I'm a PCP&C fan too. Antec's no slouch either, but my Silencer 400W keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails
hooked up to my 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird within 1% of perfect, which is pretty impressive.
No complaints on the quality, but the Silencer 400 is not as quiet as I'd hoped.
Also, the airflow is suboptimal: one fan, with a grate on the front, rather than the bottom.
I'm thinking Enermax or Antec, next time, with two temperature-controlled fans.
Could you please provide a link to Google's use of IDE drives for all their storage, I can't seem to find a page saying that their Linux are all running on IDE only.
Do a Google search on google cluster ide. The third result is an Intel customer profile on Google:
In Google's environment, disk I/O
performance is an overriding factor, yet
the cost of high-end SCSI disk subsystems
is prohibitive. So the company standardized around inexpensive IDE technology, outfitting each server with a pair of internal disks storing either 22GB or 40GB apiece. "We did a lot of benchmarking early on, and we found that for the best price/performance we would set up two IDE hard disks, each on a separate controller," says Reese.
I like two IDE drives (one per channel), plus SCSI for the CD-RW and/or DVD.
Re:Mozilla is the BEST browser!
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 2
How about... password autocomplete for people who cannot remember their password fully.
Just what I need, Zippy the paperclip coaching a snoop: "You're getting warmer...."
I can see how bombing Afghanistan would garner higher ratings than the NASCAR race, despite the dearth of new information.
But don't you think NBC has chosen an unfortunate banner: "America Strikes Back"?
You want to research the doctrine of first sale. A turn-of-the-century court case involving, essentially, EULAs in books established that a consumer has the right to transfer, in whole, a book, notwithstanding any statement to contrary by the vendor or manufacturer.
I believe this was subsequently written into law for records, but this may have been turned on its ear by passage of UCITA, which gave EULAs teeth.
Pepsi came on campus here at BGSU [bgsu.edu] and gave them $8 million dollars to take
PepsiCo as the main supplier of soft drinks (rather than having both like they did before).
Intel is pulling the same bullshit. They want to squeeze out the competition so they best
way to do that is to force large outlets of computers to stick w/one chip vendor.
I don't think that's the issue, here.
Vendors get a discount for a line of computers (e.g., Dimension, OptiPlex) that use exclusively Intel processors.
That's essentially why the Select line exists: to sell Athlons without jeopardizing Intel discounts on other lines.
I'm not aware of additional discounts for total exclusivity.
Another rather important consideration is battery life.
I have pretty good luck borrowing power in airports and hotels, but a laptop that shuts down after less than 3 hours is annoying.
A dead laptop is useless.
If you travel further than your living room, pay special attention to battery life.
Unfortunately, models change so quickly that magazine reviews can scarcely keep up, so you're at the mercy of the specs.
One thing that sold me on the VAIO F-series is that you can take out the floppy and put in a second battery.
That's good for about five hours, total.
Rambus RAM is nowadays well under $1/MB (the Chip Merchant, for instance,
sells 256MB of PC800 RDRAM for $170) - the only thing that makes it look
expensive now is the utter collapse of the DRAM market.
Crucial sells 256 MB of DDR 133 for $40, so the relative cost of Rambus is, in fact, rising.
The question is: will Intel build a decent DDR chipset?
The Original series (TOS) I liked beter because it was more about the people solving the problem instead of the easy way out as previously mentioned. (How much does everyone hate the HoloDeck?!!)
I seem to recall an episode in which Kirk died on a space walk, but the crew regenerated him from a transporter matrix.
Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi.
James Martin says "a land of milk and honey."...
1984, anyone?
Utopian predictions are the optimistic ramblings of a programmer: hand waving, "sure, we can do that."
We have lasers and spy satellites, so SDI is just a Small Matter of Programming (a billion lines of fault-tolerant, real-time code).
On a smaller scale, people have been predicting great things for home automation.
It's technologically possible, but the market cooperation isn't there.
