Over a terabyte of disk space
mlw
I do a lot of data analysis work and write code to analyze HUGE databases,
some of my test databases are freedb, U.S. Census TIGER street map, the
Netflix database, and a few other proprietary systems.
Well, I needed to test some code, but none of the disks in my system had
enough free space and Microcenter was having a sale on hard disks.
I was going to replace two EIDE disks with two new 250G IDE disks, but when
I brought the drives home I realized they were SATA and not EIDE (PATA?)
After some scrounging, I found two SATA cables and hooked them up.
The computer case was big enough to mount two more drives, and the power
supply had enough power, so, what the hell, why not?
I have 3 drives with 240,362,656, 1 with 192,292,124, and 1 with 156,250,576
1K blocks. A grand total of 1,069,630,668 1K blocks, or just over a
terabyte.
I remember buying my first Seagate ST225 20Meg hard disk for my V20 XT
clone. It cost $200.
It is amazing how much storage is available these days.
I look at this system and I wonder how difficult it would be to manage all
the drive letters one would have to deal with under Windows.
7
> I remember buying my first Seagate ST225 20Meg hard disk for my V20 XT
> clone. It cost $200.
>
> It is amazing how much storage is available these days.
I got a 4Gb USB stick for 20 pounds http://www.ebuyer.com
Thats enough to carry 5 fully featured livecds
and 500Mb to store files.
Its big enough to carry one or two liveDVDs as well.
yttrx
Hmmm...actually the truth is I have no idea how much space I have on my
main home workstation...internally its about 700gb spread over about
four drives, but then there are the external USB drives...probably
totalling somewhere in the neighborhood of 2200gb just to themselves.
I tend to need a lot of space I guess.
-----yttrx
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[H]omer
> Well, it happened, not intentionally, but it just grew that way
> I have 3 drives with 240,362,656, 1 with 192,292,124, and 1 with 156,250,576
> 1K blocks. A grand total of 1,069,630,668 1K blocks, or just over a
> terabyte.
>
> I remember buying my first Seagate ST225 20Meg hard disk for my V20 XT
> clone. It cost $200.
I remember back when I used to only have 1 Terabyte :)
> It is amazing how much storage is available these days.
It's also frightening how quickly it gets filled, but then on mine it's
mainly video, so they fill up quite easily.
> I look at this system and I wonder how difficult it would be to manage all
> the drive letters one would have to deal with under Windows.
Raid and LVM cures all.
--
K.
http://slated.org - Slated, Rated & Blogged
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| Layer' when they go through our landfill sites" - Sian Berry, the
| Green Party.
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23:35:18 up 76 days, 15:56, 3 users, load average: 0.18, 0.18, 0.18
DFS
> I have 3 drives with 240,362,656, 1 with 192,292,124, and 1 with
> 156,250,576 1K blocks. A grand total of 1,069,630,668 1K blocks, or
> just over a terabyte.
> It is amazing how much storage is available these days.
Yep. I got 2 new drives for Christmas: both Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
perpendicular recording (a 250gb and a 320gb). Each is around $100.
> I look at this system and I wonder how difficult it would be to
> manage all the drive letters one would have to deal with under
> Windows.
Why? Got Windows on the brain?
I notice instead of reflexively saying Windows can't manage 5 disks (which
would be a typical cola bozo claim), and since I shut you down the last time
you made an ignorant advocate claim about Windows, you now hedge yourself
with "wonder how difficult it would be".
The answer is: not difficult at all. Format as NTFS and convert the disks
to dynamic disks, and you have lots of options for creating partitions
(which they call volumes, MS recommends 32 volumes or less per dynamic
disk), and assigning drive letters or mounting the volumes without drive
letters. You could dedicate one disk to C:, and after that mount every
other volume in a folder under C; literally your entire 5-disk system would
use one drive letter. Or you could assign each drive a letter, etc. If you
run out of drive letters, you can continue to mount new volumes in NTFS
folders. Whether you assign a drive letter or not, you can give it a
descriptive name that makes it easy to find things in Windows Explorer, or
across networks.
