Well, come on. How many computing tasks make heavy use of the hard drive besides booting and loading? You start your application and then the drive is pretty much out of things to do, or your load the next level and when you're in the game all the assets have been loaded into memory.
SSD has a rather limited lifespan due to the number of writes it can handle before it fails. It seems rather obvious to me that you'd want to dedicate SSD to read-intensive tasks to get the best lifespan for your dollars.
I have no personal experience with SSD and I'm as skeptical as anyone, but from all the articles I've read the authors expressed that SSD was a monumental improvement in their overall computing experience.
If you have a favourite mantra with something better to say on the subject then by all means, chant away. I'm here to learn, not to preach.
You're 100% correct about vendor benchmarks. You really have to take those vendor benchmarks with a grain of salt, if you take them at all. Even the capacities of disks is embellished using the most favourable metrics (e.g., 1000KB per MB instead of 1024KB). The only way to go is to read multiple reviews and assume the average.
I believe that optimizations of the TRIM command will make a huge difference, but this is still the early adopter stage so I personally am not willing to make such a large investment in this technology. It will be the de facto standard in a few years, though.
HDDs are fairly resistant to physical damage if they're not in the middle of an operation. Many (if not most) modern laptops have an accelerometer which pauses disk access if the laptop is dropped or even rocked gently.
On the other hand, my own USB flash drive survived an hour-long tumble through the washing machine, and my friend's worked after he ran over it with his pickup truck.
The latest and greatest HDDs are indeed faster than ever before, especially with 32MB of cache, but they're still the biggest bottleneck in the equation. Sequential reads are pretty tolerable with HDD but the seek time is the killer.
The Intel X25 line includes the fastest and most expensive SSDs available. The same is true of the Cheetah and Raptor drives, but from everything I've read even the slowest and cheapest SSDs are faster than the fastest HDDs.
Generally speaking, consumers don't benefit from the extra speed that SSD offers.
I disagree. Most people turn their computers off when they're done for the day. The boot cycle as well as launching web browsers and email clients are all disk-intensive tasks, not to mention launching Powerpoint to view their landscape slideshow email attachments.
Once SSD comes standard the average PC user will not settle for anything less.
External USB HDDs tend to drain power more quickly than internal drives, plus they're an extra appendage to lug around on the road (though many USB drives are pocket-sized).
As you say, it all comes down to your needs. If you need tons of storage then HDD is the way to go. If you need speed on the go, or want to maximize battery life (I bet this is the biggest value-add for photographers) then SSD is superior.
Why choose when you can have both? Get a ~100GB HDD for your operating system and a 1TB drive for your data. It's the same concept as having a powerful GPU to offload those specific tasks from your CPU.
I believe that in the (implied, non-existant) Internet charter of rights anonymity is a basic human right. I believe in opt-in, not opt-out. A webmaster has a sacred trust that he will guard his users' IP addresses and only leverage them for internal use, if at all. Besides, that IP address could have been used by the subscriber, a child, a wardriver, a cheapskate nextdoor neighbour, or an entirely different household if the ISP made a mistake in their logs.
On my blog I allow anonymous comments and I wrote "(optional)" next to the email and WWW fields on the comment submit form. I get TONS more spam because of this, but that's a service I feel is essential to my readers and integral to the fabric of the web.
If the government fears how people react to facts then maybe they should outlaw news media.
Thanks for the reality check. You're right that my comment veered off topic a bit. The title of this article is misleading considering Ubisoft's specific comments and reasoning. My comment was more in line with the topic question.
You're missing the point. Read the title of the article. The consensus seems to be that the imagination and ability of developers is watered-down, not the Wii itself.
Every gaming platform has casual games. Catching up is a matter of mindshare and nothing more. Wii launched as a casual machine while the others marketed themselves to caffeinated tweens. Xbox and Playstation established themselves as a device for hardcore gamers while Wii appealed to everybody else. All parties hit their targets and are having trouble spreading beyond their self-fashioned niches.
There's a ton of early games that were extremely popular yet fairly complex. For example, SimCity, MS Flight Simulator, Test Drive, Zork, and King's Quest. The capabilities of the platform are irrelevant. A poor workman blames his tools.
Marry Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a quill by candlelight. Charlie Chaplin acted in movies with no sound. I think Ubisoft can manage a game about a jumping boy with a seventh-generation, games-dedicated computer system.
