How many times have you had stuff that 'should' work, but then later find out it doesn't? It happens enough that I'd prefer to be able to have some minimal control and information as to the 'health' of my drive.
Also, I do not understand your comment about how I'd know how much of the reported available storage space is defective. The drive only has the ability to determine if the cell has ever been written to, or has never been written to. It does not have the logic to determine if a cell is 'free' or 'used'. They do not differentiate between file systems at all. Once a cell has been written to once, it is 'full'. Operating systems do not go back and mark the cells as 'free' when you delete a file. The file system simply marks those cells as 'available' again. This is the chief reason why when I read articles about people that say their drive is slowly shrinking is confusing to me. How is that possible when the drive has no idea what NTFS/FAT32/ext3/ext4 is? Also, as the drive cells 'fail' and the usable space shrinks, does the drive tell the OS that? It simply reads and writes data. It may keep track of cells that have ever been written to, but it has no concept of what parts have data or do not.
Seriously. How do you 'test' for bad sectors? If you do a surface scan, it will read/write certain sectors. So you find sector 12345 is bad. You mark that sector as bad in the bad sector table and life goes on, right? Not necessarily. What if sector 12345 is now remapped to sector 23456 the next time you use it because of the hardware sector reallocation.
I hear everyone talk about how there's extra 'spare' memory pages for replacing the worn out ones. Let's say I have 5% extra blocks. How do you deal with these extra blocks? I see 2 ways...
1. All of the primary sectors are mapped physically and logically the same. As the physical pages wear out, the 'extra' pages are logically mapped in place of the physically bad ones. 2. The wear leveling mechanism remaps the physical and logical sectors through the useful life of the device. As various sectors reach their end of life, they are then remapped to the 'extra' sectors.
If #2 is the way it works, then performing any kind of 'surface' test is completely pointless. The device could remap the memory cells over and over. Through a series of surface scans you could theoretically mark every sector as bad because it's remapped every time you perform a read/write operation.
If #1 is the case, it would be very helpful if the device would tell you how many free pages you had left before writes are disabled. This would be analogous to the SMART feature of platter based media. Then we will be able to tell 'my drive has approximately 20 years left' or 'my drive has 20 minutes left! Yikes!'.
I am very interested to know which one manufacturers use, and i'm sure they all aren't the same.
We need tools to tell us what is really going in inside the SSD drives. We need software programs that find a bad sector to tell the hardware that the page of memory is actually bad and to remap accordingly. This would also signify the end of the 'bad sector table' for file systems as the issue is dealt with solely on the hardware level.
I see the long term results of this strategy similar to electricity and phones. Companies can not arbitrarily turn off your phone without a valid arguement that can withstand courts. This is due to many medical equipment devices requiring electricity and phone lines be available. To many people, going without the internet is as serious as going without electricity (albeit very arguably). I'm sure after a few years legislation will attempt to be passed protecting the internet connections to homes the same way. What is the RIAA and the ISPs in the RIAA's back pocket going to do then? Use the excuse of "we've always done it this way"? At some point someone is going to deem the internet a necessity in the home, and the RIAA is going to have to change their tactic or attempt to buy out the legislation.
Why would I pay $60 for a game that will quite likely load DRM and cause problems with my computer requiring me to restore from a backup. Now, instead of "install and play" I have to:
1. Backup my C drive. 2. Have a restore DVD ready to boot for a recovery. 3. Install the game, give it a go.... time passes(days or months???)... 4. Restore my C drive because of unnecessary DRM screwing up my own damn property. 5. If days or months went by, maybe I have to update my OS and other software again, change some settings, etc. Hopefully I have all of my data backed up. Maybe some other game' DRM policy will require me to activate it again, and maybe I'll end up using 1 of my precious limited number of re-activations before I have to buy the game again.
Why would I spend $60 for this kind of punishment? I could have sworn I spent money for the 'fun' of the game. I hardly classify 'punishment' as 'fun'. If these 2 words are used interchangably nowadays I need to get away from society. This isn't how I roll.
Also, I'd rather buy 2 games at $30 at the same time, try both and have to do steps 1-6 once than buy 2 games at $60 a piece at 2 different times and potentially have to do steps 1-5 twice. Now i'm wasting my time and spent $60 for the 'opportunity' to recover twice.
Self preservation kicks in here somewhere.
I am fully aware of no-cd patches. They do not solve all DRM problems(starforce), and I should not have to seek them out to have an acceptable gaming experience.
I've been using a hosts file since around 2003. It blocks out all those ads, popups, spyware,adware, stops alot of virii from calling home, you name it. I scan my computer about once a month, and I haven't had any of the 'serious outbreaks' of adware like all my friends. They all swear by their software programs to block it(ultimately, they always end up reformatting when they cant quite get rid of them all) but my solution uses no resources and doesn't require 'scanning' for them regularly.
I use it on my parent's computer and only update it once a year at Christmas. Even with only updating once a year they haven't gotten any adware/spyware yet, and it's been 3 years.
I highly recommend it. Give it a try, there's nothing to lose but the crapware.
Did you notice that there was a total of zero people that gave that board a 5 egg rating? And all 3 comments had less than spectacular things to say when it came to using that board.
I will agree with you that it's overpriced. Price is a bit steep. I'm just not sold that I'd really intend to build a computer using that motherboard. Everyone's comments on newegg had much larger cons sections that positives. Add that with not one 5 egg rating(yes, I see there's only 3 ratings), but I'm not sure it would be an investment(gamble?) I'd be willing to take. Can you honestly tell me you'd buy a motherboard that people claim is picky about which RAM it wants to use, isn't compatible with 1 person's raid controller(out of 3 comments) and your CPUs might not be supported because of a stepping issue. If I built a computer with that motherboard I'd be disgusted to play games on it, or anything else for that matter. PCI-X slots, you got to be kidding. 1 PCIe 16x slot(is it PCIe 1.0 or 2.0?). Where's the other PCIe slots I would need? That motherboard is quite outdated, hence the cheap price.
