[Mxsmanic]

nospam writes:

so you agree it's faster than a hard drive.

Yes. I don't recall disputing that.

which it doesn't.

That depends on how much I/O is done on the device.

[Mxsmanic]

nospam writes:

it indicates that people generally update their hardware every few
years.

On average. However, in reality, there are users who upgrade with extreme
frequency, and others who never upgrade at all.

one machine out of 100,000 is what i'd call 'extremely few', and that's
being generous.

No, I meant 100,000 machines running WfW, as can be the case in a large
enterprise.

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

what happens if it doesn't want to quit when the user tells it to quit?
it's an app. it doesn't have feelings. it does what it's told.

In many OS environments, applications may refuse a request to terminate from
the operating system.

wrong.

stop twisting things. it's not a random user process. it's done when an
app is idle and the user probably won't even notice most of the time.
when they resume the app, it picks up where it left off (usually).

An application that has been killed cannot be resumed, by definition.

nonsense. of course it can, just relaunch it.

i did. ios 4.0 & later and mac os x 10.7 & later, which was modeled
after ios.

Not an OS, a specific scenario explaining how the OS knows what the
application is doing.

last time the user had it frontmost, how many windows are still open,
how much cpu it's used recently, etc.

it's not hard.

[Mxsmanic]

nospam writes:

no it isn't.

Most desktop applications do a great deal of I/O.

no they aren't.

If processor utilization is anything less than 100%, all the applications in
the system are I/O-bound.

who cares how much i/o it does when it starts up. that's done once per
session and if it stays running, not even that.

It means that every time you start the application, you have to wait several
seconds for it to come up.

firefox, or any browser's bottleneck, is usually the network
connection, not the hard drive.

The browser isn't doing any significant network I/O. It's disk I/O. It will
take the same time even if the network connection is down.

Many other applications behave in the same way.

[Mxsmanic]

Floyd L. Davidson writes:

How about 20 seconds.

No, I meant 20 minutes. I've watched it happen.

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

it indicates that people generally update their hardware every few
years.

On average. However, in reality, there are users who upgrade with extreme
frequency, and others who never upgrade at all.

of course. it's a bell curve. most people fall into middle, which is
every few years.

outliers, like yourself, hold onto computers for ten or more years.
others get every new model whenever it's released, generally app
developers, so they can test apps on all hardware.

one machine out of 100,000 is what i'd call 'extremely few', and that's
being generous.

No, I meant 100,000 machines running WfW, as can be the case in a large
enterprise.

out of many billions of pcs. it's still extremely few.

[Mxsmanic]

Floyd L. Davidson writes:

It should probably be noted that while UNIX certainly
did that, most OS's couldn't even do that. Adding
device drivers or changing kernel parameters as was done
with UNIX was not available for other OS's, and the only
way to upgrade was to purchase an upgraded kernel
binary.

On the contrary, it has been done for almost as long as operating systems have
existed. The term SYSGEN has been in use for at least half a century, since
IBM used it for its DOS/360 and OS/360 operating systems (1964 or
thereabouts).

But the majority of kernel modules are loaded
automatically *on demand*, not just because some
hardware exists.

How are input devices handled, then? And even if they are loaded on demand,
they must generally still poll the hardware, especially if they are requested
by software.

[Mxsmanic]

Floyd L. Davidson writes:

With Linux at least it is virtually every desktop system
and almost every server that does it. I'd say that
makes it pretty common.

There's more to the world than Linux.

[Scott Dorsey]

Floyd L. Davidson writes:

It should probably be noted that while UNIX certainly
did that, most OS's couldn't even do that. Adding
device drivers or changing kernel parameters as was done
with UNIX was not available for other OS's, and the only
way to upgrade was to purchase an upgraded kernel
binary.

You need to stop buying Burroughs systems. They pulled that kind of stunt.
Hell, even DEC would let you relink.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[John Williamson]

On 25/07/2012 22:00, Mxsmanic wrote:
Floyd L. Davidson writes:

With Linux at least it is virtually every desktop system
and almost every server that does it. I'd say that
makes it pretty common.

There's more to the world than Linux.

Most Linux based systems actually boot and run from ROM.

Then again, most Linux based systems are embedded.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[Floyd L. Davidson]

Mxsmanic wrote:
Floyd L. Davidson writes:

How about 20 seconds.

