Provided your motherboard can provide the right voltage for the Coppermine and your BIOS supports it, the Abit Slotket III or the new revision of the Iwill Slocket II will both do dual FC-PGA Coppermine out of the box. Some popular slightly older slotkets like the MSI BX Master rev 2 and the Soltek SL-02A+ can be modified for dual Cu with a bit of soldering.
You might still be able to use a Cu on other motherboards with the Soltek SL-02D, which draws its power from a drive connector and provides the right Cu voltage through its own voltage regulator, even if the motherboard can't provide it. Unfortunately, this slotket is not yet dual capable.
If you are not one of us, you are one of them. Sentient programs. They can move in and out of any software still hardwired to their system. That means that everyone we haven't unplugged, is potentially an agent.
Sounds like you have a sweet setup. The Philishave however is a pet peeve of mine. I'm not fond of electric shaving in general, but like anyone who has ever touched a Braun shaver can tell you, the Philips 3 rotating heads design is rather inferior when it comes to smoothness. I got one of those gold plated monsters as a present sometime and although I appreciated the large LCD display for battery level and the multitude of status LEDs, it took me far too much time every morning stubble. But since Philips invented it back in oh 1800 or so, they're sticking to this flawed design for ever.
Your mention of DCC made me remember some more Philips injuries over the years.. who still remembers gems like VideoPac, Video 2000, the Nino WinCE handhelds or the TriMedia processor?
Philips current slogan "Let's make things better" expresses an appropriate modesty about the current state of affairs. Like IBM, this company has always been good at pioneering innovative ideas and then marketing them to death. Maybe their confusing sub brand thing with Philips, Magnavox, Aristona and Whirlpool has something to do with it.
Be it LaserDisc players, Philips 'Yes' ALMOST PC-compatible, MSX, MSX2, CD-I or their portable phones, the list of things they tried and killed is almost endless. Even their supposed strong points, video recorders and CD players, have proven notoriously unreliable for me. And please, let the stylists be the first against the wall. Ugh, those things are ugly. On the other hand, a lot of european households are filled with virtually indestructable Philips common appliances like water cookers, microwaves and TVs and somehow they survive to keep experimenting around.
As part of the latest direction change, Philips president Cor Boonstra apparantly envisions a lot of future for home copying; First he sold Polygram records, choosing to concentrate on Philips' growing CD writer trade instead. As he said, he felt foolish producing both the copying devices and the material that would be copied with it. Now here's another interesting device for your home digital copy needs. Well, seems pretty smart.
I own a Palm IIIx and I have a close friend of mine who owns a Casseopeia (which model I can't remember). I couldn't talk him into getting a Palm, he's into flash and "cool" factor.
I'd say the a Palm V series have a lot of flash and cool factor about them, and good for them too. I recall your IIIx was once a dreamy high end machine. I finally started shopping around for some wearable computer to go with a Nokia GSM about a month ago. To my surprise, I ended up going the same route as your friend. Where at first I played with a friend's Palm V, looked at Palm emulators, went to have a peek at the IIIc in the store, and read Palm boards and newsgroups. Since I couldn't find anyone who had a CE machine, or any devices that appealed to me for sale in local shops here in Amsterdam, I didn't seriously envision WinCE in my future. Aside from that, Palms are just plain sexy. So I went to compare prices and models, and had my mind set on either a Vx or a IIIc. One thing that sucks about Europe; No Handspring, TRG hard to find, and the Palm that I really liked best, the IIIxe, isn't imported.
But when I stopped to think about it, a Palm really wasn't what I wanted. What I am lusting for is an occassional burst of Internet connectivity on the go, and I imagined what a telnet session looks like on a Palm screen, even with a miniature font. Having to scroll around a lot just to see all of a ps aux was a turnoff. A screenshot of VNC for Palm revealed that you can just about fit the My Computer icon and Network Neighbourhood on a Palm screen. As for Web browsing on 160x160 pixels, ouch. I surveyed the rest of the market for a better palm terminal.
I chanced upon a refurbished colour Compaq Aero for about the price of a Palm V and went with it. The nerd in me just could not resist a 70 Mhz MIPS R4000 with 16 meg RAM to go. Life at 320x240@16 bit depth turns out to be quite bearable, and while sound recording and a CFlash slot may not be things that I use daily right now, I'm kind of used to having sound and expansion slots on any computer I've had back to the Atari 8 bit.
I'm reasonably content with this machine, although in retrospect I probably should've bought the Casio Casseopeia. The Casio's processor is faster, it has a joypad, and it runs more programs. But the Aero does what I need and WinCE talks PPP just fine with a Linux box. Add freeware iBrowser with auto picture downscaling and you can read in bed decently. There are a surprising number of websites that look quite ok, I guess I can skip WAP. Now it seems there's a CE 3.0 ROM upgrade coming in May, albeit for a 100$ fee, but still not too bad.
One negative thing about WinCE that you missed is that there's not all that much software for it. There's isn't much included in the box, and what is out there is dwarfed by the massive amount of software that is available for Palm. Often you find that certain programs aren't available on all the WinCE CPU types, or that they stupidly won't run or have a messed up display on a particular form factor (P/PC, H/PC, H/PC Pro, you come to hate those terms), or that they were written for just one model. A few appealing games only support the Casio, for instance. Shareware/demo versions abound in WinCE land, and the simplest of programs tend to be commercial. But if you search long and hard you can assemble a decent toolkit.
Anyway, this is a classic debate between an organiser and a more general purpose device, and although they're the almost the same size, you really can't compare a current Palm OS machine to a Windows CE one. I wanted a miniature computer and I think so did your friend. The extra abilities over Palm are offset by much weight and short battery life, and they're truely just flash and glitz if you want the optimal pocket organizer. But to me, they're useful.
