If I don't use the copyrighted part, then no problem, correct?
That depends on the primary use of the object, and the degree to
which the copyrighted part exists as central to the use of the
object.
With a stick, the DNA might count as absolutely unavoidably bound to
the object, but the specifics have very little bearing on the stick's
functionality.
With a CD, the music on it, although potentially removeable (in the
case of a CD-RW, anyway), counts as the entire reason you would buy
the CD in the first place. Its form as a 12cm plastic disc with a
hole in the middle very, very rarely matters.
Now, with a cell phone? Not many people care about the specific
software it runs, only about its function. But without some
software, it doesn't function.
Personally, I would put cell phones in the CD category - Legitimate posession
of the physical device should (but all to often doesn't) count
as an implied, irrevokeably license to use the copyrighted content
contained therein, including the right to change that content at
will. If a company doesn't want customers to use feature-X of
their product, they need to leave feature-X out rather than just
disabling it in software.
Is this one of those things where it must be bad because
it contains the worst of the slashdot four letter words (DMCA)?
Actually, yes. I have yet to see a "good" occurrence of that
four-letter word (acronym). At best, ironic or just-desserts,
but never actually "good".
What's the problem? If you want to pay less for a locked in phone
thats your buisness.
You miss the point - Yes, the phone comes cheap as part of signing
a 2-year contract (usually), but after that?
This doesn't involve people trying to get out of their contracts.
Just people trying to keep using their phone once they have
satisfied whatever contractual obligations exist that might
justify calling it "not theirs".
When every object we posess contains some amount of copyrighted
material, will companies successfully argue that we don't actually
"own" anything? "Sorry, that pointy stick contains DNA
for which Monsanto owns the copyright. Using it to defend yourself
against a non-Monsanto-approved bear violates the DMCA".
It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just
eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work
on a fanless CPU setup?
I have a fanless XFX card with the GF6600, and it doesn't use any
tricks to exploit other fans in the system. It runs a tad warm,
but within the spec'd range - Around 55C idle, up to around 70C
under heavy use.
Personally, I like keeping everything as cool as possible, so
"modded" my case to have a low-RPM 120mm fam blow nice cool
air on it, which drops it by 10-15C, but it doesn't
cook itself without that, and it certainly doesn't
bother me anywhere near as much as the GF4 it replaced
(with a frickin' jet engine strapped to it, louder than
anything else in the system).
I'd highly recommend you get a single 7800 GTX,
it performs as well as two 6800 Ultras in most
situations. And there's no SLI hassle, no need
for a huge power supply.
Ah, thank you for that info! Good to know.
Actually, though, I don't so much care about gaming
performance - I chose the 66/6800 primarily because
it counts as one of the few chips that offers dual
DVI outputs (and only wanted SLI so I could eventually
go to a quad LCD display with a minimum of hassle). Not
to say I don't game at all (I certainly do!), but I
realize that, once I can have fullscreen at 60fps (which
I can in virtually all games even now, in its first
decent-but-not-high-end incarnation), I can't get any
better than that.:)
I have to say I'm in no way a fan of SLI either,
but that's a personal thing.
Me neither - I consider it a messy hack. But, at least
on my motherboard, SLI will let me run two cards at x8,
rather than one at x16 and one at a mere x1 (don't know
if that holds true of all boards with more than one x16
slot, or just a limit on mine).
BTW, I think you're overamping Seasonic a bit here.
Perhaps a tiny bit, but not much. I chose them after
reading quite a few reviews, and they just crushed the competition
in test after test. As the two most important points, their
active PFC works, and they give the stated voltage right
up to the point they shut off due to overload (which happens
within a watt or two of the stated limit, rather than having
low voltage until they smoke within a hundred watts or two of
the advertised limit). And of course, the near-silence doesn't
hurt.
They are not--and will not--be available for
purchase by individuals.
Well just FUCK MIT with a big hot poker!
Hey, I consider it great that the ever popular
cause celebre, third-world-kids, will benefit.
But this sounds perfect for a 1st-world-geeks
as an all-but-disposeable laptop for taking places
with either no/unreliable power, or far to dangerous
to risk a $2500 "real" laptop.
But, guess what, oh holier-than-geek idealists at
MIT? Without the 1st-world-geeks on board, your
"market" does not exist. This project will live
and die (more likely die) at the whim of a government
grant.
And for anyone who considers this a troll, keep in mind
just how many rural Indian and Chinese kids now have
solar powered sub-$100 PCs from the last similar
project - None? A few dozen, perhaps, in "test"
villages?
Seasonic's S12 500W is my current favorite. The
120mm fan is virtually silent at moderate loads and
not too bad at higher loads.
I'll second that... I love my SeasSonic S12s (I have them
in three machines now). All-but-silent, with rock-solid
outputs, and according to every independant test I've
read, if they say 500W, it stays solid to 499.99W, and
shuts itself off (rather than smoking) at 500.01W.
However, I take exception to this entire topic...
In my PRIMARY machine, I have an S12-330. I have
an Athlon 64, and a GeForce 6600. And I have 260W left
to play with - A good thing, since my current upgrade
path includes SLI'd 6800s and a dual-core Athlon 64, which
fits well within that power budget and would make my machine
pretty much a top-end modern gaming rig (though, hopefully
by the time I consider my current setup in need of an
upgrade, the replacements will draw even less
power).
So my complaint? People don't NEED 500 and 600W power
supplies. They need to look at their electric bill and
dump the P4s. They need to buy a supply that performs
as advertised. They need to seriously consider the end
result of "anything for three more FPS" - We have KILOWATT
power supplies now! With some care, an energy efficient
home for four people can draw less than that!
Everyone has the "right" to waste money. But when you
don't even need to make a compromise between
price, performance, and power consumption - You can
have them all - Why would anyone do otherwise?
