I know I've often wished my umbrella wasn't a damp sponge once I bring it inside. Being able to shake the surface water off helps on a traditional umbrella but not being damp to the core would be a big improvement.
I keep reading about people going Seagate over Western Digital "for the 5 year warranty".
If you think that WD doesn't offer a 5 year warranty on any drives you are wrong. If you think there is only "the" 5 year warranty instead of "those" 5 year warranties then maybe I'm going to be a grammar nazi too.
People are so quick to look to the top end but there is a reliability/speed/power/noise benefit to buying the sweet spot drive. Cost is in the eye of the beholder as the 640GB drive is lower in purchase price but won't be the best price per GB. Myself I'm willing to use the smaller drives, but then I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive without being low on disk space.
As a single drive or in an array as long as you don't run out of space you gain performance using smaller drives so long as you buy carefully. In RAID more spindles equal more speed. As a single drive you can pick and choose the highest density platters (320/333/334 as the desired platters currently vs the 250GB platters that are still floating around the supply chain in so many drives)
Those are lots of numbers but it doesn't fully address Pandora.
One of the nice things about Pandora is that it doesn't stream in the traditional sense. It DLs a mp3 in the background as quick as possible and then plays from the local cache. If you watch your bandwidth it'll DL at high speed for a few seconds then sit idle through several minutes of music, then just before the song ends it'll DL the next song. While the FAQ states that it streams at 128 kbps, I'd call that a very dumbed down version of reality.
This also lets you pause a song indefinitely and it will resume from that paused point if you switch "stations" during the paused state or if you switch stations without pausing it will pause automatically.
I haven't bothered to check to see if that storage is flushed on a reboot. At the least I'm assuming it is kept so you don't have to waste bandwidth replaying a song later in the same multihour session.
It's not perfect but I'll actually miss it should Pandora go away.
The new Phenom Tri-Core, is NOT a quad core with a core disabled/broken. If it was, then it would have the cache of a quad-core wouldnt it?
Unlike Intel, AMD use a per-core cache and so disabling one core would disable one quarter of the cache too.
You are living in the past on that quote.
AMD used a per core cache on older designs. On the new design they use both a per core cache AND a shared cache. So on a quad core that has 512k per core and 2m shared the cache for a chip with one core disabled is (512x3)+2048/(512x4)+2048 or 7/8. So instead of disabling 1/4 of the cache they are disabling 1/8th, but because they disable 1/4 of the cores when disabling 1/8 of the cache it actually helps the cache per core ratio instead of hurting it.
Tri core Phenoms get 1195k of L2/L3 cache per core in that example. Quad core Phenoms get 1024k. So the tri core gets 16% larger cache based on that logic.
Besides that math is wrong/too simplistic because you are only considering L2 and L3 cache. Each core also has 128KB L1 but it seems in vogue to ignore it. It makes the math simpler especially when you get to 45nm and below when you bump that L3 cache up every time the process improves. 6MB L3 plus 512kb L2 on a tri core vs 6MB L3 plus 512kb L2 on a quad core gives you a 15/16 ratio vs the 3/4 ratio. The bigger the L3 the better the advantage for the tri core.
2560 vs 2048 in the 6MB L3 cache scenario, the 16% advantage becomes a 25% advantage at that node.
Nobody stores years as 11 bit integers. Would you care to share the goofy math that made you pick 11bit instead of 32bit?
The year 2038 problem (also known as "Unix Millennium bug", "Y2K38," "Y2K+38," or "Y2.038K" by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represents system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since January 1, 1970. This representation also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will "wrap around" and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1970. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.
Have you ever broken a CFL? Have you ever seen one burn out?
I have something like 15 or 20 of them and I've moved from apartment to apartment, from state to state. I haven't lost any of them that I've dropped to breakage and I haven't damaged any of them during the moving process. Furthermore I've had CFLs so long I'm not sure the exact year I got the first one. I'm thinking it was between 1999 and 2001. Lets say my oldest CFL has seen regular use for 6 years. I have seen them get dimmer but I've never seen one stop working entirely and I've never seen one flicker like the old long tube fluorescents did.
I'm sure at some point I'll have to dispose of some of them but they so far have outlived my concern about their ruggedness.
LONDON, Feb. 6 -- Making a big bet on the future of nuclear power, Toshiba of Japan agreed on Monday to buy Westinghouse Electric, the atomic energy division of British Nuclear Fuels, for $5.4 billion.
The purchase price is about three times the amount analysts estimated in July, because of competition for the unit. Toshiba outbid global giants like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and General Electric.
Nuclear power is increasingly seen as an alternative to energy sources like coal and oil, as energy demand increases around the world. Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba's president and chief executive, speaking at a news conference in London, estimated that demand for nuclear power would grow 50 percent by 2020.
