Even though they might get a lesser sentence, they have historically been held just as responsible. There is such a thing as moral obligations. If you do not agree with a certain order you (should) have the right to be a conscientious objector.
The Nuremberg trials obviously codified this: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".
Even though Terry Childs might have been an idiot in the way he handled the case, he didn't do anything wrong from a legal standpoint. As an admin you are obliged to keep passwords to sensitive systems away from incompetent people (whom's access could result in damages) or people who can or will probably use it for malicious purposes (like financial officers of a company).
If you are entrusted with one of the keys to a double keyed nuclear defense system, would you give the keys to your boss (eg. the President) so he can do as he whims? If you do you are just as responsible for the results as the one that actually pushed the buttons. Is there any difference in responsibility between the guards at the Nazi concentration camps and Hitler?
If you don't change your mind we'll stop providing you with cheap licenses and Gold Partner status and cut off your MSDN subscription. I worked for a couple of Gold Partners and it's the same everywhere, Microsoft uses it's monopoly status and high prices to force people into compliance.
Ubuntu is good enough for most people especially when pre-installed on a computer. Unless you're just plain stupid you will be able to work with it and do whatever you need to do. Sadly Windows is so ingrained in users that are resistant to change that it's hard to change platforms for a lot of people.
The only problem I have with this stupid statistic is that it is a statistic. Look for the reasons behind it:
In Europe, a lot of underprivileged families (anyone who is on any type of welfare) get a free broadband package - those are ~1-5 Mbps depending on where you live and sometimes even include a computer. Also, a lot of old/cheap people go with that package since it's only $5-10/month. Also, those advertised speeds are what you actually get. You cannot advertise something in most of Europe and then not give it to your customers. If you advertise 5Mbps it darn better be a continuous 5Mbps for the better part of the day.
In the US, there is no such thing as subsidized broadband. The cheapest package I can get is 8Mbps/3Mbps for ~$100 which during the better part of the day gives me about 3Mbps/1Mbps. Sure you can advertise that your average is higher than other countries/states but when the FCC publicly investigates your claims you should be welcoming them, not trying to lobby them out of power.
Not necessarily absurdly slow - there are extensive rainbow tables out there that probably cover just about any common password.
First you'll need to use the hash-side of the rainbow table to get about 36 hashes which start with [a-z0-9] and then filter right on down. You might run into some trouble finding matching hashes as you near the end of the hash but it's not impossible.
It will no matter what take long. Given enough time and resources, anyone could crack anything. The only solution for now:
- Use non-dictionary words as passwords - Do not store/read/handle passwords in plain text form - Change passwords frequently (more frequent than the time it would take somebody to crack it using the fastest methods available (local attacks) at least >2 times as frequent) - Use salts when programming - Do not trust anyone or any system - Accounts that are not used or that have a number of incorrect logons should be (temporarily or permanently) disabled.
On the other hand, where I lived, AT&T dropped 80% of the calls because I was on the edge of their tower range (although there were a couple dozen houses down the street where there was no coverage for over a mile). I then moved (to the city) and AT&T dropped only 20% of my calls. Whenever I called I could be almost certain to get either some static (interference) throughout the call or a dropped call. I had 5 phones in that period and they all did the same thing - I would put it on speakerphone because if I grabbed it I was sure to drop the call (as anyone who understands physics can agree with).
So I initially got one from the network, later on provided my own phone and for the privilege of being out of range half of the time I was still being charged $100/month.
AT&T is just a bad network and I recently dropped my contract with them and I'm not signing up for ANY cell phone provider in the US. My reason for not signing up is because they either do not support GSM (which is a must for international travel or wanting to buy your own phone) or they suck worse than AT&T. AT&T is the best network in the US for business customers but the worst network compared to providers abroad.
This experiment has been tried over the last few decades (ever since the papers discovered the commercial Internet) and has failed miserably every time. Some magazines/papers even closed their doors after they tried it because they invested too much money in something that had 0 return on investment and alienated their existing audience that was actually paying their bills.
