I dunno, but it's not all that comparative if in certain graphs, certain machines are missing. Most stats for the Sega Game Gear are missing. So either, they didn't have one lying around or they didn't find the data in their reseach.
They could have just asked me about the Game Gear, because I still got mine and it's functional and I got a few games.
Then the CPU clearly took up the slack (or it had a fast harddisk). I tried installing Windows XP Pro on a P-II 333MHz (or so, something in the 300MHz range) and it only had 128Meg RAM. That was painfully slow, but I only did that to check if all hardware worked. After that I put Linux on it.
Now, now, now.... I like to bash Microsoft as much as the next slashdot guy. However, it is possible to run Windows XP Pro on a machine with 256Meg RAM. On idle, a correclty configured XP uses about 100Meg, less depending on the active services. You can even run iTunes, Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice2.org on it. Now, true, the difference by adding another 256Meg is big, but it is possible. My mother in law ran a P-III 500MHz/256Meg RAM for quite some time until I found a slightly better CPU and another PC100 256Meg stick in a dumpster. It now is a really good machine for normal productivity applications. My last laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM and it was sufficient for my needs. I only replaced it because it fell physically apart.
True, but contrary to most nations this is split in my country. I pay a fixed fee for the "connection" to the local P&T company, and then on top of that I pay a "internet connection" fee to my ISP...
Sad, but true.... I'm aware this is different in many countries, but not in mine.
It's been a while I investigated. True... Your explanation makes much sense. I don't think they overcharge as much as in the DSL/Cable world though. It has to stay reasonable.
The difference is clear. A T1 guarantees you your bandwidth. Both DSL and Cable do not. You usually get it, but that is only because others only use a fraction of what they are "allowed" to. Look in your TOS, you'll see that they do not guarantee the speeds, they are "averages". So essentialy, your ISP pays for 100Mbps and sells 5000Mbps to 1000 customers (Each 5Mbps, but in reality they get only 0.1Mbps). (Numbers pulled out of my you know what). If everyone would start downloading like crazy at the same time you'd get congestions. The fact is that it's not the bandwith that is interesting with DSL/Cable but the fact that it is always-on.
When DSL started here, it was only 256kbps/64kbps for quite a lot of money. We made the calculation compared to our average ISDN Internet usage (that was per minute) and the price would be the same or slightly higher. Sure, the higher speed was appealing, but the fact that we knew we payed a flat-fee for unlimited interet usage and always-on made it more attractive. That was why we were early adopters, not because it was faster. After all the ISDN 64kbps was plenty of fast back then. It did change our internet habits though: checking the email in business hours was a no-no. We started to check our mail after waking up;-)
I heared that in Italy you can get a T1 for cheap, but I'm sure it comes with no guarantee.
I know a highly intelligent person, with great grades leaving highschool (in Europe) and he went for... plumber. No joke...
My father in law never finished highschool and learnt metalworking. He now owns a highly successful company doing just that. He has more money that I can dream of as an IT professional (privately employed, perhaps if I'd start my own company... hmmm) Yes, I indeed have a full CS dimploma. It really makes you wonder....
I ran NT 4.0 and W2k back in those days, but I do remember one girl I knew that insisted on running ME. It came with the computer, and she was content with it. Had a hot night with that redhead, so I'm not complaining;-)
Personally, I had sworn off the 9x line once I got NT 4.0. I essentially missed out on 98 and ME. Never used them personally, nor professionally. Got to support them for friends from time to time though. A few months, somebody gave me a P-II 350MHz/128Meg RAM machine and I tried to install 98 on it. It wasn't for me, I just was asked to repair it.... It was a horrible pain, I ended up giving it back with Ubuntu on it. At least that was legal. W2k would have run fine though, I guess... Didn't try... (I installed a Corporate Edition of XP on it to see if all hardware was okay, and it was funny how long it took to boot;-) It was absolutely unusable, well, okay, it "ran Windows" )
Despite this, there have been complaints from the PC industry that Vista isn't enough of a resource hog to force people to buy new hardware.
