The precaching happens when the machine is idle. That it occurs less-than-instantaneously is does not indicate that it is computationally expensive in any meaningful way.
Computers are devilishly fast, and on the desktop, they still spend almost all of their time waiting for their operator to catch up. It might as well spend some of that idle horsepower doing something which might save some time for its human operator.
Right, so: In order to defend your Right to Profit, we're all expected to let you do whatever the fuck you want to do, contracts (and the laws which enforce them) be damned.
If you don't like the rules, don't play the fucking game.
The signature, AFAIK, is only there to signify that you, the authorized card user, agree to the terms of the Cardholder Member Agreement or some other such nonsense.
It has nothing at all to do with accepting any particular charges, or as an affirmation of successful completion of any particular sale.
It's just to state that you agree to the terms of the same contract you signed when you got the card initially. But since that contract is not available for your review at the time that you're being asked to agree to it, the POS agreement signature is really not particularly valid, anyway.
I, therefore, sign all such documents with an X. It's worked so far.
Also, too: The narrow spectra can kill overall color perception to such an extent that many objects will appear quite plainly greyish (or, more pointedly, "lacking color").
Eyes aren't perfect, and CFL's are far worse. Grey tint? You betcha.
what sense does it make to load 450 or so MB in when I decide to just play Oblivion or something and none of that is used, and might even be written over?
What sense does it make? It helps you out substantially when you're operating the computer in your typical fashion. You deviate from the norm, you get a cache miss. Nothing new here.
What's new is the flurry of crazy-eyed weird fuckers like yourself who keep missing the point: It's faster this way, and it costs absolutely nothing in performance. Who gives a shit if it misses from time to time? It's -free-, and harmed you none by missing.
At any rate, this caching happens at low priority. If the computer had something better to do (like load Oblivion), it'd be bloody doing it. Instead, it's keeping itself busy trying to prepare itself for the next thing that you might ask of it.
Loading happens in the background, at a low priority. (Yes, Vista can and does prioritize disk IO.) It is therefore nearly free.
Defragmentation also happens, regularly and automatically by default, in the background at low priority. It works well. A typical Vista installation will probably not ever show substantial file fragmentation. This reduces the cost of "nearly free", as above, by a substantial factor.
Except for the hour and half at startup where Windows loads every application you've ever loved into memory, right?
Wrong.
Vista has the apparently unique ability to prioritize disk access. The SuperFetch function which everyone is presently complaining about uses this functionality to reduce the performance impact its initial cache preload by operating at a lower priority level than user-initiated disk access. And: It seems to work just fine[1].
[1]: I was worried about the flurry of disk access I saw when booting up Vista, but the machine seems very responsive during this time and generally behaves about as quickly as it did with XP. Subsequent to the preload, things like Opera seem to load rather instantaneously.
[1]: Of course, you get DoubleInsanity when something like Acrobat Reader, or OpenOffice.org installs its own preload function. I suspect that this "feature" will be automatically disabled in future versions of these programs when installed on Vista - until then, there's always msconfig, I guess.
Oh. Right - sorry. I forgot: It's not about actually solving a problem, but instead about adding additional steps to The Blame Game, and its counterpart The Finger-Pointing Game.
So it doesn't matter if piracy continues, as long as everyone's covering their own ass and doing a bunch of hand-waving.
My mistake.
(ObTopic: Hey, you stupid bunch of fucks! Stop running Windows XP as administrator, learn a thing or two about file permissions (NTFS does not have to suck) and it'll stop letting your users steal Office!)
I earn a big portion of my income supporting desktop Windows machines in random places, so I went ahead and jumped onto Vista with my daily-use laptop computer so that I'd know what to expect.
The Vista upgrade went fine.
The DRM you speak of, I'm not too sure about. It seems to me that some combination of mplayer / mencoder / VLC / Azureus / piratebay will handily defeat any and all obnoxious DRM schemes, even on Vista.
Isn't "profit" defined as any money that is made -after- all business expenditures such as labor, realestate investments, prospecting, drilling, and a daily course of hookers and blow for the CEO have been taken out of "revenue"?
So I went ahead and bought Vista Business, and did a clean install of it on the aforementioned laptop, an Inspiron 6000d. Pentium M 1.83, 2 gigs of DDR2 at 533, ATI X300 (using fresh drivers from ATI), Bluetooth mouse, 1 gig of ReadyBoost configured on the SD slot.
The sidebar was using 1-2% before I turned it off, but that's -all- I've turned off. Otherwise, I've been adding software left and right trying to get this machine ready for its typical use.
And guess what? Vista idles just fine. There is little or no background activity, as reported by Task Manager (though Task Manager itself likes to use a few percent, as typical for any Windows).
