My guess is that 15Krpm drives are simply more expensive to manufacture, and not that there's any inherent quality in ATA drives that keep them from achieving rotational speeds higher than 7200rpm. ATA drives are sold at cut-throat profit margins, so anything that'd make them cost less to make will help the bottom line. SCSI drives command a higher price, thus covering the cost of development, manufacturing, and quality assurance.
As you might have noticed, the page for the IDE-SCSI converter did not provide any technical reasons for why one would want to put an ATA drive on a SCSI bus. Their only valid reason is cost; large-capacity SCSI drives do exist, like the 146GB Seagate ST3146807LW, contrary to their implied claim when they ask "Tired of paying a premium for a SCSI hard drive for only half the storage capacity of an IDE hard drive?".
The page doesn't mention anything about tagged command queueing. SCSI drives can receive multiple commands from the controller simultaneously and return the results in whatever order they think is the fastest at that moment. ATA cannot do this, and this is a reason why SCSI usually 'seems' to be faster than ATA. Then there's the issue of latency; the converter would necessarily take some time to convert the commands between SCSI and ATA. Even with ATA/133, I suspect that an ATA drive connected to a SCSI bus using this converter will be much slower than a native SCSI drive. And, at USD$99, it cancels out any savings that you might get from buying an ATA drive over a SCSI one. It'd be better, though, if the converter allowed the user to connect two ATA drives simultaneously, instead of having to use one converter per drive.
Drive manufacturers already provide this kind of information on the data sheets for their products. For example, the data sheet for the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV drives says that the current draw for that drive is 2.8 amps @ 12 VDC and 1.2 amps @ 5 VDC (same numbers for all capacities). It even indicates the typical power consumption during seek, read/write, idle, and standby.
Thus, as you can see, there's no need to stick an ammetre into the power leads when you can read a piece of paper (or a web page) to figure this stuff out.
Using OmniWeb and its default User-Agent string, I get "Cannot Load Address -- This page redirects the browser back to itself". I have cookies enabled, too.
Changed the User-Agent string to that of IE 5.2 (OS X), and it works. I lay the blame on the website's idiot coders.
IIRC., on a given USB chain/bus/tree/thingie/etc., there must be one *and only* one master device (generally a computer) that controls it and manages the transfer of data between devices, while other devices act as dumb peripherals waiting for the master to do something with them. Firewire, OTOH., resembles a peer-to-peer network, in that each device can be an intelligent controller and can initiate transfers to/from other devices on its own. Thus, Firewire is ideally better suited to building a SAN than USB. I'm not saying that a USB-based SAN would be impossible to build, but that it'd require some serious hacking in order to coax it into something more useful than a very fast serial port.
Well, there's The Jargon File, a.k.a. The New Hacker's Dictionary, which the writers could presumably consult whenever they write anything with a geek factor greater than 0. However, even The File's contents can be tough to grok by non-geeks, so I've decided to condense it into a form more easily digested by non-geeks:
Hacker good, cracker bad!
Hopefully they'll get that one.
(I make no warranty of accuracy of my statements.)
Re:Use your own suggestion -- LVM
on
Unionfs for Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There's no need to unmount a volume before growing it. You still have to unmount it before shrinking it, though; resize_reiserfs will refuse to work if you don't do so.
To expand on batkiwi's comment above, here's the Gang of Four entry in the Jargon File:
Gang of Four n.
(also abbreviated `GOF') [prob. a play on the `Gang Of Four' who briefly ran Communist China after the death of Mao] Describes either the authors or the book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" published in 1995 by Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-63361-2). The authors forming the Gang Of Four are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides. They are also sometimes referred to as `Gamma et. al.' The authors state at http://www.hillside.net/patterns/DPBook/GOF.html "Why are we... called this? Who knows. Somehow the name just stuck." The term is also used to describe any of the design patterns that are used in the book, referring to the patterns within it as `Gang Of Four Patterns.'
Yes! I played 'Cool Spot' (or whatever the title was) on my Genesis/Megadrive many years ago. IIRC., it was also available for PC and Amiga. Thanks for reminding me of it.
Just wondering, are you using the custom kernel from Gentoo? If so, have you compiled your kernel with either/both of the low latency patch and/or the preemptible kernel patch? What are your experiences with either of those two options when running XFS? I'd expect the use of either of those two to improve a system's responsiveness to user interaction when doing a lot of disk I/O, but if those don't help when using XFS, I wonder what kind of black magic is going on inside that code.
The more anal-retentive amongst us would abbreviate "PlayStation 2" as "PSX2", continuing the usage of "PSX" to refer to "PlayStation" as in the original PSX. The fact that Sony chose to put a big "PS2" logo on the side (top?) of the PSX2 doesn't help, and those who've used PS/2s before (myself included) have a hard time reading "PS2" without associating it with a personal computer line from Big Blue.
Anyone who had an NES, or had a friend who had an NES, has at least heard of "Yo! Noid", from Capcom. The game didn't feature any product placement; it was an advertisement all by itself. I don't think I've seen anything like that before or since in an electronic game.
