"Panther has managed not only to lose my iTunes Library and my iPhoto Library, but also their backups kept on -- you guessed it -- my external FireWire hard disk,"
I once reinstalled a Compaq server. I copied all data to the externally connected SCSI raid and I only wanted to reinstall WinNT on the 2 internal disks. I felt safe. How wrong I was...
Because the Compaq 'System erase' tool erases not only things like the date/time, internal disk, BIOS settings etc., but also partitions/disks on all connected SCSI controllers it can access without any special drivers (3rd party FC is thus safe). When the external RAIDs disks flashed up, I knew what happened.
Moral of the story: have a backup in a safe place, not connected in a way like this. Especially if you actually care about the data.
Assuming you're using only the processor, on an 8-bit machine the data speed ought to be very close to the clock speed; a 1Mhz machine probably could copy no more than 1 megabit, and that's assuming that it was doing NOTHING else, like interacting with the user.
Interresting logic. A poor old Z80 running at modest 4MHz was able to move, using a DMA companion chip, quite exactly 1MByte/s (4MHz, 4 clock cycles/byte). The CPU without any special chip was able to move a byte in 21 cycles (via LDIR command) from memory to memory (up to 64kByte block size) or from memory to I/O port (via OTIR command) or from I/O port to memory at the same speed, but only max. 256 byte in one go. That's max. 190 kByte/s.
Of course those are absolute maximum throughputs, but you could always crank up the frequency to 8MHz (more on later models). Saturating Ethernet is thus impossible without DMA chip, but not difficult with such help. And most 'good' computers had a DMA chip for things like hard disk.
A portion of StarROMs annual profits will be donated to projects that help support the legal emulation of classic video games.
The problem with this sentence is, it's as good as a politicians statement or any CEOs statement nowadays. a portion is anything from 99.9% down to some cents. And even worse, they wrote annual profits which can be increased and decreased nearly at will by using tax things like 'one-time-expenses', 'cost of stock options for CEO', 'savings for later' etc. (I know that company is not yet listed on the stock exchanges, but I am sure they find other ways to modify their annual profits in the direction they want it.) So while the intentions might be good as I am sure they know that without emulators like MAME they won't sell many of those, I don't expect them to contribute more than a small amount to the MAME project.
By writing hard numbers like: US$1 goes to MAME for every game purchased they would commit themself to something substantial, but saying some portion of the profits is just pathetic.
I found that out too. Had a dual CPU Linux box for almost all things (beside a server running Samba, DNS, DHCP and all this type of server work). Linux was fine, but the machine was too slow for newer games (when dual booting to Windows), many games did not use the second CPU, some ATI and other drivers did not like two CPUs at all...all kind of nasty little problems.
The simple solution was a game-only computer: 1 CPU, fast video card (time to upgrade the old Radeon 8500LE). I can whole heartly recommend such a setup. If you buy the latest-and-greatest hardware, you'll have endless problems with Linux (e.g. nForce2 mainboard: no IOAPIC, no Firewire, just now they start to work, 9 monthes after the boards were available, Linux 2.5 was better but not everyone like to live on the bleeding edge). I don't blame any Linux developers as it's clearly the fault of the hardware vendors who don't supports Linux drivers actively, with very few exceptions. Use old-and-venerable hardware (1+ year) and it's a great Linux box (read: everything works out of the box) but when dual-booting to Windows for games, some hardware is no longer supported, or does not work well any more, or is just too slow for current games. I was not able to find a one-size-size-fits-all, so I bought 2 sizes and I could not be happier.
My next video card will be some updated ATI or nVidia card. With HL2 bundled or not. That will go to the Windows-mostly machine. The current ATI 8500LE will go to the Linux-mostly machine so I can finally connect 2 monitors.
It's not the perfect setup taking more space and needing a KVM switch, but it simplifies the choice of hardware a lot as I don't need to wait for simultanious Windows-and-Linux support. Getting Linux worh with it 1 year later is fine for me.
And for those who'll cry "I cannot afford 2 computers, I want my latest-and-fastest video card to be supported in Linux" I say: those video cards are far too expensive anyway. How can you afford a US$500 video card? Save for a US$200 video card, a US$300 second computer or reused parts, a KVM switch and use the best of both worlds. Seriously.
you would want to have four single point of failure
Hu? What I ment was: I've got 1 RAID controller doing some magic to create a RAID-5 out of 4 disks. If a disk fails, no issue. Gets replaced. No data loss. No downtime. Easy to understand, yes?
