The thing about rackmounts is that they're terribly noisy, especially 1U units, because they've got numerous, small, high-rpm fans. It's a real cacaphony of noise and heat so if you don't have a separate room for them, you'll get sick of them really quickly. There's also the price premium you pay for 1U cases and low-profile memory compared to normal parts.
If you need multiple systems at home, I'd suggest mini-PC's from Shuttle. Small, quiet, and cheaper than rackmounts (slightly more than regular whitebox PCs). They're flat on top so they're very stackable... 3 or 4 of them would take up the space of a normal fullsize tower. They take normal PC components, and they have 100mbps network adapters built in (some of the high-end P4 units might have 1000mbps, I'm not sure)
A barebones Shuttle w/ sound, network, and video costs between $220 and $400. After that cost you just need to drop in a CPU, ram, and disk drive. Quite affordable.
At least one supercomputer cluster chose Shuttle PCs, I forget which one.
This is my second Slashdot post in a few weeks extolling these things. I don't work for them, honest. I'm just a very satisfied customer.:P
If you're really into LAN parties, lugging around a huge tower and a CRT is definitely a pain in the butt. Even when you're not lugging them around, those beasts eat up a lot of space and usually look ugly. (Let's face it- even if you don't agree, looks are an issue for PCs, especially if they're in your living room, especially if you happen to have a wife/girlfriend)
But I still don't see the appeal of a laptop here. Why not compromise and buy a tiny Shuttle PC? They're cheap, easy to build, and you're sacrificing ZERO power/upgradability compared to "normal" desktops, unless you realllllly need more than three drive bays or have a poopload of PCI cards. 5.1 audio, acceptable video, USB2, and firewire are built right into the motherboard. And most models have an AGP slot for a "real" video card.
And you could build one for a fraction of the cost of a "performance" laptop.
$220 for a Shuttle w/ nforce2 chipset
$70 for an Athlon2500 that you can easily run at 3200 speeds
$80 for 512MB of 400mhz ram
$200 for a Radeon9800pro
$300 for a 15" lcd
$80 for a hard disk
$50 for an optical drive
That's only $1000 for something that not even a $3000 laptop could beat, gaming-wise. And it still fits in a backpack.
Of course, the system I just described isn't really that useful for taking notes in class.:P
I am to disclose to the company anything that I create wether or not during company time, and wether or not it relates to the company. I also must agree that these same creations or inventions become the sole property of the company. I would like to change the wording to only include those creations, inventions and other Intellectual Property that is the direct result of work performed for the company, involved use of company property, and/or was created or invented during paid hours spent working for the company
I was in the same boat, asked to sign the same thing. I simply asked them to change it, and they said "no problem" and did so. I even had them amend the names of some existing projects of mine as specific exceptions to that clause.
While my experience of precisely ONE doesn't amount to much, statistically, I bet you'd have a similarly easy time of it at any small company unless it's being run by an absolutely insane dictator. Nine times out of ten it's just some boilerplate legalese thrown in by the company lawyer that the owner doesn't even care about- the guy who hired me didn't even know it was there.
Hint: think about human nature and laziness. Supply your own suggested, amended text, and they'll be much more likely to change it than they would be otherwise. Less work for them.
At a larger company, I bet you'd have a much tougher time getting that change done, just because there are more layers of red tape to go through, and maybe a fulltime legal department whose egos and anal-retentive preferences are at stake, as opposed to an independent lawyer whom they get in touch with three times a year when they need a little legal work done.
Good luck, and kudos for noticing that absolute B.S. in the contract.
Silver bricks? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down. Then our dad would assay it, and if it wasn't 99% pure, all we got for breakfast was CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease!
You had HEAVY ELEMENTS? In my day, the loose clouds of interstellar gas hadn't coalesced into star systems yet. All we had were hydrogen atoms and maybe a trace of helium around Christmas!
