With built-in sound, video and ethernet, most home desktops wouldn't even need a single PCI slot. Your points about adding things such as an IEEE1394 card or DSL are interesting, but very few people would need this. I can't see too many average adding 1394, and most dsl connections (that I've dealt with) are accessed as external modems over etherent.
I think the only upgrades home users are generally interested in are adding a larger hard-drive, and increasing the ram in the machine.
Personally, I think I wouldn't be too happy with this sort of a system unless it was significantly cheaper. Then again (like many of us here on slashdot), I don't think I'm the average "home user".
What sound does this Gateway computer make in place of the Mac "bong"?
I've never seen a case mod that turned a Mac into something like *that*, but given the alternative image that Apple occasionally tries to follow I wouldn't be surprised if someone went and did this.
...can now have a cheap Beowulf Cluster super computer...
I know this post was a joke, but clustering of PS2s using Linux is something that actally *has* been attempted with some moderate success. Rumor has it that NCSA had a working two-node cluster as a proof of concept. I can't find any links to pictures or anything, but maybe someone else here has more info on it, or was even there for this.
IIRC, the biggest issues with using PS2s in this sort of an application was the extremely limited bandwidth between them. Having powerful, dedicated graphics processors running in parallel could lead to some interesting things, though!
It's not public money, it's money taken out of our own paychecks and "put away" by the US Gov't
Exactly. When it comes down to it, UI (or EI -- Employment Insurance -- as it's called here in Canada) is a form of insurance run by the government. You pay into it from every paycheck, insuring yourself against a potential job loss. If you lose your job, you still have to jump through many hoops until you actually see any money, but that's the same with *any* insurance company.
In contrast, welfare or any other form of social assistance is a redistribution of wealth. Everyone contributes a portion of their income via taxes so that those that can't work for some reason or other don't starve.
I'm not sure that having no cpu fan will make much of a difference for the total noise a system produces. On all of my boxes, the loudest component that always runs is the fan on the power supply. Hard drives and cdroms tend to be even louder, but they don't run full-time (unless you're a wee bit short on ram).
Granted, I'm not running super-high end systems, but I doubt the cooling requirements of the newest AMD and Intel chips are such that they require a fan to run so fast that it's louder than the power supply, especially if you buy a decent quality one.
If you have a way of monitoring temperature of your processor and motherboard, you *could* play around by reducing the voltages to the fans (both cpu + ps), to slow them down a bit. This might cut the noise to an acceptable level. Certainly not something I'd consider doing on a system that's important to you in any way, though!
Of course, if you're a *real* geek, you have your big system sitting in a server room somewhere and connect to it with an xterm sitting on your desk!
"Why is this news? This isn't freshmeat! Why don't you post every time Windows has a tiny update?"
We're already one step ahead of you! If you look around, you'll see most of the comparable windows stories are about bugs, problems and vulnerabilities. Windoes news here on/. seems to be so current that it gets posted long before there even is a fix. Linux bug-type news seems to have to wait until a whole new kernel gets released. I want equality, damnit!
I've found my computer monitor great for drying a wet bike helmet, or even "pre-heating" it for cold early morning commutes. There's nothing like putting on a slightly toasty helmet and then heading out when it's still dark. I've also used my monitor to dry out gloves, but there you have to be careful that they're not too wet and don't block too many of the vents of the monitor!
Other people I know have used their monitors for drying fruit (for ornamental purposes). It's amazing how different an orange will look after sitting on top of a monitor for several months!
We're going off topic here a little, but I think you're right. I think there's nothing wrong with general questions being asked here for the reasons you've said. Also, Slashdot (and Ask Slashdot) is a discussion forum as well as a news site.
A question asked here may very well be covered by countless faqs and Google searches, but could really lead to interesting discussions about related things. For example, a really simple question such as "How do I get X to work on my FooBar video card" is answered in so many different places that it's almost impossible *not* to stumble across the right info, but here it could lead to some really interesting discussions about features, unknown bugs, cool hacks and other things involving the card.
I think this is what Ask Slashdot should try to be about, in addition to providing pointers to the right answers to a question.
