Yep, an MP2000/2100 with a keyboard is very usable day-to-day. Heck, even the HWR is good enough for me to have taken notes in most of my humanities electives. The outline mode was outstanding for this. It fit comfortably in the pocket of my field jacket, but so do small children, so I'm not sure it fits the pocket-sized definition.
DEC Multia, to be exact. Not to be confused with something cool like an AlphaServer, they were very small form factors with not a lot of proc power. Pentium class, mostly.
You're still not getting it. It isn't that the ID is required, it's that we're being held to laws that we can't see! Doesn't that strike you as odd? Even a little bit? The ID issue is just bait to get this out in the open and hopefully heard by the US Supreme Court.
This isn't really a minor point that John's bringing up. It points out the hypocrisy of the current government's crusade. Really, I mean crusade here in the classic sense, with lots of somewhat well-meaning guys running out to fight the middle east, and getting their butts kicked most of the time.
I'm not talking about our military, but rather the lawmakers and bureaucrats making up secret laws to protect us from a faceless foe. I believe they really mean to keep us safe, but they're screwing up on the way. It makes me want to buy guns while I still can.
Just like the article said, this is like Rosa Parks' bus ride. It's pointing out a symptom of a much larger problem.
Hell Yeah. The IDE with Mindstorms is fantastic, especially for beginners. At first, it looks toy-like (it is) but if you look closer, it really teaches some good basic programming tasks. Certainly not OO design or b-trees or anything, but looping and if-thens are just as important. Couple that with the progressive challenges, and I think it's quite possibly the best learning toy out there.
I call shenanigans. Analog is just as important now as ever. Try designing a high-speed digital board with no regard to impedance and electromagnetics, and see how far you get.
I posit that we must always start with analog, then build logic on top of that. The World is an analog place. At some point, a computer needs to interact with the World to be useful.
I learned something interesting just yesterday about making DIMMs. There are companies out there that specialize in recovering failed DRAM chips. They buy them as factory rejects for pennies, and use some trickery to mask off the bad bits and re-use the recovered DRAM as a smaller density. I know Micron buys lots of this stuff for their value line. Maybe the patching isn't as good as we'd hope?
Eh, blame it on alpha particles. Those buggers are causing all sorts of problems with bit-flips in memory cells. Buy ECC!
I don't see that hardware support in Linux is any worse than other operating systems, on several fronts.
In the desktop PC space, I can run anything I care to hook up, other than some shitty winprinters. Granted, some features are lacking like 3D accelerators and some multimedia hardware, but if you're careful choosing your stuff, it will work with Linux. I tossed Fedora Core 2 on two new PCs and a laptop, and it just works. I couldn't say that two years ago.
Even my iMac runs YDL with all of my hardware supported. That was the biggest surprise of all, frankly.
Don't even go there with Mac OS X. They only have to support one architecture and one major hardware vendor. MS has it slightly (not really) easier than Linux, too, because they're only running on x86 for the desktop and server.
Things are better for Linux in the embedded space, as I see it. I can pick nearly any embedded processor, and Linux runs quite well with all features supported. That market is actually bigger than the desktop space, and more exciting to boot.
The Sempron is basically a marketing ploy to use old silicon. The idea was to release a very low-cost device for third-world markets. AMD can build parts with the T-bred core by the boatload (mostly because die yield is better on a low-cache device) for pennies. It isn't exactly intended for domestic desktops. I have no idea why it would be included in a head-to-head with a Barton core, other than that perhaps the reviewer has his head firmly insterted up his rectum. As he found, it doesn't compete performance-wise, but it's cheap. Shit, I coulda told you that, and I don't even have a fancy website!
Agreed. I can't convince myself to buy an XM or Sirius sat radio receiver until you can get timeshifting and/or the skip-back feature. TiVo has totally changed my passive listening concepts.
