Valid point. One of the main reasons that Microsoft Windows 95/098/ME is so unstable has to do with crummy drivers, and there is not really anything Microsoft can do about it. Apple does not have this problem since a) they control the motherboard and b) they control the main extension bus(SCSi in the old days Firewire and USB nowadays) and there are not any good reason for exteral vendors to write drivers for these sort of things.
Yeah but in case of war the military capability of attacking a facility anywhere in a large country such a China would require a missile with a much longer range. China is one big joint.
There is a difference between latency and bandwidth, and even on a slower machine having lowe UI latency (quicker response of SOMETHING on the screen) can make the program feel faster. Multithreading can help a big deal with this. Try BeOS one day to really feel the effect.
While it is true that "multi-angle" is a euphemism for "skinflick" in the movie industry, many music videos also use them. I have a Eurythmycs concert with multi angles.
Music videos are cool on DVD because its currently the only mainstream way to deliver 5.1 surround sound. The video is pretty much incidental.
Actually, the question he had was whether the AMD 64 is capable of running the applications of the day in 2003 without a hitch. I IT after all a new processor architecture
Actually, I would not give a flying f*ck if China, Russia, India, Iran or for that matter Osama bin LAden's space agence puts a fission reactor into orbit. Space does not belong to the US of A, or anyone else.
The fundamental problem is if Osama 's Space agency puts the fissionable things into a SUB orbital trajectory! But then, The US can and does maintain hordes of rockets for exacylt that purpose. So who are they to moan?
AirFrance does not fly Paris-Brussels anymore because the train is faster, period. The thing is, in both cities the airport is aways from the city and you have a 30 minut checking and so on. The stations are in the middle of the cities and you cann arrive at the station 2 minutes before the train comes by. That 1-2 hour schlep to and from the airport makes all the difference.
One way of solving some of the problems is for the programs to take and return XML streams as arguments. Them immediately all the zealot will go "No, XML is too verbose". Well, yeah. It also contains more information which is w2at the problem is in the first place: Text streams are not self descriptive and tend to be poor in their semantics.
Purely out of interest, why can you not simply use a low-power Wifi for a headset? I am no expert, just asking. I mean, if your IP telephony headset does not need to talk to an antenna in the next building but only in the cellphone 2 meters away whats there to stop it?
Here in Germany its the same. There is, however, a snag. If you resign or leave the company before the end of March you have to give the Christmas salary back!!!
And with 13 smaller checks instead of 12 it so works out that the Taxman gets more of your cash. So this 13th check thing is crap because it reduces your yearly income with about 300 Euros as well as giving the idiots in charge an opportunity for blackmail.
The irritating thing is that they forced me to change my contract, it was not always like this.
Ok, my comment was mostly directed against old hardware, but we use Linux extensively for our servers. For something that only a techie is suposed to touch this is probably better (no idiot PHB fiddling around with Windows server because he is scared is a good thing:).
One thing to keep in mind with Redhat is that it installs a lot of servers in the background such as sendmail and such which is not win windows which tends to be a killer. My Linux machie is vastly faster than Windoze XP, but its also a fastish machine.
> My impression is that these non-profits receiving the donated computers are generally short on cash. If they have 30,000 to pay a staffer, then they likely have a few hundred to spare for a computer.
Not necessarily. Budgets for projects from funding agencies are sometimes very inflexible and have weird rules. The problem for a NP is, its not really their money. The dudes who gave it to them are looking over their shoulders and balk if they see purchases which look to them like luxuries or toys. For good reason, many times the money IS blown on toys and this sort of corruption with public money must be stamped out. But sometimes new techono comes in at a good price and then things get inflexible. For instance, 2 yerars ago a DVD burner was an luxury. Not is quickly getting cheap. If you did not budget for one 3 years ago when the grant came through, well, tough luck.
Unlike most of the other posters here, I work for a non-profit as sysadmin and have for several years.
Here are some comments.
