All WinXP asked me was, essentially, "What is your Country and TimeZone".
Yes, and it still had to be told 4 times. Put in language, keyboard layout, location and timezone. Individually. And it forgets each time. If I'm in Scotland, doesn't it make sense to be in GMT/BST timezone? No! The default is still PST (or EST, I forget). What it should do is ask for location and present a set of defaults for that location; i.e. for the UK, default is English(British), keyboard layout is UK and timezone is GMT/BST.
This gets particularly annoying when the VIA USB drivers keep screwing up the registry when doing large transfers (e.g. PDA syncing, copying data to CF cards) requiring a reinstall every 5 minutes.
Re:You've completely missed the point....
on
April Fools Wrap Up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hallelujah, I'm not alone in thinking a slashback was the best way to handle this (hint: try this next year guys; you might get less flames). As others have pointed out, having a joke in amongst the real stories is the best way to go. The silliness hit rock bottom way too early yesterday.
I can cope with the overrated, but offtopic? Given the level of "reporting" from/. today, I don't think we can consider anything offtopic...
However, "redundant" has taken on a new meaning, as the first post (yes, it was, BFD) gets moderated as redundant.
Note: This is not an invitation to partake in a flame war; just my thoughts on the moderation. Ho, hum, off to post a comment to give me that extra +1 to max out at 50 again...:) Wonder if this will be it or if I'll get whacked with a -2 for troll/flamebait...;)
Ok, my view on it. I used to avoid consoles, because the games were generally more expensive than PC games and there weren't as many options with a console (I like a lot of strategy games where the lack of a keyboard would cripple me).
However, the reason I got a PS/2 was mainly down to the social aspects. I had a few mates round on Saturday night for a PS/2 session; any multiplayer session before was something like HOM&M3, in which you spend at best half your time playing, the rest is waiting for the other player(s) to finish their turns. The PS/2 on a widescreen TV was much more fun with a group of people, even when we were doing 2 player SSX tricky. Two people played, the other 2 laughed their asses off as people crashed and burned, often painfully...
Of course, your points about "easy fun" and easy accessability are good too. On the PS/2, time between switch on and playing is around 30secs-1 minute. On a PC, you need about that to load the OS, let alone get a game started. That and the fact that shutdown is so much easier; you can pull the plug on the PS/2 without a problem (unless you're saving to the memory card at the time!) but a PC has to be shut down properly, taking 30 seconds or more (OK, you can switch off if you have a journaled filesystems, but I still use FAT32 for sharing between linux and XP).
Close enough; they sell a 32-way system, but not very many of them. See the links in the main story for more info.
Large servers are where Windows has never done well; Wintel scales up to 4-way reasonably easily, 8-way at a push and 16-way is very rare. 32-way is only available from Unisys, and from what I've heard, there's some klunky stuff in the background to make it work.
Compare this to Sun/SGI who have had >=64-way for years without any kludges to make it that way. A Sunfire 15K with 72 processors handles pretty much like a 2-way E220R.
Why are there so many "bet it overheats, he-yuck!" comments here when he very clearly states that he considered that and took steps to prevent it.
Well, I'm applying Occam's razor (simplest answer is usually right) and assuming they're idiots. That and the fact they probably didn't read the article.
I can see it now; in years to come, we'll no longer have the phrase "shoot first and ask questions later" it'll be "post first read the article later".
At the time, there were hordes of dot-com ideas who never had a physical product. This is why so many of them went bust in the dot-bomb era. Many people thought that putting something on the internet was a guaranteed path to riches, forgetting that you have to be able to take in more money in revenues than you spend in costs to be a viable company.
While those concepts might seem obvious to a sensible person, they were often forgotten in the distraction of the 'net boom.
I'm not particularly au fait with this, but I'd imagine that the kernel finds the hd controller on the PCI bus and 'walks' the IDE bus looking for the information and probes the drive for info.
'course, I could be wrong, but I'd imagine some of the comments in the linux kernel code might provide some hints as to how it finds the information.
