I've found that just laying my case down lowers the temp (only by 1-2degs to be honest). I figure this is due to the fact the CPU will be facing upward and so the heatsink is working more efficiently.
I've also found that adding a fan to the top of the case to pull the hot air out (on upright cases) makes a BIG difference, especially on smaller cases designed for the MATX boards. I had an athlon in a small case that was running at 60-65degs and very unstable until I cut a hole and put a fan in the top - it dropped the temp to 50-55degs and hasn't crashed since.
I think the biggest single difference I've made was adding a Coolermaster "Heatpipe" heatsink to an Athlon - that thing knocked 15 degrees off the CPU temp immediately! I had to remove it again though, as the noise was unbearable... It makes a nice-looking paperweight though! Also little things like tidying up a rats-nest of wiring and putting dummy plates over unused expansion slot cut-outs in the case helps.
I'm also in the UK and often get calls from double glazing companies, Sky and bunch of others if I'm home around lunchtime. It's actually good stress relief for me. If I'm having a bad day I can insult the hell out of the drone at the other end (in one case making the girl cry;-) and I always feel great after dropping the receiver! Keep them coming I say.
I think that if someone marketed a fixed-line phone that could auto-block calls from people with-holding their numbers it would sell really well, BTW... I wouldn't use one though.
I do tend to listen to new tracks from a band by using a P2P service first, then if I like what I hear I go buy the CD - then rip it to OGG/MP3. In fact, I've bought CDs from bands I've never heard of before based on a single track I've downloaded.
... In my experience, the loop connections between these decoder cards and the video card degrade the image quality so much that it's very hard on the eyes when you're NOT watching movies.
I had a hardware decoder to play DVDs on my old P2 400 years ago - it was great watching a film with only 5-10% CPU usage, but I had to keep switching the plugs around at the back to get real work done. If someone comes out with the same functionality with a card that communicates internally with the normal graphic card then I'm all for it, but I wouldn't buy another "pass through" solution...
Adding a second monitor and graphic card is hardly simpler, and will probably cost as much if not more. It will also take up more space and use a lot more power!
Adding these little displays seems like a very good idea for things like headless servers for an "at a glance" check on the temperature and load avg etc. Certainly quicker than loging in from another terminal or having to switch on a monitor!
... whenever you try a search from the box on the home page it always ends up in the AMD section with "No results"? Maybe it's just me but I ALWAYS have to go through the product list page and choose the sort of thing I want first!
It's pretty anoying as their site can get slow at times, so the less pages I have to visit the better. I've found their service to be great most of the time (though they do seem to send huge boxes with about 100 times as much padding as is really necessary, it seems to me:-)
In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.
Sounds good! Where can I get the rpm of IE for linux? IE6 offers little that wasn't present in IE5, and the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.
Sorry, you were making sense up until the "Speed" part there. I'll admit it's getting much better with 1.1a, but it's not nearly as quick as IE4/5/6 yet (at least with DOM manipulation via javascript).
I'm using Moz more these days, mostly to test pages, but it's not quite good enough to become my default browser under Windows as yet. Maybe on the next release...
I use IE6 as my default on my Windows machine. Recently been working on adding file uploads to my forum and found an interesting way to crash it. The last time I used a file upload I was sending a file from a samba server on my local network. That server no longer exists, so what happened when I hit the "FILE" button on the form? Yep, total lock up:-) Actually I decided to leave it locked to see if it would give up and show the files on the desktop, and sure enough it did, after 5 minutes! While it was locked, I was using Moz to test the uploader script:-)
"This is especially true when maker bigger leaps from compiled to scripted languages (what? Verbose comments slows things down??)"
Not sure which scripting language you're referring to here. Even Javascript is now compiled and cached by browsers, so the pre-compiled version is used upon reloads (you can test this by running a benchmark script - the first run will take fractionally longer than all subsequent runs). I'm guessing perl doesn't fair any worse for having comments here and there.
A few years ago you would have been right though...
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the team working on Mozilla - up till now I've been a bit disappointed with the slow dHTML performance, but this latest version... well... AMAZING, on Windows at least...
Unfortunately the OS-X version is still as slow as before, though no worse than IE5.1 on the same machine. I get the impression it's OS-X itself that's the problem here...
Yet to test the Linux version, but I'm full of hope now!!
