I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. In general no, most apps don't need or shouldn't have access to an actual framebuffer. Thats assuming something that even makes sense as a framebuffer is available.
On the other hand, the topic of mirror drivers comes up fairly frequently on ntdev, because windows lacks the ability to access the framebuffer directly. Sometimes people with legitimate needs want to know what parts of the screen are being updated, etc..
So, there are reasons for lower level access to the video hardware. The nvidia stance that its should all be black magic outside of D3D or whatnot is complete BS. I've personally made utilities that hack some portion of a video card, because the vendor didn't provide support for some feature or another. That was back in the bad old days when you could call up the vendor of the video chipset and receive a 800 page book in the mail detailing the register set.
yes... same with vesa, and another poster pointing out that even in the DOS days people depended on the DOS for file io, and setting up the initial execution environment.
That said, the closest thing in windows (that i'm aware of) to the fbdev in linux is the deprecated directdraw hardware surface (which is a darn lot like SDL!). As I understand it, directdraw is completely emulated in software since vista. Even back in the w2k days it didn't give you full access to the hardware framebuffer, instead giving you a mapping to what was effectively a mapped surface that the hardware placed into the actual framebuffer. Basically, it behaved more like mapping a texture to a polygon being flushed to the actual hardware framebuffer than full framebuffer access.
Not that you really want to access the framebuffer over PCIe anyway, its a lot faster to use one of the dozen 3d tricks than access it directly. Hence direct2d.
No, that would be impossible on modern computers (unless you would only run the demo on one gfx card - and maybe even only on one specific firmware version at that).
If by "modern" you mean linux, there is fbdev which has a semi standard kernel interface for providing drivers that export the framebuffer. You mmap the local fbdev device into your process. Its fairly cross platform and cross video card (for many older ones it uses the VESA API). Sure it won't let you twiddle the PCI BAR's or individual card registers, but if you want to do that you can hack the appropriate fbdev driver. Most of them are just a thousand lines or so (been there done that, don't ask). It just depends on how much you really want to tweak the hardware. Most it seems just want a framebuffer and hardware blit support (or line drawing/etc).
Sitting on that, you can have SDL or DirectFB, which attempt to provide more than a basic framebuffer and mode setting API in a cross platform manner. The primary goal seems to be some basic hardware acceleration. The nice thing about them, is that if a particular piece of hardware doesn't support some feature they emulate it with software. In the case of some old sparc video cards that apparently goes as far as emulating the framebuffer.
From what I understand frys is a cash business. They don't have stores everywhere because they only open a new one when they can buy it outright rather than leveraging the whole business (unlike just about every other big box retailer).
That said, I'm in Austin, which is considered tech heavy, but the customer base at frys seems to be mostly non tech. Heck the customer base is ~50% female. Probably only about 10% of the store is heavy tech geek (PC/electronics components). The rest is just like best buy, CD/DVDs, TVs, appliances, phones, pcs, etc. Its just a better selection. The laptop area probably has upwards of 100 laptops on display. Same with the TV's. The raw floorspace of just the CD/DVD section is roughly on par with the total floorspace at the (fairly small for a best buy) best buy near my house.
Its just basically walmart for electronics, complete with more registers than a walmart (over a hundred, of which 20 or so are active most of the time, and the remainder get lit up around Christmas or big sale weekends).
Prove they cannot read the constitution anymore than the "liberals". In fact in this case the "liberals" seem to have been able to read it while the conservatives failed.
Reminds me of a bumpersticker, I saw on a truck with a bunch of Ron Paul stickers.
"Its not left vs right, its us vs the state"
The whole case was ridiculous anyway, so far fsked up to make the movie Brazil seem downright normal.
It also reminds me of the line in the recent heath care hearings where Kennedy was worried about how insurance companies would cope (with the mandate being struck down, while leaving the rest of the requirements in place). All I could think of was, that he wasn't doing his job, which was to decide if the law was constitutional or not. If the law puts the insurance companies out of business that is congresses problem not his.
Other people have posted about the manufactures test utilities, RAID etc.
