Yes, but have you seen games that don't bother to handle alt-tab at all? One word... crash. That's what many of them end up doing because they can't figure out that they need to suspend themselves while getting minimized. The winkey, on the other hand, bothers the hell out of me. It's badly placed, and the fact this one key can interrupt an entire program and cause it to possibly crash, or at the very least take a long time to switch display modes, redraw the desktop, draw the start menu, reload everything from swap, and then start the process of switching back to the game! You can't really accidently alt-tab out of a program, but that isn't true of the windows key.
I'll admit I did not look at the pictures. However, I was going by Alienware's FAQ on this technology for the information about 'off-the-shelf hardware' and such. This FAQ also claims they do not require any kind of custom driver support.
Until any of this actually makes it to market, it's all speculation. Perhaps NVIDIA and ATI are going to insist that PCI express cards have connectors for genlocking on even the lower-end gaming video cards. As it stands today, the only current NVIDIA chip that support genlocking or framelocking is the Quadro FX 3000G, and I can not determine if any ATI FireGL cards support it (I see the term referenced for the Radeon7500/8500, but only in terms of the video overlay).
I just hope they're not using something like FireGL or Quadro cards.
However, that's not possible to do with generic off-the-shelf hardware without modifying it. I understand that the Alienware technology uses off-the-shelf video cards, so there's no way to lock them to the same clock (unless they're hoping they'll all by synched with the bus clock, because I wouldn't count on it). With the old 3dfx voodoo cards, this was easy because you had a connector for the two cards. Perhaps the old VESA feature connector found on old PCI cards might've supported such features, but you don't find it on today's cards.
Now, the only way I can see this technology working would be for them to yank a copy of the framebuffer (or equivalent signal), and recompose the image before sending it out to the monitor. Either they could sit on the PCI Express bus, and try to access the framebuffer directly (SLOOOOOW), or they could sit on the analog or digital outputs, and try to grab it there. If they were sitting on the analog outputs, I have no idea how they would recompose the image. On the DVI-D output, they could either record only the data coming over the DVI link and simply replay it when it has the complete image. They'd still need to synchronize, but compared to the scanline problems the analog output would pose, it should be much easier.
Actually, two identical video cards may not (completely) identical performance. Subtle variances can creep into the various timing crystals and other electronic components that can make them unsynchronized. Two video cards outputting at 60 Hz may start out in sync, but it's virtually guaranteed that over time they will drift out of sync with each other.
As an example, a primary rule of video capture is that you tie yourself to a single timing source. In other words, if you're capturing both video and audio, you don't assume that you're getting 44,100Hz from the sound card, and 29.976 frames per second from the video. If you're going to accept the framerate given to you by the video source, then you calculate the audio bitrate from that, or vice versa.
While you're capturing video output from two video cards, you can not assume the scanlines each produce will be of the same length, or that the cards will remain in sync with each other over any period of time. You can treat one source as a trusted, but the other can not be. You might be getting 60.00000Hz from one video card, and 60.00001Hz from the other. Over the course of 28 hours, the second video card would gain a whole frame over the first one. However, in half that time, the signal would've been 180 degrees out of phase. And that's only using a variance of 0.000017 percent!
Now, I'm no electrical engineer, and I might be incorrect about some of the things I've said, but I'm pretty sure that a 1MHz clock chip isn't always exactly 1,000,000 Hz. There's a couple article son timing crystals here and here. Apparently, age and tempurature can affect the oscillations of these crystals to an extent, as well.
I don't believe the problem is Microsoft ads on LinuxToday, per se. It's more about the fact these Microsoft ads are decidely anti-Linux. In a way, this mixes the message the website is trying to convey. If it was "Upgrade to Windows 2003 because it's 20% faster than Windows 2000", it wouldn't be a problem. If it was advertisements with a list of features as why you want to switch to Windows 2003 today, it wouldn't be so bad. But these, "don't use linux because it's too expensive/slow/insecure/unreliable" advertisements should go away.
When Linux Magazine started running ads from Microsoft in their print magazine, some people were outraged. The editors said that they would continue to run the ads, but intended to refuse any ads that were negative towards Linux in any way. I feel the compromise is acceptable, but of course, not everyone sees it that way. If this policy ever changes, however, I'll simply stop reading and puchasing the magazine.
