I'll first congratulate whoever built this maagnificent piece of art. Very cool. You have way too much free time:) (He's also an excellent photographer. Not something you see very often in case modders:) )
But it's just not functional!!!!
All that metal tubing for the cables and stuff and the water cooling tubing must make it a nightmare to work in. Do all those tubes even go anywhere?? It seems awfuly crowded to work in there
How would you change a hard drive?
I'm also not a huge fan of watercooling. If there is a leak, two things happen. 1) Your computer gets wet 2) The chernobyl effect. Assuming it's survived this long, the coolant's now gone, and the computer keeps getting hotter. Uh oh.
That being said, it's still beautifully crafted with incredible attention paid to detail.
For all the folks who were chanting for OS X on the PC, this might be the closest thing.
But seriously. I remember about 2 years ago, installing and running the last release of BeOS (the one which happily coexisted with win98).
There's something VERY cool about a modern operating system which boots to the desktop in 5 seconds. This was on an Athlon 750 w/ 128mb RAM.
Of course, there were a few hitches along the way. Namely, the networking support. I was on dial-up at the time, and there was a bug in the CHAP authentication thingy in BeOS. It eventually led me to ditch the OS, but it will always remain in my heart as the coolest OS i'd ever used. The GUI was clean and simple, it had all of the 'good bits' of the Mac UI in it. It beat the heck out of Mac OS and Win9x at the time. Linux wasn't even an option at the time due to the ridiculous complexity (although I did nuke the Be partition* to install Debian which was even more short-lived then Be)
*And the windows partition. And the backup partition. And all of my files. Curse you buggy Debian Fdisk frontend!
Any idea why we haven't seen more software ported to Be? Is it not port-friendly or something?
This works great until you get into three dimensions at which point it all goes sour.
Because light's reflecting off of the coat itself. Plus, the shape of the cloak is not symetrical. I just don't see how it even works. Sure, I could imagine something like a sheet of paper partially working.
As for see-thru wall, it's probably a lot easier then this guy wants it to be...
Just make the wall itself clear. Then use an lcd-like mechanism to act as a 'shutter', allowing the outside light in. Note that each 'pixel' could be quite large (several inches).
In other words, when the wall's off, it's opaque. When current's applied to a section, the liquid inside the wall becomes clear and the wall is see-through. Not sure if the technology's there yet, though....
I find apple give more simplicity when it comes to changing systems. But if we narrow our vision to what both apple and MS does for usability, then we are bound to make the same mistakes. There are other designs that are much more usable than windows and apple for that matter. We just shouldn't follow windows, just because people are used to it.
Yes. And no.
There's an ideal balance between offering too many configuration options (which are often irrelevant), and offering virtually no options (those which are offered are also usually irrelevant).
I find this a lot in linux software. You get a nice GUI to change a few options which you will most likely never have to/want to change. Everything that's important is buried in a huge flat text file inside/etc with hundreds of options you're never going to have to mess with.
I like the balance apple provides. You can obtain a relatively high degree of customization with relatively few options. Honestly, why would a normal user want to disable SSL in their browser?
Funny thing is that Gentoo's documentation has been criticized by the 'hardcore' linux community.
It's consistent, it's up to date, and most of all, it's really easy to read. Like the parent mentioned, you really do learn a lot when reading it.
Gentoo is without a dobut one of the most complicated of the distros. Consequently, it is one of the most difficult to use, and even long-time linux users will need to refer to the documentation.
As a result, the documentation was under a lot of scruitny, and the Gentoo community saw that it needed to be improved and worked on. As a result, the hardest distro to use has the easiest documentation.
Honestly, I'd wager that because of the excellent documentation, Gentoo is one of the best/easiest linux distros.
I should note that Gentoo's DIY approach is NOT fit for the masses. Even with the excellent documentation, most users will be frightened out of partitioning their drives manually with fdisk.
