Having to know about some command that would be rather, err, weird to find out about (hard to do a search for something when you don't know it exists or if it does by what name!!) is not good a good 'user experiance"
Actually, a simple search for "Linux hard drive spin down" at Google reveals the first match is a good start.
Wouldn't it be nice if that kind of thing was sitting under a nice big uber-option entitled Power Savings or such?
Yes, but lack of knowledge about something does not entitle someone to make statements about something not existing.
It would have been better to ask, "can Linux spin hard drives down?".
Which is actually why I didn't say, "use hdparm", because for all I know, he has a drive that does'nt behave properly when issued a spin down command, in which case he may have tried it.
Some Linux distros might have a big button for this. I'd blame the ones that don't and not Linux itself, which is just a kernel. ; )
I've come across quite a few references to increased disk loading in raid systems
Out of interest, could you point them out?
I would have thought that disks in RAID systems are usually under increased load because RAID is often chosen for high load scenarios.
Kinda like saying red cars are involved in 20% more accidents than other coloured cars, therefore you have a 20% increased chance of having an accident if you drive a red car. Without considering that there are actually 20% more red cars on the road than any other colour.
PS, I just pulled the 20% figure out of the air to illustrate my point, I don't know what the real number is, just that there are more red cars on the road which can lead to ridiculously misinterpreted statistics and thoughts of voodoo and such.
I won't disagree that OGG sounds better or worse. I'm saying that NOBODY who uses compressed audio seriously gives a rat's ass.
I'm the kinda guy who cannot tolerate imperfections in my music listening. A Beyerdynamic DT-911 and Yamaha CDX-1060 kinda guy. I can walk into a room and hear if there is any CRT switched on in it. I am always annoyed at the cinema when I hear the awfull noises of AC3 and DTS. I have avoided MP3 for a long time.
Until I read about LAME 256kbit CBR. I decided to encode some of my favorite Dire Straits CD's to have a listening test. Doing A/B tests between MP3 and WAV, I could not detect any difference.
A year later, all my CD's are encoded (16GB), I only listen to CD's in the car and whenever I hear a strange tone, ringing, warble, pop or click, I quickly check the original CD, thinking I've finally found a reason not to use MP3... only to find that what I thought was an MP3 artefact, is actually on the original raw CD.
The World is not as black and white as you think. Practicality is important too. And speaking of which, if I can fit the same quality or better, in a smaller space with Ogg, then I will happily re-encode my whole collection.
Hardly matters when A. my post follows his, B. I am clearly speaking about desktop OS, not Win2k specifically, C. I reference Win2k also and D. this...
Of course, you neglect to mention nobody would credibly assert that any of these 'interactive user-oriented' OSes are suited for that kind of high speed real time operation. That's what embedded controllers are in the mix for. Often tightly interfaced to a slower responding system that supervises everything.
And there's nothing wrong with that! When I left the Navy in the early 90's, some ships were still using Valve based analog amplifiers to point guns.
Analog computers are fantastic since they don't require rebooting (they're much simpler), are able to work directly with analog values, are continuously correcting their positions and with extremely high resolution. I won't say infinitely small due to noise constraints throughout input and output transducers, amplifiers themselves and sometimes even gear backlash (not all analog computers are electronic, some merely use gearboxes).
Analog had its place and now to a lesser extent still does. Balanced signals with UTP ethernet that give great noise immunity are built on a great analog technology.
Routine rebooting (probably -- I hope) wouldn't be tolerated in the final sytem.
Me too. Anyone seen the footage of the F-22 (I think from memory) which had computer failure during take off?
Seconds after the wheels left the ground the pilot was unable to stop the plane from pitching up and down. It smacked right into the ground.
I would LOVE to see someone try to fly an F-117 with a faulty avionics computer, since the magic of the F-117 is NOT the small RADAR signature, but the fact that it flies at all.
Up to the job...well, as a desktop OS for a typical business, I'll agree with you. For an avionics platform, though, I'd be afraid to be on the plane until it had been in use for 3-4 years and proven itself safe.
Absolutely.
Some embedded OS are required to respond to I/O within some seriously short time spans. Win2k, Linux/BSD with real-time scheduling might not be up to the task.
Win2k on the desktop, good choice if you want to pay for it. Win2k responding to a fault with an engine spinning at extreme rpms? No thanks.
LAME CBR 256kbit vs. Ogg?
