I don't know about it fitting on a floppy disk, but the best thing you can bring along is in your head already. Base the price you're going to pay on what the terms of the deal are. As is, no refunds? Assume they're all broken, and price accordingly. Guaranteed working? For how long? Again, base your price mainly on the terms, not on the equipment.
After that, there are some simple things you can do to find out what you're getting, assuming they'll let you test every unit. I've written some shell scripts the I've got in an initrd with busybox that I burned to a CD that tells you if the machine can boot, and if so, what hardwhere is in it. It looks for PCI devices, SCSI disks, IDE disks, memory... Basically any info you can pull out of proc. It formats it all nicely on a single screen, so you don't need to type anything, and you spend 45 seconds at a machine max. There's no need for a full OS with apps, or a bootable distribution. I have a single floppy version as well, but it won't find every SCSI device. If you'd like a copy, send me an e-mail.
A small, light industrial machine shop will have multiple of each of these. There are hundreds of these shops in almost every city in the US. Residential electricity usage doesn't even begin to come close to commercial usage. Computer usage doesn't even come close to the electricity used by these big tools. The last study that was done estimated that computers are using about 2% of the power consumed nation wide. That figure included networking equipment for backbones, and other office equipment like copy machines, too!
Also, has ANYONE ever seen a Itanium system? I thought not. I work on RS/6000 machines and I really doubt an Itantium 2 system could even compare to a IBM RS/6000 (Power4 Based). First off, most RS/6000 machines come equpied with SMP (sometime only having one chip installed, but most are complete).
I've seen, used, and programmed for Itanium systems. There is definatly silicon available. You can even buy CPUs from some pricewatch vendors. There aren't any non-SMP capable Itanium systems available right now. They ALL support at least 2 CPUs. There are real benchmarks that have been run on Itanium 2, but there haven't been any independant benchmarks of Itanium 2 yet. The benchmarks show it slightly faster then Power 4, so expect them to be competitive with each other in real world applications. I've personally run benchmarks on the original Itanium, and they were nothing spectacular.
If I were paying the electric bill, I'd buy the Power4. If I needed more then 4 CPUs, I also wouldn't trust Itanium 2 yet, but only because I don't trust the current chipsets that are available. If I wanted a 4-CPU system or less, I didn't care about power or heat, and was only interested in speed, I'd pick the one that cost less.
Mozilla only blocks unrequested popups. I still see popups all the time if they're a result of a click. There is no problem viewing sites that functionally open new windows. You must have been doing it wrong.
Yeah, more likely it'll provoke contract disputes or legal actions from nvidia, who doesn't want to have to throw out chips it's already made. If microsoft keeps this up, they'll never get nvidia to lower the price.
Is there really a big xbox game pirating scene?
This is all silly anyway. I remember when I was younger (under 16) I used to "pirate" video games. Of course back then that meant a 1-300k download. Probably took just as long though. As soon as I was old enough to have a job, and money I stopped doing it, and started actually paying for the games I wanted. It seems to me that beyond basic anti-piracy efforts, companies are wasting money on copy protection. The people that they stop can't afford the games anyway, and the "software pirates" that can afford the games tend to be the people who will use the money to break the new protection rather then purchase the game. It would be interesting to see a study that looked for a correlating revenue increase when a new copy protection scheme comes out. More importantly, how much cheaper would my games be if I wasn't shelling out a SafeDisc 2 royalty for every one of them?
I was working on a project designing a board that used Motorola's 64bit PPC. They canned the chip in October 2001. They annonuced the cancelation in private meetings to their customers that even knew about it at the first Smart Networks forum in New Orleans. It was NEVER going to be the G5. It wasn't even going to be one of their desktop processors. It was going to be built using their "Book-E" embedded processor spec, and the MMU architecture for it was completely different from the one in the green book. I think that The "we make shit up" Register started the G5 64bit rumour.
Even when the 64bit chip was still in the plans, the G5 was going to come way before it, and was always going to be an evolution of the G4 core. So, the rumors have taken us from the begining, back to the truth, with a whole lot of made up plot in between that never happened.
