I never, ever, send mail in an HTML format. But I always send photographs and other stuff like that as urls (plaintext URLs, which most modern mail readers sense and interpret as web-links) to images I store on my webspace somewhere.
This isn't a realistic option for most people. Nor is it very convenient. Unless, of course, the image is part of an existing website.
Why shuttle around bloated email attachments?
It is not a big deal in most cases. Although this brings up an interesting point. There are cases when people want to send files (maybe an MP3 or movie) in excess of 5 megabytes. This is not appropriate for the current state of email (SMTP, et al). What do regular users do when then want to send someone a large file? They're not going to choke MY SMTP servers (with virus scanning) with their huge attachments.
But in terms of real, non-technical end-users, HTML is what's out there.
The point is, attaching pictures to email has absolutely nothing to do with HTML. "Non-technical end-users" don't compose HTML that references pictures because it requires having a Web server to serve the pictures. All you are really going to get out of HTML in an email is varied fonts and colors. As neat as that might be, it is hardly enhanced communication. Nor is it worth the risks.
95% of the HTML email I get is spam. The other 5% is messages from mailing list subscriptions or Amazon or whatever. Most of those come with both plain text and HTML. If nothing else, most "nontechnical end-users" would do good to turn off HTML so they won't have to look at offensive porn spam with obscene images (not attachments).
One complete space elevator tailored for Martian use. Pack it up, send it over, put it into geo-stationary orbit where you want it, and drop anchor. This can probablty all be done remotely.
Umm, wouldn't the weight of the starter cable pull the starter satelite (or whatever is at the top) out of orbit?
The implications for this are amazing. If we had a working space elevator, getting to mars would cost next to nothing, relative to todays costs of breaking low earth orbit.
What about breaking low Mars orbit?
Sending people to Mars is only half the problem. Getting them back is the other half. Sure, Mars is smaller than Earth, but it isn't THAT small. WHat are ya gonna do, send half of NASA to Mars to build a launch pad/control center/space elevator?? Are they gonna live there for a 10 years or whatever while the means of getting home is assembled and tested? Even if you could ship prefabricated facilities, you'd need a lot of equipment/tools. You have all the cost problems all over again (probably worse). SUre, we might have this kind of thing there eventually (like 75 years from now), but not one person can leave Mars until this stuff is in place. They are essentially stranded. Personally, i'd rather be stranded on Gilligan's Island. At least the weather was nice there.
I guess a space elevator would be neat, but come on, get your head out of clouds.
Sorry folks, a programmer with no degree but lots of Open Source experience will still have a tougher time getting a job than a C.S. student with no experience.
But a degree and open source experience will get you a job. (over a person with just a degree)
Seems to me that "4 tons of plant material per mile" speaks more to the massive amounts of energy that modern technology and societies require than to its relative (in)efficiency. The average internal combustion engine is, what, 25% efficient? Thats not terribly bad. Lets say you made it 100% efficient. You'd still be using the energy equivilent of 1 ton of plant material per mile.
Numbers like this really put into perspective the feasability of switching to renewable sources of energy on a global scale. Can we really expect to generate the energy equivelent of one years global plant growth every day from diffuse sources such as the sun, wind, and ocean? And that is just for our cars. I think it is safe to assume that as we increase efficiency we will also increase total consumption. There are a whole lot of people in teh world that don't own cars, but would love to...
-matthew
Re:Batteries really, really, really suck. For now.
on
The End of the Oil Age
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· Score: 1
You got a lead on these "better batteries?" The 1300-lb. battery pack from the old EV1 makes me think we're a long, long way from touching hydrogen.
At least the EV-1 was a real commercial product and electricity is already in wide distribution.
Converting to hydrogen (compressed, 150 Bar) with an energy density of 1/23rd of gasoline, by volume, is just not going to happen.
I'm just saying if you REALLY want an electric car, hydrogen is a waste of time.
If we find a better one, fan-freaking-tastic. I have no particular love for hydrogen-- we just need a good way to decouple the power source from the power delivery in automobiles, so sources can be swapped out at will as better alternatives develop without having to replace our entire national infrastructure a second time.
There is no hope of replacing petrolium in cars any time soon either through hdyrogen or batteries. The only realistic route is gas(preferably diesel)/electric hybrids for now. The rest is just science fiction, IMO.
