Amen to that. I *hate* dell desktops. I brought a cheap one years ago, then went to upgrade the video card and I found it didn't even have an AGP slot.
The IDE ribbon cable didn't even have a slave connector.
I'm a big fan of the inspiron and precision laptops though. Very solid machines.
Yeah, I found that out when I moved over here from NZ. Had a good laugh, shook my head at the sadness of it all and then wired up my house with ethernet and phone.
Why do you make a distinction based on skin colour between those two groups, when in reality, they are in the same position, with the same problems. You are pretending its a race issue, but its not.
But you are right, there are a lot of no-hopers in the US that suck up govt resources at various levels.
Don't you think that things like better education will improve the lot of these people, and mean they are less likely to be a drain on society in the future?
Don't you think there is a correlation between the high-quality education provided in Nordic countries, and their smaller % of white/black/brown/whatever trailer trash?
I've been using standby/sleep extensively on my desktops and laptops for the last 10 years, and I still can't understand why people with a modern machine don't use standby.
Yes back in the early days it could be flaky, but I've had very very few problems resuming from standby since about 2002.
On my current laptop, Dell latitude D820/vista I can standby in probably 10 seconds (max, often its near instant) and I can resume in less than 5
And it will happily sit in my bag for about 2 weeks while on standby before the battery is drained (but before that happens it will wake up to hibernate).
My desktop pc is on 24/7, with a 2 hour sleep timeout.
Both machines only ever get rebooted for patches. Yes they take a while to boot, but who cares? Once a month I press restart and get a coffee.
The conversions you mentioned have about the following efficiencies: chemical -> (35%) mechanical -> (90%) electrical -> (90%) mechanical.
And the 35% efficiency of your internal combustion engine is going to be way further reduced when accelerating hard - I'll be generous and say city driving gets you 75% of the mileage of steady-state freeway driving.
So, chemical -> mechanical (through a standard transmission) is going to get you 35% * 75% efficency. 25% total efficiency. chemical -> mechanical -> electrical -> mechanical will be 35% * 90% * 90% = 28%. Not a lot of difference, but I'm being very generous with my figures.
I'm also not including the gains in efficiency you'd get by eliminating the transmission, which was the point of the whole exercise anyway. This would probably give you another 10%. An engine designed for steady state running could also be made *much* more efficient than an engine that must produce power over a large range of RPM as well. The prius engine claims 40% efficiency, and its a design that still trades off some efficiency for flexibility. diesel engines designed for steady-state running (generators etc) can get 50% efficiency.
Access is a steaming turd that should be taken out back for a bullet in the head.
I cannot express in words how much I hate access. I work/develop with microsoft tech all day, and I don't mind most of it, but access is a big bowl of shit.
calling it a "spreadsheet used as a database" offends me. spreadsheets aren't that bad.
IMHO, microsoft makes some pretty good stuff. Parts of vista are pretty good,.Net is very good, SQL Server is very good. Unfortunately for them their reputation is then tarnished by completely shit products like windows 9x, access and others I don't want to think about right now.
I've got a mate who works mainly with oracle. He needed to do something quickly and access didn't cut the mustard so I said try sql server.
It took me a long time to get him out of the mindset that sql server was just a bigger brother to access.
Anyway, I go on, but maybe microsoft wouldn't it so hard to be taken seriously in some places if they stopped bringing out shite like access.
You are right about win32 processes being much more heavyweight than unix processes, but your numbers are a bit off. My desktop machine here (vista) has 87 processes running at the moment with my usual dev stuff open (2.5gb memory committed). There is also just over 1000 threads.
Server processes in unix often fork the process to handle a new client request, but in Win32 normally you create a new thread - Or more usually you pick a thread from the thread pool to do the work.
I've seen windows servers with well over 100 processes.
Ahh.net threads are regular win32 threads. They are scheduled by the OS, not the runtime..Net code is (well, can be...) much, much more robust than c++ code as its managed, and type conversion errors, null references and other things can be caught and recovered from more gracefully than C++. This applies to Java too, of course.
I've been using various Nokia S60 smartphones since 2003 and I've always used the nokia pc suite to sync outlook contacts and calendar with my phone. Initially the PC suite software was extremely flakey, but its improved a _Lot_ in the last year or so. Still leaks memory badly though...
