I'm just a *nix and Windows luser. After struggling with tens of passwords for years, keeping them (relatively) secure, difficult to guess, etc., my employer is starting to press hard on even more regulations and ended up changing my password cycles. I can't keep up any more. I've had to get passwords reset monthly for about 6 months so far because I get locked out due to bad password entries. I just had to ask for advice on keeping them straight.
Per advice, I have begun to keep a plaintext file on my desktop computer with all my passwords in it and when they expire. My corporate IT guidelines are too secure for me, a legit user. So, I'll have to compromise security in order to comply with guidelines.
The store personel rely upon the fact that most people don't want control over their lives. The electronic alarm says "STOP", they stop and succumb to the will of the security guard, manager or just about any Joe with an apron or name tag. Nobody is stretching their rights, it's just a customer (or browser) who stops of his/her own volition and offers up his/her person for inspection.
If they want to accuse me of theft, I encourage them to make sure they have the full blessing of LP and management, and only after they have placed me under citizen's arrest and the police show up will I give up my right to privacy. You see, harassment and improper invocation of citizen's arrest laws are very large liabilities. A store would have to have me on tape actually taking something very valuable and be certain I hadn't put it down before they'd put their wallets on that line.
CompUSA, Fry's, Circuit City or Best Buy. If they want to check my receipt, they have to first accuse me of theft. If they won't allow me to leave without it, they'll have to place me under citizen's arrest. Without that, it's just regular Joes thinking they have a right to inspect goods I have rightfully paid for. I have no responsibility to any third party to prove that I own my propery.
How do you think a second processor is faster than a second core? My quote, in context, "Dual cores don't add anything here. It's just what we've all seen from SMP machines..". As you point out, you have dual 2.4 processors -- assumedly in a traditional SMP configuration. How would this behave differently if they were on the same die? Perhaps a bit better as core to core communication can be faster than chip to chip configuration, but separate chips will in no way be better than multi-core die, assuming they're not competing for I/O resource.
Dual cores don't add anything here. It's just what we've all seen from SMP machines for 10-15 or more years (depending on how lucky / needy we were).
If Antivirus is a single thread, then yes, the GUI can run all it wants on the other processor and maybe kick a few threads over to the Antivirus one. Now, if you have anti-spyware, anti-virus and a firewall all running, I think we can assume that they're each at least one thread. This means that they can, hypothetically, keep their own cores busy. Actually, none of them needs the power of a full core to itself, but I digress. Yes, dual cores will allow background threads (be they antivirus or what have you) to be relegated to a slave processor while another remains responsive to the GUI. It's silly to dedicate such a background task to a core and keep everything else off of it. Even if each task is mutithreaded, having multiple cores (be they multi-core die or multiple processors) means that the likelihood goes up that there's a slot for the thread on one of them.
What I'd like to see is better control of hard drive scheduling. Anti-virus is the least important thing my computer can be doing, but it's important. I want it to have the least priority on the hard drive. I want my OS to only read a file for scanning when it's the most important thing going on, but the hard drive scheduler on every OS I've used is unable to tell the difference between inefficient cache-thrashing anti-virus and my primary tasks that need to remain responsive and/or get more I/O attention.
I saw some news about Linux doing some work on drive schedule control, and then it kinda died. I've had several people tell me that drive scheduling is unimportant because you always want response from the programs you're running, but while that's true, each one may have a different level of importance.
The ballast makes sure they blink at 30KHz, in order to maintain the plasma. (AC plasmas require less voltage than DC plasmas.) Cheap consumer class ballasts, on the other hand, also blink at 60Hz. Break out a photocell and an o-scope.
Light bulbs are there for a reason. They are cheap. Try to explain incremental cost to "Joe Sixpack" and his eyes will gloss over.
LEDs will be made by the same people who make fluorescents today. They'll start to save the costs of the transformers and the light temperature. The cheaper transformers, of course, will mean that the lights blink at the same cursed 60Hz that today's fluorescents do (I'm happy I don't live in 50Hz land, unless they have better ballasts). Some people have problems with this; my mother can't be under a fluorescent lamp for more than 5 minutes without a migraine. On the other hand, manufacturers will skimp on the blue part of the LED spectrum, which is the most expensive part-- since most modern white LEDs are made by making a blue LED and putting a material that converts some of the blue into a wider spectrum, so you compromise on overall power and make up for it by converting more of the blue to other spectrums-- which is fine for most people because most prefer a warmer light anyway.
Everybody knows a light bulb. For putting in my home, I'll stick with what's efficient. Others will see it differently. Cars may or may not do it differently. Only high end cars get efficient LEDs in their brakelights, despite the convenience and expense when the incandescents burn out and a cop pulls us over to point it out.
A slashdotter pointed this page on efficiency out in a previous LED article.
Why the heck are you buying (32-bit intel) Dells when you can buy (cheaper and faster 64-bit) Opteron boxes from Sun? If you are a Linux fanboy, Sun will sell you one with DeadRat or SuSE. They are Windoze certified in case you have had a lobotomy, and you can run the free (as in beer) 64-bit Solaris 10 on them.
But hey, it's cool to hate Sun on slashdot.
I remember, not that long ago, when Sun boxen were cool. They were "in like Ray Bans". Recently, Sun has done a lot of aggressive legwork to rid themselves of "cool factor" and become an evil company.
