"Or drive at or under the speed limit. Why is it that people never seem to consider this simple solution?"
Because of other people.
I'd be quite happy to drive at or under the speed limit, but most people seem to want to go faster. If the speed limit is 90k/hr, then everyone wants to drive 120k/hr.
It's irritating, but you're usually a bigger hazard if you don't go with the flow.
However, if weather conditions are rotten, I will force people to slow down to the speed limit... and usually they just pass me in 2-4 seconds.
I don't think this will be solved until everyone has cars that drive for them.
That's iffy. I've almost always got a constant supply of mod points - but usually I only spend half of them. I never metamod, and most of my posts go unrated.
It's either random chance or more complicated than that.
And yes, I have the tickbox checked, and yes, I use Adblock. I hate waiting 20+ seconds for some sites to load.
If all the chips come off the same line, then they might have an average cost of, say, $150.
Of course, the cost of the actual chip is approximately $8.
But they have to pay off those billions in R&D and fabs somehow! It's almost like software, where the first copy costs a ridiculous amount, and every copy after is pretty cheap.
Think of all those years of R&D - thousands of highly paid employees. Then they finally get it working, and can start mass producing them for a couple dollars each, to recoup their investment. I'm surprised we get CPUs as cheap as we do.
Later in the product line it might end up that only 20% of the lower priced chips have any flaws at all. For those people who want to tinker, it's often worth while to at least check and see if their chips will run ok when then turn the rest of them on. They stand to gain some performance if it works, and if not - eh, they paid for the slower version anyways (the only issue I take with this is when I see Negwegg reviews or forum posts claiming that they were returning the chip because it "didn't overclock far enough").
This really irritates me.:/
I have a Phenom II X4 925 that plays games at 3.6ghz, and encodes video up to 3.4ghz. It's plenty fast enough for me, even if I don't break any forum records.
Good work! I plan to do something similar soon, though the cost savings of getting a $100 2-core Ph2 and unlocking it to a $160 4-core Ph2 isn't so great:/
I picked up a Phenom II X4 925 for $130 CAD on the week they launched. That was equivalent to $120 USD at the time.
I don't need any unlocking with launch sales like that!
The same week they had these going for $80 after MIR. I didn't trust the $40 MIR, though.
Prime95 tests the FPU mainly, and is good for heat testing.
But no guarantees on the heat testing, either. My last GPU (not CPU) failed at stock speeds in Furmark. - now with the new drivers it's even worse - my GPU temps climb to 102C, and then my system shuts down. I only did it twice, because I didn't want to damage anything.
Congratulations, you've found a niche application in which the hard drive performance limitations don't matter.
I could say the same about you. Congratulations on figuring out where SSDs absolutely shine.
My laptop used to take 15 minutes to go from "cold start" to "logged in, all applications started and usable". I timed it. I took the exact same installation across to an SSD using a ghost image, and that startup time is now 35 seconds, half of which is the BIOS POST sequence. I'm not talking about "login prompt" visible, which is bullshit, but Outlook, Visual Studio, and maybe a couple of other applications loaded and responsive, which takes a long, LONG time on a hard drive.
Oh my... 15 minutes! My old Athlon XP boots off HDD in 28 seconds. (Firefox open in < 35 seconds)
My new Phenom II X4 system boots off HDD in about ~2 minutes, but Firefox is open in about 50 seconds. Everything else gets shuffled to the background.
Benchmarks seem to indicate that perhaps some unknown factor was influencing your HDD boot times. Perhaps the drive was close to failure? Or was it one of those really low RPM drives? I'm talking about 7200RPM drives, obviously - some of them like the 2TB black are dual-head, and easily shave 40% of your boot time off, over a regular 32MB cache 7200RPM drive.
I'm not convinced everyone is better off with SSDs rather than a really fast HDD. I'm glad you've found your favourite new toy - but after playing with a few SSDs and high end HDDs, I decided the space and price was worth more than the performance, to me. Besides that, I'm talking about a desktop, and you're talking about a laptop. Of course you want an SSD in a laptop. They're power efficient and shock immune.
