Re:Off-topic here, but where is that focus option?
on
Steam Users Steamed
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· Score: 1
TweakUI -> General -> Focus -> Prevent applications from stealing focus.
Looks like something's disabled this on my machine actually, but the Connecting dialog still steals focus when I turn it back on. So make that once, which is still one too many.
If a squillion Slashdotters can't work that out, how do you expect anyone not even remotely technical and who just likes to play games to work it out? I don't see a "Make available offline" button or option anywhere, and I administrate servers and write code for a living!
IMO the Steam client sucks. It quadrupled the size of my natd command line for all the ports it wants forwarding and the Friends network *still* barely works, it has no conception for storing its GB's of data on another drive, or for using another disk for its temp files, it takes ages to shut down so restarting it usually involves at least one "you can't run more than one copy" error, its anti-cheating stuff is seemingly non-existant, and it doesn't even tell you what any updates actually *do*, nor does it give me any recourse if a patch breaks something. Oh, and in the course of starting it, it stole my focus twice despite Windows being set to disallow that.
*How* many years have they been developing this thing? How many millions of dollars have they made out of it? And they can't even have it load my system-specified browser when I have it load a website!? Gah!
It's not so much bandwidth as not scanning the entire ports tree every time you update; it's less work for the client and the server. cvsup isn't that fast even with a good 10+Mbit connection, since it's largely IO-limited.
portversion uses INDEX(.db), which isn't always up to date; pkg_version walks the list of installed packages and asks each port what the current version is using make. Of course portsnap keeps the INDEX up to date for you in a much more effecient manner than make fetch (which grabs a.bz2'd copy of the entire thing each time), so I guess I might as well switch my aliases:)
"Update your software collection: cd/usr/ports; make update portupgrade -ra"
I prefer:
portsnap fetch portsnap update # use binary diffs to effeciently track small port deltas portaudit # get a quick security audit of installed ports and base system pkg_version -vL = # I alias this to pkg_chk; list updated port versions portupgrade [whatever needs doing]
Opera's a little more aggressive with caching in memory, but that's tweakable (and seems to scale reasonably to available memory). It went through a few versions where it tended to leak a lot of memory over the course of a few days heavy use, but I don't see that any more, even in 8 beta. Firefox, on the other hand, seems to leak like a sieve.
Rendering and speed wise I find Opera significantly better/faster. That's highly dependent on the sites you visit of course, but I'm a web developer, and Gecko really does give me more problems with rendering than Presto. Yay for endlessly blocking clipping/reflow bugs:(
They fly at a few millionths of an inch above the media (~4000+ times thinner than a human hair) -- you better believe it:)
There is some leeway of course; otherwise your drives would die every time you had a bout of high or low pressure. I'm pretty sure the 25%+ between 7200RPM and even 5400 will put them well outside of those limits:)
"What of drives that tout huge shock tolerances (like 225 g's over 2ms) while operating. I always thought that that meant while that impulse, the head wouldn't hit the platter. Does it mean the head can hit the platter that hard without causing damage?"
The closer to the platters the heads fly at, the greater the aerodynamic forces keeping it away from the platters; this gives you fairly impressive shock resistance (comparitively; 225g over 2ms isn't hard to create in the slightest), but I doubt any manufacturer will guarantee the disk won't skip a beat while it waits for the heads to settle:)
"You can buy a laptop HD with 7200 rpm. Why can't you buy one that spins at both speeds at different times?"
Aerodynamics. Drive heads need to run at a certain (*exceedingly* small) height from the platter, and they achieve this by being aerodynamically shaped as to use the air flowing over the platter to remain in flight. Change platter speed -> change the height the heads will fly at. It's not a simple case of making the motor variable-speed and modifying the controller.
I think the gp meant that disk caching can become counterproductive if your cache gets too huge, because it starts adding a significant latency just looking up data in the cache. Thankfully I doubt many cache lookup strategies these days use a linear search;)
The Barracuda 7200.7's go up to 200G; I have an 80G, 2 160G's and 3 200G's and they've been very good. The 7200.8's go up to 400G (3 * 133G platters; as dense as it gets) and they're *expected* to continue the good spell Seagate seem to be having.
Storage Review are good for comparing drives. They don't have 7200.8 reviews yet though, and their reliability database isn't going to be of much use for them for a while.
If read time is your priority, RAID-1 should work just as well; RAID-0 is mainly useful for when you need faster writes and more storage, and don't care about the massively reduced reliability.
Seagate have been good for (S)ATA in my experience (and seems to be confirmed by StorageReview's reliability survey). A pair of 7200.7's should do you just fine (and they have 5 year warranties).
