Alright, there ARE multiple heads, but there is still only 1 head to each platter-surface, and all the heads on all the platters are connected at the base, so they cannot move independently. You ARE better off defragged than not, but even better would be to 'arrange' files based on access paterns.
I tell you this, I notice quite a speedup after I perform a full-backup-and-restore, the only way to defrag most Linux filesystems. I saw loading OpenOffice take 7 seconds before, and 3 after.
When I load Mozilla it has to read in a LOT of other files, a proper filesystem would log that and try to move those files closer to each other. ReiserFS is trying to implement something like this, I believe, they are marking the 'temperature' of inodes based on access patterns.
I've been MS-free at home for two years now. I have my newbie girlfriend using a Gentoo/KDE box, she knows how to update it and burn audio CDs. I've got a file/print 'consolidator', a workstation, and a laptop running Linux, no windows partitions whatsoever.
I laugh at the 'I run Linux' guys at work, because they think RedHat IS linux, and they only really know how to use GNOME, They don't even know what I mean when I say "/dev/hda"
VT wanted them ASAP, and Apple had to push back delivery of PREPAID and RESERVED orders to normal consumers to meet the demand. They fonted extra money to get first in line, which is fair game in my opinion.
That's what we do at URI. Most of our lab workstations had 10GB local drives, and our image was about 2GB in ghost high-compression, we stored the image on a second partition, and each morning at 7AM they'd wake up and if there time was right they'd reimage.
Pushing updates was hard because they wouldn't let me have any server access. I had to do it manually. If I DID have server access though I'd store the image on the server, have a cronjob MD5 it, and the workstations would compare MD5sums with the server at staggered times and copy the new image if they were different.
I was actually told by several people in Rhode Island Government that "The reason we don't fire tese lazy workers is because then the'd be out of JOBS, it's the government's job to hire these people who normally wouldn't be working."
You can imagine how far that logic is getting us.
How much you want to bet most of the 'nasal rangers' are relatives/friends of local politicians, and how much you want to bet they get full benefits and a decent check with very little real oversight?
I've visited Montreal several times, and the people I was with were fond of a manuver, I forget what it was called, but it worked well.
Our destinations were always at the inconvenient ends of one-way streets, so we'd drive BACKWARDS down the street. It was quite a hoot, and at night in the quieter parts it really made getting around much simpler. We figured the 'one way' thing was workable if we had the car pointed the right way (just moving reverse).
The problem isn't speed. I've been driving about 700Mi/week as part of my service job and I'm VERY comfortable driving between 70 and 100 miles/hour. I've never so much as touched another car on the road.
The problem isn't speeders, its people who speed where and when they shouldn't, like on wet or icy days, or on non-highways.
The other MAJOR problem is the idiots who tailgate. Most highways would be perfectly safe at speeds up to 120MPH if people just stayed a few hundred feet away from each other, used the left lane for speeding, and stopped switching lanes so damn often.
Did I mention people who attempt shit other than driving while they are at the wheel? They cause a lot of trouble too. It would be dead easy to get them off the road though, if there were BIG fines for 'Driving Under Distraction'.
You could before too, they DO have one or two PCI slots in most cases.
The onboard ethernet chip on these things (the VIA Rhine and RHINE II) are REALLY bad performers. I had mine setup with the RHINE on the 'internet' side and the Intel PRO/100 pointing to the LAN and it was decent. I wouldn't use one as a file server without a third-party NIC.
I was hired to do hardware installs, lackey box-carrying work, but for almost a year I've been doing desktop support for a major financial institution. I'm still getting paid for the lackey work ($12/hr), but salary surveys (and common ethics) put my value at about $40-$45K/year, that's $20K more than what I make. I just found out that my company makes $40/hr for me to be onsite, and much more for weekends and nights that I sometimes work.
Oh well, I'm glad I do Macintosh stuff because this morning I got a job that'll start me of at $40K, they insisted that I take $40K, and told me that they'd give me a raise to their last employee's level (about $45K) if I last for six months.
