From the operating systems point of view these look no different from any other drive. it's just that they will perform badly if the partitions are misaligned so I don't see how it will cause drives formatted on one system to fail to work on another.
USB drives will be the worse though since 4k drives formatted for XP won't work with Windows 7 and vise versa Do you have a source for this claim? it seems very unlikely to me.
From the operating systems point of view these look, it's just that they will perform badly if the partitions are misaligned so I don't see how it will cause drives formatted on one system to fail to work on another.
It doesn't, and indeed these WD drives will still have 512 byte logical sectors so there will be 8 logical sectors to one physical sectors.
The problem is if the partition is misaligned the OS is likely to make a load of unaligned writes. Those unaligned writes will force the drive to do a read-modify-write (which afaict will mean waiting for a complete rotation in the middle of the operation)
Add this to the fact that some systems (most notablly XP) have a habbit of aligning partitions on the boundries of cylinders* and that a typical cylinder is 63 sectors and you have a pretty much guaranteed misalignment.
It's easilly fixed if you know about it and have the right tools (WD supply one) but if you aren't aware of it you will likely get poor performance for no obvious reason.
*cylinders don't really exist on modern drives but bioses emulate them since the traditional real mode hard drive access mechanisms use them.
According to the Anandtech article, only the pretty much end-of-life Windows XP I wouldn't call XP pretty much end-of-life just yet, you can still purchase it with new systems and it's still supported until april 8 2014 (that's after desktop support expires for the NEXT release of ubuntu LTS) and I haven't seen much use of either vista or win7 in buisness/academia yet.
This isn't that bad though, the logical sectors will still be 512 byte so it's just a matter of getting the partitions aligned right and wd will apparently be supplying a tool for doing this:).
What do you think is going to happen when Amazon announces that they'd be happy to give any author 25% of all sales if they publish direct through Amazon as opposed to the 5% their publishing house gives them? They already do
"5. Royalties. Provided you are not in breach of your obligations under this Agreement, we will pay you, for each Digital Book we sell, a royalty equal to thirty-five percent (35%) of the applicable Suggested Retail Price for such Digital Book, net of refunds, bad debt, and any taxes charged to a customer (including without limitation sales taxes) (a “Royalty”)."
However where things get interesting is when you introduce amazons reccomendation engine into the picture.
consider http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html , that was about a book that while conventionally published was relatively obscure being given a huge leg-up by amazons reccomendation system. Since afaict books published through amazons print on demand system automatically get listed by amazon I see no reason why the same couldn't happen for the better ones of them.
If (and that is a big if) conventional bookstores die out then afaict much of the advantage of using a conventional publisher will die with them.
to avoid all these greedy publisher problems? Generally authors enter into exclusive agreements with publishers so if they want to release e-book versions of existing published books then they have no choice but to work with the publishers of those books.
Just like if itunes want the current "hit" music they have to deal with the major record companies.
You mean there's a UNIX utility you can launch fom the command line that will convert a file from any arbitrary format to another arbitrary format without having to obtain a special purpose tool? What do they call it? The point is on the *nix command line* once I find a series of commands (which may or my not be part of the basic install) that do what I want I can quickly throw them together into a script, surround them with a script loop and throw them at every file in a directory.
In a graphical environment (or an interaction driven text environment but those seem to have mostly died off) there is no such easy way to go from a manual procedure to an automated one. If you are lucky the task is contained within one app. If you are unlucky you have to either do every file manually, find a tool designed to support batch processsing or break out a full-blown programming language and find suitable libraries to use with it (which is FAR FAR more effort than turning a sequence of commands into a shell script).
*Dos style batch files can do this to an extent but afaict they are far more limited and more importantly the command line tools simply aren't there on the windows side and more importantly there is a distinct lack of good windows command line apps. i've never tried the new powershell stuff so I can't comment on how good or bad it is.
you just package Cygwin DLLs with your binaries, and that's it. Then the user another app with a different version of the cygwin dll (or installs cygwin on thier system) and due to the way cygwin uses shared memory to emulate posix stuff things tend to start crashing when two versions of the dll are loaded at once.
