I'm inclined to agree on this one. I go to Starbucks, not because the drinks are great, but because the drinks are consistent. I've had better drinks at Second Cup, but so rarely, and most often all I get there is swill. This goes for other cafes as well, to the point where I've stopped ordering lattes at any other cafe, just because I don't like being disappointed.
The benefit at Starbucks is not quality, but consistency, and that's why I go there every day.
The only way I could think of to do this more 'securely' would be a full network scan to see how their tcp stack behaves, possibly looking at tcp sequence numbers and timestamps to find any quirks. Given that my iPhone may have different ports open (since purchased apps may open ports), and given that my Mac is likely going to behave identically to an iPhone from a TCP-behavior point of view, I'm in favor of this proposal.
I don't get it. Why don't they just make them out of liquid metal? Then they can survive all kinds of things, AND go on killing sprees to eliminate John Connor. Is this not obvious to anyone else?
Just to give you an idea, most of the computers at the organization I work at are running XP SP1. Suffice to say, upgrades are the least of our concerns.:/
Gigabyte had the right idea with their I-Ram device [wikipedia.org] but apparently they found making their own memory controller to be too difficult. That is something more appropriate for someone like Intel, they claimed. And I think this is actually a good point. So why aren't Intel and AMD pursuing such a device? What would be even better is if they could take a disk, or array of disks, and then stick some memory in front of that â" say, 512 MB â" that they could use to buffer reads/writes right on the disk controller. It would be a problem if you lost data, though, but you could stick a battery on it, so that if the power died, you could still complete the last few writes once power was restored.
I know I must be tired, because this was literally my thought process, until I realized I'd just (re-)invented the battery-backed write cache. Still, this is a far more practical option, and it's entirely possible (though it would be expensive) to implement this even in a laptop, to buffer reads/writes over time.
I know that in most cases, my HD is almost completely idle, so in those few cases where I burst far beyond what my HD is capable of, it would balance out in not too long, and quite possibly improve performance, at least for writes. For reads, it could be improved by using the potential for parallelism that SSDs offer, by being able to read multiple blocks in parallel, rather than in sequence like normal HDDs require, and then buffer that directly into memory.
Anytime I have to restart or cold boot it takes considerably longer than a plain XP install. I can attest to this. Every time I boot Vista, I say to myself 'Sheesh, I could have installed XP in the time this thing has taken.'
Given a typical laptops with between 50 and 80 Wh batteries and a 2 to 3 hour charge life, you're HD comprises about 3% of the average draw at idle, and about 7-8% at full tilt - for those of you running active SQL servers on your lappies. The SQL server I run on my laptop uses the query cache extensively, and thus makes considerable power consumption gains during high-load scenarios, you insensitive clod!
Put your paging file and filesystem journal on the SSD. The paging file won't get huge bulk read performance (see the article), but when paging in blocks from all over the place, it should be reasonable, and won't clog up your disk's throughput. The FS journal is the same idea - you don't need throughput, but the journal keeps getting read/re-read/written/re-written, so having something that doesn't involve writing to the platter then fetching back off it could boost performance to some degree.
Benchmarks are probably out there, but I'm sleepy.
I keep evangelizing this program on Slashdot, but it keeps being worth it, so I'll do it again.
If people are going to build slipstreamed XP discs, they need to start using nLite. It allows you not only to slipstream in SP3, but also things like Windows Media Player 11 (nice), and there are packs you can grab from the site to add things like Firefox, Acrobat, Sun Java, FoxIt PDF Reader, and so on.
â¦THENâ¦
You can go through and remove stuff. Windows XP has a ton of drivers for video cards. It doesn't support most nVidia video cards, or newer ATI stuff either, but it DOES support old Trident cards (likely even my old 256kb Trident card). it also has support for (and drivers for) ATM networking (even in the Home version, afaik). You can strip all of that out. Also feel free to take out fax support, dial-up-networking support, Domain support (if you use XP Pro at home, or MCE), and so on.
Take out Windows themes. Add other ones in. I make all my systems default to the MCE 'Royale' theme, because hey, it's nicer. You can increase the maximum TCP connections (instead of patching later); you can enable the uxtheme.dll patch to support non-signed themes. Change default preferences, like disabling theme support entirely, turning off animated menus, setting the default folder view, and others. Remove services you don't need.
I've managed to strip down a 680 MB XP Pro SP2 disc to a 150 MB SP3 disc; at the same time, I configured it for an automated install (with the exception of choosing partitions), I added custom themes, I added drivers for the ethernet cards, video cards, and sound cards I use (including drivers for Parallels and VMWare), and bam. A Windows CD customized precisely for you.
You also save a HUGE amount of space on-disk after install, the install takes less time (a timed test in a VM went from 1.5 hours to 10 minutes).