Now if the controller fails, I've got 4 disks full of data and no (simple) way of getting the data back off. (Yes it's possible, but dou you know how AMI/LSI store their RAID-5 data on 4 disks?) I'd have to buy another controller of the same brand (which is not a big problem here). Using software RAID-5 would solve this problem. Thus no need for the hardware RAID controller any more. If the IDE adapter fails, I just get another one. No issues with incompatibilities.
Could you follow this logic? I could not follow yours.
That's about what I did: get some IDE disks (4 in my case), get a drive cage capable of keeping those cool ) and hot-plugable, use a RAID-5 IDE controller and I had, with 120GB disks, 360GB space. Not extremly fast, but convenient. That box is my main server keeping all home directories, including lots of (Divx re-encoded) recorded movies/shows.
Nowawadays I would skip the RAID controller as it's potentially the single-point-of-failure in my setup. And instead of 120GB disks, I would choose larger ones.
You're on the extremely low end of where a SAN becomes practical...
I can second that. In our company we have 2 EMCs (50km apart, 1 was free, leftover from somewhere), but the switches and FC cards took a surprisingly large amount of money. And of course the disks are expensive too. No way to put in usual SCSI disks. It all still makes sense in our case, because we gain flexibility: adding some GB to that server, take some way here, change RAID levels (not a 1-step process though), copy the data to the remote data center automatically, everything is always mirrored, and we can make snapshots of servers when we do larger upgrades so we can back out quickly. And all done from your desk (in our case: from someone's desk in another city, who manages all those SAN systems centrally).
The price we pay are: money and a high level of training and practice. Don't expect to just configure an EMC or a FC fabric without either good traning and/or lots of practice. You can screw up 100 servers in one go by misconfiguring the FC switches. All at once.
Compared that with a 2TB box acting as a NFS/CIFS server: as Unix admin it's easy to administrate, and while it does not scale to server 100 DB servers, you can always get a second box for the price of 2 EMC disks (they are that expensive). Get a second (or third/forth) one some km away, replicate them either with a RAID-1 in software if performance allows this, or with rsync, and voila, you have a nice, easy to administrate file server. My advise for this type of storage: build that yourself. Don't buy cheap junk though as lots of people depend on it running 24h a day. Make it some kind of redundant.
If however you need instant replication (like EMC offers with guaranteed max. 1 outstanding I/O operation to a second EMC box), high-throughput (32GB cache to buffer nearly all RAID-5 penalties), databases and shared medium (read: FC, clusters), then companies like EMC & Co will sell you small cut-down stuff too if you cannot afford their large storage systems.
If you don't need the type of flexibility you need a SAN offers, don't use it. It's overkill, expensive and complicated. But it's interresting technology.
It is a bit more tricky than just 'add more coils' or 'use more current'.
Back at university we had a 14T He cooled magnet. Reaching 12T was standard. No issues. But having 2 more Teslas out of that thing took many tricks: pumping off the Helium to make it even colder, increasing current near the limit. The thick copper cables got pretty warm. And heat and superconducting coils and Helium don't mix well, so for us, 15T was unreachable.
It's not unsimilar to the 10s/100m in athletics: Everyone get's close, but it took some time until someone finally was faster than 10s.
20T was the limit for 'usual' magnets. Getting more needed a new trick. But I admit that for people not using this stuff, it looks very much like no particular breakthrough. Like I never cared if I can run 100m in 10.1 or 9.9s. It's just 2% difference after all, isn't it?
I never had any problems with off-the-shelf el-cheapo no-name home routers. I installed 4 such routers, 3 different brands in 3 companies and here at home. The latter one is a temporary solution, the other ones run for about 2 years now. No problems, except PPPoE related issues (MTU size limit and Linksys' inability to fragment them correctly, but this is an old Linksys). Even companies which wanted a more sophisticated router (Yamaha, Cisco) wanted: NAT, nothing incoming, everything outgoing. Not different from cheap home-routers.
That said, while a NATing router might not be the worlds securest solution, it's a very simple one and a pretty effective one too as long as users don't use the 'DMZ' feature, but I don't know anyone using it without knowing what it does in terms of attackability. For the money you pay, you get the ability to connect more than one computer to the Internet, and they are all no longer easily attackable. Great value for money.
Imagine a world where all users had those. Windows viruses/worms would have a much harder life to spread.
The key here is, that it's cheap and easy to use and it actually works. Compare that with a far more complicated Linux/*BSD firewall solution.
