Of course, they ran all their tests in Windows. I wonder how much of the results in some of the tests (like program installation) are really due to how fast NTFS can handle lots of little files and not due to the drives they were testing.
It would have been nice to see some quick tests under Linux with ext3 / XFS / reiser / ext4 / btrfs / flavor_of_the_month just to see if that was really the drives or a vastly sub-optimal access pattern.
Quite a few people could be seen to be benefiting from this. Politicians because they will "save the people" by fixing the coupon program (they broke) and stopping TV from "going away". Incumbent providers of some services (basically anyone who stands to get competition from the newly free spectrum) will benefit. Cable and satellite providers get another 120 days to try to fear monger people that they will lose TV if they don't switch to digital cable / digital satellite.
Basically, many people (myself included at this point) think this change has been handled poorly. Some European countries have been on DTV for years. They said "this is the date" and switched. No coupon programs, no hand-outs, no endless delays (hint: this was supposed to happen in '06), etc. They were willing to put up with the fact this wouldn't be perfectly clean.
If I bought that spectrum, I would sue the government to stop the delay. I was promised the spectrum (and put up a TON of cash) to get it. It was supposed to be free on Feb 17th. We'd already delayed years and were told "this is it". Now it's not. You just pushed back my millions of dollars of investment and planning by months. That will cost a ton of money.
And let's not forget, the government gets some of the spectrum too. It's supposed to be usable for emergency services. Do the TVs of a few million people who have been ignoring 2 years of warnings (plus a coupon program) deserve to watch Two and a Half men and One Life To Live more than the emergency services people deserve to use the spectrum?
It's probably all just stupidity, but it's quite possible to make a decent argument for corruption.
Unfortunately the only difference between a B&W single and a color signal (in the analog world) is the color burst. The signal will take just as much power (basically) to broadcast.
The biggest problem for most stations at this point is probably the extra power it would use to keep the analog transmitters going an extra 90 days. B&W wouldn't do any good there, it would just annoy people and cause more confusion than having no signal (or the "nightlight" signal that would have continued).
I hope that if this passes, TV stations just ignore it and switch on the 17th anyway. It's a stupid idea that won't do any good but waste money and time. Fund the coupons better, and keep the date the same.
Also, people have to go buy a digital tuner. An HD tuner costs extra, and would be a waste of money unless you had an HD monitor (which you probably don't, because if you bought one years ago you can probably afford the $150 to buy the box).
I don't think we're ripping on it for what it does (after all, Garage Band has had a vaguely similar feature).
This is getting raked over the coals because of the amazingly bad infomercial they made. If any other company made that video, we'd be poking just as much fun at them.
In the past 8 years, I have seen the President treated with basically no respect. It's really been pretty sickening, the way people discuss him. The "I wish he was dead", "he's a terrorist" stuff, etc. That's no way to treat a President.
But now Obama is the President. Apparently nothing has changed.
I don't know if I should be happy there is no double standard (that a Democrat is being treated the same) or unhappy that this is childishness is where discourse is.
I'm leaning towards sad.
In defense of Obama (I'm a Republican fwiw)... it hasn't been 5 days. He has bigger things to worry about. And he didn't flip-flop, he's voted that way before.
I was really hoping some of the venom that was being directed at the office of President would go away with the end of Bush's term.
Thank you for raising the level of the national discourse.
Why are they a scam who can't sue? It may be a scummy thing to do, but it's perfectly legal to sell GPLed software.
She could try for a return, but it was a legal sale. I don't see why they couldn't sue. It's not like it would get them in trouble with the law, they didn't do anything illegal... just rather immoral.
I'd guess it's some kind of TCP/IP optimization (the default size of packets, etc). It's set to one thing on Ubuntu, and another on Windows (probably for some historical reason or due to some old buggy driver).
If that's not it, I'd bet pretty high it's a bad driver in Windows.
It's quite likely that either Windows or Ubuntu is intrinsically faster for some reason, but I doubt the difference based on the way the networking stack is designed is anywhere near 10%, let alone 50% for a link this fast. On 10 gigE maybe, but not on a simple cable modem.
The whole 48v DC thing sounds good to me (I don't run a data center though, or anything like it).
That said the article discusses (and I've seen it said elsewhere) the large copper bars used for wires in this kind of setup, and how they will lose more power between the wall and the rack than AC.