And, the box seems to be more responsive than it was with XP...and requires even less extra software in order to optimize the machine for my tastes. (I had been using third-party software to manipulate the CPU's clock and conserve battery, but Vista has such functionality built-in, for example.)
I'm impressed. I'm also not at all sure what it is that you're doing wrong; things seem to be running great, for me, Aero eye-candy included.
Not to reply to myself, but there's another possibility which I had just thought of:
It's not really even necessary to do all of that DSP work.
Just run the speech-to-text engine on the -output- of the sound card as well as the microphone input. Use the output as a filter for the input, such that any commands which exist at the output are automatically ignored at the input.
Interesting comment, but not for the reasons you think.
It's interesting because you noticed a problem (piggish USB), isolated the problem (removed offending remote from the USB bus), and then blamed it on something else entirely (the operating system).
USB sucks. It always has sucked. Especially in the 2.0 world where things like mice and remotes live. Just because the bus is broken, does not mean that the operating system wasn't doing the very best it could with the information available to it.
If in doubt of USB's suckiness, just have a look through the notes in the Linux kernel's configuration.
Where have you seen it reported that Vista eats 10% of the CPU? I'd been somewhat considering looking at Vista for my XP laptop, to get some advance exposure to it so that I might be a bit clued when I need to operate on it for customers, and because its flash-RAM disk caching promised to make things a bit faster while increasing runtime on battery (which I expect to pair nicely with my SD card slot).
However, if it consumes 10% of the CPU, then some of those advantages are for naught.
As an aside:
I'd been noticing high-ish CPU utilization on my XP laptop during periods when it should be idle. I decided today to find out what the culprits were.
Sure, Google Desktop was using a bit to keep its index up-to-date and generate flashy graphics, and every now and then the drivers for the touchpad would stir things up a bit, but neither of those two were significant contributors. The real culprit turned out to be intel's wireless drivers, which were using 10% (!) of that 1.83GHz 2m-cached P3-M's potential, all for themselves. What's more is that disabling those CPU-hogging portions of the intel drivers has not in any way affected wireless performance, but has made the machine quieter, cooler, faster, and live longer on batteries. For free.
Perhaps the perceived CPU penalty with Vista is caused by needlessly bloated third-party drivers?
However, this should be a solvable problem with current DSP technology.
If my cellular telephone can perform realtime echo cancellation, and subtract its own speakerphone audio from the microphone audio, and do it for several hours at a time on a battery the size of a matchbook, then I can only fucking hope that a modern dual-core machine would be able to tackle the task handily.
Even after the variables are all multiplied by some factor because the speakers might move relative to the microphone, there seems to be plenty of horsepower available to throw at the problem. The fundamentals have all been solved by folks like Bell Labs, US Robotics, and Polycom a long fucking time ago, with less DSP power than my $20 optical mouse, using the widely variable POTS network as a testbed, where even the -remote- handset affects the quality of your own voice on the line.
Just because there's layers of distortion, band limiting, spurious external noises, with dynamics and delay possibly being anywhere on the map and an echo signature that changes as people move around the room, does not mean that it's not all measurable, quantifiable, and possible to reduce it to acceptable levels.
Remember, you don't have to get rid of all the feedback, and it doesn't have to be perfect. We're talking about a limiting computer's ability to hear itself, which is a far easier task than anything involving a human being. You only have to get rid of enough that the computer does not respond to its own voice. And also, remember that the resultant quality of the recorded microphone audio need not be production-grade, but only good enough for the computer to understand human-generated voice commands.
This is just silly and completely harmless vandalism. Like stickering a park bench, bus stop, or utility pole with a logo. Or TP'ing the coach's house after a big game. Or graffiti artwork (and definitely in a class above common tagging).
It didn't "work" at all: if it were intended to be panic-inducing, it'd have been DANGEROUS LOOKING. Further, if the prankster had intended to draw negative attention, they'd have simply called in a bomb threat for ANY populated building or area and skipped the construction and deployment phases.
So let us not lose sight of this simple fact:
It's just a self-illuminating picture of a cartoon figure with a raised middle finger, hanging from a public-works structure where it can easily be viewed by the masses. Clever and hilarious, if you ask me, but nobody bothered to do so before calling out the bomb squad.
I wonder how long it will take before people realize that a proper bomb, these days, will not light up and disclose its presence. It will not tick. It will not emit noxious odors. It will not be visually discernible from a laptop computer, a rolled-up newspaper, or a large rock atop one side of a bridge abutment, or a Ryder truck rolling down the street. A effective panic-inducing device need not appear to be anything more than an apparently-lost cellular phone or wallet laying on a public table, as long as such a device successfully detonates in someone's hand when they pick it up.
This was not anything like that. This was simply a grossly misinterpreted comedy, and I'm glad to have at least seen the photos.
