The real problem here is where do you buy - assuming you want to be a legit windows user - any of the older versions? They will be trying real hard to ablate the Win9x & Win2K OS, along with the Office CD's supply. It won't be bundled anymore, more and more systems are including a recovery CD rather than a real OS CD.
A couple weeks ago I built a system and needed a copy of Office 97 (client request). It was real work to find a copy that I could bundle - the OEM with cert was rare, a few retail boxes, the rest were the "replacement media" type CD's sold as an OEM version.
The last place I worked ordered 12 IBM zpros (dual xeon w/scsi). Of the lot, we lost 9 of 12 9G SCSI drives over a year and a half. Not sure what happened to the last 4 units...
They were good about replacing drives, BTW... prepaid and cross shipped with the dead drives.
As a side note - an Intel motherboard will short out of you let the floppy drive slide onto the board whith the power on. Pouring coffee into a laptop makes interesting smells. Putting a CD-ROM in the microwave for 10 seconds if you want a real show.
Seriously here, you are missing out if this kind of thing actually sways you away. The biggest flaw, IMHO, is the AMD cores chips way too easy. I would really like a coating of nickel or copper like the Intel chips have. As an early adopter of the Chrome Orb (rev 1), the hard part was safely getting the heat sink on.
I've found that an AMD CPU will give you warning signs like lockups, kernel panics, and other goofy things when you loose a fan. My mainboard will shut down 5 sec after the post if the CPU fan is not spinning fast enough! Since they are good up to ~100C, using a motherboard monitor prog will go a long way to making sure it runs safely and shuts down before it gets into deep weeds. A copper heat sink goes a long way to passive heat removal as well in an emgerency situation.
This is like buying a car based on how well it runs without oil in the engine. I suspect my BMW would make for a fantastic video if I tried that too. DON'T DO THAT! I would not pay extra for an engine that would - like using synthetic oil to give an extra two minutes of use.
Buying a CPU that throttles back and paying extra for it -- that might be insurance, but I stopped buying retail boxed CPU's with the three year warr.... It would cost me more to ship an old 400mHz CPU back to Intel than to just replace it these days. I paid $99USD for a 1.4G CPU a couple weeks ago. At that price, these things are practically disposable.
I didn't hit JavaOne this year - last place became dot.compost before we had tickets... but the year before I looked but did not see one presenter use StarOffice and only a handful use HTML. Everyone seemed to use PowerPoint.
Everyone got the CD-ROM pack with Solaris x86, Oracle, J2ME stuff, and _StarOffice_. It would have been nice to see StarOffice used by anyone giving a talk...
Hello Accounting? Yah, I just bought some computer parts to piece togher a Linux box for an article. Reciepts? Ahm, no.. I, ah, bought all the parts on-line. I can forward you some HTML source that matches what I put on the expence report...
You CAN write your own mail software, MP3 player, browser etc. on top of the OS - nothing is preventing you from doing that. The interfaces are there and documented well enough that others have used them to do so.
I'm currently digging into some of the Active Directory stuff trying to use the LDAP protocals rather than ADSI. This week, I beg to differ on what is documented and what is not. (grin)
Anyhow, the point I was trying to make is I just can't plug in a standard widget, I have to use BMW's because of the undocumented interface for my app (audio input). Sure, I could buy a different car or use an approved CD player - but I really don't have many options. They expose what they want to expose, and god help you if you need to touch an area they feel you should use something else.
Not that I'm bitter about the CD player -- I just don't want to blow out the dash trying to get the audio tapped in. If I spend a grand on a car system, you better believe it will upload music to the car via wireless lan and turn the CD's into legacy components. Thats how I'll (try to) get it past my wife's budget review anyhow...
If MS sold their OS without SW installed, so you could buy it like a car... base unit, with options... everyone here would bitch that MS was trying to rake you over to coals with all of the bundled options.
