I'd like that. Both Intel and AMD are seeing the light, it seems.
Intel is side-stepping away from the P4 line in favor of the Pentium M line for its dual core chips, even for desktops, workstations and servers, despite its rebaked-for-laptop heritage.
Now, I'd like to see AMD (or somebody) make a good mobile chipset for this. Whenever I looked, mobile chipsets for AMD parts weren't that impressive, IMO.
One thing that this doesn't help is that other items take power too, most notably the backlight and hard drive.
A 1GHz to 1.5GHz chip really isn't so bad if the overall system is well-designed. I was VERY impressed with the 866MHz PIIIm laptop I bought. Even with an old battery, it still managed about 2 1/2 hours of run time on battery and the performance was very zippy for everything I do.
The one thing I'd expand first is just the hard drive. Tom's Hardware did a test with the new Travelstar 7200 RPM drives, which provides a pretty non-negligible speed improvement for what looked like a miniscule drop in battery life.
I liked some of Digital's hardware, and I liked some of Compaq's hardware before the merger. I don't recommend brands in one shot, because both had some shaky products. I really hadn't researched much into HP's stuff.
What I'm most comfortable with now is Compaq's Evo line, I think it was an upper-level business line of computers, mostly workstations and executive computers. I have an Evo N600c notebook computer that IMO is better in overall capability, build quality, size and weight than just about any other notebook I've seen outside of a Powerbook, but I can get the Evo for cheap.
There also doesn't seem to be 100% capable replacements to Photoshop and Quickbooks. Gimp and GNUCash seem to be good for personal use, but once you get into business use, they don't seem to stack up. I had not checked on replacements for my CAD software, but I'm relatively sure that my microcontroller programming environment isn't available for Linux.
There are apparently a lot of forces involved with spectrum. A lot of hardware manufacturers managed to convince the FCC to allow research into broadband internet over TV frequencies, so that leads me to believe that the TV broadcasting lobbies aren't as powerful as some had feared.
I really would like to see more unlicenced bands opened up. The bands given to wireless networking are IMO a pittance. I'm just not convinced that this NAF really understands what they are spouting. I do see tiny grains of truth in various parts of their propaganda, but it all seems muddled to me, overshadowed by a political agenda.
I've read several good reviews of Gyration on AV Science forums. Gyration isn't too badly priced when compared to the Logitech Bluetooth stuff, I could have sworn I saw the keyboard + mouse combo for $99 at Best Buy today.
I wanted to buy it but I'm more in the market for a Bluetooth combo kit rather than some proprietary RF. Part of the reason is I have a laptop which has an available bluetooth reciever that goes into the frame, so I don't have to worry about breaking a USB dongle or anything like that.
There are Tyan dual opteron motherboards that run for about $200. I think the expensive Tyans that are $500+ have multiple PCI-X busses and slots (that's PCI-X, not PCI-Express) and have provision for 16GB of RAM, that would be 4 channels x 2 slots per channel x 2Gb pret slot. I doubt this SFF box will have either.
They don't mention how many memory channels they use, a few Opteron board manufacterers offer boards with ONE channel to save wiring cost and board space. That limits bandwidth and total memory expandability.
I'm curious if nVidia solved their Hypertransport speed bottleneck. I think they were in such a hurry to release their original nForce 3 chipsets that it operated at 75% of max speed. Their competitors had no problem setting up their chips to use the max speed.
I'm in Indiana, so we have a stricter DNC anyway.:)
I thought the Federal DNC law pre-empted any local laws. I thought that's why some people were upset at the federal law when their state had a perfectly good law in place already.
I feel for you. What a bunch of nonsense responses you got.
WTF does switching away from MP3 have to do with fixing firewire support?!
Any good distribution autoloads common hardware support, one shouldn't need to drop to command line to get basic hardware to work, that's plain nonsense.
Firewire support shouldn't just be disabled. If there is something wrong with it, it should be fixed.
If linux support is about blaming the user for problems, then the world does not need Linux.
Even opposing sides with normally intelligent people can unite to unanimously & stupidly give emergency powers to organizations that can't handle the powers that the HAVE. See: PATRIOT, PATRIOT II, DMCA
The Shuttle servicability contingency plans turned to be expensive though. I get the impression that there is was a resentment about having to service hubble every three years, but if it weren't for the plan, a $12B telescope would have been completely worthless. That said, if they didn't skimp on $800k worth of testing, a $500M+ repair mission wouldn't have been necessary.
