Yeah, I remember the good ol' days, with their 300 baud modems and walking backwards uphill both ways in the snow.
Now I have a 6000kbps/400kbps broadband link to my home. What you call OS Bloat and graphics bloat I call useability increases.
I run Firefox, which allows for nice, handy tabbed browsing. It might be useable on a 233mhz computer, provided there was enough RAM, but I wouldn't push it.
While doing that, I'll have an IM Client open that allows for connection to all major IM networks.
I'm also going to have Thunderbird open, which allows for easy management of my RSS feeds along with email.
MP3 player will of course be running in the background, because I like to listen to music while I browse. That alone would tax the hell out of your 133mhz 5x86.
If I see a/. story about an innovative new software program, or a cool liveCD, I can fire up a bit torrent client and grab it without putting as much of a strain on the server.
I didn't say you NEED a faster machine for web browsing, but I wouldn't want to do it on something slower than about 500Mhz nowadays. The minute that I have to start shutting down applications so that I can do other work, I'm just going to start looking into an inexpensive upgrade route. If my computer is seriously inhibiting my ability to do what I want to do, then no amount of bitching about bloat is going to fix that problem. While bloat is there, advances have taken place in software since 1997 (the year of the P233), and you shouldn't just discount them because your system's too slow to use those applications.
Speaking as someone who owns three Apples, leading the small desktop industry isn't too tough. Apple's the only big-name company producing a ready-built Mini-ITX sized desktop. Dell makes their 4x00 series of Inspirons, but they're not nearly as small as a mini-itx or Mac Mini. Alienware and similar game PC companies make SFF (shuttle-style) game computers, but they're physically larger and account for such a tiny slice of the market that we could effectively ignore those numbers. I've seen IBM and HP tiny desktops, but they're corporate-targetted products similar to Compaq's old iPaq desktop (not the PDA), and I don't know that a consumer can even purchase one without jumping through small business hoops.
The day Joe User can walk into a Best Buy or Circuit City and walk out with a name-brand Mini-ITX computer, there might be some more competition in that market space. As it is, though, general purpose PC buyers seem to look at price more than anything else, and those who want small products tend to end up with notebooks anyway.
Granted, this is the C3, which is slightly inferior to the Eden-N being used here. Can you see the second processor in the arithmetic benchmarks, the one running about equally? That's a 333mhz PII. Even being generous and saying this newer series chip has significantly sped up, we're still talking performance equal to maybe a dual 500 Mhz PIII.
Useable? Yes. Acceptable for generic web browsing and word processing? Maybe. An excellent-performing midrange desktop replacement? No way. The Mhz myth is definitely in effect here, just not like you might initially think. These things are fine and dandy as a generic file server where speed is not a supreme priority, and they work fine as a router/gateway or simple firewall, but please don't try to use them for much else.
HP/Compaq sell AMD-based notebooks. Gateway/eMachines sell AMD-based notebooks. Fujitsu sells AMD-based notebooks. Sony has sold AMD-based notebooks, although I can't speak about their current line-up. All four of these comapnies have their products available in large consumer electronics stores such as Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, etc.
In fact, the only big-name companies who don't seem to offer AMD notebooks are Dell (obviously), Toshiba, and IBM. Toshiba's the only one of that group that even sells through retail channels anymore.
Yeah, 20th Century Fox produced "Buffy" and sold it to WB. WB produced "Friends" and sold it to NBC. Hell, Fox, WB, and Paramount's studios produce shows all the time that end up on one of the other three majors. This is normal TV business; sometimes a channel wants the studio's show, and sometimes they don't.
Just like Sony sells DVDs and devices that could be used to pirate those DVDs, media companies are composed of individual divisions that are just trying to maximize profitability.
Not quite. Ratings are good, but the right sort of demographic is also important. This is a long-standing tradition in Hollywood; CBS cancelled "The Beverly Hillbillies" way back in the day even though it sat in the top 10 every week. Why? It's audience was an older, rural audience which wasn't really what advertisers demanded.
A similar fate befell "Buffy." What started out as part of The WB's two-pronged attack (along with "Dawson's Creek") to morph from an "urban" network to one that targetted the lucrative teen market started to skew much older than they intended. Granted, "Buffy" also started costing much more around Season 4, and the end of Season 5 marked the 100 episode point commonly needed for syndication.
"Enterprise" was the number one UPN show last time I looked at a Nielsen report, but it really doesn't belong on that channel. Programming around "Enterprise" would be tricky, and it doesn't really lend itself to many of the traditional programming strategies on a network primarily filled with minority-targetted sitcoms.
As others have suggested, cost is also a huge factor. Sci-fi series are going to generally be more expensive than a similarly rated comedy. Give me $1.5 million an episode, and I can probably find mroe profitable ventures than a sci-fi show (remember the great game show blitz of '00?)
Take heart: At the normal rate, we'll probably see another Trek show back on the air in three or four years. Maybe Paramount will have the sense to put it on something other than UPN. If this article was correct in stating that "Enterprise" was averaging 2 million viewers per episode, though, it had no business on the air at the price it probably cost.
We'll start with the issue of the "free speech violations," which are nothing more than a website struggling to maintain the sources which generate page views. Journalists protection of sources, as others on/. have pointed out, extend to government and organized crime trials; ThinkSecret is merely trying to keep the source that broke their NDA from being revealed and fired so that TS' stream of insider information can be maintained. They want to play journalist but ignore some of the rules that go with being journalist, and their motivating drive in all of this isn't some holy "free speech" crusade, it's the desire to keep the page (and ad) views coming.
I own an iPod. Less than 1% of the songs on it are Music Store songs, and only two of those are ones I actually purchased (all the rest are from the "Free single of the week" section). Your iPod can be legally filled with music ripped from your own CD collection, downloaded from indy-band sites that allow free distribution, and possibly MP3s ripped from streaming audio sources (the legality of that last one hasn't really been established). There are several other big-name music stores out there, and I'd suggest that they all get used to the disadvantages of being the second or third mover in a market such as this. Either you come up with a good reason for me to jump away from the current market and mindshare leader, or you're not going to make it. MS' Janus DRM system, for example, sounds like an interesting alternative, and might be just what Napster and friends need to pull people away from iTMS.
Would Apple be a nasty monopoly if they were in the same position as MS right now? Probably. They're not, though. The "accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics" mentioned in the article appear to be nothing other than what the article had already stated: Apple wants to know which employees broke a contract (a reasonable and completely legitimate thing to ask of a journalist), and iTMS is not the only music store or the only way to put music on an iPod.
You're thinking of a device called X-Play, IIRC. It was a 2400 baud modem (seriously!) that went into the cartridge slot first, then had the game cartridge piggy-backed in, similar to a game genie or the old Sonic and Knuckles cart.
Theoretically, the X-Play could support any game, but I believe it only supported some of the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games, and a small smattering of EA Sports titles. The modem itself was quite expensive ($100 for a 2400 when 28.8k was pretty much the standard), and I think they might have had a monthly fee.
But some people are. There is nothing more disheartening that having to spend an hour doing repetition on something you understand better than the teacher.
