I'm asking, actually curious if anyone has any insight.
I mean, it has an embedded processor, little memory, a small low-res screen, likely no graphic chip, no hard drive, smaller battery, etc. Every component is cheaper than what you'd find in the cheapest consumer notebook. And they aren't supporting consumers, so that cost is reduced.
My guess is that the R&D came mostly from a cheap/freely licenseable reference board.
Is this simply a function of economies of scale, the fact that their target audience is price insensitive or has few other options, or is there something else at play that I'm not seeing?
If they can afford to put a copy of HL2 in the box, can't they afford the extra $.50 it'd cost them to support TWO DVI monitors? Enough with the VGA connector already...
My next upgrade, sadly, will remain Nvidia. At least one of their partners can support my monitors.
That might have been true a few years ago, but you won't find BIOS redirect to serial any longer. I think most server board vendors want to sell you something fancy, expensive, and typically less useful.
Can you provide links that show that this is available in stuff you can buy today? Because I looked, and didn't find.
Users running NT based versions of Windows are effectively forced, or annoyed, into running as admin. This happens for a number of reasons:
* Old software runs as admin only. Stuff that came out during the DOS/Windows days, much of it pretty recent, simply won't run as anything but admin. This is a nasty legacy thing, and is a vestige of the horrendous design of Win95/98/ME.
* Too much new software runs as admin. For example, if you want to run Microsoft's own Age of Empires, it only installs as admin, and only runs as admin. This is a new application made by the mothership, and clearly, fits into the home scenario as the article. I'd guess that at least 20% of the apps on my Win2k box require admin rights.
* Too many housekeeping functions require admin.
* It is a relative hassle to run a program with admin rights when not admin. The most common way is to -right click on the program's icon, and then select Run As, and then enter the admin password. Ugh.
* Even for the disciplined, quick user switching allows admin to stay logged in, most likely still running OE or some other security nightmare.
The upshot is that if a user even understands the concept of not running as admin, they are forced to, or get lazy and do so.
I've set up several users on Win2k, and taught them about security, and why they really, really don't want to run as admin. Months later, they all are.
This will be a problem if Linux ever becomes widely adopted by home users, and why Lindows runs as root by default.
Didn't Apple get this figured out? Why haven't everyone else copy them as usual?
A friend of mine decided to toss Outlook Express a couple of weeks ago (this headline makes him feel better about that decision). He asked me what to use.
I steered him towards Mozilla. He's very happy with it.
Even more important is the fact that he cannot believe how good something FREE is. Yeah, free as in beer, but he gets the Free thing too.
My guess is that he'll be a lot more receptive to a Linux desktop in the future. Mozilla makes a good preview of Free software.
That's great information, thanks. I strongly suggest that you get a spindle of the Princo 4x stuffs, at least for DVD backups. So far I've done 20 of them with NO issues, and they burn at over 4x with DVD Decrypter. That's with plain vanilla firmware, BTW, on a recent drive.
I just paid $60 to get a 50 pack spindle from Rima, so it's hard to beat that price. No plug for Rima, my first order. The 4x that I got from Hyper Micro were flawless, tho, and Hyper Micro was great to deal with. Just too expensive:)
I love my A05, and I can't wait to see if some enterprising individual figures out a hardware/software hack to make it an A06. But even if they don't, it was money well spent.
Besides, when the next "hackable" drive comes out, cheap, with dual media support, I'll just recycle the trusty A05 to the girlfriend:)
Re:What about commercial dvd player systems ?
on
DVD Burner Round-up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
One of the reviewed drives, the Pioneer A05, is the "golden standard" for creating DVDs that will play back easily on set top boxes.
Yes, they don't handle the +R/W standard, but I seriously doubt that -R/W is going away anytime soon. By the time it does, dual drives will be goinng for under $75, so the risk is small.
You can find them for under $150 now, and they work pretty well with cheap media. Although many folks caution against Princo's, I've yet to create a coaster or something that won't play back correctly on a set top with the newer 4x "purple" media. You can get them for just over $1 each in small bulk, too, and they Just Work.