As an aside: I, as one interested taxpayer, want to see those responsible fired for their gross and callous abuse of my money over this ordeal.
This, my friends, is why it might a good idea to demagnetize or otherwise damage the stripe on your license.
You don't need a bulk eraser or a degaussing coil or any of those things.
Just wipe a neodymium magnet across the magstripe a few times in random directions and with random polarity, and you're done. It's probably not completely erased, but the data will be so hosed that it won't be readable anyway.
Such magnets can be had cheaply from nearly any geek-oriented electronics surplus house, or scavenged from the head actuator of any modern-ish hard drive.
It's quick and easy, and greatly reduces the automatic information-gathering potential of store clerks, bouncers, and (apparently) pharmacists, none of whom have any business knowing what restrictions are on my driver's license.
Not that I would personally ever indulge in any such intentional destruction, of course.
It's interesting that you seem to think that your experience is in some way predictive of what others will encounter. But that's just not so.
Pick a manufacturer of ANYTHING more complicated than a soupcan, and you'll always be able to find someone writing sky-is-falling stories about how the thing died within hours of the warranty expiring, right after it kicked the dog and set the house on fire.
It happens with any product. The thing of it is, though, that except for a few particularly egregious and well-publicized examples (eg, IBM Deskstar 75GXP, Sony batteries, Firestone tires), stuff generally lasts a good long while after the warranty is gone.
So for good measure, I'll now proceed with writing a bit about a few things I've noticed:
I recently discarded a Plextor burner which had seen hard duty for 9 solid years, because it (finally) started to get a bit flaky and no longer produced perfect audio CDs. It lived 4 years past its 5-year warranty.
I'm still running old 4 and 6 gig drives in a couple of machines here that don't need much for storage. 5+ years past warranty and counting. (I'm contemplating replacing these with flash memory, but more for general principal and noise abatement than any particular fear of instability.)
The Uniden cordless phone I purchased 10 years ago works like new, though the battery has been replaced a few times.
The toaster in my kitchen. Its warranty, if there were any, expired decades ago. I dump the crumbs out of it from time to time, and it keeps toasting bread just fine.
I'd go on, but it'd be beleaguering the point. Look around you, and you'll find a bunch of stuff which is currently well past its warranty period.
Nevertheless, if you start Googling a few of the more recent ones, I'm sure you'll find sad, sad stories from people whose otherwise-identical stuff died, like clockwork, precisely 20 minutes after the 90-day warranty expired. But that, my friend, is more an indication that the world is a very big place than of any grand trend toward generally-faulty products.
As long as we're explaining general viewpoints for karma, here's how I see things:
RIAA is evil. They're suing their customers. Microsoft is evil. They lock people into their products and make my job difficult with obscure licensing requirements and feature omissions. SCO is evil. Sure, UNIX(r) was great and all, but we got over it years ago.
Wal-Mart? Come on. All they do is sell products that people want, for less money than the competition, and offer correspondingly little in the way of customer service. Just like Newegg, Amazon, or any of most of the other faceless online entities who are struggling to charge as little as possible in an attempt to get ahead. This might hurt the local specialty merchants, but then, so does Newegg limit the market of a brick-and-mortar specialty PC parts store, who stands no chance at all at matching the pricing, availability, or product diversity such a beastly online merchant.
That said, I'm an informed sort of fellow, and I don't really want to pay someone to hold my hand while I make a purchase, anyway. The decisive lack of knowledgeable sales representatives at Wal-Mart and Newegg is, to me, a clear advantage, because I don't have to pay extra for supposedly-clued people to stand around and bullshit me.
Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop.
And so, at the end of the day: I could either pay less for those cheap Chinese goods, or I could pay more. Obviously, I'd rather pay less. Just like I'd rather get a raise, than continue toiling away undercompensated. Just like I'd rather sit, than stand. And I'd rather lay down, than sit. And so on, and so forth.
So now, they're making a concerted effort to boost CFL lighting, so as to cause people to spend less money on electric lighting instead of more money on more money on electric lighting. A boon for everyone. Cool!
So, Average_Joe_Sixpack: You must come from the magical world of textbook physics, where pulleys are frictionless and rope does not stretch. I hope it's nice over there.
Over here in the Really Real World, my day-job company recently sold a 3-position radio console for a 911 dispatch center to one of the local agencies that (surprise!) answers 911 calls. Just maybe, it's one of the ones near you, serving as the primary (and only) way to coordinate public service agencies in your county.
At a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars, they got a stout Dell "sever" with Win2k (can we say EOL, boys and girls), three Dell desktops with XP Pro which are used to control radio traffic, and a very nice cabinet full of proprietary 2-way radio-interface electronics.
The EOL'd Win2k box isn't needed for routine operation, which is good, because it is (yes, yet again) EOL'd. It can crash and catch fire, and the system still works. Which I guess is OK.
