Remember DIMMs without SPD-EPROMS? Same sort of thing. Although this time, from what I understand of RDRAM, you need a terminator card in each slot that is NOT used, which explains why the three-slot board is a problem.
RDRAM is a waste of time and money. Why bother converting to an unproven memory technology when PC133 and PC150 SDRAM give much better bang for the buck with today's technology, and are even faster according to most benchmarks.
I understand why Intel has to go with RDRAM. It's part of their legal obligation with Rambus to push RDRAM into the marketplace until the end of year 2002 - http://www.theregister.co.uk/990906-000003.html - but that doesn't mean we the public have to even acknowledge that the 820 chipset exists. Go VIA or stick with the tried, true, overclockable 440BX and supercool those AGP cards.
It amazes me that Intel could have been suckered into this RDRAM quandry. They should have known better, or at least have the backbone to tell the Rambus guys that they're nuts to release a slower alternative to SDRAM, and waited until RDRAM was ready before forcing it on the industry.
The shrinks had to get in on the Internet "craze" somehow. Make sense that they would "invent" a four hour timeframe as proof of addiction - it's short enough that they can claim anyone who works in the IT field is "addicted".
I'm "online" at my computer(s) in one capacity or another for at least 8 hours a day, and usually more. But when I'm out with my friends or off running an errand, I'm not thinking about how long I'm away from a 'Net connection, or when I can next go online.
These researchers should get a life, instead of studying other people's. Belgians - like they've got useful ammounts of bandwidth!:-)
I don't see how this is possible. From my experience, the Network General line of sniffers don't send ANYTHING out on the wire - they just listen to the packets going by and record them.
Tom's site may have become biased in the past few months (or the past year, whatever), but he still can write a decent general-knowledge article. I still keep his site on my Links bar. Not because I'm especially happy with the mudslinging that's been posted there, but because occasionally he's got a decent article, free of bias (I admit, it's getting harder and harder to find those articles).
Cut the Unreal guys some slack. They're GAME developers. I'd rather they be knee-deep in the successor to Unreal than involved in web politics, wouldn't you?
Re:This isn't the old Amiga - it's a Mac on steroi
on
Amiga Technology Brief
·
· Score: 1
Those custom chips did a whole lot more than "address price/performance issues". From Miner's Atari 8-bit series, and then again in the Amiga series, his designs made so much more of the computer than just a CPU. They were tightly integrated products that could do so much more than the individual parts were spec'ed to do.
It took two full generations of Wintel parts to get to the same performance level as my Amiga 500 - which I bought in the days of the 286. Not until I had a 486 DX/2-66 was I "comfortable" running GUI apps on a PC (WFW 3.11, mind you). If Miner had been able to continue design, I think his integrated chipsets would still be way ahead of the mountains of components we have to choose from now.
I'm not saying that integrated designs are necessarily better than the modular setup we have now, but they sure made for a machine with a much different feel than the ones I use now.
The reason you need a graphics card on your Amiga now is because the Amiga's chipset evolution stopped at the 3000. I, for one, wish it hadn't.
This isn't the old Amiga - it's a Mac on steroids!
on
Amiga Technology Brief
·
· Score: 1
Where is the old Amiga in all of this? This is the spec for a Mac!
- Where did Mac go for video? ATI. - What do new Macs use for drive controllers? IDE. - What did the iMac bring Macs? USB. - What OS already runs on the Macs? Linux.
While I appreciate the openness of the PC architecture, I don't want an Amiga that is basically a repackaged Mac/PC.
I want the old Amiga.
- The one that could run a functional OS and apps in 1MB of RAM. Hard disks! Who needs them? - The one that had coprocessors to offload work from the CPU. No fancy schmancy PCI bus crapola. - The one that had the oddest expansion options and the wierdedst cases I've ever seen. - The one with the most wacked out display resolutions imaginable (1200x400).
Where are Denise, Paula, and Fat Agnus? Where's the flat memory architecture? Where's the chip ram!?
After Bell Atlantic rolled out ADSL service to the New York City metro area, I visited their web page for several months, waiting for the page to say that my phone number "qualified" for ADSL service...
Then one day in April, I put in the number of the Dominoes pizza around the corner from me. It came up certified as good for ADSL service. Hmmm... Dominoes can get ADSL, but I can't?
