Their ethernet drivers, but not their wireless drivers.
Fortunately, Linuxant has made their wrapper driver 64-bit compatible, so those of us with HP/Compaq notebooks running 64-bit Linux can use wireless, even though we have to jump through hoops to do so. (I've yet to get around to buying and setting up the driver personally.)
I found out about the whitelist the hard way. Bought an expensive Atheros card, swapped it in, got the BIOS error message, got all the way up to HP's top-tier technicians and they had no idea why that error was there. More research found the reason in the HP Hardware Guide: HP swears the FCC made them do it. Yeah, right, then why don't eMachines/Acer/Dell/etc pull stunts like this...
Other than that glaring fault and their inexplicable choice of the antique GeForce 440 Go GPU, the zv5000z/R3000z series notebooks make great Linux machines and they're very easy to upgrade. See R3000 Forums for more info on the series.
The video card fan could be the biggest noise source. The thin aluminum Shuttle case doesn't dampen noise very well. When I switched my parents from a fairly modern video card to an older one, I was amazed at how much quieter their machine became.
Get the current Shuttle 939-pin Athlon 64 box (95G5?) and a Winchester-core (90nm) Athlon 64 CPU. Pick a video card with a reasonably quiet fan. I built one for my parents and it's a very quiet machine. Not perfect, but very impressive. The biggest trick is finding the right video card.
It's long past time for PC CPUs to get some power management in them so they don't have to be kicking out 100w of heat while you look at your desktop.
It's called AMD PowerNOW!. Current Linux distros (like 64-bit Fedora Core 3) enable it automagically. Athlon 64 CPUs have had it for over a year, plus the current 90nm A64's burn about HALF the power of Intel's 90nm P4 blast furnaces. AMD chips are very easy to keep cool with a low-speed fan.
Most good power supplies have temperature-controlled fans. Seasonic's new S12 series of high-efficiency power supplies with 120mm fans are my current favorite. Newegg has them. High efficiency means less waste heat. If you want something cheaper the older Seasonics are excellent too.
Did anyone else read this as 'College Students Turn Away From Landmines'? I've heard of some pretty crazy dorm pranks, but that seems a little extreme.
Voila, your notebook PC is now a HDTV PVR too. Sure, it can be a bit finicky, but the price is right. These work particularly well if your notebook has a widescreen display.
perhaps because they autosense the voltage level so there's no annoying 115V/220V switch on the back. Newegg carries them. They topped the efficiency tests in the linked review. Way, WAY more efficient than Antec True-series, and slightly more efficient than the Antec Phantom. Definitely my favorite power supply brand.
Actually, VIA's AMD chipsets have gotten pretty good, especially their AMD64 chipsets, since AMD's integrated memory controller removes one of the trickiest portions of chipset design from VIA's hands. My ASUS K8V Deluxe has performed very well under 64-bit Linux. That said, given a choice, I'll generally spend a few dollars more for a nVidia chipset board, just because nVidia has been such a good Linux supporter (64-bit video drivers).
If forced to buy Intel's grossly inefficient P4 blast furnace, though, I'd pair it with an Intel chipset. Intel is outright hostile towards third-party chipset makers. It's not fair to them, but what can y'do.
If your problem is from a weak signal, get one of these. It made a noticible difference at my parents' house (cleaned up the analog TV signal too). The better splitter they're promoting with it isn't a bad idea either though I haven't tried one myself.
Yes, Comcast should take care of such things themselves. And Microsoft should write a secure OS. Anyhow...
I'm looking forward to 6Mbps/768Kbps. I hope they upgrade my neighborhood soon.
It's more likely that unless you come from a wealthy family you don't have a chance in hell of paying elite university tuition. Even the more working-class universities are picking up the wasteful spending habits of the elite schools. Mine sure has. (Check out the EMU President's McMansion next time you're in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It's just down the street from the convocation center and football stadium. They're trying to build a new Student Union now too, when classrooms are in dire need of repair and equipment. And tuition keeps rocketing skyward. The UofM, next door in Ann Arbor, can get away with crap like that but I don't know where the Eastern powers-that-be got the idea that they can. Anyhow...)
Reagan received the same crap that Bush is receiving from you lefties, but the former Soviet ruling class thought he was rather effective. Islamic fascists are finding out the same thing about Dubya.
