Uhhh...I just read the link but am a little confused. Even Cringley points out at the first of his article that originally TCP was written for a VASTLY different and weaker network than we have now, so instead of trying to make the networks go back to a mid 1980s design, wouldn't it be smarter just to update TCP to take advantage of new tech advances?
Now i'm not really a heavy network guy so excuse me if I put it in more of my lingo, but lets compare it to something I've got more first hand experience with, hard drives. If you don't write the controller code to take advantage of the large cache frankly the cache becomes worthless but if you DO write the controller code to take into account the size of the buffer it makes a BIG difference, so much so that I've seen 5400RPM drives whip 7200RPM drives simply by having better cache management.
So wouldn't the right way to go be to update TCP for the times? i mean we didn't slow computers down so we could keep PATA or PCI, we came up with new tech like SATA and PCIe to take advantage of the faster throughput. Shouldn't we do the same here as well?
Hi Oaktrail! Got modded down so bad you are afraid to post in your own account? That's kinda sad. i don't know which is worse, the fact that you are so badly in need of medication you actually think I'm old APK who has been here frankly longer than I have and was a lurker at CNet before that, or that you think I'm sitting in some MSFT war-room plotting your every move across the net like Die Hard 4.
Seriously Oaktrail, get some help. You are showing signs or persecution complex and think people are secretly plotting against you, those are two sure signs of the start of a breakdown. Go put away your CLI, go into the sun, and go to the nearest shrink. Get help dude because if you don't someone may find you swinging behind the Xmas tree and that ain't no way to go out friend.
I guess that is the same thing with the reality tripe as I've noticed talking with my customers the females are SERIOUSLY addicted to that shit, why? i haven't a damned clue. But I've also noticed its the females addicted to farmville and those other horrible "games" which remind me of a hamster running on a wheel to get a pellet.
Maybe my oldest nephew was right when he calmly walked up to me at age 6 and had me lean down and told me his great revelation "Uncle, girls are just......they're weird".
That is what I don't get, you see your numbers dropping like flies, your users tell you in no uncertain terms what you are doing is a big DO NOT WANT and yet what do you do? "We'll just do it twice as fast, that's the ticket"?
I have to support everything from netbooks and old office P4s to the latest quads and I had to switch myself and my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based without the Google phone home) simply because I found on a LARGE swath of the older machines and netbooks it was no longer suitable for purpose. it wasn't extensions either, just to ensure of that I ran tests with ONLY extensions that Dragon and FF had, namely ForecastFox and ABP. For test beds I chose 3 systems, an off lease P4 2.2GHz, 512Mb of RAM, my nettop which is a Sempron 1.8GHz with 1,5Gb of RAM, and my netbook which is one of the new E-350 Brazos EEE netbooks with 8Gb of RAM.
What did I find? The latest version, 8.01 I believe, is simply unusable on both the Sempron AND the P4, and is frankly barely functional on the E-350 while causing its temps to shoot up nearly 20 degrees from all the CPU slamming. I just tried to go to basic sites that I knew my customers would go to, YouTube, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, a couple of random websites, and in every single case while the max that Dragon hit was around 70% CPU and that only for a few seconds FF would literally GRIND on the CPU causing such hard 100% CPU spikes that the entire desktop became unresponsive.
I personally learned of this after the 4 series when all my customers started complaining about how Facebook was slow and their PCs became unresponsive so I traced it back and sure enough it was FF slamming their CPU. In fact the ONLY customer I haven't had any complaints from is a single one that bought an AMD triple core, maybe FF doesn't know how to slam an odd cored CPU? But I would suggest to those wanting another browser either Comodo Dragon which has excellent features like the option to use their secure DNS or if you want something portable you can use the also excellent QTWeb which is built using the QT framework. From what I've been told by a poster here QTWeb will run on anything going back to Windows 98. Oh and for you Mac and Linux users? QTWeb has the links for those OSes in their download section, enjoy!
Dude, do you want me to back it up with links? hell you can even test it on your own machine, there are apps that will change your CPUID. run your little/QxO on an Intel CPU, bench it, then change the CPUID to AMD and watch the numbers fall by at LEAST 30%, probably closer to 50%.
But if you want more than MY word and your own lying eyes then you can read this blog by a guy that actually writes book on the subject of optimization and programming where he documents where INTEL TOLD HIM THAT IS WHAT THEY DID after he confronts them with the evidence! He has emails, he logged every conversation, I have NO doubt he is a good chunk of why Intel paid AMD 1.35 BILLION to not go to court, or do you believe Intel gave its rival one of the biggest paydays in CPU history because it was a nice thing to do?
I can tell you why Chrome is gaining...SPAM. I swear Google has become as bad or worse than any other for pushing their shit when it is NOT wanted! It used to be that damned Google Toolbar now every piece of freeware comes with a little tiny checkbox that if you miss it? You've been Chromed baby. And if you miss the checkbox most will have it steal your default slot so you'd be amazed at how many complaints I get from some customer that had been chromed.
Seriously Google, your the #1 fucking search company okay? Quit acting like a damned Mickey Mouse spammer and quit shoving your shit on people that don't want it! You have more eyes on your website than any place else on the planet, isn't that enough? how sad is it you have to steal the spammer crown from MSFT, it used to be that damned Live Toolbar everywhere, but now you don't get binged you get chromed. bad form Google, bad form.
Just remember folks the benchmarks are often rigged because they are compiled with the Intel compiler that to this very day ties a boat anchor to ANY chip that gives an "Authentic AMD" CPUID. So unless they tell you before running that they compiled with a neutral compiler like Open64 or GCC I wouldn't trust the benches anymore than the old Quack.exe trick. Here is an article to back me up.
