Dual monitor is a possibility for the power users / content producers. Most of these users are still running that 17" in 1024x768 mode. So even a small push to a 19" 1280x1024 or 20" 1600x1200 is going to be a sizeable jump for them.
Five years ago, this company was still buying 14" and 15" displays and running them at 640x480 or 800x600. So one of the first things I did was a push towards 17" CRTs. The trick there was to show my co-hort the benefit of running at higher resolutions. Once he was hooked, it was an easy sell to start only buying 17" CRTs. I'm still working on selling the dual-display concept.
Most of the users are paper-pushers... document editing, proposals, spreadsheets, e-mail. The graphical artists, layout artists, and other content producers already have sizeable screens (19" CRTs or laptops with 1400x1050 displays or the 17" Powerbooks).
Heck, thinking back, five years ago a lot of the business was still run on paper...
Should a corporate PC now have a lifespan of 10 years rather than 3 years ?
Since performance no longer doubles every 12-15 months? Definitely.
Most PCs bought in the last 5 years can easily last 6-8 years if they are taken care of, are running Win2k or WinXP, and have plenty of RAM (1GB is a good target for an office machine). Two years ago, we went through the office and maxed out all of the RAM on any machine with 500MHz or faster CPUs. For $100/machine, we added 2-3 years of lifespan.
New machines are being purchased with a minimum of 1GB RAM and one of the slower CPUs (save $$$ on the CPU, spend it on the RAM). Now that dual-core chips are only ~$180 and getting cheaper, we'll probably start outfitting machines with dual-core chips and 2GB of RAM. I fully expect those systems to still be running in 2016. Maybe with a bump up to 3GB of RAM along the way, but mostly untouched.
The next big upgrade cycle for us is going to be upgrading from 17" CRTs to 19" LCDs. Just about everyone has 17" CRTs on their desks already, so new systems are coming in sans monitors because the old CRTs are still working fine.
Curious what bad luck you've had with firewire enclosures? Fried hard drives? Driver issues? Failing power supplies? Bad chipsets?
I despise most external Firewire/USB enclosures because I don't think they do a good job of cooling heavily used drives. We're trying the BYTECC ME-835U2F enclosures because they are both Firewire and USB and include a cooling fan inside for the drive. Plus their power supply is internal which means you can use standard PC cords instead of keeping track of power bricks.
Maybe I'm frugal, maybe I just don't see the need to always have "the latest and greatest" but I'll stick with my strategy of building a beast of a machine every few years, but not throwing much money at it after its built.
System improvements (clock speeds, FSB speeds) have pretty much stagnated over the past 3-4 years. Dual-core is pretty much the only major performance bump to arrive in the past few years. So you shouldn't be surprised that your 2GB of RAM, 1GHz machine still feels adequate for most tasks (except CPU-bottlenecked ones). For a general-purpose machine, that (due to the 2GB of RAM) that could probably be used until 2010-2012.
That extra RAM makes up for a lot of slower CPU speed. The fact that it's a dual-CPU system is just icing on the cake and another big reason why the system still feels responsive. Dual-CPU might even make it feel responsive enough for desktop use until 2015.
A moderately spec'd modern PC can easily last 6-8 years now. Probably 2-4 years longer if it's a dual-core or dual-CPU system. Our power users are getting 2GB dual-core and/or dual-CPU machines and we don't plan on handing them off to other users until 3 years in.
Personally, I don't care about processors costing USD 400 or gaming performance, where CPU doesn't matter too much anyway. Are there any comparisons of the cheapest Core 2 processors with similarly priced AMDs?
Since the cheapest AMD dual-core CPU is still close to $300... probably not?
But there are a lot of rumors about AMD slashing prices on the Athlon64 lines (but not Sempron or Opteron) within the next few weeks. So I'm waiting to see what happens at the end of July once the new AMD pricing hits the streets.
I'd rather see how-to articles like this then some of the other pie-in-the-sky, never happen, still waiting for terabyte optical drive articles.
An post like this is valuable because I learned (through the comments) that there are 2 add-ins for Eclipse that support Subversion. Which is more information then I had yesterday. And I get a few opinions mixed in as to which of the 2 add-ins works better. I wish we'd see more discussions of what tools and techniques are in use.
(It just so happens that we're getting ready to start using Eclipse and Subversion. So the article is especially timely.)
Have you mucked with the following setting in about:config?
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
When set to "-1", Firefox assigns it a value based on your total amount of RAM. Setting it to a lower value such as 2 or 4 should result in less memory used. Especially if you are a window and tab fiend (I typically have multiple windows each with a dozen tabs open). The Mozilla site has details on how this setting works.
