Magazine ad WTF



  • I was flipping through the pages of a Quite Popular Computer Magazine(tm) yesterday, when I came across this ad:



     Alright, let's start counting the WTFs!

    - The computer is a 12-inch Apple PowerBook. With a PowerPC processor. Good luck getting Vista running on that!

    - The USB ports on the side are clearly photoshopped. The perspective isn't even correct.

    - The screen image is fake, and the fonts used for the Windows Vista logo are wrong. 

    - I would hope that all flash drives work with Windows Vista; what makes this one so special?

    My guess is that this ad was made by the head of the marketing department's 15-year-old son with a pirated copy of Photoshop. Seriously...Vista on a PPC Mac? Granted, most of the people who read computer magazines like this one are sheep who wouldn't even care. Still, this is reason #3,231 why I hate the computer industry: 99% of PC hardware advertising is crap.

    (This post brought to you by placing the magazine on a wooden table and taking a picture of it. Who needs a scanner?) 



  • Thanks for this ad, it's a gem. And scanners are for pussies people with too much desk space.



  • This WTF definitely loses points because you didn't tear the page out of the magazine, put it on a wooden table, and take a picture with a digital camera.



  • @rmr said:

    This WTF definitely loses points because you didn't tear the page out of the magazine, put it on a wooden table, and take a picture with a digital camera.

    Well, it wasn't my magazine, so I didn't rip out the page, but I did take a picture of it on a wooden table. You can see the table in the original image, but I cropped it out. :-p



  • "I would hope that all flash drives work with Windows Vista; what makes this one so special?"

     

    There's that speedup thing that makes transfers faster under Vista apparently, all the cool kids have it... 



  • For extra points, please post the uncropped image, you'll be a hero to many.
     



  • Hmmm..... it's a photo of a magazine on a wooden table, containing a photo of a laptop on a glass table.



  • @msarnoff said:

    - I would hope that all flash drives work with Windows Vista; what makes this one so special?

    All flash drives should work with vista.  However, very few work with ReadyBoost.
     



  • @Kemp said:

    Hmmm..... it's a photo of a magazine on a wooden table, containing a photo of a laptop on a glass table.

     

    Now we just need to take a photo of this web site and seal that into a chunk of perspex, and this goofball will finally have his Perspex Machine!

     

    (This is the guy who was roundly criticized a few months ago for "solving" the division-by-zero "problem" with new constructs that basically amount to +INF and -INF and NaN, and that if you insist on lumping them with regular numbers anyway, create new exceptions all over the place in things like "a*b = a*c implies b = c as long as a is non-zero".  His other bit of crankery is the Perspex Machine, which IIRC basically amounts to a Turing Machine augmented by analog geometric measurements, which are obviously capable of infinite precision, right?)

     

    @merreborn said:

    @msarnoff said:

    - I would hope that all flash drives work with Windows Vista; what makes this one so special?

    All flash drives should work with vista.  However, very few work with ReadyBoost.
     

     

    What the hell is ReadyBoost, anyway?  *googles*  Oh, here we go, Vista can use flash drives as extra cache memory if they're fast enough; I do remember the concept now, just not the name.

    I suspect the ad is intended to give the false impression that their competitors' flash drives don't work with Vista.

     



  • Sort of like saying "Our toasters are guaranteed to work with your home's 120VAC electrical system".  Obviously it'll work, but they state the obvious with the intention of planting a seed of distrust.  Other vendors' technology, which doesn't expressly state that it will work with your computer, might not work.  And are you really going to take that risk?



  • Yeah, there was a joke advertisement by Garrison Keillor once for Powdermilk Biscuits, which ran something like this:


    Our product is made without arsenic. Of course, other brands may also be made without arsenic, but if they aren't, why don't they come out and say it like we do? Powdermilk Biscuits. Made without arsenic. (begins to fade out) Or rat droppings. (end)



  • @The Vicar said:

    Yeah, there was a joke advertisement by Garrison Keillor once for Powdermilk Biscuits, which ran something like this:

    Our product is made without arsenic. Of course, other brands may also be made without arsenic, but if they aren't, why don't they come out and say it like we do? Powdermilk Biscuits. Made without arsenic. (begins to fade out) Or rat droppings. (end)

     

    I wouldn't buy them out of fear that they would be made with arsenic and rat droppings.



  • Or that they used to be.



  • Transcend Reality maybe?



  • Funny, my flash drives all refused to work with the Windows Visto I bought from that Ukranian guy at the car wash. Of course, that was Visto 2003 (as he explained to me), so maybe that will be fixed in this new Visto release.

    In the vein of "made with no arsenic," I have glanced at many ladies hair care products while waiting on my wife to pick out a shampoo. It is interesting that there are dozens of hair straighteners (and other hair car products) for African American women that proudly state: "No lye! Lye-free formula!"

     I don't think I've ever seen one that said, "Extra-lye formula" or "We proudly use lye!"

    (And if you are still reading this wondering if I really bought a Windows Visto - I did not.)
     



  • The Real WTF is that Microsoft can promote this "technology". Its been possible to mount a flashdrive as swap (in linux) for years, but why would you do it?



  • "Oh, here we go, Vista can use flash drives as extra cache memory if they're fast enough; I do remember the concept now, just not the name."

     As if this was a new feature... Linux users have had this for quite a while. You just mkswap a partition in an USB device, then swapon /dev/<partition>. In fact, you can swap to pretty much any writable storage device: a partition, an HD (80GB swap! Wheeeeeee!), and even a floppy.


