It's the tanks to hold the high pressure hydrogen while being safe enough to be kept indoors that are expensive. The hydrogen is cheap...
This isn't bad for something that can be used indoors. It's also especially good for extreme environments where it's too cold outside for a gas powered generator to start in the winter.
Tell your friend to trust her money with someone who will take only her needs into consideration.
Also, tell her that $1000 isn't going to cut it, because unless she wants a bottom of the line iMac, she's not going to be able to afford a good enough monitor to do what she wants AND have a computer to go with it.
I'd say some stuff about why you should reconsider Macs but lots of other people already said it. If you get a chance, reply to this article at some point so we can all learn what you end up deciding.
Actually in a weird way this keeps me away from everquest. From what I've heard, without a making friends and building relationships you'll never be in a party that can do the advanced stuff. But the amount of time you have to devote to the game in order to build such relationships would have a negative effect on my social life in the real world.
In other words, you can't just pick it up and play every once in a while because you will lose the social aspect of the game, which is necissary for success. Unfortuantly, I only have time to play every once in a while so it'll never be really fun for me.
There are PCI risers that have a little 4 pin piece of card on the end of a wire that grab the extra signals from another slot without taking up more space. I assume that the riser he mentions does this, or that it is motherbaord specific.
Underclocking may increase stability in small doses. 10% is probably fine, but I have worked with CPUs in the past that don't work as documented when underclocked more then 25%. Don't trust your data with an asumption. Manufacturers publish specs for a reason.
Let me guess, you slowed the chip down to 800 Mhz just so you could tell everyone that you don't need such a fast machine, and that they dont need it either. You're just like one of those obnoxious people that feels the need to tell everybody that they don't have a TV, like that makes them better then you or something.
If you have the speed you might as well use it.
Also you may have lowered the stability of your machine by slowing it down that much. Certain parts of the logic need to 'refresh' to maintain their state, and when the designer assumes that the minimum speed a CPU will be sold at is 1.something Ghz, they might not make sure the charge sticks around long enough to work at less then half of the intended clock speed. But you're so smart...
A PCI to PCI bridge is the same if it's on the motherboard or off. It's just another PCI device. (Albiet a special one) As long as it's a standard PCI bridge it should just work like the "second" PCI bus that's on alot of less expensive dual PCI bus motherboards. I wouldn't put a video card on the other side of it though:)
Look man, I'm only talking about the Circuit City in the mall near me. I don't know anything about other Circuit City's. (Oh, it's a Circuit City Express, so I don't know if that makes a difference.
There are four stores close by to my house that sell consoles. EB, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, and KB Toys. Only Wal-Mart and EB carried X-Boxes, but you can still find an X-Box or someone willing to book you one from a shipment in the next few weeks. All four of the store carry(ed) Game Cube, and all four stores have all their shipments untill christmas sold out. From what I understand Nintendo shiped more Cubes then X-Box...
Of course it doesn't help that the local EB has blown five (5) X-Box demo kiosks since 2 weeks before release and have finally given up and dismantled the thing. (That's five blown consoles in one store in less then a month!) I know of alot of people that canceled their preorder or decided to go with a Cube because of that.
You can get 144k IDSL in any larger city in the US for less then $125 a month. Frame Relay at lower speeds (256k) is also much cheaper then you think. I've seen $75/$75 for the loop/connection. Business class DSL is available in many places where residential DSL is not. You can get a 512k business SDSL line for $150 in many places. Try ISDN. It can be quite inexpensive if you don't stay connected 24/7. If all you want is e-mail go to your local salvation army thrift store and pick up a 9600 baud modem for $5 and use juno.
Above all, never count on your ISP's e-mail address to be permanent.
It's amusing that you think you can DOS me with e-mail. It's proably the easiest DOS to protect against. Grow up and be rational. Or get hysterical and shoot yourself just 'cause you don't have connectivity. Either way.
You're lucky you had the service in the first place. What if you weren't ever able to get cheap broadband. If you're so pissy about it then pony up the $150 a month and get a real connection. Those of us who have never had the luxury of an inexpensive connection faster then 28.8k aren't going to go cry you a river.
There are people in the world who can't even get a regular telephone, and you expect people to feel bad for you when your cable modem goes away? Write letters to your family. Send a check to pay the bills. What did you do before @home?
You agree not to use the Power Link Service or any Equipment or Software provided by Adelphia... to send e-mail of a personal, bulk or commercial nature, including, without limitation, bulk mailings of commercial advertising, informational announcements, charity requests, political or religious messages, and petitions for signatures, other than to those who have requested such e-mails via a double opt-in subscription process
You're not alowed to send personal e-mail unless the recipient has gone through a double opt-in process! I hope you don't want to initiate any conversations.
