Hrm... so you expect Intel to go running back to IBM now?
The same IBM that fabs two competing lines of processors? PowerPC and Athlons?
In general running to IBM expecting help is like fleeing from the Romans into the lion's den. You may be safe from your former agressor, but that's just because they know you're done for.
And if I'd bother to READ what you wrote you even said ATA/33 could support 48-bit addressing. Stupid me.
So I guess it could be done, with both a BIOS and kernel hack. And as I said, the kernel hack has been done before. TiVo starts getting real antsy when you talk about mucking with the BIOS though.
And yes, it is a big kludge. But so is the 80x86 instruction set and the entire core PC bus (keyboard on IRQ 1? WTF?). They're all successful because they're low cost and they really do work pretty damn well.
I have an older system running all SCSI drives... I'm planning on popping in a 20 GB IDE and CD-RW. I expect disk speed to at least double. SCSI-II is sloooooow by modern standards, and a new SCSI CD-RW costs more (and is slower than) an IDE HD and CD-RW combined. Sad, but true.
OK, let's say they took a 15K super-reliable server drive and put a ATA controller on it. Now why exactly is it cheaper? Sounds like the same price to me.
Shrug. They are the same. And yet they price the SCSI drive 2-3x the price of the IDE.
Go look back at when both SCSI and IDE drives were commonly available. They had the exact same mechanicals, the only difference was what controller was slapped on top. People disassembled the drives proving this too. And yet there was still a huge price difference, simply because SCSI could command a price premium.
There are certainly heat issues with the higher rotation drives, but realistically I believe the prior poster is correct - companies aren't manufacturing 10k RPM IDE drives because they're afraid of cannabalizing their highly profitable SCSI market. There may also be other reasons - yields may not be high enough yet to supply sufficient IDE drives, and they may feel costs would be too high. But costs and yields improve over time when you need to increase manufacturing capacity. If there's no need there's often little incentive to spend the time and money retooling production.
There isn't a physical difference between the cables in the two standards, so it must be possible to support the addressing in BIOS. Barring any issues in the south bridge chipset itself. And based on that I'd guess it is just a software side issue.
Never meant to imply the standard was worthless. Just that it has nothing to do with speed and everything to do with capacity. At least this time they extended addressing to a "more than reasonable" limit. It's doubtful that we'll exceed 2^48 addressing on a single drive in at least the next 3 or 4 years;)
Your concepts are right, but the numbers are a bit off...
The fastest IDE drives on the market are still maxing out at around 50 MB/s. The WD, Maxtor, and IBM drives all hover around here. WD gets the edge due to cache, but it doesn't really change the diskbuffer speed.
The Maxtor they used would certainly get it's ass whooped by the WD drive you mention - it's a 5400 rpm model and has a max transfer rate in the 40 MB/s range. Ouch.
Funny thing though... of the three companies mentioned above WD is the only one that doesn't publish the actual drive to cache transfer rates. Both Maxtor and IBM publish maximum rates, sustained rates at outer diameter, and sustained at inner. WD only publishes the cache write speed (~75 MB/s) which is meaningless. Benchmarks show the WD drive to have read transfer rates at the same speeds as Maxtor and IBM though.
I'm convinced that even if it yielded a 20% increase in performance it wouldn't be worth complicating my install
Unless you're running some really old drives it wouldn't increase your performance at all.
That new 160 GB Maxtor drive only spins at 5400 rpm and has a sustained transfer rate 10-15 MB/s lower than a 7200 rpm drive. Go check out Maxtor's website and look at the product specs in PDF format.
Note, you want the media transfer rates, not the interface transfer rates.
Ok, after having done more research than I thought would be necessary...
Most "ATA/100" systems aren't implementing ATAPI-6. They're implementing ATAPI-5 with an extention that includes UltraDMA Mode 5. ATAPI-6 does have 48-bit addressing, and Maxtor has implemented an extention that adds UltraDMA Mode 6 (aka ATA/133).
The net effect here is don't confuse the physical interface (ATAPI) with the network interface (UltraDMA). Yes, nitpick at the terms, but that's what it boils down to. Your "ATA/100" motherboard does not support 48-bit addresing.
I agree, however, on the crappy design, the marketing blurbishness, the projection of HD speeds, and your recommendation about not running out and buying a 133 adaptor.
