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They pay for something that is necessary because of competition (the competitor advertises too, creating an advertising "arms race") but that essentially is a waste of time and money; advertisement doesn't produce anything useful, it doesn't add value or information (at least by far not as much as an objective product review).

Well, you're half right here. Advertising certainly is pure waste. It seldom conveys useful information to consumers and could be replaced with something cheaper (like some sort of universal pricewatch.com). But advertising isn't a sign of competitiveness. In fact, most advertising is designed to reduce competition by (a) creating a barrier to entry and (b) creating some spurrious sense of "brand loyalty" among consumers. If advertisers' markets were truly competitive, they wouldn't be able to pay for advertising.

In a way, having a TiVo or other recording device indicates your preferences to advertisers. If large numbers of people start buying these, it will finally prove to them that we hate the 5 minutes of ads we see. Then they'll probably start buying more product placements in shows and movies (like the prominently featured Nokia phones in the Matrix or that horrible McDonalds shower in Josie & the Pussycats...Ugh!) I'd like to see a set-top box that filters out all corporate logos and product placements...not that would be useful!

Price Watch helps.

p3 733 = $117.

64 MB pc100 SDRAM = $15.

DVD drive = $40.

Total:$172

Now, lets add some accessories:

10GB IDE harddrive = $63

10/100 NIC = $5

motherboard/fan/cpu combo = $173 (subtract the price of the processor above)

Mini- Mid-tower case = $8

New total:$304 for everything but the case.

No coding required, do a fresh install of your favorite (FreeBSD) Linux distro, and you're good to go for the same price... I like my way better.

Yes, you can now buy a GHz uP for less than you paid for a 500 MHz one a few years ago, and RAM is cheaper, and so on.

That really underemphasizes the downturns we've seen in price in the last few years.
You can now buy a GHz for less than you paid for a 500 MHz last year.
I just installed 256 MB of RAM for $50, a quarter of what it cost a year ago.
We've seen an extraordinary year for prices of computer components, and as an avid reloader of PriceWatch, I don't see any slowing in the trend. I think this year of capitalism-at-its-best deserves more than a gloss-over. It's been a great year for the starving college student/computer enthusiast!

Doom 3 is designed to run on the GeForce and up, according to Carmack. Of course, it will look much better on the GeForce3, but it will run on basically any T&L card.

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is called NLX. Dell (and probably others) use them a lot (Dell uses them namely in their OptiPlex line).

NLX rocks. You'll have to get a riser card, but you'll never go back to ATX. =)

I have an NLX machine with integrated video sitting under my couch, which is about 8 feet in front of my tv. I have a video card in the machine that can use a TV for output. I put the TV in front of the couch, run all the cabling underneath the carpet, and my 'cable box' stays under the couch. Footstamp is about 14"d x 12"w 3.5"h (i'm guessing. i'm at work, the machine is at home, and it has been under the couch for a few months).

Thanks to a good internet connection, I can stream stuff and watch it on the TV, through the boxen.

A few weeks ago, there was a discussion on that douche-bag giving out free-ads for his own company...I mean, about using ethernet to hook up fibre channel drives. I have a few of those drives and the QLA2100 hooked up to the same machine (the NLX slot riser gives me 2 PCI slots in this case) and I keep all my MP3s on there, except I don't use that pussy ethernet to do it...I use HSSDC as it's intended [thanks Sandin!] (sorry, but 100Mbit is too slow for me ). Since those drives are so damn cheap though, I may get some more and figure out a way to rip DVDs onto a drive and watch them from there. =)

I use W2k Pro on it, just because I didn't want to spend much time mucking with the DVD business with nixen and the video card. I'm sure that someone could get it to work though.

Do your homework, and you will find that an 800mhz Duron with 256MB of ram, a 17in CRT (a nice optiquest which is a budget viewsonic), CD-RW, 40gig harddrive, mouse, keyboard, etc... can all be purchased for around $600. Notice how, in every way, this "budget PC" beets the cheapest iMAC in terms of performance. Fact is, Linux or BSD on dirt cheap PC hardware is the best bet for a do-it-yourself power user. Need I mention overclocking your 800mhz Duron to even greater speeds?