As for TFA frankly except for as another pointed out using it as an Android emulator i just don't get it. The Linux community has a REAL winner on their hands with expressgate/splashtop and if they'd get behind it and start writing apps for it I bet it would be trivial to get all the OEMs on board. As I've said the key to beating MSFT at their own game is NOT to try to force them into a showdown but to simply route around them. with tons of apps having a real instant on Linux OS built into every new desktop and laptop could give people REAL choice and I have a feeling once they've tried EG/ST as long as the community backs them up with plenty of apps I could see their installed Windows not getting much use. I have expressgate in my netbook and when i'm out that is practically all I use anymore, its just too nice and easy while giving me more battery life.
Uhhh...maybe he has just had good luck and likes the HTC? I mean AMD hasn't sent me even a sticker (C'mon assholes, you could at LEAST send me some fricking stickers!) but I still recommend the E series netbooks and the Deneb and Thuban desktops as I've had nothing but good luck with them and the lower prices make them easy on my customer's pocketbooks.
TLDR? Just because someone likes a product doesn't mean they are getting paid to like it, some folks just like stuff.
I gave mine up when I got my first capture card around 2000. Once you have a capture card you think "hey my monitor is better resolution than my TV, why do I need a TV again?" and that's that. I'm sure this will make me sound extra geeky but when Firefly went off that was the last of the TV for me. The only one that missed me not having a TV was my ex, she liked to snuggle up with a movie but once she learned how to control the PC with the remote she was fine with it.
The funny part is i gave up on TV because of my monitor and now one of my biggest sellers is people having me build HTPCs so they can get rid of their monitor for their TV! I can see the appeal though, at least for part of it. watching one of my customers play Batman:AA on that nice 42 inch was quite impressive and his wife just loves to death the Lenovo remote I recommend for her as the keys on it are just like texting on a phone which she is scarily fast at.
i just wonder now that all the TVs are basically monitors with tuners if we'll see more doing like my customers and just forgetting the big monitor and going for the big set.
Totally agreed on the AMD E-350 as that is the reason i finally bought a netbook. After dealing with customers constantly saying "can you make this....I don't know...faster somehow?" and having to tell them that without ION Atom was pretty much a lame duck I avoided the hell out of them until I got to work on a customers E-350 and thought "Hell yeah, this is actually usable!"
As for TFA....why? if you want a killer low resource Linux on X86/64 frankly all you have to do is go buy the AMD E-350 based EEE (don't know if they have it on the Atom) and enjoy expressgate. Instant on, adds a couple of hours to the battery, at least for me, nice GUI, its all easy peasy. If the community would just get behind expressgate/splashtop and be writing apps for it frankly i could easily see the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" meme becoming reality.
If you want to beat MSFT the trick is NOT to try to get rid of Windows, its to go around it. With EG/ST they still have windows if they need it but as they play in EG/ST and if the community backs it I could easily see them not really needing to go back to Windows much. It already plays most media, has a nice book store and piles of radio stations, all it needs is more apps and games and you could slowly but surely wean users off constantly needing Windows.
They ran benches every time they added to the kit. Kinda pointless to run benches just because its Tuesday. Are you really this obtuse or are you just being pedantic for shits and giggles?
hell don't take MY word for it, read the article for yourself. note that even though atwood says the high failure rates is worth the speed remember this man spends $400+ just on a pair of headphones so having a half a dozen brand new SSDs as spares? NOT a problem for him. hey if you have that kind of money knock yourself out, me I got better things to spend it on.
Funny but I've found at least when it comes to the cableco my experience is quite the opposite, in that while I personally don't mention the fact that I don't own a TV the girls at the desk mention it constantly when i walk in. There always seems to be a new girl there and the others are like "That's the guy that doesn't own a TV" and the new girl is ALWAYS like "No, really, you have at least one, right? What do you mean no?" and when i point out that while I do have a capture card in my desktop I frankly haven't fired it up since 2009 the look I get, its just shock.
The hilarious part is the thing that seems to cause them vaporlock is NOT the fact that I don't actually own a set so much as I don't watch reality television which I swear the way they react I have to wonder if there is some hidden signal in that tripe that makes people addicted to that shit. Frankly I do NOT care who got voted off some island, or who was voted the best at singing some crappy old song and I sure the fuck don't want to watch anything called a Snooki. And when did the world start caring about such things? did I miss a memo again?
Dude if you are going out of town just fire up any P2P client and look for steam hacks for the games you want, there are a bazillion of them out there. Just scan them first to make sure you aren't getting a fake.exe and you are good to go. And your second issue sounds more like a shitty network than steam. I feel for you there as I was stuck on HughesNet for nearly 4 years whose motto needs to be "more sucky than anyone else!" but I can tell you with even my boys flaky WISP that Steam runs like a champ, so well in fact I haven't had a steam hack for any of their games in ages.
But in the end you have to compare it to the alternatives, which is crap like Starforce and always on DRM like UbiSuck (which I refuse to buy) or crap like SecuROM where it can actually burn out any DVD burners you have if it gets into a conflict with starforce or Safedisc. of course if you go pirate you can forget MP, you have to look for new NoCDs every time a patch comes out, hope that you don't get Starforced or SecuROMed when the patch is installed...its a fucking mess. While I buy plenty from GOG frankly their selection on anything newer is severely lacking and while I give them my money even though their prices aren't great frankly the steam sales kick their asses. I mean I got all of the FEAR I AND II games for $5? Plus the DLC?
For that and all the ease of use I think I can put up with the occasional bullshit, although frankly I haven't seen any myself. Not saying you didn't get bit, I'm sure you did, but having even a halfway decent connection makes steam hassle free, at least for me and mine. Now if you'll excuse me I have the youngest on the other line, it looks like they have a game he wants on the latest steam sale and he always acts like any sale is for less than 20 minutes LOL! Peace.
