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CoffeeFiend

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Everything posted by CoffeeFiend

  1. Yeah, I didn't take time to comment on that, but thought the same. That's a lot of trouble to save <200kb of disk space (something I bought 1.28TB of in the last 4 months). And no, that's not even a 0.03% waste, it's a 0.00003% waste - or 0.00005$ worth of storage at today's prices (~0.30$/GB) - not something I lose very much sleep over personally (redo that job 30000 times and that'll be enough to buy you a single cup of coffee at tim hortons). And yeah, we've got tons of things wasting countless GBs of space, and i'm not even worried about it. If the program did what it's supposed to, didn't make the computer slow down to a crawl or anything, then there's no reason to even bother. 167KB is something I might have been worried about in the days where no one had hard drives ("dang, this will fill the 5 1/4" floppy so quickly!"), but nowadays... And like you said, compiling for size over speed makes no sense whatsoever (So much for blaming others for not knowing what compiler options to use ), so time wasted recompiling something to save a tiny fraction of a MB and make it slower in the process. Even if it only took a single second to download the source, decompress it, start IDE of some sort, open project, tweak stuff, recompile and all (that'd be a speed record!), then you'd still be working for 0.18$/h (0.00005$ of space saved/second), which makes flipping burgers seem like a high pay job I don't know about others, but worrying that much about a few kilobytes of disk space seems like some sort of drastic obsession about saving every last byte of disk space at any costs.
  2. I really see no point to have one. People flame, write and talk FUD about Vista (very popular nowadays), or about XP and how it's just a bloated Win2k with activation, how linux or windows suck/is better, or which gaming console is best, or programming languages (and countless related debates about things like ORMs), or which High Definition "DVD" format, politics, religion, car brands, sport teams, beer, mp3 player brands, music types, etc... People will disagree on several things no matter what, and nothing will ever change this. And there will always be fanatics in each camp with their agendas that will often talk/spread FUD, shills, apologists, biased people, idiots, people with irrational hatred, optimists and pessimists, people into the latest fad, people who comment on things they have no basic/fundamental understanding of, along with a large group of uninformed/misinformed folks and the good ol' trolls. No thread will ever change anything to this. And if anything, polls are a very bad idea. Let any 12yo kid who has no clue about a specific technology (isn't a programmer, doesn't know the language nor the framework/libs, how it affects development in any significant way, or anything like that) to vote "it sucks!" or "it teh roxx!" really accomplishes nothing at all. It's as insightful as polls with semi-random votes about the latest gen gaming consoles (mainly folks voting against the company they dislike), or the results of a Vista poll (if there was one) - lots of people would say it sucks, no matter what (with or without any reasons with a basis in reality or technical merit of any kind), and the same poll a year later would be VERY different... Polls are a fun thing to know things like the favorite colour of most members perhaps, but not so much for highly technical/complicated stuff most site users have an extremely limited knowledge/understanding of...
  3. Yeah. They're about average. Not noisy, not whisper quiet either. That's kind of what I meant (noise isn't a problem) I'd say the same, but about Western Digital drives. I've seen countless dozens of bad ones (however we destroy them). Yet, i've had very good luck with maxtors (mind you I mainly buy seagate these fays). Don't want to sound rude, but that's anecdotal evidence... I'll buy any maxtor over a WD anyday.
  4. cluberti has some good points, but your performance problems could be really ANYTHING at all. Could be a problem with OS or drivers, could be faulty hardware, could be a network problem of some sort (including plain old getting hammered badly by clients, SMB problems, etc) - you name it. Check the obvious stuff. Hardware (no fault lights on? can't cook eggs on the case? anything!). Check the event logs (often has some good clues) - and other logs. Check relevant performance counters. Check network traffic. Check the running processes. There's about a million other things you can check. Last time I've seen this (a server being so busy as to seem offline), it was actually getting hammered by client PCs trying to cache locally thousands of files off a network share (off the said server). Not that anybody set it up to sync manually, it's some kind of weird problem that hapenned after pushing some update that triggered it (dozens of users trying to sync a few GBs off a server simultaneously like that puts some serious load). I actually found the problem "by error" (wasn't working on fixing it, I was just wondering where the stuff in the client side cache came from on one of my boxes, and stumbled on the problem). Someone had been trying to find the problem that was causing it (server going "dead", and very weird unhelpful stuff in event log). Again, it could be so many things... The problem could even be on the client side for all we know.
  5. Indeed. Besides, I wouldn't waste any time with drive "repair" apps (some might be able to remap a couple bad sectors, but nothing will fix the clicking). This drive's about to die completely. And IMO, data on just about any drive is worth a lot more than the drive itself. From family photos that can't be replaced, to trip photos, documents of all types that took countless hours to write/make, etc. That's surely worth more than whatever a new HD costs. At the very first sign of failure, I unplug a drive, get a replacement, copy stuff over, and dispose of the old one. Chances are the old drive could have been used a little bit longer, but I see no point in risking data loss, especially given today's cheap storage prices (like 30 cents/GB).
