The spindowns are not the problem! -B 1 causes many drives to wait a very short time before unloading the heads off the platter and onto the ramp. But the OS sends read/write requests to the hdd every few seconds, unless laptop mode is enabled. The drive then must load the heads again, service the request, unload them, etc. every few seconds. This is not as bad as spin-up cycles, but very bad nonetheless.
I've noticed this behavior on my laptop, in fact I wrote a little script to stop the hard drive from doing the unloadings. I actually use Gentoo, but I wrote an ebuild for the acpi-support package to take advantage of Ubuntu's nice power management features. I didn't think Ubuntu's scripts would be the ones putting the drive into that mode!
Another thing is that if you plug the laptop in while it's asleep, then wake it, the power.sh script does not even fire, so you still get the head load cycles all the time even after plugging in.
This is really bad for all the laptops out there. Ubuntu needs to stop this behavior in acpi-support and ship an update now.
Instead, they're offering new features Are there any new features? The way I'm reading this is it's a 90->65nm die shrink with integrated RAMDACs (or whatever the proper term for DVI is). Not something an end-user would notice, other than a slimmer card drawing less power of course.
They'd lose no face in introducing an 8850 series... Now, it looks like GTS->GT->GTX which simply gets confusing when you look at the last two generations of nVidia products. I think it has always been confusing... it would be about as confusing if they released an 8850 which is slower than 8800 GTX or Ultra. Granted, ATI is even worse, and you're right in that the 6000/7000/8000 series have had mostly fairly logical model numbers aside from the letter suffixes. Both companies are apt to paint themselves into a corner with their numbering/lettering schemes and then release cards with ridiculous names like "X1800XTX" or something.
They're going to get steamrolled by ATI in a generation or two if the AMD/ATI partnership continues to open up specifications, release better drivers, and jack up performance. I'm sorry, but open specs and decent drivers do not great hardware engineering make. I'm as eager as anyone to see game development shift to Linux, but given that it was nVidia that steamrolled ATI for the past three product generations with increasing effect, what makes you think the next one will be different?
Yes, I'm fully aware that newer cards come out every few months, but it seems a little bit of a slap in the face when something comes out cheaper, arguably faster, and more manageable than your $400 piece of gear -without- a credible marketplace threat. Let me get this straight. You're complaining about nVidia releasing a new, cheaper, cooler, faster card not because ATI is about to cut its throat but simply because it wants to serve its customers better and push the envelope further???
It's really annoying how many luddites get modded up in this article. Just because you're happy with your games and can't see where new development can go, doesn't mean other people are the same way. nVidia is devoting massive engineering resources to pushing the envelope of GPU design to unprecedented performance, and now has set the stage for bringing the full force of the GeForce 8 architecture below $200, and at 65nm, below 110W TDP. There are scientific computing appliances being designed around the G80 to replace computers sold for many times the price. New engines like the Crytek one in Crysis and the Unreal 3 engine in UT3 work with unprecedented levels of detail. You may or may not enjoy the aesthetics or gameplay of these games, but you can't deny the technical excellence of both the hardware and software developers pushing the state of the art, and they are very much able to push these chips to the limits.
Ever heard of inflation? Fuel price volatility? Operational cost increases due to the retarded things our government does as a matter of foreign policy (and domestic policy designed to combat the results of that foreign policy)?
If you think that any consumer rights issue can be addressed by pointing fingers at the evil companies and screaming that they're robbing us of our money, you're delusional. Airline industry is a lot more competitive than it used to be even 10 years ago. It's also operating in an environmentally unsustainable mode (its carbon footprint is gigantic). Just because you pay 300 of your precious dollars to fly where you used to pay 200 and get no meal doesn't mean jack shit about the economics of the transaction.
Well, two things come to mind... one, since they're going to be climbing along a very thick cable already, why not attach power lines to the cable? The obvious problem with that is 35000 km or however long it is to geostationary orbit incurs giant, if not prohibitive, transmission losses in the power cable. A gas pipeline would work, though it obviously would need pumping substations since no pipeline will hold the pressure of a 35000 km tall pipe of fuel... the substations would in turn make it tricky to achieve good speed for the vehicle on the cable.
