FireWire is a fairly general-purpose specification, designed so that devices that require a fixed (and quite large) amount of bandwidth can be guaranteed it, and designed with device-to-device communication in mind. Its maximum bandwidth is 400Mbps (unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it).
SATA is a storage-device-oriented specification, designed pretty much so that drives can pump data over it as fast as they can read it, with a centralized paradigm and a much higher peak bandwidth at 1.5Gbps (or 3Gbps, but see the note about FW800 above).
Using USB for storage devices is perverted and wrong; it's synchronous, so your practical bandwidth is limited by the length of your cable and the response time of the nodes at either side. On the other hand, a design like that is pretty great for things like user input devices, which is one reason nobody ever talks about making FireWire mice.
So, in summary, SATA is more suitable for disks than FireWire, and USB is dog-slow. Any questions?
zpool create pool raidz c5t6d0 c5t6d1 c5t6d2 c5t6d3
For those of you who have not used Solaris yet, or aren't sure whether ZFS is up to the hype; that notation is "disk n of target 6 of controller 5." Your home server has absolutely nothing on the dreadnoughts from Sun. They sell a box with 50+ hotswap drive bays, and the CPU power to back it up (and it's not even the top of their line).
I am posting from Firefox 2.0.0.11 on a zombie Wallstreet PowerBook G3 running Gentoo Linux. Everything else runs livably, but Firefox REALLY SUCKS on a 266MHz G3 with 128MB of RAM.
Earlier today, switching into Firefox's workspace to see if GMail had finished loading and then switching back took nearly three minutes. And I didn't even have multiple tabs open.
If Firefox 3 performs better, I'll stop trying to switch to other browsers. (Konqueror won't finish building until sometime next year, and Opera is too weird for me.)
The effect isn't really the same if I end my post with "DISCLAIMER: THE ABOVE POST MAY CONTAIN IRONY, WHICH IS KNOWN BY THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE BIRTH DEFECTS."
Cool, I hit the lameness filter for the first time. But, lameness filter, the effect isn't the same if it's not in all caps!
I have been using Leopard since 12 hours before it was officially released. I have had two kernel panics. Both panics were my fault. (As in I explicitly loaded a kernel extension that caused the crash. Both times.)
Three or four of my friends have been using Leopard since it came out and have had no crashes at all.
My whole family's been on Leopard since it came out and has also had no crashes at all.
DRM is bad because it prevents people who legitimately own the media from doing what they want with it (including, in extreme cases, play it)
Copyright violation (at least as far as taking credit for others' work; we'll ignore the issue of piracy) is bad for reasons that don't warrant an explanation
The RIAA is bad because they're suing innocent people, and suing for much more than actual damages
Sorry, saying "1.4 MiB" to represent a file that's 1,500,000 bytes requires just as much math as saying "1.5 MB" to represent the same file.
Actually, one is a bit shift and one is a divide. The latter calculation could take as long as a dozen cycles, even on modern processors! This extra performance hit is unacceptable, especially for performance-critical applications such as displaying file sizes!
Interesting, I didn't know about that feature. Time Machine has a few extra features (which could be implemented with a script) and a nice GUI (which could be implemented with a nice GUI), but now I see what GGP meant.
Slashdot Mirror
FireWire is a fairly general-purpose specification, designed so that devices that require a fixed (and quite large) amount of bandwidth can be guaranteed it, and designed with device-to-device communication in mind. Its maximum bandwidth is 400Mbps (unless you count FW800, which I will as soon as I see a device that supports it).
SATA is a storage-device-oriented specification, designed pretty much so that drives can pump data over it as fast as they can read it, with a centralized paradigm and a much higher peak bandwidth at 1.5Gbps (or 3Gbps, but see the note about FW800 above).
Using USB for storage devices is perverted and wrong; it's synchronous, so your practical bandwidth is limited by the length of your cable and the response time of the nodes at either side. On the other hand, a design like that is pretty great for things like user input devices, which is one reason nobody ever talks about making FireWire mice.
So, in summary, SATA is more suitable for disks than FireWire, and USB is dog-slow. Any questions?
