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The Arswards for 1999
Doll Part writes "Ars' year-end Arswards are up, and they look back at geek life this past year and talk about things that have really made a difference. Linus is Person of the Year (predictable), but most their other entries are technologically provocative, and they try to remember the whole year, rather than just December. There's a really interesting bit about the start of the AOL madness, too. " One of the things that I particularly enjoy about the Arsawards is that you don't have to have released in 1999 - you just need to have made your impact in that year, like in the case of...oh. That'd be telling, wouldn't it?
With a name like "The Arswards", it's a shame they didn't get Arseface himself as their mascot!
(In case you're one of those Without Culture, he's a character in Preacher, the second greatest comic book being published today.)
We've got an ancient sparc sitting near me with an optical mouse. suns have had 'em for yonks.
However, they're clunky and awkward, especially if you're used to mice with balls (thees ees a real mouse, sen~or, con cojones!) or trackballs.
MS's hardware division seems to exist on a higher plane than their software division as most of their products are pretty damn good. Of course they screwed up on the new natural keyboards.
dave "might as well face it, you're addicted to mwheelup"
One of the things that I particularly enjoy about the Arsawards is that you don't have to have released in 1999 - you just need to have made your impact in that year
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
It was hidden under the heading
Ins tall Soundblaster Live on Linux;=) google is your friend
good luck.
+&x
I borrowed a friend's, just to try it out, stuck on the USB->PS/2 adapter, plugged it into my computer, and turned it on. It worked great, and didn't require any special drivers. So my guess is, if you set it up as you would a standard MS wheelmouse, it'll work fine.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
True, but then again, no athlon can touch a quad alpha system. We're talkign bang for the buck here remember. For the buck, the bang of the Athlon is still very high. For my particular purposes, which is to build a beowulf cluster for computational chemistry calculations, I ran the 2 pieces of software we're going to use on a C300A at 450, a C366 at 550, an Athlon 500 and an Athlon 700. Using the Athlon-performance-Mhz as my unit - ie it seemed to be about 1.1 to 1.15 celeron MHz/athlon Mhz), the prices in $CDN worked out to be per Athlon Mhz:
C300 @300 $1.43
C400 @400 $1.29
C300@450 $1.06
C366@550 $1.13
C400@600 $1.14
Athlon 500 $1.50
Athlon 700 $2.11
(this was 2 months ago).
Even when I considered how muhc memory we'd save (NFS mounted disks, servers runing FreeBSD because Linux's NFS sucks, go check to see if its true), as well as other parts, because we'd need more Celerons for the same power as Athlons, it was still a factor of at least 1.5 to 1. As I said - the bang for the buck wont come down for Athlons til about mid summer I think, and only then will it EQUAL the spring of 99's price/performance .
BTW - the Cpu of the year for 99 was the Celeron 300, even if it was released in 98. Its prices were high in 98. Spring 99 saw its prices dip way below even a K6-2 400's price at the time, and the price performance was incredible.
since it worked for him, mod me as "irresistable to women"
I can't wait
P.S. Sorry for being offtopic
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
Aw, now THAT'S funny! That kinda name just gets me outta sync and makes me forget everythin else... ARSwards! Mwahah!
;-)
Oh please please, mod me as "Funny".
............ no.
I'd like to give Creative an award for releasing their drivers' source ahead of most everybody else in the hardware industry. I think they started the ball rolling. Now 3Com has to be the "biggest" company to release drivers - these will doubtless be VERY useful for encouraging corporate adoption of linux, but Creative started it.
Now, I don't like Microsoft much, but I will admit, that some of thier hardware is pretty good (I've got a M$ Natural Keyboard 1.0 I love).
Has anyone used this new Microsoft Optical Mouse? Does it really work well on any surface? Does it work under Linux?
Is it USB and PS/2? or USB only?
