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Please! Reviewing the new features of chips is a great thing, but for fuck's sake we all know about Tom's Hardware, AnandTech and Ars Technia, All of which have covered the P4 in extensive detail.

*Bzzzzt!* Wrong. Accurate branch prediction is expecially important when you're dealing with the P4's whopping 20 stage pipeline. Each incorrect prediction costs quite a few clock cycles and slows down overall processing signifigantly. See this ArsTechnica article for details.

-Angron

Ars Technica has a fantastic article comparing and contrasting Sun's future MAJC (Microprocessor Architecture for Java Computing) CPU architecture with Intel's IA-64. It's going to be very interesting to see if Sun can carve out a large enough market to ensure MAJC's viability. My uninformed opinion after reading the article--Sun has been making decisions since its founding that have given it the only chance to survive. By almost totally eschewing both Intel and Microsoft, Sun has been forced to innovate on both hardware and software to compete with these giants. Sun simply had to invent Java--what was the alternative, reselling NT "workstations"?! Now Sun has leveraged Java into strategic partnerships with IBM, Oracle, etc. to create from scratch a major software niche, not to mention Java's future in the embedded markets. MAJC it seems to me is the logical step in hardware once Sun made the commitment to Java and once Sun decided not to become a reseller of Intel chips like say HP. Without having to worry about what Intel wants, Sun can use its traditional RISC approach to registers to once again offer a fantastic alternative--read the Ars Technica article cited above: "MAJC, however, spends so much of its die space on registers that it can have the register states for four different threads loaded at once. Since it doesn't have to save and load register states to switch between threads, its context switches are very fast". In the 1980s HP saved the company investing in PA-RISC. Maybe that was because the engineer founders David Packard and Bill Hewlett were still alive and strong. I believe that it is Sun that has applied that lesson of not surrendering control over the CPU architecture, and that HP will continue to pay a heavy price for deciding to go with Intel. Financing new chip architectures is difficult, but in my opinion there is no future for being a reseller unless one is IBM or Dell. (And note that IBM resells only because it wants to since it already manufactures alternatives, it is beholden to no one. Just who will be able to compete with IBM's Global Services?)

I found and answer to my own question at arstechnica. Could I be violating the DMCA by by posting this?

From the 11th of July to the 16th, I was in Las Vegas at the Defcon 9 conference with Dmitryi Sklyarov, an employee of our company, who was giving a talk at the conference. On the morning of June 16, we (with Dmitryi) left the hotel, and prepared to go to the airport. We had about an hour and a half until our flight. Right at the exit, two young men approached us, screaming "Hands on the wall, FBI!". We decided that this is some kind of stupid joke (at the Defcon conference, jokes about the feds have been quite common), and Dmitryi laughed, and even tried to return the joke. However, he was told, in an even more rude way, "Hands on the wall!" They asked me for a key to the hotel room, and invited me for an interview. A little later, they brought Dmitryi into the room. He was already in handcuffs.

Two more employees of the FBI came in, who apparently were covering the street. Dmitryi asked them to cuff his hands in front of him, rather than behind his back, because sitting with his hands cuffed behind his back was uncomfortable. His request was refused. An FBI employee introduced himself, and said that I wasn't being charged with anything, and that they were there to arrest Dmitryi. I was politely asked to talk with them. To my question "What did you arrest Dmitryi for?", they answered that he was accused of violating the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) - an American law about author rights. Adobe Systems is the company bringing charges and a request for an investigation. The FBI people didn't provide any more details, saying that they were just following orders. I was asked several formal questions, to which they already knew answers. They asked that I take Dmitryi's belongings with me, "so that they don't get lost somehow here in America." When I asked them what they will be doing with Dmitryi later, they answered that they were going to take him to the local FBI office, where they will ask some more questions, and then to court, where a judge will be making the final decisions.

All of the above took place in the Alexis Park Hotel, Las Vegas, in the state of Nevada. On the road to Los Angeles I was followed, quite blatantly. As soon as I got to the airport and went to a public phone, a police officer ran up and pretended that he needs to make a call, from the booth next to mine. He didn't actually make any calls.

