the only reason they perform so badly is because there's no decent buffering in ATA drives. With Tagged Command Queing and big prefetch and write buffers they could perform well at all but transferring very large data files (not a common case on most desktops, BTW).
Also, why don't modern operating systems aggressively prefetch file system metadata and keep it in cache? It seems to me that with most systems having more than adequate RAM it would make sense to keep the entire directory listing and metadata cached. I think Reiser4 has a method to determine how 'hot' a directory is based on how often it changes, there should be a way to tell the kernel you want to aggressively prefetch indexes for all objects on '/dev/hd?' with 'heat=>2'.
AFAIK the transfer speed of 10,000 and 15,000 SCSI drives isn't so far ahead of the 7,200 offerings, the improvement is in the latency. I have a SCSI system here at home and the combination of low-latency and tagged command-queing (buffering of future disk requests) lets applications start up lightning fast. Loading video and MP3 files is actually faster off the ATA drive though, as it has a higher raw transfer speed.
What would be really useful for workstations in this day and age are 16MB buffer 2.5" 5400 RPM disks running SATA with TCQ. An intelligent pre-buffering system to keep the 16MB buffer full of anticipated data would help the drives perform as well as 7200 RPM drives, and the lower heat generation and power requirements would boost corporate adoption. I'll bet that after a short while these drives could even be cheaper to produce, as there would be about 1/6th the raw materials needed; the only reason they cost more now is the lower volume.
Do you have any idea ho terrible USB is for pumping disk-storage type data? Watch your CPU-monitor while you write to a USB drive sometime and you'll never want to use one again.
You know how your system gets a bit 'laggy' when you write to a floppy? USB is worse. Hell, my mouse can't even keep up when I burn CDs over USB!
USB is for low-impact perhipherals like cameras, scanners, input devices, and pocket-drives. Firewire and SATA are much better suited for use with mass-storage devices. Already most motherboards are coming with FIreWire, and SATA is right around the corner.
Why arent I freaking out? I think the human effects might be large, but the earth is a dynamic thing. Climates changed abruptly and dramatically WAY before we showed up, and they will continue to do so well alfer we are gone. I'm not worried about temperature changes or sea levels, I'm worried about straight-up toxic pollution, because that's what'll end up being our demise. Already fertility rates are down and indicative diseases of long-term toxicity are up (obesity, cancer, and diabetes anyone?). If the sea levels go up we can move inland or adapt, if it gets got or cold we can move more indoors. If the rains burn the soil and make it so plants can't grow and the ocean is devoid of all but jellyfish bacause we filled it with poison, we're really done for!
Seriously, this global warming shit is a distraction from the real enemy, it's something we CAN'T do anything about in the long term; WE might stop our part, but the earth will make it's own rules. Meanwhile, why we all sit around trying to figure out how to burn coal without putting up 'greenhouse gasses' the farms are dumping tons of poisons into our GROUNDWATER!
I'm not saying we should all drive SUVs and leave the lights on, but there's only so much we can do about the climate. Trying to keep everything the way it is would be the most expensive, destructive, and futile effort mankind has ever assumed. Do your part to live 'green', but not to prevent global warming, do it to reduce the poisons you put into the earth and to help us be less energy-dependant.
I dare you to make a diskless windows client without paying out of your as for the software and hardware. I can put the linux kernel onto a network floppy image and have machines remotely mount '/' via NFS. Whe I upgrade software on the server it immediately hits all the clients, because they share the same file system. Can't do that in windows, and thats one hard disk that's never going to fail for each machine, and TENS of O.S. reloads over it's lifetime.
Imagine how easy PC support would be if you never had to: *install patches more than once *reload/reconfigure the OS *repair dead hard drives
One person could replace a team of twenty in most businesses and school departments.
I'm inside a major bank right now (3rd biggest in USA?), and our entire network is having issues. I keep having to disconnect from the proxies and reconnect bacause they're dropping my connections. I don't think there are many machines on the inside with the worm, and under 5% of our machines are nt-based (the rest is win98, on Novell/NT servers).