Probably letting them melt. I've had more than one HD problem with a drive that was simply overheating. My tips: get cases where the drive bays sit in front of the case intake fan and get some modest airflow over them, or use 5.25"->3.5" brackets so they have room for air to circulate.
"except that i would suggest he learn XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML"
Aside from pointless spec (or IE) breaking, what does this achieve over XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01? Markup wise, HTML 4.01 Strict is pretty much identical to XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1, but there are a whole load of other issues with using XHTML (1.1 especially) you need to be aware of that suggesting everyone use it is just.. well, silly. This is not a place you want to version-chase unless you like unnecessary hacks and more points of failure.
"a compliant, doctype'd page renders faster than HTML 4.0 in Mozilla and IE"
Wrong. IE supports XHTML the same way it supports tag-soup HTML, and so does Mozilla unless you serve it with a Content-Type IE doesn't support. Unless you have a real reason to use XHTML, it's generally better to use HTML 4.01, especially if you're playing with JS and DOM. Seriously, you're recommending to a newbie to use a doctype who's entire DOM model changes depending on how correctly you serve it?:/
None of the PHP developers I know will even give this a second look thanks to it using Java (and sounding like a complete hack). It's not even worth looking at with requirements like that, unless you're seriously desperate for AOP.
"Isn't the PHP community mostly just people who want to bash out webpages, with the rest made up of people who think it's a good platform for large-scale frameworks?"
Not quite; you missed out the people who don't think PHP's a good platform for anything significant, but who use it anyway because, well, what else is there that they know and other people will use/support?
"I think in Python so the whole idea of calling it a "paradigm" is a bit foreign to me anyhow"
What's AOP like in Python? It's pretty easy in Ruby; there's no direct language support, but it's easily added with reflection and code generation.
"The atmospheric probe deployed its first parachute about one minute later than anticipated, resulting in a small loss of upper atmospheric readings. Through review of records, the problem was later determined to likely be faulty wiring in the parachute control system. The fact that the chute opened at all was attributed to luck."
Some interesting bits on the data recorder there too.
Slashdot Mirror
TweakUI -> General -> Focus -> Prevent applications from stealing focus.
Looks like something's disabled this on my machine actually, but the Connecting dialog still steals focus when I turn it back on. So make that once, which is still one too many.
If a squillion Slashdotters can't work that out, how do you expect anyone not even remotely technical and who just likes to play games to work it out? I don't see a "Make available offline" button or option anywhere, and I administrate servers and write code for a living!
IMO the Steam client sucks. It quadrupled the size of my natd command line for all the ports it wants forwarding and the Friends network *still* barely works, it has no conception for storing its GB's of data on another drive, or for using another disk for its temp files, it takes ages to shut down so restarting it usually involves at least one "you can't run more than one copy" error, its anti-cheating stuff is seemingly non-existant, and it doesn't even tell you what any updates actually *do*, nor does it give me any recourse if a patch breaks something. Oh, and in the course of starting it, it stole my focus twice despite Windows being set to disallow that.
*How* many years have they been developing this thing? How many millions of dollars have they made out of it? And they can't even have it load my system-specified browser when I have it load a website!? Gah!
Um, this is *linking*, right? Why did you just describe proxying?
It's not so much bandwidth as not scanning the entire ports tree every time you update; it's less work for the client and the server. cvsup isn't that fast even with a good 10+Mbit connection, since it's largely IO-limited.
.bz2'd copy of the entire thing each time), so I guess I might as well switch my aliases :)
portversion uses INDEX(.db), which isn't always up to date; pkg_version walks the list of installed packages and asks each port what the current version is using make. Of course portsnap keeps the INDEX up to date for you in a much more effecient manner than make fetch (which grabs a
"Update your software collection: /usr/ports; make update
cd
portupgrade -ra"
I prefer:
portsnap fetch
portsnap update # use binary diffs to effeciently track small port deltas
portaudit # get a quick security audit of installed ports and base system
pkg_version -vL = # I alias this to pkg_chk; list updated port versions
portupgrade [whatever needs doing]
My bad, the redirection is done by your shell. Try sudo sh -c 'echo "..." >/etc/libmap.conf' :)
sudo echo "libpthread.so.1 libthr.so.1" >/etc/libmap.conf
There's your 1:1 threading model. Are you going to tell us scheduler activations are bad now?
Rendering and speed wise I find Opera significantly better/faster. That's highly dependent on the sites you visit of course, but I'm a web developer, and Gecko really does give me more problems with rendering than Presto. Yay for endlessly blocking clipping/reflow bugs
"You have CD quality at 64kbps VBR .. using ogg"
If that's the case, you either have crappy hearing, crappy speakers/headphones/amp/soundcard, or some very easy to encode CD's.
"do they really rely on it that much?"