I was just playing with it and thinking that this web based interface where you get few options and some logical default questions works rather nicely for about 90% of the things I need to get done. This kind of ease of use is something Linux apps in general can benefit from. I couldn't help but notice how effortless the VMWare installation wizards made things compared to the typical Linux install, for instance. With things like MS Office also going to web editions now, this seems like a trend and these guys are early birds as far as graphics is concerned, good for them.
One thing that annoys me about this way of working is the file transfer process before you can get to work. It's not so bad for just one service but right now you might have a bit of web space here, a mailbox there, some space for StarOffice with Sun, Office in Seattle, 50 megs with these fellows for graphics, etc etc. I wish it would somehow becomes transparent where the file you're working on happens to be.
You can probably forget SMP. Neither Cyrix nor any of the other X86 clone makers has ever made any chips that included the local APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) component that is necessary for Intel style multiprocessing. You need this to be able to allow more than one CPU to handle interupts. Since Intel reserved all rights to that technology strictly, AMD and Cyrix agreed on a competing standard instead and called it OpenPIC. But unfortunately so far no chips or motherboards ever materialised that adhered to that specification. If this chip has any sort of multiprocessing ability, which I seriously doubt, it likely won't be compatible with the Abit's I/O APIC.
There's a small chance that the combined sum of the various technology exchanges that VIA, Cyrix and in particular National Semiconductors have had with Intel over the years might have changed this, though. Look at how Cyrix is assuming that those crosslicenses are transfered onto them now that they were first bought by NS and then VIA. That's why they're using Intel's GTL+ bus, for instance, which AMD never dared. Maybe NS owned rights to the APIC too. But still that's all too late for Joshua's design anyway, and actually someone asked a Cyrix support person about this a while back and she said pretty sure no SMP.
As a real life twin, I can testify that cloning can be a very positive experience for everyone involved:). Especially when I was growing up, it was great to have another version of myself around. Someone that I can pretty much trust implicitly, that I can compare the validity of my thoughts and feelings with.
Come to think of it, several people have told me over the years that they've fantasised about being twins or that they envy me. This desire for a clone seems to be a more common one, whatever the reasons may be. I'm no psychologist but I figure that ultimately noone wants to die, noone wants to be alone, and everyone is pretty much programmed to spread their genes one way or another, anyway.
The things my brother and me have in common are reassuring, and genetically, we are exactly the same, but of course we've had many different experiences. But even if we'd done exactly the same things, we still would've turned out individuals somehow. Similarly, any clone that you make of yourself is not going to be yourself. I'm not religious, but I'll call the part that you can't duplicate the soul.
Technical difficulties with cloning aside (I recall having read that Dolly was born with genetic material that was as old as the 'mother Dolly', reducing her life expectancy, and that the egg carrier's RNA made the clone imperfect, or something like that), then what the heck is the use? Imagine being born and knowing that you're a clone of someone that is now 40 years of age or so. It's hard to really imagine how that would feel. Sure, you're an individual, and the different periods when you're growing up are going to make sure that you as clone are going to be even more different from the first edition than a twin would be. But just being able to see yourself 40 years older is a Cassandra-complex like nightmare that must be damn hard to deal with. I for one wouldn't want to do that to anyone, certainly not a tender soul so similar to myself. Personally, I think I'd be likely to loathe my blueprint.
Aside from that, nature says that as far as procreation is concerned, the idea is to take bits from 2 separate gene pools. To really help things along, we need real children. As much as I think I'm a nice guy, I do need to evolve. Clones don't add anything new.
I'm curious if these drivers support SMP kernels. I bought an SB Live instead of the Vortex because all the Windows NT drivers that Aureal have released show freaky stuff on multiprocessing machines, like long delays, samples being cut off in the middle, or blue screens. There's now supposedly a beta driver that tries to fix that but I haven't seen confirmations that it works. I'm wondering if their Linux driver has been tested for this too.
I'm finding it harder and harder to deal with the general bitter tone here on Slashdot, not just on this article, but in general. This one is particularly bad, though. Unfortunately I don't have anything positive to add here either, other that I for one was actually pretty happy to see a C-Net article that begins with 'It's time to make the leap to Linux'.
But now I'm pretty down again, after reading all the complaints on here. Kinda sad to see people stating that 'real Linux users' use Debian or Slackware or whatever. Even more extreme folk might say real Linux users don't trust any distribution, they make their own. Personally, I thought Linux users were people running a Linux kernel.
This article is obviously aimed at people who aren't running Linux yet, or haven't in the past, i.e. pretty much none of y'all, so why do you people feel so insulted when your particular distribution doesn't score as well as others? Would you honestly be happier if your distro would've scored well? Sometimes I get the idea a lot of my fellow Slashdotters are mainly into Linux to be different from the unwashed masses. Now that you aren't getting your exclusiveness quota anymore, it's time to partition yourself off into a smaller subgroup again?
I'm finding it harder and harder to deal with the general bitter tone here on Slashdot, not just on this article, but in general. This one is particularly bad, though. Unfortunately I don't have anything positive to add here either, other that I for one was actually pretty happy to see a C-Net article that begins with 'It's time to make the leap to Linux'.
But now I'm pretty down again, after reading all the complaints on here. Kinda sad to see people stating that 'real Linux users' use Debian or Slackware or whatever. Even more extreme folk might say real Linux users don't trust any distribution, they make their own. Personally, I thought Linux users were people running a Linux kernel.