It seems that the only machines inside that have this are portables, which probably picked it up from the outside, and some departments who run their own servers for testing and development (and often have under-the-radar links to the outside so the dept. admins can play with them). InfoSec is pulling the plug on anything that shows symptoms, which means that servers keep dis and re-appearing. The PC-support work queue in Rhode Island usually has 3-10 items in it, and I'm counting 40 right now.
I'm also getting calls from remote sites connected through frame-relays that are saying they can't access anything reliably if it's off their LAN.
I'm quite thankful for our InfoSec folks, and the fact that we use Novell for most servers, I'll be sad to see it go to XP/2003 in the fall...
Actually I build personal relationships with tech support people I like, I try to get their specific extension or a way to reach them next time I call. Not only does it look good to THEIR managers, it helps everyone get the most out of the call. Also, phone support is a miserable job, it helps their wole life if they feel at least a LITTLE wanted at work.
Don't forget to ask them where they are, geographically, and if that's where they're from!
Good job! Seriously! Our rights only get trampled on because of apathy. Human decency/manners/rules of safety are regularly broken for convenience in this world and it'll only get worse as long as people don't stand up to it.
A few nights ago while shopping some lady in front of me brought at least 50 items to the express lane, I was behind her. I followed her out to the parking lot and told her that if I ever caught her doing that again she'd pay for my time with her blood. That's one less asshole in the express lane FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE because I stood up to her and put fear into her.
A few days ago someone was double-parked at the mall. It was quite apparent that she decided that since a shopping cart was taking half the space she wanted she could take two spaces. I parked my car right where I should have, between the lines, but it was under two inces from her door, she was totally blocked in. I watched her climb though the passenger side from the mall,, and approaced my car just as she was pulling out. She asked why I blocked her in and I gave her a nice explanation about RULES and how to use the 'P' on her transmission to leave the car and move a blocking cart. There's another asshole of the world who will probably NEVER double park again because it's not worth the trouble I made it.
XFree seems to pick the maximum refresh possibble for a given resolution. Your monitor might be able to do 120HZ in Windows if you're running at 1024x768, but if XFree is set up for 1280X1024 the maximum refresh rate might just be 85Hz. Try running both at the same res.
Just a guess. Honestly, XConfigurator is great to get an INITIAL config file, but you'll be much better off if you clean all the cruft out of the file, tidy it up, and play with it a bit.
Also, check your monitor's On Screen Display to see if windows is telling you the truth. I have a windows machine that swears it outputs 75Hz, but when I ask the monitor itself to display mode it says 60Hz, and it is _definitely_ 60Hz.
Also, just WHY do you want to do this? I think it would be a lot easier on the CRT if you ran it in a 'normal' range (85Hz max). The general rule is to use the lowest refresh rate you find comfortable.
A wonderful side-effect of subscriptions, you can write your FP in response to a story still to be released for discussion and 'pounce' on it when it goes live.
Don't let the subject set you off, it's just a phrase.
Well there would certainly be something of a price to pay for more integrated machines, but considering that Linux is part of the march towards lower cost and more customized computing, I think we would be included rather than shut out of the emerging market. Who wants to make $100 computers if they only run MS or proprietary (expensive to develop and not interoperable) operating systems?
I also think that here's a balance to seek, right now PCs are total beasts, there's nothing elegant about a modern motherboard, it's all a bunch of high-power chips slapped together heating up offices and costing fortunes in capital outlays. If it means having to bite the bullet and accept that not everything will be as open or as commodity-based, but it will yield a more streamlined, elegant, and effective computing platform as a whole, that's a bullet I'd like to get my teeth around.
But as I said before, Linux and OSS could be a PART of that future by providing an inexpensive yet full-featured OS and tools for it. The designers of these computers would have only to gain by using Linux, they could sell their devices with OSS on them at a decent profit and their development input (drivers, mostly) would only be applicable to the hardware they make money on, there would be no 'penalty' for releasing their I.P. because it only applies to their own product.
No they don't. I have an EPIA-platform machine in front of me right now, the CPU, north and south bridges, and various I/O chips are all seperate. The EPIA is just a regular PC motherboard crammed onto a small form-factor with a VIA CPU strapped onto it, no 'integration' whatsoever.
But there's more! it's not just video on the CPU, it's the north AND south bridges! The CPU, GPU, memory controller, PCI controller, and who-knows-what-else are on this bad-boy! I've been wanting this sort of thing for a long time!