It's an amazing little tool, and I can't compliment the author enough, other than by letting people know.
Of course, if you have Vista but want to fit it onto a CD instead of filling a DVD, you can check out vLite also. Strip out all the crap you don't need, and save a ton of time.
I'd suspect that they'd remove one of the disks from the project's RAID array, write zeroes over the partition map, and claim that it's because they need the space for porn. Perfectly reasonable explanation, I suppose.
You mean bridge that previously impassable void between adolescent giggling girl & overwieght middle-aged grumpy fat bloke? Impossible! I thought Yahoo! Chat had bridged that gap a decade ago.
Check out the size of your Facebook profile or front page. Over a megabyte, easily (and most of that is Javascript). Sickening. Of course it doesn't degrade gracefully, so you can't just turn off JS for the page. Nice one.
The best way to not leak memory is to never allocate it in the first place This contrasts with the Microsoft philosophy of 'If we never deallocate memory, it won't ever leak!'
What part of this audience makes you think it's a fair metric for how good the game actually is? The people under NDAs haven't given me any specific information (i.e. 'I love the way Level 12 Wizards can cast Dispel Undergarments at-will!'); it's only been generic information ('I'll never go back to 3.5; 4th edition makes everything so much simpler and more fun, by taking out all the useless and overly complicated junk that shouldn't have been in there in the first place').
We had to figure out what our hit points were, which meant (for her fighter) 10 + 14d10 + (CON bonus x 15)â¦Âafter finishing that up, we got her an Amulet of Health, which added +6 CON, so that was another 45 hit points. This also changed all of her skills (because her CON bonus changed) so we had to consider that.
We also figured out her attacks at +15/+10/+5, plus her STR bonus (+4) which increased by one because of ability point increases at two levels, and damage as 1d12 + 5. Then we had to add more STR bonus (+6 STR from Belt of Giant Strength = +3 to Attack and Damage). Oh, and it's a magic Warhammer (+1 to attack and damage) with Weapon Focus (+1 attack) and Weapon Specialization (+2 damage). Oh, and she's got power attack tooâ¦
So her attack is 15 + 8 + 1 + 1, and her damage is 1d12 + 8 + 1 + 2. So, you can remember those as 25 and 1d12 + 11⦠except that she has Power Attackâ¦
In some specific cases, because of all the feats she has, she could charge a foe and use Power Attack (-10 to attack, +20 to damage for a 2h weapon), except she can take that penalty to AC instead, and if she hits, she gets (in the next round) to power attack and get 3x the penalty instead of 2xâ¦ÂOr, if she Bull Rushes someone to push them back, her next round she gets +1 to attack/damage per five foot square she pushed them back.
When she's Bull Rushing, she makes an opposed Strength check (1d20 + 8, for her); but then she has Improved Bull Rush (+4), might be charging (an optional +2), is a giant-equivalent (+4 size bonus) and can Enlarge Person herself (+4 size bonus)⦠Nice, if you figure that as 1d20 + 20, except that not all of those things apply in all situations; if she's not Enlarged, then no +4; if her adversary is also Large, no other +4; if she were in an antimagic field, -6 to STR, for a -3 penalty (oh, and Enlarge Person would wear off).
These are the sorts of calculations that need to be done in every single round in a modern, high-level game of D never mind trying to factor in the opponent's capabilities, cover, visibility, miss chances, critical chances, and so on.
4e is going to be pretty awesome in a lot of ways; if it does suck in parts, which is likely, it'll suck in much more tolerable ways than the current edition. At the very least, I'll have less books to dig through to build a character.
It's strange... pretty much all the negative things I've been hearing are people on the forums who've never played it and only know what's been told to them, but who form negative opinions based on what they assume people mean (and we've seen a lot of uproar about things that were never actually said).
Conversely, every review I've read by people who've actually played it, and everything I've heard from the people I know who are playtesting it right now, has been overwhelmingly positive, to the point where I have no question in my mind about wanting to switch over to 4e as soon as is possible.
One of the big issues you should consider is not just whether you are using jumbo framers or not. Some people claim a minimal performance increase, but jumbo frames can significantly reduce transmission/reception overhead on a gigabit network when doing block data transfers between 1500 and 9000 bytes.
For a database server, it depends on your read/write patterns, but especially when doing large blocks of data, it can make a difference in both CPU use and throughput. Might be worth a look, but the NIC, switch, and iSCSI SAN all need to support it (which might not be the case).
In fact, my first experience with the GIMP was using it on Linux in 1998, using Enlightenment (and later, Sawmill/Sawfish) as a window manager; even then, I found it horribly frustrating and misdesigned, and could never understand why on earth they had ever done such an idiotic thing.
