The real question this spurs is why don't servers have internal UPS's like laptops do and why aren't there ones designed for low power and long batery life
Data center applications, where you'll find the majority of servers at, are already stuck with having big UPSes for all their equipment (not all of which is the servers). Why pay extra for an internal UPS for each piece when you can use the economies of scale to get a gigantic one that covers multiple pieces instead?
Also, the batteries in a UPS are a consumable; they go bad after some number of years. Not the sort of thing you want to have to take your server down to repair. With a UPS, you just switch to another, interchangable unit, and swap the battery then; server is only down for as long as it takes to reboot.
For a number of years now, there's been a big gap between the performance of desktop and mobile CPUs, with the desktop units having much better bus/memory speed in particular. The server chips have been the only ones with enough horsepower for many applications. While lower power consumption in a high-speed server has been available for a while via AMD's Quiet & Cool approach, Intel's switch to the Core architecture will further popularize making servers that consume less power. The current costs of energy (to run the server and to run the AC to cool it) are forcing performance/watt comparisons to really matter.
Posters here already have identified the Creative patent as being one they filed on January 5, 2001. That was probably early in the design cycle for the Zen players, but before they actually were released.
I for one am glad to see Creative finally prosecuting Apple for all the technology they stole. Clearly Apple has been taking ideas from the superior Nomad products for quite some time now, and that's the only way they've been able to build the obviously derivative user interface used on the iPod.
I don't recall signing any contract with FedEx that says they can search my goods
Sigh. By handing your goods over to them, you agreed to exactly such a contract. See http://www.fedex.com/us/services/intl/ground.html and follow the link for FedEx Ground Tariff. Buried deep in the Customs area is this:
"Inspection of Shipments. FedEx Ground, or its agents or brokers, may open and inspect any or all packages in a shipment at any time. This action may be initiated by FedEx Ground or at the request of government authorities."
It's put there so people think it only applies to stuff going through customs, but the description doesn't restrict it like that so anything goes. You can be sure there are similar statements in all the other shipping services. The fact that people believe they have government mandated privacy rights when handing things over to a commerical 3rd party amuses me. FedEx can do whatever the hell they want with your package, and the worst you can do to them is try to get back your declared value by following their claim procedure. You have no guarantee of privacy whatsoever when sending things through them.
I've found some relief from Chiropractic care as well, with a competant and honest practictioner found via a personal referral from a friend. I've seen multiple shady guys practicing as well, but agree that if you find a good one they can provide substantial relief from some types of back and neck pain (I had a fair amount of both, resulting from bad posture while at my PC and reading with my head in a bad position).
The main problem I have with their approach is that it corrects the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause, which can easily lead to a really severe problem down the road. I watched a case of Chiropractic care gone really wrong, where his response to the patient should have been "you need to see a doctor immediately" after seeing the X-rays. That person ended up getting an emergency cervical fusion, and found that going to a Chiropractor first caused major problems with their health insurance coverage, as they immediately wanted to blame them for the resulting problems.
I have my doubts about their ability to recognize their own limits. Chiropractic has a small range of applications (problems which happen to occur to a larger number of people), but I wouldn't recommend it except to manage a problem that's already been diagnosed by a doctor as mild but recurring. The plentiful warnings at Chirobase are well deserved.
I was thankful to have my pain level drop to a manageable level via his banging away at spots with his little adjustment tool. As soon as I was able to, I promptly began working out the problem areas at the gym and using back exercises recommended by my doctor (he had a little cartoon pamphlet on back pain that I laughed at originally, but the sample excercises at the end rock; wish I had it handy to give more details). That routine has slowly built my muscle and flexibility back up to where my pain is almost gone, and I have no intention or need to see the chiropractor again.
On page 3, the system gets connected to the Internet, at which point he promptly disables the firewall and other important security features that he doesn't understand (that's warning sign #1 right there, the comments about SELinux). Then, on page 6, the system gets re-secured with this ISPConfig software, which may or may not be good.
