If you are talking about high-end video work, you don't screw together a PC on the advice of some game players.
Steel Rackmount ATX Case: $89 400 Watt Power Supply: $60 Dual P3-processor motherboard: $120 (or less, mine was a no-name $42.) Two P3 1GHz Processors: $240 (with heatsinks and 3 year warranty) Matrox Dual-head 2D video card and Sound Blaster Audigy EX: about $400 Pioneer DVD burner (same as Apple SuperDrive): $550 Add RAM and drives to taste, load OS and editing apps of choice (keeping in mind Apple's Final Cut Pro for Macs will run you $999.00), and you're off... for considerably less than $3499 for the dual G4.
Similar processor performance (less AltiVec optimizations), and much better video and sound hardware. Of course, "high-end video" setups that I have seen usually include about $10,000.00 of specialized equipment such as Aavid... but they don't do Mac anymore, do they?
I'm sorry, but read my parent posts. I have owned many Macs, and yes they are cool and powerful, but if you want flexibility and standard hardware, you can build a PC for far cheaper than a Mac no matter WHAT your intended use is.
You just don't see many of those in store shelves, so Apple looks expensive.
I bought an original Bondi Blue iMac in the fall of 1998. (I was poor at the time, so I financed the machine through Apple Credit. I paid it off well ahead of the eight year term, though.) It was $1,299, and it was my fourth Mac... I had previously owned an LC, a PowerBook 145, and for four years, a Quadra 840av. (Easily the most stable and "personable" computer I've ever owned, even including the iMac.)
My wife eventually started using the iMac so much that I decedid to get myself a machine. I didn't want to spend another 1300 bucks, so I built a PC and had someone give me a monitor... It was a Celeron 333 running at 500MHz, and it cost me about $700 to build over several months.
By this time, my wife wanted to watch DVDs on her machine... sorry, I said, it can't do that. So I bought a set-top box, and she was happy. Then she saw her friends making mix CDs, and she wanted to do that. OK, we can buy an external USB CD-RW, but it's $300 (year 2000) and it's limited to 4x. No thanks; I put a 16X CD-RW in my PC and it worked fine for $100.
She needed a bigger hard drive (we replaced the 4 GB drive in the iMac with a 36 GB for $200), and added 256 megs of laptop RAM for $120. Thank God for standard components.
Eventually she's compaining that the processor is too slow. So OK, I put a Celeron 800 in my PC, and give it to her. (I'm a little more liquid by this time, thanks to a big promotion.) She bitched about the UI differences for exactly two days, before realizing that Win2000 had actually run Eudora and Netscape for two days without crashing. (This was a problem on the iMac.)
So, I get another PC now. (Mid 2001.) Go down, look at slot-loading iMacs with CD-RW and a decent amount of RAM, $1500. Look at G4s, drool, and see $1700 with no monitor. Go to newegg.com, and build an Athlon 1600+, 512 megs DDR RAM, NIC, SB Audigy sound, GeForce2 GTS video, case, keyboard, mouse, floppy, 40 gig hard drive, 16x CD-RW, 16x DVD-Rom drives. Approximately $700 including shipping. Run down to Walmart and buy a Radius 15" TFT monitor (which I cannt say enough good words about, especially with zero dead pixels) for $375.
For less than $1100, I now have a system that is at LEAST as powerful as a flat-panel iMac, though not as pretty. And it doesn't run OS X, which is a nice OS. But I still haven't had a single bluescreen on either of my home-built Win2k boxen. Now, for $400 more, I could have got a nice flat-panel iMac with the SuperDrive and all the sweet Apple consumer apps on it, but with this system, I can swap out the vidcard and sound card at well, and use DDR DIMMs instead of laptop SDRAM.
For what it's worth, I traded in the old iMac with $500 in cash for a bitchin' 1976 Mercury Cougar XR-7. I still have a couple of my old Macs laying around, but now that I can Q3/Wolfenstein all night on my ugly Windows box, waiting for the GeForce4 Ti 4200 to come out...
who else is now big in the world of retail computers
If the HP/Compaq deal goes through, Dell should be number 2 behind them... and I THINK that they are still phone/web order only.
Store brands, like PowerSpec by MicroCenter (and the ilk of BestBuy and CompUSA)... the ultra-cheap (but functional) eMachines crap, the super-pricey (but refined) Sony desktops, the elitist (Bang & Olufsen of the PC world) Apple equipment.
(Obligatory avoidance of "flamebait" moderation by Apple-zealots: I am an Apple owner and fan, but we're not exclusive-- I'm seeing other machines at the moment. Not sure if the relationship is heading towards commitment, but we have plenty of time, right? She does have expensive tastes...)
