Saw this one at Gencon in August. The folks running the Anime room had quite a line up, and there's nothing like seeing a new anime materpiece with a bunch of otaku who are also seeing it for the first time. Of course, it brought the house down when it played.
I'm generally very tough on anime, the storylines aren't usually enough to keep me interested. Didn't much care for Akira, didn't like the new Metropolis, didn't much care for Ghost in the Shell... generally I don't like a lot of Anime that folks tell me I'm supposed to like, but I did like this one.
This movie reminds me a LOT of the original Neverending Story, which was my favorite film when I was a kid. The animation is unmatched, of course, and the story is very... unique. Such a strange and magical setting, so many unique characters, it was very refreshing to get a good look at someone else's imagination for a change. There were some very good laughs in this film as well.
I'd highly recommend this one to anybody who is getting sick of Disney's idea of a kid's movie. I'll definitely be catching this one in the theater, and buying it for my collection.
Hopefully this will start a trend. This is a very altruistic move on behalf of the German government... to commision and pay for the design of software to suit their needs, yet design and develop the project as open source, so that once it is done everyone around the world will be able to benefit from it.
We should try to get the US government to declare all contributions to open source development as a tax writeoff. Heck, maybe they already do, but somehow I think I would have heard of it by now if they did.
If this project delivers, the Exchange server at our organization will be in the dumpster before the hard drives have a chance to fully spin down, and I'll be running a shiny new copy of SuSE Kroupware in its place.
I have the 20GB unit. The thing is as close to indestructible as you can get a 20GB hard drive. It's only a little heavier than a CD player. It's small and will easily fit in a pocket, or you can put it on your belt with the case they give you.
I've been using it for about two months. Since it's really just a USB hard disk I use it for moving data to and from work and it simply rocks for that. I used to carry a DVD rip of LoTR around on it./chuckle
The interface is actually fast and easy to use once you get used to it. I can operate the whole thing without even bothering to look at the screen most of the time. It does have hiccups on some poorly encoded MP3 files, but I find it has far FEWER hiccups than a lot of PC players and all the Rio products. Audio quality is great, it has enough power to really pump up your headphones, and I can get about ten hours out of a single charge.
Finding a USB 2.0 A to A cable is a pain in the fricking ass, tho. It comes with one, but I had to hunt to find others so I could hook it up at work without carrying the cable around.
You know... that !$@$#% annoying game where you were a little spaceship and you had to fly over the pattern of dots on the screen in a certain number of seconds to advance to the next board... which had more dots in a nastier pattern with less time, etc...
I think I went through about 10 controllers just on that game, I had a bad habit back then of throwing them around the room when I didn't finish a board. That has got to be one of the hardest games I ever played. I have ninjalike reflexes for my age and I give sole credit to that game for them.
Other favorites... damn...
River Rage Yar's Revenge Dig Dug ($30 for a game was a lot back then!!) Adventure Berserk (guilty pleasure I know) Pitfall Tron
Anyone know how many carts were published for the 2600/7800 series of Atari Games?
Don't worry about Microsoft. They're on their way to being a footnote. I chuckle that they think that when forced to choose between MS and GPL, people will go with MS. That's not a safe assumption to make... not a safe one at all.
Just keep coding. Millions of happy hackers > politics and license agreements.
Comparing desktops to laptops is like comparing a paper airplane to a lear jet...
They are two entirely different worlds.
Very few laptop parts fit any size standard. Once you buy from someone, you're locked in to them with the exception of hard drive, memory, and PCMCIA cards.
As fas as I know, you cannot just go out and build a laptop either. If someone has info on how to do this, by all means let me know...
IF I was going to buy a laptop, I would definitely buy Dell. For servers and desktops, I will never use anything but what I build myself. I can effortlessly beat Dell's prices with better components on all of their systems from the lowest end to their best multiprocessor tier-one server class systems. That goes for anybody, actually, not just Dell.
Let me offer a tip here for those of you who will be building your PCs for the first time.
Never buy generic memory. Ever.
Stick to trusted name brands like Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, or whatever your brand of choice may be. I haven't found a "best breed" memory manufacturer out there yet, but using name brands lately has certainly reduced my costs both at home and at work (I build all the PCs and servers we use at our 100 person company).