So you want to know where? Well, you have to build the computer yourself, and you need to do a little homework at pricewatch

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

1GHz Thunderbirds seem to be around $165, while 650MHz Thunderbirds are ~$65, so that would make SMP even more cost-effective. It's a bit difficult to compare to combos, since there aren't any combos for SMP Thunderbirds (or any motherboards at all yet). I look forward to buying an SMP Athlon system, but for now they don't exist.

1GHz Thunderbirds seem to be around $165, while 650MHz Thunderbirds are ~$65, so that would make SMP even more cost-effective. It's a bit difficult to compare to combos, since there aren't any combos for SMP Thunderbirds (or any motherboards at all yet). I look forward to buying an SMP Athlon system, but for now they don't exist.

The newer 3c589d versions (which I use around the house -- I even have spares for laptop-owning friends!) are even less expensive. $18 from a place in Texas. Again, these include dongles -- an important distinction, as you can get bare cards for about $12. (But not, apparently, from places listed with Pricewatch)

Pricewatch can be a pain with all the frames, so...

• This is the search I ran

This being said, I find the laptop solution to a firewall to be ideal. I have a P233 ThinkPad that OpenBSD 2.8 installed on flawlessly, and the two previously mentioned PC Cards work with equal ease. Should I need a LAN elsewhere (where there is no cable modem or xDSL), all I need do is swap the lower ethernet card for a modem. The system runs IPF in stateful mode, DHCP server on ep1 (internal interface) only (of course), no X, and SSH allowing internal (listen address 10.0.0.1) access only.

It makes for quite an impressive tool -- it's interesting to see all the scans that get /dev/null-ed, too. That, and all the ICMP from caida.org.

The final thing -- it's silent, or nearly so. My previous firewall box was a P-100 with fans and noisy hard drives. It wasn't welcome in the living room where the cable comes into the house. I don't even notice the laptop, and it fits just like a book in the bookcase. Convenient! Add a small hub, or a 10/100 switch, and your private LAN party has internet access!

The newer 3c589d versions (which I use around the house -- I even have spares for laptop-owning friends!) are even less expensive. $18 from a place in Texas. Again, these include dongles -- an important distinction, as you can get bare cards for about $12. (But not, apparently, from places listed with Pricewatch)

Pricewatch can be a pain with all the frames, so...

• This is the search I ran

This being said, I find the laptop solution to a firewall to be ideal. I have a P233 ThinkPad that OpenBSD 2.8 installed on flawlessly, and the two previously mentioned PC Cards work with equal ease. Should I need a LAN elsewhere (where there is no cable modem or xDSL), all I need do is swap the lower ethernet card for a modem. The system runs IPF in stateful mode, DHCP server on ep1 (internal interface) only (of course), no X, and SSH allowing internal (listen address 10.0.0.1) access only.

It makes for quite an impressive tool -- it's interesting to see all the scans that get /dev/null-ed, too. That, and all the ICMP from caida.org.

The final thing -- it's silent, or nearly so. My previous firewall box was a P-100 with fans and noisy hard drives. It wasn't welcome in the living room where the cable comes into the house. I don't even notice the laptop, and it fits just like a book in the bookcase. Convenient! Add a small hub, or a 10/100 switch, and your private LAN party has internet access!

PC1600 is the DDR version of pPC100 ram. It still runs at 100 Mhz, but with DDR signaling.
IOW, you are comparing apples and oranges.

According to this search on Pricewatch, you can get Micron (Crucial) 256MB PC2100 DIMMs for ~220 + shipping.
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nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain

PC1600 is the DDR version of pPC100 ram. It still runs at 100 Mhz, but with DDR signaling.
IOW, you are comparing apples and oranges.