Plus, with multiple dynamic disks in the system, you have options to create
simple, spanned, striped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.
It's all nice and easy, point and click, and presented well in the Disk Mgmt
tool. Or you can suffer and do it all with the diskpart command line tool.
Martha Adams
course one of these attracts valuable files, which accumulate
there. So you've got a terabyte of valuable stuff. Now you
get a fire or a hardware thief comes by in the night, or
something, and you lose it. As I have seen described in
newspaper stories
How do you *back up* these giant HD spaces?
Cheers -- Martha Adams
"DFS" <nospam@dfs_.com> wrote in message
news:agRwh.7421$pg2....@bignews2.bellsouth.net...
arachnid
> Something about these large HD spaces concerns me. Of course one of these
> attracts valuable files, which accumulate there. So you've got a terabyte
> of valuable stuff. Now you get a fire or a hardware thief comes by in the
> night, or something, and you lose it. As I have seen described in
> newspaper stories
>
> How do you *back up* these giant HD spaces?
I'll tell you what worries me about Terabyte HD's... I've only got a 120G
HD on this laptop, and I've spend the past two days trying to clean up the
mess that's accumulated in just the few months since I installed it. And
I'm not even half done.
If I had a Terabyte HD, a thief would be doing me a favor...
Linonut
> Something about these large HD spaces concerns me. Of
> course one of these attracts valuable files, which accumulate
> there. So you've got a terabyte of valuable stuff. Now you
> get a fire or a hardware thief comes by in the night, or
> something, and you lose it. As I have seen described in
> newspaper stories
>
> How do you *back up* these giant HD spaces?
The first rule is that all storage space tends to become 98% full.
The second rule is that 94% of that data is crap.
The third rule is that bad sectors will pop up where they will do the
most damage.
DFS brings up a good point (indirectly), and one that bothers me from
time-to-time. Which is that it is all to easy to denigrate a system for
not having what it actually does have.
Windows NT-based systems have a lot of power. Sure, they also have a
lot of bugs and kludges. It is too easy to call a system crap because
some parts of it are crap.
Where I work, some people tend to call out "Monopoly crapware". I know
I do. Yet, another group gets a lot done with Windows. I greatly
prefer Linux, but I'm not ready to slag off on people who really seem to
like it.
Microsoft? Well, that's a different story.
--
:read ~/.signature
Linonut
Just save what you think you need, then slick it.
Maybe you'll miss some data a month from now, but more likely you won't
<grin>.
--
Microsoft Word. The word processor that thinks it's smarter than you.
mlw
> Something about these large HD spaces concerns me. Of
> course one of these attracts valuable files, which accumulate
> there. So you've got a terabyte of valuable stuff. Now you
> get a fire or a hardware thief comes by in the night, or
> something, and you lose it. As I have seen described in
> newspaper stories
>
> How do you *back up* these giant HD spaces?
The difference between "working data" and "source data" can be as high as 10
to 100 to 1.
For me, anyway, I have to create a lot intermediate or index files from
source data. While the source data may only be a few gig compressed, it
only becomes usable at 10 to 100 gig by decompression and formatting or
importing into a database, then proccesing and/or indexing.
My terabyte of storage has a lot of free space, but most all of what is not
free space is backed up on DVD and external hard disks. Or more commonly
the case, just something that can be recreated fairly easily.
tha...@tux.glaci.remove-this.com
>
> I'll tell you what worries me about Terabyte HD's... I've only got a 120G
> HD on this laptop, and I've spend the past two days trying to clean up the
> mess that's accumulated in just the few months since I installed it. And
> I'm not even half done.
>
> If I had a Terabyte HD, a thief would be doing me a favor...
Not so long ago I would have agreed with you, but then I set up our
Ultimate Linux Media Server. With five people scheduling shows to
capture from the cable tuner, a terabyte can actually seem a bit
cramped.
Later,
Thad
tha...@tux.glaci.remove-this.com
>
> Where I work, some people tend to call out "Monopoly crapware". I know
> I do. Yet, another group gets a lot done with Windows. I greatly
> prefer Linux, but I'm not ready to slag off on people who really seem to
> like it.
