser start a customized version of telnet (or sshd, or vpn, or
But neither of those are on by default. Printer sharing and Samba are off by default, which again leads back to my argument of the reduced user base you can hit.
/tmp might be on a separate partition from /; loading kernel modules might be disabled; the swap partition might be mounted in aes loopback mode (for that matter, the entire filesystem might be encrypted); the passwd file might use a modern hash algorithm (e.g. Whirlpool) instead of 3DES+salt; SELinux might be enabled by default; no users would be granted access to potentially dangerous hardware like video cards without explicit admin intervention; if a certain USB token is not present in the machine, the system might be set to delete /home and /var; etc. However, that's tinfoil-hat and OpenBSD territory.
Sure, CUPS and Samba servers are off by default. The same is not true of CUPS and Samba clients -- the only way to turn those off is to block them at the firewall level, or to not install them in the first place. Convincing an exploitable client to browse to a share controlled by a malicious server can be as bad as letting a malicious client access an exploitable server -- although in practice, attacking servers is usually easier (unless, of course, the client is called "Internet Explorer").
But basicaly just shipping without services enabled is a huge step, it's one thing to probe system and break in and quite another to lure people into even an exploit on a web site somewhere.
All Linux distros and BSD's that I've installed recently (Gentoo, Debian, Redhat Enterprise, Fedora, FreeBSD) come with exactly only one server turned on by default : openssh (which is probably the most secure open-source project out there -- and which you need, because Linux is typically installed on headless servers). If you are using your Linux box as a webserver, you turn on Apache; if you are running a fileserver, you turn on Samba or nfsd; etc. The process is just the same as on OSX, except that instead of clicking on a button, you type "/etc/init.d/samba start". It is true that in the ancient times, Redhat 5 came with all services turned on, but you should realize that Redhat 5's competitors were the amazingly insecure Win9x and old versions of Solaris.
Of course, default Linux installs could be more secure. PAM might be configured for full paranoid mode;
R00tkits will get installed on Macs the same way they get installed on Linux: through a combination of two exploits. First, the hacker uses an exploit to obtain shell access with an unprivileged account Typical exploits include holes in Samba or CUPS (which OSX also uses), browser bugs (e.g. libpng overflows), holes in various daemons (if you use your OSX as a server), or even simply using a keylogger on a public machine to catch a user's password.
Then, the hacker uses a second exploit to elevate his local shell access to local root. Typical exploits of this nature include thread race conditions in the kernel, the kernel failing to properly sanitize input, or problems when a process is shifted from one kernel security infrastructure to another. The Linux kernel had a number of local root exploits in the past few months. IIRC Apple usually doesn't publish its list of security vulnerabilities (it just puts the fixes on Sofware Update, without fully explaining what they fix), so I can't comment on the security of the darwin xnu kernel.
Thus, I would say it's about as easy to install a rootkit on a Linux workstation as on an OSX desktop (and similarly, it's as easy to install a rootkit on a Linux server as on an OSX server). In other words, you need an unpatched system vulnerable to a specific pair of exploits, a clueless admin, and a skilled hacker -- which is not an impossible combination.
What is this latency of which you speak?
All benchmarks I've read show that firewire has much worse latency than IDE. A quick google revealed that average IO response time is 17.8ms for firewire and 0.12ms for IDE for a particular Maxtor drie (note: the 0.12ms figure is almost certainly because they were hitting data in the hd cache; otherwise it should have been more like 5 ms for the ide case). I am guessing that if you are streaming data, firewire is not too bad, but random access on a firewire drive will not give you good performance.
I recommend you to run a benchmark after connecting your drive directly to your machine's IDE cable.
It completely ruins the point of having a Mac mini. Frickin' ugly as hell too.
I don't buy computers for the aesthetics. If I wanted aesthetics, I would buy a painting and hang it on my wall. The Mac Mini is the first apple that I actually find affordable, except the case sucks (sucks functionally - I don't care if it's beautifuL): there is too little airflow (so no overclocking), and not enough space for a decent hard drive. Fortunately, a $50 PC case can remedy the situation.
Mac Mini server = $500 + $200 for good 250G IDE hard drive + $50 for case = $750.
Xserve = $3000, and you still need to buy another drive (shipping 80G hard drives in a $3000 server? pathetic).
Now, you might have a spare two grand lying around. I don't. If I want a ppc server, Mac Mini is what I am getting.
1 word: Firewire... jeez.
2 words: price and latency.
Oh, and the benefits of keeping all your OS (as opposed to just your files) on a fast drive.
I imagine that with the low price, low power usage, and ppc architecture (not many binary sploits for Linux on ppc...) many people would want to use these things as small servers. The problem is that the Mac Mini hard drive sucks ass - it's slow, only 40G, and the small form factor means upgrades are expensive. Perhaps the most important part of a server is a good hard drive.