Also iirc the license for the main cygwin library is GPL with a linking exception for other FOSS licenses so if your software is not FOSS then afaict you would need a special license to do what you propose in a compliant manner.
There are no areas where the cost of energy is consistent all day and night and year round(is anyone using 100% geothermal or nuclear yet?). If you think you live in such an area then you are at one end of an energy subsidization deal. While that is true in a sense it isn't a deliberate subsidy, it's an artifact of the system and one that is seen in almost every electricity market. Some markets have two-rate tarrifs available but (at least in the UK) these only tend to be used for properties with storage heaters (electric heaters that heat up during the night and release thier heat during the day).
Time-of-day based metering is starting to appear but there are a lot of issues to deal with before it sees wide deployment such as how to structure the tarrifs in a way that both encourages people to move thier power use to off-peak times and makes it reasonably feasible for people to predict the cost of thier electricty and compare suppliers.
I was under the impression that most large generators used electromagnets to create the field. These rare-earth magnets are a relatively recent thing afaict.
Magnets are part of the generator not part of the turbine. Afaict due to issues such as speed variation and the fact they need to be light enough to mount up a tall pole economically wind-turbine generators are rather different from those used with more conventional steam, gas or (dam-based) hydro turbines.
Since moving to the UK I've not had any power outages. why is American electricity so unstable? The americans seem to preffer to do thier electricity distribution overhead. This is cheaper than underground but more susceptible to damage and disruption. Areas of the UK using overhead distribution (generally rural areas) have similar issues in my experience.
The UK also has the advantage of a pretty mild climate with basically no natural disasters.
Have you not been around for the many many times over the past few years where people have shown viable ways to get around the various common (i.e. the ones we use for anything that matters to this discussion) hashing algorithms? Not really, generating a pair of blocks of data that hash to the same value (acomplished for md5, not yet for sha1) is FAR FAR easier than generating data that matches an exiting hash.
While the first eeepcs did use a 7 inch screen they also had a load of space arround it so the overall size was about the same as the 9 inch models that arrived afterwards. They keyboard on those already feels pretty cramped so I doubt going much smaller is worthwhile.
Coming into the UK it's value is low enough to avoid duty but (assuming the vendor doesn't lie on the customs form) it almost certainly will be hit for VAT and the carrier will almost certainly slap on a handling charge (this seems to vary a lot) for collecting that VAT.
To upgrade the thing you had to fill all 4 slots Were they 30 pin simm slots? on 486 boards and 386DX boards it was normal to have to fill such slots in groups of four since the bus was four times as wide as the modules.
One good thing is motherboard chipsets are becoming irrelevant. Good for intel maybe, I don't think it's good for those who want better 3D performance from their laptops and small form factor boxes though.
At least in the desktop and mobile segment. Intel's increasingly bundling the north bridge with the CPU package. Indeed they are and things don't look good for anyone trying to compete with intel in the onboard graphics market.
For LGA775 processors (late p4 and core 2) intel integrated the graphics with the northbridge giving it easy access to the ram. Nvidia seem to have integrated the entire chipset into one main chip again giving the graphics stuff easy and fast access to main memory.
Current nahelm based processors don't seem to have any provisions for onboard graphics at all (other than using a PCIe soloution with it's own memory) which would seem to be a good thing for vendors of add-in cards. However with the next shrink it seems they are going to put graphics in the package with the CPU. I'd bet that the vast majority of nahelm based laptops will be using that on-chip graphics.
There was also the HP mini 2140 which was about the size of an EEEPC 900 but had shoehorned in a 10 inch screen and a proper HDD. Unfortunately they never released the HD screen option for it in the UK and due to problems with a supplier I missed my opportunity to grey import one.
The organisation I work at (it's a university) spends about a million quid a year because people fail to turn off PCs overnight. Could you tell me what data and assumptions were used to calculate that or are you just taking someone elses word for it?