Quartz is based on Display Postscript

No, it's based on Display PDF - big difference actually.

it's interesting that the comparison of the pipeline depths of the two processors looked like it was taken straight out of the ars technica article "The Pentium 4 and the G4e", more specifically the perils of deep pipelining

the presentation was not as technically accurate as Ars, but close enough. i am amazed anyone trying to get this technical with the general public (e.g. a non-geek-audience).

it's interesting that the comparison of the pipeline depths of the two processors looked like it was taken straight out of the ars technica article "The Pentium 4 and the G4e", more specifically the perils of deep pipelining

the presentation was not as technically accurate as Ars, but close enough. i am amazed anyone trying to get this technical with the general public (e.g. a non-geek-audience).

A review I've read indicates that OS X system response is less than stellar on a 400 MHz G3. Maybe OS X.1 will fix that (I'm guessing that that's what people are referring to as "speed gremlins"), but meanwhile I'll wait until it comes out and find out for myself.

Incidentally, the Yellow Dog Linux review posted earlier on /. has some more real-world performance metrics than Apple marketing's Photoshop tests and show that the lower real-world system performance may be endemic to the G3/4 processors slower clock speeds. The summary is that a 500 MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to an 800 MHz Pentium III.

A review I've read indicates that OS X system response is less than stellar on a 400 MHz G3. Maybe OS X.1 will fix that (I'm guessing that that's what people are referring to as "speed gremlins"), but meanwhile I'll wait until it comes out and find out for myself.

Incidentally, the Yellow Dog Linux review posted earlier on /. has some more real-world performance metrics than Apple marketing's Photoshop tests and show that the lower real-world system performance may be endemic to the G3/4 processors slower clock speeds. The summary is that a 500 MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to an 800 MHz Pentium III.

That's http://www.arstechnica.com/cpu/4q99/risc-cisc/rvc- 1.html for the Goat-phobic.

Ars Technica did a very in depth piece not too long ago. They compared various mp3 encoders here. This might be what you are thinking of as it's from March 2000, but perhaps not.

Ars Technica did a very in depth piece not too long ago. They compared various mp3 encoders here. This might be what you are thinking of as it's from March 2000, but perhaps not.

I can give you my personal reason I'm averse to paying for online content: A percieved lack of value-add, with a concrete chunk of money extracted from my account regularly.

A good example of this is Ars Technica. I wanted to read an article. I noticed a link to download a pdf version of the file. I figured "great, I can print it out and read it in bed!". I click the link and it turns out you not only have to register, you have to pay a monthly membership fee.

So now I've got two options: pony up $50 a year for a membership, for which I may or may not ever want to print an article out again, or just print out the (lousy due to paged html setup) web pages.

In other cases I'm reluctant to sign up for a site because it's one more thing to explain to the wife -- but honey, I really need this!

I would be more willing to 'pay as you go' if I could use some form of digital cash/micropayment system that didn't hassle you to sign up and if the products in question didn't cost too much. Back to my original example, I would happily have paid $0.50 for the privilege of printing a nicely formatted pdf over the crappy browser printout. But I am unwilling to if I have to register, give out tons of personal details, a credit card, etc. etc.

I can give you my personal reason I'm averse to paying for online content: A percieved lack of value-add, with a concrete chunk of money extracted from my account regularly.

A good example of this is Ars Technica. I wanted to read an article. I noticed a link to download a pdf version of the file. I figured "great, I can print it out and read it in bed!". I click the link and it turns out you not only have to register, you have to pay a monthly membership fee.

So now I've got two options: pony up $50 a year for a membership, for which I may or may not ever want to print an article out again, or just print out the (lousy due to paged html setup) web pages.

In other cases I'm reluctant to sign up for a site because it's one more thing to explain to the wife -- but honey, I really need this!

I would be more willing to 'pay as you go' if I could use some form of digital cash/micropayment system that didn't hassle you to sign up and if the products in question didn't cost too much. Back to my original example, I would happily have paid $0.50 for the privilege of printing a nicely formatted pdf over the crappy browser printout. But I am unwilling to if I have to register, give out tons of personal details, a credit card, etc. etc.

(Granted I don't know that Rambus really innovated on anything-- from the article and what I've heard, RDRAM "technology" is nearly identical to SDRAM except for a handful of minor changes..)

That is far from the truth. RAMBUS is significantly different in many ways, and can't be criticized for its lack of innovation. But those changes have their tradeoffs.

See Ars Technica article for the technical details.

The amount of information that can be stored by the [1-liter] ultimate laptop, ~10^31 bits, is much higher than the ~10^10 bits stored on current laptops. This is because conventional laptops use many degrees of freedom to store a bit, whereas the ultimate laptop uses just one.