I understand that the price will be longer development cycles and raw performance, but there are a LOT of uses for machines based on this type of thinking. Imagine how inexpensive PCs based on this type of thing could get, and how little power they would require! If managers get their heads around the idea of centralized computing again (as they should in the office) we're going to see huge demand for inexpensive fast-enough graphical terminals.
It's not that simple though, all the money that the bank would have spent paying tellers will have to go somewhere, and it's not just going to disappear from the economy; It's going to go to other departments to hire staff or purchase goods, or it'll stave off another hike in customer fees. If each of 2 million customers saves a few dollars in fees, 50 teller jobs will be well worth the overall economic impact.
Your argument has beeen proven false time and again by history, productivity is good. SOmetime there are growing pains when entire sectors are 'put out' but the overall impact on the rest of the global economy is positive. If this weren't true than unemployment would be perpetually sky-high.
The way to go about this is to look at it from the opposite direction you are, jobs are an indicator of how much money a company can spend, if you increase the money a company has it will hire more people. I know of few corporations that like to keep their assets out of the market (i.e. cash savings), most reinvest their earnigns ASAP to get the competitive edge. Investing your earnings to get 'the edge' creates more jobs than going bankrupt because your competitor has.
It's not just lack of popularity, the Mac OS Classic binary format was inherently more secure than win32 code, and AFAIK OSX uses ELF, like Linux, which is also much more secure by it's own nature. A lot of virii place code into 'unused' areas of binary files, but the 'tighter' the binary the less likely they are able to find a place to inject.
The software I used on the Quadra was some hacked-together thing that was really a one-off deal. I think it was designed for the sole purpose of proving that an '040 mac could play an MP3. I remember the mouse not really getting more than 2 frames/second when it was playing. I had it briefly but lost track of it. Rumors on the linux-m68k lists also hint that someone wrote one in assembler for the amiga, but it too was only a proof-of-concept.
The '040 was great in it's day though, quite a wonderful series of systems to work with. My 660av is still kicking, I take it out every now-and-then when Debian or NetBSD has a major update. It runs well with Mac OS 8.1 and Photoshop 3.0, which is a wonderful app for simple graphics editing. It also plays SimCity 2000, A10 Attack!, and A-Train as well as it ever has.
I'm thinking of trying to get Gentoo bootstrapped on the thing to see what kind of speed I can get out of it when I compile the whole system for the '040, I bet it'll be cute.
Are you kidding? Your box has PCI slots, right? just put an Adaptec FierWire card in there and you're all set (with a modern Mac OS, classic or X). As for playing MP3s, you've got the CPU power to decode at LEAST 15 MP3 streams at once! My 25MHz 68040 Quadra can play an MP3 (though the software player for it has long passed into oblivion), I'm sure your 300MHz machine can.
Most likely your system is in horrible shape, try formatting it and loading Mac OS 9.2.2 from scratch. Drop some more RAM in it (CHEAP!). Turn virtual memory off in the Memory control panel, and boost the disk cache to 16MB. Upgrade to the latest QuickTime Pro and enjoy your nice system!
But it's NOT the best time to send something to Mars. It would have been best to launch something about a year and a half ago, when mars and earth were moving towards each other, and have the probe REACH Mars when it starts getting farther away.
LOL, all day long I work on people's machines and about 10% of the windows population is AMAZED that I can zoom programs into the taskbar and call them up later. I think most uses don't really care if they close or minimize, it's all just crap to them.
But will I be able too painlessly move my email from Moz over? I've got two years of mail in my.mozilla folder and I don't intend to hack together some sick bastardized transfer.
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the only reason they perform so badly is because there's no decent buffering in ATA drives. With Tagged Command Queing and big prefetch and write buffers they could perform well at all but transferring very large data files (not a common case on most desktops, BTW).
Also, why don't modern operating systems aggressively prefetch file system metadata and keep it in cache? It seems to me that with most systems having more than adequate RAM it would make sense to keep the entire directory listing and metadata cached. I think Reiser4 has a method to determine how 'hot' a directory is based on how often it changes, there should be a way to tell the kernel you want to aggressively prefetch indexes for all objects on '/dev/hd?' with 'heat=>2'.