Toshiba, which is shifting more focus on its nuclear power plant maker, is eyeing demand for thermal power plant turbines, which share the same construction as turbines in nuclear power plants.
Toshiba late last year took a 77 percent stake in Westinghouse, the U.S. power plant unit of British Nuclear Fuels, for $4.16 billion, eyeing growing demand for nuclear power abroad amid fears of global warming and high prices of natural gas and oil.
Toshiba's rivals are also betting on a surge in nuclear power's popularity, including Hitachi Ltd., which plans to pool its nuclear units with GE, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, which has partnered with France's Areva.
Tokyo (AFP) Oct 22, 2007 Japan's Toshiba Corp. said Monday it would develop a state-of-the-art nuclear engineering facility as it forecast demand will continue to grow for atomic power plants.
Toshiba said it would start work on the building next year and expected it to be open by March 2009.
20 years old, yet 17 years ago computers didn't have hard drives? That's pushing it.
Mac: Sure a Mac from before 1986 was floppy only and sure even after SCSI disks were an option you could buy a Mac without a hard drive up until about 1991 when the last floppy only SE/30 was being sold. Yes I used a 3 floppy drive SE/30 with no hard drive in a computer lab but I didn't consider that optimal. Almost every non lab Mac I've ever seen since 1987 had an internal or external hard drive as the boot drive.
Early x86: Sure you could run DOS from floppy but no one would consider any x86 PC with a 386 or newer CPU in it a general purpose PC without a hard drive. Heck even 286 PCs commonly had hard drives.
A clue that hard drives were getting cheap is the consolidation of the drive industry shown below
# 1988: Tandem Computers sold its disk manufacturing division to Western Digital (WDC), which was then a well-known controller designer. # 1989: Seagate Technology bought Control Data's high-end disk business, as part of CDC's exit from hardware manufacturing. # 1990: Maxtor buys MiniScribe out of bankruptcy, making it the core of its low-end disk division.
2007-17=1990 which is past the point when the hard drive was pretty darn common. So I'd have to ask if you used a 17 year old PC with no hard drive what was it?
I know the odds of finding a pay phone nowdays are slim but does this allow you to make a free phone call or does the phone ask for money when the goog-411 transfer occurs?
"Downloading personal software onto a work computer--74% of those who have done this believe it is not a risky behavior, even though they may unintentionally install spyware or malware on the work computer."
I understand some users don't know the difference between downloading and installing but you'd like to see the writer at HNS CONSULTING LTD get that term right.
Download all day long. Its installing it after you download it that is risky. I mean really if you download an ISO but don't have a CD burner or any way to get the ISO off the PC all you did was waste bandwidth. If you download an EXE or Zip and move it to a flash disk to take home you still didn't install software on the work computer. You can break a lot of policies by downloading files and still totally avoid this whole "unintentionally install" strawman/misnomer.
Lets see the Titanic sank in 1912. Is that not enough of a lead time for engineers to figure out that redundancy and quality of manufacture are key components to public safety? Why wait 55 more years for the Silver Bridge collapse to say that bridges should be built with enough over design aka fudge factor to survive a manufacturing defect?
Stat: Prius vs Civic Class Midsize Compact MPG 46 42 GHG Emissions 4.0 4.4 Engine 1.5 1.3 Passenger Volume 96ft3 91ft3 Trunk Volume 16ft3 10ft3
Sure the Prius hybrid is more popular than the Civic Hybrid, it gets more MPG and has more cargo area and more cabin space.
Besides if the looking different thing is so significant why is it that you can't easily tell the difference between a Camry and a Camry Hybrid?
Stat: Camry Hybrid vs Old school Camry MPG 34 24 Combined HP 187 158 GHG Emissions 5.4 7.7 Engine 2.4 2.4 Passenger Volume 101ft3 101ft3 Trunk Volume 11ft3 15ft3
If you want the extra cabin space and horse power at the expense of cargo volume and worse emissions you get the Prius vs Camry Hybrid comparison
Stat: Prius vs Camry Hybrid Class Midsize Compact MPG 46 34 GHG Emissions 4.0 5.4 Engine 1.5 2.4 Passenger Volume 96ft3 101ft3 Trunk Volume 16ft3 11ft3
The Prius costs less. The Camry looks "normal".
There are plenty of trade offs but looks are the last of my concerns when deciding between these three Hybrid vehicles.
and yes the formatting is bad, not sure why I couldn't just use a PRE tag.
Slashdot Mirror
How about an umbrella?
I know I've often wished my umbrella wasn't a damp sponge once I bring it inside. Being able to shake the surface water off helps on a traditional umbrella but not being damp to the core would be a big improvement.
If the rebuild time exceeds the average time of the problem behavior it doesn't matter what RAID level you use or how many drives are involved.
With Terabytes of data RAID 5 and RAID 6 will take way too long to rebuild and your array will fail during rebuild.