-:sigma.SB
What if he's a heptachromat? (that would mean we get to interpret his color specification with 4 bits per color component, making 28 bits per pixel)
-:sigma.SB
How many edges on a nitrogon?
-:sigma.SB
For those of you who have not used Solaris yet, or aren't sure whether ZFS is up to the hype; that notation is "disk n of target 6 of controller 5." Your home server has absolutely nothing on the dreadnoughts from Sun. They sell a box with 50+ hotswap drive bays, and the CPU power to back it up (and it's not even the top of their line).
-:sigma.SB
Why were you compiling with MAKEOPTS="-j32768"? What did you really expect to happen?
-:sigma.SB
You've obviously never had any hardware die a violent death due to dust*.
-:sigma.SB
*I have.
When I read the summary my first thought was "it could be a fake".
-:sigma.SB
Am I crazy for being able to spot the problem before I finished reading despite having never used iterators in C++?
-:sigma.SB
I am posting from Firefox 2.0.0.11 on a zombie Wallstreet PowerBook G3 running Gentoo Linux. Everything else runs livably, but Firefox REALLY SUCKS on a 266MHz G3 with 128MB of RAM.
Earlier today, switching into Firefox's workspace to see if GMail had finished loading and then switching back took nearly three minutes. And I didn't even have multiple tabs open.
If Firefox 3 performs better, I'll stop trying to switch to other browsers. (Konqueror won't finish building until sometime next year, and Opera is too weird for me.)
-:sigma.SB
My VO guild is still alive. Probably. I haven't actually logged in for over six months...
-:sigma.SB
Is this a bad time to point out that you may just have missed a comma? :P
-:sigma.SB
I don't think Perl or Python are scripting languages. I think sh-script is a scripting language.
I don't like to think about AppleScript.
-:sigma.SB
The effect isn't really the same if I end my post with "DISCLAIMER: THE ABOVE POST MAY CONTAIN IRONY, WHICH IS KNOWN BY THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE BIRTH DEFECTS."
Cool, I hit the lameness filter for the first time. But, lameness filter, the effect isn't the same if it's not in all caps!
-:sigma.SB
I have been using Leopard since 12 hours before it was officially released. I have had two kernel panics. Both panics were my fault. (As in I explicitly loaded a kernel extension that caused the crash. Both times.)
Three or four of my friends have been using Leopard since it came out and have had no crashes at all.
My whole family's been on Leopard since it came out and has also had no crashes at all.
Clearly, LEOPARD HATES YOU!
-:sigma.SB
I have unusually, inhumanly low body fat. I'm just about as underweight as it's possible to be without there being an immediate medical danger.
Last time I was immunized, they had to pinch my arm to get enough muscle to inject into. On their first four tries, the needle stabbed me in the bone.
IT HURT.
-:sigma.SB
The majority view here on Slashdot is:
Does that answer your question?
-:sigma.SB
Actually, for much, much longer than that. (Unless you had AppleTalk on, then it could take as long as a minute to wake from sleep. WTF?)
Ironically, Linux on PowerPC-based laptops has had stable sleep for as long as I've dealt with it. (~2001.)
-:sigma.SB
A valid idiom (at least in the C-likes I know) and one that I use every day when readability benefits.
-:sigma.SB
Ugh. Playing Gauntlet with TWO players was camera hell.
-:sigma.SB
I read them. PayPal lost a potential customer when I read theirs.
-:sigma.SB
Actually, one is a bit shift and one is a divide. The latter calculation could take as long as a dozen cycles, even on modern processors! This extra performance hit is unacceptable, especially for performance-critical applications such as displaying file sizes!
-:sigma.SB
DISCLAIMER: JOKE
Interesting, I didn't know about that feature. Time Machine has a few extra features (which could be implemented with a script) and a nice GUI (which could be implemented with a nice GUI), but now I see what GGP meant.
-:sigma.SB
Oh, man, obviously you've never coded a software renderer on an OS that doesn't have memory protection. *shudder*
-:sigma.SB
Not to mention heat dissipation.
-:sigma.SB
rsync makes incremental backups?
-:sigma.SB