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The Rules of Thumb For Tech Purchasing
Hugh Pickens writes "Sam Grobart writes in the NYT that buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options because the reality is that most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend, and that means making trade-offs. Grobart puts forward his set of rules for getting the most for your tech dollar when buying computers, cameras, cellphones, data plans, and service contracts. For example, Rule No. 1: pay for PC memory, not speed. 'When buying and configuring a new computer, companies often give the option of upgrading the processor and adding more memory, or RAM. If it is an either/or proposition, go for the RAM,' writes Grobart. 'Processors are usually fast enough for most people; it is the RAM that can be the bottleneck.' Other rules include 'Pay for the messaging, not the minutes,' 'Pay for the components, not the cables,' 'Pay for the sensor size, not the megapixels,' and 'Pay for the TV size, not the refresh rate.' Kevin Kelly expands on Grobart's rules of thumb with 'Pay for the glass, not the shutters,' 'Pay for reliability, not mileage,' and 'Pay for comfort, not for weight.' Any others?"
Read TFA, not TFS.
"Decide what you want to do with it, then buy exactly what you need"
It sounds stupid, but you have no idea how many people buy a laptop or something without knowing whether they want to run high-end games or just use it for browsing the internet and then they end up with something overly expensive with traits they don't need.
Always buy even numbered versions. eg: iPod Touch v2, iPhone 4, etc.
Most high end brand name desktops already come with "too much" RAM as standard, often 6 or 8GB.
As long as Windows applications are almost universally 32bit, this is pointless. As long as the system has 4GB, the rest is "nice to have for future", nothing more.
Right about CPUs tho, in desktops they range from very fast to ridiculously fast. Laptops, on the other hand, are another story. Cheapest laptop CPUs are pretty puny...
FUCK! I was trying to come up with some of these sayings for open source software, but it just doesn't work.
I started with, "Pay for the FreeBSD, not the Linux". But FUCK, that doesn't work. You don't have to pay for the FreeBSD! It's already free!
Then I tried, "Pay for the LLVM, not the GCC". But FUCK, that doesn't work, either! LLVM is free, too!
Finally I tried, "Pay for the Python, not the Ruby". But FUCK ME AGAIN, that doesn't work. Python is totally free.
FUCK.
NO. The Space Nutters keep telling me how people will just line up miles-long for a chance to go for a 15 minute sub-orbital hop at 15000$ a pop. People have so much money these days!
The summary claims that one rule is to pay for more RAM over better processor. That sounds like poor advice for at least three reasons: 1) RAM can usually be user-upgraded later, while the processor usually can't be; 2) RAM is cheaper than the processor; 3) some OEMs overcharge for RAM upgrades (cough, Apple). Plus, it is dubious to claim processors are usually fast enough for most people. All told, whoever offered that suggestion wasn't thinking very soundly.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
For desktops, always use an SSD as your OS/Applications drive.
For casual photographs: Buy the smartphone with a cutting edge camera. You'll have your phone with you more often than a camera.
For tvs: size first, then black levels, then refresh rates. You can safely ignore the rest.
It really disturbs my essence how proud some people are that whilst they're making 50k a year instead of a quad-core they'll buy a celeron and say how it's good enough. Then they'll brag about it for 5 years... "well you might've wasted $200 on an X6 but I don't actually need performance so I've spent 5 years on a celeron, and the $50 I saved is now $55 when you consider compound interest, impossible that you've gotten 5 years of better times than me with your lack of $55" ,
Really I do dislike people who think they saved $50 by using a POS for half a decade... cant they possibly conceive of themselves getting more than $10 per year additional value out of something 3x faster.
So an Atom with 16GB RAM > an i5 with 4GB RAM?
(just taking the given statements to an extreme)
Basically you need to balance performance, not lean heavily towards either side
#1 rule, no matter what you buy. Plasma vs. LCD, car vs. SUV vs. truck, laptop vs. desktop, handgun vs. rifle vs. shotgun, or even rent/lease vs. own.
If you don't know your real requirements for a purchase, then you're just shooting in the dark, or have already made up your mind based on peer pressure. The best example of sheer peer pressure/brand pushing can probably be best summarized within 80% of Apple sales. The other 20% actually know what they're buying and actually need it.
Unless you plan to watch 3D
"Don't buy a house more than 3x your annual income."
Probably could have saved us some troubles back there.
I started with, "Pay for the FreeBSD, not the Linux". But FUCK, that doesn't work. You don't have to pay for the FreeBSD! It's already free!
These people will happily let you pay for FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Foundation has just paid for some of my work, so I'm pretty sure that it is possible to pay for FreeBSD.
Then I tried, "Pay for the LLVM, not the GCC". But FUCK, that doesn't work, either! LLVM is free, too!
XCode 4 includes LLVM and Apple will let you pay for it. Some of that money goes to funding LLVM development. If you need extra features added to LLVM, I (and others) will happily give you a quote.
Finally I tried, "Pay for the Python, not the Ruby". But FUCK ME AGAIN, that doesn't work. Python is totally free.
I currently have a contract that is paying me to hack on Python, so I can assure you that it is possible to pay for Python.
FUCK
I've not tried, but I'm pretty sure you can pay for that too...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend,
So, who is dealing with an infinite amount of money?
Simple. For software, pay for the support+license, not the license.
.sig withheld by request
Shop Electronically, Buy Locally. Do the research at home and take it with you to brick-and-mortal stores. If worse comes to worse, Buy Electronically, Return Locally. By doing this mistakes are easily corrected.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Of course that may not be what floats your boat...