I know that, though ultimately unexpressed, each expired URL represents a discrete idea deemed good, or at least good enough, at the point of inception to justify its registration fee.
We've always known that salon doesn't really understand the internet, but here is proof. If you fall into the trap of thinking that the only thing the internet is good for is commerce, then you are practically guaranteed to lose money.
Not only that, but an expired domain name can mean that it has served out it's usefulness. Sites don't have to live forever. Who said that that an expired domain means that some idea went unexpressed. Hell, most of those domains were probably registered by some idiot taking part in the domain name "Land Grab", and was hoping to resell them later at a huge markup. Most names were probably registered because the random collection of letters happened to make some sense in english, and contained a buzzword (like "free"). There were no broken dreams here, just idiocy, and I don't feel too badly for the greedy bastards who blew $200 million trying to make a quick buck with something they couldn't even bother to take the time to try and understand.
Now I remember why I usually don't even bother reading salon.
The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts.
You can't just assume that all encoding is the same. An improved compression algorithm can both increase quality, and decrease size, at the cost of compute power needed to compress/decompress the video. Newer codecs with much higher quality and higher compression rates then MPEG2 are possible today because fast chips have become quite inexpensive.
I agree that the higher capacity discs should be the next generation, but there is no reason quality video can't be distributed on the current discs. (Now if you want quality content then you have a whole different problem entirely.)
And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.
I agree with this statement, but only because Intel doesn't need IBM at all. Yes, IBM sells x86 boxes as a means of gaining more of their core business, but if PowerPC made by IBM replaced x86, IBM would be better off, not worse off.
It's not going to happen, so this discussion is moot.
Dude. x86 laptops are so far inferior to Apple laptops that it's hardly a comparison. The laptops are cheaper feature for feature then PC laptops, the run at reasonable speeds for a portable, they have amazing battery life, they look cooler then almost everything else out there, and they come with builtin standard features that aren't available on ANY PC laptop, much less all at the same time. Show me an x86 laptop with gigabit. How about a wide screen? How about with 4.5 hours of battery life? All that, and slim? For $2500? The slim x86 laptops aren't as fast as the powerbooks, either. Unless you can't live without windows, what more do you need? Don't start with that one mouse button thing either. There are so many extra modfier keys on the keyboard that can be mapped to buttons on a mac then there are on a PC that it's not even worth discussing, and the keys act as buttons where additional buttons belong: ABOVE the track pad. I don't know about you, but I only have one thumb, and I can only use one button down there. I want the others where my fingers are.
I prefer my powerbook to my vaio any day, and I can even fly across county with my powerbook on one battery.
then they'd still ship fewer total units compared to the number of Intel boxes they ship out the door
IBM doesn't manufacture intel boxes anymore. They rebrand third party equipment (well, actually they purchase it already branded as IBM). The margins on hardware sales for their intel based workstations are probably near zero. They make their money on the big iron (Power based), and mostly on services and software. IBM certainly does NOT need intel in the sense you are implying.
Yeah, well you can't find the real bugs with a kernel debugger anyway. You need some kind of hardware assist. For everything else that a kernel debugger does help with, printk debugging works just fine. It just takes longer.
I'm impatient, so I use kGDB. Or maybe I am a wimp. Whatever.
Agreed. Working right now on porting KERNEL CODE from solaris to linux. Not exactly a straghtforward port. Anyway, there's like 50,000 lines of code, and it's all reentrant. I have a deadlock to find that happens with interrupts disabled!
If only I had an ICE.
I have a feeling that when I'm done I'll wish I had hair.
I still think we shoud have a (-1 Clueless) moderation, and a (-1 Wrong) moderation around here.
If this guy LIVES on the boat, and needs a computer sometimes, then it's not really an option to not have a computer on board, now is it? Why would he want to be below deck? Maybe it's raining. Maybe he's naked. Maybe it's really cold out. What difference does it make?
I've heard of a guy that bought some netwinders to use on his boat, bucause they could run off the main battery all day. Never heard of any trouble, but I never heard from him again, either. Anyway, he didn't have to listen to a generator all the time, only for a little while on cloudy days.
