Posts by Ammaross Danan
969 posts • joined Wednesday 23rd September 2009 16:33 GMT
Space Remaining
Space remaining is simple enough to see. In Win7 Explorer, click "computer" and it shows the drives in the system with a bar showing used vs free space. Click on any of the drives and it shows "Space free:" in the status bar. Not as simple as always showing X free diskspace in the status bar all the time, but usually you should have an idea of how much disk space you have left....
What I hope they improve is the file renaming, so if you have, for instance a bunch of photos named "DCIM_0001", "DCIM_0002", etc, you could select all of them and rename them to end up being "Birthday2010_0001", "Birthday2010_0002" (retaining the original numberings/letterings in the part of the filename you didn't change), rather than renaming them all to your new name + _00X. It's even worse when you already have them all named, but wanted to add a short prefix to all 100 of them....
Posted in Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet goes on sale
Connector
At least it has microUSB, miniHDMI, and an SD card slot. At the same price point as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, if the screen is as nice, this might lure me away....
Sueing
Sueing for using "F150" for a car name, I can give Ford that. But sueing because a car is black with chrome accents and has "aerodynamic" (read: "rounded") corners and you drive it with a circular device (steering wheel) and a gear-shift.... I propose that all car manufacturers sue for injunctions against each other for obviously stealing each other's "look'n'feel" and failing to be "innovative." Perhaps when we're all riding in horse-and-buggies again, bureaucrats will wake up and realize that the world could be a better place without such petty wastes of (consumer) money.
(yes, it is us that eventually have to pay for all these lawyers)
Re
"will know that the Apple device will work, and be easy to use"
I think the biggest thing Apple has going for them is the iPod. A lot of people has/had one. They're used to being forced to use iTunes to manage their device. They like the idea of their iPad having the same interface, being able to use the same apps, etc. Everyone thinks "iPad" when they think of a tablet now, simply because it's "the thing to have." I've talked to a lot of people that want to use a tablet for everything an iPad CANT do (very well at least...), but they still want the iPad because they think it will do it "best." They won't even hear alternatives. It's quite sad really...like trying to give someone purified tap water as opposed to the bottled water at the store... "It's just not my <insert brand here>"
Posted in Mozilla strokes coders with Firefox 6
Plug-in developers
You mean plug-in developers have to, in advance, test their plug-in semi-regularly (every 6 weeks) on a beta build of Firefox and release at least minor updates to keep up with the current compatiblity versioning? Heaven forbid! 10 year-olds do as much and more with their World of Warcraft addons.
IE
even better, IE needs to have this auro-disabled option. to make it even better than that, make them have to click though a non-autopop menu to actually enable the toolbar. people end up with toolbars get them because they just have to hit yes to a popup: and thwy always hit yes.
Posted in Video CAPTCHAs target cyberbaddies
Forget Averages
Why not just isolate the video clip background? It should be the /exact same/ each time, unless it too is randomized (such as the bubbles example).
Either way, the high contrast and wildly different colors vs the background should make any program that is intelligent enough to pull individual frames out of the animation easily able to figure out the characters.
Likely....
...when HDDs are on par with SSD performance perhaps? There's a reason Core i7s cost more than Core i3s. Same applies to the performance difference for SSDs vs HDDs. Horses for courses and all that.
Posted in Apple injunction startles Samsung
Yes....
"If Google/Samsun had bothered designing some slightly different icons, they wouldn't be in this mess"
Yes, because everyone knows a button should be a triangle, not a square with slightly rounded corners like the one I'm going to hit for "submit"... oh wait...
Encryption
Likely, the "feature phones" or the even dumber ones would lose battery life having to encrypt/decrypt 128+bit comms. Perhaps this is a way to mask the battery drain from having signal towers too far apart?
@Tony: write wear
Since your TB written increased as your time range decreased, thus making your info fairly illegible, lets go off the assumption you write 14.5TB over a 3 month period of time...
14.5TB x 1.6 (for write amplification) x 1000 (convert to GB) / 120 (120GB vertex 2 drive size) = 193.33 full drive writes every 3 months. 3000 (expected cell endurance) / 193.33 (full writes from above) * 3 (months: time period) = 46.55 months (3.88 years) expected life span on a 120GB vertex2 SSD, not accounting for overprovisioning. Put a couple of 240GBs in a RAID1 and you can double that and have redundancy. If you're waiting more than 5 years to replace your primary DB server disk drives, you dont care enough to bother with SSDs.
Lessons about "wear" and "ware" and "their" and "there" are for another post.
Nah
My modem uses USB.
@NomNomNom
"A FYI time travel is now officially impossible so don't pull that one"
Only time travel that requires going faster than the speed of light to achieve it. There are still other ways.