(Firefox's algorithm for determining max_total_viewers seems to be a bit aggressive for larger amounts of system RAM. One could argue that it makes the erroneous assumption that total RAM equates to useable RAM. Just because I have 1GB of system RAM doesn't mean that I want Firefox to use 1/3 of that.)
I think it'd be best if Vista had a "windows update on steroids", so that not only could you get hotfixes or service packs but you could also electronically purchase and install an upgrade to the next version of Windows whenever you wanted. I don't think this will happen though because MS wants to have ultimate control over the "user experience". MS will move to a subscription service I suspect, but it'll involve MS making all the decisions about what is and isn't installed/upgraded/activated on your computer. Content with MS Office 15? Tough luck--Office 16 is out and you're getting it--and if you cancel your subscription your copy of Office 15 will be deactivated.
You mean a subscription service like Software Assurance?
Somehow I don't think corporations are going to fall for that line of thinking again. Well, okay, the subscription service that you describe isn't exactly like SA, but unless they charge somewhere below $100/seat per year not many corps are going to take them up on it. How many home users want to pay an annual cost to keep using their machine's software? Heck, most won't even re-up for anti-virus subscriptions (not as must-have as keeping the office suite working but could be seen as typical resistance towards subscription-based services).
It wouldn't surprise me if accounting rules are more favorable towards one time purchases instead of ongoing subscription costs. Which would make corporations favor up-front costing rather then subscriptions.
Subscriptions also incur a negative feeling because you have to keep paying and paying and paying. Rather then paying once and then not having to worry about shelling out any more funds until you choose to upgrade.
Tell that to the people who bought SA licenses between 2001 and 2003. The paid more so that they could a discount on the next release within 3 years. With 3 years being up, MS does not have to honor those SA agreements.
Yeah, we avoided the SA license trap back in 2001-2002. After WinXP came out (somewhat hot on the heels of Win2000), there was a big push by companies like CDW to get us to take up SA licensing.
I suspect that lack of ROI (paying something for nothing) is going to haunt Microsoft to some extent. Possibly driving a few more companies to investigate Open Source solutions where licensing costs are zero and you only pay if you want support.
XP does a lot better on a laptop then Win2000 did (I ran both over the past few years), especially with regards to WiFi networks. From what I remember, Win2000 required custom-written apps by the various WiFi card vendors while WinXP was able to handle it in-house. (Which is a lower training burden... once you learned the WinXP way, it didn't matter what WiFi card was under the hood.)
But it's been four years since I've used Win2000 on a desktop/laptop so I may be misremembering.
(And I mostly like my WinXP laptop. I'm even pushing some system upgrades through this year to replace the remaining older desktops with WinXP so that we can avoid WinVista for a few years. Hopefully any laptops that we buy in 2007 will still be available in a WinXP configuration. Otherwise we may start to push more towards OS X. With the new Intel macs, it's up to the user whether they get a Lenovo T60, Toshiba Tecra M5, or a MacBook.)
The reason I switched to Firefox wasn't because of the neat features, it was because it used less memory and was significantly faster than IE. With every release Firefox has gotten more and more bloated, to the point that it is taking 42mb of RAM to display only this thread on Slashdot. IE is taking 22mb to do the exact same thing. That's just rediculous.
Have you mucked with?
config.trim_on_minimize = true
(Useful in some scenarios when nothing else works.)
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
(A better thing to muck with. When set to "-1", Firefox assigns it a value based on your total amount of RAM, I think. Setting it to a lower value such as 2 or 4 should result in less memory used. The Mozilla site has details on how this setting works.)
Changing the second item from the default (-1) to a lower value (2) made a big difference in the amount of RAM that Firefox was chewing up on my system.
My biggest beef with Firefox is that it still crashes frequently and has massive memory leaks that require me to quit and restart the browser on a daily basis. It doesn't take much to get Firefox to grow to 1GB in memory footprint and start causing my system to thrash. A fundamental flaw is that it does not release memory back to the OS, so when you close tabs and windows, the process doesn't shrink. While this isn't directly Firefox's fault, there are lots of ways around this that they refuse to implement. On the other hand, the true memory leaks ARE their fault.
1) config.trim_on_minimize = true
2) Install the leak monitor extension for a day and disable any extensions that it complains about. (Bugging the authors of those extensions is optional.)
3) browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers - Set this to something other then -1 (such as 2 or 4). With 1GB of RAM, this defaults to a larger value. (Mozilla's wiki has the details on what "-1" translates to for various RAM configurations.)