Yeah, I know, the "real" name brand memory costs 10%-50% more depending on the name and the capacity. Just pay it. It's better than buying new memory later to replace bad chips, and dealing with downtime.
Generic memory is the devil. Our older of PCs at work here are using standard, off the shelf kinds of generic memory, no names on the chips. It tends to work for between 3 months and 2 years... at which time you begin getting segfaults, kernel panics, BSODs, and random application problems on all platforms.
If you buy name brand... YMMV but I've had much better luck. I've yet to have a single name brand memory chip fail and some of them here are as old as five years.
Don't skimp prices on memory or motherboard... and for the love of god please use a static guard when installing any of the memory. A static discharge you can't even feel is more than enough to shorten a memory module's lifespan by half.
I'll also put in a good word for MWave. They carry quality parts, have great prices, and are very cool about dealing with the occasional bad part or RMA return. I've built my last 4 systems on parts from there, over the last three years.
MWave also has a "live test" feature. If you're ordering a board/cpu/memory, they'll test it for you for a measly $10, that's a great way to avoid getting a defective part...
Am I going mad, or did I read "Well, this is not really in Slashdot's main focus" in the topic blurb?
First of all, if Slashdot HAS a focus (main or otherwise) I'd just love to see someone take a stab at describing what it is.
Second, geeks are gamers. Period. There's just no way in hell that those involved in computers and IT technology, especially those born sooner than 1970, haven't been exposed to gaming in some way. Maybe they didn't game, but some of their friends did. Heck, lots of folks cut their programming teeth on quick little apps to make RPGs easier to play.
As for the contest... well shit, doesn't sound too bad. They're basically allowing some very smart and creative individual a shot at making it into the gaming industry. Sure, they're saving a ton of development costs. Sure, they'll use a lot more of the stuff they get than just the finalists. Just remember that nobody's holding a gun to your head forcing you to give them your ideas.
Wizards has always cared more for their playerbase than the majority of the gaming companies out there. TSR treated folks like dirt, chasing all over the internet shutting down anything even remotely related to their products. Wizards releases a 3rd generation dice system free uner a license that isn't too dissimilar in spirit from the GPL, and allows the fan work to flourish. Small wonder they resurrected dungeons and dragons after TSR ran it into the ground.
There's some points in there you may find interesting...
1. United Linux is based on LSB and LiN18ux standards. NOT on their own, like so many slashdotters seem to think. This is a very GOOD thing.
2. They will be offering business level certifications for "UnitedLinux" that will certify you on all of their distros for taking just the one set of certs.
3. They have the backing of a shitload of major players... IBM, INTEL, and AMD to name a few.
4. They are willing to accept any other company into this "United Linux" conglomerate who wants to join. Open doors are good.
5. This is not a single distro. Each vendor is selling their own versions of Linux as they see fit, but the rub is that all of these distros that are "Powered by UnitedLinux" will be compatible with eachother.
Basically, this is just an agreement by these companies to make their Linux distros interoperable. That's it. This is a big push towards standards, and it is EXACTLY what Linux has needed. I hope it takes off, and that they get RedHat on board as well.
I hunted all over the net looking for benchmarks of SCSI systems versus IDE systems, and couldn't find a damn thing. Sure, people benchmark SCSI hard drives versus IDE hard drives, but nobody ever bothers to benchmark SCSI RAID versus IDE RAID.
I got so sick of it I said what the hell, and ordered up a pair of raid arrays for doing my own tests.
Test system configuration: Supermicro P4DP6 Mainboard with two Intel Xeon 2.2GHz processors, and 4GB of memory. Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
No I did not have time to test this under Linux before I had to get these bad boys ready for prouction. I doubt the benchmark results would have been much different, I've seen 3Ware running under Linux at Linuxworld and they kick some serious ass.
Here's the bottom line I got out of my benchmark tests.