Except they would only run a benchmark ONCE when they got a new piece of gear. If a max of 4 benches (one for CPU, GPU, SSD, and RAM) would kill an SSD? Thanks for proving my point friend. I can sit here and have my HDD run benches for the next 6 hours, at 4 minutes a bench that would be 90 benches and I'll bet my last dollar I won't have a single failed sector.
My customers are mostly normal folks, they have data on their machines that is precious to them and I can't think of a single one that would be willing to risk that data, even for the increased speed of SSD. At this point the tech is just too immature, it reminds me of the old first gen HDDs where the things would die left and right and you were afraid to cough in the same room. They just have too many bugs ATM for me to recommend them to ordinary folks.
Fun fact, you have it backwards, he's a Brit living in Australia, as he complains at least once a year about how the UK gets games before he does in Australia even though the USA, UK, and Australia all speak English.
Hey you spoiled kids, I had a VIC20 (you need to use caps, we didn't have no lowers back then ya know!) and ya know what? It was fun! Sure the datasette was flaky and if you didn't watch it your little sister would take the cassette that you had saved your three days worth of heavy programming onto and record culture club on it (That left scars) but where else could you get new games and programs out of magazines and have everyone who had a computer be as geeky as you?
While everyone waxes on about the old days there are some things however I do NOT miss, like the prices of RAM. Back then a 4Mb stick cost more than a fricking car! As I sit here with 8Gb in my netbook, another 8Gb in my desktop, where even my $50 graphics card has 800 stream processors and 512Mb of RAM on its own? Yeah I really don't want to go back to counting each byte and having to PEEK and POKE and GOTO every chance I could just to squeeze a few more bytes in there.
So congrats to all those Brits with their Beebs, I hear it was like us and our VICs, If you want to date yourself just compare your first machines to what you have now and boy won't you feel old. I could fit my VIC AND my first FIVE PCs into the speed and memory of my $50 GPU and have cycles left over. And the first 5 of my PCs could have their entire hard drives dumped to my $14 flash stick and still have room for every program I had ever written for the VIC...wow...yay excess?
Thanks for the reply, that does make it a little easier to grasp. Like I said me and mine are happy with the HD4850s, our screens are all 1600x900 so we can pretty much max out on most games with the HD4850 but I do have some customers that are always looking for a new card.
As for the Geforce 210 that isn't to replace the HD4650 which surprisingly is damned good with SolidWorks so i don't know if AMD has helped ATI in the OpenGL dept or what, because it makes the machine smooth as butter. What the Geforce 210 will be for is his back room PC which he moved to the back when i built him his new AMD triple. it only has an Nforce IGP and frankly SW runs like ass on IGP, it shits pixels all over the screen and leaves little glitches when you move an object. But with him being mostly retired he has to watch his budget as like PC repair the work he does at the college is feast or famine so if he can score a card for cheap that will give him an okay boost over the Nforce he's all for it.
Personally I was hoping for another ATI card as after I got burnt by a bumpgate card frankly I don't know how well i trust Nvidia at this point but unlike the summer sales where you could pick up HD4650s cards for less than $15 it looks like Geforce cards are gonna be the cheapie this Xmas
If its like the rest of the gaming mags lately where EVERY game gets a "happy ending" review of 80% plus? Good riddance to bad rubbish. Frankly the game mags have gotten so damned bought off that I only trust the MOR reviews in Amazon anymore. The top reviews you have to watch for the astroturf but the ones in the middle of the pack are usually just normal Joes.
Frankly I gave up on the mags when they started handing out glowing reviews for even the bottom of the barrel dreck like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. The whole point of the mags was to see what was coming up and what was shit and what was good, but now all they do is hand out glowing praise.
Now the only reviews i look for besides Amazon is I check out what old Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation has to say. Yes he is a smartass brit but even when he tears into a game i think I'll like he points out the flaws in a way that makes it easier for me at least to decide. And if he thinks a game is shit he'll be the first to say so, like his review of Kane & Lynch II which he called "deep fried tampons" and as someone who bought the game for a whole $1 I can say his review was right on and it wasn't worth even that.
Thanks for the info. I usually just use UBCD and once booted from it have it do a low level DoD 3. I know its overkill and a simple zero pass would do the trick but it really doesn't add any extra time worth noting and its nice to be able to tell those offices that are kind enough to donate "Don't worry I use the same wipe they do at the DoD" which makes them feel better about it.
These hybrids do worry me though, the LAST thing I need is another round of "ZOMFG we have to destroy the drives or they'll take our stuff ZOMFG!" like there was a few years back. As it is I sell those donated dirt cheap, just mainly repaying the cleaning solutions for the fans and cases, but if I were to have to switch the drives i could see them becoming too expensive for poor folks. as it is I'm usually able to sell them an office P4 with KVM for less than $100, fully loaded with FOSS software and ready to use. that makes them low enough anybody can afford them and lets me buy more cheap monitors to put with them. But if I were to have to go out and buy even 40Gb HDDs to load them up with I simply couldn't afford to do it and there would be a lot of poor folks here that wouldn't be getting a PC for little Suzy for Xmas.
I'd love to be able to help you out friend but here at the shop I tend to buy in batches when I hear there is a "good batch" in the pipe. For example I don't know whether you know this or not but talk around the campfire is avoid Seagate over 500Gb like the clap! They got the cheap ass ARM controllers from Maxtor and between that and some bad firmware most of the over 500Gb Seagate drives me and my fellow builders have seen have been seriously flaky or just plain crap.
