Messages

251

Living Room / Re: A three drive system - the sweet spot

« on: March 26, 2014, 11:52 AM »

More efficient, yes. But I'm not that sure about the amount of power being consumed.

- RAM consumes a lot of power nowadays, because it needs to read and write very fast.
- A hard disk consumes a lot of power, because it reads and writes quite fast (at least as fast as the mechanics allow for).
- A pen drive consumes hardly any power, but forget fast reading and writing.

Guess where an SSD fits in this list. Now there are advantages with the SSD. Although it draws a lot of power, it doesn't do so the whole time. Not in a similar fashion as a mechanical drive has to, at least. So yes, more efficient it will be, but don't underestimate the power consumption when it's active.

-Shades (March 25, 2014, 08:17 PM)

I should have been clearer about what I meant since efficiency is a pretty nebulous term. That's what I get for posting from a tablet.

There are obviously multiple kinds of efficiency which have varying effects. I was referring primarily to the percentage of energy converted into work vs the amount lost as heat. And, of course, the general efficiency of purely electrical components without motors to turn the spindle or move write heads. That should tend to make SSDs cooler on average.

However you make an excellent point about power usage over a shorter time frame. While a traditional HDD will probably require more instantaneous power when it spins up the platters, that increased efficiency for accessing and transferring data will mean longer, and perhaps higher, peaks for the purely electronic components. Those peaks are what your cooling strategy needs to be designed around.

And you are completely right about the quality of the PSU in a PC and the quality of the power that "feeds" the CPU. Proper grounding your grid works wonders, using small power groups also helps a lot. In the Netherlands an average house uses about 5 16 Ampere circuit breakers. Usually one for the (master) bath room, one for the kitchen, one for the living/hallway/toilet, one for the bedrooms/attic/toilet, one for the washing machine and one for a garden/shed.

All these small grids practically do not affect each other, whenever there is an appliance connected that is known to generate spikes in a grid ((older) fluorescent light elements, washing machine, dish washer, micro wave, power tools, blow dryers). Saves you already a lot of headache and the appliances that are more or less permanently attached to the 220 Volt grid really last longer. 

You really should take a look sometimes with a scope to your power grid when it is in normal use. You would be amazed how "dirty" the power in your house is.

I don't own a scope but fortunately I have a pretty good feel for how dirty the power is. It may be a little less dirty since we had some upgrades done, including new wiring from the transformer to the masthead. The wiring from the masthead to the meter turned out to be better than I expected. It's definitely been upgraded at least once, perhaps even twice. It's definitely not the same wiring that was put in for the initial 60A service almost 100 years ago and possibly more recent than the initial 100A upgrade.

However I also know the grounding didn't get upgraded like it should have. We added a ground spike for the new outlets in my office but none of the other outlets are connected to it.

252

Living Room / Re: A three drive system - the sweet spot

« on: March 26, 2014, 10:02 AM »

I've never really considered quality of power supply.

Does a normal consumer-grade UPS help with this kind of thing?

-mouser (March 26, 2014, 02:41 AM)

I've never had an UPS and I live in an area that suffers brown-outs and power failures, (lots of trees don't go well with overhead lines).

I do, however, have very good quality surge suppression/filtering power boards and I've never lost a piece of equipment that was plugged into them yet ... and I've had them for ~20 years.

It's line noise/ripple current that is a very good killer of the inferior quality capacitors used in some switchmode PSUs.  The ripple causes the capacitors to heat up, the electrolyte dries out, the ESR^w rises, current across the capacitor rises, heat increases, etc, etc, then the PSU dies ... sometimes taking whatever it's attached to.

The better you can filter the incoming AC to eliminate any noise/ripple and surges, the better it's going to be for your PSU.

-4wd (March 26, 2014, 06:07 AM)

Also, a crap PSU will create ripple from clean AC and even without any real surges ripple will definitely shorten the life of just about any electronics component.

