Dude, get yourself an SSD. I've got a Mac from 2008, upgraded with an entry-level SSD (Kingston V series) and Photoshop CS5.5 launches in under 5 seconds.
Please remember: Illinois base Sales Tax is 6.25%. Dupage County Sales Tax is 1%. Oakbrook Sales tax is.5% Cook County Sales tax is 2%. The Chicago Municipal Tax is 1.5%. The use tax in Chicago is 1% for anything bought from a retailer. There is a 2.25% tax applied to drugs and groceries in Chicago. There is an additional 3% tax on soft drinks. There is a 1% tax on prepared foods and beverages.
Is Amazon a retailer? Do they need to apply the 1% use tax?
O_O
WTF?
That's crazy. We have a 10% GST that it's required to be included in the sale price of an item. If we want something to sell for $9.99, then the actual ex-GST price of the item is $9.08.
It was a kiosk style app to run on Android tablets - I had my programmer knock it up in a day. He built a basic wrapper for the regular Android browser. This app hid all the on-screen controls and went full screen. There was no address bar. It had a pre-configured URL that the browser went to, and auto-refreshed to after xx minutes of inactivity. There was a hidden way to get to the preferences where the URL could be changed. It also had the ability to load web pages off internal flash storage so it didn't need internet access. We also put in an auto-update feature so it could load replacement content off a USB stick that was inserted.
Yes, the second part. There was a docco on here recently about Cane Toads and what a disaster they've become. From just over 100 toads that were initially introduced, to eat beetles that live 2m above the ground in cane fields, and a toad that doesn't climb very well, they've now taken over the entire of the north-east area of Australia and they're rapidly heading west and as far south as they can tolerate the weather.
Compared to native frogs and toads who will lay 100's of eggs once a year, cane toads lay 10,000's of eggs once or twice a year. Plus they are toxic, so that any animals that eat just one invariably end up dying.
There is simply no way to control these pests, we're stuck with them for a very long time. All from around 100 animals that were brought in.
Now, granted, larger species are a lot easier to control - they breed more slowly, they're easier to find, but you still have to be very careful about bringing in foreign animals to an environment and letting them loose...
Well, they clearly are, and that's the point. There are no publicly announced replacements for the U2, it's the best we've got that everyone knows about.
Whilst the foundations for higher DPI displays have been in OS X for many years now, the fact remains that there is no vendor-supported method for a user to turn on high DPI mode at present, even through some of Apple's displays are quite high resolution.
Every time I go to the Apple menu (top-left corner of the screen) or Spotlight (top-right corner of the screen) as they're essentially infinite sized targets.
You're missing the point though. I never have to move the mouse towards a menu and then reposition it with a greater degree of accuracy as the top of the screen can be hit every time without trying. One quick flick of the mouse and you're there. You simply can not overshoot the menu bar on Mac OS X (unless, of course, you have a multi-monitor setup with two monitors arranged vertically and the lower one is the main monitor with the menu bar but this is a pretty rare occurrence and it sucks to actually use it in this configuration)
I can hit the menu bar at the top of the screen 100% of the time without even looking. Move the mouse upwards and it stops automatically when you get to the menu bar. It's a far easier target to hit than a thin menu attached to each window.
As for the one button mouse - every single Mac that ships with a mouse, ships with a 2 button mouse with X/Y scroll capabilities. Macs have shipped with 2 button mouses as standard for near on 10 years now, so that's a bit of a tired meme to try and use.
Nearly every single app on the Mac uses right-click context sensitive menus - however there's a big difference with the way they're implemented. In most cases (ie, if they're done right) the context menu has functionality that's also available through the normal user interface. It is very bad design to have functionality that exists and is only accessible from a context menu and this is heavily frowned upon on OS X.
Having said that, I really don't like the new skeuomorphic user interface design that Apple is using on Lion - it kind-of works on an iPhone or iPad where you're in a single-task mode and you are more closely replicating a physical object, but on the Mac it just looks like balls.
Modern SSDs are much better with writes. They all have pretty extensive wear-levelling built in to the firmware so that even if you write to the same block over and over again, the writes get spread out over the cells that make up the disk.
I've seen figures quoted such that if you were continually writing to the disk, filling it up over and over again at a rate of 10's of MB per second then you'll still have 3-5 years of life - which is about what I'd rate a hard disk for in demanding applications like that too.
