Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the OP to you? It gets posted (usually in a modified form) as a rather amusing troll in most Mac-related discussions here nowadays. The "SWITCHEUR" troll is pretty funny too.
I fry/saute with extra virgin olive oil - "First Cold Press", the glass bottle claims. It's imported, I live in the United States of America. It's delicious!
I've been using dial-up at home for all of ten years. They won't even pave our frontage road let alone string cable or DSL out here.
How do I do it? Well, I suppose I'm just used to it. I'd say I use Opera to cope, as it's such a snappy, efficient browser, but I've been using Opera for at least eight years (version 3.something), since before the Internet was bloated, so I guess that doesn't count. I do set the Opera caches to their maximum sizes to minimize the horror of redownloading the static content of websites I visit frequently. Ah yes, I remember now. I really started using Opera because the download size was (and still is) extremely small compared to the other browsers.
I never go to Youtube, don't use MySpace, Google Maps, or other silly websites that break if you don't download the content fast enough. I browse Slashdot with more minimalist settings, with my threshold set at -1 and -all- posts displayed inline so I don't have to click on any comments to actually read them.
On other web forums I usually use the simplest scheme (Relicnews forums has a great setting called "Adminimal") and if I have trouble on a particular site or I get impatient (usually after half an hour of waiting) I'll turn image downloading off and manually download the images that I think I'll need to see.
Google displays 100 search results per page, and I set all forums to the maximum number of posts per page. Display Print Version is a welcome feature on those retarded hardware review websites. It's much better if I download it all in one go, there's a lot of overhead for me in CSS/HTML these days.
On the whole it's not so bad, over the last decade I've still managed to acquire a substantial collection of MP3s (I was in fact one of the 300,000 names on Metallica's hitlist for Napster). Dial-up first started to frustrate me in 2001 when I started making anime music videos. I used my own DVDs as source material but uploading the videos was quite a pain. I remember the first time I downloaded a large file on dial-up, I think it was around 32 megabytes. I was very proud of myself.
I used to play Unreal Tournament over the Internet when the game was very popular (1999-2002). I think the best ping I ever got was around 150-160, and I was so used to playing at over 250ms that I won every round on that server. I was very competitive at LAN parties (ok, I won grand prize at a tournament for budding game developers) but rarely got the opportunity to play at one. I think I could reclaim the glorious days of my youth if I had a better Internet connection...or if this podunk wasteland they call the High Desert of Southern California actually got some good local events going on.
The fact that HP still makes ridiculously expensive EV7-based AlphaServers might have something to do with it.
Still, it surprised me that nobody was insane enough to dump off any Alpha systems where I worked, considering all of the other diamonds in the rough that we uncovered there.
I don't believe adding core after core is what anybody could call an elegant solution to the apparent MHz wall. Not that many tasks can be multithreaded in a way that doubles performance or scales it as well or consistently as core clock. Who plays four video games at once? Is this a WoW thing?
A quad-core Intel CPU at 3GHz was only 11 times faster than a Pentium III in a CPU-bound benchmark (I'd love it if I could remember where I saw it - techreport?). They hailed this as an awesome improvement but core-for-core and clock-for-clock that actually made it slower.
A quick search on eBay doesn't turn up much, but searching Completed Listings for 'Alphaserver' shows quite a few selling for several hundred to over one thousand dollars, and they're not even particularly high-end models for the most part (DS10).
I would have bought an Alphastation or Alphaserver a long time ago, otherwise. Know where I can get one?
In fact, it's interesting to note that during my entire stay at trueCycle, where we processed thousands of tons of electronics, I never encountered a single Alpha processor in any context. Ran across VAXen and plenty of old DEC terminals, ancient SGI and Sun servers and workstations, but never an Alpha. I even found a demo kit from 1976 with a Motorola 6800 on it, their first microprocessor.
I'm well aware of the micro-op hack in modern x86 processors, and if anything it makes them less elegant. Faster per clock than most RISC implementations, sure, but as the GP lamented, it seems as though biodiversity in the ecology of ultra-high-performance general-purpose microprocessors is drying up.
I weep openly at the mention of the DEC Alpha. I'm even touched by the apparent demise of the MIPS processor.
The processors that came out of the Digital's collapse (UltraSPARC V, K7 and K8) were great processors but paled in comparison, especially considering the relative power of other CPUs on the market at the time (200MHz in 1992!).
What else out there is both powerful and elegant? All I see around me are multicore monstrosities.