A lot of people using "average" televisions in the 20-to-27-inch range can't tell the difference between VCRs and DVDs when it comes to quality. I don't doubt that people with $8,000 plasma HDTV's will be creaming their pants over this new format, but I highly doubt that Joe Sixpack (who finally got a DVD player for Christmas) with a 25" screen will care. HD-DVD's will have to offer more than video quality compared to DVD's in order to make most consumers care.
And don't tell me that the picture quality of DVDs has room for improvement. I know- I can see the compression artifacts on a lot of occaisions. The color depth often seems to leave something to be desired compared to say, a movie theater. I'm saying that most consumers don't notice or care about that stuff, though, and think DVDs are "good enough".
"it seems to me that there will be many a person at Lego in fear of their jobs right now. My guess is that there must be someone at Lego who designs a means of constructing a model AT-AT or what have you out of the bricks, decides what specialised parts are required for the project and what have you."
It's never nice to see anybody losing their job, but it's pretty much a given that any shift in business direction will create/destroy job positions. I don't think you can really worry about that too much. Should I buy Lego's loss-making products to try and save those jobs? Should I worry about the guys at the blue paint factory when I buy a red car?
I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.
I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.
There were several that had their sound de-synched on my original AD-600. However, that sort of thing was fairly common on a lot of DVD players form all brands at the time, since DVD authoring and playback technology weren't quite mature yet... I don't think the AD-600's were any worse than any other DVD solution at the time.
Since then I've owned two different models of Apex players with zero problems. Not doubting your experiences with them; just adding my two cents.:)
Apex makes pretty good equipment.
on
More ApeXtreme Info
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Kind of a tangent, but I've had good experiences with Apex equipment. I've had a few Apex DVD players, I have an Apex TV, and my girlfriend has an Apex TV as well. All for great prices.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I just wanted to say that they make some quality stuff in my experience- a lot of people might be misled by their low prices. They're not Aiwa... their stuff seems to hold up well.:P
...the lights on their router are surely blinking like mad! Hopefully it won't catch fire, which is certainly a more dangerous (albeit more aesthetically pleasing) method of lighting.:-)
USA Today has a good article [usatoday.com] about how Mars is shifting from science to politics.
Wait a minute. You're suggesting that missions to other celestial bodies might have... political or nationalistic overtones that often far dwarf the actual scientific value of the mission?
Um... do you know anything about the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union?
Enron was a huge corporation with thousands of employees, probably 99.9% of whom were innocent and hard-working individuals, unrelated to the "creative accounting" going on at the hands of certain executives and their accounting minions. Unless the job applicant was head of accounting at Enron or something, I don't think it would be a red mark against them at all.
SCO, on the other hand, is a company which now pretty much exists only to be litigious assholes. The entire company is rotten and is just a negative presence in general. There's no way that somebody could be working for them now in good conscience. I would absolutely not hire somebody who worked at that company during this time unless it was pretty clear to me that they left the company *because of* SCO's terrible practices...
My first thought was the CompactFlash-sized "microdrive" hard drives developed by IBM (not sure if they belong to Hitachi now). A 1GB microdrive sells for about $200, though. Even with the volume discount Apple would surely get, it's hard to image they could hit that $99 price point at any capacity. And I guess flash memory is ruled out for price reasons too....
Don't forget about the female robot in [Tranzor Z]. The hooters would unscrew and fire from the chest like explosive warheads. Ahhh, such fond childhood memories.....
I think I was mentally scarred by that cartoon as a kid, and her rocket boobs. I remember the first time I saw a real pair. I remember fearing that they'd launch off and explode, and I also remember being slightly disappointed that they didn't.
(random FYI: Tranzor Z's original Japanese was Great Mazinger.)
You've never tried radiosity rendering, have you? Or maybe a TV-res scanline render animation of a few seconds that includes anti-aliases ray-traced reflections? 2.4GHz is spittle.