Furthermore, the failure mode of SSDs indicate that writes will fail before reads do. Once you've got failed writes, you still should be able to read the data from the SSD and recover it.
As tedious as reinstalling Windows is, you've now got the perfect opportunity. Get a 60GB SSD and install the x64 version of Windows on that. Then you can do a gradual migration without having to wipe your C: drive. As fast as an SSD is, RAM is an order of magnitude faster so adding more RAM is always going to be better than adding more swap.
You have a kick-arse system there that can be even better with some careful optimisation - Windows 7 x64 on an SSD will seriously give it a whole new lease of life.
Failing that, convince one of your mates to go and put an SSD in their system - you really need to use one first-hand to appreciate the benefits.
You've no doubt built a very good system there. I used to do the same thing when I built my own computers - get enterprise grade components wherever I could.
Look at SSD though. You can get a 60GB SSD for $80 that will be at least a factor of 10-100 faster than the drives you've got. 10-100x the iops. Seek times reduced from over 10ms to around 0.1ms Something like 500MB/sec data transfer rate Lower power consumption. Lower noise. No moving parts. MTBF of 2 million hours.
SSD prices have dropped quite significantly since 4 years ago. They were obscenely expensive back then, and now they're expensive, but worth it. You (probably) don't need 15k RPM drives for bulk data in a workstation or personal computer.
If the choice comes down to one SSD or one HDD, and you have lots of data then you have to get the HDD. Instead of getting the biggest HDD you can get for, say, $200 however, you will be better off if you spend $100 on a small (60GB) SSD for your OS and $100 on a large, but not quite as large, HDD.
As for reliability, it's rather a moot point as that's what backups are for.
As I said, unless you've experienced the general speedup throughout the entire OS when running off an SSD, don't discount it. As someone else in this thread said, it makes a computer built in 2011 feel like it's meant to be in 2011.
On a general workstation or personal computer - the one thing you spend waiting on is disk I/O. Generally you're waiting on iops (I/O operations per second as the number of I/Os per second is a better measurement than the amount of data transferred per second). These days computers generally have enough RAM, they generally have enough CPU, they generally have enough graphics processing but all of these operations are usually waiting on disk IO.
I whacked a SSD in my laptop. It went from a machine that was sluggish to feeling like (not benchmarking like, mind you, but from a user's perspective, feeling like) it was faster than my Mac Pro workstation. Apps launched instantly, the machine booted in 15 seconds to a usable desktop with apps launched. Just doing stuff felt a lot faster. It went from having a disk that would be flat out at 400-600 iops (and bringing the whole machine to a standstill) to having a disk that could handle over 7k iops and still feeling responsive.
Before SSD came along, you'd need $100k+ of spindles to sustain 7k iops. Now you can do it on a $100 SSD.
I'm not arguing with your points, they're all valid. I am saying that you need to experience a machine running on an SSD to make a valid judgement on the worth of SSD vs HDD.
It's not just rebooting and loading apps that benefits from having a SSD, although these are areas that show the most marked improvement, the general responsiveness of the machine is improved drastically. It used to be that machines never had enough RAM, and adding RAM was the cheapest way to speed things up. Now they generally do have enough RAM and adding a SSD is the way to go. I've put SSDs in people's computers as an upgrade and with no exaggeration it feels like a whole new computer.
if you're talking about 15k enterprise drives (yes, I was and I nearly added this comment too) then dollars per gigabyte they compare pretty well to SSD. Here RRP on a Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 600GB SAS hard drive is $914 - this is an enterprise-grade server hard disk. An Intel 320 Series 600GB SSD is $1684 - not even twice as expensive.
No matter how you configure spinning hard disks, you will not get the IOPS that you can easily get from a single SSD.
If you haven't extensively used a machine with a SSD, no amount of argument I make will sway you to realise what incredible value for money a SSD actually is in real-world usage scenarios.
Buy an SSD for your OS and Apps. Buy multi-TB disks for your bulk data. Never have to worry about disk iops or throughput or free space for quite some time.
You've obviously not used a machine with the OS and apps on a SSD. I will not be getting another computer without a SSD. Sure, for bulk data, such as music, movies and photos, these all live on spinning disks, but for things where latency and throughput matters, SSDs are more than worth the additional cost.
