I needed gigabit bandwidth at work because I am moving 100GB files.
I went on reading about it on the net, on sites like www.3wire.com for example, and to make a long story short, Fiber optic yeilds the best results (obviously) but are way to expensive. Next are some 1000T copper cards that are almost doing the job, but then again, after getting 5 different cards, I can tell you right away that you can have a BIG difference from a board to another.
The best card I've got so far performance-wise are the Intel Pro 1000T-based adapters, with no optimization card to card running netcps, I'd get twice as much speed out than with the Dlink counterpart (DGE500T). They are a bit more expensive, but if you want more than 3x increase over 100Mbits, you need something a tad more expensive.
The other thing is you see card with 70Megs/second bandwidth tests on some websites, with jumbo packets turned on. You need a jumbo-frame capable switch (read: Expensive) to be able to turn that on. The cheapest gigabit switch I've found that could take an aweful lot of load without costing me an arm was the Netgear GS508T, but if you are used to managed switch, that one isn't.
Also you might be tempted to get a Gigabit card as upling with let's say 8 ports @ 100Mbits, that way you won't waste bandwidth to the server and the 8 of them can crunch it. Well good idea on paper but don't get the Dlink DES-1009G, I had to return 2 of them, and the firmware on that thing truely SUCKS. You can't just leave it there and forget it, you need to cycle the power sometimes so it can "read properly" on the ports wether 100 or 10 or half or full duplex. It's miserable and poor performing. It's cheap though:). If you can afford to do power cycling once and a while and it's not a buisness server with critical uptime, it's not all bad.. (like for a little renderfarm).
For the Intel pro cards, I got both the workstation and server ones, server being 64bits PCI.
There's one thing you want to consider, if you use Gigabit ethernet, you need also to be able to feed it, 50megs/second on the board requires a drive being able to deliver 50 megs a second to the card, and requires a PCI bus able to take the load as well (remember, it's 50megs x 2 bandwidth on the bus that on pci32/33mhz saturates at 128 but in real world 100).
How many hours you spent on your commodore 64, amiga, atari ST, on a LAME game by today's standard? I can't count how many hours I played M.U.L.E, or speedball, pinball fantasy or star control.
Why? Simplest idea sometimes are the coolest. Some games have a high level of complexity and are awesome simulators (Mech warrior series to name one), PC titles aren't all bad and some are quite addictive and are a good investment (i.e. Quake 3, you pay once, you get a zillion of mods after), but in comparison with the "pre-PC-DOOM" age, the % of titles that are addictive today are way lower than it was before.
How many people did it take to code something like burger time, how many people did it take to code a game like SOF for example? I'm sure there are more total hours played on burger time than on SOF, and forget about the "it's been there for 20 years", let's see if people are even going to remember that game in 20 years.
Anyways, this is good news, put M.U.L.E with today's level of complexity, and you could have a kick-ass title.
You pollute to the extreme, you see something happening... you wait till the last extreme minute and you do another 180 degree extreme solution to repair it.
I mean this is like punching someone's face untill he's almost dead, and then applying bandages until he suffocates and overdosing him with painkillers. yeah, it might work, but there's always going to be permanent damages in the process, you cannot just do something massive on a planetary scale and "think it'll act like this" with no doubts.
How can you tell that you could fix up the atmosphere to pre-industrial age and not suffocate plants (to name one "possible" example) if you cannot even predict weather correctly? how can you talk about a planetary system when you still have a hard time analyzing the data that you took a century to gather and trim?
Of course, applying such a technology let's say, locally (i.e. car exausts, petro-chems, etc) would fix a BIG part of the problem and be more plausible. I just don't trust someone that comes and claim this big. I am all for revolution but in this case we need evolution (that doesn't mean I wouldn't want RAPID evolution), that way we can rollback if there's something going wrong.
Thing is 4 Channels with IDE raid means 4 CHANNELS, if you put it Slave/master, even if you can stick up 8 drives, it won't go faster than it would with 4 drives as masters.
If you are serious about buying 12 drives to make a datacenter or a half-decent raid, unless you go with old drives or buy a buttload of 20-40gigs for next to nothing, You'd probably have the budget to get a REAL raid card that does decent raid5 performance like a 3Ware 7810 (8 channels, 64 bits, 48bits LBA, all the goodies plus not limited to standard PCI 33mhz/32bits speed) And if you're a bit richer, maybe a 7850 (more cache for raid 5 performance), else there's always cheaper 6810 boards that run on a standard PCI bus, either way, it'll give you FAR better performance than this board.
Of course, if it's to brag that your board can take 12 drives and want to connect your mom's 40megs and the brother's older 1gig drive and so on... that's another story
Seriously, I'm not surprised about the online fraud that we read once and a while. If you see people paying more on ebay for a used item (i.e. digital camera) than they would pay for a new one, it gives just a small hint on the IQ of some people.
I'm not in sociology, but one thing is for sure, if people are misinformed about the price of the stuff they buy (and it's a lot of them), being naive and not doublechecking someone with 0 feedback or negative complaints sure won't help the cause. It's like leaving your porsche's doors unlocked on a street.
Okay there are also those who got scammed by people with 6000 points like reported on slashdot a few weeks ago, but those are exeptions and you'd get more chances being ripped off with a used car dealer than this if you do everything that ebay recommend you to do.
now that they are on the map, just watch that poor cat being squashed by all the BULL(dogs):)
In their 10-K filling: --- The valuation model for companies such as ours has changed, and our inability to achieve profitability may continue to materially adversely affect our stock price. ---
No sh*t!
If you look at their recent chart" You notice that they don't really have much left downward to go. So basically you won't see RIAA pulling that kind of stunt on big corporation (and I can tell you quite a few big places that I worked or have some friend working that are doing the same things, and generally they have more hardware/storage at their disposal for such things than smaller companies).
This just shows how mad and especially HYPOCRITE this is. Anyways, nothing much new here, bullying starts in schools and continues in the adult world, big guys with no brain picking on small intelligent ressources/people.
