There are several angles to approach this. I think there are non-profit organizations in many cities that provide inexpensive computers. I've personally bought a lot of pretty functional computers on eBay. I am preparing two such computes to be sold or even given away locally now that I don't need them. Personally, I'd rather trust a $200 used computer than a $200 new computer. The trouble, I suppose, is finding reputable sellers and reliable models.
I wasn't aware that developers needed multiple hard drives. A fast CPU helps, it really depends. Writing code and running software isn't necessarily processor intensive. But this isn't meant to be a developer computer, I really don't see why that's even mentioned.
I thought ECS was some company that just makes junk disguised as something that might be useful.
For game play, one might as well just stick to a console computer.
At least the credit card companies have some plausible pretense of needing that information. The FBI does not, they shouldn't be conducting city-wide dragnets of people and information.
"Take your country back" Who should, the Native Americans?
Some scientists are talking of trying to restore the US to a pre-human state, BEFORE even they settled the Americas, they've found several large species that died out around 12k-14k years ago because of various pressures of humans that arrived in the Americas.
I don't understand the no-Blu-ray stance in a post largely complaining about DRM, because then you should say no HD-DVD too because they both use the exact same DRM system. Microsoft is a major proponent of DRM as well.
I don't think you should be advocating one lizard over another, even if it's not the wrong lizard, it's still a lizard.
No, the reason there are no G5 Powerbooks is that the mobile G5s came out too late and are too slow. Keep in mind that any G5 based laptop computer would max out at nearly 1GHz slower than the fastest Pentium-M and Turion 64 laptops, yet have similar IPC.
I think it is hard to track. For every given brand of product, it's easy to find someone that's had impeccable reliability, and it's also easy to find someone that's seen horrid reliability with the same product. I really can't say why. I would expect every product to fail eventually, and possibly for different reasons. It is possible that explains why different people get different results, is that their circumstances are somewhat different, be it temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, power, handling, shipping and who knows what else.
Keeping my hearing is probably more important to saving a few milliseconds for each drive seek.
That's pretty sad hyperbole. The loudest drive referenced in the 7K500 review is 45dB at 3mm, and that's the WD4000YR, and Western Digital seems to be known for the loudest drives.
In order to cause deafness, I think you'd need to be exposed to 90dB for a long duration, meaning you'd need to be near at least 15 of those drives, assuming you don't have any enclosures or accoustical treatments between you and the drives.
Check the reviews at a good reputable site, Storage Review has bothered to measure accoustical noise and buy the quietest ones.
I want a solid state drive; sick of mechanical breakdowns and especially the noise.
If you want to pay 100x more per GB of storage, go right on ahead, I won't stop you, but I won't follow your trail either until the cost difference is a lot lower. Even with buying a second set of drives for off-line backup, mechanical drives are still a far better deal for mass storage.
Frankly, I've had not much of either failures or noise in the past five years, unless you are talking 8+ year old drives, but by then they are too small or slow to be useful anyway.
You could simply switch to a quieter drive, like some Samsungs or Seagates, any good drive review site should show relevant noise measurements. I've found some treatments to make very quiet even quieter by gluing sheets of accoustical foam to various parts inside a computer case that might resonate or reflect sound.
I think that makes a good deal of sense if it only applies to businesses. Businesses handle a lot of information and there are a lot that don't understand the potential dangers, nor would they believe it until it happens to them. Many of them handle our personal and financial information, so the ones that really pay for the mistakes of a business are their customers.
In one sense, I agree, in another, I can see the benefit in this case. Normally, I'd say commercial if you need the features, but this is a somewhat different situation.
For one, a hobbyist might see a novel need or use that a corporation would overlook. A hobbyist can extend the code or add compatibility. A hobbyist might want to design a custom cutting machine and need custom software to operate it. There is some extensible and modifiable commercial stuff out there, but that is often designed and priced for the commercial market. A hobbyist might want to retrofit an old machine with software and electronics to their liking. The cost of software is just a tiny portion of the potential.
But I do see the value of just buying software. I wanted to make some CNC software but on careful examination and a little bit of preliminary pseudo-coding, I found the task ahead to be daunting. I never did make the machines I wanted to make, and the lack of an open software system was one reason I chose not to continue. Maybe someday if is a group CNC hobbyists are willing to work together on such a project, I'd be willing to lend a hand.
"The fact they're STILL making Netburst based processors just sickens me."
So?
The reason that Intel is still making Netburst processors is because chip development is a lot slower than the "speed of internet". Figure two to three years from concept to production. AMD took that long or longer to put out their A64 line. This is why Intel can't make large architecture shifts in a month.
A lot of open source projects accept donations and feature donation icons on their web page. While I don't think it is necessarily true, but it would seem that there is danger in creating the perception is that open source is beggarware.