My Sony TV and VCR don't talk to each other very well, let alone with the Onkyo receiver.
Do you really think GE, Maytag, and Sub-Zero will cooperate any better?
In the present marketplace, there's no incentive to cooperate, to adopt standards.
As a cynical tester, I give slightly more credence to anti-utopian predictions.
The Disney copyright act, the DMCA, UCITA, etc., are all taking us in the direction of Richard Stallman's The Right to Read.
It's not a matter of what you can do.
For every good idea you have about what you can do with conceivable technology, there are probably three conflicting patents in the U.S., alone.
We are largely at the mercy of billion-dollar companies, each of which is motivated by profit.
The companies don't care about customers, only about customers' money.
Take, for example, Microsoft Office, which is in the interesting position of competing with itself.
The trade rags are reporting that many business customers see no reason to upgrade Office 95.
Microsoft identifies that problem and responds with a subscription model.
Eventually, they'll obsolete Office 95 (as they are obsoleting Windows 95); problem solved.
Utopian view: companies will develop bug-free software that anticipates my every need.
Anti-utopian view: I will be hauled off to jail if I attempt to install my copy of Office 2010 on more than one computer.
Reality: software still basically sucks and costs too much, but we deal.
Looks like (relevant parts of) the source code is available
Avery claims that Vidomi is derived from the GPLed VirtualDub.
If this is true, then Vidomi source must be released.
Vidomi hopes to create a "user does the link" loophole.
This is analagous to the Objective C front end situation described in "Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism".
NeXT gave in.
Perhaps Vidomi will, too.
Or perhaps, as the headline suggests, this will go to court and set a legal precedent.
Tom Christiansen, a vocal GPL critic, has argued a position similar to Vidomi's. Dynamic linking is an interface. If there is a non-GPLed implementation of the interface, then the program is not necessarily derived from the GPLed library.
People have written GPLed replacements for proprietary programs, why not the other way around?
However, I suspect that a court would see through the sham replacements in this case.
Vidomi advertises functionality that requires GPLed code; therefore, it is a derived work (under copyright law), subject to the license of the original code.
After marketing, technology is the dominant factor in a game's success.
Quake 2 had no gameplay innovations.
It sold on reputation and nice (brown) graphics.
Thief, Thief 2, and System Shock 2 had innovative gameplay and good stories.
They didn't sell, because of the low-polygon graphics.
I'm not criticizing the market or the industry (although there is something wrong with Eidos pumping millions into Daikatana while Looking Glass went bankrupt)--graphics sell.
Summer movies become blockbusters on effects, alone.
Successful free software projects, like gcc, Linux, Apache, etc., have a long lifespan.
The development effort remains worthwhile for years.
High-tech entertainment has a short lifespan.
The incentive structure for games is similar to that for movies: compete for mainstream dollars with flashy effects.
That said, I do believe there is room for gameplay innovation.
The variety of a choose-your-own-adventure book would be welcome.
The unpredictability of Clue would be nice: play it again and maybe it's not the butler, this time.
Adventure-game conversations could go from turn based, so to speak, to real time.
Now I have evidence to back up the things I've been saying for years.
Most businesses fail.
That was true before 2000 and that will be true after 2001.
Eazel, like so many high-profile dot-bombs, burned its VC like birch.
Eazel is not evidence.
It's a statistic.
Currently, I'd say Red Hat is the best example of a successful free-software business.
It sells a brand and support, and it's going to be profitable Real Soon Now.
That said, I'm not sure Red Hat is the best prototype for commercial free software.
Take, for example, a specialized database system, like school records.
A university pays big money to a clumsy Oracle VAR for a poorly designed school records system.
Multiply that by ten or a hundred schools (each with an IT department and a CS school), remove the Oracle VAR (and maybe the Oracle) and you have a free software project with paid developers.
> media only costs a fraction more than current CD-R media
$10 per 2-pack, according to another post.
1500% is a pretty large fraction.
The other post was probably citing DD-RW prices, so you should compare to CD-RWs, which retail for about $2.50 each.