Then this asshole posts that P2P is just about 14 year old kids trading warez and pr0n!?!!? Are brainwashed chimps like this guy all we've got left in the geek community?
Well, before jumping to calling names, the local ISP here did the same thing, and most of the people who switched services here were "warez leecher". 10GB per month is pretty nice, here I have 6, it's a bit tight especially if one month you feel like trying a lot of linux/bsd distros, etc... if I go over 6 gigs, it's 2$/100megs.. this is where I find it a bit expensive.. The other complain is that they should put a 6 gig low usage, 20 gig average usage and 20+ leech, you use, you pay more, you don't, it's cheap.
Right now the problem is out of 100 home connection to the internet, probably 5 of them are over-abusing leaving their 100 gigs of MP3 on a P2P system trading like hell (which is a good thing some will say). Well ISP has to pay for the bandwidth, and they do their pricing to be profitable and expect a certain bandwidth per month, if 5% of your user hrab as much bandwidth that the 95% others, you need to implement something either to get revenues from this or cut them off because they destroy your buisness plan.
Basically it's like a health system or insurances, you can be lucky, healthy... you'll have to pay for those who "needs" it. In this respect I find disgusting that the ISP are not actually profiting from this by charging a decent fee (cmon, 2$/100 megs is kind of expensive a bit, I'd take a "package" instead) for those who use it more, and LOWER THE FEE for the others. That would balance things out, but I guess lowering the fee of 95% of the people isn't profitable or you'd have to overcharge the 5% by a big factor.
You make a good point though. Internet becomes bigger, technology makes it faster, and it's like if it's not moving or degrading sometimes... but that's capitalism and greed doing their job.
33 teraflops... you could calculate true radiosity/raytracing/caustics/shadows/photon maps/etc in realtime with that bitch (without using some fake lightmap effects and such).
You know what's weird? We're all impressed by this machine, but seeing how things evolve, that thing will probably be the "new and improved edition" of my kid's "GameBoy RealLife (TM)" in a not too distant future... unbeleivable. I just hope Carmack will "live long and prosper" to get to this, and me to enjoy it.
>What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters?
No moving parts, you can look at this like a "big ram disk" exept it has it's interface like another storage device. Look at this like A compactflash for example (it's not "SSD" but it's a good comparison.
There are a lot of interfaces (PCI, ATA, SCSI, proprietary (80GB/sec is either a big aggregated pile of raids or something similar) for these "drives" at various price points. The advantage of a SSD drive on a PC is that you have instant access, and it moves the stuff at a lightning speed limited only by your bus. Let's say you run a SSD drive on a Ultra160 interface, what you'd probably see with a disk benchmarking tool is 100nS access time (versus ~10ms for a standard drive) and you could see the real-world numbers of your scsi bus, probably around 140MB/sec (didn't try one on a U160 bus). The application for these babies are numerous: instant access to data on boards that don't handle 100GB of ram to cache everything or you wanting the machine to preload 1 hour at every reboot, bandwidth hungry application (although a raid could do the same here, but I saw some specific application needed both the bandwidth and under 1ms access time needed so..), for heavy swapping of numbers without using a buttload of ram again, etc.. probably some other people could think of something other. Usually when you break a certain amount of GB, the drives becomes cheaper than a motherboard that could handle a load of ram and the ram modules themselves, so it makes more sense if $$ is a factor (but still it's very expensive, we're talking 10K+ easily for a few GB).
There's also plenty of product on the net (search google), like I said, some are PCI cards that you add to your system with PC100 ram on it, some are IDE/SCSI, etc.. But for home people, you'd be better off with a cheap IDE raid card and a few drives, it's way cheaper:).
In my case, I got used to sleep with the computers turned on in the bedroom, the idea is that when everything is totally silent, I hear all the unregular noises, clicks, walking, neighbour yelling, whatever.. the computer noise is regular and after many years I guess my brain got used to that specific frequency and it doesn't stop me from sleeping at all... If I turn everything off, I wake up at any unregular sound, and I find it very irritating.
Man that will be weird when the girlfriend will move in. I just hope that one won't do the mistake of asking me to chose between her and the computers:)
As much as I love the P2P concept, if these guys go out of buisness or get the crap sued from them, I just hope EFF won't protect them in the name of P2P, because these guys aren't the Good Guys(tm). They are opportunists that are hiding behind ignorants and people that want to defend P2P to play their dirty scheme instead of being just dead honest.
It doesn't kill a buisness to mention any spyware or whatever, if people skip the warning and download it, well now It's their problem, but running it and acting like if you were transparent is just plain unethical, they did it many times, it simply piss me off. That's why I am using winMX since the first time I saw Kazaa doing crap to their users. It's been at least reported 2 times here if not more.
Again, being honnest about it won't change much, it'll just remove a FEW users like me and most of slashdot readers that want their privacy. Most of the people won't give a damn, so why being so dishonnest!? it could just trigger lawsuits against them for absolutely no gain.
The proof to this? well look at how many times you saw kazaa and spyware, and look at their userbase still growing (which doesn't make sense but again, MOST people just don't care, they'd sell their souls for free stuff).
Those guys that have a buttload of dysfuntionnal 1GB JAZ drives?
Those same guys that brought the BUZ video editing card that ended up with no good drivers and being just another expensive scsi card since the video part wasn't working half decently? (yeah I got one)
Those same people that had loads of trouble with their portable cdr drives?
Those same people selling the infamous Click! and never took off and left you with an expensive useless piece of....
Hell, at the price they sell their stuff, I'd still go with my solution: IDE based, for performance, 3ware board with loads of drives. You get linux/windows support. Medium storage, good performance, Adaptec board with 4 drives, and POS version, well if you thought about getting NAS (which is a tad too expensive in my opinion) you don't need to consider a POS solution:).
Anyways, with their track record, I'd go with a Maxtor NAS or any other company before Iomega, and even if there would be only Iomega in that market, I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them, Did that mistake too many times already.
