Well, the article contains a pretty wide range of benchmarks besides the one I quoted.
Do some of them support the assertion that CPUs have continued to speed up at a rapid pace?
Crime statistics are typically reported per capita per year and I was assuming the same in this case.
I agree it's better to be explicit, so it's unfortunate the article doesn't specify whether Britain is #1 in botnet infections per person, per computer, per broadband link, or something else.
No, the last 2-3 years have been a disappointing let-down in cpu development.
Dual core processors cannot be equated with single core. You can always make highly parallel tasks faster by throwing more CPUs at them, so what? There's a reason we didn't go to multi cores until single-core development stalled. If you want to compare dual-core, compare them to an SMP single-core system.
Now look at the benchmarks. For instance, on the 3dMark05 Futuremark, the fastest single processor is the Athlon 64 FX 57 with a score of 6058. Now scroll down to the P4 3.0 with a score of 4613. That's a lousy 30% improvement in the last 3 years! Awful. And the fastest dual core system is a mere 10% faster than that.
I sit on my couch and work on my laptop for a couple hours each night using wireless (compiling at the moment so give me a break ok?) Laptop on lap, feet on ottoman, nice music on the stereo, what's the problem again?
Sometimes I do work in my study, even then I don't bother to plug in the ethernet other than to play a movie while I treadmill. Why bother? Wireless works fine, going on 4 years now.
The burst speed sounds good and 16MB cache sounds good, but in these modern times, when we use OS' which use free memory as buffer/caches, we have a LOT of memory and that memory is REALLY FAST, on-drive caches are mostly being used as buffers.
I've questioned the usefulness of hdd cache compared to OS main memory cache before on slashdot and gotten flamed. Unfortunately I've still never seen any benchmark that convinced me of whether large onboard cache really helps, or just helps results on benchmarks which intentionally avoid OS disk caching. If anybody has some hard info, post a link.
In fact, as far as sustained reads and writes go, access times and sustained I/O, has SCSI EVER lost the top spot?
Sure, SCSI drives always had the quickest seek (access) times. The highest RPM drives were offered only with SCSI interfaces. That's what set them apart as "server" drives. I don't think there have been any 15K SATA or PATA drives, have there?
The only place where the 250GB model beats the 400GB is the support of a 300MB/s SATA2 bus rather than the 150MB/s of SATA1, but since no drives can actually deliver anything like 150MB/s transfer, it's redundant anyway.
According to the article, the 250GB bursts hit 171 MB/s, so actually it would be hindered by SATA1. Burst speed isn't my #1 consideration anyways, but it's something.
More importantly, could two (or more) SATA1 drives on a SATA2 bus exceed 150 MB/s in total? I would think not, in which case SATA2 is a big advantage if you want multiple drives on a bus. (I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.)
To me the most interesting thing in the article was how close commodity SATA drives have come to the Raptor. The SATA drive has a slightly faster sustained speed, and the access time is only 4% higher. Are there some other SCSI drives with higher performance now?
Thought experiment: somebody gives you a piece of paper with a list of numbers (and nothing else). The numbers are car stereo theft rates. You have to pick a number, and move to the country with that theft rate.
Would you pick a high number, a low number, or something in between?
7200 movies per hour won't even cover a small city during peak usage.
I have a crazy idea, maybe the cable company could use more than 1 single network cable.
Besides, for the foreseeable future video on demand will be pay per view, so the number of simultaneous users will be far fewer than the number of households.
I'd be happy if they just got these big pipes close enough to my house that everybody could simultaneously pull 10 mbps. That's about enough for 2 simultaneous video streams, with very good quality assuming a decent codec.
My Comcast service already hits 4 mbps whenever I ask it to, so it feels within reach but I guess we'll see.
I wonder if google's customers (companies buying advertising) will prefer calls over email?
On the one hand, placing a call costs more than an email. And I'm sure google will charge a lot more for each call transferred than for a click-though (nice move google).