(As an aside, I realize that I have compromised
power for performance, in that I could run an EPIA board
and have an entire machine draw 20W - And in fact, I have
a machine doing just that. I mean to constrain my point
to "fully functional modern PCs", though. If I could
halve the power while getting 90% of the performance,
however, I would - Thus my interim choice of a 6600
card, which draws only half as much power as the 6800s,
in the hopes that something more efficient will hit the
market before I feel a need to upgrade).
none of the ads mentioned above contain any information
whatsoever about what the consoles are, what capabilites
they claim to have, what kind of games they run, or even
who might like them.
Uhh... As compared to the original Legend of Zelda commercial?
"oc-oc-OC-OCtoROcks!".
But hey, we all knew that the fruity guy playing Link symbolized
a custom 6502 CPU clocked at 1.79MHz, and his choice of attire
conveyed the groundbreaking 52-color palette available, from which
you could have either 4, 16, 25, 52, 64, or 512 different
selections on-screen at once (depending on how badly the coders
abused the PPU).
Ah, for a return to those halcyon days of commercials clearly
showing the product's capabilities...;-)
For ~$1000 I'd be suprised if you couldn't build
your own 1TB Linux RAID5 box, but I may be wrong.
Maxtor 300's for $115. Barebones system for under $100.
A wide selection of 4-channel RAID cards for under $50
(NEVER use a softraid - which includes the crap solution
on most NF4 boards - not to mention you'll someday bow
down and thank His Noodlyness that you have your boot
drive separate from the RAID).
Under $1000? Try under $600, for either 1.2TB RAID0, or
900MB RAID5. Build two, and sync them once a week, for
an all-but-failsafe offline backup.
$1000 for one TB... Heh. You can get half that on a
single drive these days, no longer all that impressive
of a number. You can even get twice that, scaling
almost linearly (price-wise), with no more effort - You
can get 8-port SATA RAID cards for under $200 now.
Can you even find one competitor's product that matches
the iPod nano's specifications?
Nope, not a single competitor includes "scratches when
touched by soft cotton cloth" in the feature list.;-)
Just asking, hyperbole-boy.
Yes, hyperbole. And actually, price-and-feature-wise, I
will readily admit that the iPod line does compare
favorably to most other players (except they unapologetically
don't play Vorbis, the single point which will prevent me
from ever buying one). But any worse hyperbole than saying
that, by virtue of a little iconic picture of an apple on
it, an Apple product magically transmutes into something worth
more than the sum of its parts (plus the cost of assembly)?
I think not. YMMV.
Wow and don't buy a painting from an art museum, there
is only a few dollars worth of paint and canvas in them!
Some things are more expensive than the cost of just their
parts.
You seriously want to try to compare a mass-produced Nano to
a Picasso?
Wow - Talk about taking Apple FanBoyism to a whole new
level! "Dude, I know it costs 10x the competitor's
version, but Jobs (crosses self) himself has
personally blessed each one by listening to a U2 song
on it!".
Yes, some things have value beyond the cost of their components
and the assembly thereof. Cheesy consumer electronics do not
fall into that category. And even if they did, that would only
apply while they remain useable. If you can't read the
screen, you can't use it fully.
but why people are so shocked by this seems quite
odd. It's a little plastic thing you carry in your pocket.
Yes. They MARKET it as a little thing you carry
in your pocket. A place where soft plastic will very
quickly get scratched.
If you bought a new car, only to find out that <gasp!>
driving it on pavement grinds your tires down to
nothing after 10 miles, would you feel a bit peeved? Perhaps
even deceived?
The technology to protect LCD screens has existed for years.
My cell phone has no lid and an exposed screen, and I keep it in
some pretty nasty environments (pockets, bottom of a backpack while
hiking, thown on the floor of my car). And it hasn't got a single
major scratch on it. Actually, not true - The body has a
number of good dings, bu the screen remains nice and clear.
The only reason Apple can't do the same involves little green
slips of paper. If they added $2 per unit, they couldn't hit the same
carefully-planned-to-appeal-to-yuppies price point and still make the
same profit. So they skipped that "minor" point on the design.
I was interested in getting one after my current
VCR dies, but its price and subscription price bothered
me. Now, this termination fee!
The idea of paying monthy for what amounts to a digital
VCR bothered the hell out of me, too.
However, TiVo made a number of OEM-branded Series-2
machines, sold with lifetime basic service. I have
a Toshiba HD400, for example, which works just
fine. If you don't need HDTV or some obscenely high
number of hours of recording time (I get 40+ at the
highest quality setting), something similar might
make you very happy.
And if TiVo ever decides to unilaterally "change"
the terms of my service, they will lose
when I take them to small claims court.
Though, in reality, I really don't see why people
have so much trouble with Myth. Perhaps everyone
wants to get a crappy ATI AiW card to work with it?
I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 that I use mostly for
converting old irreplaceable-on-DVD VCR content
to digital form (and bought after my HD-400),
but have played with it just to see why so many
people balk at Myth. And I can honestly say that,
when my HD-400 finally dies (or when I consider it
sufficiently beneficial to have an HD-DVR), I won't
hesitate to use Myth. Really amazingly simple, once
you have the hardware working correctly (I suspect
most people fail on that point, not with Myth
itself, then blame either Myth or Linux for crappy
vendor-specific drivers - Which five minutes of research
before buying a capture card would have spared
them).
Setting a maxpoll of 5 will mean it will poll every 32 seconds.
And unless you ONLY query a server you control (ie, another
on-site Linux box with a more reliable clock), expect to get
a kiss-of-death packet from every server you use within a week.