I work at a bank, and have experience with Diebold machines.
It would NOT be hard to implement a hot-swappable printer into a voting machine, just have the printer unit on a slide-tray that any lackey can replace with one of a few spares. If it starts jamming you just swap it out and press the 'reprint' button that you put behind the locked-in printer to reprint the last transaction.
Also, concerning the usability of these systems after months in storage:
bank validators, the machines they hold the check and a slip in to print numbers and a validation code on are based on the same technology used in dot-matrix printers. These devices rely on carbon-imprints from pins that impact paper, not ink from a laser unit. They can be stored in any livable condition indefinitely without a loss of function, and as I said before, they could be made hot-swappable.
I have several clients who I've set up Gentoo servers for. After booting Gentoo I see that it uses about 14MB RAM, which leaves LOTS more than any other prepackaged distro for things like file caching and applications.
Also, Gentoo can be easily customized for what it'll be used for, and nothing else, which makes it great for security and patchability. The ground-up approach also let's you trim the boot time to under 30 seconds, which is cool in high-availability environments.
Do a lot of lusers overtweak the CFLAGS, yes. But that doesn't mean the distro itself is unstable or broken. I tend to use very conservative CFLAGS and let the GCC intrinsics do the work for me (at -march=Pentium3 -O3 -pipe almost everything is turned on and implemented properly anyway, and I've NEVER had a SEGFAULT).
In fact, I had to move a gentoo-server using client from per-case payments to subscription because they didn't need me to come in for three months! They were happy to pay me monthly because the incredible uptime saved them thousands.
I've found etc-update to be a total waste of time. I've figured that a lot of files:/etc/make.conf/etc/samba/smb.conf/etc/host*/etc/exports/etc/fstab and many more
These DONT change, there's no need to upate them , just throw away the 'new' default files.
Everything in/etc/init.d doesn't even get reviewed, I don't costomize them and they only start and stop services, I overwrite the old files with the new without looking./etc/conf.d/* gets diffed if I know I've changed the file from the default. otherwise I just overwrite.
But the point of Mozilla is to make 'the world's best browser', and IMO they are VERY close, if not there already.
'The World's Best Browser' absolutely NEEDS the world's best branding, icons, user interface, standards compliance, plugin support, etc.
A great browser with dumb icons isn't going to be 'the world's best browser' because the little things REALLY bother those of us who are irked by inconsistencies.
Applications should act the way the OS acts. Applications should follow the guidelines of the OS they run under. If it means Mozilla on Mac looks different and has different menu names than Windows, so be it.
While most of _US_ use multiple operating systems, the vast majority of people out there use only one, and they won't use an app unless it feels familiar.
Having application consistency is great for the multi-OS nerds, but it only slows adoption in the 'big room'.
But in the end it IS OSS software, so implement a 'cross-GUI' option in the prefs that loads a generic UI, AFAIK the mozilla/*bird UI is easily edited.
You people piss me off. Every Mac and self-respecting PC does a full RAM test each time it boots, and generally if RAM is good it STAYS good for a long while.
Do you even realize that ECC RAM doesn't CORRECT errors, it just shuts the machine down when it detects one? Have you ever heard of ECC RAM 'saving someone's ass'?
ECC is a good way for RAM and server manufacturers to get rich, not much more. Plus I heard a LOT of the ECC RAM out there was Pseudo-ECC, which means it just passes all the right parity bits regardless of data integrity.
I'm sure there's a good degree of redundancy in the calculations they're doing, what would happen if a machine caught fire with data in-flight? There'd have to be some sort of error-checking.
The 750GX DOES NOT include a SIMD/AltiVec unit, and these machines DO NOT have IBM 750GX CPUs in them.
the 750GX, due soon at a fabrication plant near you, is essentially a 750FX with additional L2 cache (1MB vs. 512K), and some minor reworking to accomodate higher clocking and better caching. Expect it to run in the 900MHz-1.2GHz range over it's lifetime.
