If the site chooses to spend that much of it's precious real estate on stilted, poorly dithered ugliness, they probably aren't worth visiting in the first place.
Neither of those are necessary if you use NoScript.
Yes they are. NoScript is great, and stops both annoying/dangerous javascript and Flash, but it certainly doesn't block animated GIFs, or any other ads that take up ridiculous amounts of page real-estate.
there are 4 columns in the page, one with content and 3 with menus and ads, then with the enlarged font, the content column may have only 3 to 5 words per line. This leads to lots of scrolling.
Go to View -> Page Style -> No Style
Viola, no page formatting at all (no columns), you just have to scroll down to the start of the content you want to see.
Here in the US, if somebody wants something, they'd better damned well be ready to pay for it.
No, here in the US, people simply demand more higher-end services for poor people living in mud huts.
Most people in the US will complain when their sound quality just drops, or when their internet access slows down... To the poor, a poor signal is perfectly acceptable. And a lot of hassle, like attaching a 10' antenna wire to your cell phone is something they wouldn't think twice about. No such luck here.
If people in the western world were willing to accept such conditions, you could get away with far lower-powered cell towers, with minimal maintenance on the old established tech. Not to mention cheaper land, and no aesthetic or other restrictions, allowing much more massive towers.
Yes, it seems counterintuitive, but why develop a technology which costs less to implement if that technology is going to cut into your bottom line?
Because it doesn't work that way...
If your tower costs $0 to operate, and your competition's cost $100 to operate, you can price yours one dollar less, and make $99 in profit, while your competition goes bankrupt. To keep prices up, you need widespread collusion between competitors, but that has nothing to do with capitalism, and can happen with any economic system.
while I can run most everything I have on a sub GHZ machine, everyone is clamoring about the need for 3 and 4 GHZ machines.
Umm, who? Only Intel's craptastic P4 was so inefficient that it needed to get up near 4GHz to compete with a sub-2GHz Athlon. Now, even Intel has stepped back from the edge, and sells processors only about 2GHz. With no sign of a MHz boost coming.
And though my main machine runs at over a GHZ, it still falters at decoding DRM compressed Video, even though a DVD plays fine on my 500 MHZ machine.
There could be a lot of reasons for that, such as videocard, slow RAM/IO, etc. If you have an old P4 or a VIA CPU, and that would completely explain it.
I suspect, however, it has mostly to do with the fact that downloadable DRMed content is usually in a high-end format like h.264 or WMV9, which is far more CPU-intensive than MPEG-2 used in DVDs.
The next thing I am waiting for are very cheap machines, say $150, with no moving parts, only network drivers, that will link to a remote server.
It can't be far off. Mobile chips like the Turion run on 25W, don't need a hot northbridge, etc. Throw in an extremely efficient PSU like Seasonic, and you could passively cool it without any special designs.
I've found that gigabit ethernet is generally faster than local disks. Put several dozen machines on a switch, and hook it up to a massive machine with a ton of disks in the datacenter, and it might actually improve performance for everyone.
Should every Windows course cover ntkernel internals and sophisticated registry hacking?
Yes. EVERYTHING is in the Windows registry. If you don't know how to do some advanced registry editing, you're pretty well screwed when something trivial gets corrupted, incorrectly set, etc.
Anything broadcast over the public airwaves (_all_ spectra is a natural public resource, spectrum "auctions" be damned), should be considered to have been placed into the public domain
No. The current system where you can use it for any personal/private purpose you want, is just fine. Public domain suggests you can resell it to others.
All your method would do is to ensure that nothing good would be broadcast in the clear, and heavy encryption with DRM would be required by the public to listen to the radio, further taking away more rights.
The FCC has been far too biased towards business, but that doesn't mean we should make the airwaves worthless, and kill off any and all potential use of them that could benefit the public.
It'd be terribly embarrasing to drive 900 miles in a blind rage to attack somebody, only to miss your chance due to an ill time potty break.
Embarrassing? Embarrassing!?!? She drove cross country with a mallet and BB gun, wearing a diaper. I don't think embarrassment was at the top of her list.