I can't think of technical reasons why Solaris x86 couldn't be used instead. It's all about the hype.
Maybe because there are next to no device drivers for solaris, and previous X86 versions have suffered from laughably slow performance?
It may be a decent enough OS for huge multiprocessor enterprise level servers, but it's an absolute slug on a desktop or the average web server (single or Dual P3/P4/Athlon, 512-1GB RAM etc). I've ever used it on Ultra 10s and its abysmal (and UGLY) performance on its native hardware didn't exactly have me running to the store to pick up Solaris for my PC! The standard install misses most of the nice touches of a base level linux install, and most executables seem braindead for anyone used to the gnu derivatives. Nice GUI daemon/service config tools? Non-existant.
Try here, with the Widget example or sprite demo 4, or this Donkey Kong game rendered in DHTML. Maybe the most obvious example is Video pool which is very smooth with IE and totally unplayable with NS6 despite using virtually no code forking. (BTW, I'm not plugging my site gratuitously, it's just that I've written all these scripts and tried to address Mozilla's speed problems. There are plenty of other people commenting on this topic on other sites, eg Scott Andrew who amongst other things writes articles for Apple's website.)
Don't just take it from me though, Mozilla's OWN developers acknowledge the serious performance problems with DHTML. See here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129115 . I have Mac, Windows and Linux platforms here, and with the exception of Linux (for obvious reasons!) IE outperforms NS by an extremely wide margin with dynamic content.
Of course, if anyone would provide a link to a DHTML script that runs faster in NS6/7/Moz than IE then I'd love to see it. No? Didn't think so...
You are joking I hope? Unless you have a SERIOUSLY broken version of... well.. ANY other browser, there's just no way Moz/NS6/7 are "as snappy" as any of the other players.
Maybe your 950 duron is super-quick, but on a dual 1ghz P3 it's still horrifyingly bad. Actions as simple as resizing the browser window result in screen corruption as it fails to reflow fast enough to keep up with the mouse. The Javascript/DHTML performance is beyond bad - STILL - in my own tests (I use DHTML heavily) it runs simple loops at less than 5% of the speed of Explorer. When moving layers on the screen IE outpaces it by such a wide margin it's not even funny. Need an example? try this with IE then NS/Moz. Bear in mind that is just raw Javascript speed, the DHTML performance is much much worse.
I'm no MS lover - I want to see Moz succeed, but lying about its performance is not going to help anyone, and may just turn new users off: "Hey, I was told Netscape 6 was an upgrade from IE5, but it sucks!" is something I've heard from 2 people. From what I've seen of NS7, it's still no better, and neither is Moz. It's fine as an HTML/CSS only browser, but if you try to push it, there's nothing there.
I now accept that recent iterations of Mozilla are good, but they still aren't good enough for really complex stuff.
I thinks it's important that people recognize those areas where they aren't ahead of their competition. Denial just pushes us further behind.
I agree; I'm about as rabid a linux advocate as you can get, but I freely admit that IE is by far the best browser on the Windows platform in terms of features and performance. Not so good are the numerous security flaws that seem to emerge every other week....
With the myriad plugins it's capable of just about anything that can be achieved with a native application. While NS6 can request XML data, IE is capable of far more, including DB access across a local network without having to use Java, file access and other elements necessary for true web applications. For simple HTML browsing though, I suppose NS6 is good enough...
At my last firm I was amazed to see everyone using the SAME password on hundreds of machines. I'm a bit nosey so I used to look over the shoulders of my collegues as they typed and almost without exception all of the passwords were a string of asterisks!!!! I changed mine to a string of asterisks too, because I like to fit in.
Of course, most won't say so officially, and they'll still spout the official line but look at what they're actually producing: take NN6 out for a spin and see how many sites are just a MESS with it, a totally different user experience.
Well Mr Web.Designer, since your trade is designing "web sites", not "web browser sites", you should know that most of the sites that look bad with anything other than IE do so due to non-standard markup and scripting.
Netscape are not totally without blame, completely breaking backward compatibility has caused many designers to cease developing for either of their browser lines (4.x and 6+) until one or the other is dropped completely. My own logs show more people still using NS4.x, although this may be due to the site's content (most games were designed to run with NS4/IE).
