I just updated to the new Ubuntu, and now my SATA controller doesn't work. It corrupted a partition before I figured it out and put in an PCI card to handle my drives.
Unfortunately, now my drives are juggling around./dev/sda one boot,/dev/sdb another boot!
Bless the new code. Who cares about backwards compatibility?
Without regular maintenance, apps would stop working.
I wrote a java app to remind me to phone people back before the new millennium hit.
Shockingly, it still runs - on Vista and Windows 7.
Granted, it's not a very complex app - but maybe if you're stuck with Windows, you should pick better tools rather than getting stuck with whatever Microsoft hands you?
Seems like Google got the short end of the stick, since the guy wasn't using enough keywords.
I would like to try Wolfram, though.
I don't know about you, but if I typed "Microsoft Apple" into a search box, I wouldn't be looking for stock prices. If I wanted those, I'd probably add some more terms indicating it, or maybe go to Google.com/finance, and then enter "Microsoft Apple" there.
If it's a feature I use constantly, I'd also add it to my google homepage.
I doubt it'd take long for Google to start redirecting queries with company names in them to the stock charts.
For me, google already prioritizes tech news sites, manufacturer websites, and review sites over crud like pricegrabber. When I type in Pandora, my first result is OpenPandora.org, rather than that cruddy music site that doesn't work in my country.
My solution was to hack away at XP with nLite and some other tools. I got rid of all that prefetch crap, and anything else that might use disk I/O.
Now, on a single-core Via C7 1.2ghz, the XP desktop will be up 14 seconds after I hit the power button. The time from boot menu to usable desktop is something like 4-6 seconds! Resuming from hibernation takes about 24 seconds!
But my gaming computer isn't nearly so speedy. That thing takes about a half-minute to POST, so even if boot menu to desktop is only 2-3 seconds, there's no chance of getting under ~35 seconds to boot.
Prefetching is a nice idea, but how about we fix the big boot speed drain first - the BIOS?
I/O is precious. As a user of nLite, I've seen first-hand what disabling prefetching, auto-defrag, and thumbnails can do. Folders open quicker in explorer, games start faster, and Firefox does too.
Why buy RAM and keep it unallocated?
Because the Windows security model requires that memory pages be zero'd out before being used. I wonder how long it'd take to zero out 400MB and allocate it to other processes? 10ms? 20ms? 150ms?
There is a delay. It's not as bad as java garbage collection, but it still has to be done!
This prefetching stuff doesn't actually boost performance - it simply shifts where the load is to when the computer is idle, which is a lot of the time with an average user. If your computer is (almost) always busy, or you do I/O heavy tasks like video encoding, just disable it and performance will go up. But if you are an average user, don't disable it.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language, and results in a program filled with memory leaks.
C is great, but lets be honest - at least 80% of C programmers shouldn't be programming, let alone programming in a low level language!
Sounds just like what happened with American ISPs. One undercuts by selling below cost, then as soon as the competition is dead, prices skyrocket to six times what they were.
and your line seems to suggest confusion on that part.
Doesn't seem that way to me. He's just pointing out that when compared to other electronics, we have shockingly little info available.
Even for CPUs, there are fully documented "open-source" microcontrollers available, but for GPUs there's basically nothing. It is a big mystery, how it's all done. And now we've gone so far that GPUs are doing incredible things like juggling 10,000 threads that manage all the shading when, you fire up a game.
nVidia and ATI stated GPUs are many times more complex than CPUs, and I fully believe them.
Hulu also buffers continuously, rather than treating commercials and the show's segments like separate streams. For people like me with slow internet connections (mine is barely fast enough for 480p), that means no delay after a commercial, instead of 20 seconds of buffering.
And unlike Youtube, there's none of that random jerking. I have four computers in my house, and every single one of them jerks/jolts on the worst quality youtube vids.