The job of a operating system is to enable the use of applications.
In that respect, Windows does an adequate enough job for most people.
I prefer the level of flexibility and control that Linux gives me,
but I can certainly understand that others are perfectly satisfied
with Windows. Most people spend the majority of their time in only
a few apps and don't really interact with the operating system itself
very much.
> Microsoft? Well, that's a different story.
Microsoft, like any corporation its size with so much influence on
the market, will make decisions that attempt to shape the market in
ways more favorable to itself. Unfortunately, that does not always
equate to decisions most favorable to customers. Planned
obsolescence, proprietary standards, exclusionary deals... Linux has
been able to steadily grow its install base exactly because it
rejects the onerous tactics that Microsoft (and likely any other
corporation in its position) is prone to.
Call me anti-capitalist if you like, but you would be wrong. Linux
and the broader open source trend are actually a perfect example of
free trade in action. They continue to grow exactly because they
fill demands that the proprietary world is ill equipped to meet. It
reflects the growing realization that software is often better
treated as a service industry than a manufactured goods industry.
Later,
Thad
colatrolls.blogspot.com
[snip]
You've been asked on several occasions to not top post. It is bad usenet
etiquette. Using 'Microsoft Outlook Express' is no excuse. Top posting is
a sure way to get yourself into peoples kill files.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
arachnid
> After takin' a swig o' grog, arachnid belched out this bit o' wisdom:
>
>> On Sat, 03 Feb 2007 01:46:44 +0000, Martha Adams wrote:
>>
>>> Something about these large HD spaces concerns me. Of course one of
>>> these attracts valuable files, which accumulate there. So you've got a
>>> terabyte of valuable stuff. Now you get a fire or a hardware thief
>>> comes by in the night, or something, and you lose it. As I have seen
>>> described in newspaper stories
>>>
>>> How do you *back up* these giant HD spaces?
>>
>> I'll tell you what worries me about Terabyte HD's... I've only got a
>> 120G HD on this laptop, and I've spend the past two days trying to clean
>> up the mess that's accumulated in just the few months since I installed
>> it. And I'm not even half done.
>>
>> If I had a Terabyte HD, a thief would be doing me a favor...
>
> Just save what you think you need, then slick it.
If I didn't "need" it, I wouldn't have saved it to my HD :o(
> Maybe you'll miss some data a month from now, but more likely you won't
> <grin>.
What usually happens is that I save it, then decide it's easier to find on
the Internet using Google than to go digging through all those backup
discs...
Hans Schneider
> Well, it happened, not intentionally, but it just grew that way
>
You must be saving your own postings to this newsgroup.
Hans Schneider
LOL. poor boring MLW. He was hoping for sure to hurt windows with his
long talking of rubbish he doesnt understand. Windows is great with
bigger volumes for data.
Rex Ballard
> Well, it happened, not intentionally, but it just grew that way
>
> I do a lot of data analysis work and write code to analyze HUGE databases,
> some of my test databases are freedb, U.S. Census TIGER street map, the
> Netflix database, and a few other proprietary systems.
> I was going to replace two EIDE disks with two new 250G IDE disks, but when
> I brought the drives home I realized they were SATA and not EIDE (PATA?)
> After some scrounging, I found two SATA cables and hooked them up.
I use a laptop most of the time, but I also have high-volume storage
requirements.
I found that FireWire and USB-2 drives filled the bill very well.
Both have bus speeds
of about 400 megabits/second, or roughly 40 megabytes/second. Real
effective throughput for most of these drives is about 20 megabytes/
second, which makes it pretty effective to put 2 to 4 drives into the
laptop using hubs. There are 800 Mhz firewire drives as well, but the
real bandwidth isn't that great.
The nice thing about these external drives is that when using 7200 RPM
drives, they are faster than the internal drives. Most of these
drives also have a small amount of cache bulit into the controller as
well as the cache built into the drive. Most of these drives can read
an entire track, about 100 kbyte, in a single rotation, around 9 ms,
or about , or about 12 megabytes/second . The internal IDE drive has
a 5400 RPM drive done 90 revolutions/secand, and pulls about 9
megabytes/second. These are "burst" rates for reading large
sequential files in defragmented space. In "real world" environments,
4 drives on a USB hub or firewire port is just about enough to keep
all of the drives busy.
