That's a nice overview, but one important thing you forgot to mention for those who want a decent video card with a good performance/power ratio is that NVIDIA just recently came out with the G71/G73 cores, both manufactured at 90nm, which market as 7900GTX, 7900GT, 7600GT, and 7600GS in decreasing order of power draw. The last one in particular has amazing price/performance/power balance - it's only about 4x slower than the most ridiculous single-card solution out there, has passive cooling (!), and can be had for under $120.
It's blindingly obvious why it is important in laptops - not only because of battery lifetime, but also because the cooling assembly size and weight depends on TDP, and of course for user comfort considerations. Intel started a mobile CPU revolution with the Pentium M, so it's a little disappointing to hear that its latest successor doesn't improve further.
It's just as blindingly obvious why heat is terribly important for servers, where rack heat and power density has long been the limiting factor to packing more servers into less space.
On desktops, to me personally, heat is a premier consideration when choosing any chip. I have no need for something twice as fast as my current CPU if it consumes twice the amount of power. I expect better.
One of the skills taught in the martial arts class I attend is how to stop your opponent without the danger of killing them or using illegal techniques.
That said, I think you're removing yourself too much from the point of view of a kid being bullied. The emotional and psychological effects of it can be immense. I remember all too well how it was for me not being able to avoid or fight the bullies (as opposed to yourself), and the cumulative effects it caused. Having martial arts training would not cause me to go around permanently injuring or killing the bullies; it would give me - first and foremost - a confidence and serenity unattainable by other methods, which in itself is a massive deterrent; and the ability to communicate the fact that attacking me would be ineffective and would cause pain. It would also make me confident enough to report the bullies to authorities (teachers, police, whatever).
I respect your opinion as a shodan, but I think you're not being inadequate here. The vast majority of kids for whom being bullied is a problem would benefit from martial arts training to the point where it ceases to be a problem completely; and I doubt there are any cases of bullies being killed specifically because the victim knew a martial art.
As for your example, I think the proper way to train a child to respond to this is to teach them to tell the police. At least in a city with a reasonable police force, I don't hesitate a single second to whip out my cell phone and call the police at the first sign of violence. Kids need to be taught the same idea, and school administrators who refuse to deal with violence on school territory need to be fired. This doesn't really work for ghetto schools, but ghettos need addressing on a whole different level.
Both your premises and your conclusions are bullshit. For instance, batteries are easily detachable from the laptop because they are replaceable. I just replaced my battery and the battery life is back to 4 hours. Sure, some of your premises may hold for very cheaply made laptops, but you're painting with too broad a brush.
I bought my laptop right after the big breakthrough in laptop technology (Centrino) and I spend between $100 and $200 each year upgrading it (more, faster hard drives, new battery, etc). Since it's a high quality chassis (T40) still backed by warranty (about to run out after 3 years) the few mechanical problems stemming from heavy use are fixed, and will continue to be after the warranty runs out since I can order any part of the laptop, from LCD assembly down to individual screw types, from IBM. I wholly expect this laptop to serve me for another 5 years, because in the past 3, the top laptops of its class have become barely twice as fast as this one. Windows XP would run fine on a laptop with a quarter the specs of this one. I fully expect Vista to have the same memory footprint as XP once the unneeded services are stopped, or at least one that will run fine in 512 MB of RAM. And since I run Linux, I won't need to worry about that anyway.
No one in their right mind will base their hardware decisions on the presence of DRM - it will not be available for a long time and is irresponsible anyway since it shows that you're willing to be locked up. Microsoft tried to get me to use some DRM with its WMA files - I delete them on sight and have not been inconvenienced by it in the least. I expect to do the same thing with DRM components in any OS, and not to buy hardware whose functionality is crippled by DRM (as opposed to "optional" DRM in it).
And you can be absolutely sure that administrators, if they have any say at all about where critical data is put, do not base their decisions on the hardware specs of the laptop, but on how well secured the OS is, how knowledgeable and responsible the user is, and whether the laptop implements such basic features as support for hard drive password protection.
