The enterprise version is supposed to use a standard connector, so those who want their laptop disk IO to outperform most desktops, including most RAID0 arrays, may be able to use those. For reliability, I have an old 74GB Raptor that's still working fine, but StorageReview's reliability benchmark says they are more reliable than "12%" of other drives. Not that it's scientific, but it isn't promising.
When spinning up from a cold start, the WD3000BLFS maintains its prowess with a very economical showing on its 12V rail. At just 9 watts, the VelociRaptor weighs in a full 6 watts (66%!) lower than any other drive SR has ever encountered.
I think the heatsink is mostly for show, and to make the drive fit into a normal case. Still, it would be nice if they made it easily removable.
"Multi-gigabit links operate at speeds that leave current wireless networks far behind. For example the entire works of Shakespeare could be transmitted over this six gigabit link in under seven thousandths of a second or a full DVD movie in just over three quarters of a second."
Oops. I think that the marketing people at a networking products company should get this kind of thing, above all else, correct. Especially when transmission speed is the focus of the announcement...:)
The problem for blizzard is that the original Starcraft is so popular (I expect that there are people out there who have machines that can play Starcraft but not Warcraft III) that if they released a new Starcraft, all the Starcraft players wouldnt want to buy it (cant run it, not enough players yet etc)
Recommended [for Warcraft 3]:
* 600 MHz processor
* 256 MB of RAM
* 32 MB 3D video card
* DirectX® 8.1 compatible sound card
Are you seriously suggesting that Starcraft 2 using the Warcraft 3 engine would lack players...because of system requirements? Perhaps you should consider: Were Warcraft 3's system requirements significantly greater than Warcraft 2's?
>> Let's start with Vista. Fine, so it got delayed by a few months.
>>Gosh, that's the worst mispelling of six years I've ever seen!
>It's not a mispelling, it's a twist. Vista only got delayed by a few months. Longhorn on the other hand...:)
It's not mispelling, it's "misspelling"
Back on topic, I have been amazed at big a deal everyone is making about the Vista delays. How often are software projects late? Um, always? Indeed, system vendors will be irate, but the idea of Microsoft being "doomed" as the Slashdot article states is patently absurd. Microsoft is such a massive empire; their fall would take decades and a long and consistant string of terrible screw-ups. A few products being late, even years late, might scratch their bottom-line, but it will hardly lead to their demise.
The Star-Bulletin strives to make its news report fair and accurate. If you have a question or comment about news coverage, call Editor Frank Bridgewater at 529-4791 or email him at corrections@starbulletin.com.
"I've never been able to take SR that seriously since they lost their drive reliability results back in 2002 due to a HD failure:)"
Except that they didn't lose their database in a hard drive failure--it was deletion (the drive was fine). It isn't like Storagereview's website is run on an in-house server in which SR chooses the drives and controllers and such. Like most review websites, it is run on a dedicated server on one of many hosting services. These companies generally have a generic (and cheap) configuration for easy maintenance, and do not allow "suggestions" for the storage infrastructure. In fact, SR tried to get them to run the server on two Seagate Cheetah's, but the hosting provider did not want to alter the standard hardware for the server, and rightfully so--they wouldn't have replacement parts in case the Cheetahs died.
I am sure it seems cute and fun to say "ha ha, a storage website lost data!", but you really should learn at least a little about what really happened before making a sweeping decision like "therefore they can't be taken seriously."
Durability is generally listed in the drive's official specs, and manufacturers are far better equipped than any review website to test those things. Durability was mentioned only to establish how different considerations are when looking into hard drives for laptops vs. hard drives for desktops. Really I don't see the big deal here.
Right, Storagereview.com, a website dedicated to reviewing hard drives since 1998, doesn't know what they are talking about when reviewing hard drives.
Don't worry, yours doesn't sound like a fanboy post or anything.;)
and their Recommended sections give you all the damn facts you need in the easiest possible way to read them
Good point, because it is such a pain in the ass clicking on Performance Database at the top and then choosing to sort by NOISE or POWER DISSIPATION.
Seriously I don't know how anyone can be expected to figure that out.