This is just a guess, but could your problems be related to apm or some other power management features? A bit over a year ago I was playing with apm on my Linux desktop. Whenever the computer went into a suspend or low-power mode, my clock would be completely messed up by several hours. I'm not sure if it was a bug on my motherboard, a bug in the apm code, or just that I'd misconfigured something. Either way, I just disabled all power management features (except using xset to turn off the monitor with dpms) and haven't had a problem since.
If you try this, you'll probably want to turn power management off both in software (remove apmd etc.) and in the motherboard's bios settings. Most motherboards should allow you to do this.
First, turn off the monitor. Always. That'll suck a lot of power up
Errr... Yes and no. Turning on and off frequently is not the best thing to do to save power. Whenever a monitor is powered on it will draw a higher amount of current than when it's normally running, so just switching a monitor off for only 5 minutes will probably *increase* your power consumption. Also, having a monitor come on and off many times a day probably isn't the best thing for it either; you can buy a lot of electricity for what it costs to fix or replace a monitor!
Play with your dpms settings; I find having my monitor power off after ~15 minutes works out best, meaning that if I haven't touched the computer in that time I've probably left the room. Of course physically turning off the monitor when leaving is the best thing to do. That way you *know* it won't turn on just because someone's bumped the desk or something.
When I discovered jikes, I nearly cried. It's that much faster. I've easily seen improvements in compile time of well over 10x what javac does.
For me the most painful part of java development had always been the compiles. Sitting there, waiting minutes for larger projects until everything was done. With jikes that now takes seconds. I really don't even want to think about the hours of my life that are missing from just waiting for javac...
I think most distros will install in a small footprint if you're careful and know what you're installing. I haven't tried Mandrake in a while so I can't comment there, but it's pretty easy to shoe-horn a RedHat 7.x release into about 80 megs.
Obviously that's with no X, but that still includes apache + mysql + some other useful things. Manually tearing out/usr/share/doc will also save a surprising amount of disk space. With a bit of tweaking, it should be no problem to get *any* distro to run (and be useful!) in ~50 megs. Of course that depends on what your definition of "useful" is...
I would imagine so. In fact, I'd go so far as to speculate that the next version of RedHat is not going to be 7.3 but rather 8.0 (yikes!).
If you take a look in the rawhide directory on your favourite mirror of the RedHat ftp, you'll see packages for KDE3 cvs builds, gcc3.1, and lots of other big changes that could break compatibility in not-so-surprising ways.
Many of the packages in there aren't simple installs on a 7.2 system anymore; the dependencies amongst them are too much. Either they require tens of core rawhide packages (i.e. a new glibc) to be installed, or in the case of the core packages, current 7.2 packages show incompatibilities.
Of course I may be completely wrong and the next RedHat *will* be 7.3 and all compatibility issues will be resolved by then (hey, rawhide *is* very beta!), but I wouldn't be surprised...
4 megs was (is!) a little tight to do anything meaningful with XFree86. I remember playing around on a box with 4 megs in 1995 and it just being too slow and hitting swap almost non-stop. After upgrading to a whopping 8 megs, though, a threshold was reached and I was able to have a fairly useful (and responsive) desktop on that old 486-33.
I'm sure current versions of XFree86 would run about the same given that old hardware.
There doesn't seem to be an excessive amount of new eyecandy, but that's no surprise since Gnome 2 is supposed to be more a change to the libraries and backend. I'm sure new and updated apps that take advantage of this will follow soon after the actual release.
I couldn't agree more. Linux seems to do very well for running several different services simultaneously, especially on low-end hardware for low-demand applications.
I've got an "old" (was it really *that* long ago??) 486 running sendmail + apache + samba + nfs + mysql + imap, and also doing some ip masquerading for the dsl. This is using a Redhat 7.0 install (with all updates, of course!) and some fairly anal ipmasq rules. On my home network here it performs beautifully, and the price certainly is right!
It runs a 1.8 kernel though, but its enough to get the Job done
Are you *sure* about that one? Stable Linux kernel versions were 1.0, 1.2, 2.0, 2.2, 2.4. I don't know what exactly Freesco runs on (never tired it), but since it seems to use masquerading, I'd guess it's probably one of the later 2.0 series.