Anyway, if you look at the pin-out diagram, you will see that the cluster of pins on the right is for analog video. Which means that on current Apple monitors, there are some pins not being used...future projects for an adventurous hacker?

Anyway, if you look at the pin-out diagram, you will see that the cluster of pins on the right is for analog video. Which means that on current Apple monitors, there are some pins not being used...future projects for an adventurous hacker?

I would recommend supporting the Folding@Home or Genome@Home project.

More info can be found here.

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind in the future.
You can point the bone at Big Media crushing the 'net zines, or you can point it at disappearing ad dollars and "big media" and other "traditional" news sources finally "getting" the web and putting out products that people want on it, the (inherently?) losing proposition subsidized by their traditional offerings.
Can you really cry for Suck and Feed dying at the same time you pooh-pooh Salon for (gasp!) trying to stay afloat? No, their content ain't what it used to be, but the age of micropayments is still far off, and smarter folks are doing what they can to stay in business.

The D.Net client is a really nice client - it just works. I have never had any problems with it.

People are different, and therefore some people think D.Net is cool and others think Seti is the much more interesting.

I'm part of the Arstechnica Distributed Computing (DC) team and we have a nice little "portal" (called the Food Court), for all our teams. For each team there is a nice little description about the project.

I would recommend a visit, if you would like to know a bit about the different DC projects that exists.

You are, of course, more than welcome to join one of our teams if you like ;)

The projects I personally find most interesting and would recommend if you find D.Net and Seti pointless, are the Folding@Home and Genome@Home projects. An explanation of Folding@Home can be found here. Genome@Home has a similar cause - it's the same people that's behind both projects.

We also have a pretty cool forum where your are welcome to ask questions.

Important note! Our Folding@Home team's website has just changed to a new host, therefore the link on the Food Court page (http://www.teameggroll.com) doesn't work right now! Instead, you should use http://www.teameggroll.org.

The D.Net client is a really nice client - it just works. I have never had any problems with it.

People are different, and therefore some people think D.Net is cool and others think Seti is the much more interesting.

I'm part of the Arstechnica Distributed Computing (DC) team and we have a nice little "portal" (called the Food Court), for all our teams. For each team there is a nice little description about the project.

I would recommend a visit, if you would like to know a bit about the different DC projects that exists.

You are, of course, more than welcome to join one of our teams if you like ;)

The projects I personally find most interesting and would recommend if you find D.Net and Seti pointless, are the Folding@Home and Genome@Home projects. An explanation of Folding@Home can be found here. Genome@Home has a similar cause - it's the same people that's behind both projects.

We also have a pretty cool forum where your are welcome to ask questions.

Important note! Our Folding@Home team's website has just changed to a new host, therefore the link on the Food Court page (http://www.teameggroll.com) doesn't work right now! Instead, you should use http://www.teameggroll.org.

The D.Net client is a really nice client - it just works. I have never had any problems with it.

People are different, and therefore some people think D.Net is cool and others think Seti is the much more interesting.

I'm part of the Arstechnica Distributed Computing (DC) team and we have a nice little "portal" (called the Food Court), for all our teams. For each team there is a nice little description about the project.

I would recommend a visit, if you would like to know a bit about the different DC projects that exists.

You are, of course, more than welcome to join one of our teams if you like ;)

The projects I personally find most interesting and would recommend if you find D.Net and Seti pointless, are the Folding@Home and Genome@Home projects. An explanation of Folding@Home can be found here. Genome@Home has a similar cause - it's the same people that's behind both projects.

We also have a pretty cool forum where your are welcome to ask questions.

Important note! Our Folding@Home team's website has just changed to a new host, therefore the link on the Food Court page (http://www.teameggroll.com) doesn't work right now! Instead, you should use http://www.teameggroll.org.

The D.Net client is a really nice client - it just works. I have never had any problems with it.

People are different, and therefore some people think D.Net is cool and others think Seti is the much more interesting.

I'm part of the Arstechnica Distributed Computing (DC) team and we have a nice little "portal" (called the Food Court), for all our teams. For each team there is a nice little description about the project.

I would recommend a visit, if you would like to know a bit about the different DC projects that exists.

You are, of course, more than welcome to join one of our teams if you like ;)

The projects I personally find most interesting and would recommend if you find D.Net and Seti pointless, are the Folding@Home and Genome@Home projects. An explanation of Folding@Home can be found here. Genome@Home has a similar cause - it's the same people that's behind both projects.

We also have a pretty cool forum where your are welcome to ask questions.

