3ware has 8500 series 4, 8 and 12 channel SATA RAID controllers. Maxtor has DiamondMax 9+ SATA drives at 60-200GB. Based on a quick look around the web, they appear to be available now.
The EU is much further down this road than the US, having started from a much less robust design: the "parliamentary system" (effectively, "let's give absolute unchecked power to a single House of Representatives") represented a single point of failure - and it turned round and handed power to the corrupt and unelected EU Council of Ministers. Now, that body is starting to flex its muscles, and people are starting to wonder if that was a good idea after all...
I really have no idea what you're talking about. The European Parliament was virtually powerless when it was created in 1957, but almost every new treaty has its powers. Most talk I've heard from the Future-Europe convention also talks of further increased power for the parliament.
As for the parlimentary system, it seems to work well for most European states, which either have one-chamber parliaments or lopsided two-chamber systems where one chamber is essentially powerless. In a way, the Council of Ministers serves as an upper house to the Parliament, appointed by the parliaments/presidents of the member nations, similarly to the way US senators were once appointed.
I find this to be a little annoying, because I've really found that the only popups I ever got with the "unrequested" option were ones I wanted anyway, and now I have to allow them all...
The "Block unrequested popup windows" option does exactly the same thing as unchecking "Allow unrequested popup windows" did when it was under Advanced. You only have to use the white/blacklist if there are some onLoad popups you want to allow... or have I missed the point of your post?
You might be right. While it seems subjectively slower to have everyone waiting on the same seeder I guess it might be work out the same in the end. It just seems to me like the seeder might end up uploading the same chunk of the file more times as the number of simultaneous connections increases. Really, this is more a problem of first impressions - if a user ends up waiting a long time with high up/down ratio he might get turned of BT.
Of course, I'm mostly just talking out of my ass here based on some experiences with agonisingly slow torrents.
Altough bittorrent is a very nice program, it seems this particular torrent wasn't released in a very smart way. The reason the early downloaders had problems with slow downloads was a lack of seeds - download speeds are, obviously, dependent on the number of uploaders. If you don't have a very fat pipe a very popular torrent like this needs to be announced in stages: first on smaller forums and IRC channels and then, when you have a dozen (or in the extreme case of a slashdotting, maybe 30 or so) people sharing the whole file, then you announce it to the general public. This way you avoid having 300 clients trying to download from the same poor guy with a shitty cable modem connection.
The reason I prefer BT over eDonkey or Magnet is the straight-forward nature of the system. When you want one particular file without any extra bother with of setting up a complex client BT is ideal (also, the hashing method used by eDonkey tends to bog down my system in a nasty way). The extreme simplicity of the client also makes it well suited for use by non-geek users: You just click the link, choose the download directory in a standard filepicker and you're done - just like a http download. This makes it ideal for non-scene use - imagine a game maker distrubuting demos and patches with this system, for instance. No more fruitlessly searching for a working mirror and waiting in an endless fileplanet queue on release day.
That isn't to say BT is the end-all of P2P - far from it. If you want to distrubute files <10MB you probably don't want to use BT. Torrents also tend to be shortlived, altough a different interface might change this. (It's to easy to absent-mindedly close the client when it's finished like you do with a normal download dialog.) For more general use a more complex interface like DC/Kazaa/Gnutella/etc is better. BT does one thing and does it well - something slashdotters tend to appreciate.
The only thing BT really needs know is a better interface for making your own torrents. The excisting CLI tools tend to be off-putting to Windows users.
You realise that you can change the dpi setting of your display, don't you?
My Windows box runs at 1280x960 with 120 dpi fonts. This makes the fonts much easier on the eyes (I'm a bit anal about typography) and lets you fit many more icons and toolbars onto the screen.
It does cause problem with a few poorly tested programs who don't lay out their controls in a resolution independent way, but I've found most such programs lacking in other ways as well.
1. If it's a worthwhile package someone will probably make a package for stable. I believe Ximian has had Mozilla and Galeon packages for potato as part of their GNOME port, for instance. (Altough you had to upgrade to their version of XFree and GTK+ etc, so it is debatable how stable the end system is after that.)