I hope you're feeling lucky, because I've watched my share of servers get hacked during the period between when the firewall etc. was taken down "just for a minute" and when it was turned back on again. Anyone considering following this unsafe tutorial, do yourself a favor and at least practice this much paranoia: download all the packages recommended, then disconnect your network cable during the period when you have the RedHa...er, CentOS firewall service down. Don't reconnect yourself to the network unless a) you've correctly configured the ISPConfig software, or b) you've turned the firewall back on temporarily because you need to download something else.
Product Activation completely killed the warez market for Windows XP. Seriously, why does Microsoft even try?!
Ah, but this time, the anti-piracy code is going to be written by Microsoft's best programmers, the ones who have recently made Windows the most secure and virus-free desktop operating system available.
What? You say those programmers actually work for Apple? Damn. Well, pirate away then.
> That was possibly the least informed comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
Though your ID is low, it appears you haven't actually been reading Slashdot until now.
> You can obtain good quality capture by pointing a HDTV camera at a computer screen in the same way that you can produce the next harry potter book with ink, paper, a knife and a large supply of potatos.
I had a similar problem recently while driving through Pennsylvania. I had set my car's GPS computer to lead me to Intercourse, but no matter what I pushed it I could only reach Bird in Hand. Of course, I've had this problem with web pages on my PC at home before, so I really can't blame the mapping company.
Re:Why this is significant: Risk Reduction
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
I'm glad to see someone make this point, because it's been a vital one in people I've been talking to. Just this month I switched one of my relatives over to using a Mac Mini to replace their constantly broken Dell with original Win XP. Their concern before was that one day they were going to get some wacky Windows-only application that their daughter needed to use for school, and that by having a Mac instead it would cause trouble. Once I told them we could squeeze XP onto the box as well for the rare case something like that happened, sold! Before I assumed this would always be a hack; now that it's official it's an even easier sell to the endless mass of people disgusted with how much maintenance is needed to keep their Windows PCs running even for simple tasks.
Re:Why this is significant: Risk Reduction
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
You underestimate the casual piracy of many home users. In this particular case many people will tell themselves, "well I only need XP to run this one application once a month, so it's not like Microsoft deserves my money anyway."
In the cases I'm seeing, it's more "I gave money to Microsoft before and they sold me a broken piece of shit that needed constant care to barely even work; fuck them, they've taken enough money from me already".
I've rebuilt a lot of PCs in the last year for people who weren't even able to reinstall Windows themselves after a crash, mostly dial-up users. After a spyware infection took them out, successive reinstall attemps by them failed because the machine was reinfected with remote exploits before they could even finish downloading patches to close the holes (pre-SP2 XP is not a fun place to live). These people are not concerned about proper Microsoft licensing after going through that.
That article that you and many of the other people here are linking to is largely irrelevant. It's true that there have been many people making wild-ass claims about how Omega-3 fatty acids can stave off heart disease without enough clinical data to correlate that claim. Recent work like that you cite suggests that those claims are -1 overrated.
Regardless, it's still true that the average diet in countries like the US is lacking in O-3 fatty acids, and that there are other health problems that can result from this deficency. See the Omega-3 Wikipedia article for an introduction to this subject. Most troubling is that consuming too few of the O-3 fatty acids, especially in an environment where there's an excess of O-6 ones, can decrease the health of the brain (certainly irrelevant for the average person but I care) and increase the body's inflammation level (which causes all kinds of problems that aren't necessarily linked to heart disease; pick up a title like the Meggs&Svec book "The Inflammation Cure" for a discussion of that topic).
I for one welcome our new pig...err, welcome the concept of foods tastier than fish that are heavy in O-3s. However, the past history of the food industry's use of genetically modified products has led me to a total ban on consuming them (which takes a shocking amount of work to pull off). But, please, focus on why tinkering with pig innards is bad, and not on dissing the essentialness of the fatty acids that most people don't get enough of.
You can create "high fructose" stuff as much as you like, it still is sugar. Yes, probably better than "ordinary" beet sugar, but still sugar.
high fructose corn syrup is markedly worse for you than any natural sugar. The main reason HFCS exists is that it's cheaper than real sugar and it doesn't spoil as fast.
Yes, we need fat in our diet, of course, but it's similar to salt in our diet: In "modern" food, you simply cannot eat too little of it, no matter what you do.