THAT WAS THE POINT! We'd roll in, knock off Saddam, help set up the Iraqi democracy IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDDLE EAST, and they'd show the rest of the region how it's done. The Iranian dictatorship is supposedly about where the Soviet Union was in its final years, so an indirect push--say, fellow Shias next door getting their own consensual government--has a decent chance of pushing the Iranian government over the edge. Plus the Iranian dissidents didn't want us to intervene militarily, unlike the Iraqi dissidents. 'Twas a good plan. Plus the North Korean military has over 10,000 dug-in artillery tubes pointed at the South Korean capital (the nuclear ICBMs they're working on are for blackmailing Japan, they're redundant otherwise), which means a strictly conventional weapons attack on NK just wouldn't do.
What we didn't figure on was the sickening enthusiasm the Former Soviet Useful Idiots would show in teaming up with the Islamic Fascists. I realize that modern liberalism is the ideology of Western sucide, but GET A CLUE ALREADY! If the Iraqi democracy succeeds it could bring down all the neighboring dictatorships, even Saudi. Now could y'all stop writing propaganda for the terrorists? (That means you, Dan Rather, so eager to be fooled by the 1971 edition of Microsoft Word...)
The new Turion 64's are intended for the new thin-and-light notebooks like these: regular and widescreen. The eMachines/Gateway AMD64 notebooks are built by Arima, so I'd expect these things to show up under the Gateway label.
I'd prefer a nVidia chipset and GPU though for 64-bit Linux compatibility, like my current HP zv5000z has. It'll be interesting to see what HP has to offer in the way of Turion notebooks.
I bought one of these recently. So far, I like it. It does a good job with analog cable too (unencrypted digital cable channels work too but over-the-air is looks better). The worst I can say about it is that there aren't any Linux drivers, AFAIK at least. I save HDTV shows to my Linux server. HDTVtoMPEG2 and related tools work on the saved streams.
now that the geniuses with their MBAs have figured out that overseas outsourcing is an even bigger disaster than domestic outsourcing was. ("But how can that be! It's CHEAPER!") I'm hearing from recruiters again. IT is such a huge force multiplier that it's stupid to do anything that will jeopardize its effectiveness. Labor cost is only one variable in the multivariable problem, kids.
Sure, the PHBs will whine about the need for cheap H1-Bs that they can abuse, but I don't see Congress being all that sympathetic at the moment, or at the very least they're too fragmented on the issue of immigration in general to get anything done.
Boom times are here again! Well, no, but at this point somewhat better than average middle class employment will do.
Maybe we'll see Athlon 64 PCs from "IBM" this way. Lenovo is a big AMD customer. They aren't insecurely limiting their AMD64 usage because of a fear they'll outshine Power architecture machines like IBM is. C'mon IBM, listen to your software engineers and sell/promote the good stuff.
If the Indians who sabotaged the Bhopal plant had known their actions would cause so much as a single death, it is very likely that they wouldn't have done it.
Intent matters. And BTW, why no angst about the 100 MILLION+ that were murdered by Communism in the 20th century? I mean, if we're going to bitch about economic and political systems...
I have one. HP zv5000z. I get 3-4 hours of battery life with the 12 cell battery. I just swapped in a Mobile-class Athlon 64 3200+ CPU (replacing the original DTR-class chip) to great effect (eMachines/Gateway already uses Mobile-class Athlon 64s). Right now I'm running 1.1GHz @ 0.8V, which means CPU power consumption is in... oh, probably the high single digits, wattage-wise. It'll do full speed at 1.2V too (35W max power consumption). But even without playing undervolting games like this you'll still get great battery life.
Expect the big AMD notebook onslaught to begin this Spring when their 25W 90nm Athlon 64 notebook chips are launched. Until then, I wouldn't mind a Ferarri (or this one)...
OTOH, newbies who buy Prescott-core P4's (look for the E designation, ie P4E 3GHz) better be wearing their asbestos underwear. They don't call them the P4 "Blast Furnace Edition" for nothing.
You can undervolt the DTR-class Athlon 64 CPUs down to Low-Voltage-class levels... most of the time. My old C0 stepping DTR 3200+ can. Full speed at 1.3V, 1.8GHz at 1.2V (same as the LV 2800+, only with twice the L2 cache), 1.4GHz at 1V, 1GHz at 0.85V (ridiculously low power consumption). Use ClockGen.