The CUDA dev kit includes libraries and examples for BLAS (CUBLAS) and FFT, several LAPACK routines have been implemented in several commercial packages (Jacket, CULA) and free software (MAGMA).
The OpenCL implementation in Mac OS X has FFT and there are libraries for BLAS (from sourceforge) and MAGMA gives you some type of LAPACK implementation.
I work with HPC systems based on nVIDIA GPU's in a research environment - it's still a lot of work (as all research/cluster programs are) but it's certainly doable and can most certainly accelerate some calculations but it depends highly on the application and even more so on the coder.
First of all, outsourcing to other countries is difficult to do for some/most cultures as you have import/export restrictions and delays that could be unacceptable. Besides, a bit of competition is always healthy. Do you really think it costs $1000 to test your stool sample? I work in research but our organization also does translational medicine and also contains a hospital. Sure the machines cost $3m but we charge researchers only $125 for a procedure while private companies pay a flat rate of $700 but insurers are charged $1000 or more for the same procedures.
If you let these industries do what they want, they would put in termites. Ah, you modded your washing machine without authorization - let's see how your house holds up within a year.
Oh really? As in: they can make a couple of million and all they face is an extremely small chance that they get maybe 6 months in prison? Besides how do you get caught when there are no laws against it, no police force in the world cares (your company is not big enough to afford those laws) and you could be anywhere in the world, maybe in a small banana-republic where you can treat the police as your personal mercenaries for a couple of $100.
Actually, after reading a bunch of reviews and some other people's comments: the bumper case/tape/whatever you do doesn't help the apparent drop in signal. As soon as you hold the phone, it drops in signal just like any other phone does when you block it's signal with a wall of water. There might be issues with individuals in specific areas that have very low quality cell phone providers but those people also fail to mention that with any other phone or before they had that phone they wouldn't even get a signal or have dropped calls anyway.
Especially now that we have a need for Sun's Solaris, they close up shop and sell to Oracle. Sun was far ahead of their game implementing virtualization and extreme storage limits in a time when there was no need for it. Now the industry is finally ready to get started using these technologies and they decide to sell it. Sun's systems were finally starting to get used, systems like the Thumper have been in great demand. Too bad they wasted money on overpriced 1U servers ($10k for an Opteron system?) and projects that were very good but never went anywhere (trying to build on Java's success). Instead of selling the company, they should've cut off 80% of it (including their idiot C-level executives) and concentrated on selling ZFS, Xen and Zones
I don't and never have owned an iPhone but it seems like Anandtech did a decent test and seems to me that they are scientifically correct. Of course, the hype around this issue has made it into a psychological issue where people are losing calls and blaming the phone instead of the carrier.
I used to have a cell phone with AT&T and grabbing that phone would also drop the signal out of range in some places. AT&T has a pretty bad cell phone network but is one of only two carriers in the US (Nationwide) that supports the GSM standard (which allows you to switch carriers without switching phones or eg. go on vacation abroad and place overpriced roaming calls or use a local prepaid phone - good luck doing that with your Sprint phone). Actually, besides Sprint and AT&T I can't get another carrier where I live.
The problem is that they're trying to 'reach 90% of the US' by simply boosting their tower signal to the point where you will get some type of signal (barely enough to negotiate with the network every couple of minutes and send/receive an SMS) but as soon as you pick up you will lose it (as your cell phone can't get a signal good enough for voice). Where my parents live, the signal is so bad that even though I do get a signal, the batteries in a simple cell phone die after 4 hours.
Compare this to the EU where cell phone carriers are almost exclusively GSM, you have about 15 in every state (which some still call countries) and they have 99.9% coverage (some carriers have now gone to advertising the number of digits they get behind the comma) of the land mass (not just where people live). Some carriers are adding cell phone towers to be able to cover signal even if you're traveling by train at 80mph and some are so committed to their service level that they have mobile antenna units (van's with cell phone towers on them) for places where there is going to be great demand (large concerts, new year fireworks on the beach). The EU and sometimes even state government is regulating prices across borders and even international rates (whereas previously roaming could sometimes be exorbitant) as well as switching between carriers, number transfers, exclusivity deals etc. Still they pay maybe ~50% of the price we pay on the top-end down to 10% for a simple unlimited plan.
