It really is true that people who can't read a HOWTO shouldn't be setting up servers, and therefore shouldn't be using OpenBSD.
Truly insightful. Let me expand on it a bit and say if you want to use UNIX, but don't have a systems administor or the desire to be one yourself, then stick with OSX. Period.
You don't have to be a great sysadmin, but you have to at least have the willingness to sit down read the documentation and attempt to understand it, and accept the fact that you will face difficult problems with no one around to hold your hand.
I smell a conspiracy here. "GNOME is WM agnostic" I hear everyone say, yet why do they keep exanding their WM requirements? What's to stop them from deciding which WM will be the secret official WM, and extending the reqs so only it can meet it at release time?
Due to a b0rk3d automount config on Solaris, when I once hit the "up" button in Konqi while in my home directory, Solaris started automounting every user's home directory in an extremely large multinational corporation. These directories were scattered over several dozen file servers. A half of an hour later, Konqueror finally showed directory icons for 1200 accounts.
But that's a low number in an unusual situation. I've had Konqueror quickly open up a directory with 9200 small files. No problems. If Nautilus can't do that, then something's wrong.
but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
Windows has had the concept of "mount" and "umount" since the first day it support CDROMs. But no one ever knew it because the hid the automounting from you. But it was there.
Then came along USB storage devices. Suddenly Microsoft had to bite the bullet and introduce the concept to the user. Plug in a USB disk and it automounts, no problem. Pull it out and you've got problems. Twenty minutes and ten miles later, you realize that your memory stick doesn't have all of the data on it that you copied over. You forgot to umount the device! Which is why Microsoft puts a little icon on the tray and tells you that you have to explicitly unmount it.
And don't even get me started on automatically executing applications on the CDROM! Automatically playing audio CD's is annoying enough, but automatically running software off of foreign media is a security nightmare.
Actually, it will hold a full linux distro (I've done it), though it will get tight. As for games that size, put them on a DVD and I'll think about them, otherwise I have much better things to do with my harddrive.
It goes a heck of a long way! On my FreeBSD desktop right now I'm using only 4.9 gigs. That includes a lot of software I don't use but haven't uninstalled, the sources for everything, a development workplace, multiple versions of KDE, etc. I could easily live in 2.7 gigs if I started cleaning up after myself, like we all used to do back when we only had 500Meg drives.
Just trying to remember stuff off the top of my head. Probably off a few years on some of these.
1983
IBM PC, 8088, 4.77Hz, 256K+ RAM, $10,000. Language of choice is BASIC. Video is CGA, but only if you can afford the card, MDA otherwise. Removable storage is the 5-1/2" floppy holding 320K. Some people get wise and punch their floppies to make them double sided.
The OS was PC-DOS, and fit on part of a floppy. Small, fast and feature-less.
Game I remember distinctly was "Gato" (came out about 1985 I think), a submarine hunt game. It fit on a floppy, and was awesome fun!
All PC software had to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.
Networking? Not on the PC! Of course, the PC makes an excellent (but expensive) terminal for a UNIX system, from which you can access the ARPAnet.
1993
Packard Smell, i486, 66MHz, 2Mb RAM, $3,000. Language of choice was Turbo C, although some Turbo Pascal diehards (myself) still lingered. Video is VGA and a smattering of SVGA, XVGA cards. Removable storage of choice was the 1.44Mb 3-1/2" floppy. Some people have CDROMS, but not many. Harddrives are the norm, and their typical sizes are about 100 to 500 Megs.
The OS for most people was still DOS, now version 5.0. People are running this cheesy environment called Windows 3.1 on top of it. I rebel and use OS/2. I need 8M RAM to use it, but it had a UI that GNOME and KDE are barely approaching ten years later.
My games of choice were Civilization and SimCity. They came on floppies, but a lot of other games are starting to come out on CDROMS, which pisses me off since I can't afford one. They also tend to use more RAM and Video than I can afford either.
Software in general is bloating. Stuff that takes up 5 to 10 Megs of disk is common. But I'm not bitching much, since they're adding a lot of features, not counting the GUI.
Networking has arrived! 14.4K modems are becoming standard. If you live in the right area, you can get an internet account. Otherwise AOL and Prodigy are somewhat suitable substitutes.