On computer my rules would be
1: Unlike the articles author I wouldn't worry too much about the initial ram beyond making sure it's at least 3GB (should be standard on most machines now) but I would worry about the max supported ram and would not buy any machine where it was less than 8GB. A releated point is to check whether windows is 32-bit or 64-bit and what the manufacturers policies are about switching from one to the other (without buying a whole new copy of windows).
2: try to get the latest generation. Generally with the way intel is doing their pricing at the moment the lastest gen offers the best bang for buck and is also likely to have the highest ram support (see point one) and is most likely to have support for future operating systems.
3: if buying a portable then the difficult to measure stuff like build quality and form factor are just as important if not more so than the headline specs.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Pay for the protection, not the clinic.
Old RAM advice is old.
Just do a "free -mto" or open up the perf monitor in taskman.exe . With all your common applications open, if you still have more than a few megs of free memory (instead of cached), then you probably have too much RAM.
These days, I would modify that to say RAM before SSD. You can typically load up on another 8GB+ of RAM for less the the cost of the cheapest SSD, and it will have a more profound effect on the apps you always have open. RAM is still more than 100x faster than even the high-end SSDs, but SSDs aren't necessarily more than 10x faster than a decent cheap hard disk, even with lots of small reads provided you use readahead to preload a lot of your HD data to RAM, and of course migrate /tmp to tmpfs or something.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-readahead-to-speed-up-disk.html
(and for recent Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, etc. your OS is already using readahead to boot fast)
If you never shutdown your laptop or desktop and just put them in and out of suspend, this cache is always maintained in RAM where most of your critical OS and applications never expire from, so you're kinda not benefiting from your SSD as much as you expect anyway. Maybe if you used your SSD for swap, but people don't tend to like to do that ;-)
I usually find that a faster CPU equates to a computer that is useful for a longer period of time before becoming unable to cope with up-to-date apps and OSes.
You can buy more RAM at any point in the machine's life and install it yourself, but that isn't always possible with a CPU.
The golden rule is: don't get a machine that is "just good enough for now": buy some "future" too. Also, don't be an early adopter.
Both are limited, actually. For most otherwise identical computers - laptops especially - there is a very limited range of processors. Until there was an option of getting single or multiple cores, there was often less than a 40% difference in processor performance from the bottom of the options to the top. That was a little skewed when you could get single or dual cores. Now that practically everything new is dual or quad core, and the chips are designed to maximize the speed on a single core when only a single thread is running, the field has compressed again.
RAM, otoh, can often be quadrupled or octupled by the user after the purchase - for less than the difference between processor options adding only 20-25% speed. Nothing makes you hate a laptop like swapping, even if you got the SSD. For a laptop, unless you're going for a "workstation" grade, in which case rules of thumb don't apply, you really don't need top speed on a processor. I have a 1.4GHz single core laptop and I almost never want for more speed. Of course, I've got 8GB of RAM, so I don't even have a swap file. I also don't do my Finite Element work on it, nor do I do much CAD, but I do run several engineering analysis programs on it, view and edit multi-hundred page PDFs, and do minor photo manipulation for reports. I have - and have used - photoshop and premiere on it as well, but again - why would I do my main work there when my desktop has a 4960x1600 3 monitor setup?
As for the work computer - gotta say, I got the middle of the road processor (i7 920) and am upgrading it to 24GB of RAM when the UPS guy stops by tomorrow. Everything I run runs fast enough, but when I get heavy into CAD, photoshop, premiere...I need as much memory as I can muster.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You could buy the most expensive computer but the trade off of power to cpu is pointless with most games... Usually would just buy a good solid mainboard, good ram 4 gig is enough for most things and an entry level graphics card that's good enough to enter into the 3d vision range; cheap enough now days.. You don't have to do much after that other then a 2 or 4 core processor until they come down in price. My Dad purchased a quad core and he only uses it for browsing the web, emails and writing documents.. a waste to tell the truth.. he could have gone for the same mobo and a cheaper cpu. I could have just given them my older amd FX-55 with 3 Gig of ram and he wouldn't notice much difference with most apps. You know what sales people are like.. they would sell the top bollocks computer system to someone who only wants to browse the net if they could.
I have this poster of the movie Trainpotting (1996) on my wall:
http://imagecache6.allposters.com/LRG/%5C7%5C713%5CZYKA000Z.jpg
Note hat it says "Choose fixed interest mortgage repaiments".
If only people had listened.
I also find that most people who do go for the "emotional" buy, rather than the technical buy, will often be reluctant to tell you the real reason they bought something. Usually the sales/marketing material that they quote afterwards is merely an excuse or rationalisation for their decision. Usually the reason people buy tech is because it makes them feel good. Nothing more.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Absolutely.
Basically you need to balance performance, not lean heavily towards either side
No, you just need to know what the fuck you are doing.
Deleted
Readahead is not as fast as SSD, though. You can disable readahead if you have a SSD and get a faster boot. This is especially noticeable on slow SSDs like what's in my EEE 701 4G. Ubuntu(-minimal, I'm not crazy) boot time was cut in half by removing readahead.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's also the bit about MS and its incompetent architecture. I assume that it's been fixed since then, but on 32bit versions of Windows, they claim to support 4gigs of RAM, but apparently that's not really true, the can only address 4gigs, but that includes not just the RAM, but the video RAM as well, meaning that anybody that pays for a full 4gigs isn't going to actually get to use it, and MS documentation is useless as always on the matter.
Which is yet another reason why MS sucks and should be avoided.
Analyze what your needs and wants are. You have reasons you are looking at something, decide what they all are. This can be a mental exercise but if it helps you make a physical list and rank things. Do things like set a budget, I recommend 3 points: A target, a preferred max and an absolute max. List requirements, as in deal breakers if you can't have the features, and list things you'd like to have in order of importance. Basically, get yourself a specification sheet.
