For older boards which might be a PIII or Athlon, just adding cheap ram would give you the most performance boost. For PIII and earlier boards, getting video cards is also cheap enough (AGP 4x or 2x), but look for used stuff there. Any old machine I have I try to max out the RAM. Dont invest more than that.
Drives are a seperate entity. You can add a 300GB SATA disk with a SATA IO card to a PIII type system with no problems, and take that disk into a future machine too. So thats a safe investment. So are DVD drives and anything USB. Its only the motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphic card that are tied together. Of these four, unless you can get used hardware, get only the memory and max it out.
Of course a new Athlon64 motherboard + CPU combo is about $300 canadians, or $350 including the ram. If you have a PIII or less and can fork this much out, better get the upgrade than supporting the old machine.
Well that was a bad example; VHS truly is dead. But I get your point, its like saying the cdrom is dead while holding a DVD.
The next one, hd-dvd or bluray drives will probably read dvds and cds too. A few years into the technology we'll see $40 drives that will read and write all types in that form factor. The only thing I can think of that can replace the cd/dvd form factor, is flash drives. The DVD can hold 4GB, and there are compactflash chips able to hold this much now in a much smaller package. The NOR type (I think) of flash is cheaper per GB but writing to it is slow. Its ideal as a read-only media to be sold with music/video/data on it, only is not quite that much read-only. The only other option is to transfer data directly everywhere; buy it online and download it with no media in between, ipod style.
If thats true, the DVD is the last stand of the el-cheapo read-only media. It might last much longer than VHS did.
Unfortunately this echos the GM vs Toyota war a bit too much. I'm neither Japanese nor American, but I acknowledge that the Toyota and the Playstation are both superior products. They both have a very strong foothold in N. America mainly for their quality. Meanwhile GM cars and the Xbox are being force-fed to Japan for Americans to feel the 'me too' factor. Microsoft being the 'me too' guy in case of Xbox.
Maybe we shouldnt check the products being sold in America or Japan, but rather watch a third country pick up these products.
I'm no physicist, but I would have guaranteed that the atmosphere would not have been ignited.
See, in nature most things are in their stable state, else are decaying extremely slowly. An exception is organic matter. You cannot burn water, ice, air, earth etc. They cannot go into nuclear chain reactions either. Thats because during the past 15 billion years all kinds of things have happened to matter around us, giving it enough opportunity to get into its lowest stable state.
The uranium that is used for the nuclear explosions is highly refined. Place all kinds of uranium ore around an atom bomb, it will not ignite or help in the explosion. The same is true of all the duterium in the oceans, in its current composition, water will not ignite into a big hydrogen bomb partly because it has already ignited many times over the past 15 billion years in supernovas and other processes before the earth was created... and is now in a very stable state. It has to be enriched highly, all the duterium purified to a high degree to be made weapons grade before any real danger.
Unless they can make physics processes which exceed in capability over the big bang, I would not be threatened by nature alone. However organic material is different as you can always start a forest fire. Still, nature itself starts forest fires frequently enough.
I havent bought many games at the retail level. I just buy em online. Steam allows you to just pay and get the game downloaded automatically, while others might send a DVD too.
Put it this way, people shop around online to buy hardware. More and more are doing the same for software now. If you had to buy the latest Radeon, would you just hop into the next door computer store or look around online for the best deal?
The thing with brand-name computer parts is that you can be sure they're all the same. The Geforce 4 Ti 4400 made by Asus is the same in my next-door store as on the online discount mail-order store. The difference is really just the price, including the price of waiting for it.
Most other items require personal approval. You have to try out cars and clothes and furniture. For computer parts including games, you just know you need it (you can try out games as demos).
One quite obvious feature I think is missing in all browsers is online Bookmarks, and history. I'd like to login into the browser anywhere and get my bookmarks and browse history in that browser immediately. Bookmarks would automatically be saved at that site (not locally), and I shouldnt have to login daily on my home machine's Opera.
