That fails to explain how a drive made of, in effect, nothing but cache is about an order of magnitude slower. Whether you can process the data quickly enough is irrelavent when you're dealing with a medium theoretically limited by nothing but c yet performs worse than a device spinning at 4200RPM.
We're not considering the full system performance here. We're trying to figure out why something that has a seek time that's effectively zero isn't even maxing out the interface. A RAMDisk (those funny boards Gigabyte makes that use actual system RAM and a backup battery) has that same zero seek time and completely saturates the interface; why the hell is non-volatile storage so much slower?
Well considering the fastest interface you'll find in any consumer-grade equipment maxes out at a theoretical 300MB/s (and probably 90% at best of that in actual terms), I'm going to say that your first benchmark, at least, is completely fucked up. Perhaps you misread a decimal?
I quite agree. The only serious improvement they've made to networking support in Leopard is that the Finder doesn't commit suicide if you're disconnected from a network share unexpectedly. I've had the opposite experience as to what shares show up in the devices list (Macs show up fine, Windows boxes only if I've manually connected - though I think this has to do with the Bonjour protocol) but the reliability is still a touch flaky and not having the equivalent of a "Map Network Drive -%gt; Reconnect at Login" is completely unacceptable.
As simple as OS X makes networks, it's still hugely lacking in power - something that's not really the typical case with Macs. Often times it's simple but there are powerful controls underneath, but network share support still largely sucks. Airport Disks (USB drives on an Apple router) have become distinctly worse with Leopard, as that's the one network share utility that did auto-mount shares. Why they haven't completely copied the Microsoft (and likely Linux; I can't say thanks to lack of experience) approach with mapping/disconnecting/remapping network drives and a little X through the icon if the share is unavailable continues to perplex me. Why the hell can't I right-click a mounted drive and tick a "connect to this drive whenever it's available" box?
What GUI design flaws are present in Leopard? I'd give you security issues with the firewall thing (though across all operating systems, I'd classify it as largely a non-issue thanks to the very widespread adoption of wireless and thus hardware firewalls), but I've yet to come across any UI issues.
The ONLY app I've had any trouble with since moving to Leopard is Firefox, and that's a trivially minor issue (it doesn't regain focus properly after cmd-tabbing into it or clicking the dock icon from a different space) specific to the app. I had similarly few issues with Vista when I'd first tried it - at least, as far as Microsoft was responsible *glares at nVidia*.
I've yet to hear someone defend the problematic firewall. The only thing that's close to a reasonable defense for such nonsense is that everyone who uses wireless (and pretty much everyone else too) already has a router that has a hardware firewall which will work better. It's the same reason that I never flamed XP about the same issues (though it would have been slightly more deserving for the sole reason that wireless adoption, and indeed - routers as a whole, was somewhat lower at the time).
Technically, you're completely right with this one - in fact, I've defended the same position (except for the elitist view, seeing that external hard drives suffer the same problem as internal drives and they're becoming increasingly common). Technically, the 'difference' in space is the fault of the operating system as well.
In order to make this difference go away, it becomes a matter of logistics: 1) Change the packaging of hard drives in order to reflect the "actual" capacity (ie, GiB units) 2) Change every operating system in such a way that all software recognizes the new measurement unit
Number one is not only trivially easy, but can be used for new marketing if they're smart about it (Seagate's new TrueSize 1TB drive would actually show up as 1TB in the OS, by actually having a capacity of at least 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, for example). Other manufacturers would soon follow suit. Number two, on the other hand, would take quite a bit of effort, and would likely only ever show up in the latest and greatest software if it even ever happens.
Trivia to you may be critical information to someone else. Obscure facts are often important to someone, even if most people could do without them. It may do little good to keep it there, but it does NO good to take it away (and I'd suggest makes it worse, as people will often check WP first knowing that it'll have an article on even the most obscure things, only to find it's gone).
