OK. So to make 'less expensive' larger-footprint storage drives we have to fab custom platters (the standard size platters are _pennies_ apiece), and to make performance acceptable we have to put two expensive head assemblies in, and custom-produce a DSP to handle the new 'two heads' internal geometry. Also, you need a stronger motor to spin up these big platters.
I think it would end up costing more than a standard form-factor drive.
This is why almost everything is mass-produced these days, it's just CHEAPER to go with the flow.
I recall the gist of what you're talking about. Something about the OSX microkernel still being somewhat optimized for x86, all it would take is a 'flip of the switch' to boost OSX performance quite a bit.
That's why I'm so happy with Gentoo. After two years wasted trying to learn how to work services on Linux and being frustrated by GUI config tools mucking up my beautiful config files I found a distro that lets me do what I need to do without having to scratch my head and reconfigure stuff all the time. The gentoo install process teaches you (almost) enough to start using a text editor alone as a config tool, and it doesn't ship with any tools to screw up your work. It even puts new config files aside and informs you of their presence so you have time to digest them before restarting the services they control.
I agree about the future of computing, but I think every neighborhood / office/building/small business will want someone who knows the technology inside-and-out to implement it on a large scale.
Sure, compiling the kernel isn't something Joe User wants to do, but if Joe User want to sit down and work, someone in the company's job is to make sure his PC is getting decent performance. The boss isn't going to want to buy new servers and PCs when there's plenty of life to squeeze out of what's already there, those days are (almost) over.
I don't want everyone to start adminning gentoo boxes, I'll admin boxes for them for some loot. That's my niche. The users will be running Gentoo, but they'll never have to look at GCC output or think about syncing the portage tree.
Also, your idea that Operating Systems are going to get simpler is just not feasable. They'll get easier to USE but the tradeoff is that under-the-hood they'll be that much more complex. All technology is like that, a modern car is a very complex machine; sure, automatic transmission is easy to use, but it's a LOT more complex to design, fix, or diagnose than the old manual trannies. Windows XP is (arguably) easier to USE than w98, but it's really an order of magnitude more complex beneath the presentation.
A lot of work out there is NOT owned by MegaCorps, but it can't be easily used unless you track down the artist's manager's wive's new husband who holds the current copyright as part of some stupid inheritance tree. This would put an end to that.
I find the same thing happening to myself. I started with Gentoo on the G3 as a server, then I decided to ditch W2K on my workstation (for gentoo) and just run win98se on a Via EPIA when I needed MS Office (for work). Now I've got gentoo running on server, workstation, my laptop, the EPIA (got citrix ICA to do windoze stuff directly on the server at work). Next week I'm installing Gentoo on the girlfriend's machine (she's running Mandrake 9.0 now, and it's starting to turn into a twisted mess of RPM hell).
I actually get silently offended when I tell people I use Linux and they ask "Redhat or Mandrake?" I've got friends calling me asking to set them up with gentoo boxen almost every weekend now.
Actually, I have a running dos6.22/win3.11 combo on my PIII 'just for fun' it is pretty snappy. I can't seem to get it to run SAMBA, NFSD, routed, or mount anything bigger than a 2GB partition. Maybe I should call M$ tech support.
Really, I think that's true for most people on Slashdot in general. I myself always WANTED a 'cleaner' source-based distro without the hangups of Debian, and Gentoo provides it. It's very possible to achieve a stable and fast system with Gentoo, you just have to be moderate with your make.conf settings.
I think the BEST thing about gentoo is the installation process. I finally learned how daemons get started, how to set up networking and NFS. All these things were either hidden from me behind GUI utilities or prevented from working properly by services that I didn't know about on more 'turnkey' distros.
Mandrake is cool because a newbie can get it to work. Gentoo is cool because a newbie can become a knowledgeable user after a few installs.
Thanks to Gentoo I finally understand HOW all this *NIX stuff works under the hood and I am MUCH more competent on any *NIX box. I no longer cower in fear of the bash prompt, instead I command my boxen like a pro.