Since the A05 is so popular, you can find all kinds of intriguing hacked firmware and the like that enable new abilities...there's even a rumor going around that the newer, dual media A06 is really an A05 with different firmware. Wouldn't hold my breath, but you never know...
You don't mention storage capacity needs. You do mention in a message that low power drain is a good thing. And since this is going into space, I'm sure that any weight savings are a good thing.
How about a RAID of IBM/Hitachi Microdrives? They're IDE compatible with the right cabling, use less power than any other rotating storage, and are super shockproof. Of course, given their size, they weigh very little relative to other rotating solutions.
The only problem I can see is that they're only good for 1GB each right now, but 4GB is coming soon.
Of course, you'll need some kind of off the shelf motherboard and some IDE controllers - but you can GLUE that together to avoid stuff shaking out of slots. But I guess you'd have the same issues with any RAID solution.
I think that there's a simpler explanation - that America is governed by essentially one party, called the Democratic-Republican party.
While they may appear to "fight", their politics are just a shade to the left or right of a given center, only a small degree of seperation.
Until the American legislature has multiple parties that run the political spectrum from radical to reactionary, we aren't going to have real representation - and never have.
In 1995, I worked for a website called Pathfinder. About half the staff pronounced it GIF, the other half JIF.
Since we had good ties with CompuServe, the folks that invented/popularized the format, we figured that they'd know the answer. We actually called. And has per the title, the preferred way of pronouncing it is "JIF".
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it appears to me that both of the projects cannot handle a fairly basic function - changing the channels of my cable box to record something. Seems like that feature is a wee bit more important than some of the other wonderful things like grabbing weather maps:)
If the can do this, it sure is hidden from the documentation.
I went to public school before personal computers existed. My handwriting was simply terrible, partly due, i believe now, to a muscle ailment. I literally couldn't hold a pen for more than a few minutes, or I'd suffer horrible cramps. Still do today.
I was told that I would never be able to succeed in business or college because my handwriting was just so awful. Technology allowed me to avoid that, and in fact, refute that.
I became a profound typist just to "survive". When I hit college, little portable, thermal typewriters were quiet and affordable, even if notebooks weren't. So I looked like a freak typing away in lecture hall...
I submitted all of my papers, typed out on a C64, printed out on an MX80 dot matrix. I came to realize that doing that was good for an extra grade - a B paper turned into an A every time (don't ask, but I did an objective "study" and found it to be true). And of course, there was the added benefit of tweaking spacing, pitch and trimming margins to turn a 4 page paper into a required 5 pager.
Today, my fast accurate typing is considered a major asset. I think that I hold a pen no more than a dozen times a year now.
Shed no tears for handwriting - it is a fossil, a relic, and to be discarded. For those that can still do it, well, it is nice to have mastered a quaint artform.
* If you lose your job in Romania, the goverment pays you around $150/month in unemployment, effectively setting a minimum wage.
* The average salary is about $200/month - but that is the average, skilled and non-skilled.
* The average skilled salary is about $50-$100 higher, depending on discipline. Example: an insurance actuary, a person who computes premiums, gets about $300/month. That same job in the US would get about $60k, minimum, and requires advanced mathematics degrees.
* Many Romanians have gone into business themselves to increase their earnings.
* As of last year, any kind of bandwidth aside from modem access was horribly expensive, with T1s costing over $10k/month, payable in US currency or Euros.
* Romanian women are just amazingly attractive as a group. Not totally on topic, but I can certainly understand why Western businessmen would want to prospect there:)
The bottom line: it isn't cheaper to hire a Romanian over an Indian, and their English is less likely to be acceptable.
So... it is likely that the corps are doing this as a way to avoid a spike in salary inflation in India - a negotiating tactic.
This is just stupid, and WILL be challenged by the other 500 pound gorilla in this space.
I'm pretty certain that any NDA i signed expired, and much of this is publically known anyway...
I worked at Time Inc. New Media in 1995. At the time, Time Warner had a fully functional video on demand system rolled out to a few neighborhoods in Orlando, Fl. It was both a source of pride and joy, but also seen as largely unworkable given the economics of the day.
It had features that included random access video, over fiber, distributed from a head-end, an electronic program guide, I believe, that showed either image or video previews, a remote control, pausing, ff/rw, the whole shebang.
