Dude, relax. People make mistakes, no harm was done... breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes and come back to us when you've calmed down, ok? You're going to hurt yourself with all this outrage over an almost-trivial software bug.
Well, here in Washington State, our draconian anti-smoking law applies to 'public areas', even those privately owned. (Bars, restaurants, stores, any place that welcomes visitors from the public. Not homes, though.)
Sadly, Network Solutions has also adopted the "minefield" approach to upselling in recent years. Can you recommend a registrar that *just* registers domains without upselling me on 47 other services I don't want or need?
You're really misleading people with your pricing for a few reasons:
1) A lot of the features you're bolding in Apple's column are pretty goddamned useless on a server. For example, Firewire 800, a (slightly) beefier video card, and a DVD-RW.
2) Adding support from Apple equivalent to the Dell support costs (get this!) $5995. For that price, you could buy 2 *more* of those Dell servers and have a huge chunk of change left over.
3) And your Apple hardware is still more than the Dell. You're talking about a *slight* performance edge, which costs over $900 more. (Or over $6900 more if you include equivalent support!)
Obviously, number 2 is what I'm talking about when I say that Apple's hardware is a terrible deal. To make things worse, Apple couldn't offer on-site in my area when Dell, HP, and IBM all could. (It's not in the middle of a city, but it's not exactly the boonies either.) So not only is their support mega-expensive, it's not even on-site in areas where all their competitors are.
Uh yah, now price out a server... $5,995 for their cheapest service plan, which probably doesn't include on-site. (Not that it really matters, because for almost $6k you could buy 2 more Dell servers *with* on-site service.)
Actually, I priced it out after writing that post, and IBM is not only beating Apple, but is competitive with Dell on the mid-high end of rackmount servers. Much of the reason is that Apple nickel-and-dimes you to death-- for example, they charge you an additional $200 for a secondary PSU which all Apple's competitors in that range have the second PSU as standard equipment (IBM, Dell, HP.)
Equivalent hardware to a basic $3000 xserve from IBM is about $2700, and that includes 2 PSUs and better service.
1) This was a few years ago, it's completely possible things have improved. 2) We only ordered 2 IBM rack-mount servers, and one was dead on arrival. I've never had that happen with any other vendor. Based on our limited experience, that's a 50% failure rate.;) 3) At this time, we had a boatload of shitty Lexmark printers that IBM had rebranded as Infoprint 1320s and 1332s, and they were pieces of shit, and broke down constantly. Nothing to do with servers specifically, but gave me a bad taste for IBM.
Fine; what company do you trust? HP? IBM? Replace "Dell" with them, and my example still applies. The fact is, *every* server vendor can do better than Apple. Even IBM does better, and they suck.
Oh, and BTW, all servers will have hardware problems from time-to-time. When that happens with your Dell, HP, IBM server, the guy is there in his truck in 4 hours. When that happens to your Apple server, you're SOL.
Yeah, but that's exactly the surprising part. Why would you pay Apple $3000 for a xserve running Apache and MySQL, with a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it), when you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?
If you read the transcript, that's what they were doing, a simple firewire DB dump.
The problem is that they never tested the backups, and they didn't keep versioned backups. So they'd been backing-up the corrupted database for awhile before the site finally crashed for good. When it crashed, they only had the corrupted database backup. Additionally, the DB server was on RAID but of course the corrupted DB would just get saved to both HDs, so that's no good in a situation like this.
Basically, when the site crashed, he had three copies (2 RAID, 1 backup) of the data: all corrupt. The guy wasn't totally retarded when it came to backups, just 80% retarded.
Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from LINUX/Firefox.
Get them from MSDN. The only thing Windows Update does is tell you which ones you need; you can retrieve them all from MSDN if you're willing to go through the effort of finding out which ones you need manually.
(BTW, I'd love to hear your proposal of how Windows Update could possibly work in your Linux copy of Firefox for a copy of Windows installed in a non-running VM! Talk about impossible engineering tasks!)