First, the cost of scrounging for parts and fixing up and mucking about and getting your time wasted with older machines is quite often more than the cost of just bloody buying a new one. A new Pentium wazoo with all the bells and whistles costs maybe, what, 500 Dollars? If you go for a slightly older machine such as a 1Ghz Duron or Celeron you can get a powerhouse for half that which is pretty OK, but which does not have wear and tear on the harddisks, which has enough space and which will not self-destruct from heat fatigue next week. And is under warranty, which comes in handy when it does blow up.
Yes, Staroffice or whatever runs OK on a 500Mhz Pentium III. But that same second-hand Pentium III is going to have an old harddisk which is going to croak sometimes. Older machines are finicky about the RAM they take. Try to make it work with a USB scanner is going to cause more fuss than its worth.
Most non-profits have a LOT of interaction with funding agencies and such things. These people ALL use Word. In such a case your staff will balk (legitimately) if your office program is "pretty OK" with interoperating with Word. After OpenOffice f^Hmucked up a document for for the third time (even only slightly) when it got passed around to someone in some agency with Word it really gets pretty damn annoying for both you and the guy who decides if you get the money or not.
Non-profits do publications and presentations and such. Someone mentioned Gimp. Gimp is a toy. If you want to real publications you need a vector drawing program and page layout program anyways. Despite Scribus, the only choices here are Quark (mucho expensive) and Indesign (pretty expensive, but cheper than Quark, but not used outside very much. See interaction with others above). Photoshop blows Gimp out of the water over and again and Photoshop Elements is a damn fine program and not expensive at all.
Another problem is that, unlike a corporation, a non-profit's gifts tend to be a rather, em, interesting mix of several different kinds of machines with different parts and makes which makes maintenance a problem.
Linux does have a good role to play for servers though. All our servers run it and its really better than Windoze at working on older computers.
A super fast machine at a non-profit does have a use for machines that gets shared by several users, such as a fileserver.
So, basically, giving older machines to non-profits is a nice gesture but the extra maintenance and effort to keep a bunch of old somewhat cranky machines with hard-to get parts that do not always play nice with modern equipment is something to keep in mind. The cost of keeping admin staff to maintain is probably not worth it.
Actually, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (the first LSL game) was based on an Apple II Text-only game called SoftPorn Adventure. I remember discovering this little gem in a pack of disks my dad pirat...obtained from a friend when I was all of 14 years old and it was a blast!
The cover of the box of SoftPorn adventure had a set of people in a bathtub. One of them was Roberta Williams herself.
Get real. If they can put a capsule into space that can circle the bloody planet 14 times they can also land that capsule filled with a nuclearbombnaut instead of a taikonaut anywhere, including the East Coast.
> Most of the damage to chips happens durning > booting up, powering down and spikes and surges.
And a lot of the damage that people report in previous posts due to their machine popping in a heat wave is because the heatwave makes the powersupply go bonkers and it spikes the machine. I lost two machines due to the heatwave in Europe this summer and in one case the ram got flaky and the videocard and sometimes the Mobo. If you have random failures like that a bad PSU is very often the problem.
Yeah, its an ASUS board. Thanks for the NOAPIC tip. Its not that serious for 90% of the time I do have something stuck into the card anyways, but I will try it.
> People will work their ass off for a company that > treats them fair and square....
Any they will respect a boss who simply admits his failings much more and help then than when he walk in and throws around big words to try to impress simply to boost is own ego. Quite honestly, having a problem with computers is not really the end of the world. I have enough problems to change the boil in my car. The difference between me and my boss is that I am willing to admit it.
Any they will send a boss who bullshits all the time to hell ASAP.
Ok, so there is a software step where you have to tell te operating system not to use the board anymore. Fair enough.
Now two questions: a) Why would you want to do this? If the CPU is broken then the programs on that aprtition will be dead or erratic anyways. b) Can you simply plug out the board on the fly?
Probably also an option. But here (in Germany) a USB 2 card costs 5 bucks more than a USB 1 card which would sort of obviate the waste of PCI slots. Besides, a modern motherboard has USB 2 plugs on board.
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Valid point. One of the main reasons that Microsoft Windows 95/098/ME is so unstable has to do with crummy drivers, and there is not really anything Microsoft can do about it. Apple does not have this problem since a) they control the motherboard and b) they control the main extension bus(SCSi in the old days Firewire and USB nowadays) and there are not any good reason for exteral vendors to write drivers for these sort of things.