The thing was run by an army of centrally located SGI Onyx servers, and the set top box was an SGI workstation, with a lot of stuff stripped out. It even included video games on demand, downloaded to an included Atari Jaguar. It had its own remote control design optimized for VOD. I think that they recycled the design for TW's current on-demand service; I'm guessing that a lot of Orlando tech and know-how is in there, too.
It should be mentioned that it featured an interface that was totally based on 3D imagery, and would appear advanced today. 8 years ago, it was just science fiction come to life.
This was not just pie-in-sky - it was completely functional. It just wasn't economically scaleable given the computational and compression limitations of the tme. Which is why I think that they mothballed it - to wait for cheaper servers, cheaper storage, cheaper bandwidth, better compression. And $200 set top boxes to display the video and interface.
Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Time-Warner, but they did, at least in the 90's, do some innovation.
Now, INAPE (not a patent examiner), but I'd say that Orlando pretty much invalidates this patent, from the EPG to the actual video-on-demand aspects. More importantly, the prior art has a muscle bound organization behind it to hopefully invalidate this straight away.
If I were back in skool, I'd be looking at the Tablet PCs, especially the convertible ones.
I'd think that the option to use a keyboard for text, but also be able to draw diagrams and equations on the screen would be a great combination.
This is just a guess, since I've yet to try one yet:) I thought that the Newton with keyboard would provide the same benefits, but it was just too damn slow to switch from text to doodle mode.
Sorry, as nice as the 'M' is, there is no comparison to a Northgate Omnikey, especially the Ultra.
I still have one. It weighs over 10 pounds, so it doesn't move. The feel of the keys is heavenly - perfect amount of force to depress, and a wonderful click when you do. All the keys are where they should be, including a superior diamond pattern for the cursor keys.
If you haven't used one, you don't know what you're missing. Northgates are still the golden standard for anyone who knows.
Vampire taps were actually a newer development. The original Xerox equipment required you to DRILL into the 10base5 cable. The vampire taps eventually just pierced the "frozen yellow hose" when you clamped them on. That was a huge improvement.
Thinnet, or "cheapernet", did in fact suck. Although I disagree on the reliability and usefulness of AMP drop taps - those were great for the time, and allowed a network to stay up through disconnects.
Then 10baseT came out around '91/'92, I think, and the switches followed. The first switches allowed 1 MAC address per port (the brand was Kalpana), so 48 port and 96 port switches were common.
Finally, the second gen switches ('93?) allowed multiple MACs per port, allowing you to really use them for backbones... but we had to use FDDI for 100mb to servers...oh the memories.
This had to be one of the very worst reviews I've ever read. The lack of critical thinking is astounding.
First, if you're going to have to replace the motherboard to use a Celeron, you're going to have to replace the memory to avoid regressing in performance. Run that Celeron on the same SDRAM that you had from the P3, if you can even find a motherboard to do that, will result in a substantial performance DOWNGRADE.
But since the author is presenting the idiotic scenario of upgrading by getting a $100 budget processor, along with $200-$300 in new motherboard and new PC133 memory (since PC133 costs more than DDR these days), why not consider other alternatives?
As many others have pointed out, if you're going through the trouble of replacing a motherboard, and therefore, the memory, too, why not just go AMD? Clearly a much better value.
Even better yet - why not just get a faster P3 off of eBay or a clearance outfit, and get a speed boost past the Celeron without the expense and difficulty of pulling the motherboard, reinstalling operating system and/or drivers, etc? And hey, you'd have enough left over to buy a really hot video card, too.
Bad enough that you have these sites that are trying to be the next Anandtech without the brains. Worse that Slashdot would link to this drek and therefore help support it.
I snagged two of the older 15" DVI flat panels, and have them running nicely off of a dual DVI video card in a PC. Got one at a J&R closeout for $200 about three years ago, and another for $150 off of eBay.
No dead pixels and better quality than almost anything current.
Sure, they could be out of business, but they sold me a huge bottle of toner (that works really well), and a kit of special tools that made the refill process super easy and fast. Don't know anything else about them, just a satisified customer.
After my lovely little Oki laser died after 7 years of faithful service, I needed a new machine. I also found that current offerings were kind of cheezy.
