Does it speak of how to install 8 (x86) onto a hard drive with other OS' on it?
I've tried to install 8 10/00 onto my UDMA drive with Linux residing at hda2 and a blank partition where hda1 should be. It chokes, nothing I've tried yet works, besides having the whole drive completely zeroed out. SCO Unixware 7.1.1 is the same deal.
I see different challenges of getting various OS' to install in the presence of another partition, but none seem to be as stuborn as these two. OS/2 Warp4 and NT 4 are easier, and stuff like Linux, the free BSD's, QNX and BeOS are dead easy.
Seems strange, are they trying to dominate a machine or is the installed simply brain dead?
Perhaps a future version of SSH could add a buffering mechanism that sends the whole buffer at regular (or randomized) intervals if the outbound buffer is not filled to a point where it would be deemed non-human input.
How about also padding a "regular-interval" packet with a random amount of random data to also avoid the size of the useful portion of the datagram from being calculated.
All this latest greatest eyecandy stuff is BS. Starcraft uses 2-D bitmaps and still works these newere modern FPS games.
Yeah, when I first heard about the latest Warcraft being 3D, I feared for the future of Starcraft. SC is one game that they really should'nt stuff up, if they ever release a sequel.
I would'nt mind if the latest SC had the same top down look, but used 3D terrain and models, along with nice lighting, but as long as it at least looks as good as the current (preferably better with the lighting). If they can't do it, then Starcraft 2 bitmap style at 1024x768 please!
this sounds too much like the people who try to get warranty replacements of their computers when their cats piddle on it.;-)
I knew someone who tried to have thier answering machine replaced under warantee after one of thier many cats vomited on it.;)
Their computers probably just broke down and they're hoping Palm will settle out of court and give them new ones just to get them to shut up.
Exactly, just like these people that put a mouse head into a bag of frozen peas and then try to extort a years supply of frozen peas, etc.
Scumbags. Or perhaps, they're just the type of people who first tried to use thier mouse as some foot peddle device to "make it go" (and then after accidentaly killing it, put it into a bag of frozen... Nah they could'nt be that dumb, could they?).
Tux bent them over and gave it to them good and hard.
I TRIED. I rang the morons at Dell's.au number, with SEVEN GRAND on standby, to see if they could either supply me with an i8000 1600x1200 with no OS, Linux or at least what their stance was on the Microsoft Tax (tm) refund.
In Chinese English worse than that of my local laundromat, I was answered with "Lin ux?", with a long pause, this chick who had bloody awfull English skills came back and mentioned something about only RedHat Linux working on the i8k. Yeah bullshit, anyway...
There is still no option on thier web site for a Linux laptop and although I only went there like, oh once a day for months watching prices tumble, I've never seen a Linux option besides their servers.
Looks like I will have to look elsewhere. MacOS X is looking pretty slick on one of those Ti booky things.
Sorry, but I am really pissed off, and Dell has lost my money.
"Low demand" indeed. I rang, and how many others, who were also greeted with "Lin ux?".
Thanks for wasting heaps of my time Exocet! I found this Carolyn Meinel bitch very morbidly fascinating. : ) Kinda like when people come out to see traffic accidents, hoping to see some guts on the road, etc.
Some of the stuff at http://www.attrition.org/shame/index.html was really funny.
Yeah, they are. Shrek was excellent, though everything else I've seen this year has sucked. Seen Swordfish? JT described it perfectly at the beginning of it. It has unaswered holes in the story all over the place. But that don't matter, because it's got some big name actors, CGI and a Finnish hacker character named Torvalds!
Please excuse me while I go drop a bomb in the trapdoor, with some modulated ipchains device (or some shit like that). Hollywood is hell bent on making movies with $10M CGI and $10 acting and stories.
I think movie reviews ought not be put up here at Slashdot unless the movie is actually decent, since there is such a high chance that it will be wasted bandwidth on yet another shit Hollywood excuse for making money quick.
I think it would be preferable if slashdot did reviews and ratings by the type of poll segfault uses
Of all the complaints people make about Apple 'I couldnt use a 1 button mouse' is the absolute lamest.
If all I ever did was use my notebook on a desktop, this would be fine. But using a seperate mouse is not always an option.
The 1600x1200 screen is to die for and dual 32G HDDS is pretty nice also. Having a bunch of DVD vob files, every CD I own as lame 256kbit mp3's, a bunch of mounted ISO CD images and heaps of work stuff is pretty nice also.
Don't get me wrong. I think Apple make some awesome stuff (I love my Newton 120), but if the ti came with a 1600x1200 screen and three mouse buttons, I would probably have one instead. That's just me and my reasons, not a dig at Apple or Apple users.
I don't expect everyone to share my ideas or ideals, since we don't all live the same lives.
1600x1200 screen, 1GHz Intel, 512Mb SDRAM, option for 2 32Gb UDMA drives (RAID-0, urgh urgh urgh) and a combo DVD/CDRW drive, USB, Firewire, touchpad and mousestick, internal 10/100 NIC and (Win)MODEM, Maestro 3 sound (in the latest Linux kernel) and GeForce2GO video, all whilst two batteries are installed and leaving the PCMCIA slots free for even more goodies.