No, you're right. The system isn't perfect. I adopt what I consider to be a realist's perspective toward situations such as this. It's not fair to be stuck doing rote memorization exercises, but it's also not fair to just sit there and bitch about it (or ignore the assignments). There's a student in one of my sophomore classes who voluntarily chose Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for a quotation analysis exercise when she could've chosen any novel over 100 pages. If she chooses to sleep in my class, I don't bother her about it. She obviously knows what she's doing, and the only reason she's in my regular-level class is because she doesn't want to work as hard. I teach sophomores and juniors; I threatened (mostly idly) to make her life difficult if she wasn't in an AP class next year. I can tell you that I will be aiming to create more "open" assignments, though, so that she'll have an opportunity to explore her own interests.
Any student who is in a situation such as the theoretical one I posited should simply approach the teacher about it. No teacher I know of gets angry at a student who wants to challenge themselves. I can tell you that right now I would add an hour a day to my own workload if a couple of my more advanced students were to ask me about doing something tougher than we do in class on a normal basis. Some teachers might not be willing to do this, but they would probably refer the kid to the coach of the Math/Science team, and could probably be persuaded to allow the kid to work on assignments for a Math competition that were designed by the Math/Science competition sponsor.
It's amazing how much more I know about the War of 1812 after spending an hour watching a special on the History Channel than I ever did from reading it in a history book. Maybe it's just how I learn, but I've found the same is true for most of the people I know.
Do you remember the uproar a year or two ago when Dan Rather suggested that people go read the newspaper for information about a particular event (sorry, my memory's a bit sketchy on that one). Sometimes books really are a more effective way to communicate complex interactions. To be fair, sometimes they're mind-numbingly boring. There's actually a huge debate in the world of secondary-level history about the proper instructional methods. One group pushes for students as historians, studying primary sources and attempting to form their own "histories." Obviously, this represents an excellent instructional method and would ideally teach kids to learn, not memorize. Of course, it requires a level of knowledge that I don't think is present in a lot of children, and a good working knowledge of history to begin with. That's where the second group comes in: they believe that students are not historians (probably a reasonable assumption), and that they are incapable of that sort of work without a firm rooting in the traditional "history book" learning. Which is how we end up with what any decent history class looks like: a mixture of the two, that would implement a History Channel special on the War of 1812 alongside personal accounts (to see the views of those who still pushed for a return to Britain) and the traditional textbook. Any good history teacher should be able to manage that, provided a small level of funding for the extra materials required. Unfortunately, history seems to be "coach" territory more than any other subject, which feeds to my initial suggestion about one of the causes of our faults as a system.
As for your Italian experience, that wasn't a one-time occurence? I apologize, and submit that any teacher who acts that way is too busy playing games to teach. There are crappy teachers just like there are PHP monkeys and PHBs. For the most part, though, the education profession is filled with people who enjoy seeing kids lea
No, that's pretty close to what I did as an American High School student seven or eight years ago.
My question: is that typical of the average English education? My father went to school in England, but this was in the late 60's, so I don't doubt that things have changed.
The average kid should probably have 1.5 to 2 hours per day. I could have had that (or less) if I had taken less demanding classes.
Yeah, I know people in that situation as well. Thankfully, it's a tiny margin, and I'd argue that your friends are far and away the exception to the rule.
Far more people are simply unwilling to move because they grew up there and still have friends there. It can certainly be daunting to leave all that, but to those people I'd repeat my above statement:
If you legitimately can't make a liveable salary at a job you're properly trained for, either you're not properly trained (PHP monkey) or you need to leave.
I would question any teacher who assigns 1 to 2 hours of work per night in something other than a very advanced class. I would not question a teacher who assigned 30 minutes of homework per night, such that all classes put together make 2 hours per night.
Unless you're a math genius, you need repetition to get the concept down. This doesn't mean sixty questions per evening, but it does mean some work.
You need to be able to prep for an upcoming chapter in science class. This probably means reading the chapter, and maybe outlining before the teacher beigns the chapter in class. Additionally, physics and chemistry are going to require some reasonable math on lab reports and such, so there's some more time needed.
History is just going to need some reading outside of class, period. Wasting time on reading a textbook in history class is almost as bad as doing worksheets, IMHO.
If I assign reading outside of class (which doesn't get done much anymore), I aim for a baseline of 15-20 pages per evening in a novel, and about 10 pages in a lit. book. That's a reading load that can be completed in about 15 - 30 minutes, depending upon the difficulty of the novel and the level of the student. That doesn't mean that I assign one chapter per night, though. It means that I probably tell my students that 1-4 are due on Friday, and a fair majority wait until Thursday night to start.
If you're really talking about a continuous four hours per night of homework, and not just an isolated incident here or there, there are one of three things happening:
1) The student is not practicing proper planning. Long-term assignments are being put off until days before the due date, and then they happen to stack up with normal homework. This is very easy to fix, assuming this is where your kid falls. My parents required a mandatory one hour of homework at the table before dinner started. Before long, your kid will get tired of just staring at a wall, and he or she will start that reading that's not due until next week, or the project that's due in two weeks.
2) The student is enrolled in a large section of AP/IB or similar courses. Just like you can't expect a light workload if you sign up for 21 hours/semester in college, you can't expect less than three hours per night if you have four or five AP classes and a foreign language, for example. It's good preparation and a good education, but the student needs to be willing to sacrifice some of the other aspects of their life if they want to go down that path.
3) The student isn't cut out for the class. The homework that's taking the rest of the kids thirty minutes is taking Johnny an hour, and that can be a frustrating number when you start stacking in other classes. The choices at that point are to ask Johnny to suck it up and treat it like the kid in scenario 2 (because he'll still learn something), or drop him to a less difficult class.
Rarely does 4) "All 6 - 8 of Johnny's teachers have poor time-management skills resulting in a substantially larger workload" occur.
I am of the opinion that 1.5 to 2 total hours of homework per night is acceptable. Kids get out of school somewhere between 3 and 4 PM, and the average high schooler should go to bed at 10PM to get 8 hours of sleep. Asking 1.5 or 2 hours out of that section is fully reasonable, and simply prepares kids for the workload required in college, or a job (where 8 to 3 isn't really the standard day, anyway). Not only that, but it still leaves plenty of time for play. If Johnny's parents want to put him in soccer, baseball, band, theater, and the debate team, well, see option number 2. Don't believe the extracurricular "requirement for admissions" myth. Keep a couple of things you really enjoy doing, not twelve things you're no good at.
You'll get no contradictions here from me. I hated going over to the education building at my university, because it reinforced everything you're talking about there.
Interestingly enough, part of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" bit has been to push for a return to those pre-"education major" days. While I detest large portions of that law, some of it actually works; one of the requirements for having an "acceptable" or better school is that instructors in the core subjects have degrees in the core subjects.
NCLB went into effect during my Junior year of college. Prior to that, I was planning to get my degree in English, and sit for the English and Biology certification exams. I had about 20 hours of college Bio (and not BS intro courses for liberal arts people, either), and I have a pretty scientifically-oriented mind. Science teachers are simply in shorter supply, so it made sense to increase my marketability. I will still be able to sit for that exam, but not until I have three years of classroom instruction under my belt. Even then, I'll still be a negative point against whatever school I'm working at if I'm teaching Bio instead of English. I still plan on getting the certification, because if things go wrong, I'll still be more marketable as a Bio teacher than an English teacher. You're right, though, something about knowing far more than you'll ever have to actually teach does make for a better teacher, IMHO.