Wouldn't a single board computer be better in almost every respect? Take a lower end mini-itx board, develop a wall plug silent power supply for it, and all you'd then have to make are compact flash adaptors and joystick adaptors.
[...]
The only downside I see is that it will encourage people to use the same bloated tools they are using now, rather than encouraging them to at least take a cursory glance at assembly, and gain experience in writing their own device drivers.
I think this is exactly the point: have a computer with lots of ready-to-use-software, OS, libraries, and you don't learn nearly as much as if you need to write all those nifty things yourself. And let a beginner use somethink like OpenGL/DirectX8 and they won't understand simple basics like "How do I draw a 3D cube on a 2D display?"
While I think the choice of CPU was not the best (I'd gone for a 16 or 32 bit microcontroller like NEC VR or Motorola Coldfire or IBM small PPCs), having a simple system do simple games makes you understand games (or any task) much better than buying or just installing a new program.
I for example had a Color Genie while every one else had a C64. Everyone except me
knew lots of games. Me learned how to program.
In this light, the chosen CPU might be a good idea after all. 32 bit microcrontrollers with their PCI bus,
memory configuration etc. are clearly more tricky to
handle than a (fast) 8 bit type with no such things. And given all the power of a fast 32 bit CPU, you'd want to create very complex games, which will be more difficult for most beginners than they can handle.
LCs are very slow compared to what is nowadays the speed bits traveling along a glass fibre. I cannot see a useful way of using it directly to redirect or modulate laser light. Maybe indirectly (like in getting rid of reflections), but this technology is still slow compared to what you can do with real crystals. Those are unfortunately very delicate objects (humidity is bad, bad, bad) and pretty expensive and you cannot make large ones (but you do not need to as laser light is usually small area-wise).
So unless someone shows me a useable way to use this technology, I will put it in the box Interresting technology with no current use with Internet attached to it to make it seem more interresting than it is.
Wrong. Found in many places on the Internet: like here in this GC FQA: it's not true that GC disks spin backward. You can check it out youself. Instead the CD starts at the outer part of the disk and the laser then moves towards the inside. Normal CD-ROMs and DVDs start at the inside and go outside (and slow down while doing that).
The key sensors seem to go bad after 20 years it seems.
I am using an IBM keyboard (dunno M model or not, it's heavy, noisy, made in UK and build in 1987). I use it for about 10 years now and it was in regular use before. I recently bought keyboards from pckeyboard.com as they have those IBM keyboards and the ones I got from them feel exactly like my old one. Which makes me a believe, that the new ones will last at least 10 years, probably more.
Of course it might be that they start to degrade after 20 years...still it's by far the only part of the computers I use which is not replaced for such a long time.
Wiring junction boxes frequently contain notes jotted on gray electrical tape. "Approved by engineer Larry 5/22/01; says the NEC doesn't apply here. Black:Hot White:Neutral Green:Ground BlackW/tape:Messenger WhiteW/tape:Magic. If this box is smokey, check the one at the other end of the aisle too!"
While I think it's funny, I don't think anyone who would believe the notes and touched the 'safe' white cable, would think it's funny. Yes, it's stupid to trust a piece of gray tape, but if I were to touch any cables after reading this, I would check out the wiring, mistrusting NEC and written note. There might be people who would trust the tape...
How in the world can it know where the print?.... Unless maybe you are supposed to start in the direct center of where the image is supposed to be and then it tracks from there I guess?
Good point. Can be solved however by making the device aware of the paper. Thus you'd move to the corners of the paper (even a while paper on a white surface should be ok, as there is a contrast difference visible) and as long as you don't lift the printer thing up, the printer is able to find out your relative position on the sheet.
This will not work on very large surfaces. Or spheres. My guess is, you push a button where it's supposed to start printing. And you click again to make sure the printer knows where "right" is. Or "down" or "left" in other languages.
What interrests me most is how you can swipe over a freshly printed surface without making a mess, unless they limit surface-ink combinations. Only if the printer thingy touches the surface on the lower, yet unprinted part of the paper, then it would not smear as it does not touch the upper part. The "random movement" becomes less random that way though.
All in all, a nice idea, even given some limitations like randomness of movement, special fast drying ink, limited surfaces.
x86ers would like it very much if 64bit wasn't relevant for the consumer, because they're not going to get it for a little while yet, but in truth, it really is huge. The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.
Care to elaborate why Doom III or actually any current non-server-programs will benefit from 64bit?
