RANT: Modern technology

[Shocker]

These days, innovation has gone out the window. As has quality. All they are actually focused on is selling more stuff.

• Screen resolution hasn't kept up with MHz or GB. I'm not the only one for that matter. I think maybe the manufacturers are worrying that increasing resolution beyond what it is will make things with a fixed pixel size too small . But I suppose they could have a "half-resolution" mode.
• Ever-higher pin counts force chip manufacturers to use ball-grid-array packages which are less durable (thermal expansion and contraction with nothing to take the flex) than older packages with pins (like QFP and SOP), especially when you throw lead-free solder into the mix. Add the increased heat and you can see where this is going.
• HDDs don't change anything like how they did in the 1980s and 1990s (the last truly innovative HDD was the Seagate Barracuda ATA IV from 2001!!!). And they're not as hard as they used to be. Old consumer drives were more reliable than current enterprise drives.
• All of that "green" bullshit going around really drives me crazy. Besides RoHS and lead-free solder, there's the simple fact that PCs today consume a lot more power than they did in 1992. Eco-friendly my ass. And consider the Western Digital Caviar "Green". A 7200RPM drive probably runs about 6-8W. If you have one you won't save much of anything by swapping it out for a 5400. Even 3 or 4 doesn't amount to what I would consider large. Consumers are too stupid to realise they're being tricked. Hell, you could probably label a power cord "Green" and people would buy it.
• All the CPU power we have today goes to waste because of bloatware. They make bloatware to sell us more hardware. They are EVIL.

Does time control sound like a good idea now???

EDIT: 400 posts!!!

[mariushm]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

You again...

Seems like the only time you think of posting here is to complain about something.

Screen resolution has kept with the times albeit at a slower rate. It's all about customer demand and what the technology was able to do.

People wanted bigger resolutions. CRT monitors could only go so far as 21-24" until they started to break the desks and people's eyes - realistically, you can't use 23-24" CRT 1 meter (2-3 feet or whatever it is in imperial) away from your face.
So people and the companies switched to LCD monitors - technology could only do so much without lots of broken pixels, 5-17".
HD started to become popular, lcd panel manufacturers realized they can recover more panels by switching to 16:9 and 16:10 so we started to have 17-19" wide panels.

We've slowly went up in resolution.. 1280x1024 , 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080... we're back to where CRT monitors were when it comes to resolution. The most expensive Trinitron 21" and above monitors could do 2048x1536 or something like that at 75 Hz - in real world you wouldn't work at such refresh rate, you'd drop the resolution down a bit, so that's pretty much back to near HD quality.

Now we're above HD... 2600x1440 or around that is really not that hard to buy, you only have to stop being such a cheap ass and buy it. Just because you're cheap doesn't mean there isn't improvement.

You can now choose IPS, MVA, even organic led starts to become possible in larger panel sizes, there's even a 21:9 in a laptop nowadays.

2600x1440 at 27" is already making the pixels small enough to cause font problems, and the operating systems are too dumb to do proper resizing -the Windows oses basically have only several levels of scaling, aren't quite capable of handling any aspect ratio and pixel sizes just yet, so monitor manufacturers are also held back by OS.

BGA wasn't made just to piss you off, it's a requirement to be able to get small packages, small traces etc... If you're such a smart ass, try making a QFN or some non-bga chip run at 3 Ghz and you'll see it's close to impossible. The traces between a cpu and the chipset or memory often have to be of equal length, with tolerations of a millimeter or so. Having pins on the sides of the chips would just make the traces go all wiggly and snake around the whole moderboard just to have equal trace lengths

Just look on the back of a motherboard around the cpu area, and under a CPU - do you think they put those ceramic capacitors there just to piss you off? The CPU wouldn't run without those components and basically there's several layers on a the pcb where traces go through vias between several layers and on the back side, just to put the capacitors as close as possible to the pins.

Look at how hard it is to design a DDR3 interface on the PCB: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC8wE...ailpage#t=659s

You CAN NOT have Ghz processors, high bandwidth memory, easy to cool video cards, small chips, small manufacturing processes which make the chips cost effective as more chips come out of a silicon die, you can't fit as much stuff on a motherboard without going to smaller packages, more condensed packages. Especially on a motherboard, it makes no sense to just leave all that space under a chip unused simply because you don't want BGA... it would be a crime to waste so much "real estate" on the PCB.

Customers demand more performance, higher speeds, faster, cheaper, less power consumption.. you can't have all.

HDD and Green .. again with this shit. You want that, go back in the '90s and buy a 200 GB drive for what would be now 5-600$. You were probably shocked when 1 TB drives went up to 200$ now.
If you want the degree of reliability and "innovation", just get 3 TB drives for 500$ in total and you have everything you wanted. Oh, you're a cheap ass again.

We have innovation... SSD drives. They're expensive like any technology... still, they're almost as cheap as hard drives were in the past, if you consider how much stuff you could have bought back then with the money you would have spent on a hard drive.

"there's the simple fact that PCs today consume a lot more power than they did in 1992."

That just goes to show how much shit is in your head and how out of touch you are. Modern processors and motherboards and systems can idle as low as 15-20 watts, where the difference between 10-12 watts for a WD black and 6 watts for a WD green can matter.

Here, look at these reviews:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6347/a...sktop-part-2/8

32 watts idle, 114 watts at load ... a Trinity 10-6800k ( 4 cores, 3.8 ghz), 8 gb ram, ssd, radeon 5870

and the latest cpu from amd compared to an intel chip:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/t...x4300-tested/6

a 300$ intel chip is 57 watts idle ,the 8 core amd is 72w idle

Scale the performance of a Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz eating 100 watts idle with the 300$ intel chip at 57 idle - the new intel is about 6-8 times better, using half the power.

Power supplies are better, you can get gold efficiency for 65$ nowadays, which is about how much a cheap power supply was a year or two ago.

A few watts less does matter for some people, those who make htpcs, some markets (Germany especially) want passively cooled computers so heat and efficiency matters.

If it's not your cup of tea, nobody forces you to buy WD Green drives. Go buy WD raptor and stop complaining.


All the cpu power being wasted on bloatware. Seriously, just log out and throw your computer away. If you're bothered by bloatware eating your 486 cpu power then you deserve it.