However-- that's not the point. At least not initially. The idea is to transition to an infrastructure that does not depend on any particular generation method. This opens the way for your car to be powered by anything-- not just gasoline. Once you can put hydrogen in, you're no longer tied to a single source. As more efficient generators and methods (nuclear, solar, excercise-club treadmills) come into play, your existing car will be able to immediately take advantage of them.
Bah! Hydrogen is a terrible general purpose fuel/energy medium. It has a very poor energy density (compared to gasoline), it is difficult to store, and you lose energy creating the hydrogen and then converting it back to electricity. The energy density and energy loss problems are facts that engineering are not likely to fix.
If you want to run a car on electricty, it would be far better to just develop better batteries and skip the hydrogen middle-man altogether.
Don't even get me started on the absurdity of producing hydrogen via electrolysis on a large scale basis. The physics just don't work out in favor of hydrogen.
Could you give me an example of a patch like this that was sandwiched in with other patches? Or one that made MANDATORY to download? Or one that was not able to be uninstalled?
Somewhere along the line IE became a mandatory component of Windows. I know it isn't and example of a "patch" really, but I think the point is clear. There is every reason to believe that DRM will soon become mandatory. Maybe not in XP, 2k, or 2003.. but perhaps the next version of Windows. All Microsoft has to do is tie DRM in with some common operation such as WindowsUpdate (like IE) and suddendly DRM become "mandatory" for common operations even though it might technically be optional/uninstallable.
On another note, refueling, the cars can also be run with a "fuel conditioner", that is a hydrocarbon splicer, which kan use any hydrocarbon to produce Hydrogen for the fuel cell.
If you are just going to be reforming petrol into hydrogen, you might as well just burn the petrol in something like a hybrid. Diesel/electric hybrids are VERY efficient.
We then come to the question of energy density: While it is true that the energy contents of H2 is lower than petrol, the fuel cell instead has almost 100% energy conversion!
Doesn't even begin to make up for the 23 to 1 energy desity difference between gasoline and compressed hydrogen. You need 23 liters of compressed (150 Bar) hydrogen to equal the energy in 1 liter of gasoline.
AFAIK, the prototype high pessure H2 tanks can load the equivalent amount of a regular petrol tank,
Not even liquid hydrogen stores that much energy. Liquid hydrogen has less than 1/3 the energy density of gasoline. Driving around with a high pressure tank of any gas is just plain dangerous.
Batteries has been developed for as long as the motorcar has, and we have achieved absolutely nothing. The electrical cars of today doesn't work very well because of just this: They have to haul around 1-2 tonnes of lead accumulators to achieve some kind of preformance. I firmly belive the solution to the energy storing problem, in general, is to store energy as Hydrogen, and NOT as Pb/H2SO4/PbOx, but I'm sure the people that are eveloping the next generation polymer cells will oppose me there.
Batteries HAVE come a long way since the lead/acid batteries. Li ion, for example. And polymer as you mentioned. What do you think they use in laptop computers? Lead/acid? No. Its just that lead/acid is cheap and good enough for starting a car.
Hydrogen is NOT the answer. It just isn't practical.
Shouldn't we wait for these? I mean, they had a vehicle running on a fuel cell in the show with those two car guys from NPR checking it out. So fuel cells have to be well off the drawing board if they have a prototype running around.
Fuel cell technology has been around for 100 years. So has electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. If it was cost effective, somebody would have been able to sell it by now. The reality is that hydrogen is a terrible fuel. It is difficult to store and has a very poor energy density (compared to gasoline). Also, a fuel cell is nothing more than a glorified battery. We'd be better off developing better batteries and cutting out the chemical fuel middle man altogether.
NAT does work VERY well for corporate users (and admins). It is an artificial limitation on a business to have to assign public IPs for every device on their network. What happens when a company goes over 255 hosts? Should they register for another class C or, God forbid, get a whole new/23 supernet and have to reip their internal network even though not ONE of those hosts needs to be accessible from the internet?
NAT really only breaks things for home users running silly video protocols or doing IRC/DCC or some game. Fine, give them public IPs for their machines. My DSL provider (Speakeasy) allows me to purchace additional public IPs. I don't think this practice is going to bring the death of IPv4 by 2005. The real problem is businesses that have excessivly large chunks of the public space used on computers that don't need them.