I might add, this is because some Lightwave portion of the rendering pipeline are heavily optimized for SSE2. The benchmarks on tom's hardware are flawed because he uses a scene that 95% of the calculations are SSE2-based (radiosity) and it's a known fact that it's heavily optimized (so it's clearly not a balanced scenario). If they'd use standard raytracing, you wouldn't see such a jump. In fact we use lightwave where I work, I am a lightwave fan since 2.0, and I've built up a renderfarm based on Dual XP athlon solution (with tigerMP and yes it works with bios 2.03). I don't even want to touch a dual P4 solution, clearly not a good bang for the buck even if it's faster in some (clearly not all) cases.
Again, When you look at tom's benchmarks you tend to think like if the P4 would be almost 50% faster than AMD, when you'll render balanced stuff (which is most cases I've seen and besides, nobody will do a fully animated short with "radiosity" on, it takes forever to render, so you render 1 and use the "baking" function, so you revert to raytracing or standard rendering after that), the margin grows way thinner. When you calculate the costs, Intel is way out of range for price/performance. A lot of people told tom about his LW benchmark, but as usual, he didn't acknowledge nor changed his ways (there have been benchmark data available and howto's on the net for lightwave since 4.0 on multiple platform, he doesn't seem to want to follow the "standard" thus invalidating his work to the eyes of the LW community checking the benchmark numbers. But that's another story.
Why did they drop it in the first place...
on
Can GnuPG Deliver?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I wanted to get some PGP licenses at work.
Went on their website
It was so weirdly organized, I mean you could get a "single user" license, okay cool, "i need 10 of that" wrote down the price... sent an email to get a PO
Went back a few days after, couldn't find that product, felt on the desktop security thing for buisness, ok, 5x more, wrote down the price, went to get approval, came back a day or two later, price/license switch again... couldn't find the exact same thing that I saw the day before...I just dropped it (I don't have time to waste an hour or even minutes on a badly designed website that will make me swear and kill the next person asking me for support:) ).
That's ineffective E-Commerce, and I thought it was sometime hard to find a specific download or older bulletin on microsoft's web site (and google helping more than most websites's own search engine), but this was ridiculous, not to mention all the license type and so on. If I dropped it, a lot of people probably did the same. My question is, why the heck not having something CLEAR and a decent price list, why putting things in 5+ click deep or changing stuff left and right just so the bookmarks don't work anymore and have a nightmare to find that specific thing again?
They can blame the lack of sales, but they are to blame. I mean, when I go and buy a systemworks license (to name an example), I know the price for 1, I know the price for a 5 pack, it's clear, it's constant and they don't have a gazilion difference licensing of the same thing doing the same function exept worded differently thus giving you a different result at every searches if you change a space somewhere.
All this said, it's a shame that there are not many alternatives, the freeware version does the job but the problem is "it's not legit for buisness to run this", I wonder what will happen if the product isn't sold anymore... does it make it obsolete and unavailable thus legit to use the freeware version? it does the job on the windows platform at least.
is there a PocketPC version? I'm reading all your reviews and personnal experiences here and I'd feel like giving it a try, right now I am always playing MilleCE or Card games on my pocket pc before going to sleep, I'd like something different and more "strategic", I'm sure there's a lot of PocketPC users here that would just love that too.
Scientology probably will wake up one day and notice that bad press isn't too good. Come to think of it, they know that in one way, that's why they are going against these sites in the first place, now if they realize that their actions are actually generating way more awareness in a week than the site alone would do in a year, if they have minimal judgment, they'll do the math and stop being high-tech bullies.
I have no clue about scientology, but interrestingly, I hear only negative thing about them on the net, I've yet to see scientology and a positive claim, that's kinda scary, if they want a positive image, it's not by going after every bitcher that they will do good, Good is done by DOING good things, but I guess we all know that....
They should put up webcounters, especially when linked to big hit sites like slashdot, maybe it would give them a clue on how many people are now informed on their abusive practices and they might reconsider their actions, bad press isn't good and they know it, that's why they are going against these sites in the first place, now if they realize that their actions are actually generating way more awareness in a week than the site alone in a year, if they have minimal judgment, they'll do the math.
Actually, I don't have a problem with the pricing, for a small hardware producer and not a big company like ASUS, it's even quite good (Think custom hardware, think low volume PCB, think OEM alpha BOARDS a few years ago). The point you could have brought up with the price comparison is "raw performance Vs. price tag". In that case, you make your point, but the idea behind the amiga philosophy was never to beat X platform at Y number crunching (raytracing/rendering took off on personnal computers a bit before the time the amiga went bankrupt, and even then you would have MIPS-based accelerators (remember the Raptor from newtek?) to do that work).
The idea was to do MORE with LESS. WIth a 040-4000 you could emulate a quadra (heck I did it with a A2000 w/ 040) faster than the equivalent quadra because the bios was cached in ram instead of being a slow chip (like the real Quadra's bios), you could do better realtime smooth video with scala, while PC jerked at anything above 5FPS.
To give you an illustrated example: realtime 2D effects you could do on an amiga compared to what a PC could do before the DOOM-generation, would compare like running unreal in VGA mode on a 486-100 for the PC, and geforce3 + (XP/P4) CPU for the amiga, and no that's no exageration as for the "wow" factor. PC eventually catched up, and people like John Carmack knew how to squeeze every bit of the superior processor that intel did starting from the pentium-class (compared to 68040), and they catched up on the "wow" factor.
Anyways, all this said, the reason why someone would shell out money for that platform is NOT to make economies, it's to get back with his old feelings, get in touch with his beloved platform, out of curiosity, or to develop on a new target system (or to grab one of the rare PPC boards out there:) )
--- Memory speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM. (According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design). ----
Now, I didn't mess deeply with powerPC chips or any architecture, my last CPUs from motorola were the 68040 series on my amiga 2000 (with fusion forthy) and 4000, but unless the memory controller has some sort of on-die SRAM for caching, I don't see why faster than 133mhz memory, especially with 600+mhz CPU, wouldn't help. Anyone care to explain the technicalities?
