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Comment: Re:ZFS (Score 1) 268

by washu_k (#43561817) Attached to: Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production
You didn't have enough RAM. To use deduplication on ZFS without a massive performance hit requires assloads of RAM. 8 GB is nothing to ZFS with dedup on unless your disks are tiny. While Oracle claims less, the FreeBSD guys have found you need at least 5 GB per TB of disk just for dedup, plus more for cache and the rest of the OS. Do the math and any reasonably big storage pool will need tonnes of RAM.

Comment: Re:Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro (Score 5, Informative) 176

by washu_k (#43208879) Attached to: Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

The Core i7's are consumer-grade processors and are slower than the Xeon's the Mac Pros use

This is completely incorrect. The current Mac Pros use Nehalem based Xeons which are two generations back from the current Ivy Bridge i7s. Xeons may have differences in core count, cache and/or ECC support but their execution units are the same as their desktop equivalents. The base Mac Pro CPU is equivalent to an i7-960 with ECC support. The current Ivy Bridge i7s are a fair bit faster.

Comment: Re:Java and flash... (Score 1, Insightful) 97

by washu_k (#43192447) Attached to: Apple Nabs Java Exploit That Bypassed Disabled Plugin

All other operation systems running on similar hardware but having strict security and privileges proof you wrong. Even Linux existed at that time already and ran happily on that hardware.

No, he is completely correct. Linux of the time did not "run happily" on that hardware with the same level of GUI complexity as Win9x. Either Linux had no GUI at all, or a simple window manager like TWM or FVWM.

This is also doubly wrong in claiming that all other operating systems at the time had proper security. The biggest competitors to MS at the time were even simpler and less secure OSes. For GUIs there was MacOS which didn't have protected memory and could barely multitask, along with having no security model. On the server side the biggest at the time would have been Novell, which did have a security model, but still had no protected memory and much simpler multitasking than even Win9x.

Comment: Re:Applets disabled (Score 2) 201

by washu_k (#42623017) Attached to: The status of Java on my machine:
I'm a satisfied CrashPlan customer too, but it most certainly is bloated. For what it does it's memory usage is insane. The service is currently using 900 MB of RAM on my system just idling, plus another 200 MB for the interface. I've had cases where I've had to edit its config files to allow it to use even more memory and Google shows I'm far from the only one.

It's also extremely slow. It will often backup at only 20-40 mbit/sec locally on my gig lan. I know it encrypts files, but my i7 can perform the same encryption in other programs at least an order of magnitude faster. Yes, I have allowed it to use more CPU power.

While there isn't anything that works as well, there are tonnes of programs that do similar things to CrashPlan with a fraction of the resource usage.

Comment: Re:Heh (Score 2) 348

by washu_k (#42378105) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do You Test Your New Hard Drives?
Running spinrite against an SSD is one of the clearest ways of showing that it is complete BS. It will report all sorts of things about the drive that are clearly impossible. It won't error or give no data, it clearly makes things up about the drive.

Another good BS test for spinrite is to run it against a non-ATA drive that is still BIOS accessible. A booted USB flash drive is the best, but something like a modern SCSI/SAS controller works as well. It's clearly impossible for spinrite to access such a device directly, yet it still reports all sorts of things it simply could not see. No errors or blank data, it again makes shit up and displays it.

Comment: Re:Online storage?! (Score 1) 330

by washu_k (#42165221) Attached to: Slashdot Asks: SATA DVD Drives That Don't Suck for CD Ripping?
No, it's far more likely that an audio CD will lose data. A modern HD, SSD, tape or even data CD has FAR more error correction and detection than audio CDs. Audio CDs have very limited error correction that is meant to smooth out errors in a non-audible way, not to give perfect data. Any "bitrot" is far more likely to have come from the original CD then the media used to store the ripped data.

Comment: Re:I just can't live without a ZIF socket. (Score 1) 1009

by washu_k (#42100169) Attached to: Is Intel Planning To Kill Enthusiast PCs?
No you didn't:

The 386 SX and DX have different bus widths. The SX was 16 bit and was usually soldered on. The DX was 32 bit and usually had a socket, but not a ZIF one. They never shared sockets.

Likewise the Pentium 66 used socket 4 and not socket 5 or 7 that the 150 would have used. Not compatible at all.

Comment: Re:Test on Opteron 6234 (Score 1) 286

by washu_k (#41644907) Attached to: AMD Reportedly Preparing Massive Layoff
You just proved my point. You ran a test with the most ideal case (pure integer code) and it ran slower when on the same module. Run more real world code with two threads and the performance hit gets bigger. Try the same test on an i7. The code will run the same speed no matter which cores it uses, as it doesn't lie to the OS can claim the SMT units are full cores.

This is the whole reason why Windows 7 has problems scheduling on the FX CPUs. AMD LIES to the OS and claims the SMT units are full cores. This causes performance problems when Windows schedules as if it was true. If AMD had been truthful then the FX CPUs would perform to their fullest potential on any OS, and Linux and Win 8 would not have had to be modified to work around the issue.

Call it hyper-threading, SMT or whatever, the second integer unit on FX CPUs are not full cores. AMD did SMT better than Intel, but it's still not a full core.

Comment: Re:Damn. (Score 1) 286

by washu_k (#41642615) Attached to: AMD Reportedly Preparing Massive Layoff
No, "Almost all parts" are not duplicated. Only the integer units and the L1 data caches are duplicated. The L1 instruction cache, the instruction fech, instruction decode (the big performance hit), branch predictor, instruction dispatcher, FPU and bus interface are all shared. Running almost any two threads that max out the "cores" on the same module is slower than running them on two separate modules.

Just because AMD calls them cores does not make it true.

Comment: Re:Damn. (Score 1) 286

by washu_k (#41641981) Attached to: AMD Reportedly Preparing Massive Layoff
The problem is that AMD called its version of hyper-threading a full core, which it clearly is not. Even though they put a second integer unit in the module, most other parts are shared and the performance of the second half of the module suffers. The FX-8150 is really a 4 core CPU with a good hyper-threading implementation, not an 8 core CPU. If the FX CPUs had claimed to have hyper-threading instead of full cores then Windows 7 would have scheduled properly on them.

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