Try to add a CD-ROM to your BMW 740 some time... Rather than use the same kind of interface the rest of the world uses, or even the 3x or 5x series, they came up with some funky plug that would cost me an extra $500 above and beyond the $500+ for one (two if you use the OEM version) BMW CD player option. Granted the CD player can make system calls to the dash and steering wheel, but finding info to hack a MP3 player audio output into the trunk has been rough.
Its not the bundling, its the bloody undocumented interfaces....
The P4 needs a PR rating...
on
AthlonXP Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The most irritating thing about AMD switching to a PR rating is most folks miss the fact that mhz vs mhz, the Pentium III blows the Pentium 4 out of the water. It all comes down to what gets used as a normal - using a P3 as the mHz reference point, you get the AMD chip wiping the P3, and the P3 owning the P4. The P4 could use a PR rating as well...
Intel can't make it faster, but we can increase the number of cycles... can marketing do anything with that? Intel killed the PIII because the last thing they wanted was for someone to take a 1.5gHz chip and put the P3 & P4 side by side.
Depending on how you tweak the benching and load things up, you will see strengths and weaknesses in each CPU. Priced the same, the AMD chips are a better deal for my development and gaming needs.
The last thing you want in combat is a "fair" fight. You do everything you can to give you an advantage puts the other side in a world of hurt. That is why you build walls, camp on a hill, use ranged weapons when the enemy has none, etc.
Try to take away my 12d6 fireball just because of game balance, fine. Real life? Pull out the trusty +2 tomahawk of seeking and let them have it!
Wrong (for you), Right (for me)
on
Webpads, Anyone?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
For me, I really want this space to converge.
1)I want (BADLY) for something that is more powerful than a PDA - thus why the wince pocket pc's appeal to me - they have enough power to do more than just keep appointments and sync email. The form factor makes it tough to do anything but basic app - but even something like MP3's are tough to do with under 64M of storage. If this thing uses standard SDRAM, then w00t! 512M today is an easy thing to see happening. That does not even include the micro HDD advances... I want something less than a super mobile PC, more than a PDA.
2) I want something smaller than my thinkpad. I end up lugging this think in and out of meetings all day long. Toss it in my carry-on, and I don't have a lot of space left.
3) I want something I can code to - if that's IBM's j9, Microsoft's wince c++ package, whatever, I want to build some custom apps. If its a closed systsem - thanks, but no thanks. Give me a compiler and a resonable chance of building something, and hey, I'm in....
4) The only reason I don't have a pocket pc right now is the bloody price. If palm could run a JVM and had enough space to store a few hours of MP3's I'd shell out the $400 for one of the sony jobs. Its close... The wince kits have almost enough power and RAM, but come on... $600 is way to much when I compair it to some of the laptops out there. Get the price down to $300, and things get interesting.
In short, I'd like to see my laptop and PDA killed off. Way to many "wants" in this post....
You want a (high end) Palm killer....
on
Webpads, Anyone?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This type of thing could wipe out the $600 palm and pocket pc devices... it is a sub-sub-notebook, with enough power to do apps, not just organizer type things. 800x600 screen? That beats out th 160x160 for doing something other than scratching out a quick memo.
Actually, the extra connector was for the Video card... I kid you not! The AGP pro? spec wanted an insane amount of power to be available to the video card. I've never seen a video card that ran extra power through the mainboard - several that did use an external power connecter, however...
You know, this kind of thing just kills me. I suspect you did it right, so this is not aimed at you personally, but I work with a bunch of folks who would not fix security holes or other GOOD patches because it might case them to reboot - having to run over to my cube to telnet into their box because the x server horked up again, etc.
Granted, its nice to reboot because you need to rather than the box just doing it on its own, but come on (you know who you are) its time to try the 2.4x kernal like the rest of us. I, for one, will not let my uptime get in the way of adding another CPU!