Then tell me the iBook is "the best Linux laptop".
You really wanna use a single button mouse in the X Window environment?
I love the look of the ti Book, but compared with the i8000 and the single mouse button of the ti, I just cannot come at the price of it, the Dell on the other hand, can you put a price on a mobile system of this incredible spec!?
I'm getting really poor performance (30% slower!) out of the 2.4.5's RAID-0 (up to 2.4.6-pre5). Back when I was using software RAID with the 2.2 kernels, I was actually getting a performance increase (whoa!) with RAID-0 of 50% or so, across my two 20Gb 7200rpm Seagate UDMA drives (hda and hdc).
Anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?
hda and hdc of course, with hdparm -A1c1d1k1m16u1X66/dev/hda and hdparm -A1c1d1k1m16u1X66/dev/hdc set after boot.
hdparm -t/dev/hda6 and hdparm -t/dev/hdc6 shows the same transfer rate, yet the benchmark of the corresponding stripe of those (hdparm -t/dev/md0) is about 30% slower! Timing dd bs=128k if=/dev/??? of=/dev/null for hda6, hdc6 and md0 gives the same results across the whole partitions.
PII-300, top is not showing greater than 30% CPU usage from hdparm or dd during the tests so CPU is not the problem (and it was flying under 2.2). I have tried plenty of chunk sizes up to 128k.
Hopefully 2.4.6 will fix it, but the md updates in (pre5?) did not.
Use ghostscript to print or export text from pdf files that are set to not allow it.
Then tell everyone you know who has had this problem, or other people who must deal with pdf files frequently, that they can get around these "protections" by using ghostscript even under MS Windows.
looking around the office, there are 80+ people running Windows, no complaints
Yeah, because they have come to accept that "computers are unreliable" and need a reboot every now and then, and systems "are down" every few weeks, thanks to Microsoft. I've had many contract roles and have heard many helpdesk staff state over the phone, time and time again, "reboot your PC and try again", now sure, this might be an over done cure-all that might not always be the best option, but the point is that most helpdesks are run off their feet trying to support crap closed source OS' and software, instead of having the time to refine the efficiency of systems that already work reliably.
The people who complain, are usually those in the know. People who know that this is not the "computers fault", it is almost always the OS.
No complaints indeed. Can you say help-desk, re-boot and Micro-soft?
If a large group of people had the chance to use reliable workstations and servers, and were then forced back into the old systems, they would be kicking up a big stink. But since this rarely happens, they don't complain much about what they're missing because they don't know they're missing out at all.
I absolutely can't stand hearing that an IT dept has decided to roll out the next SOE based on a Win9x to departments that only need office productivity and stability and not an extra few percent speed in Direct-bloody-X. If they have to use an MS desktop OS, at least go with WinNT. The same kind of IT departments that I see replace PII-550 notebooks (32Mb RAM) with PII-700 notebooks (which come with 128M minimum) since the old ones are "slow". ; ) Explaining that the old ones were slow because of disk paging results in puzzled looks, and then explaining that a memory upgrade would be a lot cheaper being answered with "700 is a lot faster than 550!", then you may realise that users are pretty ignorant, helpdesks are often not a lot better and managers think they know it all and think they have a efficient IT infrastructure.
A guy I know used his cell everyday for 6 months. The he had cancer right where the antenna emmited.
He had it removed, and now has a plate in his head.
People have been dying from cancer throughout the ages! And there are a lot of people using mobile phones around the World. All you need, is some scare monger news story, some person who has cancer either on the side of thier head or near where they store thier phone and you instantly have some non-scientific, knee jerk reactions from people who think they "know that this phone caused thier cancer".
Think about how many people get cancer every year with or without the usage of cell phones. An enormous ammount of people. Now, all you need, is someone with cancer, desperately looking for answers as to why they have it, who just so happened to own a cell phone. Never mind the fact that they probably did'nt take care of thier health with good eating and exercise, or perhaps had cancer in the family, or maybe even subjected thier body to smoking and alcohol. No, of course, it must be the phone that is emitting 600 milliwatts of non ionizing radiation that did it!
Taking into consideration the ammount of people that get cancer, and taking into consideration the ammount of people that use cell phones, there is a huge chance that people are going to get cancers on their heads or near the place they hold thier phone, and then accept no other explanation than "the phone caused my cancer", due to the fucking bullshit scare mongering we are subjected to by the mass media.
I recently saw a news item on TV (Sydney, Australia), that was showing a male Aussie farmer who had breast cancer. He said that he "knew for a fact that the phone caused his cancer", because he carried his phone in his shirt pocket. The funny bit was that the news showed him on his tractor, with the phone in his left pocket, and yet in the surgery, the doctor was examining his right breast.
The news is happy to ignore science to scare people into watching thier channel, so as to improve ratings and thus drive advertisment prices and thus thier revenue up.
Hey, if you want to believe the big companies, and use nicotine, nutra-sweet and cell phones.
Please do for the sake of humanity.
I don't believe the big companies, I don't use nicotine or bladder cancer causing artificial sweeteners and drink alcohol for that matter.
The fact is, that since about 1904, there have been heaps of non "big Co. funded" studies done in which NO evidence could be found showing that non ionizing radiation caused cancer.