Posted in OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller
Indilinx
Indilinx is OCZ's "cheaper" controller; the one they put in their low-end drives. Thus, they're either moving up to replace SandForce in their high-end, or their bringing up the low-end to spec with their current high-end drives in preparation for even more next-gen SandForce controllers.
Either way, should make acquiring a 120GB boot/progs drive a bit lighter on the wallet.
Teaching
Who'd want to learn finances from a guy who supports giving out shovel loads of cash for horridly overpriced devices? Sounds like the same teacher the US Gov't had when they drafted the bailouts....
(Don't believe me on "overpriced"? Just look at their operating costs and profit margins)
Actually...
"claims to have deciphering [sic] the final"
"only one of which has ever [sic] been decrypted."
See? Plenty to do with IT. Don't rely soley on your spell checker for your article. Try proof-reading it once in a while.
Or....
Don't use DRAM (like Intel) in the SSD. SandForce controllers use flash cells as their "workspace" so anything that's on the drive-side is essentially non-volatile. Now, whether the controller/hostOS knows how to handle recovering from a sudden power loss is anyone's guess....
Posted in World o' Flash: El Reg roundup report
Wafers
Intel puts out 220mm wafers for their Core-i series chips. Does this mean each CPU is ~8.6in? Nope. The wafer gets cut up into the individual dies.
Probably the same IQ as Paris?
Posted in Fujitsu installs Windows 7... on a phone
Well...
"I also note the "Two-year Microsoft® Office Personal license" - so what happens after 2 years? Do you have to buy the whole thing again?"
Answer is: likely, yes. Although I doubt you'll want to continue using Win7 on a 1.2Ghz Atom after 2 years. If you do feel like continuing, just install LibreOffice instead. It will likely support Microsoft's next office format before MS makes a readability plugin.... (remember the conversion to docx?)
One Problem....
Even these new security measures won't protect Joe User from himself when he clicks the fake antivirus message which prompts him to run a downloaded file which then in turn installs the virus with user-level permissions, which can then use <insert vuln here> to escalate priveledges (or simply be happy with user-level-priv keylogging) to install the "virus" (read: fakeAV or its ilk)
Also
Budget constraints and performance metrics are part of the problem, yes. However, an even larger elephant in the room is that of compartmentalization. Often, you'll have a group of IT guys who specialize in one thing. You ask the "Network Infrastructure" guy to fix a syslog error on the Win 2003 server and he'll likely not know how. Ask the server guy to fix a syntax error on a jsp page and he won't know where to start. Diverse skillsets in even one person will help diagnose a "slowness" issue more than having 3 whole teams on the matter. Why? Because, chances are, they won't be able to see outside their scope. They may not even know you're running that tomcat webapp server in a VM that was only given a single vCPU without any MHz reservations, but happens to coexist on the same physical machine as the reporting server...
Mass Kinetic Energy
@bazza "I was thinking of the whole machine": Just how much mass do you think this heatsink has? From the picture, it's no where near the mass required to harvest kinetic energy to power a complete rig. Perhaps if it was on the order of Scythe's Mugen R2, then you might be able to help an SSD clear its cache (Intel SSDs and the like, since Sandforce doesn't use DRAM caches). But to help the whole machine, you're looking at several kilos at the least.
Posted in Intel 320 SSD bug causes forum despair
Do you know nothing?
"What happens if the datacentre aircon fails and the SDDs get too hot ?"
I take it from this statement that you know nothing of SSDs. However, to feed the conversation for those honestly seeking answers, SSDs can work well within the range a server room would hit if the "AirCon" goes out. I'd be more worried about your CPUs tipping over and sending garbage to the SSDs than that the SSDs would continue to function normally.
You must not be aware of how things are done in Open Source....
First, it is not "they" that need to support Linux-based OSes.
Second, Linux may very well get support (or at least better support) for IOMMUs before Windows.
If it's open, it's usually available. That's why nVidia drivers exist for Linux, but Radeon drivers are still "experimental": ATI didn't support an open driver interface.
Compute resources
Quick thought for you:
I'd rather have a few %CPU taken from an i5 (or X4 depending on your faith), then offloading to a likely a 400mhz chip (if it's lucky). Most hardware RAID cards bottleneck themselves by not being able to compute parity fast enough and not being able to handle the volume of data transmits. Even high-end RAID cards can't handle the throughput that software RAID can. If you don't believe me, go get two high-end RAID cards, stick 8 SSDs in RAID-0 on them, then software RAID-0 the two RAID volumes together. Scales quite linearly, which you wouldn't see if the software RAID was the bottleneck.
Reason being....
"You'll be lucky, BTW, to get a Macbook Air for £650 after a year or have a Dell depreciate by only 40% of it initial value."