But to me the telling point on the cache issue was going from a 7200RPM 400Gb Seagate and a 320Gb WD to a 1Tb Samsung plus a 2Tb Samsung, both EcoDrives. Now both the WD and the Seagate had 8Mb of cache, both the 1Tb and 2Tb Samsung EcoDrives* have 32Mb. With both the Seagate and the WD I was hitting max sustained of 95-97 with a max burst of 105-109, both 7200RPM. With the samsung even though they are both 5400RPM EcoDrives I was hitting 108-115 sustained and nearly 136! Burst speed. That is a HELL of a big jump! The EcoDrive with the large caches impressed me so much I actually sold the 320Gb WD I was using as an OS drive and replaced it with the 1Tb Samsung. I gained probably 15 seconds on a cold boot even with the lower rotational speed!
* (which BTW I know they are high now but BUY THE SAMSUNG ECODRIVES, they are awesome and I've only been hitting max temps of 92f under load! The ones they have left are the last three batches before they sold out and frankly all 3 batches are top notch. I've put them in some hellish positions like construction trailers where the funk gets seriously thick, and they NEVER get hot and have yet to have a single issue! I just wish I'd have bought more of them when i had the chance!)
I have an even better question...does someone have a translator please? Like what the difference between a Stream processor and a core is? Because my old HD4850 has 800 Stream processors but i have NO clue as to how to translate that to cores.
Frankly the whole CPU and GPU business is starting to give me a bit of a headache. Remember when all you needed to know was MHz? Now there is in order and out of order, there are modules and full cores and hyperthreading and its all getting to the point one really needs a lookup table handy so one can translate this into numbers we can actually compare. While i doubt I'll be needing anything of this price range for me or my boys (they too are on HD4850s and quite happy as am I) I do still have a few gamer customers as well as some engineering and graphics guys and being able to translate to English would be off the good.
BTW sorry to go a little OT but does anyone know how well Nvidia cards work with SolidWorks? I have an older engineer that uses the program (he gets it from the college he volunteers for, Jesus is that program high!) and the HD4650 I sold him seems to be doing okay with it but they keep having the 210s on sale and I wonder if anyone has run the program on one of those. Just adding the HD4650 to his main PC gave it a hell of a speed boost, with no more graphic hangs when he rotates large models, but I'd hate to tell the guy to buy a 210 if it turns out Nvidia cards aren't so good with it. all the website says is use the more expensive CAD cards but frankly he doesn't need FirePro or Quatro levels of precision, he just needs the models to render quick and clean. He is a hell of a nice guy (and a former NASA engineer, getting to hold some of the actual shuttle plans? Sweeet!) and I'd really like to steer him right.
I'm sorry, did I miss a memo? Is there a reason why the lyrics from a lame old show about horny old women is suddenly a new meme? What's next "The Facts Of Life"?
As for TFA...yay Ozzies? I never saw why Apple got their knickers in a twist, to use a/. car analogy it would be like Ferrari getting pissy about the new mustang. Apple has the brand name and a lot of what sells IS the brand, its like Prada. You'll have Apple and then you'll have the knockoffs and while the geekers might like anything with Android for the regular Joes that Apple logo is worth paying the extra scratch, like the Nike logo or Adidas swoosh.
I guarantee you that anybody walking around in OZ with a Galaxy tab will be asked "What kind of iPad is that?" and when you have THAT level of branding frankly all this BS comes off as a little childish. Its a knockoff folks, when the judge can hold both it and an iPad and say "quick which one is your product?" and they can't answer? its a knockoff. And this is from someone who hasn't owned shit with an Apple logo except for a free G3 B&W I have in the closet that I still haven't figured out what to do with, maybe gut it and put in a AMD quad? It is a pretty case.
I can tell you I had 4 gamer customers that were the classic "must win teh benches!" types, one so bad his grandma is using a Skulltrail box because frankly that was the slowest hand me down he had left, and ALL FOUR had their SSDs fail within 2 years. these guys didn't buy cheap crap either, it was always what was at the top of the benches when they bought, most were either Intel or OCZ I believe is the name of the company. As for what they did? Play games, watch videos, run benches, pretty typical gamer stuff.
Meanwhile you can just call my pokey as I have 6Tb of HDDs and they show zero signs of failing, thanks. hell i have a drawer full of drives going back to 20Gb, don't know wth to do with the smaller ones but ALL of them are readable. So I'd take that MTBF with a big heaping of salt, and I'd read the link I posted previously about Coding Horror and the "hot/crazy" scale for SSDs. It is an interesting read and show the failure rates I saw weren't just a fluke.
Actually I'm pretty sure you just described what the hybrids are doing and that is what worries me. How in the hell do we zero out a drive if the file system is a lie? I get a lot of free boxes donated to me by offices because they know I'll refurb them for the poor and that I do a standard DoD 3 pass just to make sure its completely clean. How am I supposed to wipe a hybrid? Has anybody actually found a way to securely wipe the NAND portion of a hybrid?
Dude I don't know who made up this "paper" but I'd like to say they are full of shit as in my own benches I saw first hand an 8Mb Seagate 7200RPM get stomped by a Samsung 5400RPM with 32mb of cache. I've compared 2Mb, 8Mb, and 32Mb and with each the jumps have been pretty dramatic, some as high as 40% gains in burst. With the Seagate VS Samsung it went from a maximum rate of 96 to 134, that's a pretty big leap especially when we are talking one being 7200RPM and the other 5400RPM.
The only way I can see that paper having any relation to RL is if they used XP for the benches, as XP doesn't have NCQ support thus the drive is gonna have to spin pretty much constantly anyway. in 7 that large cache lets the drive time its read/writes more efficiently and that equals more speed.