There have been shitloads of studies showing nicotine to cause cancer, yet somehow the phone companies have a better stranglehold on free speech and university studies than does the MEGA tobacco industry? GET SERIOUS!
With all the independant scientific studies coming up negative on this subject, I know where I stand. I'm not going to be one of the fat fucks who mold into the couch, eating cancer causing food, not getting enough exercise, smoking and drinking, accepting everything that the idiot box tells them as gospel.
You have a brain, put it to some use and judge things for yourself.
I use it on the PC. Don't try to get all high and mighty on me with your Mac eliteness. I've admin'ed PC's and Mac's in an.edu environment and the Macs crash right along with the Windows machines.
OTOH, no Linux or BSD box I have built in the last 4 years has ever crashed.
Now that you Mac people have OS X, you finally have something to brag about, in terms of OS design and stability. But be carefull how you brag, it took BSD (OS) and Microsoft ($$$) to save your sorry Mac arses.
Re:Audiophiles, more dollars than sense.
on
Insanely Audiophile
·
· Score: 1
only ears can tell you what sounds good, not specs.
Once apon a time, I might have believed that also. My first CD player was a Technics portable and I bought some very cheap Koss closed headphones to go with it. I then started my CD collection, and most importantly, I came to know and enjoy that music through those headphones.
Years later, as they became pretty tattered, I decided to upgrade them, along with the CD player, to something that should have "sounded" a lot better. My choices were a Yamaha CDX-1060 and then I decided to try some headphones... AKG and Senheiser. To me, all the top end of these headphones sounded really dull compared with my cheapo "noisy G-clamp" Koss. This was because I had become accustomed to hearing my favorite music with them!
My point is, that specs don't lie. Your ears do. I wanted to upgrade to some Beyer Dynamic DT-911's, but had too much trouble sourcing them, and eventually weakened to a pair of Sony headphones, which I will have to be happy with for now, though I can hear some problems with them, which are certainly not "in my head", namely they clip some bass baddly.
cd-roms have very low error-rates, but terrible timing (jitter).
Jitter IS error, but not due to CDROM data, it is confined to CD audio extraction...
My point about the frozen CD debacle, is not whether CDROM drives sound good, it was that these self proclaimed, "golden eared audiophiles" did'nt have one clue what the hell they were talking about, yet they pass themselves off as the elite gurus of Hi Fi. If the Compact Disc mfg process is so flawed that it creates errors so bad that they could be heard on audio discs, then how on Earth would that process work for data usage of Compact Discs! An error in audio data could easily go unnoticed, yet a comparable error on CDROM data could cause an archive to be unusable for example.
The "jitter" problems you speak of are due to limits of the CD audio specification and the hurdles it poses to interupted extraction "as blocks". The CD audio spec does not include block accurate addressing, it was designed for CD players to be streamed into a FIFO that then goes to a DAC, the rotational speed of the CD is adjusted (since audio CD's are CLV) to adjust the stream speed as the FIFO either fills or empties. The FIFO output is clocked at an exact rate into the DAC so that the pitch of the audio remains correct to within tollerances never before heard of in audio prior to the CD.
Now enter the PC and the CDROM drive... it would be so nice if CD audio could be read off the CD's a block at a time, so as to ensure every bit is read (assuming no real, hard errors on the media), but there is no block accurate addressing available on the disc to allow this! So when ripping CD audio on a PC, you can end up with samples that are either not read at all (skipped while the CPU was distracted with another process, like say, writing that data to disk!) or read twice and then put in the resulting saved file!
This is what is most commonly known as jitter, along with the jittering you get when you bump a CD player. Both are error, and the first, that I described, is NOT a problem with CDROM's, it is a problem with the CD audio spec and PC's trying to read a CD audio stream non stop to another block addressed media without missing a beat. A CD player FIFO can continuously read from a laser pickup and control CD rotationional speed while outputting data to the DAC at a different rate. It can do this because it is made with this very thing in mind out of discrete components, which are dedicated to nothing but thier specific tasks. A PC on the other hand must contend with the CPU being the hub of activity which cannot be everywhere at once. CD audio was simply not designed to be ripped a-block-at-a-time. CDROM data OTOH, was, and therefore does not have a jitter problem.
There are methods that attempt to fix this problem though, like reading whole songs at once, forcing overlapped samples and then fixing them later with overlap detection, etc. Apparently Plextor drives have some fancy mechanism that helps to solve the issue.
it's the simplicity of the vinyl recording process that makes it so good,
Vinyl sounds awfull to me and most of the channel seperation, noise, dynamic range, distortion, wow and flutter are usually so bad they can be heard by anyone, thanks to the ancient design. It's the simplicity that makes it sound terrible next to CD and DAT.
The highest frequency our ears can hear, is approximately a sine wave at 20kHz, which is spot on the limitation of CD audio, which encodes two of these streams into seperate channels for stereo. The whole vinyl vs. CD debate is truely ridiculous.
Have you ever though about what the varying frequency waveforms look like within a vinyl groove? The needle has a harder time moving through the highs than the lows, do you realise what the result is? After the first play, they are smoothed out by the needle, thus attenuated! And this gets worse and worse as it is played more and more. You can kiss you 15kHz and up goodbye after a couple of plays. A laser pickup (designed for vinyl) will fix this, but it won't fix the terrible channel seperation.
