Only? That's more juice than your microwave (~750 watts), toaster (~1kw), more like a space heater. This thing sucks electricity HARD. A Vaccuum cleaner is about 500-700 watts. I don't think my electric clothes dryer uses as much electricity as this thing, which is using ten times the juice a normal PC uses (or more).
I doubt you have a single appliance in your house that uses much more electricity than this, and those appliances, unlike a computer, don't run 24/7.
The pot growers use 650 watt lights. If you get one of these computers, expect to be raided by the DEA when the electric company narcs on you and the DEA sees the heat signature through your walls. They'll have a no-knock warrant, and you'll be lucky if they don't shoot you. They WILL have you face down on the ground with your hands cuffed behind your back. When they find it's a computer and not a pot growing operation, they'll just plant half a pound of dope and arrest you anyway.
That is, if you survive their entrance. Maybe this will be a good thing, when the DEA starts killing too many innocent people maybe we'll rethink our stupid, insane drug laws.
Wow. I started counting the number of low estimates in your post and lost track. 1200 Watt microwaves are a dime a dozen. Then we have the 1400 Watt toaster ovens, and 1500 Watt space heaters. And I'm NOT going out of my way to find high numbers... in fact, for every one of these, I quick found items that were considerably more power. We can keep going with your poor estimates: a 4000 Watt clothes dryer and the 180-200 Watt 3 GHz Pentium 4 computer. In fact, the only number you appear to be accurate on is the pot growing (according to Google. I don't like the smell).
So really, what everyone wants to know is: when did you start growing pot?
Is it different from Model II TRS-DOS? I could swear I have an original 2.0a disk around here somewhere, and I thought the 12 was essentially similar but with half-height floppies and a less ugly color. Disk images would be annoying though, since the first track is SD and the rest is DD.
Indeed. The Model 16 could house two 8" floppy drives rather than just one like the Model II and had a much nicer case. It also added a second MC68000 co-processor. Model 12 was the same as Model 16, except without the co-processor.
I've still got a bunch of old disks and a couple of hard drives, and perhaps a full documentation set on these things. Problem is that they are stored in an attic, so there is likely bit-rot.
In most areas of the country, it's not a question of if but when your house settles and puts some nice big cracks in your concrete. Whether or not it would be a enough to damage the pipe is another question, but if you're relying on it to cool a semi-expensive piece of hardware, I might be a little nervous about it.
Also, seems like this will severely limit your options for where to put your computer physically.
Are fans really that horrible? They make them fairly quiet now. Is that extra.4 Ghz really worth all that kind of effort?
As others in the thread have pointed out, the likelihood of a damaged pipe is quite low. If it wasn't, all the houses in the USA and around the world with concrete slabs more than a few years old would be sprouting water leaks... cause the water pipes go through the foundation.
I suspect this is common to the middle east. When I was little, my father worked for Aramco and we lived in Saudi Arabia. Locals obeyed the traffic laws if they felt like it - but most of the time, they appear to have taken the attitude of "inshallah" (if god wills it, they will arrive safely. If he doesn't will it, there is nothing to be done about it anyway). When there was a wreck (which was often), they were usually pretty bad. The government would leave the wrecked cars out for everyone to see, I suppose trying to get them to understand what could happen to them or their property.
> Debian users are far more eclectic in their software choice, less likely to use any default options
Which could also mean that the Ubuntu default choices and/or options are more usable or at least acceptable than the Debian ones. Without a much more thorough analysis, the conclusion can't be supported as strong as it is proposed.
The difference between 1% and 5% is 0.1 cents according to Digikey, so it is going to take 650k resistors to recoup that cost. Assuming your board has 100 resistors on it, the cost is recouped after selling ~6500 boards. Only you can tell me if it the board is going to sell that many over its lifetime.
Having said that, if you are going to need a 1% resistor somewhere for a reason, it makes even less sense to use both 1% and 5% for that value. Just buy the 1% and eliminate the duplicate effort required to buy, receive, stock, inventory, etc a second component of the same value.