Yes, that's correct, but I think that you and I both know what 99% of people with the "upgrade itch" don't really need that much firepower, and just want the latest snazzy computer specs and toys!:)
I take exception to the "nobody else comes close" part. J. River's Media Center [musicex.com] has been doing everything iTunes offers for years, and with much more of the versatility that/. readers seem to crave than iTunes will ever give you. Yet if you're really attached to the look of iTunes, someone made a dupe [jriver.com].
Holy crow, that looks awesome. I just downloaded it. Thanks for the tip.
You sure ? My lib is 55GB now, and not cluggy at all. Runing on an AMD 1600XP with 512MB ram tho. But if you can afford to waste 55GB on mp3s, 512MB ram is even a small amount..
I have a dual AthlonMP 1.2, 1GB ram. The mp3 collection resides on a 7200rpm Western Digital drive, 8mb buffer. The way it "chugs" is actually kind of weird. When the iTunes window gets focus, it's unresponsive for about 5-10 seconds. During this unresponsive time, CPU activity does NOT spike according to Task Manager. RAM usage stays constant at around 40-50MB as well. For all intents and purposes iTunes.exe really looks like it's doing *nothing*.
The only anomalous thing I can see about iTunes.exe is that it has close to 1000 GDI objects open, which is 10x more than any other process. I don't know the reasons for or implications of that.
After 5-10 seconds it works fine and is responsive. The problem has gotten worse as I've imported more and more music into it, so I've assumed that it's a library-size thing.
Other people on the Apple iTunes forums have noted the same thing.
I've
For me, iTunes sets the bar here, as far as anything I've tried on Windows. It's so easy in iTunes to drag songs to other playlists. Why does iTunes get this SO right, and nobody else comes close?
What I like to do is listen to my entire collection on shuffle, most of the time. Occaisionally I'll hear a song that I'd like to add to one of my playlists (coding music playlist, one for my next roadtrip, etc). In iTunes this is easy. In Winamp it's possible but kind of a mess, and you can't drag from the playlist window to the list of playlists in the Media Library window. And I diskike the "let's have a different window for everything" interface concept of Winamp in general.
Those are nitpicky concerns, but for a music player they're pretty vital. It's got to be easy to use, since I have it open, off to the side, while coding... if I have to devote a lot of thought to futzing around with somebody's kludgy interface, it's a big distraction.
Not that iTunes is perfect. Chugs like a mofo when you've got 50-60GB of music imported...
I agree that this is a very well-written and well-argued artcle. It's ideal for somebody who is non-technical and doesn't grasp the concept of the GPL, such as management types.
That's why I'm not toally thrilled with the liberal use of jargon like "FUD" in the article. While it's second nature for us to use that term, I doubt that non-technical types will know what that means. It's easily-enough explained, but it might cheapen an otherwise-supurb article in their eyes. Communication is all about understanding your audience and expressing your message appropriately...
I feel bad about nitpicking such a nicely-written article. It's great otherwise. Kudos to the author.:)
The emulator won't work unless you have a copy of the required ROM file, mt32_pcm.rom
So, don't slaughter their bandwidth/server by downloading the emulator unless you've got this file. Since I already made this mistake, I thought I might try to spread the word and cushion their Slashdotting, if only a little.:-)
Anybody know how many concurrennt queries slashdot gets at peak?
It would be an interesting reference point.
I agree, it would.
