If you don't like it don't use it, don't take it personally.
Most of us don't use it. The reason for the reaction is that the product was just obscenely bad. Thank god for this thread, I've been wanting to make an on-topic comment about the catastrophic disaster that is WMP for the Macintosh for over a year now. I'm not pro- or anti-microsoft, but I was stunned that a software company of their potential made a product that was this awful. WMP for the PC is fine, it works and I was expecting the same experience when I installed it on my Mac. Not even close, the Macintosh version is/was a complete joke. Imagine trying to view a divx file on a 486 -- because that's what it felt like. Video quality was horrible, it would pause all the time (I'm talking local files too, not streaming), video glitches, audio glitches, you name it. I say good riddance!
I will probably be one of those people in about a year. I'm a software developer for a large multinational engineering corporation and our division (actually, we're more like a division of a division of a division of a corporation) will be letting most of their engineers go and replacing them workers in eastern Europe. Both American and western European engineers will be losing jobs, but mainly American. Nothing personal, just basic economics.
And this will just beget more jobs leaving America as most of our direct competition is American and therefore to be able to under-bid us, they'll have to make similar changes or cease to be competitive.
If it can be done cheaper somewhere else, it will be. It's just a matter of time.
If I'm lucky (?) I'll end up getting a "Systems Engineer" position when my job disappears, which basically means I write design documents for the new developers. Oh joy, a job consisting of nothing but documentation.:P I plan on finding other employment before it comes to that however.
Why are you so afraid that Google might tell (potential patrons that there are better prices available nearby - when you, too, could be making use of this technology ?
I don't think you understand, no one needs to use this technology, not us and especially not the consumer. Wal-Mart has the lowest prices -- Period! Haven't you seen any of our billions of dollars of marketing propaganda? Why the need to confirm online what you already know in your heart to be true? Wal-Mart cannot be beaten on price! How can there be any doubt? Why are you wasting precious time comparison shopping? You're making us cry, is that what you wanted? We forgive you.
Yeah, I think the key is not to work for a software development company. Rather, work for a company that needs a software developer. There's lots of development jobs to be had in companies whose primary products may not directly have anything to do with software. That's where you'll find your job security -- and I'm not necessarily talking about IT.
I work at a small company that develops specialized computer chassis, motherboards, and a few peripherals. Those peripherals often need embedded code development and device drivers, which I develop. However, selling hardware is the focus of our company, not selling software. Software development makes up less than 2% of the company.
I agree, it might not be legit, but the whole point of "phishing" is to get information. All of the URLs go to "*.earthlink.net". Other than being a nuisance, I don't see potential for sensitive data to be transmitted to anyone other than earthlink. Are we missing something?
Maybe I had a cursed controller, but I had the SX6000 and had a drive failure. FYI, I was doing RAID5 with four 80GB WD drives. It beeps like you said, only the SX6000 doesn't tell you which drive is bad (I was running linux, no fancy windows utils -- and their BIOS didn't have this information -- very unprofessional). So, I figured out the bad disk by running WD's diag utility on them individually. Anyway, put in a new drive. Guess what? Wouldn't rebuild. So I booted into the degraded array (oh, and the kernel would panic if you left the "new" drive attached, so I had to pull that back off) and moved my data elsewhere on the network and rebuilt from scratch.
Well, later a drive started making noise, I identified it and shutdown the system nice and neat before it failed and replaced it with a good drive. Hey, wouldn't rebuild -- again! Moved all of my data off and bought a 3ware 7500-4 controller. I've had one disk failure with the 3ware controller, and it actually worked! Rebuilt while I was using the system. Comes with decent linux utils (unlike promise -- at the time anyway). Oh, and the best part is they actually label and document their product and the BIOS will actually tell you which drive failed -- what a concept! 3ware controllers are about the same price as a promise controller, why even bother going with promise?
And no, I don't work for 3ware. Simply put, promise had their chance with me and they failed miserably. YMMV. I'm sure the SX8000, or whatever, is vastly improved and all that crap, but it's too little, too late for this consumer.