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
·
· Score: 2
My whole collection, is encoded with LAME CBR @ 256kbit because I read an article, pointed from/. long ago, that showed this to be about the best option and listening to the resulting MP3's have shown that I cannot hear a difference with my headphones between the CD and the MP3's. Occasionally I hear a click, pop, warble or ringing and I think "Ah huh!", so I then check the CD only to find that the same noise is on the CD.
If I can get my collection down from 16GB without loosing any quality or even gaining quality I would.
So can Ogg 1.0 provide better quality than LAME CBR @ 256kbit while saving space?
I've had tremendous problems with media any time I burn over 12x. I've tried half a dozen brands which were rated for 24x or better, and even at 16x, they all have errors on about one disc in ten.
Do you have an IDE or SCSI drive?
I have seen IDE HDD -> SCSI CDRW always work perfectly, SCSI CDROM -> SCSI CDRW always work perfectly but IDE CDROM (48x) -> SCSI CDRW often fail and anything with IDE CDRW often fail.
I'm just curious if your problem is in fact the media or whether you are seeing increasing reliability problems as burn speed increases with an IDE CDRW drive. I'd like to know because I have an 8x SCSI CDRW drive and I'm about to buy a new CDRW drive for a friend. If the culprit is IDE I will buy him a 24x SCSI drive, if it really is the media I will buy him a 12x SCSI drive.
Sorry for the depressive info, but if you wanna make anything even remotely "friendly" or "easy" to Joe User using linux, you need to make major changes to the filesystem layout.
[extreme_sarcasm] So this is why Mac OSX is such an unfriendly pain in the ass? [/extreme_sarcasm]
If the GUI presents the users stuff to them from their/home directory, then everything should be fine and dandy. Where their apps get loaded are neither here nor there since they have really nice big bouncing icons to launch them.
The problem with your stance is that you use Microsoft Windows as the yardstick for a "friendly desktop".
Having used MS OS' for more than 14 years, various Unix for 5 years and Macs on and off for about 7 and as a primary desktop (OSX) at home for about 6 months, I can tell you that Linux is slightly less friendly than Windows. If I could choose a few things to bring Linux up to Windows friendliness they would be:
1. cut/copy/paste between all graphical apps. 2. Common GUI interface to every GUI app.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not waving the flag for Windows. I'll use Debian Linux over any MS OS any day. My point is, Linux and Windows are actually pretty close to each other in friendliness if we're also comparing OSX with them, which is light years ahead. If I knew NeXTSTEP was so good I'd have gone that way years ago. The sad thing is that I did play with one years ago for about 30 seconds at a PC show.
Linux distros as of now, seem to have far too many band-aid fixes to common gripes. Sure it makes it usable, but I think Linux as a desktop should be re-thought out from scratch, having learned from mistakes and successes from the past of all desktop OS'. Hey hang on, that's OSX but with a BSD kernel! Sorry, seriously, I want to see Linux come up to OSX, have them out do each other and leave MS behind.
If you want security fork out the bucks for wired systems.
As if a "wired" system is secure.
It's more secure if the people who have access to it can be trusted. A family in a home network can usually be trusted with their own network. Add wireless and now you have to trust your whole neighborhood.
A determined person will either break in or get caught trying.
If they need to break in to my house, then they'll probably just take the computers.
Yes it is. I want to put one of these bad boys in my old clamshell iBook.
What I'd like to know is if I can upgrade the internal memory soldered onto the board, from 64MB to 256MB in addition to my 256MB SODIMM to give me 512MB.
That said, ogg is dead.
Huh? I've got 16GB of MP3's, my whole CD collection and my girlfriends encoded with LAME at 256kbit CBR. I am now going to go through the hassle of re-encoding all of them again because I can get the same quality in about half the HDD space. I've been aware of Ogg for ages, but I've been avoiding it until it hits 1.0 and when I can compare it. NOW I feel I can switch I will be, because as far as I'm concerned, Ogg has just been born.
The finest quality, most efficient codec that is not encumbered with patents, etc is not going to just die. Sure it may take a while for the general public to stop thinking "mp3 player", but plenty of people will use it to keep the interest going. Especially people who actually care about sound quality outside of listening to pure raw audio formats.
Unix and Unix like OS have had protected memory for yonks, NT has it for years (and now W2K), Apple has moved to this more stable design by embracing BSD, so what do the Chinese do?