IBM is also still out there in some places... it was at Radio Shack between the end of Tandy PCs and the retail agreement with Compaq. IBM prefers to sell its PCs to corporations at a loss and then rob the customers blind with on-site service contracts. My company just committed to buying 30,000 desktops from them. Whee!
I say, if it's in your house, build it yourself. If it's for someone who has your phone number (like your mom, brother, uncle, etc.), have them go pick out an HP-in-a-box at WalMart for $699 (price) or an iMac at CompUSA (quality). Get the warranty and support, because man, you don't want them calling you asking you why their computer is performing an illegal operation, and you REALLY don't want to spend the time trying to get them to understand Linux either. Unless they'll pay your salary.:)
...shouldn't they at least have to ask before using slashdot content for their own means?
Legally, they don't have to do any such thing. What would be nice, however, is an oft-forgotten concept known as Professional Courtesy.
It went out of style sometime between when the entire corporate work-force was made up of white male WWII verterans who wore white shirts and black ties to work (at leats on TV); and the high-ranking executives of companies like LTV Steel in Cleveland taking 17 million dollars in bonuses three weeks before the company filed for bankruptcy, putting three thousand blue-collar steel guys in line for unemployment benefits with no pension of health coverage.
Sorry to be offtopic... yes, it would have been nice for them to ask, but now that professional courtesy is dead, I'd be more surprised if someone DID ask permisson than if they just did whatever the hell they wanted for an almight buck to make sure the CEO gets to buy the "big yacht" this summer.
(And FYI, "Flamebait" does not mean "I disagree with this person." Point down your modpoints for a minute and take the time to write a thoughtful argument. Also, I work for a corporation, and I am critical of corporations. It's not hypocracy, it's called "taking a stand for change from within.")
I did, of course, mean Count Dooku (Aka Darth Tyrannus)... but "The Count" from Sesame Street conjures up some seriously funny parody ideas!
Re:why not set up a /. poll to help collect data?
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IBM 120GXP Revisited
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've had no trouble with DeskStars myself, as long as they're kept cool and not put in a situation where thier duty cycle exceeds 40% or so. Anything above that means SCSI to me, anyway. Right tool for the job and all that, y'know?
I know what you're trying to say, I'm just not sure if it is technically sound.
Yes, the higher-end SCSI drives (with associated higher spindle speeds, up to 15,000 RPM) are designed for full-time use, but aren't the mechanisms functionally the same? Isn't it just the case of a faster motor, more heatsinking around the drive (such as the Compaq 15K drives that have a big aluminum sink built into the tray), and an interface board for U160 instead of ATA100?
I have been buying Maxtor drives for four years; my current systems include a 7200RPM 40 gig in my machine, 5400 RPM 30 gig in my wife's box, and in the server, two 40 Gigs and two 80 Gigs (all 5400 RPM ATA 100). I've not yet (kock on wood) had any issues with them, but I keep in mind teh old adage:
There are two types of hard drives, those that have failed, and those that will fail.
The bigger argument brough up on HardOCP was duty cycle specs... the IBM drives were coming out at 333 hours a month for five years mean time between failure. That works out to 20,000 duty hours. They were spec'ing out older drives (as far back as 1989) that are listed at over a million duty hours. How can IBM justify this rating in comparison with their peers? Just assume nobody ever pays attention to that, and then when the drives fail, say "we told you so?"
Fair enough, but I've been reading Harry Knowles' previews/reviews for four years, and every one that he has written has been factually correct.
From what I can tell, some of his "anonymous sources" may fabricate material, but Harry does not. Whether you agree with his rather sophomoric presentation style is irrelevant to the actual descriptions of events in the film.
When the movie comes out in 60 short days, and some of these heretofore "un-leaked" facts are revealed, we'll see.:)
Oh, and I don't need Karma, I'm at the cap.
Me too. It's just en vogue to accuse people of Karma Whoring.:)
I just got done reading the article, and you're way off base here.
Occasionally, some reveiwers on AICN seems liek they haven't really seen the movie. But this is Harry, the proprietor of the site. And after reading the entire review (which you clearly did NOT), it's highly probable that he has seen the movie.
The details of the fight scenes between Yoda and the Count. The insight into Anakin being a "mass murderer."
Trust me, he's seen the movie. And if you hadn't been in such a rush to get karma points, you might have read the article and posting something REALLY insightful.
P.S. It is RPM, not RPMs, and expecially not RPM's.
Agreed, Commander Pedant.
And with baseball season coming up, you should be starting up your compaign to get all members of the press and game announcers to remember that Runs Batted in are RBI, not RBIs (and "expecially" [sic]) not RsBI!