However, I'm betting that our friends at the RIAA are absolutely dead set against recording broadcast material in any way, shape, or form. We all know the tech is available and implementable, but that has to be the reason that no one has done it yet.
Agreed. Wonderful touches in the UI, and absolutely no need to read a manual because of the advanced interface design. Plus a giant green backlight that works as a flashlight when necessary.
It does have 384MB in it, but I was under the impression that the vid card was not well supported under OS X. Truly, I've considered it, but I don't really want to dump ~$100 into a 5 year old machine.
How about for relatively recent Apple hardware that will run OS X poorly, like my aging 350MHz iMac? There is very little software left for OS 9, so just last night I was looking into converting the little blue gumball to Linux. This announcement is like a message from the computer gods for me. Linux it is!
Actually, my company is deploying these en-masse now. We use them on customer visits for lots of things, like block diagram sketches. You can also write directly on a PDF or other doc, then send that to a co-worker with all your notes intact. It's very cool. A PDA just doesn't have the screen size to enable this stuff, and the cost is marginally higher than for a laptop. Only field guys get them, because a regular suit just doesn't need the functionality.
Are you serious? Every professional sport, and lots of higher-echelon amateur competitors, count things down to the gram and the millimeter. I still see massive amounts of passion at every turn and every finish line. It just takes discipline and planning to get there first, along with a heaping helping on talent and determination. On an F-1 car, nothing goes unmeasured or left to chance, and it's the same with a rider in the Tour.
As far as chemical enhancements go, that's of course rampant but it's part of the game. All of racing is full of cheats and enhancments outside of the rule book. Some get caught, some don't.
Michael Schumacher still gets excited on a podium, and professional cyclists still suffer through 23 days of racing to get to Paris. It's in their faces at the top of the Alpe D'Huez. That's not automation, man, that's passion.
It's probably to prevent re-marking gray-market CPUs as faster chips, which burn out, get returned, and cause problems for the reseller and for Intel. Not every move by a corporate is evil, ya know. It would be more difficult than it's worth to make an OC-friendly chip that is un-remark-able. This is a sizeable problem for AMD, but the laser-trim bridges are a decent solution, to which they probably have a patent so Intel has to come up with something else now.
Re:Broadcom support
on
Linux Unwired
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From my dealings with BCM, I wouldn't expect them, ever. They have a profit model where they provide basic functionality and docs with their product. Everything above that, including non-MS drivers, is pretty much an additional cost, typically assessed as an NRE, and can run to the tens of thousands of USD. So you get two results: 1. No 3rd party will write Linux drivers, nor will BCM, until there is a clear need from a profit standpoint. This is like trying to get major software vendors to make a port.
2. BCM certainly won't release the docs, because then they'd lose this part of their business.
Someone, please, please tell me BCM is going to play nice and let us have a Linux driver. I'd like to hear that I'm wrong here, but just about every BCM product has worked this way.
My wife made me stop doing that. I was pasting our baby's head on different poses, because in one picture she was smiling nicely but the background was cluttered, etc. The old lady didn't think that fake memories were a good idea. I think it makes my life a little more Philip K Dick-ish, which could be good or bad, I don't know.
I did Gimp her mom into a bunch of exotic locations once, just for giggles. She really liked it.
$250 for five boards is about right, actually. Your best bet on a budget is to make a friend at someplace like Lucent or Motorola for example.
One more option would be to re-flow the boards at home in your toaster oven. No, really, I'm serious. You can use solder paste and an ordinary, inexpensive toaster oven to handle the reflow. I saw a well documented project that did this on the web somewhere, which should be easy enough to find with Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, an MP2000/2100 with a keyboard is very usable day-to-day. Heck, even the HWR is good enough for me to have taken notes in most of my humanities electives. The outline mode was outstanding for this. It fit comfortably in the pocket of my field jacket, but so do small children, so I'm not sure it fits the pocket-sized definition.