Audiophiles often purchase expensive Hi Fi equipment, with a belief that it is superior because it is very expensive and are quite happy to ignore the specs.
I remember seeing a Meridian CD player that was $25,000, which had lower specs (THD, SNR, Dynamic Range, channel seperation) than a $150 Marrantz CD player. Yet an audiophile buys the Meridian because he believes it to have a "warmer", "more fluid", "dynamic", "" sound.
I also remember seeing on TV some moron "audiophiles" comparing the sound of room temperature CD's versus CD's stored in a freezer. They believed that the plastic in CD's cracks during the cool down process of manufacture and the freezing somehow fixes this.
I wished I was there at this hearing to pose the question to these elite, golden eared, arrogant morons, that if this is true, why the fuck do CDROMs work AT ALL without heaps of errors.
Vinyl incorporates both channels into the one groove through a simple analog encode/decode method, which causes that medium to have terrible channel seperation specs, yet some of these elites choose to pour "top flight Porsche" kinda money into thier turntables.
but I believe what any modern disk drive has for head positioning is a tiny electromagnet ("audio coil") driven by a DAC
Yeah, an electromagnet in close proximity to a very strong fixed magnet, driven by a DAC that gets position and error data from either a platter that is completely dedicated to head position data, with grey code encoded tracks that correspond to the cylinders, or platters that have grey coded data between sectors on each track. Either way, the heads a positioned pretty well.
So the head is still going to wander a little (by 1/2 a DAC step at least)
Half a step? Positioning the heads half way between tracks? This would either cause the reading of erroneous data and none if the signal levels are down near the noise floor (as far as the drive can see).
Maybe you missed this: the article is not concerned with data recovery using the drive as is
No actually, that is a point I have been trying to make in other posts to try to quell some of the hype. Some people seem to think this can be done through some software trickery.
Incidentally, there may be a business opportunity here.
How about stationary erase heads that span the platter radius, so as to allow a complete degauss in a couple of revs? A full erase 7400 times in 1 sec sound good? ; )
With modern drives built to get every last byte, with tracks positioned as close as posible so as to waste as little media as posible, bluring the lines between tracks, I would'nt be amazed to see them get data from a zeroed drive, but I would be astounded if they could do it with one that has had some random write treatment a few times, even reading just off the tracks.
Do the bloody research. It's all out there. It only takes an evening or two.
I have done. In my work with Navy RADAR equipment, and my interest in HAM radio, going back 13 years. I left the Navy as a civilian in Electronic Weapons, RADAR/Fire Control, fearing for my future health. But not because of RF radiation, because of the asbestos and chemicals used that are the biggest culprit in long term illness and death in that field.
Can you please point me to some links to studies that show undeniable proof that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer?
You've been bought and sold by the media. They love scare value stories. You are much more likely to hear a "mobile phones cause cancer" story on the news than you are a "mobile phones don't cause cancer" story.
Not only is the typical mobile phone frequency range well below the typical ionizing frequency range where UV, x-rays and gamma-rays hang out, but mobile phone power levels are also astronomically below the levels required to ionize at their frequency. They could ionize, if thier power levels were far FAR greater.
It has been known since about 1904 that exposure to ionizing radiation causes elevated risks of cancer, yet amongst all these same studies to date, no conclusive evidence has been found showing non-ionizing radiation to also cause a cancer risk.
Even if non-ionizing radiation can elevate cancer risk, it would seem to be at an extremely miniscule level given the lack of evidence.
As an interesting tidbit, almost all of the men in my dept who had children, had girls. It was not a small group and the ratio was astounding. This could possibly be an effect of the RF, but I'm not talking about 0.6 - 2 Watt 900MHz phones here, I'm talking eyeball popping, 1 MegaWatt 30GHz RADAR, which may well be ionizing. ; )
I never said it was 'safe' because evidence could not be found that microwaves cause cancer.
TV's actually emit a lot worse that microwaves. They emit low frequency EMR which supposedly causes leukemia, and they actually emit small amounts of x-rays! Cancer causing ionizing radiation.
Although PC monitors emit much lower amounts due to safety standards, I can't wait till LCD flat panels are truely within financial reach to everyone who would otherwise buy a CRT.
The mobile phone you have been using these past few years, is most likely safer than all the televisions your family have been watching through the past decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it speak of how to install 8 (x86) onto a hard drive with other OS' on it?
I've tried to install 8 10/00 onto my UDMA drive with Linux residing at hda2 and a blank partition where hda1 should be. It chokes, nothing I've tried yet works, besides having the whole drive completely zeroed out. SCO Unixware 7.1.1 is the same deal.
I see different challenges of getting various OS' to install in the presence of another partition, but none seem to be as stuborn as these two. OS/2 Warp4 and NT 4 are easier, and stuff like Linux, the free BSD's, QNX and BeOS are dead easy.
Seems strange, are they trying to dominate a machine or is the installed simply brain dead?
Perhaps a future version of SSH could add a buffering mechanism that sends the whole buffer at regular (or randomized) intervals if the outbound buffer is not filled to a point where it would be deemed non-human input.