As a better solution, set an hourly cron job to call a script that does:
killall ntpd
ntpdate -b time.nist.gov
hwclock --systohc
ntpd -g
Though the effectiveness of bothering to restart
NTP seems debateable in that case - It really only works
well when you let it run for days or even weeks uninterrupted,
to get a good idea of the exact slew of your clock.
As an aside, I use that exact sequence (well, minus the killall)
in the rc.local on one of my home machines - It keeps time just
fine once it starts up, but for some reason its clock just doesn't
tick with the machine turned off (I'd say it needs a battery, but
it has no problem remembering its BIOS settings)
It holds more than that when the Declarer commits
his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. The problem
is that there isn't anyone left in this country that
still carries the Patrick Henry gene.
No, the problem centers on the government having enough
firepower to wipe out all life on Earth. Compared with
muzzle-loaders where, if you survive the first volley,
a large enough crowd can easily overcome the agents
of the oppresive regime (ie, the military unit doing
the firing).
Nukes and chemical weapons aside, in the modern world,
half a dozen soldiers with M-16s and an adequate supply
of ammo could effectively fight off the entire population
of a major city by themselves.
The world has changed. The ideals expressed in the
US Declaration of Independence may still hold true,
but the governments have made the will to fight
all but irrelevant.
He wasn't abused. No one beat a confession
out of him. He wasn't shot.
I consider my time my single most valuable
posession. Followed by my privacy.
He had a full 24 hours of his life taken away from
him forever for committing no crimes whatsoever.
He had his apartment ransacked by the police,
all his geek toys confiscated, and with luck
he might get them back before a typical
graphing calculator has more power than his
primary PC.
And don't forget the embarassment and shock (ever
seen someone arrested first-hand, or had it
happen to you? Even if they let you go an hour
later, it can damage your head for quite a good
many years after the fact).
How about the damage to his reputation? The
evening news doesn't care about the facts,
they just care that Bill Jones got arrested
on suspicion of terrorism, and the last
impression the entire world has of that name
involves a picture of him doing a perp-walk
out of a tube station.
I suspect you as a troll, but just in case you
don't mean to come off as one - Getting arrested
for doing nothing does NOT even count as REMOTELY
fucking acceptible. Events like this produce
more terrorists, not stop them.
I am quite enthusiastic about being searched.
Uhhh... Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Do you
thank muggers, too? How about people who
cut you off in traffic?
you may have found a way to rationalize the
seemingly unstoppable incursion of the governments
into our personal lives. Don't make the mistake
of thinking the rest of us have rolled over so
easily, rady to get a UFIA at a moments notice
because Officer Friendly doesn't like our haircut.
The people who make up the RIAA (and equivalent
organizations in other countries) and -- more
importantly -- the politicians they buy, are of
an age to think in terms of listening to music
on a stereo, just as they think in terms of
watching programs on a TV
Dead right!
However, this entire topic, oddly enough,
has served to expose one of the real core
problems with how "we" want to use music
compared with how "they" want us to (or,
perhaps more accurately, how they believe
we do).
First, I would like to point out that over 95% of
the music in my posession, I either legally purchased
on CD and ripped to FLAC, or legally downloaded
directly from various artists' websites. So I
don't write this as someone with a collection made
up of "616z 0f/\/\p3z" in crappy 128kbit CBR downloaded
over Kazaa, I write it as someone who buys a LOT of
music and almost always tries to get it directly from
the artist when possible. That said...
I don't even have a CD player connected
to my home audio system, unless you count a DVD
player than can also play CDs, or the CD-ROM drive
in my livingroom PC. I listen to about a quarter
of my music in my car, and the other three quarters
plays directly from my home file server (or a
number of OGG-packed data DVDs I keep at work).
So when someone says to me, "just go out and buy a
CD player", they very literally tell me "we don't
want your business". I simply don't want, need, or
use the traditional model of sitting in my livingroom
with a CD playing on the stereo.
So, until the RIAA et al fully grasp this
disconnect with their customers and deal with it
(or just go under from failing to adapt to their
market), this war will keep going strong. I think
you probably have it right, though, that it will
take at least 20 years, and basically the complete
replacement of the dinosaurs currently in charge,
to resolve this situation.
And by then... It would surprise me if how we
currently listen to music still has any relevance,
and the battle will carry on, with different names
and weapons but the exact same front lines.
CDs with DRM violate the RedBook standard for
pure-audio CDs. They might satisfy BlueBook,
as long as the particular form of DRM depends entirely
on having a data track that the playing OS gives
precedence over the audio data (rather than having
multiple broken TOCs, probably the most common form
of audio CD DRM).
So... What does (or can) Philips say about this?
Well, they have "suggested" that the RIAA not use
the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on noncompliant
CDs. But overall, they don't particularly seem to
care, and really, this amounts to a point of semantics
anyway - No one actually checks CDs for that logo
before buying them, so its absence means nothing.
Not to say we don't need some way to keep
our political twits in check, but the FEC and the
US government in general can't do a damned thing
if a Canadian blogger vocally prefers candidate
X instead of candidate Y in an upcoming US
election.
Now, I think most of the world understands
what a joke our political system has become, and
doesn't really care whether Turd Sandwich or Giant
Douche wins. But all the happy paid party-shills
can make use of that to trivially circumvent
any relevant laws. When it comes to broadcast
media, Americans don't tend to watch any foreign
channels, so the existing rules more-or-less work.
But on the internet, people regularly view
material from all over the world, usually
without even knowning exactly where in the world
it comes from ("Oh, gee, they spell things oddly
here, must live in England... Or Australia... Or
one of those other funny little micronations that
I couldn't find on a map").
We don't need more feel-good laws - We need to
make holding public office less of a free-for-all
for the biggest lowlifes our society can produce.
seems like a lot of work... when you can just
buy a Shuttle or some other small form factor
pc mostly put together already.