I called up Bell Atlantic and asked them to check my line, just for the fun of it. Two days later, they called me back and told me it certified for ADSL. WOO-HOO!
First hurdle cleared. Next hurdle - getting it installed, physically.
Bell Atlantic does EVERYTHING - from line installation and certification to installation of the splitter to the shipment of the ADSL modem to the ISP end of things. I was warry of them being my ISP, as I had used them before for 56k dialup, and the dial-up speeds had sucked. However, from what I understand of it, they outsource their ISP stuff to Iconnet. I figured Iconnet's modem banks just didn't understand V.90 back in the day (last year).
Installation is a two-step process. The first day, they install the splitter. The second day, they configure your computer.
Before Day One: Bell Atlantic sends the Westel modem to me via UPS. They never told me they were sending it, and I'm of course not there to receive it in the afternoon on a weekday (gee, I work - what a shocker). What's worse, UPS doesn't bother to leave me a note until the SECOND delivery attempt. I get UPS to reroute the package to my Boxoffice address, and pick it up the following week.
The package contains the ADSL modem, a 6 foot Ethernet cable, a 14 foot phone cable, a 3Com Etherlink XL 10Mbit PCI network card, a booklet on Bell Atlantic.Net ISP service, and the power adaptor for the ADSL modem.
Day One - a Thursday, from 8am to 12pm: Bell Atlantic ADSL certified lineman comes out to install the splitter. This took about 45 minutes. At the end of the installation process, the splitter (which is just a fancy bandpass fliter, but MUST go before all of your phones) was stuck to the wall next to my phone outlet. The ADSL modem plugs into the splitter, and the phone plugs into the wall outlet. So far, so good.
Now the fun part - the ADSL modem is plugged into the line and powered on. Based on the rather scarce info about the Westel ADSL modem, it seems that the modem has to first connect to the CO gear on the other end, then download its config, then synch up. This doesn't happen.
Three hours later, the people back at the CO finally fix a patch and the link comes up.
BA had sent my IP info to me in a letter. I had all this info entered into Win98. I was all ready to go. As soon as link came up, I plugged the Ethernet cable into my computer and the modem and rebooted Win98. Sure enough, after rebooting I could ping the local router (well, what they said was the local router).
Turns out BA gave me a router interface that wasn't in my local subnet. I promptly changed that (the ping worked because of proxy ARP).
Day Two: There is no day two. Day two is only for people who can't set up IP, Netscape, etc. This didn't apply to me. I called Bell Atlantic and cancelled the second appointment. Of course, that info never got to the tech, who left me a little note stating that he had stopped by. Oh well, Bell Atlantic's loss.
Third hurdle - outtages:
Outtage One: My first ADSL outtage was that very Saturday night, at 12:30am. There was an as yet still unknown problem upstream of the ADSL gear at the CO. How do I know? The ADSL modem stayed linked up to the remote end, but I couldn't ping the default gateway. D'oh! This behavior is apparently the norm, as it happened on all of my outtages so far. Anywho, I wake up Sunday morning to find things fixed.
Outtage Two: My second ADSL outtage was more severe. The outtage was at the same time, 12:30 AM on Sunday. However, this time when I woke the next morning, I still couldn't ping my local router...
When I got home Monday night, I called BA. They checked things out, and by 12am, they said that they'd have to refer it out to the systems group (which isn't 24x7).
Tuesday I had a long day at work, and wasn't looking forward to coming home to a non-working Internet connection (I had become hooked on multiplayer Half-Life in the few short days I had my ADSL). However, from what I knew from Monday night, I knew that the problem wasn't on the physical layer. It was at layer two or higher.
I tried pinging my IP periodically throughout the day. It became pingable in the early afternoon. I called in to BA to find out what the problem was, and to verify that it was MY machine I was pinging. About 15 minutes into the call, I found out that the problem had been that I was in the wrong VLAN. It took another 30 minutes to get to the layer 3 people to VERIFY on the router that my IP was matching my hardware address in the ARP table on the router.
Outtage Three: Again at 12:30am on Saturday. Came back up Sunday morning. Still no idea what the problem was.
Outtage Four: This was an emergency work window from 12am to 2am on Thursday morning, so I really shouldn't call this an outtage. But by this time I was pissed at BA...