I'm also not compiling the linux kernel daily. I'm loading games, which benchmarks indicate would barely improve 20%. I'd much prefer to be able to put every game on a high performance drive, rather than just 3 games.
So I stand by my opinion: I'm not convinced everyone is better off with SSDs rather than a really fast HDD. But unlike you, I'm at least willing to examine all available options.
Benchmarks have shown that in real-world scenarios, reading as little as 1MB in a strip puts HDDs very close to SSDs. Certainly close enough that 4+ of them in RAID would be faster and cost less. I'm guessing the sweet spot is around 4MB, since that's what Google uses.
Nobody cares if videos start streaming in 250ms or 1000ms, so it's fairly safe to say video streaming will be fine if handled by HDDs and RAM cache.
But you're right that more IOPS never hurts. We have L3 between L2 and RAM - SSD between HDD and RAM does makes sense, especially for comment pages and stuff. A few SSDs could manage the thousands of requests to comment pages with ease, but HDDs would be stopped dead in their tracks by all the seeking.
I wonder why I still see new routers that can only open up 10 port combinations, though?
I have a ridiculous amount of port forwarding rules for my Tomato router. Now I'm waiting for QOS to advance. I want to limit speeds and prioritize connections per IP, per port, and per connection. Not just per-connection.
It's called value. $180 for something that lets me start three games in 30 seconds rather than 60 seconds isn't good value.
It might be worth it for Crysis - that game was shown to have 50% higher minimum framerates with an SSD - but Crysis isn't one of my favourite games.
On the other hand, $260 for a 2TB HDD that lets me start a game in 40 seconds rather than 60, isn't bad. And that amount of space is pretty good value compared to a current gen SSD.
But you know what's even better than that? $80 for a 1TB HDD, and just waiting 60 seconds for a game to load.
It's no biggy. If it matters... there's always Superfetch.
According to the reviews of the "Crucial RealSSD C300" drive, which uses SATA 6 Gbps - because SATA 3 Gbps just wasn't fast enough - it can do upwards of 60,000 IOPS if you have multiple threads hitting it with small random 4kB reads and writes. To put that in perspective, that's the same performance as about 300 of the 'enterprise' 15K RPM fibre channel drives in one huge SAN array, which would cost millions. No single mechanical drive of any kind can even begin to get anywhere near that kind of performance, and even huge enterprise arrays are being left in the dust.
The latest SSDs beat hard drives in every category, sequential reads/writes and random reads/writes.
Yep, but last gen sure didn't! I remember looking at some reviews pitting those awful JMicron SSDs against that dual-head 2TB WD Black. Imagine my surprise when the HDD beat them in real-world IOPS tests.:/
As amazing as SSDs are, for me to buy one the price has to hit ~$70, and not be total crap.
1) Serial number update scripts, RunOnceEx 2) Slipstreamed textmode drivers. (Unpack the chipset SATA drivers and use the integrate option on the.inf files) 3) Unpack them with 7-zip or Universal Extractor 4) Other tools? I only maintain my home PCs, so I just download the patches to a share and install them manually.
What we need are more studies conducted by independent third parties to assess the true affects of piracy on sales. And I don't just mean a straight-up numbers analysis. I'm talking about determining the sociological implications of piracy, and its effects on buyers' habits over the long-term. Once these studies are performed we need to educate people about the *actual* conclusions, not some made-up garbage by the RIAA or other entrenched schemers.
You know what has a big impact on me buying stuff? Not getting what I paid for.
Yep. Not to mention the frequent 50-90% off sales. I can't remember the last game I bought over $20.
It also has a lot of convenient features - like when a friend of mine needed Left4Dead, I just copied it over to his computer, and his Steam picked it up. Saved him a huge download!
Redetecting games if you have to wipe or upgrade your OS (but not your game partition) is handy, on occasion. Saves HOURS reinstalling games.