Really not all that much work. For starters,
use a CF-to-IDE adaptor (around $5) and as big of a
CF card as you need (I used a 512MB I picked up for
$40 and could have gotten away with a 256MB) rather
than USB, and the single biggest hassle of the job
gets about 10x easier - That way, you can literally
just install Linux like normal and once you have
everything like you want it, follow any of the
numerous and fairly simple "how to have a RO root
filesystem under Linux" guides (alternatively,
not to sound like a Linux zealot, you could also
go with XPe using EWF).
Personally, I used an Epia CL-600 motherboard,
because I didn't need any serious CPU power but
wanted a silent machine (note - although you can
run this fanless, it stays rather toasty. A low RPM
120mm fan on the side of the case blowing in the
general direction of the CPU's heatsink will
drastically lower that, with almost no extra power
consumption or noise). Threw it into the smallest
(weighted with price as a factor) ATX compatible
case I could find on NewEgg, a Seasonic S12-330
power supply (serious overkill, but a damned fine
PS with a near-silent 120mm fan and active PFC).
The result, a machine that would work just fine
for any number of non-desktop machines, draws
20-30W, makes so little noise you need to hold
your breath to hear it, and takes no more time
to throw together than a typical whitebox PC.
Granted, that takes somewhat more effort than
buying a shuttle, but you get a better machine
for quite a lot less money.
but my last concert was $95/ticket for
an fairly-unknown electronica band -- the
crowd was thin.
Although concerts do indeed go that high, I
find it difficult to believe that an "unknown
electronica" band charged that much per
ticket (although it would certainly explain
the thin crowd!).
I go to a decent number of concerts across
the spectrum of musical styles (as an example,
in two weeks I see the Dresden Dolls, while
late next month I eagerly anticipate the
start of the new season of the local symphony
orchestra). And I have never paid more
than $70 per ticket, and that only once, with
a good number of ties for the second highest
in the mid-$40 range. But even those fall
into the minority, with over half of the shows
I go to coming in at under $20.
For starters, don't go to huge venues for
aging superstars. You will pay more,
and leave disappointed. Check out the local
clubs (as in, live music clubs, not
dance-n'-mate clubs), midweek and/or 21+, to
avoid the kiddy crowd. It might amaze you
the names that drop in for a $10-$15
cover. And best of all, you won't tend to
see "productions" in that environment, you'll
see (first hand, without binoculars or having
to watch the giant video screen) a handful of
people playing instruments and singing.
As an example of what you can find,
as opposed to taking what Clearchannel has told
you to go consume, I recall a show at Lupos (or
the Strand? Never could get those two straight
in my head, though one no longer exists) in
Providence, RI, to see Kristen Hersh. For
seating, they had covered the main floor with
couches and armchairs (and tables in the back,
of course). She chatted with us and played music,
doing basically all requests. IIRC, that had an
whopping admission of $25 even (high for a local
club). Not exactly a superstar, but not an
unknown at the time, either (and I'd go see
her over 99% of the superstars anyway)
I always though that the reason injecting
water as droplets works is because the oil
will cover the outside of the water droplet,
Water improves mileage by a simple phase change -
namely, going from an atomized mist of (still
liquid) H2O, to a high temperature gas, those
microdroplets of water expand roughly 40x more
than the intert nitrogen that would otherwise
make up the bulk of what actually expands in
your pistons. Deliberate water injection,
however, tends to greatly reduce engine life,
thus you don't see it in common use.
Now, since this system starts with gasseous
hydrogen and oxygen, that would tend to
cancel out the gain attributable purely to
water injection, since you go from one gas
(H2 + O2) to another (H2O vapor), thus no
phase change.
Overall, this sounds like a clever way to get
the benefits of running lean (far lower emissions,
more complete fuel combustion), without the
down side (significantly less power per stroke).
Though, "cool idea" credit aside, I sure
as hell wouldn't fork over $7500 to beta-test
this thing. It might work, and I sincerely
hope it does; but without a few hundred million
miles of real-world data to study, that pricetag
will leave this idea dead in the water.
As soon as you make a chipset controller, Ethernet PHY,
etc. That is not a discreet component. I realise that this
is splitting hairs to some extent, but hopefully that is
clear enough as to my intent.
Ah, fair enough.
I mistook your statement as stronger
than you meant it, and did indeed commit a factual error
(I basically just tried to list a few ICs that most people
might have heard of, and didn't take the time to make sure
Intel actually made those specifically).:)
But, that aside, would you disagree with my underlying
point, that Intel makes FAR, FAR more than CPUs, and
most of them cost a pittance each, thus making it
a virtual certainty that their entire product line
has a per-chip materials-and-labor-only cost well
below $40?
First of all, this topic comes from the German equivalent
of the National Enquirer. No one needs to point
that out (again) in response to this post.
But what the hell kind of twisted disconnect does
modern society have when the thought of actually
using corpses (of cats, dogs, even people) for
something useful absolutely horrifies us,
yet at the same time we can walk into a McDonalds
and take our pick from a selection of (at least)
four different species of corpse-on-a-bun?
Hell, I don't eat meat, yet see no problem with
turning rotting carcases into oil. How can anyone
who condones factory meat production (which
includes the vast majority of people) not also
deal with doing something useful with
the waste parts?
i'm assuming this isn't limited to
pentium 4 chips, but includes all chips
that intel makes.
I don't think you fully appreciate the size
of Intel, or the sheer number of chips they make...
P4s count for less than 1% of their sales, in
terms of volume. CPUs in general almost certainly
make up less than 10%.
The vast majority of Intel's output consists
of things like opamps, ethernet controllers,
simple logic chips, and other trivial (compared
to a modern CPU) ICs that mostly cost well under
a dollar (to buy, not to make) each.