How about also padding a "regular-interval" packet with a random amount of random data to also avoid the size of the useful portion of the datagram from being calculated.
All this latest greatest eyecandy stuff is BS. Starcraft uses 2-D bitmaps and still works these newere modern FPS games.
Yeah, when I first heard about the latest Warcraft being 3D, I feared for the future of Starcraft. SC is one game that they really should'nt stuff up, if they ever release a sequel.
I would'nt mind if the latest SC had the same top down look, but used 3D terrain and models, along with nice lighting, but as long as it at least looks as good as the current (preferably better with the lighting). If they can't do it, then Starcraft 2 bitmap style at 1024x768 please!
I'm still content to play UT:Tactical-Ops and Starcraft. ;-)
I've just finished D2:LOD, and it seems, no matter what game I get slightly sidetracked by, I always come back to Starcraft (Brood War).
I wish they'd bring out a new Starcraft, or even just another add-on like Brood.
this sounds too much like the people who try to get warranty replacements of their computers when their cats piddle on it. ;-)
;)
I knew someone who tried to have thier answering machine replaced under warantee after one of thier many cats vomited on it.
Their computers probably just broke down and they're hoping Palm will settle out of court and give them new ones just to get them to shut up.
Exactly, just like these people that put a mouse head into a bag of frozen peas and then try to extort a years supply of frozen peas, etc.
Scumbags. Or perhaps, they're just the type of people who first tried to use thier mouse as some foot peddle device to "make it go" (and then after accidentaly killing it, put it into a bag of frozen... Nah they could'nt be that dumb, could they?).
Tux bent them over and gave it to them good and hard.
.au number, with SEVEN GRAND on standby, to see if they could either supply me with an i8000 1600x1200 with no OS, Linux or at least what their stance was on the Microsoft Tax (tm) refund.
I TRIED. I rang the morons at Dell's
In Chinese English worse than that of my local laundromat, I was answered with "Lin ux?", with a long pause, this chick who had bloody awfull English skills came back and mentioned something about only RedHat Linux working on the i8k. Yeah bullshit, anyway...
There is still no option on thier web site for a Linux laptop and although I only went there like, oh once a day for months watching prices tumble, I've never seen a Linux option besides their servers.
Looks like I will have to look elsewhere. MacOS X is looking pretty slick on one of those Ti booky things.
Sorry, but I am really pissed off, and Dell has lost my money.
"Low demand" indeed. I rang, and how many others, who were also greeted with "Lin ux?".
Thanks for wasting heaps of my time Exocet! I found this Carolyn Meinel bitch very morbidly fascinating. : ) Kinda like when people come out to see traffic accidents, hoping to see some guts on the road, etc.
Some of the stuff at http://www.attrition.org/shame/index.html was really funny.
Are mainstream movies really that bad
Yeah, they are. Shrek was excellent, though everything else I've seen this year has sucked. Seen Swordfish? JT described it perfectly at the beginning of it. It has unaswered holes in the story all over the place. But that don't matter, because it's got some big name actors, CGI and a Finnish hacker character named Torvalds!
Please excuse me while I go drop a bomb in the trapdoor, with some modulated ipchains device (or some shit like that). Hollywood is hell bent on making movies with $10M CGI and $10 acting and stories.
I think movie reviews ought not be put up here at Slashdot unless the movie is actually decent, since there is such a high chance that it will be wasted bandwidth on yet another shit Hollywood excuse for making money quick.
I think it would be preferable if slashdot did reviews and ratings by the type of poll segfault uses
Yeah!
Of all the complaints people make about Apple 'I couldnt use a 1 button mouse' is the absolute lamest.
If all I ever did was use my notebook on a desktop, this would be fine. But using a seperate mouse is not always an option.
The 1600x1200 screen is to die for and dual 32G HDDS is pretty nice also. Having a bunch of DVD vob files, every CD I own as lame 256kbit mp3's, a bunch of mounted ISO CD images and heaps of work stuff is pretty nice also.
Don't get me wrong. I think Apple make some awesome stuff (I love my Newton 120), but if the ti came with a 1600x1200 screen and three mouse buttons, I would probably have one instead. That's just me and my reasons, not a dig at Apple or Apple users.
I don't expect everyone to share my ideas or ideals, since we don't all live the same lives.
Actually, the inspiron 8000 configured to that spec comes to over $3500 if you include the 3 year completecare service.
dell.com.au literally wants thousands for 512Mb, yet I can get Kingston for an i8000 for around $600 au.
Savings can be made on the extra 32G HDD also.
Don't buy a "Dell" bag, and purchase (in my case) a notebook backpack... more savings.
I don't want three years "complete care", the standard 1st year plus return to base for the 2nd and 3rd is fine with me.
Nothing is stopping you from plugging in a 2-3 button mouse. I use a wheel mouse on my G4.
Yeah, but this is a mobile PC, often used where even an optical mouse can not really be a very practical option.
Try a Dell Inspiron 8000.
1600x1200 screen, 1GHz Intel, 512Mb SDRAM, option for 2 32Gb UDMA drives (RAID-0, urgh urgh urgh) and a combo DVD/CDRW drive, USB, Firewire, touchpad and mousestick, internal 10/100 NIC and (Win)MODEM, Maestro 3 sound (in the latest Linux kernel) and GeForce2GO video, all whilst two batteries are installed and leaving the PCMCIA slots free for even more goodies.
