Actually, substituting an electrical braking/rail type system is a much better idea than any winch system as it would be much less likely to break. For a probe this might be fine, but for moving people, I'd think there's still some issues.
Neat concept, except I don't think I want the nuclear explosion to be between the "sail" and my ship. Especially when the addition of a small nuclear reactor to the ship for power appears to have had noticeable effect on performance.
Another issue is the fact that this is a mechanically complicated system (tether that has a winch to play out during the pulse and retracted post pulse. That's a recipe for multiple failure possibilities. It would be more reliable if it were on something like a crankshaft that would use simple circular motion to control the linear motion, yet both of those are far more complicated than the relatively static system of Orion.
Firewire blows away USB 2.0's performance for HDs in any meaningful benchmark you'd care to look at. eSata will probably replace it, whether that's a good thing or not. I don't believe you can daisy chain or use simple hubs with eSata, which means 1 cable/channel per logical device or expensive external controllers. It's certainly better than any USB concept due to the cluster that is USB. It's fine for secondary devices (keyboards, mice, graphic tablets, even phones) but not anything requiring high bandwidth.
USB is a lame horse that should be shot from the perspective of storage devices.
You're not alone in that observation. It's why I've gone FW on all my external hardrives. The bus supports daisy chaining and no where near the anemic performance of USB 2.0.
With Firewire 400/800 (IEEE1394a/b) I got around 16MB/s with 7200 RPM SATA external drives. That's pretty much what I expected as a maximum continuous write speed from the drives. This was much faster than with my USB 2.0 ports no matter what I've tried with them.
I think any talk of USB 3.0 faster speeds for devices is pretty much vapor. Why? Because of eSata. No separate hub needed, no special hardware on drives (the primary user of high speed devices). It's serial. It's almost as fast as this proposed USB 3.0, and probably as fast given the inherent overhead of USB.
I've worked in everything from 40 to 100K+ sites. I've also had the displeasure of dealing with precisely the big brother lock-down environment you describe. That one had 3 virus outbreaks in a single 12 month period. (i.e., if you don't manage the machines, it doesn't matter WTF you put up network wise to supposedly block threats) It also caused massive problems with trying to obtain the tools, documentation, and support sites required for our development work. They also hadn't learned that it's not a good idea to have 20K people on what appeared to be a minimally routed flat network.
... if the consumers want media without drm, they'll buy media without drm. And how, exactly, are you going to buy media without DRM if that's all the content producers will create? Oh, wait, you didn't say you could buy the media you might actually want....
My suspicion is that firms like the flexibility that the MS solution provides. Computers will work well enough with almost no support(I have seen no MS shop staff support at adequate numbers to keep the machines running), and the support personal are usually semi-skilled so if they complain about over work, they are easily replaced. And those are the reasons why most MS shops are riddled with spyware, adware, viruses, etc.
Lots of people think they're capable of supporting MS software just like lots of lemmings believe they can walk on air....
Especially unannounced / unapproved updates. Your machine may have been patched while you read this. Not here. Autoupdate is completely and totally disabled on this machine. Even better, supposedly it won't work at all with MS's new update site! Ah, we can only dream!
My Vista laptop is the same, perhpas a little faster. The point is it's easy to resume from standby, as everything's still functioning. With hibernation the computer has to do a cold boot (which you said "takes roughly 15-20s" on a mac), then put the RAM back as it was. In other words, I was right to call out the OP on whether OSX can resume faster than Windows. Having said that, XP was really solid on this, but Vista makes a right pig's ear of it. Another reason why I will be downgrading to XP when it's convenient. I can't comment on Vista, but XP seems slower, as it has issues with at least my graphics driver determining which screen to set as primary (as I sometimes use a larger external, sometimes not). I also had to tweak my settings for this to work using a logically placed and absolutely obvious setting in the "allow power management" setting in the network driver parameters of the wireless adapter configuration properties. </sarcasm>
And I should also mention the 15-20s is heavily dependent upon the amount of RAM, as my upgrade to 3GB lengthened the process by 50% (2GB -> 3GB) but was still less than 30s. My best cold boot with XP is around 20s, on a desktop.
As for hibernation, Macs transparently hibernate (at least the latest versions of the OS) meaning that they'll sleep and while entering sleep, they prep the hibernation file just in case they lose power because you're slow swapping batteries or the battery runs out. Again, this is what Vista does as its default behaviour (so-called Hybrid Sleep), but IMO this is not a great idea on a laptop. I don't want to put my computer to sleep only to find out when I try to wake it that the battery's flat - unless I'm on power, I always hibernate. Well, you and I differ on that one. I virtually never intentionally go into hibernate mode, as I usually will encounter another outlet long before I run out of battery power.
unless it's in a usable state, it's not up. My desktop behaves quite well with S3 standby mode. It's up and running in about 3-5s (the screen takes that long to come alive, the system's almost always ready to go when the screen comes up).
