Hmm, who wants to help me do some "independent research" of our own? We could compare Linux running on a WRT54G
Unfortunately it wouldn't do too well on the capabilities side of the equation. To be fair Microsoft does somewhat have a point as IBM, one of the foremost advocates of Linux, is pushing the virtual-Linux-on-a-mainframe concept, and a lot of people are buying. It seems that Microsoft was tageting that competitor rather than Linux-running-on-obsoleted-developer-PC.
I didn't bother checking, but most advertising boards are self-regulating groups that actually have zero real authority.
It's a very passionate stream of adjectives, however I don't think it's fair to call it a troll. Indeed I can most certainly commiserate with the observations, having fought the good fight - fighting trying to get your bloody numbered list consistent, or maintaining a certain style, etc. These are all very well described gaps of Word that are caused by its overly complex internal structure.
Of course Word is hardly the only culprit. Edit an email in HTML format in Outlook - it's absolutely fascinating the things it does.
Even better, given that the patent office is obviously (hugely) fallible, patent holders should hold the liability that if they threaten a "patent violator" in any way, the "violator" has the right to instantly force a proof trial (no more patent blackmail, which is largely the unfortunate purpose of patents). If the patent itself is proven to be trivial/obvious to practitioners/with obvious prior art, the patent holder should pay all defendant legal costs, as well as a huge penalty for abusing the patent system with noise (which >99% of software patents are).
This would be a huge victory for the software industry in general, while forcing the patent holders to consider their patent enforcement (or even applications - why bother will bullshit patents if they represent such a potential liability - don't bother unless you're sure) very seriously.
My signature can't be "read" (while it originally derived IHandwrittenName, it was significantly personalized and aesthetically simplified over time), and this has led to quite a few inane "Haha! THAT'S your signature?" comments.
A signature is just an individualized sequence of muscle movements that technically could be you writing an offensive remark. That's why there's normally a printed name aside it.
Well ultimately the police component of municipal budgets is the one element that gets rubber stamped virtually every year, despite the endless increases (in my region I believe the year over year increase this year was 7%...we certainly aren't growing that quickly, and crime is actually signficantly down the past couple of years). What mayor wants to be for rapists or muggers (as clearly that's what such a refusal would stand for).
I think the eventual result is that 50% of the population will be police officers, and we'll each have our own assigned cop. Actually given that there's 3 shifts, at least 75% of the population will have to be men and women in blue (probably more accounting for holidays and weekends).
Do you mean ultra-violet light? I don't believe normal glass blocks much IR at all, though there are some special, more expensive glasses (low-E) that block most IR. On the downside this means that on a sunny winter day you can't take much advantage of the sun because the IR is being blocked just as it is on a sunny 30C day.
While the article in question has an attention grabbing headline, it's basically a completely vapid rehash of the standard component software development, advocating that with plug-and-play components software can just be snapped together as if it were an assembly line. Oooh, newsflash to the author -- this has been advocated for decades. We hardly need a chief super extreme architect extraordinaire from Microsoft to reword this for us.
but isnt 2x256 also faster than 1x512? Afterall, you got two banks from which you can read/write data to?
Filling more memory slots with a single memory controller will actually increase latencies and slow your memory performance - it won't suddenly talk to all the chips at once.
What you may be thinking of is dual-channel motherboards like the nForce - these have separate memory controllers, both talking to each DIMM independently and then combining the results.
Making the example of movies shows you ain't got a clue about what raid 0 and speed is about. Movies typically load very slowly, hell they can be read from CD and it doesn't get much slower then that.
Thanks for the lesson professor, but I think you need some reading comprehension skills.
A miniDV file is about 11GB for 60 minutes of video, and one generally wants to put it on a DVD-R at about 4.7GB - compressing the file using MPEG2 is extremely intensive on the PC (one of the few things that really makes you wish for a faster PC), and is generally much slower than real-time. The point is that this is one of the few applications where mass amounts of data are used regularly on desktop machines, but even then the hard drives are most certainly not the weak link -- put them in a huge array and you'll still be waiting the same length of time. Video processing is the #1 stated reason people give for RAID arrays, yet the disk is seldom the limiting factor.
