I use both Subversion and Perforce. There's one major feature still lacking from Subversion: merge tracking. There's work underway [tigris.org] to design, implement, and document this feature, but it's not done yet. This is a huge deal for anyone with lots of branches.
Aye, the SVN team is definitely not sitting on their laurels (yet) after finally hitting the 1.0 release a while back. They made significant improvements in 1.4 and have more up their sleeves for the upcoming 1.5 release. With even more things planned for down the road.
(We made the switch to SVN over the summer, but we're just a tiny little shop with average needs.)
Heh! Not really. This last election was all about fear mongering. The dems gained seats in the legislature entirely by talking about how people should be afraid of the other party being in control.
Eh? What are you drinking? Around these parts folks were simply fed up with *whoever* the incumbent was and voted accordingly. Or the folks who believe that a divided, get-nothing-done gov't is probably the best out of all bad choices.
If I recall correctly, I think Reader's Digest (or maybe another magazine?) had a review or excerpts of that book around the time it was published. I still remember the strange pictures of what the researchers thought items from the bathroom were intended for.
's better to look at the 5 day chart where you can see that it was trading at 2.40 (pretty steady) for the past week (and most of the past few months).
1.18 as of 12:42pm and the drop seems to be slowing down slightly.
Hardware-wise, dual-core is pretty compelling. We're replacing everything 1GHz and lower (some of which are 1999-era machines still running Win98) with dual-core. The newer stuff from 2002 onward won't get upgraded until after 2007 (maybe 2008). So it depends on when you bought all those P4s...
2003 onward? They're probably good for a 6 year lifespan as long as you beef the memory up.
2002? Those are due for a replacement (my laptop is early-2002 and is starting to feel creaky). You might get another 12-18 months out of them (5-6 years total).
2001 or earlier? Definitely past their prime and worth upgrading.
The big reason we're going dual-core for everything is that for a mere 15% more in costs (if that) the machine lifespan goes from ~5 years up to 8-10 years. Well worth it in our book. It's definitely overkill today for most of our users, but a dual-core machine will age better (remain responsive) then a single-core unit did.
Card readers are one thing, but to have card writers at every branch would probably get a little expensive.
Expensive? When was the last time that you stayed in a hotel with electronic door locks using magnetic cards? Most of them have card writers at the front desk where they pull a "blank" card from a pile, run it through the machine...
Well... hmm... I'm making an assumption here that they *are* writing to the card instead of just pulling a pre-written number off the card to tell the electronic lock system what number to respond to.
OTOH, plugging "magnetic card writer" into Google shows listings that are in the $180 range. Looking at eBay shows listings around $100-$120. And these are pretty small units.
Ack! Switches cost, what, a whole extra fifty cents per port, as compared to hubs? WHY would anybody with anything significant to protect be running an unswitched network? Bad network engineer, no cookie.
The switches, they do *nothing*! (See the various attack methods for turning a switch into a hub on the fly, then sniffing all traffic.)
The better question is why the company is sending passwords in the clear in the first place? Just about every protocol under the sun can be encrypted now. And in an all Windows shop, you can tell the servers to only use IPSec for talking to the WinNT / Win2k / WinXP clients.
Looking at the 2-year graph, the stock was around $4.00 to $4.50 for a *long* time. Then back in July 2006, it suddenly took a dive to $3.00 with a long, slow slide to $2.00.
What was the big event back in July 2006 that pushed the stock down so fast?
It's been holding around $2.50 the past few months, but is currently down to $2.00.
Start cramming multiple virtual servers onto a single box and all of a sudden dual-core solutions start to seem limiting. And you find yourself wondering just how much a 4-way quad-core machine would cost...
(That 4-CPU quad-core machine is still going to be cheaper then maintaining 4 separate quad-core servers.)
So... L2 cache speed. When I look at Memtest86+ numbers, I see:
~19700 MB/s for L1
~4700 MB/s for L2
~3000 MB/s for main memory
This is on a Athlon64 X2 4600+ w/ low-speed DDR2 RAM (4 sticks of 1GB).