When you can buy quad core and six core processors for 60$, there's really no such thing as "cpu power" being wasted on bloatware.

Are you even up to date with the IT technology? It seems you stopped reading about computing technology in 2000.


(I apologize to the mods for the abrasive language)

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

You again...

I think the same of you, to be frank. And I wasn't lying when I said "I see whiskers" or some such. You're too stupid to realise that just because you don't think it will happen, doesn't mean it hasn't happened. And in this case, it isn't a one-off type event. I've seen whiskers on other drives - that work. You think tin whiskers will immediately stop the circuit from functioning, well by the same logic a HDD that falls onto the floor will break. I've had one survive the drop.

2600x1440 at 27" is already making the pixels small enough to cause font problems, and the operating systems are too dumb to do proper resizing -the Windows oses basically have only several levels of scaling, aren't quite capable of handling any aspect ratio and pixel sizes just yet, so monitor manufacturers are also held back by OS.

What I mentioned above, "half resolution" mode, and if you can't do something properly, don't attempt to do it (at least not by default).

BGA wasn't made just to piss you off, it's a requirement to be able to get small packages, small traces etc...

I never said BGA is useless. What I think is that they've gone too far and can't have both fast and reliable chips anymore.

If you're such a smart ass, try making a QFN or some non-bga chip run at 3 Ghz and you'll see it's close to impossible

Modern (and most not-so-modern) CPUs use clock multipliers so only the core runs at the entire 3GHz.

In any case, QFN isn't much more durable.

Just look on the back of a motherboard around the cpu area, and under a CPU - do you think they put those ceramic capacitors there just to piss you off? The CPU wouldn't run without those components and basically there's several layers on a the pcb where traces go through vias between several layers and on the back side, just to put the capacitors as close as possible to the pins.

Electrolytics aren't any better, and you don't always have an alternative to them either.

Look at how hard it is to design a DDR3 interface on the PCB: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC8wE...ailpage#t=659s

I never said motherboard design was easy.

You CAN NOT have Ghz processors, high bandwidth memory, easy to cool video cards, small chips, small manufacturing processes which make the chips cost effective as more chips come out of a silicon die, you can't fit as much stuff on a motherboard without going to smaller packages, more condensed packages. Especially on a motherboard, it makes no sense to just leave all that space under a chip unused simply because you don't want BGA... it would be a crime to waste so much "real estate" on the PCB.

Some people need such powerful computers, but at least 99% of the CPU power in most home PCs is lost to bloatware. Except when gaming...but that's another topic...

Customers demand more performance, higher speeds, faster, cheaper, less power consumption.. you can't have all.

I never said you could. What frustrates me is that people want stuff they don't actually need.

You were probably shocked when 1 TB drives went up to 200$ now.

About as shocked as I would be from touching the +12V output of the PSU.

If you want the degree of reliability and "innovation", just get 3 TB drives for 500$ in total and you have everything you wanted. Oh, you're a cheap ass again.

Reliability...no, I haven't had good experiences with recent drives. My old drives survived much more...well...action despite being treated the same if not worse. I have a lot of old drives, have had few new ones. Yet the new ones fail more...

Innovation...what I define as innovation in HDDs is something that provides a direct speed boost (instead of just being necessary to get the technology that far) (like voice-coil), makes it quieter, or more reliable (FDB motors in these two categories). By my logic, what advantage does the new 3TB Barracuda have over the old Barracuda ATA IV???

We have innovation... SSD drives. They're expensive like any technology... still, they're almost as cheap as hard drives were in the past, if you consider how much stuff you could have bought back then with the money you would have spent on a hard drive.

I'm not going to bother. I spend a lot of time typing posts like this one, where drive speed makes no difference.

Modern processors and motherboards and systems can idle as low as 15-20 watts, where the difference between 10-12 watts for a WD black and 6 watts for a WD green can matter.

Most CPUs in 1992 didn't need heatsinks.

Back then hard drives usually ran at 3600RPM, so they consumed even less power (but certainly weren't quieter...)

114 watts at load

a 300$ intel chip is 57 watts idle ,the 8 core amd is 72w idle

If it draws that much power when idle, it's not low-power.

Power supplies are better, you can get gold efficiency for 65$ nowadays, which is about how much a cheap power supply was a year or two ago.

I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to save up for a higher-resolution screen, it'd make a much bigger difference to the user experience. It doesn't stop at Gold, either.

A few watts less does matter for some people, those who make htpcs, some markets (Germany especially) want passively cooled computers so heat and efficiency matters.

I never said there aren't legitimate uses for 5400RPM drives. My point is that if you don't have such a low-power system (not me for sure), you won't save much.

If it's not your cup of tea, nobody forces you to buy WD Green drives. Go buy WD raptor and stop complaining.

The VelociRaptors actually run cooler than most 3.5" drives, by virtue of their small size.

The older Raptors were hotter, but not to the degree you'd expect from looking at RPM alone.

All the cpu power being wasted on bloatware. Seriously, just log out and throw your computer away. If you're bothered by bloatware eating your 486 cpu power then you deserve it.

A lot of software is so bloated there's no excuse - like recent versions of A"duh"be Flash, from what I've heard.

I made a poll months ago on bloatware being done on purpose, and got a majority vote for "Yes".

And throwing away my computer just can't be good for the environment.

The average home user has more CPU speed than they know what to do with.

I shouldn't be forced to buy a new PC every few years even though it works fine, just the software is too bloated to run on it.

(I apologize to the mods for the abrasive language)

If you continue to use it, I'll report it anyway.

[mariushm]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

I never said tin whiskers aren't a problem, I know there are tin whiskers that don't cause products to fail...
They just aren't as big of a problem as you make them to be, and in the great scheme of things, the world is better with RoHS and the restrictions it imposed. Same opinion I had in the previous discussions.

There's no half-resolution modes, you just can't make them... it's a limitation of the technology, the transistors in the panels... the operating systems already use Cleartype and other technologies like scaling to improve the way fonts are displayed on screens and go around the fact the pixels are square or slightly rectangular dots. CRTs didn't have this problem because they have natural aliasing, by the way of how they work.
Scaling is usually limited to several "presets" simply because video cards aren't currently capable of scaling the interface at any random degree - the modern operating systems use A LOT of hardware acceleration to do things fast.