I always had ~1200 mails in my gmail spam folder (ie: spam received in the last 30 days)
(until today, at least,) it has been shrinking in the last two weeks, and has (atm) 950 mail... I'll let the party begin again, and see if this number goes up again.
Write back when it has over 8100 in it (since Sun, Oct 19, 2008). The price of having the same email address for over 12 years: average of roughly 9 messages per hour that land in the spam folder. Short term average (just today) is about the same... 9 to 10 per hour.
If we would have somehow guessed the onslaught of junk email we'd have to endure back then, mailing lists and the like would have been set up differently back then.
I never touched a computer till the 7th grade, and never did anything more than basic word processing with them till the 10th grade. I learned how to do calculus using chaulkboards and paper.
I never touched a computer till the 2nd grade, and never did anything more basic on it than dbase II programming until the 7th grade when I learned C. In the 10th grade, I'd finished the Unix (actually Xenix) half of a Fidonet gateway for both email and Usenet.
But that was at home. At school, computers weren't used for teaching except in programming class. I learned how to do calculus using chaulkboards and paper as well.
But that doesn't mean they might not have their place in classrooms now. If the software was designed correctly, it could adjust to the reading or math level of the student and help them progress at a faster rate than they would otherwise (because the teacher is busy making sure "no child [is] left behind").
My kid is in the 2nd grade and already doing powerpoint. WTF?!?!?! The focus is on presentation, not content. The kids know how to make things 'look nice' but they dont have anything worth saying.
Here is my take it on: remove all computers from elementary school (K -> 6th grade), add them in at the 7th grade level for basic word processing only (no powerpoint) along with a typing class. In high school add them in where the material can actually use it (physics visualizations, math, etc). Add them to the library at that level as another research tool.
Sounds exactly like what I did when I heard that everyone and their dog was investing in real estate. When there are several t.v. shows about flipping houses, you know the peak is near.
Don't mistake (miss take?) lack of choices with people liking it. What else are people going to use if they want something that doesn't use the resources like KDE does, but has more features than Xfce?
So instead of buying one 1.5TB drive, buy 3 500MB drives (it should cost about the same) and back up your stuff up on two other drives.[...]
A 1.5TB drive will carry a considerable price premium for quite a while after it comes out - at least 6 months... just like 1 TB drives did (only in the past couple months have they become 2x 500 GB).
Anyone else notice that the best retail cost per byte is whatever the highest capacity drive is closest to $100? This was true around Christmas time as well, before the 500 GB gave way to the 640:
[...] If everyone took this option, 'brain drain' would become more of a deterrent for mergers/acquisitions/etc, and MAYBE those who make money off others' hard work would think twice if there were more serious consequences for their bad behavior. (Yeah, I know, that's awfully glass-half-full for me. [...] These things always end badly for people who do actual work.
Always? You mean so badly that I received a 10% bonus for staying on, the management is better, the hours are more sane, and the office is now closer to my home?
Your glass isn't even quarter-full, much less half-full. Not all M&A activity is bad - and in a capitalist system, it is a necessary component.
(Great post, BTW. You sound like a good team-lead/manager)
I've been on one side or the other of 35 acquisitions. My experience is that the only people absolutely guaranteed of a job when it's all done are those who are have a written retention offer as an incentive to keep them in place and not bail prior to the merger closing. Many people will keep their jobs, some will lose them, and no one other than the aforementioned can be certain of either.
Perhaps pointing out the obvious, but even a retention offer isn't a guarantee of employment. It could be retracted at any time. And in fact, if the retention offer includes bonus after X amount of time, that could actually be a subtle reason for the company to not keep you employed for X time. Exactly this happened when MCI sold a support division to EDS back in the late 90's... people looking at healthy bonuses if they stayed on for 9 months (as memory serves) got canned right before they could collect. Note that I am most certainly not saying this happens every time. In fact, I collected a 10% retention bonus from a company takeover last year.