I don't know about The Kompany in particular, but usually it has to do with guaranteeing trademarkability of your name. Anything that is sufficiently arbitrary is trademarkable, so the idea is to come up with something that is arbitrary enough to be undisputably trademarkeable, and at the same time try to create an association with something specific in the mind of the person reading it.
I took some intellectual property law classes when I was still in school in hopes that it would help me know what to steer clear of when working with open source, and software in general. One week our homework every night was to come up with 10 company or product names that were sufficiently arbitrary to be trademarkeable, yet still understandable. We then spent the class time that week trying to "overturn" the other student's trademarks. $1900 in credits well spent. (Well, it was better then the environmental law class. I don't know what I was thinking taking that one.)
No it doesn't. You don't have to get an IP via dhcp, and it's easy to sniff IPs on the network to see what's valid. Switched port, with no broadcast traffic? Use a hurestic algorithm to find a valid IP on the network with an exhausted search. You can probably find a working configuration without trying more then 1% of the configuration space. Available? Who cares! Just make sure you have a lower latency to the router then the machine you're sharing an IP with. Oh, and don't forget to spoof their MAC address.
In fact, the setup we have here gives out "safe" IPs to machines with MAC addresses it doesn't know. The router is configured to not allow traffic from these addresses to access internal resources. In this case, it's actually more difficult to NOT figure out a valid configuration on your own.
Don't fall into a trap by thinking you can improve security through your dhcp configuration.
That's funny, I could have sworn I've seen people going to work everyday at the intel fab down the street from my appartment (Hudson, MA). In fact, rumor has it that this fab was the worlds first to churn out working parts on the.13 micron process.
There are still plenty of fabs in the US. It's probably because the people who can make these tiny technologies actually work aren't cheap anywhere.
IBM does not make G4s. They don't have a license for Altivec. They already make quite speedy G3s, but you don't see them in consumer products that are marketed based on Mhz.
I know you think you're funny, but it is decidedly *not* funny to encourage people to support an organization that gained it's position by exploiting average consumers, and maintains their position through the abuse of the United States legal system.
Furthermore, I have never seen - and Gracenote has seemingly never provided - evidence that they have turned a profit on the rape of their initial users labor. They could be gone tomorrow, and it is more likely that they will go away then freedb.
Just because they don't overcharge everybody doesn't mean that the retail box price isn't overcharging. Why do you think so many people pirate Office? How many people do you know that have gone out and purchased a copy off the shelf? The bulk corporate and OEM pricing is pretty reasonable. The single unit price is outrageous. Of course Microsoft has the BSA claim that the piracy is lost revenue, and works on copy protection, rather then addressing the real issue: People can't afford Office.
BTW, everyone I know that uses office at home (Not me, thank you. I don't use it) has "borrowed" the CD from work, or had it come with their PC. I don't think I've ever met somebody who has actually gone and bought it for a personal machine.
Yeah yeah, I know my spelling is horrible, and usually ispell is my friend, but I don't have the time today to worry about it. What does TV have to do with spelling? I'm proof positive that you can not watch TV, and still be a bad speller.:)
The only things I can remember how to spell with any reliability are the function names in the kernel and libc. I stare at a CRT all day, but not the one you think I do!
Again, the FCC can and does do all those things WITHOUT mandating digital broadcast television. Regluation is different from a mandate. If television stations wish to broadcast a digital signal, or if television manufacturers want to make digital TVs, then they should be regulated by the FCC. I don't see how a mandate on television manufacturers forcing them to include a digital tuner has anything to do with those regulations.
Everything you just said has nothing to do with a mandate to switch to digital broadcast TV. The FCC has done everything you've said up to this point without this mandate. Care to comment?
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I don't know about it fitting on a floppy disk, but the best thing you can bring along is in your head already. Base the price you're going to pay on what the terms of the deal are. As is, no refunds? Assume they're all broken, and price accordingly. Guaranteed working? For how long? Again, base your price mainly on the terms, not on the equipment.