Such a feature is low-overhead in CPU and bandwidth and shouldnt take much additional code. Maybe it already exists under another name, but I still have to sync my work and home bookmarks which is a pain.
2D is awesome. 2D is very predictable and realistic compared to 3D. Anyone remember how Lucasarts killed Monkey Island by moving it to 3D? And how crappy it looked in 3D? Prince of Persia did the same, although theyve had more success with 3D.
The rendering may be 3D, if such effects are desired (NOT in Monkey Island). But it should be a 2D side scrolling game. People are still using genecy/kgens and running sonic roms because theyre still fun. You dont ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY have to use that GPU on the PC/console to sell games.
Hmm I dont know about that. Both the xbox and PS3 have CPUs more powerful than the average desktops. Both are multicore 64-bit. Both are over 3GHz. Now thats alot quite frankly.
Sure Power is used elsewhere, but we're not talking about those since theyre like change. Recently consoles have exceeded the average desktop in cpu power, and since the CPUs for both consoles are 'specialized' or highly customized, I imagine the margins are higher than if they were run of the mill G5. For Apple machines the chips weren't designed just for Apple, they were found elsewhere. For consoles the chips are custom-fit and probably the most expensive component of the console.
At least the Cell must cost some real money. Consoles are sold for little margin or sometimes at a loss to create the market for the games. AT $400, theyre close to lower end desktops (Dell), which take all their profit from the hardware being sold. So theyre not all that different anymore.
You should beware that on slashdot opinions are HEAVILY skewed against Microsoft and FOR Linux. Dont bet your job on slashdot opinions... a large portion of these people DONT have jobs.
Nobody has ever been fired for buying Big Iron. But thats probably not true:).
Youve placed options between iseries and wintel. What about others? Will you consider other architectures?
You should also discuss this with your HR department. Keeping around an iseries person is more expensive than an MCSE. These are 'hidden' costs on the iseries. And everyone already has desktops running windows on them already anyway... with an iseries server youre managing 2 different operating systems. With Wintel youre tied with Microsoft, but have options with hardware (I'd buy xseries). With iseries you run out of options, but IBM isnt going anyway. You just have to be OK with them as your vendor.
My opinion is that you should look more into the merits of the ERP system itself and the company behind it rather than what OS to run on your server. Its a little like asking which OS should I use for my firewall...
PC Power supplies are switching, and emit less heat with less load. Since youre not using much power in the first place, just open the power supply (DISCONNETED !!) and unplug the fan inside). Youll just need the additional budget of a screw driver... or the trouble of borrowing it.
I've powered PC motherboards using batteries before (not the harddisks)... they dont use much power. If the CPU power is low too, and you can make do with bootable USB key instead of harddisk, you might be able to just use two power adapters... 5V and 12V.
No wonder the quality of humanity is crappy and the value is so low. We're made in sweatshops.
Seriously, given the distribution of non-homo-sapien homonid fossils, it seems we evolved all over Africa and Eurasia. Given the enormous timescales, the apes probably walked across continents several times (but never reached the Americas or Antarctica since we havent found ANY fossils there). So we evolved in the Eastern Hemisphere but nowhere in particular. Giving a single location for the evolution of mankind is similar to creationism (THUD, thus fell Adam from the sky).
Another issue is the chromosome study. There are around 1000 variations of the Y-chromosome which is supposed to pass unchanged from father to son. This means the original homo sapiens group was around 2000 people from which we all evolved, unless you can say the Y-chromosome mutated around 999 times and survived in the past 200,000 years.
I think evolution didnt come from a single couple (Adam-type theory) but rather a collection of communities. Its quite possible we have genes from homonids which were distinct species back then from us (Neandertal, Florensis, even Erectus). While the communities evolved on their own in different parts of the world, there was sufficient transfer of genes among them to keep them all interbreedable until a very successful community took over the others. This makes sense during the ice age whereby communities were small and interbred frequently, but all the homonids travelled widely enough to be in contact with each other occasionally.