Maybe we'll get lucky with advanced in organic led technology or whatever comes next.

What I think is that they've gone too far and can't have both fast and reliable chips anymore.

You keep comparing current hardware with how it was in the past, but you're ignoring everything that makes the current hardware better.

I would say they're much faster and actually more reliable than chips in the past. It's just in how you look at reliability.

You didn't use to have so powerful chips in an iPhone, in an iPad, in hot computers with lots of vibration sources and high current consumption which causes ripple and other things.
You used to have a big steel case on the desk under the monitor, one hard drive, and everything just worked.. no stresses.
Overclocking also wasn't done at the levels done now and as often as it's done now.

If you'd have a look at how reliable laptops were compared to how reliable current laptops are, you'd be surprised.

It's so easy for you to compare the reliability of old hardware to the new hardware, ignoring all the advances in performance... it's just making me angry.

Electrolytics aren't any better, and you don't always have an alternative to them either
You can't do decoupling caps with electrolytics, they have to be tantalum or ceramic due to esr and high frequencies/current

Some people need such powerful computers, but at least 99% of the CPU power in most home PCs is lost to bloatware. Except when gaming...but that's another topic...

Again, that's a wrong assumption, you have no basis for it, yet you keep saying it.You don't know what people actually need.

Simple fact is the current way people use computers has changed, compared to how they were used in the past.
Computers are no longer typewriters but do a lot of tasks all the time.

Even a simple Facebook or iTunes page can have so much Javascript nowadays that it would slow on - let's say - a Duron based computer (single core, 1.1ghz).

People play music in the background or they watch youtube while they work on something, all this uses processor ... a lot of computing power, more than what the old processors were capable of in some cases.

Innovation...what I define as innovation in HDDs is something that provides a direct speed boost (instead of just being necessary to get the technology that far) (like voice-coil), makes it quieter, or more reliable (FDB motors in these two categories).

Companies have innovated by removing that coil completely, they moved to SSD.

What you're doing is sort of complaining companies are no longer offering VHS tapes, only DVDs. Nobody cares about VHS anymore, they innovated as much as they could and there's no more point in throwing money on a dying market.

By my logic, what advantage does the new 3TB Barracuda have over the old Barracuda ATA IV???

Oh I don't know... maybe the fact that you can actually store 3 TB of data on it? It's so simple to ignore such advances when they're common... it's a wonder of technology, accuracy, precision, algorithms, that you can store so much on a drive.

Most CPUs in 1992 didn't need heatsinks.

Back then hard drives usually ran at 3600RPM, so they consumed even less power (but certainly weren't quieter...)

Again ignoring the advances in performance. Yes, they were cooler but they also did quite little with the power they used.
Yes, the hard drives rand at 3600 rpm, but they were noisier than current drives and also did 10-20 MB/s transfer rates... not comparable with today's 150 MB/s on some drives.

a 300$ intel chip is 57 watts idle ,the 8 core amd is 72w idle
If it draws that much power when idle, it's not low-power.

The idle values are for COMPLETE systems, power measured at the wall.
A system with 16 GB of memory (this alone uses about 5-10 watts), a video card that idles at around 8 watts, on a high end motherboard optimized for overclocking (uses lots of power circuitry uses a few watts doing nothing in idle)... on a power supply that's about 85% efficient at such loads.

Having a whole systems in such conditions use as little as 60-70 watts is simply amazing.

The VelociRaptors actually run cooler than most 3.5" drives, by virtue of their small size.

No, it's not related to the size. It's related to the fact that they have a 10-20$ worth of heatsink on them. It should be fairly obvious even to a moron:



A lot of software is so bloated there's no excuse - like recent versions of A"duh"be Flash, from what I've heard.

Well good luck with that. Just think about where would we be without Flash, we'd have sites like Youtube resort to *gasp* Java applets to play videos and we'd need 8 cores processors just to play a hd video.

Flash is simply like DirectX for websites - it provides a simple way for website to gain access to hardware accelerated graphics, at a standard that's the same across platforms.

New versions of Flash are optimized for the modern hardware the majority of users use and naturally such optimizations cause it to work slower on older hardware, simply due to following different paths in the code.

For example, I used to watch Youtube and have my quad core processor run at 20-40% usage because Flash could only do some minor 2d acceleration of videos.

Newer versions of Flash can actually access the video card hardware acceleration chip and decode the video inside that chip, so instead of using 20-40% cpu to decode a HD video, the video card is now using 1-2% of its capabilities to do the whole decoding.

That's innovation. When 70-80% of the market has these hardware acceleration capabilities, you have no right to complain that new versions take advantage of that to make those peoples' lives better, sacrificing a minority of users.

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

They just aren't as big of a problem as you make them to be

Take a random device with lead-free solder, that's reasonably old, and look for whiskers. If you can't see any, try another device. If after going through ALL the devices you have, you fail to see any whiskers, then try a magnifier (I don't need one). If that fails, you can figure out what I would have said.

and in the great scheme of things, the world is better with RoHS and the restrictions it imposed.

There are just so many other H&S hazards, some of them unavoidable, that lead in solder is the LEAST of my worries.

• People die from car crashes.
• People die from smoking.
• People die from fires.
• People die from electrocution.
• People commit suicide.

And that's just the start.

If you don't get it, fine. That's what the ignore list is for.

the operating systems already use Cleartype and other technologies like scaling to improve the way fonts are displayed on screens and go around the fact the pixels are square or slightly rectangular dots.

All it is in my mind is an attempt to patch up the crappy resolution of current screens.

in hot computers with lots of vibration sources and high current consumption which causes ripple and other things.

By that logic, the old hard drives would die just as fast as the new ones. Guess what. They don't.

Overclocking also wasn't done at the levels done now and as often as it's done now.

Reading this article, overclocking doesn't make that much sense anyway - it is, after all, running chips faster than they're rated for.

If you'd have a look at how reliable laptops were compared to how reliable current laptops are, you'd be surprised.

I don't think making laptops thinner makes them more reliable. There's also a member here (quoted further down) who observed something strange - people say it's great, it doesn't work. People say it's crap, no problems.