After that, there are some simple things you can do to find out what you're getting, assuming they'll let you test every unit. I've written some shell scripts the I've got in an initrd with busybox that I burned to a CD that tells you if the machine can boot, and if so, what hardwhere is in it. It looks for PCI devices, SCSI disks, IDE disks, memory... Basically any info you can pull out of proc. It formats it all nicely on a single screen, so you don't need to type anything, and you spend 45 seconds at a machine max. There's no need for a full OS with apps, or a bootable distribution. I have a single floppy version as well, but it won't find every SCSI device. If you'd like a copy, send me an e-mail.
Some rough figures:
Some other fiures:
Industrial sheet metal shear: 3000 watts
Hydraulic press: 6000 watts
Industrial arc welder: 8000 watts
Commercial HVAC compressor (10 ton): 14,000 watts
A small, light industrial machine shop will have multiple of each of these. There are hundreds of these shops in almost every city in the US. Residential electricity usage doesn't even begin to come close to commercial usage. Computer usage doesn't even come close to the electricity used by these big tools. The last study that was done estimated that computers are using about 2% of the power consumed nation wide. That figure included networking equipment for backbones, and other office equipment like copy machines, too!
Also, has ANYONE ever seen a Itanium system? I thought not. I work on RS/6000 machines and I really doubt an Itantium 2 system could even compare to a IBM RS/6000 (Power4 Based). First off, most RS/6000 machines come equpied with SMP (sometime only having one chip installed, but most are complete).
I've seen, used, and programmed for Itanium systems. There is definatly silicon available. You can even buy CPUs from some pricewatch vendors. There aren't any non-SMP capable Itanium systems available right now. They ALL support at least 2 CPUs. There are real benchmarks that have been run on Itanium 2, but there haven't been any independant benchmarks of Itanium 2 yet. The benchmarks show it slightly faster then Power 4, so expect them to be competitive with each other in real world applications. I've personally run benchmarks on the original Itanium, and they were nothing spectacular.
If I were paying the electric bill, I'd buy the Power4. If I needed more then 4 CPUs, I also wouldn't trust Itanium 2 yet, but only because I don't trust the current chipsets that are available. If I wanted a 4-CPU system or less, I didn't care about power or heat, and was only interested in speed, I'd pick the one that cost less.
Mozilla only blocks unrequested popups. I still see popups all the time if they're a result of a click. There is no problem viewing sites that functionally open new windows. You must have been doing it wrong.
Yeah, more likely it'll provoke contract disputes or legal actions from nvidia, who doesn't want to have to throw out chips it's already made. If microsoft keeps this up, they'll never get nvidia to lower the price.
Is there really a big xbox game pirating scene?
This is all silly anyway. I remember when I was younger (under 16) I used to "pirate" video games. Of course back then that meant a 1-300k download. Probably took just as long though. As soon as I was old enough to have a job, and money I stopped doing it, and started actually paying for the games I wanted. It seems to me that beyond basic anti-piracy efforts, companies are wasting money on copy protection. The people that they stop can't afford the games anyway, and the "software pirates" that can afford the games tend to be the people who will use the money to break the new protection rather then purchase the game. It would be interesting to see a study that looked for a correlating revenue increase when a new copy protection scheme comes out. More importantly, how much cheaper would my games be if I wasn't shelling out a SafeDisc 2 royalty for every one of them?
http://quotes.nasdaq.com/Quote.dll?page=multi&mode =stock&mode=Stock&symbol=SALNC
If we didn't all know it, we should have. The information is available.
I was working on a project designing a board that used Motorola's 64bit PPC. They canned the chip in October 2001. They annonuced the cancelation in private meetings to their customers that even knew about it at the first Smart Networks forum in New Orleans. It was NEVER going to be the G5. It wasn't even going to be one of their desktop processors. It was going to be built using their "Book-E" embedded processor spec, and the MMU architecture for it was completely different from the one in the green book. I think that The "we make shit up" Register started the G5 64bit rumour.
Even when the 64bit chip was still in the plans, the G5 was going to come way before it, and was always going to be an evolution of the G4 core. So, the rumors have taken us from the begining, back to the truth, with a whole lot of made up plot in between that never happened.