There were confirmed problems with the pedal either being sticky or the floor mats being in the way. Steve Wozniak was also able to recreate problems (which he claims was the software, not the hardware) with his Prius with radar-assisted cruise control and they likewise have been recalled.
If there was no problem, then Toyota wouldn't have recalled their vehicles, they wouldn't have admitted there was a problem. This is just an attempt at rewriting history. If you read the February articles regarding this problem, you'll see that the Toyota CEO admitted they had problems.
Actually, the legal fees for pursuing these cases comes out of the artists shares. I don't know if you read the articles regarding the shares the exec's take and the shares the artists take. Every and all expenses are considered liable to the artist or the project, all the exec's combined take ~80-90% of the income no matter whether the record tanks or not. The band takes about 15%, is liable for all advances, loans and expenses (including legal) and then gets to split that 15% (if anything is left) among the 3-5 band members. If they are successful and they've worked a full year touring and recording, they could make about $5000-15000. If not so successful they actually owe the media companies and will have to start working at Mickey D's to pay off their debts. The only way the band can make money is tours (unless they have also signed into a contract regarding those which is more common these days) and showing up on talk shows.
If you say, well, they signed that contract knowing what they got into - they have to sign a paper promising to make a deal with a label even before they get to see the contract. If they don't sign the contract, they can't go to another label so all the label has to do is sit and wait - alternatively they could choose to sue the individual members of the band into signing a deal.
The big music labels are the scum of the earth, don't support their music any longer!
With deflation you could then effectively set up no-interest loans. Because by the time it gets time to pay it back, your money would be worth more. The 'only' problem with deflation is that people would have to make more informed decisions about the loans they do make which with inflation is not really the case. If you know that your money is going to be worth more by then, your effective loan rate would be maybe 25% or 30%, not 20%. The longer you wait paying back your loans, the more expensive it would get. It would also be an incentive to pay back loans faster. Currently it is not. If I pay my loans back in 2 years instead of 1, banks are going to start losing money and they'll be forced to cut their losses (as they do right now - settle for a fraction of the cost of the loan) which causes a market crash if everybody starts doing it (settling or defaulting on bad debt).
Yes, it's as if somebody implemented POSIX and a C library in Linux.
You know what, maybe an average computer user (and definitely a lawyer) will not know this but you gotta kinda implement certain calls, structures and function names to be POSIX-compliant or to implement support for other things you want a computer to do. That way, if somebody compiles their program on different systems, they will still work if they call random_function (int, int, string).
The difference between the code is just that, you give the same specs to two different programmers and they will generate a somewhat similar file at first (especially in the top of the file, the DEFINE and structures) but unless it's really simple the rest of the code will look differently. Just look at the difference between the define statements - one programmer used hex or even binary to represent a number (maybe they thought it would give them an edge in speed or so) while the other used plain base-10 integers.
Once any of the companies in power can turn a better profit using anything else, they will switch to it. Whether that be corn, beets or switchgrass - somebody will plant it and produce fuel out of it. Currently however, there is a bigger profit to be made due to the scarcity of oil-based fuels which keeps fuel prices at the point where most of the market can bear it. If the costs rise any higher (as they experimented with a couple of years ago) their customers will stop using which is not good for them. Eventually (within a couple of decades) we'll be running out of accessible sources of dead dinosaurs - then and only then will they not be able to keep the prices under control and have to switch to something else. Whether the poorest of the population dies of hunger because of it, they won't care - until their main markets are starting to get too hungry to pay for the energy will they care.
