How is this off-topic? The article, even the summary states that this is about Asus discrete audio cards. And I address not just general reliability concerns, but also audio-specific problems.
Honestly, sometimes I wonder if/. moderators are paid shills, or just really, really dumb.
Just an FYI - avoid Asus products if at all possible.
I have had no end of trouble with them with my most recent laptop. It took them four months to actually send it to me - between marking the specs incorrectly, parts being on backorder and it being shipped by 7-day UPS Ground, it was literally months before I had my hands on it.
And literally three hours before it broke, completely. Total system failure - either the CPU, or motherboard, was completely dead.
Their support is even more of a joke than their sales and shipping. I sent an email that night, receiving a message that I would get a response within 72 hours. It took them a full week to even *start* on their robotic "have you tried rebooting/resetting/etc" checklist - although I had by that time contacted them more directly.
It took five weeks for them to repair it. Yes, repair, despite the fact that I told them from day one (and on days two through twenty) that I would prefer a full replacement, which would be both faster and more reliable. After three weeks of no status updates (still "awaiting parts"), I began demanding a refund, as they obviously had enough stock to keep selling it to new customers. After a full month, I began threatening to take them to court.
And when I finally got it back? They fucked up AGAIN. I had, at their insistence, put everything back into the original packaging, from the warranty card to the power cable. I got it back in a poorly-fitting box with far too much bubble wrap, minus most of the paperwork and the detachable cord from the power supply (thankfully it's a standard PC power cable, as I *still* have not gotten that back).
Oh, and as if that isn't bad enough? Now the sound system is going out. The speakers sometimes cut out completely - sounds like a wiring issue.
I ordered it in May. I have, in total, had it in my possession for perhaps a month and a half. You do the math.
I used to be an Asus fanboy. My previous laptop was great - it was a good medium-end gaming laptop for the price of most company's low-end gaming laptops. The one time it needed servicing, they replied quickly and had it back to me within a week. Such was their specialty - good, but not the best, products, at reasonably low prices. Perhaps not the best-looking, and the experience was never "luxury" (drivers had Engrish problems, or odd issues), but the price was worth it. I recommended them whenever asked for laptop suggestions.
But now? After all this? I am not buying from them again. Ever. I'd get a fucking Alienware or Apple before I buy from Asus. I'm practically on a crusade against them at this point, considering how often I tell my story any chance I get.
Particularly sound devices. Their audio drivers, at least on their laptops, are terrible. Half the time it can't even get the "if headphones are plugged in, disable the speakers" part right, even sometimes cutting it back on well after the fact for no discernible reason, or randomly re-disabling any other sound outputs if an HDMI cable is plugged in.
Sony's having a hard time getting *gamers* interested in the Vita. It's an amazingly powerful handheld, but it's trying to offer $60, 40-hour console-level games in a portable.
It's competing not just with Nintendo's handheld, but with the iPhone and Android, and even to an extent Facebook games. Which are shorter and less involved, yes, but also cheaper, possibly even "free" (or at least, free-to-play, pay-to-win).
Problem is, portable gaming has shifted. It's not something you sit in front of for hours and play, it's something you play for a few minutes on your coffee break. Nintendo at least tries to make games that you *can* play for just a few minutes. They're not perfect at it (as evidenced by their own sales problems), but they're at least aware of the problem. Sony seems to be betting the house on people wanting full-sized games on a handheld, and that's just not really true anymore (to an extent, I doubt it ever really was). In the time it takes to *load* some Vita games, I can have finished a round of Angry Birds or Edge or whatever.
The other problem is that there's just no must-have games for it yet. For either handheld, really. They have a few good games apiece, but nothing that will sell not just the game, but the console. Third-parties rarely make those games - it's usually first-parties - but it doesn't help to not have them.
No, although I did pick up a copy a while back during a Steam sale - it claimed to be Mac-compatible, and my PC was broken at the time leaving me with only a handful of Mac-compatible games to play. Unfortunately, my Mac didn't actually meet the requirements, and now that I have a working PC again I have far better games to play, so I haven't actually played it yet.