:)
:)
:)
They fly at a few millionths of an inch above the media (~4000+ times thinner than a human hair) -- you better believe it
There is some leeway of course; otherwise your drives would die every time you had a bout of high or low pressure. I'm pretty sure the 25%+ between 7200RPM and even 5400 will put them well outside of those limits
"What of drives that tout huge shock tolerances (like 225 g's over 2ms) while operating. I always thought that that meant while that impulse, the head wouldn't hit the platter. Does it mean the head can hit the platter that hard without causing damage?"
The closer to the platters the heads fly at, the greater the aerodynamic forces keeping it away from the platters; this gives you fairly impressive shock resistance (comparitively; 225g over 2ms isn't hard to create in the slightest), but I doubt any manufacturer will guarantee the disk won't skip a beat while it waits for the heads to settle
"You can buy a laptop HD with 7200 rpm. Why can't you buy one that spins at both speeds at different times?"
Aerodynamics. Drive heads need to run at a certain (*exceedingly* small) height from the platter, and they achieve this by being aerodynamically shaped as to use the air flowing over the platter to remain in flight. Change platter speed -> change the height the heads will fly at. It's not a simple case of making the motor variable-speed and modifying the controller.
I think the gp meant that disk caching can become counterproductive if your cache gets too huge, because it starts adding a significant latency just looking up data in the cache. Thankfully I doubt many cache lookup strategies these days use a linear search ;)
The Barracuda 7200.7's go up to 200G; I have an 80G, 2 160G's and 3 200G's and they've been very good. The 7200.8's go up to 400G (3 * 133G platters; as dense as it gets) and they're *expected* to continue the good spell Seagate seem to be having.
Storage Review are good for comparing drives. They don't have 7200.8 reviews yet though, and their reliability database isn't going to be of much use for them for a while.
300G 7200.8's are going for about £140 in the UK; a 1:1 $:£ ratio is quite common, so $140 could easily be the cost before significant discounts.
Well duh -- that's why you miniaturize your storage device until you can fit a small RTG into the space you save ;)
If read time is your priority, RAID-1 should work just as well; RAID-0 is mainly useful for when you need faster writes and more storage, and don't care about the massively reduced reliability.
Seagate have been good for (S)ATA in my experience (and seems to be confirmed by StorageReview's reliability survey). A pair of 7200.7's should do you just fine (and they have 5 year warranties).
Probably letting them melt. I've had more than one HD problem with a drive that was simply overheating. My tips: get cases where the drive bays sit in front of the case intake fan and get some modest airflow over them, or use 5.25"->3.5" brackets so they have room for air to circulate.
PAR2 can help with #3, provided your backup's filesystem remains readable.
Jun 1981 A logical map of Usenet when it was still small.
"except that i would suggest he learn XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML"
:/
Aside from pointless spec (or IE) breaking, what does this achieve over XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01? Markup wise, HTML 4.01 Strict is pretty much identical to XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1, but there are a whole load of other issues with using XHTML (1.1 especially) you need to be aware of that suggesting everyone use it is just.. well, silly. This is not a place you want to version-chase unless you like unnecessary hacks and more points of failure.
"a compliant, doctype'd page renders faster than HTML 4.0 in Mozilla and IE"
Wrong. IE supports XHTML the same way it supports tag-soup HTML, and so does Mozilla unless you serve it with a Content-Type IE doesn't support. Unless you have a real reason to use XHTML, it's generally better to use HTML 4.01, especially if you're playing with JS and DOM. Seriously, you're recommending to a newbie to use a doctype who's entire DOM model changes depending on how correctly you serve it?
None of the PHP developers I know will even give this a second look thanks to it using Java (and sounding like a complete hack). It's not even worth looking at with requirements like that, unless you're seriously desperate for AOP.
"Isn't the PHP community mostly just people who want to bash out webpages, with the rest made up of people who think it's a good platform for large-scale frameworks?"
Not quite; you missed out the people who don't think PHP's a good platform for anything significant, but who use it anyway because, well, what else is there that they know and other people will use/support?
"I think in Python so the whole idea of calling it a "paradigm" is a bit foreign to me anyhow"
What's AOP like in Python? It's pretty easy in Ruby; there's no direct language support, but it's easily added with reflection and code generation.
That's a great shot, let down purely by *insane* amounts of noise :(
From Wikipedia's page on the subject:
"The atmospheric probe deployed its first parachute about one minute later than anticipated, resulting in a small loss of upper atmospheric readings. Through review of records, the problem was later determined to likely be faulty wiring in the parachute control system. The fact that the chute opened at all was attributed to luck."
Some interesting bits on the data recorder there too.
HawkinsOS released. Almost installed by some.