You seem to be awfully certain of that. Mind you it is not that I wouldn't want to see such, it is just that I would expect more leaks if something game changing was coming.
I guess we will have to wait a few more weeks to see if Apple lives up to it's own hype. I'm still trying to imagine what they where alluding to.
Dave
You're going to see higher density HDDs that are non-solid state long before Apple or anyone takes the jump for general consumption.
Embedded systems will be the biggest in-road for SSDs in the near-term.
Despite the difference in price that is still there, a 100% performance improvement is worth it - no noise, no heat. The read/write speeds of one of those drives is equivalent to a 3.5" 7200rpm standard drive in RAID-0 and it will fit in a laptop.
Being much cooler, would allow Apple to use hotter components in their laptops like faster graphics cards/CPUs.
I think we're reaching a limit on the amount of storage that can go in a rotational drive. Perpendicular recording was a big step up but I think 1TB per drive is round about the maximum we'll see for a while and laptop drives aren't quite there.
Once SSDs go to 256GB-512GB and those drives come into the £200 price bracket, conventional hard drives will be replaced simply for the reliability, performance and heat.
Even at the prices now, I would actually pay £292 for the 128GB SSD over the £80 200GB HD for the huge speed improvement if I valued performance and reliability over storage space - I would probably have the 128GB SSD internal and then a standard 500GB-1TB external drive external.
I think we're reaching a limit on the amount of storage that can go in a rotational drive. Perpendicular recording was a big step up but I think 1TB per drive is round about the maximum we'll see for a while and laptop drives aren't quite there.
Don't count them out just yet. And since you evidently like linkage:
{quote=seagate_guy]If we stay on the trajectory that we're going to grow in areal density at the rate of about 40% a year, we honestly don't see a crossover point where Flash can be competitive with hard drives from a cost perspective.[/quote]
The way I see it though is it's not so much about capacity as need. Even if HD manufacturers do go above 1TB, most people don't need anywhere near that amount. I reckon 250GB is probably the target size to cover most users.
There are those who rip stuff constantly to hard drives and keep them for ages but if normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
I can see Apple doing this in their laptops. PC manufacturers will inevitably use the cheapest components to keep prices as low as possible and there's nothing really wrong with HDs. Apple don't have to go for cheap though. Using SSD would cut down their repair costs for warranty HD repairs.
It also means they don't have to compromise on performance in the interests of lowering heat. If they switched their entire laptop and mobile devices to use flash, they'd get some sort of discount. PC manufacturers couldn't do that as it would just take one of them to stick with HD and beat the others on price. It doesn't matter to Apple if they cost a bit more.
If we stay on the trajectory that we're going to grow in areal density at the rate of about 40% a year, we honestly don't see a crossover point where Flash can be competitive with hard drives from a cost perspective.
The way I see it though is it's not so much about capacity as need. Even if HD manufacturers do go above 1TB, most people don't need anywhere near that amount. I reckon 250GB is probably the target size to cover most users.
[\\quote]
This I disagree with completely and I'm not surprised that you contradict yourself below. Capacity is and always will be an issue. As personal storage capacity increases content providers just change thief delivery technigues to take advantage of that capacity. There are many examples from highly graphical PDFs at one end to the delivery of complete training videos over the web. Note that we are not even talking about enertainment media here which can be huge.
What I'm basically saying is that 200GB is a minimal disk size for todays average user.
[quote]
There are those who rip stuff constantly to hard drives and keep them for ages but if normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
[\\quote]
First let me say I'm note a big fan of external drives for my primary storage needs. Back yes and maybe for less frequently called data but that is about it. In any event it is clear you see the need for lots of storage but like to spread it all over.
That is fine but I do have an alternative for you. Split the storage capacity across two drives. One solid state for the OS, apps and important data. Put scratch space and most other data on a magnetic drive. This way the user wins in multiple ways.
[quote]
I can see Apple doing this in their laptops. PC manufacturers will inevitably use the cheapest components to keep prices as low as possible and there's nothing really wrong with HDs. Apple don't have to go for cheap though. Using SSD would cut down their repair costs for warranty HD repairs.
[\\quote]
Apple and the collective lot of PC manufactures have access to the same exact hardware, we just pay more for it in Apple products. Plus technology wise Apple is almost always behind the curve relative to what is available in the PC world.
Quote:
It also means they don't have to compromise on performance in the interests of lowering heat. If they switched their entire laptop and mobile devices to use flash, they'd get some sort of discount. PC manufacturers couldn't do that as it would just take one of them to stick with HD and beat the others on price. It doesn't matter to Apple if they cost a bit more.
Frankly I do believe you are looking at the PC world through the proverbable rose colored glasses. There is huge variety available in PC line. Some of it of outstanding quality and a step or two ahead of Apple. Of course if you want a good OS to run on that hardware you are looking at Linux or a similar UNIX OS. In summation I don't buy your economic arguments.
{quote=seagate_guy]If we stay on the trajectory that we're going to grow in areal density at the rate of about 40% a year, we honestly don't see a crossover point where Flash can be competitive with hard drives from a cost perspective.
The way I see it though is it's not so much about capacity as need. Even if HD manufacturers do go above 1TB, most people don't need anywhere near that amount. I reckon 250GB is probably the target size to cover most users.
There are those who rip stuff constantly to hard drives and keep them for ages but if normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
I can see Apple doing this in their laptops. PC manufacturers will inevitably use the cheapest components to keep prices as low as possible and there's nothing really wrong with HDs. Apple don't have to go for cheap though. Using SSD would cut down their repair costs for warranty HD repairs.
It also means they don't have to compromise on performance in the interests of lowering heat. If they switched their entire laptop and mobile devices to use flash, they'd get some sort of discount. PC manufacturers couldn't do that as it would just take one of them to stick with HD and beat the others on price. It doesn't matter to Apple if they cost a bit more.
What the hell are you talking about? Most people don't need 200GB drives, currently, because most people don't rip DVDs and edit video, so on and so forth.
Yet, when HDTV comes to every American Household and people decide they want to rip shows and keep them they will suddenly realize that size does matter.
NAS systems will suddenly look like JVC electronics products. Pioneer will have Carousels that aren't DVD systems but Drives of several TBs.
This doesn't mean the information is worth the price of the device--most content isn't, but it's going to push demand.
Newer technologies will mix traditional solutions with more exotic materials allowing for higher densities, per Volume and SSDs won't be the end-all, be-all solution.
Embedded devices, over-priced thin laptops will be the main targets for several years to come.
This I disagree with completely and I'm not surprised that you contradict yourself below. Capacity is and always will be an issue.
It wasn't a contradiction, most people won't need more than 250GB - I know a few people with drives this size and they use around half at most. People who have 80GB internals have 256GB-500GB externals and only use half of those at most. For those who do use more space, the mechanical drives can be an option.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
What I'm basically saying is that 200GB is a minimal disk size for todays average user.
Online content is limited by bandwidth and will be for a while. Offline media content is usually delivered on large capacity discs and doesn't need to be internal. Even so, 200GB is enough to store 6 full Blu-Ray discs + OS + most average files. More than enough for most IMO.
Quote:
That is fine but I do have an alternative for you. Split the storage capacity across two drives. One solid state for the OS, apps and important data. Put scratch space and most other data on a magnetic drive. This way the user wins in multiple ways.
I agree:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
If normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
Quote:
Apple and the collective lot of PC manufactures have access to the same exact hardware, we just pay more for it in Apple products. Plus technology wise Apple is almost always behind the curve relative to what is available in the PC world.
Apple tend to go with higher end components by default though. Nearly all consumer models have webcams. They use accelerometers, magnetic power adaptors etc. They switched the entire ipod line to flash and called the hard-drive based one the 'classic'. We all know what happens to classic stuff eventually.
Floppies have been replaced by flash drives. HD will be replaced by SSD eventually.
Quote:
There is huge variety available in PC line. Some of it of outstanding quality and a step or two ahead of Apple. Of course if you want a good OS to run on that hardware you are looking at Linux or a similar UNIX OS. In summation I don't buy your economic arguments.
What I was saying is that Apple don't have to compete closely on price with PC manufacturers. If PC manufacturers started to go to SSD mainstream, all it would take is for a competitor to stick with standard HDs and undercut them. Apple don't have to ship their machines with wifi, bluetooth, and so on but they do by default because they don't have to compete with PC manufacturers who can get down to a lower price by leaving some of these options out.
Linux isn't a good OS IMO and doesn't support hardware all that well. Mileage varies but my experience of Linux hasn't been too good.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
Most people don't need 200GB drives, currently, because most people don't rip DVDs and edit video, so on and so forth.
Yet, when HDTV comes to every American Household and people decide they want to rip shows and keep them they will suddenly realize that size does matter.
NAS systems will suddenly look like JVC electronics products. Pioneer will have Carousels that aren't DVD systems but Drives of several TBs.
That's not what I see happening. We already have HD based systems - I have one already and the drive that's in it does just fine. I only store SD but there are HD ones that store 9 hours of HDTV on an 80GB drive. A 256GB SSD is enough for about a full day of HDTV.
It solves one of the biggest problems I have with mine too and that is noise and heat. The constant humming is very annoying while watching TV and it makes them less reliable as they run 24/7. Mine actually writes 24/7 as it caches the last program the device is tuned to. It has crashed a number of times.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
Embedded devices, over-priced thin laptops will be the main targets for several years to come.
One problem with hard drives is they have a limit to their rotational speed and speed with which they can access data. SSD is already more than double the speed and yet is quieter, cool and more reliable. SSD technology will advance too and they are improving performance all the time.
What if in a year's time, they get SSD to be 3 times faster than HD? If it's 256GB vs 2TB, I'll still go with the SSD for performance. For even workstation use, SSD is as fast as RAID-0. This means they could take away the 4 drive bays in the Mac Pro and leave 2 x 2.5" vs 4 x 3.5". They don't need to cool them nearly as much either.
It wasn't a contradiction, most people won't need more than 250GB - I know a few people with drives this size and they use around half at most. People who have 80GB internals have 256GB-500GB externals and only use half of those at most. For those who do use more space, the mechanical drives can be an option.
And who will ever need more than 640K of RAM?
You just aren't thinking of the applications which are soon to be possible with the confluence of reasonable powerful ultra-low-power draw processors, mobile platforms, and improving battery technology. Live life-stream real-time indexed & tagged cataloging is quite close to technically supported reality. It will eat storage at rates it is obvious you never began to imagine as reality. And that's just one easy one...
