My home server's a dual Celeron on a BP6; same chipset, same rock solid stability. The 20G HD I got when I bought it has logged about 30,000 hours poweron time in it. If I didn't keep switching OS's and upgrading things it'd probably have a good few years uptime on it now. Guess I got lucky with the caps, but I have a spare motherboard and CPU's should they ever be needed.
BTW; if you're looking for cheap, the Gigabyte KT600's are supposed to be just about as rock solid as budget gets. Don't quote me on that though, that's third party information;)
Yay for breaking the PCI spec at every turn and looking surprised when your new hacked together soundcard doesn't work properly on most systems.
I got my Live! for my dual Celeron; Intel chipset etc. Worked kinda sorta; never could get EAX working (always sounded like ass, even in UP mode.. maybe it's supposed to do that); SMP mode made it fairly clear their drivers weren't MP safe, although they fixed much of that.
I had fewer problems with it on my Athlon and it's Via chipset, but I eventually replaced it with a Prodigy 7.1. Running an Athlon on an nForce 2 now, and I'm looking forward to an AMD64 and an nForce 3. My AMD's have been nothing but rock solid, from my first 1GHz chip (currently running happily in an el-cheapo Elite Group SiS-based motherboard), my 1.4GHz running on one of the later revision KT133 Via chipsets, my XP 2500+ on an nForce 2, and a loaded up 1U dual Opteron which is proving more stable than the dual Xeon next to it.
Needless to say, our next server isn't going to be another Xeon.
Is is strfoo(), or str_foo, or foo_str() or foostr() or what? What it is is fairly well documented, but that's pretty much a requirement with an API as large and messy as PHP's.
It is similar to Perl and C in some ways; that's not a positive note in my book though.
Intel do Hyperthreading, not AMD. The buzzword there is Hypertransport, which significantly ups the speed of memory and device access; a lot of motherboards with Gigabit onboard now attach them directly to the 800/1000MHz Hypertransport bus, which can easily keep up.
FreeBSD has good hardware support (including nVidia drivers), much the same software natively as Linux, Linux emulation, good support, good performance, and is imo a nicer *ix environment than any Linux distribution. It works for me on servers, why can't it work for Mr Hollensbe on workstations?
Patents which will have rock solid prior art and thus will be invalid -- I doubt Microsoft would waste the money. They've certainly used BSD source before, and had access for plenty longer; can you point to anything from there that they've already patented?
I've experienced a handful of chargebacks and a few reversed payments. My account stopped accepting payments once to confirm I was happy to have more than 1000UKP in there, after it had been past that for the past 8 months quite regularly.
Suggestions for alternatives which aren't a lot more expensive and which aren't run by morons are welcome.
The 3700 is S754; the 3800 is S939. In a year's time I'd be more interested in a dual core chip than the top+end of line processor for my crummy cheapo transitional socket.
Sure, but even servers tend to go down for upgrades. The last time I powered off my desktop was to install a USB card; one before that was probably for new graphics drivers. Drivers for SCSI RAID cards tend to have longer cycle times, and desktops rarely have important reasons why they can't go down for 5 minutes:)
Er, look; this machine runs 24/7 between me upgrading/fiddling with hardware and applying updates. It doesn't crash, it doesn't start to feel flaky after a few weeks, it just works. It's not the most stable or secure OS's about, but it makes a perfectly usable desktop that you don't need to reboot daily. It's certainly at least as stable as 2000 in my experience.
The trips aren't necessarily between planets, but also between moons of systems like Jupiter. A transfer between moons probably has a lot more opportunity for "creative navigating" than an interplanetary one.
Besides, it's not as if speeds like that are unprecedented -- lots of sf have ships with sufficient fuel to constantly accelerate for long periods -- with 24 hours, 325km/s isn't even half a G: (325 (km / s)) divided by (24 hours) = 3.76157407 m / s^2 (1G being around 10 m / s^2 iirc). Certainly easier to swallow than Star Trek's magical impulse engines which go from 0 to 50% c in about 2s flat;)
When I last played with them optipng produced typically smaller files than the other two. I noticed some minor possible advantage piping the output of optipng into pngout iirc, but nothing really significant.