I can see the appeal of going TOTALLY 48v, but why not run AC to the racks, and just have a large converter for every 2 or three that provides the full DC power and backup for those three racks? You're still avoiding inefficiency in having 20+ individual power supplier per rack. And you avoid a voltage conversion (instead of thousands->hundreds->110v->whatever DC you need you'd have thousands->hundreds to top of rack->whatever DC is output). That would save some juice.
Plus the per-rack theory would make it really easy to convert equipment a few racks at a time without having to move a whole large chunk of a data center.
PS: I assume people would still use dual (or more) redundant PSUs on the individual boxes, even though they wouldn't be dealing with nearly as much heat since they don't have to do the whole AC->DC thing.
The 100% is a little nuts (bad driver?), but USB is definitely a CPU hog. I can move files between a computer and an external drive about twice as fast most of the time using FireWire 400 than USB2. FW800 is even faster.
The annoying thing, though, is the CPU usage. On my Mac (2.4GHz Core2Duo) I can copy large files (such as video or 8MP RAW images) as fast as the disk can take them, no problem. With FW (either 400 or 800) it barely shows up on the little CPU graph I use. It's easily under 10%.
USB2? Usually up to 20%.
It's been like this on every computer I've done this on. It's the same on my parent's iMac. It was the same of my PowerBook G4. It was the same on my old 933MHz Dell laptop.
The CPU thing isn't as much of a problem now, but it's still a problem. USB just wasn't designed for large transfers like HDs sometimes demand. It's nice they've improved things, and hopefully the fact that polling is no longer necessary will fix the CPU problem... but I'm not too enthusiastic.
Of course, with the analog transmitters off, I believe they will be allowed to turn the power on the digital signals up quite a bit, extending the range from what's available today.
I've always thought the problem was that it's an opt-in system, and that the relatives seem to often be able to over-rule what the person selected on their drivers license.
I think we should make it opt-out. There would be so many more organs available for research and transplant, we could save quite a few lives.
Noooooo. Let's let things actually finish. We're SO CLOSE.
Fun the coupon program better with an executive order. Let analog stay on at night for a while in "nightlight mode" as has been discussed (just shows a "you need a converter box" screen).
But please, we're so close. The trial in November went very well, and the nightlight thing was shown to be very helpful.
But please don't delay things. "Enough people" will never be ready. This needs to happen, it's not like it's news. We've known about this for 2+ years.
I saw the post on Jalopnik a short while ago that Toyota announced this system. I thought it was a great thing. I've wondered why it's taken so long for someone else to take on OnStar. I've also wondered by GM hasn't licensed out OnStar to other car manufacturers, but oh well.
I didn't see this part. This is amazing. So much for wanting this system. It's not like this is a weird idea, the guy in the article pegged it (albeit more diplomatically).
"It's a non-starter," says William Matthies of consultants Coyote Insight and a longtime consumer electronics executive. "You've got the same thing coming to your home now. It strikes me as the same thing" as junk mail.
That's been my experience. I haven't watched too many different titles on it, but it's highly dependent on the source. Amazing Stories looks fine even at half quality, but it's 1980s TV so it looks VHS quality all the time. Some of the transfers seem to be missing audio during part of the intro sequence too.
Meet The Robinsons looked fantastic and was clearly HD. I also have watched The King of Kong which also was perfect HD.
The connection seems to have a big part to do with it. My connection (6 Mbps DSL) is consistently at 9/10 bars of quality. It's been up to 10 a few times too. Last night my quality dropped to half for a few minutes while watching Amazing Stories. The picture wasn't very noticeably degraded, although motion wasn't quite a smooth. It looked like blown-up (though still good quality, no artifacts) web video. It lost resolution but wasn't hard to watch.
I haven't noticed problems with the aspect ratio, but I haven't watched much either.
I like it, it's VERY convenient, especially with TV shows. I'd love to use the Video on Demand I'm paying for with my cable, but of course that would require a 2-way cable card which Comcast of course wouldn't turn over even if I could get a court order.
On the surface I agree. I think we've all used those combo devices where one part of the combo was failed.
However if my TV already has all the necessary power to do the job and all it needs is a little software, I'm all for it.
Take my TiVo Series 3. It does Amazon Unbox and Netflix streaming. It already has all the hardware it needs due to it's other purpose (DVR). There is no reason not to include the feature if people want it and the device is capable of it. If it's only an extra $50 on this TV, I'd be in (if I didn't already have my S3).
Also, don't forget, that the problem with the devices you mentioned is usually hardware going bad (like the tape mechanism). In these cases where it's all CPU and RAM they shouldn't have much of a failure rate at all, and it's not effected by use (where VCRs are more likely to fail the more they are used).