* Because I'm a sysadmin for multiple machines.
And you don't use SUS? What kind of crappy sysadmin are you?
* Because I prefer to use LINUX/UNIX when at all possible.
Well, ok, but then Windows Update's functionality doesn't apply, since it only updates copies of Windows. (Not Linux. You seem confused on this point.)
* Because it is very reasonable to use ANOTHER PC to download updates/fixes for machines that ARE NOT on / online / available / working. Burn them to CD or copy them to the LAN or flash disc and you can update them when locally convenient. Actually most "critical" PCs aren't connected to the internet AT ALL by organizational security policy, hence they have to have their updates pulled from another machine.
In the first example, you can get them from MSDN. In the second, SUS will take care of that for you.
* Because for instance Microsoft's download center helpfully offers downloads like monthly CD ISO image security updates or various other tools / documents in ISO image format. Oops MS Windows HAS no official built in capability WHATSOEVER to burn Microsoft's own ISO images to CD/DVD or to extract/mount them.
I thought you preferred to use Linux anyway. Also: what the holy fuck does this even have to do with using Windows Update in another browser? "I need to be able to use Windows Update in Firefox because Microsoft Download Center has ISOs!" WTF, you're not even making sense.
* Because even on NTFS with Windows you typically run into stunningly brain dead limitations like 128 character path name limitations, and also a lot of the download/filesystem utilities are pretty bad about preserving file/directory creation/modification times. So if I'm trying to be organized and actually store information about WHERE/WHEN I've downloaded a given update I need UNIX tools/filesystems for best success. This is relevant since [thank you Microsoft!] they typically have no good / simple way based on filename or standard metadata to identify WHAT revision/version/platform a given patch is for, or even necessarily what KB/issue it is relevant to. You can end up with a lot of brain damaged "SETUP.EXE" downloads from microsoft and you'll forever be wondering "What's that?" "Why do I want it?" "Is it even the most recent version?", hence you need to manage the files in the filesystem which, as aforementioned, is much more difficult on FAT32/NTFS/Windows than LINUX.
And... we're officially completely off the rails. "I want to use Windows Update in Firefox because NTFS has worse meta-data than Linux!" WTF! Were you oxygen-starved when you composed this list?
* Because typically you don't find standard tools like download managers / bandwidth control utilities et. al. on Windows, though of course they're available as 3rd party tools. firefox, wget, curl, et.al. are better for UNIX than Windows.
This is relevant to running Windows Update in an alternate browser... how? "I want to use Windows Update in Firefox because wget in Linux is better than Windows!" Uh... yah.
e.g.:/home/sysadmin/2009-01-30-Microsoft/Windows_7_Beta_7000.0.081212-1400/download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO...illustrates nicely the problems with (a) ISO images, (b) 128 character path limits, (c) preserving metadata information about the date/source of the d
It's impossible to get any kind of support from Steam relating to pricing.
They recently ran a New Year's Sale, but coded the prices in their store incorrectly. I sent several tickets, no response. Here's the blog article and screenshots if anybody cares: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/12/27/steam-more-like-scam/
Reputable sellers have, you know, support for issues like this. Steam is such an amateur production, I still don't see fit to give them my credit card. (I was close, if they would have given me the advertised deal on Colonization, I would have gone for it.) Oh well, fuck them.
It doesn't help that the Libertarian party has yet to run a single sane and respectable candidate. I think that's more the cause of their issues than their views...
On the views, though, it's also way to broad. It ranges from people who just believe in a flat tax, to people who want to privatize the road system. Even if you agree with part of their platform, you almost certainly can't agree with all of it. (And this is true of people in the party, as well... it's basically 3-4 different viewpoints crammed under one label.)
Old fashioned HTML is also extensible, you could define your own tags (like, for example, "BLINK"), and browsers that understood them would use them, and browsers that didn't would ignore them. Arguably, making it extensible was a bad idea (for reasons that should be obvious in retrospect), but that's how it was designed.
Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web?
Not really, no.
Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?