  6. I think smartdraw would work nicely for odd drawing like that. But autocad would likely be my very last recommendation - it's just not suited to the task at all IMO. There's countless other better alternatives out there for his needs like visio or illustrator/photoshop, or even better - hybrid vector/bitmap apps, like ms expression designer ("acrylic"). An app with ink support isn't a bad idea either.
  7. Not the same type of dependancy. Yes, there are ways to preinstall, but it's still a PITA to deal with it regardless. GTK+ apps don't look very much like native apps under windows, that's what sucks. WPF : windows only indeed. Not being cross-platform is perfectly fine with most people (just like I had mentionned underneath). Right now developing cross-platform apps for most companies/devs means higher dev costs and time, and practically no extra sales/profit. The day it's profitable I'll consider it. The demand for our apps to be ported to linux is non-existant (hardly anyone makes commercial software for it unsurprisingly). Meanwhile WPF can deliver truly amazing apps for ~95% of the market (soon people will even expect this).
  8. That's precisely why I said that. They save 5 cents on a board, but I'd rather pay more for a board with a good NIC on it. As for "as long as it works", yeah, I've seen many ghetto things, like a board without even the clear CMOS jumper (the pads were there, and you could short them, but the savings must have been pretty minimal overall).
  9. There are many widget toolkits (not all cross-platform though), but they all have significant downsides (not to mention many require people to download the thing and install it besides your app), namely a lot of 'em don't have the native look and feel of some OS'es they can run onto (and that's ignoring the programming language support/bindings/limitations): GTK+: Sucks under windows. 'nuff said. Qt: not too bad, but at $3300 per developper license, I'll definitely skip! Ridiculously overpriced. wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows): doesn't suck nearly as bad as many others (lesser evil?) AWT: old stuff (dead)... mainly replaced by Swing (Swing is built on top of AWT) Swing: tends to be slow and memory intensive SWT: not really standard, somewhat of a tie with Swing (different pains) winforms: windows/.NET tech, also runs on mono (my current favorite, disregarding portability) WPF: windows only, but is by far the best IMO (slowly getting into it) More like revolutionary (there's nothing else quite like it on any platform) Thing is, there's basically no demand for most apps to run on linux. I couldn't care less if any of my apps don't run on it, and I'm far from being the only one who thinks that way. Targeting the majority platform isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  10. I think the question should be more like "Why would you pay 3000$ for a computer that'll be worth 1500$ next month?" But yeah, if one's going all-out with high-end parts, why not pick a high-end board too (not that I've even looked at it)... It's not like he's restricting himself much. How about a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX in there too?
  11. Well, it looks like they went out of their way, parting from the reference implementation in the chipset dev kit (which used a PCIe version), to using something stupid. I bet they saved a whole 5 cents too. 'Guess I ain't buying a Foxconn board anytime soon.
  12. Same here. The 320GB'ers (7200.10 series SATAII) are very well priced (~100 USD), are fast, nice 16MB buffer, pretty quiet, 5 year warranty and all.
  13. It's funny how people always "recommend" things like that (datacenter/advanced server/etc), just because it actually sounds better, and nothing else. You haven't even said for what purpose, so even there nobody should be able to make any real recommendation either (totally disregarding workstation/server OS differences). As a desktop, I'd say Win 2000 Pro. As a server, Win 2000 Server is more than sufficient. What Advanced Server gives you over the the normal Server edition? -support for up to 8GB of RAM on special and expensive PAE systems (not normal x86 hardware; if you had such specialized server hardware you wouldn't be asking those type of questions here) -8 way SMP (I very much doubt you're going to put this old OS on a 8 way Opteron or Xeon box that costs tens of thousands $) -some clustering support (something for VERY high loads most companies don't even need, expensive setup too, and if you were into clustering you wouldn't be asking such basic questions here) So no, you don't want Advanced Server, it won't do anything more for you than the normal Server version, and that's assuming you're going to run a server with it. Most people recommending Advanced Server or Datacenter base their "recommendations" on the name alone, not because they know the differences between them. It's not better than the plain server edition for normal servers and purposes. Win2k Pro is basically like WinXP (a desktop OS) Win2k Server is basically like Win2003 (a server OS) Just pick the one you need between the two.