Even so, when I have to use linux, I go to gentoo. It's nice that it's fast. The community is excellent, and without a dobut, has the best documentation. If you have a problem, IT WILL BE solved by either the documentation or (as a last resort), the forums (which are also the best among the linux community.)
That being said, Gentoo's far from perfect. As a distro, it's excellent. But it's still Linux, and still has all of its flaws. (Why oh why can't they ditch the standard driectory structure?).
For now, I'm using OS X. It's fine for my needs, and largely self-eplanitory. The official documentation, however, is way below par. Microsoft's knowledge base (though highly redundant and bloated) beats out Apple's.
Remember that women and racial minorities were not considered to be part of the public until the last century. The government has become very good at limiting the scope of such a broad classification as 'the public'. Keep that in mind.
Also, remember that this is being paid for by the US government. I'd say that the domain needs to be limited to US citizens only. It's not fair that we have to foot the bill while the rest of the world gets to use it for free.
It might not be morally correct, but it's how the government sees it.
Covered. Every now and then you'll hear about something unusual, such as a house where oil is pouring out of the walls for no apparent reason and the Virgin Mary appears in the oil. If that happens to you, and you make a claim for the damage done to your walls, you're covered.
Has this ever happened??? It seems to me that it would at least make the news:)
The Mac zealots are going to have a field day with this one.
Sorry to break it to you, but Mac users have been happily dragging and dropping since 1984.
This also looks like another piece of sony pseudo-science which really doesn't mean anything.
From what the article says, this looks like little more than cut-and-paste via bluetooth/802.11/ethernet. So here's how it would work:
User taps screen with special 'pen'. Host computer determines what is being tapped, records the unique ID of the pen, and copies it to a special clipboard.
Clipboard starts broadcasting the availibility of an item and the ID of the pen via something like Apple's Rendevous.
User taps the recieving device with the pen. It records the ID of the pen, and looks via Rendevous for an item with the matching Pen ID.
Now, the tricky part comes from the fact that most devices do not have touchscreens. Fortunately, the accuracy of such a touchscreen wouldn't need to be really high, and the pen ID could be handled in a similar manner to how wacom tablets identify the various tools and styli.
All in all, I'm not 100% sure if this would be practical. The costs of adding a touchscreen to every device are just too high for something so simple. Why can't we just add another option - copy to network -- paste from network.
There's also the security concern. This makes it really easy for someone to sneak into your office while you're not looking and steal files.
Basically it simply parses out the source files, and has a pane with all of the lines commented out beginning with TODO. From there you can assign priorities, etc.
I was surprised to see all of my TODOs automatically imported when I first began to use CBX. It's quite ingenius that all of the data is simply stored in human-readable form within the.cpp file itself.
Now, I know a lot of people, myself included despise some of Borland's C++ stuff, especially on Windows. However, CBX was a wonderful departure from the typical crappy windows IDE. It's really just a Java-based (ironic, huh?) editor with some extra built-in tools. Not to mention that it's free for personal use and runs on Win32, Linux, and Solaris.
I'll probably eventually move to MS VC++ or switch to open source tools. But, for a beginning developer, it's small features like this which make CBX the tool I use.
The first being that it was somewhat, but not completely programmable. It was well suited for cracking german ciphers, and could be modified to account for changes in the encryption schemes.
The second was that it was fast. Very fast. Granted, it suffered from a von neumann bottleneck. The computers typically operated at 1,000 charatcters per second. One of the designers tested the limits of the machine and found that it could reliably work up to 8,000 characters per second before the paper tape would catch fire from the friction. This sort of speed went unsurpassed for decades -- perhaps even into the 80s.
Thirdly, it was small. Tiny compared to ENIAC. All 10 fit into one (albeit, rather large) room.
Last, it had almost no influence upon later computers. After the war, Churchill ordered the cryptologists to cut the machine into "pieces no bigger than a man's head". However, as all government secrets go, it wasn't held quite well, and someone successfully builttheir own colossus.