I used to go on the road with 4 250 gigabyte drives, which gave me 1
terabyte, not including my 80 gig internal hard drive. Even today, I
often run VMware images out of my USB drives.
Personally, I like firewire best. The drives and controllers are a
little more expensive, but there is less negotiation trying to
accomodate low-speed peripherals on the same USB bus, which can
quickly slow you down to 11 Mbit/second with 1 Megabyte/second total
combined throughput.
> I remember buying my first Seagate ST225 20Meg hard disk for my V20 XT
> clone. It cost $200.
I remember working an a NorthStar Horizon that had a 5 megabyte hard
drive,
which cost over $1,000. The whole computer cost over $5,000. It ran
CP/M.
It had a video display, but we also had to print on a teletype
machine. We saved
our programs on punched paper tape.
> It is amazing how much storage is available these days.
The newest drives have external SATA or eSATA, and have bit rates as
fast as internal SATA drives. Pretty soon will be using fiber-optic
cable to connect the drive to the PC.
I also have a pair of Netgear SAN enclosures. Each enclosure hold two
IDE hard drives which connect to 10/100 baseT ethernet. It's fast
enough for backups, but I'd love to see it with a 1 gigabit ethernet
connection. I also have two LinkSys SAN controllers. These are Linux
boxes that are about the size of a pack of cigarrettes. They have an
ethernet connection and two USB connections. The USB drives can be
formatted as ext3 drives and mounted as SMB drives. These drives are
about twice as fast as the NTFS drives, and very nice for back-up.You
can also put an NTFS or FAT32 drive in the second slot. Between the
SAN drives, the directly attached USB2 drives, and the FireWire
drives, I can have up to 16 drives connected to a single Linux or
Windows machine. I used to create smaller partitions, but it quickly
got to the point where I didn't have enough drive letters on Windows.
Mount points on Linux were even easier.
I plug the home drives into a Linux box. This lets me take advantage
of programs like Rsync and CVS to optimize storage accesses. That
makes for some very fast backups.
> I look at this system and I wonder how difficult it would be to manage all
> the drive letters one would have to deal with under Windows.
It's possible, but not nearly as easy as mounting them on Linux
partitions and just having the various directories available.
Robt. Miller
>
> I remember buying my first Seagate ST225 20Meg hard disk for my V20 XT
> clone. It cost $200.
g=c800:5
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//\ ..may the beacon /\obt.
V_/_ pass you by.. /\/\iller
8:56am up 37 days 21:43, 23 users, load average: 0.43, 0.50, 0.35
processes 1046064
Linonut
> Call me anti-capitalist if you like, but you would be wrong. Linux
> and the broader open source trend are actually a perfect example of
> free trade in action. They continue to grow exactly because they
> fill demands that the proprietary world is ill equipped to meet. It
> reflects the growing realization that software is often better
> treated as a service industry than a manufactured goods industry.
You're probably the best, real-world Linux advocate here, Thad.
--
Rejuvenate your hardware with GNU/Linux!
DFS
> LOL. poor boring MLW. He was hoping for sure to hurt windows with his
> long talking of rubbish he doesnt understand. Windows is great with
> bigger volumes for data.
What was wrong with the Hadron nym, Damien?
7
> Something about these large HD spaces concerns me. Of
> course one of these attracts valuable files, which accumulate
> there. So you've got a terabyte of valuable stuff. Now you
> get a fire or a hardware thief comes by in the night, or
> something, and you lose it. As I have seen described in
> newspaper stories
If you have terabyte of valuable data,
use $100 disk (about 300-400Gb) as a compressed backup.
Buy as many as needed.
It faster, cheaper, compact and longer lasting
than many other alternative media.
