Only way to run commercial bloatware (not mentioning any names, Microsofy:)
Games
Erm, hang on a minute, I did have a reason. Oh yes.
Games
Basically the only thing the average PC owner will ever use the full power of his/her cpu for is games. Office apps (including spreadsheets) do not need all that power except that certain companies write crappy code (not necessarily crappy apps, but definately lazy code)
Whether games as a genre are a valid way of justifying faster processors I'm not really sure but it is a case that what seems ti happen is this:
Games Company write a cool game which sells well and they make oodles of dosh so they buy the latest hardware ahnd write a game for it, thus forcing uesrs to upgrade. As everyone is now upgraded, the manufacturers have to invent something faster - the games companies buy those and write games for them, so we upgrade again etc etc etc .
In the meantime people like Intel try to justify the high-speed chips by jumping on the internet bandwagon and kinda indicating a 700MHz processor is used for decent surfing, failing to mention the 4.2k a sec I see to get through my modem......
Yes, bluetooth will kill any 802.11 network it's near. This is because bluetooth frequency-hops extremely quickly such that other devices see it as pure noise swamping the frequency band.
All it would take is an bluetooth enabled phone (or whatever) in the same room as a base station and thw whole 802.11 network will fail.
I mean when Voyager flies past us, it goes 'Voooooooom' and all those space battles, X-wings and Tie-Fighters going 'zapzap' 'powie' 'kersnuffle' (well ok, maybe not 'kersnuffle')
And the explosions, planets and ships going 'bang' (but very loudy)
I mean if there wer no sound in space, the gigantic spaceship would go past going ' ' (loudly), release the hoardes of smaller ships, which would go ' ' (more hight pitched), shoot each other with ' ' and ' ' and ' ' (well maybe not ' ') and finally the plane would explode with a spectacular ' '
Are you telling me Hollywood is wrong and the boring guy with glasses at school was correct all along?
Connectix is releasing a version of Virtual PC, their PC emulator, with a bundled RedHat install.
Connectix have just won a court case allowing them to sell Virtual Game Station, a PSX emulator. This is currently available on the Mac and will be released for Windows soon.
VPC is NOT available, and has not been announced for Linux on any platform.
Sony are now suing Connectix for voilation of 11 patents.
I've run various servers, HTML, FTP, Hotline etc from a Mac and easily get months of uptime without a problem. There are a few appls that cause problems with Macs, Netscape is one huge example but one doesn't run those on a server. My home machine has been running for a couple of onths with the odd reboot to install system upgrades (and a new 128Mb DIMM) as the only downtime.
On the other hand if I keep my PC laptop running for ore than a few days it gently grinds to a halt and needs a reboot anyway. Unless I'm running Linux of course.
Personally I've never had real problems with macs in general - it can be a pain of you have a problem as they can be difficult to isolate but they don't go wrong that often. Just keeping a Windows PC running properly seems to take ages and for a bloke without a infinite amount of time to dedicate to Linux, keeping a linux box up to date is also somewhat time consuming (when it's a laptop anyway)
I just wish people would stop the age-old "macs are only a toy" bollocks. They might look nicer than PC but you can get at least as much productive work (and usually more) done on one.
Apple are also (often) technological leaders - with a huge R&D budget.
Ok, MacOS 9 is fairly old, but it is a fully 32bit system, something Microsoft are only just getting the hang of and with MacOS X coming fairly soon, they will have the best of both worlds - a system that's piss easy to use but unix based so power users can compile their posix apps to their heart's content:)
So how about we stop knocking Apple becuase their computers look nice and maybe spend some more time discussing their good points?
Oh god, that's bound to invite the "What good points? can it pour grits down N. Portman's trousers?" brigade
Yeah, I'm only 3606:) I've been here for bloody ages and I don't have any weird bonuses etc.
What annoys me are people moderating things incorrectly, such as funny posts marked as trolls when the obviously aren't just because the person moderating disagrees with the humour. This applies equally to people moderating things down because they disagree with the politics, OS, fizzy drink choice, sexual orientation etc of the poster. Moderation HAS to be done objectively to work well.