The past two weekends, I've had no problems. I've had the service for going on my fourth week, so I'm relatively happy with it. I work in network operations, so I can understand equipment problems (especially with cutting-edge gear).
Bell Atlantic does not lock in your MAC address anymore. They do static IPs for now, but will be migrating to a dynamic IP system. They may sell extra IPs in the future, but for now you can only get one.
BA didn't give me a problem when I told them I ran Linux as well as 95. They really don't seem to care, as long as you understand that they don't support Linux.
When you get down to it, all you are buying at this point is a one port Ethernet hub that uplinks to the Internet at 640kbit (downstream is 90kbit). It doesn't matter what machine you use, as long as it understands IP, can be configured, and can understand DHCP in the future.
My ISP, Bell Atlantic.Net has good tech support. I've never had to hold for more than 10 minutes, and they are there 24x7. The ADSL hardware side of Bell Atlantic still has a way to go - they're VERY stratified. The layer 1 people don't talk much to layer 2, and layer 2 talks even less to the router guys. This makes getting non-layer 1 problems fixed an annoying matter.
Still, it is definitely far superior to a 56k modem. I consistently get 60kBytes/second on my downloads (provided they come from a server that can support that high a speed), and multiplayer gaming is awesome!:-)
Anywho, that's my experience so far. I think it's good on the whole. I didn't expect the ADSL link to be without outtages, and I still have my 56k modem and separate ISP for those times when the ADSL goes down.
Without an OS, GNU's software is useless. It doesn't matter if GNU is responsible for all of the utilities that are used under Linux, the fact is that without a core OS, all those GNU utilities can do is look pretty on their install medium. There's no system without the core.
Richard Stallman is wrong to refer to a Linux system as GNU/Linux. By his reasoning, my system at home would be a GNU/Linux/Netscape/Adobe/etc., or a MSWindows98/QualcommEudora/CompuServeIM/etc. system. I'm not going to repeat that every time I refer to the OS I run. I'm going to refer to the systems I run by the core OS. That would be Linux for my Linux partition, and Win98 for my Windows 98 parition. To refer to it Stallman-style, I'd need a binder to keep track of all the software I use - on each partition.
If you have a MS-DOS box and rip out all of the MS utilities and replace them with GNU utilities, do you have a GNU/DOS system? I think not. If you take out all of BSD's utilities and compile GNU equivalents, do you have a GNU/BSD system? No.
As Stallman points out at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
"By the early 90s we had put together the whole system aside from the kernel (and we were also working on a kernel, the GNU Hurd, which runs on top of Mach). Developing this kernel has been a lot harder than we expected, and we are still working on finishing it. "
As I said before, without a core OS, a kernel, you don't have a system. And from what is stated above, no matter what the weight by code, the kernel is apparently the hardest part of any system to complete and/or maintain.
I appreciate the work that the GNU project does. I don't appreciate being TOLD to refer to my system as a GNU system because I use their software in conjunction with Linux.
Laptop Transit from JanSport. It's got a padded compartment for the notebook, and a foam bar for the side facing the bottom of the backpack. Plus it has a full-sized main compartment, and a couple other zipper pouches. Only thing I wish it had was more shoulder strap padding.
Why bother with getting a refund on Windows? If people don't want the OS, they shouldn't buy a computer with it. There are plenty of other companies out there who will build machines without OSes. Gateway and Dell, despite popular opinion, aren't that special.
Support the manufacturers that let one purchase a computer without an installed operating system. Better yet, buy from companies that will ship a machine with the OS one wants. If one is going to go out of the way to get a Linux-only machine, one might as well find a company who may help down the line.
1) Many ISPs may not support Linux, but that doesn't mean it won't work. You've probably learned about the modem logs that are generated with the ppp daemons and programs. I've used them to figure out what the other end wants to hear and then set up ppp accordingly.
2) Get an external modem. You can't beat having those indicator lights to tell you what's happening. Besides, if it's just the modem, you don't have to pack up the whole box and risk shipping damage again.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember DIMMs without SPD-EPROMS? Same sort of thing. Although this time, from what I understand of RDRAM, you need a terminator card in each slot that is NOT used, which explains why the three-slot board is a problem.