No, I meant 20 minutes. I've watched it happen.

Bull****. 20 seconds.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://www.apaflo.com/
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)

[Les Cargill[_4_]]

nospam wrote:
In article , Floyd L. Davidson
wrote:

floyd was talking about booting off read-only media and then adding
drivers, kexts, etc., which would have to be done every single time
because the read-only boot volume can't be modified. that's not the
usual case.

It is the normal case.

it is not the normal case where people boot off read-only media.


This has gone on long enough, but it really doesn't matter whether the
place the drivers are gotten from is read only or read write. PLAEFTR.

--
Les Cargill

[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Mxsmanic wrote:
Les Cargill writes:

I don't care about security.

Security also influences stability--

"Influences"?

if you care about stability.


Stability has very little to do with security,
outside the Web.


--
Les Cargill

[Gene E. Bloch[_3_]]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:30:25 -0500, Les Cargill wrote:

Mxsmanic wrote:
Les Cargill writes:

I don't care about security.

Security also influences stability--

"Influences"?

if you care about stability.


Stability has very little to do with security,
outside the Web.

When I am unstable (see my sig) I feel insecure.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Gene E. Bloch wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:30:25 -0500, Les Cargill wrote:

Mxsmanic wrote:
Les Cargill writes:

I don't care about security.

Security also influences stability--

"Influences"?

if you care about stability.


Stability has very little to do with security,
outside the Web.

When I am unstable (see my sig) I feel insecure.



Presumably, you're a Bloch device, so you
can at least have error checking...

--
Les Cargill

[Eric Stevens]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 07:18:07 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

It's
gotten worse as Microsoft increasingly attempts to hide the hard disk's
contents from the user. (I want to put things where I think they should go,
and be able to find them.)

Hear hear!

who cares where files are? computers can do a *much* more effective job
at managing where the user's data lives.

apps such as lightroom or aperture pretty much eliminate managing files
and folders, and it's *so* much more productive.

you don't know which sectors a file is on disk, and it doesn't matter.
the hard drive controller manages it for you and does a better job.

I find I'm often struggling to find where something or other is on, on
which directory tree. Left to its own devices, Windows 7 doesn't
present the files and folders in the way that they are logically
arranged. It hides file extensions. It even hides files! What a way to
run a business.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

[Eric Stevens]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:50:49 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

you don't know which sectors a file is on disk, and it doesn't matter.
the hard drive controller manages it for you and does a better job.

The controller doesn't have enough information or intelligence to optimize
sector placement in every case.

nonsense. of course it does.

the point is, users don't care where on the hard drive the file
actually is, nor should they care what folder it's in. as long as they
can access their data, they're happy.

... as long as they can find whatever it is they are looking for.
There is the rub.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

[mark lewis[_2_]]

the point is, users don't care where on the hard drive the file
actually is, nor should they care what folder it's in. as long as they
can access their data, they're happy.

ES ... as long as they can find whatever it is they are looking for.
ES There is the rub.

that's always been the rub... especially when the defaults for some fotware shove everything into one place and the users are never educated to know where that place is... one huge example is their web browser... i always have to specifically set mine to
)\/(ark

--
| Remove .my.foot for email
| via Waldo's Place USA Fidonet-Internet Gateway Site
| Waldo's Place USA 919-774-5930 telnet://bbs.wpusa.dynip.com
| Standard disclaimer: The views of this user are strictly his own.

[Trevor]

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

"If your Flash device is "4Gb" with a formatted capacity of 3900Mb, and
you do nothing but write to it as fast as you can - at, say, 30Mb/s -
you'll still only be able to replace its entire contents every 130
seconds. At that rate, it'll take you 150 days to hit 100,000 cycles."

You do realise 100,000 cycles is *not* guaranteed right? You may only get
one, which would take 130 seconds by your calculation.

Trevor.

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

who cares where files are? computers can do a *much* more effective job
at managing where the user's data lives.

apps such as lightroom or aperture pretty much eliminate managing files
and folders, and it's *so* much more productive.

you don't know which sectors a file is on disk, and it doesn't matter.
the hard drive controller manages it for you and does a better job.

I find I'm often struggling to find where something or other is on, on
which directory tree.

exactly why the computer should be doing that for you.