I don't understand why the wiki-owners just don't put a robots.txt file in the directory of the sandbox indicating the search engine to NOT index the page containing the sandbox.
Apple's had lots of problems recently with AirPort.
An update a month or two ago completely hosed both the base station and client in terms of speed, signal strength, and reliability. The update was pulled, and a new version was posted a week later.
The new version still had problems. Frequently, users would completely lose signal for 30 seconds to 5 minutes. I specifically had this problem, and looking around the forums, there weren't many who didn't.
Last week, apple posted an update to the client-side driver which seems to have fixed the last of the problems. Even though it's now fixed, apple was really ierresponsible by not just reverting to the old version (they didn't even provide a method to remove the faulty drivers!). I'd expect way more from Apple.
Chances are they waited until all the outstanding bugs were worked out with the current airport stuff before releasing this little gizmo.
I may get one just for the audio features and to act as a bridge in my living room which is logistically impossible to wire.
At $129, it's a friggin' steal. The old AeBS was pretty pricey at $199, and the only things justifying that high price were the USB printserver (which, BTW, doesn't support all printers, especially those which have cardreaders which act as USB hubs), WDS, and the enterprise-grade administration tools. All home users would care about was the print server.
Now, at $129, it's directly in competition with the consumer gear from Linksys, Netgear, and Co. Firstly, apple users always expect to pay a bit on the top for apple-branded gear. The quality you get is usually worth the extra 20% or so -- I've had more Netgear/Linksys power supplies die on me..... Secondly, a decent 802.11g AP WILL cost you a good $80-$90. One with a USB print server will easily cost as much as or more than the Airport Express. An independent wireless USB print server also costs around $100. Only using it as a print server is cost-effective. Finally, the audio feature is unheard of on this kind of multifunction device. You can expect to pay at LEAST $130 for a device which streams audio over the network and does nothing else. Granted, it will usually have some sort of screen and remote, but for the price, it's really not an issue. Oh yeah... did I mention it's tiny? (and very similar to the Power/iBook chargers)
The only feature I would have liked to seen would have been a USB fileserver. Instead of plugging in a printer, plug in a USB Memory Key or Hard drive and serve files off of it. Guess you can't have everything:)
Looking at the pics on the page, it looks like they could have easily built the thing inside a 1U chasis of they used the proper power supply and heatsink. All of the other parts should fit within 1U.
That being said, they could have simply used an ultraportable laptop with the screen unplugged and unnecessary parts removed/disabled.
You'd be amazed as to how little there really is inside a laptop. Think about it -- the drives and batteries take up about 75% of the chasis. Leave about another 10% for the power supply and heatsinking, and you've got a REALLY small PCB.
If space, not power, was their main concern, they could have also used one of the Shuttle cube boxes. They pack an incredibly strong punch for their size, and are usually on par with their desktop equivilants. Hell... they've even got an opteron box. The performance on the EPIA boards is horrific. What were they thinking designing a processor without a FPU? That being said, they're pretty cool because they're small, low-power, and widely availible (which laptop MBs strangely aren't). Still, they're pretty expensive considering that you're getting a PC which would have been considered pretty slow 4 years ago.
FWIW, many modern PC BIOSs will let you map a key on the keyboard (or series of keys) to the power button. You could use Caps Lock.:-)
Say.... do you think we can create a virus which enables this but only infects AOL users, IRC Kiddies, and/. Trolls?*
Actually, I wouldn't even go as far as calling it a virus. Hell, it will probably REDUCE the number of viruses out there:)
*There will also be a version which infects SCO's legal department. They will most likely claim it to be their own creation.
Re:Replace it with a key labelled [help]
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Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Apple has done this already.
It's right above the delete key in place of the infrequently used insert key.
