It seems that a lot of people are taking the price of the cheapest/GB HD's, but using the performance of the most expensive/GB HD's, in order to form their conclusions about how little they get for so much extra money.
One of the fastest platters on the market today is the Seagate 15,000 RPM Cheetah and that one runs at about $1/GB. Some of the 15K drives go for $3/GB.
SSD's are running about $3/GB across the board at the top end, a cost not dissimilar from the top end platters, but they perform much better.
I understand that many people dont want to drop more than $120 on a drive, but many of the vocal ones are letting their unwillingness to do so contaminate their criticism. SSD's are actually priced competitively vs the top performing platter drives.
Perhaps you need to be clued in on the fact that fast platter drives go for over $1 per gigabyte.
$100 for a terabyte sounds great and all, but you cant get a fast one for that price. You wont be doing sustained writing 120MB/sec writing to those 7.2K drives. You will be lucky to get 80MB/sec on the fastest portions of the drive and will average around 60MB/sec.
That SSD thats pushing 220MB/sec sustained writing is 4x the performance on that one metric, and even faster on every other metric.
They don't beat conventional drives by much at sustained IO.
umm, err?
Which platter drive did you have in mind that performs similar to a high performance SSD's? Even Seagates 15K Cheetah only pushes 100 to 150MB/sec sustained read and write. The latest performance SSD's (such as the SATA2 Colossus) are have sustained writes at "only" 220MB/sec and with better performance (260MB/sec) literally everywhere else.
At $200 the decision to get one would be easy: Buy one.
At $300 then it might be a tough decision for me: Try first.
At $400 its an easy decision again: Don't buy one.
It doesnt have to be a tablet or netbook killer. The form factor is suitable for more than what a touch-phone can comfortably offer, while tablets are too damn big to be something that I will want to carry around all the time. This booklet form factor looks to me to be just about the largest size that will still comfortably fit into the front pocket of my dockers.
The fact that Mozilla's suite doesnt make Mozilla look good in no way means that we should be using Google's V8 suite to compare Chrome vs other browsers. I would argue that Firefox's results on Mozilla's own suite (good or bad) are meaningless, and Chromes results on Google's suite (good or bad) are meaningless, etc..
Google's suite is great for comparing Firefox, Opera, Explorer, and Safari.
Mozilla's suite is great for comparing Chrome, Opera, Explorer, and Safari.
Apple's suite is great for comparing Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Explorer.
Its like using an nVidia benchmark to compare nVidia GPU's with Intel's and AMD's. Nobody would take such a benchmark seriously.
As far as Mozilla tanking on their own suite, the Open nature of the Mozilla Foundation as a whole probably has a lot to do with that. After looking at some of their tests, it looks to me like the source of their benchmarks is always based on some 3rd party, that Mozilla did not author the tests themselves (but certainly had selection powers) but instead have simply consolidated many disparate tests from many authors into a single framework.
Because the user can control the camera and lighting, as well as other scene properties such as surface materials and objects.
You dont get that with offline rendering. Didnt take more than an instant to think of this, so why didnt you think of it? Oh yeah.. its because you are ignorant about what rendering techniques can and cannot do but insist that your opinion be heard anyways.
Why do you impose the realtime requirement on it? Watching the video, it looked like they were getting about 1 fps or so, not anything resembling the so called "realtime" or "interactive" level that is required by games.
In short, soft confusing game requirements with web requirements.
I nuke my drives and re-install ALL operating systems (only Windows and Ubuntu at the moment) approximately once per year, but I also try to keep up to date on most patches.
I do this not because of virus concerns, but because I am a sloppy computer user that leaves both important and unimportant files all over the fucking place. For my windows nuking, I always zip up the entire system drive, date it, and throw it on a second drive.
I suspect that your "commando" friend is similar at least in sloppyness. When you are a sloppy computer user, nuking regularly is the end result.
If Linux ever gets a strong software presence, it will have the same issues.
In Big-O notation, repositories scale linearly with the number of developers making demands of it. Double the number of developers and you've doubled the workload for the maintainers of the repository. The Linux ecosystem needs to double about 15 times (pulled that out of my ass, 32768x) to be comparable in scale with the Windows ecosystem.
Are the Linux repositories prepared for The Year of the Linux Desktop? I suggest that no, no they are not prepared at all. They wont know what hit them.
Because rasterization 'with all kinds of ray tracing like effects' is a bitch.
Shadows alone are extremely complicated in a rasterizer, with special cases for self shadowing, for when the camera is within a shadow or not, when something reflective is being rendered, when something refractive is being rendered, and so on and on.