I've been using it quite a bit on my S3 lately (most recently I've been watching Amazing Stories season 1) and I must say I really like it. It's capable of very high quality video (I get almost full quality according to their little display, it looks like HD to me).
I only have two complaints about it. The first is it seems a little buggy. At times when I finish watching something instead of going back to the Netflix menu I'll be booted back to the main TiVo menu. Most of the bugs seem to be something like this. They don't effect viewing at all, which works perfectly.
The other is the "instant queue". You get your movies from your instant queue. That's all fine and dandy, but I don't care. I want to be able to search for a movie and watch it then. I want to be able to browse the instant selections. I don't want to have to use my laptop to find a movie and add it to my queue to be able to watch it. I understand some devices may be limited in their ability to do something like this, but TiVo clearly has the interface for it. Amazon doesn't need an "instant queue" for UnBox, I can search the whole collection.
Either way, it's an amazing feature. I'm really glad they added it. I just with it had more selection (will come with time) and they had added it earlier (like last year).
All that said, having it in the TV would worry me. It would prevent it from being updated easily (such as on the TiVo). The fact it sounds like it costs extra and requires extra hardware makes me wonder if this is just like the special DVD player some Sony TVs can take that just shows up in their crossbar menu and it's not really a feature of the TV at all.
The GP was 100% correct. If you had kept reading, you'd see that the suggestion was to use replication so you can lock the DB into a consistent state while backing up. When the backup is done, the box starts replicating again. If you didn't have the backup box, you'd have to lock the production database while your backup was going on.
He was suggesting replication purely as a way to avoid having to pause the application during backup, not as the backup it's self.
My guess (and this is a guess, I'd never heard of the site before yesterday) is that this is some guy who started his own little site and it got bigger and bigger. Basically he never designed the backup, the system was just slowly pieced bigger and bigger until it got to it's current state.
The comments in the messages from the site's operator about the cost of the drive recover and thinking both drives just died at once indicate to me that this site was basically a hobby for him and he isn't experienced as an admin.
Slashdot Mirror
That was me, I accidentally checked "post anonymously".
I want my karma! *sobs*
It would have been nice to see some quick tests under Linux with ext3 / XFS / reiser / ext4 / btrfs / flavor_of_the_month just to see if that was really the drives or a vastly sub-optimal access pattern.
Quite a few people could be seen to be benefiting from this. Politicians because they will "save the people" by fixing the coupon program (they broke) and stopping TV from "going away". Incumbent providers of some services (basically anyone who stands to get competition from the newly free spectrum) will benefit. Cable and satellite providers get another 120 days to try to fear monger people that they will lose TV if they don't switch to digital cable / digital satellite.
Basically, many people (myself included at this point) think this change has been handled poorly. Some European countries have been on DTV for years. They said "this is the date" and switched. No coupon programs, no hand-outs, no endless delays (hint: this was supposed to happen in '06), etc. They were willing to put up with the fact this wouldn't be perfectly clean.
If I bought that spectrum, I would sue the government to stop the delay. I was promised the spectrum (and put up a TON of cash) to get it. It was supposed to be free on Feb 17th. We'd already delayed years and were told "this is it". Now it's not. You just pushed back my millions of dollars of investment and planning by months. That will cost a ton of money.
And let's not forget, the government gets some of the spectrum too. It's supposed to be usable for emergency services. Do the TVs of a few million people who have been ignoring 2 years of warnings (plus a coupon program) deserve to watch Two and a Half men and One Life To Live more than the emergency services people deserve to use the spectrum?
It's probably all just stupidity, but it's quite possible to make a decent argument for corruption.
Unfortunately the only difference between a B&W single and a color signal (in the analog world) is the color burst. The signal will take just as much power (basically) to broadcast.
The biggest problem for most stations at this point is probably the extra power it would use to keep the analog transmitters going an extra 90 days. B&W wouldn't do any good there, it would just annoy people and cause more confusion than having no signal (or the "nightlight" signal that would have continued).
I hope that if this passes, TV stations just ignore it and switch on the 17th anyway. It's a stupid idea that won't do any good but waste money and time. Fund the coupons better, and keep the date the same.
Also, people have to go buy a digital tuner. An HD tuner costs extra, and would be a waste of money unless you had an HD monitor (which you probably don't, because if you bought one years ago you can probably afford the $150 to buy the box).
I don't think we're ripping on it for what it does (after all, Garage Band has had a vaguely similar feature).