Unlike the PC makers' latest trend of adding a bajillion buttons to the keyboards that will never be used, apple added four buttons above the numlock pad in place of the "lock" lights (which in place are located directly on their respective keys). The four (incredibly useful!) buttons are: Volume Down Volume Up Mute Eject Disc (less useful than other 3, especially if you have more than one optical drive. Still, since Mac OS requires a software dismount, it's necessary.
Oh yeah... did I mention that it has a USB hub in it? Why the hell are we still shipping PCs with 12-year-old PS/2 technology?
I just miss the power button. Even so, apple's relocated it to the monitor (another thing PC makers should have done years ago), which in my mind is the 'proper' place for the system's power button.
Re:Lossless is a waste of space on iPods
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60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 1
Apple could always add more RAM to the buffer.
From what I know right now, the iPod has 32mb of RAM -- enough to cache at least 5 full-length songs.
Of course, once you goto lossless, you can only fit one or two songs in that buffer. Why not just bump it up to 64mb and be done with it? Apple's introduction of the lossless codec as well as its addition to the iPod hints that Apple does indeed want to capture the audiophile market and support lossless as a standard.
Mentioning Freespace 3 or Descent 4 on one of the fan forums will result in a horde of homicidal maniacs descending upon you.
(FS and FS2 are two of the greatest games ever created. The community has done some incredible work improving the game using the source code after it was released including a port of FS1 to the FS2 engine)
This does not effect the EU's position on Micorosft in any way.
The EU is the European Union. The patent question is a US patent.
That being said, the patent looks like it was more intended to cover some rudimentary system of mouse gestures than the double-click. Either way, it will never hold up in court; there's just far too much prior art. Not to mention that in the past, MS has not enforced their frivolous patents. Methinks this is just a precautionary measure to prevent some jerk from getting it and suing MS, Apple, Xerox, and the rest of the world.
Now, if Apple got a right-click patent, that would be news
Take a look at wikipedia's List of Nuclear Accidents and decide for yourself weather or not we should be using nuclear power.
The list is either alarmingly long or extremely short depending upon how you look at it.
Some of the accidents are incredibly trivial. Others are pretty darn frightening. It's all a matter of a chain reaction (no pun intended) of bad events happening in succession. Take this one for example:
"September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."
What you want to do is to carry all your gadgets in a diaper bag. Yes, I'm serious. This is a time-tested technique. Nobody wants to steal a baby-blue or pink cute little bag full of shit.
Not only will muggers avoid you, so will the chicks!
No matter how clean it may be, it will still potentially have flaws. In the case of "army stuff", I'd tend to think that traditional computing systems would not be suitable or efficent for that matter. Any software which has to 'boot up' is probably bad.
QNX on the other hand, may be good. It's used pretty widely, is lightweight, and supposedly rock solid. But, still, if the task can be accomplished just as efficently without computers at all, it's probably a better idea.
Um... the Press Release doesn't mention Laptops.... anywhere!
These processors are meant for non-computers:) Seriously, folks... they're intended to power the next generation of "Dumb Terminals" and thin clients. 1.4ghz is severe overkill for a thin client, although AMD's prices are highly competitive.
The article also mentions a MIPS chip AMD plans to put out to be targeted at the Handheld PC market. Imagine a 1.4ghz Pocket PC?
Think of the other possibilities.... Routers would definitely be able to make use of such a chip. As color laser printeres get faster, faster processors will be needed to run them. Right now, the fastest top out at around 400mhz for the very high end models. Cisco could definitely use something like this in their routers. Set-top boxes could also benefit, although, TiVo has demonstrated that you can do a lot with a little (the Series1 Tivos ran on a 75mhz PowerPC)
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I'll first congratulate whoever built this maagnificent piece of art. Very cool. You have way too much free time :) (He's also an excellent photographer. Not something you see very often in case modders :) )
But it's just not functional!!!!
All that metal tubing for the cables and stuff and the water cooling tubing must make it a nightmare to work in. Do all those tubes even go anywhere?? It seems awfuly crowded to work in there
How would you change a hard drive?
