I think what he wants is space to put extra flash chips in to get more capacity, rather than paying a premium to have denser flash chips.
Yeah, but the question is whether the 2.5" form factor is small enough that this would be a problem for *flash chips*. It certainly is for spinning disks- limiting rotational speed and capacity- but SSD isn't HDD, so I don't know if this would still apply.
By all means if it's the case that one can get a better-performing and/or significantly cheaper drive by moving to 3.5" form factors and less-dense chips in this way, fair enough. But if not, there's really no point in having a 3.5" version when an adaptor would solve any problems with the 2.5" one.
I assume you have lots of money to spend on terabytes worth of SSDs. That's nice- but I'd say the majority of people don't have the money or if they do, probably don't want to spend it just to have all their storage be SSD.
While they might not go for Seagate's hybrid solution, having a mix of SSD (e.g. for the OS) and HDD (for larger, less frequently-used files, etc.) is a good compromise with today's prices.
I just wish someone would make 3.5" drives besides OCZ. Hell - I wish someone would make 5.25" drives.
Why- can't you just put the 2.5" models in an adaptor to fit a 3.5" or 5.25" port? Is form factor an issue with SSDs?
My post was mainly intended as a correction to the OP's misconception that "I think Europeans [i.e. Europeans in general] tend to look at disdain at Microsoft as a corporation [because of their abusive behaviour]". Unfortunately, this was just wishful thinking.:-(
You are right though- as is the other person who (correctly) noted the perception that MS just aren't cool.
Read the 3rd fucking amendment you dumbass liberal. NObama is using these drones to enforce his military dictatorship against the true citizens of this nation. This is the kind of fascism you get when you "elect" a socialist.
The drones are staying in people's houses?
No but they can peep in people's houses.
Well, that's the wrong amendment. Calling someone a dumbass and then citing the wrong amendment is entertaining, though.
What does this remind me of? Ah, yes...
RIMMER: Go to blue alert.
LISTER: What for? There's no-one to alert - we're all here.
RIMMER: I would just feel more comfortable if I know that we're all on our toes 'cos everyone's aware it's a blue-alert situation.
LISTER: We all are on our toes.
RIMMER: May I remind you all of Space Core Directive 34124?
KRYTEN: 3-4-1-2-4. "No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in
zero gravity".
RIMMER: Damn you both, all the way to Hades! I want to go to Blue Alert!
I'm a Canadian so I'm not sure how true this is, but I think Europeans tend to look at disdain at Microsoft as a corporation.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but if the UK is anything to go by, I think you're overstating the case. I don't get the impression that the majority of people really care about MS's abusive behaviour or anything like that (even if they should).
If there's any negativity associated with MS, it's more likely to be due to negative experience of Windows (not all of which will be MS's fault, but *will* be blamed on or associated with them anyway, consciously or subconsciously).
Modern Intel and AMD CPU throttling is done via hardware on the chip itself. If you remove the heatsink and boot to the BIOS screen, you'll see that the CPU has throttled itself, with no involvement from any OS.
AMD will burn! See the Tom's Hardware video.
Very interesting... except that the video is originally from 2001, so I doubt that it has a lot to say about "modern Intel and AMD CPUs" unless you count hardware that came out between the dotcom crash and 9/11 as "modern".:-)
Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.
Guess again. Printers use 1200dpi for a reason. While you can't spot the individual pixel at 600dpi we can easily tell 1200dpi looks better, and 300dpi print is so low res any human with normal vision can tell it is crappy printing from several meters away.
The problem here is that the "dpi" figures for monitors and displays vs. that given for printers *don't* refer to the same thing and they can't be directly compared. (*)
A pixel can typically have one of a *large* number of shades and brightnesses, whereas an ink dot generated by a printer is a single dot (usually one of four or sometimes six ink colours at most). The latter have to be dithered to generate the illusion of shading, which effectively means lower resolution. (**)
This image is somewhat helpful in illustrating the point.
