That is true. Consider also that the air that you foul up by paying coal-powered plants to make electrity is MY AIR. NOT THE GOVERNMENTS AIR. It's mine, and you are taking it from me.
Oh you must be right, only you in your infinite wisdom can decide what is good practice and what is bullshit.
Well for your information, my preferred mode of working is with two emacs buffers side-by-side. In this case, you can't fit much more than two 80 column buffers onto a modern computer screen. On my current screen, the best I would be able to do would be 97, and that's if I fill the whole screen with emacs, which I prefer not to do. So observing the 80 column rule helps me in my working environment.
It's absolutely true that my particular preferred way of working is only one very tiny datapoint in deciding what number of columns to restrict code to. However, there has to be a limit, and someone will always bitch about it whatever it is. I have no problem making my code a bit more 'vertical' to make it fit 80 columns. I have never ever been unable to write readable 80 column code no matter what the situation. 80 columns is the historical limit, and I see no problem with it. Learn to code within the limit and you will be fine.
Re:Kernel debugger considered harmful by Linus
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That doesn't make debuggers useless. I find it laughable that some people think debuggers are a bad thing. How can a tool that lets you inspect the workings of a program be a bad thing?
Well, I use emacs, not some GUI IDE, so there is no switching between windows, there are simply keystrokes for switching between buffers. Moving hunks of text around and launching compilers etc are also very quick and simple keystrokes. With emacs, the mouse doesn't even enter into the picture, so the integrated gesturing support of the touchstream doesn't seem so useful to me personally. I even have my window manager set so that almost all functionality can be accomplished via keystrokes, and when I have my head down and am really working hard, my hands never need to reach up from the keyboard for anything.
Still, your posts have inspired me to read a bit about the touchstream. If one was easily available to me, I'd be happy to try it based on what I've read. That being said, I have strong doubts that it could improve the speed at which I can type/edit code, because having used emacs for 18 years (!!!) I'm pretty efficient already.
The thing is, I can already type faster than I can think on normal keyboards so... I don't think a keyboard could make me more "productive". As a software developer, the time I spend thinking is much more important than the time I spend typing. Also, I think while I'm typing so the typing isn't "dead time" for me.
Perhaps if I was a journalist or something, typing faster would make me more productive. But in my current job, even if the code appeared instantaneously as I thought of it, I wouldn't end up being a whole lot more productive.
That is just stupid. My 3 year old Panasonic Y2 with a 14.1 inch screen weighs the same. How does a laptop with only a 10 inch screen (and presumably a small form factor to fit it) weigh 3.2 pounds?!?
My Y2 also had roughly the same claimed battery life when it came out (I think it was 6+ hours for the Y2). But as with any product based on Lithium Ion batteries (a crappy tech if there ever was one), you can expect half that battery life after 1 year, and 1/4 after three years. Now I'm down to about 1 hour on the battery pack, but it's about what I expected.
All that being said, I have never been happier with a laptop than I am with this Y2. It's super awesome.
The same is true in New Zealand. Coming from the USA, I had to laugh at the sentencing here. Convicted murderers get like 10 years in jail. I don't think I've ever heard of a life sentence here. They let convicted murderers out on parole who go on to murder more people. There was a dude last year who went on a killing rampage immediately after being parolled. People here are wising up and getting really pissed off though; there was a large (for New Zealand) demonstration in Auckland last week against the lenient attitudes towards criminals that the system has here.
"Works just fine" to me means that I can type all day in perfect comfort on just about any keyboard. I don't need or want any more out of a keyboard.
I also appreciate being able to go onto just about any one else's keyboard and work on it comfortably. If I had to drag a special keyboard around just so that I could type in comfort, well, that would be a real pain.
This latter issue is a good reason to not even try "better" keyboards. Why get used to something that you won't always have?
I really have to wonder why the heck people make lowball bids like that anyway. It's a total waste of everyone's time. ESPECIALLY if you're just going to try to back out if your lowball bid wins.
Lowball bidders = morons.
Also, bidders who bid multiple times on the same item instead of using the autobid feature the way it was intended = morons. Unfortunately, there are a HELL of alot of these morons around.
I work all day on keyboards, as a software developer, and I have very little preference for keyboard. I can work on anything, anytime, anywhere, without pain or difficulty. Only two things get me:
* Nonstandard key layouts (a surprising number of keyboard manufacturers put punctuation keys in odd places) * Split keyboards, like the Microsoft Natural series (I don't touch-type, I am self taught with a technique that I think just naturally fits me)
(well, also weird things like Data Gloves like my coworker used to use, don't work well for me either)
So you should stop feeling puzzled. Many people don't really need anything special because the cheapest stuff available works just fine for them.
Just about the only real criteria I have for a keyboard (aside from the above) is that it have a rectangular 'enter' key. I really get bugged by those keyboards that have an enter key that looks like it's swallowed a couple of keys above it. I don't hit my enter key with my fist, so I don't need a target that big.