I've seen simulations of molecules which can suck up all the memory you throw at them (and all the CPU time). You can use lots of memory when doing large-scale and/or high-resolution graphics (poster size rasterizing), but how can games be sped up that much? The most important benefit of 64bit it being able to have more than 2GB of memory and use it without time-consuming tricks like PAE which hit performance hard and in most cases you are better off by scaling down your program so it can fit within 2GB of memory.
For those cases with large data sets, 2GB is nice, the more is better. That's why SGIs 6 years ago could have up to 8GB memory (see here.
Now where is a game that needs that much memory? And how can it be fast when it has to use this much memory? A program does not get always faster when being able to use more memory. Memory in most PCs is pretty slow compared to the CPU and recalculating values in a tight loop is often surprisingly quick compared to a memory look-up. And even games like Unreal2 are very happy with 512MB. How fast could a game be that needs more memory?
What usual PCs need, is a fast memory subsystem. No one needs more than 2GB of memory on the desktop. Yes, there are exceptions. But games are none of them. Games use CPU and video card power. And AGP/CPU/memory bandwidth. At least until now (and if it's up to me, for some more time).
My computer is by far not a high-end box, but PCI is a (small) bottle-neck, even for me.
Let's see: 2 IDE channels, 2 disks, that's 50 MB/s each, 1 GBit network, that's peak 100MB/s. A U2W SCSI host adapter with 1 single, very fast disk is good for 70MB/s. Then there is USB2 (everything is USB2 now) and Firewire (each 50MB/s). Adds up to (peak) 370MB/s.
You and me and most people know, that a usual user and most unusual users like the./ crows will never use all devices at once. But just copying data from disk to network saturates the bus.
A simple fix is 66MHz 64Bit PCI, but those are very rare in consumer machines. So while PCI-Express might be currently overkill, I doubt simple 33MHz 32Bit PCI will be sufficient even for consumer grade computers. Just imagine 10 years ago when PCI started: most were using ISA and that was enough for most usual users. 10MBit/s Ethernet cards used less than 1MB/s. Who needs a faster bus? Only servers needed PCI (or EISA).
Watching the long migration from ISA to PCI until ISA was (mostly) replaced, I don't expect PCI-Express to replace PCI within 5 years. And in 5 years I would bet, that PCI looks like ISA does now: slow and outdated.
EMC changes the firmware in their drives which look a lot like Seagate ones. But honestly, would you even think about putting an off-the-shelf-drive into an expensive EMC box?
Sun has firmware updates for their disks in T3 storage arrays. I would not expect any problem, but i don't want to find out that the T3 completely crashed after a firmware update of the drives, just because one of the drives had a small bug in the firmware which prevented it from being updated correctly.
Quite often, while it's technically ok, you will lose all support. And the reason why companies stick with expensive Sun/IBM/HP hardware is, because unlike no-name-Taiwan-made-stuff there is support (which they pay for, usually a lot). I would not worry for any computer worth less then US$5000 to replace disks to generic ones, but management will not even think about replacing a US$800 disk with the same model generic US$200 disk in a US$50000 storage box.
At one LAN party we organized a trip to the local swimming pool. About 50 out of 100 people went there, which reduced the amount of sweat a lot and made people move physically. All in all, a very good idea, especially because it was quite warm and the rented sports hall did not have an air condition (though good ventination).
I always wondered how people get so many mail via hotmail while I do not
The only thing which I took care of, was to not click on "yes, send me spam from all advertisers", but that was a no-brainer. If you apply for spam, you will of course get it.
So far, I have my account for more than a year. I regularily send a mail once in 2 weeks to another account, with reply to keep it from expiring, but beside this I don't use nor advertise it at all. No spam. Zero. Nada.
It might be because I am non-american (so I am not a good target for american-only advertising).
While I agree, people tend to react different to the same amount of [caffeine|alcohol|you-name-it] so while I think it's unlikely to get a problem like the described one with 'only' 350mg caffeine, I know that I can drink 2 cups of coffee after dinner and sleep well 2 hours later, whereas my brother, after drinking one cup of the same coffee, cannot sleep way until after midnight.
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"Panther has managed not only to lose my iTunes Library and my iPhoto Library, but also their backups kept on -- you guessed it -- my external FireWire hard disk,"
I once reinstalled a Compaq server. I copied all data to the externally connected SCSI raid and I only wanted to reinstall WinNT on the 2 internal disks. I felt safe. How wrong I was...