If you're using OpenLDAP, you can rebuild it with ODBC support and run it on top of MySQL. I've tried running it with PostgreSQL, but have had no luck with it yet. The configure flag for this is --enable-sql.
I think saying that they are dropping the ability to boot into Mac OS [9] seems a bit misleading. It kind-of-if-you-look-at-it-differently implies that Apple is removing the feature from the firmware, however no mention of that is made in the announcement. All that they'll be doing (in my view, if I'm not missing something here) is removing OS 9 as a stand-alone OS from their new machines. It'll still live as part of OS X; Classic still needs OS 9 in order to run OS 9 apps. That said, there's no need for something like MOL, since Classic does the the same thing.
If the references to S3refresh.exe here are anything to go by, your machine probably has an S3 8xx video chip (my guess is that it's an 805). XFree 4.2 doesn't support those (yet), so you'd need 3.x if you want to run Linux/*BSD with X on it.
It sounds nice, and I've heard of similar ideas before (placing cameras at the base of the A pillar looking backwards, and colour displays inside), but here's my question: how would you then reproduce depth perception? Even with the mirrors on my tiny hatchback, the mirrors allow me to easily determine the distance between myself and other cars behind me. I wouldn't be able to do that with a two-dimensional image.
I remember IBM selling Thinkpads (amongst other manufacturers) with such screens back around 1995 or so. One of the suggested purposes was for using the computer on a plane, so that people behind you wouldn't be able to see what you're looking at. However, anyone who really needs to spy on someone using one of these computers would only have to go to a camera shoppe and buy a telephoto lens with a polarising filter.
A friend of mine has been running PhilsPhans.com since the beginning of this year with a focus on forum discussions, in response to many people who complained about the forums at the official site being crowded with spammers. The site gathered popularity among Phillies fans pretty quickly, and soon a lot of users from the official Phillies forums switched to the little new site. About a month or so ago, he received a letter from the Phillies ordering him to shut down his site due to "trademark infringement"; their claim was that the word "phils" is their property, and thus he can't use it as part of the site's name. How could anyone trademark such a common word is beyond logic, but since he doesn't have the resources to fight this, so he's being forced to move the site to a different domain.
I wanted to just uninstall the whole thing and start over, but there is no uninstall option, that I could find. So I deleted all the files that the Installer installs, and then tried to reinstall, and the Installer says it is already installed. So now I have nothing, and I can't change it.
There *is* an uninstall option for all apps that get installed via the Apple Installer. Every time Installer installs an app, it generates a Receipt file in/System/Library/Receipts (if I'm not mistaken) which you can use to uninstall that app; just double-click on the file, and Installer will launch and ask if you want to uninstall the application.
Admittedly, this is very cumbersome. An "Uninstall Apps" applet in the System Preferences would be a very welcome addition.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that 15Krpm drives are simply more expensive to manufacture, and not that there's any inherent quality in ATA drives that keep them from achieving rotational speeds higher than 7200rpm. ATA drives are sold at cut-throat profit margins, so anything that'd make them cost less to make will help the bottom line. SCSI drives command a higher price, thus covering the cost of development, manufacturing, and quality assurance.
As you might have noticed, the page for the IDE-SCSI converter did not provide any technical reasons for why one would want to put an ATA drive on a SCSI bus. Their only valid reason is cost; large-capacity SCSI drives do exist, like the 146GB Seagate ST3146807LW, contrary to their implied claim when they ask "Tired of paying a premium for a SCSI hard drive for only half the storage capacity of an IDE hard drive?".
The page doesn't mention anything about tagged command queueing. SCSI drives can receive multiple commands from the controller simultaneously and return the results in whatever order they think is the fastest at that moment. ATA cannot do this, and this is a reason why SCSI usually 'seems' to be faster than ATA. Then there's the issue of latency; the converter would necessarily take some time to convert the commands between SCSI and ATA. Even with ATA/133, I suspect that an ATA drive connected to a SCSI bus using this converter will be much slower than a native SCSI drive. And, at USD$99, it cancels out any savings that you might get from buying an ATA drive over a SCSI one. It'd be better, though, if the converter allowed the user to connect two ATA drives simultaneously, instead of having to use one converter per drive.
Drive manufacturers already provide this kind of information on the data sheets for their products. For example, the data sheet for the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV drives says that the current draw for that drive is 2.8 amps @ 12 VDC and 1.2 amps @ 5 VDC (same numbers for all capacities). It even indicates the typical power consumption during seek, read/write, idle, and standby.
Thus, as you can see, there's no need to stick an ammetre into the power leads when you can read a piece of paper (or a web page) to figure this stuff out.
For old time's sake, I shall now recall one of Slashdot's very first trolls:
MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPT !!!
Oh, Glorious Meept, where in bloody hell are you?
Using OmniWeb and its default User-Agent string, I get "Cannot Load Address -- This page redirects the browser back to itself". I have cookies enabled, too.
Changed the User-Agent string to that of IE 5.2 (OS X), and it works. I lay the blame on the website's idiot coders.
