So, in the end, i think what we can all agree on is that sun boxes are expensive, and have their highly specific purposes that they are good for, but also that those porpose are rapidly being overran by commidity hardware and Linux. now if all the fanboys on either side could just calm down, we can all discuss the immenent death of sun calmly and civilly... oh, wait... that was the whole porpose of this article to begin with...
I have currently 1 laptop 1.5ghz athalon xp, 712megs ram shared as video memory, ddr 266 ram, some ati integrated video bullshit i wanna say a radeon 7000 or somewhere in that area. I'm running in 1024x768
luckily for you all, my desktop is a 1.5ghz athalonxp, 712 megs of ddr 266 ram, and a geforce 3 top of the line when i bought it video card, and i run it at 1024x768 32bpp, I ran sysoft sandra on both of these computers, and run 3dstudio Max animation on both of them, and use them both daily.
the stats: my laptop, despite being a moble processor and having shared video memory, is about 2% slower overall, in the various tests i've ran.( not including hard drive ones) than my desktop. even the shared memory but slightly newer 3d chip in the laptop lets me work with more poly's in a scene in 3ds max, and feels more responsive than the the desktop system, just slightly.
Oddly enough my roomate has a SDR ram athalon xp 1.5ghz box with a radeon 7500(on which my mobile chip is based) and its about 15% slower than either of mine, simply because of memory bandwidth that DDR gives you. he'll be upgradeing to play half life 2, I think i'm (hopefully) sittting pretty thanks to DDR.
I'm gonna sell a knockoff That is a simple anodised brick the same size and shape as these new things, so that when girls come up to me and ask, "whats on your Ipod?" like Jobs says the will, i can show them the words "you are shallow" inscibed on a lifeless aluminium brick...
I had the same problem, my solution was to get a alarm that ran on batteries, just batteries, put it into a ammo box with a few holes drilled in it to let the sound out, then bolted the big metal box to the floor near my bed. and locked the box shut, and put the key in the shower, next to the water switch. by the time a figured out what was going on, and made my way to the shower for the key, i had given up, flipped the water on, and helped my self to a very cold shower. if you had the time or energy, you could automate the shower too...
random question: why are batteries cylinders? wouldn't a cube or rectangle make more sense, i mean, in the end they always end up in a rectangular hole, so isn't the difference in area just lost space that could be used for more mAh? also, anyone want to do the math, and want to tell me what the percentage diference between a cylinder and a rectangle is?
reminds me of the cracker who knows that your password is likely in your aol profile, and culls through chat rooms, taking names, and their profiles, then trying each name with all the words in the aol profile. only problem: you end up with a lot of under 18 restricted accounts.... too many passwrods are brittany when their profile talks about how much they love brittany and n'sync... not that i was ever "the cracker" but theorectily...
speaking as someone has public utility internet, its the flakiest most backwards built netowork i've ever seen. it goes down around an hour a day for no aperent reason, bandwidth caps seem to change daily. at one point i learned that they were unaware that they had a cap at all... things only got worse once they found that out.... they started monkying with it daily. hmm.. what else.. retarded proprietary schemes to logon users and being locked out for random "offences" once we got booted for using too much bandwidh, despite the fact that we blew the fuse to the apmnt and were at the time without power....
can some one give the tech specs for it, i couldn't find it on the web site....(but what 4 year old would care it has a 33 mhz dragonball processor?) seems like it has a nice screen, and is cheap... but then again so are many handhelds these days, what makes this one different?
true the carrera does have high hp and torque, but the engine is a 5.7 litre v10, vs. the 959's 2.4 litre, think of how much lighter and more moneuverable the 959 must be... i mean, by comparison the carrera is a hulking beast!
actually, i was talking to the game programmers at e3, and watching the game run on a system similar to your's. pretty much what he said was that the textures etc that they had were ridiculusly high res, and that the whole game was desigened to scale down graphicly to whatever you have, it just won't be as pretty on a GF 1 as on a new high end pc. and seeing it RUN on a plasma monitor, I can tell you, it's worth the upgrade!
you can get a duron 950 128 megs ram, surround sound speakers, tv out, eth. modem, cdrom, 20 gig drive for 180 pluss shipping. thats identical to an x box in terms of price, signifigantly faster. and it doesn't have that ugly x box logo all over it... oh, and a year from now its 20 bucks to double its speed, thats a big part too.
worse yet, i see many blogs that state their dislikes as popups, and down at the bottom of the page, they say it HAS to be viewed in ie5+... guess the don't know the joys of the browser formerly known as phoenix!
its very simple, if you had a chance to put I anal before a post and get away with it, wouldn't you? i mean, come on, its almost as good as working at the bait shop by the lake, and coming home and telling all your friends you're the master baiter.
