We're not applying algorithms and proving that a given encryption is secure against those attacks though.
d.net is brute forcing them - which is a tactic known to be possible against every form of encryption. It basically boils down to figuring out how many keys you can try per second and assuming the worst case - that the very last key in the set will be the correct one (if you want average times then you can just assume that with enough messages you'll average out to finding the key half way through).
It's really pretty simple math, and anyone who wants to claim that "x-bit encryption is clearly enough!" is just going to be proven wrong when computers scale up to the point that your wristwatch can do y computations of x bits in a second.
I contend, rather, that current encryption schemes are secure as long as you use enough bits, where "enough" keeps growing. Of course if quantum computers ever really work then you can throw all the old school crypto methods out the window anyway.
As someone else said, there are PHB's and other idiots that don't grasp theoretical realities though, and for them it actually has to have been broken to be proven susceptible.
complaining that somebody went into computer science rather than bio-medical
Well... not quite. I'm much better at computers and programming than I am at biology, chemistry, and life sciences. Computers aren't like that though - one set of bits is just like another to them. That said, some computers do certain things far better than others, so it may be that a PPC runs RC-128 cracks way faster than it can fold proteins, but that's quibbling.
I very much agree that running distributed projects at all, or which one to run, is an individual choice. I prefer UD Cancer. Others prefer the mathematical challanges. Whatever floats your boat - osteniabbly either one is better than spinning the CPU cycles into oblivion (to which some will disagree of course!).
Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power!
on
ECCp-109 Solved
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Oh, you're right. We should only run one at a time. Which one? RC-128 cracking? Go for it. Not interested. SETI@Home? Ok, but seeing as how I knew about it for years and never bothered downloading the client I suspect that would've continued for, oh say, eternity.
The UD Cancer project is what finally got me into the distributed computing bit. Is it useful? Dunno. I hope so. But it's far more interesting to me than trying to brute force encryption (which is a known solution, and for which the time estimate can be accurately determined ahead of time), or search for signals in space (which, while I believe in extraterestial life and intelligence, I also believe in the laws of physics and seriously doubt the likelihood of any other race wasting the time and energy in broadcasting when listening is far easier, not to mention light speed constraints, diminuation and attenuation of signals on stellar scales, etc.), or finding prime numbers (useful for crypto, but current crypto is either way secure or hopelessly insecure based on quantum computing).
My wife is running the UD agent on her computers now too. At some point I'll mention it to the rest of my family and they'll probably run it - curing cancer takes on a much higher priority after your father dies from it and your mother is diagnosed with it.
I'm not going to try and force anyone run UD though. To each their own. Which, of course, is the little thing you seem to have forgotten here.
Throughout the history of ATA, when drive capacities climb towards the addressable limit of the spec, the protocol is kludged by a team of drunken baboons to extend it for another generation
Yes. We should run out of space in the latest incarnation in roughly 50 or 60 years.
Unless, of course, you're expecting to implement a single drive with more than 144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes (that's 128 petabytes or 131072 terabytes) anytime soon.
Yes, previous extentions have been poor. Maxtor got it right for ATAPI-6 which has been adopted by the industry. 48-bit addressing of 512 byte sectors.
ATA wil debut at 150 mb/s, not really an improvment at all.
Does it matter? At all? No.
Frankly it could be 150 GB/s and it wouldn't matter in the least.
Go look at the manufacturer specs. Read the line that says "drive to host, sustained throughput". Note that no manufacturer claims more than 52 MB/s. Reality is closer to 48 MB/s for the fastest IDE drive. That's right! We're not even exceeding ATA/66 bandwidth yet. And still people are talking about 600 MB/s in a few years. Who cares? You can't reach that throughput anyway. Not to mention that the PCI bus is limited to 133 MB/s.
Ok, the bus speed does make a bit of difference. If the data you need is in cache then you can use the maximum theoretical bandwidth while reading from cache. So dumping a 8 MB cache via ATA-133 saves you about half a millisecond over ATA-66. You noticed that, right?
The advantages of SATA have nothing to do with the bus speed. The longer cable is useful in a select few tower cases. The hot swap will be nice for a small percentage of enthusiasts and idiot admins (I'm not a SCSI fan boy, but if you're running a server you really should be running SCSI). The small, thin cable is useful for everyone though -- the air traps created by ribbon cables are causing more and more problems as everything runs hotter. Most drives fail due to poor cooling. Want to bet that SATA drives have a significantly lower failure rate?
