You aren't that much of a wonk to record gas purchases. I do the same in a little notebook in my car. I take it and calculate the fuel economy on a near monthly basis and it lets me know if there's something wrong with my old '93 Nissan Altima.
It's really a quick and a smart thing to do and I encourage everybody to do it. Your fuel economy will be one of the first warning signs that your car is developing a problem. If that drops it's time to take the car to get looked at. Just a little time to save major money on repairs later. And if you go to sell your car you have a record of its health.
I can't speak on the newer cars around since I drive a '93 Nissan Altima. My milage is good, averaging around 30 mpg. I have no idea what the EPA sticker is for that year, but most people that have older Altimas in decent shape seem to get near that. Given that many new cars appear to have 28 mpg for highway driving I'd say I'm doing pretty well.
I'd have to say that the biggest part of keeping my fuel economy up is keeping my car in good shape though. I had the muffler on my car die recently, the pipe basically decided to rust off the muffler body. I noticed a little bit of noise, but the pipe was still in the muffler and they were both connected to the car so nothing looked out of place. The big tip off that something was really wrong was the reduced fuel economy. Took it in to a trusted mechanic, got it fixed, and the mpg was back to where it should be.
Also, keep your tires inflated to where they should be. I'm told this is the best way to increase fuel economy.
If the machine isn't doing much besides serving up files there's a good chance that you won't need to move the RAID out of software, as there's likely plenty of CPU to go around for those purposes, especially if it's not doing RAID 5, though I suspect it'd be alright even in that instance.
As far as I know, the RAID cards are there for when the machines are doing more than just moving files about a network, such as databases or any other server that pounds on disks and does some amount of (fast) processing. Well, also the EIDE and SATA RAID cards provide enough places to put disks to actually do RAID as well. But, unless you've got a heck of a lot of bandwidth you probably can't produce web requests fast enough to tax your processor.
Also, depending on the chipset on your mobo it may not present that great of an advantage to move to the hardware raid. Some of them move a lot of the processing to the CPU instead of doing it themselves, so there's little difference. Also, the onboard ones rarely support anything more than RAID levels 0, 1, 10, or 0+1.
RAID 6, at least according to all sources I've found, requires 2 extra drives, so 4 is the minimum number it'll run on.
I've been toying with the idea of getting a serial ATA RAID 5 card for a bit, putting maybe 4 or 5 largish drives in, and having a bit of peace of mind since my backup routine for my own stuff is a bit lacking most of the time. I have accounts on a few machines and put important stuff multiple places, or on CD or DVD, but for anything not deemed critical I generally don't. It's a bad policy and I'd like to protect myself from that a bit.
Multiple drive failures are really, really uncommon. Still, I'd hate to be the sucker who thought it was impossible. I'd still keep anything critical well backed up. Like I've said, I've seen it happen and somebody would have been fired if not for nightly backups.
Also, I think I've heard that while RAID 5 is slower than RAID 0 it is still typically faster than single drive performance due to multiple disk access. Supposedly having a dedicated card helps, and I'd tend to believe that especially if a system were under load.
True about RAID 6, though I was trying to stick with relatively common RAID levels, 0, 1, 5, 10, and 0+1. I've never once actually held a RAID 6 controller in my hands.
Two disk is rare under cases where the disks aren't all from a bad batch, and even then the individual drives stress differently and fail at different times. Again, I've actually worked on a machine that had a second drive fail, the whole RAID 5 array lost as the hot spare tried to rebuild the set. However, I've not heard firsthand of anybody else who's had this trouble. Usually one would expect the drives to fail more than minutes apart.
I'm not debating that, I'm just pointing out that the AC I originally responded to stated that 2 drives going down in a RAID 5 would cause problems, as though it were an attack on RAID 5. This is to which I had to retort that it'd be little better in a RAID 1 situation.
Anyway, I fully agree, the probability is very low if we're speaking of normal, random failures. I've worked on a machine that had it's RAID 5 set go kablooey due to a bad set of disks though. IBM support figured the extra activity of rebuilding a hot spare sent a second drive over the edge before the spare was rebuilt, killing all the data. Not to mention situations like fire, misplaced commands, hacks, etc. Backups are still essential.
Okay, but I did say semi-common. I can't think of a place where I've seen such a RAID level 6 purchasable off the shelf. It's the sort of thing that I'd expect in a enterprise situation where downtime, even the most improbable, cannot be tolerated.
RAID 5 cards can actually be had for reasonable prices, eat less space than the other RAID levels, and still allows a single drive to fail.
Okay, so applying a RAID 10 style idea to a big set of drives still gives you storage space losses of 50% and you're still vulnerable to having two disks go down, it just gets less likely that if two go down you'll be in trouble.
With that 6 drive configuration you've got your first failed disk which any RAID save 0 will save you from. Then you have a 20% chance of losing all your data with the next disk. I'll grant it's better than the 100% of a single RAID 5, but ask anybody who gives a damn about their data and they'd still have backups at that rate. 3 disks and there's a 50% chance of losing all your data, remove 4 drives and there's absolute certainty of all your data being gone.
On the other hand you could make 2 RAID 5 sets out of that same set of 6 disks. Then you could lose the first disk, have a 20% chance of losing half your data with a second failure as opposed to all. If we want to speak of outlandish possibilities then the third disk has a 100% chance of killing half your data if you didn't already lose half, but if you did a third disk can't cause more loss, so exactly half is gone here opposed to 50% chance of everything. The fourth could kill the other set, or if for some reason drive 3 in the dead array was still running, not kill the set with a 33% chance.