Older Apples are actually better for Linux, because there's been plenty of time for all the driver support to mature.Older Apples are actually better for Linux, because there's been plenty of time for all the driver support to mature. The downside of running linux on ppc is that you can't run flash and your choice of java versions are restricted to either a very old IBM port, a non-jit openjdk port or a highly experimental LLVM based jit.
The downside of running an old version of os-x is that in the not too distant future both security updates and new versions of applications are likely to dry up.
I'm guessing that when someone does do an aluminum netbook, it will be a company like Sony, who will make the price quite high and position it as a posh upscale model. It's called the HP mini 5101, at least some of the case is metal (it's tricky to tell exactly which bits because of the surface coatings but they've definately got it where it matters like the hinge and the screen back) and unlike most 10 inch machines it has a decent screen resoloution. The downside is it costs nearly twice as much as a basic 10 inch netbook.
I can't agree there, the original EEE had a screen that didn't even fill it's lid and had a horribly low resolution. The 900 series fixed that and is still IMO a good choice if you can live with the limited mass storage and the 600 pixels vertical resolution. Pity that it seems to be disappearing:(.
What really disappointed me was when they want to 10 inch they didn't increase the screen resolution. Eventually a couple of 10 inch "netbooks" with 1366x768 screens showed up (sony do one as do HP, I saw one announced by asus recently but I haven't actually seen it on the market yet) but they command a huge price premium (nearly 2x the price) over ordinary 10 inch netbooks.
most of the 12 inch "netbooks" i've seen have a 1366x768 resolution (marketed as "HD"). This one is no exception.
you can even get 1366x768 in a 10 inch though the prices are stretching the definition of a netbook (e.g. the mini 5101 with HD screen is currently £410 inc VAT ands the vaio w is currently £380 inc VAT) though they've come down a bit since I bought mine.
Slashdot Mirror
added text in bold
From the operating systems point of view these look no different from any other drive. it's just that they will perform badly if the partitions are misaligned so I don't see how it will cause drives formatted on one system to fail to work on another.
USB drives will be the worse though since 4k drives formatted for XP won't work with Windows 7 and vise versa
Do you have a source for this claim? it seems very unlikely to me.
From the operating systems point of view these look, it's just that they will perform badly if the partitions are misaligned so I don't see how it will cause drives formatted on one system to fail to work on another.
It doesn't, and indeed these WD drives will still have 512 byte logical sectors so there will be 8 logical sectors to one physical sectors.
The problem is if the partition is misaligned the OS is likely to make a load of unaligned writes. Those unaligned writes will force the drive to do a read-modify-write (which afaict will mean waiting for a complete rotation in the middle of the operation)
Add this to the fact that some systems (most notablly XP) have a habbit of aligning partitions on the boundries of cylinders* and that a typical cylinder is 63 sectors and you have a pretty much guaranteed misalignment.
It's easilly fixed if you know about it and have the right tools (WD supply one) but if you aren't aware of it you will likely get poor performance for no obvious reason.
*cylinders don't really exist on modern drives but bioses emulate them since the traditional real mode hard drive access mechanisms use them.
According to the Anandtech article, only the pretty much end-of-life Windows XP
I wouldn't call XP pretty much end-of-life just yet, you can still purchase it with new systems and it's still supported until april 8 2014 (that's after desktop support expires for the NEXT release of ubuntu LTS) and I haven't seen much use of either vista or win7 in buisness/academia yet.
This isn't that bad though, the logical sectors will still be 512 byte so it's just a matter of getting the partitions aligned right and wd will apparently be supplying a tool for doing this :).
What do you think is going to happen when Amazon announces that they'd be happy to give any author 25% of all sales if they publish direct through Amazon as opposed to the 5% their publishing house gives them?
They already do
http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=2&categoryID=12
"5. Royalties. Provided you are not in breach of your obligations under this Agreement, we will pay you, for each Digital Book we sell, a royalty equal to thirty-five percent (35%) of the applicable Suggested Retail Price for such Digital Book, net of refunds, bad debt, and any taxes charged to a customer (including without limitation sales taxes) (a “Royalty”)."