Windows Update has been a freakin' Control Panel and Service in Windows for a decade now. Please update the rhetoric to the 21st century, thank you.
Yes, the web-based Windows Update still works. Yes, it requires IE. That's because IE is the only browser that ever implemented ActiveX. But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.) ActiveX was fairly extended in the correct manner prescribed by HTML. Is it a good technology? No. Does it violate the HTML standards? Also no. Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.
Great plan, but where does the water come from? Water's freakin' heavy, and your shield would require (literally) tons of it. Also, assuming we could get that much water into orbit, the shuttle vulnerable while your shield is filling-up, so they're still taking the risk for a significant portion of the mission.
Yeah, we've all seen that. The problem is they're telling us that the ice caps are *already* melted significantly from a few years ago (I've heard figures like 40% melted), and New York is obviously not underwater, or even "40%" underwater. Clearly there's a flaw in the reasoning somewhere.
Meanwhile, global warming proponents are seemingly dedicated to making my life miserable: turn off my appliances, stop driving my car, spend thousands on solar panels, etc.
Well, despite the squealing and whining on this site, Vista and Windows 7 have the exact same amount of DRM as Windows XP-- every story about additional DRM has been utter crap (like this one). Based on that, I think it's likely Windows 8 will either have less DRM or the same amount Windows has had for the last 8 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it's really hard to lose with LinkedIn, since it has a tight focus and good anonymity rules.
Dude, relax. People make mistakes, no harm was done... breathe into a paper bag for a few minutes and come back to us when you've calmed down, ok? You're going to hurt yourself with all this outrage over an almost-trivial software bug.
Well, here in Washington State, our draconian anti-smoking law applies to 'public areas', even those privately owned. (Bars, restaurants, stores, any place that welcomes visitors from the public. Not homes, though.)
If you are going to make low-end hardware as S3 does, you better make sure that Linux compatibility is one of the first things on you list.
Why?
Not trying to troll, but I'm looking for an actual reason here.
I agree with you, but both of those meanings are still different than IRL. You can meet someone IRL while *at* the keyboard.
Sadly, Network Solutions has also adopted the "minefield" approach to upselling in recent years. Can you recommend a registrar that *just* registers domains without upselling me on 47 other services I don't want or need?
You're really misleading people with your pricing for a few reasons:
1) A lot of the features you're bolding in Apple's column are pretty goddamned useless on a server. For example, Firewire 800, a (slightly) beefier video card, and a DVD-RW.
2) Adding support from Apple equivalent to the Dell support costs (get this!) $5995. For that price, you could buy 2 *more* of those Dell servers and have a huge chunk of change left over.
3) And your Apple hardware is still more than the Dell. You're talking about a *slight* performance edge, which costs over $900 more. (Or over $6900 more if you include equivalent support!)
Obviously, number 2 is what I'm talking about when I say that Apple's hardware is a terrible deal. To make things worse, Apple couldn't offer on-site in my area when Dell, HP, and IBM all could. (It's not in the middle of a city, but it's not exactly the boonies either.) So not only is their support mega-expensive, it's not even on-site in areas where all their competitors are.
Uh yah, now price out a server... $5,995 for their cheapest service plan, which probably doesn't include on-site. (Not that it really matters, because for almost $6k you could buy 2 more Dell servers *with* on-site service.)
Actually, I priced it out after writing that post, and IBM is not only beating Apple, but is competitive with Dell on the mid-high end of rackmount servers. Much of the reason is that Apple nickel-and-dimes you to death-- for example, they charge you an additional $200 for a secondary PSU which all Apple's competitors in that range have the second PSU as standard equipment (IBM, Dell, HP.)
Equivalent hardware to a basic $3000 xserve from IBM is about $2700, and that includes 2 PSUs and better service.
Ok, well, I say that based on a couple things:
1) This was a few years ago, it's completely possible things have improved. ;)
2) We only ordered 2 IBM rack-mount servers, and one was dead on arrival. I've never had that happen with any other vendor. Based on our limited experience, that's a 50% failure rate.