Yes this is a windows/outlook solution only, but it has worked extremely well for me. I get a new phone, sync with outlook, change sim cards and sync again.
The PC suite software also lets me browse the phone's filesystem via bluetooth.
Well put. I find it incredibly annoying that a lot of the people that are paranoid about the same scenario as the OP are the same people who believe in intelligent design.
And also people out there who are paranoid about radio waves from cellphones, wireless networks, etc etc, but buy a "health mattress" that has little magnets sown all through it.
I read an editorial arguing exactly this the other day. They said "trying to find the fastest drug-free guy in the world is a bit like trying to find the fastest massey-fergson tractor in the world"
Where I work we recently got a new 3g wireless modem for use in a remote site outside our network. The machine at this site is XP, but we needed to set it up before it went out, and the crappy usb drivers for this modem didn't like Vista. (Actually the first thing we've found that refuses to work with vista - I am using informix odbc drivers that must be 10 years old, no problems at all)
Fired up a XP virtualbox vm, mapped the USB device to the VM... The usb drivers happily installed in the VM and It Just Worked.
So, to answer your question. USB support in a VM is very handy for legacy devices. If you were running linux as your main OS I imagine it would be VERY handy, for all those devices that don't supply linux drivers.
I just found out that it isn't possible to use the iphone as a 3g modem on a laptop on Friday. I was quite shocked, but knowing apple, I shouldn't have been.
Apple certainly are turning the mobile phone marketplace on its head. They are pulling stunts that no other manufacture would DREAM of.
Instead of making a device that is as useful as possible, they want to lock down the possibly uses of their product.
Steve jobs is a control freak of a whole new magnitude and the chances of me ever being tempted to buy an iphone just dropped from slim to none.
I wouldn't bet MS is irrevocably tied to x86. The xbox 360 OS is based on the original xbox OS, which is a cut-down version of windows 2000.
So MS ported this to a completely new architecture (Xenon, which is PowerPc based) without too much trouble..Net also runs on the 360 (xna) and the graphics API is based on DirectX.
If market forces indicated to MS that windows should run on other hardware, then they would make it so.
Cheers for the info, I thought it still did table locks only.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against MySQL... It has its place, and it does seem to be improving. What does make me grind my teeth is when people say its a serious competitor to MS SQL, or oracle. The typical argument is all the other things that these DBs give you (like proper ACID transactions, distributed transactions, fine-grained security, triggers, functions, etc etc) are just fluff and you don't need them anyway....
Umm I'd say you have it wrong - "Traditional" databases have many different lock granularities, such as Table locks, page locks and row locks. SQL server and Oracle certainly do this.
MySQL only does table locks, which are much simpler and much faster for light workloads, but as I'm sure you can imagine when you have many CPUs trying to update the table at once in the end each thread has to wait their turn to grab the lock and perform their updates sequentially.
In SQL Server, Oracle, or any other "enterprisey" db multiple threads can update the same table at exactly the same time, as long as its not the same row.
Stuff like this is exactly why people who use MS-SQL and oracle look down their nose at people who use MySQL and claim it is capable of playing with the big boys.
Once again, despite what MySQL are saying there is nothing innovative here. All this stuff has existed in the mainstream database engines for many, many years and they are still playing catchup.
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Amen to that. I *hate* dell desktops. I brought a cheap one years ago, then went to upgrade the video card and I found it didn't even have an AGP slot.
The IDE ribbon cable didn't even have a slave connector.
I'm a big fan of the inspiron and precision laptops though. Very solid machines.
Their inspirons are cheap crap tho
Thats because you brought inspirons. As you said, inspiron is consumer grade. They are the cheapest, nastiest laptops dell can make.
Dell do make professional laptops - try a latitude or a precision. They cost more, they have fewer flashy features, and they are much more solid.
I've still got a P3 latitude that I brought in 2001, its the most reliable computer of any sort I've ever had.
Yeah, I found that out when I moved over here from NZ. Had a good laugh, shook my head at the sadness of it all and then wired up my house with ethernet and phone.
I blame unions.
I'll bite.
Why do you make a distinction based on skin colour between those two groups, when in reality, they are in the same position, with the same problems. You are pretending its a race issue, but its not.