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
You'd be crazy (or just too rich to care I suppose) if you wanted your media collection to live on SSD, but even for that hybrid disks are pretty good in a lot of usage scenarios.
You'll also get little to no benefit putting SSDs on a RAID controller - most RAID controllers are optimised for the access times and throughput of regular hard disks, even if in this case regular means a 15k RPM SAS disk.
For all the examples of redaction fail we've seen over the years (and no doubt will continue to see) the linked-to PDF has been redacted properly. It's easy to do, the tools are built into Acrobat Professional (it's probably easier to do it right, than to do it the wrong way if you know how to do it)
It's not paranoid when they've established a consistent pattern of spying on citizens without cause in the wake of 9/11.
Yes, because everyone knows they weren't spying on you before 9/11. Sure, their legally granted powers have increased without bounds since then, but they've been spying on you right from the start.
Oh the irony - if you're really serious about espionage work, and you've got a Facebook account, then just forget it. There's already too much information about you out there for you to be of any real value.
Tape isn't slow - at least not real tape drives. In fact, if you're looking an LTO4 or LTO5, the tape is probably faster than the disk subsystem in your server and you'll do the mechanism damage by not feeding it data fast enough (shoe-shining).
Yes, because I know that I'd love to run my business on a platform that is of dubious legal standing and completely lacks any support whatsoever from any of the vendors (hardware and software) involved and could have my entire business brought to aa standstill because everything breaks when I accidentally install a vendor-supplied software update.
Yes, of course they can. They (prisons) get custom built machines. A mate of mine worked on a project to supply just these machines to prisons. Among the other special requirements was a case made entirely of clear acrylic so there would be nowhere to hide contraband.
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Dude, get yourself an SSD.
I've got a Mac from 2008, upgraded with an entry-level SSD (Kingston V series) and Photoshop CS5.5 launches in under 5 seconds.
Please remember: .5%
Illinois base Sales Tax is 6.25%.
Dupage County Sales Tax is 1%.
Oakbrook Sales tax is
Cook County Sales tax is 2%.
The Chicago Municipal Tax is 1.5%.
The use tax in Chicago is 1% for anything bought from a retailer.
There is a 2.25% tax applied to drugs and groceries in Chicago.
There is an additional 3% tax on soft drinks.
There is a 1% tax on prepared foods and beverages.
Is Amazon a retailer? Do they need to apply the 1% use tax?
O_O
WTF?
That's crazy. We have a 10% GST that it's required to be included in the sale price of an item. If we want something to sell for $9.99, then the actual ex-GST price of the item is $9.08.
That is all.
It was a kiosk style app to run on Android tablets - I had my programmer knock it up in a day.
He built a basic wrapper for the regular Android browser.
This app hid all the on-screen controls and went full screen. There was no address bar.
It had a pre-configured URL that the browser went to, and auto-refreshed to after xx minutes of inactivity.
There was a hidden way to get to the preferences where the URL could be changed.
It also had the ability to load web pages off internal flash storage so it didn't need internet access.
We also put in an auto-update feature so it could load replacement content off a USB stick that was inserted.
Yes, because every time I have an unclean shutdown, I sure want to be recovering from tape.
Yes, the second part. There was a docco on here recently about Cane Toads and what a disaster they've become. From just over 100 toads that were initially introduced, to eat beetles that live 2m above the ground in cane fields, and a toad that doesn't climb very well, they've now taken over the entire of the north-east area of Australia and they're rapidly heading west and as far south as they can tolerate the weather.
Compared to native frogs and toads who will lay 100's of eggs once a year, cane toads lay 10,000's of eggs once or twice a year. Plus they are toxic, so that any animals that eat just one invariably end up dying.
There is simply no way to control these pests, we're stuck with them for a very long time. All from around 100 animals that were brought in.
Now, granted, larger species are a lot easier to control - they breed more slowly, they're easier to find, but you still have to be very careful about bringing in foreign animals to an environment and letting them loose...
You mean, something like the Cane Toad?
Why are you comparing your $1k budget rig to a machine released in June 2003 (We got two brand new G5 towers the week they came out)
I actually wanted to read what you wrote there, but it really needs some line breaks.