Switching to electric cars won't help either - the electricity has to come from somewhere and most likely they'll be building electric generators running on oil/gas - not renewable or nuclear energy because those cannot be easily price-controlled.
There is no magic that NetApp adds that would make it any faster or slower than a comparable system using ZFS. I've seen, implemented and used both systems, they both use commodity hardware. There is no reason your ZFS should work any worse when you get down to the wire than your NetApp appliance unless you're doing something wrong. If you're comparing Sun's RAIDZ with their proprietary RAID0 then you're looking at the wrong implementation for a database. If you add a couple of L2ARC and ZIL SSD caches to your ZFS system, your database should be able to sustain well over 10000 IOPS - on commodity hardware. The other problem with NetApp is it's limits - 16TB is laughable in my field (even 16PB will be laughable in less than a decade).
When I look at NetApp's white papers, all I see is a similar implementation to ZFS. NVRAM as caches, aggregated writes, snapshots... As I said, they're afraid because ZFS does everything NetApp does and more for a heck of a lot less. NetApp seems to have stopped developing major features which could have distinguished them from other systems and instead just focuses on selling as much systems in the next few years as possible and possibly litigate to get some more cash (the SCO business model).
I've heard similar stories from Chase so they might not be as good with it. PNC Bank also seems hesitant sometimes (will wait for the vendor to explain) but in the end always delivers. I have very good experiences with BoA (world platinum cards - immediately taking charges off the account, not charging interest while investigating), HSBC (commercial accounts) and local credit unions.
Well, bones are a very strong structure (density and weight wise compared to their relative flexibility). If you could build a house with some very dense bones, I think that would stand up to a lot of things. The meat/skin/tissue part of it would probably be gross and attract insects and vermin but it might be a good alternative in places like the North Pole where the stuff won't rot and people need to keep warm.
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Even though they might get a lesser sentence, they have historically been held just as responsible. There is such a thing as moral obligations. If you do not agree with a certain order you (should) have the right to be a conscientious objector.
The Nuremberg trials obviously codified this: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".
Even though Terry Childs might have been an idiot in the way he handled the case, he didn't do anything wrong from a legal standpoint. As an admin you are obliged to keep passwords to sensitive systems away from incompetent people (whom's access could result in damages) or people who can or will probably use it for malicious purposes (like financial officers of a company).
If you are entrusted with one of the keys to a double keyed nuclear defense system, would you give the keys to your boss (eg. the President) so he can do as he whims? If you do you are just as responsible for the results as the one that actually pushed the buttons. Is there any difference in responsibility between the guards at the Nazi concentration camps and Hitler?
Well, since you obviously didn't use Google: http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/firstamendment/firstamendment.cfm
It's about somebody's "bill of rights" rights being submitted to vote which according to the Supreme Court cannot be done (they're inalienable rights)
If you don't change your mind we'll stop providing you with cheap licenses and Gold Partner status and cut off your MSDN subscription. I worked for a couple of Gold Partners and it's the same everywhere, Microsoft uses it's monopoly status and high prices to force people into compliance.
Ubuntu is good enough for most people especially when pre-installed on a computer. Unless you're just plain stupid you will be able to work with it and do whatever you need to do. Sadly Windows is so ingrained in users that are resistant to change that it's hard to change platforms for a lot of people.
The only problem I have with this stupid statistic is that it is a statistic. Look for the reasons behind it:
In Europe, a lot of underprivileged families (anyone who is on any type of welfare) get a free broadband package - those are ~1-5 Mbps depending on where you live and sometimes even include a computer. Also, a lot of old/cheap people go with that package since it's only $5-10/month. Also, those advertised speeds are what you actually get. You cannot advertise something in most of Europe and then not give it to your customers. If you advertise 5Mbps it darn better be a continuous 5Mbps for the better part of the day.
In the US, there is no such thing as subsidized broadband. The cheapest package I can get is 8Mbps/3Mbps for ~$100 which during the better part of the day gives me about 3Mbps/1Mbps. Sure you can advertise that your average is higher than other countries/states but when the FCC publicly investigates your claims you should be welcoming them, not trying to lobby them out of power.