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Uhhh...I just read the link but am a little confused. Even Cringley points out at the first of his article that originally TCP was written for a VASTLY different and weaker network than we have now, so instead of trying to make the networks go back to a mid 1980s design, wouldn't it be smarter just to update TCP to take advantage of new tech advances?
Now i'm not really a heavy network guy so excuse me if I put it in more of my lingo, but lets compare it to something I've got more first hand experience with, hard drives. If you don't write the controller code to take advantage of the large cache frankly the cache becomes worthless but if you DO write the controller code to take into account the size of the buffer it makes a BIG difference, so much so that I've seen 5400RPM drives whip 7200RPM drives simply by having better cache management.
So wouldn't the right way to go be to update TCP for the times? i mean we didn't slow computers down so we could keep PATA or PCI, we came up with new tech like SATA and PCIe to take advantage of the faster throughput. Shouldn't we do the same here as well?
Hi Oaktrail! Got modded down so bad you are afraid to post in your own account? That's kinda sad. i don't know which is worse, the fact that you are so badly in need of medication you actually think I'm old APK who has been here frankly longer than I have and was a lurker at CNet before that, or that you think I'm sitting in some MSFT war-room plotting your every move across the net like Die Hard 4.
Seriously Oaktrail, get some help. You are showing signs or persecution complex and think people are secretly plotting against you, those are two sure signs of the start of a breakdown. Go put away your CLI, go into the sun, and go to the nearest shrink. Get help dude because if you don't someone may find you swinging behind the Xmas tree and that ain't no way to go out friend.
I guess that is the same thing with the reality tripe as I've noticed talking with my customers the females are SERIOUSLY addicted to that shit, why? i haven't a damned clue. But I've also noticed its the females addicted to farmville and those other horrible "games" which remind me of a hamster running on a wheel to get a pellet.
Maybe my oldest nephew was right when he calmly walked up to me at age 6 and had me lean down and told me his great revelation "Uncle, girls are just......they're weird".
That is what I don't get, you see your numbers dropping like flies, your users tell you in no uncertain terms what you are doing is a big DO NOT WANT and yet what do you do? "We'll just do it twice as fast, that's the ticket"?
I have to support everything from netbooks and old office P4s to the latest quads and I had to switch myself and my customers to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based without the Google phone home) simply because I found on a LARGE swath of the older machines and netbooks it was no longer suitable for purpose. it wasn't extensions either, just to ensure of that I ran tests with ONLY extensions that Dragon and FF had, namely ForecastFox and ABP. For test beds I chose 3 systems, an off lease P4 2.2GHz, 512Mb of RAM, my nettop which is a Sempron 1.8GHz with 1,5Gb of RAM, and my netbook which is one of the new E-350 Brazos EEE netbooks with 8Gb of RAM.
What did I find? The latest version, 8.01 I believe, is simply unusable on both the Sempron AND the P4, and is frankly barely functional on the E-350 while causing its temps to shoot up nearly 20 degrees from all the CPU slamming. I just tried to go to basic sites that I knew my customers would go to, YouTube, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, a couple of random websites, and in every single case while the max that Dragon hit was around 70% CPU and that only for a few seconds FF would literally GRIND on the CPU causing such hard 100% CPU spikes that the entire desktop became unresponsive.
I personally learned of this after the 4 series when all my customers started complaining about how Facebook was slow and their PCs became unresponsive so I traced it back and sure enough it was FF slamming their CPU. In fact the ONLY customer I haven't had any complaints from is a single one that bought an AMD triple core, maybe FF doesn't know how to slam an odd cored CPU? But I would suggest to those wanting another browser either Comodo Dragon which has excellent features like the option to use their secure DNS or if you want something portable you can use the also excellent QTWeb which is built using the QT framework. From what I've been told by a poster here QTWeb will run on anything going back to Windows 98. Oh and for you Mac and Linux users? QTWeb has the links for those OSes in their download section, enjoy!
Dude, do you want me to back it up with links? hell you can even test it on your own machine, there are apps that will change your CPUID. run your little /QxO on an Intel CPU, bench it, then change the CPUID to AMD and watch the numbers fall by at LEAST 30%, probably closer to 50%.
But if you want more than MY word and your own lying eyes then you can read this blog by a guy that actually writes book on the subject of optimization and programming where he documents where INTEL TOLD HIM THAT IS WHAT THEY DID after he confronts them with the evidence! He has emails, he logged every conversation, I have NO doubt he is a good chunk of why Intel paid AMD 1.35 BILLION to not go to court, or do you believe Intel gave its rival one of the biggest paydays in CPU history because it was a nice thing to do?
I can tell you why Chrome is gaining...SPAM. I swear Google has become as bad or worse than any other for pushing their shit when it is NOT wanted! It used to be that damned Google Toolbar now every piece of freeware comes with a little tiny checkbox that if you miss it? You've been Chromed baby. And if you miss the checkbox most will have it steal your default slot so you'd be amazed at how many complaints I get from some customer that had been chromed.
Seriously Google, your the #1 fucking search company okay? Quit acting like a damned Mickey Mouse spammer and quit shoving your shit on people that don't want it! You have more eyes on your website than any place else on the planet, isn't that enough? how sad is it you have to steal the spammer crown from MSFT, it used to be that damned Live Toolbar everywhere, but now you don't get binged you get chromed. bad form Google, bad form.
Just remember folks the benchmarks are often rigged because they are compiled with the Intel compiler that to this very day ties a boat anchor to ANY chip that gives an "Authentic AMD" CPUID. So unless they tell you before running that they compiled with a neutral compiler like Open64 or GCC I wouldn't trust the benches anymore than the old Quack.exe trick. Here is an article to back me up.