So, if the disks are marked going to die or not in advance as one would expect, there's a 33% chance of half your data surviving 4 bad disks with 2 RAID 5 sets, and absolute certainty that exactly half your data would survive 3 bad disks. So if we want to do a rundown of how much data you'll have left on average after disk failures based on 2 RAID 5 sets versus a big mirror stripe thing, we have:
1 Disk - 100% data for RAID 5 - 100% data for other 2 Disks - 80% data for RAID 5 - 80% data for other 3 Disks - 50% data for RAID 5 - 50% data for other 4 Disks - 17% data for RAID 5 - 0% data for other
Plus you have an extra full drive's worth of storage space, not bad for the cost of a SCSI drive so typical in business RAID.
So why again would you put 6 drives into 3 mirrors with a stripe? And ugh, I feel like I just over analysed this whole thing.
And if two drives go down in a RAID 1 you're how much better off than in RAID 5? RAID 1 consists of two drives. At least with RAID 5 you'd still have at least one good drive that you could hastily format and use if need be.
The only semi-common RAID I know of that could handle two drives failing at the same time would be RAID 10, A mirrored set of striped drives, and then only if one side of the mirror died.
For your diligence bit, I've actually worked with a machine that had a drive fail in the RAID 5 set and then as the hot spare came online and started rebuilding the data needed to keep the R in RAID another drive died. The whole set was then completely unusable and somebody probably would have been fired if there weren't a set of recent backups around. As it was a couple people got to work about 12 more hours on top of their 8 for the day to make sure the machine was running again by the next day.
Thus my moral, RAID isn't a replacement for backups, as there still can be failures. RAID will reduce the frequency with which you need said backups, hopefully to never, but it can still fail. Nothing replaces a good backup.
Oh, and also another good reason for RAID 5 instead of 1, there should be a bit of speedup since there's multiple disks involved, assuming, of course, your RAID card can handle all the XORs.
I'm not trying to defend it as art, I'm trying to look at this rationally. I can write a proposal to shoot the mayor of city council for artistic purposes. I own guns and I'm sure there's a distant possibility that if I wanted to plan it all out that it could actually happen, were I so determined. However, I am not going to shoot anybody, respect guns and human life, and am a nice law abiding citizen. If I were to write such a proposal I hope they'd not be trying to lock me away and rather opening a file on me and monitoring me to make sure I'm not a huge threat. I'd hope this since a proposal is a tad different than the actual act or even a conspiracy to commit such and act.
I think people are getting way out of hand with the "It could happen" line of reasoning for trying to lock people up. Has this guy released a bunch of mutant flies? Are we in such a position that it'd be a huge disaster if he did? I mean, here we have somebody that's going out of their way to try to get this to qualify as art, big threat. Think for a second if somebody who was a little more stealthy and wanted to do some damage went about releasing mutant flies. Think there'd be warning?
Perhaps an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but if it's so easy for some "moonbat non-scientist self-proclaimed artist" as you put it to do such things, maybe we should be spending a few tax dollars making sure we have adequate response plans, detection of abnormalities to prevent wide spread, and proper equipment to clean up such a mess. Because somebody like this isn't a real threat, the person who you'll find out has such plans after the fact is the real threat. If this guy is so seriously spooky he can be monitored and brought up on charges when he goes to do something illegal, rather than just proposing it.
Seriously, it'd likely be bad if such a thing were to happen, but I don't want to live in a damned police state because a few people get scared about what somebody could possibly do. Monitor the guy and nab him before he does it, but make sure he actually is going to do it before you do so.
Oh dear god, not E. coli! Heavens forbid that somebody should have a bacteria that can be found in every single functioning stomach on the damn planet. Or Serratia, heavens, that isn't found in the soil or in damp areas. It was certainly never used in public schools in experimentation. And Bacillus globigii, I feel faint. Another soil bateria that isn't considered harmful unless you're a chemo patient in terrible shape that's pretty much hospital bound (which makes any bacteria potentially harmful).
What's next, we shut down any lab that deals with the all deadly "microbes" of doom that aren't officially run by the government? Schools will have their doors beaten down and all the petri dishes will be rounded up and taken away? What the hell? Maybe they could round up all the dirt nearby and make sure to take the terrifying E. coli out of people's guts.
And what's so terrifying about proposals to release mutant flies or demonstration that GM crops have vulnerabilities? Should we silence anybody that has the gall to show us that our tampering with food has the possibility to cause problems? Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with GM foods boosting yield and such, but it'd be a bit like somebody publishing a proof of concept that the internet can be destroyed if somebody had the resources to do so. We don't want potential hazards silenced so we can live in lala land and seal our own fates, do we?
I agree that there should be a list of substances which shouldn't be made, and if the gov't finds somebody doing so then prosecute away. I don't think we should really worry too hard about a few nonpathogenic microbes though. They certainly shouldn't be wasting my tax money on charges of having everyday bacteria. Sure, under extremely rare and odd circumstances they might become hostile, but since these bacteria are everywhere anyway that isn't really the point, is it?
I wasn't attempting to say you can't use a multi-button mouse in Mac OS. Hell, Maya requires 3 buttons and runs on Mac OS. It'd be pretty dumb to support that if you couldn't use a 3 button mouse, wouldn't it?
For being accurate, I'm merely pointing out that the right click context menus, a good GUI bit, weren't generated out of Apple, as Apple was long resistant to multi-button mice. My point was that not everything that's good in a GUI is taken from Apple. Instead of latching onto "you can do this now!" focus on the point behind my post, not everything good in a GUI came from Apple. I'm not making a statement about hardware, it's about software, about GUI magic in particular, about the context menu.
And the biggest reason I love multiple mouse buttons is ease in surfing. Look, I'm free to not touch the keyboard and can keep a beverage in my left hand, while opening new background tabs and the like with the middle mouse button.