As what was usual, they added a pile of new channels that nobody really wanted and raised subscription prices accordingly. While this is technically accurate, it leaves out an important detail - namely that these channels weren't added to available plans, but rather they were added to everyone's bill. Rogers went to all of their customers and gave them all the channels; when people complained after getting their bill, Rogers insisted that they should have called to cancel the channels if they didn't want them.
Unfortunately at the time, this practice wasn't illegal. Thanks to Rogers, it is now. Oh, and they lost so much goodwill in the area that they had to bail out, and swapped their BC holdings with Shaw's Ontario holdings. Now we have Shaw, and things are light years better than Rogers could ever manage.
Don't be silly, everyone knows that the Doctor gave up on using standard broadband in the TARDIS ten years from now. He's switched to a wireless network (via Archangel) and it's worked great ever since.
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I'm inclined to agree on this one. I go to Starbucks, not because the drinks are great, but because the drinks are consistent. I've had better drinks at Second Cup, but so rarely, and most often all I get there is swill. This goes for other cafes as well, to the point where I've stopped ordering lattes at any other cafe, just because I don't like being disappointed.
The benefit at Starbucks is not quality, but consistency, and that's why I go there every day.
I don't get it. Why don't they just make them out of liquid metal? Then they can survive all kinds of things, AND go on killing sprees to eliminate John Connor. Is this not obvious to anyone else?
Just to give you an idea, most of the computers at the organization I work at are running XP SP1. Suffice to say, upgrades are the least of our concerns. :/
Why would Rockstar pollute a simple child's game about murder, drugs, and whoring with this unacceptable content? It's appalling!
I know I must be tired, because this was literally my thought process, until I realized I'd just (re-)invented the battery-backed write cache. Still, this is a far more practical option, and it's entirely possible (though it would be expensive) to implement this even in a laptop, to buffer reads/writes over time.
I know that in most cases, my HD is almost completely idle, so in those few cases where I burst far beyond what my HD is capable of, it would balance out in not too long, and quite possibly improve performance, at least for writes. For reads, it could be improved by using the potential for parallelism that SSDs offer, by being able to read multiple blocks in parallel, rather than in sequence like normal HDDs require, and then buffer that directly into memory.
Put your paging file and filesystem journal on the SSD. The paging file won't get huge bulk read performance (see the article), but when paging in blocks from all over the place, it should be reasonable, and won't clog up your disk's throughput. The FS journal is the same idea - you don't need throughput, but the journal keeps getting read/re-read/written/re-written, so having something that doesn't involve writing to the platter then fetching back off it could boost performance to some degree.
Benchmarks are probably out there, but I'm sleepy.
I keep evangelizing this program on Slashdot, but it keeps being worth it, so I'll do it again.
If people are going to build slipstreamed XP discs, they need to start using nLite. It allows you not only to slipstream in SP3, but also things like Windows Media Player 11 (nice), and there are packs you can grab from the site to add things like Firefox, Acrobat, Sun Java, FoxIt PDF Reader, and so on.
â¦THENâ¦
You can go through and remove stuff. Windows XP has a ton of drivers for video cards. It doesn't support most nVidia video cards, or newer ATI stuff either, but it DOES support old Trident cards (likely even my old 256kb Trident card). it also has support for (and drivers for) ATM networking (even in the Home version, afaik). You can strip all of that out. Also feel free to take out fax support, dial-up-networking support, Domain support (if you use XP Pro at home, or MCE), and so on.
Take out Windows themes. Add other ones in. I make all my systems default to the MCE 'Royale' theme, because hey, it's nicer. You can increase the maximum TCP connections (instead of patching later); you can enable the uxtheme.dll patch to support non-signed themes. Change default preferences, like disabling theme support entirely, turning off animated menus, setting the default folder view, and others. Remove services you don't need.
I've managed to strip down a 680 MB XP Pro SP2 disc to a 150 MB SP3 disc; at the same time, I configured it for an automated install (with the exception of choosing partitions), I added custom themes, I added drivers for the ethernet cards, video cards, and sound cards I use (including drivers for Parallels and VMWare), and bam. A Windows CD customized precisely for you.
You also save a HUGE amount of space on-disk after install, the install takes less time (a timed test in a VM went from 1.5 hours to 10 minutes).
It's an amazing little tool, and I can't compliment the author enough, other than by letting people know.
Of course, if you have Vista but want to fit it onto a CD instead of filling a DVD, you can check out vLite also. Strip out all the crap you don't need, and save a ton of time.
And they're terrible things to waste.
I'd suspect that they'd remove one of the disks from the project's RAID array, write zeroes over the partition map, and claim that it's because they need the space for porn. Perfectly reasonable explanation, I suppose.
Who hasn't?
Maybe not, but it's still garbage.
Check out the size of your Facebook profile or front page. Over a megabyte, easily (and most of that is Javascript). Sickening. Of course it doesn't degrade gracefully, so you can't just turn off JS for the page. Nice one.