And all the time saved keeping things up to date.
Or for most games, not having to deal with crappy DRM or separate account signups...
Steam is great! GOG is also great (and DRM free), but Steam has all the new games on it.
Judging from historical records, it's not uncommon for eruptions to last decades. If - then what? New routes? Limit cross-atlantic flights endpoints to southern Spain or something?
New technology? Different kinds of engines? If it lasts a long time, someone will have to invent a solution.
Here in Canada, our big backbone providers have to share their networks with smaller ISPs. It's a law that they're trying to get rid of, (and the conservatives seem happy to let them - bastards!) but for the time being we have cheap affordable internet.
There are two big ISPs in the west (BC/Alberta area) - Shaw Cable and Telus ADSL. Cable isn't so great where I live. Since I don't have Cable TV, 15mbit/1mbit cable with a 60GB cap costs about $20/mo for 6 months, then $55/mo. But since everyone near me is on cable, I'd expect closer to 8-10mbit speeds.
Telus ADSL just put out a 10-15mbit plan (100GB cap) for $22 for 6 months, then $50/mo. If you sign up for their IPTV with a 2-year contract, they give you a free year of service, and bump your connection up to 24mbit. But the line quality to my home doesn't support their service, and I wouldn't sign up anyway because they rape you if you cancel. (hundreds of dollars for both ADSL and IPTV service)
I'm with Teksavvy, a small indy ADSL ISP. I pay $27/mo for no-contract 3mbit/640kbit ADSL with a 200GB cap. Another $5 would kick that up to 6mbit down and 1mbit up - except that the line quality to my home isn't so great. $10/mo extra gives unlimited bandwidth. (for real) Of course, on a 3mbit line, 200GB is plenty.
Where in the US can you get effectively unlimited bandwidth for $27/mo?;)
You make an interesting point. Theora is particularly well suited for high bitrates, so DVDs would actually be a fine use. It's trivial for any modern device to decode theora in hardware - the software just has to exist, and be bundled in the firmware of the device.
I feel H.264 or a codec like VP8 should win for streaming, simply because of the reduced bitrate. H.264 does exceptionally well at super low bitrates(256-512kbit), where other codecs would turn into a blurry mess. Because of the low bitrate, it's not that CPU/DSP intense.
On the other hand, H.264 is very hard to decode at very high bitrates. At 25mbit, the quality gain over a codec like Theora probably isn't as significant as the increased decoding difficulty, which would prevent it from decoding at all on most devices.
One big thing getting in the way of Theora is the lack of easy encoders.
Have you seen what they call easy? Two lines of cryptic text commands - commands that change from version to version, and aren't listed in the documentation.
With H.264, you can pick up a GUI for free, drag a slider to "Maximum", and wait 2-3 hours. Then you have a wondrous quality video, ready to be streamed, and hardware accelerated on a lot of platforms. There's even websites that will generate all the code for you, so plunking it in your own website is easy, even for the average nitwit that barely knows HTML.
If you haven't got technical superiority, and you haven't got ease of use, what have you got that's going to win people over?
Humans seem to have about 4KB of RAM and one freaking huge hard drive.
Think about it - the access latency matches up!;)
It should be noted that while we have a HyperThreading prefrontal cortex, we also have cores available doing background tasks, like managing movement, processing what we hear and see, alerting us to sudden movement/danger, etc.
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"Or drive at or under the speed limit. Why is it that people never seem to consider this simple solution?"
Because of other people.
I'd be quite happy to drive at or under the speed limit, but most people seem to want to go faster. If the speed limit is 90k/hr, then everyone wants to drive 120k/hr.
It's irritating, but you're usually a bigger hazard if you don't go with the flow.
However, if weather conditions are rotten, I will force people to slow down to the speed limit... and usually they just pass me in 2-4 seconds.
I don't think this will be solved until everyone has cars that drive for them.