And just because most Windows users use context menus in inane ways doesn't mean they're without good use. If I have a hand on the mouse it's often faster to use the mouse driven context menu. If I'm renaming a file I'll use the shortcut since I'll have to type immediately afterwards anyway. They're there for efficiency for me.
Still, all of that wasn't my point. I was just pointing to things that weren't "stolen" from Mac OS.
I think the Windows key was a pretty ill conceived idea, along with the context menu key. I never use them. The reason? I can't come up with an idea of where it'd take me less time to hit the windows key and navigate to the program I'd want to open on just the keyboard than it'd take to have my hand leave the keyboard, swing to the corner, hit the start button and find the program and move my hand back as the app starts.
For the second button on a mouse arguement, it means some amount of trouble. Just surfing the web I can have a can of soda in my left hand and lean back and surf with the mouse in the right. This includes cutting and pasting as well as opening new windows or tabs with a single hand. Firefox under Linux (and maybe elsewhere) takes it up another notch by opening a background tab from a link with the middle button.
At least with a Mac one can click and hold to get a context menu, but if I want to open a link for later perusal without interrupting what I'm reading now, that middle button hit is a lot nicer than doing a click, hold for a second, find open in new tab from the list, and going back to the page I was on.
Besides, you can get a multi-button mouse that'll work fine with a Mac. My point was that the very useful idea of multi-button mice and thus right click context menus didn't come from Apple. I point this out as a means to explain that not all good design is "stolen" from Apple.
As for IBM having a grudge against MS, that's certainly plausable, but I'd think that the laptop keyboard is already cluttered enough without having a pair of useless keys added in and that it was a design reason rather than a grudge.
Well, the move to a BSD was a good step for Apple. I won't even try to deny that because it'd be silly to do so. But if I want to run those apps exclusively I'm not gaining anything besides some GUI glitter by switching to Mac OS from Linux. The other way around and you're gaining low cost hardware and an OS that costs nothing. Again, only when you're dealing with the strictly open software.
I mention Final Cut Pro and am kinda taking a half cooked swing at the iApps. I can only name iTunes and iMovie off the top of my head. iTunes has it's music store which I largely don't see the value of and I otherwise found nothing special about it. iMovie is fairly nice, but is superceded by both Premier and FCP on the Mac or Premier on Windows. Linux isn't, as far as I know, a contender in this area yet.
Lack of Adobe is a pain to Linux adoption for some, but that's changing in a hurry. Disney and some others have really pushed for Adobe on Linux and if I remember correctly have put some weight behind emulation for those apps. Macromedia is working to bring Flash and (I think) the whole studio to Linux, through emulation first and then native. Yeah yeah, it's a emulation or future native arguement, I know. It's also a point that's conceded in a Linux vs. Mac arguement everytime, and then apart from FCP there's no convincing arguement for Mac over Windows.
Apart from a few markets it comes down to having a very functional and usable system regardless of the OS you use. So if you're in graphics you can choose Windows or Mac, video editing you only have Mac if FCP means a lot to you. Games you're pretty much stuck on Windows. For most office stuff, coding, or almost anything else you have your pick. So it comes down to how much are you willing to pay for some glitter in those cases. Not that glitter like consistant menus and the like wouldn't be nice in some GNU software...
I was really making a point (which I think you agreed on) that there were good ideas from outside of Apple as well as from Apple, and also bad ideas from Apple as well. I was mainly trying to point out that there isn't this big bad conspiracy to steal everything Apple ever did as the person I was originally replying to seemed to be implying.
But for your points:
I don't care if Apple doesn't like virtual desktops, the seperation of context they provide pretty much makes them the best thing ever for a GUI as far as I'm concerned. I can keep multiple different portions of a project I'm working on open and seperate with ease. In a single mode of thought like writing a paper they may not be necessary, but I've found them useful time and time again.
The mouse comment is more to the point that the right click context menu which many love and cherish didn't come from Apple and they seem to maintain that a click-hold or option-click is good enough, despite adding multi-button support to the OS not all that long ago. Again, not really trying to say it's a problem now, but was in the past to go along with the point of not all good came from Apple.
And the cd or disk to trash still existed in OS X last I checked, and I googled up this which seems to be dated 8/02 and gives dragging things to the trash as a valid eject mechanism. So 2001 wasn't the abandonment of that bad idea. But at least it changes to an eject sign now, so if you have the idea to put something in the trash you'll know it'll eject. So you don't have to resort to 2001 era Gnome or KDE, not that current generations are without problems. The biggest gripe I have is the lack of consistant context menus, especially cut/copy/paste not showing up in some applications even when text is selected.
To get back to the real topic, the transparency, I've always found it difficult to either read the transparent window when the opacity is high or the underlying window when the opacity is low. It may be just my experience or preference, but switching back and forth or cutting and pasting has always yielded better results than transparent windows. This has been especially true for me when text collides. between the two windows. Regardless of whether it's found useful, I still have trouble thinking that it's patentable material.
Like the virtual desktops right? Oh wait, you have to add those in to Mac OS and to Windows if you want them. Yet I'd wager they're the thing I love the absolute most about using X. They're just there, I can make as many as I want, and I don't have to run some crippled power toy version or some third party app to get them.
Don't forget the awesome multiple mouse button support that everybody keeps stealing from Mac OS too. Why, without Mac OS we'd never have context menus so easily accessible by just a right mouse click. Oh, you can't just click a single button without holding it down for a second or two to get those in Mac OS? Crap, another feature that's up on my most used list that didn't come from Apple. Actually, you should be able to now, finally. Just buy a new mouse. And you might have to configure things. But with Job's fantasy that two buttons are too difficult to grasp (though I've provided support for people who fit that categorization) it certainly didn't originate at Apple.
