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Ars Technica, known for alot of good articles often referred to on slashdot and other sites, have a very active forum which includes NT, Win2K and XP Technical Mojo. From my limited knowledge it seems like the place you are looking for.

Hi.

Your mod was not original. You hollowed out an old Mac computer and put in a lame ass AMD board. Then you stuck some lights in it which is as tired as it gets. Then you write 1984 to 2004 on a piece of glass and stick it in the front.

Whoopee.

Please next time you want to "mod" something be original. Be creative.

This sure as fuck wasn't either of those.

Some links to help out with your next project

Ars Technicas Case and Cooling fetish. They have dozens of mods being done at anyone time and many more modders lurking. Link

Applefritter. Mac case mods and the like. Link

HTH HAND

The person you are arguing with is VERY correct - the first generation of the PS1 had a very, very bad laser in it. You want sources? Read up for PS1:

My favorite PS1 Lens Repair Guide

Common Problem with SCPH-1001 model

And now for PS2:

http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/003/gaming/ps2/ ps2-1.html

http://faqs.ign.com/articles/390/390535p1.html

And I could go on and on...

The PS2 Model SCPH-30001 was horrible at reading DVD-R discs. The newer models are much, much better. So, if you want to watch home movies, you have to pitch the first generation ps2 and get a new one, like a V7, V9, or V10 console. V9 and V10 being almost identical on that front, but V7 is not bad either. About that problem with model 1001 for the PS1 above - I had that problem with my generation 1 model, and it was because Sony used plastic slide rails in the laser instead of metal. Future models used aluminum. One such fix for that problem was to take apart the laser, sand it down so the rails were even again, and then apply aluminum from a pop can with crazy glue on the rails so the plastic is protected, and doesn't wear anymore. I had a lot of success using that method with fixing those old consoles.

My point is that just because your PS1 still works, that doesn't mean that there hasn't been thousands of people who's PS1 or PS2s died within the first year they had them. That's not good - but Sony makes a lot of cash this way, and so do people like me who charge to do repairs :)

According to an Ars thread the XLC compiler will be $499 for a single seat license. WAY below the cost for the AIX versions.

Linkage

That's why sites like Ars Technica exists. A *PC* site. Not a Windows site, not a Linux site, but a site for PC enthusiasts with assorted software, hardware, and other geek news. I follow that other posters advice about visiting Yahoo. :-)

No, in fact the recently released RealPlayer 10 will play iTunes purchased music.

Disclaimer: I am not anti-Linux. However, here is why I like FreeBSD..

1) PORTS. FreeBSD could win on this point alone. The ports system is AWESOME. I have never used Linux, but I hear a lot of people bitch about RPMs and "dependency hell". FreeBSD has dependencies but the ports system tracks all that. Every file, every version, every port is noted. I can just go to a directory and type "make clean install" and everything will be downloaded, built to my tastes, along with all dependencies and their dependencies and built in the proper order, then registered in the database. Daily I sync my ports tree and see what's new. If I want it, I can upgrade it (along with dependencies) safely with one command. It just doesn't get better than this. Recently, FreeBSD pass the 10,000 ports mark. There's also a nice overview of the ports system at Arstechnica.

2) Stability. FreeBSD is notoriously stable. You can pick any Netcraft report (such as here, here, here, here, or here. ) for evidence of this.

3) Consolidation. There is only one "FreeBSD". If I have 5.2 and you have 5.2, we have the same OS. There is no one "Linux". In reality, Linux is a kernel, and when you add a userland then you have a distribution. FreeBSD is kernel + userland.

4) File organization. Linux seems to lay out its file hierarchy somewhat randomly, with no consistancy of where an installed executable binary might be placed or separation of base/user. FreeBSD has polished this and adheres rigidly to a formal structure. For example, I know my base system is under /usr/bin. When I install an app, I know it'll be beneath /usr/local/bin for console apps or /usr/X11R6/bin for X apps. Base config files are in /etc, while config files for stuff installed via ports is in /usr/local/etc.

