The only problem i have with the second sentance is moore's law - current technology will have doubled in speed twice and be well on it's way to doubling again by the time he triples it, so, why bother if you're just gonna be playing catch up?
If they'd said that if their record sales fell off the record company wouldn't subsidize the tour, I could believe that.
But I've met and spoken with some of my favorite full time musicians, people who have been playing their music for their livelihood for over a decade. And what they told me wasn't different from what I'd heard about all but the most popular recording artists.
If it weren't for the touring and live shows, they'd go hungry. Literally, if it wasn't for their cut of the door, and the tshirt sales, and the poster sales, and the substantially thicker margins of CDs sold at the show, they would not have money for food.
Just as i have to get up in the morning and go be an admin, they have to get up in the afternoon and go please the fans on stage.
Nobody hates the record company more than the average recording artist. You pay, what, $15 for that cd. The band gets less than a dollar of that. And the cost of manufacturing the cd comes out of the band's cut. When i's all said and done, they're getting a piddling sum of money for it. They'd probably make twice as much money paying for duplication up front and selling them direct for $1 each.
But they can't. There's a little problem of contract law, and only the record company has the right to distribute the albums. Yes, believe it or not, most of your favorite songs will probably be making the RIAA money until 70 years after the artist dies. This is what they call "standard industry practice"
I protest, I've never used a 3com nic that i didn't hate.
They're overpriced and generally underpowered. In my own tests (ttcp, closed, switched network) their flagship 905tx was consistently slower than everything else, even realtek.
They do have a good warranty, but you're gonna need it. I've had many, many fail on me.
Personally my advice is this: If you want top performance in microsoft OSs, go for Intel 82559 based nics, for about half the price of 3Com. If you want top performance in Linux or BSD, go for a DEC Tulip or tulip-clone based nic like the Netgear FA-310TX for a quarter the price of 3Com. Genuine DEC 21140 Tulip cards are getting rare, most these days use a clone chip, you may have the best results with 2.2.14.
If you want cheap, various surplus vendors are carrying DEC 21140 Tulip based nics for about $12 each. You won't be disappointed. The ones I've seen are Samsung branded. Settling for less (Maxonix, Realtek) you will probably be disappointed. The Netgear nic can be had for $15.
So why blow $45 on a 3Com when it sucks? Screw the warranty, buy a spare for every machine for half the total cost.
You take, what, five tests? At a hundred bucks a test at Sylvan, that's $500.
OK, sure, you *COULD* spend $10,000.00 on a training course a IKON or something, but the folks i know that did that still ended up borrowing somebody elses transcenders and cramming.
Point being - neither that training nor the certification equate to competence. Those who are competent should have no trouble with the certification.
If you know your shit, recertifying should be a walk in the park.
I have no sympathy for anyone who doesn't feel they're up to that challenge. Browse through a sample exam, pay another hundred bucks to the testing center, and get your new fangled slip of paper.
Personally, i resisted the MCSE goldrush and decided to instead concentrate on systems that i would actually consent to use. Thus, i avoided what has become the best recognized resume stain.
Some of you people out there feel you need this slip of paper from microsoft in order to give the people around you a reason to believe you're worth some fraction of what you're making.
Those of you who know your shit, obviously don't actually need any such paper. Your accomplishments should speak for themselves.
Those of you who aquired said slip of paper in order to quit the job at the quickiemart and enter the new workforce, who don't know your shit, please feel free to sit on it and spin.
You have chosen to use Microsoft products. Win2k is a *New* Microsoft Product. It's a lot different from NT4. It has different features and different bugs.
Again, if you're worth your salt, this shouldn't be that big of a deal, and you should be able to accomplish recertification in a weekend.
If you're not, you made your bed, now sleep in it.
A: You have plenty of processor power to decode MP3, no $100 outboard dongle required. I also found it odd how hard it was to find that price on the lp3 web page.
B: You can build a parallel port IR reciever that will work with just about any remote controll and with the linux infrared remote controll drivers for about $10 worth of radioshack parts. see http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~columbus/lirc/parallel .html for a scematic.
i have had bad, Bad, BAD experiences with software raid in production environments!
I had 1 of 4 drives in a raid 5 array using the 0.90 drivers go bad. When it went bad, it locked up the scsi bus long enough that the raid driver decided that another drive must also be bad.