The other thing is, why not use a nuclear reactor to power the climber motors? A climber is a much more controlled environment than regular spacecraft, it can jettison the reactor in a reentry capsule if things go wrong. Cooling is tricky but probably possible with either big radiator panels or jettisoning superheated coolant. I really can't think of any compelling argument not to use a reactor here.
Can you please list your subnets? I'd like to blackhole them altogether so I don't have to deal with retarded admins who like to make my life more difficult than it already is.
Ping is an essential diagnostic tool. You're going out of your way to disable it for no good reason. Don't be surprised when network admins get annoyed at you, to put it very mildly.
do you really think that religious thought and practice have anything to do with what goes on in a science lab? Do you really think that God is hiding behind a Higgs Boson? I'm vehemently agnostic, and by agnostic I mean atheist without the faith thing atheists are used to being attacked for. That is, I reject all religion because it's absurd. Even so, as a scientist, I see only harm in antagonizing my religious scientist friends or anyone religious as long as they're not fundamentalist or use religion to exert influence on others. And whether you intend it or not, that's all you're accomplishing with your sweeping remarks.
Get this in your head: Good science doesn't depend on whether the person doing it was good, bad, whether their views aligned with yours or not. The whole idea of science is to deal in falsifiable hypotheses, which have nothing to do with anyone's religious beliefs (and by the way, real, personal religion has the potential to be far above such trite questions as whether God is hiding beyond this or that, and to be deeply emotionally satisfying). So don't call people fools because they might mix science and religion in their minds. It's none of your concern, and it brings you one step down toward the level on which the very religious bigots you want to oppose think and act.
It should be clear to any human being in this world that democracy (and the rule of secular law), though not perfect by any means, leads to a populace who have a moral investment in the country in which they live - and this leads them to think of greater things, such as science, and not the day-to-day issues like how to not be killed for wearing the wrong clothes. No, actually, it's not clear at all. How do people living in a democracy have a greater moral investment in their country than those living in a monarchy, or an oligarchy, or a dictatorship? How is the scientific elite of a country, and the educated middle class from which it's sourced, concerned with stuff like what one has to wear? (Know much about Pakistan?) It may be a symptom of something else in the society, but it sure isn't the cause.
You should be aware that your argument, while well-intentioned, is both flamebait to people who see no conflict between science and religion, and pretty disgusting in its arrogance to people who may actually agree with you otherwise.
Your theory is laughably incorrect. You apparently know absolutely nothing of the history of scientific accomplishment in the Soviet Union or the scientific juggernaut that China has become in the past decade. (Failing to become scientifically important? They are already important, still far behind the US and EU, but catching up fast.)
Totalitarian elites are just as aware of the benefits of research as less restrictive elites, if not more. The relative intellectual freedom of the scientists in USSR was a consequence, and not a cause, of the structure promulgated from above, and most scientists were nearly as brainwashed as the rest of the population. Some theories were arbitrarily attacked by the state (cf. Lysenkoism), resulting in quite a bit of damage, but the system actually worked around it.
Freedom of speech simply isn't necessary for scientific achievement. Read the articles in Science lately? (not the editorial content, the real articles) How much would you identify in them that would be objectionable to the censor? Nothing whatsoever for the vast majority of them. Access to publications, ability to publish, good research facilities, good basic education that allows for a scientific thought process to develop, and good leadership are pretty much all you need for scientific progress. The Soviets had that in abundance, the chinese have recently built it all up to a very formidable level.
Do not confuse freedom of speech as defied by authoritarian regimes with the social structure and priorities conductive to good science.
you still pay over $120 for a 12 pixel pipeline card, and those are using reject 16 pix pipe chips.... not that long back i remember their being $40 graphic cards in best buy, but last time i was in their they sold nothing under $80. by the time 100 pixel pipeline cards become affordable ill probabbly be an old man Huh? I just bought a card with 32 SPs for $100. ATI now sells midrange ($120) cards with 120 SPs. Both sell cards for under $40 (check online sometime) that kick three year old cards' ass. Check your facts.
The midrange market is not doing great in that you actually have to pay proportionally more to get a higher performing card (using the 8800 as the benchmark), but it's nowhere near as bad as you paint it.
