No, it had zilch to do with magnetic tapes. Back in the 70s/80s state-of-the-art was to design your IC circuits on a drafting table by hand using opaque tape (opaque to the light frequency that you were using during the manufacturing step). You would then coat your silicon in a special film, and shoot light through your design, through a reducer lens and onto the silicon. Follow up with an acid bath to wash away anything that wasn't shadowed and you had your circuit.
There was also "tape" used to create one-off circuit boards for the hobbyist / HAM radio crowd. You'd start with a copper covered circuit board (either one-sided, or two-sided). Tape out (or ink out) your design on the board, then dunk it in a bath to wash away the excess copper. After which you would have a circuit board with useful copper traces, ready for drilling and mounting of components. Radio Shack used to sell kits to do this stuff.
Java's single inheritance still sucks, but it does keep you from doing stupid things.
At least now, with aspects, you can do things like have a class implement an interface while also supplying a default implementation of that interface.
Well, in Java, it's now as easy as writing your logging stuff in AspectJ and having that advise the method. Any cross-cutting stuff (logging, exceptions, security) gets moved out to a common aspect which is then applied to all methods that either implement an interface, are annotated, or match a calling pattern or name.
If you're dirtying up your Java business object classes with security / logging / exception handling, you're still doing it the hard way.
Yeah, supposedly there's an optimization patch coming in January. I'm hopeful, because right now I'm CPU-bound (hit Alt-F in game and see the "[CPU]" tag in light blue). That's with a brand new GeForce 660 Ti card installed - which is no slouch.
Open world I can get a good 50-60 FPS. Most fights I'm in the 30-35 range. But in a big fray, I'm down to 17-20 which is laggy and annoying to play.
At about 100 hours played so far, the 6-month subscription was money well spent. I've spent that much on AAA titles which only offered 20-30 hours of content.
And once you learn to read the map and make educated guesses about who is going where and when, there's not a whole lot of downtime.
PS2 is rumored to be offering account wide unlocks. So if you buy a particular carbine, it would be available to all classes that can use that particular carbine. I haven't seen exact details yet.
And if you play between Dec 21 and Jan 2, SOE is doing another 2x XP period in Planetside 2. So if you're at all on the fence about playing, the next week is a very good time to dip your toes in and get some double-XP time.
RAID is generally still a very bad idea with SSDs. The RAID controllers and software don't know how to communicate properly with the SSD.
Best bet with SSDs is to buy one, then buy a 2nd large hard drive along with setting up automatic weekly/monthly backups using some sort of disk imaging software (Acronis, etc). That way if the SSD does die, you can just restore from last week's or last month's backup.
Restoring from an Acronis backup usually takes 30-40 minutes, even over slow USB 2.0 speeds (20MB/s).
I agree with most of those points (97 hours played).
Lone-wolf types need not apply unless you can fly a ESF (empire-specific fighter). Get into a squad, even a pickup-group, and follow them around. Start looking at everyone's outfit (guild / clan / corp) tags in square brackets. Pay attention to who seems to be team-oriented and which groups only zerg. Then find their recruiting posts on the forums and join up.
If you're in a half-decent outfit, that uses voice comms, approaches the map at a strategic level, and has players that stick together and provide support, you're going to have a lot of fun. Smaller outfits can go after the perimeter bases and provide a distraction while the enemy zerg is attacking some major facility instead. Teamwork, even at the 6-person (1/2 of a squad) level makes a big difference. A full squad (12 players) can do a lot of damage.
If you're camped in a spawn room, stop being a lemming. Open up your map and hit the "redeploy" button and spawn to a mobile spawn point (sunderer or "sundy") or another friendly base nearby. If a whole squad does that and moves in together from the flank, your odds of making a difference go way up.
There are still teething problems. Some of the XP rewards need to be tuned to reward team-based play more. The render distance and automatic culling are problems, as is the poor performance where the game is CPU-bound instead of being GPU-bound.
It takes 250 XP per cert, on an average night as an engineer, I can make about 5k XP/hr or about 20 certs/hr. Not bad, not great and about average. If you suck, you're only getting 2-3k XP/hr. If you're farming, then you can get closer to 10-15k XP/hr.
So, on average, expect to take about a week per 1000 cert weapon that you want to unlock. Or grit your teeth and find a grinding spot like Indar's Crown and be a medic or engineer to make more like 10-15k XP/hr.