I heard the argument about two companies merging with conflicting private address space... First of all, what are the chances of this if each one uses a suitably arbitrary (but not overly large) chunk of the private space? Second of all, have you ever heard of DHCP? Jeez.
In general, I think NAT is a great way to go... as long as the option to have a public IP is always available, like with Speakeasy.
While I understand where you are coming from, your theory would only hold water if you could find many people who were used to special effects from teh 50's and thought that the animatronics of the 70's and 80's were worse or less realistic or whatever. Somehow I suspect that most would feel that the FX field had evolved or improved.
The real issue, as others have pointed out, is more likely that there are just more movies hitting the mainstream that use CG. A mainstream that isn't exactly known for quality in the first place. If they can't a simple plot/acting right, how should we expect them to implement CG right? CG probably is a superior or more evolved method of generating special effects. Its just that most of these movies would suck no matter what is used to generate the effects. Also, when I think back to "the good ol' days," I am generally drawing from a very small subset of movies such as Star Wars and 2001. Where I would convieniently forget about all the movies that also came out during the time that were really bad and looked fake. Oh well.
Also it seems that you can't separate the VFX from the story.Just because you didn't like a movie or story doesn't mean the VFX suck.
I do see a difference between a bad story and bad VFX. As I noted, Star Wars I and II were just bad movies that also had bad VFX. The Matrix was a good movie that had overdone CG. I think the term "pixel perfect" describes modern VFX best. Life isn't pixel perfect. Movies shouldn't be either. There is just something I liked better about the old, animatronic Yoda.
Granted some people out of college (many of them button pushers) might want to do CG and VFX. But many of the people in top acilities have been doing CG for more than a decade. Wouldn't you consider John Lasseter of Pixar, who directed both Toy Storries and has done CG since the early-mid 80s an artists.
I think CG is GREAT in the context of animation. I loved Toy Story, Shrek, Monsters Inc., etc. (well, Ice Age sucked). See, the problem with CG in non-animated movies is that it tends to look like animation. It's close to realistic, but not quite. I think that back in the day they knew that animatronics didn't look quite real, so they used special photography to create the illusion.. close up shots, quick pans, etc. Now, they just pan out and show you the whole damn scene in all of its computer animated glory... and it often looks animated. I use Star War as an example because I think it is the only series that had the same director but used totally different methods for creating effects. The original Star Wars series was so much richer and engaging. And I don't mean just the plot.
Then again, there are movies like Gladiator that looked good. You know, where they inserted all those CG people in teh audience and stuff. But the thing is, that wasn't central to the movie. They didn't build the movie around that effect. The real action, blood, and story was not CG, AFAIK.
Is it just me or are special effects in movies getting worse? Maybe I am just getting older and too attached to the "good ol' days" or something like that, but I sincerely feel that the original Star Wars series was far more moving and "believable" than the latest 2 movies. Same with Terminator, as this reviewer notes. There is just something really not right about all the over blown CG effects. The Matrix suffered from this too. For as much as I might have liked the plot in these movies (well, Star Wars I an II were just plain stupid), the effects ultimately turned me off.
Besides LoTR and animated films like Shrek, almost all action/sci-fi/fantasy films lately have totally over done it with the CG effects. Way over the top. Its like directors and producers have this new toy and can't wait to exploit it every chance they get.
All I can say is give me animatronics. Give me real stunt people. Give me true artists. Not some kids out of college who just learned out to operate a 3D rendering application.
Technology is still the best hope for killing spam.
I've been hearing that line for nearly two decades, and I've seen absolutely NO PROGRESS!
What are you talking about? I block 75% of all SPAM by DNS blacklisting alone (with very few false positives). And the rest is covered by Bayesian filters at the server level which has almost zero false positives. This is more than I could ever hope for from legislation.
Get a better sysadmin/ISP, because SPAM can be blocked very effectively. I know it sounds like a bandaide fix, but if enough people do it, there will be little incentive for the SPAMmers to go through the trouble.
Personally, I am sick of waiting for the government to come up with solutions to my problems.
Besides, a technical solution is more fun than a legal one.
You can't do this with debian either. The kernel is updated in major releases, so you must reboot to change the kernel.