I think some form of seniority-related bonus might stop the run of recent trolling users, but maybe all we need is a week or two at 0 for new users?
I guess what we are failing to realise is that Slashdot is a humourless repository of knowledge, designed to objectively portray the world of computing and Linux etc without any bias or emotion whatsoever.
Troc
PS for Americans - the above was a sarcastic message
Yeah - RedHat has a pretty good HOWTO list and also links to the LDP (in fact they put a link to it on your desktop when you install) Very useful unless you are trying to get ethernet working via pcmcia and the pcmcia HOWTO is on the 'net and you aren't..........
I burned a cd with all the HOWTOs on it in HTML with a couple of navigation pages and a search engine I knocked up recently and I've found it extremely helpful when on the road etc.....
Ok, moderation is really annoying me now. The post I made wasn't a troll! It was an attempt at humour. If anything it could have been moderated as offtopic, but what was trollish about it? Was I desperately waiting to start a flame war about AMD vs Intel? MacOS vs the world? Bud vs Bud light?
No. Some people should lighten up:)
Hohum.
I'll await the 'troll' score for this one I suppose.
Slashdot user lm563872bs today revealed the new food sensation that is sweeping geekdom. Troll Grits, a genetically modified form of vegetable protien, shaped into the likenesses of geek Goddess Natalie Portman and UberGeek Linus Torvalds are entirely flavourless and designed expressly for pouring down one's trousers an an inopportune moment.
AFAIK The Blue/White G3 and G4 PowerMacs can be rackmounted by just removing the 4 handles at the corners and bolting them via the holes remaining to a rack..........
I assumme that the original poster did not understand what was going on;). Like alot of slashdot in this case - concerned but not knowledgeable....
More like, 'not very good at writing things down succinctly' I've spent so long writing my bloody PhD that I tend to add millions of extraneous words to everything I type. I'm also not a biochemist, just a humble materials scientist who makes high-pressure gas cylinders for a living.
I actually submitted this a few weeks ago, but with the huge anmout of submissions, things tend to take a while to filter through the system:)
I've had some email from Ewan Birney at ensembl about doing this but it seems they lack experience of client coding! I personally no nothing about that at all, I'm a bender of metals and I can just about write html on a good day. If anyone has any help to offer, you could visit their webpage....... I've not added his email address in case he's paranoid, but I can forward stuff to him:)
That's an interesting one. It's a point I agree with and have done for a while........
I could have moderated it myself, but what to do? Really it should be moderated 'offtopic' but it's something that needs discussion, so maybe it should be 'interesting'?
That caused me to think and post instead as one can't do both.
That is exactly how I run mine, headless with TB2 for admin - just remember that TB2 won't initialise the remote control stuff unless it sees a video card. This is a problem on my 6100 because it doesn't initialise the video card unless it sees a monitor. I got round that by putting a mac -> vga adaptor on the end od the video card:)
I run a webserver on a 6100 and it's rock solid - no need to reboot for something like 3 months now, would have been more but I upgraded the system to 8.6 which was one reboot.
There's nothing there now though, all the real content has been moved but the server still exists:)
I also have some friends that run a pretty huge commerce site using Macs running Webstar and Filemaker Pro AV-Store as their main set-up very happy with it although they will probably move to OS X Server with Apache and Web Objects soon......
Yet another case of anti-something moderation. The comment isn't redundant (as it's currently been moderated)It's an observation. I'm not sure moderation and meta-moderation are working.
In the meantime I'd like to point out I've been running a MacOS based server (Webstar as well) for 4 years and I've found it to be rock solid and increadibly secure.
I have an original 6100, from 1994 (or 1993, whatever) with a 60MHz ppc 601 etc etc - I can currently buy a G3 upgrade for it, running at somehting like 400MHz - that's more than enough speed for any normal user. G4 upgrades are / will be available (they have been announced)
I also have one of the original beige G3s - I can upgrade that to a G4 as well.