Take a 7200 RPM IDE drive. Take a 7200 RPM SCSI drive (ok, these are rather hard to find now). Rip off the electronics boards.
Now try to find a difference. You won't find one.
The physical drives are identical, at least as long as they have the same performance criteria.
Seek times? Bearing costs? You're comparing a 7200 RPM IDE drive to a 15,000 RPM SCSI drive. Amazing how the seek time is lower and the bearing costs are higher. It's simple math.
Uh... yes it does. It's called SATA. See the article.
And, frankly, configuring IDE drives isn't the nightmare it used to be. As long as the jumpers are set right then the BIOS will usually auto detect and setup the drive properly. Only time I've had problems with that is jumper issues or having explicitly set the location to "disabled".
Don't get me wrong - for home use, SCSI is overpowered. But if you're talking anything bigger than a desktop, make mine SCSI.
If it's on a CD in SVCD format then you can take it to nearly any DVD player, stick it in, and watch. That's it.
If you're limited to a computer then you're paying 4-10x the money for the playback device and you can't transport it. Want to record something for someone else, or to take to a friend's house and watch? Too bad. Want to send a recording of an important TV show to family or friends? Nope. Can't do.
Not to mention that labeling a CD as "Junkyard Wars, Season 5, Episode 3" makes it a whole lot easier for a non-techie to deal with than some obscure location on a poorly integrated HTPC.
Scientists have shown that we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green stuff) produced on Earth each year either taking it directly or keeping other organisms from using it through our agriculture and land use practices.
Which answers the "what the hell is NPP" question.
And in response I say "so what?".
We are the top of the food chain. We are one of the few animals that changes the environment to suit us rather than the other way around. We are one of the few animals that can exist in nearly any environment because of that. Of course we've bent most of the resources on the planet toward our whim. In fact, I'm surprised it's not a higher percentage based on whatever nebulous methodology these "researchers" want to use.
Quite frankly the numbers put forth in this study are trash. They've perverted things like the percentage of earth's surface used to make alarmist numbers while using negative language and exploiting the average person's lack of scientific knowledge to try and prove their points. Which is basically that we humans are horribly evil and Ma Earth would be better off without us.
Fine by me. I expect them to suicide first to prove their devotion.
Well, is that a 'place of exhibition, display, and a sales establishment'? Didn't think so. At best it's online advertising... in any case it wouldn't be covered by the ADA.
I was hesitant about the ADA requirements too, but as people have pointed out this isn't about every webpage out there. It's only about the ones that are trying to sell services or goods to the public (like SouthWest is). And from what several people have said it's not even that hard for the average site - just being HTML compliant does virtually all the work.
It has nothing to do about getting enjoyment from the web. It has everything to do with being able to do business on the web.
The only reason I can think of is for cryptography purposes.
My personal opinion (again) is that it's a fairly bunk reason to spend CPU cycles on - it doesn't really enhance cryptography much, and modern crypto is either secure enough for a long, long time or it's doomed to insecurity no matter what (which viewpoint you take depends on how successful you believe quantum computing will be).
Of course, I'm not a mathmatician either, so I may be missing out on other practical uses for large primes.
Hint: People can use their own spare CPU cycles on whatever they like
Sure they can. That's not in question. But the theory behind the distributed clients is to avoid wasting CPU cycles and to do something useful.
The point of the OP was that SETI@Home (and, frankly, RC5 crack searches) are osteniably no better than having the CPU cycles spinning anyway. Projects like Folding@Home, Genome@Home, and UD Cancer Research can provide a real, proveable benefit in both the short and long term. Mathematical projects like GIMPS and prime number searches do so as well, although my personal opinion is that they're not as valuable.
Use your CPU cycles however you like. Hell, don't run a distributed project at all if you don't want to. All that's being asked is to consider how to actually use the spare cycles effectively if you're going to join a distributed project.
To clarify what anonymousman77 said - the RBOCs are currently required to lease out DSL coloc's for the amount it costs them to deliver service.
Which sounds all fine and good, except that they're not allowed to charge for infrastructure costs. How much did it cost to upgrade the CO to DSL? To restructure wiring? To perform service upgrades? Doesn't matter, can't charge for it.
