I mean, nobodyhasever built a small low-powered PC based on a Geode chip before...
The only thing that's really novel about this is the integrated video, and having some (possibly lobotomized version of) Windows pre-installed. Otherwise, this isn't exactly a remarkable technological development.
Also seconding the "how could they make this and not include a display" question. The boards I cited above are intended for embedded development, and I've never used a monitor on any of them. (I've got probably fifty of them, all running various customized Linux and BSD distributions, scattered over four counties in my network. They're intended to be used that way, which is why they don't even have a VGA port.)
Seriously, once you add a monitor, you're pretty close to low-end Dell pricing, which gives you a computer with roughly 20 times the raw horsepower, and a lot more versatility, so I suppose they're marketing this to the "omg computers are scary" crowd. Best of luck on that. I'd like to think at this point the American public is smarter than this, but I'm probably setting myself up for another disappointment.
I own a Palm m125. It's a stinker, and has exactly this problem.
Thing is, I didn't get it "new". Mine was a promotional freebie -- last fall, Netgear had some mail-in offers where if you bought a $100 network switch, they'd send you a free Palm as well. It came in a sealed white box that said, basically, "refurbished by PalmOne".
I'm filing anyway. Worst they can do is deny my claim, and I'm out a stamp. Maybe I'll get very lucky and get a working unit, or a better unit, out of it. I've basically given up on it, so whatever.
I work for a small ISP, about 2500 dialup customers, and about 500 on our high-speed offering. We took a poll (not just a Web poll, mind, but printed and mailed inserts in our dialup customers' monthly invoices).
I don't recall the precise wording, but it was basically, "If you could get a 128kbps internet connection (twice the speed of dialup) for the same price you're paying now, and no changeover/installation fee, would you be interested in this offering?"
Out of the couple hundred folks that sent that form back, we only got about a 50% "yes" rate. The main reasons cited for turning down this proposal were "my connection works fine" (folks afraid of change for the sake of change) and "I don't need a faster connection" (frankly, I dunno).
We have the technology to provide high-speed service to most of these folks (wireless Internet with reallllly big antennas). Obviously we can't cover everyone, but we try. There are a lot of people out there that don't see the need for broadband, or don't want it, or are just plain silly for whatever reason.
I'd love to get rid of dialup too. Folks who live out in the boonies and complaining about slow speeds make up a good portion of our tech support calls. And maintaining all that dialup stuff (the hundreds of incoming phone lines we need) is bloody expensive.
But at least in my little neck of the woods, dialup is not going away anytime soon.
We put up a firewall rule that blocks access to Slashdot from the office. Productivity doubled.
(Also, serious answer: When I started there, our twice-monthly invoices were generated in more-or-less random order. I wrote software that, wow, alphabetized them, to make them easier to file. Cost a ten-hours-per-week girl her job, but she was the only one upset about it. Everyone else loved me for it.)
Since most of the comments have diverged a bit from the original question, I might as well diverge a bit more...
Most of my music is stored on a headless Linux box, with SSH and Samba running. That PC has a decent sound card, and cheap-but-serviceable speakers. Normally, if I want to have some music playing, but keep the desktop's CPU free (I've been doing a lot of radio and topographical-related work of late, which chews up CPU), I have to SSH into the other system, decide what to listen to, and run mpg123 (or insert your favorite command-line music player here).
It works, but I'd like a bit better option. A nifty Web-based (or something) interface to the/home/me/music/* file tree, where I can easily navigate through stuff, edit the current playlist on the fly, pause/stop/skip tracks, and so on, would be ideal.
xmms-shell would have all the requisite functionality, I think, but it requires XMMS, which requires GTK+, which requires Xwindows, which requires a bloody lot of tinkering to set up, and since the system is headless, I can't even easily double-check my work.
I've seen a LOT of different interfaces for setting up a streaming-music server, but that's not quite what I'm looking for. I want something like that, but where the music plays locally.