Then start doing some research. Find out what best meets your needs that fits in your budget. You can certainly get help, ask friends who are experts and so on. However research what your options are and decide what you would most like.
Also be willing to back down if you can't make it work. If you cannot find anything that meets your requirements and gits your budget, then be willing to say "Ok, I can't have that."
That doesn't guarantee a purchase you love, because nothing does, but it gives you a much better chance. You can also rest easier in your purchase with the knowledge that you probably bought what was best, even if it doesn't end up being perfect. You likely couldn't have done better.
Now I should note I'm not saying do this for every single thing in life. Base it on price. The more it costs, the more considered the decision should be.
When I bought a $20 water filter/pitcher I did no research beforehand, I just went to Target, looked at the options, and got the one I felt was most what I wanted.
When I bought a $600 bicycle I did some research beforehand on the Internet, and brought a friend who is a bike nut with me to the store.
When I bought a $7000 air conditioner, I spent a number of weeks researching A/Cs including who makes them, what matters, what options there are, and solicited bids from about 5 different vendors, all of who I did online background checks on with places like the ROC and BBB.
When I bought a 6 figure house, I hired a professional (real estate agent) to help me out in searching who in turn hired other professionals (home inspector, title search agent) to examine the potential purchase and make sure I was getting what I thought I was.
Tech is no different. If you are getting a cheap clock radio, go ahead and buy whichever one strikes your fancy at a store. If you are getting a $1000 computer, you can spend some time doing some research to see what meets you needs.
It's a hardware problem, not a software problem:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/dude-wheres-my-4-gigabytes-of-ram.html
Just run 64-bit Windows / Linux and you'll be fine.
The rule is "Your mortgage payment should be no more than 1/3rd your pretax income." Turns out to be pretty valid at all levels. Now that doesn't mean you should get one that expensive, just that is the absolute max, you probably can't afford more than that.
I find this statement to be true more for computer monitors than for television screens. Too many people end up with TV screens so large that the individual pixels become annoyingly visible. HD mitigates this, but most channels still use SD.
Pick a TV screen size that's appropriate for your viewing distance, instead of the bigger == better fallacy.
I get that all the time with audio shit. Someone will came and say they want "The best sound system, money is no object." I say ok, and start laying out what in my opinion would be the best sound system money can buy. Generally you are talking in the high six figures, and no that doesn't use anything like audiophile ripoff cable, just extremely high spec speakers, amps, processors and so on.
They always balk at that, of course, and usually it turns out the budget is a few hundred bucks at most, which doesn't even get you a mid range home theater system. However for some reason they decided that they could have, and wanted, "The best." Never mind that even most people who have that kind of money wouldn't want it as the gains get extremely incremental.
Don't buy something you really don't want. Save your money and get the one you really want.
The only rule of thumb should be, have a techie help you if you're not one already.
Ask a guy (who has the knowledge) for technical advice. Could be a complete stranger in the store, it doesn't matter. 99 times out of 100 he'll fall all over himself to guide you through the purchase. It's a "guy thing" constructively interfering with a "geek thing" that creates a local maximum of altruism rarely seen in other contexts.
I have 1Gb of RAM and do just fine. Am I sick?
Yeah, readahead is unnecessary overhead on SSDs... it takes a extra second or two to compile the list of inodes and reorder them to minimize disk head movement, which is completely unnecessary on SSDs so it's a waste of time. But on conventional hard disks, it can boost bulk reads from plodding along at 10MB/s to 100MB/s, which is a bit closer into cheap SSD territory.
Readahead might still be nice for preloading a lot of the desktop, so you're not sitting there waiting for icons to load when you're navigating menus. You should be able to just go into /etc/readahead.d/ and tweak exactly what you want loaded into RAM before and after bootup so it makes sense on your system.
I'm running eeebuntu 3.0 on my eeePC 901 w/ 1GB RAM ... should be a bit better optimized for it out of the box. I am a bit crazy and have it running compiz so I can get all the eye candy, and it actually runs pretty snappily. Biggest change to my habits was running chrome instead of firefox to make web browsing more responsive. Also useful to replace the google earth static 3D libraries with symlinks to the system ones to fix a bunch of UI artifacts.
Dead technologies include IDE drives, PS/2, serial ports, PCI slots, VGA video ports, and CD-only drive bays. They're only useful for legacy components, and adapters or external support components are cheap. Ignore them, they just waste your time and system space.
Watch your power consumption. You may think "I can upgrade my RAM and CPU later if I want", but if you've already added half-a-dozen USB widgets and a spanking new 1 TB hard drive, you may find yourself out of electrical power and cooling for all those upgrades.
And, oh, yes. A pair of big RAM modules is always better than a slew of smaller modules of the same size. Easier upgrade path, easier to find a failure, and likely to take less coolling.
RAM over processor. We're not talking Pentium 90 vs an i7 here. We're talking i7 vs i5. At that level, the difference in processor isn't that big of a deal compared to not having enough RAM.
If, however, you're coming close enough to your RAM limit that you start using swap space on your hard drive, the computer will grind to a crawl. A 7200 RPM drive will certainly help lessen the impact, but the speed difference between RAM and HD is huge. I upgraded my laptop for the first time in about 5 years from a 2GB machine to an 8GB machine. I'm currently sitting here using 5.9 GB of RAM and it's not because I'm doing high end gaming (I'm not). It's just that I'm using a lot of application at once and have about 50 tabs open in Chrome. Helps my work flow. My 5 year old dual core machine would have probably lasted me another 5 years if I could have just put more RAM than 2GB in it.