I don't think that has to do with Vista being a resource hog. I think this has more to do with the availability with 500€ to 1000€ machines (including LCD screen, keyboard and mouse) that pretty much flied with Windows XP. People got used to that. Now suddenly, you need to buy a much more expensive machine to run Windows Vista and many people realise that Windows XP was sufficient and suited their needs.
My first laptop was a 486DX/2, 8Meg of RAM with Active Matrix TFT and a harddisk of 320Meg (that was rare and expensive back in the day). It costed a whopping 3000€, and was pretty high-end when I bought it. The machine after that was a P-I 120MHz, 32Meg RAM with a 1Gig harddisk. It was mid-range, because the 486DX died and needed a PC ASAP and I didn't have enough money for a high-end one. That machine was also 3000€. The laptop after that was an iBook G3 600MHz, 384Meg RAM with 20Gb harddisk. That was the biggest iBook back then and cost "only" 2200€.
When my iBook died, I bought a obsoleted laptop from work for 100€. So let's just disregard that one. It still lasted me a good two years before starting to fall apart physically.
In january, I bit the bullet and bought a AMD Turion X2, 1Gig of RAM with 120Gig harddisk. How much? 799€ The same machine two months later was to be had for 695€ That is definately a low-end machine (I upgraded to 2Gig immediately though and that was 140€ extra, but I still have the two 512Meg sticks that I could sell on eBay, I guess) It is technically Vista Capable, or so said the sticker on it. The fine print on the box essentially told me "you can run Vista on it, but you won't be getting all fancy features". It's in the category that Dell (no, it's not a Dell) labelled as "Fine for booting Vista". I'm sure you saw that on their website, as it was posted on slashdot a few times in the comments.
The machine flies with Windows XP.... For pretty much no money, and I didn't even take into account inflation....
Vista asks more resources, but people have become used to good value PCs. That has been taken away by Vista.... No wonder Dell ships XP again... Customers demand it...
You also forgot "break" and "continue" that both are hidden gotos. Oh, and if you look a bit deeper: every decision (let it be a if or a switch or a while, etc...) will generate a JMP instruction in the end. Of course, nobody thinks that way anymore. (That's what you mean with "where we would have used GOTO in 1970, we have better sturctures", I guess...) Probably shows my age;-)
I still have a mothballed vintage 2001 computer laying around running Win2K and office 2K quite snappily, and there isn't a damned office-related task it can't do just fine.
Vintage?!? I bet it can even run WinXP fine if it has enough memory. My primary laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM (RAM was scavenged from other machines) up until last january. It ran plenty fast for my mundane tasks (including running OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, Thunderbird, iTunes *at the same time*). The only reason that I replaced it was because it was starting to fall apart physically. My mother in law uses a P-III 550MHz/512Meg RAM (again, RAM scavenged from other machines) I have never heard her complain. Of course, neither of us run games...;-)
I have found faster machines in the dumpster! When I have the time, I might just replace my mother in laws machine with a P-IV I found there.;-) My own former desktop (from 1999, IIRC) now is my parents server.... It's an P-III 800MHz/768Meg (that RAM was originally there, yes) runs OpenBSD and top reports a mere 34Meg used.
If I think "Vintage", I think C=64, Sinclair QL, TRS-80, Amiga 500, IBM XT, and many other that have a few more years behind it and really are unable to run anything close to "modern".
Granted, I don't even bother with anything that is not a P-III, but the P-III came out in 1999. That's a good 8 years ago.
That said, with computers under 500€ with keyboard and LCD srceen, I wonder why I even bother taking "the viable ones" out of the dumpster.
I know you said essentially the same, I just wanted to object to "Vintage". You don't call a 10 year old car "Vinatge", you call it "old" or in my case "good enough" (my car is 7 years old, but you get the idea...)