Firefox had a bad habit of eating up 350MB on my 1GB system. Now it's much better behaved (around 120MB) just by changing option #3 to a value of "2" instead of "-1". I've also disabled some of the extensions that the leak monitor extension complained about.
I haven't used suggestion #1 yet.
My biggest complaint is similar to yours, separate tabs should be separate threads rather then hanging all of the browser windows and tabs waiting on network activity. An implosion in one tab should only take out that tab (or worst-case that window).
There's been over 100 successful shuttle missions. Every single one of these is astonishing to me, even though I may agree with plenty of the criticisms of the programme. There's a visceral joy in seeing these things do their stuff -- ageing, expensive and cumbersome though they may be.
The coolest thing I saw during the launch was watching the flight control surfaces and the orbiter's main nozzles moving around in the final few seconds before launch. Very strange to see nozzles that large moving around that quickly.
My only wish was that the streaming video could've been of a higher quality then 150kbs... that worked fine as long as things were stationary, but wasn't enough bandwidth to deal with the more dynamic scenes.
Yeah, that "duh" tag really grates on me; it seems like half the articles here get tagged with it, often in situations just as dubious as this one. It's interesting the way the tagging system causes people to rally around certain words, though; I wouldn't have predicted, before it was implemented, that "duh" in particular would grow to be a particular annoyance for me, but it's become entrenched now.
Assuming that you have tagging rights... strike back with "!duh" and "!stupid". Don't forget to include your own positive tags to reinforce tags that you agree with.
I'm not entirely sure where tagging is going... but I'm trying to tag more often, including reinforcing tags that I agree with.
Is there really a performance benefit for going from 1GB to 2GB for average user?
It all depends... (but you're right about the 512MB to 1GB jump, that's an important one).
Games like Civ4 use up 1-1.5GB of RAM for the larger scenarios. WinXP systems (not just the O/S) tend to have around 300-400MB in use once everything in the system tray starts up. So it doesn't take long to start climbing past the 1GB mark (5+ applications open with lots of windows... all those windows add up). The extra disk cache from that RAM is nice if you're working with larger files (images / video).
Mostly, I suggest 2GB of RAM for systems that will be in use for 5+ years. Not an unrealistic expectation now that performance increases have slowed down. Applications will get fatter over time and/or the user will discover the joys of multitasking. Or the user will slowly add more and more applications to their system to get more use out of it.
Personally, I find 1GB to be a bit contraining. But I'm a heavy multi-tasker doing system administration and development work. At least 8 different applications open at the same time, multiple Firefox windows with a dozen tabs each, 8 SSH windows, etc. If I could pack 2GB into this 4-year old laptop, I would. Instead, I make use of a dual-CPU Opteron system sitting next to me with 3GB of RAM for some of my work.
Now that I found Firefox's browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers setting, I've been able to trim Firefox from a working set of 300MB down to a more svelt 120MB. So I've been feeling a bit less memory-constrained this past week.
I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be in Iraq right now if a few dozen grannies in Florida could have figured out how to work a butterfly ballot in 2000.
I dunno about that, but I agree with the rest of your sentiment.
Voting against the incumbent, even if the incumbent still wins re-election sends a message that there are voters out there who think the incumbent is not doing a good job. Even the most jaded politicians pay attention to their vote counts.
(I plan on a similar voting strategy in the fall. Either voting for Independent candidates or against the incumbents.)
The "N replies beneath your current threshold." can catch people's eyes if it's a largish number.
I typically browse in nested mode at whatever score level gives me a single page of comments (which is 100 comments for my settings). If I see a large block of replies such as "20 replies beneath..." I may open that link up in a new tab to see what was filtered out.
Sometimes there's gold there, sometimes fool's gold... and sometimes all you get is rocks.
We're going to have to rebuild some of the basic comms protocols of the Internet pretty soon anyway, to solve increasing problems of spam, DDoS, and others. Why not fix this one at the same time?
There's an old adage: encryption is the easy part... it's managing the keys that's really difficult.
In a small environment (such as a corporate LAN), key management is somewhat easy. Just setup a PKI or CA infrastructure where everyone ends up trusting some root servers. As long as the core servers are uncompromised, it's possible to exchange keys in a secure manner without falling victim to various attacks (man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping, etc.().
But on the wild internet, who do you trust? If you don't trust anyone, then there's no way to ensure that the key you get is the key for the machine that you're trying to talk to. (a.k.a. detecting a man-in-the-middle attack)
Unless, of course, you transmit the keys via a separate secure channel (which is why quantum encryption was getting all the attention). The hard part is setting up that separate secure channel or verifying the public key of a machine the first time.