This article is obviously aimed at people who aren't running Linux yet, or haven't in the past, i.e. pretty much none of y'all, so why do you people feel so insulted when your particular distribution doesn't score as well as others. Would you honestly be happier if your distro would've scored well? Sometimes I get the idea a lot of my fellow Slashdotters are mainly into Linux to be different from the unwashed masses. Now that you aren't getting your exclusiveness quota anymore, it's time to partition yourself off into a smaller subgroup again?
Maybe I'm overseeing something, but I'm wondering about one thing. The previous Linux Doom and Quake were distributed over ftp by idsoftware themselves, and they looked for the Windows retail CD for their data files. If I buy this Loki version, will I be able to use it as a key cd for the Windows version? Cause you just KNOW the Windows one will always be at least one revision ahead. I don't really care which platform I play it on. I'd like to buy the Linux version to show my support, but if it means that I won't be able to play with all the Windows users just because I have to wait a week longer for the latest patch, then it's not much good. I'd like to be able to switch to Windows just as long as is necessary. Also, the graphic card drivers for Windows tend to be more highly optimised, another reason why I want flexibility. What about authentication, will I get a license number from Loki that'll get me equivalent rights on the authentication servers? Florin
I'm hesitant to condemn the man on the spot, because after all, he is CEO of a multimillion dollar company and one would guess that his vide presidents shield him carefully from saying anything TOO embarassing in public. But when I read the vague 'I don't know how it worked, but I'm sure cookies had something to do with it', I really started to have my doubts. Are there sites that store cookies with your freshly entered credit card number in it? I can't believe it. Only thing this shows is that he lacks a fundamental grasp of what cookies are and how they work.
I'm not just being hateful here. I really mean it, I can't take care of them. It's not that I don't like them or anything, it's that taking on a live animal is a responsibility I'm not up to. I never have enough time to play with it. And not enough regularity in my life to take proper care of it.
I can't even feed myself properly most of the time (Bothering to order a salad along with my pizza is a highlight in my weekly nourishment). Having a live animal would mean I couldn't just take off and drive south for a couple of weeks anymore. A live pet is a commitment for something like 15 years (okay, maybe half, as I'd definitely go to the asylum to get an older abandoned one rather than a puppy/kitten/whatever). I guess I'm just immature. It's fine when you have parents to do the work, and you just get the fun. There were always pets around when I was younger.
I tried Sea Monkeys, the ultimate instant carefree pet, and highly disposable too, but they're just too damn small. I can't relate much with little white dots.
Now I've seen this and it definitely looks promising. But I don't want to control it. What I'm really looking for is some random movement in the corner of my eye, that comes with an OFF button. I'd get an Aibo if they weren't so hard to come by. So I'm definitely keeping an eye out for someone to turn this into a product.
Come now AC, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel! Anyway, I totally agree with the general sentiment. This just isn't right. First the article is sort of apologetic for their failure to stay updated and then they bounce the blame right off on there not being a central repository for updates.
Which is just plain silly. The hack could've been prevented if they'd just checked Red Hat's web pages sometime, or the updates ftp directory, or been on the proper mailing list. Or configured autorpm to deal with this for them. Exactly what is a company required to do to get heard by PCWeek's system administrators, perhaps sending out a fripping press release would help? Hmm, makes me wonder if they have found the repository for Microsoft Hotfixes yet. Maybe they just stick to Service Packs?
Although the closed settop box is a concept that is wasted on a home PC builder like myself, this project is more exciting to me than others if just for the fact that Nokia is involved. I've come to like their products, both for computer monitors and their portable phones. Alas, so far I've found one thing lacking, namely Linux support.
Initially, I wasn't real pleased to have to carry a phone around but I really fell in love with my 6110. It goes a long way towards a PDA with its built in SMS email, faxing, calendar, calculator and even some games. You can also hack it for some fun. Anyhow, I never figured portable phones for a geek thing, but it's been fun to play with.
Then a problem had to come up. One feature of the phone that appealed to me is the ability to link it with a PC or a laptop through cable or infrared link and then use the phone as a modem. But the modem function is software, and of course that software (Nokia Data Suite) is only available for Windows. It also costs an arm and a leg, which I don't care to invest in a legacy platform.
So I realise this is my mistake for not investigating the purchase closely enough and figuring the infrared function would be a normal IRDA compliant device and the modem would be hardware. I guess I should've bought a 8110 or an Ericsson instead. Still it leaves me wondering if there are other 61xx owners that use Linux and are bugged by this. Any software modem projects underway perhaps?
In short, this is Voodoo SLI or Wicked3D's PGC with a twist. Interesting, but with ATI's traditional lackluster performance, it remains to be seen whether this will be the thing speed freaks really want. Personally I expect more from T&L acceleration..
Some people claim the Celeron doesn't scale well and to some degree they are right. The Celeron's second level cache, though twice as fast, is only one fourth the size of that of a Pentium III and as such main memory will have to be accessed more frequently. If you don't happen to be overclocking, that main memory runs at only 66 Mhz , compared to 100 Mhz on other Intel processors. Add another Celeron on the same bus and at some point you're going to have contention as both CPUs wait around for their memory accesses.
This isn't always a critical issue. One program that's hardly affected is the RC5DES client. This program is optimised for i686 processors and it supports SMP. The client will automatically recognise and use 2 CPUs and a second CPU gives instant practically double key throughput. My own dual Celeron 366 running at 550 Mhz goes from 1.6 to 3.15 Mkeys a sec. It seems that RC5 is a small piece of code with a small data set that runs almost completely in the L1 and L2 caches. The dual Celeron scores competitively with even a Xeon 550.