Mostly, not having to worry about whether the HVM extensions are turned on in a particular motherboard / CPU combination. Because *all* of the AMDs (from the lowly Athlon64 X2 chips and up) have it turned on.
And 45W parts at the desktop are *very* nice in terms of noise. Even with the stock CPU fan, it makes for a very quiet desktop.
I swear anyone who thinks 7 is fast has never used it alongside a solid XP install.
I'll take that bet. Multiple instances of EVE Online running in XP and you were lucky to get 30-40 FPS on the primary window, with the background windows chugging along at 10-20.
Same hardware, Win7 64bit, now you're getting 60fps solid on the primary window and 30-45 on the secondary windows.
Also running Win7 on my 2007 era Thinkpad T61p. Runs nicer the WinXP did and I do a lot more with it.
(Win7 is pretty darned good. But I still might move to Ubuntu on the next laptop and run Win7 in a VM.)
A good estimate for reasonable passwords which can be remembered and aren't complete gibberish is only around 4.5-5.5 bits per character.
At 4.5 bits/char and 14 chars, that gives you: 9.22E+18
At 5.5 bits/char and 14 chars, that gives you: 1.51E+23
If you limit yourself even further to just english words and no strangeness in the capitalization, you're down in the 3.0-3.5 bits per character range.
Just like the world is full of "developers" who write everything to c:\temp, the world is full of Unix hacks who chmod 777 everything "because then it works".
Or the Linux hacks who disable SELinux because they can't figure out how to create exceptions or fix the file system labeling problems.
It's strange, I must be in some kind of culture jam, but my family, and everyone I know (IRL) steers clear of whitebread. We all eat 9 or 7 grain bread (the wholegrain stuff). I don't really know why. I grew up with it, and can't even stand the taste of whitebread. It's like there's nothing in it.
It's been part of a culture shift in the US away from plain white bread over the past 10-20 years. Many people associate PWB with trailer-trash living and prefer to appear more upscale by buying the multi-grains, wholegrain, etc. Plus the health movement that says bleached white flour isn't the best and that you should go with unbleached flour.
(This was actually in the news recently, but I can't remember if it was the Economist, Time Magazine, or some other online news source. They were discussing how PWB no longer has a majority share of the market.
I much prefer the taste of a *good* whole wheat loaf over PWB. If it has texture and isn't a homogenous mass, then it's one of the better ones. The multi-grains tend to be too sweet for my tastes.)
Interestingly, in the US, "plain white bread" is no longer the favorite and hasn't been for a while. The population seems to now associate it with trailer-trash people and it's not considered cool to eat plain white bread. So more complex breads like whole wheat / multi-grains / oat / and other breads are far more commonly sold.
(Personally, I can't stand plain white bread. It has no taste or texture. I prefer a proper whole wheat.)
How much faster is a single processor core then what we had back in '06? Some, but nowhere close to an order of magnitude (2x, maybe). For a lot of people, once processors went dual-core and dropped below $100, we hit the point where they will suffice for most people for a very long time. With the 2nd core, now your system felt more responsive because even if something maxed out the 1st core, there was a 2nd one to handle user input. Add the new low-priced SSDs into the mix and you've removed another bottleneck for a lot of users. And that SSD will breathe new life into what was probably perceived as a sluggish machine.
My everyday work laptop is a 2007-era Thinkpad T61p with a dual-core 2.2GHz Core2 Duo inside. Now running with a 300GB Intel SSD, 8GB RAM and Win7 Pro 64bit. It's a little bit sluggish compared to the hex-core / 16GB desktop which is far more recent, but the SSD makes up for that. If I need lots of CPU power for video transcoding, I use the desktop. During a normal day, I have 3-4 firefox windows each with half a dozen tabs, plus 3 other browsers open, the mail client, instant message client, SSH client, the IDE, plus a few documents / spreadsheets.
Do I want a new laptop? Eh, want yes, need no. I might upgrade in 2013, but will probably wait until 2014. A critical hardware failure would change my mind, but not much else.
Win7 does almost everything right for a business desktop. It's got a few quirks, but nothing that will stop an uneducated user from finding their programs and getting work done. Plus it's more up to date then the aging XP, handles SSDs better, is a fair bit more secure then XP was, handles 64bit memory spaces without hacks.
And I'm starting to really like some of the Aero features like window preview and the iconified task bar.
Fortunately, if you go the business route you can still buy Win7.