So i had one drive down and another drive tagged as desynched. This resulted in Total Loss of Data. There was no way to make it rebuild. I tried everything the people on the mailing list could think of.
My fault for not having backups. Shame on me.
BUT. The speed allegations are pretty false. A *good* hardware RAID card with on-board hardware cacheing beats the tar out of software raid. Up to 4x the sustained throughput.
Your issue there is that FlashPoint RAID cards aint RAID cards.
AMI Megaraid is a RAID card. Mylex DAC960 is a RAID card. Flashpoint, is a scsi card with some firmware bits and pieces to help along a software RAID system.
FWIW, there are any number of two channel UW-SCSI AMI Megaraid 428 cards on the surplus market at about $150. They rock, and have full linux support.
AMEN! Geeze, yeah, if anyone wants to play with Sun4c hardware i'll give you my old Sparcstation IPC for free. Just come over to my house and ask, it's yours . . .
your 95% cache hit rates are on workstation-class systems, running workstation-class process loads, from where i sit.
You're thinking too small. Most PeeCee type systems rarely run more than, say, 60 or so processes at once.
I've seen Sun E450's spawn thousands of processes at once, and, instead of bogging down, saturate the hell out of a fiberchannel raid array and still have enough cpu time left over to fight for more.
8 megs of on-die cache means that a lot more programs can have that 95% cache hit ratio than could hope to on a lesser processor.
ATi has never claimed their video cards have on-board DVD decoders. What they claim is "DVD Acceleration".
What they mean by that is that there are special features of their video board that make typical mpeg2 display measurably quicker than it would be if you did not use those features.
Specifically, it has exactly what nearly every video card manufactured since 1994 has.
First, it has a bi-linear scaler so it can scale the size of the movie window in a whole two directions. Usually width and height.
Second, it has a pallete-dac that allows your software mpeg2 decoder to write YUV data to the framebuffer and have the video card convert it to RGB on the fly. This is nice, because most compressed video streams are YUV internally, and your monitor is unrelentingly RGB.
Now, these are nice things to have around, I don't deny that at all. But they do not a DVD decoder make.
Think of it like those BASF commercials - "We don't decode your DVD, we just make it better"
In some sense, i have to agree, linux, as it is today, i would not ask my mother to use. And Mom used to code in pascal on macos.
I used to be an OS/2 user, and you might have even called me an OS/2 pundit, but, the mantra i followed in OS/2 advocacy is "OS/2 is Not for Everyone".
people are best served by the tool that is best suited to both the task at hand and their ability to use it.
For many things, OS/2 was, and in some cases, still is, the best tool for the job, and simple enough for most any geek to use.
For many things, Linux is, and will continue to be, the best tool for many jobs, if you have people around who are capable of using it.
for most end-user tasks, the client variant of Windows or MacOS will continue to be the best tool for many. This is unfortunate in several senses, but it isn't the end of the world.
I don't belong to a LUG, and one of the reasons i don't is the same reason i never joined an OS/2 user's group: I don't advocate convincing someone that they should use a tool other than that which is best fitted to them is the tool they should use, and user's groups do things like "install-fests"
when people ask me if they should run linux, i don't automatically say yes, i ask "why do you want to use linux?"
if they don't have a good answer, i don't offer to help them. if they have a good answer, i help them find the right questions to ask, and then help them figure out how to answer them for themselves. I find that's a lot more effective, in the long run, than simply telling them the answer.
don't be silly, scsi devices can only be connected to a scsi bus.
i'm sure there are nice, serviceable firewire-scsi bridges. there are also usb-scsi bridges. it's still a scsi device on a scsi bus, it's just there's one more layer between the device and your memory.
but maybe you ment to say there are firewire harddrives?
OK, if all that's true, why does every pc on the market have a USB port? When hardly any have a firewire port?
Maybe it's implementation costs that make a firewire addon board cost a minimum of about $80? that's as much as a mid-grade motherboard with built in USB . . .
Oh relax, haven't you ever heard of a phono preamp?
If you don't suffer from audiophilia, you can get a reasonable one for under $20.
(I feel blessed that my ears are crude enough to forgive most forms of electrical noise in recordings, my music habit would be a lot more expensive otherwise)
The customizable throbber icon thing first showed up in, of all things, OS/2's WebExplorer.