The flip side to this is that traditionally the RBOCs have used exactly these costs (and generally inflated them) to prevent competition. To put it bluntly - they fucked other companies for a decade and now they're being punished for it.
Of course, this doesn't help anyone who can't get DSL because it doesn't make economic sense for the RBOC to upgrade. Or the various telecomm supply companies who have seen their contracts evaporate because the RBOCs aren't willing to invest in infrastructure at this point.
Yes, but you're making the very mistaken assumption that 100% of the population votes.
Since the realistic number is closer to 30% of registered voters, and roughly 50% of the people are registered, the number shrinks drastically - you're talking about 250k voters here. If you manage to get all 20k of your culti... er, devoted followers to vote (and vote the same way) then you have an 8% voting block which is pretty significant.
Are there any benefits to IDE burners (technically for the IDE interface, not just because they're newer and faster) over the SCSI counterparts?
Wow... what a leading question.
Of course not - it's a given that the IDE interface is technically inferior to SCSI. That's not debatable. Ok, some people have said "yeah, it doesn't use an ID on my SCSI chain", but that's a pretty far stretch. I suppose you could point out that an IDE drive won't ever slow the SCSI bus down, which can be detrimental, but a separate bus/card fixes that just as easily.
The real question is: "Are there any benefits to SCSI burners over the IDE counterparts?"
And the answer to that is "no".
IDE burners don't make coasters anymore. The various write controller techs prevent buffer underflows in all but the most contrived situations. Drive failure rate is low as well - come on folks, you really think they're using different components for the SCSI and IDE units? All it is is a different controller board. Everything else is the same. If you want Plextor, buy them - they make IDE drives as well.
Of course, the IDE drives are roughly 1/4 - 1/2 the price of the SCSI drives (Plextors and Yamaha are an exception, with the SCSI drives only $20-50 more usually, but that's because their IDE drives are 2-3x the cost of everyone else already). They're also faster, and the newest techs are available on IDE first now (which didn't used to be the case).
If you have a server that needs burning capability, go ahead and look into a SCSI drive. Being able to disable IDE entirely means you have to deal with fewer buses in the same box, and simplicity is king. But otherwise you're just paying out the nose for SCSI for no good reason. Except maybe bragging about your all SCSI system to your friends who are too clueless to know how much money you wasted.
i dont see why people go to such extremes, for little to no improvement.
It's called the noise floor, and while it may not matter much to you in standard computing environments, it matters a lot in non-standard ones. Like if you're building a home theater PC. If your PC runs at 40 dB then forget hearing anything below that -- which can be either quiet passages in music (classical or rock - both have 'em) or downkeyed scenes in movies. Turning the volume of the system up isn't an option unless you want to constantly change the volume during a movie so you don't lose your hearing during action/climactic scenes.
Additionally any noise like a PC can interfere with subtle nuances in music or movies, which is equally bad. With a 20 dB noise floor you may be able to hear sound queues for things you can't hear with a 40 dB noise floor.
So it's not little to no improvement - it can be pretty substantial in the right environment. Personally I'm looking to build my next PC to be quieter, not because it's going to be a HTPC, but because I'm tired of having an absurdly loud PC. I'm not going to take it to extremes, but I will try to purchase quieter components.
Less than half an acre, since that's all the robomower is designed for.
If, however, he bought it a couple years ago I might buy a hundred hours saved.
Looked at one of the robotic mowers a few months ago, but they only work well if you have a single contiguous area of lawn, with no narrow sections. I have three separate lawn areas, which would require buying two additional power stations and manually moving the robomower between each section. No thanks.
People who prefer tube amps do it because of the different sound they lend to the music - not because of SNR or THD, both of which are higher than modern discrete amps.
Most people don't want to OC. I've done it before and I won't do it again - the added speed isn't worth the instability. Especially if you're planning to keep using the computer for several years.
As others have said, adding yet another fan is a detriment for normal use. It's another mechanical part that will fail - especially since most of the bundled fans are as cheap as they can afford to keep prices down.
One of my buying criteria on a motherboard is passive cooling for the north bridge. I don't need the active cooling and I really don't need the added noise.
Better than that - "cannot deliver - recipient deceased".