2. You don't have upgrade your whole system to use a package from testing. A properly configured apt will only upgrade the packages nessecary to get (say) Mozilla to work, while leaving the rest of the system alone. Google for "apt pinning".
As stated above, stability and the bleeding edge don't mix. KDE 3.0 is most certainly not ready for anyone's stable release yet (no matter what SuSE says). GNOME 2.0 is a very major release and should not be trusted near an important system until 2.1 at the earliest. Debian stable is, in general, more stable than Red Hat and a lot more stable than many distrubutions. This comes at a cost.
Bdale, the new Project Leader, has stated that he hopes to speed up the release cycle. I wish him the best of luck in this, altough that's what they said after potato was released too.:-/
* Corrected AdvWriteDWordLramNoSwap in drivers/scsi/advansys.c (Jerome L. Quinn, closes: #128080). * Added check for VIA KT266 IO-APIC, version == 2 (closes: #136163). * Updated pegasus driver (2.4.19pre6). * Added ATARAID device names to main.c (Eduard Bloch, closes: #139604). ->* Updated uhci driver (Johannes Erdfelt, closes: #135785). * Translate slashes in broken Acorn ISO9660 file systems (Darren Salt, closes: #141660). * Added newline to printk in drivers/sound/i810_audio.c (handler-case@gmx.net, closes: #142214). * Updated parport driver (2.4.19pre6).
-- Herbert Xu <herbert@debian.org> Sat, 13 Apr 2002 22:07:22 +1000
Judging by what's said in bug 135785 <http://bugs.debian.org/>, it seems the problem is fixed. I'm not ready to swear that this package is the one used on bf2.4, however. I've got no USB hardware myself.
It isn't really exandable either. For 27 cubes, perhaps the 3x3x3 is the best layout or topology of the blocks, but as you increase the size of the array (100 bricks or something), a cube becomes far more complex, with longer paths between cubes, longer latency, impossibility of removing a central brick. Heat would build up in the centre (yes, they are watercooled, but every part will be making heat, and not all of them connected to the heatpipe and watercooling system).
And you'ld never be able to fit it into the server room either.:-) By the time you'd have built such a large system the original bricks would be so obsolete that they'd just be spaceheaters anyway. Better to mirror the old cube onto a new one and throw the obsolete one out.
Reliability may be an issue - 2.5" disks which it uses are known to be not as reliable as their larger counter parts. And there are a lot of them in this (12x27 = 324 disks), so failure is almost guaranteed within a short time.
The cubes would presumably be redundant and autoreconfiguring internally as well, so they would degrade over time until you lost all the controllers/disks/interconnects/powersupplies.
There's no integrated video that I can see. On the other hand the onboard audio is deifinately weak. The C-Media chip a lot of other motherboards use is much better. Still, with optical out for the audio freaks and 5.1 analog to push most people's crappy "multimedia" speakers I guess it's satisfactory.
It's not like this is their only KT333 board, anyway. If this doesn't fit your requirements, buy another model.
Have you tried reading the Linux Weekly News kernel page? Reading that every week keeps me quite well informed. For instance, this week's (or next week's, depending on how you look at it) kernel page reads
The current development kernel release is 2.5.3, which was released on January 30 (changelog). The biggest change in the more recent prepatches has been the split of the massive (> 1MB) Configure.help file into multiple, smaller files spread out over the source tree. This change will make those files easier to maintain (it is hoped); in the mean time, however, it has broken a number of the configuration tools. Other changes include a large ReiserFS update and the inclusion of Nathan Scott's extended attribute patch, which paves the way for access control lists and other useful stuff in the future.
And it goes on into more detail after that. The previous issue talked about the new ATA drivers.
