Procmail helps, but running your own mail server is even better. You can hand out a different email address to every commercial entity you deal with over the net. That way, if mail comes in to track010@salfter.dyndns.org and it's not from eBay or from someone who had an auction up on eBay, then I know that eBay is selling addresses (just an example; I'm not saying that eBay does this). When one of these addresses starts getting spam, I then delete it, let further messages to it bounce, and can go after the bastards who are selling addresses.
...that Dvorak is a moron? I honestly can't recall the last article I've read from him (which probably would've been some time ago in PC Rag) that had its facts straight. The only way I can see getting to his quoted $500 cost is with considerable upgrading (mine came to just over $500...once you added in lifetime service and a 30GB hard drive to boost its capacity). Getting a phone line to a TiVo is no more difficult than fishing a phoneline under the carpet or using one of those powerline phone extensions...and if you already have DSS and/or WebTV, you've figured that bit out already. There's also the consideration that TiVo's handling of commercials is no different than a VCR's (and there were some VCRs that had a true commercial-skip feature).
(I probably should've just flagged his article @ Forbes in my mind as -1, Troll, just like his other stuff...but it's sometimes fun to mess with the trolls. For a little while, anyway.:-) )
When I put the screws back in my CD-ROM and/or put the case back on, I get all kinds of trouble, but without them everythings fine.
Years ago, I had a power supply like that. If it was firmly fastened to the back of the case with all four screws, it'd glitch and cause the computer to reboot. Leaving it somewhat loose appeared to alleviate the problem somewhat. IIRC, I eventually "fixed" the problem by removing the upper half of the power supply case. I don't know if it was overheating or if there was an intermittent connection on the power supply circuit board, but it didn't give me any more problems once it was opened up. (It may not have been the safest setup, but I know the danger involved and nobody else pokes around inside my computers.)
When will we see intel and AMD pushing refrigeration units for their systems?
Ever hear of KryoTech? Their website is pretty much content-free at the moment, but they sell refrigeration systems for overclockers. They also sell prebuilt Athlon-based systems...they had Athlons running at 1.0 GHz months before AMD shipped true 1.0-GHz Athlons. Last time I heard, their equipment, combined with the latest processors, was supposed to enable speeds up to 1.5-1.6 GHz. If a 1.2-GHz Athlon is an even match for a 1.5-GHz P4 in most tasks, imagine how an Athlon @ 1.5 GHz would compare to a 1.5-GHz P4.
There are other companies out there in this business...KryoTech is the one that popped to mind first. I think Tom's Hardware did a review of a similar product from another company, and continues to use a system built around that product as its reference "absolute fastest you can get" system.
Yeah, I heard good things about Orb and I got myself one.
Most of what I've heard about them has been not-so-good...mostly along the lines of "looks impressive, but doesn't get the job done." They don't appear to have much surface area to them, which is a Bad Thing (TM) for a heatsink.
I bought this heatsink to go with my 1.0-GHz Athlon...it's cheap, but it gets the job done fairly well AFAICT (no lockups, and the heatsink only gets warm, not hot). The thermal pad at the bottom was removed and the appropriate amount of Arctic Silver II was scraped across the top of the die. There's no thermal monitoring on the motherboard (a Biostar M7MIA), so I can't provide numbers for comparison, but I suspect that mine is running much cooler than yours.
From what I understand (I'm Canadian, but half my family's British), they drive these vans around and can apparently detect signals from an unlicenced television.
Most devices that tune in some kind of radio signal throw off at least a local-oscillator signal (typically 455 kHz for AM radio, 10.7 MHz for FM...don't know what TV uses) that could be picked up from a short distance. TVs also have sawtooth oscillators that produce the horizontal and vertical scanning. These run at 60 Hz for vertical and 15.75 kHz for horizontal (these numbers are for NTSC as implemented in North America; they will vary elsewhere). If a van rolled up, pointed an antenna in your TV's general direction, and picked up the appropriate combination of frequencies, it would be a reasonable assumption on their part that you have a TV running.
After all, it's time that everyone starts to realise that, now the iron curtain is down, there are no more enemies for the US to combat.
I guess you must not be keeping up with current events, as I think most people would rate Red China as somewhat less than friendly. There are also countries such as North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Cuba that, while they're not serious threats today, could present problems for us in the future. Remember this: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
The B-2 was used against Serbia in 1999. It flew less than 5% of the missions, but dropped 25% of the guided munitions in the entire conflict. They sortied from Holliman AFB in Missouri,
Holloman AFB (note the spelling) is in New Mexico, not Missouri, and is the current home of the F-117, not the B-2. (An AC already posted that Whiteman AFB was the name you sought, though I can't confirm or deny that. I am an Air Force brat, but we were always at fighter bases (Langley, Eglin, Nellis, Ramstein, Upper Heyford) when I was growing up, not bomber bases.)