5) Community. I find the FreeBSD community to be less fanatical and instead more disciplined and polite. I feel like I'm getting help from someone wearing a suit & tie (though I doubt they really are..:) ) instead of a "LINUX RULEZ!!!" kid.

6) Documentation. FreeBSD has EXTENSIVE DOCUMENTATION, which is helped by Reason #3. There are also a number of excellent books on FreeBSD, all of which in this list I own. Sure, there are a bazillion books on Linux, but FreeBSD doesn't need so many because there's just one FreeBSD, and once you get beyond the OS, the rest is specific to the application/server and is not OS-specific.

7) Performance. FreeBSD is notorious for performing well. In fact, sometimes applications under Linux-emulation (see #8) run better than on a native Linux box. FreeBSD's TCP/IP implementation is also well-known for being very fast.

8) Linux-emulation. Most stuff for Linux is available as open-source and can be compiled natively for FreeBSD (and is probably in the ports tree), but for the few binary-only things that aren't, FreeBSD can still run them. Some of the Linux stuff I run myself include RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader (although gpdf works well too), the Flash plugin (running in a native Firebird, btw), and maybe some other things I ca

Ars Technica has one also - less technical than the Intel paper but very accessible and with pretty colored diagrams.

... I learned from this article.

arstechnica report that XP service pack 2 adds a pop-up blocker to IE

something like the visual queue google gives.

Sound queues annoy me too

something like the visual queue google gives.

Sound queues annoy me too

forgot the dialog box image link

IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE. A service is a service is a service. This distinction you keep tyring to make between "services" and "system services" DOES NOT EXIST outside of semantics. Privileges can be granted discretely. It is not unix, it doesn't require the all-or-nothing approach of a superuser.

Indeed, this little tidbit from Ars Technica's review of XP's Service Pack 2 would suggest it places more restrictions on the RPC service:

"Now, the RPC mechanism in Service Pack 2 has been overhauled. No longer does it live with complete privileges and with the default firewall behavior RPC will no longer be as great a target."

Well, just possibly because UNIX variants don't generally come with really nasty security holes enabled.

I'm sure there's at least one in the default install of most 2 - 3 year old unix releases.

Yet it seems comoon enough to infect any given windows computer before you can even download a patch after turning it on.

I didn't say it was uncommon, I just said the majority of worms don't perform automatic remote exploits.

Yes, it certaainly is more elegant as is evidenced by the ease at which viruses are stopped. Or not!

You should invest in a dictionary. It will help you with words you do not understand the meaning of.

Your simplification and unwillingness to accept the simple fact that for all the "elegance" of NT's ACLs you can't adjust key services is pretty much baffling.

That's because it's not a fact. At best, it's an observation of default system settings.

You have yet to proove anything at all, only gone on about theoretical elegeance of the system while ingoring the reality that is the world of windows exploits around you. Not very impressive so far.

I have demonstrated your main assertion - that services cannot run as arbitrary users - is false. I have also tried to explain the differences between NT and unix methodologies and how NT's capabilities are a superset of unixes - and why this makes the need to run as an arbitrary user largely redundant.

You have done little except continued to try and argue a demonstratably incorrect point, throw insults, claim atypical configurations are common and make conclusive, sweeping extrapolations based on little more than hypocritical, ignorant opinion.

Security Practicum: Essential Home Wireless Security Practices

I am pretty sure they are in fact D cells, just welded together and bundled into a single battery pack.

Nominal voltage of a NiMH cell is 1.2V, so that would be 120 cells. One battery site lists the weight of a single D cell at 163g, so 120 of the would be 19560g or 19.5kg.

Doing a quick google search, this article repeats my theory above, as does this one.

Its cheaper to use an already existing battery type, than to build one special for the car.

Interestingly the battery store listed above offers the Nimh D cells for $6.83 in quantities above 100. Thats $890.. and Honda currently lists the replacement cost of the Insight battery at $1500.

Here's a thread at Ars' OpenForum giving their predictions. whiprush's initial post is very insightful.