Essentially nobody has EVER made general purpose rasterizer that flawlessly supports shadows in concert with all the other 'ray tracing like effects' and it is likely that nobody ever will, because the problem is more than just non-trivial. There is always another edge case. Games get away with it because they impose restrictions (explicit or implicit) which avoid most of the edge cases that the renderer can't handle.
Even highly developed engines such as Valve's Source Engine still have problems with incorrect shadowing of their own (non-arbitrary) content, and thats in scenes without reflections or refractions complicating the problem. Now factor in that a renderer such as this is supposed to render arbitrary content, and you see the main problem with rasterizers as general purpose photo-realistic renderers is that nobody can do it, in spite of decades of effort.
The reason to use a raytracer is because all the photo-realistic behaviors of light fall right out of it by definition. Adding yet another behavior of light is simple. Shadows, reflection, refraction, global illumination.. its all SIMPLE (tho certainly less efficient.) The problematic "quality" issues raytracers have are trivial in comparison, with the hardest probably being the inherent aliasing of sub-pixel features.
These open source designs always scream open source. They just lack the polish and careful thought that you get with Windows or OSX.
Microsoft and Apple have spent millions over the years on controlled usability studies, while these guys here did a poll and had some forum bitching and griping sessions.
Pandering to active vocal people targets the very narrow segment that consists of only the active vocal.
The 'other' side is the 'paper cut' side. You know what a paper cut is? Its those things they were trying to get rid of with this update. Some vocal minority obviously took over the project and decided to slice the rest of the world.
What does the price of a 160GB HD have to do with anything? Seriously..
Right now if you are getting less than 10GB per USD (0.74 euro) then you arent even close to optimal on the cost per gigabyte metric. That 160GB drive you just priced.. yeah.. thats a horrible value.
That kingston SSD is probably a reasonable choice for many people. Thats 160GB drive you priced isnt a reasonable choice for anybody.
The question is, why do you think that the cost/gigabyte is the important metric such that you wont be "making the jump" until the "prices arent almost an order of magnitude different?"
Did you buy your CPU based only on performance per dollar? Did you buy your computers memory based only on capacity per dollar? Was that LCD of yours purchased based on pixels per dollar?
They are. In the 1990s, despite "Windows boxes in the internet" (if you had a SLIP connection), all of the exploits that I saw were targetting SunOS and BSD. They were going after Apache. When Aleph One was writing about buffer overflows, do you think he was working with Windows apps?
This is exactly what these newbies just don't know. (thats right, most of you slashdotters are newbies to the internet.. 5 or 10 years? lol.. newbs)
A small snippet of the security problems on the early internet are in CERT Advisory history. When the internet was mostly unix, unix-like, and VMS machines.. there were plenty of exploits for unix, unix-like, and VMS machines.
You think that Linux isnt susceptible to that kind of thing?
"OK honey, I'll be there in a minute. Just installing a virus scanner because that web page found 25 infections! This scanner needed root privileges, so I had to run it with SU"
They lost the moment they made the decision to rewrite everything from scratch, which was prior to IE being the leader. IE became the leader because several major versions of it were released prior to Netscape finishing its total rewrite. IE retained leadership because the new netscape was worse than its prior version.
In fact the combined Microsoft+Intel backward compatibility record is way better than anyone else, which is certainly one of the main reasons that the combination is #1.
Or they are complying exactly with what was agreed upon.
Consider the two phrases:
Present the list of browsers ordered randomly.
Present the list of browsers sorted randomly.
Now, most people probably dont see much of a distinction.. but a software engineer who lives and dies on his skill to meet contractual specifications.. yeah.. the two specifications are distinctly different.
He means a OS where a virus/trojan can't harm your computer without asking for your root password.
I am pretty sure that you do not run one of these. What you are running is an OS that is fairly good at protecting ITSELF, but does little to nothing at all to protect user space.
Thats why distros such as SELinux exist. Because whatever you are running sucks as much ass as windows in this regard.
"You are right that water vapors effect is vastly greater than all the other GHG's combined, but..." and then nothing of real substance other than making the distinction between feedbacks vs forcings.
The distinction alone is not important.
The effects of water vapor are so large that even the small uncertainties in its effects are more significant than the effects of all the others combined. The uncertainties are anything but small, because water vapor is responsible for clouds, a poorly understood player in that thing we call climate.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that a lot of people are taking the price of the cheapest/GB HD's, but using the performance of the most expensive/GB HD's, in order to form their conclusions about how little they get for so much extra money.
One of the fastest platters on the market today is the Seagate 15,000 RPM Cheetah and that one runs at about $1/GB. Some of the 15K drives go for $3/GB.