A friend of mine in college wrote that on a letter he got from a pseudo-ex-girlfriend (pseudo because she was never actually dating him - just playing mind games).
Ok, assuming you went that route right now you're paying $200 for the drive. Plus a minimum of $75 for the controller.
Or you can buy two 40GB IDE drives at $70 ea. and run them in RAID 1 mode, which doubles your transfer rate. Seek time isn't affected, but transfer rate is the killer anyway. And assuming you have a good RAID controller on your mobo (which all high end mobo's do nowadays), you've just saved $135 for 90-95% of the speed.
Heck, I know a guy who bought two 15k SCSI drives and ran them in RAID to speed up gaming (in particular, EQ). If you have the money to burn, that's fine... but that 1 second faster load time just isn't worth it IMO (in the case of EQ it was closer to 5 seconds - whoop de do, you can't do much until the rest of your group zones in anyway).
Frankly, the $135 you saved is probably better spent on memory or CPU. Or pizza even.
Uh... hate to tell you, but SCSI is already a niche product for high end servers.
The price differential between SCSI and IDE is already absurd. I can buy an 80 GB IDE drive for $87. SCSI? $249 (actually, that's only 73.4 GB). 180 GB IDE? $291. SCSI? $1019.
And the prices above don't even include the $75-300 SCSI adapter you need for the drives.
The performance difference between SCSI and IDE on the average desktop PC (AutoCad, movie editing, etc. do not fall into "normal PC") is negligible. Modern IDE drives are not the monsterous CPU suckers of days old. Nor are they absurdly slow. Sure, you're still best off keeping it to a single drive per controller, but a lot of modern MBs have 4-6 controllers on them anyway.
Look, I used to be a SCSI advocate and proclaimed how wonderfully fast and better SCSI was. And then I got a new system built with IDE because SCSI prices were so absurd. Awhile later I removed the SCSI drives from my old system and put in an IDE HD and CD-RW. And know what? My computer sped up. The SCSI drives were considerably slower than the IDE ones. Admittedly, they were only SCSI-2, not the Ultra160's on the market today, but the fact is that SCSI isn't magically faster just because it's SCSI. And while I guess I could've gone and bought a new SCSI subsystem, I paid less for the HD and CD-RW than I would have for just a SCSI CD-RW (which was half the speed of the IDE version).
SCSI is great for servers and ultra high end workstations, but it has no place in desktop PCs anymore. The price/performance benefit just isn't there.
Yes. As I recall, they missed the 2 years of Win 3.0. Entirely.
much better interface than M$ Word
Perhaps, but it was so entirely different from the rest of Windows that it caused major problems for novice users. Having menus contain radically different things in different applications makes the learning curve much higher. Most people don't want to spend their time learning to use your application - they just want to use it. Quibble with that, point out how much more efficient they'd be if they invested the time (which is true), it doesn't matter. That's just not how most people work.
And, of course, the first releases of WP 5.x for Windows were so unstable that you couldn't rely on them for long editing sessions.
her clear and unbiased opinion
Which, of course, wasn't influenced at all by your familiarity with WP and ability to help her get things done as compared to Word. Riiiiight.
BTW, despite your flameage, I'm not a Word Fanatic. I dislike it and use it at work only because I have to. I don't use it at home. All I said was that WP was a piece of shit back in the early Win 3.x days and that's true. That's when WP lost the word processor market and they've never regained it since.
Word Perfect might come back if they export to real XML or HTML, PS or other published and recognized standards
Like SGML? Yeah, you know, that format they've been using since 6.0?
Actually, I was referring to WP on Win 3.x. I don't care what version it was - it sucked and sucked bad. That's the point when WP lost the word processing business, which was my entire point.
Yes, some companies still use it, mainly because the other word processors never made the dictionaries for legal and other highly specific fields. Very few companies outside of these fields still use WP - the rest of the world has moved to Word now (unfortunately).
Of course, WP wasn't exactly free and open with their file format back when they were the king either.
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We're not applying algorithms and proving that a given encryption is secure against those attacks though.
d.net is brute forcing them - which is a tactic known to be possible against every form of encryption. It basically boils down to figuring out how many keys you can try per second and assuming the worst case - that the very last key in the set will be the correct one (if you want average times then you can just assume that with enough messages you'll average out to finding the key half way through).