Maybe it is my fault for reading the article but:

The iTunes service was acknowledged as their biggest gainer.

Is clearly false. From the article:

In Apple's annual analyst conference call, Jobs admitted that iTMS was a loss leader for them. Apple's goal in getting into the music business is to sell more iPods.

Apple only offers the iTMS to sell iPods, the number 1 selling mp3 player. Apple takes a loss on the service to make up the money on the iPods. Also the iPod is Apple's venture into the consumer electronics market (different from the computer market). Apple already said they wont be doing flat screen TVs or cell phones, but other consumer electronics are on the way.

So, keep in mind, Apple is losing money with the iTMS, but making it up on the iPod. Now, if Apple is losing money on iTMS, I wonder how Walmart and Napster are fairing.

"But "perceived performance" is where Mac OS X has always suffered. As far as the user experience is concerned, if it "feels slow," it is slow. Panther has improved here as well. I am hard-pressed to find any part of the user interface that does not feel noticeably faster in Panther than it does in Jaguar. It's as if the cobwebs have been removed from the OS. There are far fewer "uncomfortable pauses" in the UI. Animations have fewer frames, and therefore complete faster. Yes, even windows resize slightly faster."

Boot speed across basically any system capable of running OS X has also been improved markedly. This is one of Steve Jobs' "things"; as far back as the original Macs, one of the "insanely great" things he insisted on was a boot speed within a certain amount of time.

This person's friend is reacting to a genuine effort by Apple to improve their users' experience.

This seems to fit most of your requirements, althought the sheer weight is a problem IMHO.

So far, Ace's is the only place I've found that actually goes over my head from time to time. I do enjoy the challenge. ;)

I have to wonder whether the parent has ever read Ars Technica? Particularly some of their CPU articles by 'Hannibal'.

Ace's (Recommended)

Ars

HardOCP

Tom's

Anandtech (Recommended)

Take all benchmark results with a grain of salt. Many things can influence the results, and some sites like Tom's have long been known to be quite biased. If you read enough sites though, you tend to get a much better overall picture of how things really are.

Anandtech is generally the best place to find information on anything you're looking for and is where all the cool kids go. They go above and beyond the call of duty in all of their reviews, and their monitor reviews are unsurpassed.

IBM's PPC compiler is XLC.

• XM now has >1M subscribers, about half of those due to trial subscriptions in XM-equipped new GM cars.
• Sirius is about 180,000 subscribers; Ford et al start making OEM gear available in the 2005 model year (not sure about the Daimler-Chrysler deployment schedule)
• about half of XM music streams now have commercials, reportedly averaging 6 minutes per hour
• Sirius music streams are still commercial-free and shows no signs of changing
• Sirius and the NFL have just announced a 7-year deal to have Sirius host the 24/7 NFL Channel and broadcast all NFL games live starting next season
• Sirius now has NFL, NBA, NHL, and is rumored to be pursuing MLB
• XM has NASCAR
• both services are still losing $$ and both have similar market caps at about $2.7B
• but the future is rosy: satellite radio itself shows the fastest take-up of *any* consumer product in history
• XMFan.com is a good forum for XM listeners
• siriusbackstage.com is a good forum for Sirius listeners

From one of my old University buddies: Ars Technica: Satellite Radio Review

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache /System/Library/Extensions.mkext

I can't imagine a single /. user (hopefully) who doesn't have 128-bit WEP

WEP (128-bit or othewise) really isn't very secure. If you're that freaked out about it, you should be using something else...
Of course, 128-bit WEP is better than nothing, but it really isn't any better than any other strength WEP.

Using today's computing horsepower, this feature (128-bit WEP) increases the time it takes to brute force crack a WEP key from a few days to approximately 20 weeks. While it seems like a good idea, there are several key areas where this security initiative falls short of the definitive security solution. On top of the management problems using static WEP keys there are two serious issues that plague 128 bit WEP. First of all, the attacks on WEP have nothing whatsoever to do with the key length itself. Whether you are using a 64 bit or 128 bit WEP you still have the exact same 24 bit IV which is the source of the weaknesses. This increases security absolutely zero for today's wireless implementations because no one bothers to brute force a WEP key when it is so easy to use one of the other attacks.