As for TFA frankly except for as another pointed out using it as an Android emulator i just don't get it. The Linux community has a REAL winner on their hands with expressgate/splashtop and if they'd get behind it and start writing apps for it I bet it would be trivial to get all the OEMs on board. As I've said the key to beating MSFT at their own game is NOT to try to force them into a showdown but to simply route around them. with tons of apps having a real instant on Linux OS built into every new desktop and laptop could give people REAL choice and I have a feeling once they've tried EG/ST as long as the community backs them up with plenty of apps I could see their installed Windows not getting much use. I have expressgate in my netbook and when i'm out that is practically all I use anymore, its just too nice and easy while giving me more battery life.
Uhhh...maybe he has just had good luck and likes the HTC? I mean AMD hasn't sent me even a sticker (C'mon assholes, you could at LEAST send me some fricking stickers!) but I still recommend the E series netbooks and the Deneb and Thuban desktops as I've had nothing but good luck with them and the lower prices make them easy on my customer's pocketbooks.
TLDR? Just because someone likes a product doesn't mean they are getting paid to like it, some folks just like stuff.
I gave mine up when I got my first capture card around 2000. Once you have a capture card you think "hey my monitor is better resolution than my TV, why do I need a TV again?" and that's that. I'm sure this will make me sound extra geeky but when Firefly went off that was the last of the TV for me. The only one that missed me not having a TV was my ex, she liked to snuggle up with a movie but once she learned how to control the PC with the remote she was fine with it.
The funny part is i gave up on TV because of my monitor and now one of my biggest sellers is people having me build HTPCs so they can get rid of their monitor for their TV! I can see the appeal though, at least for part of it. watching one of my customers play Batman:AA on that nice 42 inch was quite impressive and his wife just loves to death the Lenovo remote I recommend for her as the keys on it are just like texting on a phone which she is scarily fast at.
i just wonder now that all the TVs are basically monitors with tuners if we'll see more doing like my customers and just forgetting the big monitor and going for the big set.
Totally agreed on the AMD E-350 as that is the reason i finally bought a netbook. After dealing with customers constantly saying "can you make this....I don't know...faster somehow?" and having to tell them that without ION Atom was pretty much a lame duck I avoided the hell out of them until I got to work on a customers E-350 and thought "Hell yeah, this is actually usable!"
As for TFA....why? if you want a killer low resource Linux on X86/64 frankly all you have to do is go buy the AMD E-350 based EEE (don't know if they have it on the Atom) and enjoy expressgate. Instant on, adds a couple of hours to the battery, at least for me, nice GUI, its all easy peasy. If the community would just get behind expressgate/splashtop and be writing apps for it frankly i could easily see the fabled "year of the Linux desktop" meme becoming reality.
If you want to beat MSFT the trick is NOT to try to get rid of Windows, its to go around it. With EG/ST they still have windows if they need it but as they play in EG/ST and if the community backs it I could easily see them not really needing to go back to Windows much. It already plays most media, has a nice book store and piles of radio stations, all it needs is more apps and games and you could slowly but surely wean users off constantly needing Windows.
They ran benches every time they added to the kit. Kinda pointless to run benches just because its Tuesday. Are you really this obtuse or are you just being pedantic for shits and giggles?
hell don't take MY word for it, read the article for yourself. note that even though atwood says the high failure rates is worth the speed remember this man spends $400+ just on a pair of headphones so having a half a dozen brand new SSDs as spares? NOT a problem for him. hey if you have that kind of money knock yourself out, me I got better things to spend it on.
Funny but I've found at least when it comes to the cableco my experience is quite the opposite, in that while I personally don't mention the fact that I don't own a TV the girls at the desk mention it constantly when i walk in. There always seems to be a new girl there and the others are like "That's the guy that doesn't own a TV" and the new girl is ALWAYS like "No, really, you have at least one, right? What do you mean no?" and when i point out that while I do have a capture card in my desktop I frankly haven't fired it up since 2009 the look I get, its just shock.
The hilarious part is the thing that seems to cause them vaporlock is NOT the fact that I don't actually own a set so much as I don't watch reality television which I swear the way they react I have to wonder if there is some hidden signal in that tripe that makes people addicted to that shit. Frankly I do NOT care who got voted off some island, or who was voted the best at singing some crappy old song and I sure the fuck don't want to watch anything called a Snooki. And when did the world start caring about such things? did I miss a memo again?
Dude if you are going out of town just fire up any P2P client and look for steam hacks for the games you want, there are a bazillion of them out there. Just scan them first to make sure you aren't getting a fake .exe and you are good to go. And your second issue sounds more like a shitty network than steam. I feel for you there as I was stuck on HughesNet for nearly 4 years whose motto needs to be "more sucky than anyone else!" but I can tell you with even my boys flaky WISP that Steam runs like a champ, so well in fact I haven't had a steam hack for any of their games in ages.
But in the end you have to compare it to the alternatives, which is crap like Starforce and always on DRM like UbiSuck (which I refuse to buy) or crap like SecuROM where it can actually burn out any DVD burners you have if it gets into a conflict with starforce or Safedisc. of course if you go pirate you can forget MP, you have to look for new NoCDs every time a patch comes out, hope that you don't get Starforced or SecuROMed when the patch is installed...its a fucking mess. While I buy plenty from GOG frankly their selection on anything newer is severely lacking and while I give them my money even though their prices aren't great frankly the steam sales kick their asses. I mean I got all of the FEAR I AND II games for $5? Plus the DLC?
For that and all the ease of use I think I can put up with the occasional bullshit, although frankly I haven't seen any myself. Not saying you didn't get bit, I'm sure you did, but having even a halfway decent connection makes steam hassle free, at least for me and mine. Now if you'll excuse me I have the youngest on the other line, it looks like they have a game he wants on the latest steam sale and he always acts like any sale is for less than 20 minutes LOL! Peace.