That's iffy. I've almost always got a constant supply of mod points - but usually I only spend half of them. I never metamod, and most of my posts go unrated.
It's either random chance or more complicated than that.
And yes, I have the tickbox checked, and yes, I use Adblock. I hate waiting 20+ seconds for some sites to load.
If all the chips come off the same line, then they might have an average cost of, say, $150.
Of course, the cost of the actual chip is approximately $8.
But they have to pay off those billions in R&D and fabs somehow! It's almost like software, where the first copy costs a ridiculous amount, and every copy after is pretty cheap.
Think of all those years of R&D - thousands of highly paid employees. Then they finally get it working, and can start mass producing them for a couple dollars each, to recoup their investment. I'm surprised we get CPUs as cheap as we do.
Later in the product line it might end up that only 20% of the lower priced chips have any flaws at all. For those people who want to tinker, it's often worth while to at least check and see if their chips will run ok when then turn the rest of them on. They stand to gain some performance if it works, and if not - eh, they paid for the slower version anyways (the only issue I take with this is when I see Negwegg reviews or forum posts claiming that they were returning the chip because it "didn't overclock far enough").
This really irritates me. :/
I have a Phenom II X4 925 that plays games at 3.6ghz, and encodes video up to 3.4ghz. It's plenty fast enough for me, even if I don't break any forum records.
Good work! I plan to do something similar soon, though the cost savings of getting a $100 2-core Ph2 and unlocking it to a $160 4-core Ph2 isn't so great :/
I picked up a Phenom II X4 925 for $130 CAD on the week they launched. That was equivalent to $120 USD at the time.
I don't need any unlocking with launch sales like that!
The same week they had these going for $80 after MIR. I didn't trust the $40 MIR, though.
Prime95 tests the FPU mainly, and is good for heat testing.
But no guarantees on the heat testing, either. My last GPU (not CPU) failed at stock speeds in Furmark. - now with the new drivers it's even worse - my GPU temps climb to 102C, and then my system shuts down. I only did it twice, because I didn't want to damage anything.
Oh well - modded cooling to the rescue!
I lost a USB stick once. I found it in the driveway a week or two later.
But there was nothing important on it. Just downloaded programs, like avast and Spybot.
This is somewhat bigger than a $10 USB stick - but I do hope he doesn't get turfed.
Congratulations, you've found a niche application in which the hard drive performance limitations don't matter.
I could say the same about you. Congratulations on figuring out where SSDs absolutely shine.
My laptop used to take 15 minutes to go from "cold start" to "logged in, all applications started and usable". I timed it. I took the exact same installation across to an SSD using a ghost image, and that startup time is now 35 seconds, half of which is the BIOS POST sequence. I'm not talking about "login prompt" visible, which is bullshit, but Outlook, Visual Studio, and maybe a couple of other applications loaded and responsive, which takes a long, LONG time on a hard drive.
Oh my... 15 minutes! My old Athlon XP boots off HDD in 28 seconds. (Firefox open in < 35 seconds)
My new Phenom II X4 system boots off HDD in about ~2 minutes, but Firefox is open in about 50 seconds. Everything else gets shuffled to the background.
Benchmarks seem to indicate that perhaps some unknown factor was influencing your HDD boot times. Perhaps the drive was close to failure? Or was it one of those really low RPM drives? I'm talking about 7200RPM drives, obviously - some of them like the 2TB black are dual-head, and easily shave 40% of your boot time off, over a regular 32MB cache 7200RPM drive.
I'm not convinced everyone is better off with SSDs rather than a really fast HDD. I'm glad you've found your favourite new toy - but after playing with a few SSDs and high end HDDs, I decided the space and price was worth more than the performance, to me. Besides that, I'm talking about a desktop, and you're talking about a laptop. Of course you want an SSD in a laptop. They're power efficient and shock immune.
I'm also not compiling the linux kernel daily. I'm loading games, which benchmarks indicate would barely improve 20%. I'd much prefer to be able to put every game on a high performance drive, rather than just 3 games.
