It's the business model I disliked and stated.

Critique me with what I say.

For me, there are very good reasons to not engage in business with a company that has a business model I do not like. Next thing you know they'll control the majority of online content, charge exorbitant prices and restrict what hardware I can use.

Oh, that's right, they already are.

I guess I should have quoted you directly as the posting in which you mention your dislike for Steve Jobs seems to have miraculously disappeared and so now I cannot refer to it.

Sorry. I was writing as you posted. I must have hit the submit button when I thought the preview button. It's happened before. This is what i said.

The Apple (Mac) business model is too closed for my comfort. Jobs has learned how to become very wealthy with it but I prefer spending my money with other businesses.

And of course if all contents where kept in RAM, each machine would not need 2TB of storage and only 16GB or RAM.

Specifications:
In 2002; upwards of 15,000 servers[5] ranging from 533 MHz Intel Celeron to dual 1.4 GHz Intel Pentium III (as of 2003).
One or more 80 GB hard disks per server (2003)
2–4 GB of memory per machine (2004)
A 2005 estimate by Paul Strassmann has 200,000 servers, while unspecified sources claimed this number to be upwards of 450,000 in 2006.
~ 16 GB RAM, 2 TB disk space per machine (2009)

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

And while they use Linux, as you mentioned, its not the only solution they use.

The software that runs the Google infrastructure includes:[27]
Google Web Server — Custom Linux-based Web server that Google uses for its online services; according to Google, this is not based on Apache.

Storage systems: Google File System and its successor, Colossus[28]
BigTable — structured storage built upon GFS/Colossus[28]
Spanner — planet-scale structured storage system, next generation of BigTable stack[28][8]
Chubby lock service
Borg — job scheduling and monitoring system[29]
MapReduce and Sawzall programming language
Indexing/search systems:
TeraGoogle — Google's large search index (launched in early 2006), designed by Anna Paterson of Cuil fame.[30]
Caffeine (Percolator) — continuous indexing system (launched in 2010).[31]
Google has developed several abstractions which it uses for storing most of its data:[32]
Protocol buffers — "Google's lingua franca for data"[33], a binary serialization format which is widely used within the company.
SSTable (Sorted Strings Table) — a persistent, ordered, immutable map from keys to values, where both keys and values are arbitrary byte strings. It is also used as one of the building blocks of BigTable.[34]
RecordIO — a sequence of variable sized records.[35][32][36

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

This is a good read:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat.pdf

And a more basic read (re-cap):

http://features.techworld.com/storage/467/googles-storage-strategy/

And some more fun:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf


Oddly, I can not find any definitive claims that Googles DOES store everything in RAM. Do you happen to have some links? Everything I find is rather vague on the details. Only mentioning recent cache files and indexes being stored in RAM.

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

Story from 2008 - But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast. Source

Posting from 2009 (cf diazona) - Google caches the entire internet in RAM. Source

Now I've been side-tracked the past 2.5 years (health, but am now recovering) so I have not been in touch with what's happened recently but I tend to stay current (except for Macs, smart-phones, social networking).

Ah, this article may better explain things without dumbing things down or getting too technical:

http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

Currently there over 200 GFS clusters at Google. A cluster can have 1000 or even 5000 machines. Pools of tens of thousands of machines retrieve data from GFS clusters that run as large as 5 petabytes of storage. Aggregate read/write throughput can be as high as 40 gigabytes/second across the cluster.

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

I worked at Google for 2 years. They have a lot of hardware, but not nearly enough to store a backup copy of the entire Internet in RAM. The notion of even being able to store the entire internet in one place is fairly absurd, let alone in volatile memory.

-J

That article is just hearsay. Plus they had less hardware in 2008 which makes it even more absurd. They probably do keep a copy of the index in RAM for fast searches.

As part of my job I worked on these machines: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

-J

Thanks for the info. It was a pretty common fable for a while.

I understand Mac uses some BSD code and can boot Windows. Someone earlier stated that it ran native windows in the Mac OS without virtualization. That was the only statement I could not grasp.

I currently run a 4 unit LAN using Win 7 and have 5 more PCs for sale. Not much room for another machine right now. If I get a chance to get my hands on a powerful Mac and can play with it I'd like to see what it can do.

I think the poster was confused on semantics. Often emulation and virtualization are confused even though they are very different. On a Mac, like most machines, one can emulate or virtualize. And like on most machines, one can boot into a multitude of operating systems. At its core a Mac is like any other Windows box. But beyond the core foundations of the hardware is where the Mac becomes onto its own.

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

Rocky Marciano could have beaten Muhammad Ali.

Wikipaedia is your friend. Emphasis is mine.


Mac OS X (pronounced /ˈmæk ˌoʊ ˌɛs ˈtɛn/)[7] is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, Mac OS X has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems. It is the successor to Mac OS 9, released in 1999, the final release of the "classic" Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984.
Mac OS X, whose X is the Roman numeral for 10 and is a prominent part of its brand identity, is a Unix-based graphical operating system,[8] built on technologies developed at NeXT between the second half of the 1980s and Apple's purchase of the company in late 1996. From its sixth release, Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" and onward, every release of Mac OS X gained UNIX 03 certification while running on Intel processors.[3][4] Mac OS X - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am curently running Snow Leopard and will switch to Lion after another 6 months or so. A pilot once told me"Never own the -A Model". Wise words.