Choose to copy one of the most unstable OS' that the World has ever been burdened with!?!?
I think there is a *MUCH* simpler solution. Embrace a free Unix with an excellent stability and hardware support history (FreeBSD) and then standardize on something like OpenOffice.
Any huge efforts like recreating a crap OS could have been put into improving OpenOffice and perhaps writing some decent groupware.
Oh, I think the PDFs feature vector graphics, so they'll print far nicer than your ps2pdf PDF will.
Postscript and PDF both do vector. If the fonts on the page you are printing are vector, you print to postscript, you get vector fonts in the postscript, ps2pdf that and you get vector fonts in the resulting PDF.
Most of the PDF's I have created within Debian Linux using ps2pdf, have shown within Acrobat Reader, at 1600x zoom, to be completely smooth vector fonts.
Sometimes you might get a font within one of these PDF's that is obviously bitmap, they don't look great on screen, but they do look much better printed than on screen. Good thing is though, the most popular fonts tend to be vector within Debian at least.
I like to make PDF's of pages of particular interest for offline reading and archiving should they ever go offline.
I usually click the printer friendly version if they have one, print it to a file, which gives me a postscript file within Linux, then using the a tool that come with ghostscript (?) "ps2pdf" the file. It usually comes out very nice.
But with Ars, I prefer to just grab the article with wget, since they don't seem to offer a printer friendly version outside of a subscribers only PDF file. Anyone subscribed? Free?
Course, now I have OS X, I just print preview then save to PDF.
Slashdot Mirror
Having to know about some command that would be rather, err, weird to find out about (hard to do a search for something when you don't know it exists or if it does by what name!!) is not good a good 'user experiance"
Actually, a simple search for "Linux hard drive spin down" at Google reveals the first match is a good start.
People first need to learn how to search the net.
Then, people who like to show how superior they are will take the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority.
/. after all.
Ahh, too true. I forgot, this is
Here I was thinking this was some online utopia or something!
Wouldn't it be nice if that kind of thing was sitting under a nice big uber-option entitled Power Savings or such?
Yes, but lack of knowledge about something does not entitle someone to make statements about something not existing.
It would have been better to ask, "can Linux spin hard drives down?".
Which is actually why I didn't say, "use hdparm", because for all I know, he has a drive that does'nt behave properly when issued a spin down command, in which case he may have tried it.
Some Linux distros might have a big button for this. I'd blame the ones that don't and not Linux itself, which is just a kernel. ; )
It'd be great if Linux could spin it down...
Have you tried hdparm?
I've come across quite a few references to increased disk loading in raid systems
Out of interest, could you point them out?
I would have thought that disks in RAID systems are usually under increased load because RAID is often chosen for high load scenarios.
Kinda like saying red cars are involved in 20% more accidents than other coloured cars, therefore you have a 20% increased chance of having an accident if you drive a red car. Without considering that there are actually 20% more red cars on the road than any other colour.
PS, I just pulled the 20% figure out of the air to illustrate my point, I don't know what the real number is, just that there are more red cars on the road which can lead to ridiculously misinterpreted statistics and thoughts of voodoo and such.
stand out the front and shoot everyone who gets dropped of by their mums?
I want to see what nuclear and rocket scientists look like. Since the ones around here often seem to be quite immature.
No doubt.
Is Mac webmail encrypted?
Beta over VHS, LD over VHS, Mac (and others) over MS OS, MD over CD, etc, etc, etc.
You seem to have compared these as Best:Worst.
So why MD:CD?
You think MD is better than CD?
I won't disagree that OGG sounds better or worse. I'm saying that NOBODY who uses compressed audio seriously gives a rat's ass.
I'm the kinda guy who cannot tolerate imperfections in my music listening. A Beyerdynamic DT-911 and Yamaha CDX-1060 kinda guy. I can walk into a room and hear if there is any CRT switched on in it. I am always annoyed at the cinema when I hear the awfull noises of AC3 and DTS. I have avoided MP3 for a long time.
Until I read about LAME 256kbit CBR. I decided to encode some of my favorite Dire Straits CD's to have a listening test. Doing A/B tests between MP3 and WAV, I could not detect any difference.
A year later, all my CD's are encoded (16GB), I only listen to CD's in the car and whenever I hear a strange tone, ringing, warble, pop or click, I quickly check the original CD, thinking I've finally found a reason not to use MP3... only to find that what I thought was an MP3 artefact, is actually on the original raw CD.