I have to admit, I'm probably going to get one of these eventually, if everything goes right.
But that's the key - it has to work. It has to have at least two games I want to play that I can't play elsewhere, it has to function as a half-decent media player, it has to, you know, actually exist as a physical thing.
Right now, there's just too much a chance of this never even being released for me to pre-order. And even if it does come out, there's a large chance that it won't have any good, interesting games come out.
Now, if it does come out and live up to its promises, I'll buy one. No problem there. But I'm just still too apprehensive about it to commit to it until it's solid.
While Windows itself might work well with that setup, a lot of (badly-coded) programs do not, either assuming your home directory *must* be C:\Users\, or even worse, C:\Documents and Settings\.
And Windows seems to be working fine with symlinks now. At least directory symlinks - haven't needed file symlinks yet.
Wildfires do a lot of damage - and those *can* destroy a datacenter, not just disable one. Then there's droughts, which if severe enough can disable water-cooled datacenters.
I live in Virginia. Yes, hurricanes do a decent amount of damage on a regular basis (oddly, my internet is more resilient than my power - I can hook up a generator and still get internet).
But everywhere has a risk. West coast has earthquakes. Midwest has tornadoes. Northeast has blizzards and nor'easters. Maybe some are less of a hazard, or are more mitigate-able, but nowhere is "safe". Or at least, no affordable place is "safe". There's just varying amounts of danger.
I would recommend buying an SSD, putting the OS and all applications on it, and then using a magnetic drive as the "users" volume. Any sanely laid out OS makes this very easy.
Just an FYI for everyone, Windows does not count as a sane OS for this purpose. I managed to render a Windows install unusable trying to do that.
The best trick is to move just specific user's folders, not the whole Users directory, over, and then symlink it back to the original location. Trying to move the entire \Users folder almost always breaks something, often rendering it impossible to log in. Other methods either require setting up your own unattended install disks with odd config files, or do not work completely.
The general process: 1) Install Windows to the SSD as normal 2) Create a user account and a backup account. For this demonstration, their original, default home folders will be C:\Users\GMan and C:\Users\Admin 3) Reboot (to log both out completely) 4) Log into the backup account, otherwise the system will choke while copying your registry files 5) use Robocopy to copy the user folder to the hard drive (robocopy C:\Users\GMan D:\Users\GMan/COPYALL/E) 6) Delete the user folder (rmdir C:\Users\GMan) 7) Symlink the folder on the hard drive back to the SSD (mklink/J C:\Users\GMan D:\Users\GMan) 8) Repeat for any other users, but note that you only need one "backup" account
This gives a few advantages: 1) It works transparently with programs that assume you are at C:\Users\[username] 2) It copies all user data, not just documents/images/videos 3) If the hard drive fails, you don't break the OS - you can log in using the alternate account (Admin in my example) to try to recover things 4) If you really wanted to, you could try to set some specific files in your user directory to be on the SSD 5) If you have a Windows install, or at least recovery partition, on the hard drive, either drive can fail without rendering the system unusable.
After getting it initially set up (which was, I will concede, a pain in three hundred asses), my own dual-drive system has required me to think about which drive to put something on precisely once, when installing the Unreal Anthology off CD (which was a case of picking "D:\Unreal Anthology" instead of "C:\Unreal Anthology" when installing).
Maybe it's because I could afford an SSD big enough that I don't worry *too* much about space, and having a hard drive faster than normal (it's a 7200rpm drive in a laptop - not too common, although a bit more common than dual-drive laptops in the first place).
I have a mostly-vanilla Windows install on my SSD (I have a partition waiting for Linux, but I haven't found the time for it yet). The only change was moving \Users\GMan and \Steam over to a hard drive. C:\Users\GMan is now a symlink to the same on D: - I had tried it moving all of \Users, but that borked Windows so bad I had to reinstall. And now there's a backup user account, so if my HDD fails I can still at least log in.
Should I ever get Linux installed, I'll probably make/home/gman a symlink to D:\Users\GMan, so all my documents are literally in the same place.