Luckily, most of the time you're not doing that sort of thing;
Which is why PowerNow, SpeedStepping, and whatever else they call it lately, is in widespread use on both notebooks and desktops now. x86 CPUs can be clocked down and undervolted to almost nothing when idle.
You don't run full video editing suites or heavy CFD codes on a handheld!
Video playback, however, is quite popular on PDAs. And with a 30GB hard drive, I fully expect things along the lines of video editing/encoding, heavy encryption, and many similarly CPU-intensive tasks being performed on this tiny palmtop.
Even with only a 1.1GHz Pentium M CPU, it can fly past the fastest PDAs available, where needed.
Because it needs to be x86, with in turn means that it needs to have a bigger battery, fancier engineering, special cooling.
x86 is extremely efficient. Remember the OLPC??? It's running x86, on a couple watts. Show me something better.
A hard drive because it needs to swap due to Windows memory needs and usage patterns.
Yeah, you've gotta have a 30GD HDD for a Windows swap file...
Kill off Windows, and then you have a bunch of better processors - PPC, ARM, whatever. Smaller battery. No special cooling.
The only reason ARM/MIPS/SH3 CPUs in PDAs and cell phones have lower power specs than mobile x86 CPUs, is because they omit the MMU, FPU, etc. etc. Once you start trying to run REAL software on those CPUs, you find the 400MHz ARM CPU runs worse than the 200MHz Pentium CPU you had 10 years ago, which had similarly low power requirements...
No need for a hard drive. No Windows license. Room for other features - cell phone/modem? Bluetooth hub functionality?
Yeah, because Linux can store your 20GB database on a 4GB Compact Flash card...
And the Windows license, that takes up a lot of room on the PCB...
Ehm. No. Their vibration scale is x out of 10, 10 being completely without vibrations.
Yeah, my mistake. Just took a quick glance.
FWIW AAM on or off doesn't make much of a difference with my drive, especially since I suspended it.
I find that very strange. It made all the difference with mine (WD 160GB).
Why? First among other things: "Much lower noise."
It's strange, they list many things, but nothing about arm noise, spin-up/spin-down noise, etc. Also, the extra quiet 2.5" HDD @16dB is quite the exception, most are 20dB just like their larger counterparts.
Besides, insurance is meant to cover damage due to normal mishandling, such as dropping a box by mistake, not the kind of (at least nearly) intentional damage that must have been involved in my case. Or maybe you have a theory of how my box got squashed that badly in the normal course of FedEx's business.
I still don't know where you get that idea. Insurance is meant to handle any kind of damage, including being completely destroyed in plane crashes, car accidents, train derailments, theft, loss, and anything else that could possibly occur.
For your package, I imagine it was run over by one piece of equipment or another. Forklifts, tractor trailers, etc. Or it may have been some sort of freak accident with equipment in their automated package handling system. I certainly don't have any reason to believe it was intentional, unless you have some reason to believe you've seriously pissed-off your local fedex office employees beforehand...
Yes. That's hard. At least compared to just buying cheap, off the shelf quiet components.
Not at all. If you're buying a PSU separately, you're competent enough to route all the wires, plug-in the ATX connectors properly, and remove and replace a dozen screws.
At that, throwing 8 more screws into the mix, and one more wire to plug-in isn't a big deal.
the doctrine at Silent PC Review, probably the definitive resource on this kind of stuff, is that 2.5" disks overall are more quiet than 3.5" disks
I'm not sure what gives you that idea. They very clearly rate notebook hard drives as having much, much higher vibrations than any desktop hard drives. The non-vibration acoustics are, at worst, very, very close between the two.
IMHO, their testing methodology leaves a lot to be desired (which is why I no longer read the site). The 0-1 dB difference between AACs and default on most drives clearly contradicts the significant improvements I've heard with my own ears.
MP3 is simply overrated. Today, with all the vast improvements to MP3 sound quality that have been made by LAME, such as VBR and psycho acoustic models, it's still less than a 33% bitrate reduction over MP2.
At the time (mid to late '90s) when it was still CBR, and sounded pretty lowsy. It was barely any improvement at all over the MP2 files that were popular around the web. What's worse, MP3 used significantly more CPU power to accomplish that small bitrate savings.
