Well... Much of Internet purchases for goods are crossing state borders, therefore Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States applies;... No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state....
I would like to reaffirm that there is no such thing as an "internet economy". If anything, the "internet economy" got us where we're at today.
I would believe that most companies can handle their own surveillance needs and if need be, contact authorities.
It seems expensive, and probably not very efficient in stopping terror attacks. Perhaps the Federal government should consider issuing guidelines, just as they do for roads and railroads as to how a national ISPs network should be built for proper de-centralization so that a lights-out situation doesn't affect the whole nation?
"Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., posted the download Monday evening at the following Web site: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/, charging users $20 for the software. Sun will follow up the early-access version with a completed release of Solaris 9 x86 in December. The company will probably charge $99 for a single-processor license, Loiacono said."
This is further amplified by the following site;
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1872
And I find that it's rather preposterous to say that Sun started charging for StarOffice because people thought its $0 price tag made it inferior to Microsoft Office.
Sun is a company like any other and it needs to see returns on investments. Sun did something rather silly which was to spend a lot of money on the dot-com bubble. The "Free for All" idea is basically dead today, as you can see many companies that used to be free are either gone or are charging. Yahoo! e-mail, PayPal and to a certain degree, even Slashdot has realised that one needs to make money in order to spend it. Hence the big bloated ads.
There is nothing wrong with charging for software. I am sure it's possible to make a business model based on GPL software thrive, but one can't do so unless it is certain that support and other added services are needed. Not everybody who downloads a free copy of Solaris x86 is going to buy a support contract. So charging a nominal, and $99 is not a lot of money, fee will at worst weed out the people who aren't serious about using it anyway.
"it's just about selling hardware at a high price to those that can afforded it, and cover the costs of warrenties and getting sued by mega corp whose data was on the drive that just failed."
A monopoly is good for the consumer. Given of course that the market is truely a Free Market.
If the consumers in a Free Market favors one company and its products over than others, the monopoly will emerge based on at least three (arguably perceived) premises;
1) Price. 2) Quality. 3) Availability.
If there weren't such silly patent laws (hence the market is not a Free Market), anybody could produce a similar product and compete with a lower price or quality. Availability comes with recognition.
Take an airline as an example. We have Spectacular Airways and Lincoln Air. Spectacular has been flying the friendly skies for decades and is a well known operator. Lincoln has been in the market for a few years now and is a budget airline. As air travel becomes more and more of a necessity and less interesting, price is going to have an ever increasing impact on fares. Spectacular charges $200 for a round trip from NY to FL whereas Lincoln charges $80. If Spectacular can't match that fare, it may be unseated as the king of the skies. When Lincoln takes over as the market leader, it'll remember what brought them there and remain focused on that. Perhaps later a new operator will emerge with a similar price strategy, although once again offering full meals instead of peanuts and crackers. Perhaps also nicer seating arrangements?
As long as the monopoly serves the Free Market, the consumer wins. In our days, this is not true. The markets are regulated on some fronts and not at all on others. Since our markets allow for a great deal of legal barrage against competitors and the fact that patents are abused, a monopolist has the power to effectively force the consumer to spend money on its products.
The interpretation of the law is something that increasingly seems to go in favor of special interest groups.
The Bill of Rights as we know it is very different from the spirit of the law. These days the Bill of Rights does NOT supercede these bullshit laws, because of certain judicial and political factors.
The Bill of Rights was a once-good thing, but is today very eroded since it no longer has precedence.
Every release of Solaris ships with a companion CD which contains lots of GNU tools, including GCC, GNU make, autoconf etc. Also included on this CD comes KDE and GNOME.
To continue this, Sun is moving towards GNOME and should have a supported release soon.
How do you come to the conclusion that Solaris is the most proprietary, when comparing with DEC UNIX and HP-UX?
Your frustrations with Solaris are most likely due to, forgive me if I sound condescending, inexperience.
I have never heard of a Sun Fire 150. Sun has a Fire V100 and Fire V120. These have two ethernet interfaces, which I think are called dmfe[01]. I don't have access to one so I can't verify that. You can figure this out by using prtconf(1M).
To harden a Solaris box takes a little time. But it shouldn't take 4 hours. You basically need to make sure that RPC services are turned off and that you step through inetd.conf.