Now enter the SETI client. I was trying the text mode NT client and noticed it was running much slower than I had expected on my box, so I retimed the same work unit (WU) a couple of times with different configurations. The same PC, which was equipped with only 64 MB of memory - fine for RC5DES, does the WU in about 10 hours and 30 minutes. However, when I ran a second parallel SETI client (The client is generic i386 and does not support SMP by itself) it did two WUs in about 15:50 hours. Major overhead!
It didn't matter much whether I let the two processes run free or explicitly tied their affinity to one CPU each. In the first case one of the processes was finished about 3 minutes earlier, but total time was still roughly the same.
So I first added another 64 MB and retimed it. Timing went down to 14 hours and 40 mins. Although I hadn't noticed it swapping and the SETI docs claim the clients take only about 13 megs of mem each, the original 64 MB apparantly was not quite enough to fit both processes completely in real memory, and thus the modest improvement. Then I tried changing the memory timing from CAS 3 to CAS 2 and lo and behold, I was now doing this unit (same unit twice in parallel) in only 12:30 hours each! Nice. Much closer to the 10:30 of a single 550.
But still not quite as good as dual Pentium IIIs, as far as I can gather from Usenet postings that is. Xeons supposedly have phenomenal SETI scores. And because I overclock, my Celeron runs at a 100 Mhz bus, partly making up for the difference. Normal Celerons running at 66 Mhz bus would break down worse, as far as I can predict.
I've noticed some people here are quite critical about these dual Celeron freaks. But in some ways our bragging rights are real and these PCs really do counts as 1100 Mhz. In others, it falls down flat on its face. I love my box tho. I learned a lot of stuff about how different operating systems upgrade to SMP, how process affinity works out, which drivers aren't threadsafe, all stuff I can apply when I'm working on serious SMP hardware. Yeah it mostly sits around cracking keys or SETI, but just the ability to run VMWare on a CPU of its own is at least one killer app.
Actually, aside from buying the NT Resource Kit you can also get the uptomp.exe utility as a download from the Microsoft website. Unfortunately the program does have some problems and many people are left with unbootable systems afterwards, so there's also has a Knowledge Base article about doing it by hand.
BTW, I get about 3.16 megakeys a second on my dual Celeron 366 at 550. RC5DES is certainly very scalable, much more so than SETI.
This expansion is logical and necessary move for Red Hat and they're welcome on the European mainland. Attention to local language support in the software itself and in the helpdesk facilities is still a must over here if RH is to grow.
Suse's dominance is often trumpeted but Red Hat certainly has its share of fans too. I don't think we need anybody to be claiming anything as their turf. Suse can defend itself on technical merit or with marketing just like everyone else. In some ways they appear to be aiming more for the desktop where RH is more of a server thing. It's nice to have a choice. Of course, they both consist of mostly the same software anyhow and can both be made to do most things quite easily.
They could well coexist. Or we could all be switching to Mandrake next. We'll just have to see what happens. Me, I honestly wouldn't mind if everyone would just use one Linux distribution, or at least all the novice users, it would make support and identifying and getting rid of common problems easier for sure. Choice is good, chaos can be disruptive.
Tom has had this thing for quite some time, the article had been on there for a while already. A tip for those submitting stories.. check the date on the story. That one was posted August 13.
To the previous poster.. say what you want about Tom's Hardware, but it's still on my run-by-to-check-daily list of websites. I actually think it has gotten somewhat better again in the last few weeks. There were a couple of months that there was nothing worth reading on there anymore and that Tom had really lost touch with his core audience (Like with the test of 32 video cards, where he used the driver that was included in the box, i.e. the entire test a complete and utter waste of time. Or like his reviews of Singapore hotels or German cars.). But the addition of the webnews column as well as a publication of a couple of good old fashioned articles about genuinely HOT stuff like K7 motherboards or Ultra video card comparisons has given me hope that things will get back into shape. They can get rid of Second Hand Smoke though, as far as I'm concerned.
There are now so many hardware tech websites that one really can't follow all of them anymore, but the previous poster has indentified the 3 biggies. I agree that Ars Technica's reviewers don't always appear competent, but I don't agree on the 'cheap' issue; I think most people who visit these websites regularly do it exactly to look for things like overclocking and dual celeron. I also read Anandtech a lot and must say I haven't noticed attitude spewing to an annoying degree, but I do think they have far too many reviews of ordinary hardware (What, another BX board? Another TNT2 clone??) and not enough of what really interests me. For instance, 3 weeks ago Anand complained about having experienced K7 motherboard instability and I'm still waiting for the details. That is hot, that is relevant now, that is what I want to hear about.
One other site (Hardware/Games oriented) that I like a lot is the Tresh's FiringSquad.
It seems this last setback was too much. Intel has called off the introduction for the second time. Intel had planned for the release of the 820 or Camino chipset this coming Monday, but it has now been delayed 'indefinitely'. Check out this ZDNet article.
Just as a general observation, did anyone else find it amusing to see just how strikingly different in nature Linus' day and evening jobs are?
He got famous by starting a completely open project, in a very humble fashion, inviting anyone who felt like it to help turn it into something really useful. Everything in the spirit of cooperation and selflessly making things better for users everywhere. I think we can say he succeeded far beyond what he set out to do and that his work has affected the industry on the whole to no small degree.
Now he's an anchor of one of the most secretive companies in this industry. He can't even say anything about what he's working on or what the company is going to do. We only know the company grabs patents to the left and to the right and we anticipate that it's going to make a big splash someday.
Whether or not that is true remains to be seen, but hiring him was a good move by Transmeta. Legends are the only thing the company has, so far.