Sony's installed base and even continuing console sales STILL makes a laughing stock of the XBox. N and MS are simply fighting for last place. In Japan, Xbox is about even with the original Playstation in weekly sales.
That said, Microsoft has had a history of being willing to lose on two or three generations of products to come out on top. Hopefully Sony and Nintendo don't get too arrogant, their continued viability in the game market may depend on staying sharp and making the right choices.
I thought one of the attractions of doing remote camping was to get AWAY from technology for a few days?
I do think the project is interesting, but it seems to defeat the point of the event. I think standard convention houses offer at least broadband, I can't say much for wireless.
I think NTFS is on something like its seventh revision, at least according to Norton's defrag and their Ghost program.
In terms of stability, I've never had a problem with NTFS going corrupt. I was using NT4.0 on a couple Alphas for five years, and Windows 2000 on three x86 machines for maybe three years.
Fragmentation is something of an issue but it really didn't seem to slow down my SCSI drives noticably.
That depends on how well the software fits the architecture, how well optimized GCC is, etc. It would also depend on testers getting G5s and the other systems.
Something tells me if the billions of dollars per year in R&D were spent on a fully-RISC system, externally and internally, it would be much faster, saving a stage or two of decoding and other internal mangagement, saving a lot of design and testing hassles.
For over half a decade, DEC held its own against Intel with $70M / year CPU development budget, when Intel was spending $2B. They only got tripped up with poor marketing and problems and delays in fabbing the EV6 and EV7.
For one, being fully RISC made it far easier to validate the chip design because it didn't involve lots of work disassembling instructions and keeping track of the results, predicting properly and so on.
I know people that gripe about Hotmail's 2MB limit
I think it is the oversell factor. They don't need 1GB, but they can claim it even if noone uses it. And it's not like storage is expensive, hard drives are at about fifty cents per gigabyte now.
The reason is that a three-drop bus used for Xeon DP (533MHz bus), five-drop for Xeon MP (400MHz bus), can't operate as fast signalling-wise as a point-to-point bus used for Pentium 4 and all Athlon systems, 1 and 2 processor. Terminmation was just too difficult, I think. Before Hypertransport, the wiring for multiprocessing with only a point-to-point bus was rediculously expensive, particularly on the chip that connects the CPUs to the rest of the system.
AMD got a little unconventional and this time it paid off on Opteron. It didn't work so well with the Athlon MP because of this wiring problem, too many wires, too expensive of a core chip, it was 1000+ pins when 600 pins was thought to be expensive.
I wish I knew what the problem was with the desktop LCD market. One can get a 14" laptop with a 1400x1050 display, but even then, that resolution is a bit hard to find. And the entire laptop that has this is as think as a 15" display panel. I'd love to have a desktop panel of any diagonal that was less than 1/4" thick and had less than 1/4" of a border on the edge. This CAN be done with an LCD panel, it almost never is for desktops.
I guess this is kind of moot for me as I am giving up on "desktop" type machines. My primary computer will be a laptop because it allows me to work in an untethered manner, even disconnected from power for four hours given the proper laptop. My current desktop will become a server in this arrancement. I don't play games much but I will start demanding that the games I buy will work on the laptop. I've never wanted to go to a LAN party because I never wanted to drag around a 50lb computer, but even a Shuttle is a drag, IMO.
I'd like to see a comparison in brightness to a decent CRT to get a feel for what "400 lumens" means. It does seem pretty good though, but this is in comparison with projectors that need to be used in the dark to get a decent sized picture.
All devices have a limited lifetime, LCDs are limited by the flourescent sidelight bulb, CRTs and plasmas do fade over time, but the difference is that all the colors fade at a similar rate, which I think is more noticible than an overall brightness fade. I'd call it pretty acceptable if nobody really notices a color shift for a decade of heavy use.
I think credit card issuers are worse. If you think Paypal is bad, DON'T start a business and accept credit cards from Visa / Mastercard either.
In one case, the card issuer had authorized a $1200 transaction, then the next day they put it on hold. The package had already shipped. The customer probably could have claimed that it was unauthorized use and kept the package, but thankfully the customer was an honest person.
