If you're not up to at least GF level gfx, you're a cheap bastard. You can get a -lot- of video card for $50-60 (GF4mx / GF fx5200 / radeon 9000-9200); or you can get a gf2mx for as little as $30. If you live in any reasonably sized city, you shouldn't have a problem scoring something cheaper on a local forsale newsgroup.
Which is exactly why I've got a Slackware 9.0 set that wasn't in my hands for almost a month -after- I installed the system. Pat's welcome to my money.
The obvious solution is to stop using "the Internet". Time to establish a separate "Intarweb" that is used for filesharing; we can leave the Internet to the spammers and pornographers.
The real difference is that in the US, we speak English and can get by with 8-bit ASCII; the Japanese, OTOH, need Unicode to transmit data, thus they actually -need- 12Mb connections.
The problem with your example is that it neglects what allows other countries to do manufacturing cheaper is that their people DON'T make as much as their American counterparts. Of course, today the Japs are close, but 'Japanese cars' are just as much made in USia as 'American cars' are.
Things become much different when you're talking about the difference between a USian making $50k and some 3rd worlder making $5-10k.
The question is, is there a point at which, if we ship more jobs overseas, the USian consumer-base will be so un(der)-employed that they become unable to purchase goods anymore, regardless of how cheaply they're made?
If you're really concerned about not being outsourced become a plumber. When somebody's water heater bursts open at 2am, they're not going to care if somebody in the next town, let alone halfway across the world, can fix it for half the price; it needs to be done now.
I see all jobs coming down to 3 things:
retail sales
plumbers
politics
While retail sales and plumbing are common on one level, in that they are both jobs that need to be done on site, the plumber is a skilled position where retail sales can essentially be filled by any available warm body.
Makes sense to me; ship hundreds (if not thousands) of manufacturing and design jobs overseas and then get excited about a handful of analyst jobs getting created.
In the New World Order, the only jobs left will be retail clerks, politicians and plumbers; systems analysts are plumbers.
Ick. It turns out that the whole gig is just a publicity stunt for Engineered Inteligence's "CxC" parallel/clustering programming language/environment. Considering that it requires a '30 day free trial' (or paid licence) of the system to test, debug and play the game, I doubt this'll take off into much of a self-sustaining community.
Considering the paralllels already drawn between this and Corewars, it's no suprise that GA-derived programs don't work. For most things, GA-derived algos are seldom the best or most cost-effective way of developing a solution, but numerous people have tried using GAs to develop CW code, and they've not been able to build anything more successful than a variant of hand-crafted programs (and generally do far worse).
Do you think that if you were to try calling up Sears and ordering from their catalog they'd ship to Hungary? Do you think major Hungarian web-merchants would ship to the USA?
The very fact that it's an s370 board means that it's fairly craptacular by todays standards. nVidia reall raised the bar with the nForce, and in the last year or two quality has gone way up.
I mean, for example, my current board is an ECS K7S5A Pro ($50-ish); the last one was a K7S5A (non-pro). The pro was released a year or so after the non-pro and added USB2 and a new audio chip (as well as going from a black PCB to a purple one). The non-pro board would click and stutter mercilessly when playing games that mixed multiple audio streams (ie GTA3), the new version handles it flawlessly on otherwise identical hardware.
The big problem with a modded xbox is that it's only got 64MB of memory, and you can't upgrade that. A modern desktop distro is going to want to use 128MB or more. With only 64MB of ram, the machine's not good for doing much of anything too interesting.
You forgot the video; I doubt anything at that price point is going to have worthwhile onboard video, so you're going to want to drop another $50 or so to get a better GPU.
The GeForceFX used WHQL drivers... But despite these 'superior' drivers, the Radeon 9800 still reigned in all the real world tests
WHQL doesn't mean they're better drives, it just means that they passed some MSFT testing bits. If anything, non-WHQL drivers have potential to have higher performance (think a car engine that doesn't have to worry about passing emissions), since they don't have to worry so much about playing nice with -all- available hardware.
Not to mention that they completely overlook the fact that ATI's Linux drivers provide only a fraction of the performance that the Windows ones do, while the nVidia drivers provide almost the exact same level of performance across the different platforms.
What kind of High-School club has 250 members, 100 of which really want to put up web-pages and has that kind of left-over budget for getting a computer?
I went to a fairly large HS (3000ish), and when I was there, I doubt the entire computer lab was worth $4000 at the time.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket; in other words, what if the entire community threw it's effort and resources into project Foo and let project Bar die and it turns out 2-3 years later that Foo is a dead-end, and has major design flaws? Being more focused gives you a slight advantage in how far you can go, but diversification allows for failures to be handled more gracefully.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not up to at least GF level gfx, you're a cheap bastard. You can get a -lot- of video card for $50-60 (GF4mx / GF fx5200 / radeon 9000-9200); or you can get a gf2mx for as little as $30. If you live in any reasonably sized city, you shouldn't have a problem scoring something cheaper on a local forsale newsgroup.