Patching Solaris is a breeze compared to various Linux distributions, including Red Hat. Apply the latest MU and then either use PatchPro or Recommended clusters.
You're right, Solaris isn't exactly point-and-click. Perhaps you should, as you suggested, stick with MacOS X.
While I realise this is a troll, I just wanted to point out to others that most commercial UNICES do NOT come with C/C++ compilers. UnixWare, OpenServer, HP-UX, Solaris, DEC UNIX etc. do not come with C/C++ compilers.
SunOS 4.x came with a K&R C compiler, but if you wanted ANSI C or C++ you needed to buy SparcWorks.
Virtually the only UNICES that come with C/C++ compilers are the free ones, e.g. distributed with GCC. But first of all, these can not be called 'Unix' and second, GCC is available for most of the above commercial platforms anyway, so the point is moot.
Re:Alternatives
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As previously mentioned, copying bit-by-bit is something Ghost already does. The problem, and ultimately unfeasibility with this utility is that it DOESN'T recognize filesystems and structures.
That means that you can only restore an image to a disk in equal or larger size than that of the dump. It also means that if you have a larger disk you'll find that you'll end up with unused space or perhaps worse, a boot sector in the wrong place so that you can't even boot your system.
I do believe that this project has the ability to go further at some point, but right now, I see it as a NetBSD boot floppy with network drivers and a ramdisk which has dd(1).
"The OpenSSL holes have nothing to do with OpenBSD, they are built by a seperate team."
Really? I thought the OpenBSD team built OpenSSL for use with OpenBSD and OpenSSH. Or do you mean that the OpenSSL team writes OpenSSL and Theo & Co. build it?
"3rd party auditing of the source (which is what OpenBSD does for stuff it doesn't directly develop) won't find everything."
I thought the whole point that is touted with the code audits is that they don't let any bugs in. And to further develop on this statement, you're suggesting that having source code doesn't help any with finding bugs? I didn't know that Ballmer was right all this time.
"Face the facs, it'll happening sooner or later."
Latin factum, from neuter of factus, past participle of facere. A fact is something that has happened, not something that will or may happen. Anything that will or may happen coincides with assumptions and probabilities.
"I think the 3.0 series has been the best yet, and the most innovative. I think it will continue to be too."
Are you for real? Are you telling me hat software becomes better and/or more functional with time?
MAPI is a transport mechanism that Outlook and Exchange both use. Exchange functionality could be duplicated but I am not so sure the way you suggest is the best way of doing it.
First of all, Outlook talks MAPI. Period. You need to understand MAPI to talk to Outlook. Then about half of your troubles are solved. Outlook and Exchange do not use the iCalendar protocol for calendaring. Just because that's a protocol defined in an RFC doesn't mean Outlook uses it. Think about it. Why in the world would Microsoft do that? They would lose money to whoever writes the better Exchange server. No, what's needed here is a samba-type approach. If one really needs iCalendar, one would have to write fudge layer between iCalendar and whatever Exchange and Outlook speak.
POP is out of the question. IMAP retains much of the functionality that Outlook has when managing mailboxes, but IMAP doesn't use MAPI. In which case there would be a need for a kludgy layer between IMAP and MAPI to make it all work.
I think it would be easier to try to replicate that which Exchange does with Outlook and vice versa. The issue here though is that we're so far astrayed from standards that they're not even applicable anymore. What is the goal? To maintain an open standard or try to play catchup with Microsoft? Both?
Also, what kind of enhancements were you talking about?
MAPI is used by Exchange and Outlook in a bi-directional fashion. Exchange drives Outlook. Hence it is as much a server API as a client one. The fact that Outlook uses MAPI to talk to other services is a different story.
Your assessment is largely correct, except that Exchange DOES use MAPI. I would have to agree that MAPI is vile though.
OpenMail and I would believe that Samsung Contact, use MAPI as a transport protocol. It's really kludgy. While Outlook and Exchange talk and exchange information on various objects with MAPI, the OpenMail variant is to use the client to populate OpenMail objects. To make this work, one needs HP's special little client layer with Outlook.
Nevertheless, it does work very well when properly configured. Delegation of principals works also.
OpenMail is however not at all a server that can natively drive Outlook. Think of a local calendar, shared on the server as a file object rather than a master calendar updated by objects.