Then tell me the iBook is "the best Linux laptop".
You really wanna use a single button mouse in the X Window environment?
I love the look of the ti Book, but compared with the i8000 and the single mouse button of the ti, I just cannot come at the price of it, the Dell on the other hand, can you put a price on a mobile system of this incredible spec!?
I'm getting really poor performance (30% slower!) out of the 2.4.5's RAID-0 (up to 2.4.6-pre5). Back when I was using software RAID with the 2.2 kernels, I was actually getting a performance increase (whoa!) with RAID-0 of 50% or so, across my two 20Gb 7200rpm Seagate UDMA drives (hda and hdc).
/dev/hda and hdparm -A1c1d1k1m16u1X66 /dev/hdc set after boot.
/dev/hda6 and hdparm -t /dev/hdc6 shows the same transfer rate, yet the benchmark of the corresponding stripe of those (hdparm -t /dev/md0) is about 30% slower! Timing dd bs=128k if=/dev/??? of=/dev/null for hda6, hdc6 and md0 gives the same results across the whole partitions.
Anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?
hda and hdc of course, with hdparm -A1c1d1k1m16u1X66
hdparm -t
PII-300, top is not showing greater than 30% CPU usage from hdparm or dd during the tests so CPU is not the problem (and it was flying under 2.2). I have tried plenty of chunk sizes up to 128k.
Hopefully 2.4.6 will fix it, but the md updates in (pre5?) did not.
Use ghostscript to print or export text from pdf files that are set to not allow it.
Then tell everyone you know who has had this problem, or other people who must deal with pdf files frequently, that they can get around these "protections" by using ghostscript even under MS Windows.
looking around the office, there are 80+ people running Windows, no complaints
Yeah, because they have come to accept that "computers are unreliable" and need a reboot every now and then, and systems "are down" every few weeks, thanks to Microsoft. I've had many contract roles and have heard many helpdesk staff state over the phone, time and time again, "reboot your PC and try again", now sure, this might be an over done cure-all that might not always be the best option, but the point is that most helpdesks are run off their feet trying to support crap closed source OS' and software, instead of having the time to refine the efficiency of systems that already work reliably.
The people who complain, are usually those in the know. People who know that this is not the "computers fault", it is almost always the OS.
No complaints indeed. Can you say help-desk, re-boot and Micro-soft?
If a large group of people had the chance to use reliable workstations and servers, and were then forced back into the old systems, they would be kicking up a big stink. But since this rarely happens, they don't complain much about what they're missing because they don't know they're missing out at all.
I absolutely can't stand hearing that an IT dept has decided to roll out the next SOE based on a Win9x to departments that only need office productivity and stability and not an extra few percent speed in Direct-bloody-X. If they have to use an MS desktop OS, at least go with WinNT. The same kind of IT departments that I see replace PII-550 notebooks (32Mb RAM) with PII-700 notebooks (which come with 128M minimum) since the old ones are "slow". ; ) Explaining that the old ones were slow because of disk paging results in puzzled looks, and then explaining that a memory upgrade would be a lot cheaper being answered with "700 is a lot faster than 550!", then you may realise that users are pretty ignorant, helpdesks are often not a lot better and managers think they know it all and think they have a efficient IT infrastructure.
When in fact, they don't.
He specifially stated he wanted to attach an IDE drive to his LVD chain.
A guy I know used his cell everyday for 6 months. The he had cancer right where the antenna emmited.
He had it removed, and now has a plate in his head.
People have been dying from cancer throughout the ages! And there are a lot of people using mobile phones around the World. All you need, is some scare monger news story, some person who has cancer either on the side of thier head or near where they store thier phone and you instantly have some non-scientific, knee jerk reactions from people who think they "know that this phone caused thier cancer".
Think about how many people get cancer every year with or without the usage of cell phones. An enormous ammount of people. Now, all you need, is someone with cancer, desperately looking for answers as to why they have it, who just so happened to own a cell phone. Never mind the fact that they probably did'nt take care of thier health with good eating and exercise, or perhaps had cancer in the family, or maybe even subjected thier body to smoking and alcohol. No, of course, it must be the phone that is emitting 600 milliwatts of non ionizing radiation that did it!
Taking into consideration the ammount of people that get cancer, and taking into consideration the ammount of people that use cell phones, there is a huge chance that people are going to get cancers on their heads or near the place they hold thier phone, and then accept no other explanation than "the phone caused my cancer", due to the fucking bullshit scare mongering we are subjected to by the mass media.
I recently saw a news item on TV (Sydney, Australia), that was showing a male Aussie farmer who had breast cancer. He said that he "knew for a fact that the phone caused his cancer", because he carried his phone in his shirt pocket. The funny bit was that the news showed him on his tractor, with the phone in his left pocket, and yet in the surgery, the doctor was examining his right breast.
The news is happy to ignore science to scare people into watching thier channel, so as to improve ratings and thus drive advertisment prices and thus thier revenue up.
Hey, if you want to believe the big companies, and use nicotine, nutra-sweet and cell phones.