SCSI Performance CPU Usage: 2.1%, Access time 6.1ms Read Speed: Max 37.6MB/s Min 11.6MB/s Avg 30.8MB/s Write Speed: Max 8.5MB/S Min 5.4 MB/s Avg 7.5 MB/s
IDE Performance CPU Usage: 3.1%, Access time 14.2ms Read Speed: Max 31.8MB/s Min 4.3 MB/S Avg 18.3MB/s Write Speed: Max 48.7MB/s Min 12.3MB/s Avg 36.4MB/s
I was a bit shcoked to see the IDE do so well. It annihilated the SCSI in terms of sheer write performance but lagged behind a bit from the read performance. CPU use isn't a factor for most people, who really cares if you lose 1% more of your CPU to the IDE compared to the SCSI.
Those 15,000 RPM drives were loud as jet engines, and they got hot enough that I was thinking of cooking some bacon strips on them. They were too hot to touch. The IDE drives on the other hand were barely audible even with the case off, and remained completely cool to the touch through the whole test without even a fan on them. You tell me which of those two types of drives is going to have a longer MTBF...
I didn't even use high performance IDE drives for that test. I'd also like to point out that the Mylex card was 66MHz/64bit, whereas the 3Ware card was 33MHz/64bit... so the 3Ware card was holding its own even though it was running at a slower rate of speed. I wonder what will happen in future generations of these controllers when they turn up the speed and improve the code...
Cost... I coul have built three of those IDE Raid systems for the price of that one SCSI system.
Space... The IDE drives were 80GB, the SCSI were 36GB. IDE owns SCSI in terms of space. We have some bigass databases where I work so that's actually fairly important to us.
Unless you REALLY need that 6.1ms access time or the extra ~20% in read performance you are far, far better off with an IDE Raid at this point.
The guys at Toms and Anandtech really need to do a major article on this stuff...
For the skeptical, here's a link to the screenshots of the HDTach benchmarks I ran. Be GENTLE guys we do not have tons of bandwidth for this...
Ads are useless. I haven't bought a product based off an advertisement on television since I reached the age of reason. I never watch the Ads now, I either click over to another channel or get up to go do something for the full five minutes that they run this crap. Do they really think that anyone on this entire planet gives a damn about 1-800 rates, the latest in skin-care products, or what new car they are going to buy this year, all based on television ads? All telephone rates are roughly the same. Skin care hasn't changed in a thousand years, you wash it you don't have problems. Stick to auto-enthusiast magazines for your car info, you'll get better information.
Lo and behold, after fifty years of being inundated with this crap, we developed a way to remove the ads. You know what they'll be doing next? Overlaying the advertisements directly on the picture, like CNNfn does with the stock ticker. just what I need to keep me interested... a constant stream of inane bullshit streaming across the face of the show I'm interested in watching.
I say, let them. We'll create PVRs that zoom in and completely ignore the banners. Move the banners and windows around, we'll develop PVRs that can track the real content and we will still avoid the advertisements. Every trick they can devise can be countered with a technical solution. You can't rule these devices as illegal, because they do nothing that IS illegal. There are no contracts to watch advertisements, and nobody would watch any television if there were.
Let these assclowns go back to a subscription model. You create a channel that has content that I actually WANT to watch, and I'll pay you for it. You can leave the useless ads out, you'll get your money, and everyone will be happy except the advertisers. Good, fuck them. I hope there is a special place in hell just for them, right next to the telemarketers and email spammers.
I have very serious doubts about the ability of the television industry to actually create anything that even remotely resembles quality entertainment. I've reached the point where I frankly have zero interest in watching any television. If the show is that good, I'll buy the DVD releases, ad free, and they can get their money that way.
Or better yet, I'll keep my damned money and go to the library. There's more entertainment in one single Neal Stephenson novel than there is in an entire year of television, even if you count the content from every single damned station.
Someday the artists of this world are just going to have to start giving everything away free. After a few years, when all the big media companies go bankrupt from being unable to compete with the independent media, things will be back on track again.
Well, no actually. I was thinking more along the lines of administrators doing their jobs and keeping the patches up to date (not gonna happen), or even Microsoft changing their design philosophy so that these sort of problems never occur in the first place.
The person who wrote this spent some time thinking of the way to do the most damage. This virus nails you to the wall the instant it infects someone who just has your email address. That was some vicious thinking. The problems caused by this virus actually extend into social engineering. Pure genius.