No, their average cost per chip, over their
entire product line, does not come out to $40.
Not even close. That would bankrupt them in
a week, selling X chips at $600 while selling
95X at $1.
That said, the $40 figure certainly does not
take the total cost into consideration. Perhaps
the raw materials, electricity, and immediate
labor to produce them once everything has
fallen into place. But just the cost of building
a new fab (in the low billions), or
retooling an old one for a new process (hundreds
of millions) far outweighs the ongoing per-unit
production costs.
Slashdot Mirror
If I don't use the copyrighted part, then no problem, correct?
That depends on the primary use of the object, and the degree to which the copyrighted part exists as central to the use of the object.
With a stick, the DNA might count as absolutely unavoidably bound to the object, but the specifics have very little bearing on the stick's functionality.
With a CD, the music on it, although potentially removeable (in the case of a CD-RW, anyway), counts as the entire reason you would buy the CD in the first place. Its form as a 12cm plastic disc with a hole in the middle very, very rarely matters.
Now, with a cell phone? Not many people care about the specific software it runs, only about its function. But without some software, it doesn't function.
Personally, I would put cell phones in the CD category - Legitimate posession of the physical device should (but all to often doesn't) count as an implied, irrevokeably license to use the copyrighted content contained therein, including the right to change that content at will. If a company doesn't want customers to use feature-X of their product, they need to leave feature-X out rather than just disabling it in software.
But, we live in this world, not a perfect one.
Is this one of those things where it must be bad because it contains the worst of the slashdot four letter words (DMCA)?
Actually, yes. I have yet to see a "good" occurrence of that four-letter word (acronym). At best, ironic or just-desserts, but never actually "good".
What's the problem? If you want to pay less for a locked in phone thats your buisness.
You miss the point - Yes, the phone comes cheap as part of signing a 2-year contract (usually), but after that?
This doesn't involve people trying to get out of their contracts. Just people trying to keep using their phone once they have satisfied whatever contractual obligations exist that might justify calling it "not theirs".
When every object we posess contains some amount of copyrighted material, will companies successfully argue that we don't actually "own" anything? "Sorry, that pointy stick contains DNA for which Monsanto owns the copyright. Using it to defend yourself against a non-Monsanto-approved bear violates the DMCA".
It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?
I have a fanless XFX card with the GF6600, and it doesn't use any tricks to exploit other fans in the system. It runs a tad warm, but within the spec'd range - Around 55C idle, up to around 70C under heavy use.
Personally, I like keeping everything as cool as possible, so "modded" my case to have a low-RPM 120mm fam blow nice cool air on it, which drops it by 10-15C, but it doesn't cook itself without that, and it certainly doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as the GF4 it replaced (with a frickin' jet engine strapped to it, louder than anything else in the system).
I'd highly recommend you get a single 7800 GTX, it performs as well as two 6800 Ultras in most situations. And there's no SLI hassle, no need for a huge power supply.
:)
Ah, thank you for that info! Good to know.
Actually, though, I don't so much care about gaming performance - I chose the 66/6800 primarily because it counts as one of the few chips that offers dual DVI outputs (and only wanted SLI so I could eventually go to a quad LCD display with a minimum of hassle). Not to say I don't game at all (I certainly do!), but I realize that, once I can have fullscreen at 60fps (which I can in virtually all games even now, in its first decent-but-not-high-end incarnation), I can't get any better than that.
I have to say I'm in no way a fan of SLI either, but that's a personal thing.
Me neither - I consider it a messy hack. But, at least on my motherboard, SLI will let me run two cards at x8, rather than one at x16 and one at a mere x1 (don't know if that holds true of all boards with more than one x16 slot, or just a limit on mine).
BTW, I think you're overamping Seasonic a bit here.
Perhaps a tiny bit, but not much. I chose them after reading quite a few reviews, and they just crushed the competition in test after test. As the two most important points, their active PFC works, and they give the stated voltage right up to the point they shut off due to overload (which happens within a watt or two of the stated limit, rather than having low voltage until they smoke within a hundred watts or two of the advertised limit). And of course, the near-silence doesn't hurt.
They are not--and will not--be available for purchase by individuals.
Well just FUCK MIT with a big hot poker!
Hey, I consider it great that the ever popular cause celebre, third-world-kids, will benefit. But this sounds perfect for a 1st-world-geeks as an all-but-disposeable laptop for taking places with either no/unreliable power, or far to dangerous to risk a $2500 "real" laptop.
But, guess what, oh holier-than-geek idealists at MIT? Without the 1st-world-geeks on board, your "market" does not exist. This project will live and die (more likely die) at the whim of a government grant.
And for anyone who considers this a troll, keep in mind just how many rural Indian and Chinese kids now have solar powered sub-$100 PCs from the last similar project - None? A few dozen, perhaps, in "test" villages?
Seasonic's S12 500W is my current favorite. The 120mm fan is virtually silent at moderate loads and not too bad at higher loads.
I'll second that... I love my SeasSonic S12s (I have them in three machines now). All-but-silent, with rock-solid outputs, and according to every independant test I've read, if they say 500W, it stays solid to 499.99W, and shuts itself off (rather than smoking) at 500.01W.
However, I take exception to this entire topic...
In my PRIMARY machine, I have an S12-330. I have an Athlon 64, and a GeForce 6600. And I have 260W left to play with - A good thing, since my current upgrade path includes SLI'd 6800s and a dual-core Athlon 64, which fits well within that power budget and would make my machine pretty much a top-end modern gaming rig (though, hopefully by the time I consider my current setup in need of an upgrade, the replacements will draw even less power).