It was, at the time, on my 14.4k modem, the most amazingly interminable thing i'd ever seen embedded in a web page, I mean, damn, like 40k at the front of a web page just so the activity indicator would look different.
WebEx also had a simplified version of IE's browsing history.
Airbus is always complaining about spies this and spies that. I think they're just jumping on the eschelon bandwagon.
Frankly, i've been on an Airbus 310, and I'd rather walk. So, my theory is that they lost the deal when someone thought they could get a better jet, the exact number Airbus offered probably didn't play into it at all.
Survey says 63% of Americans are Dumb as a Sack of Hammers.
Seriously folks, with the stats on things like highschool graduation, college acceptance, etc, do you really care what 63% of americans think?
Do you ever wonder why this is a Republic and not a direct democracy? I believe the words were "Your people, sir, are a great beast"
Heck, I'm almost willing to help fund a survey to call thousands of lonely housewives and ask them if, in their opinion, should the American People have to pay to bail us out of our national debt, or should the US Government have to pay for it?
On a more relivant note, does anybody have access to historical data re: the AT&T breakup? Did they pull any stunts like this?
Technically, sortof, the current Apple line runs on IBM processors.
The PowerPC is, at it's heart, and IBM "Power" series processor.
And those AltiVec instructions in the G4 that are supposed to make multimedia so fast. They're vector algebra functions that IBM added to their version of the ppc, this was actually the point of divergence last year when IBM and Motorola were going to go their separate ways because IBM wanted better math and Motorola wanted better multimedia. Motorola ended up tossing their multimedia extnesions in favor of ibm's math extensions.
I'm not saying Motorola didn't make a significant contribution, I'm saying that their contribution was mostly in making a Power series processor financially viable for mass production.
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The only problem i have with the second sentance is moore's law - current technology will have doubled in speed twice and be well on it's way to doubling again by the time he triples it, so, why bother if you're just gonna be playing catch up?
If they'd said that if their record sales fell off the record company wouldn't subsidize the tour, I could believe that.
But I've met and spoken with some of my favorite full time musicians, people who have been playing their music for their livelihood for over a decade. And what they told me wasn't different from what I'd heard about all but the most popular recording artists.
If it weren't for the touring and live shows, they'd go hungry. Literally, if it wasn't for their cut of the door, and the tshirt sales, and the poster sales, and the substantially thicker margins of CDs sold at the show, they would not have money for food.
Just as i have to get up in the morning and go be an admin, they have to get up in the afternoon and go please the fans on stage.
Nobody hates the record company more than the average recording artist. You pay, what, $15 for that cd. The band gets less than a dollar of that. And the cost of manufacturing the cd comes out of the band's cut. When i's all said and done, they're getting a piddling sum of money for it. They'd probably make twice as much money paying for duplication up front and selling them direct for $1 each.
But they can't. There's a little problem of contract law, and only the record company has the right to distribute the albums. Yes, believe it or not, most of your favorite songs will probably be making the RIAA money until 70 years after the artist dies. This is what they call "standard industry practice"
I protest, I've never used a 3com nic that i didn't hate.
They're overpriced and generally underpowered. In my own tests (ttcp, closed, switched network) their flagship 905tx was consistently slower than everything else, even realtek.
They do have a good warranty, but you're gonna need it. I've had many, many fail on me.
Personally my advice is this: If you want top performance in microsoft OSs, go for Intel 82559 based nics, for about half the price of 3Com. If you want top performance in Linux or BSD, go for a DEC Tulip or tulip-clone based nic like the Netgear FA-310TX for a quarter the price of 3Com. Genuine DEC 21140 Tulip cards are getting rare, most these days use a clone chip, you may have the best results with 2.2.14.
If you want cheap, various surplus vendors are carrying DEC 21140 Tulip based nics for about $12 each. You won't be disappointed. The ones I've seen are Samsung branded. Settling for less (Maxonix, Realtek) you will probably be disappointed. The Netgear nic can be had for $15.
So why blow $45 on a 3Com when it sucks? Screw the warranty, buy a spare for every machine for half the total cost.
You take, what, five tests? At a hundred bucks a test at Sylvan, that's $500.
OK, sure, you *COULD* spend $10,000.00 on a training course a IKON or something, but the folks i know that did that still ended up borrowing somebody elses transcenders and cramming.