Level loads in games are different. There you gotta wait until the full level is loaded and to some people that matters. I know for a fact that in MMORPG's you can see wich people got the slowass PC's with the dell HD's. They are the people that arrive in a new location minutes after everyone else.
Even the slowest modern drive loads at about 30MB/second (and most standard ones read 50MB/second) -- do you really think that new level has 3GB of data that it needs to read? Here's a clue stick for you -- Most games load a little bit, and then decompress or process in memory, and then they load a little bit more, and decompress or process into structures in memory. Repeat. While the little HD light might be on for an extended period of time, it is highly likely that the weak link is actually your processor, not the hard drive.
Wether YOU need it is irrelevant. That is taste, never argue about taste on a tech site.
Uh, okay Philosopher King. Whether YOU need it is irrelevant too, so what the hell is your point?
Whoops I actually meant to type 27 seconds - missed the 2 (I coincidentally timed it last night because I intended to do an Access disk defrag with O&O and wanted to see the improvement). 7200 RPM IDE hard drive with the standard Diskeeper defrag.
Well I bet then that the machine doesn't do anything , my 2003 is using nearly 2 minutes before I get a promt
Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition running SQL Server 2005, IIS, among a plethora of additional services. As a sidenote, the login prompt doesn't wait until the services are all running. But yes, it is a desktop machine - I do software development and database development using data samples -- I don't make it double as a production environment (that's what servers using SANs are for).
Right, and that's my point - the most commonly given justification for RAID arrays on a desktop machine is video compression (as it's really the only thing that uses huge amounts of data), yet it is signficantly more constricted by other limits than it is by disk I/O limits. Other than that there are few examples of huge data usage on the desktop, apart from contrived examples.
This definitely reveals itself because of the fact that games like Doom 3, Far Cry, and Painkiller are all perfectly playable on my computer, but the latter two games take an unbearably long time to load.
Most modern SATA hard drives read at approximately 50-70MB/second -- do you really think this is the reason those games load slowly? It isn't. They generally load slowly because of the use of compressed objects, or maps that need to be rendered into structures in memory: It's far more likely your CPU that is the limiting factor (it's easy enough to turn on performance monitor and see).
"I can't tell you how nice it is to have my computer boot in half the time... how your system feels like you always wished it would feel. You can add all the memory you want, all the processing power you want, but if you can't feed the computer, it's all pointless...The only thing I wish now was that my system had a faster and/or wider bus that would allow me to take advantage of all the currently unused bandwidth available from the four drives."
Translation - "If my system were tremendously faster, then it would justify the risk and cost of my unnecessary 4-drive RAID-0 array! Don't knock it until you've tried some future computer that actually has a use for this bandwidth!"
There are a few problems with your analysis. Firstly, boot time really isn't that important (yes, even if you're using Windows) - booting from a single disk IDE Windows Server 2003 is awaiting your login in about 7 seconds. Not really a critical amount of time.
For virutally all other activity (I'm currently running Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Sever 2005, IIS, a variety of web services, Mozilla, Outlook, and a plethora of system services) the hard drives are twiddling their spindles, doing absolutely nothing, and when they do it's generally sporatic very-small accesses that are affected by random access astronomically more than by throughput.
But for the majority of us normal people who are running huge multi-threaded database applications on their desktop machines, RAID-0 is much nicer than having to manually allocate all of your database extents across your disks. Of course, RAID-10 would be better, but that would involve spending money.../I>
The number of users that have a database on their desktop that puts space pressure on their harddrive (which are now generally in the 120-200GB range) is absolutely miniscule (and more likely the domain of really poor process shops where they have no development servers, and copy production right to the developers desktops. There is so much wrong there I won't even start).
A common theme, revisited several times, in the article is that the other conclusions were wrong because they used low-load testing.
"A safe conclusion would be that a Business Winstone 2004-benchmark alone is not a good starting point when testing RAID 0 performance. On the contrary: to have some reliable tests, we will need to put heavy loads on the array."
In essence, if my understanding is correct, they're saying that the value of a RAID 0 setup is under constant extreme loads, not the loads created by business applications or games. Isn't this entirely the point of the articles in question - That given the sporatic, generally light load of even power users, RAID 0 is not really that beneficial (as random access plays even more of a part than gross throughput)?