I detest MS Exchange for many reasons, but foremost because of MAPI. This package does not have MAPI specified, in which case it is correct of Telastyn to claim that it isn't a drop in replacement package.
MAPI is Outlook's native protocol which encapsulates calls to the Exchange server to retrieve/modify calendars, mailboxes and other objects.
This will probably be a nice mailserver-in-a-box deal and it's nice to see Linux vendors do these things. But to call it a drop in replacement sounds like a lot of hot air. PLEASE do not assume that I am in any way saying that Exchange is better. I am not. I am saying however, that vendors should take care in advertising more correctly. Otherwise they're proving to Exchange users that Exchange is the real deal and whatever is offered by SuSE is a joke.
I read the review and it speaks loads about how fast IDE is versus SCSI and how much cheaper it is and blah blah blah. But NOT ONE WORD about what made it faster or even how the test was performed to make the ruling.
Hence it is hearsay at best and a pointless comparison. Did you know that a Yugo is better than a Porsche? Because you get a lot farther on a tank of gas and it costs considerably less.
See? Now I made a comparison. All I have to do now is say that the Yugo is faster and puts the Porsche to shame. Now I made a ruling. What do I base this on? If I don't tell anybody how I came to that conclusion, it is a rather pointless thing to say, no?
I doubt it will cost a lot extra. Perhaps initially in the order of $50 on a $200 disk, but I doubt it will go further.
The roadmap is interesting, but it's pointless to assume that the 600MB/s version would have surpassed SCSI in 2006. SCSI is today at 320MB/s levels and come very close to those transfer rates. Where SCSI will be in 2006 is something none of us know. In fact, we don't know if SATA will be a success at all at this point. Neither do we know that either of the two will still exist in 2006. Perhaps FCAL-3 would be cheap enough at that point and with idiot-proof connectors, that nobody would look back...
Where are we today?
* SCSI has much better seek times than IDE disks. * IDE can transfer huge files at decent speeds, but CPU usage goes up significantly and doesn't come close to concurrent SCSI gear. * IDE is cheap for storage, but if you're looking for performance, a nice IDE RAID card (3WARE Escalade 8500-4) and disks (Western Digital Caviar Special Edition) is expensive compared to an Adaptec 39320 and a Seagate Ultra320 disk. The IDE variant would require at least two, but probably four disks in a RAID 0 configuration to even come close to the SCSI performance. * IDE is terrible at simultaneous access to lots of small files, compared to SCSI. * While to some degree also true about SCSI, IDE disks use large caches to compensate for slow write speeds to the platter. IDE disks "cheat" and report back that the file has been written, when it may partly or entirely exist in cache at that moment. Hence unsuitable for reliable storage.
If SATA or any other standard produces a better performing product than today's SCSI, I will gladly switch. But as of right now, there is no such alternative. And for all intents and purposes, SATA is still not widely tested which SCSI is. In the case of several hundreds of dollars, I'd rather spend money on a devil I know than a devil I don't.
It is conscievable that they haven't taken into account that in large cities, which is where human concentrations seem to be heaviest, humans live on top of eachother.
Not knowing what methodologoy was used in this survey, one could imagine that there's been an average taken of how many square feet a human occupies as "home" and then subtracted from the total known land space on Earth.
It could also have been a "home + work + landfills" type of equation.
The results do however sound exaggerated. This meanwhile it is sobering to hear that humans are still affected by instincts to conquer. Once there is nothing more to conquer or free-range animals to eat, we'll be in for a surprise. Hindsight is always 20/20.
"I even see SATA proclaimed to be to the harddisks what the switch is over the hub."
I would say that the analogy is more likely (Switch == SCSI) && (ATA == Hub).
And why are you surprised that there are no 10k+ RPM disks for ATA? Because of two things;
1) With IDE, rotational latency isn't really that big of a deal because the congestion is at the bus level. IDE disks don't have any intelligence built in to speak of, which is why they're cheaper than SCSI. So all the rotational speed in the world won't do any difference.
2) Why spend money developing faster IDE disks when it's far too difficult to retain compatibility and keeping production costs low..? Because it isn't worth it. It's money in the wishing well.