Except they would only run a benchmark ONCE when they got a new piece of gear. If a max of 4 benches (one for CPU, GPU, SSD, and RAM) would kill an SSD? Thanks for proving my point friend. I can sit here and have my HDD run benches for the next 6 hours, at 4 minutes a bench that would be 90 benches and I'll bet my last dollar I won't have a single failed sector.
My customers are mostly normal folks, they have data on their machines that is precious to them and I can't think of a single one that would be willing to risk that data, even for the increased speed of SSD. At this point the tech is just too immature, it reminds me of the old first gen HDDs where the things would die left and right and you were afraid to cough in the same room. They just have too many bugs ATM for me to recommend them to ordinary folks.
Fun fact, you have it backwards, he's a Brit living in Australia, as he complains at least once a year about how the UK gets games before he does in Australia even though the USA, UK, and Australia all speak English.
Hey you spoiled kids, I had a VIC20 (you need to use caps, we didn't have no lowers back then ya know!) and ya know what? It was fun! Sure the datasette was flaky and if you didn't watch it your little sister would take the cassette that you had saved your three days worth of heavy programming onto and record culture club on it (That left scars) but where else could you get new games and programs out of magazines and have everyone who had a computer be as geeky as you?
While everyone waxes on about the old days there are some things however I do NOT miss, like the prices of RAM. Back then a 4Mb stick cost more than a fricking car! As I sit here with 8Gb in my netbook, another 8Gb in my desktop, where even my $50 graphics card has 800 stream processors and 512Mb of RAM on its own? Yeah I really don't want to go back to counting each byte and having to PEEK and POKE and GOTO every chance I could just to squeeze a few more bytes in there.
So congrats to all those Brits with their Beebs, I hear it was like us and our VICs, If you want to date yourself just compare your first machines to what you have now and boy won't you feel old. I could fit my VIC AND my first FIVE PCs into the speed and memory of my $50 GPU and have cycles left over. And the first 5 of my PCs could have their entire hard drives dumped to my $14 flash stick and still have room for every program I had ever written for the VIC...wow...yay excess?
Thanks for the reply, that does make it a little easier to grasp. Like I said me and mine are happy with the HD4850s, our screens are all 1600x900 so we can pretty much max out on most games with the HD4850 but I do have some customers that are always looking for a new card.
As for the Geforce 210 that isn't to replace the HD4650 which surprisingly is damned good with SolidWorks so i don't know if AMD has helped ATI in the OpenGL dept or what, because it makes the machine smooth as butter. What the Geforce 210 will be for is his back room PC which he moved to the back when i built him his new AMD triple. it only has an Nforce IGP and frankly SW runs like ass on IGP, it shits pixels all over the screen and leaves little glitches when you move an object. But with him being mostly retired he has to watch his budget as like PC repair the work he does at the college is feast or famine so if he can score a card for cheap that will give him an okay boost over the Nforce he's all for it.
Personally I was hoping for another ATI card as after I got burnt by a bumpgate card frankly I don't know how well i trust Nvidia at this point but unlike the summer sales where you could pick up HD4650s cards for less than $15 it looks like Geforce cards are gonna be the cheapie this Xmas
If its like the rest of the gaming mags lately where EVERY game gets a "happy ending" review of 80% plus? Good riddance to bad rubbish. Frankly the game mags have gotten so damned bought off that I only trust the MOR reviews in Amazon anymore. The top reviews you have to watch for the astroturf but the ones in the middle of the pack are usually just normal Joes.
Frankly I gave up on the mags when they started handing out glowing reviews for even the bottom of the barrel dreck like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. The whole point of the mags was to see what was coming up and what was shit and what was good, but now all they do is hand out glowing praise.
Now the only reviews i look for besides Amazon is I check out what old Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation has to say. Yes he is a smartass brit but even when he tears into a game i think I'll like he points out the flaws in a way that makes it easier for me at least to decide. And if he thinks a game is shit he'll be the first to say so, like his review of Kane & Lynch II which he called "deep fried tampons" and as someone who bought the game for a whole $1 I can say his review was right on and it wasn't worth even that.
Thanks for the info. I usually just use UBCD and once booted from it have it do a low level DoD 3. I know its overkill and a simple zero pass would do the trick but it really doesn't add any extra time worth noting and its nice to be able to tell those offices that are kind enough to donate "Don't worry I use the same wipe they do at the DoD" which makes them feel better about it.
These hybrids do worry me though, the LAST thing I need is another round of "ZOMFG we have to destroy the drives or they'll take our stuff ZOMFG!" like there was a few years back. As it is I sell those donated dirt cheap, just mainly repaying the cleaning solutions for the fans and cases, but if I were to have to switch the drives i could see them becoming too expensive for poor folks. as it is I'm usually able to sell them an office P4 with KVM for less than $100, fully loaded with FOSS software and ready to use. that makes them low enough anybody can afford them and lets me buy more cheap monitors to put with them. But if I were to have to go out and buy even 40Gb HDDs to load them up with I simply couldn't afford to do it and there would be a lot of poor folks here that wouldn't be getting a PC for little Suzy for Xmas.
I'd love to be able to help you out friend but here at the shop I tend to buy in batches when I hear there is a "good batch" in the pipe. For example I don't know whether you know this or not but talk around the campfire is avoid Seagate over 500Gb like the clap! They got the cheap ass ARM controllers from Maxtor and between that and some bad firmware most of the over 500Gb Seagate drives me and my fellow builders have seen have been seriously flaky or just plain crap.