But you are right, there are a lot of no-hopers in the US that suck up govt resources at various levels.
Don't you think that things like better education will improve the lot of these people, and mean they are less likely to be a drain on society in the future?
Don't you think there is a correlation between the high-quality education provided in Nordic countries, and their smaller % of white/black/brown/whatever trailer trash?
"titty fucking arse bandits with their gay dick up an elephants cunt".
Congratulations, you just got Slasdot banned in australia
On the bright side, maybe I'll be able to get some work done now.
Yes, except just yesterday Microsoft joined OpenId, _without_ this sort of stunt.
IMHO, microsoft's behavior in the last few years is to be commended, they are worlds away from where they were 10 years ago.
Sadly, google seems to be heading the other way.
I've been using standby/sleep extensively on my desktops and laptops for the last 10 years, and I still can't understand why people with a modern machine don't use standby.
Yes back in the early days it could be flaky, but I've had very very few problems resuming from standby since about 2002.
On my current laptop, Dell latitude D820/vista I can standby in probably 10 seconds (max, often its near instant) and I can resume in less than 5
And it will happily sit in my bag for about 2 weeks while on standby before the battery is drained (but before that happens it will wake up to hibernate).
My desktop pc is on 24/7, with a 2 hour sleep timeout.
Both machines only ever get rebooted for patches. Yes they take a while to boot, but who cares? Once a month I press restart and get a coffee.
As a Kiwi who has recently come the other way, I'd recommend against it.
The standard of living over the ditch isn't nearly as good, the infrastructure is _crap_, and race relations will do your head in.
Roads in NZ are shocking. there are virtually no divided roads outside the cities. Going anywhere on a long weekend - forgetaboutit.
To do this you need the TrueCrypt bootloader installed, which is a dead give-away that you probably have a hidden volume.
Not correct. You are thinking of the Hidden Operating System feature.
A standard Hidden Volume can be placed in any truecrypt container.
The conversions you mentioned have about the following efficiencies:
chemical -> (35%) mechanical -> (90%) electrical -> (90%) mechanical.
And the 35% efficiency of your internal combustion engine is going to be way further reduced when accelerating hard - I'll be generous and say city driving gets you 75% of the mileage of steady-state freeway driving.
So, chemical -> mechanical (through a standard transmission) is going to get you 35% * 75% efficency. 25% total efficiency.
chemical -> mechanical -> electrical -> mechanical will be 35% * 90% * 90% = 28%.
Not a lot of difference, but I'm being very generous with my figures.
I'm also not including the gains in efficiency you'd get by eliminating the transmission, which was the point of the whole exercise anyway. This would probably give you another 10%.
An engine designed for steady state running could also be made *much* more efficient than an engine that must produce power over a large range of RPM as well. The prius engine claims 40% efficiency, and its a design that still trades off some efficiency for flexibility.
diesel engines designed for steady-state running (generators etc) can get 50% efficiency.
Access is a steaming turd that should be taken out back for a bullet in the head.
I cannot express in words how much I hate access. I work/develop with microsoft tech all day, and I don't mind most of it, but access is a big bowl of shit.
calling it a "spreadsheet used as a database" offends me. spreadsheets aren't that bad.
IMHO, microsoft makes some pretty good stuff. Parts of vista are pretty good, .Net is very good, SQL Server is very good.
Unfortunately for them their reputation is then tarnished by completely shit products like windows 9x, access and others I don't want to think about right now.
I've got a mate who works mainly with oracle. He needed to do something quickly and access didn't cut the mustard so I said try sql server.
It took me a long time to get him out of the mindset that sql server was just a bigger brother to access.
Anyway, I go on, but maybe microsoft wouldn't it so hard to be taken seriously in some places if they stopped bringing out shite like access.
You are right about win32 processes being much more heavyweight than unix processes, but your numbers are a bit off. My desktop machine here (vista) has 87 processes running at the moment with my usual dev stuff open (2.5gb memory committed). There is also just over 1000 threads.
Server processes in unix often fork the process to handle a new client request, but in Win32 normally you create a new thread - Or more usually you pick a thread from the thread pool to do the work.
I've seen windows servers with well over 100 processes.