I know one guy in which his business was bilked out of about $20,000. He simply had the misfortune of dealing with a person that used a stolen credit card number. When the fraud was exposed, the card issuer sued him to recover the money. I haven't talked to him lately, last I heard he said that he'd probably have to file for bankrupcy and lose his business.
Card issuers really don't take much risk in terms of fraudulent card use, often they automatically do charge-backs when a transaction is contested, even if the business took every required means of verifying the card.
which are artificially inflated in price by the apple/ibm/motorola consortium.
It appears that way when in reality, that probably is an exercise in comparing bananas and oranges.
Development Evaluation / Reference Design boards are generally higher in price because of their volume, and the fact that they have different levels of support, often times, software, documents and engineering support is available to them for this type of product. Products intended for a slightly different market, the embedded market, are often slightly cheaper but don't always fit the "standard" form factors like ATX and ITX, but they weren't meant to be used as personal computers, so that point is moot, although it would probably help prices and cut development costs a lot.
The idea is that a prospective manufacturer would buy the Devel board to test the capabilities of the overall system. When they want volume, they take the reference design as a basis for their own fabrication and and make it in volume, but often for proprietary form factors to fit a very specific task.
One thing I noticed is that reference boards for Intel and AMD chips often cost a little more than those for RISC chips. If the ARM board costs $600, a similar embedded reference board for an x86 chip often costed $700 to $800. The difference here is that there are plenty of consumer boards available for x86 systems, but not RISC systems, so this is where the RISC boards look expensive.
In a way, I can see the "free software" movement having three decades of history, if not more. Wasn't AT&T Unix originally an open-sourced type UNIX where AT&T suddenly claimed the copyright to all submissions, and closed it up?
Tracing lines of code that far back probably wouldn't hold water though.
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I'd like that. Both Intel and AMD are seeing the light, it seems.
Intel is side-stepping away from the P4 line in favor of the Pentium M line for its dual core chips, even for desktops, workstations and servers, despite its rebaked-for-laptop heritage.
Now, I'd like to see AMD (or somebody) make a good mobile chipset for this. Whenever I looked, mobile chipsets for AMD parts weren't that impressive, IMO.
One thing that this doesn't help is that other items take power too, most notably the backlight and hard drive.
A 1GHz to 1.5GHz chip really isn't so bad if the overall system is well-designed. I was VERY impressed with the 866MHz PIIIm laptop I bought. Even with an old battery, it still managed about 2 1/2 hours of run time on battery and the performance was very zippy for everything I do.
The one thing I'd expand first is just the hard drive. Tom's Hardware did a test with the new Travelstar 7200 RPM drives, which provides a pretty non-negligible speed improvement for what looked like a miniscule drop in battery life.
I liked some of Digital's hardware, and I liked some of Compaq's hardware before the merger. I don't recommend brands in one shot, because both had some shaky products. I really hadn't researched much into HP's stuff.
What I'm most comfortable with now is Compaq's Evo line, I think it was an upper-level business line of computers, mostly workstations and executive computers. I have an Evo N600c notebook computer that IMO is better in overall capability, build quality, size and weight than just about any other notebook I've seen outside of a Powerbook, but I can get the Evo for cheap.
There also doesn't seem to be 100% capable replacements to Photoshop and Quickbooks. Gimp and GNUCash seem to be good for personal use, but once you get into business use, they don't seem to stack up. I had not checked on replacements for my CAD software, but I'm relatively sure that my microcontroller programming environment isn't available for Linux.
Which consortium is trying to hawk "smart" radio?
There are apparently a lot of forces involved with spectrum. A lot of hardware manufacturers managed to convince the FCC to allow research into broadband internet over TV frequencies, so that leads me to believe that the TV broadcasting lobbies aren't as powerful as some had feared.
I really would like to see more unlicenced bands opened up. The bands given to wireless networking are IMO a pittance. I'm just not convinced that this NAF really understands what they are spouting. I do see tiny grains of truth in various parts of their propaganda, but it all seems muddled to me, overshadowed by a political agenda.
I've read several good reviews of Gyration on AV Science forums. Gyration isn't too badly priced when compared to the Logitech Bluetooth stuff, I could have sworn I saw the keyboard + mouse combo for $99 at Best Buy today.