Yeah, I have a script to make the numbers before tracks have the correct number of leading zeros so that the tracks play in the expected order. I tried the kenwood ones and they do this too, and my roommate has the sony Xplode version which also does this. I really wouldn't recommend the Sony unit. It doesn't support file names longer then 32 characters, and has a flimsy feel to it. It also has a weird control stick thingie on the front that i just can't stand.
I have the Aiwa uint, an my girlfriend has the second version with the mechanical front. It doesn't suck. The only think I would change about it is the gap between songs. What have you heard bad about it? I would recommend it.
Many distributions install lots of packages you don't need nowadays. Uninstall some, or switch to a more minimalist distribution. Try installing debian with only the base packages. Then whenever you need a program you don't have, apt-get it. It'll make for an annoying few weeks perhaps, but at the end you'll have a system with just what you need on it. I'll bet you will end up with only around 600 binaries in the end (Unless you install gnome... That's like 600 binaries on it's own.)
What does it matter anyway? If you have 1500 programs it's no better to have them in their own directories then to have them in one place. Also, it's not like you're dealing with all of them at once.
DVD players are not all the same. Without even getting into progressive scan or other advanced features there are many quality differences between DVD players. This is different then CD players, since the DVD data is encoded, and requires decoding while CD audio is unencoded and just needs to be converted to analog. Poor quality decoding can cause video artifacts that you may not notice if you're used to VHS, but if someone pointed one out to you, you'd hate your player forever. Once you know what to look for you can't stop looking.
PCI has an UMA. The BARs in PCI config space are used to map the devices into the systems physical address space. This is not anything special about the XBOX. Your 486 DX2 did it. You can always send data directly from one PCI device to another... Say from the hard drive to the sound chip or the DVD decoder. The reason that it is not done this way in a typical PC is not because of special hardware requirements, but because of how the operating system works. There is no simple API in most OSs that makes it easy to say "send this data directly to the sound blaster" because that would require driver cooperation, and typically the drivers are written by different companies.
I'm not saying that there aren't other components in the xbox that aren't improved by being in the UMA, just I/O isn't one of them. (It's questionable wether the video frame buffer being globally mapped is any advantage since the GPU will be modifying the frame buffer, the CPU would have to modify it asyncronously and hope that it's changes weren't either overwritten, or appeared in the right frame. Also, how much additional rendering can the CPU possibly aid such a powerful GPU with, especially when it's busy with other processing. Come back in six months and we'll find out if this UMA stuff is totally hype or not.)
1) When you stream in data from DVD / HD the cpu has almost no work to do to in order to use that data. On other consoles a memcpy() or an additional DMA will be needed.
Huh? DVD and HDD hang off of an ATA-whatever interface. This interface is issued commands which are essentially "read this block to address x" or "write to this block from address x". The ATA controller uses the DMA engines in the PCI bridge to access the CPU's memory directly. In this sense, if your OS programs it that way, PCI has always been UMA, and is even on your PC. There should never be another DMA (The data is in memory already, and most machines don't have an independant DMA engine to do copies) and only poor implementations would do a copy. The CPU must still do a load on the data to get it into a register (There will be page faults and cache misses involved) before it can access the data either way.
If anything an UMA will slow down this process, since the ATA controller will not have any local memory, and would have to use extremely high latency (through the PCI bridge, remember) system memory for performance optimizations that it might do like keeping read aheads or storing device parameters. More likely is that the ATA controller has some small amount of non globally accessable memory onboard or attached to it, and they convienently don't talk about it when they say UMA since it helps performance but they don't want to confuse the consumer.
13K e-mails is very few. What software have you tried that chokes on such a small amount? You should try procmail. It has a very good message scoring system that I use for a spam filter. It catches 90% of incoming spam, and I haven't had a false positive in over two years. Also, on a relativly modest linux box (I use a P2 233Mhz) you can filter tens of thousands of messages an hour. You should be able to incorporate such a filter into your environment even if you are windows based without changing your client setup, and using your existing server software.
I would be happy to send you my rules file if you are interested.
You can instantly close the lid on it, shutting off it's power. This would preserve battery life to possibly many days at a time for a traveler.
I already have one of those... It's called a PowerBook. Close the lid, and it goes to sleep in a fraction of a second and can remain that way for at least 2 weeks. Open it up and push any button, and 1 second later you're precisely where you left off...
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It's the tanks to hold the high pressure hydrogen while being safe enough to be kept indoors that are expensive. The hydrogen is cheap...