But I didn't see anyone mention that most newer drives can run media scans while idle. For example seagate supports the T10 Background Media Scan (BMS), where the drive scans itself, and relocates sectors when its not actively processing commands from the host. It also supports idle read after write, which reads recently written sectors and compares them with the copy in the cache during idle periods.
Finally, all the modern RAID controllers i've seen have scrub options for validating the RAID parity and taking drives offline that are failing the parity checks. (which is mostly pointless if your drive is scrubbing itself, the ECC from the drive provides more protection than RAID5. 6 is probably safer..).
The key of course it to make sure your raid controller understand the drive failure metrics behind it.
That is true when your ripping through a lot of code.
If you have a routine consuming the majority of your time, it doesn't really take that much to rewrite it a few times in C look at the assembly outputs, run them through vtune, and try moving the bottleneck around with some custom assembly. Usually you can get a nice incremental improvement doing that, and sometimes doing that work forces you to rethink the problem and come up with a different way of approaching it that can yield multiple order of magnitude improvements. But without the time spent understanding the problem and the way it is behaving on real hardware, knowing which way to approach a rewrite isn't necessarily clear.
You just need to maintain/extend the same piece of code for 10+ years. That means calls at 3AM when it doesn't work. It also means having assorted 3rd parties come in and extend pieces of functionality on a regular basis and then leave.
That will teach you more about code maintainability and stability than letting a bunch of self righteous, clever idiots, "review" your code.
Of course, in the meantime... stick to the basics, clarity, consistency, and simplicity. Also, read a lot of other peoples code, you will discover what you like about their code, as well as what you dislike. Then don't write code like the stuff you find hard to understand. One of the big problems with software is that the KISS principle should reign supreme, but everyone thinks they are the next Mozart, and Einstein rolled into one. Rather than building the next Eiffel tower they end up creating the next Rube Goldberg contraption.
Except in the developer preview I have, I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to get a proper start menu. I was constantly flipping back and forth to start applications.
It basically left me scratching my a** a couple of times trying to figure simple stuff out. It might be intuitive for my 5Y/O but anyone over 20 is going to be like WTF? From someone who actually owns a touchpad and an ipad, and didn't find either interface to be that foreign. The developer preview was a mess.
Yah, American business "We can't find any developers in the US so we have to hire abroad". Two weeks later "Uh, we are laying off 1000 developers".
I totally agree, they wouldn't be laying people off if it was so hard to find new ones. Its 100% about cost cutting, nothing else. Telling people otherwise is a lie. These companies won't be happy until they have thousands of people with 18+ years education willing to work for $10/hour applying for every single software position.
The worse part is that the only kind of cost cutting upper mgmt seems to be able to understand is laying people off. The idea of actually, increasing efficiency, or maybe reducing executive perks never crosses their mind.
The good news is that all that "talent" lying around is busy starting new companies that compete with the big IBM's and HPs of the world. If your going to work at a poverty level, you might as well work for yourself, in the hopes you can make something of it.
I flew regularly on business for just over a decade and the only time I flew in/out of Texas
Its nothing particular to Texas, but when the US hubs go down air traffic gets disrupted. Loosing two of them in the middle of the country will cause the remaining ones (in the middle) to go over capacity and basically deadlock. If you fly enough you have probably seen what happens when one of the major hubs goes down, even for a few hours. Its not pretty. The east and west coast N-S routes will probably survive but the east-west routes will have serious problems as planes back up in chicago and other airports already at near 100% capacity. It then would be a question of how the airlines can cope with huge scheduling problems. It doesn't matter if your flying from boston to NY, you will have disruption if the plane or crew used on the route is inbound from some place in the midwest. If the deadlock lasts more than a few weeks the airlines could probably recover by using some second tier airports, but it won't last that long, someone will cave.
Because Texas has two very important hubs, DFW and IAH. Plus a very large number of southwest flights pass through Texas. When DFW/IAH gets shutdown the ripples will be national, good luck finding a flight anywhere. The texas leg should totally call their bluff, lets see what happens when united can't fly through IAH, and American can't fly through DFW. Plus chopping the middle out of southwest won't be pretty either.
Loosing the 2,3 and 4th largest airlines in the US will be a bigger problem for TSA, than any terrorist attack.
That was me before I got married/kids. It was fantastic..
