One is that expanders are cheaper than controllers. When I looked the per port cost of controllers seemed pretty similar to the per port cost of multiplier capable controller with multipliers.
Another is that they don't take a slot. That's handy if you're using a case that supports 25 drives. You still have to mount them somewhere though, most i've seen seem to be intended for special mountings found in dedicated external storage enclosures. I've also seen expansion slot mountings but that kinda defeats the object of saving expansion slots.
A last is that you want to attach external storage This seems to be the main attraction to me, you can have an external enclosure with 4-10 drives and only one or two cables connecting it to the main machine.
SAS can maintain multiple drives on a single cable while SATA is limited to one device per cable. My understanding was that with both SATA and SAS cables were point to point and both could support multiple drives per port with additional hardware. However SAS expanders do allow for far more drives on a port and a much more complex topology than SATA port multipliers.
High-speed serial interfaces use DIFFERENTIAL SIGNALLING. So do some high speed paralell interfaces (such as some SCSI variants)
The trick here is that although data is interleaved across all 16 channels, those channels are not syncronized with each other. They are out of phase, and the the data is just put back into phase at the receiver. Indeed this seems to be the method that gives the highest performance because it combines high clock rates with parallism. The downside of course is the complexity of buffering it into sync and then de-interleaving it.
The thing is signals running in paralell with shared timing doesn't work very well beyond a certain clock speed*distance product.
Signals running in paralell with independent timing seems at the moment to be the way to go for really high bandwidth (this is what PCIe uses and afaict SAS has the capability to use it as well) but it gets pretty complex.
Still I bet with the use of a few shell companies in various shitholes arround the world plus some front relationships with those shell companies you could cover where the money came from if you really wanted. Especially as it looks like it wasn't eactly a huge ammount.
But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient. The latest mini has gained a second monitor port but in general I agree it's a PITA that there is no midrange mac that's not an all-in-one.
My dirtcheap brand name crapbox is collecting dust because it isn't much more expandable than a mini despite it's size and ugliness. Please specify make and model so we can confirm or refute your claims as regards that particular machine.
In my experiance while some dells suck expandability wise others don't. The only HPs i've encounted recently were fine expandability wise but I suspect they have ones that suck too. ALL the reasonablly priced macs suck expandability wise.
Lets compare the dell vostro 420 (a machine I purchased recently) to the mac mini. For the purposes of this comparision I configured them for the closest CPU clocks (2.33 for the vostro, 2.26 for the mini), DVD +-RW drive, 250 gigabyte hard drive and 1GB of ram. Both machines with the most basic one year warranty the supplier offers. For the OS on the dell I selected vista buisness downgraded to XP pro. The mini comes out to £761.01, the dell to £470.34 (both prices include VAT, the apple price includes delivery, dell has a free delivery promotion on as usual.
Advantages of the mac mini : * smaller * lower power consumption * can run OS-X without messing about and breaking the EULA * has firewire 800 as standard
Advantages of the dell vostro 420: * cheaper * probablly better graphics (i'm not an expert on this though), and if it turns out to be insufficiant later you can drop a better one in. * plenty of drive bays (4 internal 3.5 inch, one external 3.5 inch and 3 external 5.25 inch though the 5.25 inch ones do have annoying flip down covers) and plenty of sata ports to support the drives in them. * twice as many cores * ESATA for higher performance external drives * faster HDD * Expansion slots (one PCIe x16 which is taken by the graphics card, two PCIe x1 and five PCI free). * Dual monitors (maybe even triple, not sure if the card in the vostro can drive all three of it's outputs at once) without requiring seperate purchase of manufacturer specific adaptors.
Oh, they have one. The bottom end single-processor Mac Pro is that machine. Kindof, the single processor mac pro while cheaper than the dual processor one is still server hardware.
But by pricing it the way they have, Apple is basically flipping the bird to all those people who have been begging them to sell a mid-range tower. It's hard to think of a better example of The Steve's contempt for "power users". Agreed.
That works fine for those countries you spend a lot of time in.
It doesn't work so well if you are just stopping over in a country that you don't spend any significant time in. You have to either get a sim with a good data deal for that country (and this won't be easy for some countries) or put up with insane roaming fees.
apparently there are even camera/software combintions that can take a series of exposures of different lengths and combine them automatically to create a single high dynamic range image.