Why buy cheaper Sun boxes when you could buy Dell boxes? Excellent question. You're leaving Sun, so it's time to get away from the distortion field that your company tells your employees.
Sun is famous for lock-in. They get you hooked on a technology at a loss and then milk you for licensing and upgrades. It's how the Big Boys do it -- the only problem with this scheme is the newbies who don't see it coming. Dell, on the other hand, is a known quantity for everyone. You want more hardware? Simple enough to get an easy-to-read quote. Service? Same thing. Software, they'll happily re-sell you. Last time I had a Sun service call was a horrible experience, but I can't compare that to Dell. Linux support? Who cares about Linux support at a university? Don't they have undergraduates on work-study programs for that?
When you buy Dell, it's like going to McDonald's. It may not be gourmet, but you know what you'll get. Buying Sun is like going on a blind date. Only the experienced know what to expect and the rest of us will be surprised.
Don't get me wrong, there are reasons to go with Sun -- and very good ones, too. But Sun trains its employees that its machines are always superior over any other vendor, which clearly is not the case.
Dell is selling full PC's for the $200 range. Look at their website for buisness servers. Of course, you don't get an OS.
Apple is also behind in speed. You can talk about pipelines. You can talk about the myth of Mhz. But when it is a 2 to 1 ratio, and the price is a 2 to 1 ratio in the wrong direction, the PC is still king.
Do you claim that a 2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970 running OSX is half as fast as a $1500 Wintel machine? I've used both. Each is a nice machine. The OSX machine -- in my objective and qualitative user opinion, is not half as fast. You can take your rhetoric about "megahertz myth myth" and go sit down with the likes of Cyrix and AMD. When you finish, you can go pick up a computer architecture book (I recomment Hennesy and Patterson) and hopefully understand what they told you.
Or are you comparing a $500 MiniMac to a $500 small form factor, quiet PC? Again, I have used both and find the OSX MiniMac to be faster.
If you want to talk about Apple not having competition for the cheap, cobbled together x86 with fans turned up to high and a big case, that's fine. Apple has ceded that's not their expertise. No PowerPC user has tried to compete there. If you want to bash Apple for not having a $500 "fast as possible, to hell with design, noise and stability", that's valid. They've told you they don't want that kind of customer. I've got a very fast, noisy $500 x86 on my desk at work, and I'd much rather have a Mini. If you want a laptop and peripherals, weight and size don't matter, you can certainly find a machine cheaper than an iBook. My current work machine cost more than an iBook, runs XP and the clock rate is higher than the iBook, but OSX on the iBook is far more responsive (and faster for GUI apps and perl execution for what I do).
The PC is king. You can't argue with 95+ market share. But you sound like an idiot when you tell me that the reason is because Apple and PowerPC are at a 4 to 1 loss in the price to performance comparison. They don't have products where volume is -- price at the cost of speed and performance or speed at the cost of noise and stability.
back in the day (but not too far)... For those whose mail/news clients interpreted JavaScript
Uhm, buddy? I don't know how to say this politely. Unless you're younger than 15 years old, JavaScript didn't exist for any definition of "back in the day". Java itself hasn't even been around for more than 10 years (1.0 was in 1996, but you might think about 1997's 1.1). Java came to be between 1996 and 1999.
And I'm not even that old. I don't even remember Jimmy Carter being president.
As recently as 2 years ago, Mapquest had satellite images for most of the US. I could type in the addresses of all my friends from college and my parents' and get pictures of their homes. The resolution wasn't great, and different zoom features may have been from different satellite passes, but it was a very entertaining and educational service. (The highest resolution pass of my home showed nothing but cleared dirt but the third highest showed completed structures.)
Once I was trying to give someone directions to the Cheesecake Factory in Austin's Arboretum, the map services were not very informative, and the restaraunt is actually kind of hidden from most of the parking lot. The map services could get a car to the complex, but it's a decent sized place to direct a coworker. So I got the satellite image, printed it on the color laser printer and pointed out the building we'd meet at. Worked great.
It was, of course, licensed from a third party and I have no doubt the licence didn't pay for itself in Mapquests's grand plans.
On the other hand, Mapquest's satellite photos weren't very good at plotting some of the area around Saratoga Springs, NY, and northern Vermont was missing. Google's new service seems to have those fixed, from a quick look around.
If you combine all of them into a single point of failure, you might reduce what you think is an "eye sore" but at the cost of a higher risk of failure.
Actually, the reliability of each piece is multiplied together. A single product may have a 99% liklihood of surviving a year. If you rely upon 10 of those, take.99^10 and you have a 90% liklihood of surviving a year in total. Sure, a single 99% means any failure is catastrophic, but the odds are better.
What would you plug into a wall-wart remover? Personally, I'd throw in my Airport, firewall, IP phone / DSL modem, router, external hard drives and phone charger. The network gear may as well all die together anyway, I don't do much interhouse transfer anyway. If the external hard drives (which are used for archiving and are on a journaled file system) go down, I'm okay with that. My phone charger would disapoint me, but it's only out of paranoia I recharge it daily -- it goes for a week or more with how little I use it. I'd be curious about putting my laptop on it, too, but at 65W alone (peak), much more load than that and my unified power supply probably requires more active cooling (AC/DC and DC/DC switching is not free).
