It isn't just a manufacturing hurdle. IMO, The articles (er, press releases) completely ignores the most significant drawback: that the different colors fade at different speeds.
I think standard full-size BTX might allow all the same number of expansion slots.
What's sad is that I think most of the things in the BTX format could have done without making people throw out their ATX cases to upgrade. The BTX bolt pattern is actually a screw-for-screw mirroring of ATX, just with a few more options for smaller cases. The problem there is that there are already tiny ATX case standards avalable, as well as NLX.
Better air management? What is to prevent BTX's intake and exhaust ducting and CPU relocation ideas from being used in ATX? Some people even use ducting in ATX, witness some of Dell's cases, and I have a Compaq workstation that also ducts air around the CPU heat sinks, so quieter fans can direct air to the parts that need it most. Actually, the Compaq I have is WTX or extended ATX, not sure which or whether both are the same, just better for dual CPU systems.
Does it have to be a "modern" language, as in one still in broad use?
Pascal seems to do about 99% of what C does, well, it doesn't have the +=, -= and similar operators, but that's a negative for programming newbies, IMO. It does it in a very similar structure as well, minus all the cryptic symbology that is hard on a newbie's eyes, instead it often uses words or the very basic arithmetic symbols.
What are good ways to test this difference? I don't use active directory.
Switching to a PCI card is relatively trivial, I already have several spare cards. The problem is I've never personally really run into a case where the on-board chip made a noticible impact. I had in the past been using Alpha systems with TULIP chips on board, I would presume that DEC did a good job setting those up. Currently my main systems are XEON based, so they simply might be better engineered, i.e., the design of such systems don't exactly easily fall prey to the corner cutting of the consumer market.
Re:Simple
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Yeah, it seems like it was only within the last year that an x86 motherboard had the "priviledge" of having a 3Com network chip on it. The reviewers remarked that previously 3Com chips were only available as an add-on 3Com branded card such as a PCI card.
Every computer I've bought in the last eight years had a network card built into the mainboard. I guess they were out of the running for my systems by default. Any time I needed a supplementary card or one to put in someone else's system, I had no familiarity with them, so I just stuck with what I knew would work. Sticking with the same brand chips as what's already in the system also netted a benefit of not having to load yet another set of drivers.
I'm sick of the speculation. Maybe Linux has some key benefits that make swap useful on a machine that has more memory than it needs to operate. I'd like to see some evidence that those techniques actually make a jack of a difference or not.
Is there anyone willing to take two identical machines and run a full Gentoo compile, with or without swap, with 256, 512 and 1028MB RAM installed, and time it? If swap really does make a difference, I think that sort of thing would help tell when swap is or is not useful in currently available systems. I'd love to do it but I simply don't have a good internet connection to do it.
B-52 is also one of the longest lived aircraft platforms with examples still in active service. I think C-135 being pretty close behind. The airframes simply can't be beat in terms of overall performance for the cost, the best they can do to improve on it is periodically upgrade cockpit and control systems.
That said, for the typical corporate desktop, is there anything being done now on a 3GHz computer that couldn't have been done on a 300MHz computer five years ago? There will always be the unusual needs, but they are catered to on a case-by-case basis, such as heavy workstations for the engineering group and so on.
It just seems wasteful for a company to replace all their computers every three years when they could do it every five years. I can see justifying it on a department-basis if they need to use particular new piece of software that won't run so well on the systems it has.
Re:My father's response to Carr's article
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 1
I do agree that poor management is a cancer on modern society.
One thing that must be kept in mind is whether a new techology is being adopted for its own sake, or if it will provide a true competitive or societal advantage. Faxes improved on mail, and emails improved on faxes, but mail, email and faxes are all still necessary. Currently, there few technologies that provide such a leap forward to abolish the previous standard but the next few years may hold something new.
Innovators don't always win, sometimes it takes several iterations of a product for an idea to really take hold, and by then, the innovator's company is long gone. The first to market doesn't always win in the long term either.
I think you have it right. Ogg isn't necessarily sufficiently superior in quality to narrow your player choices. OK, so Vorbis is as good at 128kbps as MP3 is at say 145kbps (or whatever). Storage isn't so prohibitively expensive that one can't afford the extra 12% of space it takes.
It feels like 10K a year is what it takes just maintaining five Windows computers.
Re:This Comment May Be Slightly Off Topic
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
·
· Score: 1
Google is incredibly handy. Despite that, I do buy the occasional technical book because it doesn't require power or a network to operate.