I'm responsible for about a dozen unique ZIP codes in there, sorry. My company does high-speed wireless Internet, and we put up a few new towers last spring. (Those numbers are based on the June FCC filings, so they're already six months out of date.) There are a few dot-on-the-map "towns" that have a population of like three people, but they're within five miles of a tower, and we somehow managed to get broadband to them. If there's even one customer, we're required to report it.
The FCC form (Form 477) doesn't actually ask for any kind of correlation between "ZIP codes" and "number of people per ZIP code". One page asks about how many broadband customers we have, and another page asks for a shopping list of all our broadband customers' ZIPs. We offer broadband in about thirty different ZIP codes, even though most of them only have one or two customers.
(Since a T1 qualifies as broadband, natch, they think we have coverage thirty miles from our nearest tower -- one customer out there wanted a hookup badly enough that they were willing to pay through the nose, so we did it.)
I know a few folks from local orchestras who are looking for interesting new things to do, to try to expand their audience beyond the normal concert-going crowd (i.e. old people who only listen to music that's been around for 250+ years).
To do it right, though, would require two things that I frankly don't know where to get them.
One: Permission, and royalties if applicable. For those who don't know, generally orchestral performances and plays, at least where the composer or author is still alive, generally have to be paid for. In addition to the obvious expense of sheet music and those massive conductors' scorebooks, you usually have to pay the composer/author for the privilege of performing their work publicly. It's not often more than a few hundred dollars, but since Nobuo Uematsu is still alive, he deserves his kickbacks. Where would the money go?
Two: The scores themselves. A fair amount of Googling/eBaying/Amazoning (whatever) hasn't turned up anything promising. I've found piano music, and programs that claim to turn MIDI files into sheet music, but nothing on the scale of "click here to buy a full score," which you'd need to pull off something on this grand a scale.
... not to mention one of the best (IMO) commercial packages out there.
My office (an ISP, with about 5000 email addresses) uses a Barracuda 400.
It's a nice 1U rackmount system, dead simple to integrate into most SMTP networks (just one DNS change and you're done), works well (internally, it's basically a somewhat-tuned version of SpamAssassin), great for the end-users (integrated Web interface for adjusting settings, handling quarantined emails, etc.). And cost-effective (the 400 was under $5k from our reseller).
Ultimately, though, this is probably another instance of "they don't advertise with zdnet, so F 'em". Barracuda does occasinally advertise here, though, so if you haven't disabled ads, keep an eye out.:-)
I've had one of these devices for a while. Not a bad little toy. I'd love to be able to just put MP3s on the flash card and go, instead of having to convert them to "GBS" (Game Boy Sound?) format, but the GBA doesn't have that much CPU.
The article text is a bit misleading. You don't have to have one of the new, slimmer Movie Advance units to use the NES emulator feature - just update the firmware on the old one and it'll work just fine.
Will I be able to automatically migrate from my old copy of Pine?
I'm half serious on this, actually. At some point I went all "eye candy" and I do most of my work with pretty GUIs and such. And I still have to open pine in a terminal window and it looks weird.
So, because the publisher messed up, they're taking this book and giving it an impossibly lame title, pretty much guaranteeing that Katie Tarbox's royalties dry up. Not to mention that the damage is done; the book was first published four years ago, and aside from "the great literary classics of the world" most books are sold within the first year of publication. After that, it starts dropping down pretty steep.
If this had been done before, say, the second printing, it would matter. Now, it's far too late to have any meaningful effect on Katie Jones.
So how do you *get* LiteStep? Every page on their Web site is identical, and I don't want to create an account on their site, hand out my email address, etc. just to download something that in all likelihood I'll be done playing with inside of a week.
The big difference I see is that PHP is cross platform and ASP is not. To me, that makes PHP the "winner", hands down.
Exactly.:-)
I just moved a few sites around amongst various servers in my office.
Sites moved from old Linux machine to new FreeBSD machine, all PHP/MySQL: Fairly seamless. I had to recompile PHP and Apache because I forgot to put in all the different modules I'm using.
Sites moved from old Linux machine to another old Linux machine on a different architecture (going from i386 to a sparc machine I got for cheap): Again, seamless. (This new machine runs Gentoo, so it already has pretty much every PHP option on the planet enabled.)