I'd read about all sorts of random internet subculture on Wikipedia some time ago, and when I went to pull it up again for whatever reason, the whole lot of it was gone. Not only did I never find the information a second time (I sure as hell can't be bothered to look through dozens of pages of revisions), but I wasted a lot of time clicking around and hoping I'd stumble across it as is so common on Wikipedia. Yes, it was trivia. No, it wasn't especially important information - but that's true of a ton of things. Nonetheless, I'd found it interesting, and wasted a bunch of time in vain trying to find it again. It might not have done me much good to find it, but I was worse off with it not being there thanks to all the wasted time looking.
Honestly, what does it really matter? Information is information, and I thought the goal behind Wikipedia was to centralize as much of it as possible. So long as it's accurate, why does it matter if it's deemed "important"? Importance is hugely subjective - if I were in charge of deciding what articles are important enough to keep in WP, you'd see a whole lot less about Hollywood entertainment, for example. Yet Hollywood information stays - I can go check out Hally Barre's bio if I'm so inclined. Why shouldn't I be able to dig up information on some obscure webcomic, too?
As long as information is accurate, it shouldn't need to be important. Stick it in a trivia page or separate it if you want, but don't make it disappear. We all see different things as important - and on a global scale, any piece of information will be important to someone.
Of course, if it turns out that this whole thing is about Wikipedia's hard drives getting a bit cramped and you need to trim things down because a nonprofit can't afford a new drive, contact me and I'll FedEx down a spare drive:)
That may be true, but you're going with anecdotal evidence. While I think that frequent service interruption is unacceptable even at a consumer level, it's to be expected to some amount while you're not paying for a dedicated pipe - and I don't think many home users need a T1, let alone could afford one (and by today's standards, they're positively slow for a download connection).
I too rarely if ever have internet connection disruptions, at least ones that aren't related to me hitting a dead spot in my Wifi (by setting up an 802.11n-only network and using 5.8GHz phones, I tend to avoid interference). But on occasions, it happens. Sites will time out on occasion. I just hit refresh and be done with it. I've yet to have an issue with a VNC connection, other than the time that I remotely edited my NAT settings and decided to point the VNC port at a different internal IP. Hell, I can use VNC reliably from my phone over EDGE (!) and have yet to have a service interruption. But on the rare occasion that they occur, I don't feel the need to bitch about it. That 0.1% is the difference between a $60 connection and a $600+ connection.
Of course, if it was throttled traffic, packet shaping, or whatever, then I'd be pissed - and rightly so. There's a difference between intentional data sabotage and the connection occasionally flaking out. Of course, there's only so much I can do in either case other than moan about it (read: next to nothing) as there's a single ISP in the area, which is half the problem.
That, and there are established companies that have the infrastructure in place to provide this service already, and as such can do it at a much lower cost. I think the paid Google Apps for business users offers guaranteed access/uptime, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon's numerous data services do as well. Cost savings alone, I'd trust Google or Amazon and their half a million servers for my data redundancy and accessibility far more than I'd trust even the most well-funded company IT department (unless, of course, that company is Google).
Actual document security is something relatively easily dealt with, especially if they provide half-decent APIs into the system. Create an app that mounts a TrueCrypt volume stored on Amazon S3, or something to that effect. As far as the end user can tell, it's just a mounted drive with the capacity of whatever you set the quota (err, container file size) if you do it right.
Yes, I know I'm hugely oversimplifying this, and that there are dozens of reasons that what I suggested wouldn't work. But being in IT takes a bit of mental creativity. There are resources out there that can do things better than you can, or do things just as well at less cost, or whatever. Don't waste your time bitching about why they can't work for you - find a way so that they can. You won't be terminated in favor of the robots if nothing else, and it could well result in a promotion for finding such a better way to use your resources.
I'm pretty sure you get the first in Final Fantasy VII. In fact, I'd put five bucks on that tower in the middle to be the clock tower in Kalm./must dig out the PS1 and play another fifty times
Only within your own home. You still have legs, I expect. And if that's not the case, you REALLY should have read the fine print before signing that Comcast contract.