(I would point to the Wikipedia articles (Dots per inch and Pixel density), but I found them a bit unclear, and in fact one of them has been tagged.)
(*) This isn't really your fault, so much as it's a problem with the generally-accepted (mis?-)usage of "dpi" to describe both "pixels per inch" and "(ink) dots per inch" obscuring that fact.
(**) Of course, it's more complicated than that, as (e.g.) with crisp, high-contrast material like text, there's no shading and the effective resolution will be higher. But for arbitrary photographic material with a range of shades, it won't be.
And why ruin a good piece of broccoli with cheese sauce? [..] Sounds fatty.
It's true that broccoli tastes better when you're eating it with something saucy, but I've never heard of it being covered in cheese sauce in itself. Is someone confusing it with cauliflower and cauliflower cheese? (Article says this is a British dish, so maybe the Yanks eat broccoli with cheese instead, but I've never heard of that, and its article doesn't mention cheese).
If you're going to take the time to say you have sources you should probably post them.
No not really.. that's what goggle is for
"Goggle" [sic] is for searching. It's the person making the claims' job to back them up (particularly if their sources are as easy to find as implied), not the other person's. Goggle, er *Google* makes that easier- nice for the person whose job it is to back up what they're saying:-)
get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances:D-<
* nmp3bot dances:D|-<
* nmp3bot dances:D/-<
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet
Better graphics and new games are something you get in the current cycle, without upgrade consoles. Games from 2012 look a lot better than they did in 2005 on the same hardware.
This has pretty much always been the case with most formats- the later games look better as they get to grips with the hardware and standards generally improve. Later Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64 games looked miles better than some of the first releases.
Conversely, while the first tranche of next-generation games may look marginally impressive next to their predecessors, it's often not that big a leap, e.g. I remember when my flatmates bought a PS2 in early 2001 and the games looked slightly improved over what you'd expect from the original PlayStation, but nothing that impressed me that much. (The Grand Prix racing game in particular looked just like a PS1 game with higher resolution). Similarly, the early PS1 game Road Rash looked pretty much like a Mega Drive/Genesis racer, just with a few added polygon buildings and some FMV slapped on.
You're nineteen years old but your user ID number suggests that you must have joined Slashdot around the turn of the millennium? For someone having used Slashdot since they were seven years old or so, it's surprising that you still haven't found out about Google.
Either that or (a) you were aping a 19-year-old for comedy effect or (b) you were telling porkies.;-)
It loses something without the rest of the context.
I was replying to a post that *does* include more of the conversation- the only bit it missed out was Lister's final comment for some reason, and we couldn't have had that, could we? Hence my one-line reply.:-)
All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations [..] consumer-grade antivirus products can't protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets
I think that *this* part of your comment:-
(barring an employee or a government doing it)
may answer your own question. Aside from the fact that governments would have had massive resources to start off with, it's also probable that MS were (at least) forced to allow those governments access or involvement at some level to otherwise secure or confidential aspects of their software.
If this is the case, then at the very least, they could have used such knowledge to give themselves an advantage. Going one step further, it's possible that they used or exploited this to help steal or get access to those keys.
But given that it's widely claimed that the US government was involved in the creation of Stuxnet, it's equally plausible that MS willingly gave- or were pressurised into giving- them those certificates knowingly, even if they might not have known exactly what they were for.
This is just speculation- I don't know any of this for sure, or have any special knowledge of the situation. But it does add up to being at least plausible.
Rimmer: Just cause they're aliens doesn't mean to say they don't have to visit the little boys' room. Only they probably do something weird and alien-esque, like it comes out of the top of their heads or something.
Lister: Well, I wouldn't like to be stuck behind one in a cinema.
On the other hand, AMD graphics cards are pretty popular."
They are. Although to what extent that is the result of Bitcoin mining (at which AMD/ATI cards excel, and Nvidia cards suck), I'll leave as an exercise for the reader...