World of Warcraft is an excellent game, but at the same time it tends to have a "canned" feel about it. What I mean by that is that it seems as if almost everything that a player can achieve has been expressly thought of, balanced, tweaked, and timed by Blizzard. This is good in a sense--it makes the game simple and somewhat predictable, which is one truth that has made Blizzard games so appealing to the mainstream in the past. On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if the game would benefit from more depth in some ways. For example, it would be interesting to have a Morrowind-style enchantment system, where certain (possibly rare) "base items" can hold varying degrees of enchantment, and enchanters can assign a wide variety of abilities to those items. If a player chooses to have an item hold two different types of enchantments, each will be far weaker than just having the one. In order to prevent extreme specialization, it may then be necessary to implement some sort of penalty for having multiple items with the same enchantment. For example, it would be a BadThing® if every single item on a warrior were enchanted with +1% chance of critical hits.
Another important item, at least important to me, which I believe to be missing from WoW is the role-playing. WoW is classified as a role-playing game, but there really aren't any moral choices of any kind as most RPGs would include (and make an important part of the gameplay). For example, many of the quests are "good deed" quests, but there exists no option to do the quest "out of the goodness of your heart" or to have to choose between "evil" and "good" quests.
I suspect that perhaps a good way to implement this would be to have an attribute like "virtue", similar to faction "meters." The benefits of this attribute would be up to Blizzard of course, but a few possible suggestions might include: 1) Requiring that warlocks maintain a fairly low virtue and and that paladins maintain a high virtue (or have penalties). 2) High virtue may lead to a discount at stores 3) Virtue effects faction
I am sure the creative minds at Blizzard could come up with good uses for this idea without ruining the simplicity and streamlining of the game. I hope they do!
Re:Just had to be....
on
The Neuron Drive
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Most of the time, a series of drive deaths can be traced to all drives coming from the same supplier, or the same shipment. Most deaths are caused by shipping or otherwise something in-between the manufacturer and the user. It is not uncommon to see UPS drop an entire pallet of drives from the truck, and pick them back up and continue on as if it were a shipment of basketballs or something.
Not that I consider Maxtor the best at this time, but I do not consider it the worst either. Drive companies tend to go through phases of poor reliability and then good reliability every 3-7 years or so.
(Mods: Yes this is offtopic. If you want to talk about a painting with a hard drive glued on, be my guest)
Are you sure that you replied to the right story? I think you meant this announcement of the Intel dual-core Pentium IV chips--you know, the ones that have a TDP of 125 watts It is Intel, that has the heat problem with dual-core chips.
Although in single-core land, while AMD's Venice runs nice and cool, Intel's Pentium-M is even nicer and cooler (though it doesn't have the AMD64 instructions like the Pentium-D has).
To be clear, I wasn't saying that the website with the TFA is a bad one. It's writing is of better quality than a lot of them out there. I was just struck by the blatant overuse of the marketdroid word "xtreme." I am sure I am the only one.
"powering her Intel P4 3.73 EE, Asus P5AD2-E premium based test bench."
And we're supposed to believe that someone is powering a P4 3.73GHz with only a 580W power supply?
In all seriousness, I have to be suspect of a title like "European Senior Reviewer" from a website that has the 'word' "Xtreme" four times in the title image alone (and not just because most hardware savvy people are using either Athlon64s or Pentium-M's). I guess it's cool, or something, to have an xtreme power supply for the extremely power-hungry PIV. Or maybe it was the metallic blue finish--always an important factor when considering the relative merits of competing power supplies.:) Reminds me of that group of idiot truck-driving teenagers in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. "That was so not extreme." Cool movie.:)
And if you're a shrink wrap house, you'll pay these high IQ salaries with... what exactly? If you *do* come up with something great, you'll have 100 SourceForge copycats within a month and they will erode your market.
F/OSS is the great poison pill of software. If anyone comes out with something that is good (and it isn't you), then just put some effort into a F/OSS "alternative" and poison the whole market... basically make it where if *I* can't make any money in that market, then no one will.