So I stand by my opinion: I'm not convinced everyone is better off with SSDs rather than a really fast HDD. But unlike you, I'm at least willing to examine all available options.
Benchmarks have shown that in real-world scenarios, reading as little as 1MB in a strip puts HDDs very close to SSDs. Certainly close enough that 4+ of them in RAID would be faster and cost less. I'm guessing the sweet spot is around 4MB, since that's what Google uses.
Nobody cares if videos start streaming in 250ms or 1000ms, so it's fairly safe to say video streaming will be fine if handled by HDDs and RAM cache.
But you're right that more IOPS never hurts. We have L3 between L2 and RAM - SSD between HDD and RAM does makes sense, especially for comment pages and stuff. A few SSDs could manage the thousands of requests to comment pages with ease, but HDDs would be stopped dead in their tracks by all the seeking.
Sounds like you're talking about UPnP.
I wonder why I still see new routers that can only open up 10 port combinations, though?
I have a ridiculous amount of port forwarding rules for my Tomato router. Now I'm waiting for QOS to advance. I want to limit speeds and prioritize connections per IP, per port, and per connection. Not just per-connection.
It's called value. $180 for something that lets me start three games in 30 seconds rather than 60 seconds isn't good value.
It might be worth it for Crysis - that game was shown to have 50% higher minimum framerates with an SSD - but Crysis isn't one of my favourite games.
On the other hand, $260 for a 2TB HDD that lets me start a game in 40 seconds rather than 60, isn't bad. And that amount of space is pretty good value compared to a current gen SSD.
But you know what's even better than that? $80 for a 1TB HDD, and just waiting 60 seconds for a game to load.
It's no biggy. If it matters... there's always Superfetch.
According to the reviews of the "Crucial RealSSD C300" drive, which uses SATA 6 Gbps - because SATA 3 Gbps just wasn't fast enough - it can do upwards of 60,000 IOPS if you have multiple threads hitting it with small random 4kB reads and writes. To put that in perspective, that's the same performance as about 300 of the 'enterprise' 15K RPM fibre channel drives in one huge SAN array, which would cost millions. No single mechanical drive of any kind can even begin to get anywhere near that kind of performance, and even huge enterprise arrays are being left in the dust.
Great for forums and other database crap.
But not for file servers or video streaming.
Two words: RAM Cache.
The latest SSDs beat hard drives in every category, sequential reads/writes and random reads/writes.
Yep, but last gen sure didn't! I remember looking at some reviews pitting those awful JMicron SSDs against that dual-head 2TB WD Black. Imagine my surprise when the HDD beat them in real-world IOPS tests. :/
As amazing as SSDs are, for me to buy one the price has to hit ~$70, and not be total crap.
First... nLite isn't for commercial use.
Second...
1) Serial number update scripts, RunOnceEx .inf files)
2) Slipstreamed textmode drivers. (Unpack the chipset SATA drivers and use the integrate option on the
3) Unpack them with 7-zip or Universal Extractor
4) Other tools? I only maintain my home PCs, so I just download the patches to a share and install them manually.
like Saskatchewan damnit!
Your province resembles a skirt.
But you may be right. It should be easier to measure size on a 2D landscape.
What we need are more studies conducted by independent third parties to assess the true affects of piracy on sales. And I don't just mean a straight-up numbers analysis. I'm talking about determining the sociological implications of piracy, and its effects on buyers' habits over the long-term. Once these studies are performed we need to educate people about the *actual* conclusions, not some made-up garbage by the RIAA or other entrenched schemers.
You know what has a big impact on me buying stuff? Not getting what I paid for.
Can't even blame it on the pirates this time, since Ubisoft knew it'd be cracked on day 0. :/
Yep. Not to mention the frequent 50-90% off sales. I can't remember the last game I bought over $20.
It also has a lot of convenient features - like when a friend of mine needed Left4Dead, I just copied it over to his computer, and his Steam picked it up. Saved him a huge download!
