To me it's kind of a lost computing heaven, much like some of you nuts that used NeXT, BeOS, Amiga or whatever perfect "real Unix" that never really existed. Of course IE had to go first, replaced by firefox 0.x and 1.x, then the 64K resource limit got atrocious (Firefox 0.7 ; problem stabilized at version 0.9 ; then Steam as a huge offender) and then only the 2000/XP/2003 branch was viable. Had to move from that one to linux.
This reminds me of the days you could run IE5, Windows Media Player 6.0 (don't update to 7 it's garbage!), Paint, Notepad, MSN Messenger and it was all good. File manager turning into IE or FTP and vice versa was awesome and the software very lightweight. Pinnacle of GUI, of course Active Desktop was the first sign of garbage you had to disable so you had the first signs of microsoft turning really evil and crappy. Great games and software in the quicklaunch if you wanted, including the almost-real DOS prompt. Use Winamp for music, as WMP doesn't have a playlist anyway. Fool around in the sound recorder if you wish. Even the minesweeper and solitaire were both the real versions.
Both maths and real tests tell that higher than CD quality is useless. I will agree than 320Kbps MP3 or high bitrate VBR is enough, but with flac you can simply ignore the whole issue and have it 100% the same as the source. You can go maximum overkill with 24bit/48KHz flac (I'd be curious to know how it compresses versus the same downsampled to 16bit, perhaps the fill size is not much bigger)
I like xvid video in mkv container fine, thanks. In truth, I don't care very much about the video container or codec, I'm more bothered that the sound track is usually 128kbps MP3 or 128Kbps AAC and not something with twice the bitrate while keeping the video size low enough.
You might as well say "64GB RAM in a consumer desktop? Yawn, my server has 1TB". It is a consumer SSD, on a smallish card (single slot, single PCB) meaning you'll be able to order it from newegg et al. at one tenth the cost.
A single Sata 6Gbps SSD that reads at 500 MB/s is reasonably close to the 10Gbps ethernet bandwith, and M2 PCIe 2x matches it. I can agree it's not critical at all to have such network bandwith. It's doable right now essentially as a luxury (Apple sells an external Thunderbolt 10Gbe NIC at around $1K as an option) unless you're working with lots of content creation and convince yourself it's damn nice.
I remember playing Valve's DMC, which is Quake 1 multiplayer in another game (something that gets run very infrequently) and I found myself on that big outdoor map (which feels surprisingly sunny for quake 1, but well the graphics are upgraded to 16bit) against a lone guy that kicked my ass constantly. Always 200HP, 200 armor and a big weapon versus my sorry ass. I assumed he was an oldtimer and timed the weapons by himself. That and knowing the map and not dying. It was painful for me LOL. This makes me appreciate Counterstrike 1.x, where the game engine is the same but there's no respawning and stuff lying around in the map (usually)
On a desktop you will have gigabytes that come from dailywtf-worthy javascript from the internet, pixmaps and buffers that came from rendered html and jpeg files etc., that sort of crap. If you leave that shit running for days (tab hoarding, even mild) and the OS puts some old unused shit into swap so you get more free memory and disk caching, that seems a win.
Consuming all RAM with only an OS and browser is also all too easily doable. So I would say you have it more easy on a server (unless maybe you run garbage software there which I'm sure there's no shortage of)
If you're worried about that it's easy to not fill it up, make partitions so you leave out 10 to 20 GB that will never get used at the end of the (logical) drive, in addition to the overprovisioning that is already there.
Perhaps the OS needs an option to artificially slow down the swapping. Or just get over it. If you're too worried about the various caches, temp files etc. eating your precious I/O reserve then your SSD will be wasted because you're afraid to use it.
I'm using a 12-year-old Seagate fine. Yay, really a drive that old still is big enough to run the latest OS and it is nicely quiet compared to a Maxtor or worst, Quantum. Seagate had its shit series that's not good for anything, 7200.11.
Indeed, complicated storage schemes tied to a hardware controller that's likely to fail (a computer in your computer), what could go wrong. Better to use software RAID 1, or even rsync a drive to another.
In the context of home storage anyway, I would say RAID 1 (and checking your RAM yearly with memtest86+) is better than nothing at all, which is the "backup strategy" adopted by 90%+ people. Better yet would be RAID 1 + off-site backup. Note to self : have to make a list of files and folders in my music collection. That would be a useful "back up" already.
Thunderbolt is external PCIe, and is thus nice for overpriced laptops and trash can shaped workstations. Else it is a lot cheaper to use your internal PCIe. PCIe 2.0 4x will do the same job as Thunderbolt 2.0 - and so you can either use a PCIe 2.0 4x card for your SSD (or a 3.0 one to yet double the bandwith, seems the 3.2TB Samsung SSD uses that) or for a 10Gb NIC.
Real issue with 10Gb ethernet is the cost and then the power use, not anywhere near a graphics card but around the 10W mark which is significant. A high end motherboard was just announced (2011-3 socket) which has a dual 10Gb NIC built-in, which uses 14 watts.
