I have seen bad tapes, but I have never seen hard disks go bad from just sitting there. And I have even powered up old 20MB RLL drives that I have let sit for years in my basement and they come right up and all the data is on them from when they were retired.
Hard disks also have the added benifit on being random access, so if you accidently deleted one file, you don't have to wait a long time for the tape drive to track that file down and read it. Finally, with an external hard disk, if your main computer suddenly exploded or something, you can hook that external hard disk up to any computer with USB/Firewire and get at your data. With tapes it kind of sucks when you lose the physical drive, and you have to order another one to read your data.
So I don't think hard disks are really unreliable. On the other hand, if the leave-your-computer-on-24/7 crowd is to be believed, the best thing to do with a backup hard drive is to not put it on a shelf, but to hook it up to power and let it spin for the next 15 years.
Besides, with hard disks being so cheap, if the data is so important buy 2 external drives and store them in different places.
Actually, I'm almost certain that Microsoft would rather see people running a pirated copy of Windows than Linux any day, which is why I don't think that Microsoft will try to eliminate piracy of the OS, atleast for now. Look at it this way, if tomorrow, Microsoft could magically stop all pirated copies of Windows, *A LOT* of people would switch to Linux. And that would hurt Microsoft far more than the lost revenue from all those pirated copies of XP floating around.
However, this only applies to people that don't want to pay a lot for their OS. Businesses generally have plenty of money and a lot more at stake, so Microsoft doesn't hesitate to stick the BSA on them.
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
·
· Score: 1
FAT32 can do upto 2 Terabytes, and I remember Microsoft making claims to that back when they were pushing Windows 98.
It is true that after 32GB you have to use 32k clusters though, which is not that efficent (and why FAT16 just sucked for 1-2GB partitions). But for a collection of MP3's the loss of space would be minimal.
So yeah, the nerfing of the format utility is just another example of Microsoft forcing you to do things their way, cause that's the way they want it to be.
The stories of RAID arrays failing when they shouldn't is kind of amusing in a scary kind of way.
I actually did just that, but by accident, with my computer and a RAID 1 array. I was messing around with a failing fan when I oh-so-cleverly pulled out the power plug of one of the hard disks. Even though this is just a cheap controller (no hot swapping), it did not crash the computer. Instead, I just had a little pop up dialog along the lines of "Master drive on controller one has failed." I was like "Oh shit!" Quickly shut down the computer, rehooked up the drive, and when I powered it back on, it detected both drives were back, and it reimaged the drive I accidently pulled. I was back on my way with no loss in about 90 minutes. I can only wonder what trouble one could get in if they pulled the power on a RAID 0 array though.
Even turning off all the eye candy, and switching everything back to "Windows Classic", XP still has other annoyances, like how browsing the network has changed for the worse. And how once easy to find options now seem buried somewhere where I can't find them.
Besides, once someone has disabled all the eye candy, what exactly are the big differences between Windows 2000 and XP? About the only difference I have noticed is that XP has better support for dual displays, especially with dual-head video cards (sadly Windows 98 has better support for dual displays than 2000).
Doesn't Apple now use IBM chips... which incidently partnered with Cyrix back in the day, and Cyrix got sold to VIA, which makes the Effecion. So you see, the Effecion *is* a Motorola chip, just with 4 degrees of seperation!
I would think that a 1.1ghz CPU that uses 7W of power is newsworthy. It seems that VIA is the only x86 CPU maker out there that seems to make these kind of processors.
I have a hunch that in a few years people are going to become uninterested in faster computers to do things like office apps, email, and web browsing and instead will demand smaller, cheaper, and quieter computers. At that time Intel and AMD may find that many people are not interested in the Pentium VI Supa-Extreme Edition or the Athlon 128XXP++++, but rather in VIA's powerful enough but energy efficient chips.
There's nothing wrong with VCRs. What do you want in your school? DVD home theatre systems?
When I was in high school (1990's) it was not uncommon at all to watch film/film stripes that dated back from the 50's and 60's. It wasn't towards the end that they got a TV/VCR in most classrooms, and even then they still ran the projectors because all their movies were in that format.
What amazes more is the people running old browsers. Who the heck still uses Netscape 4? I mean, by today's standards it sucks. Even for old hardware, it still sucks. There are much better choices - Netscape 4 is just bloat, and it's slow. IE 3.0? C'mon people!
Anyhow, my choice for web browsers on ancient machines is Opera 5, which has a nice balance between speed, features, and ability to view fancy webpages that you shouldn't be loading on a 486 anyway.
I just looked it up, and it apparently is to be used for airplanes. The basic rundown is that if a passenger wants to use the bathroom, he/she has to press a button on their seat. This communicates with a computer on the plane, and this computer assigns them a place in a queue to use the most convienent bathroom. A display tells the passenger what place they are in and approximately how long they have to wait.