Redetecting games if you have to wipe or upgrade your OS (but not your game partition) is handy, on occasion. Saves HOURS reinstalling games.
And all the time saved keeping things up to date.
Or for most games, not having to deal with crappy DRM or separate account signups...
Steam is great! GOG is also great (and DRM free), but Steam has all the new games on it.
Judging from historical records, it's not uncommon for eruptions to last decades. If - then what? New routes? Limit cross-atlantic flights endpoints to southern Spain or something?
New technology? Different kinds of engines? If it lasts a long time, someone will have to invent a solution.
Here in Canada, our big backbone providers have to share their networks with smaller ISPs. It's a law that they're trying to get rid of, (and the conservatives seem happy to let them - bastards!) but for the time being we have cheap affordable internet.
There are two big ISPs in the west (BC/Alberta area) - Shaw Cable and Telus ADSL. Cable isn't so great where I live. Since I don't have Cable TV, 15mbit/1mbit cable with a 60GB cap costs about $20/mo for 6 months, then $55/mo. But since everyone near me is on cable, I'd expect closer to 8-10mbit speeds.
Telus ADSL just put out a 10-15mbit plan (100GB cap) for $22 for 6 months, then $50/mo. If you sign up for their IPTV with a 2-year contract, they give you a free year of service, and bump your connection up to 24mbit. But the line quality to my home doesn't support their service, and I wouldn't sign up anyway because they rape you if you cancel. (hundreds of dollars for both ADSL and IPTV service)
I'm with Teksavvy, a small indy ADSL ISP. I pay $27/mo for no-contract 3mbit/640kbit ADSL with a 200GB cap. Another $5 would kick that up to 6mbit down and 1mbit up - except that the line quality to my home isn't so great. $10/mo extra gives unlimited bandwidth. (for real) Of course, on a 3mbit line, 200GB is plenty.
Where in the US can you get effectively unlimited bandwidth for $27/mo? ;)
IMHO large parts of Europe have the right idea.
Actually, Theora is bad at exactly that. Or no so much high bitrates as high resolutions, which is often the same thing.
Well then, what is Theora good at? I'm drawing a blank.
Well, you're right - it certainly is easy!
But it doesn't offer any options for bitrate or quality. It's a bit like taking a screenshot and saving it as a .BMP with MS Paint.
When you upload that to a website, people will shout at you for not compressing it or picking a better format.
You make an interesting point. Theora is particularly well suited for high bitrates, so DVDs would actually be a fine use. It's trivial for any modern device to decode theora in hardware - the software just has to exist, and be bundled in the firmware of the device.
I feel H.264 or a codec like VP8 should win for streaming, simply because of the reduced bitrate. H.264 does exceptionally well at super low bitrates(256-512kbit), where other codecs would turn into a blurry mess. Because of the low bitrate, it's not that CPU/DSP intense.
On the other hand, H.264 is very hard to decode at very high bitrates. At 25mbit, the quality gain over a codec like Theora probably isn't as significant as the increased decoding difficulty, which would prevent it from decoding at all on most devices.
One big thing getting in the way of Theora is the lack of easy encoders.
Have you seen what they call easy? Two lines of cryptic text commands - commands that change from version to version, and aren't listed in the documentation.
With H.264, you can pick up a GUI for free, drag a slider to "Maximum", and wait 2-3 hours. Then you have a wondrous quality video, ready to be streamed, and hardware accelerated on a lot of platforms. There's even websites that will generate all the code for you, so plunking it in your own website is easy, even for the average nitwit that barely knows HTML.
If you haven't got technical superiority, and you haven't got ease of use, what have you got that's going to win people over?
Humans seem to have about 4KB of RAM and one freaking huge hard drive.
Think about it - the access latency matches up! ;)
It should be noted that while we have a HyperThreading prefrontal cortex, we also have cores available doing background tasks, like managing movement, processing what we hear and see, alerting us to sudden movement/danger, etc.