That is not uncommon. Where I grew up (NE Ohio) many country roads were named after the owner of the land at either endpoint. Hence, Solomon-Hutchings Rd, Tibbets-Wick Rd, Albright-McKay Rd (my grandparents lived on this one), Sharon-Stewart Rd, etc. Definitely it made for unique and memorable, although long, road names.
You are a scare monger who is trying to imply that one major disaster in the entire history of nuclear power plants makes them all unacceptably dangerous.
I agree with the GP poster. I would welcome a nuclear power plant in 'my backyard'. Not my actual back yard, I wouldn't want any kind of power plant that close to me, just because they're all ugly and have other undesireable features (such as noise, normal industrial scale pollution, the kind of stuff that any industrialized area suffers from that keeps people from building houses in industrial zones). But as close as any other industrial facility would be fine by me.
And I seriously, really, mean it. I suppose the only thing I would not be happy about is that the value of my house would go down because most of the population is just as ignorant as you are and have an irrational fear of nuclear power plants.
I have recently been testing NX as a replacement for my current system, which is:
* Run a VNC server on my local workstation at work, and run an X server as well that runs a single, full-screen program: a VNC viewer of the local desktop.
* When I am at home (or actually, halfway around the world since my office workstation is in California and my home is in New Zealand), I can VNC-over-SSH into my work VNC server and have the exact same view on the same desktop that I have at work
This is super awesome because it lets me use the same desktop wherever I am.
However, VNC has terrible performance over high-latency/low-bandwidth links. TERRIBLE. Even if I choose the best compression I can find, it's still bad. With VNC, you have to have latencies less than 100 ms and bandwidth > 1 mbit to be remotely useable, and true useability does not start until your latencies drop to under 20 ms and your bandwidth is at ethernet speeds.
I have experimented with NX as a substitute, and from a performance perspective, it is *way* better than VNC; it is useable at latencies as high as 80 ms and bandwidths as low as 56k. I find that truly good useability requires latencies under 40 ms though. 56k bandwidth is plenty. However, with latencies from NZ to CA being 150 ms minimum, NX as a simple X11 proxy doesn't cut it. It is not really workable to have to wait a third of a second or more for a single mouse click to 'register'.
Enter nxagent. This is an X11 server that is further optimized to work with NX proxies and reduce roundtrips considerably. I find that this is *much* more useable with high latency links - 200 ms latencies result in on-the-edge-of-useable interactive performance.
However, I haven't dug deeply enough to figure out how to get NX agent to have the other great feature of VNC - that I can disconnect from VNC, and reconnect, and see the exact same desktop I had right before I left.
Since I run nxagent on my local system, and the X clients on the remote host, if my connection drops, then all the X clients get 'server disconnected' and they die. They can't be reconnected to. I am not sure if any solution to this exists.
There are very few movies with truly convincing computer-generated special effects. In fact, I can't even think of ONE.
Things typically look too plastic-y, not lighted properly, and don't move convincingly. Often times the effect is 'good enough' that we are willing to suspend disbelief. But computer graphics, when they are the center of focus of a scene, are to this day not truly convincing.
I agree that when they are used in the periphery of a scene they can be hard to spot, but that's mostly because I'm not really paying attention to what's in the periphery. Kind of like how they used an old tennis shoe instead of an x-wing fighter in the edges of some shot or other in Star Wars. It's not that tennis shoes making convincing x-wings, it's just that we don't pay attention to stuff in the corner (unless the movie is *really* boring, and then it's got far worse problems than crummy special effects).
I just tried all of your settings advice and it is definitely an improvement.
The activity light on my flash drive is flashing for longer periods of time, which leads me to believe that the flushing of the writes is happening in smaller increments.
And whereas before firefox would be completely frozen while the activity light is flashing, it now continues to be responsive.
I am definitely keeping the settings that you have advised. I think everyone who uses Linux on a flash device should be made aware of them!
No, I swear, I am pretty gentle with them. Maybe I have had especially bad luck and you have had especially good luck?
For the 64 MB drive, I could tell after it cracked that there was a flaw in the design. It's hard to describe, but there was an activity LED window that acted in part as a clip for the cap, and it was the stress on this thing from snapping the cap on and off a dozen times or so that cracked the plastic case. It was the kind of thing that I could see happening to pretty much everyone who used one of these drives (which otherwise never left my drawer and certainly was not abused), and thus I was not surprised when the company so quickly and easily agreed to replace it. I got the feeling that they'd had alot of similar calls.
The Patriot is just a cheap piece of crap. It's just a tiny PCB, USB connector, and two halves of a plastic case snapped on. It was easy to snap the halves apart once the PCB got pushed in too far and ended up floating free inside the case. I could see how simply it was put together and it did not surprise me that it had basically no durability.