Crysis doesn't jolt. Neither does Hulu. Youtube does.:/
I don't know if it's fast enough for linux. It really is a microcontroller - not a full fledged CPU or SoC. It only has something like 32KB of RAM built-in. You might get one of those DOS-style assembly operating systems to run on it, but probably not linux.
I'd rate it somewhere up there with all those AVR CPUs used in projects like the Arduino - except with different capabilities.
Their website has a lot of downloadable code on it. Do some research and see if anyone has written code for what you need.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I just updated to the new Ubuntu, and now my SATA controller doesn't work. It corrupted a partition before I figured it out and put in an PCI card to handle my drives.
Unfortunately, now my drives are juggling around. /dev/sda one boot, /dev/sdb another boot!
Bless the new code. Who cares about backwards compatibility?
At least I ruined it by being informative. :P
Java applets coded back in 1996 still run in the newest JRE. Pretty impressive for the consumer/user, though it must be a nightmare to maintain.
I'm not aware of any huge changes to Apache Tomcat in the past few years - certainly nothing that required re-coding an entire website from scratch.
If you want something that maintains compatibility, go with java.
Depending on your point of view, that could be a negative or a positive.
At times I really wish slashdot had an edit button.
No, I don't log out. I have a static dynamic IP. It's dynamic, but it hasn't changed in 9 months, despite many power outages.
I do it all the time. I seem to get 5-15 mod points every week.
It's possible that it tracks whether you get bad ratings - but since I only use it for informative stuff, I haven't had that happen yet.
Yep, you're right - no single configuration is perfect for everyone.
I do hope vLite gets updated for Windows 7, but I doubt it will before actual release.
I've come to rely on searches a lot more too, lately - although in my case I use Locate32. IMHO, it's an almost perfect file(name) searcher.
Without regular maintenance, apps would stop working.
I wrote a java app to remind me to phone people back before the new millennium hit.
Shockingly, it still runs - on Vista and Windows 7.
Granted, it's not a very complex app - but maybe if you're stuck with Windows, you should pick better tools rather than getting stuck with whatever Microsoft hands you?
Eclipse is available on Windows. ;)
I use anonymous posts to get around the mod point thing, when necessary. ;)
A lot of *nix tools have equivalents in Windows, but if you want an all-in-one package that is syntactically identical, definitely go for cygwin.
But this time it's Microsoft vs Microsoft, so how can they lose!?
Seems like Google got the short end of the stick, since the guy wasn't using enough keywords.
I would like to try Wolfram, though.
I don't know about you, but if I typed "Microsoft Apple" into a search box, I wouldn't be looking for stock prices. If I wanted those, I'd probably add some more terms indicating it, or maybe go to Google.com/finance, and then enter "Microsoft Apple" there.
If it's a feature I use constantly, I'd also add it to my google homepage.
I doubt it'd take long for Google to start redirecting queries with company names in them to the stock charts.
For me, google already prioritizes tech news sites, manufacturer websites, and review sites over crud like pricegrabber. When I type in Pandora, my first result is OpenPandora.org, rather than that cruddy music site that doesn't work in my country.
Win98! Ick!
My solution was to hack away at XP with nLite and some other tools. I got rid of all that prefetch crap, and anything else that might use disk I/O.
Now, on a single-core Via C7 1.2ghz, the XP desktop will be up 14 seconds after I hit the power button. The time from boot menu to usable desktop is something like 4-6 seconds! Resuming from hibernation takes about 24 seconds!
But my gaming computer isn't nearly so speedy. That thing takes about a half-minute to POST, so even if boot menu to desktop is only 2-3 seconds, there's no chance of getting under ~35 seconds to boot.
Prefetching is a nice idea, but how about we fix the big boot speed drain first - the BIOS?
I remember Sunbelt Firewall used to pagefault every time the icon changed. (back when it was still Kerio Personal Firewall)
I'd check the task manager, and it'd be in the millions.