I also have a P133 (well a P120 I clocked) It's about the same age as the 6100, maybe 1995 or so. The equivalent upgrade would be to plug a PIII into the socket 7 on my motherboard. Ooops, won't fit. Fair enough - the 601 on my 6100 is soldered to the board, the upgrade is a card in it's PDS slot. So there must be an adaptor for the pc? nope. There are those crappy evergreen overdrive things but they suck (tried one)
Yeah - sure I can get a new motherboard, but I'll need to get a new case as well, probably new ram too, not to mention the processor - that's not upgrading a system, that's replacing a system.
And intel will be changing their slot design again. Great. No wonder my pc is still a P133.
The digital interface is a standard one I believe, SGI uses it for their 18" display, it requires a digital output from the graphics gard - currently #9 produce the SGI card. Digital (ok, I know all flat panels are digital internally:)flat panels are much crisper than other ones - I think all notebooks use digital video cards.
I would assume that fairly soon most decent cards will have a digital output as well as analogue (I'm British) as TFT displays get more common. Shouldn't be too hard as al cards are digital until the final D-A converter. Which is why most PC flat displays are silly as they then have to A-D internally. Too much A-D-A'ing is bad for signal quality as all Hi-Fi buffs will tell you. Ok, they D-A-D. Shut up:)
Having eaten durian fruit in Indonesia, I can honestly say it's aweful. It stinks so much it's banned in most hotels there and all internal aeroplane flights etc..... The durian also kills a few tourists each year by falling of it's tree and landing on their heads:)
Well, Yamaha and Sony make excellent ones, Plextor sell them, come to think of it, pretty well everybody makes decent SCSI cd-rw drives, quite a few at 6x write these days.
For ultimate speed though, get the new Lacie 8x write 20x read cd-r drive:)
and me with my humble Sony 4x write drive (which is extremely reliable)
The Lacie DVD-RAM drives are excellent too, I've used a couple.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically the only thing the average PC owner will ever use the full power of his/her cpu for is games. Office apps (including spreadsheets) do not need all that power except that certain companies write crappy code (not necessarily crappy apps, but definately lazy code)
Whether games as a genre are a valid way of justifying faster processors I'm not really sure but it is a case that what seems ti happen is this:
Games Company write a cool game which sells well and they make oodles of dosh so they buy the latest hardware ahnd write a game for it, thus forcing uesrs to upgrade. As everyone is now upgraded, the manufacturers have to invent something faster - the games companies buy those and write games for them, so we upgrade again etc etc etc .
In the meantime people like Intel try to justify the high-speed chips by jumping on the internet bandwagon and kinda indicating a 700MHz processor is used for decent surfing, failing to mention the 4.2k a sec I see to get through my modem......
Hohum
Troc
Yes, bluetooth will kill any 802.11 network it's near. This is because bluetooth frequency-hops extremely quickly such that other devices see it as pure noise swamping the frequency band.
All it would take is an bluetooth enabled phone (or whatever) in the same room as a base station and thw whole 802.11 network will fail.
Troc
Sure they do............
;) for the Humour-impaired
I mean when Voyager flies past us, it goes 'Voooooooom' and all those space battles, X-wings and Tie-Fighters going 'zapzap' 'powie' 'kersnuffle' (well ok, maybe not 'kersnuffle')
And the explosions, planets and ships going 'bang' (but very loudy)
I mean if there wer no sound in space, the gigantic spaceship would go past going ' ' (loudly), release the hoardes of smaller ships, which would go ' ' (more hight pitched), shoot each other with ' ' and ' ' and ' ' (well maybe not ' ') and finally the plane would explode with a spectacular ' '
Are you telling me Hollywood is wrong and the boring guy with glasses at school was correct all along?
I think I'll cry
Troc
PS
Troc
I've run various servers, HTML, FTP, Hotline etc from a Mac and easily get months of uptime without a problem. There are a few appls that cause problems with Macs, Netscape is one huge example but one doesn't run those on a server.
:)
My home machine has been running for a couple of onths with the odd reboot to install system upgrades (and a new 128Mb DIMM) as the only downtime.