Indeed yes. If you log out and look at that storage counter on the login page, you'll see it's going up MUCH faster than it used to. Doing some very rough math, I took it to be about a 30MB/day increase going by a sample of twenty seconds or so, but that doesn't seem right unless it had been longer than I thought since I last logged in to the web interface. All I know for sure is that my usage dropped from about 17% to 10%.
Keep in mind, Stallman comes from a generational philosophy that , following Wittgenstein, notes that words have the ability to confuse, so precise language ensures your being understood.
So basically, he's against corporate double-speak. I too refer to DRM as "digital restrictions management", as the typically-used word "rights" implies that it's there to protect mine - which, as we all know, is most certainly not the case. Truth be told, I usually just call it copy protection, seeing that's the most frequent way it'll cause something to stop functioning as you'd think (the notable major exception of late being that thing where Google shut down their video store and killed all of people's purchases).
Well technically speaking, not using open standards isn't a DRM issue (especially seeing that non-MS software such as OpenOffice and Pages can open most Word docs fine), but I share your sentiment.
And as a member under my household, the copyright laws that I've recently shat out apply to any content I can access from within said household - which is to effectively say that I own the entire internet.
Come on now. If the servers and the administrators are located in Canada, then the EU's copyright model should not apply, any more than international tourists can ignore local laws and only obey those of their native country while abroad. It would work in reverse, too - since Africa can get online, pretty much the entire world's digital content should be treated as public domain, as most of Africa's copyright laws range from nonexistent to extremely minimal.
If there were valid claims against work still under Canadian copyright - fine, that's valid, and would would even constitute a rare acceptable use of a takedown notice (regardless of what you think of copyright laws, it's still a valid claim if you're breaking them). That's within their jurisdiction. Violations that are only the case in Europe are not.
The giving-geeks-a-bad-name mom's-basement-dwelling sociopaths who adopt obscure TV series, comic book characters, or musicians and then write and champion the articles about their outre darlings.
Digg users? Come on now, that's just being unfair. They have no "darlings" in any sense of the word.
I take that same approach for any edits. I think I have an account, but I'm not even sure why. I know I haven't logged in once since I started it, if I even did (it's only vaguely familiar as I've messed around with setting up my own wiki). I don't care about any sort of attribution so I get credit for corrections, and if it's a page that tends to get vandalized a lot and as such has been partially locked, I figure that any changes I make will end up getting reverted anyways. Basically, it's impersonal information, so I see no need or benefit to register or log in.
I do feel special for having fixed the Googolplex page. Some buffoon had it written as 10^100, not 10^(10^100). You'd think that someone would have caught it earlier, as it seems to be one of those obscure pages that you always end up hitting when you just start clicking random links.
I also feel special for throwing a shitfit at someone who was bragging about having vandalized the entry for some rival high school back then. Special in that "get out of the library, you're being way too damn loud" sense, at least. Good times...
I'll bet it is. That's close enough to a power-of-two (16,384, as if you didn't already know) that it's probably just some idiotic coding error that slipped by.
I get 300GB storage and 3TB of bandwidth for under eight bucks a month (and they often have sign-up specials that knock that down to six or so). If all you're looking for is a gigantic inbox, I think that should suffice reasonably. PowWeb, if you care.
Most importantly, I have IMAP. I'd been bouncing between gmail and my own domain's mail for some time, but having finally set up IMAP through my host and not having that option with gmail, my solution is just to forward * to my IMAP'd domain.
Well I have to say that it pairs quite nicely with Amazon's new MP3 store. Or if you have Amazon Prime (since 2-day shipping is free on Prime items). At least with the MP3s, you can have it show a confirmation after the one-click purchase making it two-click - I'd assume it's the same for tangible goods as well.
But yeah, it's obvious if I've ever seen it. In fact, doesn't iTunes use it? Surely a patent this stupid would apply to web apps just as much as it applies to websites.