Also, I never liked the 'full-featured' desktops for linux that ship with RedHat or Mandrake. GNOME and KDE always felt slow and unfocused to me. With Gentoo it was amazingly simple to build a system with WindowMaker and the apps I needed without having the overhead of KDE/GNOME running behind it. When I boot up gentoo my RAM usage is 14MB, my 'barebones' mandrake box uses 72MB to get to "login:"
I've been running Gentoo-1.4 release candidates on my G3 server for almost a year now, I can tell you, Gentoo and PPC are an awesome combination.
The PowerPC architecture is amazingly snappy and responsive, even though my box only has a 450MHz CPU. I get the feeling that the PPC arch is a lot less 'laggy' than the x86, just a vague feeling, but it's quite nice. Compiling my whole distro with "-mcpu=750" and a few other options has made my old box into quite a workhorse. Anyone else want to share PPC/Linux experiences?
Are you KIDDING? KDE is absolutely godawful in terms of performance, opening Konqueror takes over five seconds on my 1.4GHz Athlon! BeOS file manager opened in under one second on my 500 MHz K6-2. Also, be didn't have for hunderd-bazillion options in every menu, it was CLEAN. I swear, if I had the know-how to rip out the unneeded menu options in KDE I would. A real feat would be to have KDE 'learn' what sets of features you want to use and remove the others.
I know that every option was added because SOMEBODY needed it and had the know-how to put it there, but really, KDE is total overkill.
When I drag a file from one window to another, I don't want it to pop up a menu EVERY TIME, just friggin' MOVE the file, or COPY it if it's on a different physical drive, when I select multiple items and click one to move them, why on earth does KDE de-select all but the one I clicked on? KDE can do it all, but it seems to do everything in the most obfuscated non-intuitive way possible. Linux Human Interface coders should talk to some old-school MacOS users, the MacOS has hands-down the most sensical handling of file management and drag-and-drop on the market, amd has since the debut of Mac System 7.
I don't have much experience with GNOME, as I never really liked what I saw and switched to WindowMaker and Krusader.
You obviously haven't played with BeOS enough, or you don't have an appreciation for simplicity and 'less is more' computing. I think BeOS is what the Mac would have evolved into if apple decided to ditch their Classic environment five years earlier.
Remember the BigFoot series of hard drive? They were 5.25" drives by Quantum (now Maxtor) for desktop use. The problem is that when you make the disc wider, you have to slow down the rotation to keep the platters from breaking or 'stretching'. You'd have to run the things at 5400 RPM _AND_ a 'front to back' head seek would take forever. These would be GREAT as backup-only drives, but companies that buy backupd drives now are willing to pay $BIG_MONEY for backup drives (the bank I work at uses 36GB 10K U160-SCSI for server archives). There's really no market for cheap slow drives that hold oodles of data, they exist and don't sell well. Also, they'd end up in low-end PCs for sure, your uncle's eMachine would CRAWL with one of these.
For the same reason Microsoft doesn't give you Office for free. You don't kill the cash cow. Apple makes money on the hardware, off people who are dead-set on the Apple product. Apple's software sales are puny in comparison to the $BIG_MONEY made off the hardware sales. Many mac users don't even buy OS upgrades, there's a 'I paid $BIG_MONEY for my Mac, I'm entitled to a free copy of Jaguar' attitude thats left over from the pre-system 7 days when Apple gave the OS away for free.
I agree, people just lose their eyes with time. Almost any profession will tax the eyes, from welding to jewlery design to banking and programming.
Staring at a CRT WILL screw up your mind though, ever 'burn out' on a PC and forget to eat, or get sick after realizing that you've been staring at an electron gun bouncing up and down 85 times/second for eight hours?
I'm thinking about moving to an LCD so I can fall asleep easier, I get 'amped' on CRTs late at night and have trouble falling asleep, when I use the laptop it's much easier to close my eyes, it's even easier if I sit down with dead-tree editions of what I'm reading on the machine.
Word. My floor (linoleum tile / basement) is cool to the touch all year round, which sort of sucks in December, but ceiling fans in the summer just blow the hottest air onto the cooling floor tiles. The place stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I'm thinking about installing a timed 'bleeding' hose up around the whole house up where the foundation ends, that way I can keep the outer concrete damp, that should keep it a bit cooler in here. I also have a section of ceiling that extends from the house, so it's a tar roof, and I'm going to put some dirt down and grow grass on it with another 'bleeder' hose, that oughtta look cool and the grass will do some serious cooling in the summer and insulating in the winter.