RDRAM is a waste of time and money. Why bother converting to an unproven memory technology when PC133 and PC150 SDRAM give much better bang for the buck with today's technology, and are even faster according to most benchmarks.
I understand why Intel has to go with RDRAM. It's part of their legal obligation with Rambus to push RDRAM into the marketplace until the end of year 2002 - http://www.theregister.co.uk/990906-000003.html - but that doesn't mean we the public have to even acknowledge that the 820 chipset exists. Go VIA or stick with the tried, true, overclockable 440BX and supercool those AGP cards.
It amazes me that Intel could have been suckered into this RDRAM quandry. They should have known better, or at least have the backbone to tell the Rambus guys that they're nuts to release a slower alternative to SDRAM, and waited until RDRAM was ready before forcing it on the industry.
Just my $0.02
The shrinks had to get in on the Internet "craze" somehow. Make sense that they would "invent" a four hour timeframe as proof of addiction - it's short enough that they can claim anyone who works in the IT field is "addicted".
:-)
I'm "online" at my computer(s) in one capacity or another for at least 8 hours a day, and usually more. But when I'm out with my friends or off running an errand, I'm not thinking about how long I'm away from a 'Net connection, or when I can next go online.
These researchers should get a life, instead of studying other people's. Belgians - like they've got useful ammounts of bandwidth!
D'OH! So I take it the new-fangled Windows NT- based Network General (Associates, whatever) sniffers are supceptible to this anti-sniffer sniffer?
Then again, that wouldn't explain why the NT boxes have two interfaces - one for monitoring and one for transport...
Eh, I liked the DOS version more than the NT version anyway.
I don't see how this is possible. From my experience, the Network General line of sniffers don't send ANYTHING out on the wire - they just listen to the packets going by and record them.
:-)
Guess I'll have to check this out...
Tom's site may have become biased in the past few months (or the past year, whatever), but he still can write a decent general-knowledge article. I still keep his site on my Links bar. Not because I'm especially happy with the mudslinging that's been posted there, but because occasionally he's got a decent article, free of bias (I admit, it's getting harder and harder to find those articles).
Cut the Unreal guys some slack. They're GAME developers. I'd rather they be knee-deep in the successor to Unreal than involved in web politics, wouldn't you?
Those custom chips did a whole lot more than "address price/performance issues". From Miner's Atari 8-bit series, and then again in the Amiga series, his designs made so much more of the computer than just a CPU. They were tightly integrated products that could do so much more than the individual parts were spec'ed to do.
It took two full generations of Wintel parts to get to the same performance level as my Amiga 500 - which I bought in the days of the 286. Not until I had a 486 DX/2-66 was I "comfortable" running GUI apps on a PC (WFW 3.11, mind you). If Miner had been able to continue design, I think his integrated chipsets would still be way ahead of the mountains of components we have to choose from now.
I'm not saying that integrated designs are necessarily better than the modular setup we have now, but they sure made for a machine with a much different feel than the ones I use now.
The reason you need a graphics card on your Amiga now is because the Amiga's chipset evolution stopped at the 3000. I, for one, wish it hadn't.
Where is the old Amiga in all of this? This is the spec for a Mac!
- Where did Mac go for video? ATI.
- What do new Macs use for drive controllers? IDE.
- What did the iMac bring Macs? USB.
- What OS already runs on the Macs? Linux.
While I appreciate the openness of the PC architecture, I don't want an Amiga that is basically a repackaged Mac/PC.
I want the old Amiga.
- The one that could run a functional OS and apps in 1MB of RAM. Hard disks! Who needs them?
- The one that had coprocessors to offload work from the CPU. No fancy schmancy PCI bus crapola.
- The one that had the oddest expansion options and the wierdedst cases I've ever seen.
- The one with the most wacked out display resolutions imaginable (1200x400).
Where are Denise, Paula, and Fat Agnus? Where's the flat memory architecture? Where's the chip ram!?
Jay Miner's probably rolling over in his grave.
After Bell Atlantic rolled out ADSL service to the New York City metro area, I visited their web page for several months, waiting for the page to say that my phone number "qualified" for ADSL service...
:-)
Then one day in April, I put in the number of the Dominoes pizza around the corner from me. It came up certified as good for ADSL service. Hmmm... Dominoes can get ADSL, but I can't?