We're just getting around to installing Win7, which is a pretty good upgrade from WinXP. Definitely skipping Win8 and probably Win9. Don't plan on refreshing the hardware for another 3-5 years.
At this point, you can change that to "If you have to ask, use ext4". It's been around long enough at this point that it's ready for production use (and has been for a year or two). Especially if you have situations of multi-gigabyte files that take a long time to delete under ext3, or you want the faster fsck of ext4.
I plan on waiting until at least late next year before I'd test btrfs for production. Let others be the pioneers in that, because ext4 handles our workload just fine.
Ext4 is also a lot better then ext3 was for very large files, and has the larger market share / acceptance / eyeballs. So not sure I'd bother to use XFS just for large file support.
In ext3, when you would delete a multi-gigabyte file, it would take up to a few minutes for it to happen. In ext4, that process is measured in fractions of a comparison.
Base is garbage for situations where you have a lot of small ad-hoc datasets that are only needed for a week or two, and then hardly ever referenced again until the following year.
Nor can you easily hook a Base database to a pgsql server to a SQL server to another base database and move data around.
Fuck, the last time I bothered to look (around 3.0 or 3.1), you couldn't even export to/from CSV with Base. You had to go through the Calc tool and create a spreadsheet.
Base may be fine for sitting as a front-end to a static database which changes maybe once a season, but it's just garbage for day-to-day get-shit-done mode where your data might come in as a dozen different formats and needs to be exported to a bunch of others.
I've been waiting 5+ years to get off of Windows & MSAccess, but nobody in the open source world grasps what MSAccess is good at. They just poo-poo it as a toy.
VSS was at least usable if you stuck SourceOffSite in front of it. That kept 99% of the problems from happening.
We evaluated a bunch of solutions back in '05-'07 and finally switched everything to SVN in '07. TortoiseSVN was the key selling point. Our environment is one where the users are not overly geeky or technical and a central repository suits our needs far better. We're not an open-source shop and all code is proprietary.
I've looked at git a few times, it just doesn't meet our needs.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it had zilch to do with magnetic tapes. Back in the 70s/80s state-of-the-art was to design your IC circuits on a drafting table by hand using opaque tape (opaque to the light frequency that you were using during the manufacturing step). You would then coat your silicon in a special film, and shoot light through your design, through a reducer lens and onto the silicon. Follow up with an acid bath to wash away anything that wasn't shadowed and you had your circuit.
There was also "tape" used to create one-off circuit boards for the hobbyist / HAM radio crowd. You'd start with a copper covered circuit board (either one-sided, or two-sided). Tape out (or ink out) your design on the board, then dunk it in a bath to wash away the excess copper. After which you would have a circuit board with useful copper traces, ready for drilling and mounting of components. Radio Shack used to sell kits to do this stuff.
Java's single inheritance still sucks, but it does keep you from doing stupid things.
At least now, with aspects, you can do things like have a class implement an interface while also supplying a default implementation of that interface.
Well, in Java, it's now as easy as writing your logging stuff in AspectJ and having that advise the method. Any cross-cutting stuff (logging, exceptions, security) gets moved out to a common aspect which is then applied to all methods that either implement an interface, are annotated, or match a calling pattern or name.
If you're dirtying up your Java business object classes with security / logging / exception handling, you're still doing it the hard way.
Yeah, supposedly there's an optimization patch coming in January. I'm hopeful, because right now I'm CPU-bound (hit Alt-F in game and see the "[CPU]" tag in light blue). That's with a brand new GeForce 660 Ti card installed - which is no slouch.
Open world I can get a good 50-60 FPS. Most fights I'm in the 30-35 range. But in a big fray, I'm down to 17-20 which is laggy and annoying to play.
At about 100 hours played so far, the 6-month subscription was money well spent. I've spent that much on AAA titles which only offered 20-30 hours of content.
And once you learn to read the map and make educated guesses about who is going where and when, there's not a whole lot of downtime.
PS2 is rumored to be offering account wide unlocks. So if you buy a particular carbine, it would be available to all classes that can use that particular carbine. I haven't seen exact details yet.
And if you play between Dec 21 and Jan 2, SOE is doing another 2x XP period in Planetside 2. So if you're at all on the fence about playing, the next week is a very good time to dip your toes in and get some double-XP time.
RAID is generally still a very bad idea with SSDs. The RAID controllers and software don't know how to communicate properly with the SSD.