Essential Fatty Acids are called that because your body needs them and can't produce them on its own. "Modern" food as you call it has little or no Omega-3 fatty acids; therefore you can eat it all day and not make any significant progress toward getting O-3 fats. The two types of fat are so different in terms of what your body uses them for that you can't substitute one for the other.
Running at 24 bit yields a display that looks like something one would expect to see after dropping a couple hits of acid.
Well, that's at least a huge cost savings for you.
As for reasearch, unless you find someone with the exact same model, even accounts of chipset compatibility in laptop land are not all that reliable. For example, in your case, it sounds like there may be a BIOS problem that's screwing up your VESA support; may not have anything to do with the GPU chip itself, could be a shoddy integration job by Acer (it's not like VESA is important to Windows users so there's little incentive to test).
My experience with running Linux on random laptops has has been so bad that I find one of the machines and boot the Ubuntu and/or Knoppix Live DVDs on them before I'll buy. If I can't get a desktop that's at least usable with those (usually the VESA driver is good enough) I run away.
As a reference point here, 11.1% of AMZN (amazon.com) shares are shorted right now. As another, over 25% of the shares in dead man walking SCOX are shorted.
TIVO's short position is substantial, but calling it "crazy" is overstating the case a bit I think; it's not out of line for a tech company in the subscription model business, which people love to bet against. A really fair comparision would be Sirius Satellite Radio (8.8% short) or XM Radio (14.6% short).
Crazy would be TZOO (Travelzoo), where 39.20% of the float is short right now.
The first Tivo I used was bought with a lifetime subscription in 1999, one of the original Philips models. It's since needed a replacement hard drive (at which point the original owner gave the box to me and upgraded to a newer model), and the modem port blew up (switched to the serial port and ultimately a TivoNet card); with those repairs it's still running fine. As of right now that puts this one at around $2.75/month for its lifetime.
The payback period for the lifetime subscription has been between 2 and 3 years of product use, well within the expected lifetime of the box. Even in the rare case where the Tivo fails before then, it usually adds something to the salvage value of the unit if sold on ebay. As such, I have advised everyone who purchases a Tivo that they should consider the lifetime subscription part of the purchase price of the unit, and to look at it as a 3 year purchase--after which they would normally expect another couple of years worth of free service before the hard drive fails and they need to spend more money.
Now I'm going to have to tell them something else altogether, as Tivo has just priced itself out of the market. Looks like it's time to get familiar with my local cable provider's DVR box.
I haven't seen that many men all trying to bang the same woman since the last time I watched...wait, I wasn't supposed to admit to owning that movie. Nevermind.
Samsung's OneNAND design uses some interesting implementation details to run faster than is normally expected with flash. Their specs at http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/OneN AND/index.htm suggest writes at 9.3MB/s and reads at 108MB/s; plenty fast for many applications even without running multiples in parallel. It's certainly much slower than writing directly to the drive if the drive is active. However, if the drive isn't spun up at the moment and the amount of data to be written fits in the NAND flash cache, I could see this being a net performance boost over the spinup/seek time combination of the hard drive.
They also spec 100,000 erase cycles before it's worn out. As was noted by an underrated poster the last time this came up, intelligent flash controller designs like this can cope with bad bits and assuring level usage of the memory much better than what you normally see in random hunk of flash. An analysis at http://www.sudhian.com/printdocs.cfm?aid=686 suggests 33 years of usage for a typical worker. When you run the numbers it doesn't sound that difficult to create a design that would likely outlast the mechanical parts of a standard hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
$_="if you think the United states wouldn't go to war to protect its economic interests you are fooling yourself";
s/wouldn't/didn't already/g;
print;
If you're in the Netherlands, but can't find anything better to get addicted to than games, clearly you do need help.
If you're ruined simply by programming in BASIC, you never were a potential wizard.
The real question this spurs is why don't servers have internal UPS's like laptops do and why aren't there ones designed for low power and long batery life
Data center applications, where you'll find the majority of servers at, are already stuck with having big UPSes for all their equipment (not all of which is the servers). Why pay extra for an internal UPS for each piece when you can use the economies of scale to get a gigantic one that covers multiple pieces instead?
