Having spent time working in a mixed office and working with other mixed offices with a broad variety of tools. I've found that the Linux/Apple/MS zealots swear by their os and will spend great quantities of time espousing the benefits of the respective environments. Some of these (not all, and some workers not in this group) will also spend considerable time "tweaking" their workstation/applications. If these would shut up and work they might approach the productivity levels of the people who don't care and just do their job.
Outside of the above group productivity appears to be unrelated to platform. Our biggest related time sink is getting applications to play nice with each other's formats. If we could standardize on a platform that would help, but it isn't an option for us.
As for myself, I was once a "tweaker" (on any of the big three platforms at one time or another) but eventually I just got bored and am now really *very* happy with my plain Jane WindowsXP box. The extent of my tweakery extends to my wallpaper and keeping my start menu somewhat under control.
As Guy Kawasaki once said (paraphrased) "I would love to argue platform advocacy with you, but I've got a check to cash."
Everquest II wants 512 mb for their max setting as well. And it will probably help a *lot* performance wise as the drop off in performance as image quality improves is significant.
For games, while a little improvement of texture resolution can help some, the real benefit (IMHO) will be in variation of textures. MMORPG type games (such as Everquest II) have a much more noticeable issue with limited ram. Most of the variation in second gen titles have worked around some of this with geometry and tinting instead of textures, but there is still a lot of sameness in the games.
This is also an issue for other types of games. Repeating textures and armies of cloned combatants are a couple of examples of working with limited texture space. Developers have more of a choice in presenting even sharper images and/or greater variety of images in their games.
iTunes with an iTunes express seems to work quite well in my home. IIRC it should work with up to 4 streams simultaneously, but syncing is not possible. Note also that some people have complained about skipping (datarate) issues with just one, so perhaps 4 is asking a bit much unless they're all in the same room.
With a PDA you can get a copy of "RemoteAmp" which will function as a remote control for your setup. It is quirky but functional. Works well for playing playlists and random music. Viewing/playing a single album is not as nice. Add to that when you view your library it sends the *whole goddamned thing* every time. With my 6k library it's a good 20-30 second wait via Bluetooth. It's better with WiFi (still not good though) but my PDA's batteries won't last an evening powering the 802.11 connection.
Or answer it. Last I read, some finance companies were paying 20-40 bucks per lead. I'm sure, given some of the extreme tales we've read about recently that it's some times a lot more than that.
Imagine if instead of.001% of spam (a number pulled right out of my ass) netting a valid customer, that these spamer abusing softwares answered it.
Even if you can't engineer a bad lead from top to bottom, you can make such a mess they can't find the good ones.
The last AA powered hard drive based MP3 player I had ran about 7 hours under continuous use(spinning up every minute or so). I would suppose that if the drive were spinning continuously 1.5 - 2 hours would be reasonable figure.
Never mind the system resources, disk space, download time, and memory requirements.
Irrational sure, but every time an app crashes or does something bad I envision the meeting where they decided they had resources to devote to skinning their apps.
Creative Labs is I think the ultimate example. The hardware and feature set are ok as bullets on the outside of the box. But the apps are coosed up like a welfare mom with too much makeup on, take forever to load and don't work as well as you would hope.
I really do love running Trillian on my windows platform, but I can't help but wonder if this story goes along with the rest of Slashdot type stuff. I mean, Trillian is:
* Windows only
* Not open source and probably never will be.
* Its pro version isn't free.
I was honestly surprised to see this on slashdot this morning. After all, there aren't many slashdot posts proclaiming excitement over new versions of SQL Server, right?
But it does have that "rebellious teen" flavor that slash geeks so enjoy. It's also saturday, and news is slow. On the other hand, in line with your SQL remark, the OSS community does have it's sometimes problematic but often workable variant in Jabber.
Which brings us to my best guess why... A) The submitter suggested (and linked) that we pressure them toward a multiplatform product. B) Trillian does it's thing a fair bit better than anything the OSS community has been able to produce as of yet.
No way! You paid a dirt-cheap, well below expected value price for a POS DVD player and it really turned out to be a POS worth what you paid for it? Say it isn't so!
POS or no, a DVD player should play DVD's. The price is irrelevant. The real question is why didn't he return it.
It is an extension of the "Bored Teen Hacker" bug wherein your sim teens actually hack *Your* box and e-mail *your* contacts an urgent request for help in transfering a large sum of money to their account.
This is surely the most useless article I've seen posted here in some time, and that's saying a lot, considering we're just out of election season. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works, the company's website consists of two press releases that don't tell you jack shit, so how about it folks - someone want to fill in a poor/. poster by telling me how this ------- thing works?