Another thing to consider is that wall wart makers are going for the cheapest of the cheap. They're making very simple products with little eye towards longevity. 1) A more expensive, quality driven unified DC power supply may have more reliability than the cheapies thrown in for free with everything. 2) Some of the wall warts put out pretty dirty signals, relying upon bypass caps (decoupling caps, if you swing that way) at the product to clean it up. The products they drive actually last longer with cleaner supplies -- which a unified, quality driven supply may be able to do. It's hard to say how many failures are because of dirty power. Additionally, most of those wall warts are not using switching power supplies, which means they're more power hungry than a unified one could be.
I got a Leatherman for Christmas before I was old enough to appreciate it. I was in awe that my parents bought me a butterfly... pliers? I broke it in High School. Sent it off to be repaired (under 25 year warranty, no receipt, only the knowledge that the product wasn't that old) and it came back fixed, and the handle still had my name engraved on it. Nice service. In Boy Scouts, I learned that the Leatherman was good for whittling, but anything I had to do with the pliers must not involve much force on the handles because they dug into my hands.
In college, I became a teaching assistant for an electronics course. Lots of proto board work, wires, chips, the like. Needlenose pliers were a must, and the ability to pull them out of my pocket and butterfly my pliers out in less than a second was very timely. I ended up selling about 2 dozen (not direclty, but through telling students where to go purchase a tool like my Geek Tool). As I continued to advance in my own coursework, my rising experience with my Leatherman was a competitive advantage. The other tools were easy to find, but any tool you've used regularly for any length of time will be that comfortable to you. I ended up spraying a bit of Pam (the cooking spray) in the handle to make it open faster and smoother, but getting too much in there makes it close too easily to hold.
In a senior level course, a buddy of mine whipped out his Leatherman in front of our professor. The professor demanded, "What are you doing?" My buddy responded, "I'm too lazy to walk across the lab and get the public pliers, so I brought my own." To which the obese professor, recovering from a bypass surgery responded, "Get up. WHILE YOU STILL CAN!"
To summarize: I'm sure just about any tool will be useful for most people who are asking. You will develop a fondness for whatever you get. If you need to apply force, however, carefully consider the Leatherman model. Gerbers are more universally appropriate.
Even if there was a tested an proven layout that would gaurantee quicker results than QWERTY, why would anyone want to give up QWERTY? It's taken me years to perfect touch typing with QWERTY. On a good day with pretty simple sentences, I can easily do 100 WPM. So even if I could theoretically acheive an excess of 100 WPM with, say Dvorak, the time it would take to learn it, as well as the non-portability of the skill (what are the odds of finding another Dvorak keyboard wherever you go), are not worth it.
If you're in an industry where the speed of your typing is not the limiting factor, say programming (you're thinking more time than you're typing, or your type speed is limited by your thinking speed), then you obviously may be right. If speed is the only advantage, why suffer the cost? Of course, if the speed is there because the fingers have less space to travel on average, I would assume that the fingers suffer less stress. If that assumption is correct, it would be interesting to find out if RSI was less of a problem, all other things being equal. If this proved correct, mightn't a permanant speed hit be worth being able to work longer?
Of course, if you're in an industry where you're paid by the word, or if your thinking speed increases by 20% when your fingers get where they're going faster, then you would become more productive. I think that touch typing for most of us is very similar to programming -- once you know the first language, the rest are straightforward. My old roommate in college tought himself DVORAK inside of a week. Bless his heart, but he wasn't always the brightest crayon in the box, so if he can get pretty proficient inside of a week, I'm sure most of us can do alright too. After the learning curve, he had difficulty switching between layouts for about 2 minutes before his brain was fully switched into the current layout. Personally, I learned the Japanese keyboard inside of a day, but [a-z][0-9] are qwerty so it's not a direct comparison.
If it takes you 1 week of downtime (maybe spread out during your personal time after work), and it increases your productivity by 20-50%, then it doesn't take much math to show how much longer you have to stay in your job to prove the value. This assumes you can take the short term productivity hit.
Let's look at this story another way. Enterprise fans (who are among the most rabid bit torrent users, many because of UPN's limited audience) don't believe they're spending enough money on the show through eyeballs (commercials) and uploading. They feel the need to tell the studios that they're willing to pay more, so they took out an ad.
Do we need more evidence that current copyright law is hindering the progress of science and useful arts?
Studios, the Internet is there for more than just commercials served as web pages. We're willing to pay for content. We're ready for you. You will lose money if you stand in the way of progress, just like the US Constitution foretold 200 years ago. You can either help with something like iTunes or sue dead grandmothers until teenagers teach their parents how to take care of this themselves.
We have the technology to allow the market to directly tell you what they want. We want Firefly (just count those DVD sales). We want Family guy. Yet the studios count the millions who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials the same as a rabid fan base who will pay through the nose for a series on commercial free DVD. (Here's a tip, I don't like menus or "special features", I just want to use my DVD player like a CD player hooked up to the TV.)
[karma whore]Wait, this is Slashdot. Nobody likes Enterprise. How much did both Enterprise fans have to contribute for the full page ad?[/karma whore]
This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures.
Let's face it. Every single word of that is true. Loki didn't quit because they ran out of money, they quit because they were going to lose, and they knew it.
It is up to us, as individuals, to come up with a "fair use" method to compensate copyright holders while enjoying the promition the progress of science and useful arts -- the Internet is clearly more than current movie and television studios are using it.