The point is that lack of RAM is much more detrimental than lack of processor and by maxing out your RAM, you'll get a lot more life out of your machine. Especially with everything moving to 64 bit.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Also, I should add that I'm not saying you need to upgrade the RAM from the OEM. It's simple enough to just upgrade it yourself, but regardless of how much you spend upgrading it, it will be more valuable than the processor speed boost in the long run. It's not like RAM has a never-ending upgrade cap like a hard drive. The mother board has a per-slot limit too so it become no easier to upgrade the ram once you hit the max than it does to upgrade the processor.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Don't buy a house with a MORTGAGE greater than 3X your annual income.
I live in a house valued at £300K. That is almost SIX times my income. So according to your 'rule' I'd be overextended.
However:-
re wording it.
I live in a house valued at £300k. I have a Mortgage of £50K. That is less than my annual income.
See the difference.!
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I say, live within your means in other respects (don't buy ridiculous cars, houses, motorcycles, boozes, home theater systems etc) and if you're the average American, you'll be able to buy almost any computer you want. Think about it: spending $2 grand per year gets you a hell of a lot of computer and software, and that works out to 6% of the average American's income. I dunno about you, but I spend a lot more than 6% of my time on my computer, so it's money well spent.
You actually should look for the best processor/disk/etc BEFORE memory, since RAM is where vendors like to bend you over a counter and rape you. I miss the days where you could buy computers (especially Macs) with 0MB RAM and then fit it yourself.
The only exception to this is where the RAM is soldered onto the system board, like the Macbook Air. Or, if you're exceedingly lucky, you buy from a vendor that doesn't have a one-size-rapes-all RAM pricing policy.
Monitors - Put the money in a quality monitor over the computer. People tend to keep a monitor over the life of several computers. This may be dated, as you can pick up about any size HD monitor you want now for under $200. The next wave should be getting more pixels on those big screens (i hope).
Storage - Buy what you need today, as the price of storage is always falling. Buy more when you need it. Only downside to this rule is the hassle of upgrading drives, and the cost of multi-gig hard drives is getting really cheap. Perhaps today this should be buy the solid state drive that fits your needs if you can afford it, and upgrade when you need more?
Save money on software (use free software, or even resort to piracy)...
Don't scrimp on hardware, unlike software, hardware still generally follows the "you get what you pay for" rule - if you buy cheap hardware, chances are the manufacturer will have cut corners in some way. The only real exception to this, is big name brands like Apple where the brand itself will carry its own markup (although the hardware usually is pretty decent quality too).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Never buy a camera without a viewfinder(with only a screen), especially if you will be using it in bright sunlight! Glass lens elements are better than plastic, and larger diameter lanses are bettrer than smaller.
Most importantly, do your homework! Decide what features you will use, read reviews, download and read manuals. And NEVER EVER BUY (CR)APPLE PRODUCTS! Owning an iPod, iPad, iPhone, iMac, or iAnything does not make you look cool or smart!! It just means you fell for the marketing hype and paid way too much for inferior prodects!!!
For example - "Pay for RAM, not speed. The speed of the computer chip does not matter; the attention-span or RAM memory does matter."
Totally wrong. You can always throw in more ram at a later date, and it will probably cost less to replace all of it than the cost of the "upgrade" today. Upgrading ram on a laptop is even easier than on a desktop, while a cpu upgrade ... forget it. And you'll always find takers for your old ram.
Or "Pay for components, not cables. Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables". While you don't have to pay a monster price for "Monster Cables", some HDMI cables don't meet the latest specs. The difference between those that do and the cheapest may only be a few bucks, and it can't hurt.
Or "Pay for speed, not channels. For cable internet, with enough speed you can watch TV channels on the internet for free." Pay for bandwidth. Speed means nothing if you have a low bandwidth cap. And buying a pair of bunny-ears for your HDTV can give a better picture over the air than either the net OR cable.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
And for those who don't think gas prices will go that high, they already are in many parts of the world (and you can bet that cash-strapped state and federal governments are going to need to raise more taxes).
Think of how many people bought their cars when gas prices were half what they were today. When buying a car today, you have to keep in mind that history tends to repeat itself.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Pay for function, not form.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Pay for the service, not for the content.
Here is the best advice yet, wait for new console releases before buying a computer for gaming and your computer will be able to play 90% of the games released until they come out with new consoles. My computer is ages old but was top of the line when I bought it and I can still play most games on high settings (not ultra high) with a dx9 card.
Yes, but the documentation ought to reflect reality rather than fiction. MS shouldn't claim that XP supports 4 gigs if it doesn't really support it. And it's really not legitimate for somebody to have to go really digging to find out that MS is lying about what they support.
32-bit Linux reserves 1GB of address space for the kernel and hardware too.
..also, 32-bit Linux needs to be recompiled to enable PAE (something off by default on nearly every 32-bit distro)
Please turn in your geek card at the logout button.
"His name was James Damore."
I totally disagree with the "max memory" suggestion. Any damned fool is capable of adding more memory sticks, but upgrading a CPU is much more complicated. 1 - You won't be able to buy an upgraded CPU at anything near the price the manufacturer paid for them in bulk. 2 - Are you SURE the faster (or whatever) CPU is compatible with your motherboard? Your BIOS? 3 - What are you going to do with the old CPU? Give it to the kids to play with?
Nope, if you have any intentions of upgrading your system at all, go with the fastest possible CPU right at the start to ensure everything's compatible. And try to ensure you have some free memory slots. You can always buy compatible memory and add it later.
which refers to a blog that contains this claim:
This is entirely false. The lens size controls how much light enters the sensor and therefore how much light is "soaked up" by the sensor. So, the advice should be: "PAY FOR THE LENS".