I would get up and have another 4-6 hours of _VERY_ productive time. I would go running, go to the gym, write code, go to the local bar and hit on women, remodel the house, etc. This was when I was the most effective.
Now I just walk around like a zombie all day, until I hit the bed. Nothing really gets done unless I drink massive quantities of caffeine.
Firefox desperately needs to be made more parallel so that rendering and UI don't block so much.
Yah, so it can consume all my memory and processors. Right now running the 32-bit version its limited to one CPU and ~2GB of memory. Which I can live with. I will definitely dump it the second it becomes parallel and consumes all my cores and all my memory.
Toyota says there's no reason to change synthetic in the Prius any more often than 10000 miles.
Yah, and with my tundra there is an *, which says, if you tow, drive off-road, or in heavy stop and go traffic it should be 5k. I'm betting redlining it counts too.
Its not just how long the oil "lasts" its how much crap it collects, and how much damage that stuff does during normal operation. Then its a question of how much damage is acceptable over the "lifetime" of the car. So is toyota shooting for 500k or are they shooting for 100k, before you need new valve stems and rings?
The fact that they change it by 1/2 depending on duty cycle makes me think there may not be as much play as you would like. Of course if your selling it after two years, what is the point of changing the oil anyway.
I don't think cylinder wear is particularly prominent among the causes of death for cars. Where I live I see a fair number of older cars that have internal leaks. They are easily diagnosed by the oil smoke that comes out in varying amounts idling at the stoplight, under acceleration, etc (depending on problem). Given the fact that its visible at all indicates some pretty serious issues that probably will result in major bills in the near future. Bills that are often better spent on buying another junker.
What a load of shit, its not like you pass 12534.12 miles and your oil is suddenly "bad". No it gets progressively worse from the second you pour it in. Making a judgment about how bad it can get isn't something a lab is going to tell you.
Synthetics only slow the rate of oil breakdown, they don't do anything about the fact that its collecting combustion byproducts that the filter cannot remove. That crap is basically just a really fine buffing compound, in your oil. So, hey no worries...
You don't even need to send it off to a lab (cause what are they going to tell you anyway, 1% of your oil is sludge, 25% of your oil is sludge, how much is too much?), if you check the oil and the papertowel you wipe it on has something that's darker than honey you should start thinking about it.
The manufactures recommended intervals are based on how many times you should change it over a given estimated lifetime to avoid excessive wear. What those numbers are, don't appear in your owners manual. If the manufacturer is shooting for more than 150k I would be surprised. Increasing the frequency will increase the lifetime, on the converse, racing, towing, etc will increase the wear... So its a mixed bag, don't be surprised when your rice racer with synthetic oil starts burning it from the valve stems after 50k cause you only changed the oil twice and it gets revved to 8k daily.
My 80's ford did the same thing with the fan *"relay module". In that case it was simply bad connectors which corroded enough that the module basically turned into a big resistor and melted.
*Module, because just having a $5 relay wasn't good enough, it needed some resistors, a BJT, and a proprietary connector to justify the $100.
Funny, thats the same line, i've been using about windows. I work on linux all day, come home and run an old ass XP copy with the security settings turned up to "irritating".
But, I don't have to deal with broken sound drivers, multiple monitor x configs, etc, every few months.
Course I'm the weird guy out at work too, I'm running 2k3 and xming on my desktop that hasn't been reinstalled since (ugh ) 2005. All the guys running linux on their desktops have reinstalled every year or so, and with a day or two of downtime, while they retweak everything to actually work again.
Strangely well publicized. Toyota has some unprovable problem, and its news for 8 months (right after they took the top auto spot too). A few Fords burn peoples houses down, and the volt's battery packs spontaneously combust and its not even news. Heck my mustang had more recalls in one year than the tachoma I purchased in 99 (still can't sell it, its the best vehicle I've ever owned, it only gets driven a couple times a week now, since its been replaced by another toyota) had in 13 years.
