The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it). -- Bill Joy 6/21/85

That's so funny since just about every computer runs Windows and no one cares about UNIX.  Plus now that Apple is certified, OS X is UNIX. 

I'm having problems surfing tonight.  There seems to be uber lag.  I rebooted stargazer which helped with local sites, but there is an apparent DNS resolving problem.  Best I can tell, Comcast or a backbone are having network related outages.  I can' t get a traceroute to go through for many sites to track down the problem.  I can't get to very much on the west coast and the east coast sties are slow.  A speedtest site showed me uploading at 12kbps and downloading at about the same.  Steam tried to update at 1kbps!  I shut down all network related software on my PC and my mac is completely shut off.  I'm still having severe problems that have persisted for an hour. There isn't much activity on the router and its showing all go in the admin.  The switch is showing moderate traffic.  Most of my network tools aren't showing any bottlenecks. 

This problem is slowing down work on my website projects for class. I had to give up for tonight. I got an essay for 328 done and some page chagnes.  444 needs a lot of work yet.  I need to finish the Jewel site stuff and write the essay.  Most of the students are behind on this one.  I think a time adjustment was needed..  We had the time in the semester if we would have started earlier. 

I bought a new USB stick specifically for ReadyBoost and it failed the test.  Testing data is available in the Event Log.  There is a way to force a device to be used anyway.

From Windows Vista Magazine:

Using the left-hand pane, work your way through the following folders: HKLM (Local Machine) -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> CurrentVersion -> EMDgmt. You'll have a list of USB devices the computer has encountered, one of which should be your USB stick. Click on it.

Here there's a few details you need to edit. Double click on Device Status and change the value to 2, then ok. Do the same for ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs, changing their values to both 1000. Exit the regedit and breathe a sigh of relief.

A few notes:

• The values should stay in hex. 
• My drive just barely failed the read/write tests.  A very slow drive will have negative impact on performance. 
• This is a hack, so do benchmarking to make sure its actually improving things.

I had another stick that is several years old pass on vista launch day but fail today.  I suspect either something changed with the stick (unlikely) or Microsoft upped the speed requirements with a patch? 

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/14/180222

The judge ordered that RAM be turned over because it contains documents!  Well RAM is not long term storage like a flash drive or hard drive.  Lamers tend to use it as such but its not.  Its temporary space.  If i pull out the chips, everything is lost.  If I turn off a computer, everything is loss.  It would be impossible to have memory dumps of RAM and still have computers operate at any useful speed.  I can't emphasize how ignorant about technology this judge is.   

I'm having trouble coming up with an example, but let me try.  Imagine someone got busted for drinking alcohol underage.  The judge ordered the glass that held the beer to be turned over expecting to find beer even though it had been six months and it had been washed.  That's not the same thing, but it does point out how impossible it is.  Now imagine you had to keep an exact copy of any beverage in that glass.  How on earth could you do that?  How many glasses would that be?  Each of those would in turn be evidience and need to be turned over too. 

My diagnosis for the Mac seems to be correct. The new IDE cables came today and aside from a little electrical tape to hold them in place, they are in rather well. The 36 inch cable was a bit long. I think 30 inches would have been optimal. So far the Mac isn't crashing when a CD or DVD is inserted in either drive. That is a very good thing. It seems moderately more stable and a bit quicker in Finder. I was able to play a few minutes of Syriana which I rented online.

I wont get a chance to play with it tonight since I've got essays to write and more homework. I don't see how I'm supposed to perform peer review. Both my site and other sites are not done. I think out of two classes, one person has it all done.