Important note! Our Folding@Home team's website has just changed to a new host, therefore the link on the Food Court page (http://www.teameggroll.com) doesn't work right now! Instead, you should use http://www.teameggroll.org.

Ars Technica did an article on this topic a year ago. Check this link for the article.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

Just lurk in the Ars Technica Case and Cooling Fetish forum for a couple days. This comes up regularly there.

Unsuprisingly, the Macatista wrote that meggy-hurtz don't matter, and besides, Mac's are 3 times more powerful than a Pentium 3 anyway! Pop.Sci. wrote back, saying breaking the Ghz IS a milestone thats important to note, and that tests have shown that yes, in some areas, Mac's are 3 times more powerful than a Pentium 3. However, these same tests show that in some areas, x86 platforms are 3 times more powerful than the Mac.

This argument has long bored me. The arcitechural differences between x86 and PPC have been vast until the last year or so. According to an article at Ars Technica, the Intel Pentium 3 chip is somewhat like the PPC, but the AMD Athlon is even more similar to the RISC found in the Mac. Even if that's the case, have you ever seen the price difference between the two platforms? Plus add in your options (and the price thereof) when buying a Mac. You take what Apple will give you. Apple's prices on memory are so laughable as to be a great stand-up routine.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the hardware, and the only problem I have with the OS as an intermidiate user is the file organisation system. I just think that Apple's managment sucks, and that I get more bang for my buck going out to a local computer store, in which I can support the mom&pop's of America. A one or two year parts, and three years labor warranty is good enough for me.

-zAmboni

• Sharky Extreme's video card review list
• Graphics Guide on Tom's Hardware
• AnandTech list of reviewed video cards
• ArsTechnica list of reviewed video cards

A few years ago I was swapping hardware between an NT and a FreeBSD box, and I that was when I saw a first-hand comparison of the TNT2 and Xpert 98. Now in terms of 3D performance, the Xpert 98 can't touch the TNT2, but when I swapped cards and put the TNT2 in the FreeBSD box, I had to turn the monitor brightness up a whole lot to see the screen clearly. Conversely, I had to turn the brightness down on the NT box to keep from blinding myself. The TNT2 was dark and mushy on the desktop. Now that I have the GeForce, I wish I still had the Xpert98 for comparison.

--

Well, what you see are pixels but MacOS X's quartz is a third generation display that uses Postscript. You'll notice that resized icons don't become pixelated (well, stuff that takes advantage of postscript won't appear pixelated, but older stuff from the legacy MacOS will still use the older pixmap rendering)

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/ma cos-x-gui-1.html

a Sparc microprocessor might be considered a pure RISC chip but the UltraSparc II isn't and the UltraSparc III most especially isn't. As a matter of fact, the underlying architecture bears a lot of resemblance to x86 implementations. Go read this article for an explanation of the fact.

I take this to mean that you've actually played games on the Apple 15/17/22 lcd displays? Can you give some particulars? (which lcd, games, vid card).

In most reviews of the 22" ACD, the reviewers go ga-ga over the picture quality, wide viewing angle, minimal color distortion (for an lcd), etc., but I have only seen one review specifically mention game performance, and in this review, the conclusion is: "Gamers, this is not your monitor."

So does anyone have first-hand experience with games like Quake3 or Unreal that contradict this?

Not only does the technology exist, but according to arstechnica theyre already for sale. Thats a first hype a technology AFTER its been released instead of three years down the road.

/. suckered? Well, then so was Ars Technica - yesterday.

I find myself going there more and more every day. It's a real shame.

/. suckered? Well, then so was Ars Technica - yesterday.

I find myself going there more and more every day. It's a real shame.

1. Updates frequently are great. You find a set of bugs, fix them, w/o having to wait for a monlithic update that could be hampered by one bug that cant be fixed.

2. Because of the way X handles its packages/frameworks, its very hard to break a program, id assume, since old calls of the same name are not overwritten, if a program makes a call to a specific version of that call, it will always be there. I think thats the gist of it, you can read more Here, at ars-technica

And Mr.Adams... So long, and thanks for all the fish, you will be missed...

As has been mentioned before, this emulation layer has to run somewhere, if not in software, in hardware. The major reason why a Crusoe would run slower than a PIII is that it only has two ALUs and a single FPU. You would not buy this chip to play Quake with.