The DOS(?) version was even easier - hold the [shift] and type FUNDS before you started building. It would cause a few disasters, but thats OK when there are no buildings yet....
I'm running without a CATALINA_HOME, and it spins up fine - jsp, servlets, and JavaBeans... The howto was just to get folks up and running with a stand alone version, without the clutter of extra stuff.
Without reading the docs (grin), I think that had more to do with setting up just the servlets. Could be wrong, won't be the last time...
Download the file - lets say on a Win2K they have locked down at work. No admin rights? no problem... (Win2K assumptions here, though most OS's work about the same)
Unzip to a directory - taking the defaults sets you up in c:\jakarta-tomcat-4.0.
Go to the control pannel, click system, click advanced, click Environment Variables. Click new button on system variables and create a JAVA_HOME with a path to where you extracted your JDK. (My box has javac located in c:\jdk\bin, so my JAVA_HOME is c:\jdk). Create a TOMCAT_HOME as above pointing to c:\jakarta-tomcat-4.0.
Open up a command prompt, cd to c:\jakarta-tomcat-4.0\bin and run startup.bat.
Open a browser and type in http://localhost:8080, you should see it...
Even that is skewed, however. They stop counting Absentee votes in Minnesota after enough are counted to call a state electorate, which tend to be more Republican than Democrat. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.... it all depends on your definition of how you count things...
You cannot let the smoke out of the CPU, because it it the magic that makes it run....
Well, anyhow, last week I mounted a cheap heatsink to my brand new AMD 1.3G CPU and it burned up before I really got to the post screen. Ish. A few days later my new copper heat sink showed up, but I was more afraid of chipping the CPU than having it burn up... done that too.. They (www.hardocp.com) have long since commented about the few seconds it takes to make an AMD processor keychain by running it without a heatsink, but man... don't even mess with something that may be marginal.
I was thinking more along the lines of CounterStrike, UT, C&C2, or Tribes2 personally....
(grin)
The browser is great, but where is the spell check
on
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
·
· Score: 2
Come on already.... lets get a spell checker folded into the email client. I need ALL the help I can get. I tried hacking the 6.1 checker in to the last build, but no luck. Is there any word on when - world acording to me - one of the most basic things about an email client will be included?
Slashdot Mirror
(banging head on cube wall)
Argh, your right, of course. That will teach me to do math in my head!
The real problem here is where do you buy - assuming you want to be a legit windows user - any of the older versions? They will be trying real hard to ablate the Win9x & Win2K OS, along with the Office CD's supply. It won't be bundled anymore, more and more systems are including a recovery CD rather than a real OS CD.
A couple weeks ago I built a system and needed a copy of Office 97 (client request). It was real work to find a copy that I could bundle - the OEM with cert was rare, a few retail boxes, the rest were the "replacement media" type CD's sold as an OEM version.
The last place I worked ordered 12 IBM zpros (dual xeon w/scsi). Of the lot, we lost 9 of 12 9G SCSI drives over a year and a half. Not sure what happened to the last 4 units...
They were good about replacing drives, BTW... prepaid and cross shipped with the dead drives.
and ask to be added for 10 years -- don't forget to add the max time limit!
As a side note - an Intel motherboard will short out of you let the floppy drive slide onto the board whith the power on. Pouring coffee into a laptop makes interesting smells. Putting a CD-ROM in the microwave for 10 seconds if you want a real show.
Seriously here, you are missing out if this kind of thing actually sways you away. The biggest flaw, IMHO, is the AMD cores chips way too easy. I would really like a coating of nickel or copper like the Intel chips have. As an early adopter of the Chrome Orb (rev 1), the hard part was safely getting the heat sink on.
I've found that an AMD CPU will give you warning signs like lockups, kernel panics, and other goofy things when you loose a fan. My mainboard will shut down 5 sec after the post if the CPU fan is not spinning fast enough! Since they are good up to ~100C, using a motherboard monitor prog will go a long way to making sure it runs safely and shuts down before it gets into deep weeds. A copper heat sink goes a long way to passive heat removal as well in an emgerency situation.