The World is not as black and white as you think. Practicality is important too. And speaking of which, if I can fit the same quality or better, in a smaller space with Ogg, then I will happily re-encode my whole collection.
You mistyped the last paragraph.
No I didn't, it's a straight cut and paste.
It's not consistent with the paragraph before it:
Hardly matters when A. my post follows his, B. I am clearly speaking about desktop OS, not Win2k specifically, C. I reference Win2k also and D. this...
Of course, you neglect to mention nobody would credibly assert that any of these 'interactive user-oriented' OSes are suited for that kind of high speed real time operation. That's what embedded controllers are in the mix for. Often tightly interfaced to a slower responding system that supervises everything.
is EXACTLY my point.
Actually, I'm not seriously asking those questions. That's my way of very nicely doubting that the rudder is the usual tool for avoiding stall.
A number of printers have used the i960 for Postscript interpretation.
doing an estimation with opamps.
And there's nothing wrong with that! When I left the Navy in the early 90's, some ships were still using Valve based analog amplifiers to point guns.
Analog computers are fantastic since they don't require rebooting (they're much simpler), are able to work directly with analog values, are continuously correcting their positions and with extremely high resolution. I won't say infinitely small due to noise constraints throughout input and output transducers, amplifiers themselves and sometimes even gear backlash (not all analog computers are electronic, some merely use gearboxes).
Analog had its place and now to a lesser extent still does. Balanced signals with UTP ethernet that give great noise immunity are built on a great analog technology.
the CPU always has to do litle rudder movements
Is it doing it just with the rudder? What about at cruise speeds?
I would have thought it would intelligently be doing it with ailerons, elevators and rudder, depending on air speed and conditions.
How effective is the rudder in the F-22 at cruise speeds?
Routine rebooting (probably -- I hope) wouldn't be tolerated in the final sytem.
Me too. Anyone seen the footage of the F-22 (I think from memory) which had computer failure during take off?
Seconds after the wheels left the ground the pilot was unable to stop the plane from pitching up and down. It smacked right into the ground.
I would LOVE to see someone try to fly an F-117 with a faulty avionics computer, since the magic of the F-117 is NOT the small RADAR signature, but the fact that it flies at all.
Up to the job...well, as a desktop OS for a typical business, I'll agree with you. For an avionics platform, though, I'd be afraid to be on the plane until it had been in use for 3-4 years and proven itself safe.
Absolutely.
Some embedded OS are required to respond to I/O within some seriously short time spans. Win2k, Linux/BSD with real-time scheduling might not be up to the task.
Win2k on the desktop, good choice if you want to pay for it. Win2k responding to a fault with an engine spinning at extreme rpms? No thanks.
My whole collection, is encoded with LAME CBR @ 256kbit because I read an article, pointed from /. long ago, that showed this to be about the best option and listening to the resulting MP3's have shown that I cannot hear a difference with my headphones between the CD and the MP3's. Occasionally I hear a click, pop, warble or ringing and I think "Ah huh!", so I then check the CD only to find that the same noise is on the CD.
If I can get my collection down from 16GB without loosing any quality or even gaining quality I would.
So can Ogg 1.0 provide better quality than LAME CBR @ 256kbit while saving space?
I've had tremendous problems with media any time I burn over 12x. I've tried half a dozen brands which were rated for 24x or better, and even at 16x, they all have errors on about one disc in ten.
Do you have an IDE or SCSI drive?
I have seen IDE HDD -> SCSI CDRW always work perfectly, SCSI CDROM -> SCSI CDRW always work perfectly but IDE CDROM (48x) -> SCSI CDRW often fail and anything with IDE CDRW often fail.
I'm just curious if your problem is in fact the media or whether you are seeing increasing reliability problems as burn speed increases with an IDE CDRW drive. I'd like to know because I have an 8x SCSI CDRW drive and I'm about to buy a new CDRW drive for a friend. If the culprit is IDE I will buy him a 24x SCSI drive, if it really is the media I will buy him a 12x SCSI drive.
Thanks.
Sorry for the depressive info, but if you wanna make anything even remotely "friendly" or "easy" to Joe User using linux, you need to make major changes to the filesystem layout.
/home directory, then everything should be fine and dandy. Where their apps get loaded are neither here nor there since they have really nice big bouncing icons to launch them.