The point of the system seems to be to reduce the time people are standing up on the airplane, since you now wait in your seat. Plus it reduces waiting time (the computer will assign you to the closest bathroom with the shortest line), and streamlines the process of having to get up and go to the bathroom on a crowded plane.
There is a whole bunch of things that have to do with sensors to determine when the passenger has left their seat, etc. And things that the crew can do to control the system (as in shut off access during take-off/landing).
It also talks about other ideas, like the queues could be adjusted so that 1st class passengers get to bump in line over coach, etc. I don't really care much for that part of it.
Anyway, overall, this patent is not nearly as stupid as you make it out to be. It's not some frivilous patent that IBM came out with that people have been doing forever (I have never heard of a system like this anywhere in place).
I believe the standard procedure when doing this is to copy explorer.exe (and a couple of other select files) from Windows 95, and you end up with a Windows 98 install with the Windows 95 explorer and shell. Works pretty nicely I hear.
It seems to me that the article you reference seems to conclude with a "really we don't know" - rather than to say either layout is better or worse than the other. It does seem to imply that since the market chooses QWERTY that it must be alright, though it has been proven over and over again that the market doesn't always choose the best product for whatever reason.
Anyway, as someone that uses both layouts, I can say that Dvorak causes less strain (there is no arguing that you have to move your hands a lot more on QWERTY). For that reason alone I'll keep with Dvorak. Besides, Dvorak does make some sense (why put f, j, k, and ; on the homerow?)
Well a side effect of trying to not put frequently used characters next to each other on the QWERTY layout results in a lot of alternating of which hand is used when typing. This is desirable, as it is slower when you have to hit multiple keys in a row with the same hand (and worse when it has to be done with the same finger).
The Dvorak layout, likewise, is optomized for this (that's one reason why the vowels are all on the left side), but also takes it a bit further by doing things like putting the most commonly used keys on the homerow, and making it so the bottom row is not needed nearly as much. This is mainly done to reduce travel (how far you have to move your hands around to press the keys).
All I know is that on Dvorak I don't have the strain at the end of a long day typing like I did on QWERTY. And for that reason alone I consider it a better layout.
As a compromize, you can design your own keyboard layouts (in Windows 9x only it seems) with this program:
http://solair.eunet.yu/~janko/engdload.htm
Get a keyboard like the Model M, and then you can easily rearrange your keycaps to match your custom driver.
Otherwise, I don't know about moving towards a gesture/graffiti input instead of a keyboard. I personally hate graffiti, and I don't think anyone could possibly input text that way faster than a good typist. But YMMV.
Basically the QWERTY keyboard was invented to keep typewriters from jamming back in the early days. The idea was to minimize the chances of hitting two keys right next to each other so it wouldn't jam. There is also a story that it was designed so that 'typewriter' could be typed using only the top row of keys for demos, but whether that is true or just coincidence is unknown.
More information here: http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert. html
Since then, other keyboard layouts such as Dvorak have been designed, but despite their superiority they haven't caught on for various reasons (mostly inertia - people don't want to relearn how to type)
The distraction caused by a cellphone when driving will far outweigh any benifits that having 3G waves beamed through your head will give you.
This is great. Not only do we have to put up with drivers talking on cellphones, we now have to put up with them thinking they are better drivers because of it.
Sure, a blackout costs them. But if having the power go out for some reason is cheaper than actually doing things to stop it from happening such as updating infrastructure, maintance, building more power plants - you can bet the stockholders will choose the blackout, especially if they don't live in the affected areas.
It's like computers. Having 99.9% uptime is a lot cheaper than 99.999% uptime. Having the system go down will cost you, but if getting those extra nines costs more than the losses due to having it fail occasionally, many people pick the 99.9% and let deal with the extra failures.
I'd say a cheap power supply could do things like cause surges. But you'd probably be better turning that off because it will fail faster by leaving it on (failing capacitors, etc.) But if you are going to buy a throw-away computer who cares about how long it lasts?
I'd be more concerned about the dust that's going to build up inside the power supply from leaving it on all the time.
The article states that they smashed their own machines. I suppose some of them maybe were running 386's, but I got the impression that the reason they were so addicted to the computer was the Internet, implying they probably had something more modern.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen bad tapes, but I have never seen hard disks go bad from just sitting there. And I have even powered up old 20MB RLL drives that I have let sit for years in my basement and they come right up and all the data is on them from when they were retired.