" Yeah, I know, it's flamebait, but I feel it's true. SCSI had a time and place where it looked superior. But now, CPU usage for hdds is negligible, 150mbit/s transfer rates *pr* disk with SATA is on par with SCSI and ATA RAID is everywhere."
Yes, it is flamebait. It is also a fallacy. 150mbit/s is something that SCSI did 10 years ago. Today it does 20 times that! Or were you suggesting 150MB/s? In which case that is also untrue. You do not get that kind of transfer speed out of an IDE bus. That is a theoretical maximum. Let alone "*pr*[sic]" disk. SATA being on par with SCSI is something that remains to be seen, so you can't make that claim either. Please show me the benchmark which has SATA beat Ultra320 SCSI, or even Ultra160 SCSI. If you can't produce that, please refrain from making comments like that.
CPU usage is also not negligible. If you have to compensate with 2GHz+ CPUs to use IDE, the point is moot. Why pay $1,000 for a computer so that you can use IDE, when you can pay ten times less that to get your WORKING computer to use faster disks?
Where's the SCSI version? Seriously, why does it seem as CD-R/DVD-R drive manufacturers are abandoning SCSI? I realise that the dude who's getting a Dell has IDE and they probably sell more of those. I also realise the people out there who don't want to spend the extra cash on SCSI have a say in this. I further realise that there will be people who will say that they've never had a problem with IDE burners and good for them. I have had nothing but trouble with them and I will never purchase another again...
SCSI burners work better and tend to last longer, although the only metric I have are my Plextors who have lasted a few years now. This is versus HP IDE burners which have both failed.
So... Where's the SCSI version? Last time I checked, Plextor was the last reliable SCSI CD-RW drive vendor out there. Who/what/why would you recommend today? Are there any benefits to IDE burners (technically for the IDE interface, not just because they're newer and faster) over the SCSI counterparts?
Slashdot Mirror
Well... Much of Internet purchases for goods are crossing state borders, therefore Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States applies; ... ...
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
I would like to reaffirm that there is no such thing as an "internet economy". If anything, the "internet economy" got us where we're at today.
I would believe that most companies can handle their own surveillance needs and if need be, contact authorities.
It seems expensive, and probably not very efficient in stopping terror attacks. Perhaps the Federal government should consider issuing guidelines, just as they do for roads and railroads as to how a national ISPs network should be built for proper de-centralization so that a lights-out situation doesn't affect the whole nation?
Yes, geek is derogatory.
It will not be free.
2 6/ 021126hnsolaris.xml?s=IDGNS
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/
"Sun, based in Santa Clara, Calif., posted the download Monday evening at the following Web site: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/, charging users $20 for the software. Sun will follow up the early-access version with a completed release of Solaris 9 x86 in December. The company will probably charge $99 for a single-processor license, Loiacono said."
This is further amplified by the following site;
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1872
And I find that it's rather preposterous to say that Sun started charging for StarOffice because people thought its $0 price tag made it inferior to Microsoft Office.
Sun is a company like any other and it needs to see returns on investments. Sun did something rather silly which was to spend a lot of money on the dot-com bubble. The "Free for All" idea is basically dead today, as you can see many companies that used to be free are either gone or are charging. Yahoo! e-mail, PayPal and to a certain degree, even Slashdot has realised that one needs to make money in order to spend it. Hence the big bloated ads.
There is nothing wrong with charging for software. I am sure it's possible to make a business model based on GPL software thrive, but one can't do so unless it is certain that support and other added services are needed. Not everybody who downloads a free copy of Solaris x86 is going to buy a support contract. So charging a nominal, and $99 is not a lot of money, fee will at worst weed out the people who aren't serious about using it anyway.
I thought there was a Supreme Court ruling that stated that a company is a legal person, in 1886:
h tm l
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.
So according to this, the company is not subjected to different laws when it comes to criminal liability.
A company which allows for shares of ownership or other securities to be traded are subject to ADDITIONAL rules, not different ones.
Although I could be wrong of course.
"it's just about selling hardware at a high price to those that can afforded it, and cover the costs of warrenties and getting sued by mega corp whose data was on the drive that just failed."
Sounds like market forces to me...
I think it is important to point out that writing to cache is not safe. A power outage prior to committing to disk will cause data loss or corruption.
A monopoly is good for the consumer. Given of course that the market is truely a Free Market.