Part of my certification for teaching required me to study the history of public schools in America. Anytime I see this line about "babysitting" trotted out, I shudder. Yes, that was part of the driving force behind schooling in America "back in the day." The instructional methodologies, subjects, structure of the day, etc. is totally different in today's world than it used to be. We've kept the idea of "free public schools," and that's about it. Not coincidentally, the structure and instructional methodologies (with a few exceptions, such as the VoTech paths and less "democratic" emphasis) is very similar in most other countries. Having talked to people who've "been there," I'd need no more than a crash course in local education law to be comfortable teaching my English class in France, Korea, Japan, or Iceland. I do feel like a babysitter sometimes, as I'm sure every teacher does occasionally, but trust me when I tell you that things have seriously changed.
I believe this stems from two roots. The first is the amount of "busy work" a typical student gets. Teachers often put very little thought into assignments and simply say "do these exercises from the book." A student then typically gets a "check" or something that just signifies completion.
I'm not talking about a worksheet here. I abhor them, and they rarely grace my classroom. As I pointed out above, I can't assign an out-of-class reading (say, chapters 1 through 4) and expect it to get done. I teach English. This poses a bit of a problem, and forces me to devote classtime to reading a novel rather than actually studying it.
I'm not sure this is fair. Knowledge is a very relativistic thing. 100 years ago, an education person was fluent in latin, probably french, and had read most of the "great" books.
Of course, they did not know anything about modern physics, information technology, or any of the modern sciences.
Read about where I arrived at that conclusion. This is not about languages and physics, it's about the ablity of the average high schooler to comprehend the verbal and math portions of the SAT, and how significantly that changed in the span of ten or so years. Somewhere along the line, the skillset required to comprehend Geometry-level math and Sophomore or Junior-level English dropped.
That's specifically why I said we'd gotten "dumber" rather than "our intelligence has dropped." The average high school student is probably just as intelligent. They'd probably be capable of learning French, Greek, and Latin while simultaneously reading the "great books" if we decided that that's what they needed. In my opinion, a large portion of our educational difficulties springs not from the school system or classroom itself, but from societal issues that are going to be much harder to change. Situations such as my reading assignments partially demonstrate this. Something significant took place that started telling kids it was acceptable to ignore the work that was sent home, and I don't think it took place in the five hours a week I see them (and believe me, the homework deal is not an issue unique to my classroom). Kids are just as intelligent, but these changes have made our system unable to take advantage of that intelligence. Hence, we've gotten "dumber."
1. The US high school system is so obsessed with its democratic origins that it still strives to treat and educate every child the same. This doesn't work. Essentially, we have a system that imposes a K-12 college preperatory mindset on every student that comes through. By this, I mean that we aim to put every kid through Chemistry, Physics, four years of English, Pre-Calculus, etc. Contrast this approach with many foreign systems that break kids off at the 9th or 10th grade equivalent into the kids who want to be in hard-core academics and the kids who need real vocational training. Don't knock vocational training, either; a good auto mechanic or plumber makes more than I do teaching those "academic classes." This "all equal" mindset has placed us in a position where school districts and communities have essentially had to rig up an equivalent to the foreign system; honors and AP/IB classes that actually challenge and teach the "academic minded" ones, and regulars classes that are lax enough to allow the kids through who ordinarily wouldn't ever sit in a chemistry class.
Please don't take my comments up there to imply that everyone should be hard focused on only the courses needed for what they plan to "do." As an English teacher who pushed all the way through Calculus, non-trivial Biology, and some CS courses at the Uni, I appreciate the idea of learning for learning's sake. I also recognize that there are huge amounts of people out there who don't.
2) We've gotten "dumber." This is where the root of most of our problems begin. Go look at an application for any university. They have a section where they state their minimum SAT requirements for admission. For a University that has set their minimum requirement at 1100 (for example), there will be a fine print that reads, "or 1030 for tests prior to 1994." Why? Well, the ideal for the SAT is that the average score is 1000. Unfortunately, around the late 80's and early 90's, the scores started declining more than a normal deviation could account for. The average was closer to 920. So the SAT was made "easier." Somewhere between the 70's and the 90's, we all collectively lost an intelligence level that our prior generation had.
I see it all day long in the school system. Homework is a lesser priority; I can't even assign an out-of-class reading, because it won't get done and my lesson the next day will be worthless. Academic journals targetted at teachers have articles on how to create alternatives to homework that will actually get done, which is something I highly doubt they broached in the 70's. Standards have to be lowered; if I were to fail the number of kids who really need to fail, I'd be out of a job. And don't even get me started on the priority athletics and similar extracurriculars take over academics, or the paltry sum (and respect) given to educators in this country.
Take your normal standardized test complaint. Yes, they take away from class time. Yes, I use learning time to prep for these things. But they aren't really all that difficult, and it's hard to argue against any claim that they cover things you should already have discussed in the classroom (in most cases). I have no doubt that a 1970's era classroom, poor or no, could tackle an English or Math standardized exam with less preparation than an '05 classroom would need, and still score better. We really are "dumber" than the prior generation (I say "we" here because I am part of this group).
There are hundreds of theories on why this is the case. I'm not going to pretend that I can explain any of them. Parental involvement is lower with the severe proliferation of two-income households. The burgeoning American obsession with consumer debt both drives the previous issue and misleads students into thinking that a $25K/year job in their late 20's will allow them to have an Escalade and a nice house. The disrespect of education and school in general is an ingrained part of our culture. We are one of the few school systems worlwide t
I graduated last December with Bachelor's Degree and a teaching certificate. Finding a job mid-year as a teacher can be tough to begin with, but I was living in the Austin, TX area, which does not have serious need of anything other than Math/Science teachers (who are needed everywhere).
Did I bitch and complain about a tight job market? No. I widened my search to include the 4th largest city in the US (Houston), and I now have a teaching job while few of my graduating peers do.
I love California, but if you're honestly staring down the barrel of a $25K salary, get the hell out now.
First off, these things aren't quiet. Read the posts.
If you're into hacking, I'd assume you'd want something without a prorietary mobo and PSU design. See, you can get any kind of small microATX case and a matching mobo if all you're interested in is a small computer with reasonable power. The SFF design, though, ties you into the mobo that's already installed and the PSU that's already installed. If either dies, you get to pay Shuttle's gouge prices. With a microATX design, you can buy a mobo and PSU from more than ten different vendors.
Don't get me wrong here; I'm not some teenaged fan boy who thinks that gaming is the only use for computers and that everyone should have a GeForce 9000. As I mentioned in another post, I came at it from the gaming angle because that's obviously who Shuttle is targetting. When you add Gigabit Ethernet, a bleeding-edge expansion slot designed for high-end video cards, and SPDIF audio output, it's pretty obvious that you're gunning for a gaming crowd. Anyone who just wants a small case has many more options than these, and most of those options make a lot more sense.
