More like an endless kalidescope of advertising!
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TV's Tipping Point
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· Score: 1
TV networks aren't going to use technology to give people more choice, they're going to use it to spam advertising to make more money. TV "bugs" are already getting our of hand. Example: SpikeTV's gigantic Joe Schmo ad that pops up over about the entire lower left quarter of the screen every 2 minutes. Or their animated and opaque spraypaint logo bug that refreshes every 45 seconds.
The future of TV is popups. The actual show will get less and less space as multiple eyecatch techniques are used to spam and spam and spam. Floating semi-transparent animated billboards will roam around all edges of the screen, probably across it too. It's not like browsing where you can click them off either. This is the plan to get around TiVo, you just make the commercials part of the show so they can't be cut out.
Doesn't bother me much though, I'll just download more dvd rips of shows the networks cancel because they don't appeal to the general moron. Or anime series that would either never make it here or would be mangled to death by censors and bad dubbing anyway.
Scotty uses this in the TNG episode "Relics" to keep himself alive by being stuck in a transporter doing diagnostic loops for a good number of years (Hey at least it was better than the plothole for Kirk's TNG appearance in Generations!). I always find it amusing when I see sci-fi stuff start showing up in the real world.
The Ace's review does some testing on the already pretty useable windows64 beta. I don't think it'll take that much longer for it to get up to their normal stability standards for a release.
Great! Now all we need is a way to control it.
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Sharp Announces 3D Laptop
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· Score: 4, Interesting
So what's going to be the breakthrough control interface for 3D like the mouse was for 2D? And don't point at one of those "3D mice" with the little eraser pointer for scroll on them either. Maybe one of the gyroscopic mice but I think I'd get tired of having to hold the damn thing up in the air 8 hours a day. Maybe something like the SpaceOrb 360, but I couldn't get any decent precision with that when I had one.
Maybe someone should dust off the old NES U-force and find a way to integrate it into the laptop.
From what I've read in their manuals, the 3wares allow any combination of RAID and single disks and hot spare you want. So you can get the 8 channel controller and use it that way if you wish.
Also I don't think they bitch about smaller drives. I actually had the RAID0 comprised of 4 75GXPs on my 6400 go bad just as I was installing the RAID5 on the 7500 with 4 WD1200JBs in the same system to copy the data over. I wound up ordering a new drive that turned out to be about 2MB smaller, swapping circuit boards on one of my good drives to the failed one, imaging it to the new drive with dd, then swapping the board back, plugging the new drive in, and rebooting the array.
It worked, but corrupted about 5% of my files, mostly in the newer stuff like downloads. I copied about 150GB over to the RAID5 and then returned the new drive.
I bought a 3Ware 6400 back when they were new. Before the 6410 came out, and you had to get a full length PCI card for 4 ports. I got it through hypermicro.com, who I knew and trusted for all my storage purposes.
Until the 3ware, I had been "The SCSI guy" in most circles. I was running all scsi systems starting in 1992 and woe betide he who suggest I add an inferior IDE device to my system. I had first spotted the 3Ware at PC Expo back when they were prototyping the 6000 series, and immediately scoffed at it as "just another IDE RAID wannabe." The 3Ware engineers overheard this and invited me to come over and play with their system and tune the benchmarks on it (standard ones like iometer, not custom in house things you can fake easy) to prove they were serious. I left their booth saying "I want one!" and repeating it to my friends for the rest of the show.
But I digress. I had purchased a 3ware, to go in my new Athlon system. This was back in the old Slot A athlon days with the bad AMD750 chipsets. I had an Asus K7M, and the 3Ware was not cooperating. After a few hours of fighting with it, I put it in my trusty celeron system with the BX chipset motherboard. It still didn't work, so then I knew I had a problem. This was unfortunate considering I was leaving for college on saturday, and this was thursday afternoon.
So I called 3Ware. I described the problem and had very little trouble (for once) convincing the tech support guy I wasn't some kind of moron. They believed me when I said I knew what I was doing when I put a system together, unlike most other companies. After an attempt to flash the card's BIOS to a good image, they said that the card most likely had a defective chip and would need replacement. They said they would gladly do it but their RMA system was down due to a server problem, and that calling hypermicro back would be the best option.