2003
Home Built, P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gig RAM, $1,000. Language of choice is C++, although several dozen other major languages are common. There are no video standards anymore, but the minimum resolution anyone can put up with is 32-bit 1024x768. GPUs are more expensive and have bigger fans than CPUs. Removable media of choice is the CD-R, with USB memory sticks becoming popular. But the 1.44M floppy is still king. It will probably remain standard equipment until the typical BIOS can boot from USB devices (guesstimate of one year).
The common operating environment is still Windows, but fortunately, the current incarnation runs on top of NT instead of DOS. WinXP recommends 512M RAM. UNIX is making strong headway into the desktop market. Even the most basic Linux distro requires a minimum of 16M RAM, with most recommending 64M.
I haven't bought any games in a couple of years. The last one was Civilization III. (My how things change!) The game market has become dull. My prediction from ten years earlier, that game developers would start scaling back and produce games that would run on systems that the public actually owned, proved false. Instead, the public eagerly upgrades their RAM and GPU's every six months. I see that the many new blockbuster games require video cards that haven't been on the market more than six months.
Software in general has long since passed the bloat stage, and has become quivering mounds of fat reminiscent of dead whales washed up on the beach. This isn't limited to the Windows world. I don't see much increased functionality with OpenOffice versus the Lotus SmartSuite of ten years earlier.
Highspeed internet connections are considered a human right in some regions. You hide your head in shame if you're still using a dialup modem or ISDN.
When's the last time you installed Linux, BSD, or any non-Windows OS? Because what you're describing is the default on everything I've seen with a few exceptions. Maybe they don't say exactly "click next", but they will allow to to proceed in a logical manner to the next screen by clicking or selecting a "next", "OK" or "finish" icon. Most you don't even have to click, as the installer automatically takes you to the next screen.
I'm not talking about just the newbie distros like Lycoris or Xandros. I'm talking about the "hard" systems like Slackware and FreeBSD!
In fact, if you want, Linux/BSD will happily reformat and use your entire harddrive so you don't have to worry your fretted brow over partitioning issues. Just like Windows!
Moderators marked you as funny, but I think you're insightful. It's only been within the last few months that people are starting to realize that they've been using the term "usability" as an erroneous synonym for "familiarity".
One prime example is the "D" drive. When I boot into Windows, and try to play some MP3s on a CD in WinAmp, I'm always forgetting where it is. Are they under D:, E:, F: or G:? I have two primary FAT32 partitions on my first harddrive, and two CDROM drives, so "D" is most assuredly NOT the correct answer. (But try telling that to tech support!)
It's a concept the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon knew. The Greeks and Romans new it. The Saxons and Normans knew it. Even the founders of the US knew it. But somehow that concept has been lost in the modern US. It's truly sad.
I just wish I knew exactly where to place the blame. Is it the lawsuit culture, where you are promised (but can never collect) millions of dollars by being a victim? Is it the modern welfare state where you are taken care of from cradle to grave? Is it the university professors who teach students that they can change the world by whining? How the heck are you supposed to learn responsibility as a child when your parents think dropping you off at school is the extent of their parenting obligations?
Unless the culture of the US makes an about-face, it is doomed. I am not a European making cracks at the US. I am a proudly patriotic US citizen. Which is why I am distressed that the whining mediocrity has taken over.
The solution won't come from the Democrats or Republicans. It won't come from any one politician, no matter how spiffy their website or fiery their oration. Instead it has to come from the bottom foundations of society. People from every walk of life need to stand up and say "I will be responsible for every action I take!" When the lawyer urges you to sue, spit on his shoes. When the politician promises you money if you vote for him, walk away. When you professor tells you that your condition is the result of evil meat-eating while male Europeans, drop the class.
"Created" versus "invented". There's not much difference. If you're going to get that nit-picky, then NO ONE invented the internet, because it was never patented. Geez.
No one is claiming that Gore said he literally invented the internet from scratch from the ground up, including the technical foundations of it. But it sure as heck sounded like he meant that he was the impetus behind it.
His quote, if not a lie, is still a disembling of the truth. He's making the general public, who are ignorant of technical matters, think that he created/invented/funded/proposed the internet. He certainly rallied behind it, he certainly diverted tax monies towards certain segments of it, and he definitely promoted the term "Information Superhighway", but he was in no way involved in its creation and birth. The modern public internet *IS* the old ARPAnet, just grown up. Running internet connections to schools is not the same thing as creating the internet.
