a.) Battery life sucks
b.) Tray-tables can BARELY support a laptop. You can breat your screen if the guy in front of you leans back
I'm guessing you're basing these assumptions on laptops from a few years ago. I'm a big fella (6'3", 215#) and I can use my fairly late-model Thinkpad T21 just fine on a seatback tray. Even if the guy leans back suddenly, there's no danger. I couldn't say that for my Toshiba Satellite Pro from a couple years back, though.
With the UltraBay battery installed, I get about 4 hours of battery life - my Palm M105 lasts about twice that under constant use, but who wants to use a PDA for 4 hours straight? Much less 8. I tried using a Palm to write a memo once during a cross-country flight, just to see how it would work, and I gave up after about a paragraph.
c.) A PDA fits in your pocket. That's surprisingly useful when you have to go to the bathroom.
You're using your PDA in the bathroom? I'm confused. Surely you can't be saying this is an advantage on an airplane - nobody's stealing laptops off airplanes.
I use a PDA to record (voice no less) story inspirations. I'm not carrying a laptop on my daily 4-mile walk just to do that.
Based on your parameters, an ordinary $25 tape recorder would work even better. You still haven't explained why you would use a PDA.
When I power them up all the displays look decent....so I can use them to build things like: a combined larger display, an automobile display for a DVD player, photo frames,
Instead of figuring out how to reuse just the displays, I'd suggest that you're probably much better off trying to figure out how to reuse the entire machine elegantly. For example, in automotive applications, old laptops are great because they're small, they use DC power, and they have a lot of niceties like PCMCIA slots (great for wireless modems).
Photo frames are another good example - you can build a table with the laptop guts mounted underneath and the flat panel displayed under the glass top. Pick up a couple of cheap wireless network cards, and presto, you've got a network of photo frames that can be automatically refreshed remotely.
Trying to reuse a bunch of different LCD's is going to be a really tough road. If you bought a set of identical ones, at least you wouldn't be doing so much research, but if you keep the machines intact then you're well on your way to finishing cooler projects faster.
After a lot of Ebay deals gone sour, I've got a personal rule: never purchase from a seller with zero feedback. After they've sold at least a couple dozen of these, then I might reconsider. Heh.
Yep, so does the Treo. How's the email on that I300? That was my problem with it, the inability to sync to my company's Exchange server without hooking up the cables. TreoMail will sync over the airwaves. Plus, there's the fact that the I300 doesn't have a keyboard, that was a problem for me.
That has more to do with the fact that the systems have been out of production for many years now making it hard to even find one for sale.
You mean like the working Commodore 64's and Atari 2600's that you can routinely pick up on Ebay for under fifty bucks? That argument doesn't hold water.
Most people remember it because it was very expensive.
And most people still do, because they still go for more than a Playstation 2. There are games for these things that go for more than an Playstation 2, for crying out loud.
The article's authors needed a way to store large amounts of network log data quickly - they're trying to capture packets in real time. For that kind of straightforward use (large volumes of data, only one user, no simultaneous read/writes) it's easy to see why IDE is more cost-effective and speedy, as the article states. However, when you add multiple users trying to write multiple drives simultaneously, the story changes, and the article simply doesn't address that.
If you're going to do a game marathon to introduce a new station, you can't use Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Frogger, or any of those other games that still come out in new iterations for Windows every now and then. You've got to reach way back into the past to come up with something you can license cheaply enough to make a 24-hour 7-day marathon feasible - and Pong sounds like it fits that bill.
Re:Needs VoIP - POTS gateway first
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
·
· Score: 2
I just ordered 20 of these things and I am placing one,a P-200 box with a floppy linux solution, and a el-cheapo phone at eacho of my T-1 Z ends. Voila... FREE telco lines to every location for technical phone calls to deal with the hardware at the other end back to master-control.
You're telling me your equipment is so unreliable that you're installing 20 P200 boxes with a USB phones to save money on end user support calls?!? Here's a better idea: save the money & time you're going to spend implementing this phone network and put it into making your real equipment more reliable.