That's 200%, not 1500%.
As for comparing CD-R to DD-RW, you're repeating many of the same arguments of CD-R v. CD-RW.
You need to burn a CD-RW about twenty times before the cost of media breaks even with a CD-R.
You need to burn a lot of CD-RWs before the cost of the drive breaks even with CD-R.
DD-RW is priced competitively with CD-RW.
I doubt that DD-R will be priced competitively with CD-R.
how do prices triple and still stay under $0.50USD?
Retail/rebate rat race.
Best Buy had a 50-pack Imation spindle for $5 after rebates one week, and a 50-pack Maxell spindle for $5 after rebates the next. CompUSA had a 100-pack Imation spindle for $10 after rebates and a 50-pack of Imation slim cases free after rebates.
Also, it may depend on patent royalties and piracy taxes in your area.
The article claims CD-R royalties are $0.08USD, and I think there's another penny or two for the piracy tax, so I guess the disks are being sold at close to cost in the US.
Who's busting balls?
I'm excited that Epic continues to support OpenGL and Linux.
It would be nice if the licensees, such as 3D Realms, went that extra mile, too.
We're not doing too bad, though.
Four Quake 2s: SoF, Heretic II, Kingpin, Sin; one Quake 3: Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2; one Unreal: Deus Ex; one Lithtech: Shogo.
However, no Half-Life, no NOLF, no Voyager or DS9.
All that work porting Unreal to Linux so that Loki can port Deus Ex almost a year after the Windows release?
Hopefully, Epic, id, and Monolith will force each other to be cross platform (including Linux), if only as a checklist item.
Can I quote you on that?
How does this sound: "A high-level source at Epic Games promised the Slashdot community that Unreal 2 and Duke Nukem Forever will be released for Linux"?
Or, I can just go with "Bullshit."
I personally have both versions (Windows and Linux) of all of the following games
You're feeding the hand that bites you.
Why should we pay full price just for the privilege of running on another platform?
id, EDO, Loki, et al. are not charities.
They will not survive by marketing to "supporters."
The "tightwads" are their bread and butter.
They have to put quality, affordable titles on the shelf in a timely manner.
I, for one, would love to see them put it all in one box.
id and Epic got it (mostly) right by letting you download Windows and Linux executables, regardless of which you bought.
That, of course, explains why the $10 Quake 3 Linux tin is finally flying off the shelves.
What id got wrong was expecting their sales numbers to mean anything.
The Windows version came out first and, until recently, cost less.
Who knows how many copies of the Windows version are running on Linux (and vice versa)?
Dare has completely avoided the most important issue: compatibility.
I work for a company that produces a DBMS that is marketed as "post-relational."
It is, in fact, a hierarchical DBMS with a relational layer and a separate object data management layer.
(The relational and object layer are linked by the conventional class-table, object-row, attribute-column mapping.)
The object database is the strategic offering, with a proprietary scripting language, proprietary COM and Java bindings, and a proprietary web "server pages" technology.
(If you think I'm using "proprietary" as a dirty word, you're right.)
The relational database is still the money maker.
We get "relational refugees" from Oracle and Sybase.
We have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) customer replacing MySQL with our ODBC interface.
As patchy as the SQL, ODBC, and JDBC standards may be, they have commoditized the DBMS market.
Until object databases can do the same (the ODMG standards don't even come close), they lock you into a proprietary solution.
Ultimately, if your database doesn't scale as well as you'd like, that will hurt performance.
Victor Yodaiken chose to license a patent for use in software released under version 2 of the GNU GPL.
The net effect is less freedom than mutual defense or simply publishing the "invention" to serve as prior art.
nobody creates a passenger aircraft, or an automobile, or a new, nicer design of
personal computer for pure creative self-actualising joy
You're talking about things that can't be readily shared.
Why would I design any of those things?
Neither Boeing, Ford, nor Apple need my charity.