I have owned both brands of cards and I can say that ATI drivers aren't so bad, in Linux they're much better, in fact. As for the windows driver, ATI Catalyst series drivers have been rock-solid from the beginning.
The memory bus IS 64-bit on most machines (including current Macs) but the ADDRESSING is handled in 32-bits (by a 32-bit CPU). Theoretically all you need to put 16GB RAM on a machine is more slots, but it would be pointless because the CPU and memory contoller would still only be addressing the memory with 32-bits, limiting you to 4GB total physical RAM.
I assure you, all PC SDRAMS -ARE- 64-bit wide memory devices, they're just being handled from above in a 32-bit world.
I hear this "64-bit is TWICE as fast as 32-bit" stuff all the time. I don't think it's true though. As far as I know, almost all PCs use at least a 64-bit memory bus already. I thought the real advantage to having a 64-bit processor was the increased address space and that things that do calculate numbers over 32-bits will be easier to handle (ever notice how there are all sorts of 32-bit limits on PC internals, like disk addressing and 2GB file sizes that need to get worked around?).
I want to hear from the computer scientists and electrical engineers out there, we know the 64-bit chips will be faster, but is it JUST because they've got 64-bit goodness, or is it because they're just newer and of 'fresher' designs?
No, I just don't like loud, angry sounding computers, and an athlon running full-tilt is just that. Occasionally I need to compile something HUGE (GCC, KDE, Mozilla, etc.) and I bring the clock up to full-speed. The other 95% of the time I'm more than happy running at 866Mhz.
As for keeping the machine, I intend to give it to future offspring or a significant other down the line. My current girlfriend is happy with her Celeron 500, which is several years old. I figure by the time I move up to 'The Next Big Thing' she'd appreciate a machine that's thrice the speed. Or if we produce children I can give it to them as a starter machine, it'll be WAY outdated but I got to where I am today by playing with computers from the 1970s when they were antiques, and I hope the same for my kids.
Well the celeron is a special case. It's a capable chip sold at a lower clock than it can run at. Also, you aren't overclocking your mainboard (fsb, ram, PCI, AGP), just bumping up the CPU multiplier. What you did was a 'clean' overclock. If you were running your FSB at 123Mhz and PCI at 36.5MHz you'd probably switch right back to the standard speeds, because your stability would plummet.
As for my RAM, I like to know that I can move my memory chips to any machine without problems, and getting the Kingmax memory was perfect for that purpose, it works in any PC without any questions because it's faster than any PC can handle!
My CPU is a barton/333FSB underclocked to 266FSB because my board tops out at 266MHz, but the lower clock has made it run MUCH cooler and it still has the 'barton 640K cache' advantage.
Well I like to buy the pretty Kingmax PC-150 sticks with the TinyBGA modules on them, but I only run them @ PC-100 or PC-133. I buy the best to reduce power consumption, heat and to increase reliability. I don't know many other geeks who have NEVER had to throw away a DIMM because it crapped out on them.
I also underclock my athlon so it stays nice and cool, and run my hard drives in 'slow but quiet' mode.
I don't know why people are so obsessed with tweaking every 1% out of their PCs, it's a good way to kill them before their time. I'd like my system to still be usable in a few years and my method is to ride 'gently' on it. Am I the only one who does this?
Putting together a system with this board will probably cost MORE than buying a mac, and running OSX under MOL reduces you to unaccelerated graphics anyway. I can understand firing up an OSX session on your pegasos machine to test if an app compiles/runs under OSX, but the usability of OSX under MOL is minimal.
I'd rather pay for Apple's workstation-class hardware than an obscure mobo running a VIA chipset, even if I have no intention of running an Apple OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops, I had no idea it was an issue. My apologies! BTW, that was a legit photo shoot for a friend.
gotphotography.com is his (work in progress) online portfolio.