I'm not just mentioning this as another thing to factor into the cost of retrofitting ships; there is also the consideration of the added draft the ship needs in port in order to avoid running aground.
I know that some Dutch sailing ships on the Ijsselmeer use leeboards where the foil is attached to the side of the hull. During tacking you have to lower the one just before raising the other out of the water. When working in shallow waters, you raise both up to reduce draft.
AMD's slashing prices 30-50% at the end of this month. The X2 3800+ will be in the vicinity of $170.
Good news, everyone!
Seriously, the price trend graph over at PriceScan shows just how flat pricing for the X2's has been. The average price as $375 last October and has only fallen to $325 recently. The low-price was $350 last October and is now only down to ~$300.
The Athlon64 X2 4200+ 939pin shows the same pattern. Fairly stale pricing for the past 6 months.
On the Intel side, the Intel Pentium D 930 3.0GHz price has been trending steadily downward for about 3 months.
I don't know who's out there snapping up the multi-GHz multi-core 64-bit CPUs, but I can't imagine what they're doing in today's software ecosystem (apart from the gamers and the physicists) that could require that sort of processing power.
Video editing is a typical task that requires lots of CPU power. As CPUs have gotten more powerful, we've been able to move from VHS quality footage (quarter D1) to DVD (full D1). That requires 4x the processing and with my 2-year old dual-Opteron system it takes me about 4-6 minutes per minute of footage to process. Which is better then the 10-15 minutes per minute of footage of my previous system, but still a hefty time commitment when you're looking at a DVD that holds 80 minutes of footage.
80 minutes x 5 min/min is still a long time...
I'm almost ready to upgrade to a dual-cpu dual-core Opteron system. It would cut my processing time in half. Making me about 50%-60% more productive. I'm just waiting on the dual-core prices to drop a bit more.
That's just one use case. For the more average user, maxing out the RAM on the computer can give the system another 3 year lease on life. Such as my 4-year old laptop with 1 GB of RAM. If I could put another gigabyte of RAM into this laptop, I'd be happy to keep it for another 4 years. But since it's maxed out, I have to upgrade to a new one.
And every 2 years isn't horrible, especially if you do computers for a living. Me, I'll be shooting for four years or so between upgrades, unless I get back into gaming...
Even for gaming a 2 year old machine can do fairly well at running the newer offerings. At least if you:
- Bought a semi-decent video card two years ago (something in the $150-$200 range) that was top-of-the-line three years ago.
- Put enough RAM into the system (at least 1GB, but 2GB would've been better)
CPU performance (other then dual-core) has not been improving by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Long gone are the days where performance increased twofold every 12-15 months. Now we're lucky if we see a doubling of performance every 30-40 months because we hit the "Hz" wall and had to go back to the drawing board.
Dual-core is changing the landscape. Getting a dual-core machine for a gaming system is not necessarily a bad choice. And you get some small performance benefit from having a 2nd core to handle misc duties. But for a budget gamer, the dual-core chips from AMD are still too pricey.
(I'm sticking with my 2.2GHz Opteron with 2GB of RAM and my GeForce 6800 card for at least another year. At least until the dual-core chips drop below $120 at the low-end.)
My rule (and I'm not a screenwriter): Important data should be stored on at least 4 spindles / tapes / discs in at least two geographically distant locations.
That means 2-3 external drives that get rotated and moved offsite to secure locations. Along with optical media archives (which is what optical media excels at) for long-term storage.
PGP/GPG + webmail makes for a handy ad-hoc backup system as well. Encrypt the document, mail it to your GMail account. Heck, mail it to any packrat friends.
Easy enough to put the O/S on top of RAID1 as well (assuming that we're talking Linux).
After working with Software RAID for a while, I definitely prefer it over more proprietary RAID solutions (dedicated RAID controllers). Software RAID is extremely flexible, easily recovered (move the disks to another box) and my RAID array doesn't depend on a single piece of hardware that may be difficult to replace if it fails. For smaller companies who can't afford to buy three of everything, that's a big advantage.
Mdadm also does a good job of letting you run without a config file. That means you can move a disk from a failed controller to a spare port on another controller and immediately get back up and running.
Like drinkypoo says, with higher resolution displays most users start running apps in windows rather then full-screen. On my 1400x1050 14" LCD, I run the browser at about 3/4 screen width (~1000 pixels wide). On the 19" 1600x1200, the browser is typically only 5/8 screen width (~900 pixels). On both screens that's about 8" of width which is what I find to be a comfortable size (with text that is 9-12 points in size).