Makes you wonder what else they'll come up with...
Maybe someday we'll have security, and patch this sort of thing...
"They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap. One ad states, 'No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."
Ok, this kinda floored me. Those are the EXACT SAME REASONS we DON'T love Microsoft where I work. Hello Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
Well hey, if they are ramping this up and spending that much on advertising, it means Linux has them running scared, and that is a good thing.
Gladriel did give Frodo the phial in the theatrical release of the film. It was in, but wasn't more than 15 seconds long.
As for the rest, well, they were all wearing their elven cloaks in the film too. The giving scene was just cut, but the gifts are there if you look for them.
All except Sam's seed box actually. PJ says the entire "Scouring of the Shire" is cut, because it simply doesn't work on screen. I think that's a load of BS myself, but it's not my movie to make...
You have to understand Harry in order to get the substance from his reviews.
Harry has a deep seated and pathological NEED to absolutely love every film he watches. His desire for this is so strong that within about 15 minutes of viewing a film he will find the proper mindset in which to view it. (Mindsets being in this case the point of view that one should approach a film with in order to obtain the most enjoyment from it.)
Harry has never once pretended not to want or use the "special access" and preferred treatment he gets from studios. Heck, he delights in it far more than any other reviewer I've ever seen, like a kid at christmas. That's part of the game. The one thing Harry does do is incinerate films he doesn't like, special screenings be damned. Just look at his review for Rollerball 2000 if you want a prime example. Out of 10 movies he gets "special access" for, 1 is awesome, 2 are good, 5 suck in one way or another, and the rest he never reviews since they are a waste of time.
The only real problem you get reading Harry's reviews is that sometimes it's just not possible to get into the mindset he does to enjoy a film, so you end up with Harry giving a good to glowing review for a movie that to a non-film geek is a pile of crap (Godzilla 2000 for example). He's gotten better at knowing when this is happening lately and you'll find his reviews peppered with "If you don't like x you'll hate this" or "If you like y then this is a lot like it".
And get off with this betrayal thing. I get far, far better reviews from Harry and Moriarty on AICN then I do from all other film sites combined. You're coming across as a bitter old school AICN poster who feels robbed because he went to see a movie that Harry recommended and couldn't get into it. No reviewers are right all the time. Feeling betrayed for eight bucks is a little dramatic. It's like all the punks who think they were betrayed by Green Day when they ditched the punk rock, and all the old slashdot posters whining about how much the site sucks nowadays.
Re:Anecdotal evidence against....
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Actually, I used to be an EQ junkie, and both my roomates still are.../play of 90+ days will shock you out of it most of the time, at least it did me.
The problem with EQ is that you get so many in-game friends that they become your family. It isn't that you are isolated from social contact, you are isolated from REAL people because the game eats up all your time. You get tons of social interaction, so much so that at the highest levels of play it is all you play for...
Friends don't let friends play MMORPGs...
Re:Anecdotal evidence against....
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· Score: 1
TV isolates you -- sits you on your couch with nobody to talk to and no reason to move. The net makes you branch out. It's reversing what the TV has done to us for decades.
That's the kind of statment that needs to be shouted from the rooftops...
Slashdot Mirror
Saw this one at Gencon in August. The folks running the Anime room had quite a line up, and there's nothing like seeing a new anime materpiece with a bunch of otaku who are also seeing it for the first time. Of course, it brought the house down when it played.
I'm generally very tough on anime, the storylines aren't usually enough to keep me interested. Didn't much care for Akira, didn't like the new Metropolis, didn't much care for Ghost in the Shell... generally I don't like a lot of Anime that folks tell me I'm supposed to like, but I did like this one.
This movie reminds me a LOT of the original Neverending Story, which was my favorite film when I was a kid. The animation is unmatched, of course, and the story is very... unique. Such a strange and magical setting, so many unique characters, it was very refreshing to get a good look at someone else's imagination for a change. There were some very good laughs in this film as well.
I'd highly recommend this one to anybody who is getting sick of Disney's idea of a kid's movie. I'll definitely be catching this one in the theater, and buying it for my collection.