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800),
WOW! Is that old? My own system is from begin 2003 and it's a workstation class AMD Athlon MP 2400+ (2 CPUs) with 4Gigs of RAM and a NVidia AGP card (originally it was a Ti4200, now it's an FX5500). My wifes machine is a P-IV 2.4HT with 2Gig of RAM and the Ti4200 that was in my machine. Sure they have been slightly upgraded (mine from 1Gig to 4Gig and hers from 512Meg to 2Gig). I wouldn't dare to call them "old", but they are easily outperformed by your wifes system.
I found a complete P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM machine in a dumpster as I found a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon (no RAM though, but I have some of my own!) there. I don't know what I use them for, but both make decent desktops. Also consider that my primary laptop until 3 months ago was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM. I only replaced it because it was starting to physically fall apart. My dad still uses his P-III 733MHz/512Meg RAM laptop. He wanted to replace it earlier this year and I asked what the problem was: not enough disk space. Upgrading the 20Gig disk to a 80Gig disk made him happy....
I think you have a very strange definition of "old". Even my definition of "old" is stretched. I won't take a fully functional P-III out of the dumpster, because I know that I'll find a better one next time I come along.
You also suck at HTML. Let me introduce entities: they look like this &entity;. For example, to have a lower than sign you use < and for a greater than entitpy you use a >.
Ehm... You mean as in 100% hardcoded, because I do control my DNS server (separte Unix machine). That said, if I know those IP addresses, I still can route them to somewhere else (I also control my router, go figure!). My idea can work.
I heard Windows bypasses the hosts file for some sites, but I still thought it did genuine DNS lookups.
About that 2Gig limit... Did you check the motherboards compatibility? I have two desktops, my wifes and mine. My wifes desktop only supports 2Gig and can handle them fine. My motherboard can handle 4Gig but due to architectural reasons you never get the last 512Meg, so Windows reports 3.5Gig, the PC detects 4Gig.
It really depends on the motherboard: my server is an AMD64 and the max it will run at is 2Gig at full speed. More, and the memory clock is downthrottled (yes, it is a 754 socket, yes, I know...)
Please check the manual, it might be that you thought 4Gig worked, but that the motherboard doesn't support it. This is not Vistas fault. You'd have the same problem with Linux.
I would take it if it was free... Why? To have a good laugh. All of my PCs (except my laptop which is 3 months old, but is only "Vista Capable" and you know what that means....) are from 2003. It'll be fun to see how hardware that is just fine for my use is rendered to an overloaded heap of junk;-)
Just wondering: has someone reverse-engineered the WinXP activation protocol? You could imagine setting up a server that replies "yup, you're okay" to every request. The only thing you need to do it also have a DNS server that points *.microsoft.com to said server for activation time.
The DNS part is easy, the reverse engineering probably very hard.
Of course, there are versions of Windows XP Pro that do not require activation: the Corporate Editions....
Oh, I understand how you mean gambling now. I call that "the risks of life". When I read "gambling" is has a co-notation of monetary involvment. So playing roulette is gambling, playing the lottery is gambling, uninformed investment in stock is gambling, but driving is not, taking the plane is not.
So, no I wasn't trying to be funny... It was all in the definition. And yes, I need to lighten up, but it's hard. My wife has been hospitalized since last friday. This has of course no place here, but you're right that I need to lighten up, but not for the reasons you think.
Oh, and paper money is based on debt, that's why it isn't backed by gold anymore.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, but it's not all that comparative if in certain graphs, certain machines are missing. Most stats for the Sega Game Gear are missing. So either, they didn't have one lying around or they didn't find the data in their reseach.
They could have just asked me about the Game Gear, because I still got mine and it's functional and I got a few games.
Notepad++
Oh, I'm sure they can make the clerk say: "By agreeing this sale, you may not space-shift this DVD to other media. Have a nice day." ;-)
Then the CPU clearly took up the slack (or it had a fast harddisk). I tried installing Windows XP Pro on a P-II 333MHz (or so, something in the 300MHz range) and it only had 128Meg RAM. That was painfully slow, but I only did that to check if all hardware worked. After that I put Linux on it.