Is Bitcoin mining *really* that significant a part of the market as a whole? I suspect it probably seems more prominent on Slashdot than it actually is.
Besides which, from what I understand, the increasing difficulty of solving new "problems" to generate Bitcoins meant we'd passed the point where the electricity needed to power the computations outweighed the generally-accepted value of the generated Bitcoins some time back.
Retrieval of that free backup costs a whopping $25.
Think about that statement for a minute...
Backup is free. Retrieving said free backup is what costs you.
Which means... it's not free.
For what it's worth, I knew exactly what you were trying to get that when you said "think about that statement for a minute" the first time.
But you *do* get the backup for free, it's the restoration you pay for. I'm aware that you probably think this sounds like disingenuous pedantry, but the evidence that the "free" backup isn't valueless is that... you try getting your data back from a faulty hard drive *without* a backup and you'll be damn lucky to get some (or any) of it back for $25!
That's not what's wrong with the idea at all. Many early VCRs didn't record, they were VCPs...
I might be wrong, but I'm not aware of player-only machines having been a significant percentage of the market, at least not when the mass market was taking off in the late 70s. I'd have thought that- aside from the fact that the mechanics would be almost the same- that the technology required to create a playback-only head would be only marginally less complex than one that could record.
DVD players aren't as good a comparison because they were *much* cheaper than late-70s/early-80s VCRs (in real terms) during the early-2000s, which was around the time they *really* exploded in popularity (i.e. sub-£100 in the UK, and rapidly falling even further versus around ten times that price for a VCR in late 70s terms).
Interesting that you mention DVD recorders being bought by old people because they worked like a VCR, because I made a similar comment about how (and why) they had some popularity a few years back but were ultimately a red herring. Namely that DVD recorders were based on a new, digital technology yet the mode of operation was similar enough to the VCR that anyone used to that way of doing things would see the DVD recorder as its natural successor. But this misses the point that in the digital age you only really need DVDs if you plan on archiving and 90% of VCR recording was just timeshifting, so the PVR is the better choice for those people- they just had to have time to make the paradigm shift of not having lots of tapes and discs and the like.
It didn't help that in practice, DVD recorders had annoying (and pointless) complexities that VCRs didn't, like media compatibility, finalising discs and the like.
This assumes that people would have been willing to pay the same (or very close) for a playback-only videocassette machine instead of one that could record. I doubt removing the latter facility would have decreased the cost by that much.
Remember that when they first came out, home video recorders were very expensive by modern standards, and in part it was probably the mass market that helped to drive the price down in the first place. Chicken and egg. A playback-only machine, even if marginally cheaper, would have been a much harder sell.
Of course, let's not also forget the World War II bomber [the Sunday Sport reported they had] found up there.
I remember when the story broke (in the Sunday Sport) that a London Routemaster bus had been discovered there. They had pictures as well.
They reported that a bus had been found at the South Pole, but I couldn't find one about a bus on the moon. Perhaps you're confusing the two somewhat similar stories, or maybe they did another?
Also, don't forget the bodies of the two astronauts killed by those escaped Kryptonian criminals.
Speaking of "don't mess with our stuff", was it Superman II (Zod and friends) or Superman IV (Nuclear Man) where he had a fight with the baddies and the American flag got knocked over, then (spoiler follows *cough*) when he inevitably won, he put the flag back up?
Slashdot Mirror
I think what he wants is space to put extra flash chips in to get more capacity, rather than paying a premium to have denser flash chips.
Yeah, but the question is whether the 2.5" form factor is small enough that this would be a problem for *flash chips*. It certainly is for spinning disks- limiting rotational speed and capacity- but SSD isn't HDD, so I don't know if this would still apply.