Sites moved from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003: I'll let you know when it's done. Going from IIS5 to IIS6 is a royal pain in the arse, what with the ultra-paranoid new security options you have to contend with (it's nice to know they're finally trying to make their stuff secure, but all the settings are in about a half-dozen different places). And large chunks of precompiled code no longer work for no good reason.
Have any Slashdot readers ever actually used the backwards compatibility on their PlayStation 2?
Hell, that's about all I use it for. I still play FF7 (never did get "Knights of the Round"), and use it to play DVDs, but I only own one PS2 game, and I don't have any free time, so my copy of Xenosaga just kinda sits there, unloved.
Xbox won't be hurt so badly by this, as they don't have nearly as big a base of existing customers to piss off, but the back-compat feature was one of the bigger reasons I finally sprung for a PS2.
Total emails received 27900189 Blocked (Spamhaus lists) 22450665 Quarantined (probably spam) 4449044 Viruses 117518 Allowed 882962
That's right, about 96% of our email is spam, viruses, or otherwise
ungood.
I'd be delighted if the spam dropped off so it were only 32% of our mail. Think of all the things I could do with that extra bandwidth...
In fairness, the study says they were looking at businesses, and this is at a small ISP, mostly residential customers. But it's a good number to chew on nonetheless.
Another similar program is StartupCPL. Small (it's only an 80k binary), simple, works with pretty much every version of Windows out there (95, NT, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP), free-as-in-beer (though go ahead and send the author a couple bucks).
It doesn't handle services, but it covers most everything else, except maybe autoexec.bat. And it's a lot faster than digging through the registry.
I do. We're a small shop, we'll fix your PC even if you're the one who f'd it up by installing Kazaa. Our current record, as reported by Ad-Aware 6.181 with a then-current reference file, is 1354. It's on a whiteboard near our workbench. This record has held for over a month now; the previous record was "merely" 950-something.
Note that of those 30 pieces of spyware per PC, 24 of them are labeled as "cookies."
There's still a LOT of junkware/spyware/adware/malware/whatever out there, far more than there should be IMO, but it's not quite as bad as they let on.:-)
There's a whole niche market for "stripped-down versions of Linux" that handle things like this.
Currently, I'm using Mikrotik RouterOS as a core router. It's at a small ISP -- 400 or so high-speed customers, 3000 dialup customers (400-500 of which are connected during peak times). Standard routing stuff (30 or so internal static routes, big deal). Couple hundred firewall rules (some for stopping Windows worms from spreading, some for general network security, some to help keep the nastier spammers in check). And BGP, taking a full BGP feed from our upstream, plus a couple multihops from places like Cymru's bogons project. And it doubles as a PPTP server so I can securely work from home (in a gesture of supreme irony, I can't get Internet connectivity from the company I work at).
And some other stuff I can't think of right now.
All this is running in a 1U system I got from eRacks (they make good cheap stuff), except for the hard drive, which I yanked and replaced with a 64MB IDE-flash drive from these guys. Celeron 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM. The system never ever, even during peak times, goes over 10% CPU load.
This isn't quite up to the specs the original author was looking for, mainly because this hardware isn't also doing the T1 stuff. (It's got plain old boring Ethernet to an older Cisco router, to which our four T1s are connected, but the Cisco is basically just a really big media converter.) But given how low the hardware utilization is on this unit, and how underpowered this system is as compared to current hardware, I think it shows that the notion is quite feasible.
I skimmed through the whole list of artists (which includes a number of artists that don't have a whole album, only one track on a compilation CD). I'm not an expert on music in general, and especially not on dance/techno/electronica/whatever the heck this stuff is, but I have only heard of two of the 'bout 100 artists they even list.
This is all well and good and The Way It Should Be (TM), but it's not exactly a major breakthrough on the scale of iTunes changing formats, or Vivendi Universal offering MP3s, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, nobody has ever built a small low-powered PC based on a Geode chip before...