I found a refurb reseller who was offering some Lexmark Optra S units. The reseller sucks, so I won't mention them here, but the printer I got was a great deal.
For about $300, I got a unit with less than 20,000 pages, three paper trays, a duplex unit, and a network card. It can do 18 pages per minute at 1200 DPI, and its rated for over 20k pages per month. It was hardly used. They even threw in a toner cart.
Best of all, it uses big old carts that are a breeze to refill, so my toner costs are about $40 for 17k pages. Not too bad. I use www.tonerrefillkits.com, no affiliation, and their stuff works as advertised. Web site is down right now, so they could be out of biz, hope not.
So, don't try and buy a new printer. Find a creampuff that came off lease, and enjoy it for the next 10 years or so. Some of those older models were made like tanks, and well designed ones at that. I'm glad that some corporate wonk felt the need to upgrade to the "latest".
Did you read my question? Your response is irrelevant to my point.
I don't care what the theater's economics of it are, since I can almost always rent the DVD later even if the piddly local theater can't afford to show a movie. The bottom line is that even with this "enabling" technology, seeing a movie with lossy compression in a theater is a crappy value, at least to me. It makes more sense to wait and see it on DVD.
When they tell us that they've dropped movie ticket prices in response to their costs going down, then I might be interested.
To me, the reason for paying silly prices for movie tickets is to see a clean PRINT - to get playback fidelity that I can't get at home. I've demanded, and gotten, refunds on admission when the print was in poor condition.
I'll also deal with increasingly rude and irritating fellow audience members, again, to see a movie in better fidelity.
However, I have a largish TV, I have a DVD player, I have surround sound. I rent movies from NetFlix for about $2-3 a throw.
So, exactly why do I want to pay a money/irritation premium to go the movies any more? I think that Landmarjust lost a small but significant percentage of their customer base.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, most notebooks have Windows installed on them as well. I'd guess that the CE license is cheaper than XP Home.
I'm asking, actually curious if anyone has any insight.
I mean, it has an embedded processor, little memory, a small low-res screen, likely no graphic chip, no hard drive, smaller battery, etc. Every component is cheaper than what you'd find in the cheapest consumer notebook. And they aren't supporting consumers, so that cost is reduced.
My guess is that the R&D came mostly from a cheap/freely licenseable reference board.
Is this simply a function of economies of scale, the fact that their target audience is price insensitive or has few other options, or is there something else at play that I'm not seeing?
Jonathan
If they can afford to put a copy of HL2 in the box, can't they afford the extra $.50 it'd cost them to support TWO DVI monitors? Enough with the VGA connector already...
My next upgrade, sadly, will remain Nvidia. At least one of their partners can support my monitors.
That might have been true a few years ago, but you won't find BIOS redirect to serial any longer. I think most server board vendors want to sell you something fancy, expensive, and typically less useful.
Can you provide links that show that this is available in stuff you can buy today? Because I looked, and didn't find.
Jonathan
Users running NT based versions of Windows are effectively forced, or annoyed, into running as admin. This happens for a number of reasons:
* Old software runs as admin only. Stuff that came out during the DOS/Windows days, much of it pretty recent, simply won't run as anything but admin. This is a nasty legacy thing, and is a vestige of the horrendous design of Win95/98/ME.
* Too much new software runs as admin. For example, if you want to run Microsoft's own Age of Empires, it only installs as admin, and only runs as admin. This is a new application made by the mothership, and clearly, fits into the home scenario as the article. I'd guess that at least 20% of the apps on my Win2k box require admin rights.
* Too many housekeeping functions require admin.
* It is a relative hassle to run a program with admin rights when not admin. The most common way is to -right click on the program's icon, and then select Run As, and then enter the admin password. Ugh.
* Even for the disciplined, quick user switching allows admin to stay logged in, most likely still running OE or some other security nightmare.
The upshot is that if a user even understands the concept of not running as admin, they are forced to, or get lazy and do so.
I've set up several users on Win2k, and taught them about security, and why they really, really don't want to run as admin. Months later, they all are.
This will be a problem if Linux ever becomes widely adopted by home users, and why Lindows runs as root by default.