While paying for DVDs takes some cash, Netflix's largest expenditure is shipping costs, IIRC.
A mail carrier further up mentioned that Netflix DVDs tend to be delivered in sets of three. There's a pretty easy explanation for this: Netflix processes on Monday through Friday. The mail service ships Monday through Saturday. There are probably more people watching on the weekend then the week, so the likelihood of a collection of DVDs being mailed back on Monday is probably higher. Additionally, assuming you mail out to them and your DVD arrives on a Friday or Saturday, your chances of that DVD being processed on a Monday are fairly high, which increases the chances of that being grouped with another movie that made it to their center on Monday.
The point in all of this is to simply explain why the discs arrive in triplicate so frequently. Given this, why doesn't Netflix have some sort of slightly larger envelope that they stuff with return envelopes and discs? It would seem to me that sending that bigger envelope (it only needs to be a little bigger, so no postage increase) with two or three DVDs for the same postage would cut costs tremendously.
Not only that, but non-gamers have plenty of small-ish options available to them. Shuttle goes out of their way to accomodate full-height expansion cards, premium mobo features such as GigE and SPDIF audio, and premium expansion slots generally reserved for high-end video cards. If you want a small computer, there are hundreds of tiny MicroATX cases and accompanying motherboards that fit that requirement. The fact that many SFF manufacturers include those features in an assembly-required package indicates to me that they're targetting a gamer market, which is why I asked for a comparison to a popular gaming chassis.
Well, I left college less than a year ago. The shuttle SFFs I'm personally familiar with were NForce2-based AthlonXP numbers sporting heatpipes and BIOS-controlled fan systems. And these things were noisy as crap.
Thing is, for all the reviews that mention an SFF being quieter than expected, I see plenty of online posts from people who stuck a Radeon 9800-range card in one and now have to override fan control to keep the thing at a tolerable temperature.
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Whereables?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not only that, but consider the niche they target. Plenty of niche requirements are not commercially available.
Example: where are the consumer targetted RAID-capable NAS units? Sure, I can buy RAID NAS devices from plenty of vendors, but a quick peek shows Iomega's chepest RAID capable unit over the $1,000 range new (and don't go spouting off on remanufactured units on ebay; that doesn't count). This is a simple example, but the NAS from other vendors is pretty much the same deal. Consumer-line NAS exists, yes, but consumers NEED RAID. They never run backups, and they're usually storing things like digital camera photos that they'll never be able to recover after an HDD crash. This need has arguably existed for several years, and I'd happily recommend a zero-maintenance box with two mirrored 80GB drives and an ethernet port in the $500 range for tons of non-techies that I know. I've seen one ethernet-based disk by some company I don't know of that claims RAID support, but I'm not sure how, since it exists as a stand-alone single-drive model (does it start mirroring over the network automagically?). Buffalo seems like they might finally be stepping up to the plate, but for a long time it's been "roll your own or fork over $1,000 more than you can justify."
Or:
Hot on the heels of the SFF story, we're only now starting to see actually-for-sale SFF computers, as opposed to bare-bones units. Sure, there've been skinny corporate-targetted workstations for a while, but the pseudo enthusiast who wanted an SFF-like computer either built it from components or lived without one. It's only been in the last nine months or so that I've seen these things available on shelves or somewhere other than an obscure whitebox retailer's website.
So in addition to being bulky and useless, wearables are so totally niche right now that there's no money to be made in commercially providing one for anything other than a total specialty area.
Note: excuse my references to the Lanboy. I'm not trying to whore for Antec; it's just that their product is the most readily recognizable example of the design I'm referencing.
During the last two years of college, I got very into the LAN scene. All the guys I worked with were big on LAN gaming, and some people at my apartment complex were into it. Even my girlfriend had her LAN machine (in addition to her art major necessity Mac), which she decorated with Hello Kitty stencils on the requisite LAN computer window and dubbed "Halo Kitty."
We mostly leaned toward aluminum cases for weight benefits coupled with smaller LCDs. Because a fair amount of us were PC repair techs, we'd always have that one slightly older machine that could still easily hang with the games we played. New people would show up, get hooked, and start wanting to build/buy something so that they could participate.
A few people ended up with Shuttles or similar SFF cases. While fairly convenient in size, we consitently saw overheating issues and high noise levels. Shoehorning a good graphics card into these things (since LAN action is obviously a target market) sends heat levels through the roof, and the smaller size means only one fan. The need for a single fan means that fan must turn at very high speeds. This made for some excessive noise levels, especially for people who wanted to use these as their primary computer, and (logically) envisioned setting them atop their desk beside the monitor.
So the question out of all of this is here: are these SFF designs worth it? I love the convenient size of the Mac Mini as much as the next guy, but (in addition to being much smaller than most SFF PCs) they target a totally different market. When I look at these squatty boxes and compare them to an Antec Lanboy or other similar aluminum chassis w/ handles, I start wondering.
Isn't it just smarter to buy a lightweight mini-tower? With space for 3HDDs, isn't that what this thing really is, anyway? A Lanboy comes with a carry strap, weighs less than 20 lbs. loaded with an HDD and optical drive, and avoids the excessive heat and noise levels generated by the SFF design. While a Lanboy might be 2 or 2.5 times taller, it's also skinnier, so we're not talking about a huge gain there. On top of this, I get to choose my own internal components, whereas I was always put off of these because I'd end up having to use a shuttle mainboard.
By "one drive" do you mean that only one out of X got noisier, or do you mean that you tried it once and abandoned the idea?
That may have been an isolated situation, or it may have been that you managed to push a metal portion of the drive more tightly against the case. In my non-scientific analyses, a small washer that completely separates the drive from the case does reduce vibration noise.
Antec's silent series of cases use a pretty nifty commercial application of this idea. Drives rest in a removable cage. The screws have a long, non-threaded section above the actual portion that locks into the drive. The holes in the cage are slightly larger, and have a rubber "spool" that effectively locks into the hole with larger portions at each side. The screw then attaches through this, so that the non-threaded portion is gripped by the center section of the spool. I used one of these for my sisters' computer, and I was pretty surprised at how quiet it was.
You couldn't pay me enough to use an onboard card, gaming or no. Because of the shared RAM access, onboard cards have a nasty habit of seriously degrading system performance. The few times I'm forced to use shared memory cards, the systems not only perform worse in CPU and RAM-bound operations, they feel generally sluggish in everything.
I don't dispute the cheapness of fans on nice videocards; like the RAMDAC, it's one of the things the gaming crowd rarely pays attention to. If you're not planning on making a gaming monster, though, something like the Radeon 9600 will perform modestly but only need passive cooling.
The CD Reader/Burner is of course only an issue when you're actually reading/burning. That is a point in time when I'm willing to settle for the noise, especially given that a 52X model will be done sooner than an 8X. As for CDs that need to be in the tray, Daemon Tools + an ISO improves performance better than any drive ever could, and adds no noise to the equation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I remember the good ol' days, with their 300 baud modems and walking backwards uphill both ways in the snow.
/. story about an innovative new software program, or a cool liveCD, I can fire up a bit torrent client and grab it without putting as much of a strain on the server.