Sorry... The unit's only got one ethernet-port.
Can't route or firewall anything...:-(
What if you use one of those USB-Ethernet adapters? It's only 10 Mbps, but that's enough for most WAN connections. There's probably more processor overhead in those adapters than in, say, a 3C905C...but then maybe that P!!!-733 wouldn't be such overkill at all if you end up doing this.:-)
(Yes, this assumes that someone figures out how to hook ordinary USB devices into an Xbox, since it's been hinted that some goofball connector might be used to prevent this.)
Those sound like lowball prices from the bottom-feeders that Pricewatch tends to attract. I'm not saying that you can't find good deals through companies on Pricewatch (I use it for pricing, but only in combination with ResellerRatings), but you probably don't want to buy from the absolute cheapest vendor you find. This will end up driving the cost of the configuration you quoted past $300, possibly by a considerable amount.
As an example, consider my recent hardware upgrade. I looked up the parts I bought where I bought them, and then checked Pricewatch for the absolute lowest prices on the same items. For a 1.0-GHz Athlon (200-MHz FSB), Biostar M7MIA, and IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB (I bought the 45GB model, but it was no longer listed), the place where I bought them has those items at $425. The cheapest prices on Pricewatch for the same items added up to $390. That's not much of a difference, but that's only for three components (I bought the DDR memory for the motherboard from another vendor and used the other parts that I already had). Factor in the other bits that you need for a complete system and the disparity can only increase.
In any case, with the quantities Microsoft will be buying, I'm reasonably sure they can get better prices than you or I can get. They're also not likely to charge themselves the "Windows tax" (otherwise known as "license fee") that they charge other computer makers.
And I've just had a great idea for using an X10. I could get a linux box to listen for keepalives from my (sorry) Win98 box on the LAN, and cycle the power on it whenever it hangs. Neato!;)
I used that to allow remote power-cycling of the cable modem for a while, one day after it got wedged. It came in handy once or twice, but I yanked it out when I needed the module to control Christmas lights.:-) The modem hasn't glitched in a while anyway, and since I still haven't gotten dial-in working since switching from SuSE to LFS, there's really no way to control a remote cable-modem reset right now anyway. (Well, maybe nohup (br k8 off; sleep 5; br k8 on) & logout would work...)
yeah i know about the glock trigger safeties and stuff..glocks have some ceramic parts..just not the barrel and stuff but they are lighter thatn most weapons due to the ceramics.
No ceramics...they're too brittle. The receiver is plastic, with some metal parts in the trigger mechanism. As you noted, the barrel and slide are metal. (I have a Glock 23...I speak from experience.)
Or did you mean things like making sure the key is only used on YOUR private system and to keep the private key ring on a floppy that's with you at all times?
An even better approach might be one of those USB flash-storage dongles that have been mentioned here before. They have enough space for your (PGP) keyring and, IIRC, they'll fit on your (metal hoop) keyring. Assuming they work with Linux, this would seem to be a natural application...stick your key in the USB port to enable PGP signing/decryption/etc. They should also be more reliable than 3.5" floppies, which are notorious for dropping bits.
buy glocks. they dont have wimpy things like safeties AND they're porcelain.
Bzzt...there are three different safeties (it's just that none of them require action on your part other than to point and shoot), and the "porcelain Glock" doesn't exist. It's some BS model made up to go in one of the Die Hard (?) movies. This page on Glock's website explains what the safeties are and how they work.
Getting back on topic, what do you suppose will be the odds that you can filter out the ads that appear in games? Are they likely to be hardcoded into the game, or would they be pulled off the 'net periodically? (Not that I'm into gameplaying much, even though I have a machine now that'll run damn near anything...)
Next time in your rush to get first post, you might consider RTFA first...the author is already bringing a notebook around with him. He wants something more powerful that's still small, as you can't exactly get a 1.33-GHz Athlon with a 15k-rpm Ultra160 hard drive in a notebook (OK, so you don't exactly need that much firepower for a gaming rig, but notebooks are generally less powerful than desktops (or machines built up from desktop components).
How can Slashdot so vocally support SETI@home, a cool, but completely useless endevour, but badmouth a project that aims to save lives?