I'm not an AMD fan, but I'm not an Intel fanboy either. Me personally, I'd never buy AMD. But with how many friends have them and enjoy them, I don't find it justifiable to bash AMD either. When I looked at a $100 8 RAM slot motherboard, I found more people giving the motherboard 1 egg compared to 5. That's not such a great thing IMO.
I'll stick with my ANS-9010 and you can stick with your setup. I can use my ANS-9010 with any board that supports SATA, and your ideas are limited to buying into a build that limits your future choices(and perhaps compatibility with other cards). There's no effective way to boot from it, save it's contents in a reasonable period of time, etc. I feel my idea is more versatile and obviously much less committed to a particular motherboard/CPU.
From my personal experience, booting from the ANS-9010 and running my system off of it is significantly faster than anything I've ever seen. I can't even believe it's the same computer when I image my ANS-9010 to my actual hard drive and boot from it. Even after defragmenting and everything else, it just doesn't feel like the same computer. Having microsecond seek times to read data is significantly more important than the quantity of data you can transfer.
Your calculations compare the cost for 16GB of DDR2 Registered RAM to the ANS-9010 + RAM cost. You should actually be comparing the ANS-9010+RAM to the cost of everything necessary to make a RAMdrive using a system. So you will need: very expensive motherboard with 8 RAM slots, an expensive processor, hard drive, CD-ROM, power supply, case, operating system, 16GB of RAM, the electrical usage, the cooling needed, etc.
You'll see that the ANS-9010 with 8*4GB sticks is probably cheaper than running a whole second computer with a xeon processor and a single(or likely dual) processor motherboard. Plus the invested time in setting up the darn thing. But even after that, the performance of the ANS-9010 would more than saturate gigabit LAN. A system RAM ramdrive would be limited even by 10 gigabit LAN. So how do you intend to use this 'ultra fast ramdrive' in another system of your choosing if you can't really use the speeds to begin with?
I would agree that if you were building a computer it might be cheaper to have a bunch of ram used as a ramdrive and shared, but you still couldn't boot from it as well as save the data at shutdown without having to back up the RAMdrive during shutdown.
The time to install Windows XP SP3 from SP0 was 2 minutes. This is a significant difference from the typical 20-30 minutes(sometimes more) I've seen in the past for the SP3 installation. Everything is so much faster. My computer is a core i7 920, and when I use my platter drives to boot instead of my ANS-9010, it's night and day difference. The difference in performance to me is akin to telling your family member to upgrade from 512MB of RAM to 2GB. It's night and day. Plain and simple.
If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides.
Ok... 1. Find me a motherboard that has 8 RAM slots that doesn't require expensive ECC and/or Registered memory 2. Find me a computer that can boot from it's own RAM drive. 3. Find me a computer that can use a RAM drive that can be persistent through reboots without having to save the contents to something else.
I have several of these, and I run a power cord that is normally used for one of those SATA/IDE to USB kits in the back of my computer to power my box.
You don't think about all of the uses that this thing offers.
Actually, this box supports it's own ECC function. If you use ECC RAM, the ECC function is just like a normal ECC function. However, if you don't want to spend extravagant prices for ECC RAM, the box will create it's own ECC function. This function does use 1/9th the total RAM, but it is ECC, and it works. I own 3 of these boxes right now. They are fast as heck. I haven't played with SSD much(my first SSD drive arrives in the mail today), but I was able to perform tasks at performances that were beyond comprehension. From the time I double clicked the executable to the computer completely rebooted after the install was less than 2 minutes. Currently, Windows XP with all the standard software installed is less than 30 seconds.
Being a former sailor I have personal experience with this issue. Bottom line, it sucks. There are very few options available to you, aside from setting up your own system. The idea of wget might work the best, but you would always be waiting for that reply email. The idea of some kind of HAM system is another good idea. I've heard there are HAM systems set up that are used for internet for wide areas and are used during hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Opening web pages with internet that comes in and out(as the waves rock the ship back and forth) is almost impossible. There's ALOT of packet loss and basic timeouts. I'm talking sometimes as high as 50% packet loss, and latency over 2500ms. Honestly, if you can design a system to interact via email, that's your best option because your emails will always get to you... eventually. Downloading a webpage that times out means reloading the page, where the same problem will probably haunt you again and again. Find as many web pages as you can that have as few pictures as possible(that's what will kill your surfing abilities). You want webpages that utilize as few data connections as possible.
Even downloading a 10MB file on the ship while underway was completely out of the question. You were lucky if you could actually view the whole page. If you want files emailed to you and you can't accept attachments, look into something similar to what newsgroups uses. The yEnc(or whatever the common ones are) would come in handy here.
I just accepted that I wasn't going to get my slashdot addiction satisfied while underway. I had my g/f email me the slashdot articles sometimes, or whatever stuff she found on cnn.com that she thought I'd like.
But if MPC owned a large number of warranties, and they are now defunct, why is this allowed to affect the consumer at all? If I buy a warranty from company 'A', and company 'A' sells their warranty department to company 'B' a year later, why can I as a consumer not go back to company 'A' and demand that they honor the warranty that was originally purchased under them? Company 'A' likely was paid for those warranties, and I don't find it unreasonable to expect that money from company 'A' be used to cover their decision to sell what was their responsibilities to company 'B'. After all, the warranty was between company 'A' and myself. If company 'A' didn't handle the decision to sell to company 'B' in the best interest of the consumer, then company 'A' should be held responsible for them.