You underestimate spectacularly the proportion of ignorant laptop thieves.
There are a lot more dumb thieves than smart thieves out there. A dumb thief, even one who intends to later resell the hardware, will try to use the laptop as if it was their own. The window of opportunity to allow that sort of thief to use it and expose themselves long enough to allow tracking them down is a trade-off with the security of the data on the laptop. I don't have the statistics, but I suspect that most laptop thefts are opportunistic and that the thief will try to use the laptop.
By the way, data security in laptops is really far easier to implement than most paranoid people think. Either you use whole-drive encryption which cannot be cracked, period, until the absolute majority of data is uselessly out-of-date or possibly unless NSA is interested in it (and I personally doubt NSA's ability to crack modern crypto in useful time), or you use a hard drive password combined with screen locks, which is just as secure if the drive is turned off and the password is strong (even if the drive is kept on, the attacker needs a very sophisticated electronics lab to swap the drive bus and read out the data). If you deal in state secrets which are sensitive even after decades, then obviously you'll take extra precautions.
Thanks for the great reply.
when was the last time you saw a video posted online with the headline "Cop does picture perfect takedown" and you thought to yourself "That was a perfectly reasonable display of force"? A long time ago, but of course, abuse gets highlighted, as it should be. Doing your job properly doesn't attract a whole lot of attention, and most cops I interact with are extremely professional, very cool dudes.
the taser was applied like a stun gun, which means it's localized pain rather than a full body shock , and it was used exactly as it should have been, in a short burst to shock him into cooperating so they could properly cuff and restrain him. You'll notice after that shock, it's all over. His cuffed, gets up under his own power and they walk him out. At what cost? Why couldn't they apply wrist and elbow techniques? I think taser - even in "stun drive" capacity, which as someone elsewhere in the discussion pointed out is an oxymoron - is a cruel device designed to elicit extreme pain, as opposed to some pain and much fear of further pain as proper incomplete applications of locks do. As such it should only be used when the subject is a real threat, not a hypothetical "he's thrashing on the floor and might grab our guns" threat. At least one of the officers was as heavy as the subject, so he could have applied restrained force effectively.
This kid looked to be about 6' and maybe 175lbs or so. Probably heavier.
Get one of your friends who's built like this, and then get 3 or 4 of your buddies and a pair of handcuffs. Now, try and arrest your friend and do it all without hurting him. No weapons, no blows, and no holds that cause pain. You will find that the only point that you can get the cuffs on your friend is when he stops fighting with all his might because he's afraid that something is going to break or dislocate. That is how retraints and compliance holds work, on fear (and application) of serious and severe pain and injury. It's almost impossible to physically restrain someone without inducing either pain or fear of pain. The distinction here is between using a taser as a cruel and unprovoked escalation to very severe pain, as opposed to a properly applied compliance technique which uses little pain and much fear of further pain.
Absent things like tasers, that comes down to much less politically correct methods sometimes. And that results in everything from bruises to dislocated shoulders, and worse. Only when the police officer is woefully incompetent and has had inadequate training. And in this particular case, it's hard to overstate how inexcusable the use of any force other than simple body locks (which don't impart lasting pain or bruises) was.
You are right about the public's fear of gestapo-like police, but I didn't see it in the video. It's really too late to be concerned about that though. Police have the power, you don't. We as a nation gave it to them a long time ago. We all just have to live with it... or work toward changing it. Your shortage of cognitive skills is troubling.
You don't have much training in self-defense or lock techniques, do you?
Let's just say that it's absolutely possible to restrain an untrained person one-on-one in the situation you describe without any strikes or kicks. Moreover, you can usually do it in no less than five different ways.
And I have no respect for police officers who are too lazy to remember and apply proper techniques when they outnumber a subject FIVE TO ONE, choosing to use a taser instead. In fact I have nothing but disgust for them, and I think they should serve jail time for their actions.
They used the TASER to subdue him without twisting arms other more forceful methods. Taser is by far the more violent, forceful, painful, and cruel method than arm twisting, much less a proper arm lock. These police officers' actions are inexcusable, and the officer who fired the taser should serve jail time. "Probably overreacted" my ass. I don't care who you assign "fault" to, any police officer tasering a non-violent subject needs to serve jail time.