Because some corporation is involved in coordinating the compute time to be used, and the prevailing attitude among the/. staff appears to be that Corporations Are Evil (TM). Sometimes I wonder if Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin haven't come back from the dead and gotten jobs as/. editors.
And while we're griping about MS, it REALLY pisses me off that they've apparently decided that Outlook Express is "essential to the Windows Operating System" just like Internet Explorer, because I upgraded a machine to Win2k yesterday just to see what the differences were, if any, and I discovered that OE can't be removed by any conventional means.
Win2K installs everything (including the kitchen sink), with no option to leave out whatever crap (accessibility options, NetMeeting, etc.) that you don't want. That and numerous glitches and incompatibilities sent me back to Win98. I just reinstalled Win98 SE (conflicting CD-burning programs nuked each other and maybe some system-level stuff as well), and I left Outlook Express out both in the initial install and the upgrade to IE 5.5. (For mail and news, I ssh into my Linux server and use mutt and trn...when Windows eats itself, I don't have to worry about losing my mail.)
...after a few more years, the novelty of the 'net will fade, and it will become a standard part of our lives. People won't see the need to have their own website anymore, unless they really are trying to share something with the world that is worthwhile.
No offense, but bullshit. Did the novelty of the Polaroid fade? Are the only people who have an interest in photography these days folks like Ansel and Maplethorpe? No! Now we have disposable cameras and sticky film.
Personal pages will be around as long as somebody's giving away free hosting in exchange for ad banners... Now if you want to debate the certain death of the ad banner, that's different.:-)
Screw the banners...with broadband to the home, you can run your own server and put whatever you want on it, with the only size limit being what your hard drive can hold and without those stupid "punch the monkey" banner ads. If anything, personal pages have the potential to proliferate (say that three times quickly:-) ) to an even greater extent than before, and potentially with less meddling from The Powers That Be (assuming for a moment that they don't do something really stupid, like say that you can't host your own website on your cable-modem or DSL connection).
(FWIW, I've heard from people in other parts of the country with high-bandwidth connections that their usage of those connections is somewhat restricted. Maybe I'm lucky, as the provider I'm using doesn't seem to care much what I do with the fat pipe, as long as I don't resell bandwidth or provide warez/kiddie pr0n/etc. through whatever services I might make available. Besides, with 128 kbps upstream, it's only good for a personal site that sees maybe 10-20 hits on a good day.)
I've been doing that for a couple or three months now, using 2.4.0+reiserfs to serve a couple of diskless machines with ClusterNFS.
(The thing that somewhat pisses me off is I just downloaded 2.4.2 last night, compiled it, and got it going. I want to remove the firewall machine I have going and have everything go straight into the server. I needed to compile in ipmasq support on the server, so I figured I might as well upgrade the kernel at the same time. Now 2.4.3 is out...oh well, with uptime still under 24 hours, yet another upgrade shouldn't be too bad at this point.:-) )
ignoring that this thread is dumb you dont really need a comma if one is using modern block style that what i learned in school but hey gammar has to be the most objective thing i know about
In addition to not teaching grammar, it would appear that the schools aren't teaching spelling nowadays. What is this "modern block style" BS, anyway? It looks more like incoherent rambling with no beginning and no end.
If I ever end up raising kids, it looks more and more like I'll have to keep them out of the public schools. If this rot is what they're "teaching," I wouldn't want the mental midgets exponding these concepts anywhere near them.
Does anyone know of a CD player that's been designed to have that fuzzy analog feel?
A couple of years ago or so, Electronics Now published plans for an effects box intended to be stuck on the output of a CD player, preamp, etc. IIRC, it used a 12AX7 to add "tube sound" to modern equipment. Except for the tube and its socket, the parts were all of the type you could find at Radio Shack. (Actually, you could probably even special-order the tube through them, but there are cheaper sources available.)
It depends if you consider the following data "personally identifying information."
Anonymous Coward turns on his TV around 5:15 every weekday evening. He then watches the cooking channel for about 45 minutes, then turns his TV off.
On Tuesday, he watches ABC religiously from 6 to 9 PM.
Also, he watches the Cartoon Network every Sunday morning from 3 AM to 4 AM.
(add a few more tidbits, possibly some demographic information such as age and gender to clinch it).