Even with RAID 10, if the behavior occurs in less time than synching the mirror takes you are screwed.
I keep reading about people going Seagate over Western Digital "for the 5 year warranty".
If you think that WD doesn't offer a 5 year warranty on any drives you are wrong. If you think there is only "the" 5 year warranty instead of "those" 5 year warranties then maybe I'm going to be a grammar nazi too.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488 will get you started on 5 year warranty drives from WD.
WD1001FALS = 1TB
WD7501AALS = 750GB
WD6401AALS = 640GB (I'd recommend this drive)
WD5001AALS = 500GB
People are so quick to look to the top end but there is a reliability/speed/power/noise benefit to buying the sweet spot drive. Cost is in the eye of the beholder as the 640GB drive is lower in purchase price but won't be the best price per GB. Myself I'm willing to use the smaller drives, but then I'm the type that can still make out on a 250GB drive without being low on disk space.
As a single drive or in an array as long as you don't run out of space you gain performance using smaller drives so long as you buy carefully. In RAID more spindles equal more speed. As a single drive you can pick and choose the highest density platters (320/333/334 as the desired platters currently vs the 250GB platters that are still floating around the supply chain in so many drives)
You think Seagate is the only company to offer consumer hard drives with a 5 year warranty?
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=488&language=en
It's not that hard to find 5 year warranty mentioned on the WDC website.
Black = WD6401AALS 5 year warranty
Blue = WD6400AAKS 3 year warranty
Green = WD6400AACS 3 year warranty
And to add to the fun the Black has twice the cache and is only about $10 more than the Blue at 640GB.
Seagate is by no means a bad company but they aren't the only game in town.
Those are lots of numbers but it doesn't fully address Pandora.
One of the nice things about Pandora is that it doesn't stream in the traditional sense. It DLs a mp3 in the background as quick as possible and then plays from the local cache. If you watch your bandwidth it'll DL at high speed for a few seconds then sit idle through several minutes of music, then just before the song ends it'll DL the next song. While the FAQ states that it streams at 128 kbps, I'd call that a very dumbed down version of reality.
This also lets you pause a song indefinitely and it will resume from that paused point if you switch "stations" during the paused state or if you switch stations without pausing it will pause automatically.
FWIW the storage Pandora uses is part of Adobe Flash so if you want to modify the cache settings you would follow this link to bring up the settings http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html#117498
I haven't bothered to check to see if that storage is flushed on a reboot. At the least I'm assuming it is kept so you don't have to waste bandwidth replaying a song later in the same multihour session.
It's not perfect but I'll actually miss it should Pandora go away.
Was I the only one that thought http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/photos/pom/2003sept.htm was nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/photos/porn/2003sept.htm and tried to imagine NASA porn that somehow involved a silver beard?
You are living in the past on that quote.
AMD used a per core cache on older designs. On the new design they use both a per core cache AND a shared cache. So on a quad core that has 512k per core and 2m shared the cache for a chip with one core disabled is (512x3)+2048/(512x4)+2048 or 7/8. So instead of disabling 1/4 of the cache they are disabling 1/8th, but because they disable 1/4 of the cores when disabling 1/8 of the cache it actually helps the cache per core ratio instead of hurting it.
Tri core Phenoms get 1195k of L2/L3 cache per core in that example. Quad core Phenoms get 1024k. So the tri core gets 16% larger cache based on that logic.
Besides that math is wrong/too simplistic because you are only considering L2 and L3 cache. Each core also has 128KB L1 but it seems in vogue to ignore it. It makes the math simpler especially when you get to 45nm and below when you bump that L3 cache up every time the process improves. 6MB L3 plus 512kb L2 on a tri core vs 6MB L3 plus 512kb L2 on a quad core gives you a 15/16 ratio vs the 3/4 ratio. The bigger the L3 the better the advantage for the tri core.
2560 vs 2048 in the 6MB L3 cache scenario, the 16% advantage becomes a 25% advantage at that node.
Nobody stores years as 11 bit integers. Would you care to share the goofy math that made you pick 11bit instead of 32bit?
The year 2038 problem (also known as "Unix Millennium bug", "Y2K38," "Y2K+38," or "Y2.038K" by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represents system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since January 1, 1970. This representation also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will "wrap around" and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1970. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.
Have you ever broken a CFL? Have you ever seen one burn out?
I have something like 15 or 20 of them and I've moved from apartment to apartment, from state to state. I haven't lost any of them that I've dropped to breakage and I haven't damaged any of them during the moving process. Furthermore I've had CFLs so long I'm not sure the exact year I got the first one. I'm thinking it was between 1999 and 2001. Lets say my oldest CFL has seen regular use for 6 years. I have seen them get dimmer but I've never seen one stop working entirely and I've never seen one flicker like the old long tube fluorescents did.