It's really pretty simple math, and anyone who wants to claim that "x-bit encryption is clearly enough!" is just going to be proven wrong when computers scale up to the point that your wristwatch can do y computations of x bits in a second.
I contend, rather, that current encryption schemes are secure as long as you use enough bits, where "enough" keeps growing. Of course if quantum computers ever really work then you can throw all the old school crypto methods out the window anyway.
As someone else said, there are PHB's and other idiots that don't grasp theoretical realities though, and for them it actually has to have been broken to be proven susceptible.
complaining that somebody went into computer science rather than bio-medical
Well... not quite. I'm much better at computers and programming than I am at biology, chemistry, and life sciences. Computers aren't like that though - one set of bits is just like another to them. That said, some computers do certain things far better than others, so it may be that a PPC runs RC-128 cracks way faster than it can fold proteins, but that's quibbling.
I very much agree that running distributed projects at all, or which one to run, is an individual choice. I prefer UD Cancer. Others prefer the mathematical challanges. Whatever floats your boat - osteniabbly either one is better than spinning the CPU cycles into oblivion (to which some will disagree of course!).
Oh, you're right. We should only run one at a time. Which one? RC-128 cracking? Go for it. Not interested. SETI@Home? Ok, but seeing as how I knew about it for years and never bothered downloading the client I suspect that would've continued for, oh say, eternity.
The UD Cancer project is what finally got me into the distributed computing bit. Is it useful? Dunno. I hope so. But it's far more interesting to me than trying to brute force encryption (which is a known solution, and for which the time estimate can be accurately determined ahead of time), or search for signals in space (which, while I believe in extraterestial life and intelligence, I also believe in the laws of physics and seriously doubt the likelihood of any other race wasting the time and energy in broadcasting when listening is far easier, not to mention light speed constraints, diminuation and attenuation of signals on stellar scales, etc.), or finding prime numbers (useful for crypto, but current crypto is either way secure or hopelessly insecure based on quantum computing).
My wife is running the UD agent on her computers now too. At some point I'll mention it to the rest of my family and they'll probably run it - curing cancer takes on a much higher priority after your father dies from it and your mother is diagnosed with it.
I'm not going to try and force anyone run UD though. To each their own. Which, of course, is the little thing you seem to have forgotten here.
Throughout the history of ATA, when drive capacities climb towards the addressable limit of the spec, the protocol is kludged by a team of drunken baboons to extend it for another generation
Yes. We should run out of space in the latest incarnation in roughly 50 or 60 years.
Unless, of course, you're expecting to implement a single drive with more than 144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes (that's 128 petabytes or 131072 terabytes) anytime soon.
Yes, previous extentions have been poor. Maxtor got it right for ATAPI-6 which has been adopted by the industry. 48-bit addressing of 512 byte sectors.
ATA wil debut at 150 mb/s, not really an improvment at all.
Does it matter? At all? No.
Frankly it could be 150 GB/s and it wouldn't matter in the least.
Go look at the manufacturer specs. Read the line that says "drive to host, sustained throughput". Note that no manufacturer claims more than 52 MB/s. Reality is closer to 48 MB/s for the fastest IDE drive. That's right! We're not even exceeding ATA/66 bandwidth yet. And still people are talking about 600 MB/s in a few years. Who cares? You can't reach that throughput anyway. Not to mention that the PCI bus is limited to 133 MB/s.
Ok, the bus speed does make a bit of difference. If the data you need is in cache then you can use the maximum theoretical bandwidth while reading from cache. So dumping a 8 MB cache via ATA-133 saves you about half a millisecond over ATA-66. You noticed that, right?
The advantages of SATA have nothing to do with the bus speed. The longer cable is useful in a select few tower cases. The hot swap will be nice for a small percentage of enthusiasts and idiot admins (I'm not a SCSI fan boy, but if you're running a server you really should be running SCSI). The small, thin cable is useful for everyone though -- the air traps created by ribbon cables are causing more and more problems as everything runs hotter. Most drives fail due to poor cooling. Want to bet that SATA drives have a significantly lower failure rate?
Compare apples to apples.
Take a 7200 RPM IDE drive. Take a 7200 RPM SCSI drive (ok, these are rather hard to find now). Rip off the electronics boards.
Now try to find a difference. You won't find one.
The physical drives are identical, at least as long as they have the same performance criteria.