Even under perceived heavy I/O loads, the reality is often that the hard disk is under-used - I occasionally compress videos from miniDV to DVD, and my CPU would need a four or five fold increase in speed to even begin to put pressure on the single 7200 RPM hard disk.
In many states, including Texas, you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" unless you have a degree in engineering
Note that in most juristictions it's not the degree that matters, but rather the membership in a sanctioned monopoly engineering guild. There are actually ways to get a professional engineering membership without having an engineering degree (such as by working in an engineering field for a prescribed period of time), and conversely having an engineering degree doesn't automatically translate into earning membership in the guild. There are loads of engineering graduates out there who can't legally called themselves engineers.
As a sidenote, this power to coopt a traditional word is largely unproven - Here in Ontario it was long believed that the word "engineer" or "engineering" was owned, in essence, by the professional engineers of Ontario. Even Microsoft backed down when threatened, encouraging MCSE holders not to use the expanded version of the acronym in the province of Ontario. Microsoft considered their legal options, and eventually told its membership to go ahead and use the term engineer. I've yet to hear about them regretting this decision.
The P4EE was largely a marketing chip from the beginning - they squeezed it out just in time to take some of the thunder out of the newly released Athlon 64 back in September of last year.
This largely stopped AMD from recapturing the performance crown, despite the fact that supplies of the P4EE were extremely tight, and the price was hugely non-competitive.
"Doom 3 doesn't change the formula. Maybe, as a console gamer I'm biased, but Doom 3 is certainly the belle of the ball now, unless the mod community really takes off I don't seeing it being a watermark for gaming."
This is exactly what people said when the various Quake issues emerged on the scene - "They forgot multiplayer, and multiplayer is where it's at" "Same old same old" "No innovation". I think it'd be interesting for a lot of the cynics to revisit the reviews of these old games some time.
The real power of Carmack's creations, though, is that he builds a tremendously flexible framework (usually with cutting edge graphics), and tosses it over to the mod community. As games themselves each of the Quake franchise games were okay, but nothing special, but by way of mods (Action Quake, Urban Terror, among others) I must have spent thousands of hours on each of those games. The entertainment value was extraordinary. Carmack basically has a habit of delivering solid foundations, usually with a half decent get-you-started game. The user community then takes that framework and makes something extraordinary.
Lets put you in a chair and drop you straight down, see how well you fare.
If the occupant instantly lost absolutely all lift, they'd hit the ground at about 27 km/h - fairly hard, but certainly not fatal or serious on most surfaces (I'd presume they'd do this over grass or the like). Of course in reality it's highly unlikely that absolutely all lift would disappear (the thing would have to get itself up to 3 meters - if it lost lift, it'd more likely be a gradual reduction), so the much more likely scenario is a signficantly slower impact. Maybe someone will twist an ankle or pull a joint, but it's hardly life threatening.
I'm really curious how you were "tested" - did the Secret Service show up at your door one day, proclaim that they've heard far and wide about your amazing typing prowess, and compel you to complete a typing test? Alternately did you go to an online "feel good" test? You know, the same one that then told you that your IQ was 150+.
I'm curious because 100wpm or above are generally only achievable on specialized keyboards (i.e. court transcriptions for example), and is extremely rare on qwerty (which is designed to slow you down). Do you use the dvorak layout?
Exactly, freedom is. If, as you state, one has no boundaries on their actions that intrude and impede on others, then why couldn't someone just go shoot up the place? The reason is that we have laws and constraints ensuring that while each of us has individual freedoms, our freedoms are more limited when they impede on the freedoms of others, hence why one's freedom to shoot people is limited given that someone else will be shot.
Yes it is absurd that I'm comparing a simple message with homicide, but the point is simply that you can't wave your hands and state that it's "freedom", when freedom also means the freedom from the freedom of others.
The problem is that, thanks in part due to the mere existence of such intrusive socialist agencies as the FTC, the US is now no longer anything approaching a free society.
So in a truly free society, they could send their messenger popup, and in return I could send a platoon of machine gun equipped commandos to liquidate their offices? Is that freedom with intrusive socialist agencies like justice departments or police?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, who wants to help me do some "independent research" of our own? We could compare Linux running on a WRT54G
Unfortunately it wouldn't do too well on the capabilities side of the equation. To be fair Microsoft does somewhat have a point as IBM, one of the foremost advocates of Linux, is pushing the virtual-Linux-on-a-mainframe concept, and a lot of people are buying. It seems that Microsoft was tageting that competitor rather than Linux-running-on-obsoleted-developer-PC.