It gives high performance on all my applications - even LibreOffice and GIMP start in a reasonable amount of time. But all my bulky stuff (documents, videos, games (often 10+GB apiece)) are stored on the cheap drive (my few non-Steam games were also installed there). So I'm never cramped - my SSD has 75 of its 96GB partition free, and my HDD has 400 of it's 680gb free (the Windows recovery partition is also on there, just in case the SSD fails).
Both my high school and college used a large number of iMacs. I don't think one ever overheated on me, in the six years we had them. And we did some decently-power-hungry things with them (I once tried to compute the XKCD number on one - long story short, it didn't work).
Now, there was a problem in one lab, where running all of them at once at full brightness would trip the breaker for the room, but that's a building power fault, not a computer power fault.
Which generation was it that you used? All of the ones I've used were post-Intel ones, and I've heard the G4/G5 iMacs were terrible at heat management - I know the G5 Power Macs the graphics department had generated more heat than the server room.
The comparison was actually with the laptop being next to the TV, so that's about as valid as I can get it. I've even found they can see a difference between a 1280x720 TV and my 1600x900 monitor, and that's much less a difference in physical size AND in resolution.
Higher resolution does matter. Maybe there is a limit (I haven't seen 4K video on a home-size screen yet), but we're far from reaching it.
And you also have to think about changes in consumption. More and more people aren't lounging on the couch and staring at a massive screen three/four meters away, but sitting at a desk watching video on a smaller screen, or watching on a laptop that's, at worst, on the coffee table.
So now it's not a matter of a screen half a room away - it's a screen a meter away, or less. And I can *definitely* see a difference between my 17" 1920x1080 laptop and my old 15" 1280x800 laptop (basically 720p, but 16:10 instead of 16:9 so it has 80 extra vertical pixels).
but considering that most people can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, I doubt that will ever happen.
Uh, what?
I can see the difference. I can even see the difference between 1080p and 1440p, or 1440p and 2160p. And it's not a slight difference that I could understand people missing. In informal tests, comparing my laptop playing 1080p video to my parent's 720p "HDTV", 100% of those surveyed responded "holy crap that looks better" (margin of error for 95% confidence interval: 9.38%).
The "trick" is basically the card using the slow decay of unpowered memory to detect if the card has been powered on recently, and if so, force a small delay. The goal is basically to limit the rate of attacks with minimal impact on proper use (if the card reads properly every time, this has near-zero impact on proper use - it might annoy a bit if your card doesn't read right, having to wait a second or two to swipe again, but that's neither a terribly common case nor a significant impact on real users).
Chilling it actually makes it worse for you, as the card will detect itself as "having been powered up recently" for longer than it would normally, so you limit your attack rate even more.
I tried using it on my old computer (Core 2 Duo @ 2.26GHz, GeForce 9600), and it didn't run at all well. Primarily seemed to be the sound - sound disabled, it ran at about full speed, but with sound it ran around 5fps. Changing video settings didn't seem to affect it - I got 5fps at 16x MSAA and 5fps at 0x AA.
That computer died a while back, and I'm on a new, more powerful one now (Core i7 @ 2.3GHz, GeForce 660), so I might try this out sometime, see if I can handle it now.
I've ditched Firefox before. I started using it at 2.0, and loved it, switching from Opera. The entire 3.x series, however, had a bug that was unnoticed or minor to most users, but absolutely crippling to a few, myself included. Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds) were refreshed in the main thread, which meant that every time I started it up, it would stagger and sputter for over five minutes while trying to update all my feeds, and it would repeat the process every few hours.
For the entire 3.x series, I was primarily a Chrome user, starting Firefox once a day only to check all my feeds (I have yet to find an RSS reader I like more than FFLB). Very annoying.
The bug was fixed in 4.0, and I switched back. Chrome remains a bit faster than Firefox, but I find the performance hit is barely noticeable on my machines (I'm a gamer, so I tend to have more processing power than most users). And even a small performance hit would be acceptable if it means my RSS feeds are always in my browser.