Rex Ballard
> On Sat, 03 Feb 2007 01:46:44 +0000, Martha Adams wrote:
> > Something about these large HD spaces concerns me. Of course one of these
> > attracts valuable files, which accumulate there. So you've got a terabyte
> > of valuable stuff. Now you get a fire or a hardware thief comes by in the
> > night, or something, and you lose it. As I have seen described in
> > newspaper stories
>
> > How do you *back up* these giant HD spaces?
Actually, one of the main advantages of external hard drives is that
they make
great back-ups.
If you buy a DVD burner with 18x write speed, that's about 20
megabytes/second, maybe 10 megabytes/second net throughput. That
would be roughly 2 minutes/gigabyte or one DVD every 5 minutes.
Backing up a 100 gigabyte hard drive woud take about 3 hours, and
would require 25 DVDs.
With Windows, you have a little problem though. You can't back up
DVDs to Windows because Windows doesn't allow back-up of system files
while they are open.
Linux on the other hand, makes back-up and recovery a bit easier.
Linux administrators usually create a separate "home" partition which
can be backed up using any sort of backup tool, and the core root and /
usr partitions can be backed up even while the machine is running.
The only thing that will be incomplete is that you would have log
files that wouldn't restore well.
Linux and UNIX also have tools designed for managing and mirroring
huge quantities of data efficiently. The simplest approach is to use
RAID 1 or RAID 10 arrays. If one drive goes bad, the other can take
over the load and the damaged drive can be replaced with a good one
and recovered from the good working drive as time and load permits.
Many RAID controllers have automatic mapping of these spare drives and
can read/write in real time. This is often ideal for servers which
often contain huge amounts of rapidly changing data.
RAID 5 is often used for "read mostly" drives. Typically you'll have
4-7 drives and a "checksum" drive. When data is written to the disk,
the same location on all of the disks is xor'd together and the
checksum in written to the extra drive. If a drive in the array
fails, the RAID controller maps in a spare drive and the cylinders
from the other drives are xor'd, yielding the content of the "lost"
drive. RAID 5 is much slower because the RAID array controller has to
read all drives compute the checksum, and write the new data and
checksum before the system is "stable" again.
Keep in mind that RAID arrays aren't new, and Windows does have
support for RAID in hardware and RAID in software. In addition,
several Linux "Appliances" and most RAID controllers used in SAN and
NAS environments use a stripped down version of Linux or UNIX to
manage the arrays. It's a standard Linux kernel, but generally has
few if any direct interfaces. Usually the management and
configuration is done using a simple Web server that uses CGI scripts
for configuration. This makes these controllers fast, simple and
cheap. Some high-end controllers have the ability to manage hundreds
of drives and even a couple hundred gigabytes of RAM, some servers
have slots for dozens of PCI cards, and each PCI card can control up
to 8 drives. Remember, a PCI 133 Card can transfer at rates of 400
MegaBYTES/second, almost 10 times faster than a single FireWire or
USB-2 drive, and most SCSI drives as well.
Keep in mind as well that each drive spends as much as 80% of it's
time "getting into position", moving the heads and waiting for the
start of the desired sector, block, or cluster. Linux tries to
optimize these reads by organizing them into inodes and tries to map
each inode into as close to 64 condiguous blocks as possible. Each
block can range in size from 512 bytes to 4 kbytes, depending on
various tuning factors. Usually, Linux will read these inodes in one
continuous read, which is why so much of the space not used by
applications is used as disk buffers. If an application needs lots of
memory it can be moved dynamically from the disk buffer pool to the
free pool and from there into the application memory. This was a
critical innovation of Linux and eliminated the need to configure
these parameters at compile time or prior to a reboot.
But not everybody needs huge RAID arrays. If you information doesn't
change that often, you can use "rsync" to syncronize a faster drive to
a slower less expensive drive. You could take a fast internal SATA
drive and Linux could rsync that to a Firewire or USB-2 drive. Most
people will do this on a daily basis. In addition, you can set up
these backups in a script file and use a crontab entry to schedule
automated backups. Typically, you would only need to back up a small
percentage of your documents, but the total percentage can be very
small. Some people will even use a separate server for the RSYNC
server. For example, if I have a laptop that I want to back up using
rsync, I can have a Linux desktop machine that can be accessed using
rsync, and I will only have to actually transfer the altered files.