By putting the Mini into a PC case, you get the room to add a large fast hard drive, and the air flow needed to cool it.
There are some problems with using the Cell as a Linux chip. First and foremost, the Cell is a much "dumber" processor than anything that has been on the market for the past 10 years - for instance, it uses the OS (or the application) to manage each core's cache. (Most modern CPU's try to hide the complexity of their internal implementation from software - the Cell, however, requires programs to explicitly use all of its hardware internals) Modifying the Linux kernel so that it can manage nine cache banks while maintaining both good security and reasonable performance will be an interesting research project - and it won't be done in one day.
Add to it the fact that Linux is really designed as a general-purpose OS for general-purpose hardware. Implementing NUMA took years of work from SGI and IBM. I imagine that adding efficient support for the Cell's bizarre asymmetric 9-core design (keeping each core fed, not overloading the Cell's internal bus, etc.) will be a multi-year chore. Then, all the applications (or at least all the major libraries) will have to be rewritten to take advantage of the Cell's design. And even then, gcc won't produce efficient code for it -- you really need a good compiler to take advantage of the Cell, and gcc's main focus is portability, not performance...
I can see something like a PS3 using the Cell -- after all, all the games are hand-coded for the processor, and there isn't much of an OS. I can see IBM using the cell as addon accelerator cards for its AIX systems, since it controls the entire AIX stack. I don't see Linux being able to take good advantage of a Cell system for a while.
The two basic problems are sanitation and security. Who cleans the place up if a homeless guy pisses in the stairwell? Who cleans the place up if beer is spilled on your chair? Is the office bathroom designed to handle a dozen people washing themselves in the sinks every night?
As for security, unless every single thing is bolted down, your office will suddenly need a much larger budget to replace disappearing paper, pens, coffee, computer parts and the like. And considering that a typical PC is completely vulnerable to physical access attacks - would you feel comfortable typing anything secure on a keyboard in an office that is lived in by unknown non-company-employees?
I am not saying that your idea is impossible - however, it will not be easy to implement, especially in a way that office occupants find agreeable.
Sure, the Economist has an obvious bias (free markets, privatized everything, western democracy, and modest but well-enforced government regulation). Sure, it makes mistakes (lauding Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, etc.) However, if you compare it to pretty much any other English-language press -- the BBC, any American newspaper or magazine, or (deity forbid) American television -- you will see that it stands out as the lone isle in a sea of shite.
If the only language is English, and you have any ability at all to filter editorial statements out of news stories, you should subscribe to the economist -- and I say this even though I am a registered pinko commie bastard.
I have experienced the same type of problems as the author, albeit about a year and a half ago. I spent a couple of weeks trying to get everything just plain working. I did eventually get it all working, but after using it for a couple more weeks, I got tired of searching Google for solutions to things that should be self explanitory. I told myself that I'd try Linux again in a couple of years, when there'd been more time to get the bugs out.
So did I. Basically, I did not check whether my video card had proper X drivers (this was back around 1998 or so). Naturally, it didn't work. So, I spent futile weeks digging through mailing lists for some driver that didn't lock up or crash the machine (note: 1998, so search engines were in their infancy - even if google existed, it doubt it crawled the entire web).
However, the difference between you and me is that I learned from my mistake. The next time I installed Linux, I checked hardware compatibility for everything. It installed and ran perfectly (until the hard drive head crashed into the disk platter a few years later - but that's what one gets for buying cheap hard drives).
Perhaps your next project should be getting GNU HURD/L4 on a Mac Mini working with a firewire video capture device...
I have no clue what that means. I'm sure IT departments everywhere are howling at that one, though.
I recommend you to scan through slashdot stories posted on the same day as TFA (namely, Feb 4, 2005). I am sure you will learn many wonderful things in addition to the reason why my joke is funny.
Why are most cars sold nowadays equipped with automatic transmission?
Only in the US. Everywhere else in the world, manual is king (for passenger cars; new European trucks are mostly automatic nowadays). In most countries, driving automatic is equivalent to admitting you have too much money and don't care about your car's performance...
Linux is for experts who like to tinker. I don't. I like using my computer, not fixing it.
I think there is a company called Apple whose products you might want to look into. Neither Linux nor Microsoft will satisfy your criteria.
For a few months back, any time you visited a site (even slashdot) extolling the virtues of Linux, you got a banner ad for the low TCO of Windows (it was the study comparing the TCO of Windows on el-cheapo Dells with the TCO of Linux on IBM's zSeries mainframes - quite funny actually, once you dig through the fud).
/., el reg, ars and others pick up the fact that MS is fudding, and MS takes down the fud in embarassment.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with such ads. I like Linux; other people like Windows. Both are operating systems. Both compete in the same market niches. For some applications, it's a tossup as to which one is actually better. So why not carry the ads? Problems only arise if the ads are misleading (such as the fud-full campaign I described above) - in which case