I get the feeling that most cheap USB devices are like the Patriot. And I would not be surprised if many, many of them break in similar ways. Hence my post. However, I am also not surprised that there are some diamonds in the rough like your flash drive.
I used all of the techniques you described (cabextract, mkisofs, etc). The problem I *think* was experiencing is that the Windows installation CD-ROM also includes an El Torito boot sector, which has to be duplicated correctly in the modified disk that you create with mkisofs. And mkisofs has support for El Torito, but I couldn't figure out how to extract the boot sector from the CD-ROM drive in such a way that I could re-write it with mkisofs and have it be able to actually boot the CD-ROM. I tried using other techniques to boot the Windows install CD-ROM that I created (since it wouldn't boot itself because of the aforementioned boot sector problems), such as booting from another media and running the install CD-ROM's install process from, but they always failed at a certain point when I attempted to select the NTFS partition on the flash drive for installation to. I tried a bunch of different things, based on guesses on what was going on, and nothing worked.
It's a tricky enough process that I think that you really do have to do *exactly* the steps that the howto's tell you to do, using the exact same software in the exact same way, or else some bit or other ends up not being exactly correct on the install CD that you create and it just doesn't work. I imagine that the people that came up with the howto must have gone through many, many attempts before they finally found a set of magical incantations that worked. And without using that exact same set, I essentially have to iterate in the same way to find my own set of magical incantations. And I just didn't have the time or energy for that. After trying the obvious stuff, I just gave up.
I guess for me it's a perception thing. I honestly perceive shareware as a whole as being the lowest quality software. Well I guess the lowest is probably "free software projects that never really went anywhere and were quickly abandoned". But aside from those, which are easy to avoid, I have found that shareware often doesn't have the quality that comes from professional software development by people who get paid to make the software good, nor does it have the quality that comes from free software development by people who do what they do out of love and a desire to be proud of what they have accomplished.
I feel like shareware is mostly produced by people who want to make money off of software but aren't good enough to make their product professional, or in love with their project enough to do it for free.
I know that there are counterexamples to this, but the experiences I have had with shareware in the past have time and again reinforced my opinions in this area.
I much prefer free software over commercial software, and really appreciate people who write software for free and have 'donate' links on their web site. When I find software like this I know that I can both use the software and not pay money if I think it's not worth it, even if I use the software extensively for lack of a better option, but also have the option to donate money if I think the software is particularly good and I am especially appreciative of it (which I have done on numerous occasions).
If I had known that my attempts to use free software to duplicate the steps required to install Windows XP on my flash drive would have been such a miserable and time consuming failure (not due to the shortcomings of the free software involved, but simply because it was not intended for the purposes that I was using it for), I definitely would have just ponied up the cash for the shareware up front. But by the end of a completely wasted day, I didn't even want to do that anymore because I had already sunk more time into the problem than the solution was worth to me.
You are definitely correct in that, but I think that also many consumers don't even realize that the devices may not be very durable and thus that ruggedized versions are necessary for even moderately used devices to maintain their integrity. Of course, I don't believe that even if people did know the difference, that they'd buy the more expensive unit, because people are so willing to put up with anything as long as it's dirt cheap. I've been known to make this same mistake myself from time to time.
In terms of how much more ruggedized versions cost, I agree with you, it's not much more. However, it is at least 10% more I believe, and for many people, that is a cost difference that needs justification. And unless they understand the benefits of ruggedization, many will not choose to pay more.
I have found that the good performance flash is what really costs. Like, 3x the price or more, for the highest performance drives, over the cheapest ones. If I were to buy another flash drive, based on my experience with the ones that I have, I would find that to be a worthwhile expense though and would gladly pay $100 for 8 GB of the fastest flash versus $30 for 8 GB of the standard mediocre stuff.
Are you saying that you run Windows XP from a flash drive?
Do tell how, please! I spent an entire day doing nothing but trying to install Windows XP on a flash drive, and eventually gave up, defeated.
I found some great howto's for installing Windows XP to a flash drive, but they required that you be able to modify the Windows installation CD-ROM using some shareware programs that can change files on an ISO copy of the CD without altering the structure of the CD, such that you can just change some files, write the ISO back out, and you've got essentially the same Windows XP installation CD, but with some minor changes in.ini files that allow installing to flash.
Unfortunately, I refused to use any shareware programs for the purpose, and instead tried to use equivalent freeware Linux software for doing this. But it didn't work - the Windows installation CD was not bootable after I changed the files and re-wrote the ISO file, and I think it's because the tools I was using modified the ISO in such a way to put files in different places on the disk than the Windows boot loader on the disk was looking for them at.
Anyway, I gave up, after trying many many different things except to follow the instructions exactly, which like I said, would have required shareware (and on Windows no less), which I refuse to use.
If you have any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.
This does remind me of what a geek I am though. I think I must be the only person in the world who often daydreams (when I have the time and inclination to daydream) that I've gone back in time and taken some piece of modern computer equipment to shock and amaze people from the early days of computing.
