The point of the original story was that SSD is cheaper than ran. Clearly moving everything from SSD into ram is going to make things faster, but so would moving everything from HDD to ram. Its just a matter of cost vs benefit.
I am not too sure how the cost/benefit of ReadyBoost stacks up, but I'd guess that plugging in a decent flash-drive would be cheaper than trying to find obsolete Laptop ram.
The wikipedia entry for Superfetch doesn't mention anything about only being 32bit, and it sound like it would work better the more RAM it has to play with:
In any case, hack or not, ReadyBoost is an example of a hybrid system.
Another reason is that running a program under wine does not normally need a Windows license to be legal. Can be handy if you've avoided the MS tax, but you find that there is one piece of windows software that you want to run.
I just note that VirtualBox has a "seamless" mode which makes (2) invalid. It still behaves differently than a native, e.g. when a windows app has focus I have a second panel. However I "can cut/paste between them, and put them in a beside each other and so on."
"Yeah, so my dogs name is Rufus, whats yours?"
"Fido huh? MWahahaha!"
True story. When someones been playing Runescape for half their life playing Runescape they tend to forget their "secret question" and the need to keep it secret.
For a while I used the LyX Gui to do what I wanted and then inspected the LaTeX LyX generated. Then I would write the LaTeX using vim, giving me arguably the best of both worlds. LyX allows you to View Source while you type, making this even easier.
When reviewers review Linux they often say things like "Even I couldn't figure out how to install X with Linux, how could a novice user possibly learn how to use Linux". However computer novices don't try to install software. In my experience the main problem novices have with Linux is that they cannot find the Internet Explorer icon. Once you tell them to click the Firefox icon instead they have no problem.
I don't think that Trademarks are anything like copyrights. However they can be a PITA, and they could have potential for abuse. I don't think we should use the e.g. IE icon for firefox even though it would save new users some grief. However I agree that some uses of trademarks could be seen as abusive. I can see how Prohibitions on unmodified redistribution could be seen as abusive, for example.
Indeed. At a high level of mathematics it is basically all about mathematical proofs. There is little point in doing a proof unless you give your steps. Writing out non-trivial proofs such that other people can understand them can take me weeks. Still it would be nice if the teacher explained why writing out working can be so important. When I was in school I found it hard to be motivated to do things that I didn't see a real world use for. If Fermat had bothered to write out his proof we could have saved mathematicians 300 years of head scratching: http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/FermatsLastTheorem.html;)
I don't know what evidence 'electrosoccertux' has on this either,
What I find frustrating that it is unlikely that the moderators who modded 'tux up to (+5, Insightful) probably had no idea what the evidence was either. I don't think a post that makes a unsubstantiated allegation without even a link deserves any + mods let alone +5.
IANAL either, but AFAICT the only reason it would be hard to prove in a court of law is because it would be hard to prove fullstop. A payee agreeing to wear a wiretap is proof, but someone on teh internets saying bad shit about ATI is probably just a troll or a unhappy customer.
As a corporation, you don't *normally* go around sueing individuals just for saying bad things about you, and *proving* the NVIDIA link would be the really hard part, legally.
Well, I don't normally go around claiming knowledge without some form of proof either. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_comment_affair, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with NVidia or ATI. After several searches of Google I haven't found any evidence that anyone other than electrosoccertux even suspects Nvidia of this. Nor do I know on what basis 'tux "knows" this. Does someone have a link to any discussion of the evidence?
(Also, Technically, for a civil trial you just need to show that the "preponderance of evidence" indicates that the law was broken. So arguably you can win a lawsuit without even knowing that the law was broken, depending on how strongly you interpret the word "know".)
Nvidia is known to pay forum users and the like to post FUD like this.
Really? If this is *known* why doesn't ATI sue?
Anyway, I realize this is about the Windows drivers, but I've had three ATI cards, and the flgrx didn't work properly on any of them, while I've never had any trouble with the NVIDIA cards.
So where can I claim my $$, or does the FUD have to be false?
YMMV, but I find the atom processors barely powerful enough to run the applications I use (e.g. Firefox). So I wouldn't want to switch to something slower without a big benefit. Also MIPS CPUs can't access words that are not aligned to a 4 byte boundary, which leads to hitting bugs on a MIPS you wouldn't worry about on a x86. So it isn't just windows that would have troubles... this would be an advantage if you want to test that your software runs on other types of CPU, but a pain otherwise. In short, I won't be switching to MIPS just to ensure that nobody will install anything windows-y on the machine I am using.