I know that, though ultimately unexpressed, each expired URL represents a discrete idea deemed good, or at least good enough, at the point of inception to justify its registration fee.
We've always known that salon doesn't really understand the internet, but here is proof. If you fall into the trap of thinking that the only thing the internet is good for is commerce, then you are practically guaranteed to lose money.
Not only that, but an expired domain name can mean that it has served out it's usefulness. Sites don't have to live forever. Who said that that an expired domain means that some idea went unexpressed. Hell, most of those domains were probably registered by some idiot taking part in the domain name "Land Grab", and was hoping to resell them later at a huge markup. Most names were probably registered because the random collection of letters happened to make some sense in english, and contained a buzzword (like "free"). There were no broken dreams here, just idiocy, and I don't feel too badly for the greedy bastards who blew $200 million trying to make a quick buck with something they couldn't even bother to take the time to try and understand.
Now I remember why I usually don't even bother reading salon.
The problem with the red-laser DVD is that it is already pushed to its limits to hold ordinary encoded PAL/NTSC video data plus the new high-data-rate audio (DTS and/or DD), and even then critical viewers mutter about compression artefacts.
You can't just assume that all encoding is the same. An improved compression algorithm can both increase quality, and decrease size, at the cost of compute power needed to compress/decompress the video. Newer codecs with much higher quality and higher compression rates then MPEG2 are possible today because fast chips have become quite inexpensive.
I agree that the higher capacity discs should be the next generation, but there is no reason quality video can't be distributed on the current discs. (Now if you want quality content then you have a whole different problem entirely.)
And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.
I agree with this statement, but only because Intel doesn't need IBM at all. Yes, IBM sells x86 boxes as a means of gaining more of their core business, but if PowerPC made by IBM replaced x86, IBM would be better off, not worse off.
It's not going to happen, so this discussion is moot.
Dude. x86 laptops are so far inferior to Apple laptops that it's hardly a comparison. The laptops are cheaper feature for feature then PC laptops, the run at reasonable speeds for a portable, they have amazing battery life, they look cooler then almost everything else out there, and they come with builtin standard features that aren't available on ANY PC laptop, much less all at the same time. Show me an x86 laptop with gigabit. How about a wide screen? How about with 4.5 hours of battery life? All that, and slim? For $2500? The slim x86 laptops aren't as fast as the powerbooks, either. Unless you can't live without windows, what more do you need? Don't start with that one mouse button thing either. There are so many extra modfier keys on the keyboard that can be mapped to buttons on a mac then there are on a PC that it's not even worth discussing, and the keys act as buttons where additional buttons belong: ABOVE the track pad. I don't know about you, but I only have one thumb, and I can only use one button down there. I want the others where my fingers are.
I prefer my powerbook to my vaio any day, and I can even fly across county with my powerbook on one battery.
then they'd still ship fewer total units compared to the number of Intel boxes they ship out the door
IBM doesn't manufacture intel boxes anymore. They rebrand third party equipment (well, actually they purchase it already branded as IBM). The margins on hardware sales for their intel based workstations are probably near zero. They make their money on the big iron (Power based), and mostly on services and software. IBM certainly does NOT need intel in the sense you are implying.
Yeah, well you can't find the real bugs with a kernel debugger anyway. You need some kind of hardware assist. For everything else that a kernel debugger does help with, printk debugging works just fine. It just takes longer.
I'm impatient, so I use kGDB. Or maybe I am a wimp. Whatever.
Agreed. Working right now on porting KERNEL CODE from solaris to linux. Not exactly a straghtforward port. Anyway, there's like 50,000 lines of code, and it's all reentrant. I have a deadlock to find that happens with interrupts disabled!
If only I had an ICE.
I have a feeling that when I'm done I'll wish I had hair.
I still think we shoud have a (-1 Clueless) moderation, and a (-1 Wrong) moderation around here.
If this guy LIVES on the boat, and needs a computer sometimes, then it's not really an option to not have a computer on board, now is it? Why would he want to be below deck? Maybe it's raining. Maybe he's naked. Maybe it's really cold out. What difference does it make?