Best bet with SSDs is to buy one, then buy a 2nd large hard drive along with setting up automatic weekly/monthly backups using some sort of disk imaging software (Acronis, etc). That way if the SSD does die, you can just restore from last week's or last month's backup.
Restoring from an Acronis backup usually takes 30-40 minutes, even over slow USB 2.0 speeds (20MB/s).
I agree with most of those points (97 hours played).
Lone-wolf types need not apply unless you can fly a ESF (empire-specific fighter). Get into a squad, even a pickup-group, and follow them around. Start looking at everyone's outfit (guild / clan / corp) tags in square brackets. Pay attention to who seems to be team-oriented and which groups only zerg. Then find their recruiting posts on the forums and join up.
If you're in a half-decent outfit, that uses voice comms, approaches the map at a strategic level, and has players that stick together and provide support, you're going to have a lot of fun. Smaller outfits can go after the perimeter bases and provide a distraction while the enemy zerg is attacking some major facility instead. Teamwork, even at the 6-person (1/2 of a squad) level makes a big difference. A full squad (12 players) can do a lot of damage.
If you're camped in a spawn room, stop being a lemming. Open up your map and hit the "redeploy" button and spawn to a mobile spawn point (sunderer or "sundy") or another friendly base nearby. If a whole squad does that and moves in together from the flank, your odds of making a difference go way up.
There are still teething problems. Some of the XP rewards need to be tuned to reward team-based play more. The render distance and automatic culling are problems, as is the poor performance where the game is CPU-bound instead of being GPU-bound.
It takes 250 XP per cert, on an average night as an engineer, I can make about 5k XP/hr or about 20 certs/hr. Not bad, not great and about average. If you suck, you're only getting 2-3k XP/hr. If you're farming, then you can get closer to 10-15k XP/hr.
So, on average, expect to take about a week per 1000 cert weapon that you want to unlock. Or grit your teeth and find a grinding spot like Indar's Crown and be a medic or engineer to make more like 10-15k XP/hr.
Any RAID without a hot-spare drive already hooked up is a disaster waiting to happen.
Either a 2nd drive will die before you get a chance to swap out the bad one or you'll be an idiot and pull the wrong drive.
If all you have is (4) bays, you should mirror across the first (3) and use the 4th as your hot-spare.
Mostly, not having to worry about whether the HVM extensions are turned on in a particular motherboard / CPU combination. Because *all* of the AMDs (from the lowly Athlon64 X2 chips and up) have it turned on.
And 45W parts at the desktop are *very* nice in terms of noise. Even with the stock CPU fan, it makes for a very quiet desktop.
I swear anyone who thinks 7 is fast has never used it alongside a solid XP install.
I'll take that bet. Multiple instances of EVE Online running in XP and you were lucky to get 30-40 FPS on the primary window, with the background windows chugging along at 10-20.
Same hardware, Win7 64bit, now you're getting 60fps solid on the primary window and 30-45 on the secondary windows.
Also running Win7 on my 2007 era Thinkpad T61p. Runs nicer the WinXP did and I do a lot more with it.
(Win7 is pretty darned good. But I still might move to Ubuntu on the next laptop and run Win7 in a VM.)
A good estimate for reasonable passwords which can be remembered and aren't complete gibberish is only around 4.5-5.5 bits per character.
At 4.5 bits/char and 14 chars, that gives you: 9.22E+18
At 5.5 bits/char and 14 chars, that gives you: 1.51E+23
If you limit yourself even further to just english words and no strangeness in the capitalization, you're down in the 3.0-3.5 bits per character range.
Just like the world is full of "developers" who write everything to c:\temp, the world is full of Unix hacks who chmod 777 everything "because then it works".
Or the Linux hacks who disable SELinux because they can't figure out how to create exceptions or fix the file system labeling problems.
It's strange, I must be in some kind of culture jam, but my family, and everyone I know (IRL) steers clear of whitebread. We all eat 9 or 7 grain bread (the wholegrain stuff). I don't really know why. I grew up with it, and can't even stand the taste of whitebread. It's like there's nothing in it.
It's been part of a culture shift in the US away from plain white bread over the past 10-20 years. Many people associate PWB with trailer-trash living and prefer to appear more upscale by buying the multi-grains, wholegrain, etc. Plus the health movement that says bleached white flour isn't the best and that you should go with unbleached flour.
(This was actually in the news recently, but I can't remember if it was the Economist, Time Magazine, or some other online news source. They were discussing how PWB no longer has a majority share of the market.