According to this search on Pricewatch, you can get Micron (Crucial) 256MB PC2100 DIMMs for ~220 + shipping.
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nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain

• While the size and luminosity of the Samsung were nice, it wasn't nearly as sharp as Apple's Cinema Display. And for the Samsung's price you can buy a G4 Cube with the 24" panel!

i got two more drives from there just a few hours ago =)

brings a grand total of 27G for $51 (not including the shipping, which is where you get screwed...$12.50/drive)

ebay has 'em though:
here

pricewatch has 'em too:
here

or, one more place :
here

18.2GB Fibre Channel: $95
http://www.pricewatch.com/1/26/2129-1.htm


Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

One: memory is dirt cheap right now. seriously. a 128mb stick of pc100 is like $40 where I live. see pricewatch.com for more US prices. If you live somewhere else I don't know if this point would be relevant. So you could probably at least approach the "ok performance" range, especially if you have family that would be sympathetic for your school-related need of an upgrade.

Two: argoUML, a GPLd and reasonably decent java UML program. (argouml.org) It performs just fine on my machine (450mhz, 128 mb of pc100 ram).

Three: TCM, the toolkit for conceptual modelling. Haven't played with it much but it looks pretty nifty. Also it isn't in Java. Again it runs fine on my machine. Does stuff besides UML too, I'm new to this whole modeling/specifying bit, so some of the functionality didn't make much sense to me.

However, as has been pointed out, USB 2 is more than fast enough (at 480 MBits/second).

While Firewire does provide the speed now, it is more expensive, and AFAIK there is no way of getting hubs for Firewire.

However, as has been pointed out, USB 2 is more than fast enough (at 480 MBits/second).

While Firewire does provide the speed now, it is more expensive, and AFAIK there is no way of getting hubs for Firewire.

However, as has been pointed out, USB 2 is more than fast enough (at 480 MBits/second).

While Firewire does provide the speed now, it is more expensive, and AFAIK there is no way of getting hubs for Firewire.

Anybody know what kind of memory these will be using?

If I can eventually buy one of these boards with a $70 dollar 256 meg stick of RAM from pricewatch Then it would be pointless to do any upgrades on any of my computers. I just wish I could quit drooling over this! Look Out Intel!

The competition heats up? Yeah right. On every single one of the (many) tests Anand ran, the Duron 800 beat the Celeron 800. Every single one. On most of them, the Duron _600_ beat it!! But that's OK, right, Celerons are cheap CPUs, not fast CPUs, I hear you say?

(shuffles over to www.pricewatch.com)

No price for a Celeron 800. But a 766 costs $155. And the Durons? $71 for an 800. $47 for a 600. What a miserable piece of shit this Celeron 800 is, 100MHz FSB or no.

Oh, for shame. Why do you insist on paying full retail?

go to price watch for WPC11 starting at $120 + 8 s/h
or for 802.11b starting at $118 + 6 s/h
or for 802.11b pci starting at $160 + 6 s/h

enjoy!


TangoChaz

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Oh, for shame. Why do you insist on paying full retail?

go to price watch for WPC11 starting at $120 + 8 s/h
or for 802.11b starting at $118 + 6 s/h
or for 802.11b pci starting at $160 + 6 s/h

enjoy!


TangoChaz

--------------------

Oh, for shame. Why do you insist on paying full retail?

go to price watch for WPC11 starting at $120 + 8 s/h
or for 802.11b starting at $118 + 6 s/h
or for 802.11b pci starting at $160 + 6 s/h

enjoy!


TangoChaz

--------------------

Not necessarily, When I purchase off the internet, it is usually to get killer deals. Out of the 3 computer retail stores in my small town, the best deal on a stick of ram i could get is 128 Megs of PC100 for $179. I don't feel like paying $179

Now... after searching on www.pricewatch.com, I found a Micron 128MB PC133 Stick for only $50. After spending about $10 in shipping. $60 is a lot better deal that spending the $191 I could have spend locally.