A comment like that without technical backup would probably make most technical people tend to think "oook... if that comes from the engineer that designed the board, I should stay away from getting this"
Of course I don't want to bash, I "worship" the amiga cause more than most/. users hate microsoft:), I want a technical explanation of that ram issue before trusting my money into a system that "could" have a "potential" of bad design or architecture limitation, and I wouldn't tolerate "don't worry, everything is fine and that's normal" for an explanation. I'd rather hear "look, implementing DDR ram would only give a 5% boost and cost too much of R&D than hearing BS. Still, I am aware that honnesty doesn't drive the computer industry but I can always wish:)
Agree. I have a renderfarm (6 computers) based on XP cpus, the only risk taken by using XPs in MP motherboards is that you could get a BIOS update one day that will "disable" XPs. I've bought 1 unit to test it before hand to be sure everything was stable, and that I wouldn't need bios upgrade afterwards (since it's always doing the same thing), it was okay, and still is today.
Even with older BIOS I would get "2 MP found" in the system (tyan tiger MP), with the 2.03 bios and after, its correctly identifying MPs from XP.
There's probably something with MPX motherboards BIOS that is disabling XPs.
Performance-wise, I've noticed a subtle difference when I put 2 ram stick versus 4 ram sticks (must be something that has to do with how memory is accessed), but that's about it, MP and XP in rendering don't seem to have a difference (I have 2 MP for my server, I didn't want to take any risks on that:) ).
OFS, wasn't that the os prior to FastFilesystem on amiga? (FFS)
they should have skipped to the next letter. PFS... uh no ProFileSystem on amiga again, is there a QFS yet?:)
Anyways, With the current stuff microsoft is hiding in it's OS/filesystem I wouldn't be surprised to see a LOT of spyware/logware in an obscure filesystem like this, and this time, *REALLY* hidden, at least for a year or two the time some people code low-level disk tools.
The scary thing is I don't see the need to upgrade past NTFS5 until I get 13+TB raids (ntfs's limit). I am currently at 1.2 on my datacenter so it's probably still going to be a few years (I hope). I wonder what tactic they'll use to shove it down to reluctant people like me into using it. Up to now I didn't need to use XP, and I'm happy with win2k. I evaluated XP for 3 days and I've returned it (didn't activate it). I hope the next generation won't suck as much, and if it does, I hope I'll be able to keep win2k for that one has well.
Just read the article, reminds me of when sometimes you apply to participate in a beta testing of something, and 2 weeks later you're putted on a mailing list with no warning other than the message, and there's always some newbies (and total idiots) that put their email addresses everywhere and wonder why "out loud" after.
You start receiving message from people that are asking "WTF" and then people replying to get out of the list and the gazillion "me too" posts and then the bitching following because they aren't putted out and receiving another million of people bitching at the last million emails...then a moderator jumps in, exmplain the situation, then you get another bunch of emails because people didn't read it, and it goes on until the moderator +M the list.
What's the mistake?
1. not taking the people for complete idiots
Not meant in a insulting way, but rather that taking for granted that people will understand X and Y and Z, it's not because they signed up for a beta, or whatever, that they are mature people or good with internet/communicating/netiquette. So if you take for granted that you will operate a bunch of monkeys for a start, you won't get this problem, and the more you see how the list is, the more slack you can cut off.
Basically it's like a server, if you open all access to everything, and cut after, it's hell with the users. If you start strick and cut some slack, it's always better (best example being the quota, people flood your drives, and blam!. the other way around is people manage their space, and welcome the added storage). This is a stretched example but the concept can apply to a mailing list when all the posts needs to be moderated (pain in the ass and you don't get instant feedback) versus when they go freely in the list, to people that KNOW they will receive the email and will react correctly.
2. The lack of experience at managing mailing list.
Just go to egroups and looks at all the flame/crap going around in some mailing lists... sometimes it goes out of control and gets ugly, a good moderator knows when to jump in and how to so nobody gets offended and people drop it willingly instead of being forced to.
3. Lack of technical expertise and lack of communication
Something lame, but if you setup a mailing list for your customers for example, and you don't know what the "digest versus individual email" mode does, and you don't even bother to check, (well this is a lame example again but you get the idea) well if you have an average 20 emails a day for lets say, update on a product or different security patches for different modules and some will concern everyone some won't but you send them anyways, maybe you should be sure of every switch you'll turn on on the mailing list software, and be sure to ask the customers over the phone if they'd like an email for every fixes or a batch in 1 email every day for example (or better, give them the option and explain it clearly).
And also, never forget that you are dealing with human being, this might sound stupid, but everyone here that ever ran a BBS, or a mailing list, knows what this means and the implications (flame, mistakes, etc).
Sometimes Mailing list are a good thing, most time, people tend to forget that FORUMS can do as much and even better (search, no need to give out email addresses, etc). A counter-example would be to issue security alerts, for this, email rules. You have to weight the for and against for the project you are working on, and if you are to be moderator, be sure you know exactly what you are dealing with, both the software and the target people, and setup with these previous raw guidelines in mind, and unless you make a big mistake, it should go fine.
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I needed gigabit bandwidth at work because I am moving 100GB files.
:). If you can afford to do power cycling once and a while and it's not a buisness server with critical uptime, it's not all bad.. (like for a little renderfarm).
I went on reading about it on the net, on sites like www.3wire.com for example, and to make a long story short, Fiber optic yeilds the best results (obviously) but are way to expensive. Next are some 1000T copper cards that are almost doing the job, but then again, after getting 5 different cards, I can tell you right away that you can have a BIG difference from a board to another.
The best card I've got so far performance-wise are the Intel Pro 1000T-based adapters, with no optimization card to card running netcps, I'd get twice as much speed out than with the Dlink counterpart (DGE500T). They are a bit more expensive, but if you want more than 3x increase over 100Mbits, you need something a tad more expensive.
The other thing is you see card with 70Megs/second bandwidth tests on some websites, with jumbo packets turned on. You need a jumbo-frame capable switch (read: Expensive) to be able to turn that on. The cheapest gigabit switch I've found that could take an aweful lot of load without costing me an arm was the Netgear GS508T, but if you are used to managed switch, that one isn't.