I much prefer the taste of a *good* whole wheat loaf over PWB. If it has texture and isn't a homogenous mass, then it's one of the better ones. The multi-grains tend to be too sweet for my tastes.)
Interestingly, in the US, "plain white bread" is no longer the favorite and hasn't been for a while. The population seems to now associate it with trailer-trash people and it's not considered cool to eat plain white bread. So more complex breads like whole wheat / multi-grains / oat / and other breads are far more commonly sold.
(Personally, I can't stand plain white bread. It has no taste or texture. I prefer a proper whole wheat.)
How much faster is a single processor core then what we had back in '06? Some, but nowhere close to an order of magnitude (2x, maybe). For a lot of people, once processors went dual-core and dropped below $100, we hit the point where they will suffice for most people for a very long time. With the 2nd core, now your system felt more responsive because even if something maxed out the 1st core, there was a 2nd one to handle user input. Add the new low-priced SSDs into the mix and you've removed another bottleneck for a lot of users. And that SSD will breathe new life into what was probably perceived as a sluggish machine.
My everyday work laptop is a 2007-era Thinkpad T61p with a dual-core 2.2GHz Core2 Duo inside. Now running with a 300GB Intel SSD, 8GB RAM and Win7 Pro 64bit. It's a little bit sluggish compared to the hex-core / 16GB desktop which is far more recent, but the SSD makes up for that. If I need lots of CPU power for video transcoding, I use the desktop. During a normal day, I have 3-4 firefox windows each with half a dozen tabs, plus 3 other browsers open, the mail client, instant message client, SSH client, the IDE, plus a few documents / spreadsheets.
Do I want a new laptop? Eh, want yes, need no. I might upgrade in 2013, but will probably wait until 2014. A critical hardware failure would change my mind, but not much else.
Win7 does almost everything right for a business desktop. It's got a few quirks, but nothing that will stop an uneducated user from finding their programs and getting work done. Plus it's more up to date then the aging XP, handles SSDs better, is a fair bit more secure then XP was, handles 64bit memory spaces without hacks.
And I'm starting to really like some of the Aero features like window preview and the iconified task bar.
Fortunately, if you go the business route you can still buy Win7.
We're just getting around to installing Win7, which is a pretty good upgrade from WinXP. Definitely skipping Win8 and probably Win9. Don't plan on refreshing the hardware for another 3-5 years.
Dovecot works fine with pgsql as well.
At this point, you can change that to "If you have to ask, use ext4". It's been around long enough at this point that it's ready for production use (and has been for a year or two). Especially if you have situations of multi-gigabyte files that take a long time to delete under ext3, or you want the faster fsck of ext4.
I plan on waiting until at least late next year before I'd test btrfs for production. Let others be the pioneers in that, because ext4 handles our workload just fine.
Ext4 is also a lot better then ext3 was for very large files, and has the larger market share / acceptance / eyeballs. So not sure I'd bother to use XFS just for large file support.
In ext3, when you would delete a multi-gigabyte file, it would take up to a few minutes for it to happen. In ext4, that process is measured in fractions of a comparison.
Base is garbage for situations where you have a lot of small ad-hoc datasets that are only needed for a week or two, and then hardly ever referenced again until the following year.
Nor can you easily hook a Base database to a pgsql server to a SQL server to another base database and move data around.
Fuck, the last time I bothered to look (around 3.0 or 3.1), you couldn't even export to/from CSV with Base. You had to go through the Calc tool and create a spreadsheet.
Base may be fine for sitting as a front-end to a static database which changes maybe once a season, but it's just garbage for day-to-day get-shit-done mode where your data might come in as a dozen different formats and needs to be exported to a bunch of others.
I've been waiting 5+ years to get off of Windows & MSAccess, but nobody in the open source world grasps what MSAccess is good at. They just poo-poo it as a toy.
VSS was at least usable if you stuck SourceOffSite in front of it. That kept 99% of the problems from happening.
We evaluated a bunch of solutions back in '05-'07 and finally switched everything to SVN in '07. TortoiseSVN was the key selling point. Our environment is one where the users are not overly geeky or technical and a central repository suits our needs far better. We're not an open-source shop and all code is proprietary.
I've looked at git a few times, it just doesn't meet our needs.
Lies, nobody plays EVE Online in a casual fashion.
(Spoken as a multi-account addict...)