It wasn't a contradiction, most people won't need more than 250GB - I know a few people with drives this size and they use around half at most. People who have 80GB internals have 256GB-500GB externals and only use half of those at most. For those who do use more space, the mechanical drives can be an option.
After a summer of ownership my MBP's 200GB disk drive has about 112 GB on it. That includes a very small iTunes library.
What is important here is that I got very close to 80 GB just installing apps and my pic collection. I should say part of my pic collection as much of it is on film.
Quote:
Online content is limited by bandwidth and will be for a while. Offline media content is usually delivered on large capacity discs and doesn't need to be internal. Even so, 200GB is enough to store 6 full Blu-Ray discs + OS + most average files. More than enough for most IMO.
Exactly which is why most people will download and keep content as opposed to streaming the media when wanting to reference it. In many cases local storage is the best place for this content.
Quote:
I agree:
Apple tend to go with higher end components by default though. Nearly all consumer models have webcams. They use accelerometers, magnetic power adaptors etc. They switched the entire ipod line to flash and called the hard-drive based one the 'classic'. We all know what happens to classic stuff eventually.
Yes but i'd hazard to guess that Apple would still enjoy considerable sales of the classic simply buy upping the storage limit through a larger HD. There will always be a class of users that can make use of the extra space. Will FLASH solid state storage over take HD based storage - possibly but the cost equation isn't there yet. Lets face it Apple could build a high capacity Flash based iPod today for a reasonable cost if they really wanted to. It would require some circuitry to interface all the chips but 8GB chips aren't all that expensive today for iPod class performance. I just don't think they can come up with a reasonably sized and priced package right now. It is a question of how many chips and the space they take.
Note to this doesn't even take into account stacking dies to increase density. The point is HD based devices will stay around as long as they are the cost effective solution.
Quote:
Floppies have been replaced by flash drives. HD will be replaced by SSD eventually.
Yes eventually that will happen. The difference is I'm not convinced that it will be FLASH based SSDs. FLASH has been around the corner for a long time now, I suspect that it will remain around the corner forever.
Quote:
What I was saying is that Apple don't have to compete closely on price with PC manufacturers. If PC manufacturers started to go to SSD mainstream, all it would take is for a competitor to stick with standard HDs and undercut them. Apple don't have to ship their machines with wifi, bluetooth, and so on but they do by default because they don't have to compete with PC manufacturers who can get down to a lower price by leaving some of these options out.
All I pointed out is that there are a number of PC manufactures out there and they don't all compete on price.
Quote:
Linux isn't a good OS IMO and doesn't support hardware all that well. Mileage varies but my experience of Linux hasn't been too good.
You do realize those are fighting words
I ran LINUX for a long time before getting my MBP, late this spring. Actually since about RedHat 5, so I know its in and outs. The biggest attraction for Apple hardware is (in my case) the photography software available and the integration with iPod/iPhone and allied iTunes.
It should be noted that I wouldn't have jumped ship if I had seen signs of OpenMoko going in the right direction or greater availability of open LINUX phones. It may seem that the solution to the lack of open hardware in the mobile space is to switch to Apple hardware but if you think about it it is the smart move.
In many ways the Mac and its OS are as open as anything on LINUX and often we are talking about the same software. Yeah they have closed platforms but they are solutions to problems not easily solved else where.
Quote:
That's not what I see happening. We already have HD based systems - I have one already and the drive that's in it does just fine. I only store SD but there are HD ones that store 9 hours of HDTV on an 80GB drive. A 256GB SSD is enough for about a full day of HDTV.
Which pretty much proves the point about disk size. You can't setup a script to record stuff while you are out and be assured you won't run out of space.
People who are into video recording big time often have disk arrays to store stuff on. That is fine for the advance user but I think it is fair to say many simply don't want that trouble.
In any event if you have friends that do PC support you will often find out that disk upgrades are a big part of their business. This simply because a big disk is the best place to keep a variety of files, especially on a portable.
Quote:
It solves one of the biggest problems I have with mine too and that is noise and heat. The constant humming is very annoying while watching TV and it makes them less reliable as they run 24/7. Mine actually writes 24/7 as it caches the last program the device is tuned to. It has crashed a number of times.
I don't have personal experience with SSD but their power draw isn't a freebie. There will be heat produced. Less will help with the fan noise only if your installation has the fan control to do so.
Quote:
One problem with hard drives is they have a limit to their rotational speed and speed with which they can access data. SSD is already more than double the speed and yet is quieter, cool and more reliable. SSD technology will advance too and they are improving performance all the time.
Yes but FLASH isn't without its own problems. That is why I agree that traditional HD's will go away, I'm just not convinced that FLASH is a long term play.
Quote:
What if in a year's time, they get SSD to be 3 times faster than HD? If it's 256GB vs 2TB, I'll still go with the SSD for performance. For even workstation use, SSD is as fast as RAID-0. This means they could take away the 4 drive bays in the Mac Pro and leave 2 x 2.5" vs 4 x 3.5". They don't need to cool them nearly as much either.
See here we go again comparing Apples to Rutabaga. Those drives in a Mac Pro are likely to be 1 TB or larger and depending on the production environment may be well used. So you end up looking at four or five times the number of FLASH drives.
The problem is there are al sorts of classes of storage problems, for many speed means very little compared to the need for expansive space. For every good example that you might find where the SSD is just the nuts you can find a like number where it won't cut the mustard. In any event it could very well be 4 years until FLASH based drives catch up with old hard drives.
Anyone who says the Linux OS is not an industry solid, top-tier Operating System knows nothing about Operating Systems and their Design.
Userspace is not the Operating System.
Anyone who claims KDE 4 is superior to OS X is either a KDE zealot and is wishing it were as consistent throughout the userspace with form and function or they know nothing about Userspace needs, UI Design and ease-of-use that includes leveraging advanced UI paradigms beyond eye-candy.
OS X and Linux are driving innovation, as well as OpenSolaris [dtrace, ZFS and more], with many contributions from the various BSD distributions that without we'd be in a world of hurt the world over.
You just aren't thinking of the applications which are soon to be possible with the confluence of reasonable powerful ultra-low-power draw processors, mobile platforms, and improving battery technology. Live life-stream real-time indexed & tagged cataloging is quite close to technically supported reality. It will eat storage at rates it is obvious you never began to imagine as reality. And that's just one easy one...
But again demand comes first. You could say one day someone somewhere will want to recreate the entire universe down to the last detail using computer graphics so we'll have to store the data somewhere. I don't see that need ever coming about. Life-stream recording where all your activities are tracked and noted day to day is not something I or anyone I know have ever expressed any interest in because and this is an important point:
The more data you store, the more work is required to manage that data
I actually see people who used to have classic ipods downgrading to iphones and flash-based ipods because they have discovered that carrying their entire music collection does more harm than good because they end up only listening to a small selection but it takes longer to find it. The hard drives are also heavier and more prone to breaking after dropping them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
What is important here is that I got very close to 80 GB just installing apps and my pic collection.
Do you have stuff that you need to access regularly that won't fit in what's left? That's what's important because if that's not the case then you don't 'need' more space, you are anticipating the need. The availability of space often makes people feel like they should use it up otherwise it's just wasted. In using it up, there is then a need for more. All that's really 'needed' is better storage management and better archival solutions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
Exactly which is why most people will download and keep content as opposed to streaming the media when wanting to reference it.
Limited bandwidth implies media is compressed for it. Look at the Apple TV, you get HD content via itunes but the biggest drive they sell is 160GB.
The point is HD based devices will stay around as long as they are the cost effective solution.
I agree entirely but if SSD goes mainstream then fewer people will buy HDDs except for external storage. SSD prices will come down considerably.
If we are weighing up HDD vs SSD accurately and taking into consideration performance, they aren't currently far apart. Check out the prices of 10,000 - 15,000 rpm hard drives:
150GB 10k WD Raptor 84MB/s £134
128GB SSD 80MB/s £292
Ok so you say the WD drive is still less than half the price with more storage but it also needs a heatsink to cool it.
It's still slower in real-world tests because the access times of SSD are ridiculously low:
"the Velociraptor is simply no match for a solid-state device. In the real-world PCMark05 suite of tests, a single solid-state drive is 80 percent faster than a single Velociraptor and 47 percent faster than a pair of Velociraptors in a RAID 0 configuration"
The write speeds are lower but that won't matter to the majority of people and there are 230MB/s SSD capable of up to 512GB due for production at the end of this year:
You can't setup a script to record stuff while you are out and be assured you won't run out of space.
But you could say that about HDD too. If you have a 1TB drive, you're not going to be assured that you can store 25 simultaneous 1080p TV channels so when you get home you can watch whatever you missed on any channel. But nobody needs to do this. As systems progress, people realise that a brute force approach isn't the best way forward. This goes back to OpenCL. We already have fast GPUs, we don't need to keep trying to force CPUs to do everything, we just need to make more intelligent code.
When it comes to storage, we use more intelligent compression algorithms, use more convenient content delivery systems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
In any event if you have friends that do PC support you will often find out that disk upgrades are a big part of their business.
Not recurrent business though. They'll ask for upgrades from 80GB to 256GB and leave it at that for years or get a replacement if the drive breaks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
Anyone who says the Linux OS is not a industry solid, top-tier Operating System knows nothing about Operating Systems and their Design.
It's great for running servers and routers etc. For desktop use/productivity it falls short of OS X and even Windows.
But again demand comes first. You could say one day someone somewhere will want to recreate the entire universe down to the last detail using computer graphics so we'll have to store the data somewhere. I don't see that need ever coming about. Life-stream recording where all your activities are tracked and noted day to day is not something I or anyone I know have ever expressed any interest in because and this is an important point:
The more data you store, the more work is required to manage that data
I actually see people who used to have classic ipods downgrading to iphones and flash-based ipods because they have discovered that carrying their entire music collection does more harm than good because they end up only listening to a small selection but it takes longer to find it. The hard drives are also heavier and more prone to breaking after dropping them.
Who says the person needs to do that work? That's where the processing power enabled by upcoming battery tech comes in.
The difference between our opinions is you keep thinking of ways to say something shouldn't or won't be done because _________, I think of how new hardware meshed with properly inspired and implemented software can enable whole new ways of doing things which would have been downright stupid to try before.