I didn't bother checking, but most advertising boards are self-regulating groups that actually have zero real authority.
It's a very passionate stream of adjectives, however I don't think it's fair to call it a troll. Indeed I can most certainly commiserate with the observations, having fought the good fight - fighting trying to get your bloody numbered list consistent, or maintaining a certain style, etc. These are all very well described gaps of Word that are caused by its overly complex internal structure.
Of course Word is hardly the only culprit. Edit an email in HTML format in Outlook - it's absolutely fascinating the things it does.
Even better, given that the patent office is obviously (hugely) fallible, patent holders should hold the liability that if they threaten a "patent violator" in any way, the "violator" has the right to instantly force a proof trial (no more patent blackmail, which is largely the unfortunate purpose of patents). If the patent itself is proven to be trivial/obvious to practitioners/with obvious prior art, the patent holder should pay all defendant legal costs, as well as a huge penalty for abusing the patent system with noise (which >99% of software patents are).
This would be a huge victory for the software industry in general, while forcing the patent holders to consider their patent enforcement (or even applications - why bother will bullshit patents if they represent such a potential liability - don't bother unless you're sure) very seriously.
My signature can't be "read" (while it originally derived IHandwrittenName, it was significantly personalized and aesthetically simplified over time), and this has led to quite a few inane "Haha! THAT'S your signature?" comments.
A signature is just an individualized sequence of muscle movements that technically could be you writing an offensive remark. That's why there's normally a printed name aside it.
Well ultimately the police component of municipal budgets is the one element that gets rubber stamped virtually every year, despite the endless increases (in my region I believe the year over year increase this year was 7%...we certainly aren't growing that quickly, and crime is actually signficantly down the past couple of years). What mayor wants to be for rapists or muggers (as clearly that's what such a refusal would stand for).
I think the eventual result is that 50% of the population will be police officers, and we'll each have our own assigned cop. Actually given that there's 3 shifts, at least 75% of the population will have to be men and women in blue (probably more accounting for holidays and weekends).
`MOHAA and ET are just fine without the gore and "evil" theme.'
So you consider killing representations of other human beings as a less objectionable than fighting chariactures of evil beings?
Note that normal glass blocks IR already
Do you mean ultra-violet light? I don't believe normal glass blocks much IR at all, though there are some special, more expensive glasses (low-E) that block most IR. On the downside this means that on a sunny winter day you can't take much advantage of the sun because the IR is being blocked just as it is on a sunny 30C day.
While the article in question has an attention grabbing headline, it's basically a completely vapid rehash of the standard component software development, advocating that with plug-and-play components software can just be snapped together as if it were an assembly line. Oooh, newsflash to the author -- this has been advocated for decades. We hardly need a chief super extreme architect extraordinaire from Microsoft to reword this for us.
but isnt 2x256 also faster than 1x512? Afterall, you got two banks from which you can read/write data to?
Filling more memory slots with a single memory controller will actually increase latencies and slow your memory performance - it won't suddenly talk to all the chips at once.
What you may be thinking of is dual-channel motherboards like the nForce - these have separate memory controllers, both talking to each DIMM independently and then combining the results.
Making the example of movies shows you ain't got a clue about what raid 0 and speed is about. Movies typically load very slowly, hell they can be read from CD and it doesn't get much slower then that.
Thanks for the lesson professor, but I think you need some reading comprehension skills.
A miniDV file is about 11GB for 60 minutes of video, and one generally wants to put it on a DVD-R at about 4.7GB - compressing the file using MPEG2 is extremely intensive on the PC (one of the few things that really makes you wish for a faster PC), and is generally much slower than real-time. The point is that this is one of the few applications where mass amounts of data are used regularly on desktop machines, but even then the hard drives are most certainly not the weak link -- put them in a huge array and you'll still be waiting the same length of time. Video processing is the #1 stated reason people give for RAID arrays, yet the disk is seldom the limiting factor.
Level loads in games are different. There you gotta wait until the full level is loaded and to some people that matters. I know for a fact that in MMORPG's you can see wich people got the slowass PC's with the dell HD's. They are the people that arrive in a new location minutes after everyone else.