For example, I'll daydream that I've taken my laptop (which is now a few years old and not impressive to anybody, but with 768 MB of RAM, a 40 GB disk, and 1.4 Ghz Pentium M, would have blown the socks off of a computer enthusiast from, say, 1969) back in time and am showing it off to a group of scientists like at say that famous "mother of all demos" where the mouse and graphical interface were first demoed.
Can you imagine showing up and being like, hey check this out. That 64 KB PDP-11 that you have running your demo is cool and all. But let me show you my computer, which has 768 MILLION bytes of RAM! And a 1400x1050 32 bit color flat panel LCD display! With built-in keyboard!
It's not that I would lord it over anyone. But it's fun (for me) to daydream about the conversations you'd have with someone from 1969, explaining to them the advances of modern technology and how they are used in our world.
Anyway, your comment reminded me of that, because although a 2 GB flash drive today is totally ho-hum, if you could sneak one of those back in time to the 1970's, you'd have something that governments would probably go to war over:) Of course you'd have to take the USB 2.0 spec back with you too...
I installed Arch Linux on a cheap 2 GB Patriot flash drive. It boots pretty quickly and overall performance seems good, even for a cheap drive. However I don't do hugely disk intensive tasks with it.
One annoying thing I have noticed is that programs will periodically completely freeze up and I'll look over and notice that the activity light on the drive is flashing. A common experience is that Firefox will be completely unresponsive, not even redrawing itself when a window that was obscuring it is moved, until the drive stops flashing, and then Firefox will instantly come back to life.
My theory is that the kernel is caching writes to the drive and then at some random point decides it's time to flush the write cache to disk. I think that any program that tries to write any files while the kernel is flushing the cache gets put into a wait state by the kernel until the cache flush is complete and then whatever write the program was attempting, gets written into the cache, ready to be flushed again on the next cache flush.
Furthermore, I theorize that for normal hard disk drives, the write speed is sufficient to keep "ahead" of cache flushes so that the cache never really "fills up" and no programs ever get waited in this way.
But that for slowish flash drives like mine, the kernel doesn't compensate for the slow write speed of the flash (because the kernel doesn't even realize that it's writing to flash?) and so it lets enough data buffer up that it has to frantically try to flush it all when the cache has filled up. Or perhaps, that the kernel just tries to flush too much at once, not realizing how slow the flush is going to be due to the underlying speed of the device.
I also theorize that this problem could be solved by having the kernel flush the cache more aggressively, and in smaller increments. If the flash drive were kept continually busy flushing small chunks of write cache, then a) the write cache would not be as likely to fill up, and b) no individual write would monopolize the device for such a long period of time becase the writes are all smaller.
Writing all of this makes me realize that the root cause may be that programs are trying to *read* from the device while a write cache flush is happening, and since the device can only do one operation (read or write) at a time, the long duration of the cache flush operation is blocking a program from reading the drive. Furthermore, if what the program is trying to read is a demand-paged part of its text segment, then it makes perfect sense that the whole process would be blocked by the kernel while the text segment piece waits to be loaded.
Am I even close to the mark on this one?
If so, I am sure there are Linux kernel experts who can tell me what values to write into what/proc filesystem entries to turn more aggressive write cache flushing on. I can't keep up with the/proc filesystem because it changes so frequently, so I don't even bother to try to stay abreast of how to do things with the Linux kernel in this way anymore...
My biggest beef with flash drives thus far is with the flimsy construction. I have owned three flash drives. The first was a 64 byte drive back in the day when that was sizeable. I think it was an Iomega drive. It was really tiny which is why I liked it. But after only about a dozen gentle insertions (no jokes please), it developed a crack in the housing which soon threatened to cause the whole device to fall apart. Iomega was kind enough to replace it for free (it was still under warrantly, less than 6 months old) with a 128 Megabyte version. That was drive #2. I think I lost that one.
My next drive was a Patriot 2 GB flash drive. It lasted maybe 50 insertions before the usb connector "pushed in" and became so loose that it could no longer be inserted properly into a USB port. I ended up snapping the outer housing off and now it's just a little tiny PCB with chips on it and a USB connector at the end. Works fine but I wouldn't take it anywhere remotely hostile. I keep it next to my computer.
So what is the point of this long story? That flash drives tend to have really cheap construction (in my experience) that doesn't hold up to much use, let alone much abuse. In the case of the Patriot I'm not surprised because it was a really cheap unit. But the Iomega was not.
I don't doubt that th expensive ruggedized flash drives can take much, much more abuse. But they represent like 1% of the market. Most drives are these really flimsily constructed things that fall apart when you look at them the wrong way.
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That is true. Consider also that the air that you foul up by paying coal-powered plants to make electrity is MY AIR. NOT THE GOVERNMENTS AIR. It's mine, and you are taking it from me.