Most UPS include some form of surge suppression/filtering, the quality is usually commensurate with the cost.  Almost all consumer, (not business), grade UPS are of the Stand-by type.  They don't do anything until the power fails, until then they're just a power board with surge suppression/line filtering.

Absolutely. You should always use an online (aka continuous) UPS whenever possible. Besides the fact the battery backup in a standby UPS may not kick in fast enough, using the battery as the primary, rather than secondary, power source typically means more electrical isolation. Isolation is a key factor in surge suppression. Besides which, the filtering in a standby UPS is usually pretty unreliable.

That's also where proper grounding comes in very handy. Nothing protects against surges better than bleeding the excess current away to ground. It will increase the chances your protection circuitry survives a big event caused by something like lightning or a damaged transformer on the pole outside. It also makes a different in brownout conditions since brownouts are usually accompanied by spikes.

In my neighborhood the power is realtively clean but we do have intermittent brownout issues. The power lines run through back alleys and the power company can't be  bothere to trim the tree branches around them aggressively enough. They actually do a great job on power lines that run along the street but those are less work and more visible to the public. On a windy day the chances of the lights flickering at least once or twice is pretty high.

When we moved in we had to have the breaker box capacity upgraded for an electric dryer and I had the electrician put in a grounded circuit and new outlets for the computers in my office. At the time I didn't have a UPS for my server so every time the lights flickered it went down. After plugging it into a properly grounded outlet that stopped entirely. If the monitor is on it will shut off but generally the computer stays up. It has a UPS now so that's not an issue at all but still I wouldn't plug it into an ungrounded outlet if I could avoid it.

Be that and all, a crap PSU is still a crap PSU, a good filter will only make it last a little longer.

And won't stop it from damaging your computer during that time. Also IME a cheap power supplies are more prone to failing spectacularly, taking out the motherboard - sometimes the CPU and/or RAM as well.

+1 with @40hz about a quality PSU but I'd also throw in a good quality line filter before it.

If you have particularly poor power conditions - like almost any rural area here - it's even a good idea to have a separate line conditioner before a UPS. It will extend the life of the UPS, and likely the life of the battery as well. Unless things have changed considerably since the last time I had a UPS battery die (it's been a few years), it's almost as expensive as a new UPS. Plus you'll probably be able to either spend less on the UPS or get more capacity (ie time) for the same money if you don't need superior filtering.

Of course, the best filtering available in a UPS isn't equivalent to a good dedicated line conditioner anyway.

253

Living Room / Re: A three drive system - the sweet spot

« on: March 26, 2014, 08:56 AM »

A properly sized unit from a reputable name such as Corsair, Antec, Seasonic, or PC Power & Cooling are all good bets. You don't need to spring for expensive 'enterprise' grade models. Units built for workstation deployment are just fine. Put a good UPS in front of them and Bob's yer uncle.

It's the no-name Asian imports that go for <$50 you want to avoid.

-40hz (March 26, 2014, 06:03 AM)

That's more true today than it was in the past. It wasn't that long ago some name brands (I'm looking at you CoolerMaster) sold mostly flaky PSUs. I say sold because the vast majority of quality power supplies are made by Seasonic and Corsair. Companies like Antec do some assembly and add some touches of their own but the core comes from another factory fully assembled. I could have sworn there was a third OEM but I could be wrong. At any rate most name brands have switched to building their PSUs from either Corsair or Seasonic internals, including CoolerMaster, so quality has generally taken an upward turn.

For anyone who wants to educate themselves on PSU technology I highly recommend reading through some of the reviews at JonnyGuru. They include thorough testing under load and in-depth details about internal components and build quality. Also you can usually find out who the OEM for a particular model or line is.

254

Living Room / Re: A three drive system - the sweet spot

« on: March 25, 2014, 06:10 PM »

That's without even getting into the issue of cooling which is a problem for all drives, but probably even more for a SSD (especially a consumer model) than a HDD.