Now I have a 6000kbps/400kbps broadband link to my home. What you call OS Bloat and graphics bloat I call useability increases.
I run Firefox, which allows for nice, handy tabbed browsing. It might be useable on a 233mhz computer, provided there was enough RAM, but I wouldn't push it.
While doing that, I'll have an IM Client open that allows for connection to all major IM networks.
I'm also going to have Thunderbird open, which allows for easy management of my RSS feeds along with email.
MP3 player will of course be running in the background, because I like to listen to music while I browse. That alone would tax the hell out of your 133mhz 5x86.
If I see a
I didn't say you NEED a faster machine for web browsing, but I wouldn't want to do it on something slower than about 500Mhz nowadays. The minute that I have to start shutting down applications so that I can do other work, I'm just going to start looking into an inexpensive upgrade route. If my computer is seriously inhibiting my ability to do what I want to do, then no amount of bitching about bloat is going to fix that problem. While bloat is there, advances have taken place in software since 1997 (the year of the P233), and you shouldn't just discount them because your system's too slow to use those applications.
Speaking as someone who owns three Apples, leading the small desktop industry isn't too tough. Apple's the only big-name company producing a ready-built Mini-ITX sized desktop. Dell makes their 4x00 series of Inspirons, but they're not nearly as small as a mini-itx or Mac Mini. Alienware and similar game PC companies make SFF (shuttle-style) game computers, but they're physically larger and account for such a tiny slice of the market that we could effectively ignore those numbers. I've seen IBM and HP tiny desktops, but they're corporate-targetted products similar to Compaq's old iPaq desktop (not the PDA), and I don't know that a consumer can even purchase one without jumping through small business hoops.
The day Joe User can walk into a Best Buy or Circuit City and walk out with a name-brand Mini-ITX computer, there might be some more competition in that market space. As it is, though, general purpose PC buyers seem to look at price more than anything else, and those who want small products tend to end up with notebooks anyway.
Not quite...
Benchmark review of a single 933 Via processor
Granted, this is the C3, which is slightly inferior to the Eden-N being used here. Can you see the second processor in the arithmetic benchmarks, the one running about equally? That's a 333mhz PII. Even being generous and saying this newer series chip has significantly sped up, we're still talking performance equal to maybe a dual 500 Mhz PIII.
Useable? Yes. Acceptable for generic web browsing and word processing? Maybe. An excellent-performing midrange desktop replacement? No way. The Mhz myth is definitely in effect here, just not like you might initially think. These things are fine and dandy as a generic file server where speed is not a supreme priority, and they work fine as a router/gateway or simple firewall, but please don't try to use them for much else.
Sony already sells them for use in their ~$2,000 Firewire/USB2 external Blu-Ray Recorder.
About $32. This was the quickest link I could find, although I think the last magazine storage review I read mentioned the blanks being $25.
HP/Compaq sell AMD-based notebooks. Gateway/eMachines sell AMD-based notebooks. Fujitsu sells AMD-based notebooks. Sony has sold AMD-based notebooks, although I can't speak about their current line-up. All four of these comapnies have their products available in large consumer electronics stores such as Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, etc.
In fact, the only big-name companies who don't seem to offer AMD notebooks are Dell (obviously), Toshiba, and IBM. Toshiba's the only one of that group that even sells through retail channels anymore.
Where do you live?
Yeah, 20th Century Fox produced "Buffy" and sold it to WB. WB produced "Friends" and sold it to NBC. Hell, Fox, WB, and Paramount's studios produce shows all the time that end up on one of the other three majors. This is normal TV business; sometimes a channel wants the studio's show, and sometimes they don't.
Just like Sony sells DVDs and devices that could be used to pirate those DVDs, media companies are composed of individual divisions that are just trying to maximize profitability.
Not quite. Ratings are good, but the right sort of demographic is also important. This is a long-standing tradition in Hollywood; CBS cancelled "The Beverly Hillbillies" way back in the day even though it sat in the top 10 every week. Why? It's audience was an older, rural audience which wasn't really what advertisers demanded.
A similar fate befell "Buffy." What started out as part of The WB's two-pronged attack (along with "Dawson's Creek") to morph from an "urban" network to one that targetted the lucrative teen market started to skew much older than they intended. Granted, "Buffy" also started costing much more around Season 4, and the end of Season 5 marked the 100 episode point commonly needed for syndication.
"Enterprise" was the number one UPN show last time I looked at a Nielsen report, but it really doesn't belong on that channel. Programming around "Enterprise" would be tricky, and it doesn't really lend itself to many of the traditional programming strategies on a network primarily filled with minority-targetted sitcoms.
As others have suggested, cost is also a huge factor. Sci-fi series are going to generally be more expensive than a similarly rated comedy. Give me $1.5 million an episode, and I can probably find mroe profitable ventures than a sci-fi show (remember the great game show blitz of '00?)
Take heart: At the normal rate, we'll probably see another Trek show back on the air in three or four years. Maybe Paramount will have the sense to put it on something other than UPN. If this article was correct in stating that "Enterprise" was averaging 2 million viewers per episode, though, it had no business on the air at the price it probably cost.
We'll start with the issue of the "free speech violations," which are nothing more than a website struggling to maintain the sources which generate page views. Journalists protection of sources, as others on /. have pointed out, extend to government and organized crime trials; ThinkSecret is merely trying to keep the source that broke their NDA from being revealed and fired so that TS' stream of insider information can be maintained. They want to play journalist but ignore some of the rules that go with being journalist, and their motivating drive in all of this isn't some holy "free speech" crusade, it's the desire to keep the page (and ad) views coming.
I own an iPod. Less than 1% of the songs on it are Music Store songs, and only two of those are ones I actually purchased (all the rest are from the "Free single of the week" section). Your iPod can be legally filled with music ripped from your own CD collection, downloaded from indy-band sites that allow free distribution, and possibly MP3s ripped from streaming audio sources (the legality of that last one hasn't really been established). There are several other big-name music stores out there, and I'd suggest that they all get used to the disadvantages of being the second or third mover in a market such as this. Either you come up with a good reason for me to jump away from the current market and mindshare leader, or you're not going to make it. MS' Janus DRM system, for example, sounds like an interesting alternative, and might be just what Napster and friends need to pull people away from iTMS.
Would Apple be a nasty monopoly if they were in the same position as MS right now? Probably. They're not, though. The "accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics" mentioned in the article appear to be nothing other than what the article had already stated: Apple wants to know which employees broke a contract (a reasonable and completely legitimate thing to ask of a journalist), and iTMS is not the only music store or the only way to put music on an iPod.
You're thinking of a device called X-Play, IIRC. It was a 2400 baud modem (seriously!) that went into the cartridge slot first, then had the game cartridge piggy-backed in, similar to a game genie or the old Sonic and Knuckles cart.
Theoretically, the X-Play could support any game, but I believe it only supported some of the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games, and a small smattering of EA Sports titles. The modem itself was quite expensive ($100 for a 2400 when 28.8k was pretty much the standard), and I think they might have had a monthly fee.
But some people are. There is nothing more disheartening that having to spend an hour doing repetition on something you understand better than the teacher.