The 750VX, which nobody has even claimed to have seen yet, is the rumored IBM 750+AltiVec CPU. It would be IBM's answer to Motorola's G4 chip. Specs are up in the air.
I think if you were to tear one of these new notebooks open you'd see a Motorola 7XXX branded CPU, which tend to favor AltiVec in exchange for on-die cache. What leads me to this conclusion? The IBM whitepapers for the 750GX have been out since June, and their specs just don't match with this laptop's, while Motorola's offerings clearly do.
If you intend to release a product that is inherently slower than even modern low-end systems you think you'd make a heavy investment in getting the most out of it.
The hardware video decode is also totally undocumented. I guess they COULD decode loosely encoded DiVX video, but it would totally hose the CPU, and I'll bet you'd skip frames. All the windows benchmarks you see use the accelerated video drivers that decode MPEG2 via an ASIC that Linux can't touch yet.
Right now XFree86 doesn't even have native drivers for the CLE266/CastleRock 2D video, you'll have to use the FBDev driver (slow as molasses) or wait for XFree86 4.4.
Overall these EPIA systems pretty much suck, the LAN chip, video chip, video-out, and overall board quality pretty much suck. It's all THERE but it's bottom-of-the-barrel quality. The onboard VIA RHINE II LAN chip was using about 30% of my CPU during transfers, I had to add an Intel NIC just to get it performing to my needs. The RCA video out quality was totally a bummer, as was the VGA video quality on my nice monitor, everything seemed a bit 'blurry' like when you use a shitty $20 KVM with noname cables. Sound was decent, but who the fsck cares when you can't see anything right?
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Alright, there ARE multiple heads, but there is still only 1 head to each platter-surface, and all the heads on all the platters are connected at the base, so they cannot move independently. You ARE better off defragged than not, but even better would be to 'arrange' files based on access paterns.
I tell you this, I notice quite a speedup after I perform a full-backup-and-restore, the only way to defrag most Linux filesystems. I saw loading OpenOffice take 7 seconds before, and 3 after.
When I load Mozilla it has to read in a LOT of other files, a proper filesystem would log that and try to move those files closer to each other. ReiserFS is trying to implement something like this, I believe, they are marking the 'temperature' of inodes based on access patterns.
I've been MS-free at home for two years now. I have my newbie girlfriend using a Gentoo/KDE box, she knows how to update it and burn audio CDs. I've got a file/print 'consolidator', a workstation, and a laptop running Linux, no windows partitions whatsoever.
I laugh at the 'I run Linux' guys at work, because they think RedHat IS linux, and they only really know how to use GNOME, They don't even know what I mean when I say "/dev/hda"
VT wanted them ASAP, and Apple had to push back delivery of PREPAID and RESERVED orders to normal consumers to meet the demand. They fonted extra money to get first in line, which is fair game in my opinion.
That's what we do at URI. Most of our lab workstations had 10GB local drives, and our image was about 2GB in ghost high-compression, we stored the image on a second partition, and each morning at 7AM they'd wake up and if there time was right they'd reimage.
Pushing updates was hard because they wouldn't let me have any server access. I had to do it manually. If I DID have server access though I'd store the image on the server, have a cronjob MD5 it, and the workstations would compare MD5sums with the server at staggered times and copy the new image if they were different.
I am trying to hold my face on after that one. 'Blinker Fluid'
I was actually told by several people in Rhode Island Government that "The reason we don't fire tese lazy workers is because then the'd be out of JOBS, it's the government's job to hire these people who normally wouldn't be working."
You can imagine how far that logic is getting us.
How much you want to bet most of the 'nasal rangers' are relatives/friends of local politicians, and how much you want to bet they get full benefits and a decent check with very little real oversight?
I've visited Montreal several times, and the people I was with were fond of a manuver, I forget what it was called, but it worked well.