Didn't Apple get this figured out? Why haven't everyone else copy them as usual?
Jonathan
A friend of mine decided to toss Outlook Express a couple of weeks ago (this headline makes him feel better about that decision). He asked me what to use.
I steered him towards Mozilla. He's very happy with it.
Even more important is the fact that he cannot believe how good something FREE is. Yeah, free as in beer, but he gets the Free thing too.
My guess is that he'll be a lot more receptive to a Linux desktop in the future. Mozilla makes a good preview of Free software.
That's great information, thanks. I strongly suggest that you get a spindle of the Princo 4x stuffs, at least for DVD backups. So far I've done 20 of them with NO issues, and they burn at over 4x with DVD Decrypter. That's with plain vanilla firmware, BTW, on a recent drive.
:)
:)
I just paid $60 to get a 50 pack spindle from Rima, so it's hard to beat that price. No plug for Rima, my first order. The 4x that I got from Hyper Micro were flawless, tho, and Hyper Micro was great to deal with. Just too expensive
I love my A05, and I can't wait to see if some enterprising individual figures out a hardware/software hack to make it an A06. But even if they don't, it was money well spent.
Besides, when the next "hackable" drive comes out, cheap, with dual media support, I'll just recycle the trusty A05 to the girlfriend
One of the reviewed drives, the Pioneer A05, is the "golden standard" for creating DVDs that will play back easily on set top boxes.
Yes, they don't handle the +R/W standard, but I seriously doubt that -R/W is going away anytime soon. By the time it does, dual drives will be goinng for under $75, so the risk is small.
You can find them for under $150 now, and they work pretty well with cheap media. Although many folks caution against Princo's, I've yet to create a coaster or something that won't play back correctly on a set top with the newer 4x "purple" media. You can get them for just over $1 each in small bulk, too, and they Just Work.
Since the A05 is so popular, you can find all kinds of intriguing hacked firmware and the like that enable new abilities...there's even a rumor going around that the newer, dual media A06 is really an A05 with different firmware. Wouldn't hold my breath, but you never know...
How about a RAID of IBM/Hitachi Microdrives? They're IDE compatible with the right cabling, use less power than any other rotating storage, and are super shockproof. Of course, given their size, they weigh very little relative to other rotating solutions.
The only problem I can see is that they're only good for 1GB each right now, but 4GB is coming soon.
Of course, you'll need some kind of off the shelf motherboard and some IDE controllers - but you can GLUE that together to avoid stuff shaking out of slots. But I guess you'd have the same issues with any RAID solution.
Jonathan
I think that there's a simpler explanation - that America is governed by essentially one party, called the Democratic-Republican party.
While they may appear to "fight", their politics are just a shade to the left or right of a given center, only a small degree of seperation.
Until the American legislature has multiple parties that run the political spectrum from radical to reactionary, we aren't going to have real representation - and never have.
jonathan
In 1995, I worked for a website called Pathfinder. About half the staff pronounced it GIF, the other half JIF.
:)
Since we had good ties with CompuServe, the folks that invented/popularized the format, we figured that they'd know the answer. We actually called. And has per the title, the preferred way of pronouncing it is "JIF".
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it appears to me that both of the projects cannot handle a fairly basic function - changing the channels of my cable box to record something. Seems like that feature is a wee bit more important than some of the other wonderful things like grabbing weather maps :)
If the can do this, it sure is hidden from the documentation.
I went to public school before personal computers existed. My handwriting was simply terrible, partly due, i believe now, to a muscle ailment. I literally couldn't hold a pen for more than a few minutes, or I'd suffer horrible cramps. Still do today.
I was told that I would never be able to succeed in business or college because my handwriting was just so awful. Technology allowed me to avoid that, and in fact, refute that.
I became a profound typist just to "survive". When I hit college, little portable, thermal typewriters were quiet and affordable, even if notebooks weren't. So I looked like a freak typing away in lecture hall...
I submitted all of my papers, typed out on a C64, printed out on an MX80 dot matrix. I came to realize that doing that was good for an extra grade - a B paper turned into an A every time (don't ask, but I did an objective "study" and found it to be true). And of course, there was the added benefit of tweaking spacing, pitch and trimming margins to turn a 4 page paper into a required 5 pager.