This isn't bad for something that can be used indoors. It's also especially good for extreme environments where it's too cold outside for a gas powered generator to start in the winter.
Tell your friend to trust her money with someone who will take only her needs into consideration.
Also, tell her that $1000 isn't going to cut it, because unless she wants a bottom of the line iMac, she's not going to be able to afford a good enough monitor to do what she wants AND have a computer to go with it.
I'd say some stuff about why you should reconsider Macs but lots of other people already said it. If you get a chance, reply to this article at some point so we can all learn what you end up deciding.
Actually in a weird way this keeps me away from everquest. From what I've heard, without a making friends and building relationships you'll never be in a party that can do the advanced stuff. But the amount of time you have to devote to the game in order to build such relationships would have a negative effect on my social life in the real world.
In other words, you can't just pick it up and play every once in a while because you will lose the social aspect of the game, which is necissary for success. Unfortuantly, I only have time to play every once in a while so it'll never be really fun for me.
There are PCI risers that have a little 4 pin piece of card on the end of a wire that grab the extra signals from another slot without taking up more space. I assume that the riser he mentions does this, or that it is motherbaord specific.
Underclocking may increase stability in small doses. 10% is probably fine, but I have worked with CPUs in the past that don't work as documented when underclocked more then 25%. Don't trust your data with an asumption. Manufacturers publish specs for a reason.
Let me guess, you slowed the chip down to 800 Mhz just so you could tell everyone that you don't need such a fast machine, and that they dont need it either. You're just like one of those obnoxious people that feels the need to tell everybody that they don't have a TV, like that makes them better then you or something.
If you have the speed you might as well use it.
Also you may have lowered the stability of your machine by slowing it down that much. Certain parts of the logic need to 'refresh' to maintain their state, and when the designer assumes that the minimum speed a CPU will be sold at is 1.something Ghz, they might not make sure the charge sticks around long enough to work at less then half of the intended clock speed. But you're so smart...
A PCI to PCI bridge is the same if it's on the motherboard or off. It's just another PCI device. (Albiet a special one) As long as it's a standard PCI bridge it should just work like the "second" PCI bus that's on alot of less expensive dual PCI bus motherboards. I wouldn't put a video card on the other side of it though :)
Look man, I'm only talking about the Circuit City in the mall near me. I don't know anything about other Circuit City's. (Oh, it's a Circuit City Express, so I don't know if that makes a difference.
There are four stores close by to my house that sell consoles. EB, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, and KB Toys. Only Wal-Mart and EB carried X-Boxes, but you can still find an X-Box or someone willing to book you one from a shipment in the next few weeks. All four of the store carry(ed) Game Cube, and all four stores have all their shipments untill christmas sold out. From what I understand Nintendo shiped more Cubes then X-Box...
Of course it doesn't help that the local EB has blown five (5) X-Box demo kiosks since 2 weeks before release and have finally given up and dismantled the thing. (That's five blown consoles in one store in less then a month!) I know of alot of people that canceled their preorder or decided to go with a Cube because of that.
Someday I'll own a Cube......
I don't have a phone. And you're correct, I could do just fine without my car. I also wouldn't be a whiny baby about it if I was unable to have one.
Last I checked, QNX was tiny and fit on a single floppy with a GUI and a web browser.
You can get 144k IDSL in any larger city in the US for less then $125 a month. Frame Relay at lower speeds (256k) is also much cheaper then you think. I've seen $75/$75 for the loop/connection. Business class DSL is available in many places where residential DSL is not. You can get a 512k business SDSL line for $150 in many places. Try ISDN. It can be quite inexpensive if you don't stay connected 24/7. If all you want is e-mail go to your local salvation army thrift store and pick up a 9600 baud modem for $5 and use juno.
Above all, never count on your ISP's e-mail address to be permanent.
It's amusing that you think you can DOS me with e-mail. It's proably the easiest DOS to protect against. Grow up and be rational. Or get hysterical and shoot yourself just 'cause you don't have connectivity. Either way.
There are people in the world who can't even get a regular telephone, and you expect people to feel bad for you when your cable modem goes away? Write letters to your family. Send a check to pay the bills. What did you do before @home?
Forget the porn clause... Look at this!
... to send e-mail of a personal, bulk or commercial nature, including, without limitation, bulk mailings of commercial advertising, informational announcements, charity requests, political or religious messages, and petitions for signatures, other than to those who have requested such e-mails via a double opt-in subscription process
You agree not to use the Power Link Service or any Equipment or Software provided by Adelphia
You're not alowed to send personal e-mail unless the recipient has gone through a double opt-in process! I hope you don't want to initiate any conversations.