Even the slowest modern drive loads at about 30MB/second (and most standard ones read 50MB/second) -- do you really think that new level has 3GB of data that it needs to read? Here's a clue stick for you -- Most games load a little bit, and then decompress or process in memory, and then they load a little bit more, and decompress or process into structures in memory. Repeat. While the little HD light might be on for an extended period of time, it is highly likely that the weak link is actually your processor, not the hard drive.
Wether YOU need it is irrelevant. That is taste, never argue about taste on a tech site.
Uh, okay Philosopher King. Whether YOU need it is irrelevant too, so what the hell is your point?
Whoops I actually meant to type 27 seconds - missed the 2 (I coincidentally timed it last night because I intended to do an Access disk defrag with O&O and wanted to see the improvement). 7200 RPM IDE hard drive with the standard Diskeeper defrag.
Well I bet then that the machine doesn't do anything , my 2003 is using nearly 2 minutes before I get a promt
Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition running SQL Server 2005, IIS, among a plethora of additional services. As a sidenote, the login prompt doesn't wait until the services are all running. But yes, it is a desktop machine - I do software development and database development using data samples -- I don't make it double as a production environment (that's what servers using SANs are for).
Right, and that's my point - the most commonly given justification for RAID arrays on a desktop machine is video compression (as it's really the only thing that uses huge amounts of data), yet it is signficantly more constricted by other limits than it is by disk I/O limits. Other than that there are few examples of huge data usage on the desktop, apart from contrived examples.
This definitely reveals itself because of the fact that games like Doom 3, Far Cry, and Painkiller are all perfectly playable on my computer, but the latter two games take an unbearably long time to load.
Most modern SATA hard drives read at approximately 50-70MB/second -- do you really think this is the reason those games load slowly? It isn't. They generally load slowly because of the use of compressed objects, or maps that need to be rendered into structures in memory: It's far more likely your CPU that is the limiting factor (it's easy enough to turn on performance monitor and see).
"I can't tell you how nice it is to have my computer boot in half the time... how your system feels like you always wished it would feel. You can add all the memory you want, all the processing power you want, but if you can't feed the computer, it's all pointless...The only thing I wish now was that my system had a faster and/or wider bus that would allow me to take advantage of all the currently unused bandwidth available from the four drives."
Translation - "If my system were tremendously faster, then it would justify the risk and cost of my unnecessary 4-drive RAID-0 array! Don't knock it until you've tried some future computer that actually has a use for this bandwidth!"
There are a few problems with your analysis. Firstly, boot time really isn't that important (yes, even if you're using Windows) - booting from a single disk IDE Windows Server 2003 is awaiting your login in about 7 seconds. Not really a critical amount of time.
For virutally all other activity (I'm currently running Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Sever 2005, IIS, a variety of web services, Mozilla, Outlook, and a plethora of system services) the hard drives are twiddling their spindles, doing absolutely nothing, and when they do it's generally sporatic very-small accesses that are affected by random access astronomically more than by throughput.
But for the majority of us normal people who are running huge multi-threaded database applications on their desktop machines, RAID-0 is much nicer than having to manually allocate all of your database extents across your disks. Of course, RAID-10 would be better, but that would involve spending money.../I>
The number of users that have a database on their desktop that puts space pressure on their harddrive (which are now generally in the 120-200GB range) is absolutely miniscule (and more likely the domain of really poor process shops where they have no development servers, and copy production right to the developers desktops. There is so much wrong there I won't even start).
A common theme, revisited several times, in the article is that the other conclusions were wrong because they used low-load testing.
"A safe conclusion would be that a Business Winstone 2004-benchmark alone is not a good starting point when testing RAID 0 performance. On the contrary: to have some reliable tests, we will need to put heavy loads on the array."
In essence, if my understanding is correct, they're saying that the value of a RAID 0 setup is under constant extreme loads, not the loads created by business applications or games. Isn't this entirely the point of the articles in question - That given the sporatic, generally light load of even power users, RAID 0 is not really that beneficial (as random access plays even more of a part than gross throughput)?