That sounds like an answer that a Turing machine might give.
I think you failed the test, put the human back on...
Re:Missing a bit of history (Re:Corante article)
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Google Juice
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· Score: 2
(Hopefully not veering TOO far offtopic, but stick with me on this...)
I'm a bit surprised that when people picked up on this six months later it's considered clever and original.
How apropos that you mention this now... someone just emailed me a link to the "All Your Base..." flash animation. He said it's all the rage on his Mazda RX-7 discussion board, even though WE found it "clever and original" what, about 18 months ago?
The Internet has warped this time perception for us--it's an instant-message, instant-gratification type of environment. Links explode through email and IM to the point that most of us see it within ten days. Such a concept as "six months ago" seems like an externity.
But go outside the 'net environment... there are places and people that can find novelty in things that we have taken for granted for six years; maybe even six DECADES. It's all a matter of environmental, societal and personal context.
As usual, I have no point; just something to ponder, eh?
Speak for yourself, Geek In Training. You may be a leech, but I'm not. I'm one of the apparently less than 3000 (acording to Taco) people who contribute to this site.
Well, until 5 minutes ago, my karma was 50. I've posted almost 200 comments, so I think I'm a contributor as much as anyone.
I wasn't trying to overgeneralize, but I can see how it cam eout that way. But there are a LOT of those mentioned "3000" who come off like elitist, entitlement-complex idiots. "This is our community!! Why should a few editors have so much power, and answer to no one!"
If you don't like the way the lifeguards enforce the rules, play in someone else's pool.
(Now more than ever, I believe (-1) Flamebait == I think you're wrong, but I'm too lazy or stupid to actually post and tell you why. I'll just mod you down instead.)
Seriously, was this remark written by a troll? Someone who sits at -1 and crapflood because they don't have anything better to do?
Now they're whining because in addition to having to avoid ads (or pay to not get them) while posting "The Turd Report," they're also NOT going to have any new features to belittle, defame, and destroy either?
Aww, poor trolls.:~( *Sniff*
Get real. I've been "using" (reading, learning, commenting, moderating) for four years, and if Rob's boss is mandating bigger banner ads to keep the site afloat, I'll just let my eyeballs jump over them the same way they do on other sites. If they get too annoying on some areas, I'll pay a few bucks to get rid of some for a while.
These people don't owe us anything; we aren't a "community," we a bunch of freaking bandwidth leeches who sit here and suck down knowledge and commentary all day.
We've got close to 400 PC's here and none of them have even 1/5 of that. Even the servers only have 8GB's (two 4G SCSI drives).
Thank you, Junis in Afghanistan.
We just rolled out (between 2000 and mid-2001) 4000 branch desktops with 733 MHz processors and 20GB hard drives. The corporate standard (new employee PCs) get a 1.6GHz P4 with 20 to 40 gigs of HD, and 256-512 megs of RAM.
Why do you think corporations ask for such big tax incentives and charge so much for goods and services? So that managers who make commission can keep up their income from the IBM sales rep.
CompUSA employees
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iWarez
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· Score: 5, Insightful
From teh article: Webb watched the teenager copy a couple of other applications. He left the kid to find a CompUSA employee. "I went over and told a CompUSA guy, but he looked at me like I was clueless," Webb said.
Isn't that a misprint? Should it not read: I look at him as though HE were clueless?
Sounds about right... CompUSA loser is thinking, "Yeah man, sure... the kids stealing apps off out machines with his Walkman. WHATever... don't forget your tinfoil hat on that way out!"
Just another moron who doesn't know his products or their capabilities.
(It's not just PC workers, even today's car salesmen don't know their product. I went shopping with a friend who wanted to buy a car in the same model that I own. My friend is an informed consumer; he and I had to correct the sales guy on model names, equipment on each, engine size and wheel size on three different cars.)
I don't have the figures on hand for hard drive production, but I would guess as a first approximation that 16 billion GB is not quite equal to the total number of bits of digital storage of all kinds manufactured throughout computing history up until today. (I'd guess it's too small by a factor of 3 or so.)
Given my own numbers and the rapid acceleration of drive capacties over the past 5 years, I think you're wrong.
I support servers in a Fortune 500 financial services corporation. My rough, low-ball estimates of our current hard disk storage space is 1.4PB (petabytes, of about 1.4 million gigabytes) on desktops, servers, big iron, DASD and SAN. It's probably closer to 2PB... you can't imagine the amount of drivespace a huge corporate enterpise requires. If I have 2PB of data storage in one 30,000 employee US company, that's already one eight-thousandth of the 16EB "worldwide ever" total you're working with.