I think a search solution is exactly what you want if you don't have a solid structure in place. Give people multifaceted navigation and let them choose whether they want to browse a hierarchical structure, or perform a search to try to cut to the chase, or even both so that users can choose a specific category or directory to narrow down the search corpus.
Enterprise Search Server is a really nifty app based on the excellent MOSS search functionality, but in my tests it doesn't hold a candle to the Google Search Appliance. To scratch the surface...
the GSA will index the first 2.5MB of text in a document while SSX only indexes 256KB.
SSX isn't exactly free because you need hardware plus a Windows Server license.
implementations of SSX larger than 1 million documents are very complex, sometimes requiring multiple servers for query, index, and crawling, whereas the GSA supports 10 million documents in a single 2U server.
the relevance of SERPs and snippets is just superior on GSA (my subjective opinion)
If you've got a spare Windows server laying around then ESS is a terrific way to put it to use, but if you're fleshing out an enterprise search solution from the ground up I would recommend GSA in almost any scenario.
Poor planning is not the fault of a company whose product was so fantastic that it was foolishly adopted as a panacea. Adapt or die. It's the law of the jungle.
why should I be forced to purchase an inferior (for me) product in order to get a new computer?
You're not forced into anything. You can buy Apple or enterprise Linux or compile your own kernel. Or, heaven forbid, you could upgrade to a newer, better, backward-compatible version of what you already have, for the same price you'd pay for the old version.
Don't build your future on a foundation with an expiration date stamped on it. Stay agile and adaptable. A clock can tick on forever if you don't attach a timebomb to it.
So in Russia it's illegal for a company to sell a 10 year old product, even though that product will be 2 versions old this year? If we could make legal demands to sell retired products I'd still be eating Ninja Turtle cereal today.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like Suprnova, and ShareReactor, and Mininova, and Pizzatorrent, and a zillion others. That's the end of that, and the beginning of another.
Well, come on. How many computing tasks make heavy use of the hard drive besides booting and loading? You start your application and then the drive is pretty much out of things to do, or your load the next level and when you're in the game all the assets have been loaded into memory.
SSD has a rather limited lifespan due to the number of writes it can handle before it fails. It seems rather obvious to me that you'd want to dedicate SSD to read-intensive tasks to get the best lifespan for your dollars.
I have no personal experience with SSD and I'm as skeptical as anyone, but from all the articles I've read the authors expressed that SSD was a monumental improvement in their overall computing experience.
If you have a favourite mantra with something better to say on the subject then by all means, chant away. I'm here to learn, not to preach.
You're 100% correct about vendor benchmarks. You really have to take those vendor benchmarks with a grain of salt, if you take them at all. Even the capacities of disks is embellished using the most favourable metrics (e.g., 1000KB per MB instead of 1024KB). The only way to go is to read multiple reviews and assume the average.
I believe that optimizations of the TRIM command will make a huge difference, but this is still the early adopter stage so I personally am not willing to make such a large investment in this technology. It will be the de facto standard in a few years, though.
HDDs are fairly resistant to physical damage if they're not in the middle of an operation. Many (if not most) modern laptops have an accelerometer which pauses disk access if the laptop is dropped or even rocked gently.
On the other hand, my own USB flash drive survived an hour-long tumble through the washing machine, and my friend's worked after he ran over it with his pickup truck.
The latest and greatest HDDs are indeed faster than ever before, especially with 32MB of cache, but they're still the biggest bottleneck in the equation. Sequential reads are pretty tolerable with HDD but the seek time is the killer.
The Intel X25 line includes the fastest and most expensive SSDs available. The same is true of the Cheetah and Raptor drives, but from everything I've read even the slowest and cheapest SSDs are faster than the fastest HDDs.
Generally speaking, consumers don't benefit from the extra speed that SSD offers.
I disagree. Most people turn their computers off when they're done for the day. The boot cycle as well as launching web browsers and email clients are all disk-intensive tasks, not to mention launching Powerpoint to view their landscape slideshow email attachments.
Once SSD comes standard the average PC user will not settle for anything less.
Flash drives have no moving parts so what you describe isn't a mechanical failure. By definition, it's not a machine.
External USB HDDs tend to drain power more quickly than internal drives, plus they're an extra appendage to lug around on the road (though many USB drives are pocket-sized).