Because the Compaq 'System erase' tool erases not only things like the date/time, internal disk, BIOS settings etc., but also partitions/disks on all connected SCSI controllers it can access without any special drivers (3rd party FC is thus safe). When the external RAIDs disks flashed up, I knew what happened.Moral of the story: have a backup in a safe place, not connected in a way like this. Especially if you actually care about the data.
Assuming you're using only the processor, on an 8-bit machine the data speed ought to be very close to the clock speed; a 1Mhz machine probably could copy no more than 1 megabit, and that's assuming that it was doing NOTHING else, like interacting with the user.
Interresting logic. A poor old Z80 running at modest 4MHz was able to move, using a DMA companion chip, quite exactly 1MByte/s (4MHz, 4 clock cycles/byte). The CPU without any special chip was able to move a byte in 21 cycles (via LDIR command) from memory to memory (up to 64kByte block size) or from memory to I/O port (via OTIR command) or from I/O port to memory at the same speed, but only max. 256 byte in one go. That's max. 190 kByte/s.
Of course those are absolute maximum throughputs, but you could always crank up the frequency to 8MHz (more on later models). Saturating Ethernet is thus impossible without DMA chip, but not difficult with such help. And most 'good' computers had a DMA chip for things like hard disk.
A portion of StarROMs annual profits will be donated to projects that help support the legal emulation of classic video games.
The problem with this sentence is, it's as good as a politicians statement or any CEOs statement nowadays. a portion is anything from 99.9% down to some cents. And even worse, they wrote annual profits which can be increased and decreased nearly at will by using tax things like 'one-time-expenses', 'cost of stock options for CEO', 'savings for later' etc. (I know that company is not yet listed on the stock exchanges, but I am sure they find other ways to modify their annual profits in the direction they want it.) So while the intentions might be good as I am sure they know that without emulators like MAME they won't sell many of those, I don't expect them to contribute more than a small amount to the MAME project.
By writing hard numbers like: US$1 goes to MAME for every game purchased they would commit themself to something substantial, but saying some portion of the profits is just pathetic.
Really, an all 1 one machine doesnt exist.
I found that out too. Had a dual CPU Linux box for almost all things (beside a server running Samba, DNS, DHCP and all this type of server work). Linux was fine, but the machine was too slow for newer games (when dual booting to Windows), many games did not use the second CPU, some ATI and other drivers did not like two CPUs at all...all kind of nasty little problems.
The simple solution was a game-only computer: 1 CPU, fast video card (time to upgrade the old Radeon 8500LE). I can whole heartly recommend such a setup. If you buy the latest-and-greatest hardware, you'll have endless problems with Linux (e.g. nForce2 mainboard: no IOAPIC, no Firewire, just now they start to work, 9 monthes after the boards were available, Linux 2.5 was better but not everyone like to live on the bleeding edge). I don't blame any Linux developers as it's clearly the fault of the hardware vendors who don't supports Linux drivers actively, with very few exceptions. Use old-and-venerable hardware (1+ year) and it's a great Linux box (read: everything works out of the box) but when dual-booting to Windows for games, some hardware is no longer supported, or does not work well any more, or is just too slow for current games. I was not able to find a one-size-size-fits-all, so I bought 2 sizes and I could not be happier.
My next video card will be some updated ATI or nVidia card. With HL2 bundled or not. That will go to the Windows-mostly machine. The current ATI 8500LE will go to the Linux-mostly machine so I can finally connect 2 monitors.
It's not the perfect setup taking more space and needing a KVM switch, but it simplifies the choice of hardware a lot as I don't need to wait for simultanious Windows-and-Linux support. Getting Linux worh with it 1 year later is fine for me.
And for those who'll cry "I cannot afford 2 computers, I want my latest-and-fastest video card to be supported in Linux" I say: those video cards are far too expensive anyway. How can you afford a US$500 video card? Save for a US$200 video card, a US$300 second computer or reused parts, a KVM switch and use the best of both worlds. Seriously.
you would want to have four single point of failure
Hu? What I ment was: I've got 1 RAID controller doing some magic to create a RAID-5 out of 4 disks. If a disk fails, no issue. Gets replaced. No data loss. No downtime. Easy to understand, yes?
Now if the controller fails, I've got 4 disks full of data and no (simple) way of getting the data back off. (Yes it's possible, but dou you know how AMI/LSI store their RAID-5 data on 4 disks?) I'd have to buy another controller of the same brand (which is not a big problem here). Using software RAID-5 would solve this problem. Thus no need for the hardware RAID controller any more. If the IDE adapter fails, I just get another one. No issues with incompatibilities.
