throughput
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Agility 4 SSD from OCZ announced, already in stock at $150
SSD makers often try to wow us with raw MB/S, but OCZ is talking up "enterprise-level" reliability, ops per second, and throughput equally with its new SATA III 6Gbps Agility 4. The 64GB / 128GB / 256GB / 512GB drives -- with Marvell-built Indilinx Everest 2 controllers -- have middling max read/write throughput of 400 MB/s and 48,000 IOPS / 85,000 IOPS, respectively. But with Indilinx Ndurance 2.0 technology and no data compression, they claim that the NAND memory will last "well beyond" the manufacturer's specs -- without backing that up with actual figures. Prices seem steep at Amazon next to the competition, but could drop when they hit the streets in volume. So, if you're after an all-rounder instead of a sprinter, check the PR after the break.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to compare intellect and spirit in Mists of Pandaria
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. With Mists of Pandaria coming up on the horizon, many holy paladins are looking ahead to the changes that the expansion will bring. Most of the talent and ability info is still very malleable at this point, and as such, I haven't begun to worry or get excited just yet. One thing that we do know is that in Mists, intellect will finish the transformation that it started in Cataclysm. Intellect is going to become a throughput-only stat, as it will stop increasing our maximum mana. Today, intellect and longevity are nearly synonymous. Replenishment and Divine Plea are two of our largest mana sources, and they both scale off of our intellect. Most paladins are sporting intellect gems and trinkets, and intellect flasks and food fill up our bags. Holy paladins have been leaning on intellect for a long time due to its versatility, and it seemed like the decision to roll spell power into intellect would permanently ensure intellect's role as our best stat. By decoupling intellect and mana, the developers are changing everything we know about gearing a healer.
Visualized: a zettabyte
Remember the good old days when a gigabyte was considered a lot of space? Improvements in hard disk technology have allowed the humble magnetic drive to reach the dizzying heights of multiple terabytes of storage, but Cisco foresees a future that's a few orders of magnitude more impressive. Pinpointing 2015 as the commencement of what it calls the zettabyte era, the company has put together a handy infographic to show us just how much data can be fit into one: you can alternatively think of it as the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, 36 million years of HD video, or the volume of the Great Wall of China if you allow an 11oz cup of coffee to represent a gigabyte of data. So "zetta" must be Greek for one hell of a lot, but what Cisco expects is that we'll be pushing that much information around the web each year by 2015. Any bets on how many exabytes of it will be to stream videos of cats diving into cardboard boxes?
Raid Rx: Throughput, regeneration and secondary stats
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading on the Matticast. This ends up being the same question that new players keep asking that has spanned multiple expansions. The war between throughput and regeneration continues to be debated. Really, though, there isn't much to discuss because you can't really compare the two on the same scale. Throughput refers to the strength and impact your spells make. Intellect, critical strike rating, mastery and haste affect that to some degree, depending on your class. Regeneration is largely about your mana pool and the rate at which you gain mana back. Without mana, no spells can be cast. Intellect and spirit are the main stats here. They both affect different parts of your game, and I hesitate whenever I'm asked to pit the two against each other.
Our annual data consumption estimated at 9.57 zettabytes or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
The internet is a mighty big place that's only growing larger each day. That makes it a perfectly unwieldy thing to measure, but the traffic it generates has nonetheless been subjected to a rigorous estimation project by a group of UC San Diego academics. Their findings, published online this month, reveal that in 2008 some 9.57 zettabytes made their way in and out of servers across the globe. Some data bits, such as an email passing through multiple servers, might be counted more than once in their accounting, but the overall result is still considered an under-estimation because it doesn't address privately built servers, such as those Google, Microsoft and others run in their backyards. On a per-worker basis (using a 3.18 billion human workforce number), all this data consumption amounts to 12GB daily or around 3TB per year. So it seems that while we might not have yet reached the bliss of the paperless office, we're guzzling down data as if we were. Check out the report below for fuller details on the study and its methodology.