Also you might be tempted to get a Gigabit card as upling with let's say 8 ports @ 100Mbits, that way you won't waste bandwidth to the server and the 8 of them can crunch it. Well good idea on paper but don't get the Dlink DES-1009G, I had to return 2 of them, and the firmware on that thing truely SUCKS. You can't just leave it there and forget it, you need to cycle the power sometimes so it can "read properly" on the ports wether 100 or 10 or half or full duplex. It's miserable and poor performing. It's cheap though
For the Intel pro cards, I got both the workstation and server ones, server being 64bits PCI.
There's one thing you want to consider, if you use Gigabit ethernet, you need also to be able to feed it, 50megs/second on the board requires a drive being able to deliver 50 megs a second to the card, and requires a PCI bus able to take the load as well (remember, it's 50megs x 2 bandwidth on the bus that on pci32/33mhz saturates at 128 but in real world 100).
How many hours you spent on your commodore 64, amiga, atari ST, on a LAME game by today's standard? I can't count how many hours I played M.U.L.E, or speedball, pinball fantasy or star control.
Why? Simplest idea sometimes are the coolest. Some games have a high level of complexity and are awesome simulators (Mech warrior series to name one), PC titles aren't all bad and some are quite addictive and are a good investment (i.e. Quake 3, you pay once, you get a zillion of mods after), but in comparison with the "pre-PC-DOOM" age, the % of titles that are addictive today are way lower than it was before.
How many people did it take to code something like burger time, how many people did it take to code a game like SOF for example? I'm sure there are more total hours played on burger time than on SOF, and forget about the "it's been there for 20 years", let's see if people are even going to remember that game in 20 years.
Anyways, this is good news, put M.U.L.E with today's level of complexity, and you could have a kick-ass title.
You pollute to the extreme, you see something happening... you wait till the last extreme minute and you do another 180 degree extreme solution to repair it.
I mean this is like punching someone's face untill he's almost dead, and then applying bandages until he suffocates and overdosing him with painkillers. yeah, it might work, but there's always going to be permanent damages in the process, you cannot just do something massive on a planetary scale and "think it'll act like this" with no doubts.
How can you tell that you could fix up the atmosphere to pre-industrial age and not suffocate plants (to name one "possible" example) if you cannot even predict weather correctly? how can you talk about a planetary system when you still have a hard time analyzing the data that you took a century to gather and trim?
Of course, applying such a technology let's say, locally (i.e. car exausts, petro-chems, etc) would fix a BIG part of the problem and be more plausible. I just don't trust someone that comes and claim this big. I am all for revolution but in this case we need evolution (that doesn't mean I wouldn't want RAPID evolution), that way we can rollback if there's something going wrong.
my 0.02.
Thing is 4 Channels with IDE raid means 4 CHANNELS, if you put it Slave/master, even if you can stick up 8 drives, it won't go faster than it would with 4 drives as masters.
If you are serious about buying 12 drives to make a datacenter or a half-decent raid, unless you go with old drives or buy a buttload of 20-40gigs for next to nothing, You'd probably have the budget to get a REAL raid card that does decent raid5 performance like a 3Ware 7810 (8 channels, 64 bits, 48bits LBA, all the goodies plus not limited to standard PCI 33mhz/32bits speed) And if you're a bit richer, maybe a 7850 (more cache for raid 5 performance), else there's always cheaper 6810 boards that run on a standard PCI bus, either way, it'll give you FAR better performance than this board.
Of course, if it's to brag that your board can take 12 drives and want to connect your mom's 40megs and the brother's older 1gig drive and so on... that's another story
I thought he was only a voting option :)
Seriously, I'm not surprised about the online fraud that we read once and a while. If you see people paying more on ebay for a used item (i.e. digital camera) than they would pay for a new one, it gives just a small hint on the IQ of some people.
I'm not in sociology, but one thing is for sure, if people are misinformed about the price of the stuff they buy (and it's a lot of them), being naive and not doublechecking someone with 0 feedback or negative complaints sure won't help the cause. It's like leaving your porsche's doors unlocked on a street.
Okay there are also those who got scammed by people with 6000 points like reported on slashdot a few weeks ago, but those are exeptions and you'd get more chances being ripped off with a used car dealer than this if you do everything that ebay recommend you to do.
IIS...
:)
now that they are on the map, just watch that poor cat being squashed by all the BULL(dogs)
In their 10-K filling:
---
The valuation model for companies such as ours has changed, and our inability to achieve profitability may continue to materially adversely affect our stock price.
---
No sh*t!
If you look at their recent chart" You notice that they don't really have much left downward to go. So basically you won't see RIAA pulling that kind of stunt on big corporation (and I can tell you quite a few big places that I worked or have some friend working that are doing the same things, and generally they have more hardware/storage at their disposal for such things than smaller companies).
This just shows how mad and especially HYPOCRITE this is. Anyways, nothing much new here, bullying starts in schools and continues in the adult world, big guys with no brain picking on small intelligent ressources/people.
Then this asshole posts that P2P is just about 14 year old kids trading warez and pr0n!?!!? Are brainwashed chimps like this guy all we've got left in the geek community?
Well, before jumping to calling names, the local ISP here did the same thing, and most of the people who switched services here were "warez leecher". 10GB per month is pretty nice, here I have 6, it's a bit tight especially if one month you feel like trying a lot of linux/bsd distros, etc... if I go over 6 gigs, it's 2$/100megs.. this is where I find it a bit expensive.. The other complain is that they should put a 6 gig low usage, 20 gig average usage and 20+ leech, you use, you pay more, you don't, it's cheap.
Right now the problem is out of 100 home connection to the internet, probably 5 of them are over-abusing leaving their 100 gigs of MP3 on a P2P system trading like hell (which is a good thing some will say). Well ISP has to pay for the bandwidth, and they do their pricing to be profitable and expect a certain bandwidth per month, if 5% of your user hrab as much bandwidth that the 95% others, you need to implement something either to get revenues from this or cut them off because they destroy your buisness plan.