No, you're right. The system isn't perfect. I adopt what I consider to be a realist's perspective toward situations such as this. It's not fair to be stuck doing rote memorization exercises, but it's also not fair to just sit there and bitch about it (or ignore the assignments). There's a student in one of my sophomore classes who voluntarily chose Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar for a quotation analysis exercise when she could've chosen any novel over 100 pages. If she chooses to sleep in my class, I don't bother her about it. She obviously knows what she's doing, and the only reason she's in my regular-level class is because she doesn't want to work as hard. I teach sophomores and juniors; I threatened (mostly idly) to make her life difficult if she wasn't in an AP class next year. I can tell you that I will be aiming to create more "open" assignments, though, so that she'll have an opportunity to explore her own interests.
Any student who is in a situation such as the theoretical one I posited should simply approach the teacher about it. No teacher I know of gets angry at a student who wants to challenge themselves. I can tell you that right now I would add an hour a day to my own workload if a couple of my more advanced students were to ask me about doing something tougher than we do in class on a normal basis. Some teachers might not be willing to do this, but they would probably refer the kid to the coach of the Math/Science team, and could probably be persuaded to allow the kid to work on assignments for a Math competition that were designed by the Math/Science competition sponsor.
It's amazing how much more I know about the War of 1812 after spending an hour watching a special on the History Channel than I ever did from reading it in a history book. Maybe it's just how I learn, but I've found the same is true for most of the people I know.
Do you remember the uproar a year or two ago when Dan Rather suggested that people go read the newspaper for information about a particular event (sorry, my memory's a bit sketchy on that one). Sometimes books really are a more effective way to communicate complex interactions. To be fair, sometimes they're mind-numbingly boring. There's actually a huge debate in the world of secondary-level history about the proper instructional methods. One group pushes for students as historians, studying primary sources and attempting to form their own "histories." Obviously, this represents an excellent instructional method and would ideally teach kids to learn, not memorize. Of course, it requires a level of knowledge that I don't think is present in a lot of children, and a good working knowledge of history to begin with. That's where the second group comes in: they believe that students are not historians (probably a reasonable assumption), and that they are incapable of that sort of work without a firm rooting in the traditional "history book" learning. Which is how we end up with what any decent history class looks like: a mixture of the two, that would implement a History Channel special on the War of 1812 alongside personal accounts (to see the views of those who still pushed for a return to Britain) and the traditional textbook. Any good history teacher should be able to manage that, provided a small level of funding for the extra materials required. Unfortunately, history seems to be "coach" territory more than any other subject, which feeds to my initial suggestion about one of the causes of our faults as a system.
As for your Italian experience, that wasn't a one-time occurence? I apologize, and submit that any teacher who acts that way is too busy playing games to teach. There are crappy teachers just like there are PHP monkeys and PHBs. For the most part, though, the education profession is filled with people who enjoy seeing kids lea
No, that's pretty close to what I did as an American High School student seven or eight years ago.
My question: is that typical of the average English education? My father went to school in England, but this was in the late 60's, so I don't doubt that things have changed.
The average kid should probably have 1.5 to 2 hours per day. I could have had that (or less) if I had taken less demanding classes.
Yeah, I know people in that situation as well. Thankfully, it's a tiny margin, and I'd argue that your friends are far and away the exception to the rule.
Far more people are simply unwilling to move because they grew up there and still have friends there. It can certainly be daunting to leave all that, but to those people I'd repeat my above statement:
If you legitimately can't make a liveable salary at a job you're properly trained for, either you're not properly trained (PHP monkey) or you need to leave.
I would question any teacher who assigns 1 to 2 hours of work per night in something other than a very advanced class. I would not question a teacher who assigned 30 minutes of homework per night, such that all classes put together make 2 hours per night.
Unless you're a math genius, you need repetition to get the concept down. This doesn't mean sixty questions per evening, but it does mean some work.
You need to be able to prep for an upcoming chapter in science class. This probably means reading the chapter, and maybe outlining before the teacher beigns the chapter in class. Additionally, physics and chemistry are going to require some reasonable math on lab reports and such, so there's some more time needed.
History is just going to need some reading outside of class, period. Wasting time on reading a textbook in history class is almost as bad as doing worksheets, IMHO.
If I assign reading outside of class (which doesn't get done much anymore), I aim for a baseline of 15-20 pages per evening in a novel, and about 10 pages in a lit. book. That's a reading load that can be completed in about 15 - 30 minutes, depending upon the difficulty of the novel and the level of the student. That doesn't mean that I assign one chapter per night, though. It means that I probably tell my students that 1-4 are due on Friday, and a fair majority wait until Thursday night to start.
If you're really talking about a continuous four hours per night of homework, and not just an isolated incident here or there, there are one of three things happening:
1) The student is not practicing proper planning. Long-term assignments are being put off until days before the due date, and then they happen to stack up with normal homework. This is very easy to fix, assuming this is where your kid falls. My parents required a mandatory one hour of homework at the table before dinner started. Before long, your kid will get tired of just staring at a wall, and he or she will start that reading that's not due until next week, or the project that's due in two weeks.
2) The student is enrolled in a large section of AP/IB or similar courses. Just like you can't expect a light workload if you sign up for 21 hours/semester in college, you can't expect less than three hours per night if you have four or five AP classes and a foreign language, for example. It's good preparation and a good education, but the student needs to be willing to sacrifice some of the other aspects of their life if they want to go down that path.
3) The student isn't cut out for the class. The homework that's taking the rest of the kids thirty minutes is taking Johnny an hour, and that can be a frustrating number when you start stacking in other classes. The choices at that point are to ask Johnny to suck it up and treat it like the kid in scenario 2 (because he'll still learn something), or drop him to a less difficult class.
Rarely does 4) "All 6 - 8 of Johnny's teachers have poor time-management skills resulting in a substantially larger workload" occur.
I am of the opinion that 1.5 to 2 total hours of homework per night is acceptable. Kids get out of school somewhere between 3 and 4 PM, and the average high schooler should go to bed at 10PM to get 8 hours of sleep. Asking 1.5 or 2 hours out of that section is fully reasonable, and simply prepares kids for the workload required in college, or a job (where 8 to 3 isn't really the standard day, anyway). Not only that, but it still leaves plenty of time for play. If Johnny's parents want to put him in soccer, baseball, band, theater, and the debate team, well, see option number 2. Don't believe the extracurricular "requirement for admissions" myth. Keep a couple of things you really enjoy doing, not twelve things you're no good at.
You'll get no contradictions here from me. I hated going over to the education building at my university, because it reinforced everything you're talking about there.
Interestingly enough, part of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" bit has been to push for a return to those pre-"education major" days. While I detest large portions of that law, some of it actually works; one of the requirements for having an "acceptable" or better school is that instructors in the core subjects have degrees in the core subjects.