Slashdot Mirror
Dual monitor is a possibility for the power users / content producers. Most of these users are still running that 17" in 1024x768 mode. So even a small push to a 19" 1280x1024 or 20" 1600x1200 is going to be a sizeable jump for them.
Five years ago, this company was still buying 14" and 15" displays and running them at 640x480 or 800x600. So one of the first things I did was a push towards 17" CRTs. The trick there was to show my co-hort the benefit of running at higher resolutions. Once he was hooked, it was an easy sell to start only buying 17" CRTs. I'm still working on selling the dual-display concept.
Most of the users are paper-pushers... document editing, proposals, spreadsheets, e-mail. The graphical artists, layout artists, and other content producers already have sizeable screens (19" CRTs or laptops with 1400x1050 displays or the 17" Powerbooks).
Heck, thinking back, five years ago a lot of the business was still run on paper...
Should a corporate PC now have a lifespan of 10 years rather than 3 years ?
Since performance no longer doubles every 12-15 months? Definitely.
Most PCs bought in the last 5 years can easily last 6-8 years if they are taken care of, are running Win2k or WinXP, and have plenty of RAM (1GB is a good target for an office machine). Two years ago, we went through the office and maxed out all of the RAM on any machine with 500MHz or faster CPUs. For $100/machine, we added 2-3 years of lifespan.
New machines are being purchased with a minimum of 1GB RAM and one of the slower CPUs (save $$$ on the CPU, spend it on the RAM). Now that dual-core chips are only ~$180 and getting cheaper, we'll probably start outfitting machines with dual-core chips and 2GB of RAM. I fully expect those systems to still be running in 2016. Maybe with a bump up to 3GB of RAM along the way, but mostly untouched.
The next big upgrade cycle for us is going to be upgrading from 17" CRTs to 19" LCDs. Just about everyone has 17" CRTs on their desks already, so new systems are coming in sans monitors because the old CRTs are still working fine.
Curious what bad luck you've had with firewire enclosures? Fried hard drives? Driver issues? Failing power supplies? Bad chipsets?
I despise most external Firewire/USB enclosures because I don't think they do a good job of cooling heavily used drives. We're trying the BYTECC ME-835U2F enclosures because they are both Firewire and USB and include a cooling fan inside for the drive. Plus their power supply is internal which means you can use standard PC cords instead of keeping track of power bricks.
Ask me in a few months whether they hold up...
Maybe I'm frugal, maybe I just don't see the need to always have "the latest and greatest" but I'll stick with my strategy of building a beast of a machine every few years, but not throwing much money at it after its built.
System improvements (clock speeds, FSB speeds) have pretty much stagnated over the past 3-4 years. Dual-core is pretty much the only major performance bump to arrive in the past few years. So you shouldn't be surprised that your 2GB of RAM, 1GHz machine still feels adequate for most tasks (except CPU-bottlenecked ones). For a general-purpose machine, that (due to the 2GB of RAM) that could probably be used until 2010-2012.
That extra RAM makes up for a lot of slower CPU speed. The fact that it's a dual-CPU system is just icing on the cake and another big reason why the system still feels responsive. Dual-CPU might even make it feel responsive enough for desktop use until 2015.
A moderately spec'd modern PC can easily last 6-8 years now. Probably 2-4 years longer if it's a dual-core or dual-CPU system. Our power users are getting 2GB dual-core and/or dual-CPU machines and we don't plan on handing them off to other users until 3 years in.
Personally, I don't care about processors costing USD 400 or gaming performance, where CPU doesn't matter too much anyway. Are there any comparisons of the cheapest Core 2 processors with similarly priced AMDs?
Since the cheapest AMD dual-core CPU is still close to $300... probably not?
But there are a lot of rumors about AMD slashing prices on the Athlon64 lines (but not Sempron or Opteron) within the next few weeks. So I'm waiting to see what happens at the end of July once the new AMD pricing hits the streets.
I'd rather see how-to articles like this then some of the other pie-in-the-sky, never happen, still waiting for terabyte optical drive articles.
An post like this is valuable because I learned (through the comments) that there are 2 add-ins for Eclipse that support Subversion. Which is more information then I had yesterday. And I get a few opinions mixed in as to which of the 2 add-ins works better. I wish we'd see more discussions of what tools and techniques are in use.
(It just so happens that we're getting ready to start using Eclipse and Subversion. So the article is especially timely.)
Have you mucked with the following setting in about:config?
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
When set to "-1", Firefox assigns it a value based on your total amount of RAM. Setting it to a lower value such as 2 or 4 should result in less memory used. Especially if you are a window and tab fiend (I typically have multiple windows each with a dozen tabs open). The Mozilla site has details on how this setting works.