And besides, I can just see it: you start out troubleshooting a network problem, and next thing you know, you're trying to troubleshoot a floppy linux solution and an "el-cheapo phone". Keep it simple....
As an All-In-Wonder Radeon owner, just want to clear up the things the article glosses over. You can't set it to record the same show no matter what time it comes on, you can't view listings more than 7 days in advance, and unlike a Tivo, it won't record similar shows for you. This is not set-it-and-forget-it software, and people need to stop comparing it to Tivo. It's much closer to a VCR than to Tivo: you have to manually program it, and it's just not that smart. (The quality's outstanding, though.)
I dunno bout Windows, but my PCG-505GX works great under Red Hat 6.x/7.x...didn't even have to get a new pcmcia driver:}
No kidding? How's that Firewire port working for you? And the memory stick slot? I couldn't get either of them to work with RedHat 7.3, that was the last I tried with a Z505.
As somebody who's been using laptops for the last ten years as my primary machine, and as a guy who's surrounded by mobile salespeople and execs who live on laptops, the reason why you don't see comparison reviews is because most of us are zealots about one or two brands.
The salespeople at my shop are absolutely married to their Sony Vaios, because they look sexy, they impress clients, and they're very lightweight. They don't care about things like driver support or warranty, because the tech crew handles that, and they always get a new one every year anyway.
The network admin crew loves Dells and Toshibas, because they're solid as rocks and the driver support is much better, with pretty regular driver updates.
You're already seeing lots of people slap up their opinion here, but notice that it's all opinions - not hardware comparisons. Us Slashdotters are subject to the same hardware fanatacism that my cohorts are subject to. Whether you want integrated 802.11b, big hard drives, big memory support, whatever, you can always find it in any brand. Everybody's doing basically the same thing, and the performance is within 10% of the next guy.
Print out the email receipt that comes with your subscription, and tack on the $5 to your next expense report. After all, doesn't your company pay for subscriptions and training materials? Odds are they won't balk at the $5, and if you've ever sent your coworkers a juicy news item via a Slashdot link, then you're totally justified. I bet your boss won't even blink at it - $5 for this is a much better value than a magazine subscription.
Having 2 completely seperate arms mounted 180d apart from each other arround the platter means that they could track independently in & out from each other. Of course in such a drive, each arm would still read to both the bottom & top of all the platters. So in effect there would be 4 heads per platter rather than 2.
The only advantage here would be if you were going to allow two simultaneous actions to take place on a given platter side, like two simultaneous reads from two separate areas of the drive, correct? That's why you're talking about tracking to independent areas of the platter.
So what happens when there's a simultaneous write and read to the same side of the same platter? Would you trust those actions to occur simultaneously, without wondering if one write is going to affect the other read? What about two simultaneous writes? What about one very long write while the other head is doing several different reads - one of which is in the area currently being written? You'd have to do so much checking of the data to see if there's a danger of events happening out of order, and events that affect each other, that you'd end up losing all of the performance gains. The only way it would be useful is for read-only drives.
It was like their PC lines. They were always $500 - $1000 more than anyone else. Who the hell would want to pay that?
I'm typing this from my Thinkpad, with a 32gb drive in it that spins so quietly I can't hear. They've got my vote, to say the least.
But to be fair, I went to CDW's hard drive section to check prices. IBM's 60gb Deskstar 7200 rpm IDE is $136 - exactly the same price as Maxtor's about five lines down. Sounds competitive to me.
IBM has decided to exit the hard drive market citing the market has become too competitive.
Too competitive? They were the ones introducing all the cool features. They were the first ones out with quiet IDE drives, the first ones with adjustable noise levels, the first with the "pixie dust" stuff with awesome platter density, the first big (60+ gig) laptop drives. I can't think of another hard drive company that was nearly as competitive as IBM was, and for them to say the market is too competitive, that really tells you something.
You go to a restaurant with 10 friends, and you all agree to split the bill 10 ways, and pay 1/10 of the bill each. Would you now say it was fair to order twice as much as everyone else, and a bottle of champagne for yourself?