Could you follow this logic? I could not follow yours.
That's about what I did: get some IDE disks (4 in my case), get a drive cage capable of keeping those cool ) and hot-plugable, use a RAID-5 IDE controller and I had, with 120GB disks, 360GB space. Not extremly fast, but convenient. That box is my main server keeping all home directories, including lots of (Divx re-encoded) recorded movies/shows.
Nowawadays I would skip the RAID controller as it's potentially the single-point-of-failure in my setup. And instead of 120GB disks, I would choose larger ones.
You're on the extremely low end of where a SAN becomes practical...
I can second that. In our company we have 2 EMCs (50km apart, 1 was free, leftover from somewhere), but the switches and FC cards took a surprisingly large amount of money. And of course the disks are expensive too. No way to put in usual SCSI disks. It all still makes sense in our case, because we gain flexibility: adding some GB to that server, take some way here, change RAID levels (not a 1-step process though), copy the data to the remote data center automatically, everything is always mirrored, and we can make snapshots of servers when we do larger upgrades so we can back out quickly. And all done from your desk (in our case: from someone's desk in another city, who manages all those SAN systems centrally).
The price we pay are: money and a high level of training and practice. Don't expect to just configure an EMC or a FC fabric without either good traning and/or lots of practice. You can screw up 100 servers in one go by misconfiguring the FC switches. All at once.
Compared that with a 2TB box acting as a NFS/CIFS server: as Unix admin it's easy to administrate, and while it does not scale to server 100 DB servers, you can always get a second box for the price of 2 EMC disks (they are that expensive). Get a second (or third/forth) one some km away, replicate them either with a RAID-1 in software if performance allows this, or with rsync, and voila, you have a nice, easy to administrate file server. My advise for this type of storage: build that yourself. Don't buy cheap junk though as lots of people depend on it running 24h a day. Make it some kind of redundant.
If however you need instant replication (like EMC offers with guaranteed max. 1 outstanding I/O operation to a second EMC box), high-throughput (32GB cache to buffer nearly all RAID-5 penalties), databases and shared medium (read: FC, clusters), then companies like EMC & Co will sell you small cut-down stuff too if you cannot afford their large storage systems.
If you don't need the type of flexibility you need a SAN offers, don't use it. It's overkill, expensive and complicated. But it's interresting technology.
It is a bit more tricky than just 'add more coils' or 'use more current'.
Back at university we had a 14T He cooled magnet. Reaching 12T was standard. No issues. But having 2 more Teslas out of that thing took many tricks: pumping off the Helium to make it even colder, increasing current near the limit. The thick copper cables got pretty warm. And heat and superconducting coils and Helium don't mix well, so for us, 15T was unreachable.
It's not unsimilar to the 10s/100m in athletics: Everyone get's close, but it took some time until someone finally was faster than 10s.
20T was the limit for 'usual' magnets. Getting more needed a new trick. But I admit that for people not using this stuff, it looks very much like no particular breakthrough. Like I never cared if I can run 100m in 10.1 or 9.9s. It's just 2% difference after all, isn't it?
I never had any problems with off-the-shelf el-cheapo no-name home routers. I installed 4 such routers, 3 different brands in 3 companies and here at home. The latter one is a temporary solution, the other ones run for about 2 years now. No problems, except PPPoE related issues (MTU size limit and Linksys' inability to fragment them correctly, but this is an old Linksys). Even companies which wanted a more sophisticated router (Yamaha, Cisco) wanted: NAT, nothing incoming, everything outgoing. Not different from cheap home-routers.
That said, while a NATing router might not be the worlds securest solution, it's a very simple one and a pretty effective one too as long as users don't use the 'DMZ' feature, but I don't know anyone using it without knowing what it does in terms of attackability. For the money you pay, you get the ability to connect more than one computer to the Internet, and they are all no longer easily attackable. Great value for money.
Imagine a world where all users had those. Windows viruses/worms would have a much harder life to spread.
The key here is, that it's cheap and easy to use and it actually works. Compare that with a far more complicated Linux/*BSD firewall solution.
Bad style to reply to myself. But the 68HCS12 is not a (fast) 8 bit microcontroller, but instead a (bit fast) 16 bit microcontroller.