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

the point is, users don't care where on the hard drive the file
actually is, nor should they care what folder it's in. as long as they
can access their data, they're happy.

... as long as they can find whatever it is they are looking for.
There is the rub.

they can very easily using appropriate software.

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Trevor
wrote:

"If your Flash device is "4Gb" with a formatted capacity of 3900Mb, and
you do nothing but write to it as fast as you can - at, say, 30Mb/s -
you'll still only be able to replace its entire contents every 130
seconds. At that rate, it'll take you 150 days to hit 100,000 cycles."

You do realise 100,000 cycles is *not* guaranteed right? You may only get
one, which would take 130 seconds by your calculation.

if it does that, then it's defective and you get it replaced under
warranty.

[Mxsmanic]

nospam writes:

if it does that, then it's defective and you get it replaced under
warranty.

Your system is still down in the meantime.

Reliability is always preferable to a good warranty.

[Mxsmanic]

nospam writes:

exactly why the computer should be doing that for you.

The computer's attempts to hide things are usually what makes it so difficult
to find things.

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

William Sommerwerck wrote:
You should be doing backups a *lot* more frequently
and better yet, have it automated so you don't need
to do anything for it to happen.

The MOBO I've selected directly supports several RAID flavors. How I'll
configure it I haven't decided.

"You should be eating more vegetables" - "The steakhouse I'll be
eating at has a wide range of real meat steaks, I haven't decided
yet which one I'll take"

See the problem?

-Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , William Sommerwerck
wrote:

Windows creates what used to be called a swap file that is continually
written to and read from. I don't want that on my SSD. Fortunately, you can
tell Windows where to put it.

you absolutely want swap on ssd because it's significantly faster than
hd. stop worrying about wearing out ssd. you'll be wanting to replace
the computer with a better model long before an ssd wears out.

I happen to have a 3 year old laptop with an SSD. The SSD has
long passed it's calculated write allowance. (Ask S.M.A.R.T.)
Yes, it's still working, no, any warranty for it has died with
passing that write allowance.

The SSD has the swap.

-Wolfgang

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

if it does that, then it's defective and you get it replaced under
warranty.

Your system is still down in the meantime.

the same thing can happen with a hard drive, and more likely too.

Reliability is always preferable to a good warranty.

that's why ssd is better.

[nospam[_3_]]

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

exactly why the computer should be doing that for you.

The computer's attempts to hide things are usually what makes it so difficult
to find things.

it hides what you don't need to see, such as system files. it does not
hide user files, and it can search them a helluva lot quicker than you
can.

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

It's
gotten worse as Microsoft increasingly attempts to hide the hard disk's
contents from the user. (I want to put things where I think they should go,
and be able to find them.)

Hear hear!

who cares where files are?

People trying to retrive them.

computers can do a *much* more effective job
at managing where the user's data lives.

By creating an abstraction called a "file system". Basically
it is a hierarchical database.

apps such as lightroom or aperture pretty much eliminate managing files
and folders, and it's *so* much more productive.

Yep, so you need to make a full backup of everything (tens or
hundreds of TB, recordings of all the recent TV programmes of
interest which you don't want to back up) just to capture your
GBs of photos. That's just so much more productive, having to
buy tons of storage space and waiting for days for a backup ...

And imagine every program that handles files having to know
all about *all* apps like lighroom or aperture (and a couple
10,000 others) just to be able to do their job. That's much
better than files, isn't it?

you don't know which sectors a file is on disk,

I can find out easily.

and it doesn't matter.

Up to the second you get an unreadable sector and need to find
out which file to restore from backup (or to ignore it, since
the sector belongs to an already deleted file).

the hard drive controller manages it for you and does a better job.

The hard drive controller presents the same old image of sectors
that they have done since there were hard drive contollers (back
when they were separate items from hard drives!).

Guess there is a good reason for that, instead of a hard drive
controller presenting an "app".


One can see that you don't have much experience with computers
outside using a few applications. That's much like the average
4 year old kid with his crayons as experience telling the
photographer how to use his camera: "Just get paper and crayons.
That's so much more productive ... for portraits, realistic
landscapes, etc."

-Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

the point is, users don't care where on the hard drive the file
actually is, nor should they care what folder it's in. as long as they
can access their data, they're happy.