And if just one XP Pro box catches fire, things are still OK. That's only 1 out of 3 positions that go off-air.
But if a worm happens, and all three XP Pro boxen die at once (which has happened more than once in the history of Windows networks), then nobody will be able to talk. At all[1].
So whether or not consumer-grade OS's are supposed to be used for mission-critical apps or not, rest assured, Average_Joe_Sixpack: It already is that way. And, further: it's extremely likely that it (XP Pro) is the weak link between you and the fire department, as you listen helplessly at the curb while your children burn to death and the fire department still has not shown up to help.[2]
Good luck with your physics career!
[1]: Oh, sure. There's still a hardware box with a transmit button on it. But nobody knows how to use it, and they didn't cover it with any depth during technical training. Besides, 1 transmit button doesn't do 12 radios very much good, and nobody knows how to switch channels. And even if they did, they wouldn't remember by the time they needed to. So, as a backup/replacement for the fragility of a Dell Dimension with Windows XP, it might as well not even be there.
[2]: Oh, sure. The 911 dispatcher can always pick up a phone to dispatch a fire crew. But that's an extra 20 or so seconds that I'd rather not spend with my own house/kids/cat/fish/wife/whatever burning - thanks.
I suppose that the basic sentiment of your argument is that "driving like a prick is never OK, as long as you're trying to go faster than me."
In which case, prick, I can only retort that you, sir, are an asshole. Get the fuck out of the way, and let the passing lane be for passing. It is not your purpose to establish or discredit cause, justification, or merit for other drivers to operating their vehicles at a greater velocity than your own. Nor, it is not your entitlement to establish a "safe" speed, nor to adopt vigilante methods of enforcing any posted speed limit.
Rather, you do have a legal obligation to be driving in the right-most lane permitted by your surroundings, unless you are passing slower traffic.
Just. Like. Everyone. Else.
So pass that traffic, and move the fuck over. You'll find that other drivers are immediately far more polite as a result.
You know what? You're right! You don't need a truck. Rather, you need your head examined.
You're a fool if you think that you require such an enormous vehicle just to haul things "at least a few times a month" for a home remodeling project.
I am also a homeowner. Therefore, I understand that the fruit of a home improvement shopping trip comes only in one of two different sizes:
Big, and Gargantuan.
For Big loads, a small, short-bed pickup is more than adequate. You can fit surprising quantities of material of reasonable (8'+) length mostly into the bed; a red flag tied to the end and a couple of tie-down straps (which you should be using regardless) satisfies the DOT's safety requirements. For hauling a room's worth of tile and other Big things like toilets and bath tubs, it also generally works OK. A small pickup can easily handle almost any home remodeling job by itself.
Except, of course, for those things that qualify as Gargantuan. Stuff like 12' countertop sections. 16-foot 2x4s. A kitchen's worth of cabinets. A room's worth of sheetrock. Major appliances. Gargantuan. Say it with me: Gargantuan. The hypothetical small pickup mentioned in the above paragraph is not Gargantuan, and therefore is not equipped to handle these jobs.
But you just don't do much of that, and in fact the average home only has a few Garguantuan trips worth of stuff in it once fully built and furnished, anyway.
Which is, of course, why companies who sell Gargantuan things also ubiquitously offer DELIVERY SERVICES. That's right, for a small fee (or, quite often, for free), they'll load up all of your Gargantuan stuff onto a purpose-built, Gargantuan truck and deliver it to your home, and sometimes even unload it for you.
So you get the best of all worlds: You get the convenience of being able to do Big things on a whim while retaining the ability to purchase Gargantuan items, and you don't have to maintain your own Gargantuan truck.
You get to save on gas, of course. But you also get to benefit from reduced usage of other vehicular consumables: Smaller engines typically contain less oil, making changes cheaper. Brakes are smaller, and therefore less expensive. The tires are cheaper. Exhaust systems are less expensive. Fewer cylinders means cheaper and less-frequent serious engine repairs. And since you're driving it EVEN LESS due to the services of the delivery man, the whole thing lasts longer by default.
So please, get your head examined. If you were a general contractor, or a welder, or a horse breeder, or a stone mason, then I would probably feel differently. But you, sir, are insane if you think that your solitary house and its paltry appetite for Gargantuan stuff is sufficient justification for you to drive such a wasteful vehicle.
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Takes time? From what?
The precaching happens when the machine is idle. That it occurs less-than-instantaneously is does not indicate that it is computationally expensive in any meaningful way.
Computers are devilishly fast, and on the desktop, they still spend almost all of their time waiting for their operator to catch up. It might as well spend some of that idle horsepower doing something which might save some time for its human operator.