All other things being equal, there may be advantages to having a larger sensor, but getting more photons into the sensor is not one of them.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
IMHO nothing beats running a 36 or more conductor twisted-pair 0.05" pitch ribbon cable between your amp and the speakers. Such cable can be often cheaply bought on eBay as products move to smaller pitch or flat assemblies. 3M makes this stuff, others surely do too. Just connect all odd conductors to one terminal, even conductors to the other. The thing has lowest distributed inductance of anything you could economically use to drive speakers, and it dissipates heat very well, too. The slight distributed series resistance helps, too. Nothing like a 1000ft "open box" of 3M twisted pair ribbon :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The whole $500 tablet thing says it all. A tablet really can't fulfill all your needs. Most people who have a tablet also have a cell phone and another PC, most likely a desktop AND a laptop. Sure there are plenty of people without money, but there are spectacular number of people with quite a bit of money. People always complain that they don't have money, and then they have to pay for their cable, internet, cell phone, air conditioner, two cars, and many other things that didn't even exist, or nobody had 50 years ago.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Let me fill in step 2 for you: "Masturbate on Steve Jobs' picture"
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
Think of how many people bought their cars when gas prices were half what they were today. When buying a car today, you have to keep in mind that history tends to repeat itself.
Indeed. I think most people estimate fuel cost based on current prices. That's shows ignorance of economics and history. Unless you are planning to keep your car for only a very short time, you can bank on gas prices being substantially higher when you sell the vehicle than they are today. When I bought my civic early in 2006, I estimate average fuel prices over the 10 year span I expected to own the vehicle at $5/gallon. Current prices were about $2.50/gallon. I am now thinking my estimate was a bit low but not so far off that the hybrid would have been a better deal. I just don't drive that much.
Pay for anything else, not the extended warranty.
It's $200K per flight, and if you were referring to the deposit, it's $20K, not $15K. We're both going to die of old age, QA, but I'll have had way more fun along the way.
Psh - active studo reference monitors, connected to your high quality mixing board via XLR cables. :P
Pay for any other brand, not for Sony.....
on conventional hard disks, it can boost bulk reads from plodding along at 10MB/s to 100MB/s, which is a bit closer into cheap SSD territory.
Realistically though, you're not getting anywhere near 100MB/sec out of a typical or even an enthusiast-level hard disk that will be installed in a desktop system; you're going to need a RAID of some fairly decent drives to do that with winchester disks. You could maybe achieve it with as few as two disks if you were very lucky but realistically it will take three very fast disks to do 100MB/sec sustained, even for ordered reads. I've never got any of my (admittedly much slower than the hottest hotness) 7200 RPM disks, either ATA133 or SATA or SATA-II to do any more than about 25MB/sec sustained sequential reads in a real world test, that is, on a system running more than the kernel and actually dealing with a filesystem and not just the raw device. I would be shocked if most users' readahead was occurring at more than 25MB/sec even with 10k spindles. Since the system is doing nothing but readahead while that is occurring, a RAID user or a user with a very fast disk with few platters that has low seek time, especially with a reordering defragment which puts the most-needed files for boot at the beginning of the volume like even Windows XP does is probably experiencing a delay in boot time when using readahead. Of course, they are far in the minority. I have it disabled only on my EEE701, which has the only SSD in the house... and of course there's no readahead on my Debian Dockstar, which is booting from an older Sandisk USB2 4GB (one of the slidey flashey ones) which has agonizingly slow writes... and the reads are none too fast either.
Holy run-on sentence, batman. Too lazy to fix it though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Windows (at least XP) supports PAE under a different name actually, though you do have to turn it on (a setting in the boot.ini file iirc), and there's a different artificial limit MS put in to keep people from running high RAM servers off a cheap version of windows.
Also, the memory limit includes the graphics card. So you can lose a fair bit more than the first 512MB if you don't do this.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I'm on a Pentium M 1.8Ghz machine now that I was about ready to throw out. I got curious and checked the RAM and there was only 512MB. I thought I had bought it with more than that, but my memory was pretty bad, obviously. Upgraded to the max 2GB and have breathed another couple of years of life into the machine.
I'm a "computer guy" so I knew that RAM made a difference, but I hadn't ever experienced a RAM only upgrade that showed SO MUCH improvement. I run the network simulation tool GNS3 and it would not run at all before. Now I can have several routers running OSPF, BGP, etc. while I write Python scripts to poll them or whatever and it all works great.
Preaching to the choir here (you'd think), but spend the money on RAM, not a couple hundred MHz.
A lot of the software that ships with computers is an unnecessary expense, maybe you already have a license for that software, or maybe there is free software that is equivalent or better for the given situation.
Among the most reliable vehicles on the road are the Toyota Prius, and the various BMW and VW Diesels, all of which have good or very good fuel consumption. In the past, high MPG went with small engines and bottom-end gearboxes which were cheaper and less well made than the more expensive ones further up the range. Now it's likely to be the mid range powertrains that are older designs and less reliable, while the most modern and high spec powertrains also use less fuel.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I dunno about this. Anything above 4 GB has limited benefit for most users. And it's easier to add more RAM later than it is to replace the processor.
MobileMe is worth it for people who are concerned about their iPhone being lost or stolen. I also use the iDisk and the bookmark synchronization.
Sent from my iPhone
Pay for the resolution, not the screen size. 1920x1080 at 21" is the same as 1920x1080 at 27", but with poorer image quality (less pixels/inch).
1) Boot up in linux
2) use dd to copy over MBR and partition table
3) for each partition on source disk, mount it and equivalent partition on target disk, copy all contents, unmount
4) reboot, repartition any free space on the new disk
If you're using lilo or something else that can't handle stuff moving around, just use dd to copy everything in one step without mounting the devices. This is less efficient in that it will copy the free space as well, but the target will be an exact copy of the source.