It works by generating a "scientific article" and discussion in order to attract investors.
You know, I've heard that the human brain operates at about a 10Hz frequency, has 100Bln neurons, and trillions of interconnections. Amazingly, its power dissipation is at around 40W. (And its MIPS rating is on the order of 10^15 instructions per second). Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation.
Give them time. Evolution has a few billion years head start on R&D.
Because it doesn't really make much of a difference (and nowhere near 5%) on that particular hardware. Consider the two drives mentioned in the article the 10K V, and MaXLine III. While SR commented on the discrepancy, the 10K V despite having half the cache has a read service time that is nearly twice as fast as that of the ML3 thanks to a faster spindle speed.
The OS disk cashing system ultimately provides essentially the same function dynamically. That's not to say that another layer of caching would not help at all, or that more cache has no impact. But the performance improvement for increased on-drive cache in this market segment (workstation) is very very small.
This is google's week to be good. IBM have the last week of the month, unless SCO has another press release, then they're good that week as well. Sun is good on all days that are multiples of 5 and evil on the 11th and 23rd of the month. When available they are evil on the 29th of February. I've lost track of Oracle but I think they alternate the 2nd and third weeks of the month. Microsoft is always evil unless Timothy posts the news, in which case Slashdot is evil for posting a duped story and MS passes go and collects their 200 bucks.
It's incomplete but there is the rundown on the schedule as far as I can tell.
Slashdot Mirror
Having spent time working in a mixed office and working with other mixed offices with a broad variety of tools. I've found that the Linux/Apple/MS zealots swear by their os and will spend great quantities of time espousing the benefits of the respective environments. Some of these (not all, and some workers not in this group) will also spend considerable time "tweaking" their workstation/applications.
If these would shut up and work they might approach the productivity levels of the people who don't care and just do their job.
Outside of the above group productivity appears to be unrelated to platform. Our biggest related time sink is getting applications to play nice with each other's formats. If we could standardize on a platform that would help, but it isn't an option for us.
As for myself, I was once a "tweaker" (on any of the big three platforms at one time or another) but eventually I just got bored and am now really *very* happy with my plain Jane WindowsXP box. The extent of my tweakery extends to my wallpaper and keeping my start menu somewhat under control.
As Guy Kawasaki once said (paraphrased) "I would love to argue platform advocacy with you, but I've got a check to cash."
Everquest II wants 512 mb for their max setting as well. And it will probably help a *lot* performance wise as the drop off in performance as image quality improves is significant.
For games, while a little improvement of texture resolution can help some, the real benefit (IMHO) will be in variation of textures. MMORPG type games (such as Everquest II) have a much more noticeable issue with limited ram. Most of the variation in second gen titles have worked around some of this with geometry and tinting instead of textures, but there is still a lot of sameness in the games.
This is also an issue for other types of games. Repeating textures and armies of cloned combatants are a couple of examples of working with limited texture space. Developers have more of a choice in presenting even sharper images and/or greater variety of images in their games.
Get a treadmil and only watch tv/play video games when you're on it.
iTunes with an iTunes express seems to work quite well in my home. IIRC it should work with up to 4 streams simultaneously, but syncing is not possible. Note also that some people have complained about skipping (datarate) issues with just one, so perhaps 4 is asking a bit much unless they're all in the same room.
With a PDA you can get a copy of "RemoteAmp" which will function as a remote control for your setup. It is quirky but functional. Works well for playing playlists and random music. Viewing/playing a single album is not as nice. Add to that when you view your library it sends the *whole goddamned thing* every time. With my 6k library it's a good 20-30 second wait via Bluetooth. It's better with WiFi (still not good though) but my PDA's batteries won't last an evening powering the 802.11 connection.
What does the PC have that the Mac doesn't?
Games? Even if the one you want is available, that ATI 9200(32mb) will not likely be adequate.*
The PC comes with a free week on the sofa as well.
*Breakout & Super Breakout not withstanding.
It's patented, but the people who've got the patent are saying they won't charge people to use it.
I'm sure they were sincere, but you could say the same for SCO before Daryl was hired.
Or answer it. Last I read, some finance companies were paying 20-40 bucks per lead. I'm sure, given some of the extreme tales we've read about recently that it's some times a lot more than that.
Imagine if instead of
Even if you can't engineer a bad lead from top to bottom, you can make such a mess they can't find the good ones.
The last AA powered hard drive based MP3 player I had ran about 7 hours under continuous use(spinning up every minute or so). I would suppose that if the drive were spinning continuously 1.5 - 2 hours would be reasonable figure.