By all means if it's the case that one can get a better-performing and/or significantly cheaper drive by moving to 3.5" form factors and less-dense chips in this way, fair enough. But if not, there's really no point in having a 3.5" version when an adaptor would solve any problems with the 2.5" one.
If I need bigbadstorage, I buy multiple SSDs.
I assume you have lots of money to spend on terabytes worth of SSDs. That's nice- but I'd say the majority of people don't have the money or if they do, probably don't want to spend it just to have all their storage be SSD.
While they might not go for Seagate's hybrid solution, having a mix of SSD (e.g. for the OS) and HDD (for larger, less frequently-used files, etc.) is a good compromise with today's prices.
I just wish someone would make 3.5" drives besides OCZ. Hell - I wish someone would make 5.25" drives.
Why- can't you just put the 2.5" models in an adaptor to fit a 3.5" or 5.25" port? Is form factor an issue with SSDs?
You underestimate the influence of mavens.
My post was mainly intended as a correction to the OP's misconception that "I think Europeans [i.e. Europeans in general] tend to look at disdain at Microsoft as a corporation [because of their abusive behaviour]". Unfortunately, this was just wishful thinking. :-(
You are right though- as is the other person who (correctly) noted the perception that MS just aren't cool.
Read the 3rd fucking amendment you dumbass liberal. NObama is using these drones to enforce his military dictatorship against the true citizens of this nation. This is the kind of fascism you get when you "elect" a socialist.
The drones are staying in people's houses?
No but they can peep in people's houses.
Well, that's the wrong amendment. Calling someone a dumbass and then citing the wrong amendment is entertaining, though.
What does this remind me of? Ah, yes...
RIMMER: Go to blue alert.
LISTER: What for? There's no-one to alert - we're all here.
RIMMER: I would just feel more comfortable if I know that we're all on our toes 'cos everyone's aware it's a blue-alert situation.
LISTER: We all are on our toes.
RIMMER: May I remind you all of Space Core Directive 34124?
KRYTEN: 3-4-1-2-4. "No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero gravity".
RIMMER: Damn you both, all the way to Hades! I want to go to Blue Alert!
I'm a Canadian so I'm not sure how true this is, but I think Europeans tend to look at disdain at Microsoft as a corporation.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but if the UK is anything to go by, I think you're overstating the case. I don't get the impression that the majority of people really care about MS's abusive behaviour or anything like that (even if they should).
If there's any negativity associated with MS, it's more likely to be due to negative experience of Windows (not all of which will be MS's fault, but *will* be blamed on or associated with them anyway, consciously or subconsciously).
Modern Intel and AMD CPU throttling is done via hardware on the chip itself. If you remove the heatsink and boot to the BIOS screen, you'll see that the CPU has throttled itself, with no involvement from any OS.
AMD will burn! See the Tom's Hardware video.
Very interesting... except that the video is originally from 2001, so I doubt that it has a lot to say about "modern Intel and AMD CPUs" unless you count hardware that came out between the dotcom crash and 9/11 as "modern". :-)
Looking around my office most people sit about 20" from their monitor but hold a smartphone 12" away from their face. With 20:20 vision are humans able to see 326ppi at 20"? I would guess not.
Guess again. Printers use 1200dpi for a reason. While you can't spot the individual pixel at 600dpi we can easily tell 1200dpi looks better, and 300dpi print is so low res any human with normal vision can tell it is crappy printing from several meters away.
The problem here is that the "dpi" figures for monitors and displays vs. that given for printers *don't* refer to the same thing and they can't be directly compared. (*)
A pixel can typically have one of a *large* number of shades and brightnesses, whereas an ink dot generated by a printer is a single dot (usually one of four or sometimes six ink colours at most). The latter have to be dithered to generate the illusion of shading, which effectively means lower resolution. (**)
This image is somewhat helpful in illustrating the point.
(I would point to the Wikipedia articles (Dots per inch and Pixel density), but I found them a bit unclear, and in fact one of them has been tagged.)