Businesses should be aligned to honor and treasure their customers. If businesses do not want to make those decisions willingly, then laws should allow customers to go and file a lawsuit as applicable. I'm sorry but the customer shouldn't be allowed to lose without recourse because a few people were selfish assholes. I'm sure the business owners have been reimbursed quite well for running their business into the ground. If the decision makers made a bad decision, then the business owner should be walking away from the business with the clothes on their back and their tail between their legs. Nothing less than this should EVER be acceptable.
It's situations like this that make me somewhat leery of buying one of those 3rd party warranties. If ABC computers wants to warranty my Dell PC for 3 years for $349.99 will ABC computers really be in business for the next 3 years? If they flop a week later, do I have any options for recourse?
It's a fact that when the economy is down, more people will actually use their warranty options rather than just buy a new computer and justify it saying "Well, the computer is 2.5 years old. Why not buy a new one instead of the hassle of warranty". Money is tight, and consumers will use their warranty to the maximum extent possible.
I feel bad for the employees at the company that were effectively jobless days after christmas, with no warning of their impending 'layoff'. I find their letter justifying why the couldn't give 60 days notice unsettling. They're admitting they screwed up, and i'm sure their former employees are comforted by this fact, right? I hope they ban together and demand those 60 days paid, as is required by law. Who pays their salary for those 60 days? The people in charge that decided they'd gamble with people's jobs and try to get 'financial assistance' to keep those higher-ups a job.
So we're on the brink of a recession/depression and the Economy is more important than the war. The Economy has ALWAYS recovered, and I am 100% sure it will recover again(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong if it never recovers), but the people at war are permanently dead. Why are we placing a temporary problem before a permanent one? Money can be earned, but we can't revive the dead....
First they say that these new improved lower failure-rate drives along with bigger disks are going to kill RAID5. Then, they try to tell us that if 1 drive failed it's likely you will lose the array due to an unrecoverable error on the remaining array drives. So which is it? Are hard drives becoming more reliable or more error prone? You can't have it both ways. This sounds like complete crap to me. I'll still be using them at home, and probably 5 years from now too.
Open source...is about the user. Closed source...is about the company producing the software.
Open source is often written by the very people that will use the software, and they don't want crap in their software.
Closed source is often written by people that will use it, but they need it to sell money. So is it cheaper to push crap out the door or gold plated jewelry?
I just have to wonder what it's like to be in the shoes of the person that wrote the code that's flawed. Maybe i'm mistaken, but this seems like something that the coder did knowing that if anyone ever figured it out, it was game over for the DRM. Surely this person is now explaining why it is how it is to his supervisors, who are probably banging their heads against the wall thinking "OMG".
This is why if I buy a computer, it had better come with a genuine Microsoft Windows installation disk. I don't know what is on that recovery disk, and I don't want to find out when I'm a victim of identity theft because my installation comes with a free virus. Never mind all their crapware that I can uninstall. Viruses don't come with an uninstall. If I want an "uninstaller" it's called AntiVirus. I'm pretty sure Dell/HP/etc would be MORE than happy to sell me a copy too. Aren't they nice? First give me the problem, and then sell me the fix.
This sounds like one of those TV ads...
"But wait! There's more! Call in the next 15 mins and we'll send you a FREE virus! Yes, FREE! A $250 value, yours free!"
This is disappointing. A few months back ASUS got into a flamewar with GIGABYTE. GIGABYTE came out and told Tom's Hardware that ASUS used inferior parts, changed their % gains versus their competitor without changing the product whatsoever, and that ASUS's EPU feature is software instead of hardware(meaning it is inferior to GIGABYTE). GIGABYTE did come back and appologize for claiming ASUS used inferior parts(it was found that it was a different vendor's board that contained inferior parts). ASUS threatened to sue any website that talked dirty about ASUS when this all came to light. Check out http://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-gigabyte-motherboard,5348.html to read about the GIGABYTE versus ASUS drama. Then check http://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-gigabyte-motherboard,5480.html for ASUS suing GIGABYTE for the bad publicity.
I have been an ASUS user for many years, building many computers with ASUS parts. While GIGABYTE did include some false claims, they did have valid complaints for their other arguements. I was one of the people that was stuck with a motherboard that cost me $250 that didn't do quite what it was supposed to do, and as a result my linux based computer cannot use their power management function(because it is software based). GIGABYTE's is hardware, and is enabled in BIOS and doesn't care which OS you use. This one hit home for me. My computer is on 24x7, and I wanted my computer to be green. Unfortunately that dream will not be a reality with ASUS hardware.
This again paints a bad picture of the quality work ASUS has been doing lately. I am sure that my next motherboard won't be ASUS. They have lost points with me, and I am going to check out one of the other top tier motherboard companies.
I have never purchased a motherboard from GIGABYTE, but I'm already looking for motherboards for Nahelem when it comes out next month, and I'm not even looking at what ASUS is offering. Bite me once, shame on you. Bite me twice, shame on me!
Reasons for leaving ASUS:
1. Changing your product efficiency % gains after shipping the product for months, AND not changing anything on the product! As if they wouldn't get caught? Competitors are always shopping their other competitors!
2. They fail to mention that EPU REQUIRES Windows to run. I don't care what ASUS says. If it requires software(Windows based at that!), then it's software based. Even if its hardware functions are enabled by using the software.
3. Suing anyone who talks about their bad publicity from GIGABYTE. WTF? Seriously, WTF? That's RIAA type behavior, and I will not tolerate that type of child in my house.