If I torrent a file, it could be assumed that I have no intent to compensate the copyright holder, unless I can demonstrate that I attempted to compensate the copyright holder a fair amount. If I can show a court that I paid for a movie ticket -- which was not ripped in half at the theater -- the issue of downloading goes away and the uploading becomes the interpretation of the Constitution.
While 4.6 GHz sounds impressive, I thought we were getting away from the notion that clock speed = performance. The Pentium 4 killed off clock speed comparisons.
Nobody is claiming that clock speed always equals performance, but think about it this way -- say you have data coming in at 10 GB/s. You could either have 8 wires (and buffers and processing) running at 10 GHz, 16 wires (etc.) running at 5GHz, 32 wires at 2.5GHz (etc.), you get the idea. If the Cell architecture processes data at 4GHz, the only thing we can be pretty certain of is that the pipeline is very deep. The benchmarks you want to see will very likely be very impressive. Perhaps the speed was partially dictated by wire density and transistor sizing?
Real world, though, what does this mean? This chip is due to be a game machine. Game workloads are, for the most part, very predictable. You process an entire screen of graphics in a very similar manner every time. This means that if you get the prediction models (and compiler hints) right, your actual performance will be very high. The same supposition could be made for encryption or any other bulk vector processing, with obvious strengths according to the instruction set of the processor. General workloads, however, do not do very well with deep pipelines. They tend to prefer less of a pipeline and less of a branch mispredict penalty. Cell will be great at its intended market, but you don't use a 4+GHz chip with over half the area (guessing, looking at the pictures) tuned for vector math (the APUs have been called SIMD) to take over the PC. For that, we will still have multicore x86 and PPC chips to dream about.
Apple faces a perception problem. For every vocal person like NanoGator (who seems to have positive karma despite this Troll moderation), there are probably 20 quiet ones who believe the same thing, despite what Mac fans believe.
A.) It may be cheap and sexy, but it's hard to find apps for.
Wrong.
Where can we send NanoGator to buy Mac applications? Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, even ElBo used to have Mac games. There's always the Apple website (and probably 10 other internet and catalogs of reasonable repute), but for the person wanting instant gratification, there's work to be done in cities without the Apple Store. Even cities with an Apple Store find that they are not always convenient to all the residents.
B.) No Games. Sorry.
Wrong.
I enjoy games on my Mac -- and have for a few years now. Bleeding edge gamers, however, can start naming tens of games that are not out for the Mac. Sure, MacHeads can point out that 90% of those are junk and not playable after 5 hours, maybe even 80% of them turned out to be a waste of money. Aforementioned MacHeads would point out Apple's list of games as proof that good games are out there, but it's still a perception problem.
C.) Regardless of the low price, Apple has a huge hurdle to overcome with the general masses that they won't be missing out if they get it.
NanoGator, I think you're more right than any of us would like you to be. I think a lot of that will be addressed after developers and store owners see how popular a $500 Mac turns out to be.
Got a reference that shows floppy drives with 2 opposing heads?
To Google!
The difference between single and double sided drives is obvious -- the
double sided drive has an extra head (mounted on top of the disk) and a
switching circuit to select between the 2 heads.Reference.
I remember buying "DS" 5.25" floppies, and having to flip them.
Some people did just that -- they formatted both sides of the floppies as single sided and flipped them. It made some of the older generation more at ease -- how could a machine read both sides-- and the younger who felt that they were putting one over on the computer -- I just gave you the other side, and now it has different data! I just marveled over how it was able to synch up two heads and come up with the same output twice in a row.
And I started with 90KB floppies. The doubling densities (90->180->360->720->1.4) were achieved by tighter cylinder counts - not by producing a hyper^4cylinder.
I don't remember 90KB floppies, only 160KB (?), 180KB, 360KB and 1.2MB. Then we hit the 3.5's and used 360KB, 720KB and 1.44MB.
let's finally get doublesided drives (without flipping discs): they've been promising doublesided media since DS/DD 5.25" floppies, and we're still waiting.
I can't tell if I missed your joke or if you missed out how the floppies worked for all those years. The original 5.25" floppy was typically double the density of the 8" floppies, and weighed in at 180KB per side, or 360KB for the whole media. Most drives out there (almost all PC drives, for example) were double sided drives (a reader on top and a reader on the bottom), so you could read both sides seamlessly without having to "flip the media". This could be demonstrated by formatting a disk as 180KB on both sides and storing discrete data or formatting the back of a disk as double sided and then wondering where your FAT went on the other side. 720KB DS/DD 3.5" floppies, similarly, coexisted with a smaller number of 360KB SS/DD 3.5" floppies.
My father purchased a bulk number of 3.5" SS/DD, drilled holes in all the corners and formatted them as DS/HD. It took a silly long time to figure out why they all failed faster than everybody else's more expensive media.
Right, because everyone knows that races are won by fatigued drivers making extra pit stops.
I was once priviledged enough to ride in a Ferrari Testarossa. It was the most uncomfortable ride to get to 80 MPH out of the driveway before the first turn. The ride was fast, make no mistake, but a performance driver wants to "feel the road". Someone driving a luxury car typically wants to feel like the road is silk. They also didn't waste much weight dampening the engine noise from entering the cabin. Of course, if I had the opportunity, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Comfort isn't everything.