... as long as they can find whatever it is they are looking for.
There is the rub.

they can very easily using appropriate software.

So you do all your backups with lightroom?

-Wolfgang

[j]

On 7/24/2012 8:16 AM, David Ruether wrote:


"Steve King" wrote in message news:
:
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

I just had a client who needed to restore some backups after a total
loss
type hard drive crash. His USB flash drive had about 9 GB of data. It
blue-screened the laptop its data needed to be restored to after a few
minutes of loading. Its reliability for just reading was poor on 3
other
desktop systems. The drive disconnected itself from the system several
times during attempts at restoring it, and on one machine that
normally
works well, it would just sit in a loop attaching, crashing, and
re-attaching. On another older laptop the whole 9 GB flowed to its
hard
drive (a flash-based SSD) just fine in one clean shot. I moved the
data
to the target machine over a wireless LAN without incident.

YMMV.

Would be interesting to know your client's blood pressure swings as the
recovery attempts/failures went on;-) This is a good story to remind me
that if a USB Flash drive fails to read on one machine to keep trying.

Steve King

I just dumped and reloaded Vegas Pro 11, and before I ran some
tests that had caused Pro to crash ever more frequently in the
past, I thought to remove the USB 4-gig thumb-drive from the
computer before reloading the program. The thumb drive may not
have been the cause of the problems, but without it and with
the new installation, Vegas Pro 11 passed my tests and did not
crash. 8^)


I've never had any trouble with flash memory cards, whether CF or SD.

Thumb drives are a completely different story. And my friends concur. A
cheap thumb drive will cause you grief.

Jeff

--DR

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

Trevor wrote:

Al the good programs I have used give you setup options on where to place
temp files, data files, backup files, autosave files, multiple scratch disk
usage etc.

All good programs use the environment clues where to put temporary
files. No need to tell each program the same thing over and over.


There will always be poorly written programs that don't, your mission is to
find something else if you don't like how they behave.

So basically it's the user's fault. Even if it isn't.

-Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

not when there isn't a second drive available, such as in a laptop,
which is exactly where you are most likely to find ssd. plus, putting
virtual memory swap on an hd is dumb. it's much better to keep it on
the much faster ssd.

Swap and paging files receive a tremendous amount of I/O in most systems,
enough to burn through some SSDs in short order.

except, they don't.

You have to decide which it is:
- There's little IO on swap/paging. E.g. because you have
enough RAM and tuned your system not to page easily.
= Then you don't need paging on the SSD. It's so rare it
doesn't matter.

- There's much IO on swap/paging.
= Then you have many, many write cycles.
= The write cycles will cause many erases and small writes
tend to drive up the write amplification.
= This will not let an SSD live long, and put it out of
warranty even faster. (Warranty is only within the
allowed amount of erase cycles. Ask S.M.A.R.T. for
the percentage of erase cycles already done (1% left
means it's out of warranty and past it's guaranteed
erase cycles.))

-Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , Mxsmanic

The difference that a SSD makes over my personal baseline - a 1 GB 7200 rpm
hard drive, is pretty impressive.

That is to be expected: access time on the SSD is much lower. If SSDs didn't
have the weakness of limited writes (and high price, although prices will come
down), they'd be a great replacement for hard disks.

they are a great replacement for hard disks. the only issue is price
which really only affects the larger sizes. 128-256g ssd is very
affordable.

So are 1-3 TB HDDs. They cost the same as your SSDs, when you
take the cheapest SSDs.


But some uses of
disk/SSD, such as paging and swapping and certain server-style applications,
can potentially burn through a SSDs life expectancy very rapidly (months,
weeks, or days).

nonsense.

So your SSDs have unlimited write and erase cycles? Most
interesting, would you be willing to run a program that constantly
wrote (and later deleted) files on your SSD for weeks?


I just built a laptop that booted so fast that its resume/suspend feature
was superfluous. It did either in about the same amount of time - 20
seconds. My new 5.1 receiver takes longer to power up to the point where it
is making sound!

Do you have swap/paging files on the SSD?

that's where it should be.

So your swap/paging files aren't there. They just "should
be" there.

why would you want swap on a slower hard
drive?

Either because swapping is rare enough that it doesn't matter,
or it's so often that it matters --- then it eats erase cycles
like mad.

-Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , Mxsmanic

Backing a 64-bit address space without a swapping or paging file requires
17,179,869,184 gigabytes of RAM, so virtual memory isn't likely to become
superfluous any time soon.

nonsense. 64 bit address space can address *significantly* more memory
than 16 gig,

Is 17 exabytes enough for you? That's more than 1/20th of the
whole world's storage as of 2011. (Note: not "digital storage".
Storage. All of it.)

which actually is not that much these days. you are going
to have swap if you do anything major with your computer, even with
that much memory.

That pretty much depends on what you deem "major". People did
major things with computers 10 and 20 years ago ... Remember?
"PDA" coined (Apple Newton), 486DX2, Windows 3.1 ... back when
2-8 MB RAM (that's MEGAbyte, not GIGAbyte, folks) was what the
average had.

So you can't do anything with 4 MB RAM? Sheesh, only shows how
wasteful you are.

-Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

Mxsmanic wrote:
Floyd L. Davidson writes:

So there is not "always physical I/O".

If there is no physical I/O, there has been no swap.

You can swap to a ram disk created from your computer's RAM.


Or the OS can kill some other process to obtain the memory requested.

I don't know of any OS that does this.

You don't know the Linux OOM killer?
OK, that's run only if you overcommit memory ...

The whole point is that most processes have significant
code and data that need not be kept in RAM.

That is not necessarily true. It depends on the program.

"most". For "most" it is true. Very few programs will
randomly access all it's data and code pages.


The data is paged to the swap device, the program code is merely
released and marked as available from the original
binary file.

As a general rule, nothing is paged out unless there are things that need to
be paged in and there are no free pages.

You may wish to observe a Linux kernel.

Paging is extremely expensive and is
resorted to only when limited main memory requires it.

Which is why unneeded parts can be paged out and the memory better
used for disk buffers. Using RAM to store data that is not needed
is wastful when it could cut down (extremely expensive) disk I/O.
[1]

Yes, that *is* the correct behaviour in the general case. If you
wish to tune the kernel in this regard, you easily can.

-Wolfgang

[1] Ask yourself: how often do you need the code and data to shut
down an application or program? How often do you need data
from the disk?

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

Alan Browne wrote:

I've yet to hear of a MacBook Air user having issues with their flash
disk. The MBA has been out there for over 4 years - and it only had 64
GB of SSD making it a candidate for early failure (due to the wear
leveling management).

I've yet to hear of a MacBook Ai user. Therefore, no such machines
exist in the wild ...

-Wolfgang

[Eric Stevens]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 23:10:57 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

who cares where files are? computers can do a *much* more effective job
at managing where the user's data lives.

apps such as lightroom or aperture pretty much eliminate managing files
and folders, and it's *so* much more productive.

you don't know which sectors a file is on disk, and it doesn't matter.
the hard drive controller manages it for you and does a better job.

I find I'm often struggling to find where something or other is on, on
which directory tree.

exactly why the computer should be doing that for you.

It never used to be difficult. But then microsoft decided to throw
everything into a sack and then present me with an alphabetical
listing with no hint of the tree structure./..
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

[Eric Stevens]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 10:32:04 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

exactly why the computer should be doing that for you.

The computer's attempts to hide things are usually what makes it so difficult
to find things.

it hides what you don't need to see, such as system files. it does not
hide user files, and it can search them a helluva lot quicker than you
can.

Who says I don't need to see system files?

I don't very often, but I most definitely do on occasion.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

[Wolfgang Weisselberg]

nospam wrote:
In article , Floyd L. Davidson

Look at all those distribution "live DVD" disks. They're pretty
common.

what about them? how many people boot off a live dvd as part of their
normal day to day usage?

What do you mean, daily booting?

some computers, namely ultrabooks, don't even have dvd drives. sure you
could hook one up, but that defeats the point of having an ultrabook.

So boot from a read-only USB stick. Instant safe virus-free
system.


just because something is possible doesn't mean it's commonly done.

Super computers are also not commonly done, and yet ...


Look at all those millions of WIFI routers.

why? embedded devices are single purpose devices

And? That's not a computer?

and do not have swap
space, so they do not count.

Only computers with swap space count? Well, only SSDs that don't
get swap/paging done to them count.

-Wolfgang