"Who buys those high-end Windows machines? Nobody with any sense." People that make their living with their computer should. The junk that they sell as a consumer notebook these days is terrible. Audio recordings are full of static. Hard drives seem so slow that it just isn't funny and a build quality that is just a bad joke. The specs are close on a lot of consumer notebooks but they cut corners on the parts that are not on the spec like hard drive speed, power supply quality, and build quality in general. Yes you or I can take a consumer notebook and get a few years out of it. But a good notebook can last for five years or more and work every day for five years. If you don't play games then you might be surprised to see just how well a good five year old Thinkpad will work if you keep it clean and free of malware. Quality really does count. I would rather spend a few hundred more for a quality product than for the cheapest piece of junk that will run Windows. I don't own a Mac but I will pay a little more for a good notebook.
"2) My quad core desktop with dual HD4800 video cards still consumes less power than my old 5 year old Pentium desktop" Not very likely dual HD4800? 4850s or 4870s? The old Pentium uses so little power that it often ran with Just a heat sink and no fan! That just doesn't add up. But then you gave very incomplete data.
Where F-94s and F-86Ds. The ADC would practice night intercepts on airliners. Those two aircraft where some of the first to have afterburners. The pilots would often light the burner and pull up. Then shut down the burner. Strange light making unusual maneuvers then is gone...
"I did check the illuminated target speed indicator. It went from 400K to 700K in a matter of seconds." A drone with a jamming pod? Modern AI radar uses Doppler to get the speed of the the target. A jamming pod could spoof speed.
A123Systems which makes some of the most advanced batteries around put first put their products into cordless tools. Cordless tools have done a lot to push battery tech for the simple reason that the battery for a good cordless tool must be. Light. Powerful. and Rugged. Also it is right now a multi-million dollar market. So they are exactly the kind of batteries that you will want in an electric car. Look to see A123 to supply the battery pack for the Volt. Tesla couldn't get their gearbox to work right so they went to the old school gearbox maker for help and got one that worked. If Tesla had delivered their car two years ago, a year ago, or even yesterday then yes they would be somewhat important. By the time Tesla delivers a car they will be old news.
There are a lot of devices that still use Comports. You may not use them but they are common in a lot of industries. "Dump LPT ports, all of it, the physical connector and the LPT architecture. Everyone is using a USB printer or a networked print server or a networked MF device." There is a good amount of hardware that plugs in to those ports used in industrial controllers systems. They don;t cost much and are still useful. "Dump dialup modems. If you need one plug it into your USB hub." I have run into devices that are mission critical that don't work with USB dialup modems. They also don't work with WinModems. I don't know why but I am guessing that a lot of newer modems play fast and loose with the lower speed standards. Oh and even the new versions of those devices still use dial up connections. "Dump PCCard. It's long past its prime. It takes up a slot that never ever gets used on a laptop anymore." Again they are used for some wifi cards and other devices. Why dump a good expansion buss. The Expresscard slot is a good replacement.
"Dump PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports. Waste of space. If you need an external keyboard or trackball go USB or wireless." Big expensive KVMs and here is a news flash. USB eats a lot more CPU cycles than PS/2.
For the average users you are right but there are a lot of none average users out there.
Appletalk was available when networking was one of those neat ideas. The idea that you could network a bunch of macs together for very little money was mind blowing at the time. Sure it wasn't TCP/IP but it was no worse than say Lantastic.
"As TV manufacturers move from Cold Cathode Fluorescent backlights to OLED backlights, you'll see a significant drop in power use." Unless people make the jump too 72" Tvs. I do agree it will help a lot but I worry that it will will be eaten up. "What really needs to be dropped is standby power, which is being sucked up the whole time the TV is off." I have an invention that will fix that. It is called an OFF BUTTON. When you hit the OFF BUTTON the tv will be OFF. No power going through it at all. Probably not going to happen since real off switches do tend to fail more than anybody would like. A microcontroller that runs off a super cap that controls the power circuit will probable be the solution of choice.