And then we'd be hearing instead, "The biggest problem with MacOS/Linux is that Apple/Linus gave a very powerful OS to Joe Servicepack who has NO CLUE how to get it stable and keep it stable."
If that's the case, then why do people like this exist? All you have to do, according to them (and my experience) is pick up a consumer grade firewall with embedded Linux and you never worry about non-user initiated exploits. Aside from default password problems, can you name 5 remote exploits affecting consumer grade firewalls that prevent the user from being able to download patches?
Seems like everybody I know has one of those boxes (or their equivalent) and I'm the only one who knows how to upgrade the firmware on 'em. I did it to be security paranoid, but they've never had any problems. Shouldn't the default install of $CONSUMEROS be as security tight when it comes out of the box? Shouldn't anything else be considered a premature release?
At the navy company the poster describes, not only are the new password requirements as described, but the intranet still relies upon unencrypted communications. Many servers don't even have an encrypted way to log in!
Strong password requirements are all fine and good, but your 256 kilobyte password rotated hourly doesn't mean anything when you have to telnet or ftp to a box to log in.
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I'm just a *nix and Windows luser. After struggling with tens of passwords for years, keeping them (relatively) secure, difficult to guess, etc., my employer is starting to press hard on even more regulations and ended up changing my password cycles. I can't keep up any more. I've had to get passwords reset monthly for about 6 months so far because I get locked out due to bad password entries. I just had to ask for advice on keeping them straight.
Per advice, I have begun to keep a plaintext file on my desktop computer with all my passwords in it and when they expire. My corporate IT guidelines are too secure for me, a legit user. So, I'll have to compromise security in order to comply with guidelines.
The store personel rely upon the fact that most people don't want control over their lives. The electronic alarm says "STOP", they stop and succumb to the will of the security guard, manager or just about any Joe with an apron or name tag. Nobody is stretching their rights, it's just a customer (or browser) who stops of his/her own volition and offers up his/her person for inspection.
If they want to accuse me of theft, I encourage them to make sure they have the full blessing of LP and management, and only after they have placed me under citizen's arrest and the police show up will I give up my right to privacy. You see, harassment and improper invocation of citizen's arrest laws are very large liabilities. A store would have to have me on tape actually taking something very valuable and be certain I hadn't put it down before they'd put their wallets on that line.
CompUSA, Fry's, Circuit City or Best Buy. If they want to check my receipt, they have to first accuse me of theft. If they won't allow me to leave without it, they'll have to place me under citizen's arrest. Without that, it's just regular Joes thinking they have a right to inspect goods I have rightfully paid for. I have no responsibility to any third party to prove that I own my propery.
I would think there'd be a use for something like "nice" or "renice".
How do you think a second processor is faster than a second core? My quote, in context, "Dual cores don't add anything here. It's just what we've all seen from SMP machines..". As you point out, you have dual 2.4 processors -- assumedly in a traditional SMP configuration. How would this behave differently if they were on the same die? Perhaps a bit better as core to core communication can be faster than chip to chip configuration, but separate chips will in no way be better than multi-core die, assuming they're not competing for I/O resource.
"Bzzt. Sorry, wrong answer". Try again.
Dual cores don't add anything here. It's just what we've all seen from SMP machines for 10-15 or more years (depending on how lucky / needy we were).
If Antivirus is a single thread, then yes, the GUI can run all it wants on the other processor and maybe kick a few threads over to the Antivirus one. Now, if you have anti-spyware, anti-virus and a firewall all running, I think we can assume that they're each at least one thread. This means that they can, hypothetically, keep their own cores busy. Actually, none of them needs the power of a full core to itself, but I digress. Yes, dual cores will allow background threads (be they antivirus or what have you) to be relegated to a slave processor while another remains responsive to the GUI. It's silly to dedicate such a background task to a core and keep everything else off of it. Even if each task is mutithreaded, having multiple cores (be they multi-core die or multiple processors) means that the likelihood goes up that there's a slot for the thread on one of them.
What I'd like to see is better control of hard drive scheduling. Anti-virus is the least important thing my computer can be doing, but it's important. I want it to have the least priority on the hard drive. I want my OS to only read a file for scanning when it's the most important thing going on, but the hard drive scheduler on every OS I've used is unable to tell the difference between inefficient cache-thrashing anti-virus and my primary tasks that need to remain responsive and/or get more I/O attention.
I saw some news about Linux doing some work on drive schedule control, and then it kinda died. I've had several people tell me that drive scheduling is unimportant because you always want response from the programs you're running, but while that's true, each one may have a different level of importance.
The ballast makes sure they blink at 30KHz, in order to maintain the plasma. (AC plasmas require less voltage than DC plasmas.) Cheap consumer class ballasts, on the other hand, also blink at 60Hz. Break out a photocell and an o-scope.
Light bulbs are there for a reason. They are cheap. Try to explain incremental cost to "Joe Sixpack" and his eyes will gloss over.
LEDs will be made by the same people who make fluorescents today. They'll start to save the costs of the transformers and the light temperature. The cheaper transformers, of course, will mean that the lights blink at the same cursed 60Hz that today's fluorescents do (I'm happy I don't live in 50Hz land, unless they have better ballasts). Some people have problems with this; my mother can't be under a fluorescent lamp for more than 5 minutes without a migraine. On the other hand, manufacturers will skimp on the blue part of the LED spectrum, which is the most expensive part-- since most modern white LEDs are made by making a blue LED and putting a material that converts some of the blue into a wider spectrum, so you compromise on overall power and make up for it by converting more of the blue to other spectrums-- which is fine for most people because most prefer a warmer light anyway.