Last time I checked, 'apt-get dist-upgrade' didn't replace the kernel. A release of Debian is in no way tied to a particular kernel version. Hell, I had Woody (3.0) running on kernel 2.0.38 for a time. Presumably, you've been keeping the kernel up to date as needed anyway. And even if you weren't keeping the kernel up to date, an old kernel will generally work fine with newer versions of Debian. The only problems are with newer kernels and older Debians (module packages and such). In other words: A reboot is not required.
Not only have I done major upgrades without rebooting, but I have done them remotely in less than an hour (depending on bandwidth) without ever losing my connection. Although I do recall getting kicked off when I upgraded ssh on an old Debian 1.2 box. Something about that version of sshd didn't allow connected sessions to keep goign when the master process died.
I guess you were sleeping when you wrote that comment tho, so I won't hold it against you...
And you were, what, in a coma when you wrote yours? Do you run Debian or even Linux for that matter?
Ok so what if you plan to upgrade every two years or so? Debian is the best choice. First, everyting is tested and easy to use; it works without persuasion. Second, Debian is the easiest OS to update. Lastly, the updates are timely and work right.
Yeah, somehow the idea of supporting a 5 year old Debian version seems a little absurd when the upgrade/update path is generally so smooth.
Why is this a choice between just Redhat consumer and enterprise? There are many other distributions out there. Especially if you already have the "talent" Do you really use the Redhat support or whatever it is they offer?
I've got an AthlonXP 1800+, and I've never ever ever ever had an mp3 skip (both windows and linux) unless the mp3 file was actually corrupted itself. Hell, even when I was using my old pentium 233 I only rarely had a skip. I can even have my CPU usage run up to 100% compiling stuff and mp3's still don't skip. I'm just not sure I buy this.
It may be a matter of DMA not being enabled on the IDE drive in Linux. PIO/IRQ masking disk access can choke even the fastest machine.Makes me wonder how many people who complain about slowness in Linux are running IDE without enabling DMA.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a realistic option for most people. Nor is it very convenient. Unless, of course, the image is part of an existing website.
Why shuttle around bloated email attachments?
It is not a big deal in most cases. Although this brings up an interesting point. There are cases when people want to send files (maybe an MP3 or movie) in excess of 5 megabytes. This is not appropriate for the current state of email (SMTP, et al). What do regular users do when then want to send someone a large file? They're not going to choke MY SMTP servers (with virus scanning) with their huge attachments.
-matthew
The point is, attaching pictures to email has absolutely nothing to do with HTML. "Non-technical end-users" don't compose HTML that references pictures because it requires having a Web server to serve the pictures. All you are really going to get out of HTML in an email is varied fonts and colors. As neat as that might be, it is hardly enhanced communication. Nor is it worth the risks.
95% of the HTML email I get is spam. The other 5% is messages from mailing list subscriptions or Amazon or whatever. Most of those come with both plain text and HTML. If nothing else, most "nontechnical end-users" would do good to turn off HTML so they won't have to look at offensive porn spam with obscene images (not attachments).
-matthew
I can think of cheaper ways of getting rid of lawyers.
That's one hell of a spool of cable.
Umm, wouldn't the weight of the starter cable pull the starter satelite (or whatever is at the top) out of orbit?
-matthew
What about breaking low Mars orbit? Sending people to Mars is only half the problem. Getting them back is the other half. Sure, Mars is smaller than Earth, but it isn't THAT small. WHat are ya gonna do, send half of NASA to Mars to build a launch pad/control center/space elevator?? Are they gonna live there for a 10 years or whatever while the means of getting home is assembled and tested? Even if you could ship prefabricated facilities, you'd need a lot of equipment/tools. You have all the cost problems all over again (probably worse). SUre, we might have this kind of thing there eventually (like 75 years from now), but not one person can leave Mars until this stuff is in place. They are essentially stranded. Personally, i'd rather be stranded on Gilligan's Island. At least the weather was nice there.
I guess a space elevator would be neat, but come on, get your head out of clouds.
-matthew
But a degree and open source experience will get you a job. (over a person with just a degree)
-matthew
-matthew
-matthew
At least the EV-1 was a real commercial product and electricity is already in wide distribution. Converting to hydrogen (compressed, 150 Bar) with an energy density of 1/23rd of gasoline, by volume, is just not going to happen.
I'm just saying if you REALLY want an electric car, hydrogen is a waste of time.
