That's the problem. All people entering the USA have no protection as accorded to American citizens. You are treated as hostile unless proven otherwise. In the meantime, all rights are suspended with no expectation of being treated as a human being.

Being a foreigner, I have read numerous times of horror stories happening at the immigration. It's really discouraging to go to the USA even if you have all the best intentions to go there. Good thing I don't have any necessity to go there at this point in time.

At the end, I'm not sure it is helping thwart bad people from entering the USA.

I think this might help Microsoft too. If they can pull it off with a great user experience, people will be getting Windows to run both Windows software that they use (such as MS Office, and other corporate software) and run parallel Android apps for their personal stuff. This will be great in sandboxing the work and personal stuff in a computer. People will appreciative of the Windows environment because it can run whatever apps they like. It might also increase the adaptation of Windows (especially ver 8 and above.)

Recently, we built a Supermicro Workstation 7047GR-TRF configuration. I am revising the system configuration to update the parts to get a comparable overview:
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2643 v2 (fastest available) - $1552
Memory (4GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $240
Firepro W8000 (x2) - $2560
Intel SSD 910 400GB - $2000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $7,172
The base system will be pretty much high vs the $3,999 cost

In another comparison
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Firepro W9000 (x2) - $6800
Intel SSD 910 800GB - $4000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $15210
The configured system is still pretty high compared to $9599 from Apple pricing

Although specifications cannot be matched one is to one, I believe that the Windows workstation can be reduced in pricing by changing the Intel PCIe SSD and GPU to avoid using the top of the line products.

For example, using the following
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Quadro K5000 (x2) - $3200
Intel SSD DC S3700 200GB - $500
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $8110
The configured Mac Pro is $8119 for the 256GB Storage and Dual D500.

So I guess the configuration will depend on the system.

For us though, we have found a more cost efficient alternative by buying a Supermicro 7047GR-TRF dual Intel Xeon socket and not using the top of the line for everything. But we are able to achieve 12 cores 2GHz, 64GB RAM, Nvidia K4000 for Display, Dual GTX680 GPU for compute, 8Gb FC Celerity HBA for around $5,000.00.

It will really depend on the applications to be used at the end. For us though, most of the applications are available in Windows and Linux configurations will limited Mac exclusivity so the PC solution is economical for us.

That's the problem we are experiencing at the office right now. We have been archiving to tape for quite sometime when we were starting with LTO3. Now we are at LTO5 (always one generation behind so the cost will be cheaper.)

The problem is backup speed. Our data are incompressible data (video, pictures) so we do not gain from the very high published backup rates. Our arrays are high speed hundreds of megabytes for streaming uncompressed video (even this is not compressible by the tape, which is very odd.) With terabytes of data generated, it is hard to keep up with backup. Our data is regularly restored because of access to archival storage. This creates data management challenges as well. Our main problem is the very long time to backup and restore TBs worth of data on a daily basis. Though it would be easier to scale by adding more tape libraries, but it is not cost effective to keep on adding (as well as adding more arrays to handle streaming read and write operations at the same time.) We are also using LTFS which automated backup software are not friendly too. Our requirement is different from the enterprise backup of multiplexing data from different servers at the same time to get speed. We backup projects one at a time on a tape (self contained.)

LTO6 does not go faster much from LTO5 speeds (160MB vs 120MB for uncompressed.) It is likely that the tape is reaching its limit (much like harddrive speeds have not grown with capacity increases over the years.) SSDs are faster but not effective in capacity wise though. So time to look for new technologies in storing and accessing data. In all, storage has not kept up with the performance improvements in CPU, memory, and other bandwidth links (Ethernet, fibre channel, etc.) We should be transferring at the 10GB/s range already at this time.

This is what happened with typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan. The local telcos were able to provide cellphone coverage through a mobile cell site. I'm sure all the electric poles are down and pretty much the last mile will be disconnected even though the exchange might still be working. Though electricity will be restored months from now, cellphone will be much convenient at the moment compared to restoring pots service which could take a very long time.

I guess pots will work when there are major blackouts and not in disasters where last mile will get cut.

I feel that eating up 5.73kWh a day is still high given that we are only at home probably a few hours a day. Though there is no air conditioning. Just fan. Old style CRT TV. No refrigerator but a water cooler is there. Lights. Laptop and other mobile devices. Water heater though is present.

