Posts by foxyshadis

Enough to stop unresponsiveness?

So the latest turbo boost is going to magically spped up fragmented high-latency hard drives? Not bloody likely. Not one single application I can think of has its startup cpu bound (unless it involves some unholy transparent decryption, decompression, and antivirus); every single time it's the hard drive that the system has to wait on.. and wait, and wait some more. That's been the case since at least 1999, and platter drives show no sign of getting any better. Higher areal densities are always eaten up by larger programs.

Intel should just integrate an SSD on its motherboards as a level 4+ cache. Instant hard drive speedups without the ugly SSD price overhead for a decent size, since hybrids were abandoned.

Lack of features, lack of performance, definitely a Lenovo

No DVI/HDMI? A standard feature on every other notebook for the last 4-5 years? This is why I can't stand Lenovo, even their docks don't have a DVI on the X-series up until this year's model. And the T-series only got it with the T60. I have one VP constantly complaining about the wiggly screen, but I can't even buy a better dock to give him DVI.

The only saving grace for the x100 would be if it was as rugged as the larger models. Why no test for that?

Terrible screen resolution

Now that Vista has long since come and gone, high resolution with large fonts and large icons should be a priority for every manufacturer; the clarity and benefits against eye fatigue are incredible. There are 1920x1080 panels for 15.6" screens, so on earth do they keep pushing 1280x800 for that and 1600x900 as the standard on 17"?

Also, weird bit of editing between now and when I first read the article, it seems like a paragraph may have been chopped out accidentally.

AJAX is killing firefox?

I fear it's as much the wretched quality of javascript on the web that's the culprit: It hasn't become all that much better, but it's become so much more complex and pervasive in the last few years. My blackberry's gone from being able to render 10% of pages years ago, up to 60% with updates and a push for mobile compatibility, down to maybe 30% with all the ajax out there now. Not that it's any good blaming the web any more than blaming the web for bad HTML, we just want to be able to use it.

I'd give a clean Firefox 2 vs. a clean Firefox 3.6 (with sessions off) a go on today's web, see if the difference is real or imagined. I'm interested in trying it myself tonight.

Chrome has some amazing javascript hotspot-style optimizers, I'll give it that. That's one place Google's PhD wizards shine, and Apple seems to do very well itself.

@Si 1

I think the idea is not for apps to rely on it, but for it to be entirely invisible - the browser will ask the server if it's supported, if the server responds it's used and otherwise plain HTTP is used. Kind of like url fopen or disk caching, it's not application-level. It's just an architectural change.

@magnetik

Think a minute before you spout a knee-jerk reaction, there's a much simpler way to do this that has worked since Windows NT: Right click the file/folder and open its properties. The security tab lists all users' permissions if you have any rights to the object at all. The same is true on all operating systems, by various means, or do you think that seeing the owner/group in a *nix file list is any different?

If you don't have any rights, you won't see the box, you'll just get a generic Administrator default runas box.

Model numbers

There is actually a model number consistency of some sort - the E7xxx series is to the E8xxx series what the E4xxx series was to the E6xxx series. The two sets are just a way to differentiate Merom from Penryn. E5xxx would make more sense. Xeons ended up with the E3xxx and E5xxx names so those would be out, but there are also E7xxx Xeons so it's all a big mess. F that.

I do think it's dumb that they kept using E there if they were going to do this.

I would have thought...

"the routers to do packet-drop in real-time are more expensive than the aynchronous Sandvine system."

...the simplest way to achieve this is to just buy inexpensive, underpowered routers and let the internet grind to a halt in the sea of lost packets until tcp/ip stacks throttle themselves so far back that your network runs at a constant speed again.

Now, it's not very <i>controllable</i>, but what do you need now, eh?

Technical difficulties

Takes this long to add a new year to the dropdown? wth.

why no USB?

They did make a USB form factor for it - the Xmod. Same lousy noisy sound chip inside. I prefer the turtle beach SRM for usb 5.1, due only to driver differences.

That's the great thing about standards.

If the past is any indication, the nominal USB 3 rate will be 4.7 but the most you'll be able to get will be 2.8. Hopefully they'll cut down on the signalling overhead and make faster chipsets this time around.

Fortunately firewire learned its lesson and reused the old plug; unfortunately, many products are still being made with the incompatible but more common 400 connector.

Weird list

Why the hell are so many amiga mod formats on there? I've never heard of anyone charging for demotunes.