Today, my fast accurate typing is considered a major asset. I think that I hold a pen no more than a dozen times a year now.
Shed no tears for handwriting - it is a fossil, a relic, and to be discarded. For those that can still do it, well, it is nice to have mastered a quaint artform.
jonathan
A few facts:
:)
* If you lose your job in Romania, the goverment pays you around $150/month in unemployment, effectively setting a minimum wage.
* The average salary is about $200/month - but that is the average, skilled and non-skilled.
* The average skilled salary is about $50-$100 higher, depending on discipline. Example: an insurance actuary, a person who computes premiums, gets about $300/month. That same job in the US would get about $60k, minimum, and requires advanced mathematics degrees.
* Many Romanians have gone into business themselves to increase their earnings.
* As of last year, any kind of bandwidth aside from modem access was horribly expensive, with T1s costing over $10k/month, payable in US currency or Euros.
* Romanian women are just amazingly attractive as a group. Not totally on topic, but I can certainly understand why Western businessmen would want to prospect there
The bottom line: it isn't cheaper to hire a Romanian over an Indian, and their English is less likely to be acceptable.
So... it is likely that the corps are doing this as a way to avoid a spike in salary inflation in India - a negotiating tactic.
jonathan
This is just stupid, and WILL be challenged by the other 500 pound gorilla in this space.
I'm pretty certain that any NDA i signed expired, and much of this is publically known anyway...
I worked at Time Inc. New Media in 1995. At the time, Time Warner had a fully functional video on demand system rolled out to a few neighborhoods in Orlando, Fl. It was both a source of pride and joy, but also seen as largely unworkable given the economics of the day.
It had features that included random access video, over fiber, distributed from a head-end, an electronic program guide, I believe, that showed either image or video previews, a remote control, pausing, ff/rw, the whole shebang.
The thing was run by an army of centrally located SGI Onyx servers, and the set top box was an SGI workstation, with a lot of stuff stripped out. It even included video games on demand, downloaded to an included Atari Jaguar. It had its own remote control design optimized for VOD. I think that they recycled the design for TW's current on-demand service; I'm guessing that a lot of Orlando tech and know-how is in there, too.
It should be mentioned that it featured an interface that was totally based on 3D imagery, and would appear advanced today. 8 years ago, it was just science fiction come to life.
This was not just pie-in-sky - it was completely functional. It just wasn't economically scaleable given the computational and compression limitations of the tme. Which is why I think that they mothballed it - to wait for cheaper servers, cheaper storage, cheaper bandwidth, better compression. And $200 set top boxes to display the video and interface.
Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Time-Warner, but they did, at least in the 90's, do some innovation.
Now, INAPE (not a patent examiner), but I'd say that Orlando pretty much invalidates this patent, from the EPG to the actual video-on-demand aspects. More importantly, the prior art has a muscle bound organization behind it to hopefully invalidate this straight away.
Jonathan
If I were back in skool, I'd be looking at the Tablet PCs, especially the convertible ones.
:) I thought that the Newton with keyboard would provide the same benefits, but it was just too damn slow to switch from text to doodle mode.
I'd think that the option to use a keyboard for text, but also be able to draw diagrams and equations on the screen would be a great combination.
This is just a guess, since I've yet to try one yet
jonathan
Sorry, as nice as the 'M' is, there is no comparison to a Northgate Omnikey, especially the Ultra .
I still have one. It weighs over 10 pounds, so it doesn't move. The feel of the keys is heavenly - perfect amount of force to depress, and a wonderful click when you do. All the keys are where they should be, including a superior diamond pattern for the cursor keys.
If you haven't used one, you don't know what you're missing. Northgates are still the golden standard for anyone who knows.
jonathan
Wow, people actually remember this stuff...
Vampire taps were actually a newer development. The original Xerox equipment required you to DRILL into the 10base5 cable. The vampire taps eventually just pierced the "frozen yellow hose" when you clamped them on. That was a huge improvement.
Thinnet, or "cheapernet", did in fact suck. Although I disagree on the reliability and usefulness of AMP drop taps - those were great for the time, and allowed a network to stay up through disconnects.