Where and when was this? We performed this with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra and some other choirs a few years ago. You're right about the piece needing those sudden dynamic changes - respect both the forte and the piano, please!
I was going to moderate this thread, but I just had to chime in with my experiences with Tt's Big Typhoon once I found that it was rated so highly - I recently bought one at a local shop and used the included thermal paste, put it on my Core 2 Duo E6600, and did a modest (25%) overclock, bringing it up to 3GHz. The Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus board I bought was probably the most important component in the overclock, though. I'm a big fan of symmetry so I'm using 2x2GB of lower-latency memory at only 667MHz to match the 1333MHz FSB.
Overclocked, the CPU idles at 30C and doesn't go above 45C under maximum load for both cores as long as I have the case fans running. Needless to say, I was happy to spend $50 in the process of saving ~$650 on an X6800. Room temperature is between 70F and 75F.
I also have a Thermaltake Blue Orb (II?) on my older Athlon 64 3400+. I'm not entirely satisfied with its performance but I'm not sure if it's the fault of the heatsink, misapplied thermal paste, or ventilation issues in the case (Thermaltake Armor, yes I am a fanboy). It's idling at 48C right now with a room temperature of 75F.
What are you on? Spindle speed is far more important for sequential transfer rates than areal density. It's also the biggest factor for seek time, which can impact a server with lots of concurrent I/O significantly more than raw transfer rate.
500GB/7200RPM SATA drives have a minimum sequential transfer rate of around 35-45 megabytes per second, with the maximum possible somewhere around 75 megabytes per second. 73-147GB 10,000RPM SCSI drives have comparable minimum transfer rate performance, but with maximum rates of 80 to nearly 100 megabytes per second. For new 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, the *minimum* sequential transfer rate is 70-80 megabytes per second, topping off at between just under 100 and 135 megabytes per second at the edge of the platters. You can't buy 15,000 RPM SATA or IDE drives - that kind of performance is only available in SCSI, SAS, and FC drives.
Oh, so we control the media, eh? Red Sea pedestrians run the world? So where's my bag of Jew Gold? Where's my direct line to Zion Command? When do I get to lord it over the goyim? It's my birthright, after all!
The Inquirer is definitely the best. They're almost insanely prophetic, update several times a day, review bleeding-edge hardware themselves, and have "round-ups" of other review sites' reviews. Their idiosyncratic slang (boffin, vole, etc) is also amusing.
Definitely digital controls for almost anything. I can't stand them.
If you're in your car and working the climate control, those controls are analog for a good reason. You can see what they're set to and change before you start the car. Stereo systems are another great example (quickly turning volume up/down, not having it reset all the time). Analog dials of all kinds also give you far better real-time feedback about a given signal (delta, etc.).
I know plenty of MySpace Morons in real life and have seen more than a few of their garishly decorated user profiles. I can assure you that plenty of "regular people" sign up with their real names and "information". MySpace shifted the IQ bell curve of Internet users like no other website before it.
I was referring to a short ton, or what we here in the primitive Thirteen Colonies deign to refer to as simply "ton". I assumed that you would be exposed to at least one more of the many types of tons than your very own long ton, and I even included the lbs conversion to clarify. It might interest you to know than both the long ton and the short ton are 20cwt, and that the cwt's weight in pounds is dependent on which ton you're referring to.
Although I'm not the biggest supporter of the metric system I at least recognise the logic in a hundredweight that actually weighs one hundred pounds.
How do I searched web? Come on, this isn't 4chan, is it?
I went to bed right after posting my previous post so you were tragically left in the care of another Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't really bother me.
A gaylord is, yes, a large cardboard box designed to take up one pallet. The cardboard sides are about an inch thick which makes them very tough and quite reusable even when minimum-wage demanufacturing crews throw hundreds of hard drives or power supplies into them all day long. Infrastructure would sometimes cut out part of the side to make unloading the incoming material onto pallets for logging and sorting easier. A little bit more civilised, anyways, than what I saw in the photo essay.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, one of my favourite trolls. I hadn't seen you in quite a while.
I take it you prefer your Muslims "very well done" as opposed to "still twitching"?
You must be new here...
http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like the OP to you? It gets posted (usually in a modified form) as a rather amusing troll in most Mac-related discussions here nowadays. The "SWITCHEUR" troll is pretty funny too.
I fry/saute with extra virgin olive oil - "First Cold Press", the glass bottle claims. It's imported, I live in the United States of America. It's delicious!