It seems those who forget history are doomed to repeat it... It's a whole new level of sad to find people talking encoding their music to high-bitrate MP3s for better sound quality... It's been pretty universally accepted for a very long time that, at 192K or above, MP2 sounds far better than MP3 can ever hope to, at any bitrate. The frequency domain coding required by MP3 causes distortions that the time domain coding of MP2 does not. This (plus better error resiliency) is why broadcasters use MP2, and won't touch MP3.
And nobody better try to tell me they need MP3s for compatibility... MP3 is 100% backwards compatible... Rename your MP2 files to.mp3 and any MP3 player in the world will handle it.
While I'm ranting... the same goes for MPEG video. MPEG-1 looks better than MPEG-2 videos at low bitrates, and even better than MPEG-4 (IMO) at very low bitrates. Any format that can play MPEG-4 can play MPEG-2, and anything that can play MPEG-2 can play MPEG-1 (which happens to be patent-free for years now).
No, it's exactly the same format now, as it always was. VBR vs CBR is an improvement, as are the much newer psycho-acoustic models, but it's still 100% MP3 format. The earliest decoders, if they weren't written to be very strict, could decode the newest MP3s just fine.
Personally, I haven't tried water cooling yet, but I would definitely like to get the sound of a buzzsaw out of my PC.
Water cooling won't help. For one, you still need a very hefty fan cooling your radiator, as well as a noisy water pump.
For another, water cooling only helps with point cooling... You can cool your CPU easily enough, but good luck cooling the hundreds of other tiny components that get quite warm... So you'll still need a couple of case fans.
The "buzzsaw" noise in your system isn't due to fans, it's due to crappy fans. Buy some decent, thermally controlled fans, or any AMD64 system with CnQ (which will adjust fan speed as needed) and you'll see a world of difference. It won't be silent, but neither is water cooling.
The power supply is probably the hardest thing to get quiet,
Not at all. Just replace the stock 80mm fan with a better (thermally controlled) one. For $5, you've got a very quiet PSU. For those not proficient with soldering or splicing, a $1 fan extension cable to will be long enough to allow you to plug the fan into your motherboard, or a fan speed controller.
Hint: Avoid PSUs with 120mm fans. It's all gimmick. They're usually poorly designed, with horrible airflow, and much noisier than 80mm versions.
like a Seasonic, for 75 bucks or so.
Bah! Seasonic PSUs can be found for $45 easily.
elastic mounting works wonders, but it's still just quiet, not silent. You need to go for a more expensive 2.5" drive and possibly sound insulation for that.
Bah! 2.5" HDDs are usually louder than their desktop equivalents, because of power saving features which quickly snap the arm back and forth.
Once you've got your 3.5" HDD shock-mounted, use hdparm (or whatever tool for your platform) to set acoustic noise management to it's maximum setting (hdparm -M128). Your hard drive will be damn near silent.
The only component that is hard to get silent is the DVD drive... Samsung seems to be trying, but they were unreliable junk when I bought one, and didn't allow you to set the read speed lower, which should have been the #1 noise saving feature.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet here you are, reading
Yes they are. NoScript is great, and stops both annoying/dangerous javascript and Flash, but it certainly doesn't block animated GIFs, or any other ads that take up ridiculous amounts of page real-estate.
Go to View -> Page Style -> No Style
Viola, no page formatting at all (no columns), you just have to scroll down to the start of the content you want to see.
Good luck getting better than 93% efficiency with inverters and (cheap) batteries... or any other storage and conversion methods for that matter.
No, here in the US, people simply demand more higher-end services for poor people living in mud huts.
Most people in the US will complain when their sound quality just drops, or when their internet access slows down... To the poor, a poor signal is perfectly acceptable. And a lot of hassle, like attaching a 10' antenna wire to your cell phone is something they wouldn't think twice about. No such luck here.
If people in the western world were willing to accept such conditions, you could get away with far lower-powered cell towers, with minimal maintenance on the old established tech. Not to mention cheaper land, and no aesthetic or other restrictions, allowing much more massive towers.
Because it doesn't work that way...