OK, so you read Slashdot and you think you need a water cooled i7 with 16G of RAM and two Nvidia cards (More power than an NSA Cray), but you game on a console? So is this just for some testosterone laden bragging rights? It makes no sense for anybody to pay more than $500.00 for a PC, I do some pretty interesting things with an Asus b202 and an Asus Celeron M powered netbook.
When you puff up your chest and ball up your Cheeto stained fingers into fists and thump your tiny hairless chest and proclaim that you need this power for **, remember millions of people get by with way less just fine.
And, YES, I'm agreeing with you!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Unless you have somthing "special" in mind, don't waste your money (a big bank account is much better than a big monitor). Buy somthing you can live with for three years, older than that you can get for almost nothing on Ebay/Craigslist. For most people $500.00 is plenty for a decent (New) PC.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Pay for the lap dance, not the bed.
You pay for a hooker for an hour, and 20 minutes in you're not interested any more.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
FUCK
I've not tried, but I'm pretty sure you can pay for that too...
Um pay for the condom, not to prevent your dick turning green and falling off, or you dying.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
XCode 4 includes LLVM and Apple will let you pay for it.
Actually, no. XCode 4 is free. Yes, you need a Mac to run it, but it's a free download for anyone who registers (again, for free) to be a developer.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Not anymore. I just registered as a developer for free (using this page) and when I try to download Xcode 4, I see the following message:
You must be an iOS or Mac Developer Program member to download Xcode 4 or you can purchase Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store.
So, it's 99 bucks a year if you want the latest tools. So long, Apple - I remember the days when you used to make it easy for developers to support your platform.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
"Pay for hookers, not wives." It pays off in the end as you'll probably end up paying for kids if you opt for the wife option.
On my desktop system, I routinely read data from disk at more than 20MB/sec on a live system when burning DVDs. This isn't exactly your 25MB/sec claim, but it's the most disk-intensive thing I do, and it never breaks a sweat.
The only thing I do special when burning DVDs is limit the process to one burning process per spindle, since a single head assembly obviously can't keep up with more than one such process.
Otherwise, things chew along just fine according to the monitoring tools I sometimes gawk at when burning DVDs. I get similarly good results over the network, from a Samba share on an old Athlon box. (None of these disks are particularly new, some are downright old, and none were particularly awesome when they were new.)
Sometimes, I'll even burn three DVDs at once, each from their own spindle, and things just collectively *shrug* and plod along without complaint.
Interestingly, the biggest improvement I've made in desktop Windows performance in years was something very simple, and quite by accident: I was running low on space, and added another hard drive. I then made an effort to move much of my largest software over to it, to free up space.
The improvement in speed was completely unexpected, and was in the leaps-and-bounds category of improvement. Just freeing up the system drive from the burden of dealing with $giant_ass_program made this old Q6600 feel like a new machine, across the board.
The extra disk was free-ish (I was able to just shuffle some hardware around to free it up).
Unfortunately, this has made me a believer in using a proper SSD for desktop use, since I can now clearly see just how limiting a common hard disk can be in common use.
Kid-proof tablet..
XCode 3.x is free (and also contains the latest version of LLVM / Clang, but not such nice integration - it doesn't use it for syntax highlighting or autocompletion, I think). XCode 4 is $4.99 on the Apple App Store, or included if you pay $99/year to be on the developer program.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, you can get MobileMe services elsewhere for free, and they work better.
However, I can trust Apple to keep my data private, and not sell it or give it away to third parties - I pay them for services, I have a contract, I can sue them if they violate it.
Gmail is great, but they explicitly tell you they mine it for data, if only to target their ads. If that information leaks out somehow, or is given out intentionally, you have no recourse. Don't know about their calendar.
Privacy or convenience - your choice.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You made my day. I about fell out of my chair laughing.
Due to the complex current voltage impedance of any dynamic speaker system, there is no ideal speaker cable impedance. The best speaker cable quite literally is NONE.
For good bandwidth from my mixer to your speaker a transmission line terminated into it's impedance will give a flat response. This practice is used for everything from CAT5 cables terminated in 120 ohms to XLR cable terminated in about 200 ohms.
A very short wire between the amp and speaker is the best solution to the speaker wire issue. A powered studio monitor is the obvious solution. The next best solution is an amp with less than 6 feet of wire between the amp and speaker. The amp should be fed with a proper balanced low impedance cable. RCA cables don't cut it. There is no such thing as a consumer cable with an impedance of 47K ohms to properly match the input impedance of the consumer grade amp. 47K RCA is for short consumer grade patches only.
Using a high capacitance woven speaker cable is one trick used to add capacitance to a speaker wire so the cable impedance with the many twisted pairs has a lower total impedance much less than the typical 100-300 ohm impedance of most single twisted pair cables. Unfortunately due to the complex impedance of a speaker, this solution is not a proper match at most frequencies. I suppose it would be OK to use the wire, but only for short runs.
Do most people place an amp within a few feet of their speakers? Most do, so the speaker wire issue is trivial. With the proper equipment, the response of any cable can be measured with a complex impedance load. Unfortunately most high end cable is sold with nobody having any idea of how much the quantitative improvement really is.
Save money on the wire. Remote the amps and buy better speakers with the savings. The bang for the buck is measurable.
The truth shall set you free!
The big (3) improvements:
- 2nd CPU core. I now consider this a must-have, even if the multi-core CPU is slower per-core then a single-core CPU. Every time I use a single-core machine, I'm reminded just how bad WinXP is at scheduling. (Ubuntu isn't as bad, but that 2nd core still really helps a lot.) It's also why I haven't picked up a netbook yet, dual-core is a must-have for me.
