I'm not really down on angry birds, but honestly, when i get on a plane/long train journey, i dont want to spend hours playing angry birds on my phone, i want some decent games on my PSP (FF crisis core was awesome last holiday). Even when just gaming for half an hour i prefer my PSP over my phone. And angry birds is pretty much the pinacle of mobile phone gaming.
Angry birds is good, very good, but not exactly a match for a half way decent PSP/DS game once you get beyond the scope of wasting five minutes waiting for the bus
true that, my wii is sitting on top of my blu ray player, but hasnt been turned on in months. I have it softmodded, so even though the costs of games can be essentially zero for me, i cant be bothered with most. I mostly did the mod just for the hell of it though.
When i got a gamecube, there were compelling titles at launch, Roque squadron, smash bros, good stuff, but somehow the wii didnt have that much going for it at launch other then the gimmicky movement based games. Sure, metroid 3 is good, the new smash bros/mario kart did the basic iterative improvement which nintendo always does on their franchises, but to me it always lacked the blockbuster titles that other consoles have/had.
I probably will buy a wii-u, but only because my GF will keep harassing me about some gimmicky motion game..
i'm not a huge physics buff (only did advanced high school level physics, no quantum/relativity stuff or anything), but i would probably run LHC before SETI, if only because i hope we as a race get more advanced.
Not sure about Folding though, that seems like a very noble goal as well, although somehow intuitively i sort of expected it to turn up some significant stuff by now already
True perhaps, my original point was that (excluding flukes like that personal anecdote), linux does provide a good experience for joe-i-click-the-blue-e. The unexplained crashes would probably be too much for me right now to solve, however i do have 5 other linux machines running, including two webservers.
Another point was that while XP might be easier right now, those machines can quickly devolve into your typical botnet dungfest without proper care, that's why i wouldnt recommend XP anymore, unless to someone who really knows what they are doing, and has a valid reason not to just use windows 7 (if it must be windows at all)
IOW, even with you as his system administrator - a knowledgeable, experienced person, I assume - you still switched back to XP.
At the time, i was only just starting to cut my teeth at linux-stuff, the machine would crash at random intervals, completely hosing grub and thus becoming unable to boot. I managed to fix it back to bootable state, but was unable to diagnose why the machine would suddenly die. The same hardware ran flawlessly for years with windows.
I have never seen such failures since, and am still puzzled what was going on, but with the machine freaking out every two/three weeks, and me living an hour away with a full time job, it didnt make sense to leave my dad with such an unreliable machine.
I would still prefer a novice to use Win XP, how does it matter if it is going to be un-supported, unless the charity people are going to install all latest and greatest software/games.
security patches? that is actually the reason i moved my little brother from illegal XP to legal Vista. It may suck as an OS, but at least you get continued patches, free AV from MS, and a somewhat sane user/rights system. On of the main concerns when letting joe sixpack loose on a pc is making that box as hard to infect/ruin as possible, even if it means sacrificing some speed/comfort.
I had my father running Kubuntu for half a year. This was a man who's most advanced computer experience involved windows 98. He took to Kubuntu without much problems, used firefox/openoffice/thunderbird without issue. The only reason we moved him back to XP was some odd hardware/software conflict causing repeated crashes which i couldnt figure out in a timely manner.
The OP might have made this clearer, but the Galaxy S2 isnt a tablet, it is Samsung's current flagship android phone, and i can anecdotally confirm that demand for the S2 is very high, most stores have little or no stock, even with regular shipment. These things sell like hot-cakes here.
sadly, the reason that the sales-block isnt effective immediatly is because the cases in the netherlands are ongoing, to be judged today and tomorrow, the final verdict isnt expected until a few weeks.
So yes, you can still get galaxy tabs (if they are released even, not sure), but that probably wont be long:(
Part of your problem is that the Doom 3 engine ran much better of nvidia hardware, the ultimate BftB card for doom 3 back then was the 6600GT, stepping up to the 6800GT/U if you wanted high res.