I've always preferred Sun chips myself.
My fiancée and I created 15th level characters the other day for a group we're joining, and it was all manner of messy.
We had to figure out what our hit points were, which meant (for her fighter) 10 + 14d10 + (CON bonus x 15)â¦Âafter finishing that up, we got her an Amulet of Health, which added +6 CON, so that was another 45 hit points. This also changed all of her skills (because her CON bonus changed) so we had to consider that.
We also figured out her attacks at +15/+10/+5, plus her STR bonus (+4) which increased by one because of ability point increases at two levels, and damage as 1d12 + 5. Then we had to add more STR bonus (+6 STR from Belt of Giant Strength = +3 to Attack and Damage). Oh, and it's a magic Warhammer (+1 to attack and damage) with Weapon Focus (+1 attack) and Weapon Specialization (+2 damage). Oh, and she's got power attack tooâ¦
So her attack is 15 + 8 + 1 + 1, and her damage is 1d12 + 8 + 1 + 2. So, you can remember those as 25 and 1d12 + 11⦠except that she has Power Attackâ¦
In some specific cases, because of all the feats she has, she could charge a foe and use Power Attack (-10 to attack, +20 to damage for a 2h weapon), except she can take that penalty to AC instead, and if she hits, she gets (in the next round) to power attack and get 3x the penalty instead of 2xâ¦ÂOr, if she Bull Rushes someone to push them back, her next round she gets +1 to attack/damage per five foot square she pushed them back.
When she's Bull Rushing, she makes an opposed Strength check (1d20 + 8, for her); but then she has Improved Bull Rush (+4), might be charging (an optional +2), is a giant-equivalent (+4 size bonus) and can Enlarge Person herself (+4 size bonus)⦠Nice, if you figure that as 1d20 + 20, except that not all of those things apply in all situations; if she's not Enlarged, then no +4; if her adversary is also Large, no other +4; if she were in an antimagic field, -6 to STR, for a -3 penalty (oh, and Enlarge Person would wear off).
These are the sorts of calculations that need to be done in every single round in a modern, high-level game of D never mind trying to factor in the opponent's capabilities, cover, visibility, miss chances, critical chances, and so on.
3.5e can be very fun, but it's also obscenely complicated. It took us two days to make two level 15 characters; in 4e, we could probably do it in an hour or so, because there's a lot less pointless variation. Ok, so my wizard gets 4 HP per level instead of rolling 1d4. That's bad, because every 15th-level wizard has 60 HP, but good, because my 15th-level wizard doesn't end up with 22 HP (and yes, I have rolled that before). Hell, if I didn't have a CON bonus (not unlikely), my fiancée's damage, even if she rolls ones, would kill me in two hits; if she rolls max, one hit. Not really something you want to be trying to play on the battlefield.
4e is going to be pretty awesome in a lot of ways; if it does suck in parts, which is likely, it'll suck in much more tolerable ways than the current edition. At the very least, I'll have less books to dig through to build a character.
It's strange... pretty much all the negative things I've been hearing are people on the forums who've never played it and only know what's been told to them, but who form negative opinions based on what they assume people mean (and we've seen a lot of uproar about things that were never actually said).
Conversely, every review I've read by people who've actually played it, and everything I've heard from the people I know who are playtesting it right now, has been overwhelmingly positive, to the point where I have no question in my mind about wanting to switch over to 4e as soon as is possible.
Go figure.
Pfft, this is sad. Ambrosia's offered a Universal Binary of Wiretap Pro since last August.
I know Australia's a little behind sometimes, but seriously, this is what automatic updates are for.
One of the big issues you should consider is not just whether you are using jumbo framers or not. Some people claim a minimal performance increase, but jumbo frames can significantly reduce transmission/reception overhead on a gigabit network when doing block data transfers between 1500 and 9000 bytes.
For a database server, it depends on your read/write patterns, but especially when doing large blocks of data, it can make a difference in both CPU use and throughput. Might be worth a look, but the NIC, switch, and iSCSI SAN all need to support it (which might not be the case).
In fact, my first experience with the GIMP was using it on Linux in 1998, using Enlightenment (and later, Sawmill/Sawfish) as a window manager; even then, I found it horribly frustrating and misdesigned, and could never understand why on earth they had ever done such an idiotic thing.
Unfortunately at the time, this practice wasn't illegal. Thanks to Rogers, it is now. Oh, and they lost so much goodwill in the area that they had to bail out, and swapped their BC holdings with Shaw's Ontario holdings. Now we have Shaw, and things are light years better than Rogers could ever manage.
Don't be silly, everyone knows that the Doctor gave up on using standard broadband in the TARDIS ten years from now. He's switched to a wireless network (via Archangel) and it's worked great ever since.