OK. So to make 'less expensive' larger-footprint storage drives we have to fab custom platters (the standard size platters are _pennies_ apiece), and to make performance acceptable we have to put two expensive head assemblies in, and custom-produce a DSP to handle the new 'two heads' internal geometry. Also, you need a stronger motor to spin up these big platters.
I think it would end up costing more than a standard form-factor drive.
This is why almost everything is mass-produced these days, it's just CHEAPER to go with the flow.
I recall the gist of what you're talking about. Something about the OSX microkernel still being somewhat optimized for x86, all it would take is a 'flip of the switch' to boost OSX performance quite a bit.
That's why I'm so happy with Gentoo. After two years wasted trying to learn how to work services on Linux and being frustrated by GUI config tools mucking up my beautiful config files I found a distro that lets me do what I need to do without having to scratch my head and reconfigure stuff all the time. The gentoo install process teaches you (almost) enough to start using a text editor alone as a config tool, and it doesn't ship with any tools to screw up your work. It even puts new config files aside and informs you of their presence so you have time to digest them before restarting the services they control.
I agree about the future of computing, but I think every neighborhood / office /building /small business will want someone who knows the technology inside-and-out to implement it on a large scale.
Sure, compiling the kernel isn't something Joe User wants to do, but if Joe User want to sit down and work, someone in the company's job is to make sure his PC is getting decent performance. The boss isn't going to want to buy new servers and PCs when there's plenty of life to squeeze out of what's already there, those days are (almost) over.
I don't want everyone to start adminning gentoo boxes, I'll admin boxes for them for some loot. That's my niche. The users will be running Gentoo, but they'll never have to look at GCC output or think about syncing the portage tree.
Also, your idea that Operating Systems are going to get simpler is just not feasable. They'll get easier to USE but the tradeoff is that under-the-hood they'll be that much more complex. All technology is like that, a modern car is a very complex machine; sure, automatic transmission is easy to use, but it's a LOT more complex to design, fix, or diagnose than the old manual trannies. Windows XP is (arguably) easier to USE than w98, but it's really an order of magnitude more complex beneath the presentation.
A lot of work out there is NOT owned by MegaCorps, but it can't be easily used unless you track down the artist's manager's wive's new husband who holds the current copyright as part of some stupid inheritance tree. This would put an end to that.
It's true! She's pretty too!
My Myssie
I find the same thing happening to myself. I started with Gentoo on the G3 as a server, then I decided to ditch W2K on my workstation (for gentoo) and just run win98se on a Via EPIA when I needed MS Office (for work). Now I've got gentoo running on server, workstation, my laptop, the EPIA (got citrix ICA to do windoze stuff directly on the server at work). Next week I'm installing Gentoo on the girlfriend's machine (she's running Mandrake 9.0 now, and it's starting to turn into a twisted mess of RPM hell).
I actually get silently offended when I tell people I use Linux and they ask "Redhat or Mandrake?" I've got friends calling me asking to set them up with gentoo boxen almost every weekend now.
Actually, I have a running dos6.22/win3.11 combo on my PIII 'just for fun' it is pretty snappy. I can't seem to get it to run SAMBA, NFSD, routed, or mount anything bigger than a 2GB partition. Maybe I should call M$ tech support.
Really, I think that's true for most people on Slashdot in general. I myself always WANTED a 'cleaner' source-based distro without the hangups of Debian, and Gentoo provides it. It's very possible to achieve a stable and fast system with Gentoo, you just have to be moderate with your make.conf settings.
I think the BEST thing about gentoo is the installation process. I finally learned how daemons get started, how to set up networking and NFS. All these things were either hidden from me behind GUI utilities or prevented from working properly by services that I didn't know about on more 'turnkey' distros.
Mandrake is cool because a newbie can get it to work. Gentoo is cool because a newbie can become a knowledgeable user after a few installs.
Thanks to Gentoo I finally understand HOW all this *NIX stuff works under the hood and I am MUCH more competent on any *NIX box. I no longer cower in fear of the bash prompt, instead I command my boxen like a pro.