Oh you must be right, only you in your infinite wisdom can decide what is good practice and what is bullshit.
Well for your information, my preferred mode of working is with two emacs buffers side-by-side. In this case, you can't fit much more than two 80 column buffers onto a modern computer screen. On my current screen, the best I would be able to do would be 97, and that's if I fill the whole screen with emacs, which I prefer not to do. So observing the 80 column rule helps me in my working environment.
It's absolutely true that my particular preferred way of working is only one very tiny datapoint in deciding what number of columns to restrict code to. However, there has to be a limit, and someone will always bitch about it whatever it is. I have no problem making my code a bit more 'vertical' to make it fit 80 columns. I have never ever been unable to write readable 80 column code no matter what the situation. 80 columns is the historical limit, and I see no problem with it. Learn to code within the limit and you will be fine.
That doesn't make debuggers useless. I find it laughable that some people think debuggers are a bad thing. How can a tool that lets you inspect the workings of a program be a bad thing?
Well, I use emacs, not some GUI IDE, so there is no switching between windows, there are simply keystrokes for switching between buffers. Moving hunks of text around and launching compilers etc are also very quick and simple keystrokes. With emacs, the mouse doesn't even enter into the picture, so the integrated gesturing support of the touchstream doesn't seem so useful to me personally. I even have my window manager set so that almost all functionality can be accomplished via keystrokes, and when I have my head down and am really working hard, my hands never need to reach up from the keyboard for anything.
Still, your posts have inspired me to read a bit about the touchstream. If one was easily available to me, I'd be happy to try it based on what I've read. That being said, I have strong doubts that it could improve the speed at which I can type/edit code, because having used emacs for 18 years (!!!) I'm pretty efficient already.
The thing is, I can already type faster than I can think on normal keyboards so ... I don't think a keyboard could make me more "productive". As a software developer, the time I spend thinking is much more important than the time I spend typing. Also, I think while I'm typing so the typing isn't "dead time" for me.
Perhaps if I was a journalist or something, typing faster would make me more productive. But in my current job, even if the code appeared instantaneously as I thought of it, I wouldn't end up being a whole lot more productive.
It weighs 3.2 lbs!?!?!?
That is just stupid. My 3 year old Panasonic Y2 with a 14.1 inch screen weighs the same. How does a laptop with only a 10 inch screen (and presumably a small form factor to fit it) weigh 3.2 pounds?!?
My Y2 also had roughly the same claimed battery life when it came out (I think it was 6+ hours for the Y2). But as with any product based on Lithium Ion batteries (a crappy tech if there ever was one), you can expect half that battery life after 1 year, and 1/4 after three years. Now I'm down to about 1 hour on the battery pack, but it's about what I expected.
All that being said, I have never been happier with a laptop than I am with this Y2. It's super awesome.
The same is true in New Zealand. Coming from the USA, I had to laugh at the sentencing here. Convicted murderers get like 10 years in jail. I don't think I've ever heard of a life sentence here. They let convicted murderers out on parole who go on to murder more people. There was a dude last year who went on a killing rampage immediately after being parolled. People here are wising up and getting really pissed off though; there was a large (for New Zealand) demonstration in Auckland last week against the lenient attitudes towards criminals that the system has here.
"Works just fine" to me means that I can type all day in perfect comfort on just about any keyboard. I don't need or want any more out of a keyboard.
I also appreciate being able to go onto just about any one else's keyboard and work on it comfortably. If I had to drag a special keyboard around just so that I could type in comfort, well, that would be a real pain.
This latter issue is a good reason to not even try "better" keyboards. Why get used to something that you won't always have?
Your version sounds more accurate.
I really have to wonder why the heck people make lowball bids like that anyway. It's a total waste of everyone's time. ESPECIALLY if you're just going to try to back out if your lowball bid wins.
Lowball bidders = morons.
Also, bidders who bid multiple times on the same item instead of using the autobid feature the way it was intended = morons. Unfortunately, there are a HELL of alot of these morons around.
I work all day on keyboards, as a software developer, and I have very little preference for keyboard. I can work on anything, anytime, anywhere, without pain or difficulty. Only two things get me:
* Nonstandard key layouts (a surprising number of keyboard manufacturers put punctuation keys in odd places)
* Split keyboards, like the Microsoft Natural series (I don't touch-type, I am self taught with a technique that I think just naturally fits me)
(well, also weird things like Data Gloves like my coworker used to use, don't work well for me either)
So you should stop feeling puzzled. Many people don't really need anything special because the cheapest stuff available works just fine for them.
Just about the only real criteria I have for a keyboard (aside from the above) is that it have a rectangular 'enter' key. I really get bugged by those keyboards that have an enter key that looks like it's swallowed a couple of keys above it. I don't hit my enter key with my fist, so I don't need a target that big.