Bizarre.. I'm the exact opposite. I *hated* going to bed when I was a kid. I'd sit there with my transistor radio turned really low or read a book with a flashlight under the covers until I fell asleep (usually 1-2 hours later). I slept well, I suppose, but I couldn't fall asleep very easily.
Now, as a 30 year old male, I can practically fall asleep on command. I'm a hypnotist's wet dream. The only things that can disturb me are repetive noises (like something beeping) and warm temperatures. The colder, the better.
Not entirely true. If a corporation has competition, then this has an effect. Stereo company A is fined a gazillion dollars, now stereo company A has to raise prices of their product(s) to pay for their fine. Stereo company B (and C, D, etc..) now has a more favorable price difference with company A, which should increase company B's market share.
Problem here is, there's not really a "company B".
Depends on what you're doing. We build many systems which are identical. Initially, you invest a day (or two) to build a highly optimized and efficient environment. Then you image the disk and just do image to disk copies after that. Very quick, simple, and easy to control.
Yup, I've got a//c in the closet also along with a Centris 610. The//c is about 20 years old, Centris is about 10 years old. Both still work -- last time I checked.
I've got an ex-girlfriend's Mac Classic that I've had in my possession for almost 10 years now. (damn I'm getting old) It's broken, I was supposed to fix it for her. (heh) Oh well, she got my gumby doll -- fair trade. You know, I still haven't looked at the contents of the hard drive. I am curious to see what's on there, but apparently not curious enough.
Enter data into your laptop for 2 years and never back it up!Then proceed to send it in to tech-support for repairs and get pissed when they either swap out the hard drive or format the original drive.
This was a Promise SX6000 btw and I was doing raid 5 under linux. I'll make this short. I had a drive failure, replaced the drive, the controller would not rebuild the array. Backed up all the data, rebuilt the array from scratch, reloaded everything. Time goes on. Another drive starts making an unusual noise. I happened to have a back up drive handy. I gracefully powered down the system and swapped out the noisy drive with the new drive. The controller would not rebuild the array.
I said screw it and bought a 3ware 7500. Have had it for about a year now, no problems.
I actually just sold my SX6000 about 2 weeks ago for 2/3 what I paid for it. I'm glad I hung on to the piece of crap instead of pitching it.
A friend of mine does this fairly often and he uses multiple 24-port 10Mb switches with 100Mb uplinks into a single 100Mb switch. This has several benefits. 1) They're cheap. 2) 10Mb is more than enough for games. 3) If people want to trade files (and they will) it doesn't congest the switches and lag the network.
Re:some comments on promise linux support
on
IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 2
Jason, not sure if we're using the same promise card, but they do have the source available for the driver for my controller. I'm using it as I type with Gentoo.
I agree with you on your overall assesment of Promise though. I've had problems with this card (see elsewhere in this topic for that post). I too will probably look for a different IDE RAID vendor next time around.
I always do..;P Ok, I've got a Promise SX6000, which wasn't one of the models reviewed, but not much different than the SX4000. ATA100, 6 channels, 128MB PC100.. Got 4 80GB WD drives running RAID 5 under linux.
Was running RedHat, using generic I2O drivers, not the Promise drivers, no big deal, though performance wasn't probably as good as it could have been. My main concern was data integrity, not performance.
So anyway, this system is in my bedroom (which sounds like a busy airport, but i like it) and one night I woke up because it was beeping, which means something no worky. I had noticed a few days earlier that I was getting pauses during reads from the disk, which was unusual -- I was going to put the Promise drivers on and see if that made any difference. But then the beeping came. So go in, system still running fine, shutdown and go into the raid bios. It says it's trying to rebuild, and it's failing, it isn't saying it has a bad disk, and even if it did say that, it couldn't tell me which disk because they didn't think that info would be important when they made the product. So, shut it down and pull out each disk, run WD diags on them. Found that one of the disks, during the sector walks, was pausing every now and then for no good reason. Fine, put the working disks back in with a new disk so the array can rebuild. Array rebuilding.. Array fails during rebuild.. WTF? I tried about a dozen configurations and the thing simply wouldn't rebuild. Well, @#$&*!, I'll just rebuild everything from scratch, so back up the data elsewhere on the network. Boot up (i boot from the raid array, I know bad bad), kernel panic after about 3 minutes (it's still trying to rebuild in the background -- and failing, why the panic though i have no idea, might have been the i2o drivers). Take out the new (blank) drive, no more kernel panic (because no more trying to rebuild). So... copy data to network. Put new OS on (this time Gentoo) on a 4GB hard drive for booting only. Rebuild the raid array (which takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r). Copy data back, install apps, lalala, big pain in the ass.