Everybody knows a light bulb. For putting in my home, I'll stick with what's efficient. Others will see it differently. Cars may or may not do it differently. Only high end cars get efficient LEDs in their brakelights, despite the convenience and expense when the incandescents burn out and a cop pulls us over to point it out.
A slashdotter pointed this page on efficiency out in a previous LED article.
I remember, not that long ago, when Sun boxen were cool. They were "in like Ray Bans". Recently, Sun has done a lot of aggressive legwork to rid themselves of "cool factor" and become an evil company.
Why buy cheaper Sun boxes when you could buy Dell boxes? Excellent question. You're leaving Sun, so it's time to get away from the distortion field that your company tells your employees.
Sun is famous for lock-in. They get you hooked on a technology at a loss and then milk you for licensing and upgrades. It's how the Big Boys do it -- the only problem with this scheme is the newbies who don't see it coming. Dell, on the other hand, is a known quantity for everyone. You want more hardware? Simple enough to get an easy-to-read quote. Service? Same thing. Software, they'll happily re-sell you. Last time I had a Sun service call was a horrible experience, but I can't compare that to Dell. Linux support? Who cares about Linux support at a university? Don't they have undergraduates on work-study programs for that?
When you buy Dell, it's like going to McDonald's. It may not be gourmet, but you know what you'll get. Buying Sun is like going on a blind date. Only the experienced know what to expect and the rest of us will be surprised.
Don't get me wrong, there are reasons to go with Sun -- and very good ones, too. But Sun trains its employees that its machines are always superior over any other vendor, which clearly is not the case.
Do you claim that a 2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970 running OSX is half as fast as a $1500 Wintel machine? I've used both. Each is a nice machine. The OSX machine -- in my objective and qualitative user opinion, is not half as fast. You can take your rhetoric about "megahertz myth myth" and go sit down with the likes of Cyrix and AMD. When you finish, you can go pick up a computer architecture book (I recomment Hennesy and Patterson) and hopefully understand what they told you.
Or are you comparing a $500 MiniMac to a $500 small form factor, quiet PC? Again, I have used both and find the OSX MiniMac to be faster.
If you want to talk about Apple not having competition for the cheap, cobbled together x86 with fans turned up to high and a big case, that's fine. Apple has ceded that's not their expertise. No PowerPC user has tried to compete there. If you want to bash Apple for not having a $500 "fast as possible, to hell with design, noise and stability", that's valid. They've told you they don't want that kind of customer. I've got a very fast, noisy $500 x86 on my desk at work, and I'd much rather have a Mini. If you want a laptop and peripherals, weight and size don't matter, you can certainly find a machine cheaper than an iBook. My current work machine cost more than an iBook, runs XP and the clock rate is higher than the iBook, but OSX on the iBook is far more responsive (and faster for GUI apps and perl execution for what I do).
The PC is king. You can't argue with 95+ market share. But you sound like an idiot when you tell me that the reason is because Apple and PowerPC are at a 4 to 1 loss in the price to performance comparison. They don't have products where volume is -- price at the cost of speed and performance or speed at the cost of noise and stability.
Uhm, buddy? I don't know how to say this politely. Unless you're younger than 15 years old, JavaScript didn't exist for any definition of "back in the day". Java itself hasn't even been around for more than 10 years (1.0 was in 1996, but you might think about 1997's 1.1). Java came to be between 1996 and 1999.
And I'm not even that old. I don't even remember Jimmy Carter being president.
First in the industry?
As recently as 2 years ago, Mapquest had satellite images for most of the US. I could type in the addresses of all my friends from college and my parents' and get pictures of their homes. The resolution wasn't great, and different zoom features may have been from different satellite passes, but it was a very entertaining and educational service. (The highest resolution pass of my home showed nothing but cleared dirt but the third highest showed completed structures.)
Once I was trying to give someone directions to the Cheesecake Factory in Austin's Arboretum, the map services were not very informative, and the restaraunt is actually kind of hidden from most of the parking lot. The map services could get a car to the complex, but it's a decent sized place to direct a coworker. So I got the satellite image, printed it on the color laser printer and pointed out the building we'd meet at. Worked great.
It was, of course, licensed from a third party and I have no doubt the licence didn't pay for itself in Mapquests's grand plans.
On the other hand, Mapquest's satellite photos weren't very good at plotting some of the area around Saratoga Springs, NY, and northern Vermont was missing. Google's new service seems to have those fixed, from a quick look around.
Actually, the reliability of each piece is multiplied together. A single product may have a 99% liklihood of surviving a year. If you rely upon 10 of those, take .99^10 and you have a 90% liklihood of surviving a year in total. Sure, a single 99% means any failure is catastrophic, but the odds are better.
What would you plug into a wall-wart remover? Personally, I'd throw in my Airport, firewall, IP phone / DSL modem, router, external hard drives and phone charger. The network gear may as well all die together anyway, I don't do much interhouse transfer anyway. If the external hard drives (which are used for archiving and are on a journaled file system) go down, I'm okay with that. My phone charger would disapoint me, but it's only out of paranoia I recharge it daily -- it goes for a week or more with how little I use it. I'd be curious about putting my laptop on it, too, but at 65W alone (peak), much more load than that and my unified power supply probably requires more active cooling (AC/DC and DC/DC switching is not free).