Right, so: In order to defend your Right to Profit, we're all expected to let you do whatever the fuck you want to do, contracts (and the laws which enforce them) be damned.
If you don't like the rules, don't play the fucking game.
The signature, AFAIK, is only there to signify that you, the authorized card user, agree to the terms of the Cardholder Member Agreement or some other such nonsense.
It has nothing at all to do with accepting any particular charges, or as an affirmation of successful completion of any particular sale.
It's just to state that you agree to the terms of the same contract you signed when you got the card initially. But since that contract is not available for your review at the time that you're being asked to agree to it, the POS agreement signature is really not particularly valid, anyway.
I, therefore, sign all such documents with an X. It's worked so far.
Also, too: The narrow spectra can kill overall color perception to such an extent that many objects will appear quite plainly greyish (or, more pointedly, "lacking color").
Eyes aren't perfect, and CFL's are far worse. Grey tint? You betcha.
what sense does it make to load 450 or so MB in when I decide to just play Oblivion or something and none of that is used, and might even be written over?
What sense does it make? It helps you out substantially when you're operating the computer in your typical fashion. You deviate from the norm, you get a cache miss. Nothing new here.
What's new is the flurry of crazy-eyed weird fuckers like yourself who keep missing the point: It's faster this way, and it costs absolutely nothing in performance. Who gives a shit if it misses from time to time? It's -free-, and harmed you none by missing.
At any rate, this caching happens at low priority. If the computer had something better to do (like load Oblivion), it'd be bloody doing it. Instead, it's keeping itself busy trying to prepare itself for the next thing that you might ask of it.
Sigh. I wish you fuckers would, at least, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/features/details/performance.mspx>read about it first, and then start with the design theory what-if arguments. Just because you've identified that a problem is not always simple, does not mean that it has not been solved already and plainly documented.
Loading happens in the background, at a low priority. (Yes, Vista can and does prioritize disk IO.) It is therefore nearly free.
Defragmentation also happens, regularly and automatically by default, in the background at low priority. It works well. A typical Vista installation will probably not ever show substantial file fragmentation. This reduces the cost of "nearly free", as above, by a substantial factor.
Except for the hour and half at startup where Windows loads every application you've ever loved into memory, right?
Wrong.
Vista has the apparently unique ability to prioritize disk access. The SuperFetch function which everyone is presently complaining about uses this functionality to reduce the performance impact its initial cache preload by operating at a lower priority level than user-initiated disk access. And: It seems to work just fine[1].
[1]: I was worried about the flurry of disk access I saw when booting up Vista, but the machine seems very responsive during this time and generally behaves about as quickly as it did with XP. Subsequent to the preload, things like Opera seem to load rather instantaneously.
[1]: Of course, you get DoubleInsanity when something like Acrobat Reader, or OpenOffice.org installs its own preload function. I suspect that this "feature" will be automatically disabled in future versions of these programs when installed on Vista - until then, there's always msconfig, I guess.
Oh. Right - sorry. I forgot: It's not about actually solving a problem, but instead about adding additional steps to The Blame Game, and its counterpart The Finger-Pointing Game.
So it doesn't matter if piracy continues, as long as everyone's covering their own ass and doing a bunch of hand-waving.
My mistake.
(ObTopic: Hey, you stupid bunch of fucks! Stop running Windows XP as administrator, learn a thing or two about file permissions (NTFS does not have to suck) and it'll stop letting your users steal Office!)
Um.
How will destroying Windows help solve your software piracy problem?
I earn a big portion of my income supporting desktop Windows machines in random places, so I went ahead and jumped onto Vista with my daily-use laptop computer so that I'd know what to expect.
The Vista upgrade went fine.
The DRM you speak of, I'm not too sure about. It seems to me that some combination of mplayer / mencoder / VLC / Azureus / piratebay will handily defeat any and all obnoxious DRM schemes, even on Vista.
Someone, please correct me on this if I'm wrong:
Isn't "profit" defined as any money that is made -after- all business expenditures such as labor, realestate investments, prospecting, drilling, and a daily course of hookers and blow for the CEO have been taken out of "revenue"?
In other words: Extra money?
Right, then.
So I went ahead and bought Vista Business, and did a clean install of it on the aforementioned laptop, an Inspiron 6000d. Pentium M 1.83, 2 gigs of DDR2 at 533, ATI X300 (using fresh drivers from ATI), Bluetooth mouse, 1 gig of ReadyBoost configured on the SD slot.
The sidebar was using 1-2% before I turned it off, but that's -all- I've turned off. Otherwise, I've been adding software left and right trying to get this machine ready for its typical use.
And guess what? Vista idles just fine. There is little or no background activity, as reported by Task Manager (though Task Manager itself likes to use a few percent, as typical for any Windows).