Granted, a 6600GT is about twice as powerfull as the good old 9600XT (i had a 9600pro for a while, nice card that was), but a buddy of mine ran doom 3 quite well on a geforce 4 Ti, without Dx9 offcourse.
Man, this takes me back to playing BF2 on my unlocked 6800LE, that was just awesome.
There, now read past the first line of my post and consider the point i was making about SSD failures spreadage Vs HDD failure spreadage and its effect on RAID strategies.
Didnt apple stop selling the x-serve though? The only option for a (new) server running OS-X would be either minis or mac-pro's (only an idiot would be something with an expensive integrated screen for a server), both of which are consumer hardware and miss features which are pretty much a must once you get into serious server stuff.
a mini/mac pro as a fileserver for a small business might not be bonkers, but beyond SOHO use, why would anyone bother with a mac server?
i fully realize that consumer grade SSD != enterprise SSD, but a tighter grouping of failures is still very likely due to the way SSDs work. I for one am curious to see what effect this will have on RAID strategies in the future. As for usage, people using their SSD for swap are either stupid, or like the speedup that much that they are willing to eat the cost of an SSD over a years time, but in enterprise land those drives can see very heavy use as well, especially when logging/databases are involved.
Also, shortly after posting the root post, i realized that theoretically rebuilding a raid array should only write heavily to the new disk and only read from the remaining parts of the old array, so triggering a second failure by rebuilding isnt that likely.
I read a blog-post a while back stating that SSDs fail a lot more then you would expect. Somewhere around a year of heavy use seems to take most of the life out of a consumer grade ssd. Now i wonder how putting SSDs into Raid 5 (or 6, or whatever) will behave. If a certain model of SSD croaks around X write ops, then i think the nature of Raid will mean that your entire array of SSDs will go bad pretty closely together. It must suck to have two more drives go belly up while rebuilding your array after the first drive failure.
Perhaps it would make sense to stagger SSDs in different phases of their lifetime to keep simultanious failures at bay, use some burned in drives and some fresh ones.
Thanks for that list, interesting read, and mostly pretty sane, although i find the whole song licensing stuff a bit bizare. I always figured religious songs were mostly bible stuff, and not newly written commercially licensed works. Somehow it seems a bit unethical to ask money for that kind of thing, but there you go, welcome to humanity.
Still, bookkeeping / online research and powerpoint, seems like something a single laptop (or two desktops, one in the church for the powerpoint stuff) should be able to handle.
You are wrong, but i wont bother explaining why, just assume by the complicated sentences i put together, that i am smarter then you and shut up
There, i reworded your post a bit.
Honestly, i try to NOT be an asshole online, but whenever i see people trying to win an argument with a post that is essentially null in terms of content, i cant help myself
Okay, i have seen church-PCs mentioned before on slashdot, and as a devout atheist european, i have to ask, what do you guys use those things for? Is church book-keeping so involved that the minister cant handle it with simple dead-tree anymore? Does the church provide a free to use internet service for its members while they are in? Are they part of a distributed computing effort to analyze scans of the shroud of turin?
Over here most churches are basically houses of prayer as far as i know
i havent had experience with the 1 GHz bit, but back in the beta, i ran win 7 on a sempron 3000+ (good old socket 754, so single channel ddr-400), which is 1800 MHz with a mere pittance in terms of L2 cache, and a whopping 1 GB of ram. It was pretty decent, and it stayed out of swap well enough as long as i didnt get my multi-task on like i was used to on bigger systems. The only real memory i have of the system really bogging down involved me simultaniously web-browsing multiple tabs, streaming music and having two software installations going in the background.
Honestly, from my experience win7 can be pretty damn usable on old hardware, just as long as you dont expect any miracles.
Yup, fusion is pretty cool, i have a e350 based mitx board in the garage, hasnt seen much use lately though.
i'm also considering a fusion based ultraportable (i refuse to call a 11,6" machine a netbook, partly because i dont want to use it as a netbook), the only niggle is that i'm not sure the e350 is up to replacing my dual core Turion for stuff like eclipse and the android emulator, that last one is slow as shit as it is on my turion x2.