Even under perceived heavy I/O loads, the reality is often that the hard disk is under-used - I occasionally compress videos from miniDV to DVD, and my CPU would need a four or five fold increase in speed to even begin to put pressure on the single 7200 RPM hard disk.
In many states, including Texas, you can't legally call yourself an "engineer" unless you have a degree in engineering
Note that in most juristictions it's not the degree that matters, but rather the membership in a sanctioned monopoly engineering guild. There are actually ways to get a professional engineering membership without having an engineering degree (such as by working in an engineering field for a prescribed period of time), and conversely having an engineering degree doesn't automatically translate into earning membership in the guild. There are loads of engineering graduates out there who can't legally called themselves engineers.
As a sidenote, this power to coopt a traditional word is largely unproven - Here in Ontario it was long believed that the word "engineer" or "engineering" was owned, in essence, by the professional engineers of Ontario. Even Microsoft backed down when threatened, encouraging MCSE holders not to use the expanded version of the acronym in the province of Ontario. Microsoft considered their legal options, and eventually told its membership to go ahead and use the term engineer. I've yet to hear about them regretting this decision.
The P4EE was largely a marketing chip from the beginning - they squeezed it out just in time to take some of the thunder out of the newly released Athlon 64 back in September of last year.
h tml
http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030923/index.
This largely stopped AMD from recapturing the performance crown, despite the fact that supplies of the P4EE were extremely tight, and the price was hugely non-competitive.
"Doom 3 doesn't change the formula. Maybe, as a console gamer I'm biased, but Doom 3 is certainly the belle of the ball now, unless the mod community really takes off I don't seeing it being a watermark for gaming."
This is exactly what people said when the various Quake issues emerged on the scene - "They forgot multiplayer, and multiplayer is where it's at" "Same old same old" "No innovation". I think it'd be interesting for a lot of the cynics to revisit the reviews of these old games some time.
The real power of Carmack's creations, though, is that he builds a tremendously flexible framework (usually with cutting edge graphics), and tosses it over to the mod community. As games themselves each of the Quake franchise games were okay, but nothing special, but by way of mods (Action Quake, Urban Terror, among others) I must have spent thousands of hours on each of those games. The entertainment value was extraordinary. Carmack basically has a habit of delivering solid foundations, usually with a half decent get-you-started game. The user community then takes that framework and makes something extraordinary.
Lets put you in a chair and drop you straight down, see how well you fare.
If the occupant instantly lost absolutely all lift, they'd hit the ground at about 27 km/h - fairly hard, but certainly not fatal or serious on most surfaces (I'd presume they'd do this over grass or the like). Of course in reality it's highly unlikely that absolutely all lift would disappear (the thing would have to get itself up to 3 meters - if it lost lift, it'd more likely be a gradual reduction), so the much more likely scenario is a signficantly slower impact. Maybe someone will twist an ankle or pull a joint, but it's hardly life threatening.
I'm really curious how you were "tested" - did the Secret Service show up at your door one day, proclaim that they've heard far and wide about your amazing typing prowess, and compel you to complete a typing test? Alternately did you go to an online "feel good" test? You know, the same one that then told you that your IQ was 150+.
I'm curious because 100wpm or above are generally only achievable on specialized keyboards (i.e. court transcriptions for example), and is extremely rare on qwerty (which is designed to slow you down). Do you use the dvorak layout?
Freedom is a double edged sword, friend.
Exactly, freedom is. If, as you state, one has no boundaries on their actions that intrude and impede on others, then why couldn't someone just go shoot up the place? The reason is that we have laws and constraints ensuring that while each of us has individual freedoms, our freedoms are more limited when they impede on the freedoms of others, hence why one's freedom to shoot people is limited given that someone else will be shot.
Yes it is absurd that I'm comparing a simple message with homicide, but the point is simply that you can't wave your hands and state that it's "freedom", when freedom also means the freedom from the freedom of others.
Ughh...with=without.
The problem is that, thanks in part due to the mere existence of such intrusive socialist agencies as the FTC, the US is now no longer anything approaching a free society.
So in a truly free society, they could send their messenger popup, and in return I could send a platoon of machine gun equipped commandos to liquidate their offices? Is that freedom with intrusive socialist agencies like justice departments or police?
No one force him to abandon tape for CD, just as no one forced him to replace his copy of "Porky's" with the Anniversary DVD edition.