I've heard of a guy that bought some netwinders to use on his boat, bucause they could run off the main battery all day. Never heard of any trouble, but I never heard from him again, either. Anyway, he didn't have to listen to a generator all the time, only for a little while on cloudy days.
I don't know about The Kompany in particular, but usually it has to do with guaranteeing trademarkability of your name. Anything that is sufficiently arbitrary is trademarkable, so the idea is to come up with something that is arbitrary enough to be undisputably trademarkeable, and at the same time try to create an association with something specific in the mind of the person reading it.
I took some intellectual property law classes when I was still in school in hopes that it would help me know what to steer clear of when working with open source, and software in general. One week our homework every night was to come up with 10 company or product names that were sufficiently arbitrary to be trademarkeable, yet still understandable. We then spent the class time that week trying to "overturn" the other student's trademarks. $1900 in credits well spent. (Well, it was better then the environmental law class. I don't know what I was thinking taking that one.)
No it doesn't. You don't have to get an IP via dhcp, and it's easy to sniff IPs on the network to see what's valid. Switched port, with no broadcast traffic? Use a hurestic algorithm to find a valid IP on the network with an exhausted search. You can probably find a working configuration without trying more then 1% of the configuration space. Available? Who cares! Just make sure you have a lower latency to the router then the machine you're sharing an IP with. Oh, and don't forget to spoof their MAC address.
In fact, the setup we have here gives out "safe" IPs to machines with MAC addresses it doesn't know. The router is configured to not allow traffic from these addresses to access internal resources. In this case, it's actually more difficult to NOT figure out a valid configuration on your own.
Don't fall into a trap by thinking you can improve security through your dhcp configuration.
That's funny, I could have sworn I've seen people going to work everyday at the intel fab down the street from my appartment (Hudson, MA). In fact, rumor has it that this fab was the worlds first to churn out working parts on the .13 micron process.
There are still plenty of fabs in the US. It's probably because the people who can make these tiny technologies actually work aren't cheap anywhere.
IBM does not make G4s. They don't have a license for Altivec. They already make quite speedy G3s, but you don't see them in consumer products that are marketed based on Mhz.
I know you think you're funny, but it is decidedly *not* funny to encourage people to support an organization that gained it's position by exploiting average consumers, and maintains their position through the abuse of the United States legal system.
Furthermore, I have never seen - and Gracenote has seemingly never provided - evidence that they have turned a profit on the rape of their initial users labor. They could be gone tomorrow, and it is more likely that they will go away then freedb.
If apple came out wuth OS X for x86 cpus, what makes you think it would run on non-Apple machines? It wouldn't.
Just because they don't overcharge everybody doesn't mean that the retail box price isn't overcharging. Why do you think so many people pirate Office? How many people do you know that have gone out and purchased a copy off the shelf? The bulk corporate and OEM pricing is pretty reasonable. The single unit price is outrageous. Of course Microsoft has the BSA claim that the piracy is lost revenue, and works on copy protection, rather then addressing the real issue: People can't afford Office.
BTW, everyone I know that uses office at home (Not me, thank you. I don't use it) has "borrowed" the CD from work, or had it come with their PC. I don't think I've ever met somebody who has actually gone and bought it for a personal machine.
Yeah yeah, I know my spelling is horrible, and usually ispell is my friend, but I don't have the time today to worry about it. What does TV have to do with spelling? I'm proof positive that you can not watch TV, and still be a bad speller. :)
The only things I can remember how to spell with any reliability are the function names in the kernel and libc. I stare at a CRT all day, but not the one you think I do!
Again, the FCC can and does do all those things WITHOUT mandating digital broadcast television. Regluation is different from a mandate. If television stations wish to broadcast a digital signal, or if television manufacturers want to make digital TVs, then they should be regulated by the FCC. I don't see how a mandate on television manufacturers forcing them to include a digital tuner has anything to do with those regulations.
Everything you just said has nothing to do with a mandate to switch to digital broadcast TV. The FCC has done everything you've said up to this point without this mandate. Care to comment?