I guess all those small usage add up a lot.

People will still continue to search even though Google places banner ads all around. Look at Youtube, the ads placed there are a nuisance (for me) but it didn't stop people from watching videos. If you don't like it, suck it up. Since you'll still search from them anyway.

So pretty much unless another competitor challenges Google, they can pretty much do whatever the want.

What are you going to do with all that 1Gbps download speeds when your upload is capped to 512kbps?

We have been looking at a reliable provider for high upload speeds (uploading big content such as videos.) It seems LTE has got it right now (but signal reliability is not good especially when it rains.) Fiber is not yet available at our area (hopefully it does soon enough.)

I feel so old with the poll. I think it is almost more than 20 years before when I first used the modem. I misunderstood the poll and I guess the last time would be sometime 10-20 years ago. I guess this poll is indicative to be "when is your first broadband access?"

The first modem that I got was a 1200bps modem. I quickly upgraded it to 2400bps modem. It pretty much held on after a while when I was able to afford a 14.4kbps modem. That took on some time. I played Doom (1 and 2) via modem during the time with my friends and even hosted my own local BBS (yey!) I would even try to do a long distance call to connect to Apogee BBS to download those shareware games. :P I upgraded to a 28.8kbps modem afterwards and eventually moved to 33.6kbps modem. By that time, I was already playing Descent via modem with my friends. However, we normally had to throttle down because of bad quality lines (where we typically end up at 14.4kbps.) I also remember the party line which would interrupt our connections. Hmph! Eventually, I upgraded to a 56kbps modem before switching to my first 256kbps DSL broadband. I guess I passed on almost all modems except for the 300bps. Wow, that's 37.5 characters per second! That's a long way now with access speeds of up to gigabit and backbones running in 40Gbps and even 100Gbps and beyond.

The funny thing I remember is trying to look for different combinations of the AT command set to configure the modem so we could achieve higher baud rate and less disconnection. :P Me and my friends would compare who has configured the best commands. Oh times have changed.

I can remember back then when the campus network was put to a halt when a single laptop overloaded the poor Cisco router connected to the internet with too much requests. It took us quite some time to isolate the problem when we were using hubs and unmanaged switches. It was quite dramatic when I stormed the room in a middle of a presentation and pulled the UTP plug out of the computer! :)

I can also remember the Nimda worm back then when it infected a part of the network. Good thing we were using higher end switches and was able to isolate it pretty fast. We just got curious back then why all the network switch ports were blinking non-stop.

Share those interesting experiences. :)

John

We have recently purchased around 300-400 drives of 500GB from Hitachi GST.

Our test method for checking the drives is filling up the drives with files (by replication) and do a hash check after (with comparison to the original source file.) Should the drive drop out (due to retry errors) it is RMAd. We do check for SMART after, as based on experience, it is fairly accurate on the sector reallocation count when the drive is in imminent failure. You also need to keep an eye on read statistics (we use iostat) to check if the performance is sub par. Normally, the drives will return to normal speeds after sector reallocation.

Based on our statistics, I would say that we do get around 1% defect rate for the drives (we have swapped out around 3 of them for 1 died and 2 having bad sectors.) After around a month, you get a further 1% or less (for typically having bad sectors further.) The same goes for after around 1 year.

In another interesting note, we purchased around 8 pcs of 2TB from Hitachi GST and probably from a batch problem, we had to replace around half of it due to bad sectors. We had a batch before of around 8 pcs of 2TB but everything were good.

As for performance, there are times when some of the drives deliver consistent performance (the hash checks don't all finish at the same time.) Though we don't classify the drives but my guesstimate is around 5%.

Slashdot should have a like button. I like your post. But alas, I don't think we will have it where I live.

i thought that galaxy is defined as a group of starts, planets, etc. orbiting a central blackhole. but probably it's more of an observation than the definition though.

oops... hahaha

thinking of modem

but i guess my subconscious was thinking of another. :))

There are microprocessors probably in just about everything:

computer
cellphone
remote control
tv
microwave
light bulbs
monitor
air conditioner
dsl modem
router
dsl router
model
etc...

i will assume nowadays that all electric consuming equipment will have a microprocessor in it.

at the same time, these equipment may have multiple microprocessors in it as well.