It's not even questionable. Carmack cannot make a game.
And he doesn't try to. He's listed in the credits for Rage as "Lead Programmer". If you think the game sucked, blame Tim Willits (Lead Designer). Even back in the Commander Keen days, he was just the technical genius, letting Romero et al. do the game design.
That is perfectly fine for write-once/read-many use cases, in fact preferably. However it has absolutely terrible rewrite performance, requiring either a messy, polluting chemical to overwrite, or resulting in heavily fragmented data.
This is a bit high-tech, but I've had good results with it.
You're going to need a cylinder of compressed graphite, roughly.5mm in diameter and 5cm in length. Encapsulate it in some ablative material (preferably a renewable organic material) for better grip and structural integrity.
Use this implement to store data on a flexible two-dimensional lattice. The graphite will slowly be worn down as it is deposited on the surface - you will need to continually ablate more of the cover.
Data removal is handled either by disposing of the lattice itself (for bulk erase), or by use of a specialized tool (often attached to one end of the data write implement) for small deletes - although I will note that, after sufficient rewrite cycles, data may be unreadable.
This offers many advantages over traditional computer-based storage. It is far lower-power, functioning off a few milliwatts of energy. It allows for highly flexible unstructured data storage (sort of like NoSQL), and can be improved rapidly by agile development, as no data standards are enforced. I often use a system of my own design to encrypt data by use of an alternative character set (the Unicode committee has, unfortunately, declined to add it to the standard). It also allows more rapid and accurate entry of non-textual or rich-text data.
The only drawbacks are a rather inefficient system for video storage, and it can become rather bulky (while not as dense as the old computer systems, they often have similar or even higher mass). But those are rather minor drawbacks given all the advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Blood peasant...
How is this off-topic? The article, even the summary states that this is about Asus discrete audio cards. And I address not just general reliability concerns, but also audio-specific problems.
Honestly, sometimes I wonder if /. moderators are paid shills, or just really, really dumb.
Just an FYI - avoid Asus products if at all possible.
I have had no end of trouble with them with my most recent laptop. It took them four months to actually send it to me - between marking the specs incorrectly, parts being on backorder and it being shipped by 7-day UPS Ground, it was literally months before I had my hands on it.
And literally three hours before it broke, completely. Total system failure - either the CPU, or motherboard, was completely dead.
Their support is even more of a joke than their sales and shipping. I sent an email that night, receiving a message that I would get a response within 72 hours. It took them a full week to even *start* on their robotic "have you tried rebooting/resetting/etc" checklist - although I had by that time contacted them more directly.
It took five weeks for them to repair it. Yes, repair, despite the fact that I told them from day one (and on days two through twenty) that I would prefer a full replacement, which would be both faster and more reliable. After three weeks of no status updates (still "awaiting parts"), I began demanding a refund, as they obviously had enough stock to keep selling it to new customers. After a full month, I began threatening to take them to court.
And when I finally got it back? They fucked up AGAIN. I had, at their insistence, put everything back into the original packaging, from the warranty card to the power cable. I got it back in a poorly-fitting box with far too much bubble wrap, minus most of the paperwork and the detachable cord from the power supply (thankfully it's a standard PC power cable, as I *still* have not gotten that back).
Oh, and as if that isn't bad enough? Now the sound system is going out. The speakers sometimes cut out completely - sounds like a wiring issue.
I ordered it in May. I have, in total, had it in my possession for perhaps a month and a half. You do the math.
I used to be an Asus fanboy. My previous laptop was great - it was a good medium-end gaming laptop for the price of most company's low-end gaming laptops. The one time it needed servicing, they replied quickly and had it back to me within a week. Such was their specialty - good, but not the best, products, at reasonably low prices. Perhaps not the best-looking, and the experience was never "luxury" (drivers had Engrish problems, or odd issues), but the price was worth it. I recommended them whenever asked for laptop suggestions.