I called up Bell Atlantic and asked them to check my line, just for the fun of it. Two days later, they called me back and told me it certified for ADSL. WOO-HOO!
First hurdle cleared. Next hurdle - getting it installed, physically.
Bell Atlantic does EVERYTHING - from line installation and certification to installation of the splitter to the shipment of the ADSL modem to the ISP end of things. I was warry of them being my ISP, as I had used them before for 56k dialup, and the dial-up speeds had sucked. However, from what I understand of it, they outsource their ISP stuff to Iconnet. I figured Iconnet's modem banks just didn't understand V.90 back in the day (last year).
Installation is a two-step process. The first day, they install the splitter. The second day, they configure your computer.
Before Day One: Bell Atlantic sends the Westel modem to me via UPS. They never told me they were sending it, and I'm of course not there to receive it in the afternoon on a weekday (gee, I work - what a shocker). What's worse, UPS doesn't bother to leave me a note until the SECOND delivery attempt. I get UPS to reroute the package to my Boxoffice address, and pick it up the following week.
The package contains the ADSL modem, a 6 foot Ethernet cable, a 14 foot phone cable, a 3Com Etherlink XL 10Mbit PCI network card, a booklet on Bell Atlantic.Net ISP service, and the power adaptor for the ADSL modem.
Day One - a Thursday, from 8am to 12pm: Bell Atlantic ADSL certified lineman comes out to install the splitter. This took about 45 minutes. At the end of the installation process, the splitter (which is just a fancy bandpass fliter, but MUST go before all of your phones) was stuck to the wall next to my phone outlet. The ADSL modem plugs into the splitter, and the phone plugs into the wall outlet. So far, so good.
Now the fun part - the ADSL modem is plugged into the line and powered on. Based on the rather scarce info about the Westel ADSL modem, it seems that the modem has to first connect to the CO gear on the other end, then download its config, then synch up. This doesn't happen.
Three hours later, the people back at the CO finally fix a patch and the link comes up.
BA had sent my IP info to me in a letter. I had all this info entered into Win98. I was all ready to go. As soon as link came up, I plugged the Ethernet cable into my computer and the modem and rebooted Win98. Sure enough, after rebooting I could ping the local router (well, what they said was the local router).
Turns out BA gave me a router interface that wasn't in my local subnet. I promptly changed that (the ping worked because of proxy ARP).
Day Two: There is no day two. Day two is only for people who can't set up IP, Netscape, etc. This didn't apply to me. I called Bell Atlantic and cancelled the second appointment. Of course, that info never got to the tech, who left me a little note stating that he had stopped by. Oh well, Bell Atlantic's loss.
Third hurdle - outtages:
Outtage One: My first ADSL outtage was that very Saturday night, at 12:30am. There was an as yet still unknown problem upstream of the ADSL gear at the CO. How do I know? The ADSL modem stayed linked up to the remote end, but I couldn't ping the default gateway. D'oh! This behavior is apparently the norm, as it happened on all of my outtages so far. Anywho, I wake up Sunday morning to find things fixed.
Outtage Two: My second ADSL outtage was more severe. The outtage was at the same time, 12:30 AM on Sunday. However, this time when I woke the next morning, I still couldn't ping my local router...
When I got home Monday night, I called BA. They checked things out, and by 12am, they said that they'd have to refer it out to the systems group (which isn't 24x7).
Tuesday I had a long day at work, and wasn't looking forward to coming home to a non-working Internet connection (I had become hooked on multiplayer Half-Life in the few short days I had my ADSL). However, from what I knew from Monday night, I knew that the problem wasn't on the physical layer. It was at layer two or higher.
I tried pinging my IP periodically throughout the day. It became pingable in the early afternoon. I called in to BA to find out what the problem was, and to verify that it was MY machine I was pinging. About 15 minutes into the call, I found out that the problem had been that I was in the wrong VLAN. It took another 30 minutes to get to the layer 3 people to VERIFY on the router that my IP was matching my hardware address in the ARP table on the router.
Outtage Three: Again at 12:30am on Saturday. Came back up Sunday morning. Still no idea what the problem was.
Outtage Four: This was an emergency work window from 12am to 2am on Thursday morning, so I really shouldn't call this an outtage. But by this time I was pissed at BA...