Now, now, now.... I like to bash Microsoft as much as the next slashdot guy. However, it is possible to run Windows XP Pro on a machine with 256Meg RAM. On idle, a correclty configured XP uses about 100Meg, less depending on the active services. You can even run iTunes, Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice2.org on it. Now, true, the difference by adding another 256Meg is big, but it is possible. My mother in law ran a P-III 500MHz/256Meg RAM for quite some time until I found a slightly better CPU and another PC100 256Meg stick in a dumpster. It now is a really good machine for normal productivity applications. My last laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM and it was sufficient for my needs. I only replaced it because it fell physically apart.
You're absolutely right
True, but contrary to most nations this is split in my country. I pay a fixed fee for the "connection" to the local P&T company, and then on top of that I pay a "internet connection" fee to my ISP...
Sad, but true.... I'm aware this is different in many countries, but not in mine.
It's been a while I investigated. True... Your explanation makes much sense. I don't think they overcharge as much as in the DSL/Cable world though. It has to stay reasonable.
Why do you even ask this question?
The difference is clear. A T1 guarantees you your bandwidth. Both DSL and Cable do not. You usually get it, but that is only because others only use a fraction of what they are "allowed" to. Look in your TOS, you'll see that they do not guarantee the speeds, they are "averages". So essentialy, your ISP pays for 100Mbps and sells 5000Mbps to 1000 customers (Each 5Mbps, but in reality they get only 0.1Mbps). (Numbers pulled out of my you know what). If everyone would start downloading like crazy at the same time you'd get congestions. The fact is that it's not the bandwith that is interesting with DSL/Cable but the fact that it is always-on.
When DSL started here, it was only 256kbps/64kbps for quite a lot of money. We made the calculation compared to our average ISDN Internet usage (that was per minute) and the price would be the same or slightly higher. Sure, the higher speed was appealing, but the fact that we knew we payed a flat-fee for unlimited interet usage and always-on made it more attractive. That was why we were early adopters, not because it was faster. After all the ISDN 64kbps was plenty of fast back then. It did change our internet habits though: checking the email in business hours was a no-no. We started to check our mail after waking up ;-)
I heared that in Italy you can get a T1 for cheap, but I'm sure it comes with no guarantee.
7 reasons why intelligent design likes pasta
I do not think that many ID people are familiar with the Flying Spaghetti Monster... Ignorant as they are.
ALL HAIL THE FLYNG SPAGHETTI MONSTER!
I know a highly intelligent person, with great grades leaving highschool (in Europe) and he went for... plumber. No joke...
My father in law never finished highschool and learnt metalworking. He now owns a highly successful company doing just that. He has more money that I can dream of as an IT professional (privately employed, perhaps if I'd start my own company... hmmm) Yes, I indeed have a full CS dimploma. It really makes you wonder....
So is anything you learn in school....
That point does not only apply to Math.
Unless they teach gun handling at US schools ;-)
I ran NT 4.0 and W2k back in those days, but I do remember one girl I knew that insisted on running ME. It came with the computer, and she was content with it. Had a hot night with that redhead, so I'm not complaining ;-)
Personally, I had sworn off the 9x line once I got NT 4.0. I essentially missed out on 98 and ME. Never used them personally, nor professionally. Got to support them for friends from time to time though. A few months, somebody gave me a P-II 350MHz/128Meg RAM machine and I tried to install 98 on it. It wasn't for me, I just was asked to repair it.... It was a horrible pain, I ended up giving it back with Ubuntu on it. At least that was legal. W2k would have run fine though, I guess... Didn't try... (I installed a Corporate Edition of XP on it to see if all hardware was okay, and it was funny how long it took to boot ;-) It was absolutely unusable, well, okay, it "ran Windows" )
Despite this, there have been complaints from the PC industry that Vista isn't enough of a resource hog to force people to buy new hardware.