On the other hand, hobbyists frequently share plans for things that are easier to make--furniture, flight-sim cockpits, automobile "mods", etc.
Software is easy to share.
Some of the free software people have created is the software equivalent of a consumer good.
Many here have pointed out the folly of Eazel spending all of its venture capital to develop, in essence, a file manager.
If all the things discovered by companies were free for other people to learn and use
A patent-free world would not necessarily be a Star Trek utopia.
The strongest argument for patents is the incentive to publish an invention that would otherwise be a trade secret.
That said, I believe that trade secrets are less evil than patents.
Rare is the invention that is twenty years ahead of its time.
Rarer still one that no one else could reinvent in that time.
That's what some of the folks said in "Meet the New Game Gods," PC Gamer 11/00.
Stevie Case got a job in Ion Storm QA after beating John Romero in a Quake challenge.
She says, "I was the lowest paid person when I started at Ion Storm out of a hundred people--the lowest paid, and I just used my free time, I did everything extra I could, I offered to help, I was learning level design, learning to write strategy guides, all this extra stuff.
And if you put in the extra effort, they see that and move you up."
American McGee, who started at id, says,
"I started anwering the phones and went from that to writing code, doing levels, doing sound effects, making music, I mean just everything and anything I could get my hands on I would take over and do the best thing I could with it."
Ed Del Castillo parlayed contacts from a video arcade into a Mindcraft support job.
Slashdot Mirror
No complaints on the quality, but the Silencer 400 is not as quiet as I'd hoped. Also, the airflow is suboptimal: one fan, with a grate on the front, rather than the bottom. I'm thinking Enermax or Antec, next time, with two temperature-controlled fans.
Do a Google search on google cluster ide. The third result is an Intel customer profile on Google:
I like two IDE drives (one per channel), plus SCSI for the CD-RW and/or DVD.
Just what I need, Zippy the paperclip coaching a snoop: "You're getting warmer...."
I can see how bombing Afghanistan would garner higher ratings than the NASCAR race, despite the dearth of new information. But don't you think NBC has chosen an unfortunate banner: "America Strikes Back"?
I believe this was subsequently written into law for records, but this may have been turned on its ear by passage of UCITA, which gave EULAs teeth.
Intel is pulling the same bullshit. They want to squeeze out the competition so they best way to do that is to force large outlets of computers to stick w/one chip vendor.
I don't think that's the issue, here. Vendors get a discount for a line of computers (e.g., Dimension, OptiPlex) that use exclusively Intel processors. That's essentially why the Select line exists: to sell Athlons without jeopardizing Intel discounts on other lines. I'm not aware of additional discounts for total exclusivity.
I'd like to resolve local DNS requests from the DHCP clients table. Are there any sub-$300 routers that do this?
A dead laptop is useless. If you travel further than your living room, pay special attention to battery life. Unfortunately, models change so quickly that magazine reviews can scarcely keep up, so you're at the mercy of the specs.
One thing that sold me on the VAIO F-series is that you can take out the floppy and put in a second battery. That's good for about five hours, total.
Crucial sells 256 MB of DDR 133 for $40, so the relative cost of Rambus is, in fact, rising. The question is: will Intel build a decent DDR chipset?
I seem to recall an episode in which Kirk died on a space walk, but the crew regenerated him from a transporter matrix. Star Trek has never been hard sci-fi.
Utopian predictions are the optimistic ramblings of a programmer: hand waving, "sure, we can do that." We have lasers and spy satellites, so SDI is just a Small Matter of Programming (a billion lines of fault-tolerant, real-time code). On a smaller scale, people have been predicting great things for home automation. It's technologically possible, but the market cooperation isn't there. My Sony TV and VCR don't talk to each other very well, let alone with the Onkyo receiver. Do you really think GE, Maytag, and Sub-Zero will cooperate any better? In the present marketplace, there's no incentive to cooperate, to adopt standards.
As a cynical tester, I give slightly more credence to anti-utopian predictions. The Disney copyright act, the DMCA, UCITA, etc., are all taking us in the direction of Richard Stallman's The Right to Read.