But presumably somebody who calls is more likely to buy than somebody who clicks, and at least you know it's not a click-bot.
I have to wonder if there is something more to it. My first thought was that this is awfully similar to drawing on somebody with sunblock when they fall asleep on the beach.
What was stupid? The drive benchmarked at twice the speed of the competition, who cares if they use a dumb word like "extreme." If the thing is that much better, it's worthy of positive press.
Now if it turns out the benchmark was intentionally skewed (i.e. other existing competitive products were excluded from the test), then I agree with you.
Certainly a fair point in theory, but in this case it's 128kbps vs CDDA. I won't say it's impossible for some audio codec at 128kbps to beat CDDA on selected material (assuming both are made from some higher fidelity source), but raise your hand if you think that is happening here.
Do we even know whether or not this was about taking a stand on Darwin in the first place? I only read the first article, but I saw exactly 0 companies quoted as witholding support to avoid controversy. It's a very slippery business trying to ascribe one particular cause to the lack of support for a fundraiser. "I'm persecuted" sounds a lot better than "nobody's interested." I've never been to any natural history museum that even hinted at anything other than Darwinism, so I don't see why it would be so controversial now.
Oh my goodness, that thing finished at over $2K. I wonder what are the odds of him actually collecting that $2K? That said, I count 6 unique bidders over $1K on that XBox.
Then again $2K isn't a large slice of the XBox marketing budget. It might be worth it to Microsoft for breathless media reports of XBoxes going for $2K on EBay.
Which is like earning $27K to $45K at a company with full benefits. Besides being on your own for health care (yikes!) and retirement, the contractor would have to pay the whole 15% for Social Security, no? I'd better get back to work, my job is looking better by the minute.
Here's a better solution for hooking up to your stereo: a Linux-compatible (so maybe FreeBSD too?) sound card with SPDIF optical outputs to your receiver, for less than $30 shipped.
Be careful to get the "AW850 Deluxe" and not the confusingly similar "AW850 D" - they're different! It wasn't easy to find a cheap, OSS-supported digital sound card that can handle various sample rates, but this one works.
If you want flexibility to go beyond those simple tasks, small cases are too crippled by the inability to add PCI cards. It might be OK if you're sure you'll never need new capabilities down the road, but my HTPC/fileserver is a 7-year old computer which never would have lasted so long without the flexibility to add:
1) a linux-compatible sound card with optical outputs for my stereo.
2) a pci to pcmcia adapter for a wireless card
3) a second video card (one outputs to the TV, the second to the kids' monitor and keyboard)
4) a second NIC (it's the router and provides QoS for VOIP)
5) a TV tuner card
6) second hard drive (you want lots of HDD space and a separate spindle for backup in a fileserver/HTPC)
7) an old-fashioned serial port for the infrared receiver (remote control)
8) Another obvious addition would be a high-performance graphics card for gaming on the TV, but I don't do that.
I realize you can get a small PC with some or many of these things now, but my point is a lot of those needs were originally unforeseen and you never know what will happen next. Of course there are external USB devices, but IMHO that's much uglier than one somewhat larger box.
As for larger boxes being ugly monsters, well it's personal taste but I note that many of the higher-end receivers are in taller boxes that look a lot like the cases in this review.
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Well, the article contains a pretty wide range of benchmarks besides the one I quoted. Do some of them support the assertion that CPUs have continued to speed up at a rapid pace?
I agree it's better to be explicit, so it's unfortunate the article doesn't specify whether Britain is #1 in botnet infections per person, per computer, per broadband link, or something else.
Dual core processors cannot be equated with single core. You can always make highly parallel tasks faster by throwing more CPUs at them, so what? There's a reason we didn't go to multi cores until single-core development stalled. If you want to compare dual-core, compare them to an SMP single-core system.
Now look at the benchmarks. For instance, on the 3dMark05 Futuremark, the fastest single processor is the Athlon 64 FX 57 with a score of 6058. Now scroll down to the P4 3.0 with a score of 4613. That's a lousy 30% improvement in the last 3 years! Awful. And the fastest dual core system is a mere 10% faster than that.