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That fails to explain how a drive made of, in effect, nothing but cache is about an order of magnitude slower. Whether you can process the data quickly enough is irrelavent when you're dealing with a medium theoretically limited by nothing but c yet performs worse than a device spinning at 4200RPM.
We're not considering the full system performance here. We're trying to figure out why something that has a seek time that's effectively zero isn't even maxing out the interface. A RAMDisk (those funny boards Gigabyte makes that use actual system RAM and a backup battery) has that same zero seek time and completely saturates the interface; why the hell is non-volatile storage so much slower?
Well considering the fastest interface you'll find in any consumer-grade equipment maxes out at a theoretical 300MB/s (and probably 90% at best of that in actual terms), I'm going to say that your first benchmark, at least, is completely fucked up. Perhaps you misread a decimal?
Nothing about the iPhone prevents it - I think it's more the lack of a market for used fingers.
I quite agree. The only serious improvement they've made to networking support in Leopard is that the Finder doesn't commit suicide if you're disconnected from a network share unexpectedly. I've had the opposite experience as to what shares show up in the devices list (Macs show up fine, Windows boxes only if I've manually connected - though I think this has to do with the Bonjour protocol) but the reliability is still a touch flaky and not having the equivalent of a "Map Network Drive -%gt; Reconnect at Login" is completely unacceptable.
As simple as OS X makes networks, it's still hugely lacking in power - something that's not really the typical case with Macs. Often times it's simple but there are powerful controls underneath, but network share support still largely sucks. Airport Disks (USB drives on an Apple router) have become distinctly worse with Leopard, as that's the one network share utility that did auto-mount shares. Why they haven't completely copied the Microsoft (and likely Linux; I can't say thanks to lack of experience) approach with mapping/disconnecting/remapping network drives and a little X through the icon if the share is unavailable continues to perplex me. Why the hell can't I right-click a mounted drive and tick a "connect to this drive whenever it's available" box?
What GUI design flaws are present in Leopard? I'd give you security issues with the firewall thing (though across all operating systems, I'd classify it as largely a non-issue thanks to the very widespread adoption of wireless and thus hardware firewalls), but I've yet to come across any UI issues.
The ONLY app I've had any trouble with since moving to Leopard is Firefox, and that's a trivially minor issue (it doesn't regain focus properly after cmd-tabbing into it or clicking the dock icon from a different space) specific to the app. I had similarly few issues with Vista when I'd first tried it - at least, as far as Microsoft was responsible *glares at nVidia*.
Nope, you get $200 per user - $801 back! And lucky me for buying in NH and not paying sales tax... I get the full rebate.
I've yet to hear someone defend the problematic firewall. The only thing that's close to a reasonable defense for such nonsense is that everyone who uses wireless (and pretty much everyone else too) already has a router that has a hardware firewall which will work better. It's the same reason that I never flamed XP about the same issues (though it would have been slightly more deserving for the sole reason that wireless adoption, and indeed - routers as a whole, was somewhat lower at the time).
Technically, you're completely right with this one - in fact, I've defended the same position (except for the elitist view, seeing that external hard drives suffer the same problem as internal drives and they're becoming increasingly common). Technically, the 'difference' in space is the fault of the operating system as well.
In order to make this difference go away, it becomes a matter of logistics:
1) Change the packaging of hard drives in order to reflect the "actual" capacity (ie, GiB units)
2) Change every operating system in such a way that all software recognizes the new measurement unit
Number one is not only trivially easy, but can be used for new marketing if they're smart about it (Seagate's new TrueSize 1TB drive would actually show up as 1TB in the OS, by actually having a capacity of at least 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, for example). Other manufacturers would soon follow suit. Number two, on the other hand, would take quite a bit of effort, and would likely only ever show up in the latest and greatest software if it even ever happens.
Trivia to you may be critical information to someone else. Obscure facts are often important to someone, even if most people could do without them. It may do little good to keep it there, but it does NO good to take it away (and I'd suggest makes it worse, as people will often check WP first knowing that it'll have an article on even the most obscure things, only to find it's gone).