So I called Hypermicro, and they say they'll be happy to get me a new card, but there's no way they could get it to me overnight (as it's now late afternoon). I explain the problem of leaving for college and they say they'll be happy to ship it to me when I get there. I wasn't happy about that.
So I called 3Ware back, and explained what Hypermicro had said about being unable to replace the card before I leave. It's now about 8:30pm NY time, Hypermicro I believe is in central time, and 3Ware is on pacific time. The 3Ware support guy brings his manager on the phone (I didn't ask), and the manager says "Give me your information, and I'll have a card there for you. Send us your defective one back when you get a chance." So, 3Ware sends me a retail box card with the cables and all as a replacement for my OEM bare card, cross shipped, without an RMA number, and has someone take a car and speed to the FedEx hub in person to get it shipped.
10AM NY time the next morning the card was there.
The new card worked perfectly, and I was very happy with it. About 2 months after I bought it, 3Ware sends me an email. It basicly says the following: "We have implemented RAID5 support for your card in our new driver and firmware. You may download it as a free upgrade even though we had only planned to support RAID0, 1, and 10 on your product." How's that for support and driver updates?
Also, after the 6000 series was retired in favor of the 7000 and 7500s, 3Ware sends me another email that basicly says "We know your cards are considered obsolete and no longer made, but here's a free driver that adds > 137GB disk support to your ata-66 level controller that shouldn't officially support that standard." And at that point they'd basicly retired the products, yet they were still developing new drivers and firmware for their obsolete parts!
I now own a 7500-4 as my main controller, and I will likely be buying one of the 9000 series SATA-II controllers when they come out as an upgrade.
Oh and I've never missed my DPT (unfortunately since bought and ruined by Acraptec) with its hardware RAID5 and cache or my seagate cheetahs or any of my other SCSI hardware ever since.
Maybe then they should start all their press releases with "Incoming message from The Big Giant Head!"
It really works especially if he's gonna keep saying cool stuff like "The next revolution in P2P file sharing is upon you. Resistance is futile and we are now in control".
Back in 1993, I didn't know what a web browser was. I was looking forward towards college, and I was enjoying the new fast 14.4 I had got and my fast 486/66DX2 that cost a ton with its entire SCSI disk system.
I would commonly dial up various local BBS's, leave posts for my friends, upload and download interesting files. Stuff like.mod files, so we could go "wow, these almost sound like REAL" music. Or I'd chat with my friend with the insane idea of "Yeah I wanna have a pirate radio station and send the sound over a 14.4 in realtime." and everyone would laugh saying "There's no way to compress it enough!"
Socially, everything was posts and emails on isolated systems, and you'd go system to system like a bee harvesting data for you, and that's how we all kept in touch. You rarely communicated outside the local few area codes because it'd cost too much to dial that far.
People spread rumors about new BBS's that would allow actual graphics instead of just text. But everyone said it wouldn't work because it would be too hard to get everyone to use the same systems.
Today, most of my friends live in other states. I can grab music and video for just about anything I want and have it in less than a day. I don't even have to think too hard about setting up this kind of functionality. Everyone just talks to each other on different OS's and exchanges files without much thought outside "Do I have a player for this? Where can I donwload one for free if I don't?"
Computing has become more abstracted. Nobody thinks about opening a web page, you just do it. There can be 5 gifs 9 jpgs and pregenerated content on it, but you don't really care much about your browser or OS except in a few specific cases. You go somewhere else and use a browser and expect the web to be there, with graphics and maybe sound and text and easy to use. You grab a file and don't think about where it comes from, you just search entire networks without a second though. Can't remember something? Search google about it. As long as you're online, information is there, and you're ALWAYS online at high speed, unless you leave the house, and then it's maybe low speed if you're lucky.
This is a BIG CHANGE. 10 years ago setting up a network was a huge hassle, and inter-system exchange was a veritable nightmare of standards. Today that's all gone. Almost completely paved over with systems that WORK and work so well most people aren't even aware of them.
So what's coming in the NEXT 10 years?
