Why pay $40 for RH6 with no support? It seems like it would be more helpful to order a RH6 CD from CheapBytes for $2 and donate $40 to Debian on the same credit card order.
Personally, I just downloaded Slackware 4 last week, though.
Some sort of a combination design would be best. Say something equivalent to a Rio that has a CD drive attached. 650 MB of MP3 files could be cached on the CD disk, but they would be cued up into 90 MB of RAM where the song would be played from. With a reasonably fast-access CD drive mechanism, motors would only need to run (and draw significant power) intermittantly to load songs into the RAM.
The processor should probably be a specialty DSP chip of some sort (i.e. from TI or someone who makes good DSP) so it wouldn't be a power sap itself. What processor is used in the Rio?
If they are in negotigations with the individual, then it's entirely possible that this whole hotheaded discussion will work against the cause.
Re:Dead end vs. Dead end.
on
PDA+MP3 Player
·
· Score: 1
You mean there are people out there who treated Iomega drives as anything but sneakernet devices?
I find it insane that anybody would keep archival information on expen$ive Zip disks, when a CDR costs 1/10 as much and holds 6 times as much data (and is readable on any machine with a CD reader)
I bought six zipdisks when I bought my parallel port Zip drive (it was $65 on buy.com, a price I've never seen there since then) and never intend to buy another Zip disk.
It's interesting. You're proposing that the solution to the problem is to hamstring Microsoft so it's so balkanized that it's as weak as the Unix vendors. That's an interesting approach. Are you proposing that the government also reimburse all the businesses damaged by the new balkanized computer industry? Or can people like yourself instead by found liable?
One person's garbage is another person's treasure. There are even people in the world who use their computer, instead of poking around being awestruck by what's inside it.
Rumor has it there are millions of people out there doing productive billable work using Microsoft products. Maybe someday poke your head out the door and notice them.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste by seething in hatred at something you don't understand and you can't change.
Why should volume discounts on software be illegal? I am having a hard time following your logic as to why it's a ridiculous notion. You're coming off as being rather absurb.
When companies like Dell offer a bundled OS with sale of a computer they also become the support organization for that copy of the OS. Unless they suddenly decide they want the headache of supporting a whole bunch of new software they know little about, it isn't economically feasible for them to distribute it.
You wouldn't happen to be saying the government should force them to sell alternative OSes with their equipment would you? In that case your reasoning makes more sense, and is far easier to refute.
I certainly can't speak for Mr. Gates, but I've gotten the distinct impression that he is into being successful more than anything else. Power is part of what he sees as success.
Oh, and he's been pretty successful, too.
(many people are very envious envious of his success. Of course they won't ever admit it. They get very shrill about denying it.)
It's obvious you belong in charge of the bulk granola at the Co-op and not anywhere near a marketing organization. Let's get real here.
Economies of scale do not work when there has to be somebody integrating 10,000 different possible combinations. Preinstall versions of software don't get picked off racks by little elves and installed on each hard drive on an as-needed basis. Pre-installs are built on one drive, which is then duplicated 10,000 times on drives before they are put into machines.
Re:But ordering a-la-carte is more costly...
on
IBM & Microsoft Rift
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· Score: 1
That sounds so thuggish.
Slashdot is starting to become an ingrown little fiefdom of thugs preaching to one another. It's fairly repulsive to some of us who use a lot of different OSes for various purposes.
Anybody who doesn't sing along in the chorus of war songs against Microsoft is basically branded as a fool or an evile spy. Any counter arguement to anti MS storm trooper fantasies is shouted down. It's sad really, because it becomes obvious that its just the Usenet phenomenon taking hold here.
The more vocal segments of the Linux "community" seem to be more anti- than anything else. And it's sad, because Linux has so much potential for use in a lot of ways. But regular folks get driven away by the reek of cultishness.
Band together, little men. Preach to one another about how cool you are for not buying into "The Mans" establishment. You look like bloody fools.
USENET has rules. However, the rules thus far have always been based on a form of consensus. Maybe that form of consensus is now obsolete, given that USENET and the net in general is no longer the domain of a rarified elite.