Please explain, in scientific terms, the advantage of a larger sensor. For the purposes of this explanation, do not assume that a larger sensor has more pixels. There are a many issues, here are a few off the top of my head.
Make your apeture small and you cut out light and cause diffraction, make it large and you get parallax issues, the lens reduces parallax issues to some degree but only for a limited range of distances.
Move the sensor further from the apeture and you will reduce the parallax issues without reducing the light intake. Of course if you do this you will need a larger sensor to capture all the light.
And now a couple of digital specific issues.
In general for a given pixel count the smaller the sensor the worse the fill factor, that means more light is getting wasted hitting inactive areas of the sensor.
The final consideration is dynamic range, typically a larger sensing element will have a larger difference between the noise floor and the saturation mount.
Afaict among the things that tend to play havoc with RF are metal and water.
Metal is used quite a bit in food packaging but probablly could be mostly eliminated. Water is a bigger problem I doubt most people would be prepared to eat just dehydrated food.
I don't think anything legal either Should have said:
I don't think they've made a special EULA for the netbook copies restricting the ram but i'm not postive on that (the only windows netbook i've dealt with so far is a relatively early EEE 900 and has a normal XP home sticker, not a ULCPC one) and if they have I dunno if it would be valid.
It looks to me like it *was* linus's work number when he was at transmeta (at least from the address thats alongside it on http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/ ). Firefox tells me that page hasn't been modified since 1999.
But isn't this what makes the net cool. If you're blocked you can find a way around it. You don't *have* to use MSN. Or Facebook. There's other ways to talk. There are, OTOH if you have friends you only have contact with though MSN now might be a good time to start checking up on other contact details for them.
so they must be US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) or 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches. Track gauge (spacing between the rails) != loading gauge (maximum dimensions of a car on the railway). While there is some relation between track gauge and loading gauge (you can't make the loading gauge too big or the train will be unstable and you can't really make it narrower than the track gauge) loading gauge can vary without track gauge changing. IIRC american and continental european loading gauges are quite a bit bigger than british loading gauge even though the track gauge is the same.
Why can't I just go and install Starter Edition on my Pentium D? Oh i'm sure you will be able to install it if you get your hands on a non-vendor specific copy or a vendor specific copy of the right brand.
MS doesn't really give a fuck if some masochist geek installs starter on a higher powered machine though. This is about what the big OEMs that use bios locked copies of windows and follow the rules because they are big enough that breaking the rules would be an unacceptable risk.
Just like now you can't buy an XP home netbook from the manufacturer with more than 1GB of ram but there is nothing technical (and I don't think anything legal either though IANAL) stopping you ripping out the 1GB stick and dropping in a 2GB or on some models even a 4GB one.
I personally would be very surprised if they banned external monitor ports on netbooks (most current netbooks have them afaict) but ultimately we will only have rumours until the release actually happens (and even then certain details will likely be a secret between MS and thier OEMS)
I mean, the 3.0 standard sets speed at 5 Gbps... When I said USB I meant USB 2.0 high speed which is what the sheevaplug has and what any USB to video adaptor you are likely to find easilly at the moment will use.
Afaict 3.0 super speed is not on the general market yet and even when it is it remains to be seen how close to it's headline number it will get in practice
You can set your print serving pc to boot on network signal. Then just send it an ARP packet & pause while it boots before printing. If your power supply is old enuf you can plug the printer into the monitor power plug on it, and you're golden. I don't think i've ever seen an ATX power supply that controlled power to the monitor. I've seen a few with a monitor power socket but it was just constantly powered.
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One is that expanders are cheaper than controllers.
When I looked the per port cost of controllers seemed pretty similar to the per port cost of multiplier capable controller with multipliers.
Another is that they don't take a slot. That's handy if you're using a case that supports 25 drives.
You still have to mount them somewhere though, most i've seen seem to be intended for special mountings found in dedicated external storage enclosures. I've also seen expansion slot mountings but that kinda defeats the object of saving expansion slots.