Wow. It's not clear from your comment, do you really endorse the use of violence on a mike hogger, or just someone you consider uncaring of what you think and semi-insane? In a public event with an open mike?
But forced compliance, whether via taser or blows or holds is all violence. I would bet if you took a set of videos containing reasonable use of force and unreasonable force in compliance situations, most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference except in extreme cases. That is ignorant bullshit. Anyone trained in self-defense knows ways of restraining an opponent without causing severe pain, and a properly trained police officer should know dozens of them. Using a taser in this situation is not just ludicrously overkill - it should be a criminal offense. When you see five officers - or however many there were holding that kid - unable to properly restrain him or walk him out, you know that they're all absolutely incompetent.
This is just one set of videos showing what is an obviously inexcusable abuse of force. The problem is that while this event got a lot of exposure and the responsible officers will probably be punished, there are many cases in which nothing will happen.
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The spindowns are not the problem! -B 1 causes many drives to wait a very short time before unloading the heads off the platter and onto the ramp. But the OS sends read/write requests to the hdd every few seconds, unless laptop mode is enabled. The drive then must load the heads again, service the request, unload them, etc. every few seconds. This is not as bad as spin-up cycles, but very bad nonetheless.
Wow.
I've noticed this behavior on my laptop, in fact I wrote a little script to stop the hard drive from doing the unloadings. I actually use Gentoo, but I wrote an ebuild for the acpi-support package to take advantage of Ubuntu's nice power management features. I didn't think Ubuntu's scripts would be the ones putting the drive into that mode!
Another thing is that if you plug the laptop in while it's asleep, then wake it, the power.sh script does not even fire, so you still get the head load cycles all the time even after plugging in.
This is really bad for all the laptops out there. Ubuntu needs to stop this behavior in acpi-support and ship an update now.
It's Ubuntu only, though perhaps Debian too. The acpi-support package is specific to them.
Do you realize what the alternative is?
It's really annoying how many luddites get modded up in this article. Just because you're happy with your games and can't see where new development can go, doesn't mean other people are the same way. nVidia is devoting massive engineering resources to pushing the envelope of GPU design to unprecedented performance, and now has set the stage for bringing the full force of the GeForce 8 architecture below $200, and at 65nm, below 110W TDP. There are scientific computing appliances being designed around the G80 to replace computers sold for many times the price. New engines like the Crytek one in Crysis and the Unreal 3 engine in UT3 work with unprecedented levels of detail. You may or may not enjoy the aesthetics or gameplay of these games, but you can't deny the technical excellence of both the hardware and software developers pushing the state of the art, and they are very much able to push these chips to the limits.
You still didn't cite your source for the 80%.
Ever heard of inflation? Fuel price volatility? Operational cost increases due to the retarded things our government does as a matter of foreign policy (and domestic policy designed to combat the results of that foreign policy)?
If you think that any consumer rights issue can be addressed by pointing fingers at the evil companies and screaming that they're robbing us of our money, you're delusional. Airline industry is a lot more competitive than it used to be even 10 years ago. It's also operating in an environmentally unsustainable mode (its carbon footprint is gigantic). Just because you pay 300 of your precious dollars to fly where you used to pay 200 and get no meal doesn't mean jack shit about the economics of the transaction.
Well, two things come to mind... one, since they're going to be climbing along a very thick cable already, why not attach power lines to the cable? The obvious problem with that is 35000 km or however long it is to geostationary orbit incurs giant, if not prohibitive, transmission losses in the power cable. A gas pipeline would work, though it obviously would need pumping substations since no pipeline will hold the pressure of a 35000 km tall pipe of fuel... the substations would in turn make it tricky to achieve good speed for the vehicle on the cable.
The other thing is, why not use a nuclear reactor to power the climber motors? A climber is a much more controlled environment than regular spacecraft, it can jettison the reactor in a reentry capsule if things go wrong. Cooling is tricky but probably possible with either big radiator panels or jettisoning superheated coolant. I really can't think of any compelling argument not to use a reactor here.
Can you please list your subnets? I'd like to blackhole them altogether so I don't have to deal with retarded admins who like to make my life more difficult than it already is.