...on Pricewatch for $259... load up now while you can.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT

I have a Voodoo3 3000 AGP/16MB in my Linux desktop machine right now. The drivers are great, all resolutions supported and great 3D support. Beyond that, I wanna say you can get a Voodoo3 3000 AGP for about $80 now.

This is a borderline silly comment. The difference between the Duron and the T-bird is more than the price difference on the Motherboards that prompted this story on /. Check the prices at Pricewatch

Durons are just the amd version of the celeron so it doesn't matter much anyway most geeks would buy the athlon anyway.

This Duron + SiS 730S platform isn't aimed at geeks, it's aimed at the goddamn-cheap market, the people who flog crappy PCs at low prices via full-page ads in the newspaper with lots of exclamation marks!! I think it has a lot of potential there - Anand says the 730S will cost $6 more in bulk than the Intel 810E, but that's no great hardship given that low-end Duron CPUs (obviously such machines use low-end CPUs) retail for $18 - $24 less than same-clocked Celerons (pricewatch).

Now of course these machines will suck, because even if the 730S is OK, and (as we all know) Durons are cool, every other component will be complete ass. Nasty 15" monitor, crappy case, cheapest drives in the world, etc. But anyway, it's more sales for AMD, helps fund their work on nice CPUs that geeks will love..

As far as security goes, other than floppy disks general lack of reliability, what's the problem with them?

That IS the problem, reliability. Consider the cost of a hard drive these days; A 30gb UDMA100 disk is $100 at Fry's (The Supermarket of Electronics) on a regular basis. Now, it's true that a 3.5" 1.44MB disk drive is $5. But a 2.1gb EIDE disk is $45 and up (according to pricewatch) and really, isn't another $40 worth it to have the basic expectation that the machine will boot on a regular basis?

EMJ Embedded will sell you a M-Systems 16MB IDE-connected flash disk for $69 (In quantity:1.) A 32MB will run you $160 though, so if you can't fit it in 16MB, you probably want a hard disk. Of course, if you can't fit it in 16MB, you *definitely* can't fit it on a floppy disk. This is an ISA card (8-bit) which will provide you with up to 5.76MB (2.88MB of flash, max, but you can fill the thing with SRAM and it has a lithium cell to power it) so maybe that's more your speed; I don't know how much it costs. There are certainly more products available than just those, though. If you could get your hands on one, and figure out how to program it, the Cisco PIX-520 firewall uses either a 2MB or 16MB (Or was it 32MB?) flash ISA card, depending on revision.

I can't believe no one has suggested pricewatch.com. Pricewatch has whole linux systems for $450 to $500. You still need a monitor, but if the machine is going to be headless, or just something you use infrequently, consider using ssh, or even VNC which comes in both Winders and Linux/Unix flavors. It's even GPL'd. You can use it to "PCAnywhere" a system (I.E. remote control it) that has no monitor, keyboard or mouse. It rocks.

Fawking Trolls!

I dunno, seems like Lynx is a pretty decent browser to me. I've only had one crash while using it, and that was when the power went out.

I must've forgotten that, or maybe I should've clarified IE as being a graphical browser. I occasionally fire up Lynx to view sites that I know aren't too f*cked-up to not display properly in Lynx (my site is standards-compliant and Lynx-friendly, FWIW), though I more often use Lynx as the retrieval part of a screen-scraper application to pull data off of websites. (I'm currently working on something that'll merge price information from Price Watch and vendor ratings from ResellerRatings so that you can find the best price for computer equipment without getting burned by the bottom-feeders who post lowball prices. I have the retrieval part figured out for both sites; now I just need to merge the two together. I could use MySQL, but that seems like overkill...)

I know you are just making fun but isn't it nice to have a better system with the money you saved? When you're not running StarOffice your computer will fly in everything else. Some better than others obviously but you get the point. You should be able to keep the upgrades you mentioned under $600.00(USD) and have a fairly nice system. Maybe you could build a Q3/UT server with your leftover Celeron 400 since you know have a sweet game. This is assuming you have a reasonably good video card (Geforce 2 MX under $100.00)

Yeah Yeah, Of course it costs less than a PC, but your PC does more. My Bike costs less than more car, but that doesn't make it better.