I'm not even sure SCO's case has anything to do with copyright, either. SCO makes big copyright claims to the press, then tells the court that the case isn't about copyright, but rather contract law.
If it has to hide it's true function somewhere within 10 pages of legalese in the EULA, then it's triply evil. Drive-by downloads, on the other hand, particularily those that exploit bugs in IE should be considered viruses or malware by antivirus software.
For 'MPEG', he's probably talking about those VideoCD MPEG-1 files. DivX, xvid, 3vix, etc all have their ups and downs. Some encode certain scenes better than others. I'm sure that WMV v9 has some extensions that make it more or less incompatible with standard MPEG-4, though. It's the "One Microsoft Way", isn't it?
Yes, MS Exchange is fun, isn't it. I had lots of fun getting Exchange 2000's Outlook Webaccess working with an Apache reverse proxy. I didn't want the hassle of trying to run an Exchange 'Front End' server in the DMZ, and trying to figure out which ports Exchange and Windows are going to demand to be able to communicate with, I decided I was just going to do a simple reverse proxy. With Exchange 5.5, this is no problem. Exchange 2000, on the other hand, wants to write or rewrite the FQDN into the requests.
Today, I have two servers who are convinced they own the www.domain.com. One is Windows/Exchange just so it's not screwing up things, and the other is Linux/Apache because it really is serving that website.
Just look at the IDE 'RAID' boards. Many come with a 'lite' BIOS that disables most of the features that the full blown IDE RAID card may have. Or look at the Promise ATA cards. The only difference between the RAID and non-RAID versions are the BIOS they are flashed with. This is an easy example because those ATA RAID cards are mainly a software RAID anyway.
The 16 in FAT16 is the number of clusters it can access. Likewise the 32 in FAT32 is supposed to show how much bigger that limit is. FAT16 partitions can go up to 2GB (4GB in WinNT) because the maximum cluster size is 32K (64k for NT), and the max number of clusters is 65536 (less reserved sectors, etc). 32768 (2^15) * 65536 (2^16) = 2147483648 (2^31)
I believe FAT32's cluster limit is closer to 28 bit than a full 32 bits. The maximum FAT32 partition is 8TB, not 128TB as a full 32-bit FAT would imply.
I prefer ext2fsd for this purpose. If you need to view a file, there's no need to copy it. I wouldn't try enabling write support, and if you use ext3, you can't anyway.
Bad example. A better example is the lawsuits against replacement garage door opener remote manufacturers. A completely bogus use of the law, but they still argued it. See http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000436.h tml for details on the case.
They could force the issue by requiring challenge/response authentication before you're allowed to get the diag code. I doubt any of them to it today since simply making a new interface and/or connector for every single make and model works fine so far.
Depends. If she was complaining about the cost of his games, then it was a completely valid comparison. If she was lamenting about him gaming too much in general, then he got what he deserved. You do not bring up money in a situation where it does not belong, unless you are in one of those strange relationships where you actually enjoy fighting.
But what's the problem, really? Am I a bad person because I don't buy new vehicles? I mean, I'm depriving the automobile industry of all that income they're ENTITLED TO! Absurd? Absolutely, but there's no difference between arguing that reselling used games is bad or arguing that reselling used cars is bad.
On the other hand, maybe this goes to show that customers of video games feel that video game prices are too high and because of it, are even willing to let EB and GameSTOP gouge them because it hurts less than buying new.
I'm sure someone will try to say that we should ban reselling games and software, and revoke the first sale doctrine. Books, movies and music have dealt with competing with used counterparts for ages, and have done alright. I'm aware they tried banning reselling books in the past, but it didn't stick. People demand the freedom to do with their posessions as they please after they've purchased it.
On the other hand, a price cut in the games would mean the company selling used games would likely have to make a reciprocal cut in their used game prices. I buy used games, but I won't buy used music. Why? I save enough money by purchasing the used games to make it worth the hassle, whereas saving 5-7$ on used music isn't worth it, IMO.
I'd have to agree with #4 and #5. I've had my laptop stolen, and, no, I didn't keep backups of my data. It still bothers me to this day that I have lost that data. However, I did have insurance (it was cheap, about $25CDN/year at the time, it's $60 on my new one), so replacing the laptop didn't cost me anything.