I'm also not a huge fan of watercooling. If there is a leak, two things happen.
1) Your computer gets wet
2) The chernobyl effect. Assuming it's survived this long, the coolant's now gone, and the computer keeps getting hotter. Uh oh.
That being said, it's still beautifully crafted with incredible attention paid to detail.
Pretty nifty.
For all the folks who were chanting for OS X on the PC, this might be the closest thing.
But seriously. I remember about 2 years ago, installing and running the last release of BeOS (the one which happily coexisted with win98).
There's something VERY cool about a modern operating system which boots to the desktop in 5 seconds. This was on an Athlon 750 w/ 128mb RAM.
Of course, there were a few hitches along the way. Namely, the networking support. I was on dial-up at the time, and there was a bug in the CHAP authentication thingy in BeOS. It eventually led me to ditch the OS, but it will always remain in my heart as the coolest OS i'd ever used. The GUI was clean and simple, it had all of the 'good bits' of the Mac UI in it. It beat the heck out of Mac OS and Win9x at the time. Linux wasn't even an option at the time due to the ridiculous complexity (although I did nuke the Be partition* to install Debian which was even more short-lived then Be)
*And the windows partition. And the backup partition. And all of my files. Curse you buggy Debian Fdisk frontend!
Any idea why we haven't seen more software ported to Be? Is it not port-friendly or something?
This works great until you get into three dimensions at which point it all goes sour.
Because light's reflecting off of the coat itself. Plus, the shape of the cloak is not symetrical. I just don't see how it even works. Sure, I could imagine something like a sheet of paper partially working.
As for see-thru wall, it's probably a lot easier then this guy wants it to be...
Just make the wall itself clear. Then use an lcd-like mechanism to act as a 'shutter', allowing the outside light in. Note that each 'pixel' could be quite large (several inches).
In other words, when the wall's off, it's opaque. When current's applied to a section, the liquid inside the wall becomes clear and the wall is see-through. Not sure if the technology's there yet, though....
I find apple give more simplicity when it comes to changing systems. But if we narrow our vision to what both apple and MS does for usability, then we are bound to make the same mistakes. There are other designs that are much more usable than windows and apple for that matter. We just shouldn't follow windows, just because people are used to it.
/etc with hundreds of options you're never going to have to mess with.
Yes. And no.
There's an ideal balance between offering too many configuration options (which are often irrelevant), and offering virtually no options (those which are offered are also usually irrelevant).
I find this a lot in linux software. You get a nice GUI to change a few options which you will most likely never have to/want to change. Everything that's important is buried in a huge flat text file inside
I like the balance apple provides. You can obtain a relatively high degree of customization with relatively few options. Honestly, why would a normal user want to disable SSL in their browser?
I wholehartedly agree with you 100% here.
Funny thing is that Gentoo's documentation has been criticized by the 'hardcore' linux community.
It's consistent, it's up to date, and most of all, it's really easy to read. Like the parent mentioned, you really do learn a lot when reading it.
Gentoo is without a dobut one of the most complicated of the distros. Consequently, it is one of the most difficult to use, and even long-time linux users will need to refer to the documentation.
As a result, the documentation was under a lot of scruitny, and the Gentoo community saw that it needed to be improved and worked on. As a result, the hardest distro to use has the easiest documentation.
Honestly, I'd wager that because of the excellent documentation, Gentoo is one of the best/easiest linux distros.
I should note that Gentoo's DIY approach is NOT fit for the masses. Even with the excellent documentation, most users will be frightened out of partitioning their drives manually with fdisk.
Even so, when I have to use linux, I go to gentoo. It's nice that it's fast. The community is excellent, and without a dobut, has the best documentation. If you have a problem, IT WILL BE solved by either the documentation or (as a last resort), the forums (which are also the best among the linux community.)
That being said, Gentoo's far from perfect. As a distro, it's excellent. But it's still Linux, and still has all of its flaws. (Why oh why can't they ditch the standard driectory structure?).
