XP corporate doesn't phone home to install, though you do have to pass WGA to get a lot of the updates, but there are ways around that too if you are really anti-wga. I used to hate XP and now its all I use because it was ultimately more stable than 2000 which I hung on to until probably 4 years ago. I mean it really is more of an update to 2000 than anything. If you hate the bloat you can turn it all off and pretty much go back to a Windows 2000 desktop if you like. You can even use nlite and strip out the stuff you don't want and get a lighter installation that chews up less RAM. My initial install was using like 128 megs at boot, thought I've since bloated it out to like 400 megs or so with AV software and a firewall and whatnot. XP isn't all that bad. If I could run everything as well under linux (photoshop cs3, reason, live, etc) I would happily make the switch again, but the gimp and audacity just isn't going to cut it for what I'm trying to do.
If I only had mod points. You just took the words right out of my mouth. Congress should be DEMANDING better/cheaper access after the phone companies have done virtually nothing to hold their end of the deal up. Now they want to implement a tiered internet and ridiculously low caps (40GB??) All the while trying to charge us more?? I think the consumers are getting a pretty raw deal, especially when you see the Japan and Korea are getting hundreds of megabits out of copper. Surely bandwidth costs have come down in the last 10 years domestically. So theoretically they should be making even more off consumers as their costs should be going down. Look at it this way. You pay $50 for cable and $50 for internet. Those 150 channels cost the cable company a LOT more than even 200 gigabytes worth of data transmissions. Problem is that the ISPs all want a piece of a bigger pie than just simply providing 0s and 1s to your door will give them. God help us if net neutrality fails.
I used to be a Windows 2000 diehard but I found that a lot of things worked better under XP after I ended up giving in and using it for a while. It was certainly an improvement over 2000, but marginally so. Now, after security has been fixed for so many things it really has become like a comfortable well worn glove. I'm afraid that the newer flavors of my favorite apps won't run under XP forever so I guess I might be forced to upgrade. Windows 2000 is still supported under contract until 2010 though, so I doubt we'll be seeing XP going away anytime soon. M$ has really created a conundrum for themselves. They are being forced to compete with themselves with a product that the public has taken to despising. I honestly don't think Windows 7 is so mind blowingly awesome that people will just want to run out get a copy. Is NT as a technology worth hanging on to? I think their better direction would have been to embrace a UNIX-like OS as the underlying technology and restarted the GUI from scratch. You could always run XP in a virtual machine for those "gotta-have" apps. Backwards compatibility has become one of the PCs biggest crutches.
PC gaming has been dead for years, but every once in a while some real classics come out that make it all worthwhile. (Looking at you, morrowind) Sure there are lots of ports back and forth, but the PC is generally the better platform. PC games age like a fine wine. Yesterdays games still don't look half bad, especially when you can crank the graphics to the max. Most games are much better enjoyed after they have been patched several times. I really cannot fathom why people try to stay on the bleeding edge. When your graphics card starts costing more than the rest of the hardware put together, you may have more money than sense. It seems to me like graphics should start hitting a plateau in detail as well. I think already we are seeing character detail starting to level off, with the graphical power being spent on more characters onscreen, larger, more populated environments, etc. I don't think PC games will go away anytime soon, not with the steady stream of PC/360 cross developments at least. M$ has been very smart to convince developers to produce titles for both platforms and smarter in giving them the tools to do it with nearly a flip of the switch. I really see the transition going the other way, where the computer replaces the TV, and for a whole lot of people, the switch has already occurred. In theory the PC gaming market should be vastly larger than the 360s or the PS3s because 85% of the population apparently has a computer in their house. I'll quit ranting. Its been a long day.:P
Why does the usb boggle? Low latency certainly gives a big boost...but then again, if you are running into swap enough to justify speeding it up then more RAM is really what you need to be looking at.
oh yeah...i did forget about the problems they had trying to get the g5 in laptop form while intel had the cool and efficient cores in the wings. thanks for reminding me. it doesn't make me any sadder to see the power go.