Also, the batteries in a UPS are a consumable; they go bad after some number of years. Not the sort of thing you want to have to take your server down to repair. With a UPS, you just switch to another, interchangable unit, and swap the battery then; server is only down for as long as it takes to reboot.
For a number of years now, there's been a big gap between the performance of desktop and mobile CPUs, with the desktop units having much better bus/memory speed in particular. The server chips have been the only ones with enough horsepower for many applications. While lower power consumption in a high-speed server has been available for a while via AMD's Quiet & Cool approach, Intel's switch to the Core architecture will further popularize making servers that consume less power. The current costs of energy (to run the server and to run the AC to cool it) are forcing performance/watt comparisons to really matter.
Creative first released their Nomad Jukebox products in early 2000:e .html
h tml
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/createjuk
The first iPod came out on October 23, 2001.
The Nomad Zen was a late 2002 product:
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/nomadzen.
Posters here already have identified the Creative patent as being one they filed on January 5, 2001. That was probably early in the design cycle for the Zen players, but before they actually were released.
I for one am glad to see Creative finally prosecuting Apple for all the technology they stole. Clearly Apple has been taking ideas from the superior Nomad products for quite some time now, and that's the only way they've been able to build the obviously derivative user interface used on the iPod.
(Note to self: turn down sarcasm knob a notch)
That might explain how a grizzly got to the region, but few can explain how it managed to get along with a polar bear long enough to mate.
Clearly none of the people speculating spend much time drinking. You can mate anything with enough Tequila.
I don't recall signing any contract with FedEx that says they can search my goods
Sigh. By handing your goods over to them, you agreed to exactly such a contract. See http://www.fedex.com/us/services/intl/ground.html and follow the link for FedEx Ground Tariff. Buried deep in the Customs area is this:
"Inspection of Shipments. FedEx Ground, or its agents or brokers, may open and inspect any or all packages in a shipment at any time. This action may be initiated by FedEx Ground or at the request of government authorities."
It's put there so people think it only applies to stuff going through customs, but the description doesn't restrict it like that so anything goes. You can be sure there are similar statements in all the other shipping services. The fact that people believe they have government mandated privacy rights when handing things over to a commerical 3rd party amuses me. FedEx can do whatever the hell they want with your package, and the worst you can do to them is try to get back your declared value by following their claim procedure. You have no guarantee of privacy whatsoever when sending things through them.
I've found some relief from Chiropractic care as well, with a competant and honest practictioner found via a personal referral from a friend. I've seen multiple shady guys practicing as well, but agree that if you find a good one they can provide substantial relief from some types of back and neck pain (I had a fair amount of both, resulting from bad posture while at my PC and reading with my head in a bad position).
The main problem I have with their approach is that it corrects the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause, which can easily lead to a really severe problem down the road. I watched a case of Chiropractic care gone really wrong, where his response to the patient should have been "you need to see a doctor immediately" after seeing the X-rays. That person ended up getting an emergency cervical fusion, and found that going to a Chiropractor first caused major problems with their health insurance coverage, as they immediately wanted to blame them for the resulting problems.
I have my doubts about their ability to recognize their own limits. Chiropractic has a small range of applications (problems which happen to occur to a larger number of people), but I wouldn't recommend it except to manage a problem that's already been diagnosed by a doctor as mild but recurring. The plentiful warnings at Chirobase are well deserved.
I was thankful to have my pain level drop to a manageable level via his banging away at spots with his little adjustment tool. As soon as I was able to, I promptly began working out the problem areas at the gym and using back exercises recommended by my doctor (he had a little cartoon pamphlet on back pain that I laughed at originally, but the sample excercises at the end rock; wish I had it handy to give more details). That routine has slowly built my muscle and flexibility back up to where my pain is almost gone, and I have no intention or need to see the chiropractor again.
On page 3, the system gets connected to the Internet, at which point he promptly disables the firewall and other important security features that he doesn't understand (that's warning sign #1 right there, the comments about SELinux). Then, on page 6, the system gets re-secured with this ISPConfig software, which may or may not be good.