The fastest IDE on the market is still only spinning at 7200 rpm. Maximum transfer rate is going to vary depending on the media density at the outermost track on the drive, but in general it's still not going to approach 133 MB/s. Most IDE drives have sustained data transfer rates in the 50 MB/s range (the Maxtor D740X, which is one of the most popular IDE drives on the market currently, has a sustained transfer rate of only 44.4 MB/s at the outer diameter and 24.2 at the inner, as per Maxtor's own tech sheet).
If you read the literature from Maxtor, who designed this standard, even they will admit that the maximum transfer rate will only occur on a read from cache - and the biggest cache on an IDE drive is a whopping 8 MB. So congrats on sustaining that maximum transfer rate for all of 60 ms. After that you're back to reading from disk.
The only real advantage of ATA133 is to support drives >120GB. Of course, the funny thing is that the only 160GB drive available right now is a mere 5400 RPM (with a lovely 35.9 MB/s at outer diameter).
ATA133 is widely regarded as a marketing gimick. Apparantly it's working though, since some people actually think it matters.
Uh, have you seen the problems the telecomms have been in for the past year?
The cell phone market isn't working very well anymore... most of the companies don't give away phones anymore, because they realized they really can't afford to do this with an 80% annual churn rate (after 1 year 80% of customers drop service).
Most of them are bleeding green all over the floor and don't know how to stop it.
Fast forward buttons don't care how long a commercial break is, and if the device has something like TiVo's skipback adjustment it works very well indeed.
Additionally there are certain markers that surround advertising blocks - fade in/outs are the cheap and easy way to look for them, but a gain meter on the sound level is better. And circumventing these things is considerably harder - especially the second one.
Banner ads are the least avoidable of all of this... without some custom filtering on each show you'll have to live with them. And I've already seen one network (don't recall if it's Fox or CBS) start to use them during programming. And badly - they rescale the main show to a new aspect ratio for 15-20s while running the banner ad. Makes everyone look short and fat. Freaking annoying.
Uh... the same game system which had some of the world's crappiest games on it, both in the arcade and on the home system?
Look, if you want cheap and playable then go out and get a $200 PC and play PC games from yesteryear. Go get MAME and other emulators and also play old arcade games like Qbert, Qix, Dig Dug, and so forth.
You can recycle nuclear fuel rods. The French do it with their rods. Most of the uranium is still "good" and useful for continued power production, and you can turn >96% of the rod back into usable material. This leaves a brick about the size of a standard tape of really fucking NASTY stuff.
The downsides? Well, cost certainly. I don't know if it's cost-effective (although if you take long-term storage into consideration I'd think it is - imagine reducing the tons of nuclear waste we currently have by 96% or so). The real big issue, and the reason I've heard the US doesn't do the same as France, is that the process can be used to produce warhead-grade plutonium and uranium. And, of course, that the waste product is itself very valuable to anyone who would want nuclear capability. It's a good bit harder to steal a bunch of spent fuel rods contained in concrete, lead, and steel than it is to steal a few pounds of highly radioactive gunk incased in same.
Not always... or if they do, the leaders are often defunct and not really managing the project anymore.
Open Source is great when done right. And shitty when not done so. Funny... the same can be said about non-OSS software development and for most things in general.
it's like anything else and can become second nature. It only took me about six months to get a good handle on all of the above and then another year to refine it to a science
Er... so a year and a half to be rid of spam? That's a bit much, don't ya think?
Seriously though, thanks for the links. I'm going to be building my own home mail server soonish as well and knew I needed to hunt this kind of thing down.
It is, however, utterly absurd that we should have to do these kinds of things. Some jackass has decided that my hotmail address is their disposable email and I've wound up on all of the spammer's lists now. I add 3-4 more sites to my block filter on a daily basis. That means I only get a dozen or so spams daily - with 100+ getting insta-deleted.
Again, thanks for the useful info. Just grousing that it's necessary at all.
If it wasn't for "the corporates," there wouldn't be a need for Samba
Nor would there be computers. Or much of the industrialized world.
Why would people be so hot about SMB compatibility if it weren't for MS's huge install base?
You miss the point.