  14. The theory is somewhat valid, but the name you chose is rather inappropriate, and the example sure is a bad one. That person didn't sue just because she accidentally poured some coffee on herself (happens, and it's not usually a problem). The problem here is actually the company you're seemingly sympatizing with. After several hundreds of ppl getting serious burns - sometimes caused by their employees. and even though they've known their coffee to be dangerously hot (180 to 190 degrees F! - and not being any reasons to do so), they still continue to prepare/serve it that way (talk about being careless - there's publications about this very problem at the said company). And in this specific case, it was 3rd deree burns to the groin - those are deep burns, requiring skin grafts (to a place where I'd rather that never happen) and costs a lot of money (over 10k$ in this case). And it's not like people should expect coffee to be this ridiculously hot and dangerous (no warnings of any kind anywhere either). The couple times where I've had coffee there (not a pleasant experience for one's taste buds at all), I've discovered how hot it really is by burning my tongue with the first sip, after having waited for it to cool down quite a bit (nevermind it almost tasted better that way). Besides, spilling coffee isn't exactly ineptitude. Who hasn't ever spilled coffee before? Or any kind of drink, really. Common everyday accidents aren't ineptitude, and it certainly was the company at fault here (court ruled so too). I wish people would stop siding with a company that willingly does bad things like this - not to comment on the nutritive value (or lack of) their "food". It would be difficult to come up with a worse example. That's just like siding with Ford about the exploding Pintos, because the drivers must have been inept or something (unfounded too), and calling it the Ford theory.
  15. That's extremely unlikely. As ppl said before, no cable modem out there resets / reinitializes / is back online within 2 seconds or even anything near that. My surfboard SB5101 takes more like a whole minute. My bet is still on the router.
  16. As I've pointed out before, it's not - it's off the PCI-e bus, thus solving the PCI latency issues.
  17. Personally, I prefer the Dell Ultrasharps to every single other LCD screen I've seen before (including NEC/viewsonic models). It's almost all I'd consider buying. But again, that's just me. Decently priced for the size, nice high resolutions and all. I'm planning to buy a pair of these and a dual monitor (DVI) KVM switch sometime next year. As if the monitors aren't expensive enough, the basic 4 port dual monitor (DVI) switches are like 400$ + the cable sets (10 expensive 6ft DVI cables)! And most freaking KVMs don't play nice with logitech mice/trackballs seemingly (I know the 400$ startech doesn't like it), and that's a problem for me as MS doesn't make trackballs... I'd be happy with a single 30" Ultrasharp too, but finding a switch for dual link DVI (plus new video cards) is only going to be harder and more expensive. Ideally, I'd love something like the SwitchView SC8, but that's like 2000$
  18. There are lots of 3rd party utilities to peek and set it. I would bet money it's a PCI latency problem (being solved by removing the "faulty" card with a too high setting). As for the drop in speed, it could be so many things... Like drivers, individual card settings (MTU, etc), or even plain bad luck. As for TCP/IP offloading, I would believe the broadcom chip is actually better (pretty much does it all - TCP/IP and UDP checksums, CPU task offload, TCP segmentation offload, interrupt combining, supports jumbo frames, etc), the old 3c905 doesn't support half of what the broadcom does. Besides, it mainly affects CPU load. So I'd think the reason for any difference in speed is elsewhere. Either ways, why not run it @ 100mbit? 10 is way slow for any network (unless you're talking about your internet speed) Put it back in, and tweak the PCI latency timer via 3rd party utils (a google search should reveal many), and I bet you'll manage to keep the old card and not have any stuttering. Mind you, I wouldn't keep any old NIC for a 100kbps difference, but that's just me.
  19. And asking here won't solve that. The idea is to put it where there is more performance. The RAID0 setup should perform quite well, but if you're doing IO intensive stuff on there, being on another drive would be faster. It really depends. Same goes for things like photoshop scratch disk setup. And it's a bit like pagefile size. People have been arguing over this for ages, and asking here wouldn't give you a definitive answer either.
  20. The standard implementation (see the link in my last post) is off the PCI-e bus, and I can't see why they'd go out of their way to put it on the PCI bus, which can't really handle full gigabit speeds in the first place. It would likely cost more to implement and might be harder to route (implemented differently than in the chipset development kit), perform slower, etc. Just like onboard audio, the onboard NIC isn't bad at all. Yes, a very good sound card (M-Audio or whatever) would be better, just like a high-end PCI-e NIC would be better, but going with the 3c905 here is almost like if he had replaced his onboard high def audio for a SB16, which is not exactly great anymore (but it was a good card for its time too).
  21. I doubt changing slots will help (especially for a latency problem). As for trying another card, that's why I talked about the onboard one He's got a perfectly good Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet onboard, and he's using a 100mbit oldie instead... The only thing I like about those 3c905's and intel pro 100's is that driver support (including ndis2 for dos) is pretty much universal/supported out of the box. But I'd much rather use the one he has onboard over that. Even if it's not for the speed/performance, with modern chipsets like he's using (945), the NIC is usually off the PCI-e bus (not off the "old" PCI bus) - as long as he doesn't run OS'es that he can't get the broadcom drivers for (unlikely). That could easily solve a PCI latency problem too, and it's quick to try (plug ethernet cable in other jack, and see if it makes a difference - no need to swap parts, move stuff, change configs, etc). I still have a couple dozen such old NICs (and a few extras of others kinds), and they're great as 2nd NICs, for use by firewalls, VMWare and what not, but as primary NIC... Let's say they're starting to show their age.