Point being - neither that training nor the certification equate to competence. Those who are competent should have no trouble with the certification.
If you know your shit, recertifying should be a walk in the park.
I have no sympathy for anyone who doesn't feel they're up to that challenge. Browse through a sample exam, pay another hundred bucks to the testing center, and get your new fangled slip of paper.
Personally, i resisted the MCSE goldrush and decided to instead concentrate on systems that i would actually consent to use. Thus, i avoided what has become the best recognized resume stain.
Some of you people out there feel you need this slip of paper from microsoft in order to give the people around you a reason to believe you're worth some fraction of what you're making.
Those of you who know your shit, obviously don't actually need any such paper. Your accomplishments should speak for themselves.
Those of you who aquired said slip of paper in order to quit the job at the quickiemart and enter the new workforce, who don't know your shit, please feel free to sit on it and spin.
You have chosen to use Microsoft products. Win2k is a *New* Microsoft Product. It's a lot different from NT4. It has different features and different bugs.
Again, if you're worth your salt, this shouldn't be that big of a deal, and you should be able to accomplish recertification in a weekend.
If you're not, you made your bed, now sleep in it.
why settle for vnc? You can easily get XWindows up and running in 16 megs of flash.
A: You have plenty of processor power to decode MP3, no $100 outboard dongle required. I also found it odd how hard it was to find that price on the lp3 web page.
l .html for a scematic.
:)
B: You can build a parallel port IR reciever that will work with just about any remote controll and with the linux infrared remote controll drivers for about $10 worth of radioshack parts. see http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~columbus/lirc/paralle
Happy hacking
i have had bad, Bad, BAD experiences with software raid in production environments!
I had 1 of 4 drives in a raid 5 array using the 0.90 drivers go bad. When it went bad, it locked up the scsi bus long enough that the raid driver decided that another drive must also be bad.
So i had one drive down and another drive tagged as desynched. This resulted in Total Loss of Data. There was no way to make it rebuild. I tried everything the people on the mailing list could think of.
My fault for not having backups. Shame on me.
BUT. The speed allegations are pretty false. A *good* hardware RAID card with on-board hardware cacheing beats the tar out of software raid. Up to 4x the sustained throughput.
Your issue there is that FlashPoint RAID cards aint RAID cards.
AMI Megaraid is a RAID card. Mylex DAC960 is a RAID card. Flashpoint, is a scsi card with some firmware bits and pieces to help along a software RAID system.
FWIW, there are any number of two channel UW-SCSI AMI Megaraid 428 cards on the surplus market at about $150. They rock, and have full linux support.
AMEN! Geeze, yeah, if anyone wants to play with Sun4c hardware i'll give you my old Sparcstation IPC for free. Just come over to my house and ask, it's yours . . .
your 95% cache hit rates are on workstation-class systems, running workstation-class process loads, from where i sit.
You're thinking too small. Most PeeCee type systems rarely run more than, say, 60 or so processes at once.
I've seen Sun E450's spawn thousands of processes at once, and, instead of bogging down, saturate the hell out of a fiberchannel raid array and still have enough cpu time left over to fight for more.
8 megs of on-die cache means that a lot more programs can have that 95% cache hit ratio than could hope to on a lesser processor.
That's a license for non-production use.
A commercial license of Solaris 7 for Sparc costs more than a month's rent for me . . .
Oh yeah, these chips also have motion compensation, which is definately cool, but has a lot more to do with video recording than video playback.
Be careful, you're treading on marketing waters.
ATi has never claimed their video cards have on-board DVD decoders. What they claim is "DVD Acceleration".
What they mean by that is that there are special features of their video board that make typical mpeg2 display measurably quicker than it would be if you did not use those features.
Specifically, it has exactly what nearly every video card manufactured since 1994 has.
First, it has a bi-linear scaler so it can scale the size of the movie window in a whole two directions. Usually width and height.
Second, it has a pallete-dac that allows your software mpeg2 decoder to write YUV data to the framebuffer and have the video card convert it to RGB on the fly. This is nice, because most compressed video streams are YUV internally, and your monitor is unrelentingly RGB.
Now, these are nice things to have around, I don't deny that at all. But they do not a DVD decoder make.
Think of it like those BASF commercials - "We don't decode your DVD, we just make it better"
In some sense, i have to agree, linux, as it is today, i would not ask my mother to use. And Mom used to code in pascal on macos.