Seek times? Bearing costs? You're comparing a 7200 RPM IDE drive to a 15,000 RPM SCSI drive. Amazing how the seek time is lower and the bearing costs are higher. It's simple math.
IDE has NOTHING with that configurability.
Uh... yes it does. It's called SATA. See the article.
And, frankly, configuring IDE drives isn't the nightmare it used to be. As long as the jumpers are set right then the BIOS will usually auto detect and setup the drive properly. Only time I've had problems with that is jumper issues or having explicitly set the location to "disabled".
Don't get me wrong - for home use, SCSI is overpowered. But if you're talking anything bigger than a desktop, make mine SCSI.
That I can certainly agree with you on.
Wow... amazing how people don't get it.
If it's on a CD in SVCD format then you can take it to nearly any DVD player, stick it in, and watch. That's it.
If you're limited to a computer then you're paying 4-10x the money for the playback device and you can't transport it. Want to record something for someone else, or to take to a friend's house and watch? Too bad. Want to send a recording of an important TV show to family or friends? Nope. Can't do.
Not to mention that labeling a CD as "Junkyard Wars, Season 5, Episode 3" makes it a whole lot easier for a non-techie to deal with than some obscure location on a poorly integrated HTPC.
Quoting from the article:
Scientists have shown that we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green stuff) produced on Earth each year either taking it directly or keeping other organisms from using it through our agriculture and land use practices.
Which answers the "what the hell is NPP" question.
And in response I say "so what?".
We are the top of the food chain. We are one of the few animals that changes the environment to suit us rather than the other way around. We are one of the few animals that can exist in nearly any environment because of that. Of course we've bent most of the resources on the planet toward our whim. In fact, I'm surprised it's not a higher percentage based on whatever nebulous methodology these "researchers" want to use.
Quite frankly the numbers put forth in this study are trash. They've perverted things like the percentage of earth's surface used to make alarmist numbers while using negative language and exploiting the average person's lack of scientific knowledge to try and prove their points. Which is basically that we humans are horribly evil and Ma Earth would be better off without us.
Fine by me. I expect them to suicide first to prove their devotion.
play the online games at Playhouse Disney
Well, is that a 'place of exhibition, display, and a sales establishment'? Didn't think so. At best it's online advertising... in any case it wouldn't be covered by the ADA.
I was hesitant about the ADA requirements too, but as people have pointed out this isn't about every webpage out there. It's only about the ones that are trying to sell services or goods to the public (like SouthWest is). And from what several people have said it's not even that hard for the average site - just being HTML compliant does virtually all the work.
It has nothing to do about getting enjoyment from the web. It has everything to do with being able to do business on the web.
Oh come now. It's not that hard.
The train routes are pretty brain dead simple... the train times have no relation to reality.
The bus routes have no relation to known space and time whatsoever.
And MARTA wonders why nobody wants to ride it...
The only reason I can think of is for cryptography purposes.
My personal opinion (again) is that it's a fairly bunk reason to spend CPU cycles on - it doesn't really enhance cryptography much, and modern crypto is either secure enough for a long, long time or it's doomed to insecurity no matter what (which viewpoint you take depends on how successful you believe quantum computing will be).
Of course, I'm not a mathmatician either, so I may be missing out on other practical uses for large primes.
Hint: People can use their own spare CPU cycles on whatever they like
Sure they can. That's not in question. But the theory behind the distributed clients is to avoid wasting CPU cycles and to do something useful.
The point of the OP was that SETI@Home (and, frankly, RC5 crack searches) are osteniably no better than having the CPU cycles spinning anyway. Projects like Folding@Home, Genome@Home, and UD Cancer Research can provide a real, proveable benefit in both the short and long term. Mathematical projects like GIMPS and prime number searches do so as well, although my personal opinion is that they're not as valuable.
Use your CPU cycles however you like. Hell, don't run a distributed project at all if you don't want to. All that's being asked is to consider how to actually use the spare cycles effectively if you're going to join a distributed project.
To clarify what anonymousman77 said - the RBOCs are currently required to lease out DSL coloc's for the amount it costs them to deliver service.
Which sounds all fine and good, except that they're not allowed to charge for infrastructure costs. How much did it cost to upgrade the CO to DSL? To restructure wiring? To perform service upgrades? Doesn't matter, can't charge for it.