I don't think that has to do with Vista being a resource hog. I think this has more to do with the availability with 500€ to 1000€ machines (including LCD screen, keyboard and mouse) that pretty much flied with Windows XP. People got used to that. Now suddenly, you need to buy a much more expensive machine to run Windows Vista and many people realise that Windows XP was sufficient and suited their needs.
My first laptop was a 486DX/2, 8Meg of RAM with Active Matrix TFT and a harddisk of 320Meg (that was rare and expensive back in the day). It costed a whopping 3000€, and was pretty high-end when I bought it. The machine after that was a P-I 120MHz, 32Meg RAM with a 1Gig harddisk. It was mid-range, because the 486DX died and needed a PC ASAP and I didn't have enough money for a high-end one. That machine was also 3000€. The laptop after that was an iBook G3 600MHz, 384Meg RAM with 20Gb harddisk. That was the biggest iBook back then and cost "only" 2200€.
When my iBook died, I bought a obsoleted laptop from work for 100€. So let's just disregard that one. It still lasted me a good two years before starting to fall apart physically.
In january, I bit the bullet and bought a AMD Turion X2, 1Gig of RAM with 120Gig harddisk. How much? 799€ The same machine two months later was to be had for 695€ That is definately a low-end machine (I upgraded to 2Gig immediately though and that was 140€ extra, but I still have the two 512Meg sticks that I could sell on eBay, I guess) It is technically Vista Capable, or so said the sticker on it. The fine print on the box essentially told me "you can run Vista on it, but you won't be getting all fancy features". It's in the category that Dell (no, it's not a Dell) labelled as "Fine for booting Vista". I'm sure you saw that on their website, as it was posted on slashdot a few times in the comments.
The machine flies with Windows XP.... For pretty much no money, and I didn't even take into account inflation....
Vista asks more resources, but people have become used to good value PCs. That has been taken away by Vista.... No wonder Dell ships XP again... Customers demand it...
You also forgot "break" and "continue" that both are hidden gotos. Oh, and if you look a bit deeper: every decision (let it be a if or a switch or a while, etc...) will generate a JMP instruction in the end. Of course, nobody thinks that way anymore. (That's what you mean with "where we would have used GOTO in 1970, we have better sturctures", I guess...) Probably shows my age ;-)
I still have a mothballed vintage 2001 computer laying around running Win2K and office 2K quite snappily, and there isn't a damned office-related task it can't do just fine.
Vintage?!? I bet it can even run WinXP fine if it has enough memory. My primary laptop was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM (RAM was scavenged from other machines) up until last january. It ran plenty fast for my mundane tasks (including running OpenOffice.org 2, Firefox, Thunderbird, iTunes *at the same time*). The only reason that I replaced it was because it was starting to fall apart physically. My mother in law uses a P-III 550MHz/512Meg RAM (again, RAM scavenged from other machines) I have never heard her complain. Of course, neither of us run games... ;-)
I have found faster machines in the dumpster! When I have the time, I might just replace my mother in laws machine with a P-IV I found there. ;-) My own former desktop (from 1999, IIRC) now is my parents server.... It's an P-III 800MHz/768Meg (that RAM was originally there, yes) runs OpenBSD and top reports a mere 34Meg used.
If I think "Vintage", I think C=64, Sinclair QL, TRS-80, Amiga 500, IBM XT, and many other that have a few more years behind it and really are unable to run anything close to "modern".
Granted, I don't even bother with anything that is not a P-III, but the P-III came out in 1999. That's a good 8 years ago.
That said, with computers under 500€ with keyboard and LCD srceen, I wonder why I even bother taking "the viable ones" out of the dumpster.
I know you said essentially the same, I just wanted to object to "Vintage". You don't call a 10 year old car "Vinatge", you call it "old" or in my case "good enough" (my car is 7 years old, but you get the idea...)
Hey, I took a risk when I married her.... You can write off that as a gamble. :-)
As for the debt part, it isn't the government: the banks create money using debt.... There is no backing, I know....
