Think about it. If you needed to pacify your own population, what better way than to squelch all information flow, except from Government approved sources?
Seems like the likely target is the American people, and no one else.
I have two servers at home using it. One is a file server that has been in use for four years, no issues. The other is somewhat newer, bigger, and has been in use for 6 months. Built one for a friend that is over 1TB, also going strong. They do 50-60 MB/sec easily on reads.
Stick with fairly decent hardware - cheap Intel branded board, good "generic" IDE controllers. Give each drive it's own IDE port. You'll be fine.
FYI: Promise has seeminly added a crippling feature in their latest non-RAID EIDE controllers to avoid folks making cheap soft RAIDs.
You used to be able to use as many Promise PCI IDE cards as you had PCI slots - I've had up to 5 Promise cards previously, ATA-66 vintage. However, the newer PCI IDE cards will give fatal errors if you have more than 2 in your system - drive timeouts, write errors, etc.
I confirmed this with their tech support. This is something in their BIOS, and cannot be avoided. I'd guess that they purposely did this.
This is not an issue with "generic" IDE controllers, like the one that SIIG makes that has a Silicon Image chip on it. Same price, no hassles.
There isn't anything _preventing_ the hardware from working with other operating systems. Since ATI ships their Mac stuff under other product lines, the same hardware with different discs and different box will probably show up for that platform before too long.
Rattle my cage when something more general ships only for XP, and only can work with XP due to a hardware issue.
This is all well and good, but it isn't going to happen any time soon. But, it is very likely to happen, given today's reality.
See, XP wasn't as big a success as Microsoft anticipated. Right now, about half the PCs out there are still running older versions of Windows. The majority of those are running Windows 98 (!). The rest of running some form of XP. Yes, half the PCs sounds like a big success, but it doesn't ensure hegemony. No one is going to ship an XP only piece of hardware, today. Tomorrow, possibly.
Keep in mind, also, that this is about three years since XP appeared. Longhorn isn't going to install on any current machines, most likely.
Now, given this statistic, how long is it going to take for Longhorn to get to 50%? You'd best believe that product is going to be shipped, during the Longhorn period, that works on the last two version of Windows, - Win2k and XP. USB device producers aren't going to come up with new models of anything that won't work with the majority of computers out there. Well, maybe Microsoft will.
I'm guessing that it will take at least until 2010 before the majority of PCs have are Longhorn enabled. When that happens, it'll be a the beginning of a problem. Possibly longer if corps go kicking and screaming, which they will.
Non-MS computer enthusiasts/anti-DRM advocates have at least 6 years to get enough alternative desktops out there to prevent this. I hope that the commercial Linux distro makers and Apple are listening. They need market penetration _now_ to prevent eradication later. Or we'll see the end of personal computing as we know it next decade.
AMD did a dual core demo the week before. They opened the boxes, passed around sample chips, showed enlargements of the cores, etc.
Intel did their demo with a closed box, presumably in response to AMD. Only when asked if it was really dual core did they say it contained "real silicon".
I'd say that there was some vapor in that closed box, too.
A friend of mine was having CD-ROM drives die every two or three _months_. Seems that his consumer ionizer was putting out enough ozone to eat the belts away. He stopped using the ionizer, and the problem went away.
My guess is that ozone would also kill off hard drive gasket seals and even certain types of insulation material.
Nope, I don't think you understand the concept of defining a market. Apple's brand hasn't worked the same magic for home computers, now has it? But they certainly dominate the digital music scene, no argument there. I'd add that this wouldn't have happened if the iPod was bad. Look as Sony's product - can't get any traction at all, despite Sony's branding and marketing prowess.
Fact is that HP/Compaq had product _years_ before Apple did, but they totally blew it. They could have defined this market to be, say, purple MP3 players with purple buds. But no - they had to ship a very very ugly unit through a no-name proxy.
So, I stick to my guns: HP/Compaq blew a great opportunity, ironic since HP is trying to get into the consumer electronics space, and are now owned by folks that should be paying them royalties.