Basically it's like a health system or insurances, you can be lucky, healthy... you'll have to pay for those who "needs" it. In this respect I find disgusting that the ISP are not actually profiting from this by charging a decent fee (cmon, 2$/100 megs is kind of expensive a bit, I'd take a "package" instead) for those who use it more, and LOWER THE FEE for the others. That would balance things out, but I guess lowering the fee of 95% of the people isn't profitable or you'd have to overcharge the 5% by a big factor.
You make a good point though. Internet becomes bigger, technology makes it faster, and it's like if it's not moving or degrading sometimes... but that's capitalism and greed doing their job.
Will there be a doom III port on it? :)
33 teraflops... you could calculate true radiosity/raytracing/caustics/shadows/photon maps/etc in realtime with that bitch (without using some fake lightmap effects and such).
You know what's weird? We're all impressed by this machine, but seeing how things evolve, that thing will probably be the "new and improved edition" of my kid's "GameBoy RealLife (TM)" in a not too distant future... unbeleivable. I just hope Carmack will "live long and prosper" to get to this, and me to enjoy it.
>What exactly is meant by "Solid State Disk." Are there spinning platters?
:).
No moving parts, you can look at this like a "big ram disk" exept it has it's interface like another storage device. Look at this like A compactflash for example (it's not "SSD" but it's a good comparison.
There are a lot of interfaces (PCI, ATA, SCSI, proprietary (80GB/sec is either a big aggregated pile of raids or something similar) for these "drives" at various price points. The advantage of a SSD drive on a PC is that you have instant access, and it moves the stuff at a lightning speed limited only by your bus. Let's say you run a SSD drive on a Ultra160 interface, what you'd probably see with a disk benchmarking tool is 100nS access time (versus ~10ms for a standard drive) and you could see the real-world numbers of your scsi bus, probably around 140MB/sec (didn't try one on a U160 bus). The application for these babies are numerous: instant access to data on boards that don't handle 100GB of ram to cache everything or you wanting the machine to preload 1 hour at every reboot, bandwidth hungry application (although a raid could do the same here, but I saw some specific application needed both the bandwidth and under 1ms access time needed so..), for heavy swapping of numbers without using a buttload of ram again, etc.. probably some other people could think of something other. Usually when you break a certain amount of GB, the drives becomes cheaper than a motherboard that could handle a load of ram and the ram modules themselves, so it makes more sense if $$ is a factor (but still it's very expensive, we're talking 10K+ easily for a few GB).
There's also plenty of product on the net (search google), like I said, some are PCI cards that you add to your system with PC100 ram on it, some are IDE/SCSI, etc.. But for home people, you'd be better off with a cheap IDE raid card and a few drives, it's way cheaper
In my case, I got used to sleep with the computers turned on in the bedroom, the idea is that when everything is totally silent, I hear all the unregular noises, clicks, walking, neighbour yelling, whatever.. the computer noise is regular and after many years I guess my brain got used to that specific frequency and it doesn't stop me from sleeping at all... If I turn everything off, I wake up at any unregular sound, and I find it very irritating.
:)
Man that will be weird when the girlfriend will move in. I just hope that one won't do the mistake of asking me to chose between her and the computers
"we're sorry for the spyware"
they remove it
a month later
"We're sorry for the spyware"
they remove it
goto 10.
As much as I love the P2P concept, if these guys go out of buisness or get the crap sued from them, I just hope EFF won't protect them in the name of P2P, because these guys aren't the Good Guys(tm). They are opportunists that are hiding behind ignorants and people that want to defend P2P to play their dirty scheme instead of being just dead honest.
It doesn't kill a buisness to mention any spyware or whatever, if people skip the warning and download it, well now It's their problem, but running it and acting like if you were transparent is just plain unethical, they did it many times, it simply piss me off. That's why I am using winMX since the first time I saw Kazaa doing crap to their users. It's been at least reported 2 times here if not more.
Again, being honnest about it won't change much, it'll just remove a FEW users like me and most of slashdot readers that want their privacy. Most of the people won't give a damn, so why being so dishonnest!? it could just trigger lawsuits against them for absolutely no gain.
The proof to this? well look at how many times you saw kazaa and spyware, and look at their userbase still growing (which doesn't make sense but again, MOST people just don't care, they'd sell their souls for free stuff).
Those guys that have a buttload of dysfuntionnal 1GB JAZ drives?
....
:).
Those same guys that brought the BUZ video editing card that ended up with no good drivers and being just another expensive scsi card since the video part wasn't working half decently? (yeah I got one)
Those same people that had loads of trouble with their portable cdr drives?
Those same people selling the infamous Click! and never took off and left you with an expensive useless piece of
Hell, at the price they sell their stuff, I'd still go with my solution: IDE based, for performance, 3ware board with loads of drives. You get linux/windows support. Medium storage, good performance, Adaptec board with 4 drives, and POS version, well if you thought about getting NAS (which is a tad too expensive in my opinion) you don't need to consider a POS solution
Anyways, with their track record, I'd go with a Maxtor NAS or any other company before Iomega, and even if there would be only Iomega in that market, I'd make my own solution with off the shelf parts before trusting my data to them, Did that mistake too many times already.
I might add, this is because some Lightwave portion of the rendering pipeline are heavily optimized for SSE2. The benchmarks on tom's hardware are flawed because he uses a scene that 95% of the calculations are SSE2-based (radiosity) and it's a known fact that it's heavily optimized (so it's clearly not a balanced scenario). If they'd use standard raytracing, you wouldn't see such a jump. In fact we use lightwave where I work, I am a lightwave fan since 2.0, and I've built up a renderfarm based on Dual XP athlon solution (with tigerMP and yes it works with bios 2.03). I don't even want to touch a dual P4 solution, clearly not a good bang for the buck even if it's faster in some (clearly not all) cases.