The flip side to this is that traditionally the RBOCs have used exactly these costs (and generally inflated them) to prevent competition. To put it bluntly - they fucked other companies for a decade and now they're being punished for it.
Of course, this doesn't help anyone who can't get DSL because it doesn't make economic sense for the RBOC to upgrade. Or the various telecomm supply companies who have seen their contracts evaporate because the RBOCs aren't willing to invest in infrastructure at this point.
Yes, but you're making the very mistaken assumption that 100% of the population votes.
Since the realistic number is closer to 30% of registered voters, and roughly 50% of the people are registered, the number shrinks drastically - you're talking about 250k voters here. If you manage to get all 20k of your culti... er, devoted followers to vote (and vote the same way) then you have an 8% voting block which is pretty significant.
Are there any benefits to IDE burners (technically for the IDE interface, not just because they're newer and faster) over the SCSI counterparts?
Wow... what a leading question.
Of course not - it's a given that the IDE interface is technically inferior to SCSI. That's not debatable. Ok, some people have said "yeah, it doesn't use an ID on my SCSI chain", but that's a pretty far stretch. I suppose you could point out that an IDE drive won't ever slow the SCSI bus down, which can be detrimental, but a separate bus/card fixes that just as easily.
The real question is: "Are there any benefits to SCSI burners over the IDE counterparts?"
And the answer to that is "no".
IDE burners don't make coasters anymore. The various write controller techs prevent buffer underflows in all but the most contrived situations. Drive failure rate is low as well - come on folks, you really think they're using different components for the SCSI and IDE units? All it is is a different controller board. Everything else is the same. If you want Plextor, buy them - they make IDE drives as well.
Of course, the IDE drives are roughly 1/4 - 1/2 the price of the SCSI drives (Plextors and Yamaha are an exception, with the SCSI drives only $20-50 more usually, but that's because their IDE drives are 2-3x the cost of everyone else already). They're also faster, and the newest techs are available on IDE first now (which didn't used to be the case).
If you have a server that needs burning capability, go ahead and look into a SCSI drive. Being able to disable IDE entirely means you have to deal with fewer buses in the same box, and simplicity is king. But otherwise you're just paying out the nose for SCSI for no good reason. Except maybe bragging about your all SCSI system to your friends who are too clueless to know how much money you wasted.
i dont see why people go to such extremes, for little to no improvement.
It's called the noise floor, and while it may not matter much to you in standard computing environments, it matters a lot in non-standard ones. Like if you're building a home theater PC. If your PC runs at 40 dB then forget hearing anything below that -- which can be either quiet passages in music (classical or rock - both have 'em) or downkeyed scenes in movies. Turning the volume of the system up isn't an option unless you want to constantly change the volume during a movie so you don't lose your hearing during action/climactic scenes.
Additionally any noise like a PC can interfere with subtle nuances in music or movies, which is equally bad. With a 20 dB noise floor you may be able to hear sound queues for things you can't hear with a 40 dB noise floor.
So it's not little to no improvement - it can be pretty substantial in the right environment. Personally I'm looking to build my next PC to be quieter, not because it's going to be a HTPC, but because I'm tired of having an absurdly loud PC. I'm not going to take it to extremes, but I will try to purchase quieter components.
Less than half an acre, since that's all the robomower is designed for.
If, however, he bought it a couple years ago I might buy a hundred hours saved.
Looked at one of the robotic mowers a few months ago, but they only work well if you have a single contiguous area of lawn, with no narrow sections. I have three separate lawn areas, which would require buying two additional power stations and manually moving the robomower between each section. No thanks.
Which is why there shouldn't be a fan in the first place.
You may want to try some enthusiast boards - try www.hardocp.com and it's forums. Or the AnandTech forums.
I've long since left the world of OCing. Works fine for 6 months to a year and then things start going whacky fast.
Tubes have far worse SNR's than discrete amps do.
People who prefer tube amps do it because of the different sound they lend to the music - not because of SNR or THD, both of which are higher than modern discrete amps.
So add a fan on yourself if you want to OC.
Most people don't want to OC. I've done it before and I won't do it again - the added speed isn't worth the instability. Especially if you're planning to keep using the computer for several years.