I have used the MS optical mouse by plugging into the USB port of my Mac G3 Laptop (Lombard) running LinuxPPC. It worked perfectly in both X and the console, and it sure was nice to have those three buttons back :)
-Outland Traveller
English: (1) Art, craft, skill , method, technique (2) an occupation, profession (and others which don't apply here)
So the best translation of Ars Technica is probably along the lines of "the technological art" (and perhaps profession)
ufdraco
and they have been for months. That was literally the first bugfix posted when Creative opened up the source. Get the curent CVS version or a recent snapshot.
As others have noted, you can indeed use either a USB or a PS/2 connection for this mouse, but it should be noted that a serial-to-PS/2 adapater WILL NOT WORK with this mouse. So, if you've got an older system (like some of mine) which has no PS/2 or USB ports, and you're used to being able to using PS/2 mice via a USB-serial adapter, you're not gonna be able to use the IntelliMouse Explorer. (If you're really in need, you could always go buy a cheap USB card.)
That said, it's still a fantastic little piece of hardware.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I nominate ArseAwards as the Award of the Year. I would also like to nominate Time Magazine as having being the best "best of the millenium" of the millenium.
However I think the ArseAwards got one thing wrong: the controversy of the year should be whether or not anybody cares what someone else thinks was the best of the year.
This is just millenium fever, it isn't news.
Now if only creative's drivers were SMP friendly...
However the opensound stuff is very nice, though
propriatary and closed.
-JB
though the printing press won the award, i wouldn't have said it had the impact it could (and did) have immediately, as much knowledge and its dissemination was still controlled by few sources (such as the catholic church) - no open sourcing until the 17th-18th centuries
i was surprised to see none of what i would consider the greatest technological inventions of our millenium got any considerable votage, namely:
the combustion engine. for obvious reasons.
the integrated circuit. for allowing the crunching down of technology into such a small space as to make computers, small electronic circuits and essentially every appliance we use today from microwaves to dishwashers to toasters and water meters, a possibility.
and last but definitely not least, and probably the top of all:
the toilet. the invention of the u-bend allowed for an amazing increase in santitation in the home, leading to greater quality of life for all concerned. look at countries that don't have a sewage disposal system comparable to the western world, and the impact it has in terms of disease and pollution. this simple device put paid to all that.
but all round, it is amazing to think how far we have come as a race in a thousand years. i think that calls for a drink! ooh! fermentation! damn, that was invented over a thousand years ago, wasn't it... *grin*
Fross
It was the Celeron. Whatever intel did to make such damn high quality C300A's was great. They used technologies from P2 production and yet left the Celeron at 1.5 times less Mhz than the P2.
This left us with only one thing to do. OVERCLOCK. They tried to lock the bus to make it hard to do, but that didnt matter. With the advent of really nice 100Mhz FSB boards out there like the BH6 which was rock solid for overclocking, things just took off.
Now that Celerons up to 533are now being produced, with Intel 'doing the OC for us' by having them at 100Mhz bus now, those halcyon days are over. The C300A was just the BEST at overclocking. No need for any special cooling devices for me, and among a dozen friends that tried it, 11 of us succeeded - the other guy went and got a replacement that worked. The power/$ because of this is something the Athlon wont even match til prices fall this summer.
Or ARE the halcyon days over? According to this slashdot note about this article, there may be more such days ahead during the early release of the intel flipchip 500 and 550e, before they start streaming into high quality high speed high price chips, and lo end ones which wont OC. GET THEM AT THE START of the cycle.
If you arent running a server, the leeway intel has given for overclocking is just too large to ignore. If you consider it, the Athlon, while a technological marvel and all for the elegant solutions it employs to be compatible with a stupid x86 design (see this ARSTechnica comparison G4 vs Athlon) just does NOT give the same bang for the buck if you check it all out. (And REALLY, the Alpha is still an amazing chip, 64 bits and all, and heavily underused - and its years old.)
So if price/performance and x86 compatibility are all that matters, the Celeron300A was the best CPU deal of the year.
Math