But to me the telling point on the cache issue was going from a 7200RPM 400Gb Seagate and a 320Gb WD to a 1Tb Samsung plus a 2Tb Samsung, both EcoDrives. Now both the WD and the Seagate had 8Mb of cache, both the 1Tb and 2Tb Samsung EcoDrives* have 32Mb. With both the Seagate and the WD I was hitting max sustained of 95-97 with a max burst of 105-109, both 7200RPM. With the samsung even though they are both 5400RPM EcoDrives I was hitting 108-115 sustained and nearly 136! Burst speed. That is a HELL of a big jump! The EcoDrive with the large caches impressed me so much I actually sold the 320Gb WD I was using as an OS drive and replaced it with the 1Tb Samsung. I gained probably 15 seconds on a cold boot even with the lower rotational speed!
* (which BTW I know they are high now but BUY THE SAMSUNG ECODRIVES, they are awesome and I've only been hitting max temps of 92f under load! The ones they have left are the last three batches before they sold out and frankly all 3 batches are top notch. I've put them in some hellish positions like construction trailers where the funk gets seriously thick, and they NEVER get hot and have yet to have a single issue! I just wish I'd have bought more of them when i had the chance!)
I have an even better question...does someone have a translator please? Like what the difference between a Stream processor and a core is? Because my old HD4850 has 800 Stream processors but i have NO clue as to how to translate that to cores.
Frankly the whole CPU and GPU business is starting to give me a bit of a headache. Remember when all you needed to know was MHz? Now there is in order and out of order, there are modules and full cores and hyperthreading and its all getting to the point one really needs a lookup table handy so one can translate this into numbers we can actually compare. While i doubt I'll be needing anything of this price range for me or my boys (they too are on HD4850s and quite happy as am I) I do still have a few gamer customers as well as some engineering and graphics guys and being able to translate to English would be off the good.
BTW sorry to go a little OT but does anyone know how well Nvidia cards work with SolidWorks? I have an older engineer that uses the program (he gets it from the college he volunteers for, Jesus is that program high!) and the HD4650 I sold him seems to be doing okay with it but they keep having the 210s on sale and I wonder if anyone has run the program on one of those. Just adding the HD4650 to his main PC gave it a hell of a speed boost, with no more graphic hangs when he rotates large models, but I'd hate to tell the guy to buy a 210 if it turns out Nvidia cards aren't so good with it. all the website says is use the more expensive CAD cards but frankly he doesn't need FirePro or Quatro levels of precision, he just needs the models to render quick and clean. He is a hell of a nice guy (and a former NASA engineer, getting to hold some of the actual shuttle plans? Sweeet!) and I'd really like to steer him right.
I'm sorry, did I miss a memo? Is there a reason why the lyrics from a lame old show about horny old women is suddenly a new meme? What's next "The Facts Of Life"?
As for TFA...yay Ozzies? I never saw why Apple got their knickers in a twist, to use a /. car analogy it would be like Ferrari getting pissy about the new mustang. Apple has the brand name and a lot of what sells IS the brand, its like Prada. You'll have Apple and then you'll have the knockoffs and while the geekers might like anything with Android for the regular Joes that Apple logo is worth paying the extra scratch, like the Nike logo or Adidas swoosh.
I guarantee you that anybody walking around in OZ with a Galaxy tab will be asked "What kind of iPad is that?" and when you have THAT level of branding frankly all this BS comes off as a little childish. Its a knockoff folks, when the judge can hold both it and an iPad and say "quick which one is your product?" and they can't answer? its a knockoff. And this is from someone who hasn't owned shit with an Apple logo except for a free G3 B&W I have in the closet that I still haven't figured out what to do with, maybe gut it and put in a AMD quad? It is a pretty case.
I can tell you I had 4 gamer customers that were the classic "must win teh benches!" types, one so bad his grandma is using a Skulltrail box because frankly that was the slowest hand me down he had left, and ALL FOUR had their SSDs fail within 2 years. these guys didn't buy cheap crap either, it was always what was at the top of the benches when they bought, most were either Intel or OCZ I believe is the name of the company. As for what they did? Play games, watch videos, run benches, pretty typical gamer stuff.
Meanwhile you can just call my pokey as I have 6Tb of HDDs and they show zero signs of failing, thanks. hell i have a drawer full of drives going back to 20Gb, don't know wth to do with the smaller ones but ALL of them are readable. So I'd take that MTBF with a big heaping of salt, and I'd read the link I posted previously about Coding Horror and the "hot/crazy" scale for SSDs. It is an interesting read and show the failure rates I saw weren't just a fluke.
Actually I'm pretty sure you just described what the hybrids are doing and that is what worries me. How in the hell do we zero out a drive if the file system is a lie? I get a lot of free boxes donated to me by offices because they know I'll refurb them for the poor and that I do a standard DoD 3 pass just to make sure its completely clean. How am I supposed to wipe a hybrid? Has anybody actually found a way to securely wipe the NAND portion of a hybrid?
Dude I don't know who made up this "paper" but I'd like to say they are full of shit as in my own benches I saw first hand an 8Mb Seagate 7200RPM get stomped by a Samsung 5400RPM with 32mb of cache. I've compared 2Mb, 8Mb, and 32Mb and with each the jumps have been pretty dramatic, some as high as 40% gains in burst. With the Seagate VS Samsung it went from a maximum rate of 96 to 134, that's a pretty big leap especially when we are talking one being 7200RPM and the other 5400RPM.
The only way I can see that paper having any relation to RL is if they used XP for the benches, as XP doesn't have NCQ support thus the drive is gonna have to spin pretty much constantly anyway. in 7 that large cache lets the drive time its read/writes more efficiently and that equals more speed.