Wireless will be big. It will be huge. Everyone is going to want to take their data, and have it everywhere. On their PDA, on their phone ( which is their PDA), in their laptop (which connects to their PDA), at their friends' house (which networks with their laptop or pda). People are going to want to be able to just drag files at their friends' machines and swap them just like that. Better integration of popular apps will mean IM peer groups that are also P2P file clusters that can be searched and traded among as seamlessly as IMs are sent now.
The concept of "Desktop PC" will begin to fade. There will still be geeks who love them to death, but the average joe won't care. He wants the latest PDA/cellphone combo with 500mhz CPU, 256MB ram, 10GB of storage, and ultra high speed networking links to a half dozen wired and wireless network standards all over the globe. And his OS will manage all this and transition from one network to another as he roams through coverage areas that provide different services, just like we take DHCP for granted now.
Maybe he'll go pick up one of those docking stations he saw his sister get for school. You know, the kind where you put an adapter on your PDA and then it locks into a standard bay in the side of what looks like a traditional laptop, letting you use the bigger screen and comfortable keyboard and expanded ports while still using the PDA's cpu? And you can even add a fuelcell to it that can recharge your PDA's supe
I seem to remember way way back in the days of old, you would go look at computers, and most major manufacturers would have benchmark scores with various applications. You'd then pick the machine with the highest score in the applications you used most often that you could afford. Or you'd go pick up a couple of PC magazines and read a review or two. What happened to that?
Oh yeah, people started paying off reviewers and cheating on the benchmarks.
Then again, assuming that benchmarks did get back into a realistic picture, what would we use for the test applications these days? Browser page loads? I mean what does the average user who doesn't understand the terminology run on their machine?
1. IE or Netscape.
2. AOL's crap or similar from another "value" ISP like MSN.
3. A media player of some kind for audio or video or dvds.
4. An IM client of some kind.
5. Games, most likely a year or more out of date games like starcraft, diablo2, and counterstrike.
6. Some form of word processor maybe. I doubt 90% of the people who get bundled office suites ever use spreadsheets or presentations.
7. Maybe some basic photo stuff that came with a camera or scanner.
8. Financial software for taxes maybe?
Now, pick one on the list that requires more than a 1ghz machine, which is arguably the slowest machine you could reasonably expect to find. Even the games they're likely to run don't require anything within 2 generations of the latest hardware, usually it's hardcore gamers playing the new stuff that drives most of the faster system sales these days, at least for home users. But most of them learn the jargon after awhile.
So when AMD says "People aren't buying fast computers because they don't understand the terms!" I think the real problem is that people aren't buying fast computers because they don't need them. Anything they buy will do whatever they do as fast as they need so they'll be happy with whatever a salesman has been paid to talk them into buying. They never know they're getting a bad deal because there's no way for them to tell, even after they get it home and use it for a year! The only way they can know is if someone who knows all the terminology comes and looks at it and says "What did you pay for this?" and tells them it's crap.
Let's face it, the majority of applications are no longer intensive enough to drive faster hardware sales. Only a few niche apps like the latest games, heavy duty image and video editing, and software development need a system faster than even the most pathetic mainstream commercial offering in stores now. And the people who run those apps already know what they're talking about when they go shopping.
The home PC market is dying. Start buying PDA and cellphone stocks now. What? Mom'll never use a PDA? Like she won't ever use a computer? Or a VCR? Wait till the PDAs cross this "sufficiency threshold" of being able to run the apps listed above, and relegate PCs to a role of "home server" to centrally store videos you don't feel like watching this week and such. "Hmm, now I can take my entire machine with me anywhere and just dock it into a small box with a keyboard under an LCD, even at work or my friend's house, and still have all my stuff, and it works just like my old PC did." It happens, it's just like OSs giving way to browsers, and command lines giving way to GUIs and ICs to microprocessors, transistors to ICs, and vaccuum tubes to transistors. It seems like it actually starts to happen just about every 10 years on the 5th year, give or take a few.
Had some fun upgrading their computers a few years ago. Mostly early pentiums to P200s etc, new HDs and install NT, add ram, etc. This was back in 98 or so, they've probably upgraded again. Did about 10 machines per day on the night shift, I think with 6 of us we managed about 330 in a week.
I got to see some of the neat toys though. Like the really expensive robot that's programmed to open and close drawers all day till they break.