So, bad disk and bad raid controller IMHO. Should have been able to rebuild. However, I did not lose any data. New system has been up and running now with no further problems. Also, performance seems better when using the actual Promise driver, go figure.
I think what you would like, although it's a bit dated, would be Understanding Digital Computers. This book takes starts at the gate level and goes through the layout and operation of a simple 8 bit CPU. I got this book when I was 13. When I went to college and took my digital architecture classes I aced them, and even though that was much more difficult I credit my success to having read this book first instead of diving in naked like most students do/did. It's been forever since I've read it, but I still have it on my bookshelf.
Just got things back to normal this week actually.. Where do I start..
Ok, let me start by saying I have been building PCs for 10 years.. I don't do it as a job anymore, but I used to. I've been using Abit boards exclusively since about 1997. Out of the dozens of systems I've built with Abit, I only ever had one flakey problem with an Abit board. Up until recently that is..
I have (had) an Athlon 2100 XP running in a KR7A-RAID133 Abit board. I was replacing the heatsink in this system and one other system. Afterwards, the other system was fine, this one wasn't. I had to run the FSB at 100MHz for it to operate, and it did, flawlessly, but wouldn't run at 133MHz, like it used to. So, I figured I messed up installing the new heatsink and broke/fryed/etc something. My fault right? I won't go through the gory details, but I tried a new (insert every computer component here -- I'm not kidding) and still had the same problems. Actually no, they got worse. Eventually the new motherboard toasted my CPU. I said screw it and decided to go with Abit's KD7-RAID and used an Athlon 2200. Get that and try it, doesn't work. @&#$*&@#$ Ok, cross-ship _another_ KD7-RAID and CPU. This doesn't work either!!! Break down and buy an ASUS A7V8X. Swap out the Abit board, everything else is the same and guess what? Works perfectly.. I'm back up and running.
I don't know what's going on at Abit, but dear god. I wasted a decent sum of money on shipping alone, plus was without my main system for about 2 weeks. I'll never buy Abit again, plain and simple. The whole time I'm doing this, I'm talking about it with my co-workers and they're all, "Abit sucks!" And I was like, "Are you serious, I've never had any problems with Abit." and they'd say, "Times have changed, they've really gone downhill." Maybe I'll listen next time.. Actually, no, I probably won't..:P
Of course it would be covered, who wants to see that?
I got nothin'..
Great, something else to fight over.
on
3D LCD Display
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· Score: 2, Funny
The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D.
Geesh, if PCs were going to die as a gaming platform -- they never would have become a gaming platform.
Only within the last decade or so have PCs started to achieve parity with the games on their console counterparts. Go back to 1985 and tell me if you'd rather have had a 386 for gaming or a Nintendo. I'm going to go out on a limb and say *most* would have rather had a Nintendo.
Essentially, the only reason PC games have become popular is because computers have become popular. So when computers go away (and that's a whole other discussion) PC games will go with it, but not until then.
The surviving spiders, 2 members from Def Leppard, and a keyboardist tour occasionally as the Cybernauts.
The band is a tribute to Bowie and to Mick Ronson. They basically do covers from all the albums that the spiders were involved in, which obviously includes Ziggy.
They have a privately released CD that will quit being sold sometime this year. It's a 2 disc set. One live disk and one studio disk. The live stuff is about 5 years old now, but the studio stuff is fairly recent. They quality is excellent and so are the performances. There are audio samples on the website.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like it don't use it, don't take it personally.