AFAIK the transfer speed of 10,000 and 15,000 SCSI drives isn't so far ahead of the 7,200 offerings, the improvement is in the latency. I have a SCSI system here at home and the combination of low-latency and tagged command-queing (buffering of future disk requests) lets applications start up lightning fast. Loading video and MP3 files is actually faster off the ATA drive though, as it has a higher raw transfer speed.
What would be really useful for workstations in this day and age are 16MB buffer 2.5" 5400 RPM disks running SATA with TCQ. An intelligent pre-buffering system to keep the 16MB buffer full of anticipated data would help the drives perform as well as 7200 RPM drives, and the lower heat generation and power requirements would boost corporate adoption. I'll bet that after a short while these drives could even be cheaper to produce, as there would be about 1/6th the raw materials needed; the only reason they cost more now is the lower volume.
Do you have any idea ho terrible USB is for pumping disk-storage type data? Watch your CPU-monitor while you write to a USB drive sometime and you'll never want to use one again.
You know how your system gets a bit 'laggy' when you write to a floppy? USB is worse. Hell, my mouse can't even keep up when I burn CDs over USB!
USB is for low-impact perhipherals like cameras, scanners, input devices, and pocket-drives. Firewire and SATA are much better suited for use with mass-storage devices. Already most motherboards are coming with FIreWire, and SATA is right around the corner.
Why arent I freaking out? I think the human effects might be large, but the earth is a dynamic thing. Climates changed abruptly and dramatically WAY before we showed up, and they will continue to do so well alfer we are gone. I'm not worried about temperature changes or sea levels, I'm worried about straight-up toxic pollution, because that's what'll end up being our demise. Already fertility rates are down and indicative diseases of long-term toxicity are up (obesity, cancer, and diabetes anyone?). If the sea levels go up we can move inland or adapt, if it gets got or cold we can move more indoors. If the rains burn the soil and make it so plants can't grow and the ocean is devoid of all but jellyfish bacause we filled it with poison, we're really done for!
Seriously, this global warming shit is a distraction from the real enemy, it's something we CAN'T do anything about in the long term; WE might stop our part, but the earth will make it's own rules. Meanwhile, why we all sit around trying to figure out how to burn coal without putting up 'greenhouse gasses' the farms are dumping tons of poisons into our GROUNDWATER!
I'm not saying we should all drive SUVs and leave the lights on, but there's only so much we can do about the climate. Trying to keep everything the way it is would be the most expensive, destructive, and futile effort mankind has ever assumed. Do your part to live 'green', but not to prevent global warming, do it to reduce the poisons you put into the earth and to help us be less energy-dependant.
I dare you to make a diskless windows client without paying out of your as for the software and hardware. I can put the linux kernel onto a network floppy image and have machines remotely mount '/' via NFS. Whe I upgrade software on the server it immediately hits all the clients, because they share the same file system. Can't do that in windows, and thats one hard disk that's never going to fail for each machine, and TENS of O.S. reloads over it's lifetime.
Imagine how easy PC support would be if you never had to:
*install patches more than once
*reload/reconfigure the OS
*repair dead hard drives
One person could replace a team of twenty in most businesses and school departments.
I'm inside a major bank right now (3rd biggest in USA?), and our entire network is having issues. I keep having to disconnect from the proxies and reconnect bacause they're dropping my connections. I don't think there are many machines on the inside with the worm, and under 5% of our machines are nt-based (the rest is win98, on Novell/NT servers).
It seems that the only machines inside that have this are portables, which probably picked it up from the outside, and some departments who run their own servers for testing and development (and often have under-the-radar links to the outside so the dept. admins can play with them). InfoSec is pulling the plug on anything that shows symptoms, which means that servers keep dis and re-appearing. The PC-support work queue in Rhode Island usually has 3-10 items in it, and I'm counting 40 right now.
I'm also getting calls from remote sites connected through frame-relays that are saying they can't access anything reliably if it's off their LAN.
I'm quite thankful for our InfoSec folks, and the fact that we use Novell for most servers, I'll be sad to see it go to XP/2003 in the fall...