That isn't quite correct. If someone comes up with a nifty utility to base their business on, then yeah, the OSS community will duplicate it in no time, but then, so will commercial vendors.
It seems most of these complaints come from companies who charge money for the most trivial of crap, such as this password generator. Nevermind that it has one of the worst user interfaces ever designed (look at that screenshot), it's a freaking PASSWORD GENERATOR! Trivial software is trivial to reimplement. It's offensive that someone would even charge money for this.
Now if a company develops something non-trivial, for which there aren't already a thousand similar products, this shouldn't be a problem. For example, just try finding an F/OSS product that can compete with 3D Studio Max or Maya. Blender isn't even in the same league. Photoshop? The Gimp is neat for web logos or hobbiest graphics, but doesn't even fully support the most fundamental Photoshop features such as native CMYK color.
Siebel Systems makes non-trivial software, but it is only non-trivial in that it is large. It isn't innovative; it's just a lot of work. I don't know of any OSS products that compete with, for example, their customer management software, but if there are, I would not doubt that it is because Siebel's stuff sucks (I've used it), and some smart developer got fed up and decided to show Siebel how it's done. If they do a better job, should we feel sorry for poor Siebel for losing revenue to the F/OSS guy, or should we root for the OSS project because any multi-billion dollar company which can't make a better project than a handful of F/OSS programmers needs to die?
With all that said, I don't see how F/OSS is any different than another commercial competitor. An intelligently run business targets their product to account for competitors' weaknesses and tries to downplay its strengths. Seems to be working for Microsoft, and every single one of their core products have powerful and mature F/OSS competitors, yet their revenue has grown every year. Specifically, the F/OSS community may be great at making low-level technical stuff, such as libraries, web servers, and DBMS software, but it isn't very good at polishing user interfaces (compare Visual C++ to KDevelop or Anjuta, though this being Slashdot will probably prefer the latter two regardless), at making high-end enterprise software (MySQL is neat but it can't even touch Teradata), or making the absolute highest-performance software (Apache is sort of fast, but Zeus and even recent versions of IIS can blow it away, especially in static page serving [That said, most corporations are even worse at making performance software, using bloatware tools such as MFC to make bloatware apps such as Norton Utilities]).
In short, the reasons given sound like the kind of reasons given by the kind of companies that make password generators or horribly poor quality customer management software and then complain that the F/OSS community is stealing your marketshare. Hell,
Slashdot Mirror
Power usage is 60% lower than any drive ever encountered (see earlier post). Apparently the huge heatsink is epoxied (or something like that) onto the drive. Not very bright on WD's part, unless I'm missing something.
The enterprise version is supposed to use a standard connector, so those who want their laptop disk IO to outperform most desktops, including most RAID0 arrays, may be able to use those.
For reliability, I have an old 74GB Raptor that's still working fine, but StorageReview's reliability benchmark says they are more reliable than "12%" of other drives. Not that it's scientific, but it isn't promising.
Power usage = heat.
From the StorageReview.com article:
When spinning up from a cold start, the WD3000BLFS maintains its prowess with a very economical showing on its 12V rail. At just 9 watts, the VelociRaptor weighs in a full 6 watts (66%!) lower than any other drive SR has ever encountered.
I think the heatsink is mostly for show, and to make the drive fit into a normal case. Still, it would be nice if they made it easily removable.
The review is up on on StorageReview.com . You can use the database to compare this drive to every other drive out there in different kinds of tasks.
Oops. I think that the marketing people at a networking products company should get this kind of thing, above all else, correct. Especially when transmission speed is the focus of the announcement...
"Why not?" seems to be the only reasoning behind the Slashdot mods sometimes...
From http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=awr0517p:
Recommended [for Warcraft 3]:
* 600 MHz processor
* 256 MB of RAM
* 32 MB 3D video card
* DirectX® 8.1 compatible sound card
Are you seriously suggesting that Starcraft 2 using the Warcraft 3 engine would lack players...because of system requirements? Perhaps you should consider: Were Warcraft 3's system requirements significantly greater than Warcraft 2's?
Aye, Google and ye shall recieve.