So did mankind come out of Africa or some part of Asia or Australia? Depends on which homonid ancestor you're willing to label THE ancestor.
I hope both Pentium and Athlon names are shedded off. Theyre just making a bit much of one brand of their chips which were successful. Its been 15 years now since Pentium and over 10 for Athlon.
Cars get cool new names. Chips should too.
I hate having to explain the Pentium 4 here is different from the Pentium 4 over there because of yada yada. Its also getting pretty bad for the Athlon now, Athlon, Athlon (thunderbird), Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 (dual core)...
I bought a computer for a friend a week ago. He didnt know much but he knew he wanted the 'real thing'. In other words of his, 'real intel stuff' or 'genuine stuff' or 'should be intel inside for real'.
So I dug deeper into his questions. He remembered the K5 from AMD and its troubles. He remembered people trying to pass the Cyrix processor off as Pentium MMX chips, while the real Intel was expensive. In many countries sellers had no issues marketing the Cyrix and K4 and K5 as 'Intel Pentium' and even as 'Intel Cyrix' in places, to make the point that its EQUIVALENT to those chips. The Pentium was the more stable one in those days.
How times have changed. I explained how AMD is leading now and the only other company is Intel. Others like Via and (RIP) Transmeta dont even TRY to tackle AMD and Intel head-on and just market themselves as low-power mobile chips and such. 'Intel Inside' is now a bad thing. It means your 64-bit architecture implementation is either a bad copy of AMD or a bad failure (Itanium). AMD, as long as its not one of those early Athlon chips which could turn a house in Antarctica into a sauna, means good chips, better bang for the buck, and now means the only way to go if you want 64-bits and x86 in the same bag (or if you want Microsoft and 64-bit).
The latest ARM9 chips can give you a few MIPS per mW. Yes you can take them down to microwatt levels too. Add some SRAM and flash (possibly stacked) to lower power and STN LCD screen, and you have a machine more powerful than than 1981 286 system, and its full 32-bit too.
Someone probably said what you said i 1981. Find that person and WAKE HIM UP!!
You dont have to be RICH to need such power. Have you ever used the latest Autodesk products? (minimum 1GB ram req) or met people developing apps for oracle?
Have you ever had to produce linux kernels, 20 of them with every iteration of some config list?
Heck I can think of games which can benefit from that, but you dont really NEED that unless youre rich.
The point is there are places and people who just need the power. Reminds me of the data systems racks of the STAR detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Its all nice to have accurate amounts of alcohol served to patrons. But legal driving or otherwise 'drunk' thresholds are percentage of blood levels. People differ much more than alcohol, with men going between 140 to 300 lbs in the bump part of the bell curve. Thats like twice the weight (and therefore the blood volume).
So 16 ounces might be less for the 400lbs person while 14 ounces might be more so for the 140lbs.
Its possible for bartenders to profile their customers before serving drinks, but theres another problem. Peoples alcohol tolerance and how fast their system clears it also vary enormously. (worlds fastest eater is a rather thin Japanese guy).
I guess it matters little how much a bartender pours if its not more than twice between the extremes, and if its not charged the same.
Slashdot Mirror
For older boards which might be a PIII or Athlon, just adding cheap ram would give you the most performance boost. For PIII and earlier boards, getting video cards is also cheap enough (AGP 4x or 2x), but look for used stuff there. Any old machine I have I try to max out the RAM. Dont invest more than that.
Drives are a seperate entity. You can add a 300GB SATA disk with a SATA IO card to a PIII type system with no problems, and take that disk into a future machine too. So thats a safe investment. So are DVD drives and anything USB. Its only the motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphic card that are tied together. Of these four, unless you can get used hardware, get only the memory and max it out.