Wouldn't a single board computer be better in almost every respect? Take a lower end mini-itx board, develop a wall plug silent power supply for it, and all you'd then have to make are compact flash adaptors and joystick adaptors.
[...]The only downside I see is that it will encourage people to use the same bloated tools they are using now, rather than encouraging them to at least take a cursory glance at assembly, and gain experience in writing their own device drivers.
I think this is exactly the point: have a computer with lots of ready-to-use-software, OS, libraries, and you don't learn nearly as much as if you need to write all those nifty things yourself. And let a beginner use somethink like OpenGL/DirectX8 and they won't understand simple basics like "How do I draw a 3D cube on a 2D display?"
While I think the choice of CPU was not the best (I'd gone for a 16 or 32 bit microcontroller like NEC VR or Motorola Coldfire or IBM small PPCs), having a simple system do simple games makes you understand games (or any task) much better than buying or just installing a new program.
I for example had a Color Genie while every one else had a C64. Everyone except me knew lots of games. Me learned how to program.
In this light, the chosen CPU might be a good idea after all. 32 bit microcrontrollers with their PCI bus, memory configuration etc. are clearly more tricky to handle than a (fast) 8 bit type with no such things. And given all the power of a fast 32 bit CPU, you'd want to create very complex games, which will be more difficult for most beginners than they can handle.
LCs are very slow compared to what is nowadays the speed bits traveling along a glass fibre. I cannot see a useful way of using it directly to redirect or modulate laser light. Maybe indirectly (like in getting rid of reflections), but this technology is still slow compared to what you can do with real crystals. Those are unfortunately very delicate objects (humidity is bad, bad, bad) and pretty expensive and you cannot make large ones (but you do not need to as laser light is usually small area-wise).
So unless someone shows me a useable way to use this technology, I will put it in the box Interresting technology with no current use with Internet attached to it to make it seem more interresting than it is.
BTW, don't care to read the full thread. It does not contain any informations, but lots of bad language.
Wrong. Found in many places on the Internet: like here in this GC FQA: it's not true that GC disks spin backward. You can check it out youself. Instead the CD starts at the outer part of the disk and the laser then moves towards the inside. Normal CD-ROMs and DVDs start at the inside and go outside (and slow down while doing that).
Google cache of the article how to modify an old IBM keyboard to work on a new P4 computer.
I had no such problems though. Maybe it's because I have an Athlon...
The key sensors seem to go bad after 20 years it seems.
I am using an IBM keyboard (dunno M model or not, it's heavy, noisy, made in UK and build in 1987). I use it for about 10 years now and it was in regular use before. I recently bought keyboards from pckeyboard.com as they have those IBM keyboards and the ones I got from them feel exactly like my old one. Which makes me a believe, that the new ones will last at least 10 years, probably more.
Of course it might be that they start to degrade after 20 years...still it's by far the only part of the computers I use which is not replaced for such a long time.
Wiring junction boxes frequently contain notes jotted on gray electrical tape. "Approved by engineer Larry 5/22/01; says the NEC doesn't apply here. Black:Hot White:Neutral Green:Ground BlackW/tape:Messenger WhiteW/tape:Magic. If this box is smokey, check the one at the other end of the aisle too!"
While I think it's funny, I don't think anyone who would believe the notes and touched the 'safe' white cable, would think it's funny. Yes, it's stupid to trust a piece of gray tape, but if I were to touch any cables after reading this, I would check out the wiring, mistrusting NEC and written note. There might be people who would trust the tape...
How in the world can it know where the print? .... Unless maybe you are supposed to start in the direct center of where the image is supposed to be and then it tracks from there I guess?
Good point. Can be solved however by making the device aware of the paper. Thus you'd move to the corners of the paper (even a while paper on a white surface should be ok, as there is a contrast difference visible) and as long as you don't lift the printer thing up, the printer is able to find out your relative position on the sheet.
This will not work on very large surfaces. Or spheres. My guess is, you push a button where it's supposed to start printing. And you click again to make sure the printer knows where "right" is. Or "down" or "left" in other languages.
What interrests me most is how you can swipe over a freshly printed surface without making a mess, unless they limit surface-ink combinations. Only if the printer thingy touches the surface on the lower, yet unprinted part of the paper, then it would not smear as it does not touch the upper part. The "random movement" becomes less random that way though.
All in all, a nice idea, even given some limitations like randomness of movement, special fast drying ink, limited surfaces.
x86ers would like it very much if 64bit wasn't relevant for the consumer, because they're not going to get it for a little while yet, but in truth, it really is huge. The potential for huge performance increases in games (I'm thinking Doom III of course) is massive.
