What I cannot find is a modern G4 based platform not maufactured by apple that is capable of Booting OS X natively. I have seen short lived attempts made, the best example being a hardware development platform for PPC that was put on "indefinite hold" shortly after this years Linuxworld Expo.
Another revenue model you might consider is selling wifi access like downtown parking. You could charge customers on a regular basis, or get local business owners to "Validate" surfing. The idea would be that business owners could give out single-use codes to customers that asked (and presumably bought something) and they could use these codes to authenticate to the access points for a given time limit.
The idea is the same as when you go to a mall and get a store to validate your parking. Distributing one-time access codes would be a little tricky- if shopkeepers had web access though, they could easily use a web interface that would spit out new codes. Ideally, local businesses would provide you with enough revenue that you wouldn't have to rely on user subscriptions.
Judging from your sig, I'd guess you're a gamer. How well do games run under a VMware session? Can you play windows games that don't work with wine yet?
From what I've seen, VMware boasts something like a 2x-4x slowdown, which is actually pretty good for a (CSIM) virtual machine. It's by far the fastest CSIM virtual machine implementation I've seen.
"There's something very important I forgot to tell you." "What?" "Don't cross the streams." "Why?" "It would be bad." "I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. Whattya mean 'bad?'" "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light." "Total protonic reversal...." "Right, that's bad...OK.. important safety tip. Thanks, Egon. "
I'm not sure how much truth is behind the allegations that Intel is trying to convince Asus NOT to make boards for AMD processors. If this is true, though, I would definitely throw that in the category of *evil* business practices. In my opinion Asus makes the best quality boards with some of the fastest bus speeds for the best prices around. I won't buy anything that isn't an Asus board. And there are alot of people that agree with me, especially AMD consumers.
If Asus doesn't make a board for the Athlon, it will hurt AMD bad. Lots of people won't be able to get the Asus/AMD combination that we have all come to love in these past few years. This could be *BAD* for AMD.
"I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing, Egon. What do you mean by bad?"
The most interesting thing, I think, about the BWP is some of the tricks that the directors used to make the movie so scary.
1) the use of no sound. i haven't seen this done since Kubrick's "The Shining." no sound is so much scarier than any cheezy music the directors drum up. hollywood really needs to catch up on this trick. it's just downright eerie.
2) so many things left to the imagination. you're own imagination (with a little help) is the scariest thing there is. the directors didn't try to give away everything, they just made suggestions and let us scare ourselves. in the scene with the bundle of sticks and bloody human pieces, all i saw were red chunks, but everyone around me saw what they wanted to: i've heard "it's his eyes," teeth, intestines, tongue, nose(?), whatever. personally i thought it was fingers, but you can see whatever you want to see. You never get to see the witch. you're free to imagine her being whatever you want her to be: a big hairy cafeteria-type chick, or those two hillbillies from Deliverance. Spielberg (sp?) played around with this in Jaws, not showing the shark for the first hour or so of the movie, but eventually he broke down. BWP takes it all the way. Even the scene where something was beating on their tent from all sides in the middle of the night. All I could imagine was 50 little dead kids surrounding the tent and beating on it with their fists. Creepy.
3) the breakdown of the human psyche. watching the characters slowly degrade was one of the scariest things to me. these characters weren't in control like some horror movie heroes. they were bickering, lost, fatigued, and scared out of there wits. listening to Josh and Heather fight and scream, or beat up on Matt for losing the map was pretty unnerving. I just found all the tension in the movie to be unsettling. alot of emotions that other horror movies just don't seem to invoke from me. Obviously the use of the documentary style filming made it ALOT more realistic, (see KIDS), but with good editing and a great idea like this, these guys seem to have come up with my favorite movie for this summer.
I did this with my old ThinkPad 350C it looks pretty sweet. I fully recommend that anyone with an old portable that they want to play around with gives it a shot. The trick is getting the screen cover to pop off, some models are harder than others. But if you can get the top polarized filter out you're golden. Then just replace the top filter with a piece of clear sturdy plastic about the smae thickness (plexiglass works great of you can find it that thin.) Get a pair of old school snowboarding goggles and cut out circles from the filter you removed and fasten them to the inside of the goggles and WALA! Stealth computing. It looks pretty fly when you're hacking away at your portable and there's nothing but a blank screen in front of you. And if you really wanna be smooth, try painting over the characters on the keyboard so you have a completely blank terminal in front of you. My thinkpad looks cool this way.
There are some applications of this that would really make life alot easier, i.e. Access to updated and current maps so you can use the maps and your sattelite GPD uplink to find detours, a dedicated line so you can call for help in an emergency, although it probably wouldn't work if your battery was dead. But here in Ann Arbor the drivers are crazy enough as it is, and the ones with Cell Phones are even worse! That's just what I need, to get hit by a minivan while crossing the street b/c someone is trying to check their email instead of driving. The applications are endless, but I wouldn't bet on the consumer using these resources very responsibly.
Oh my gosh, Linux is so big they could barely fit UCLinux on a SIMM! that's horrible. And all those single floppy distros(Tom's Root Boot), my gosh, talk about a bloated kernel!
Personally I think that the scalabilty of Linux is one of it's greatest assests. It can be as bloated and slow or as small and fast as you want it to be.
I gotta admit though, anyone who uses Beowulf clusters is OK in my book, even if they don't know how to recompile a kernel;)
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Oh sure, you can use table scraps to power the flux capacitor, but the engine still runs on gasoline.
That dog just won't hunt.
Now cut that fence and get this G-d d-mn company on the move.
What I cannot find is a modern G4 based platform not maufactured by apple that is capable of Booting OS X natively. I have seen short lived attempts made, the best example being a hardware development platform for PPC that was put on "indefinite hold" shortly after this years Linuxworld Expo.