My experience with a fairly recent Acura, is that they are actually worse than Ford.. Of course this stuff is all model specific, but I don't consider a near 100% failure rate on transmissions before 120k a quality automobile. The Acura v6 my wife has, is an oil leak monster, and needs to have its EGR ports cleaned every 30k miles or they clog. It too eats engine mounts (honda has this problem on probably every car they have made in the last 20 years). Some of their models were reliable, but my mother, a devout honda buyer for 30 years now, has a track record that isn't very good of picking crappy ones. Of the 6 (IIRC) only two were what I would call quality automobiles out to 120k miles.
I'm actually convinced that as soon as honda figured out how to make an engine with more than 100HP they forgot to upgrade the rest of the drive train.
If you want to know where AMD is fucking up its killing Thuban and AM3.
Yes, I was just looking for a PII X2 565 (did the 570 actually ever ship?). Seems AMD doesn't ship those anymore, newegg has discontinued them, about the only place to get them is doggy 3rd tier vendors.
Anyway, if they won't make something I want to buy, then that sort of seals the deal. I'm willing to put up with being a few percent slower than intels flagship (especially if it costs 1/2), but not having anything in a market is just stupid.
Just think, if this keeps up, it will be possible to make money, by exchanging your dollars for pennies and selling them on the commodities market.... Then repeat....
Of course, that is sort of what caused the last bust.
But, its telling if the smaller denominations cannot be produced effectively because the base metals are to expensive. Worse yet is the raw manufacturing cost is almost 1/2...
On the positive side, no one will counterfeit something that is worth less than the materials used to make it.
If this takes off, apple could probably beat it with just a ios app emulator for osx, and a decent remote desktop app for ios. I have a couple pads, and I just open a RDP session if I need a windows only app. Frankly the kind of heavyweight windows apps that dont run on an ipad arent going to suddenly stop consuming tons of CPU.
Its funny, thats what i'm doing now because my desktop browser is better/faster than the one built into the tablet.
Exactly, the question long term becomes, at what cost/transaction does it make sense to throw all that legacy software away, and recreate it on a system where the cost/transaction is significantly less.
You can hire a lot of programmer/hours to rewrite a system, using the cost savings going from a $1.5M/year to $120K/year system, over a life span of multiple decades.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I agree with this 100%. In general no, most apps don't need or shouldn't have access to an actual framebuffer. Thats assuming something that even makes sense as a framebuffer is available.
On the other hand, the topic of mirror drivers comes up fairly frequently on ntdev, because windows lacks the ability to access the framebuffer directly. Sometimes people with legitimate needs want to know what parts of the screen are being updated, etc..
So, there are reasons for lower level access to the video hardware. The nvidia stance that its should all be black magic outside of D3D or whatnot is complete BS. I've personally made utilities that hack some portion of a video card, because the vendor didn't provide support for some feature or another. That was back in the bad old days when you could call up the vendor of the video chipset and receive a 800 page book in the mail detailing the register set.
yes... same with vesa, and another poster pointing out that even in the DOS days people depended on the DOS for file io, and setting up the initial execution environment.
That said, the closest thing in windows (that i'm aware of) to the fbdev in linux is the deprecated directdraw hardware surface (which is a darn lot like SDL!). As I understand it, directdraw is completely emulated in software since vista. Even back in the w2k days it didn't give you full access to the hardware framebuffer, instead giving you a mapping to what was effectively a mapped surface that the hardware placed into the actual framebuffer. Basically, it behaved more like mapping a texture to a polygon being flushed to the actual hardware framebuffer than full framebuffer access.
Not that you really want to access the framebuffer over PCIe anyway, its a lot faster to use one of the dozen 3d tricks than access it directly. Hence direct2d.
(per writing to the hardware)
No, that would be impossible on modern computers (unless you would only run the demo on one gfx card - and maybe even only on one specific firmware version at that).
If by "modern" you mean linux, there is fbdev which has a semi standard kernel interface for providing drivers that export the framebuffer. You mmap the local fbdev device into your process. Its fairly cross platform and cross video card (for many older ones it uses the VESA API). Sure it won't let you twiddle the PCI BAR's or individual card registers, but if you want to do that you can hack the appropriate fbdev driver. Most of them are just a thousand lines or so (been there done that, don't ask). It just depends on how much you really want to tweak the hardware. Most it seems just want a framebuffer and hardware blit support (or line drawing/etc).