Bah, I've got you all beat, mine's in binary. >)
Hopefully this will start a trend. This is a very altruistic move on behalf of the German government... to commision and pay for the design of software to suit their needs, yet design and develop the project as open source, so that once it is done everyone around the world will be able to benefit from it.
We should try to get the US government to declare all contributions to open source development as a tax writeoff. Heck, maybe they already do, but somehow I think I would have heard of it by now if they did.
If this project delivers, the Exchange server at our organization will be in the dumpster before the hard drives have a chance to fully spin down, and I'll be running a shiny new copy of SuSE Kroupware in its place.
I'll also give this one a thumbs up.
/chuckle
I have the 20GB unit. The thing is as close to indestructible as you can get a 20GB hard drive. It's only a little heavier than a CD player. It's small and will easily fit in a pocket, or you can put it on your belt with the case they give you.
I've been using it for about two months. Since it's really just a USB hard disk I use it for moving data to and from work and it simply rocks for that. I used to carry a DVD rip of LoTR around on it.
The interface is actually fast and easy to use once you get used to it. I can operate the whole thing without even bothering to look at the screen most of the time. It does have hiccups on some poorly encoded MP3 files, but I find it has far FEWER hiccups than a lot of PC players and all the Rio products. Audio quality is great, it has enough power to really pump up your headphones, and I can get about ten hours out of a single charge.
Finding a USB 2.0 A to A cable is a pain in the fricking ass, tho. It comes with one, but I had to hunt to find others so I could hook it up at work without carrying the cable around.
Oh you bastard.
/sigh
So much for my productivity
You know... that !$@$#% annoying game where you were a little spaceship and you had to fly over the pattern of dots on the screen in a certain number of seconds to advance to the next board... which had more dots in a nastier pattern with less time, etc...
I think I went through about 10 controllers just on that game, I had a bad habit back then of throwing them around the room when I didn't finish a board. That has got to be one of the hardest games I ever played. I have ninjalike reflexes for my age and I give sole credit to that game for them.
Other favorites... damn...
River Rage
Yar's Revenge
Dig Dug ($30 for a game was a lot back then!!)
Adventure
Berserk (guilty pleasure I know)
Pitfall
Tron
Anyone know how many carts were published for the 2600/7800 series of Atari Games?
Anyone remember the first RPG/Adventure game ever created?
;)
No, it wasn't Dragon Warrior.
This game was also the first game to have an Easter Egg, as placing a certain object in a certain place would cause the programmer's name to pop up.
So, who still remembers where the secret room in the red castle is and thinks they can find their way through the maze on the first try?
Don't worry about Microsoft. They're on their way to being a footnote. I chuckle that they think that when forced to choose between MS and GPL, people will go with MS. That's not a safe assumption to make... not a safe one at all.
Just keep coding. Millions of happy hackers > politics and license agreements.
Comparing desktops to laptops is like comparing a paper airplane to a lear jet...
They are two entirely different worlds.
Very few laptop parts fit any size standard. Once you buy from someone, you're locked in to them with the exception of hard drive, memory, and PCMCIA cards.
As fas as I know, you cannot just go out and build a laptop either. If someone has info on how to do this, by all means let me know...
IF I was going to buy a laptop, I would definitely buy Dell. For servers and desktops, I will never use anything but what I build myself. I can effortlessly beat Dell's prices with better components on all of their systems from the lowest end to their best multiprocessor tier-one server class systems. That goes for anybody, actually, not just Dell.
Let me offer a tip here for those of you who will be building your PCs for the first time.
Never buy generic memory. Ever.
Stick to trusted name brands like Kingston, Crucial, Corsair, or whatever your brand of choice may be. I haven't found a "best breed" memory manufacturer out there yet, but using name brands lately has certainly reduced my costs both at home and at work (I build all the PCs and servers we use at our 100 person company).
Yeah, I know, the "real" name brand memory costs 10%-50% more depending on the name and the capacity. Just pay it. It's better than buying new memory later to replace bad chips, and dealing with downtime.