Actually I build personal relationships with tech support people I like, I try to get their specific extension or a way to reach them next time I call. Not only does it look good to THEIR managers, it helps everyone get the most out of the call. Also, phone support is a miserable job, it helps their wole life if they feel at least a LITTLE wanted at work.
Don't forget to ask them where they are, geographically, and if that's where they're from!
Good job! Seriously! Our rights only get trampled on because of apathy. Human decency/manners/rules of safety are regularly broken for convenience in this world and it'll only get worse as long as people don't stand up to it.
A few nights ago while shopping some lady in front of me brought at least 50 items to the express lane, I was behind her. I followed her out to the parking lot and told her that if I ever caught her doing that again she'd pay for my time with her blood. That's one less asshole in the express lane FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE because I stood up to her and put fear into her.
A few days ago someone was double-parked at the mall. It was quite apparent that she decided that since a shopping cart was taking half the space she wanted she could take two spaces. I parked my car right where I should have, between the lines, but it was under two inces from her door, she was totally blocked in. I watched her climb though the passenger side from the mall,, and approaced my car just as she was pulling out. She asked why I blocked her in and I gave her a nice explanation about RULES and how to use the 'P' on her transmission to leave the car and move a blocking cart. There's another asshole of the world who will probably NEVER double park again because it's not worth the trouble I made it.
Also, forgot to say this:
XFree seems to pick the maximum refresh possibble for a given resolution. Your monitor might be able to do 120HZ in Windows if you're running at 1024x768, but if XFree is set up for 1280X1024 the maximum refresh rate might just be 85Hz. Try running both at the same res.
I think it would lie in changing something like this:
/etc/X11/XF86Config for me)
(in
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "cm771"
HorizSync 31.5-96
VertRefresh 50-160
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
to something like this:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "cm771"
HorizSync 31.5-96
VertRefresh 120
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Just a guess. Honestly, XConfigurator is great to get an INITIAL config file, but you'll be much better off if you clean all the cruft out of the file, tidy it up, and play with it a bit.
Also, check your monitor's On Screen Display to see if windows is telling you the truth. I have a windows machine that swears it outputs 75Hz, but when I ask the monitor itself to display mode it says 60Hz, and it is _definitely_ 60Hz.
Also, just WHY do you want to do this? I think it would be a lot easier on the CRT if you ran it in a 'normal' range (85Hz max). The general rule is to use the lowest refresh rate you find comfortable.
A wonderful side-effect of subscriptions, you can write your FP in response to a story still to be released for discussion and 'pounce' on it when it goes live.
Don't let the subject set you off, it's just a phrase.
Well there would certainly be something of a price to pay for more integrated machines, but considering that Linux is part of the march towards lower cost and more customized computing, I think we would be included rather than shut out of the emerging market. Who wants to make $100 computers if they only run MS or proprietary (expensive to develop and not interoperable) operating systems?
I also think that here's a balance to seek, right now PCs are total beasts, there's nothing elegant about a modern motherboard, it's all a bunch of high-power chips slapped together heating up offices and costing fortunes in capital outlays. If it means having to bite the bullet and accept that not everything will be as open or as commodity-based, but it will yield a more streamlined, elegant, and effective computing platform as a whole, that's a bullet I'd like to get my teeth around.
But as I said before, Linux and OSS could be a PART of that future by providing an inexpensive yet full-featured OS and tools for it. The designers of these computers would have only to gain by using Linux, they could sell their devices with OSS on them at a decent profit and their development input (drivers, mostly) would only be applicable to the hardware they make money on, there would be no 'penalty' for releasing their I.P. because it only applies to their own product.
No they don't. I have an EPIA-platform machine in front of me right now, the CPU, north and south bridges, and various I/O chips are all seperate. The EPIA is just a regular PC motherboard crammed onto a small form-factor with a VIA CPU strapped onto it, no 'integration' whatsoever.
But there's more! it's not just video on the CPU, it's the north AND south bridges! The CPU, GPU, memory controller, PCI controller, and who-knows-what-else are on this bad-boy! I've been wanting this sort of thing for a long time!
I understand that the price will be longer development cycles and raw performance, but there are a LOT of uses for machines based on this type of thinking. Imagine how inexpensive PCs based on this type of thing could get, and how little power they would require! If managers get their heads around the idea of centralized computing again (as they should in the office) we're going to see huge demand for inexpensive fast-enough graphical terminals.