If there wasn't SMB, there would be something else. Maybe it would be NFS. But file and print sharing are needed well beyond the "corporate" arena. Just look at how many people use it at home for file and print sharing between computers.
The nifty thing here is that Samba does it across platforms with relatively easy setup. And it does it cheaper, faster, and better than the company that invented (and continues to maintain) the thing. Which is a pretty sad statement.
IANAL, but I believe that a good bit of OSS would be exempt... why? Because it's not sold and thus does not fall into the "intended purpose" bit of product liability laws.
Red Hat, Mandrake, and others that do sell a product would become liable though, and that'd certainly kill them.
I think that liability with a broad brush would definitely be a bad idea. But negligence is another matter... some of the exploits could definitely be shown as negligence on the part of the software maker (e.g. - you were informed of this exploit 5 months ago and failed to remedy it). This isn't just MS either - Sun, IBM, etc. have all had times where they failed to release a security patch within a reasonable time period after being informed of a vulnerability.
That kind of thing should definitely result in liability on the part of the software company. Similarly, applications that have destructive bugs and don't get fixed should result in liability.
The problem becomes one of defining how long is "long enough", and what should the fines be? Realistically we don't need new laws here. We just need to apply some old ones to a new situation.
go back to actually using our bandwidth and machines for important things instead of 3 MB of klez and sircam worms daily.
Oh goody. That'll leave even more bandwidth for the spam then. I've been deeply worried about not getting a couple hundred emails a day about making both my breasts and penis larger.
Wow... they've only been dropping rumors about (and falsely announcing) its release for the past THREE YEARS.
Sigh... glad to see it's finally coming, and hopefully they'll do it right. Too many of the early releases were disservices to the movies and the fans.
Should the site reflect the editors' viewpoints or the readers? Traditionally, newspapers and other media outlets have reflected the editors' beliefs and thoughts. I think/. (and perhaps kuro5him even more so) is designed to break away from that and allow the readers to choose as much of the content as possible.
All you are asking is for the editors to push your agenda. That's no different from what the original poster was saying.
And know what? Both of you have missed the boat entirely on the entire concept of free speech.
Don't want to read about the latest films, Windows games, or whatever? Turn them off in your preferences. Or go to a site that will happily insulate you from all those things you don't want to hear about.
Bloody hell. Does nobody read the articles anymore? This was even in the header, not the body.
AOL-TW CEO said that PVR users were stealing
No. That was the Turner Network CEO. Which is not Ted Turner. Turner Networks is a subsidiary of Time-Warner Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of AOL-TW. He has about the same relationship to AOL-TW's CEO as the head of the English department has to the University president (hint - there's a dean in between somewhere).
And believe me, if Mr. Keller's idiotic statement gets enough press, he'll get summarily thwapped by the head corporation. Doubtful it'll be fired, but he won't be doing any interviews for a long time. And he'll tow the party line on how PVRs are great, especially if they're integrated with the All New AOL Version 345739847.1, now with 402 free hours!
Mod me down for flamebait, but mod the moron above me down for not being able to read too.
I generally explain it as the odd concept of "individualism". Some weirdo right wing thing that tries to convince Us that We don't all think the same exact thing.
Fight it. Discontinuity can only follow. If We are not all the same, society will certainly crumble!
Seriously - just because a story gets posted by the editors doesn't mean that everyone on/. agrees with the political slant on it. I personally believe that the DMCA and related laws are likely to permanantly cripple the Western economy, just like religious laws did so in SW Asia (aka Middle East) and manufacturing-oriented labor laws have done so in parts of Europe. But that doesn't mean that everyone else agrees with me, and while I can try to convince them, I can't expect them to do as I would do.
Look at the part numbers on the drives. They're the same.
Obviously this works better if you look at older drives, since there aren't many 7200 rpm SCSI drives manufactured still.
Sorry, but anyone thinking otherwise is trying to convince themselves that there's something magical about a physical transport medium that has the same performance requirements and characteristics.
They're also trying to convince themselves they're not being ripped off for buying SCSI.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm... so you expect Intel to go running back to IBM now?
The same IBM that fabs two competing lines of processors? PowerPC and Athlons?
In general running to IBM expecting help is like fleeing from the Romans into the lion's den. You may be safe from your former agressor, but that's just because they know you're done for.