3) At this time, we had a boatload of shitty Lexmark printers that IBM had rebranded as Infoprint 1320s and 1332s, and they were pieces of shit, and broke down constantly. Nothing to do with servers specifically, but gave me a bad taste for IBM.
Fine; what company do you trust? HP? IBM? Replace "Dell" with them, and my example still applies. The fact is, *every* server vendor can do better than Apple. Even IBM does better, and they suck.
Oh, and BTW, all servers will have hardware problems from time-to-time. When that happens with your Dell, HP, IBM server, the guy is there in his truck in 4 hours. When that happens to your Apple server, you're SOL.
Yeah, but that's exactly the surprising part. Why would you pay Apple $3000 for a xserve running Apache and MySQL, with a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it), when you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?
Anyone who buys an xserve is an idiot.
If you read the transcript, that's what they were doing, a simple firewire DB dump.
The problem is that they never tested the backups, and they didn't keep versioned backups. So they'd been backing-up the corrupted database for awhile before the site finally crashed for good. When it crashed, they only had the corrupted database backup. Additionally, the DB server was on RAID but of course the corrupted DB would just get saved to both HDs, so that's no good in a situation like this.
Basically, when the site crashed, he had three copies (2 RAID, 1 backup) of the data: all corrupt. The guy wasn't totally retarded when it came to backups, just 80% retarded.
Are you kidding? It drives me bat guano nuts when I CAN'T download Windows updates/patches from
LINUX/Firefox.
Get them from MSDN. The only thing Windows Update does is tell you which ones you need; you can retrieve them all from MSDN if you're willing to go through the effort of finding out which ones you need manually.
(BTW, I'd love to hear your proposal of how Windows Update could possibly work in your Linux copy of Firefox for a copy of Windows installed in a non-running VM! Talk about impossible engineering tasks!)
* Because I'm a sysadmin for multiple machines.
And you don't use SUS? What kind of crappy sysadmin are you?
* Because I prefer to use LINUX/UNIX when at all possible.
Well, ok, but then Windows Update's functionality doesn't apply, since it only updates copies of Windows. (Not Linux. You seem confused on this point.)
* Because it is very reasonable to use ANOTHER PC to download updates/fixes for machines that ARE NOT on / online / available / working. Burn them to CD or copy them to the LAN or flash disc and you can update them when locally convenient. Actually most "critical" PCs aren't connected to the internet AT ALL by organizational security policy, hence they have to have their updates pulled from another machine.
In the first example, you can get them from MSDN. In the second, SUS will take care of that for you.
* Because for instance Microsoft's download center helpfully offers downloads like monthly CD ISO image security updates or various other tools / documents in ISO image format. Oops MS Windows HAS no official built in capability WHATSOEVER to burn Microsoft's own ISO images to CD/DVD or to extract/mount them.
I thought you preferred to use Linux anyway. Also: what the holy fuck does this even have to do with using Windows Update in another browser? "I need to be able to use Windows Update in Firefox because Microsoft Download Center has ISOs!" WTF, you're not even making sense.
* Because even on NTFS with Windows you typically run into stunningly brain dead limitations like 128 character path name limitations, and also a lot of the download/filesystem utilities are pretty bad about preserving file/directory creation/modification times. So if I'm trying to be organized and actually store information about WHERE/WHEN I've downloaded a given update I need UNIX tools/filesystems for best success. This is relevant since [thank you Microsoft!] they typically have no good / simple way based on filename or standard metadata to identify WHAT revision/version/platform a given patch is for, or even necessarily what KB/issue it is relevant to. You can end up with a lot of brain damaged "SETUP.EXE" downloads from microsoft and you'll forever be wondering "What's that?" "Why do I want it?" "Is it even the most recent version?", hence you need to manage the files in the filesystem which, as aforementioned, is much more difficult on FAT32/NTFS/Windows than LINUX.
And... we're officially completely off the rails. "I want to use Windows Update in Firefox because NTFS has worse meta-data than Linux!" WTF! Were you oxygen-starved when you composed this list?