Compaq _invented_ the hard drive MP3 player. They had their first prototypes in 1997-8, I think. Their marketing folks decided that no one would want one, and they licensed the design off to a Korean company in 1999. You can read about it here and here.
I got mine in early 1999, unit #4. It still does things that the iPod doesn't do, like gapless MP3 playback. It has a superior interface, battery life and sound quality. A shrunken version with an attractive design would have kicked ass.
At any rate, HP bought Compaq, which means that they actually own patents covering almost every aspect of the iPod.
So what does the New HP do? They license the iPod from Apple. Yup, pay Apple for the IP that they own. I'm guessing that the clever MBAs running the company never decided to do a simple patent search.
Thus, HP wins the Dumbest Big Company Ever award. HP's stupidity regarding this matter has been confirmed to me by former employees who will remain nameless.
Mine is super fast. It is a Hughes branded Series 2, no mods, and it tends to be totally full at all times. Sorry that your experience is non-optimal:(
* Go to your guide, * Hit the "info" button on your remote, * Change the style from DirecTV grid to Tivo Live Guide.
The Tivo style guide is better (IMO) and super fast. I'm guessing that they had to include the DirecTV grid for some contractual reason, but really want to folks to use their EPG.
In some cases benchmarks were run with some executables (like the chess thingy) that would fit in the Xeon's cache, but not in the A64's. This would give the Xeon an extremely unfair advantage, and it came out that way.
Same benches with the same cache, the Xeon gets killed.
I think that the article demonstrates the effectiveness of cache for some applications. How much would you like to bet that the Xeon was able to run pretty much everything in cache where it won, and the Athlon 64 wasn't?
I was just researching this today for a cash strapped architecture student. Do you know for a _fact_ that, for example, the Inspiron 8600 can be "upgraded" to a precision M60?
If so, I'd love to see links discussing it. Not sure my friend wants to be a complete pioneer:)
Jonathan
Drawbacks not in the article...
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have Vonage for home, Voicepulse for business. They both work mostly well, but both have big issues:
1. Faxing - simply not reliable in general, forget about fax modems.
2. The directory listings issue is definitely just that - I almost couldn't open a bank account for my business because of it, and then was initially rejected for a company credit card.
However, with proper documentation, both of these things were overcome.
3. Online ordering? A _few_, thankfully not most, ecommerce outfits do a 'sanity check' on your phone number to see if it 'matches' your address.
4. Regional info line: can't dial 311 in NYC, which is pretty kick ass. You can, however, put the 10-digit 'out of area' version in your speed-dial.
5. Most of the services don't have in-code-7 digit dialing. Of course, we lost in that in NYC a while ago anyway for POTS.
6. Orphaning. As your VOIP provider starts using the newest, greatest, most bandwidth efficient VOIP adapter for new subs, earlier adopters with older adapters won't get the same features, or even the same level of service. This is definitely an issue with Voicepulse, may they burn in hell.
7. Roach motel portability - or no portability. You can port your phone# to vonage, but not out. You can't port your number to/from voicepulse.
Back in college, circa 1985-1989, I had a little computer graphics/interactive media studio that helped pay for tuition. My partner and I mostly made graphics that ended up on cheezy local car commercials for a few hundred bucks a pop. We used Amigas, and we actually did OK.
So, one day, this guy asks us to make a touch screen kiosk kind of thing that he had seen at the mall. We did all the scripting, he loved it - and then we needed a touch screen. At the time, they were crazy, crazy expensive. But, you could just buy a kit that fit on a standard Amiga monitor for a whole lot less. It did, however, involve opening up your Amiga 1084 monitor and installing a secondary power supply.
So, never having worked on such a thing before, I disassembled my monitor, unplugged it, got to work. When it was installed, I absolutely had to hook up an Amiga and try it out, while guts of the monitor where still exposed.
It tested well, but I was tired. So tired that as I reached for a screwdriver, my bare arm made contact with two hefty capicitors sticking out of the monitor guts.
It was then that I learned about high volts. My arm, involuntarily, swung back so violently that it lifted me out of my chair backwards. I ended up on the floor, on my back, seeing a purple and orange haze, and having no feeling at all in my arm.