Our destinations were always at the inconvenient ends of one-way streets, so we'd drive BACKWARDS down the street. It was quite a hoot, and at night in the quieter parts it really made getting around much simpler. We figured the 'one way' thing was workable if we had the car pointed the right way (just moving reverse).
The problem isn't speed. I've been driving about 700Mi/week as part of my service job and I'm VERY comfortable driving between 70 and 100 miles/hour. I've never so much as touched another car on the road.
The problem isn't speeders, its people who speed where and when they shouldn't, like on wet or icy days, or on non-highways.
The other MAJOR problem is the idiots who tailgate. Most highways would be perfectly safe at speeds up to 120MPH if people just stayed a few hundred feet away from each other, used the left lane for speeding, and stopped switching lanes so damn often.
Did I mention people who attempt shit other than driving while they are at the wheel? They cause a lot of trouble too. It would be dead easy to get them off the road though, if there were BIG fines for 'Driving Under Distraction'.
Here's an idea, to flash the firmware you need to send a big long 'key' that matches the firmware before it gives you write access. Easy as cake.
You could before too, they DO have one or two PCI slots in most cases.
The onboard ethernet chip on these things (the VIA Rhine and RHINE II) are REALLY bad performers. I had mine setup with the RHINE on the 'internet' side and the Intel PRO/100 pointing to the LAN and it was decent. I wouldn't use one as a file server without a third-party NIC.
I was hired to do hardware installs, lackey box-carrying work, but for almost a year I've been doing desktop support for a major financial institution. I'm still getting paid for the lackey work ($12/hr), but salary surveys (and common ethics) put my value at about $40-$45K/year, that's $20K more than what I make. I just found out that my company makes $40/hr for me to be onsite, and much more for weekends and nights that I sometimes work.
Oh well, I'm glad I do Macintosh stuff because this morning I got a job that'll start me of at $40K, they insisted that I take $40K, and told me that they'd give me a raise to their last employee's level (about $45K) if I last for six months.
Screw contracting companies!
I work at a bank, and have experience with Diebold machines.
It would NOT be hard to implement a hot-swappable printer into a voting machine, just have the printer unit on a slide-tray that any lackey can replace with one of a few spares. If it starts jamming you just swap it out and press the 'reprint' button that you put behind the locked-in printer to reprint the last transaction.
Also, concerning the usability of these systems after months in storage:
bank validators, the machines they hold the check and a slip in to print numbers and a validation code on are based on the same technology used in dot-matrix printers. These devices rely on carbon-imprints from pins that impact paper, not ink from a laser unit. They can be stored in any livable condition indefinitely without a loss of function, and as I said before, they could be made hot-swappable.
Please mod the parent up so his experiment works. Small price to pay.
Oh REALLY?
I have several clients who I've set up Gentoo servers for. After booting Gentoo I see that it uses about 14MB RAM, which leaves LOTS more than any other prepackaged distro for things like file caching and applications.
Also, Gentoo can be easily customized for what it'll be used for, and nothing else, which makes it great for security and patchability. The ground-up approach also let's you trim the boot time to under 30 seconds, which is cool in high-availability environments.
Do a lot of lusers overtweak the CFLAGS, yes. But that doesn't mean the distro itself is unstable or broken. I tend to use very conservative CFLAGS and let the GCC intrinsics do the work for me (at -march=Pentium3 -O3 -pipe almost everything is turned on and implemented properly anyway, and I've NEVER had a SEGFAULT).
In fact, I had to move a gentoo-server using client from per-case payments to subscription because they didn't need me to come in for three months! They were happy to pay me monthly because the incredible uptime saved them thousands.
I've found etc-update to be a total waste of time. I've figured that a lot of files: /etc/make.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/host* /etc/exports /etc/fstab
/etc/init.d doesn't even get reviewed, I don't costomize them and they only start and stop services, I overwrite the old files with the new without looking. /etc/conf.d/* gets diffed if I know I've changed the file from the default. otherwise I just overwrite.
and many more
These DONT change, there's no need to upate them , just throw away the 'new' default files.
Everything in
Just wondering. hehe.