Which is exactly why I've got a Slackware 9.0 set that wasn't in my hands for almost a month -after- I installed the system. Pat's welcome to my money.
ASS
We're not talking the name of god here, don't be afraid to use all the letter.
The obvious solution is to stop using "the Internet". Time to establish a separate "Intarweb" that is used for filesharing; we can leave the Internet to the spammers and pornographers.
Anything it takes to avoid having to make music that doesn't suck...
The real difference is that in the US, we speak English and can get by with 8-bit ASCII; the Japanese, OTOH, need Unicode to transmit data, thus they actually -need- 12Mb connections.
The problem with your example is that it neglects what allows other countries to do manufacturing cheaper is that their people DON'T make as much as their American counterparts. Of course, today the Japs are close, but 'Japanese cars' are just as much made in USia as 'American cars' are.
Things become much different when you're talking about the difference between a USian making $50k and some 3rd worlder making $5-10k.
The question is, is there a point at which, if we ship more jobs overseas, the USian consumer-base will be so un(der)-employed that they become unable to purchase goods anymore, regardless of how cheaply they're made?
I see all jobs coming down to 3 things:
While retail sales and plumbing are common on one level, in that they are both jobs that need to be done on site, the plumber is a skilled position where retail sales can essentially be filled by any available warm body.
Makes sense to me; ship hundreds (if not thousands) of manufacturing and design jobs overseas and then get excited about a handful of analyst jobs getting created.
In the New World Order, the only jobs left will be retail clerks, politicians and plumbers; systems analysts are plumbers.
Not just the library, but any tenured faculty member is bound to have at least half a dozen texts on every undergrad subject.
It seems that ug-ridden repitition is what draws in MMORPG players.
Because they win.
Ick. It turns out that the whole gig is just a publicity stunt for Engineered Inteligence's "CxC" parallel/clustering programming language/environment. Considering that it requires a '30 day free trial' (or paid licence) of the system to test, debug and play the game, I doubt this'll take off into much of a self-sustaining community.
Considering the paralllels already drawn between this and Corewars, it's no suprise that GA-derived programs don't work. For most things, GA-derived algos are seldom the best or most cost-effective way of developing a solution, but numerous people have tried using GAs to develop CW code, and they've not been able to build anything more successful than a variant of hand-crafted programs (and generally do far worse).
Do you think that if you were to try calling up Sears and ordering from their catalog they'd ship to Hungary? Do you think major Hungarian web-merchants would ship to the USA?
I doubt it.
The obvious thing to do is to sue Adobe since their free product discriminates against the blind.
The very fact that it's an s370 board means that it's fairly craptacular by todays standards. nVidia reall raised the bar with the nForce, and in the last year or two quality has gone way up.
I mean, for example, my current board is an ECS K7S5A Pro ($50-ish); the last one was a K7S5A (non-pro). The pro was released a year or so after the non-pro and added USB2 and a new audio chip (as well as going from a black PCB to a purple one). The non-pro board would click and stutter mercilessly when playing games that mixed multiple audio streams (ie GTA3), the new version handles it flawlessly on otherwise identical hardware.
Shit...
Future Crew's Second Reality did Dolby encoding on a fucking Gravis Ultrasound back in 92-94 on my 486.
The big problem with a modded xbox is that it's only got 64MB of memory, and you can't upgrade that. A modern desktop distro is going to want to use 128MB or more. With only 64MB of ram, the machine's not good for doing much of anything too interesting.
You forgot the video; I doubt anything at that price point is going to have worthwhile onboard video, so you're going to want to drop another $50 or so to get a better GPU.
Who needs bargain bin cards? Many mid-range motherboards come with 5.1 sound on them these days.
WHQL doesn't mean they're better drives, it just means that they passed some MSFT testing bits. If anything, non-WHQL drivers have potential to have higher performance (think a car engine that doesn't have to worry about passing emissions), since they don't have to worry so much about playing nice with -all- available hardware.
Not to mention that they completely overlook the fact that ATI's Linux drivers provide only a fraction of the performance that the Windows ones do, while the nVidia drivers provide almost the exact same level of performance across the different platforms.
What kind of High-School club has 250 members, 100 of which really want to put up web-pages and has that kind of left-over budget for getting a computer?
I went to a fairly large HS (3000ish), and when I was there, I doubt the entire computer lab was worth $4000 at the time.
One thing you're missing...
Don't put all your eggs in one basket; in other words, what if the entire community threw it's effort and resources into project Foo and let project Bar die and it turns out 2-3 years later that Foo is a dead-end, and has major design flaws? Being more focused gives you a slight advantage in how far you can go, but diversification allows for failures to be handled more gracefully.