Sitting on that, you can have SDL or DirectFB, which attempt to provide more than a basic framebuffer and mode setting API in a cross platform manner. The primary goal seems to be some basic hardware acceleration. The nice thing about them, is that if a particular piece of hardware doesn't support some feature they emulate it with software. In the case of some old sparc video cards that apparently goes as far as emulating the framebuffer.
From what I understand frys is a cash business. They don't have stores everywhere because they only open a new one when they can buy it outright rather than leveraging the whole business (unlike just about every other big box retailer).
That said, I'm in Austin, which is considered tech heavy, but the customer base at frys seems to be mostly non tech. Heck the customer base is ~50% female. Probably only about 10% of the store is heavy tech geek (PC/electronics components). The rest is just like best buy, CD/DVDs, TVs, appliances, phones, pcs, etc. Its just a better selection. The laptop area probably has upwards of 100 laptops on display. Same with the TV's. The raw floorspace of just the CD/DVD section is roughly on par with the total floorspace at the (fairly small for a best buy) best buy near my house.
Its just basically walmart for electronics, complete with more registers than a walmart (over a hundred, of which 20 or so are active most of the time, and the remainder get lit up around Christmas or big sale weekends).
Prove they cannot read the constitution anymore than the "liberals". In fact in this case the "liberals" seem to have been able to read it while the conservatives failed.
Reminds me of a bumpersticker, I saw on a truck with a bunch of Ron Paul stickers.
"Its not left vs right, its us vs the state"
The whole case was ridiculous anyway, so far fsked up to make the movie Brazil seem downright normal.
It also reminds me of the line in the recent heath care hearings where Kennedy was worried about how insurance companies would cope (with the mandate being struck down, while leaving the rest of the requirements in place). All I could think of was, that he wasn't doing his job, which was to decide if the law was constitutional or not. If the law puts the insurance companies out of business that is congresses problem not his.
Other people have posted about the manufactures test utilities, RAID etc.
But I didn't see anyone mention that most newer drives can run media scans while idle.
For example seagate supports the T10 Background Media Scan (BMS), where the drive scans itself, and relocates sectors when its not actively processing commands from the host. It also supports idle read after write, which reads recently written sectors and compares them with the copy in the cache during idle periods.
Finally, all the modern RAID controllers i've seen have scrub options for validating the RAID parity and taking drives offline that are failing the parity checks. (which is mostly pointless if your drive is scrubbing itself, the ECC from the drive provides more protection than RAID5. 6 is probably safer..).
The key of course it to make sure your raid controller understand the drive failure metrics behind it.
That is true when your ripping through a lot of code.
If you have a routine consuming the majority of your time, it doesn't really take that much to rewrite it a few times in C look at the assembly outputs, run them through vtune, and try moving the bottleneck around with some custom assembly. Usually you can get a nice incremental improvement doing that, and sometimes doing that work forces you to rethink the problem and come up with a different way of approaching it that can yield multiple order of magnitude improvements. But without the time spent understanding the problem and the way it is behaving on real hardware, knowing which way to approach a rewrite isn't necessarily clear.
You just need to maintain/extend the same piece of code for 10+ years. That means calls at 3AM when it doesn't work. It also means having assorted 3rd parties come in and extend pieces of functionality on a regular basis and then leave.
That will teach you more about code maintainability and stability than letting a bunch of self righteous, clever idiots, "review" your code.
Of course, in the meantime... stick to the basics, clarity, consistency, and simplicity. Also, read a lot of other peoples code, you will discover what you like about their code, as well as what you dislike. Then don't write code like the stuff you find hard to understand. One of the big problems with software is that the KISS principle should reign supreme, but everyone thinks they are the next Mozart, and Einstein rolled into one. Rather than building the next Eiffel tower they end up creating the next Rube Goldberg contraption.
Except in the developer preview I have, I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to get a proper start menu. I was constantly flipping back and forth to start applications.
It basically left me scratching my a** a couple of times trying to figure simple stuff out. It might be intuitive for my 5Y/O but anyone over 20 is going to be like WTF? From someone who actually owns a touchpad and an ipad, and didn't find either interface to be that foreign. The developer preview was a mess.