I think the general concensious(sp) is that we like to build things, doesnt matter what we build, be it computers, bikes, space planes, movies, music, etc... slashdotters are people who like to create. in work or outside of it, we make stuff. second to that is learning stuff. amateur astronomers, radio operators, pilots, scientists of various sorts. beyond that? I don't know... shopping would probably be pretty low on the list. I'm trying to think of what my non geek friends do as hobbies. I think its shopping, drinking, and well, a lot of them don't have hobbies, they just work, buy things, and complain about stuff. guess that's why I'm a geek!
this was all quite informative. thanks. dangerous for sure, i was BADLY burned at the point where i was shocked, and probly lucky to be alive. as for testing the resistance of the battery loop, when i came two i kicked the shit out them all, and since have told everyone that they are not to reasemble them, or i will beat them with a stick.
about a month ago my roomate came home with 250 9 volt batteries he had gotten free from work becase they only had 8 volts or so in them.. so, of course we strung them end to end and were making little streeks of lightning. it made little balls of plasma on a glass of water, if you put on cable in the water, and the other just above it. fun stuff. Long story short i got a little too close to both contacts, got blown acros the room, as i had an aluminum splinter in my hand, it jumped into my hand, burning me badly there, and then out my wrist on the opposite hand. flew across the room swearing at teh top of my lungs, and then stomped the sht out of the abomination that was 2k volts of batteries. SO I ask you, how many amps would i have been hit by there? I know it was 2k volts, Because we had a volt tester present, but i have no idea the amperage. anyone?
First thing i did apon reading this is kill my smb search engine. i guess the threat of being one of the ones that stands out is too much.. if anylawyers wanna represent me in court, i'd be willing to put it back up and take a gamle that i'd win against the RIAA. after all bankruptcy only means a couple bucks in my case... seams a shame that the best tool for finding files in my friends(and frequently my own) computer is soo dangerous to my welbeing.
comptuers in my opinion are nearly indestructable. I am currently running my athalon breadboarded on my desk in the dorms, due to selling my case(without psu) for beer money. its been going strong for 3 months, despite me dragging the whole thing onto the floor using they keyboard several times. thanksfully the harddrive never fell. My old 100 gig seagate just gives me garbled bios and no disk when i plug it it, and it just feel off the top of my old case to the ground below.. weakling... anyways, what else? hot swaping my vooodoo 2. if its in when you start and you put it back, it should just work again, but you can't ADD it hot, the cpu doesn't know what to do with it then. go figure? accidentaly stuck a live 5volt psu wire to the cpu heatsink and POP no more running system. unplug, wait 5 mins, and it boots right up. but then again, after trying to stuff the whole thing into a suitcase last week i don't get any sound... hmmmm....
For all you californaians out there( like myself) this only works in the 20's fahreneit, so don't think your going to make snow out here on the west coastt, this only works when its FREEZING.
For the money, the PowerPC processor needs to speed up or get shipped out.
Depends what you do with your computer, doesn't it? Yeah, the iBook is using a G3. Why didn't you try out a Powerbook? Or an iMac/eMac/G4 tower? And isn't Apple due to move to a new PPC chip this year anyway?
THe point is that it needs something faster right now! I am in school trying to do video post production on the new IMacs and its just sad the things they can't do.... I just pack up my stuff and go home to my commodity little athalon and get back to work. I would love to see a mac witha chip that doesn't come grinding to a halt within minutes of working on a video, but even the duals can't keep up with my athalon in terms of dealing with layers in afterFX.
I have found that this is the last link in making my machine a linux box. I need to be able to plug in various dv camearas and have them just work while I am using Adobe AfterFX, and premiere. since those 2 programs are almost constantly being used these days, I can't even justify a dual boot. The fact of the matter is that buggy/and or inconsistant or incomplete software is unacceptable when dealing with video, no one wants to drop dozens or hundreds of hours into a project only to find they can't export/convert/do that last thing to make the project complete, they need something that Just Works(great, now I am a mac commercial...) p.s. on a side note my 2 filmaker roomates both have titanium Ibooks.