I wanted to buy it but I'm more in the market for a Bluetooth combo kit rather than some proprietary RF. Part of the reason is I have a laptop which has an available bluetooth reciever that goes into the frame, so I don't have to worry about breaking a USB dongle or anything like that.
There are Tyan dual opteron motherboards that run for about $200. I think the expensive Tyans that are $500+ have multiple PCI-X busses and slots (that's PCI-X, not PCI-Express) and have provision for 16GB of RAM, that would be 4 channels x 2 slots per channel x 2Gb pret slot. I doubt this SFF box will have either.
They don't mention how many memory channels they use, a few Opteron board manufacterers offer boards with ONE channel to save wiring cost and board space. That limits bandwidth and total memory expandability.
I'm curious if nVidia solved their Hypertransport speed bottleneck. I think they were in such a hurry to release their original nForce 3 chipsets that it operated at 75% of max speed. Their competitors had no problem setting up their chips to use the max speed.
I'm in Indiana, so we have a stricter DNC anyway. :)
I thought the Federal DNC law pre-empted any local laws. I thought that's why some people were upset at the federal law when their state had a perfectly good law in place already.
I feel for you. What a bunch of nonsense responses you got.
WTF does switching away from MP3 have to do with fixing firewire support?!
Any good distribution autoloads common hardware support, one shouldn't need to drop to command line to get basic hardware to work, that's plain nonsense.
Firewire support shouldn't just be disabled. If there is something wrong with it, it should be fixed.
If linux support is about blaming the user for problems, then the world does not need Linux.
Even opposing sides with normally intelligent people can unite to unanimously & stupidly give emergency powers to organizations that can't handle the powers that the HAVE. See: PATRIOT, PATRIOT II, DMCA
The Shuttle servicability contingency plans turned to be expensive though. I get the impression that there is was a resentment about having to service hubble every three years, but if it weren't for the plan, a $12B telescope would have been completely worthless. That said, if they didn't skimp on $800k worth of testing, a $500M+ repair mission wouldn't have been necessary.
Sony's installed base and even continuing console sales STILL makes a laughing stock of the XBox. N and MS are simply fighting for last place. In Japan, Xbox is about even with the original Playstation in weekly sales.
That said, Microsoft has had a history of being willing to lose on two or three generations of products to come out on top. Hopefully Sony and Nintendo don't get too arrogant, their continued viability in the game market may depend on staying sharp and making the right choices.
IPoB (IP over Bird?)
anyway, back to thread topic:
I have to think, of all the....
erm...
I thought one of the attractions of doing remote camping was to get AWAY from technology for a few days?
I do think the project is interesting, but it seems to defeat the point of the event. I think standard convention houses offer at least broadband, I can't say much for wireless.
I think NTFS is on something like its seventh revision, at least according to Norton's defrag and their Ghost program.
In terms of stability, I've never had a problem with NTFS going corrupt. I was using NT4.0 on a couple Alphas for five years, and Windows 2000 on three x86 machines for maybe three years.
Fragmentation is something of an issue but it really didn't seem to slow down my SCSI drives noticably.
That depends on how well the software fits the architecture, how well optimized GCC is, etc. It would also depend on testers getting G5s and the other systems.
x86-64 only doubles the number of registers.
Something tells me if the billions of dollars per year in R&D were spent on a fully-RISC system, externally and internally, it would be much faster, saving a stage or two of decoding and other internal mangagement, saving a lot of design and testing hassles.
For over half a decade, DEC held its own against Intel with $70M / year CPU development budget, when Intel was spending $2B. They only got tripped up with poor marketing and problems and delays in fabbing the EV6 and EV7.
For one, being fully RISC made it far easier to validate the chip design because it didn't involve lots of work disassembling instructions and keeping track of the results, predicting properly and so on.
I know people that gripe about Hotmail's 2MB limit
I think it is the oversell factor. They don't need 1GB, but they can claim it even if noone uses it. And it's not like storage is expensive, hard drives are at about fifty cents per gigabyte now.