I used to like the higher quality of content on USENET of days now past. But I'm not foolish enough to believe that any good thing will last forever. The net is a bigger world now, and the consensus model probably isn't going to work any longer. Putting up walls and barriers will kill USENET just as much as the spam will.
It's over. We don't send messages to each other using pnuematic tubes in the wall anymore either. The spammers didn't 'win'- the world has just changed. It does that from time to time. Deal with it.
I suspect that a power-switch event could be linked to trigger a shutdown somehow, maybe in the inittable (?) like control-alt-delete is. It seems like pretty low-level hardware stuff, though. Does anybody know if power-switch handling is part of the ATX specification (which I believe is available at Intel somewhere) to make it worth the effort of something like this? (it would be a nightmare to have it be architecture dependent with tons of variations)
I prefer the "Baby AT" form factor (it is wrong to call it just 'AT'- the actual PC-AT footprint was a MONSTER- bigger than ATX) because I can go to swapmeets and get mondo tower cases for $12.50, strip out the older hardware (386 or 486 usually), put in a newer motherboard, and stand 'em in the corner of the lab with all the other *nix servers I've got running. It's increasingly an obsolete form factor for voltage and layout reasons. It's worth noting, however, that the repositioning of the CPU, while it makes it much easier to plug full-legnth cards into the slots isn't that important. There just aren't many full-length cards being made these days. My STB Reality 3-D video card is the longest PCI card I've seen and it's only a 3/4 length card.
We're supposed to pull all the ISA cards, fill the connectors with epoxy, and cut off all the serial/parallel headers at the board-edge anyways, you know, to meet Microsoft's PC2000 requirement of no ISA, and no "legacy" Serial/Parallel ports.
I have never, ever, going all the way back to 4.77 MHz 8088 systems, seen a PC system that used anything but a switching power supply. I believe my old Z-80 'bigboard' system (early 80's vintage) used a linear supply. Is that what you mean by 'old power supply'?
In the old days (in the "PC" time scale) power supplies were sold separate from cases (and all for big bucks) but it's correct that it's almost always a package deal these days. And cases are getting to be really, really chintzy lately. (not quite aluminum foil yet, but the beancounters are working on it...)
My FIC VA-503+ is connected to an AT power supply and appears to work. I hadn't noticed if it had a big heatsinked regulator or not, but I believe it does. Possibly it just doesn't have a big heatsink (more efficient?), but the lower-than-5 voltage IS being produced somehow. All later-generation Pentium-class chips need split voltages.
It isn't possible to power an ATX motherboard with an AT power supply. The ATX power supplies produce an additional 3.2 volt output not present on a standard AT power supply. That is why modern motherboards that work with AT power supplies always have a big heatsinked part on them, to regulate and produce the lower voltage not availabe from an AT power supply (which only supplies +-5 and +-12 volts). A cord adaptor to allow you to use an AT supply on an ATX motherboard would have to incorporate a pretty fancy inline DC-DC converter to give the MB the voltages/current it needs.
I can testify from direct experience that reversing the two power connectors on an AT motherboard does not always fry anything. I've done it a few times in recent history. Newer power supplies sense a massive overcurrent condition and shut down without any damage. Because of the way the pins are assigned, plugging the connectors in reverse does a pretty good job of shorting the right stuff out to protect the hardware. Older supplies and older systems in general probably don't have fast enough current limiting and safety shutdown for this to work, though.
I am curious to know how this works. If you, say, wanted the reverse behavior, for the power enable line coming from the MB to the power supply to disable power supply startup when power is supplied. How does the system power up far enough into the powerup sequence for the Motherboard to read bios settings and know it should not continue to power up? Is there a bistable latch circuit in there somewhere?