Most of us don't use it. The reason for the reaction is that the product was just obscenely bad. Thank god for this thread, I've been wanting to make an on-topic comment about the catastrophic disaster that is WMP for the Macintosh for over a year now. I'm not pro- or anti-microsoft, but I was stunned that a software company of their potential made a product that was this awful. WMP for the PC is fine, it works and I was expecting the same experience when I installed it on my Mac. Not even close, the Macintosh version is/was a complete joke. Imagine trying to view a divx file on a 486 -- because that's what it felt like. Video quality was horrible, it would pause all the time (I'm talking local files too, not streaming), video glitches, audio glitches, you name it. I say good riddance!
Whew, now I can rest.
I will probably be one of those people in about a year. I'm a software developer for a large multinational engineering corporation and our division (actually, we're more like a division of a division of a division of a corporation) will be letting most of their engineers go and replacing them workers in eastern Europe. Both American and western European engineers will be losing jobs, but mainly American. Nothing personal, just basic economics.
:P I plan on finding other employment before it comes to that however.
And this will just beget more jobs leaving America as most of our direct competition is American and therefore to be able to under-bid us, they'll have to make similar changes or cease to be competitive.
If it can be done cheaper somewhere else, it will be. It's just a matter of time.
If I'm lucky (?) I'll end up getting a "Systems Engineer" position when my job disappears, which basically means I write design documents for the new developers. Oh joy, a job consisting of nothing but documentation.
Why are you so afraid that Google might tell (potential patrons that there are better prices available nearby - when you, too, could be making use of this technology ?
I don't think you understand, no one needs to use this technology, not us and especially not the consumer. Wal-Mart has the lowest prices -- Period! Haven't you seen any of our billions of dollars of marketing propaganda? Why the need to confirm online what you already know in your heart to be true? Wal-Mart cannot be beaten on price! How can there be any doubt? Why are you wasting precious time comparison shopping? You're making us cry, is that what you wanted? We forgive you.
Yeah, I think the key is not to work for a software development company. Rather, work for a company that needs a software developer. There's lots of development jobs to be had in companies whose primary products may not directly have anything to do with software. That's where you'll find your job security -- and I'm not necessarily talking about IT.
I work at a small company that develops specialized computer chassis, motherboards, and a few peripherals. Those peripherals often need embedded code development and device drivers, which I develop. However, selling hardware is the focus of our company, not selling software. Software development makes up less than 2% of the company.
Nevermind. There is a bogus URL. I wasn't looking at the source.
I agree, it might not be legit, but the whole point of "phishing" is to get information. All of the URLs go to "*.earthlink.net". Other than being a nuisance, I don't see potential for sensitive data to be transmitted to anyone other than earthlink. Are we missing something?
Maybe I had a cursed controller, but I had the SX6000 and had a drive failure. FYI, I was doing RAID5 with four 80GB WD drives. It beeps like you said, only the SX6000 doesn't tell you which drive is bad (I was running linux, no fancy windows utils -- and their BIOS didn't have this information -- very unprofessional). So, I figured out the bad disk by running WD's diag utility on them individually. Anyway, put in a new drive. Guess what? Wouldn't rebuild. So I booted into the degraded array (oh, and the kernel would panic if you left the "new" drive attached, so I had to pull that back off) and moved my data elsewhere on the network and rebuilt from scratch.
Well, later a drive started making noise, I identified it and shutdown the system nice and neat before it failed and replaced it with a good drive. Hey, wouldn't rebuild -- again! Moved all of my data off and bought a 3ware 7500-4 controller. I've had one disk failure with the 3ware controller, and it actually worked! Rebuilt while I was using the system. Comes with decent linux utils (unlike promise -- at the time anyway). Oh, and the best part is they actually label and document their product and the BIOS will actually tell you which drive failed -- what a concept! 3ware controllers are about the same price as a promise controller, why even bother going with promise?
And no, I don't work for 3ware. Simply put, promise had their chance with me and they failed miserably. YMMV. I'm sure the SX8000, or whatever, is vastly improved and all that crap, but it's too little, too late for this consumer.
