And to make things even more confusing, you have this application running on a Mac Pro - which has really bad memory latency, poor bandwidth and 8 processors to feed with it?
Can you cite a reference to this claim? Not flaming, honestly curious since I thought the motherboard was designed around Intel's latest-and-greatest given their use of the 1600MHz FSB.
Task manager doesn't get the priority it used to? If this is the case, then I'd venture to guess that this would be a serious problem. I can't tell you how many times I've had an unresponsive Windows environment when I've been able to hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc or in worse cases Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the task manager and take care of whatever is wrong.
Feh. I'm still using the heck out of an old Pentium Pro 200MHz running Linux. Yeah, it isn't doing HEAVY LIFTING, but as a file server, low utilization mysql and basic service runner, it works fine.
Slightly off-topic, perhaps, but who in their right mind makes decisions based on the [now wholly predictable] crapflood of 1-star reviews the geek in full mob force posts to Amazon.com?
Completely agree with you, but before making a purchase on a piece of computer hardware, it was worth to see what the reviews were.
Sure, you skim past the "hey, my friend said that his brother-in-law said that his dog thinks this is a great product so 5 stars!" and the "OMFG IT SUX BALLZ!!1!" and sometimes there is something worth value.
Hey... it DID stop me from pressing "add to cart" and notice what was going on?
I've been looking to buy a large second drive for my Mac and ALMOST hit the buy button on this drive a week ago. However, I noticed some 1-star comments on Amazon's reviews of the drive and have been watching this ever since.
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)
Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).
I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
Ahh, the philosophy of the Amiga OS. Always run the UI at a high priority, including the mouse, so that the user always feels that they're at least able to tell the computer what to do even if the rest of the system is lagging because of high CPU load.
Yes, this pseudo-integer variable support is part of the 6502 BASIC code that Microsoft created and made its way into AppleSoft, Atari BASIC, CBM BASIC, etc.
Not to bash Microsoft here, but just stating that it was a common code base for all of the 8-bit micros that used their BASIC on the 6502.
You've got your flamethrower on, but just couldn't help to point out two things:
BASIC for the Commodore PET (and I believe this transferred over to the VIC-20, 64, 128, etc) was sold to Jack Tramiel for $10,000. Basically Bill Gates didn't want to deal with a 6502 BASIC at the time (thought the processor's stack was garbage for some reason).
Microsoft Amiga BASIC only really worked on 68000 machines with no higher than Kickstart 1.3. Since there were 68020 and 68030 machines before there was Kickstart 2.04, I would say that you could date the dropped support earlier than version 2.
For what it's worth, I tried bringing recognition to one of my workers in a past project. Here is the room: myself, my employee, my manager and his manager. Note that my direct manager had a few hundred people under him (through several people) and thus his manager had a few thousand.
Though the "big boss" was not impolite, it was obviously pointless to bring my employee along since the guy didn't even get so much as a 3 second glance. You just need to understand that they can't know EVERYONE at those levels because they're trusting their direct reports to make the correct decisions for the good of the company by hiring the correct people and getting the job done.
Quite frankly, have you ever stopped to think about the weight your manager has on their shoulder? They are ultimately responsible for EVERYTHING their employees do. If my workers screw up royally, it isn't their fault, it is MY FAULT. Sure, I could turn around and punish the person really at fault, but it is my job to carry the weight of the responsibility. One reason managers get paid more (and tend to get gray hairs:-) ) but at the same time, we also are the ones praised for getting the job done. We should in turn praise and reward the employee responsible for making us look good. That is how it works.
Make your boss happy and they'll take care of you. You'll eventually rise up, if you want.
As well, I'd be tempted to suggest that maybe Microsoft even did this on their own. See the binaries for the Solaris version of Internet Explorer 5. Looks like there is some ported Windows API there.
My employer recently blocked access to the web based text service that I'd use regularly to keep in touch with my girlfriend (she has one of those "unlimited everything" type plans where mine is cheapest possible). In a bit of frustration, I thought for a moment about the history of my text plan prices.
Late 2001: $0.10 to send, $0.02 to receive.
Circa 2003: $0.10 to send or receive.
Circa 2005: $0.12 to send or receive.