The haze went away. My arm stopped tingling about an hour later. The client never paid for his touch screen kiosk.
While this _should_ be a great business opportunity, I think you'd find that small businesses pose some interesting challenges:
* Small business owners are CHEAP. They don't want to spend a nickel on something that isn't an immediate problem.
* They don't see the value in disaster recovery until they experience the disaster.
* They are hard to sell and market to.
* They often use horrible niche-market server based solutions that are Windows only.
I spent a few weeks talking to various business owners about a solution that would offer the following:
* Redundancy, in many of the same ways discussed here,
* Security: firewall, antivirus, antispam
* Offsite backup and admin
* Four hour replacement
* Other stuff, potentially, like ad blocking, web whitelists/blacklists, fax server, email server, etc.
The price to do this for a small business would have to be at least $250/month. They won't spend it on something that they see as intangible. This is the reaction, even considering that at least $200 a month is spent by them in man-hours to have someone, often the owner, wrestling with the cheapo Windows server that they're using. Keep in mind that the $250 would include DSL connectivity AND the hardware for the box.
I grew up in Brooklyn, and used to take the subways to go to school in Manhattan. During the course of grades 7-9, I was mugged three times, and saw several muggings. I mean, who the hell mugs an 11 year old and expects to get something good?
I returned from living elsewhere in '95, and have never been bothered, have never seen any crime, and don't know anyone that has been victimized.
This is only anecdotal, but I'd hazard to guess that the hype over how safe NYC is right on the money.
At any rate, my advice for shiny toys is: get ones that you can part with. I don't have an iPod, I have an OLD PJB-100 that does the same job, although it isn't as flash. I carry a subnotebook around at all times, but it is a >$400 ebay special. My cellphone was free with a new contract. My PDA was a cheapo Zaurus. They all do the job, but I won't cry if I'm asked to part with them, although I will ask the mugger (nicely) if I can keep my SIM card from the phone:) - not for the data, to avoid the hassle of getting the old one deactivated.
I'd pick up the old side-talkin' version for cheap, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. They really needed to put the same features in the new form-factor!
The answer is: mostly. I'm guessing that my cons, below, are pretty niche, and that most desktop users will really be able to use it the same way as Windows.
I just installed it on older notebook. The good:
* Found most of the hardware easily - sound, video, ethernet, etc.
* Trivially easy, but slow, install. Could have been my hardware.
* Boots right into X with almost no user intervention after install, and the you're in a nice Bluecurve GUI. Trivially easy to change desktop environments/windows managers.
* Runs fast - very useable on a PIII-500.
* Excellent support for ACPI out of the box - better, in fact, than Win2000. I'm getting longer battery life on Linux than on Win2k for the first time.
* Yum is a good, tho not great, package management system. Might be having issues due to my FC newbie status, but it doesn't seem to measure up to portage or the BSD ports system. But getting/installing software is easier than Windows for sure.
Cons:
* The install doesn't ask for a domain or hostname, which is odd. So the machine boots as "local.localdomain". They need to fix this.
* PCMCIA support is BROKEN - for some reason, the yenta_socket module (for a very common PCMCIA support chip) does not load. There is a manual workaround which isn't horrible, but annoying.
* Support for wireless is kind of hidden and a bit flakey.
* Support for Synaptics mouse is not there, no mouse taps on the pad by default. Easy to fix with a boot-time kernel argument.
Again, most of my bitches are either mobile/niche in nature. Folks with "standard" hardware should have very little in the way of issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it. If you needed to pacify your own population, what better way than to squelch all information flow, except from Government approved sources?
Seems like the likely target is the American people, and no one else.
I have two servers at home using it. One is a file server that has been in use for four years, no issues. The other is somewhat newer, bigger, and has been in use for 6 months. Built one for a friend that is over 1TB, also going strong. They do 50-60 MB/sec easily on reads.
Stick with fairly decent hardware - cheap Intel branded board, good "generic" IDE controllers. Give each drive it's own IDE port. You'll be fine.