(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)
Re:What I'd like to see in "New Kernel" announceme
on
Kernel 2.5.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The current development kernel release is 2.5.3, which was released on January 30 (changelog). The biggest change in the more recent prepatches has been the split of the massive (> 1MB) Configure.help file into multiple, smaller files spread out over the source tree. This change will make those files easier to maintain (it is hoped); in the mean time, however, it has broken a number of the configuration tools. Other changes include a large ReiserFS update and the inclusion of Nathan Scott's extended attribute patch, which paves the way for access control lists and other useful stuff in the future.
And it goes on into more detail after that. The previous issue talked about the new ATA drivers.
(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)
* Inability to use screen resolutions greater than (or less than) 1024x768, compounded by the availability of only two zoom levels.
Read readme.txt:
Ini file tweaks: The first time Civilization III is run, it will create a file called 'civilization3.ini'. The following lines can be added and allow you to tweak the game:
KeepRes=1 - When set to 1, your desktop resolution will be what the game uses. 1024x768 screens will be centered, but you will be able to see much more of the map on one screen.
Video Mode=1792 / Video Mode=1600 / Video Mode=1280 / Video Mode=1152 - Force screen resolution to one of these settings.
I agree with you on a lot of the other stuff. They should probably have waited until they had finished the game to print the manuals. But then, the Civ2 manual had errors too...
It would be nice to be able to mark units obsolete, like in SMAC.
There's supposed to be a patch before Christmas. Not that that's an excuse to ship a shoddy game.
When your Windows crashes (and it will) a popup comes up that asks if you would like to send the crash info to Microsoft to debug and possibly improve the product, or at least help you out.
You're being ridiculous. They asks you if you want to send it in. If you don't want to, just say no. Isn't it obvious to you that looking at a stack trace would make it easier for MS support to find out what went wrong?
Netscape/Mozilla.org does the same thing with the Netscape Quality Feedback Agent: when the browser crashes, a window pops up which let's you send in some info about what went wrong. This lets the developer find new bugs and shows them which occur most often.
...and Winamp3 uses a completely new, different API. Infact just about everything about Winamp3 is new, so comparing it to 2.x is pointless.
Winamp has been completely rewritten to become the ultimate music experience. Every detail has been relentlessly rethought, redesigned, optimized and maintained to bring our faithful users the entertainment platform that they richly deserve.
Yes, but won't it take YEARS, if ever, for this "advantage" to actually benefit the majority of apps that will be run on a P4?
Yes, but Intel will certainly encourage developers to do this. As a lost of people gave said already, the x87 is a terribly obsolete piece of crap, and most developers will be happy to get rid of it. This will lead to faster acceptance, at least where it matters.
Who is going to rush out to support SSE2 instructions for a chip that isn't likely to sell very well?
The Pentium 4 will sell well, there's no doubt about that. The PIII can't go any faster than it does now, so those looking for a faster MPU will have to go for the P4. Corporations and consumers are so used to "newer is better" they'll buy anything that Intel gives them. Haven't you seen the advertisments for 1 ghz PIII boxes with 64 MBs of RAM and TNT2 M64 cards in them?
What about AMD then? Well, AMDs fabs are already running at full capacity - there just aren't enough Athlons to go around. Also, the Intel brand is still incomparably bigger than the AMD in the real world.
Also, to use SSE2 and the P4 to it's potential, you have to upgrade EVER[sic] SINGLE APP on your PC. How likely is that to happen? Even assuming they are available, which they aren't?
Most of your apps don't stress the FPU. The areas that really need to be rewritten/recompiled are DirectX and vidcard drivers. People upgrade these a lot more often than their apps.
Intel made a HUGE mistake in putting a wussy FPU on this chip. If the P4 even had the P3's FPU it would have been even with the Athlon.
I really don't know why the P4 FPU is so very bad. I guess the PIII FPU doesn't scale to the kinds of clock speeds Intel are aiming for with the P4.
Don't take this post as a recommendation to buy the Pentium 4. You'll have to be a fool to buy one until 2002, especially with the dead end nature of the Willamette/Socket423. Of cource Intel knows there's no shortage of fools...
If you look here (scroll down two or three pages) you'll see that the Xeon is useless unless you need a 4-way system - and if your webserving, a cluster of PIIIs is a lot more cost efficent in most cases. (And don't forget the advantages of greater redundancy in clusters.) Don't let the Intel marketing fool you.