  22. Before? That's still the case IMO. Wireless cards can be a PITA to get working (often via ndiswrapper). Newer video cards are often problematic. Getting lots of simple things working (like spdif out of a SB Live 5.1) is sometimes a nightmare (at least on the distro I was using). Lots of things like that. Installing software isn't exactly always easy either - not as much as under windows IMO. Like Mythtv or TrixBox and others. There's distros that help installing some of those, but what if I want a different distro, or use both (can't just install both distros on the same box). Or another little thing: installing apache. Easy enough to start the install process via apt-get or whatever the distro of choice uses, but it doesn't ask nor tell where it puts the htdocs (home for your pages or whatever) - which seemingly varies from one distro to another, it doesn't start the service or anything (just in case you were just installing it for the sake of using disk space and not serving pages?) Too many things are unecessarily complicated to accomplish. Don't get me wrong, it's a very useful OS, at least for many niche purposes, like dirt cheap LAMP hosting, firewalls, etc. But the main reason to stick to windows (you're the one asking)? 99% of the apps I need/want require windows (and have no direct/suitable replacement), and it's unlikely to change anytime soon. As for linux automatically and necessarily being more robust/reliable/secure or whatever, I'm calling FUD on this one. Besides, Vista isn't that bad. I've tried the betas, and never got a BSOD (and likely your problem was with your specific hardware config or drivers, and yes, it's expected and normal that this can happen in a few cases like yours). And w/o Aero and all that, it runs pretty smoothly even on older PCs.
  23. Personally, I'd try not to share the sound card's IRQ with other things, especially demanding ones like the video card (although I don't think that's causing the problem by itself). I'd also check the PCI latency of the sound card and NIC (try lowering the NIC - 32 should be enough, and increasing the sound card if necessary). Perhaps the NIC is hogging the PCI bus. Eventually, I'd try the onboard NIC instead. They're not bad usually (better than most onboard audio are). Personally, I haven't experienced such a problem since the dreaded KT133 chipset (which not only stuttered but BSOD'ed ridiculously), which was mainly due to PCI latency.
  24. Have fun restricting yourself to MS-only software. Firewall wise, Vista changed nothing (I still didn't use 3rd party firewalls on 2k/XP). Ghost was an essential tool until Vista, that's pretty much the only change I'll grant you, but it's hardly an expense, as most of us (who actually buy their software) have already bought it. As for IE7, just because you add tabs to the suckiest browser ever doesn't make other browsers useless. what FF has that IE7 doesn't? Things like standards compliance, lots of cool and very useful addons, etc. Even if it wasn't for FF, I still wouldn't use IE. Good joke! Why use something that doesn't suck and has a tons more useful features, yeah. Can't see why! Can't see why someone would want to use photoshop over paint either. Because I want good authoring/encoding/burning apps? That's always been that way. Except a couple months ago those were 3rd party. Vista changed nothing to this. If that's all the software you need (that's EXTREMELY minimalistic needs, I don't recall seeing a PC with so little software installed/in use EVER), and that you're content with sub-par versions of everything, then why not? I bet you even like Windows Media Player...
  25. Didn't know that (I don't run Vista yet) Yet another reason to not use a 64 bit version of windows... Seemingly there's so much problems with 64bit OS'es right now, it's not worth the trouble. From missing drivers, to lack of 64 bit software, to apps using more memory (due to pointers being twice as big and other things), no legacy 16 bit app support whatsoever, etc. I just see no real pros, but sure are a lot of cons. I just discovered today another problem running apps with 64 bit Windows: apps can't use the Jet engine anymore. Yes, it's crusty old tech that sucks, but there's a LOT of apps relying on it still. Jet is not ported to x64 platform, and will likely never be! While it's possible to install the 32 bit version (4.0 SP8) on x64, 64 bit apps cannot make use of it (as it's an in-process component). It could be a problem with many apps. Even for web stuff - there's a lot of small intranet apps that still use jet (ms access .mdb files) for databases. Won't work on 64 bit windows (there's no 32 bit copy of IIS), forcing people to convert their apps to use another database. Might not be a bad thing to see Jet finally die - being replaced by "ACE" (Access Data Engine), but still breaking apps. Besides, I doubt ACE will be much better (security/performance/feature wise). Why not force people to use a REAL database instead? (they're suggesting it, but then turning around and creating another sub-par engine hardly helps) While it's not a major problem, it just seems to pile up with the countless other problems/issues/whatever about 64 bit Windows. Maybe in a few years, it might finally be worth it.
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