And the incredibly sophisticated TV implosion tester consisting of a bowling ball on a steel cable hung from the ceiling.
Will I have to give a phone number so they can call me and confirm it's really my email when I sign up on that one?
And exactly HOW do you enter data into this?
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Microsoft SPOT Watches
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· Score: 1, Redundant
I really can't see how you're supposed to get text onto this thing. Stylus? Nah, it's too small. Voice recognition? Yeah that won't look weird and stupid talking to your watch all the time, plus I doubt it'd be very accurate especially in noisy environments. Looks like it's upload from another device then, which makes it seem pretty lame to me. Either that or some really lame button combos to get text on it, which is even worse, even if the buttons are onscreen.
Yeah that'd really be a pain. It'd be like having the same speed chip released in versions with different multiplier settings so you could run it at different FSB speeds. I mean the confusion would make it completely unprofitable. Good thing nobody ever does anything like that. It's much easier and cheaper to upgrade my $100-150 motherboard to support new ram speeds every year or two than buy a new $100-150 CPU AND a new motherboard every time I buy ram. I mean why would you wanna replace a perfectly good 800mhz cpu just because you got DDR400 and a better motherboard? I mean what would I do if I had to replace the CPU too, build a completely new machine and have two? Ludicrious!
No longer must we be deprived of 256 color paletted graphics with inferior lossless compession! Now we can experience the finest in 1980s(?) image technology!
I did use command line copy on both OS's. I've also tried tons of "accelerator" programs that claim to be faster at copying. I tried same partition, different partitions, changing cluster size to every possible setting it allows, etc. With Atto, the drive performs well once write size gets over 256K, but the OS's internal copy routines for both command line and drag/drop apparently want to write one 512 byte cluster at a time and confirm it went to disk before writing the next one, which is crippling the write performance because the writes won't cache or stripe.
Just "right click, turn on write cache etc" (from a previous post to this) DOESN'T WORK. If you'd care to READ what I originally posted I mention that it indicates write cache is enabled when IT ISN'T. It's pretty obvious whether it is or isn't based on the write performance. When read is 80-90MB/s and write is 1/10th of that, there's a problem. It's called the OS is forcing write-through, i.e. confirm all data to physical disk instead of just write back to the cache.
As for the controller, it's a 3Ware Escalade 7500-4, not one of those POS promise things. The drives are 4 Western Digital 1200JBs in RAID5. My previous Escalade 6400 and 4 75GXPs in RAID0 had the same problem. (this was asked in one of the previous posts)
It's really irritating to have a RAID that gets crippled to 5-10MB/sec when on other OS and FS combos it can do 80-100 because MS has decided "Oh performance isn't important, reliability is, so we'll force cache off for all SCSI miniport devices even if it says it's on."
See http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?act=ST&f =2&t=1758&hl=slow+scsi+performance&s=9f0e65a3ff482 2032e4a63091694cc3f it never got fixed. Non-RAID IDE is unaffected supposedly due to a "bug" in the system where IDE devices ignore the OS commands to switch to write through caching. It's really ridiculous when a 700MB file takes almost 2 minutes to copy under XP and yet under BSD on the same system dual booted on the same array, it takes 11.2 seconds.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
BZZZT! Sorry, RIAA doing a remote hack in and scan of my HD and finding a file they think may be a copy of copyrighted content is not due process by a long stretch. I demand a trial. But we already know that's way too expensive to stop $1 worth of piracy since it hasn't already happened to 80% of the population under 30.
Or maybe just my name as part of an evil scheme of some kind. But what size font would you use for that? If you get it wrong you might get stuck with only 3 letters or something, or leave too much space and it'll look akward unless someone takes a bite out of it later.
These were great back when they were still being made. I'm sure they were sold under other names, but this is the only one I still remember. Everything fully programmable, including macros, 8way arrow pad with space in the center, and double set of function keys, both across the top and down the left side. Since you could assign any key to any value you wanted or a macro, you could make them do whatever you want. I used to reprogram them to dvorak before I gave up on it. Sometimes you run into these in the used parts bins for $10 at computer shows.