However where things get interesting is when you introduce amazons reccomendation engine into the picture.
consider http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html , that was about a book that while conventionally published was relatively obscure being given a huge leg-up by amazons reccomendation system. Since afaict books published through amazons print on demand system automatically get listed by amazon I see no reason why the same couldn't happen for the better ones of them.
If (and that is a big if) conventional bookstores die out then afaict much of the advantage of using a conventional publisher will die with them.
to avoid all these greedy publisher problems?
Generally authors enter into exclusive agreements with publishers so if they want to release e-book versions of existing published books then they have no choice but to work with the publishers of those books.
Just like if itunes want the current "hit" music they have to deal with the major record companies.
You mean there's a UNIX utility you can launch fom the command line that will convert a file from any arbitrary format to another arbitrary format without having to obtain a special purpose tool? What do they call it?
The point is on the *nix command line* once I find a series of commands (which may or my not be part of the basic install) that do what I want I can quickly throw them together into a script, surround them with a script loop and throw them at every file in a directory.
In a graphical environment (or an interaction driven text environment but those seem to have mostly died off) there is no such easy way to go from a manual procedure to an automated one. If you are lucky the task is contained within one app. If you are unlucky you have to either do every file manually, find a tool designed to support batch processsing or break out a full-blown programming language and find suitable libraries to use with it (which is FAR FAR more effort than turning a sequence of commands into a shell script).
*Dos style batch files can do this to an extent but afaict they are far more limited and more importantly the command line tools simply aren't there on the windows side and more importantly there is a distinct lack of good windows command line apps. i've never tried the new powershell stuff so I can't comment on how good or bad it is.
you just package Cygwin DLLs with your binaries, and that's it.
Then the user another app with a different version of the cygwin dll (or installs cygwin on thier system) and due to the way cygwin uses shared memory to emulate posix stuff things tend to start crashing when two versions of the dll are loaded at once.
Also iirc the license for the main cygwin library is GPL with a linking exception for other FOSS licenses so if your software is not FOSS then afaict you would need a special license to do what you propose in a compliant manner.
There are no areas where the cost of energy is consistent all day and night and year round(is anyone using 100% geothermal or nuclear yet?). If you think you live in such an area then you are at one end of an energy subsidization deal.
While that is true in a sense it isn't a deliberate subsidy, it's an artifact of the system and one that is seen in almost every electricity market. Some markets have two-rate tarrifs available but (at least in the UK) these only tend to be used for properties with storage heaters (electric heaters that heat up during the night and release thier heat during the day).
Time-of-day based metering is starting to appear but there are a lot of issues to deal with before it sees wide deployment such as how to structure the tarrifs in a way that both encourages people to move thier power use to off-peak times and makes it reasonably feasible for people to predict the cost of thier electricty and compare suppliers.
I was under the impression that most large generators used electromagnets to create the field. These rare-earth magnets are a relatively recent thing afaict.
Magnets are part of the generator not part of the turbine. Afaict due to issues such as speed variation and the fact they need to be light enough to mount up a tall pole economically wind-turbine generators are rather different from those used with more conventional steam, gas or (dam-based) hydro turbines.
Since moving to the UK I've not had any power outages. why is American electricity so unstable?
The americans seem to preffer to do thier electricity distribution overhead. This is cheaper than underground but more susceptible to damage and disruption. Areas of the UK using overhead distribution (generally rural areas) have similar issues in my experience.
The UK also has the advantage of a pretty mild climate with basically no natural disasters.
Have you not been around for the many many times over the past few years where people have shown viable ways to get around the various common (i.e. the ones we use for anything that matters to this discussion) hashing algorithms?
Not really, generating a pair of blocks of data that hash to the same value (acomplished for md5, not yet for sha1) is FAR FAR easier than generating data that matches an exiting hash.