For now, I'm using OS X. It's fine for my needs, and largely self-eplanitory. The official documentation, however, is way below par. Microsoft's knowledge base (though highly redundant and bloated) beats out Apple's.
But what is the domain of the public?
Remember that women and racial minorities were not considered to be part of the public until the last century. The government has become very good at limiting the scope of such a broad classification as 'the public'. Keep that in mind.
Also, remember that this is being paid for by the US government. I'd say that the domain needs to be limited to US citizens only. It's not fair that we have to foot the bill while the rest of the world gets to use it for free.
It might not be morally correct, but it's how the government sees it.
A religious phenomenon damages your home:
:)
Covered. Every now and then you'll hear about something unusual, such as a house where oil is pouring out of the walls for no apparent reason and the Virgin Mary appears in the oil. If that happens to you, and you make a claim for the damage done to your walls, you're covered.
Has this ever happened??? It seems to me that it would at least make the news
Considering that this guy's a HS senior, he probably has finals tomorrow.
And he's posting to slashdot.
I have finals tomorrow.
And I'm posting to slashdot.
Beautiful!!
The Mac zealots are going to have a field day with this one.
Sorry to break it to you, but Mac users have been happily dragging and dropping since 1984.
This also looks like another piece of sony pseudo-science which really doesn't mean anything.
From what the article says, this looks like little more than cut-and-paste via bluetooth/802.11/ethernet. So here's how it would work:
User taps screen with special 'pen'. Host computer determines what is being tapped, records the unique ID of the pen, and copies it to a special clipboard.
Clipboard starts broadcasting the availibility of an item and the ID of the pen via something like Apple's Rendevous.
User taps the recieving device with the pen. It records the ID of the pen, and looks via Rendevous for an item with the matching Pen ID.
Recieving device connects to host, downloads clipboard contents, host stops broadcasting.
Now, the tricky part comes from the fact that most devices do not have touchscreens. Fortunately, the accuracy of such a touchscreen wouldn't need to be really high, and the pen ID could be handled in a similar manner to how wacom tablets identify the various tools and styli.
All in all, I'm not 100% sure if this would be practical. The costs of adding a touchscreen to every device are just too high for something so simple. Why can't we just add another option - copy to network -- paste from network.
There's also the security concern. This makes it really easy for someone to sneak into your office while you're not looking and steal files.
Boarland's C++BuilderX has this feature.
.cpp file itself.
Basically it simply parses out the source files, and has a pane with all of the lines commented out beginning with TODO. From there you can assign priorities, etc.
I was surprised to see all of my TODOs automatically imported when I first began to use CBX. It's quite ingenius that all of the data is simply stored in human-readable form within the
Now, I know a lot of people, myself included despise some of Borland's C++ stuff, especially on Windows. However, CBX was a wonderful departure from the typical crappy windows IDE. It's really just a Java-based (ironic, huh?) editor with some extra built-in tools. Not to mention that it's free for personal use and runs on Win32, Linux, and Solaris.
I'll probably eventually move to MS VC++ or switch to open source tools. But, for a beginning developer, it's small features like this which make CBX the tool I use.
The colossus is interesting in a few respects.
The first being that it was somewhat, but not completely programmable. It was well suited for cracking german ciphers, and could be modified to account for changes in the encryption schemes.
The second was that it was fast. Very fast. Granted, it suffered from a von neumann bottleneck. The computers typically operated at 1,000 charatcters per second. One of the designers tested the limits of the machine and found that it could reliably work up to 8,000 characters per second before the paper tape would catch fire from the friction. This sort of speed went unsurpassed for decades -- perhaps even into the 80s.
Thirdly, it was small. Tiny compared to ENIAC. All 10 fit into one (albeit, rather large) room.
Last, it had almost no influence upon later computers. After the war, Churchill ordered the cryptologists to cut the machine into "pieces no bigger than a man's head". However, as all government secrets go, it wasn't held quite well, and someone successfully builttheir own colossus.