But again demand comes first. You could say one day someone somewhere will want to recreate the entire universe down to the last detail using computer graphics so we'll have to store the data somewhere. I don't see that need ever coming about. Life-stream recording where all your activities are tracked and noted day to day is not something I or anyone I know have ever expressed any interest in because and this is an important point:
The more data you store, the more work is required to manage that data
I actually see people who used to have classic ipods downgrading to iphones and flash-based ipods because they have discovered that carrying their entire music collection does more harm than good because they end up only listening to a small selection but it takes longer to find it. The hard drives are also heavier and more prone to breaking after dropping them.
Do you have stuff that you need to access regularly that won't fit in what's left? That's what's important because if that's not the case then you don't 'need' more space, you are anticipating the need. The availability of space often makes people feel like they should use it up otherwise it's just wasted. In using it up, there is then a need for more. All that's really 'needed' is better storage management and better archival solutions.
Limited bandwidth implies media is compressed for it. Look at the Apple TV, you get HD content via itunes but the biggest drive they sell is 160GB.
I agree entirely but if SSD goes mainstream then fewer people will buy HDDs except for external storage. SSD prices will come down considerably.
If we are weighing up HDD vs SSD accurately and taking into consideration performance, they aren't currently far apart. Check out the prices of 10,000 - 15,000 rpm hard drives:
150GB 10k WD Raptor 84MB/s £134
128GB SSD 80MB/s £292
Ok so you say the WD drive is still less than half the price with more storage but it also needs a heatsink to cool it.
It's still slower in real-world tests because the access times of SSD are ridiculously low:
"the Velociraptor is simply no match for a solid-state device. In the real-world PCMark05 suite of tests, a single solid-state drive is 80 percent faster than a single Velociraptor and 47 percent faster than a pair of Velociraptors in a RAID 0 configuration"
The write speeds are lower but that won't matter to the majority of people and there are 230MB/s SSD capable of up to 512GB due for production at the end of this year:
But you could say that about HDD too. If you have a 1TB drive, you're not going to be assured that you can store 25 simultaneous 1080p TV channels so when you get home you can watch whatever you missed on any channel. But nobody needs to do this. As systems progress, people realise that a brute force approach isn't the best way forward. This goes back to OpenCL. We already have fast GPUs, we don't need to keep trying to force CPUs to do everything, we just need to make more intelligent code.
When it comes to storage, we use more intelligent compression algorithms, use more convenient content delivery systems.
Not recurrent business though. They'll ask for upgrades from 80GB to 256GB and leave it at that for years or get a replacement if the drive breaks.
It's great for running servers and routers etc. For desktop use/productivity it falls short of OS X and even Windows.
Define desktop use and productivity.
When you chew on that you'll soon discover that Windows is a distant third, as the OS, not the applications, and OS X leads with Linux not far behind.
On an Application by Application level you have far more mature applications on both Windows and OS X; and in conventional applications Linux is a distant third--solely due to traditional houses making it's applications native on Linux as an afterthought; eerily similar to where Apple was not many years ago.
How they are designed to leverage their associative OS varies widely between OS X and Windows and Linux.
The huge change will come when 10.6 dumps Carbon and streamlines to Cocoa native applications. You'll see how come NeXT was always considered a jewel in the Computing Industry and if they only were as cheap as Macs and PCs how they could have owned the market, blah, blah, blah--having worked at NeXT and Apple I can be critical of both.
OS X and Linux are here to stay and with systems like OpenSolaris and the other BSDs will always be copied, however poorly, by Windows.
It's up to Operating Systems to provide rich, consistent APIs for their third party developers--both OS X and Linux have failed: OS X with Carbon and Cocoa fighting for space when it's clear from the beginning Cocoa was the future: Linux with GTK+ and Qt battling it out and producing GNOME and KDE, respectively--not to forget about the several lesser know Desktop Environments on Linux even weakening the Desktop expansion.
Apple cowtailed to 3 major developers to slow it's progress and Linux proclaims "it's a feature."
Microsoft continued to win with this crap and infighting from Apple and the Linux communities.
Since Apple cut the ties with Carbon the sales are escalating on all their hardware. It will continue to skyrocket with OS X 10.6.
Linux Standards Base 4.0 makes massive improvements to interoperability between the competing GTK+ and Qt Toolkits, not to mention GNUstep and lesser known, but highly respected APIs.
Microsoft goes back to the drawing board and will try to copy from both Trees, release a ductaped solution and proclaim themselves the Industry leaders.
Who says the person needs to do that work? That's where the processing power enabled by upcoming battery tech comes in.
I don't mean physical management, although that comes into play too, I meant logical management of the information becomes tedious the more you have as software has to be written to process the information. Take for example Webserver stats. They often track all sorts of details about what users visit the site, browser etc. If I only need a hit count, I have to parse a massive file to get one number.
Now sure, the other stats are nice when you need them but when you don't, they create more work. This goes for storing the information too. You have to come up with ways to logically categorize everything. This wastes lots of development time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hiro
The difference between our opinions is you keep thinking of ways to say something shouldn't or won't be done because _________, I think of how new hardware meshed with properly inspired and implemented software can enable whole new ways of doing things which would have been downright stupid to try before.
I heard one idea, which wasn't a practical example. We're talking mainstream use here. Forget specialized applications of huge amounts of storage and concentrate on members of your family i.e Joe Public. What practical scenarios will they find themselves in that will require 256GB+ drive space?
Like I say, some people will always come up with ways to use storage even if it's just because the storage is there to be used. But some people similarly buy the latest machines where the majority of users get by for quite a while with older machines. The larger market will dictate where storage goes in the future and I think that hard drives will soon be relegated to specialized high storage uses and SSD will be used by the majority.
If I was into the stock market, I'd be buying shares in SSD companies right now.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
Define desktop use and productivity.
When you chew on that you'll soon discover that Windows is a distant third
And yet Linux has the smallest number of desktop users of any OS. It's free and it's open so developments are continually released and yet few people want it.
Not very good hardware support, so many people battle issues with sound cards and other basic hardware. There are so many different versions and incompatible components (window managers, kernels, drivers etc).
The real problem is choice. There is such a thing as too much choice. Average users don't care about what version of the system they use. They want something that works with their hardware. There are so many PCs to choose from and so many variants of Linux that to end up with something that lets you be productive (i.e get any real work done) is a bit of a challenge.
If Microsoft had simply used a popular version of Linux, ported their drivers over, I would bet there would be a lot less Mac users. You get the hardware you want with a single open, well supported OS.
Microsoft won't do this as they want too much control. The Linux community has too many members who will argue over the smallest differences in the OS so they won't narrow down to one version. OS X is almost the ideal - it's just limited to Apple's limited hardware options and locked down to some extent.
It certainly depends on what aspects of the OS you look at but I could not use Linux in a production environment for film work, possibly website development but no native Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, no standardized media software like Quicktime. I could do this on Windows though.
I heard one idea, which wasn't a practical example. We're talking mainstream use here. Forget specialized applications of huge amounts of storage and concentrate on members of your family i.e Joe Public. What practical scenarios will they find themselves in that will require 256GB+ drive space?
My wifes hobby photo collection, only about 100GB of images, and nearly another hundred of post-processed. My 11 year old already has several GB of animation renders, just wait until he gets fast at it. Then put about 120GB of generic stuff+OS+iTunes on and three in a family of four just destroyed the 256GB barrier without even being special. Thank god for firewire external drives, but the desk starts running out of space stacking them up PLUS a TB for Time Machine...
I don't mean physical management, although that comes into play too, I meant logical management of the information becomes tedious the more you have as software has to be written to process the information. Take for example Webserver stats. They often track all sorts of details about what users visit the site, browser etc. If I only need a hit count, I have to parse a massive file to get one number.
Now sure, the other stats are nice when you need them but when you don't, they create more work. This goes for storing the information too. You have to come up with ways to logically categorize everything. This wastes lots of development time that could be better spent elsewhere.
I heard one idea, which wasn't a practical example. We're talking mainstream use here. Forget specialized applications of huge amounts of storage and concentrate on members of your family i.e Joe Public. What practical scenarios will they find themselves in that will require 256GB+ drive space?
Like I say, some people will always come up with ways to use storage even if it's just because the storage is there to be used. But some people similarly buy the latest machines where the majority of users get by for quite a while with older machines. The larger market will dictate where storage goes in the future and I think that hard drives will soon be relegated to specialized high storage uses and SSD will be used by the majority.
If I was into the stock market, I'd be buying shares in SSD companies right now.
And yet Linux has the smallest number of desktop users of any OS. It's free and it's open so developments are continually released and yet few people want it.
Not very good hardware support, so many people battle issues with sound cards and other basic hardware. There are so many different versions and incompatible components (window managers, kernels, drivers etc).
The real problem is choice. There is such a thing as too much choice. Average users don't care about what version of the system they use. They want something that works with their hardware. There are so many PCs to choose from and so many variants of Linux that to end up with something that lets you be productive (i.e get any real work done) is a bit of a challenge.
If Microsoft had simply used a popular version of Linux, ported their drivers over, I would bet there would be a lot less Mac users. You get the hardware you want with a single open, well supported OS.
Microsoft won't do this as they want too much control. The Linux community has too many members who will argue over the smallest differences in the OS so they won't narrow down to one version. OS X is almost the ideal - it's just limited to Apple's limited hardware options and locked down to some extent.
It certainly depends on what aspects of the OS you look at but I could not use Linux in a production environment for film work, possibly website development but no native Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, no standardized media software like Quicktime. I could do this on Windows though.
I haven't had a sound card issue in years with Linux.
Sorry, but ALSA, HAL and more are extremely mature on Linux.
I layed out the differences and you repeated much of what I said and threw in digs from 5 years ago.
If you can't get audio running in OpenSUSE 10.x or 11.x I question your ability to install an operating system and let it plug n' play the device.
The same goes for Debian [Sid especially]; and with Debian Lenny around the corner anyone who complains they couldn't install Debian Etch 4.0 and still complain about Debian Lenny 5.0 truly should never proclaim themselves proficient in operating systems required for "production" environments.
Hell, both GTK+ and Qt, with GNOME latest and KDE 4.2 will soon be on WINDOWS and OS X.
I pointed out that these platforms spend more time beating each other up for the sake of choice, but to declare them not mature platforms is moronic.
By the way, the main reason LINUX is difficult to measure for operating system percentages is that very few OEMs offer LINUX pre-installed.
DELL got smart and is doing it. HP is doing it. Lenovo is doing it.