I wouldn't be able to take a stab at the actual numeric value for your answer, but I believe that Slashdot (as most large, content-driven websites need to do) caches a lot of data, so that it doesn't need to be queried out of the database every single time somebody requests the page. That greatly cuts down on the actual number of queries being slung at the database.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about rackmounts is that they're terribly noisy, especially 1U units, because they've got numerous, small, high-rpm fans. It's a real cacaphony of noise and heat so if you don't have a separate room for them, you'll get sick of them really quickly. There's also the price premium you pay for 1U cases and low-profile memory compared to normal parts. If you need multiple systems at home, I'd suggest mini-PC's from Shuttle. Small, quiet, and cheaper than rackmounts (slightly more than regular whitebox PCs). They're flat on top so they're very stackable... 3 or 4 of them would take up the space of a normal fullsize tower. They take normal PC components, and they have 100mbps network adapters built in (some of the high-end P4 units might have 1000mbps, I'm not sure) A barebones Shuttle w/ sound, network, and video costs between $220 and $400. After that cost you just need to drop in a CPU, ram, and disk drive. Quite affordable. At least one supercomputer cluster chose Shuttle PCs, I forget which one. This is my second Slashdot post in a few weeks extolling these things. I don't work for them, honest. I'm just a very satisfied customer. :P
If you're really into LAN parties, lugging around a huge tower and a CRT is definitely a pain in the butt. Even when you're not lugging them around, those beasts eat up a lot of space and usually look ugly. (Let's face it- even if you don't agree, looks are an issue for PCs, especially if they're in your living room, especially if you happen to have a wife/girlfriend) But I still don't see the appeal of a laptop here. Why not compromise and buy a tiny Shuttle PC? They're cheap, easy to build, and you're sacrificing ZERO power/upgradability compared to "normal" desktops, unless you realllllly need more than three drive bays or have a poopload of PCI cards. 5.1 audio, acceptable video, USB2, and firewire are built right into the motherboard. And most models have an AGP slot for a "real" video card. And you could build one for a fraction of the cost of a "performance" laptop. $220 for a Shuttle w/ nforce2 chipset $70 for an Athlon2500 that you can easily run at 3200 speeds $80 for 512MB of 400mhz ram $200 for a Radeon9800pro $300 for a 15" lcd $80 for a hard disk $50 for an optical drive That's only $1000 for something that not even a $3000 laptop could beat, gaming-wise. And it still fits in a backpack. Of course, the system I just described isn't really that useful for taking notes in class. :P
Now...if I had a seperate monitor for each desktop, that would be cool.
:P
If you actually had a separate monitor for each desktop, it would be hard to call them virtual at that point, wouldn't it?
I am to disclose to the company anything that I create wether or not during company time, and wether or not it relates to the company. I also must agree that these same creations or inventions become the sole property of the company. I would like to change the wording to only include those creations, inventions and other Intellectual Property that is the direct result of work performed for the company, involved use of company property, and/or was created or invented during paid hours spent working for the company
I was in the same boat, asked to sign the same thing. I simply asked them to change it, and they said "no problem" and did so. I even had them amend the names of some existing projects of mine as specific exceptions to that clause.
While my experience of precisely ONE doesn't amount to much, statistically, I bet you'd have a similarly easy time of it at any small company unless it's being run by an absolutely insane dictator. Nine times out of ten it's just some boilerplate legalese thrown in by the company lawyer that the owner doesn't even care about- the guy who hired me didn't even know it was there.
Hint: think about human nature and laziness. Supply your own suggested, amended text, and they'll be much more likely to change it than they would be otherwise. Less work for them.
At a larger company, I bet you'd have a much tougher time getting that change done, just because there are more layers of red tape to go through, and maybe a fulltime legal department whose egos and anal-retentive preferences are at stake, as opposed to an independent lawyer whom they get in touch with three times a year when they need a little legal work done.
Good luck, and kudos for noticing that absolute B.S. in the contract.
Silver bricks? You was lucky! In my day we had mine our own ore and smelt it down. Then our dad would assay it, and if it wasn't 99% pure, all we got for breakfast was CompUSA Silver Thermal Grease!
You had HEAVY ELEMENTS? In my day, the loose clouds of interstellar gas hadn't coalesced into star systems yet. All we had were hydrogen atoms and maybe a trace of helium around Christmas!
A lot of people using "average" televisions in the 20-to-27-inch range can't tell the difference between VCRs and DVDs when it comes to quality. I don't doubt that people with $8,000 plasma HDTV's will be creaming their pants over this new format, but I highly doubt that Joe Sixpack (who finally got a DVD player for Christmas) with a 25" screen will care. HD-DVD's will have to offer more than video quality compared to DVD's in order to make most consumers care.