Also, I never liked the 'full-featured' desktops for linux that ship with RedHat or Mandrake. GNOME and KDE always felt slow and unfocused to me. With Gentoo it was amazingly simple to build a system with WindowMaker and the apps I needed without having the overhead of KDE/GNOME running behind it. When I boot up gentoo my RAM usage is 14MB, my 'barebones' mandrake box uses 72MB to get to "login:"
I've been running Gentoo-1.4 release candidates on my G3 server for almost a year now, I can tell you, Gentoo and PPC are an awesome combination.
The PowerPC architecture is amazingly snappy and responsive, even though my box only has a 450MHz CPU. I get the feeling that the PPC arch is a lot less 'laggy' than the x86, just a vague feeling, but it's quite nice. Compiling my whole distro with "-mcpu=750" and a few other options has made my old box into quite a workhorse. Anyone else want to share PPC/Linux experiences?
Are you KIDDING? KDE is absolutely godawful in terms of performance, opening Konqueror takes over five seconds on my 1.4GHz Athlon! BeOS file manager opened in under one second on my 500 MHz K6-2. Also, be didn't have for hunderd-bazillion options in every menu, it was CLEAN. I swear, if I had the know-how to rip out the unneeded menu options in KDE I would. A real feat would be to have KDE 'learn' what sets of features you want to use and remove the others.
I know that every option was added because SOMEBODY needed it and had the know-how to put it there, but really, KDE is total overkill.
When I drag a file from one window to another, I don't want it to pop up a menu EVERY TIME, just friggin' MOVE the file, or COPY it if it's on a different physical drive, when I select multiple items and click one to move them, why on earth does KDE de-select all but the one I clicked on? KDE can do it all, but it seems to do everything in the most obfuscated non-intuitive way possible. Linux Human Interface coders should talk to some old-school MacOS users, the MacOS has hands-down the most sensical handling of file management and drag-and-drop on the market, amd has since the debut of Mac System 7.
I don't have much experience with GNOME, as I never really liked what I saw and switched to WindowMaker and Krusader.
You obviously haven't played with BeOS enough, or you don't have an appreciation for simplicity and 'less is more' computing. I think BeOS is what the Mac would have evolved into if apple decided to ditch their Classic environment five years earlier.
Remember the BigFoot series of hard drive? They were 5.25" drives by Quantum (now Maxtor) for desktop use. The problem is that when you make the disc wider, you have to slow down the rotation to keep the platters from breaking or 'stretching'. You'd have to run the things at 5400 RPM _AND_ a 'front to back' head seek would take forever. These would be GREAT as backup-only drives, but companies that buy backupd drives now are willing to pay $BIG_MONEY for backup drives (the bank I work at uses 36GB 10K U160-SCSI for server archives). There's really no market for cheap slow drives that hold oodles of data, they exist and don't sell well. Also, they'd end up in low-end PCs for sure, your uncle's eMachine would CRAWL with one of these.
For the same reason Microsoft doesn't give you Office for free. You don't kill the cash cow. Apple makes money on the hardware, off people who are dead-set on the Apple product. Apple's software sales are puny in comparison to the $BIG_MONEY made off the hardware sales. Many mac users don't even buy OS upgrades, there's a 'I paid $BIG_MONEY for my Mac, I'm entitled to a free copy of Jaguar' attitude thats left over from the pre-system 7 days when Apple gave the OS away for free.
He could just totally awe the enemy by LICKING HIS OWN EYEBALL and keeping a straight face. I always thought that was weird.
I agree, people just lose their eyes with time. Almost any profession will tax the eyes, from welding to jewlery design to banking and programming.
Staring at a CRT WILL screw up your mind though, ever 'burn out' on a PC and forget to eat, or get sick after realizing that you've been staring at an electron gun bouncing up and down 85 times/second for eight hours?
I'm thinking about moving to an LCD so I can fall asleep easier, I get 'amped' on CRTs late at night and have trouble falling asleep, when I use the laptop it's much easier to close my eyes, it's even easier if I sit down with dead-tree editions of what I'm reading on the machine.