DEC Multia, to be exact. Not to be confused with something cool like an AlphaServer, they were very small form factors with not a lot of proc power. Pentium class, mostly.
You're still not getting it. It isn't that the ID is required, it's that we're being held to laws that we can't see! Doesn't that strike you as odd? Even a little bit? The ID issue is just bait to get this out in the open and hopefully heard by the US Supreme Court.
This isn't really a minor point that John's bringing up. It points out the hypocrisy of the current government's crusade. Really, I mean crusade here in the classic sense, with lots of somewhat well-meaning guys running out to fight the middle east, and getting their butts kicked most of the time.
I'm not talking about our military, but rather the lawmakers and bureaucrats making up secret laws to protect us from a faceless foe. I believe they really mean to keep us safe, but they're screwing up on the way. It makes me want to buy guns while I still can.
Just like the article said, this is like Rosa Parks' bus ride. It's pointing out a symptom of a much larger problem.
True that. I'll take a bottle in front of me over a frontal lobotomy any day.
Too late. You have seen the VAXbar, right?
I'm not going to post a link. If someone doesn't know what it was, either STFU or google it. n00bs.
Hell Yeah. The IDE with Mindstorms is fantastic, especially for beginners. At first, it looks toy-like (it is) but if you look closer, it really teaches some good basic programming tasks. Certainly not OO design or b-trees or anything, but looping and if-thens are just as important. Couple that with the progressive challenges, and I think it's quite possibly the best learning toy out there.
I call shenanigans. Analog is just as important now as ever. Try designing a high-speed digital board with no regard to impedance and electromagnetics, and see how far you get.
I posit that we must always start with analog, then build logic on top of that. The World is an analog place. At some point, a computer needs to interact with the World to be useful.
I learned something interesting just yesterday about making DIMMs. There are companies out there that specialize in recovering failed DRAM chips. They buy them as factory rejects for pennies, and use some trickery to mask off the bad bits and re-use the recovered DRAM as a smaller density. I know Micron buys lots of this stuff for their value line. Maybe the patching isn't as good as we'd hope?
Eh, blame it on alpha particles. Those buggers are causing all sorts of problems with bit-flips in memory cells. Buy ECC!
The first rule of OSDL is that you don't talk about OSDL.
I don't see that hardware support in Linux is any worse than other operating systems, on several fronts.
In the desktop PC space, I can run anything I care to hook up, other than some shitty winprinters. Granted, some features are lacking like 3D accelerators and some multimedia hardware, but if you're careful choosing your stuff, it will work with Linux. I tossed Fedora Core 2 on two new PCs and a laptop, and it just works. I couldn't say that two years ago.
Even my iMac runs YDL with all of my hardware supported. That was the biggest surprise of all, frankly.
Don't even go there with Mac OS X. They only have to support one architecture and one major hardware vendor. MS has it slightly (not really) easier than Linux, too, because they're only running on x86 for the desktop and server.
Things are better for Linux in the embedded space, as I see it. I can pick nearly any embedded processor, and Linux runs quite well with all features supported. That market is actually bigger than the desktop space, and more exciting to boot.
Mad Props to Bob Pease! I really enjoy his articles in EDN, as well.
As noted in the Amazon reviews, the other must-have is Art of Elelctronics by Horowitz/Hill.
The Sempron is basically a marketing ploy to use old silicon. The idea was to release a very low-cost device for third-world markets. AMD can build parts with the T-bred core by the boatload (mostly because die yield is better on a low-cache device) for pennies. It isn't exactly intended for domestic desktops. I have no idea why it would be included in a head-to-head with a Barton core, other than that perhaps the reviewer has his head firmly insterted up his rectum. As he found, it doesn't compete performance-wise, but it's cheap. Shit, I coulda told you that, and I don't even have a fancy website!
Thanks for doing that. Long live HIPAA!
Seriously, I really like the access limits and privacy blocks mandated by HIPAA.