Not really, an easy way to falsify your account is to run an old motherboard, hard drive or pretty anything that's not been used in ten to fifteen years : it works fine. The firmware is usually stored in flash (instead of PROM or EEPROM as was done in the 80s and early 90s) which is also why all it takes is a DOS program to update firmware instead of removing chips and putting them in a programmer.
IRC is client/server yet it broadcasts your IP to everyone when you join a channel ("coward - some_ip_address_format joined #blah"). Which I find unnerving as it's one more thing to track you down on the internet, and it's right in the open, it even leaks your local username (on your computer) if you're not careful.
If players meet up on IRC as is common, you just got their IP.
Isn't that obvious that daemon is an older spelling of the same word? (though the a and e should be jointed). Let me rant about how fetus should be spelled "foetus". It follows that all US people should have been aborted.
But there was a second vote, which is a puzzling as a non US reader. It's the first time I hear of Ross Perot!, and I had no idea a third candidate did 19%. Clinton only did 43%, and Bush 37.4%. A second round ought to have taken place between Clinton and Bush so that one of them gets over 50%. Well, I have just forgot about the Great Electors system and so there was a sad entirely blue vs red US map anyway.
I was using the keyword feature 10 years ago, now I don't (esp. since the search box's engine choice was merged with the default search in URL bar) and I don't rely too much on the features of a customized firefox profile.
The keyword feature is very old, even available in the former "Mozilla" browser.
Cheese is more of a "super food" for me (esp. if it's better than Cheeseburger cheese and similar), full of fat and proteins and better adapted to adult consumption than milk. Milk is for children (but doesn't really hurt in coffee, mashed potatoes etc.). Yet cheese is expensive (5 to 20 euros per kg or more) which is a good proxy as how energy intensive it is.
I have a somewhat "cheese first" eating policy regarding (animal) proteins, which I ought to turn into "eggs first" instead (and I ought to cut on the horrid processed pork in some of the stuff I buy, which is the "meat" I deign to buy.)
I remember when the problem of web video was finally solved for like a couple monthes, at least for me. WMV video plugin would reliably install and play full screen video on a modest computer. But instead, flash video replaced it and tripled the CPU requirements, and it works but this is shit. The web would be better if we had followed the route of a NPAPI video plugin, we'd have Youtube that works on a Pentium II and 128MB RAM. Running three of them would not make a 2GHz single core computer crumble.
To me it's kind of a lost computing heaven, much like some of you nuts that used NeXT, BeOS, Amiga or whatever perfect "real Unix" that never really existed. Of course IE had to go first, replaced by firefox 0.x and 1.x, then the 64K resource limit got atrocious (Firefox 0.7 ; problem stabilized at version 0.9 ; then Steam as a huge offender) and then only the 2000/XP/2003 branch was viable. Had to move from that one to linux.
This reminds me of the days you could run IE5, Windows Media Player 6.0 (don't update to 7 it's garbage!), Paint, Notepad, MSN Messenger and it was all good.
File manager turning into IE or FTP and vice versa was awesome and the software very lightweight. Pinnacle of GUI, of course Active Desktop was the first sign of garbage you had to disable so you had the first signs of microsoft turning really evil and crappy.
Great games and software in the quicklaunch if you wanted, including the almost-real DOS prompt. Use Winamp for music, as WMP doesn't have a playlist anyway. Fool around in the sound recorder if you wish. Even the minesweeper and solitaire were both the real versions.
Both maths and real tests tell that higher than CD quality is useless.
I will agree than 320Kbps MP3 or high bitrate VBR is enough, but with flac you can simply ignore the whole issue and have it 100% the same as the source. You can go maximum overkill with 24bit/48KHz flac (I'd be curious to know how it compresses versus the same downsampled to 16bit, perhaps the fill size is not much bigger)
I like xvid video in mkv container fine, thanks.
In truth, I don't care very much about the video container or codec, I'm more bothered that the sound track is usually 128kbps MP3 or 128Kbps AAC and not something with twice the bitrate while keeping the video size low enough.
Or read-only would be more trivial to implement, so that poor sheeps that strolled out of the microsoft true path can migrate their data.
You might as well say "64GB RAM in a consumer desktop? Yawn, my server has 1TB".
It is a consumer SSD, on a smallish card (single slot, single PCB) meaning you'll be able to order it from newegg et al. at one tenth the cost.
That explains the strong cultural trait in favor of limited government power or federal power
A single Sata 6Gbps SSD that reads at 500 MB/s is reasonably close to the 10Gbps ethernet bandwith, and M2 PCIe 2x matches it.
I can agree it's not critical at all to have such network bandwith. It's doable right now essentially as a luxury (Apple sells an external Thunderbolt 10Gbe NIC at around $1K as an option) unless you're working with lots of content creation and convince yourself it's damn nice.
I remember playing Valve's DMC, which is Quake 1 multiplayer in another game (something that gets run very infrequently) and I found myself on that big outdoor map (which feels surprisingly sunny for quake 1, but well the graphics are upgraded to 16bit) against a lone guy that kicked my ass constantly. Always 200HP, 200 armor and a big weapon versus my sorry ass.