**offtopic alert** It's a phenomenon I have encountered in embedded designs in the past- a device has to be on in order to know if it should turn itself on. It certainly sells more MOV and Gas-tube surge protectors to have everything powered up and ready for a soft-powerup, or a lightening jolt. In the old days when you turned something off, it stayed off and was physically disconnected from the power grid. (shaking head and muttering about how glad I am my Stereo uses a Harmon-Kardon tube-type integrated amplifier) **end of offtopic alert**
Awhile back I needed the additional 3.2 volts that an ATX supply provides, to power a DEC Alpha motherboard (Cabriolet). The motherboard used the traditional AT-type power supply connector but had additional connectors for the 3.2 volts it needed. I ended up chopping off the connector on an ATX supply and splicing on a traditional AT connector, then hooking up the 3.2 volt connectors to the 3.2 volt lines. Then I had to ground the control line that the MB uses to control the power supply. It worked out okay, after a bit of reverse engineering the ATX power supply spec.
Actually, you would find that Microsoft is very liberal regarding single-user incidents of software copying. If you upgrade to a newer version of Office, their response is "give the old copy to a friend if you like" because they know once someone is on the Office bandwagon they'll eventually be buying an upgrade version. (go ahead and groan, anti MS zealots, but it's the truth) Obviously the official position has to be absolute, but I'd be curious to hear of any instances where Microsoft has busted an individual end user for copying one of their products for personal use. They've got bigger fish to fry, i.e. businesses pirating their products on a wide scale.
When MS won the Look-N-Feel lawsuit Apple filed against them (back when Apple was playing legal games that ran all the other x86 GUI vendors out of business, plowing the ground for the success of Windows, ultimately leading to their own defeat), a legal precedent was set that in turn allowed others to legally clone the Windows 95 widgets. Thus making it legal for things like FVWM-95 and StarOffice to exist.
Microsoft sees this kind of stuff as good for the industry. I suspect they'll be happy to sell Linux users Windows software to run under Wine. (what could be better than selling licenses they'll never have to back up with technical support?)
I think he is referring to back when Microsoft mostly was selling Basic Interpreters (in software and in firmware) and IBM contracted with them to produce (purchase and repackage, actually) PC-DOS to run on the new IBM-PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Why pay $40 for RH6 with no support? It seems like it would be more helpful to order a RH6 CD from CheapBytes for $2 and donate $40 to Debian on the same credit card order.
Personally, I just downloaded Slackware 4 last week, though.
Some sort of a combination design would be best. Say something equivalent to a Rio that has a CD drive attached. 650 MB of MP3 files could be cached on the CD disk, but they would be cued up into 90 MB of RAM where the song would be played from. With a reasonably fast-access CD drive mechanism, motors would only need to run (and draw significant power) intermittantly to load songs into the RAM.
The processor should probably be a specialty DSP chip of some sort (i.e. from TI or someone who makes good DSP) so it wouldn't be a power sap itself. What processor is used in the Rio?
If they are in negotigations with the individual, then it's entirely possible that this whole hotheaded discussion will work against the cause.
You mean there are people out there who treated Iomega drives as anything but sneakernet devices?
I find it insane that anybody would keep archival information on expen$ive Zip disks, when a CDR costs 1/10 as much and holds 6 times as much data (and is readable on any machine with a CD reader)
I bought six zipdisks when I bought my parallel port Zip drive (it was $65 on buy.com, a price I've never seen there since then) and never intend to buy another Zip disk.
It's interesting. You're proposing that the solution to the problem is to hamstring Microsoft so it's so balkanized that it's as weak as the Unix vendors. That's an interesting approach. Are you proposing that the government also reimburse all the businesses damaged by the new balkanized computer industry? Or can people like yourself instead by found liable?
Oh, I forgot, Open Source(tm) will save the day.
Now you're getting shrill.
One person's garbage is another person's treasure. There are even people in the world who use their computer, instead of poking around being awestruck by what's inside it.
Rumor has it there are millions of people out there doing productive billable work using Microsoft products. Maybe someday poke your head out the door and notice them.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste by seething in hatred at something you don't understand and you can't change.
Why should volume discounts on software be illegal? I am having a hard time following your logic as to why it's a ridiculous notion. You're coming off as being rather absurb.
When companies like Dell offer a bundled OS with sale of a computer they also become the support organization for that copy of the OS. Unless they suddenly decide they want the headache of supporting a whole bunch of new software they know little about, it isn't economically feasible for them to distribute it.