All you need to do is publish your designs somewhere. Who knows maybe people may offer suggestions that will improve them. Open sourcing hardware is certainly something that has been done before. As long as you don't care if companies potentially exploit your ideas and not compensate you then by all means go ahead and make the world a better place. I admit I am mildly disappointed that you did not even share any details at all. Maybe your invention is really cool and now we may never know.
It makes me wonder why Apple was so quick to ditch the Power architecture and jump ship to x86. Intel really needs something other than x86 to compete with on the desktop end. I understand that the Power road map was stated to lose competitiveness with intel's offerings and all, but given the fabrication shortcomings it still appears to be very much in the race. It would be terrible to rely on one single chip manufacturer and it makes me happy that there remains quite a few different architectures out there. The potential is there for us to be on the verge of a quantum shift in computing and yet we still cling to dinosaurs that still boot into standard real mode like its 1981 all over again. Its interesting to see how badly the sparc is flailing on specint. It makes me wonder what IBM will do with the architecture when they acquire it. There is still a big rift on the RISC vs CISC debate and if modern chip designs show any indication, RISC as a concept still won by a long shot as it sits at the core of modern x86 cpus today.
From the wikipedia:
RISC and x86
However, despite many successes, RISC has made few inroads into the desktop PC and commodity server markets, where Intel's x86 platform remains the dominant processor architecture (Intel is facing increased competition from AMD, but even AMD's processors implement the x86 platform, or a 64-bit superset known as x86-64). There are three main reasons for this.
1. The very large base of proprietary PC applications are written for x86, whereas no RISC platform has a similar installed base, and this meant PC users were locked into the x86.
2. Although RISC was indeed able to scale up in performance quite quickly and cheaply, Intel took advantage of its large market by spending vast amounts of money on processor development. Intel could spend many times as much as any RISC manufacturer on improving low level design and manufacturing. The same could not be said about smaller firms like Cyrix and NexGen, but they realized that they could apply pipelined design philosophies and practices to the x86-architecture -- either directly as in the 6x86 and MII series, or indirectly (via extra decoding stages) as in Nx586 and AMD K5.
3. Later, more powerful processors such as Intel P6 and AMD K6 had similar RISC-like units that executed a stream of micro-operations generated from decoding stages that split most x86 instructions into several pieces. Today, these principles have been further refined and are used by modern x86 processors such as Intel Core 2 and AMD K8. The first available chip deploying such techniques was the NexGen Nx586, released in 1994 (while the AMD K5 was severely delayed and released in 1995).
While early RISC designs were significantly different than contemporary CISC designs, by 2000 the highest performing CPUs in the RISC line were almost indistinguishable from the highest performing CPUs in the CISC line.[10][11][12]
[edit] Diminishing benefits
Over time, improvements in chip fabrication techniques have improved performance exponentially, according to Moore's law, whereas architectural improvements have been comparatively small. Modern CISC implementations have adopted many of the performance improvements introduced by RISC, such as single-clock instructions. Compilers have also become more sophisticated, and are better able to exploit complex instructions on CISC architectures. The RISC-CISC distinction has blurred significantly in practice.
Exactly what I was thinking. I don't know much about it, but i've seen it used for some midi workstations. Surely TOS had some impact. Much more than beOS....
oh, the fear has never stopped me, mind you. though i'd add that. i always like to roll the dice every once in a while. its just never fun when you are suddenly starting at something that will never power on again. my cheap ass insignia mp3 player died the other day after less than a year. 12 year olds should not be manufacturing electronics.....