After seeing this post, I decided to see what *I* still have kicking around on old floppies. The shoebox of 3.5" disks has the ususal assortment of crap-- Doom1, Windows 3.1, and some disks with drivers on them for hardware that's long extinct.
In a deep corner of a closet I found the following gem: Leisure Suit Larry 1 and 2, both in the original boxes. Methinks it's time to dig out an old 5.25" drive from the parts box and see if I can get it up and running in a dos emulator. Alas, I may have to follow some of the advice posted elsewhere here to install the drive. Turns out that I've also run out of space on the front of my case.
Thanks, Slashdot, you've found me a great way to kill time for the evening!
Can anyone speculate how easy it would be to sustain a stable orbit around the moon for long periods of time?
IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist), but I would imagine that the influence of the earth's gravity on an object orbiting the moon could destabilize a satellite's orbit rather quickly.
"It's like we've always worn red sunglasses. When we take them off, we'll discover red flowers, red apples, red ladybugs, red flames."
Does anyone else think that part of this project has to do with research into "pharmaceuticals" in addition to the astronomy research? Sounds kind of "spacey" to me...
Forget this web-board with limited filtering business, I want a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Just think, all you'd have to do is point your favourite news reader (i.e. tin) at nntp.slashdot.org and post away. The bandwidth savings over this heavyweight html+graphics crap would alone be worth it, while the ability to choose your own client program with its own interface and filtering rules would be even better.
The scary thing is that this could probably be done in a reasonable way. Articles could map to newsgroups on the server (with new ones appearing daily and old ones disappearing). Since comments are threaded anyways, this should transfer across directly. And as long as the slashdot username and password are required for accessing the NNTP server, there shouldn't be any real problems with unauthorized usage by spammers and such.
Oh well. Too bad most of the crowd here is too young to remember what usenet even is...
Slashdot Mirror
With built-in sound, video and ethernet, most home desktops wouldn't even need a single PCI slot. Your points about adding things such as an IEEE1394 card or DSL are interesting, but very few people would need this. I can't see too many average adding 1394, and most dsl connections (that I've dealt with) are accessed as external modems over etherent.
I think the only upgrades home users are generally interested in are adding a larger hard-drive, and increasing the ram in the machine.
Personally, I think I wouldn't be too happy with this sort of a system unless it was significantly cheaper. Then again (like many of us here on slashdot), I don't think I'm the average "home user".
What sound does this Gateway computer make in place of the Mac "bong"?
I've never seen a case mod that turned a Mac into something like *that*, but given the alternative image that Apple occasionally tries to follow I wouldn't be surprised if someone went and did this.
Startup sound in that case? Definitely a gurgle!
...can now have a cheap Beowulf Cluster super computer...
I know this post was a joke, but clustering of PS2s using Linux is something that actally *has* been attempted with some moderate success. Rumor has it that NCSA had a working two-node cluster as a proof of concept. I can't find any links to pictures or anything, but maybe someone else here has more info on it, or was even there for this.
IIRC, the biggest issues with using PS2s in this sort of an application was the extremely limited bandwidth between them. Having powerful, dedicated graphics processors running in parallel could lead to some interesting things, though!
A friend of mine has a bachelor's degree in journalism. The official abbreviation is BJ.
It's not public money, it's money taken out of our own paychecks and "put away" by the US Gov't
Exactly. When it comes down to it, UI (or EI -- Employment Insurance -- as it's called here in Canada) is a form of insurance run by the government. You pay into it from every paycheck, insuring yourself against a potential job loss. If you lose your job, you still have to jump through many hoops until you actually see any money, but that's the same with *any* insurance company.
In contrast, welfare or any other form of social assistance is a redistribution of wealth. Everyone contributes a portion of their income via taxes so that those that can't work for some reason or other don't starve.
I'm not sure that having no cpu fan will make much of a difference for the total noise a system produces. On all of my boxes, the loudest component that always runs is the fan on the power supply. Hard drives and cdroms tend to be even louder, but they don't run full-time (unless you're a wee bit short on ram).
Granted, I'm not running super-high end systems, but I doubt the cooling requirements of the newest AMD and Intel chips are such that they require a fan to run so fast that it's louder than the power supply, especially if you buy a decent quality one.