A last is that you want to attach external storage
This seems to be the main attraction to me, you can have an external enclosure with 4-10 drives and only one or two cables connecting it to the main machine.
SAS can maintain multiple drives on a single cable while SATA is limited to one device per cable.
My understanding was that with both SATA and SAS cables were point to point and both could support multiple drives per port with additional hardware. However SAS expanders do allow for far more drives on a port and a much more complex topology than SATA port multipliers.
High-speed serial interfaces use DIFFERENTIAL SIGNALLING.
So do some high speed paralell interfaces (such as some SCSI variants)
The trick here is that although data is interleaved across all 16 channels, those channels are not syncronized with each other. They are out of phase, and the the data is just put back into phase at the receiver.
Indeed this seems to be the method that gives the highest performance because it combines high clock rates with parallism. The downside of course is the complexity of buffering it into sync and then de-interleaving it.
The thing is signals running in paralell with shared timing doesn't work very well beyond a certain clock speed*distance product.
Signals running in paralell with independent timing seems at the moment to be the way to go for really high bandwidth (this is what PCIe uses and afaict SAS has the capability to use it as well) but it gets pretty complex.
Still I bet with the use of a few shell companies in various shitholes arround the world plus some front relationships with those shell companies you could cover where the money came from if you really wanted. Especially as it looks like it wasn't eactly a huge ammount.
Even for those running Windows, the Mac Pro is one of the most powerful computers available, bar none.
Depends on the workload I guess.
The mac pro maxes out at dual-quad (8 cores total) there are systems availible with quad-hex xeon processors but they are from the old core2 based generation ( https://iceberg.aberdeeninc.com/AberSys/ConPag.aspx?Nire=conpag&Tikya=scStirling444 ).
I can't find anything current gen with more than dual-quad so I guess which is better will depend on your workload.
Things get a lot more expensive when you go beyond two sockets though.
But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient.
The latest mini has gained a second monitor port but in general I agree it's a PITA that there is no midrange mac that's not an all-in-one.
Because the mac pro is insanely expensive and the mini and the imac are not what us geeks generally want in a desktop.
My dirtcheap brand name crapbox is collecting dust because it isn't much more
expandable than a mini despite it's size and ugliness.
Please specify make and model so we can confirm or refute your claims as regards that particular machine.
In my experiance while some dells suck expandability wise others don't. The only HPs i've encounted recently were fine expandability wise but I suspect they have ones that suck too. ALL the reasonablly priced macs suck expandability wise.
Lets compare the dell vostro 420 (a machine I purchased recently) to the mac mini. For the purposes of this comparision I configured them for the closest CPU clocks (2.33 for the vostro, 2.26 for the mini), DVD +-RW drive, 250 gigabyte hard drive and 1GB of ram. Both machines with the most basic one year warranty the supplier offers. For the OS on the dell I selected vista buisness downgraded to XP pro. The mini comes out to £761.01, the dell to £470.34 (both prices include VAT, the apple price includes delivery, dell has a free delivery promotion on as usual.
Advantages of the mac mini :
* smaller
* lower power consumption
* can run OS-X without messing about and breaking the EULA
* has firewire 800 as standard
Advantages of the dell vostro 420:
* cheaper
* probablly better graphics (i'm not an expert on this though), and if it turns out to be insufficiant later you can drop a better one in.
* plenty of drive bays (4 internal 3.5 inch, one external 3.5 inch and 3 external 5.25 inch though the 5.25 inch ones do have annoying flip down covers) and plenty of sata ports to support the drives in them.
* twice as many cores
* ESATA for higher performance external drives
* faster HDD
* Expansion slots (one PCIe x16 which is taken by the graphics card, two PCIe x1 and five PCI free).
* Dual monitors (maybe even triple, not sure if the card in the vostro can drive all three of it's outputs at once) without requiring seperate purchase of manufacturer specific adaptors.
Oh, they have one. The bottom end single-processor Mac Pro is that machine.
Kindof, the single processor mac pro while cheaper than the dual processor one is still server hardware.
But by pricing it the way they have, Apple is basically flipping the bird to all those people who have been begging them to sell a mid-range tower. It's hard to think of a better example of The Steve's contempt for "power users".