(Firefox's algorithm for determining max_total_viewers seems to be a bit aggressive for larger amounts of system RAM. One could argue that it makes the erroneous assumption that total RAM equates to useable RAM. Just because I have 1GB of system RAM doesn't mean that I want Firefox to use 1/3 of that.)
I think it'd be best if Vista had a "windows update on steroids", so that not only could you get hotfixes or service packs but you could also electronically purchase and install an upgrade to the next version of Windows whenever you wanted. I don't think this will happen though because MS wants to have ultimate control over the "user experience". MS will move to a subscription service I suspect, but it'll involve MS making all the decisions about what is and isn't installed/upgraded/activated on your computer. Content with MS Office 15? Tough luck--Office 16 is out and you're getting it--and if you cancel your subscription your copy of Office 15 will be deactivated.
You mean a subscription service like Software Assurance?
Somehow I don't think corporations are going to fall for that line of thinking again. Well, okay, the subscription service that you describe isn't exactly like SA, but unless they charge somewhere below $100/seat per year not many corps are going to take them up on it. How many home users want to pay an annual cost to keep using their machine's software? Heck, most won't even re-up for anti-virus subscriptions (not as must-have as keeping the office suite working but could be seen as typical resistance towards subscription-based services).
It wouldn't surprise me if accounting rules are more favorable towards one time purchases instead of ongoing subscription costs. Which would make corporations favor up-front costing rather then subscriptions.
Subscriptions also incur a negative feeling because you have to keep paying and paying and paying. Rather then paying once and then not having to worry about shelling out any more funds until you choose to upgrade.
Tell that to the people who bought SA licenses between 2001 and 2003. The paid more so that they could a discount on the next release within 3 years. With 3 years being up, MS does not have to honor those SA agreements.
Yeah, we avoided the SA license trap back in 2001-2002. After WinXP came out (somewhat hot on the heels of Win2000), there was a big push by companies like CDW to get us to take up SA licensing.
I suspect that lack of ROI (paying something for nothing) is going to haunt Microsoft to some extent. Possibly driving a few more companies to investigate Open Source solutions where licensing costs are zero and you only pay if you want support.
XP does a lot better on a laptop then Win2000 did (I ran both over the past few years), especially with regards to WiFi networks. From what I remember, Win2000 required custom-written apps by the various WiFi card vendors while WinXP was able to handle it in-house. (Which is a lower training burden... once you learned the WinXP way, it didn't matter what WiFi card was under the hood.)
But it's been four years since I've used Win2000 on a desktop/laptop so I may be misremembering.
(And I mostly like my WinXP laptop. I'm even pushing some system upgrades through this year to replace the remaining older desktops with WinXP so that we can avoid WinVista for a few years. Hopefully any laptops that we buy in 2007 will still be available in a WinXP configuration. Otherwise we may start to push more towards OS X. With the new Intel macs, it's up to the user whether they get a Lenovo T60, Toshiba Tecra M5, or a MacBook.)
The reason I switched to Firefox wasn't because of the neat features, it was because it used less memory and was significantly faster than IE. With every release Firefox has gotten more and more bloated, to the point that it is taking 42mb of RAM to display only this thread on Slashdot. IE is taking 22mb to do the exact same thing. That's just rediculous.
Have you mucked with?
config.trim_on_minimize = true
(Useful in some scenarios when nothing else works.)
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
(A better thing to muck with. When set to "-1", Firefox assigns it a value based on your total amount of RAM, I think. Setting it to a lower value such as 2 or 4 should result in less memory used. The Mozilla site has details on how this setting works.)
Changing the second item from the default (-1) to a lower value (2) made a big difference in the amount of RAM that Firefox was chewing up on my system.
My biggest beef with Firefox is that it still crashes frequently and has massive memory leaks that require me to quit and restart the browser on a daily basis. It doesn't take much to get Firefox to grow to 1GB in memory footprint and start causing my system to thrash. A fundamental flaw is that it does not release memory back to the OS, so when you close tabs and windows, the process doesn't shrink. While this isn't directly Firefox's fault, there are lots of ways around this that they refuse to implement. On the other hand, the true memory leaks ARE their fault.
1) config.trim_on_minimize = true
2) Install the leak monitor extension for a day and disable any extensions that it complains about. (Bugging the authors of those extensions is optional.)
3) browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers - Set this to something other then -1 (such as 2 or 4). With 1GB of RAM, this defaults to a larger value. (Mozilla's wiki has the details on what "-1" translates to for various RAM configurations.)