Anyone know of an equivalent to ClockGen for 64-bit Linux?
The new 90nm mobile A64's are 35W max... and outside of the 3000+ in the Acer Ferarri 3400, not out yet. Dunno what AMD is waiting for, desktop 90nm A64's are plentiful.
I found it relatively easy to get my Bluetooth mouse working with FC3. I documented that and a few other things here.
The one major problem I had: FC3 won't boot with a nVidia graphics card until you logon in text mode without rhgb (use the "a" option in grub to modify the kernal parameters, delete rhgb and add "3"), build the nVidia drivers, modprobe nvidia, and:
as documented here. That was true with both my notebook (GeForce 440 Go) and desktop (GeForce 6800GT). Maybe the nv driver work work too, I didn't check.
AMD64 power management works automagically now.
The upgrade was worth it to me for Bluetooth and power management.
They could at least stop buffer overflow attacks by using AMD Athlon 64 CPUs ("Enhanced Virus Protection" as marketing says). And cut their electric bill. But noooo, they keep buying the overpriced Intel-based blast furnaces that Dell sells them.
It won't make Windows secure, but it might free up enough time for strategic thinking. Then again, so would doing IT development in-house rather than cleaning up outsourced disasters...
Look at the power consumption difference between this new P4 and the Athlon 64. It's big enough between the 90nm P4's and 130nm A64's, but a 90nm P4 system uses nearly twice the juice of a 90nm A64. Mind you, that's the difference between entire systems, so the consumption difference between just the CPUs is even more extreme.
Slashdot Mirror
But Broadcom have clearly GPL'd their drivers:
Their ethernet drivers, but not their wireless drivers.
Fortunately, Linuxant has made their wrapper driver 64-bit compatible, so those of us with HP/Compaq notebooks running 64-bit Linux can use wireless, even though we have to jump through hoops to do so. (I've yet to get around to buying and setting up the driver personally.)
I found out about the whitelist the hard way. Bought an expensive Atheros card, swapped it in, got the BIOS error message, got all the way up to HP's top-tier technicians and they had no idea why that error was there. More research found the reason in the HP Hardware Guide: HP swears the FCC made them do it. Yeah, right, then why don't eMachines/Acer/Dell/etc pull stunts like this...
Other than that glaring fault and their inexplicable choice of the antique GeForce 440 Go GPU, the zv5000z/R3000z series notebooks make great Linux machines and they're very easy to upgrade. See R3000 Forums for more info on the series.
The video card fan could be the biggest noise source. The thin aluminum Shuttle case doesn't dampen noise very well. When I switched my parents from a fairly modern video card to an older one, I was amazed at how much quieter their machine became.
Get the current Shuttle 939-pin Athlon 64 box (95G5?) and a Winchester-core (90nm) Athlon 64 CPU. Pick a video card with a reasonably quiet fan. I built one for my parents and it's a very quiet machine. Not perfect, but very impressive. The biggest trick is finding the right video card.
It's long past time for PC CPUs to get some power management in them so they don't have to be kicking out 100w of heat while you look at your desktop.
It's called AMD PowerNOW!. Current Linux distros (like 64-bit Fedora Core 3) enable it automagically. Athlon 64 CPUs have had it for over a year, plus the current 90nm A64's burn about HALF the power of Intel's 90nm P4 blast furnaces. AMD chips are very easy to keep cool with a low-speed fan.
Most good power supplies have temperature-controlled fans. Seasonic's new S12 series of high-efficiency power supplies with 120mm fans are my current favorite. Newegg has them. High efficiency means less waste heat. If you want something cheaper the older Seasonics are excellent too.
Did anyone else read this as 'College Students Turn Away From Landmines'?
I've heard of some pretty crazy dorm pranks, but that seems a little extreme.
Those VMI kids have all the fun.
Forget that. Get one of these:
http://www.usbhdtv.com
Voila, your notebook PC is now a HDTV PVR too. Sure, it can be a bit finicky, but the price is right. These work particularly well if your notebook has a widescreen display.
Yes, it's Windows only, but what can y'do.