Then 10baseT came out around '91/'92, I think, and the switches followed. The first switches allowed 1 MAC address per port (the brand was Kalpana), so 48 port and 96 port switches were common.
Finally, the second gen switches ('93?) allowed multiple MACs per port, allowing you to really use them for backbones... but we had to use FDDI for 100mb to servers...oh the memories.
jonathan
This had to be one of the very worst reviews I've ever read. The lack of critical thinking is astounding.
First, if you're going to have to replace the motherboard to use a Celeron, you're going to have to replace the memory to avoid regressing in performance. Run that Celeron on the same SDRAM that you had from the P3, if you can even find a motherboard to do that, will result in a substantial performance DOWNGRADE.
But since the author is presenting the idiotic scenario of upgrading by getting a $100 budget processor, along with $200-$300 in new motherboard and new PC133 memory (since PC133 costs more than DDR these days), why not consider other alternatives?
As many others have pointed out, if you're going through the trouble of replacing a motherboard, and therefore, the memory, too, why not just go AMD? Clearly a much better value.
Even better yet - why not just get a faster P3 off of eBay or a clearance outfit, and get a speed boost past the Celeron without the expense and difficulty of pulling the motherboard, reinstalling operating system and/or drivers, etc?
And hey, you'd have enough left over to buy a really hot video card, too.
Bad enough that you have these sites that are trying to be the next Anandtech without the brains. Worse that Slashdot would link to this drek and therefore help support it.
jonathan
They sure are, and you can often find them cheap.
I snagged two of the older 15" DVI flat panels, and have them running nicely off of a dual DVI video card in a PC. Got one at a J&R closeout for $200 about three years ago, and another for $150 off of eBay.
No dead pixels and better quality than almost anything current.
You sure can, if your IR keyboard transmits a flavor of IR that the Pronto can understand. Not all keyboards are going to be compatible.
I used the Pronto learning feature to "learn" from my IR keyboard - at least a few keystrokes that I use to control a DVD playing program on a PC.
Sure, they could be out of business, but they sold me a huge bottle of toner (that works really well), and a kit of special tools that made the refill process super easy and fast. Don't know anything else about them, just a satisified customer.
jonathan
After my lovely little Oki laser died after 7 years of faithful service, I needed a new machine. I also found that current offerings were kind of cheezy.
I found a refurb reseller who was offering some Lexmark Optra S units. The reseller sucks, so I won't mention them here, but the printer I got was a great deal.
For about $300, I got a unit with less than 20,000 pages, three paper trays, a duplex unit, and a network card. It can do 18 pages per minute at 1200 DPI, and its rated for over 20k pages per month. It was hardly used. They even threw in a toner cart.
Best of all, it uses big old carts that are a breeze to refill, so my toner costs are about $40 for 17k pages. Not too bad. I use www.tonerrefillkits.com, no affiliation, and their stuff works as advertised. Web site is down right now, so they could be out of biz, hope not.
So, don't try and buy a new printer. Find a creampuff that came off lease, and enjoy it for the next 10 years or so. Some of those older models were made like tanks, and well designed ones at that. I'm glad that some corporate wonk felt the need to upgrade to the "latest".
Did you read my question? Your response is irrelevant to my point.
I don't care what the theater's economics of it are, since I can almost always rent the DVD later even if the piddly local theater can't afford to show a movie. The bottom line is that even with this "enabling" technology, seeing a movie with lossy compression in a theater is a crappy value, at least to me. It makes more sense to wait and see it on DVD.
When they tell us that they've dropped movie ticket prices in response to their costs going down, then I might be interested.
To me, the reason for paying silly prices for movie tickets is to see a clean PRINT - to get playback fidelity that I can't get at home. I've demanded, and gotten, refunds on admission when the print was in poor condition.
I'll also deal with increasingly rude and irritating fellow audience members, again, to see a movie in better fidelity.
However, I have a largish TV, I have a DVD player, I have surround sound. I rent movies from NetFlix for about $2-3 a throw.
So, exactly why do I want to pay a money/irritation premium to go the movies any more? I think that Landmarjust lost a small but significant percentage of their customer base.