Wait, another great idea that came out of Apple, lets drag disks to the trash to eject them. I'm so happy that other GUIs have copied that too. Wait, they haven't because it's rediculously insane.
See the trend here? Not all good ideas have come from Apple and not all of Apple's ideas are good. Sure, there's some stuff that's been moved from Mac OS into other GUIs, but Apple is by no means the pinnacle of GUI goodness. So no, it isn't really the trend and good ideas can come from anywhere, just like bad ideas. It's an evolution of systems where the best parts eventually end up everywhere, even if it's through some third party app.
And who the hell cares about window transparency besides the cool factor it adds? Yes, I make my terminals transparent, but for the look. Has anybody ever implemented a transparent window that actually did something useful? Is this something that really needs to be covered by patent? If it's "stolen" will it devalue Mac OS so much? Seriously, please let me know what makes window transparency so useful apart from gratuitous glitter to sucker people in as a selling point.
It's also an assinine point to argue that it isn't an intuitive idea to make a window transparent if you really think about it. Do you have opaque windows in your home? Where does the term originate?
I think that's the first time I've ever heard (apart from Final Cut Pro) an arguement that Apple has more applications than another system. If there's one thing that has been a thorn in Apple's side for so long it is the lack of software. I mean, how happy was everybody when Apple got a BSD under the hood so they could finally start running some useful software?
The other claims, besides the GUI bit are insanity at it's finest. But the GUI isn't so terrible that Linux market share isn't rising above Apple's, so it's either something people are willing to tolerate for a better system overall or it isn't much of an issue. I'll vote for the latter, as while Mac OS's GUI is consistant I find it a pain in the neck anyway. I can honestly say I love tools like virtual desktops, customizable window managers, and the option to not have sickly amounts of glitter if I want them, and by default no less.
Different from what the original poster was saying yes, but not different from what's been done. I do agree that most people here have missed the point of the article. However, remember the Voodoo 2s? They worked in parallel rather nicely.
Frankly, though, I could care less about using a pair of cards to crunch graphics faster. I'd rather have more displays. I want PCI express so I can have a quad head setup with all the screens running decently fast. The only way to do this now is with PCI cards which aren't that fast. Actually, I think nVidia made a Quadro4 card that did four displays at decent speed, but it wanted a 64 bit PCI slot. Ah well.
From a non-gaming point I'd rather have more room for stuff than have my desktop refresh faster than it already does. From a gaming point I'd rather have a game that engages me and is fun than have it concentrate solely on graphics to the point it needs two massive cards.
On the other hand, it might allow decent single screen performance on low cost hardware for gaming and switch modes to multi-screen on the desktop. A boost like that would always be welcome, but the article seems a little scarce on details.
Meh, there are plenty of hacks (at the cost of a single extra cycle of latency) that extend memory access out to 48 bits. The problem being you can only have 4 GB pages, but for many, many applications it doesn't matter. For Joe Consumer who maybe, possibly, has 1 GB of RAM right now it's not a big deal. Heck, I haven't seen more than that preloaded into a computer at a retail outlet yet.
Sure, the people that need 64 bit memory access will welcome cheap 64 bit CPUs, but it isn't like 64 bit CPUs have been difficult to find in the past. The availability of cheap 64 bit CPUs will likely hasten their adoption so it isn't a big problem when we really need the extra memory, but that problem is still a good way off for most of us.
I wouldn't exactly say Apple should start fearing, but you're a little too dismissive of MD as a format I think. Despite not having a huge US following it is still popular in many circles, including (around here at least) a lot of the tech people, myself included.
So where to start, old and aging is semi-true in the light of the older players. They store a CD's worth of music at a decent compression, 2-3 at a reasonable compression, which I'd say rivals most reasonable MP3 bitrates, and the 4x mode isn't really worth mentioning IMHO. Okay, fine. But the MD is getting bumped up to double that on the Hi-MD recorders with existing media and 1 GB of space for the new media.
Ooh, 1 GB you say. Well, it is removable media. You know, you can have multiple of these 1 GB MDs and change them? Kinda like CDs, but holding much more. And use the extra space as a removable device. Okay, that sounds pretty nice to me.
Only works on Windows PCs is a bit misleading. At least the traditional MD's have had optical and analog inputs for recording. If I remember right some of the decks had optical output as well. No computer needed. It's convenient (well, kinda, check later in the post) to have a PC, but not necessary.
Haven't mentioned battery life yet. My MD player gets over 40 hours on a single AA. What's the battery life on the iPod again?
I'll be the first to damn Sony for their crappy PC software and nightmarish attempts at copy protection though. The new Hi-MDs will be sufficiently crippled as far as making digital copies of even your own recordings go. The unwillingness to give the users control of their device isn't so nice. Sony is killing the format by making it so restrictive.
Talk about small and light though. Check here for some pics of one of their upcoming players. Tiny! It's hardly bigger than the disc itself.
I'd imagine. Luckily I can still compute on battery power from my laptop.
Coincidentally I can compute with my desktop out of the wall as long as it's still plugged into the UPS. It's nowhere near silent though and that damned beeping from the UPS makes it a little louder than when it's getting wall power, so I tend to run it that way. =D
My Dell Inspiron 8100 is practically silent when it isn't attached to wall power. The processor drops speed and the fans absolutely will not come on when running on battery. The hard drive is pretty quiet too, since I opted for the slower one.
The only time there's really any noise is when it's attached to the wall, but even then the fan only runs every now and then, and allowing speedstep while on the wall would pretty much kill that too if I wanted. The CD drive is a real noise maker, but really, which CD drives don't make whirring noises?