I don't understand why the wiki-owners just don't put a robots.txt file in the directory of the sandbox indicating the search engine to NOT index the page containing the sandbox.
That's why it's there.....
Apple's had lots of problems recently with AirPort.
:)
An update a month or two ago completely hosed both the base station and client in terms of speed, signal strength, and reliability. The update was pulled, and a new version was posted a week later.
The new version still had problems. Frequently, users would completely lose signal for 30 seconds to 5 minutes. I specifically had this problem, and looking around the forums, there weren't many who didn't.
Last week, apple posted an update to the client-side driver which seems to have fixed the last of the problems. Even though it's now fixed, apple was really ierresponsible by not just reverting to the old version (they didn't even provide a method to remove the faulty drivers!). I'd expect way more from Apple.
Chances are they waited until all the outstanding bugs were worked out with the current airport stuff before releasing this little gizmo.
I may get one just for the audio features and to act as a bridge in my living room which is logistically impossible to wire.
At $129, it's a friggin' steal. The old AeBS was pretty pricey at $199, and the only things justifying that high price were the USB printserver (which, BTW, doesn't support all printers, especially those which have cardreaders which act as USB hubs), WDS, and the enterprise-grade administration tools. All home users would care about was the print server.
Now, at $129, it's directly in competition with the consumer gear from Linksys, Netgear, and Co. Firstly, apple users always expect to pay a bit on the top for apple-branded gear. The quality you get is usually worth the extra 20% or so -- I've had more Netgear/Linksys power supplies die on me..... Secondly, a decent 802.11g AP WILL cost you a good $80-$90. One with a USB print server will easily cost as much as or more than the Airport Express. An independent wireless USB print server also costs around $100. Only using it as a print server is cost-effective. Finally, the audio feature is unheard of on this kind of multifunction device. You can expect to pay at LEAST $130 for a device which streams audio over the network and does nothing else. Granted, it will usually have some sort of screen and remote, but for the price, it's really not an issue. Oh yeah... did I mention it's tiny? (and very similar to the Power/iBook chargers)
The only feature I would have liked to seen would have been a USB fileserver. Instead of plugging in a printer, plug in a USB Memory Key or Hard drive and serve files off of it. Guess you can't have everything
Looking at the pics on the page, it looks like they could have easily built the thing inside a 1U chasis of they used the proper power supply and heatsink. All of the other parts should fit within 1U.
That being said, they could have simply used an ultraportable laptop with the screen unplugged and unnecessary parts removed/disabled.
You'd be amazed as to how little there really is inside a laptop. Think about it -- the drives and batteries take up about 75% of the chasis. Leave about another 10% for the power supply and heatsinking, and you've got a REALLY small PCB.
If space, not power, was their main concern, they could have also used one of the Shuttle cube boxes. They pack an incredibly strong punch for their size, and are usually on par with their desktop equivilants. Hell... they've even got an opteron box. The performance on the EPIA boards is horrific. What were they thinking designing a processor without a FPU? That being said, they're pretty cool because they're small, low-power, and widely availible (which laptop MBs strangely aren't). Still, they're pretty expensive considering that you're getting a PC which would have been considered pretty slow 4 years ago.
FWIW, many modern PC BIOSs will let you map a key on the keyboard (or series of keys) to the power button. You could use Caps Lock. :-)
/. Trolls?*
:)
Say.... do you think we can create a virus which enables this but only infects AOL users, IRC Kiddies, and
Actually, I wouldn't even go as far as calling it a virus. Hell, it will probably REDUCE the number of viruses out there
*There will also be a version which infects SCO's legal department. They will most likely claim it to be their own creation.
Apple has done this already.
It's right above the delete key in place of the infrequently used insert key.