It must also disclose what the company's new network management system will look like.
So, does this mean that the FCC had already made the assumption that Comcast is going to use another method to throttle traffic? If the FCC already knows, then what is the FCC exactly fighting for? Because it definitely isn't fighting for net neutrality.
Viacom is suing Google for a pretty damn big lump of money for copyright infringement. There has to be more to this story than we know. AFAIK Viacom has never admitted what exactly they want the info for. They just keep saying to prove their case of copyright infringment. If they wanted a database of which users and what they uploaded, they could have written a website crawler to extract that info from Youtube's website. Remember that every video says who posted it(gosh.. wouldn't that be easier than a lawsuit?) They didn't want usernames. They wanted IP addresses linked with the usernames(.. and I'm sure the RIAA would LOVE to have that info!). Anyway, they asked the judge for IPs, account names, videos watched, etc. Now, if you agree that the IPs(and their connection to the username) is protect by the privacy law, then the judge should have demanded to know why they needed the info. If they didn't have a need for it, then the judge shouldn't have granted it.
Here's where I think that Viacom has been caught red handed and trying to fix their public relations problem. The judge granted Viacom's motion and the info was to be handed over to Viacom. Now suddenly Viacom doesn't need this info? What changed? I'm sure the public outcry played a big part in it.
Sounds to me like Viacom's intention all along was to either:
1. Collect this wealth of information, and do some more good old fashioned RIAA lawsuits.
2. Hurt the Youtube name. How many people might no longer watch/post on Youtube because of what they've read about this lawsuit? I'm willing to bet that the people that are less knowledgable about this situation are the same people that'll go to another site that provides the same features(and could face the same exact lawsuits, have to hand over data, etc.) thinking that they are safe because they aren't using Youtube anymore. Maybe if they devalue Youtube enough, they'll try to buy it off of Google for pennies on the dollar.
3. Do #1, and if the shit hit the fan, go to backup plan(#2).
If it's #3, then it doesn't really matter. They've accomplished something, and I'm sure they'll pat themselves on the back for sucessfully accomplishing their goal. I'm willing to bet that sometime soon I'll hear of Viacom's 'brand new' site that competes directly with Youtube(that is assuming there isn't one already that I haven't heard of).
Viacom doesn't have a use for the posters that work at Google that posted coypright videos. Google is protected from being sued by what individuals do. If Viacom has an email from Google management that tells their employee's to post copyright info deliberately, that is different.
Stay tuned. I'm betting money there's more to this story than the public actually knows. I'm interested in seeing what happens from here.
I swear in the last 2 years I've heard more and more laws being passed, with OUR voted in representatives, that quite a few people claim are illegal before they are even signed into law. Has anyone stopped to think about this? In this case, all these lawsuits involving the telecoms will be dismissed. A big fight will ensue over the legality of this new law... 5+ years from now it might(or might not) get struck down as unconstitional. What happens then? Oops, your right to sue has expired since the statue of limitations has long expired. Congress accomplished what they wanted, to protect the telecoms. And they will do JUST that, even if this law is completely unconstitional. What I want to see is a law that requires that all laws be found constitional by a court before they can be passed. This system of being able to pass unconstitional laws KNOWING that they are unconstitional is just out of control.
I've watched our government(the USA) worry about the "zomg right now we need gas for cheap" instead of stopping to think that we'll still need it for cheap next year, 10 years from now, maybe 50 years from now. The government deal with the RIGHT here, RIGHT now. They don't think about tomorrow. That's part of the problem with the USA. We don't think ahead at all. Our attempts to think ahead are only because some other company 'thought ahead', and they know just how to make ALOT of money off of the government, our government.
My dad told me of a song by the Grass Roots called "Let's live for today". Apparently quite a few radio stations refused to play it because the words to the song basically ignore what could happen tomrrow, and just worry about right now. This is the world we live in. We're living for today.
Look at how people are handling the war in Iraq. We went in there, now the Democrats are saying that they only gave permission to invade, not stay for years to clean up the government that WE removed. Are they serious!?
Look at our government spending. We're spending money faster than we ever have, and there's no attempt to control it. The dollar is weakening daily as a result and Bush and Co. want to spend more money? Are they serious!?
Stop and look at all of your gripes about the government mishandling things, and then ask yourself how much of them could have been handled better had we simply thought ahead.
Quite often the gripes people have that they want the government to fix are because they didn't think ahead themselves. Variable home loans and you signed up for more house than you could afford? Gas prices out of control? Hurricane destroyed your house and although you could have had insurance you didn't spend the money? You gotta own up to your own mistakes.
We need to start thinking ahead folks. Plain and simple.
Do I plan ahead in my life? I didn't choose 'the perfect spot on the beach that's 45 mins away in my Hummer'. I chose a location that is close to work. I am 10 minutes from work, and I drive a minivan(vice an SUV) because it is more fuel efficient than an SUV. I also have my beater car around for when I drive alone. It gets slightly better gas mileage than my minivan.
I try to think of what COULD go wrong in the future, instead of dealing with the future when it fsck me in the a$$. Why can't my government do the same?
I just wonder what our founding fathers would think of the USA if they were here now.
We can't assume Creative is protecting their own butts. Creative can't be held responsible for what some random guy does with their drivers, right? Dolby can't sue Creative just because Creative is holding up their end of the bargain(not releasing drivers). Dolby might be able to go after someone for making the feature available without buying a license. I'm not sure how the Dolby licensing works.
So your theory doesn't make sense. But, that doesn't mean there isn't a much more sinister look to all of this business between Creative, Dolby, and the consumer. I think everyone here agrees that Creative is clearly and deliberately not enabling these features.