Generally what I do for an unfamiliar topic is buy the basic book. That basic book gets me started, especially to show me the miscellaneous jargon and common gotchas. From there, I know what to look for online.
Isn't 640x400 the maximum for composite video and 640x480 the max for s-video?
You have that wrong. Resolution on NTSC systems is horizontal-limited, and only by bandwidth. There are always 480 active vertical scan lines for NTSC. Comb filters generally get in the way of good composite decoding. The general standard for digitized NTSC is 720x480.
I also wonder if this research should be directed more toward aircraft engines, they ARE mostly just huge fans, after all. It's probably easier to research on a computer fan than a jet engine.
but if you've just gotta have a dual Xeon workstation, and anything powerful enough to keep the thing running is bound to be noisy, then maybe a $25/fan premium to quiet 'em down isn't such a bad thing?
Sorry, I don't buy it.
I have a dual Xeon workstation, and two other workstations designed for handling two chips, the second socket isn't populated, but the cooling system and power supplies are all set up for the second chip should I put it in. If you want specific models, one is a PIII Compaq SP700, the two other are Compaq P4 Xeon W8000 systems. One of the W8000's is serving as my HTPC to boot. I asked my sister if she could hear it, and she had to put her ear up against it.
They are hardly what I'd consider loud. They are quieter than both of the small form factor Shuttle cases I've seen in operation, both of which were claimed to be quiet. The workstation can be quieter with simple passive damping techniques, there's no need for added complexity and cost.
For any computer that is annoyingly loud, I'd consider calling it poor design and parts choices. I'm not against active cancellation, I simply think that there are cheap passive methods designing quiet, yet powerful systems. And you wouldn't have to deal with as many potential problems to boot.
I dunno, someone made a trojan for OS X as a proof of concept. There were a couple programs for Linux that had a vaguely virus-like nature, but people that ran Linux at the time mostly knew how to operate their systems properly.
I wouldn't go that far. I'm not sure the insurance companies want to insure anything.
At least with my dad's experiences, it seems as if the insurance industry is practically unwilling to insure anything but tiny risks. My parents put in a pool, diving board and fence combination that went by national standards but the insurance company simply decided to yank house insurance. They are low risk people that only had made one minor claim in twenty years, but forget that, they have a pool now. My parents would have been happy to pay an appropriate rate increase, forget that, they were uninsured for a few months while looking for a replacement company. They've had other odd run-ins with business insurance too which I won't go into right now, and the business hasn't made any claims in fifteen years that I remember.
I don't understand the comment on 50yr old 500 cars. My parents had a '70 Eldorado convertible with a 500cu engine that only did 8 to 10 mpg, I think SUVs now have more power to boot. IIRC old power measurement was without intake or exhaust manifolds, which provides a highly inflated number that you'd never see in a real car. The new SUVs possibly give better handling, much better emissions, and get 12 to 15 mpg. The new engines use lower octane gasolene because they can't use lead as an anti-knock additive.
It isn't as if I'm enamored with SUVs, I'd really love to have that Eldorado back even if only to keep as a show car and a twice-a-year driver.
I think the open standards idea is great. That way no commercial software company can complain that they don't have a chance. They just have to be better than OSS or have actual useful features that open source software doesn't.
For developing countries, one thing that can be said about "shooting self in foot" is paying heavy licencing fees to foreign companies to develop and use their software, money better kept within your own borders. There's a reason why China is making their own standards to counter the heavy patent encumberments of Western standards.
You just have to sell it as making us independent of foreign oil. That has to get right-wingers interested, unless the individual owns a stake in an oil importer. It might destablize the middle-east as oil is one of the biggest exports, but not many people seem interested in actual stability.
Wintel doesn't seem to be encroaching into Sony's traditional spaces very well, although IBM seems to be, at least in terms of game consoles.
XBox 2 will have a PPC based CPU, albiet possibly custom designed. I think the next Nintendo will be PPC based. Sony, Toshiba and IBM seem to be cooperating on Cell. No Intel here.
Intel is making the XScale CPUs for PDAs, but I don't think they are the #1 player in that market, I'm not sure if Cell can be expected for that market either though.
I don't know what other CPU markets Intel is managing to get into, but the desktop is the only market in which Intel has much of a hold.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, the very story entry says this:
"announced in its changelog for slackware-current that they are switching to X.org, mostly for compatibility reasons. "
The emphasis is mine.
It isn't just a manufacturing hurdle. IMO, The articles (er, press releases) completely ignores the most significant drawback: that the different colors fade at different speeds.