Plus sides would be, better graphics (so some mild on the go gaming), much lower power use, lighter weight etc..
Fine, i could get a mac mini at 799, but i dont use desktops anymore or a 11" MBA for 949, near enough as makes no difference 1000 euros, and god forbid if i would want to connect an extra monitor, since they havent sold anything with DVI/VGA out for ages. (so better pull out your wallet for the appropriate fucking cable)
Yes i could buy a mini, or apple could fuck off with their overpriced junk, and requiring it to run their damn IDE
i've said this time and time again, if you buy any product based on promises from the manufacturer on what they will update, you are a fool. You are giving them your money for stuff you might get in the future, with only the marketing meatbag saying "we'll give you want you want, honest", while the beancounters start forecasting revenue for the succesor product.
I dislike apple's model with iOs, i vehemently hate my ipod touch for its reliance on itunes, or shady workaround software. However, as a programmer interested in trying my hand at app development, the fact that i dont have a mac, and it would cost me roughly near 1000 euros to acquire a recent one to develop on is as much of a roadblock as their policies. I have more x86 hardware then i can shake a stick at (i literally just started throwing out old P4 machines since i cant think of any reason to keep them), i have an old thinkpad which i got for 50 bucks which works just dandy for android development.
Why would i want to start out my small experiment with investing 1000 euros just to be able to program?
as my AC sibling points out, by buying used games, you are giving (part of, the middle man takes a BIG chunk) money to someone who doesnt boycot ubi, and thus, some of your money still flowes to ubisoft.
I enjoyed assassins creed a lot, then they pulled that always online DRM out of their hat for part 2, and even though i only play those games on the xbox, i stopped buying them altogether, fuck ubisoft!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really down on angry birds, but honestly, when i get on a plane/long train journey, i dont want to spend hours playing angry birds on my phone, i want some decent games on my PSP (FF crisis core was awesome last holiday). Even when just gaming for half an hour i prefer my PSP over my phone. And angry birds is pretty much the pinacle of mobile phone gaming.
Angry birds is good, very good, but not exactly a match for a half way decent PSP/DS game once you get beyond the scope of wasting five minutes waiting for the bus
true that, my wii is sitting on top of my blu ray player, but hasnt been turned on in months. I have it softmodded, so even though the costs of games can be essentially zero for me, i cant be bothered with most. I mostly did the mod just for the hell of it though.
When i got a gamecube, there were compelling titles at launch, Roque squadron, smash bros, good stuff, but somehow the wii didnt have that much going for it at launch other then the gimmicky movement based games. Sure, metroid 3 is good, the new smash bros/mario kart did the basic iterative improvement which nintendo always does on their franchises, but to me it always lacked the blockbuster titles that other consoles have/had.
I probably will buy a wii-u, but only because my GF will keep harassing me about some gimmicky motion game..
i'm not a huge physics buff (only did advanced high school level physics, no quantum/relativity stuff or anything), but i would probably run LHC before SETI, if only because i hope we as a race get more advanced.
Not sure about Folding though, that seems like a very noble goal as well, although somehow intuitively i sort of expected it to turn up some significant stuff by now already
True perhaps, my original point was that (excluding flukes like that personal anecdote), linux does provide a good experience for joe-i-click-the-blue-e. The unexplained crashes would probably be too much for me right now to solve, however i do have 5 other linux machines running, including two webservers.
Another point was that while XP might be easier right now, those machines can quickly devolve into your typical botnet dungfest without proper care, that's why i wouldnt recommend XP anymore, unless to someone who really knows what they are doing, and has a valid reason not to just use windows 7 (if it must be windows at all)
IOW, even with you as his system administrator - a knowledgeable, experienced person, I assume - you still switched back to XP.
At the time, i was only just starting to cut my teeth at linux-stuff, the machine would crash at random intervals, completely hosing grub and thus becoming unable to boot. I managed to fix it back to bootable state, but was unable to diagnose why the machine would suddenly die. The same hardware ran flawlessly for years with windows.