The point is that the usefulness of a laptop is not determined solely by its specs but by the quality of its components, the support of its manufacturer (I believe you can still get parts from IBM for even the 600 series), and the expertise of its user. There is no reason for laptops to have lifespans of 1 to 2 years.
As for the solution, the cheap and easy option nowadays is to simply use stock motherboards - most will accomodate 4 SATA drives and up to 4 PATA drives with no extra work - and run Linux with software RAID on them. It's still a problem to boot from a RAID disk, so one can be set aside for that purpose. Motherboards have GigE nowadays, so speed is not limited by the network link. 300 GB drives are cheap, making a 1.5 TB server affordable if you acquire it piecewise over the course of a year or two.
Now duplicate this setup into 2 boxes and you're good to go.
What you neglect to mention is that Intel's 90 nm process suffers from very high leakage and thus thermal problems, while AMD has managed to decrease overall TDP dramatically on their 90 nm designs compared to 130 nm. 65 nm will probably be different, but as the processes in current production stand, AMD's 90nm kicks Intel's ass.
Instead of blocking the installation of anything, why doesn't this do what IE does with DirectX controls and such, ie say "hey, this page WANTS to do this, SHOULD I let it?", with an option of "Yes please"?
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Don't you know that's one of the main install vectors of spyware on Windows? When you see a big fat dialog in the middle of your browsing session, your biggest urge is usually to get that dialog out of the way. Many unexperienced users will just click "yes" without looking, like they would with a "Security Certificate Expired" dialog for instance. Making the user perform certain non-trivial steps to install plugins and not letting website authors snare them with dialogs where one of the options will cause data loss (if not worse) is a good thing.
Re:Now we just need...
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
To each their own. To me, Gnome apps look flashy (icons in standard OK/Cancel/Apply buttons? No thanks, I just need Enter/Esc to work), disjointed (try comparing the amount of shared functionality in Gnome apps and KDE apps sometime - you can expect each KDE app to implement standard toolbar/shortcut configuration dialogs and tons of other standard actions in predictable ways), uncoordinated (the default CrystalSVG KDE iconset is more coherent than anything I've seen in Gnome, and with only minor tweaking the whole environment looks very subdued and serious) and by no means faster than anything I use in KDE. The two points I agree with you on are bad toolbars (not so much cluttered as the customization tool is broken) and bugs in icon text/selection rectangle drawing.
KDE is far more integrated than any other set of apps I've seen, and this integration is useful in many non-obvious ways. To me, in KDE things look more refined.
Re:If 3.5 is a major release...
on
KDE 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
If 3.5 is a major release... what will 4.0 be? A stupendous release?
TweakUI on Windows allows you to set a registry flag which will disallow this behavior. There are programs which will not honor it (including Firefox, which is why I turn on its error pages).
On KDE, if a program is acting up, you can set in window-specific preferences to never allow it to steal focus ever again. That means unless you click on the title bar, the app will never get focus. This can be set for all programs, too.
Here's another testimonial to how much KDE rocks. When I started exploring the desktop options on Linux, I was very unhappy with Gnome's suite of apps and design methodology. I was just as unimpressed by XFCE's minimalism and other WMs' total lack of desktop component integration. Then I saw KDE 3.3 and was somewhat interested. By the time 3.4 came out (with lots of polish upon 3.3), I was hooked. At 3.5, I'm a fan, and KDE 4 will rock the world of desktop environments.
But as I found out very soon, KDE's strength is not just in the desktop itself but also in the apps: as the parent posters say, development is easy and integration of standard components is thorough. For instance, every app that needs to do text editing uses the same text editing library component (Kate KPart) and so the awesome power of the Kate editor is available in all text editing apps.
The KDE apps I've come to love and use every day:
* AmaroK, Konqueror, Konsole, Kile, Quanta, K3B, KPDF (bring on the kviewshell integration though!) were mentioned before.