The past two weekends, I've had no problems. I've had the service for going on my fourth week, so I'm relatively happy with it. I work in network operations, so I can understand equipment problems (especially with cutting-edge gear).
Bell Atlantic does not lock in your MAC address anymore. They do static IPs for now, but will be migrating to a dynamic IP system. They may sell extra IPs in the future, but for now you can only get one.
BA didn't give me a problem when I told them I ran Linux as well as 95. They really don't seem to care, as long as you understand that they don't support Linux.
When you get down to it, all you are buying at this point is a one port Ethernet hub that uplinks to the Internet at 640kbit (downstream is 90kbit). It doesn't matter what machine you use, as long as it understands IP, can be configured, and can understand DHCP in the future.
My ISP, Bell Atlantic.Net has good tech support. I've never had to hold for more than 10 minutes, and they are there 24x7. The ADSL hardware side of Bell Atlantic still has a way to go - they're VERY stratified. The layer 1 people don't talk much to layer 2, and layer 2 talks even less to the router guys. This makes getting non-layer 1 problems fixed an annoying matter.
Still, it is definitely far superior to a 56k modem. I consistently get 60kBytes/second on my downloads (provided they come from a server that can support that high a speed), and multiplayer gaming is awesome!
Anywho, that's my experience so far. I think it's good on the whole. I didn't expect the ADSL link to be without outtages, and I still have my 56k modem and separate ISP for those times when the ADSL goes down.
Just my $0.02.
You forgot - a new X-Files, too.
Without an OS, GNU's software is useless. It doesn't matter if GNU is responsible for all of the utilities that are used under Linux, the fact is that without a core OS, all those GNU utilities can do is look pretty on their install medium. There's no system without the core.
Richard Stallman is wrong to refer to a Linux system as GNU/Linux. By his reasoning, my system at home would be a GNU/Linux/Netscape/Adobe/etc., or a MSWindows98/QualcommEudora/CompuServeIM/etc. system. I'm not going to repeat that every time I refer to the OS I run. I'm going to refer to the systems I run by the core OS. That would be Linux for my Linux partition, and Win98 for my Windows 98 parition. To refer to it Stallman-style, I'd need a binder to keep track of all the software I use - on each partition.
If you have a MS-DOS box and rip out all of the MS utilities and replace them with GNU utilities, do you have a GNU/DOS system? I think not. If you take out all of BSD's utilities and compile GNU equivalents, do you have a GNU/BSD system? No.
As Stallman points out at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
"By the early 90s we had put together the whole system aside from the kernel (and we were also working on a kernel, the GNU Hurd, which runs on top of Mach). Developing this kernel has been a lot harder than we expected, and we are still working on finishing it. "
As I said before, without a core OS, a kernel, you don't have a system. And from what is stated above, no matter what the weight by code, the kernel is apparently the hardest part of any system to complete and/or maintain.
I appreciate the work that the GNU project does. I don't appreciate being TOLD to refer to my system as a GNU system because I use their software in conjunction with Linux.
Laptop Transit from JanSport. It's got a padded compartment for the notebook, and a foam bar for the side facing the bottom of the backpack. Plus it has a full-sized main compartment, and a couple other zipper pouches. Only thing I wish it had was more shoulder strap padding.
It'll probably be like IE for UNIX - big, slow, CPU-intensive, and prone to crashes.
On the plus side, it'll give everyone an excuse to upgrade to Pentium III processors (and/or the K7).
Perry Kettler
Why bother with getting a refund on Windows? If people don't want the OS, they shouldn't buy a computer with it. There are plenty of other companies out there who will build machines without OSes. Gateway and Dell, despite popular opinion, aren't that special.
Support the manufacturers that let one purchase a computer without an installed operating system. Better yet, buy from companies that will ship a machine with the OS one wants. If one is going to go out of the way to get a Linux-only machine, one might as well find a company who may help down the line.
Just two comments:
1) Many ISPs may not support Linux, but that doesn't mean it won't work. You've probably learned about the modem logs that are generated with the ppp daemons and programs. I've used them to figure out what the other end wants to hear and then set up ppp accordingly.
2) Get an external modem. You can't beat having those indicator lights to tell you what's happening. Besides, if it's just the modem, you don't have to pack up the whole box and risk shipping damage again.