I'm guessing that L2 gains are because it can respond to a memory request faster (fewer clock cycles) then because of the bandwidth? Because the L2 bandwidth of 4.7GB/s doesn't seem to be that exciting anymore once main RAM can feed the CPU at 3GB/s.
No kidding! I mean, it's been nearly 2 years since storage capacities have doubled. What the hell is taking them so long?
Well, PR drive are finally starting to hit the market (Barracuda 7200.10 series, the 160GB 2.5" notebook drives, etc.). So hopefully we'll finally see something bigger then a 750GB 3.5" in the next year (and the 750GB is already a PR drive). I would assume that manufacturing / process difficulties caused delays although there were no press releases or news reports about it.
Still, PR is only going to get us a 2x-5x improvement over the old longitudinal recording. Maybe 10x if all the planets align properly. So a 1TB 3.5" drive is a strong possibility with a 2-3 TB drive probably being the upper limit for 3.5". Notebook drives will probably top out at 400GB or so.
If anything, cable at least gives you decent reception. For some reason, the FCC mandated that digital TV has to use less power than analog, which means that every car that drives past my house makes my signal all choppy and jittery. To the FCC and broadcasters, I say: AMP THAT BITCH, DAMMIT.
Are you sure that the TV station doing the OTA transmission is transmitting at full power? Because I know a few of the stations around Harrisburg PA started with low-power transmissions during their initial rollout.
Widescreen is nice if you have a lot of DVDs that are also widescreen. I have a 23" LCD hooked up as a 2nd display to a PC in my office and use it for watching movies. Zoom Player does a nice job of upconverting the DVD resolution (720x480) to the 1360x768 resolution of my 23". In fact it does such a nice job that I never use my upconverting (a.k.a. overpriced and underperforming) DVD player that is hooked to the HDMI input on the back of the 23" TV.
Was it needed? Well, it's nicer then the old 13" CRT TV that I had. And the prices had finally dropped enough last year that I didn't feel ripped off. But for the price I paid last year, this year I could've gotten a 32" LCD with a built-in OTA tuner.
I thought prices last year were "good enough". This year you can get 20-odd inch LCD HD units for ~$600, which is getting close to mainstream pricing. ($300-$400 and ~25" is probably the sweet spot) The 23-26" units are good for a small L/R with the 28-32" units better for slightly larger L/Rs.
Reckon I'll replace my 19" CRT TV in the L/R with a 32" LCD sometime next year. Prices should be reasonable enough by then, and more units are shipping with OTA tuners.
This is one of the reasons I switched back to the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite. It uses less memory when you run Mail and the Browser together than Firefox and Thunderbird.
I tried that... and got tired of a crash in one applet taking out the entire suite. Which left me trying to pickup the pieces and remember what all I was working on when the suite crashed.
(I used the suite up until about 2 months ago and finally switched back to standalone versions of Thunderbird and Firefox.)
This strikes me as so factually inaccurate I can't believe it. FF 2.0 may be more featureful, but it's far faster than FF 1.5 on every piece of hardware I've tried it on. And it has fewer memory leak issues.
Try this simple test... fire up FF 1.5 or FF 2.0 over a dial-up line. Open up a page in the background and watch the entire UI freeze while FF does the DNS lookup and opens the initial connection to the web server.
Which basically makes background loading of tabs near useless.
Especially when you're doing search engine stuff and opening interesting links in the background while you continue looking for more interesting links.
There's no reason that the UI should block while processing background tabs.
Great... now search engines all over the world will notice a sudden global interest in chicken porn. The media will pick up on this tidbit and announce that it's the end of civilization as we know it while some other loonies march in a "think of the chickies" protest.
Aye, community support is pretty sparse for Windows Mobile. Which is mainly the fault of MS segmenting it's own market (not all PocketPC versions were compatible with each other). Then there's the SmartPhone version of Windows Mobile, which very little from the PPC side will work with.