Well that's the point isn't it: vector execution units are useless without software optimisations. As I see it SSE2 is AltiVec for the rest of us. When software comes out that's optimised for the P4, the G4 will probably be destroyed - the G4 has a higher instructions/clock ratio than the P4, but not 3 times higher.
It doesn't look like Motorola has any interrest in persuing Intel and AMD for the performance crown, so it's unlikely that Motos next generation PowerPC will be able to compete either. Unless IBM is willing to invest more in the PowerPC architecture, the Mac on PPC is probably doomed.
Apple might be up for one of those "We're refocusing on Internet Appliances" announcements.
[Note for the zelots: the preceding paragraph is a joke.]
I bought the book last month. (Nice to get something before the Americans for a change:-)) I think it's fairly good, but not up to books like Use of Weapons. The novel has a kind of travelougue feel in parts, which makes it feel like the story might have made a good short story if the filler had been cut out. The Chelgrans are - arguably - derivative of David Niven's Kzini. Still, don't take this as a reason not to read the book! Banks builds some incredibly imaginative worlds in this book as in his others. Banks' average is still better than most writers' best.
Incidentally, if you prefer SF about (semi)evil corps, (as discussed in a previous thread) you might want to look at The Business, Banks' latest non-SF novel.
Slashdot Mirror
3ware has 8500 series 4, 8 and 12 channel SATA RAID controllers. Maxtor has DiamondMax 9+ SATA drives at 60-200GB. Based on a quick look around the web, they appear to be available now.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. The European Parliament was virtually powerless when it was created in 1957, but almost every new treaty has its powers. Most talk I've heard from the Future-Europe convention also talks of further increased power for the parliament.
As for the parlimentary system, it seems to work well for most European states, which either have one-chamber parliaments or lopsided two-chamber systems where one chamber is essentially powerless. In a way, the Council of Ministers serves as an upper house to the Parliament, appointed by the parliaments/presidents of the member nations, similarly to the way US senators were once appointed.
The iso from the FTP server only differs from the torrent iso by a one-bit error, so I guess we can assume there is no foul play involved.
The "Block unrequested popup windows" option does exactly the same thing as unchecking "Allow unrequested popup windows" did when it was under Advanced. You only have to use the white/blacklist if there are some onLoad popups you want to allow... or have I missed the point of your post?
You might be right. While it seems subjectively slower to have everyone waiting on the same seeder I guess it might be work out the same in the end. It just seems to me like the seeder might end up uploading the same chunk of the file more times as the number of simultaneous connections increases. Really, this is more a problem of first impressions - if a user ends up waiting a long time with high up/down ratio he might get turned of BT.
Of course, I'm mostly just talking out of my ass here based on some experiences with agonisingly slow torrents.
That torrent appears to be corrupted. md5sum does not match the md5sum on the FTP servers. Proceed at your own risk.
Altough bittorrent is a very nice program, it seems this particular torrent wasn't released in a very smart way. The reason the early downloaders had problems with slow downloads was a lack of seeds - download speeds are, obviously, dependent on the number of uploaders. If you don't have a very fat pipe a very popular torrent like this needs to be announced in stages: first on smaller forums and IRC channels and then, when you have a dozen (or in the extreme case of a slashdotting, maybe 30 or so) people sharing the whole file, then you announce it to the general public. This way you avoid having 300 clients trying to download from the same poor guy with a shitty cable modem connection.
The reason I prefer BT over eDonkey or Magnet is the straight-forward nature of the system. When you want one particular file without any extra bother with of setting up a complex client BT is ideal (also, the hashing method used by eDonkey tends to bog down my system in a nasty way). The extreme simplicity of the client also makes it well suited for use by non-geek users: You just click the link, choose the download directory in a standard filepicker and you're done - just like a http download. This makes it ideal for non-scene use - imagine a game maker distrubuting demos and patches with this system, for instance. No more fruitlessly searching for a working mirror and waiting in an endless fileplanet queue on release day.