    Not really of much use, since Flash drives are NOT designed for this (they have a read/write limit). Doing this will kill the USB device in a while.
     



  • readyboost is quite different than just using a flash device as swap. It's used as an extra cache and only for operations that are faster on a flash device than on a hdd, ie random small reads, large sequential reads are served by the hdd. Lifespan of flash devices was considered but deemed not to be a problem with an estimated lifespan of 10 years when used as a readyboost device. I think it's save to assumbe that hardly any one will want use a current usb flash device in 10years.

     Perhaps you should first read up on the technology befre posting nonsense. http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx would be a start
     



  • So that's really a swap with HDD fallback. I think that it doesn't speed up memory writes, because they have to write to the disk first and then update the flash. It's going to be slower than if you just used the USB drive as swap.

    I tried to use a CF card as a pagefile-only partition under XP, but it's too dumb for that...



  • I'm going to just link to page 5 of the Tom's Hardware post which has a bunch of graphs of ReadyBoost and SuperFetch tested:

     http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page5.html

     
    The full article is here, which includes an explanation of what they both are meant to do, as well as how they tested them:

     http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/

     

    What they end up showing is that in some circumstances, such as when you have too little main memory, this can be quite a good addition.  It is good to note that it is not a flat caching system, it takes the speed and strengths (and weaknesses) of flash drives into account, and only caches those files which will access from a flash drive faster than a hard drive.  It also doesn't use it to augment main memory in terms of raw size.  If you are editing gigantic photos in Photoshop while playing World of Warcraft, the flash drive won't help you.

    Think of it as a cache for frequently run applications, which load many small DLLs into memory on startup, for instance.  It isn't treated like RAM or a swap file, but rather as a cache that can do some things must faster than a harddrive.

    Personally, readyboost does very little for me.  I have 2GB of RAM, and tend to play games.  It might make my games start up slightly faster, but most of the data that games use isn't likely to cache well on a flash drive.  It's a nifty feature, though, when you recognize what it is supposed to do and what it isn't supposed to do.  It works, especially if you have too little memory to start with.  Since I'm capable of adding more memory the "right" way, I don't need it.  For the kind of person that won't ever open their computer, this is a neat way to allow them to squeeze a bit more performance from their machine.
     



  • @schmads said:

    I'm going to just link to page 5 of the Tom's Hardware post which has a bunch of graphs of ReadyBoost and SuperFetch tested:

     http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page5.html


    The full article is here, which includes an explanation of what they both are meant to do, as well as how they tested them:

     http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/

     

    What they end up showing is that in some circumstances, such as when you have too little main memory, this can be quite a good addition.  It is good to note that it is not a flat caching system, it takes the speed and strengths (and weaknesses) of flash drives into account, and only caches those files which will access from a flash drive faster than a hard drive.  It also doesn't use it to augment main memory in terms of raw size.  If you are editing gigantic photos in Photoshop while playing World of Warcraft, the flash drive won't help you.

    Think of it as a cache for frequently run applications, which load many small DLLs into memory on startup, for instance.  It isn't treated like RAM or a swap file, but rather as a cache that can do some things must faster than a harddrive.

    Personally, readyboost does very little for me.  I have 2GB of RAM, and tend to play games.  It might make my games start up slightly faster, but most of the data that games use isn't likely to cache well on a flash drive.  It's a nifty feature, though, when you recognize what it is supposed to do and what it isn't supposed to do.  It works, especially if you have too little memory to start with.  Since I'm capable of adding more memory the "right" way, I don't need it.  For the kind of person that won't ever open their computer, this is a neat way to allow them to squeeze a bit more performance from their machine.
     

     You know those stupid blisterpacks that all your little electronic devices come in? the ones that are a bitch to open and you always curse god when you get them home and have to break out a chainsaw to open them? I worked for one of the two thermalforming companies in california (AFIAK) and then contracted for the other one after a few years. One time i got called in to fix their CNC machine, the 'hard drive' was on the fritz and they needed a backup restored.

    What they do is have a main queue server, and each CNC machine is run by a PC that is connected to the network. Now get this crap... they were discless. Not networkboot, but discless. they booted off of compact flash. I told them that having this setup near a machine that more often than not threw out EMI was bound to screw up after a while.

    I redesigned the network and instantiated a new CF backup system for them. to this day i still have a copy of the boot software and several blisterpacks for everything from dildos to headphones and CF memory itself.

    heh.



  • on another note... is this crap really necessary if you have 2gb of ram and don't use a paging file?

    Does anyone remember the oldschool ppc601 processors? they'd let you have a ramdisk... and you could copy the OS onto the ramdisk, and then boot from that? i got a teacher's boot time from 6 minutes down to 35 seconds. I was impressed. and then they put out the g3 processors, and they had some feature that cleared ram between boots (IT PREVENTS VIRUSES LOL) and you couldn't use this nifty feature (even though you could install around 768 to 1024MB of memory in a g3 at the time).

    Apple promised to look in to it, but to this day, they still haven't implemeted booting off of a ramdisk.



  • @GeneWitch said:

    up to this day, they still haven't implemeted booting off of a ramdisk.

     
    I suppose few people would really benefit from this as a) you can suspend to ram and b) most people (well, most professional people, but only those would know how to set up a boot from ramdisk scenario anyhow) turn their computers on once in the morning (if at all turning it off), so boot time is not such a big deal anyways.



  • @GeneWitch said:

    to this day i still have a copy of the boot software and several blisterpacks for everything from dildos to

    Wait... what? Do I even want to... no, actually, no I don't think I do.


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