Every day we start looking more and more like soviet russia. Just look at the slippery slope that the British have fallen down. They are getting ever so close to the bottom. Funny that they still value the things that americans should abhor. Royalty, excessive taxation, empire building, disarming the population, Orwellian surveillance....where do I stop? Some smart guys fought for independence from such tyranny and generations later their offspring have fallen back into the same well worn path as their european ancestors with gleeful abandon. We embrace everything we revolted against and why? Because we have let greed and the corporations assume control. Disarm the corporation as a legal entity. Make people responsible for their companies. Take their overwhelmingly loud voices out of the room and let the people speak for once. I'd love to taste an ounce of the freedoms we used to enjoy as privileged citizens of this fine country. Maybe our day will finally come. I look forward to that glorious day.
dual bios boards are nice. i've always been afraid of flashing a bios because its the easiest way to brick a machine short of frying it. oh, and i tried sticking some generic pc133 512mb dimms into a 700mhz p3 compaq presario and it really didn't like them. To the point that it never booted again. Its amazing they can still make computers that crappy. Reminds me of the old packard bell days. Oh how I wanted to bomb that company.
I don't think the ISO is much usable above 1600 on this camera IIRC. 3200 is probably doable but you get lots of noise at high ISO. For what its worth, a usable 800 or 1600 gives a whole lot of options. I personally feel that night shots are better taken with long exposures, so speed starts to matter less, but for indoor shots at say some dark party or at concerts or whatnot you could probably do some cool stuff.
It depends on what your shots are for. If they are for a website or a magazine, then why not just save automatically as jpeg and call it a day? Your shot will never be larger than 8x10 so what does it matter? If you are using your camera properly then you shouldn't need massive post processing. I personally prefer RAW for a whole lot of reasons, but then again, maybe I am a purist at heart. It *is* pretty much the closest equivalent to digital negatives we'll get in a while and I have lots of fun playing with the exposure and black levels in my black and whites.....
Yeah, I did forget we were talking about the Z-series here. I do know that they use the Power architecture and no, I am no an expert. My point was still valid though that plenty of mainframes use x86 processors.
You must not know a lot about mainframes. Lots of mainframes use commodity x86 CPUs. Old mainframe code is resuable through emulation. Like you can buy a Burroughs compatible mainframe that will run your old Burroughs code from the 70s all running on brand new x86 processors. If it ain't broke don't fix it certainly applies here.
They mention the cost of installing. It is roughly the same as the cell. Even if the finished cells are over $1 a watt they are very close to making that number go down. The problem is, as the article mentions, is that supply of materials is going to be a big problem. There aren't any easy solutions for this in the short term.
UWB seemed to be the promise of a completely wireless future. I remember them saying that it would eliminate interference, be much, much faster, and cover a much larger area. How many of those things are still true? It seems to me that transmission strength is a huge limitation on any wireless device. Since UWB theoretically covers the whole spectrum, I still fail to see how it does not cause at least some level of interference with other devices. Even a strobing effect across the spectrum would cause some level of signal degradation with other radio based devices. I guess I should just read some more about it.
From the wikipedia article:
UWB communications transmit in a way that doesn't interfere largely with other more traditional 'narrow band' and continuous carrier wave uses in the same frequency band. However first studies show that the rise of noise level by a number of UWB transmitters puts a burden on existing communications services. This may be hard to bear for traditional systems designs and may affect the stability of such existing systems.
So interference is such a problem that transmission strengths are vastly reduced to close proximity devices, hence the adoption of UWB for PAN. So the advantage is purely that UWB is really fast? I hate to say it I don't think anything is going to really compete with 802.11x. Unless Intel starts including it in its chipsets or dell starts throwing it on their notebooks, I doubt it will ever leave the niche market. I mean look at 802.11n, very few people are actually using it in their homes yet, and probably won't be for some years. People like to just plug in stuff and have it work. WiFi is so pervasive now that I can't really imagine anything taking over in the short to mid term. When your average fiber connection in the home is running at 200mbps, people might start caring that their network is suddenly "slow."