FYI: Promise has seeminly added a crippling feature in their latest non-RAID EIDE controllers to avoid folks making cheap soft RAIDs.
You used to be able to use as many Promise PCI IDE cards as you had PCI slots - I've had up to 5 Promise cards previously, ATA-66 vintage. However, the newer PCI IDE cards will give fatal errors if you have more than 2 in your system - drive timeouts, write errors, etc.
I confirmed this with their tech support. This is something in their BIOS, and cannot be avoided. I'd guess that they purposely did this.
This is not an issue with "generic" IDE controllers, like the one that SIIG makes that has a Silicon Image chip on it. Same price, no hassles.
The equivalent mbox or maildir will be a small fraction of that size. .PST files, for some reason, are just huge for what they contain.
There isn't anything _preventing_ the hardware from working with other operating systems. Since ATI ships their Mac stuff under other product lines, the same hardware with different discs and different box will probably show up for that platform before too long.
Rattle my cage when something more general ships only for XP, and only can work with XP due to a hardware issue.
This is all well and good, but it isn't going to happen any time soon. But, it is very likely to happen, given today's reality.
See, XP wasn't as big a success as Microsoft anticipated. Right now, about half the PCs out there are still running older versions of Windows. The majority of those are running Windows 98 (!). The rest of running some form of XP. Yes, half the PCs sounds like a big success, but it doesn't ensure hegemony. No one is going to ship an XP only piece of hardware, today. Tomorrow, possibly.
Keep in mind, also, that this is about three years since XP appeared. Longhorn isn't going to install on any current machines, most likely.
Now, given this statistic, how long is it going to take for Longhorn to get to 50%? You'd best believe that product is going to be shipped, during the Longhorn period, that works on the last two version of Windows, - Win2k and XP. USB device producers aren't going to come up with new models of anything that won't work with the majority of computers out there. Well, maybe Microsoft will.
I'm guessing that it will take at least until 2010 before the majority of PCs have are Longhorn enabled. When that happens, it'll be a the beginning of a problem. Possibly longer if corps go kicking and screaming, which they will.
Non-MS computer enthusiasts/anti-DRM advocates have at least 6 years to get enough alternative desktops out there to prevent this. I hope that the commercial Linux distro makers and Apple are listening. They need market penetration _now_ to prevent eradication later. Or we'll see the end of personal computing as we know it next decade.
AMD did a dual core demo the week before. They opened the boxes, passed around sample chips, showed enlargements of the cores, etc.
Intel did their demo with a closed box, presumably in response to AMD. Only when asked if it was really dual core did they say it contained "real silicon".
I'd say that there was some vapor in that closed box, too.
Ozone eats certain rubber parts in your computer.
A friend of mine was having CD-ROM drives die every two or three _months_. Seems that his consumer ionizer was putting out enough ozone to eat the belts away. He stopped using the ionizer, and the problem went away.
My guess is that ozone would also kill off hard drive gasket seals and even certain types of insulation material.
Bad idea. Don't go here.
This is the hottest part. It means that I can take my current Operton dual CPU machine and make it into a 4-way, likely with just a BIOS upgrade.
I think that a lot of folks are going to go for this type of upgrade, just because the upside is so huge.
Nope, I don't think you understand the concept of defining a market. Apple's brand hasn't worked the same magic for home computers, now has it? But they certainly dominate the digital music scene, no argument there. I'd add that this wouldn't have happened if the iPod was bad. Look as Sony's product - can't get any traction at all, despite Sony's branding and marketing prowess.
Fact is that HP/Compaq had product _years_ before Apple did, but they totally blew it. They could have defined this market to be, say, purple MP3 players with purple buds. But no - they had to ship a very very ugly unit through a no-name proxy.
So, I stick to my guns: HP/Compaq blew a great opportunity, ironic since HP is trying to get into the consumer electronics space, and are now owned by folks that should be paying them royalties.
Compaq _invented_ the hard drive MP3 player. They had their first prototypes in 1997-8, I think. Their marketing folks decided that no one would want one, and they licensed the design off to a Korean company in 1999. You can read about it here and here.