This is getting raked over the coals because of the amazingly bad infomercial they made. If any other company made that video, we'd be poking just as much fun at them.
It's just... unspeakably bad.
So you're a pop musician?
And yet, the Japanese have virtual singers. Witness Vocalioid 2 (three is better, but there aren't many videos on YouTube):
Clearly, we've lost the digital song war.
In the past 8 years, I have seen the President treated with basically no respect. It's really been pretty sickening, the way people discuss him. The "I wish he was dead", "he's a terrorist" stuff, etc. That's no way to treat a President.
But now Obama is the President. Apparently nothing has changed.
I don't know if I should be happy there is no double standard (that a Democrat is being treated the same) or unhappy that this is childishness is where discourse is.
I'm leaning towards sad.
In defense of Obama (I'm a Republican fwiw)... it hasn't been 5 days. He has bigger things to worry about. And he didn't flip-flop, he's voted that way before.
I was really hoping some of the venom that was being directed at the office of President would go away with the end of Bush's term.
Thank you for raising the level of the national discourse.
Why are they a scam who can't sue? It may be a scummy thing to do, but it's perfectly legal to sell GPLed software.
She could try for a return, but it was a legal sale. I don't see why they couldn't sue. It's not like it would get them in trouble with the law, they didn't do anything illegal... just rather immoral.
I'd guess it's some kind of TCP/IP optimization (the default size of packets, etc). It's set to one thing on Ubuntu, and another on Windows (probably for some historical reason or due to some old buggy driver).
If that's not it, I'd bet pretty high it's a bad driver in Windows.
It's quite likely that either Windows or Ubuntu is intrinsically faster for some reason, but I doubt the difference based on the way the networking stack is designed is anywhere near 10%, let alone 50% for a link this fast. On 10 gigE maybe, but not on a simple cable modem.
The whole 48v DC thing sounds good to me (I don't run a data center though, or anything like it).
That said the article discusses (and I've seen it said elsewhere) the large copper bars used for wires in this kind of setup, and how they will lose more power between the wall and the rack than AC.
I can see the appeal of going TOTALLY 48v, but why not run AC to the racks, and just have a large converter for every 2 or three that provides the full DC power and backup for those three racks? You're still avoiding inefficiency in having 20+ individual power supplier per rack. And you avoid a voltage conversion (instead of thousands->hundreds->110v->whatever DC you need you'd have thousands->hundreds to top of rack->whatever DC is output). That would save some juice.
Plus the per-rack theory would make it really easy to convert equipment a few racks at a time without having to move a whole large chunk of a data center.
PS: I assume people would still use dual (or more) redundant PSUs on the individual boxes, even though they wouldn't be dealing with nearly as much heat since they don't have to do the whole AC->DC thing.
I'm sorry, but I can't seem to read your post.
Did you forget to use UTF-8?
The 100% is a little nuts (bad driver?), but USB is definitely a CPU hog. I can move files between a computer and an external drive about twice as fast most of the time using FireWire 400 than USB2. FW800 is even faster.
The annoying thing, though, is the CPU usage. On my Mac (2.4GHz Core2Duo) I can copy large files (such as video or 8MP RAW images) as fast as the disk can take them, no problem. With FW (either 400 or 800) it barely shows up on the little CPU graph I use. It's easily under 10%.
USB2? Usually up to 20%.
It's been like this on every computer I've done this on. It's the same on my parent's iMac. It was the same of my PowerBook G4. It was the same on my old 933MHz Dell laptop.
The CPU thing isn't as much of a problem now, but it's still a problem. USB just wasn't designed for large transfers like HDs sometimes demand. It's nice they've improved things, and hopefully the fact that polling is no longer necessary will fix the CPU problem... but I'm not too enthusiastic.
Of course, with the analog transmitters off, I believe they will be allowed to turn the power on the digital signals up quite a bit, extending the range from what's available today.
I've always thought the problem was that it's an opt-in system, and that the relatives seem to often be able to over-rule what the person selected on their drivers license.
I think we should make it opt-out. There would be so many more organs available for research and transplant, we could save quite a few lives.
Noooooo. Let's let things actually finish. We're SO CLOSE.
Fun the coupon program better with an executive order. Let analog stay on at night for a while in "nightlight mode" as has been discussed (just shows a "you need a converter box" screen).
But please, we're so close. The trial in November went very well, and the nightlight thing was shown to be very helpful.