The end result was I spent about $900, got a really sweet laptop that can run Linux well, (just as my previous one did). Of course, I haven't learned my data backup lesson, and there's still data on my laptop that does not exist anywhere else. The only injuries to me, today, are the lost data, and the lost trust I could've otherwise placed in my co-workers (it was stolen at work).
The moral of the story: Get insurance, especially if it's expensive, and easily stealable like a laptop is. Shop around for it if you must (having no deductable on your insured item is worth having), but get it.
On an tangent (but related!) matter, does anyone have a copy of the dcerpc.net CVS and mailing list archives? This is some of the data I lost, and would like to get a copy of it again.
Re:Blame it on Linksys
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
D-Link is crap, too (maybe I'm just bitter because a D-Link NIC fried three separate PCI slots on me). Don't kid yourself. They're cheap parts made cheaply. They may work fine if you don't stress them too much, but as soon as you put a load on them (much like P2P filesharing apps do), they will start malfunctioning.
One thing I have noticed about the low-end gateway routers is that the older products are almost always more reliable than the newer ones. I have an old Netgear RT314 that I'm sure still works fine, but I stopped using it because it didn't have an MTU limiting (MSS clamping) function. I got a Netgear MR814, and it dies when too many connections try to go through it. V1 Linksys BEFSR41s were pretty stable. V2 was more unstable, and V3 is completely useless. I have no historical impression of D-Link routers because they haven't worked well on the local DSL service until fairly recently.
The problem was the level 2 and/or CPU caches couldn't cache over 64MB on those boards (mostly pentium and earlier). Instead of hitting the faster cache memory, you were hitting the much slower main memory. If you want to see the difference in performance of this on one of those older machines, all you need to do is turn off the caches in the system's BIOS. A system that would boot Windows 95 in a couple minutes would turn into one that took up to 10 minutes to boot.
Now, the problem with all of this is that the OS is generally unaware of the fact this memory over 64MB is dog slow. Most OS's prefer using physical RAM over swap because it's a well known fact that access disks is slower than accessing RAM. If the OS had been aware of this slow RAM, it could've used that additional RAM just as it would've used swap, or EMS memory (remember that?). Nearly all, however, blindly assumed that all memory was created equal in the system.
I believe most of those programs just did a very large allocation of memory, which basically forced Windows 98 to start cleaning up to make room for this large memory chunk that was requested. In a way, Windows 98 was too lazy with it's swap and memory allocation duties, and the problem with Linux is it's too dutiful for some workloads. Windows 98 wasn't swapping out when it ought to, and Linux is swapping when it shouldn't. The problem for Linux users is more a matter of tuning than anything else. Sysadmins like having knobs they can turn, and Linux only provides one -- swappiness (and what exactly it changes is a little unclear to most people, myself included).
Re:okay, here's a challenge...
on
Is Swap Necessary?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it's simply a case of, 'there's no simple answer'. Even a benchmark would be difficult to do, because it would vary depending on workload. You might be able to handle a particular machine with no swap, but I would find it unusable. I'm not even sure how you would test this. What kind of performance would you test? Latency? I/O throughput? Integer instructions per second? If you turned off cache, your maximum latency and insn per second might increase, but your throughput may decrease.
The other side of this is that memory that is not being used is wasted. Getting unused memory out of RAM, and into swap, so that memory can be used for real work can improve performance. This isn't just about memory that your applications are using. It's also about memory that is being used as cache for the disks you're using.
Maybe you have enough memory to run your program, but you don't have enough memory to keep enough directory structures into RAM, so you keep needing to read the disk. If there are unused pages in that program that were only used once during startup, for example, it makes sense to get them out or memory, so that memory can be used for disk caching instead.
Now, you have to understand how Linux handles paging, too. Unmodified pages from executables that are running may be discarded by the kernel at any time, because it knows where to get them. They won't be thrown into swap because it's not necessary. On the other hand, if that particular page has been modified (and some are modified as they are loaded by ld.so, for example), then the page must be copied into swap before it's discarded.
Slashdot Mirror
For all intents and purposes, I believe that all intensive purposes have no place on slashdot.