* Kdevelop offers an awesome C++ development environment, not to mention powerful development for KDE.
* Kopete and Korganizer very nearly match the functionality of Trillian and Outlook, respectively, with the obvious advantages. Step aside, Gaim and Evolution.
* Kate is, once again, an awesome text editor. I used to like UltraEdit and grudgingly learn Emacs. Then I saw Kate.
* Kaffeine is the most polished video playing front-end in all of Linux. Using MPlayer and Xine directly? What a joke. (I do of course respect the MPlayer and Xine teams' back-end development efforts)
And on and on...
There is a massive number of useful applications for KDE. I, too, am truly thankful for the work of all the developers who made this desktop possible.
I've been happy with SessionSaver so I kept it and didn't use the save session feature in Tab Mix. If it does all the same things, then eventually I'll switch to that.
SessionSaver - invisible and absolute persistency TabMix Plus - tab rearrangement, scrollable tab bar, one window rule enforcement, tab highlighting and permissions, and a lot more Flashblock - replace all Flash on a page with clickable banners ImageZoomer - zoom in or out of images via context menu Nuke Anything - remove any element of a page via context menu, useful for annoying page elements when you just want to read the text Permit Cookies - cookie management via alt+C downTHEMall! - occasionally useful for mass downloads short of wget Google Suggest - occasionally useful for searching with the Google box
I don't use AdBlock because the combination of Flashblock and/etc/hosts based filtering is sufficient for me.
Reliability reports on drives grouped by manufacturer cannot be trusted except when they're extreme low outliers (e.g. IBM's Deathstar). All major brands today are about equally reliable for practical purposes (except when you have severe heat dissipation issues maybe). In 8 years and no less than 15 different drives of 10 different models, I have not had a Maxtor drive die on me.
In general, I find that clean power is much more necessary than a preferred manufacturer. Dirty power from a cheap or overloaded power supply may kill the most reliable drive ever.
This means extensive end-user testing and brutal simplification. The user should never see anything unrelated to exactly what they want to do. The folder heirarchy they see on the drive should ONLY contain things relevant to their activities. They should [not] have to wade through "interface spam" of a million options which one in a million users will ever actually use.
Brutal oversimplification is why Gnome is a bad thing for the Linux desktop. I can't overemphasize how much more I appreciate the KDE approach of "more options, organized better" to the Gnome approach of "this option will never be used by a newbie user, cut it out of the GUI". Linux appeals so much more to the power user than to the newbie that it's harmful to alienate the former just to make the latter a little more comfortable.
I've seen options spam that you mention, and the key to eliminating it is not to cut down on configurability, but to better organize, name, and describe the options.
Concur. But even more importantly, screen by default doesn't come with any sort of on-screen window list. This.screenrc line makes a screen session tremendously more comprehensible to me:
Oh, I see. I misread the context and thought you were comparing future Intel dual-core chips for Apple to AMD ones.
On the other hand I would guess that tasks which must communicate frequently have an advantage on dual-core chips due to the lower latency between the two chips' caches.
If it was an Athlon 64, it could have performed worse, because you'd be going from dual independent memory controllers to a shared memory controller
Regardless of memory controller architecture, Athlon 64 dual cores significantly outperform Intel ones, primarily because they have a better inter-core bus (and maybe better cache architecture?).
Slashdot Mirror
That's a nice overview, but one important thing you forgot to mention for those who want a decent video card with a good performance/power ratio is that NVIDIA just recently came out with the G71/G73 cores, both manufactured at 90nm, which market as 7900GTX, 7900GT, 7600GT, and 7600GS in decreasing order of power draw. The last one in particular has amazing price/performance/power balance - it's only about 4x slower than the most ridiculous single-card solution out there, has passive cooling (!), and can be had for under $120.
How important is heat, really?
Extremely important.