And don't tell me that the picture quality of DVDs has room for improvement. I know- I can see the compression artifacts on a lot of occaisions. The color depth often seems to leave something to be desired compared to say, a movie theater. I'm saying that most consumers don't notice or care about that stuff, though, and think DVDs are "good enough".
"it seems to me that there will be many a person at Lego in fear of their jobs right now. My guess is that there must be someone at Lego who designs a means of constructing a model AT-AT or what have you out of the bricks, decides what specialised parts are required for the project and what have you."
It's never nice to see anybody losing their job, but it's pretty much a given that any shift in business direction will create/destroy job positions. I don't think you can really worry about that too much. Should I buy Lego's loss-making products to try and save those jobs? Should I worry about the guys at the blue paint factory when I buy a red car?
I like the "back to the basics" idea. Today's Lego sets look way too specialized to me- too many specialized pieces, not enough basic Lego bricks- so there's a lot less creative potential. They also look way too expensive.
I think that selling basic Lego sets again is a nice potential return to the things I liked about Legos as a kid in the early 80's. It would be nice if they could sell the basic sets in addition to the fancier licsensed sets and the advanced products like Mindstorms instead of canning those products entirely, but all in all I like this move.
There were several that had their sound de-synched on my original AD-600. However, that sort of thing was fairly common on a lot of DVD players form all brands at the time, since DVD authoring and playback technology weren't quite mature yet... I don't think the AD-600's were any worse than any other DVD solution at the time.
:)
Since then I've owned two different models of Apex players with zero problems. Not doubting your experiences with them; just adding my two cents.
Kind of a tangent, but I've had good experiences with Apex equipment. I've had a few Apex DVD players, I have an Apex TV, and my girlfriend has an Apex TV as well. All for great prices.
:P
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I just wanted to say that they make some quality stuff in my experience- a lot of people might be misled by their low prices. They're not Aiwa... their stuff seems to hold up well.
...the lights on their router are surely blinking like mad! Hopefully it won't catch fire, which is certainly a more dangerous (albeit more aesthetically pleasing) method of lighting. :-)
USA Today has a good article [usatoday.com] about how Mars is shifting from science to politics.
Wait a minute. You're suggesting that missions to other celestial bodies might have... political or nationalistic overtones that often far dwarf the actual scientific value of the mission?
Um... do you know anything about the space race between the U.S. and Soviet Union?
Well, seems we've had bad luck and you had good luck, and we could even say you deserved the good luck and we deserved the bad luck.
:)
On the subject of space exploration, this "we" and "you" business seems especially... I don't know... kind of pointless. We're all humans.
Enron was a huge corporation with thousands of employees, probably 99.9% of whom were innocent and hard-working individuals, unrelated to the "creative accounting" going on at the hands of certain executives and their accounting minions. Unless the job applicant was head of accounting at Enron or something, I don't think it would be a red mark against them at all.
SCO, on the other hand, is a company which now pretty much exists only to be litigious assholes. The entire company is rotten and is just a negative presence in general. There's no way that somebody could be working for them now in good conscience. I would absolutely not hire somebody who worked at that company during this time unless it was pretty clear to me that they left the company *because of* SCO's terrible practices...
Correction: looks like you can get a 2GB microdrive and not a 1GB one for about $200, actually. But, still... doesn't seem feasible price-wise...
What kind of storage device would these use?
My first thought was the CompactFlash-sized "microdrive" hard drives developed by IBM (not sure if they belong to Hitachi now). A 1GB microdrive sells for about $200, though. Even with the volume discount Apple would surely get, it's hard to image they could hit that $99 price point at any capacity. And I guess flash memory is ruled out for price reasons too....
Don't forget about the female robot in [Tranzor Z]. The hooters would unscrew and fire from the chest like explosive warheads. Ahhh, such fond childhood memories.....
I think I was mentally scarred by that cartoon as a kid, and her rocket boobs. I remember the first time I saw a real pair. I remember fearing that they'd launch off and explode, and I also remember being slightly disappointed that they didn't.