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Provided your motherboard can provide the right voltage for the Coppermine and your BIOS supports it, the Abit Slotket III or the new revision of the Iwill Slocket II will both do dual FC-PGA Coppermine out of the box. Some popular slightly older slotkets like the MSI BX Master rev 2 and the Soltek SL-02A+ can be modified for dual Cu with a bit of soldering.
You might still be able to use a Cu on other motherboards with the Soltek SL-02D, which draws its power from a drive connector and provides the right Cu voltage through its own voltage regulator, even if the motherboard can't provide it. Unfortunately, this slotket is not yet dual capable.
If you are not one of us, you are one of them. Sentient programs. They can move in and out of any software still hardwired to their system. That means that everyone we haven't unplugged, is potentially an agent.
The specs say 'increased flexibility - supports both parallel and USB ports' but my TV doesn't come with either of these.
Sounds like you have a sweet setup. The Philishave however is a pet peeve of mine. I'm not fond of electric shaving in general, but like anyone who has ever touched a Braun shaver can tell you, the Philips 3 rotating heads design is rather inferior when it comes to smoothness. I got one of those gold plated monsters as a present sometime and although I appreciated the large LCD display for battery level and the multitude of status LEDs, it took me far too much time every morning stubble. But since Philips invented it back in oh 1800 or so, they're sticking to this flawed design for ever.
Your mention of DCC made me remember some more Philips injuries over the years.. who still remembers gems like VideoPac, Video 2000, the Nino WinCE handhelds or the TriMedia processor?
Philips current slogan "Let's make things better" expresses an appropriate modesty about the current state of affairs. Like IBM, this company has always been good at pioneering innovative ideas and then marketing them to death. Maybe their confusing sub brand thing with Philips, Magnavox, Aristona and Whirlpool has something to do with it.
Be it LaserDisc players, Philips 'Yes' ALMOST PC-compatible, MSX, MSX2, CD-I or their portable phones, the list of things they tried and killed is almost endless. Even their supposed strong points, video recorders and CD players, have proven notoriously unreliable for me. And please, let the stylists be the first against the wall. Ugh, those things are ugly. On the other hand, a lot of european households are filled with virtually indestructable Philips common appliances like water cookers, microwaves and TVs and somehow they survive to keep experimenting around.
As part of the latest direction change, Philips president Cor Boonstra apparantly envisions a lot of future for home copying; First he sold Polygram records, choosing to concentrate on Philips' growing CD writer trade instead. As he said, he felt foolish producing both the copying devices and the material that would be copied with it. Now here's another interesting device for your home digital copy needs. Well, seems pretty smart.
I own a Palm IIIx and I have a close friend of mine who owns a Casseopeia (which model I can't remember). I couldn't talk him into getting a Palm, he's into flash and "cool" factor.
I'd say the a Palm V series have a lot of flash and cool factor about them, and good for them too. I recall your IIIx was once a dreamy high end machine. I finally started shopping around for some wearable computer to go with a Nokia GSM about a month ago. To my surprise, I ended up going the same route as your friend. Where at first I played with a friend's Palm V, looked at Palm emulators, went to have a peek at the IIIc in the store, and read Palm boards and newsgroups. Since I couldn't find anyone who had a CE machine, or any devices that appealed to me for sale in local shops here in Amsterdam, I didn't seriously envision WinCE in my future. Aside from that, Palms are just plain sexy. So I went to compare prices and models, and had my mind set on either a Vx or a IIIc. One thing that sucks about Europe; No Handspring, TRG hard to find, and the Palm that I really liked best, the IIIxe, isn't imported.
But when I stopped to think about it, a Palm really wasn't what I wanted. What I am lusting for is an occassional burst of Internet connectivity on the go, and I imagined what a telnet session looks like on a Palm screen, even with a miniature font. Having to scroll around a lot just to see all of a ps aux was a turnoff. A screenshot of VNC for Palm revealed that you can just about fit the My Computer icon and Network Neighbourhood on a Palm screen. As for Web browsing on 160x160 pixels, ouch. I surveyed the rest of the market for a better palm terminal.
I chanced upon a refurbished colour Compaq Aero for about the price of a Palm V and went with it. The nerd in me just could not resist a 70 Mhz MIPS R4000 with 16 meg RAM to go. Life at 320x240@16 bit depth turns out to be quite bearable, and while sound recording and a CFlash slot may not be things that I use daily right now, I'm kind of used to having sound and expansion slots on any computer I've had back to the Atari 8 bit.
I'm reasonably content with this machine, although in retrospect I probably should've bought the Casio Casseopeia. The Casio's processor is faster, it has a joypad, and it runs more programs. But the Aero does what I need and WinCE talks PPP just fine with a Linux box. Add freeware iBrowser with auto picture downscaling and you can read in bed decently. There are a surprising number of websites that look quite ok, I guess I can skip WAP. Now it seems there's a CE 3.0 ROM upgrade coming in May, albeit for a 100$ fee, but still not too bad.
One negative thing about WinCE that you missed is that there's not all that much software for it. There's isn't much included in the box, and what is out there is dwarfed by the massive amount of software that is available for Palm. Often you find that certain programs aren't available on all the WinCE CPU types, or that they stupidly won't run or have a messed up display on a particular form factor (P/PC, H/PC, H/PC Pro, you come to hate those terms), or that they were written for just one model. A few appealing games only support the Casio, for instance. Shareware/demo versions abound in WinCE land, and the simplest of programs tend to be commercial. But if you search long and hard you can assemble a decent toolkit.
Anyway, this is a classic debate between an organiser and a more general purpose device, and although they're the almost the same size, you really can't compare a current Palm OS machine to a Windows CE one. I wanted a miniature computer and I think so did your friend. The extra abilities over Palm are offset by much weight and short battery life, and they're truely just flash and glitz if you want the optimal pocket organizer. But to me, they're useful.