Of course a new Athlon64 motherboard + CPU combo is about $300 canadians, or $350 including the ram. If you have a PIII or less and can fork this much out, better get the upgrade than supporting the old machine.
Whattsa matta Zonk? 2 dead articles in a row. I can see one about BSD coming next.
Nothing like a 'Oh btw Commodore is dead' type article to kick up a dead news day.
Well that was a bad example; VHS truly is dead. But I get your point, its like saying the cdrom is dead while holding a DVD.
The next one, hd-dvd or bluray drives will probably read dvds and cds too. A few years into the technology we'll see $40 drives that will read and write all types in that form factor. The only thing I can think of that can replace the cd/dvd form factor, is flash drives. The DVD can hold 4GB, and there are compactflash chips able to hold this much now in a much smaller package. The NOR type (I think) of flash is cheaper per GB but writing to it is slow. Its ideal as a read-only media to be sold with music/video/data on it, only is not quite that much read-only. The only other option is to transfer data directly everywhere; buy it online and download it with no media in between, ipod style.
If thats true, the DVD is the last stand of the el-cheapo read-only media. It might last much longer than VHS did.
Unfortunately this echos the GM vs Toyota war a bit too much. I'm neither Japanese nor American, but I acknowledge that the Toyota and the Playstation are both superior products. They both have a very strong foothold in N. America mainly for their quality. Meanwhile GM cars and the Xbox are being force-fed to Japan for Americans to feel the 'me too' factor. Microsoft being the 'me too' guy in case of Xbox.
Maybe we shouldnt check the products being sold in America or Japan, but rather watch a third country pick up these products.
I'm no physicist, but I would have guaranteed that the atmosphere would not have been ignited.
See, in nature most things are in their stable state, else are decaying extremely slowly. An exception is organic matter. You cannot burn water, ice, air, earth etc. They cannot go into nuclear chain reactions either. Thats because during the past 15 billion years all kinds of things have happened to matter around us, giving it enough opportunity to get into its lowest stable state.
The uranium that is used for the nuclear explosions is highly refined. Place all kinds of uranium ore around an atom bomb, it will not ignite or help in the explosion. The same is true of all the duterium in the oceans, in its current composition, water will not ignite into a big hydrogen bomb partly because it has already ignited many times over the past 15 billion years in supernovas and other processes before the earth was created... and is now in a very stable state. It has to be enriched highly, all the duterium purified to a high degree to be made weapons grade before any real danger.
Unless they can make physics processes which exceed in capability over the big bang, I would not be threatened by nature alone. However organic material is different as you can always start a forest fire. Still, nature itself starts forest fires frequently enough.
I havent bought many games at the retail level. I just buy em online. Steam allows you to just pay and get the game downloaded automatically, while others might send a DVD too.
Put it this way, people shop around online to buy hardware. More and more are doing the same for software now. If you had to buy the latest Radeon, would you just hop into the next door computer store or look around online for the best deal?
The thing with brand-name computer parts is that you can be sure they're all the same. The Geforce 4 Ti 4400 made by Asus is the same in my next-door store as on the online discount mail-order store. The difference is really just the price, including the price of waiting for it.
Most other items require personal approval. You have to try out cars and clothes and furniture. For computer parts including games, you just know you need it (you can try out games as demos).
dd if=/root/kernel of=/dev/hda && reboot
One quite obvious feature I think is missing in all browsers is online Bookmarks, and history. I'd like to login into the browser anywhere and get my bookmarks and browse history in that browser immediately. Bookmarks would automatically be saved at that site (not locally), and I shouldnt have to login daily on my home machine's Opera.
Such a feature is low-overhead in CPU and bandwidth and shouldnt take much additional code. Maybe it already exists under another name, but I still have to sync my work and home bookmarks which is a pain.
2D is awesome. 2D is very predictable and realistic compared to 3D. Anyone remember how Lucasarts killed Monkey Island by moving it to 3D? And how crappy it looked in 3D? Prince of Persia did the same, although theyve had more success with 3D.