But now? After all this? I am not buying from them again. Ever. I'd get a fucking Alienware or Apple before I buy from Asus. I'm practically on a crusade against them at this point, considering how often I tell my story any chance I get.
Particularly sound devices. Their audio drivers, at least on their laptops, are terrible. Half the time it can't even get the "if headphones are plugged in, disable the speakers" part right, even sometimes cutting it back on well after the fact for no discernible reason, or randomly re-disabling any other sound outputs if an HDMI cable is plugged in.
Sony's having a hard time getting *gamers* interested in the Vita. It's an amazingly powerful handheld, but it's trying to offer $60, 40-hour console-level games in a portable.
It's competing not just with Nintendo's handheld, but with the iPhone and Android, and even to an extent Facebook games. Which are shorter and less involved, yes, but also cheaper, possibly even "free" (or at least, free-to-play, pay-to-win).
Problem is, portable gaming has shifted. It's not something you sit in front of for hours and play, it's something you play for a few minutes on your coffee break. Nintendo at least tries to make games that you *can* play for just a few minutes. They're not perfect at it (as evidenced by their own sales problems), but they're at least aware of the problem. Sony seems to be betting the house on people wanting full-sized games on a handheld, and that's just not really true anymore (to an extent, I doubt it ever really was). In the time it takes to *load* some Vita games, I can have finished a round of Angry Birds or Edge or whatever.
The other problem is that there's just no must-have games for it yet. For either handheld, really. They have a few good games apiece, but nothing that will sell not just the game, but the console. Third-parties rarely make those games - it's usually first-parties - but it doesn't help to not have them.
No, although I did pick up a copy a while back during a Steam sale - it claimed to be Mac-compatible, and my PC was broken at the time leaving me with only a handful of Mac-compatible games to play. Unfortunately, my Mac didn't actually meet the requirements, and now that I have a working PC again I have far better games to play, so I haven't actually played it yet.
I have to admit, I'm probably going to get one of these eventually, if everything goes right.
But that's the key - it has to work. It has to have at least two games I want to play that I can't play elsewhere, it has to function as a half-decent media player, it has to, you know, actually exist as a physical thing.
Right now, there's just too much a chance of this never even being released for me to pre-order. And even if it does come out, there's a large chance that it won't have any good, interesting games come out.
Now, if it does come out and live up to its promises, I'll buy one. No problem there. But I'm just still too apprehensive about it to commit to it until it's solid.
While Windows itself might work well with that setup, a lot of (badly-coded) programs do not, either assuming your home directory *must* be C:\Users\, or even worse, C:\Documents and Settings\.
And Windows seems to be working fine with symlinks now. At least directory symlinks - haven't needed file symlinks yet.
No problem - I wish I had known that when I first tried it. Took a whole day to get it working right, since I had to reinstall so many times.
Wildfires do a lot of damage - and those *can* destroy a datacenter, not just disable one. Then there's droughts, which if severe enough can disable water-cooled datacenters.
I live in Virginia. Yes, hurricanes do a decent amount of damage on a regular basis (oddly, my internet is more resilient than my power - I can hook up a generator and still get internet).
But everywhere has a risk. West coast has earthquakes. Midwest has tornadoes. Northeast has blizzards and nor'easters. Maybe some are less of a hazard, or are more mitigate-able, but nowhere is "safe". Or at least, no affordable place is "safe". There's just varying amounts of danger.
One megabyte was just 1/1024 of a gigabyte!
FTFY
I would recommend buying an SSD, putting the OS and all applications on it, and then using a magnetic drive as the "users" volume. Any sanely laid out OS makes this very easy.
Just an FYI for everyone, Windows does not count as a sane OS for this purpose. I managed to render a Windows install unusable trying to do that.
The best trick is to move just specific user's folders, not the whole Users directory, over, and then symlink it back to the original location. Trying to move the entire \Users folder almost always breaks something, often rendering it impossible to log in. Other methods either require setting up your own unattended install disks with odd config files, or do not work completely.