SSD's are running about $3/GB across the board at the top end, a cost not dissimilar from the top end platters, but they perform much better.
I understand that many people dont want to drop more than $120 on a drive, but many of the vocal ones are letting their unwillingness to do so contaminate their criticism. SSD's are actually priced competitively vs the top performing platter drives.
Perhaps you need to be clued in on the fact that fast platter drives go for over $1 per gigabyte.
$100 for a terabyte sounds great and all, but you cant get a fast one for that price. You wont be doing sustained writing 120MB/sec writing to those 7.2K drives. You will be lucky to get 80MB/sec on the fastest portions of the drive and will average around 60MB/sec.
That SSD thats pushing 220MB/sec sustained writing is 4x the performance on that one metric, and even faster on every other metric.
They don't beat conventional drives by much at sustained IO.
umm, err?
Which platter drive did you have in mind that performs similar to a high performance SSD's? Even Seagates 15K Cheetah only pushes 100 to 150MB/sec sustained read and write. The latest performance SSD's (such as the SATA2 Colossus) are have sustained writes at "only" 220MB/sec and with better performance (260MB/sec) literally everywhere else.
This.
At $200 the decision to get one would be easy: Buy one.
At $300 then it might be a tough decision for me: Try first.
At $400 its an easy decision again: Don't buy one.
It doesnt have to be a tablet or netbook killer. The form factor is suitable for more than what a touch-phone can comfortably offer, while tablets are too damn big to be something that I will want to carry around all the time. This booklet form factor looks to me to be just about the largest size that will still comfortably fit into the front pocket of my dockers.
The fact that Mozilla's suite doesnt make Mozilla look good in no way means that we should be using Google's V8 suite to compare Chrome vs other browsers. I would argue that Firefox's results on Mozilla's own suite (good or bad) are meaningless, and Chromes results on Google's suite (good or bad) are meaningless, etc..
Google's suite is great for comparing Firefox, Opera, Explorer, and Safari.
Mozilla's suite is great for comparing Chrome, Opera, Explorer, and Safari.
Apple's suite is great for comparing Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Explorer.
Its like using an nVidia benchmark to compare nVidia GPU's with Intel's and AMD's. Nobody would take such a benchmark seriously.
As far as Mozilla tanking on their own suite, the Open nature of the Mozilla Foundation as a whole probably has a lot to do with that. After looking at some of their tests, it looks to me like the source of their benchmarks is always based on some 3rd party, that Mozilla did not author the tests themselves (but certainly had selection powers) but instead have simply consolidated many disparate tests from many authors into a single framework.
Chrome was the winner, but unfortunately one of the JavaScript tests was the Google benchmark. Thats a facepalm for toms hardware this time.
I would love to see these tests done with only independent benchmarks.
Because the user can control the camera and lighting, as well as other scene properties such as surface materials and objects.
You dont get that with offline rendering. Didnt take more than an instant to think of this, so why didnt you think of it? Oh yeah.. its because you are ignorant about what rendering techniques can and cannot do but insist that your opinion be heard anyways.
Why do you impose the realtime requirement on it? Watching the video, it looked like they were getting about 1 fps or so, not anything resembling the so called "realtime" or "interactive" level that is required by games.
In short, soft confusing game requirements with web requirements.
I nuke my drives and re-install ALL operating systems (only Windows and Ubuntu at the moment) approximately once per year, but I also try to keep up to date on most patches.
I do this not because of virus concerns, but because I am a sloppy computer user that leaves both important and unimportant files all over the fucking place. For my windows nuking, I always zip up the entire system drive, date it, and throw it on a second drive.
I suspect that your "commando" friend is similar at least in sloppyness. When you are a sloppy computer user, nuking regularly is the end result.
This isnt unique to Windows. Its the same on OSX.
If Linux ever gets a strong software presence, it will have the same issues.
In Big-O notation, repositories scale linearly with the number of developers making demands of it. Double the number of developers and you've doubled the workload for the maintainers of the repository. The Linux ecosystem needs to double about 15 times (pulled that out of my ass, 32768x) to be comparable in scale with the Windows ecosystem.
Are the Linux repositories prepared for The Year of the Linux Desktop? I suggest that no, no they are not prepared at all. They wont know what hit them.
Because rasterization 'with all kinds of ray tracing like effects' is a bitch.
Shadows alone are extremely complicated in a rasterizer, with special cases for self shadowing, for when the camera is within a shadow or not, when something reflective is being rendered, when something refractive is being rendered, and so on and on.