Yeah but in case of war the military capability of attacking a facility anywhere in a large country such a China would require a missile with a much longer range. China is one big joint.
There is a difference between latency and bandwidth, and even on a slower machine having lowe UI latency (quicker response of SOMETHING on the screen) can make the program feel faster. Multithreading can help a big deal with this. Try BeOS one day to really feel the effect.
While it is true that "multi-angle" is a euphemism for "skinflick" in the movie industry, many music videos also use them. I have a Eurythmycs concert with multi angles.
Music videos are cool on DVD because its currently the only mainstream way to deliver 5.1 surround sound. The video is pretty much incidental.
Actually, the question he had was whether the AMD 64 is capable of running the applications of the day in 2003 without a hitch. I IT after all a new processor architecture
Actually, I would not give a flying f*ck if China, Russia, India, Iran or for that matter Osama bin LAden's space agence puts a fission reactor into orbit. Space does not belong to the US of A, or anyone else.
The fundamental problem is if Osama 's Space agency puts the fissionable things into a SUB orbital trajectory! But then, The US can and does maintain hordes of rockets for exacylt that purpose. So who are they to moan?
AirFrance does not fly Paris-Brussels anymore because the train is faster, period. The thing is, in both cities the airport is aways from the city and you have a 30 minut checking and so on. The stations are in the middle of the cities and you cann arrive at the station 2 minutes before the train comes by. That 1-2 hour schlep to and from the airport makes all the difference.
Actually I saw in a job board the other day that Deutsche Bahn was looking for a physicist to examine sonic booms.
MIPS is apparently still used quite a lot in the embedded market. It is certainly not dying out.
One way of solving some of the problems is for the programs to take and return XML streams as arguments. Them immediately all the zealot will go "No, XML is too verbose". Well, yeah. It also contains more information which is w2at the problem is in the first place: Text streams are not self descriptive and tend to be poor in their semantics.
Purely out of interest, why can you not simply use a low-power Wifi for a headset? I am no expert, just asking. I mean, if your IP telephony headset does not need to talk to an antenna in the next building but only in the cellphone 2 meters away whats there to stop it?
Here in Germany its the same. There is, however, a snag. If you resign or leave the company before the end of March you have to give the Christmas salary back!!!
And with 13 smaller checks instead of 12 it so works out that the Taxman gets more of your cash. So this 13th check thing is crap because it reduces your yearly income with about 300 Euros as well as giving the idiots in charge an opportunity for blackmail.
The irritating thing is that they forced me to change my contract, it was not always like this.
The NSA ARE the ones who decides if the bizarre laws apply or not and I seriously doubt that they will boycott themselves...
Ok, my comment was mostly directed against old hardware, but we use Linux extensively for our servers. For something that only a techie is suposed to touch this is probably better (no idiot PHB fiddling around with Windows server because he is scared is a good thing :).
One thing to keep in mind with Redhat is that it installs a lot of servers in the background such as sendmail and such which is not win windows which tends to be a killer. My Linux machie is vastly faster than Windoze XP, but its also a fastish machine.
> My impression is that these non-profits receiving the donated computers are generally short on cash. If they have 30,000 to pay a staffer, then they likely have a few hundred to spare for a computer.
Not necessarily. Budgets for projects from funding agencies are sometimes very inflexible and have weird rules. The problem for a NP is, its not really their money. The dudes who gave it to them are looking over their shoulders and balk if they see purchases which look to them like luxuries or toys. For good reason, many times the money IS blown on toys and this sort of corruption with public money must be stamped out. But sometimes new techono comes in at a good price and then things get inflexible. For instance, 2 yerars ago a DVD burner was an luxury. Not is quickly getting cheap. If you did not budget for one 3 years ago when the grant came through, well, tough luck.
Unlike most of the other posters here, I work for a non-profit as sysadmin and have for several years.
Here are some comments.