Another example: if you buy a commercial plane ticket for $100, do you expect to be able to pull the back door open and parachute jump out of it? No. There's no big conspiracy to halt your freedom, you just have to do it in the right plane: go hire a plane that is dedicated to doing that sort of thing.
If you want to run P2P apps from home, you need to understand that you can't jump out of every airplane, and you can't stick your friends with the champagne bill. Go get an ISP that allows for that kind of thing, and yes, it will cost you more. There's a time and a place for everything, and if you want to transmit huge files, it's going to cost you more.
What's that you say? You don't have the money? Well, just like everything else in the world, you gotta pay to play. Just because you can't get a free billboard in Times Square that says "I Love Morpheus" doesn't mean anybody's restricting your freedom of speech.
$20 for 500 minutes? Man, my cell phone is a much better deal than that. Unlike VoIP, the number follows me everywhere. I get that this is cool, but it's a long way from practical.
Could this be the beginning of the end for our dependence on oil? I hope so.
Let me get this straight: you think the mere presence of a large quantity of an alternative is going to change things? So what exactly is holding back solar power, wind power, and nuclear power? They're all more freely available than hydrogen. They've all been around for quite a while, and you don't see people giving up oil just yet.
There's already a mini-howto explaining how to set this up in combination with a Linux Terminal Server. Basically, you end up with a bunch of workstations that actually relieve the server from CPU load. Odd to think that the more diskless workstations you add to your network, the faster it becomes!
Given all the questions about Kazaa...
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You would have to be crazy to even think about installing something like this on your system. If its sole intention is to rat on people, wouldn't you think it would monitor just a little bit more than what you volunteered to offer?
Check out Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators by Mark Minasi with Dan York and Craig Hunt. It's from Sybex. Can't recommend it enough, got me started - explains everything from a Windows point of view, and doesn't bore you with things you already know from Windows experience.
Slashdot Mirror
a.) Battery life sucks
b.) Tray-tables can BARELY support a laptop. You can breat your screen if the guy in front of you leans back
I'm guessing you're basing these assumptions on laptops from a few years ago. I'm a big fella (6'3", 215#) and I can use my fairly late-model Thinkpad T21 just fine on a seatback tray. Even if the guy leans back suddenly, there's no danger. I couldn't say that for my Toshiba Satellite Pro from a couple years back, though.
With the UltraBay battery installed, I get about 4 hours of battery life - my Palm M105 lasts about twice that under constant use, but who wants to use a PDA for 4 hours straight? Much less 8. I tried using a Palm to write a memo once during a cross-country flight, just to see how it would work, and I gave up after about a paragraph.
c.) A PDA fits in your pocket. That's surprisingly useful when you have to go to the bathroom.
You're using your PDA in the bathroom? I'm confused. Surely you can't be saying this is an advantage on an airplane - nobody's stealing laptops off airplanes.
I use a PDA to record (voice no less) story inspirations. I'm not carrying a laptop on my daily 4-mile walk just to do that.
Based on your parameters, an ordinary $25 tape recorder would work even better. You still haven't explained why you would use a PDA.
When I power them up all the displays look decent....so I can use them to build things like: a combined larger display, an automobile display for a DVD player, photo frames,
Instead of figuring out how to reuse just the displays, I'd suggest that you're probably much better off trying to figure out how to reuse the entire machine elegantly. For example, in automotive applications, old laptops are great because they're small, they use DC power, and they have a lot of niceties like PCMCIA slots (great for wireless modems).
Photo frames are another good example - you can build a table with the laptop guts mounted underneath and the flat panel displayed under the glass top. Pick up a couple of cheap wireless network cards, and presto, you've got a network of photo frames that can be automatically refreshed remotely.
Trying to reuse a bunch of different LCD's is going to be a really tough road. If you bought a set of identical ones, at least you wouldn't be doing so much research, but if you keep the machines intact then you're well on your way to finishing cooler projects faster.
After a lot of Ebay deals gone sour, I've got a personal rule: never purchase from a seller with zero feedback. After they've sold at least a couple dozen of these, then I might reconsider. Heh.