I assumed he was an oldtimer and timed the weapons by himself. That and knowing the map and not dying. It was painful for me LOL. This makes me appreciate Counterstrike 1.x, where the game engine is the same but there's no respawning and stuff lying around in the map (usually)
On a desktop you will have gigabytes that come from dailywtf-worthy javascript from the internet, pixmaps and buffers that came from rendered html and jpeg files etc., that sort of crap. If you leave that shit running for days (tab hoarding, even mild) and the OS puts some old unused shit into swap so you get more free memory and disk caching, that seems a win.
Consuming all RAM with only an OS and browser is also all too easily doable. So I would say you have it more easy on a server (unless maybe you run garbage software there which I'm sure there's no shortage of)
If you're worried about that it's easy to not fill it up, make partitions so you leave out 10 to 20 GB that will never get used at the end of the (logical) drive, in addition to the overprovisioning that is already there.
Perhaps the OS needs an option to artificially slow down the swapping. Or just get over it. If you're too worried about the various caches, temp files etc. eating your precious I/O reserve then your SSD will be wasted because you're afraid to use it.
I'm using a 12-year-old Seagate fine. Yay, really a drive that old still is big enough to run the latest OS and it is nicely quiet compared to a Maxtor or worst, Quantum.
Seagate had its shit series that's not good for anything, 7200.11.
Indeed, complicated storage schemes tied to a hardware controller that's likely to fail (a computer in your computer), what could go wrong.
Better to use software RAID 1, or even rsync a drive to another.
In the context of home storage anyway, I would say RAID 1 (and checking your RAM yearly with memtest86+) is better than nothing at all, which is the "backup strategy" adopted by 90%+ people. Better yet would be RAID 1 + off-site backup. Note to self : have to make a list of files and folders in my music collection. That would be a useful "back up" already.
Thunderbolt is external PCIe, and is thus nice for overpriced laptops and trash can shaped workstations. Else it is a lot cheaper to use your internal PCIe. PCIe 2.0 4x will do the same job as Thunderbolt 2.0 - and so you can either use a PCIe 2.0 4x card for your SSD (or a 3.0 one to yet double the bandwith, seems the 3.2TB Samsung SSD uses that) or for a 10Gb NIC.
Real issue with 10Gb ethernet is the cost and then the power use, not anywhere near a graphics card but around the 10W mark which is significant. A high end motherboard was just announced (2011-3 socket) which has a dual 10Gb NIC built-in, which uses 14 watts.
1.8" is dying, but you have mSATA and M2 interfaces instead.
Not really, an easy way to falsify your account is to run an old motherboard, hard drive or pretty anything that's not been used in ten to fifteen years : it works fine. The firmware is usually stored in flash (instead of PROM or EEPROM as was done in the 80s and early 90s) which is also why all it takes is a DOS program to update firmware instead of removing chips and putting them in a programmer.
IRC is client/server yet it broadcasts your IP to everyone when you join a channel ("coward - some_ip_address_format joined #blah"). Which I find unnerving as it's one more thing to track you down on the internet, and it's right in the open, it even leaks your local username (on your computer) if you're not careful.
If players meet up on IRC as is common, you just got their IP.
Is it a bit like object-oriented C code? :-)
Isn't that obvious that daemon is an older spelling of the same word? (though the a and e should be jointed).
Let me rant about how fetus should be spelled "foetus". It follows that all US people should have been aborted.
"But there was no second vote" I meant. sorry.
But there was a second vote, which is a puzzling as a non US reader.
It's the first time I hear of Ross Perot!, and I had no idea a third candidate did 19%. Clinton only did 43%, and Bush 37.4%. A second round ought to have taken place between Clinton and Bush so that one of them gets over 50%. Well, I have just forgot about the Great Electors system and so there was a sad entirely blue vs red US map anyway.
I was using the keyword feature 10 years ago, now I don't (esp. since the search box's engine choice was merged with the default search in URL bar) and I don't rely too much on the features of a customized firefox profile.
The keyword feature is very old, even available in the former "Mozilla" browser.
Cheese is more of a "super food" for me (esp. if it's better than Cheeseburger cheese and similar), full of fat and proteins and better adapted to adult consumption than milk. Milk is for children (but doesn't really hurt in coffee, mashed potatoes etc.). Yet cheese is expensive (5 to 20 euros per kg or more) which is a good proxy as how energy intensive it is.
I have a somewhat "cheese first" eating policy regarding (animal) proteins, which I ought to turn into "eggs first" instead (and I ought to cut on the horrid processed pork in some of the stuff I buy, which is the "meat" I deign to buy.)
It does hurt, it's a false dogma that's now outdated science as much as bleeding the patient is.
I remember when the problem of web video was finally solved for like a couple monthes, at least for me. WMV video plugin would reliably install and play full screen video on a modest computer. But instead, flash video replaced it and tripled the CPU requirements, and it works but this is shit.
The web would be better if we had followed the route of a NPAPI video plugin, we'd have Youtube that works on a Pentium II and 128MB RAM. Running three of them would not make a 2GHz single core computer crumble.