Yeah, I have a script to make the numbers before tracks have the correct number of leading zeros so that the tracks play in the expected order. I tried the kenwood ones and they do this too, and my roommate has the sony Xplode version which also does this. I really wouldn't recommend the Sony unit. It doesn't support file names longer then 32 characters, and has a flimsy feel to it. It also has a weird control stick thingie on the front that i just can't stand.
I have the Aiwa uint, an my girlfriend has the second version with the mechanical front. It doesn't suck. The only think I would change about it is the gap between songs. What have you heard bad about it? I would recommend it.
How many of those 1500 binaries do you run, hmm?
Many distributions install lots of packages you don't need nowadays. Uninstall some, or switch to a more minimalist distribution. Try installing debian with only the base packages. Then whenever you need a program you don't have, apt-get it. It'll make for an annoying few weeks perhaps, but at the end you'll have a system with just what you need on it. I'll bet you will end up with only around 600 binaries in the end (Unless you install gnome... That's like 600 binaries on it's own.)
What does it matter anyway? If you have 1500 programs it's no better to have them in their own directories then to have them in one place. Also, it's not like you're dealing with all of them at once.
Are you sure you're not making this up? There's no RCA jacks on the PS2.
DVD players are not all the same. Without even getting into progressive scan or other advanced features there are many quality differences between DVD players. This is different then CD players, since the DVD data is encoded, and requires decoding while CD audio is unencoded and just needs to be converted to analog. Poor quality decoding can cause video artifacts that you may not notice if you're used to VHS, but if someone pointed one out to you, you'd hate your player forever. Once you know what to look for you can't stop looking.
PCI has an UMA. The BARs in PCI config space are used to map the devices into the systems physical address space. This is not anything special about the XBOX. Your 486 DX2 did it. You can always send data directly from one PCI device to another... Say from the hard drive to the sound chip or the DVD decoder. The reason that it is not done this way in a typical PC is not because of special hardware requirements, but because of how the operating system works. There is no simple API in most OSs that makes it easy to say "send this data directly to the sound blaster" because that would require driver cooperation, and typically the drivers are written by different companies.
I'm not saying that there aren't other components in the xbox that aren't improved by being in the UMA, just I/O isn't one of them. (It's questionable wether the video frame buffer being globally mapped is any advantage since the GPU will be modifying the frame buffer, the CPU would have to modify it asyncronously and hope that it's changes weren't either overwritten, or appeared in the right frame. Also, how much additional rendering can the CPU possibly aid such a powerful GPU with, especially when it's busy with other processing. Come back in six months and we'll find out if this UMA stuff is totally hype or not.)
1) When you stream in data from DVD / HD the cpu has almost no work to do to in order to use that data. On other consoles a memcpy() or an additional DMA will be needed.
Huh? DVD and HDD hang off of an ATA-whatever interface. This interface is issued commands which are essentially "read this block to address x" or "write to this block from address x". The ATA controller uses the DMA engines in the PCI bridge to access the CPU's memory directly. In this sense, if your OS programs it that way, PCI has always been UMA, and is even on your PC. There should never be another DMA (The data is in memory already, and most machines don't have an independant DMA engine to do copies) and only poor implementations would do a copy. The CPU must still do a load on the data to get it into a register (There will be page faults and cache misses involved) before it can access the data either way.
If anything an UMA will slow down this process, since the ATA controller will not have any local memory, and would have to use extremely high latency (through the PCI bridge, remember) system memory for performance optimizations that it might do like keeping read aheads or storing device parameters. More likely is that the ATA controller has some small amount of non globally accessable memory onboard or attached to it, and they convienently don't talk about it when they say UMA since it helps performance but they don't want to confuse the consumer.
13K e-mails is very few. What software have you tried that chokes on such a small amount? You should try procmail. It has a very good message scoring system that I use for a spam filter. It catches 90% of incoming spam, and I haven't had a false positive in over two years. Also, on a relativly modest linux box (I use a P2 233Mhz) you can filter tens of thousands of messages an hour. You should be able to incorporate such a filter into your environment even if you are windows based without changing your client setup, and using your existing server software.
I would be happy to send you my rules file if you are interested.
I already have one of those... It's called a PowerBook. Close the lid, and it goes to sleep in a fraction of a second and can remain that way for at least 2 weeks. Open it up and push any button, and 1 second later you're precisely where you left off...
Fresh air if you like breathing pure CO2...
Where do you pay $0.02 per KWHr? I want to move there! (I currently pay $0.22/KWHr in eastern Mass, USA)