@BitTwister

Not true; it blocks all WMV and WMA files, drm or no drm. But it doesn't block m4p, so it's Apple's DRM that they're really looking out for. Redmond has nothing to do with this, I suspect.

@David Simpson

This blocks you from sharing files WITHIN YOUR OWN HOME.

Total fees

The total fee on the auction would be about $18500... I wonder if the guy ate the $5.00 insertion fee as a cost of advertising his other auctions. Joke's on him as soon as someone hits BIN on a lark and ebay takes the fees out of his credit card. (Sure, they'll refund fees back... two months later.)

Catching exceptions

"If you call a function that throws exceptions, catch them and handle them. Don't let them percolate up."

This is more subtle but arguably even more pernicious than single-exit. Catching every exception whether it makes sense or not is a ticket to design problems. There are many exceptions that the caller doesn't actually know how to handle in all situations (whether the designer knows it or not), and the caller's parent(s) should be the one to deal with that particular exception. Catching every exception but only taking care of the ones you know about is easily just as horrible as Basic's On Error Resume Next. You will end up inadvertently swallowing something the parent should see, or performing an action that isn't called for.

What are you going to do in that case? Copy the exception, set up a labyrinth of if/else, and then rethrow it at the end? Convert it into a return code somehow, even if it's completely unexpected?

That's what happens when you fit old dogma onto new domains without logically thinking about whether it still fits. (Not that I consider fully exception-driven programming to be saner.)

To others: Yes, the laundry list of assertions at the beginning of the function is the best imho. I don't care about identifying other because hey, my IDE highlights return statements in big bold brown letters, and not using a syntax highlighting editor is a crime.

Re: uh ??

There's no point in comparing your results to theirs if you have no idea what or how they converted. You'd have to have the same source, workflow, and settings for that.

@kevin elliott

"The article's author knows this and has seen the correspondence, but has conveniently left out ebay's side - I wonder why."

That would be because Ebay never responds to queries. If their automated system picks something up and fires off an email, great - but getting the customer service to even respond to repeated requests, and oftentimes even getting the PR to say something other than no comment, is impossible.

Leopard competes with Vista all right

...both of them stink just as bad on release.

Okay, that's really too harsh, but after helping a couple of people with new annoyances (especially the menu bar "feature") I won't be paying for it until I see if it shapes up in the next few months.

More negative ratings, please. =D

Self-testing calculations?

It seems absolutely hilarious to me that people are willing to give up half of Itanic's already dismal performance to get absolute certainty that their hardware even works in the first place. As opposed to the vastly more common software errors, which it will happily compute wrongly twice. What would you do if it failed regularly, anyway? Turn it off for five minutes every hour to cool down?

What VMware wants

VMware makes the vast majority of its money on support contracts anyway. Oh lord, those were brutal, after our two-year was up we decided self-support was the better part of valor. Open source would change the dynamics and I'm sure it would lower their immediate revenue, but the overall effect would be less than she says and I bet she knows that; they have a unique position compared to most.

The reality is that they just don't want Microsoft or Xen to have any kind of access at all. They'll continue to use every dirty trick in the book to hold their position, as most companies in their place would, and only cede to open source the platform when it gets commoditized and the addons (like VMotion) become more important.

Re: Weak

Maybe if Cisco would sell the 2821 closer to their real worth the comparison would have no validity. If they had compared it to a router designed to handle the same workload, the price difference would have been an order of magnitude higher.

Most Cisco gear seems to have that massive padding on top compared to other router makers, both software and ASIC brands, thanks to their 'no one ever got fired for buying Cisco' mentality. Don't mind us, though, if you're willing to get scammed that's entirely up to you.

Obvious stat

600 Kg is roughly the total mass/weight limit of the plane (1320 pounds), not the carrying capacity. Can't believe so many people missed that.

It could take off in 5-10 years, if they get the transmission sorted and there are no giant deadly wrecks in the first few years. We Americans will generally pay almost any amount of money to get somewhere faster and get out of traffic, without inconveniences (like changing cars).

All the world can talk like alabama now.

I like how southern white trash are already way ahead of these guys. When they can get the tenses right in the first place, that is.

Millions of pounds in new revenue, maybe.

Nothing ever "costs" the legal profession anything. It certainly may be costing them some time, but only their clients pay for it, double-billed of course.