As you say, it all comes down to your needs. If you need tons of storage then HDD is the way to go. If you need speed on the go, or want to maximize battery life (I bet this is the biggest value-add for photographers) then SSD is superior.
This fantastic and voluminous illustrates how even the slowest SSD drives run circles around the fastest HDDs. However, current SSD technology causes those drives to run much more slowly when all the sectors have been written to at some point in time, and remain slow until the drive is formatted. SSD is consistently faster than HDD out of the gate, but until SSD algorithms or mechanics/chemistry are improved they lose their edge after a few months of regular use.
Why choose when you can have both? Get a ~100GB HDD for your operating system and a 1TB drive for your data. It's the same concept as having a powerful GPU to offload those specific tasks from your CPU.
I'm talking about internet anonymity - being able to publish anonymously without fear. There's a world of difference between words and actions.
I believe that in the (implied, non-existant) Internet charter of rights anonymity is a basic human right. I believe in opt-in, not opt-out. A webmaster has a sacred trust that he will guard his users' IP addresses and only leverage them for internal use, if at all. Besides, that IP address could have been used by the subscriber, a child, a wardriver, a cheapskate nextdoor neighbour, or an entirely different household if the ISP made a mistake in their logs.
On my blog I allow anonymous comments and I wrote "(optional)" next to the email and WWW fields on the comment submit form. I get TONS more spam because of this, but that's a service I feel is essential to my readers and integral to the fabric of the web.
If the government fears how people react to facts then maybe they should outlaw news media.
Thanks for the reality check. You're right that my comment veered off topic a bit. The title of this article is misleading considering Ubisoft's specific comments and reasoning. My comment was more in line with the topic question.
You're missing the point. Read the title of the article. The consensus seems to be that the imagination and ability of developers is watered-down, not the Wii itself.
The Wii has sold more units than the PS2, PS3, and Xbox360 combined. Pretty profitable slump.
Every gaming platform has casual games. Catching up is a matter of mindshare and nothing more. Wii launched as a casual machine while the others marketed themselves to caffeinated tweens. Xbox and Playstation established themselves as a device for hardcore gamers while Wii appealed to everybody else. All parties hit their targets and are having trouble spreading beyond their self-fashioned niches.
There's a ton of early games that were extremely popular yet fairly complex. For example, SimCity, MS Flight Simulator, Test Drive, Zork, and King's Quest. The capabilities of the platform are irrelevant. A poor workman blames his tools.
Marry Shelley wrote Frankenstein with a quill by candlelight. Charlie Chaplin acted in movies with no sound. I think Ubisoft can manage a game about a jumping boy with a seventh-generation, games-dedicated computer system.
Due to the atomic number 112 I recommend Fibonaccium, after the Fibonacci sequence which adds the 2 preceding numbers to find the next in sequence.
I think a search solution is exactly what you want if you don't have a solid structure in place. Give people multifaceted navigation and let them choose whether they want to browse a hierarchical structure, or perform a search to try to cut to the chase, or even both so that users can choose a specific category or directory to narrow down the search corpus.
Enterprise Search Server is a really nifty app based on the excellent MOSS search functionality, but in my tests it doesn't hold a candle to the Google Search Appliance. To scratch the surface...
If you've got a spare Windows server laying around then ESS is a terrific way to put it to use, but if you're fleshing out an enterprise search solution from the ground up I would recommend GSA in almost any scenario.
Poor planning is not the fault of a company whose product was so fantastic that it was foolishly adopted as a panacea. Adapt or die. It's the law of the jungle.
What, Fruity pebbles isn't good enough for you? What are you, a communist?
What do you mean you won't share your property with the proletariat?? BAM!! BAM BAM!!
why should I be forced to purchase an inferior (for me) product in order to get a new computer?
You're not forced into anything. You can buy Apple or enterprise Linux or compile your own kernel. Or, heaven forbid, you could upgrade to a newer, better, backward-compatible version of what you already have, for the same price you'd pay for the old version.
Don't build your future on a foundation with an expiration date stamped on it. Stay agile and adaptable. A clock can tick on forever if you don't attach a timebomb to it.
So in Russia it's illegal for a company to sell a 10 year old product, even though that product will be 2 versions old this year? If we could make legal demands to sell retired products I'd still be eating Ninja Turtle cereal today.