I have never seen such failures since, and am still puzzled what was going on, but with the machine freaking out every two/three weeks, and me living an hour away with a full time job, it didnt make sense to leave my dad with such an unreliable machine.
I would still prefer a novice to use Win XP, how does it matter if it is going to be un-supported, unless the charity people are going to install all latest and greatest software/games.
security patches? that is actually the reason i moved my little brother from illegal XP to legal Vista. It may suck as an OS, but at least you get continued patches, free AV from MS, and a somewhat sane user/rights system. On of the main concerns when letting joe sixpack loose on a pc is making that box as hard to infect/ruin as possible, even if it means sacrificing some speed/comfort.
I had my father running Kubuntu for half a year. This was a man who's most advanced computer experience involved windows 98. He took to Kubuntu without much problems, used firefox/openoffice/thunderbird without issue. The only reason we moved him back to XP was some odd hardware/software conflict causing repeated crashes which i couldnt figure out in a timely manner.
The OP might have made this clearer, but the Galaxy S2 isnt a tablet, it is Samsung's current flagship android phone, and i can anecdotally confirm that demand for the S2 is very high, most stores have little or no stock, even with regular shipment. These things sell like hot-cakes here.
and arguably, someone could use a clipboard with paper to do computations on as well, so the handheld computer bit is covered too!
sadly, the reason that the sales-block isnt effective immediatly is because the cases in the netherlands are ongoing, to be judged today and tomorrow, the final verdict isnt expected until a few weeks.
So yes, you can still get galaxy tabs (if they are released even, not sure), but that probably wont be long :(
Also, screw apple!
TDP = Thermal Design Power, as in the maximal power usage it is designed for.
Your T61 might have a power usage of 15W, but the cpu TDP for various T61 is around 35 W
Part of your problem is that the Doom 3 engine ran much better of nvidia hardware, the ultimate BftB card for doom 3 back then was the 6600GT, stepping up to the 6800GT/U if you wanted high res.
Granted, a 6600GT is about twice as powerfull as the good old 9600XT (i had a 9600pro for a while, nice card that was), but a buddy of mine ran doom 3 quite well on a geforce 4 Ti, without Dx9 offcourse.
Man, this takes me back to playing BF2 on my unlocked 6800LE, that was just awesome.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
There, now read past the first line of my post and consider the point i was making about SSD failures spreadage Vs HDD failure spreadage and its effect on RAID strategies.
Didnt apple stop selling the x-serve though? The only option for a (new) server running OS-X would be either minis or mac-pro's (only an idiot would be something with an expensive integrated screen for a server), both of which are consumer hardware and miss features which are pretty much a must once you get into serious server stuff.
a mini/mac pro as a fileserver for a small business might not be bonkers, but beyond SOHO use, why would anyone bother with a mac server?
i fully realize that consumer grade SSD != enterprise SSD, but a tighter grouping of failures is still very likely due to the way SSDs work. I for one am curious to see what effect this will have on RAID strategies in the future. As for usage, people using their SSD for swap are either stupid, or like the speedup that much that they are willing to eat the cost of an SSD over a years time, but in enterprise land those drives can see very heavy use as well, especially when logging/databases are involved.
Also, shortly after posting the root post, i realized that theoretically rebuilding a raid array should only write heavily to the new disk and only read from the remaining parts of the old array, so triggering a second failure by rebuilding isnt that likely.
I read a blog-post a while back stating that SSDs fail a lot more then you would expect. Somewhere around a year of heavy use seems to take most of the life out of a consumer grade ssd. Now i wonder how putting SSDs into Raid 5 (or 6, or whatever) will behave. If a certain model of SSD croaks around X write ops, then i think the nature of Raid will mean that your entire array of SSDs will go bad pretty closely together. It must suck to have two more drives go belly up while rebuilding your array after the first drive failure.