You do get hotswap IDE now, but obviously the OS needs to support it. As most modern OSs don't actually use the BIOS for disk accesses (past the kernel booting), the BIOS is a non-issue.
Benchmarks prove whose processor is the fastest at running benchmarks...
That said, a well written benchmark can give a guide to relative performance, and it's hard to argue that a quake 3 benchmark isn't measuring "real world" performance in 3D gaming (although the incident with ATi was a bit of an embarressment).
You should have left it and just defragged away. The result would have been good enough for anyone. And if it wasn't, just create a new contiguous page file, and take off the old one, then defrag the rest.
Defragging with a pagefile leaves a chunk of disk that can't be reallocated on the fly (unless they've improved that); removing the page file allows most stuff to be moved during the defrag process. As for adding/removing paging files, any time I've tried adjusting paging on NT/2k has required a reboot.
...Win2K will be fine with 128M if you're just running Office-type apps
Hrm, from my experience, that's bull unless you assume that IE, Outlook 2000 and Word aren't office apps. My general setup is that I have 3 apps open all the time: IE5, Outlook 2000 and Xvision (Xserver program from SCO). The latter only uses 4-5MB (according to task mangler), but IE5 usually uses >=10MB. Any time I start an application past those 3 (e.g. Word), the machine starts swapping like crazy and I can't switch between windows. Basically, if I want to open a Word document, I have to assume I can't use the system for anything other than a space heater for 20 seconds. Popup menus regularly take over 2 seconds to appear (after disabling the fancy crud). That does not sound like it is, as you say, "fine".
Of course, some of that could be due to how the machines are set up; I'm not the NT admin and I'd rather not putz about with stuff too much unless the hell desk starts getting stroppy about it.
Our systems here only have 128MB of RAM. I discovered last week that isn't even enough to run Windows 2000 on; I wanted to defrag the disk fully so I removed all paging spaces. I couldn't even open the defragger before it complained about being out of virtual memeory.
Add on to that the programs I have running all the time (explorer, Outlook, Xvision) it makes running anything else (Word, Excel, SAP etc) a complete git.
That may well have been the intent, but the license reads like "you won't tell anyone anything about our software unless we say it's OK" which could be used to block security disclosures. Note that it says "divulge any details"; I think that's a broad statement.
Re:Would have been great in College
on
Speed Reading?
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· Score: 2
Well, my IQ has varied in tests between about 115 to over 170. No, I don't place any value on the high score as it was heavily maths based which I'm very good at; an IQ test based on image recognition would rate me lower. This gave me a 2.2 honours degree (in the UK degrees are rated 1st class, 2.1, 2.2, 3rd class in decending order) and a pass in an MSc which, to be honest, I really should have got a distinction in as I was probably one of the most technically skilled in the class (this wasn't too hard, given the majority of the class:) )
Anyway, the point I'd like to make is that IQ != good marks at school/college/university. Learning things by rote can get you a passing grade in most subjects. A high IQ should give you an advantage in analyzing questions to get good answers and give you a few (lot?) more marks, but if you haven't got the learning bit done right, an IQ of 200 isn't going to help you get a top grade mark.
It's a simple equation; 10 companies colluding provides less competition than two companies going at each other's throats. Unless AMD and Intel decide to start settling differences and cooperate (hah!) there will still be competition.
Added to this, you have PPC, Sparc et al on the side, still producing chips which will rocket away from Intel/AMD if they rest on their laurels.
...and I think AMD has shown this. As he says, "they changed because competition made them change. So I'm proud of that. " Up until the K7 (Athlon) came out, AMD and the now dead Cyrix chips were good, budget chips but they never matched the Pentiums in raw performance, at least where it counted for gamers, in floating point. Since the Athlon came out, Intel have had a fight on their hands which they're winning in some quarters (mainly the server arena), and losing in others.
Intel have the bucks to hand out deals to keep Dell etc sweet and market others into submission, but while AMD keep producing good value chips, they will still have a market amongst those who know better (generally the geeks of the world:) ).