I've been using dial-up at home for all of ten years. They won't even pave our frontage road let alone string cable or DSL out here.
How do I do it? Well, I suppose I'm just used to it. I'd say I use Opera to cope, as it's such a snappy, efficient browser, but I've been using Opera for at least eight years (version 3.something), since before the Internet was bloated, so I guess that doesn't count. I do set the Opera caches to their maximum sizes to minimize the horror of redownloading the static content of websites I visit frequently. Ah yes, I remember now. I really started using Opera because the download size was (and still is) extremely small compared to the other browsers.
I never go to Youtube, don't use MySpace, Google Maps, or other silly websites that break if you don't download the content fast enough. I browse Slashdot with more minimalist settings, with my threshold set at -1 and -all- posts displayed inline so I don't have to click on any comments to actually read them.
On other web forums I usually use the simplest scheme (Relicnews forums has a great setting called "Adminimal") and if I have trouble on a particular site or I get impatient (usually after half an hour of waiting) I'll turn image downloading off and manually download the images that I think I'll need to see.
Google displays 100 search results per page, and I set all forums to the maximum number of posts per page. Display Print Version is a welcome feature on those retarded hardware review websites. It's much better if I download it all in one go, there's a lot of overhead for me in CSS/HTML these days.
On the whole it's not so bad, over the last decade I've still managed to acquire a substantial collection of MP3s (I was in fact one of the 300,000 names on Metallica's hitlist for Napster). Dial-up first started to frustrate me in 2001 when I started making anime music videos. I used my own DVDs as source material but uploading the videos was quite a pain. I remember the first time I downloaded a large file on dial-up, I think it was around 32 megabytes. I was very proud of myself.
I used to play Unreal Tournament over the Internet when the game was very popular (1999-2002). I think the best ping I ever got was around 150-160, and I was so used to playing at over 250ms that I won every round on that server. I was very competitive at LAN parties (ok, I won grand prize at a tournament for budding game developers) but rarely got the opportunity to play at one. I think I could reclaim the glorious days of my youth if I had a better Internet connection...or if this podunk wasteland they call the High Desert of Southern California actually got some good local events going on.
Try here - http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/Products.asp
Any laptop that claims "up to 16GB of RAM" can't be half bad.
As far as I know, CP/M on the Zilog Z-80 is still waiting for a JVM...
The fact that HP still makes ridiculously expensive EV7-based AlphaServers might have something to do with it.
Still, it surprised me that nobody was insane enough to dump off any Alpha systems where I worked, considering all of the other diamonds in the rough that we uncovered there.
I don't believe adding core after core is what anybody could call an elegant solution to the apparent MHz wall. Not that many tasks can be multithreaded in a way that doubles performance or scales it as well or consistently as core clock. Who plays four video games at once? Is this a WoW thing?
A quad-core Intel CPU at 3GHz was only 11 times faster than a Pentium III in a CPU-bound benchmark (I'd love it if I could remember where I saw it - techreport?). They hailed this as an awesome improvement but core-for-core and clock-for-clock that actually made it slower.
A quick search on eBay doesn't turn up much, but searching Completed Listings for 'Alphaserver' shows quite a few selling for several hundred to over one thousand dollars, and they're not even particularly high-end models for the most part (DS10).
I would have bought an Alphastation or Alphaserver a long time ago, otherwise. Know where I can get one?
In fact, it's interesting to note that during my entire stay at trueCycle, where we processed thousands of tons of electronics, I never encountered a single Alpha processor in any context. Ran across VAXen and plenty of old DEC terminals, ancient SGI and Sun servers and workstations, but never an Alpha. I even found a demo kit from 1976 with a Motorola 6800 on it, their first microprocessor.
I'm well aware of the micro-op hack in modern x86 processors, and if anything it makes them less elegant. Faster per clock than most RISC implementations, sure, but as the GP lamented, it seems as though biodiversity in the ecology of ultra-high-performance general-purpose microprocessors is drying up.
I weep openly at the mention of the DEC Alpha. I'm even touched by the apparent demise of the MIPS processor.
The processors that came out of the Digital's collapse (UltraSPARC V, K7 and K8) were great processors but paled in comparison, especially considering the relative power of other CPUs on the market at the time (200MHz in 1992!).
What else out there is both powerful and elegant? All I see around me are multicore monstrosities.
Where and when was this? We performed this with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra and some other choirs a few years ago. You're right about the piece needing those sudden dynamic changes - respect both the forte and the piano, please!