That is not uncommon. Where I grew up (NE Ohio) many country roads were named after the owner of the land at either endpoint. Hence, Solomon-Hutchings Rd, Tibbets-Wick Rd, Albright-McKay Rd (my grandparents lived on this one), Sharon-Stewart Rd, etc. Definitely it made for unique and memorable, although long, road names.
You are a scare monger who is trying to imply that one major disaster in the entire history of nuclear power plants makes them all unacceptably dangerous.
I agree with the GP poster. I would welcome a nuclear power plant in 'my backyard'. Not my actual back yard, I wouldn't want any kind of power plant that close to me, just because they're all ugly and have other undesireable features (such as noise, normal industrial scale pollution, the kind of stuff that any industrialized area suffers from that keeps people from building houses in industrial zones). But as close as any other industrial facility would be fine by me.
And I seriously, really, mean it. I suppose the only thing I would not be happy about is that the value of my house would go down because most of the population is just as ignorant as you are and have an irrational fear of nuclear power plants.
I have recently been testing NX as a replacement for my current system, which is:
* Run a VNC server on my local workstation at work, and run an X server as well that runs a single, full-screen program: a VNC viewer of the local desktop.
* When I am at home (or actually, halfway around the world since my office workstation is in California and my home is in New Zealand), I can VNC-over-SSH into my work VNC server and have the exact same view on the same desktop that I have at work
This is super awesome because it lets me use the same desktop wherever I am.
However, VNC has terrible performance over high-latency/low-bandwidth links. TERRIBLE. Even if I choose the best compression I can find, it's still bad. With VNC, you have to have latencies less than 100 ms and bandwidth > 1 mbit to be remotely useable, and true useability does not start until your latencies drop to under 20 ms and your bandwidth is at ethernet speeds.
I have experimented with NX as a substitute, and from a performance perspective, it is *way* better than VNC; it is useable at latencies as high as 80 ms and bandwidths as low as 56k. I find that truly good useability requires latencies under 40 ms though. 56k bandwidth is plenty. However, with latencies from NZ to CA being 150 ms minimum, NX as a simple X11 proxy doesn't cut it. It is not really workable to have to wait a third of a second or more for a single mouse click to 'register'.
Enter nxagent. This is an X11 server that is further optimized to work with NX proxies and reduce roundtrips considerably. I find that this is *much* more useable with high latency links - 200 ms latencies result in on-the-edge-of-useable interactive performance.
However, I haven't dug deeply enough to figure out how to get NX agent to have the other great feature of VNC - that I can disconnect from VNC, and reconnect, and see the exact same desktop I had right before I left.
Since I run nxagent on my local system, and the X clients on the remote host, if my connection drops, then all the X clients get 'server disconnected' and they die. They can't be reconnected to. I am not sure if any solution to this exists.
There are very few movies with truly convincing computer-generated special effects. In fact, I can't even think of ONE.
Things typically look too plastic-y, not lighted properly, and don't move convincingly. Often times the effect is 'good enough' that we are willing to suspend disbelief. But computer graphics, when they are the center of focus of a scene, are to this day not truly convincing.
I agree that when they are used in the periphery of a scene they can be hard to spot, but that's mostly because I'm not really paying attention to what's in the periphery. Kind of like how they used an old tennis shoe instead of an x-wing fighter in the edges of some shot or other in Star Wars. It's not that tennis shoes making convincing x-wings, it's just that we don't pay attention to stuff in the corner (unless the movie is *really* boring, and then it's got far worse problems than crummy special effects).
I just tried all of your settings advice and it is definitely an improvement.
The activity light on my flash drive is flashing for longer periods of time, which leads me to believe that the flushing of the writes is happening in smaller increments.
And whereas before firefox would be completely frozen while the activity light is flashing, it now continues to be responsive.
I am definitely keeping the settings that you have advised. I think everyone who uses Linux on a flash device should be made aware of them!
Awesome advice - you are definitely my hero! I will try what you suggest and appreciate the thorough and informative response.
No, I swear, I am pretty gentle with them. Maybe I have had especially bad luck and you have had especially good luck?
For the 64 MB drive, I could tell after it cracked that there was a flaw in the design. It's hard to describe, but there was an activity LED window that acted in part as a clip for the cap, and it was the stress on this thing from snapping the cap on and off a dozen times or so that cracked the plastic case. It was the kind of thing that I could see happening to pretty much everyone who used one of these drives (which otherwise never left my drawer and certainly was not abused), and thus I was not surprised when the company so quickly and easily agreed to replace it. I got the feeling that they'd had alot of similar calls.
The Patriot is just a cheap piece of crap. It's just a tiny PCB, USB connector, and two halves of a plastic case snapped on. It was easy to snap the halves apart once the PCB got pushed in too far and ended up floating free inside the case. I could see how simply it was put together and it did not surprise me that it had basically no durability.