Sometimes I do work in my study, even then I don't bother to plug in the ethernet other than to play a movie while I treadmill. Why bother? Wireless works fine, going on 4 years now.
If you want to rely on regulated spectrum, hook into your cell phone and start paying.
Why don't you direct us to a more comprehensive CPU benchmark comparison then.
More importantly, could two (or more) SATA1 drives on a SATA2 bus exceed 150 MB/s in total? I would think not, in which case SATA2 is a big advantage if you want multiple drives on a bus. (I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.)
To me the most interesting thing in the article was how close commodity SATA drives have come to the Raptor. The SATA drive has a slightly faster sustained speed, and the access time is only 4% higher. Are there some other SCSI drives with higher performance now?
Would you pick a high number, a low number, or something in between?
Besides, for the foreseeable future video on demand will be pay per view, so the number of simultaneous users will be far fewer than the number of households.
100 mbps is ridiculous. DVD is 5 mbps.
My Comcast service already hits 4 mbps whenever I ask it to, so it feels within reach but I guess we'll see.
On the one hand, placing a call costs more than an email. And I'm sure google will charge a lot more for each call transferred than for a click-though (nice move google).
But presumably somebody who calls is more likely to buy than somebody who clicks, and at least you know it's not a click-bot.
I have to wonder if there is something more to it. My first thought was that this is awfully similar to drawing on somebody with sunblock when they fall asleep on the beach.
Now if it turns out the benchmark was intentionally skewed (i.e. other existing competitive products were excluded from the test), then I agree with you.
To propse that somebody's busiess will fail because they don't adhere to the intricate technicalities of a rule of thumb is preposterous.
Certainly a fair point in theory, but in this case it's 128kbps vs CDDA. I won't say it's impossible for some audio codec at 128kbps to beat CDDA on selected material (assuming both are made from some higher fidelity source), but raise your hand if you think that is happening here.
Wouldn't your browser warn you currently if your bank's certificate changed? I though CA's were only for initial key exchange, am I wrong?
Do we even know whether or not this was about taking a stand on Darwin in the first place? I only read the first article, but I saw exactly 0 companies quoted as witholding support to avoid controversy. It's a very slippery business trying to ascribe one particular cause to the lack of support for a fundraiser. "I'm persecuted" sounds a lot better than "nobody's interested." I've never been to any natural history museum that even hinted at anything other than Darwinism, so I don't see why it would be so controversial now.
Then again $2K isn't a large slice of the XBox marketing budget. It might be worth it to Microsoft for breathless media reports of XBoxes going for $2K on EBay.
Which is like earning $27K to $45K at a company with full benefits. Besides being on your own for health care (yikes!) and retirement, the contractor would have to pay the whole 15% for Social Security, no? I'd better get back to work, my job is looking better by the minute.
Be careful to get the "AW850 Deluxe" and not the confusingly similar "AW850 D" - they're different! It wasn't easy to find a cheap, OSS-supported digital sound card that can handle various sample rates, but this one works.
1) a linux-compatible sound card with optical outputs for my stereo.
2) a pci to pcmcia adapter for a wireless card
3) a second video card (one outputs to the TV, the second to the kids' monitor and keyboard)
4) a second NIC (it's the router and provides QoS for VOIP)
5) a TV tuner card
6) second hard drive (you want lots of HDD space and a separate spindle for backup in a fileserver/HTPC)
7) an old-fashioned serial port for the infrared receiver (remote control)
8) Another obvious addition would be a high-performance graphics card for gaming on the TV, but I don't do that.
I realize you can get a small PC with some or many of these things now, but my point is a lot of those needs were originally unforeseen and you never know what will happen next. Of course there are external USB devices, but IMHO that's much uglier than one somewhat larger box.
As for larger boxes being ugly monsters, well it's personal taste but I note that many of the higher-end receivers are in taller boxes that look a lot like the cases in this review.