You can't do decoupling caps with electrolytics, they have to be tantalum or ceramic due to esr and high frequencies/current

I didn't mean you can use them in that application. I meant in the applications in which they're used, they are less reliable than ceramics.

Again, that's a wrong assumption, you have no basis for it, yet you keep saying it.You don't know what people actually need.

Need it for what???

If you don't give an example, I'll assume it's for the wrong reasons.

Companies have innovated by removing that coil completely, they moved to SSD.

So it's no longer a HDD innovation.

What you're doing is sort of complaining companies are no longer offering VHS tapes, only DVDs. Nobody cares about VHS anymore, they innovated as much as they could and there's no more point in throwing money on a dying market.

They should at least keep the previous versions available for people continuing to use the old hardware, and provide recommendation links to them (something along the lines of "if you're still using X, download version Y").

Oh I don't know... maybe the fact that you can actually store 3 TB of data on it? It's so simple to ignore such advances when they're common... it's a wonder of technology, accuracy, precision, algorithms, that you can store so much on a drive.

If you're comparing drives with the same number of platters, a Barracuda ATA IV will be much heavier than the current model - and I've noticed a correlation (if but vague) between heavier and more reliable HDDs.

Old Seagate Barracudas were heavy. They were reliable.
8-series Maxtors were light. They weren't so reliable.
9-series Maxtors were in-between in weight, and probably in reliability.

they were noisier than current drives

As I stated. The Barracuda ATA IV didn't go wild for nothing.

10-20 MB/s

That's way way way too high for a drive from 1992. I have a Quantum Fireball TM3840AT (1.28GB/platter, 6 heads, 4500RPM) from late 1996 and it does 3.5-7.0MB/s.

I think it would be more like 1-2MB/s.

Unless you meant the raw bit rate on the platters, which is measured in MegaBITs per second.

The idle values are for COMPLETE systems, power measured at the wall.

Well then you should have said "a system with a $300 Intel chip".

No, it's not related to the size. It's related to the fact that they have a 10-20$ worth of heatsink on them. It should be fairly obvious even to a moron:

I linked to the page with the numbers and you ignored them.

All you've managed to convince me is that you're the moron.

Well good luck with that. Just think about where would we be without Flash, we'd have sites like Youtube resort to *gasp* Java applets to play videos and we'd need 8 cores processors just to play a hd video.

Here goes:

My parents are still using an old Pentium 4 system. They don't do anything that should require anything more than a Pentium II, but that Pentium 4 is so slow that it is almost unusable. It can play the Windows 7 "Wildlife in HD" sample video (720p WMV format) full-screen at a screen resolution of 1280x1024, but it can't play a 360p Youtube video full-screen at any resolution above 1024x768.

New versions of Flash are optimized for the modern hardware the majority of users use and naturally such optimizations cause it to work slower on older hardware, simply due to following different paths in the code.

Then they should leave the old version on older computers.

That's innovation. When 70-80% of the market has these hardware acceleration capabilities, you have no right to complain that new versions take advantage of that to make those peoples' lives better, sacrificing a minority of users.

Whatever. Any way you think about it, they shouldn't make the old version unavailable.

[mariushm]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Take a random device with lead-free solder, that's reasonably old, and look for whiskers. If you can't see any, try another device. If after going through ALL the devices you have, you fail to see any whiskers, then try a magnifier (I don't need one). If that fails, you can figure out what I would have said.


And your point is what? I really don't get it. Tin whiskers are just one of the reasons of failure. I can very well go through lots of devices and eventually I'll find one with tin wiskers... but before I find one I could very well find one with leaked batteries corroding the insides, or leaking capacitors, or leaking transistors or whatever.
This doesn't make tin wiskers any more problem than capacitors - I don't see you raging about why companies don't use polymer capacitors everywhere for example, yet you keep going about tin wiskers.

By that logic, the old hard drives would die just as fast as the new ones. Guess what. They don't.

Older hard drives don't have the same requirements as the new hard drives. Less rpm, less data density, less heat generated by the motors and the platters through friction with the air inside, other factors. You honestly think the hard drives of today are the same as old hard drives, just motors changed to have higher rotation speed?

For example, in general, in a population of hard drives, they still fail at a rate of 2-3%. The old drives had just a slight lower failure rate of about 1-1.5%, only there were other failures making them die.
At the end of the day, I don't care what makes a hard drive fail. I'm fine with the slight increase of failure, because in return I get a lot of other benefits, speed, capacity, lower access times among them.


So it's no longer a HDD innovation.

HDD is short for Hard Disk Drive... it's not short for ROTATING disk drive. The heads could very well move and have the disk fixed inside the device.
SSD just replaces the motor and disk with memory chips. it's "solid state drive".

Instead of using a ferromagnetic canvas to store the bits and a magnetic field, an electric pulse is used instead to store bits into silicon canvas. You just don't have to move the "canvas" and the write head around to read and write date.

It's innovation.

Want an analogy? Cars are still cars even if they don't have internal combustion engine. The motor does not define the car.

They should at least keep the previous versions available for people continuing to use the old hardware, and provide recommendation links to them (something along the lines of "if you're still using X, download version Y").

They are. You can still buy SATA, even ATA hard drives. You don't want just that, you want them to actually keep improving them.


I linked to the page with the numbers and you ignored them.
All you've managed to convince me is that you're the moron.

You said :

"The VelociRaptors actually run cooler than most 3.5" drives, by virtue of their small size."

The page you linked to has NO INFORMATION about temperature, no readings, nothing. It just says the power consumption. Lower power consumption DOES NOT EQUAL cooler hard drive. You're making the false assumption that lower power requirements equal less heat.

In fact I went through the whole review and there's not even ONE mention of temperature. Being SilentPCReview.com they focus on the noise levels, and it shows, as they pointed out that when heatsink is mounted, the noise profile changes and the heatsink actually dampens the vibrations making it more silent.


(continued in next post, wrote over 10k characters)

[mariushm]

Re: RANT: Modern technology


Here goes:

Quote:
Originally Posted by lti
My parents are still using an old Pentium 4 system. They don't do anything that should require anything more than a Pentium II, but that Pentium 4 is so slow that it is almost unusable. It can play the Windows 7 "Wildlife in HD" sample video (720p WMV format) full-screen at a screen resolution of 1280x1024, but it can't play a 360p Youtube video full-screen at any resolution above 1024x768.