Slashdot Mirror
So, in the end, i think what we can all agree on is that sun boxes are expensive, and have their highly specific purposes that they are good for, but also that those porpose are rapidly being overran by commidity hardware and Linux. now if all the fanboys on either side could just calm down, we can all discuss the immenent death of sun calmly and civilly... oh, wait... that was the whole porpose of this article to begin with...
i second the nomination, now, can we put it to a vote? (or see it in a slashdot poll?)
I have currently 1 laptop 1.5ghz athalon xp, 712megs ram shared as video memory, ddr 266 ram, some ati integrated video bullshit i wanna say a radeon 7000 or somewhere in that area. I'm running in 1024x768
luckily for you all, my desktop is a 1.5ghz athalonxp, 712 megs of ddr 266 ram, and a geforce 3 top of the line when i bought it video card, and i run it at 1024x768 32bpp,
I ran sysoft sandra on both of these computers, and run 3dstudio Max animation on both of them, and use them both daily.
the stats: my laptop, despite being a moble processor and having shared video memory, is about 2% slower overall, in the various tests i've ran.( not including hard drive ones) than my desktop. even the shared memory but slightly newer 3d chip in the laptop lets me work with more poly's in a scene in 3ds max, and feels more responsive than the the desktop system, just slightly.
Oddly enough my roomate has a SDR ram athalon xp 1.5ghz box with a radeon 7500(on which my mobile chip is based) and its about 15% slower than either of mine, simply because of memory bandwidth that DDR gives you. he'll be upgradeing to play half life 2, I think i'm (hopefully) sittting pretty thanks to DDR.
I'm gonna sell a knockoff That is a simple anodised brick the same size and shape as these new things, so that when girls come up to me and ask, "whats on your Ipod?" like Jobs says the will, i can show them the words "you are shallow" inscibed on a lifeless aluminium brick...
I had the same problem, my solution was to get a alarm that ran on batteries, just batteries, put it into a ammo box with a few holes drilled in it to let the sound out, then bolted the big metal box to the floor near my bed. and locked the box shut, and put the key in the shower, next to the water switch. by the time a figured out what was going on, and made my way to the shower for the key, i had given up, flipped the water on, and helped my self to a very cold shower. if you had the time or energy, you could automate the shower too...
random question: why are batteries cylinders? wouldn't a cube or rectangle make more sense, i mean, in the end they always end up in a rectangular hole, so isn't the difference in area just lost space that could be used for more mAh? also, anyone want to do the math, and want to tell me what the percentage diference between a cylinder and a rectangle is?
reminds me of the cracker who knows that your password is likely in your aol profile, and culls through chat rooms, taking names, and their profiles, then trying each name with all the words in the aol profile. only problem: you end up with a lot of under 18 restricted accounts.... too many passwrods are brittany when their profile talks about how much they love brittany and n'sync...
not that i was ever "the cracker" but theorectily...
speaking as someone has public utility internet, its the flakiest most backwards built netowork i've ever seen. it goes down around an hour a day for no aperent reason, bandwidth caps seem to change daily. at one point i learned that they were unaware that they had a cap at all... things only got worse once they found that out.... they started monkying with it daily. hmm.. what else.. retarded proprietary schemes to logon users and being locked out for random "offences" once we got booted for using too much bandwidh, despite the fact that we blew the fuse to the apmnt and were at the time without power....
can some one give the tech specs for it, i couldn't find it on the web site....(but what 4 year old would care it has a 33 mhz dragonball processor?) seems like it has a nice screen, and is cheap... but then again so are many handhelds these days, what makes this one different?
true the carrera does have high hp and torque, but the engine is a 5.7 litre v10, vs. the 959's 2.4 litre, think of how much lighter and more moneuverable the 959 must be... i mean, by comparison the carrera is a hulking beast!
actually, i was talking to the game programmers at e3, and watching the game run on a system similar to your's. pretty much what he said was that the textures etc that they had were ridiculusly high res, and that the whole game was desigened to scale down graphicly to whatever you have, it just won't be as pretty on a GF 1 as on a new high end pc. and seeing it RUN on a plasma monitor, I can tell you, it's worth the upgrade!
you can get a duron 950 128 megs ram, surround sound speakers, tv out, eth. modem, cdrom, 20 gig drive for 180 pluss shipping. thats identical to an x box in terms of price, signifigantly faster. and it doesn't have that ugly x box logo all over it...
oh, and a year from now its 20 bucks to double its speed, thats a big part too.
worse yet, i see many blogs that state their dislikes as popups, and down at the bottom of the page, they say it HAS to be viewed in ie5+... guess the don't know the joys of the browser formerly known as phoenix!
its very simple, if you had a chance to put
I anal before a post and get away with it, wouldn't you? i mean, come on, its almost as good as working at the bait shop by the lake, and coming home and telling all your friends you're the master baiter.
sorry, thats only the solution if you're sen. orin hatch... vigilante justice that is... yea, i've stopped making sense for the night.
you must..... slay them all!