As for silent PCs, I'm looking at the Hush Mini-ITX PC. It uses one of Via's little chips which requires little cooling. The Hush actually uses one that would normally require a fan and heatpipe's it to the chassis. Also, the power supply is a brick like laptops and such use, no fans at all. The only noise that could come from the machine would be the drives, but I've been considering getting an adapter that lets you use Compact Flash as an IDE drive and fetch all data but the OS from over a network. Then there really would be no moving parts.
I'll give you that the install procedure looks complicated, but I've never really had a big issue with it. Gentoo's install guide is pretty top notch, and just following the instructions should get most people a working system, though maybe not all. At any rate, it'll teach a new user a thing or two about the underpinnings and isn't so arcane and odd that it is impossible.
Some of the things that I think would be nice for somebody trying to support a company environment with Gentoo are as follows:
- First, there's compile to binary support, so assuming a fairly homogenous environment (like IT managers like) the needed binary is the same, but the compile from source optimizations are maintained. Client machines get that binary from a central machine. Compile once only. - Second, there seems to be support for distributed compilation via distcc, even in the base install phase. That would speed up the problematic compile phase even further, so now it's compile once on many machines and then deploy. Still looking into this myself, but I'm going to try it this summer. - Third, it can be made incredibly lightweight. You only install what you want on the system. From that point of view it seems difficult to get Mandrake on a box without a slew of stuff you don't want coming with. That fine grain control is very nice in my opinion.
That's not to say there aren't downsides. Compared to Debian, I'm not sure I'd say that the support for absolutely stable is there. Ebuilds are updated pretty frequently (great for desktop usage in my view) which leads to bleeding edge sorts of problems. Sometimes (rarely?) things break with a new ebuild, though it's typically resolved very quickly. Of course, I'm sure Gentoo knows this and if they were aiming to create enterprise versions there'd be some enterprise mask in portage for really stable packages only. Portage already is great as far as dependency checking (or anything package management) is concerned.
Frame rate was always the big thing for me and it definately was for this guy. If the control is at all jerky or laggy then you're going to get your butt handed to you unless you're one of those weird kids that plays via modem only and has thus compensated, and can't play when it's smooth.
I'd say resolution helps, but I've never seen that to be the case. My friend certainly didn't get any better playing on any of our machines which were quite a bit faster, though it would have been difficult to imagine him playing a better game than he did. I don't feel like higher resolution increases accuracy any either. But hey, YMMV. I'd still be curious at the frame rate differences between the two cards you'd been playing on.
The formula for who was going to win with my group of friends generally depended almost solely on who had been playing the most, granted they had hardware sufficient to keep the game smooth. Provided the graphics card was capable of achieving ~50 fps the hardware seemed to make zero difference in our playing.
All of that said, I like playing those games with the detail at full and the resolution fairly high. I just don't think that I'm gaining anything as long as the control is smooth. But that's just me.
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It's really a quick and a smart thing to do and I encourage everybody to do it. Your fuel economy will be one of the first warning signs that your car is developing a problem. If that drops it's time to take the car to get looked at. Just a little time to save major money on repairs later. And if you go to sell your car you have a record of its health.
I'd have to say that the biggest part of keeping my fuel economy up is keeping my car in good shape though. I had the muffler on my car die recently, the pipe basically decided to rust off the muffler body. I noticed a little bit of noise, but the pipe was still in the muffler and they were both connected to the car so nothing looked out of place. The big tip off that something was really wrong was the reduced fuel economy. Took it in to a trusted mechanic, got it fixed, and the mpg was back to where it should be.
Also, keep your tires inflated to where they should be. I'm told this is the best way to increase fuel economy.
As far as I know, the RAID cards are there for when the machines are doing more than just moving files about a network, such as databases or any other server that pounds on disks and does some amount of (fast) processing. Well, also the EIDE and SATA RAID cards provide enough places to put disks to actually do RAID as well. But, unless you've got a heck of a lot of bandwidth you probably can't produce web requests fast enough to tax your processor.
Also, depending on the chipset on your mobo it may not present that great of an advantage to move to the hardware raid. Some of them move a lot of the processing to the CPU instead of doing it themselves, so there's little difference. Also, the onboard ones rarely support anything more than RAID levels 0, 1, 10, or 0+1.
I've been toying with the idea of getting a serial ATA RAID 5 card for a bit, putting maybe 4 or 5 largish drives in, and having a bit of peace of mind since my backup routine for my own stuff is a bit lacking most of the time. I have accounts on a few machines and put important stuff multiple places, or on CD or DVD, but for anything not deemed critical I generally don't. It's a bad policy and I'd like to protect myself from that a bit.
Multiple drive failures are really, really uncommon. Still, I'd hate to be the sucker who thought it was impossible. I'd still keep anything critical well backed up. Like I've said, I've seen it happen and somebody would have been fired if not for nightly backups.
Also, I think I've heard that while RAID 5 is slower than RAID 0 it is still typically faster than single drive performance due to multiple disk access. Supposedly having a dedicated card helps, and I'd tend to believe that especially if a system were under load.
Two disk is rare under cases where the disks aren't all from a bad batch, and even then the individual drives stress differently and fail at different times. Again, I've actually worked on a machine that had a second drive fail, the whole RAID 5 array lost as the hot spare tried to rebuild the set. However, I've not heard firsthand of anybody else who's had this trouble. Usually one would expect the drives to fail more than minutes apart.
Anyway, I fully agree, the probability is very low if we're speaking of normal, random failures. I've worked on a machine that had it's RAID 5 set go kablooey due to a bad set of disks though. IBM support figured the extra activity of rebuilding a hot spare sent a second drive over the edge before the spare was rebuilt, killing all the data. Not to mention situations like fire, misplaced commands, hacks, etc. Backups are still essential.