And, the box seems to be more responsive than it was with XP...and requires even less extra software in order to optimize the machine for my tastes. (I had been using third-party software to manipulate the CPU's clock and conserve battery, but Vista has such functionality built-in, for example.)
I'm impressed. I'm also not at all sure what it is that you're doing wrong; things seem to be running great, for me, Aero eye-candy included.
You program your Pronto remote with Linux?
Fucking awesome!
Tell me: How do you do it?
Not to reply to myself, but there's another possibility which I had just thought of:
:)
It's not really even necessary to do all of that DSP work.
Just run the speech-to-text engine on the -output- of the sound card as well as the microphone input. Use the output as a filter for the input, such that any commands which exist at the output are automatically ignored at the input.
Problem fucking solved.
Interesting comment, but not for the reasons you think.
It's interesting because you noticed a problem (piggish USB), isolated the problem (removed offending remote from the USB bus), and then blamed it on something else entirely (the operating system).
USB sucks. It always has sucked. Especially in the 2.0 world where things like mice and remotes live. Just because the bus is broken, does not mean that the operating system wasn't doing the very best it could with the information available to it.
If in doubt of USB's suckiness, just have a look through the notes in the Linux kernel's configuration.
Where have you seen it reported that Vista eats 10% of the CPU? I'd been somewhat considering looking at Vista for my XP laptop, to get some advance exposure to it so that I might be a bit clued when I need to operate on it for customers, and because its flash-RAM disk caching promised to make things a bit faster while increasing runtime on battery (which I expect to pair nicely with my SD card slot).
However, if it consumes 10% of the CPU, then some of those advantages are for naught.
As an aside:
I'd been noticing high-ish CPU utilization on my XP laptop during periods when it should be idle. I decided today to find out what the culprits were.
Sure, Google Desktop was using a bit to keep its index up-to-date and generate flashy graphics, and every now and then the drivers for the touchpad would stir things up a bit, but neither of those two were significant contributors. The real culprit turned out to be intel's wireless drivers, which were using 10% (!) of that 1.83GHz 2m-cached P3-M's potential, all for themselves. What's more is that disabling those CPU-hogging portions of the intel drivers has not in any way affected wireless performance, but has made the machine quieter, cooler, faster, and live longer on batteries. For free.
Perhaps the perceived CPU penalty with Vista is caused by needlessly bloated third-party drivers?
All true.
However, this should be a solvable problem with current DSP technology.
If my cellular telephone can perform realtime echo cancellation, and subtract its own speakerphone audio from the microphone audio, and do it for several hours at a time on a battery the size of a matchbook, then I can only fucking hope that a modern dual-core machine would be able to tackle the task handily.
Even after the variables are all multiplied by some factor because the speakers might move relative to the microphone, there seems to be plenty of horsepower available to throw at the problem. The fundamentals have all been solved by folks like Bell Labs, US Robotics, and Polycom a long fucking time ago, with less DSP power than my $20 optical mouse, using the widely variable POTS network as a testbed, where even the -remote- handset affects the quality of your own voice on the line.
Just because there's layers of distortion, band limiting, spurious external noises, with dynamics and delay possibly being anywhere on the map and an echo signature that changes as people move around the room, does not mean that it's not all measurable, quantifiable, and possible to reduce it to acceptable levels.
Remember, you don't have to get rid of all the feedback, and it doesn't have to be perfect. We're talking about a limiting computer's ability to hear itself, which is a far easier task than anything involving a human being. You only have to get rid of enough that the computer does not respond to its own voice. And also, remember that the resultant quality of the recorded microphone audio need not be production-grade, but only good enough for the computer to understand human-generated voice commands.
I generally agree with you. However:
It's not a stunt.
This is just silly and completely harmless vandalism. Like stickering a park bench, bus stop, or utility pole with a logo. Or TP'ing the coach's house after a big game. Or graffiti artwork (and definitely in a class above common tagging).
It didn't "work" at all: if it were intended to be panic-inducing, it'd have been DANGEROUS LOOKING. Further, if the prankster had intended to draw negative attention, they'd have simply called in a bomb threat for ANY populated building or area and skipped the construction and deployment phases.
So let us not lose sight of this simple fact:
It's just a self-illuminating picture of a cartoon figure with a raised middle finger, hanging from a public-works structure where it can easily be viewed by the masses. Clever and hilarious, if you ask me, but nobody bothered to do so before calling out the bomb squad.
I wonder how long it will take before people realize that a proper bomb, these days, will not light up and disclose its presence. It will not tick. It will not emit noxious odors. It will not be visually discernible from a laptop computer, a rolled-up newspaper, or a large rock atop one side of a bridge abutment, or a Ryder truck rolling down the street. A effective panic-inducing device need not appear to be anything more than an apparently-lost cellular phone or wallet laying on a public table, as long as such a device successfully detonates in someone's hand when they pick it up.