I am not convinced that switching to a MIPS CPU would make that much difference. An entry level Atom CPU starts at $20 or $45 including chipset [2], so the price of an atom is smallish even in a comparison to the price of the $250 netbook. Depending on the atom in question, the atom may take up to 2.5 watts at 100% CPU usage, about as much as a single desktop DIMM of ram, much less than the 28W a 10" monitor could draw [3]. A low power atom would draw just 0.65 watt [2]. It seems that one you start looking at a machine with decent specs, you'll want to spend a few extra dollars and a couple of extra watts (up to 1W idle [1]) to get an Atom that has double [1] the performance of the fastest ARM11 based CPU.
it will be interesting to see if Adobe adds free ARM binaries to their repositories, especially with Gnash nipping at their heels.
I found it annoying that my symbian based smart phone can't run most of the free (as in beer or speech) software that I take for granted. It left me feeling that they should have used a decent OS with decent software (e.g. Linux). I would be reluctant to use an ARM processor until the software I want is availiable on similar terms to the Intel based versions.
Yes, the buy it now price for a new/refurbished "ASUS 701 EEE PC NETBOOK 7" 900MHZ 512MB RAM 4G WHITE" is about ~$230 USD including shipping on ebay . From the european website linked by the story, the big advantage of the Alpha is that it is *very* light, at 650g. However the Eeepc was revolutionary in that it was both small and cheap. It seems that unless you have very small fingers you'd be better served by the larger, more powerful and slightly cheaper Eeepc, than this yet to be released product.
I've never understood why the United States engages in "free trade"...
This made me almost made me lose my esophagus (I wasn't drinking coffee). When the US enacts trade barriers is it to prevent dumping, so if NZ fruit are cheaper in US supermarkets than Japanese supermarkets it is clearly because NZ is dumping it fruit in the US (not because Japan could have any trade barriers against other countries). In the latest and most bizarre case, "free trade" means messing around with Australia's public health system.
Second, the intention of SSDs were never to "offload RAM". The idea is to use SSD as a pre-buffer for RAM, so it's quicker to access than reading from disk.
Well, eXecute In Place was designed to allow SSD to be accessed directly by the CPU. I understand that XIP can improve startup times, as we do not need to move the data from flash to ram to CPU, but we instead move it directly to CPU. SSD tends to be slower than memory, but the CPU cache may offset this. See for example:
That would be a ext3 loop device on top FAT or NTFS, which would probably be OK I guess. The other obvious way would be UMSDOS, but that was dropped after 2.6.11: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS
Well, I have read a number of other articles (more informative than this one). And yes, here it can take 1 year to get second degree, even with the GE if you share lots of units. The opposition to the idea of Global Warming seems rather lazy to me; I have never read an argument against global warming that tried to quantify the actual effect of unchecked growth of carbon emissions. This leaves a number of models of carbon emissions all of which agree than unchecked growth of CO2 emissions would have some pretty nasty effects over the next 100 years. The only credible arguments for doing nothing I have seen have been economic arguments along the lines of "it isn't worth doing anything yet". How we respond to any of this seems to have more to do with politics than which model is correct, but I don't see that debates on/. are going to resolve anything that climate sciences hasn't. For once, talking about M$ vs Open Sores gives us no answers.
In theory, memtest could pass this location automatically, or at the click of a button, which would be a lot more time efficient than replacement... assuming the bad RAM doesn't waste your time again later.
There are a number of reasons that might come in handy. I find modern motherboards very easy to damage however, so IMHO anything that involves opening the case should be avoided. I've kept gaming rigs that had minor hardware faults. Also while waiting for the RAM to arrive a "just don't use the bad bits" may come in handy.
On the other hand performance-wise, Windows XP running on a Core i7 with 3GB of triple channel DDR3 ram should be sufficient for checking your email. Personally I am using a 1x2GB module. This was recommended to me so I could upgrade easily when 64 bit becomes more common and/or RAM drops in price. In the meanwhile I save a few watts of power by only having one module of RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the original story was that SSD is cheaper than ran. Clearly moving everything from SSD into ram is going to make things faster, but so would moving everything from HDD to ram. Its just a matter of cost vs benefit.
I am not too sure how the cost/benefit of ReadyBoost stacks up, but I'd guess that plugging in a decent flash-drive would be cheaper than trying to find obsolete Laptop ram.
The wikipedia entry for Superfetch doesn't mention anything about only being 32bit, and it sound like it would work better the more RAM it has to play with: In any case, hack or not, ReadyBoost is an example of a hybrid system.
Isn't ReadyBoost essentially a hybrid system?
