> stepped on by an elephant, run over by a Land Rover, dropped from a second-story window, buried in mud, soaked in a pint of beer, and roasted in an oven at 150 degrees c

Hey, coincidentally, that exactly describes what happened to me last night. And I'm still working.

The PS2 has two vector coprocessors running at 300Mhz too, though only one of them is really useful for anything. Because of Sony's general philosophy of putting a bunch of weird specialty hardware in their machines, you can't just list CPU clock rates (as relevant as that ever is to anything).

The XBox is clearly more powerful than the PS2 (though not by as much as you suggest), but the GameCube isn't.

Where the XBox, the 360, and the Wii have the biggest advantage is that they're relatively easy to program for. Writing software for specialized vector processors is a pain.

I don't have any mod points, so I'm just going to say, beautifully illustrated!

Can you imagine if a manager was to pull himself away from his desk, walk down to the IT shop and ask an employee to, "show me," that he could make a cable, and then test that it was correctly made? Who's watching the stock price while that is going on? No one.

I'm so glad that we are staying focused on real CYA business practices here, instead of muddying the waters with talk of profit and loss, craftsmanship, or product quality.

Anonymous Coward:

RAID5 has terrible random write performance, because every write causes a write to every disk in the array.

XanC:

I have to read from _every drive in the array_ in order to do a write, because the parity has to be calculated. Note that it's not the calculation that's slow, it's getting the data for it. So that's multiple operations to do a simple write.

No it does not. An x+1 parity computation only requires the parity block and the block being overwritten to write the new block. You take the parity, "subtract" the old data, and "add" the new data (in fact, the "subtract" and "add" are both just XOR).

Alternatively, if you're writing a full stripe, you can just compute the parity directly. This is of course preferable to doing reads, since reads are slow. Your random write performance is suffering because you have to read and write exactly two disks in the stripe.

I don't know why this old myth comes up so often. Any decent reference will explain how parity works. Maybe if Kari Byron explained RAID parity striping, it would sink in?

Doing random reads is not slow for an SSD, so of course the random write performance with RAID 5 will be much better with SSDs.

Boot time for an OS is measured from boot loader to usable system, not from power button. This is a different measurement from boot time for a whole computer system.

Why the distinction?

Well, for example, Linux can't do anything if your BIOS sucks. It could boot in half a second, but it'll still take 90 seconds to get to the boot loader. What this means is that you use the OS time when comparing operating systems.

When comparing a Mac to an Dell computer, you compare the OS and the hardware boot time together, because Apple and Dell can actually fix that BIOS stuff if you complain enough.

So, the poster above was right to compare OSX to Ubuntu using the time from boot loader.

Broaden your vision. This is about making smaller components.

What can you do with smaller components? Well, right away, you can put more stuff in the case. Your iphonanopalmtop thing can have a foldout screen and keyboard, or a bigger battery, or it can simply be lighter. I don't know about you, but I find an iPhone a bit hefty.

Now, if you look beyond next week, smaller components let you do entirely new things. You think technology is sufficient now to put a computer in a palmtop? Whatever, dude.

I want a computer in my eyeglasses. Optically corrected screens overlaying my vision. High resolution. And I want them to weigh the same as a normal pair of glasses. Don't forget to throw in a video camera for good measure.

Can we build something like that now? Or course not. That sort of thing today is either a huge bulky piece of headgear, or it's moderately bulky and has a terrible display. We need better components: much smaller, much lower power, faster.

Don't ever say we've reached the limits of useful computer technology. Until you're plugged in directly via your visual cortex and have a robot butler who brings you waffles in the morning, we haven't even reached the limits of uses we can already imagine.

I heard on TV that an omnipotent sky monkey plans to torture us all in a volcano forever because some woman made out of a guy's rib ate a snack with a talking snake.

And that was supposed to be an education show!

Washington has basically the same system as Oregon. We have a simple solution to the important and very common problem you listed:

"*ring ring* Hi, police? Yes. This guy just pointed a gun to my head and forced me to fill out my ballot his way. You'll get right on that? Thanks!"

"*ring ring* Hi, elections board? This guy just pointed a gun to my head and forced me to fill out my ballot his way. You'll invalidate my ballot and let me re-vote in person? Thanks!"

This sort of thing happens with 5-10% of the votes here every election, which is why you always see employers and neighbors getting thrown in prison by the police for felony elections fraud. Oh wait, voter coercion is practically unheard of, so that doesn't happen? Bizarre!

Well, Washington is (pretty much) all vote-by-mail too now. Basically the same system.

It may evolve to the point that these characters will want to invest the effort in really carefully targeting their marks. I have heard it called, "spear phishing," but I have never actually seen it.

If they really wanted to do that, I would think they'd start by harvesting info from the million zombie pcs they root. I *have* seen a worm that eavesdropped on FTP to steal login info, and tag sites with malware, but that is about all I have seen in the wild.

Most of the spam/phish gang action I see, seems to be very big nets, cast very wide.

Again, that may change over time.