Actually, I'm not even sure they can figure out when you're watching with any degree of accuracy, other than when you're watching the stuff it's recorded. While the remote can be set up to switch your TV on and off, I doubt that the TiVo box picks up your TV's on/off code. Even if it did, what would happen if you went up to the TV and hit the power button on the TV? (Since I have to get up to switch the stereo on/off anyway, I usually switch the TV at the same time.) Maybe this would work if the TiVo box controlled power to your TV, but unless you have an ancient 60s/70s model with twin knobs for tuning VHF and UHF, that wouldn't be too practical (newer TVs with digital controls typically lose all their settings when you unplug them)...and who's going to use a 25-year-old store-brand TV from Sears, JCPenney, or whoever with a TiVo?
has amd actually made a reliable processor yet? it seems that everytime to release a processor they dont test them as thourghly as intel tests their pentium chips. if amd releases a bad processor they usually say 'oh well, lets see if we can fix that problem with the next batch'.
Have a look at the Linux source code sometime...arch/i386/kernel/setup.c is particularly interesting as to whose bugs need to be worked around by the kernel. Looking at init_amd, one bug is attributed to B-stepping K6 processors, that comes into play in systems with more than 32MB RAM. (BTW, AMD used to replace those processors that were affected...I don't know if that program is still in effect.) By comparison, init_intel has workarounds for the F00F bug (non-root users could kill any Pentium or Pentium-MMX system) and the Pentium Pro's CPUID bug (it says it supports the SEP instruction when it really doesn't). There was also the problem with the 1.13-GHz Pentium III running so badly that it was recalled, plus the FDIV bug in the first Pentiums. Now try telling me that Intel makes a better/more reliable product than AMD.
I'm on my fourth AMD processor now...started with a K6-200 and went through a K6-2-300 and K6-III-450 to arrive at the 1.0-GHz Athlon I'm using now. (The K6-III is still in use, only in my server now.) I've also built a few K6-2 and Duron systems for others, and the only problem that's ever popped up in any of them was an overheated SiS 530 (on the one time that I tried building a really cheap box) in one of the K6-2 boxen...fixed that by slapping a cooler on that chip, and in any case it wasn't a processor problem.
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Procmail helps, but running your own mail server is even better. You can hand out a different email address to every commercial entity you deal with over the net. That way, if mail comes in to track010@salfter.dyndns.org and it's not from eBay or from someone who had an auction up on eBay, then I know that eBay is selling addresses (just an example; I'm not saying that eBay does this). When one of these addresses starts getting spam, I then delete it, let further messages to it bounce, and can go after the bastards who are selling addresses.
(I probably should've just flagged his article @ Forbes in my mind as -1, Troll, just like his other stuff...but it's sometimes fun to mess with the trolls. For a little while, anyway. :-) )
£2, not 2 lbs. (I suspect that handcuffs would cost more than a couple quid, though.)
Years ago, I had a power supply like that. If it was firmly fastened to the back of the case with all four screws, it'd glitch and cause the computer to reboot. Leaving it somewhat loose appeared to alleviate the problem somewhat. IIRC, I eventually "fixed" the problem by removing the upper half of the power supply case. I don't know if it was overheating or if there was an intermittent connection on the power supply circuit board, but it didn't give me any more problems once it was opened up. (It may not have been the safest setup, but I know the danger involved and nobody else pokes around inside my computers.)
Ever hear of KryoTech? Their website is pretty much content-free at the moment, but they sell refrigeration systems for overclockers. They also sell prebuilt Athlon-based systems...they had Athlons running at 1.0 GHz months before AMD shipped true 1.0-GHz Athlons. Last time I heard, their equipment, combined with the latest processors, was supposed to enable speeds up to 1.5-1.6 GHz. If a 1.2-GHz Athlon is an even match for a 1.5-GHz P4 in most tasks, imagine how an Athlon @ 1.5 GHz would compare to a 1.5-GHz P4.
There are other companies out there in this business...KryoTech is the one that popped to mind first. I think Tom's Hardware did a review of a similar product from another company, and continues to use a system built around that product as its reference "absolute fastest you can get" system.
Most of what I've heard about them has been not-so-good...mostly along the lines of "looks impressive, but doesn't get the job done." They don't appear to have much surface area to them, which is a Bad Thing (TM) for a heatsink.
I bought this heatsink to go with my 1.0-GHz Athlon...it's cheap, but it gets the job done fairly well AFAICT (no lockups, and the heatsink only gets warm, not hot). The thermal pad at the bottom was removed and the appropriate amount of Arctic Silver II was scraped across the top of the die. There's no thermal monitoring on the motherboard (a Biostar M7MIA), so I can't provide numbers for comparison, but I suspect that mine is running much cooler than yours.