The rendering may be 3D, if such effects are desired (NOT in Monkey Island). But it should be a 2D side scrolling game. People are still using genecy/kgens and running sonic roms because theyre still fun. You dont ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY have to use that GPU on the PC/console to sell games.
Hmm I dont know about that. Both the xbox and PS3 have CPUs more powerful than the average desktops. Both are multicore 64-bit. Both are over 3GHz. Now thats alot quite frankly.
Sure Power is used elsewhere, but we're not talking about those since theyre like change. Recently consoles have exceeded the average desktop in cpu power, and since the CPUs for both consoles are 'specialized' or highly customized, I imagine the margins are higher than if they were run of the mill G5. For Apple machines the chips weren't designed just for Apple, they were found elsewhere. For consoles the chips are custom-fit and probably the most expensive component of the console.
At least the Cell must cost some real money. Consoles are sold for little margin or sometimes at a loss to create the market for the games. AT $400, theyre close to lower end desktops (Dell), which take all their profit from the hardware being sold. So theyre not all that different anymore.
Cant wait to get the Cell on an ATX board.
But 21 can drink. All the better no?
I figure these are clothing gift cards. I know I'd appreciate such things more than most everything else I'd get on Christmas.
You should beware that on slashdot opinions are HEAVILY skewed against Microsoft and FOR Linux. Dont bet your job on slashdot opinions... a large portion of these people DONT have jobs.
:).
Nobody has ever been fired for buying Big Iron. But thats probably not true
Youve placed options between iseries and wintel. What about others? Will you consider other architectures?
You should also discuss this with your HR department. Keeping around an iseries person is more expensive than an MCSE. These are 'hidden' costs on the iseries. And everyone already has desktops running windows on them already anyway... with an iseries server youre managing 2 different operating systems. With Wintel youre tied with Microsoft, but have options with hardware (I'd buy xseries). With iseries you run out of options, but IBM isnt going anyway. You just have to be OK with them as your vendor.
My opinion is that you should look more into the merits of the ERP system itself and the company behind it rather than what OS to run on your server. Its a little like asking which OS should I use for my firewall...
PC Power supplies are switching, and emit less heat with less load. Since youre not using much power in the first place, just open the power supply (DISCONNETED !!) and unplug the fan inside). Youll just need the additional budget of a screw driver... or the trouble of borrowing it.
I've powered PC motherboards using batteries before (not the harddisks)... they dont use much power. If the CPU power is low too, and you can make do with bootable USB key instead of harddisk, you might be able to just use two power adapters... 5V and 12V.
Hmm, so hard to crack jokes at Leap Ahead. Maybe they made that with slashdot crowd in mind...
Sounds like some Chinese government plan. Maybe theyre just trying to leap eastwards to cut costs.
We're ALL made in China?
No wonder the quality of humanity is crappy and the value is so low. We're made in sweatshops.
Seriously, given the distribution of non-homo-sapien homonid fossils, it seems we evolved all over Africa and Eurasia. Given the enormous timescales, the apes probably walked across continents several times (but never reached the Americas or Antarctica since we havent found ANY fossils there). So we evolved in the Eastern Hemisphere but nowhere in particular. Giving a single location for the evolution of mankind is similar to creationism (THUD, thus fell Adam from the sky).
Another issue is the chromosome study. There are around 1000 variations of the Y-chromosome which is supposed to pass unchanged from father to son. This means the original homo sapiens group was around 2000 people from which we all evolved, unless you can say the Y-chromosome mutated around 999 times and survived in the past 200,000 years.
I think evolution didnt come from a single couple (Adam-type theory) but rather a collection of communities. Its quite possible we have genes from homonids which were distinct species back then from us (Neandertal, Florensis, even Erectus). While the communities evolved on their own in different parts of the world, there was sufficient transfer of genes among them to keep them all interbreedable until a very successful community took over the others. This makes sense during the ice age whereby communities were small and interbred frequently, but all the homonids travelled widely enough to be in contact with each other occasionally.