The general process: /COPYALL /E) /J C:\Users\GMan D:\Users\GMan)
1) Install Windows to the SSD as normal
2) Create a user account and a backup account. For this demonstration, their original, default home folders will be C:\Users\GMan and C:\Users\Admin
3) Reboot (to log both out completely)
4) Log into the backup account, otherwise the system will choke while copying your registry files
5) use Robocopy to copy the user folder to the hard drive (robocopy C:\Users\GMan D:\Users\GMan
6) Delete the user folder (rmdir C:\Users\GMan)
7) Symlink the folder on the hard drive back to the SSD (mklink
8) Repeat for any other users, but note that you only need one "backup" account
This gives a few advantages:
1) It works transparently with programs that assume you are at C:\Users\[username]
2) It copies all user data, not just documents/images/videos
3) If the hard drive fails, you don't break the OS - you can log in using the alternate account (Admin in my example) to try to recover things
4) If you really wanted to, you could try to set some specific files in your user directory to be on the SSD
5) If you have a Windows install, or at least recovery partition, on the hard drive, either drive can fail without rendering the system unusable.
After getting it initially set up (which was, I will concede, a pain in three hundred asses), my own dual-drive system has required me to think about which drive to put something on precisely once, when installing the Unreal Anthology off CD (which was a case of picking "D:\Unreal Anthology" instead of "C:\Unreal Anthology" when installing).
Maybe it's because I could afford an SSD big enough that I don't worry *too* much about space, and having a hard drive faster than normal (it's a 7200rpm drive in a laptop - not too common, although a bit more common than dual-drive laptops in the first place).
I do OS + most programs.
I have a mostly-vanilla Windows install on my SSD (I have a partition waiting for Linux, but I haven't found the time for it yet). The only change was moving \Users\GMan and \Steam over to a hard drive. C:\Users\GMan is now a symlink to the same on D: - I had tried it moving all of \Users, but that borked Windows so bad I had to reinstall. And now there's a backup user account, so if my HDD fails I can still at least log in.
Should I ever get Linux installed, I'll probably make /home/gman a symlink to D:\Users\GMan, so all my documents are literally in the same place.
It gives high performance on all my applications - even LibreOffice and GIMP start in a reasonable amount of time. But all my bulky stuff (documents, videos, games (often 10+GB apiece)) are stored on the cheap drive (my few non-Steam games were also installed there). So I'm never cramped - my SSD has 75 of its 96GB partition free, and my HDD has 400 of it's 680gb free (the Windows recovery partition is also on there, just in case the SSD fails).
If they could somehow fit Raspberry Pi and the DMCA into it, it would be the Perfect Storm of /. articles!
Say what?
Both my high school and college used a large number of iMacs. I don't think one ever overheated on me, in the six years we had them. And we did some decently-power-hungry things with them (I once tried to compute the XKCD number on one - long story short, it didn't work).
Now, there was a problem in one lab, where running all of them at once at full brightness would trip the breaker for the room, but that's a building power fault, not a computer power fault.
Which generation was it that you used? All of the ones I've used were post-Intel ones, and I've heard the G4/G5 iMacs were terrible at heat management - I know the G5 Power Macs the graphics department had generated more heat than the server room.
The comparison was actually with the laptop being next to the TV, so that's about as valid as I can get it. I've even found they can see a difference between a 1280x720 TV and my 1600x900 monitor, and that's much less a difference in physical size AND in resolution.
Higher resolution does matter. Maybe there is a limit (I haven't seen 4K video on a home-size screen yet), but we're far from reaching it.
And you also have to think about changes in consumption. More and more people aren't lounging on the couch and staring at a massive screen three/four meters away, but sitting at a desk watching video on a smaller screen, or watching on a laptop that's, at worst, on the coffee table.
So now it's not a matter of a screen half a room away - it's a screen a meter away, or less. And I can *definitely* see a difference between my 17" 1920x1080 laptop and my old 15" 1280x800 laptop (basically 720p, but 16:10 instead of 16:9 so it has 80 extra vertical pixels).
but considering that most people can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, I doubt that will ever happen.
Uh, what?