The only thing that's really novel about this is the integrated video, and having some (possibly lobotomized version of) Windows pre-installed. Otherwise, this isn't exactly a remarkable technological development.
Also seconding the "how could they make this and not include a display" question. The boards I cited above are intended for embedded development, and I've never used a monitor on any of them. (I've got probably fifty of them, all running various customized Linux and BSD distributions, scattered over four counties in my network. They're intended to be used that way, which is why they don't even have a VGA port.)
Seriously, once you add a monitor, you're pretty close to low-end Dell pricing, which gives you a computer with roughly 20 times the raw horsepower, and a lot more versatility, so I suppose they're marketing this to the "omg computers are scary" crowd. Best of luck on that. I'd like to think at this point the American public is smarter than this, but I'm probably setting myself up for another disappointment.
I own a Palm m125. It's a stinker, and has exactly this problem.
Thing is, I didn't get it "new". Mine was a promotional freebie -- last fall, Netgear had some mail-in offers where if you bought a $100 network switch, they'd send you a free Palm as well. It came in a sealed white box that said, basically, "refurbished by PalmOne".
I'm filing anyway. Worst they can do is deny my claim, and I'm out a stamp. Maybe I'll get very lucky and get a working unit, or a better unit, out of it. I've basically given up on it, so whatever.
"kill dialup"
That's just not gonna happen.
I work for a small ISP, about 2500 dialup customers, and about 500 on our high-speed offering. We took a poll (not just a Web poll, mind, but printed and mailed inserts in our dialup customers' monthly invoices).
I don't recall the precise wording, but it was basically, "If you could get a 128kbps internet connection (twice the speed of dialup) for the same price you're paying now, and no changeover/installation fee, would you be interested in this offering?"
Out of the couple hundred folks that sent that form back, we only got about a 50% "yes" rate. The main reasons cited for turning down this proposal were "my connection works fine" (folks afraid of change for the sake of change) and "I don't need a faster connection" (frankly, I dunno).
We have the technology to provide high-speed service to most of these folks (wireless Internet with reallllly big antennas). Obviously we can't cover everyone, but we try. There are a lot of people out there that don't see the need for broadband, or don't want it, or are just plain silly for whatever reason.
I'd love to get rid of dialup too. Folks who live out in the boonies and complaining about slow speeds make up a good portion of our tech support calls. And maintaining all that dialup stuff (the hundreds of incoming phone lines we need) is bloody expensive.
But at least in my little neck of the woods, dialup is not going away anytime soon.
We put up a firewall rule that blocks access to Slashdot from the office. Productivity doubled.
(Also, serious answer: When I started there, our twice-monthly invoices were generated in more-or-less random order. I wrote software that, wow, alphabetized them, to make them easier to file. Cost a ten-hours-per-week girl her job, but she was the only one upset about it. Everyone else loved me for it.)
Since most of the comments have diverged a bit from the original question, I might as well diverge a bit more...
/home/me/music/* file tree, where I can easily navigate through stuff, edit the current playlist on the fly, pause/stop/skip tracks, and so on, would be ideal.
Most of my music is stored on a headless Linux box, with SSH and Samba running. That PC has a decent sound card, and cheap-but-serviceable speakers. Normally, if I want to have some music playing, but keep the desktop's CPU free (I've been doing a lot of radio and topographical-related work of late, which chews up CPU), I have to SSH into the other system, decide what to listen to, and run mpg123 (or insert your favorite command-line music player here).
It works, but I'd like a bit better option. A nifty Web-based (or something) interface to the
xmms-shell would have all the requisite functionality, I think, but it requires XMMS, which requires GTK+, which requires Xwindows, which requires a bloody lot of tinkering to set up, and since the system is headless, I can't even easily double-check my work.
I've seen a LOT of different interfaces for setting up a streaming-music server, but that's not quite what I'm looking for. I want something like that, but where the music plays locally.
Any suggestions?