I got mine in early 1999, unit #4. It still does things that the iPod doesn't do, like gapless MP3 playback. It has a superior interface, battery life and sound quality. A shrunken version with an attractive design would have kicked ass.
At any rate, HP bought Compaq, which means that they actually own patents covering almost every aspect of the iPod.
So what does the New HP do? They license the iPod from Apple. Yup, pay Apple for the IP that they own. I'm guessing that the clever MBAs running the company never decided to do a simple patent search.
Thus, HP wins the Dumbest Big Company Ever award. HP's stupidity regarding this matter has been confirmed to me by former employees who will remain nameless.
Jonathan
Mine is super fast. It is a Hughes branded Series 2, no mods, and it tends to be totally full at all times. Sorry that your experience is non-optimal :(
Jonathan
Change the channel guide like this:
* Go to your guide,
* Hit the "info" button on your remote,
* Change the style from DirecTV grid to Tivo Live Guide.
The Tivo style guide is better (IMO) and super fast. I'm guessing that they had to include the DirecTV grid for some contractual reason, but really want to folks to use their EPG.
Jonathan
In some cases benchmarks were run with some executables (like the chess thingy) that would fit in the Xeon's cache, but not in the A64's. This would give the Xeon an extremely unfair advantage, and it came out that way.
Same benches with the same cache, the Xeon gets killed.
Jonathan
I think that the article demonstrates the effectiveness of cache for some applications. How much would you like to bet that the Xeon was able to run pretty much everything in cache where it won, and the Athlon 64 wasn't?
Very poor comparo.
Jonathan
I was just researching this today for a cash strapped architecture student. Do you know for a _fact_ that, for example, the Inspiron 8600 can be "upgraded" to a precision M60?
:)
If so, I'd love to see links discussing it. Not sure my friend wants to be a complete pioneer
Jonathan
I have Vonage for home, Voicepulse for business. They both work mostly well, but both have big issues:
1. Faxing - simply not reliable in general, forget about fax modems.
2. The directory listings issue is definitely just that - I almost couldn't open a bank account for my business because of it, and then was initially rejected for a company credit card.
However, with proper documentation, both of these things were overcome.
3. Online ordering? A _few_, thankfully not most, ecommerce outfits do a 'sanity check' on your phone number to see if it 'matches' your address.
4. Regional info line: can't dial 311 in NYC, which is pretty kick ass. You can, however, put the 10-digit 'out of area' version in your speed-dial.
5. Most of the services don't have in-code-7 digit dialing. Of course, we lost in that in NYC a while ago anyway for POTS.
6. Orphaning. As your VOIP provider starts using the newest, greatest, most bandwidth efficient VOIP adapter for new subs, earlier adopters with older adapters won't get the same features, or even the same level of service. This is definitely an issue with Voicepulse, may they burn in hell.
7. Roach motel portability - or no portability. You can port your phone# to vonage, but not out. You can't port your number to/from voicepulse.
Jonathan
Back in college, circa 1985-1989, I had a little computer graphics/interactive media studio that helped pay for tuition. My partner and I mostly made graphics that ended up on cheezy local car commercials for a few hundred bucks a pop. We used Amigas, and we actually did OK.
So, one day, this guy asks us to make a touch screen kiosk kind of thing that he had seen at the mall. We did all the scripting, he loved it - and then we needed a touch screen. At the time, they were crazy, crazy expensive. But, you could just buy a kit that fit on a standard Amiga monitor for a whole lot less. It did, however, involve opening up your Amiga 1084 monitor and installing a secondary power supply.
So, never having worked on such a thing before, I disassembled my monitor, unplugged it, got to work. When it was installed, I absolutely had to hook up an Amiga and try it out, while guts of the monitor where still exposed.
It tested well, but I was tired. So tired that as I reached for a screwdriver, my bare arm made contact with two hefty capicitors sticking out of the monitor guts.
It was then that I learned about high volts. My arm, involuntarily, swung back so violently that it lifted me out of my chair backwards. I ended up on the floor, on my back, seeing a purple and orange haze, and having no feeling at all in my arm.
