Slashdot Mirror
Quiet Desk (Not Desktop) PC
Anonymous Coward writes "Rusty took a wholly different approach to PC noise: he built his XP1900+ machine right into the desk! While it may not make the PC industry scramble to define a new *desk* (not desktop) form factor, Rusty's inventive techniques will surely have computer hardware enthusiasts poring over his fine work."
My God man. Bit of a problem upgrading?
Did you see that? I've had enlight cases with sides that pop right off. I've had beautiful huge Addtronics cases that have doors that open, on simple hinges, and with a motherboard panel that takes all of 30 seconds to remove.
This man's desk kicks the ass of everything I've seen.
Aside from the time it would take to cut a new vent (he can position a new motherboard to use the current hole in the desk for the vent), this is the easiest to upgrade, most accessible machine I've ever seen.
It would take less time to pop a new PCI card into it than it would to reboot it. All he has to do is pull out a drawer, pop the card in, and he's done.
This thing is beautiful.
I dunno if building a PC into a desk is all that original. I've seen a few in my time which were pretty inventive. This, on the other hand, seems quite an improvement, at least it's got Hot Java. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My dads been doing this for 30 years. To change his hard drive he pulls out a drawer and puts in a new one. He started it while working for McDonald Douglas a few years before I was born. I still remember sticking 5" floppies into the slot opening in the bottom drawer. I would kick my feet while playing this wierd cow game he had and every couple minutes would kick the lever releasing the floppy and crashing the system.
To him it makes perfect sense. He can expand more easily without opening cases and it solves some heat issues you get in tiny enclosures. Not to mention its totally silent.
Imagine a sheet of e-paper with touch sensitive layer on top of it on an engineer's desk. The engineer uses a stilus to enter schematic diagrams and navigate the UI. A virtual keyboard program can be started for text entries.
This paradigm would work for a lot of things an average user would use a computer for: web surfing, e-mail, text processing. It would probably be a tough fit for multimedia and gaming, though.
You mean like in the movie Antitrust - where the corporate day-care facility has lego-style workstations for the kids?
Fast, cheap & reliable. Pick two.
When the fuck are you going to start providing a temporary mirror for these sites?
This.
:)
Sadly, it's been discontinued, which is why you'll only find it in Google's cache.
Cool idea though.
On a lighter note, you could now have water cooling linked to a nice decorative fish tank - hell you don't even need real fish
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Dammit. Yet another cool site I'd love to see, but predictably slashdotted into the depths of hell.
Sheesh. How hard is this? Quietly prepare a mirror of the site. Post the story. When their poor little server goes screaming into the abyss, shoot them an email that says, "Hi. Sorry we depthcharged your site. Would you like us to point our link to a mirror?" They say "Hell, yes."
Problem solved. Well, OK, maybe warning them in advance would work better.
Admittedly, I am far from the sharpest crayon in the box, and yes, this adds a layer of administration and screwups, but how is that any worse than the subject of almost every single story being unavailable?
We're supposed to be a bunch of smart geeks here. Slashdotting sites into the next millenium is a technical problem. Why can't we fix this?
And no, dammit, this is not off-topic.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I'll admit i havnt read the page (slashdotted), so I'm curious, How does it disipate heat? I know it has vents, but where? I'm guessing its fanned out the back, but won't it just hit a wall in most situations?
They should start making vents on the top of computers (and the top of this desk), just to take advantage of the fact that heat rises. why waste so much energy fanning it out the back?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
About eight years ago, my uncle received a computer desk from a colleague of his. Since it still had the computer in it, he asked me to remove it. As I recall, it was a minicomputer built into a shelving unit behind the kickplate. There were three sets of shelves, the bottom shelf held two power supplies, the second shelf held the hard drives and tape drive (which had an access port from the side), and the top shelf held the motherboard. Monitor and keyboard ports were in the top of the desk on the back edge, and the puck tablet (it had a puck instead of a mouse) was built into a cutout on the underside. I assume it ran some type of Unix, it wouldn't boot anything though, the drives were shot. I think there was a floppy built into the drawer, too. He also got a bunch of Bell Labs manuals, a couple of binders full of printouts of Fortran code, and about 100' of coax cable.
I've always wanted to do basically what this intrepid guy did. Cool stuff. I've wanted to mount it underneath the tabletop of the desk and have slot feed drives. Just sliding a DVD into the top of the desk would be pretty slick. It would also be slick when I spilled coffee... Pipe-dream? sure. It would still be pretty nifty.
That's not entirely true... ... there was an ultimate gaming table posted to slashdot some weeks or months back - it's site was slashdotted too.
1 9&mode=thread&tid=127
t Year=2002&PostMonth=8
Ah, here we are:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/15/20552
"The Ultimate Gaming Table"
Check out their news archives:
http://www.agyris.net/portal/newsarchives.asp?Pos
where they discuss rising from the ashes after being slashdotted.
Using a 1 or 2u rackmount chassis, and building my pc into that and mounting it under my desk...kind of a hack, but it could work and make the PC a heck of a lot harder to steal....
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Back in the BBS days, a friend of mine I was living with run his BBS from his desk. He ran out of room in the case he had (it was a pizza box sized thing) so he bolted his hard drives inside a lockable drawer, complete with reeeeally long cables. It was a sight to behold.
Robert Anton Wilson
To turn the fan on when your machine is on, just use a relay to switch the circuit. :)
It isn't that hard - you could use the pins from the motherboard for the fans, or use floppy drive power lead, or even use the parallel port (then you could switch the fan on or off from software
Read the Coffee-howto - its a mini howto at www.tldp.org
This is an excellent idea. The main two problems I see with actual implementation are:
e sk&pg =1s k&pg =2 ... and so on ....
:-)
1. Accountability. Most sites will want to know how much traffic their mirrored site is getting. Surely the geniuses at Slashdot could provide a mechanism for the sites to get this data. Perhaps the old pixel gif trick would apply here, the mirrored site could simply deliver a 1x1 gif from a server with logging turned on:
mirroredsite.com/slash/pixel.gif?story=coold
mirroredsite.com/slash/pixel.gif?story=coolde
Just parse the results with grep, a script, load into DB, whatever. (I used to work in engineering at DoubleClick so I'm aware of all the fun you can have with pixel gifs
2. advertising. Most third party advertising is handled via a couple lines of html pulling from someone else's server anyway, so you probably just need to include this html intact or maybe provide some simple functionality to plug in random numbers for cache busting--either server-side or w/javascript.
Voila, slash serves the html w/embedded img src tags to pull pixel gifs from mirrored site, advertising from whererever. Slash can either host the bandwidth-intensive images/media themselves, or go with someone like Akamai if they aren't interested in this nightmare (I wouldn't be).
Some kinks to be worked out, admittedly, but this could work.
Very stylish desk/computer. One quick question: Do you have issues with RF interference? I'm guessing that wood doesn't block many radio waves. Can you have a radio (AM or FM) on your desk, and actually pick up any stations? The issues of being an AM radio fanatic...