Hard disks also have the added benifit on being random access, so if you accidently deleted one file, you don't have to wait a long time for the tape drive to track that file down and read it. Finally, with an external hard disk, if your main computer suddenly exploded or something, you can hook that external hard disk up to any computer with USB/Firewire and get at your data. With tapes it kind of sucks when you lose the physical drive, and you have to order another one to read your data.
So I don't think hard disks are really unreliable. On the other hand, if the leave-your-computer-on-24/7 crowd is to be believed, the best thing to do with a backup hard drive is to not put it on a shelf, but to hook it up to power and let it spin for the next 15 years.
Besides, with hard disks being so cheap, if the data is so important buy 2 external drives and store them in different places.
Actually, I'm almost certain that Microsoft would rather see people running a pirated copy of Windows than Linux any day, which is why I don't think that Microsoft will try to eliminate piracy of the OS, atleast for now. Look at it this way, if tomorrow, Microsoft could magically stop all pirated copies of Windows, *A LOT* of people would switch to Linux. And that would hurt Microsoft far more than the lost revenue from all those pirated copies of XP floating around.
However, this only applies to people that don't want to pay a lot for their OS. Businesses generally have plenty of money and a lot more at stake, so Microsoft doesn't hesitate to stick the BSA on them.
FAT32 can do upto 2 Terabytes, and I remember Microsoft making claims to that back when they were pushing Windows 98.
It is true that after 32GB you have to use 32k clusters though, which is not that efficent (and why FAT16 just sucked for 1-2GB partitions). But for a collection of MP3's the loss of space would be minimal.
So yeah, the nerfing of the format utility is just another example of Microsoft forcing you to do things their way, cause that's the way they want it to be.
Not much of a RAID array now was it?
The stories of RAID arrays failing when they shouldn't is kind of amusing in a scary kind of way.
I actually did just that, but by accident, with my computer and a RAID 1 array. I was messing around with a failing fan when I oh-so-cleverly pulled out the power plug of one of the hard disks. Even though this is just a cheap controller (no hot swapping), it did not crash the computer. Instead, I just had a little pop up dialog along the lines of "Master drive on controller one has failed." I was like "Oh shit!" Quickly shut down the computer, rehooked up the drive, and when I powered it back on, it detected both drives were back, and it reimaged the drive I accidently pulled. I was back on my way with no loss in about 90 minutes. I can only wonder what trouble one could get in if they pulled the power on a RAID 0 array though.
Even turning off all the eye candy, and switching everything back to "Windows Classic", XP still has other annoyances, like how browsing the network has changed for the worse. And how once easy to find options now seem buried somewhere where I can't find them.
Besides, once someone has disabled all the eye candy, what exactly are the big differences between Windows 2000 and XP? About the only difference I have noticed is that XP has better support for dual displays, especially with dual-head video cards (sadly Windows 98 has better support for dual displays than 2000).
Doesn't Apple now use IBM chips... which incidently partnered with Cyrix back in the day, and Cyrix got sold to VIA, which makes the Effecion. So you see, the Effecion *is* a Motorola chip, just with 4 degrees of seperation!
I would think that a 1.1ghz CPU that uses 7W of power is newsworthy. It seems that VIA is the only x86 CPU maker out there that seems to make these kind of processors.
I have a hunch that in a few years people are going to become uninterested in faster computers to do things like office apps, email, and web browsing and instead will demand smaller, cheaper, and quieter computers. At that time Intel and AMD may find that many people are not interested in the Pentium VI Supa-Extreme Edition or the Athlon 128XXP++++, but rather in VIA's powerful enough but energy efficient chips.
1090
That's the same reasoning that states that since a Honda Civic still manages to pollute quite a bit, we might as well drive Hummer H2's everywhere.
Every bit counts. We can't eliminate energy waste or pollution, but we should atleast try to minimize it.
There's nothing wrong with VCRs. What do you want in your school? DVD home theatre systems?
When I was in high school (1990's) it was not uncommon at all to watch film/film stripes that dated back from the 50's and 60's. It wasn't towards the end that they got a TV/VCR in most classrooms, and even then they still ran the projectors because all their movies were in that format.
What amazes more is the people running old browsers. Who the heck still uses Netscape 4? I mean, by today's standards it sucks. Even for old hardware, it still sucks. There are much better choices - Netscape 4 is just bloat, and it's slow. IE 3.0? C'mon people!
Anyhow, my choice for web browsers on ancient machines is Opera 5, which has a nice balance between speed, features, and ability to view fancy webpages that you shouldn't be loading on a 486 anyway.
I just looked it up, and it apparently is to be used for airplanes. The basic rundown is that if a passenger wants to use the bathroom, he/she has to press a button on their seat. This communicates with a computer on the plane, and this computer assigns them a place in a queue to use the most convienent bathroom. A display tells the passenger what place they are in and approximately how long they have to wait.