Where are my + mod points when I need them.
Reguardless of the package it does integrate the messaging systems very well.
I agree with your thoughts on their product, but they still do their primary function(s) better than anyone.
Never mind the system resources, disk space, download time, and memory requirements.
Irrational sure, but every time an app crashes or does something bad I envision the meeting where they decided they had resources to devote to skinning their apps.
Creative Labs is I think the ultimate example. The hardware and feature set are ok as bullets on the outside of the box. But the apps are coosed up like a welfare mom with too much makeup on, take forever to load and don't work as well as you would hope.
I really do love running Trillian on my windows platform, but I can't help but wonder if this story goes along with the rest of Slashdot type stuff. I mean, Trillian is:
* Windows only
* Not open source and probably never will be.
* Its pro version isn't free.
I was honestly surprised to see this on slashdot this morning. After all, there aren't many slashdot posts proclaiming excitement over new versions of SQL Server, right?
But it does have that "rebellious teen" flavor that slash geeks so enjoy. It's also saturday, and news is slow.
On the other hand, in line with your SQL remark, the OSS community does have it's sometimes problematic but often workable variant in Jabber.
Which brings us to my best guess why...
A) The submitter suggested (and linked) that we pressure them toward a multiplatform product.
B) Trillian does it's thing a fair bit better than anything the OSS community has been able to produce as of yet.
No way! You paid a dirt-cheap, well below expected value price for a POS DVD player and it really turned out to be a POS worth what you paid for it? Say it isn't so!
POS or no, a DVD player should play DVD's. The price is irrelevant. The real question is why didn't he return it.
So here's my suggestion.. go to nothing but RSS and no HTML!
Except it'll be an hour before someone implements images in RSS feeds, and then it's 1990 all over again.
It is an extension of the "Bored Teen Hacker" bug wherein your sim teens actually hack *Your* box and e-mail *your* contacts an urgent request for help in transfering a large sum of money to their account.
Squeenix in the vernacular.
Totally off topic...
Funny that in blocking the ad's for "internet accelerator" I've accelerated my connection speed far more than their product ever will.
This is surely the most useless article I've seen posted here in some time, and that's saying a lot, considering we're just out of election season. The article doesn't tell you anything significant about how it works, the company's website consists of two press releases that don't tell you jack shit, so how about it folks - someone want to fill in a poor /. poster by telling me how this ------- thing works?
It works by generating a "scientific article" and discussion in order to attract investors.
I call it the second round of funding effect.
You know, I've heard that the human brain operates at about a 10Hz frequency, has 100Bln neurons, and trillions of interconnections. Amazingly, its power dissipation is at around 40W. (And its MIPS rating is on the order of 10^15 instructions per second). Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation.
Give them time. Evolution has a few billion years head start on R&D.
Because it doesn't really make much of a difference (and nowhere near 5%) on that particular hardware. Consider the two drives mentioned in the article the 10K V, and MaXLine III. While SR commented on the discrepancy, the 10K V despite having half the cache has a read service time that is nearly twice as fast as that of the ML3 thanks to a faster spindle speed.
The OS disk cashing system ultimately provides essentially the same function dynamically. That's not to say that another layer of caching would not help at all, or that more cache has no impact. But the performance improvement for increased on-drive cache in this market segment (workstation) is very very small.
Unfortunately Moore's observation has nothing to do with clock speed or hard drive capacity. Plus one, and minus two?
Could this be a new area of tech jobs, setting up and maintaining ecommerce sites, creating search assisting applications?
That looks like a long winded variation on googlejacking.
"for about 3 weeks back in 1999 I had the new PBX here reporting our outgoing caller ID information as "Touch my Monkey"
we were setting it up, messing around and forgot to set it to the company information after we put it online.
The Director of sales was, for some strange reason, not amused. "
That explains why the salesman refused to talk dirty to me. I thought it was just an agressive 976 campaign.
And just like the US, the consumers of said products will, in public office, decry the practice.
The more insistant the official, the larger their infraction.
This is google's week to be good. IBM have the last week of the month, unless SCO has another press release, then they're good that week as well.
Sun is good on all days that are multiples of 5 and evil on the 11th and 23rd of the month. When available they are evil on the 29th of February.
I've lost track of Oracle but I think they alternate the 2nd and third weeks of the month. Microsoft is always evil unless Timothy posts the news, in which case Slashdot is evil for posting a duped story and MS passes go and collects their 200 bucks.
It's incomplete but there is the rundown on the schedule as far as I can tell.