Either put in <br> or post as Plain Old Text (in the Options button below the text-entry box) and you'll make it a lot easier for people to read.
It's time to give it up (Score:3, Insightful)?
Funny maybe, but insightful? Seriously...
Well, they clearly are, and that's the point.
There are no publicly announced replacements for the U2, it's the best we've got that everyone knows about.
No, we definitely don't have anything better.
but that just shows up as *******
Whilst the foundations for higher DPI displays have been in OS X for many years now, the fact remains that there is no vendor-supported method for a user to turn on high DPI mode at present, even through some of Apple's displays are quite high resolution.
Every time I go to the Apple menu (top-left corner of the screen) or Spotlight (top-right corner of the screen) as they're essentially infinite sized targets.
You're missing the point though. I never have to move the mouse towards a menu and then reposition it with a greater degree of accuracy as the top of the screen can be hit every time without trying. One quick flick of the mouse and you're there. You simply can not overshoot the menu bar on Mac OS X (unless, of course, you have a multi-monitor setup with two monitors arranged vertically and the lower one is the main monitor with the menu bar but this is a pretty rare occurrence and it sucks to actually use it in this configuration)
Refer to Fitts's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
I can hit the menu bar at the top of the screen 100% of the time without even looking. Move the mouse upwards and it stops automatically when you get to the menu bar. It's a far easier target to hit than a thin menu attached to each window.
As for the one button mouse - every single Mac that ships with a mouse, ships with a 2 button mouse with X/Y scroll capabilities. Macs have shipped with 2 button mouses as standard for near on 10 years now, so that's a bit of a tired meme to try and use.
Nearly every single app on the Mac uses right-click context sensitive menus - however there's a big difference with the way they're implemented. In most cases (ie, if they're done right) the context menu has functionality that's also available through the normal user interface. It is very bad design to have functionality that exists and is only accessible from a context menu and this is heavily frowned upon on OS X.
Having said that, I really don't like the new skeuomorphic user interface design that Apple is using on Lion - it kind-of works on an iPhone or iPad where you're in a single-task mode and you are more closely replicating a physical object, but on the Mac it just looks like balls.
Modern SSDs are much better with writes. They all have pretty extensive wear-levelling built in to the firmware so that even if you write to the same block over and over again, the writes get spread out over the cells that make up the disk.
I've seen figures quoted such that if you were continually writing to the disk, filling it up over and over again at a rate of 10's of MB per second then you'll still have 3-5 years of life - which is about what I'd rate a hard disk for in demanding applications like that too.
Furthermore, the failure mode of SSDs indicate that writes will fail before reads do. Once you've got failed writes, you still should be able to read the data from the SSD and recover it.
As tedious as reinstalling Windows is, you've now got the perfect opportunity. Get a 60GB SSD and install the x64 version of Windows on that. Then you can do a gradual migration without having to wipe your C: drive. As fast as an SSD is, RAM is an order of magnitude faster so adding more RAM is always going to be better than adding more swap.
You have a kick-arse system there that can be even better with some careful optimisation - Windows 7 x64 on an SSD will seriously give it a whole new lease of life.
Failing that, convince one of your mates to go and put an SSD in their system - you really need to use one first-hand to appreciate the benefits.
You've no doubt built a very good system there. I used to do the same thing when I built my own computers - get enterprise grade components wherever I could.
Look at SSD though. You can get a 60GB SSD for $80 that will be at least a factor of 10-100 faster than the drives you've got.
10-100x the iops.
Seek times reduced from over 10ms to around 0.1ms
Something like 500MB/sec data transfer rate
Lower power consumption.
Lower noise.
No moving parts.
MTBF of 2 million hours.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227737
SSD prices have dropped quite significantly since 4 years ago. They were obscenely expensive back then, and now they're expensive, but worth it.
You (probably) don't need 15k RPM drives for bulk data in a workstation or personal computer.
If the choice comes down to one SSD or one HDD, and you have lots of data then you have to get the HDD. Instead of getting the biggest HDD you can get for, say, $200 however, you will be better off if you spend $100 on a small (60GB) SSD for your OS and $100 on a large, but not quite as large, HDD.
As for reliability, it's rather a moot point as that's what backups are for.
