It appears you've taken the oft-repeated mantra that RAID is not a backup solution and gone a step further by suggesting that hard drives themselves aren't backup media.
Which, by the way, is ludicrous. Hard drives use tried-and-true technology, they're cheap as hell, and transfer speeds are outrageously faster than any other media in contention. Suggesting that they don't make good backup media is well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say misguided.
FLAC is already supported on a number of platforms—and why not, considering it's *FREE* (licensing-wise) for them to do so. If my miniscule SanDisk Clip can play FLACs, surely all the other manufacturers should be able to figure it out.
mp3HD is a poster-child for stillborn technology. Hey Thomson, nice try staying relevant!
I still don't understand why a smaller screen, lesser screen, smaller interface, lesser interface, slower processor, and lesser functionality will ever be worthwhile
Simple: because battery technology hasn't kept pace with transistor technology. So we have multiple cores and ludicrous memory bandwidth and insane clock speeds (if you can handle the cooling). But it's a balance: a bigger battery means you can use a higher-powered chip, which means you can run a better OS which means more features & functionality, etc. Too small and you're restricted to Sudoku and MP3 players. Too large and you can't fit it in your pocket. The current batteries just aren't up to the resource requirements of our best chips, so there's a huge push in the industry to "Go Green" and low-power.
But until we see some quantum leap in energy storage technology, an easy fix is to just release faster software to begin with.
Don't mind him. He's clearly never heard of Compiz (more info). Notice how smooth all the transitions are? Whenever I see an Aero desktop it feels so much clunkier... kinda like the cheap animation of Saturday-morning cartoons versus, say, a Pixar movie.
Notice also the plethora of plugins for Compiz. It'd be a cold day in hell before Microsoft let you do something like the Wiimote plugin for Aero.
Your 2003/2008 servers aren't affected because they fixed this bug a while ago (the GP was being slightly disingenuous). But it was a pretty notorious Win95/98 bug. Here's the MS support ticket if you don't believe me.
A make and model would be appreciated, it's the kind of information that is useful to know.
Agreed. It's up to users to complain if they have a problem with support. Slashdot is a huge resource, read by millions of people. If some hardware vendor refuses to release a 64-bit driver, hold their feet to the fire.
For example, NIKON -- Nikon has had more than five years to come out with a 64-bit driver for their dedicated film scanners like the LS-9000 or LS-5000.
Those are Nikon's top-of-the-line film scanners. They're being manufactured and sold around the world as you read this. Yet Nikon's "solution" to being too goddamned lazy to write 64-bit drivers? Just use this third-party's driver.
Awesome job, guys, thanks. Because after shelling out $1,000 for a film scanner, the one thing I really appreciate is having to spend another $400 just to be able to use your fucking product.
Just confirming that this is true. My father used to work on the shuttle main engines and once told me that most of the real engineering beauty of the orbiter was in the main engine design. Most rockets simply burn until their fuel is extinguished; the shuttle can change throttle from something like 60% - 100%.
The problem is a project can have dozens of library dependencies, each with thousands of classes, each with dozens of methods and properties, scattered all over your file system.
Now, if your idea of a "project" is a blog about your cat, I can understand why you might think these sorts of costly (performance-wise) code inspections are overkill. But when you're dealing with projects that are a few orders of magnitude bigger, you quickly start to appreciate having the IDE perform these sanity checks on your code.
But this effectively only means you have more room for compiling larger targets. Running Hibernate queries in the built-in editor, for example, can easily take out huge swaths of available memory. It doesn't help with code inspections because IntelliJ still has to run those off actual files. Even if it were redesigned to aggressively cache files in memory (which would be silly, because that would mean less memory for everything else) you still have the problem of filling that cache... i.e., you still have to load the files from a hard drive at some point to even fill the cache.
Wouldn't it give most of the same benefits, if the ramdisk is big enough to contain the files you use to compile?
Sure it would, but then you'd have to copy over your files every time you boot up, and you wouldn't have the safety of persistence if the power goes out.
I use SSDs for my (both) development systems--the first was for the work system, and after seeing the improvements I decided I would never use spinning-platter technology again.
The biggest performance gains are in my IDE (IntelliJ). My "normal" sized projects tend to link to hundreds of megs of JAR files, and the IDE is constantly performing inspections to validate the code is correct. No matter how fast the processor, you quickly become IO-bound as the computer struggles to parse through tens of thousands of classes. After upgrading to SSD, I no longer find the IDE struggling to keep up.
I ended up going with SSD after reading this suggestion for increasing IDE performance. The general jist: the only way to improve the speed of your programming environment is to get rid of your file access latency.