When people crap on OS X for being small in marketshare we all revolt as that's just a blatant lie.
The same goes, to a lesser extent, towards LINUX.
If you think the bulk of Web Development is done on OS X and Windows then you're full of it.
The bulk of development and deployment is done on LINUX and OS X.
Microsoft isn't paying hundreds of millions of dollars to NOVELL because they aren't threatened by LINUX.
The two major platform movements, as I stated earlier, are OS X and LINUX.
My wifes hobby photo collection, only about 100GB of images, and nearly another hundred of post-processed. My 11 year old already has several GB of animation renders, just wait until he gets fast at it. Then put about 120GB of generic stuff+OS+iTunes on and three in a family of four just destroyed the 256GB barrier without even being special. Thank god for firewire external drives, but the desk starts running out of space stacking them up PLUS a TB for Time Machine...
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. My brother is a keen photographer and still has under 20GB of photos. Old events are archived to DVD. 20GB is enough to store 80,000 photos compressed to 250k. Do you know how long it takes to look through even 1,000 images? Keeping 80,000 on a main drive or insanely high resolution images is just unnecessary and wasting space.
Your kid producing GBs of animation isn't common among kids and renders to uncompressed formats usually aren't archived - you archive the final render with composites and the original scene files, then if you need to go back to them in future, you can render them again or adjust a single uncompressed render.
I doubt those animations will be longer than 5 minutes (if it's 3D, 5 minutes of animation would take about 15-30 hours to render) and 5 minutes anamorphic DVD uncompressed is under 4GB (depends on the content of course).
The 120GB extra was a figure pulled out of nowhere. I would highly doubt that your entire family will top 50GB of music combined. If so, the collection needs sorting because that's about 15,000 tracks. The OS size will be reduced and is currently only 15GB.
Other stuff, we're talking about small movie clips, word documents etc - combined about 20GB. This leaves plenty of overhead.
256GB - 15GB OS - 100GB photos - 10GB software - 40GB music - 30GB uncompressed renders - 20GB miscellaneous files leaves 40GB of free space and that is still fairly badly managed storage.
I could understand if people want to run multiple systems and they want storage split between them but even at that, the space required in total won't exceed 256GB for most people.
If 256GB is too low, go to 512GB, which will be available next year in SSD. SSD will increase in space too. I just don't see a point where storage is needed to keep on increasing. The popularity of Time Machine shows people are more concerned about data safety and SSD is more reliable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
If you can't get audio running in OpenSUSE 10.x or 11.x I question your ability to install an operating system and let it plug n' play the device.
The same goes for Debian [Sid especially]; and with Debian Lenny around the corner anyone who complains they couldn't install Debian Etch 4.0 and still complain about Debian Lenny 5.0 truly should never proclaim themselves proficient in operating systems required for "production" environments.
You clearly want to get into a whole Linux thing here but hardly any production software runs natively on Linux. Tell me an industry standard NLE like Final Cut or Avid that runs natively on Linux:
How can it be used in production for this field when it doesn't run the software? Go to any store and note down all the boxes that have Linux support written on them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
Hell, both GTK+ and Qt, with GNOME latest and KDE 4.2 will soon be on WINDOWS and OS X.
When I see demos of Linux window managers, they are often concerned with trying to make their interfaces like aqua. GTK+ is only going to bring native software like GIMP, which falls way short of Photoshop. Trolltech Qt has been on OS X for ages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
By the way, the main reason LINUX is difficult to measure for operating system percentages is that very few OEMs offer LINUX pre-installed.
DELL got smart and is doing it. HP is doing it. Lenovo is doing it.
These companies didn't 'get smart'. They caved into pressure from people like you who demand that Linux be recognised as a viable alternative. They don't even advertise it clearly that they offer it as an option. It's not listed beside XP or Vista in BTO because people will see it as equal to Windows, buy it and then flood the seller with complaints saying that hardly any software works properly with it.
Very few OEMs sell it because it's not a good OS for desktop use. Machines like the EEEPC are different because it's a cut down version of an OS like the gOS Google Linux system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
If you think the bulk of Web Development is done on OS X and Windows then you're full of it.
Ok so Windows + OS X has about 95% of the desktop market. If you're telling me that website developers take up that other 5% (if it is even that much), I'm not the one who's full of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyner
Microsoft isn't paying hundreds of millions of dollars to NOVELL because they aren't threatened by LINUX.
In server space not desktop space. Linux is great for server use and I deploy websites on Linux servers, I wouldn't even consider using Windows servers.
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. My brother is a keen photographer and still has under 20GB of photos. Old events are archived to DVD. 20GB is enough to store 80,000 photos compressed to 250k. Do you know how long it takes to look through even 1,000 images? Keeping 80,000 on a main drive or insanely high resolution images is just unnecessary and wasting space.
So your argument is that harddisks are big enough and people wanting more space should just select and compress the stuff they want to keep on their computers. I just don't see the logic in that:
Selecting takes time and effort, you run the risk of throwing too much away and have regrets later. It is simply way easier to just save all that might be wanted in the future. Thanks to spotlight power and databased apps like iTunes or aperture it can all be found back easily. I save all my (non-spam/commercial) emails and most music and all decent pictures.
I'm also an amateur photographer. I shoot in Raw from my SLR camera en keep everything organized in aperture. No I won't compress it as to me Raw is the digital equivalent to a negative and once you compress that and throw away the original you can never go back and do it over it again. Yes I could put it on an external drive, but... why??
I also really enjoy music, own a 200+ CD collection all imported in at least 192 kb. I have the iMac connected to the stereo system. I would love to have it all in Lossless quality but.... my disk is not big enough....
The ever increasing hard disk sizes just keep making it easier and more affordable to keep everything you might want to look at again in the future, do that in the best possible quality and have all your digital stuff in one convenient location.
Such a strategy is apparantly wastefull in your eyes. To many of us it's simply the bliss of progress
My current usage (on my 250 GB iMac, backed up on a 1 TB time machine disk):
Pictures: 64 GB
Music: 75 GB
Movies/TV shows: 30 GB
Software: 7 GB
Email: 2 GB
Documents: 2 GB
Combine that with system files and my wife's stuff and there's currently only 22 GB free on my HD and I have to frequently clean out the movies/tv shows we watched. so I for one am already looking forward very much to our next desktop in a couple of years having at least 2 TB of storage.
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. My brother is a keen photographer and still has under 20GB of photos. Old events are archived to DVD. 20GB is enough to store 80,000 photos compressed to 250k. Do you know how long it takes to look through even 1,000 images? Keeping 80,000 on a main drive or insanely high resolution images is just unnecessary and wasting space.
Your kid producing GBs of animation isn't common among kids and renders to uncompressed formats usually aren't archived - you archive the final render with composites and the original scene files, then if you need to go back to them in future, you can render them again or adjust a single uncompressed render.
I doubt those animations will be longer than 5 minutes (if it's 3D, 5 minutes of animation would take about 15-30 hours to render) and 5 minutes anamorphic DVD uncompressed is under 4GB (depends on the content of course).
The 120GB extra was a figure pulled out of nowhere. I would highly doubt that your entire family will top 50GB of music combined. If so, the collection needs sorting because that's about 15,000 tracks. The OS size will be reduced and is currently only 15GB.
Other stuff, we're talking about small movie clips, word documents etc - combined about 20GB. This leaves plenty of overhead.
256GB - 15GB OS - 100GB photos - 10GB software - 40GB music - 30GB uncompressed renders - 20GB miscellaneous files leaves 40GB of free space and that is still fairly badly managed storage.
I could understand if people want to run multiple systems and they want storage split between them but even at that, the space required in total won't exceed 256GB for most people.
If 256GB is too low, go to 512GB, which will be available next year in SSD. SSD will increase in space too. I just don't see a point where storage is needed to keep on increasing. The popularity of Time Machine shows people are more concerned about data safety and SSD is more reliable.
You clearly want to get into a whole Linux thing here but hardly any production software runs natively on Linux. Tell me an industry standard NLE like Final Cut or Avid that runs natively on Linux:
How can it be used in production for this field when it doesn't run the software? Go to any store and note down all the boxes that have Linux support written on them.
When I see demos of Linux window managers, they are often concerned with trying to make their interfaces like aqua. GTK+ is only going to bring native software like GIMP, which falls way short of Photoshop. Trolltech Qt has been on OS X for ages.
These companies didn't 'get smart'. They caved into pressure from people like you who demand that Linux be recognised as a viable alternative. They don't even advertise it clearly that they offer it as an option. It's not listed beside XP or Vista in BTO because people will see it as equal to Windows, buy it and then flood the seller with complaints saying that hardly any software works properly with it.
Very few OEMs sell it because it's not a good OS for desktop use. Machines like the EEEPC are different because it's a cut down version of an OS like the gOS Google Linux system.
Ok so Windows + OS X has about 95% of the desktop market. If you're telling me that website developers take up that other 5% (if it is even that much), I'm not the one who's full of it.
In server space not desktop space. Linux is great for server use and I deploy websites on Linux servers, I wouldn't even consider using Windows servers.
I deploy on Linux and OS X and have on Windows. Please spare me the boasting.
Having worked for two operating system companies I know how the way they operate and where they are being used.
Spare me the armchair 95% Windows+OS X market share.
Windows has peaked and it's all down hill from here.
The corporation's stock is stagnant and will never expand as they oversplit a decade prior.
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. <cut all the irrelevant crap>
Take your hoity toity you're all f___ed up because you don't archive to non-interactive formats and get the hell off my wavelength.
You just keep coming up with more and more ridiculous ways to try and maintain some sort of artificial size limit on what others are allowed to have on hard drives before they become The Unwashed.
I once had a boss in my young-un days who said "If you are in a room and everyone else say's your s___ is all f___ed up, you better go take a damn good look at it, because it awful damn unlikely they are all wrong."
Well the chance all of us are wrong about the usefulness of hard drive sizes approached zero asymptotically a long time ago. Stop fearing the TeraByte!
Comments
You seem to be awfully certain of that. Mind you it is not that I wouldn't want to see such, it is just that I would expect more leaks if something game changing was coming.
I guess we will have to wait a few more weeks to see if Apple lives up to it's own hype. I'm still trying to imagine what they where alluding to.
Dave
You're going to see higher density HDDs that are non-solid state long before Apple or anyone takes the jump for general consumption.
Embedded systems will be the biggest in-road for SSDs in the near-term.