You wouldn't happen to be saying the government should force them to sell alternative OSes with their equipment would you? In that case your reasoning makes more sense, and is far easier to refute.
I had not noticed him standing beside me saying "Open Wider."
You must have far better eyesight than I do.
I certainly can't speak for Mr. Gates, but I've gotten the distinct impression that he is into being successful more than anything else. Power is part of what he sees as success.
Oh, and he's been pretty successful, too.
(many people are very envious envious of his success. Of course they won't ever admit it. They get very shrill about denying it.)
You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code.
-- Bill Gates
That sounds remarkably like an Open Source(r) environment.
It's obvious you belong in charge of the bulk granola at the Co-op and not anywhere near a marketing organization. Let's get real here.
Economies of scale do not work when there has to be somebody integrating 10,000 different possible combinations. Preinstall versions of software don't get picked off racks by little elves and installed on each hard drive on an as-needed basis. Pre-installs are built on one drive, which is then duplicated 10,000 times on drives before they are put into machines.
That sounds so thuggish.
Slashdot is starting to become an ingrown little fiefdom of thugs preaching to one another. It's fairly repulsive to some of us who use a lot of different OSes for various purposes.
Anybody who doesn't sing along in the chorus of war songs against Microsoft is basically branded as a fool or an evile spy. Any counter arguement to anti MS storm trooper fantasies is shouted down. It's sad really, because it becomes obvious that its just the Usenet phenomenon taking hold here.
The more vocal segments of the Linux "community" seem to be more anti- than anything else. And it's sad, because Linux has so much potential for use in a lot of ways. But regular folks get driven away by the reek of cultishness.
Band together, little men. Preach to one another about how cool you are for not buying into "The Mans" establishment. You look like bloody fools.
(off topic, but in context with the point)
Why is Amazon.com still in business, then?
USENET has rules. However, the rules thus far have always been based on a form of consensus. Maybe that form of consensus is now obsolete, given that USENET and the net in general is no longer the domain of a rarified elite.
I used to like the higher quality of content on USENET of days now past. But I'm not foolish enough to believe that any good thing will last forever. The net is a bigger world now, and the consensus model probably isn't going to work any longer. Putting up walls and barriers will kill USENET just as much as the spam will.
It's over. We don't send messages to each other using pnuematic tubes in the wall anymore either. The spammers didn't 'win'- the world has just changed. It does that from time to time. Deal with it.
Reset is a pretty cruel and unforgiving beast.
I suspect that a power-switch event could be linked to trigger a shutdown somehow, maybe in the inittable (?) like control-alt-delete is. It seems like pretty low-level hardware stuff, though. Does anybody know if power-switch handling is part of the ATX specification (which I believe is available at Intel somewhere) to make it worth the effort of something like this? (it would be a nightmare to have it be architecture dependent with tons of variations)
I prefer the "Baby AT" form factor (it is wrong to call it just 'AT'- the actual PC-AT footprint was a MONSTER- bigger than ATX) because I can go to swapmeets and get mondo tower cases for $12.50, strip out the older hardware (386 or 486 usually), put in a newer motherboard, and stand 'em in the corner of the lab with all the other *nix servers I've got running. It's increasingly an obsolete form factor for voltage and layout reasons. It's worth noting, however, that the repositioning of the CPU, while it makes it much easier to plug full-legnth cards into the slots isn't that important. There just aren't many full-length cards being made these days. My STB Reality 3-D video card is the longest PCI card I've seen and it's only a 3/4 length card.
We're supposed to pull all the ISA cards, fill the connectors with epoxy, and cut off all the serial/parallel headers at the board-edge anyways, you know, to meet Microsoft's PC2000 requirement of no ISA, and no "legacy" Serial/Parallel ports.
I have never, ever, going all the way back to 4.77 MHz 8088 systems, seen a PC system that used anything but a switching power supply. I believe my old Z-80 'bigboard' system (early 80's vintage) used a linear supply. Is that what you mean by 'old power supply'?
