Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Cooperation, Gravity, Petite
This is only making my biggest case look even bigger. Andrew Pakula of StealthPC writes: "A little while ago you posted about our Pentium 3 little pc, the size of a CD-ROM. ... Many of emails people sent us however were for people looking for a Pentium 4 little pc but at the time we didn't have anything to offer them with that power.
Well now we do have a Pentium 4 version, slightly taller than the Pentium 3 version it is still very, very small. You can take a look a look at it here. There are several pictures of it there as well as on the images page."
Just don't tell him your full real name. If your question didn't rise to the top of the recent Kevin Mitnick interview, here's your chance: Arvonn Tully points to this site (an activities listing for Carnegie Mellon University) writes "If you look at the bottom of the page you will see that Kevin Mitnick will be coming to Carnegie Mellon and lecturing on March 18th."
Those two are really joined at the XML! JP Schnapper-Casteras of the Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group writes about the post last week titled "KDE And Gnome Cooperate On Interface Guidelines," to clarify the extent of that cooperation: "We're going to co-locate, NOT combine the documents. This means that means there will be separate guidelines for GNOME and KDE in different chapters / sections of the same document. The current overview implies that KDE and GNOME will become stylistically similar, which is not the case. We're simply creating one site and mailing list where HIGs for all desktops can reside."
Lucy in the sky with a junker that's just begging to be dropped. Last September, we mentioned the fellows who like to abuse technology by dropping unusual things (manned automobiles, for one) from the backs of cargo planes for skydiving thrills. If that interested you, you will enjoy (and boggle at) the group's DVD documentary/video montage Good Stuff. I watched it with jaw unhinged; if this doesn't make you want to skydive, nothing will.
I dont normally give free adverts (or any for that matter), but Ive used Stealth's pointing devices/keyboards in an iron foundry (read as; incredibly harsh environment) -- they are they only thing to stand up to the abuse. Good quality stuff.
I 'll bet these little PCs are built equally well.
Tandem skydiving was fun but there's too many accidents for me to jump all the time.
Fatalities:
http://www.skyxtreme.com/safety.html
As spotted on linitx.org: 7in x 7in P4 mobo
Should be much CHEAPER to build a system than the one refered in this article...
---------- ovidius naso
It's a pretty brief blurb, but AB's Slash-like site actually has comments on the article.
Direct link
For more information, click here.
It's already been done, and done better than a stack of these little CD-sized guys. The RLX deals are pretty damn amazing. I've had occasion to see two different models in the past two years, and have been impressed each time. My favorite has to the be Transmeta-based blades, just because the consume like 9 watts when sitting idle. They're cool enough that you'd have a hard time telling they were powered on.
What makes something like an RLX chassis better than stacking in "little PCs" is that RLX has some very nice mgmt software that comes with the whole unit. Basically, you dedicate one blade to do mgmt stuff, and the rest (whether you have one chassis or ten) can all be managed by it. You can have all the blades sitting there blank, and remotely (and programmatically) boot up and then re-image any number of them with Windows or Linux, in any configuration you've set up. (The OS images are actually just tarballs of previously-installed operating systems you've set up and saved. So you can dedicate one blade to OS imaging duty, put Red Hat in whater config you want on it, upgrade the kernel or whatever and then push that tarball out to a "test blade" if you want to see how your apps runs.)
You also get more hardware with something like an RLX. The newer ones have dual fibre channel NICs, dual Gig Ethernet NICS, and a dedicated backplane network for "out of band" management, and an optional layer 2 switch for that chassis. That all means that you can make a cluster out of them really easily. And it means that you can do away with their hard drives, boot off the net and use network disk everywhere while still keeping them as "individual" servers. One more bonus: you don't have a cabling nightmare, and don't really need KVM for every server. They are also designed with heat output in mind. You can literally fill a 42U rack full of them (which is a total of like 330-something P3s) and still power it up. They're hot-swappable, too.
I don't work for RLX, I've just seen them up close a couple times (we're demoing one unit now, and will get another soon). If you are thinking of making a cheap cluster, or just want a lot of PCs in a little space withut a management headache, you might do well to look into RLX.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Wow, tiny computer. Nice. Look a n o t h e r tiny computer.
I think it was Apple who decided that OK should be on the right. The idea is that the buttons should work like the 'Next' and 'Back' buttons do in wizards - take you to the next logical step, or go back to the previous one.
When you think of them in that context, OK and Cancel really should be ordered the other way around.
Of course, it's still hard to get used to for your average Windows user (like me).
In case you care, the movie was Terminal Velocity.
- Roads are very uneven, and full of random crud which would tend to deflect the bowling ball from a straight course, and
- Roads are typically designed to be convex (high in the middle, low on the sides) so that rain drains off. Even if the ball wasn't deflected by debris, it would tend to roll to the side anyway.
Even if you don't have those problems to deal with, imagine how hard it would be to avoid rolling a gutter ball on a bowling alley 2 miles long.The reason there was nothing in the paper is that the ball is in the ditch, probably a few hundred feet from where they started it.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
Following up on a recent story (Carmack Needs Rocket Fuel), John an interesting post to the CATS board, which I'll reproduce here to save Slashdotting:
So perhaps things are moving forward after all! All you "chem majors" can now stop e-mailing him. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Doesn't mention where they rolled it. But in Anchorage, Alaska at least the vast majority of our roads all have two nice "ruts" per lane that would be deep enough to guide a bowling ball nicely for a mile or two. I've personally seen them be up to 4" deep. And while it's nice that a road is "designed" to be convex, they rarely stay that way for long in any area with heavy traffic and poor quality asphalt.
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
That movie was called "Terminal Velocity", and seemed pretty cool to me when I was 14 and in a preview audience. Of course, I was 14.
They dropped something like sixteen Cadillacs out of the plane they were using to get all of the scenes they needed for that last shot. It was pretty cool, but if I remember correctly, one or two of the cars landed on something that made it a bit of a mess to clean off of the Arizona desert. Nothing that killed anyone, but still a bit weird.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
You want a Soekris box. 486/133, 64mb ram, three 10/100s, compactflash, even a 3.3v pci slot. 10 watts and 4.9"x5.7".
There's also a Atmel-based 802.11b controller you can add as an option. Can't seem to find it on their site, but I've seen it at some European resellers.
Not too expesive either: with the wireless option and the Intel chips, it runs at around 400 EUR (plus memory and storage).