Hey, now. The original Amiga--the technical foundation of the entire line of systems--wasn't designed by Commodore. It was primarily the brainchild of Jay Miner, the same IC guru that designed the Atari 2600's graphics chip, TIA.
What's really too bad is that it was marketed by Commodore.
the builders were saying how much easier it would be to build a second one, now that all the design work was done and they have experience putting it together
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? -S.R. Hadden
Yet another reason they should have never gotten rid of the trackball. Trackpads are notoriously sensitive and take up too much valuable space on a laptop.
Well, it'd serve as a pretty stern warning to any future malfeasance.
There are a few crimes that directly attack the structure of our democratic system. For regular citizens, it's treason. This behvavior is tantamount to treason for a sitting judge. Ciavarella directly undermined and knowingly contradicted the justice system for his own personal gain. Under these circumstances, I don't think execution is that outrageous a suggestion.
Hence the complete craziness of throwing away all those shuttle primary fuel tanks.
Many of them are still in orbit, still being tracked by ground stations. But you're right, most of them are actually ditched over the Indian Ocean. The irony is that the shuttle could actually be more efficient if they knew they were going to re-use the tank in orbit, because they wouldn't have to waste the fuel necessary to perform the MET ditch maneuver.
Each fuel tank weighs more than the total shuttle payload. That's an enormous amount of raw materials that are already up in space to work with. But this is not an original idea... people have been talking about converting main fuel tanks into crew habitats for years.
The first mention was back in 1979 by a group of undergraduate students writing for a competition at the International Astronautical Congress. It was entitled, appropriately enough Space Shuttle External Tank Used as a Space Station.
They ended up winning first prize, but naturally nothing was ever done about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, that's "degree symbol","micro symbol", "plus-or-minus","delta","almost-equal", and "pound currency" and "Euro currency" symbols.
Hmm...
° ==
µ ==
± == ±
Δ ==
£ == £
€ == €
Looks like slashcode is fucking up HTML entities as well, which (if memory serves) don't provide much in the way of "attack vectors."
NICE JOB DUDES!
HDs are NOT backup media.
It appears you've taken the oft-repeated mantra that RAID is not a backup solution and gone a step further by suggesting that hard drives themselves aren't backup media.
Which, by the way, is ludicrous. Hard drives use tried-and-true technology, they're cheap as hell, and transfer speeds are outrageously faster than any other media in contention. Suggesting that they don't make good backup media is well, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say misguided.
FLAC is already supported on a number of platforms—and why not, considering it's *FREE* (licensing-wise) for them to do so. If my miniscule SanDisk Clip can play FLACs, surely all the other manufacturers should be able to figure it out.
mp3HD is a poster-child for stillborn technology. Hey Thomson, nice try staying relevant!
I still don't understand why a smaller screen, lesser screen, smaller interface, lesser interface, slower processor, and lesser functionality will ever be worthwhile
Simple: because battery technology hasn't kept pace with transistor technology. So we have multiple cores and ludicrous memory bandwidth and insane clock speeds (if you can handle the cooling). But it's a balance: a bigger battery means you can use a higher-powered chip, which means you can run a better OS which means more features & functionality, etc. Too small and you're restricted to Sudoku and MP3 players. Too large and you can't fit it in your pocket. The current batteries just aren't up to the resource requirements of our best chips, so there's a huge push in the industry to "Go Green" and low-power.
But until we see some quantum leap in energy storage technology, an easy fix is to just release faster software to begin with.
Utter FUD. With one exception.
Yeah, the ridiculous number of 4's and 5's for XP immediately jumped out at me, too.
Look, if you're going to do a fluff piece of PR, at least make it believable.
Don't mind him. He's clearly never heard of Compiz (more info). Notice how smooth all the transitions are? Whenever I see an Aero desktop it feels so much clunkier... kinda like the cheap animation of Saturday-morning cartoons versus, say, a Pixar movie.
Notice also the plethora of plugins for Compiz. It'd be a cold day in hell before Microsoft let you do something like the Wiimote plugin for Aero.
Your 2003/2008 servers aren't affected because they fixed this bug a while ago (the GP was being slightly disingenuous). But it was a pretty notorious Win95/98 bug. Here's the MS support ticket if you don't believe me.
A make and model would be appreciated, it's the kind of information that is useful to know.
Agreed. It's up to users to complain if they have a problem with support. Slashdot is a huge resource, read by millions of people. If some hardware vendor refuses to release a 64-bit driver, hold their feet to the fire.
For example, NIKON -- Nikon has had more than five years to come out with a 64-bit driver for their dedicated film scanners like the LS-9000 or LS-5000.