I'm confused

Why would yahoo sit on its thumbs so long over the issue? I've been using DomainKeys and SPF for over a year to block the brunt of the phishing hitting my company. Ebay must be pretty royally pissed after spending effort to implement it, when Yahoo's done nothing to block it despite all the initial hype.

Having two competing anti-phishing proposed standards is kind of lame, though.

Don't they know the Boy Scout motto?

The biggest fault was probably preparation. I would hope that they talked to the lady on her initial call to get a vague idea of what to expect, if someone called me I'd try to at least figure out if I needed to bring anything out of the ordinary. Those are probably the ones who found it. In fact, if it sounded like hardware at all, I'd tell them to just bring it in, the field isn't the best place to check that if you can avoid it. (RAM and mobos aren't something I carry around, though I think there's a PSU in the trunk, and hard drives have been damaged easily in my car. Then again, that's why I have lackeys to order around.)

As for static, won't touching the case before you poke around clear off 99% of any static anyway? I'm used to a mild climate where I've never even heard a first-hand account of static damage.

Odd failures story: Once had a lady employ me to find out why it was crashing so much and ran so slow, the first was easy - video card, but all it needed was a driver update. (And it had been through several PC repair trips and a return to the manufacturer!) The second was, believe it or not, too many fonts, and I never did find a good font manager/swapper to fix that. Windows is unkind to graphic designers, I fear.

Let the games begin?

And we see more rushing to litigate before the new law (presumably) passes and takes effect. I bet this will only increase into a frenzy in the next few months as more companies make last-ditch attempts to monetize dodgy patents against huge corporations. Joy.

No sense second-guessing them

"The team of scientists working on the STEREO mission have combined the images to make a movie. They've also written up the discovery for the 10 October issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters."

No, that's obviously CG, c'mon now.

I wouldn't doubt the boffins were able to track the rock separate from the tail, after all, that's what they _do_ for a living, track rocks. Too bad their pics weren't highlighted better to point out the rock as well as the tail.

disasters

Tim, the point was that the Thames was a man-made disaster for hundreds of years, even if it eventually became a multi-billion pound successful restoration.

kain, the salton sea was created by a man-made canal off the colorado river without adequate flood protection, causing the whole river to divert into it and creating a giant ecological disaster for wildlife in the area for a decade. It almost permanently changed the course of the river. On balance, it's been a great refuge for birds and fish, although increasing salinity and mexican pollution are putting an end to that.

Suing everyone in the chain

I guess punk music kicked a few people's dogs or something.

According to reuter's he is suing the publisher, as well as the studio and the ramones estate, so don't knock him for that.

Re: He who lives by the sword...

You know that standards bodies create license pools in which every patent-holder gets a share of the license, right? They don't steal from companies, that's why all the stake-holders get together. A big chunk of the negotiating time is working out fee schedules, in fact, since all the IP-holders want as much as they can get and the chip-makers want to pay as little as possible. (IEEE isn't directly involved in licensing like MPEG-LA, but it's part of what goes on during standardization.)

Re: Skirmish before Microsoft battle?

Tom, the paranoia is unjustified - Microsoft can't possibly be funding all of the thousands of GPL violators out there, and this has nothing to do with whether Monsoon wants a court battle or not. They tried to brush off the SFLC, so the SFLC filed the lawsuit, Monsoon's desires be damned. Filing lawsuits doesn't mean things won't end in a settlement.

I see Simpson's comment as pragmatic, and not insulting, as well - the problem is not convincing geeks of the value, it's convincing a judge and finding enough legal precedent to assign a value to work that is conditionally given away. But I assume the SFLC has been working on a legal strategy for a long time, and has decided it's time to start proving it in court against the more flagrant offenders.

Whoa, Lotus Symphony?

Lotus Symphony... I think in the garage I still have a box with cloth cover, huge book, and a dozen disks with a 1984 edition of that. Those were the good ol' days of proper documentation.

Positional subwoofers

Yeah, but PC subwoofers don't deserve the name, most of them do more mid-range than low and drop off a cliff below 100Hz, so this is pretty par for course. Even expensive 2.1 and 5.1 pc kit is much lower quality than a similarly priced amp+studio monitors or bookshelves, let alone expensive hi-fi sets and giant earth-rattling subs.

A cheapie iPod dock is nice for okay portable sound (not this one, but there are small ipod speakers with decent low-mid sound) and remote control (again unlike this), but it makes no sense to pay that kind of money for something that'll tie you down when real speakers are the better deal.