"He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be"
No one is denying that. Gore did a lot of good things (and a few bad) in his promotion of the internet. But realizing the power of an ubiquitous global network is hardly the same thing as creating it. He was not involved in the creation of TCP/IP, Usenet, http, or any RFCs.
I would really like to see geeks getin on the ground floor with some third parties. Both the Republicans and Democrats are stuck in the seventies. They have some good candidates, but their lost in the crowd of fossils. It's time for the Greens and Libertarians. You either hate them or love them, not like the current crop that leaves you cold.
There were two main branches of UNIX. The first was the commercialized AT&T/USL UNIX, which SCO know apparently owns. The other branch of BSD UNIX. From day one this was noncommercial. It was BSD UNIX that made UNIX a success. Without BSD, UNIX would be down and out in the gutter sharing a bottle of Ripple with Multics and cursing its fortunes.
BSD might not be allowed to call itself a "UNIX" today, but the fact remains that it is still UNIX and it is Free Software.
Whoo hoo! Give me the freedom to take away the freedoms of others! That's the FSF spirit!
p.s. The above cheer is an example of sarcasm. The humour^H^Hr comes from GTK+ being a GNU project whose main selling point seems to be the ability to write user subjugating proprietary software.
What's is it with all of the "Poor Trolltech" sentiment in this thread?
Because the article was severly biased against it, while pretending to be fair and balanced. To rephrase the question, what the fsck does a business-oriented website have to do with the quality of the toolkit? Next thing you know he'll be dissing Redhat and SuSE for the same reason.
It's sad that while everyone here realizes that, so few actually act like it. When it comes to the non-tech world, we take our media pablum just like everyone else.
In California the governor is going to be recalled. Today's poll shows 64% would vote to recall. But the reason has nothing to do with technology. Does anyone on Slashdot know WHY California is generally pissed off at Davis? Hint: it's not about Oracle software. There is a "tech" candidate running that has a decent change of winning in California. Do you know who he is? Hint: it's not Arnold or Larry, or any of the college kids with web pages. You don't know who he is because he's too busy courting the mainstream vote to bother advertising himself as an introvert geek.
Sounds like you don't know too much about private schools. Most private schools are just as strapped for cash as public schools. Their facilities are better maintained, but that's just because they use their money where its needed, rather than where the remote politician wants it spent.
Trendy "elite" schools are a different matter. Because of their demand, they can charge a heck of a lot and get it. Their customers are also those parents most likely to want cameras installed so they can view their kids remotely thinking that it counts as "quality time".
Since forever. Actually, to be totally accurate, it is not "free" as in "free beer". You're still going to be charged for the medical services, and it may cause you to file bankruptcy. But it is still "free" as in "free access". If you're bleeding from a gunshot wound, you WILL be treated! If your child is sick with pneumonia, he WILL be treated! No, you won't get free viagra, elective surgery, or cholesterol screenings, but you WILL have access to emergency medical care.
I am a KDE fan, but I'm going to say that the "ugly hack" comment was right on target. There is a reason why Karamba is not in the core KDE distribution. It looks cool. It feels cool. But looking through the code, it's damned ugly and very hackish.
This isn't a slam. I really believe that the orginal Karamba authors meant it to be a prototype demonstration of an idea. They didn't mean for it to be a release quality definitive implementation.
When you're streaming a file, you're streaming a single file. All file systems will be roughly equivalent at this point. After all, once the harddrive has seeked to the starting sector, odds are very high that the data will be contiguous.
Where you want the efficiency is when you have to deal with a large number of files. For example, I use UFS on FreeBSD. Before I used softupdates, untarring the ports tree severly bogged down the system, because there were tens of thousands of very small files. But after I turned on softupdates, the same operation was extremely fast. But moving a single large file around (tarball of my homedir) didn't make any difference if softupdates was on or off.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what's your point again?
The point is, if GNOME is following the wm-spec, why is Metacity the only WM that works correctly with GNOME?
It really is true that people who can't read a HOWTO shouldn't be setting up servers, and therefore shouldn't be using OpenBSD.