The point of the system seems to be to reduce the time people are standing up on the airplane, since you now wait in your seat. Plus it reduces waiting time (the computer will assign you to the closest bathroom with the shortest line), and streamlines the process of having to get up and go to the bathroom on a crowded plane.
There is a whole bunch of things that have to do with sensors to determine when the passenger has left their seat, etc. And things that the crew can do to control the system (as in shut off access during take-off/landing).
It also talks about other ideas, like the queues could be adjusted so that 1st class passengers get to bump in line over coach, etc. I don't really care much for that part of it.
Anyway, overall, this patent is not nearly as stupid as you make it out to be. It's not some frivilous patent that IBM came out with that people have been doing forever (I have never heard of a system like this anywhere in place).
I believe the standard procedure when doing this is to copy explorer.exe (and a couple of other select files) from Windows 95, and you end up with a Windows 98 install with the Windows 95 explorer and shell. Works pretty nicely I hear.
It seems to me that the article you reference seems to conclude with a "really we don't know" - rather than to say either layout is better or worse than the other. It does seem to imply that since the market chooses QWERTY that it must be alright, though it has been proven over and over again that the market doesn't always choose the best product for whatever reason.
Anyway, as someone that uses both layouts, I can say that Dvorak causes less strain (there is no arguing that you have to move your hands a lot more on QWERTY). For that reason alone I'll keep with Dvorak. Besides, Dvorak does make some sense (why put f, j, k, and ; on the homerow?)
Well a side effect of trying to not put frequently used characters next to each other on the QWERTY layout results in a lot of alternating of which hand is used when typing. This is desirable, as it is slower when you have to hit multiple keys in a row with the same hand (and worse when it has to be done with the same finger).
The Dvorak layout, likewise, is optomized for this (that's one reason why the vowels are all on the left side), but also takes it a bit further by doing things like putting the most commonly used keys on the homerow, and making it so the bottom row is not needed nearly as much. This is mainly done to reduce travel (how far you have to move your hands around to press the keys).
All I know is that on Dvorak I don't have the strain at the end of a long day typing like I did on QWERTY. And for that reason alone I consider it a better layout.
As a compromize, you can design your own keyboard layouts (in Windows 9x only it seems) with this program:
http://solair.eunet.yu/~janko/engdload.htm
Get a keyboard like the Model M, and then you can easily rearrange your keycaps to match your custom driver.
Otherwise, I don't know about moving towards a gesture/graffiti input instead of a keyboard. I personally hate graffiti, and I don't think anyone could possibly input text that way faster than a good typist. But YMMV.
Basically the QWERTY keyboard was invented to keep typewriters from jamming back in the early days. The idea was to minimize the chances of hitting two keys right next to each other so it wouldn't jam. There is also a story that it was designed so that 'typewriter' could be typed using only the top row of keys for demos, but whether that is true or just coincidence is unknown.
. html
More information here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert
Since then, other keyboard layouts such as Dvorak have been designed, but despite their superiority they haven't caught on for various reasons (mostly inertia - people don't want to relearn how to type)
More info:
http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/
But why yank out the power cords? And then they dare call use Americans wasteful.
Heck, my microwave was made in 1985!
Easy! They download pirate copies of Linux from Kazaa!
The distraction caused by a cellphone when driving will far outweigh any benifits that having 3G waves beamed through your head will give you.
This is great. Not only do we have to put up with drivers talking on cellphones, we now have to put up with them thinking they are better drivers because of it.
Sure, a blackout costs them. But if having the power go out for some reason is cheaper than actually doing things to stop it from happening such as updating infrastructure, maintance, building more power plants - you can bet the stockholders will choose the blackout, especially if they don't live in the affected areas.
It's like computers. Having 99.9% uptime is a lot cheaper than 99.999% uptime. Having the system go down will cost you, but if getting those extra nines costs more than the losses due to having it fail occasionally, many people pick the 99.9% and let deal with the extra failures.
I'd say a cheap power supply could do things like cause surges. But you'd probably be better turning that off because it will fail faster by leaving it on (failing capacitors, etc.) But if you are going to buy a throw-away computer who cares about how long it lasts?
I'd be more concerned about the dust that's going to build up inside the power supply from leaving it on all the time.
"...have a little holiday out in the backyard cooking on the barbaque and watching TV."
How exactly are they going to be watching TV with no power?
With many of the early Athlons, you don't even need to overclock it. Remove the CPU cooler and watch it go up in smoke.
The article states that they smashed their own machines. I suppose some of them maybe were running 386's, but I got the impression that the reason they were so addicted to the computer was the Internet, implying they probably had something more modern.