* Because typically you don't find standard tools like download managers / bandwidth control utilities et. al. on Windows, though of course they're available as 3rd party tools. firefox, wget, curl, et.al. are better for UNIX than Windows.
This is relevant to running Windows Update in an alternate browser... how? "I want to use Windows Update in Firefox because wget in Linux is better than Windows!" Uh... yah.
e.g.: /home/sysadmin/2009-01-30-Microsoft/Windows_7_Beta_7000.0.081212-1400/download.microsoft.com/download/6/3/3/633118BD-6C3D-45A4-B985-F0FDFFE1B021/EN/7000.0.081212-1400_client_en-us_Ultimate-GB1CULXFRE_EN_DVD.ISO ...illustrates nicely the problems with (a) ISO images, (b) 128 character path limits, (c) preserving metadata information about the date/source of the d
It's impossible to get any kind of support from Steam relating to pricing.
They recently ran a New Year's Sale, but coded the prices in their store incorrectly. I sent several tickets, no response. Here's the blog article and screenshots if anybody cares: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/12/27/steam-more-like-scam/
Reputable sellers have, you know, support for issues like this. Steam is such an amateur production, I still don't see fit to give them my credit card. (I was close, if they would have given me the advertised deal on Colonization, I would have gone for it.) Oh well, fuck them.
It doesn't help that the Libertarian party has yet to run a single sane and respectable candidate. I think that's more the cause of their issues than their views...
On the views, though, it's also way to broad. It ranges from people who just believe in a flat tax, to people who want to privatize the road system. Even if you agree with part of their platform, you almost certainly can't agree with all of it. (And this is true of people in the party, as well... it's basically 3-4 different viewpoints crammed under one label.)
Old fashioned HTML is also extensible, you could define your own tags (like, for example, "BLINK"), and browsers that understood them would use them, and browsers that didn't would ignore them. Arguably, making it extensible was a bad idea (for reasons that should be obvious in retrospect), but that's how it was designed.
Has no one ever noticed that Microsoft.com had various effects, direct system access, and other features not found anywhere else on the web?
Not really, no.
Or that Windows Update only worked through Internet Explorer?
Windows Update has been a freakin' Control Panel and Service in Windows for a decade now. Please update the rhetoric to the 21st century, thank you.
Yes, the web-based Windows Update still works. Yes, it requires IE. That's because IE is the only browser that ever implemented ActiveX. But the thing is, HTML was/is *designed* so that companies can extend it! (That's why HTML ignores tags it doesn't understand, for example.) ActiveX was fairly extended in the correct manner prescribed by HTML. Is it a good technology? No. Does it violate the HTML standards? Also no. Is there any technical reason Firefox can't implement ActiveX? No.
It wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened.
What is the first time something like this has happened?
Great plan, but where does the water come from? Water's freakin' heavy, and your shield would require (literally) tons of it. Also, assuming we could get that much water into orbit, the shuttle vulnerable while your shield is filling-up, so they're still taking the risk for a significant portion of the mission.
Duh. Yes.
What kind of question even is that? What did you expect the answer to be? "No, Communism works so much better, obviously!"
Yeah, we've all seen that. The problem is they're telling us that the ice caps are *already* melted significantly from a few years ago (I've heard figures like 40% melted), and New York is obviously not underwater, or even "40%" underwater. Clearly there's a flaw in the reasoning somewhere.
Economists don't tell me what to do.
Meanwhile, global warming proponents are seemingly dedicated to making my life miserable: turn off my appliances, stop driving my car, spend thousands on solar panels, etc.
People don't like being told what to do.
I don't know what "HDisk" is, but it's not part of Vista. You're full of crap.
Well, despite the squealing and whining on this site, Vista and Windows 7 have the exact same amount of DRM as Windows XP-- every story about additional DRM has been utter crap (like this one). Based on that, I think it's likely Windows 8 will either have less DRM or the same amount Windows has had for the last 8 years.