I hope you're feeling lucky, because I've watched my share of servers get hacked during the period between when the firewall etc. was taken down "just for a minute" and when it was turned back on again. Anyone considering following this unsafe tutorial, do yourself a favor and at least practice this much paranoia: download all the packages recommended, then disconnect your network cable during the period when you have the RedHa...er, CentOS firewall service down. Don't reconnect yourself to the network unless a) you've correctly configured the ISPConfig software, or b) you've turned the firewall back on temporarily because you need to download something else.
Product Activation completely killed the warez market for Windows XP. Seriously, why does Microsoft even try?!
Ah, but this time, the anti-piracy code is going to be written by Microsoft's best programmers, the ones who have recently made Windows the most secure and virus-free desktop operating system available.
What? You say those programmers actually work for Apple? Damn. Well, pirate
away then.
> That was possibly the least informed comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
Though your ID is low, it appears you haven't actually been reading Slashdot until now.
> You can obtain good quality capture by pointing a HDTV camera at a computer screen in the same way that you can produce the next harry potter book with ink, paper, a knife and a large supply of potatos.
Expect to hear from my patent lawyers if you try.
I had a similar problem recently while driving through Pennsylvania. I had set my car's GPS computer to lead me to Intercourse, but no matter what I pushed it I could only reach Bird in Hand. Of course, I've had this problem with web pages on my PC at home before, so I really can't blame the mapping company.
I'm glad to see someone make this point, because it's been a vital one in people I've been talking to. Just this month I switched one of my relatives over to using a Mac Mini to replace their constantly broken Dell with original Win XP. Their concern before was that one day they were going to get some wacky Windows-only application that their daughter needed to use for school, and that by having a Mac instead it would cause trouble. Once I told them we could squeeze XP onto the box as well for the rare case something like that happened, sold! Before I assumed this would always be a hack; now that it's official it's an even easier sell to the endless mass of people disgusted with how much maintenance is needed to keep their Windows PCs running even for simple tasks.
You underestimate the casual piracy of many home users. In this particular case many people will tell themselves, "well I only need XP to run this one application once a month, so it's not like Microsoft deserves my money anyway."
In the cases I'm seeing, it's more "I gave money to Microsoft before and they sold me a broken piece of shit that needed constant care to barely even work; fuck them, they've taken enough money from me already".
I've rebuilt a lot of PCs in the last year for people who weren't even able to reinstall Windows themselves after a crash, mostly dial-up users. After a spyware infection took them out, successive reinstall attemps by them failed because the machine was reinfected with remote exploits before they could even finish downloading patches to close the holes (pre-SP2 XP is not a fun place to live). These people are not concerned about proper Microsoft licensing after going through that.
That article that you and many of the other people here are linking to is largely irrelevant. It's true that there have been many people making wild-ass claims about how Omega-3 fatty acids can stave off heart disease without enough clinical data to correlate that claim. Recent work like that you cite suggests that those claims are -1 overrated.
Regardless, it's still true that the average diet in countries like the US is lacking in O-3 fatty acids, and that there are other health problems that can result from this deficency. See the Omega-3 Wikipedia article for an introduction to this subject. Most troubling is that consuming too few of the O-3 fatty acids, especially in an environment where there's an excess of O-6 ones, can decrease the health of the brain (certainly irrelevant for the average person but I care) and increase the body's inflammation level (which causes all kinds of problems that aren't necessarily linked to heart disease; pick up a title like the Meggs&Svec book "The Inflammation Cure" for a discussion of that topic).
I for one welcome our new pig...err, welcome the concept of foods tastier than fish that are heavy in O-3s. However, the past history of the food industry's use of genetically modified products has led me to a total ban on consuming them (which takes a shocking amount of work to pull off). But, please, focus on why tinkering with pig innards is bad, and not on dissing the essentialness of the fatty acids that most people don't get enough of.
You can create "high fructose" stuff as much as you like, it still is sugar. Yes, probably better than "ordinary" beet sugar, but still sugar.
high fructose corn syrup is markedly worse for you than any natural sugar. The main reason HFCS exists is that it's cheaper than real sugar and it doesn't spoil as fast.
Yes, we need fat in our diet, of course, but it's similar to salt in our diet: In "modern" food, you simply cannot eat too little of it, no matter what you do.