- Enough RAM to run everything you need to without swapping. For WinXP users, that's generally in the 1-2GB range. The office machines that we bought a few years ago all ended up with 2GB with room to improve them to ~3.5GB (32bit WinXP). For me personally, 1GB was way too tight and I'm much happier with 3GB where I can keep things open.
- SSD. For an older laptop, this can breathe even more life into an aging system if you do a lot of task swapping / file manipulation. My work laptop (3.5 years old, dual-core, 3GB, Thinkpad T61p) was on its last legs this year because the hard drive was just such a bottleneck. So I dropped a SSD in and suddenly it's a lot more pleasurable to use. Now that the 128GB SSDs are under $200, I don't ever plan on using an old-style rotational drive as the primary drive in any new systems. Use the SSD for the OS and primary data, use rotational drives for bulk storage. (The Thinkpad has the advantage that I can swap out the optical bay for a 2nd SATA drive.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
That's Apple and Apple hardware is not indicative of the rest of the personal computer world. It's ridiculously marked up PC components. You get more for your money when you buy PC components.
Do some research first. The same CPU bump at Dell is practically the same price ($270)
The problem is not Apple (or Dell), it's buying pre-built vs. building your own.
I'm not sure telling people that they should swap out Internet for the cable box as a TV source is all that wise.
In the US you have Netflix at least.
One can't get news and sports on Netflix. See further thoughts on the issue collected from a previous Slashdot discussion.
In a typical Windows environment, where 90% of apps are going to be 32-bit apps, no single app can use more than 2 GB.
We've come a long way from the Windows 9x days of multiple applications sharing a single "system resources" cap. If each open document runs in its own process, each document gets its own 2 GB cap. Google Chrome, for example, uses this model of a process per tab. So does Windows Notepad. Your antivirus is likewise a separate process. What kind of applications need more than 2 GB for a single task?
I started with, "Pay for the FreeBSD, not the Linux". But FUCK, that doesn't work. You don't have to pay for the FreeBSD! It's already free!
The saying you were looking for may have been "Pay for the hardware that has working drivers under FreeBSD, not just Linux or Windows."
Also when making tight ends meet, "Pay for a P.C., not a Mac."
if you still have more than a few megs of free memory (instead of cached), then you probably have too much RAM.
Unless you're planning for a future service pack of your operating system, antivirus, web browser, etc. to use more RAM than the current version. How much more RAM does Windows XP Service Pack 3 use compared to Windows XP RTM?
If you never shutdown your laptop or desktop and just put them in and out of suspend
Unless your laptop only holds a charge for a couple days while on suspend.
Shop Electronically, Buy Locally.
I tried this a few times. But once I decided on a product, I ran into a case where no local retailer even carried the make and model that I decided on (Nokia N900 or Archos 43). And I've never managed to find a retailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that can match Monoprice's prices on cables.
The problem with matched impedances (for analog interconnect cables, not speaker cables) is that the system becomes more vulnerable to RFI. Keep the driving and transmission line impedances low; in most audio situations it's more important than matching and easier to achieve.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I'd say that 100MB/sec for ordered reads or writes on a single consumer HDD with filesystem is actually realistic. For example, I can copy large files between my workstation (Windows 7) and my server (FreeBSD, Samba) at 100MB/sec. Admittedly, the filesystem on the server (UFS2) is only 30% full. The disks in both systems are modern 7200rpm devices: WD Caviar Blue 640GB and a random Samsung 1TB HDD. Both systems use AHCI capable (onboard) controllers. If you can't get more than 25MB/sec sustained from your hardware, it must be really old or something else is wrong.
You're twisting my words. I only claim that if you want to get most bang for the buck and have to run any appreciable length of cable to your speaker, use a surplus twisted pair ribbon. RFI-wise it's the next best thing to having a fully shielded cable, and it also has the lowest possible inductance that you can get without resorting to impractical things (impedance matching with a speaker, haha). I stand by this statement. People often run silly stuff like a pair of #18 "speaker wire" between their amp and the speaker, and that's just sad.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
1) Make a list of requirements. All but one must exist and be mature technology.
2) Wait 1,5 years and buy it for cheap.
3) Profit!
Pay for blowjobs, not pussy. Any old bitch will fuck you but they have to be in love to give you the BJ.
Has anyone already reminded of the simple fact, that paying for the brand name is a waste of tons of money?
Take any big-brand product, a PC or a track suit, they all are still made in the same sweat shops as is the no-brand thingy.
Never had a brand PC that "just works". Build it yourself or ask a friend that can.
You think there is any difference in the signal the loudspeaker driver receives because it goes through little wires separately insulated instead of little wires all together? Now that's silly stuff. I'll get out the signal generators, the 20MHz data acquisition card, and the laser interferometer to measure the speaker transfer function, and you bring your magic wire and I'll just use coat hangars as speaker wire. I would say we sum the differences using a comparator, but the right and left channel of the best amp would have differences in tolerance a magnitude greater than the difference between the speaker wires.
Used and at least 1 generation behind. Maximum tech for the smallest buck.
Instead of $725 for a 32" bedroom TV I spend $298 for a demo model LG 32" 720p. Plus I gained rs232 control so my crestron can control it.
Instead of an iPad 2, used iPad 1 for 1/2 the price. I get all the goodness and dont care about not having a camera. I can buy a pocket camera for the money saved that will utterly kick the arse of the built in ipad camera. oh and I dont look like a dork taking a photo with it.
The fools buy new.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have this weakness too. One trick I learned (accidentally stumbled onto) in order to deal with it, is as I add computers to the house, think really hard about a certain computer in a certain room, and say, "That is my e-peen." Then think about the computer I need to add, and remember, "This isn't my e-peen; I have a different box for that," which frees me up to match the capabilities of the computer I'm building up to what I'll be doing with it. This is what let me buy the Atom frontend and the Athlon II server, instead of getting all Corei[57]|Phenom II.