I get the feeling that most cheap USB devices are like the Patriot. And I would not be surprised if many, many of them break in similar ways. Hence my post. However, I am also not surprised that there are some diamonds in the rough like your flash drive.
I used all of the techniques you described (cabextract, mkisofs, etc). The problem I *think* was experiencing is that the Windows installation CD-ROM also includes an El Torito boot sector, which has to be duplicated correctly in the modified disk that you create with mkisofs. And mkisofs has support for El Torito, but I couldn't figure out how to extract the boot sector from the CD-ROM drive in such a way that I could re-write it with mkisofs and have it be able to actually boot the CD-ROM. I tried using other techniques to boot the Windows install CD-ROM that I created (since it wouldn't boot itself because of the aforementioned boot sector problems), such as booting from another media and running the install CD-ROM's install process from, but they always failed at a certain point when I attempted to select the NTFS partition on the flash drive for installation to. I tried a bunch of different things, based on guesses on what was going on, and nothing worked.
It's a tricky enough process that I think that you really do have to do *exactly* the steps that the howto's tell you to do, using the exact same software in the exact same way, or else some bit or other ends up not being exactly correct on the install CD that you create and it just doesn't work. I imagine that the people that came up with the howto must have gone through many, many attempts before they finally found a set of magical incantations that worked. And without using that exact same set, I essentially have to iterate in the same way to find my own set of magical incantations. And I just didn't have the time or energy for that. After trying the obvious stuff, I just gave up.
I guess for me it's a perception thing. I honestly perceive shareware as a whole as being the lowest quality software. Well I guess the lowest is probably "free software projects that never really went anywhere and were quickly abandoned". But aside from those, which are easy to avoid, I have found that shareware often doesn't have the quality that comes from professional software development by people who get paid to make the software good, nor does it have the quality that comes from free software development by people who do what they do out of love and a desire to be proud of what they have accomplished.
I feel like shareware is mostly produced by people who want to make money off of software but aren't good enough to make their product professional, or in love with their project enough to do it for free.
I know that there are counterexamples to this, but the experiences I have had with shareware in the past have time and again reinforced my opinions in this area.
I much prefer free software over commercial software, and really appreciate people who write software for free and have 'donate' links on their web site. When I find software like this I know that I can both use the software and not pay money if I think it's not worth it, even if I use the software extensively for lack of a better option, but also have the option to donate money if I think the software is particularly good and I am especially appreciative of it (which I have done on numerous occasions).
If I had known that my attempts to use free software to duplicate the steps required to install Windows XP on my flash drive would have been such a miserable and time consuming failure (not due to the shortcomings of the free software involved, but simply because it was not intended for the purposes that I was using it for), I definitely would have just ponied up the cash for the shareware up front. But by the end of a completely wasted day, I didn't even want to do that anymore because I had already sunk more time into the problem than the solution was worth to me.
You are definitely correct in that, but I think that also many consumers don't even realize that the devices may not be very durable and thus that ruggedized versions are necessary for even moderately used devices to maintain their integrity. Of course, I don't believe that even if people did know the difference, that they'd buy the more expensive unit, because people are so willing to put up with anything as long as it's dirt cheap. I've been known to make this same mistake myself from time to time.
In terms of how much more ruggedized versions cost, I agree with you, it's not much more. However, it is at least 10% more I believe, and for many people, that is a cost difference that needs justification. And unless they understand the benefits of ruggedization, many will not choose to pay more.
I have found that the good performance flash is what really costs. Like, 3x the price or more, for the highest performance drives, over the cheapest ones. If I were to buy another flash drive, based on my experience with the ones that I have, I would find that to be a worthwhile expense though and would gladly pay $100 for 8 GB of the fastest flash versus $30 for 8 GB of the standard mediocre stuff.
Well I guess I am not alone after all! Indeed I have daydreamed in 'the reverse direction' too :)
Are you saying that you run Windows XP from a flash drive?
.ini files that allow installing to flash.
Do tell how, please! I spent an entire day doing nothing but trying to install Windows XP on a flash drive, and eventually gave up, defeated.
I found some great howto's for installing Windows XP to a flash drive, but they required that you be able to modify the Windows installation CD-ROM using some shareware programs that can change files on an ISO copy of the CD without altering the structure of the CD, such that you can just change some files, write the ISO back out, and you've got essentially the same Windows XP installation CD, but with some minor changes in
Unfortunately, I refused to use any shareware programs for the purpose, and instead tried to use equivalent freeware Linux software for doing this. But it didn't work - the Windows installation CD was not bootable after I changed the files and re-wrote the ISO file, and I think it's because the tools I was using modified the ISO in such a way to put files in different places on the disk than the Windows boot loader on the disk was looking for them at.
Anyway, I gave up, after trying many many different things except to follow the instructions exactly, which like I said, would have required shareware (and on Windows no less), which I refuse to use.
If you have any advice, it would be greatly appreciated.
Whoops, typo :) But your response was funny.