You're going to see higher density HDDs that are non-solid state long before Apple or anyone takes the jump for general consumption.
Embedded systems will be the biggest in-road for SSDs in the near-term.
I reckon they're not too far off:
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=55VL
OCZ Technology 128GB SATA 2.5" SSD 120MBs Read 80MBs Write
£292
By comparison, a normal drive:
http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=4N3Q
Seagate 200GB 7200 rpm 2.5" 59MBs
£80
Despite the difference in price that is still there, a 100% performance improvement is worth it - no noise, no heat. The read/write speeds of one of those drives is equivalent to a 3.5" 7200rpm standard drive in RAID-0 and it will fit in a laptop.
Being much cooler, would allow Apple to use hotter components in their laptops like faster graphics cards/CPUs.
I think we're reaching a limit on the amount of storage that can go in a rotational drive. Perpendicular recording was a big step up but I think 1TB per drive is round about the maximum we'll see for a while and laptop drives aren't quite there.
Once SSDs go to 256GB-512GB and those drives come into the £200 price bracket, conventional hard drives will be replaced simply for the reliability, performance and heat.
Even at the prices now, I would actually pay £292 for the 128GB SSD over the £80 200GB HD for the huge speed improvement if I valued performance and reliability over storage space - I would probably have the 128GB SSD internal and then a standard 500GB-1TB external drive external.
I think we're reaching a limit on the amount of storage that can go in a rotational drive. Perpendicular recording was a big step up but I think 1TB per drive is round about the maximum we'll see for a while and laptop drives aren't quite there.
Don't count them out just yet. And since you evidently like linkage:
http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/071015a.html
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles...1&id=1805&pg=2
http://www.scribd.com/doc/390188/HARD-DISK
Don't count them out just yet.
{quote=seagate_guy]If we stay on the trajectory that we're going to grow in areal density at the rate of about 40% a year, we honestly don't see a crossover point where Flash can be competitive with hard drives from a cost perspective.[/quote]
The way I see it though is it's not so much about capacity as need. Even if HD manufacturers do go above 1TB, most people don't need anywhere near that amount. I reckon 250GB is probably the target size to cover most users.
There are those who rip stuff constantly to hard drives and keep them for ages but if normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
I can see Apple doing this in their laptops. PC manufacturers will inevitably use the cheapest components to keep prices as low as possible and there's nothing really wrong with HDs. Apple don't have to go for cheap though. Using SSD would cut down their repair costs for warranty HD repairs.
It also means they don't have to compromise on performance in the interests of lowering heat. If they switched their entire laptop and mobile devices to use flash, they'd get some sort of discount. PC manufacturers couldn't do that as it would just take one of them to stick with HD and beat the others on price. It doesn't matter to Apple if they cost a bit more.
If we stay on the trajectory that we're going to grow in areal density at the rate of about 40% a year, we honestly don't see a crossover point where Flash can be competitive with hard drives from a cost perspective.
The way I see it though is it's not so much about capacity as need. Even if HD manufacturers do go above 1TB, most people don't need anywhere near that amount. I reckon 250GB is probably the target size to cover most users.
[\\quote]
This I disagree with completely and I'm not surprised that you contradict yourself below. Capacity is and always will be an issue. As personal storage capacity increases content providers just change thief delivery technigues to take advantage of that capacity. There are many examples from highly graphical PDFs at one end to the delivery of complete training videos over the web. Note that we are not even talking about enertainment media here which can be huge.
What I'm basically saying is that 200GB is a minimal disk size for todays average user.
[quote]
There are those who rip stuff constantly to hard drives and keep them for ages but if normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
[\\quote]
First let me say I'm note a big fan of external drives for my primary storage needs. Back yes and maybe for less frequently called data but that is about it. In any event it is clear you see the need for lots of storage but like to spread it all over.
That is fine but I do have an alternative for you. Split the storage capacity across two drives. One solid state for the OS, apps and important data. Put scratch space and most other data on a magnetic drive. This way the user wins in multiple ways.
[quote]
I can see Apple doing this in their laptops. PC manufacturers will inevitably use the cheapest components to keep prices as low as possible and there's nothing really wrong with HDs. Apple don't have to go for cheap though. Using SSD would cut down their repair costs for warranty HD repairs.
[\\quote]
Apple and the collective lot of PC manufactures have access to the same exact hardware, we just pay more for it in Apple products. Plus technology wise Apple is almost always behind the curve relative to what is available in the PC world.
It also means they don't have to compromise on performance in the interests of lowering heat. If they switched their entire laptop and mobile devices to use flash, they'd get some sort of discount. PC manufacturers couldn't do that as it would just take one of them to stick with HD and beat the others on price. It doesn't matter to Apple if they cost a bit more.
Frankly I do believe you are looking at the PC world through the proverbable rose colored glasses. There is huge variety available in PC line. Some of it of outstanding quality and a step or two ahead of Apple. Of course if you want a good OS to run on that hardware you are looking at Linux or a similar UNIX OS. In summation I don't buy your economic arguments.
Dave
{quote=seagate_guy]If we stay on the trajectory that we're going to grow in areal density at the rate of about 40% a year, we honestly don't see a crossover point where Flash can be competitive with hard drives from a cost perspective.
The way I see it though is it's not so much about capacity as need. Even if HD manufacturers do go above 1TB, most people don't need anywhere near that amount. I reckon 250GB is probably the target size to cover most users.
There are those who rip stuff constantly to hard drives and keep them for ages but if normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
I can see Apple doing this in their laptops. PC manufacturers will inevitably use the cheapest components to keep prices as low as possible and there's nothing really wrong with HDs. Apple don't have to go for cheap though. Using SSD would cut down their repair costs for warranty HD repairs.
It also means they don't have to compromise on performance in the interests of lowering heat. If they switched their entire laptop and mobile devices to use flash, they'd get some sort of discount. PC manufacturers couldn't do that as it would just take one of them to stick with HD and beat the others on price. It doesn't matter to Apple if they cost a bit more.
What the hell are you talking about? Most people don't need 200GB drives, currently, because most people don't rip DVDs and edit video, so on and so forth.
Yet, when HDTV comes to every American Household and people decide they want to rip shows and keep them they will suddenly realize that size does matter.
NAS systems will suddenly look like JVC electronics products. Pioneer will have Carousels that aren't DVD systems but Drives of several TBs.
This doesn't mean the information is worth the price of the device--most content isn't, but it's going to push demand.
Newer technologies will mix traditional solutions with more exotic materials allowing for higher densities, per Volume and SSDs won't be the end-all, be-all solution.
Embedded devices, over-priced thin laptops will be the main targets for several years to come.
This I disagree with completely and I'm not surprised that you contradict yourself below. Capacity is and always will be an issue.
It wasn't a contradiction, most people won't need more than 250GB - I know a few people with drives this size and they use around half at most. People who have 80GB internals have 256GB-500GB externals and only use half of those at most. For those who do use more space, the mechanical drives can be an option.
What I'm basically saying is that 200GB is a minimal disk size for todays average user.
Online content is limited by bandwidth and will be for a while. Offline media content is usually delivered on large capacity discs and doesn't need to be internal. Even so, 200GB is enough to store 6 full Blu-Ray discs + OS + most average files. More than enough for most IMO.
That is fine but I do have an alternative for you. Split the storage capacity across two drives. One solid state for the OS, apps and important data. Put scratch space and most other data on a magnetic drive. This way the user wins in multiple ways.
I agree:
If normal HDs keep growing in capacity and dropping in price then like I say, they are great for external drives or even spare internal drives. For main internal drives where the OS is, the performance and reliability should be the highest priority and SSD delivers on that.
Apple and the collective lot of PC manufactures have access to the same exact hardware, we just pay more for it in Apple products. Plus technology wise Apple is almost always behind the curve relative to what is available in the PC world.
Apple tend to go with higher end components by default though. Nearly all consumer models have webcams. They use accelerometers, magnetic power adaptors etc. They switched the entire ipod line to flash and called the hard-drive based one the 'classic'. We all know what happens to classic stuff eventually.
Floppies have been replaced by flash drives. HD will be replaced by SSD eventually.
There is huge variety available in PC line. Some of it of outstanding quality and a step or two ahead of Apple. Of course if you want a good OS to run on that hardware you are looking at Linux or a similar UNIX OS. In summation I don't buy your economic arguments.
What I was saying is that Apple don't have to compete closely on price with PC manufacturers. If PC manufacturers started to go to SSD mainstream, all it would take is for a competitor to stick with standard HDs and undercut them. Apple don't have to ship their machines with wifi, bluetooth, and so on but they do by default because they don't have to compete with PC manufacturers who can get down to a lower price by leaving some of these options out.
Linux isn't a good OS IMO and doesn't support hardware all that well. Mileage varies but my experience of Linux hasn't been too good.
Most people don't need 200GB drives, currently, because most people don't rip DVDs and edit video, so on and so forth.
Yet, when HDTV comes to every American Household and people decide they want to rip shows and keep them they will suddenly realize that size does matter.
NAS systems will suddenly look like JVC electronics products. Pioneer will have Carousels that aren't DVD systems but Drives of several TBs.
That's not what I see happening. We already have HD based systems - I have one already and the drive that's in it does just fine. I only store SD but there are HD ones that store 9 hours of HDTV on an 80GB drive. A 256GB SSD is enough for about a full day of HDTV.
It solves one of the biggest problems I have with mine too and that is noise and heat. The constant humming is very annoying while watching TV and it makes them less reliable as they run 24/7. Mine actually writes 24/7 as it caches the last program the device is tuned to. It has crashed a number of times.
Embedded devices, over-priced thin laptops will be the main targets for several years to come.
One problem with hard drives is they have a limit to their rotational speed and speed with which they can access data. SSD is already more than double the speed and yet is quieter, cool and more reliable. SSD technology will advance too and they are improving performance all the time.
What if in a year's time, they get SSD to be 3 times faster than HD? If it's 256GB vs 2TB, I'll still go with the SSD for performance. For even workstation use, SSD is as fast as RAID-0. This means they could take away the 4 drive bays in the Mac Pro and leave 2 x 2.5" vs 4 x 3.5". They don't need to cool them nearly as much either.
It wasn't a contradiction, most people won't need more than 250GB - I know a few people with drives this size and they use around half at most. People who have 80GB internals have 256GB-500GB externals and only use half of those at most. For those who do use more space, the mechanical drives can be an option.
And who will ever need more than 640K of RAM?