Firefox had a bad habit of eating up 350MB on my 1GB system. Now it's much better behaved (around 120MB) just by changing option #3 to a value of "2" instead of "-1". I've also disabled some of the extensions that the leak monitor extension complained about.
I haven't used suggestion #1 yet.
My biggest complaint is similar to yours, separate tabs should be separate threads rather then hanging all of the browser windows and tabs waiting on network activity. An implosion in one tab should only take out that tab (or worst-case that window).
There's been over 100 successful shuttle missions. Every single one of these is astonishing to me, even though I may agree with plenty of the criticisms of the programme. There's a visceral joy in seeing these things do their stuff -- ageing, expensive and cumbersome though they may be.
The coolest thing I saw during the launch was watching the flight control surfaces and the orbiter's main nozzles moving around in the final few seconds before launch. Very strange to see nozzles that large moving around that quickly.
My only wish was that the streaming video could've been of a higher quality then 150kbs... that worked fine as long as things were stationary, but wasn't enough bandwidth to deal with the more dynamic scenes.
Yeah, that "duh" tag really grates on me; it seems like half the articles here get tagged with it, often in situations just as dubious as this one. It's interesting the way the tagging system causes people to rally around certain words, though; I wouldn't have predicted, before it was implemented, that "duh" in particular would grow to be a particular annoyance for me, but it's become entrenched now.
Assuming that you have tagging rights... strike back with "!duh" and "!stupid". Don't forget to include your own positive tags to reinforce tags that you agree with.
I'm not entirely sure where tagging is going... but I'm trying to tag more often, including reinforcing tags that I agree with.
Is there really a performance benefit for going from 1GB to 2GB for average user?
It all depends... (but you're right about the 512MB to 1GB jump, that's an important one).
Games like Civ4 use up 1-1.5GB of RAM for the larger scenarios. WinXP systems (not just the O/S) tend to have around 300-400MB in use once everything in the system tray starts up. So it doesn't take long to start climbing past the 1GB mark (5+ applications open with lots of windows... all those windows add up). The extra disk cache from that RAM is nice if you're working with larger files (images / video).
Mostly, I suggest 2GB of RAM for systems that will be in use for 5+ years. Not an unrealistic expectation now that performance increases have slowed down. Applications will get fatter over time and/or the user will discover the joys of multitasking. Or the user will slowly add more and more applications to their system to get more use out of it.
Personally, I find 1GB to be a bit contraining. But I'm a heavy multi-tasker doing system administration and development work. At least 8 different applications open at the same time, multiple Firefox windows with a dozen tabs each, 8 SSH windows, etc. If I could pack 2GB into this 4-year old laptop, I would. Instead, I make use of a dual-CPU Opteron system sitting next to me with 3GB of RAM for some of my work.
Now that I found Firefox's browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers setting, I've been able to trim Firefox from a working set of 300MB down to a more svelt 120MB. So I've been feeling a bit less memory-constrained this past week.
I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be in Iraq right now if a few dozen grannies in Florida could have figured out how to work a butterfly ballot in 2000.
I dunno about that, but I agree with the rest of your sentiment.
Voting against the incumbent, even if the incumbent still wins re-election sends a message that there are voters out there who think the incumbent is not doing a good job. Even the most jaded politicians pay attention to their vote counts.
(I plan on a similar voting strategy in the fall. Either voting for Independent candidates or against the incumbents.)
The "N replies beneath your current threshold." can catch people's eyes if it's a largish number.
I typically browse in nested mode at whatever score level gives me a single page of comments (which is 100 comments for my settings). If I see a large block of replies such as "20 replies beneath..." I may open that link up in a new tab to see what was filtered out.
Sometimes there's gold there, sometimes fool's gold... and sometimes all you get is rocks.
We're going to have to rebuild some of the basic comms protocols of the Internet pretty soon anyway, to solve increasing problems of spam, DDoS, and others. Why not fix this one at the same time?
There's an old adage: encryption is the easy part... it's managing the keys that's really difficult.
In a small environment (such as a corporate LAN), key management is somewhat easy. Just setup a PKI or CA infrastructure where everyone ends up trusting some root servers. As long as the core servers are uncompromised, it's possible to exchange keys in a secure manner without falling victim to various attacks (man-in-the-middle, eavesdropping, etc.().
But on the wild internet, who do you trust? If you don't trust anyone, then there's no way to ensure that the key you get is the key for the machine that you're trying to talk to. (a.k.a. detecting a man-in-the-middle attack)
Unless, of course, you transmit the keys via a separate secure channel (which is why quantum encryption was getting all the attention). The hard part is setting up that separate secure channel or verifying the public key of a machine the first time.