If your tower costs $0 to operate, and your competition's cost $100 to operate, you can price yours one dollar less, and make $99 in profit, while your competition goes bankrupt. To keep prices up, you need widespread collusion between competitors, but that has nothing to do with capitalism, and can happen with any economic system.
Umm, who? Only Intel's craptastic P4 was so inefficient that it needed to get up near 4GHz to compete with a sub-2GHz Athlon. Now, even Intel has stepped back from the edge, and sells processors only about 2GHz. With no sign of a MHz boost coming.
There could be a lot of reasons for that, such as videocard, slow RAM/IO, etc. If you have an old P4 or a VIA CPU, and that would completely explain it.
I suspect, however, it has mostly to do with the fact that downloadable DRMed content is usually in a high-end format like h.264 or WMV9, which is far more CPU-intensive than MPEG-2 used in DVDs.
It can't be far off. Mobile chips like the Turion run on 25W, don't need a hot northbridge, etc. Throw in an extremely efficient PSU like Seasonic, and you could passively cool it without any special designs.
I've found that gigabit ethernet is generally faster than local disks. Put several dozen machines on a switch, and hook it up to a massive machine with a ton of disks in the datacenter, and it might actually improve performance for everyone.
Blame the software, not the hardware.
Even a PII 300MHz system should have no problem playing back DVDs, if configured properly, with MPlayer.
I want those 2 minutes of my life back...
You haven't seen some of the PCs I have...
Yes. EVERYTHING is in the Windows registry. If you don't know how to do some advanced registry editing, you're pretty well screwed when something trivial gets corrupted, incorrectly set, etc.
No. The current system where you can use it for any personal/private purpose you want, is just fine. Public domain suggests you can resell it to others.
All your method would do is to ensure that nothing good would be broadcast in the clear, and heavy encryption with DRM would be required by the public to listen to the radio, further taking away more rights.
The FCC has been far too biased towards business, but that doesn't mean we should make the airwaves worthless, and kill off any and all potential use of them that could benefit the public.
Actually, it's mainly because trucks have far larger gas tanks (and run on diesel) so can go many more hours between stops than cars.
If trucks had to stop every 6 hours to refill, you'd never have heard of trucker bombs.
Embarrassing? Embarrassing!?!? She drove cross country with a mallet and BB gun, wearing a diaper. I don't think embarrassment was at the top of her list.
It's clear nobody else here on
Which is why PowerNow, SpeedStepping, and whatever else they call it lately, is in widespread use on both notebooks and desktops now. x86 CPUs can be clocked down and undervolted to almost nothing when idle.
Video playback, however, is quite popular on PDAs. And with a 30GB hard drive, I fully expect things along the lines of video editing/encoding, heavy encryption, and many similarly CPU-intensive tasks being performed on this tiny palmtop.
Even with only a 1.1GHz Pentium M CPU, it can fly past the fastest PDAs available, where needed.
And the $1000 laptop can't even do what the $500 desktop could...
x86 is extremely efficient. Remember the OLPC??? It's running x86, on a couple watts. Show me something better.
Yeah, you've gotta have a 30GD HDD for a Windows swap file...
The only reason ARM/MIPS/SH3 CPUs in PDAs and cell phones have lower power specs than mobile x86 CPUs, is because they omit the MMU, FPU, etc. etc. Once you start trying to run REAL software on those CPUs, you find the 400MHz ARM CPU runs worse than the 200MHz Pentium CPU you had 10 years ago, which had similarly low power requirements...
Yeah, because Linux can store your 20GB database on a 4GB Compact Flash card...
And the Windows license, that takes up a lot of room on the PCB...
Yeah, my mistake. Just took a quick glance.
I find that very strange. It made all the difference with mine (WD 160GB).
It's strange, they list many things, but nothing about arm noise, spin-up/spin-down noise, etc. Also, the extra quiet 2.5" HDD @16dB is quite the exception, most are 20dB just like their larger counterparts.
I still don't know where you get that idea. Insurance is meant to handle any kind of damage, including being completely destroyed in plane crashes, car accidents, train derailments, theft, loss, and anything else that could possibly occur.