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TV networks aren't going to use technology to give people more choice, they're going to use it to spam advertising to make more money. TV "bugs" are already getting our of hand. Example: SpikeTV's gigantic Joe Schmo ad that pops up over about the entire lower left quarter of the screen every 2 minutes. Or their animated and opaque spraypaint logo bug that refreshes every 45 seconds.
The future of TV is popups. The actual show will get less and less space as multiple eyecatch techniques are used to spam and spam and spam. Floating semi-transparent animated billboards will roam around all edges of the screen, probably across it too. It's not like browsing where you can click them off either. This is the plan to get around TiVo, you just make the commercials part of the show so they can't be cut out.
Doesn't bother me much though, I'll just download more dvd rips of shows the networks cancel because they don't appeal to the general moron. Or anime series that would either never make it here or would be mangled to death by censors and bad dubbing anyway.
Scotty uses this in the TNG episode "Relics" to keep himself alive by being stuck in a transporter doing diagnostic loops for a good number of years (Hey at least it was better than the plothole for Kirk's TNG appearance in Generations!). I always find it amusing when I see sci-fi stuff start showing up in the real world.
I seem to remember a few DEC Alpha based "PC"s running WindowsNT back in the early 90s. Does that count?
Yes, now all you need is some multi-socket 478 motherboards.... seen any?
Yeah, it's not like you can just look them up. Oh wait, Apple doesn't like to send them scores. Wonder why that is....
The FX will also probably perform a bit better once it's freed from having to use registered memory. Wait for the 939pin version.
The Ace's review does some testing on the already pretty useable windows64 beta. I don't think it'll take that much longer for it to get up to their normal stability standards for a release.
Do the math! (Jaguar)
So what's going to be the breakthrough control interface for 3D like the mouse was for 2D? And don't point at one of those "3D mice" with the little eraser pointer for scroll on them either. Maybe one of the gyroscopic mice but I think I'd get tired of having to hold the damn thing up in the air 8 hours a day. Maybe something like the SpaceOrb 360, but I couldn't get any decent precision with that when I had one.
Maybe someone should dust off the old NES U-force and find a way to integrate it into the laptop.
From what I've read in their manuals, the 3wares allow any combination of RAID and single disks and hot spare you want. So you can get the 8 channel controller and use it that way if you wish.
Also I don't think they bitch about smaller drives. I actually had the RAID0 comprised of 4 75GXPs on my 6400 go bad just as I was installing the RAID5 on the 7500 with 4 WD1200JBs in the same system to copy the data over. I wound up ordering a new drive that turned out to be about 2MB smaller, swapping circuit boards on one of my good drives to the failed one, imaging it to the new drive with dd, then swapping the board back, plugging the new drive in, and rebooting the array.
It worked, but corrupted about 5% of my files, mostly in the newer stuff like downloads. I copied about 150GB over to the RAID5 and then returned the new drive.
I bought a 3Ware 6400 back when they were new. Before the 6410 came out, and you had to get a full length PCI card for 4 ports. I got it through hypermicro.com, who I knew and trusted for all my storage purposes.
Until the 3ware, I had been "The SCSI guy" in most circles. I was running all scsi systems starting in 1992 and woe betide he who suggest I add an inferior IDE device to my system. I had first spotted the 3Ware at PC Expo back when they were prototyping the 6000 series, and immediately scoffed at it as "just another IDE RAID wannabe." The 3Ware engineers overheard this and invited me to come over and play with their system and tune the benchmarks on it (standard ones like iometer, not custom in house things you can fake easy) to prove they were serious. I left their booth saying "I want one!" and repeating it to my friends for the rest of the show.
But I digress. I had purchased a 3ware, to go in my new Athlon system. This was back in the old Slot A athlon days with the bad AMD750 chipsets. I had an Asus K7M, and the 3Ware was not cooperating. After a few hours of fighting with it, I put it in my trusty celeron system with the BX chipset motherboard. It still didn't work, so then I knew I had a problem. This was unfortunate considering I was leaving for college on saturday, and this was thursday afternoon.
So I called 3Ware. I described the problem and had very little trouble (for once) convincing the tech support guy I wasn't some kind of moron. They believed me when I said I knew what I was doing when I put a system together, unlike most other companies. After an attempt to flash the card's BIOS to a good image, they said that the card most likely had a defective chip and would need replacement. They said they would gladly do it but their RMA system was down due to a server problem, and that calling hypermicro back would be the best option.