The haze went away. My arm stopped tingling about an hour later. The client never paid for his touch screen kiosk.
Jonathan
AMD is just asking for abuse. See here.
Tried the FUD angle. This was shortly after 9/11, and the question was: what would you do if all of your data vanished? If your office was destroyed?
Of course, the FUD angle is: what would you do if your server was eaten by worms/viruses?
Again, it is a great idea, but one that would be very problematic to actually sell.
Jonathan
While this _should_ be a great business opportunity, I think you'd find that small businesses pose some interesting challenges:
* Small business owners are CHEAP. They don't want to spend a nickel on something that isn't an immediate problem.
* They don't see the value in disaster recovery until they experience the disaster.
* They are hard to sell and market to.
* They often use horrible niche-market server based solutions that are Windows only.
I spent a few weeks talking to various business owners about a solution that would offer the following:
* Redundancy, in many of the same ways discussed here,
* Security: firewall, antivirus, antispam
* Offsite backup and admin
* Four hour replacement
* Other stuff, potentially, like ad blocking, web whitelists/blacklists, fax server, email server, etc.
The price to do this for a small business would have to be at least $250/month. They won't spend it on something that they see as intangible. This is the reaction, even considering that at least $200 a month is spent by them in man-hours to have someone, often the owner, wrestling with the cheapo Windows server that they're using. Keep in mind that the $250 would include DSL connectivity AND the hardware for the box.
Jonathan
Whatever the reason, NYC is truly very safe.
:) - not for the data, to avoid the hassle of getting the old one deactivated.
I grew up in Brooklyn, and used to take the subways to go to school in Manhattan. During the course of grades 7-9, I was mugged three times, and saw several muggings. I mean, who the hell mugs an 11 year old and expects to get something good?
I returned from living elsewhere in '95, and have never been bothered, have never seen any crime, and don't know anyone that has been victimized.
This is only anecdotal, but I'd hazard to guess that the hype over how safe NYC is right on the money.
At any rate, my advice for shiny toys is: get ones that you can part with. I don't have an iPod, I have an OLD PJB-100 that does the same job, although it isn't as flash. I carry a subnotebook around at all times, but it is a >$400 ebay special. My cellphone was free with a new contract. My PDA was a cheapo Zaurus. They all do the job, but I won't cry if I'm asked to part with them, although I will ask the mugger (nicely) if I can keep my SIM card from the phone
I'd pick up the old side-talkin' version for cheap, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. They really needed to put the same features in the new form-factor!
The answer is: mostly. I'm guessing that my cons, below, are pretty niche, and that most desktop users will really be able to use it the same way as Windows.
I just installed it on older notebook. The good:
* Found most of the hardware easily - sound, video, ethernet, etc.
* Trivially easy, but slow, install. Could have been my hardware.
* Boots right into X with almost no user intervention after install, and the you're in a nice Bluecurve GUI. Trivially easy to change desktop environments/windows managers.
* Runs fast - very useable on a PIII-500.
* Excellent support for ACPI out of the box - better, in fact, than Win2000. I'm getting longer battery life on Linux than on Win2k for the first time.
* Yum is a good, tho not great, package management system. Might be having issues due to my FC newbie status, but it doesn't seem to measure up to portage or the BSD ports system. But getting/installing software is easier than Windows for sure.
Cons:
* The install doesn't ask for a domain or hostname, which is odd. So the machine boots as "local.localdomain". They need to fix this.
* PCMCIA support is BROKEN - for some reason, the yenta_socket module (for a very common PCMCIA support chip) does not load. There is a manual workaround which isn't horrible, but annoying.
* Support for wireless is kind of hidden and a bit flakey.
* Support for Synaptics mouse is not there, no mouse taps on the pad by default. Easy to fix with a boot-time kernel argument.
Again, most of my bitches are either mobile/niche in nature. Folks with "standard" hardware should have very little in the way of issues.
Jonathan
Vonage is a Number Portability roach motel - you can port to them, but they refuse to give it up to anyone else in case you want to switch.
This will likely force them to port in two directions, something that they are not doing now.
Jonathan