I hope AMD keep going, but I hope they never crush Intel entirely, otherwise they may fall into the trap of becoming complacent and progress will slow.
My understanding is that the Serial ATA standard is open, and any lack of a Serial ATA AMD mobo is down to the AMD mobo manufacturers not being as fast as Intel.
Chances are, Intel will have a chipset out before AMD, if only because they have a larger R&D department.
Well, we've (i.e. an oil company) recently bought over 70 Sunblade 1000s for use in oil/gas exploration. Currently, there are a lot of applications which require the graphics throughput provided by Elite3d/Expert3d cards backed up by dual 64-bit CPUs which a wintel solution can't provide due to various factors, not least of which is bus bandwidth. Note that these cards use UPA slots, not PCI or AGP and most high-end Unix workstations come with 64-bit PCI which is much less common in the Intel based world (yes, I know they exist, but...).
As for raw compute performance, if you believe Sun's SPEC ratings from their product site, a 1.05GHz SPARC CPU is only just lagging behind an Intel 2.2GHz PIV on integer performance and beating it on FP. As FP is what drive 90% of scientific applications, Intel hasn't got the SPARC beaten yet by a long shot (especially since you can get a 106-way SPARC box, but Intel is limited to 32-way last I heard).
It's probably also worth noting that list price is rarely what a company will end up paying.
Slashdot Mirror
This gets particularly annoying when the VIA USB drivers keep screwing up the registry when doing large transfers (e.g. PDA syncing, copying data to CF cards) requiring a reinstall every 5 minutes.
Hallelujah, I'm not alone in thinking a slashback was the best way to handle this (hint: try this next year guys; you might get less flames). As others have pointed out, having a joke in amongst the real stories is the best way to go. The silliness hit rock bottom way too early yesterday.
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Redundant=1, Funny=3, Overrated=1, Total=6.
I can cope with the overrated, but offtopic? Given the level of "reporting" from /. today, I don't think we can consider anything offtopic...
However, "redundant" has taken on a new meaning, as the first post (yes, it was, BFD) gets moderated as redundant.
Note: This is not an invitation to partake in a flame war; just my thoughts on the moderation. Ho, hum, off to post a comment to give me that extra +1 to max out at 50 again...:) Wonder if this will be it or if I'll get whacked with a -2 for troll/flamebait...;)
The cluetrain bit was a giveaway...
However, the reason I got a PS/2 was mainly down to the social aspects. I had a few mates round on Saturday night for a PS/2 session; any multiplayer session before was something like HOM&M3, in which you spend at best half your time playing, the rest is waiting for the other player(s) to finish their turns. The PS/2 on a widescreen TV was much more fun with a group of people, even when we were doing 2 player SSX tricky. Two people played, the other 2 laughed their asses off as people crashed and burned, often painfully...
Of course, your points about "easy fun" and easy accessability are good too. On the PS/2, time between switch on and playing is around 30secs-1 minute. On a PC, you need about that to load the OS, let alone get a game started. That and the fact that shutdown is so much easier; you can pull the plug on the PS/2 without a problem (unless you're saving to the memory card at the time!) but a PC has to be shut down properly, taking 30 seconds or more (OK, you can switch off if you have a journaled filesystems, but I still use FAT32 for sharing between linux and XP).
They've been saying that about Unix for years. Trouble is, we have a damn good necromancer keeping it going.
Large servers are where Windows has never done well; Wintel scales up to 4-way reasonably easily, 8-way at a push and 16-way is very rare. 32-way is only available from Unisys, and from what I've heard, there's some klunky stuff in the background to make it work.
Compare this to Sun/SGI who have had >=64-way for years without any kludges to make it that way. A Sunfire 15K with 72 processors handles pretty much like a 2-way E220R.
Well, I'm applying Occam's razor (simplest answer is usually right) and assuming they're idiots. That and the fact they probably didn't read the article.