In the old days (in the "PC" time scale) power supplies were sold separate from cases (and all for big bucks) but it's correct that it's almost always a package deal these days. And cases are getting to be really, really chintzy lately. (not quite aluminum foil yet, but the beancounters are working on it...)
My FIC VA-503+ is connected to an AT power supply and appears to work. I hadn't noticed if it had a big heatsinked regulator or not, but I believe it does. Possibly it just doesn't have a big heatsink (more efficient?), but the lower-than-5 voltage IS being produced somehow. All later-generation Pentium-class chips need split voltages.
It isn't possible to power an ATX motherboard with an AT power supply. The ATX power supplies produce an additional 3.2 volt output not present on a standard AT power supply. That is why modern motherboards that work with AT power supplies always have a big heatsinked part on them, to regulate and produce the lower voltage not availabe from an AT power supply (which only supplies +-5 and +-12 volts). A cord adaptor to allow you to use an AT supply on an ATX motherboard would have to incorporate a pretty fancy inline DC-DC converter to give the MB the voltages/current it needs.
I can testify from direct experience that reversing the two power connectors on an AT motherboard does not always fry anything. I've done it a few times in recent history. Newer power supplies sense a massive overcurrent condition and shut down without any damage. Because of the way the pins are assigned, plugging the connectors in reverse does a pretty good job of shorting the right stuff out to protect the hardware. Older supplies and older systems in general probably don't have fast enough current limiting and safety shutdown for this to work, though.
I am curious to know how this works. If you, say, wanted the reverse behavior, for the power enable line coming from the MB to the power supply to disable power supply startup when power is supplied. How does the system power up far enough into the powerup sequence for the Motherboard to read bios settings and know it should not continue to power up? Is there a bistable latch circuit in there somewhere?
**offtopic alert**
It's a phenomenon I have encountered in embedded designs in the past- a device has to be on in order to know if it should turn itself on. It certainly sells more MOV and Gas-tube surge protectors to have everything powered up and ready for a soft-powerup, or a lightening jolt. In the old days when you turned something off, it stayed off and was physically disconnected from the power grid. (shaking head and muttering about how glad I am my Stereo uses a Harmon-Kardon tube-type integrated amplifier)
**end of offtopic alert**
Awhile back I needed the additional 3.2 volts that an ATX supply provides, to power a DEC Alpha motherboard (Cabriolet). The motherboard used the traditional AT-type power supply connector but had additional connectors for the 3.2 volts it needed. I ended up chopping off the connector on an ATX supply and splicing on a traditional AT connector, then hooking up the 3.2 volt connectors to the 3.2 volt lines. Then I had to ground the control line that the MB uses to control the power supply. It worked out okay, after a bit of reverse engineering the ATX power supply spec.
Melbert
It must have been that same guy who's been uploading Black Helicopter Bitmaps (tm) on my computer every time I look away!
Actually, you would find that Microsoft is very liberal regarding single-user incidents of software copying. If you upgrade to a newer version of Office, their response is "give the old copy to a friend if you like" because they know once someone is on the Office bandwagon they'll eventually be buying an upgrade version. (go ahead and groan, anti MS zealots, but it's the truth) Obviously the official position has to be absolute, but I'd be curious to hear of any instances where Microsoft has busted an individual end user for copying one of their products for personal use. They've got bigger fish to fry, i.e. businesses pirating their products on a wide scale.
Microsoft has done similar things in the past.
When MS won the Look-N-Feel lawsuit Apple filed against them (back when Apple was playing legal games that ran all the other x86 GUI vendors out of business, plowing the ground for the success of Windows, ultimately leading to their own defeat), a legal precedent was set that in turn allowed others to legally clone the Windows 95 widgets. Thus making it legal for things like FVWM-95 and StarOffice to exist.
Microsoft sees this kind of stuff as good for the industry. I suspect they'll be happy to sell Linux users Windows software to run under Wine. (what could be better than selling licenses they'll never have to back up with technical support?)
I think he is referring to back when Microsoft mostly was selling Basic Interpreters (in software and in firmware) and IBM contracted with them to produce (purchase and repackage, actually) PC-DOS to run on the new IBM-PC.