IIRC., on a given USB chain/bus/tree/thingie/etc., there must be one *and only* one master device (generally a computer) that controls it and manages the transfer of data between devices, while other devices act as dumb peripherals waiting for the master to do something with them. Firewire, OTOH., resembles a peer-to-peer network, in that each device can be an intelligent controller and can initiate transfers to/from other devices on its own. Thus, Firewire is ideally better suited to building a SAN than USB. I'm not saying that a USB-based SAN would be impossible to build, but that it'd require some serious hacking in order to coax it into something more useful than a very fast serial port.
Well, there's The Jargon File, a.k.a. The New Hacker's Dictionary, which the writers could presumably consult whenever they write anything with a geek factor greater than 0. However, even The File's contents can be tough to grok by non-geeks, so I've decided to condense it into a form more easily digested by non-geeks:
Hopefully they'll get that one.
(I make no warranty of accuracy of my statements.)
You can resize ReiserFS volumes online!
There's no need to unmount a volume before growing it. You still have to unmount it before shrinking it, though; resize_reiserfs will refuse to work if you don't do so.
The Register covered it this morning, here.
To expand on batkiwi's comment above, here's the Gang of Four entry in the Jargon File:
Yes! I played 'Cool Spot' (or whatever the title was) on my Genesis/Megadrive many years ago. IIRC., it was also available for PC and Amiga. Thanks for reminding me of it.
Just wondering, are you using the custom kernel from Gentoo? If so, have you compiled your kernel with either/both of the low latency patch and/or the preemptible kernel patch? What are your experiences with either of those two options when running XFS? I'd expect the use of either of those two to improve a system's responsiveness to user interaction when doing a lot of disk I/O, but if those don't help when using XFS, I wonder what kind of black magic is going on inside that code.
The more anal-retentive amongst us would abbreviate "PlayStation 2" as "PSX2", continuing the usage of "PSX" to refer to "PlayStation" as in the original PSX. The fact that Sony chose to put a big "PS2" logo on the side (top?) of the PSX2 doesn't help, and those who've used PS/2s before (myself included) have a hard time reading "PS2" without associating it with a personal computer line from Big Blue.
Anyone who had an NES, or had a friend who had an NES, has at least heard of "Yo! Noid", from Capcom. The game didn't feature any product placement; it was an advertisement all by itself. I don't think I've seen anything like that before or since in an electronic game.
If you're using OpenLDAP, you can rebuild it with ODBC support and run it on top of MySQL. I've tried running it with PostgreSQL, but have had no luck with it yet. The configure flag for this is --enable-sql.
HTH.
I know where you've heard it: on the trailers for Godzilla (1998). However, most people ignored it (rightfully so).
I think saying that they are dropping the ability to boot into Mac OS [9] seems a bit misleading. It kind-of-if-you-look-at-it-differently implies that Apple is removing the feature from the firmware, however no mention of that is made in the announcement. All that they'll be doing (in my view, if I'm not missing something here) is removing OS 9 as a stand-alone OS from their new machines. It'll still live as part of OS X; Classic still needs OS 9 in order to run OS 9 apps. That said, there's no need for something like MOL, since Classic does the the same thing.
So what's the big fuss about, anyway?
If the references to S3refresh.exe here are anything to go by, your machine probably has an S3 8xx video chip (my guess is that it's an 805). XFree 4.2 doesn't support those (yet), so you'd need 3.x if you want to run Linux/*BSD with X on it.
It sounds nice, and I've heard of similar ideas before (placing cameras at the base of the A pillar looking backwards, and colour displays inside), but here's my question: how would you then reproduce depth perception? Even with the mirrors on my tiny hatchback, the mirrors allow me to easily determine the distance between myself and other cars behind me. I wouldn't be able to do that with a two-dimensional image.
I remember IBM selling Thinkpads (amongst other manufacturers) with such screens back around 1995 or so. One of the suggested purposes was for using the computer on a plane, so that people behind you wouldn't be able to see what you're looking at. However, anyone who really needs to spy on someone using one of these computers would only have to go to a camera shoppe and buy a telephoto lens with a polarising filter.
A friend of mine has been running PhilsPhans.com since the beginning of this year with a focus on forum discussions, in response to many people who complained about the forums at the official site being crowded with spammers. The site gathered popularity among Phillies fans pretty quickly, and soon a lot of users from the official Phillies forums switched to the little new site. About a month or so ago, he received a letter from the Phillies ordering him to shut down his site due to "trademark infringement"; their claim was that the word "phils" is their property, and thus he can't use it as part of the site's name. How could anyone trademark such a common word is beyond logic, but since he doesn't have the resources to fight this, so he's being forced to move the site to a different domain.
Maybe not, but here are my suggestions:
Take your pick.
Pudge said,
There *is* an uninstall option for all apps that get installed via the Apple Installer. Every time Installer installs an app, it generates a Receipt file in /System/Library/Receipts (if I'm not mistaken) which you can use to uninstall that app; just double-click on the file, and Installer will launch and ask if you want to uninstall the application.
Admittedly, this is very cumbersome. An "Uninstall Apps" applet in the System Preferences would be a very welcome addition.
So Radio Shack sells flux capacitors too? Damn, what don't they have for sale, eh?
More accurately, it could be considered a time of waste.