RAID 5 cards can actually be had for reasonable prices, eat less space than the other RAID levels, and still allows a single drive to fail.
With that 6 drive configuration you've got your first failed disk which any RAID save 0 will save you from. Then you have a 20% chance of losing all your data with the next disk. I'll grant it's better than the 100% of a single RAID 5, but ask anybody who gives a damn about their data and they'd still have backups at that rate. 3 disks and there's a 50% chance of losing all your data, remove 4 drives and there's absolute certainty of all your data being gone.
On the other hand you could make 2 RAID 5 sets out of that same set of 6 disks. Then you could lose the first disk, have a 20% chance of losing half your data with a second failure as opposed to all. If we want to speak of outlandish possibilities then the third disk has a 100% chance of killing half your data if you didn't already lose half, but if you did a third disk can't cause more loss, so exactly half is gone here opposed to 50% chance of everything. The fourth could kill the other set, or if for some reason drive 3 in the dead array was still running, not kill the set with a 33% chance.
So, if the disks are marked going to die or not in advance as one would expect, there's a 33% chance of half your data surviving 4 bad disks with 2 RAID 5 sets, and absolute certainty that exactly half your data would survive 3 bad disks. So if we want to do a rundown of how much data you'll have left on average after disk failures based on 2 RAID 5 sets versus a big mirror stripe thing, we have:
1 Disk - 100% data for RAID 5 - 100% data for other
2 Disks - 80% data for RAID 5 - 80% data for other
3 Disks - 50% data for RAID 5 - 50% data for other
4 Disks - 17% data for RAID 5 - 0% data for other
Plus you have an extra full drive's worth of storage space, not bad for the cost of a SCSI drive so typical in business RAID.
So why again would you put 6 drives into 3 mirrors with a stripe? And ugh, I feel like I just over analysed this whole thing.
The only semi-common RAID I know of that could handle two drives failing at the same time would be RAID 10, A mirrored set of striped drives, and then only if one side of the mirror died.
For your diligence bit, I've actually worked with a machine that had a drive fail in the RAID 5 set and then as the hot spare came online and started rebuilding the data needed to keep the R in RAID another drive died. The whole set was then completely unusable and somebody probably would have been fired if there weren't a set of recent backups around. As it was a couple people got to work about 12 more hours on top of their 8 for the day to make sure the machine was running again by the next day.
Thus my moral, RAID isn't a replacement for backups, as there still can be failures. RAID will reduce the frequency with which you need said backups, hopefully to never, but it can still fail. Nothing replaces a good backup.
Oh, and also another good reason for RAID 5 instead of 1, there should be a bit of speedup since there's multiple disks involved, assuming, of course, your RAID card can handle all the XORs.
I think people are getting way out of hand with the "It could happen" line of reasoning for trying to lock people up. Has this guy released a bunch of mutant flies? Are we in such a position that it'd be a huge disaster if he did? I mean, here we have somebody that's going out of their way to try to get this to qualify as art, big threat. Think for a second if somebody who was a little more stealthy and wanted to do some damage went about releasing mutant flies. Think there'd be warning?
Perhaps an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but if it's so easy for some "moonbat non-scientist self-proclaimed artist" as you put it to do such things, maybe we should be spending a few tax dollars making sure we have adequate response plans, detection of abnormalities to prevent wide spread, and proper equipment to clean up such a mess. Because somebody like this isn't a real threat, the person who you'll find out has such plans after the fact is the real threat. If this guy is so seriously spooky he can be monitored and brought up on charges when he goes to do something illegal, rather than just proposing it.
Seriously, it'd likely be bad if such a thing were to happen, but I don't want to live in a damned police state because a few people get scared about what somebody could possibly do. Monitor the guy and nab him before he does it, but make sure he actually is going to do it before you do so.
I thought about that when I wrote the school bit, but there are, nonetheless, private schools which teach bio. So the statement still stands.
What's next, we shut down any lab that deals with the all deadly "microbes" of doom that aren't officially run by the government? Schools will have their doors beaten down and all the petri dishes will be rounded up and taken away? What the hell? Maybe they could round up all the dirt nearby and make sure to take the terrifying E. coli out of people's guts.
And what's so terrifying about proposals to release mutant flies or demonstration that GM crops have vulnerabilities? Should we silence anybody that has the gall to show us that our tampering with food has the possibility to cause problems? Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with GM foods boosting yield and such, but it'd be a bit like somebody publishing a proof of concept that the internet can be destroyed if somebody had the resources to do so. We don't want potential hazards silenced so we can live in lala land and seal our own fates, do we?
I agree that there should be a list of substances which shouldn't be made, and if the gov't finds somebody doing so then prosecute away. I don't think we should really worry too hard about a few nonpathogenic microbes though. They certainly shouldn't be wasting my tax money on charges of having everyday bacteria. Sure, under extremely rare and odd circumstances they might become hostile, but since these bacteria are everywhere anyway that isn't really the point, is it?
I wasn't attempting to say you can't use a multi-button mouse in Mac OS. Hell, Maya requires 3 buttons and runs on Mac OS. It'd be pretty dumb to support that if you couldn't use a 3 button mouse, wouldn't it?
For being accurate, I'm merely pointing out that the right click context menus, a good GUI bit, weren't generated out of Apple, as Apple was long resistant to multi-button mice. My point was that not everything that's good in a GUI is taken from Apple. Instead of latching onto "you can do this now!" focus on the point behind my post, not everything good in a GUI came from Apple. I'm not making a statement about hardware, it's about software, about GUI magic in particular, about the context menu.