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The problem is that little keyword...should.
How many times have you had stuff that 'should' work, but then later find out it doesn't? It happens enough that I'd prefer to be able to have some minimal control and information as to the 'health' of my drive.
Also, I do not understand your comment about how I'd know how much of the reported available storage space is defective. The drive only has the ability to determine if the cell has ever been written to, or has never been written to. It does not have the logic to determine if a cell is 'free' or 'used'. They do not differentiate between file systems at all. Once a cell has been written to once, it is 'full'. Operating systems do not go back and mark the cells as 'free' when you delete a file. The file system simply marks those cells as 'available' again. This is the chief reason why when I read articles about people that say their drive is slowly shrinking is confusing to me. How is that possible when the drive has no idea what NTFS/FAT32/ext3/ext4 is? Also, as the drive cells 'fail' and the usable space shrinks, does the drive tell the OS that? It simply reads and writes data. It may keep track of cells that have ever been written to, but it has no concept of what parts have data or do not.
Seriously. How do you 'test' for bad sectors? If you do a surface scan, it will read/write certain sectors. So you find sector 12345 is bad. You mark that sector as bad in the bad sector table and life goes on, right? Not necessarily. What if sector 12345 is now remapped to sector 23456 the next time you use it because of the hardware sector reallocation.
I hear everyone talk about how there's extra 'spare' memory pages for replacing the worn out ones. Let's say I have 5% extra blocks. How do you deal with these extra blocks? I see 2 ways...
1. All of the primary sectors are mapped physically and logically the same. As the physical pages wear out, the 'extra' pages are logically mapped in place of the physically bad ones.
2. The wear leveling mechanism remaps the physical and logical sectors through the useful life of the device. As various sectors reach their end of life, they are then remapped to the 'extra' sectors.
If #2 is the way it works, then performing any kind of 'surface' test is completely pointless. The device could remap the memory cells over and over. Through a series of surface scans you could theoretically mark every sector as bad because it's remapped every time you perform a read/write operation.
If #1 is the case, it would be very helpful if the device would tell you how many free pages you had left before writes are disabled. This would be analogous to the SMART feature of platter based media. Then we will be able to tell 'my drive has approximately 20 years left' or 'my drive has 20 minutes left! Yikes!'.
I am very interested to know which one manufacturers use, and i'm sure they all aren't the same.
We need tools to tell us what is really going in inside the SSD drives. We need software programs that find a bad sector to tell the hardware that the page of memory is actually bad and to remap accordingly. This would also signify the end of the 'bad sector table' for file systems as the issue is dealt with solely on the hardware level.
I see the long term results of this strategy similar to electricity and phones. Companies can not arbitrarily turn off your phone without a valid arguement that can withstand courts. This is due to many medical equipment devices requiring electricity and phone lines be available. To many people, going without the internet is as serious as going without electricity (albeit very arguably). I'm sure after a few years legislation will attempt to be passed protecting the internet connections to homes the same way. What is the RIAA and the ISPs in the RIAA's back pocket going to do then? Use the excuse of "we've always done it this way"? At some point someone is going to deem the internet a necessity in the home, and the RIAA is going to have to change their tactic or attempt to buy out the legislation.
Why would I pay $60 for a game that will quite likely load DRM and cause problems with my computer requiring me to restore from a backup. Now, instead of "install and play" I have to:
1. Backup my C drive. ... time passes(days or months???) ...
2. Have a restore DVD ready to boot for a recovery.
3. Install the game, give it a go.
4. Restore my C drive because of unnecessary DRM screwing up my own damn property.
5. If days or months went by, maybe I have to update my OS and other software again, change some settings, etc. Hopefully I have all of my data backed up. Maybe some other game' DRM policy will require me to activate it again, and maybe I'll end up using 1 of my precious limited number of re-activations before I have to buy the game again.
Why would I spend $60 for this kind of punishment? I could have sworn I spent money for the 'fun' of the game. I hardly classify 'punishment' as 'fun'. If these 2 words are used interchangably nowadays I need to get away from society. This isn't how I roll.
Also, I'd rather buy 2 games at $30 at the same time, try both and have to do steps 1-6 once than buy 2 games at $60 a piece at 2 different times and potentially have to do steps 1-5 twice. Now i'm wasting my time and spent $60 for the 'opportunity' to recover twice.
Self preservation kicks in here somewhere.
I am fully aware of no-cd patches. They do not solve all DRM problems(starforce), and I should not have to seek them out to have an acceptable gaming experience.
I've been using a hosts file since around 2003. It blocks out all those ads, popups, spyware,adware, stops alot of virii from calling home, you name it. I scan my computer about once a month, and I haven't had any of the 'serious outbreaks' of adware like all my friends. They all swear by their software programs to block it(ultimately, they always end up reformatting when they cant quite get rid of them all) but my solution uses no resources and doesn't require 'scanning' for them regularly.
I use it on my parent's computer and only update it once a year at Christmas. Even with only updating once a year they haven't gotten any adware/spyware yet, and it's been 3 years.
I highly recommend it. Give it a try, there's nothing to lose but the crapware.
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
I looked up Carbonite on the Better Business Bureau. They are BBB accredited with a B+ rating.... Maybe the BBB should be rethinking their scales?
http://reports-boston.bbb.org/Boston/Public/Reports/RR/Report.aspx?i=17194
Did you notice that there was a total of zero people that gave that board a 5 egg rating? And all 3 comments had less than spectacular things to say when it came to using that board.