Perhaps it would make sense to stagger SSDs in different phases of their lifetime to keep simultanious failures at bay, use some burned in drives and some fresh ones.
Thanks for that list, interesting read, and mostly pretty sane, although i find the whole song licensing stuff a bit bizare. I always figured religious songs were mostly bible stuff, and not newly written commercially licensed works. Somehow it seems a bit unethical to ask money for that kind of thing, but there you go, welcome to humanity.
Still, bookkeeping / online research and powerpoint, seems like something a single laptop (or two desktops, one in the church for the powerpoint stuff) should be able to handle.
You are wrong, but i wont bother explaining why, just assume by the complicated sentences i put together, that i am smarter then you and shut up
There, i reworded your post a bit.
Honestly, i try to NOT be an asshole online, but whenever i see people trying to win an argument with a post that is essentially null in terms of content, i cant help myself
Okay, i have seen church-PCs mentioned before on slashdot, and as a devout atheist european, i have to ask, what do you guys use those things for? Is church book-keeping so involved that the minister cant handle it with simple dead-tree anymore? Does the church provide a free to use internet service for its members while they are in? Are they part of a distributed computing effort to analyze scans of the shroud of turin?
Over here most churches are basically houses of prayer as far as i know
i havent had experience with the 1 GHz bit, but back in the beta, i ran win 7 on a sempron 3000+ (good old socket 754, so single channel ddr-400), which is 1800 MHz with a mere pittance in terms of L2 cache, and a whopping 1 GB of ram. It was pretty decent, and it stayed out of swap well enough as long as i didnt get my multi-task on like i was used to on bigger systems. The only real memory i have of the system really bogging down involved me simultaniously web-browsing multiple tabs, streaming music and having two software installations going in the background.
Honestly, from my experience win7 can be pretty damn usable on old hardware, just as long as you dont expect any miracles.
Yup, fusion is pretty cool, i have a e350 based mitx board in the garage, hasnt seen much use lately though.
i'm also considering a fusion based ultraportable (i refuse to call a 11,6" machine a netbook, partly because i dont want to use it as a netbook), the only niggle is that i'm not sure the e350 is up to replacing my dual core Turion for stuff like eclipse and the android emulator, that last one is slow as shit as it is on my turion x2.
Plus sides would be, better graphics (so some mild on the go gaming), much lower power use, lighter weight etc..
Fine, i could get a mac mini at 799, but i dont use desktops anymore or a 11" MBA for 949, near enough as makes no difference 1000 euros, and god forbid if i would want to connect an extra monitor, since they havent sold anything with DVI/VGA out for ages. (so better pull out your wallet for the appropriate fucking cable)
Yes i could buy a mini, or apple could fuck off with their overpriced junk, and requiring it to run their damn IDE
i've said this time and time again, if you buy any product based on promises from the manufacturer on what they will update, you are a fool. You are giving them your money for stuff you might get in the future, with only the marketing meatbag saying "we'll give you want you want, honest", while the beancounters start forecasting revenue for the succesor product.
It is about both.
I dislike apple's model with iOs, i vehemently hate my ipod touch for its reliance on itunes, or shady workaround software. However, as a programmer interested in trying my hand at app development, the fact that i dont have a mac, and it would cost me roughly near 1000 euros to acquire a recent one to develop on is as much of a roadblock as their policies. I have more x86 hardware then i can shake a stick at (i literally just started throwing out old P4 machines since i cant think of any reason to keep them), i have an old thinkpad which i got for 50 bucks which works just dandy for android development.
Why would i want to start out my small experiment with investing 1000 euros just to be able to program?
I might be secretely cheating here (dont know if windows 7 has powershell by default), but mklink surely works
as my AC sibling points out, by buying used games, you are giving (part of, the middle man takes a BIG chunk) money to someone who doesnt boycot ubi, and thus, some of your money still flowes to ubisoft.
I enjoyed assassins creed a lot, then they pulled that always online DRM out of their hat for part 2, and even though i only play those games on the xbox, i stopped buying them altogether, fuck ubisoft!