Our currencies only survive on trust and proper financial policy. If any of those goes, it's a lost bet... OOPS? Have I been caught gamlbing?
Thanks for the well-wishes for Mrs Shark. :-D
No, but XP on a P-III 550MHz/256Meg runs fine for basic tasks. It's what I recycled for my mother in law.
Funny enough, my wife got my old computer (dual core 3600+ AMD, 2 gigs ram and ATI Radion XT1800),
WOW! Is that old? My own system is from begin 2003 and it's a workstation class AMD Athlon MP 2400+ (2 CPUs) with 4Gigs of RAM and a NVidia AGP card (originally it was a Ti4200, now it's an FX5500). My wifes machine is a P-IV 2.4HT with 2Gig of RAM and the Ti4200 that was in my machine. Sure they have been slightly upgraded (mine from 1Gig to 4Gig and hers from 512Meg to 2Gig). I wouldn't dare to call them "old", but they are easily outperformed by your wifes system.
I found a complete P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM machine in a dumpster as I found a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon (no RAM though, but I have some of my own!) there. I don't know what I use them for, but both make decent desktops. Also consider that my primary laptop until 3 months ago was a P-III 600MHz/512Meg RAM. I only replaced it because it was starting to physically fall apart. My dad still uses his P-III 733MHz/512Meg RAM laptop. He wanted to replace it earlier this year and I asked what the problem was: not enough disk space. Upgrading the 20Gig disk to a 80Gig disk made him happy....
I think you have a very strange definition of "old". Even my definition of "old" is stretched. I won't take a fully functional P-III out of the dumpster, because I know that I'll find a better one next time I come along.
You also suck at HTML. Let me introduce entities: they look like this &entity;. For example, to have a lower than sign you use < and for a greater than entitpy you use a >.
Ehm... You mean as in 100% hardcoded, because I do control my DNS server (separte Unix machine). That said, if I know those IP addresses, I still can route them to somewhere else (I also control my router, go figure!). My idea can work.
I heard Windows bypasses the hosts file for some sites, but I still thought it did genuine DNS lookups.
About that 2Gig limit... Did you check the motherboards compatibility? I have two desktops, my wifes and mine. My wifes desktop only supports 2Gig and can handle them fine. My motherboard can handle 4Gig but due to architectural reasons you never get the last 512Meg, so Windows reports 3.5Gig, the PC detects 4Gig.
It really depends on the motherboard: my server is an AMD64 and the max it will run at is 2Gig at full speed. More, and the memory clock is downthrottled (yes, it is a 754 socket, yes, I know...)
Please check the manual, it might be that you thought 4Gig worked, but that the motherboard doesn't support it. This is not Vistas fault. You'd have the same problem with Linux.
I would take it if it was free... Why? To have a good laugh. All of my PCs (except my laptop which is 3 months old, but is only "Vista Capable" and you know what that means....) are from 2003. It'll be fun to see how hardware that is just fine for my use is rendered to an overloaded heap of junk ;-)
Just wondering: has someone reverse-engineered the WinXP activation protocol? You could imagine setting up a server that replies "yup, you're okay" to every request. The only thing you need to do it also have a DNS server that points *.microsoft.com to said server for activation time.
The DNS part is easy, the reverse engineering probably very hard.
Of course, there are versions of Windows XP Pro that do not require activation: the Corporate Editions....
Oh, I understand how you mean gambling now. I call that "the risks of life". When I read "gambling" is has a co-notation of monetary involvment. So playing roulette is gambling, playing the lottery is gambling, uninformed investment in stock is gambling, but driving is not, taking the plane is not.
So, no I wasn't trying to be funny... It was all in the definition. And yes, I need to lighten up, but it's hard. My wife has been hospitalized since last friday. This has of course no place here, but you're right that I need to lighten up, but not for the reasons you think.
Oh, and paper money is based on debt, that's why it isn't backed by gold anymore. ;-)