So my complaint? People don't NEED 500 and 600W power supplies. They need to look at their electric bill and dump the P4s. They need to buy a supply that performs as advertised. They need to seriously consider the end result of "anything for three more FPS" - We have KILOWATT power supplies now! With some care, an energy efficient home for four people can draw less than that!
Everyone has the "right" to waste money. But when you don't even need to make a compromise between price, performance, and power consumption - You can have them all - Why would anyone do otherwise?
(As an aside, I realize that I have compromised power for performance, in that I could run an EPIA board and have an entire machine draw 20W - And in fact, I have a machine doing just that. I mean to constrain my point to "fully functional modern PCs", though. If I could halve the power while getting 90% of the performance, however, I would - Thus my interim choice of a 6600 card, which draws only half as much power as the 6800s, in the hopes that something more efficient will hit the market before I feel a need to upgrade).
none of the ads mentioned above contain any information whatsoever about what the consoles are, what capabilites they claim to have, what kind of games they run, or even who might like them.
;-)
Uhh... As compared to the original Legend of Zelda commercial?
"oc-oc-OC-OCtoROcks!".
But hey, we all knew that the fruity guy playing Link symbolized a custom 6502 CPU clocked at 1.79MHz, and his choice of attire conveyed the groundbreaking 52-color palette available, from which you could have either 4, 16, 25, 52, 64, or 512 different selections on-screen at once (depending on how badly the coders abused the PPU).
Ah, for a return to those halcyon days of commercials clearly showing the product's capabilities...
For ~$1000 I'd be suprised if you couldn't build your own 1TB Linux RAID5 box, but I may be wrong.
Maxtor 300's for $115. Barebones system for under $100. A wide selection of 4-channel RAID cards for under $50 (NEVER use a softraid - which includes the crap solution on most NF4 boards - not to mention you'll someday bow down and thank His Noodlyness that you have your boot drive separate from the RAID).
Under $1000? Try under $600, for either 1.2TB RAID0, or 900MB RAID5. Build two, and sync them once a week, for an all-but-failsafe offline backup.
$1000 for one TB... Heh. You can get half that on a single drive these days, no longer all that impressive of a number. You can even get twice that, scaling almost linearly (price-wise), with no more effort - You can get 8-port SATA RAID cards for under $200 now.
Can you even find one competitor's product that matches the iPod nano's specifications?
;-)
Nope, not a single competitor includes "scratches when touched by soft cotton cloth" in the feature list.
Just asking, hyperbole-boy.
Yes, hyperbole. And actually, price-and-feature-wise, I will readily admit that the iPod line does compare favorably to most other players (except they unapologetically don't play Vorbis, the single point which will prevent me from ever buying one). But any worse hyperbole than saying that, by virtue of a little iconic picture of an apple on it, an Apple product magically transmutes into something worth more than the sum of its parts (plus the cost of assembly)? I think not. YMMV.
Wow and don't buy a painting from an art museum, there is only a few dollars worth of paint and canvas in them! Some things are more expensive than the cost of just their parts.
You seriously want to try to compare a mass-produced Nano to a Picasso?
Wow - Talk about taking Apple FanBoyism to a whole new level! "Dude, I know it costs 10x the competitor's version, but Jobs (crosses self) himself has personally blessed each one by listening to a U2 song on it!".
Yes, some things have value beyond the cost of their components and the assembly thereof. Cheesy consumer electronics do not fall into that category. And even if they did, that would only apply while they remain useable. If you can't read the screen, you can't use it fully.
but why people are so shocked by this seems quite odd. It's a little plastic thing you carry in your pocket.
Yes. They MARKET it as a little thing you carry in your pocket. A place where soft plastic will very quickly get scratched.
If you bought a new car, only to find out that <gasp!> driving it on pavement grinds your tires down to nothing after 10 miles, would you feel a bit peeved? Perhaps even deceived?
The technology to protect LCD screens has existed for years. My cell phone has no lid and an exposed screen, and I keep it in some pretty nasty environments (pockets, bottom of a backpack while hiking, thown on the floor of my car). And it hasn't got a single major scratch on it. Actually, not true - The body has a number of good dings, bu the screen remains nice and clear.
The only reason Apple can't do the same involves little green slips of paper. If they added $2 per unit, they couldn't hit the same carefully-planned-to-appeal-to-yuppies price point and still make the same profit. So they skipped that "minor" point on the design.
I was interested in getting one after my current VCR dies, but its price and subscription price bothered me. Now, this termination fee!
The idea of paying monthy for what amounts to a digital VCR bothered the hell out of me, too.
However, TiVo made a number of OEM-branded Series-2 machines, sold with lifetime basic service. I have a Toshiba HD400, for example, which works just fine. If you don't need HDTV or some obscenely high number of hours of recording time (I get 40+ at the highest quality setting), something similar might make you very happy.
And if TiVo ever decides to unilaterally "change" the terms of my service, they will lose when I take them to small claims court.
Though, in reality, I really don't see why people have so much trouble with Myth. Perhaps everyone wants to get a crappy ATI AiW card to work with it? I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 that I use mostly for converting old irreplaceable-on-DVD VCR content to digital form (and bought after my HD-400), but have played with it just to see why so many people balk at Myth. And I can honestly say that, when my HD-400 finally dies (or when I consider it sufficiently beneficial to have an HD-DVR), I won't hesitate to use Myth. Really amazingly simple, once you have the hardware working correctly (I suspect most people fail on that point, not with Myth itself, then blame either Myth or Linux for crappy vendor-specific drivers - Which five minutes of research before buying a capture card would have spared them).
And unless you ONLY query a server you control (ie, another on-site Linux box with a more reliable clock), expect to get a kiss-of-death packet from every server you use within a week.
As a better solution, set an hourly cron job to call a script that does:
Though the effectiveness of bothering to restart NTP seems debateable in that case - It really only works well when you let it run for days or even weeks uninterrupted, to get a good idea of the exact slew of your clock.