Most devices that tune in some kind of radio signal throw off at least a local-oscillator signal (typically 455 kHz for AM radio, 10.7 MHz for FM...don't know what TV uses) that could be picked up from a short distance. TVs also have sawtooth oscillators that produce the horizontal and vertical scanning. These run at 60 Hz for vertical and 15.75 kHz for horizontal (these numbers are for NTSC as implemented in North America; they will vary elsewhere). If a van rolled up, pointed an antenna in your TV's general direction, and picked up the appropriate combination of frequencies, it would be a reasonable assumption on their part that you have a TV running.
I guess you must not be keeping up with current events, as I think most people would rate Red China as somewhat less than friendly. There are also countries such as North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Cuba that, while they're not serious threats today, could present problems for us in the future. Remember this: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Holloman AFB (note the spelling) is in New Mexico, not Missouri, and is the current home of the F-117, not the B-2. (An AC already posted that Whiteman AFB was the name you sought, though I can't confirm or deny that. I am an Air Force brat, but we were always at fighter bases (Langley, Eglin, Nellis, Ramstein, Upper Heyford) when I was growing up, not bomber bases.)
What if you use one of those USB-Ethernet adapters? It's only 10 Mbps, but that's enough for most WAN connections. There's probably more processor overhead in those adapters than in, say, a 3C905C...but then maybe that P!!!-733 wouldn't be such overkill at all if you end up doing this. :-)
(Yes, this assumes that someone figures out how to hook ordinary USB devices into an Xbox, since it's been hinted that some goofball connector might be used to prevent this.)
As an example, consider my recent hardware upgrade. I looked up the parts I bought where I bought them, and then checked Pricewatch for the absolute lowest prices on the same items. For a 1.0-GHz Athlon (200-MHz FSB), Biostar M7MIA, and IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB (I bought the 45GB model, but it was no longer listed), the place where I bought them has those items at $425. The cheapest prices on Pricewatch for the same items added up to $390. That's not much of a difference, but that's only for three components (I bought the DDR memory for the motherboard from another vendor and used the other parts that I already had). Factor in the other bits that you need for a complete system and the disparity can only increase.
In any case, with the quantities Microsoft will be buying, I'm reasonably sure they can get better prices than you or I can get. They're also not likely to charge themselves the "Windows tax" (otherwise known as "license fee") that they charge other computer makers.
I used that to allow remote power-cycling of the cable modem for a while, one day after it got wedged. It came in handy once or twice, but I yanked it out when I needed the module to control Christmas lights. :-) The modem hasn't glitched in a while anyway, and since I still haven't gotten dial-in working since switching from SuSE to LFS, there's really no way to control a remote cable-modem reset right now anyway. (Well, maybe nohup (br k8 off; sleep 5; br k8 on) & logout would work...)
No ceramics...they're too brittle. The receiver is plastic, with some metal parts in the trigger mechanism. As you noted, the barrel and slide are metal. (I have a Glock 23...I speak from experience.)
An even better approach might be one of those USB flash-storage dongles that have been mentioned here before. They have enough space for your (PGP) keyring and, IIRC, they'll fit on your (metal hoop) keyring. Assuming they work with Linux, this would seem to be a natural application...stick your key in the USB port to enable PGP signing/decryption/etc. They should also be more reliable than 3.5" floppies, which are notorious for dropping bits.
Bzzt...there are three different safeties (it's just that none of them require action on your part other than to point and shoot), and the "porcelain Glock" doesn't exist. It's some BS model made up to go in one of the Die Hard (?) movies. This page on Glock's website explains what the safeties are and how they work.
Getting back on topic, what do you suppose will be the odds that you can filter out the ads that appear in games? Are they likely to be hardcoded into the game, or would they be pulled off the 'net periodically? (Not that I'm into gameplaying much, even though I have a machine now that'll run damn near anything...)
You've never overheated a frying pan, have you? :-)
Next time in your rush to get first post, you might consider RTFA first...the author is already bringing a notebook around with him. He wants something more powerful that's still small, as you can't exactly get a 1.33-GHz Athlon with a 15k-rpm Ultra160 hard drive in a notebook (OK, so you don't exactly need that much firepower for a gaming rig, but notebooks are generally less powerful than desktops (or machines built up from desktop components).
Because some corporation is involved in coordinating the compute time to be used, and the prevailing attitude among the /. staff appears to be that Corporations Are Evil (TM). Sometimes I wonder if Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin haven't come back from the dead and gotten jobs as /. editors.