Macs don't make that much sense for a renderfarm, although a few xserves do the job just nicely
Good point.
Another revenue model you might consider is selling wifi access like downtown parking. You could charge customers on a regular basis, or get local business owners to "Validate" surfing. The idea would be that business owners could give out single-use codes to customers that asked (and presumably bought something) and they could use these codes to authenticate to the access points for a given time limit.
The idea is the same as when you go to a mall and get a store to validate your parking. Distributing one-time access codes would be a little tricky- if shopkeepers had web access though, they could easily use a web interface that would spit out new codes. Ideally, local businesses would provide you with enough revenue that you wouldn't have to rely on user subscriptions.
Judging from your sig, I'd guess you're a gamer. How well do games run under a VMware session? Can you play windows games that don't work with wine yet?
./adam12
From what I've seen, VMware boasts something like a 2x-4x slowdown, which is actually pretty good for a (CSIM) virtual machine. It's by far the fastest CSIM virtual machine implementation I've seen.
"A long time have I watched this one."
"There's something very important I forgot to tell you."
"What?"
"Don't cross the streams."
"Why?"
"It would be bad."
"I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. Whattya mean 'bad?'"
"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."
"Total protonic reversal...."
"Right, that's bad...OK.. important safety tip. Thanks, Egon. "
./adam12
I'm not sure how much truth is behind the allegations that Intel is trying to convince Asus NOT to make boards for AMD processors. If this is true, though, I would definitely throw that in the category of *evil* business practices. In my opinion Asus makes the best quality boards with some of the fastest bus speeds for the best prices around. I won't buy anything that isn't an Asus board. And there are alot of people that agree with me, especially AMD consumers.
If Asus doesn't make a board for the Athlon, it will hurt AMD bad. Lots of people won't be able to get the Asus/AMD combination that we have all come to love in these past few years. This could be *BAD* for AMD.
"I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing, Egon. What do you mean by bad?"
./adam12
I think we should leave this decision up to Dan Quayle. After all, he invented the interenet....
./adam12
*some* spoilers ahead . . .
The most interesting thing, I think, about the BWP is some of the tricks that the directors used to make the movie so scary.
1) the use of no sound. i haven't seen this done since Kubrick's "The Shining." no sound is so much scarier than any cheezy music the directors drum up. hollywood really needs to catch up on this trick. it's just downright eerie.
2) so many things left to the imagination. you're own imagination (with a little help) is the scariest thing there is. the directors didn't try to give away everything, they just made suggestions and let us scare ourselves. in the scene with the bundle of sticks and bloody human pieces, all i saw were red chunks, but everyone around me saw what they wanted to: i've heard "it's his eyes," teeth, intestines, tongue, nose(?), whatever. personally i thought it was fingers, but you can see whatever you want to see.
You never get to see the witch. you're free to imagine her being whatever you want her to be: a big hairy cafeteria-type chick, or those two hillbillies from Deliverance. Spielberg (sp?) played around with this in Jaws, not showing the shark for the first hour or so of the movie, but eventually he broke down. BWP takes it all the way.
Even the scene where something was beating on their tent from all sides in the middle of the night. All I could imagine was 50 little dead kids surrounding the tent and beating on it with their fists. Creepy.
3) the breakdown of the human psyche. watching the characters slowly degrade was one of the scariest things to me. these characters weren't in control like some horror movie heroes. they were bickering, lost, fatigued, and scared out of there wits. listening to Josh and Heather fight and scream, or beat up on Matt for losing the map was pretty unnerving. I just found all the tension in the movie to be unsettling. alot of emotions that other horror movies just don't seem to invoke from me.
Obviously the use of the documentary style filming made it ALOT more realistic, (see KIDS), but with good editing and a great idea like this, these guys seem to have come up with my favorite movie for this summer.
I did this with my old ThinkPad 350C it looks pretty sweet. I fully recommend that anyone with an old portable that they want to play around with gives it a shot. The trick is getting the screen cover to pop off, some models are harder than others. But if you can get the top polarized filter out you're golden. Then just replace the top filter with a piece of clear sturdy plastic about the smae thickness (plexiglass works great of you can find it that thin.) Get a pair of old school snowboarding goggles and cut out circles from the filter you removed and fasten them to the inside of the goggles and WALA! Stealth computing. It looks pretty fly when you're hacking away at your portable and there's nothing but a blank screen in front of you.
And if you really wanna be smooth, try painting over the characters on the keyboard so you have a completely blank terminal in front of you. My thinkpad looks cool this way.
There are some applications of this that would really make life alot easier, i.e. Access to updated and current maps so you can use the maps and your sattelite GPD uplink to find detours, a dedicated line so you can call for help in an emergency, although it probably wouldn't work if your battery was dead. But here in Ann Arbor the drivers are crazy enough as it is, and the ones with Cell Phones are even worse! That's just what I need, to get hit by a minivan while crossing the street b/c someone is trying to check their email instead of driving. The applications are endless, but I wouldn't bet on the consumer using these resources very responsibly.
"A long time have I watched this one"
Oh my gosh, Linux is so big they could barely fit UCLinux on a SIMM! that's horrible. And all those single floppy distros(Tom's Root Boot), my gosh, talk about a bloated kernel!
;)
Personally I think that the scalabilty of Linux is one of it's greatest assests. It can be as bloated and slow or as small and fast as you want it to be.
I gotta admit though, anyone who uses Beowulf clusters is OK in my book, even if they don't know how to recompile a kernel
It's interesing that Linux and computers keep getting smaller and smaller while Microsoft's source code keeps getting bigger and bigger ...
"Judge me by my size do you? and well you should not..."