Agreed.
That works fine for those countries you spend a lot of time in.
It doesn't work so well if you are just stopping over in a country that you don't spend any significant time in. You have to either get a sim with a good data deal for that country (and this won't be easy for some countries) or put up with insane roaming fees.
apparently there are even camera/software combintions that can take a series of exposures of different lengths and combine them automatically to create a single high dynamic range image.
Please explain, in scientific terms, the advantage of a larger sensor. For the purposes of this explanation, do not assume that a larger sensor has more pixels.
There are a many issues, here are a few off the top of my head.
Make your apeture small and you cut out light and cause diffraction, make it large and you get parallax issues, the lens reduces parallax issues to some degree but only for a limited range of distances.
Move the sensor further from the apeture and you will reduce the parallax issues without reducing the light intake. Of course if you do this you will need a larger sensor to capture all the light.
And now a couple of digital specific issues.
In general for a given pixel count the smaller the sensor the worse the fill factor, that means more light is getting wasted hitting inactive areas of the sensor.
The final consideration is dynamic range, typically a larger sensing element will have a larger difference between the noise floor and the saturation mount.
Your numbers do not seem to match up at all with those from the articles you are citing.
IIRC acrobat has always been pretty expensive (and therefore relatively rare) and the free pdf creators have only become well known fairly recently.
Afaict among the things that tend to play havoc with RF are metal and water.
Metal is used quite a bit in food packaging but probablly could be mostly eliminated. Water is a bigger problem I doubt most people would be prepared to eat just dehydrated food.
I don't think anything legal either
Should have said:
I don't think they've made a special EULA for the netbook copies restricting the ram but i'm not postive on that (the only windows netbook i've dealt with so far is a relatively early EEE 900 and has a normal XP home sticker, not a ULCPC one) and if they have I dunno if it would be valid.
It looks to me like it *was* linus's work number when he was at transmeta (at least from the address thats alongside it on http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/ ). Firefox tells me that page hasn't been modified since 1999.
But isn't this what makes the net cool. If you're blocked you can find a way around it. You don't *have* to use MSN. Or Facebook. There's other ways to talk.
There are, OTOH if you have friends you only have contact with though MSN now might be a good time to start checking up on other contact details for them.
so they must be US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) or 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches.
Track gauge (spacing between the rails) != loading gauge (maximum dimensions of a car on the railway). While there is some relation between track gauge and loading gauge (you can't make the loading gauge too big or the train will be unstable and you can't really make it narrower than the track gauge) loading gauge can vary without track gauge changing. IIRC american and continental european loading gauges are quite a bit bigger than british loading gauge even though the track gauge is the same.
Why can't I just go and install Starter Edition on my Pentium D?
Oh i'm sure you will be able to install it if you get your hands on a non-vendor specific copy or a vendor specific copy of the right brand.
MS doesn't really give a fuck if some masochist geek installs starter on a higher powered machine though. This is about what the big OEMs that use bios locked copies of windows and follow the rules because they are big enough that breaking the rules would be an unacceptable risk.
Just like now you can't buy an XP home netbook from the manufacturer with more than 1GB of ram but there is nothing technical (and I don't think anything legal either though IANAL) stopping you ripping out the 1GB stick and dropping in a 2GB or on some models even a 4GB one.
I personally would be very surprised if they banned external monitor ports on netbooks (most current netbooks have them afaict) but ultimately we will only have rumours until the release actually happens (and even then certain details will likely be a secret between MS and thier OEMS)
I mean, the 3.0 standard sets speed at 5 Gbps...
When I said USB I meant USB 2.0 high speed which is what the sheevaplug has and what any USB to video adaptor you are likely to find easilly at the moment will use.
Afaict 3.0 super speed is not on the general market yet and even when it is it remains to be seen how close to it's headline number it will get in practice
You can set your print serving pc to boot on network signal. Then just send it an ARP packet & pause while it boots before printing. If your power supply is old enuf you can plug the printer into the monitor power plug on it, and you're golden.
I don't think i've ever seen an ATX power supply that controlled power to the monitor. I've seen a few with a monitor power socket but it was just constantly powered.
Not to mention USB video is going to have terrible performance.