Again, When you look at tom's benchmarks you tend to think like if the P4 would be almost 50% faster than AMD, when you'll render balanced stuff (which is most cases I've seen and besides, nobody will do a fully animated short with "radiosity" on, it takes forever to render, so you render 1 and use the "baking" function, so you revert to raytracing or standard rendering after that), the margin grows way thinner. When you calculate the costs, Intel is way out of range for price/performance. A lot of people told tom about his LW benchmark, but as usual, he didn't acknowledge nor changed his ways (there have been benchmark data available and howto's on the net for lightwave since 4.0 on multiple platform, he doesn't seem to want to follow the "standard" thus invalidating his work to the eyes of the LW community checking the benchmark numbers. But that's another story.
I wanted to get some PGP licenses at work.
:) ).
Went on their website
It was so weirdly organized, I mean you could get a "single user" license, okay cool, "i need 10 of that" wrote down the price... sent an email to get a PO
Went back a few days after, couldn't find that product, felt on the desktop security thing for buisness, ok, 5x more, wrote down the price, went to get approval, came back a day or two later, price/license switch again... couldn't find the exact same thing that I saw the day before...I just dropped it (I don't have time to waste an hour or even minutes on a badly designed website that will make me swear and kill the next person asking me for support
That's ineffective E-Commerce, and I thought it was sometime hard to find a specific download or older bulletin on microsoft's web site (and google helping more than most websites's own search engine), but this was ridiculous, not to mention all the license type and so on. If I dropped it, a lot of people probably did the same. My question is, why the heck not having something CLEAR and a decent price list, why putting things in 5+ click deep or changing stuff left and right just so the bookmarks don't work anymore and have a nightmare to find that specific thing again?
They can blame the lack of sales, but they are to blame. I mean, when I go and buy a systemworks license (to name an example), I know the price for 1, I know the price for a 5 pack, it's clear, it's constant and they don't have a gazilion difference licensing of the same thing doing the same function exept worded differently thus giving you a different result at every searches if you change a space somewhere.
All this said, it's a shame that there are not many alternatives, the freeware version does the job but the problem is "it's not legit for buisness to run this", I wonder what will happen if the product isn't sold anymore... does it make it obsolete and unavailable thus legit to use the freeware version? it does the job on the windows platform at least.
GROW YOUR PENIS 16% BIGGER IN JUST A WEEK WITH THIS NEW HIGH-TECH CREAM DEVELOPED BY NASA blablabla
:).
The scary part about this is... you know it will happen
is there a PocketPC version? I'm reading all your reviews and personnal experiences here and I'd feel like giving it a try, right now I am always playing MilleCE or Card games on my pocket pc before going to sleep, I'd like something different and more "strategic", I'm sure there's a lot of PocketPC users here that would just love that too.
Scientology probably will wake up one day and notice that bad press isn't too good. Come to think of it, they know that in one way, that's why they are going against these sites in the first place, now if they realize that their actions are actually generating way more awareness in a week than the site alone would do in a year, if they have minimal judgment, they'll do the math and stop being high-tech bullies.
I have no clue about scientology, but interrestingly, I hear only negative thing about them on the net, I've yet to see scientology and a positive claim, that's kinda scary, if they want a positive image, it's not by going after every bitcher that they will do good, Good is done by DOING good things, but I guess we all know that....
They should put up webcounters, especially when linked to big hit sites like slashdot, maybe it would give them a clue on how many people are now informed on their abusive practices and they might reconsider their actions, bad press isn't good and they know it, that's why they are going against these sites in the first place, now if they realize that their actions are actually generating way more awareness in a week than the site alone in a year, if they have minimal judgment, they'll do the math.
Actually, I don't have a problem with the pricing, for a small hardware producer and not a big company like ASUS, it's even quite good (Think custom hardware, think low volume PCB, think OEM alpha BOARDS a few years ago). The point you could have brought up with the price comparison is "raw performance Vs. price tag". In that case, you make your point, but the idea behind the amiga philosophy was never to beat X platform at Y number crunching (raytracing/rendering took off on personnal computers a bit before the time the amiga went bankrupt, and even then you would have MIPS-based accelerators (remember the Raptor from newtek?) to do that work).
:) )
:)
The idea was to do MORE with LESS. WIth a 040-4000 you could emulate a quadra (heck I did it with a A2000 w/ 040) faster than the equivalent quadra because the bios was cached in ram instead of being a slow chip (like the real Quadra's bios), you could do better realtime smooth video with scala, while PC jerked at anything above 5FPS.
To give you an illustrated example: realtime 2D effects you could do on an amiga compared to what a PC could do before the DOOM-generation, would compare like running unreal in VGA mode on a 486-100 for the PC, and geforce3 + (XP/P4) CPU for the amiga, and no that's no exageration as for the "wow" factor. PC eventually catched up, and people like John Carmack knew how to squeeze every bit of the superior processor that intel did starting from the pentium-class (compared to 68040), and they catched up on the "wow" factor.
Anyways, all this said, the reason why someone would shell out money for that platform is NOT to make economies, it's to get back with his old feelings, get in touch with his beloved platform, out of curiosity, or to develop on a new target system (or to grab one of the rare PPC boards out there
Hope that helps
This made me react weidly.
/. users hate microsoft :), I want a technical explanation of that ram issue before trusting my money into a system that "could" have a "potential" of bad design or architecture limitation, and I wouldn't tolerate "don't worry, everything is fine and that's normal" for an explanation. I'd rather hear "look, implementing DDR ram would only give a 5% boost and cost too much of R&D than hearing BS. Still, I am aware that honnesty doesn't drive the computer industry but I can always wish :)
I quote:
---
Memory speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM. (According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design).
----
Now, I didn't mess deeply with powerPC chips or any architecture, my last CPUs from motorola were the 68040 series on my amiga 2000 (with fusion forthy) and 4000, but unless the memory controller has some sort of on-die SRAM for caching, I don't see why faster than 133mhz memory, especially with 600+mhz CPU, wouldn't help. Anyone care to explain the technicalities?
A comment like that without technical backup would probably make most technical people tend to think "oook... if that comes from the engineer that designed the board, I should stay away from getting this"
Of course I don't want to bash, I "worship" the amiga cause more than most
Agree. I have a renderfarm (6 computers) based on XP cpus, the only risk taken by using XPs in MP motherboards is that you could get a BIOS update one day that will "disable" XPs. I've bought 1 unit to test it before hand to be sure everything was stable, and that I wouldn't need bios upgrade afterwards (since it's always doing the same thing), it was okay, and still is today.