However, by having the "Code Morphing" technology run as software it allows for more aggressive run-time application tuning since more data can be retained on the given application. What this means is that the clock cycles on the Crusoe should be more efficient than conventional processors since it is executing more thoroughly optimized code.

The really cool possibility that this opens up is dynamically loading/unloading specialized processor code that is tuned to specific applications. That would be cool, l33t, sweet, and bitchin' all rolled into one.

For more info, see Ars-Technica's Crusoe Review.

I have noticed in the recent past that there has been a lot of marketing whoring with regards to Ultra DMA and its various speeds.

I am most disappointed with IDE in general from a performance standpoint. I go through hardware all the time because of the nature of my job, and two things stick out as the sore thumb in bad system performance. The first is the availability of huge quantities of memory, the second being the hard drive.

As far as controllers go in the this area of performance, I tend not to care for anything that is not Intel or Promise, not that I have a fetish for Intel goods. I've yet to try any striping/parity striping controllers yet either. My observation of IDE thus far, regardless of bus 'speed' is somewhat negative. High CPU usage, bad multi-thrashability (e.g., hitting the disk with nasty requests in multiple ways all at once). I feel the hard disk holding me up, especially in Windows. I have found the following registry keys for Windows 2000 to enable DMA66+ operations, FYI:

From this site...

To activate the ATA/66 (UDMA/66) setting, you need to run Regedit (or Regedt32) and go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000 0

If using Regedt32 uncheck "Read Only Mode" in the Options menu. Note that the "0000" key above might show as "0001", "0002" or "0003" on your machine, depending on your particular hardware settings. Select the key appropriate to your case. Right-click to create a new DWORD [REG_DWORD] Value, call it "EnableUDMA66" (no quotes), and type 1 in the Decimal box to enable ATA/66 (UDMA/66) support. To disable it, change the Decimal value to 0, or delete the "EnableUDMA66" Value altogether. Reboot when done.

A MUST: To properly enable the UDMA/66 setting, you need to have your ATA/66 (or ATA/100) capable drive(s) hooked up to a different IDE channel than the one your older (E)IDE (even if UDMA/33 capable) drive(s) are connected to!

Another site has directions for NT 4.0 Sp5+ here.

Another useful site is here, BMDRIVERS.

Here and there you will see reports about reduced CPU usage. This is laughable. One place indicates that mass transfers were taking 90% CPU and with the new and improved drivers, a "mere 56%". Meanwhile all my SCSI drives never elevate the CPU at all.

Another alternative to using all these tweaks and hacks is to just download the Intel drivers (if you have an Intel chipset which you should for PCs, save the glorious Athlon).

I have noticed various anomalies with these drivers.

Sorry for giving so much attention to Windows, these operating systems tend to need the most attention. As far as unix goes, the hdparm suggestions I have seen so far seem correct, thanks for the input.

The SCSI paradigm is greatly suffering from the same pomp with festering numbers. My experience has been that Ultra 160 drives perform no better than Ultra 80. Open Magazine did a whole battery of benchmarks to illustrate its uselessness (unable to locate link).

I personally look for fast rotational speed, good platter density and fewer platters and a fast media rate, and lastly seek times.

IDE and its Ultra friends are great for huge drives to dump crap onto, and even mirror. Keep the OS and the swap file on a SCSI drive, and you can use your CPU for something else.

Here's the comment from a Inquest white paper:

: Intel's Thermal Design Guide has revealed that the absolute maximum power dissipation of the 1.5GHz P4 is actually 72.9 watts. This is 33% higher than the published system design specification, and essentially identical to the 1.33 GHz Athlon. If power dissipation is sustained at a level higher than 54.7 watts thermal overload can occur. In order to deal with this, a mechanism called thermal throttling is used. If performance critical applications drive the CPU above a predetermined temperature, the CPU is halted with a 50% duty cycle (alternating 2 microseconds on; 2 microseconds off) until it cools down. This effectively turns your 1.5GHz processor into a 750MHz processor - just at the moment you demand peak performance. On the other hand, you will probably still be able to check your email at 1.5GHz. This scheme is described on page 23 of Intel's P4 Thermal Design Guide. ... Intel's motto... "1.7GHz. Its there. Unless you need it."

It's still on the ArsTechnica home page.

Invaded my home through my roomate's usage. I use a Mac, but there are still Microsoft programs I have to use. As a web developer, I require Internet Explorer to do my day to day work. Like it or not Microsoft is everywhere. I just don't want them in my living room.