Generic memory is the devil. Our older of PCs at work here are using standard, off the shelf kinds of generic memory, no names on the chips. It tends to work for between 3 months and 2 years... at which time you begin getting segfaults, kernel panics, BSODs, and random application problems on all platforms.
If you buy name brand... YMMV but I've had much better luck. I've yet to have a single name brand memory chip fail and some of them here are as old as five years.
Don't skimp prices on memory or motherboard... and for the love of god please use a static guard when installing any of the memory. A static discharge you can't even feel is more than enough to shorten a memory module's lifespan by half.
I'll also put in a good word for MWave. They carry quality parts, have great prices, and are very cool about dealing with the occasional bad part or RMA return. I've built my last 4 systems on parts from there, over the last three years.
MWave also has a "live test" feature. If you're ordering a board/cpu/memory, they'll test it for you for a measly $10, that's a great way to avoid getting a defective part...
Nah. Gygax was run out of TSR via the usual gamut of nasty politics.
Once TSR ended up under new management, they got him back.
My point is, TSR most likely would have done a lot better with Gygax helming it the whole time.
Reminds me of Apple kicking out Steve Jobs, only to damage the company and later get him back again.
Am I going mad, or did I read "Well, this is not really in Slashdot's main focus" in the topic blurb?
First of all, if Slashdot HAS a focus (main or otherwise) I'd just love to see someone take a stab at describing what it is.
Second, geeks are gamers. Period. There's just no way in hell that those involved in computers and IT technology, especially those born sooner than 1970, haven't been exposed to gaming in some way. Maybe they didn't game, but some of their friends did. Heck, lots of folks cut their programming teeth on quick little apps to make RPGs easier to play.
As for the contest... well shit, doesn't sound too bad. They're basically allowing some very smart and creative individual a shot at making it into the gaming industry. Sure, they're saving a ton of development costs. Sure, they'll use a lot more of the stuff they get than just the finalists. Just remember that nobody's holding a gun to your head forcing you to give them your ideas.
Wizards has always cared more for their playerbase than the majority of the gaming companies out there. TSR treated folks like dirt, chasing all over the internet shutting down anything even remotely related to their products. Wizards releases a 3rd generation dice system free uner a license that isn't too dissimilar in spirit from the GPL, and allows the fan work to flourish. Small wonder they resurrected dungeons and dragons after TSR ran it into the ground.
TSR never should have dumped Gygax...
There's some points in there you may find interesting...
1. United Linux is based on LSB and LiN18ux standards. NOT on their own, like so many slashdotters seem to think. This is a very GOOD thing.
2. They will be offering business level certifications for "UnitedLinux" that will certify you on all of their distros for taking just the one set of certs.
3. They have the backing of a shitload of major players... IBM, INTEL, and AMD to name a few.
4. They are willing to accept any other company into this "United Linux" conglomerate who wants to join. Open doors are good.
5. This is not a single distro. Each vendor is selling their own versions of Linux as they see fit, but the rub is that all of these distros that are "Powered by UnitedLinux" will be compatible with eachother.
Basically, this is just an agreement by these companies to make their Linux distros interoperable. That's it. This is a big push towards standards, and it is EXACTLY what Linux has needed. I hope it takes off, and that they get RedHat on board as well.
I hunted all over the net looking for benchmarks of SCSI systems versus IDE systems, and couldn't find a damn thing. Sure, people benchmark SCSI hard drives versus IDE hard drives, but nobody ever bothers to benchmark SCSI RAID versus IDE RAID.
I got so sick of it I said what the hell, and ordered up a pair of raid arrays for doing my own tests.
Test system configuration:
Supermicro P4DP6 Mainboard with two Intel Xeon 2.2GHz processors, and 4GB of memory.
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
No I did not have time to test this under Linux before I had to get these bad boys ready for prouction. I doubt the benchmark results would have been much different, I've seen 3Ware running under Linux at Linuxworld and they kick some serious ass.
IDE setup:
3Ware Escalade 7450 Raid Controller
Three Seagate Barracuda ATA IV Drives (7200RPM 9.5ms access time)
This was set up in a RAID5 configuration.