I think that the problem is that very few people have 13 to 17 inch LCD TVs anymore. They are more power efficient but bigger. THe back light is the real killer.
Kind of in the range of Duh isn't this. Tempest goes back into the 80s and maybe even past that. Seems very odd to me that this is news. I remember seeing an article on slashdot about reading modem leds, and all sorts of other methods. I guess you could wrap your keyboard cable and monitor cable in a conductor and ground it to help cut the effective range down. Or just not worry about it.
For the CP/M disks a good starting point would probably be a 1571 and a Commodore 128. It can read a lot of CP/M formats. Your other option would be to try and find a copy of a program called uniform for the PC. It could read just about anything.
virtual machines may not cut it. A lot of those devices need to bang the bits to work and VM don't let you get down to that level... With good reason. You will need to boot from each of them probably.
The Transmission you are talking about is made by Borg Warner. You know the people that have made gear boxes for US cars for... Longer than I have been alive. Battery Development??? Better thank the people that make wireless tools for that. Really they are already pumping millions of dollars into battery development. Those and Cell phones, laptops, and MP3 players are the ones pushing that. Tesla it nothing but a exotic car company. Kind of cool but the at the end of the day just not that important.
Trust me they will not get it. Mainframes are dull. They just work. Most people on slashdot have only used PCs. They can not imagine a computer that you never have to shut down. That you can upgrade CPUs and RAM with out any downtime. All they know is that it will not transcode any faster than their X86 and costs as much as a house.
Ahh. Well then that is your problem. That shouldn't happen at all. Also when you talk about through put you should look at strengths of the two systems. If you are doing anything with a lot of floating point. The Zmachine will lose to Intel every time. If you want to do that then get one of the Big Power boxes, a bunch of X86, or one of the big Itantium boxes with a lot of cores. If you are doing millions of database transactions and you want to make sure that it NEVER goes down. Get a Zmachine with an application that wasn't written by an idiot.
Exactly. IBM mainframes just run and run. You can swap out memory and CPUs without taking the system down. You measure uptimes by the year not by the hour or day. People don't buy a mainframe because they are stupid they do it because they have looked at the options and this is the best solution for their problem.
Of of the errors that IBM made was when they thought that the PC was an experiment. If they had only known that it would be a standard I would bet money that it would have used the 360 ISA and not the 8088.
Actually they are jumping for joy. Now if a Solaris shop needs some big Iron IBM can walk right in and sell a Z to them. If an IBM shop wants Solaris then IBM can say hey no need to by Sun hardware just put in on your Z. This is a happy day in Armonk.
Well they claim the Volt will get 50 MPG on gas which is very good. 40 mile range would mean that I would only use the gas motor one weekday of each week. Week ends it could depend on what I need to do. The Volt may be good enough but it will depend on the price like everything else. Now if Honda would put a diesel in the Element and a 15 gallon tank... I live in hurricane country so evacuation range is a good thing. If I could get a car that went say 500 miles+ on a tank that would be great.
Tesla is nothing but a exotic car company. They build toys for the rich and often go out of business unless some real car company buys them for a halo brand. Yea Tesla was cool but not really important. What bothers me more is I fear that GM will build the Volt and nobody will buy it That will be a real blow.
People keep saying how innovative Tesla is/was? But the Tesla roadster was nothing but an electric race car.. It is very expensive and not all that practical. They have not even shipped any to customers yet. We have no idea if they can even make a profit at $110,000 each. Toyota, Ford, Honda, and GM are shipping hybrids now. The Volt from GM and the new all electric from Chrysler are both pretty innovative and best of all probably producible.
The Tesla Roadster is at best an expensive exotic toy. At wost an unproductive fantasy. Tesla will not usher in the era of alternative vehicles. It will be Toyta, GM, Ford, Honda and all the other big car companies.
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The best part is I get to slug everybody that IM'd and sent me email to remind me about "Talk like a Pirate day!"
"Who buys those high-end Windows machines? Nobody with any sense."
People that make their living with their computer should.
The junk that they sell as a consumer notebook these days is terrible.
Audio recordings are full of static. Hard drives seem so slow that it just isn't funny and a build quality that is just a bad joke.