&gt my Tivo fits into my entertainment center
It wouldn't need to if you have a long enough coax cable and a TV out on your video card.

&gt I don't have to stop using it when my daughter wants to print out her term paper.
That's odd. I've never had to quit watching TV on my PC to print out anything. As a matter of fact, I often let my TV app stay under my text editor while I type and just listen. If it sounds like something cool is happening, I just change windows. What could be more cool than watching TV, surfing the net, and typing a report on the same screen?

&gtwith rebates it cost about $300 w/lifetime service, vs. $1000-$2000 for your computer
Ever go to Pricewatch.com? Pick up a Linux box for $300 and add a $50.00 TV tuner card.

I don't have to write any scripts/programs
IMHO, this is both a plus and a negative, but it also limits the functionality of the TiVO.

&gtremote controled
Okay, you got me there. (although I do have a wireless Keyboard).
;-p

&gt blah blah blah
Exactly my point!

The article mentions that AMD Duron isn't selling that well in North America, whereas in Europe the sales are "incredible". Why is that?

I doubt it's enough to fully explain it, but the price difference between Duron and Celeron is slightly more attractive here in the UK than the USA. Comparing prices on the UK site www.pcindex.co.uk to the USA site www.pricewatch.com, the price difference (while better for AMD in both countries) is maybe 5% bigger in the UK. That's why I bought a Duron for my new PC, I guess others think the same way.

But lets face it, if price/performance is what sold chips, Duron would kill Celeron in the USA also. I think it's just because you have more Intel ads over there. :-)

Price watch lists vendors for the P4 1.5Ghz unit here and some claim to have stock. Prices range from $1097 to $1198.

Cheapest P4 1.4 Ghz =$920US

Cheapest Thunderbird 1.2 Ghz = $488US.

Sounds like a signifigant difference to me.

Good record players can be found for cheap these days. I've got myself a Sony linear tracker for free from a friend. It had corrosion contact resistance problems at the cartridge and old belts. This was easily fixed. Record players are mechanical and can be fixed most of the time.

A CD writer was more expensive and the software is elusive for a casual user. I bought a fancy new brand name writer for speed and new software, but I imagine you can find a cheaper one on pricewatch or at your your local computer recycler. The software to run it is a typical Windows nightmare and I've been too lazy to look for Free goodies. Though you'd imagine that converting formats is trivial once you have device drivers, the greedheads want your money for any real functionality. The software I got with my CD recorder does not automaticaly devide albums into their songs, nor does it directly read and convert autio CD's to wav files. Instead it goes through a clumsy D/A then A/D conversion for CD's and records. Let me tell you what a pain it is to have to jump up and down to start and stop recording that record. WavGold takes care of some these problems, but it's beg ware and becomes so anoying that I quit using it. So there you have it, bare bones software where a full featured package should exist because some greedhead wants to make some extra bucks off a few extra chucks of code. One day, I'll have the time to record again, get or make some decent Freeware, and my last excuse to have Windows on any machine will go away. Oh, back to topic.

I have to agree with you that the record companies are under no obligation to provide new media. Software companies do this to engender goodwill. Of course, evil companies like MS break their formats on purpose and the "upgrade" gets you little more than the ability to continue using the software that you already own. After all there has been no real functionality added to any MS work since windows 3.11, and anyone can that their "upgrade price" is just a software tax that engeners no goodwill at all. But that's different from audio recordings. No one expected records to last forever so the deal was fair. Publishers are not obligated to publish things forever. They would be foolish to sit on top of things people will pay for, but oh well, such are the failings of the racket RIAA and the five big music publishers. It was nice enough of them to line their pockets promoting ordinary work to begin with. We would not be able to get together and sign if it were not for the Beatles, right? One day, the market for such things will shrink and the record companies will be forced into a low production, high cost mode. The Beatles will have to be labled as a golden classic and become very expensive. How else will they be able to make money forever off their good sense of promotion? It would be foolish to expect such stuff to pass into the public domain in any reasonable amount of time (75 years in the US), just as it would be foolish to expect the artists to actually profit from their work. Still, no one else is obligated to continue to publish things in perpetuity.