By excluding volitile directories such as cache directories for
browsers, the backup and recovery can be as much as 1000 times faster
than a full backup.
Some people really hate to lose any history. They want to keep track
of every version of a document so that they can track the changes.
Linux has a number of version control systems that not only let you
"undelete" a file, but even let you "unsave" your last round of
changes.
For personal use, RCS or SCCS give you low level version control.
They also make people check out a document so that others won't try to
edit the document while you are working on it.
For larger teams, especially across multiple time zones, there is
CVS. Even for personal use CVS is a very easy way to keep a record of
history and changes to a document. In this case, you can create a
directory and "check out" files from the repositories, you can "add"
files that you want to be archived (not every file needs to be
archived, such as temporary files created by editors), and you can
commit files after you have changed them and you are satisfied with
your changes. If you are working with large teams, you can request
"update" which gives you the latest stable versions from all of the
different members of the team. This is really handy in big projects.
Finally, you can set "tags" to indicate that a particular checkpoint
is "stable" or "ready for release". And if you want to create a
backup of only the changes since a previous backup, you can create a
"patch" file, which generates a file that includes editor commands and
instructions as to how to update existing product to another version.
These files are often small enough to fit on a CD-ROM, DVD, or USB
drive.
Subversion is much like CVS, but also provides better repository
organization. It also has the ability to do better comparisons
between "binary" files such as word documents and exel speadsheetst as
well as compressed documents such as Open Document files.
Microsoft doesn' t think that PC users really need much backup. They
often reccoend to corporations that users simply mount a drive and put
all of their personal files on that drive. In effect, the local hard
disk is more like as small "cache" for providing high-speed access to
the run-time software.
For databases, there is replication or snapshots. Some databases such
as IBM's DB2 and Oracle, have "data integrators" which allow updates
to a primary database to be spooled to a secondary slower database.
For example, I might want a really fast RAID 1 or RAID-10 array for
the first week when there is lots of volitility, and then mirror this
to a slower RAID 5 array using firewire or USB-2 IDE or SATA drives.
Drives with slower speeds, such as 5400 RPM 3.5 inch hard drives can
be very nice for storing huge archives inexpensively. If the data is
only accessed occaisionally, it's a nice way to manage that extra
storage.
One of the problems with any backup is that the data has to be
restored properly. In Windows this can be a real challenge. Windows
is organized as one huge partition, which means that all personal
data, programs installed as part of the operating system, programs
installed by the user, and programs installed by download or active-X
controls must all be archived while the partition is inactive. Some
programs such as ghost even go so far as to boot the user into
something like DOS, FreeDOS, or Linux to back up those static files.
Linux installations generally reccomend installing applications on one
partition (or more), and putting user data on a separate partition.
This not only makes it easier to back-up an existing partiton, but it
also makes it easier to upgrade or even switch distributions.
The last resort is virtualization. Newer virtualization techniques
use libraries to fool applications into thinking that the native
operating system is calling the BIOS or operating system functions,
when in fact, they are calling library functions on the "host"
operating system. One can use VMWare or Xen to install Windows in a
VM, and that VM can be stored as a full image, or as a "snapshot"
against that full image. This makes it much easier to get a reliable
fall-back. Some people will keep several images on external drives.
> I'll tell you what worries me about Terabyte HD's... I've only got a 120G
> HD on this laptop, and I've spend the past two days trying to clean up the
> mess that's accumulated in just the few months since I installed it. And
> I'm not even half done.
And there you have it. Instead of trying to figure out how to back up
120 G into a stack full of CDs or DVDs, you can get a "one touch"
external drive, and use rsync to back up what you need. You can even
keep multiple versions (using CVS). A good rule of thumb is to go
with a back-up device that is at least twice as big as the space you
want to archive.
> If I had a Terabyte HD, a thief would be doing me a favor...
If you wanted to save every document you've ever read, witten,
reviewed, or managed, since 1990 (assuming you were at least 25 at
that time), including illustrations, photographs, and WYSIWYG
formatted documents, You would probably need about a terabyte.