I'm not sure what's going to happen, but the Mozilla rendering engine needs some serious work to bring it up to the speed of IE, and until that happens, I can't see people switching. BTW, I'm talking about the layout engine, which is still abysmally slow when working with dynamic content (DHTML). I personally design a lot of web apps, and currently then Moz engine is far too slow to consider.
I still prefer Konq. Much smaller dev team putting together a great browser - it's still little way behind Moz, but I'd choose it over Moz any day for its speed alone.
I can buy a movie that's only distributed in Hong Kong, but if I use a region enabled player, I won't be able to view it at all, even though there IS NO EQUIVALENT for my region.
Furthermore, if I managed to collect several hundred DVDs quite LEGALLY, then moved to another country, oh, say from the UK to the US my collection would become useless to me as the region encoding would prevent me from playing them on my shiny new US LEGALLY PURCHASED DVD player.
I totally agree. In fact I never create a new function/method if it's only going to be called from one statement. Not only is it frustrating to have to scroll around (or even hop between separate source files) but it's hardly efficient. I've seen functions broken up like this where a subfunction is called within a loop, which demonstrably sucks CPU cycles (pushing and popping registers over and over again is no way to optimise).
The longer you keep them on the line, the less opportunity they have to close a sale with someone else.
You could also say:
"The longer you keep them on the line, the less opportunity they have to annoy someone else."
I'm glad I'm costing them money - I really enjoy it! If I'm having a bad day and get some tele-marketter on the line I can't resist cracking my knuckles and giving them a force 11 down the phone with a big grin on my face. I have an otherwise useless talent for spewing profanity and pure evil, and having some faceless drone willing to act as the punchbag - for free! - is a godsend. After reducing one of these scumbags to tears, or provoking them into less than professional dialogue I feel a warm inner-glow:-)
If you work for scumbags, and earn money for scumbags, you are by extension, a scumbag.
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I've found that just laying my case down lowers the temp (only by 1-2degs to be honest). I figure this is due to the fact the CPU will be facing upward and so the heatsink is working more efficiently.
I've also found that adding a fan to the top of the case to pull the hot air out (on upright cases) makes a BIG difference, especially on smaller cases designed for the MATX boards. I had an athlon in a small case that was running at 60-65degs and very unstable until I cut a hole and put a fan in the top - it dropped the temp to 50-55degs and hasn't crashed since.
I think the biggest single difference I've made was adding a Coolermaster "Heatpipe" heatsink to an Athlon - that thing knocked 15 degrees off the CPU temp immediately! I had to remove it again though, as the noise was unbearable... It makes a nice-looking paperweight though!
Also little things like tidying up a rats-nest of wiring and putting dummy plates over unused expansion slot cut-outs in the case helps.
Whose head is that in the bottom right of the picture? ;-)
I'm also in the UK and often get calls from double glazing companies, Sky and bunch of others if I'm home around lunchtime. It's actually good stress relief for me. If I'm having a bad day I can insult the hell out of the drone at the other end (in one case making the girl cry ;-) and I always feel great after dropping the receiver! Keep them coming I say.
I think that if someone marketed a fixed-line phone that could auto-block calls from people with-holding their numbers it would sell really well, BTW... I wouldn't use one though.
"somebody in UK, please write your queen about this"
Didn't you know? We all know her here in the UK - I'll pass on your message next time I drop by for tea and scones...
I do tend to listen to new tracks from a band by using a P2P service first, then if I like what I hear I go buy the CD - then rip it to OGG/MP3. In fact, I've bought CDs from bands I've never heard of before based on a single track I've downloaded.
Maybe I'm not the average "criminal" though...
... In my experience, the loop connections between these decoder cards and the video card degrade the image quality so much that it's very hard on the eyes when you're NOT watching movies.
I had a hardware decoder to play DVDs on my old P2 400 years ago - it was great watching a film with only 5-10% CPU usage, but I had to keep switching the plugs around at the back to get real work done. If someone comes out with the same functionality with a card that communicates internally with the normal graphic card then I'm all for it, but I wouldn't buy another "pass through" solution...
:-) Er yeah, I just remembered that it might be a good idea to allow directory listings on the ROMs directory!
DOH!!
Should work now...
I've got a few on my machine on my ADSL line. Take what you like ;-)
Adding a second monitor and graphic card is hardly simpler, and will probably cost as much if not more. It will also take up more space and use a lot more power!