That isn't to say BT is the end-all of P2P - far from it. If you want to distrubute files <10MB you probably don't want to use BT. Torrents also tend to be shortlived, altough a different interface might change this. (It's to easy to absent-mindedly close the client when it's finished like you do with a normal download dialog.) For more general use a more complex interface like DC/Kazaa/Gnutella/etc is better. BT does one thing and does it well - something slashdotters tend to appreciate.
The only thing BT really needs know is a better interface for making your own torrents. The excisting CLI tools tend to be off-putting to Windows users.
You realise that you can change the dpi setting of your display, don't you?
My Windows box runs at 1280x960 with 120 dpi fonts. This makes the fonts much easier on the eyes (I'm a bit anal about typography) and lets you fit many more icons and toolbars onto the screen.
It does cause problem with a few poorly tested programs who don't lay out their controls in a resolution independent way, but I've found most such programs lacking in other ways as well.
Put your plugins (or symlinks to them) in ~/.mozilla/plugins/
Phoenix will look in ,mozilla as wellas in .phoenix
1. If it's a worthwhile package someone will probably make a package for stable. I believe Ximian has had Mozilla and Galeon packages for potato as part of their GNOME port, for instance. (Altough you had to upgrade to their version of XFree and GTK+ etc, so it is debatable how stable the end system is after that.)
2. You don't have upgrade your whole system to use a package from testing. A properly configured apt will only upgrade the packages nessecary to get (say) Mozilla to work, while leaving the rest of the system alone. Google for "apt pinning".
As stated above, stability and the bleeding edge don't mix. KDE 3.0 is most certainly not ready for anyone's stable release yet (no matter what SuSE says). GNOME 2.0 is a very major release and should not be trusted near an important system until 2.1 at the earliest. Debian stable is, in general, more stable than Red Hat and a lot more stable than many distrubutions. This comes at a cost.
Bdale, the new Project Leader, has stated that he hopes to speed up the release cycle. I wish him the best of luck in this, altough that's what they said after potato was released too. :-/
From /usr/share/doc/kernel-source-2.4.18/changelog . z:
kernel-source-2.4.18 (2.4.18-5) unstable; urgency=low
* Corrected AdvWriteDWordLramNoSwap in drivers/scsi/advansys.c
(Jerome L. Quinn, closes: #128080).
* Added check for VIA KT266 IO-APIC, version == 2 (closes: #136163).
* Updated pegasus driver (2.4.19pre6).
* Added ATARAID device names to main.c (Eduard Bloch, closes: #139604).
->* Updated uhci driver (Johannes Erdfelt, closes: #135785).
* Translate slashes in broken Acorn ISO9660 file systems (Darren Salt,
closes: #141660).
* Added newline to printk in drivers/sound/i810_audio.c
(handler-case@gmx.net, closes: #142214).
* Updated parport driver (2.4.19pre6).
-- Herbert Xu <herbert@debian.org> Sat, 13 Apr 2002 22:07:22 +1000
Judging by what's said in bug 135785 <http://bugs.debian.org/>, it seems the problem is fixed. I'm not ready to swear that this package is the one used on bf2.4, however. I've got no USB hardware myself.
And you'ld never be able to fit it into the server room either. :-) By the time you'd have built such a large system the original bricks would be so obsolete that they'd just be spaceheaters anyway. Better to mirror the old cube onto a new one and throw the obsolete one out.
The cubes would presumably be redundant and autoreconfiguring internally as well, so they would degrade over time until you lost all the controllers/disks/interconnects/powersupplies.
There's no integrated video that I can see. On the other hand the onboard audio is deifinately weak. The C-Media chip a lot of other motherboards use is much better. Still, with optical out for the audio freaks and 5.1 analog to push most people's crappy "multimedia" speakers I guess it's satisfactory.
It's not like this is their only KT333 board, anyway. If this doesn't fit your requirements, buy another model.
It is new. Look at the 1.0 branch a notice the 1.0 RC1. That wasn't there before.