Yes, but have you seen games that don't bother to handle alt-tab at all? One word... crash. That's what many of them end up doing because they can't figure out that they need to suspend themselves while getting minimized. The winkey, on the other hand, bothers the hell out of me. It's badly placed, and the fact this one key can interrupt an entire program and cause it to possibly crash, or at the very least take a long time to switch display modes, redraw the desktop, draw the start menu, reload everything from swap, and then start the process of switching back to the game! You can't really accidently alt-tab out of a program, but that isn't true of the windows key.
Until any of this actually makes it to market, it's all speculation. Perhaps NVIDIA and ATI are going to insist that PCI express cards have connectors for genlocking on even the lower-end gaming video cards. As it stands today, the only current NVIDIA chip that support genlocking or framelocking is the Quadro FX 3000G, and I can not determine if any ATI FireGL cards support it (I see the term referenced for the Radeon7500/8500, but only in terms of the video overlay).
I just hope they're not using something like FireGL or Quadro cards.
Now, the only way I can see this technology working would be for them to yank a copy of the framebuffer (or equivalent signal), and recompose the image before sending it out to the monitor. Either they could sit on the PCI Express bus, and try to access the framebuffer directly (SLOOOOOW), or they could sit on the analog or digital outputs, and try to grab it there. If they were sitting on the analog outputs, I have no idea how they would recompose the image. On the DVI-D output, they could either record only the data coming over the DVI link and simply replay it when it has the complete image. They'd still need to synchronize, but compared to the scanline problems the analog output would pose, it should be much easier.
As an example, a primary rule of video capture is that you tie yourself to a single timing source. In other words, if you're capturing both video and audio, you don't assume that you're getting 44,100Hz from the sound card, and 29.976 frames per second from the video. If you're going to accept the framerate given to you by the video source, then you calculate the audio bitrate from that, or vice versa.
While you're capturing video output from two video cards, you can not assume the scanlines each produce will be of the same length, or that the cards will remain in sync with each other over any period of time. You can treat one source as a trusted, but the other can not be. You might be getting 60.00000Hz from one video card, and 60.00001Hz from the other. Over the course of 28 hours, the second video card would gain a whole frame over the first one. However, in half that time, the signal would've been 180 degrees out of phase. And that's only using a variance of 0.000017 percent!
Now, I'm no electrical engineer, and I might be incorrect about some of the things I've said, but I'm pretty sure that a 1MHz clock chip isn't always exactly 1,000,000 Hz. There's a couple article son timing crystals here and here. Apparently, age and tempurature can affect the oscillations of these crystals to an extent, as well.
When Linux Magazine started running ads from Microsoft in their print magazine, some people were outraged. The editors said that they would continue to run the ads, but intended to refuse any ads that were negative towards Linux in any way. I feel the compromise is acceptable, but of course, not everyone sees it that way. If this policy ever changes, however, I'll simply stop reading and puchasing the magazine.
I'm not even sure SCO's case has anything to do with copyright, either. SCO makes big copyright claims to the press, then tells the court that the case isn't about copyright, but rather contract law.
If it has to hide it's true function somewhere within 10 pages of legalese in the EULA, then it's triply evil. Drive-by downloads, on the other hand, particularily those that exploit bugs in IE should be considered viruses or malware by antivirus software.
For 'MPEG', he's probably talking about those VideoCD MPEG-1 files. DivX, xvid, 3vix, etc all have their ups and downs. Some encode certain scenes better than others. I'm sure that WMV v9 has some extensions that make it more or less incompatible with standard MPEG-4, though. It's the "One Microsoft Way", isn't it?
Today, I have two servers who are convinced they own the www.domain.com. One is Windows/Exchange just so it's not screwing up things, and the other is Linux/Apache because it really is serving that website.
Just look at the IDE 'RAID' boards. Many come with a 'lite' BIOS that disables most of the features that the full blown IDE RAID card may have. Or look at the Promise ATA cards. The only difference between the RAID and non-RAID versions are the BIOS they are flashed with. This is an easy example because those ATA RAID cards are mainly a software RAID anyway.
I believe FAT32's cluster limit is closer to 28 bit than a full 32 bits. The maximum FAT32 partition is 8TB, not 128TB as a full 32-bit FAT would imply.
No, 2^16 is 64k... 2^31 is 2GB.
I prefer ext2fsd for this purpose. If you need to view a file, there's no need to copy it. I wouldn't try enabling write support, and if you use ext3, you can't anyway.
http://sys.xiloo.com/
Bad example. A better example is the lawsuits against replacement garage door opener remote manufacturers. A completely bogus use of the law, but they still argued it. See http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000436.h tml for details on the case.