It's a real shame that Palm screwed the pooch back in the early 2000s.
I keep hoping that Linux-based phones will take back some ground, but none of them were good enough for me to upgrade to this year. So I went with a WM5/SmartPhone.
AgendaOne might meet your needs. The base functionality in Windows Mobile 5 leaves a lot to be desired. (Note: I'm using AgendaOne on the SmartPhone version of WM5.)
We're still a long way from offering HD-quality video downloads over the Internet. It would require huge increases in download speeds, maybe as high as 50 megabits per second at bare minimum (the number of broadband Internet home users with anything over 10 mbps download speeds is still very small even in Europe and Asia).
Bullpucky...
You only need 50mbit/s if you're using old fat MPEG2 compression (even then, broadcast HD is only 25mbit/s or less).
But if you use a more modern MPEG4 codec, you can easily get good quality in a 2mbit/s stream (maybe as low as 1.5mbit/s?) or a high quality stream at 3-4 mbit/s.
DVD streams look good at 0.40 to 0.75 mbit/s in MPEG4 and HD is roughly 5x larger in area.
With Software RAID you can drive that 33% chance down even farther... at the cost of less net capacity.
Create 3-disk RAID1 arrays where all 3 disks are active (writes go to all 3 disks at the same time). Then layer a RAID0 array across however many RAID1 sets that you created. You gain the guaranteed ability to survive a 2-disk failure without data loss.
Only for the truly paranoid... and those 3rd disks in each RAID1 set are probably better used to populate a backup array. But when you have a system that absolutely, positively, cannot go down for maintenance, maybe it's an option.
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I use both Subversion and Perforce. There's one major feature still lacking from Subversion: merge tracking. There's work underway [tigris.org] to design, implement, and document this feature, but it's not done yet. This is a huge deal for anyone with lots of branches.
Aye, the SVN team is definitely not sitting on their laurels (yet) after finally hitting the 1.0 release a while back. They made significant improvements in 1.4 and have more up their sleeves for the upcoming 1.5 release. With even more things planned for down the road.
(We made the switch to SVN over the summer, but we're just a tiny little shop with average needs.)
Heh! Not really. This last election was all about fear mongering. The dems gained seats in the legislature entirely by talking about how people should be afraid of the other party being in control.
Eh? What are you drinking? Around these parts folks were simply fed up with *whoever* the incumbent was and voted accordingly. Or the folks who believe that a divided, get-nothing-done gov't is probably the best out of all bad choices.
If I recall correctly, I think Reader's Digest (or maybe another magazine?) had a review or excerpts of that book around the time it was published. I still remember the strange pictures of what the researchers thought items from the bathroom were intended for.
Bitlocker might be a great solution to keep stolen laptops from causing so much damage.
Only if you buy the "right" version of Vista (i.e. "Ultimate"). Which comes with other things that business really aren't interested in.
's better to look at the 5 day chart where you can see that it was trading at 2.40 (pretty steady) for the past week (and most of the past few months).
1.18 as of 12:42pm and the drop seems to be slowing down slightly.
Hardware-wise, dual-core is pretty compelling. We're replacing everything 1GHz and lower (some of which are 1999-era machines still running Win98) with dual-core. The newer stuff from 2002 onward won't get upgraded until after 2007 (maybe 2008). So it depends on when you bought all those P4s...
2003 onward? They're probably good for a 6 year lifespan as long as you beef the memory up.
2002? Those are due for a replacement (my laptop is early-2002 and is starting to feel creaky). You might get another 12-18 months out of them (5-6 years total).
2001 or earlier? Definitely past their prime and worth upgrading.
The big reason we're going dual-core for everything is that for a mere 15% more in costs (if that) the machine lifespan goes from ~5 years up to 8-10 years. Well worth it in our book. It's definitely overkill today for most of our users, but a dual-core machine will age better (remain responsive) then a single-core unit did.