This is like buying a car based on how well it runs without oil in the engine. I suspect my BMW would make for a fantastic video if I tried that too. DON'T DO THAT! I would not pay extra for an engine that would - like using synthetic oil to give an extra two minutes of use.
Buying a CPU that throttles back and paying extra for it -- that might be insurance, but I stopped buying retail boxed CPU's with the three year warr.... It would cost me more to ship an old 400mHz CPU back to Intel than to just replace it these days. I paid $99USD for a 1.4G CPU a couple weeks ago. At that price, these things are practically disposable.
I didn't hit JavaOne this year - last place became dot.compost before we had tickets... but the year before I looked but did not see one presenter use StarOffice and only a handful use HTML. Everyone seemed to use PowerPoint.
Everyone got the CD-ROM pack with Solaris x86, Oracle, J2ME stuff, and _StarOffice_. It would have been nice to see StarOffice used by anyone giving a talk...
Hello Accounting? Yah, I just bought some computer parts to piece togher a Linux box for an article. Reciepts? Ahm, no.. I, ah, bought all the parts on-line. I can forward you some HTML source that matches what I put on the expence report...
Pizza and beer on me guys, Accounting bought it!
I'm currently digging into some of the Active Directory stuff trying to use the LDAP protocals rather than ADSI. This week, I beg to differ on what is documented and what is not. (grin)
Anyhow, the point I was trying to make is I just can't plug in a standard widget, I have to use BMW's because of the undocumented interface for my app (audio input). Sure, I could buy a different car or use an approved CD player - but I really don't have many options. They expose what they want to expose, and god help you if you need to touch an area they feel you should use something else.
Not that I'm bitter about the CD player -- I just don't want to blow out the dash trying to get the audio tapped in. If I spend a grand on a car system, you better believe it will upload music to the car via wireless lan and turn the CD's into legacy components. Thats how I'll (try to) get it past my wife's budget review anyhow...
Try to add a CD-ROM to your BMW 740 some time... Rather than use the same kind of interface the rest of the world uses, or even the 3x or 5x series, they came up with some funky plug that would cost me an extra $500 above and beyond the $500+ for one (two if you use the OEM version) BMW CD player option. Granted the CD player can make system calls to the dash and steering wheel, but finding info to hack a MP3 player audio output into the trunk has been rough.
Its not the bundling, its the bloody undocumented interfaces....
The most irritating thing about AMD switching to a PR rating is most folks miss the fact that mhz vs mhz, the Pentium III blows the Pentium 4 out of the water. It all comes down to what gets used as a normal - using a P3 as the mHz reference point, you get the AMD chip wiping the P3, and the P3 owning the P4. The P4 could use a PR rating as well...
Intel can't make it faster, but we can increase the number of cycles... can marketing do anything with that? Intel killed the PIII because the last thing they wanted was for someone to take a 1.5gHz chip and put the P3 & P4 side by side.
Depending on how you tweak the benching and load things up, you will see strengths and weaknesses in each CPU. Priced the same, the AMD chips are a better deal for my development and gaming needs.
Fair fight?
The last thing you want in combat is a "fair" fight. You do everything you can to give you an advantage puts the other side in a world of hurt. That is why you build walls, camp on a hill, use ranged weapons when the enemy has none, etc.
Try to take away my 12d6 fireball just because of game balance, fine. Real life? Pull out the trusty +2 tomahawk of seeking and let them have it!
For me, I really want this space to converge.
1)I want (BADLY) for something that is more powerful than a PDA - thus why the wince pocket pc's appeal to me - they have enough power to do more than just keep appointments and sync email. The form factor makes it tough to do anything but basic app - but even something like MP3's are tough to do with under 64M of storage. If this thing uses standard SDRAM, then w00t! 512M today is an easy thing to see happening. That does not even include the micro HDD advances... I want something less than a super mobile PC, more than a PDA.