This is VERY well-done and impressive.

Based upon the final photographs, I honestly could easily mistake this for a 'real' Apple product.

This quality of this is WAY above the normal case-modding job. Not only does it add style, it adds functionality and usability by adding the handles and front USB ports.

In addition, the motherboard looks like it's UPSIDE DOWN. This could have a serious impact upon the cooling of the processor. See here for a picture of the back of the REAL cube.

A minor sidenote: How on earth did he drill the holes in the side panels? They are definitely not pre-drilled as shown by the pattern of holes around the cutouts for the power button, CD drive, and USB hub.

All in all, while I held nothing against the original design of the Cube, and I absolutely hate the design of the G5, this mod-job is very impressive, and I like it a lot. Kudos.

You are correct, but you are mainly talking about people who started using linux over the past few years. It is now easier than ever to run Linux without having a clue. I am frequently flabergasted when linux users discuss basic concepts like file permissions like they are news. See the ars linux site for further point and drool linux tips from these obviously recent windows converts.

I anticipate a time in the not to distant future when distributions like Lindows relegate the command prompt to some obsure location (for experts only) creating a whole new generation of clueless users indistinguishable from Mac users.

One click away

The lads over at arstechnica also have a review of it.

Just because the SSID is default/broadcasted doesn't mean anything special. What's special is that there's no other security enabled on your neighbor's AP's. It also appears you are connecting without any WEP or watnot on your own wifi lan, as well, if you're connecting to your neighbor's APs or you have more than one profile set up. I think you can create a preferred profile.

With MAC adress filtering and 128-bit WEP, the difficulty in hacking that wifi is somewhat prohibitive unless the hacker has unlimited time to do it, ie townhome/apartment/close neighbor, default SSID or not.

Some tips I'm sure a lot of you already know: turn down your signal to the lowest setting you need for your home. Stop broadcasting your SSID. Filter MAC addresses. Add in 128-bit WEP and change your WEP key regularly. If you really want to be a *lot* more secure, use a Cisco 350 AP + client cards (or some similar Radius/LEAP enabled hardware) and set up a Radius server.

Here's a good how-to.

WEP is fine, but if you live in an apartment building, you have unlimited time for your hacker neighbors to crack the WEP, even 128-bit. Please use MAC address filtering. Here's a
good how-to if you're interested.

And stop broadcasting your SSID! =)

No, pipelining helps push the clock frequency up. A non-pipelined processor would be faster at the same clock frequency because we would have no pipeline stalls.

That paragraph is a bit confusing... it's correct, but one of the key things that needs to be pointed out is that it simply would't be possible to have a non-pipelined processor running at anywhere close to modern speeds. I think the last x86 CPU with no pipelining at all was the 80286. Certainly you could get more than 12 MHz using modern techniques, but you wouldn't come anywhere close to even 1 GHz. I'm not even sure if you could break 100 MHz.

If anyone out there wants to know what the hell pipelining and the rest of this crap is -- go over to Ars Technica -- they have some excellent CPU design articles. HowStuffWorks may also have some stuff, but I've never looked for it.

You'll find that Ars has some very nice articles on many hardware topics including PPC970 internals, x86-64, pipelining and superscalar execution, general cpu stuff, memory tech including the bandwidth and latency.

Give it a read.

You'll find that Ars has some very nice articles on many hardware topics including PPC970 internals, x86-64, pipelining and superscalar execution, general cpu stuff, memory tech including the bandwidth and latency.

Give it a read.

I'll be modded down as flamebait or offtopic, when this is stuff that matters (...) Still stick there at 1.25GHz on your G4s apple? Tsk.

May not be that much off-topic, actually. It's blatantly obvious nowadays that clock frequency isn't closely linked to performance, especially when comparing different architectures like PPC and 386.