FYI, and just to nitpick, the mozilla GUI has changed VERY little from M18 to Moz-1.5, while win95 and 2K are quite different.
But the point of Mozilla is to make 'the world's best browser', and IMO they are VERY close, if not there already.
'The World's Best Browser' absolutely NEEDS the world's best branding, icons, user interface, standards compliance, plugin support, etc.
A great browser with dumb icons isn't going to be 'the world's best browser' because the little things REALLY bother those of us who are irked by inconsistencies.
No!
Applications should act the way the OS acts. Applications should follow the guidelines of the OS they run under. If it means Mozilla on Mac looks different and has different menu names than Windows, so be it.
While most of _US_ use multiple operating systems, the vast majority of people out there use only one, and they won't use an app unless it feels familiar.
Having application consistency is great for the multi-OS nerds, but it only slows adoption in the 'big room'.
But in the end it IS OSS software, so implement a 'cross-GUI' option in the prefs that loads a generic UI, AFAIK the mozilla/*bird UI is easily edited.
I'm pointing at you and scrawling 'swarms of zealots' on a t-shirt to hand you. Catch!
You people piss me off. Every Mac and self-respecting PC does a full RAM test each time it boots, and generally if RAM is good it STAYS good for a long while.
Do you even realize that ECC RAM doesn't CORRECT errors, it just shuts the machine down when it detects one? Have you ever heard of ECC RAM 'saving someone's ass'?
ECC is a good way for RAM and server manufacturers to get rich, not much more. Plus I heard a LOT of the ECC RAM out there was Pseudo-ECC, which means it just passes all the right parity bits regardless of data integrity.
I'm sure there's a good degree of redundancy in the calculations they're doing, what would happen if a machine caught fire with data in-flight? There'd have to be some sort of error-checking.
The 750GX DOES NOT include a SIMD/AltiVec unit, and these machines DO NOT have IBM 750GX CPUs in them.
the 750GX, due soon at a fabrication plant near you, is essentially a 750FX with additional L2 cache (1MB vs. 512K), and some minor reworking to accomodate higher clocking and better caching. Expect it to run in the 900MHz-1.2GHz range over it's lifetime.
The 750VX, which nobody has even claimed to have seen yet, is the rumored IBM 750+AltiVec CPU. It would be IBM's answer to Motorola's G4 chip. Specs are up in the air.
I think if you were to tear one of these new notebooks open you'd see a Motorola 7XXX branded CPU, which tend to favor AltiVec in exchange for on-die cache. What leads me to this conclusion? The IBM whitepapers for the 750GX have been out since June, and their specs just don't match with this laptop's, while Motorola's offerings clearly do.
exactly!
If you intend to release a product that is inherently slower than even modern low-end systems you think you'd make a heavy investment in getting the most out of it.
The hardware video decode is also totally undocumented. I guess they COULD decode loosely encoded DiVX video, but it would totally hose the CPU, and I'll bet you'd skip frames. All the windows benchmarks you see use the accelerated video drivers that decode MPEG2 via an ASIC that Linux can't touch yet.
Right now XFree86 doesn't even have native drivers for the CLE266/CastleRock 2D video, you'll have to use the FBDev driver (slow as molasses) or wait for XFree86 4.4.
Overall these EPIA systems pretty much suck, the LAN chip, video chip, video-out, and overall board quality pretty much suck. It's all THERE but it's bottom-of-the-barrel quality. The onboard VIA RHINE II LAN chip was using about 30% of my CPU during transfers, I had to add an Intel NIC just to get it performing to my needs. The RCA video out quality was totally a bummer, as was the VGA video quality on my nice monitor, everything seemed a bit 'blurry' like when you use a shitty $20 KVM with noname cables. Sound was decent, but who the fsck cares when you can't see anything right?
nope, linux 2.4.22 on a lonely 100Mbit switched LAN. The NICs are the same, and the server runs a 9GB AtlasIV on an Adaptec 2940U2B PCI card.