The I300 has a speaker phone!
Yep, so does the Treo. How's the email on that I300? That was my problem with it, the inability to sync to my company's Exchange server without hooking up the cables. TreoMail will sync over the airwaves. Plus, there's the fact that the I300 doesn't have a keyboard, that was a problem for me.
That has more to do with the fact that the systems have been out of production for many years now making it hard to even find one for sale.
You mean like the working Commodore 64's and Atari 2600's that you can routinely pick up on Ebay for under fifty bucks? That argument doesn't hold water.
Most people remember it because it was very expensive.
And most people still do, because they still go for more than a Playstation 2. There are games for these things that go for more than an Playstation 2, for crying out loud.
The article's authors needed a way to store large amounts of network log data quickly - they're trying to capture packets in real time. For that kind of straightforward use (large volumes of data, only one user, no simultaneous read/writes) it's easy to see why IDE is more cost-effective and speedy, as the article states. However, when you add multiple users trying to write multiple drives simultaneously, the story changes, and the article simply doesn't address that.
If you're going to do a game marathon to introduce a new station, you can't use Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Frogger, or any of those other games that still come out in new iterations for Windows every now and then. You've got to reach way back into the past to come up with something you can license cheaply enough to make a 24-hour 7-day marathon feasible - and Pong sounds like it fits that bill.
I just ordered 20 of these things and I am placing one,a P-200 box with a floppy linux solution, and a el-cheapo phone at eacho of my T-1 Z ends. Voila... FREE telco lines to every location for technical phone calls to deal with the hardware at the other end back to master-control.
You're telling me your equipment is so unreliable that you're installing 20 P200 boxes with a USB phones to save money on end user support calls?!? Here's a better idea: save the money & time you're going to spend implementing this phone network and put it into making your real equipment more reliable.
And besides, I can just see it: you start out troubleshooting a network problem, and next thing you know, you're trying to troubleshoot a floppy linux solution and an "el-cheapo phone". Keep it simple....
As an All-In-Wonder Radeon owner, just want to clear up the things the article glosses over. You can't set it to record the same show no matter what time it comes on, you can't view listings more than 7 days in advance, and unlike a Tivo, it won't record similar shows for you. This is not set-it-and-forget-it software, and people need to stop comparing it to Tivo. It's much closer to a VCR than to Tivo: you have to manually program it, and it's just not that smart. (The quality's outstanding, though.)
It's got firewire, yeah...I've had no use for it so that I can't vouch for...
:-D
Ah, so the drivers didn't work. That's what I thought.
I dunno bout Windows, but my PCG-505GX works great under Red Hat 6.x/7.x...didn't even have to get a new pcmcia driver :}
No kidding? How's that Firewire port working for you? And the memory stick slot? I couldn't get either of them to work with RedHat 7.3, that was the last I tried with a Z505.
As somebody who's been using laptops for the last ten years as my primary machine, and as a guy who's surrounded by mobile salespeople and execs who live on laptops, the reason why you don't see comparison reviews is because most of us are zealots about one or two brands.
The salespeople at my shop are absolutely married to their Sony Vaios, because they look sexy, they impress clients, and they're very lightweight. They don't care about things like driver support or warranty, because the tech crew handles that, and they always get a new one every year anyway.
The network admin crew loves Dells and Toshibas, because they're solid as rocks and the driver support is much better, with pretty regular driver updates.
You're already seeing lots of people slap up their opinion here, but notice that it's all opinions - not hardware comparisons. Us Slashdotters are subject to the same hardware fanatacism that my cohorts are subject to. Whether you want integrated 802.11b, big hard drives, big memory support, whatever, you can always find it in any brand. Everybody's doing basically the same thing, and the performance is within 10% of the next guy.
Print out the email receipt that comes with your subscription, and tack on the $5 to your next expense report. After all, doesn't your company pay for subscriptions and training materials? Odds are they won't balk at the $5, and if you've ever sent your coworkers a juicy news item via a Slashdot link, then you're totally justified. I bet your boss won't even blink at it - $5 for this is a much better value than a magazine subscription.