I/O is precious. As a user of nLite, I've seen first-hand what disabling prefetching, auto-defrag, and thumbnails can do. Folders open quicker in explorer, games start faster, and Firefox does too.
Why buy RAM and keep it unallocated?
Because the Windows security model requires that memory pages be zero'd out before being used. I wonder how long it'd take to zero out 400MB and allocate it to other processes? 10ms? 20ms? 150ms?
There is a delay. It's not as bad as java garbage collection, but it still has to be done!
This prefetching stuff doesn't actually boost performance - it simply shifts where the load is to when the computer is idle, which is a lot of the time with an average user. If your computer is (almost) always busy, or you do I/O heavy tasks like video encoding, just disable it and performance will go up. But if you are an average user, don't disable it.
http://hackaday.com/2007/09/02/o-scope-pong/
It's from 2007, but it proves someone did it.
Does it qualify as indy? Or is a ~10 person company too much?
http://www.mawgame.com/
I'm surprised Caster made it into this review. I first heard about it sometime in 2008.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language, and results in a program filled with memory leaks.
C is great, but lets be honest - at least 80% of C programmers shouldn't be programming, let alone programming in a low level language!
I've seen more horribly malformed C than VB!
Sounds just like what happened with American ISPs. One undercuts by selling below cost, then as soon as the competition is dead, prices skyrocket to six times what they were.
and your line seems to suggest confusion on that part.
Doesn't seem that way to me. He's just pointing out that when compared to other electronics, we have shockingly little info available.
Even for CPUs, there are fully documented "open-source" microcontrollers available, but for GPUs there's basically nothing. It is a big mystery, how it's all done. And now we've gone so far that GPUs are doing incredible things like juggling 10,000 threads that manage all the shading when, you fire up a game.
nVidia and ATI stated GPUs are many times more complex than CPUs, and I fully believe them.
I have a system nearly identical to yours - overclocked Athlon XP 2400+, running Win2k.
I've been following Hulu for a while, and they've actually been adding things over time. I sent in a few suggestions, and some made it in!
Stuff like Space for pausing, alt+enter for fullscreen toggling, and a buffering bar so you can see why it's stuttering.
I like how they did the buffering bit - it's even better than a regular bar.
I'd be very surprised if they axed features. It's clear they have some smart guys on their design team.
Hulu also buffers continuously, rather than treating commercials and the show's segments like separate streams. For people like me with slow internet connections (mine is barely fast enough for 480p), that means no delay after a commercial, instead of 20 seconds of buffering.
And unlike Youtube, there's none of that random jerking. I have four computers in my house, and every single one of them jerks/jolts on the worst quality youtube vids.
Crysis doesn't jolt. Neither does Hulu. Youtube does. :/
Most of that is completely over my head, but it does sound interesting.
Today I stumbled on yet another Propeller project - A wiki reader.
http://hackaday.com/2009/05/02/wikibrowser/
The project homepage is linked in the comments. I think the reader would be better with some formatting, but still quite neat!
I don't know if it's fast enough for linux. It really is a microcontroller - not a full fledged CPU or SoC. It only has something like 32KB of RAM built-in. You might get one of those DOS-style assembly operating systems to run on it, but probably not linux.
I'd rate it somewhere up there with all those AVR CPUs used in projects like the Arduino - except with different capabilities.
Their website has a lot of downloadable code on it. Do some research and see if anyone has written code for what you need. :)
The problem is, too little of X mineral is bad, but too much is also bad.
We should all be getting hair analysis done to determine what minerals we need. Or maybe we should just live life - that works too for most people.
I'd prefer a Pandora
That way I can slack off playing old SNES games like that security guard in the corner. :P
Damnit, I clicked Submit rather than Continue Editing!
This isn't so much impressive hardware, as impressive software:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5885351342753379583&q=8088
FMV on an 8088!
Okay, I admit, the quality/resolution isn't that good, but it's still fascinating. :P