I will agree with you that it's overpriced. Price is a bit steep. I'm just not sold that I'd really intend to build a computer using that motherboard. Everyone's comments on newegg had much larger cons sections that positives. Add that with not one 5 egg rating(yes, I see there's only 3 ratings), but I'm not sure it would be an investment(gamble?) I'd be willing to take. Can you honestly tell me you'd buy a motherboard that people claim is picky about which RAM it wants to use, isn't compatible with 1 person's raid controller(out of 3 comments) and your CPUs might not be supported because of a stepping issue. If I built a computer with that motherboard I'd be disgusted to play games on it, or anything else for that matter. PCI-X slots, you got to be kidding. 1 PCIe 16x slot(is it PCIe 1.0 or 2.0?). Where's the other PCIe slots I would need? That motherboard is quite outdated, hence the cheap price.
I'm not an AMD fan, but I'm not an Intel fanboy either. Me personally, I'd never buy AMD. But with how many friends have them and enjoy them, I don't find it justifiable to bash AMD either. When I looked at a $100 8 RAM slot motherboard, I found more people giving the motherboard 1 egg compared to 5. That's not such a great thing IMO.
I'll stick with my ANS-9010 and you can stick with your setup. I can use my ANS-9010 with any board that supports SATA, and your ideas are limited to buying into a build that limits your future choices(and perhaps compatibility with other cards). There's no effective way to boot from it, save it's contents in a reasonable period of time, etc. I feel my idea is more versatile and obviously much less committed to a particular motherboard/CPU.
From my personal experience, booting from the ANS-9010 and running my system off of it is significantly faster than anything I've ever seen. I can't even believe it's the same computer when I image my ANS-9010 to my actual hard drive and boot from it. Even after defragmenting and everything else, it just doesn't feel like the same computer. Having microsecond seek times to read data is significantly more important than the quantity of data you can transfer.
Your calculations compare the cost for 16GB of DDR2 Registered RAM to the ANS-9010 + RAM cost. You should actually be comparing the ANS-9010+RAM to the cost of everything necessary to make a RAMdrive using a system. So you will need: very expensive motherboard with 8 RAM slots, an expensive processor, hard drive, CD-ROM, power supply, case, operating system, 16GB of RAM, the electrical usage, the cooling needed, etc.
You'll see that the ANS-9010 with 8*4GB sticks is probably cheaper than running a whole second computer with a xeon processor and a single(or likely dual) processor motherboard. Plus the invested time in setting up the darn thing. But even after that, the performance of the ANS-9010 would more than saturate gigabit LAN. A system RAM ramdrive would be limited even by 10 gigabit LAN. So how do you intend to use this 'ultra fast ramdrive' in another system of your choosing if you can't really use the speeds to begin with?
I would agree that if you were building a computer it might be cheaper to have a bunch of ram used as a ramdrive and shared, but you still couldn't boot from it as well as save the data at shutdown without having to back up the RAMdrive during shutdown.
Nope. It's 1/9th. Read the manual on their website. They really use ECC. The size deteced in the BIOS is 1/9th less than expected.
Sorry, 12 hour work days fragmented my last post.
The time to install Windows XP SP3 from SP0 was 2 minutes. This is a significant difference from the typical 20-30 minutes(sometimes more) I've seen in the past for the SP3 installation. Everything is so much faster. My computer is a core i7 920, and when I use my platter drives to boot instead of my ANS-9010, it's night and day difference. The difference in performance to me is akin to telling your family member to upgrade from 512MB of RAM to 2GB. It's night and day. Plain and simple.
The manual I got with mine says ECC RAM is supported. I can't confirm that ECC actually works as I have no ECC memory to test at the present time.
If you compare this thing to just putting the RAM in your PC there are NO upsides.
Ok...
1. Find me a motherboard that has 8 RAM slots that doesn't require expensive ECC and/or Registered memory
2. Find me a computer that can boot from it's own RAM drive.
3. Find me a computer that can use a RAM drive that can be persistent through reboots without having to save the contents to something else.
I have several of these, and I run a power cord that is normally used for one of those SATA/IDE to USB kits in the back of my computer to power my box.
You don't think about all of the uses that this thing offers.
Actually, this box supports it's own ECC function. If you use ECC RAM, the ECC function is just like a normal ECC function. However, if you don't want to spend extravagant prices for ECC RAM, the box will create it's own ECC function. This function does use 1/9th the total RAM, but it is ECC, and it works. I own 3 of these boxes right now. They are fast as heck. I haven't played with SSD much(my first SSD drive arrives in the mail today), but I was able to perform tasks at performances that were beyond comprehension. From the time I double clicked the executable to the computer completely rebooted after the install was less than 2 minutes. Currently, Windows XP with all the standard software installed is less than 30 seconds.
Being a former sailor I have personal experience with this issue. Bottom line, it sucks. There are very few options available to you, aside from setting up your own system. The idea of wget might work the best, but you would always be waiting for that reply email. The idea of some kind of HAM system is another good idea. I've heard there are HAM systems set up that are used for internet for wide areas and are used during hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
Opening web pages with internet that comes in and out(as the waves rock the ship back and forth) is almost impossible. There's ALOT of packet loss and basic timeouts. I'm talking sometimes as high as 50% packet loss, and latency over 2500ms. Honestly, if you can design a system to interact via email, that's your best option because your emails will always get to you... eventually. Downloading a webpage that times out means reloading the page, where the same problem will probably haunt you again and again. Find as many web pages as you can that have as few pictures as possible(that's what will kill your surfing abilities). You want webpages that utilize as few data connections as possible.
Even downloading a 10MB file on the ship while underway was completely out of the question. You were lucky if you could actually view the whole page. If you want files emailed to you and you can't accept attachments, look into something similar to what newsgroups uses. The yEnc(or whatever the common ones are) would come in handy here.