And if I'd bother to READ what you wrote you even said ATA/33 could support 48-bit addressing. Stupid me.
So I guess it could be done, with both a BIOS and kernel hack. And as I said, the kernel hack has been done before. TiVo starts getting real antsy when you talk about mucking with the BIOS though.
Sadly, I think TiVo's (the original SA's at least)are running ATA/33 and don't have any chance in hell of support 48-bit addressing.
I recall an early hack replacing the kernel in 1.3 to support >80G drives though.
Thanks for the clarifications.
And yes, it is a big kludge. But so is the 80x86 instruction set and the entire core PC bus (keyboard on IRQ 1? WTF?). They're all successful because they're low cost and they really do work pretty damn well.
I have an older system running all SCSI drives... I'm planning on popping in a 20 GB IDE and CD-RW. I expect disk speed to at least double. SCSI-II is sloooooow by modern standards, and a new SCSI CD-RW costs more (and is slower than) an IDE HD and CD-RW combined. Sad, but true.
OK, let's say they took a 15K super-reliable server drive and put a ATA controller on it. Now why exactly is it cheaper? Sounds like the same price to me.
Shrug. They are the same. And yet they price the SCSI drive 2-3x the price of the IDE.
Go look back at when both SCSI and IDE drives were commonly available. They had the exact same mechanicals, the only difference was what controller was slapped on top. People disassembled the drives proving this too. And yet there was still a huge price difference, simply because SCSI could command a price premium.
There are certainly heat issues with the higher rotation drives, but realistically I believe the prior poster is correct - companies aren't manufacturing 10k RPM IDE drives because they're afraid of cannabalizing their highly profitable SCSI market. There may also be other reasons - yields may not be high enough yet to supply sufficient IDE drives, and they may feel costs would be too high. But costs and yields improve over time when you need to increase manufacturing capacity. If there's no need there's often little incentive to spend the time and money retooling production.
Most likely.
There isn't a physical difference between the cables in the two standards, so it must be possible to support the addressing in BIOS. Barring any issues in the south bridge chipset itself. And based on that I'd guess it is just a software side issue.
Never meant to imply the standard was worthless. Just that it has nothing to do with speed and everything to do with capacity. At least this time they extended addressing to a "more than reasonable" limit. It's doubtful that we'll exceed 2^48 addressing on a single drive in at least the next 3 or 4 years ;)
Your concepts are right, but the numbers are a bit off...
The fastest IDE drives on the market are still maxing out at around 50 MB/s. The WD, Maxtor, and IBM drives all hover around here. WD gets the edge due to cache, but it doesn't really change the diskbuffer speed.
The Maxtor they used would certainly get it's ass whooped by the WD drive you mention - it's a 5400 rpm model and has a max transfer rate in the 40 MB/s range. Ouch.
Funny thing though... of the three companies mentioned above WD is the only one that doesn't publish the actual drive to cache transfer rates. Both Maxtor and IBM publish maximum rates, sustained rates at outer diameter, and sustained at inner. WD only publishes the cache write speed (~75 MB/s) which is meaningless. Benchmarks show the WD drive to have read transfer rates at the same speeds as Maxtor and IBM though.
I'm convinced that even if it yielded a 20% increase in performance it wouldn't be worth complicating my install
Unless you're running some really old drives it wouldn't increase your performance at all.
That new 160 GB Maxtor drive only spins at 5400 rpm and has a sustained transfer rate 10-15 MB/s lower than a 7200 rpm drive. Go check out Maxtor's website and look at the product specs in PDF format.
Note, you want the media transfer rates, not the interface transfer rates.
Ok, after having done more research than I thought would be necessary...
Most "ATA/100" systems aren't implementing ATAPI-6. They're implementing ATAPI-5 with an extention that includes UltraDMA Mode 5. ATAPI-6 does have 48-bit addressing, and Maxtor has implemented an extention that adds UltraDMA Mode 6 (aka ATA/133).
Note that ATAPI-5 is the current official standard. ATAPI-6 is _not_ yet official. See the Technical Committee T13 website for details. Another good reference is ATA-ATAPI.com, along with PC Guide ATA standards.
The net effect here is don't confuse the physical interface (ATAPI) with the network interface (UltraDMA). Yes, nitpick at the terms, but that's what it boils down to. Your "ATA/100" motherboard does not support 48-bit addresing.