If you have a way of monitoring temperature of your processor and motherboard, you *could* play around by reducing the voltages to the fans (both cpu + ps), to slow them down a bit. This might cut the noise to an acceptable level. Certainly not something I'd consider doing on a system that's important to you in any way, though!
Of course, if you're a *real* geek, you have your big system sitting in a server room somewhere and connect to it with an xterm sitting on your desk!
"Why is this news? This isn't freshmeat! Why don't you post every time Windows has a tiny update?"
/. seems to be so current that it gets posted long before there even is a fix. Linux bug-type news seems to have to wait until a whole new kernel gets released. I want equality, damnit!
We're already one step ahead of you! If you look around, you'll see most of the comparable windows stories are about bugs, problems and vulnerabilities. Windoes news here on
I've found my computer monitor great for drying a wet bike helmet, or even "pre-heating" it for cold early morning commutes. There's nothing like putting on a slightly toasty helmet and then heading out when it's still dark. I've also used my monitor to dry out gloves, but there you have to be careful that they're not too wet and don't block too many of the vents of the monitor!
Other people I know have used their monitors for drying fruit (for ornamental purposes). It's amazing how different an orange will look after sitting on top of a monitor for several months!
We're going off topic here a little, but I think you're right. I think there's nothing wrong with general questions being asked here for the reasons you've said. Also, Slashdot (and Ask Slashdot) is a discussion forum as well as a news site.
A question asked here may very well be covered by countless faqs and Google searches, but could really lead to interesting discussions about related things. For example, a really simple question such as "How do I get X to work on my FooBar video card" is answered in so many different places that it's almost impossible *not* to stumble across the right info, but here it could lead to some really interesting discussions about features, unknown bugs, cool hacks and other things involving the card.
I think this is what Ask Slashdot should try to be about, in addition to providing pointers to the right answers to a question.
This is just a guess, but could your problems be related to apm or some other power management features? A bit over a year ago I was playing with apm on my Linux desktop. Whenever the computer went into a suspend or low-power mode, my clock would be completely messed up by several hours. I'm not sure if it was a bug on my motherboard, a bug in the apm code, or just that I'd misconfigured something. Either way, I just disabled all power management features (except using xset to turn off the monitor with dpms) and haven't had a problem since.
If you try this, you'll probably want to turn power management off both in software (remove apmd etc.) and in the motherboard's bios settings. Most motherboards should allow you to do this.
Good luck!
First, turn off the monitor. Always. That'll suck a lot of power up
Errr... Yes and no. Turning on and off frequently is not the best thing to do to save power. Whenever a monitor is powered on it will draw a higher amount of current than when it's normally running, so just switching a monitor off for only 5 minutes will probably *increase* your power consumption. Also, having a monitor come on and off many times a day probably isn't the best thing for it either; you can buy a lot of electricity for what it costs to fix or replace a monitor!
Play with your dpms settings; I find having my monitor power off after ~15 minutes works out best, meaning that if I haven't touched the computer in that time I've probably left the room. Of course physically turning off the monitor when leaving is the best thing to do. That way you *know* it won't turn on just because someone's bumped the desk or something.
the compiler's name is "flyingember"
And here I was thinking it was gcc the whole time. Live and learn...
When I discovered jikes, I nearly cried. It's that much faster. I've easily seen improvements in compile time of well over 10x what javac does.
For me the most painful part of java development had always been the compiles. Sitting there, waiting minutes for larger projects until everything was done. With jikes that now takes seconds. I really don't even want to think about the hours of my life that are missing from just waiting for javac...
I think most distros will install in a small footprint if you're careful and know what you're installing. I haven't tried Mandrake in a while so I can't comment there, but it's pretty easy to shoe-horn a RedHat 7.x release into about 80 megs.
/usr/share/doc will also save a surprising amount of disk space. With a bit of tweaking, it should be no problem to get *any* distro to run (and be useful!) in ~50 megs. Of course that depends on what your definition of "useful" is...
Obviously that's with no X, but that still includes apache + mysql + some other useful things. Manually tearing out
When is RedHat 7.3 expected? After KDE3 in April?