Essential Fatty Acids are called that because your body needs them and can't produce them on its own. "Modern" food as you call it has little or no Omega-3 fatty acids; therefore you can eat it all day and not make any significant progress toward getting O-3 fats. The two types of fat are so different in terms of what your body uses them for that you can't substitute one for the other.
Running at 24 bit yields a display that looks like something one would expect to see after dropping a couple hits of acid.
Well, that's at least a huge cost savings for you.
As for reasearch, unless you find someone with the exact same model, even accounts of chipset compatibility in laptop land are not all that reliable. For example, in your case, it sounds like there may be a BIOS problem that's screwing up your VESA support; may not have anything to do with the GPU chip itself, could be a shoddy integration job by Acer (it's not like VESA is important to Windows users so there's little incentive to test).
My experience with running Linux on random laptops has has been so bad that I find one of the machines and boot the Ubuntu and/or Knoppix Live DVDs on them before I'll buy. If I can't get a desktop that's at least usable with those (usually the VESA driver is good enough) I run away.
As improbable as it sounds, your story still has a better plot than the last thing I saw Hulk Hogan in.
It's been widely noted that the basic hardware in the MacBook pro is nearly identical to that in the Acer model mentioned in TFA; see http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/ faq/technical_performance_2.html for a rundown. So it's no wonder the run-time is the same.
The appropriate conclusion here is "Macbook Pro runs XP as fast as the fastest PC with the same CPU and chipset", to which I would say, duh!
You drink as much caffeine as narf did to get this accomplished and we'll see how much your hands shake.
You are in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike. You may be eaten by a deadline.
As a reference point here, 11.1% of AMZN (amazon.com) shares are shorted right now. As another, over 25% of the shares in dead man walking SCOX are shorted.
TIVO's short position is substantial, but calling it "crazy" is overstating the case a bit I think; it's not out of line for a tech company in the subscription model business, which people love to bet against. A really fair comparision would be Sirius Satellite Radio (8.8% short) or XM Radio (14.6% short).
Crazy would be TZOO (Travelzoo), where 39.20% of the float is short right now.
The first Tivo I used was bought with a lifetime subscription in 1999, one of the original Philips models. It's since needed a replacement hard drive (at which point the original owner gave the box to me and upgraded to a newer model), and the modem port blew up (switched to the serial port and ultimately a TivoNet card); with those repairs it's still running fine. As of right now that puts this one at around $2.75/month for its lifetime.
The payback period for the lifetime subscription has been between 2 and 3 years of product use, well within the expected lifetime of the box. Even in the rare case where the Tivo fails before then, it usually adds something to the salvage value of the unit if sold on ebay. As such, I have advised everyone who purchases a Tivo that they should consider the lifetime subscription part of the purchase price of the unit, and to look at it as a 3 year purchase--after which they would normally expect another couple of years worth of free service before the hard drive fails and they need to spend more money.
Now I'm going to have to tell them something else altogether, as Tivo has just priced itself out of the market. Looks like it's time to get familiar with my local cable provider's DVR box.
I haven't seen that many men all trying to bang the same woman since the last time I watched...wait, I wasn't supposed to admit to owning that movie. Nevermind.
Samsung's OneNAND design uses some interesting implementation details to run faster than is normally expected with flash. Their specs at http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/OneN AND/index.htm suggest writes at 9.3MB/s and reads at 108MB/s; plenty fast for many applications even without running multiples in parallel. It's certainly much slower than writing directly to the drive if the drive is active. However, if the drive isn't spun up at the moment and the amount of data to be written fits in the NAND flash cache, I could see this being a net performance boost over the spinup/seek time combination of the hard drive.
They also spec 100,000 erase cycles before it's worn out. As was noted by an underrated poster the last time this came up, intelligent flash controller designs like this can cope with bad bits and assuring level usage of the memory much better than what you normally see in random hunk of flash.
An analysis at http://www.sudhian.com/printdocs.cfm?aid=686 suggests 33 years of usage for a typical worker. When you run the numbers it doesn't sound that difficult to create a design that would likely outlast the mechanical parts of a standard hard drive.