I can see your point, but until we return to a policy of creating "smart kid" classes and "not-so-smart kid" classes
But... but... but, that's not fair! No kidding. It most certainly is not fair to the smart kids to be stuck in a classroom where the teacher is forced to spend all their time trying to get the struggling kids up-to-minimal level.
Well, Time Warner doesn't have much copper... a year or two ago, they ran fiber down many of the major roads in the area.
An unbelievable amount of labor went into getting the fiber from the street into the building.
We are two buildings away from a major intersection. They did some trenching very close to that intersection to run the fiber over to a telephone pole (and for possibly other reasons). Then strung the fiber (heavily cladded/protected the whole time mind you - not the yellow cladding that you are used to seeing) across about five telephone poles (over a driveway), then back down to the ground. From there, they go under a parking lot to the corner of the building, up the outside of the building (in conduit). Many days of work from multiple people.
We're at the entrance to a business park. What I don't know is what they'll do if other companies in the business park get fiber as well (if it will come to our building, or also go all the way back to the intersection).
You don't pay for a 6Mb pipe. You probably wouldn't want to pay for a 6Mb pipe, either.
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant. For a DS3-based service, you may very well be correct (possibly because of the way stuff is tariffed?). But...
My office just switched over from bonded DS1's with Broadwing (went down frequently) to a 15 Mbps Ethernet service offered by Time Warner. We "inspected" the equipment and it's Ethernet over GFP[*] over OC-12 (we believe configured as UPSR). $1200/mo. I believe that is several hundred less than the 2xDS1 that we had.
Not to mention Pb-free seems to greatly increase tin whisker problems. We need new materials quickly, because a meaningful percentage of the boards being produced right now are going to be dead in a few years.
So the handy dandy window listing the 100's of updates you are missing to keep your WinXP machine up-to-date just popped up over the weekend. No clue why. After seeing this slashdot story, I scrolled down and saw "Windows Internet Exploer 7.0 for Windows XP". I read the details and the last line says:
"This update includes Windows Genuine Advantage Validation."
I guess so few people are "choosing" to install their spyware that they now they are bundling it with other stuff? This is AFTER Microsloth said they weren't going to do such a thing:
Find a box fan and stand a few feet in front it. Put your hand between your legs at knee level and feel how much air is flowing between them. Now go stand behind the box fan and do the same thing. Your legs are the fins of a heatsink.
The velocity and pressure of the air coming out of the fan is different. It forces more air into places that it would otherwise would have never reached (be it due to distance, or due to resistance).
One thing that kind of upsets me is that all the cpu fan designs blow towards the cpu, instead of up and away from.. For lack of better terminology, I thought fans work better at creating higher pressure than at creating a vacuum. That is correct. The danger with vacuum is that you get uneven cooling - some (much?) of the moving air is going to come from all gaps around the heatsink, rather than forcing air through the fins.
know I've got a 20-pin PC Power & Cooling PSU just itching to get back in the game, and some old DDR2 RAM as well. They're crying out, I tells ya!
What do you mean old DDR2? How can it be old when DDR2 wasn't introduced but four years ago!? I don't own ANY DDR2 memory (or DDR3), much less any old DDR2.
Now, I do have 128 or 256 MB of EDO DRAM, a 700 MB SCSI hard drive (cost me around $1k in 1992), and a real AT-style keyboard (with big connector) that I wouldn't mind putting back into service... or we could go back further in the closet and gut the AT-compatible by tossing the 10 MHz 286 motherboard, and use its 70 MB hard drive from ~1987. I think I'll pass on trying to make use of the TRS-80/Tandy 16b with its full-height 12 MB hard drive. Some things are just not worth it, even to a nerd.
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The PSU is only 1100W
Only? That's more juice than your microwave (~750 watts), toaster (~1kw), more like a space heater. This thing sucks electricity HARD. A Vaccuum cleaner is about 500-700 watts. I don't think my electric clothes dryer uses as much electricity as this thing, which is using ten times the juice a normal PC uses (or more).