I was just playing with it and thinking that this web based interface where you get few options and some logical default questions works rather nicely for about 90% of the things I need to get done. This kind of ease of use is something Linux apps in general can benefit from. I couldn't help but notice how effortless the VMWare installation wizards made things compared to the typical Linux install, for instance. With things like MS Office also going to web editions now, this seems like a trend and these guys are early birds as far as graphics is concerned, good for them.
One thing that annoys me about this way of working is the file transfer process before you can get to work. It's not so bad for just one service but right now you might have a bit of web space here, a mailbox there, some space for StarOffice with Sun, Office in Seattle, 50 megs with these fellows for graphics, etc etc. I wish it would somehow becomes transparent where the file you're working on happens to be.
You can probably forget SMP. Neither Cyrix nor any of the other X86 clone makers has ever made any chips that included the local APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) component that is necessary for Intel style multiprocessing. You need this to be able to allow more than one CPU to handle interupts. Since Intel reserved all rights to that technology strictly, AMD and Cyrix agreed on a competing standard instead and called it OpenPIC. But unfortunately so far no chips or motherboards ever materialised that adhered to that specification. If this chip has any sort of multiprocessing ability, which I seriously doubt, it likely won't be compatible with the Abit's I/O APIC.
There's a small chance that the combined sum of the various technology exchanges that VIA, Cyrix and in particular National Semiconductors have had with Intel over the years might have changed this, though. Look at how Cyrix is assuming that those crosslicenses are transfered onto them now that they were first bought by NS and then VIA. That's why they're using Intel's GTL+ bus, for instance, which AMD never dared. Maybe NS owned rights to the APIC too. But still that's all too late for Joshua's design anyway, and actually someone asked a Cyrix support person about this a while back and she said pretty sure no SMP.
As a real life twin, I can testify that cloning can be a very positive experience for everyone involved :). Especially when I was growing up, it was great to have another version of myself around. Someone that I can pretty much trust implicitly, that I can compare the validity of my thoughts and feelings with.
Come to think of it, several people have told me over the years that they've fantasised about being twins or that they envy me. This desire for a clone seems to be a more common one, whatever the reasons may be. I'm no psychologist but I figure that ultimately noone wants to die, noone wants to be alone, and everyone is pretty much programmed to spread their genes one way or another, anyway.
The things my brother and me have in common are reassuring, and genetically, we are exactly the same, but of course we've had many different experiences. But even if we'd done exactly the same things, we still would've turned out individuals somehow. Similarly, any clone that you make of yourself is not going to be yourself. I'm not religious, but I'll call the part that you can't duplicate the soul.
Technical difficulties with cloning aside (I recall having read that Dolly was born with genetic material that was as old as the 'mother Dolly', reducing her life expectancy, and that the egg carrier's RNA made the clone imperfect, or something like that), then what the heck is the use? Imagine being born and knowing that you're a clone of someone that is now 40 years of age or so. It's hard to really imagine how that would feel. Sure, you're an individual, and the different periods when you're growing up are going to make sure that you as clone are going to be even more different from the first edition than a twin would be. But just being able to see yourself 40 years older is a Cassandra-complex like nightmare that must be damn hard to deal with. I for one wouldn't want to do that to anyone, certainly not a tender soul so similar to myself. Personally, I think I'd be likely to loathe my blueprint.
Aside from that, nature says that as far as procreation is concerned, the idea is to take bits from 2 separate gene pools. To really help things along, we need real children. As much as I think I'm a nice guy, I do need to evolve. Clones don't add anything new.
I'm curious if these drivers support SMP kernels. I bought an SB Live instead of the Vortex because all the Windows NT drivers that Aureal have released show freaky stuff on multiprocessing machines, like long delays, samples being cut off in the middle, or blue screens. There's now supposedly a beta driver that tries to fix that but I haven't seen confirmations that it works. I'm wondering if their Linux driver has been tested for this too.
I'm finding it harder and harder to deal with the general bitter tone here on Slashdot, not just on this article, but in general. This one is particularly bad, though. Unfortunately I don't have anything positive to add here either, other that I for one was actually pretty happy to see a C-Net article that begins with 'It's time to make the leap to Linux'.
But now I'm pretty down again, after reading all the complaints on here. Kinda sad to see people stating that 'real Linux users' use Debian or Slackware or whatever. Even more extreme folk might say real Linux users don't trust any distribution, they make their own. Personally, I thought Linux users were people running a Linux kernel.
This article is obviously aimed at people who aren't running Linux yet, or haven't in the past, i.e. pretty much none of y'all, so why do you people feel so insulted when your particular distribution doesn't score as well as others? Would you honestly be happier if your distro would've scored well? Sometimes I get the idea a lot of my fellow Slashdotters are mainly into Linux to be different from the unwashed masses. Now that you aren't getting your exclusiveness quota anymore, it's time to partition yourself off into a smaller subgroup again?
Unhappy,
Florin
I'm finding it harder and harder to deal with the general bitter tone here on Slashdot, not just on this article, but in general. This one is particularly bad, though. Unfortunately I don't have anything positive to add here either, other that I for one was actually pretty happy to see a C-Net article that begins with 'It's time to make the leap to Linux'.
But now I'm pretty down again, after reading all the complaints on here. Kinda sad to see people stating that 'real Linux users' use Debian or Slackware or whatever. Even more extreme folk might say real Linux users don't trust any distribution, they make their own. Personally, I thought Linux users were people running a Linux kernel.