I just accepted that I wasn't going to get my slashdot addiction satisfied while underway. I had my g/f email me the slashdot articles sometimes, or whatever stuff she found on cnn.com that she thought I'd like.
Good luck and enjoy your cruise!
But if MPC owned a large number of warranties, and they are now defunct, why is this allowed to affect the consumer at all? If I buy a warranty from company 'A', and company 'A' sells their warranty department to company 'B' a year later, why can I as a consumer not go back to company 'A' and demand that they honor the warranty that was originally purchased under them? Company 'A' likely was paid for those warranties, and I don't find it unreasonable to expect that money from company 'A' be used to cover their decision to sell what was their responsibilities to company 'B'. After all, the warranty was between company 'A' and myself. If company 'A' didn't handle the decision to sell to company 'B' in the best interest of the consumer, then company 'A' should be held responsible for them.
Businesses should be aligned to honor and treasure their customers. If businesses do not want to make those decisions willingly, then laws should allow customers to go and file a lawsuit as applicable. I'm sorry but the customer shouldn't be allowed to lose without recourse because a few people were selfish assholes. I'm sure the business owners have been reimbursed quite well for running their business into the ground. If the decision makers made a bad decision, then the business owner should be walking away from the business with the clothes on their back and their tail between their legs. Nothing less than this should EVER be acceptable.
It's situations like this that make me somewhat leery of buying one of those 3rd party warranties. If ABC computers wants to warranty my Dell PC for 3 years for $349.99 will ABC computers really be in business for the next 3 years? If they flop a week later, do I have any options for recourse?
It's a fact that when the economy is down, more people will actually use their warranty options rather than just buy a new computer and justify it saying "Well, the computer is 2.5 years old. Why not buy a new one instead of the hassle of warranty". Money is tight, and consumers will use their warranty to the maximum extent possible.
I feel bad for the employees at the company that were effectively jobless days after christmas, with no warning of their impending 'layoff'. I find their letter justifying why the couldn't give 60 days notice unsettling. They're admitting they screwed up, and i'm sure their former employees are comforted by this fact, right? I hope they ban together and demand those 60 days paid, as is required by law. Who pays their salary for those 60 days? The people in charge that decided they'd gamble with people's jobs and try to get 'financial assistance' to keep those higher-ups a job.
It all stinks of shit to me.
So we're on the brink of a recession/depression and the Economy is more important than the war. The Economy has ALWAYS recovered, and I am 100% sure it will recover again(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong if it never recovers), but the people at war are permanently dead. Why are we placing a temporary problem before a permanent one? Money can be earned, but we can't revive the dead....
First they say that these new improved lower failure-rate drives along with bigger disks are going to kill RAID5. Then, they try to tell us that if 1 drive failed it's likely you will lose the array due to an unrecoverable error on the remaining array drives. So which is it? Are hard drives becoming more reliable or more error prone? You can't have it both ways. This sounds like complete crap to me. I'll still be using them at home, and probably 5 years from now too.
Open source...is about the user.
Closed source...is about the company producing the software.
Open source is often written by the very people that will use the software, and they don't want crap in their software.
Closed source is often written by people that will use it, but they need it to sell money. So is it cheaper to push crap out the door or gold plated jewelry?
I just have to wonder what it's like to be in the shoes of the person that wrote the code that's flawed. Maybe i'm mistaken, but this seems like something that the coder did knowing that if anyone ever figured it out, it was game over for the DRM. Surely this person is now explaining why it is how it is to his supervisors, who are probably banging their heads against the wall thinking "OMG".
This is why if I buy a computer, it had better come with a genuine Microsoft Windows installation disk. I don't know what is on that recovery disk, and I don't want to find out when I'm a victim of identity theft because my installation comes with a free virus. Never mind all their crapware that I can uninstall. Viruses don't come with an uninstall. If I want an "uninstaller" it's called AntiVirus. I'm pretty sure Dell/HP/etc would be MORE than happy to sell me a copy too. Aren't they nice? First give me the problem, and then sell me the fix.
This sounds like one of those TV ads...
"But wait! There's more! Call in the next 15 mins and we'll send you a FREE virus! Yes, FREE! A $250 value, yours free!"
This is disappointing. A few months back ASUS got into a flamewar with GIGABYTE. GIGABYTE came out and told Tom's Hardware that ASUS used inferior parts, changed their % gains versus their competitor without changing the product whatsoever, and that ASUS's EPU feature is software instead of hardware(meaning it is inferior to GIGABYTE). GIGABYTE did come back and appologize for claiming ASUS used inferior parts(it was found that it was a different vendor's board that contained inferior parts). ASUS threatened to sue any website that talked dirty about ASUS when this all came to light. Check out http://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-gigabyte-motherboard,5348.html to read about the GIGABYTE versus ASUS drama. Then check http://www.tomshardware.com/news/asus-gigabyte-motherboard,5480.html for ASUS suing GIGABYTE for the bad publicity.
I have been an ASUS user for many years, building many computers with ASUS parts. While GIGABYTE did include some false claims, they did have valid complaints for their other arguements. I was one of the people that was stuck with a motherboard that cost me $250 that didn't do quite what it was supposed to do, and as a result my linux based computer cannot use their power management function(because it is software based). GIGABYTE's is hardware, and is enabled in BIOS and doesn't care which OS you use. This one hit home for me. My computer is on 24x7, and I wanted my computer to be green. Unfortunately that dream will not be a reality with ASUS hardware.
This again paints a bad picture of the quality work ASUS has been doing lately. I am sure that my next motherboard won't be ASUS. They have lost points with me, and I am going to check out one of the other top tier motherboard companies.