If the consumers in a Free Market favors one company and its products over than others, the monopoly will emerge based on at least three (arguably perceived) premises;
1) Price.
2) Quality.
3) Availability.
If there weren't such silly patent laws (hence the market is not a Free Market), anybody could produce a similar product and compete with a lower price or quality. Availability comes with recognition.
Take an airline as an example. We have Spectacular Airways and Lincoln Air. Spectacular has been flying the friendly skies for decades and is a well known operator. Lincoln has been in the market for a few years now and is a budget airline. As air travel becomes more and more of a necessity and less interesting, price is going to have an ever increasing impact on fares. Spectacular charges $200 for a round trip from NY to FL whereas Lincoln charges $80. If Spectacular can't match that fare, it may be unseated as the king of the skies. When Lincoln takes over as the market leader, it'll remember what brought them there and remain focused on that. Perhaps later a new operator will emerge with a similar price strategy, although once again offering full meals instead of peanuts and crackers. Perhaps also nicer seating arrangements?
As long as the monopoly serves the Free Market, the consumer wins. In our days, this is not true. The markets are regulated on some fronts and not at all on others. Since our markets allow for a great deal of legal barrage against competitors and the fact that patents are abused, a monopolist has the power to effectively force the consumer to spend money on its products.
The interpretation of the law is something that increasingly seems to go in favor of special interest groups.
The Bill of Rights as we know it is very different from the spirit of the law. These days the Bill of Rights does NOT supercede these bullshit laws, because of certain judicial and political factors.
The Bill of Rights was a once-good thing, but is today very eroded since it no longer has precedence.
Every release of Solaris ships with a companion CD which contains lots of GNU tools, including GCC, GNU make, autoconf etc. Also included on this CD comes KDE and GNOME.
To continue this, Sun is moving towards GNOME and should have a supported release soon.
How do you come to the conclusion that Solaris is the most proprietary, when comparing with DEC UNIX and HP-UX?
Your frustrations with Solaris are most likely due to, forgive me if I sound condescending, inexperience.
I have never heard of a Sun Fire 150. Sun has a Fire V100 and Fire V120. These have two ethernet interfaces, which I think are called dmfe[01]. I don't have access to one so I can't verify that. You can figure this out by using prtconf(1M).
To harden a Solaris box takes a little time. But it shouldn't take 4 hours. You basically need to make sure that RPC services are turned off and that you step through inetd.conf.
Patching Solaris is a breeze compared to various Linux distributions, including Red Hat. Apply the latest MU and then either use PatchPro or Recommended clusters.
You're right, Solaris isn't exactly point-and-click. Perhaps you should, as you suggested, stick with MacOS X.
While I realise this is a troll, I just wanted to point out to others that most commercial UNICES do NOT come with C/C++ compilers. UnixWare, OpenServer, HP-UX, Solaris, DEC UNIX etc. do not come with C/C++ compilers.
SunOS 4.x came with a K&R C compiler, but if you wanted ANSI C or C++ you needed to buy SparcWorks.
Virtually the only UNICES that come with C/C++ compilers are the free ones, e.g. distributed with GCC. But first of all, these can not be called 'Unix' and second, GCC is available for most of the above commercial platforms anyway, so the point is moot.
As previously mentioned, copying bit-by-bit is something Ghost already does. The problem, and ultimately unfeasibility with this utility is that it DOESN'T recognize filesystems and structures.
That means that you can only restore an image to a disk in equal or larger size than that of the dump. It also means that if you have a larger disk you'll find that you'll end up with unused space or perhaps worse, a boot sector in the wrong place so that you can't even boot your system.
I do believe that this project has the ability to go further at some point, but right now, I see it as a NetBSD boot floppy with network drivers and a ramdisk which has dd(1).
"The OpenSSL holes have nothing to do with OpenBSD, they are built by a seperate team."
Really? I thought the OpenBSD team built OpenSSL for use with OpenBSD and OpenSSH. Or do you mean that the OpenSSL team writes OpenSSL and Theo & Co. build it?
"3rd party auditing of the source (which is what OpenBSD does for stuff it doesn't directly develop) won't find everything."
I thought the whole point that is touted with the code audits is that they don't let any bugs in. And to further develop on this statement, you're suggesting that having source code doesn't help any with finding bugs? I didn't know that Ballmer was right all this time.