Circa 2007: $0.15 to send or receive.
Today: $0.20 to send or receive.
(note that this does not include picture or media messaging which is $0.25)
Now what is lovely is that they don't offer a text plan to go with my voice plan because it is obsolete (yeah, the "upgraded" one is more expensive and more restrictive). And so wonderful when they sent me a cheery reminder to get a text plan because "rates are going up". Yes, like the cost of sending a 140 byte message is a serious burden on their network? Please.
I guess I'm just appalled by the fact that my text rate went up 1000% since I first started using it. Unbelievable. This is complete fleecing and introducing artificial rate increases.
Someone who used to work for me several years ago came from the world of Cray computers. Cray was always considered a super computer because of its unique ability to be VERY fast at vector processing. Of course, nowadays your PS2 or PS3 is probably just as fast as what he was using then, but that is besides the point.
The point being that he told of how those machines weren't really fast at doing general programs, but when you programmed them for vector calculations (math, physics, etc) they SCREAMED.
I guess this is kind of the same idea as if you were to use a GPU for general computation; it would be slow for most common operations, but when you feed it the right job it will put everything else to shame.
I think what would kick some serious butt is if someone would implement network play ability to MAME games, e.g. you have a connection to your buddy, you both have Mario Bros. up and the screens are in sync, and player A controls are on machine 1 and player B controls are on remote machine 2.
Probably a bitch with latency, but over a short network hop I'm sure something reasonable could be achieved for some games?
Or maybe I should start working on that.. hmmmm.....
Supra made some nice products back in the day. Not that anyone cares, but it was a big day for me when I took the $500 or so that I earned from pumping gas to buy a "sysop discount" USRobotics Courier HST 14.4. Damn thing is huge compared to other modems and the power brick was almost the size of a literal standard red clay brick. But man, was I flyyyyin'!
Try this one... be one of those bands that plays with a carpet under you. Drag that cheap cable across the carpet and be amazed at how much static comes through the amp!
What's so idiotic about the 95/98/2000/XP versioning scheme? It is called marketing to non-geeks - you know, the people who don't have Pi memorized to 100 digits.
While I might personally like version numbers, I wouldn't go as far as call the guy an asshole and an idiot.
OK, this story is about 10 years old, but it was my only real experience with Comcast techies. I got a cable modem in late 1997 / early 1998 and at the time I was running Windows NT 4.0 on a Pentium Pro. The tech who came over to install the hardware (who was paired with some seriously sketchy looking dude with a long drill for the cable) didn't seem to know much about computers. He knew how to install the network card and then turned on the computer and sat back happily waiting for the plug-and-play to detect and configure everything for him. I told the people on the phone before the installation that I had NT and I even mentioned it to this guy when he came in and seemed to think that it was no problem. Well, no problem if you leave out the fact that plug-and-play never really worked on NT4 and thus was disabled. In the end, I think they hired someone that only knew how to open a PC, install a card and then run a demo to show how fast the internet was now. Great - know what a network mask is? Guess not. I never let another tech touch my computer after that - how many times did I say NT on the phone? Too many.
Visual Studio vs Borland: VS was never better than Borland on a level playing field. MS only completed by being a bully.
I just remember that when I was in my university bookstore over a decade ago, I had the choice of buying Microsoft Visual C++ (4.0?) for $50. Borland C++ was at least double the price (I don't quite remember the exact price). If it wasn't for the fact that the Borland compiler claimed on the box that it could generate code for a Pentium Pro (my PC at the time), I would have absolutely gone with the much cheaper VC++.
Is that bullying? Not quite. Is that smart pricing strategy? Absolutely. What happened with IE and Netscape is the same thing, except the difference here is that you could reasonably download Netscape for free on a 14.4 modem whereas you weren't exactly going to download Borland C++ or MSVC++.
The first job is always the hardest, because they look for GPA and academia.
If you choose to go with the lesser grades, one possible suggestion is that you try and score an internship with some company after you graduate, prove to them how good you are and then when your internship is near done, let them realize that you're going to find another job and you'll be out on the street. They might just make an exception to keep you on somehow if they really valued what you could do.