Quit wasting your money on your PC and cable modem subscription, o pretentious one.
perhaps because they autosense the voltage level so there's no annoying 115V/220V switch on the back. Newegg carries them. They topped the efficiency tests in the linked review. Way, WAY more efficient than Antec True-series, and slightly more efficient than the Antec Phantom. Definitely my favorite power supply brand.
Also they only support Pentium 4s so you're looking at a portable toaster.
Yeah, really. All they need is a couple of slots for bread and it'd be the perfect kitchen PC.
Actually, VIA's AMD chipsets have gotten pretty good, especially their AMD64 chipsets, since AMD's integrated memory controller removes one of the trickiest portions of chipset design from VIA's hands. My ASUS K8V Deluxe has performed very well under 64-bit Linux. That said, given a choice, I'll generally spend a few dollars more for a nVidia chipset board, just because nVidia has been such a good Linux supporter (64-bit video drivers).
If forced to buy Intel's grossly inefficient P4 blast furnace, though, I'd pair it with an Intel chipset. Intel is outright hostile towards third-party chipset makers. It's not fair to them, but what can y'do.
If your problem is from a weak signal, get one of these. It made a noticible difference at my parents' house (cleaned up the analog TV signal too). The better splitter they're promoting with it isn't a bad idea either though I haven't tried one myself.
Yes, Comcast should take care of such things themselves. And Microsoft should write a secure OS. Anyhow...
I'm looking forward to 6Mbps/768Kbps. I hope they upgrade my neighborhood soon.
It's more likely that unless you come from a wealthy family you don't have a chance in hell of paying elite university tuition. Even the more working-class universities are picking up the wasteful spending habits of the elite schools. Mine sure has. (Check out the EMU President's McMansion next time you're in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It's just down the street from the convocation center and football stadium. They're trying to build a new Student Union now too, when classrooms are in dire need of repair and equipment. And tuition keeps rocketing skyward. The UofM, next door in Ann Arbor, can get away with crap like that but I don't know where the Eastern powers-that-be got the idea that they can. Anyhow...)
Reagan received the same crap that Bush is receiving from you lefties, but the former Soviet ruling class thought he was rather effective. Islamic fascists are finding out the same thing about Dubya.
Hussein was a wussy. Easy pickings.
THAT WAS THE POINT! We'd roll in, knock off Saddam, help set up the Iraqi democracy IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDDLE EAST, and they'd show the rest of the region how it's done. The Iranian dictatorship is supposedly about where the Soviet Union was in its final years, so an indirect push--say, fellow Shias next door getting their own consensual government--has a decent chance of pushing the Iranian government over the edge. Plus the Iranian dissidents didn't want us to intervene militarily, unlike the Iraqi dissidents. 'Twas a good plan. Plus the North Korean military has over 10,000 dug-in artillery tubes pointed at the South Korean capital (the nuclear ICBMs they're working on are for blackmailing Japan, they're redundant otherwise), which means a strictly conventional weapons attack on NK just wouldn't do.
What we didn't figure on was the sickening enthusiasm the Former Soviet Useful Idiots would show in teaming up with the Islamic Fascists. I realize that modern liberalism is the ideology of Western sucide, but GET A CLUE ALREADY! If the Iraqi democracy succeeds it could bring down all the neighboring dictatorships, even Saudi. Now could y'all stop writing propaganda for the terrorists? (That means you, Dan Rather, so eager to be fooled by the 1971 edition of Microsoft Word...)
The new Turion 64's are intended for the new thin-and-light notebooks like these: regular and widescreen. The eMachines/Gateway AMD64 notebooks are built by Arima, so I'd expect these things to show up under the Gateway label.
I'd prefer a nVidia chipset and GPU though for 64-bit Linux compatibility, like my current HP zv5000z has. It'll be interesting to see what HP has to offer in the way of Turion notebooks.
Netflix, through Season 7 at least. Worked for me.
I bought one of these recently. So far, I like it. It does a good job with analog cable too (unencrypted digital cable channels work too but over-the-air is looks better). The worst I can say about it is that there aren't any Linux drivers, AFAIK at least. I save HDTV shows to my Linux server. HDTVtoMPEG2 and related tools work on the saved streams.
;-).
Standard def is so last century
"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy."
That essay is one of my all-time favorites.
now that the geniuses with their MBAs have figured out that overseas outsourcing is an even bigger disaster than domestic outsourcing was. ("But how can that be! It's CHEAPER!") I'm hearing from recruiters again. IT is such a huge force multiplier that it's stupid to do anything that will jeopardize its effectiveness. Labor cost is only one variable in the multivariable problem, kids.