Those are Nikon's top-of-the-line film scanners. They're being manufactured and sold around the world as you read this. Yet Nikon's "solution" to being too goddamned lazy to write 64-bit drivers? Just use this third-party's driver.
Awesome job, guys, thanks. Because after shelling out $1,000 for a film scanner, the one thing I really appreciate is having to spend another $400 just to be able to use your fucking product.
afaik, 32 bits XP can't/won't use the last gigabyte
No, but XP 64-bit will. So you can still keep XP and throw gobs of RAM into your computer.
Space shuttle also has multiple speeds.
Just confirming that this is true. My father used to work on the shuttle main engines and once told me that most of the real engineering beauty of the orbiter was in the main engine design. Most rockets simply burn until their fuel is extinguished; the shuttle can change throttle from something like 60% - 100%.
Well, at least you used an apostrophe.
The problem is a project can have dozens of library dependencies, each with thousands of classes, each with dozens of methods and properties, scattered all over your file system.
Now, if your idea of a "project" is a blog about your cat, I can understand why you might think these sorts of costly (performance-wise) code inspections are overkill. But when you're dealing with projects that are a few orders of magnitude bigger, you quickly start to appreciate having the IDE perform these sanity checks on your code.
My idea.vmoptions file has been pretty extensively tweaked. Currently, my configuration looks like this:
But this effectively only means you have more room for compiling larger targets. Running Hibernate queries in the built-in editor, for example, can easily take out huge swaths of available memory. It doesn't help with code inspections because IntelliJ still has to run those off actual files. Even if it were redesigned to aggressively cache files in memory (which would be silly, because that would mean less memory for everything else) you still have the problem of filling that cache... i.e., you still have to load the files from a hard drive at some point to even fill the cache.
Wouldn't it give most of the same benefits, if the ramdisk is big enough to contain the files you use to compile?
Sure it would, but then you'd have to copy over your files every time you boot up, and you wouldn't have the safety of persistence if the power goes out.
I use SSDs for my (both) development systems--the first was for the work system, and after seeing the improvements I decided I would never use spinning-platter technology again.
The biggest performance gains are in my IDE (IntelliJ). My "normal" sized projects tend to link to hundreds of megs of JAR files, and the IDE is constantly performing inspections to validate the code is correct. No matter how fast the processor, you quickly become IO-bound as the computer struggles to parse through tens of thousands of classes. After upgrading to SSD, I no longer find the IDE struggling to keep up.
I ended up going with SSD after reading this suggestion for increasing IDE performance. The general jist: the only way to improve the speed of your programming environment is to get rid of your file access latency.
Too bad it was made by Commodore.
Hey, now. The original Amiga--the technical foundation of the entire line of systems--wasn't designed by Commodore. It was primarily the brainchild of Jay Miner, the same IC guru that designed the Atari 2600's graphics chip, TIA.
What's really too bad is that it was marketed by Commodore.
the builders were saying how much easier it would be to build a second one, now that all the design work was done and they have experience putting it together
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? -S.R. Hadden
I take it you don't have a mortgage.
Or children.
Yet another reason they should have never gotten rid of the trackball. Trackpads are notoriously sensitive and take up too much valuable space on a laptop.
Rubbish = British for bullshit.
Nothing is broken. It works fine so long as you are CAREFUL.
Who in the hell moderates so fast that they miss their target option? Slow down, buddy, you're gonna give yourself a heart-attack.
What's the point of that?
Well, it'd serve as a pretty stern warning to any future malfeasance.
There are a few crimes that directly attack the structure of our democratic system. For regular citizens, it's treason. This behvavior is tantamount to treason for a sitting judge. Ciavarella directly undermined and knowingly contradicted the justice system for his own personal gain. Under these circumstances, I don't think execution is that outrageous a suggestion.
Hence the complete craziness of throwing away all those shuttle primary fuel tanks.
Many of them are still in orbit, still being tracked by ground stations. But you're right, most of them are actually ditched over the Indian Ocean. The irony is that the shuttle could actually be more efficient if they knew they were going to re-use the tank in orbit, because they wouldn't have to waste the fuel necessary to perform the MET ditch maneuver.
Each fuel tank weighs more than the total shuttle payload. That's an enormous amount of raw materials that are already up in space to work with. But this is not an original idea... people have been talking about converting main fuel tanks into crew habitats for years.
The first mention was back in 1979 by a group of undergraduate students writing for a competition at the International Astronautical Congress. It was entitled, appropriately enough Space Shuttle External Tank Used as a Space Station.
They ended up winning first prize, but naturally nothing was ever done about it.
No, it was socialism that got us into this mess.
You do realize, of course, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both private corporations before they went belly-up, right?
Nice fear-mongering, though.