Yah, American business "We can't find any developers in the US so we have to hire abroad". Two weeks later "Uh, we are laying off 1000 developers".
I totally agree, they wouldn't be laying people off if it was so hard to find new ones. Its 100% about cost cutting, nothing else. Telling people otherwise is a lie. These companies won't be happy until they have thousands of people with 18+ years education willing to work for $10/hour applying for every single software position.
The worse part is that the only kind of cost cutting upper mgmt seems to be able to understand is laying people off. The idea of actually, increasing efficiency, or maybe reducing executive perks never crosses their mind.
The good news is that all that "talent" lying around is busy starting new companies that compete with the big IBM's and HPs of the world. If your going to work at a poverty level, you might as well work for yourself, in the hopes you can make something of it.
I flew regularly on business for just over a decade and the only time I flew in/out of Texas
Its nothing particular to Texas, but when the US hubs go down air traffic gets disrupted. Loosing two of them in the middle of the country will cause the remaining ones (in the middle) to go over capacity and basically deadlock. If you fly enough you have probably seen what happens when one of the major hubs goes down, even for a few hours. Its not pretty. The east and west coast N-S routes will probably survive but the east-west routes will have serious problems as planes back up in chicago and other airports already at near 100% capacity. It then would be a question of how the airlines can cope with huge scheduling problems. It doesn't matter if your flying from boston to NY, you will have disruption if the plane or crew used on the route is inbound from some place in the midwest. If the deadlock lasts more than a few weeks the airlines could probably recover by using some second tier airports, but it won't last that long, someone will cave.
Because Texas has two very important hubs, DFW and IAH. Plus a very large number of southwest flights pass through Texas. When DFW/IAH gets shutdown the ripples will be national, good luck finding a flight anywhere. The texas leg should totally call their bluff, lets see what happens when united can't fly through IAH, and American can't fly through DFW. Plus chopping the middle out of southwest won't be pretty either.
Loosing the 2,3 and 4th largest airlines in the US will be a bigger problem for TSA, than any terrorist attack.
That was me before I got married/kids. It was fantastic..
I would get up and have another 4-6 hours of _VERY_ productive time. I would go running, go to the gym, write code, go to the local bar and hit on women, remodel the house, etc. This was when I was the most effective.
Now I just walk around like a zombie all day, until I hit the bed. Nothing really gets done unless I drink massive quantities of caffeine.
Firefox desperately needs to be made more parallel so that rendering and UI don't block so much.
Yah, so it can consume all my memory and processors. Right now running the 32-bit version its limited to one CPU and ~2GB of memory. Which I can live with. I will definitely dump it the second it becomes parallel and consumes all my cores and all my memory.
Toyota says there's no reason to change synthetic in the Prius any more often than 10000 miles.
Yah, and with my tundra there is an *, which says, if you tow, drive off-road, or in heavy stop and go traffic it should be 5k. I'm betting redlining it counts too.
Its not just how long the oil "lasts" its how much crap it collects, and how much damage that stuff does during normal operation. Then its a question of how much damage is acceptable over the "lifetime" of the car. So is toyota shooting for 500k or are they shooting for 100k, before you need new valve stems and rings?
The fact that they change it by 1/2 depending on duty cycle makes me think there may not be as much play as you would like. Of course if your selling it after two years, what is the point of changing the oil anyway.
I don't think cylinder wear is particularly prominent among the causes of death for cars.
Where I live I see a fair number of older cars that have internal leaks. They are easily diagnosed by the oil smoke that comes out in varying amounts idling at the stoplight, under acceleration, etc (depending on problem). Given the fact that its visible at all indicates some pretty serious issues that probably will result in major bills in the near future. Bills that are often better spent on buying another junker.
What a load of shit, its not like you pass 12534.12 miles and your oil is suddenly "bad". No it gets progressively worse from the second you pour it in. Making a judgment about how bad it can get isn't something a lab is going to tell you.
Synthetics only slow the rate of oil breakdown, they don't do anything about the fact that its collecting combustion byproducts that the filter cannot remove. That crap is basically just a really fine buffing compound, in your oil. So, hey no worries...