Essentially nobody has EVER made general purpose rasterizer that flawlessly supports shadows in concert with all the other 'ray tracing like effects' and it is likely that nobody ever will, because the problem is more than just non-trivial. There is always another edge case. Games get away with it because they impose restrictions (explicit or implicit) which avoid most of the edge cases that the renderer can't handle.
Even highly developed engines such as Valve's Source Engine still have problems with incorrect shadowing of their own (non-arbitrary) content, and thats in scenes without reflections or refractions complicating the problem. Now factor in that a renderer such as this is supposed to render arbitrary content, and you see the main problem with rasterizers as general purpose photo-realistic renderers is that nobody can do it, in spite of decades of effort.
The reason to use a raytracer is because all the photo-realistic behaviors of light fall right out of it by definition. Adding yet another behavior of light is simple. Shadows, reflection, refraction, global illumination.. its all SIMPLE (tho certainly less efficient.) The problematic "quality" issues raytracers have are trivial in comparison, with the hardest probably being the inherent aliasing of sub-pixel features.
These open source designs always scream open source. They just lack the polish and careful thought that you get with Windows or OSX.
Microsoft and Apple have spent millions over the years on controlled usability studies, while these guys here did a poll and had some forum bitching and griping sessions.
Pandering to active vocal people targets the very narrow segment that consists of only the active vocal.
The 'other' side is the 'paper cut' side. You know what a paper cut is? Its those things they were trying to get rid of with this update. Some vocal minority obviously took over the project and decided to slice the rest of the world.
When I saw the screenshot and noticed the state buttons were in the upper left...
..I thought immediately.. "ouch! now THATS a paper cut!"
He's right. unless he's wrong.
Thats not what he said. He said Hes right, unless hes lying.
Is it your contention that TFA is lying?
What does the price of a 160GB HD have to do with anything? Seriously..
Right now if you are getting less than 10GB per USD (0.74 euro) then you arent even close to optimal on the cost per gigabyte metric. That 160GB drive you just priced.. yeah.. thats a horrible value.
That kingston SSD is probably a reasonable choice for many people. Thats 160GB drive you priced isnt a reasonable choice for anybody.
The question is, why do you think that the cost/gigabyte is the important metric such that you wont be "making the jump" until the "prices arent almost an order of magnitude different?"
Did you buy your CPU based only on performance per dollar? Did you buy your computers memory based only on capacity per dollar? Was that LCD of yours purchased based on pixels per dollar?
They are. In the 1990s, despite "Windows boxes in the internet" (if you had a SLIP connection), all of the exploits that I saw were targetting SunOS and BSD. They were going after Apache. When Aleph One was writing about buffer overflows, do you think he was working with Windows apps?
This is exactly what these newbies just don't know. (thats right, most of you slashdotters are newbies to the internet.. 5 or 10 years? lol.. newbs)
A small snippet of the security problems on the early internet are in CERT Advisory history. When the internet was mostly unix, unix-like, and VMS machines.. there were plenty of exploits for unix, unix-like, and VMS machines.
You think that Linux isnt susceptible to that kind of thing?
"OK honey, I'll be there in a minute. Just installing a virus scanner because that web page found 25 infections! This scanner needed root privileges, so I had to run it with SU"
PWNED
They lost the moment they made the decision to rewrite everything from scratch, which was prior to IE being the leader. IE became the leader because several major versions of it were released prior to Netscape finishing its total rewrite. IE retained leadership because the new netscape was worse than its prior version.
TFA says its 1.3 trillion lb's, which is 6 orders of magnitude larger than that figure you pulled out of your ass.
In fact the combined Microsoft+Intel backward compatibility record is way better than anyone else, which is certainly one of the main reasons that the combination is #1.
Or they are complying exactly with what was agreed upon.
Consider the two phrases:
Present the list of browsers ordered randomly.
Present the list of browsers sorted randomly.
Now, most people probably dont see much of a distinction.. but a software engineer who lives and dies on his skill to meet contractual specifications.. yeah.. the two specifications are distinctly different.
Me and all my friends do shots at least once per week.
He means a OS where a virus/trojan can't harm your computer without asking for your root password.
I am pretty sure that you do not run one of these. What you are running is an OS that is fairly good at protecting ITSELF, but does little to nothing at all to protect user space.
Thats why distros such as SELinux exist. Because whatever you are running sucks as much ass as windows in this regard.
"You are right that water vapors effect is vastly greater than all the other GHG's combined, but..." and then nothing of real substance other than making the distinction between feedbacks vs forcings.
The distinction alone is not important.
The effects of water vapor are so large that even the small uncertainties in its effects are more significant than the effects of all the others combined. The uncertainties are anything but small, because water vapor is responsible for clouds, a poorly understood player in that thing we call climate.