You just aren't thinking of the applications which are soon to be possible with the confluence of reasonable powerful ultra-low-power draw processors, mobile platforms, and improving battery technology. Live life-stream real-time indexed & tagged cataloging is quite close to technically supported reality. It will eat storage at rates it is obvious you never began to imagine as reality. And that's just one easy one...
It wasn't a contradiction, most people won't need more than 250GB - I know a few people with drives this size and they use around half at most. People who have 80GB internals have 256GB-500GB externals and only use half of those at most. For those who do use more space, the mechanical drives can be an option.
After a summer of ownership my MBP's 200GB disk drive has about 112 GB on it. That includes a very small iTunes library.
What is important here is that I got very close to 80 GB just installing apps and my pic collection. I should say part of my pic collection as much of it is on film.
Online content is limited by bandwidth and will be for a while. Offline media content is usually delivered on large capacity discs and doesn't need to be internal. Even so, 200GB is enough to store 6 full Blu-Ray discs + OS + most average files. More than enough for most IMO.
Exactly which is why most people will download and keep content as opposed to streaming the media when wanting to reference it. In many cases local storage is the best place for this content.
I agree:
Apple tend to go with higher end components by default though. Nearly all consumer models have webcams. They use accelerometers, magnetic power adaptors etc. They switched the entire ipod line to flash and called the hard-drive based one the 'classic'. We all know what happens to classic stuff eventually.
Yes but i'd hazard to guess that Apple would still enjoy considerable sales of the classic simply buy upping the storage limit through a larger HD. There will always be a class of users that can make use of the extra space. Will FLASH solid state storage over take HD based storage - possibly but the cost equation isn't there yet. Lets face it Apple could build a high capacity Flash based iPod today for a reasonable cost if they really wanted to. It would require some circuitry to interface all the chips but 8GB chips aren't all that expensive today for iPod class performance. I just don't think they can come up with a reasonably sized and priced package right now. It is a question of how many chips and the space they take.
Note to this doesn't even take into account stacking dies to increase density. The point is HD based devices will stay around as long as they are the cost effective solution.
Floppies have been replaced by flash drives. HD will be replaced by SSD eventually.
Yes eventually that will happen. The difference is I'm not convinced that it will be FLASH based SSDs. FLASH has been around the corner for a long time now, I suspect that it will remain around the corner forever.
What I was saying is that Apple don't have to compete closely on price with PC manufacturers. If PC manufacturers started to go to SSD mainstream, all it would take is for a competitor to stick with standard HDs and undercut them. Apple don't have to ship their machines with wifi, bluetooth, and so on but they do by default because they don't have to compete with PC manufacturers who can get down to a lower price by leaving some of these options out.
All I pointed out is that there are a number of PC manufactures out there and they don't all compete on price.
Linux isn't a good OS IMO and doesn't support hardware all that well. Mileage varies but my experience of Linux hasn't been too good.
You do realize those are fighting words
I ran LINUX for a long time before getting my MBP, late this spring. Actually since about RedHat 5, so I know its in and outs. The biggest attraction for Apple hardware is (in my case) the photography software available and the integration with iPod/iPhone and allied iTunes.
It should be noted that I wouldn't have jumped ship if I had seen signs of OpenMoko going in the right direction or greater availability of open LINUX phones. It may seem that the solution to the lack of open hardware in the mobile space is to switch to Apple hardware but if you think about it it is the smart move.
In many ways the Mac and its OS are as open as anything on LINUX and often we are talking about the same software. Yeah they have closed platforms but they are solutions to problems not easily solved else where.
That's not what I see happening. We already have HD based systems - I have one already and the drive that's in it does just fine. I only store SD but there are HD ones that store 9 hours of HDTV on an 80GB drive. A 256GB SSD is enough for about a full day of HDTV.
Which pretty much proves the point about disk size. You can't setup a script to record stuff while you are out and be assured you won't run out of space.
People who are into video recording big time often have disk arrays to store stuff on. That is fine for the advance user but I think it is fair to say many simply don't want that trouble.
In any event if you have friends that do PC support you will often find out that disk upgrades are a big part of their business. This simply because a big disk is the best place to keep a variety of files, especially on a portable.
It solves one of the biggest problems I have with mine too and that is noise and heat. The constant humming is very annoying while watching TV and it makes them less reliable as they run 24/7. Mine actually writes 24/7 as it caches the last program the device is tuned to. It has crashed a number of times.
I don't have personal experience with SSD but their power draw isn't a freebie. There will be heat produced. Less will help with the fan noise only if your installation has the fan control to do so.
One problem with hard drives is they have a limit to their rotational speed and speed with which they can access data. SSD is already more than double the speed and yet is quieter, cool and more reliable. SSD technology will advance too and they are improving performance all the time.
Yes but FLASH isn't without its own problems. That is why I agree that traditional HD's will go away, I'm just not convinced that FLASH is a long term play.
What if in a year's time, they get SSD to be 3 times faster than HD? If it's 256GB vs 2TB, I'll still go with the SSD for performance. For even workstation use, SSD is as fast as RAID-0. This means they could take away the 4 drive bays in the Mac Pro and leave 2 x 2.5" vs 4 x 3.5". They don't need to cool them nearly as much either.
See here we go again comparing Apples to Rutabaga. Those drives in a Mac Pro are likely to be 1 TB or larger and depending on the production environment may be well used. So you end up looking at four or five times the number of FLASH drives.
The problem is there are al sorts of classes of storage problems, for many speed means very little compared to the need for expansive space. For every good example that you might find where the SSD is just the nuts you can find a like number where it won't cut the mustard. In any event it could very well be 4 years until FLASH based drives catch up with old hard drives.
Dave
Userspace is not the Operating System.
Anyone who claims KDE 4 is superior to OS X is either a KDE zealot and is wishing it were as consistent throughout the userspace with form and function or they know nothing about Userspace needs, UI Design and ease-of-use that includes leveraging advanced UI paradigms beyond eye-candy.
OS X and Linux are driving innovation, as well as OpenSolaris [dtrace, ZFS and more], with many contributions from the various BSD distributions that without we'd be in a world of hurt the world over.
You just aren't thinking of the applications which are soon to be possible with the confluence of reasonable powerful ultra-low-power draw processors, mobile platforms, and improving battery technology. Live life-stream real-time indexed & tagged cataloging is quite close to technically supported reality. It will eat storage at rates it is obvious you never began to imagine as reality. And that's just one easy one...
But again demand comes first. You could say one day someone somewhere will want to recreate the entire universe down to the last detail using computer graphics so we'll have to store the data somewhere. I don't see that need ever coming about. Life-stream recording where all your activities are tracked and noted day to day is not something I or anyone I know have ever expressed any interest in because and this is an important point:
The more data you store, the more work is required to manage that data
I actually see people who used to have classic ipods downgrading to iphones and flash-based ipods because they have discovered that carrying their entire music collection does more harm than good because they end up only listening to a small selection but it takes longer to find it. The hard drives are also heavier and more prone to breaking after dropping them.
What is important here is that I got very close to 80 GB just installing apps and my pic collection.
Do you have stuff that you need to access regularly that won't fit in what's left? That's what's important because if that's not the case then you don't 'need' more space, you are anticipating the need. The availability of space often makes people feel like they should use it up otherwise it's just wasted. In using it up, there is then a need for more. All that's really 'needed' is better storage management and better archival solutions.
Exactly which is why most people will download and keep content as opposed to streaming the media when wanting to reference it.
Limited bandwidth implies media is compressed for it. Look at the Apple TV, you get HD content via itunes but the biggest drive they sell is 160GB.
Someone has modified an ATV with SSD:
http://www.appletvhacks.net/2008/06/...pped-apple-tv/
The point is HD based devices will stay around as long as they are the cost effective solution.
I agree entirely but if SSD goes mainstream then fewer people will buy HDDs except for external storage. SSD prices will come down considerably.
If we are weighing up HDD vs SSD accurately and taking into consideration performance, they aren't currently far apart. Check out the prices of 10,000 - 15,000 rpm hard drives:
150GB 10k WD Raptor 84MB/s £134
128GB SSD 80MB/s £292
Ok so you say the WD drive is still less than half the price with more storage but it also needs a heatsink to cool it.
It's still slower in real-world tests because the access times of SSD are ridiculously low:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the...ver?page=0%2C1
"the Velociraptor is simply no match for a solid-state device. In the real-world PCMark05 suite of tests, a single solid-state drive is 80 percent faster than a single Velociraptor and 47 percent faster than a pair of Velociraptors in a RAID 0 configuration"
The write speeds are lower but that won't matter to the majority of people and there are 230MB/s SSD capable of up to 512GB due for production at the end of this year:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/11/i...ec-read-speed/
You can't setup a script to record stuff while you are out and be assured you won't run out of space.
But you could say that about HDD too. If you have a 1TB drive, you're not going to be assured that you can store 25 simultaneous 1080p TV channels so when you get home you can watch whatever you missed on any channel. But nobody needs to do this. As systems progress, people realise that a brute force approach isn't the best way forward. This goes back to OpenCL. We already have fast GPUs, we don't need to keep trying to force CPUs to do everything, we just need to make more intelligent code.
When it comes to storage, we use more intelligent compression algorithms, use more convenient content delivery systems.
In any event if you have friends that do PC support you will often find out that disk upgrades are a big part of their business.
Not recurrent business though. They'll ask for upgrades from 80GB to 256GB and leave it at that for years or get a replacement if the drive breaks.
Anyone who says the Linux OS is not a industry solid, top-tier Operating System knows nothing about Operating Systems and their Design.
It's great for running servers and routers etc. For desktop use/productivity it falls short of OS X and even Windows.
But again demand comes first. You could say one day someone somewhere will want to recreate the entire universe down to the last detail using computer graphics so we'll have to store the data somewhere. I don't see that need ever coming about. Life-stream recording where all your activities are tracked and noted day to day is not something I or anyone I know have ever expressed any interest in because and this is an important point:
The more data you store, the more work is required to manage that data
I actually see people who used to have classic ipods downgrading to iphones and flash-based ipods because they have discovered that carrying their entire music collection does more harm than good because they end up only listening to a small selection but it takes longer to find it. The hard drives are also heavier and more prone to breaking after dropping them.
Who says the person needs to do that work? That's where the processing power enabled by upcoming battery tech comes in.
The difference between our opinions is you keep thinking of ways to say something shouldn't or won't be done because _________, I think of how new hardware meshed with properly inspired and implemented software can enable whole new ways of doing things which would have been downright stupid to try before.