I agree, however, on the crappy design, the marketing blurbishness, the projection of HD speeds, and your recommendation about not running out and buying a 133 adaptor.
No, the bottleneck is the drives.
The fastest IDE on the market is still only spinning at 7200 rpm. Maximum transfer rate is going to vary depending on the media density at the outermost track on the drive, but in general it's still not going to approach 133 MB/s. Most IDE drives have sustained data transfer rates in the 50 MB/s range (the Maxtor D740X, which is one of the most popular IDE drives on the market currently, has a sustained transfer rate of only 44.4 MB/s at the outer diameter and 24.2 at the inner, as per Maxtor's own tech sheet).
If you read the literature from Maxtor, who designed this standard, even they will admit that the maximum transfer rate will only occur on a read from cache - and the biggest cache on an IDE drive is a whopping 8 MB. So congrats on sustaining that maximum transfer rate for all of 60 ms. After that you're back to reading from disk.
The only real advantage of ATA133 is to support drives >120GB. Of course, the funny thing is that the only 160GB drive available right now is a mere 5400 RPM (with a lovely 35.9 MB/s at outer diameter).
ATA133 is widely regarded as a marketing gimick. Apparantly it's working though, since some people actually think it matters.
Uh, have you seen the problems the telecomms have been in for the past year?
The cell phone market isn't working very well anymore... most of the companies don't give away phones anymore, because they realized they really can't afford to do this with an 80% annual churn rate (after 1 year 80% of customers drop service).
Most of them are bleeding green all over the floor and don't know how to stop it.
Fast forward buttons don't care how long a commercial break is, and if the device has something like TiVo's skipback adjustment it works very well indeed.
Additionally there are certain markers that surround advertising blocks - fade in/outs are the cheap and easy way to look for them, but a gain meter on the sound level is better. And circumventing these things is considerably harder - especially the second one.
Banner ads are the least avoidable of all of this... without some custom filtering on each show you'll have to live with them. And I've already seen one network (don't recall if it's Fox or CBS) start to use them during programming. And badly - they rescale the main show to a new aspect ratio for 15-20s while running the banner ad. Makes everyone look short and fat. Freaking annoying.
I'm picking playability over 3d anyday
And you're talking about the Neo Geo here?
Uh... the same game system which had some of the world's crappiest games on it, both in the arcade and on the home system?
Look, if you want cheap and playable then go out and get a $200 PC and play PC games from yesteryear. Go get MAME and other emulators and also play old arcade games like Qbert, Qix, Dig Dug, and so forth.
Not that this'll get read this late, but...
You can recycle nuclear fuel rods. The French do it with their rods. Most of the uranium is still "good" and useful for continued power production, and you can turn >96% of the rod back into usable material. This leaves a brick about the size of a standard tape of really fucking NASTY stuff.
The downsides? Well, cost certainly. I don't know if it's cost-effective (although if you take long-term storage into consideration I'd think it is - imagine reducing the tons of nuclear waste we currently have by 96% or so). The real big issue, and the reason I've heard the US doesn't do the same as France, is that the process can be used to produce warhead-grade plutonium and uranium. And, of course, that the waste product is itself very valuable to anyone who would want nuclear capability. It's a good bit harder to steal a bunch of spent fuel rods contained in concrete, lead, and steel than it is to steal a few pounds of highly radioactive gunk incased in same.
Not always... or if they do, the leaders are often defunct and not really managing the project anymore.
Open Source is great when done right. And shitty when not done so. Funny... the same can be said about non-OSS software development and for most things in general.
it's like anything else and can become second nature. It only took me about six months to get a good handle on all of the above and then another year to refine it to a science
Er... so a year and a half to be rid of spam? That's a bit much, don't ya think?
Seriously though, thanks for the links. I'm going to be building my own home mail server soonish as well and knew I needed to hunt this kind of thing down.
It is, however, utterly absurd that we should have to do these kinds of things. Some jackass has decided that my hotmail address is their disposable email and I've wound up on all of the spammer's lists now. I add 3-4 more sites to my block filter on a daily basis. That means I only get a dozen or so spams daily - with 100+ getting insta-deleted.
Again, thanks for the useful info. Just grousing that it's necessary at all.