Card readers are one thing, but to have card writers at every branch would probably get a little expensive.
Expensive? When was the last time that you stayed in a hotel with electronic door locks using magnetic cards? Most of them have card writers at the front desk where they pull a "blank" card from a pile, run it through the machine...
Well... hmm... I'm making an assumption here that they *are* writing to the card instead of just pulling a pre-written number off the card to tell the electronic lock system what number to respond to.
OTOH, plugging "magnetic card writer" into Google shows listings that are in the $180 range. Looking at eBay shows listings around $100-$120. And these are pretty small units.
Ack! Switches cost, what, a whole extra fifty cents per port, as compared to hubs? WHY would anybody with anything significant to protect be running an unswitched network? Bad network engineer, no cookie.
The switches, they do *nothing*! (See the various attack methods for turning a switch into a hub on the fly, then sniffing all traffic.)
The better question is why the company is sending passwords in the clear in the first place? Just about every protocol under the sun can be encrypted now. And in an all Windows shop, you can tell the servers to only use IPSec for talking to the WinNT / Win2k / WinXP clients.
Looking at the 2-year graph, the stock was around $4.00 to $4.50 for a *long* time. Then back in July 2006, it suddenly took a dive to $3.00 with a long, slow slide to $2.00.
What was the big event back in July 2006 that pushed the stock down so fast?
It's been holding around $2.50 the past few months, but is currently down to $2.00.
You don't run Gentoo, do you?
The more up-to-date version would be:
You don't do virtualization, do you?
Start cramming multiple virtual servers onto a single box and all of a sudden dual-core solutions start to seem limiting. And you find yourself wondering just how much a 4-way quad-core machine would cost...
(That 4-CPU quad-core machine is still going to be cheaper then maintaining 4 separate quad-core servers.)
So... L2 cache speed. When I look at Memtest86+ numbers, I see:
~19700 MB/s for L1
~4700 MB/s for L2
~3000 MB/s for main memory
This is on a Athlon64 X2 4600+ w/ low-speed DDR2 RAM (4 sticks of 1GB).
I'm guessing that L2 gains are because it can respond to a memory request faster (fewer clock cycles) then because of the bandwidth? Because the L2 bandwidth of 4.7GB/s doesn't seem to be that exciting anymore once main RAM can feed the CPU at 3GB/s.
No kidding! I mean, it's been nearly 2 years since storage capacities have doubled. What the hell is taking them so long?
Well, PR drive are finally starting to hit the market (Barracuda 7200.10 series, the 160GB 2.5" notebook drives, etc.). So hopefully we'll finally see something bigger then a 750GB 3.5" in the next year (and the 750GB is already a PR drive). I would assume that manufacturing / process difficulties caused delays although there were no press releases or news reports about it.
Still, PR is only going to get us a 2x-5x improvement over the old longitudinal recording. Maybe 10x if all the planets align properly. So a 1TB 3.5" drive is a strong possibility with a 2-3 TB drive probably being the upper limit for 3.5". Notebook drives will probably top out at 400GB or so.
If anything, cable at least gives you decent reception. For some reason, the FCC mandated that digital TV has to use less power than analog, which means that every car that drives past my house makes my signal all choppy and jittery. To the FCC and broadcasters, I say: AMP THAT BITCH, DAMMIT.
Are you sure that the TV station doing the OTA transmission is transmitting at full power? Because I know a few of the stations around Harrisburg PA started with low-power transmissions during their initial rollout.
(Or maybe you live on the fringe...)
Widescreen is nice if you have a lot of DVDs that are also widescreen. I have a 23" LCD hooked up as a 2nd display to a PC in my office and use it for watching movies. Zoom Player does a nice job of upconverting the DVD resolution (720x480) to the 1360x768 resolution of my 23". In fact it does such a nice job that I never use my upconverting (a.k.a. overpriced and underperforming) DVD player that is hooked to the HDMI input on the back of the 23" TV.