On the other hand if I keep my PC laptop running for ore than a few days it gently grinds to a halt and needs a reboot anyway. Unless I'm running Linux of course.
Personally I've never had real problems with macs in general - it can be a pain of you have a problem as they can be difficult to isolate but they don't go wrong that often. Just keeping a Windows PC running properly seems to take ages and for a bloke without a infinite amount of time to dedicate to Linux, keeping a linux box up to date is also somewhat time consuming (when it's a laptop anyway)
I just wish people would stop the age-old "macs are only a toy" bollocks. They might look nicer than PC but you can get at least as much productive work (and usually more) done on one.
Apple are also (often) technological leaders - with a huge R&D budget.
Ok, MacOS 9 is fairly old, but it is a fully 32bit system, something Microsoft are only just getting the hang of and with MacOS X coming fairly soon, they will have the best of both worlds - a system that's piss easy to use but unix based so power users can compile their posix apps to their heart's content
So how about we stop knocking Apple becuase their computers look nice and maybe spend some more time discussing their good points?
Oh god, that's bound to invite the "What good points? can it pour grits down N. Portman's trousers?" brigade
Hohum
troc
Yeah, I'm only 3606 :) I've been here for bloody ages and I don't have any weird bonuses etc.
What annoys me are people moderating things incorrectly, such as funny posts marked as trolls when the obviously aren't just because the person moderating disagrees with the humour. This applies equally to people moderating things down because they disagree with the politics, OS, fizzy drink choice, sexual orientation etc of the poster. Moderation HAS to be done objectively to work well.
I think some form of seniority-related bonus might stop the run of recent trolling users, but maybe all we need is a week or two at 0 for new users?
Troc
I guess what we are failing to realise is that Slashdot is a humourless repository of knowledge, designed to objectively portray the world of computing and Linux etc without any bias or emotion whatsoever.
Troc
PS for Americans - the above was a sarcastic message
Yeah - RedHat has a pretty good HOWTO list and also links to the LDP (in fact they put a link to it on your desktop when you install)
Very useful unless you are trying to get ethernet working via pcmcia and the pcmcia HOWTO is on the 'net and you aren't..........
I burned a cd with all the HOWTOs on it in HTML with a couple of navigation pages and a search engine I knocked up recently and I've found it extremely helpful when on the road etc.....
Troc
Ok, moderation is really annoying me now. The post I made wasn't a troll! It was an attempt at humour. If anything it could have been moderated as offtopic, but what was trollish about it?
:)
Was I desperately waiting to start a flame war about AMD vs Intel? MacOS vs the world? Bud vs Bud light?
No. Some people should lighten up
Hohum.
I'll await the 'troll' score for this one I suppose.
troc
New Troll Grits (tm)
1500hrs 8/2/2000
Slashdot user lm563872bs today revealed the new food sensation that is sweeping geekdom.
Troll Grits, a genetically modified form of vegetable protien, shaped into the likenesses of geek Goddess Natalie Portman and UberGeek Linus Torvalds are entirely flavourless and designed expressly for pouring down one's trousers an an inopportune moment.
Nobody whatsoever was available for comment.
Troc
AFAIK The Blue/White G3 and G4 PowerMacs can be rackmounted by just removing the 4 handles at the corners and bolting them via the holes remaining to a rack..........
Troc
Now that you mention it.....
Ghormenghast is being shown as a 4 part tv-series costing oodles of millions of UK pounds here in the UK starting tonight.
been getting good reviews...
Troc
Yes. D10's are the nicest though and my D30 is the easiest....
Well except for my spherical D6
hohum
Troc
More like, 'not very good at writing things down succinctly' I've spent so long writing my bloody PhD that I tend to add millions of extraneous words to everything I type. I'm also not a biochemist, just a humble materials scientist who makes high-pressure gas cylinders for a living.
:)
troc
I actually submitted this a few weeks ago, but with the huge anmout of submissions, things tend to take a while to filter through the system :)
:)
I've had some email from Ewan Birney at ensembl about doing this but it seems they lack experience of client coding! I personally no nothing about that at all, I'm a bender of metals and I can just about write html on a good day. If anyone has any help to offer, you could visit their webpage....... I've not added his email address in case he's paranoid, but I can forward stuff to him
Cheers
Troc
That's an interesting one. It's a point I agree with and have done for a while........