Care to elaborate why Doom III or actually any current non-server-programs will benefit from 64bit?
I've seen simulations of molecules which can suck up all the memory you throw at them (and all the CPU time). You can use lots of memory when doing large-scale and/or high-resolution graphics (poster size rasterizing), but how can games be sped up that much? The most important benefit of 64bit it being able to have more than 2GB of memory and use it without time-consuming tricks like PAE which hit performance hard and in most cases you are better off by scaling down your program so it can fit within 2GB of memory. For those cases with large data sets, 2GB is nice, the more is better. That's why SGIs 6 years ago could have up to 8GB memory (see here.
Now where is a game that needs that much memory? And how can it be fast when it has to use this much memory? A program does not get always faster when being able to use more memory. Memory in most PCs is pretty slow compared to the CPU and recalculating values in a tight loop is often surprisingly quick compared to a memory look-up. And even games like Unreal2 are very happy with 512MB. How fast could a game be that needs more memory?
What usual PCs need, is a fast memory subsystem. No one needs more than 2GB of memory on the desktop. Yes, there are exceptions. But games are none of them. Games use CPU and video card power. And AGP/CPU/memory bandwidth. At least until now (and if it's up to me, for some more time).
Now that's a no-brainer.
My computer is by far not a high-end box, but PCI is a (small) bottle-neck, even for me.
Let's see: 2 IDE channels, 2 disks, that's 50 MB/s each, 1 GBit network, that's peak 100MB/s. A U2W SCSI host adapter with 1 single, very fast disk is good for 70MB/s. Then there is USB2 (everything is USB2 now) and Firewire (each 50MB/s). Adds up to (peak) 370MB/s.
You and me and most people know, that a usual user and most unusual users like the ./ crows will never use all devices at once. But just copying data from disk to network saturates the bus.
A simple fix is 66MHz 64Bit PCI, but those are very rare in consumer machines. So while PCI-Express might be currently overkill, I doubt simple 33MHz 32Bit PCI will be sufficient even for consumer grade computers. Just imagine 10 years ago when PCI started: most were using ISA and that was enough for most usual users. 10MBit/s Ethernet cards used less than 1MB/s. Who needs a faster bus? Only servers needed PCI (or EISA).
Watching the long migration from ISA to PCI until ISA was (mostly) replaced, I don't expect PCI-Express to replace PCI within 5 years. And in 5 years I would bet, that PCI looks like ISA does now: slow and outdated.
EMC changes the firmware in their drives which look a lot like Seagate ones. But honestly, would you even think about putting an off-the-shelf-drive into an expensive EMC box?
Sun has firmware updates for their disks in T3 storage arrays. I would not expect any problem, but i don't want to find out that the T3 completely crashed after a firmware update of the drives, just because one of the drives had a small bug in the firmware which prevented it from being updated correctly.
Quite often, while it's technically ok, you will lose all support. And the reason why companies stick with expensive Sun/IBM/HP hardware is, because unlike no-name-Taiwan-made-stuff there is support (which they pay for, usually a lot). I would not worry for any computer worth less then US$5000 to replace disks to generic ones, but management will not even think about replacing a US$800 disk with the same model generic US$200 disk in a US$50000 storage box.
Whenever I read about military-grade encryption I remember this.
At one LAN party we organized a trip to the local swimming pool. About 50 out of 100 people went there, which reduced the amount of sweat a lot and made people move physically. All in all, a very good idea, especially because it was quite warm and the rented sports hall did not have an air condition (though good ventination).
I always wondered how people get so many mail via hotmail while I do not
The only thing which I took care of, was to not click on "yes, send me spam from all advertisers", but that was a no-brainer. If you apply for spam, you will of course get it.
So far, I have my account for more than a year. I regularily send a mail once in 2 weeks to another account, with reply to keep it from expiring, but beside this I don't use nor advertise it at all. No spam. Zero. Nada.
It might be because I am non-american (so I am not a good target for american-only advertising).
Am I the only one with this "problem"?
While I agree, people tend to react different to the same amount of [caffeine|alcohol|you-name-it] so while I think it's unlikely to get a problem like the described one with 'only' 350mg caffeine, I know that I can drink 2 cups of coffee after dinner and sleep well 2 hours later, whereas my brother, after drinking one cup of the same coffee, cannot sleep way until after midnight.