So I called Hypermicro, and they say they'll be happy to get me a new card, but there's no way they could get it to me overnight (as it's now late afternoon). I explain the problem of leaving for college and they say they'll be happy to ship it to me when I get there. I wasn't happy about that.
So I called 3Ware back, and explained what Hypermicro had said about being unable to replace the card before I leave. It's now about 8:30pm NY time, Hypermicro I believe is in central time, and 3Ware is on pacific time. The 3Ware support guy brings his manager on the phone (I didn't ask), and the manager says "Give me your information, and I'll have a card there for you. Send us your defective one back when you get a chance." So, 3Ware sends me a retail box card with the cables and all as a replacement for my OEM bare card, cross shipped, without an RMA number, and has someone take a car and speed to the FedEx hub in person to get it shipped.
10AM NY time the next morning the card was there.
The new card worked perfectly, and I was very happy with it. About 2 months after I bought it, 3Ware sends me an email. It basicly says the following: "We have implemented RAID5 support for your card in our new driver and firmware. You may download it as a free upgrade even though we had only planned to support RAID0, 1, and 10 on your product." How's that for support and driver updates?
Also, after the 6000 series was retired in favor of the 7000 and 7500s, 3Ware sends me another email that basicly says "We know your cards are considered obsolete and no longer made, but here's a free driver that adds > 137GB disk support to your ata-66 level controller that shouldn't officially support that standard." And at that point they'd basicly retired the products, yet they were still developing new drivers and firmware for their obsolete parts!
I now own a 7500-4 as my main controller, and I will likely be buying one of the 9000 series SATA-II controllers when they come out as an upgrade.
Oh and I've never missed my DPT (unfortunately since bought and ruined by Acraptec) with its hardware RAID5 and cache or my seagate cheetahs or any of my other SCSI hardware ever since.
Maybe then they should start all their press releases with "Incoming message from The Big Giant Head!"
It really works especially if he's gonna keep saying cool stuff like "The next revolution in P2P file sharing is upon you. Resistance is futile and we are now in control".
Let's consdier 1993 vs now.
.mod files, so we could go "wow, these almost sound like REAL" music. Or I'd chat with my friend with the insane idea of "Yeah I wanna have a pirate radio station and send the sound over a 14.4 in realtime." and everyone would laugh saying "There's no way to compress it enough!"
Back in 1993, I didn't know what a web browser was. I was looking forward towards college, and I was enjoying the new fast 14.4 I had got and my fast 486/66DX2 that cost a ton with its entire SCSI disk system.
I would commonly dial up various local BBS's, leave posts for my friends, upload and download interesting files. Stuff like
Socially, everything was posts and emails on isolated systems, and you'd go system to system like a bee harvesting data for you, and that's how we all kept in touch. You rarely communicated outside the local few area codes because it'd cost too much to dial that far.
People spread rumors about new BBS's that would allow actual graphics instead of just text. But everyone said it wouldn't work because it would be too hard to get everyone to use the same systems.
Today, most of my friends live in other states. I can grab music and video for just about anything I want and have it in less than a day. I don't even have to think too hard about setting up this kind of functionality. Everyone just talks to each other on different OS's and exchanges files without much thought outside "Do I have a player for this? Where can I donwload one for free if I don't?"
Computing has become more abstracted. Nobody thinks about opening a web page, you just do it. There can be 5 gifs 9 jpgs and pregenerated content on it, but you don't really care much about your browser or OS except in a few specific cases. You go somewhere else and use a browser and expect the web to be there, with graphics and maybe sound and text and easy to use. You grab a file and don't think about where it comes from, you just search entire networks without a second though. Can't remember something? Search google about it. As long as you're online, information is there, and you're ALWAYS online at high speed, unless you leave the house, and then it's maybe low speed if you're lucky.
This is a BIG CHANGE. 10 years ago setting up a network was a huge hassle, and inter-system exchange was a veritable nightmare of standards. Today that's all gone. Almost completely paved over with systems that WORK and work so well most people aren't even aware of them.