Word. My floor (linoleum tile / basement) is cool to the touch all year round, which sort of sucks in December, but ceiling fans in the summer just blow the hottest air onto the cooling floor tiles. The place stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I'm thinking about installing a timed 'bleeding' hose up around the whole house up where the foundation ends, that way I can keep the outer concrete damp, that should keep it a bit cooler in here. I also have a section of ceiling that extends from the house, so it's a tar roof, and I'm going to put some dirt down and grow grass on it with another 'bleeder' hose, that oughtta look cool and the grass will do some serious cooling in the summer and insulating in the winter.
I have owned both brands of cards and I can say that ATI drivers aren't so bad, in Linux they're much better, in fact. As for the windows driver, ATI Catalyst series drivers have been rock-solid from the beginning.
The memory bus IS 64-bit on most machines (including current Macs) but the ADDRESSING is handled in 32-bits (by a 32-bit CPU). Theoretically all you need to put 16GB RAM on a machine is more slots, but it would be pointless because the CPU and memory contoller would still only be addressing the memory with 32-bits, limiting you to 4GB total physical RAM.
I assure you, all PC SDRAMS -ARE- 64-bit wide memory devices, they're just being handled from above in a 32-bit world.
I hear this "64-bit is TWICE as fast as 32-bit" stuff all the time. I don't think it's true though. As far as I know, almost all PCs use at least a 64-bit memory bus already. I thought the real advantage to having a 64-bit processor was the increased address space and that things that do calculate numbers over 32-bits will be easier to handle (ever notice how there are all sorts of 32-bit limits on PC internals, like disk addressing and 2GB file sizes that need to get worked around?).
I want to hear from the computer scientists and electrical engineers out there, we know the 64-bit chips will be faster, but is it JUST because they've got 64-bit goodness, or is it because they're just newer and of 'fresher' designs?
No, I just don't like loud, angry sounding computers, and an athlon running full-tilt is just that. Occasionally I need to compile something HUGE (GCC, KDE, Mozilla, etc.) and I bring the clock up to full-speed. The other 95% of the time I'm more than happy running at 866Mhz.
As for keeping the machine, I intend to give it to future offspring or a significant other down the line. My current girlfriend is happy with her Celeron 500, which is several years old. I figure by the time I move up to 'The Next Big Thing' she'd appreciate a machine that's thrice the speed. Or if we produce children I can give it to them as a starter machine, it'll be WAY outdated but I got to where I am today by playing with computers from the 1970s when they were antiques, and I hope the same for my kids.
Well the celeron is a special case. It's a capable chip sold at a lower clock than it can run at. Also, you aren't overclocking your mainboard (fsb, ram, PCI, AGP), just bumping up the CPU multiplier. What you did was a 'clean' overclock. If you were running your FSB at 123Mhz and PCI at 36.5MHz you'd probably switch right back to the standard speeds, because your stability would plummet.
As for my RAM, I like to know that I can move my memory chips to any machine without problems, and getting the Kingmax memory was perfect for that purpose, it works in any PC without any questions because it's faster than any PC can handle!
My CPU is a barton/333FSB underclocked to 266FSB because my board tops out at 266MHz, but the lower clock has made it run MUCH cooler and it still has the 'barton 640K cache' advantage.
Well I like to buy the pretty Kingmax PC-150 sticks with the TinyBGA modules on them, but I only run them @ PC-100 or PC-133. I buy the best to reduce power consumption, heat and to increase reliability. I don't know many other geeks who have NEVER had to throw away a DIMM because it crapped out on them.
I also underclock my athlon so it stays nice and cool, and run my hard drives in 'slow but quiet' mode.
I don't know why people are so obsessed with tweaking every 1% out of their PCs, it's a good way to kill them before their time. I'd like my system to still be usable in a few years and my method is to ride 'gently' on it. Am I the only one who does this?
It's a strange slashdot obsession.
Putting together a system with this board will probably cost MORE than buying a mac, and running OSX under MOL reduces you to unaccelerated graphics anyway. I can understand firing up an OSX session on your pegasos machine to test if an app compiles/runs under OSX, but the usability of OSX under MOL is minimal.
I'd rather pay for Apple's workstation-class hardware than an obscure mobo running a VIA chipset, even if I have no intention of running an Apple OS.
GODOT!