First, the cost of scrounging for parts and fixing up and mucking about and getting your time wasted with older machines is quite often more than the cost of just bloody buying a new one. A new Pentium wazoo with all the bells and whistles costs maybe, what, 500 Dollars? If you go for a slightly older machine such as a 1Ghz Duron or Celeron you can get a powerhouse for half that which is pretty OK, but which does not have wear and tear on the harddisks, which has enough space and which will not self-destruct from heat fatigue next week. And is under warranty, which comes in handy when it does blow up.
Yes, Staroffice or whatever runs OK on a 500Mhz Pentium III. But that same second-hand Pentium III is going to have an old harddisk which is going to croak sometimes. Older machines are finicky about the RAM they take. Try to make it work with a USB scanner is going to cause more fuss than its worth.
Most non-profits have a LOT of interaction with funding agencies and such things. These people ALL use Word. In such a case your staff will balk (legitimately) if your office program is "pretty OK" with interoperating with Word. After OpenOffice f^Hmucked up a document for for the third time (even only slightly) when it got passed around to someone in some agency with Word it really gets pretty damn annoying for both you and the guy who decides if you get the money or not.
Non-profits do publications and presentations and such. Someone mentioned Gimp. Gimp is a toy. If you want to real publications you need a vector drawing program and page layout program anyways. Despite Scribus, the only choices here are Quark (mucho expensive) and Indesign (pretty expensive, but cheper than Quark, but not used outside very much. See interaction with others above). Photoshop blows Gimp out of the water over and again and Photoshop Elements is a damn fine program and not expensive at all.
Another problem is that, unlike a corporation, a non-profit's gifts tend to be a rather, em, interesting mix of several different kinds of machines with different parts and makes which makes maintenance a problem.
Linux does have a good role to play for servers though. All our servers run it and its really better than Windoze at working on older computers.
A super fast machine at a non-profit does have a use for machines that gets shared by several users, such as a fileserver.
So, basically, giving older machines to non-profits is a nice gesture but the extra maintenance and effort to keep a bunch of old somewhat cranky machines with hard-to get parts that do not always play nice with modern equipment is something to keep in mind. The cost of keeping admin staff to maintain is probably not worth it.
.
Actually, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (the first LSL game) was based on an Apple II Text-only game called SoftPorn Adventure. I remember discovering this little gem in a pack of disks my dad pirat...obtained from a friend when I was all of 14 years old and it was a blast!
The cover of the box of SoftPorn adventure had a set of people in a bathtub. One of them was Roberta Williams herself.
Get real. If they can put a capsule into space that can circle the bloody planet 14 times they can also land that capsule filled with a nuclearbombnaut instead of a taikonaut anywhere, including the East Coast.
> Most of the damage to chips happens durning
> booting up, powering down and spikes and surges.
And a lot of the damage that people report in previous posts due to their machine popping in a heat wave is because the heatwave makes the powersupply go bonkers and it spikes the machine. I lost two machines due to the heatwave in Europe this summer and in one case the ram got flaky and the videocard and sometimes the Mobo. If you have random failures like that a bad PSU is very often the problem.
Yeah, its an ASUS board. Thanks for the NOAPIC tip. Its not that serious for 90% of the time I do have something stuck into the card anyways, but I will try it.
Does playing Elite count?? Otherwise, how the hell are you going to get that one on your resume?
> People will work their ass off for a company that
> treats them fair and square....
Any they will respect a boss who simply admits his failings much more and help then than when he walk in and throws around big words to try to impress simply to boost is own ego. Quite honestly, having a problem with computers is not really the end of the world. I have enough problems to change the boil in my car. The difference between me and my boss is that I am willing to admit it.
Any they will send a boss who bullshits all the time to hell ASAP.
And they still work too! The one is a video card in a machine of mine (connected to a 17" LCD and the other one is a router.
Sadly, the old 75 MHz 486 Notebook I took out of the cupboard yesterday was not up to scratch anymore.
Ok, so there is a software step where you have to tell te operating system not to use the board anymore. Fair enough.
Now two questions:
a) Why would you want to do this? If the CPU is broken then the programs on that aprtition will be dead or erratic anyways.
b) Can you simply plug out the board on the fly?
Probably also an option. But here (in Germany) a USB 2 card costs 5 bucks more than a USB 1 card which would sort of obviate the waste of PCI slots. Besides, a modern motherboard has USB 2 plugs on board.