The reason why I mention this is because most companies don't want to necessarily hire people straight out of school because you have no experience (sure, open source is great, but it isn't always a disciplined environment). Once you've got some experience, only your skill set will really matter (and what insight you bring to the table with those skills).
Well, in a way I believe the people who download iTunes are already downloading Safari. Ever visit the iTunes store? Ever click on a link that has a tms: protocol? I think that the Safari browser has been alive and well on Windows machines for quite a while, but there has been no way of telling it what URL you really want to go to. I've tried hacking it a bit for the fun of it, but gave up because it wasn't really worth the effort.
I think iTunes is to Safari as Internet Explorer is to Outlook (not express; try the "web toolbar" on Outlook and and enter a URL).
Slashdot Mirror
Can you cite a reference to this claim? Not flaming, honestly curious since I thought the motherboard was designed around Intel's latest-and-greatest given their use of the 1600MHz FSB.
Task manager doesn't get the priority it used to? If this is the case, then I'd venture to guess that this would be a serious problem. I can't tell you how many times I've had an unresponsive Windows environment when I've been able to hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc or in worse cases Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the task manager and take care of whatever is wrong.
Not entirely. The PS1/PS2 compatibility was only for the first few revisions of the PS3. It was dropped later to save costs.
see here
Feh. I'm still using the heck out of an old Pentium Pro 200MHz running Linux. Yeah, it isn't doing HEAVY LIFTING, but as a file server, low utilization mysql and basic service runner, it works fine.
Completely agree with you, but before making a purchase on a piece of computer hardware, it was worth to see what the reviews were.
Sure, you skim past the "hey, my friend said that his brother-in-law said that his dog thinks this is a great product so 5 stars!" and the "OMFG IT SUX BALLZ!!1!" and sometimes there is something worth value.
Hey... it DID stop me from pressing "add to cart" and notice what was going on?
The problem appears to manifest itself in lockups for 30 seconds or so at a time which kills music streaming, video streaming, etc. The only reports of success appear to be from people who are using it for an archive disk and thats it. Some people claim the problem can be avoided somewhat by disabling the write cache, but naturally you get a serious performance hit from that (especially since the memory cache is 32MB!)
Reading the forums, it appears that Seagate has not only thus told people that the drives aren't meant for a RAID environment, but even gone so far as to tell people that RAID doesn't stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but rather "Independent Drives". Hmm. Seems that time has changed this definition (FOLDOC and Wikipedia seem to claim the change in name as well).
I'm rather disappointed since now that I have a taste for a 1.5TB drive, I'm not looking to buy "just" a 1TB. Hopefully one of these companies can resolve this.
On a more serious note, I read something in Maximum PC this month that there are thermal reliability issues with perpendicular storage technology? Does this mean that all perpendicular drives are less reliable?
Ahh, the philosophy of the Amiga OS. Always run the UI at a high priority, including the mouse, so that the user always feels that they're at least able to tell the computer what to do even if the rest of the system is lagging because of high CPU load.
Maybe they bolted them down because they knew Ballmer was coming?
Actually, the TI-81 and ColecoVision shared the same graphics chip.
Not to bash Microsoft here, but just stating that it was a common code base for all of the 8-bit micros that used their BASIC on the 6502.
Just my two cents of computer history :-)
Though the "big boss" was not impolite, it was obviously pointless to bring my employee along since the guy didn't even get so much as a 3 second glance. You just need to understand that they can't know EVERYONE at those levels because they're trusting their direct reports to make the correct decisions for the good of the company by hiring the correct people and getting the job done.
Quite frankly, have you ever stopped to think about the weight your manager has on their shoulder? They are ultimately responsible for EVERYTHING their employees do. If my workers screw up royally, it isn't their fault, it is MY FAULT. Sure, I could turn around and punish the person really at fault, but it is my job to carry the weight of the responsibility. One reason managers get paid more (and tend to get gray hairs :-) ) but at the same time, we also are the ones praised for getting the job done. We should in turn praise and reward the employee responsible for making us look good. That is how it works.
Make your boss happy and they'll take care of you. You'll eventually rise up, if you want.