Right, but there could be one civilization per 100 galaxies and there would still be room for billions of them; all with next to zero chance of contacting each other.
"Stupid concept. I'll agree there -- it really didn't seem to work right, and this is probably one of the reasons so few people watched it first time around. It feels dumb."
I can say the same about Star Trek. The difference is, Star Trek seems to take itself quite seriously; Firefly, er, doesn't. Joss is trying to provide entertainment here, not some vision of the future.
There's no FTL in Firefly; it's all set in one system after being colonised by a sleeper ship of some sort.
They obviously have the technology to breed cattle from embryos, but such technology isn't very useful when you don't have the time or resources to grow them, never mind the money to pay for or run all that expensive hi-tech equipment.
That's a big issue with Firefly; that high technology is expensive and in limited supply (manufacturing etc is limited to a core of heavily populated inner planets mostly interested in looking after themselves; the outer planets are full of the poor). As for cheap spaceflight? Well, it's not that cheap; that they're constantly low on money to pay for fuel and parts is one of the key points of the series; they're not going to want to pay even more for hardware they can do without -- why spend a few million on a hard-to-fix kitchen-o-matic when you can make do with pots, a tin opener and some tins? Why smuggle out an expensive top of the line ray-gun from a core world when you can get a cheap projectile weapon you can maintain yourself?
This isn't Star Trek here; it's more like a group of people in a second hand van driving around some frontier/third world country, struggling to make enough money to keep the van running.
It works surprisingly well, not least because it doesn't take itself all that seriously.
My FX5900XT seems pretty good to me; certainly a worthy progression from my Ti4200. The initial (high end) cards suffered from significant cooling and power requirements and poorly tuned drivers, but what's wrong with them now?
The Amiga had a preemptive multitasking OS, but for most things involving "closely coupled" custom chips the OS was bypassed (if not disabled completely) and the hardware hit directly, typically with hand-crafted assembly.
Move the Amiga into an environment where hardware changes massively every 8 months and you need to abstract everything lest you need to rewrite your application for every single combination of hardware and it ends up surprisingly like a slow PC. Even consoles are moving towards that state; keeping hardware and software tightly coupled may have short term performance advantages, but it takes a lot of work and doesn't have an attractive lifespan.
Parallax on 2D platformers was easy for the Amiga up to a point because of it's planar graphics; the arrangement of colour information in memory made it easy to blit parts of the display independently from other parts, based on what (short) colour range each chunk had. The scan-line synchronized Copper (co-processor) made things like horizontally shaded backgrounds pretty easy too (you just had it change a bit in the pallete every scan-line). Things like this are great for specific tricks used in old style platform games and such, but don't hold much advantage beyond that.
BTW, your 8 channel.mod? That was mixed in software; the Paula never got past 4 channel 8 bit sound by itself. Half the Amiga's advantage was having a lot of developers who were experienced in getting around it's hardware limitations. These days, our PC's can blit gigabytes of graphics around in their sleep; your platform game may no longer be as effectively vblank locked as your old Amiga one, but nor was your Amiga handling 32 bit graphics in 1280*1024 behind API's which will keep the same software working on entirely different hardware in 5 years time, while running umpteen background processes in it's spare time. Oh, and your Amiga wasn't running half the game through a Python interpreter or so either.
Bah, I'm babbling again. I need less SlashDot and more caffeine:/
(and yay for "No Karma Bonus" now staying selected across previews)
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My home server's a dual Celeron on a BP6; same chipset, same rock solid stability. The 20G HD I got when I bought it has logged about 30,000 hours poweron time in it. If I didn't keep switching OS's and upgrading things it'd probably have a good few years uptime on it now. Guess I got lucky with the caps, but I have a spare motherboard and CPU's should they ever be needed.