I used to be an OS/2 user, and you might have even called me an OS/2 pundit, but, the mantra i followed in OS/2 advocacy is "OS/2 is Not for Everyone".
people are best served by the tool that is best suited to both the task at hand and their ability to use it.
For many things, OS/2 was, and in some cases, still is, the best tool for the job, and simple enough for most any geek to use.
For many things, Linux is, and will continue to be, the best tool for many jobs, if you have people around who are capable of using it.
for most end-user tasks, the client variant of Windows or MacOS will continue to be the best tool for many. This is unfortunate in several senses, but it isn't the end of the world.
I don't belong to a LUG, and one of the reasons i don't is the same reason i never joined an OS/2 user's group: I don't advocate convincing someone that they should use a tool other than that which is best fitted to them is the tool they should use, and user's groups do things like "install-fests"
when people ask me if they should run linux, i don't automatically say yes, i ask "why do you want to use linux?"
if they don't have a good answer, i don't offer to help them. if they have a good answer, i help them find the right questions to ask, and then help them figure out how to answer them for themselves. I find that's a lot more effective, in the long run, than simply telling them the answer.
don't be silly, scsi devices can only be connected to a scsi bus.
i'm sure there are nice, serviceable firewire-scsi bridges. there are also usb-scsi bridges. it's still a scsi device on a scsi bus, it's just there's one more layer between the device and your memory.
but maybe you ment to say there are firewire harddrives?
OK, if all that's true, why does every pc on the market have a USB port? When hardly any have a firewire port?
Maybe it's implementation costs that make a firewire addon board cost a minimum of about $80? that's as much as a mid-grade motherboard with built in USB . . .
Those marble-sized trackballs proved to be constant service problems. getting full of crud, etc. And personally, i never felt they worked that well.
The touchpad, obviously, is very durable.
But i agree with you, they're awful pointing devices. I won't buy anything without a trackpoint. You know, the little eraserhead in the keyboard.
My Toshiba Portege has one, i love it.
Oh relax, haven't you ever heard of a phono preamp?
If you don't suffer from audiophilia, you can get a reasonable one for under $20.
(I feel blessed that my ears are crude enough to forgive most forms of electrical noise in recordings, my music habit would be a lot more expensive otherwise)
The RSA patent expires in 6 months.
it sure will be interesting to see where cryptography goes after that.
The customizable throbber icon thing first showed up in, of all things, OS/2's WebExplorer.
It was, at the time, on my 14.4k modem, the most amazingly interminable thing i'd ever seen embedded in a web page, I mean, damn, like 40k at the front of a web page just so the activity indicator would look different.
WebEx also had a simplified version of IE's browsing history.
AOLServer, their web server, is open source.
They own Netscape, who is at least partially responsible for your latest Mozilla build, right?
Airbus is always complaining about spies this and spies that. I think they're just jumping on the eschelon bandwagon.
Frankly, i've been on an Airbus 310, and I'd rather walk. So, my theory is that they lost the deal when someone thought they could get a better jet, the exact number Airbus offered probably didn't play into it at all.
Survey says 63% of Americans are Dumb as a Sack of Hammers.
Seriously folks, with the stats on things like highschool graduation, college acceptance, etc, do you really care what 63% of americans think?
Do you ever wonder why this is a Republic and not a direct democracy? I believe the words were "Your people, sir, are a great beast"
Heck, I'm almost willing to help fund a survey to call thousands of lonely housewives and ask them if, in their opinion, should the American People have to pay to bail us out of our national debt, or should the US Government have to pay for it?
On a more relivant note, does anybody have access to historical data re: the AT&T breakup? Did they pull any stunts like this?
Technically, sortof, the current Apple line runs on IBM processors.
The PowerPC is, at it's heart, and IBM "Power" series processor.
And those AltiVec instructions in the G4 that are supposed to make multimedia so fast. They're vector algebra functions that IBM added to their version of the ppc, this was actually the point of divergence last year when IBM and Motorola were going to go their separate ways because IBM wanted better math and Motorola wanted better multimedia. Motorola ended up tossing their multimedia extnesions in favor of ibm's math extensions.
I'm not saying Motorola didn't make a significant contribution, I'm saying that their contribution was mostly in making a Power series processor financially viable for mass production.