You don't even need to send it off to a lab (cause what are they going to tell you anyway, 1% of your oil is sludge, 25% of your oil is sludge, how much is too much?), if you check the oil and the papertowel you wipe it on has something that's darker than honey you should start thinking about it.
The manufactures recommended intervals are based on how many times you should change it over a given estimated lifetime to avoid excessive wear. What those numbers are, don't appear in your owners manual. If the manufacturer is shooting for more than 150k I would be surprised. Increasing the frequency will increase the lifetime, on the converse, racing, towing, etc will increase the wear... So its a mixed bag, don't be surprised when your rice racer with synthetic oil starts burning it from the valve stems after 50k cause you only changed the oil twice and it gets revved to 8k daily.
My 80's ford did the same thing with the fan *"relay module". In that case it was simply bad connectors which corroded enough that the module basically turned into a big resistor and melted.
*Module, because just having a $5 relay wasn't good enough, it needed some resistors, a BJT, and a proprietary connector to justify the $100.
Funny, thats the same line, i've been using about windows. I work on linux all day, come home and run an old ass XP copy with the security settings turned up to "irritating".
But, I don't have to deal with broken sound drivers, multiple monitor x configs, etc, every few months.
Course I'm the weird guy out at work too, I'm running 2k3 and xming on my desktop that hasn't been reinstalled since (ugh ) 2005. All the guys running linux on their desktops have reinstalled every year or so, and with a day or two of downtime, while they retweak everything to actually work again.
Toyota also had some well-publicized disasters.
Strangely well publicized. Toyota has some unprovable problem, and its news for 8 months (right after they took the top auto spot too). A few Fords burn peoples houses down, and the volt's battery packs spontaneously combust and its not even news. Heck my mustang had more recalls in one year than the tachoma I purchased in 99 (still can't sell it, its the best vehicle I've ever owned, it only gets driven a couple times a week now, since its been replaced by another toyota) had in 13 years.
The only thing worth a note is the Acura V6.
My experience with a fairly recent Acura, is that they are actually worse than Ford.. Of course this stuff is all model specific, but I don't consider a near 100% failure rate on transmissions before 120k a quality automobile. The Acura v6 my wife has, is an oil leak monster, and needs to have its EGR ports cleaned every 30k miles or they clog. It too eats engine mounts (honda has this problem on probably every car they have made in the last 20 years). Some of their models were reliable, but my mother, a devout honda buyer for 30 years now, has a track record that isn't very good of picking crappy ones. Of the 6 (IIRC) only two were what I would call quality automobiles out to 120k miles.
I'm actually convinced that as soon as honda figured out how to make an engine with more than 100HP they forgot to upgrade the rest of the drive train.
If you want to know where AMD is fucking up its killing Thuban and AM3.
Yes, I was just looking for a PII X2 565 (did the 570 actually ever ship?). Seems AMD doesn't ship those anymore, newegg has discontinued them, about the only place to get them is doggy 3rd tier vendors.
Anyway, if they won't make something I want to buy, then that sort of seals the deal. I'm willing to put up with being a few percent slower than intels flagship (especially if it costs 1/2), but not having anything in a market is just stupid.
Just think, if this keeps up, it will be possible to make money, by exchanging your dollars for pennies and selling them on the commodities market.... Then repeat....
Of course, that is sort of what caused the last bust.
But, its telling if the smaller denominations cannot be produced effectively because the base metals are to expensive. Worse yet is the raw manufacturing cost is almost 1/2...
On the positive side, no one will counterfeit something that is worth less than the materials used to make it.
If this takes off, apple could probably beat it with just a ios app emulator for osx, and a decent remote desktop app for ios. I have a couple pads, and I just open a RDP session if I need a windows only app. Frankly the kind of heavyweight windows apps that dont run on an ipad arent going to suddenly stop consuming tons of CPU.
Its funny, thats what i'm doing now because my desktop browser is better/faster than the one built into the tablet.
Exactly, the question long term becomes, at what cost/transaction does it make sense to throw all that legacy software away, and recreate it on a system where the cost/transaction is significantly less.
You can hire a lot of programmer/hours to rewrite a system, using the cost savings going from a $1.5M/year to $120K/year system, over a life span of multiple decades.