But again demand comes first. You could say one day someone somewhere will want to recreate the entire universe down to the last detail using computer graphics so we'll have to store the data somewhere. I don't see that need ever coming about. Life-stream recording where all your activities are tracked and noted day to day is not something I or anyone I know have ever expressed any interest in because and this is an important point:
The more data you store, the more work is required to manage that data
I actually see people who used to have classic ipods downgrading to iphones and flash-based ipods because they have discovered that carrying their entire music collection does more harm than good because they end up only listening to a small selection but it takes longer to find it. The hard drives are also heavier and more prone to breaking after dropping them.
Do you have stuff that you need to access regularly that won't fit in what's left? That's what's important because if that's not the case then you don't 'need' more space, you are anticipating the need. The availability of space often makes people feel like they should use it up otherwise it's just wasted. In using it up, there is then a need for more. All that's really 'needed' is better storage management and better archival solutions.
Limited bandwidth implies media is compressed for it. Look at the Apple TV, you get HD content via itunes but the biggest drive they sell is 160GB.
Someone has modified an ATV with SSD:
http://www.appletvhacks.net/2008/06/...pped-apple-tv/
I agree entirely but if SSD goes mainstream then fewer people will buy HDDs except for external storage. SSD prices will come down considerably.
If we are weighing up HDD vs SSD accurately and taking into consideration performance, they aren't currently far apart. Check out the prices of 10,000 - 15,000 rpm hard drives:
150GB 10k WD Raptor 84MB/s £134
128GB SSD 80MB/s £292
Ok so you say the WD drive is still less than half the price with more storage but it also needs a heatsink to cool it.
It's still slower in real-world tests because the access times of SSD are ridiculously low:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the...ver?page=0%2C1
"the Velociraptor is simply no match for a solid-state device. In the real-world PCMark05 suite of tests, a single solid-state drive is 80 percent faster than a single Velociraptor and 47 percent faster than a pair of Velociraptors in a RAID 0 configuration"
The write speeds are lower but that won't matter to the majority of people and there are 230MB/s SSD capable of up to 512GB due for production at the end of this year:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/11/i...ec-read-speed/
But you could say that about HDD too. If you have a 1TB drive, you're not going to be assured that you can store 25 simultaneous 1080p TV channels so when you get home you can watch whatever you missed on any channel. But nobody needs to do this. As systems progress, people realise that a brute force approach isn't the best way forward. This goes back to OpenCL. We already have fast GPUs, we don't need to keep trying to force CPUs to do everything, we just need to make more intelligent code.
When it comes to storage, we use more intelligent compression algorithms, use more convenient content delivery systems.
Not recurrent business though. They'll ask for upgrades from 80GB to 256GB and leave it at that for years or get a replacement if the drive breaks.
It's great for running servers and routers etc. For desktop use/productivity it falls short of OS X and even Windows.
Define desktop use and productivity.
When you chew on that you'll soon discover that Windows is a distant third, as the OS, not the applications, and OS X leads with Linux not far behind.
On an Application by Application level you have far more mature applications on both Windows and OS X; and in conventional applications Linux is a distant third--solely due to traditional houses making it's applications native on Linux as an afterthought; eerily similar to where Apple was not many years ago.
How they are designed to leverage their associative OS varies widely between OS X and Windows and Linux.
The huge change will come when 10.6 dumps Carbon and streamlines to Cocoa native applications. You'll see how come NeXT was always considered a jewel in the Computing Industry and if they only were as cheap as Macs and PCs how they could have owned the market, blah, blah, blah--having worked at NeXT and Apple I can be critical of both.
OS X and Linux are here to stay and with systems like OpenSolaris and the other BSDs will always be copied, however poorly, by Windows.
It's up to Operating Systems to provide rich, consistent APIs for their third party developers--both OS X and Linux have failed: OS X with Carbon and Cocoa fighting for space when it's clear from the beginning Cocoa was the future: Linux with GTK+ and Qt battling it out and producing GNOME and KDE, respectively--not to forget about the several lesser know Desktop Environments on Linux even weakening the Desktop expansion.
Apple cowtailed to 3 major developers to slow it's progress and Linux proclaims "it's a feature."
Microsoft continued to win with this crap and infighting from Apple and the Linux communities.
Since Apple cut the ties with Carbon the sales are escalating on all their hardware. It will continue to skyrocket with OS X 10.6.
Linux Standards Base 4.0 makes massive improvements to interoperability between the competing GTK+ and Qt Toolkits, not to mention GNUstep and lesser known, but highly respected APIs.
Microsoft goes back to the drawing board and will try to copy from both Trees, release a ductaped solution and proclaim themselves the Industry leaders.
Repeat and rinse.
Who says the person needs to do that work? That's where the processing power enabled by upcoming battery tech comes in.
I don't mean physical management, although that comes into play too, I meant logical management of the information becomes tedious the more you have as software has to be written to process the information. Take for example Webserver stats. They often track all sorts of details about what users visit the site, browser etc. If I only need a hit count, I have to parse a massive file to get one number.
Now sure, the other stats are nice when you need them but when you don't, they create more work. This goes for storing the information too. You have to come up with ways to logically categorize everything. This wastes lots of development time that could be better spent elsewhere.
The difference between our opinions is you keep thinking of ways to say something shouldn't or won't be done because _________, I think of how new hardware meshed with properly inspired and implemented software can enable whole new ways of doing things which would have been downright stupid to try before.
I heard one idea, which wasn't a practical example. We're talking mainstream use here. Forget specialized applications of huge amounts of storage and concentrate on members of your family i.e Joe Public. What practical scenarios will they find themselves in that will require 256GB+ drive space?
Like I say, some people will always come up with ways to use storage even if it's just because the storage is there to be used. But some people similarly buy the latest machines where the majority of users get by for quite a while with older machines. The larger market will dictate where storage goes in the future and I think that hard drives will soon be relegated to specialized high storage uses and SSD will be used by the majority.
If I was into the stock market, I'd be buying shares in SSD companies right now.
Define desktop use and productivity.
When you chew on that you'll soon discover that Windows is a distant third
And yet Linux has the smallest number of desktop users of any OS. It's free and it's open so developments are continually released and yet few people want it.
Not very good hardware support, so many people battle issues with sound cards and other basic hardware. There are so many different versions and incompatible components (window managers, kernels, drivers etc).
The real problem is choice. There is such a thing as too much choice. Average users don't care about what version of the system they use. They want something that works with their hardware. There are so many PCs to choose from and so many variants of Linux that to end up with something that lets you be productive (i.e get any real work done) is a bit of a challenge.
If Microsoft had simply used a popular version of Linux, ported their drivers over, I would bet there would be a lot less Mac users. You get the hardware you want with a single open, well supported OS.
Microsoft won't do this as they want too much control. The Linux community has too many members who will argue over the smallest differences in the OS so they won't narrow down to one version. OS X is almost the ideal - it's just limited to Apple's limited hardware options and locked down to some extent.
It certainly depends on what aspects of the OS you look at but I could not use Linux in a production environment for film work, possibly website development but no native Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, no standardized media software like Quicktime. I could do this on Windows though.
I heard one idea, which wasn't a practical example. We're talking mainstream use here. Forget specialized applications of huge amounts of storage and concentrate on members of your family i.e Joe Public. What practical scenarios will they find themselves in that will require 256GB+ drive space?
My wifes hobby photo collection, only about 100GB of images, and nearly another hundred of post-processed. My 11 year old already has several GB of animation renders, just wait until he gets fast at it. Then put about 120GB of generic stuff+OS+iTunes on and three in a family of four just destroyed the 256GB barrier without even being special. Thank god for firewire external drives, but the desk starts running out of space stacking them up PLUS a TB for Time Machine...
I don't mean physical management, although that comes into play too, I meant logical management of the information becomes tedious the more you have as software has to be written to process the information. Take for example Webserver stats. They often track all sorts of details about what users visit the site, browser etc. If I only need a hit count, I have to parse a massive file to get one number.
Now sure, the other stats are nice when you need them but when you don't, they create more work. This goes for storing the information too. You have to come up with ways to logically categorize everything. This wastes lots of development time that could be better spent elsewhere.
I heard one idea, which wasn't a practical example. We're talking mainstream use here. Forget specialized applications of huge amounts of storage and concentrate on members of your family i.e Joe Public. What practical scenarios will they find themselves in that will require 256GB+ drive space?
Like I say, some people will always come up with ways to use storage even if it's just because the storage is there to be used. But some people similarly buy the latest machines where the majority of users get by for quite a while with older machines. The larger market will dictate where storage goes in the future and I think that hard drives will soon be relegated to specialized high storage uses and SSD will be used by the majority.
If I was into the stock market, I'd be buying shares in SSD companies right now.
And yet Linux has the smallest number of desktop users of any OS. It's free and it's open so developments are continually released and yet few people want it.
Not very good hardware support, so many people battle issues with sound cards and other basic hardware. There are so many different versions and incompatible components (window managers, kernels, drivers etc).
The real problem is choice. There is such a thing as too much choice. Average users don't care about what version of the system they use. They want something that works with their hardware. There are so many PCs to choose from and so many variants of Linux that to end up with something that lets you be productive (i.e get any real work done) is a bit of a challenge.
If Microsoft had simply used a popular version of Linux, ported their drivers over, I would bet there would be a lot less Mac users. You get the hardware you want with a single open, well supported OS.
Microsoft won't do this as they want too much control. The Linux community has too many members who will argue over the smallest differences in the OS so they won't narrow down to one version. OS X is almost the ideal - it's just limited to Apple's limited hardware options and locked down to some extent.
It certainly depends on what aspects of the OS you look at but I could not use Linux in a production environment for film work, possibly website development but no native Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, no standardized media software like Quicktime. I could do this on Windows though.
I haven't had a sound card issue in years with Linux.
Sorry, but ALSA, HAL and more are extremely mature on Linux.
I layed out the differences and you repeated much of what I said and threw in digs from 5 years ago.
If you can't get audio running in OpenSUSE 10.x or 11.x I question your ability to install an operating system and let it plug n' play the device.
The same goes for Debian [Sid especially]; and with Debian Lenny around the corner anyone who complains they couldn't install Debian Etch 4.0 and still complain about Debian Lenny 5.0 truly should never proclaim themselves proficient in operating systems required for "production" environments.