This article is obviously aimed at people who aren't running Linux yet, or haven't in the past, i.e. pretty much none of y'all, so why do you people feel so insulted when your particular distribution doesn't score as well as others. Would you honestly be happier if your distro would've scored well? Sometimes I get the idea a lot of my fellow Slashdotters are mainly into Linux to be different from the unwashed masses. Now that you aren't getting your exclusiveness quota anymore, it's time to partition yourself off into a smaller subgroup again?
Unhappy,
Florin
Thanks Sam, chalk me up for one purchase then. I don't mind waiting a couple more days for yours to come out initially.
Maybe I'm overseeing something, but I'm wondering about one thing. The previous Linux Doom and Quake were distributed over ftp by idsoftware themselves, and they looked for the Windows retail CD for their data files.
If I buy this Loki version, will I be able to use it as a key cd for the Windows version? Cause you just KNOW the Windows one will always be at least one revision ahead.
I don't really care which platform I play it on. I'd like to buy the Linux version to show my support, but if it means that I won't be able to play with all the Windows users just because I have to wait a week longer for the latest patch, then it's not much good. I'd like to be able to switch to Windows just as long as is necessary. Also, the graphic card drivers for Windows tend to be more highly optimised, another reason why I want flexibility. What about authentication, will I get a license number from Loki that'll get me equivalent rights on the authentication servers?
Florin
I'm hesitant to condemn the man on the spot, because after all, he is CEO of a multimillion dollar company and one would guess that his vide presidents shield him carefully from saying anything TOO embarassing in public. But when I read the vague 'I don't know how it worked, but I'm sure cookies had something to do with it', I really started to have my doubts.
Are there sites that store cookies with your freshly entered credit card number in it? I can't believe it. Only thing this shows is that he lacks a fundamental grasp of what cookies are and how they work.
I'm not just being hateful here. I really mean it, I can't take care of them. It's not that I don't like them or anything, it's that taking on a live animal is a responsibility I'm not up to. I never have enough time to play with it. And not enough regularity in my life to take proper care of it.
I can't even feed myself properly most of the time (Bothering to order a salad along with my pizza is a highlight in my weekly nourishment). Having a live animal would mean I couldn't just take off and drive south for a couple of weeks anymore. A live pet is a commitment for something like 15 years (okay, maybe half, as I'd definitely go to the asylum to get an older abandoned one rather than a puppy/kitten/whatever). I guess I'm just immature. It's fine when you have parents to do the work, and you just get the fun. There were always pets around when I was younger.
I tried Sea Monkeys, the ultimate instant carefree pet, and highly disposable too, but they're just too damn small. I can't relate much with little white dots.
Now I've seen this and it definitely looks promising. But I don't want to control it. What I'm really looking for is some random movement in the corner of my eye, that comes with an OFF button. I'd get an Aibo if they weren't so hard to come by. So I'm definitely keeping an eye out for someone to turn this into a product.
Flo out
Come now AC, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel! Anyway, I totally agree with the general sentiment. This just isn't right. First the article is sort of apologetic for their failure to stay updated and then they bounce the blame right off on there not being a central repository for updates.
Which is just plain silly. The hack could've been prevented if they'd just checked Red Hat's web pages sometime, or the updates ftp directory, or been on the proper mailing list. Or configured autorpm to deal with this for them. Exactly what is a company required to do to get heard by PCWeek's system administrators, perhaps sending out a fripping press release would help? Hmm, makes me wonder if they have found the repository for Microsoft Hotfixes yet. Maybe they just stick to Service Packs?
Although the closed settop box is a concept that is wasted on a home PC builder like myself, this project is more exciting to me than others if just for the fact that Nokia is involved. I've come to like their products, both for computer monitors and their portable phones. Alas, so far I've found one thing lacking, namely Linux support.
Initially, I wasn't real pleased to have to carry a phone around but I really fell in love with my 6110. It goes a long way towards a PDA with its built in SMS email, faxing, calendar, calculator and even some games. You can also hack it for some fun. Anyhow, I never figured portable phones for a geek thing, but it's been fun to play with.
Then a problem had to come up. One feature of the phone that appealed to me is the ability to link it with a PC or a laptop through cable or infrared link and then use the phone as a modem. But the modem function is software, and of course that software (Nokia Data Suite) is only available for Windows. It also costs an arm and a leg, which I don't care to invest in a legacy platform.
So I realise this is my mistake for not investigating the purchase closely enough and figuring the infrared function would be a normal IRDA compliant device and the modem would be hardware. I guess I should've bought a 8110 or an Ericsson instead. Still it leaves me wondering if there are other 61xx owners that use Linux and are bugged by this. Any software modem projects underway perhaps?
Michiel
In short, this is Voodoo SLI or Wicked3D's PGC with a twist. Interesting, but with ATI's traditional lackluster performance, it remains to be seen whether this will be the thing speed freaks really want. Personally I expect more from T&L acceleration..
Some people claim the Celeron doesn't scale well and to some degree they are right. The Celeron's second level cache, though twice as fast, is only one fourth the size of that of a Pentium III and as such main memory will have to be accessed more frequently. If you don't happen to be overclocking, that main memory runs at only 66 Mhz , compared to 100 Mhz on other Intel processors. Add another Celeron on the same bus and at some point you're going to have contention as both CPUs wait around for their memory accesses.
This isn't always a critical issue. One program that's hardly affected is the RC5DES client. This program is optimised for i686 processors and it supports SMP. The client will automatically recognise and use 2 CPUs and a second CPU gives instant practically double key throughput. My own dual Celeron 366 running at 550 Mhz goes from 1.6 to 3.15 Mkeys a sec. It seems that RC5 is a small piece of code with a small data set that runs almost completely in the L1 and L2 caches. The dual Celeron scores competitively with even a Xeon 550.