Was it needed? Well, it's nicer then the old 13" CRT TV that I had. And the prices had finally dropped enough last year that I didn't feel ripped off. But for the price I paid last year, this year I could've gotten a 32" LCD with a built-in OTA tuner.
I thought prices last year were "good enough". This year you can get 20-odd inch LCD HD units for ~$600, which is getting close to mainstream pricing. ($300-$400 and ~25" is probably the sweet spot) The 23-26" units are good for a small L/R with the 28-32" units better for slightly larger L/Rs.
Reckon I'll replace my 19" CRT TV in the L/R with a 32" LCD sometime next year. Prices should be reasonable enough by then, and more units are shipping with OTA tuners.
Same question that I was going to ask. I saw the meme pop up over on "Two Lumps" (online comic) a few weeks back.
And she gave me the evil eye when I told her that if she actually shut up, watched and listened, she'd get the answer to her own questions.
Alternate Theory #2: Some people like to be the center of attention...
This is one of the reasons I switched back to the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite. It uses less memory when you run Mail and the Browser together than Firefox and Thunderbird.
I tried that... and got tired of a crash in one applet taking out the entire suite. Which left me trying to pickup the pieces and remember what all I was working on when the suite crashed.
(I used the suite up until about 2 months ago and finally switched back to standalone versions of Thunderbird and Firefox.)
This strikes me as so factually inaccurate I can't believe it. FF 2.0 may be more featureful, but it's far faster than FF 1.5 on every piece of hardware I've tried it on. And it has fewer memory leak issues.
Try this simple test... fire up FF 1.5 or FF 2.0 over a dial-up line. Open up a page in the background and watch the entire UI freeze while FF does the DNS lookup and opens the initial connection to the web server.
Which basically makes background loading of tabs near useless.
Especially when you're doing search engine stuff and opening interesting links in the background while you continue looking for more interesting links.
There's no reason that the UI should block while processing background tabs.
(claps) Time for the boffins to add a few more 9's on to that number.
Great... now search engines all over the world will notice a sudden global interest in chicken porn. The media will pick up on this tidbit and announce that it's the end of civilization as we know it while some other loonies march in a "think of the chickies" protest.
Aye, community support is pretty sparse for Windows Mobile. Which is mainly the fault of MS segmenting it's own market (not all PocketPC versions were compatible with each other). Then there's the SmartPhone version of Windows Mobile, which very little from the PPC side will work with.
It's a real shame that Palm screwed the pooch back in the early 2000s.
I keep hoping that Linux-based phones will take back some ground, but none of them were good enough for me to upgrade to this year. So I went with a WM5/SmartPhone.
AgendaOne might meet your needs. The base functionality in Windows Mobile 5 leaves a lot to be desired. (Note: I'm using AgendaOne on the SmartPhone version of WM5.)
We're still a long way from offering HD-quality video downloads over the Internet. It would require huge increases in download speeds, maybe as high as 50 megabits per second at bare minimum (the number of broadband Internet home users with anything over 10 mbps download speeds is still very small even in Europe and Asia).
Bullpucky...
You only need 50mbit/s if you're using old fat MPEG2 compression (even then, broadcast HD is only 25mbit/s or less).
But if you use a more modern MPEG4 codec, you can easily get good quality in a 2mbit/s stream (maybe as low as 1.5mbit/s?) or a high quality stream at 3-4 mbit/s.
DVD streams look good at 0.40 to 0.75 mbit/s in MPEG4 and HD is roughly 5x larger in area.
With Software RAID you can drive that 33% chance down even farther... at the cost of less net capacity.
Create 3-disk RAID1 arrays where all 3 disks are active (writes go to all 3 disks at the same time). Then layer a RAID0 array across however many RAID1 sets that you created. You gain the guaranteed ability to survive a 2-disk failure without data loss.
Only for the truly paranoid... and those 3rd disks in each RAID1 set are probably better used to populate a backup array. But when you have a system that absolutely, positively, cannot go down for maintenance, maybe it's an option.