Go on and transfer to CD's yourself, before your record player really gives out. Electrolitic capacitors do die, and the result will be degraded sound quality. My CD's sound just as good as my records ever sounded. With a little work, I can take the pop and hiss out of my CD recordings later and make better coppies.

Sometimes I'd like a real tactile keyboard, the ones that click, but I don't know where to find those anymore. I actually have one in my basement, but many years ago I spilled a plastic bonding agent on the keys, and while the board still functions, the keys are all grimy.

I picked up a Focus FK-2001 a few months ago...it's nice and clicky. PC Club had a stack of 'em one day...don't know if they still do, but if not, Price Watch had a couple of vendors that were selling them for around $20. This keyboard model has been around nearly forever, and for good reason.

Who needs a PIV when you can get a PIII 1GHz for for about $460. And with the prices dropping about $20 a week, hey, its gonna be worth it to get one (or two) by the time the PIV is even officially released.

Why would anyone want one of these chips? Looking at Pricewatch, the chips are going for nearly $1k! Meanwhile, you have a great Thunderbird going for $480'ish. Currently, the low end systems for most games are still running PII 266 with a good Voodoo2! With a combo of Athlon/PIII and a good GPU from Nvidia, you will have a system that runs the latest software at the greatest of speeds. I am sure that Intel will release a great benchmark tool that will demonstrate why we need it, but my question is where is the software to really demonstrate the power of this chip?

Bryan R.

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Checking over at pricewatch, I could build the following machine for $800:

600 mhz Duron, Mini Tower Case, God knows what Motherboard (barebones system, $200) + 128 megs PC133 SDRAM ($100) + CD Rom ($50) + Floppy, NIC or modem, sound ($70) + 10 gig hard drive ($100 easily) + Old voodoo vid card ($50).

Don't think I'm missing something, and I still get $200 to buy a cheap monitor and keyboard/mouse. Heck, I could even go cheaper, since I know there are barebones systems for under $200 with sound/nic/modem/video on the motherboard (*shudder* at the thought).

Not sure about the performance of a low end iMac, but I'm assuming that this machine would be faster for most applications.

Close to the top of the page is this Q: Who "runs" UDDI? A: The UDDI project is not being "run" by any one company. Nor is it a standards body or a new company. Rather, UDDI is currently being guided by a group of industry leaders that are spearheading the early creation and design efforts. Over the next twelve to eighteen months, the UDDI specifications will be turned over to a standards organization, with the continued commitment of the cross industry team that initiated UDDI. We encourage other companies to join the UDDI project.
Kinda strange, the companies they are talking about are Micro$oft IBM and [Ariba ?]. I dont really know what this means.
I also think someone else has implemented something like this.

I bet it won't live up to their Hype.

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slashDot me :)
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The NVidia TNT2 is faster and has better Linux drivers, and it's going for $58 (32MB) on PriceWatch.

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Because it seems that, while he is good with numbers, he stinks at prices.
I cannot find a single video card at the prices he has mentioned.
The cheapest Gladiac was $170 (pricewatch), and the cheapeast Radeon was $180 (buy.com).
What gives??

-D

On PriceWatch, the GeForce 2 is selling for $169, just $10 more than the ATI Radeon DDR, and $30 more than the Radeon SDR. I don't think the Radeon DDR fits in the "value" range, and the SDR is arguable.

Last I checked, the GeForce 2 is the second fastest card on the market, right behind the GeForce 2 Ultra (which is still insanely expensive).

Oh, and the Voodoo 5 goes for $234. Go figure.

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I'd like the performance boost, but the price better come down, since I need a lot of memory.


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