This can be very easily explained by someone who has experience with video and video encoding techniques and I can understand how it can be confusing for a normal person.

Let me put it in a simple way for you.

Here's the Wildlife in HD sample: http://archive.org/details/Windows7WildlifeSampleVideo

It's a 31 second video, that takes 25 MB of disk space. Why do you think it takes so much disk space for 30 seconds? Simple. They use about 6 mbps of bandwidth for the video :

ID : 2
Format : VC-1
Format profile : AP@L3
Codec ID : WVC1
Duration : 30s 531ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 5 942 Kbps

Each video codec has several levels of "complexity"... the higher the complexity of each encoded picture, the more processing power needs to be used for the video to unpacked and for each pixel information to be obtained. Here, Microsoft used Level 3 (AP@L3) in VC-1, which is a very simple complexity, the decoder doesn't have to actually WORK to decode the video. This complexity is so low you can use a 40$ chinese player to watch this HD video.

Then, the video is also compressed with HIGH bitrate, 5942 kbps or 6 mbps . In general, the lower the bitrate, the more the encoder worked more to retain as much information in the video, so the decoder has to work more to recreate the pictures it shows on the screen. With such high bitrate, the encoder didn't even sweat to pack all the information in the video, so the decoder has no problem decompressing everything even on slow computers.

Third, if you actually watch the video, you will notice it's a poorly deinterlaced video, and a sequence of scenes that are easy to encode and decode by anything. They're all scenes where there's still motion (just animals standing still yawning) and a couple of scenes where there's motion but in ONE direction only... because motion vectors are easy to compress this way.

And if you're really observe, the fast motion scenes are both at the BEGINNING of the video - that is because a video player like Windows Media Player will load from hard drive a few MB of content, buffer about 10 seconds of video and THEN start playing the video... high motion, high bitrate scene at the beginning with the horses, all the 5 seconds of it, is already in RAM decompressed and ready to be played before the player actually starts playing the content.

So the conclusion is that Microsoft used every trick in the book to make this short sample work even on the lousiest of the computers around, to promote their VC-1 codec and their operating system. It's not a representative sample of HD content.

They just needed something that most people will probably play the moment they finish installing Windows 7, so 90% they'll use Windows Media Player (the default) to play it, therefore they tweaked it for how Windows Media Player behaves.... then they made it super easy to decode and play because they couldn't predict if the video card drivers were properly installed (hence 2d and video acceleration is not guaranteed, the video needs to play fast no matter what video card is installed)

-

Now let's think about what happens with Youtube. Youtube has to pay for the bandwidth, so they really have to squeeze as much quality as possible in low bitrates, because not everyone has constant 6 mbps like in the sample above to watch HD videos.

Here's the identical sample on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1YCIy1yLM8 (right click on video, show video info)

Youtube has several resolutions:

360p : 640x360 788 kbps

720p : 1280x720 1145 kbps

So while MS used 5948 kbps and L3 complexity for their video, in 720p Youtube actually packs the video as much as possible, squeezing it into 1145 kbps, and I can assure you it encodes it with a much higher complexity level, probably L4.1

In general 720p videos on Youtube hover around 2-3 mbps and 1080p videos hover at around 6-8mbps. Microsoft used for 720p as much as Youtube uses for 1080p.

Now here's the kicker: for 720p and 1080p Youtube actually uses MP4 and the h264 encoding standard, which is sort of the same as VC-1. Both VC-1 and H264 are supported by modern video cards and can be played in hardware, without using the processor at all.

The lower versions are a mix of MP4 (usually 480p) and the 360p and 240p are almost always VP3 - a format of video which is one of the original video formats supported by Flash.
This VP3 is sort of like divx or xvid, it's an older encoding standard which can't be accelerated by video cards.
More recently, Youtube converted most of these to VP8, which is a sort of H264 or VC-1 but again, it can't be accelerated by video cards.

So when bill tried to play the 360p in Flash, Flash had to use the processor to decode in software a video that was very compressed, then it had to resize the video in software again to show it at 1024x768. All this takes a lot of processing power.

When lti watched the HD sample in the player, the player didn't break a sweat because it was almost not compressed, it was that easy to be decoded and played.

The media player also didn't have additional layers of functionality, it just had to play the video. Flash player actually has to decode the video and have each picture in the movie to put the buttons, logos (whatever Flash does) over the pictures. So while the media player can just instruct the video card to put the pictures on screen, the Flash player needs to further process the pictures, stretch them, merge them with buttons or whatever... more processing power, done in CPU.

If you have a video card that was made in the last 10 years or so, it would have enough 2D acceleration support that the Flash player would play anything before HD with no problems.

I know my parents were watching Youtube on a Athlon XP 2600+ and a Radeon 9200 with 128 MB of ram (the card died a few months ago and I gave them a GeForce 4) and my sister is watching Youtube videos on a somwhat similar processor with a GeForce 2 MX 400 (or something like that).

Both aren't capable of accelerating HD videos because they don't have that chip on them, so playing HD videos from youtube is out of the question, the processors are simply too slow. BUT, the video cards have enough 2D acceleration to allow the Flash player to offload the resizing and some color conversions to the video cards, so the videos even work full screen without lagging.

Then they should leave the old version on older computers.

New versions fix security issues (bugs, exploits) and add features websites actually use and people actually want. For example version 10 added full screen support for Flash on monitors other than the first. I can now start youtube on the second monitor and put it full screen and play it while working on first monitor.

You can get older versions of Flash, just like you can get older versions of Firefox or whatever you want, you just have to search for them:

Here, download whatever version you want: http://www.oldversion.com/Macromedia-Flash-Player.html

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

You botched the transfer rates on old HDDs, you never admitted it.

The hell with it...

EDIT: SSDs are not a direct replacement for HDDs.

[lti]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Thanks for bringing me into this.

I know that Windows 7 sample video wasn't very hard to play back because it was mostly still images. The CPU usage was 100% when playing it.