This was not anything like that. This was simply a grossly misinterpreted comedy, and I'm glad to have at least seen the photos.
As an aside: I, as one interested taxpayer, want to see those responsible fired for their gross and callous abuse of my money over this ordeal.
This, my friends, is why it might a good idea to demagnetize or otherwise damage the stripe on your license.
You don't need a bulk eraser or a degaussing coil or any of those things.
Just wipe a neodymium magnet across the magstripe a few times in random directions and with random polarity, and you're done. It's probably not completely erased, but the data will be so hosed that it won't be readable anyway.
Such magnets can be had cheaply from nearly any geek-oriented electronics surplus house, or scavenged from the head actuator of any modern-ish hard drive.
It's quick and easy, and greatly reduces the automatic information-gathering potential of store clerks, bouncers, and (apparently) pharmacists, none of whom have any business knowing what restrictions are on my driver's license.
Not that I would personally ever indulge in any such intentional destruction, of course.
It's interesting that you seem to think that your experience is in some way predictive of what others will encounter. But that's just not so.
Pick a manufacturer of ANYTHING more complicated than a soupcan, and you'll always be able to find someone writing sky-is-falling stories about how the thing died within hours of the warranty expiring, right after it kicked the dog and set the house on fire.
It happens with any product. The thing of it is, though, that except for a few particularly egregious and well-publicized examples (eg, IBM Deskstar 75GXP, Sony batteries, Firestone tires), stuff generally lasts a good long while after the warranty is gone.
So for good measure, I'll now proceed with writing a bit about a few things I've noticed:
I recently discarded a Plextor burner which had seen hard duty for 9 solid years, because it (finally) started to get a bit flaky and no longer produced perfect audio CDs. It lived 4 years past its 5-year warranty.
I'm still running old 4 and 6 gig drives in a couple of machines here that don't need much for storage. 5+ years past warranty and counting. (I'm contemplating replacing these with flash memory, but more for general principal and noise abatement than any particular fear of instability.)
The Uniden cordless phone I purchased 10 years ago works like new, though the battery has been replaced a few times.
The toaster in my kitchen. Its warranty, if there were any, expired decades ago. I dump the crumbs out of it from time to time, and it keeps toasting bread just fine.
I'd go on, but it'd be beleaguering the point. Look around you, and you'll find a bunch of stuff which is currently well past its warranty period.
Nevertheless, if you start Googling a few of the more recent ones, I'm sure you'll find sad, sad stories from people whose otherwise-identical stuff died, like clockwork, precisely 20 minutes after the 90-day warranty expired. But that, my friend, is more an indication that the world is a very big place than of any grand trend toward generally-faulty products.
Relax.
In Soviet Russia, Pirate Bay visits YOU!
As long as we're explaining general viewpoints for karma, here's how I see things:
RIAA is evil. They're suing their customers.
Microsoft is evil. They lock people into their products and make my job difficult with obscure licensing requirements and feature omissions.
SCO is evil. Sure, UNIX(r) was great and all, but we got over it years ago.
Wal-Mart? Come on. All they do is sell products that people want, for less money than the competition, and offer correspondingly little in the way of customer service. Just like Newegg, Amazon, or any of most of the other faceless online entities who are struggling to charge as little as possible in an attempt to get ahead. This might hurt the local specialty merchants, but then, so does Newegg limit the market of a brick-and-mortar specialty PC parts store, who stands no chance at all at matching the pricing, availability, or product diversity such a beastly online merchant.
That said, I'm an informed sort of fellow, and I don't really want to pay someone to hold my hand while I make a purchase, anyway. The decisive lack of knowledgeable sales representatives at Wal-Mart and Newegg is, to me, a clear advantage, because I don't have to pay extra for supposedly-clued people to stand around and bullshit me.
Right then. So you say that they only sell stuff made in China. But so do all of the other places where I can actually afford to shop.
And so, at the end of the day: I could either pay less for those cheap Chinese goods, or I could pay more. Obviously, I'd rather pay less. Just like I'd rather get a raise, than continue toiling away undercompensated. Just like I'd rather sit, than stand. And I'd rather lay down, than sit. And so on, and so forth.
So now, they're making a concerted effort to boost CFL lighting, so as to cause people to spend less money on electric lighting instead of more money on more money on electric lighting. A boon for everyone. Cool!
So, Average_Joe_Sixpack: You must come from the magical world of textbook physics, where pulleys are frictionless and rope does not stretch. I hope it's nice over there.
Over here in the Really Real World, my day-job company recently sold a 3-position radio console for a 911 dispatch center to one of the local agencies that (surprise!) answers 911 calls. Just maybe, it's one of the ones near you, serving as the primary (and only) way to coordinate public service agencies in your county.