Having 2 completely seperate arms mounted 180d apart from each other arround the platter means that they could track independently in & out from each other. Of course in such a drive, each arm would still read to both the bottom & top of all the platters. So in effect there would be 4 heads per platter rather than 2.
The only advantage here would be if you were going to allow two simultaneous actions to take place on a given platter side, like two simultaneous reads from two separate areas of the drive, correct? That's why you're talking about tracking to independent areas of the platter.
So what happens when there's a simultaneous write and read to the same side of the same platter? Would you trust those actions to occur simultaneously, without wondering if one write is going to affect the other read? What about two simultaneous writes? What about one very long write while the other head is doing several different reads - one of which is in the area currently being written? You'd have to do so much checking of the data to see if there's a danger of events happening out of order, and events that affect each other, that you'd end up losing all of the performance gains. The only way it would be useful is for read-only drives.
Welcome to the United State of Microsoft. (Or maybe President Bill prefers the Microsoft States of America).
Ah, no, I think the official term will be the United Oracle of Microsoft.
Now I can't imagine being unable to reenter the country because the Passport servers were down again. Grrrreat.
It was like their PC lines. They were always $500 - $1000 more than anyone else. Who the hell would want to pay that?
I'm typing this from my Thinkpad, with a 32gb drive in it that spins so quietly I can't hear. They've got my vote, to say the least. But to be fair, I went to CDW's hard drive section to check prices. IBM's 60gb Deskstar 7200 rpm IDE is $136 - exactly the same price as Maxtor's about five lines down. Sounds competitive to me.
IBM has decided to exit the hard drive market citing the market has become too competitive.
Too competitive? They were the ones introducing all the cool features. They were the first ones out with quiet IDE drives, the first ones with adjustable noise levels, the first with the "pixie dust" stuff with awesome platter density, the first big (60+ gig) laptop drives. I can't think of another hard drive company that was nearly as competitive as IBM was, and for them to say the market is too competitive, that really tells you something.
You go to a restaurant with 10 friends, and you all agree to split the bill 10 ways, and pay 1/10 of the bill each. Would you now say it was fair to order twice as much as everyone else, and a bottle of champagne for yourself?
Another example: if you buy a commercial plane ticket for $100, do you expect to be able to pull the back door open and parachute jump out of it? No. There's no big conspiracy to halt your freedom, you just have to do it in the right plane: go hire a plane that is dedicated to doing that sort of thing.
If you want to run P2P apps from home, you need to understand that you can't jump out of every airplane, and you can't stick your friends with the champagne bill. Go get an ISP that allows for that kind of thing, and yes, it will cost you more. There's a time and a place for everything, and if you want to transmit huge files, it's going to cost you more.
What's that you say? You don't have the money? Well, just like everything else in the world, you gotta pay to play. Just because you can't get a free billboard in Times Square that says "I Love Morpheus" doesn't mean anybody's restricting your freedom of speech.
$20 for 500 minutes? Man, my cell phone is a much better deal than that. Unlike VoIP, the number follows me everywhere. I get that this is cool, but it's a long way from practical.
Could this be the beginning of the end for our dependence on oil? I hope so.
Let me get this straight: you think the mere presence of a large quantity of an alternative is going to change things? So what exactly is holding back solar power, wind power, and nuclear power? They're all more freely available than hydrogen. They've all been around for quite a while, and you don't see people giving up oil just yet.
There's already a mini-howto explaining how to set this up in combination with a Linux Terminal Server. Basically, you end up with a bunch of workstations that actually relieve the server from CPU load. Odd to think that the more diskless workstations you add to your network, the faster it becomes!
You would have to be crazy to even think about installing something like this on your system. If its sole intention is to rat on people, wouldn't you think it would monitor just a little bit more than what you volunteered to offer?
Check out Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators by Mark Minasi with Dan York and Craig Hunt. It's from Sybex. Can't recommend it enough, got me started - explains everything from a Windows point of view, and doesn't bore you with things you already know from Windows experience.