As for hibernation, Macs transparently hibernate (at least the latest versions of the OS) meaning that they'll sleep and while entering sleep, they prep the hibernation file just in case they lose power because you're slow swapping batteries or the battery runs out. I've not dealt with direct hibernation, so can't comment.
I can attest that a cold boot or even a reboot takes roughly 15-20s. There seems to be very little noticeable difference between cold boots and reboots. I don't see this often though.
That's because the HD doesn't need to spin up to "wake up" from standby.
On my MBP, it's literally open case, 1..2.. type in password and off I go. It doesn't matter if I have external keyboards, mice, and monitors hooked up or not.
My XP Pro Dell, after a wonderful round of 3 weeks of figuring out that the power management setting on the built in wireless adapter needed to be set to off as it regularly hung the OS during the switch to power saving mode still goes through conniptions. Sometimes the screen comes up right (I have nVidia's Dualview enabled) sometimes not. Sometimes the dock keyboard/mouse come on line, sometimes not, even though the dock's video is always used, yet almost always reverses itself in sequence to the laptop screen position (An annoyance I haven't figured out yet).
I think you've not been keeping up with this topic. Their stock's in the toilet. I believe they're about to be delisted, if they're not already delisted. They have no customers left, or none that will admit to it. (When's the last time you saw SCO UNIX anywhere, or any other SCO product?)
Their only business for the last 3 years was the same model that the RIAA is following: sue your customers.
Even if they were relived of their debt, they've already been relieved of all of their current claims of copyright and IP ownership, so should they ever come out of bankruptcy, there will be nothing for them to do business with, or even sue over.
They're dead, it's only a question of who's going to sweep up the ashes and throw them in the litter box.
Heck, DDR2 is only now worth it, since it's cheaper than DDR. I have a DDR 400 system at home that's more than 20% OC'd on the memory bus and rock stable. When I bought the 2GB that's in that machine, DDR was about half the price of DDR2.
I'll jump on the DDR2 bandwagon with my next system, unless DDR3 drops to the same or less than DDR2 prices.
By disabling/removing (if needed) pretty much all but 4-9 services. My VM has 4 processes running and works well. My desktop has 9, including video and network drivers and utilities.
In a well architected network with well-administered systems, the need to update an MS OS is virtually non-existent. If all you've installed/enabled that's MS is the OS then you're pretty safe.
It should have been the first thing you did anyways, after logging in and before connecting to the internet. Why anyone would want an auto update service with a company that has as many known problems and patch failures as MS is beyond understanding. If you disable the update service and delete wuauclt.exe, you've pretty much ended any issues with MS's update service.
Despite all its issues, Windows XP can be made to be relatively lean and stable as an OS. It merely requires heavy tweaking in the form of disabling "services" on startup. (Yep, really need that Zero Configuration Wireless service running on a wired desktop, yep yep....)
Any real geek doesn't waste any resources on something that is completely covered by open windows anyways, and why would they want a "browser" view that can't even receive focus when it's under a layer of other windows anyways?
In the US anyways, that's a sure way to get fired. You haven't had the pleasure of a BSA software audit called down upon you by a disgruntled (former) employee, have you? It's loads of fun, and at $200K or so per piece of violating software, not something you'd want to risk as a business owner.
It's not that hard; it's called good old fashioned true grit. If you can demonstrate to companies that you are worth something to them, believe me you'll get hired.
What he means is that it's more important to be lucky than good. The dirty secret is that hard work accounts for a very small part of success. While luck has a lot to do with it, it certainly isn't everything. If you're good, you can find what you're looking for. However, good in this sense is dependent on experience. There are no "good" beginning programmers/software engineers. They haven't made the mistakes to learn from yet, and they will make them. (Maybe not all of the mistakes, but enough to make them not "good").
For instance, it took me 6 months to find my current job, but it wasn't for lack of opportunities nor offers. I wasn't in a hurry, and was looking for a particular environment, stability, minimum salary, job skill set, no travel requirements, geographic location, and type of work. (Yes, that's a heap load of restrictions, which is why it took 6 months:)
As for luck, yes, luck has a lot to do with it, but mostly at companies you don't want to work for. "Luck" is generally definable upon reflection as a combination of "got there first" combined with "superior ass-kissing", usually inversely to any actual skills.
Low power can be overcome by large volumes, and that one is extremely easy (non-technical) to accomplish. The largest non-military explosion I know of was the 1947 Texas City Grand Campe explosion.
Better to lose some 'x' amount of money vs losing all credibility, mindshare, etc, by releasing a flawed product in haste. We'll see if their strategy pays off in the near future. I noted from the benchmarks that these 1.7-2GHz chips keep up with Intels in many benchmarks, but Intel's best are still slightly ahead.