ICANN't believe the USA has done this!!!
ICANN
I tried that on this production server, and I think it's working...but why is it taking so long?
"...The browser is only 29.2MB, but the source code download is over 11GB."
It's not mispelling, it's "misspelling"
Back on topic, I have been amazed at big a deal everyone is making about the Vista delays. How often are software projects late? Um, always?
Indeed, system vendors will be irate, but the idea of Microsoft being "doomed" as the Slashdot article states is patently absurd. Microsoft is such a massive empire; their fall would take decades and a long and consistant string of terrible screw-ups. A few products being late, even years late, might scratch their bottom-line, but it will hardly lead to their demise.
starbulletin.com/2006/01/15/news/corrections.html
Like most review websites, it is run on a dedicated server on one of many hosting services. These companies generally have a generic (and cheap) configuration for easy maintenance, and do not allow "suggestions" for the storage infrastructure.
In fact, SR tried to get them to run the server on two Seagate Cheetah's, but the hosting provider did not want to alter the standard hardware for the server, and rightfully so--they wouldn't have replacement parts in case the Cheetahs died.
I am sure it seems cute and fun to say "ha ha, a storage website lost data!", but you really should learn at least a little about what really happened before making a sweeping decision like "therefore they can't be taken seriously."
Durability is generally listed in the drive's official specs, and manufacturers are far better equipped than any review website to test those things. Durability was mentioned only to establish how different considerations are when looking into hard drives for laptops vs. hard drives for desktops.
Really I don't see the big deal here.
Don't worry, yours doesn't sound like a fanboy post or anything.
Good point, because it is such a pain in the ass clicking on Performance Database at the top and then choosing to sort by NOISE or POWER DISSIPATION.
Seriously I don't know how anyone can be expected to figure that out.
Speak like Yoda he does?
World of Warcraft is an excellent game, but at the same time it tends to have a "canned" feel about it. What I mean by that is that it seems as if almost everything that a player can achieve has been expressly thought of, balanced, tweaked, and timed by Blizzard.
This is good in a sense--it makes the game simple and somewhat predictable, which is one truth that has made Blizzard games so appealing to the mainstream in the past.
On the other hand, I can't help but wonder if the game would benefit from more depth in some ways.
For example, it would be interesting to have a Morrowind-style enchantment system, where certain (possibly rare) "base items" can hold varying degrees of enchantment, and enchanters can assign a wide variety of abilities to those items. If a player chooses to have an item hold two different types of enchantments, each will be far weaker than just having the one.
In order to prevent extreme specialization, it may then be necessary to implement some sort of penalty for having multiple items with the same enchantment. For example, it would be a BadThing® if every single item on a warrior were enchanted with +1% chance of critical hits.
Another important item, at least important to me, which I believe to be missing from WoW is the role-playing. WoW is classified as a role-playing game, but there really aren't any moral choices of any kind as most RPGs would include (and make an important part of the gameplay).
For example, many of the quests are "good deed" quests, but there exists no option to do the quest "out of the goodness of your heart" or to have to choose between "evil" and "good" quests.
I suspect that perhaps a good way to implement this would be to have an attribute like "virtue", similar to faction "meters."
The benefits of this attribute would be up to Blizzard of course, but a few possible suggestions might include: 1) Requiring that warlocks maintain a fairly low virtue and and that paladins maintain a high virtue (or have penalties).
2) High virtue may lead to a discount at stores
3) Virtue effects faction
I am sure the creative minds at Blizzard could come up with good uses for this idea without ruining the simplicity and streamlining of the game. I hope they do!
Please see: http://3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716 9399375105820974944592.com/
Not everyone agrees with PC World that Earthlink is the best, even for the average joe (but then, what's new?).
Most of the time, a series of drive deaths can be traced to all drives coming from the same supplier, or the same shipment. Most deaths are caused by shipping or otherwise something in-between the manufacturer and the user.
It is not uncommon to see UPS drop an entire pallet of drives from the truck, and pick them back up and continue on as if it were a shipment of basketballs or something.