It's not a matter of what you can do. For every good idea you have about what you can do with conceivable technology, there are probably three conflicting patents in the U.S., alone. We are largely at the mercy of billion-dollar companies, each of which is motivated by profit. The companies don't care about customers, only about customers' money. Take, for example, Microsoft Office, which is in the interesting position of competing with itself. The trade rags are reporting that many business customers see no reason to upgrade Office 95. Microsoft identifies that problem and responds with a subscription model. Eventually, they'll obsolete Office 95 (as they are obsoleting Windows 95); problem solved.
Utopian view: companies will develop bug-free software that anticipates my every need. Anti-utopian view: I will be hauled off to jail if I attempt to install my copy of Office 2010 on more than one computer. Reality: software still basically sucks and costs too much, but we deal.
Avery claims that Vidomi is derived from the GPLed VirtualDub. If this is true, then Vidomi source must be released.
Vidomi hopes to create a "user does the link" loophole. This is analagous to the Objective C front end situation described in "Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism". NeXT gave in. Perhaps Vidomi will, too. Or perhaps, as the headline suggests, this will go to court and set a legal precedent.
Tom Christiansen, a vocal GPL critic, has argued a position similar to Vidomi's. Dynamic linking is an interface. If there is a non-GPLed implementation of the interface, then the program is not necessarily derived from the GPLed library. People have written GPLed replacements for proprietary programs, why not the other way around? However, I suspect that a court would see through the sham replacements in this case. Vidomi advertises functionality that requires GPLed code; therefore, it is a derived work (under copyright law), subject to the license of the original code.
After marketing, technology is the dominant factor in a game's success. Quake 2 had no gameplay innovations. It sold on reputation and nice (brown) graphics. Thief, Thief 2, and System Shock 2 had innovative gameplay and good stories. They didn't sell, because of the low-polygon graphics.
I'm not criticizing the market or the industry (although there is something wrong with Eidos pumping millions into Daikatana while Looking Glass went bankrupt)--graphics sell. Summer movies become blockbusters on effects, alone.
Successful free software projects, like gcc, Linux, Apache, etc., have a long lifespan. The development effort remains worthwhile for years. High-tech entertainment has a short lifespan. The incentive structure for games is similar to that for movies: compete for mainstream dollars with flashy effects.
That said, I do believe there is room for gameplay innovation. The variety of a choose-your-own-adventure book would be welcome. The unpredictability of Clue would be nice: play it again and maybe it's not the butler, this time. Adventure-game conversations could go from turn based, so to speak, to real time.
Most businesses fail. That was true before 2000 and that will be true after 2001. Eazel, like so many high-profile dot-bombs, burned its VC like birch. Eazel is not evidence. It's a statistic.
Currently, I'd say Red Hat is the best example of a successful free-software business. It sells a brand and support, and it's going to be profitable Real Soon Now. That said, I'm not sure Red Hat is the best prototype for commercial free software.
Take, for example, a specialized database system, like school records. A university pays big money to a clumsy Oracle VAR for a poorly designed school records system. Multiply that by ten or a hundred schools (each with an IT department and a CS school), remove the Oracle VAR (and maybe the Oracle) and you have a free software project with paid developers.
$10 per 2-pack, according to another post. 1500% is a pretty large fraction.
The other post was probably citing DD-RW prices, so you should compare to CD-RWs, which retail for about $2.50 each. That's 200%, not 1500%.
As for comparing CD-R to DD-RW, you're repeating many of the same arguments of CD-R v. CD-RW. You need to burn a CD-RW about twenty times before the cost of media breaks even with a CD-R. You need to burn a lot of CD-RWs before the cost of the drive breaks even with CD-R.
DD-RW is priced competitively with CD-RW. I doubt that DD-R will be priced competitively with CD-R.