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XP corporate doesn't phone home to install, though you do have to pass WGA to get a lot of the updates, but there are ways around that too if you are really anti-wga. I used to hate XP and now its all I use because it was ultimately more stable than 2000 which I hung on to until probably 4 years ago. I mean it really is more of an update to 2000 than anything. If you hate the bloat you can turn it all off and pretty much go back to a Windows 2000 desktop if you like. You can even use nlite and strip out the stuff you don't want and get a lighter installation that chews up less RAM. My initial install was using like 128 megs at boot, thought I've since bloated it out to like 400 megs or so with AV software and a firewall and whatnot. XP isn't all that bad. If I could run everything as well under linux (photoshop cs3, reason, live, etc) I would happily make the switch again, but the gimp and audacity just isn't going to cut it for what I'm trying to do.
If I only had mod points. You just took the words right out of my mouth. Congress should be DEMANDING better/cheaper access after the phone companies have done virtually nothing to hold their end of the deal up. Now they want to implement a tiered internet and ridiculously low caps (40GB??) All the while trying to charge us more?? I think the consumers are getting a pretty raw deal, especially when you see the Japan and Korea are getting hundreds of megabits out of copper. Surely bandwidth costs have come down in the last 10 years domestically. So theoretically they should be making even more off consumers as their costs should be going down. Look at it this way. You pay $50 for cable and $50 for internet. Those 150 channels cost the cable company a LOT more than even 200 gigabytes worth of data transmissions. Problem is that the ISPs all want a piece of a bigger pie than just simply providing 0s and 1s to your door will give them. God help us if net neutrality fails.
I used to be a Windows 2000 diehard but I found that a lot of things worked better under XP after I ended up giving in and using it for a while. It was certainly an improvement over 2000, but marginally so. Now, after security has been fixed for so many things it really has become like a comfortable well worn glove. I'm afraid that the newer flavors of my favorite apps won't run under XP forever so I guess I might be forced to upgrade. Windows 2000 is still supported under contract until 2010 though, so I doubt we'll be seeing XP going away anytime soon. M$ has really created a conundrum for themselves. They are being forced to compete with themselves with a product that the public has taken to despising. I honestly don't think Windows 7 is so mind blowingly awesome that people will just want to run out get a copy. Is NT as a technology worth hanging on to? I think their better direction would have been to embrace a UNIX-like OS as the underlying technology and restarted the GUI from scratch. You could always run XP in a virtual machine for those "gotta-have" apps. Backwards compatibility has become one of the PCs biggest crutches.
PC gaming has been dead for years, but every once in a while some real classics come out that make it all worthwhile. (Looking at you, morrowind) Sure there are lots of ports back and forth, but the PC is generally the better platform. PC games age like a fine wine. Yesterdays games still don't look half bad, especially when you can crank the graphics to the max. Most games are much better enjoyed after they have been patched several times. I really cannot fathom why people try to stay on the bleeding edge. When your graphics card starts costing more than the rest of the hardware put together, you may have more money than sense. It seems to me like graphics should start hitting a plateau in detail as well. I think already we are seeing character detail starting to level off, with the graphical power being spent on more characters onscreen, larger, more populated environments, etc. I don't think PC games will go away anytime soon, not with the steady stream of PC/360 cross developments at least. M$ has been very smart to convince developers to produce titles for both platforms and smarter in giving them the tools to do it with nearly a flip of the switch. I really see the transition going the other way, where the computer replaces the TV, and for a whole lot of people, the switch has already occurred. In theory the PC gaming market should be vastly larger than the 360s or the PS3s because 85% of the population apparently has a computer in their house. I'll quit ranting. Its been a long day. :P
Why does the usb boggle? Low latency certainly gives a big boost...but then again, if you are running into swap enough to justify speeding it up then more RAM is really what you need to be looking at.
Oh, I've had submissions completely rewritten. They really don't seem to like it when you include negative opinions on things it seems... :)
Actually you had to wait for double barelled shotgun to reload. Or was that Doom 2.....? Its been so many years.
"The planet has a fever" -Al Gore
oh yeah...i did forget about the problems they had trying to get the g5 in laptop form while intel had the cool and efficient cores in the wings. thanks for reminding me. it doesn't make me any sadder to see the power go.