The specs are close on a lot of consumer notebooks but they cut corners on the parts that are not on the spec like hard drive speed, power supply quality, and build quality in general.
Yes you or I can take a consumer notebook and get a few years out of it. But a good notebook can last for five years or more and work every day for five years. If you don't play games then you might be surprised to see just how well a good five year old Thinkpad will work if you keep it clean and free of malware.
Quality really does count. I would rather spend a few hundred more for a quality product than for the cheapest piece of junk that will run Windows.
I don't own a Mac but I will pay a little more for a good notebook.
"2) My quad core desktop with dual HD4800 video cards still consumes less power than my old 5 year old Pentium desktop"
Not very likely dual HD4800? 4850s or 4870s?
The old Pentium uses so little power that it often ran with Just a heat sink and no fan!
That just doesn't add up. But then you gave very incomplete data.
Where F-94s and F-86Ds.
The ADC would practice night intercepts on airliners. Those two aircraft where some of the first to have afterburners. The pilots would often light the burner and pull up. Then shut down the burner.
Strange light making unusual maneuvers then is gone...
"I did check the illuminated target speed indicator. It went from 400K to 700K in a matter of seconds."
A drone with a jamming pod? Modern AI radar uses Doppler to get the speed of the the target. A jamming pod could spoof speed.
A123Systems which makes some of the most advanced batteries around put first put their products into cordless tools.
Cordless tools have done a lot to push battery tech for the simple reason that the battery for a good cordless tool must be.
Light.
Powerful.
and Rugged.
Also it is right now a multi-million dollar market.
So they are exactly the kind of batteries that you will want in an electric car.
Look to see A123 to supply the battery pack for the Volt.
Tesla couldn't get their gearbox to work right so they went to the old school gearbox maker for help and got one that worked.
If Tesla had delivered their car two years ago, a year ago, or even yesterday then yes they would be somewhat important.
By the time Tesla delivers a car they will be old news.
There are a lot of devices that still use Comports. You may not use them but they are common in a lot of industries.
"Dump LPT ports, all of it, the physical connector and the LPT architecture. Everyone is using a USB printer or a networked print server or a networked MF device."
There is a good amount of hardware that plugs in to those ports used in industrial controllers systems. They don;t cost much and are still useful.
"Dump dialup modems. If you need one plug it into your USB hub." I have run into devices that are mission critical that don't work with USB dialup modems. They also don't work with WinModems. I don't know why but I am guessing that a lot of newer modems play fast and loose with the lower speed standards. Oh and even the new versions of those devices still use dial up connections.
"Dump PCCard. It's long past its prime. It takes up a slot that never ever gets used on a laptop anymore." Again they are used for some wifi cards and other devices. Why dump a good expansion buss. The Expresscard slot is a good replacement.
"Dump PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports. Waste of space. If you need an external keyboard or trackball go USB or wireless."
Big expensive KVMs and here is a news flash. USB eats a lot more CPU cycles than PS/2.
For the average users you are right but there are a lot of none average users out there.
Appletalk was available when networking was one of those neat ideas.
The idea that you could network a bunch of macs together for very little money was mind blowing at the time.
Sure it wasn't TCP/IP but it was no worse than say Lantastic.
Yes and PCs never used RS-232 for keyboards.
"As TV manufacturers move from Cold Cathode Fluorescent backlights to OLED backlights, you'll see a significant drop in power use."
Unless people make the jump too 72" Tvs. I do agree it will help a lot but I worry that it will will be eaten up.
"What really needs to be dropped is standby power, which is being sucked up the whole time the TV is off."
I have an invention that will fix that. It is called an OFF BUTTON.
When you hit the OFF BUTTON the tv will be OFF. No power going through it at all.
Probably not going to happen since real off switches do tend to fail more than anybody would like. A microcontroller that runs off a super cap that controls the power circuit will probable be the solution of choice.
I think that the problem is that very few people have 13 to 17 inch LCD TVs anymore.
They are more power efficient but bigger. THe back light is the real killer.