Ping is an essential diagnostic tool. You're going out of your way to disable it for no good reason. Don't be surprised when network admins get annoyed at you, to put it very mildly.
Get this in your head: Good science doesn't depend on whether the person doing it was good, bad, whether their views aligned with yours or not. The whole idea of science is to deal in falsifiable hypotheses, which have nothing to do with anyone's religious beliefs (and by the way, real, personal religion has the potential to be far above such trite questions as whether God is hiding beyond this or that, and to be deeply emotionally satisfying). So don't call people fools because they might mix science and religion in their minds. It's none of your concern, and it brings you one step down toward the level on which the very religious bigots you want to oppose think and act.
You should be aware that your argument, while well-intentioned, is both flamebait to people who see no conflict between science and religion, and pretty disgusting in its arrogance to people who may actually agree with you otherwise.
Your theory is laughably incorrect. You apparently know absolutely nothing of the history of scientific accomplishment in the Soviet Union or the scientific juggernaut that China has become in the past decade. (Failing to become scientifically important? They are already important, still far behind the US and EU, but catching up fast.)
Totalitarian elites are just as aware of the benefits of research as less restrictive elites, if not more. The relative intellectual freedom of the scientists in USSR was a consequence, and not a cause, of the structure promulgated from above, and most scientists were nearly as brainwashed as the rest of the population. Some theories were arbitrarily attacked by the state (cf. Lysenkoism), resulting in quite a bit of damage, but the system actually worked around it.
Freedom of speech simply isn't necessary for scientific achievement. Read the articles in Science lately? (not the editorial content, the real articles) How much would you identify in them that would be objectionable to the censor? Nothing whatsoever for the vast majority of them. Access to publications, ability to publish, good research facilities, good basic education that allows for a scientific thought process to develop, and good leadership are pretty much all you need for scientific progress. The Soviets had that in abundance, the chinese have recently built it all up to a very formidable level.
Do not confuse freedom of speech as defied by authoritarian regimes with the social structure and priorities conductive to good science.
The midrange market is not doing great in that you actually have to pay proportionally more to get a higher performing card (using the 8800 as the benchmark), but it's nowhere near as bad as you paint it.
Or maybe crossfire is just harder to implement.
IIRC crossfire hardware requirements are a superset of those of SLI, namely they require bus support for peer writes.
You underestimate spectacularly the proportion of ignorant laptop thieves.
There are a lot more dumb thieves than smart thieves out there. A dumb thief, even one who intends to later resell the hardware, will try to use the laptop as if it was their own. The window of opportunity to allow that sort of thief to use it and expose themselves long enough to allow tracking them down is a trade-off with the security of the data on the laptop. I don't have the statistics, but I suspect that most laptop thefts are opportunistic and that the thief will try to use the laptop.
By the way, data security in laptops is really far easier to implement than most paranoid people think. Either you use whole-drive encryption which cannot be cracked, period, until the absolute majority of data is uselessly out-of-date or possibly unless NSA is interested in it (and I personally doubt NSA's ability to crack modern crypto in useful time), or you use a hard drive password combined with screen locks, which is just as secure if the drive is turned off and the password is strong (even if the drive is kept on, the attacker needs a very sophisticated electronics lab to swap the drive bus and read out the data). If you deal in state secrets which are sensitive even after decades, then obviously you'll take extra precautions.
You don't have much training in self-defense or lock techniques, do you?
Let's just say that it's absolutely possible to restrain an untrained person one-on-one in the situation you describe without any strikes or kicks. Moreover, you can usually do it in no less than five different ways.
And I have no respect for police officers who are too lazy to remember and apply proper techniques when they outnumber a subject FIVE TO ONE, choosing to use a taser instead. In fact I have nothing but disgust for them, and I think they should serve jail time for their actions.
Wow. It's not clear from your comment, do you really endorse the use of violence on a mike hogger, or just someone you consider uncaring of what you think and semi-insane? In a public event with an open mike?
This is just one set of videos showing what is an obviously inexcusable abuse of force. The problem is that while this event got a lot of exposure and the responsible officers will probably be punished, there are many cases in which nothing will happen.
All your music exists in CDDB and is ripped from CDs? Lame.