:) ).
Even with older BIOS I would get "2 MP found" in the system (tyan tiger MP), with the 2.03 bios and after, its correctly identifying MPs from XP.
There's probably something with MPX motherboards BIOS that is disabling XPs.
Performance-wise, I've noticed a subtle difference when I put 2 ram stick versus 4 ram sticks (must be something that has to do with how memory is accessed), but that's about it, MP and XP in rendering don't seem to have a difference (I have 2 MP for my server, I didn't want to take any risks on that
if it ever gets /.'ed
5 86 / (Bratislava)
s /m andrake/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (North Carolina)
d ra ke/iso/ (Esslingen)
a ke /iso/
s /m andrake/Mandrake/iso/ (North Carolina) u ti ons/mandrake/iso/ (Georgia)
Mandrake Linux 8.2 for i586 and higher
Mandrake 8.2 Packs & CDs are available for pre-order at Mandrakestore.com.
Czech Republic
ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/8.2/i586/
France
ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Lyon)
Slovakia
ftp://spirit.profinet.sk/mirrors/Mandrake/8.2/i
United States
ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distribution
ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Illinois)
Last modified: Mon Mar 18 11:18:41 2002
Mandrake Linux 8.2 ISO images mirrors for i586 and higher
Mandrake 8.2 Packs & CDs are available for pre-order at Mandrakestore.com.
Czech Republic
ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/iso/
France
ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Lyon)
ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/iso/ (Nancy)
Germany
ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/Man
Iceland
ftp://ftp.mbl.is/pub/mandrake/iso/ (Reykjavik)
Italy
ftp://bo.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/Mandrake/iso/ (Bologna)
http://bo.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/Mandrake/iso/ (Bologna)
Slovakia
ftp://hq.alert.sk/pub/linux/distributions/mandr
ftp://spirit.profinet.sk/mirrors/Mandrake/iso/ (Bratislava)
Taiwan
ftp://mdk.linux.org.tw/pub/mandrake/iso/
United States
ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distribution
ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distrib
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/linux/Mandrake/iso/ (Utah)
ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/iso/ (Illinois)
Last modified: Mon Mar 18 11:18:41 2002
Very interresting If they Pull it out.
OFS, wasn't that the os prior to FastFilesystem on amiga? (FFS)
:)
they should have skipped to the next letter. PFS... uh no ProFileSystem on amiga again, is there a QFS yet?
Anyways, With the current stuff microsoft is hiding in it's OS/filesystem I wouldn't be surprised to see a LOT of spyware/logware in an obscure filesystem like this, and this time, *REALLY* hidden, at least for a year or two the time some people code low-level disk tools.
The scary thing is I don't see the need to upgrade past NTFS5 until I get 13+TB raids (ntfs's limit). I am currently at 1.2 on my datacenter so it's probably still going to be a few years (I hope). I wonder what tactic they'll use to shove it down to reluctant people like me into using it. Up to now I didn't need to use XP, and I'm happy with win2k. I evaluated XP for 3 days and I've returned it (didn't activate it). I hope the next generation won't suck as much, and if it does, I hope I'll be able to keep win2k for that one has well.
Just read the article, reminds me of when sometimes you apply to participate in a beta testing of something, and 2 weeks later you're putted on a mailing list with no warning other than the message, and there's always some newbies (and total idiots) that put their email addresses everywhere and wonder why "out loud" after.
:)
You start receiving message from people that are asking "WTF" and then people replying to get out of the list and the gazillion "me too" posts and then the bitching following because they aren't putted out and receiving another million of people bitching at the last million emails...then a moderator jumps in, exmplain the situation, then you get another bunch of emails because people didn't read it, and it goes on until the moderator +M the list.
What's the mistake?
1. not taking the people for complete idiots
Not meant in a insulting way, but rather that taking for granted that people will understand X and Y and Z, it's not because they signed up for a beta, or whatever, that they are mature people or good with internet/communicating/netiquette. So if you take for granted that you will operate a bunch of monkeys for a start, you won't get this problem, and the more you see how the list is, the more slack you can cut off.
Basically it's like a server, if you open all access to everything, and cut after, it's hell with the users. If you start strick and cut some slack, it's always better (best example being the quota, people flood your drives, and blam!. the other way around is people manage their space, and welcome the added storage). This is a stretched example but the concept can apply to a mailing list when all the posts needs to be moderated (pain in the ass and you don't get instant feedback) versus when they go freely in the list, to people that KNOW they will receive the email and will react correctly.
2. The lack of experience at managing mailing list.
Just go to egroups and looks at all the flame/crap going around in some mailing lists... sometimes it goes out of control and gets ugly, a good moderator knows when to jump in and how to so nobody gets offended and people drop it willingly instead of being forced to.
3. Lack of technical expertise and lack of communication
Something lame, but if you setup a mailing list for your customers for example, and you don't know what the "digest versus individual email" mode does, and you don't even bother to check, (well this is a lame example again but you get the idea) well if you have an average 20 emails a day for lets say, update on a product or different security patches for different modules and some will concern everyone some won't but you send them anyways, maybe you should be sure of every switch you'll turn on on the mailing list software, and be sure to ask the customers over the phone if they'd like an email for every fixes or a batch in 1 email every day for example (or better, give them the option and explain it clearly).
And also, never forget that you are dealing with human being, this might sound stupid, but everyone here that ever ran a BBS, or a mailing list, knows what this means and the implications (flame, mistakes, etc).
Sometimes Mailing list are a good thing, most time, people tend to forget that FORUMS can do as much and even better (search, no need to give out email addresses, etc). A counter-example would be to issue security alerts, for this, email rules. You have to weight the for and against for the project you are working on, and if you are to be moderator, be sure you know exactly what you are dealing with, both the software and the target people, and setup with these previous raw guidelines in mind, and unless you make a big mistake, it should go fine.
My $0.02