Kind of in the range of Duh isn't this. Tempest goes back into the 80s and maybe even past that.
Seems very odd to me that this is news. I remember seeing an article on slashdot about reading modem leds, and all sorts of other methods.
I guess you could wrap your keyboard cable and monitor cable in a conductor and ground it to help cut the effective range down. Or just not worry about it.
For the CP/M disks a good starting point would probably be a 1571 and a Commodore 128. It can read a lot of CP/M formats.
Your other option would be to try and find a copy of a program called uniform for the PC. It could read just about anything.
virtual machines may not cut it. A lot of those devices need to bang the bits to work and VM don't let you get down to that level... With good reason.
You will need to boot from each of them probably.
The Transmission you are talking about is made by Borg Warner. You know the people that have made gear boxes for US cars for... Longer than I have been alive.
Battery Development??? Better thank the people that make wireless tools for that. Really they are already pumping millions of dollars into battery development. Those and Cell phones, laptops, and MP3 players are the ones pushing that.
Tesla it nothing but a exotic car company. Kind of cool but the at the end of the day just not that important.
Move to the middle of no where in the mid west :)
Trust me they will not get it.
Mainframes are dull. They just work. Most people on slashdot have only used PCs. They can not imagine a computer that you never have to shut down. That you can upgrade CPUs and RAM with out any downtime.
All they know is that it will not transcode any faster than their X86 and costs as much as a house.
Ahh. Well then that is your problem. That shouldn't happen at all. Also when you talk about through put you should look at strengths of the two systems.
If you are doing anything with a lot of floating point. The Zmachine will lose to Intel every time. If you want to do that then get one of the Big Power boxes, a bunch of X86, or one of the big Itantium boxes with a lot of cores.
If you are doing millions of database transactions and you want to make sure that it NEVER goes down. Get a Zmachine with an application that wasn't written by an idiot.
Exactly. IBM mainframes just run and run. You can swap out memory and CPUs without taking the system down. You measure uptimes by the year not by the hour or day.
People don't buy a mainframe because they are stupid they do it because they have looked at the options and this is the best solution for their problem.
Of of the errors that IBM made was when they thought that the PC was an experiment. If they had only known that it would be a standard I would bet money that it would have used the 360 ISA and not the 8088.
Actually they are jumping for joy.
Now if a Solaris shop needs some big Iron IBM can walk right in and sell a Z to them.
If an IBM shop wants Solaris then IBM can say hey no need to by Sun hardware just put in on your Z.
This is a happy day in Armonk.
And IBM mainframe running Solaris...
Now I have seen everything. Next AIX on the Sparc.
The thing I am more upset with is the lack of an express card slot.
If the had put in an express card slot then you could add a firewire port if you need it.
But Apple is moving back towards the idea of the computer as a closed box like the original Mac.
Well they claim the Volt will get 50 MPG on gas which is very good.
40 mile range would mean that I would only use the gas motor one weekday of each week. Week ends it could depend on what I need to do.
The Volt may be good enough but it will depend on the price like everything else.
Now if Honda would put a diesel in the Element and a 15 gallon tank... I live in hurricane country so evacuation range is a good thing.
If I could get a car that went say 500 miles+ on a tank that would be great.
Tesla is nothing but a exotic car company. They build toys for the rich and often go out of business unless some real car company buys them for a halo brand.
Yea Tesla was cool but not really important. What bothers me more is I fear that GM will build the Volt and nobody will buy it That will be a real blow.
People keep saying how innovative Tesla is/was?
But the Tesla roadster was nothing but an electric race car.. It is very expensive and not all that practical. They have not even shipped any to customers yet. We have no idea if they can even make a profit at $110,000 each.
Toyota, Ford, Honda, and GM are shipping hybrids now. The Volt from GM and the new all electric from Chrysler are both pretty innovative and best of all probably producible.
The Tesla Roadster is at best an expensive exotic toy. At wost an unproductive fantasy.
Tesla will not usher in the era of alternative vehicles. It will be Toyta, GM, Ford, Honda and all the other big car companies.