On that computer, I had to disable hardware acceleration in Flash to get videos to play full screen. With hardware acceleration enabled, attempting to play Flash video full-screen just produces a solid white screen. It could be a driver issue, but I am curently using the best driver available. The later drivers for the GeForce 4 MX 420 only allow 4:3 resolutions to be chosen and slow the computer down. That computer is now connected to a 16:9 widescreen monitor because the old 17" LCD monitor died.

[Wester547]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Shocker, sort of off-topic, but speaking of the old Barracuda ATA IV...

In my experience of the two ATA IV 40GBs I've had, they both have started below room temperature (by a few degrees, or 20%, but other drives I have, all of them, from Seagate or otherwise, start at room temperature), judging by the S.M.A.R.T. data (and because of that pretty much double in temperature by the time the temperature stabilizes at idle).... has that been the case for you too (with regard to Barracuda ATA IV drives)? I doubt something's wrong with them because one has lasted 7,000 power cycles and 16,000 power on hours and the other 5,000 power cycles and 17,500 power on hours and they're both in working order.

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

I don't remember. I have 3 of them now - one in each capacity except 80GB.

The 20GB and 60GB have SH6950s. The 40GB has a SMOOTH . When I removed the SeaShield from the 20GB, I saw that one of the ceramic caps was soldered in such a position that it almost looked like someone dislodged it, even though it wasn't.

In any case, if you think that you can reduce the toxicity of electronics to the point where e-waste is only a minor health problem, you're absolutely insane.

You can figure out who's on my ignore list now.

[Junk Parts]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Here is my two cents worth. I remember when adding a pile of RAM ment a big 64mb for a total or something like that. Did it make a difference? Hell yes and the PC was fast. The other great upgrade was the 7200rpm harddrive. This upgrade was like going to another planet! With the hardware being as maxed out as it is today these types of upgrades just don't do nearly as much.
Quality is another big issue today. Remember the old IBM Tower 386 and 486 units? Who hasn't almost gotten a hernia from lifting one of these things! These units were not Main Frames ether. They were just the Personal Computers of thier time. On the insde they were built like scientific equipment should be too. Todays stuff is mostly built like Cheap Chinese Transistor Radio's from the sixties and seventies.

[PeteS in CA]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Sixties transistor radios were from Japan, JP. Japanese electronics came a long way in the 60s and 70s, quality-wise.

[Junk Parts]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Well you know what I mean Pete. Sorry I made the wrong country guilty of the crime...LOL Japan has made some true "junk" too in the past. I think that "Made in Japan" used to mean "This Is Junk". This isn't true for most of their products today at all. I hate to say it but Japanese cars rule today.

[smason]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Quality is another big issue today. Remember the old IBM Tower 386 and 486 units? Who hasn't almost gotten a hernia from lifting one of these things! These units were not Main Frames ether. They were just the Personal Computers of thier time. On the insde they were built like scientific equipment should be too. Todays stuff is mostly built like Cheap Chinese Transistor Radio's from the sixties and seventies.

Yup, very well built. But remember the price?

No way you could get that kinda quality out of the Chinese manufacturers for today's prices.

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

I never liked the results of scaling raster images. The resolution is bad enough already, so why make it worse??? I have to say, I can't stop noticing the lame resolution of current screens.

Some people may actually like it, but then again, some people like stretching 4:3 images onto 16:9 screens...

EDIT: Turning down the screen brightness will save a lot more power than a "Green" drive.

EDIT 2: Almost forgot - I won't buy new hardware for the sake of a security fix unless I'm running a business that depends on it.

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Just for mariushm:

I took 11 drives I've identified as being RoHS compliant and found tin whiskers on 9 of them.

Seriously, do you still think it's a small problem???

[Shocker]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

big steel case

I'm not using a plastic case. In any case, PCs shouldn't have plastic cases to begin with, because plastic doesn't provide shielding (which is always important with computers).

People play music in the background or they watch youtube while they work on something, all this uses processor ... a lot of computing power, more than what the old processors were capable of in some cases.

Multitasking is bad for you.

Nobody cares about VHS anymore, they innovated as much as they could

With VHS they didn't have much room to innovate without breaking compatibility because the use of a standardised recorder imposes many limitations on what they can change.

With HDDs, on the other hand, all they actually have to conform to is the interface and the form factor. They're free to change the heads, platters, magnets, coils, and bearings as they desire, because each set of disks has its own drive (so to speak).

Oh I don't know... maybe the fact that you can actually store 3 TB of data on it? It's so simple to ignore such advances when they're common... it's a wonder of technology, accuracy, precision, algorithms, that you can store so much on a drive.

Bigger, faster, SATA...but otherwise it looks the same to me. Reliability aside

This doesn't make tin wiskers any more problem than capacitors - I don't see you raging about why companies don't use polymer capacitors everywhere for example, yet you keep going about tin wiskers.

Until you learn to spell "whisker" right I'm not going to listen to you and probably not even then.

I didn't rage about the caps because everyone else has done so already.

Older hard drives don't have the same requirements as the new hard drives. Less rpm, less data density, less heat generated by the motors and the platters through friction with the air inside, other factors. You honestly think the hard drives of today are the same as old hard drives, just motors changed to have higher rotation speed?

The RPM hasn't changed at all from the Barracuda ATA IV to the 3TB monster. (Or should I say monster unreliability instead of monster capacity. Makes more sense to me. )

I couldn't find any indication in the specifications that the new HDDs are that much less durable. If anything, they (the specifications) are the other way around.

For example, in general, in a population of hard drives, they still fail at a rate of 2-3%.

This isn't 3%, is it???

We used a few seagate Enterprise drives in PCs at work. A year later, all but one are dead.

And :

You wouldn't believe what happened today. One of the enterprise drives which we RMA'd about two months ago has died again.

I know it sounds like I'm trying to beat a , but when c_hegge, Wester547, and PCBONEZ all agree with me, what can you say???

Maybe your new HDDs have survived because you ONLY store them on rubber mats, and ONLY handle them with rubber gloves, and ONLY put them in cases with rubber grommets. That's not what matters to me. If it's that easily damaged, it's too impractical for me, no matter how "awesome" it is.
__________________

If new HDDs can't survive what old HDDs did, in spite of anything the manufacturers say, what am I to believe??? Blame them, not me.