The reason is that a three-drop bus used for Xeon DP (533MHz bus), five-drop for Xeon MP (400MHz bus), can't operate as fast signalling-wise as a point-to-point bus used for Pentium 4 and all Athlon systems, 1 and 2 processor. Terminmation was just too difficult, I think. Before Hypertransport, the wiring for multiprocessing with only a point-to-point bus was rediculously expensive, particularly on the chip that connects the CPUs to the rest of the system.
AMD got a little unconventional and this time it paid off on Opteron. It didn't work so well with the Athlon MP because of this wiring problem, too many wires, too expensive of a core chip, it was 1000+ pins when 600 pins was thought to be expensive.
I agree. I don't see why a person should think that others are really interested in recording what a person eats.
The photos of breakfast, coffee, mountain dew were pretty superfluous, and didn't have anything to do with the presentation itself.
I wish I knew what the problem was with the desktop LCD market. One can get a 14" laptop with a 1400x1050 display, but even then, that resolution is a bit hard to find. And the entire laptop that has this is as think as a 15" display panel. I'd love to have a desktop panel of any diagonal that was less than 1/4" thick and had less than 1/4" of a border on the edge. This CAN be done with an LCD panel, it almost never is for desktops.
I guess this is kind of moot for me as I am giving up on "desktop" type machines. My primary computer will be a laptop because it allows me to work in an untethered manner, even disconnected from power for four hours given the proper laptop. My current desktop will become a server in this arrancement. I don't play games much but I will start demanding that the games I buy will work on the laptop. I've never wanted to go to a LAN party because I never wanted to drag around a 50lb computer, but even a Shuttle is a drag, IMO.
I'd like to see a comparison in brightness to a decent CRT to get a feel for what "400 lumens" means. It does seem pretty good though, but this is in comparison with projectors that need to be used in the dark to get a decent sized picture.
All devices have a limited lifetime, LCDs are limited by the flourescent sidelight bulb, CRTs and plasmas do fade over time, but the difference is that all the colors fade at a similar rate, which I think is more noticible than an overall brightness fade. I'd call it pretty acceptable if nobody really notices a color shift for a decade of heavy use.
Seven volt from many batteries isn't enough to spark. Most cell batteries are encased in plastic, so you don't have the metal spark either.
I think credit card issuers are worse. If you think Paypal is bad, DON'T start a business and accept credit cards from Visa / Mastercard either.
In one case, the card issuer had authorized a $1200 transaction, then the next day they put it on hold. The package had already shipped. The customer probably could have claimed that it was unauthorized use and kept the package, but thankfully the customer was an honest person.
I know one guy in which his business was bilked out of about $20,000. He simply had the misfortune of dealing with a person that used a stolen credit card number. When the fraud was exposed, the card issuer sued him to recover the money. I haven't talked to him lately, last I heard he said that he'd probably have to file for bankrupcy and lose his business.
Card issuers really don't take much risk in terms of fraudulent card use, often they automatically do charge-backs when a transaction is contested, even if the business took every required means of verifying the card.
Tue enough, but I thought the "nommu" part meant that it was effectively running uCLinux and not the full Linux?
which are artificially inflated in price by the apple/ibm/motorola consortium.
It appears that way when in reality, that probably is an exercise in comparing bananas and oranges.
Development Evaluation / Reference Design boards are generally higher in price because of their volume, and the fact that they have different levels of support, often times, software, documents and engineering support is available to them for this type of product. Products intended for a slightly different market, the embedded market, are often slightly cheaper but don't always fit the "standard" form factors like ATX and ITX, but they weren't meant to be used as personal computers, so that point is moot, although it would probably help prices and cut development costs a lot.
The idea is that a prospective manufacturer would buy the Devel board to test the capabilities of the overall system. When they want volume, they take the reference design as a basis for their own fabrication and and make it in volume, but often for proprietary form factors to fit a very specific task.
One thing I noticed is that reference boards for Intel and AMD chips often cost a little more than those for RISC chips. If the ARM board costs $600, a similar embedded reference board for an x86 chip often costed $700 to $800. The difference here is that there are plenty of consumer boards available for x86 systems, but not RISC systems, so this is where the RISC boards look expensive.
In a way, I can see the "free software" movement having three decades of history, if not more. Wasn't AT&T Unix originally an open-sourced type UNIX where AT&T suddenly claimed the copyright to all submissions, and closed it up?
Tracing lines of code that far back probably wouldn't hold water though.