I'm sure at some point I'll have to dispose of some of them but they so far have outlived my concern about their ruggedness.
I suppose it makes sense given news stories about Toshiba
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/business/worldbusiness/07nuclear.html?pagewanted=print
LONDON, Feb. 6 -- Making a big bet on the future of nuclear power, Toshiba of Japan agreed on Monday to buy Westinghouse Electric, the atomic energy division of British Nuclear Fuels, for $5.4 billion.
The purchase price is about three times the amount analysts estimated in July, because of competition for the unit. Toshiba outbid global giants like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and General Electric.
Nuclear power is increasingly seen as an alternative to energy sources like coal and oil, as energy demand increases around the world. Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba's president and chief executive, speaking at a news conference in London, estimated that demand for nuclear power would grow 50 percent by 2020.
http://www.reuters.com/article/mergersNews/idUST33395920070402
Toshiba, which is shifting more focus on its nuclear power plant maker, is eyeing demand for thermal power plant turbines, which share the same construction as turbines in nuclear power plants.
Toshiba late last year took a 77 percent stake in Westinghouse, the U.S. power plant unit of British Nuclear Fuels, for $4.16 billion, eyeing growing demand for nuclear power abroad amid fears of global warming and high prices of natural gas and oil.
Toshiba's rivals are also betting on a surge in nuclear power's popularity, including Hitachi Ltd., which plans to pool its nuclear units with GE, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, which has partnered with France's Areva.
http://www.energy-daily.com/reports/Toshiba_to_build_nuclear_engineering_hub_999.html
Tokyo (AFP) Oct 22, 2007
Japan's Toshiba Corp. said Monday it would develop a state-of-the-art nuclear engineering facility as it forecast demand will continue to grow for atomic power plants.
Toshiba said it would start work on the building next year and expected it to be open by March 2009.
20 years old, yet 17 years ago computers didn't have hard drives? That's pushing it.
Mac:
Sure a Mac from before 1986 was floppy only and sure even after SCSI disks were an option you could buy a Mac without a hard drive up until about 1991 when the last floppy only SE/30 was being sold. Yes I used a 3 floppy drive SE/30 with no hard drive in a computer lab but I didn't consider that optimal. Almost every non lab Mac I've ever seen since 1987 had an internal or external hard drive as the boot drive.
Early x86: Sure you could run DOS from floppy but no one would consider any x86 PC with a 386 or newer CPU in it a general purpose PC without a hard drive. Heck even 286 PCs commonly had hard drives.
A clue that hard drives were getting cheap is the consolidation of the drive industry shown below
# 1988: Tandem Computers sold its disk manufacturing division to Western Digital (WDC), which was then a well-known controller designer.
# 1989: Seagate Technology bought Control Data's high-end disk business, as part of CDC's exit from hardware manufacturing.
# 1990: Maxtor buys MiniScribe out of bankruptcy, making it the core of its low-end disk division.
2007-17=1990 which is past the point when the hard drive was pretty darn common. So I'd have to ask if you used a 17 year old PC with no hard drive what was it?
I know the odds of finding a pay phone nowdays are slim but does this allow you to make a free phone call or does the phone ask for money when the goog-411 transfer occurs?
"Downloading personal software onto a work computer--74% of those who have done this believe it is not a risky behavior, even though they may unintentionally install spyware or malware on the work computer." I understand some users don't know the difference between downloading and installing but you'd like to see the writer at HNS CONSULTING LTD get that term right. Download all day long. Its installing it after you download it that is risky. I mean really if you download an ISO but don't have a CD burner or any way to get the ISO off the PC all you did was waste bandwidth. If you download an EXE or Zip and move it to a flash disk to take home you still didn't install software on the work computer. You can break a lot of policies by downloading files and still totally avoid this whole "unintentionally install" strawman/misnomer.
Lets see the Titanic sank in 1912. Is that not enough of a lead time for engineers to figure out that redundancy and quality of manufacture are key components to public safety? Why wait 55 more years for the Silver Bridge collapse to say that bridges should be built with enough over design aka fudge factor to survive a manufacturing defect?
It's simple math. I don't care what the Prius looks like or what the Civic Hybrid looks like.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/2008car1tablef.jsp? id=23599 vs http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/2008car1tablef.jsp? id=23533
Sure the Prius hybrid is more popular than the Civic Hybrid, it gets more MPG and has more cargo area and more cabin space.
Besides if the looking different thing is so significant why is it that you can't easily tell the difference between a Camry and a Camry Hybrid?
If you want the extra cabin space and horse power at the expense of cargo volume and worse emissions you get the Prius vs Camry Hybrid comparison
The Prius costs less. The Camry looks "normal".
There are plenty of trade offs but looks are the last of my concerns when deciding between these three Hybrid vehicles. and yes the formatting is bad, not sure why I couldn't just use a PRE tag.