HDD is short for Hard Disk Drive... it's not short for ROTATING disk drive. The heads could very well move and have the disk fixed inside the device.

That wouldn't work because the heads are held off the platters by airflow, and stopping the platters would eliminate the airflow. Keeping the heads off the platters is necessary for HDDs to last, when the platters are spinning so fast.

SSDs aren't really drives, because the "drive" part is, if you think about it, referring to the motor that spins the disks.

I'd rather say SSD means Silicon Storage Device.

You can still buy SATA, even ATA hard drives. You don't want just that, you want them to actually keep improving them.

They haven't stopped working on HDDs, but I'm asking for RELIABLE HDDs again and that's why I'm still using old HDDs - because reliability is more important than speed or capacity, at least to me.

The page you linked to has NO INFORMATION about temperature, no readings, nothing. It just says the power consumption. Lower power consumption DOES NOT EQUAL cooler hard drive. You're making the false assumption that lower power requirements equal less heat.

Temperature rise (°C) = thermal power (W) x thermal resistance (°C/W)

Thermal power (W) = temperature rise (°C) ÷ thermal resistance (°C/W)

Thermal resistance (°C/W) = temperature rise (°C) ÷ thermal power (W)

It's the thermal version of Ohm's law. It's EASY!!!!!
__________________

VelociRaptor: 70mm wide / 100mm long / 15mm thick

3.5" HDD: 102mm wide / 146mm long / 25mm thick

I'll assume the airflow is lengthwise. This means that the ends of the drive do not count toward cooling.

VelociRaptor: 1,500mm² each along the sides, 7,000mm² each on top and bottom
3.5": 2,581mm² each along the sides, 14,839mm² each on top and bottom

VelociRaptor: 17,000mm² total
3.5": 34,839mm² total
__________________

If you hard mount it the difference in thermal resistance isn't as large, assuming a decent contact between the PC case and the sides of the drive.

But it doesn't matter. All I was really trying to say back up there was that a WD Raptor, Veloci- or otherwise, is not the way to go if you want to be anti-green.

If you want to be anti-green, go out and buy a 1.5TB 7200.11. Oh wait, you can't.

as they pointed out that when heatsink is mounted, the noise profile changes and the heatsink actually dampens the vibrations making it more silent.

No, the heatsink amplifies high frequency noise, and I can hardly stand high frequency noise.

Conclusion: mariushm is a moron.

[mariushm]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

Sigh...

I took 11 drives I've identified as being RoHS compliant and found tin whiskers on 9 of them.

You took 11 drives. You found tin whiskers on 9 of them.
That's supposed to tell me what?

You're saying absolutely NOTHING to me with this, it's incomplete information.

Are they 11 random drives?
Are they 11 DEAD drives?
Are they same batch or not?
If they're DEAD are they dead because of tin whiskers or for other reasons? Tin whiskers can form due to overheating or stresses that are caused by other possible failures.
Basic conclusion: you're not enough of an expert to determine that tin whiskers are the reason for why those drives failed. That's why I didn't even reply to your previous comment, because it was a stupid comment - a normal person reading it would come to that conclusion, that statistically the fact that you found 9 tin whiskers in 11 drives (again, who knows what state and how they were abused) is irrelevant.
It doesn't mean CRAP.

I'm not using a plastic case. In any case, PCs shouldn't have plastic cases to begin with, because plastic doesn't provide shielding (which is always important with computers).

Do some research about Faraday cage and its principles and the electromagnetic permeability of various materials. Simply put, the plastic in most cases it's on TOP of a mesh of metal that basically forms a Faraday cage shielding the system. You're talking out of your ass.

Multitasking is bad for you.

Says who? The uneducated Shocker? Read some research about it before you spew crap.

Some research papers say multitasking decreases productivity BUT the person actually feels better overall, so while productivity at a particular moment is worse, the person would enjoy and keep working at something for a longer time. Without enjoyment, the productivity would slowly decrease, in time. So it's up to you as a human person to determine what's the best compromise between those.
You want to be a soulless drone in a cubicle? By all means refuse multitasking.

You can start from here if you want: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

With VHS they didn't have much room to innovate without breaking compatibility because the use of a standardised recorder imposes many limitations on what they can change.

You're confused. They did improve the principles behind vhs, using better tapes, better chemical composition, denser tracks, better use of the width of the tapes, and so on. You got backup tapes from that and other things. You just don't know about them because you're ignorant.
For example look up DAT tapes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape They use the same principles of reading and writing with rotating heads and using helical scan of the tape to pack a lot of bits per inch of tape.
DV and miniDV use the same principles, but improved further.

Yet the technology is doomed to fail and engineers recognized that. Tape stretches, the heads rub against the metallic dust on the tape, in time the glue keeping the dust on the polymer carrier (the tape) leeks and causes the tape to stick... it simply made more sense to move to optical medium.

With HDDs, on the other hand, all they actually have to conform to is the interface and the form factor. They're free to change the heads, platters, magnets, coils, and bearings as they desire, because each set of disks has its own drive (so to speak).

You're forgetting the part about hard drives changing from IDE to EIDE, from ATA33 to ATA 66, 100, 133, FROM SCSI to ATA, from ATA to SATA, from SATA to SAS, Fiber Channel ... there are A LOT of standards used with hard drives.
Just because you are most familiar with SATA, it doesn't mean you are allowed to pretend other things don't exist, ignore and complain about a particular thing you don't like.

Bigger, faster, SATA...but otherwise it looks the same to me

That's because you're not looking anywhere. You're only looking in the same place, expecting people to shove in your face something. If you don't bother to search and read about IT and keep yourself informed about innovations, you shouldn't complain all the time.

You have choices. It's like complaining about all the sedans having four wheels and same style, ignoring the fact that there are SUVs and vans out there you could use instead of sedans, only because you're used with sedans.

You have choices between 3.5" drives, 2.5" drives, even 1.8" drives. You can choose between 5400rpm drives, 5900rpm drives, 7200rpm, 10k , 15k drives... yet you say :

The RPM hasn't changed at all from the Barracuda ATA IV to the 3TB monster. (Or should I say monster unreliability instead of monster capacity. Makes more sense to me. )

Are you really that ignorant? We're going back to the point that if it's too expensive, then that thing doesn't exist for you. You like 7200 rpm therefore everything should be made around 7200 rpm and anything else is bad.