I doubt you have a single appliance in your house that uses much more electricity than this, and those appliances, unlike a computer, don't run 24/7.
The pot growers use 650 watt lights. If you get one of these computers, expect to be raided by the DEA when the electric company narcs on you and the DEA sees the heat signature through your walls. They'll have a no-knock warrant, and you'll be lucky if they don't shoot you. They WILL have you face down on the ground with your hands cuffed behind your back. When they find it's a computer and not a pot growing operation, they'll just plant half a pound of dope and arrest you anyway.
That is, if you survive their entrance. Maybe this will be a good thing, when the DEA starts killing too many innocent people maybe we'll rethink our stupid, insane drug laws.
Wow. I started counting the number of low estimates in your post and lost track. 1200 Watt microwaves are a dime a dozen. Then we have the 1400 Watt toaster ovens, and 1500 Watt space heaters. And I'm NOT going out of my way to find high numbers... in fact, for every one of these, I quick found items that were considerably more power. We can keep going with your poor estimates: a 4000 Watt clothes dryer and the 180-200 Watt 3 GHz Pentium 4 computer. In fact, the only number you appear to be accurate on is the pot growing (according to Google. I don't like the smell).
So really, what everyone wants to know is: when did you start growing pot?
Marc
Is it different from Model II TRS-DOS? I could swear I have an original 2.0a disk around here somewhere, and I thought the 12 was essentially similar but with half-height floppies and a less ugly color. Disk images would be annoying though, since the first track is SD and the rest is DD.
Indeed. The Model 16 could house two 8" floppy drives rather than just one like the Model II and had a much nicer case. It also added a second MC68000 co-processor. Model 12 was the same as Model 16, except without the co-processor.
Oblink: http://home.claranet.nl/users/pb0aia/cm/modelii.html
I've still got a bunch of old disks and a couple of hard drives, and perhaps a full documentation set on these things. Problem is that they are stored in an attic, so there is likely bit-rot.
Marc
In most areas of the country, it's not a question of if but when your house settles and puts some nice big cracks in your concrete. Whether or not it would be a enough to damage the pipe is another question, but if you're relying on it to cool a semi-expensive piece of hardware, I might be a little nervous about it.
Also, seems like this will severely limit your options for where to put your computer physically.
Are fans really that horrible? They make them fairly quiet now. Is that extra .4 Ghz really worth all that kind of effort?
As others in the thread have pointed out, the likelihood of a damaged pipe is quite low. If it wasn't, all the houses in the USA and around the world with concrete slabs more than a few years old would be sprouting water leaks... cause the water pipes go through the foundation.
Marc
I suspect this is common to the middle east. When I was little, my father worked for Aramco and we lived in Saudi Arabia. Locals obeyed the traffic laws if they felt like it - but most of the time, they appear to have taken the attitude of "inshallah" (if god wills it, they will arrive safely. If he doesn't will it, there is nothing to be done about it anyway). When there was a wreck (which was often), they were usually pretty bad. The government would leave the wrecked cars out for everyone to see, I suppose trying to get them to understand what could happen to them or their property.
> Debian users are far more eclectic in their software choice, less likely to use any default options
Which could also mean that the Ubuntu default choices and/or options are more usable or at least acceptable than the Debian ones. Without a much more thorough analysis, the conclusion can't be supported as strong as it is proposed.
Marc
The difference between 1% and 5% is 0.1 cents according to Digikey, so it is going to take 650k resistors to recoup that cost. Assuming your board has 100 resistors on it, the cost is recouped after selling ~6500 boards. Only you can tell me if it the board is going to sell that many over its lifetime.
Having said that, if you are going to need a 1% resistor somewhere for a reason, it makes even less sense to use both 1% and 5% for that value. Just buy the 1% and eliminate the duplicate effort required to buy, receive, stock, inventory, etc a second component of the same value.
Marc
I always had ~1200 mails in my gmail spam folder (ie: spam received in the last 30 days)
(until today, at least,) it has been shrinking in the last two weeks, and has (atm) 950 mail... I'll let the party begin again, and see if this number goes up again.