However, if you only wanted to save everything you've red in the last
5 years, you'd need 1/2 tarabyte. This is because the documents are
getting bigger and more complex. In 1990, one could easily put 4-5
documents on a single 1.4 megabyte floppy. In 2001, a CD would hold
about 200 documents. In 2006, a DVD would hold about 100 documents,
including short videos and audios. In 1993, a 640x480 picture would
fill a 15 inch screen and be considered high quality. Today, 6
megapixel cameras and HDTV can create magazine qualty images in a
magazine size image. Top of the line WUXGA displays aro only 2.3
megapixel resolution and produce only a 1920 x 1200 display. With a 6
megapixel camara you won't be able to see the entire picture on a
typical display.
Rex Ballard
OMG Master IT Architect
Rex Ballard
> DFS brings up a good point (indirectly), and one that bothers me from
> time-to-time. Which is that it is all to easy to denigrate a system for
> not having what it actually does have.
>
> Windows NT-based systems have a lot of power. Sure, they also have a
> lot of bugs and kludges. It is too easy to call a system crap because
> some parts of it are crap.
Windows NT, especially Windows 2000 and Windows XP have many nice
features. Then again so does Linux. The main issue that most Linux
advocates
have is that Microsoft "force feeds" Windows into nearly 100 million
PCs per year,
and one of the conditions for these force feeds is "No competition".
OEMs can't
advertize that they support competitor's software (Linux, Solaris,
BSD, UnixWare...)
OEMs can't install Linux "in addition" to Windows, even though Linux
distributors
have offered very reasonable terms. It's this "Lock-out" that is the
issue.
Let's assume that Linux is only 80% as good as Windows in most things.
But let's suppose that Linux is 20% better than Windows at other
things.
If we put both machines in a store, side-by-side, how many customers
would
eventually buy the Windows machines, and how many would buy Linux?
How many buy Macs?
Until the release of Vista, Microsoft turned a blind eye to end users
who installed Linux as the primary operating systems and then
reinstalled Windows, or installed a "dual boot" system, or set up the
Linux system so that the Windows partitions could boot under Xen.
The Vista EULA has changed all that. Microsoft has explicitly
forbidden the use of Home editions as Linux "clients". Since the
retailer machines are only being sold with Home Editions, end users
who want to install Linux and then reinstall Windows as a VMWare
client or Xen client - have to pay a premium price for the upgrade.
This is pretty much an open declaration of war against any attempts to
promote competition and end-user modifications. If Microsoft insists
on continuing this policy, it's quite possible that many users will
choose Macs instead of Vista machines. Others will turn to the "White
Box" market and purchase machines with NO WINDOWS. Microsoft may have
overplayed their hand. Time will tell.
Fortunately, new distributions such as Xandros have made it a point to
be able to run applications written for Windows 9x and Windows NT.
Not all applications work perfectly, but the hope is that they can
meet ISVs half-way until they decide that using the Linux APIs and
tools is a better way to reach the broader market.
Meanwhile, a number of Linux vendors have opened up ways to make the
Linux APIs available on Windows machines. Along with promotion of the
Java APIs. Red Hat offers cygwin, which lets end-users install a
Linux API based environment and applications as a way to run software
written to the Linux APIs on the Windows NT/2K/XP/Vista platform.
ISVs are beginning to look uch more carefully at how they can support
Linux as well as Windows, and many have opted for "multiplatform" APIs
including the Trolltech Qt libraries (KDE), the Java, AJAX, and Web
2.0 APIs, or the Linux APIs. Even many .NET programmers are now
restricting themselves to the toolkit available in MONO rather than
risk being excluded if and when the market starts shifting to *nix
(Linux, Mac OS/X, Solaris, BSD...).
> Where I work, some people tend to call out "Monopoly crapware". I know
> I do. Yet, another group gets a lot done with Windows. I greatly
> prefer Linux, but I'm not ready to slag off on people who really seem to
> like it.