(random FYI: Tranzor Z's original Japanese was Great Mazinger.)
Those keyboards are absolute hell to type on, if you're typing more than a few characters per hour. Not a solution.
You've never tried radiosity rendering, have you? Or maybe a TV-res scanline render animation of a few seconds that includes anti-aliases ray-traced reflections? 2.4GHz is spittle.
:)
Yes, that's correct, but I think that you and I both know what 99% of people with the "upgrade itch" don't really need that much firepower, and just want the latest snazzy computer specs and toys!
I take exception to the "nobody else comes close" part. J. River's Media Center [musicex.com] has been doing everything iTunes offers for years, and with much more of the versatility that /. readers seem to crave than iTunes will ever give you. Yet if you're really attached to the look of iTunes, someone made a dupe [jriver.com].
Holy crow, that looks awesome. I just downloaded it. Thanks for the tip.
You sure ? My lib is 55GB now, and not cluggy at all. Runing on an AMD 1600XP with 512MB ram tho. But if you can afford to waste 55GB on mp3s, 512MB ram is even a small amount..
I have a dual AthlonMP 1.2, 1GB ram. The mp3 collection resides on a 7200rpm Western Digital drive, 8mb buffer. The way it "chugs" is actually kind of weird. When the iTunes window gets focus, it's unresponsive for about 5-10 seconds. During this unresponsive time, CPU activity does NOT spike according to Task Manager. RAM usage stays constant at around 40-50MB as well. For all intents and purposes iTunes.exe really looks like it's doing *nothing*.
The only anomalous thing I can see about iTunes.exe is that it has close to 1000 GDI objects open, which is 10x more than any other process. I don't know the reasons for or implications of that.
After 5-10 seconds it works fine and is responsive. The problem has gotten worse as I've imported more and more music into it, so I've assumed that it's a library-size thing.
Other people on the Apple iTunes forums have noted the same thing. I've
For me, iTunes sets the bar here, as far as anything I've tried on Windows. It's so easy in iTunes to drag songs to other playlists. Why does iTunes get this SO right, and nobody else comes close?
What I like to do is listen to my entire collection on shuffle, most of the time. Occaisionally I'll hear a song that I'd like to add to one of my playlists (coding music playlist, one for my next roadtrip, etc). In iTunes this is easy. In Winamp it's possible but kind of a mess, and you can't drag from the playlist window to the list of playlists in the Media Library window. And I diskike the "let's have a different window for everything" interface concept of Winamp in general.
Those are nitpicky concerns, but for a music player they're pretty vital. It's got to be easy to use, since I have it open, off to the side, while coding... if I have to devote a lot of thought to futzing around with somebody's kludgy interface, it's a big distraction.
Not that iTunes is perfect. Chugs like a mofo when you've got 50-60GB of music imported...
I agree that this is a very well-written and well-argued artcle. It's ideal for somebody who is non-technical and doesn't grasp the concept of the GPL, such as management types.
:)
That's why I'm not toally thrilled with the liberal use of jargon like "FUD" in the article. While it's second nature for us to use that term, I doubt that non-technical types will know what that means. It's easily-enough explained, but it might cheapen an otherwise-supurb article in their eyes. Communication is all about understanding your audience and expressing your message appropriately...
I feel bad about nitpicking such a nicely-written article. It's great otherwise. Kudos to the author.
The emulator won't work unless you have a copy of the required ROM file, mt32_pcm.rom
:-)
So, don't slaughter their bandwidth/server by downloading the emulator unless you've got this file. Since I already made this mistake, I thought I might try to spread the word and cushion their Slashdotting, if only a little.
Anybody know how many concurrennt queries slashdot gets at peak? It would be an interesting reference point.
I agree, it would.
I wouldn't be able to take a stab at the actual numeric value for your answer, but I believe that Slashdot (as most large, content-driven websites need to do) caches a lot of data, so that it doesn't need to be queried out of the database every single time somebody requests the page. That greatly cuts down on the actual number of queries being slung at the database.