As well, I'd be tempted to suggest that maybe Microsoft even did this on their own. See the binaries for the Solaris version of Internet Explorer 5. Looks like there is some ported Windows API there.
- Late 2001: $0.10 to send, $0.02 to receive.
- Circa 2003: $0.10 to send or receive.
- Circa 2005: $0.12 to send or receive.
- Circa 2007: $0.15 to send or receive.
- Today: $0.20 to send or receive.
(note that this does not include picture or media messaging which is $0.25)Now what is lovely is that they don't offer a text plan to go with my voice plan because it is obsolete (yeah, the "upgraded" one is more expensive and more restrictive). And so wonderful when they sent me a cheery reminder to get a text plan because "rates are going up". Yes, like the cost of sending a 140 byte message is a serious burden on their network? Please.
I guess I'm just appalled by the fact that my text rate went up 1000% since I first started using it. Unbelievable. This is complete fleecing and introducing artificial rate increases.
waah.
The point being that he told of how those machines weren't really fast at doing general programs, but when you programmed them for vector calculations (math, physics, etc) they SCREAMED.
I guess this is kind of the same idea as if you were to use a GPU for general computation; it would be slow for most common operations, but when you feed it the right job it will put everything else to shame.
Probably a bitch with latency, but over a short network hop I'm sure something reasonable could be achieved for some games?
Or maybe I should start working on that.. hmmmm.....
Supra made some nice products back in the day. Not that anyone cares, but it was a big day for me when I took the $500 or so that I earned from pumping gas to buy a "sysop discount" USRobotics Courier HST 14.4. Damn thing is huge compared to other modems and the power brick was almost the size of a literal standard red clay brick. But man, was I flyyyyin'!
Try this one... be one of those bands that plays with a carpet under you. Drag that cheap cable across the carpet and be amazed at how much static comes through the amp!
Only buy quality guitar cables. End of statement.
I am. Mine is lower than yours.
(waiting for someone with a lower digit to e-slap me on that one >grin
Depends on what your definition of "is" is...
While I might personally like version numbers, I wouldn't go as far as call the guy an asshole and an idiot.
OK, this story is about 10 years old, but it was my only real experience with Comcast techies. I got a cable modem in late 1997 / early 1998 and at the time I was running Windows NT 4.0 on a Pentium Pro. The tech who came over to install the hardware (who was paired with some seriously sketchy looking dude with a long drill for the cable) didn't seem to know much about computers. He knew how to install the network card and then turned on the computer and sat back happily waiting for the plug-and-play to detect and configure everything for him. I told the people on the phone before the installation that I had NT and I even mentioned it to this guy when he came in and seemed to think that it was no problem. Well, no problem if you leave out the fact that plug-and-play never really worked on NT4 and thus was disabled. In the end, I think they hired someone that only knew how to open a PC, install a card and then run a demo to show how fast the internet was now. Great - know what a network mask is? Guess not. I never let another tech touch my computer after that - how many times did I say NT on the phone? Too many.
I just remember that when I was in my university bookstore over a decade ago, I had the choice of buying Microsoft Visual C++ (4.0?) for $50. Borland C++ was at least double the price (I don't quite remember the exact price). If it wasn't for the fact that the Borland compiler claimed on the box that it could generate code for a Pentium Pro (my PC at the time), I would have absolutely gone with the much cheaper VC++.
Is that bullying? Not quite. Is that smart pricing strategy? Absolutely. What happened with IE and Netscape is the same thing, except the difference here is that you could reasonably download Netscape for free on a 14.4 modem whereas you weren't exactly going to download Borland C++ or MSVC++.
If you choose to go with the lesser grades, one possible suggestion is that you try and score an internship with some company after you graduate, prove to them how good you are and then when your internship is near done, let them realize that you're going to find another job and you'll be out on the street. They might just make an exception to keep you on somehow if they really valued what you could do.
The reason why I mention this is because most companies don't want to necessarily hire people straight out of school because you have no experience (sure, open source is great, but it isn't always a disciplined environment). Once you've got some experience, only your skill set will really matter (and what insight you bring to the table with those skills).
I think iTunes is to Safari as Internet Explorer is to Outlook (not express; try the "web toolbar" on Outlook and and enter a URL).