Another thing to consider is that wall wart makers are going for the cheapest of the cheap. They're making very simple products with little eye towards longevity. 1) A more expensive, quality driven unified DC power supply may have more reliability than the cheapies thrown in for free with everything. 2) Some of the wall warts put out pretty dirty signals, relying upon bypass caps (decoupling caps, if you swing that way) at the product to clean it up. The products they drive actually last longer with cleaner supplies -- which a unified, quality driven supply may be able to do. It's hard to say how many failures are because of dirty power. Additionally, most of those wall warts are not using switching power supplies, which means they're more power hungry than a unified one could be.
I got a Leatherman for Christmas before I was old enough to appreciate it. I was in awe that my parents bought me a butterfly... pliers? I broke it in High School. Sent it off to be repaired (under 25 year warranty, no receipt, only the knowledge that the product wasn't that old) and it came back fixed, and the handle still had my name engraved on it. Nice service. In Boy Scouts, I learned that the Leatherman was good for whittling, but anything I had to do with the pliers must not involve much force on the handles because they dug into my hands.
In college, I became a teaching assistant for an electronics course. Lots of proto board work, wires, chips, the like. Needlenose pliers were a must, and the ability to pull them out of my pocket and butterfly my pliers out in less than a second was very timely. I ended up selling about 2 dozen (not direclty, but through telling students where to go purchase a tool like my Geek Tool). As I continued to advance in my own coursework, my rising experience with my Leatherman was a competitive advantage. The other tools were easy to find, but any tool you've used regularly for any length of time will be that comfortable to you. I ended up spraying a bit of Pam (the cooking spray) in the handle to make it open faster and smoother, but getting too much in there makes it close too easily to hold.
In a senior level course, a buddy of mine whipped out his Leatherman in front of our professor. The professor demanded, "What are you doing?" My buddy responded, "I'm too lazy to walk across the lab and get the public pliers, so I brought my own." To which the obese professor, recovering from a bypass surgery responded, "Get up. WHILE YOU STILL CAN!"
To summarize: I'm sure just about any tool will be useful for most people who are asking. You will develop a fondness for whatever you get. If you need to apply force, however, carefully consider the Leatherman model. Gerbers are more universally appropriate.
If you're in an industry where the speed of your typing is not the limiting factor, say programming (you're thinking more time than you're typing, or your type speed is limited by your thinking speed), then you obviously may be right. If speed is the only advantage, why suffer the cost? Of course, if the speed is there because the fingers have less space to travel on average, I would assume that the fingers suffer less stress. If that assumption is correct, it would be interesting to find out if RSI was less of a problem, all other things being equal. If this proved correct, mightn't a permanant speed hit be worth being able to work longer?
Of course, if you're in an industry where you're paid by the word, or if your thinking speed increases by 20% when your fingers get where they're going faster, then you would become more productive. I think that touch typing for most of us is very similar to programming -- once you know the first language, the rest are straightforward. My old roommate in college tought himself DVORAK inside of a week. Bless his heart, but he wasn't always the brightest crayon in the box, so if he can get pretty proficient inside of a week, I'm sure most of us can do alright too. After the learning curve, he had difficulty switching between layouts for about 2 minutes before his brain was fully switched into the current layout. Personally, I learned the Japanese keyboard inside of a day, but [a-z][0-9] are qwerty so it's not a direct comparison.
If it takes you 1 week of downtime (maybe spread out during your personal time after work), and it increases your productivity by 20-50%, then it doesn't take much math to show how much longer you have to stay in your job to prove the value. This assumes you can take the short term productivity hit.
Let's look at this story another way. Enterprise fans (who are among the most rabid bit torrent users, many because of UPN's limited audience) don't believe they're spending enough money on the show through eyeballs (commercials) and uploading. They feel the need to tell the studios that they're willing to pay more, so they took out an ad.
Do we need more evidence that current copyright law is hindering the progress of science and useful arts?
Studios, the Internet is there for more than just commercials served as web pages. We're willing to pay for content. We're ready for you. You will lose money if you stand in the way of progress, just like the US Constitution foretold 200 years ago. You can either help with something like iTunes or sue dead grandmothers until teenagers teach their parents how to take care of this themselves.
We have the technology to allow the market to directly tell you what they want. We want Firefly (just count those DVD sales). We want Family guy. Yet the studios count the millions who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials the same as a rabid fan base who will pay through the nose for a series on commercial free DVD. (Here's a tip, I don't like menus or "special features", I just want to use my DVD player like a CD player hooked up to the TV.)
[karma whore]Wait, this is Slashdot. Nobody likes Enterprise. How much did both Enterprise fans have to contribute for the full page ad?[/karma whore]
Your opinion may be more relevant, but I believe (as an American citizen living overseas) that current copyright law is illegal. As an American citizen, my rights are governed by a 200 year old piece of paper, which says "Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." My rights, it appears, broaden when the copyright holder is using the copyright to hinder "the Progress of Science".
It is up to us, as individuals, to come up with a "fair use" method to compensate copyright holders while enjoying the promition the progress of science and useful arts -- the Internet is clearly more than current movie and television studios are using it.