And did you ever stop to think WHY would manufacturers not change the RPM speed from Barracuda to the 3 TB monster? Have you bothered to think that perhaps it's a problem of physics, a limitation of how the drives are designed, and the manufacturers are not just there to screw you?

All drives running at 10k rpm or 15k rpm are either in 2.5" format, or use 2.5" platters inside a 3.5" form factor. Such high speeds are simply stressing the platter material too much, causing fractures in it, stretching it, forcing the drives to keep recalibrating the heads to the proper tracks.
That's why you don't see increased rotation speed.

In addition, increasing rotation speed would not increase the performance a lot - the biggest problem with rotating drives is still the fact that heads have to move to a track, and these have inertia, and once they're in position they still have to wait for data to come in front of them.
It doesn't make shit of a difference if you increase the speed to 10k or 15k if the number of IOPS is small. This is where SSD drives are better and that's why they're better.

But it's simpler and easier to be ignorant and pick on something as simple as rotation speed to justify your anger or whatever you have.

Quote:
For example, in general, in a population of hard drives, they still fail at a rate of 2-3%.

You're doing the math on your 11 drives, I'm doing the math on a large population of drives, as anyone doing statistics would do. 11 "individuals" is below even the error margin of most polls.
As I don't know what those 11 drives are, I can't guess.
You can very well say 11 drives represent 100%, then of course 9 drives with whiskers are 81%.... but that's incorrect.

The reality is that you may have gone through 500 drives to get 11 dead drives (2.2%) and from those 2.2% dead drives, 81% are caused by whiskers.

But even this affirmation is flawed, because tin whiskers can very well be a "conclusion", a consequence of drives failing for other reasons, but these tin whiskers were the obvious, visual, easy to spot cause. Are they there? Yes. Did they short something or not? You can't tell. So you can't just put an equal sign between "tin whiskers present" and "hard drive died".

That wouldn't work because the heads are held off the platters by airflow, and stopping the platters would eliminate the airflow. Keeping the heads off the platters is necessary for HDDs to last, when the platters are spinning so fast.

Yes, disk heads float on a cushion of air, they never touch the surface of the platters... I thought that was obvious and it's like that since decades. It's not "necessary" for the HDDs to last, it's critical. Hit the platters and the drive's gone at such speeds. It is possible to have the discs fixed and have the heads move around, but the heads react even slower so the speed would be less.

A simple hack for hard drives would be to simply put 4 axles with heads in each corner of the hard drive, and synchronize all four axles to read each a part of a circular track, buffer it and send it to a processor which recomposes the track into a continuous track.
The manufacturers could slow down the speed to 3-4k rpm, but being 4x as many heads the speed would still be 3-4 times bigger than normal hard drives. But to fit four axles with heads, the drive would have to be 5.25", so we're back to the bigfoot design.
So now the drive is 5.25", 4000rpm, reads and writes with 600 MB/s just like SSDs, it costs 3-4 times the price of a normal hard drive yet it still has only 4-8 times the IOPS of regular drives, while SSDs have thousands of times more capability.

The sad thing is such innovation would cost millions of dollars in custom chips, but you'd still complain it costs too much or that it's not 7200rpm, ignoring the actual technologic advances INSIDE the hard drive. Just like you're complaining about SSDs.


Great... " The text that you have entered is too long (11173 characters). Please shorten it to 10000 characters long." What a waste of my time.

[mariushm]

Re: RANT: Modern technology

I'm asking for RELIABLE HDDs again and that's why I'm still using old HDDs - because reliability is more important than speed or capacity, at least to me.

Like I said before, you don't really care about reliability. If you did care about reliability you'd use datacenter hard drives, raid, daily backups etc ... knowing full well nothing is 100% reliable.
It's not technologically efficient anymore to do what you want... low capacity platters, chips and controllers produced at large micron size (the sillicon wafers cost too much and the productions costs would be too much and the companies making the chips obsoleted those production lines or upgraded them to lower micron manufacturing), the platters are cheaper to be made in volume and at high data density, everything is better in volume to keep costs down.

Your kind of people are too few to get even a cent of profit from making such drives. You would pay for reliability up to a point, and these drives would cost too much to be bought by people like you, you're too cheap.

Search for reliability somewhere else, accept the fact that the reliability has decreased in some areas but advances in technology give you means to increase the reliability (raid)

temperature blurb

You're ignoring a lot of things related to what components actually generate heat on a hard drive, what the heatsink does for the Raptor, how the PCB under the drive is positioned, a lot of things.
The WD Raptor could very well generate more heat than older drives, but this heat is dissipated faster into the environment compared to older drives.

For example (hypothetical), an old drive can consume 10 watts at the wall and do 2 watts of heat, while a new drive can use 6 watts in total but still generate 2 watts of heat. The new drive may seem cooler because those 2 watts are spread more evenly on the surface of the drive (motor, controller, pwm, large cache, vrm) and it dissipates the heat better through the heatsink, while the older will be more hot because the heat has a harder time to go away from the main generator of heat (the motor).

But when you draw the line, they both lose 2 watts of heat.

WD Raptor is cooler due to heatsink... air is an insulator when it comes to heat, the heatsink on Raptor increases the dissipation area, air convection in the case makes it cooler.

No, the heatsink amplifies high frequency noise, and I can hardly stand high frequency noise.

I'll agree with you here, I re-read the review and they said it's more silent without the heatsink. So I was wrong when I said it's more silent - it does dampen the vibrations but it's not more silent.

But it's a question of personal taste and how the case blocks the noises. Some cases are better at blocking high frequency, others are better at lower noises. Some people are too old to hear those low frequency noises or have tinnitus.

Until you learn to spell "whisker" right I'm not going to listen to you and probably not even then.

I'm in Romania, Europe. English is not my native language. I do think I write and speak it well enough, I was passionate enough to learn it, however mistakes do happen, especially when I write late in the night and I'm angry.
I would certainly excuse your mistakes, were you to write to me in Romanian or anything besides English.

Oh, thank you for making me a moron.