As I said, unless you've experienced the general speedup throughout the entire OS when running off an SSD, don't discount it. As someone else in this thread said, it makes a computer built in 2011 feel like it's meant to be in 2011.
On a general workstation or personal computer - the one thing you spend waiting on is disk I/O. Generally you're waiting on iops (I/O operations per second as the number of I/Os per second is a better measurement than the amount of data transferred per second). These days computers generally have enough RAM, they generally have enough CPU, they generally have enough graphics processing but all of these operations are usually waiting on disk IO.
I whacked a SSD in my laptop. It went from a machine that was sluggish to feeling like (not benchmarking like, mind you, but from a user's perspective, feeling like) it was faster than my Mac Pro workstation. Apps launched instantly, the machine booted in 15 seconds to a usable desktop with apps launched. Just doing stuff felt a lot faster. It went from having a disk that would be flat out at 400-600 iops (and bringing the whole machine to a standstill) to having a disk that could handle over 7k iops and still feeling responsive.
Before SSD came along, you'd need $100k+ of spindles to sustain 7k iops. Now you can do it on a $100 SSD.
I'm not arguing with your points, they're all valid. I am saying that you need to experience a machine running on an SSD to make a valid judgement on the worth of SSD vs HDD.
It's not just rebooting and loading apps that benefits from having a SSD, although these are areas that show the most marked improvement, the general responsiveness of the machine is improved drastically. It used to be that machines never had enough RAM, and adding RAM was the cheapest way to speed things up. Now they generally do have enough RAM and adding a SSD is the way to go. I've put SSDs in people's computers as an upgrade and with no exaggeration it feels like a whole new computer.
if you're talking about 15k enterprise drives (yes, I was and I nearly added this comment too) then dollars per gigabyte they compare pretty well to SSD.
Here RRP on a Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 600GB SAS hard drive is $914 - this is an enterprise-grade server hard disk.
An Intel 320 Series 600GB SSD is $1684 - not even twice as expensive.
No matter how you configure spinning hard disks, you will not get the IOPS that you can easily get from a single SSD.
If you haven't extensively used a machine with a SSD, no amount of argument I make will sway you to realise what incredible value for money a SSD actually is in real-world usage scenarios.
Buy an SSD for your OS and Apps. Buy multi-TB disks for your bulk data. Never have to worry about disk iops or throughput or free space for quite some time.
You've obviously not used a machine with the OS and apps on a SSD.
I will not be getting another computer without a SSD.
Sure, for bulk data, such as music, movies and photos, these all live on spinning disks, but for things where latency and throughput matters, SSDs are more than worth the additional cost.
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
You'd be crazy (or just too rich to care I suppose) if you wanted your media collection to live on SSD, but even for that hybrid disks are pretty good in a lot of usage scenarios.
You'll also get little to no benefit putting SSDs on a RAID controller - most RAID controllers are optimised for the access times and throughput of regular hard disks, even if in this case regular means a 15k RPM SAS disk.
For all the examples of redaction fail we've seen over the years (and no doubt will continue to see) the linked-to PDF has been redacted properly.
It's easy to do, the tools are built into Acrobat Professional (it's probably easier to do it right, than to do it the wrong way if you know how to do it)
It's not paranoid when they've established a consistent pattern of spying on citizens without cause in the wake of 9/11.
Yes, because everyone knows they weren't spying on you before 9/11.
Sure, their legally granted powers have increased without bounds since then, but they've been spying on you right from the start.
Oh the irony - if you're really serious about espionage work, and you've got a Facebook account, then just forget it. There's already too much information about you out there for you to be of any real value.
Tape isn't slow - at least not real tape drives. In fact, if you're looking an LTO4 or LTO5, the tape is probably faster than the disk subsystem in your server and you'll do the mechanism damage by not feeding it data fast enough (shoe-shining).
Yes, because I know that I'd love to run my business on a platform that is of dubious legal standing and completely lacks any support whatsoever from any of the vendors (hardware and software) involved and could have my entire business brought to aa standstill because everything breaks when I accidentally install a vendor-supplied software update.
Yes, of course they can. They (prisons) get custom built machines. A mate of mine worked on a project to supply just these machines to prisons. Among the other special requirements was a case made entirely of clear acrylic so there would be nowhere to hide contraband.