However, I'm betting that our friends at the RIAA are absolutely dead set against recording broadcast material in any way, shape, or form. We all know the tech is available and implementable, but that has to be the reason that no one has done it yet.
Agreed. Wonderful touches in the UI, and absolutely no need to read a manual because of the advanced interface design. Plus a giant green backlight that works as a flashlight when necessary.
BTW, my MP2100 is for sale if anyone wants it.
It does have 384MB in it, but I was under the impression that the vid card was not well supported under OS X. Truly, I've considered it, but I don't really want to dump ~$100 into a 5 year old machine.
I look at YDL, for me, as extended life support.
Ha ha! But you're assuming I'm not a cheap bastard!
BTW, I consider it relatively recent because my last Mac was a 6100/60. Not a bad machine in it's day.
Believe me, I've drooled over the iBook as an inexpensive OS X entry. Someday...
How about for relatively recent Apple hardware that will run OS X poorly, like my aging 350MHz iMac? There is very little software left for OS 9, so just last night I was looking into converting the little blue gumball to Linux. This announcement is like a message from the computer gods for me. Linux it is!
Actually, my company is deploying these en-masse now. We use them on customer visits for lots of things, like block diagram sketches. You can also write directly on a PDF or other doc, then send that to a co-worker with all your notes intact. It's very cool. A PDA just doesn't have the screen size to enable this stuff, and the cost is marginally higher than for a laptop. Only field guys get them, because a regular suit just doesn't need the functionality.
Are you serious? Every professional sport, and lots of higher-echelon amateur competitors, count things down to the gram and the millimeter. I still see massive amounts of passion at every turn and every finish line. It just takes discipline and planning to get there first, along with a heaping helping on talent and determination. On an F-1 car, nothing goes unmeasured or left to chance, and it's the same with a rider in the Tour.
As far as chemical enhancements go, that's of course rampant but it's part of the game. All of racing is full of cheats and enhancments outside of the rule book. Some get caught, some don't.
Michael Schumacher still gets excited on a podium, and professional cyclists still suffer through 23 days of racing to get to Paris. It's in their faces at the top of the Alpe D'Huez. That's not automation, man, that's passion.
It's probably to prevent re-marking gray-market CPUs as faster chips, which burn out, get returned, and cause problems for the reseller and for Intel. Not every move by a corporate is evil, ya know. It would be more difficult than it's worth to make an OC-friendly chip that is un-remark-able. This is a sizeable problem for AMD, but the laser-trim bridges are a decent solution, to which they probably have a patent so Intel has to come up with something else now.
From my dealings with BCM, I wouldn't expect them, ever. They have a profit model where they provide basic functionality and docs with their product. Everything above that, including non-MS drivers, is pretty much an additional cost, typically assessed as an NRE, and can run to the tens of thousands of USD. So you get two results:
1. No 3rd party will write Linux drivers, nor will BCM, until there is a clear need from a profit standpoint. This is like trying to get major software vendors to make a port.
2. BCM certainly won't release the docs, because then they'd lose this part of their business.
Someone, please, please tell me BCM is going to play nice and let us have a Linux driver. I'd like to hear that I'm wrong here, but just about every BCM product has worked this way.
My wife made me stop doing that. I was pasting our baby's head on different poses, because in one picture she was smiling nicely but the background was cluttered, etc. The old lady didn't think that fake memories were a good idea. I think it makes my life a little more Philip K Dick-ish, which could be good or bad, I don't know.
I did Gimp her mom into a bunch of exotic locations once, just for giggles. She really liked it.
$250 for five boards is about right, actually. Your best bet on a budget is to make a friend at someplace like Lucent or Motorola for example.
One more option would be to re-flow the boards at home in your toaster oven. No, really, I'm serious. You can use solder paste and an ordinary, inexpensive toaster oven to handle the reflow. I saw a well documented project that did this on the web somewhere, which should be easy enough to find with Google.