So what's coming in the NEXT 10 years?
Wireless will be big. It will be huge. Everyone is going to want to take their data, and have it everywhere. On their PDA, on their phone ( which is their PDA), in their laptop (which connects to their PDA), at their friends' house (which networks with their laptop or pda). People are going to want to be able to just drag files at their friends' machines and swap them just like that. Better integration of popular apps will mean IM peer groups that are also P2P file clusters that can be searched and traded among as seamlessly as IMs are sent now.
The concept of "Desktop PC" will begin to fade. There will still be geeks who love them to death, but the average joe won't care. He wants the latest PDA/cellphone combo with 500mhz CPU, 256MB ram, 10GB of storage, and ultra high speed networking links to a half dozen wired and wireless network standards all over the globe. And his OS will manage all this and transition from one network to another as he roams through coverage areas that provide different services, just like we take DHCP for granted now.
Maybe he'll go pick up one of those docking stations he saw his sister get for school. You know, the kind where you put an adapter on your PDA and then it locks into a standard bay in the side of what looks like a traditional laptop, letting you use the bigger screen and comfortable keyboard and expanded ports while still using the PDA's cpu? And you can even add a fuelcell to it that can recharge your PDA's supe
I seem to remember way way back in the days of old, you would go look at computers, and most major manufacturers would have benchmark scores with various applications. You'd then pick the machine with the highest score in the applications you used most often that you could afford. Or you'd go pick up a couple of PC magazines and read a review or two. What happened to that?
Oh yeah, people started paying off reviewers and cheating on the benchmarks.
Then again, assuming that benchmarks did get back into a realistic picture, what would we use for the test applications these days? Browser page loads? I mean what does the average user who doesn't understand the terminology run on their machine?
1. IE or Netscape.
2. AOL's crap or similar from another "value" ISP like MSN.
3. A media player of some kind for audio or video or dvds.
4. An IM client of some kind.
5. Games, most likely a year or more out of date games like starcraft, diablo2, and counterstrike.
6. Some form of word processor maybe. I doubt 90% of the people who get bundled office suites ever use spreadsheets or presentations.
7. Maybe some basic photo stuff that came with a camera or scanner.
8. Financial software for taxes maybe?
Now, pick one on the list that requires more than a 1ghz machine, which is arguably the slowest machine you could reasonably expect to find. Even the games they're likely to run don't require anything within 2 generations of the latest hardware, usually it's hardcore gamers playing the new stuff that drives most of the faster system sales these days, at least for home users. But most of them learn the jargon after awhile.
So when AMD says "People aren't buying fast computers because they don't understand the terms!" I think the real problem is that people aren't buying fast computers because they don't need them. Anything they buy will do whatever they do as fast as they need so they'll be happy with whatever a salesman has been paid to talk them into buying. They never know they're getting a bad deal because there's no way for them to tell, even after they get it home and use it for a year! The only way they can know is if someone who knows all the terminology comes and looks at it and says "What did you pay for this?" and tells them it's crap.
Let's face it, the majority of applications are no longer intensive enough to drive faster hardware sales. Only a few niche apps like the latest games, heavy duty image and video editing, and software development need a system faster than even the most pathetic mainstream commercial offering in stores now. And the people who run those apps already know what they're talking about when they go shopping.
The home PC market is dying. Start buying PDA and cellphone stocks now. What? Mom'll never use a PDA? Like she won't ever use a computer? Or a VCR? Wait till the PDAs cross this "sufficiency threshold" of being able to run the apps listed above, and relegate PCs to a role of "home server" to centrally store videos you don't feel like watching this week and such. "Hmm, now I can take my entire machine with me anywhere and just dock it into a small box with a keyboard under an LCD, even at work or my friend's house, and still have all my stuff, and it works just like my old PC did." It happens, it's just like OSs giving way to browsers, and command lines giving way to GUIs and ICs to microprocessors, transistors to ICs, and vaccuum tubes to transistors. It seems like it actually starts to happen just about every 10 years on the 5th year, give or take a few.
Had some fun upgrading their computers a few years ago. Mostly early pentiums to P200s etc, new HDs and install NT, add ram, etc. This was back in 98 or so, they've probably upgraded again. Did about 10 machines per day on the night shift, I think with 6 of us we managed about 330 in a week.