Think about it, take all the private desktop PCs bought in the past three years; they're probably averaging 15-20 GB per unit in drive space. If there were 70 million PCs sold worldwide in 1999 (found via Google), and we triple that (again, probably low for the last coule of years), 210 millions PCs times 20 GB is 4.2EB, again a quarter of the 16EB you are working with.
Between corporate and private puchases, I'd bet 16EB worth of digital storage has been manufactured and sold in the past 24 months.
'Cost' includes opportunity costs, which are never on a balance sheet. They work like this:
Look buddy, I'll be straight with you. I'm an idiot. You can spout "Ivy League University Econ450 - Masters Level" at me all day if you want to, but it doesn't help our conversation. I took Econ 101, and got a B (would have got an A if it weren't for the fact that 0 out 9 TAs were native English speakers at my state Univ).
So when I say cost, to me it means "how many green American dollars did it cost the company to acquire that good or service and deliver it to me." By that definition, my comment stands.
You can argue semantics with me if you want, but I fail to see how your arguement supports or contradicts my rambling remark.
With all due respect, have you ever worked with fiber? Had to buy it, run it and install it?
The cost of wiring is still significantly higher than copper twisted-pair. While you show a possible solution, hardware with fiber connectors is still much much more costly than that $79 firewall/router/4-port 100bT switch you can buy at BestBuy.
Running fiber and installing it is also a pain in the butt. Yes you get superior technology with superior bandwidth that scales who-knows-how-far, but while every house already has copper that will run DSL (and most have cable to support cable modems), NOBODY has fiber from the CO to their desks. The CO MIGHT be willing to pay a premium to rebuild their CO data installations with fiber-only equipment, but don't count on it.
So you want to get it there? Not only is the cable more expensive; the tools are more expensive, it is far less accepting of splices than copper, you have a very restrictive bend radius... And if anybody comes along with a backhoe (underground fiber) or a big storm comes through (aerial fiber), you're screwed. Kick the cable out of the wall, buy a new patch cable. And warning, Best Buy does not stock multiple lengths of ST or SC fiber patch cables like they do RJ-45 twisted-pair.
It's the same reason we don't all have alternative-fuel vehicles yet... who's going to replace all the gas stations, or augment them with alternative refueling stops? And why pay $25,000 for an economy car when you can get a big dead-dinosaur-exploiting Frod Exploder for the same price?
If you can get Gigabit Ethernet LANs and 10 Megabit WANS with Copper today, what's the incentive for fiber? Nobody's going to do it until we're doing MPEG-4 video-on-demand to the set-top box.
This fictitious argument that a "dozen competitors in the same small geographical area" will all "sell at a loss and die" may be the case.
Which reminds me of the quote I read on a Slashdot book review about the dot-bombs recently:
"In perfect competition, all products are sold at cost, and there is no profit."
Hmmm, I wonder if we're on to something here. Sell the service at too high a cost, nobody will buy it (Bell). Sell it too low, and you'll get plenty of customers, but go bankrupt because you're not profiting (Covad).
So to be successful, you either have to have 1)collusion to price-fix amongst all competitors, setting minimum pricing just above break-even, or 2)start selling at a loss, then find a way to profit either by raising prices and keeping customers through brand-reputation and good service, or by selling "auxilliary services/merchandise" that are more profitable.
Aside: It looks like Amazon.com did both (raised prices somewhat, stopped handing out $20 gift certificates with every $10 purchase, partnered with third parties), and finally turned that brand-recognition into a profit, as promised. Amazing.
I don't really have a point I guess... just rambling as usual. "But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." (Dennis Miller)
All I know is that my boss was an Arabic interpreter based in the Middle East in the early 1970's, and after getting out, he spent nine months traveling the region on foot. (He has pictures of himself, beaded vest and all, standing beside the now-destroyed Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 1973.)
He said he was able to travel the whole of the region between Turkey and Afghanistan based on his classroom Arabic skills and experience deciphering messages picked up over communications frequencies (that was his job).
Sounds like they need more experienced technology talent working for them... hopefully someone who speaks Arabic.
JonKatz, why not talk to your friend Junis in Afghanistan? I'll bet that the Iranian National Television broadcasters could really use him and his 'leet C64 skills in setting up receivers and monitoring stations around the middle east.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are talking about high-end video work, you don't screw together a PC on the advice of some game players.
Steel Rackmount ATX Case: $89
400 Watt Power Supply: $60
Dual P3-processor motherboard: $120 (or less, mine was a no-name $42.)