Also I rememeber that one of the main disadvantages of Btrfs over ZFS was that I doesn't support using SSD to speed up overall access, while ZFS does.
Also has an Ethernet port. Estimated run time of 2.5 hours. Apparently will also come in 2GB SSD, 128MiB ram options.
This is true, but perhaps chrome uses some clever copy-on-write VM technology? Or (gasp) perhaps windows does? Any VM guys want to comment?
You mean like the everyday common POSIX fork() command? Yes, apparently Windows does have that capability, they just hide it in their API.
The turbo feature works by routing all your non https content via compression servers, which can ofcourse cause slowdowns: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/03/13/opera-10-alpha-now-includes-opera-turbo-compression/
This appears to be lossy compression that reduces image quality... Hopefully pretty much all html is compressed at the source these days: http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/
I just note that VirtualBox has a "seamless" mode which makes (2) invalid. It still behaves differently than a native, e.g. when a windows app has focus I have a second panel. However I "can cut/paste between them, and put them in a beside each other and so on."
Only wimps backup their password to a sticky notes: _real_ men just upload their important passwords on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
"Yeah, so my dogs name is Rufus, whats yours?"
"Fido huh? MWahahaha!"
True story. When someones been playing Runescape for half their life playing Runescape they tend to forget their "secret question" and the need to keep it secret.
For a while I used the LyX Gui to do what I wanted and then inspected the LaTeX LyX generated. Then I would write the LaTeX using vim, giving me arguably the best of both worlds. LyX allows you to View Source while you type, making this even easier.
When reviewers review Linux they often say things like "Even I couldn't figure out how to install X with Linux, how could a novice user possibly learn how to use Linux". However computer novices don't try to install software. In my experience the main problem novices have with Linux is that they cannot find the Internet Explorer icon. Once you tell them to click the Firefox icon instead they have no problem.
I don't think that Trademarks are anything like copyrights. However they can be a PITA, and they could have potential for abuse. I don't think we should use the e.g. IE icon for firefox even though it would save new users some grief. However I agree that some uses of trademarks could be seen as abusive. I can see how Prohibitions on unmodified redistribution could be seen as abusive, for example.
Indeed. At a high level of mathematics it is basically all about mathematical proofs. There is little point in doing a proof unless you give your steps. Writing out non-trivial proofs such that other people can understand them can take me weeks. Still it would be nice if the teacher explained why writing out working can be so important. When I was in school I found it hard to be motivated to do things that I didn't see a real world use for. If Fermat had bothered to write out his proof we could have saved mathematicians 300 years of head scratching: http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/FermatsLastTheorem.html ;)
I don't know what evidence 'electrosoccertux' has on this either,
What I find frustrating that it is unlikely that the moderators who modded 'tux up to (+5, Insightful) probably had no idea what the evidence was either. I don't think a post that makes a unsubstantiated allegation without even a link deserves any + mods let alone +5.
IANAL either, but AFAICT the only reason it would be hard to prove in a court of law is because it would be hard to prove fullstop. A payee agreeing to wear a wiretap is proof, but someone on teh internets saying bad shit about ATI is probably just a troll or a unhappy customer.
As a corporation, you don't *normally* go around sueing individuals just for saying bad things about you, and *proving* the NVIDIA link would be the really hard part, legally.
Well, I don't normally go around claiming knowledge without some form of proof either. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_for_comment_affair, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with NVidia or ATI. After several searches of Google I haven't found any evidence that anyone other than electrosoccertux even suspects Nvidia of this. Nor do I know on what basis 'tux "knows" this. Does someone have a link to any discussion of the evidence?
(Also, Technically, for a civil trial you just need to show that the "preponderance of evidence" indicates that the law was broken. So arguably you can win a lawsuit without even knowing that the law was broken, depending on how strongly you interpret the word "know".)
Nvidia is known to pay forum users and the like to post FUD like this.
Really? If this is *known* why doesn't ATI sue?
Anyway, I realize this is about the Windows drivers, but I've had three ATI cards, and the flgrx didn't work properly on any of them, while I've never had any trouble with the NVIDIA cards.
So where can I claim my $$, or does the FUD have to be false?
YMMV, but I find the atom processors barely powerful enough to run the applications I use (e.g. Firefox). So I wouldn't want to switch to something slower without a big benefit. Also MIPS CPUs can't access words that are not aligned to a 4 byte boundary, which leads to hitting bugs on a MIPS you wouldn't worry about on a x86. So it isn't just windows that would have troubles... this would be an advantage if you want to test that your software runs on other types of CPU, but a pain otherwise. In short, I won't be switching to MIPS just to ensure that nobody will install anything windows-y on the machine I am using.