All you need to do is publish your designs somewhere. Who knows maybe people may offer suggestions that will improve them. Open sourcing hardware is certainly something that has been done before. As long as you don't care if companies potentially exploit your ideas and not compensate you then by all means go ahead and make the world a better place. I admit I am mildly disappointed that you did not even share any details at all. Maybe your invention is really cool and now we may never know.
It makes me wonder why Apple was so quick to ditch the Power architecture and jump ship to x86. Intel really needs something other than x86 to compete with on the desktop end. I understand that the Power road map was stated to lose competitiveness with intel's offerings and all, but given the fabrication shortcomings it still appears to be very much in the race. It would be terrible to rely on one single chip manufacturer and it makes me happy that there remains quite a few different architectures out there. The potential is there for us to be on the verge of a quantum shift in computing and yet we still cling to dinosaurs that still boot into standard real mode like its 1981 all over again. Its interesting to see how badly the sparc is flailing on specint. It makes me wonder what IBM will do with the architecture when they acquire it. There is still a big rift on the RISC vs CISC debate and if modern chip designs show any indication, RISC as a concept still won by a long shot as it sits at the core of modern x86 cpus today.
From the wikipedia:
RISC and x86
However, despite many successes, RISC has made few inroads into the desktop PC and commodity server markets, where Intel's x86 platform remains the dominant processor architecture (Intel is facing increased competition from AMD, but even AMD's processors implement the x86 platform, or a 64-bit superset known as x86-64). There are three main reasons for this.
1. The very large base of proprietary PC applications are written for x86, whereas no RISC platform has a similar installed base, and this meant PC users were locked into the x86.
2. Although RISC was indeed able to scale up in performance quite quickly and cheaply, Intel took advantage of its large market by spending vast amounts of money on processor development. Intel could spend many times as much as any RISC manufacturer on improving low level design and manufacturing. The same could not be said about smaller firms like Cyrix and NexGen, but they realized that they could apply pipelined design philosophies and practices to the x86-architecture -- either directly as in the 6x86 and MII series, or indirectly (via extra decoding stages) as in Nx586 and AMD K5.
3. Later, more powerful processors such as Intel P6 and AMD K6 had similar RISC-like units that executed a stream of micro-operations generated from decoding stages that split most x86 instructions into several pieces. Today, these principles have been further refined and are used by modern x86 processors such as Intel Core 2 and AMD K8. The first available chip deploying such techniques was the NexGen Nx586, released in 1994 (while the AMD K5 was severely delayed and released in 1995).
While early RISC designs were significantly different than contemporary CISC designs, by 2000 the highest performing CPUs in the RISC line were almost indistinguishable from the highest performing CPUs in the CISC line.[10][11][12]
[edit] Diminishing benefits
Over time, improvements in chip fabrication techniques have improved performance exponentially, according to Moore's law, whereas architectural improvements have been comparatively small. Modern CISC implementations have adopted many of the performance improvements introduced by RISC, such as single-clock instructions. Compilers have also become more sophisticated, and are better able to exploit complex instructions on CISC architectures. The RISC-CISC distinction has blurred significantly in practice.
Exactly what I was thinking. I don't know much about it, but i've seen it used for some midi workstations. Surely TOS had some impact. Much more than beOS....
oh, the fear has never stopped me, mind you. though i'd add that. i always like to roll the dice every once in a while. its just never fun when you are suddenly starting at something that will never power on again. my cheap ass insignia mp3 player died the other day after less than a year. 12 year olds should not be manufacturing electronics.....