Two P3 1GHz Processors: $240 (with heatsinks and 3 year warranty)
Matrox Dual-head 2D video card and Sound Blaster Audigy EX: about $400
Pioneer DVD burner (same as Apple SuperDrive): $550
Add RAM and drives to taste, load OS and editing apps of choice (keeping in mind Apple's Final Cut Pro for Macs will run you $999.00), and you're off... for considerably less than $3499 for the dual G4.
Similar processor performance (less AltiVec optimizations), and much better video and sound hardware. Of course, "high-end video" setups that I have seen usually include about $10,000.00 of specialized equipment such as Aavid... but they don't do Mac anymore, do they?
I'm sorry, but read my parent posts. I have owned many Macs, and yes they are cool and powerful, but if you want flexibility and standard hardware, you can build a PC for far cheaper than a Mac no matter WHAT your intended use is.
You just don't see many of those in store shelves, so Apple looks expensive.
I bought an original Bondi Blue iMac in the fall of 1998. (I was poor at the time, so I financed the machine through Apple Credit. I paid it off well ahead of the eight year term, though.) It was $1,299, and it was my fourth Mac... I had previously owned an LC, a PowerBook 145, and for four years, a Quadra 840av. (Easily the most stable and "personable" computer I've ever owned, even including the iMac.)
My wife eventually started using the iMac so much that I decedid to get myself a machine. I didn't want to spend another 1300 bucks, so I built a PC and had someone give me a monitor... It was a Celeron 333 running at 500MHz, and it cost me about $700 to build over several months.
By this time, my wife wanted to watch DVDs on her machine... sorry, I said, it can't do that. So I bought a set-top box, and she was happy. Then she saw her friends making mix CDs, and she wanted to do that. OK, we can buy an external USB CD-RW, but it's $300 (year 2000) and it's limited to 4x. No thanks; I put a 16X CD-RW in my PC and it worked fine for $100.
She needed a bigger hard drive (we replaced the 4 GB drive in the iMac with a 36 GB for $200), and added 256 megs of laptop RAM for $120. Thank God for standard components.
Eventually she's compaining that the processor is too slow. So OK, I put a Celeron 800 in my PC, and give it to her. (I'm a little more liquid by this time, thanks to a big promotion.) She bitched about the UI differences for exactly two days, before realizing that Win2000 had actually run Eudora and Netscape for two days without crashing. (This was a problem on the iMac.)
So, I get another PC now. (Mid 2001.) Go down, look at slot-loading iMacs with CD-RW and a decent amount of RAM, $1500. Look at G4s, drool, and see $1700 with no monitor. Go to newegg.com, and build an Athlon 1600+, 512 megs DDR RAM, NIC, SB Audigy sound, GeForce2 GTS video, case, keyboard, mouse, floppy, 40 gig hard drive, 16x CD-RW, 16x DVD-Rom drives. Approximately $700 including shipping. Run down to Walmart and buy a Radius 15" TFT monitor (which I cannt say enough good words about, especially with zero dead pixels) for $375.
For less than $1100, I now have a system that is at LEAST as powerful as a flat-panel iMac, though not as pretty. And it doesn't run OS X, which is a nice OS. But I still haven't had a single bluescreen on either of my home-built Win2k boxen. Now, for $400 more, I could have got a nice flat-panel iMac with the SuperDrive and all the sweet Apple consumer apps on it, but with this system, I can swap out the vidcard and sound card at well, and use DDR DIMMs instead of laptop SDRAM.
For what it's worth, I traded in the old iMac with $500 in cash for a bitchin' 1976 Mercury Cougar XR-7. I still have a couple of my old Macs laying around, but now that I can Q3/Wolfenstein all night on my ugly Windows box, waiting for the GeForce4 Ti 4200 to come out...
who else is now big in the world of retail computers
:)
If the HP/Compaq deal goes through, Dell should be number 2 behind them... and I THINK that they are still phone/web order only.
Store brands, like PowerSpec by MicroCenter (and the ilk of BestBuy and CompUSA)... the ultra-cheap (but functional) eMachines crap, the super-pricey (but refined) Sony desktops, the elitist (Bang & Olufsen of the PC world) Apple equipment.
(Obligatory avoidance of "flamebait" moderation by Apple-zealots: I am an Apple owner and fan, but we're not exclusive-- I'm seeing other machines at the moment. Not sure if the relationship is heading towards commitment, but we have plenty of time, right? She does have expensive tastes...)
IBM is also still out there in some places... it was at Radio Shack between the end of Tandy PCs and the retail agreement with Compaq. IBM prefers to sell its PCs to corporations at a loss and then rob the customers blind with on-site service contracts. My company just committed to buying 30,000 desktops from them. Whee!