Please do for the sake of humanity.
I don't believe the big companies, I don't use nicotine or bladder cancer causing artificial sweeteners and drink alcohol for that matter.
The fact is, that since about 1904, there have been heaps of non "big Co. funded" studies done in which NO evidence could be found showing that non ionizing radiation caused cancer.
There have been shitloads of studies showing nicotine to cause cancer, yet somehow the phone companies have a better stranglehold on free speech and university studies than does the MEGA tobacco industry? GET SERIOUS!
With all the independant scientific studies coming up negative on this subject, I know where I stand. I'm not going to be one of the fat fucks who mold into the couch, eating cancer causing food, not getting enough exercise, smoking and drinking, accepting everything that the idiot box tells them as gospel.
You have a brain, put it to some use and judge things for yourself.
I use it on the PC. Don't try to get all high and mighty on me with your Mac eliteness. I've admin'ed PC's and Mac's in an .edu environment and the Macs crash right along with the Windows machines.
OTOH, no Linux or BSD box I have built in the last 4 years has ever crashed.
Now that you Mac people have OS X, you finally have something to brag about, in terms of OS design and stability. But be carefull how you brag, it took BSD (OS) and Microsoft ($$$) to save your sorry Mac arses.
only ears can tell you what sounds good, not specs.
Once apon a time, I might have believed that also. My first CD player was a Technics portable and I bought some very cheap Koss closed headphones to go with it. I then started my CD collection, and most importantly, I came to know and enjoy that music through those headphones.
Years later, as they became pretty tattered, I decided to upgrade them, along with the CD player, to something that should have "sounded" a lot better. My choices were a Yamaha CDX-1060 and then I decided to try some headphones... AKG and Senheiser. To me, all the top end of these headphones sounded really dull compared with my cheapo "noisy G-clamp" Koss. This was because I had become accustomed to hearing my favorite music with them!
My point is, that specs don't lie. Your ears do. I wanted to upgrade to some Beyer Dynamic DT-911's, but had too much trouble sourcing them, and eventually weakened to a pair of Sony headphones, which I will have to be happy with for now, though I can hear some problems with them, which are certainly not "in my head", namely they clip some bass baddly.
cd-roms have very low error-rates, but terrible timing (jitter).
Jitter IS error, but not due to CDROM data, it is confined to CD audio extraction...
My point about the frozen CD debacle, is not whether CDROM drives sound good, it was that these self proclaimed, "golden eared audiophiles" did'nt have one clue what the hell they were talking about, yet they pass themselves off as the elite gurus of Hi Fi. If the Compact Disc mfg process is so flawed that it creates errors so bad that they could be heard on audio discs, then how on Earth would that process work for data usage of Compact Discs! An error in audio data could easily go unnoticed, yet a comparable error on CDROM data could cause an archive to be unusable for example.
The "jitter" problems you speak of are due to limits of the CD audio specification and the hurdles it poses to interupted extraction "as blocks". The CD audio spec does not include block accurate addressing, it was designed for CD players to be streamed into a FIFO that then goes to a DAC, the rotational speed of the CD is adjusted (since audio CD's are CLV) to adjust the stream speed as the FIFO either fills or empties. The FIFO output is clocked at an exact rate into the DAC so that the pitch of the audio remains correct to within tollerances never before heard of in audio prior to the CD.
Now enter the PC and the CDROM drive... it would be so nice if CD audio could be read off the CD's a block at a time, so as to ensure every bit is read (assuming no real, hard errors on the media), but there is no block accurate addressing available on the disc to allow this! So when ripping CD audio on a PC, you can end up with samples that are either not read at all (skipped while the CPU was distracted with another process, like say, writing that data to disk!) or read twice and then put in the resulting saved file!
This is what is most commonly known as jitter, along with the jittering you get when you bump a CD player. Both are error, and the first, that I described, is NOT a problem with CDROM's, it is a problem with the CD audio spec and PC's trying to read a CD audio stream non stop to another block addressed media without missing a beat. A CD player FIFO can continuously read from a laser pickup and control CD rotationional speed while outputting data to the DAC at a different rate. It can do this because it is made with this very thing in mind out of discrete components, which are dedicated to nothing but thier specific tasks. A PC on the other hand must contend with the CPU being the hub of activity which cannot be everywhere at once. CD audio was simply not designed to be ripped a-block-at-a-time. CDROM data OTOH, was, and therefore does not have a jitter problem.
There are methods that attempt to fix this problem though, like reading whole songs at once, forcing overlapped samples and then fixing them later with overlap detection, etc. Apparently Plextor drives have some fancy mechanism that helps to solve the issue.
it's the simplicity of the vinyl recording process that makes it so good,
Vinyl sounds awfull to me and most of the channel seperation, noise, dynamic range, distortion, wow and flutter are usually so bad they can be heard by anyone, thanks to the ancient design. It's the simplicity that makes it sound terrible next to CD and DAT.
The highest frequency our ears can hear, is approximately a sine wave at 20kHz, which is spot on the limitation of CD audio, which encodes two of these streams into seperate channels for stereo. The whole vinyl vs. CD debate is truely ridiculous.