It does take a lot of time and energy to make a useful program and I do think that financial support can be a good motivator, though there might be weaknesses.
I'll second the support. I'd rather not spend a whole lot of time retraining a person to a new OS. Then there's the setup, if I forget a detail regarding their needs, then I have to go back and fix it.
Heck, I connected a higher resolution monitor to an FC4 installation and I couldn't find a way to update the monitor profile. Current consumer OSs (being Windows and Mac OS X) automatically detect a changed monitor and update the resolution profiles.
I think what you suggest would be lame too. To capture the young demographic like you suggest, I think they would have to dump the last of the remaining politics stuff and have news reports and editorials about how W is bad because Laura Bush wears bad shoes!
I think there needs to be some work on formatting and ads. The formatting of news web sites seem to leave a lot to be desired. For one, look at CNN.com, for any given page, the actual article is less than 1/4th of the page, the rest is split between an asinine site navigation system and ads.
Ads in a newspaper aren't anywhere nearly as intrusive as on the Internet. No newspaper ad bounces, flash, shake, spin, spawns popups or any crap like that. Newspaper ads don't try to leave cookies, tracks IP or otherwise grab and store information without telling me. I block all that stuff, but it's still a surprise when I use other computers.
I haven't had an update go bad on me either, though I would just plan on a problem coming and do something to prevent further trouble. It's a good idea to do an backup of the system partition before upgrading. I just started the backup now, despite having done a backup a couple days ago. Once that is done, I will download the update.
Sadly, a lot of people will pay that for a freaking ringtone, and that is a huge market. The same can be said of the games and backgrounds that can be bought for a phone, and I've seen many that expire in 90 or 120 days. That isn't good enough for me.
I don't think slashdotters are the target market. If they are, then I think Sprint has miscalculated.
I think a lot of the stuff you mention are great potential fodder for videocasts. I think being able to sell ad time to pay for the production would be a tough thing to do at first though.
Anyway, any video you have or make has potential to be transcoded, no need to buy them if you know what to do.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several angles to approach this. I think there are non-profit organizations in many cities that provide inexpensive computers. I've personally bought a lot of pretty functional computers on eBay. I am preparing two such computes to be sold or even given away locally now that I don't need them. Personally, I'd rather trust a $200 used computer than a $200 new computer. The trouble, I suppose, is finding reputable sellers and reliable models.
I wasn't aware that developers needed multiple hard drives. A fast CPU helps, it really depends. Writing code and running software isn't necessarily processor intensive. But this isn't meant to be a developer computer, I really don't see why that's even mentioned.
I thought ECS was some company that just makes junk disguised as something that might be useful.
For game play, one might as well just stick to a console computer.
At least the credit card companies have some plausible pretense of needing that information. The FBI does not, they shouldn't be conducting city-wide dragnets of people and information.
"Take your country back" Who should, the Native Americans?
Some scientists are talking of trying to restore the US to a pre-human state, BEFORE even they settled the Americas, they've found several large species that died out around 12k-14k years ago because of various pressures of humans that arrived in the Americas.
I don't understand the no-Blu-ray stance in a post largely complaining about DRM, because then you should say no HD-DVD too because they both use the exact same DRM system. Microsoft is a major proponent of DRM as well.
I don't think you should be advocating one lizard over another, even if it's not the wrong lizard, it's still a lizard.
No, the reason there are no G5 Powerbooks is that the mobile G5s came out too late and are too slow. Keep in mind that any G5 based laptop computer would max out at nearly 1GHz slower than the fastest Pentium-M and Turion 64 laptops, yet have similar IPC.
So what the hell is a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) community? Sounds distinctly middle eastern...
The new form of democracy! Instead of voting with your feet, you vote with your itchy trigger finger.
I think it is hard to track. For every given brand of product, it's easy to find someone that's had impeccable reliability, and it's also easy to find someone that's seen horrid reliability with the same product. I really can't say why. I would expect every product to fail eventually, and possibly for different reasons. It is possible that explains why different people get different results, is that their circumstances are somewhat different, be it temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, power, handling, shipping and who knows what else.
Keeping my hearing is probably more important to saving a few milliseconds for each drive seek.
That's pretty sad hyperbole. The loudest drive referenced in the 7K500 review is 45dB at 3mm, and that's the WD4000YR, and Western Digital seems to be known for the loudest drives.
In order to cause deafness, I think you'd need to be exposed to 90dB for a long duration, meaning you'd need to be near at least 15 of those drives, assuming you don't have any enclosures or accoustical treatments between you and the drives.
Check the reviews at a good reputable site, Storage Review has bothered to measure accoustical noise and buy the quietest ones.