"Face the facs, it'll happening sooner or later."
Latin factum, from neuter of factus, past participle of facere. A fact is something that has happened, not something that will or may happen. Anything that will or may happen coincides with assumptions and probabilities.
"I think the 3.0 series has been the best yet, and the most innovative. I think it will continue to be too."
Are you for real? Are you telling me hat software becomes better and/or more functional with time?
MAPI is a transport mechanism that Outlook and Exchange both use. Exchange functionality could be duplicated but I am not so sure the way you suggest is the best way of doing it.
First of all, Outlook talks MAPI. Period. You need to understand MAPI to talk to Outlook. Then about half of your troubles are solved. Outlook and Exchange do not use the iCalendar protocol for calendaring. Just because that's a protocol defined in an RFC doesn't mean Outlook uses it. Think about it. Why in the world would Microsoft do that? They would lose money to whoever writes the better Exchange server. No, what's needed here is a samba-type approach. If one really needs iCalendar, one would have to write fudge layer between iCalendar and whatever Exchange and Outlook speak.
POP is out of the question. IMAP retains much of the functionality that Outlook has when managing mailboxes, but IMAP doesn't use MAPI. In which case there would be a need for a kludgy layer between IMAP and MAPI to make it all work.
I think it would be easier to try to replicate that which Exchange does with Outlook and vice versa. The issue here though is that we're so far astrayed from standards that they're not even applicable anymore. What is the goal? To maintain an open standard or try to play catchup with Microsoft? Both?
Also, what kind of enhancements were you talking about?
MAPI is used by Exchange and Outlook in a bi-directional fashion. Exchange drives Outlook. Hence it is as much a server API as a client one. The fact that Outlook uses MAPI to talk to other services is a different story.
Your assessment is largely correct, except that Exchange DOES use MAPI. I would have to agree that MAPI is vile though.
OpenMail and I would believe that Samsung Contact, use MAPI as a transport protocol. It's really kludgy. While Outlook and Exchange talk and exchange information on various objects with MAPI, the OpenMail variant is to use the client to populate OpenMail objects. To make this work, one needs HP's special little client layer with Outlook.
Nevertheless, it does work very well when properly configured. Delegation of principals works also.
OpenMail is however not at all a server that can natively drive Outlook. Think of a local calendar, shared on the server as a file object rather than a master calendar updated by objects.
I detest MS Exchange for many reasons, but foremost because of MAPI. This package does not have MAPI specified, in which case it is correct of Telastyn to claim that it isn't a drop in replacement package.
MAPI is Outlook's native protocol which encapsulates calls to the Exchange server to retrieve/modify calendars, mailboxes and other objects.
This will probably be a nice mailserver-in-a-box deal and it's nice to see Linux vendors do these things. But to call it a drop in replacement sounds like a lot of hot air. PLEASE do not assume that I am in any way saying that Exchange is better. I am not. I am saying however, that vendors should take care in advertising more correctly. Otherwise they're proving to Exchange users that Exchange is the real deal and whatever is offered by SuSE is a joke.
I read the review and it speaks loads about how fast IDE is versus SCSI and how much cheaper it is and blah blah blah. But NOT ONE WORD about what made it faster or even how the test was performed to make the ruling.
Hence it is hearsay at best and a pointless comparison. Did you know that a Yugo is better than a Porsche? Because you get a lot farther on a tank of gas and it costs considerably less.
See? Now I made a comparison. All I have to do now is say that the Yugo is faster and puts the Porsche to shame. Now I made a ruling. What do I base this on? If I don't tell anybody how I came to that conclusion, it is a rather pointless thing to say, no?
Nonwithstanding, the comparison is the fastest disks from both camps. Thus it is valid.
I doubt it will cost a lot extra. Perhaps initially in the order of $50 on a $200 disk, but I doubt it will go further.
The roadmap is interesting, but it's pointless to assume that the 600MB/s version would have surpassed SCSI in 2006. SCSI is today at 320MB/s levels and come very close to those transfer rates. Where SCSI will be in 2006 is something none of us know. In fact, we don't know if SATA will be a success at all at this point. Neither do we know that either of the two will still exist in 2006. Perhaps FCAL-3 would be cheap enough at that point and with idiot-proof connectors, that nobody would look back...