Have you ever though about what the varying frequency waveforms look like within a vinyl groove? The needle has a harder time moving through the highs than the lows, do you realise what the result is? After the first play, they are smoothed out by the needle, thus attenuated! And this gets worse and worse as it is played more and more. You can kiss you 15kHz and up goodbye after a couple of plays. A laser pickup (designed for vinyl) will fix this, but it won't fix the terrible channel seperation.
specs - schmecks
The specs don't lie, your perception does.
Audiophiles often purchase expensive Hi Fi equipment, with a belief that it is superior because it is very expensive and are quite happy to ignore the specs.
I remember seeing a Meridian CD player that was $25,000, which had lower specs (THD, SNR, Dynamic Range, channel seperation) than a $150 Marrantz CD player. Yet an audiophile buys the Meridian because he believes it to have a "warmer", "more fluid", "dynamic", "" sound.
I also remember seeing on TV some moron "audiophiles" comparing the sound of room temperature CD's versus CD's stored in a freezer. They believed that the plastic in CD's cracks during the cool down process of manufacture and the freezing somehow fixes this.
I wished I was there at this hearing to pose the question to these elite, golden eared, arrogant morons, that if this is true, why the fuck do CDROMs work AT ALL without heaps of errors.
Vinyl incorporates both channels into the one groove through a simple analog encode/decode method, which causes that medium to have terrible channel seperation specs, yet some of these elites choose to pour "top flight Porsche" kinda money into thier turntables.
They are being scammed.
My original point stands, though.
I don't doubt there are other bad effects, and I have already heard of these problems.
No, a DAC step
Sorry, I should know better.
That is, the erase head would have to be capable of writing 1's and 0's both,
Yeah I was thinking that, a simple degauss might not be good enough.
Hi markmoss,
but I believe what any modern disk drive has for head positioning is a tiny electromagnet ("audio coil") driven by a DAC
Yeah, an electromagnet in close proximity to a very strong fixed magnet, driven by a DAC that gets position and error data from either a platter that is completely dedicated to head position data, with grey code encoded tracks that correspond to the cylinders, or platters that have grey coded data between sectors on each track. Either way, the heads a positioned pretty well.
So the head is still going to wander a little (by 1/2 a DAC step at least)
Half a step? Positioning the heads half way between tracks? This would either cause the reading of erroneous data and none if the signal levels are down near the noise floor (as far as the drive can see).
Maybe you missed this: the article is not concerned with data recovery using the drive as is
No actually, that is a point I have been trying to make in other posts to try to quell some of the hype. Some people seem to think this can be done through some software trickery.
Incidentally, there may be a business opportunity here.
How about stationary erase heads that span the platter radius, so as to allow a complete degauss in a couple of revs? A full erase 7400 times in 1 sec sound good? ; )
With modern drives built to get every last byte, with tracks positioned as close as posible so as to waste as little media as posible, bluring the lines between tracks, I would'nt be amazed to see them get data from a zeroed drive, but I would be astounded if they could do it with one that has had some random write treatment a few times, even reading just off the tracks.
Do the bloody research. It's all out there. It only takes an evening or two.
i on/rfpresentation/nonionizing/nonionizing2handout. html
m
I have done. In my work with Navy RADAR equipment, and my interest in HAM radio, going back 13 years. I left the Navy as a civilian in Electronic Weapons, RADAR/Fire Control, fearing for my future health. But not because of RF radiation, because of the asbestos and chemicals used that are the biggest culprit in long term illness and death in that field.
Can you please point me to some links to studies that show undeniable proof that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer?
You've been bought and sold by the media. They love scare value stories. You are much more likely to hear a "mobile phones cause cancer" story on the news than you are a "mobile phones don't cause cancer" story.
Not only is the typical mobile phone frequency range well below the typical ionizing frequency range where UV, x-rays and gamma-rays hang out, but mobile phone power levels are also astronomically below the levels required to ionize at their frequency. They could ionize, if thier power levels were far FAR greater.
http://www.osha-slc.gov/SLTC/radiofrequencyradiat
It has been known since about 1904 that exposure to ionizing radiation causes elevated risks of cancer, yet amongst all these same studies to date, no conclusive evidence has been found showing non-ionizing radiation to also cause a cancer risk.
http://www.labor.state.ak.us/lss/pads/ionizing.ht
Even if non-ionizing radiation can elevate cancer risk, it would seem to be at an extremely miniscule level given the lack of evidence.
As an interesting tidbit, almost all of the men in my dept who had children, had girls. It was not a small group and the ratio was astounding. This could possibly be an effect of the RF, but I'm not talking about 0.6 - 2 Watt 900MHz phones here, I'm talking eyeball popping, 1 MegaWatt 30GHz RADAR, which may well be ionizing. ; )
I never said it was 'safe' because evidence could not be found that microwaves cause cancer.
TV's actually emit a lot worse that microwaves. They emit low frequency EMR which supposedly causes leukemia, and they actually emit small amounts of x-rays! Cancer causing ionizing radiation.
Although PC monitors emit much lower amounts due to safety standards, I can't wait till LCD flat panels are truely within financial reach to everyone who would otherwise buy a CRT.
The mobile phone you have been using these past few years, is most likely safer than all the televisions your family have been watching through the past decades.