I say, if it's in your house, build it yourself. If it's for someone who has your phone number (like your mom, brother, uncle, etc.), have them go pick out an HP-in-a-box at WalMart for $699 (price) or an iMac at CompUSA (quality). Get the warranty and support, because man, you don't want them calling you asking you why their computer is performing an illegal operation, and you REALLY don't want to spend the time trying to get them to understand Linux either. Unless they'll pay your salary.
Can you imagine the court reporter, trying to type out the 'leet-speak?
"1 0wn j00, y0 h0noR!!! m3 w1ll h4x0r joo and l3gAl 5y5t3mz!!!"
...shouldn't they at least have to ask before using slashdot content for their own means?
Legally, they don't have to do any such thing. What would be nice, however, is an oft-forgotten concept known as Professional Courtesy.
It went out of style sometime between when the entire corporate work-force was made up of white male WWII verterans who wore white shirts and black ties to work (at leats on TV); and the high-ranking executives of companies like LTV Steel in Cleveland taking 17 million dollars in bonuses three weeks before the company filed for bankruptcy, putting three thousand blue-collar steel guys in line for unemployment benefits with no pension of health coverage.
Sorry to be offtopic... yes, it would have been nice for them to ask, but now that professional courtesy is dead, I'd be more surprised if someone DID ask permisson than if they just did whatever the hell they wanted for an almight buck to make sure the CEO gets to buy the "big yacht" this summer.
(And FYI, "Flamebait" does not mean "I disagree with this person." Point down your modpoints for a minute and take the time to write a thoughtful argument. Also, I work for a corporation, and I am critical of corporations. It's not hypocracy, it's called "taking a stand for change from within.")
OK, now *THAT* was funny. :)
I did, of course, mean Count Dooku (Aka Darth Tyrannus)... but "The Count" from Sesame Street conjures up some seriously funny parody ideas!
I've had no trouble with DeskStars myself, as long as they're kept cool and not put in a situation where thier duty cycle exceeds 40% or so. Anything above that means SCSI to me, anyway. Right tool for the job and all that, y'know?
I know what you're trying to say, I'm just not sure if it is technically sound.
Yes, the higher-end SCSI drives (with associated higher spindle speeds, up to 15,000 RPM) are designed for full-time use, but aren't the mechanisms functionally the same? Isn't it just the case of a faster motor, more heatsinking around the drive (such as the Compaq 15K drives that have a big aluminum sink built into the tray), and an interface board for U160 instead of ATA100?
I have been buying Maxtor drives for four years; my current systems include a 7200RPM 40 gig in my machine, 5400 RPM 30 gig in my wife's box, and in the server, two 40 Gigs and two 80 Gigs (all 5400 RPM ATA 100). I've not yet (kock on wood) had any issues with them, but I keep in mind teh old adage:
There are two types of hard drives, those that have failed, and those that will fail.
The bigger argument brough up on HardOCP was duty cycle specs... the IBM drives were coming out at 333 hours a month for five years mean time between failure. That works out to 20,000 duty hours. They were spec'ing out older drives (as far back as 1989) that are listed at over a million duty hours. How can IBM justify this rating in comparison with their peers? Just assume nobody ever pays attention to that, and then when the drives fail, say "we told you so?"
See how easy it is to fake a review?
:)
:)
Fair enough, but I've been reading Harry Knowles' previews/reviews for four years, and every one that he has written has been factually correct.
From what I can tell, some of his "anonymous sources" may fabricate material, but Harry does not. Whether you agree with his rather sophomoric presentation style is irrelevant to the actual descriptions of events in the film.
When the movie comes out in 60 short days, and some of these heretofore "un-leaked" facts are revealed, we'll see.
Oh, and I don't need Karma, I'm at the cap.
Me too. It's just en vogue to accuse people of Karma Whoring.
Wait, you mean he has no proof?
I just got done reading the article, and you're way off base here.
Occasionally, some reveiwers on AICN seems liek they haven't really seen the movie. But this is Harry, the proprietor of the site. And after reading the entire review (which you clearly did NOT), it's highly probable that he has seen the movie.
The details of the fight scenes between Yoda and the Count. The insight into Anakin being a "mass murderer."
Trust me, he's seen the movie. And if you hadn't been in such a rush to get karma points, you might have read the article and posting something REALLY insightful.
P.S. It is RPM, not RPMs, and expecially not RPM's.
Agreed, Commander Pedant.
And with baseball season coming up, you should be starting up your compaign to get all members of the press and game announcers to remember that Runs Batted in are RBI, not RBIs (and "expecially" [sic]) not RsBI!
Turing machine != Turing test
Sorry about that (mea culpa!)...