NCLB went into effect during my Junior year of college. Prior to that, I was planning to get my degree in English, and sit for the English and Biology certification exams. I had about 20 hours of college Bio (and not BS intro courses for liberal arts people, either), and I have a pretty scientifically-oriented mind. Science teachers are simply in shorter supply, so it made sense to increase my marketability. I will still be able to sit for that exam, but not until I have three years of classroom instruction under my belt. Even then, I'll still be a negative point against whatever school I'm working at if I'm teaching Bio instead of English. I still plan on getting the certification, because if things go wrong, I'll still be more marketable as a Bio teacher than an English teacher. You're right, though, something about knowing far more than you'll ever have to actually teach does make for a better teacher, IMHO.
Part of my certification for teaching required me to study the history of public schools in America. Anytime I see this line about "babysitting" trotted out, I shudder. Yes, that was part of the driving force behind schooling in America "back in the day." The instructional methodologies, subjects, structure of the day, etc. is totally different in today's world than it used to be. We've kept the idea of "free public schools," and that's about it. Not coincidentally, the structure and instructional methodologies (with a few exceptions, such as the VoTech paths and less "democratic" emphasis) is very similar in most other countries. Having talked to people who've "been there," I'd need no more than a crash course in local education law to be comfortable teaching my English class in France, Korea, Japan, or Iceland. I do feel like a babysitter sometimes, as I'm sure every teacher does occasionally, but trust me when I tell you that things have seriously changed.
I believe this stems from two roots. The first is the amount of "busy work" a typical student gets. Teachers often put very little thought into assignments and simply say "do these exercises from the book." A student then typically gets a "check" or something that just signifies completion.
I'm not talking about a worksheet here. I abhor them, and they rarely grace my classroom. As I pointed out above, I can't assign an out-of-class reading (say, chapters 1 through 4) and expect it to get done. I teach English. This poses a bit of a problem, and forces me to devote classtime to reading a novel rather than actually studying it.
I'm not sure this is fair. Knowledge is a very relativistic thing. 100 years ago, an education person was fluent in latin, probably french, and had read most of the "great" books.
Of course, they did not know anything about modern physics, information technology, or any of the modern sciences.
Read about where I arrived at that conclusion. This is not about languages and physics, it's about the ablity of the average high schooler to comprehend the verbal and math portions of the SAT, and how significantly that changed in the span of ten or so years. Somewhere along the line, the skillset required to comprehend Geometry-level math and Sophomore or Junior-level English dropped.
That's specifically why I said we'd gotten "dumber" rather than "our intelligence has dropped." The average high school student is probably just as intelligent. They'd probably be capable of learning French, Greek, and Latin while simultaneously reading the "great books" if we decided that that's what they needed. In my opinion, a large portion of our educational difficulties springs not from the school system or classroom itself, but from societal issues that are going to be much harder to change. Situations such as my reading assignments partially demonstrate this. Something significant took place that started telling kids it was acceptable to ignore the work that was sent home, and I don't think it took place in the five hours a week I see them (and believe me, the homework deal is not an issue unique to my classroom). Kids are just as intelligent, but these changes have made our system unable to take advantage of that intelligence. Hence, we've gotten "dumber."
1. The US high school system is so obsessed with its democratic origins that it still strives to treat and educate every child the same. This doesn't work. Essentially, we have a system that imposes a K-12 college preperatory mindset on every student that comes through. By this, I mean that we aim to put every kid through Chemistry, Physics, four years of English, Pre-Calculus, etc. Contrast this approach with many foreign systems that break kids off at the 9th or 10th grade equivalent into the kids who want to be in hard-core academics and the kids who need real vocational training. Don't knock vocational training, either; a good auto mechanic or plumber makes more than I do teaching those "academic classes." This "all equal" mindset has placed us in a position where school districts and communities have essentially had to rig up an equivalent to the foreign system; honors and AP/IB classes that actually challenge and teach the "academic minded" ones, and regulars classes that are lax enough to allow the kids through who ordinarily wouldn't ever sit in a chemistry class.
Please don't take my comments up there to imply that everyone should be hard focused on only the courses needed for what they plan to "do." As an English teacher who pushed all the way through Calculus, non-trivial Biology, and some CS courses at the Uni, I appreciate the idea of learning for learning's sake. I also recognize that there are huge amounts of people out there who don't.
2) We've gotten "dumber." This is where the root of most of our problems begin. Go look at an application for any university. They have a section where they state their minimum SAT requirements for admission. For a University that has set their minimum requirement at 1100 (for example), there will be a fine print that reads, "or 1030 for tests prior to 1994." Why? Well, the ideal for the SAT is that the average score is 1000. Unfortunately, around the late 80's and early 90's, the scores started declining more than a normal deviation could account for. The average was closer to 920. So the SAT was made "easier." Somewhere between the 70's and the 90's, we all collectively lost an intelligence level that our prior generation had.
I see it all day long in the school system. Homework is a lesser priority; I can't even assign an out-of-class reading, because it won't get done and my lesson the next day will be worthless. Academic journals targetted at teachers have articles on how to create alternatives to homework that will actually get done, which is something I highly doubt they broached in the 70's. Standards have to be lowered; if I were to fail the number of kids who really need to fail, I'd be out of a job. And don't even get me started on the priority athletics and similar extracurriculars take over academics, or the paltry sum (and respect) given to educators in this country.
Take your normal standardized test complaint. Yes, they take away from class time. Yes, I use learning time to prep for these things. But they aren't really all that difficult, and it's hard to argue against any claim that they cover things you should already have discussed in the classroom (in most cases). I have no doubt that a 1970's era classroom, poor or no, could tackle an English or Math standardized exam with less preparation than an '05 classroom would need, and still score better. We really are "dumber" than the prior generation (I say "we" here because I am part of this group).
There are hundreds of theories on why this is the case. I'm not going to pretend that I can explain any of them. Parental involvement is lower with the severe proliferation of two-income households. The burgeoning American obsession with consumer debt both drives the previous issue and misleads students into thinking that a $25K/year job in their late 20's will allow them to have an Escalade and a nice house. The disrespect of education and school in general is an ingrained part of our culture. We are one of the few school systems worlwide t
Um, with respect to the unemployed: MOVE!
I graduated last December with Bachelor's Degree and a teaching certificate. Finding a job mid-year as a teacher can be tough to begin with, but I was living in the Austin, TX area, which does not have serious need of anything other than Math/Science teachers (who are needed everywhere).
Did I bitch and complain about a tight job market? No. I widened my search to include the 4th largest city in the US (Houston), and I now have a teaching job while few of my graduating peers do.
I love California, but if you're honestly staring down the barrel of a $25K salary, get the hell out now.
First off, these things aren't quiet. Read the posts.
If you're into hacking, I'd assume you'd want something without a prorietary mobo and PSU design. See, you can get any kind of small microATX case and a matching mobo if all you're interested in is a small computer with reasonable power. The SFF design, though, ties you into the mobo that's already installed and the PSU that's already installed. If either dies, you get to pay Shuttle's gouge prices. With a microATX design, you can buy a mobo and PSU from more than ten different vendors.
Don't get me wrong here; I'm not some teenaged fan boy who thinks that gaming is the only use for computers and that everyone should have a GeForce 9000. As I mentioned in another post, I came at it from the gaming angle because that's obviously who Shuttle is targetting. When you add Gigabit Ethernet, a bleeding-edge expansion slot designed for high-end video cards, and SPDIF audio output, it's pretty obvious that you're gunning for a gaming crowd. Anyone who just wants a small case has many more options than these, and most of those options make a lot more sense.