(*) This isn't really your fault, so much as it's a problem with the generally-accepted (mis?-)usage of "dpi" to describe both "pixels per inch" and "(ink) dots per inch" obscuring that fact.
(**) Of course, it's more complicated than that, as (e.g.) with crisp, high-contrast material like text, there's no shading and the effective resolution will be higher. But for arbitrary photographic material with a range of shades, it won't be.
I always think of Betteridge's Law of Headlines
Headline I'd like to see: "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines actually correct?"
And why ruin a good piece of broccoli with cheese sauce? [..] Sounds fatty.
It's true that broccoli tastes better when you're eating it with something saucy, but I've never heard of it being covered in cheese sauce in itself. Is someone confusing it with cauliflower and cauliflower cheese? (Article says this is a British dish, so maybe the Yanks eat broccoli with cheese instead, but I've never heard of that, and its article doesn't mention cheese).
If you're going to take the time to say you have sources you should probably post them.
No not really.. that's what goggle is for
"Goggle" [sic] is for searching. It's the person making the claims' job to back them up (particularly if their sources are as easy to find as implied), not the other person's. Goggle, er *Google* makes that easier- nice for the person whose job it is to back up what they're saying :-)
get up :D-< :D|-< :D/-<
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet
Better graphics and new games are something you get in the current cycle, without upgrade consoles. Games from 2012 look a lot better than they did in 2005 on the same hardware.
This has pretty much always been the case with most formats- the later games look better as they get to grips with the hardware and standards generally improve. Later Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64 games looked miles better than some of the first releases.
Conversely, while the first tranche of next-generation games may look marginally impressive next to their predecessors, it's often not that big a leap, e.g. I remember when my flatmates bought a PS2 in early 2001 and the games looked slightly improved over what you'd expect from the original PlayStation, but nothing that impressed me that much. (The Grand Prix racing game in particular looked just like a PS1 game with higher resolution). Similarly, the early PS1 game Road Rash looked pretty much like a Mega Drive/Genesis racer, just with a few added polygon buildings and some FMV slapped on.
You're nineteen years old but your user ID number suggests that you must have joined Slashdot around the turn of the millennium? For someone having used Slashdot since they were seven years old or so, it's surprising that you still haven't found out about Google.
;-)
Either that or (a) you were aping a 19-year-old for comedy effect or (b) you were telling porkies.
It loses something without the rest of the context.
I was replying to a post that *does* include more of the conversation- the only bit it missed out was Lister's final comment for some reason, and we couldn't have had that, could we? Hence my one-line reply. :-)
I kind of thought Microsoft would make damn sure someone else couldn't duplicate their signatures (barring an employee or a government doing it).
Given the blurb for this story that also appeared today...
All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations [..] consumer-grade antivirus products can't protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets
I think that *this* part of your comment:-
(barring an employee or a government doing it)
may answer your own question. Aside from the fact that governments would have had massive resources to start off with, it's also probable that MS were (at least) forced to allow those governments access or involvement at some level to otherwise secure or confidential aspects of their software.
If this is the case, then at the very least, they could have used such knowledge to give themselves an advantage. Going one step further, it's possible that they used or exploited this to help steal or get access to those keys.
But given that it's widely claimed that the US government was involved in the creation of Stuxnet, it's equally plausible that MS willingly gave- or were pressurised into giving- them those certificates knowingly, even if they might not have known exactly what they were for.
This is just speculation- I don't know any of this for sure, or have any special knowledge of the situation. But it does add up to being at least plausible.
Rimmer: Just cause they're aliens doesn't mean to say they don't have to visit the little boys' room. Only they probably do something weird and alien-esque, like it comes out of the top of their heads or something.
Lister: Well, I wouldn't like to be stuck behind one in a cinema.
Consumers rule and they need to get their collective shit together and start cracking whips.
Have you boycotted distributors and/or development teams whose games have had this problem?