The best part about this, is that the e-peen computer doesn't even need to exist. For the last 2-3 years the e-peen has been the computer that I'm getting "in a month or two, whenever I get around to it." I keep Osbourning myself, and since my e-peen is imaginary, it is always the latest and greatest stuff. It's never obsolete, and I never facepalm over a $100 CPU coming along that is just as good as the $300 CPU I bought 6 months ago.
Meanwhile, the Atom-ION box chugs along and serves up the video to the family every day, and it never disappoints any more than the imaginary e-peen. Whenever I think about something it can't do well, I just remember, "Well, this box isn't intended for that particular job..." And yet it remains the computer I use every day.
Vendors way overcharge for RAM. Apple is a prime example. Do a RAM upgrade at the apple store to a standard package and it's way more expensive than you can buy the ram on newegg or something. I am more concerned about how much RAM you can upgrade to in a computer.
I'd say that 100MB/sec for ordered reads or writes on a single consumer HDD with filesystem is actually realistic. For example, I can copy large files between my workstation (Windows 7) and my server (FreeBSD, Samba) at 100MB/sec.
I can't find a real-world sequential read benchmark for your disk over 80MB/sec, and that's a raw benchmark, not an application benchmark. I don't believe you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you wish to either calculate or measure the impact of moderate to long speaker wire, here is a good place to start.
The inverse of the damping factor of an amplifier (measurable) is the output impedance.
http://www.transcendentsound.com/Transcendent/Amplifier_Output_Impedance.html
A good amp has a typical output impedance of under 0.01 ohms to maintain the waveform to the speaker even though the impedance of the speaker varies. The damping factor is important to control of the speaker cone motion.
Here is a copper wire table. The resistance given is for a single conductor. Due to the entire length of a speaker wire being in series, a 50 foot speaker wire for example contains 100 feet of wire resistance.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/wirega.html
Note that 12 gauge wire has resistance of 1.588 ohms/1000 feet. A 50 foot speaker wire would then contain 100 feet of conductor length for a resistance of 0.1588 ohms, or about 15 times the speaker damping factor.
On the other hand a 5 foot length of 18 awg wire is 0.06385 ohms.
The short cheap small gauge speaker wire outperforms the larger gauge longer wire. Short is best. Inductance is a function of length. Again short is best. Capacitance is a function of length, dielectric, conductor size, and spacing. Again short is best.
The resistance listed is for the conductor Resistance and does not factor dielectric losses, inductance or distributed capacitance. These factors are cumulative. Cutting the 50 foot 12 gauge wire down 5 feet now puts the wire on par with the amplifier impedance with a resistance of 0.01588 ohms. A comparison of the signal at both ends of the 100 foot speaker wire will provide measured differences in input verses output even when only resistance loss is accounted for. It is true most people won't even notice the difference in a blind test. As speaker wire runs become longer and smaller (cheaper) speaker wire such as 16 or 18 gauge, the difference becomes quite significant.
This shows the advantage of remote amps with a 200 ohm input resistive input impedance and a short speaker wire instead of a central amp and long speaker wires.
If all you play is modern top 100 compressed stuff destroyed by the loudness war, then yes the sound system improvements is wasted money. It's all rock and roll and a cheap set of speakers will do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
You can't get back the sound engineered out of a recording.
When you make wire claims, please provide measurable factors. This is Slashdot. news for Geeks. Science is spoken here sometimes.
The truth shall set you free!
For computer power supplies: pay for amps across +12V rails, not total watts.
"Always buy the second cheapest Sony." Or maybe it was, "Always buy the second most expensive Sony." Can't remember...
I'm afraid it really is so. Here are some screenshots to prove it.
Downloading a big file
http://lux.student.utwente.nl/~pyotr/dump/hddspeed.png
Uploading a big file
http://lux.student.utwente.nl/~pyotr/dump/hddspeed-up.png
Destination disk is
ada0: ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
I can assure you FreeBSD does not do write behind caching (well it does, but only 1MB or so). Windows probably does.
Well, shiver me timbers. Anyway, I am too lazy to check to see what I said above, but are those sequential reads? What we need is reads with forward seeks only (assuming a lack of reordering, which may not be a safe assumption.) ... but not sequential.
Still very impressive. I wish I had a faster disk but these are not especially modern disks nor are they especially fast disks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, thats sequential. Obviously with forward seeks or seeks of any kind, performance will diminish. Still I suppose if you could put everything that is needed for booting on the first 100MB of the disk, you could read it in about a second... I'm speculating here, but perhaps someone might write a boot cache that does a trace of an actual boot and caches all those data blocks in order somewhere on the disk. That should speed things up significantly.
Well, XP relocates stuff to optimize boot... :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whoops! Since my last download, I joined the developer program. Forgot about the change.
Of course, you realize it's only five bucks to download it if you're not in the program, right? I think five bucks still qualifies as "easy" for most developers.
The CB App. What's your 20?
My bad. I downloaded version 3 some time back, finally joined the iOS developer program, and then just the other day downloaded version 4 without thinking about it. I forgot that it's $4.99 for non-paying developers. My bad.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I do like that part, but do you get free upgrades? Do you have to purchase it again every time a new version is released? How many versions are released each year?
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Well, I guess that remains to be seen, but remember, there's a ceiling on the cost: if they release a new version every five minutes and charge $5 for every +0.001 version release, then the thing to do is join the developer program. I think $99 a year also qualifies as "easy" for any developer who plans on actually releasing product.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I wasnt thinking about it like that.
Read Consumer Reports. (or the industry equivalent)
Is it really this hard?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.