Every day we start looking more and more like soviet russia. Just look at the slippery slope that the British have fallen down. They are getting ever so close to the bottom. Funny that they still value the things that americans should abhor. Royalty, excessive taxation, empire building, disarming the population, Orwellian surveillance....where do I stop? Some smart guys fought for independence from such tyranny and generations later their offspring have fallen back into the same well worn path as their european ancestors with gleeful abandon. We embrace everything we revolted against and why? Because we have let greed and the corporations assume control. Disarm the corporation as a legal entity. Make people responsible for their companies. Take their overwhelmingly loud voices out of the room and let the people speak for once. I'd love to taste an ounce of the freedoms we used to enjoy as privileged citizens of this fine country. Maybe our day will finally come. I look forward to that glorious day.
dual bios boards are nice. i've always been afraid of flashing a bios because its the easiest way to brick a machine short of frying it. oh, and i tried sticking some generic pc133 512mb dimms into a 700mhz p3 compaq presario and it really didn't like them. To the point that it never booted again. Its amazing they can still make computers that crappy. Reminds me of the old packard bell days. Oh how I wanted to bomb that company.
I don't think the ISO is much usable above 1600 on this camera IIRC. 3200 is probably doable but you get lots of noise at high ISO. For what its worth, a usable 800 or 1600 gives a whole lot of options. I personally feel that night shots are better taken with long exposures, so speed starts to matter less, but for indoor shots at say some dark party or at concerts or whatnot you could probably do some cool stuff.
It depends on what your shots are for. If they are for a website or a magazine, then why not just save automatically as jpeg and call it a day? Your shot will never be larger than 8x10 so what does it matter? If you are using your camera properly then you shouldn't need massive post processing. I personally prefer RAW for a whole lot of reasons, but then again, maybe I am a purist at heart. It *is* pretty much the closest equivalent to digital negatives we'll get in a while and I have lots of fun playing with the exposure and black levels in my black and whites.....
To each his own I guess. :)
Yeah, I did forget we were talking about the Z-series here. I do know that they use the Power architecture and no, I am no an expert. My point was still valid though that plenty of mainframes use x86 processors.
You must not know a lot about mainframes. Lots of mainframes use commodity x86 CPUs. Old mainframe code is resuable through emulation. Like you can buy a Burroughs compatible mainframe that will run your old Burroughs code from the 70s all running on brand new x86 processors. If it ain't broke don't fix it certainly applies here.
They mention the cost of installing. It is roughly the same as the cell. Even if the finished cells are over $1 a watt they are very close to making that number go down. The problem is, as the article mentions, is that supply of materials is going to be a big problem. There aren't any easy solutions for this in the short term.
Interesting. I always wondered what caused the buildup of tissue in asbestos cases.
What makes you think a T-Cell can eat a nanomachine? Can you eat a laptop? Chew it? Swallow it? Didn't think so.....
I thought it looked more modern than slashdot! Try browsing the web with mosaic 1 these days.... :P
Oh man! You have no idea how many times I wish I knew that! Curse you designers who can't make a window that is smaller than 640x480!!
UWB seemed to be the promise of a completely wireless future. I remember them saying that it would eliminate interference, be much, much faster, and cover a much larger area. How many of those things are still true? It seems to me that transmission strength is a huge limitation on any wireless device. Since UWB theoretically covers the whole spectrum, I still fail to see how it does not cause at least some level of interference with other devices. Even a strobing effect across the spectrum would cause some level of signal degradation with other radio based devices. I guess I should just read some more about it.
From the wikipedia article:
UWB communications transmit in a way that doesn't interfere largely with other more traditional 'narrow band' and continuous carrier wave uses in the same frequency band. However first studies show that the rise of noise level by a number of UWB transmitters puts a burden on existing communications services. This may be hard to bear for traditional systems designs and may affect the stability of such existing systems.
So interference is such a problem that transmission strengths are vastly reduced to close proximity devices, hence the adoption of UWB for PAN. So the advantage is purely that UWB is really fast? I hate to say it I don't think anything is going to really compete with 802.11x. Unless Intel starts including it in its chipsets or dell starts throwing it on their notebooks, I doubt it will ever leave the niche market. I mean look at 802.11n, very few people are actually using it in their homes yet, and probably won't be for some years. People like to just plug in stuff and have it work. WiFi is so pervasive now that I can't really imagine anything taking over in the short to mid term. When your average fiber connection in the home is running at 200mbps, people might start caring that their network is suddenly "slow."