-Vurbal (March 25, 2014, 04:28 PM)

I find that my machines run cooler with SSDs than with mechanical drives. More space for air flow?

-cranioscopical (March 25, 2014, 05:51 PM)

That's probably part of it. Keep in mind they also use less power, and probably use it a lot more efficiently too. The problem, once again, would mostly apply to badly designed hardware - the case rather than the PSU in this instance

255

Living Room / Re: A three drive system - the sweet spot

« on: March 25, 2014, 04:28 PM »

WRT consumer SSDs I think the real world reliability is often very different than what you're likely to get from a properly configured test setup due to power quality issues. IME controller electronics have been far and away the most common failure point for modern consumer HDDs for several years now.

A significant percentage of home computers (and sadly an awful lot of business computers) have low quality power supplies which are plugged into outlets with inconsistent line quality and poor or nonexistent grounding. When you replace the mechanical bits of a hard drive with the purely electronic ones in a SSD it stands to reason cheap computers would have a higher failure rate than expensive ones. I'm over generalizing a bit because not every expensive computer has a quality power supply but a quality power supply usually makes for a more expensive computer.

That's without even getting into the issue of cooling which is a problem for all drives, but probably even more for a SSD (especially a consumer model) than a HDD.

256

Living Room / Re: good Videos [short films] here :)

« on: March 25, 2014, 03:52 PM »

YouTube comment reconstruction. NSFW - yeah I know that's redundant 

257

Living Room / Re: good Videos [short films] here :)

« on: March 25, 2014, 07:43 AM »

258

General Software Discussion / Re: What the Heck is Happening to Windows? Article on Windows 8 Disaster

« on: March 20, 2014, 03:04 PM »

Nothing personal but I'd be a lot happier if I thought there was a chance  you guys were wrong. There really isn't though.

259

Living Room / Re: What happens when Hollywood gets involved with a Kickstarter

« on: March 20, 2014, 02:24 PM »

The reason Google gets squat is because they refuse to stop stealing from content producer's. No I don't believe that, but yes most of the bigshots in legacy content industries believe some or all of the following.

Google refuses to rework their search algorithms to eliminate illegal offerings. They do this partly to generate traffic, but primarily to sell ads on illegal sites when they could easily make them go away

YouTube, not an addiction to throwing away $200 million a pop on movies written by executive committee, is the reason people don't buy what Hollywood tells them to.

Google TV is all about stealing from the broadcasters because otherwise consumers would be happy to ante up for endless price hikes with money they don't have.

Google = the Internet but Apple = the entertainment industry


Also, this:

260

General Software Discussion / Re: How link to pix in Tumblr?

« on: March 20, 2014, 01:03 PM »

If you still have the default grouping enabled, you can right click the group stack is the taskbar and select 'Close group'. You will get a batch of 'Close all tabs?' prompts but can select 'Always close all tabs' to avoid that.

-Stoic Joker (March 20, 2014, 06:48 AM)

I thought that's what the Big Red Switch was for. 

261

General Software Discussion / Re: What the Heck is Happening to Windows? Article on Windows 8 Disaster

« on: March 20, 2014, 11:59 AM »

IMO Windows needs a total ground up redesign, not unlike what Apple did with OS X.

-Vurbal (March 20, 2014, 09:57 AM)

I don't trust Microsoft to do it well.

-wraith808 (March 20, 2014, 11:50 AM)

I certainly don't trust their management to do it well. That's potentially an argument for why it might be better if Microsoft continues to bet on the past and wait for somebody else to take over and do things right after they drive themselves into the ground.

262

General Software Discussion / Re: What the Heck is Happening to Windows? Article on Windows 8 Disaster

« on: March 20, 2014, 11:57 AM »

One was convincing individuals to license Office rather than buying it.

-Vurbal (March 20, 2014, 09:57 AM)

To be honest, IMO that's the only part of their new business model that makes even small sense within an admittedly limited number of use cases. Where it fits, it fits very well. For the rest of us...uh...I doesn't.

