At which point you'd be put in a cell.
Until you were discharged.

Reminds me of a story too...

My Dad had a new-ish 386 PC which he loved, he especially loved how fast it was. One weekend I played some games on it, one of which (maybe Level 42?) needed the turbo off, as it was way too fast to play at the full nosebleed-speed of 33 MHz. I then went away for the week.

When I came back that Saturday lunchtime, he was literally waiting on the driveway for em, purple with fury. He'd been struggling for the whole week with an unuseably slow PC, and he'd tried rebooting, and he'd tried lots of things, and it had ruined his week... basically he was ready to murder me, and woe betide me if I didn't fix it pronto.

I was in a panic - what the hell had broken to make it so slow? Was it something I'd got from a BBS with a virus? Was it some TSR causing an issue?

The panic ended when I walked into his study, and from across the room saw the Turbo light off. I walked over to it, pressed Turbo, and let him try again. Problem solved. It was years before he could laugh about it...

That reminds me, I shoudl dig out Level 42 and try it on my 3.4 GHz machine... maybe running it in DOS in Bochs would slow it down enough?

Thanks for pointing that out, it's not like the catholic church has any positions or beliefs that are in conflict with sanity, reason and common sense, is it?

Infallibility of the pope (until there's a new one)
Randomly picking which bits of the bible are absolutely unquestionably the literal command of god, and which bits are just allegories
Condoms and contraception in general (helping spread AIDS and other effects such as overpopulation)
Celibacy of priests (and look where that has lead in terms of rampant child abuse and a complete lack of appropriate response)
Decades or even centuries of fighting against scientific discoveries that eventually become part of 'accepted teaching'

and that's before we get to the whole imaginary-god-invented-to-control-people thing.

You have access to this thing called the Internet. Go to ark.intel.com - it's been there a long long time. It tells you *all* the details of every chip they sell.

They do sell a huge array of chips with many subtle differences - it's not like the good old days when there were 4 speeds of 486 to choose between - bus speeds, chip speeds, integrated GPU, process node, cache sizes, VT-x extensions, SSE4.2, AES, power draw, number of cores, Hyper-threading, form factor, socket, lead-free, PCIe lanes, ebmbedded...

Many, many people don't care, and buy their PCs to a price, and based on how it looks. For those of us that do care, or need a particular feature, it's *really* easy to find out what's what.

Nice one, I didn't know about the 50% thing - probably because where I live 50% humidity is abnormally dry.

What are *you* on about? 3kW is a lot, when it's 24x7x365. Add it up. The house you mention is very unlikely to add up to anywhere near 3kW constantly for the whole year. The comparison (and your other about the desktop PC) is insane, and here's why:

His is one rack, in a row of dozens, with (unless it's a very small datacentre) dozens of rows.

All the customers in all the racks are trying to maximise their utilisation of the rack (extra racks cost more), and the utilisaton of the systems in those racks (more computers cost more). Each of those hundreds of racks needs multiple kW (some more than 3, not many less than 2 or so), with huge reliability.

Now add nearly the same amount of power again to cool all those racks, to keep air passing over them all. As well as powering the chillers, and driving the air down many channels to get it to every intake fan in every rack, all of which needs to have very good filtering (usually HEPA), and add on dehumidifying on top.

Multiple feeds into the building from the grid, UPS protection, surge protection, switching between live feed 1, live feed 2, and UPS power all has to be seamless enough to not bother a nodern computer - it all adds up to a very hard job. Yes it's an established process, but that doesn't make it easy.

Your midrange desktop with 4 cores - you couldn't get more than around 20 of those in a single rack, and you would be drawing way more than 3 kW to drive them. To get 200 cores and storage (and presumably some network kit too) into a single rack is still impressive now - and for it to draw only 3 kW is impressive - they must be very efficient units.

Add in the hard drives, RAM, fans, lossy power supplies, chipsets, switches, etc.

Oh, and very few professionals would use 2 TB SATA drives in a datacentre setting. Most units nowadays use 2.5" drives, and in the SAS world that limits you to 300 GB fast ones or 450 GB slow ones - 600 GB has been announced but it takes a while to become actually used. You need more though, as you need RAID to protect against failures. That frequently means installing double what you need in terms of raw storage. Then, you throw in a few hot spares for good measure. It all adds up.

Really, it's not as bad as you make out. Firstly and most importantly, as you've already pointed out you *can* Google for it. 20 seconds on the wikipedia page for Intel's processors can tell you what you need to know about the model number in front of you.

You really think they haven't thought about how to differentiate their products and make things clear? In reality they have a lot of different product ranges to cover, from multi-socket servers down to netbooks and PDAs.

Then they have variables like number of cores, HT or not, VT or not, integrated graphics or not, 45 or 32 nm, which socket it's for, TDP, Speedstep, bus/QPI speeds, OEM or retail, which SSE/ANI extensions they have, L1 cache size(s), L2 cache size(s), L3 cache size, form factor... the list goes on.

Then remember the VAST majority of their customers don't give a flying fuck about *any* of that - they're buying a whole computer to a price point, and the reality is almost any modern CPU will do for them. A vanishingly small number of their sales are individual CPUs to geeks, and for those geeks the information is out there.

In summary, how would you suggest they do it? Is there an industry where such a complex product range is all simple, clear and straightforward? The car-analogy /. fetish gives an example of similar confusion - my BMW 323i is not a 2.3 litre engine as the model number implies, it's a 2.5, same as the 325i. All customers care about is that the 325i is MOAR - it's faster than a 323i. The 318i is a 2 litre, same as the 320i. But the bigger number is MOAR. If you have more money, you go for the bigger number. And that's the level of detail most people want.