As an aside, I use that exact sequence (well, minus the killall) in the rc.local on one of my home machines - It keeps time just fine once it starts up, but for some reason its clock just doesn't tick with the machine turned off (I'd say it needs a battery, but it has no problem remembering its BIOS settings)
It holds more than that when the Declarer commits his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor. The problem is that there isn't anyone left in this country that still carries the Patrick Henry gene.
No, the problem centers on the government having enough firepower to wipe out all life on Earth. Compared with muzzle-loaders where, if you survive the first volley, a large enough crowd can easily overcome the agents of the oppresive regime (ie, the military unit doing the firing).
Nukes and chemical weapons aside, in the modern world, half a dozen soldiers with M-16s and an adequate supply of ammo could effectively fight off the entire population of a major city by themselves.
The world has changed. The ideals expressed in the US Declaration of Independence may still hold true, but the governments have made the will to fight all but irrelevant.
He wasn't abused. No one beat a confession out of him. He wasn't shot.
I consider my time my single most valuable posession. Followed by my privacy.
He had a full 24 hours of his life taken away from him forever for committing no crimes whatsoever. He had his apartment ransacked by the police, all his geek toys confiscated, and with luck he might get them back before a typical graphing calculator has more power than his primary PC.
And don't forget the embarassment and shock (ever seen someone arrested first-hand, or had it happen to you? Even if they let you go an hour later, it can damage your head for quite a good many years after the fact).
How about the damage to his reputation? The evening news doesn't care about the facts, they just care that Bill Jones got arrested on suspicion of terrorism, and the last impression the entire world has of that name involves a picture of him doing a perp-walk out of a tube station.
I suspect you as a troll, but just in case you don't mean to come off as one - Getting arrested for doing nothing does NOT even count as REMOTELY fucking acceptible. Events like this produce more terrorists, not stop them.
I am quite enthusiastic about being searched.
Uhhh... Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Do you thank muggers, too? How about people who cut you off in traffic?
you may have found a way to rationalize the seemingly unstoppable incursion of the governments into our personal lives. Don't make the mistake of thinking the rest of us have rolled over so easily, rady to get a UFIA at a moments notice because Officer Friendly doesn't like our haircut.
The people who make up the RIAA (and equivalent organizations in other countries) and -- more importantly -- the politicians they buy, are of an age to think in terms of listening to music on a stereo, just as they think in terms of watching programs on a TV
/\/\p3z" in crappy 128kbit CBR downloaded
over Kazaa, I write it as someone who buys a LOT of
music and almost always tries to get it directly from
the artist when possible. That said...
Dead right!
However, this entire topic, oddly enough, has served to expose one of the real core problems with how "we" want to use music compared with how "they" want us to (or, perhaps more accurately, how they believe we do).
First, I would like to point out that over 95% of the music in my posession, I either legally purchased on CD and ripped to FLAC, or legally downloaded directly from various artists' websites. So I don't write this as someone with a collection made up of "616z 0f
I don't even have a CD player connected to my home audio system, unless you count a DVD player than can also play CDs, or the CD-ROM drive in my livingroom PC. I listen to about a quarter of my music in my car, and the other three quarters plays directly from my home file server (or a number of OGG-packed data DVDs I keep at work).
So when someone says to me, "just go out and buy a CD player", they very literally tell me "we don't want your business". I simply don't want, need, or use the traditional model of sitting in my livingroom with a CD playing on the stereo.
So, until the RIAA et al fully grasp this disconnect with their customers and deal with it (or just go under from failing to adapt to their market), this war will keep going strong. I think you probably have it right, though, that it will take at least 20 years, and basically the complete replacement of the dinosaurs currently in charge, to resolve this situation.
And by then... It would surprise me if how we currently listen to music still has any relevance, and the battle will carry on, with different names and weapons but the exact same front lines.
if they're drm'ed, they're NOT CD's
Technically wrong, but you have the right idea.
CDs with DRM violate the RedBook standard for pure-audio CDs. They might satisfy BlueBook, as long as the particular form of DRM depends entirely on having a data track that the playing OS gives precedence over the audio data (rather than having multiple broken TOCs, probably the most common form of audio CD DRM).
So... What does (or can) Philips say about this? Well, they have "suggested" that the RIAA not use the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on noncompliant CDs. But overall, they don't particularly seem to care, and really, this amounts to a point of semantics anyway - No one actually checks CDs for that logo before buying them, so its absence means nothing.
Why bother?
Not to say we don't need some way to keep our political twits in check, but the FEC and the US government in general can't do a damned thing if a Canadian blogger vocally prefers candidate X instead of candidate Y in an upcoming US election.
Now, I think most of the world understands what a joke our political system has become, and doesn't really care whether Turd Sandwich or Giant Douche wins. But all the happy paid party-shills can make use of that to trivially circumvent any relevant laws. When it comes to broadcast media, Americans don't tend to watch any foreign channels, so the existing rules more-or-less work. But on the internet, people regularly view material from all over the world, usually without even knowning exactly where in the world it comes from ("Oh, gee, they spell things oddly here, must live in England... Or Australia... Or one of those other funny little micronations that I couldn't find on a map").
We don't need more feel-good laws - We need to make holding public office less of a free-for-all for the biggest lowlifes our society can produce.
seems like a lot of work ... when you can just
buy a Shuttle or some other small form factor
pc mostly put together already.
Really not all that much work. For starters, use a CF-to-IDE adaptor (around $5) and as big of a CF card as you need (I used a 512MB I picked up for $40 and could have gotten away with a 256MB) rather than USB, and the single biggest hassle of the job gets about 10x easier - That way, you can literally just install Linux like normal and once you have everything like you want it, follow any of the numerous and fairly simple "how to have a RO root filesystem under Linux" guides (alternatively, not to sound like a Linux zealot, you could also go with XPe using EWF).