-40hz (March 20, 2014, 11:12 AM)

And there certainly are use scenarios where it makes a lot of sense. Enterprise licensing isn't particularly cost effective if you're just looking at the cost of the software itself but combined with management and maintenance efficiencies it can be a significant bargain. Likewise if you include good support, and my experience with Microsoft's enterprise support was always good, it can also be a good value for many consumers.

Attempting to create a walled garden isn't something that's going to be tolerated willingly. Especially now that enough developers have seen what Apple's iStore arrangement got them. One locked platform is bad enough. If Microsoft thinks to follow in Steve Jobs footsteps, they'll have a long uphill battle ahead of them. And at this juncture, they really can't afford to get into one.

What Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky completely missed was that Apple's walled garden wasn't a feature per se. It was something their customers are okay with because it adds to the overall experience of iOS. The reason Apple users are willing to accept their tight control over third party software is the superior out of the box experience for pretty much all their devices, from desktops and laptops down to smartphones and set-top boxes. It's not better for everyone, certainly not for me, but if what you mostly need is "it just works" it definitely is.

The Win 8 desktop brings nothing of significance to the mix. It's different for the sake of different, ugly to look at, and makes little sense without a touchscreen. To call  it an improvement over the past is like saying Alcatraz was better than Levinworth Penitentiary because at least Alcatraz is in California and by the ocean. Microsft has to get off the way of thinking that says "Now sucks less!" is the same thing as "New and Improved!" when it comes to product design. (And while we're on the subject...could Microsoft please hire at least one designer who has some sense of color esthetics? Because whoever came up with that Fisher-Price color palette for Windows 8 either needs an eye exam-  or a new job. Preferably in the fast food or hospitality industry.)

Just to be clear, I was referring to the traditional desktop. The Start Screen is obviously a completely different matter. It's arguably the ultimate object lesson to explain the philosophy of making everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. It's not just that their design team doesn't seem to have had anyone with actual UI expertise, or at least no one they were listening to. Puking the Start Menu up as a flat list on the Start Screen has to be one of the most monumentally retarded design blunders of all time.

IMO Windows needs a total ground up redesign, not unlike what Apple did with OS X.

-Vurbal (March 20, 2014, 09:57 AM)

Oh yeah...one more thing Microsoft? Ditch the Registry if you're still thinking in that direction? That was yet another "innovation"  that never really worked that well in practice. The simple fact that Microsoft itself frequently violated their own guidelines regarding the Registry - and also never fully (publicly) documented it - says all that really needs to be said about it.

I already mentioned this but it really can't be over emphasized. If you sit down and try to detail the problems in Windows you'll find that the registry is an integral part of nearly every one. More importantly it's an integral part of why they can't fix them without starting from scratch.

What Microsoft needs to do is sit down and code an OS that both works and provides what's needed. Not constantly try to wow people with things they neither want or know how to use.

The really frustrating thing for me is I know they have the in-house expertise to do just that. It's purely a question of whether their management has the vision or will to walk away from short term revenue and bet on the future. If they wait until that revenue stream dries up they likely won't have the necessary financial reserves to accomplish it. Waiting until you're desperate to take chances is an almost surefire recipe for failure.

263

Developer's Corner / Interesting tool for generating WMI queries

« on: March 20, 2014, 10:33 AM »

While I was searching for a way to read shortcut (lnk) file properties in C# (why no I haven't torn out _all_ my hair, but thanks for asking) I stumbled across a nice little GUI for generating WMI queries called WMI Code Creator. It can be used either to enumerate the WMI namespaces, classes, methods, and qualifiers on a given computer (local or remote) or to actually generate C#, VB.NET, or VBScript code for running queries against them via WSH.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.01.utilityspotlight.aspx

I haven't gotten around to testing the code at all, or even attempted to browse the WMI providers on a remote machine for that matter. And of course WSH is deprecated in favor of PowerShell anyway. At the very least, though, the WMI browsing functionality seems useful. There's also a PowerShell based WMI browser that's probably more useful for that. Since PowerShell was introduced shortly before the end of my days as an IT monkey I can't seem to be bothered to put the time and effort into messing with it though.

