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Linuxwatch Budget System of 2001
A reader writes "Linuxwatch.org has posted their Budget System of 2001 in response to LinuxHardware's 2001 System of the year. Boasting their system is 13% of the price and plenty of power for "normal users". Running at 1.4Ghz with 256MB RAM, it doesn't seem to bad for "normal users"(whatever that means)IMHO."
The "average user" is someone who surfs the web, sends the occasional e-mail, and writes letters. And that user does not significantly benefit from a ghz-class machine. Put them on an "old" 700mhz machine from a couple of years ago, and they do just fine. More and more individuals and businesses are realizing that the computers that they already own work fine for what they do. People no longer drum their fingers waiting for programs to load, files to compress, and spreadsheets to recalculate.
Sure, there are a handful of people who really do need fast machines, but, as Apple has realized, you don't need to have ghz+ machines to satisfy the average user.
Oops, I thought they meant a watch running Linux at 1.4Ghz with 256MB RAM.
Booya! I'll take one of those.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
I'm glad they highlight the budget system. As a software developer, I find most of my desktop cycles are spare. Even builds I do on a server. Budget systems can do more now than supercomputers a few years ago.
What the computer industry really needs are some breakthroughs in software development to enhance stability and usability.
for the same price you can get a turtle beach - santa Cruz. nice linux support, and it beats the tar out of the soundblaster live in specs reliability and system stability. (SBLive is NOT PCI2.1 compliant and does leak noise onto the PCI bus. link about it here
Otherwise, couple that machine with a nice 15" Flat panel display and you have a nice Lan-party Box.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's interesting to see how prices for hardware continually drops while software prices (Non-free as in beer software) maintain or increase in price. The total system cost for machine listed in the article is $399..Now, let's add Windows...$99, an office suite $150, anti-virus software, $59...We've almost immediately doubled the price of the machine by merely adding functionality. This is quite possibly why people accept paying extragavant prices for software; it's a trade-off..lower prices for hardware, higher prices for software = maintain status quo of computer system pricing.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
...if their budget system is 4 times faster than my system?
*blush in shame*
And I consider myself a geek...
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
I like really fast systems; I simulate brain areas for a living (or, well, for a PhD), and like lots of speed. The reality is, however, that even with an application like that, I spend a very small time actually running the simulator, and most of my time in an editor, writing code, writing papers, or writing grant proposals. This system, overall, would probably make me just as happy as a biggest-bang-of-all kind of product.
The only app I can think of that would require the best PC available (and that does not simply require the fastest system) is games. You want to run really serious simulations or hardware design apps? Well, get a big workstation or a PC cluster or something. You want to run smaller stuff? Run it on an ordinary PC, maybe get a cup of coffee while it churns - or get some text written while the simulator is working.
We're approaching the inflection point where it simply does not apply to get steadily faster, more potent computers. Last years machine - or that of three years ago - will do pretty much everything you throw at it. Not even MS has been able to increase system requirements at the same speed hardware has improved for the last couple of years.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I tried to post a comment at that site, but it seems their comments system is down (slashdotted?). Anyway, I'll post it here:
I miss a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, a floppy drive and a cpu cooler (you'll need a good one with that CPU: it will not burn out your pocket, but WILL burn out itself and your motherboard if you don't cool it properly).
Furthermore, keeping a cdrom drive out of the equation isn't really honest. Almost any desktop box needs one. I don't know whether a NIC is included in the "system of the year", but this is the same as for a cdrom: almost any desktop box needs one.
I guess we can double the price for this so called budget system, because working without input and output devices (silly unneeded things like a monitor/keyboard etc) is a bit difficult.
I think there system lacks any creativity. Now that you can buy all the processing power an average user needs very cheaply, why do they just make a budget system centered on performance ?
They should made a system centered on low noise or one that has good look or something other that isn't found in every system now.
What about making a small and quite system using a shuttle sv24 barebone with a passive cooled c3 ? Or a dual duron ?
And why did they just use 256 mb ? Now that ram is that cheap, they should brought at least 512 mb while that 1.4 ghz athlon isn't really needed. Or what about ECC sdram ?
Jan
I'm running 750 Mhz Slot A Athlon [classic] on a windoze box. This is a smoking machine even with the huge over head of XP. All the fluffy things don't seem to slow me down.
The difference seems to be the amount of ram. I've went from 128 to 384 and cut my boot time in half, so it seemed. When I dual-booted from this box, linux smoked and I've never seen a faster machine.
My linux box is simply a 333Mhz K6-2. Nothing seems to be slow there. I must admit that I don't run X, quake or etc... but it seems to be enough.
A budget system at 1.4Ghz seems to be a little much. But while we are on the subject, the amount of RAM seems to be low considering that RAM is so cheap.
I could be wrong, I can access the page.. or any page at Linuxwatch.
Get your Unix fortune now!