Write back when it has over 8100 in it (since Sun, Oct 19, 2008). The price of having the same email address for over 12 years: average of roughly 9 messages per hour that land in the spam folder. Short term average (just today) is about the same... 9 to 10 per hour.
If we would have somehow guessed the onslaught of junk email we'd have to endure back then, mailing lists and the like would have been set up differently back then.
Marc
I'm thinking along the same lines.
I never touched a computer till the 7th grade, and never did anything more than basic word processing with them till the 10th grade. I learned how to do calculus using chaulkboards and paper.
I never touched a computer till the 2nd grade, and never did anything more basic on it than dbase II programming until the 7th grade when I learned C. In the 10th grade, I'd finished the Unix (actually Xenix) half of a Fidonet gateway for both email and Usenet.
But that was at home. At school, computers weren't used for teaching except in programming class. I learned how to do calculus using chaulkboards and paper as well.
But that doesn't mean they might not have their place in classrooms now. If the software was designed correctly, it could adjust to the reading or math level of the student and help them progress at a faster rate than they would otherwise (because the teacher is busy making sure "no child [is] left behind").
My kid is in the 2nd grade and already doing powerpoint. WTF?!?!?! The focus is on presentation, not content. The kids know how to make things 'look nice' but they dont have anything worth saying.
Here is my take it on: remove all computers from elementary school (K -> 6th grade), add them in at the 7th grade level for basic word processing only (no powerpoint) along with a typing class. In high school add them in where the material can actually use it (physics visualizations, math, etc). Add them to the library at that level as another research tool.
All very good points.
Marc
Sounds exactly like what I did when I heard that everyone and their dog was investing in real estate. When there are several t.v. shows about flipping houses, you know the peak is near.
With buidings being taken over by COGs, and re-taken back by toons, doesn't Toontown already have a simple version of this?
There are now more ways to configure the Smart Location (Awesome Bar) functionality which should make most complaints go away:
http://ed.agadak.net/2008/07/firefox-31-restricts-matches-keywords
I'm sure that this reply will get lost in the noise of all the other "I hate Awesome Bar" replies.
Don't mistake (miss take?) lack of choices with people liking it. What else are people going to use if they want something that doesn't use the resources like KDE does, but has more features than Xfce?
Marc
So instead of buying one 1.5TB drive, buy 3 500MB drives (it should cost about the same) and back up your stuff up on two other drives.[...]
A 1.5TB drive will carry a considerable price premium for quite a while after it comes out - at least 6 months... just like 1 TB drives did (only in the past couple months have they become 2x 500 GB).
Anyone else notice that the best retail cost per byte is whatever the highest capacity drive is closest to $100? This was true around Christmas time as well, before the 500 GB gave way to the 640:
WD5000AACS 500 GB: $80 = $0.160/GB
WD6400AAKS 640 GB: $90 = $0.141/GB
(anybrand) 750 GB: $120 = $0.160/GB
HD103UJ 1000 GB: $170 = $0.170/GB
Marc
[...] If everyone took this option, 'brain drain' would become more of a deterrent for mergers/acquisitions/etc, and MAYBE those who make money off others' hard work would think twice if there were more serious consequences for their bad behavior. (Yeah, I know, that's awfully glass-half-full for me. [...] These things always end badly for people who do actual work.
Always? You mean so badly that I received a 10% bonus for staying on, the management is better, the hours are more sane, and the office is now closer to my home?
Your glass isn't even quarter-full, much less half-full. Not all M&A activity is bad - and in a capitalist system, it is a necessary component.
Marc
(Great post, BTW. You sound like a good team-lead/manager)
I've been on one side or the other of 35 acquisitions. My experience is that the only people absolutely guaranteed of a job when it's all done are those who are have a written retention offer as an incentive to keep them in place and not bail prior to the merger closing. Many people will keep their jobs, some will lose them, and no one other than the aforementioned can be certain of either.