Hell, both GTK+ and Qt, with GNOME latest and KDE 4.2 will soon be on WINDOWS and OS X.
I pointed out that these platforms spend more time beating each other up for the sake of choice, but to declare them not mature platforms is moronic.
By the way, the main reason LINUX is difficult to measure for operating system percentages is that very few OEMs offer LINUX pre-installed.
DELL got smart and is doing it. HP is doing it. Lenovo is doing it.
When people crap on OS X for being small in marketshare we all revolt as that's just a blatant lie.
The same goes, to a lesser extent, towards LINUX.
If you think the bulk of Web Development is done on OS X and Windows then you're full of it.
The bulk of development and deployment is done on LINUX and OS X.
Microsoft isn't paying hundreds of millions of dollars to NOVELL because they aren't threatened by LINUX.
The two major platform movements, as I stated earlier, are OS X and LINUX.
My wifes hobby photo collection, only about 100GB of images, and nearly another hundred of post-processed. My 11 year old already has several GB of animation renders, just wait until he gets fast at it. Then put about 120GB of generic stuff+OS+iTunes on and three in a family of four just destroyed the 256GB barrier without even being special. Thank god for firewire external drives, but the desk starts running out of space stacking them up PLUS a TB for Time Machine...
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. My brother is a keen photographer and still has under 20GB of photos. Old events are archived to DVD. 20GB is enough to store 80,000 photos compressed to 250k. Do you know how long it takes to look through even 1,000 images? Keeping 80,000 on a main drive or insanely high resolution images is just unnecessary and wasting space.
Your kid producing GBs of animation isn't common among kids and renders to uncompressed formats usually aren't archived - you archive the final render with composites and the original scene files, then if you need to go back to them in future, you can render them again or adjust a single uncompressed render.
I doubt those animations will be longer than 5 minutes (if it's 3D, 5 minutes of animation would take about 15-30 hours to render) and 5 minutes anamorphic DVD uncompressed is under 4GB (depends on the content of course).
The 120GB extra was a figure pulled out of nowhere. I would highly doubt that your entire family will top 50GB of music combined. If so, the collection needs sorting because that's about 15,000 tracks. The OS size will be reduced and is currently only 15GB.
Other stuff, we're talking about small movie clips, word documents etc - combined about 20GB. This leaves plenty of overhead.
256GB - 15GB OS - 100GB photos - 10GB software - 40GB music - 30GB uncompressed renders - 20GB miscellaneous files leaves 40GB of free space and that is still fairly badly managed storage.
I could understand if people want to run multiple systems and they want storage split between them but even at that, the space required in total won't exceed 256GB for most people.
If 256GB is too low, go to 512GB, which will be available next year in SSD. SSD will increase in space too. I just don't see a point where storage is needed to keep on increasing. The popularity of Time Machine shows people are more concerned about data safety and SSD is more reliable.
If you can't get audio running in OpenSUSE 10.x or 11.x I question your ability to install an operating system and let it plug n' play the device.
The same goes for Debian [Sid especially]; and with Debian Lenny around the corner anyone who complains they couldn't install Debian Etch 4.0 and still complain about Debian Lenny 5.0 truly should never proclaim themselves proficient in operating systems required for "production" environments.
You clearly want to get into a whole Linux thing here but hardly any production software runs natively on Linux. Tell me an industry standard NLE like Final Cut or Avid that runs natively on Linux:
http://community.avid.com/forums/t/5...px?PageIndex=1
How can it be used in production for this field when it doesn't run the software? Go to any store and note down all the boxes that have Linux support written on them.
Hell, both GTK+ and Qt, with GNOME latest and KDE 4.2 will soon be on WINDOWS and OS X.
When I see demos of Linux window managers, they are often concerned with trying to make their interfaces like aqua. GTK+ is only going to bring native software like GIMP, which falls way short of Photoshop. Trolltech Qt has been on OS X for ages.
By the way, the main reason LINUX is difficult to measure for operating system percentages is that very few OEMs offer LINUX pre-installed.
DELL got smart and is doing it. HP is doing it. Lenovo is doing it.
These companies didn't 'get smart'. They caved into pressure from people like you who demand that Linux be recognised as a viable alternative. They don't even advertise it clearly that they offer it as an option. It's not listed beside XP or Vista in BTO because people will see it as equal to Windows, buy it and then flood the seller with complaints saying that hardly any software works properly with it.
Very few OEMs sell it because it's not a good OS for desktop use. Machines like the EEEPC are different because it's a cut down version of an OS like the gOS Google Linux system.
If you think the bulk of Web Development is done on OS X and Windows then you're full of it.
Ok so Windows + OS X has about 95% of the desktop market. If you're telling me that website developers take up that other 5% (if it is even that much), I'm not the one who's full of it.
Microsoft isn't paying hundreds of millions of dollars to NOVELL because they aren't threatened by LINUX.
In server space not desktop space. Linux is great for server use and I deploy websites on Linux servers, I wouldn't even consider using Windows servers.
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. My brother is a keen photographer and still has under 20GB of photos. Old events are archived to DVD. 20GB is enough to store 80,000 photos compressed to 250k. Do you know how long it takes to look through even 1,000 images? Keeping 80,000 on a main drive or insanely high resolution images is just unnecessary and wasting space.
Selecting takes time and effort, you run the risk of throwing too much away and have regrets later. It is simply way easier to just save all that might be wanted in the future. Thanks to spotlight power and databased apps like iTunes or aperture it can all be found back easily. I save all my (non-spam/commercial) emails and most music and all decent pictures.
I'm also an amateur photographer. I shoot in Raw from my SLR camera en keep everything organized in aperture. No I won't compress it as to me Raw is the digital equivalent to a negative and once you compress that and throw away the original you can never go back and do it over it again. Yes I could put it on an external drive, but... why??
I also really enjoy music, own a 200+ CD collection all imported in at least 192 kb. I have the iMac connected to the stereo system. I would love to have it all in Lossless quality but.... my disk is not big enough....
The ever increasing hard disk sizes just keep making it easier and more affordable to keep everything you might want to look at again in the future, do that in the best possible quality and have all your digital stuff in one convenient location.
Such a strategy is apparantly wastefull in your eyes. To many of us it's simply the bliss of progress
My current usage (on my 250 GB iMac, backed up on a 1 TB time machine disk):
Pictures: 64 GB
Music: 75 GB
Movies/TV shows: 30 GB
Software: 7 GB
Email: 2 GB
Documents: 2 GB
Combine that with system files and my wife's stuff and there's currently only 22 GB free on my HD and I have to frequently clean out the movies/tv shows we watched. so I for one am already looking forward very much to our next desktop in a couple of years having at least 2 TB of storage.
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. My brother is a keen photographer and still has under 20GB of photos. Old events are archived to DVD. 20GB is enough to store 80,000 photos compressed to 250k. Do you know how long it takes to look through even 1,000 images? Keeping 80,000 on a main drive or insanely high resolution images is just unnecessary and wasting space.
Your kid producing GBs of animation isn't common among kids and renders to uncompressed formats usually aren't archived - you archive the final render with composites and the original scene files, then if you need to go back to them in future, you can render them again or adjust a single uncompressed render.
I doubt those animations will be longer than 5 minutes (if it's 3D, 5 minutes of animation would take about 15-30 hours to render) and 5 minutes anamorphic DVD uncompressed is under 4GB (depends on the content of course).
The 120GB extra was a figure pulled out of nowhere. I would highly doubt that your entire family will top 50GB of music combined. If so, the collection needs sorting because that's about 15,000 tracks. The OS size will be reduced and is currently only 15GB.
Other stuff, we're talking about small movie clips, word documents etc - combined about 20GB. This leaves plenty of overhead.
256GB - 15GB OS - 100GB photos - 10GB software - 40GB music - 30GB uncompressed renders - 20GB miscellaneous files leaves 40GB of free space and that is still fairly badly managed storage.
I could understand if people want to run multiple systems and they want storage split between them but even at that, the space required in total won't exceed 256GB for most people.
If 256GB is too low, go to 512GB, which will be available next year in SSD. SSD will increase in space too. I just don't see a point where storage is needed to keep on increasing. The popularity of Time Machine shows people are more concerned about data safety and SSD is more reliable.
You clearly want to get into a whole Linux thing here but hardly any production software runs natively on Linux. Tell me an industry standard NLE like Final Cut or Avid that runs natively on Linux:
http://community.avid.com/forums/t/5...px?PageIndex=1
How can it be used in production for this field when it doesn't run the software? Go to any store and note down all the boxes that have Linux support written on them.
When I see demos of Linux window managers, they are often concerned with trying to make their interfaces like aqua. GTK+ is only going to bring native software like GIMP, which falls way short of Photoshop. Trolltech Qt has been on OS X for ages.
These companies didn't 'get smart'. They caved into pressure from people like you who demand that Linux be recognised as a viable alternative. They don't even advertise it clearly that they offer it as an option. It's not listed beside XP or Vista in BTO because people will see it as equal to Windows, buy it and then flood the seller with complaints saying that hardly any software works properly with it.
Very few OEMs sell it because it's not a good OS for desktop use. Machines like the EEEPC are different because it's a cut down version of an OS like the gOS Google Linux system.
Ok so Windows + OS X has about 95% of the desktop market. If you're telling me that website developers take up that other 5% (if it is even that much), I'm not the one who's full of it.
In server space not desktop space. Linux is great for server use and I deploy websites on Linux servers, I wouldn't even consider using Windows servers.
I deploy on Linux and OS X and have on Windows. Please spare me the boasting.
Having worked for two operating system companies I know how the way they operate and where they are being used.
Spare me the armchair 95% Windows+OS X market share.
Windows has peaked and it's all down hill from here.
The corporation's stock is stagnant and will never expand as they oversplit a decade prior.
They will become the next IBM, if they are lucky.
That's hardly typical usage and the storage isn't well managed. <cut all the irrelevant crap>
Take your hoity toity you're all f___ed up because you don't archive to non-interactive formats and get the hell off my wavelength.
You just keep coming up with more and more ridiculous ways to try and maintain some sort of artificial size limit on what others are allowed to have on hard drives before they become The Unwashed.
I once had a boss in my young-un days who said "If you are in a room and everyone else say's your s___ is all f___ed up, you better go take a damn good look at it, because it awful damn unlikely they are all wrong."
Well the chance all of us are wrong about the usefulness of hard drive sizes approached zero asymptotically a long time ago. Stop fearing the TeraByte!