Truly insightful. Let me expand on it a bit and say if you want to use UNIX, but don't have a systems administor or the desire to be one yourself, then stick with OSX. Period.
You don't have to be a great sysadmin, but you have to at least have the willingness to sit down read the documentation and attempt to understand it, and accept the fact that you will face difficult problems with no one around to hold your hand.
What the fsck is the "gnome2-compliant" crap I'm hearing about? Hasn't GNOME heard of wm-spec?
I smell a conspiracy here. "GNOME is WM agnostic" I hear everyone say, yet why do they keep exanding their WM requirements? What's to stop them from deciding which WM will be the secret official WM, and extending the reqs so only it can meet it at release time?
Due to a b0rk3d automount config on Solaris, when I once hit the "up" button in Konqi while in my home directory, Solaris started automounting every user's home directory in an extremely large multinational corporation. These directories were scattered over several dozen file servers. A half of an hour later, Konqueror finally showed directory icons for 1200 accounts.
But that's a low number in an unusual situation. I've had Konqueror quickly open up a directory with 9200 small files. No problems. If Nautilus can't do that, then something's wrong.
but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
Windows has had the concept of "mount" and "umount" since the first day it support CDROMs. But no one ever knew it because the hid the automounting from you. But it was there.
Then came along USB storage devices. Suddenly Microsoft had to bite the bullet and introduce the concept to the user. Plug in a USB disk and it automounts, no problem. Pull it out and you've got problems. Twenty minutes and ten miles later, you realize that your memory stick doesn't have all of the data on it that you copied over. You forgot to umount the device! Which is why Microsoft puts a little icon on the tray and tells you that you have to explicitly unmount it.
And don't even get me started on automatically executing applications on the CDROM! Automatically playing audio CD's is annoying enough, but automatically running software off of foreign media is a security nightmare.
Actually, it will hold a full linux distro (I've done it), though it will get tight. As for games that size, put them on a DVD and I'll think about them, otherwise I have much better things to do with my harddrive.
2.7 gigs of disk won't go far today.
It goes a heck of a long way! On my FreeBSD desktop right now I'm using only 4.9 gigs. That includes a lot of software I don't use but haven't uninstalled, the sources for everything, a development workplace, multiple versions of KDE, etc. I could easily live in 2.7 gigs if I started cleaning up after myself, like we all used to do back when we only had 500Meg drives.
IBM PC, 8088, 4.77Hz, 256K+ RAM, $10,000. Language of choice is BASIC. Video is CGA, but only if you can afford the card, MDA otherwise. Removable storage is the 5-1/2" floppy holding 320K. Some people get wise and punch their floppies to make them double sided.
The OS was PC-DOS, and fit on part of a floppy. Small, fast and feature-less.
Game I remember distinctly was "Gato" (came out about 1985 I think), a submarine hunt game. It fit on a floppy, and was awesome fun!
All PC software had to fit on (and run from) a single floppy.
Networking? Not on the PC! Of course, the PC makes an excellent (but expensive) terminal for a UNIX system, from which you can access the ARPAnet.
Packard Smell, i486, 66MHz, 2Mb RAM, $3,000. Language of choice was Turbo C, although some Turbo Pascal diehards (myself) still lingered. Video is VGA and a smattering of SVGA, XVGA cards. Removable storage of choice was the 1.44Mb 3-1/2" floppy. Some people have CDROMS, but not many. Harddrives are the norm, and their typical sizes are about 100 to 500 Megs.
The OS for most people was still DOS, now version 5.0. People are running this cheesy environment called Windows 3.1 on top of it. I rebel and use OS/2. I need 8M RAM to use it, but it had a UI that GNOME and KDE are barely approaching ten years later.
My games of choice were Civilization and SimCity. They came on floppies, but a lot of other games are starting to come out on CDROMS, which pisses me off since I can't afford one. They also tend to use more RAM and Video than I can afford either.
Software in general is bloating. Stuff that takes up 5 to 10 Megs of disk is common. But I'm not bitching much, since they're adding a lot of features, not counting the GUI.
Networking has arrived! 14.4K modems are becoming standard. If you live in the right area, you can get an internet account. Otherwise AOL and Prodigy are somewhat suitable substitutes.