On the other hand, AMD graphics cards are pretty popular."
They are. Although to what extent that is the result of Bitcoin mining (at which AMD/ATI cards excel, and Nvidia cards suck), I'll leave as an exercise for the reader...
Is Bitcoin mining *really* that significant a part of the market as a whole? I suspect it probably seems more prominent on Slashdot than it actually is.
Besides which, from what I understand, the increasing difficulty of solving new "problems" to generate Bitcoins meant we'd passed the point where the electricity needed to power the computations outweighed the generally-accepted value of the generated Bitcoins some time back.
I can report that I very rarely come across porn of any description.
Sensible move- that generally causes the pages to stick together.
Retrieval of that free backup costs a whopping $25.
Think about that statement for a minute...
Backup is free. Retrieving said free backup is what costs you.
Which means... it's not free.
For what it's worth, I knew exactly what you were trying to get that when you said "think about that statement for a minute" the first time.
But you *do* get the backup for free, it's the restoration you pay for. I'm aware that you probably think this sounds like disingenuous pedantry, but the evidence that the "free" backup isn't valueless is that... you try getting your data back from a faulty hard drive *without* a backup and you'll be damn lucky to get some (or any) of it back for $25!
That's not what's wrong with the idea at all. Many early VCRs didn't record, they were VCPs...
I might be wrong, but I'm not aware of player-only machines having been a significant percentage of the market, at least not when the mass market was taking off in the late 70s. I'd have thought that- aside from the fact that the mechanics would be almost the same- that the technology required to create a playback-only head would be only marginally less complex than one that could record.
DVD players aren't as good a comparison because they were *much* cheaper than late-70s/early-80s VCRs (in real terms) during the early-2000s, which was around the time they *really* exploded in popularity (i.e. sub-£100 in the UK, and rapidly falling even further versus around ten times that price for a VCR in late 70s terms).
Interesting that you mention DVD recorders being bought by old people because they worked like a VCR, because I made a similar comment about how (and why) they had some popularity a few years back but were ultimately a red herring. Namely that DVD recorders were based on a new, digital technology yet the mode of operation was similar enough to the VCR that anyone used to that way of doing things would see the DVD recorder as its natural successor. But this misses the point that in the digital age you only really need DVDs if you plan on archiving and 90% of VCR recording was just timeshifting, so the PVR is the better choice for those people- they just had to have time to make the paradigm shift of not having lots of tapes and discs and the like.
It didn't help that in practice, DVD recorders had annoying (and pointless) complexities that VCRs didn't, like media compatibility, finalising discs and the like.
This assumes that people would have been willing to pay the same (or very close) for a playback-only videocassette machine instead of one that could record. I doubt removing the latter facility would have decreased the cost by that much.
Remember that when they first came out, home video recorders were very expensive by modern standards, and in part it was probably the mass market that helped to drive the price down in the first place. Chicken and egg. A playback-only machine, even if marginally cheaper, would have been a much harder sell.
Of course, let's not also forget the World War II bomber [the Sunday Sport reported they had] found up there.
I remember when the story broke (in the Sunday Sport) that a London Routemaster bus had been discovered there. They had pictures as well.
They reported that a bus had been found at the South Pole, but I couldn't find one about a bus on the moon. Perhaps you're confusing the two somewhat similar stories, or maybe they did another?
Also, don't forget the bodies of the two astronauts killed by those escaped Kryptonian criminals.
Speaking of "don't mess with our stuff", was it Superman II (Zod and friends) or Superman IV (Nuclear Man) where he had a fight with the baddies and the American flag got knocked over, then (spoiler follows *cough*) when he inevitably won, he put the flag back up?
Of course, let's not also forget the World War II bomber they found up there.
If the mission is to learn programming, I'd hand them a copy of BASIC for their computer, and have at it.
Hmm. I don't understand why you'd want to sabotage their mission by handing them BASIC though. :-(