While paying for DVDs takes some cash, Netflix's largest expenditure is shipping costs, IIRC.
A mail carrier further up mentioned that Netflix DVDs tend to be delivered in sets of three. There's a pretty easy explanation for this: Netflix processes on Monday through Friday. The mail service ships Monday through Saturday. There are probably more people watching on the weekend then the week, so the likelihood of a collection of DVDs being mailed back on Monday is probably higher. Additionally, assuming you mail out to them and your DVD arrives on a Friday or Saturday, your chances of that DVD being processed on a Monday are fairly high, which increases the chances of that being grouped with another movie that made it to their center on Monday.
The point in all of this is to simply explain why the discs arrive in triplicate so frequently. Given this, why doesn't Netflix have some sort of slightly larger envelope that they stuff with return envelopes and discs? It would seem to me that sending that bigger envelope (it only needs to be a little bigger, so no postage increase) with two or three DVDs for the same postage would cut costs tremendously.
That's why my computer sits under the desk.
Not only that, but non-gamers have plenty of small-ish options available to them. Shuttle goes out of their way to accomodate full-height expansion cards, premium mobo features such as GigE and SPDIF audio, and premium expansion slots generally reserved for high-end video cards. If you want a small computer, there are hundreds of tiny MicroATX cases and accompanying motherboards that fit that requirement. The fact that many SFF manufacturers include those features in an assembly-required package indicates to me that they're targetting a gamer market, which is why I asked for a comparison to a popular gaming chassis.
Well, I left college less than a year ago. The shuttle SFFs I'm personally familiar with were NForce2-based AthlonXP numbers sporting heatpipes and BIOS-controlled fan systems. And these things were noisy as crap.
Thing is, for all the reviews that mention an SFF being quieter than expected, I see plenty of online posts from people who stuck a Radeon 9800-range card in one and now have to override fan control to keep the thing at a tolerable temperature.
Not only that, but consider the niche they target. Plenty of niche requirements are not commercially available.
Example: where are the consumer targetted RAID-capable NAS units? Sure, I can buy RAID NAS devices from plenty of vendors, but a quick peek shows Iomega's chepest RAID capable unit over the $1,000 range new (and don't go spouting off on remanufactured units on ebay; that doesn't count). This is a simple example, but the NAS from other vendors is pretty much the same deal. Consumer-line NAS exists, yes, but consumers NEED RAID. They never run backups, and they're usually storing things like digital camera photos that they'll never be able to recover after an HDD crash. This need has arguably existed for several years, and I'd happily recommend a zero-maintenance box with two mirrored 80GB drives and an ethernet port in the $500 range for tons of non-techies that I know. I've seen one ethernet-based disk by some company I don't know of that claims RAID support, but I'm not sure how, since it exists as a stand-alone single-drive model (does it start mirroring over the network automagically?). Buffalo seems like they might finally be stepping up to the plate, but for a long time it's been "roll your own or fork over $1,000 more than you can justify."
Or:
Hot on the heels of the SFF story, we're only now starting to see actually-for-sale SFF computers, as opposed to bare-bones units. Sure, there've been skinny corporate-targetted workstations for a while, but the pseudo enthusiast who wanted an SFF-like computer either built it from components or lived without one. It's only been in the last nine months or so that I've seen these things available on shelves or somewhere other than an obscure whitebox retailer's website.
So in addition to being bulky and useless, wearables are so totally niche right now that there's no money to be made in commercially providing one for anything other than a total specialty area.
Note: excuse my references to the Lanboy. I'm not trying to whore for Antec; it's just that their product is the most readily recognizable example of the design I'm referencing.
During the last two years of college, I got very into the LAN scene. All the guys I worked with were big on LAN gaming, and some people at my apartment complex were into it. Even my girlfriend had her LAN machine (in addition to her art major necessity Mac), which she decorated with Hello Kitty stencils on the requisite LAN computer window and dubbed "Halo Kitty."
We mostly leaned toward aluminum cases for weight benefits coupled with smaller LCDs. Because a fair amount of us were PC repair techs, we'd always have that one slightly older machine that could still easily hang with the games we played. New people would show up, get hooked, and start wanting to build/buy something so that they could participate.
A few people ended up with Shuttles or similar SFF cases. While fairly convenient in size, we consitently saw overheating issues and high noise levels. Shoehorning a good graphics card into these things (since LAN action is obviously a target market) sends heat levels through the roof, and the smaller size means only one fan. The need for a single fan means that fan must turn at very high speeds. This made for some excessive noise levels, especially for people who wanted to use these as their primary computer, and (logically) envisioned setting them atop their desk beside the monitor.
So the question out of all of this is here: are these SFF designs worth it? I love the convenient size of the Mac Mini as much as the next guy, but (in addition to being much smaller than most SFF PCs) they target a totally different market. When I look at these squatty boxes and compare them to an Antec Lanboy or other similar aluminum chassis w/ handles, I start wondering.
Isn't it just smarter to buy a lightweight mini-tower? With space for 3HDDs, isn't that what this thing really is, anyway? A Lanboy comes with a carry strap, weighs less than 20 lbs. loaded with an HDD and optical drive, and avoids the excessive heat and noise levels generated by the SFF design. While a Lanboy might be 2 or 2.5 times taller, it's also skinnier, so we're not talking about a huge gain there. On top of this, I get to choose my own internal components, whereas I was always put off of these because I'd end up having to use a shuttle mainboard.
So SFF buyers, what draws you to these things?
By "one drive" do you mean that only one out of X got noisier, or do you mean that you tried it once and abandoned the idea?
That may have been an isolated situation, or it may have been that you managed to push a metal portion of the drive more tightly against the case. In my non-scientific analyses, a small washer that completely separates the drive from the case does reduce vibration noise.
Antec's silent series of cases use a pretty nifty commercial application of this idea. Drives rest in a removable cage. The screws have a long, non-threaded section above the actual portion that locks into the drive. The holes in the cage are slightly larger, and have a rubber "spool" that effectively locks into the hole with larger portions at each side. The screw then attaches through this, so that the non-threaded portion is gripped by the center section of the spool. I used one of these for my sisters' computer, and I was pretty surprised at how quiet it was.
You couldn't pay me enough to use an onboard card, gaming or no. Because of the shared RAM access, onboard cards have a nasty habit of seriously degrading system performance. The few times I'm forced to use shared memory cards, the systems not only perform worse in CPU and RAM-bound operations, they feel generally sluggish in everything.
I don't dispute the cheapness of fans on nice videocards; like the RAMDAC, it's one of the things the gaming crowd rarely pays attention to. If you're not planning on making a gaming monster, though, something like the Radeon 9600 will perform modestly but only need passive cooling.
The CD Reader/Burner is of course only an issue when you're actually reading/burning. That is a point in time when I'm willing to settle for the noise, especially given that a 52X model will be done sooner than an 8X. As for CDs that need to be in the tray, Daemon Tools + an ISO improves performance better than any drive ever could, and adds no noise to the equation.