2) I want something smaller than my thinkpad. I end up lugging this think in and out of meetings all day long. Toss it in my carry-on, and I don't have a lot of space left.
3) I want something I can code to - if that's IBM's j9, Microsoft's wince c++ package, whatever, I want to build some custom apps. If its a closed systsem - thanks, but no thanks. Give me a compiler and a resonable chance of building something, and hey, I'm in....
4) The only reason I don't have a pocket pc right now is the bloody price. If palm could run a JVM and had enough space to store a few hours of MP3's I'd shell out the $400 for one of the sony jobs. Its close... The wince kits have almost enough power and RAM, but come on... $600 is way to much when I compair it to some of the laptops out there. Get the price down to $300, and things get interesting.
In short, I'd like to see my laptop and PDA killed off. Way to many "wants" in this post....
This type of thing could wipe out the $600 palm and pocket pc devices... it is a sub-sub-notebook, with enough power to do apps, not just organizer type things. 800x600 screen? That beats out th 160x160 for doing something other than scratching out a quick memo.
An engineer would say two weeks...
Actually, the extra connector was for the Video card... I kid you not! The AGP pro? spec wanted an insane amount of power to be available to the video card. I've never seen a video card that ran extra power through the mainboard - several that did use an external power connecter, however...
Granted, its nice to reboot because you need to rather than the box just doing it on its own, but come on (you know who you are) its time to try the 2.4x kernal like the rest of us. I, for one, will not let my uptime get in the way of adding another CPU!
The DOS(?) version was even easier - hold the [shift] and type FUNDS before you started building. It would cause a few disasters, but thats OK when there are no buildings yet....
but it may take a while before it gets shipped (grin)
/bin/ladin
rm -rf
Try Wrox "Professional JSP 2nd Ed". It works from Tomcat as the basis for most example code. Nice intro into JSP, which does hit servlets as well...
I'm running without a CATALINA_HOME, and it spins up fine - jsp, servlets, and JavaBeans... The howto was just to get folks up and running with a stand alone version, without the clutter of extra stuff.
Without reading the docs (grin), I think that had more to do with setting up just the servlets. Could be wrong, won't be the last time...
Make sure you have a JDK installed, like Sun's Windows version.
Unzip to a directory - taking the defaults sets you up in c:\jakarta-tomcat-4.0.
Go to the control pannel, click system, click advanced, click Environment Variables. Click new button on system variables and create a JAVA_HOME with a path to where you extracted your JDK. (My box has javac located in c:\jdk\bin, so my JAVA_HOME is c:\jdk). Create a TOMCAT_HOME as above pointing to c:\jakarta-tomcat-4.0.
Open up a command prompt, cd to c:\jakarta-tomcat-4.0\bin and run startup.bat.
Open a browser and type in http://localhost:8080, you should see it...
Happy hacking in the example code!
Even that is skewed, however. They stop counting Absentee votes in Minnesota after enough are counted to call a state electorate, which tend to be more Republican than Democrat. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.... it all depends on your definition of how you count things...
Well, anyhow, last week I mounted a cheap heatsink to my brand new AMD 1.3G CPU and it burned up before I really got to the post screen. Ish. A few days later my new copper heat sink showed up, but I was more afraid of chipping the CPU than having it burn up... done that too.. They (www.hardocp.com) have long since commented about the few seconds it takes to make an AMD processor keychain by running it without a heatsink, but man... don't even mess with something that may be marginal.
I was thinking more along the lines of CounterStrike, UT, C&C2, or Tribes2 personally....
(grin)
Come on already.... lets get a spell checker folded into the email client. I need ALL the help I can get. I tried hacking the 6.1 checker in to the last build, but no luck. Is there any word on when - world acording to me - one of the most basic things about an email client will be included?