;)
BTW; if you're looking for cheap, the Gigabyte KT600's are supposed to be just about as rock solid as budget gets. Don't quote me on that though, that's third party information
Yay for breaking the PCI spec at every turn and looking surprised when your new hacked together soundcard doesn't work properly on most systems.
I got my Live! for my dual Celeron; Intel chipset etc. Worked kinda sorta; never could get EAX working (always sounded like ass, even in UP mode.. maybe it's supposed to do that); SMP mode made it fairly clear their drivers weren't MP safe, although they fixed much of that.
I had fewer problems with it on my Athlon and it's Via chipset, but I eventually replaced it with a Prodigy 7.1. Running an Athlon on an nForce 2 now, and I'm looking forward to an AMD64 and an nForce 3. My AMD's have been nothing but rock solid, from my first 1GHz chip (currently running happily in an el-cheapo Elite Group SiS-based motherboard), my 1.4GHz running on one of the later revision KT133 Via chipsets, my XP 2500+ on an nForce 2, and a loaded up 1U dual Opteron which is proving more stable than the dual Xeon next to it.
Needless to say, our next server isn't going to be another Xeon.
Are you kidding? Here's a small sample of string and type handling function names (about as standard library as it gets):Is is strfoo(), or str_foo, or foo_str() or foostr() or what? What it is is fairly well documented, but that's pretty much a requirement with an API as large and messy as PHP's.
It is similar to Perl and C in some ways; that's not a positive note in my book though.
Now, why hasn't Rails hit SlashDot yet?
Intel do Hyperthreading, not AMD. The buzzword there is Hypertransport, which significantly ups the speed of memory and device access; a lot of motherboards with Gigabit onboard now attach them directly to the 800/1000MHz Hypertransport bus, which can easily keep up.
FreeBSD has good hardware support (including nVidia drivers), much the same software natively as Linux, Linux emulation, good support, good performance, and is imo a nicer *ix environment than any Linux distribution. It works for me on servers, why can't it work for Mr Hollensbe on workstations?
Cool 'n' Quiet keeps the CPU ticking over at 800MHz when idle, where it puts out about 35W; hence the fan stopping when idle.
Opteron/Athlon 64 and the S754 Semprons have SSE2 (being effectively a 64bit-free Newcastle).
Patents which will have rock solid prior art and thus will be invalid -- I doubt Microsoft would waste the money. They've certainly used BSD source before, and had access for plenty longer; can you point to anything from there that they've already patented?
Status: UK - Verified (1746)
I've experienced a handful of chargebacks and a few reversed payments. My account stopped accepting payments once to confirm I was happy to have more than 1000UKP in there, after it had been past that for the past 8 months quite regularly.
Suggestions for alternatives which aren't a lot more expensive and which aren't run by morons are welcome.
The 3700 is S754; the 3800 is S939. In a year's time I'd be more interested in a dual core chip than the top+end of line processor for my crummy cheapo transitional socket.
Don't forget the BP6 too. A pair of 500MHz Celerons made for a nice little machine that still fit well inside most budgets.
Not quite "high profile", but Starshatter uses Oggs.
More interesting I think is the number of games using Python, lua and other open source languages for scripting.
Sure, but even servers tend to go down for upgrades. The last time I powered off my desktop was to install a USB card; one before that was probably for new graphics drivers. Drivers for SCSI RAID cards tend to have longer cycle times, and desktops rarely have important reasons why they can't go down for 5 minutes :)
Er, look; this machine runs 24/7 between me upgrading/fiddling with hardware and applying updates. It doesn't crash, it doesn't start to feel flaky after a few weeks, it just works. It's not the most stable or secure OS's about, but it makes a perfectly usable desktop that you don't need to reboot daily. It's certainly at least as stable as 2000 in my experience.
The trips aren't necessarily between planets, but also between moons of systems like Jupiter. A transfer between moons probably has a lot more opportunity for "creative navigating" than an interplanetary one.