[extreme_sarcasm] So this is why Mac OSX is such an unfriendly pain in the ass? [/extreme_sarcasm]
If the GUI presents the users stuff to them from their
The problem with your stance is that you use Microsoft Windows as the yardstick for a "friendly desktop".
Having used MS OS' for more than 14 years, various Unix for 5 years and Macs on and off for about 7 and as a primary desktop (OSX) at home for about 6 months, I can tell you that Linux is slightly less friendly than Windows. If I could choose a few things to bring Linux up to Windows friendliness they would be:
1. cut/copy/paste between all graphical apps.
2. Common GUI interface to every GUI app.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not waving the flag for Windows. I'll use Debian Linux over any MS OS any day. My point is, Linux and Windows are actually pretty close to each other in friendliness if we're also comparing OSX with them, which is light years ahead. If I knew NeXTSTEP was so good I'd have gone that way years ago. The sad thing is that I did play with one years ago for about 30 seconds at a PC show.
Linux distros as of now, seem to have far too many band-aid fixes to common gripes. Sure it makes it usable, but I think Linux as a desktop should be re-thought out from scratch, having learned from mistakes and successes from the past of all desktop OS'. Hey hang on, that's OSX but with a BSD kernel! Sorry, seriously, I want to see Linux come up to OSX, have them out do each other and leave MS behind.
If you want security fork out the bucks for wired systems.
As if a "wired" system is secure.
It's more secure if the people who have access to it can be trusted. A family in a home network can usually be trusted with their own network. Add wireless and now you have to trust your whole neighborhood.
A determined person will either break in or get caught trying.
If they need to break in to my house, then they'll probably just take the computers.
Is it possible to upgrade the iBook hard drive?
Yes it is. I want to put one of these bad boys in my old clamshell iBook.
What I'd like to know is if I can upgrade the internal memory soldered onto the board, from 64MB to 256MB in addition to my 256MB SODIMM to give me 512MB.
That said, ogg is dead.
Huh? I've got 16GB of MP3's, my whole CD collection and my girlfriends encoded with LAME at 256kbit CBR. I am now going to go through the hassle of re-encoding all of them again because I can get the same quality in about half the HDD space. I've been aware of Ogg for ages, but I've been avoiding it until it hits 1.0 and when I can compare it. NOW I feel I can switch I will be, because as far as I'm concerned, Ogg has just been born.
The finest quality, most efficient codec that is not encumbered with patents, etc is not going to just die. Sure it may take a while for the general public to stop thinking "mp3 player", but plenty of people will use it to keep the interest going. Especially people who actually care about sound quality outside of listening to pure raw audio formats.
Unix and Unix like OS have had protected memory for yonks, NT has it for years (and now W2K), Apple has moved to this more stable design by embracing BSD, so what do the Chinese do?
Choose to copy one of the most unstable OS' that the World has ever been burdened with!?!?
I think there is a *MUCH* simpler solution. Embrace a free Unix with an excellent stability and hardware support history (FreeBSD) and then standardize on something like OpenOffice.
Any huge efforts like recreating a crap OS could have been put into improving OpenOffice and perhaps writing some decent groupware.
Crazy crazy stuff.
The subscription is something like $10 per month.
Bugger that! Thanks for the info.
Oh, I think the PDFs feature vector graphics, so they'll print far nicer than your ps2pdf PDF will.
Postscript and PDF both do vector. If the fonts on the page you are printing are vector, you print to postscript, you get vector fonts in the postscript, ps2pdf that and you get vector fonts in the resulting PDF.
Most of the PDF's I have created within Debian Linux using ps2pdf, have shown within Acrobat Reader, at 1600x zoom, to be completely smooth vector fonts.
Sometimes you might get a font within one of these PDF's that is obviously bitmap, they don't look great on screen, but they do look much better printed than on screen. Good thing is though, the most popular fonts tend to be vector within Debian at least.
For subscribers only?
I like to make PDF's of pages of particular interest for offline reading and archiving should they ever go offline.
I usually click the printer friendly version if they have one, print it to a file, which gives me a postscript file within Linux, then using the a tool that come with ghostscript (?) "ps2pdf" the file. It usually comes out very nice.
But with Ars, I prefer to just grab the article with wget, since they don't seem to offer a printer friendly version outside of a subscribers only PDF file. Anyone subscribed? Free?
Course, now I have OS X, I just print preview then save to PDF.
Really! I'm enjoying my free broadband!
Just keep using it, everything is all right.