Adding these little displays seems like a very good idea for things like headless servers for an "at a glance" check on the temperature and load avg etc. Certainly quicker than loging in from another terminal or having to switch on a monitor!
... whenever you try a search from the box on the home page it always ends up in the AMD section with "No results"? Maybe it's just me but I ALWAYS have to go through the product list page and choose the sort of thing I want first!
:-)
It's pretty anoying as their site can get slow at times, so the less pages I have to visit the better. I've found their service to be great most of the time (though they do seem to send huge boxes with about 100 times as much padding as is really necessary, it seems to me
In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.
Sounds good! Where can I get the rpm of IE for linux?
IE6 offers little that wasn't present in IE5, and the many useful features in Mozilla 1.0 (tabbed browsing, anti-popup features, speed, stability, and security) mean that IE will be losing a significant amount of market share very soon.
Sorry, you were making sense up until the "Speed" part there. I'll admit it's getting much better with 1.1a, but it's not nearly as quick as IE4/5/6 yet (at least with DOM manipulation via javascript).
I'm using Moz more these days, mostly to test pages, but it's not quite good enough to become my default browser under Windows as yet. Maybe on the next release...
I use IE6 as my default on my Windows machine. Recently been working on adding file uploads to my forum and found an interesting way to crash it. The last time I used a file upload I was sending a file from a samba server on my local network. That server no longer exists, so what happened when I hit the "FILE" button on the form? Yep, total lock up :-) Actually I decided to leave it locked to see if it would give up and show the files on the desktop, and sure enough it did, after 5 minutes! While it was locked, I was using Moz to test the uploader script :-)
"This is especially true when maker bigger leaps from compiled to scripted languages (what? Verbose comments slows things down??)"
Not sure which scripting language you're referring to here. Even Javascript is now compiled and cached by browsers, so the pre-compiled version is used upon reloads (you can test this by running a benchmark script - the first run will take fractionally longer than all subsequent runs). I'm guessing perl doesn't fair any worse for having comments here and there.
A few years ago you would have been right though...
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the team working on Mozilla - up till now I've been a bit disappointed with the slow dHTML performance, but this latest version... well... AMAZING, on Windows at least...
Unfortunately the OS-X version is still as slow as before, though no worse than IE5.1 on the same machine. I get the impression it's OS-X itself that's the problem here...
Yet to test the Linux version, but I'm full of hope now!!
I can't think of technical reasons why Solaris x86 couldn't be used instead. It's all about the hype.
Maybe because there are next to no device drivers for solaris, and previous X86 versions have suffered from laughably slow performance?
It may be a decent enough OS for huge multiprocessor enterprise level servers, but it's an absolute slug on a desktop or the average web server (single or Dual P3/P4/Athlon, 512-1GB RAM etc). I've ever used it on Ultra 10s and its abysmal (and UGLY) performance on its native hardware didn't exactly have me running to the store to pick up Solaris for my PC! The standard install misses most of the nice touches of a base level linux install, and most executables seem braindead for anyone used to the gnu derivatives. Nice GUI daemon/service config tools? Non-existant.
here's a snapshot of my desktop when resizing Mozilla (latest release). Notice the "artistic" way it renders the page...
This is completely bogus.
Try here, with the Widget example or sprite demo 4, or this Donkey Kong game rendered in DHTML. Maybe the most obvious example is Video pool which is very smooth with IE and totally unplayable with NS6 despite using virtually no code forking. (BTW, I'm not plugging my site gratuitously, it's just that I've written all these scripts and tried to address Mozilla's speed problems. There are plenty of other people commenting on this topic on other sites, eg Scott Andrew who amongst other things writes articles for Apple's website.)
Don't just take it from me though, Mozilla's OWN developers acknowledge the serious performance problems with DHTML. See here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12911
Of course, if anyone would provide a link to a DHTML script that runs faster in NS6/7/Moz than IE then I'd love to see it. No? Didn't think so...
You are joking I hope? Unless you have a SERIOUSLY broken version of... well.. ANY other browser, there's just no way Moz/NS6/7 are "as snappy" as any of the other players.