It's not that simple though, all the money that the bank would have spent paying tellers will have to go somewhere, and it's not just going to disappear from the economy; It's going to go to other departments to hire staff or purchase goods, or it'll stave off another hike in customer fees. If each of 2 million customers saves a few dollars in fees, 50 teller jobs will be well worth the overall economic impact.
Your argument has beeen proven false time and again by history, productivity is good. SOmetime there are growing pains when entire sectors are 'put out' but the overall impact on the rest of the global economy is positive. If this weren't true than unemployment would be perpetually sky-high.
The way to go about this is to look at it from the opposite direction you are, jobs are an indicator of how much money a company can spend, if you increase the money a company has it will hire more people. I know of few corporations that like to keep their assets out of the market (i.e. cash savings), most reinvest their earnigns ASAP to get the competitive edge. Investing your earnings to get 'the edge' creates more jobs than going bankrupt because your competitor has.
It's not just lack of popularity, the Mac OS Classic binary format was inherently more secure than win32 code, and AFAIK OSX uses ELF, like Linux, which is also much more secure by it's own nature. A lot of virii place code into 'unused' areas of binary files, but the 'tighter' the binary the less likely they are able to find a place to inject.
The software I used on the Quadra was some hacked-together thing that was really a one-off deal. I think it was designed for the sole purpose of proving that an '040 mac could play an MP3. I remember the mouse not really getting more than 2 frames/second when it was playing. I had it briefly but lost track of it. Rumors on the linux-m68k lists also hint that someone wrote one in assembler for the amiga, but it too was only a proof-of-concept.
The '040 was great in it's day though, quite a wonderful series of systems to work with. My 660av is still kicking, I take it out every now-and-then when Debian or NetBSD has a major update. It runs well with Mac OS 8.1 and Photoshop 3.0, which is a wonderful app for simple graphics editing. It also plays SimCity 2000, A10 Attack!, and A-Train as well as it ever has.
I'm thinking of trying to get Gentoo bootstrapped on the thing to see what kind of speed I can get out of it when I compile the whole system for the '040, I bet it'll be cute.
Are you kidding? Your box has PCI slots, right? just put an Adaptec FierWire card in there and you're all set (with a modern Mac OS, classic or X). As for playing MP3s, you've got the CPU power to decode at LEAST 15 MP3 streams at once! My 25MHz 68040 Quadra can play an MP3 (though the software player for it has long passed into oblivion), I'm sure your 300MHz machine can.
Most likely your system is in horrible shape, try formatting it and loading Mac OS 9.2.2 from scratch. Drop some more RAM in it (CHEAP!). Turn virtual memory off in the Memory control panel, and boost the disk cache to 16MB. Upgrade to the latest QuickTime Pro and enjoy your nice system!
I was just thinking that!
This sounds a LOT like Token ring has gone to the, um... ether?
But it's NOT the best time to send something to Mars. It would have been best to launch something about a year and a half ago, when mars and earth were moving towards each other, and have the probe REACH Mars when it starts getting farther away.
The flash MEDIA, the chips that store the data can run at 5-7MB/sec, but the USB interface limits throughput to 1.5MBytes/sec.
LOL, all day long I work on people's machines and about 10% of the windows population is AMAZED that I can zoom programs into the taskbar and call them up later. I think most uses don't really care if they close or minimize, it's all just crap to them.
wow. 'too' I thought I'd never make that mistake. Please beat me with a two-foot double-header for that.
But will I be able too painlessly move my email from Moz over? I've got two years of mail in my .mozilla folder and I don't intend to hack together some sick bastardized transfer.
I guess I'm just old school.
I think 'multimedia' is bullshit.
Animations, video, and sound where they don't belong just piss me off.
If your website has flash I don't like it.
If my PDA has to render my address book in 'vibrant 16-bit color' it's more of a toy than a tool.
If I wanted to take pictures I'd have bought a camera, keep CCDs out of my PDAs and Phones.
Bluetooth is a way to reduce wire clutter, not an excuse to have 35 wireless perhipherals jumping around my desk.
video cards have too much RAM onboard these days. I don't think I've ever USED more than 5MB VRAM.