Home Built, P4, 2.8GHz, 1Gig RAM, $1,000. Language of choice is C++, although several dozen other major languages are common. There are no video standards anymore, but the minimum resolution anyone can put up with is 32-bit 1024x768. GPUs are more expensive and have bigger fans than CPUs. Removable media of choice is the CD-R, with USB memory sticks becoming popular. But the 1.44M floppy is still king. It will probably remain standard equipment until the typical BIOS can boot from USB devices (guesstimate of one year).
The common operating environment is still Windows, but fortunately, the current incarnation runs on top of NT instead of DOS. WinXP recommends 512M RAM. UNIX is making strong headway into the desktop market. Even the most basic Linux distro requires a minimum of 16M RAM, with most recommending 64M.
I haven't bought any games in a couple of years. The last one was Civilization III. (My how things change!) The game market has become dull. My prediction from ten years earlier, that game developers would start scaling back and produce games that would run on systems that the public actually owned, proved false. Instead, the public eagerly upgrades their RAM and GPU's every six months. I see that the many new blockbuster games require video cards that haven't been on the market more than six months.
Software in general has long since passed the bloat stage, and has become quivering mounds of fat reminiscent of dead whales washed up on the beach. This isn't limited to the Windows world. I don't see much increased functionality with OpenOffice versus the Lotus SmartSuite of ten years earlier.
Highspeed internet connections are considered a human right in some regions. You hide your head in shame if you're still using a dialup modem or ISDN.
Okay, now time for 2013 predictions:
Sun Home Workstation, 128-bit i986 class, 1
That's rpm.org. What about Redhat.com?
When's the last time you installed Linux, BSD, or any non-Windows OS? Because what you're describing is the default on everything I've seen with a few exceptions. Maybe they don't say exactly "click next", but they will allow to to proceed in a logical manner to the next screen by clicking or selecting a "next", "OK" or "finish" icon. Most you don't even have to click, as the installer automatically takes you to the next screen.
I'm not talking about just the newbie distros like Lycoris or Xandros. I'm talking about the "hard" systems like Slackware and FreeBSD!
In fact, if you want, Linux/BSD will happily reformat and use your entire harddrive so you don't have to worry your fretted brow over partitioning issues. Just like Windows!
Moderators marked you as funny, but I think you're insightful. It's only been within the last few months that people are starting to realize that they've been using the term "usability" as an erroneous synonym for "familiarity".
One prime example is the "D" drive. When I boot into Windows, and try to play some MP3s on a CD in WinAmp, I'm always forgetting where it is. Are they under D:, E:, F: or G:? I have two primary FAT32 partitions on my first harddrive, and two CDROM drives, so "D" is most assuredly NOT the correct answer. (But try telling that to tech support!)
At least someone saw the intended humour...
It's a concept the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon knew. The Greeks and Romans new it. The Saxons and Normans knew it. Even the founders of the US knew it. But somehow that concept has been lost in the modern US. It's truly sad.
I just wish I knew exactly where to place the blame. Is it the lawsuit culture, where you are promised (but can never collect) millions of dollars by being a victim? Is it the modern welfare state where you are taken care of from cradle to grave? Is it the university professors who teach students that they can change the world by whining? How the heck are you supposed to learn responsibility as a child when your parents think dropping you off at school is the extent of their parenting obligations?
Unless the culture of the US makes an about-face, it is doomed. I am not a European making cracks at the US. I am a proudly patriotic US citizen. Which is why I am distressed that the whining mediocrity has taken over.
The solution won't come from the Democrats or Republicans. It won't come from any one politician, no matter how spiffy their website or fiery their oration. Instead it has to come from the bottom foundations of society. People from every walk of life need to stand up and say "I will be responsible for every action I take!" When the lawyer urges you to sue, spit on his shoes. When the politician promises you money if you vote for him, walk away. When you professor tells you that your condition is the result of evil meat-eating while male Europeans, drop the class.
"Created" versus "invented". There's not much difference. If you're going to get that nit-picky, then NO ONE invented the internet, because it was never patented. Geez.
No one is claiming that Gore said he literally invented the internet from scratch from the ground up, including the technical foundations of it. But it sure as heck sounded like he meant that he was the impetus behind it.