I got to see some of the neat toys though. Like the really expensive robot that's programmed to open and close drawers all day till they break.
And the incredibly sophisticated TV implosion tester consisting of a bowling ball on a steel cable hung from the ceiling.
Will I have to give a phone number so they can call me and confirm it's really my email when I sign up on that one?
I really can't see how you're supposed to get text onto this thing. Stylus? Nah, it's too small. Voice recognition? Yeah that won't look weird and stupid talking to your watch all the time, plus I doubt it'd be very accurate especially in noisy environments. Looks like it's upload from another device then, which makes it seem pretty lame to me. Either that or some really lame button combos to get text on it, which is even worse, even if the buttons are onscreen.
Yeah that'd really be a pain. It'd be like having the same speed chip released in versions with different multiplier settings so you could run it at different FSB speeds. I mean the confusion would make it completely unprofitable. Good thing nobody ever does anything like that. It's much easier and cheaper to upgrade my $100-150 motherboard to support new ram speeds every year or two than buy a new $100-150 CPU AND a new motherboard every time I buy ram. I mean why would you wanna replace a perfectly good 800mhz cpu just because you got DDR400 and a better motherboard? I mean what would I do if I had to replace the CPU too, build a completely new machine and have two? Ludicrious!
No longer must we be deprived of 256 color paletted graphics with inferior lossless compession! Now we can experience the finest in 1980s(?) image technology!
I did use command line copy on both OS's. I've also tried tons of "accelerator" programs that claim to be faster at copying. I tried same partition, different partitions, changing cluster size to every possible setting it allows, etc. With Atto, the drive performs well once write size gets over 256K, but the OS's internal copy routines for both command line and drag/drop apparently want to write one 512 byte cluster at a time and confirm it went to disk before writing the next one, which is crippling the write performance because the writes won't cache or stripe.
Just "right click, turn on write cache etc" (from a previous post to this) DOESN'T WORK. If you'd care to READ what I originally posted I mention that it indicates write cache is enabled when IT ISN'T. It's pretty obvious whether it is or isn't based on the write performance. When read is 80-90MB/s and write is 1/10th of that, there's a problem. It's called the OS is forcing write-through, i.e. confirm all data to physical disk instead of just write back to the cache.
As for the controller, it's a 3Ware Escalade 7500-4, not one of those POS promise things. The drives are 4 Western Digital 1200JBs in RAID5. My previous Escalade 6400 and 4 75GXPs in RAID0 had the same problem. (this was asked in one of the previous posts)
It's really irritating to have a RAID that gets crippled to 5-10MB/sec when on other OS and FS combos it can do 80-100 because MS has decided "Oh performance isn't important, reliability is, so we'll force cache off for all SCSI miniport devices even if it says it's on."
f =2&t=1758&hl=slow+scsi+performance&s=9f0e65a3ff482 2032e4a63091694cc3f it never got fixed. Non-RAID IDE is unaffected supposedly due to a "bug" in the system where IDE devices ignore the OS commands to switch to write through caching. It's really ridiculous when a 700MB file takes almost 2 minutes to copy under XP and yet under BSD on the same system dual booted on the same array, it takes 11.2 seconds.
See http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?act=ST&
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
BZZZT! Sorry, RIAA doing a remote hack in and scan of my HD and finding a file they think may be a copy of copyrighted content is not due process by a long stretch. I demand a trial. But we already know that's way too expensive to stop $1 worth of piracy since it hasn't already happened to 80% of the population under 30.
Or maybe just my name as part of an evil scheme of some kind. But what size font would you use for that? If you get it wrong you might get stuck with only 3 letters or something, or leave too much space and it'll look akward unless someone takes a bite out of it later.
These were great back when they were still being made. I'm sure they were sold under other names, but this is the only one I still remember. Everything fully programmable, including macros, 8way arrow pad with space in the center, and double set of function keys, both across the top and down the left side. Since you could assign any key to any value you wanted or a macro, you could make them do whatever you want. I used to reprogram them to dvorak before I gave up on it. Sometimes you run into these in the used parts bins for $10 at computer shows.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/uk.cfm?id=596242003