Not necessarily absurdly slow - there are extensive rainbow tables out there that probably cover just about any common password.
First you'll need to use the hash-side of the rainbow table to get about 36 hashes which start with [a-z0-9] and then filter right on down. You might run into some trouble finding matching hashes as you near the end of the hash but it's not impossible.
It will no matter what take long. Given enough time and resources, anyone could crack anything. The only solution for now:
- Use non-dictionary words as passwords
- Do not store/read/handle passwords in plain text form
- Change passwords frequently (more frequent than the time it would take somebody to crack it using the fastest methods available (local attacks) at least >2 times as frequent)
- Use salts when programming
- Do not trust anyone or any system
- Accounts that are not used or that have a number of incorrect logons should be (temporarily or permanently) disabled.
On the other hand, where I lived, AT&T dropped 80% of the calls because I was on the edge of their tower range (although there were a couple dozen houses down the street where there was no coverage for over a mile). I then moved (to the city) and AT&T dropped only 20% of my calls. Whenever I called I could be almost certain to get either some static (interference) throughout the call or a dropped call. I had 5 phones in that period and they all did the same thing - I would put it on speakerphone because if I grabbed it I was sure to drop the call (as anyone who understands physics can agree with).
So I initially got one from the network, later on provided my own phone and for the privilege of being out of range half of the time I was still being charged $100/month.
AT&T is just a bad network and I recently dropped my contract with them and I'm not signing up for ANY cell phone provider in the US. My reason for not signing up is because they either do not support GSM (which is a must for international travel or wanting to buy your own phone) or they suck worse than AT&T. AT&T is the best network in the US for business customers but the worst network compared to providers abroad.
Next time the potato crops go wrong I guess we'll see a lot of Irish immigrating to the US.
This experiment has been tried over the last few decades (ever since the papers discovered the commercial Internet) and has failed miserably every time. Some magazines/papers even closed their doors after they tried it because they invested too much money in something that had 0 return on investment and alienated their existing audience that was actually paying their bills.
The CUDA dev kit includes libraries and examples for BLAS (CUBLAS) and FFT, several LAPACK routines have been implemented in several commercial packages (Jacket, CULA) and free software (MAGMA).
The OpenCL implementation in Mac OS X has FFT and there are libraries for BLAS (from sourceforge) and MAGMA gives you some type of LAPACK implementation.
I work with HPC systems based on nVIDIA GPU's in a research environment - it's still a lot of work (as all research/cluster programs are) but it's certainly doable and can most certainly accelerate some calculations but it depends highly on the application and even more so on the coder.
First of all, outsourcing to other countries is difficult to do for some/most cultures as you have import/export restrictions and delays that could be unacceptable. Besides, a bit of competition is always healthy. Do you really think it costs $1000 to test your stool sample? I work in research but our organization also does translational medicine and also contains a hospital. Sure the machines cost $3m but we charge researchers only $125 for a procedure while private companies pay a flat rate of $700 but insurers are charged $1000 or more for the same procedures.
If you let these industries do what they want, they would put in termites. Ah, you modded your washing machine without authorization - let's see how your house holds up within a year.
Oh really? As in: they can make a couple of million and all they face is an extremely small chance that they get maybe 6 months in prison? Besides how do you get caught when there are no laws against it, no police force in the world cares (your company is not big enough to afford those laws) and you could be anywhere in the world, maybe in a small banana-republic where you can treat the police as your personal mercenaries for a couple of $100.
Actually, after reading a bunch of reviews and some other people's comments: the bumper case/tape/whatever you do doesn't help the apparent drop in signal. As soon as you hold the phone, it drops in signal just like any other phone does when you block it's signal with a wall of water. There might be issues with individuals in specific areas that have very low quality cell phone providers but those people also fail to mention that with any other phone or before they had that phone they wouldn't even get a signal or have dropped calls anyway.