It's blindingly obvious why it is important in laptops - not only because of battery lifetime, but also because the cooling assembly size and weight depends on TDP, and of course for user comfort considerations. Intel started a mobile CPU revolution with the Pentium M, so it's a little disappointing to hear that its latest successor doesn't improve further.
It's just as blindingly obvious why heat is terribly important for servers, where rack heat and power density has long been the limiting factor to packing more servers into less space.
On desktops, to me personally, heat is a premier consideration when choosing any chip. I have no need for something twice as fast as my current CPU if it consumes twice the amount of power. I expect better.
You're using Excel for something best handled by a database solution.
One of the skills taught in the martial arts class I attend is how to stop your opponent without the danger of killing them or using illegal techniques.
That said, I think you're removing yourself too much from the point of view of a kid being bullied. The emotional and psychological effects of it can be immense. I remember all too well how it was for me not being able to avoid or fight the bullies (as opposed to yourself), and the cumulative effects it caused. Having martial arts training would not cause me to go around permanently injuring or killing the bullies; it would give me - first and foremost - a confidence and serenity unattainable by other methods, which in itself is a massive deterrent; and the ability to communicate the fact that attacking me would be ineffective and would cause pain. It would also make me confident enough to report the bullies to authorities (teachers, police, whatever).
I respect your opinion as a shodan, but I think you're not being inadequate here. The vast majority of kids for whom being bullied is a problem would benefit from martial arts training to the point where it ceases to be a problem completely; and I doubt there are any cases of bullies being killed specifically because the victim knew a martial art.
As for your example, I think the proper way to train a child to respond to this is to teach them to tell the police. At least in a city with a reasonable police force, I don't hesitate a single second to whip out my cell phone and call the police at the first sign of violence. Kids need to be taught the same idea, and school administrators who refuse to deal with violence on school territory need to be fired. This doesn't really work for ghetto schools, but ghettos need addressing on a whole different level.
Both your premises and your conclusions are bullshit. For instance, batteries are easily detachable from the laptop because they are replaceable. I just replaced my battery and the battery life is back to 4 hours. Sure, some of your premises may hold for very cheaply made laptops, but you're painting with too broad a brush.
I bought my laptop right after the big breakthrough in laptop technology (Centrino) and I spend between $100 and $200 each year upgrading it (more, faster hard drives, new battery, etc). Since it's a high quality chassis (T40) still backed by warranty (about to run out after 3 years) the few mechanical problems stemming from heavy use are fixed, and will continue to be after the warranty runs out since I can order any part of the laptop, from LCD assembly down to individual screw types, from IBM. I wholly expect this laptop to serve me for another 5 years, because in the past 3, the top laptops of its class have become barely twice as fast as this one. Windows XP would run fine on a laptop with a quarter the specs of this one. I fully expect Vista to have the same memory footprint as XP once the unneeded services are stopped, or at least one that will run fine in 512 MB of RAM. And since I run Linux, I won't need to worry about that anyway.
No one in their right mind will base their hardware decisions on the presence of DRM - it will not be available for a long time and is irresponsible anyway since it shows that you're willing to be locked up. Microsoft tried to get me to use some DRM with its WMA files - I delete them on sight and have not been inconvenienced by it in the least. I expect to do the same thing with DRM components in any OS, and not to buy hardware whose functionality is crippled by DRM (as opposed to "optional" DRM in it).
And you can be absolutely sure that administrators, if they have any say at all about where critical data is put, do not base their decisions on the hardware specs of the laptop, but on how well secured the OS is, how knowledgeable and responsible the user is, and whether the laptop implements such basic features as support for hard drive password protection.
The point is that the usefulness of a laptop is not determined solely by its specs but by the quality of its components, the support of its manufacturer (I believe you can still get parts from IBM for even the 600 series), and the expertise of its user. There is no reason for laptops to have lifespans of 1 to 2 years.
Oh, and make sure you have a good power supply to run those drives. And a properly ventilated chassis (a fan in the front should work).
Never trust your data to any one box.