SCSI Setup:
Mylex AcceleRAID 352 Raid Controller
Three Seagate Cheetah LVD160 Drives (15,000RPM 3.6ms access time)
This was also set up in a RAID5 configuration.
Benchmarking utility used:
HD Tach 2.52
Here's the bottom line I got out of my benchmark tests.
SCSI Performance
CPU Usage: 2.1%, Access time 6.1ms
Read Speed: Max 37.6MB/s Min 11.6MB/s Avg 30.8MB/s
Write Speed: Max 8.5MB/S Min 5.4 MB/s Avg 7.5 MB/s
IDE Performance
CPU Usage: 3.1%, Access time 14.2ms
Read Speed: Max 31.8MB/s Min 4.3 MB/S Avg 18.3MB/s
Write Speed: Max 48.7MB/s Min 12.3MB/s Avg 36.4MB/s
I was a bit shcoked to see the IDE do so well. It annihilated the SCSI in terms of sheer write performance but lagged behind a bit from the read performance. CPU use isn't a factor for most people, who really cares if you lose 1% more of your CPU to the IDE compared to the SCSI.
Those 15,000 RPM drives were loud as jet engines, and they got hot enough that I was thinking of cooking some bacon strips on them. They were too hot to touch. The IDE drives on the other hand were barely audible even with the case off, and remained completely cool to the touch through the whole test without even a fan on them. You tell me which of those two types of drives is going to have a longer MTBF...
I didn't even use high performance IDE drives for that test. I'd also like to point out that the Mylex card was 66MHz/64bit, whereas the 3Ware card was 33MHz/64bit... so the 3Ware card was holding its own even though it was running at a slower rate of speed. I wonder what will happen in future generations of these controllers when they turn up the speed and improve the code...
Cost... I coul have built three of those IDE Raid systems for the price of that one SCSI system.
Space... The IDE drives were 80GB, the SCSI were 36GB. IDE owns SCSI in terms of space. We have some bigass databases where I work so that's actually fairly important to us.
Unless you REALLY need that 6.1ms access time or the extra ~20% in read performance you are far, far better off with an IDE Raid at this point.
The guys at Toms and Anandtech really need to do a major article on this stuff...
For the skeptical, here's a link to the screenshots of the HDTach benchmarks I ran. Be GENTLE guys we do not have tons of bandwidth for this...
IDE vs SCSI
IDE is on the top, SCSI is on the bottom. Interesting how SCSI is fairly linear but IDE is really sloppy and just running all over the place.
Ads are useless. I haven't bought a product based off an advertisement on television since I reached the age of reason. I never watch the Ads now, I either click over to another channel or get up to go do something for the full five minutes that they run this crap. Do they really think that anyone on this entire planet gives a damn about 1-800 rates, the latest in skin-care products, or what new car they are going to buy this year, all based on television ads? All telephone rates are roughly the same. Skin care hasn't changed in a thousand years, you wash it you don't have problems. Stick to auto-enthusiast magazines for your car info, you'll get better information.
Lo and behold, after fifty years of being inundated with this crap, we developed a way to remove the ads. You know what they'll be doing next? Overlaying the advertisements directly on the picture, like CNNfn does with the stock ticker. just what I need to keep me interested... a constant stream of inane bullshit streaming across the face of the show I'm interested in watching.
I say, let them. We'll create PVRs that zoom in and completely ignore the banners. Move the banners and windows around, we'll develop PVRs that can track the real content and we will still avoid the advertisements. Every trick they can devise can be countered with a technical solution. You can't rule these devices as illegal, because they do nothing that IS illegal. There are no contracts to watch advertisements, and nobody would watch any television if there were.
Let these assclowns go back to a subscription model. You create a channel that has content that I actually WANT to watch, and I'll pay you for it. You can leave the useless ads out, you'll get your money, and everyone will be happy except the advertisers. Good, fuck them. I hope there is a special place in hell just for them, right next to the telemarketers and email spammers.
I have very serious doubts about the ability of the television industry to actually create anything that even remotely resembles quality entertainment. I've reached the point where I frankly have zero interest in watching any television. If the show is that good, I'll buy the DVD releases, ad free, and they can get their money that way.