Where are we today?
* SCSI has much better seek times than IDE disks.
* IDE can transfer huge files at decent speeds, but CPU usage goes up significantly and doesn't come close to concurrent SCSI gear.
* IDE is cheap for storage, but if you're looking for performance, a nice IDE RAID card (3WARE Escalade 8500-4) and disks (Western Digital Caviar Special Edition) is expensive compared to an Adaptec 39320 and a Seagate Ultra320 disk. The IDE variant would require at least two, but probably four disks in a RAID 0 configuration to even come close to the SCSI performance.
* IDE is terrible at simultaneous access to lots of small files, compared to SCSI.
* While to some degree also true about SCSI, IDE disks use large caches to compensate for slow write speeds to the platter. IDE disks "cheat" and report back that the file has been written, when it may partly or entirely exist in cache at that moment. Hence unsuitable for reliable storage.
If SATA or any other standard produces a better performing product than today's SCSI, I will gladly switch. But as of right now, there is no such alternative. And for all intents and purposes, SATA is still not widely tested which SCSI is. In the case of several hundreds of dollars, I'd rather spend money on a devil I know than a devil I don't.
It is conscievable that they haven't taken into account that in large cities, which is where human concentrations seem to be heaviest, humans live on top of eachother.
Not knowing what methodologoy was used in this survey, one could imagine that there's been an average taken of how many square feet a human occupies as "home" and then subtracted from the total known land space on Earth.
It could also have been a "home + work + landfills" type of equation.
The results do however sound exaggerated. This meanwhile it is sobering to hear that humans are still affected by instincts to conquer. Once there is nothing more to conquer or free-range animals to eat, we'll be in for a surprise. Hindsight is always 20/20.
"I even see SATA proclaimed to be to the harddisks what the switch is over the hub."
I would say that the analogy is more likely (Switch == SCSI) && (ATA == Hub).
And why are you surprised that there are no 10k+ RPM disks for ATA? Because of two things;
1) With IDE, rotational latency isn't really that big of a deal because the congestion is at the bus level. IDE disks don't have any intelligence built in to speak of, which is why they're cheaper than SCSI. So all the rotational speed in the world won't do any difference.
2) Why spend money developing faster IDE disks when it's far too difficult to retain compatibility and keeping production costs low..? Because it isn't worth it. It's money in the wishing well.
" Yeah, I know, it's flamebait, but I feel it's true. SCSI had a time and place where it looked superior. But now, CPU usage for hdds is negligible, 150mbit/s transfer rates *pr* disk with SATA is on par with SCSI and ATA RAID is everywhere."
Yes, it is flamebait. It is also a fallacy. 150mbit/s is something that SCSI did 10 years ago. Today it does 20 times that! Or were you suggesting 150MB/s? In which case that is also untrue. You do not get that kind of transfer speed out of an IDE bus. That is a theoretical maximum. Let alone "*pr*[sic]" disk. SATA being on par with SCSI is something that remains to be seen, so you can't make that claim either. Please show me the benchmark which has SATA beat Ultra320 SCSI, or even Ultra160 SCSI. If you can't produce that, please refrain from making comments like that.
CPU usage is also not negligible. If you have to compensate with 2GHz+ CPUs to use IDE, the point is moot. Why pay $1,000 for a computer so that you can use IDE, when you can pay ten times less that to get your WORKING computer to use faster disks?
Where's the SCSI version? Seriously, why does it seem as CD-R/DVD-R drive manufacturers are abandoning SCSI? I realise that the dude who's getting a Dell has IDE and they probably sell more of those. I also realise the people out there who don't want to spend the extra cash on SCSI have a say in this. I further realise that there will be people who will say that they've never had a problem with IDE burners and good for them. I have had nothing but trouble with them and I will never purchase another again...
SCSI burners work better and tend to last longer, although the only metric I have are my Plextors who have lasted a few years now. This is versus HP IDE burners which have both failed.
So... Where's the SCSI version? Last time I checked, Plextor was the last reliable SCSI CD-RW drive vendor out there. Who/what/why would you recommend today? Are there any benefits to IDE burners (technically for the IDE interface, not just because they're newer and faster) over the SCSI counterparts?
The biggest shit of all; what they paid is peanuts. How much would the profits offset the settlement?