And the biggest reason I love multiple mouse buttons is ease in surfing. Look, I'm free to not touch the keyboard and can keep a beverage in my left hand, while opening new background tabs and the like with the middle mouse button.
And just because most Windows users use context menus in inane ways doesn't mean they're without good use. If I have a hand on the mouse it's often faster to use the mouse driven context menu. If I'm renaming a file I'll use the shortcut since I'll have to type immediately afterwards anyway. They're there for efficiency for me.
Still, all of that wasn't my point. I was just pointing to things that weren't "stolen" from Mac OS.
For the second button on a mouse arguement, it means some amount of trouble. Just surfing the web I can have a can of soda in my left hand and lean back and surf with the mouse in the right. This includes cutting and pasting as well as opening new windows or tabs with a single hand. Firefox under Linux (and maybe elsewhere) takes it up another notch by opening a background tab from a link with the middle button.
At least with a Mac one can click and hold to get a context menu, but if I want to open a link for later perusal without interrupting what I'm reading now, that middle button hit is a lot nicer than doing a click, hold for a second, find open in new tab from the list, and going back to the page I was on.
Besides, you can get a multi-button mouse that'll work fine with a Mac. My point was that the very useful idea of multi-button mice and thus right click context menus didn't come from Apple. I point this out as a means to explain that not all good design is "stolen" from Apple.
As for IBM having a grudge against MS, that's certainly plausable, but I'd think that the laptop keyboard is already cluttered enough without having a pair of useless keys added in and that it was a design reason rather than a grudge.
I mention Final Cut Pro and am kinda taking a half cooked swing at the iApps. I can only name iTunes and iMovie off the top of my head. iTunes has it's music store which I largely don't see the value of and I otherwise found nothing special about it. iMovie is fairly nice, but is superceded by both Premier and FCP on the Mac or Premier on Windows. Linux isn't, as far as I know, a contender in this area yet.
Lack of Adobe is a pain to Linux adoption for some, but that's changing in a hurry. Disney and some others have really pushed for Adobe on Linux and if I remember correctly have put some weight behind emulation for those apps. Macromedia is working to bring Flash and (I think) the whole studio to Linux, through emulation first and then native. Yeah yeah, it's a emulation or future native arguement, I know. It's also a point that's conceded in a Linux vs. Mac arguement everytime, and then apart from FCP there's no convincing arguement for Mac over Windows.
Apart from a few markets it comes down to having a very functional and usable system regardless of the OS you use. So if you're in graphics you can choose Windows or Mac, video editing you only have Mac if FCP means a lot to you. Games you're pretty much stuck on Windows. For most office stuff, coding, or almost anything else you have your pick. So it comes down to how much are you willing to pay for some glitter in those cases. Not that glitter like consistant menus and the like wouldn't be nice in some GNU software...
But for your points:
I don't care if Apple doesn't like virtual desktops, the seperation of context they provide pretty much makes them the best thing ever for a GUI as far as I'm concerned. I can keep multiple different portions of a project I'm working on open and seperate with ease. In a single mode of thought like writing a paper they may not be necessary, but I've found them useful time and time again.
The mouse comment is more to the point that the right click context menu which many love and cherish didn't come from Apple and they seem to maintain that a click-hold or option-click is good enough, despite adding multi-button support to the OS not all that long ago. Again, not really trying to say it's a problem now, but was in the past to go along with the point of not all good came from Apple.
And the cd or disk to trash still existed in OS X last I checked, and I googled up this which seems to be dated 8/02 and gives dragging things to the trash as a valid eject mechanism. So 2001 wasn't the abandonment of that bad idea. But at least it changes to an eject sign now, so if you have the idea to put something in the trash you'll know it'll eject. So you don't have to resort to 2001 era Gnome or KDE, not that current generations are without problems. The biggest gripe I have is the lack of consistant context menus, especially cut/copy/paste not showing up in some applications even when text is selected.
To get back to the real topic, the transparency, I've always found it difficult to either read the transparent window when the opacity is high or the underlying window when the opacity is low. It may be just my experience or preference, but switching back and forth or cutting and pasting has always yielded better results than transparent windows. This has been especially true for me when text collides. between the two windows. Regardless of whether it's found useful, I still have trouble thinking that it's patentable material.
Don't forget the awesome multiple mouse button support that everybody keeps stealing from Mac OS too. Why, without Mac OS we'd never have context menus so easily accessible by just a right mouse click. Oh, you can't just click a single button without holding it down for a second or two to get those in Mac OS? Crap, another feature that's up on my most used list that didn't come from Apple. Actually, you should be able to now, finally. Just buy a new mouse. And you might have to configure things. But with Job's fantasy that two buttons are too difficult to grasp (though I've provided support for people who fit that categorization) it certainly didn't originate at Apple.
Wait, another great idea that came out of Apple, lets drag disks to the trash to eject them. I'm so happy that other GUIs have copied that too. Wait, they haven't because it's rediculously insane.
See the trend here? Not all good ideas have come from Apple and not all of Apple's ideas are good. Sure, there's some stuff that's been moved from Mac OS into other GUIs, but Apple is by no means the pinnacle of GUI goodness. So no, it isn't really the trend and good ideas can come from anywhere, just like bad ideas. It's an evolution of systems where the best parts eventually end up everywhere, even if it's through some third party app.
And who the hell cares about window transparency besides the cool factor it adds? Yes, I make my terminals transparent, but for the look. Has anybody ever implemented a transparent window that actually did something useful? Is this something that really needs to be covered by patent? If it's "stolen" will it devalue Mac OS so much? Seriously, please let me know what makes window transparency so useful apart from gratuitous glitter to sucker people in as a selling point.
It's also an assinine point to argue that it isn't an intuitive idea to make a window transparent if you really think about it. Do you have opaque windows in your home? Where does the term originate?