I have never purchased a motherboard from GIGABYTE, but I'm already looking for motherboards for Nahelem when it comes out next month, and I'm not even looking at what ASUS is offering. Bite me once, shame on you. Bite me twice, shame on me!
Reasons for leaving ASUS:
1. Changing your product efficiency % gains after shipping the product for months, AND not changing anything on the product! As if they wouldn't get caught? Competitors are always shopping their other competitors!
2. They fail to mention that EPU REQUIRES Windows to run. I don't care what ASUS says. If it requires software(Windows based at that!), then it's software based. Even if its hardware functions are enabled by using the software.
3. Suing anyone who talks about their bad publicity from GIGABYTE. WTF? Seriously, WTF? That's RIAA type behavior, and I will not tolerate that type of child in my house.
It must also disclose what the company's new network management system will look like.
So, does this mean that the FCC had already made the assumption that Comcast is going to use another method to throttle traffic? If the FCC already knows, then what is the FCC exactly fighting for? Because it definitely isn't fighting for net neutrality.
Here's where I think that Viacom has been caught red handed and trying to fix their public relations problem. The judge granted Viacom's motion and the info was to be handed over to Viacom. Now suddenly Viacom doesn't need this info? What changed? I'm sure the public outcry played a big part in it.
Sounds to me like Viacom's intention all along was to either:
1. Collect this wealth of information, and do some more good old fashioned RIAA lawsuits.
2. Hurt the Youtube name. How many people might no longer watch/post on Youtube because of what they've read about this lawsuit? I'm willing to bet that the people that are less knowledgable about this situation are the same people that'll go to another site that provides the same features(and could face the same exact lawsuits, have to hand over data, etc.) thinking that they are safe because they aren't using Youtube anymore. Maybe if they devalue Youtube enough, they'll try to buy it off of Google for pennies on the dollar.
3. Do #1, and if the shit hit the fan, go to backup plan(#2).
If it's #3, then it doesn't really matter. They've accomplished something, and I'm sure they'll pat themselves on the back for sucessfully accomplishing their goal. I'm willing to bet that sometime soon I'll hear of Viacom's 'brand new' site that competes directly with Youtube(that is assuming there isn't one already that I haven't heard of).
Viacom doesn't have a use for the posters that work at Google that posted coypright videos. Google is protected from being sued by what individuals do. If Viacom has an email from Google management that tells their employee's to post copyright info deliberately, that is different.
Stay tuned. I'm betting money there's more to this story than the public actually knows. I'm interested in seeing what happens from here.
I swear in the last 2 years I've heard more and more laws being passed, with OUR voted in representatives, that quite a few people claim are illegal before they are even signed into law. Has anyone stopped to think about this? In this case, all these lawsuits involving the telecoms will be dismissed. A big fight will ensue over the legality of this new law... 5+ years from now it might(or might not) get struck down as unconstitional. What happens then? Oops, your right to sue has expired since the statue of limitations has long expired. Congress accomplished what they wanted, to protect the telecoms. And they will do JUST that, even if this law is completely unconstitional. What I want to see is a law that requires that all laws be found constitional by a court before they can be passed. This system of being able to pass unconstitional laws KNOWING that they are unconstitional is just out of control.
I've watched our government(the USA) worry about the "zomg right now we need gas for cheap" instead of stopping to think that we'll still need it for cheap next year, 10 years from now, maybe 50 years from now. The government deal with the RIGHT here, RIGHT now. They don't think about tomorrow. That's part of the problem with the USA. We don't think ahead at all. Our attempts to think ahead are only because some other company 'thought ahead', and they know just how to make ALOT of money off of the government, our government.
My dad told me of a song by the Grass Roots called "Let's live for today". Apparently quite a few radio stations refused to play it because the words to the song basically ignore what could happen tomrrow, and just worry about right now. This is the world we live in. We're living for today.
Look at how people are handling the war in Iraq. We went in there, now the Democrats are saying that they only gave permission to invade, not stay for years to clean up the government that WE removed. Are they serious!?
Look at our government spending. We're spending money faster than we ever have, and there's no attempt to control it. The dollar is weakening daily as a result and Bush and Co. want to spend more money? Are they serious!?
Stop and look at all of your gripes about the government mishandling things, and then ask yourself how much of them could have been handled better had we simply thought ahead.
Quite often the gripes people have that they want the government to fix are because they didn't think ahead themselves. Variable home loans and you signed up for more house than you could afford? Gas prices out of control? Hurricane destroyed your house and although you could have had insurance you didn't spend the money? You gotta own up to your own mistakes.
We need to start thinking ahead folks. Plain and simple.
Do I plan ahead in my life? I didn't choose 'the perfect spot on the beach that's 45 mins away in my Hummer'. I chose a location that is close to work. I am 10 minutes from work, and I drive a minivan(vice an SUV) because it is more fuel efficient than an SUV. I also have my beater car around for when I drive alone. It gets slightly better gas mileage than my minivan.
I try to think of what COULD go wrong in the future, instead of dealing with the future when it fsck me in the a$$. Why can't my government do the same?
I just wonder what our founding fathers would think of the USA if they were here now.
We can't assume Creative is protecting their own butts. Creative can't be held responsible for what some random guy does with their drivers, right? Dolby can't sue Creative just because Creative is holding up their end of the bargain(not releasing drivers). Dolby might be able to go after someone for making the feature available without buying a license. I'm not sure how the Dolby licensing works.
So your theory doesn't make sense. But, that doesn't mean there isn't a much more sinister look to all of this business between Creative, Dolby, and the consumer. I think everyone here agrees that Creative is clearly and deliberately not enabling these features.