I can see it now; in years to come, we'll no longer have the phrase "shoot first and ask questions later" it'll be "post first read the article later".
While those concepts might seem obvious to a sensible person, they were often forgotten in the distraction of the 'net boom.
'course, I could be wrong, but I'd imagine some of the comments in the linux kernel code might provide some hints as to how it finds the information.
You do get hotswap IDE now, but obviously the OS needs to support it. As most modern OSs don't actually use the BIOS for disk accesses (past the kernel booting), the BIOS is a non-issue.
That said, a well written benchmark can give a guide to relative performance, and it's hard to argue that a quake 3 benchmark isn't measuring "real world" performance in 3D gaming (although the incident with ATi was a bit of an embarressment).
Sounds about right; it certainly doesn't surprise me as it's sufficiently moronic for a Windows system.
Defragging with a pagefile leaves a chunk of disk that can't be reallocated on the fly (unless they've improved that); removing the page file allows most stuff to be moved during the defrag process. As for adding/removing paging files, any time I've tried adjusting paging on NT/2k has required a reboot.
Hrm, from my experience, that's bull unless you assume that IE, Outlook 2000 and Word aren't office apps. My general setup is that I have 3 apps open all the time: IE5, Outlook 2000 and Xvision (Xserver program from SCO). The latter only uses 4-5MB (according to task mangler), but IE5 usually uses >=10MB. Any time I start an application past those 3 (e.g. Word), the machine starts swapping like crazy and I can't switch between windows. Basically, if I want to open a Word document, I have to assume I can't use the system for anything other than a space heater for 20 seconds. Popup menus regularly take over 2 seconds to appear (after disabling the fancy crud). That does not sound like it is, as you say, "fine".
Of course, some of that could be due to how the machines are set up; I'm not the NT admin and I'd rather not putz about with stuff too much unless the hell desk starts getting stroppy about it.
Add on to that the programs I have running all the time (explorer, Outlook, Xvision) it makes running anything else (Word, Excel, SAP etc) a complete git.
That may well have been the intent, but the license reads like "you won't tell anyone anything about our software unless we say it's OK" which could be used to block security disclosures. Note that it says "divulge any details"; I think that's a broad statement.
Anyway, the point I'd like to make is that IQ != good marks at school/college/university. Learning things by rote can get you a passing grade in most subjects. A high IQ should give you an advantage in analyzing questions to get good answers and give you a few (lot?) more marks, but if you haven't got the learning bit done right, an IQ of 200 isn't going to help you get a top grade mark.
Added to this, you have PPC, Sparc et al on the side, still producing chips which will rocket away from Intel/AMD if they rest on their laurels.
Intel have the bucks to hand out deals to keep Dell etc sweet and market others into submission, but while AMD keep producing good value chips, they will still have a market amongst those who know better (generally the geeks of the world :) ).
I hope AMD keep going, but I hope they never crush Intel entirely, otherwise they may fall into the trap of becoming complacent and progress will slow.
of or relating to hagiography
cross reference to hagiography is:
$ ./sokoban.sed
Too many {'s$
Bleh...
My guess is that it isn't IBM, but the admins of the crashing mail servers doing the suing.
Chances are, Intel will have a chipset out before AMD, if only because they have a larger R&D department.
Quicktime on linux has been done, it just doesn't support Sorenson(sp?) codecs which, unfortunately, the majority of streaming video on the net uses.
The full Quicktime suite of apps might be harder, but all most linux users really want is a viewer/plugin that handles Quicktime movies.
As for raw compute performance, if you believe Sun's SPEC ratings from their product site, a 1.05GHz SPARC CPU is only just lagging behind an Intel 2.2GHz PIV on integer performance and beating it on FP. As FP is what drive 90% of scientific applications, Intel hasn't got the SPARC beaten yet by a long shot (especially since you can get a 106-way SPARC box, but Intel is limited to 32-way last I heard).
It's probably also worth noting that list price is rarely what a company will end up paying.