I want a solid state drive; sick of mechanical breakdowns and especially the noise.
If you want to pay 100x more per GB of storage, go right on ahead, I won't stop you, but I won't follow your trail either until the cost difference is a lot lower. Even with buying a second set of drives for off-line backup, mechanical drives are still a far better deal for mass storage.
Frankly, I've had not much of either failures or noise in the past five years, unless you are talking 8+ year old drives, but by then they are too small or slow to be useful anyway.
You could simply switch to a quieter drive, like some Samsungs or Seagates, any good drive review site should show relevant noise measurements. I've found some treatments to make very quiet even quieter by gluing sheets of accoustical foam to various parts inside a computer case that might resonate or reflect sound.
I think it invites a massive fraud potential which not only drains money, but bandwidth.
I think that makes a good deal of sense if it only applies to businesses. Businesses handle a lot of information and there are a lot that don't understand the potential dangers, nor would they believe it until it happens to them. Many of them handle our personal and financial information, so the ones that really pay for the mistakes of a business are their customers.
In one sense, I agree, in another, I can see the benefit in this case. Normally, I'd say commercial if you need the features, but this is a somewhat different situation.
For one, a hobbyist might see a novel need or use that a corporation would overlook. A hobbyist can extend the code or add compatibility. A hobbyist might want to design a custom cutting machine and need custom software to operate it. There is some extensible and modifiable commercial stuff out there, but that is often designed and priced for the commercial market. A hobbyist might want to retrofit an old machine with software and electronics to their liking. The cost of software is just a tiny portion of the potential.
But I do see the value of just buying software. I wanted to make some CNC software but on careful examination and a little bit of preliminary pseudo-coding, I found the task ahead to be daunting. I never did make the machines I wanted to make, and the lack of an open software system was one reason I chose not to continue. Maybe someday if is a group CNC hobbyists are willing to work together on such a project, I'd be willing to lend a hand.
Is that considering just the chip or considering the round of upgrades that most people would need to upgrade to it?
Has anyone managed to get Rosetta to run?
"The fact they're STILL making Netburst based processors just sickens me."
So?
The reason that Intel is still making Netburst processors is because chip development is a lot slower than the "speed of internet". Figure two to three years from concept to production. AMD took that long or longer to put out their A64 line. This is why Intel can't make large architecture shifts in a month.
On the other hand, making people use known problematic software isn't a bright idea either.
Firefox can and does self-patch automatically. That update system even works in the Deer Park nightlies.
A lot of open source projects accept donations and feature donation icons on their web page. While I don't think it is necessarily true, but it would seem that there is danger in creating the perception is that open source is beggarware.
It does take a lot of time and energy to make a useful program and I do think that financial support can be a good motivator, though there might be weaknesses.
That doesn't make sense on several points. The one I can explain quickly is that earplugs don't really stop bass.
I'll second the support. I'd rather not spend a whole lot of time retraining a person to a new OS. Then there's the setup, if I forget a detail regarding their needs, then I have to go back and fix it.
Heck, I connected a higher resolution monitor to an FC4 installation and I couldn't find a way to update the monitor profile. Current consumer OSs (being Windows and Mac OS X) automatically detect a changed monitor and update the resolution profiles.
I think what you suggest would be lame too. To capture the young demographic like you suggest, I think they would have to dump the last of the remaining politics stuff and have news reports and editorials about how W is bad because Laura Bush wears bad shoes!
I think there needs to be some work on formatting and ads.
The formatting of news web sites seem to leave a lot to be desired. For one, look at CNN.com, for any given page, the actual article is less than 1/4th of the page, the rest is split between an asinine site navigation system and ads.
Ads in a newspaper aren't anywhere nearly as intrusive as on the Internet. No newspaper ad bounces, flash, shake, spin, spawns popups or any crap like that. Newspaper ads don't try to leave cookies, tracks IP or otherwise grab and store information without telling me. I block all that stuff, but it's still a surprise when I use other computers.
I haven't had an update go bad on me either, though I would just plan on a problem coming and do something to prevent further trouble. It's a good idea to do an backup of the system partition before upgrading. I just started the backup now, despite having done a backup a couple days ago. Once that is done, I will download the update.
Sadly, a lot of people will pay that for a freaking ringtone, and that is a huge market. The same can be said of the games and backgrounds that can be bought for a phone, and I've seen many that expire in 90 or 120 days. That isn't good enough for me.
I don't think slashdotters are the target market. If they are, then I think Sprint has miscalculated.
I think a lot of the stuff you mention are great potential fodder for videocasts. I think being able to sell ad time to pay for the production would be a tough thing to do at first though.
Anyway, any video you have or make has potential to be transcoded, no need to buy them if you know what to do.