The other claims, besides the GUI bit are insanity at it's finest. But the GUI isn't so terrible that Linux market share isn't rising above Apple's, so it's either something people are willing to tolerate for a better system overall or it isn't much of an issue. I'll vote for the latter, as while Mac OS's GUI is consistant I find it a pain in the neck anyway. I can honestly say I love tools like virtual desktops, customizable window managers, and the option to not have sickly amounts of glitter if I want them, and by default no less.
Frankly, though, I could care less about using a pair of cards to crunch graphics faster. I'd rather have more displays. I want PCI express so I can have a quad head setup with all the screens running decently fast. The only way to do this now is with PCI cards which aren't that fast. Actually, I think nVidia made a Quadro4 card that did four displays at decent speed, but it wanted a 64 bit PCI slot. Ah well.
From a non-gaming point I'd rather have more room for stuff than have my desktop refresh faster than it already does. From a gaming point I'd rather have a game that engages me and is fun than have it concentrate solely on graphics to the point it needs two massive cards.
On the other hand, it might allow decent single screen performance on low cost hardware for gaming and switch modes to multi-screen on the desktop. A boost like that would always be welcome, but the article seems a little scarce on details.
Sure, the people that need 64 bit memory access will welcome cheap 64 bit CPUs, but it isn't like 64 bit CPUs have been difficult to find in the past. The availability of cheap 64 bit CPUs will likely hasten their adoption so it isn't a big problem when we really need the extra memory, but that problem is still a good way off for most of us.
So where to start, old and aging is semi-true in the light of the older players. They store a CD's worth of music at a decent compression, 2-3 at a reasonable compression, which I'd say rivals most reasonable MP3 bitrates, and the 4x mode isn't really worth mentioning IMHO. Okay, fine. But the MD is getting bumped up to double that on the Hi-MD recorders with existing media and 1 GB of space for the new media.
Ooh, 1 GB you say. Well, it is removable media. You know, you can have multiple of these 1 GB MDs and change them? Kinda like CDs, but holding much more. And use the extra space as a removable device. Okay, that sounds pretty nice to me.
Only works on Windows PCs is a bit misleading. At least the traditional MD's have had optical and analog inputs for recording. If I remember right some of the decks had optical output as well. No computer needed. It's convenient (well, kinda, check later in the post) to have a PC, but not necessary.
Haven't mentioned battery life yet. My MD player gets over 40 hours on a single AA. What's the battery life on the iPod again?
I'll be the first to damn Sony for their crappy PC software and nightmarish attempts at copy protection though. The new Hi-MDs will be sufficiently crippled as far as making digital copies of even your own recordings go. The unwillingness to give the users control of their device isn't so nice. Sony is killing the format by making it so restrictive.
Talk about small and light though. Check here for some pics of one of their upcoming players. Tiny! It's hardly bigger than the disc itself.
Coincidentally I can compute with my desktop out of the wall as long as it's still plugged into the UPS. It's nowhere near silent though and that damned beeping from the UPS makes it a little louder than when it's getting wall power, so I tend to run it that way. =D
The only time there's really any noise is when it's attached to the wall, but even then the fan only runs every now and then, and allowing speedstep while on the wall would pretty much kill that too if I wanted. The CD drive is a real noise maker, but really, which CD drives don't make whirring noises?
As for silent PCs, I'm looking at the Hush Mini-ITX PC. It uses one of Via's little chips which requires little cooling. The Hush actually uses one that would normally require a fan and heatpipe's it to the chassis. Also, the power supply is a brick like laptops and such use, no fans at all. The only noise that could come from the machine would be the drives, but I've been considering getting an adapter that lets you use Compact Flash as an IDE drive and fetch all data but the OS from over a network. Then there really would be no moving parts.
Some of the things that I think would be nice for somebody trying to support a company environment with Gentoo are as follows:
- First, there's compile to binary support, so assuming a fairly homogenous environment (like IT managers like) the needed binary is the same, but the compile from source optimizations are maintained. Client machines get that binary from a central machine. Compile once only.
- Second, there seems to be support for distributed compilation via distcc, even in the base install phase. That would speed up the problematic compile phase even further, so now it's compile once on many machines and then deploy. Still looking into this myself, but I'm going to try it this summer.
- Third, it can be made incredibly lightweight. You only install what you want on the system. From that point of view it seems difficult to get Mandrake on a box without a slew of stuff you don't want coming with. That fine grain control is very nice in my opinion.
That's not to say there aren't downsides. Compared to Debian, I'm not sure I'd say that the support for absolutely stable is there. Ebuilds are updated pretty frequently (great for desktop usage in my view) which leads to bleeding edge sorts of problems. Sometimes (rarely?) things break with a new ebuild, though it's typically resolved very quickly. Of course, I'm sure Gentoo knows this and if they were aiming to create enterprise versions there'd be some enterprise mask in portage for really stable packages only. Portage already is great as far as dependency checking (or anything package management) is concerned.
I'd say resolution helps, but I've never seen that to be the case. My friend certainly didn't get any better playing on any of our machines which were quite a bit faster, though it would have been difficult to imagine him playing a better game than he did. I don't feel like higher resolution increases accuracy any either. But hey, YMMV. I'd still be curious at the frame rate differences between the two cards you'd been playing on.
The formula for who was going to win with my group of friends generally depended almost solely on who had been playing the most, granted they had hardware sufficient to keep the game smooth. Provided the graphics card was capable of achieving ~50 fps the hardware seemed to make zero difference in our playing.
All of that said, I like playing those games with the detail at full and the resolution fairly high. I just don't think that I'm gaining anything as long as the control is smooth. But that's just me.