As for the solution, the cheap and easy option nowadays is to simply use stock motherboards - most will accomodate 4 SATA drives and up to 4 PATA drives with no extra work - and run Linux with software RAID on them. It's still a problem to boot from a RAID disk, so one can be set aside for that purpose. Motherboards have GigE nowadays, so speed is not limited by the network link. 300 GB drives are cheap, making a 1.5 TB server affordable if you acquire it piecewise over the course of a year or two.
Now duplicate this setup into 2 boxes and you're good to go.
What you neglect to mention is that Intel's 90 nm process suffers from very high leakage and thus thermal problems, while AMD has managed to decrease overall TDP dramatically on their 90 nm designs compared to 130 nm. 65 nm will probably be different, but as the processes in current production stand, AMD's 90nm kicks Intel's ass.
And Debian actually *is* the only significant distro that isn't tied to a corporation. Which matters.
Try Gentoo. (Well, and Ubuntu, which is linked to Debian.)
It does matter. That's why, when I was choosing a distro, I chose Gentoo because it's far more agile than Debian in many respects.
Instead of blocking the installation of anything, why doesn't this do what IE does with DirectX controls and such, ie say "hey, this page WANTS to do this, SHOULD I let it?", with an option of "Yes please"?
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Don't you know that's one of the main install vectors of spyware on Windows? When you see a big fat dialog in the middle of your browsing session, your biggest urge is usually to get that dialog out of the way. Many unexperienced users will just click "yes" without looking, like they would with a "Security Certificate Expired" dialog for instance. Making the user perform certain non-trivial steps to install plugins and not letting website authors snare them with dialogs where one of the options will cause data loss (if not worse) is a good thing.
To each their own. To me, Gnome apps look flashy (icons in standard OK/Cancel/Apply buttons? No thanks, I just need Enter/Esc to work), disjointed (try comparing the amount of shared functionality in Gnome apps and KDE apps sometime - you can expect each KDE app to implement standard toolbar/shortcut configuration dialogs and tons of other standard actions in predictable ways), uncoordinated (the default CrystalSVG KDE iconset is more coherent than anything I've seen in Gnome, and with only minor tweaking the whole environment looks very subdued and serious) and by no means faster than anything I use in KDE. The two points I agree with you on are bad toolbars (not so much cluttered as the customization tool is broken) and bugs in icon text/selection rectangle drawing.
KDE is far more integrated than any other set of apps I've seen, and this integration is useful in many non-obvious ways. To me, in KDE things look more refined.
If 3.5 is a major release... what will 4.0 be? A stupendous release?
Yes.
TweakUI on Windows allows you to set a registry flag which will disallow this behavior. There are programs which will not honor it (including Firefox, which is why I turn on its error pages).
On KDE, if a program is acting up, you can set in window-specific preferences to never allow it to steal focus ever again. That means unless you click on the title bar, the app will never get focus. This can be set for all programs, too.
And on and on...
Here's another testimonial to how much KDE rocks. When I started exploring the desktop options on Linux, I was very unhappy with Gnome's suite of apps and design methodology. I was just as unimpressed by XFCE's minimalism and other WMs' total lack of desktop component integration. Then I saw KDE 3.3 and was somewhat interested. By the time 3.4 came out (with lots of polish upon 3.3), I was hooked. At 3.5, I'm a fan, and KDE 4 will rock the world of desktop environments.
But as I found out very soon, KDE's strength is not just in the desktop itself but also in the apps: as the parent posters say, development is easy and integration of standard components is thorough. For instance, every app that needs to do text editing uses the same text editing library component (Kate KPart) and so the awesome power of the Kate editor is available in all text editing apps.
The KDE apps I've come to love and use every day:
* AmaroK, Konqueror, Konsole, Kile, Quanta, K3B, KPDF (bring on the kviewshell integration though!) were mentioned before.
* Kdevelop offers an awesome C++ development environment, not to mention powerful development for KDE.