They could force the issue by requiring challenge/response authentication before you're allowed to get the diag code. I doubt any of them to it today since simply making a new interface and/or connector for every single make and model works fine so far.
Depends. If she was complaining about the cost of his games, then it was a completely valid comparison. If she was lamenting about him gaming too much in general, then he got what he deserved. You do not bring up money in a situation where it does not belong, unless you are in one of those strange relationships where you actually enjoy fighting.
On the other hand, maybe this goes to show that customers of video games feel that video game prices are too high and because of it, are even willing to let EB and GameSTOP gouge them because it hurts less than buying new.
I'm sure someone will try to say that we should ban reselling games and software, and revoke the first sale doctrine. Books, movies and music have dealt with competing with used counterparts for ages, and have done alright. I'm aware they tried banning reselling books in the past, but it didn't stick. People demand the freedom to do with their posessions as they please after they've purchased it.
On the other hand, a price cut in the games would mean the company selling used games would likely have to make a reciprocal cut in their used game prices. I buy used games, but I won't buy used music. Why? I save enough money by purchasing the used games to make it worth the hassle, whereas saving 5-7$ on used music isn't worth it, IMO.
The end result was I spent about $900, got a really sweet laptop that can run Linux well, (just as my previous one did). Of course, I haven't learned my data backup lesson, and there's still data on my laptop that does not exist anywhere else. The only injuries to me, today, are the lost data, and the lost trust I could've otherwise placed in my co-workers (it was stolen at work).
The moral of the story: Get insurance, especially if it's expensive, and easily stealable like a laptop is. Shop around for it if you must (having no deductable on your insured item is worth having), but get it.
On an tangent (but related!) matter, does anyone have a copy of the dcerpc.net CVS and mailing list archives? This is some of the data I lost, and would like to get a copy of it again.
One thing I have noticed about the low-end gateway routers is that the older products are almost always more reliable than the newer ones. I have an old Netgear RT314 that I'm sure still works fine, but I stopped using it because it didn't have an MTU limiting (MSS clamping) function. I got a Netgear MR814, and it dies when too many connections try to go through it. V1 Linksys BEFSR41s were pretty stable. V2 was more unstable, and V3 is completely useless. I have no historical impression of D-Link routers because they haven't worked well on the local DSL service until fairly recently.
Now, the problem with all of this is that the OS is generally unaware of the fact this memory over 64MB is dog slow. Most OS's prefer using physical RAM over swap because it's a well known fact that access disks is slower than accessing RAM. If the OS had been aware of this slow RAM, it could've used that additional RAM just as it would've used swap, or EMS memory (remember that?). Nearly all, however, blindly assumed that all memory was created equal in the system.
I believe most of those programs just did a very large allocation of memory, which basically forced Windows 98 to start cleaning up to make room for this large memory chunk that was requested. In a way, Windows 98 was too lazy with it's swap and memory allocation duties, and the problem with Linux is it's too dutiful for some workloads. Windows 98 wasn't swapping out when it ought to, and Linux is swapping when it shouldn't. The problem for Linux users is more a matter of tuning than anything else. Sysadmins like having knobs they can turn, and Linux only provides one -- swappiness (and what exactly it changes is a little unclear to most people, myself included).
I think it's simply a case of, 'there's no simple answer'. Even a benchmark would be difficult to do, because it would vary depending on workload. You might be able to handle a particular machine with no swap, but I would find it unusable. I'm not even sure how you would test this. What kind of performance would you test? Latency? I/O throughput? Integer instructions per second? If you turned off cache, your maximum latency and insn per second might increase, but your throughput may decrease.
Maybe you have enough memory to run your program, but you don't have enough memory to keep enough directory structures into RAM, so you keep needing to read the disk. If there are unused pages in that program that were only used once during startup, for example, it makes sense to get them out or memory, so that memory can be used for disk caching instead.
Now, you have to understand how Linux handles paging, too. Unmodified pages from executables that are running may be discarded by the kernel at any time, because it knows where to get them. They won't be thrown into swap because it's not necessary. On the other hand, if that particular page has been modified (and some are modified as they are loaded by ld.so, for example), then the page must be copied into swap before it's discarded.