Bizarre.. I'm the exact opposite. I *hated* going to bed when I was a kid. I'd sit there with my transistor radio turned really low or read a book with a flashlight under the covers until I fell asleep (usually 1-2 hours later). I slept well, I suppose, but I couldn't fall asleep very easily.
Now, as a 30 year old male, I can practically fall asleep on command. I'm a hypnotist's wet dream. The only things that can disturb me are repetive noises (like something beeping) and warm temperatures. The colder, the better.
Not entirely true. If a corporation has competition, then this has an effect. Stereo company A is fined a gazillion dollars, now stereo company A has to raise prices of their product(s) to pay for their fine. Stereo company B (and C, D, etc..) now has a more favorable price difference with company A, which should increase company B's market share.
Problem here is, there's not really a "company B".
Depends on what you're doing. We build many systems which are identical. Initially, you invest a day (or two) to build a highly optimized and efficient environment. Then you image the disk and just do image to disk copies after that. Very quick, simple, and easy to control.
Yup, I've got a
I've got an ex-girlfriend's Mac Classic that I've had in my possession for almost 10 years now. (damn I'm getting old) It's broken, I was supposed to fix it for her. (heh) Oh well, she got my gumby doll -- fair trade. You know, I still haven't looked at the contents of the hard drive. I am curious to see what's on there, but apparently not curious enough.
Enter data into your laptop for 2 years and never back it up! Then proceed to send it in to tech-support for repairs and get pissed when they either swap out the hard drive or format the original drive.
I give you Mr. Steven Thrasher.
This was a Promise SX6000 btw and I was doing raid 5 under linux. I'll make this short. I had a drive failure, replaced the drive, the controller would not rebuild the array. Backed up all the data, rebuilt the array from scratch, reloaded everything. Time goes on. Another drive starts making an unusual noise. I happened to have a back up drive handy. I gracefully powered down the system and swapped out the noisy drive with the new drive. The controller would not rebuild the array.
I said screw it and bought a 3ware 7500. Have had it for about a year now, no problems.
I actually just sold my SX6000 about 2 weeks ago for 2/3 what I paid for it. I'm glad I hung on to the piece of crap instead of pitching it.
Darl and his other brother Darl hardly ever spoke. Boy, do I miss those days.
A friend of mine does this fairly often and he uses multiple 24-port 10Mb switches with 100Mb uplinks into a single 100Mb switch. This has several benefits. 1) They're cheap. 2) 10Mb is more than enough for games. 3) If people want to trade files (and they will) it doesn't congest the switches and lag the network.
Jason, not sure if we're using the same promise card, but they do have the source available for the driver for my controller. I'm using it as I type with Gentoo.
I agree with you on your overall assesment of Promise though. I've had problems with this card (see elsewhere in this topic for that post). I too will probably look for a different IDE RAID vendor next time around.
I always do..
Was running RedHat, using generic I2O drivers, not the Promise drivers, no big deal, though performance wasn't probably as good as it could have been. My main concern was data integrity, not performance.
So anyway, this system is in my bedroom (which sounds like a busy airport, but i like it) and one night I woke up because it was beeping, which means something no worky. I had noticed a few days earlier that I was getting pauses during reads from the disk, which was unusual -- I was going to put the Promise drivers on and see if that made any difference. But then the beeping came. So go in, system still running fine, shutdown and go into the raid bios. It says it's trying to rebuild, and it's failing, it isn't saying it has a bad disk, and even if it did say that, it couldn't tell me which disk because they didn't think that info would be important when they made the product. So, shut it down and pull out each disk, run WD diags on them. Found that one of the disks, during the sector walks, was pausing every now and then for no good reason. Fine, put the working disks back in with a new disk so the array can rebuild. Array rebuilding.. Array fails during rebuild.. WTF? I tried about a dozen configurations and the thing simply wouldn't rebuild. Well, @#$&*!, I'll just rebuild everything from scratch, so back up the data elsewhere on the network. Boot up (i boot from the raid array, I know bad bad), kernel panic after about 3 minutes (it's still trying to rebuild in the background -- and failing, why the panic though i have no idea, might have been the i2o drivers). Take out the new (blank) drive, no more kernel panic (because no more trying to rebuild). So... copy data to network. Put new OS on (this time Gentoo) on a 4GB hard drive for booting only. Rebuild the raid array (which takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r). Copy data back, install apps, lalala, big pain in the ass.