264

General Software Discussion / Re: What the Heck is Happening to Windows? Article on Windows 8 Disaster

« on: March 20, 2014, 09:57 AM »

I think it's a little generous to call the problems with the Win8 interface PR related. They didn't successfully communicate the user benefits of the interface because their reasons for the changes had nothing to do with solving user problems. The entire point was solving Microsoft's impending revenue stream problem. It's the same reason they came up with Office 365.

The vast majority of Microsoft's profits come from volume licensing of Windows and Office. When they finally accepted the reality those revenue streams aren't sustainable in the long term they started flailing around for replacements. One was convincing individuals to license Office rather than buying it. The other was taking a cut of third party software sales via a walled garden. That's the whole reason Steve Ballmer went off the rails on his iPhone = brilliant / Android = confusing tangent after years of dismissing the iPhone.

Having said that, I find the Windows 8 desktop interface refreshing because eliminating the Start Menu stripped away more than a decade of mostly kludge. It leaves a lot more room for people who have a better idea (or even an ounce of give a damn) about what users want and need to do the job right by designing from the ground up. Unfortunately I think it doesn't go nearly far enough.

IMO Windows needs a total ground up redesign, not unlike what Apple did with OS X. The result would be a quick and somewhat painful death as it's being replaced by something leaner, meaner, and free of the virtual Rube Goldberg machine which is the registry. The alternative is a slow and agonizing death as people abandon the platform altogether.

As much as I appreciate the overall design brilliance of *nix based operating systems, I also believe in alternative approaches as a necessary component of technology development. Windows has too much legacy cruft baked into its core to be viable in the long term. However there is also a lot of interesting and useful technology that's been added over the years to prop up that legacy framework. An operating system built around those bits and the lessons learned along the way could be brilliant.

265

General Software Discussion / Re: Raymond.cc compares 20 Drive Imaging Tools

« on: March 20, 2014, 04:07 AM »

And remember, nothing wrong with having images from more than one software. And doing a special data only partition with file-by-file backup.

-Steven Avery (March 20, 2014, 02:29 AM)

Good points and I would also add the occasional offline backup to bypass the complications of a running system. Fortunately that's the one thing the last version of Acronis True Image I bought does reliably - besides completely b0rking Windows Backup and failing to uninstall properly anyway. I use the Bart's PE plugin for semi-regular offline backups to my server. It's the only reason I decided to decline the refund they offered me.

266

Living Room / Re: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone: Choosing between tiny DIY computer kits

« on: March 19, 2014, 09:19 AM »

The projects that interest me the most right now for the Raspberry Pi are using it to power either a laptop using the Motorola Atrix dock or a DIY Linux tablet.

For years (decades really) I've been envisioning a true personal computer which consists of a mobile core unit which interfaces with a variety of different dock-like devices. Until the iPhone came out I didn't realize how close something like that might be. There was an interesting product introduced about 10 years ago called the Mobile Computing Core which incorporated the general idea but never really had a shot in the real world.

The Arduino platform OTOH seems more interesting right now for building custom control surfaces.

267

General Software Discussion / Re: Raymond.cc compares 20 Drive Imaging Tools

« on: March 17, 2014, 08:42 PM »

I've been using Macrium free very happily for a couple of years now, but I'm a big fan of Easus partition management tools, so I may have to switch to Easus.

Though I will note that speed is of secondary concern to me -- reliability of restoration is at the top -- and that's something reviews have a hard time addressing.

-mouser (March 17, 2014, 08:22 PM)

It definitely is. I've had good experiences with restoring but in both cases I was going back to a clean Windows 7 install image.