Or better yet, I'll keep my damned money and go to the library. There's more entertainment in one single Neal Stephenson novel than there is in an entire year of television, even if you count the content from every single damned station.
Someday the artists of this world are just going to have to start giving everything away free. After a few years, when all the big media companies go bankrupt from being unable to compete with the independent media, things will be back on track again.
This is like fighting some kind of fucked up war.
Well, no actually. I was thinking more along the lines of administrators doing their jobs and keeping the patches up to date (not gonna happen), or even Microsoft changing their design philosophy so that these sort of problems never occur in the first place.
The person who wrote this spent some time thinking of the way to do the most damage. This virus nails you to the wall the instant it infects someone who just has your email address. That was some vicious thinking. The problems caused by this virus actually extend into social engineering. Pure genius.
Makes you wonder what else they'll come up with...
Maybe someday we'll have security, and patch this sort of thing...
"They are apparently hyping that Unix is an expensive money trap. One ad states, 'No wonder Unix makes you feel boxed in. It ties you to an inflexible system. It requires you to pay for expensive experts. It makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."
Ok, this kinda floored me. Those are the EXACT SAME REASONS we DON'T love Microsoft where I work. Hello Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
Well hey, if they are ramping this up and spending that much on advertising, it means Linux has them running scared, and that is a good thing.
Gladriel did give Frodo the phial in the theatrical release of the film. It was in, but wasn't more than 15 seconds long.
As for the rest, well, they were all wearing their elven cloaks in the film too. The giving scene was just cut, but the gifts are there if you look for them.
All except Sam's seed box actually. PJ says the entire "Scouring of the Shire" is cut, because it simply doesn't work on screen. I think that's a load of BS myself, but it's not my movie to make...
Finally, something to explain why I suck so much at playing Blitzball in FFX! I knew there had to be a reason...
Yeah, that shitfest. I completely forgot they had a REAL 'zilla movie come out just afterwards. /chuckle
You have to understand Harry in order to get the substance from his reviews.
Harry has a deep seated and pathological NEED to absolutely love every film he watches. His desire for this is so strong that within about 15 minutes of viewing a film he will find the proper mindset in which to view it. (Mindsets being in this case the point of view that one should approach a film with in order to obtain the most enjoyment from it.)
Harry has never once pretended not to want or use the "special access" and preferred treatment he gets from studios. Heck, he delights in it far more than any other reviewer I've ever seen, like a kid at christmas. That's part of the game. The one thing Harry does do is incinerate films he doesn't like, special screenings be damned. Just look at his review for Rollerball 2000 if you want a prime example. Out of 10 movies he gets "special access" for, 1 is awesome, 2 are good, 5 suck in one way or another, and the rest he never reviews since they are a waste of time.
The only real problem you get reading Harry's reviews is that sometimes it's just not possible to get into the mindset he does to enjoy a film, so you end up with Harry giving a good to glowing review for a movie that to a non-film geek is a pile of crap (Godzilla 2000 for example). He's gotten better at knowing when this is happening lately and you'll find his reviews peppered with "If you don't like x you'll hate this" or "If you like y then this is a lot like it".
And get off with this betrayal thing. I get far, far better reviews from Harry and Moriarty on AICN then I do from all other film sites combined. You're coming across as a bitter old school AICN poster who feels robbed because he went to see a movie that Harry recommended and couldn't get into it. No reviewers are right all the time. Feeling betrayed for eight bucks is a little dramatic. It's like all the punks who think they were betrayed by Green Day when they ditched the punk rock, and all the old slashdot posters whining about how much the site sucks nowadays.
Actually, I used to be an EQ junkie, and both my roomates still are... /play of 90+ days will shock you out of it most of the time, at least it did me.
The problem with EQ is that you get so many in-game friends that they become your family. It isn't that you are isolated from social contact, you are isolated from REAL people because the game eats up all your time. You get tons of social interaction, so much so that at the highest levels of play it is all you play for...
Friends don't let friends play MMORPGs...
TV isolates you -- sits you on your couch with nobody to talk to and no reason to move. The net makes you branch out. It's reversing what the TV has done to us for decades. That's the kind of statment that needs to be shouted from the rooftops...