I think standard full-size BTX might allow all the same number of expansion slots.
What's sad is that I think most of the things in the BTX format could have done without making people throw out their ATX cases to upgrade. The BTX bolt pattern is actually a screw-for-screw mirroring of ATX, just with a few more options for smaller cases. The problem there is that there are already tiny ATX case standards avalable, as well as NLX.
Better air management? What is to prevent BTX's intake and exhaust ducting and CPU relocation ideas from being used in ATX? Some people even use ducting in ATX, witness some of Dell's cases, and I have a Compaq workstation that also ducts air around the CPU heat sinks, so quieter fans can direct air to the parts that need it most. Actually, the Compaq I have is WTX or extended ATX, not sure which or whether both are the same, just better for dual CPU systems.
Does it have to be a "modern" language, as in one still in broad use?
Pascal seems to do about 99% of what C does, well, it doesn't have the +=, -= and similar operators, but that's a negative for programming newbies, IMO. It does it in a very similar structure as well, minus all the cryptic symbology that is hard on a newbie's eyes, instead it often uses words or the very basic arithmetic symbols.
What are good ways to test this difference? I don't use active directory.
Switching to a PCI card is relatively trivial, I already have several spare cards. The problem is I've never personally really run into a case where the on-board chip made a noticible impact. I had in the past been using Alpha systems with TULIP chips on board, I would presume that DEC did a good job setting those up. Currently my main systems are XEON based, so they simply might be better engineered, i.e., the design of such systems don't exactly easily fall prey to the corner cutting of the consumer market.
Yeah, it seems like it was only within the last year that an x86 motherboard had the "priviledge" of having a 3Com network chip on it. The reviewers remarked that previously 3Com chips were only available as an add-on 3Com branded card such as a PCI card.
Every computer I've bought in the last eight years had a network card built into the mainboard. I guess they were out of the running for my systems by default. Any time I needed a supplementary card or one to put in someone else's system, I had no familiarity with them, so I just stuck with what I knew would work. Sticking with the same brand chips as what's already in the system also netted a benefit of not having to load yet another set of drivers.
But tomrrow it will be cheaper, and drive down the costs of smaller CF card..
This is a good thing for all, even those that dont have the cash for a 12gb card...
Meaning: another round of trickle-down electronics for everyone!
Oops, for the pedants, yes, the RAM amount should be 1024MB. Too bad that Slash is one of the few forum programs that doesn't allow post editing.
I'm sick of the speculation. Maybe Linux has some key benefits that make swap useful on a machine that has more memory than it needs to operate. I'd like to see some evidence that those techniques actually make a jack of a difference or not.
Is there anyone willing to take two identical machines and run a full Gentoo compile, with or without swap, with 256, 512 and 1028MB RAM installed, and time it? If swap really does make a difference, I think that sort of thing would help tell when swap is or is not useful in currently available systems. I'd love to do it but I simply don't have a good internet connection to do it.
B-52 is also one of the longest lived aircraft platforms with examples still in active service. I think C-135 being pretty close behind. The airframes simply can't be beat in terms of overall performance for the cost, the best they can do to improve on it is periodically upgrade cockpit and control systems.
Moderation is an excellent idea.
That said, for the typical corporate desktop, is there anything being done now on a 3GHz computer that couldn't have been done on a 300MHz computer five years ago? There will always be the unusual needs, but they are catered to on a case-by-case basis, such as heavy workstations for the engineering group and so on.
It just seems wasteful for a company to replace all their computers every three years when they could do it every five years. I can see justifying it on a department-basis if they need to use particular new piece of software that won't run so well on the systems it has.
I do agree that poor management is a cancer on modern society.
One thing that must be kept in mind is whether a new techology is being adopted for its own sake, or if it will provide a true competitive or societal advantage. Faxes improved on mail, and emails improved on faxes, but mail, email and faxes are all still necessary. Currently, there few technologies that provide such a leap forward to abolish the previous standard but the next few years may hold something new.
Innovators don't always win, sometimes it takes several iterations of a product for an idea to really take hold, and by then, the innovator's company is long gone. The first to market doesn't always win in the long term either.
I think you have it right. Ogg isn't necessarily sufficiently superior in quality to narrow your player choices. OK, so Vorbis is as good at 128kbps as MP3 is at say 145kbps (or whatever). Storage isn't so prohibitively expensive that one can't afford the extra 12% of space it takes.
It feels like 10K a year is what it takes just maintaining five Windows computers.
Google is incredibly handy. Despite that, I do buy the occasional technical book because it doesn't require power or a network to operate.