I was going to moderate this thread, but I just had to chime in with my experiences with Tt's Big Typhoon once I found that it was rated so highly - I recently bought one at a local shop and used the included thermal paste, put it on my Core 2 Duo E6600, and did a modest (25%) overclock, bringing it up to 3GHz. The Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus board I bought was probably the most important component in the overclock, though. I'm a big fan of symmetry so I'm using 2x2GB of lower-latency memory at only 667MHz to match the 1333MHz FSB.
Overclocked, the CPU idles at 30C and doesn't go above 45C under maximum load for both cores as long as I have the case fans running. Needless to say, I was happy to spend $50 in the process of saving ~$650 on an X6800. Room temperature is between 70F and 75F.
I also have a Thermaltake Blue Orb (II?) on my older Athlon 64 3400+. I'm not entirely satisfied with its performance but I'm not sure if it's the fault of the heatsink, misapplied thermal paste, or ventilation issues in the case (Thermaltake Armor, yes I am a fanboy). It's idling at 48C right now with a room temperature of 75F.
What are you on? Spindle speed is far more important for sequential transfer rates than areal density. It's also the biggest factor for seek time, which can impact a server with lots of concurrent I/O significantly more than raw transfer rate.
500GB/7200RPM SATA drives have a minimum sequential transfer rate of around 35-45 megabytes per second, with the maximum possible somewhere around 75 megabytes per second. 73-147GB 10,000RPM SCSI drives have comparable minimum transfer rate performance, but with maximum rates of 80 to nearly 100 megabytes per second. For new 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, the *minimum* sequential transfer rate is 70-80 megabytes per second, topping off at between just under 100 and 135 megabytes per second at the edge of the platters. You can't buy 15,000 RPM SATA or IDE drives - that kind of performance is only available in SCSI, SAS, and FC drives.
Oh, so we control the media, eh? Red Sea pedestrians run the world? So where's my bag of Jew Gold? Where's my direct line to Zion Command? When do I get to lord it over the goyim? It's my birthright, after all!
Trolls don't actually read Slashdot. They're not even PEOPLE for heaven's sake! Not even 2/5ths of a person.
The Inquirer is definitely the best. They're almost insanely prophetic, update several times a day, review bleeding-edge hardware themselves, and have "round-ups" of other review sites' reviews. Their idiosyncratic slang (boffin, vole, etc) is also amusing.
Definitely digital controls for almost anything. I can't stand them.
If you're in your car and working the climate control, those controls are analog for a good reason. You can see what they're set to and change before you start the car. Stereo systems are another great example (quickly turning volume up/down, not having it reset all the time). Analog dials of all kinds also give you far better real-time feedback about a given signal (delta, etc.).
It looks to me more like the plan that these guys are carrying out is working like a charm!
It almost makes me ashamed that I didn't vote for any of those clownboats.
That would only be one step at a time if you were starting with Ebmail or switching to F#mail, then G#mail.
At least G#mail is pretty upscale compared to Email.
So they plan on taxing things that don't make anybody any money? Or are they only taxing commercial e-mail?
I know plenty of MySpace Morons in real life and have seen more than a few of their garishly decorated user profiles. I can assure you that plenty of "regular people" sign up with their real names and "information". MySpace shifted the IQ bell curve of Internet users like no other website before it.
Dear, dear pedantic clownboat:
I was referring to a short ton, or what we here in the primitive Thirteen Colonies deign to refer to as simply "ton". I assumed that you would be exposed to at least one more of the many types of tons than your very own long ton, and I even included the lbs conversion to clarify. It might interest you to know than both the long ton and the short ton are 20cwt, and that the cwt's weight in pounds is dependent on which ton you're referring to.
Although I'm not the biggest supporter of the metric system I at least recognise the logic in a hundredweight that actually weighs one hundred pounds.
How do I searched web? Come on, this isn't 4chan, is it?
I went to bed right after posting my previous post so you were tragically left in the care of another Anonymous Coward, but that doesn't really bother me.
A gaylord is, yes, a large cardboard box designed to take up one pallet. The cardboard sides are about an inch thick which makes them very tough and quite reusable even when minimum-wage demanufacturing crews throw hundreds of hard drives or power supplies into them all day long. Infrastructure would sometimes cut out part of the side to make unloading the incoming material onto pallets for logging and sorting easier. A little bit more civilised, anyways, than what I saw in the photo essay.
So would you hazard a guess as to what it actually is? Random, generic point of sale board perhaps?