As others have said, adding yet another fan is a detriment for normal use. It's another mechanical part that will fail - especially since most of the bundled fans are as cheap as they can afford to keep prices down.
One of my buying criteria on a motherboard is passive cooling for the north bridge. I don't need the active cooling and I really don't need the added noise.
Better than that - "cannot deliver - recipient deceased".
A friend of mine in college wrote that on a letter he got from a pseudo-ex-girlfriend (pseudo because she was never actually dating him - just playing mind games).
Ok, assuming you went that route right now you're paying $200 for the drive. Plus a minimum of $75 for the controller.
Or you can buy two 40GB IDE drives at $70 ea. and run them in RAID 1 mode, which doubles your transfer rate. Seek time isn't affected, but transfer rate is the killer anyway. And assuming you have a good RAID controller on your mobo (which all high end mobo's do nowadays), you've just saved $135 for 90-95% of the speed.
Heck, I know a guy who bought two 15k SCSI drives and ran them in RAID to speed up gaming (in particular, EQ). If you have the money to burn, that's fine... but that 1 second faster load time just isn't worth it IMO (in the case of EQ it was closer to 5 seconds - whoop de do, you can't do much until the rest of your group zones in anyway).
Frankly, the $135 you saved is probably better spent on memory or CPU. Or pizza even.
Uh... hate to tell you, but SCSI is already a niche product for high end servers.
The price differential between SCSI and IDE is already absurd. I can buy an 80 GB IDE drive for $87. SCSI? $249 (actually, that's only 73.4 GB). 180 GB IDE? $291. SCSI? $1019.
And the prices above don't even include the $75-300 SCSI adapter you need for the drives.
The performance difference between SCSI and IDE on the average desktop PC (AutoCad, movie editing, etc. do not fall into "normal PC") is negligible. Modern IDE drives are not the monsterous CPU suckers of days old. Nor are they absurdly slow. Sure, you're still best off keeping it to a single drive per controller, but a lot of modern MBs have 4-6 controllers on them anyway.
Look, I used to be a SCSI advocate and proclaimed how wonderfully fast and better SCSI was. And then I got a new system built with IDE because SCSI prices were so absurd. Awhile later I removed the SCSI drives from my old system and put in an IDE HD and CD-RW. And know what? My computer sped up. The SCSI drives were considerably slower than the IDE ones. Admittedly, they were only SCSI-2, not the Ultra160's on the market today, but the fact is that SCSI isn't magically faster just because it's SCSI. And while I guess I could've gone and bought a new SCSI subsystem, I paid less for the HD and CD-RW than I would have for just a SCSI CD-RW (which was half the speed of the IDE version).
SCSI is great for servers and ultra high end workstations, but it has no place in desktop PCs anymore. The price/performance benefit just isn't there.
Word Perfect 5.2 was available soon after Win3.1
Yes. As I recall, they missed the 2 years of Win 3.0. Entirely.
much better interface than M$ Word
Perhaps, but it was so entirely different from the rest of Windows that it caused major problems for novice users. Having menus contain radically different things in different applications makes the learning curve much higher. Most people don't want to spend their time learning to use your application - they just want to use it. Quibble with that, point out how much more efficient they'd be if they invested the time (which is true), it doesn't matter. That's just not how most people work.
And, of course, the first releases of WP 5.x for Windows were so unstable that you couldn't rely on them for long editing sessions.
her clear and unbiased opinion
Which, of course, wasn't influenced at all by your familiarity with WP and ability to help her get things done as compared to Word. Riiiiight.
BTW, despite your flameage, I'm not a Word Fanatic. I dislike it and use it at work only because I have to. I don't use it at home. All I said was that WP was a piece of shit back in the early Win 3.x days and that's true. That's when WP lost the word processor market and they've never regained it since.
Word Perfect might come back if they export to real XML or HTML, PS or other published and recognized standards
Like SGML? Yeah, you know, that format they've been using since 6.0?
Actually, I was referring to WP on Win 3.x. I don't care what version it was - it sucked and sucked bad. That's the point when WP lost the word processing business, which was my entire point.
Yes, some companies still use it, mainly because the other word processors never made the dictionaries for legal and other highly specific fields. Very few companies outside of these fields still use WP - the rest of the world has moved to Word now (unfortunately).
Of course, WP wasn't exactly free and open with their file format back when they were the king either.