So did mankind come out of Africa or some part of Asia or Australia? Depends on which homonid ancestor you're willing to label THE ancestor.
I think I saw 5 High-definition type technology items in that list. Methinks the Hi-def techs have been multiplied to make the list a nice 10.
My home server is Va Linux too... and Va Linux 1000 at that. Nothing special really?
Do I get bonus points for saying I'm running Windows XP (access: RDP) on it? No? Nevermind then.
I hope both Pentium and Athlon names are shedded off. Theyre just making a bit much of one brand of their chips which were successful. Its been 15 years now since Pentium and over 10 for Athlon.
Cars get cool new names. Chips should too.
I hate having to explain the Pentium 4 here is different from the Pentium 4 over there because of yada yada. Its also getting pretty bad for the Athlon now, Athlon, Athlon (thunderbird), Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 (dual core)...
I bought a computer for a friend a week ago. He didnt know much but he knew he wanted the 'real thing'. In other words of his, 'real intel stuff' or 'genuine stuff' or 'should be intel inside for real'.
So I dug deeper into his questions. He remembered the K5 from AMD and its troubles. He remembered people trying to pass the Cyrix processor off as Pentium MMX chips, while the real Intel was expensive. In many countries sellers had no issues marketing the Cyrix and K4 and K5 as 'Intel Pentium' and even as 'Intel Cyrix' in places, to make the point that its EQUIVALENT to those chips. The Pentium was the more stable one in those days.
How times have changed. I explained how AMD is leading now and the only other company is Intel. Others like Via and (RIP) Transmeta dont even TRY to tackle AMD and Intel head-on and just market themselves as low-power mobile chips and such. 'Intel Inside' is now a bad thing. It means your 64-bit architecture implementation is either a bad copy of AMD or a bad failure (Itanium). AMD, as long as its not one of those early Athlon chips which could turn a house in Antarctica into a sauna, means good chips, better bang for the buck, and now means the only way to go if you want 64-bits and x86 in the same bag (or if you want Microsoft and 64-bit).
We bought an Athlon-64 machine.
The latest ARM9 chips can give you a few MIPS per mW. Yes you can take them down to microwatt levels too. Add some SRAM and flash (possibly stacked) to lower power and STN LCD screen, and you have a machine more powerful than than 1981 286 system, and its full 32-bit too.
Someone probably said what you said i 1981. Find that person and WAKE HIM UP!!
Your panel tells you you dont need more than 55W.
Tell you what. Just use the older IBM power supplies which can do 100W or 80W REAL QUIET. Thats more than you need right?
Just keep a fire extinguisher close by.
You dont have to be RICH to need such power. Have you ever used the latest Autodesk products? (minimum 1GB ram req) or met people developing apps for oracle?
Have you ever had to produce linux kernels, 20 of them with every iteration of some config list?
Heck I can think of games which can benefit from that, but you dont really NEED that unless youre rich.
The point is there are places and people who just need the power. Reminds me of the data systems racks of the STAR detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
What about running two 500W supplies in parallel?
For less money I could run 3 500W power supplies in parallel and be redundant!
Its all nice to have accurate amounts of alcohol served to patrons. But legal driving or otherwise 'drunk' thresholds are percentage of blood levels. People differ much more than alcohol, with men going between 140 to 300 lbs in the bump part of the bell curve. Thats like twice the weight (and therefore the blood volume).
So 16 ounces might be less for the 400lbs person while 14 ounces might be more so for the 140lbs.
Its possible for bartenders to profile their customers before serving drinks, but theres another problem. Peoples alcohol tolerance and how fast their system clears it also vary enormously. (worlds fastest eater is a rather thin Japanese guy).
I guess it matters little how much a bartender pours if its not more than twice between the extremes, and if its not charged the same.