Personally, I used an Epia CL-600 motherboard, because I didn't need any serious CPU power but wanted a silent machine (note - although you can run this fanless, it stays rather toasty. A low RPM 120mm fan on the side of the case blowing in the general direction of the CPU's heatsink will drastically lower that, with almost no extra power consumption or noise). Threw it into the smallest (weighted with price as a factor) ATX compatible case I could find on NewEgg, a Seasonic S12-330 power supply (serious overkill, but a damned fine PS with a near-silent 120mm fan and active PFC).
The result, a machine that would work just fine for any number of non-desktop machines, draws 20-30W, makes so little noise you need to hold your breath to hear it, and takes no more time to throw together than a typical whitebox PC. Granted, that takes somewhat more effort than buying a shuttle, but you get a better machine for quite a lot less money.
but my last concert was $95/ticket for an fairly-unknown electronica band -- the crowd was thin.
Although concerts do indeed go that high, I find it difficult to believe that an "unknown electronica" band charged that much per ticket (although it would certainly explain the thin crowd!).
I go to a decent number of concerts across the spectrum of musical styles (as an example, in two weeks I see the Dresden Dolls, while late next month I eagerly anticipate the start of the new season of the local symphony orchestra). And I have never paid more than $70 per ticket, and that only once, with a good number of ties for the second highest in the mid-$40 range. But even those fall into the minority, with over half of the shows I go to coming in at under $20.
For starters, don't go to huge venues for aging superstars. You will pay more, and leave disappointed. Check out the local clubs (as in, live music clubs, not dance-n'-mate clubs), midweek and/or 21+, to avoid the kiddy crowd. It might amaze you the names that drop in for a $10-$15 cover. And best of all, you won't tend to see "productions" in that environment, you'll see (first hand, without binoculars or having to watch the giant video screen) a handful of people playing instruments and singing.
As an example of what you can find, as opposed to taking what Clearchannel has told you to go consume, I recall a show at Lupos (or the Strand? Never could get those two straight in my head, though one no longer exists) in Providence, RI, to see Kristen Hersh. For seating, they had covered the main floor with couches and armchairs (and tables in the back, of course). She chatted with us and played music, doing basically all requests. IIRC, that had an whopping admission of $25 even (high for a local club). Not exactly a superstar, but not an unknown at the time, either (and I'd go see her over 99% of the superstars anyway)
I always though that the reason injecting water as droplets works is because the oil will cover the outside of the water droplet,
Water improves mileage by a simple phase change - namely, going from an atomized mist of (still liquid) H2O, to a high temperature gas, those microdroplets of water expand roughly 40x more than the intert nitrogen that would otherwise make up the bulk of what actually expands in your pistons. Deliberate water injection, however, tends to greatly reduce engine life, thus you don't see it in common use.
Now, since this system starts with gasseous hydrogen and oxygen, that would tend to cancel out the gain attributable purely to water injection, since you go from one gas (H2 + O2) to another (H2O vapor), thus no phase change.
Overall, this sounds like a clever way to get the benefits of running lean (far lower emissions, more complete fuel combustion), without the down side (significantly less power per stroke). Though, "cool idea" credit aside, I sure as hell wouldn't fork over $7500 to beta-test this thing. It might work, and I sincerely hope it does; but without a few hundred million miles of real-world data to study, that pricetag will leave this idea dead in the water.
As soon as you make a chipset controller, Ethernet PHY, etc. That is not a discreet component. I realise that this is splitting hairs to some extent, but hopefully that is clear enough as to my intent.
:)
Ah, fair enough.
I mistook your statement as stronger than you meant it, and did indeed commit a factual error (I basically just tried to list a few ICs that most people might have heard of, and didn't take the time to make sure Intel actually made those specifically).
But, that aside, would you disagree with my underlying point, that Intel makes FAR, FAR more than CPUs, and most of them cost a pittance each, thus making it a virtual certainty that their entire product line has a per-chip materials-and-labor-only cost well below $40?
Intel is not in the business of making discreet components.
Could you tell me, then, who made the (at a quick glance) 7 chips in my PC, (not even counting the CPU) that have an Intel logo on them?
First of all, this topic comes from the German equivalent of the National Enquirer. No one needs to point that out (again) in response to this post.
But what the hell kind of twisted disconnect does modern society have when the thought of actually using corpses (of cats, dogs, even people) for something useful absolutely horrifies us, yet at the same time we can walk into a McDonalds and take our pick from a selection of (at least) four different species of corpse-on-a-bun?
Hell, I don't eat meat, yet see no problem with turning rotting carcases into oil. How can anyone who condones factory meat production (which includes the vast majority of people) not also deal with doing something useful with the waste parts?
i'm assuming this isn't limited to pentium 4 chips, but includes all chips that intel makes.
I don't think you fully appreciate the size of Intel, or the sheer number of chips they make...
P4s count for less than 1% of their sales, in terms of volume. CPUs in general almost certainly make up less than 10%.
The vast majority of Intel's output consists of things like opamps, ethernet controllers, simple logic chips, and other trivial (compared to a modern CPU) ICs that mostly cost well under a dollar (to buy, not to make) each.
No, their average cost per chip, over their entire product line, does not come out to $40. Not even close. That would bankrupt them in a week, selling X chips at $600 while selling 95X at $1.
That said, the $40 figure certainly does not take the total cost into consideration. Perhaps the raw materials, electricity, and immediate labor to produce them once everything has fallen into place. But just the cost of building a new fab (in the low billions), or retooling an old one for a new process (hundreds of millions) far outweighs the ongoing per-unit production costs.