If we find a better one, fan-freaking-tastic. I have no particular love for hydrogen-- we just need a good way to decouple the power source from the power delivery in automobiles, so sources can be swapped out at will as better alternatives develop without having to replace our entire national infrastructure a second time.
There is no hope of replacing petrolium in cars any time soon either through hdyrogen or batteries. The only realistic route is gas(preferably diesel)/electric hybrids for now. The rest is just science fiction, IMO.
-matthew
Bah! Hydrogen is a terrible general purpose fuel/energy medium. It has a very poor energy density (compared to gasoline), it is difficult to store, and you lose energy creating the hydrogen and then converting it back to electricity. The energy density and energy loss problems are facts that engineering are not likely to fix. If you want to run a car on electricty, it would be far better to just develop better batteries and skip the hydrogen middle-man altogether.
Don't even get me started on the absurdity of producing hydrogen via electrolysis on a large scale basis. The physics just don't work out in favor of hydrogen.
-matthew
Somewhere along the line IE became a mandatory component of Windows. I know it isn't and example of a "patch" really, but I think the point is clear. There is every reason to believe that DRM will soon become mandatory. Maybe not in XP, 2k, or 2003.. but perhaps the next version of Windows. All Microsoft has to do is tie DRM in with some common operation such as WindowsUpdate (like IE) and suddendly DRM become "mandatory" for common operations even though it might technically be optional/uninstallable.
-matthew
If you are just going to be reforming petrol into hydrogen, you might as well just burn the petrol in something like a hybrid. Diesel/electric hybrids are VERY efficient.
We then come to the question of energy density: While it is true that the energy contents of H2 is lower than petrol, the fuel cell instead has almost 100% energy conversion!
Doesn't even begin to make up for the 23 to 1 energy desity difference between gasoline and compressed hydrogen. You need 23 liters of compressed (150 Bar) hydrogen to equal the energy in 1 liter of gasoline.
AFAIK, the prototype high pessure H2 tanks can load the equivalent amount of a regular petrol tank,
Not even liquid hydrogen stores that much energy. Liquid hydrogen has less than 1/3 the energy density of gasoline. Driving around with a high pressure tank of any gas is just plain dangerous.
Batteries has been developed for as long as the motorcar has, and we have achieved absolutely nothing. The electrical cars of today doesn't work very well because of just this: They have to haul around 1-2 tonnes of lead accumulators to achieve some kind of preformance. I firmly belive the solution to the energy storing problem, in general, is to store energy as Hydrogen, and NOT as Pb/H2SO4/PbOx, but I'm sure the people that are eveloping the next generation polymer cells will oppose me there.
Batteries HAVE come a long way since the lead/acid batteries. Li ion, for example. And polymer as you mentioned. What do you think they use in laptop computers? Lead/acid? No. Its just that lead/acid is cheap and good enough for starting a car.
Hydrogen is NOT the answer. It just isn't practical.
-matthew
Fuel cell technology has been around for 100 years. So has electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. If it was cost effective, somebody would have been able to sell it by now. The reality is that hydrogen is a terrible fuel. It is difficult to store and has a very poor energy density (compared to gasoline). Also, a fuel cell is nothing more than a glorified battery. We'd be better off developing better batteries and cutting out the chemical fuel middle man altogether.
-matthew
NAT really only breaks things for home users running silly video protocols or doing IRC/DCC or some game. Fine, give them public IPs for their machines. My DSL provider (Speakeasy) allows me to purchace additional public IPs. I don't think this practice is going to bring the death of IPv4 by 2005. The real problem is businesses that have excessivly large chunks of the public space used on computers that don't need them.
I heard the argument about two companies merging with conflicting private address space... First of all, what are the chances of this if each one uses a suitably arbitrary (but not overly large) chunk of the private space? Second of all, have you ever heard of DHCP? Jeez.
In general, I think NAT is a great way to go... as long as the option to have a public IP is always available, like with Speakeasy.
-matthew
Huh? You don't need to run KDE to use a qt based app and you dont' need GNOME to run a gtk based app.