268

General Software Discussion / Re: Raymond.cc compares 20 Drive Imaging Tools

« on: March 17, 2014, 08:16 PM »

I notice EaseUS ToDo showed similar performance which matches my personal experience using the free version for a few months now. I'll be buying it sooner or later.

269

Living Room / Re: What happens when Hollywood gets involved with a Kickstarter

« on: March 17, 2014, 06:28 PM »

Does anybody here want to pretend they're surprised?

I really wanted to but for some reason I don't think I could come up with something convincing enough to fool anyone here.

270

Developer's Corner / Re: On HTML...

« on: March 17, 2014, 10:43 AM »

James Mickens is one of the smartest and funniest people around. I'm particularly fond of another article called "The Night Watch."

You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist. Make no mistake, I don’t want to write systems software in a language like C++. Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked, obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours, and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love.

If there was a Pulitzer Prize for technical reference I suspect he would have one.

271

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« on: March 15, 2014, 07:45 PM »

Just stumbled across this the other day. A Japanese company apparently approached John Entwhistle after The Who toured in 1989 about putting a band together so they could broadcast a performance for their new satellite TV service. He brought along Simon Phillips (drummer for the '89 Who tour), along with Keith Emerson, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, Joe Walsh, and did a mini tour of Japan under the name The Best.

Normally I find super groups like this pretty underwhelming but I think they lived up to the name.

272

General Software Discussion / Re: jv16 PowerTools - using Indiegogo to 'fund'' open-sourcing it

« on: March 15, 2014, 09:29 AM »

It's more a political or philosophical thing. It's not a business model.

Not true. GNU says exactly opposite, they don't mind selling the software copies or raising funds for the software. If selling is allowed then it is business model too.

-mahesh2k (March 14, 2014, 01:52 AM)

I think we have very different definitions of what constitutes a business model. Suggesting and encouraging developers to 'charge something somehow' is not the same thing as having a business model.

Using the FOSS development philosophy can be an element in a business strategy. But that's not the same thing as being a model for conducting business - even though there have been numerous attempts to come up with business models that capitalize on using the GPL as part of their overall strategy.

Note: The best formal analysis I've ever seen for the "open software" development process was by a guy called Benkler who came up with the term "commons-based peer production." It's an interesting idea that gets into the whole concept of 'emergence' as it applies to economics. It's all rather fascinating to read and think about.

The jury is still out as to whether this process marks the start of a 'sea change' in economics as opposed to being merely a temporary phenomenon. But only time will tell. 

-40hz (March 14, 2014, 03:43 AM)

To quote Mike Masnick, "Give it away and pray isn't a business model."

273

Living Room / Re: Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.

« on: March 14, 2014, 10:46 PM »

^ So just think what it will be like if they ever find intelligent life on this planet.
___________________

-Vurbal (March 14, 2014, 10:36 AM)

There is intelligent life on this planet, but I'm just passing through...

-IainB (March 14, 2014, 10:14 PM)

You might want to go around instead. It gets pretty hot toward the center.   

274

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: MS Office 2013 US$9.95 Corporate/Enterprise Home Use Program - Mini-Review

« on: March 14, 2014, 11:14 AM »

...but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.
_____________________

-dr_andus (March 13, 2014, 09:26 AM)

Why?   

-IainB (March 14, 2014, 05:55 AM)

Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.

-dr_andus (March 14, 2014, 08:28 AM)

That was the biggest eye opener for me when I tried out Windows 8. I already didn't use Aero but in Win8 it's not optional any more. Having a 4 year old computer with onboard ATI graphics pretty much guarantees my video driver is going to suck which, not surprisingly, it does. I didn't realize how catastrophic that could be until I tried out Win8 which forces you to use Aero's window manager.

I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.

275

Living Room / Re: Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.

« on: March 14, 2014, 10:36 AM »

^ So just think what it will be like if they ever find intelligent life on this planet.