I'd read about all sorts of random internet subculture on Wikipedia some time ago, and when I went to pull it up again for whatever reason, the whole lot of it was gone. Not only did I never find the information a second time (I sure as hell can't be bothered to look through dozens of pages of revisions), but I wasted a lot of time clicking around and hoping I'd stumble across it as is so common on Wikipedia. Yes, it was trivia. No, it wasn't especially important information - but that's true of a ton of things. Nonetheless, I'd found it interesting, and wasted a bunch of time in vain trying to find it again. It might not have done me much good to find it, but I was worse off with it not being there thanks to all the wasted time looking.
Honestly, what does it really matter? Information is information, and I thought the goal behind Wikipedia was to centralize as much of it as possible. So long as it's accurate, why does it matter if it's deemed "important"? Importance is hugely subjective - if I were in charge of deciding what articles are important enough to keep in WP, you'd see a whole lot less about Hollywood entertainment, for example. Yet Hollywood information stays - I can go check out Hally Barre's bio if I'm so inclined. Why shouldn't I be able to dig up information on some obscure webcomic, too?
:)
As long as information is accurate, it shouldn't need to be important. Stick it in a trivia page or separate it if you want, but don't make it disappear. We all see different things as important - and on a global scale, any piece of information will be important to someone.
Of course, if it turns out that this whole thing is about Wikipedia's hard drives getting a bit cramped and you need to trim things down because a nonprofit can't afford a new drive, contact me and I'll FedEx down a spare drive
That may be true, but you're going with anecdotal evidence. While I think that frequent service interruption is unacceptable even at a consumer level, it's to be expected to some amount while you're not paying for a dedicated pipe - and I don't think many home users need a T1, let alone could afford one (and by today's standards, they're positively slow for a download connection).
I too rarely if ever have internet connection disruptions, at least ones that aren't related to me hitting a dead spot in my Wifi (by setting up an 802.11n-only network and using 5.8GHz phones, I tend to avoid interference). But on occasions, it happens. Sites will time out on occasion. I just hit refresh and be done with it. I've yet to have an issue with a VNC connection, other than the time that I remotely edited my NAT settings and decided to point the VNC port at a different internal IP. Hell, I can use VNC reliably from my phone over EDGE (!) and have yet to have a service interruption. But on the rare occasion that they occur, I don't feel the need to bitch about it. That 0.1% is the difference between a $60 connection and a $600+ connection.
Of course, if it was throttled traffic, packet shaping, or whatever, then I'd be pissed - and rightly so. There's a difference between intentional data sabotage and the connection occasionally flaking out. Of course, there's only so much I can do in either case other than moan about it (read: next to nothing) as there's a single ISP in the area, which is half the problem.
That, and there are established companies that have the infrastructure in place to provide this service already, and as such can do it at a much lower cost. I think the paid Google Apps for business users offers guaranteed access/uptime, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon's numerous data services do as well. Cost savings alone, I'd trust Google or Amazon and their half a million servers for my data redundancy and accessibility far more than I'd trust even the most well-funded company IT department (unless, of course, that company is Google).
Actual document security is something relatively easily dealt with, especially if they provide half-decent APIs into the system. Create an app that mounts a TrueCrypt volume stored on Amazon S3, or something to that effect. As far as the end user can tell, it's just a mounted drive with the capacity of whatever you set the quota (err, container file size) if you do it right.
Yes, I know I'm hugely oversimplifying this, and that there are dozens of reasons that what I suggested wouldn't work. But being in IT takes a bit of mental creativity. There are resources out there that can do things better than you can, or do things just as well at less cost, or whatever. Don't waste your time bitching about why they can't work for you - find a way so that they can. You won't be terminated in favor of the robots if nothing else, and it could well result in a promotion for finding such a better way to use your resources.