Now enter the SETI client. I was trying the text mode NT client and noticed it was running much slower than I had expected on my box, so I retimed the same work unit (WU) a couple of times with different configurations. The same PC, which was equipped with only 64 MB of memory - fine for RC5DES, does the WU in about 10 hours and 30 minutes. However, when I ran a second parallel SETI client (The client is generic i386 and does not support SMP by itself) it did two WUs in about 15:50 hours. Major overhead!
It didn't matter much whether I let the two processes run free or explicitly tied their affinity to one CPU each. In the first case one of the processes was finished about 3 minutes earlier, but total time was still roughly the same.
So I first added another 64 MB and retimed it. Timing went down to 14 hours and 40 mins. Although I hadn't noticed it swapping and the SETI docs claim the clients take only about 13 megs of mem each, the original 64 MB apparantly was not quite enough to fit both processes completely in real memory, and thus the modest improvement. Then I tried changing the memory timing from CAS 3 to CAS 2 and lo and behold, I was now doing this unit (same unit twice in parallel) in only 12:30 hours each! Nice. Much closer to the 10:30 of a single 550.
But still not quite as good as dual Pentium IIIs, as far as I can gather from Usenet postings that is. Xeons supposedly have phenomenal SETI scores. And because I overclock, my Celeron runs at a 100 Mhz bus, partly making up for the difference. Normal Celerons running at 66 Mhz bus would break down worse, as far as I can predict.
I've noticed some people here are quite critical about these dual Celeron freaks. But in some ways our bragging rights are real and these PCs really do counts as 1100 Mhz. In others, it falls down flat on its face. I love my box tho. I learned a lot of stuff about how different operating systems upgrade to SMP, how process affinity works out, which drivers aren't threadsafe, all stuff I can apply when I'm working on serious SMP hardware. Yeah it mostly sits around cracking keys or SETI, but just the ability to run VMWare on a CPU of its own is at least one killer app.
Michiel
Actually, aside from buying the NT Resource Kit you can also get the uptomp.exe utility as a download from the Microsoft website. Unfortunately the program does have some problems and many people are left with unbootable systems afterwards, so there's also has a Knowledge Base article about doing it by hand.
BTW, I get about 3.16 megakeys a second on my dual Celeron 366 at 550. RC5DES is certainly very scalable, much more so than SETI.
This expansion is logical and necessary move for Red Hat and they're welcome on the European mainland. Attention to local language support in the software itself and in the helpdesk facilities is still a must over here if RH is to grow.
Suse's dominance is often trumpeted but Red Hat certainly has its share of fans too. I don't think we need anybody to be claiming anything as their turf. Suse can defend itself on technical merit or with marketing just like everyone else. In some ways they appear to be aiming more for the desktop where RH is more of a server thing. It's nice to have a choice. Of course, they both consist of mostly the same software anyhow and can both be made to do most things quite easily.
They could well coexist. Or we could all be switching to Mandrake next. We'll just have to see what happens. Me, I honestly wouldn't mind if everyone would just use one Linux distribution, or at least all the novice users, it would make support and identifying and getting rid of common problems easier for sure. Choice is good, chaos can be disruptive.
Tom has had this thing for quite some time, the article had been on there for a while already. A tip for those submitting stories.. check the date on the story. That one was posted August 13.
To the previous poster.. say what you want about Tom's Hardware, but it's still on my run-by-to-check-daily list of websites. I actually think it has gotten somewhat better again in the last few weeks. There were a couple of months that there was nothing worth reading on there anymore and that Tom had really lost touch with his core audience (Like with the test of 32 video cards, where he used the driver that was included in the box, i.e. the entire test a complete and utter waste of time. Or like his reviews of Singapore hotels or German cars.). But the addition of the webnews column as well as a publication of a couple of good old fashioned articles about genuinely HOT stuff like K7 motherboards or Ultra video card comparisons has given me hope that things will get back into shape. They can get rid of Second Hand Smoke though, as far as I'm concerned.
There are now so many hardware tech websites that one really can't follow all of them anymore, but the previous poster has indentified the 3 biggies. I agree that Ars Technica's reviewers don't always appear competent, but I don't agree on the 'cheap' issue; I think most people who visit these websites regularly do it exactly to look for things like overclocking and dual celeron. I also read Anandtech a lot and must say I haven't noticed attitude spewing to an annoying degree, but I do think they have far too many reviews of ordinary hardware (What, another BX board? Another TNT2 clone??) and not enough of what really interests me. For instance, 3 weeks ago Anand complained about having experienced K7 motherboard instability and I'm still waiting for the details. That is hot, that is relevant now, that is what I want to hear about.
One other site (Hardware/Games oriented) that I like a lot is the Tresh's FiringSquad.
It seems this last setback was too much. Intel has called off the introduction for the second time. Intel had planned for the release of the 820 or Camino chipset this coming Monday, but it has now been delayed 'indefinitely'. Check out this ZDNet article.
Just as a general observation, did anyone else find it amusing to see just how strikingly different in nature Linus' day and evening jobs are?
He got famous by starting a completely open project, in a very humble fashion, inviting anyone who felt like it to help turn it into something really useful. Everything in the spirit of cooperation and selflessly making things better for users everywhere. I think we can say he succeeded far beyond what he set out to do and that his work has affected the industry on the whole to no small degree.
Now he's an anchor of one of the most secretive companies in this industry. He can't even say anything about what he's working on or what the company is going to do. We only know the company grabs patents to the left and to the right and we anticipate that it's going to make a big splash someday.
Whether or not that is true remains to be seen, but hiring him was a good move by Transmeta. Legends are the only thing the company has, so far.