Actually, this capability is already there. There just isn't any GUI for it. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/component s/ConfigPolicy.html.
Arrgh. Always preview. Here we go again:
Have you tried reading the Linux Weekly News kernel page? Reading that every week keeps me quite well informed. For instance, this week's (or next week's, depending on how you look at it) kernel page reads And it goes on into more detail after that. The previous issue talked about the new ATA drivers.(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)
(I'm not affiliated with LWN. I just like the service.)
Kind of how most older KT133A boards can't run Athlon XPs? New manufacturing processes almost always mean lower voltages.
Read readme.txt:
I agree with you on a lot of the other stuff. They should probably have waited until they had finished the game to print the manuals. But then, the Civ2 manual had errors too...
It would be nice to be able to mark units obsolete, like in SMAC.
There's supposed to be a patch before Christmas. Not that that's an excuse to ship a shoddy game.
You're being ridiculous. They asks you if you want to send it in. If you don't want to, just say no. Isn't it obvious to you that looking at a stack trace would make it easier for MS support to find out what went wrong?
Netscape/Mozilla.org does the same thing with the Netscape Quality Feedback Agent: when the browser crashes, a window pops up which let's you send in some info about what went wrong. This lets the developer find new bugs and shows them which occur most often.
Yes, but Intel will certainly encourage developers to do this. As a lost of people gave said already, the x87 is a terribly obsolete piece of crap, and most developers will be happy to get rid of it. This will lead to faster acceptance, at least where it matters.
The Pentium 4 will sell well, there's no doubt about that. The PIII can't go any faster than it does now, so those looking for a faster MPU will have to go for the P4. Corporations and consumers are so used to "newer is better" they'll buy anything that Intel gives them. Haven't you seen the advertisments for 1 ghz PIII boxes with 64 MBs of RAM and TNT2 M64 cards in them?
What about AMD then? Well, AMDs fabs are already running at full capacity - there just aren't enough Athlons to go around. Also, the Intel brand is still incomparably bigger than the AMD in the real world.
Most of your apps don't stress the FPU. The areas that really need to be rewritten/recompiled are DirectX and vidcard drivers. People upgrade these a lot more often than their apps.
I really don't know why the P4 FPU is so very bad. I guess the PIII FPU doesn't scale to the kinds of clock speeds Intel are aiming for with the P4.
Don't take this post as a recommendation to buy the Pentium 4. You'll have to be a fool to buy one until 2002, especially with the dead end nature of the Willamette/Socket423. Of cource Intel knows there's no shortage of fools...
If you look here (scroll down two or three pages) you'll see that the Xeon is useless unless you need a 4-way system - and if your webserving, a cluster of PIIIs is a lot more cost efficent in most cases. (And don't forget the advantages of greater redundancy in clusters.) Don't let the Intel marketing fool you.
Well that's the point isn't it: vector execution units are useless without software optimisations. As I see it SSE2 is AltiVec for the rest of us. When software comes out that's optimised for the P4, the G4 will probably be destroyed - the G4 has a higher instructions/clock ratio than the P4, but not 3 times higher.
It doesn't look like Motorola has any interrest in persuing Intel and AMD for the performance crown, so it's unlikely that Motos next generation PowerPC will be able to compete either. Unless IBM is willing to invest more in the PowerPC architecture, the Mac on PPC is probably doomed.
Apple might be up for one of those "We're refocusing on Internet Appliances" announcements.
[Note for the zelots: the preceding paragraph is a joke.]
I bought the book last month. (Nice to get something before the Americans for a change :-)) I think it's fairly good, but not up to books like Use of Weapons. The novel has a kind of travelougue feel in parts, which makes it feel like the story might have made a good short story if the filler had been cut out. The Chelgrans are - arguably - derivative of David Niven's Kzini. Still, don't take this as a reason not to read the book! Banks builds some incredibly imaginative worlds in this book as in his others. Banks' average is still better than most writers' best.
Incidentally, if you prefer SF about (semi)evil corps, (as discussed in a previous thread) you might want to look at The Business, Banks' latest non-SF novel.