I can see the difference. I can even see the difference between 1080p and 1440p, or 1440p and 2160p. And it's not a slight difference that I could understand people missing. In informal tests, comparing my laptop playing 1080p video to my parent's 720p "HDTV", 100% of those surveyed responded "holy crap that looks better" (margin of error for 95% confidence interval: 9.38%).
Which makes it harder, actually.
The "trick" is basically the card using the slow decay of unpowered memory to detect if the card has been powered on recently, and if so, force a small delay. The goal is basically to limit the rate of attacks with minimal impact on proper use (if the card reads properly every time, this has near-zero impact on proper use - it might annoy a bit if your card doesn't read right, having to wait a second or two to swipe again, but that's neither a terribly common case nor a significant impact on real users).
Chilling it actually makes it worse for you, as the card will detect itself as "having been powered up recently" for longer than it would normally, so you limit your attack rate even more.
I tried that - the 5fps was with it OFF. With it synched to graphics, it was more in the range of "30 frames per minute" than "30 frames per second".
I tried using it on my old computer (Core 2 Duo @ 2.26GHz, GeForce 9600), and it didn't run at all well. Primarily seemed to be the sound - sound disabled, it ran at about full speed, but with sound it ran around 5fps. Changing video settings didn't seem to affect it - I got 5fps at 16x MSAA and 5fps at 0x AA.
That computer died a while back, and I'm on a new, more powerful one now (Core i7 @ 2.3GHz, GeForce 660), so I might try this out sometime, see if I can handle it now.
I've ditched Firefox before. I started using it at 2.0, and loved it, switching from Opera. The entire 3.x series, however, had a bug that was unnoticed or minor to most users, but absolutely crippling to a few, myself included. Live Bookmarks (RSS feeds) were refreshed in the main thread, which meant that every time I started it up, it would stagger and sputter for over five minutes while trying to update all my feeds, and it would repeat the process every few hours.
For the entire 3.x series, I was primarily a Chrome user, starting Firefox once a day only to check all my feeds (I have yet to find an RSS reader I like more than FFLB). Very annoying.
The bug was fixed in 4.0, and I switched back. Chrome remains a bit faster than Firefox, but I find the performance hit is barely noticeable on my machines (I'm a gamer, so I tend to have more processing power than most users). And even a small performance hit would be acceptable if it means my RSS feeds are always in my browser.
It's not even questionable. Carmack cannot make a game.
And he doesn't try to. He's listed in the credits for Rage as "Lead Programmer". If you think the game sucked, blame Tim Willits (Lead Designer). Even back in the Commander Keen days, he was just the technical genius, letting Romero et al. do the game design.
That is perfectly fine for write-once/read-many use cases, in fact preferably. However it has absolutely terrible rewrite performance, requiring either a messy, polluting chemical to overwrite, or resulting in heavily fragmented data.
This is a bit high-tech, but I've had good results with it.
You're going to need a cylinder of compressed graphite, roughly .5mm in diameter and 5cm in length. Encapsulate it in some ablative material (preferably a renewable organic material) for better grip and structural integrity.
Use this implement to store data on a flexible two-dimensional lattice. The graphite will slowly be worn down as it is deposited on the surface - you will need to continually ablate more of the cover.
Data removal is handled either by disposing of the lattice itself (for bulk erase), or by use of a specialized tool (often attached to one end of the data write implement) for small deletes - although I will note that, after sufficient rewrite cycles, data may be unreadable.
This offers many advantages over traditional computer-based storage. It is far lower-power, functioning off a few milliwatts of energy. It allows for highly flexible unstructured data storage (sort of like NoSQL), and can be improved rapidly by agile development, as no data standards are enforced. I often use a system of my own design to encrypt data by use of an alternative character set (the Unicode committee has, unfortunately, declined to add it to the standard). It also allows more rapid and accurate entry of non-textual or rich-text data.
The only drawbacks are a rather inefficient system for video storage, and it can become rather bulky (while not as dense as the old computer systems, they often have similar or even higher mass). But those are rather minor drawbacks given all the advantages.