It'll be good to see what comes up in the next 2-3 months as production ramps up.
MSSQL still sucks rocks (I've actually had the misfortune to work with a MSSQL Cluster). If your system supports Oracle, it's usually not too tough to migrate to PostgreSQL. The main problem you'll have is deprogramming your DBA's so they can effectively work with PostgreSQL. And yes, I've used Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase, Informix, and, yes, MSSQL. Depending upon what you're doing, these days you'd use Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, or MySQL. The others just don't have any benefits over these for new projects. My current project is being developed to run on Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Why rush when your current system is within 10% of your rival's best efforts? Not to mention that they still lead in the server space on a number of metrics.
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Actually, substituting an electrical braking/rail type system is a much better idea than any winch system as it would be much less likely to break. For a probe this might be fine, but for moving people, I'd think there's still some issues.
Neat concept, except I don't think I want the nuclear explosion to be between the "sail" and my ship. Especially when the addition of a small nuclear reactor to the ship for power appears to have had noticeable effect on performance.
Another issue is the fact that this is a mechanically complicated system (tether that has a winch to play out during the pulse and retracted post pulse. That's a recipe for multiple failure possibilities. It would be more reliable if it were on something like a crankshaft that would use simple circular motion to control the linear motion, yet both of those are far more complicated than the relatively static system of Orion.
And I'd rather not have a large disk to disk transfer interfere with my recording an HD channel.
Firewire blows away USB 2.0's performance for HDs in any meaningful benchmark you'd care to look at. eSata will probably replace it, whether that's a good thing or not. I don't believe you can daisy chain or use simple hubs with eSata, which means 1 cable/channel per logical device or expensive external controllers. It's certainly better than any USB concept due to the cluster that is USB. It's fine for secondary devices (keyboards, mice, graphic tablets, even phones) but not anything requiring high bandwidth.
USB is a lame horse that should be shot from the perspective of storage devices.
You're not alone in that observation. It's why I've gone FW on all my external hardrives. The bus supports daisy chaining and no where near the anemic performance of USB 2.0.
With Firewire 400/800 (IEEE1394a/b) I got around 16MB/s with 7200 RPM SATA external drives. That's pretty much what I expected as a maximum continuous write speed from the drives. This was much faster than with my USB 2.0 ports no matter what I've tried with them.
I think any talk of USB 3.0 faster speeds for devices is pretty much vapor. Why? Because of eSata. No separate hub needed, no special hardware on drives (the primary user of high speed devices). It's serial. It's almost as fast as this proposed USB 3.0, and probably as fast given the inherent overhead of USB.
I've worked in everything from 40 to 100K+ sites. I've also had the displeasure of dealing with precisely the big brother lock-down environment you describe. That one had 3 virus outbreaks in a single 12 month period. (i.e., if you don't manage the machines, it doesn't matter WTF you put up network wise to supposedly block threats) It also caused massive problems with trying to obtain the tools, documentation, and support sites required for our development work. They also hadn't learned that it's not a good idea to have 20K people on what appeared to be a minimally routed flat network.
Yes, I am sure. I even checked the file versions. Both of my machines and VMs are pre the version in question. And they will remain so.
... if the consumers want media without drm, they'll buy media without drm. And how, exactly, are you going to buy media without DRM if that's all the content producers will create? Oh, wait, you didn't say you could buy the media you might actually want....Lots of people think they're capable of supporting MS software just like lots of lemmings believe they can walk on air....
And I should also mention the 15-20s is heavily dependent upon the amount of RAM, as my upgrade to 3GB lengthened the process by 50% (2GB -> 3GB) but was still less than 30s. My best cold boot with XP is around 20s, on a desktop. As for hibernation, Macs transparently hibernate (at least the latest versions of the OS) meaning that they'll sleep and while entering sleep, they prep the hibernation file just in case they lose power because you're slow swapping batteries or the battery runs out. Again, this is what Vista does as its default behaviour (so-called Hybrid Sleep), but IMO this is not a great idea on a laptop. I don't want to put my computer to sleep only to find out when I try to wake it that the battery's flat - unless I'm on power, I always hibernate. Well, you and I differ on that one. I virtually never intentionally go into hibernate mode, as I usually will encounter another outlet long before I run out of battery power.
unless it's in a usable state, it's not up. My desktop behaves quite well with S3 standby mode. It's up and running in about 3-5s (the screen takes that long to come alive, the system's almost always ready to go when the screen comes up).
As for hibernation, Macs transparently hibernate (at least the latest versions of the OS) meaning that they'll sleep and while entering sleep, they prep the hibernation file just in case they lose power because you're slow swapping batteries or the battery runs out. I've not dealt with direct hibernation, so can't comment.