I wasn't posting this as a means to bash Microsoft (or get moded), but more as a small tidbit of info that some people seem to be missing about the PS2. A lot of people claim that Sony is dead in the consel wars because the stats of the system are lower than those of Xbox and GameCube. But the PS2 is based around a whole new architure for not only a consel, but PCs as well. Since people are still learning how to program for the thing, I believe the system could still have untold abilities yet. Read this Ars article for more info.

As always, the games will tell the story. PS2's already got a good list of games that I want to play. So that's where my money went.

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Ars Technica - Physical Home Networking: An Installation Guide

There is a great installation guide/diary complete with photographic documentation by Ben Rota at ArsTechnica.

http://arstechnica.com/guide/networking/installati on-1.html for those who like cut and paste.

Does /. have some rule against linking to other tech news sites? This was posted on Ars Technica about an hour and 15 minutes before /.

Blah.

Uhm, I wish I was smart enough to earn browny points by reading Ars Technica and then posting submissions to /.. Only now you've been caught!

"100 Dumbest moments in e-Business history - Posted 04/12/2001 - 1:19am EST" on Ars Technica.
"101 Dumbest Dot-Com Moments - Posted by Hemos on Thursday April 12, @12:44".

If you're only running native apps (which the are relatively few at this second, but many are coming this summer), then you'll probably do just fine on 64MB of RAM. Last time I checked, this is pretty comparable to GNOME or KDE.

Actually, OS X is amazingly sluggish even with 128MB of RAM (the "minimum requirements") on my G4 400MHz PowerBook. Even the dead-simple TextEdit program takes a good 5 seconds to load most of the time, and a web browser easily takes longer than 20 seconds. If you're compiling something in a terminal window in the background, you can go get a cup of tea while you launch another program! The good ArsTechnica article that was posted on Slashdot the other day explains all this in great detail.

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Most modern desktop and server operating systems (including Windows 2000) use what is often called a "modified microkernel" architecture. Mac OS X does this as well. Instead of running as a user-level process on top of Mach, Mac OS X's BSD subsystem runs in kernel mode in the same address space as Mach itself. Most message passing between Mach and BSD is eliminated in this situation; the BSD subsystem can interact with Mach via normal function calls.

It's important to note that Mach's native kernel interfaces have not been broken by this "incorporation" of the BSD subsystem. They remain just as accessible to other subsystems as they would be in a pure microkernel implementation. This is important in Mac OS X because of the wide variety of subsystems implemented on top of Mach (and, by extension, on top of BSD): Cocoa, Carbon, the Java Virtual Machine, and even Classic.

Also, if you take a look at your own link, you 'll see that OS X is has Mach as its primary ancestor, and OS X Server had NeXTStep (and BSD by extension).
Art Ar Home

A/UX sucked so bad I can still smell it 10 years later. I used it on a IIci back in 90-91 finishing up a masters thesis. I have mercifully forgotten most of that experience.

More reboots required even than NT 3.5.

The ars article (link) discusses boot time a little -- claims that it is not so important. But if you have EVER waited for the mac OS to boot so you could boot the ridiculously slow A/UX kernel than you might agree that boot time is important. I can still remember that slowly creeping status bar from hell. I shudder to think ...

Not only that, but A/UX was a very much frontal lobotmized unix. Of course that was back in the days before autoconf, so extensive hacking was required to get A/UX to compile *anything*. OS/X can at least handle a symbolic link.

On the other hand, if we let our memory get a little fuzzy we can say that it was a good thing, and maybe OS/X will take where it needed to go.

QuickTime performance remains problematic on the G3. I was unable to play even a single copy of the large (588x440) version of the Ruby iMac television advertisement at the full framerate on the G3/400, even on a totally idle system. This movie plays just fine in Mac OS 9 on the same machine. The dual G4/450 does much better, happily playing two copies of this movie simultaneously at full speed on a lightly loaded system. Obviously, the G4's AltiVec unit helps QuickTime playback a great deal, but I'm still puzzled by the poor G3 performance, especially the disparity between playback in OS X versus Mac OS 9. This has been a problem throughout Mac OS X's development, and it's a shame to see that it's made it into the 10.0 release. Is Apple simply giving up on the G3 in favor of G4 optimizations?

In other words, it can't play DVDs yet because it's not fast enough.

I hope this is helpful information for people who didn't see how it could be possible for real-time high-bandwidth operations to play slower on a system with advanced multitasking. Primitive multitasking can get in the way less.

Tim