But please don't delay things. "Enough people" will never be ready. This needs to happen, it's not like it's news. We've known about this for 2+ years.
Right.
I just have to listen to the little "ping" every time one comes in.
And see the "you have 6 unread messages" message on my dashboard every time I try to look at the map.
And...
I saw the post on Jalopnik a short while ago that Toyota announced this system. I thought it was a great thing. I've wondered why it's taken so long for someone else to take on OnStar. I've also wondered by GM hasn't licensed out OnStar to other car manufacturers, but oh well.
I didn't see this part. This is amazing. So much for wanting this system. It's not like this is a weird idea, the guy in the article pegged it (albeit more diplomatically).
That's been my experience. I haven't watched too many different titles on it, but it's highly dependent on the source. Amazing Stories looks fine even at half quality, but it's 1980s TV so it looks VHS quality all the time. Some of the transfers seem to be missing audio during part of the intro sequence too.
Meet The Robinsons looked fantastic and was clearly HD. I also have watched The King of Kong which also was perfect HD.
The connection seems to have a big part to do with it. My connection (6 Mbps DSL) is consistently at 9/10 bars of quality. It's been up to 10 a few times too. Last night my quality dropped to half for a few minutes while watching Amazing Stories. The picture wasn't very noticeably degraded, although motion wasn't quite a smooth. It looked like blown-up (though still good quality, no artifacts) web video. It lost resolution but wasn't hard to watch.
I haven't noticed problems with the aspect ratio, but I haven't watched much either.
I like it, it's VERY convenient, especially with TV shows. I'd love to use the Video on Demand I'm paying for with my cable, but of course that would require a 2-way cable card which Comcast of course wouldn't turn over even if I could get a court order.
On the surface I agree. I think we've all used those combo devices where one part of the combo was failed.
However if my TV already has all the necessary power to do the job and all it needs is a little software, I'm all for it.
Take my TiVo Series 3. It does Amazon Unbox and Netflix streaming. It already has all the hardware it needs due to it's other purpose (DVR). There is no reason not to include the feature if people want it and the device is capable of it. If it's only an extra $50 on this TV, I'd be in (if I didn't already have my S3).
Also, don't forget, that the problem with the devices you mentioned is usually hardware going bad (like the tape mechanism). In these cases where it's all CPU and RAM they shouldn't have much of a failure rate at all, and it's not effected by use (where VCRs are more likely to fail the more they are used).
I think they meant that comparison for people who are interested in renting a movie, not purchasing a movie.
I've been using it quite a bit on my S3 lately (most recently I've been watching Amazing Stories season 1) and I must say I really like it. It's capable of very high quality video (I get almost full quality according to their little display, it looks like HD to me).
I only have two complaints about it. The first is it seems a little buggy. At times when I finish watching something instead of going back to the Netflix menu I'll be booted back to the main TiVo menu. Most of the bugs seem to be something like this. They don't effect viewing at all, which works perfectly.
The other is the "instant queue". You get your movies from your instant queue. That's all fine and dandy, but I don't care. I want to be able to search for a movie and watch it then. I want to be able to browse the instant selections. I don't want to have to use my laptop to find a movie and add it to my queue to be able to watch it. I understand some devices may be limited in their ability to do something like this, but TiVo clearly has the interface for it. Amazon doesn't need an "instant queue" for UnBox, I can search the whole collection.
Either way, it's an amazing feature. I'm really glad they added it. I just with it had more selection (will come with time) and they had added it earlier (like last year).
All that said, having it in the TV would worry me. It would prevent it from being updated easily (such as on the TiVo). The fact it sounds like it costs extra and requires extra hardware makes me wonder if this is just like the special DVD player some Sony TVs can take that just shows up in their crossbar menu and it's not really a feature of the TV at all.
It is not a tumor.
*BZZZZT*
The GP was 100% correct. If you had kept reading, you'd see that the suggestion was to use replication so you can lock the DB into a consistent state while backing up. When the backup is done, the box starts replicating again. If you didn't have the backup box, you'd have to lock the production database while your backup was going on.
He was suggesting replication purely as a way to avoid having to pause the application during backup, not as the backup it's self.
My guess (and this is a guess, I'd never heard of the site before yesterday) is that this is some guy who started his own little site and it got bigger and bigger. Basically he never designed the backup, the system was just slowly pieced bigger and bigger until it got to it's current state.
The comments in the messages from the site's operator about the cost of the drive recover and thinking both drives just died at once indicate to me that this site was basically a hobby for him and he isn't experienced as an admin.