Shocker! UK regulator finds average broadband speeds are 'less than half' those advertised
You don't have to go to the lengths of compiling a statistical project to know that advertised and actual broadband speeds are two pretty disparate entities, but it does help. Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, recently took a thorough look at 11 broadband packages, which collectively account for over 90 percent of all British broadband subscriptions, and found that actual download throughput was less than half (only 45 percent) of the advertised "up to" speed. The worst offenders were resellers of BT's ADSL lines, with Orange dipping below 3Mbit on its 8Mbit lines and TalkTalk occasionally offering only 7.5Mbit to users paying for a 24Mbit connection, while Virgin's cable connectivity won out by sticking most loyally to its listed rating. What Ofcom proposes for the future is that all these service providers start offering Typical Speed Ranges that more accurately reflect the bandwidth a potential subscriber would be buying into -- a proposal that might actually have some teeth as the British Advertising Standards Authority is currently in the midst of a review specifically concerned with broadband advertising practices. Transparency in the way we're sold broadband? That'd make a welcome change!
The Light and How to Swing It: Straight talk about holy paladin healing
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how come I had to use Lay on Hands to save that tank. You've heard me talk about Cataclysm's revolutionary triage paradigm of healing, and you've read all about the new Three Heal style for heal design. Every healing class starts with three nearly-identical healing spells as a baseline. The devs then sprinkle in a few extra heals to make each class somewhat unique. Add in a variety of AoE and specialty heals, and you've got a recipe for any one of the healing classes in Cataclysm. We were subject to a lot of retooling to get our holy tree to fit into this model, but it was definitely a success. While it's fun to discuss the paradigm from a bird's-eye view, it's also not representative of actually healing encounters. WoW isn't played with a pen and paper, but with a keyboard and mouse. Every boss encounter requires different techniques, and their varying mechanics are key in determining the best course of action. How can we take what we know about the new healing paradigm and actually apply it to real encounters? What heals are holy paladins really using today?
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladins are all about throughput
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how to pull off an awesome dive heal, as pictured above. Blizzard has tried to give holy paladins so many interesting tools. We saw our first absorption effect in our level 80 ability, Sacred Shield. Its potency was limited due to the proc mechanics involved, and once it was limited to a single target, it became just another buff we kept active. The dev team tried giving us not one but two different HoTs. The first was via the old Glyph of Flash of Light, which took our weakest heal and cut its up-front healing in half in exchange for a weak HoT. It simply didn't make sense. The second HoT we received came from the interaction between Infusion of Light and Sacred Shield, which would put a HoT on our SS target when we used FoL on him. While more powerful than the last iteration, it was still far too weak to make any difference, and its limitation of a single target really made it untenable. Our ability to prevent damage via absorption effects or proactively heal damage via HoTs was basically nil, and holy paladins relied on massive throughput to solve every healing dilemma. It looks like that model hasn't changed today.
Huawei breaks DSL speed barrier with 700Mbps prototype
DSL cables might not really be the sexiest thing in networking anymore, but what they are is ubiquitous, so let's not begrudge Huawei its feat here. The Chinese telecoms facilitator has shown off a new prototype that can pump 700Mbps of data across a 400-meter expanse. This is done by bundling four twisted pairs of copper wire together and sprinkling in some fairy dust to make them communicate at 175Mbps each. The clever bit here is in how crosstalk and interference are minimized, and Huawei claims a 75 percent improvement in bandwidth as a result. An immediate opportunity for these new cables will be, ironically, with fiber rollouts, as they could serve as the last connection between fiber hubs and your home. Then again, with Google and Chattanooga already looking at 1Gbps lanes, maybe the day of the copper wire has already passed?