I'm not just mentioning this as another thing to factor into the cost of retrofitting ships; there is also the consideration of the added draft the ship needs in port in order to avoid running aground.
I know that some Dutch sailing ships on the Ijsselmeer use leeboards where the foil is attached to the side of the hull. During tacking you have to lower the one just before raising the other out of the water. When working in shallow waters, you raise both up to reduce draft.
AMD's slashing prices 30-50% at the end of this month. The X2 3800+ will be in the vicinity of $170.
Good news, everyone!
Seriously, the price trend graph over at PriceScan shows just how flat pricing for the X2's has been. The average price as $375 last October and has only fallen to $325 recently. The low-price was $350 last October and is now only down to ~$300.
The Athlon64 X2 4200+ 939pin shows the same pattern. Fairly stale pricing for the past 6 months.
On the Intel side, the Intel Pentium D 930 3.0GHz price has been trending steadily downward for about 3 months.
I don't know who's out there snapping up the multi-GHz multi-core 64-bit CPUs, but I can't imagine what they're doing in today's software ecosystem (apart from the gamers and the physicists) that could require that sort of processing power.
Video editing is a typical task that requires lots of CPU power. As CPUs have gotten more powerful, we've been able to move from VHS quality footage (quarter D1) to DVD (full D1). That requires 4x the processing and with my 2-year old dual-Opteron system it takes me about 4-6 minutes per minute of footage to process. Which is better then the 10-15 minutes per minute of footage of my previous system, but still a hefty time commitment when you're looking at a DVD that holds 80 minutes of footage.
80 minutes x 5 min/min is still a long time...
I'm almost ready to upgrade to a dual-cpu dual-core Opteron system. It would cut my processing time in half. Making me about 50%-60% more productive. I'm just waiting on the dual-core prices to drop a bit more.
That's just one use case. For the more average user, maxing out the RAM on the computer can give the system another 3 year lease on life. Such as my 4-year old laptop with 1 GB of RAM. If I could put another gigabyte of RAM into this laptop, I'd be happy to keep it for another 4 years. But since it's maxed out, I have to upgrade to a new one.
And every 2 years isn't horrible, especially if you do computers for a living. Me, I'll be shooting for four years or so between upgrades, unless I get back into gaming...
Even for gaming a 2 year old machine can do fairly well at running the newer offerings. At least if you:
- Bought a semi-decent video card two years ago (something in the $150-$200 range) that was top-of-the-line three years ago.
- Put enough RAM into the system (at least 1GB, but 2GB would've been better)
CPU performance (other then dual-core) has not been improving by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Long gone are the days where performance increased twofold every 12-15 months. Now we're lucky if we see a doubling of performance every 30-40 months because we hit the "Hz" wall and had to go back to the drawing board.
Dual-core is changing the landscape. Getting a dual-core machine for a gaming system is not necessarily a bad choice. And you get some small performance benefit from having a 2nd core to handle misc duties. But for a budget gamer, the dual-core chips from AMD are still too pricey.
(I'm sticking with my 2.2GHz Opteron with 2GB of RAM and my GeForce 6800 card for at least another year. At least until the dual-core chips drop below $120 at the low-end.)
My rule (and I'm not a screenwriter): Important data should be stored on at least 4 spindles / tapes / discs in at least two geographically distant locations.
That means 2-3 external drives that get rotated and moved offsite to secure locations. Along with optical media archives (which is what optical media excels at) for long-term storage.
PGP/GPG + webmail makes for a handy ad-hoc backup system as well. Encrypt the document, mail it to your GMail account. Heck, mail it to any packrat friends.
Easy enough to put the O/S on top of RAID1 as well (assuming that we're talking Linux).
After working with Software RAID for a while, I definitely prefer it over more proprietary RAID solutions (dedicated RAID controllers). Software RAID is extremely flexible, easily recovered (move the disks to another box) and my RAID array doesn't depend on a single piece of hardware that may be difficult to replace if it fails. For smaller companies who can't afford to buy three of everything, that's a big advantage.
Mdadm also does a good job of letting you run without a config file. That means you can move a disk from a failed controller to a spare port on another controller and immediately get back up and running.
Like drinkypoo says, with higher resolution displays most users start running apps in windows rather then full-screen. On my 1400x1050 14" LCD, I run the browser at about 3/4 screen width (~1000 pixels wide). On the 19" 1600x1200, the browser is typically only 5/8 screen width (~900 pixels). On both screens that's about 8" of width which is what I find to be a comfortable size (with text that is 9-12 points in size).