I can attest that a cold boot or even a reboot takes roughly 15-20s. There seems to be very little noticeable difference between cold boots and reboots. I don't see this often though.
That's because the HD doesn't need to spin up to "wake up" from standby.
On my MBP, it's literally open case, 1..2.. type in password and off I go. It doesn't matter if I have external keyboards, mice, and monitors hooked up or not.
My XP Pro Dell, after a wonderful round of 3 weeks of figuring out that the power management setting on the built in wireless adapter needed to be set to off as it regularly hung the OS during the switch to power saving mode still goes through conniptions. Sometimes the screen comes up right (I have nVidia's Dualview enabled) sometimes not. Sometimes the dock keyboard/mouse come on line, sometimes not, even though the dock's video is always used, yet almost always reverses itself in sequence to the laptop screen position (An annoyance I haven't figured out yet).
I think you've not been keeping up with this topic. Their stock's in the toilet. I believe they're about to be delisted, if they're not already delisted. They have no customers left, or none that will admit to it. (When's the last time you saw SCO UNIX anywhere, or any other SCO product?)
Their only business for the last 3 years was the same model that the RIAA is following: sue your customers.
Even if they were relived of their debt, they've already been relieved of all of their current claims of copyright and IP ownership, so should they ever come out of bankruptcy, there will be nothing for them to do business with, or even sue over.
They're dead, it's only a question of who's going to sweep up the ashes and throw them in the litter box.
Heck, DDR2 is only now worth it, since it's cheaper than DDR. I have a DDR 400 system at home that's more than 20% OC'd on the memory bus and rock stable. When I bought the 2GB that's in that machine, DDR was about half the price of DDR2.
I'll jump on the DDR2 bandwagon with my next system, unless DDR3 drops to the same or less than DDR2 prices.
By disabling/removing (if needed) pretty much all but 4-9 services. My VM has 4 processes running and works well. My desktop has 9, including video and network drivers and utilities.
In a well architected network with well-administered systems, the need to update an MS OS is virtually non-existent. If all you've installed/enabled that's MS is the OS then you're pretty safe.
It should have been the first thing you did anyways, after logging in and before connecting to the internet. Why anyone would want an auto update service with a company that has as many known problems and patch failures as MS is beyond understanding. If you disable the update service and delete wuauclt.exe, you've pretty much ended any issues with MS's update service.
Despite all its issues, Windows XP can be made to be relatively lean and stable as an OS. It merely requires heavy tweaking in the form of disabling "services" on startup. (Yep, really need that Zero Configuration Wireless service running on a wired desktop, yep yep....)
That's only if you have Active Desktop running.
Any real geek doesn't waste any resources on something that is completely covered by open windows anyways, and why would they want a "browser" view that can't even receive focus when it's under a layer of other windows anyways?
In the US anyways, that's a sure way to get fired. You haven't had the pleasure of a BSA software audit called down upon you by a disgruntled (former) employee, have you? It's loads of fun, and at $200K or so per piece of violating software, not something you'd want to risk as a business owner.
For instance, it took me 6 months to find my current job, but it wasn't for lack of opportunities nor offers. I wasn't in a hurry, and was looking for a particular environment, stability, minimum salary, job skill set, no travel requirements, geographic location, and type of work. (Yes, that's a heap load of restrictions, which is why it took 6 months:)
As for luck, yes, luck has a lot to do with it, but mostly at companies you don't want to work for. "Luck" is generally definable upon reflection as a combination of "got there first" combined with "superior ass-kissing", usually inversely to any actual skills.
Try 94% NH4NO3 + 6% Common Fuel Oil.
Low power can be overcome by large volumes, and that one is extremely easy (non-technical) to accomplish. The largest non-military explosion I know of was the 1947 Texas City Grand Campe explosion.
Better to lose some 'x' amount of money vs losing all credibility, mindshare, etc, by releasing a flawed product in haste. We'll see if their strategy pays off in the near future. I noted from the benchmarks that these 1.7-2GHz chips keep up with Intels in many benchmarks, but Intel's best are still slightly ahead.
It'll be good to see what comes up in the next 2-3 months as production ramps up.
MSSQL still sucks rocks (I've actually had the misfortune to work with a MSSQL Cluster). If your system supports Oracle, it's usually not too tough to migrate to PostgreSQL. The main problem you'll have is deprogramming your DBA's so they can effectively work with PostgreSQL. And yes, I've used Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase, Informix, and, yes, MSSQL. Depending upon what you're doing, these days you'd use Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL, or MySQL. The others just don't have any benefits over these for new projects. My current project is being developed to run on Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Why rush when your current system is within 10% of your rival's best efforts? Not to mention that they still lead in the server space on a number of metrics.