Maybe your 950 duron is super-quick, but on a dual 1ghz P3 it's still horrifyingly bad. Actions as simple as resizing the browser window result in screen corruption as it fails to reflow fast enough to keep up with the mouse. The Javascript/DHTML performance is beyond bad - STILL - in my own tests (I use DHTML heavily) it runs simple loops at less than 5% of the speed of Explorer. When moving layers on the screen IE outpaces it by such a wide margin it's not even funny. Need an example? try this with IE then NS/Moz. Bear in mind that is just raw Javascript speed, the DHTML performance is much much worse.
I'm no MS lover - I want to see Moz succeed, but lying about its performance is not going to help anyone, and may just turn new users off: "Hey, I was told Netscape 6 was an upgrade from IE5, but it sucks!" is something I've heard from 2 people. From what I've seen of NS7, it's still no better, and neither is Moz. It's fine as an HTML/CSS only browser, but if you try to push it, there's nothing there.
I now accept that recent iterations of Mozilla are good, but they still aren't good enough for really complex stuff.
I thinks it's important that people recognize those areas where they aren't ahead of their competition. Denial just pushes us further behind.
I agree; I'm about as rabid a linux advocate as you can get, but I freely admit that IE is by far the best browser on the Windows platform in terms of features and performance. Not so good are the numerous security flaws that seem to emerge every other week....
With the myriad plugins it's capable of just about anything that can be achieved with a native application. While NS6 can request XML data, IE is capable of far more, including DB access across a local network without having to use Java, file access and other elements necessary for true web applications. For simple HTML browsing though, I suppose NS6 is good enough...
Take a notice, that Internet2 project is right now only for universities and big companys... And right now - for testing pourpourses only...
Which examination are the pourpourses taking?
Good luck to all the pourpourses out there!!
At my last firm I was amazed to see everyone using the SAME password on hundreds of machines. I'm a bit nosey so I used to look over the shoulders of my collegues as they typed and almost without exception all of the passwords were a string of asterisks!!!! I changed mine to a string of asterisks too, because I like to fit in.
Of course, most won't say so officially, and they'll still spout the official line but look at what they're actually producing: take NN6 out for a spin and see how many sites are just a MESS with it, a totally different user experience.
Well Mr Web.Designer, since your trade is designing "web sites", not "web browser sites", you should know that most of the sites that look bad with anything other than IE do so due to non-standard markup and scripting.
Netscape are not totally without blame, completely breaking backward compatibility has caused many designers to cease developing for either of their browser lines (4.x and 6+) until one or the other is dropped completely. My own logs show more people still using NS4.x, although this may be due to the site's content (most games were designed to run with NS4/IE).
I'm not sure what's going to happen, but the Mozilla rendering engine needs some serious work to bring it up to the speed of IE, and until that happens, I can't see people switching. BTW, I'm talking about the layout engine, which is still abysmally slow when working with dynamic content (DHTML). I personally design a lot of web apps, and currently then Moz engine is far too slow to consider.
I still prefer Konq. Much smaller dev team putting together a great browser - it's still little way behind Moz, but I'd choose it over Moz any day for its speed alone.
I can buy a movie that's only distributed in Hong Kong, but if I use a region enabled player, I won't be able to view it at all, even though there IS NO EQUIVALENT for my region.
Furthermore, if I managed to collect several hundred DVDs quite LEGALLY, then moved to another country, oh, say from the UK to the US my collection would become useless to me as the region encoding would prevent me from playing them on my shiny new US LEGALLY PURCHASED DVD player.
Yeah, that'll stop piracy...
I totally agree. In fact I never create a new function/method if it's only going to be called from one statement. Not only is it frustrating to have to scroll around (or even hop between separate source files) but it's hardly efficient. I've seen functions broken up like this where a subfunction is called within a loop, which demonstrably sucks CPU cycles (pushing and popping registers over and over again is no way to optimise).
The longer you keep them on the line, the less opportunity they have to close a sale with someone else.
You could also say:
"The longer you keep them on the line, the less opportunity they have to annoy someone else."
I'm glad I'm costing them money - I really enjoy it! If I'm having a bad day and get some tele-marketter on the line I can't resist cracking my knuckles and giving them a force 11 down the phone with a big grin on my face. I have an otherwise useless talent for spewing profanity and pure evil, and having some faceless drone willing to act as the punchbag - for free! - is a godsend. After reducing one of these scumbags to tears, or provoking them into less than professional dialogue I feel a warm inner-glow
If you work for scumbags, and earn money for scumbags, you are by extension, a scumbag.