I'm pretty sure you get the first in Final Fantasy VII. In fact, I'd put five bucks on that tower in the middle to be the clock tower in Kalm. /must dig out the PS1 and play another fifty times
Only within your own home. You still have legs, I expect. And if that's not the case, you REALLY should have read the fine print before signing that Comcast contract.
Indeed yes. If you log out and look at that storage counter on the login page, you'll see it's going up MUCH faster than it used to. Doing some very rough math, I took it to be about a 30MB/day increase going by a sample of twenty seconds or so, but that doesn't seem right unless it had been longer than I thought since I last logged in to the web interface. All I know for sure is that my usage dropped from about 17% to 10%.
So basically, he's against corporate double-speak. I too refer to DRM as "digital restrictions management", as the typically-used word "rights" implies that it's there to protect mine - which, as we all know, is most certainly not the case. Truth be told, I usually just call it copy protection, seeing that's the most frequent way it'll cause something to stop functioning as you'd think (the notable major exception of late being that thing where Google shut down their video store and killed all of people's purchases).
Well technically speaking, not using open standards isn't a DRM issue (especially seeing that non-MS software such as OpenOffice and Pages can open most Word docs fine), but I share your sentiment.
And as a member under my household, the copyright laws that I've recently shat out apply to any content I can access from within said household - which is to effectively say that I own the entire internet.
Come on now. If the servers and the administrators are located in Canada, then the EU's copyright model should not apply, any more than international tourists can ignore local laws and only obey those of their native country while abroad. It would work in reverse, too - since Africa can get online, pretty much the entire world's digital content should be treated as public domain, as most of Africa's copyright laws range from nonexistent to extremely minimal.
If there were valid claims against work still under Canadian copyright - fine, that's valid, and would would even constitute a rare acceptable use of a takedown notice (regardless of what you think of copyright laws, it's still a valid claim if you're breaking them). That's within their jurisdiction. Violations that are only the case in Europe are not.
What the hell? That's my S. caprae, the dirty slut!
Digg users? Come on now, that's just being unfair. They have no "darlings" in any sense of the word.
I take that same approach for any edits. I think I have an account, but I'm not even sure why. I know I haven't logged in once since I started it, if I even did (it's only vaguely familiar as I've messed around with setting up my own wiki). I don't care about any sort of attribution so I get credit for corrections, and if it's a page that tends to get vandalized a lot and as such has been partially locked, I figure that any changes I make will end up getting reverted anyways. Basically, it's impersonal information, so I see no need or benefit to register or log in.
I do feel special for having fixed the Googolplex page. Some buffoon had it written as 10^100, not 10^(10^100). You'd think that someone would have caught it earlier, as it seems to be one of those obscure pages that you always end up hitting when you just start clicking random links.
I also feel special for throwing a shitfit at someone who was bragging about having vandalized the entry for some rival high school back then. Special in that "get out of the library, you're being way too damn loud" sense, at least. Good times...
I'll bet it is. That's close enough to a power-of-two (16,384, as if you didn't already know) that it's probably just some idiotic coding error that slipped by.
Well, I guess I'll just have to file a class action against MySpace under the Americans With Retinas Act.
I get 300GB storage and 3TB of bandwidth for under eight bucks a month (and they often have sign-up specials that knock that down to six or so). If all you're looking for is a gigantic inbox, I think that should suffice reasonably. PowWeb, if you care.
Most importantly, I have IMAP. I'd been bouncing between gmail and my own domain's mail for some time, but having finally set up IMAP through my host and not having that option with gmail, my solution is just to forward * to my IMAP'd domain.
Well I have to say that it pairs quite nicely with Amazon's new MP3 store. Or if you have Amazon Prime (since 2-day shipping is free on Prime items). At least with the MP3s, you can have it show a confirmation after the one-click purchase making it two-click - I'd assume it's the same for tangible goods as well.
But yeah, it's obvious if I've ever seen it. In fact, doesn't iTunes use it? Surely a patent this stupid would apply to web apps just as much as it applies to websites.