* Kopete and Korganizer very nearly match the functionality of Trillian and Outlook, respectively, with the obvious advantages. Step aside, Gaim and Evolution.
* Kate is, once again, an awesome text editor. I used to like UltraEdit and grudgingly learn Emacs. Then I saw Kate.
* Kaffeine is the most polished video playing front-end in all of Linux. Using MPlayer and Xine directly? What a joke. (I do of course respect the MPlayer and Xine teams' back-end development efforts)
And on and on...
There is a massive number of useful applications for KDE. I, too, am truly thankful for the work of all the developers who made this desktop possible.
Actually, that's what laptops are for
I've been happy with SessionSaver so I kept it and didn't use the save session feature in Tab Mix. If it does all the same things, then eventually I'll switch to that.
SessionSaver - invisible and absolute persistency
/etc/hosts based filtering is sufficient for me.
TabMix Plus - tab rearrangement, scrollable tab bar, one window rule enforcement, tab highlighting and permissions, and a lot more
Flashblock - replace all Flash on a page with clickable banners
ImageZoomer - zoom in or out of images via context menu
Nuke Anything - remove any element of a page via context menu, useful for annoying page elements when you just want to read the text
Permit Cookies - cookie management via alt+C
downTHEMall! - occasionally useful for mass downloads short of wget
Google Suggest - occasionally useful for searching with the Google box
I don't use AdBlock because the combination of Flashblock and
I'd mod you up, if I hadn't posted :)
Reliability reports on drives grouped by manufacturer cannot be trusted except when they're extreme low outliers (e.g. IBM's Deathstar). All major brands today are about equally reliable for practical purposes (except when you have severe heat dissipation issues maybe). In 8 years and no less than 15 different drives of 10 different models, I have not had a Maxtor drive die on me.
In general, I find that clean power is much more necessary than a preferred manufacturer. Dirty power from a cheap or overloaded power supply may kill the most reliable drive ever.
This means extensive end-user testing and brutal simplification. The user should never see anything unrelated to exactly what they want to do. The folder heirarchy they see on the drive should ONLY contain things relevant to their activities. They should [not] have to wade through "interface spam" of a million options which one in a million users will ever actually use.
Brutal oversimplification is why Gnome is a bad thing for the Linux desktop. I can't overemphasize how much more I appreciate the KDE approach of "more options, organized better" to the Gnome approach of "this option will never be used by a newbie user, cut it out of the GUI". Linux appeals so much more to the power user than to the newbie that it's harmful to alienate the former just to make the latter a little more comfortable.
I've seen options spam that you mention, and the key to eliminating it is not to cut down on configurability, but to better organize, name, and describe the options.
...when you pry my amaroK from my cold, dead hands.
Have you used amarok? It's everything winamp, foobar2000, and itunes were meant to be. It doesn't just rock. It dominates the other audio players.
Also, put this in your ~/.bash_profile:
if [[ `who -m` ]] ; then
[ -z "$WINDOW" ] && screen -xdR
fi
to start screen automatically on terminal logins and grab the previous screen session.
Concur. But even more importantly, screen by default doesn't come with any sort of on-screen window list. This .screenrc line makes a screen session tremendously more comprehensible to me:
backtick 1 0 0 whoami
caption always "%>%{kw}%1`@%H %{bw}%?%-Lw%?%{bW}%n*%f %t%?(%u)%?%{bw}%?%+Lw%?%"
This will put a caption at the bottom of the screen listing your open shells and highlighting the current one.
Oh, I see. I misread the context and thought you were comparing future Intel dual-core chips for Apple to AMD ones.
On the other hand I would guess that tasks which must communicate frequently have an advantage on dual-core chips due to the lower latency between the two chips' caches.
If it was an Athlon 64, it could have performed worse, because you'd be going from dual independent memory controllers to a shared memory controller
Regardless of memory controller architecture, Athlon 64 dual cores significantly outperform Intel ones, primarily because they have a better inter-core bus (and maybe better cache architecture?).