For your package, I imagine it was run over by one piece of equipment or another. Forklifts, tractor trailers, etc. Or it may have been some sort of freak accident with equipment in their automated package handling system. I certainly don't have any reason to believe it was intentional, unless you have some reason to believe you've seriously pissed-off your local fedex office employees beforehand...
Not at all. If you're buying a PSU separately, you're competent enough to route all the wires, plug-in the ATX connectors properly, and remove and replace a dozen screws.
At that, throwing 8 more screws into the mix, and one more wire to plug-in isn't a big deal.
I'm not sure what gives you that idea. They very clearly rate notebook hard drives as having much, much higher vibrations than any desktop hard drives. The non-vibration acoustics are, at worst, very, very close between the two.
IMHO, their testing methodology leaves a lot to be desired (which is why I no longer read the site). The 0-1 dB difference between AACs and default on most drives clearly contradicts the significant improvements I've heard with my own ears.
MP3 is simply overrated. Today, with all the vast improvements to MP3 sound quality that have been made by LAME, such as VBR and psycho acoustic models, it's still less than a 33% bitrate reduction over MP2.
.mp3 and any MP3 player in the world will handle it.
At the time (mid to late '90s) when it was still CBR, and sounded pretty lowsy. It was barely any improvement at all over the MP2 files that were popular around the web. What's worse, MP3 used significantly more CPU power to accomplish that small bitrate savings.
It seems those who forget history are doomed to repeat it... It's a whole new level of sad to find people talking encoding their music to high-bitrate MP3s for better sound quality... It's been pretty universally accepted for a very long time that, at 192K or above, MP2 sounds far better than MP3 can ever hope to, at any bitrate. The frequency domain coding required by MP3 causes distortions that the time domain coding of MP2 does not. This (plus better error resiliency) is why broadcasters use MP2, and won't touch MP3.
And nobody better try to tell me they need MP3s for compatibility... MP3 is 100% backwards compatible... Rename your MP2 files to
While I'm ranting... the same goes for MPEG video. MPEG-1 looks better than MPEG-2 videos at low bitrates, and even better than MPEG-4 (IMO) at very low bitrates. Any format that can play MPEG-4 can play MPEG-2, and anything that can play MPEG-2 can play MPEG-1 (which happens to be patent-free for years now).
No, it will be free like GIF/LZW, MPEG-1 video, MP2 audio, etc.
No, it's exactly the same format now, as it always was. VBR vs CBR is an improvement, as are the much newer psycho-acoustic models, but it's still 100% MP3 format. The earliest decoders, if they weren't written to be very strict, could decode the newest MP3s just fine.
Water cooling won't help. For one, you still need a very hefty fan cooling your radiator, as well as a noisy water pump.
For another, water cooling only helps with point cooling... You can cool your CPU easily enough, but good luck cooling the hundreds of other tiny components that get quite warm... So you'll still need a couple of case fans.
The "buzzsaw" noise in your system isn't due to fans, it's due to crappy fans. Buy some decent, thermally controlled fans, or any AMD64 system with CnQ (which will adjust fan speed as needed) and you'll see a world of difference. It won't be silent, but neither is water cooling.
Not at all. Just replace the stock 80mm fan with a better (thermally controlled) one. For $5, you've got a very quiet PSU. For those not proficient with soldering or splicing, a $1 fan extension cable to will be long enough to allow you to plug the fan into your motherboard, or a fan speed controller.
Hint: Avoid PSUs with 120mm fans. It's all gimmick. They're usually poorly designed, with horrible airflow, and much noisier than 80mm versions.
Bah! Seasonic PSUs can be found for $45 easily.
Bah! 2.5" HDDs are usually louder than their desktop equivalents, because of power saving features which quickly snap the arm back and forth.
Once you've got your 3.5" HDD shock-mounted, use hdparm (or whatever tool for your platform) to set acoustic noise management to it's maximum setting (hdparm -M128). Your hard drive will be damn near silent.
The only component that is hard to get silent is the DVD drive... Samsung seems to be trying, but they were unreliable junk when I bought one, and didn't allow you to set the read speed lower, which should have been the #1 noise saving feature.