GarbageCollection
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British garbage collectors to get 1,500 BlackBerrys
First it was the rozzers, now British bin men are getting BlackBerrys as part of their job equipment pack. Biffa, a private garbage collection firm responsible for cleaning up 25 local authorities around the UK, has agreed a £1.7 million ($2.44 million) deal with Vodafone for the provision of some 1,500 BlackBerry handsets along with dongles and 3G data cards. This somewhat curious capital investment has been made in order to allow drivers to download maps, collect data from customers, liaise with head office, and even take photos where necessary. The RIM phones will also allow Biffa to track its trucks' locations -- an option that's sure to get plenty of use, considering how much Brits love to keep an eye on things.
Windows 7 gets a thorough SSD optimization guide
We all know we want an SSD, but do we truly know what to do with one when we get it? Sure, you could plug it into the familiar SATA and power cables and consider your job done, but that's not really the way of the geek. To educate us wistful, hopeful, soon-to-be SSD owners, TweakTown have put together a comprehensive guide on optimizing your solid state storage -- starting from the very first step of picking out the right drive. What lies ahead is a full breakdown of the controllers available on the market today, along with helpful reminders of the importance of Trim command and garbage collection support. After you pick out your perfect life partner, you'll be wanting to ensure it plays along nicely with Windows 7 as well, and they've got you covered on that front too. Just hit the source link and get informed. We did, even though we still can't afford to buy one of these mythical drives.
SSD shootout, round III: OCZ, Corsair and PhotoFast butt heads
Like clockwork, we've stumbled upon yet another updated SSD shootout almost a year to the day since the last one, and nearly two years since the first. Since 2008, we've seen OCZ introduce a new "garbage collection" algorithm for its Vertex Series 120GB SSD, Corsair introduce its P64 and PhotoFast make waves with its supposedly speedy G-Monster-V5. The benchmarking gurus over at HotHardware had the patience to sit 'em all down and break out the rulers, and the long and short of it is this: the Vertex Turbo and G-Monster V5 bested the Corsair, with the PhotoFast drive in particular showing remarkably strong performance in read / write tests. Of course, all of the units were quite a bit quicker than traditional HDDs, but the folks at HH maintained that SSD pricing is still way out of reach for many consumers. But hey, if you've got the means to lay down $3 per gigabyte, feel free to tap that read link and ingest.
Tweaking the garbage collector (for techheads only)
Bewarned: this post has to do with a technical, hidden process in your WoW client, something involving how your computer's memory is used and how you might be able to make it a little faster. But if you're not interested in the technical side of things, don't worry: this post is extremely skippable. The upshot is that while you can download an addon right now to possibly make your memory usage a little faster, the same functionality is coming to the regular client in 2.3. So feel free to move on to the next post if that's all you wanted to know.If you're still reading, you probably know by now that we're talking about garbage collection. Cladhaire has a well-written thread started in the UI and Macros forum that goes over exactly how garbage collection works in your computer's RAM-- after Burning Crusade, the WoW client uses a process called "incremental garbage collection," which dynamically deallocates memory as it falls out of use within the application. The problem, as I understand it, is that sometimes the memory won't actually fall out of use, which means the garbage collector won't kick off, which means garbage will sometimes sit in memory for a while waiting to be collected. For those times, there's GCTweak, an addon which you can install that will occasionally force the garbage collector to do its thing. If you have really low system memory, this might help, but only slightly.At any rate, while this is interesting (probably moreso to those of you comp sci majors out there), it's really a nonissue-- Slouken confirms that exactly this functionality is being built into the standard client in 2.3. If you're really good at this technical stuff, GCTweak might let you tweak your system enough to pump out a few extra FPS on a lower end system. But if you don't know RAM from ROM, and can't be bothered with all this technical wackiness, just wait until 2.3, and you'll get this same functionality anyway.