So what *IS* a Turing machine?
That sounds like an answer that a Turing machine might give.
I think you failed the test, put the human back on...
(Hopefully not veering TOO far offtopic, but stick with me on this...)
I'm a bit surprised that when people picked up on this six months later it's considered clever and original.
How apropos that you mention this now... someone just emailed me a link to the "All Your Base..." flash animation. He said it's all the rage on his Mazda RX-7 discussion board, even though WE found it "clever and original" what, about 18 months ago?
The Internet has warped this time perception for us--it's an instant-message, instant-gratification type of environment. Links explode through email and IM to the point that most of us see it within ten days. Such a concept as "six months ago" seems like an externity.
But go outside the 'net environment... there are places and people that can find novelty in things that we have taken for granted for six years; maybe even six DECADES. It's all a matter of environmental, societal and personal context.
As usual, I have no point; just something to ponder, eh?
Speak for yourself, Geek In Training. You may be a leech, but I'm not. I'm one of the apparently less than 3000 (acording to Taco) people who contribute to this site.
Well, until 5 minutes ago, my karma was 50. I've posted almost 200 comments, so I think I'm a contributor as much as anyone.
I wasn't trying to overgeneralize, but I can see how it cam eout that way. But there are a LOT of those mentioned "3000" who come off like elitist, entitlement-complex idiots. "This is our community!! Why should a few editors have so much power, and answer to no one!"
If you don't like the way the lifeguards enforce the rules, play in someone else's pool.
(Now more than ever, I believe (-1) Flamebait == I think you're wrong, but I'm too lazy or stupid to actually post and tell you why. I'll just mod you down instead.)
"When in danger,
or in doubt...
Run in circles!
Scream and shout!"
(Wasn't that Heinlein?)
Anyways, this is complete FUD. You cannot pick out binary packet data from transmit/receive status lights.
Put the tinfoil hats back on and crawl back under the table... er, sorry, your "Fortress of Solitude."
Seriously, was this remark written by a troll? Someone who sits at -1 and crapflood because they don't have anything better to do?
:~( *Sniff*
Now they're whining because in addition to having to avoid ads (or pay to not get them) while posting "The Turd Report," they're also NOT going to have any new features to belittle, defame, and destroy either?
Aww, poor trolls.
Get real. I've been "using" (reading, learning, commenting, moderating) for four years, and if Rob's boss is mandating bigger banner ads to keep the site afloat, I'll just let my eyeballs jump over them the same way they do on other sites. If they get too annoying on some areas, I'll pay a few bucks to get rid of some for a while.
These people don't owe us anything; we aren't a "community," we a bunch of freaking bandwidth leeches who sit here and suck down knowledge and commentary all day.
Cope!!
We've got close to 400 PC's here and none of them have even 1/5 of that. Even the servers only have 8GB's (two 4G SCSI drives).
Thank you, Junis in Afghanistan.
We just rolled out (between 2000 and mid-2001) 4000 branch desktops with 733 MHz processors and 20GB hard drives. The corporate standard (new employee PCs) get a 1.6GHz P4 with 20 to 40 gigs of HD, and 256-512 megs of RAM.
Why do you think corporations ask for such big tax incentives and charge so much for goods and services? So that managers who make commission can keep up their income from the IBM sales rep.
From teh article: Webb watched the teenager copy a couple of other applications. He left the kid to find a CompUSA employee. "I went over and told a CompUSA guy, but he looked at me like I was clueless," Webb said.
Isn't that a misprint? Should it not read: I look at him as though HE were clueless?
Sounds about right... CompUSA loser is thinking, "Yeah man, sure... the kids stealing apps off out machines with his Walkman. WHATever... don't forget your tinfoil hat on that way out!"
Just another moron who doesn't know his products or their capabilities.
(It's not just PC workers, even today's car salesmen don't know their product. I went shopping with a friend who wanted to buy a car in the same model that I own. My friend is an informed consumer; he and I had to correct the sales guy on model names, equipment on each, engine size and wheel size on three different cars.)
I don't have the figures on hand for hard drive production, but I would guess as a first approximation that 16 billion GB is not quite equal to the total number of bits of digital storage of all kinds manufactured throughout computing history up until today. (I'd guess it's too small by a factor of 3 or so.)
Given my own numbers and the rapid acceleration of drive capacties over the past 5 years, I think you're wrong.
I support servers in a Fortune 500 financial services corporation. My rough, low-ball estimates of our current hard disk storage space is 1.4PB (petabytes, of about 1.4 million gigabytes) on desktops, servers, big iron, DASD and SAN. It's probably closer to 2PB... you can't imagine the amount of drivespace a huge corporate enterpise requires. If I have 2PB of data storage in one 30,000 employee US company, that's already one eight-thousandth of the 16EB "worldwide ever" total you're working with.