The reason? Line-up refreshes. In one year, you may get a speed bump (proc/ram) or a HDD size upgrade for the MBA/MBP line-up. In six months, the Dell, et al, laptop will have gone through 2 revisions, and in a year it will be shipping with the next-gen CPU (Ivy Bridge in this case). Who would want to shell out £350 for a second-rate, old-tech PC laptop when you could drop another £500 for the New Shiney, and still be barely more expensive than the original purchasing cost of that MBA? Granted, if you're speaking portability, the MBA does get around fairly easily, but there are PC counterparts to that. The point is more along the lines of why you can still get a last-year's MacBook for a high price: you can't get anything (much) better now. They just don't move that fast. Hence why the MBA was using a slow, underclocked ultra-low voltage Core2Duo (for three years) up until their SNB refresh a couple months ago.
A few corrections
As stated in an earlier reply by some else, but with a lot more bias, you're wrong.
The new AMD kit is a mere $5-10 premium over the "on sale" i3-2100. If you compare vs the i3-2105 (with the HD 3000 gfx, rather than the very worse HD 2000 of the original i3-2100), the price matches exactly.
Platform is also a consideration, since the A75 boards, when features are compared, are generally cheaper than their 1155 counterparts. Not by much mind you.
Also, as a correction to the biased reply, it is true the i3 is a dual core, with hyperthreading, however, hyperthreading gains a lot more than a mere 10% (the OP stated "2.2" factoring in the dual cores) performance increase. There's upwards to a 40-60% increase in threaded situations over running with hyperthreading disabled. What was never touched was that the i3 cores, MHz-for-MHz perform better than the AMD cores.
In the end, the i3-2105 (yes, better GPU than the 2100) has better performance in single-threaded or general light loads. The AMD A8 chip does better when you're taxing the system with heavily-threaded loads (does better by far btw). However, you're not likely to do that unless your encoding video or doing many things at once, at which point, you bought the wrong CPU either way. The GPU core in Sandy Bridge doesn't even hold water against the A8 GPU core. The A8 has 2x the performance of the HD 3000, hands down. There's just no comparison. The only advantage the HD 3000 has is QuickSync. But then again, the A8 has DX11.
Who's the victor? Anyone who buys the $500 Walmart machines. Why? Because they'll have an AMD CPU.
@Fred Flintstone:
"I'm pretty sure that if I could use a platform working 10 years ago it would absolutely fly on today's hardware and honestly not lose that much in the way of functionality."
You do realize that 10 years ago, you barely had USB support in Windows, you definately didn't support TRIM, SATA 2/3, PCIe, effective multi-cpu computing (no, most programs were, and some still are, single threaded), and Windows 2000 had a nasty 128GB(ish) hard drive limitation requiring a hack (to enable LBA) to work around. And yes, this is the same 10-year-old equipment you're speaking of.
One other thing to mention, "I could use a platform working 10 years ago it would absolutely fly on today's hardware" sorry, no you can't. Just try installing Win98/2k native on the metal. You'll quickly realize that your 10yr-old "platform" is now relegated to VM-only status. Might as well claim that playing the original Super Mario World is all you need, because the graphics were good enough and would simply fly if played on a Wii.
Posted in Do we really want 100Gig Ethernet?
Numpty
You forget FCoE or NAS/SAN solutions that run over ethernet. Simply running no-local-storage servers with 128GB+ of RAM and hosting 10-20+ VMs is enough to saturate 1Gb, and likely 10Gb ethernet.
That and you still believe BG actually said the 640KB quote I assume?
Of course....
They could just support community development of Open servers, such as is happening with the reverse-engineering people and World of Warcraft....but sanction it.
Installation problem
Could just pick "Run all from disk" (or whatever) option rather than the "Install on first use" defaults.
Agreed
For once, a social network that makes sense. The big problem MyFaceSpaceBook has is that your work "collegues" and your "BFF"s get the same level of view to your posts, rants, raves, and terrible cell-phone pics from the night before. "Circles" would allow you to tier that into "this is a picture of me, some basic work/edu history" and "this was me last weekend on a bender"
@Cris E
"And we're not talking IE6 here either; the guy in the article didn't even get his release through testing before support was dropped. That's not cool."
This isn't some change from IE6 to IE7 where MS decided, yet again, to redo how every internal thing works. Firefox doesn't have (many) kludges you have to script around or UI display glitches to design around. Also, no one seems to realize that Firefox 5 is essentially the old Firefox 4.1-style release, but using Chrome's development cycle. They're trying to stuff minor/major browser frame tweaks and redesigns, update the javascript parser/JIT, add additional HTML5 support, etc. Most of these things should leave validation testing relatively unaffected as far as results are concerned.
All this in mind, it's when you're forced to update from old versions (v3.6+) to the newest that they shoot themselves in the foot.