I am not convinced that switching to a MIPS CPU would make that much difference. An entry level Atom CPU starts at $20 or $45 including chipset [2], so the price of an atom is smallish even in a comparison to the price of the $250 netbook. Depending on the atom in question, the atom may take up to 2.5 watts at 100% CPU usage, about as much as a single desktop DIMM of ram, much less than the 28W a 10" monitor could draw [3]. A low power atom would draw just 0.65 watt [2]. It seems that one you start looking at a machine with decent specs, you'll want to spend a few extra dollars and a couple of extra watts (up to 1W idle [1]) to get an Atom that has double [1] the performance of the fastest ARM11 based CPU.
[1] http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20080529/152586/
[2] http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36795/118/
[3] http://www.planetomni.com/MSLCD_SHRP_lc-10a2ubp_DTL.shtml
it will be interesting to see if Adobe adds free ARM binaries to their repositories, especially with Gnash nipping at their heels.
I found it annoying that my symbian based smart phone can't run most of the free (as in beer or speech) software that I take for granted. It left me feeling that they should have used a decent OS with decent software (e.g. Linux). I would be reluctant to use an ARM processor until the software I want is availiable on similar terms to the Intel based versions.
Yes, the buy it now price for a new/refurbished "ASUS 701 EEE PC NETBOOK 7" 900MHZ 512MB RAM 4G WHITE" is about ~$230 USD including shipping on ebay . From the european website linked by the story, the big advantage of the Alpha is that it is *very* light, at 650g. However the Eeepc was revolutionary in that it was both small and cheap. It seems that unless you have very small fingers you'd be better served by the larger, more powerful and slightly cheaper Eeepc, than this yet to be released product.
I've never understood why the United States engages in "free trade" ...
This made me almost made me lose my esophagus (I wasn't drinking coffee). When the US enacts trade barriers is it to prevent dumping, so if NZ fruit are cheaper in US supermarkets than Japanese supermarkets it is clearly because NZ is dumping it fruit in the US (not because Japan could have any trade barriers against other countries). In the latest and most bizarre case, "free trade" means messing around with Australia's public health system.
are more likely to be persuaded to shell out $100 for a pair of shoes.
Second, the intention of SSDs were never to "offload RAM". The idea is to use SSD as a pre-buffer for RAM, so it's quicker to access than reading from disk.
Well, eXecute In Place was designed to allow SSD to be accessed directly by the CPU. I understand that XIP can improve startup times, as we do not need to move the data from flash to ram to CPU, but we instead move it directly to CPU. SSD tends to be slower than memory, but the CPU cache may offset this. See for example:
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0409.1/0510.html
I'll note XIP is mostly used for embedded devices. So for PCs you are essentially correct when you say that SSD are just fast storage.
That would be a ext3 loop device on top FAT or NTFS, which would probably be OK I guess. The other obvious way would be UMSDOS, but that was dropped after 2.6.11: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMSDOS
Well, I have read a number of other articles (more informative than this one). And yes, here it can take 1 year to get second degree, even with the GE if you share lots of units. The opposition to the idea of Global Warming seems rather lazy to me; I have never read an argument against global warming that tried to quantify the actual effect of unchecked growth of carbon emissions. This leaves a number of models of carbon emissions all of which agree than unchecked growth of CO2 emissions would have some pretty nasty effects over the next 100 years. The only credible arguments for doing nothing I have seen have been economic arguments along the lines of "it isn't worth doing anything yet". How we respond to any of this seems to have more to do with politics than which model is correct, but I don't see that debates on /. are going to resolve anything that climate sciences hasn't. For once, talking about M$ vs Open Sores gives us no answers.
In theory, memtest could pass this location automatically, or at the click of a button, which would be a lot more time efficient than replacement... assuming the bad RAM doesn't waste your time again later.
There are a number of reasons that might come in handy. I find modern motherboards very easy to damage however, so IMHO anything that involves opening the case should be avoided. I've kept gaming rigs that had minor hardware faults. Also while waiting for the RAM to arrive a "just don't use the bad bits" may come in handy.
On the other hand performance-wise, Windows XP running on a Core i7 with 3GB of triple channel DDR3 ram should be sufficient for checking your email. Personally I am using a 1x2GB module. This was recommended to me so I could upgrade easily when 64 bit becomes more common and/or RAM drops in price. In the meanwhile I save a few watts of power by only having one module of RAM.