I don't think it would be nonsensical to run a benchmark comparing PPC, Intel x86 and AMD x86: if you read a few of the articles at Ars Technica, you will see how incredibly complex the P4 is. In these conditions, it wouldn't be surprising that Intel's chip is as different from PPC as from AMD's chips.

You didn't subtract one. And the original poster misunderstood what he was replying to anyway, so it doesn't matter. A Mersenne prime number is defined as every prime number that is also 2^n - 1 for some integer n. Obviously not every number matching that pattern is prime. In fact the incredible majority of them are not prime.

So far we have found 40 Mersenne prime numbers, the 40th being 2^(20996011)-1

Read more at ArsTechnica or try a Google search.

Ultimate Limits of Computers (Yeah, yeah, I know copy, paste, remove slashdot-inserted space, it works too, BUT...)

Moore's law is also about cost! Ars has a good article about it.

My favourite result from typing SCO into Google is this!!!

The SCO 419 Scam... Oh, how I laughed.

But I couldn't find it. Maybe I was reading Ars.

AKA as "The only real skill we have is installing hardware and clicking on the 3DMark 2003 icon"-reviewers.

The world is full of them. The only decent sites seems to be The Tech Report and Ars Technica who actually try to test the gear on something other than WindowsXP.

My apologies. I was replying, long after I had last posted in the thread. I should have paid more attention the the context than just reading your post.

Mixing up nm and mm was rampant in this story. I was beginning to think nobody had a frigging clue what they were talking about. If a guy just reads the background articles on Ars Technica, they're a veritable authority compared to the average discussion participant.

I reccomend you head on over to Ars . They've posted a review of gnome 2.4 and it's compliance to the HIG. Looks very nice, actually, especially with respect to useability for people with disabilities, and also with support for multiple languages. So it looks like the newer gnome builds are aiming for (and apparently hitting) useability compliance standards.

that was reported on a number of these. otherwise, its nice lookin'

I was thinking the wafer itself was larger, but 300mm is what Intel are using (or were using when that article was written).

There is a great article at Ars Technica by John Syracusa on this subject of the paradigm that the computer interface is based on, specifically spacial interfaces versus hierarchical interfaces:

About the Finder...

As a Linux user (and user of OS X at work) I have, like most of us here, am very comfortable with flying around in and out of the hierarchical nature of the file-systems on our computers. When giving my mother tech support over the phone, she is continually amazed that I can just list to her (while driving down the road) the series of directories that she had to go through to find her necessary document. A little after this, I read the above mentioned article which gets into why the finder in Apple's OSes =9 were so "user friendly" and got some new insight.

Like many of us, when using OS 8-9, I was always annoyed with how the icons would never line up and you very soon built up this annoyingly HUGE mess of windows whenever searching very deep for something. What I missed about this system in my attempts to over-ride it, are Syracusa's main points: - There is ALWAYS a one to one correspondence between folders and windows. I.e., you can't have the same folder open in two windows. - The contents of a folder ALWAYS look EXACTLY how you last left them, even if that causes some weird overlap or scrolling nastiness.

The result of the absolute consistency of the above two things is that when you interface with the computer, you can build a visual sequence of landmarks to your data. Something akin to driving your route to work. You may not know the names of all of the streets (directories), but still find your way because you can recognize the arrangement of streets, like taking the third one after the blue house. Syracusa gives the example of light-switches. After a couple of days in a house, you don't need to hunt for them because our minds have developed over millions of years to recognize these sorts of visual information so that we can find things in the world around us.

Contrast this with your the file browser in OS X, Konqueror, Windows, etc. When you open up a given directory you really have no idea what the contents will look like. This depends on the view options you chose in the parent directory as well as auto sorting and all of these such things. Because of this lack of visual consistency, you are forced to remember the file names of every parent of the file that you are looking for. While I do well with this and am perfectly comfortable keeping the whole darned thing in my head and navigating from the cli, MOST people aren't. This is one of those things that should be heavily researched (anyone doing a psychology PhD and need a thesis topic?) in order to move not just Linux, but computing in general forward.

...this for info about AMD64 and 64-bit computing in general.