Generally what I do for an unfamiliar topic is buy the basic book. That basic book gets me started, especially to show me the miscellaneous jargon and common gotchas. From there, I know what to look for online.
Isn't 640x400 the maximum for composite video and 640x480 the max for s-video?
You have that wrong. Resolution on NTSC systems is horizontal-limited, and only by bandwidth. There are always 480 active vertical scan lines for NTSC. Comb filters generally get in the way of good composite decoding. The general standard for digitized NTSC is 720x480.
I do agree.
I also wonder if this research should be directed more toward aircraft engines, they ARE mostly just huge fans, after all. It's probably easier to research on a computer fan than a jet engine.
but if you've just gotta have a dual Xeon workstation, and anything powerful enough to keep the thing running is bound to be noisy, then maybe a $25/fan premium to quiet 'em down isn't such a bad thing?
Sorry, I don't buy it.
I have a dual Xeon workstation, and two other workstations designed for handling two chips, the second socket isn't populated, but the cooling system and power supplies are all set up for the second chip should I put it in. If you want specific models, one is a PIII Compaq SP700, the two other are Compaq P4 Xeon W8000 systems. One of the W8000's is serving as my HTPC to boot. I asked my sister if she could hear it, and she had to put her ear up against it.
They are hardly what I'd consider loud. They are quieter than both of the small form factor Shuttle cases I've seen in operation, both of which were claimed to be quiet. The workstation can be quieter with simple passive damping techniques, there's no need for added complexity and cost.
For any computer that is annoyingly loud, I'd consider calling it poor design and parts choices. I'm not against active cancellation, I simply think that there are cheap passive methods designing quiet, yet powerful systems. And you wouldn't have to deal with as many potential problems to boot.
I dunno, someone made a trojan for OS X as a proof of concept. There were a couple programs for Linux that had a vaguely virus-like nature, but people that ran Linux at the time mostly knew how to operate their systems properly.
I wouldn't go that far. I'm not sure the insurance companies want to insure anything.
At least with my dad's experiences, it seems as if the insurance industry is practically unwilling to insure anything but tiny risks. My parents put in a pool, diving board and fence combination that went by national standards but the insurance company simply decided to yank house insurance. They are low risk people that only had made one minor claim in twenty years, but forget that, they have a pool now. My parents would have been happy to pay an appropriate rate increase, forget that, they were uninsured for a few months while looking for a replacement company. They've had other odd run-ins with business insurance too which I won't go into right now, and the business hasn't made any claims in fifteen years that I remember.
I don't understand the comment on 50yr old 500 cars. My parents had a '70 Eldorado convertible with a 500cu engine that only did 8 to 10 mpg, I think SUVs now have more power to boot. IIRC old power measurement was without intake or exhaust manifolds, which provides a highly inflated number that you'd never see in a real car. The new SUVs possibly give better handling, much better emissions, and get 12 to 15 mpg. The new engines use lower octane gasolene because they can't use lead as an anti-knock additive.
It isn't as if I'm enamored with SUVs, I'd really love to have that Eldorado back even if only to keep as a show car and a twice-a-year driver.
I think the open standards idea is great. That way no commercial software company can complain that they don't have a chance. They just have to be better than OSS or have actual useful features that open source software doesn't.
For developing countries, one thing that can be said about "shooting self in foot" is paying heavy licencing fees to foreign companies to develop and use their software, money better kept within your own borders. There's a reason why China is making their own standards to counter the heavy patent encumberments of Western standards.
You just have to sell it as making us independent of foreign oil. That has to get right-wingers interested, unless the individual owns a stake in an oil importer. It might destablize the middle-east as oil is one of the biggest exports, but not many people seem interested in actual stability.
Wintel doesn't seem to be encroaching into Sony's traditional spaces very well, although IBM seems to be, at least in terms of game consoles.
XBox 2 will have a PPC based CPU, albiet possibly custom designed. I think the next Nintendo will be PPC based. Sony, Toshiba and IBM seem to be cooperating on Cell. No Intel here.
Intel is making the XScale CPUs for PDAs, but I don't think they are the #1 player in that market, I'm not sure if Cell can be expected for that market either though.
I don't know what other CPU markets Intel is managing to get into, but the desktop is the only market in which Intel has much of a hold.
Your response makes a lot of sense to me.
I thought the bi-directional nature of service on the internet doesn't exactly lend itself well to just considering it like a power or water utility.
Another analogy: if you manage to poison the water by backflowing sludge into the water supply, you can bet on seeing some legal action.