;)
:)
Besides, it's not as if speeds like that are unprecedented -- lots of sf have ships with sufficient fuel to constantly accelerate for long periods -- with 24 hours, 325km/s isn't even half a G: (325 (km / s)) divided by (24 hours) = 3.76157407 m / s^2 (1G being around 10 m / s^2 iirc). Certainly easier to swallow than Star Trek's magical impulse engines which go from 0 to 50% c in about 2s flat
Oh, and (325 (kilometers / second)) divided by speed of sound at sea level = 955.067736
When I last played with them optipng produced typically smaller files than the other two. I noticed some minor possible advantage piping the output of optipng into pngout iirc, but nothing really significant.
Right, but there could be one civilization per 100 galaxies and there would still be room for billions of them; all with next to zero chance of contacting each other.
I can say the same about Star Trek. The difference is, Star Trek seems to take itself quite seriously; Firefly, er, doesn't. Joss is trying to provide entertainment here, not some vision of the future.
There's no FTL in Firefly; it's all set in one system after being colonised by a sleeper ship of some sort.
They obviously have the technology to breed cattle from embryos, but such technology isn't very useful when you don't have the time or resources to grow them, never mind the money to pay for or run all that expensive hi-tech equipment.
That's a big issue with Firefly; that high technology is expensive and in limited supply (manufacturing etc is limited to a core of heavily populated inner planets mostly interested in looking after themselves; the outer planets are full of the poor). As for cheap spaceflight? Well, it's not that cheap; that they're constantly low on money to pay for fuel and parts is one of the key points of the series; they're not going to want to pay even more for hardware they can do without -- why spend a few million on a hard-to-fix kitchen-o-matic when you can make do with pots, a tin opener and some tins? Why smuggle out an expensive top of the line ray-gun from a core world when you can get a cheap projectile weapon you can maintain yourself?
This isn't Star Trek here; it's more like a group of people in a second hand van driving around some frontier/third world country, struggling to make enough money to keep the van running.
It works surprisingly well, not least because it doesn't take itself all that seriously.
Wasn't that an ad-lib from Alan Tudyk?
optipng automatically reduces colour depth where possible. Seems generally better than pngcrush too.
My FX5900XT seems pretty good to me; certainly a worthy progression from my Ti4200. The initial (high end) cards suffered from significant cooling and power requirements and poorly tuned drivers, but what's wrong with them now?
The Amiga had a preemptive multitasking OS, but for most things involving "closely coupled" custom chips the OS was bypassed (if not disabled completely) and the hardware hit directly, typically with hand-crafted assembly.
.mod? That was mixed in software; the Paula never got past 4 channel 8 bit sound by itself. Half the Amiga's advantage was having a lot of developers who were experienced in getting around it's hardware limitations. These days, our PC's can blit gigabytes of graphics around in their sleep; your platform game may no longer be as effectively vblank locked as your old Amiga one, but nor was your Amiga handling 32 bit graphics in 1280*1024 behind API's which will keep the same software working on entirely different hardware in 5 years time, while running umpteen background processes in it's spare time. Oh, and your Amiga wasn't running half the game through a Python interpreter or so either.
:/
Move the Amiga into an environment where hardware changes massively every 8 months and you need to abstract everything lest you need to rewrite your application for every single combination of hardware and it ends up surprisingly like a slow PC. Even consoles are moving towards that state; keeping hardware and software tightly coupled may have short term performance advantages, but it takes a lot of work and doesn't have an attractive lifespan.
Parallax on 2D platformers was easy for the Amiga up to a point because of it's planar graphics; the arrangement of colour information in memory made it easy to blit parts of the display independently from other parts, based on what (short) colour range each chunk had. The scan-line synchronized Copper (co-processor) made things like horizontally shaded backgrounds pretty easy too (you just had it change a bit in the pallete every scan-line). Things like this are great for specific tricks used in old style platform games and such, but don't hold much advantage beyond that.
BTW, your 8 channel
Bah, I'm babbling again. I need less SlashDot and more caffeine
(and yay for "No Karma Bonus" now staying selected across previews)