:) Of course you'd have to take the USB 2.0 spec back with you too ...
...
This does remind me of what a geek I am though. I think I must be the only person in the world who often daydreams (when I have the time and inclination to daydream) that I've gone back in time and taken some piece of modern computer equipment to shock and amaze people from the early days of computing.
For example, I'll daydream that I've taken my laptop (which is now a few years old and not impressive to anybody, but with 768 MB of RAM, a 40 GB disk, and 1.4 Ghz Pentium M, would have blown the socks off of a computer enthusiast from, say, 1969) back in time and am showing it off to a group of scientists like at say that famous "mother of all demos" where the mouse and graphical interface were first demoed.
Can you imagine showing up and being like, hey check this out. That 64 KB PDP-11 that you have running your demo is cool and all. But let me show you my computer, which has 768 MILLION bytes of RAM! And a 1400x1050 32 bit color flat panel LCD display! With built-in keyboard!
It's not that I would lord it over anyone. But it's fun (for me) to daydream about the conversations you'd have with someone from 1969, explaining to them the advances of modern technology and how they are used in our world.
Anyway, your comment reminded me of that, because although a 2 GB flash drive today is totally ho-hum, if you could sneak one of those back in time to the 1970's, you'd have something that governments would probably go to war over
Like I said, I am a total geek
I installed Arch Linux on a cheap 2 GB Patriot flash drive. It boots pretty quickly and overall performance seems good, even for a cheap drive. However I don't do hugely disk intensive tasks with it.
/proc filesystem entries to turn more aggressive write cache flushing on. I can't keep up with the /proc filesystem because it changes so frequently, so I don't even bother to try to stay abreast of how to do things with the Linux kernel in this way anymore ...
One annoying thing I have noticed is that programs will periodically completely freeze up and I'll look over and notice that the activity light on the drive is flashing. A common experience is that Firefox will be completely unresponsive, not even redrawing itself when a window that was obscuring it is moved, until the drive stops flashing, and then Firefox will instantly come back to life.
My theory is that the kernel is caching writes to the drive and then at some random point decides it's time to flush the write cache to disk. I think that any program that tries to write any files while the kernel is flushing the cache gets put into a wait state by the kernel until the cache flush is complete and then whatever write the program was attempting, gets written into the cache, ready to be flushed again on the next cache flush.
Furthermore, I theorize that for normal hard disk drives, the write speed is sufficient to keep "ahead" of cache flushes so that the cache never really "fills up" and no programs ever get waited in this way.
But that for slowish flash drives like mine, the kernel doesn't compensate for the slow write speed of the flash (because the kernel doesn't even realize that it's writing to flash?) and so it lets enough data buffer up that it has to frantically try to flush it all when the cache has filled up. Or perhaps, that the kernel just tries to flush too much at once, not realizing how slow the flush is going to be due to the underlying speed of the device.
I also theorize that this problem could be solved by having the kernel flush the cache more aggressively, and in smaller increments. If the flash drive were kept continually busy flushing small chunks of write cache, then a) the write cache would not be as likely to fill up, and b) no individual write would monopolize the device for such a long period of time becase the writes are all smaller.
Writing all of this makes me realize that the root cause may be that programs are trying to *read* from the device while a write cache flush is happening, and since the device can only do one operation (read or write) at a time, the long duration of the cache flush operation is blocking a program from reading the drive. Furthermore, if what the program is trying to read is a demand-paged part of its text segment, then it makes perfect sense that the whole process would be blocked by the kernel while the text segment piece waits to be loaded.
Am I even close to the mark on this one?
If so, I am sure there are Linux kernel experts who can tell me what values to write into what
My biggest beef with flash drives thus far is with the flimsy construction. I have owned three flash drives. The first was a 64 byte drive back in the day when that was sizeable. I think it was an Iomega drive. It was really tiny which is why I liked it. But after only about a dozen gentle insertions (no jokes please), it developed a crack in the housing which soon threatened to cause the whole device to fall apart. Iomega was kind enough to replace it for free (it was still under warrantly, less than 6 months old) with a 128 Megabyte version. That was drive #2. I think I lost that one.
My next drive was a Patriot 2 GB flash drive. It lasted maybe 50 insertions before the usb connector "pushed in" and became so loose that it could no longer be inserted properly into a USB port. I ended up snapping the outer housing off and now it's just a little tiny PCB with chips on it and a USB connector at the end. Works fine but I wouldn't take it anywhere remotely hostile. I keep it next to my computer.
So what is the point of this long story? That flash drives tend to have really cheap construction (in my experience) that doesn't hold up to much use, let alone much abuse. In the case of the Patriot I'm not surprised because it was a really cheap unit. But the Iomega was not.
I don't doubt that th expensive ruggedized flash drives can take much, much more abuse. But they represent like 1% of the market. Most drives are these really flimsily constructed things that fall apart when you look at them the wrong way.