-matthew
The real issue, as others have pointed out, is more likely that there are just more movies hitting the mainstream that use CG. A mainstream that isn't exactly known for quality in the first place. If they can't a simple plot/acting right, how should we expect them to implement CG right? CG probably is a superior or more evolved method of generating special effects. Its just that most of these movies would suck no matter what is used to generate the effects. Also, when I think back to "the good ol' days," I am generally drawing from a very small subset of movies such as Star Wars and 2001. Where I would convieniently forget about all the movies that also came out during the time that were really bad and looked fake. Oh well.
-matthew
I do see a difference between a bad story and bad VFX. As I noted, Star Wars I and II were just bad movies that also had bad VFX. The Matrix was a good movie that had overdone CG. I think the term "pixel perfect" describes modern VFX best. Life isn't pixel perfect. Movies shouldn't be either. There is just something I liked better about the old, animatronic Yoda.
Granted some people out of college (many of them button pushers) might want to do CG and VFX. But many of the people in top acilities have been doing CG for more than a decade. Wouldn't you consider John Lasseter of Pixar, who directed both Toy Storries and has done CG since the early-mid 80s an artists.
I think CG is GREAT in the context of animation. I loved Toy Story, Shrek, Monsters Inc., etc. (well, Ice Age sucked). See, the problem with CG in non-animated movies is that it tends to look like animation. It's close to realistic, but not quite. I think that back in the day they knew that animatronics didn't look quite real, so they used special photography to create the illusion.. close up shots, quick pans, etc. Now, they just pan out and show you the whole damn scene in all of its computer animated glory... and it often looks animated. I use Star War as an example because I think it is the only series that had the same director but used totally different methods for creating effects. The original Star Wars series was so much richer and engaging. And I don't mean just the plot.
Then again, there are movies like Gladiator that looked good. You know, where they inserted all those CG people in teh audience and stuff. But the thing is, that wasn't central to the movie. They didn't build the movie around that effect. The real action, blood, and story was not CG, AFAIK.
-matthew
Besides LoTR and animated films like Shrek, almost all action/sci-fi/fantasy films lately have totally over done it with the CG effects. Way over the top. Its like directors and producers have this new toy and can't wait to exploit it every chance they get.
All I can say is give me animatronics. Give me real stunt people. Give me true artists. Not some kids out of college who just learned out to operate a 3D rendering application.
-matthew
I've been hearing that line for nearly two decades, and I've seen absolutely NO PROGRESS!
What are you talking about? I block 75% of all SPAM by DNS blacklisting alone (with very few false positives). And the rest is covered by Bayesian filters at the server level which has almost zero false positives. This is more than I could ever hope for from legislation.
Get a better sysadmin/ISP, because SPAM can be blocked very effectively. I know it sounds like a bandaide fix, but if enough people do it, there will be little incentive for the SPAMmers to go through the trouble.
Personally, I am sick of waiting for the government to come up with solutions to my problems.
Besides, a technical solution is more fun than a legal one.
-matthew
Last time I checked, 'apt-get dist-upgrade' didn't replace the kernel. A release of Debian is in no way tied to a particular kernel version. Hell, I had Woody (3.0) running on kernel 2.0.38 for a time. Presumably, you've been keeping the kernel up to date as needed anyway. And even if you weren't keeping the kernel up to date, an old kernel will generally work fine with newer versions of Debian. The only problems are with newer kernels and older Debians (module packages and such). In other words: A reboot is not required.
Not only have I done major upgrades without rebooting, but I have done them remotely in less than an hour (depending on bandwidth) without ever losing my connection. Although I do recall getting kicked off when I upgraded ssh on an old Debian 1.2 box. Something about that version of sshd didn't allow connected sessions to keep goign when the master process died.
I guess you were sleeping when you wrote that comment tho, so I won't hold it against you...
And you were, what, in a coma when you wrote yours? Do you run Debian or even Linux for that matter?
-matthew
Heh, try upgrading from NT 4 to Windows 2000 in one command without requiring a reboot... for FREE.
Yeah, somehow the idea of supporting a 5 year old Debian version seems a little absurd when the upgrade/update path is generally so smooth.
-matthew
Why is this a choice between just Redhat consumer and enterprise? There are many other distributions out there. Especially if you already have the "talent" Do you really use the Redhat support or whatever it is they offer?
It may be a matter of DMA not being enabled on the IDE drive in Linux. PIO/IRQ masking disk access can choke even the fastest machine.Makes me wonder how many people who complain about slowness in Linux are running IDE without enabling DMA.
-matthew