If it wasn't for "the corporates," there wouldn't be a need for Samba
Nor would there be computers. Or much of the industrialized world.
Why would people be so hot about SMB compatibility if it weren't for MS's huge install base?
You miss the point.
If there wasn't SMB, there would be something else. Maybe it would be NFS. But file and print sharing are needed well beyond the "corporate" arena. Just look at how many people use it at home for file and print sharing between computers.
The nifty thing here is that Samba does it across platforms with relatively easy setup. And it does it cheaper, faster, and better than the company that invented (and continues to maintain) the thing. Which is a pretty sad statement.
IANAL, but I believe that a good bit of OSS would be exempt... why? Because it's not sold and thus does not fall into the "intended purpose" bit of product liability laws.
Red Hat, Mandrake, and others that do sell a product would become liable though, and that'd certainly kill them.
I think that liability with a broad brush would definitely be a bad idea. But negligence is another matter... some of the exploits could definitely be shown as negligence on the part of the software maker (e.g. - you were informed of this exploit 5 months ago and failed to remedy it). This isn't just MS either - Sun, IBM, etc. have all had times where they failed to release a security patch within a reasonable time period after being informed of a vulnerability.
That kind of thing should definitely result in liability on the part of the software company. Similarly, applications that have destructive bugs and don't get fixed should result in liability.
The problem becomes one of defining how long is "long enough", and what should the fines be? Realistically we don't need new laws here. We just need to apply some old ones to a new situation.
go back to actually using our bandwidth and machines for important things instead of 3 MB of klez and sircam worms daily.
Oh goody. That'll leave even more bandwidth for the spam then. I've been deeply worried about not getting a couple hundred emails a day about making both my breasts and penis larger.
Wow... they've only been dropping rumors about (and falsely announcing) its release for the past THREE YEARS.
Sigh... glad to see it's finally coming, and hopefully they'll do it right. Too many of the early releases were disservices to the movies and the fans.
Should the site reflect the editors' viewpoints or the readers? Traditionally, newspapers and other media outlets have reflected the editors' beliefs and thoughts. I think /. (and perhaps kuro5him even more so) is designed to break away from that and allow the readers to choose as much of the content as possible.
All you are asking is for the editors to push your agenda. That's no different from what the original poster was saying.
And know what? Both of you have missed the boat entirely on the entire concept of free speech.
Don't want to read about the latest films, Windows games, or whatever? Turn them off in your preferences. Or go to a site that will happily insulate you from all those things you don't want to hear about.
Bloody hell. Does nobody read the articles anymore? This was even in the header, not the body.
AOL-TW CEO said that PVR users were stealing
No. That was the Turner Network CEO. Which is not Ted Turner. Turner Networks is a subsidiary of Time-Warner Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of AOL-TW. He has about the same relationship to AOL-TW's CEO as the head of the English department has to the University president (hint - there's a dean in between somewhere).
And believe me, if Mr. Keller's idiotic statement gets enough press, he'll get summarily thwapped by the head corporation. Doubtful it'll be fired, but he won't be doing any interviews for a long time. And he'll tow the party line on how PVRs are great, especially if they're integrated with the All New AOL Version 345739847.1, now with 402 free hours!
Mod me down for flamebait, but mod the moron above me down for not being able to read too.
I generally explain it as the odd concept of "individualism". Some weirdo right wing thing that tries to convince Us that We don't all think the same exact thing.
/. agrees with the political slant on it. I personally believe that the DMCA and related laws are likely to permanantly cripple the Western economy, just like religious laws did so in SW Asia (aka Middle East) and manufacturing-oriented labor laws have done so in parts of Europe. But that doesn't mean that everyone else agrees with me, and while I can try to convince them, I can't expect them to do as I would do.
Fight it. Discontinuity can only follow. If We are not all the same, society will certainly crumble!
Seriously - just because a story gets posted by the editors doesn't mean that everyone on
Look at the part numbers on the drives. They're the same.
Obviously this works better if you look at older drives, since there aren't many 7200 rpm SCSI drives manufactured still.
Sorry, but anyone thinking otherwise is trying to convince themselves that there's something magical about a physical transport medium that has the same performance requirements and characteristics.
They're also trying to convince themselves they're not being ripped off for buying SCSI.