Spiritual Guidance: Shield spam and Divine Aegis, a theorycrafting story
In the beginning there were priests. Then Blizzard said "Let there be other classes!" Things have been a lot more complicated ever since. Fortunately, there is Spiritual Guidance, WoW.com's bi-weekly guide for priests. On Sundays you can enjoy discussion on discipline, holy, and healing in the company of Dawn Moore. We don't have cookies here, but only because we call them biscuits, and serve them with tea, sandwiches, and scones. Did you want one lump, or two? A couple of months ago I found myself talking to a non-priest about the gems I had slotted on my character. He was of the understanding that disc priests wanted nothing but crit, and thought it was strange that I had gemmed straight spellpower on all my gear. Figuring he was behind on the times, I happily explained to him that I was using the standard gem set up for shield spamming disc priests, which works around the premise that if the majority of what we do is cast shields, then we should stack as much spellpower as possible in order to make our most used spell (Power Word: Shield) absorb more. This is the standard practice advised to shield spammers throughout the priest community, and I've advised it here on Spiritual Guidance before as well. The non-priest still didn't understand though. He kept insisting "but crit ..." which inclined me to gently stroke back his hair and say "there there, poor little confused non-priest, it's all right." I allowed him his dignity though, and instead went on with my explanation. I told him that alternative stats like crit and haste didn't do much for shield spamming since Power Word: Shield can't crit, and Borrowed Time removes the necessity for haste since the talent carries us down to the 1 second GCD soft cap whenever we cast Power Word: Shield. The non-priest still didn't understand, so I explained to him that a disc priest's primary interest in crit was Divine Aegis, a talent which applies a second shield whenever one of your spells crits. "But shields don't crit," I reiterated. "The heal from the Glyph of Power Word: Shield can, but that would only add say ... 500 extra absorption from Divine Aegis. The spellpower is still better." As I typed out those last words, they boomeranged back and hit me square in the face. Startled, I peeled the sans serif off my nose and and reexamined the limp letters in my hands. Suddenly I wondered, "is that really true?"
The Light and How to Swing It: It's all intellect's fault
Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we examine the difference between throughput and longevity, and how intellect skews the scale. Paladins have an incredible amount of what I call 'support' spells: things that aren't part of your rotation but provide us with quite a bit of flexibility. All of our 'Hand of X' spells would fall into this category, along with several other unique abilities that set us apart from other healers. Our healing toolbox has also expanded significantly, with Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light completely redefining how a holy paladin heals in WotLK. My actions bars are filled with macros and various support spells that I may need on a moment's notice. Even with the sheer number of abilities that paladins have to deal with different situations, we are left with only two true healing spells to rely on. Holy Light and Flash of Light are our workhorses, with nearly all of our actual healing coming from one or the other. Holy Light provides us with an essentially infinite source of throughput (see the above graph from Valithria Dreamwalker), while Flash of Light's efficiency gives us a longevity that has other healers green with envy. Trying to reconcile the difference between these two paradigms, massive throughput vs persistent longevity, is one of the most intensely discussed topics in the holy paladin community. Read on for my thoughts on the topic.
Rogers allows iPhone tethering in Canada for no extra charge until 2010
While US iPhone users are stuck waiting for AT&T to get their act together, Rogers in Canada has stunned iPhone users by not actively trying to screw users right out of the gate as they did when announcing the data plan pricing for the iPhone last year. After a high-profile backlash, Rogers was forced to offer more reasonable data plans for iPhones, and it appears they've learned their lesson this time. As we all know by now, tethering is built in to the iPhone 3.0 firmware, and as long as you are on a data plan that gives you at least 1 GB of throughput per month, you can use iPhone tethering for no additional charge in Canada until at least the end of 2009. It's unclear what will happen next year, and it seems that Rogers isn't sure yet either. But rather than simply not allow it while they figure it out (as AT&T is doing), they chose to allow it. My guess is the execs at Rogers are doing a few things here: Looking to increase goodwill after the disastrous data plan fiasco last year Wanting to watch usage patterns to see just how popular tethering turns out to be, to help them determine price points Using the drug dealer method of marketing -- get people hooked, then jack up the price Of course, this is assuming they will revert to their evil ways; it would be nice to think that Rogers has actually turned over a new leaf and wants to provide reasonable service for a reasonable price. My guess is that most users of tethering are like me in that they want to have access to it for emergencies, but don't actually need it on a day-to-day basis. In that regard, allowing tethering as part of the not-inexpensive <1 GB data plans that Rogers provides makes reasonable sense. So, does anyone think Rogers will continue to do what makes reasonable sense next year when it comes to tethering, or will the lure of a few extra dollars be too much for them to resist?
