TOTD #1: Microsoft, ZFS, Hard Drives
Microsoft
This topic annoys me quite a bit, but once again it came up. Someone on a linux mailing list I belong to sent out an email with some bashing comments about Microsoft. A couple other people followed up with jokes that probably weren’t jokes. One of them happens to use Hotmail, a product I actually do dislike quote a bit. After emailing him and saying that he shouldn’t make comments since he is a Hotmail user he made some comments about me needing to lighten up.
So first off, this individual has not been using Linux that long, and his knowledge of a lot of stuff seems a bit lacking. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, but it bothers me when people who barely know anything about the thing they feel so strongly about start making comments about people/companies/things that helped their product grow. First off, if Microsoft products had not had some of the flaws they do I think less people would be trying Linux, that means that less people would probably be putting the effort into improving it. Microsoft has also helped computing become more of a mainstream thing. If you think about all of the questions people have asked you about their computers you must realize that Linux wouldn’t have improved that. Maybe a few things like graphical package managers where people can find all the software they could possibly want, or faster booting and more reliability, but Linux does not make things easier for the user. It certainly did not make things easier for the user years ago and while Ubuntu is great there are still things that can take quite a while to get going. For someone that just putzes around it really doesn’t matter, they have their OpenOffice, a browser, and a couple other applications their get them through their day, but there are a lot of things that can still be very complicated, and that is not always desirable. The original mailer went on to comment on Microsoft going out of their way to annoy the Linux community. Why do Linux advocates like him go out of their way to trash Microsoft in any email they can bring it up in. The original topic of the email was right, they were taking the penguin and trying to disassociate it, but I don’t think you need to trash the entire company. This is also someone who has tons to say against proprietary software, if it isn’t open source he hates it, which is also a horrible stand to take. Every company has a right to keep things to themselves. Google has their trade secrets, and there is nothing wrong with that. If everything was open source and everyone shared everything it would be like communism is supposed to be, but that never seems to work out too well.
I use OS X, various Linux distros, and various Windows versions and I can list reasons to use each one and reasons to avoid each one for certain tasks. I also don’t see 98% of the problems people bitch up and down about when it comes to Windows, and that is not because I am not using it, it is because I know what the hell I am doing. Someone who has been using Linux full strength as much as I have used Windows would have the same to say about the things an unexperienced Linux user would say.
ZFS
A friend of mine just built a nice little file server using ZFS. If you have been following I commented on the beauty of ZFS a couple posts ago. From everything he has said he is getting a little better performance than I am so I am going to order the non-raid cards he bought and test out a few different scenarios. He had no troubles getting things setup, and right now there is no real support to be able to expand an array without breaking it down and rebuilding it, but I am sure that will come at some point. My real interest is in speed because for some reason I only pull 350-400mb/s max on my RAID card and when I benchmarked each drive they were coming in around 109mb/s so you would think 8 of them even in RAID6 would pull in some higher numbers. From what I have been able to find ZFS kicks huge ass.
Hard Drives
This one is pretty short. Newegg has the 7200.11 1TB drives for $109.99 so $0.10999 per GB. The 750GB drives are $99.99 which is $0.13332 per GB. Even last night when the 1TB was 119.99 it was only 11 cents per GB. Remarkable a larger drive is actually cheaper per GB. When you are dealing with 40 and 80 gig drives that is common to see, but the large drives never seem to end up like that.