Think about it, take all the private desktop PCs bought in the past three years; they're probably averaging 15-20 GB per unit in drive space. If there were 70 million PCs sold worldwide in 1999 (found via Google), and we triple that (again, probably low for the last coule of years), 210 millions PCs times 20 GB is 4.2EB, again a quarter of the 16EB you are working with.
Between corporate and private puchases, I'd bet 16EB worth of digital storage has been manufactured and sold in the past 24 months.
'Cost' includes opportunity costs, which are never on a balance sheet. They work like this:
Look buddy, I'll be straight with you. I'm an idiot. You can spout "Ivy League University Econ450 - Masters Level" at me all day if you want to, but it doesn't help our conversation. I took Econ 101, and got a B (would have got an A if it weren't for the fact that 0 out 9 TAs were native English speakers at my state Univ).
So when I say cost, to me it means "how many green American dollars did it cost the company to acquire that good or service and deliver it to me." By that definition, my comment stands.
You can argue semantics with me if you want, but I fail to see how your arguement supports or contradicts my rambling remark.
It's time to build new fiber-to-the-home nets...
With all due respect, have you ever worked with fiber? Had to buy it, run it and install it?
The cost of wiring is still significantly higher than copper twisted-pair. While you show a possible solution, hardware with fiber connectors is still much much more costly than that $79 firewall/router/4-port 100bT switch you can buy at BestBuy.
Running fiber and installing it is also a pain in the butt. Yes you get superior technology with superior bandwidth that scales who-knows-how-far, but while every house already has copper that will run DSL (and most have cable to support cable modems), NOBODY has fiber from the CO to their desks. The CO MIGHT be willing to pay a premium to rebuild their CO data installations with fiber-only equipment, but don't count on it.
So you want to get it there? Not only is the cable more expensive; the tools are more expensive, it is far less accepting of splices than copper, you have a very restrictive bend radius... And if anybody comes along with a backhoe (underground fiber) or a big storm comes through (aerial fiber), you're screwed. Kick the cable out of the wall, buy a new patch cable. And warning, Best Buy does not stock multiple lengths of ST or SC fiber patch cables like they do RJ-45 twisted-pair.
It's the same reason we don't all have alternative-fuel vehicles yet... who's going to replace all the gas stations, or augment them with alternative refueling stops? And why pay $25,000 for an economy car when you can get a big dead-dinosaur-exploiting Frod Exploder for the same price?
If you can get Gigabit Ethernet LANs and 10 Megabit WANS with Copper today, what's the incentive for fiber? Nobody's going to do it until we're doing MPEG-4 video-on-demand to the set-top box.
This fictitious argument that a "dozen competitors in the same small geographical area" will all "sell at a loss and die" may be the case.
Which reminds me of the quote I read on a Slashdot book review about the dot-bombs recently:
"In perfect competition, all products are sold at cost, and there is no profit."
Hmmm, I wonder if we're on to something here. Sell the service at too high a cost, nobody will buy it (Bell). Sell it too low, and you'll get plenty of customers, but go bankrupt because you're not profiting (Covad).
So to be successful, you either have to have 1)collusion to price-fix amongst all competitors, setting minimum pricing just above break-even, or 2)start selling at a loss, then find a way to profit either by raising prices and keeping customers through brand-reputation and good service, or by selling "auxilliary services/merchandise" that are more profitable.
Aside: It looks like Amazon.com did both (raised prices somewhat, stopped handing out $20 gift certificates with every $10 purchase, partnered with third parties), and finally turned that brand-recognition into a profit, as promised. Amazing.
I don't really have a point I guess... just rambling as usual. "But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." (Dennis Miller)
All I know is that my boss was an Arabic interpreter based in the Middle East in the early 1970's, and after getting out, he spent nine months traveling the region on foot. (He has pictures of himself, beaded vest and all, standing beside the now-destroyed Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 1973.)
He said he was able to travel the whole of the region between Turkey and Afghanistan based on his classroom Arabic skills and experience deciphering messages picked up over communications frequencies (that was his job).
I was under the impression that they spoke dialects of Arabic. Sorry for the confusion. It was 7am on Monday. :)
Sounds like they need more experienced technology talent working for them... hopefully someone who speaks Arabic.
JonKatz, why not talk to your friend Junis in Afghanistan? I'll bet that the Iranian National Television broadcasters could really use him and his 'leet C64 skills in setting up receivers and monitoring stations around the middle east.