If I torrent a file, it could be assumed that I have no intent to compensate the copyright holder, unless I can demonstrate that I attempted to compensate the copyright holder a fair amount. If I can show a court that I paid for a movie ticket -- which was not ripped in half at the theater -- the issue of downloading goes away and the uploading becomes the interpretation of the Constitution.
Nobody is claiming that clock speed always equals performance, but think about it this way -- say you have data coming in at 10 GB/s. You could either have 8 wires (and buffers and processing) running at 10 GHz, 16 wires (etc.) running at 5GHz, 32 wires at 2.5GHz (etc.), you get the idea. If the Cell architecture processes data at 4GHz, the only thing we can be pretty certain of is that the pipeline is very deep. The benchmarks you want to see will very likely be very impressive. Perhaps the speed was partially dictated by wire density and transistor sizing?
Real world, though, what does this mean? This chip is due to be a game machine. Game workloads are, for the most part, very predictable. You process an entire screen of graphics in a very similar manner every time. This means that if you get the prediction models (and compiler hints) right, your actual performance will be very high. The same supposition could be made for encryption or any other bulk vector processing, with obvious strengths according to the instruction set of the processor. General workloads, however, do not do very well with deep pipelines. They tend to prefer less of a pipeline and less of a branch mispredict penalty. Cell will be great at its intended market, but you don't use a 4+GHz chip with over half the area (guessing, looking at the pictures) tuned for vector math (the APUs have been called SIMD) to take over the PC. For that, we will still have multicore x86 and PPC chips to dream about.
Apple faces a perception problem. For every vocal person like NanoGator (who seems to have positive karma despite this Troll moderation), there are probably 20 quiet ones who believe the same thing, despite what Mac fans believe.
Where can we send NanoGator to buy Mac applications? Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, even ElBo used to have Mac games. There's always the Apple website (and probably 10 other internet and catalogs of reasonable repute), but for the person wanting instant gratification, there's work to be done in cities without the Apple Store. Even cities with an Apple Store find that they are not always convenient to all the residents.
I enjoy games on my Mac -- and have for a few years now. Bleeding edge gamers, however, can start naming tens of games that are not out for the Mac. Sure, MacHeads can point out that 90% of those are junk and not playable after 5 hours, maybe even 80% of them turned out to be a waste of money. Aforementioned MacHeads would point out Apple's list of games as proof that good games are out there, but it's still a perception problem.
NanoGator, I think you're more right than any of us would like you to be. I think a lot of that will be addressed after developers and store owners see how popular a $500 Mac turns out to be.
To Google!
Some people did just that -- they formatted both sides of the floppies as single sided and flipped them. It made some of the older generation more at ease -- how could a machine read both sides-- and the younger who felt that they were putting one over on the computer -- I just gave you the other side, and now it has different data! I just marveled over how it was able to synch up two heads and come up with the same output twice in a row.
I don't remember 90KB floppies, only 160KB (?), 180KB, 360KB and 1.2MB. Then we hit the 3.5's and used 360KB, 720KB and 1.44MB.
I can't tell if I missed your joke or if you missed out how the floppies worked for all those years. The original 5.25" floppy was typically double the density of the 8" floppies, and weighed in at 180KB per side, or 360KB for the whole media. Most drives out there (almost all PC drives, for example) were double sided drives (a reader on top and a reader on the bottom), so you could read both sides seamlessly without having to "flip the media". This could be demonstrated by formatting a disk as 180KB on both sides and storing discrete data or formatting the back of a disk as double sided and then wondering where your FAT went on the other side. 720KB DS/DD 3.5" floppies, similarly, coexisted with a smaller number of 360KB SS/DD 3.5" floppies.
My father purchased a bulk number of 3.5" SS/DD, drilled holes in all the corners and formatted them as DS/HD. It took a silly long time to figure out why they all failed faster than everybody else's more expensive media.
I was once priviledged enough to ride in a Ferrari Testarossa. It was the most uncomfortable ride to get to 80 MPH out of the driveway before the first turn. The ride was fast, make no mistake, but a performance driver wants to "feel the road". Someone driving a luxury car typically wants to feel like the road is silk. They also didn't waste much weight dampening the engine noise from entering the cabin. Of course, if I had the opportunity, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Comfort isn't everything.
If that's the case, then why do people like this exist? All you have to do, according to them (and my experience) is pick up a consumer grade firewall with embedded Linux and you never worry about non-user initiated exploits. Aside from default password problems, can you name 5 remote exploits affecting consumer grade firewalls that prevent the user from being able to download patches?
Seems like everybody I know has one of those boxes (or their equivalent) and I'm the only one who knows how to upgrade the firmware on 'em. I did it to be security paranoid, but they've never had any problems. Shouldn't the default install of $CONSUMEROS be as security tight when it comes out of the box? Shouldn't anything else be considered a premature release?
At the navy company the poster describes, not only are the new password requirements as described, but the intranet still relies upon unencrypted communications. Many servers don't even have an encrypted way to log in!
Strong password requirements are all fine and good, but your 256 kilobyte password rotated hourly doesn't mean anything when you have to telnet or ftp to a box to log in.
Sorry, wrong links.
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Courtesy of Macslash.
Torrent link here: http://nedron.net:6969/torrents/1984macintro.mov.t orrent