Retail/rebate rat race. Best Buy had a 50-pack Imation spindle for $5 after rebates one week, and a 50-pack Maxell spindle for $5 after rebates the next. CompUSA had a 100-pack Imation spindle for $10 after rebates and a 50-pack of Imation slim cases free after rebates.
Also, it may depend on patent royalties and piracy taxes in your area. The article claims CD-R royalties are $0.08USD, and I think there's another penny or two for the piracy tax, so I guess the disks are being sold at close to cost in the US.
It would be nice if the licensees, such as 3D Realms, went that extra mile, too. We're not doing too bad, though. Four Quake 2s: SoF, Heretic II, Kingpin, Sin; one Quake 3: Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2; one Unreal: Deus Ex; one Lithtech: Shogo. However, no Half-Life, no NOLF, no Voyager or DS9.
All that work porting Unreal to Linux so that Loki can port Deus Ex almost a year after the Windows release? Hopefully, Epic, id, and Monolith will force each other to be cross platform (including Linux), if only as a checklist item.
Bullshit
Can I quote you on that? How does this sound: "A high-level source at Epic Games promised the Slashdot community that Unreal 2 and Duke Nukem Forever will be released for Linux"? Or, I can just go with "Bullshit."
You're feeding the hand that bites you. Why should we pay full price just for the privilege of running on another platform?
id, EDO, Loki, et al. are not charities. They will not survive by marketing to "supporters." The "tightwads" are their bread and butter. They have to put quality, affordable titles on the shelf in a timely manner. I, for one, would love to see them put it all in one box.
id and Epic got it (mostly) right by letting you download Windows and Linux executables, regardless of which you bought. That, of course, explains why the $10 Quake 3 Linux tin is finally flying off the shelves. What id got wrong was expecting their sales numbers to mean anything. The Windows version came out first and, until recently, cost less. Who knows how many copies of the Windows version are running on Linux (and vice versa)?
As patchy as the SQL, ODBC, and JDBC standards may be, they have commoditized the DBMS market. Until object databases can do the same (the ODMG standards don't even come close), they lock you into a proprietary solution. Ultimately, if your database doesn't scale as well as you'd like, that will hurt performance.
Check this license out.
Victor Yodaiken chose to license a patent for use in software released under version 2 of the GNU GPL. The net effect is less freedom than mutual defense or simply publishing the "invention" to serve as prior art.
You're talking about things that can't be readily shared. Why would I design any of those things? Neither Boeing, Ford, nor Apple need my charity. On the other hand, hobbyists frequently share plans for things that are easier to make--furniture, flight-sim cockpits, automobile "mods", etc.
Software is easy to share. Some of the free software people have created is the software equivalent of a consumer good. Many here have pointed out the folly of Eazel spending all of its venture capital to develop, in essence, a file manager.
A patent-free world would not necessarily be a Star Trek utopia. The strongest argument for patents is the incentive to publish an invention that would otherwise be a trade secret. That said, I believe that trade secrets are less evil than patents. Rare is the invention that is twenty years ahead of its time. Rarer still one that no one else could reinvent in that time.
That's what some of the folks said in "Meet the New Game Gods," PC Gamer 11/00. Stevie Case got a job in Ion Storm QA after beating John Romero in a Quake challenge. She says, "I was the lowest paid person when I started at Ion Storm out of a hundred people--the lowest paid, and I just used my free time, I did everything extra I could, I offered to help, I was learning level design, learning to write strategy guides, all this extra stuff. And if you put in the extra effort, they see that and move you up."
American McGee, who started at id, says, "I started anwering the phones and went from that to writing code, doing levels, doing sound effects, making music, I mean just everything and anything I could get my hands on I would take over and do the best thing I could with it."
Ed Del Castillo parlayed contacts from a video arcade into a Mindcraft support job.
Also, check out the Ask Devs section of Voodoo Extreme. Kevin Levine, Brian Hook, and Tim Sweeney have addressed this topic.
"Meet the Next Game Gods" in PC Gamer 11/00 touches on how some current designers got their start.