While the first eeepcs did use a 7 inch screen they also had a load of space arround it so the overall size was about the same as the 9 inch models that arrived afterwards. They keyboard on those already feels pretty cramped so I doubt going much smaller is worthwhile.
Coming into the UK it's value is low enough to avoid duty but (assuming the vendor doesn't lie on the customs form) it almost certainly will be hit for VAT and the carrier will almost certainly slap on a handling charge (this seems to vary a lot) for collecting that VAT.
To upgrade the thing you had to fill all 4 slots
Were they 30 pin simm slots? on 486 boards and 386DX boards it was normal to have to fill such slots in groups of four since the bus was four times as wide as the modules.
One good thing is motherboard chipsets are becoming irrelevant.
Good for intel maybe, I don't think it's good for those who want better 3D performance from their laptops and small form factor boxes though.
At least in the desktop and mobile segment. Intel's increasingly bundling the north bridge with the CPU package.
Indeed they are and things don't look good for anyone trying to compete with intel in the onboard graphics market.
For LGA775 processors (late p4 and core 2) intel integrated the graphics with the northbridge giving it easy access to the ram. Nvidia seem to have integrated the entire chipset into one main chip again giving the graphics stuff easy and fast access to main memory.
Current nahelm based processors don't seem to have any provisions for onboard graphics at all (other than using a PCIe soloution with it's own memory) which would seem to be a good thing for vendors of add-in cards. However with the next shrink it seems they are going to put graphics in the package with the CPU. I'd bet that the vast majority of nahelm based laptops will be using that on-chip graphics.
There was also the HP mini 2140 which was about the size of an EEEPC 900 but had shoehorned in a 10 inch screen and a proper HDD. Unfortunately they never released the HD screen option for it in the UK and due to problems with a supplier I missed my opportunity to grey import one.
The organisation I work at (it's a university) spends about a million quid a year because people fail to turn off PCs overnight.
Could you tell me what data and assumptions were used to calculate that or are you just taking someone elses word for it?
E300000 initially and then E10K a day (that's about E3.5 million a year) until they remove the content in question.
However IMO the big deal is likely not this judgement per-se but the me-too lawsuits that are likely to follow.
Older Apples are actually better for Linux, because there's been plenty of time for all the driver support to mature.Older Apples are actually better for Linux, because there's been plenty of time for all the driver support to mature.
The downside of running linux on ppc is that you can't run flash and your choice of java versions are restricted to either a very old IBM port, a non-jit openjdk port or a highly experimental LLVM based jit.
The downside of running an old version of os-x is that in the not too distant future both security updates and new versions of applications are likely to dry up.
I'm guessing that when someone does do an aluminum netbook, it will be a company like Sony, who will make the price quite high and position it as a posh upscale model.
It's called the HP mini 5101, at least some of the case is metal (it's tricky to tell exactly which bits because of the surface coatings but they've definately got it where it matters like the hinge and the screen back) and unlike most 10 inch machines it has a decent screen resoloution. The downside is it costs nearly twice as much as a basic 10 inch netbook.
I can't agree there, the original EEE had a screen that didn't even fill it's lid and had a horribly low resolution. The 900 series fixed that and is still IMO a good choice if you can live with the limited mass storage and the 600 pixels vertical resolution. Pity that it seems to be disappearing :(.
What really disappointed me was when they want to 10 inch they didn't increase the screen resolution. Eventually a couple of 10 inch "netbooks" with 1366x768 screens showed up (sony do one as do HP, I saw one announced by asus recently but I haven't actually seen it on the market yet) but they command a huge price premium (nearly 2x the price) over ordinary 10 inch netbooks.
most of the 12 inch "netbooks" i've seen have a 1366x768 resolution (marketed as "HD"). This one is no exception.
you can even get 1366x768 in a 10 inch though the prices are stretching the definition of a netbook (e.g. the mini 5101 with HD screen is currently £410 inc VAT ands the vaio w is currently £380 inc VAT) though they've come down a bit since I bought mine.