Perhaps pointing out the obvious, but even a retention offer isn't a guarantee of employment. It could be retracted at any time. And in fact, if the retention offer includes bonus after X amount of time, that could actually be a subtle reason for the company to not keep you employed for X time. Exactly this happened when MCI sold a support division to EDS back in the late 90's... people looking at healthy bonuses if they stayed on for 9 months (as memory serves) got canned right before they could collect. Note that I am most certainly not saying this happens every time. In fact, I collected a 10% retention bonus from a company takeover last year.
Marc
Well, Time Warner doesn't have much copper... a year or two ago, they ran fiber down many of the major roads in the area.
An unbelievable amount of labor went into getting the fiber from the street into the building.
We are two buildings away from a major intersection. They did some trenching very close to that intersection to run the fiber over to a telephone pole (and for possibly other reasons). Then strung the fiber (heavily cladded/protected the whole time mind you - not the yellow cladding that you are used to seeing) across about five telephone poles (over a driveway), then back down to the ground. From there, they go under a parking lot to the corner of the building, up the outside of the building (in conduit). Many days of work from multiple people.
We're at the entrance to a business park. What I don't know is what they'll do if other companies in the business park get fiber as well (if it will come to our building, or also go all the way back to the intersection).
Marc
...hosted by Xilinx even!
http://git.xilinx.com/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=linux-2.6-xlnx.git;a=summary
A real 6Mb connection is a fraction DS3 with a SLA. Ballpark, you're talking about $3k a month for that kind of service, and that's assuming you live in a major metro area where the loop won't be exorbitant. For a DS3-based service, you may very well be correct (possibly because of the way stuff is tariffed?). But...
My office just switched over from bonded DS1's with Broadwing (went down frequently) to a 15 Mbps Ethernet service offered by Time Warner. We "inspected" the equipment and it's Ethernet over GFP[*] over OC-12 (we believe configured as UPSR). $1200/mo. I believe that is several hundred less than the 2xDS1 that we had.
Marc
[*] GFP = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_Framing_Procedure
Not to mention Pb-free seems to greatly increase tin whisker problems. We need new materials quickly, because a meaningful percentage of the boards being produced right now are going to be dead in a few years.
For more info:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21151552/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
and of course, just to save someone a bit of typing or extra mouse click:
http://www.google.com/search?q=tin+whiskers
Marc
> DRM is not only socially undesirable, it's sexually perverse.
/. is DRM'ed? That's about the best excuse I've heard for nerds not being able to find/keep women!
So what you're saying is that everyone on
So the handy dandy window listing the 100's of updates you are missing to keep your WinXP machine up-to-date just popped up over the weekend. No clue why. After seeing this slashdot story, I scrolled down and saw "Windows Internet Exploer 7.0 for Windows XP". I read the details and the last line says:
"This update includes Windows Genuine Advantage Validation."
I guess so few people are "choosing" to install their spyware that they now they are bundling it with other stuff? This is AFTER Microsloth said they weren't going to do such a thing:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.aspx
Marc
Find a box fan and stand a few feet in front it. Put your hand between your legs at knee level and feel how much air is flowing between them. Now go stand behind the box fan and do the same thing. Your legs are the fins of a heatsink.
The velocity and pressure of the air coming out of the fan is different. It forces more air into places that it would otherwise would have never reached (be it due to distance, or due to resistance).
Marc
Marc
What do you mean old DDR2? How can it be old when DDR2 wasn't introduced but four years ago!? I don't own ANY DDR2 memory (or DDR3), much less any old DDR2.
Now, I do have 128 or 256 MB of EDO DRAM, a 700 MB SCSI hard drive (cost me around $1k in 1992), and a real AT-style keyboard (with big connector) that I wouldn't mind putting back into service... or we could go back further in the closet and gut the AT-compatible by tossing the 10 MHz 286 motherboard, and use its 70 MB hard drive from ~1987. I think I'll pass on trying to make use of the TRS-80/Tandy 16b with its full-height 12 MB hard drive. Some things are just not worth it, even to a nerd.
Marc