I would imagine so. In fact, I'd go so far as to speculate that the next version of RedHat is not going to be 7.3 but rather 8.0 (yikes!).
If you take a look in the rawhide directory on your favourite mirror of the RedHat ftp, you'll see packages for KDE3 cvs builds, gcc3.1, and lots of other big changes that could break compatibility in not-so-surprising ways.
Many of the packages in there aren't simple installs on a 7.2 system anymore; the dependencies amongst them are too much. Either they require tens of core rawhide packages (i.e. a new glibc) to be installed, or in the case of the core packages, current 7.2 packages show incompatibilities.
Of course I may be completely wrong and the next RedHat *will* be 7.3 and all compatibility issues will be resolved by then (hey, rawhide *is* very beta!), but I wouldn't be surprised...
4 megs was (is!) a little tight to do anything meaningful with XFree86. I remember playing around on a box with 4 megs in 1995 and it just being too slow and hitting swap almost non-stop. After upgrading to a whopping 8 megs, though, a threshold was reached and I was able to have a fairly useful (and responsive) desktop on that old 486-33.
I'm sure current versions of XFree86 would run about the same given that old hardware.
There's a few up on the dotplan website:
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/.
There doesn't seem to be an excessive amount of new eyecandy, but that's no surprise since Gnome 2 is supposed to be more a change to the libraries and backend. I'm sure new and updated apps that take advantage of this will follow soon after the actual release.
Yes, and don't forget to watch out for those penguins!
(also oddly appropriate for slashdot...)
I couldn't agree more. Linux seems to do very well for running several different services simultaneously, especially on low-end hardware for low-demand applications.
I've got an "old" (was it really *that* long ago??) 486 running sendmail + apache + samba + nfs + mysql + imap, and also doing some ip masquerading for the dsl. This is using a Redhat 7.0 install (with all updates, of course!) and some fairly anal ipmasq rules. On my home network here it performs beautifully, and the price certainly is right!
It runs a 1.8 kernel though, but its enough to get the Job done
Are you *sure* about that one? Stable Linux kernel versions were 1.0, 1.2, 2.0, 2.2, 2.4. I don't know what exactly Freesco runs on (never tired it), but since it seems to use masquerading, I'd guess it's probably one of the later 2.0 series.
After seeing this post, I decided to see what *I* still have kicking around on old floppies. The shoebox of 3.5" disks has the ususal assortment of crap-- Doom1, Windows 3.1, and some disks with drivers on them for hardware that's long extinct.
In a deep corner of a closet I found the following gem: Leisure Suit Larry 1 and 2, both in the original boxes. Methinks it's time to dig out an old 5.25" drive from the parts box and see if I can get it up and running in a dos emulator. Alas, I may have to follow some of the advice posted elsewhere here to install the drive. Turns out that I've also run out of space on the front of my case.
Thanks, Slashdot, you've found me a great way to kill time for the evening!
Can anyone speculate how easy it would be to sustain a stable orbit around the moon for long periods of time?
IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist), but I would imagine that the influence of the earth's gravity on an object orbiting the moon could destabilize a satellite's orbit rather quickly.
"It's like we've always worn red sunglasses. When we take them off, we'll discover red flowers, red apples, red ladybugs, red flames."
Does anyone else think that part of this project has to do with research into "pharmaceuticals" in addition to the astronomy research? Sounds kind of "spacey" to me...
Forget this web-board with limited filtering business, I want a Slashdot-to-Usenet gateway. Just think, all you'd have to do is point your favourite news reader (i.e. tin) at nntp.slashdot.org and post away. The bandwidth savings over this heavyweight html+graphics crap would alone be worth it, while the ability to choose your own client program with its own interface and filtering rules would be even better.
The scary thing is that this could probably be done in a reasonable way. Articles could map to newsgroups on the server (with new ones appearing daily and old ones disappearing). Since comments are threaded anyways, this should transfer across directly. And as long as the slashdot username and password are required for accessing the NNTP server, there shouldn't be any real problems with unauthorized usage by spammers and such.
Oh well. Too bad most of the crowd here is too young to remember what usenet even is...
...you could spend 45 minutes disecting their testicles while they watched...
what testicles???