I could have moderated it myself, but what to do? Really it should be moderated 'offtopic' but it's something that needs discussion, so maybe it should be 'interesting'?
That caused me to think and post instead as one can't do both.
Hohum
John
That is exactly how I run mine, headless with TB2 for admin - just remember that TB2 won't initialise the remote control stuff unless it sees a video card. This is a problem on my 6100 because it doesn't initialise the video card unless it sees a monitor. I got round that by putting a mac -> vga adaptor on the end od the video card :)
I run a webserver on a 6100 and it's rock solid - no need to reboot for something like 3 months now, would have been more but I upgraded the system to 8.6 which was one reboot.
:)
Server
There's nothing there now though, all the real content has been moved but the server still exists
I also have some friends that run a pretty huge commerce site using Macs running Webstar and Filemaker Pro AV-Store as their main set-up very happy with it although they will probably move to OS X Server with Apache and Web Objects soon......
Troc
Yet another case of anti-something moderation.
The comment isn't redundant (as it's currently been moderated)It's an observation.
I'm not sure moderation and meta-moderation are working.
In the meantime I'd like to point out I've been running a MacOS based server (Webstar as well) for 4 years and I've found it to be rock solid and increadibly secure.
Bet this post gets an 'offtopic' flag
John
Hang on a minute :)
I own a couple of Macs and PCs (hardware nut!)
I have an original 6100, from 1994 (or 1993, whatever) with a 60MHz ppc 601 etc etc - I can currently buy a G3 upgrade for it, running at somehting like 400MHz - that's more than enough speed for any normal user. G4 upgrades are / will be available (they have been announced)
I also have one of the original beige G3s - I can upgrade that to a G4 as well.
I also have a P133 (well a P120 I clocked) It's about the same age as the 6100, maybe 1995 or so. The equivalent upgrade would be to plug a PIII into the socket 7 on my motherboard. Ooops, won't fit. Fair enough - the 601 on my 6100 is soldered to the board, the upgrade is a card in it's PDS slot. So there must be an adaptor for the pc? nope. There are those crappy evergreen overdrive things but they suck (tried one)
Yeah - sure I can get a new motherboard, but I'll need to get a new case as well, probably new ram too, not to mention the processor - that's not upgrading a system, that's replacing a system.
And intel will be changing their slot design again. Great. No wonder my pc is still a P133.
John
The digital interface is a standard one I believe, SGI uses it for their 18" display, it requires a digital output from the graphics gard - currently #9 produce the SGI card. Digital (ok, I know all flat panels are digital internally :)flat panels are much crisper than other ones - I think all notebooks use digital video cards.
:)
I would assume that fairly soon most decent cards will have a digital output as well as analogue (I'm British) as TFT displays get more common. Shouldn't be too hard as al cards are digital until the final D-A converter. Which is why most PC flat displays are silly as they then have to A-D internally. Too much A-D-A'ing is bad for signal quality as all Hi-Fi buffs will tell you. Ok, they D-A-D. Shut up
John
Having eaten durian fruit in Indonesia, I can honestly say it's aweful. It stinks so much it's banned in most hotels there and all internal aeroplane flights etc..... The durian also kills a few tourists each year by falling of it's tree and landing on their heads :)
:(
And the taste - Onion-flavoured ice cream
Well, Yamaha and Sony make excellent ones, Plextor sell them, come to think of it, pretty well everybody makes decent SCSI cd-rw drives, quite a few at 6x write these days.
:)
For ultimate speed though, get the new Lacie 8x write 20x read cd-r drive
and me with my humble Sony 4x write drive (which is extremely reliable)
The Lacie DVD-RAM drives are excellent too, I've used a couple.
I've got a UK mirror of the .mov running at http :)
://131.227.180.82/tb480.mov. Should be quick for all of you on SuperJanet