I think the general concensious(sp) is that we like to build things, doesnt matter what we build, be it computers, bikes, space planes, movies, music, etc... slashdotters are people who like to create. in work or outside of it, we make stuff. second to that is learning stuff. amateur astronomers, radio operators, pilots, scientists of various sorts. beyond that? I don't know... shopping would probably be pretty low on the list. I'm trying to think of what my non geek friends do as hobbies. I think its shopping, drinking, and well, a lot of them don't have hobbies, they just work, buy things, and complain about stuff. guess that's why I'm a geek!
this was all quite informative. thanks. dangerous for sure, i was BADLY burned at the point where i was shocked, and probly lucky to be alive. as for testing the resistance of the battery loop, when i came two i kicked the shit out them all, and since have told everyone that they are not to reasemble them, or i will beat them with a stick.
about a month ago my roomate came home with 250 9 volt batteries he had gotten free from work becase they only had 8 volts or so in them.. so, of course we strung them end to end and were making little streeks of lightning. it made little balls of plasma on a glass of water, if you put on cable in the water, and the other just above it. fun stuff. Long story short i got a little too close to both contacts, got blown acros the room, as i had an aluminum splinter in my hand, it jumped into my hand, burning me badly there, and then out my wrist on the opposite hand. flew across the room swearing at teh top of my lungs, and then stomped the sht out of the abomination that was 2k volts of batteries. SO I ask you, how many amps would i have been hit by there? I know it was 2k volts, Because we had a volt tester present, but i have no idea the amperage. anyone?
First thing i did apon reading this is kill my smb search engine. i guess the threat of being one of the ones that stands out is too much.. if anylawyers wanna represent me in court, i'd be willing to put it back up and take a gamle that i'd win against the RIAA. after all bankruptcy only means a couple bucks in my case...
seams a shame that the best tool for finding files in my friends(and frequently my own) computer is soo dangerous to my welbeing.
comptuers in my opinion are nearly indestructable. I am currently running my athalon breadboarded on my desk in the dorms, due to selling my case(without psu) for beer money. its been going strong for 3 months, despite me dragging the whole thing onto the floor using they keyboard several times. thanksfully the harddrive never fell. My old 100 gig seagate just gives me garbled bios and no disk when i plug it it, and it just feel off the top of my old case to the ground below.. weakling... anyways, what else? hot swaping my vooodoo 2. if its in when you start and you put it back, it should just work again, but you can't ADD it hot, the cpu doesn't know what to do with it then. go figure? accidentaly stuck a live 5volt psu wire to the cpu heatsink and POP no more running system. unplug, wait 5 mins, and it boots right up. but then again, after trying to stuff the whole thing into a suitcase last week i don't get any sound... hmmmm....
For all you californaians out there( like myself) this only works in the 20's fahreneit, so don't think your going to make snow out here on the west coastt, this only works when its FREEZING.
For the money, the PowerPC processor needs to speed up or get shipped out.
Depends what you do with your computer, doesn't it? Yeah, the iBook is using a G3. Why didn't you try out a Powerbook? Or an iMac/eMac/G4 tower? And isn't Apple due to move to a new PPC chip this year anyway?
THe point is that it needs something faster right now! I am in school trying to do video post production on the new IMacs and its just sad the things they can't do.... I just pack up my stuff and go home to my commodity little athalon and get back to work. I would love to see a mac witha chip that doesn't come grinding to a halt within minutes of working on a video, but even the duals can't keep up with my athalon in terms of dealing with layers in afterFX.
I have found that this is the last link in making my machine a linux box. I need to be able to plug in various dv camearas and have them just work while I am using Adobe AfterFX, and premiere. since those 2 programs are almost constantly being used these days, I can't even justify a dual boot. The fact of the matter is that buggy/and or inconsistant or incomplete software is unacceptable when dealing with video, no one wants to drop dozens or hundreds of hours into a project only to find they can't export/convert/do that last thing to make the project complete, they need something that Just Works(great, now I am a mac commercial...) p.s. on a side note my 2 filmaker roomates both have titanium Ibooks.
i am new to this, how does this first post thing work? do i get a prize?