I'm responsible for about a dozen unique ZIP codes in there, sorry. My company does high-speed wireless Internet, and we put up a few new towers last spring. (Those numbers are based on the June FCC filings, so they're already six months out of date.) There are a few dot-on-the-map "towns" that have a population of like three people, but they're within five miles of a tower, and we somehow managed to get broadband to them. If there's even one customer, we're required to report it.
The FCC form (Form 477) doesn't actually ask for any kind of correlation between "ZIP codes" and "number of people per ZIP code". One page asks about how many broadband customers we have, and another page asks for a shopping list of all our broadband customers' ZIPs. We offer broadband in about thirty different ZIP codes, even though most of them only have one or two customers.
(Since a T1 qualifies as broadband, natch, they think we have coverage thirty miles from our nearest tower -- one customer out there wanted a hookup badly enough that they were willing to pay through the nose, so we did it.)
I know a few folks from local orchestras who are looking for interesting new things to do, to try to expand their audience beyond the normal concert-going crowd (i.e. old people who only listen to music that's been around for 250+ years).
To do it right, though, would require two things that I frankly don't know where to get them.
One: Permission, and royalties if applicable. For those who don't know, generally orchestral performances and plays, at least where the composer or author is still alive, generally have to be paid for. In addition to the obvious expense of sheet music and those massive conductors' scorebooks, you usually have to pay the composer/author for the privilege of performing their work publicly. It's not often more than a few hundred dollars, but since Nobuo Uematsu is still alive, he deserves his kickbacks. Where would the money go?
Two: The scores themselves. A fair amount of Googling/eBaying/Amazoning (whatever) hasn't turned up anything promising. I've found piano music, and programs that claim to turn MIDI files into sheet music, but nothing on the scale of "click here to buy a full score," which you'd need to pull off something on this grand a scale.
... not to mention one of the best (IMO) commercial packages out there.
:-)
My office (an ISP, with about 5000 email addresses) uses a Barracuda 400.
It's a nice 1U rackmount system, dead simple to integrate into most SMTP networks (just one DNS change and you're done), works well (internally, it's basically a somewhat-tuned version of SpamAssassin), great for the end-users (integrated Web interface for adjusting settings, handling quarantined emails, etc.). And cost-effective (the 400 was under $5k from our reseller).
Ultimately, though, this is probably another instance of "they don't advertise with zdnet, so F 'em". Barracuda does occasinally advertise here, though, so if you haven't disabled ads, keep an eye out.
I've had one of these devices for a while. Not a bad little toy. I'd love to be able to just put MP3s on the flash card and go, instead of having to convert them to "GBS" (Game Boy Sound?) format, but the GBA doesn't have that much CPU.
The article text is a bit misleading. You don't have to have one of the new, slimmer Movie Advance units to use the NES emulator feature - just update the firmware on the old one and it'll work just fine.
I'm half serious on this, actually. At some point I went all "eye candy" and I do most of my work with pretty GUIs and such. And I still have to open pine in a terminal window and it looks weird.
So, because the publisher messed up, they're taking this book and giving it an impossibly lame title, pretty much guaranteeing that Katie Tarbox's royalties dry up. Not to mention that the damage is done; the book was first published four years ago, and aside from "the great literary classics of the world" most books are sold within the first year of publication. After that, it starts dropping down pretty steep.
If this had been done before, say, the second printing, it would matter. Now, it's far too late to have any meaningful effect on Katie Jones.
So how do you *get* LiteStep? Every page on their Web site is identical, and I don't want to create an account on their site, hand out my email address, etc. just to download something that in all likelihood I'll be done playing with inside of a week.
You know that's not really from Sal because the page isn't written in italics
http://phoenix.bureau42.com/trailer_hitchhikers.av i
I just moved a few sites around amongst various servers in my office.
Sites moved from old Linux machine to new FreeBSD machine, all PHP/MySQL: Fairly seamless. I had to recompile PHP and Apache because I forgot to put in all the different modules I'm using.
Sites moved from old Linux machine to another old Linux machine on a different architecture (going from i386 to a sparc machine I got for cheap): Again, seamless. (This new machine runs Gentoo, so it already has pretty much every PHP option on the planet enabled.)