Unlike the PC makers' latest trend of adding a bajillion buttons to the keyboards that will never be used, apple added four buttons above the numlock pad in place of the "lock" lights (which in place are located directly on their respective keys). The four (incredibly useful!) buttons are:
Volume Down
Volume Up
Mute
Eject Disc (less useful than other 3, especially if you have more than one optical drive. Still, since Mac OS requires a software dismount, it's necessary.
Oh yeah... did I mention that it has a USB hub in it? Why the hell are we still shipping PCs with 12-year-old PS/2 technology?
I just miss the power button. Even so, apple's relocated it to the monitor (another thing PC makers should have done years ago), which in my mind is the 'proper' place for the system's power button.
Apple could always add more RAM to the buffer.
From what I know right now, the iPod has 32mb of RAM -- enough to cache at least 5 full-length songs.
Of course, once you goto lossless, you can only fit one or two songs in that buffer. Why not just bump it up to 64mb and be done with it? Apple's introduction of the lossless codec as well as its addition to the iPod hints that Apple does indeed want to capture the audiophile market and support lossless as a standard.
Only time will tell.
Don't forget about Freespace!
Mentioning Freespace 3 or Descent 4 on one of the fan forums will result in a horde of homicidal maniacs descending upon you.
(FS and FS2 are two of the greatest games ever created. The community has done some incredible work improving the game using the source code after it was released including a port of FS1 to the FS2 engine)
This does not effect the EU's position on Micorosft in any way.
The EU is the European Union. The patent question is a US patent.
That being said, the patent looks like it was more intended to cover some rudimentary system of mouse gestures than the double-click. Either way, it will never hold up in court; there's just far too much prior art. Not to mention that in the past, MS has not enforced their frivolous patents. Methinks this is just a precautionary measure to prevent some jerk from getting it and suing MS, Apple, Xerox, and the rest of the world.
Now, if Apple got a right-click patent, that would be news
Take a look at wikipedia's List of Nuclear Accidents and decide for yourself weather or not we should be using nuclear power.
The list is either alarmingly long or extremely short depending upon how you look at it.
Some of the accidents are incredibly trivial. Others are pretty darn frightening. It's all a matter of a chain reaction (no pun intended) of bad events happening in succession. Take this one for example:
"September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."
Make sure it's a D4
No dice are more deadly than a handful of D4s. Throw em' on the ground and you can't walk away barefooted.
What you want to do is to carry all your gadgets in a diaper bag. Yes, I'm serious. This is a time-tested technique. Nobody wants to steal a baby-blue or pink cute little bag full of shit.
Not only will muggers avoid you, so will the chicks!
Yes. But not all hardware supported by OS X is made by Apple.
Virtually every USB/1394 storage device is a plug-and-go affair. Same for printing devices, etc. Linux is reluctant to do even this...
Clean software is better than bloated software.
No software is better than clean software.
No matter how clean it may be, it will still potentially have flaws. In the case of "army stuff", I'd tend to think that traditional computing systems would not be suitable or efficent for that matter. Any software which has to 'boot up' is probably bad.
QNX on the other hand, may be good. It's used pretty widely, is lightweight, and supposedly rock solid. But, still, if the task can be accomplished just as efficently without computers at all, it's probably a better idea.
Um... the Press Release doesn't mention Laptops.... anywhere!
:) Seriously, folks... they're intended to power the next generation of "Dumb Terminals" and thin clients. 1.4ghz is severe overkill for a thin client, although AMD's prices are highly competitive.
These processors are meant for non-computers
The article also mentions a MIPS chip AMD plans to put out to be targeted at the Handheld PC market. Imagine a 1.4ghz Pocket PC?
Think of the other possibilities....
Routers would definitely be able to make use of such a chip.
As color laser printeres get faster, faster processors will be needed to run them. Right now, the fastest top out at around 400mhz for the very high end models.
Cisco could definitely use something like this in their routers.
Set-top boxes could also benefit, although, TiVo has demonstrated that you can do a lot with a little (the Series1 Tivos ran on a 75mhz PowerPC)