Not that I consider Maxtor the best at this time, but I do not consider it the worst either. Drive companies tend to go through phases of poor reliability and then good reliability every 3-7 years or so.
(Mods: Yes this is offtopic. If you want to talk about a painting with a hard drive glued on, be my guest)
Are you sure that you replied to the right story? I think you meant this announcement of the Intel dual-core Pentium IV chips--you know, the ones that have a TDP of 125 watts
It is Intel, that has the heat problem with dual-core chips.
Although in single-core land, while AMD's Venice runs nice and cool, Intel's Pentium-M is even nicer and cooler (though it doesn't have the AMD64 instructions like the Pentium-D has).
To be clear, I wasn't saying that the website with the TFA is a bad one. It's writing is of better quality than a lot of them out there. I was just struck by the blatant overuse of the marketdroid word "xtreme." I am sure I am the only one.
And we're supposed to believe that someone is powering a P4 3.73GHz with only a 580W power supply?
In all seriousness, I have to be suspect of a title like "European Senior Reviewer" from a website that has the 'word' "Xtreme" four times in the title image alone (and not just because most hardware savvy people are using either Athlon64s or Pentium-M's). I guess it's cool, or something, to have an xtreme power supply for the extremely power-hungry PIV. Or maybe it was the metallic blue finish--always an important factor when considering the relative merits of competing power supplies.
Reminds me of that group of idiot truck-driving teenagers in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. "That was so not extreme."
Cool movie.
That isn't quite correct. If someone comes up with a nifty utility to base their business on, then yeah, the OSS community will duplicate it in no time, but then, so will commercial vendors.
It seems most of these complaints come from companies who charge money for the most trivial of crap, such as this password generator. Nevermind that it has one of the worst user interfaces ever designed (look at that screenshot), it's a freaking PASSWORD GENERATOR! Trivial software is trivial to reimplement. It's offensive that someone would even charge money for this.
Now if a company develops something non-trivial, for which there aren't already a thousand similar products, this shouldn't be a problem. For example, just try finding an F/OSS product that can compete with 3D Studio Max or Maya. Blender isn't even in the same league. Photoshop? The Gimp is neat for web logos or hobbiest graphics, but doesn't even fully support the most fundamental Photoshop features such as native CMYK color.
Siebel Systems makes non-trivial software, but it is only non-trivial in that it is large. It isn't innovative; it's just a lot of work. I don't know of any OSS products that compete with, for example, their customer management software, but if there are, I would not doubt that it is because Siebel's stuff sucks (I've used it), and some smart developer got fed up and decided to show Siebel how it's done. If they do a better job, should we feel sorry for poor Siebel for losing revenue to the F/OSS guy, or should we root for the OSS project because any multi-billion dollar company which can't make a better project than a handful of F/OSS programmers needs to die?
Another example is the game market. There are neat OSS technologies such as the Irrlicht engine, but Itari and Blizzard aren't exactly concerned about F/OSS games taking over their market. When's the last time you played an open-source game which was even comparable to Farcry, Starcraft, or Alpha Centauri in terms of refinement, scale, and fun factor?
With all that said, I don't see how F/OSS is any different than another commercial competitor. An intelligently run business targets their product to account for competitors' weaknesses and tries to downplay its strengths. Seems to be working for Microsoft, and every single one of their core products have powerful and mature F/OSS competitors, yet their revenue has grown every year.
Specifically, the F/OSS community may be great at making low-level technical stuff, such as libraries, web servers, and DBMS software, but it isn't very good at polishing user interfaces (compare Visual C++ to KDevelop or Anjuta, though this being Slashdot will probably prefer the latter two regardless), at making high-end enterprise software (MySQL is neat but it can't even touch Teradata), or making the absolute highest-performance software (Apache is sort of fast, but Zeus and even recent versions of IIS can blow it away, especially in static page serving [That said, most corporations are even worse at making performance software, using bloatware tools such as MFC to make bloatware apps such as Norton Utilities]).
In short, the reasons given sound like the kind of reasons given by the kind of companies that make password generators or horribly poor quality customer management software and then complain that the F/OSS community is stealing your marketshare. Hell,