Sure, the PHBs will whine about the need for cheap H1-Bs that they can abuse, but I don't see Congress being all that sympathetic at the moment, or at the very least they're too fragmented on the issue of immigration in general to get anything done.
Boom times are here again! Well, no, but at this point somewhat better than average middle class employment will do.
Maybe we'll see Athlon 64 PCs from "IBM" this way. Lenovo is a big AMD customer. They aren't insecurely limiting their AMD64 usage because of a fear they'll outshine Power architecture machines like IBM is. C'mon IBM, listen to your software engineers and sell/promote the good stuff.
If the Indians who sabotaged the Bhopal plant had known their actions would cause so much as a single death, it is very likely that they wouldn't have done it.
OTOH, the Islamofascist who bombed the WTC the first time around in 1993 "expressed regret that more people had not died and said he had hoped the bomb would cause one of the two World Trade Center towers to fall on its twin, killing at least 250,000 Americans.". I'd imagine that bin Laden and company have much the same sentiments, though perhaps they'd have acted differently had they comprehended the subtle differences between Democratic and Republican Commanders-in-Chief.
Intent matters. And BTW, why no angst about the 100 MILLION+ that were murdered by Communism in the 20th century? I mean, if we're going to bitch about economic and political systems...
I have one. HP zv5000z. I get 3-4 hours of battery life with the 12 cell battery. I just swapped in a Mobile-class Athlon 64 3200+ CPU (replacing the original DTR-class chip) to great effect (eMachines/Gateway already uses Mobile-class Athlon 64s). Right now I'm running 1.1GHz @ 0.8V, which means CPU power consumption is in... oh, probably the high single digits, wattage-wise. It'll do full speed at 1.2V too (35W max power consumption). But even without playing undervolting games like this you'll still get great battery life.
Expect the big AMD notebook onslaught to begin this Spring when their 25W 90nm Athlon 64 notebook chips are launched. Until then, I wouldn't mind a Ferarri (or this one)...
OTOH, newbies who buy Prescott-core P4's (look for the E designation, ie P4E 3GHz) better be wearing their asbestos underwear. They don't call them the P4 "Blast Furnace Edition" for nothing.
You can undervolt the DTR-class Athlon 64 CPUs down to Low-Voltage-class levels... most of the time. My old C0 stepping DTR 3200+ can. Full speed at 1.3V, 1.8GHz at 1.2V (same as the LV 2800+, only with twice the L2 cache), 1.4GHz at 1V, 1GHz at 0.85V (ridiculously low power consumption). Use ClockGen.
Anyone know of an equivalent to ClockGen for 64-bit Linux?
The new 90nm mobile A64's are 35W max... and outside of the 3000+ in the Acer Ferarri 3400, not out yet. Dunno what AMD is waiting for, desktop 90nm A64's are plentiful.
I found it relatively easy to get my Bluetooth mouse working with FC3. I documented that and a few other things here.
/dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices /etc/udev/devices/nvidia*
The one major problem I had: FC3 won't boot with a nVidia graphics card until you logon in text mode without rhgb (use the "a" option in grub to modify the kernal parameters, delete rhgb and add "3"), build the nVidia drivers, modprobe nvidia, and:
cp -a
chown root.root
as documented here. That was true with both my notebook (GeForce 440 Go) and desktop (GeForce 6800GT). Maybe the nv driver work work too, I didn't check.
AMD64 power management works automagically now.
The upgrade was worth it to me for Bluetooth and power management.
They could at least stop buffer overflow attacks by using AMD Athlon 64 CPUs ("Enhanced Virus Protection" as marketing says). And cut their electric bill. But noooo, they keep buying the overpriced Intel-based blast furnaces that Dell sells them.
It won't make Windows secure, but it might free up enough time for strategic thinking. Then again, so would doing IT development in-house rather than cleaning up outsourced disasters...
Look at the power consumption difference between this new P4 and the Athlon 64. It's big enough between the 90nm P4's and 130nm A64's, but a 90nm P4 system uses nearly twice the juice of a 90nm A64. Mind you, that's the difference between entire systems, so the consumption difference between just the CPUs is even more extreme.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...