Sites moved from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003: I'll let you know when it's done. Going from IIS5 to IIS6 is a royal pain in the arse, what with the ultra-paranoid new security options you have to contend with (it's nice to know they're finally trying to make their stuff secure, but all the settings are in about a half-dozen different places). And large chunks of precompiled code no longer work for no good reason.
Hell, that's about all I use it for. I still play FF7 (never did get "Knights of the Round"), and use it to play DVDs, but I only own one PS2 game, and I don't have any free time, so my copy of Xenosaga just kinda sits there, unloved.
Xbox won't be hurt so badly by this, as they don't have nearly as big a base of existing customers to piss off, but the back-compat feature was one of the bigger reasons I finally sprung for a PS2.
Isn't this Paul Allen, aka "one of the zillionaires from Microsoft," aka "Charter Communications," aka "richer than God" ?
Why the heck does he need to take donations for this?
... so what will become of Playboy's proposed "Women of TechTV" photo shoot? I'm still waiting for Morgan b00bies.
From the logs of our anti-spam appliance, over the last six weeks or so:
That's right, about 96% of our email is spam, viruses, or otherwise ungood.I'd be delighted if the spam dropped off so it were only 32% of our mail. Think of all the things I could do with that extra bandwidth...
In fairness, the study says they were looking at businesses, and this is at a small ISP, mostly residential customers. But it's a good number to chew on nonetheless.
Another similar program is StartupCPL. Small (it's only an 80k binary), simple, works with pretty much every version of Windows out there (95, NT, 98, 98SE, 2000, ME, XP), free-as-in-beer (though go ahead and send the author a couple bucks).
It doesn't handle services, but it covers most everything else, except maybe autoexec.bat. And it's a lot faster than digging through the registry.
Try working for an ISP.
I do. We're a small shop, we'll fix your PC even if you're the one who f'd it up by installing Kazaa. Our current record, as reported by Ad-Aware 6.181 with a then-current reference file, is 1354. It's on a whiteboard near our workbench. This record has held for over a month now; the previous record was "merely" 950-something.
There's still a LOT of junkware/spyware/adware/malware/whatever out there, far more than there should be IMO, but it's not quite as bad as they let on. :-)
Oh, I think it's breast if we just change the subject right now.
There's a whole niche market for "stripped-down versions of Linux" that handle things like this.
Currently, I'm using Mikrotik RouterOS as a core router. It's at a small ISP -- 400 or so high-speed customers, 3000 dialup customers (400-500 of which are connected during peak times). Standard routing stuff (30 or so internal static routes, big deal). Couple hundred firewall rules (some for stopping Windows worms from spreading, some for general network security, some to help keep the nastier spammers in check). And BGP, taking a full BGP feed from our upstream, plus a couple multihops from places like Cymru's bogons project. And it doubles as a PPTP server so I can securely work from home (in a gesture of supreme irony, I can't get Internet connectivity from the company I work at).
And some other stuff I can't think of right now.
All this is running in a 1U system I got from eRacks (they make good cheap stuff), except for the hard drive, which I yanked and replaced with a 64MB IDE-flash drive from these guys. Celeron 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM. The system never ever, even during peak times, goes over 10% CPU load.
This isn't quite up to the specs the original author was looking for, mainly because this hardware isn't also doing the T1 stuff. (It's got plain old boring Ethernet to an older Cisco router, to which our four T1s are connected, but the Cisco is basically just a really big media converter.) But given how low the hardware utilization is on this unit, and how underpowered this system is as compared to current hardware, I think it shows that the notion is quite feasible.
I skimmed through the whole list of artists (which includes a number of artists that don't have a whole album, only one track on a compilation CD). I'm not an expert on music in general, and especially not on dance/techno/electronica/whatever the heck this stuff is, but I have only heard of two of the 'bout 100 artists they even list.
This is all well and good and The Way It Should Be (TM), but it's not exactly a major breakthrough on the scale of iTunes changing formats, or Vivendi Universal offering MP3s, etc.