I was wondering exactly the same thing, thanks
Ahh .net threads are regular win32 threads. They are scheduled by the OS, not the runtime. .Net code is (well, can be...) much, much more robust than c++ code as its managed, and type conversion errors, null references and other things can be caught and recovered from more gracefully than C++. This applies to Java too, of course.
Use a nokia and its not an issue.
I've been using various Nokia S60 smartphones since 2003 and I've always used the nokia pc suite to sync outlook contacts and calendar with my phone. Initially the PC suite software was extremely flakey, but its improved a _Lot_ in the last year or so. Still leaks memory badly though...
Yes this is a windows/outlook solution only, but it has worked extremely well for me. I get a new phone, sync with outlook, change sim cards and sync again.
The PC suite software also lets me browse the phone's filesystem via bluetooth.
Well put. I find it incredibly annoying that a lot of the people that are paranoid about the same scenario as the OP are the same people who believe in intelligent design.
And also people out there who are paranoid about radio waves from cellphones, wireless networks, etc etc, but buy a "health mattress" that has little magnets sown all through it.
Were there any mentions of an unexpected resonance cascade?
Gravity doesn't work like that. If they lose mass they won't orbit any closer....
Remember galeleios' experiment - a hollow cannonball falls just as quickly as a solid cannonball.
I read an editorial arguing exactly this the other day. They said "trying to find the fastest drug-free guy in the world is a bit like trying to find the fastest massey-fergson tractor in the world"
Where I work we recently got a new 3g wireless modem for use in a remote site outside our network.
The machine at this site is XP, but we needed to set it up before it went out, and the crappy usb drivers for this modem didn't like Vista. (Actually the first thing we've found that refuses to work with vista - I am using informix odbc drivers that must be 10 years old, no problems at all)
Fired up a XP virtualbox vm, mapped the USB device to the VM... The usb drivers happily installed in the VM and It Just Worked.
So, to answer your question. USB support in a VM is very handy for legacy devices. If you were running linux as your main OS I imagine it would be VERY handy, for all those devices that don't supply linux drivers.
I just found out that it isn't possible to use the iphone as a 3g modem on a laptop on Friday. I was quite shocked, but knowing apple, I shouldn't have been.
Apple certainly are turning the mobile phone marketplace on its head. They are pulling stunts that no other manufacture would DREAM of.
Instead of making a device that is as useful as possible, they want to lock down the possibly uses of their product.
Steve jobs is a control freak of a whole new magnitude and the chances of me ever being tempted to buy an iphone just dropped from slim to none.
I'm schizophrenic, you insensitive clod!
Thats nothing. Both of us are schizophrenic!
(yes I know, I'm going to burn for that, thats not really what schizophrenia is, yada yada.)
I wouldn't bet MS is irrevocably tied to x86. The xbox 360 OS is based on the original xbox OS, which is a cut-down version of windows 2000.
.Net also runs on the 360 (xna) and the graphics API is based on DirectX.
So MS ported this to a completely new architecture (Xenon, which is PowerPc based) without too much trouble.
If market forces indicated to MS that windows should run on other hardware, then they would make it so.
Cheers for the info, I thought it still did table locks only.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against MySQL... It has its place, and it does seem to be improving. What does make me grind my teeth is when people say its a serious competitor to MS SQL, or oracle. The typical argument is all the other things that these DBs give you (like proper ACID transactions, distributed transactions, fine-grained security, triggers, functions, etc etc) are just fluff and you don't need them anyway....
Umm I'd say you have it wrong - "Traditional" databases have many different lock granularities, such as Table locks, page locks and row locks. SQL server and Oracle certainly do this.
MySQL only does table locks, which are much simpler and much faster for light workloads, but as I'm sure you can imagine when you have many CPUs trying to update the table at once in the end each thread has to wait their turn to grab the lock and perform their updates sequentially.
In SQL Server, Oracle, or any other "enterprisey" db multiple threads can update the same table at exactly the same time, as long as its not the same row.
Stuff like this is exactly why people who use MS-SQL and oracle look down their nose at people who use MySQL and claim it is capable of playing with the big boys.
Once again, despite what MySQL are saying there is nothing innovative here. All this stuff has existed in the mainstream database engines for many, many years and they are still playing catchup.