I have no problem with letting people make that choice, even
encouraging them to make that choice. People SHOULD be encouraged to
make their choices, and be responsible for the consequences of those
choices. In fact, that is exactly what Linux Advocates want. The
problem is that Microsoft DOES NOT want people to have the ability to
make an informed choice. To make an informed choice between Linux and
Windows, one must have access to the information. I can go into any
Staples, BestBuy, CompUSA, or other major PC retailer, and I can look
at 20 nearly identical Windows machines. In a very few stores, I can
go over an isle or two, and look at the Macs on display. Given only
those two choices, more and more people are choosing the Mac over
Vista.
What is so horribly wrong - for everybody BUT Microsoft, about having
at least ONE PC on the shelf running at least ONE version of Linux?
Would the economy collapse if Microsoft didn't get their 85% profit
margin because 30% of the people who walked into these stores that
sell PCs decided they would rather have Linux? Would the earth tilt
on it's axis if Microsoft didn't get $60 per machine on 100 Million
PCs sold this year? Would corporate commerce come to a complete stop
if some percentage of employees chose to use Linux instead of Windows?
But Microsoft is a monopoly. They want absolute control of the market
from the image as it is installed by the OEM, to the configuration
used in the workplace, to the services being used at home and at
work. Microsoft doesn't just want total control of the world's PCs,
they want absolute control of the world's information!
Information, in the wrong hands, can be a dangerous thing. It can be
used to manipulate public officials, to manipulate the outcome of
elections, to start wars, to fund political turmoil and to sponsor and
organize terrorism. But Microsoft seems to think that unless they
have absolute control, that they are prepared to permit, and possibly
even cause, all of these things.
The problem isn't Microsoft. Bill and Steve try to be benevolent
dictators (politically), but the very same mechisms used by Microsoft
to maintain this absolute control, are also used by hackers for
unsavory purposes. Identity theft, security leaks, terrorist acts,
misinformaton, disinformation, leaks of information designed to
destroy political careers, and even terrorist acts themselves, are all
made possible via these back doors.
I am not saying we should ban Microsoft. I am saying that users
should be able to make an informed choice, without having to face a
gauntlet of obstructions from Microsoft. Linux vendors have as much
right to the OEM market as Microsoft. If OEMs chose Microsoft to the
exclusion of other vendors, then they are in violation of the clayton
act. If corporate IT managers chose Microsoft to the exclusion of
other competitors, they are in violation of the Clayton act. And if
Microsoft forces them into an "All or nothing" decision, they are in
violation of the Sherman act. These are the names of the US laws, but
there are similar laws in Europe and Asia.
For Microsoft to have maintained a near total monopoly on PC operating
systems for nearly 25 years is unconcionable. It is a symptom of poor
leadership, poor management, and poor economics. In some ways, I'm
hoping that Microsoft does cross that invisible line in an
unforgivable way. They have already disabled Volume Managed Licenses
and demanded payments. This was ruled as extortion in another case
just a few days ago.
Can Steve Ballmer continue his gestapo tactics and hitleresque
speeches without eventually coming off like the great dictator?
Microsoft is now facing a jury. I'm hoping that that jury awards
triple damages against Microsoft, just to demonstrate, once an for
all, that Microsoft has to live by the same rules as the rest of us.
Even so, I fear that it will be the market that will ultimately have
to stand up against Microsoft's minions. I fear that if Microsoft
insists on continuing it's iron-fisted tactics, that the opposition
may demand that Microsoft be excluded from the choices. Look at
Massechussetts. The backlash reaction to Microsoft's tactics and
refusal to offer an acceptable settlement has led to efforts to
mandate Open Document format, even to exclude Microsoft products from
bidding and evaluation. This may be too much in the other direction,
but may be necessary to achieve the long term goal of freedom of
choice for the end-user.
> :read ~/.signature
Kelsey Bjarnason
> On 2007-02-02, mlw <m...@nospamnoway.zz> wrote:
>>
>> I remember buying my first Seagate ST225 20Meg hard disk for my V20 XT
>> clone. It cost $200.
>
> g=c800:5
>
Heh. That's going back a ways. :)