His quote, if not a lie, is still a disembling of the truth. He's making the general public, who are ignorant of technical matters, think that he created/invented/funded/proposed the internet. He certainly rallied behind it, he certainly diverted tax monies towards certain segments of it, and he definitely promoted the term "Information Superhighway", but he was in no way involved in its creation and birth. The modern public internet *IS* the old ARPAnet, just grown up. Running internet connections to schools is not the same thing as creating the internet.
"He was certainly among the first if not the first in Congress to realize how powerful the information revolution would be"
No one is denying that. Gore did a lot of good things (and a few bad) in his promotion of the internet. But realizing the power of an ubiquitous global network is hardly the same thing as creating it. He was not involved in the creation of TCP/IP, Usenet, http, or any RFCs.
Um, you might want to check out your facts to see if their factual. Not everything your masters tell you is the truth.
I would really like to see geeks getin on the ground floor with some third parties. Both the Republicans and Democrats are stuck in the seventies. They have some good candidates, but their lost in the crowd of fossils. It's time for the Greens and Libertarians. You either hate them or love them, not like the current crop that leaves you cold.
There were two main branches of UNIX. The first was the commercialized AT&T/USL UNIX, which SCO know apparently owns. The other branch of BSD UNIX. From day one this was noncommercial. It was BSD UNIX that made UNIX a success. Without BSD, UNIX would be down and out in the gutter sharing a bottle of Ripple with Multics and cursing its fortunes.
BSD might not be allowed to call itself a "UNIX" today, but the fact remains that it is still UNIX and it is Free Software.
Whoo hoo! Give me the freedom to take away the freedoms of others! That's the FSF spirit!
p.s. The above cheer is an example of sarcasm. The humour^H^Hr comes from GTK+ being a GNU project whose main selling point seems to be the ability to write user subjugating proprietary software.
What's is it with all of the "Poor Trolltech" sentiment in this thread?
Because the article was severly biased against it, while pretending to be fair and balanced. To rephrase the question, what the fsck does a business-oriented website have to do with the quality of the toolkit? Next thing you know he'll be dissing Redhat and SuSE for the same reason.
Politics are about more than just the RIAA.
It's sad that while everyone here realizes that, so few actually act like it. When it comes to the non-tech world, we take our media pablum just like everyone else.
In California the governor is going to be recalled. Today's poll shows 64% would vote to recall. But the reason has nothing to do with technology. Does anyone on Slashdot know WHY California is generally pissed off at Davis? Hint: it's not about Oracle software. There is a "tech" candidate running that has a decent change of winning in California. Do you know who he is? Hint: it's not Arnold or Larry, or any of the college kids with web pages. You don't know who he is because he's too busy courting the mainstream vote to bother advertising himself as an introvert geek.
Sounds like you don't know too much about private schools. Most private schools are just as strapped for cash as public schools. Their facilities are better maintained, but that's just because they use their money where its needed, rather than where the remote politician wants it spent.
Trendy "elite" schools are a different matter. Because of their demand, they can charge a heck of a lot and get it. Their customers are also those parents most likely to want cameras installed so they can view their kids remotely thinking that it counts as "quality time".
Since when?
Since forever. Actually, to be totally accurate, it is not "free" as in "free beer". You're still going to be charged for the medical services, and it may cause you to file bankruptcy. But it is still "free" as in "free access". If you're bleeding from a gunshot wound, you WILL be treated! If your child is sick with pneumonia, he WILL be treated! No, you won't get free viagra, elective surgery, or cholesterol screenings, but you WILL have access to emergency medical care.
I am a KDE fan, but I'm going to say that the "ugly hack" comment was right on target. There is a reason why Karamba is not in the core KDE distribution. It looks cool. It feels cool. But looking through the code, it's damned ugly and very hackish.
This isn't a slam. I really believe that the orginal Karamba authors meant it to be a prototype demonstration of an idea. They didn't mean for it to be a release quality definitive implementation.
When you're streaming a file, you're streaming a single file. All file systems will be roughly equivalent at this point. After all, once the harddrive has seeked to the starting sector, odds are very high that the data will be contiguous.
Where you want the efficiency is when you have to deal with a large number of files. For example, I use UFS on FreeBSD. Before I used softupdates, untarring the ports tree severly bogged down the system, because there were tens of thousands of very small files. But after I turned on softupdates, the same operation was extremely fast. But moving a single large file around (tarball of my homedir) didn't make any difference if softupdates was on or off.