300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?

I live in a big city (160,000 people) in England. There are just 59 cameras monitored by the local police, and they are monitored by one person. I live just over a mile from the city centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.

For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are published.

I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.

My theory is that someone (who had a point to make or an axe to grind) counted all the CCTV cameras in a particular small area - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then took that number, multiplied it by the area of the country, and ignored the fact that 99%+ are nothing to do with government or police, to make whatever point they were trying to make. No doubt some imbecile published it (Daily Mail I wouldn't be surprised to hear) and made it out to be a fact and a huge problem, people repeated it and so it became an urban legend.

Amen, wish I had a mod point for you. 300 per block, WTF? +5 Insightful, WTFF?

I live in a city of 160,000 people in England, there are just 59 cameras monitored by the local government, and they are monitored by one person. I live 1.5 miles outside the centre, and none of them are within a mile of where I live.

For 9 months they weren't even monitored at all on the night shift, as no-one could be found to fill the position. The locations are even published.

I'm happy with that - most of the cameras are near the worse nightclubs that tend to have trouble outside some weekends, and taxi ranks where people might be waiting on their own late at night. They put them where people want them.

My theory is, someone counted all the CCTV cameras - general security cameras on/in offices, in hotel receptions, in shops, cameras that just measure average traffic speeds for GPS congestion avoidance, car parks and so on. They then used that vastly-bigger number to make whatever point they were trying to make, and it sounds like a big problem, people repeated it and so it became a false meme.

A fair point, and when doing any new server software I always do testing before going live, naturally. As I already pointed out there will be exceptions to the rule, but it's not a theoretical discussion, I've done it.

I was head systems manager in a setup of over 280 servers and 3,500 clients for a few years, and from 2003 until I left in 2009, only one of those 3,800 machines (a legacy AIX processing box) needed 'normal' amounts of swap. There was one version of AutoCAD which whinged without swap, so the 2-3 machines that ran on got 16 MB (the minimum non-zero amount Windows will allow), and with that they were fine.

Except that assumption has proved not to be true in my wide experience... Windows (XP, Server 2000, 2003, 2008, Vista, 7) is quite happy without swap, and it is an allowed setting, Linux (from 2.4 onwards) you can either simply not mount any swap, or if you want to get really anal about it (I never have needed to) compile the kernel without swap support.

There was one app which REQUIRED swap to be present, and on those couple of machines a fixed-size 16 MB (the minimum allowed above zero in Windows) has solved it. That was an old version of AutoCAD on Windows XP.

Try it, you'll see. You certainly don't need to spend significant money to have something you almost certainly don't need, spend the money on more RAM and a fast CPU instead!

...is anyone in the know still using swap?

I've not used swap on any desktop, laptop or server for several years now, and not had a problem. Domain controllers, Exchange servers, SMTP relays, file servers, web servers, database servers. Windows, Linux. 32 bit and 64 bit. All fine, and some with uptimes over a year. I agree there will be outliers who need it, but most people and most situation's don't.

Provide enough RAM for what you need and switch swap off!

On a desktop/laptop, towards the end of a busy day with lots of apps open, see how much you're using and most importantly what the peak utilisation was. If it was more than your RAM, you need more RAM. If it's comfortably below the RAM you have, you can switch off swap and get a free significant performance boost.

The performance gains alone should make it worthwhile, let alone your reduced hard drive wear and tear, and power savings (hard drives can go to sleep much more frequently and for longer) on top of that...

Oh, and as someone else has correctly pointed out, RAM that's in use for caching is not being wasted, the RAM that's sitting there not being used that's being wasted.

For a start, it's very good printer. I have one. Edge-to-edge printing, CDR printing, and 6-colour photo printing to a very high quality. Second, it's a good flatbed scanner too - so it can do photocopying without the host PC being on. Third, it can print straight from files on USB sticks and flash cards.

Now I'm not saying you're using all those features, but frankly you seem to be bitching about the cost of a full set of carts for it. There are two other options: el cheapo cartridges as others have pointed out are a lot cheaper than originals, or you can buy individual ones - and I find it hard to believe you've run out of all 6.

For me, it's not a problem. The cartridges last a long time, the photos it produces are wonderful and (so far) are fade-free, and it's a very quick copier/printer for other documents. The scanner's great too.

In summary, the cheapo replacement printer will NOT BE AS GOOD, unless you're only using it for printing, and only printing documents, not display-quality photos. In which case, she bought the wrong thing to start with.

I can only hope they sqirm - they have got lazy. Although their products have been hugely useful, I have noticed as I went over the years from a dedicated device to TomTom software on a Windows Mobile phone to TomTom software on an iPhone, that they haven't really progressed in that time, at all.

Over the same years the Google maps went from strength to strength, with the spooky-clever real-time route dragging, Street View and clever ways to search making it better and better. The only feature lacking has been the turn-by-turn navigation, and here it now is.

My hope is that the other companies have spent their profits wisely over the years on development, and they have some wonderful, innovative new products in the pipeline. If not, Google is about to steamroller them. The only possible benefit I can see my iPhone TomTom app having right now is the fact that the whole app and maps live on the phone - it works even when there's no phone or wifi signal. If/When Google fix that, bye bye TomTom.