Win2K installs everything (including the kitchen sink), with no option to leave out whatever crap (accessibility options, NetMeeting, etc.) that you don't want. That and numerous glitches and incompatibilities sent me back to Win98. I just reinstalled Win98 SE (conflicting CD-burning programs nuked each other and maybe some system-level stuff as well), and I left Outlook Express out both in the initial install and the upgrade to IE 5.5. (For mail and news, I ssh into my Linux server and use mutt and trn...when Windows eats itself, I don't have to worry about losing my mail.)
Screw the banners...with broadband to the home, you can run your own server and put whatever you want on it, with the only size limit being what your hard drive can hold and without those stupid "punch the monkey" banner ads. If anything, personal pages have the potential to proliferate (say that three times quickly :-) ) to an even greater extent than before, and potentially with less meddling from The Powers That Be (assuming for a moment that they don't do something really stupid, like say that you can't host your own website on your cable-modem or DSL connection).
(FWIW, I've heard from people in other parts of the country with high-bandwidth connections that their usage of those connections is somewhat restricted. Maybe I'm lucky, as the provider I'm using doesn't seem to care much what I do with the fat pipe, as long as I don't resell bandwidth or provide warez/kiddie pr0n/etc. through whatever services I might make available. Besides, with 128 kbps upstream, it's only good for a personal site that sees maybe 10-20 hits on a good day.)
I've been doing that for a couple or three months now, using 2.4.0+reiserfs to serve a couple of diskless machines with ClusterNFS.
(The thing that somewhat pisses me off is I just downloaded 2.4.2 last night, compiled it, and got it going. I want to remove the firewall machine I have going and have everything go straight into the server. I needed to compile in ipmasq support on the server, so I figured I might as well upgrade the kernel at the same time. Now 2.4.3 is out...oh well, with uptime still under 24 hours, yet another upgrade shouldn't be too bad at this point. :-) )
In addition to not teaching grammar, it would appear that the schools aren't teaching spelling nowadays. What is this "modern block style" BS, anyway? It looks more like incoherent rambling with no beginning and no end.
If I ever end up raising kids, it looks more and more like I'll have to keep them out of the public schools. If this rot is what they're "teaching," I wouldn't want the mental midgets exponding these concepts anywhere near them.
A couple of years ago or so, Electronics Now published plans for an effects box intended to be stuck on the output of a CD player, preamp, etc. IIRC, it used a 12AX7 to add "tube sound" to modern equipment. Except for the tube and its socket, the parts were all of the type you could find at Radio Shack. (Actually, you could probably even special-order the tube through them, but there are cheaper sources available.)
Actually, I'm not even sure they can figure out when you're watching with any degree of accuracy, other than when you're watching the stuff it's recorded. While the remote can be set up to switch your TV on and off, I doubt that the TiVo box picks up your TV's on/off code. Even if it did, what would happen if you went up to the TV and hit the power button on the TV? (Since I have to get up to switch the stereo on/off anyway, I usually switch the TV at the same time.) Maybe this would work if the TiVo box controlled power to your TV, but unless you have an ancient 60s/70s model with twin knobs for tuning VHF and UHF, that wouldn't be too practical (newer TVs with digital controls typically lose all their settings when you unplug them)...and who's going to use a 25-year-old store-brand TV from Sears, JCPenney, or whoever with a TiVo?
Have a look at the Linux source code sometime...arch/i386/kernel/setup.c is particularly interesting as to whose bugs need to be worked around by the kernel. Looking at init_amd, one bug is attributed to B-stepping K6 processors, that comes into play in systems with more than 32MB RAM. (BTW, AMD used to replace those processors that were affected...I don't know if that program is still in effect.) By comparison, init_intel has workarounds for the F00F bug (non-root users could kill any Pentium or Pentium-MMX system) and the Pentium Pro's CPUID bug (it says it supports the SEP instruction when it really doesn't). There was also the problem with the 1.13-GHz Pentium III running so badly that it was recalled, plus the FDIV bug in the first Pentiums. Now try telling me that Intel makes a better/more reliable product than AMD.
I'm on my fourth AMD processor now...started with a K6-200 and went through a K6-2-300 and K6-III-450 to arrive at the 1.0-GHz Athlon I'm using now. (The K6-III is still in use, only in my server now.) I've also built a few K6-2 and Duron systems for others, and the only problem that's ever popped up in any of them was an overheated SiS 530 (on the one time that I tried building a really cheap box) in one of the K6-2 boxen...fixed that by slapping a cooler on that chip, and in any case it wasn't a processor problem.