Especially now that we have a need for Sun's Solaris, they close up shop and sell to Oracle. Sun was far ahead of their game implementing virtualization and extreme storage limits in a time when there was no need for it. Now the industry is finally ready to get started using these technologies and they decide to sell it. Sun's systems were finally starting to get used, systems like the Thumper have been in great demand. Too bad they wasted money on overpriced 1U servers ($10k for an Opteron system?) and projects that were very good but never went anywhere (trying to build on Java's success). Instead of selling the company, they should've cut off 80% of it (including their idiot C-level executives) and concentrated on selling ZFS, Xen and Zones
I don't and never have owned an iPhone but it seems like Anandtech did a decent test and seems to me that they are scientifically correct. Of course, the hype around this issue has made it into a psychological issue where people are losing calls and blaming the phone instead of the carrier.
I used to have a cell phone with AT&T and grabbing that phone would also drop the signal out of range in some places. AT&T has a pretty bad cell phone network but is one of only two carriers in the US (Nationwide) that supports the GSM standard (which allows you to switch carriers without switching phones or eg. go on vacation abroad and place overpriced roaming calls or use a local prepaid phone - good luck doing that with your Sprint phone). Actually, besides Sprint and AT&T I can't get another carrier where I live.
The problem is that they're trying to 'reach 90% of the US' by simply boosting their tower signal to the point where you will get some type of signal (barely enough to negotiate with the network every couple of minutes and send/receive an SMS) but as soon as you pick up you will lose it (as your cell phone can't get a signal good enough for voice). Where my parents live, the signal is so bad that even though I do get a signal, the batteries in a simple cell phone die after 4 hours.
Compare this to the EU where cell phone carriers are almost exclusively GSM, you have about 15 in every state (which some still call countries) and they have 99.9% coverage (some carriers have now gone to advertising the number of digits they get behind the comma) of the land mass (not just where people live). Some carriers are adding cell phone towers to be able to cover signal even if you're traveling by train at 80mph and some are so committed to their service level that they have mobile antenna units (van's with cell phone towers on them) for places where there is going to be great demand (large concerts, new year fireworks on the beach). The EU and sometimes even state government is regulating prices across borders and even international rates (whereas previously roaming could sometimes be exorbitant) as well as switching between carriers, number transfers, exclusivity deals etc. Still they pay maybe ~50% of the price we pay on the top-end down to 10% for a simple unlimited plan.
There were confirmed problems with the pedal either being sticky or the floor mats being in the way. Steve Wozniak was also able to recreate problems (which he claims was the software, not the hardware) with his Prius with radar-assisted cruise control and they likewise have been recalled.
If there was no problem, then Toyota wouldn't have recalled their vehicles, they wouldn't have admitted there was a problem. This is just an attempt at rewriting history. If you read the February articles regarding this problem, you'll see that the Toyota CEO admitted they had problems.
Actually, the legal fees for pursuing these cases comes out of the artists shares. I don't know if you read the articles regarding the shares the exec's take and the shares the artists take. Every and all expenses are considered liable to the artist or the project, all the exec's combined take ~80-90% of the income no matter whether the record tanks or not. The band takes about 15%, is liable for all advances, loans and expenses (including legal) and then gets to split that 15% (if anything is left) among the 3-5 band members. If they are successful and they've worked a full year touring and recording, they could make about $5000-15000. If not so successful they actually owe the media companies and will have to start working at Mickey D's to pay off their debts. The only way the band can make money is tours (unless they have also signed into a contract regarding those which is more common these days) and showing up on talk shows.
If you say, well, they signed that contract knowing what they got into - they have to sign a paper promising to make a deal with a label even before they get to see the contract. If they don't sign the contract, they can't go to another label so all the label has to do is sit and wait - alternatively they could choose to sue the individual members of the band into signing a deal.
The big music labels are the scum of the earth, don't support their music any longer!