So, bad disk and bad raid controller IMHO. Should have been able to rebuild. However, I did not lose any data. New system has been up and running now with no further problems. Also, performance seems better when using the actual Promise driver, go figure.
I think what you would like, although it's a bit dated, would be Understanding Digital Computers. This book takes starts at the gate level and goes through the layout and operation of a simple 8 bit CPU. I got this book when I was 13. When I went to college and took my digital architecture classes I aced them, and even though that was much more difficult I credit my success to having read this book first instead of diving in naked like most students do/did. It's been forever since I've read it, but I still have it on my bookshelf.
Just got things back to normal this week actually.. Where do I start..
Ok, let me start by saying I have been building PCs for 10 years.. I don't do it as a job anymore, but I used to. I've been using Abit boards exclusively since about 1997. Out of the dozens of systems I've built with Abit, I only ever had one flakey problem with an Abit board. Up until recently that is..
I have (had) an Athlon 2100 XP running in a KR7A-RAID133 Abit board. I was replacing the heatsink in this system and one other system. Afterwards, the other system was fine, this one wasn't. I had to run the FSB at 100MHz for it to operate, and it did, flawlessly, but wouldn't run at 133MHz, like it used to. So, I figured I messed up installing the new heatsink and broke/fryed/etc something. My fault right? I won't go through the gory details, but I tried a new (insert every computer component here -- I'm not kidding) and still had the same problems. Actually no, they got worse. Eventually the new motherboard toasted my CPU. I said screw it and decided to go with Abit's KD7-RAID and used an Athlon 2200. Get that and try it, doesn't work. @&#$*&@#$ Ok, cross-ship _another_ KD7-RAID and CPU. This doesn't work either!!! Break down and buy an ASUS A7V8X. Swap out the Abit board, everything else is the same and guess what? Works perfectly.. I'm back up and running.
I don't know what's going on at Abit, but dear god. I wasted a decent sum of money on shipping alone, plus was without my main system for about 2 weeks. I'll never buy Abit again, plain and simple. The whole time I'm doing this, I'm talking about it with my co-workers and they're all, "Abit sucks!" And I was like, "Are you serious, I've never had any problems with Abit." and they'd say, "Times have changed, they've really gone downhill." Maybe I'll listen next time.. Actually, no, I probably won't..
Of course it would be covered, who wants to see that?
I got nothin'..
The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D.
Get out of the sweet spot runt!
MOOOOMMMMMM!
Wrong. What we need to ask is, what would Brian Boitano do to be on Slashdot?
pay-to-download services are rising in popularity
That's kind of like saying this new car model we introduced last year is selling better than it was 2 years ago.
Geesh, if PCs were going to die as a gaming platform -- they never would have become a gaming platform.
Only within the last decade or so have PCs started to achieve parity with the games on their console counterparts. Go back to 1985 and tell me if you'd rather have had a 386 for gaming or a Nintendo. I'm going to go out on a limb and say *most* would have rather had a Nintendo.
Essentially, the only reason PC games have become popular is because computers have become popular. So when computers go away (and that's a whole other discussion) PC games will go with it, but not until then.
The surviving spiders, 2 members from Def Leppard, and a keyboardist tour occasionally as the Cybernauts.
The band is a tribute to Bowie and to Mick Ronson. They basically do covers from all the albums that the spiders were involved in, which obviously includes Ziggy.
They have a privately released CD that will quit being sold sometime this year. It's a 2 disc set. One live disk and one studio disk. The live stuff is about 5 years old now, but the studio stuff is fairly recent. They quality is excellent and so are the performances. There are audio samples on the website.