Posted in 'Robots can save America', says Obama
Have to start somewhere
@James Micallef:
"because they don't have the necessary education to work in a knowledge economy (unemployment among graduates has been almost unaffected by the supposed crises)"
What about the young undergrads who are trying to pay their way to this "necessary education" you speak of? What will they do when fast food establishments no longer require burger flippers and fry tossers? Where are the uneducated going to work when there are no need for "sandwich artists" anymore? Just more people to support on welfare, meaning tax hikes, meaning those with the higher education still end up paying for it, perhaps?
Well, not quite....
"the Air is far from being a toy in its performance"
Up until the most refresh a couple months back, bringing the MBA up to Sandy Bridge, it was running an underclocked, undervolted Core2Duo mobile chip. While not a sluggish processor (compared to Centrinos of the day), it was by no means a zippy CPU. Fortunately Apple is no longer selling netbook-esque (read: dated, slow) internals in their MBA.
So, what happened to....
"The same source also spoke of a new iPad display with a resolution one-third higher than the that of the iPad 2."
So, what happened to that mythical 2X resolution screen at 2048x1538 that all the iFans were cheering on about for the iPad2?
Yes, it's a retorical question.
Right....
"...and then being able to buy additional features as cheap add-ons would be awesome"
Now if only Apple sold anything at a "cheap" price.... C'mon, these are the 100% markup people.
Posted in World braces for domain name EXPLOSION
I, for one....
"What "thing" is it that gets "worse" because of this?"
I'll head out and buy some various great domain names, like the following:
Chasec.om
Goog.lecom
Micro.softcom
.m and .om (for obvious above reasons)
Perhaps I'll have paypa.lcom and amazo.ncom in my list. If people can't tell the difference between:
http://paypal.subsite.register.stealyourpassword.29.39.49.239/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
and
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
what makes you think they can tell the difference with:
https://www.paypalc.om/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
Posted in AMD trumpets next-gen GPU architecture
You laugh, but....
Look at technology. What are the main two drivers? War and Sex. I would welcome holodecks, even if their primary driver was porn.
This....
....from a company that sues others for using "icons" in a "tiled array" on a "handheld device"....
Pardon?
"...so they probably didn't even see it"
I think you failed to read the article where it stated he got a personal call from Apple which stated they showed it to the developers who "were impressed." 'nuf said? Thought so.
/where's my RTFA (a for article) icon?
Office
MS Office is written in C/C++ (MS Visual or otherwise). MS has written APIs to utilize Office in .NET or the like, but it doesn't mean the code is written in .NET. Might as well claim MS Access is written in VBA....
Posted in Linux kernel runs inside web browser
Chrome
Nah, Chrome's already covered: Native Code plugin FTW!
(yes, sarcasm)
Ergonomic
This keyboard isn't being pitched as ergonomic (thankfully, because it's not). Having no physical buttons to feel and press is actually worse, from an ergo standpoint, than a 'real' keyboard. This issue came up with the infrared, projected keyboards.
Problem is
...the original tricorder didn't need blood, breath, or pee. Likely used some form of portable MRI to take the readings though, as it was just waved near the bodily injury. Now, Next Generation had a detachable mini-wand that was used as a remote sensor, rather than simply waving the whole device itself. The other trick is that the tricorder acted almost like a read-only (no way to act on the environment) Sonic Screwdriver, being able to detect lifesigns, mineral composition, air quality, etc. There's quite the challenge ahead for those seeking the $10mil.
Yep
Now the down side is that it will take years (as stated) for the drug to be put through additional non-human trials, then a (few) human trials, FDA approval, etc before it will be available to the many individuals staring death in the face during that time, as most die by the age of 22 or so.... I'd certainly hate to be a sufferer just hitting the 20yr mark, knowing I'll die just a year or two before being able to be treated.
Considering....
Considering that (most) MLC manufacturers consider their 22nm/34nm MLC NAND having a 5,000 write/erase cycle lifespan, 18,251 is quite exceptional. Definitely a boon for Enterprise markets, but hardly useful over traditional flash for consumer markets.
Simples
"How the hell do you get a shipminds visible manifestation, and multi-kilomiter long ships hull, probably concealed by layer upon layer of 'fields', to emote in a fasion an audience can appreciate?"
It's simple. Ever seen Tank Police?
Clearly
This is clearly MS attempting to attract users by offering something akin to FaceTime (how well FaceTime actually works is beside the point...). They'll likely keep support for alternative platforms (likely since it's already there), but I could see them being lax on emerging platforms (MeeGo or some other). But Ballmer did get one thing right, it's about market penetration. The more platforms he continues to support, the more users he'll have, and the more people will want to have Skype to talk to them "for free." I'm just hoping his adverts don't become intrusive. A side bar of ads is tolerable. The popup-in-front-of-video that YouTube does deserves to be shot in the head. (I suggest a sidebar since most screens are the usual 16:9 nowadays, making vertical real-estate fairly valuable)