You mean like the Axiotron Modbook? It's a really nice device designed by Woz. I considered getting one myself but it's a bit expensive.
With deflation you could then effectively set up no-interest loans. Because by the time it gets time to pay it back, your money would be worth more. The 'only' problem with deflation is that people would have to make more informed decisions about the loans they do make which with inflation is not really the case. If you know that your money is going to be worth more by then, your effective loan rate would be maybe 25% or 30%, not 20%. The longer you wait paying back your loans, the more expensive it would get. It would also be an incentive to pay back loans faster. Currently it is not. If I pay my loans back in 2 years instead of 1, banks are going to start losing money and they'll be forced to cut their losses (as they do right now - settle for a fraction of the cost of the loan) which causes a market crash if everybody starts doing it (settling or defaulting on bad debt).
Yes, it's as if somebody implemented POSIX and a C library in Linux.
You know what, maybe an average computer user (and definitely a lawyer) will not know this but you gotta kinda implement certain calls, structures and function names to be POSIX-compliant or to implement support for other things you want a computer to do. That way, if somebody compiles their program on different systems, they will still work if they call random_function (int, int, string).
The difference between the code is just that, you give the same specs to two different programmers and they will generate a somewhat similar file at first (especially in the top of the file, the DEFINE and structures) but unless it's really simple the rest of the code will look differently. Just look at the difference between the define statements - one programmer used hex or even binary to represent a number (maybe they thought it would give them an edge in speed or so) while the other used plain base-10 integers.
Once any of the companies in power can turn a better profit using anything else, they will switch to it. Whether that be corn, beets or switchgrass - somebody will plant it and produce fuel out of it. Currently however, there is a bigger profit to be made due to the scarcity of oil-based fuels which keeps fuel prices at the point where most of the market can bear it. If the costs rise any higher (as they experimented with a couple of years ago) their customers will stop using which is not good for them. Eventually (within a couple of decades) we'll be running out of accessible sources of dead dinosaurs - then and only then will they not be able to keep the prices under control and have to switch to something else. Whether the poorest of the population dies of hunger because of it, they won't care - until their main markets are starting to get too hungry to pay for the energy will they care.
Switching to electric cars won't help either - the electricity has to come from somewhere and most likely they'll be building electric generators running on oil/gas - not renewable or nuclear energy because those cannot be easily price-controlled.
There is no magic that NetApp adds that would make it any faster or slower than a comparable system using ZFS. I've seen, implemented and used both systems, they both use commodity hardware. There is no reason your ZFS should work any worse when you get down to the wire than your NetApp appliance unless you're doing something wrong. If you're comparing Sun's RAIDZ with their proprietary RAID0 then you're looking at the wrong implementation for a database. If you add a couple of L2ARC and ZIL SSD caches to your ZFS system, your database should be able to sustain well over 10000 IOPS - on commodity hardware. The other problem with NetApp is it's limits - 16TB is laughable in my field (even 16PB will be laughable in less than a decade).
When I look at NetApp's white papers, all I see is a similar implementation to ZFS. NVRAM as caches, aggregated writes, snapshots... As I said, they're afraid because ZFS does everything NetApp does and more for a heck of a lot less. NetApp seems to have stopped developing major features which could have distinguished them from other systems and instead just focuses on selling as much systems in the next few years as possible and possibly litigate to get some more cash (the SCO business model).
I've heard similar stories from Chase so they might not be as good with it. PNC Bank also seems hesitant sometimes (will wait for the vendor to explain) but in the end always delivers. I have very good experiences with BoA (world platinum cards - immediately taking charges off the account, not charging interest while investigating), HSBC (commercial accounts) and local credit unions.
Well, bones are a very strong structure (density and weight wise compared to their relative flexibility). If you could build a house with some very dense bones, I think that would stand up to a lot of things. The meat/skin/tissue part of it would probably be gross and attract insects and vermin but it might be a good alternative in places like the North Pole where the stuff won't rot and people need to keep warm.