One weird thing that I saw, I was looking up the mobo and some of the stats on the motherboard say that it supports up to 1.2ghz cpu's and yet they're trying to put a 1.4ghz cpu into it?
I noticed the circular for my local Fry's advertised a desktop (w/o monitor) for $299 this morning. 900Mhz Celeron, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD. When I looked closer, it said it was linux 1.3-based (whatever the hell that means, aren't we on the 2.4x kernel now?). The ad declared that it supported "e-mail, web browsing, and word processing", and that "Windows [was] available for additional charge". So it really does appear that these sorts of machines are being sold retail.
on such a system, because that would explain why it's /.'d all to heck. ;)
No chance of a mirror, eh? How about a Google cache?
My sigs always suck.
Ah, the hidden cost of the Athlon: you need a $300 power supply. Or did you mean 300 W.. ;)
Obviously, the reason hardware prices have gone down is because the cost of building computer components goes down over time.
.. company sells enough to cover costs, and (slowly) starts dropping the price because now they only have to worry about manufacturing costs.. If they didn't drop their prices, their competition begins to steal their marketshare.
No, the reason hardware prices go down is because hardware companies have competition
Cost to design and engineer a CPU or video card costs $X
Software company releases an OS or Office Suite, and sells enough to cover programmers time. They then see they have no competition, and decide "well, we'll just keep the price the same - we have no reason to lower our prices, because we have no competition."
(The article is slashdotted, so I'm assuming by your post that they chose the SBLive for the machine).
The Linux support for the Santa Cruz is nowhere near that of the SBLive.
First, the SBLive will give you hardware mixing in Linux, so there's no need to worry about which apps use which sound daemon. The CS4630 driver doesn't do this.
Second, The sound quality of the SBLive in Linux is much better than in Windows. Chalk that up to the Linux emu10k1 driver guys who have created better DSP patches for the emu10k1 than the guys at Creative.
Finally, there's no evidence that the SBLive's non-compliance has had adverse effects in any OS other than Windows, at least not that I've seen or heard. I've heard many testimonials from people with the SBLive/686B combo who have no problems in Linux.
Your gripes would've been applicable had this been a Windows box, but it isn't.
an office suite $150
Here's an interesting little secret for Mac OS and Windows users looking for a good office suite. AppleWorks 6 is only _39 dollars_ from the Apple Store for Education. Runs on Windows, Classic Mac OS, and natively on OS X. That's what I'm running on my home and work machines. And the filters for MS Office are top notch.
Come to think of it, you could buy AppleWorks instead of MS Office for your machine now, and use the money you saved on the license to buy this _entire_ budget system. And a monitor. And a NIC. And all the other parts people mention are missing from the currently Slashdotted article.
--saint
Value not only refers to cost of the machine but the quality within.
That's why I buy Apple gear. But try explaining the concept of a price premium for value to a bunch of 1337 h@x0rs living in mom's basement, running a system cobbled together from CompUSA free-with-rebate parts, an untested bleeding edge kernel grafted onto the TurboLinux install from the CD they found in the dumpster behind Barnes and Noble's.
Yeah, I know, Flamebait. I've been at the cap too fucking long anyway.
--saint
RED HAT REALLY CHOKES BADLY AUTOPARTITIONING SMALL DISKS. It likes to keep things proportional and make sure there's lots of room in
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I really don't see what the big deal is with slashdotted servers. I've had two of my own articles posted on slashdot, and rode the wave just fine....ON A CABLE MODEM.
:)
Yes, it's true. I hosted a review / editorial site on a Cox@home cable modem for around a year and a half. Never had a problem. It maxed at 30k/sec upstream. Images might have been slow to load, but the entire page always loaded in less than 10 seconds (and rest assured, it had plenty of images, screenshots, and data to load). I think the problem lies less with the amount of visitors going to the site, but with the inefficient page designs with inefficiently placed and uncompressed images.
But then again, maybe I'm just blowing my own horn.
MIPS was a measurement created (I suspect by CMP) back in the 1960s. It was the amount of processing power that a CPU had in terms of IBM 360/50 machine instructions. (Millions of IBM Instructions per Second.) Not cycles of the machine being measured, but normalized against a 360/50's work/clock being "1".
The 360/50 was a classic CISC machine, with the kind of complex addressing modes that only a BAL programmer could love. RISC demonstrated that simple instructions generated by a compiler could often outperform microcode. But that came later: As IBM developed the 360 and 370 lines, work per clock cycle varied. MIPS was normalized.
At DEC, we faced demands for comparison between the VAX and 360 families. (Apples to squash, really, but you know how people want simple comparisons.) In raw CPU capability, an early CISC VAX-11 was not far from a 360/50 in work/cycle. But the measurement we used was the VUPS (VAX unit of processor speed). Again, it was a performance measurement, not a clock timer.