At a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars, they got a stout Dell "sever" with Win2k (can we say EOL, boys and girls), three Dell desktops with XP Pro which are used to control radio traffic, and a very nice cabinet full of proprietary 2-way radio-interface electronics.
The EOL'd Win2k box isn't needed for routine operation, which is good, because it is (yes, yet again) EOL'd. It can crash and catch fire, and the system still works. Which I guess is OK.
And if just one XP Pro box catches fire, things are still OK. That's only 1 out of 3 positions that go off-air.
But if a worm happens, and all three XP Pro boxen die at once (which has happened more than once in the history of Windows networks), then nobody will be able to talk. At all[1].
So whether or not consumer-grade OS's are supposed to be used for mission-critical apps or not, rest assured, Average_Joe_Sixpack: It already is that way. And, further: it's extremely likely that it (XP Pro) is the weak link between you and the fire department, as you listen helplessly at the curb while your children burn to death and the fire department still has not shown up to help.[2]
Good luck with your physics career!
[1]: Oh, sure. There's still a hardware box with a transmit button on it. But nobody knows how to use it, and they didn't cover it with any depth during technical training. Besides, 1 transmit button doesn't do 12 radios very much good, and nobody knows how to switch channels. And even if they did, they wouldn't remember by the time they needed to. So, as a backup/replacement for the fragility of a Dell Dimension with Windows XP, it might as well not even be there.
[2]: Oh, sure. The 911 dispatcher can always pick up a phone to dispatch a fire crew. But that's an extra 20 or so seconds that I'd rather not spend with my own house/kids/cat/fish/wife/whatever burning - thanks.
I suppose that the basic sentiment of your argument is that "driving like a prick is never OK, as long as you're trying to go faster than me."
In which case, prick, I can only retort that you, sir, are an asshole. Get the fuck out of the way, and let the passing lane be for passing. It is not your purpose to establish or discredit cause, justification, or merit for other drivers to operating their vehicles at a greater velocity than your own. Nor, it is not your entitlement to establish a "safe" speed, nor to adopt vigilante methods of enforcing any posted speed limit.
Rather, you do have a legal obligation to be driving in the right-most lane permitted by your surroundings, unless you are passing slower traffic.
Just. Like. Everyone. Else.
So pass that traffic, and move the fuck over. You'll find that other drivers are immediately far more polite as a result.
You know what? You're right! You don't need a truck. Rather, you need your head examined.
You're a fool if you think that you require such an enormous vehicle just to haul things "at least a few times a month" for a home remodeling project.
I am also a homeowner. Therefore, I understand that the fruit of a home improvement shopping trip comes only in one of two different sizes:
Big, and Gargantuan.
For Big loads, a small, short-bed pickup is more than adequate. You can fit surprising quantities of material of reasonable (8'+) length mostly into the bed; a red flag tied to the end and a couple of tie-down straps (which you should be using regardless) satisfies the DOT's safety requirements. For hauling a room's worth of tile and other Big things like toilets and bath tubs, it also generally works OK. A small pickup can easily handle almost any home remodeling job by itself.
Except, of course, for those things that qualify as Gargantuan. Stuff like 12' countertop sections. 16-foot 2x4s. A kitchen's worth of cabinets. A room's worth of sheetrock. Major appliances. Gargantuan. Say it with me: Gargantuan. The hypothetical small pickup mentioned in the above paragraph is not Gargantuan, and therefore is not equipped to handle these jobs.
But you just don't do much of that, and in fact the average home only has a few Garguantuan trips worth of stuff in it once fully built and furnished, anyway.
Which is, of course, why companies who sell Gargantuan things also ubiquitously offer DELIVERY SERVICES. That's right, for a small fee (or, quite often, for free), they'll load up all of your Gargantuan stuff onto a purpose-built, Gargantuan truck and deliver it to your home, and sometimes even unload it for you.
So you get the best of all worlds: You get the convenience of being able to do Big things on a whim while retaining the ability to purchase Gargantuan items, and you don't have to maintain your own Gargantuan truck.
You get to save on gas, of course. But you also get to benefit from reduced usage of other vehicular consumables: Smaller engines typically contain less oil, making changes cheaper. Brakes are smaller, and therefore less expensive. The tires are cheaper. Exhaust systems are less expensive. Fewer cylinders means cheaper and less-frequent serious engine repairs. And since you're driving it EVEN LESS due to the services of the delivery man, the whole thing lasts longer by default.
So please, get your head examined. If you were a general contractor, or a welder, or a horse breeder, or a stone mason, then I would probably feel differently. But you, sir, are insane if you think that your solitary house and its paltry appetite for Gargantuan stuff is sufficient justification for you to drive such a wasteful vehicle.